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magicalforcesau · 3 years

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Dancing With Ghosts in Your Garden~ Chapter 21 - Year 2: May

(ao3 link)

Palpatine would never expect his morning to start with something as pathetic as tripping over a potted plant upon entering his office. He managed not to fall, and bit back a sneer as he kicked the damned thing over. Someone had been in here… He could tell even if it wasn’t explicitly obvious. Not a single thing seemed out of place, but as he studied his desk it seemed to have been moved. Now that he mentioned it, everything in the room had been moved ever so slightly to the left, just enough to cause suspicion and clearly just enough to cause him to stumble like a newborn deer.

“Maul,” He growled, waving his wand in search of any hidden surprises, but had the madman tried to set any curses, his alarms would surely have been set off. Yes, he’d known he was close and had his suspicions that he was in the building.

A few days ago, the leeches had been let out of the potion storage. The Slytherin students hadn’t been very thrilled when several of them were found in their beds. Palpatine had dealt with it, regardless of how he’d prefer his house learn to deal with such trivial matters themselves.

The Slytherins he went to school with were much braver than the cowards of today.

Such an event he could chalk up to an accident, or a student lurking where they shouldn’t be. Yet even still, he found it unlikely that the leeches found their way into the common room on their own.

Of course he was the only one with such suspicions. The braindead ministry dogs stationed outside of the school had nary a clue to where Maul was at any given time. Maul would have to do nothing short of waltzing up to them in handcuffs before they’d realize what was right in front of them. With the sloppy way Maul was presenting himself, it was even more damning.

Even more useless were the pitiful dementors that couldn’t seem to find him even if he’d announced himself front and center. Though truthfully, Palpatine had some theories on that.

Maul had gotten soft in his time away it seemed, reduced to petty pranks and trickery like the student he’d never fully been. His former apprentice had never been particularly focused, becoming the killing machine of his namesake easily and with little prompting. Now, after many years to stew in the place where most lost their minds if not their souls, he refused to move his sights off of Skywalker.

Palpatine waved his wand again, righting his office to its proper position. He would not fall prey to such a mundane task as moving furniture, not when he had much bigger fish to fry. He walked around his desk staring a hole through the daily prophet left sitting there, Maul’s wanted poster still front and center.

If his former apprentice wanted to waste his time riling him up, he could do as he so pleased. Palpatine had worked too hard and too long to bring his plans into fruition. When he finally got his hands on him, Maul would learn to regret even the slightest action against him.

***

“Did that exam feel…” Satine paused, still in shock as they put greater distance between themselves and the courtyard.

“Short?” Obi-Wan finished for her, clearly still reeling from the same level of unease over the whole matter. They’d all passed- even Hondo- but that hadn’t exactly been hard since despite all of the drills and practices they needed to run, the exam somehow only consisted of a simple apparition across the lawn and back. Such practices were normally not possible at Hogwarts, with the sole exception being when a class was being taught.

“Yeah,” She nodded, confusion still pouring off her in waves.

“Even I thought it was a little too easy,” Cody admitted, which felt like a true testament that Obi-Wan and Satine weren’t simply disappointed that they hadn’t been challenged, “Normally, you’d never hear me say that, but…”

“And this isn’t our typical Charms or History of Magic exam,” Obi-Wan said.

“This is something akin to a driver’s license.” Satine turned to both of them, “And I promise you that while not rocket science by any measure, the driver’s test at least tries to prove that you can do the basics.”

“Hondo fell on his bum when he landed and he still passed.” Obi-Wan added, concern knitting his brow. “Makes me a bit worried what sort of people they’re allowing to apparate.”

“That’s just it, my brothers told me about the apparition exam and they always said they made you run drills like they did in class.”

“I remember Qui-Gon saying something similar,” Satine bit her lip, “Do you think they did this because of everything going on?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Obi-Wan said and they continued walking, “Think about it, we were all out in the open, with a murderer on the loose. I bet they wanted to get it over with and usher us inside as fast as they could.”

“Then delay the test,” Satine shrugged, “I don’t get what the rush was to approve all of us.”

“Maybe it’s a means of escape,” Cody said darkly. “I just hope it doesn’t result in any other consequences. I don’t know if either of you have ever been splinched, but-”

“-It’s not comfortable,” Obi-Wan filled in a bit too quickly for either of his friend’s satisfaction. Particularly Satine looked concerned at how immediate his reaction had been. She’d heard of it, of course, but as a muggle-born, it never happened to her. Most of the time, according to Windu, it was clothes or hair lost to splinching, but there were instances when flesh was wounded.

Obi-Wan cleared his throat before either could comment, “I suppose the bright side is, we passed.”

Neither were so sure how bright it was.

***

Ventress has truly anticipated expulsion or at the very least, suspension, and maybe this would have been the case under Headmaster Yoda’s rule, but whether she deemed it lucky or not, she was receiving no such punishment with Palpatine.

“I hope you understand where you belong, Ventress and see that I have afforded you mercy because of your family.” Palpatine said in that smooth, light voice. His eyes spoke of a different story. Something haunted him or perhaps he was the one who'd done the haunting. He was lauded as the kindly old potions’ professor, but she knew from experience that one didn’t climb so high up the social ladder without breaking backs on one’s way.

Dooku was that way and she’d been one of the backs he’d broken. She wasn’t even a high peg on a ladder to him, just a meager foot stool.

“Did you write them?” She asked, because it was always good to know when she’d be expecting a howler in the mail.

“Not yet,” He tsked, walking around his desk, “Though I suspect I won’t need to. Word travels fast enough.”

Yes, this cursed world did appreciate a show more than anything else. She had never expected hers to be deemed a pitiful tragedy- a failed villainous uprising. She’d hoped that when her story broke that she’d have the support and care of her sisters at either side. Instead, as always, Ventress was alone.

“What are you going to do with me, Headmaster?” She asked, looking up into his eyes. She didn’t feel remorse for her actions, per say, just that they were evidently in vain. Like any true Slytherin, she was willing to do whatever it took to achieve the means to an end.

Part of her wanted expulsion or to be thrown away without the key. Anything, at the moment, seemed better than going back home and groveling and pretending that she was an abused victim. She wanted, with everything in her heavy bones, for this to be her narrative rather than the reality that she was nothing more than a bookend to Dooku’s and his master’s. She loathed the concept of being used, of being the victim, even if she knew her survival would depend on playing that role.

Palpatine watched her with almost serene calmness, like he could sense the way her thoughts bled. Nobody knew Palpatine’s story, because he kept that close to the chest. Ventress wondered if they ever would, even after death.

Everyone had their secrets.

And Ventress missed hers.

“Well, I’m stripping you of all authority, for starters,” He said, walking around his desk to sit behind it again, “Seeing as you are still a minor, I’ve managed to convince the Ministry to not toss you into Azkaban. If and only if-”

If there was one thing Ventress hated more than pretending, it was negotiating, which was a large facet of the pureblood world. People negotiated the terms of courting rituals, business deals, even social events and how they would proceed. It was all one big set of terms and conditions.

Even if she quite possibly still stood solely for her pure hatred for Dooku, she still couldn’t help but agree with some of those ideals. Would she abandon them in an effort to sabotage him? Yes, without hesitance. It was but another means to an end. She’d abandoned so much of what she knew already. It was only icing on the cake.

“What?” She asked, keeping her hands cross in her lap to prevent herself from clawing at the desk between them.

“You must tell the aurors everything you know about Dooku,” He said sagely, but it was clearly rehearsed, quite possibly just before she came in, “And my dear, they will know if you’re lying.”

***

Despite the waning student population and the heightened anxieties surrounding Maul sightings in the area, they were still allowing the Quidditch match between Slytherin and Hufflepuff. It seemed like a desperate grasping for normalcy from the staff members still trying to keep up morale. It didn’t feel very normal, however, when all four houses fit neatly within the bounds of the Gryffindor section of the field. The professors didn’t want everyone spread out and those with friends in other houses welcomed the opportunity to chat outside of class. Satine had positioned herself between Obi-Wan and Cody, they were sitting closest to the exit. She felt almost like she was being watched and kept glancing behind her, but there was no one there. Paranoia certainly.

“I hope Hufflepuff beats Slytherin,” Cody grumbled as he crossed his arms over his chest, “It’s the only way to get Gryffindor back in the running.”

“I think that’s fairly unlikely,” Ben nodded towards the field, a soft glare on his face, “Ventress looks angry.”

“When doesn’t she,” Satine muttered, ignoring Ben as he turned his concerned eyes onto her.

She was willing to put the experience behind her. Though she doubted she’d ever forget what it felt like to be slowly turned to stone. The girl in question had lost her title as Quidditch captain, but had remained on the team. It seemed though, they hadn’t gotten around to choosing a new captain because Ventress still approached Breha to shake hands. So it was simply the matter of losing a title and not really a position. If in fact Headmaster Palpatine didn’t bother to enforce such things.

Then again, she always knew he favored purebloods.

“Shouldn’t even be allowed to play,” Cody crossed his arms, “She shouldn’t even be allowed to be here at all.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t haul her off to Azkaban.”

“Do you really think a child belongs on that foul island?” Because that’s what they were, children. Satine didn’t think that such a horrible punishment would be worth it for someone who likely only recently turned 17. For something so horrible to be done on her account as well? She couldn’t stand for it. She wanted Ventress to find peace and she certainly wouldn’t be able to move past being a pawn for Dooku behind bars.

“It’s starting!” Cody grinned and leaned forward. At least this time since they were stuck in the back she wouldn’t have to worry about keeping him from falling over the ledge.

***

“Hey, Professor! You coming to see the match?” Anakin asked.

Kit Fisto flashed them a bright smile, which came easily for him even with the rumors that it would be cancelled due to Maul’s lingering presence. Anakin found that he was having a more difficult time offering legitimate smiles these days. Never did he ever consider that Maul was capable of drawing so close to the school.

“Just making sure there aren’t any stragglers, Anakin.” He said, “We’ve all got to stick together, after all.”

“Yeah, okay, but make sure you come watch! Gryffindor might not win the cup this year, but it would be pretty cool to see Ventress get beat by Hufflepuff.

“There’s got to be some punishment for what she did to us,” Rex growled with a clenched fist.

“And what’s better than getting demolished by the worst team in Quidditch?” Anakin said cheerily, although Rex didn’t seem so sure that was appropriate. Neither did the few Hufflepuffs that shot him dirty looks as they passed.

In spite of this, Kit Fisto laughed, his long green tentacles wiggling as he did, “Yes, well, I’m sure Headmaster Palpatine won’t let her off completely scot free.”

“I think he just let her play because she’s a good player,” Anakin grumbled.

“Now, now, there’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes than either you or I are privy to,” Fisto said placatingly, “We’re all doing what we can to keep you guys safe.”

“I know.” Both Anakin and Rex said in unison.

“Even if I do feel like this might be testing fate a bit,” He gestured to the large crowd of people, “I suppose it is nice to see everyone so happy for a change.”

It was, but even Anakin, who had made some bold and sometimes foolish decisions in the name of fun, thought it was a little soon. He’d heard rumors that Palpatine was being pushed by the Ministry to hold the Quidditch matches anyway. Apparently, there was a decent gambling pool that relied on which team would come out on top.

“It would make me happier if Slytherin loses.” Rex said.

He leaned down to their level and winked, “Between you and me? Same.”

“We’ll see you in there?” Anakin laughed.

“I’m right behind you,” Fisto nodded.

***

Breha was never one to underestimate her opponents. Slytherin team may have been without a captain, but she still knew they would be looking to Ventress for plays. They’d been working with her all year after all. It was, however, still something they could take advantage of. A few of the Slytherin players would certainly be willing to try and usurp the queen in order to gain the position next year and that would make their play style much more chaotic than it would otherwise be.

That was excellent for a team like Hufflepuff, who thrived in their teamwork. None of them had the same level of ambition as many of the Slytherin’s she knew. Ambition wasn’t always a bad thing, Breha would be hard pressed to say she didn’t possess some level of it herself, but in a situation like this, she knew her team would flow like a stream whereas their opposition would butt heads like a rockslide.

She knocked away the Quaffle from the golden hoops as she kept a careful eye on the bludgers that were being knocked her way. Her chasers were quick to grab it out from the competitive hands of two Slytherin chasers. Hufflepuff was steadily racking up points and although they were nowhere near to beating them without the snitch, it certainly was quite an embarrassment for the house of green and silver. Normally Hufflepuff would be hard pressed to get the ball through a ring at all.

“Get it together, you useless swine,” Ventress hollered at her team as she skirted dangerously close to their heads. If she likely wasn’t in the mood to get into more trouble, Breha wondered if she might hit them with her bat.

“Good job!” Breha cheered with a smile as her own team scored a point. The cheers erupting from the audience were quieter than they usually were, but loud enough to hear over the wind. Breha frowned, taking her eyes off the game for only a moment to search her surroundings. She almost thought she’d heard a scream.

She turned, around and narrowly managed to catch the Quaffle with her hands rather than her face before tossing it down field. The audience cheered again, but something didn’t feel right. Breha’s hands twitched on the handle of her broom. She could call a timeout, but she would hate to waste something over a feeling.

She glanced around again. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

She raised her hands to make the call when a loud whistle jolted the game to a halt. Breha dodged a bludger as they both went sailing for their holding crate. Professor Tiin was holding up his hands in a desperate T. She descended quickly on her broom and the rest of the students in the sky followed.

“What’s going on?”

***

“They’ve stopped,” Satine was surprised. She’d watched a lot of Quidditch despite her distaste for it and she certainly hadn’t seen anything like this happen before, “A time out?”

“Somethings up,” Cody was the one to respond. He was watching the field with interest, but there was a layer of worry that he normally didn’t have when watching even the most dangerous of crashes, “Ref called for their grounding; there wasn’t anything wrong with the game.”

“No penalties,” Ben nodded. He too looked concerned, eyes flicking around the stadium. Satine found herself looking behind her again. She no longer felt eyes on her, but she certainly felt like the hairs on the back of her neck were beginning to raise. Before either of them could comment further though, Headmaster Palpatine’s voice, amplified, filled the stadium. His tone was less than pleased.

“Students and Faculty,” He started solemnly, “We must immediately return to the castle.”

Chatter filled the stands at once, not just the children either, but Satine caught Professor Plo turning to whisper to Professor Windu. Neither of them looked like they knew anything.

“What about the game?” A fourth year Gryffindor yelled, “It’s against the rules to stop!”

“What’s going on?” A Ravenclaw third year added from a few seats in front of her. Satine felt like her limbs were full of lead as she reached out to clutch the sleeve of Ben’s robe. She had a bad feeling.

“The game is not important,” There was a soft sigh that was barely audible past a few outcries from the student body, “It brings me a terrible sadness to inform you of the passing of Professor Kit Fisto-”

Cries of outrage and of sadness expelled themselves from the student body. The Professors, while schooled better on their emotions, looked just as surprised as they stood, immediately gathering students and shuffling them towards the exits. On the field, Professor Tiin was doing the same with the Quidditch teams.

“It has to be Maul,” Ben hissed at them, “He’s getting bolder.”

Neither she nor Cody could make much of a response though, being swept amongst other panicked students out of the stands and onto the sprawling grounds. Satine only realized she still had a grip on Ben’s sleeve when he tripped and fell, and she narrowly avoided the same fate by letting go.

“Ben-” She started reaching out a hand for him when she noticed he’d tripped over a first year who looked rather shell shocked, wide horrified eyes filling up with tears. He must have fallen first and narrowly avoided being trampled on.

“Oh, hey there, it’s alright,” Ben had noticed too, taking the time to help the boy up off the ground, despite the shouts of professors for them to get back in line, “Come on, we just have to get into the castle, alright? We’ll be safe there.” Satine felt like she was intruding, but refused to leave them there alone. Luckily, the boy took Ben’s hand quickly and the three of them shuffled back into the crowd quickly.

As soon as the last student was through the doors to the castle they slammed shut, latching forcefully behind them. The doors to the Great Hall did similarly.

“Bloody hell, I thought you two had disappeared,” Cody ran up to them, looking relieved. His own brothers fell at ease the second he turned away from them, clearly he’d rounded them up first thing.

“Is Anakin-?” Ben whipped his head around to look and Cody pointed towards where Anakin and Rex were looking pale and shaken, but alive.

All were accounted for it seemed, all but Professor Kit Fisto, who had died at the hands of a mad man while guarding the far side of the pitch, alone.

***

A funeral for Kit Fisto had been held off grounds- somewhere in the middle of the ocean for all of his aquatic friends and family members to properly mourn him in accordance with their traditions. His ashes were sprinkled over the Mariana Trench, where he’d done some of his biggest work.

His absence left the school caught in a limbo of uncertainty. Professors were in a mode of practicality only and it was hardly blameable. Maul had not only gotten within their barrier, but had committed a gruesome act of violence that some students had the horrors of bearing witness to the aftermath of.

Kit Fisto had been treated not like a person, but a sign to be waved on a stick, to show just what Maul intended to do to each of them if they didn’t give him Anakin Skywalker. Classes were taught within the confines of the common rooms to keep students from traveling elsewhere. With the blocked off tunnels, it seemed like the only safe space to keep Maul out.

No longer were even prefects allowed to walk the halls. Patrols were cancelled, and professors and aurors walked every space and brought food to students as well as taught their classes. It was a mess, really, and students were definitely affected by the change. Less and less faces were present, many removed from the castle altogether at the insistence of their parents.

However, those who remained were downcast and gray just like the sky outside their windows. A greedy part of Obi-Wan was thankful that his friends were still here, even if the current circumstances didn’t allow him to see Cody or Anakin. He was surprised Satine’s mother didn’t bring her home, though he had his suspicions of the extent at which she knew. It was hard to tell with the muggle families. They didn’t get the same news as wizards did, but it seemed awfully callous for there to be no warning from the school.

Then again, professors were quite busy working alongside the aurors to track Maul down. Part of him wondered where he could possibly be hiding, but really, there were endless corridors at Hogwarts that he’d never known of- not until the existence of the map, anyway. Even then, the fabled Room of Requirement was still out there untouched. Pure intentions were supposed to unlock it and he had severe doubts that Maul’s qualified.

This castle that they’d once been free to roam had shrunk significantly for all of them. He couldn’t even imagine being in Slytherin house and segmented only to the lightless space near the dungeons.

The news of Kit Fisto’s tragic demise took a while to reach outside outlets, for it wasn’t until an entire week later, shortly after his reported funeral, that they’d received a very dramatic and incoherent Floo call from Aayla. Even in the charcoal embers taking form into her face, he could tell she was blubbering like a baby.

“HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?” She wailed and the other students in the common room, who were a bit piled on top of one another, turned their bodies to try and allow privacy to the fireplace. It wasn’t like Aayla seemed to mind much.

“Er, I know this must be difficult for you,” Obi-Wan tried awkwardly as he searched his eyes through the room. Where was Satine when he needed her? There weren’t too many places to go, after all.

“DIFFICULT? TRY IRREVOCABLY HEARTBROKEN TO THE LARGEST DEGREE? HE WAS SO YOUNG SO KIND SO BEAUTIFUL.” She shook with tears, “Too good for this world, honestly. I don’t… I don’t know how I’ll go on.”

Obi-Wan didn’t think himself a callous person, but he sure as hell didn’t know how to navigate this conversation without further setting her off, “He will be dearly missed as he was a favorite teacher for most.”

“He’s more than that!” She bellowed, but it wasn’t intimidating due to the hiccups she’d recently caught, “He was the kindest soul placed on this earth like an orb of light- and I but a moth drawn to him…”

“Yes, of course!” Obi-Wan panicked, “I didn’t mean to reduce your care for him, I only meant-”

“Aayla?” Satine was suddenly knelt beside him, looking over his shoulder and into the fire.

“Yes, Satine, Aayla heard the unfortunate news regarding Professor Fisto-”

“DON’T SAY HIS NAME IT’S TOO SOON!” She sobbed.

Satine flashed him a scathing look and he shrugged helplessly. Aayla did have a point about there being many extremely crestfallen students over the professor’s death. Beyond simply grieving a good professor and person too. Many of the remaining members of Fisto’s fan club were inconsolably upset, like they’d just lost the love of their young lives. It seemed he’d made a big impression in his short time as a professor, even if not necessarily the way he’d intended to.

Even on that scale, he’d be missed. Although reserved by bureaucratic restrictions, Fisto tried to teach them to fight, to protect themselves. In many ways, Obi-Wan preferred him as a professor to Dooku (even removing the sinister Sith stuff), because of how approachable and charismatic he’d been. Obi-Wan was in a bit of disbelief even still that he was gone.

“Did you see him?” She sniffled.

Satine tensed, but shook her head, “No, and I don’t envy those who did.”

“No, I suppose not.” Aayla said, “You know what my last words were to him?”

“What’s that?” Obi-Wan asked.

She breathed deeply to stabilize herself, “That I’d perfect resistance to the Imperius curse while at home. What kind of goodbye is that?”

“Well, you couldn’t have possibly known, Aayla.” Satine said soothingly and Obi-Wan wondered how she maintained the careful line of logic and empathetic. It would be beautiful to bear witness to under different circumstances that weren’t this depressing.

“Maybe not, but I haven’t even been able to do him justice by practicing my resistance!”

“Everyone’s having a hard time studying in this climate,” Satine said and looked around, “We’re all on top of one another in here.”

“Plus, rumor has it, someone’s fixed up a shrine for Professor Fisto in the girl’s bathroom,” Obi-Wan said.

“I should be there to pay tribute,” She said. “If it weren’t for my parents, I would be.”

“It’s better that you’re not,” Satine assured, “You can properly mourn him when you come back, when everything is safe again.”

If it was safe again. She hadn’t said it that way, but he could tell by her demeanor that she was thinking of it. It had only been a week since they were confined to their common room, but it was starting to feel very much like they were trapped. His only means of asking how Anakin was aside from the fireplace was through Qui-Gon and his daily visits.

“I’LL NEVER LOVE AGAIN!” She cried.

“Erm,” he bit his lip, “There there, he wouldn’t want you to be-”

“-He would never know what I want, because I, like many others, kept my feelings locked within my heart instead of on display. It’s the stupid logical side of me.”

“Well, he was your professor.” This was not the correct thing to say. “You couldn’t possibly pursue a relationship-”

“-Ben, why don’t you referee the first and second year’s game of gobstones, since you like it so,” The edge to her voice queued him into realizing that thankfully, it was not a suggestion.

“You still play that?” Aayla wrinkled her nose, briefly distracted from her woe, “That’s for children!”

“It’s a very tactical game, thank you!” Obi-Wan huffed.

“Kit liked darts.” Aayla remembered that she was supposed to be heartbroken.

Obi-Wan took his opportunity to exit before it was lost on him, feeling a bit guilty for leaving Satine with that mess to clean. As it were, sticking around was only making it worse. He just hoped that the other houses were faring better than they were locked up.

***

If it weren’t for the blanket of loss that stained everything, Anakin probably would have called their mandatory lockdown some sort of break from school. The concept of a “staycation” was lost on Rex and his brothers, but it was even less pleasant given the circumstances. The first day hadn’t been bad, since they all basically hung out and tried to distract themselves with snacks and jokes. Seven days in, however, it was getting tedious and it was even worse by the professors attempting to teach the entire common room at once, which meant that half of it was far too confusing and ahead of the game for even Anakin to grasp.

Plus, he didn’t have Obi-Wan to edit his stuff, which made a big difference. Qui-Gon did offer to deliver any parcels or letters back and forth, but that felt silly when he could always theoretically use the fireplace. Acknowledging that they might be in here for a while was starting to get to him.

“I’d give anything for a game of Quidditch,” Cody sighed as he flipped through a magazine on the very subject, wistfully running a hand on the glossy pictures that depicted summer fun in the most recent digest.

“Quidditch? I’d give anything to do a lap running around the castle,” Rex added with a stretch of his leg, “I’m going stir crazy.”

“Need I remind you all that you lot rejected our suggestion for indoor Aingingein.” Fives piped up from his spot on the floor beside his twin.

“Yeah, and I’ll never be desperate enough to try that inside!” Cody said, “We haven’t even got any barrels to light on fire anyway.”

“We could improvise!” Echo complained. “It doesn’t have to be on fire.”

“With you lot, it’s always on fire.” He said pointedly, “Even if it’s not supposed to be.”

“I have always excelled with pyrotechnic spells,” Echo said smugly, “Definitely a strong suit of mine.”

“Of ours, thank you,” Fives corrected.

“Never thought I’d hear the day where you’re the voice of reason,” Anakin said to Cody, who turned his head lazily with a crooked smile.

“Process of elimination, kid.” He said, though Anakin viewed Cody as more responsible than he gave himself credit for.

He felt guilty for allowing himself to feel monotony. Someone had died, after all, and the only reason they were all stuck here was because Maul wanted to eliminate the Chosen One- a title he couldn’t believe he’d once been proud of. They were all lucky to be safe within their common room and that Maul hadn’t incited anymore violence the day he got Fisto. Even that small consolation felt immediately hollow as Anakin thought of it.

It didn’t stop the darkest crevices of his mind from generating possibilities of Maul picking off each standing professor and auror, leaving them trapped and with no real way of knowing what was happening. It was horrifying. Judging by The Daily Prophet, reports weren’t being as authentic as they could be about the sheer amount of danger they were in.

“What’s the first thing you’re doing when we get out of here?” Rex asked him.

“Oh,” Anakin hadn’t really thought of it, “Probably never complain about having to wake up early for class ever again.”

“I hear that.” Fives said, “Getting up and moving to a different room sounds like a dream. Anything has to be better than sitting here wasting time.”

Anakin glanced over towards the other end of the room, where Padmé was perched near the window, allowing the natural light of the sun to provide an angelic glow on her face as she read the book in her lap. Even though they didn’t have to, she still dressed in Gryffindor robes and had her hair pulled back in two buns that were fanned out at the base of her neck and shimmering with a silver glitter.

In the pocket of his robes was the necklace he’d decorated for her. There were so many moments where he wanted to give it to her, to tell her that he painted it with his hands and that he knew life was short and that meant seizing it while you had it, not isolating him.

He considered standing and approaching her, sitting opposite and inquiring about what she was reading, telling her she looked lovely, and making this anything but wasted time for him.

The thought washed away faster than it appeared and an announcement chimed through the entire room, silencing everyone from the idle chatter that kept them sane thus far.

Anakin didn’t need to hear it before to know who it belonged to.

“Professors and students of Hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry,” Maul addressed them all like a king addressing his loyal subjects, “Despite how the Daily Prophet might paint me, I am capable of being reasonable. You see I am not as young as I used to be, so I see no issue in leaving the castle and its occupants unscathed. There is but one thing that I desire.”

Anakin’s heart was pounding in his chest and he felt Rex’s hand on his shoulder immediately. It should have been stabilizing and comforting, but all it really did was serve as a reminder as to why Maul was even here.

“Give me your precious Chosen One, and I will see to it that there is no more bloodshed,” Maul continued, “For it was not long ago that I was in your midst and though I was treated like a feral animal not worthy of teaching, I do have some sentimental nostalgia to this place. After all, every hero requires an origin story.”

“We do not bargain with murderers, Maul.” This time, Anakin truly did know the voice to be Mace Windu’s firm tone.

“A pity, Professor Windu, a pity indeed,” Maul remained completely calm and neutral, which Anakin hadn’t expected. They all watched the ceiling as though they waited with bated breath for him to sink through it. “Because until you submit to my conditions, I will cut through every single person in this school until I get what I want.”

“You will not succeed, Maul.” Palpatine, this time, echoed through the room, even if not physically present.

A long pause, and then, “I’ll be the judge of that, Headmaster.”

And then, a laugh so sinister and cold that Anakin swore his blood was frozen solid. Everyone was watching him as the voices faded and they were only left to the crackling of the fire. He stared straight ahead, burning with an anger and fear so bright that he felt he might physically glow.

“We aren’t going to let him get you, mate.” Rex insisted severely, “You hear me?”

He didn’t doubt that they would do everything in their power to save him, but Anakin already had the guilt of his mother’s disappearance weighing on his conscience. He wasn’t sure he could bear another.

At the thought of his mother, he practically saw stars. This monster had been the reason his family, his home, his protector was gone. He took her and did who knows what with her. And while he knew from deep within him, from the small little voice that told him so in his most horrible dreams, he wasn’t ready for such a threat.

But he also wasn’t ready to lose his mother and he certainly wasn’t ready to allow his friends to take any heroic falls for him. Maul was here for a reason and perhaps, that’s what he needed, to have it handed straight over to him.

“Anakin.” Rex said again and shook his shoulder, “I don’t like that look you’ve got on your face.”

He stared at his friend, memorizing the kindness on his face. He didn’t deserve him. “I’m sorry, Rex.”

“It’s not your fault!” He insisted, scoffing at the idea of it. “He’s a lunatic! He’s gone and murdered a professor because of a stupid poem that was written centuries ago! So what if you’re the Chosen One according to that! Isn’t Qui-Gon always saying the future is always changing?”

He was, but right now was the present, which Anakin could only control his own actions in.

“I am sorry for that… And for this,” He nodded, but then blasted his friend backwards with a swift stupefy spell, and raced out of the room before anyone could grab him. One of the Fett’s nearly succeeded and ripped a piece of his robe, but the door slammed behind him before he could be fully pulled back.

He was going to face Maul.

***

Satine, like every other student in the school, was horrified at the conversation they’d all heard booming in their ears. It felt like an immense invasion of privacy and had intended to have that effect, considering the initial source. They were lucky enough to have Qui-Gon present when it occurred for class, but any comfort that his presence might have offered was swept away when he immediately made for the exit with his wand ready.

“Qui-Gon,” Obi-Wan was paler than she’d ever seen him and watching his mentor with a fear they never should have known, “Don’t.”

“I will do what I must, Obi-Wan,” He nodded, “As will you, I’m sure.”

There was a passing secret language between them of which Satine did not understand and was not intended to. Whatever it meant, it caused Obi-Wan to look ready to snap in two right before her eyes.

He opened his mouth to say something, but closed it, not knowing what to say at all under such circumstances. They were under siege by one man, who couldn’t be stopped by aurors or Dementors or even their notable DADA professor. She felt her heart plunge into the pit of her stomach as the severity of this dawned on all of them. For a moment, it felt like there was no one else in the room but the three of them.

“Yes, Professor.” He said instead of what he’d meant to and just like that, Qui-Gon Jinn was gone and the door behind him locked.

Obi-Wan stared at where he’d left for a long moment, fists balled and whether it was the angle of the sun or otherwise, his eyes looked glassy. His lip didn’t tremble and his breathing didn’t change. Instead, he looked rigid beyond repair.

“I’m sure he’s just going to Gryffindor’s common room to check on Anakin.” Satine said as she cautiously approached him to rest a hand on his shoulder blade. He didn’t flinch or jump at her touch, but it did feel like he had transported off to another plane of existence.

“That’s exactly what he’s doing.” He said heavily and finally turned to meet her eyes, “Maul went to this school. Surely, he knows it well enough to know where the Gryffindors sleep.”

That had also occurred to her, but right now, standing in front of him, where they were both so desperately trying to grasp onto some semblance of hope, she didn’t want to voice it. She feared their time for seeking solace was well passed.

“Maul doesn’t know the codes to get in.” She said firmly, “He won’t be able to get in and get Anakin. The Fat Lady wouldn’t allow for it.

He did nod at that, “Yes, it was a security measure from-”

“-The war, I presume.” She raised an eyebrow, “As everything is?”

“Actually from the amount of teen pregnancies occurring from inter-house relations.” He said frankly and it nearly made her laugh if it didn’t sound like such a believably ludicrous solution only thought of by wizards.

Any light quip she was thinking of making disappeared into nothing as the fireplace burst into a hasty shout of, “Kenobi? Are you there? Satine? Anyone?”

They rushed to the fire again, recognizing their best friend’s voice in mind-numbing alarm. Any younger students dove out of the way immediately on instinct to avoid being knocked into the flames.

“Cody, I-” Obi-Wan hadn’t even gotten a word in edgewise before he was promptly cut off by Cody’s furious shout, which was no doubt trying to compete with the noisy background surrounding him.

“ANAKIN’S ESCAPED!”

“What?” It was Obi-Wan who interrupted this time. “What do you mean he escaped?”

“He’s going for Maul!” Rex cried, shoving his brother out of the way, “I tried to stop him, but-”

Anything else Rex said faded to the background, though she suspected it was mostly nonsense judging by how upset he clearly was.

No, that couldn’t be. Her heart was thundering in her ears at the implication. Anakin was giving himself up for slaughter, but she knew in her heart that despite his claims, Maul would not stop there. Violence only begets more violence, especially when from the hand of a bloodthirsty animal.

“Stay put,” Obi-Wan’s voice was almost unrecognizable. It was deeper, commanding, and completely unlike the gentle witticism she’d grown used to (and fond of) over the years. Had she not watched him speak, she might not have believed it at all.

“Kenobi, don’t you even think-” Cody shoved back in.

Obi-Wan didn’t allow him to finish the sentiment, ending the connection and shoving himself off the ground with nearly as much speed as he’d gotten to it, aggressively shoving through a surrounding crowd, knocking Fenn Rau onto his arse when he tried to block him from the exit with tremendous ease. Satine followed through the space he’d left in his wake, desperately trying to reach him with a pounding dread that washed her into a blinding panic.

She caught his hand just before he could leave, in a vice grip that under different circumstances she would not use, but it drew his attention back to her, his eyes blazing with purpose and certainty.

“Let go of me.” He said with strange calm.

“No.” She said, “I won’t let you do this.”

“That’s not up to you!”

“Like hell it isn’t!” She argued, “I won’t have you knocking on death’s door yet again out of some infuriating sense of nobility.”

“Satine,” His eyes softened as he focused on her and looked a little more like the boy who effortlessly stole her breath away, “It’s Anakin.”

She knew that. Her stomach curled and coiled at the vile revelation and what it meant for Obi-Wan, who despite not being the main character of this prophetic narrative, was a true hero despite his own self-doubts. And really, she wouldn’t care for him the way she did if he weren’t the type to run into the fire against his better logic for a boy who had always been chosen to him- prophecy be damned.

There was no one else in the room as she contemplated just how dire this moment was and how pitiful it was.

“Please be careful.” She found herself saying in a voice only he could hear.

“I always try to be.” It wasn’t a promise and she noticed that. He would never make a promise he couldn’t keep. Not to her.

They stared at each other for what felt like an eternity and her mind raced with a flush of memories and regrets- that in this moment the cold reality was drenching them with how little time they likely had left. It seemed he was processing a similar line of thinking, because his eyes scanned her face as though memorizing every detail. Thousands of unsaid words passed between them, though even then she yearned to hear the real thing.

It was now or never, it seemed.

“At Christmas, I-” His breath hitched, “I- Well, I’ve never…”

He seemed quite infuriated with himself. A crash in the distance caused them both to break their spell and Obi-Wan turned back to her, regret swimming in his eyes as well as a fondness that could no longer be debated.

They didn’t have time.

“I’m sorry,” He raised her hand to his lips, pressing a single firm kiss to her knuckles, “Another time, I hope.”

And she watched him go, memorizing with painstaking clarity the feeling of his hand slipping from hers and out of reach as his perfect silhouette danced down the stairs hurriedly, never looking back. Perhaps, because doing so would make him run back to her. That’s what she told herself again.

Her hand burned as she clutched it tightly. She had a duty to uphold too.

***

Anakin ran, assuming logically that the grand staircases would be where Maul awaited. He seemed to be somewhat interested in being dramatic and Anakin could think of no better place to stage an assault. He’d expected to hear someone following behind him, a professor trying to catch him before he did something so stupid or a friend come to his aid, but neither seemed as crazy as he was to face a threat so great.

The closer to the staircase he grew, the more aurors were laid about, Anakin felt his steps falter as he purposely turned his eyes away. They were fine, they had to be, they were just… taking a nap.

Although even his own heart didn’t take the gentle suggestion at face value.

He saw green light reflecting off the wall up ahead. It gave off an eerie strobe effect that made Anakin hesitate. His wand was still gripped in his hand and he did know a fair few spells he was quite good at, but what did he know about going against someone so powerful? Countless aurors were lying about, clearly not able to take him themselves and it certainly didn’t seem like Maul was in the mood to play with his victims.

The thoughts of his own home kept his feet moving forward. His mother’s bedroom, covered with feathers and his mother, missing, possibly worse and it had to be at the hands of Maul. Who else would be trying to draw him out, but the man who was very clear at wanting him dead this entire year? He repeated over and over and over again the stunning spell in his head as he stepped out into the open area of the staircases.

An auror had just caught the end of a green beam and was falling down. Maul looked almost bored as he watched and didn’t flinch as Anakin did as they hit the ground with a thud. Maul had put forth no effort in his spree, but the thought didn’t deter Anakin from hurtling his own spell while he had the element of surprise.

“Stupify,” He tried to be quiet about it, but his spell still missed the man by a few centimeters. Maul had noticed him much sooner, by the way he just stood there, watching him like a predator would its prey.

“So you have the dignity to fight your own battles,” He flicked his wand and Anakin dodged, jumping onto a staircase as it pivoted past him. Maul stepped casually onto his own and they both spun around each other before their stairs clicked into place. Anakin held his ground, aiming to stay as far away as he could from the man. There were things he wanted answered and he surely didn’t come here to lay down and die.

“I want to know what you did to my mum!” Anakin yelled before sending out another stunning spell and missing narrowly. Maul was still unperturbed by this and stepped onto another staircase.

“What would I care about your mother?” Maul asked with a sneer.

Anakin’s heart leapt, he must be lying, “Y-you took her! I know you did!” He shouted, his wand still clutched tightly in his hand. He sent off a quick chain-cast, aiming to disarm Maul, at least then there wasn’t much damage he could do. Maul reflected it like it was a particularly pesky fly and Anakin’s spell slammed into the wall, showering debris all around them.

“I didn’t take your mother, boy,” Maul sent a spell knocking Anakin’s wand out of his hand and causing it to tumble down the steps. He shrunk back as Maul took each step down to him incredibly slowly, “But once you’ve been erased from this earth,” He grinned, sharp teeth grinding together in a hideous display, “I’ll send her to find you.”

Maul’s wand was moving and in a last-ditch attempt at living, Anakin rushed forward, jumping at Maul and trying to rip his wand out of his hand. Maul growled, a low dangerous sound before shoving Anakin off. Anakin stumbled, but managed not to fall just in time for Maul’s foot to come crashing into his chest, sending him tumbling down the stairs.

He landed hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs, but in the dust kicked up he managed to locate his wand before Maul could aim again and he sent out another desperate spell.

His heart sank as Maul simply stepped aside to dodge such a thing. This wasn’t how he wanted his life to end. He’d thought he’d be avenging his mother, locating her, being a hero. He was the Chosen One, he thought he could live through anything.

Maul raised his wand.

Anakin thought of his friends who he’d come to love like family. He thought of magic and all he had yet to learn. He thought of his mother, out there somewhere waiting for him.

***

There were bodies upon bodies lining the walls, all aurors, and all dead by Maul, presumably. Obi-Wan didn’t look as he went, not needing the horrifying distraction at the moment. These men and women gave themselves over to protect them and were treated like dominos to be knocked over in a chain reaction, all leading to-

-He came to an abrupt halt from his sprint, brain whirring as it tried to catch up to what his eyes saw to the left on the grand staircase. It was a body, and not just any body, but Anakin, small and limp at the bottom, completely unmoving. And just three flights up, completely shrouded in black save for his fiery face, was Maul.

“Stay away from him!” Obi-Wan shouted, drawing his attention immediately. Time only continued when he noticed Anakin’s chest moving up and down where he lay. All hope was not lost yet.

That was not to say that they were anywhere near out of the woods. The dementors had entered the space, but even this offered Obi-Wan no false hope. In fact, by the way they hovered beside him with a slight green glow surrounding their usual complete blackness, it was like they obeyed Maul somehow, serving the very opposite purpose than what was programmed of them.

Maul’s wand was sleek and smooth and undoubtedly did not belong to him originally. Obi-Wan knew enough about the clearances distributed by the Ministry that it belonged to an officer of some kind. He didn’t want to picture what happened to its original owner. Obi-Wan always struggled with conjuring patronuses, but if there was ever a time to learn, there was nothing like the present. He had to force his hand not to shake as he outstretched it, hoping he didn’t look as young as he felt.

He tried to channel happiness and positivity in a moment like this, in order to create the bright light needed to banish these dementors away, but every time a spark felt as though it might kindle, the gravity of their situation snuffed it out.

Maul said nothing, just as he hadn’t in Hogsmeade, but he did bear a full mouthful of yellow-stained teeth that matched the glowing eyes that appeared hollowed out in his skull. There was only hate and suffering behind those eyes, never a day of love or care. If Anakin’s life weren’t on the line, Obi-Wan might have felt sorry for him.

He knew the moment he made a move for the boy, Maul would only charge, but they couldn’t remain in this uneven standoff forever. Literally, they could not, because the stairs would not hold still for anyone, not even for the theatrics of a bloody lunatic. So, while it felt like a longshot, it also seemed like his only shot.

Obi-Wan took the leap, dashing to the end of the stairs, tumbling and grabbing Anakin on the way, just as the stairs moved and swiftly knocked them at an alarming velocity towards another shifting staircase. As predicted, when he moved, Maul moved, but not fast enough and stumbled as the stairs shifted, toppling over a railing in the process.

“Obi-Wan?” Anakin sat up and rubbed his head.

He quickly inspected the boy, satisfied that there was no blood, but there would definitely be a large bump on his head from whatever fall he’d taken. They didn’t have time to dilly dally. They had to go. He grabbed Anakin by the hand and pulled him the rest of the way down the stairs to the ground level, flickering his eyes up to notice the dementors closing in on them like nightfall.

For a brief moment, as the dementor positioned itself ready, Obi-Wan saw the future of Hogwarts as it was to be should Maul truly claim the school. He saw destruction, fire, betrayal, hate. He saw so much hate in the form of enraged yellow eyes. He couldn’t seem to feel his hands or his feet as the tunnel of darkness closed in on him. There was no life, there was no hope, there was no purpose.

All he wanted was for it to be over… Just put him out of his misery.

Why hadn’t Maul claimed them yet?

He saw his friends suffering at his failure. He saw the school itself burning to the ground. Cody was on the ground of the castle, a fiery hole in his chest that hadn’t cooled, unmoving and unblinking. Satine was surely next as she sobbed alongside him. Everything was painted in gray.

In the reflection of the green aura that tainted the dementors’ ragged cloaks, he met Anakin’s equally disillusioned gaze. That spark that refused to ignite earlier dragged like flint on steel and rubbed rapidly, starting to warm him up and remind him not of the bright spots of life, but of what he’d come here to do.

Positioning himself in front of Anakin, Obi-Wan yelled, “Expecto Patronum!”

Only an azure burst of light did not come from the tip of his wand, but somewhere above the dementors, taking the form of a beautiful blue and florid owl before circling and encompassing the dark phantoms with a blinding light. In the process, it knocked Maul backwards up a staircase and bolting forwards towards the person responsible.

He knew that patronus.

“Qui-Gon!” Anakin pointed up even further, where Obi-Wan’s mentor had thoroughly derailed Maul’s plans of following them by engaging in a violent trade of green and red bouts of magic back and forth, dancing along the stairs rhythmically, away from them, as though they were partners in an arranged production. Glass windows shattered and more dementors joined the game, never once standing a chance for Qui-Gon Jinn, though Maul proved himself quite the martial artist.

“We’ve got to help him!” Anakin began to move, which stalled Obi-Wan from his shocked reverie and he grabbed the boy by the collar of his shirt and yanked him back.

“No, you’ve got to get to safety!” Obi-Wan said and held him close to his face, “You are in no shape to be fighting a Sith lord.”

“Neither is he!” Anakin pointed out the obvious, which was that Maul’s aggressively acrobatic fighting style was only going to wear Qui-Gon out should they continue to edge towards a dead end. Qui-Gon would have very little room to maneuver and parry should they corner themselves in a tower or a narrow walkway. “And neither are you.”

“I have to help him.” Obi-Wan said, “It’s the only way.”

He couldn’t explain it too, because it just felt like he needed to push forward. The logical thing to do would be to run back to Ravenclaw tower with Anakin in tow and reunite with his friends in safety, but he was drawn to the fight and not for any sense of bloodlust, but refined purpose.

“I won’t let you!” Anakin cried, “It’s my fault!”

“Like hell it is!” Obi-Wan chastised and shoved him forward, “You are in control of your own actions, not Maul’s. The only action you should be doing is getting the hell out of here.”

“But-”

“No but’s, Anakin! If you never listen to me again, listen to me now: run. Hide. Get help, whatever, but you stay as far away as your little legs can carry you, alright? You are the future of tomorrow. This is only today.”

It wasn’t what he promised Qui-Gon, but if Anakin was away from Maul, he was safe, so if Obi-Wan could help delay that, he would.

“Where?”

“Exactly where you need to be,” He said.

“I can never get those stupid riddles!”

“Trust me, you will.” Obi-Wan said. “Just run.”

“And what about you?”

“I’m right behind you,” Though as they stared at each other, they both knew it was a lie. With tears staining his cheeks, Anakin nodded and ran in the opposite direction. Obi-Wan watched him until he was far enough away before turning and racing back up the steps again. Just as he did, they began moving, knocking Obi-Wan around rather roughly and almost backwards again, but he kept running and even dove forward to catch the next staircase by the hand.

For a moment, he was suspended above by only one hand, forcing himself to use all the strength in his body to lift himself and keep climbing.

Qui-Gon and Maul kept moving, the sound of glass shattering in their wake.

***

Against every fiber of his being that told him to stay and fight, Anakin ran. He aggressively swiped tears from his eyes with his arm as he did so, trying to keep his vision as clear as possible. He didn’t know where to go or what to do. Gryffindor’s common room was the other way and he would never understand the Ravenclaw riddle to get in.

Obi-Wan had only told him to go, but not where, though he’d looked at him with conviction as though he had given him a clue. Anakin was far too distressed to think of any clues. Fear swelled in him, as he considered what his two mentors were sacrificing in order to protect him, to protect the future. They believed in him, but he didn’t quite believe in himself at the moment. Maul was going to tear through this entire school and if there was one thing that was proven, it was just how inescapable that was.

He was supposed to be a hero, but he was trying to escape. It had always been the plan, but he’d never expected to have to do so alone. He was supposed to save them all, but he’d learned the hard way that he was no match for Maul.

His feet rapidly hit the ground, never once breaking stride as he tred onward. There was only so far he could go before he ended up right back where they were. He needed a place where no one would find him. He needed a safe haven.

But between the Zillo Beast, Dooku, and now Maul, he’d learned that there was no real sense of security in this wizarding world. It was fantastic in both the best and worst ways possible, with no room for the mundane quiet of peace. Anakin never typically cared when it didn’t involve a sadist breaking in and trying to murder him.

As he rounded a particularly sharp corner and briefly considered hiding in an empty classroom under a desk or in a chest, his eyes went round as he noticed not one, not two, but three dementors lingering near the dungeons. Slytherin’s common room was nearby, but they’d never let him in.

“Skywalker, what the hell are you doing?” Windu dropped in from seemingly nowhere, banishing the now mob of dementors that were swirling around them like a tornado.

“They’re everywhere!” He yelled.

“How did this happen?” Windu asked.

“Maul turned them against everyone! I don’t know how!”

Windu grimaced as they closed in on them and kept Anakin close as he flipped his cape to the side and valiantly pointed his wand with the lethal confidence of someone who had done it many times before. From Windu’s wand, a glowing blue ram burst through the wall of spinning black to create a pocket just big enough for Anakin.

“Run!” He shouted and once again, Anakin obeyed.

He needed to make sure he paid attention if he got to live to see the day patronuses were taught in school. Clearly, it was going to be an important lesson and one that Obi-Wan didn’t quite grasp yet.

Other professors were on the front lines of this massive fight against dementors whether inside or outside. Anakin leapt around one that was trying to suck the face off of Professor Ki-Adi Mundi, but was immediately banished by the vigilant Professor Shaak Ti. He never received more encouragement to keep pushing forward and away than he did in that moment.

Who would help Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan? Who would save them if all of the other professors were trying to handle the immediate threat of the dementors turning on them? His heart started to rattle as he kept going, approaching a dead end and slinking against the wall. The dementors came quicker than he anticipated even possible. Their long and bony fingers reached for him, ready to pull him into his own worst nightmares imaginable and to make them living realities. He’d snuck many horror movies in his time, but he’d never seen anything worse than them.

Where was it written that the Chosen One would need a soul to save the universe? Nowhere, it would seem, because this didn’t qualify as death, but a fate worse than. He pointed his wand out, hoping he could also learn the patronus charm on the fly, but felt the immediate disconnect between his words and his wand. They were just words in the end.

He pressed himself against the door, never wishing more than to be anywhere but here. He wished he could have found where Obi-Wan was referring. He needed it. He needed that refuge if he was going to be brave and if he was going to fight back one day.

He needed- To open his eyes?

Because once he did so, he realized that he was in a completely different room that he’d never seen before. It wasn’t empty, exactly. There were old books stacked on some rickety tables. Cobwebs lined the portraits on the walls that chatted amongst themselves. They stopped dead in the middle of conversation when they spotted Anakin.

“Er- Sorry for interrupting.” He said with a wave.

“Who the blazes are you?” The dusty portrait of a man with dark hair and light brown skin frowned deeply at Anakin.

“Don’t be rude, Master Ketu.” The hooded man in the portrait opposite to him nodded at Anakin, “Congratulations.”

“Do you even know what’s going on out there? There’s nothing to be congratulated for,” He said.

“Boy, have you no concept of what you have uncovered?” The man called Ketu pressed, his arms crossed over the numerous medals of honor that hung from his neck.

Anakin looked around him, “Uh… A dirty old classroom?”

He pinched his nose, “I swear, these children grow more ungrateful by the years.”

“To be fair, we haven’t seen a new child in over a century.” The other man said placatingly, “And there’s no way he can be worse than him. I am Ters Sendon, archivist and historian and this is Master Ketu, former leader of the old Je’daii order.”

“Je’Daii?”

“He hasn’t even heard of us.” Scoffed Ketu.

“An old group of warrior wizards who used to combat the ancient Sith during the old wars.” Ters said and Anakin gasped when he lifted off his hood to reveal horns protruding from his head just as Maul’s did. “What is it?”

“You’re… You’re like him!” Anakin backed away, nearly stumbling over a stray chair as he did, “You’re like the Sith lord that’s currently taking over our school!”

“I’m no Sith!” He protested.

“You look like him?”

“So? Sith is not a race, it’s a religion.” Ters said, “There are good people that look like me and plenty of bad people that look like you.”

Anakin considered that and realized as he looked at Ters Sendon that he didn’t bear any of the malicious traits that Maul had. There was no hate radiating off of his gaze, no yellow or orange to his eyes, no hostility in his voice. He didn’t even really look like Maul aside from the horns. As opposed to a stark red and black patterned face, Ters was more the color of leather, with beige swirls around his eyes and nose.

Ketu, not nearly as bored as he was before, stroked his black goatee, “You mean, the Sith have returned?”

“I’m supposed to defeat them someday.” Anakin said, “I’m the Chosen One. Or at least… I’m supposed to be, but I’m hiding…”

“Well, you’re much too young to fight a Sith, my boy.” Ketu said.

“Everyone’s been saying that and I know that, but how can I let other people take the fall for me?”

“Take it from someone who has seen plenty of golden haired heroes that were supposed to be chosen for greatness, you must accept that they are not fighting for you.”

“Ketu! How is that helpful?” Ters asked.

“Because it removes the pressure that comes with the position. Everyone has their place in this war, but you… You must survive. You must survive so that many others can live.” He fixed Anakin with a stern look, “That is why the Room summoned you.”

“The room?” Anakin looked around, “This place is special?”

“The Room of Requirement manifests itself only to students who truly need it.” Ters explained, “In your case, it’s to hide from this dastardly foe that breached your school.”

“If only I were alive… I’d bring this Sith to his knees.” Ketu sighed wistfully.

“I can’t just sit in here and wait!” Anakin yelped, his voice echoing around the room.

“Clearly, whatever you were running from had outnumbered you. You were whiter than a ghost.” Ters said, “And I’ve seen many ghosts.”

“Ghosts can come in here?”

“Not here, no.” Ketu shook his head, “We are the only portraits in the school that cannot move, but in our time, there were ghosts too.”

“Why can’t you move?”

“We must protect the integrity of the room,” Ters explained, “And a good thing too, because the last boy would have destroyed the place to prevent anyone else from finding it.”

“The magical enchantments were too powerful for him then, thankfully,” Ketu whistled, “I wonder where he got off to…”

“We need to get more people in here, to protect them!” Anakin said. “How can I let others follow me?”

“I think they may be safer where they are.”

Anakin wasn’t so sure.

***

Qui-Gon had but one clear goal when parrying and deflecting the onslaught of fast green bolts that erupted from Maul’s wand: get him out of the castle. Hopefully, from there, other professors stronger than he could prevent him from entering again. Qui-Gon was no fighter by nature. It took a great deal of strength and focus and connectivity with his inner peace to remain in line with Maul’s attacks. He was definitely no one’s first choice in fighting off a man who murdered countless aurors in his wake.

However, the moment he saw Maul and his possessed dementors hovering over Obi-Wan and Anakin, he knew that this would be his fight after all.

He’d never faced anything like this in his life- growing up in a time of peace was like the beautiful summer and late fall that preambled a harsh winter. Well, the ruthless attempts at his head led by the tenacious Sith was more of enough proof that winter had arrived with the full impact of a blizzard at their heels.

Qui-Gon tried to analyze and predict the Zabrak’s next attack, hoping that his strategic capabilities would balance him against the superior fighting style that was the combination of martial artistry and power. There was much hate that spewed from every fiber of Maul’s being, so personal that Qui-Gon almost took it as such. It was like every person who stood in his way somehow became Maul’s target enemy and it was obvious he wasn’t used to anyone lasting this long.

Well, Qui-Gon did have the high ground when he snuck up on Maul and took him off guard, effectively clipping the wings that the dementors brought him. He wouldn’t even begin to question how he’d did it, save for that it was obviously an ancient magic known to the Sith. As they crossed the archway to the empty Great Hall, veering away from the direction of the student dormitories to Qui-Gon’s relief, and Maul was allotted true space to spew knives and broken shards of glassware towards him at once, Qui-Gon realized why this man hid all year.

He did not hide to feel out their positioning or to even tease them. Any of that had only been a cherry on top for the malignant evil before him. No, Maul waited it out to grow, to improve his strengths, to ready himself for this fight, because regardless of the ease at which he slipped through their clenched fists, he still expected a grave one.

“Protego!” Qui-Gon shouted numerous times in numerous directions, shielding himself from every blow Maul flung at him, but dodging an incoming killing curse as well.

That was going to leave a mark on the walls.

The candles came crashing down, bathing the entire room in a gray hollowness that he wasn’t used to, but didn’t ponder. It was only fitting that a Sith was trying to take everything good about this place with him. Well, he wouldn’t have it, not on his watch, anyway.

Their beams collided, his disarming and Maul’s for the kill, creating the collaboration of blinding green and red at the middle. It resembled a golden snitch at the heart of the contact, but despite having dueled Dooku just last year, Qui-Gon felt his arm, and eventually his whole body by extension, growing weak. Dooku had been going easy on him and he knew it. Maul would do no such thing.

Maul tapped further into his heat, bearing a tight grin as he pushed harder, showing just what the dark side could do, but Qui-Gon did not and would not envy his pain or his suffering that led him to such darkness.

“You were just a child, did you even get to choose?” Qui-Gon asked, trying to possibly tap into any shred of humanity left within the empty cavern that took place of Maul’s soul. That included, bringing up a history Maul did not want to remember.

“You don’t know me.” It only emboldened his opponent’s attack, making the push and pull of their tug of war look a great deal more green than red.

“Perhaps, I do. We were students here once, right? At the same time even.”

Maul remained silent and focused. He would not monologue for Qui-Gon. It seemed he was the sort of foe not worth quarreling with.

“Give me the boy.” Was all he said.

“I cannot do that.” Qui-Gon shook his head.

“Then you will die.” He smiled.

Sweat gathered at his temples as he pushed harder, channeling the peace that existed in harmony at his core, willing the spark to burn brighter than it ever had. If not ever again, now would be the moment.

It was not looking good.

Until, an unprecedented blast of blue sent Maul skidding across the table, sliding into every stray glass and plate that had been left in shambles on the way. He was up and charging within a matter of seconds, which was remarkable on its own right, but this also meant that Qui-Gon didn’t have much of a second to breathe or consider that the wizard that entered the room was not a colleague or auror, but Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“Obi-Wan!” He shouted and moved to jump in front of him to be a last standing shield from Maul, as if that would do anything, but the boy was quick and immediately took to pursuing Maul with his own attacks.

“You shouldn’t be here.” He said.

“But I am, and we can talk about this later, no?” Obi-Wan gritted as Maul whipped out a second wand from his utility belt and let his robe drift to the ground. It seemed he came prepared for this very situation. It was a very unfortunate way to learn Maul was ambidextrous as he was just as proficient with his left hand as he was his right and was able to perform the same spell from two wands.

“We definitely will.” Qui-Gon fired back, but had to concede that the very last thing they needed to be doing to get out of here was arguing with each other. Not to mention, a very small part of him couldn’t help but be proud of Obi-Wan’s prowess for being so young.

He’d never seen him like this before- so sure of himself and so determined, as well as so underdressed. His robe and jumper were completely discarded somewhere along his way here and the sleeves of his collared shirt had been pushed up. While still wearing the tie that symbolized his house with pride, he suddenly looked much older than the boy he knew.

Even more than that, he successfully and quickly reflected Maul’s own curse back on him, sending the Sith dizzily stumbling around, though never once losing speed.

With Obi-Wan at his side, he was able to take Maul on at a more even level, even with the two wands. He and his mentee practiced in sync together. They’d never formally fought alongside each other, but where Qui-Gon moved, Obi-Wan moved, and the two took to dejecting each and every distant move displayed by Maul.

That was not to say it was easy, of course. Between the physicality and ferocity of Maul’s magical and non-magical aggression, it was still throwing the both of them through the ringer. Obi-Wan’s face was red, but laser focused and never relieved with pride if he managed to land some sort of attack.

They left out the doorway they came and through the third floor corridor, only further exhausting themselves the smaller the quarters became. Maul began to literally bounce off the walls, running up them and doing backflips to dodge and alternatively, to gain traction. As his history showed, he wasn’t purely invested in the magical portion of a fight, but the physical combat as well.

Up the stairs they went to the very top, a difficult task when Maul decided to turn the steps into slippery goo in his wake and fire on the railings. Qui-Gon had learned the latter of that sequence on his own the hard way. Obi-Wan charged ahead, more athletic than he gave himself credit for, and twice as brave. It was a lethal combination, though not one Qui-Gon would fool himself into believing would be enough to seizing Maul completely. They needed to distract him until Windu found them.

They needed help.

Maul was quite pressed when Obi-Wan managed a leg-locker spell on him, though it was only one leg by his aim. It wasn’t his fault, since Qui-Gon had to shove him aside to avoid wand arrows that came straight for his head.

Even still, there was no doubt that they were fighting better together.

The ceiling of the pointed tower crumbled, specs of dust and later actual pieces of infrastructure raining down on them and hurrying their pace. When reaching the small bridge that connected the two towers, Maul blasted the center as he ran ahead.

“Where’s he going?”

“The classrooms, it seems.” Qui-Gon answered as he tried to catch his breath. “Anakin-”

“-Is safe.” He said with resounding certainty, his blue eyes sharper than glass as he regarded him with shoulders back and his jaw squared. He was still shorter than Qui-Gon, but it was evident now more than ever that he was a child no longer. Yes, Obi-Wan was ready. Or was it that he had no choice but to be ready?

It pained Qui-Gon’s very soul, because children fighting the battles of adults never soothed him. They leapt over the chasm and through the already crumbling tower that dwindled all the way down, catching Maul at his heels after a few flights of rapidly following suit. He was either leading them to the belly of his trap or he was trying to shake them. Qui-Gon didn’t know how that spoke for their success as his opponents, but was willing to take any wins offered to them.

They were far from finished in their pursuit, as the tower began to physically shake back and forth. Taking this battle to heart, or whatever stood in place of it, Maul turned, charging up the stairs with a sword at hand pointed straight at them.

On instinct rather than through thought, Qui-Gon pushed Obi-Wan hard against the side of the wall, narrowly preventing him from meeting the tip of the blade.

“Stupefy!” He yelled, but missed and Maul went for the younger man again, a tight smile on his lips as he flipped forwards against the current of gravity and spun the sword straight towards them. Obi-Wan, who was stronger than he looked, caught Maul’s wrist before the finality of the attack could be completed. Using his entire body weight, he flung them down, doing his own half-assed little stunt to avoid being stabbed.

Qui-Gon seized his moment to attack, turning the coat of arms by the doorway onto Maul, giving them three fighters on their side. This didn’t stop Maul, who only seemed delighted by the challenge and swung at the ground to encourage it.

Obi-Wan scrambled off the ground in time and trotted alongside Qui-Gon as the knight moved forward and Maul backed himself up to the wall of the rounded tower, clashing his sword with the knight’s, meeting every swing with one of his own caliber. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon, meanwhile, tried to use this brief moment of distraction to their advantage and fired whatever spells could come to their mind.

Obi-Wan had gotten even more creative and used a tongue fattening spell, likely trying to limit his airway.

It didn’t seem he even minded the limited mobility, though it only seemed to anger him that he was wasting his time. Maul had the advantage, being alive, but the knight had nothing to lose. Sometimes, that wasn’t a strength.

In a fit of unbridled rage, which was the only way either Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan could describe what transpired next, lightning rang through the sword and Maul leapt into the air, bringing the blade straight through the empty head of the knight and using the momentum of this force to fling the still sparking helmet towards them, hitting Obi-Wan directly in the stomach and sending him flipping over the railing with the added help of Maul diving forward to punch him square in the face.

“Immobulus!” Qui-Gon hollered, pointing his wand at Obi-Wan’s collapsing body just before he could hit the bottom stone at full-force. He was knocked out, nothing more, or maybe that’s what Qui-Gon needed to convince himself to continue edging through this battle.

The sword came down, achieving not a speck of flesh, but slicing Qui-Gon’s wand clean in two against the marble railing to their right. It was the closest he’d ever been to Maul and he understood why few wanted to approach him. He could feel the turmoil within this shell of a man, who was only driven by his own hate. He was like a walking timebomb who was expected to walk the earth like a person.

“When I’m done with you, I’ll kill the kid too,” Only he wasn’t referring to Anakin, but Obi-Wan.

“You won’t have the chance,” Qui-Gon said and kicked up his foot to toss the former knight’s sword into own hand. He was taught to wield by Count Dooku long ago, adopting many different tactics. It had always been in a gentlemanly fashion before, but Maul knew no such artistry or decency in this field. He was a predator and while he may have been playing with his food, he would still want nothing more than to collect the prize.

They backed out of the exit, Qui-Gon pursuing Maul as their blades clinked and clanked at rapid speed, each performing offensively without any pauses or breaks. Qui-Gon took his first success as they approached the classrooms and he managed to knock one of Maul’s wands free and clattering onto the ground. The Sith swordsman paid no mind, flipping backwards and inviting Qui-Gon to chase him into yet another trapped space.

He knew he was better where he could be afforded more breathing room, but at the moment, this was not a battle where Qui-Gon dictated the rules. Rarely, did the heroes get to do much of that in history. It was all about adaptivity and believing in oneself and the magic that lay within them.

“I am one with magic and the magic is within me.” He chanted on a harmonic loop inside his head, ignoring every fiber of his being that broke apart as they crashed through Professor Palpatine’s office of all places.

Perhaps, he was trying to pay a visit to his favorite professor. He looked disappointed even through the mask of focused disdain that he wasn’t present. He would never have known that Anakin might have been hiding here, after all. He lingered around the castle for a little while, but not long enough to see the students interact.

Thinking a bit like his enemy, Qui-Gon seized the weakness, going in for an elongated stalemate of the inner strengths, bringing them up close and personal.

“Who do you work for?” He asked calmly.

He knew that nothing splintered more than serenity or moreover, when their dastardly deeds took no effect on their desired target. Predictably, Maul clenched his yellow teeth to bare.

“I work for no one.” He scowled and shoved them apart, spinning and beginning a new onslaught of attacks that Qui-Gon met and dodged. The dodged shots ended up as holes that would need to be patched later and each designated attack seemed to chip away at him more and more.

Maul might have possessed an eternal source of energy from the cruelty at his very core, but he did not envy him for it.

They shuffled onto the external viaduct, which stretched back to the courtyard outside the Great Hall again, back towards the common rooms. He couldn’t let that happen. Qui-Gon knew that this was it. This long stretch of smooth stone that expanded over the chasm beneath them, was where this needed to end.

As if reading his mind, Maul closed in on him, making Qui-Gon overshoot a swing and nearly set himself off balance. Maul’s sword came down hard on the stone balustrade to their side, cracking it with the power and magical tenacity it contained, before retracting and kicking Qui-Gon in the sternum.

He rolled, backwards, and landed on his feet just in time to collide blades harshly, feeling like the swords might break if they strike again. This didn’t stop either of them and Qui-Gon desperately tried to seek out a window to take the advantage. And then, he found it. Maul’s gloved finger twitched just as he was reaching for his other wand- a dirty trick in a match of the blades, but Dooku might have done the same in his modern state.

Luckily, Qui-Gon didn’t necessarily need a wand.

He snatched the wand from midair by the sheer willpower of doing so.

“Petrificus Totalus!” And while Maul leapt to the ground, his frame stilled in the air as he caught the end of the charm, hitting the ground hard with his sword stuck frozen in hand.

He let out a heavy breath of relief. He pointed the wand at Maul and tossed the blade to the side and knelt over him. Only the man’s face could move, so he didn’t grow too close at risk of literally being bitten, but Qui-Gon looked at him sternly.

“What business do you have with the boy?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Maul chuckled lightly, “To destroy him.”

“But for what? Because he’s a threat to you?”

“No,” He would have shaken his head if he could, “Because he’s a threat to all of us.”

Qui-Gon frowned, “That- No, he will bring about an end to monsters like yourself and whatever master you refuse to name.”

“Don’t you see?” Maul said, “He is the monster.”

The words trickled through Qui-Gon’s ears like rain hitting the hard sidewalk. That couldn’t be true. He was to bring balance. Though, it was never exactly said how. It couldn’t be. The prophecy spoke of a united world and for the hero, which was Anakin, to prevail at great sacrifice.

Or at least, that’s how he interpreted it after much studying.

“That cannot be.”

“It has been written in fate. I have seen it,” And by the legitimate fear that plagued Maul’s gaze, he could tell the Sith was not lying about having been exposed to a plethora of horror, “He is but the pawn in a greater plan. Just like you and just like me.”

“He’s so much more than either of us,” Qui-Gon shook his head, keeping the wand steady at his throat, poking the skin ever so slightly. “Especially you.”

“I am merely trying to save us all,” Maul begged, “Just as you think you are. We are not that different. Skywalker isn’t either.”

“Anakin is the hero of this story, not you.” Qui-Gon said, determined now, “I will see to that.”

“No,” And just as quick as he fell, he moved too fast for Qui-Gon to even blink and the sword that had seemed frozen in time was thrust right into the pit of Qui-Gon’s stomach. Immeasurable pain soaked through him as he felt blood from all over rush through him and a varying list of parables cross his mind.

Maul brought him so close that their noses touched, “You won’t.”

He unsheathed the sword from the pit of Qui-Gon’s stomach and let him fall backwards, hitting the stone unceremoniously as sound seemed to fall behind in slow, deep motions. The blood rushed from his body and breathing suddenly became labored beyond measure. He was faced with warm sunlight, though he found himself only growing colder by the second. Slowly, the bright blue around the high sun was becoming a tunnel and getting fuzzier. The pain in his stomach was less aching as it was dull and detached from him. He saw stars and galaxies and far more than the human eyes could see.

He saw blackness that occluded the stars and realized strangely that it was a man in a dark cape. This was Vader, he knew somehow, but he couldn’t quite explain why. But there was more and as he looked into the stars that gathered in the eyes of his helmet, he saw the fates for what they were. There was so much loss in this montage of multiple realities that spawned in front of him. There was agony, hate, betrayal, death. So so much death beyond his own.

It was strange, to realize that he was dying and to not really care about the logistics of that. Instead, he cared for what he saw next: happiness, love, family, weddings, babies, revolution against an unjust cause, rebirth.

He saw the back of a man with white hair and a beard to match and while his heart initially spoke to him of his mentor, he found that the eyes that turned to meet him matched another that would grow to be wiser than them all.

He saw the good in the blond boy that everyone else feared. He saw the duality of the young brunette who was capable of far more than her small stature dictated. He saw friends he did and didn’t know. He saw them all come together and he saw them win. It was an imperfect future, full of not one, but many heroes.

Some that were chosen ones merely by their own volition. That fact settled hard and heavy. There was still much obscurity to meet the hope. Nothing, even at these far reaches of the universe, was written in stone. If there was one thing that was clear: Anakin was the key.

And in a flash he was back for a moment, given one last breath of life and to meet the tear stained eyes of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

He failed. But there was still hope.

***

“NO!” His cry was anguished and angry, his vision red like the blood dripping off the blade. He had already been running, hurrying to catch up with his mentor, not willing to leave him alone with that monster for more than a second longer than necessary.

He clearly hadn’t been fast enough.

He sprinted, faster still, wand automatically raised and flourished. A crack was heard as red light burst from his own wand and slammed into Maul, knocking him back a few feet and causing his sword to fly from his hand and over the bridge. He hadn’t even uttered the words, but his wand seemed to read his mind, connect with him and in this brief moment of connection, he hurtled as many spells as he could think of.

It was a dance of light. Maul had managed to pull his own wand out and was doing a fair job at blocking each colorful strike, but had yet to get an opening to counter. Obi-Wan tossed another stupify at Maul and it hit his protective spell so hard sparks flew.

“You’re too late,” Maul kicked a loose stone towards him, managing to distract him long enough that Maul could send a killing curse his way. He just managed to block it, the green spell falling apart just inches from his face. He staggered backwards nearly falling over the edge before launching another volley of attacks.

“I won’t let you hurt him,” Obi-Wan growled, although the pang in his chest reminded him of what he’d seen, what he hadn’t been fast enough to stop. He cast a smoke spell causing them both to be hidden within a dark cloud. Obi-Wan crept silently to the side, the only real chance he had was to catch Maul off guard. Just a few more steps-

A gust of wind kicked up from the center of the cloud blowing away the smoke screen and revealing an almost smug looking Maul. He grinned wildly, his yellow eyes gleaming like a tiger going for the kill.

Obi-Wan just managed to dodge as the spell Maul hurled blew a hole through the already crumbling parapet. He returned the favor with another stunning charm that did little more than knock Maul off balance.

Obi-Wan, however, took the opportunity rushing forwards a curse on the tip of his tongue before Maul fell backwards slamming a foot into Obi-Wan and kicking him back.

He stumbled to regain balance, but his foot slipped and time slowed as he desperately clawed for the edge of the bridge with his free hand. He swung there precariously, heart beating a mile a minute as he tried to think of something, anything. Maul grunted, he could only assume he was standing up again, making his way slowly towards what was surely Obi-Wan’s doom.

He looked to his wand, he couldn’t risk a spell, if he missed and hit the viaduct, he would surely be falling to his death. If he didn’t… Well he didn’t want to think of the terrible fate that would bring him. He swung his arm up, hand still gripping his wand, but allowing for him to pull himself up just high enough to see. Maul was approaching, wand twitching as he surely thought through every nasty spell he had at his disposal.

The dying sun came out from behind the clouds, reflecting its light off of something silver on the edge. A sudden burst of hope filled him as he whispered a series of spells that he hoped Maul took as nothing more than him praying for salvation.

Maul didn’t pause.

Obi-Wan dropped hold of the ledge flicking his wand upwards in order to soar up through the air landing behind Maul, just steady enough he was able to catch the silver sword, sapphires glittered across the bottom, a sight to behold if he weren’t busy lunging with it.

Maul had turned just in time to watch as Obi-Wan used every bit of strength, every bit of magic left in his body to bring the sword clear through his middle. The sadist had the decency to look surprised, shocked that he could be foiled by a scrawny 17 year old when so many had tried and failed before. Obi-Wan brought up his foot and kicked, returning the favor of pushing the Zabrak off the viaduct, he didn’t bother watching him fall.

The clatter of the sword falling out of Obi-Wan’s hand and onto the stone brought him out of his adrenaline induced daze and he turned his head almost robotically to where Qui-Gon still lay. He was breathing, but barely, each breath looked laborious even from afar.

“Qui-Gon!” One moment he was standing over where he committed a high wizarding crime and another he was on his knees next to his mentor. He ripped off his top layer and pressed over the wound desperately trying to stop the bleeding even though he could feel that his trousers were already being soaked through.

“No, no,” Qui-Gon batted his hands away, but it only gave Obi-Wan the determination to press harder.

“It’ll be alright, you’ll be fine,” Obi-Wan repeated to himself as he focused on the task at hand. A shaky hand caught his wrist and he tore his eyes away from the gore and met Qui-Gon’s deep blue eyes. Eyes normally filled with mystery and whimsy were focused just enough to quelm his fast-racing thoughts.

“Obi-Wan,” He pleaded, “Anakin-”

“Anakin’s fine!” Obi-Wan shook his head angrily, “I already told you he’s-”

“I need you to see that Anakin gets his training,” Qui-Gon grasped for his attention again and he gave it though he struggled too, “Anakin must become a wizard, he is the chosen one,” Qui-Gon spoke the words with a strong conviction as if he had been born with this knowledge and hadn’t found out along with the rest of them last year.

“Yes, sure, but Qui-Gon-” Obi-Wan tried, but froze when Qui-Gon struggled for a breath.

“Promise me Obi-Wan,” Qui-Gon managed to pant, “Promise me you’ll see to it.”

“I promise,” He answered, they looked into each other’s eyes for a beat more before Obi-Wan returned to his task, wishing quite desperately that he’d gone with Satine to those first aid classes instead of the dueling club, “But don’t worry about that now, I-”

Qui-Gon’s breathing ceased.

There were no other sounds. He couldn’t hear the birds in the sky or the breeze through the trees; it was only silence. He felt his mouth form words, but couldn’t hear them. He moved his hands from Qui-Gon’s middle towards his shoulders shaking him once, twice, three times. He felt tears trailing down his face and he tried to wipe them away, likely just smearing his own face with the blood of both that murderer and of Qui-Gon. Merging the two of their beings together like they were twisted up into some horrifying cycle of fate. He pressed his head, body trembling, to Qui-Gon’s chest, praying to hear even an unsteady heartbeat.

All he could hear was silence.

He stayed there, unable to move and hardly unable to breathe at Qui-Gon’s side, sitting vigil for his mentor, his most trusted ally, the wisest man he knew. Eventually the bubble was bound to break and if it wasn’t Qui-Gon growing cold under him it was the hand that fell on his shoulder.

He flinched, whipping to the side prepared to fight another enemy, but his hands fell at the guarded look of Windu’s eyes. The professor tried to pull him away, but he broke out of his grasp with more strength than he’d thought he had left.

“Where’s Maul?” Windu crouched beside him, gently pressing Qui-Gon’s eyes shut. Obi-Wan couldn’t find it in himself to speak and he shook his head to try and convey that, but Windu just grabbed his shoulders and looked him straight in the eye, “I need to know if he’s still around.”

“I ki-” He tried, voice croaky and ruined in his silence, “He’s gone. Dead.”

Professor Windu said nothing, just placed a hand on his back for a moment more before standing. He swished his wand, brilliant red and gold sparks bursting out and filling the night sky, announcing to all that they were finally safe. However, after the display of colors he did not lower his wand and instead kept it raised, the tip glowing softly in the night’s sky.

Professor Plo Koon was the next to join them, his eyes sad and mournful under the light of their two wands. Then one by one the professors arrived, each taking in the scene and lighting their wands in silence. Obi-Wan felt much too numb sitting there on his own, magic exhausted from the fight, to locate his own wand much less light it in honor. Qui-Gon had never been much for ceremonies anyways, but the thought brought him no comfort.

The unspoken vigil ended as Headmaster Palpatine lowered his own wand, followed by Professor Windu. Obi-Wan was stood up by the latter, this time he found no fight left in him, and escorted towards the castle. He kept an eye on Qui-Gon’s body for as long as he could, but surrounded by the Headmaster and various professors it was impossible to see long before he crossed the threshold into the school.

#anakin skywalker #obi-wan kenobi #obitine #anidala #the clone wars #tcw #star wars #magical forces au #hpau

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pastpatientlywaitingforimagines · 4 years

Text

Andromeda | Spencer Reid x Reader

WC: 1865

Warnings: SPOILERS FOR 03x05 AND THE SECOND HALF OF SEASON 12, prison Reid, mentions of trauma/anxiety/therapy.

A/N: Remember this post? I was talking about this fic. Anyways, the concept of both Spencer and Reader being groomed for the BAU was one that intrigued me so I wrote this. One day I’ll get tired of writing for this universe but today is not that day. Enjoy!

GALAXY MASTERLIST (not needed to understand the plot but there’s similar content here if you liked this fic!)

You had seen a lot of bad things in your life, but hands down the worst thing you had ever seen was Spencer Reid sitting on the other side of the partition in the prison visiting room. As always your proximity to the doctor cleared your head and relaxed you in a way you hadn’t felt in weeks, but due to the circumstances you knew it was only because he was alive.

“I don’t like this,” you wasted no time making your feelings known.

“I know, me neither,” even though he was alive, you could tell your friend was in rough shape, “how are you doing?”

You breathed a laugh, “I should be asking you that.”

“I’m the same as I was when Garcia visited last week, and we both know she called you as soon as she left here.”

He was right, Penelope had filled you in on everything he had said when she had gone for her visit the week prior.

“Have you gone back to work yet?”

“Yeah, but I’m still not allowed in the field. My therapist keeps telling Emily I’m compromised,” you rolled your eyes, “I think being back in the field would help me compartmentalize better than doing paperwork in Penelope’s office.”

“What have you been doing outside of work?”

“Has my therapist talked to you too? Yeesh,” you rolled your eyes again, causing Spencer to crack a smile, “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Luke, he reminds me of some of the guys from my Platoon. He lets me watch Roxy when the team is traveling, and we go to a veteran’s support group every Tuesday. I don’t think he actually needs the support but he definitely knows I don’t go if he’s not there.”

Spencer sighed, “support groups are good, is it helping?”

“I don’t know,” you shrugged, “I already did the work to cope with my time in the military years ago. The problem isn’t my military trauma, the problem is that my best friend is in prison and the constant anxiety is dredging up old wounds.”

Your eyes narrowed, aware that he was definitely doing a light psych eval of you in that brain of his. You half expected him to start spouting exactly what was happening in your brain that was causing the increased frequency of your episodes, but it never came.

“Will you keep going, for me?”

“Sure, but only because you asked. And if Luke says anything about it you can’t tell him I don’t think it’s working.”

“Deal,” the light banter was the most normal thing that had happened to you since bringing Spencer home from Mexico.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“I know you’re a super genius and everything, but do you ever feel like you weren’t cut out for the BAU even though you were groomed for it?”

“Yeah, I had to get waived on every physical part of training and failed my gun certification an embarrassing number of times even after I was hired. I wouldn’t have gotten the job if Gideon didn’t do some serious vouching for me. Do you… do you feel like that?” You thought it was ironic that Spencer was concerned for you when he was the one in jail.

“Out of everyone in my class at the Academy, Rossi and Hotch picked me. There were at least four other agents that were better at profiling than I was, I was not the obvious choice. My entire career has been defined by joining the BAU and yet I still get hit with some serious imposter syndrome, especially since you’ve been gone. Sometimes I wonder where I would have ended up if I hadn’t been picked, what kind of agent I’d be.”

“You would have ended up with the Hostage Rescue Team,” you knew Spencer was a know-it-all, but you were surprised at his confidence and quick response.

“How do you figure?” you questioned, watching the tips of his ears turn red as he blushed.

“Garcia and I overheard Hotch and Rossi talking about you when they came back from recruiting. We did some… ‘spelunking’ and found your file.”

“Anything juicy in there?” you teased, thoroughly amused at the image of Spencer and Penelope huddled around her desk investigating you.

“No. It said you were ex-military and had been psychologically discharged. We didn’t dig deeper into that, but I could see signs of anxiety the first time I met you so it wasn’t really going to be a secret anyways.”

“Fair, so how did you know about Hostage Rescue?”

“There was a note from their unit chief that they wanted you. It makes sense, you passed the field tests in the Academy with flying colors and you’re exceptional in the field. You would do really well on a tactical team.”

“In theory, until I have a panic attack and get thirty people killed,” you joked, “they probably asked Hotch to take me because I’d have the smallest chance of being a liability in the BAU.”

“Actually, Hotch said he liked how you had approached the exercise they had given you.”

You remembered that day like it was yesterday, Hotch and Rossi had come into your class with the bare bones of a case: an abducted child in a mall a week following a prior abduction of a similar nature. As a collective you had to solve the case, asking the right questions to get the information you needed from the two Supervisory Special Agents.

Your previously mentioned classmates that had a knack for profiling were quick to build a few theories and get a bit more information, including a glimpse of the girl on a security camera, but there were still a lot of missing pieces. Something about the whole thing felt off to you, so you finally spoke up.

“What if it was someone in her family?” Your classmates looked at you in confusion, a few of them jumping up to reiterate the evidence against your suggestion. “I see your point, and I’ll support the group if you still think I’m wrong, but hear me out. There’s evidence of the abduction being personal. I don’t think it’s related to the prior case at all.”

“The family has been with us the whole time,” one of your classmates argued.

“The father?” someone else suggested.

“No, not him,” your brain was working hard, “I think it was the aunt, Susan.”

“Well done, Agent,” you heard Agent Hotchner over the clamor of the room at your suggestion.

“Do you want to back up your theory?” Rossi asked once your classmates had settled down.

“Her husband shows signs of grooming Katie: he knows more about his niece than he does his own kid. If his wife noticed, she might be trying to protect her family. She was probably ashamed that her husband was a pedophile, her son had a record, and her marriage was falling apart. Susan already said she worked retail in a mall, even if she didn’t work at this mall she’d at least have knowledge of how malls work and where she could hide a body. The abduction from the previous week would have given her something to pin Katie’s disappearance on, and Katie would have trusted her enough to go somewhere without an obvious struggle.”

“Bingo, Agent…?” Rossi looked at you for your name.

“(y/l/n),” you offered.

“Susan took her own pain out on Katie. Our agents were able to recover Katie’s body and resuscitate her, and both Susan and her husband were brought into custody.”

Later, as class was dismissed, you were approached by the two men.

“What was it that made you look deeper into the family as suspects?” Hotch had asked.

“I just had a feeling, sir,” you told him honestly.

“What kind of feeling?” Rossi seemed genuinely interested in what you were saying.

“A gut feeling. I know we’re supposed to use the facts, and all the facts were presenting themselves as becoming a serial abduction, but it just didn’t feel right to me. When I started exploring other possibilities the relevant evidence jumped right out.”

“Sometimes we get cases with barely enough information to make decisions from. Following instincts can lead to breakthroughs that solve the whole case. Keep up the good work,” Hotch shook your hand before walking away with Rossi right behind him.

“Yeah, I went out on a limb with that one. I’ll tell you about it later,” you shook your head, knowing you didn’t have enough time to tell Spencer the whole story. He was quiet for a minute, glancing around the room before he spoke again.

“If I can’t get out of here, I think you should look into transferring to Hostage Rescue.”

“You’re not serious, are you? You’re getting out of here. I’m seeing to it personally,” you said it like it was a fact. His face told you he wasn’t kidding.

“Let me ask you this- if I’m found guilty at my trial, how are you going to take it?”

You wanted to tell him you would be fine and continue to fight for his freedom, but you both knew there was a reason your therapist wasn’t clearing you for field work that would only get worse if your best friend had to serve upwards of 25 years in jail.

The BAU without Spencer Reid just wouldn’t be the same BAU you fell in love with when Hotch and Rossi had hired you all those years ago.

“Do you really think the brass would approve a transfer to an anti-terrorism tactical unit when I can’t even get cleared for field work now?” you countered.

“I do. Your coping mechanisms are well developed. If you separate yourself from the BAU… and me… I think you could pass their psych eval just fine. And everyone knows your tactical skills are off the charts, even after you’ve taken time off.”

“You’re not a very good genius if you think you can get rid of me that easily,” you were quick to point out, “even if I did transfer, I’d still be here as much as possible. Penelope wouldn’t let me cut myself off that easily from the rest of the team either.”

“Just think about it, please.”

You sighed, “I’ll think about it, but I’m still holding out that we’re proving your innocence and you and I will be back to our shenanigans in no time.”

“I’m looking forward to it. How’s my mom doing?”

“She’s been ok, I visit every day and JJ usually comes with me. Cassie’s been really great for her,” you told him.

“Good, will you tell her I-“

“Prisoners line up!” a guard yelled.

“Will you tell her I love her?” Spencer said quickly as he stood. You nodded, watching as he lined up with the other inmates and walked away.

As you left the prison you told yourself you were never getting used to this, and you were going to start working double time on proving Spencer’s innocence. There was no family like your BAU family, and whoever had framed Spencer was not going to destroy that so easily.

#spencer reid x reader #spencer reid #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fluff #platonic soulmates #platonic imagine #criminal minds #criminal minds fanfic

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bethansfandoms · 4 years

Note

if you're up for another prompt... I'm a sucker for the classic Dancer!Remus and bored Sirius there with his family, but sees this adorable talent and suddenly could not be less bored. I'm not too bothered by the dance style, but preferably not Ballet because I've seen that done a few times. Maybe Ballroom/Latin, since I project onto Remus so much 🤦‍♂️. But it's not that big of a deal. Thanks! You're so talented btw...

Always up for new prompts, and thank you so much! Okay I think this may turn out different to how you intended and may not be the classic dancer! Remus prompt you’re used to, but I hope you enjoy it :)

Sirius absolutely hated these events. Like, really hated them.

Because why did being wealthy mean you had to know how to ballroom dance? Or prove that you know how in this case.

It wasn’t that Sirius couldn’t dance. He’d practically been been forced to as soon as he could walk. What he hated was actually doing it.

He also hated socialising with the friends of the family who liked to attend these sorts of things as well. Because he had enough lecturing about his posture and hair and attitude and voice at home. He didn’t need it from these people as well.

So as they entered the grand ballroom, Sirius immediately walked over to a table and sat on the chair away from the dance floor, much to his parents annoyance.

He knew full well about their ulterior motive. He was seventeen. This event was usually attended by the financially elite and so was a good place to find a girl for Sirius who his parents deemed worthy.

Sirius had a few problems with this. One, social staus was neither important nor attractive to him. Two, he didn’t trust his parents taste in partners as, well, they’d married each other. Three, the ‘girl’ part was an all round bit of an issue.

He could tell Regulus secretly hated this as well, but had not been brave enough to sit with Sirius at a distance from the dance floor, so had now been partnered with a blonde girl of similar age to him.

Sirius new this period of relaxation would not last. His parents were dancing together but they were obviously scouting the crowd for somebody to pair with their eldest son.

Sirius slumped in his chair pretending to not exist on the off chance it actually came true. He couldn’t stand to watch his parents dancing any longer and so scanned the room for familiar faces of family and friends who he probably hated and would intend to avoid.

And then his eyes settled on a couple that he didn’t recognise. A girl with bright red hair who seemed to be enjoying herself but was not a great dancer. And partnering her, a tawny haired boy.

And although Sirius was in no way attracted by people’s dance ability, this guy was possibly the best dancer in the whole room and Sirius couldn’t help but be impressed at how effortlessly he lead the red haired girl.

He was tall, really tall, and quite pale as well. His hair fell slightly in front of his eyes and curled a little bit at the ends. Which Sirius decided was adorable. He had this huge smile plastered on his face. Sirius didn’t fail to notice how cute his smile was. And unlike almost every male in the room, he was not wearing black and white but instead a combination of blues and browns.

And Sirius had always preferred watching to dancing, but now he felt more adamant about this opinion than ever.

And then suddenly his parents were talking to them and they’d stopped dancing, to Sirius’s disappointment as the guy looked so good doing it. And his name was being called and he tried to disappear into his chair. Which did not work and resulted in his name just being called louder.

The boy was walking towards him and sat next to Sirius, smiling at him. Sirius blushes slightly and hated himself for it.

“I think they require your presence.” He said, still smiling sweetly. And Sirius decided this was very unfair because holy crap even his voice was attractive.

“No, I think they must mean a different Sirius.”

And to his delight, the taller boy laughed. Okay, definitely not fair, he was not allowed to have a cute laugh as well.

“Not much of a dancer?”

“Define dancing. Because if you count jumping around to loud rock music, I’m a big fan. Ballroom, not so much.”

And when he laughed again and Sirius bit his lip nervously. And now his name is being accompanied by a glare and he knew he had no choice and groaned, walking towards them.

“Good luck!” The boy called after him. And Sirius didn’t think he was capable of responding and so didn’t.

He knew exactly why he was being called. The red haired girl looked about his age and so he assumed his parents were already planning their wedding.

He breguginglg took a position to lead and they slowly began dancing.

“I’m not marrying you, by the way.” The girl sad, grinning at him.

Sirius sighed in annoyance. “Oh no, they didn’t actually mention a wedding did they!”

She laughed, “indeed they did.”

“Well don’t worry, you’re not really my type.”

The girl stood on his foot, possibly by accident but he suspected not.

“No! I didn’t mean it like that.” He said hurriedly. “I, uh. No girls, that’s my type. Not females.”

She giggled again. “I’m Lily, it’s nice to meet you.”

He introduced himself as Sirius which earned him a snarky response about how everybody knew his name due to the volume his parents had been yelling it at.

“I’ve never seen you here before.” Sirius said. Changing the tempo of their dance as the song changed.

“Oh, well, this is totally not my scene. But Remus, my friend, his father was invited and made me come along for emotional support.”

And all Sirius could think was, Remus Remus Remus Remus. Because the boy from earlier had to be who she was talking about. And he decided he loved that name.

“Is that the boy you were dancing with earlier?” Sirius asked, playing it cool. Lily nodded. “And you’re just friends?” Sirius asked coyly, winking at her.

“Yeah. He’s single if you’re interested.”

Sirius intentionally stood on her foot causing her to grimace at him. But his heart fluttered slightly, much to his annoyance, because had Lily just implied that Remus would date a guy? Nope. He was being stupid. Lily had just been joking around.

Sirius’s previous conception had been correct, she truly was quite a horrific dancer. As he spun her round, she full on tripped and Sirius quickly knelt to see if she was okay. Her laughter made it evident she was.

And suddenly Remus had appeared to check on her as well.

“I’m fine!” She assured. “But maybe Remus should take it from here.” And with that, she quickly stood and strode off. Winking at Remus who made some comment at her under his breath.

Sirius stood, staring at him awkwardly. Oh no. He had freckles. Sirius knew he was done for.

“You leading or me?” Remus asked which snapped him out of his daydream.

“Oh, uh, I thought Lily was joking about that.”

Remus widened his eyes slightly. His beautiful, green eyes flecked with specks of brown. Sirius shook his head slightly.

“We don’t have to if you don’t want to!” Remus assured.

“No,” Sirius had said that far to quickly. “No it’s fine, let’s do it. You lead?” He suggested.

And Remus smiled and obliged. Taking Sirius’s hand in his own and placing his other around the top of his back. Sirius held their arms up at head level and rested his other on top of the one locked around him.

Being in this close proximity was definitely affecting his dancing. But Remus seemed unbothered and was still leading him around expertly.

“Oh, I’m Sirius by the way!”

“Yeah, I know.” He laughed slightly. “Remus.”

“Yeah, I know.” Sirius repeated. “Lily told me.”

“You two seemed to get on well.” Remus said, grinning and raising his eyebrows.

“Yes, well, my parents basically proposed to her for me. They’re desperate to find me a girlfriend.”

“Well, she’s single, you know.” Remus said, biting his lip a little. Sirius cursed that he managed to make literally everything he did so attractive.

“Yes, and I’m gay.” Sirius confirmed. Remus chuckled slightly.

“So I’m to assume your parents don’t know?”

“I think they’d actually kill me.”

And then Remus stopped dancing and pulled away, leaving his hand on Sirius’s back but looking him in the eye.

“I’m so sorry. It sucks to have parents who don’t support you. Luckily my mum was cool with it, dad took a while to come round.”

And then Sirius swore his vision went hazy as he realised what Remus was saying. And just as he was about to enquire further, his mother appeared at his side, enquiring about the whereabouts of the girl they’d partnered him with.

Remus grinned at him for the entire duration of the discussion.

“I should probably get going, but I’ll see you around?” Remus said.

“Yeah. Yeah, well, we come here the first Saturday of every month so, maybe I’ll see you here again sometime?”

“I’d like that.”

And then he was walking off and taking Lily’s arm, before shooting him a final wave and disappearing through the door.

And Sirius is just stood there, staring at him in awe. Because Remus, adorable, not heterosexual, single Remus, said that he’d like to see him, Sirius Black, again.

#wolfstar #wolfstar drabble #wolfstar au #wolfstar prompt #wolfstar headcanon #wolfstar fanfiction #wolfstar dancing #dancer!remus #dancer!au #remus lupin x sirius black #sirius black #remus lupin #remus lupin prompt #sirius black prompt

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puddygeeks · 4 years

Text

Wᴇ Cᴏᴍᴇ Rᴜɴɴɪɴɢ - Tʜᴇ 100 Bᴇʟʟᴀᴍʏ x OC - Cʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 46: Sᴄᴇɴᴇ Oғ Tʜᴇ Cʀɪᴍᴇ

Masterlist

Rating: Mature

Summary: During her time in the Skybox, Indigo formed a precious friendship with fellow outcast Octavia Blake, the girl under the floor. At first they thought their departure from the oppression of the Ark was a blessing, but quickly came to rely on Indigo's keen survival instincts. The 100 struggle to meet the challenges of Earth whilst Bellamy strives to lead the wavering teenagers and his irresponsible attitude fuels constant conflict with Indigo. Their only shared interest is in protecting Octavia and Indigo beings to suspect that there is a deeper cause to Bellamy's seemingly irrational choices. As the consequences of his actions mount up around him, he finally begins to confide in her and she discovers more than she ever bargained for.

Fandom: CW’s The 100

Pairing: OC x Bellamy Blake

LONG TERM ONGOING PROJECT :)

My writing is entirely fuelled by coffee! If you enjoy my work, feel free to donate toward my caffeine dependency: will work for coffee

Warnings: Mature content. Non-consent, language, sex, self harm, suicide, anxiety, helplessness, torture, captivity/confinement, alcohol/drug use.

Chapter Forty-Six

Following some substantial effort, I had managed to stop Harper’s words from swirling around in my mind by the morning. All that remained was a heavy confusion over Bellamy’s hot and cold behaviour as of late and I struggled to make any sense of it.

When I arrived at the meeting point for my training with Octavia, I was stunned to find that she was absent. In all of our days together, she had been strictly devoted to the plan and had been diligently awaiting my arrival at every session. I sat tapping my knee anxiously for a while and when it became clear that she would not be coming, I wandered through the courtyard with confusion. I discovered that Bellamy was still in his room as I stepped inside and he met my eyes with an expression that indicated he had been searching for me. He rushed over to greet me whilst I stared back at him in surprise.

“There you are! Didn’t you get my message?” He asked with a hint of irritation and I cocked a brow at him. “Your training with Octavia is cancelled today, we’ve got an assignment and I thought you’d want to join for it.” He started cryptically and I stared back at him with a lurch in my stomach. “We’re going to Mount Weather.” He revealed and I noticed that he observed me closely with an obvious concern.

“What?” I breathed as I battled to contain the wave of shock that crashed over me and he made a sympathetic expression. My legs felt weak as I processed the idea and my breathing became sharper.

“Kane’s cleared us to go to Mount Weather. There’s plenty of supplies there that are going to waste, he wants us to start bringing them back to camp.” He clarified as I stared open mouthed with a feeling of dread in my stomach. Although I could understand the logic of this plan, the very concept of returning to the location that held horrifying memories for almost every resident of camp was too large to fit in my mind. “Look, if I got this wrong and you can’t handle it, you don’t have to come Indie. I just...I thought that it might help you to face it.” He explained with a nervous voice and I finally recovered enough of my composure to nod fervently at him. I swallowed the terror and fixed a determination into my voice.

“No, you’re completely right Bel, I need to put this to rest.” I agreed in reaction to his insecure addition. A dazzling smile spread across his face at my words and I felt a surge of comfort at the sight of it. “How do I convince Kane to let me join?” I enquired as I began to build my confidence internally and set my mind to the task. I couldn’t allow myself to become distracted with the list of reasons that this plan was a bad idea that my brain was compiling.

“I’ve already arranged it. You and Octavia are the official guard support.” He revealed with pride evident in his voice and I smiled at him in amazement. “I know, I’m awesome. Now hurry up and get ready, everyone else is preparing to leave.” He ushered me inside with an urgency and I rushed to gather my things so that I could follow him from the room.

We attended the armoury together and Bellamy took the time to check that I was thoroughly equipped before we were joined by the prying eyes of the rest of the unit. I smiled fondly at the way that he fussed over me and after his bizarre antics in recent days, I enjoyed being the subject of his protective nature again. When we entered the hanger where the guard group was gathered, I was surprised to find a far smaller crew than the last outing. I took a moment to consider that some of the originals must not be recovered enough to embark on another mission yet. Instead, I found Octavia, Monty, Raven, Miller and Harper waiting with smiling faces at our entrance. For a moment, it felt like old times as we glanced at each other and I felt a surge of optimism for the mission. We finished gathering supplies and endured a short briefing from Kane and Abby before we were finally allowed to leave the camp.

It was a gruelling journey to the place that I had been rescued from barely weeks ago. Due to the fact that I was unconscious during the return to camp, I hadn’t realised the distance and I gained a new appreciation for the challenge that it had been to assault the facility. As we strolled through the endless trees we filled the time with idle chatter and it was strangely peaceful to be surrounded by those closest to me. Monty revealed that he had left Jasper in Knox’s care and I found myself hoping that he was kinder to the poor kid than he had been to either of us.

As Bellamy announced that we were near the entrance now, I felt a fresh set of nerves build in my stomach and I was pleased when he dropped to the back of the group to slip his hand into mine in a gesture of reassurance that I sorely needed. Any other members of our group who had been held inside the mountain became shifty and awkward too; Harper in particular seemed legitimately stressed and I smiled when I noticed Monty subtly placed a hand on her arm to steady her. As the oversized bunker door crept into view, I struggled to contain a wave of terror that caused me to break into trembling all over and Harper paused to gag between the trees. The others waited patiently whilst we took a moment to compose ourselves and Bellamy positioned himself to block me from their view so that I could recover without an audience.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this, Love?” He enquired with his brows furrowed deeply in concern and I nodded in response, despite the fear that blossomed in my chest. “You don’t have to go in there if you’ve changed your mind, or if it’s too much. You’re in control here.” He asserted and I smiled at him fondly with a deep appreciation for his careful wording. I was impressed that he had chosen to ensure that he empowered me and as he observed me attentively, I felt my nerves slowly minimising back under my control in the safety that he radiated. When I next met his eyes, I displayed a new determination and he smiled proudly at me. “Alright, I’ll be right there the whole time, you’re safe.” He soothed, before turning to rejoin our friends. “Let’s get this over with.” He announced as he led us toward the door and I took long, slow breaths on the approach.

The moment that we entered the facility, the first thing that we noticed was the pungent smell of death. Harper barely managed a few steps inside, before she ran back out to vomit and I frantically covered my face with my hands in a desperate bid to prevent myself from following suit. Bellamy snatched the rag from his belt and wrapped it over my nose and mouth, without any consideration for his own discomfort. Even Octavia could not contain her reaction, despite her well practiced controlled exterior and the group quickly ensured that they all sourced something to cover their faces with.

The familiar halls and spaces contained horrors that rivalled even my nightmares as almost every room contained bodies in various stages of decay. It was abundantly clear that none of us had prepared for this issue and we spent a gruelling few hours dragging them outside to burn. It was thankless work and I found myself wishing that we had been provided with a larger group for this particular task.

Once we had cleared the dead, Bellamy announced that cleaning of the bunker could wait until the next outing and we gathered around a map of the facility to strategise. We divided ourselves into smaller groups and planned to each search a different area for the necessary supplies. Monty and Harper teamed up for communication devices or other useful technology, Miller and Raven beelined for food whilst Octavia was assigned a list of priority medications from Abby. Bellamy and I were left to search for weaponry and as we all split with instructions to regroup, I was relieved to have a moment alone. I turned to face Bellamy as I dropped my facade of calm and he assessed me with a clear anxiety in his expression.

“How you doing Indie?” He asked with a soft tone to his voice and I sighed as I fidgeted on the spot. There was an overwhelming nervous energy flowing through my body as I battled to remain focused on the task rather than the panic that lurked at the back of my mind. It took constant concentration to hold myself together and I willed myself to complete this mission without having a full breakdown of any sort.

“It’s surreal to be here, especially with you.” I grumbled quietly as I fiddled with my hands and he smiled supportively. “This is where I grieved for you. And yet, here you are, standing in front of me as if none of it happened. I guess it just starts to feel hard to tell dreams from reality, you know.” I explained and he nodded at me with a patient understanding that was comforting to witness. He stepped closer and took my face in his hands carefully.

“Let me help.” He whispered as he leaned in to place a chaste kiss on my forehead and I felt myself relax slightly at the warmth of his touch. “That feel real to you?” He asked with adoration glistening in his eyes and I stared into them with a swelling in my heart. I nodded bashfully, earning a smile from him as he took this as incentive to continue. He graced his lips delicately on one of my cheeks, before trailing his way teasingly past my mouth to the other cheek. “How about that?” He breathed against my skin and I nodded again as I gulped in anticipation. “Good. Final test, is this real to you yet Indigo?” His voice grew gruff and raspy as he found his way to my lips and although he was holding the heat between us at bay with his cautious movements, the connection of his kiss blew the breath from my lungs.

I had expected by now for his effect on me to have waned somewhat, or at least to have lost the extremity of it’s edge, but as we stood in the very halls where I fell into him for the first time, I felt the same overwhelming, world spinning thrill as I did then. Whenever he kissed me, it was grounding and his devotion always blew any fear away, as I knew that I couldn’t have imagined something as incredible as this. When he finally stepped away, I felt far more equipped to deal with the situation and I smiled at him with appreciation that came directly from my heart.

“Definitely real.” I commented smugly and he chuckled before he took my hand to lead toward our assigned role.

“Okay, let me know if you need to check again.” He remarked with a wink that made my heart flip.

We searched several areas that we had highlighted as potential storage for weaponry and gathered a small selection of items from each as we continued from room to room. Bellamy stepped into our final location first and fiddled around in search of a light switch, whilst I kept my attention on him so that I wouldn’t spiral into panic. Whilst I waited, it occurred to me that he had purposely chosen our task around avoiding dorms or any of the common areas and I was once again struck with how considerate he was of my needs. As the lights flickered into life on the ridiculously high ceilings, I realised that we were in a hangar sized space that was crammed with weaponry that overflowed from the shelves and I turned to face Bellamy in open mouthed shock.

“Holy shit! Jackpot.” I hissed as he stared around in amazement. He took a few careful steps into the room and I followed with my eyes roaming the shelves. Although logically I knew that this bunker had been designed to survive and endure, it was shocking to discover this level of preparation. We wandered aimlessly through the stacks of shelves until we emerged to an area where large shutters waited behind an unfamiliar vehicle and I glanced back at Bellamy with an exhilarated smile. “You think it works?” I crooned with an excitement that was clearly contagious and his eyes twinkled with hope.

“Let’s find out.” He suggested as he rushed toward the driver’s door and I ran to the passenger side with my heartbeat pounding. The doors opened easily to our surprise and we slid into the seats. Bellamy immediately began searching for a set of keys whilst I was distracted by the large area in the back that could easily accommodate our group and a substantial amount of salvage.

“We could take so much more home with this!” I exclaimed as I turned back to the front and felt optimism filling the space that my anxiety had inhabited until now. I hadn’t expected to find anything this helpful inside the mountain and found myself feeling thankful that we’d taken this risk. Bellamy pulled down the sun visor and released a set of keys that dropped toward his lap. He caught them mid air with a flourish and fixed me with a dazzling smile.

“It’s a good day, Love.” He stated with a cheerful tone that made my stomach fizz and I relished in his joy. As he fiddled to insert the keys, I clocked him with a worried realisation and felt the return of some anxiety.

“Wait a second. Do you even know how to drive?” I enquired with concern and he paused momentarily at my scrutiny. A wicked smile spread across his face and I felt my stomach lurch in dread. This was a familiar expression that I knew was usually closely followed by some kind of reckless decision and I was unsure if I could handle this side of him today.

“Eh, how hard can it be?” He stated and I cocked a brow at him suspiciously. He turned the keys confidently in the ignition and the engine grumbled to life. I gasped at the victory whilst he held both fists up in celebration and we high fived in a shared moment of excitement. “Alright, what have we got? Accelerator, brakes, yeah I’ve got this.” He mumbled aloud as I assessed him nervously.

“Calm your jets, Bel. Are you sure this is a good idea? Maybe we should just wait for Raven, I bet she could give us a full crash course.” I reasoned in a calm manner and he rolled his eyes at me. For the first time since our original camp, I felt as if I were boring him with my attitude and a tingle of nostalgia crossed my chest.

“Have a little faith Indie, I know what I’m doing.” He asserted with an overpowering confidence and I viewed him sceptically. “Buckle up.” He instructed and I rushed to strap myself in as he prepared to test whether the vehicle could still manage any movement. “Are you ready for the ride of your life?” He winked as he spoke and I felt a flutter of nervous butterflies as I nodded back with my hand tightly clinging to the handle above the door. “Now, if I just-”

I hardly noticed what it was that caused the car to spur into action, but before he could even finish his sentence the vehicle surged forward and crashed a set of shelving to the ground in a clattering noise that sent its contents flying. Bellamy’s head bounced lightly against the steering wheel, rousing into action ancient airbags that exploded dust clouds over the pair of us and I yelped in shock.

“Oh my god! Oh my god, are you alright?” I asked with a wave of terror as I frantically examined him and when he met my eyes, I couldn’t contain a snort of laughter at his bewildered expression. In barely moments we had descended into hysterical cackling and each of us fed the others uncontrollable fits. Tears streamed down my cheeks and I could barely catch my breath as he guffawed back at me. I realised that we had never had the chance to share playfulness like this before and I treasured the innocent pleasure that beamed across Bellamy’s face.

When we could finally calm ourselves enough to speak, he peeked out at the chaos that he’d caused through the windscreen, then returned his attention to me with amusement dancing in his eyes.

“You have to cover for me. When the team gets here, say it was you who drove into the shelving and dented the brand new vehicle we just found.” He instructed in his best attempt at any authoritative voice and I raised my brows at him with a scoff.

“Hell no! This is gold! This is all you, baby.” I defended with the lilt of laughter still clear in my voice and I wiped at my damp cheeks. Although I’d been pleased to share this experience with him, I partly wished that anyone else had been here to witness it as he tried to shift the blame.

“Come on Indie, this is my reputation we’re talking about! I’m their unit leader.” He pleaded and I felt myself easily slipping into giggles again at his embarrassment. I could only imagine the expressions on the faces of the trainees if they realised that their leader was an overconfident goofball and felt a new appreciation for the fact that I had the privilege to experience this side of him.

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you went all Evel Knievel on it?” I snorted and he reached over to playfully jab me in the side, only causing me to laugh harder.

We managed to move the vehicle back into its original position and assessed that other than some minor marks on the bonnet, there were no obvious signs of damage. I assisted Bellamy in replacing the shelving and items, before he radioed the others to inform them of our discovery. He instructed Raven to come to us for a full assessment of the vehicle before we could increase the amount of supplies we gathered. We brushed the dust from our clothes and attempted to clear each other's faces, despite the mutual distrust about whether we’d truly got it all. The air bags were practically impossible to return correctly but Bellamy was adamant that no one would ever have to know that they’d gone off.

Once Raven had recovered from the thrill of discovering the vehicle, she confirmed that it was likely to be able to manage the journey back to Arkadia, but asserted that it would need some work once home. She busied herself with seeking out the parts needed for the repairs whilst Bellamy and I arranged a larger stack of weaponry to place in the boot. Deep in the shelves, I worked through the items to ensure that I collected a mixture that would give us an advantage and startled as Raven crept up beside me.

“So, about that rover...I noticed that the panel on the airbags is broken, and it’s pretty dusty in there?” She spoke smugly and I gave my best effort to shrug innocently. She thinned her eyes at me and I felt myself gulp involuntarily. “You two been going at it instead of working?” She crooned and my eyes widened dramatically.

“No! That’s so gross Raven!” I hissed under my breath and a satisfied cackle escaped Raven’s composure. “Let’s just say that I think it would be best if you drove us home.” I reported with a playful wink and I noticed that her expression dropped slightly. I tilted my head at her in confusion and she released a long sigh.

“I can’t. The walk here was already too much for my stupid leg.” She admitted bitterly as she avoided my gaze and I kicked myself inwardly for being too focused on my own anxieties to notice her struggle. I reached out to put a hand on her arm and was pleased when she reluctantly met my eyes.

“Hey, that’s okay, next time for sure.” I asserted and she nodded slowly. “In the meantime, I think we’d all appreciate it if you could give Bellamy some pointers.” I hinted and she smiled at my insinuation. I glanced around to check that we were alone and dropped my voice so that I couldn’t be overheard. “He crashed it into the shelves earlier.” I revealed and was relieved when she returned to laughing. It was always difficult for me to witness Raven suffering and I made a mental note to check on her more frequently in future.

Bellamy’s voice carried across the hangar as he returned with the others and we regrouped to finish loading supplies into the back of the rover. Raven seized the opportunity to instruct Bellamy under the guise of confirming that everything worked as it should and I was thankful for her subtlety for a change. There was a buzz of excitement in the air as we piled into the rover and I could practically feel the relief in the group that we wouldn’t have to walk. Bellamy turned the key in the ignition and I made a point of fastening my seatbelt whilst smirking at him.

“Not a word.” He grumbled as a warning and I struggled to suppress a smile at our in-joke.

“I didn’t say anything.” I breathed with a wide smile that forced its way onto my face and I noticed that his lips twitched upward too.

I was relieved to find that Bellamy’s driving was far soother now that he had spoken with Raven and it was actually a pleasant journey through the woods as the others chatted casually in the cramped back seats. There was a strange sense of peace that filled the overpacked space and as I looked into the rear view mirror, I noticed that even Octavia had relaxed into the warm atmosphere.

We drove for hours until Bellamy started to seem confused and we descended into bickering as I made my best effort to direct him with a painfully simple map of the area. I didn’t even notice that the rest of the car had fallen silent to listen to us until Octavia called out to assist Bellamy with her knowledge of the area. As we moved off again, Bellamy glanced over at me sheepishly and I clenched my jaw in a huff.

“Christ, this is like the real road trip experience, mom and dad arguing in the front.” Miller commented idly from behind and rapidly the tension disappeared as I could sense every person in the vehicle struggling to suppress their amusement.

“Are we nearly there yet?” Harper groaned dramatically as I kept my eyes trained on the passenger window in an effort to hide my expression.

“Mom, dad, I have to pee.” Raven announced to further fuel the group who were quickly falling into an exhaustion fuelled, playful delirium.

“God, Raven, you’re the worst. That’s the fifth time.” Monty crooned in a convincing tone and I could hardly believe that this conversation was gaining momentum.

“I have a small bladder, leave me alone.” She defended bitterly as her voice cracked and she began to laugh. The energy that bounced between them was almost palpable in the small containment of the back compartment and I felt a pull of sentimentality as I processed how pleasant it was to be able to share humour with them.

“I’m hungry, can I open the snacks?” Octavia asked in a whinier voice than I’d ever heard her use and I rolled my eyes at her dramatic performance as Bellamy peeked at me out of the corner of his eyes. I could feel that he was as delighted by their enjoyment of this time together as I was and we shared a subtle smile at each other.

“Mom, Miller hit me!” Harper called, causing the entire group to break into vivacious laughter that filled the vehicle with warmth. I couldn’t recall a time where I’d heard them behave in such a manner and I could no longer resist indulging in the playful atmosphere.

“Stop distracting your father or you’ll all be going to bed early.” I scolded as I finally caved to their childish game with a wink at Bellamy and he chuckled to himself.

“Hey!” Bellamy called authoritatively and they all flinched in surprise as their attention turned to him nervously. “You better behave back there or so help me god, I will turn this car around.” He ordered with a blatant smirk spread across his lips and the others cheered at his participation.

“What about you two, going to bed early?” Raven crooned with a suggestive wink and I threw a bread roll at her head from the bag at the front.

The rest of the journey passed in a blur and several members of the group fell asleep in the back. Bellamy occasionally glanced over at me with a fond smile which I couldn’t help returning. It was a strange outcome for a day that began full of dread to be one of my favourite days since we arrived on Earth. I peeked into the rearview mirror to observe my peacefully sleeping, ragtag family huddled together in the back and smiled in contentment. In this moment, I felt that life truly couldn’t get any better and I found myself finally starting to accept my new reality.

***

The sound of conversation and laughter filled the air as we relaxed in the metal seats under the night sky. There was a feeling of intense satisfaction in the camp tonight after a particularly delightful meal made with the food from the mountain and I had been thrilled to discover that Miller had snuck a plentiful supply of alcohol into the back of the rover. We had promptly set about creating a simple bar and a terrace area in the camp upon our return. As Harper, Raven and I drank in a chilled state, I felt pleased that we had chosen to install this area and noticed several other members of camp settling nearby.

“To us!” Raven announced as she lifted her cup and we all toasted. “We are the heroes of food and booze.” She added with a smirk and we chuckled at her brazen attitude. We’d been here for a while, observing the bustling activity of camp whilst we caught up on petty gossip and Raven, as usual, downed twice the amount of drinks as Harper or I. She had already given Harper a thorough grilling on Monty, from which I’d had to rescue her before Raven caused any long term trauma. I sighed in contentment as I glanced between them and now that she was well warmed, I decided to use this opportunity to attempt to pry information from Raven.

“So, Raven, a little birdy told me that there was a potential suitor around whilst we were away.” I began in a smooth tone and Harper sat forward in interest. Raven tensed slightly as she viewed me with a deep suspicion.

“Oh really? And who told you that?” She asked with a pout that revealed her displeasure in my knowledge of this and I thinned my eyes at her. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t mentioned it and her avoidance of the topic only further fueled my interest.

“Nice try, but I know better than to rat out my sources, especially to you, or they’ll never tell me anything again.” I teased as I sipped my cup with a resolute expression and she rolled her eyes. I could only imagine what she would do to timid Knox if she knew that he had been gossiping to me and I decided that he did not deserve such a fate.

“Don’t avoid the question, you weren’t this shy when it came to grilling me!” Harper stated as she addressed her with a wink and leaned closer to examine her. “Now, spill the tea.” She insisted with a jab which Raven flinched away from her in annoyance. It was fascinating to watch their developing friendship and I hoped that Raven might accept her support eventually as she had mine. From the reports of others in the camp, she’d been making quite the attempt to isolate herself recently and I knew that it would take consistent work to undo that.

“There’s nothing to spill!” She whined in a voice that was entirely the wrong pitch for her and I knew immediately that she was lying as she shuffled in her seat. “Why do you even want to know?” She enquired defensively and Harper scoffed under her breath.

“Such a hypocrite!” She hissed as she crossed her arms at me and I chuckled at her reaction. I had known Raven long enough to recognise her tight lipped attitude when it came to sharing anything she didn’t want to and I smiled knowingly at Harper before turning my attention to our avoidant friend. If I were going to prize this information from her, it would take some well planned tactics.

“I’m a concerned friend, I need to check that whoever it is deserves you.” I explained in an almost convincing tone as she cocked a brow at me.

“Bitch, have you ever known me to drop my standards? I know my worth.” She asserted, before she leaned forward to assess me in a movement that made my stomach lurch. I recognised the glint in her eyes and tried to steel myself for a counter attack. “Besides, if I’m gonna part with that kind of information, I’m gonna need something in return.” She began with a smile and I felt my spine straighten in response. I knew immediately that I’d made a mistake by challenging her and tried to seem unphased by her demand.

“Oh, here we go.” I muttered as she observed me like an animal studying its prey. Already I regretted initiating this conversation and I hadn’t even heard her price yet.

“I wanna know what it was like when you finally got it on with Bellamy, give me the details. What’s he like? Does he have any kinks? Was it rough, or is that all just bravado? Ooh, how big's his dick?!” She spurted out the questions in rapid fire and my cheeks grew red at the same speed. Harper choked loudly on her drink and it poured out of her nostrils as she struggled to catch her breath.

“Raven!” I scolded as my mouth dropped open in shock and she smiled in a manner that indicated she was thoroughly pleased with herself. I glanced over at Harper for assistance, who had now finished drying herself off and was peeking between us with riveted interest.

“This outta be good.” Harper muttered and I sighed in disappointment at her betrayal after my earlier support of her. I made a mental note to allow Raven to question her to her heart's desire in future.

“Don’t be a prude!” Raven remarked as she rounded on me again. “Is it big?” She asked with absolutely no shame in sight and I squirmed in my seat with a gulp. “Oh yeah, looks like he would be big. Your face says it is.” She teased and I covered my face in humiliation whilst she cackled wickedly.

“You know, until now I’ve never wished that I died in Mount Weather.” I groaned as I squinted back up at the two of them and although Harper smiled apologetically, Raven simply shrugged with a complete lack of any remorse. I had always known that she was able to embarrass me at any time, but it was clear she was demonstrating the full power of her ability to teach me a lesson.

“Your face is almost blending into your hair there, lover.” She commented as she sipped on her drink with a smug expression. I decided in this moment that I would need to develop a far thicker skin before I ever attempted to corner her again.

“Just cause you’re my friend, that doesn’t mean I won’t kick you in the face.” I spat as I twitched toward her threateningly and she simply held her middle finger up carelessly.

“Oh jesus Mel, give it a rest.” Harper muttered as we both regarded her in confusion. “Talk about barking up the wrong tree.” She added as she indicated to her side and we followed her eyeline to Bellamy. He was standing in the courtyard chatting to a young, brunette girl who seemed particularly more invested in the conversation than he did. I felt my stomach lurch slightly at the way that she batted her lashes at him but ensured that it didn’t show on my face as Raven turned back to consider us with a cold expression.

“Yeah, she’s definitely trying it.” She drawled with an obvious annoyance that she shared with Harper as she met her eyes and I was warmed by their defensiveness on my behalf. “You wanna sort that out Indie?” Raven suggested with a gesture over her shoulder and stern eyes.

“It’s fine.” I remarked as I forced a smile and tone that I hoped was casual. “Bellamy’s a big boy, he can do whatever he wants.” I stated with a shrug and studied my drink in an effort to avoid their reactions. There was a moment of silence as I could sense that they were deciding how to address my apparent lack of interest and sighed as I expected to be scolded.

“Is he a big boy though?” Harper muttered under her breath and I gasped as my eyes snapped back up to her suggestive smile with shock.

“Harper!” I cried in outrage and playfully slapped her arm. “Jesus, I expect that kind of savagery from her but not you!” I scolded as I fought to contain a smile and returned my scowl to Raven. “You’re a terrible influence, you know that?” I accused and she simply shrugged, before she glanced over her shoulder again with a growing disbelief.

“You’re just gonna let that be?” She grilled and my attention flitted over to find Mel touching Bellamy’s arm fondly as he shifted in a subtly awkward gesture that probably would’ve been unnoticable to anyone else. I felt a pang of annoyance at her ongoing efforts but tried to remind myself that Bellamy hadn’t made any commitments to me, nor had I requested any, so I felt that I had no right to be upset. “She’s literally doing it right in front of you.” Raven groaned as she observed their conversation with a disgusted look.

“I don’t think she even knows who I am, Raven. She has no idea not to do it in front of me.” I commented idly and realised that Bellamy didn’t even seem to be aware that we were here. Raven cocked a brow at me sceptically. “What would you suggest?” I asked in exasperation and as she assessed Mel with a darkness in her eyes, I immediately regretted my invitation for her twisted ideas.

“Me? I’d slap her about.” She stated in a cold tone as she took a long sip from her cup and gave a meaningful expression.

“Shit, Raven!” I hissed as my mouth dropped open in disbelief and even Harper flinched at her words. This was extreme even for Raven and I began to realise that our time apart had changed her more than I had cared to address yet.

“She’s just a dumb kid, we’ve all been there.” Harper breathed in a sympathetic tone and Raven rolled her eyes in disappointment at the two of us.

“Baby, if you don’t want to tell him to behave, I get it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t scare her the hell off.” She presented her case with a clear belief in the validity of her wisdom and I scoffed at her simple logic. “Look, all I’m saying is that I’ve tried to be the cool, understanding girl who just waits for my guy to pick me and look at where it got me. I should’ve taken Clarke out of the picture when I had the chance.” She avoided my gaze as she stared down at her hands and her face was filled with bitterness. I watched her with a deep sympathy but before I could say anything, she cleared her throat and forced a smile. “How about this: I’ll hold her down and you punch.” She suggested with a deviant wink and I stared at her with wide eyes.

“Okay, you know what, I’m sensing a hint of bitterness, and a serious anger problem and...hmm...you getting cut off for the night.” I declared as I leaned forward to snatch the drink from her hands before leaning back to gesture to the bartender that she was done and he gave a thumbs up in confirmation. “Thank you.” I chanted as I tipped the drink into my cup and she crossed her arms at me.

“Wow, I thought we were friends.” She blurted in an accusing manner and I chuckled under my breath.

“We are friends! And friends don’t let friends drink and drive...their life into the ground.” I spoke with a flourish of my hands for emphasis and she groaned in disapproval as she moved to a standing position.

“Whatever, I have a stash in my room.” She spat as she stumbled slightly on the spot and I scanned her unsteady posture with a worried smile.

“You’re a menace to society, you know that?” I drawled whilst she simply yawned at me to imply that I was too dull for her interest. “You sure you can even make it back there in one piece?” I enquired with a lightly teasing tone and she scoffed loudly at my question.

“Fuck you.” She groaned and although Harper shifted awkwardly at her aggressive tone, I caught a sly wink before Raven shuffled away in a veering journey towards the Ark.

“Don’t worry, she’ll get over it. She just needs to sleep off the temper.” I confirmed with a smile as I sipped from my cup and Harper visibly relaxed at my confirmation.

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doctorbonzo · 3 years

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Doctor Bonzo Book of the Month (October 2020)

“Talking to Strangers” by Malcolm Gladwell

I was really excited to read this book, which was recommended to me by a 4th-year medical student who I met at a conference in Portland, OR earlier this year. The concept of the book, as it was presented to me, was that we (people in general) don’t do a good job of communicating with other people that we don’t know, especially if they’re from different backgrounds than the ones we come from. In other words, we don’t know how to talk to strangers. I have definitely been on the receiving end of this over the past 15 years since I graduated from residency; there are times when I felt like I was from a different planet than my coworkers.

The concept behind the book was proven within the first few pages of the book; it became obvious to me that Malcolm Gladwell was a “stranger,” and my difficulty relating to him might impair my “communication” with him (communicating in the sense of receptive language/hearing what he is saying to me, the reader). The first passage that caught my attention was when he said, “I suspect that you may have had to pause for a moment to remember who Sandra Bland was.” For personal reasons, there are only 5 other deaths/murders in recent years—those of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd—that have had a similar personal impact on me as the death of Sandra Bland. I mean, she was one of the main sources of the “Say Her Name” demand that we often saw from the movement for Black Lives. It’s difficult for me to relate to a world where people don’t remember who she is. If Gladwell remembers her, but suspects that his readers don’t, then that makes me wonder if this book was written for people like me.

Also early in the book, Gladwell frames the death of Sandra Bland as a “two sides” issue, which I feel is ridiculous (“Each side was right, in its own way”). Anyone who watches the video of Sandra Bland’s encounter with Brian Encinia and comes away with any point of view where Encinia is “right,” is absolutely a “stranger” to me. He also described the deaths of several other unarmed Black people in a way that disturbed me, such as saying that Freddie Gray “fell into a coma” as opposed to saying that he had his spinal cord severed. Again, I continued to read thinking that this book might give me some point of view that I had not considered in my communications with people from different backgrounds. After all, he ended his first chapter with a statement that I wholeheartedly agreed with: “If we were more thoughtful as a society…[Sandra Bland] would not have ended up dead in a Texas jail cell.”

Liars

I really enjoyed this key point of the book. Gladwell presented several historical examples of difficulty knowing when people are lying or not. From CIA agents who didn’t realize that Cuban spies had infiltrated their ranks, to Neville Chamberlain not realizing that Adolf Hitler was a genocidal maniac. These were examples of people whose lies went undetected; he also presented some good examples of people that society believed were lying when they weren’t. The most prominent example of that was the case of Amanda Knox who, I must admit, I thought was clearly guilty the moment I saw her making out with her boyfriend outside of the crime scene of her roommate’s murder. I live my life trying to give people the benefit of the doubt—innocent until proven guilty—but behavior that I deem atypical or bizarre often leads us to assume the worst about people. In some portions of the book, Gladwell presents situations where artificial intelligence/computers that can’t see a person do a better job than attorneys and judges at guessing when people are guilty. However, he didn’t mention Bias as one of the reasons for misjudging people once you can see them.

Default to Truth

The book mentioned a concept of the “Truth-Default Theory,” in which we assume that people are telling us the truth until enough doubts are introduced about them that we can’t explain away. Gladwell mentioned triggers that can “snap us out of” the default to truth but I was surprised that, by page 85, he still had not mentioned Bias as one of these triggers. It’s stunning that he doesn’t see Bias as a key barrier to our ability to communicate with or relate to strangers. The sections on espionage had “won me over” after the aforementioned disconnect re: Sandra Bland, but this is when I started to get the feeling again that our perspectives just weren’t aligned.

Sexual Assault

This is when Malcolm Gladwell just lost me; I think I will never be able to “talk to this stranger” about issues related to sexual assault and pedophilia. He seemed to offer up too many excuses for my comfort level when it came to understanding how sexual abuse runs rampant in certain situations. In the case of Larry Nassar, he seems to absolve Michigan State because even the parents of the abused women were fooled. He said that parents weren’t trying to protect financial interests, but we know this isn’t necessarily true; there are plenty of parents that care more about their kids’ success than they do about their kids’ safety, even if it is subconscious. Just look at the recent issue in my hometown, Savannah, GA, when parents refused to press charges after their 8-year-old son’s travel football coach repeatedly struck their son in the head for not playing well.

Gladwell also gives the leadership at Penn State a pass with regards to their handling of Jerry Sandusky, and I had the impression that he thinks they were treated unfairly. He spent a lot of time trying to poke holes in the testimony of Sandusky’s victims, at one point raising doubt because former victims came to visit him later in life. I have seen people sexually abused by parents and siblings—in situations where the family members admit they did it—who still keep close contact with their abusers and even forgive them. That doesn’t mean that the abuser shouldn’t still be punished or scrutinized. Ironically, he is proving that he doesn’t know much about certain strangers, as there is no way he has spent a significant amount of time talking to sexual assault victims.

Victims of trauma all respond differently, which is one of his main points in the book (see the Amanda Knox section). Someone not remembering specific details, like the month or date that the abuse happens, doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. Also, this book did not spend enough time discussing the easiest, indisputable point of the Penn State fiasco: a grown man should not be showering with children…period! One of the administrators involved said that Sandusky should have worn swim trunks. Are you kidding me?! How does Gladwell have any sympathy for people with this kind of decision-making? I just sensed too much of a vibe that Gladwell gives people a pass for not protecting victims of sexual assault. He spent a lot of time later discussing the link between alcohol and sexual assaults on college campuses during the section about Brock Turner. Like his views on Sandra Bland, I think we just have completely different points of view that will be difficult to reconcile, because he sounded like a rape apologist to me.

Suicide

Now, I found this portion of the book to be completely fascinating, and I can imagine myself referring back to this section in the future. He describes a concept that I was previously unfamiliar with, known as coupling. Completed suicide is often coupled to “very specific circumstances and conditions,” which conflicts with the idea that if someone really wants to die by suicide, they’ll find a way to do it. As was the case of the poet Sylvia Plath’s death by suicide, intentional carbon monoxide poisoning (by placing the head of the victim inside of kitchen stoves) was a major problem in London during the 1960s. It was a relatively painless way to die without leaving behind too gruesome a scene (relatively speaking, of course; the death of a loved one is always terrible). Interestingly, as town gas was phased out and it became almost impossible to die in this way, the suicide rates dropped significantly.

Gladwell also mentioned the Golden Gate Bridge, which I didn’t realize has been the site of the most suicides in the world since it was first built. For decades, advocates have encouraged San Francisco and/or California to build barriers or nets to prevent people from jumping off the bridge, but there has been push-back. Some opponents of suicide barriers argue that people will find another way to die, while Gladwell does a remarkable job of describing how this is not consistent with the historical evidence in support of coupling (see above). Of the 500+ people who were prevented from jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge in a study conducted over 30+ years, only 25 of them later died by suicide. The whole “motive + opportunity” thing applies not only to crime, but also to people who suffer from depression severe enough to lead to suicide.

Policing

After the Sandra Bland issue that I described above, I had a feeling that Gladwell’s policing commentary would be problematic for me. His foundational ideas were solid, and he described several studies that I was unfamiliar with. He provided compelling evidence that extra policing does not improve the safety of communities. In fact, society’s views of certain cities, or even certain neighborhoods, as unsafe are not accurate; police officers’ views of the most dangerous and violent blocks often don’t match up with actual statistics. Although he argues against more overall policing, he seems to advocate for more focused policing in areas that truly have higher rates of crime.

Gladwell describes one study as a “miracle,” but it sounded like a nightmare to me. In Kansas City, they focused their energy on a small, high-crime area known as District 144. The police used any excuse they could to stop people who looked suspicious between the hours of 7pm – 1am. Gun-related crimes were cut in half, but Gladwell didn’t mention all the innocent people who were pulled over, harassed, and traumatized. He comes off to me as an absolute “stranger” who doesn’t know how to communicate with African Americans like me if he couldn’t see how much of a nightmare this sounds like. Gladwell ends this section describing the police officers being in “constant motion,” and describes 948 vehicle stops in a 200-day period of time, resulting in 616 arrests, 532 pedestrian checks, and 29 guns seized. Are you kidding me?! More than 500 pedestrian checks?! You don’t see a problem with that?! This idea sounds a lot like the “Stop and Frisk” behavior in New York City during the Michael Bloomberg era. Also, he doesn’t say what the arrests were for, so I have no idea if they made the community any safer. Finally, he was oblivious to the fact that his stats meant that >300-400 people were stopped for no reason whatsoever.

I wonder if Malcolm Gladwell has ever been profiled by police. Has he ever felt the humiliation of being yelled at and treated like a criminal because you were trying to ask a police officer for directions? Has he ever had a police officer point a gun at him? I’m going to go out on a limb and say no based on his view of policing.

Sandra Bland

Similar to his introductory comments on the Sandra Bland case, the final chapter of his book (titled “Sandra Bland”) was very upsetting to me. He repeatedly says things that I can’t relate to like, “…we have decided that we would rather our leaders and guardians pursue their doubts than dismiss them.” Speak for yourself! I would rather the police dismiss their doubts about me as a law-abiding citizen instead of pursuing the idea that I’m up to no good. Gladwell did highlight something that I was unfamiliar with called the “Reid Technique,” which is a disgusting training program used by 2/3 of police departments in this country. However, similar to the sexual assault chapter, I felt that he passed the buck and blamed Brian Encinia’s behavior on the poor training that he received. He believed Encinia’s lame story that he actually feared for his life.

If he led off the book with this entire Sandra Bland chapter, I doubt I would have finished the book. At one point, he said that Sandra Bland was “mismatched,” or that she looked like a criminal to Encinia even though she wasn’t one (he said that Encinia was “terrified” of her). I don’t see how anyone who watched that video could come to that conclusion. Gladwell has an obvious Eurocentric point of view that does not match up with my life experience. Her behavior was clearly annoyance at being pulled over, and Encinia did everything he could to provoke her; when she lit up a cigarette to help her relax in the situation, he made up a law so that he could assault and arrest her. The fact that Gladwell doesn’t see this, and the fact that he never mentions her race as a potential contributor, means that this book wasn’t written for people like me.

In the last few pages of the book, I had difficulty determining if Gladwell was being naïve or dishonest. He actually states that Encinia was empathetic to Sandra Bland because he asked her “What’s wrong?” The question was clearly said in a sarcastic and provocative way if you watch the video. Gladwell believes the officer’s assertion that he was frightened by a “dangerous woman,” but he doesn’t try to explain why he would escalate things and become argumentative if he was so afraid of her. The author also tells the story of a young Black man playing basketball in Ferguson, MO who was profiled by police and accused of being a pedophile with no evidence. He describes it as a “mistake” and portrays this police behavior as police officers’ attempts to find a needle in a haystack. He does mention innocent people caught up in the middle, but never mentions that they are mostly Black and Brown people!

Finally, on page 337 out of 346, he mentions in the footnotes that “there is significant evidence that African Americans are considerably more likely to be subjected to…stops than white Americans.” That it took him this long to get here and that he doesn’t see racial bias as a major barrier in “Talking to Strangers” epitomizes my problems with this book. He concludes that Sandra Bland’s death happened because society does not know how to talk to strangers. He never considers that these deaths happen because of racism, or because power-hungry people in positions of power abuse their authority. Until he sees that the problem in the Sandra Bland case began with anti-Blackness as opposed to a faulty police manual, then I doubt he’ll ever get it. On the last page of the book, he said that Sandra Bland unfairly became the villain of the story in the end. Maybe that’s the case in his whitewashed world, but in the eyes of the people I know and love, Sandra Bland was a beautiful soul who had her life snuffed out too early. She was a martyr, and the blame for her death rests on Brian Encinia. Rest in power, Sandra Bland.

As for you, Malcolm Gladwell, your writing style grabs the reader’s attention, you have a way with words that makes it easy to fly through your book. I’m sure I will reference your section of this book on suicide in the future...but I doubt I will ever read another one of your books. You’re just too much of a stranger to me.

{FIN}

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atlas-of-a-human-soul · 4 years

Text

Wicked, pt.9/finale (DT royal AU)

A/N - instead of a summary, I wanted to let you know that this is the finale and thank those who have stuck with the series and gave me the inspiration to keep going. I know this was an ambitious endeavor, but I’m glad I stuck to it. This part will have a lot of things packed into it in only about 3.5k words and there’s a lot there to say and explain but I didn’t want to drag the series out unnecessarily. In case you have questions about the series and their future or concepts about the series, feel free to send them in and I’ll answer when I can and tag it under #wicked.

Enjoy the last part :)

Warnings: angst, indicating smut, fluff, swearing

Word count: 3500

WICKED - SERIES MASTERLIST

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There was a moment when Y/N realized she'd misinterpreted Grayson’s actions, his words, his expressions from the moment they met... as if he'd been speaking a language she couldn't understand... that moment was the moment her heart broke...She could hardly speak in her shock then, but this shockingly defining moment was much different than that first moment.

Body exhausted, heart tortured, drenched in her pain, Y/N could barely stand as she watched her supposedly dead husband dismount the beautiful horse he rode in, her hands grabbing onto Ethan for support. She didn’t believe she was seeing clearly, certain her mind is playing tricks on her. After all, she was far from recovered from her extremely difficult delivery and in moments of great heartache many people see and hear things that aren’t truly there. She believed it to be one of those moments.

Ethan had gripped her tightly, not only to hold her from falling as he felt her shaking in his arms like she could collapse at any given moment, but to also secure himself for he believed his eyes lied to him.

“Get away from her!” Grayson shouted angrily, his jaw clenched and his eyebrows furrowed as he strode toward the shaken pair, fists clenched at his sides.

He barely came within arm’s reach when Y/N noticed someone else at the gates, her mind and body finally giving out and letting the shock overwhelm her. Eyes rolling back in her skull, body going limp in Ethan’s arms, Y/N fell into darkness she was lost in.

“Y/N!” Ethan screamed in horror, holding her tightly as Grayson practically growled.

“What now, huh? Faking it so she can figure out some excuse to save you both from me?!” Grayson turned around, rubbing his chin in frustration as Ethan realized what’s happening. Not only was Grayson alive, but he had concocted some ridiculous theory about how he nearly lost his life.

“Brooks?!” Ethan didn’t need to look to know the knight was near, already rushing to carry the young queen back to her bed. The moment Brooks walked into the castle, Ethan unleashed his own anger toward the king, grabbing him by the shoulder to force Grayson to look him in the eye.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Huh?! You don’t deserve that woman, brother. She is too good for you!” Ethan spat, pushing Grayson back to hopefully stop himself from punching him. He was ecstatic his brother was alive, but he was done being quiet.

“Me? I mean, it makes sense. I wish I saw it all earlier. Should have known you two would join forces to have me killed! Was there ever a Gandria, Ethan? Because you just happened to disappear to Dracovia and then have me come because she was apparently giving birth to my son?! A month early?!” Grayson paused to shake his head, convinced it was all just a wicked plan of his dragon wife – seduce his power-hungry brother and fake a delivery? She still looked very pregnant to him. And not only that, but they had him declared dead within ten days and would have buried him without a body? She probably already knew he left her the kingdom from before…for Grayson, it was all a ploy. She never loved him – he never said it and he decided to believe what he was given…and in his mind, he was given nothing.

“You really want the throne so badly, E.? My wicked dragon wife? Because if you’re willing to kill me for it, you can have it all. Take it, but you’ll never see me again!” Grayson spat, barely holding himself back from calling his guards and taking his brother prisoner.

“Follow me,” Ethan growled out, pushing Grayson toward the castle. There was no use in talking to him, but he’ll try before he can also show his brother he’s an idiot.

“You think we did this? That the woman you saw today was celebrating your death? Like she didn’t kill hundreds of people in her grief and burned a fucking island?” Ethan ranted, his throat tight and his voice low as he vibrated in the anger that consumed him. Grayson held onto his every word, shaken by the revelations of what she had done in his name.

“The same woman who wept for you, whose heart broke?! Who mobilized all her men to find you? Who had sharks killed to make sure you weren’t a meal?!” Ethan chuckled lowly, gritting his teeth as he stopped in front of the door that separated them from Y/N – the door to the room Grayson and Y/N shared in their marriage.

“You think the delivery story was a lie?” Ethan chuckled dryly once more, staring intently at a stone-faced Grayson, no emotion passing his features. Until they heard a tiny, yet loud wail like cry that stopped as quickly as it began and Grayson’s eyes widened.

“It wasn’t a lie.” Ethan snapped as he gripped Grayson’s shirt and pulled him closer in the most violent manner.

“That woman nearly died giving birth to your son that night. She called your name in delirium the entire time and when morning came and she opened her eyes, she got the news of your death and she refused to accept it. She didn’t do it because it’s her duty as a wife, she did it because she loves you and you need to shut up about the theories that aren’t true and focus on giving her a loving home she never had.” Letting go, Ethan straightened Grayson’s shirt and forced a smile for he could tell Grayson was coming back to his senses. It was evident Grayson went through the ringer considering the long cut on his right cheek that reached from his eye to his jaw, but Ethan knew a friendly approach wouldn’t be of use in this case.

“I’m willing to forget this ever happened and she doesn’t have to know you suspected her, but you have to stop expecting the worst of her…and of me.”

Nodding, Grayson opened his mouth to apologize, but Ethan interjected. “It’s fine. Just go in and meet your kid because he’s pretty fucking adorable. And make sure to be gentle with her…she went through hell her whole life while you only had days of it.”

Opening the door, Grayson held his breath. He wondered how the hell did he let himself think she would kill him when she never did when she had much better opportunities. In the moments between realizing he’d crash into the ocean and drowning in the water, Grayson only thought of her – the beautiful, fiery eyes that changed emotion as often as wind changed direction, the incredible ability to argue on any topic with such passion that he would goat her to go on just to enjoy the way her entire body engaged as she spoke, or the way she’d grip her thighs tighter and her hands would press deeper into his back and hips to pull him closer to her when they would make love. She was all he could think of and in the moment when he could no longer hold his breath, he had prayed she forgives him for giving up on her, on them.

How did he go from such love to thinking the worst of her?

“She’s asleep. She came to for a few seconds, but she was out like a light right after she whispered your name.” Brooks spoke, his mistrust toward Grayson and loyalty to Y/N evident immediately. The blue eyes that usually had a melancholy tone to them now bore a fire that matched Y/N’s and Grayson nearly slipped up and asked the man of his dragon patron only to remember how Y/N told him their patrons are usually a secret, a very intimate detail to be shared.

Yet she shared hers with him.

“Alright. You can go. She’s my wife and I plan on protecting her myself if need be.” Grayson knew it was unnecessary but he still felt the need to remind this overprotective knight that Y/N was indeed his and that wasn’t changing anytime soon. Perhaps it’s silly jealousy, maybe the feeling of inadequacy or the possessiveness inside, but Grayson wanted it known.

“I’ll remain close by,” Brooks responded before dragging himself out of the room. He wanted to stay and care for his friend, for his love, for his queen, but Grayson was right – he was her husband and Brooks knew she loved him. He wouldn’t stand in their way.

Sighing, Grayson looked to the ashen beauty on the bed, back to where she belongs – in their bed, by his side. But no matter how every atom in his body wanted him to lay beside her and tuck his face in the crook of her neck, the small sound made from a crib to his left had taken all his attention. Guided by his heart, Grayson walked toward his son, looking down on the sleeping child with such glee that his eyes watered immediately. He couldn’t stop shaking as he watched the little one smack his lips before sticking out his tongue ever so slightly, all with his eyes still closed.

“I named him Bailey.” Y/N’s weak voice startled him, turning back to face her without hiding the tears that flowed. Not wanting to upset the baby and make him cry, Grayson decided to talk to Y/N first and sort everything out. He missed her so much for so long that seeing her felt unreal. But he welcomed the feeling nonetheless.

“You always did love that name.” He managed a smile before he laid beside her.

“I can’t believe I missed my firstborn being brought into this world.”

“It’s okay. You weren’t exactly on vacation.” She turned on her side, her shaky hand momentarily suspended in air, just above his chest in uncertainty. It isn’t until he places a hand over hers that she lets it fall to his chest, feeling his heart beating.

“You’re really alive.” She croaked, looking at their hands placed over his chest and her eyelids flutter to keep tears away.

“And we’re really parents, huh?” Grayson smiled before bringing her hand to his lips, leaving a tender kiss on her palm.

“Yeah.” She whispered. “You better not miss our second child being born. That I won’t forgive so lightly.” She teased.

“Oh? Second?” Grayson couldn’t help but chuckle, content she’s thinking of a future with him.

Daring to look up at him, she licked her lips. “How did you manage to survive this? They said it was hopeless.”

Grayson watched her with the softest smile he could muster, noticing how in each and every line of her face there was emotion and it was there for him. She had lost the dull, empty look in her eyes and she wasn’t cold with him anymore. She was warm, very caring, very close.

“I had promised you I would always come home to you and bother you for years to come and I didn’t plan on becoming a liar so early in our marriage.” Grayson teased as he reminded her of the promise given only hours before he had imprisoned her to conquer Dracovia in her name. But he had much more to tell her and he knew she wouldn’t be as forgiving or as calm when he does.

“And earned yourself a scar there.” Tracing the cut on his right cheek, Y/N chuckled softly as he bowed his head shyly, pecking her forearm swiftly. “I think it’s sexy.” She stated, pushing herself closer to him.

“But I had help.” Grayson drew in a deep breath, looking for some strength to tell her what he had to. Unfortunately, other people had different plans as the door opened and the helping hand decided to be introduced to his wife.

“My darling dragon.”

Y/N sat up so quickly that her head hurt and her vision blurred, but she finally realized that the person she saw at the gates wasn’t a hallucination as she believed. This person was very real and Y/N connected the dots rather quickly.

“Mom?” Grayson thought she’d run into her mother’s arms and cry happy tears as she did for his return but she didn’t. Her eyes narrowed and her voice turned venomous. “How…how could you?!” She shouted, scaring Bailey into a scream-like cry. Grayson wanted to rush to his son, to hold him and offer him some solace, but Y/N needed him immeasurably more.

Before the woman has a chance to speak, Y/N had already passed her judgment. Struggling to stand, she grips the bed tightly and pulls herself up.

“I thank you for saving my husband, but I want you gone. And don’t even think of going to Dracovia.” Y/N’s eyes have never been as cold as they were when they looked at the woman she called her mother.

“Please. I…I had to do it! He would have killed me anyway. I was lucky our men were loyal to me.” The woman insisted but Y/N wouldn’t hear it.

“You left me with that monster! You left me with a man who had manipulated me every step of my life! He had killed me day in and day out! He is why I associate love with pain! I never knew what love is until Grayson! And you allowed that! You were the queen! You say the army was loyal to you?! Then why didn’t you kill him or imprison him if murder was too much to stomach?!” Y/N heaved, struggling to stand, to breathe, to even keep her eyes open. There was so much pain, so many unsaid things left inside her that wanted out that she was crumbling. Grayson held onto her, his mind exploding as his baby was screaming along with his wife – his two greatest loves both needing him and he was but a single man.

“Dracovia is mine. You’re not welcome there or anywhere near me. You once said I should never give up my crown for anyone and I won’t. Not for you.” Y/N managed to say before nodding to Brooks who was standing just behind the former queen. He was quick in removing her from the room and Y/N finally felt like she could breathe again.

“Let me help you.” Grayson mussed as he tried moving her to the bed, his own strength affected by the events of the past ten days.

“Don’t. Bailey needs help more.” She spoke firmly and calmly, but Grayson recognized the brass tone. She was upset and angry and frustrated, her emotions in shambles as her memories haunted her again.

Grayson knew it would be a losing battle to fight her on this, watching her grab onto the bed frame before letting her go and turning to get the baby. He had only ever held a baby once, but he remembered how his mother taught him – support the head and all would be good. He also made a mental note to go see his mother after for she too had suffered in his absence. She had been there for him like no one was ever there for Y/N and he had a lot of gratitude to express.

Bailey settled down rather quickly in his father’s arms, simply needing a sense of safety and a calm atmosphere. It’s as if he could feel his mother was battling her own demons but as she stilled and her tears stopped, so did his and Grayson knew it wasn’t over, but he could draw a full breath without thinking about his inhaler.

Putting the infant back in the crib, Grayson tucked him in and smiled to himself, thinking ‘We really made a beautiful baby’ before turning to his distraught wife.

“Don’t defend her…She left her child with an abusive man and she never looked back. Maybe I’d understand if I didn’t have my own little potato, but I do and I could never leave my child in such a toxic environment.” Y/N glanced at Grayson quizzically, certain he has something to say as he always does, but she just found him to be confused. “What?”

“Potato?” Grayson chuckled as he remembered how she told him she never even saw a baby in her life, only in pictures and they always reminded her of potatoes. He couldn’t wait to see her maternal instincts and love, because even though she never had a model parent or any siblings, she already acted like a good mother.

Laughing through it all, she pushed his shoulder playfully and leaned into him with an airy “Shut up” aimed at him. He thought about pointing out how she’s starting to talk more like an Astrovian, but decided against it as he put an arm around her and ran his hand up and down her shoulder.

“Look, love. You don’t have to forgive her or even speak to her if you don’t want to, but she did save my life. The submarine she was in with one of the navy armies was close by and if she didn’t order them to check what happened, I’d have drowned. In fact, I was dead. They got me back and they treated my injuries from the fall and the pulmonary edema I got from swallowing all that salty water. It’s why I couldn’t come sooner. I was trying to survive to come back to you.” Grayson felt her eyes on him as he spoke, looking down on her to catch that beautiful gaze of hers that could rob any man of his sanity.

“And I am grateful. It’s the only reason why I didn’t have her executed.” Y/N reasoned and Grayson stiffened visibly. She felt him tense up and the way he looked at her changed as well.

“Would you really do that?” He asked in disbelief, genuinely worried about what happened to his soft-hearted dragon bride. When they met she talked about unimaginable things in moments she thought to be alone, but she talked of horrors publically now.

“You have no idea what I’d do to protect my family. And I don’t trust a mother who abandons her child to save herself. Maybe one day I’ll be able to be civil with her, but I can’t even look at her now. Grayson please don’t make me.” Her eyes weren’t hard as one would expect. Her words, her thoughts hurt her and despite the unmistakably dark part of her soul, Grayson embraced her again and pressed a kiss to her forehead before letting her go. He had to ask his savior to leave, but he’d make sure the woman was secure for life concerning money. It’s the least he could do.

“Wait, please.” Y/N caught him by the wrist, curling her fingers around it. She couldn’t watch him walk away from her, not when she knew what she said shook him deeply. He wasn’t like her and he definitely would never understand that part of her – the darkness her father created couldn’t be cleared no matter how long she spent away from the man. But if she ever lost Grayson to the fiery blood that controls her, she’d be lost too.

“You must allow me to tell you how wholeheartedly I admire and love you. And if you wish for me to leave, I will do so, but I cannot lie to either of us anymore. Because I do love you. You’re why I know what love is.”

Within moments, Y/N found her lips molded to Grayson’s, stealing her breath away. He drew her fully against him and in her wonder, Y/N parted her lips on instinct. Her senses overflowed with Grayson – his hands, the touch of his lips, his tongue, his hardened length brushing her lower abdomen and his masculine scent.

Groaning, Grayson had to break the kiss. Parting, breathless, he whispered an ‘I love you’ against her lips as Y/N tried to get a grip on reality for her mind was drunk on Grayson and for a moment she thought about urging him to continue only to remember she wasn’t in any state to make love to him for a month longer.

“Really can’t wait. This month will drive me insane.” She complained, palming him through his pants, but Grayson couldn’t handle her touch when they couldn’t finish what she started. Grabbing her wrist, he growls with eyes closed and forehead resting on hers.

“We’re going to break the bed when they give us the green light, but I don’t want to hurt you. Love, I’ll wait, but for all that you hold sacred, never put your hand on my dick again if we can’t go the distance because I’ve been practically celibate and I’m not sure I’ll be able to control myself and I never want to lose control with you.”

Y/N swallowed thickly, wondering what the hell her experience would be with Grayson if he lost control because she never realized he was holding back with her. She wanted to know exactly what that entailed but she was sensible enough to wait a while longer. Even if it was insanely hard to keep her hands off him.

“Go.” She tapped his cheek and he opened his eyes eagerly, wanting to see her flushed cheeks again. Her cheeks darkening was possibly his favorite thing about her – it’s the first thing he noticed about her whenever he’d come close. It’s how he knew she was attracted to him despite her claims.

“I’ll come back. I promise.” He pressed a feathery kiss to her lips before running off, adjuting his pants in the process and she couldn’t help but chuckle, whispering to herself, “I believe you.”

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Tags: @graysavant @yaren-ates @beinscorpio @dolandolll @godlydolans @dolanstwintuesday @accalialionheart @peacedolantwins @heyits-claire @graydolan12 @gia-kerks @justordinaryjen @dopedoodes @sunshinedolantwins @pitreshawn @melodiesforari

#grayson dolan #grayson dolan x reader #ethan dolan #dolan twins #grayson dolan series #grayson dolan royal au #grayson dolan fanfic #grayson dolan fanfiction #grayson dolan fic #grayson dolan fluff #grayson dolan angst #grayson dolan au #grayson dolan x y/n #king!grayson #wicked

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mooksie01 · 5 years

Text

Virgil and Logan

First of all, major spoilers for the new video, so proceed with caution! tl;dr at the end ‘cause this got long.

So it finally happened in this video. What we’ve all been suspecting for the longest time was properly confirmed: Virgil used to be a part of the group that we refer to as the “dark sides.”

Of course, with that confirmation also came some pretty conclusive evidence to the other theory that each “light side” has an opposite—in the form of Roman and Remus (lovely play on Romulus and Remus, by the way). Naturally, that means that the second the video dropped, there was immediately a ton of speculation about who Virgil’s “light side” is, as well as to who Logan’s “dark side” is, with a popular theory beginning to quickly emerge with the conclusion that Virgil is Logan’s “dark side.”

Now, I will admit that this theory is compelling for a number of reasons, one of my personal favorites being that Virgil is very grounded in logic, but a form of logic twisted both to fit his own goals and to, unfortunately, cater to and intensify his own fears. On top of that, both Virgil and Logan have shown protective streaks throughout the series. However, I really don’t think this theory is quite hitting the nail on the head...

For one thing, based upon the Rainbow Theory, which, again, received greatly conclusive evidence with Remus’ color being green, there still remains one “dark side,” Orange, and I think that whoever that is will be Logan’s actual “dark side.” I have a few reasons for thinking this:

Logan has never displayed any sort of true annoyance / fear / affectedness toward any of the “dark sides” we have encountered thus far. He has, without fail, always been able to rationalize poor behavior, whether it be from Deceit, Remus, or, yes, even Virgil. If Virgil were actually Logan’s “dark side,” one would think that Logan would be more affected by him, but he’s not. Logan has not yet been daunted by any of the “dark sides,” and has, in fact, been a vital tool in shooting down all three of them--Deceit in his first appearance in “Can Lying Be Good?,” Remus in “Dealing with INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS,” and, finally, Virgil in “My NEGATIVE Thinking.” I believe that we will finally meet someone who can actually shake Logan to his core in the form of Orange, whenever that character makes his appearance. As of right now, Logan has been the guiding force through the “dark sides”; it’s why Deceit firmly sidelined him last episode--because he’s a threat. If Logan has a “dark side,” it needs to be someone who will put him off his game so completely that the others are forced to fight him without Logan’s aid, using the lessons that Logan has taught them (as a side-note, it is my theory that this is what will finally bring us to Logan’s room).

Speaking of the others--or, more specifically, “the others,” I find it rather interesting that Virgil refuses the term “dark sides.” He used to be one of them, but even with that experience, he obviously doesn’t believe that that title is fitting. Every single time that the word has been brought up or that Virgil has referred to those sides, he either seems uncomfortable with the title or outright refuses it. In its first appearance, which comes from Roman in "Can Lying Be Good?”, Virgil winces at its use--now, obviously this could be because he was one and that term stings a little, and that’s likely a contributing factor, but with other evidence, that just doesn’t seem fully right. In the last episode, Virgil refers to them as Deceit and “his friends.” Multiple times, he’s called them simply: “The Others,” including within this episode when, in a display that I think makes my whole point, Thomas specifically calls them the “dark sides” to Virgil’s face, only for him to immediately respond with this alternative title. This leads me to the crux of my theory:

I think we, and all of the “light sides” minus Virgil, as well as Character-Thomas have been going about this the wrong way. Thinking of the sides as “light” and “dark” may be doing more harm than good. Logan said himself in this episode that Patton/Thomas think of things in terms that are far too “black and white,” with Roman being a major contributing factor to this. Who named the “dark sides”? Roman. While I do think that some of the sides are rather opposed to one another, they are also necessary to complement each other and make Thomas into a full person--and when I say complement, I mean that quite literally. Roman and Remus are literally cut from the same cloth. They were, presumably, one full side originally before the divide that produced two Creativities. I will concede that “light sides” and “dark sides” are convenient shorthand terms, yes, but the idea of such diametrically opposed sides ignores the areas of Character-Thomas’ personality that are morally gray (honestly, Deceit is the best example of this) and forces us and the characters within the narrative to put the sides into boxes that they don’t necessarily fit in. I don’t approve of Remus’ viewpoints or many of Deceit’s, but I also acknowledge that they may have things to bring to the table--or, at least, Deceit does. And if we add on the fact that Virgil was a “dark side,” or rather, an “Other,” then that’s just full confirmation that things in Character-Thomas’ head can’t be evenly divided into “Light” and “Dark,” something which is only further backed by the Rainbow Theory--there can only be seven sides if that theory is correct. There isn’t room for each and every character to have an opposing character--a “dark” to their “light” or vice-versa--and if I were placing my bets on which character won’t, I’m going to have to go with Virgil.

Virgil’s mere existence and his very proven capacity for both good and evil is an immediate point against the dichotomy implied by the idea of “dark sides” and “light sides.” A side so neutral cannot exist within that dichotomy, and it is clear that Virgil knows this and, in fact, disputes that dichotomy through his insistence on refusing to use the term “dark sides.” At the end of the day, Virgil proves that the “dark sides” are not evil by nature--they have a very real capacity to do good for Thomas if they only decide to, and, more importantly, decide to do it with the cooperation and help of the other sides. Virgil’s redemption arc came as a result of his long-term interactions with the “light sides,” and it was through their support that he began to work with Thomas instead of against him. What is important about the current “dark sides,” Remus and Deceit, is that they refuse to work with the other sides, or even, really, with Thomas. In their current states, they aren’t good for Thomas because they aren’t working with him, in a different meaning of the word for each. Deceit believes that he is the only one who knows best for Thomas (a trait which Logan also occasionally exhibits, and which becomes a problem when it makes itself known), and it is because of this belief that he will not ever be a “light side” if he continues to refuse to change his ways--because Deceit, much like Virgil in the beginning of his character arc, cannot do good--or, in this case protect Thomas--without balance from others. A point has been made in the series that too much of a good thing is bad, and while I don’t personally believe that Deceit is a fully good thing, I don’t actually think lying is always bad, either. What makes Deceit, the character, a bad thing is his refusal to find his balance and to see that just because he advocates for something, that does not automatically make that something good. Remus, on the other hand, is in the unique situation with Roman of neither of them being a full, actualized side. By themselves, they are each only halves of a full Creativity who separated due to repression. The reason that Roman and Remus are so diametrically opposed as to make them the only true representations of the ideas of “light” and “dark” sides is because they are disallowed balance by their very natures as separated sides. Balance, and therefore, goodness and helpfulness toward Thomas, is impossible for Remus, in particular, out of the two of them, because while, in the separation, Roman was given the liberty of good creativity, even with its idealistic drawbacks, Remus was left only with the bad creativity--the thoughts that could never be helpful or necessary in, as Virgil says, the mind of a “stable” person. It is because of this that, although I do think Deceit has the capacity for good, I don’t think Remus does, and, vice-versa, I don’t think Roman has a full capacity for intentional wrongdoing--because neither is a full side. They are the only actual, indisputable justification for the use of the “light” and “dark” terms, which, again, were notably coined by Roman, who would naturally gravitate toward these terms as a half of a whole. All of this is to say that, I don’t believe there is any possible way for Virgil to have a “light” side, and thus, for him to be Logan’s “dark” side, because I don’t believe that those concepts work. Indeed, although Virgil may once have worked with “The Others,” he was never a “dark side” because “dark sides” don’t exist--just sides neglecting or unable to achieve balance within Thomas.

In conclusion, because this has become far too long, I don’t know how much stock I’m willing to put in the concepts of “dark sides” and “light sides”--I don’t think the lines are so definite in any case except for Remus’ and Roman’s due to neither being a full side (which leaves lovely room for Roman angst, by the way, my dudes). Because of this, I don’t think that Virgil is Logan’s “dark side”. It’s a fun theory, yes, but I can’t bring myself to believe in it. I do think we’ll meet Logan’s opposition eventually, but I don’t think things are so cut-and-dry as “light” and “dark,” especially for Virgil, who not only disproves the whole thing merely by existing as a character, but who also has shown himself to be extremely threatened by both of the other “dark sides,” rather than by any “light side” opposition of his. Whereas Patton is clearly disturbed by Deceit, his opposition, and Roman is outright taken out of the picture by Remus, Logan has not yet been daunted by either, and Virgil has been intimidated by both. Virgil’s real “opposition” in this whole thing, in a way, is himself, and, more specifically his past, which he is scared to death of hurting Thomas with, just as he puts unbearable pressure upon himself to protect Thomas from that past. Meanwhile, I see no possible way that Virgil could be Logan’s opposition, because they have never held that attitude toward each other in the way that Deceit-and-Patton and Remus-and-Roman do. Even in their worst argument--”My Negative Thinking”--they ended the video by complimenting one another, and Logan, notably, by going so far as to reassure Virgil. I think that the whole concept of “light sides” and “dark sides” comes down to balance, or a lack thereof, and I don’t think that Logan and Virgil can possibly be on opposing ends of any kind of spectrum because they provide that balance for each other rather than constantly fighting for an upper-hand in pursuit of their own goals, as the other opposed pairs do. So yeah. That’s just my theory. A Sanders Sides theory.

TL;DR - The theory that Virgil is actually Logan’s “dark side” has been floating around since the release of the new video, but, for a number of reasons, I’m convinced that this isn’t the case, and, in fact, put very little stock in the truth behind the concepts of “light” and “dark” sides to begin with, for other reasons.

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harrietredding · 4 years

Text

THE INTERVIEW — GRIMM TASK 001

“Was this really necessary?” Harriet hissed at the male detective who had collected her at her work given her reluctance to come down to the station. She was the mourning aunt and the concept that some may have believed she or Chad had anything to do with this was outright idiotic. There was no motive for them to have done anything, but with a few questions of her own — she followed the detective downtown. What she wanted to know was how someone had gotten away with the murder of a fiery red head without any witnesses. While her niece may have been a number of things, she wasn’t someone to do something she didn’t want to. Madison would have fought with everything she had and while the list of potential suspects may have been long — she had a few ideas of her own.

“I’d like some coffee before we start,” Harriet told the male detective as she folded her arms across of her chest. “As well as some water.” Forest hues peered at the male as he rose from his seat and left the room. The click of the door resounded through the room and while she was aware that there may have been some individuals on the other side of the mirrored window, she still reached for her phone to shoot a text to Chad.

If the police ask to speak to you, i want to be present.... IM MESSAGE delivered at 2:30 PM

With her phone still in hand, she shot a few emails and instructions to her staff during her absence, leaving the device at her side in fear of missing an emergency at the Grimm Chronicles. “I hope it’s okay if I leave my phone here. You’ve caught me in the middle of a busy day and without any forewarning, I couldn’t provide my staff adequate support. But as you’ve mentioned, I should think of this as a friendly check in, correct?” What a load of fucking bullshit. Men, nothing she hated more in this world was when men underestimated her intelligence. The fact he believed that she wasn’t a suspect was practically insulting. Frankly, it was enough to want to reach over and slap him. However, with a face such as his, she felt that his life was hard enough as it was. Truly a face only a mother could love.

“Let’s get started, Harriet. Please state your name and your relationship with Madison Redding.”

Harriet peered at him for a moment as if he’d fallen and knocked the stupid out of him. His chubby fingers danced towards the recording machine at his left to indicate that while he knew of their relationship — it still needed to be stated for the video recording. Green hues rolled and a sight slipped past her lips as she readjusted her position on her seat. She could already imagine a group of swollen faced men analyzing this video, commenting about her shift when the question was asked. Stupidly, they’d assumed it was because of some kind of guilt or the fact that she was uncomfortable with the question. All based on how stupid she found the Detective before her and the Sheriff whom she suspected was responsible for her nieces murder. “Madison Redding. I am Madison’s aunt and was her caregiver from the age of sixteen years old and onwards. Her mother left and father died, so both herself and brother lived with me from that moment on.” She stated calmly as she peering over the male who had been writing notes down. Manicured nails drummed upon the surface of the metal table as she awaited for his next question to slip past his lips.

“Where were you on the night of February 28th and of March 5th.”

Now she had to roll her eyes. “I surely hope you’ve found better questions than these to ask the suspects you drag into this hole. How is someone meant to know where they were three weeks ago.” She groaned slightly. While she wasn’t foolish in believing the task was an easy one given the amount of people that had been splayed out on Madison’s blog. The whole fucking town had a reason to kill her niece, but this all seemed a little too meek. “I was at my office both nights,” Harriet said without searching too far through her mind. She’d been at her office most nights for the past twenty years. Workaholic was a kind definition when it came to Harriet Redding, which was why they’d be hard pressed to find an alibi for her. No one, not even the janitor, could be found in the office during those hours. Thankfully, she knew that there were cameras who would be able to corroborate her story. At least, she hoped so given how she felt no use in returning to those nights in detail. “Are you not going to give me a time period or you’re just asking me in general?” She asked on a scoff. “You must have a timeline for the events you believed happened to my niece, is that not right?” Dark hues peered slightly as she inched forward to look at the male in the face. “Look, I don’t believe your department, much less your sheriff, knows what the hell an investigation looks like even if it slapped them in the face. Therefore, I’m a little irritated that these are the questions you choose to ask me and those who’re suspected of her murder. In fact, I’m confused as to how this was allowed to happen in the first place? A girl goes missing for this long and no one sees anything? Are you even looking into the Alibi’s of those people that were plastered all over her website? There were numerous rumours and confessions on there — but no, here you are waisting your time with me.” Her head shook and a small sigh of frustration parted her lips. Lifting the vile coffee to her mouth, she took a sip.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Ma’am — we are doing our best. When was the last time you saw or spoke to your niece?”

A snort slipped past her lips at the assurance that they were doing everything. Bullshit. This wasn’t a mere accident where a girl slipped through ice and drowned. Someone in their vicinity had cut her niece piece by piece. How could she feel confident that the police of grimmbook could manage this when they couldn’t seem to find their own foot up their asses. “Tell me, Detective — what will it take to get someone with experience here to take over the case? Another body, maybe even two? I’m hopeful that you see you’re all in over your heads, correct? Especially that of your idiotic sheriff of yours.” Though she talked down the male’s boss, Harriet couldn’t find an ounce of care. For as long as Brandon remained at the helm of her niece’s investigation, she held little hope of it ever being remedied. Therefore, she’d vowed the night of her niece’s murder that she would find her murderer on her own. Even if it meant tearing down the entire police department to do so. “I spoke to my niece the night that she went missing. We had a fight when I tried to take the laptop you took from her room. She stormed off and it’s the last time I saw her” The woman snapped back at him with a pointed gaze. “Speaking of which, since you haven’t been finding much use of the device evidently. I would like to have it back, including the hard drives as they were. After all, they belong to me given that my credit card was used to buy it.” The woman clipped as she folded her arms to look over at him.

“Are these all the famous question you need to ask me?” She spat out as mossy hues flicked over his being. “If so, I have some questions for you.” Pulling a list from her pocket, she slid it towards the detective without so much as a word. It was a list of whom she believed could be suspected and at the top of the list, circled in a red marker was: Brandon Wolfe. “I want to know if you’re looking into your own department and whether each member has been interrogated as I have?” She questioned.

Brandon Wolfe

Casper Du Pont

Caleb Myers

Dominic Hall

Carrie Pope

Madelaine Sloan

Alec Glothieb

Anastasia Cameron

Ella Gertrude

Gus Ashton

Harrison Iraklidis

Dark hues remained on the list as the male looked it over. “It’s a jumping off point,” she murmured as the red head shrugged her jacket on and began to rose. “Now, the next time that you come to my office and demand that I come to the precinct — it better be because you have information and suspects for me or I better be under arrest. Now, if you’d excuse me. I have work to do. —Please give Sheriff Wolfe my regards.”

#grimm.task #grimm.task01 #murder tw

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onionjulius · 4 years

Link

[...]

For all the hands we’ve wrung dry over it in recent elections, electability isn’t a thing you can measure. It’s subjective, not objective — which is why Sanders isn’t the only candidate whose persona can be twisted one way to fit a narrative of unelectability, and another to tell a story of certain success. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren can attest to that.)

Political scientists study electability, but electability ain’t no science. Instead, researchers say, it’s basically a layer of ex post facto rationalization that we slather over a stack of psychological biases, media influence and self-fulfilling poll prophecies. It’s not bullshit, exactly; some people really are more likely to be elected than others. But the reasons behind it, and the ability to make assumptions based on it, well …

“[Electability] is this vague, floppy concept,” said Nichole Bauer, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. “We don’t know who is electable until someone is elected.”

“I’m not sure I’m who you want to talk to,” said Julie Brown of West Des Moines, arching her eyebrows and flashing the Elizabeth Warren button hidden under the flap of her canvas purse. She came to the Sanders rally with her teenage daughter, curious to understand why he was polling better than her favored candidate. As Sanders proxies worked the crowd, we huddled against a wall, talking about the ways electability and psychological biases overlap. “I think he is electable and that frustrates me,” she said. “It frustrates the female inside me. If Elizabeth Warren had had a heart attack, they would have put her six feet under.”

Determining who is electable inevitably pits candidates against each other, especially in an election year when the top priority for primary voters — by a long shot — is nominating someone who can take down the sitting president. Brown is a voter who sees “electability” as basically a reflection of whether a candidate can clear the hurdles presented by the electorate’s prejudices.

Months of talking about the primary — and wondering whether candidates will eventually win the general election — has made electability a hot buzzword of the 2020 election. But, scientists say, we’ve not put as much work into clearly establishing what it is.

When physicists suspect a thing exists, but can’t observe it directly, they start studying the stuff around it. You can’t see the particles, you can’t look at the black hole, but you can see what happens when they crash into something else. And that’s basically what political scientists have ended up doing with electability. To understand it better, researchers have looked at a couple of different kinds of social collisions: What voters like in a politician, and what those voters think other people like.

And, in that way, Julie Brown isn’t wrong about electability and bias, Bauer told me. Social scientists do use voters’ biases to understand what electability is and what it might look like.

[...]

So it’s fair to say that our notion of electability is, at some level, related to our individual knee-jerk social biases — things like the color of a person’s skin, or the way they present their gender to the world. We take those ingredients and we make assumptions about that person. We make assumptions about what other people might think about that person. We make assumptions about what researchers want us to say when they ask about our biases. We make a stew — reactions and reactions to reactions. It’s virtually impossible to avoid bias in perceptions of electability, said Alan Abramowitz, professor of political science at Emory University. “Just about anything that affects how you feel about a candidate could affect assessment of electability,” he said.

Media narratives, in turn, often prey on these biases, which only makes them stronger. In lifting up electability as a marker of fitness, we’ve inadvertently created a system that caters to whatever our imagined lowest common denominator might be. You might want to vote for a black, female candidate, goes the narrative … but other voters are racist and sexist and so you can’t.

Because, of course, electability isn’t just about individual feelings.

When voters like Julie Brown and Brooks Vander Kopsa talk about whether Bernie Sanders is electable, they aren’t really talking about their own feelings. They’re talking about what they think other people feel, which is where polls come in.

“The average person knows a little about politics, but not a ton,” Stephen Utych, a professor of political science at Boise State University, said. And voters use polls as a source of information to fill in the gaps. “If I’m a Republican and other Republicans don’t like this person, I don’t know what it is, but there must be something wrong with them,” Utych said. We American voters really like to believe we’re independent, Kam agreed, but the reality is that we take a lot of cues from the herd.

But polls can become a bit of an ouroboros. Kam and Utych’s 2014 study found that candidates who were behind in the polls were rated less favorably by voters — and voters were less interested in seeking out information about those candidates.

The interaction of polls and media becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy, Abramowitz and Utych both said. And candidates can shift the perception of how electable they are by striking back at the media and crafting their own narratives. In a 2018 study, the share of voters who, after reading a candidate’s defense of their own electability, were willing to think the candidate could win the election more than doubled, rising from 15 percent to nearly 34 percent.

This early in the election season, there’s still an opportunity to change the narrative – to grasp electability out of the jaws of defeat. And that’s the paradox that leads candidates like Sanders to spend months traversing the early primary states – breakfast to breakfast, handshake to handshake. Winning Iowa allowed Barack Obama to craft a narrative of electability around himself in 2008. Conversely, Bill Clinton lost Iowa and took second place in New Hampshire in 1992. But, from that, his campaign was able to spin a narrative of being the “comeback kid”, said Seth McKee, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University. “I think Iowa and New Hampshire matter so much in how the media portray the horse race after the votes have been cast,” he told me.

But building those narratives and harnessing those horses are dependent on the idea that voters have a good idea of what other voters want, or what other people’s deal breakers might be. And the psychology gets very tricky here. Frankly, experts said, voters aren’t great at knowing what’s going on in their own heads, let alone those of strangers.

[...]

Then there’s the issue that electability is not a fixed idea. What makes a candidate likable to the nation, as a whole, is in flux — tracking, experts say, with hardening partisan lines.

And voters see it, too. James Muhammad, a Californian visiting Iowa, was one of the other people I spoke to at the Sanders rally. When I asked him about electability, he just laughed. “Was Trump electable?” he said.

That’s a question academics are also asking. And it’s one that’s deeply tied up in attempts to understand what electability looks like to Democrats now. From what we can see in research on congressional races, which are more numerous, there’s something about electability that is shifting. Something fundamental.

“I think there is an idea in the media of a centrist, usually white, not necessarily college educated voter who is the one at play and that probably has influenced the way the media is covering it,” said Joshua Darr, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and professor of political science at Louisiana State University. That assumption of the power of the centrist voter is, to some extent, evidence based. Historically, being moderate and appealing to centrist voters was a great way to win congressional elections, Utych and Abramowitz both told me. But that’s been changing. Abramowitz’s analysis of the 2018 House elections turned up evidence that an incumbent candidate’s past voting record — whether they were more moderate or not — didn’t really make much of a difference in whether they won or lost, regardless of party. What’s more, he told me, the number of moderate members in Congress has been falling for decades. Forty-eight percent of the 95th Congress (1977-79) fell within the moderate range of ideology,1 compared to just 16 percent of the 115th Congress (2017-19), Abramowitz found.

Ideologues are elected more often than they used to be. Outsiders are elected more often, too. And the percentage of true swing voters is shrinking, Utych said. So does that mean someone like Sanders is more electable and someone like former Vice President Joe Biden is less electable? Electability here becomes a game of divining which group is more important to winning — swing voters or the partisan base. But that’s no more accurate than trying to estimate how sexist your neighbors are. “Which segment is bigger … there’s not great information on that,” Utych said. “Anything you say is just guessing.”

Even attempts to pin electability down subjectively leave you chasing your own tail, said Elizabeth Simas, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. We know from decades of research that voters have a tendency to line up their assumptions about who is electable line with the person they want to be elected. Maybe that means people just want to maintain some kind of cognitive consistency. “But it’s just always going to be impossible to parse out whether someone supports a candidate because of electability, or if a candidate is perceived as electable because they are the preferred candidate,” Simas said.

[...]

Maggie Koerth is a senior science writer for FiveThirtyEight. @maggiekb1

#fivethirtyeight #u.s. politics #u.s. election 2020 #maggie koerth #long post

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duhragonball · 4 years

Text

On “Araki Forgot”

youtube

We were watching these videos before a stream on Kast. (I think @semercury was the one who pulled them up). I’ve only been in the JoJo fandom for about three years, but I learned about the “Araki Forgot” joke very early in, and it was nice to see Hamon Beat take the time to sort through all the supposed plot holes in JJBA. We didn’t get through the Part 6 video that night, but I watched it later on and I think it’s my favorite, because this one gets to the heart of the matter. The video is full of spoilers, though, so I’ll just make my point below.

Hamon Beat says Part 6 is the “most hated” JoJo arc in the western fandom, and he suspects that this has led to a vicious cycle where the haters didn’t pay attention while they read it, and then they turn around and complain about “plot holes” that don’t actually exist. For example, they say “Araki forgot” that Jolyne should have gotten her Stand back in the late 80′s, just like Holly and Josuke and Giorno, except Jolyne didn’t exist in the 1980′s. Stone Ocean starts in 2011, and she was only 19 years old. This is clearly stated in the text of the story.

The entire video is full of examples like this, and I think it becomes clear that a lot of fans are saying “Araki forgot” when they should actually be saying “I forgot” or “I didn’t understand.” I find myself in the latter category when it comes to Parts 6 and 7, because I often had trouble keeping up with all the nutty ideas that were being thrown around. But I try to keep an even temper with this stuff, because I tend to trust that the author knows what they’re doing, even if it doesn’t seem to make sense.

In particular, this video debunks the old fan theory that Annasui’s gender was changed after his first appearance, due to editorial pressure or artistic whim. I always liked that theory, because the whole thing with Annasui seemed odd and it never came up again in the story, and I liked having a possible explanation better than none at all. But Hamon Beat points out that there’s zero evidence for any of it, and Annasui’s transformation could easily be explained by his Stand ability, since he alters his appearance a second time later in the story. Hamon Beat further speculates that Annasui may have only assumed female form so he could infiltrate the women’s wing of the prison more easily, allowing him to keep an eye on Jolyne, since he enters the story already aware of who she is. This may only be another fan theory, but it’s a lot less extraordinary than the first. It plays into Annasui’s character a lot better.

My impression is that “Araki forgot” started out as a joke, an then it became an exercise for fans to try to find as many discontinuities in the story as possible, then blame them on the author. The problem is that doing this encourages readers to seek out flaws where they may not exist, and to ignore any possible explanation for why they may not be flaws at all.

I think Araki sort of invites this sort of criticism with the way he introduces new characters. Annasui first appearing as a woman is a perfect example. Oftentimes new Stand Users are introduced in very mysterious or confusing ways. You might see a demonstration of their powers, but it’s just a small taste of what they can do, and oftentimes that initial demonstration doesn’t seem to line up with their full powers. Like in Part 3, we first meet Kakyoin while he’s painting a picture, and it seems like the painting has something to do with his Stand ability, but as Hamon Beat points out, this is merely a coincidence. He’s just doing two things at once, and the brush strokes happen to to take place while the Stand does its thing. Annasui can probably make himself look like a woman whenever he wants, but he never needs to do it again in the story, so he never does it, which leads fans to think it was a blooper the first time he did it.

Nevertheless, I think most of the problem lies with western fans, who have no doubt been used to reading western comic books, where continuity is either pitch perfect or a garbled mess, with little in between. For example, I’ve been reading the 1992 DC Comics crossover “Eclipso: The Darkness Within”. The concept back then was to do this multipart story running through the annuals for 18 different series. So like, the Superman annual for 1992 was one chapter, and then the Batman annual is another chapter, and so on. Eclipso was the bad guy, and his powers were tweaked to support this premise. He’s a demon who lives on the moon, and he has all these black diamonds on Earth, and if someone holds a black diamond while they’re angry, he can possess that person and control their body. So he could interact with multiple groups of characters without having to run back and forth from one city to the next.

The problem is that you don’t have one writer handling the entire thing. Each annual had its own creative team, and groups of annuals were under separate editorial departments, so it’s only a matter of time before a few mistakes pop up. Here’s an example:

In Justice League: America Annual #5, Superman asks Wonder Woman to help the League deal with the Eclipso crisis. At first, she declines, but then she has a run-in with a possessed cop, and sees for herself just how dangerous Eclipso is. She returns to help the League, but they end up fighting one of their possessed teammates and don’t really get very far.

But a few chapters later, we get to Wonder Woman Annual #3, which sees Wonder Woman meet the White Magician. His goal is to trick Diana into getting possessed by Eclipso for some magical ritual he has in mind. So part of his plan is to give Diana a black diamond, so that she’ll have it on her when she eventually gets angry enough for the possession to happen.

It’s a little odd that she never suspects the black diamond in this second story, since she had a pretty good demonstration of another black diamond’s powers in the first. You can rationalize this by saying she didn’t think the White Magician’s diamond was the same, but that seems pretty weak. Also, why isn’t she still helping the JLA?

If it had been one writer handling both of these annuals, this could have easily been avoided, but that’s not how DC Comics works. Dan Jurgens wrote the JLA annual, and William Messner-Loebs handled the Wonder Woman story. Chances are, both scripts were written around the same time, and edited by different people, and by the time anyone noticed the mistake, it was too late to do anything about it. I guess the best solution would have been for Jurgens to use a different guest star, someone who wouldn’t be showing up again in their own solo book. But as plot holes go, it’s pretty tame for comic books.

So I think that western audiences have gotten so used to this sort of thing that they fail to appreciate what it means for JJBA to be written by the same guy for over 30 years. Sure, Araki could make a mistake from time to time, but he also created all of the characters. How can someone accuse him of forgetting how Hamon works when he invented Hamon? How can you say the Dio flashbacks in Part 6 are out-of-character with the Dio in Part 3, when the same guy wrote both parts?

The far simpler explanation is that maybe there’s other details in play here, which may be things that the reader forgot about, or never considered in the first place. Even the Wonder Woman example I mentioned has some room for explanation. Maybe it’s not a discontinuity at all, and the point here is that Diana is harder to beat in a combat situation, but is vulnerable to quieter, subtler deceptions in a peaceful moment. She didn’t notice the similarity in the diamonds because she’s not a trained observer like Batman. And so on. If I can do that for a story shared among a dozen writers, how much easier must it be for a single writer like Araki? But I guess that’s an easy enough thing to overlook.

#jojo's bizarre adventure #spoilers #stone ocean #eclipso: the darkness within #the bigger plot hole in eclipso is that sometimes his victims have to satisfy their personal grudge before eclipso can control their bodies #but sometimes he's in the driver's seat immediately #but he's more of a plot device than a chracter in some of these stories so it's not worth worrying about #that's probably the bigger moral here #there's all sorts of stories that may be riddled with plot holes or not #but they never get noticed because they aren't popular enough to get dissected to that extent #the strength of jjba is that it's this big complex thing that's worth exploring and analyzing #and that's why so many people do it #and why too many of them do it half-assed

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jackalgirl · 5 years

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Exodus and Ancient Egypt

So, there’s been this kind of big discussion in one of the Tumblr circles I follow about Israel-in-Egypt, which is a pretty big deal in the Bible and Torah (”pretty big deal” is a huge understatement). Problem is, although there are some references so Semitic people (and “Semitic” in this context means more ethic/national groups than Israelites) in some Ancient Egyptian texts, there is nowhere any kind of description of a population of people outnumbering the Egyptians, or descriptions of anything like the events as described in Exodus. In fact, there are a lot of texts describing things (such as the building of the Pyramids) that specifically mention the process (i.e., conscription of local laborers in the off-season, who were then paid, and how much, etc.) that directly debunk the popular notion that a) Israelites were slaves* in Egypt and b) that they built the Pyramids.

* I must also point out that the modern idea of what constitutes slavery and the ancient idea of what constitutes slavery is not the same, and a common error is to try to map our modern Western connotations of slavery on the ancient world.

I’d like to note that DH, who is a Masters candidate in Christian** Ministry, agrees with my very cursory reading of Exodus in my New Oxford Annotated study bible that Exodus makes no claim whatsoever about the Pyramids. It’s been pointed out on Tumblr by someone whom I shall not mention because she is sick, sick, sick to death of this discussion, that this conception that the Pyramids were built by Jewish slaves was a fiction created by post-Egyptian (that is, people who came along after the ability to read Middle and Late Egyptian was lost) writers who were basically just making stuff up.

** Protestant / Baptist, to be specific

What it boils down to is that on the one hand, you have Talmudic and Biblical scholars talking about this massive experience in Egypt, and Egyptologists saying, “there’s scant evidence for all of this on the Egyptian side of things.”

So, in the spirit of people who are basically just making stuff up (about Jewish slaves building the Pyramids), I’m going to talk a bit about my suppositions. I’d like to point out that these are merely suppositions, ones I haven’t researched yet, based on hazy understandings of the history of the time from both Biblical and Egyptological viewpoints. So take it or leave it, and I won’t be offended at all if you completely leave it.

Supposition the First: the major events as described in Exodus did not take place during the New Kingdom

I know that a lot of people really want the Pharaoh of Exodus to be one of the New Kingdom Rameses, but the New Kingdom is pretty well documented. I’d expect there to be more writing, somewhere, about the events -- even given the idea of “it was a major disaster, so Egyptians wouldn’t have written about it”. Someone would have written about it, especially someone who used the events to leverage power for themselves (and there’s always some of these). So I don’t think that it would have involved people on the Egyptian side for whom there is a lot of documentation.

Supposition the Second: Israel settled in the Sinai and Delta region of Egypt during the Old Kingdom

The beginning of Exodus says, after naming the 12 patriarchs of Israel who came into Egypt with their households: “The total number of people born to Jacob was seventy. ” (Exodus 1:5) (1)

The footnote in my study Bible says of verse 5: “Because the number seven and its multiples symbolize totality, the notion of seventy descendants of Jacob signifies that all of Israel is present in Egypt (cf. Gen 46:27; Deut 10.22)” (2)

I’m taking this to understand generations. If one sets a generation at 50 years (completely arbitrarily -- remember, I am making stuff up), then that puts the entry of Israel into Egypt in the Old Kingdom (counting backwards from the start of the Second Intermediate Period). The Sinai was a part of Egypt at this point, so I’m supposing that the major settlements of Israel were in the Delta-to-Sinai areas of Egypt (this ties into the locations of the cities that the later generations were forced to build; see below).

Supposition the Third: the events of Exodus happened during the Fifteenth Dynasty of Egypt

After establishing (or reminding the reader of) the context of how Israel got into Egypt, Exodus gets into the meat of the actual Exodus story, which is that “...a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” (Exodus 1:8) (3)

The basics of this is that the new ruler felt threatened by the number and power of the Israelites, so sought to limit them via oppression (”forced labor”) and other increasing awful proscriptions, all of which leads to the classic Exodus story. This king does not seem to be a person who is the head of a well-established, well-supported, or organized power structure. For example, apparently there are two -- TWO -- midwives for all of these Hebrew women and he can’t even get them to follow his orders to kill male Hebrew newborns.

It’s this kind of thing, in combination with the fact that there’s not a whole lot of documentation on the Egyptian side, which leads me to suspect and suppose that the events of Exodus happened during a time when Egypt was actually fragmented, and that the Pharaoh we’re dealing with is one of the very sparsely-documented ones (we don’t really even know with certainty the names and order of their kings), one who had access to chariots. Hence: the Fifteen Dynasty, which were the Hyskos, in the Second Intermediate Period, who introduced horses and chariots to Egypt, and that all of this took place in the Delta region, probably the part closest to the Sinai, which at this point had been overrun by the Hyskos who swept southward through there. (4)

I’m aware that some information pokes holes in this; for example, Exodus 1:11 names two cities built by this forced labor, “Pithom and Ramses”, both of which are identified by Wikipedia*** as Per-Atum and Pi-Ramsses, located in the region between the Delta and Sinai, the latter of which is described as Rameses II’s newly-built capital, which is where the Exodus-in-New-Kingdom comes from, I think. (5) I suspect that Per-Atum is older, and I’m not sure about the “Ramses” of Exodus yet, and I do acknowledge that I’m trying to find things that fit my story, so reader be aware that that’s what I’m doing.

*** So this is, so far, the extent of my “research”, which is another reason you, dear reader, should be taking this with a huge grain of natron.

Anywho, all of this is born of a need to be a consensus builder and say, “Talmudic/Biblical scholars and Egyptologists, you can both be right!” which is kind of in my nature. But that’s basically how I come to this completely as-of-yet unsupported hypothesis that there’s a grain of historical truth in the Exodus story in spite of a lack of evidence from the Egyptian side: we’re dealing with a period of time in Egypt when political fragmentation led to a) insecure kings and b) fragmentary documentation.

(1) Coogan, Michael D. (Editor), The New Oxford Annotated Bible, An Ecumenical Study Bible - New Revised Standard Version With The Apocrypha, Fully Revised Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, 2018, book / verses as noted

(2) Ibid

(3) Ibid

(4) See the Wikipedia entries for “Hyskos” and “Fifteenth Dynasty” for more info

(5) See the Wikipedia entries for “Pithom” and “Pi-Ramesses” for more info

#too many words #ancient egypt #exodus #yes my citations are crappy

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c2ley · 5 years

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Andy Kaminski Wrote

So no, folks, the reasons people dislike Christopher Hitchens isn't just their emotional attachment to their beliefs, or about how he pointed out the absurdity of their beliefs (and I love how his followers treat this as axiomatic), or because they are ‘misinformed’ (I know it's really convenient to think everyone who doesn't agree with the amazing you is less knowledgeable but it's not a position that shows much skepticism). It certainly isn't because he's ‘more intelligent than them’ (as though they have a similar problem with everyone more intelligent than them, and as though not one critic of Hitchens is more intelligent than Hitchens himself was). Does this form part of the reason people dislike Hitchens? Sure it does (well, not the bit about intelligence, which is just ridiculous). Nobody likes having their ideas criticized, including (as shown by abundant evidence here) fans of Hitchens. This does not, however, mean that every, or even most, criticisms of Hitchens are the result of over-sensitivity or insecurity. People dislike Hitchens because he was, first and foremost, a polemicist and a propagandist. His works are not even handed studies of subjects, they are Hitchens’ view and only Hitchens’ view. They are built around meta-narratives, and only evidence that suits the meta-narrative appears at all. Any inconvenient ideas are disregarded and any opposing ideas, on the rare occasion they are even mentioned, are oversimplified and misrepresented. Many people find propaganda of this kind dishonest and manipulative. As a result of putting his meta-narrative before any more complex truth, Hitchens was often shockingly uninterested in facts. His research was often shoddy in the extreme. Any serious scholar of religion from any perspective would struggle to find a single page of Hitchens’ most famous work, God is not Great, that doesn't contain some jaw-dropping factual error. His example of Buddhism being anti-intellectual was a Hindu. He gets Bart Ehrman’s name wrong, misidentifies him as a Christian and misattributes research to him. He claims the Q document was the basis for all four gospels when Q materials are only even present in two, and says the gospels don't agree on anything of substance when three of the gospels largely share the same text (the very fact that resulted in the formulation of the Q hypothesis in the first place). These aren't the sort of mistakes that sometimes slip through the net in any piece of serious research, they are the sort of errors that crop up when you are more interested in telling a story than actually knowing what you are talking about. Note that all the examples above are factual errors, not just disagreement with Hitchens’ arguments. Nonetheless, Hitchens’ arguments were often not only suspect, but downright bizarre. The moment in God is not Great when he tries to claim Martin Luther King (a minister, lest we forget) was only nominally a Christian should have any right thinking person’s jaw on the floor with incredulity. His argument against vicarious atonement is deeply strange. Whilst it's understandable that someone would not want someone else to suffer on their behalf, to suggest that someone would be immoral for willingly doing so is just odd. It suggests nobody should ever endure any hardship on another human being’s behalf without their express permission. It suggests the whole concept of self-sacrifice, upon which a great deal of human nobility is founded, is somehow reprehensible. People who dislike Hitchens find much to dislike in the real Christopher Hitchens, not the imaginary version of Christopher Hitchens worshiped by his followers. This fantasy version of Hitchens was gracious and generous, whereas the real Hitchens was often snobbish and rude. This fantasy version of Hitchens was a paragon of integrity, whereas the real Christopher Hitchens was often hypocritical, attacking his targets political affiliations whilst happy to support suspect regimes that suited his leanings. This fantasy version of Hitchens never even came close to losing a debate, whereas the real Christopher Hitchens was clearly out of his depth when debating anyone of substance. People, in short, don't dislike Hitchens as much as they dislike the tedious, fawning legend that sprang up around him. Christopher Hitchens was a deeply flawed human being who said something a certain group of people agreed with and said it passionately and quotably. As a result, his fans ascribe his work a depth it never had and ascribe Hitchens characteristics he rarely displayed. The attitudes some people have towards Christopher Hitchens have disturbing echoes of the the very things they claim to despise in followers of religions. An unskeptical, uncritical, blatantly biased view that is unwilling to see anything inconvenient and unable to handle any sort of criticism.

#Rejecting Nihilism

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 6 years

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No Comicstorian, Marvel DOESN’T need a reboot Part 1: DC history

Youtube channel ‘Comicstorian’ recently put out a video detailing why he feels the PS4 Spider-Man game proves why Marvel needs to reboot their history.

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I was so gobsmacked by how misinformed his views were I felt compelled to debunk his statements in two parts, the first being a coverage of DC comics history of reboots.

“This game proves that Marvel should do what DC does and soft reboot their continuity every 4-7 years”

This is the first and probably biggest point of bullshit spoken about and I suspect my points will apply to the rest of the video’s arguments.

The idea of this one game adaptation ‘proving’ Spider-Man, let alone ALL OF MARVEL COMICS, needs to reboot their continuity is laughable at best. Did Batman the Animated Series prove Marvel needed to reboot their history? Did X-Men the Animated Series? Did the X-Men movies? Did X-Men Evolution? Wolverine and the X-Men? The 1994 Spider-Man cartoon? The Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon? The Raimi Movies? The MCU?

All of those are wonderful adaptations of the comic book characters (mostly) but none of them led to anyone rebooting anything, reorientating maybe but not rebooting. Moreover if all those more public and serialized stories were awesome and modernized the characters why does this ONE GAME prove that NOW we need to do this for Marvel?

It doesn’t prove anything, it’s just his ‘feelings’.

But there is a bigger issue with this point of view.

Comicstorian is mind blowingly out of touch with the nature of DC’s reboots.

Broadly speaking it is understood that a hard reboot in comic books is something like Crisis on Infinite Earths wherein the majority of old stories for a character are thrown out and the fundamental building blocks of them are changed or remixed in major ways.

Even for a character like Batman his origin as recounted in the Golden Age was significantly different when it came time to reboot him in the 1980s post-crisis, even though it retained the same basic ideas and story beats. For Wonder Woman and Superman this was an even bigger deal as for the most part their whole origins as understood in the 1980s were burned down and started over representing a drastically almost opposite direction for their characters. And of course 90% of their then established history was just outright deleted, in Wonder Woman’s case this being 100%. Every post-crisis WW story is the ENTIRE HISTORY of post-Crisis Wonder Woman, nothing was carried over from pre-crisis.

A soft reboot by contrast is something more like what happened in the 1990s with Zero Hour. In Zero Hour the then established lore and histories of every character were retained near identically and only smaller details were changed or tweaked. Those could have big knock on affects but those were not deliberate on the part of the authors.

Why am I defining what a hard and a soft reboot is? Because Comicstorian claims that DC engage in them every 4-7 years and this is objectively untrue.

The FIRST reboot DC technically engaged in was in the 1950s when they created Barry Allan, a new iteration of the Golden Age hero the Flash, thus dawned the Silver Age of comics.

Whilst the intention to create a new version of the Flash was deliberate, calling this a reboot as we understand the term today is kind of weird because back in the 1950s the notion of a sequential continuity that mattered in defining who exactly the characters were simply didn’t exist for DC comics. They just had general ideas of who every character was and then just did whatever they wanted, even recycling ideas every 5 or so years because it was felt that the readership would rotate in and out within that time. no mention of such similar plots occurring was ever brought up even though technically they were happening to the exact same versions of the exact same characters who’d experienced near damn the same things before.

That type of storytelling just didn’t exist for the characters. Basically Barry Allan was created as the new Flash, interacted with Superman and Batman the way Jay Garrick did all the while handwaving that Jay Garrick was just a comic book character because the writers were like “Fuck it. No one cares and it doesn’t matter.”

Except fans did care and thus it wound up mattering. Fans wrote in asking how Jay Garrick could be a comic book character in the DC Universe when they’ve seen stories where he wasn’t and where he wasn’t and how the fuck Barry Allan thinks he’s the first Flash.

This is when DC ‘rebooted’ their continuity by establishing that the Golden Age stories happened on ‘Earth 2’ and all the silver age and beyond stories were on ‘Earth 1’, with the exact point of transition for individual characters varying. This was never the authorial intention by anyone. As far as 1950s Superman writers knew or cared up until that point they’d just been writing the same Superman who showed up in 1938. Same deal with Batman though DC tried to claim that Earth 2 Batman was the guy who didn’t have a yellow oval on his chest and Earth 1 was the guy who did.

With the concept installed they then went wild with it telling stories about Earth 1 and Earth 2 and how they were similar yet different, e.g. they married Earth 2 Superman and killed Earth 2 Batman whilst they remained committed to Earth 1 (their main versions) Superman staying single and Earth 1 Batman obviously staying alive.

This wasn’t a reboot that occurred due to freshen things up or anything. It was just the Flash writer not giving a shit and doing what he wanted and DC pulling an explanation out of thing air to justify it.

Their first true reboot was in the 1980s when they did Crisis on Infinite Earths and in the story combined Earth 1 and Earth 2 whilst deleting parts of it and every other universe so that they could reshape their whole line of comics.

Did they do this just because you know the old continuity had been around for awhile and it was time to freshen things up and make it more modern?

No they did it because the writers of DC didn’t want to deal with the insane contradictory mess the old DC universe (that hadn’t had much planning and developed haphazardly) and also because they wanted their universe to be more like Marvel’s.

Remember that. the biggest reboot DC ever did was because they wanted their universe to be like Marvel’s because Marvel’s, which was like 20-25 years old at the time, was more successful.

Then the next reboot was Zero Hour in the mid-1990s. Did THIS exist to freshen things up and modernize it?

Fuck no.

Zero Hour mostly existed to pay off a Green Lantern storyline and more significantly to just clean up continuity snafus that had cropped up because DC hadn’t perfectly planned out everything the first time they rebooted in the 1980s.

Then came Superman: Birthright in like 2003. This was originally meant as a non-canon update of Superman’s origin by uber Superman fanboy Mark Waid, recycling ideas from a failed pitch he (and Mark Millar and Grant Morrisson) had made in 2000 to also reboot Superman.*

But then it was folded into DC’s continuity effectively replacing Superman’s origin story from the 1980s by John Byrne although DC kinda sorta pretended like BOTH origins counted and like between them this is Superman’s actual canonical origin and Birthright contradicted nothing.

Except it did and they later explained that Superman’s history, along with other alterations to the DC universe pre-2006 had occurred due to Superboy Prime punching a fucking wall which causes reality altering shockwaves or some shit like that I don’t know.

That idea cropped up in the 2006 event comic Infinite Crisis which was a direct sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths and another soft reboot of DC’s history but kind of a bigger one than in Zero Hour. Whilst Birthright was an unintentional reboot of just Superman, Infinite Crisis was a deliberate soft rebooting of the entire DC universe.

Because it was just again time to freshen things up, modernize the characters and inject some creative energy into the universe?

Lol noooooooooooooooooooooooooooope!

Infinite Crisis existed primarily out of the mind of writer Goeff Johns and to a lesser extent Dan Didio, EIC of DC Comics.

In not so many words both have more or less admitted their desire to work for DC was specifically to restore Barry Allan and Hal Jordan as the Flash and Green Lantern respectively after the former died and got replaced in Crisis on Infinite Earths and the latter went evil and got replaced in the 1990s Ron Marx run of GL.

And when you know this and look at their statements and work before and after Infinite Crisis along with what actually happens and the unsubtle metacommentary within the story it becomes obvious why the story really existed.

The story existed because John and Didio, like Waid, Morrisson, Millar and probably other people at DC,were butthurt that the versions of the DC characters they grew up on had been rebooted way back in the 1980s in COIE.

And there is plenty of circumstantial evidence supporting this.

In the 2000s DC had slowly but surely already been working in silver age elements back into the DC universe, for example Superman was dealing with lots of different types of kryptonite, reintroducing his cousin Supergirl and his dog Krypto and getting steadily more and more overpowered. This is in spite of the 1980s reboot specifically wanting to restrict kryptonite to just the green kind, powering down Superman and make him distinctly the lone survivor of Krypton.

The Superman 2000s pitch by Waid, Morrisson and Millar is very revealing because it makes it very clear that the Superman/Lois Lane marriage (something that was born very directly out of the new directions of the post-crisis era) needed to go so they could get back to the Supes/Lois/Clark love triangle. In fact the proposed story of the pitch was all about Superman rebooting his history in order to save Lois’ life which would mean undoing their marriage. Along with that the pitch made Superman even more sci-fi and powered up again evoking the silver age all of them have been on record as adoring.

Even if you were unaware of this Morrisson’s All-Star Superman story was built off the back of being a love letter to the silver age Superman stories and his Batman run adopts a Silver age story as a key foundation stone for the story he wanted to tell.

Johns equally makes his adoration of the silver age obvious in almost everything he does, even referencing how great a new silver age of superheores will be in an episode of Smallville he wrote.

When Johns personally wrote Superman’s rebooted origin after Infinite Crisis he re-established various silver age elements into Superman lore, including his being Superboy as a teen, his membership in the Legion of Super Heroes, Lex Luthor being a childhood friend of Clark’s and him losing his hair as a result.

The big takeaway from Infinite Crisis? It existed because DC’s staff wanted to recreate the status quos they loved as kids and because they hated the post-crisis stuff for the most part because it erased those versions. This is especially true of Mark Waid who is candid about how mad he was that Superman got rebooted by John Byrne and asked at a panel in his youth when the ‘real’ version (pre-crisis version) was going to come back.

Wonder Woman herself underwent a kind of reboot too under J. Michael Straczynski’s tenure where her history got futzed with. This wasn’t an isolated incident.

Then DC did their second (or third if you wanna count the Earth 1-2 shit) hard reboot in 2011.

The story was Flashpoint and it set up the New 52 era. The Nu52 was again Silver Age inspired but used shitty 1990s tropes at the same time. Because Jim Lee had been given a position of power in DC by this point.

What followed was for almost every character five years of near solid deterioration. Wonder Woman and Superman got fucked especially hard, not only because they were shipped together (thus fulfilling a stupid Silver-Bronze Age ship born out of Diana being able to not die during sex with Clark) but because their characters were just....broken.

Diana devolved into this kind of Xena/300 character who had a biological Daddy (just like in the Silver Age) a mother with blonde hair (just like in the Silver Age) and generally began to have her narrative revolve around the men in her life like Ares, Zeus, Orion, her brother, Apollo, Superman, etc (just. Like. In. The. Silver. Age!)

Now that wasn’t the case for Superman. He just went back to being an isolated alien God whom Lois Lane didn’t think much of and being overpowered as fuck. They just added him this lame young and unsure of himself bullshit to make him more like post-One More Day Spider-Man. A reboot trying to make a DC character more like a Marvel one, who’d have thunk it?

Meanwhile over in Batman Barbra Gordon went back to being able to walk and became Batgirl again in essentially the identical costume she had in the Silver Age and Bruce Wayne briefly dated rarely seen Silver/Bronze Age girlfriend Julie Madison.

Barry Allan meanwhile was the one and the only Flash, Wally West the defining post-Crisis Flash had never even held the mantle and was not going to.

Basically if Infinite Crisis was the powers that be warping the DC universe to more resemble what it was like when they were kids in the Silver Age then the Nu52 was them just erasing the DC universe and replacing it with their shitty Silver Age fanfiction. It was what they obviously had deep down wanted to do back in Infinite Crisis if they’d been allowed.

And I cannot stress this enough, it failed.

It failed spectacularly.

It was the single most promoted DC reboot ever with TV adds, they made an effort to court the digital comics crowd, they had new #1s to entice new readers, they got rid of all their old history to (in theory) REALLY entice new readers.

And their sales spiked...at first.

Then gradually died and died and died.

Except for Batman, the character who famously changed the least from one reboot into the next, retaining most of his over all history.

It got so bad that DC reintroduced the pre-Flashpoint Superman (complete with his wife Lois and now with their new son Jon) and had them co-exist in the primary DC universe alongside nu52 Superman.

Then they killed Nu52 Superman off and had pre-FP Superman decide to fill in for him.

And this was all part of an initiative called DC Rebirth in 2016. What was DC Rebirth?

DC Rebirth was an effort to essentially reinstate a lot of the history and directions of the DC characters from the post-crisis/pre-flashpoint era (so like 1986-2011) BACK into the DC universe via you guess it, soft rebooting it.

Was this just because it’d been 5 years now so it’s time to freshen things up?

Jesus Christ no. DC Rebirth existed as an apology for having rebooted in the new 52!

Again Superman was a microcosm of this. Not only was the pre-flashpoint Superman, the guy with most of the history from 1986-2011, now the primary Superman but in a 2017 story called Superman: Reborn DC cosmically integrated him into the prime DC universe so that his history now stated he had ALWAYS been there as the main defining Superman and all that happened was he wore the nu52 Superman’s costume for awhile.

His history though was essentially the one we got from after Infinite Crisis so in effect they reverse rebooted Superman because the 2011 rebooted version of him was so aweful.

Wonder Woman got much the same treatment with ANOTHER new origin for her but one more in line with her Golden Age and Post-crisis origin that threw out the trash from the 2011 nu52 origin.

Sales and critical acclaim for DC over all increased after Rebirth and fans were loud and vocal about how much they appreciated DC essentially fixing what they’d broken in 2011, with Superman being perhaps the biggest example.

Superman had something like 7+ reboots across his 80 year history and the DC universe over all about 6 across the same span of time.

Meanwhile Marvel between 1961-present has never rebooted their continuity and...has usually outsold DC.

In fact the only DC title that regularly tends to outsell major Marvel titles is Batman. That character who again has been altered the least reboot to reboot.

What is the big takeaway from all this? Well

a) DC didn’t reboot (be it soft or hard) every 4-7 years. The Earth 1 and 2 concepts showed up something like 18ish years after the DC universe began. COIE occurred around 20 years later. Zero Hour was 8 years after COIE ended. Infinite Crisis was 12 years later. Flashpoint/the New 52 was 5 years after that and Rebirth was 5 years after that

b) Reboots never occurred for the sake of keeping things fresh or a sincere desire to generate new creative directions. They existed either to plug holes by careless writing (Earth2 and Zero Hour), purely corporate reasons (like making things more like Marvel), an attempt to recapture nostalgia (Infinite Crisis, New 52, Rebirth) or a desire to ‘fix’ whatever older reboots ‘broke’ (Infinite Crisis/New 52, Rebirth)

c) Reboots are not creatively healthy, they just lead to more and more retcons and reboot turning everything into a clusterfuck

d) Maintaining a fairly consistent continuity is actually creatively and financially more sensible hence DC is routinely outsold by the company that has never rebooted

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atthevogue · 6 years

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“Tony de Peltrie” (1985)

The basics: Wikipedia

Opened: A landmark piece of computer animation, the Canadian short was part of the 19th Annual Tournee of Animation anthology that showed at the Vogue Theater in March and April of 1986.

Also on the bill: At least one Saturday in April, it was programmed in the 9:00 slot after Chris Marker’s Akira Kurosawa documentary A.K. and Woody Allen’s Sleeper, and before a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead, which sounds to me like a very good eight-hour day at the movies. Otherwise, you could have had a less perfect day seeing it play after Haskell Wexler’s forgotten Nicaragua war movie Latino and the equally forgotten Gene Hackman/Ann-Margaret romantic drama Twice in a Lifetime.

What did the paper say? ★★★1/2 from the Courier-Journal film critic Dudley Saunders. Saunders described the Tournee as “a specialized event that shows signs of moving into the movie mainstream,” correctly presaging the renaissance in feature-length animation in the 1990s generally and Pixar specifically, whose Luxo, Jr. short was released that same year. Of Tony, Saunders singles it out as “one of the most technologically advanced,” and that it featured “some delightful music from Marie Bastien.” He then throws his hands up: "Computers were used in this Canadian entry. Don’t ask how.” Saunders was long-time film critic for the C-J’s afternoon counterpart, the Louisville Times, throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. In the late 1980s, he would co-found Louisville’s free alternative weekly, the Louisville Eccentric Observer.

What was I doing? I was six and hypothetically could have seen an unrated animation festival, though I'd have been a little bit too young to have fully appreciated it. Although, who knows, I’m sure I was watching four hours of cartoons a day at the time, so maybe my taste was really catholic.

How do I see it in 2018? It’s on YouTube.

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A four-hour-a-day diet of cartoons was probably on the lower end for most of my peers. I grew up during what I believe is commonly known as the Garbage Age of Animation, which you can trace roughly from The Aristocrats in 1970 to The Little Mermaid (or The Simpsons) in 1989. The quantity of animation was high, and the quality was low. Those twenty years were a wasteland for Disney, and even though I have fond memories of a lot of those movies, like The Black Cauldron, they’re a pretty bleak bunch compared to what was sitting in those legendary Disney vaults, waiting patiently to be released on home video.

Other than low-quality Disney releases, the 1980s were highlighted mostly by the post-’70s crap was being churned out of the Hanna-Barbera laboratories. Either that, or nutrition-free Saturday morning toy commercials like The Smurfs and G.I. Joe. Of course there’s also Don Bluth, whose work is kind of brilliant, but whose odd feature-length movies seem very out-of-step with the times. Don Bluth movies seem now like baroque Disney alternatives for weird, dispossessed kids who didn’t yet realize they were weird and dispossessed. (Something like The Secret of NIMH is like Jodorowsky compared to, say, 101 Dalmatians.) Most of the bright spots of those years were produced under the patronage of the saint of 1980s suburbia, Steven Spielberg. An American Tale or Tiny Toon Adventures aren’t regarded today as auteurist masterpieces of animation (or are they?), but they were really smart and imaginative if you were nine years old. Still, the idea that cartoons might be sophisticated enough to be enjoyed by non-stoned adults was probably very alien concept in 1985.

In the midst of all of this, though, scattered throughout the world were a bunch of programmers and animators working out the next regime. Within ten years of Tony de Peltrie, Pixar’s Toy Story would be the first feature-length CGI animated movie, and within another ten years, traditional hand-drawn animation, at least for blockbuster commercial purposes, would be effectively dead. That went for both kids and their parents. Animation, like comic books, would take on a new sophistication and levels of respectability in the coming decades.

I love it when you read an old newspaper review with the benefit of hindsight, and find that the critic has gotten it right in predicting how things may play out in years to come. That’s why I was excited to read in Saunders’ review of the Tournee that he suspected animation as an artform was showing “signs of moving into the movie mainstream.” His sense of confusion (or wonder, or some combination) at the computer-generated aspects is charming in retrospect, too.

Tony de Peltrie is a landmark in computer-generated animation, but its lineage doesn’t really travel through the Pixar line at all (even though John Lassetter himself served on the award panel for the film festival where it was first shown, and predicted it’d be regarded as a landmark piece of animation). The children of the 1970s and ‘80s grew up to revere the golden era of Pixar movies as adults, and the general consensus is that not only are they great technical accomplishments, but works of great emotional resonance.

As much of an outlier as it makes me: I just don’t know. I haven’t really thought so. I think most Pixar movies are really, really sappy in the most obvious way possible. The oldest ones look to me as creaky as all those rotoscoped Ralph Bakshi cartoons of the ‘70s. Which is fine, technology is one thing -- most silent movies look pretty creaky, too -- but the underlying of armature of refined Disney sap that supports the whole structure strains to the point of collapse after a time or two.

Film critic Emily Yoshida said it best on Twitter: she noted, when Incredibles 2 came out, she’d recently re-watched the first Incredibles and was shocked at how crude it looked. "The technoligization of animation will not do individual works favors over time,” she wrote. “The wet hair effect in INCREDIBLES, which I remember everyone being so excited about, felt like holding a first generation iPod. Which is how these movies have trained people to watch them on a visual level...as technology.” There’s something here that I think Yoshida is alluding to about Pixar movies that is very Silicon Valley-ish in the way they’re consumed, almost as status symbols, or as luxury products. This is true nearly across all sectors of the tech industry now, but it’s particularly evident with animation.

One of my favorite movie events of the year is when the Landmark theaters here in Minneapolis play the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at the beginning of the year. Every year, it’s the same: you’ll get a collection of fascinating experiments from all over the world, some digitally rendered, some hand-drawn. They don’t always work, and some of them are really bad, but there’s always such a breadth of styles, emotions and narratives that I’m always engaged and delighted. They remind you that, in animation, you can do anything you want. You can go anywhere, try everything, show anything a person can imagine. Seeing the animated shorts every year, more than anything else, gets me so excited about what movies can be.

And then, in the middle of the program, there’s invariably some big gooey, sentimental mush from Pixar. Not all of them are bad, and some are quite nicely done, but for the most part, it’s cute anthropomorphized animals or objects or kids placed in cute, emotionally manipulative situations. I usually go refill my Diet Coke or take a bathroom break during the Pixar sequence.

Yeah, yeah, I know. What kind of monster hates Pixar?

I don’t hate Pixar, and I like most of the pre-Cars 2 features just fine. The best parts of Toy Story and Up and Wall-E are as good as people say they are. But when you take the reputation that Pixar has had for innovation and developing exciting new filmmaking technology in the past 25 years, and compare it to the reality, there’s an enormous gap. And it drives me nuts, because if this is supposed to be the best American animation has to offer in terms of innovation and emotional engagement, it's not very inspiring. Especially placed alongside the sorts of animated shorts that come out of independent studios elsewhere in the U.S., or Japan, or France, or Canada.

Which brings us to Tony de Peltrie, created in Montreal by four French-Canadian animators, and supported in part by the National Film Board of Canada, who would continue to nurture and support animation projects in Canada through the twenty-first century. A huge part of the enjoyment -- and for me, there was an enormous amount of enjoyment in watching Tony de Peltrie -- is seeing this entirely new way of telling stories and conveying images appear in front of you for the first time. Maybe it’s because I have clear memories of a world without contemporary CGI, but I still find this enormous sense of wonder in what’s happening as Tony is onscreen. I still remember very clearly seeing the early landmarks of computer-aided graphics, and being almost overwhelmed with a sense of awe -- Tron, Star Trek IV, Jurassic Park. Tony feels a bit like that, even after so many superior technical accomplishments that followed.

Tony de Peltrie doesn’t have much of a plot. A washed-up French-Canadian entertainer recounts his past glories as he sits at the piano and plays, and then slowly dissolves over a few minutes into an amorphous, impressionistic void. (Part of the joke, I think, is using such cutting-edge technology to tell the story of a white leather shoe-clad artist whose work has become very unfashionable by the 1980s.) It’s really just a monologue. The content could be conveyed using a live actor, or traditional hand-drawn animation.

But Tony looks so odd, just sitting on the edge of the Uncanny Valley, dangling those white leather shoes into the void. Part of the appeal is that, while Tony’s monologue is so human and delivered in such an off-the-cuff way, you’re appreciating the challenge of having the technology match the humanity. Tony’s chin and eyes and fingers are exaggerated, like a caricature, but there’s such a sense of warmth underneath the chilliness of the computer-rendered surfaces. Though it’s wistful and charming, you wouldn’t necessarily call it a landmark in storytelling -- again, it’s just a monologue, and not an unfamiliar one -- but it is a technological landmark in showing that the computer animation could be used to humane ends. It’d be just as easy to make Tony fly through space or kill robots or whatever else. But instead, you get an old, well-worn story that slowly eases out of the ordinary into the surreal, and happens so gradually you lose yourself in a sort of trance.

As Yoshida wrote, technoligization of animation doesn’t do individual works favors over time. To that end, something like Tony can’t be de-coupled from its impressive but outdated graphics. These landmarks tend to be more admired than watched -- to the extent that it’s remembered at all, it’s as a piece of technology, and not as a piece of craft or storytelling.

Still, Tony is the ancestor of every badly rendered straight-to-Netflix animated talking-animals feature cluttering up your queue, but he’s also the ancestor of any experiment that tries to apply computer-generated imagery to ways of storytelling. In that sense, he has as much in common with Emily in World of Tomorrow as he does with Boss Baby, a common ancestor to any computer-generated human-like figure with a story. When Tony dissolves into silver fragments at the end of the short, it’s as if those pieces flew out into the world, through the copper wires that connect the world’s animation studios and personal computers, and are now present everywhere. He’s like a ghost that haunts the present. I feel that watching it now, and I imagine audiences sitting at the Vogue in 1986 might have felt a stirring of something similar.

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murasaki-murasame · 6 years

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Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 17 [Chapter 5 - Trial]

Aaaaahhhhhhhh.

Thoughts under the cut.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. There were like . . . a thousand things that happened that I could talk about first. Wow. This goddamn trial sure took me for a spin and left me completely dazed and overwhelmed and depressed by the end.

I probably should have seen Kaito being the culprit coming. I just assumed that it would be ‘too easy’, since it was the second most obvious answer after Kokichi. But I can definitely say that even if the ‘who’ wasn’t too inherently difficult, the ‘how’ sure as fuck was.

It’s slightly lame that a good amount of the mystery of this trial revolved around stuff that only happens during the trial itself, but it’s fine. The shit that went down in this trial was oh so worth it.

Funnily enough, the thing I thought was a spoiler about Kaito being a culprit probably wasn’t actually intended as a spoiler for it, but it still lead me to the right conclusion. I saw a spoiler-free review that talked about how some of the motives in this game are lame, and I vaguely remember them mentioning the idea of someone killing because they had a terminal illness, which immediately made me think of Kaito once that whole plot point started up, but since his motive for murder had nothing to do with his illness, I think that person was just throwing out a generic example of a cliche motive, but it just so happened to still point at someone who ended up being a culprit anyway. They probably should have chosen a different example, lol.

Anyway, this trial was just sorta . . . insane. Wow. I wasn’t even able to definitively guess that the person in the Exisal was Kaito because his entire demeanor, especially when he switched over to ‘being Kaito’, felt too uncharacteristic of him to be true. But it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t actually Kokichi. Though even then, I still wasn’t sure if that meant Kaito was actually the killer.

Especially with the mid-trial swerve of Maki seeming to be the culprit, and genuinely believing herself to be the culprit. I was skeptical about the idea of the killer being spelled out before the intermission phase happened, but her whole story seemed too good not to be true.

I really, really liked this whole trial’s set-up of having both a mystery victim and a mystery killer. That was a really interesting idea. Especially with the additional layer of it being intended as ‘a mystery that even Monokuma can’t solve’. It made things feel incredibly baffling. In a good way.

The most negative thing I can say about the mystery itself was probably that, in the end, it ended up being almost exactly the same sort of scenario as case five in DR2, with a character setting up an insane murder mystery with themselves as the victim, set up in a way to expose and destroy the mastermind. They definitely played out in different ways, but the similarity was a bit too hard to ignore.

As a whole, though, it was great. It at least felt more satisfying than chapter four, even though I get in hindsight that chapter four’s trial was ‘unsatisfying’ for very intentional reasons.

It even made me warm up to Kokichi a lot as a character, which I wasn’t expecting. Now that his motives and feelings are more or less clear, it’s easier for me to understand him and appreciate his choices. I still can’t help but see him as a version of Komaeda that has a more off-putting personality, though. He’s definitely a fun character, but his personality just irritates me a lot of the time.

The first half or so of the trial wasn’t super hard in terms of the logic and the minigames, but it definitely picked up in the latter half once things got more and more weird and complicated. That was good. Sometimes the exact logic behind certain things still bugs me, though. I think I mentioned it before, but the ‘pick one of your truth bullets from the full list’ parts can sometimes feel a bit non-intuitive. Like when you have to point out that the crossbow was used, but you have to specifically pick the crossbow itself, because picking the arrows makes the other person be like ‘what, are you saying that they just stabbed someone with the arrows?’. That felt a bit dumb. It should have been immediately obvious what I meant by that. But it’s a minor point.

On a similar topic, a lot of the mini-games still feel kinda unnecessary, but that’s always been an issue with this franchise. There’s not really much to say about it at this point. Though I should say that it threw me off so fucking hard when I got a hidden Monokuma inside one of the Psyche Taxi segments. I had no idea that was possible. And on THAT note, I’ve had no real luck at getting those. This one was literally the second one I’ve found in the entire game. I know I missed one because I only noticed it in the background right before I started a free time event with someone, though. Maybe it would have been there if I went back for it later, but I didn’t bother.

I’m also getting better at the Argument Armament sections, somehow. They’re still stressful as heck, but I’m slowly improving. [And on the note of this chapter’s one, I guess I was right in assuming that if Kaito was this chapter’s killer, someone else would try and defend him]

I feel almost silly for suspecting Keebo so heavily, but both Kokichi and Kaito felt a bit too easy at the time. Oh well. I have . . . things to say about Keebo, but I’ll leave that for later, I guess.

Back on the topic of the murder itself, the whole set-up of it really was kinda ingenious, and really could have been an unsolvable mystery if things had gone differently. Especially with the whole element of there being no real proof as to whether the victim died via Maki’s poison arrow, or the hydraulic press. In the end, it basically came down to personal feelings and belief, rather than cold hard evidence.

Which reminds me, I also really liked the whole theme of Shuichi’s intuition as a device vs his feelings of belief as an individual. That was neat. Especially when it got to the point where, even after using evidence and deduction to figure out that Kaito was the culprit, he decided to lie in an attempt to stand for what Kaito believed in, and was risking his life for. Which, sadly, ended up being the final push that got Kaito to give up.

I actually tried like three times to vote for Kokichi even after that scene, since I still wanted to support Kaito, but the game didn’t let me. Oh well.

Before I forget, I may as well get back to my whole [apparently ongoing] rant for a little while.

As I’ve said before, I still personally interpret Shuichi as having a crush on Kaito that he’s trying to deny. I also said it before, but I’ve been aware from the start that this probably isn’t ‘canon’, especially after this whole trial happened and it didn’t get mentioned, but it’s still something I believe in. Especially with how heavily Shuichi and Maki were getting paralleled in this trial. Either way, at this point it feels safe to say that whatever Shuichi feels for Kaito is equal to or stronger than whatever he felt for Kaede [and had much longer to develop], and the game’s obviously already framing her as his love interest, so yeah.

I guess it goes without saying, but with how this whole game is about the nature of truth and lies, and about criticizing the idea that exposing and living with the truth is always necessary and good, it feels rather fitting that I’m choosing to treat this as my personal truth, even if it might just be a lie.

And for the record I still find Maki’s crush on Kaito to be really adorable and also heart-wrenching in this trial. If anything that’s just part of the reason why I’m seeing Shuichi’s feelings as basically being the same sort of thing.

Rant time over [for now], lol.

I guess there’s not much more to say about the mystery itself, so I should start talking more about the aftermath of the trial.

To start with, I figured in advance that Kokichi probably wasn’t the mastermind, since it felt too ‘obvious’ and happened way too early. I think I also commented on how it was a bit odd how the Exisals and stuff were treating Monokuma, but I didn’t quite guess what the full situation with that one was.

I’ll talk about the concept of the ‘true mastermind’ in a minute. Before that, I wanna say that it was really fitting and amusing that Kaito’s execution was a spin on Jin’s from DR1. I really should have seen that coming. It was a nice little throwback. I also really, really liked the detail of Kaito dying from his injuries rather than the execution itself. It may not have been a complete victory, but it was a moral victory.

Though on the flip-side we have the whole reveal that Kaito probably had the plague that killed off most of humanity, which in itself wouldn’t change anything, but it carries the really uncomfortable implication that maybe everyone in the cast had the same plague, and he just had his symptoms show up first. Which would just make this entire scenario even MORE depressing than it was before.

This whole chapter’s just making me more and more unsure what the deal is meant to be with Rantarou and the Monokubs. I still feel like they have to be related to the overall story somehow, but I’m getting less and less sure about what their purpose could be. I’m still assuming that the Monokubs have AIs that are based on the personalities of other people in the last killing game Rantarou was a part of. Maybe the other survivors of said killing game. Which makes me wonder if we’d ever get any idea who they were as actual people.

With the reveal that Kokichi ISN’T the mastermind, and might not have had anything to do with setting up the killing game, now I can’t help but wonder if it was Rantarou who set things up. Obviously SOMEONE had to, and I assume it’s one of the main cast members. It’d also explain why he knew about the killing game in advance, and why he seemed intent on winning it. It certainly hints at him being kinda . . . malicious, but that was already clear enough. This would also explain what he meant about how this is a killing game that he wanted to have happen.

Presumably he’s genuinely dead, though, so that pokes some holes in the idea of him being the mastermind, assuming that ‘the mastermind’ is a currently living person. If we limit it just to the main cast, then Keebo seems like the most suspicious person, since he’s a robot who could be running some sort of sub-program to control Monokuma, in a way that might not even be conscious on his part. But, again, I’ll talk more about him in a moment.

First, I should talk about the plot point that I’ve been holding off on mentioning for this entire post, and that’s Junko. I’m laughing so hard at the implication that she’s the goddamn mastermind for the third game in a row. It’s such a brilliantly polarizing writing choice. Part of me had been genuinely hoping it would happen. I have a soft spot for Junko as a villain, if only because I love seeing people get so angry over her. The ways that she causes despair and frustration in the fandom just by existing kinda validates her status as the main villain of the series.

I’ve mentioned before that it feels like they’re setting up some sort of a twist about the events of this game being fictional, even in the context of the DR universe, and this is making me even more certain of that. Especially with the focus on the topic of ‘the people who this killing game are being shown to’. The main thing that always bugged me about the apocalypse idea was that broadcasting the killing game had always been the top priority, and so it felt weird to imagine a killing game happening in this sort of scenario. I kinda assumed it was to do with there being a new mastermind with new priorities, but the idea of Monokuma still abiding by his own rules is definitely too strange, even if we make that kind of assumption. So it makes sense that he’s broadcasting this to SOMEONE. The question is who.

And honestly my best guess is that this is setting up some abstract meta-twist about us, as the players, being the people who the game is broadcast to. I’d been idly considering that for a while, but seeing Junko show up, and seeing the references to how the characters are all ‘easily replaceable’ and that ‘the killing game can happen again and again’ makes me think that, in-universe, V3 is literally some kind of story that Junko’s writing. Maybe not in a literal sense of her writing a book or something, but maybe the game takes place in a DR2-esque simulation, and she can just restart it again and again to create an unending killing game of unending despair. It seems like the sort of thing she’d do. And obviously it’d work pretty well on a meta level as commentary about the franchise itself. Which to me got pretty definitively confirmed when Junko mentioned ‘supply and demand’. V3, and it’s killing game, only exists because we, the fans, financially supported this series enough, and wanted to see more killing games happen enough, that this game got made. It seems like the natural end point of how this series likes to comment on the almost voyeuristic nature of murder. This game only exists because there was an active demand for it. Because we like seeing people kill each other in video games. Because experiencing intense emotions through media is a cathartic experience that people want to go through again and again. I’m not trying to be like ‘violent video games are bad!’ or whatever, I just mean that if this game is going to end with the big bad villain literally being the people playing the game, then it’s certainly justified.

Though on the same level it also makes it feel like this is the furthest the series could ever go, and that any more games being made would just feel uncomfortable and weird. But even if this game ends in that sort of way, there’s still going to be demand for more games. We’ll still want to get another killing game, and another, and another, even if we complain about how discomfiting it is to have a game turn around and criticize us for our enjoyment of it.

If we assume that this is where it’s going, I wonder how chapter six will go, and how the game will end. Will it be like DR2, where we get to argue against a digital version of Junko? That’d be a bit . . . odd, and probably kinda depressing, since if this is all just a story being written/programmed/etc by Junko, then no matter what the characters can to do her, it probably won’t kill her. She’ll still be alive in the real world.

On that note, if we’re meant to assume that Junko is alive ‘in the real world’, it makes me wonder what point in the timeline we’re working with, since her physical body got pretty definitively destroyed at one point, unless the person we saw in that one CG near the end was her in a robot body made to look like her. Who even knows.

Also, this whole Junko thing makes me even MORE unsure how the hell Rantarou and the Monokubs fit into the story. Is their backstory all part of a fictional setting she made up for this game? I have no idea.

I really can’t help but wonder if Kodaka will try and continue the series after this. I guess it wouldn’t be impossible for him to do so, but I just . . . don’t know how it’d work, really.

I still find it incredibly fascinating how utterly depressing and miserable and filled with despair this entire game is, especially as we understand how it connects to the entire franchise, compared to the far more hopeful ending that DR3 gave us. Though it’d be a lot less depressing if the entire apocalypse scenario was also made up by Junko and didn’t actually happen. But to be honest I kinda love the sheer audacity of Kodaka writing such a hopeful direction for the story and it’s universe, only to completely tear it apart by literally putting it through a fiery apocalypse, so either option works for me.

Anyway, I wonder if we’ll get any more deaths, or if it’ll be like the last games where nobody in the main cast dies in chapter six, ignoring the mastermind. The game is REALLY hammering in the concept of ‘the killing game will end when two people are left’. So it just makes me wonder if that might really happen. Though since only two people died in this chapter, we’d need to get a scenario of two victims and one culprit in the next chapter, to create a scenario where we’re then left with two people. Or maybe three people will just die normally. It just depends on whether or not we get another trial, really. I’m not really sure what I expect to happen, but the most important thing is probably that, if this really is all fictional, to some degree or another, then the concept of someone surviving becomes a bit meaningless, so on some level it kinda doesn’t matter. But it’s still interesting to speculate about.

I really would not be surprised at this point if the next chapter involves Himiko and Tsumugi dying, and us getting one last trial between Shuichi, Maki, and Keebo, who all definitely feel like the most major and plot-important characters right now. That might be interesting.

But it also makes me wonder if we’d then get ANOTHER chapter after that, or if we just might not get a trial where we face off against Junko specifically. Who knows.

Either way, Himiko and Tsumugi definitely feel a little expendable right about now, and I’m incredibly suspicious of Keebo and his plans right now.

I wasn’t really expecting his inner voice to just . . . malfunction and stop working after he gets hit with a rock. That kinda came out of nowhere. And now we have this bizarre scenario of him powering up and flying around while apparently bombarding the school with missiles. I wonder if his plan is just to burn everything to the ground so that the killing game will forcibly come to an end. It’s kinda hard to imagine Keebo doing something so violent, though.

I did really like seeing the remaining survivors, aside from Keebo, start training together. That was really sweet. I really love the sense of friendship and companionship between them. Well, mostly between Shuichi and Maki, but you get what I mean.

I have no goddamn clue where the next chapter is going to go, at this point. The end of this chapter raised so many questions and cliffhangers that I feel like things can just go in any direction they want now.

But as a bottom line, I can only imagine this game having a depressing, or at least bittersweet, ending. Especially if everything is some sort of fictional story. But even if it’s not, the characters have no real future left. No matter how much hope they have, they’re stuck in the academy. So I just can’t see this ending happily.

Also, as a final note, I tend to be pretty bad at expressing the exact extent of my emotional reactions to stuff in this game since I’m having to talk about so much in these posts and I try and keep them at least relatively concise and orderly and whatnot, even if this isn’t meant to be any kind of a professional review or anything, but this whole trial and it’s conclusion was depressing as fuck. It tore me apart. I knew something like this was gonna happen, since I was already bracing for this ending with Kaito dying in some way or another, but actually seeing it happen really hurt. I’m not kidding when I talk about how much I love the entire Kaito-Shuichi-Maki trio. I honestly think that they’ve become some of my all-time favourite DR characters. I get why a lot of people might think they’re a bit boring and plain [other than maybe Maki], but I absolutely adore them. Out of all of the ‘main trios’, they’re far and away my favourites at the moment, although there’s a lot of recency bias going on there, since I still have a huge soft spot for the main characters of DR2. Mostly Hinata and Komaeda, though. The fact that I like Maki a LOT more than Nanami is probably what weigh things out in V3′s favour. I don’t really wanna pit any of the characters against each other.

Anyway yeah, this chapter put me through an entire rollercoaster of emotions.

#murasaki rambles #danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #danganronpa v3 spoilers

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