#and considering quasi's story i felt it was more likely he's asking to walk through life alongside the people through good times and bad

[viking-raider]

Southern Generation - Part I

Summary: After more than a decade of service, Captain Syverson as retired from the military, but now that he is retired, he still needs to find a job.

Pairing: Syverson/OFC

Word Count: 6,214

Rating: PG - Quasi-Slow Burn, Language, PTSD, Fluff, Angst, Anxiety, Hurt/Comfort, Reclusive Behavior

Inspiration: I wrote a similar story for another fandom and I’ve wanted to finally write a Sy story, since I don’t have one.

Author’s Note: I wasn’t going to post this til I was done, but thought what the hell. Thanks to @wondersofdreaming​ of for her help with it.

He was home, finally and for good.

After more than ten years of service in the U.S Army and retiring as a Captain, Austin Wyatt Syverson was no longer a soldier. It felt amazing to be back on southern soil again, home sweet home; back in the city he was named after.

Austin, Texas.

Slinging his bag over his shoulder, Syverson found his way back home, to his flat in central Austin. He didn't expect a huge welcome back, unlike the first time he came back home from overseas, years before. His parents had decorated his apartment with streamers, a 'welcome back' sign and balloons. They had cake and noise makers as he entered, surprising him. But, this time, there was none of that, just bare gray walls, covered in band posters and other things Syverson liked.

His father had died of a heart attack two years into his second deployment and his mother had passed from breast cancer a year before. He was an only child and he wasn't close to his other relatives, so he would have hit the floor if any of them had even sent him a 'welcome back' text.

No, Austin Syverson was on his own, and he was more than all right with that. One thing he wasn't all right with was not having a job. So, after settling in, getting into his civilian clothing and cooking a good home cooked lunch, he picked up a newspaper and perused the job section. He preferred a job that he could do with his hands, he had always liked working with his hands, even as a kid, tinkering in the garage with his dad. Several advertisements caught his attention and he saved the numbers in his phone, planning on calling them to inquire about the job, but for now, Syverson just wanted to relax and settle in as a newly-minted civilian.

The one thing he did miss was Aika, the German Shepherd he befriended back in Baghdad. He had started the process of having Aika sent over from Iraq, but she was stuck in a month-long quarantine, before she would be cleared to be with him again, in Austin.

“She's all the family I need.” Sy said, popping the cap off a cold one.

Bright and early the next morning, Sy started calling the numbers in the advertisements and discovered to his disgruntled annoyance, that the paper he picked up was nearly a week old. He made a mental note to give the clerk at the corner store a piece of his mind, the next time he saw him.

“I'm really sorry, Mr. Syverson.” the owner of a construction company sighed, feeling bad that he didn't have room on his current job for him.

“It's fine, I'll find something.” Sy frowned, rubbing the side of his face. “Thanks though.” He sighed, and started to hang up.

“Wait!”

Sy paused, his finger almost pressed to his screen to hang up the call, and put it back to his ear. “Yeah?” He replied, biting his lip.

“I just remembered, it's a private contract, I got it a couple days ago.” He explained, fumbling through several stacks of papers and files he had strewn across his desk. “It's out in Celina, I know that's a bit of a drive from where you are in Austin.”

“That's fine.” Sy answered, relieved. “A job is a job.”

He figured if he could do a job overseas, he could do a job three hours outside of Austin.

“Well, if you want it, it's yours.” He told Sy, finally finding the paper he was looking for.

“Of course!”

He gave Sy the details of the contract, it was a private contract, sent into his company by a young lady, who lived just outside of Celina, Texas, on a small farm. Apparently the house and the barn on the property were in disrepair and she wanted them repaired. So, Sy took the contract and the information, then hung up with him, immediately calling the number he had given him for the young lady.

“Hello?” A soft, almost meek, voice answered.

“Hi, I'm Cap-” Sy cleared his throat and squeezed his eyes shut, it was going to be a while, before he broke himself out of the habit of introducing himself as Captain Syverson. “I'm Austin Syverson. I know you don't know me, but I got your contract from Mr. McJames, the owner of Diamond Ridge Constructions, in Austin.” He explained to her, sure it sounded a bit crazy.

“Oh.” She replied, unconsciously brushing her hair out of her face. “Right. The contract.”

“Is it still available?” He asked, feeling a small tingle of apprehension in the pit of his stomach.

“Yes!” She answered, hastily, worried she had given him the wrong impression. “Yes, the contract is still available. You're actually my only inquirer for it.” She told him, honestly.

“I would love to meet up with you and talk about it.” Sy said, letting out a relieved sigh and felt his massive shoulders relax.

“Um,” She gulped, licking her lips and felt her hands shake.

“I could meet you in Celina, take you for coffee?” He suggested, hoping to make her more comfortable with meeting him in a public place. “My treat.” He added, with a sweet tone.

“No, no.” She squeaked, fidgeting in her chair. “That's all right, if you want to take the contract it's yours, Mr. Syverson. It's seventeen an hour, with everything provided.” She explained to him, taking deep breaths, to calm down her nerves.

Sy was a little surprised by how easy it was, but he was willing to do the job, either way. “Of course, I would gladly take the job for you.” He agreed.

“Excellent.” She smiled, bouncing on her toes. “You can start at your earliest convenience.” She told him.

“I can come by tomorrow morning, if that's all right with you.” He replied, looking around his kitchen for something to write with and on, so he could take down her address.

“That's splendid.” She assured him, then rattled off her address for him. “If you have any issues finding the place, just call.” She told him, before they hung up.

Sy woke up early, for the three hour drive from Austin to Celina.

It was a nice drive, watching the bustling city of Austin slowly melt away to the rural landscape of the countryside, endless farmlands of varying crops. Sy found it rather soothing, after seeing nothing but sand, rubble and burned out buildings for so long. He felt like he was getting back to his roots again, his southern heritage. His GPS chimed into his thoughts, announcing he was within a mile of her home. So, he turned off the music he was playing and rolled down the window of his truck, squinting at the mailboxes that dotted the few dirt driveways along the long country road.

“You've passed your destination.”

“Fuck.” Sy grunted, tires screeching as he turned around.

He stopped his truck by the side of the road and got out, looking up and down the empty road, frowning. He pulled his GPS device off its holder and started walking in the direction it indicated her house was in, pausing, as it told him he was standing exactly where he needed to be. Turning in a circle, he noticed the sun baked, wooden gate, that was slightly hidden by weeds and had no mailbox. Frowning, Sy locked up his truck, pushed open the gate that almost fell over in the process, before walking up the driveway.

The simple, two story farmhouse slowly came into view. The roof of the farm porch was dilapidated and sagging, there were shingles missing on both roofs, the paint of the house was faded and peeling, chipping away from the warped and cracked boards, a couple of them were missing.

“It definitely needs work.” Sy said, stopping to look the house over, then noticed the barn a couple of yards away, in even worse condition. “Looks like I got my work cut out for me.” He sighed, but wasn't daunted by any of it.

His eyes moved away from the barn and back to the house as the screen door opened and a woman stepped out onto the porch; Sy could practically hear the high-pitch creak of the screen door from where he stood. She was a teeny little thing, maybe five foot, and looked timid, by the way she hugged the screen door, using it to hide behind as she watched him finish approaching the house.

“Mr. Syverson?” She called out to him, biting her bottom lip.

“Yes, ma'am.” Sy answered, stopping at the bottom of the warped steps leading up to her on the porch.

“I hope you didn't have too much trouble finding the place?”

“Not at all.” He smiled at her, shaking his head. “I don't lose my way often.” He assured him, teasingly.

“Good.” She chuckled, nervousness. “I suppose you'd like a closer look at the place?” She asked, glancing around the porch.

“If you don't mind.” Sy nodded, glancing around as well.

Biting her lip, she stepped out onto the porch, the screen door closing with a soft bang. “I'm sure you saw a lot of the issues on your way up.” She explained, slowly stepping off the porch.

“I have.” Sy nodded, looking down and smirking at her bare feet. “Seems a lot of the boards are rotted and the house, and barn, could use a good fresh coat of paint.”

“That's the least of the problems.” She replied, looking at the side of the house as they rounded its corner, heading towards the barn. “There's several weak points in the roof, on both the barn and the house.”

“When was the place built?” He asked, touching the side of the house, flecks of paint brushing off under his fingertips.

“1921.” She answered, looking up to the top of the house, squinting in the bright sunlight. “I bought the place four years ago.” She explained, turning towards the barn.

“I can understand you wanting to fix up the house, being you live in it.” Sy commented, checking out the barn. “But, what do you want the barn with? If you don't mind me asking.”

“I'm considering turning it into my studio.” She answered, trying to push open the barn door.

“What do you do?” Sy asked, helping her push open the door; one handed, while she leaned her body into it.

“I'm a graphic designer and a photographer.” She explained to him, stepping inside the barn with him.

“That's cool.” He smiled at the back of her head.

“Thanks.” She replied, smiling at him over her shoulder. “So,” She gulped and glanced around the barn. “Do you think you can do the job?” She asked, regarding him.

Sy heaved a sigh and roamed around the barn for a moment, checking things out. “I'm more than sure I could.” He finally said, stopping in front of her and crossed his arms. “It might take a couple of weeks to finish. But, I can do it.”

“Great.” She smiled, relieved and excited to hear that he could.

“I can start right away, if you want.” He added, resolute.

“Sounds excellent.” She nodded, fidgeting and nervously twisting the hem of her tank top with her fingers. “I can get the tools for you.” She turned and left the barn, heading back towards her house.

Sy followed after her, staying on the top step of the porch, while she disappeared inside. “Here.” He smiled as she came back, carrying a heavy red and rushed toolbox; stepping forward to take it from her.

“If you need anything else, more tools or supplies, like, I don't know, lumber or whatever.” She mumbled, staring down at her bare feet, shyly. “Just ask.”

“I will.” Sy grinned down at her, hefting the toolbox and making the tools inside of it rattle.

With that, Sy gave her a gentlemanly nod of his head and stepped off the porch. He carried the heavy box of tools down the long driveway, back to his truck, still parked on the side of the road, where he left it. Opening the back hatch, he set the tool box down in the truck bed and opened it, checking out all the tools that were stored inside it.

“Not too bad.” He nodded, approving of the selection that was inside, then turned towards his first project for the place, the pathetic excuse and falling over the gate.

Digging his phone out of his pocket, Sy googled the closet hardware store, secured the toolbox in the back of his truck and hopped in behind the wheel and followed the directions into the town of Celina. He knew she told him to tell her if he needed anything while working on her property, but Sy had a sound enough savings, that he didn't mind spending his own money on bits and bobs. He browsed the aisles of the hardware store, picking up a couple of tools he would need and weren't in the box, then several boards of wood, to build a new gate.

“Thanks.” Sy muttered, nodding his head at the hardware store owner, collecting his things and packing them back into his truck.

Getting back to the farm, Sy parked close to the head of the driveway and got to work, tearing down the old gate and piled up the lumber to the side, out of the way. Without a power source, this far out, Sy relied on a trusty hand saw and the thick muscle of his arms to cut the fresh boards, still strongly smelling of the pine tree they were hewn from. He measured everything out, tucking the pencil behind his ear, as he leaned into the saw as he cut them to length and nailed them together, forming the new gate.

She watched him the whole time, from the upstairs window of her office. He was a hard and diligent worker. Taking painstaking time to double, or even triple, his measuring of the boards, before finally cutting them with a manual saw. In a matter of hours, he had the new gate made and started putting it up. Biting her lip and saving her work on her laptop, she went downstairs into her humble little kitchen, whipped up a couple of things, making some food and drinks, before texting him.

» If you're hungry, I made lunch.

Sy smiled at her text, putting the last screw into the gate and pushed it open with two fingers. Grinning and proud of his work, then turning back to his truck, he put all the tools away and cleaned up the rest of the mess he made, then drove through the gate, stopping long enough to get out and close the gate behind him, then went up and parked beside her own little car. She came out onto the porch, holding a plate of food and a tall glass of cold lemonade.

“Thank you.” He grinned at her, taking the plate and glass, and sitting down on the rickety porch swing, balancing the plate in his lap.

“You're welcome.” She mumbled back, so shy that she didn't meet his blue eyes.

Chuckling, Sy took a deep gulp of the lemonade, parched beyond belief after all the work he had done. He moaned as the cold tang washed over his tongue, refreshing him tremendously. “That is delicious, thank you.” He complimented her.

“Thank you.” She smiled, still fidgeting beside the swing. “I'll be inside, if you need me.” She said in a rush, and scuttled inside.

Sy tilted his head as the screen door slammed shut behind her. She was a curious person, always so nervous and shy, fidgeting and never meeting his eye. He wondered if his presence made her feel uncomfortable, he was wearing a red, DILLIGAF t-shirt, a tight pair of black jeans and boots. He was an imposing guy, with stacked muscle, which made his job in the Special Forces easier, and his head was shaved, while sporting a beard. Sy's whole presence came off as authoritative and commanding, it was a natural effect he had, it was one of the reasons he had advanced in the military and succeeded as a leader so well.

Sighing, he finished off his food and gulped down the rest of his lemonade, before getting up and carefully knocking on the wood of the door frame, peeking inside. The main door was half open and he could see into the foyer and the living room beyond that, the large rug on the hardwood floors and the mismatched couch and furniture of the living room, a flat screen tv mounted above the fireplace. He could just see around the corner into what looked like a dining room, seeing the edge of a table and a couple of chairs. She appeared from the other side of the door, looking up into his eyes for a moment, before dropping them down again.

“All finished?” She asked, quietly.

“I am, thank you.” Sy smiled at her, pressing his lips together. “It was really good, the best I've had so far, since coming home.” He told her, taking a step back as she opened the screen door, taking the dishes from him, their fingers brushing.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” He asked, gulping at the soft touch of her fingers.

“No, thank you.” She squeaked, drawing away from him. “I appreciate you fixing the gate.” She added, breathlessly.

“Of course, ma'am.” Sy smiled, chuckling softly. “I'll be back tomorrow and I'll have a look around the house and see what projects need more direct attention.” He explained to her, glancing around the porch.

“That sounds great.” She mumbled back, clearing her throat.

“I'll take my leave then.” Sy said, bowing his head to her, and heading back to his truck.

There was an infernal banging coming from outside, with a loud clattering that followed, all of it in a steady rhythm that was driving her crazy.

She was nuzzled into the warmth of her thick down blankets, in that heavenly position, where you found the perfect spot on the mattress to lay, and even the slightest movement will ruin it, in a millisecond. She growled into her pillow, still reluctant to move even the tiniest bit, but she couldn't take it anymore, and thrashed out of bed, in a fling of arms, legs, pillows and blankets.

“What in the world?” She huffed, pulling on an oversized hoodie and scrambled downstairs.

She froze, catching a glimpse out of the large bay window in her den, a huge male with a shaved head, and realized it was Sy. Gulping, she moved closer and watched him through the window. He wasn't in his red shirt and jeans this morning, but wore a blue tank top and a pair of basketball shorts, but still sporting his combat boots. He also had wireless earbuds in, head bumping to whatever he was listening to. Mustering some early morning courage and stepped over to the front door, pulling it open.

“Careful!” Sy called out, appearing from the other side of the house.

She looked down and saw a good amount of the boards of the porch were gone, and looked back up at him.

“Morning.” He smiled, one corner a bit higher in an amused way.

“Morning.” She squeaked back, burrowing into her hoodie a little bit.

“I thought I would start on the porch.” Sy said, looking over what he had already torn up.

“I-I can see..that.” She stammered, biting the inside corner of her lip, then looked behind her, to the coo-coo clock on the foyer wall.

It was seven in the morning, and Sy had already been on the farm for an hour and pulled up just about half of the wrap around porch. She looked back at him and was rather impressed by it, with a shy nod of her head, she went back inside and into the kitchen, setting up the coffee maker and got breakfast going. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, she glanced in the direction of the noise and followed it again.

“Would you like some breakfast or coffee?” She asked as Sy yanked up another warmed porch board, with his gloved hands, biceps bulging as he got it loose with a grunt.

Tossing the board into the growing pile, Sy wiped his sweaty face on his arms and turned to look up at her. “I would love some, if that's all right with you.” He answered, he only had a liquid breakfast of a tall black coffee from Starbucks as he left Austin for Celina.

“Pancakes, eggs and bacon, okay with you?” She asked, fidgeting.

“Yes, ma'am.” Sy nodded, smiling sweetly at her.

A smile twitched on her lips, before she turned on her bare feet and went back into the kitchen. She pulled open the refrigerator, pulling out the milk, eggs and bacon, before going into the pantry to grab the dry pancake ingredients. The coffee maker beeps as she whipped up the pancake batter and turned, pulling out two cups from the cabinet and setting up her own cup, before going back to the front porch.

“Coffee is ready, if you want to—come in—and get your cup ready.” She told him, shyly.

“Thank you.” Sy smiled at her, wiping his face again.

Pulling off his gloves, stuffing them into his back pocket, Sy entered the house, glancing around as he followed her into the kitchen. He found his cup by the coffee maker and smirked at it, it was a Texas Rodeo cup, a picture of a bucking horse on the background of the shape of Texas.

“I wasn't sure what you took in your coffee.” She commented as he stirred a single sugar into the cup and took a seat at the breakfast nook table.

“Either straight black, or with one sugar.” He replied, taking a sip of the steaming brown liquid, while he watched her finish mixing the pancake batter. “Depends on my mood.” He added, as she poured a bit of the thick batter into the sizzling hot skillet on the very old, blue and gas stove, that had to be made in the 1940's.

Easily. Sy thought, taking a deep gulp of his coffee.

“So, you live here alone?” He asked, lifting a brow at her and set it cup down on the table in front of him.

“I do.” She nodded, brushing her hair behind her ear, and flipped a couple of the pancakes.

“Does your family live nearby?”

She paused for a moment, her back stiffening at the mention of her family. “My mother passed away, when I was born.” She said, her voice strained. “I don't have any siblings and I don't know where my father is.” She explained, flipping the finished pancakes onto a plate by the stove and turned to the cardboard carton of eggs.

“How many would you like?” She asked, holding up a sooth, brown shelled egg.

“Three, please.” Sy replied, nodding his head to her. “Sunny side up.”

“What about your family?” She asked, cracking his eggs into the pan.

“No siblings and both of my parents are dead.” He answered her, leaning back in his chair. “My dad died of a heart attack, during my second deployment and my mom died of cancer, little over a year ago.” He explained, watching her baby his eggs.

“I'm so sorry.” She frowned, looking over her shoulder at him, with a look of pure sympathy, but no pity.

“It's all right.” Sy told her, his voice soft.

She fried the bacon with the eggs, then set the hot stack of pancakes and bacon on the table, setting Sy's plate of sunny side up eggs in front of him, with a container of syrup and a dish of butter, before handing him his fork. She sat down at the table, across from him, with her plate of two scrambled eggs, then took two pancakes and three pieces of bacon for herself, drizzling her pancakes with the maple syrup.

“Thank you, ma'am.” Sy smiled, before digging into his food.

“Lily.” She mumbled, staring at her untouched plate.

“Excuse me?” Sy frowned, looking up at her, fork posed at his mouth.

“Lily.” She replied, a little bit louder. “My name is Lily. You can call me, Lily.” She told him, meeting his eyes.

Sy grinned at her, lowering his fork and sitting up straighter. “All right then, Lily.” He nodded, loving the roll of her name off his tongue. “I'm Austin. But, everyone just calls me, Sy.”

Lily held her free hand out over their plates. “It's a pleasure.” She smiled at him, sweetly.

“Same.” Sy replied, gently taking her smooth and dainty hand in his big and calloused one.

Both of their faces warmed, before their hands pulled apart and they went back to finishing up their breakfast, having a polite and casual conversation as they did. With breakfast finished, Lily cleared away the plates and silverware, setting them in the sink to be washed later on, while Sy pulled his gloves back on and headed back out to finish pulling up the rest of the porch boards.

“Now that all the boards are pried up,” Sy explained as they ate lunch together in the kitchen. “I'll be able to start nailing down the new ones.” He told her, gulping down his glass of iced tea. “I'll put down the boards in front of the main door, so you can actually get out of the house, without having to be a hurdle jumper.” He laughed, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

Sy was true to his word, as he always was, he had all of the boards of the porch along the front of the house down, even though it took him until after sundown to pull it off. He sighed, as he drove the last nail in flush to the board. He stood with a groan, his knees and shoulders stiff and screaming from the hard work of the day. Gathering the strewn about tools, Sy put them back into the tool box and lugged that into the back of his truck.

“Lily.” He called out through the open screen door of the house, knocking gently on the door frame.

“Yes?” She called back, then appeared a moment later.

“I'm done for the day.” He told her, rubbing a hand over his bald head. “I'll be back tomorrow morning.”

“Bright and early, I'm sure, Captain.” She smiled at him.

Sy chuckled, he had told her a teeny bit about his career in the military, how he was a Captain and had spent more than ten years in the service, right out of high school, much to his parents' disappointment, since they wanted him to go to college. But, Sy wanted to serve his country, especially after the attacks in New York, causing him to enlist in early 2002.

“As always.” He grinned back, rubbing his palms on the thighs of his jeans. “Good night, Ms. Lily.” He bowed his head to her and stepped back.

“Good night, Sy.” She nodded back to him.

Sy got into his truck and sighed heavily, as he started the engine. He was exhausted beyond belief, he scrubbed at his face as he drove down the long driveway, stopping to open and close the gate as he left the property. He only got a couple miles from Lily's, when he decided he was just too exhausted to drive the three hours to Austin. So, he turned around and headed for Celina, knowing there was a small motel there that he could rent a room from for the night. There was also the upside of staying in the motel, it was only thirty minutes away from Lily's place, which meant he could get there earlier and could work for a few more hours.

Lily came out onto the porch, when she heard the hammering on the east side of the house stop. Her bare feet gliding over the smooth new boards on the porch. Rounding the corner, she found Sy with his back against the side of the house, where he was currently prying the warped siding off of. She chuckled, realizing he had apparently stopped for a short break and fallen asleep. She moved closer to him, watching his face pinch and his head shake, like he was trying to wake himself up, but couldn't.

“Sy?” She called to him, softly, kneeling down beside him. “Hey, Sy.” She reached out to touch his shoulder. “Austin.” She said his name, gently.

She had no sooner touched his shoulder, than he jerked violently and lunged towards her. Lily yelped and scrambled backwards, away from him. Sy shook his head several times and squeezed his eyes shut, breathing hard, his entire body rigged.

“I'm sorry.” Sy pushed the words out of his throat. “I am so sorry, I didn't realize I fell asleep.” He said, sitting back where he had been. “I didn't hurt you, did I?” He looked over at her, his intense blue eyes scanning her for anything out of place, but only found her frightened and shaking.

“Lily.” He choked.

He had episodes like this, on and off over the last thirteen years, he had decked more than one of his men, who tried shaking him awake. He had even ended up choking one of his commanding officers, and needed his squad to pull him off and slap him back into consciousness. Sy had lost more than one friend and girlfriend over his episodes, nightmares and PTSD, he really didn't want to lose Lily over them.

“I'm-I'm f-fine.” She gulped, biting her lip and tried to calm herself down. “Are you?” She asked, pressing her back to the post that supported the porch roof.

Sy let out a hard breath, pressing a hand to his face and took a moment to settle his nerves, relieved that he hadn't hurt her. “I'm fine. I just didn't realize I fell asleep. I've been really tired lately.” He paused and dropped his hand.

“I've been tired for years.” He admitted out loud.

“You've been working from sun up to sun down, here for a month. That's without a day off, Sy.” She said, drawing her knees up to her chest. “You really should take a day off. When was the last time you had an actual day off?” She asked, studying him.

“What year is it?” He asked, chuckling at her.

“That's not good.” Lily said, shaking her head at him, then stood up. “All right, Syverson. You're officially off duty, effective now.”

“But, the siding?” He said, waving his hand over the unfinished siding on that side of the house.

“It can wait.” She told him, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Well, what am I supposed to do then?” He asked, heaving a sigh and standing up.

“Whatever you like, Sy.” She said, turning back towards the house.

“What if I'd like to finish the siding?” He asked, smirking at her, impishly.

Lily turned, lifting a brow at him and narrowing her eyes, making him chuckle at her, throwing his hands up in defeat. He followed her into the house and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. In the month since Sy had taken the job on Lily's property, they had gotten close and she had made him feel more at home than he had ever felt, anywhere in the world. Now, that she had made him take the day off, Sy had no idea what to do with it. Since he was a little boy, he was working hard, either on his parents' small farm or dealing with his deployment in the middle east.

He stepped back out on the porch, smirking to himself as he stood on solid porch boards that didn't squeak and creak under his weight. He still needed to stain the boards, but he planned on doing that after he removed all the siding from the house and put up fresh ones. His only missing plan with the siding was finding out if Lily wanted him to stain those too or if she wanted the house painted a particular color. But, he'd figure that out tomorrow, for now, he started out over the slice of land out front of the house. The grass was almost as tall as he was and he knew she didn't have a mower, not even an ancient push mower, so it would be something else he'd need to get his hands on to tame the wild jungle of sun bleached grass and weeds.

Humming to himself and taking a sip of his coffee, Sy walked around the porch, surveying the work he had done on that side, with two thirds of the siding pulled off, then continued to the back of the porch. The backyard was just as vast and wild as the front and sides of the house. Her land butted up against another farm that looked like they grew wheat. He noticed a slight movement on the thin trail that cut through the overgrowth and stepped off the porch to follow it, stopping several yards away from the boundary line that divided the two properties, finding Lily leaning on the rusted metal gate, her arm held out above it as a dapple-gray horse came trotting up to her, taking the apple out of her outstretched hand. She rubbed the mare's nose, smiling softly at it, and pulled out another apple out of the pouch of her hoodie.

Sy smiled as he watched her feed and pet that magnificent creature. “A friend of yours?” He asked, alerting her to his presence.

Lily blushed at him, trying to bite back her smile. “You can say that.” She replied, feeling the horse nudge her gently, and produced another apple. “Her name is Juniper.” She explained, patting the side of the horse's neck.

“She's beautiful.” Sy replied, but his eyes were on her.

“Isn't she.” Lily agreed, grinning at the horse, oblivious.

Sy moved closer to them, his shoulder brushing Lily's as he reached out to pet the mare, chuckling at Juniper's snort and head shake. “She hasn't been a mare for very long.” He pointed out.

“Nope.” Lily shook her head. “She was born a little more than three years ago. My neighbor, her owner, mostly deals in wheat and corn, but his daughter is working on becoming a champion barrel racer. So, he bought Juniper, when she was about a year old.”

“She looks in good shape for it.” He commented, checking out the rest of the horse. “Have you seen any of her shows?” He asked, looking back at Lily.

“Sadly, no.” She shook her head, shyly. “I do know she won her last one.” She added, smiling up at him. “It was her first win, in the ten or so shows she's competed in.”

Sy smiled at her, she seemed and sounded so proud of the horse's owner winning the competition. “We should go to her next one.” He suggested, lifting his brows at her.

“What?” Lily squeaked, looking at Sy like a frightened doe.

“Yeah, it will be a great day off for me.” He grinned at her, liking the idea. “I've never seen you leave the property, either.” He added, his brow creasing as he thought about it. “I've only seen you go far enough to get the mail, come to think of it.”

“I don't know.” She gulped, licking her lips nervously. “I've had a lot of work lately.” She stammered, fidgeting and rubbing her hands on her thighs.

“You give me guff for not taken a day off, and won't take one yourself.” He teased her, lightheartedly. “What's the worst that can happen?” He asked, leaning against the gate. “It's not like the world will blow up.”

“It might.” She mumbled, toeing at the sparse gravel under her feet.

Sy could tell she was anxious about leaving the house, he could understand that, the world was a shitty place, and he had seen a lot of that first hand. But, he blew it off, figuring it was just the stress of getting all her work done on time.

“I'll think about it.” Lily said, biting her lip and shyly scrunching up her body.

“Good.” He smiled, hopeful.

PART II

#Henry Cavill #HenryCavill #Southern Generation #Southern Generation *fic* #captain syverson #Syverson #Sand Castle #Syverson/OFC #Syverson x OFC #Austin Syverson #viking-raider fics #Texas #us military #Fluff #Angst #PTSD #Construction #Farming #renovation #contract work #Austin #horses #anxiety #panic attack #Hurt/Comfort #quasi slow burn #domestic life #Domestic Kink #retirement #Celina

[mysticalmuddle]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but what got into asoiaf? Also, did you like Arya and Jonrya from the first read or did that come later? What do you think of Jon as a character? What are your top 10 favourite characters and moments? I aplologise for this avalanche of questions but I just couldn't help wanting to know more of my favourite asoiaf writer. PS: I adore your aesthetic, your blog and writing gives me an otherworldly feeling.

Hey no worries! Ask away <333

but what got you into asoiaf?  I’ve always been into quasi-medieval fantasy, and picked up asoiaf a looooooooong time ago, when I was in middle school. It was so engagingly written that it never really left my brain since? That’s like, ten whole years rent free I’ve been thinking about these characters. What recently spurred me into like, engaging with the fandom/writing/etc was the lack of action in the Jonrya tag, and more specifically, the lack of stories updating that I was interested in, so I decided to make my own 😅

Also, did you like Arya and Jonrya from the first read or did that come later? Re: liking Jon and Arya right off the bat--Okay, so when I first read the series, I was Going Through It IRL, and identified a lot with Jon and his storyline? But I was also so not past the age of “girls going on insane dangerous adventures and being brave despite that” being massively appealing and all the Arya chapters were a satisfyingly more adult version of that genre. I’ll say I liked them both from the get-go, and it’s never really died down since, and I just learned over the years and rereads to appreciate more of the characters. (If I’d been a little older on that first read, I probably would have glommed onto Tyrion instead, and my fandom interactions now would be...vastly different  😂😂😂)

I guess I sort of shipped it from the moment I read ADWD. Like, I was super into Jon&Arya before then--that level of devotion is one of my fictional relationship draws--but ADWD really got me into it. There was just something so compelling about how often they think of each other, and how badly they want to be reunited again, in Arya’s chapters especially. But the whole passage with the Pink Letter just Fucked Me Up emotionally, and suddenly I was like, “They should reunite and kiss”.  Over the years, my enthusiasm for the ship has increased, as my very old slushpile of unpublished fics can attest.

What do you think of Jon as a character? I think he’s an incredibly complex character, which is my favorite type of character! His struggles in the series against his own desires versus his sense of duty, especially framed in the narrative by popular thoughts about bastards, and how that affected his self esteem--he has to be more honorable, more clever, more dedicated just to make up for a facet of his own existence that he didn’t control and can’t change!--is something I just find so compelling. And, of course, his deeply intense love for Arya always gets me like 😍😍😍😍 I don’t have any huge takes on him though--I’m not a very thinky type person and everything I think about characters seems so hard to articulate unless I’m pouring it out into a fic (so I’m sorry if you wanted Takes! This Bitch Empty!)

What are your top 10 favourite characters?

Arya

Jon

Daenerys

Brienne

Tyrion

Missandei

Oberyn

Bran

Asha

Sansa

What are your top 10 favourite moments? Alright, these are in no particular order of preference, just listened as I remembered/googled exactly what books they took place in

1. When Brienne rescues Willow from the Bloody mummers, despite knowing that they’ll kill her for the attempt, AFFC-Brienne VII. No chance and no choice gives me chills every fucking time

2. When Arya kills Dareon and walks off with his boots, AFFC-Cat of the Canals. This moment has implications and speaks to Arya’s inability to let go of herself, even when all that being a Stark means in that moment is the gruesome work of justice, but I’ll be honest--I just like it because of how nonchalant and almost sassy she is when taking the boots afterwards, and how it speaks to her practicality. 

3. When Jon reads the Pink Letter and loses his shit, ADWD-Jon XIII.  I want my bride back … I want my bride back … I want my bride back …"I think we had best change the plan," Jon Snow said. Ohohohohhhoo!!! Juuuuust fuck me up GRRM!!

4. When Daenerys has breakfast with Missandei in Mereen and Missandei chides her into eating more, saying Daenerys is very small, ADWD-Daenerys VII. But also every Daenerys & Missandei interaction ever. Every time they speak to each other, you can just tell the level of care they have, and how they see each other as family over time!!!

5. When Arya travels with the Brotherhood Without Banners and gives water to the northern prisoners before watching as Anguy mercy-kills them, ASoS-Arya V. It’s a facet of Arya’s personality that imo, I think is ignored in metas and fics. She considers them her pack, and despite her disappointment in them, and her disgust at their crimes, still gives them water and finds them a quick, merciful death.

6. The dinner with the men of the Nightswatch and the discussion Bran and Robb have afterwards, about riding to the Wall to see Jon, and about whether their family will come back, AGoT-Bran IV This moment, I think, speaks to Robb’s characterization in a way that Catelyn’s POV chapters don’t touch very well. He’s so very young, despite everything, and trying his hardest, and well aware of the dangers his family is in, and how he’s falling short of saving them and there’s nothing he can do about that. 

7. Oberyn during Tyrion’s trail by combat, and his arrogance and his rage, ASoS-Tyrion X. His demand that the Mountain say Elia’s name got me tearing up the first time I read it, not realizing what the cost of that justice would be for Oberyn himself. So much of ASoIaF deals with grief, and the consequences of obsessive grief, and this fit into the series so impeccably fucking well

8. Every single thing about Daenerys freeing the slaves at Astapor, ASoS-Daenerys III. One of the things I really didn’t appreciate in the show is how they changed the tone of that scene, very much altering it from Daenerys and her joy that she can do this thing, a balm after the horror she felt seeing the slaves and learning about the brutal training the Unsullied go through, into a moment that was just her being badass and powerful. 

"Unsullied!" Dany galloped before them, her silver-gold braid flying behind her, her bell chiming with every stride. "Slay the Good Masters, slay the soldiers, slay every man who wears a tokar or holds a whip, but harm no child under twelve, and strike the chains off every slave you see." She raised the harpy's fingers in the air . . . and then she flung the scourge aside. "Freedom!" she sang out. "Dracarys! Dracarys!" "Dracarys!" they shouted back, the sweetest word she'd ever heard. "Dracarys! Dracarys!" And all around them slavers ran and sobbed and begged and died, and the dusty air was filled with spears and fire. "Dracarys!" they shouted back, the sweetest word she'd ever heard. "Dracarys! Dracarys!" And all around them slavers ran and sobbed and begged and died, and the dusty air was filled with spears and fire."Dracarys!" they shouted back, the sweetest word she'd ever heard. "Dracarys! Dracarys!" And all around them slavers ran and sobbed and begged and died, and the dusty air was filled with spears and fire. [Bold mine] The moment on the show was momentous, but this was-----vastly superior and far more indicative of her character.

9. Catelyn stopping the catspaw from killing Bran, AGoT-Catelyn III. Watching Catelyn emerge from the haze of her grief only to go full fucking ham feral and brutal protecting her child was like *chef’s kiss* There’s just such a cool contrast between her losing her shit talking with Robb a moment before, and then the actual fight, and then her busting out with:  "The circumstances did not allow me to examine it closely, but I can vouch for its edge," Catelyn replied with a dry smile. "Why do you ask?"

10. This exchange:  Alliser Thorne overheard him. "Lord Snow wants to take my place now." He sneered. "I'd have an easier time teaching a wolf to juggle than you will training this aurochs.""I'll take that wager, Ser Alliser," Jon said. "I'd love to see Ghost juggle." AGoT-Jon III. That’s the moment I knew I stanned Jon Snow irreparably, forever.

PS: I adore your aesthetic, your blog and writing gives me an otherworldly feeling.  No u! For real, anon, that’s so fucking sweet of you to say  🥰🥰🥰 Hope I answered everything to your satisfaction, and feel free to come back and chat if the mood strikes ya!

#asks #Anonymous #read more because rip this got long

[dicebox]

Assembly (Deadlands Fic)

Asher’s Creek

Jillian Cain rode into Asher’s Creek slowly, as much for herself as for her horse. A recent encounter with a herd of undead buffalo had left her injured and drained, and much as she preferred riding the range on her own as the Almighty’s Word, sometimes she needed a roof over her head and a decent meal in her belly. Besides, Asher’s Creek was a reasonably-sized township, and maybe there was someone in town who could do some repair work on her guns. As channels for the Almighty’s power, they were well enough, but from the purely earthly standpoint, they could probably pack a bit more punch.

She approached Asher’s Creek saloon and inn, and stopped dead fifty yards or so from the building as something at the hitching post caught her eye. The ... thing was the approximate size and shape of the average mule, but it was made of metal, boxy of body, and beeping to itself in a contented sort of way. For a moment, Jillian considered whether or not this was an abomination unto the Almighty ... then decided that as long as it wasn’t eating people, she should probably leave the machine alone. Still, she tied up her horse as far away from the metal mule as the hitching post allowed, and eyed it suspiciously as she entered the saloon.

Curiosity and self-interest spurred Jillian into examining the saloon’s patrons as she walked in. Quasi-abomination or not, the metal mule outside suggested someone with a way with machinery, and guns were just a less complicated form of machinery. If she wanted someone to look her six-shooters over with an eye to improvements, she could probably do worse. She could at least take the man’s measure, see if whatever oddity of mind possessed someone to make a mechanical mule could be effectively harnessed for a one-time fix-it job.

The ‘man’, when Jillian found what she was looking for ... wasn’t. All of the men in the inn were the usual range-riders, farmers and occasional shopkeepers; most of the women were farmwives, schoolmarms and one or two ‘ladies of the evening’. But one young woman - no more than a girl, really - stood out. No one with any sense whatsoever tried to dye their hair with boot-black, but that’s what this girl had apparently done. Her clothes were too good for the riding she’d been doing, given the tatters and dirt. She was eyeing her wallet, or its contents at least, with an expression that telegraphed nerves and chagrin.

So the girl was in trouble. That made things a little easier. Jillian went to the bar and picked up a couple of mugs of beer, then made her way to the girl’s table, putting the beer down in front of the girl without a word. The girl, for her part, made a nervous squeaking noise and cut her sharp brown eyes from the mug to Jillian’s face. Jillian could almost see the girl’s mind working, mapping out possibilities and approaches ... and then, in the worst fake accent Jillian had ever heard, she spoke up: “Sooooo ... what kin Ah do ya for?”

After eyeing the girl dubiously for a moment, Jillian just said, “Don’t bother.”

The girl blinked. “Wut.”

“The accent. Don’t bother. It needs work.” While the girl was sufficiently derailed, Jillian got down to business. “That your mechanical mule outside?”

“Uh-huh.” She bit her lip and, quietly, in an accent that was pure Northern and clearly her real one, said, “That’s Muffin. Muffin is awesome.”

Jillian felt her brain trying to actively shut down at the thought of someone naming their mechanical mule the same thing as Jillian herself had named the family cat when she was nine, and took a moment to dismiss it. Then she returned to her original text. “Is that the only mechanical know-how you’ve got?”

The girl shook her head, looking proud. “I like fixing things! Also sometimes boom, when boom is required!” Her eyes landed on the butts of Jillian’s pistols and brightened with interest. “Ooh. You’ve got guns. Did you want me to fix your guns? I can do that!”

Jillian, who hadn’t seen this level of enthusiasm in a very long time and wasn’t sure how to handle it, backed off, stalling with a question: “What’s your name?”

“Um...” For someone whose mind seemed to work a little too fast for common sense, the girl took a suspiciously long time coming up with a name. “Uh ... Aloy! Aloy O’Toole. Pleased to meet you.” She held out a hand for the shaking, biting her lower lip with every appearance of nerves overlaid with high-class manners.

Jillian raised an eyebrow and eyed the self-styled Aloy before taking the offered hand. “Are you gonna stick with that? The name.”

“It’s as good a name as any.” Aloy shrugged. “I mean, it’s something people can call me. It works.”

Having retrieved her hand from the handshake, Jillian took a long drink from her mug while deciding how to proceed. Finally, she asked, “You in some kind of trouble?”

Aloy looked Jillian over for a moment, clearly doing some unfathomable calculation in her head. Eventually, she leaned close for some semblance of privacy and said, “Well ... you know ghost rock? Well, I kind of stopped some people messing with it in bad ways that involved zombie factory workers. Boom was involved. So I sort of want to keep my head down right now, okay?” There was so much more to that story; Aloy couldn’t have been more obvious about it. She also couldn’t have been more obvious about her refusal to say more at that point.

For herself, Jillian was minded to let Aloy keep the details to a minimum. She knew what she needed to; mostly, that she and this strange Northern girl with the mechanical mule and the overactive brain had some common interests. Still, there was a difference between ‘letting this strange Yankee look at her guns’ and ‘letting this strange Yankee tag along on her mission from the Lord’. While the compassionate part of her wanted to help, and a tiny part of herself she tried to ignore these days murmured something about being glad of some company other than her horse on long lonely rides across the plains, the sensible part of her - which was most of her - was still incredibly wary. They’d start with the guns, she decided. At least she could make sure the weird little Yankee had some cash in her pocket--

Then the screams started outside, and Jillian dismissed the entire thing, getting out of her chair and out the door without so much as a word to Aloy.

Jillian froze on the balcony, then groaned at the sight that greeted her. She’d thought that herd of undead buffalo had been a little smaller than the usual plains herd. Now here were the rest of them, eight in all, rampaging through town looking for something to bite. The townsfolk had managed to stay out of biting range so far, but that wouldn’t last long, and while demons couldn’t always afford to be picky, they preferred human suits to wear. Letting one of the ... well, things that had possessed the corpses of these buffalo get hold of a human being, and things would get very ugly, very fast. She grabbed for her guns without hesitation, surveying the main street for a first target.

Something nudged her in the back, and when Jillian turned to look, she saw Aloy running past, the pitter-patter of truly inappropriate shoes on balcony boards nearly unheard over the sound of the miniature stampede. She unhitched the mechanical mule, grabbed something that looked like a blunderbuss gone wrong off its back, then shouted, “Muffin! CHARGE!”

Jillian watched, dumbfounded, as the mechanical mule surged forward on its weird metal legs and rammed its head into the nearest undead buffalo, knocking it into the front wall of the local jailhouse. Aloy pointed her weird blunderbuss at another one, and while there was still a lot more shooting to be done, Jillian had to watch the trigger pulled on that thing. Not least because if it exploded in the girl’s face, something would probably have to be done for her.

The expected explosion never happened. Instead, little glass tubes along the side of the blunderbuss lit up with a faint whining noise before lightning arced from the barrel, hitting her target and reducing it to a smoking, jittering pile of spoiled buffalo meat. The grin on Aloy’s face was disturbing as she cried, jubilance personified, “THE UPGRADES WORK!”

Jillian only allowed herself time to side-eye the weird little Yankee briefly before getting her mind back on business. She’d thought she was too tired for much more of this kind of thing, but the Lord didn’t accept that kind of excuse, and the power rose up in her with the words, “BACK TO THE HELL FROM WHENCE YE CAME, ABOMINATIONS, IN THE NAME OF THE LORD!” Even as she spoke, she started shooting.

Later

Jillian and Aloy, now with the understanding that their money was no good at the Asher’s Creek Saloon, sat back in their corner, exhausted and a little battered, but breathing. Aloy spent most of the meal grumbling into her beans: “It’s gonna take weeks to get the dents out of Muffin. And a new ball peen hammer. He hates the hammer. I’m gonna have to chase him around the street for an hour.”

Jillian considered asking why she kept treating her machine like it was alive, and then decided against it. For all her quirks, Aloy was clearly pretty handy. Which brought her back to her original thought: “So do you work with ... normal guns?”

“Oh, yeah, I wanted to ask you about that!” Aloy’s eyes brightened and she looked over Jillian’s holsters in a covetous sort of way. “I mean, those are okay? But I could make them so much better - more accurate, more boom, maybe channel that ... God thing you do better, even. I’d need a couple of hours for the work and probably a day or so to let the bruises on my shoulder fade so I don’t twitch wrong and mess it up, but... Did you want me to?”

Jillian considered. Aloy talked too much, flailed too much, and was a little unsettling at the best of times. Still, she could get her shit together when she had to and that Muffin thing, however bizarre, was useful. After a long moment to consider her words, she said, “Well ... I guess you can tell how I’m not too fond of the undead and those that make them, any more than you say you are. Might be I could use a gunsmith on the regular, if they don’t mind not having a steady home. Makes it hard to find a body, being on the move all the time.”

Aloy tilted her head as she thought over what Jillian had said ... and what she left unsaid. Then she smiled bright as a sunrise on a clear day. “I could do that.” Then she leaned out the window and called, “Did you hear that, Muffin? Adventure!”

Quietly, so as not to be heard over the delighted beeping of the mechanical mule, Jillian sighed and muttered, “What did I get myself into?”

#Deadlands #Fic #jillian cain #aloy o'toole

[sinceileftyoublog]

Kyle Forester Interview: A Place of Sanctuary

Photo by Michael Stasiak

BY JORDAN MAINZER

“Marigold, it was a miracle,” sings Kyle Forester on his upcoming second album Hearts in Gardens. The sentiment of the line is emblematic of Forester’s attitude these days. In between his 2016 self-titled debut and now, the former Crystal Stilts and Ladybug Transistor and now Woods member, like everyone else, saw his fair share of highs (the birth of his child, playing on Purple Mountains’ self-titled record, forming a band to play his solo material) and lows (the death of David Berman, the political world at large). So in general but especially on Hearts in Gardens, Forester chooses to focus on the little things, from the flowers in a garden to the sun-kissed psychedelia of his peers. 

Speaking to me over the phone last month while walking around and outside an arts supplies store in New York, Forester touched on the writing and recording process of Hearts in Gardens, as well as the books, movies, and albums that inspired or remind him of it. The album’s out February 21st, and he’s playing an opening gig Saturday at Alphaville in Brooklyn and a headlining show March 14th at The Sultan Room, The Turk’s Inn. Read our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.

Since I Left You: You had a lot of positive life changes leading up to this record. Is that what inspired you to make it?

Kyle Forester: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, actually. The first one was definitely one of these things where Crystal Stilts had kind of wrapped up, and I had nothing major going on, besides all my normal stuff, so I started making music not knowing where it would lead. Then, I did get kind of busy, and my kid was born, and I ended up going back on tour with Woods. One really motivating thing was I had gotten a good band together, and it was really fun to play music again. To have that experience of playing with people I really enjoyed playing with. I didn’t really tour in 2014 or 2015, which was the first time in a while I had not been on tour at all. Then, when I did, that was weirdly inspiring--being out at shows. I really just wanted to give myself another shot at doing my own thing that felt true to the kind of music I like to hear and make. The first record was a little pieced together recording-wise. I had a bunch of it recorded and overdubbed the drums on top of what was there. This time, I really wanted to do a record with a band in a room in a good studio and microphones. 

In terms of the writing process, I’m never not writing a bit. I’m one of those people who has 50 scraps on voice memos. It’s more about deciding when it’s time to turn some of those into real songs. Once I decided I wanted to do that, I had lots of stuff to pick from and develop. There were one or two songs I just sat down and wrote. “Hearts and Gardens” was like that, “Know What You’re Doing” was like that. Old fashioned sitting down with your guitar and the song comes out for some reason. But a song like “Marigold”, the main guitar riff was something I started playing one day and recorded it, and I came back to it later and heard it and thought it was interesting, then I wrote another part of it. The thing that was different this time was I got together with my band, who took it to another place. That was cool.

SILY: So the couple tracks that were outliers are the lead single (“Know What You’re Doing”) and the (sort of) title track?

KF: That’s true. It’s funny. I read this lurid John Lennon biography a year ago called The Lives of John Lennon. It was controversial because it was one of the first big bios of Lennon after he died, and it was where the rumor that John Lennon had some kind of sexual relationship with Brian Epstein. Anyway, he had a lot of songs that he labored over, like “Strawberry Fields Forever”, where he had a bunch of versions, and then songs like “Across The Universe”, which is something where he sat down and the song unfurled. I don’t have that experience often. I’ve never considered myself in that sense a real songwriter songwriter. But I do occasionally! [laughs] And I think it’s natural that you feel a special fondness for those songs. They’re little gifts from the universe, whereas the others feel like something you labored over and you had to push out of yourself. “Hearts and Gardens”, we moved into this new apartment, and I set up my new studio and was looking out the window. It’s like that kind of song.

Me and my wife just watched the Lady Gaga A Star Is Born. [laughs] I love movie depictions of songwriting. They’re so funny. Did you see that movie?

SILY: I did.

KF: The idea that they’re hanging out in that parking lot and she sings a couple lines, and going off of that he does an arrangement and she comes on stage and sings it? It’s not a realistic depiction of how music making works, but it’s kind of cool! 

SILY: The biopics are even worse, the ones purporting to tell a true story. Did you see Bohemian Rapsody? The scene in the studio where someone stomps and claps and all of a sudden, “We Will Rock You” is born?

KF: Exactly. [laughs] That’s why that movie Walk Hard is so good as a joke.

SILY: It holds up so well!

KF: The part where he’s saying, “It’s a difficult stroll,” and [the title] is coming to him in real time. You can depict it in that way, but it rarely happens that way.

SILY: What specific aesthetic difference was there by having the full band in the studio?

KF: I don’t know how different the music came out. I don’t really listen to my own music much after I’m done making it. I haven’t listened to the two records to hear the difference. I think there are nice little moments of musicianship on this one, on a song like “Another Day”, which has a little bit of jamming. There wasn’t really much of that on the first record. The first song on the first record, called “Won’t Go Crazy”, that was one where I recorded 20 guitars, and there were two different drum tracks. A very inorganic experience, which I also enjoy. But here, you can tell there’s a band playing. You know that album John, The Wolf King of L.A.?

SILY: Yeah.

KF: The playing is so good on that, though I think John Philips might be controversial now. But you could just listen to that band play. Obviously, I don’t think we achieved anything like that. But for me, when I listen to it, I can enjoy those moments. It was fun for me to have Paul [Jenkins] play the bass. I played the bass on the first record. When it’s you, you know what you did, but when it’s someone else, you get to enjoy it more. You’re like, “Oh, that’s a nice thing he did I wouldn’t have done.” It’s a little looser. It’s more in common with some of those classic albums with a good band playing songs. But obviously we did a lot with them afterwards. It wasn’t super naturalistic.

SILY: The first couple tracks, the idea behind them is that you’re still finding beauty in an increasingly chaotic world. You’re finding ways to feel good. Is that increasingly almost a radical state of mind?

KF: I was talking to a friend the other night about how people talk about 80′s goth culture and certain parts of punk culture in the UK. The darkness was a reaction to the Reagan-Thatcher era of politics. A friend was saying that it seems like the Trump era almost seems to be creating this new age interest in spirituality and positivity. That’s a reaction. Trump specifically is so negative, that you can’t be any more negative than him. It is weird. Everything that’s happening with the planet, I feel like a little bit over the last couple years that anyone who cares to know, knows there was stuff that was going to happen. But now, there’s a real creeping sense that we might be living through something. That’s something I think about a lot. That we are or are going to be witness to a time of change in our world that we didn’t think we were going to be witness to. How do you respond to that as a person? You don’t have to do anything, but you certainly can start by getting yourself in order in the way you want to be, and then trying to go out and work from there. That’s not a very articulate way to put it. [laughs]

SILY: I get what you’re saying for sure. When he first got elected, people were saying, from a very privileged perspective, “Music’s gonna be so good!” as if that was their only concern. At the same time, I agree with you--maybe some people were envisioning some sort of 60′s idealism of standing up to injustice through angry music, but you’re also seeing people simply finding ways to cope. If that’s writing about the things in your life that make you feel happy or safe, that’s true and honest.

KF: What we’re going through as a country and society and species, it feels so much deeper and more spiritual than a political issue. It’s not the Vietnam War, where it’s, “We’ll all go out in the streets and stop the Vietnam War.” There’s a whole different way of living and living together that needs to happen if we’re gonna survive. That feels true in a way that maybe hasn’t ever before. It’s very psychedelic.

SILY: I want to ask you about a couple more specific tracks. What was the inspiration behind "[Interlude]”?

KF: I was excited to make my own record, partially because I played with a lot of bands but have never gotten to be in a position where I can do whatever I want. When I first started working on my music, I thought I might do a lot of little instrumental pieces. I sometimes think I’m better at that than writing songs. There are two quasi instrumentals on the first record. But in doing a record with a band, there were 3 or 4 things where I created a simple structure and played it with the drummer and the bass player. One of them is the last song on the record, “On the Way Down”. I literally said to the band, “This tempo, these three chords, go!” We hadn’t practiced it. We played for five minutes. Then, we went home and listened to it and sang over it and made it into a song. If you listen to that one, you can tell it’s the same three chords repeating. We edited the drums to make them have a little more shape. “[[Interlude]” was just one that didn’t get words on it. There were five minutes of us playing that riffing pattern. I kind of want to make an instrumental record. I love krautrock and weird synthesizer jamming kind of records. I like listening to albums, so I like thinking about an album in terms of the things you can do to break up the listening experience so you’re not just listening to a bunch of songs. An interlude makes you stop for a second and notice you’re listening to music.

SILY: When working on “On The Way Down”, did you know it was going to be the album closer?

KF: No, I didn’t. This album was particularly unsequenced. I didn’t really have a vision for it. I don’t know if I had anything else in mind for the closer, though. It’s not really a pun, but ending the album on a song called “On The Way Down” felt like a fade-out. I like the mood of that song. It’s maybe a little eerie, but it’s nice to listen to.

SILY: How did you end up deciding upon the sequencing of the record in general?

KF: I’ve been through that process a lot with bands. I remember the last Crystal Stilts record where we had a band meeting, and I brought construction paper where we wrote out all the different sequences and figured out which ones worked. Sequencing is super interesting. I tend to do it with vinyl listening in mind even if it’s not how most people are going to hear it. I think about what’s a good starter, side A end, side B starter, etc. I like “Turn of the Century” at the end of Side A. Side A of Abbey Road ends you with “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”. “Another Day”, I wanted to start the second side with something exciting. And “On the Way Down” to end. I kind of do this thing where I listen to beginnings and endings a bunch of time to hear what sounds good. When I was 12 years old, I was really into reading Guitar World magazine. I was reading this interview with KISS, and Paul Stanley said something like, “The chorus should scratch an itch the verse creates.” I think about that all the time in songwriting and sequencing. You listen to a song, what kind of song does that put you in the mood to listen to? I don’t like KISS, by the way, for the record. [laughs]

SILY: What made you want to call the record Hearts in Gardens?

KF: That was actually suggested by the guy that made the album artwork. His name is Jay Pluck; he’s a cool dude. I was struggling with this. At one point, I was going to call it Marigold, but then I heard the band Pinehurst is putting out an album called Marigold. I think they just put it out.

SILY: Yeah, Pinegrove. 

KF: Pinegrove! I just called them Pinehurst. [laughs] But I was like, “Yeahhh...I’m not gonna share an album title with them.”

SILY: Probably a good move.

KF: Those kind of things are funny. Obviously, it wouldn’t have mattered. But I think Hearts in Gardens resonates with a lot of things. The idea that you’re finding good things in places. You have a garden, which is a closed space, and your heart is a place of sanctuary. It somehow resonated. It doesn’t really mean anything. But it means a lot of things, too.

Jay is an artist and a musician. I used to share a practice space with him. He makes really crazy show fliers. I’ve always been a fan of his work, and he works in a collage style. He’s an unbelievably creative guy. Pretty early when the record was done, I asked him about the artwork, and he listened to the record a bunch. He knew I was struggling with the album title. He did the cover of the first record, too, with a similar process: describe a few things to him, gave him a few images, and then he just made it. I really like what he did with this album. I’m tickled by it. It’s really hard. When you’re a musician and you collaborate with people, whether for the music video or art, it can be such a painful process. Art, like music, is fundamentally non-verbal. You can have a two-hour meeting to talk about what you have in mind, but until there’s something you’re both looking at, you don’t really know if you’re talking about the same thing. I’ve had that experience plenty of times, where you talk to someone about what you want, and then they make it, and it’s not what you were thinking. It hits home when it’s really great. Jay had this idea with the cliff and the water. I will cop to being a big fan of the band Genesis; the album Foxtrot has a really insane album cover that also involves a shore. I like anything in common with the artwork of that-era Genesis.

SILY: Are you playing these tracks live?

KF: We’ve played a few live. I’ve been taking a break from playing shows, but now we’re getting a new set ready. Do you know the band Modern Nature?

SILY: I just saw them the other night!

KF: Did you enjoy the show?

SILY: Yeah, it was awesome. I really like them. Olden Yolk played, too.

KF: Oh yeah, I like them.

SILY: And Tōth and Hannah Cohen. I love Sunwatchers, too.

KF: Totally. So I went to see Modern Nature in New York, and they started playing, and I realized they were just playing the album. I was like, “That’s cool, maybe I should do that.” We’re gonna play a couple shows in February and March, and maybe we’ll just play the album in homage to Modern Nature and lots of other bands who have done that [laughs] But there are some songs from the first record we never learned as a band because we never played them because that record wasn’t made that way. In this case, we can pretty much play all of them. A few of them have guitar tuning issues. I’m happy with how they all turned out, but a song like “Lily” could drift into a type of music I don’t like as much.

SILY: Why is that?

KF: A really weird experience when I’m playing music live, maybe you played it slower or faster, or maybe there are important elements from the record you don’t have live, but it feels different. It feels like a different type of song than how it feels to you when recorded. In the case of “Lily”, it could turn into a cliche classic rock song. And I wrote it in the Keith Richards guitar tuning. My mind goes towards “not good bar band.” It’s a weird thing to worry about.

SILY: Are you coming to Chicago?

KF: I would like to! Last time around, I didn’t get to touring much. I did some East Coast touring. But this time, I had someone write me asking whether I’d like to come to Columbus. And I’d like to come to Chicago just to go to Chicago because I have some friends there. So then I got thinking about going in that direction. I think that could be cool. I gotta try harder this time. Booking tours is hard. It’s hard until it’s easy, but one of the things I get hung up on is whether I should try to get a legit show, an opening slot, or do really small DIY-ish kind of shows. I never know which direction to turn. So the answer is maybe.

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

KF: I’m always listening to lots of things. I like that new Modern Nature record. In my house, we’re really into Alex Cameron. His new album Miami Memory is my feel-good record. I’ve been a lot to this label Unseen Worlds. He does a lot of reissues, weird, meandering piano stuff. I’ve been listening a lot to this Michael Vincent Waller record. I really like instrumental music you can just put on. The last couple days I’ve been listening a lot to this Irish record I came aware of through Cian Nugent. I think he produced it or co-produced it. It’s Aoife Nessa Frances’ [Land of No Junction]. The last four days I’ve been playing that every day and have been really enjoying. 

I don’t really watch things. Over the holidays, me and my wife got into watching blockbusters. We just watched Crazy Rich Asians and A Star Is Born. I just read a book I really liked, A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid. I hacked my way through a Maria Montessori book...Do you know who Gary Valentine is? He was in the first lineup of Blondie. He now goes by his real name and writes books about very esoteric subjects. He wrote a book about Aleister Crowley. He wrote a book about the role dark arts played in the rise of Trump. He also wrote a biography of Rudolf Steiner I read, which I really like. [Steiner] founded Waldorf schools and invented biodynamic farming, so he’s having a movement with all these people drinking organic wine. He was a really far-out dude.

#kyle forester #Interviews #Hampus Öhman-Frölund #sam kulik #alphaville #the sultan room #the turk's inn #jay pluck #hearts in gardens #michael stasiak #crystal stilts #the ladybug transistor #woods #purple mountains #david berman #john lennon #the lives of john lennon #brian epstein #lady gaga #a star is born #bohemian rapsody #walk hard #john the wolf king of l.a. #john phillips #abbey road #guitar world #paul stanley #kiss #pinegrove #genesis

[96thdayofrage]

Slavery’s denial of rights now prefigured Jim Crow, while enslaved people’s resistance predicted the collective self-assertion that developed into first the civil rights movement and later, Black Power.

But perhaps the changes were not so great as they seemed on the surface. The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters and other spaces outside of white observation. Yet the insistence that assertive resistance undermined enslavers’ power, and a focus on the development of an independent black culture, led some to believe that enslaved people actually managed to prevent whites from successfully exploiting their labor. This idea, in turn, created a quasi-symmetry with post– Civil War plantation memoirs that portrayed gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a nonprofit endeavor aimed at civilizing Africans.

Thus, even after historians of the civil rights, Black Power, and multicultural eras rewrote segregationists’ stories about gentlemen and belles and grateful darkies, historians were still telling the half that has ever been told. For some fundamental assumptions about the history of slavery and the history of the United States remain strangely unchanged. The first major assumption is that, as an economic system—a way of producing and trading commodities—American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it. Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor. This perspective implies not only that slavery didn’t change, but that slavery and enslaved African Americans had little long-term influence on the rise of the United States during the nineteenth century, a period in which the nation went from being a minor European trading partner to becoming the world’s largest economy—one of the central stories of American history.

The second major assumption is that slavery in the United States was fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be resolved in favor of the free-labor North. Sooner or later, slavery would have ended by the operation of historical forces; thus, slavery is a story without suspense. And a story with a predetermined outcome isn’t a story at all.

Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.

All these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape attitudes, identities, and debates about policy. If slavery was outside of US history, for instance—if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket booster to American economic growth—then slavery was not implicated in US growth, success, power, and wealth. Therefore none of the massive quantities of wealth and treasure piled by that economic growth is owed to African Americans. Ideas about slavery’s history determine the ways in which Americans hope to resolve the long contradiction between the claims of the United States to be a nation of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unfreedom, the unequal treatment, and the opportunity denied that for most of American history have been the reality faced by people of African descent. Surely, if the worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of citizen—even elect one of them president—to make amends. Then the issue will be put to rest forever.

Slavery’s story gets told in ways that reinforce all these assumptions. Textbooks segregate twenty-five decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture. Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. All this is the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved people, as two scholars of those weird places put it.2 Meanwhile, at other points we tell slavery’s story by heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or death in rebellion, leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn’t flee or die somehow “accepted” slavery. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians’ collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.

The truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions. But back in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of leading ones, designed by white officials—some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning. He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. “Did slaves mind being called ‘nigger’?” “What did slaves call master or mistress?” “Have you been happier in slavery or free?” “Was the mansion house pretty?” Escaping from chains is very difficult, however, so Anderson dutifully asked the prescribed questions and poised his pencil to take notes.

Ivy listened politely. He sat still. Then he began to speak: “My mother’s master was named William Tunstall. He was a mean man. There was only one good thing he did, and I don’t reckon he intended to do that. He sold our family to my father’s master George H. Gilman.”

Perhaps the wind blowing through the window changed as a cloud moved across the spring sun: “Old Tunstall caught the ‘cotton fever.’ There was a fever going round, leastways it was like a fever. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives. One woman had twelve children. Yessir. Took ‘em all down south with him to Georgia and Alabama.”

Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. Next time it could’ve been his mother. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. No, this wasn’t the story the books told.

So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.

For more than a century, white people in the United States had been singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds. Scapegoaters had a noble precedent. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson tried to blame King George III for using the Atlantic slave trade to impose slavery on the colonies. In historians’ tellings, the 1808 abolition of the Atlantic trade brought stability to slavery, ringing in the “Old South,” as it has been called since before the Civil War. Of course, one might wonder how something that was brand new, created after a revolution, and growing more rapidly than any other commodity-producing economy in history before then could be considered “old.” But never mind. Historians depicted slave trading after 1808 as irrelevant to what slavery was in the “Old South,” and to how America as a whole was shaped. America’s modernization was about entrepreneurs, creativity, invention, markets, movement, and change. Slavery was not about any of these things—not about slave trading, or moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make cotton. Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with each other.

But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words. “They sold slaves here and everywhere. I’ve seen droves of Negroes brought in here on foot going South to be sold. Each one of them had an old tow sack on his back with everything he’s got in it. Over the hills they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in double lines chained together by twos. They walk ‘em here to the railroad and shipped ’em south like cattle.”

Then Lorenzo Ivy said this: “Truly, son, the half has never been told.”

To this, day, it still has not. For the other half is the story of how slavery changed and moved and grew over time: Lorenzo Ivy’s time, and that of his parents and grandparents. In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized—also by force—from their Native American inhabitants. From

1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth. And that truth was the half of the story that survived mostly in the custodianship of those who survived slavery’s expansion—whether they had been taken over the hill, or left behind. Forced migration had shaped their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. But what survivors experienced, analyzed, and named was a slavery that didn’t fit the comfortable boxes into which other Americans have been trying to fit it ever since it ended.

I read Lorenzo Ivy’s words, and they left me uneasy. I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history—not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre–Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents. Most of all, the half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex-slaves, such as Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.

For a long time I wasn’t sure how to tell the story of this muscular, dynamic process in a single book. The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre–Civil War United States. Enslavers’ surviving papers showed calculations of returns from slave sales and purchases as well as the costs of establishing new slave labor camps in the cotton states. Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The accounts of northern merchants and bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery’s expansion. Scholars and students talked about politics as a battle about states’ rights or republican principles, but viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery’s expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue.

The story seemed too big to fit into one framework. Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the vast open spaces beyond. From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in 1790 to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa. And could one book do Lorenzo Ivy’s insight justice? It would have to avoid the old platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a collection of topics—here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating heart out of the story. For the half untold was a narrative, a process of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what had been done before them—and what people chose to do in response.

No, this had to be a story, and one couldn’t tell it solely from the perspective of powerful actors. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even remade the land itself. But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy’s words as a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains. Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent themselves every day. Enslaved people’s creativity enabled their survival, but, stolen from them in the form of ever-growing cotton productivity, their creativity also expanded the slaveholding South at an unprecedented rate. Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.

One day I found a metaphor that helped. It came from the great African-American author Ralph Ellison. You might know his novel Invisible Man. But in the 1950s, Ellison also produced incredible essays. In one of them he wrote, “On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.”3

The image fit the story that Ivy’s words raised above the watery surface of buried years. The only problem was that Ellison’s image implied a stationary giant. In the old myth, the stationary, quintessentially unchanging plantation was the site and the story of African-American life from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. But Lorenzo Ivy had described a world in motion. After the American Revolution—which seemed at the time to portend slavery’s imminent demise—a metastatic transformation and growth of slavery’s giant body had begun instead. From the exploitation, commodification, and torture of enslaved people’s bodies, enslavers and other free people gained new kinds of modern power. The sweat and blood of the growing system, a network of individuals and families and labor camps that grew bigger with each passing year, fueled massive economic change. Enslaved people, meanwhile, transported and tortured, had to find ways to survive, resist, or endure. And over time the question of their freedom or bondage came to occupy the center of US politics.

This trussed-up giant, stretched out on the rack of America’s torture zone, actually grew, like a person passing through ordeals to new maturity. I have divided the chapters of this book with Ellison’s imagined giant in mind, a structure that has allowed the story to take as its center point the experience of enslaved African Americans themselves. Before we pass through the door that Lorenzo Ivy opened, here are the chapters’ names. The first is “Feet,” for the story begins with unfree movement on paths to enslaved frontiers that were laid down between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the early 1800s. “Heads” is the title of the second chapter, which covers America’s acquisition of the key points of the Mississippi Valley by violence, a gain that also consolidated the enslavers’ hold on the frontier. Then come the “Right Hand” and the “Left Hand” (Chapters 3 and 4). They reveal the inner secrets of enslavers’ power, secrets which made the entire world of white people wealthy.

“Tongues” (Chapter 5) and “Breath” (Chapter 6) follow. They describe how, by the mid-1820s, enslavers had not only found ways to silence the tongues of their critics, but had built a system of slave trading that served as expansion’s lungs. Most forms of resistance were impossible to carry out successfully. So a question hung in the air. Would the spirit in the tied-down body die, leaving enslaved people to live on like undead zombies serving their captors? Or would the body live, and rise? Every transported soul, finding his or her old life killed off, faced this question on the individual level as well: whether to work with fellow captives or scrabble against them in a quest for individualistic subsistence. Enslaved African Americans chose many things. But perhaps most importantly, they chose survival, and true survival in such circumstances required solidarity. Solidarity allowed them to see their common experience, to light their own way by building a critique of enslavers’ power that was an alternative story about what things were and what they meant.

This story draws on thousands of personal narratives like the one that Lorenzo Ivy told Claude Anderson. Slavery has existed in many societies, but no other population of formerly enslaved people has been able to record the testimonies of its members like those who survived slavery in the United States. The narratives began with those who escaped slavery’s expansion in the nineteenth century as fugitives. Over one hundred of those survivors published their autobiographies during the nineteenth century. As time went on, such memoirs found a market, in no small part because escapees from southern captivity were changing the minds of some of the northern whites about what the expansion of slavery meant for them. Then, during the 1930s, people like Claude Anderson conducted about 2,300 interviews with the ex-slaves who had lived into that decade. Because the interviews often allowed old people to tell about the things they had seen for themselves and the things they heard from their elders in the years before the Civil War, they take us back into the world of explanation and storytelling that grew up around fires and on porches and between cotton rows. No one autobiography or interview is pure and objective as an account of all that the history books left untold. But read them all, and each one adds to a more detailed, clearer picture of the whole. One story fills in gaps left by another, allowing one to read between the lines.4

Understanding something of what it felt like to suffer, and what it cost to endure that suffering, is crucial to understanding the course of US history. For what enslaved people made together—new ties to each other, new ways of understanding their world—had the potential to help them survive in mind and body. And ultimately, their spirit and their speaking would enable them to call new allies into being in the form of an abolitionist movement that helped to destabilize the mighty enslavers who held millions captive. But the road on which enslaved people were being driven was long. It led through the hell described by “Seed” (Chapter 7), which tells of the horrific near-decade from 1829 to 1837. In these years entrepreneurs ran wild on slavery’s frontier. Their acts created the political and economic dynamics that carried enslavers to their greatest height of power. Facing challenges from other white men who wanted to assert their masculine equality through political democracy, clever entrepreneurs found ways to leverage not just that desire, but other desires as well. With the creation of innovative financial tools, more and more of the Western world was able to invest directly in slavery’s expansion. Such creativity multiplied the incredible productivity and profitability of enslaved people’s labor and allowed enslavers to turn bodies into commodities with which they changed the financial history of the Western world.

Enslavers, along with common white voters, investors, and the enslaved, made the 1830s the hinge of US history. On one side lay the world of the industrial revolution and the initial innovations that launched the modern world. On the other lay modern America. For in 1837, enslavers’ exuberant success led to a massive economic crash. This self-inflicted devastation, covered in Chapter 8, “Blood,” posed new challenges to slaveholders’ power, led to human destruction for the enslaved, and created confusion and discord in white families. When southern political actors tried to use war with Mexico to restart their expansion, they encountered new opposition on the part of increasingly assertive northerners. As Chapter 9, “Backs,” explains, by the 1840s the North had built a complex, industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor. Yet, although all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people, many northern whites were now willing to use politics to oppose further expansions of slavery. The words that the survivors of slavery’s expansion had carried out from the belly of the nation’s hungriest beast had, in fact, become important tools for galvanizing that opposition.

Of course, in return for the benefits they received from slavery’s expansion, plenty of northerners were still willing to enable enslavers’ disproportionate power. With the help of such allies, as “Arms” (Chapter 10) details, slavery continued to expand in the decade after the Compromise of 1850. For now, however, it had to do so within potentially closed borders. That is why southern whites now launched an aggressive campaign of advocacy, insisting on policies and constitutional interpretations that would commit the entire United States to the further geographic expansion of slavery. The entire country would become slavery’s next frontier. And as they pressed, they generated greater resistance, pushed too hard, and tried to make their allies submit—like slaves, the allies complained. And that is how, at last, whites came to take up arms against each other.

Yet even as southern whites seceded, claiming that they would set up an independent nation, shelling Fort Sumter, and provoking the Union’s president, Abraham Lincoln, to call out 100,000 militia, many white Americans wanted to keep the stakes of this dispute as limited as possible. A majority of northern Unionists opposed emancipation. Perhaps white Americans’ battles with each other were, on one level, not driven by a contest over ideals, but over the best way to keep the stream of cotton and financial revenues flowing: keep slavery within its current borders, or allow it to consume still more geographic frontiers. But the growing roar of cannon promised others a chance to force a more dramatic decision: slavery forever, or nevermore. So it was that as Frank Baker, Townshend, and Sheppard Mallory crept across the dark James River waters that had washed so many hulls bearing human bodies, the future stood poised, uncertain between alternative paths. Yet those three men carried something powerful: the same half of the story that Lorenzo Ivy could tell. All they had learned from it would help to push the future onto a path that led to freedom. Their story can do so for us as well. To hear it, we must stand as Lorenzo Ivy had stood as a boy in Danville—watching the chained lines going over the hills, or as Frank Baker and others had stood, watching the ships going down the James from the Richmond docks, bound for the Mississippi. Then turn and go with the marching feet, and listen for the breath of the half that has never been told.

[welllpthisishappening]

Where You Can Still Remember Dreaming (9/35)

Killian Jones, former crime reporter, was not happy to be home. It hadn’t been home in a very long time, after all. Home was an abstract construct that existed for people who didn’t know as many adjectives for blood as he did. Home wasn’t New York City, but it certainly wasn’t Boston or New Orleans either and he’d always gone where the story was. And he was positive Emma Swan was one hell of a story.

Emma Swan, pro video game player, desperately wanted to find home. She thought she had, a million years ago in the back corner of a barn and a town and faces she trusted. But that had all blown up in her face and it didn’t take long for her to decide she was going to control the pyrotechnics from here on out. So now she was in New York City and a different corner and she kind of wanted to trust Killian Jones.

Neither one of them expected a year of of video games and feature stories to dredge up old enemies and even older feelings, but, together, they made a pretty good team.

Rating: Mature AN: Stuff. It happens. David is an absurdly overprotective brother and I actually drew a color-coded flow chart while I was plotting this to make sure I knew how everyone was connected to everyone else. We’re getting into the good stuff and there’s a lot more happening than Killian being confused by Overwatch catchphrases. Thanks for continuing to click and read and comment, guys!  || Also on Ao3, FF.net and Tumblr || 

He was going to kiss her.

He was.

He couldn’t come up with a reason not to – not when he could feel her everywhere, that one hand resting on his chest feeling like some kind of live wire in the middle of the hallway and maybe it was the wine, but Killian was fairly positive it was just the echo of her voice and the slightly nervous smile on her face and God he wanted to kiss her.

One of them moved or maybe both of them moved and he could feel her fingers tighten on the front of his t-shirt and his hand fell to her hip, wrapping all the way across her and they should have drank more wine.

If only to make sure that he couldn’t spill the wine. All over Emma.

“Holy shit,” she gasped, jumping up and there were droplets of wine falling off her leg and that wasn’t helpful at all because it only made Killian look at her leg and he was frozen in the middle of the hallway trying to figure out how to not want to kiss her.

Ethics. Ethics. A line of professionalism that should be as wide as several city blocks. And wine. A lot of spilled wine.

“How did we not drink more of this?” Emma continued, trying to brush her leg off and that was distracting too. God damnit.

Killian shrugged, standing up and stepping back into her space like there was a magnet there or some kind of gravitational pull and the carpet was absolutely soaked too. This was a disaster.

And maybe he should tell Henry to stop talking so much.

Or come up with a way to kiss Emma.

The two things didn’t really go together.

“We haven’t been out here very long, love,” Killian pointed out, immediately groaning when the words seemed to land at his feet. Emma scoffed, but there was still a ghost of a smile on her face and barely any space between them.

Killian felt like he’d drank the entire bottle of wine.

“Maybe that’s why no one’s come out here,” she mumbled. “Usually they’re more obnoxious about that kind of stuff.” “Ah, well, maybe they’re trying something new.”

“Maybe.”

Emma laughed softly, head falling forward and Killian didn’t think she meant for her forehead to brush against him, but they were practically occupying the same space and his hand was back on her hip before he could even consider something different.

She didn’t move her head, but he could see her shoulders shift, the sound of her deep breath bouncing off the walls in the abandoned hallway and for one, absolutely insane moment he wanted to tell her everything.

He wanted to tell her about that night in New Orleans and the suspicions he’d never been able to actually confirm and he wanted to tell her why he still hadn’t been able to look at a single apartment, why he couldn’t imagine living anywhere below 86th Street and how he kept finding himself running up the West Side Highway if only to be close enough to the water that, maybe, things would start to make sense again.

He wanted to tell her that, maybe, she made sense.

“Emma,” Killian breathed and her whole body stiffened, going taut with tension as her hand fell back to his arm.

“Still here,” she muttered. She didn’t lift her head.

He laughed softly, fingers tracing across her shirt and over her back and they’d teleported across those blocks. “Yeah, I can see that.” “You’ve got to stop doing that.” He dropped his hand as quickly as if he’d been shocked, eyes going wide and Emma, finally, pulled her head up, staring at him like she couldn't quite figure out what she’d done wrong. “What?” “What?” “Why are we repeating each other?” “I have no idea what’s happening.” It wasn’t a laugh, not really, but Emma smiled at him and maybe the world recentered or gravity shifted slightly and he’d never wanted to kiss anyone as much as he wanted to kiss her and maybe they could walk out of some kind of quasi-family, team-bonding dinner without anyone noticing that they were gone.

“I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of this,” Emma chuckled. “This whole friend thing. We’re kind of talking in circles here.” “What are you trying to say, Swan?” Killian asked, ignoring the flash of sheer terror that seemed to shoot down his spine at her words

Melodramatic idiot.

She rolled her eyes, squeezing her hand and he’d forgotten it was there – fingers wrapped around his forearm and just above his brace and the terror turned back to nerves and he was back in the middle of whiplash all over again. “We keep having these vaguely emotional, heavy conversations in hallways and corners and, well, this was just supposed to be fun.”

She laughed again and he’d probably think about her lip in between her teeth for the rest of dinner.

With her brother at the other end of the couch.

Fuck.

“Are we not having fun?” Killian asked, determined to stop thinking and considering and Robin was going to kill him. He didn’t want to think about Robin either.

“If emotional backstory is your idea of fun.” “I wanted to know. And…” He took a deep breath and moved his hand again, fingers tracing over the back of her palm and the wine bottle was still on the floor. “I wanted to know,” he repeated. “Not...not on the record or anything, just because it’s you.” Emma blinked, lips parting slightly and he could hear her breath rush out of her, like she was stunned. “See, you’re doing it again.” “Be more specific, Swan.” “You’re...nice.” “That didn’t sound very confident.” She shrugged, clicking her tongue. “I didn’t expect you to be nice. You’re just supposed to be here for the angle or something.”

“I’m not,” Killian said seriously, bringing his hand up to wrap around her shoulder and she bit down on her lip again. “You know I don’t just steal cinnamon and risk lawsuit for people I’m only interested in getting a few quotes out of.” Emma laughed and he could feel that too, some kind of overly emotional, metaphorical light that seemed to sink into every inch of him. “I don’t think one Starbucks is going to miss its cinnamon container. Which is all you stole, by the way. It’s not like you staged this major theft of the entire cinnamon supply.” “You’ve put a lot of thought into this.” “Nah,” Emma shook her head. “I’m just trying to keep that ego in check. Can’t have you getting too far ahead of yourself. And, after all, aren’t you just supposed to report on the crime, not live it?” “That’s a good point, although, if we’re going to follow through on that line of thought, I’m not much of a crime reporter anymore.” Emma hummed and Killian tried not to consider just how easy it was to fall back into features and caring and stories that kept him up until five in the morning. And he wasn’t nervous – not really. The story had done well, better than he thought it would with far more hits than he’d promised Cora, but anything could happen and Killian found himself wanting all over again.

That was dangerous.

He needed to get out of the hallway.

“Hey guys,” a voice called from a few feet away and Killian spun around to find a nervous looking Belle leaning around the doorway. “Uh, David and Ruby want Emma to come play MarioKart? Something about wrecking on Special Cup? And also Mary Margaret says there’s food. She also mentioned combating the wine. I have no idea what that meant.” Emma sighed, rolling her eyes when Killian glanced over his shoulder. “She thinks she’s my mother,” she explained and he couldn't even find it in himself to be frustrated. Even if he still wanted to kiss her a questionable amount.

“It’s still not a bad thing, love.” Her eyes flashed back up towards him and he couldn’t seem to stop moving towards her. Belle was still standing in the doorway. “Yeah, I know, I know. I just....they’re totally putting on a show for you. And we wasted all that wine.” “I’m not worried about the wine. Or the show.” “No?” “No,” Killian said easily, shaking his head and Emma’s feet hit up against his sneakers. He’d never taken his shoes off. And she was barefoot in the hallway with her eyes tracing over his face like she was looking for the lie and a small puddle of white wine a few inches away.

Emma nodded once, lips pressed together tightly and she tugged on his shirt again. He was, at least, ninety-nine percent positive she rocked towards him and maybe she wanted just a bit too. “Alright,” she sighed. “You want to be incredibly impressed by my MarioKart skills?” “I’d like nothing better, Swan.”

“Good.” He followed her back into the apartment – the empty bottle of wine in his hand – and he didn’t think he imagined the knowing look on Belle’s face when she closed the door behind them.

And if Killian wanted to kiss Emma in the hallway then it was nothing compared to how much he wanted to kiss her on her brother and sister-in-law’s couch, watching with something that probably looked a bit like awe, as her thumbs flew over the controller in her hand and she let out a string of trash talk and laughter that made him reconsider everything he learned in Journalism 101 at least twenty-four times.

It was the same thing that had happened at the qualifier. She was more confident with a game in front of her  and Killian couldn’t seem to stop watching her, the way her eyes flitted across the screen and tongue pressed into her cheek and maybe he should drink some more.

David groaned again – his car spinning out into what appeared to be an actual moat of lava when Emma ran into him. She let out a triumphant sound, flashing a smile at Killian, and David slumped further into his seat, dropping his controller on the ground.

“Told you I was good,” Emma muttered, knocking her shoulder into Killian’s arm and for as tense and cautious as they’d been in the hallway, she was the exact opposite with the game on TV and the chance to gloat just a bit in front of her brother.

Killian grinned, shifting slightly and maybe his arm moved over the back of the couch on purpose. Maybe he completely ignored Ruby’s quirked eyebrows and the quick glance she shot Elsa’s direction. “I wasn’t doubting you, Swan,” he said. “Although I’ll admit that my experience with this game is limited to being absolutely destroyed by Henry and Roland.” “Roland, too? Jeez, you’re just painfully bad at all of this aren’t you?” He shrugged, but Emma’s smile didn’t waver and David picked up his controller again, demanding another round and another race. “Henry is, of course, some kind of expert, but Roland’s getting there and this is at least an almost acceptable game to play with a seven-year-old. He’s just got better hand-eye coordination than I do.” Emma widened her eyes and Killian wasn’t sure if that crash was David’s controller falling again or Mary Margaret dropping several pounds of food. Ruby snorted softly, holding her own controller out expectantly a few inches away from Killian’s nose.

“What?” he asked, possibly just asking the entire apartment.

Ruby pushed the controller into his chest. “Here,” she said. “You can use mine. I’ve got...whatever, come on David.” David had absolutely dropped his controller, still bent over when his head snapped up to gape at Ruby. “What? No, no, Rainbow Road! We’ve got one more track! I’m almost actually good at that one. I could knock Emma into oblivion.” “Nothing says family like threatening to knock each other into oblivion” Ruby laughed, taking a step towards him and tugging him unceremoniously out of the chair. “C’mon. M’s probably needs help or something.” David stared at her for a beat, glancing quickly towards a clearly frustrated Emma. “Right,” he nodded. “Right, right. There’s a ton of food. Absolutely.” “Really selling it, Detective,” Ruby muttered, pushing him back towards the kitchen and leaving Killian on the couch with Emma next to him and three other teammates sitting awkwardly in the living room.

“Well,” Belle said awkwardly, grabbing a handful of empty cups off the coffee table in front of her. “There’s a lot of food, so….come on Anna.” Anna blinked, barely taking her eyes off her phone screen before it buzzed again and Belle eyed her meaningfully. “Oh,” she sighed, jumping up immediately. “Right, right the food. Yeah. Ok. Let’s go, El.”

Emma closed her eyes, resting her head in her hands and her shoulders had gone tense again. He should have bought two bottles of wine.

They never should have left the hallway.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Elsa mumbled, resting a hand on Emma’s shoulder as she followed her sister back towards the suddenly crowded kitchen.

They sat in silence for what felt like an entire lifetime and another Saturday night of whatever any of this was and Killian only realized he was still holding the controller when the game started to make noise and the stupid thing vibrated in his hand.

“Uh, Swan,” he muttered and she snapped her head towards him, something that looked like dread on her face. “Hey, what’s the matter?” She sighed, her whole body sagging forward and he moved again, twisting back towards her, the controller and the game forgotten completely. “Are you kidding me?” “No.” “This is a disaster.” “It’s not.” “I didn’t even think about….” Emma swallowed, pulling her lips back behind her teeth and if he still didn’t want to kiss her so much he probably would have been concerned by the look on her face. “God, you should just...I don’t know what I’m doing here. I didn’t even think about your hand-eye coordination and I…” “Swan,” Killian interrupted. She stared at him, hands twisted in her lap and Mary Margaret dropped another dish. “Is she doing that to make sure we don’t think they’re all eavesdropping?” “Probably.” “They’re not very subtle.” “Why do you think I’m freaking out? Between the pans and the food and, God, we didn’t even tell anyone about the puddle of wine in the hallway. The whole place is going to smell like...what was that?” “Chardonnay.” “Jeez, did you spend a lot of money on that? I hope you didn’t spend a lot of money on that.” “I didn’t,” Killian promised, not sure if that was an admission he was particularly pleased to make. Emma sighed. “And I don’t mind the lack of subtlety. It’s almost funny.” “Gee, thanks.” “You know what I meant.” “I promise I don’t,” Emma groaned and she was dangerously close to him again, half on the same couch cushion and this all felt a bit teenage and somewhere close to absurd, but a few days before he’d bet his entire career on a series of video game features, so it almost made sense.

Killian grimaced and he should tell her he couldn’t. There were rules and expectations and, shit, bias and Regina would absolutely push him onto the tracks at the Astor Place station if she realized he was thinking any of this.

He didn’t.

Of course not.

He couldn’t seem to get his mouth to move.

“Ask me a question,” Emma said suddenly.

Killian lowered his eyebrows, blinking twice and she smiled at him, certain and confident and exactly the way she looked when she was playing the game. “What?”

“A question. Ask me. Something. Anything. Make this less weird.” “And interviewing you is going to be less weird than trying to play this game and ignoring whatever it is Mary Margaret is doing?” “Yes,” Emma said evenly. “Plus I’d absolutely destroy you on Rainbow Road. If we’re going to actually do this then we need to start on something easier.” Killian felt his lips twitch, something that might have actually been nerves settling in the pit of his stomach and maybe easier was better.

Friends. Friends. Friends.

Goddamn fucking ethics.

“Why is your coffee order so absurd?” he asked and maybe he’d think about Emma’s laugh even more than that thing she kept doing with her lip.

“That’s your question?” “It’s been driving me nuts since the qualifier.” Emma smiled at him – the green in her eyes getting slightly darker as soon as that particular admission seemed to just fall out of him. “Yeah?” she asked. He just nodded. “Ah, well, it’s a complicated, dramatic story. And mostly all Mary Margaret’s fault. When we were in high school, she worked at the diner in town and she was...let’s say very good at experimenting with food and drinks and dessert options.”

“And you were her favorite test subject?” Killian asked.

“Those journalism instincts.” “Perceptive.” “Right,” she grinned. “Well, M’s started getting more and more ambitious and finally she came up with, as she will be the first to tell you, the perfect ratio of hot chocolate to coffee. See, we lived in a tiny town and the closet Dunkin Donuts was twenty minutes away, so the idea of a fancy cup of coffee was a bit of a dream to the residents of Storybrooke. M’s changed all that.”

“You’re right, it was a very dramatic story.”

“It’s a staple at the diner now. Although no one makes it as good as M’s does.” “Naturally,” Killian agreed. “Why the cinnamon though?”

Emma’s breath hitched and there was another crash in the kitchen and feet padding across the living room floor – a drastic and immediate return of family and a distinct lack of subtlety. She twisted her hands again, the knuckles in her fingers cracking from the movement and Killian’s stomach clenched, not quite sure how one follow-up could have blown up in his face like that.

“So,” David said pointedly, dropping back onto the chair and kicking his legs out. Killian sat up a bit straighter. “How’s someone start writing about the video games?”

Emma groaned, grabbing a pillow off the floor and tugging her legs up, resting her chin on her knees. “Subtle,” she muttered, but David just shrugged. “Probably the same way someone becomes a professional video game player,” Killian said. “Interest. Maybe a bit of talent. A deep-rooted desire to pay rent and become a functional member of society.” “I wouldn’t go that far,” Emma said, but the smile was back. “The functional member of society part. I mean, that’s just kind of my corner of the apartment now.”

“Ah, but you’re not sleeping in a hotel and living off room service.” “Are you?” “Barely.”

David made a noise and Killian pulled his eyes away from Emma, trying to look as if this wasn’t all blatantly obvious. “But you’re only just getting back into feature writing now, right?”

“Yeah,” Killian said. “I’ve only been at Mills for about a month. I got back to the city a couple days before I met the team.” “Wait, really?” Emma asked sharply. Killian shrugged, far too aware of the audience in front of them and whatever checklist of questions David was working his way down.

“Right, right,” David muttered, tapping his fingers on his thigh like he was trying not to actually start taking notes. Emma still hadn’t let go of the pillow. “And you were covering...crime before? Seems kind of generic?” Killian lifted his eyebrows, the couch creaking slightly when Emma moved. “Was that supposed to be a question?”

“I mean there’s a lot of crime.” “Oh my God, David, this isn’t even entertaining anymore,” Ruby muttered, but David didn’t seem deterred. He straightened his shoulders, eyeing Killian like some kind of journalistic threat and Emma couldn’t stop staring at her still sockless feet.

“I didn’t start with that,” Killian explained. “I did a lot of longform stuff when newspapers were still interested in longform stuff, but that changed fairly quickly and uh…” He glanced towards Emma, trying to take stock of her face and her eyes and how much he wanted and the truth just kind of tumbled out of him. “When my brother died, there wasn’t much left in the city to keep me interested and the industry was changing and I wanted...a change of scenery.” Emma let go of the pillow.

“So,” Killian continued. “I picked up a bunch of freelance stuff, all over the country and I landed in New Orleans about seven years ago, started working on a series of stuff, got hit by a car, came back to New York, left New York again, went to Boston, stayed in Boston for a few years, wrote whatever they told me to and then stopped doing that when I got fired. Now, I’m covering video games and trying to figure out how to play this game and, hopefully, going to Philadelphia with my photographer so we can keep getting hits on the site.” The entire goddamn apartment stared at him and Killian tried not to blink or look at Emma and neither one of those things was particularly easy.

“It was a good story,” David said, breaking the silence and standing up. He took three steps towards Killian, reaching his hand out and Emma made some kind of strangled noise on the other end of the couch.

“Thanks,” Killian said cautiously, taking the outstretched hand and shaking.

“And Philadelphia shouldn’t be a problem,” Elsa added quietly. She clicked her tongue when every head in the apartment turned towards her, Killian’s eyebrows shooting up his forehead quickly. “Emma didn’t tell you?” “I was getting there,” Emma sighed. “Eventually.” He turned towards her, certain every single nerve ending in his body sparked as soon as her eyes met his and he’d talked about Liam. Shit. “There was a point to this celebration, remember?” she asked. “We figured out Philadelphia.” “Elsa figured out Philadelphia,” Ruby corrected and Emma hummed in agreement.

Elsa waved a dismissive hand through the air, rolling her eyes for good measure and Killian tried not to actually explode with questions. “This is also a very long story,” she warned.

“It’s good though,” Emma mumbled, a nervous smile on her face and she certainly hadn’t missed that whole dead brother part of the story. He wished they were in the hallway again. “She’s secretly a lawyer.” “What?” Killian asked. His neck wasn’t going to stand up to a full year of this. His muscles already felt like they were being twisted in impossible ways.

“That’s not technically true,” Elsa corrected. “I never actually took the bar in New York and I’ve never really practiced and...whatever, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I know people in a corporate type way and, well, our parents knew even more people and I don’t really like Weselton, but he did a lot of work with my parents and they’re interested in getting into sponsorship possibilities and…” She shrugged, clearly not comfortable with the spotlight or the half a dozen pairs of eyes staring at her. Killian wished he’d brought a notebook. Or a pen.

He was woefully unprepared.

“What do they do?” he asked and Emma widened her eyes in confusion. “This Weselton guy and, I’m assuming, his company? What do they do?” “Oh, uh, shipping. Trade stuff.” “Trade stuff?” “Is it really that important? I mean we weren’t going to be able to do much of anything if we didn’t get the money. From what I can tell they’ve got their hands in a bunch of different things. There’s really no rhyme or reason to it. It just seems like a money thing and if they can ship it, they move it.” “And they want to get involved in sponsorships?” Killian pressed, some kind of metaphorical alarm bell going off in the back of his mind.  “Of video game teams?” “They’re the only ones who responded,” Elsa admitted quietly and Emma stuttered at that, eyes going wide and shoulders sagging when her head darted towards a slightly stunned looking Ruby. “I...Anna and I came up with a bunch of people our parents might have known or could have worked with and…” “Wait, wait, wait,” Killian said. “Might have? Past tense?” Anna scowled at him, finally dropping her phone on the ground. “Past tense,” she repeated, but there was a hint of sadness in her voice. This was an unqualified disaster. Maybe there was a twenty-four hour liquor store nearby. Probably not.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. Anna made a face, not quite disappointment, but not quite acceptance either and David looked like he couldn't quite believe he’d started this whole conversation.

“They worked in collections,” Elsa said, answering a question Killian hadn’t actually asked. “You know, fine art, antiques, that kind of thing. We basically grew up in the back corner of Sotheby’s.” “You grew up in New York too?” Killian asked, working the first genuine smile out of either one of the sisters since any of them had started talking.

Elsa nodded. “Upper East.” “Naturally.” “Did you say too?”

“Morningside Heights,” Killian mumbled, trying not to actually sigh at the admission. It felt like an admission. God, Liam would punch him. “Although now it’s more a very expensive hotel room room on 92nd. That’s a work in progress, though.”

He chanced a look Emma’s direction – something about those pesky, metaphorical magnets again – and he couldn't quite read the expression on her face, a mix between confusion and interest and, maybe, concern. “Did everyone in this room grow up in the city except us?” David asked, nodding towards Mary Margaret and Emma.

Belle shook her head. “Hartford,” she said. “Until I went to school and then a couple years abroad and back here for the job at the library.” “You and Emma should talk the old town.” He gasped as soon as the words were out of his mouth and there was far too much going on in that living room. Mary Margaret banged on another pan, announcing she needed more help and David practically leapt out of his chair.

Killian didn’t move his eyes away from Emma, trying to read her mind and coming up decidedly short. “Swan,” he said slowly, reaching towards her arm. She shook her head.

“Weselton’s going to pay for the whole thing,” Elsa continued. “Getting to Philadelphia and being in Philadelphia and we just have to…” “What?” “Win,” Emma finished. “We have to win. Immediately.” Killian furrowed his eyebrows. “That’s not how it works though. It’s a whole season. You can’t just win while you’re in Philadelphia.” “There are events though and rounds and things that we can win,” Elsa said, sinking onto the arm of the couch. “And if we can keep up this whole publicity thing then Weselton thinks he’ll get a push and maybe he’ll start shipping video game consoles or something. We keep winning, he keeps winning and the company keeps paying. It’s a win-win.” That wasn’t right.

There was something wrong about this, but Killian couldn’t figure out what it was or what it could be and he couldn’t think when Emma looked so worried and Mary Margaret was announcing dinner and drinks.

He tried not to think about it – the hallway or the wine or how he could nearly feel the nervous energy radiating off Emma the entire night, just a breath away from him on that stupid couch and every time he got another piece of information, Killian just found himself more confused than ever.

It didn’t matter.

There was no room for questions in a celebration and David tried to get him to play MarioKart again and he was just as horrible as promised, trying to twist the entire goddamn controller underneath his left thumb so he could steer – until Emma jumped off the couch and dropped onto his left side. He gaped at her and he couldn’t actually feel her fingers when they dropped onto his brace, but Emma didn’t flinch, just looked at him hopefully and Killian nodded.

He had no idea what he was agreeing to.

“Just hit the buttons when I tell you, ok?” she asked and he nodded again.

They won the next race, Emma’s quiet instructions in his ear and a smile on her face that seemed to erase whatever she’d thought about Hartford and questionable video game sponsors and she steered and he hit the ‘A’ button a questionable number of times.

David threw his controller again.

“Serves you right,” Emma announced, her whole arm pressed up against Killian’s and it felt a little bit like staring straight into the sun. “I don’t know why you keep picking tracks you suck at.” “He sucks at every track,” Ruby mumbled, snapping her jaw when David kicked another pillow her direction. Mary Margaret rolled her eyes, but she didn’t look surprised to see any of this and even Elsa looked amused.

Belle tried to turn her yawn into something that didn’t sound like complete exhaustion, but it didn’t really work and it was already after midnight. Killian hadn’t looked at his phone all night.

“Ah, well,” Ruby sighed. “Maybe now’s a good time to save David some more embarrassment. Can’t have the pride of New York showing just how shitty he is at basic video games in front of the press like this. What will the commissioner think?” David scoffed, flicking his finger at Ruby’s arm. “I would imagine he’d be concerned why anyone is judging another human being on their MarioKart skills.”

He glanced at Killian and Emma groaned, her whole body going slack against Killian and he tried not to actually wrap his arm around her shoulders.

Or kiss her.

Definitely kiss her.

“Heavy handed, Detective,” she hissed, but David just grinned and held his hand out towards her, pulling her off the couch and tugging her against his side. Emma shook her head, but she didn’t argue the movement and she was still smiling when she looked back at Killian. “I think we figured it out right? Some kind of absolute-destroyer team?” “That’s a little violent, Swan, but, yeah, we’ve definitely figured it out,” Killian said and it was a lie and he didn’t have anything figured out.

Mary Margaret forced leftovers into his hand – there’s no getting out of it, you can give it to me later if you don’t want it, Ruby promised, but Killian couldn’t imagine eating another round of room service and he did have a tiny fridge in his room. “Thank you,” he said honestly, tucking the container under his arm and Mary Margaret beamed at him.

“I have no idea what portion control is,” she said and the entire night hadn’t made much sense, but being mothered by Henry’s teacher and Emma’s sister-in-law was probably the only thing he’d almost expected. “And room service makes me want to cry.” “You and me both.” She smiled even wider, using his shoulder as leverage and pressing a quick kiss on his cheek. Huh. Killian’s eyes flashed towards Emma – just a bit paler than she’d been all night with wide eyes that, somehow, seemed greener and he tried to remember what the definition of friends was. “Goodnight, Killian,” Mary Margaret said.

He nodded slowly, the other conversations in the apartment white noise in the background when he could hear Emma’s footsteps following him to the front door. “She’s going to try and feed you all the time now, you know,” she warned. “She’ll probably keep non-perishables in her desk at school on the off chance you pick up Henry and Roland again.” “Tuesday then,” Killian said without even thinking about it.

“Yeah? You know for someone who keeps promising they’re not much more than passing through, you’re doing a bang-up job of posing as top-notch uncle.” He laughed, leaning against the side of the open doorframe. “There’s some kind of third quarter meeting for Mills on Tuesday afternoon that’s expected to, and I’m quoting here, last until the end of time and I won’t have much to do this week. So I volunteered. Plus,” he added softly and he wished he could stop talking, “there’s always the chance of serendipitous run-ins when I wind up at school. And ice cream.” “Vocabulary,” she muttered and Killian grinned at her. This was flirting. This felt a hell of a lot like flirting. “And we’ve got to practice on Tuesday. The only reason I was there this week was because of some school emergency that I showed up late for.” “Ah, of course.”

“Although….” “Although?” Emma’s eyes flashed and the flirting had turned into some kind of unspoken challenge. Or maybe he’d just lost his mind. They were blocking the door completely. Killian could hear Ruby mumbling under her breath, the sound of Anna’s fingers tapping on her phone screen and Mary Margaret’s quiet assurances that there was more than enough food for Elsa to take some as well.

“Although,” she repeated. “We’re off on Wednesday because I’m a benevolent captain.” Killian chuckled. “Good word.” “You know I’ve never been farther uptown than Lincoln Center.” He was going to fall over. Or maybe collapse under the force of Ruby’s continued glare and he clearly hadn’t flirted in a very long time because he was kind of slow on the uptake. “What?” Killian asked. “Honestly, Swan?” “I’ve only ever stayed here with M’s and David and they live here and Ruby lives downtown and there was no point.”

“Huh.” Ruby groaned and even Elsa looked a little amused when she shouted, jeez, you are dense from the other side of the apartment. It took another two seconds before he realized.

“Oh, shit,” Killian muttered. Emma bit her lip. “Do you have pen, Swan?” “You are the least prepared journalist in the world,” she accused, but Mary Margaret was there in an instant with a blue and black option and a full notebook. “God, now she’s handing out school supplies.” “They’re extra,” Mary Margaret promised.

He drew her a map. An actual, honest to goodness map  and Emma looked like she was just on the edge of hysterics the entire time, particularly when the pen stopped working where he was leaning up against the wall.

“Here,” she said, pushing the replacement into his hand and Killian finished tracing out the crosstown route that include a train and one bus and several blocks of walking. “God, this is the most complex thing I’ve ever seen. Why do you just have this memorized?” “There’s a giant park in between where I grew up and where I went to college,” Killian explained, nodding towards the crudely drawn rectangle in the center of the map. “You pick up on these things after awhile. What time?” “What?” “Time. We start at Lincoln Center and work our way up or something. God, you’ve missed half the city.” Emma rolled her eyes, but she looked excited and he’d drawn her a map. The hallway still smelled like wine. “I already explained that part, plus if I wasn’t playing or in this apartment, I was working for Granny, so there wasn’t much time for sightseeing.” Killian held the notebook back towards Emma, nodding towards the map and trying not to memorize every single inch of her – the way her fingers curled around the pages or that piece of hair that was back again, seemingly there just to taunt him, or how she rocked back on her heels when her tongue darted between her lips and friends could hang out.

Journalists could be friends with their...God, subjects was a terrible word. He was going to get drunk off wine fumes in the hallway.

“So, let’s change that then, huh?” he asked, rocking back towards her and he’d have to look up how magnets worked later.

Emma’s fingers tightened on the paper. “Two? Do you get days off? How does it work?” “It’ll work,” Killian promised and it wasn’t really an answer to the question, but the story had done well and Regina owed him or something he’d probably spend the next few days rationalizing because Emma kept smiling at him and he’d drawn a map for God’s sake.

“Ok,” Emma smiled and he was absolutely going to kiss her, but then Ruby was there and Elsa was there and Belle’s face was flushed so red with embarrassment that it was a wonder she was even still able to stay standing.

“C’mon, Jones,” Ruby said knowingly. “Let’s see which city kid who can hail a cab faster.” He hummed, pushing any frustration back into the corner of his mind and maybe he was part of the team now. Emma was still holding the map. “I’m totally going to win,” he promised and Ruby made some kind of contradictory noise at the other end of the hall.

Emma twisted her eyebrows, leaning forward slightly and he could smell whatever shampoo she used as soon as she took a step towards him. Her hand was warm against his chest. He tried not to read into that. “I’ve got no doubt,” she said and the certainty in her voice sent that same shockwave of heat through every single one of his veins and probably three-quarters of his arteries. “I’ll see you Wednesday.” He tried not to think about it.

He did. It didn’t really work. And he was about just as subtle as David had been – drawing questions from Robin and Will and even, once, Roland who wanted to know why he was so distracted when he totally forgot to even offer ice cream after school on Tuesday.

Regina glared at him for most of dinner that night.

Killian absolutely didn’t care. He just smirked back over a plate of questionably expensive food and walked back uptown to try and work out some of that residual energy and, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, he ordered two cups of ridiculously espresso-filled coffee and coffee hybrids and took up his spot in front of the Lincoln Center fountain.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Emma said, jogging towards him with two cups of coffee in her hand. “Although insert cliché about great minds here or whatever.” Shit.

He knew his eyes widened slightly when she took another step, could feel the smile inching across his face as soon as he realized she was there and talking to him and she’d bought them coffee too. God, he wanted to show her the entire goddamn city.

He couldn’t remember the last time he cared about the island of Manhattan that much.

Or anyone else.

This was a problem.

“I’ll take the compliment, Swan,” he grinned. “Although I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with all of this caffeine.” “Drink it?” Killian barked out a laugh, nodding towards the sidewalk. “Genius, love.” “That almost sounded sarcastic.” “Almost being the operative word there.” “Drink your coffee,” Emma muttered, but she was still smiling and the sun was reflecting off her hair or something equally absurd. “What exactly did you have in mind today? And has this fountain always been here?” “Always. When I was a kid, my brother used to bring us down here with pennies and a whole bunch of those clichés you were talking about and we’d try and figure out what happened next. It never really worked the way we planned.” Killian took a gulp of coffee as soon as the words were out of his mouth and immediately winced when he burnt his tongue. An absolute, fucking disaster.

She put her hand on his arm. Again.

“How much older was he?” she asked and that was the last thing he expected. He expected how did he die and why did you run and where were your parents – he didn’t expect a question about age. Emma smiled, shifting the cups in her hands and squeezing his arm again. “You can ask a follow-up if that helps.” Killian laughed, but that knot of anxiety that kept appearing in his stomach loosened. “That’s not a requirement, love.” “Ah, well, whatever helps the interview move along, I guess.” “He was nearly ten years older than me.” “Quite an age gap.” “Ah, yeah,” Killian said and he couldn’t run his hand through his hair with two cups of coffee in his grip. “I wasn’t exactly...let’s just say I was something someone else had to figure out.” “Oh.” Killian hummed and they’d jumped right back into god awful rather quickly. “Change of subject, Swan? And that wasn’t the follow-up.” Emma nodded, taking a sip of her coffee and he probably shouldn’t have regretted the loss of her hand as much as he did. “You’ve never been farther north than right here, right?” “Why are you asking questions you already know the answer to?” “I’m recapping, love. It’s what you do in a series of stories.” Emma rolled her eyes, just took another gulp of coffee and she was already finished with hers. She held her hand out expectantly and Killian wasn’t sure he’d smiled as much in the last six years as he had since Emma Swan had showed up in his life. “You want to see how the other half lives?” He didn’t give her a moment to argue – trying to take stock of the flash of excitement in her eyes and the quirk of her lips as he took a step back towards the sidewalk and led her towards Central Park.

“So, this is that very well-drawn rectangle on the map, huh?” Emma asked when they kept walking, weaving in between pedicabs and tourists and some cart that appeared to just be selling balloons.

“I’m nothing if not an artist, Swan,” Killian said and the coffee cups were long forgotten, gone cold in between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. It left his right hand hanging at his side, something that felt like sparks practically shooting out his fingertips.

“Ah, yeah, I can see that. You’ve really captured the energy of it. Those four lines brought to life this oasis in an otherwise concrete jungle.” “That was almost poetic enough for me to ignore that slight sarcastic jab.” “No sarcasm. A tease at best. Where even are we? Is this just the great New York City fountain tour, then?” Killian hummed and Emma shrugged, the smile just a bit sarcastic as well. “It’s a better fountain,” he said, holding his hand out and Emma eyed him speculatively, the din of early-fall tourists and camera shutters working their way through the archway in front of them. “This is a historical landmark.” “Is that true?” Emma asked, the genuine curiosity catching him short.

“I’d imagine so.” “You don’t actually know? What kind of tour guide are you?” “I said we’d get you above 66th Street, Swan and made sure you got to see the good parts of the city. I made absolutely no promises about the validity of any of my claims.” She twisted her mouth slightly, turning towards him and God if he just took a step towards her, he could kiss her and maybe it wouldn’t feel like his goddamn arm was going to fall off from not touching her. “The good parts, huh?” Emma asked. “What makes them good?” “I like them,” Killian answered easily. “You like fountains?” “I like....water.” Jeez.

“Because of the Navy thing?” Emma asked and he couldn’t breathe. She winced, squeezing one eye closed. “Was that the wrong question? You can get two follow ups. That seems fair, right?”

Killian nodded dumbly, mind racing to try and keep up with this and none of this was part of the plan. He was just supposed to write. He wasn’t supposed to….no. None of that. “Yeah, that’s fair,” he agreed. “And yeah to the actual question too. How did...how did you figure that out?” “Just because I don’t have a degree doesn’t mean I’m actually the dumbest person alive, you know.” “God, Swan,” Killian groaned, eyes bulging slightly and she was still smiling. “Was that also part of the teasing thing?” “Maybe.” “Shit,” he breathed. “God, you can’t….” Emma laughed – loud and meaningful and both her hands fell back on his chest when her head fell back towards him. “I’ll keep that in mind next time. You said Robin was old Navy and that he served with your brother. Wasn’t really hard to put two and two together. Although there is one thing I can’t figure out.” “Which is?” “Why didn’t you? Don’t those kinds of things go hand in hand? And from the way you’ve talked about you brother, I just kind of assumed…” “I did,” Killian interrupted and Emma lifted her eyebrows. “Thought he was the beginning and end of everything?” She nodded. “I did. And I probably would have followed, but he wouldn’t have let me. He wanted, well, a lot for me and for us and he dropped a hell of a lot of pennies in a hell of a lot of fountains so I wouldn’t have to do that. I got into school here and he made sure I went. Probably would have come back stateside if he even thought I wasn’t going to class every day.” They’d been walking. He didn’t realize that they’d been walking or that Emma was staring at him with something that felt a bit like wonder on her face. “You alright, Swan?” Killian asked and the noise was even louder near the fountain, more ice cream carts and tourists and coins splashing in the water.

“I just...he sounds like David,” she mumbled.

“Yeah, a little. That overprotective streak runs a mile wide, huh?” “I’m sorry about that. They were, well, I was kind of expecting it, but I didn’t think the whole lot of them would be like that. I mean we’re friends, right?” Killian ignored the flush of disappointment that shot down his spine, settling in his back and maybe he could just walk into the goddamn fountain and stand there until he melted or something. “Yeah,” he said, far too late to sound like he meant it. “Of course we are.”

“Good. That’s...that’s good news.” “Good.” “Are you going to ask your follow ups or nah?”

He laughed and some of that tension that he couldn’t quite see through seemed to evaporate right in front of his eyes. And then he tried to take a leap of faith – without throwing a coin in the fountain. “Would you ever think about going back to school? “Oh,” Emma blinked, twisting the end of her hair around finger. “Um, well,” she took a deep breath and that standing in the fountain plan was looking more and more appealing until she answered, “yeah.”

“Yeah?” “Yeah,” she shrugged and that smile was just absurd. Like the center of the universe. Or something. Or exactly that. “I mean, not right now, obviously, but I’ve been thinking about that for awhile and it’s kind of a timing thing, I guess and M’s and I have talked about classes online and a GED sounds...I don’t know, kind of like a copout, but…” Emma cut herself off, eyes going wide as sank onto the edge of the fountain, groaning slightly when she realized there was water involved. “Mary Margaret is the only one who knows that,” she whispered. “I don’t know why I told you that.” The disappointment threatening to pull Killian into the center of the Earth shifted to something a bit more hopeful and, screw the water, he sat down next to her. “Off the record, love. And I think you could do it. I know you could do it.” “You don’t.” “I do,” he argued. “You’re not the only one who’s capable of using Google, Swan. And you’ve won a lot of tournaments and there’s a reason this team just defaulted to you being in charge. Because you should be. You could...you could do anything.” She blushed slightly, but she didn’t look away like she normally did. She held his gaze and rolled her shoulders back when she took a deep breath. “You can’t just say that.” “I just did.” “Off the record.” Killian shook his head. “Decidedly on. What would you study?” Emma lifted her eyebrows and he knew his voice had picked up, could feel that rush that he got from a good interview and good questions and he was far too curious for his own good. “You did say two follow-ups.” “I don’t know,” Emma admitted with a soft laugh. “I haven’t gotten that far into the plan yet. I just want to feel like I’ve finally caught up to everyone else.” “It’s not a race, Swan.” “Ah, so says the award-winner with a job in his degree field.” “You’re a professional video game player, love,” Killian pointed out. “I don’t think you’re sitting in last place of whatever metaphorical race this is.”

“Yeah, with everything riding on this entire thing in Philadelphia. We’ve got to make a good impression or Elsa thinks this guy will pull and I...” she scrunched her nose, tapping her fingers impatiently on the granite underneath them, “...did you think that was weird? Not the deal part of it, obviously sponsors want their teams to do well, but a shipping company? It just seems strange, right? David thinks it’s fine.” “He’s the detective, Swan. I just type quickly.” “Yeah, but you did that whole thing in New Orleans, worked out clues or something, right?” “You think Elsa’s shipping company is...what? Dealing? And sponsoring video game teams? This guy knew her parents.” “That’s not a disagreement.”

She was right. And she knew she was right. It didn’t make any sense and if he’d thought about this afternoon for a questionable amount of time since Saturday night, then he’d considered the reasons for a shipping company offering to sponsor a video game team nearly just as much.

None of it added up.

“It’s not,” Killian admitted. “And, yeah, I did think it was kind of weird, but if it gets you to Philadelphia then it seems good for now.” “And what happens after Philadelphia?” Killian shrugged. “You win the entire inaugural season of the Overwatch League.” “Obviously. You’re awfully confident.”

“In you.” “That’s weird.” “Why?” Killian asked and Emma rolled her whole body in response. “Honestly, Swan. At some point you’ve got to understand that I am in this for the long haul. You can do this. We can do this.”

“Why’d you bring me here?” Emma asked sharply, a quick contrast from whatever conversation they’d been having. “Because I don’t...are we really friends?” Killian nodded. “There’s no angle here, love. This place is, well, it’s important and I wanted you to come here. With me.” “You bring all your feature-story subjects up here?”

“No.”

He hadn’t meant to say it so bluntly, but there was no point in beating around some metaphorical bush or very solid fountain and none of this made sense, but he couldn’t seem to stop staring at Emma.

“What was his name?” she asked. “Your brother, I mean.” He stopped breathing. Or the world stopped spinning. Or maybe just fell off its axis. And Emma Swan smiled at him.

Shit, he was screwed.

“Liam,” he mumbled. “His name was Liam.” “And he brought you here?” Killian nodded, heart picking up and maybe trying to work its way out of his chest and he hoped Emma couldn't hear it because that would probably be embarrassing. “Thank you,” she continued, just a bit breathless and he could barely hear her over the kid screaming a few feet away.

“Thank me when we hit five-hundred thousand hits, love, not for this.” “Yeah, well, you said that was just inevitable or something, right?” Emma laughed and he briefly wondered if it was possible to actually self combust from want. Probably not. He hoped not.

“That wasn’t a guarantee, Swan. But we’ll talk thank you’s then.” “Like what?” Emma’s mouth quirked, a piece of hair flying across her face when a gust of wind swept through the park. “Exactly?”

“Gratitude?”

“I thought this was a discussion for after the second story. Don’t you need to interview someone for that?”

“I thought I’d talk to Elsa about getting the sponsorship.” “Ah.” Killian smirked, well aware that the smirk hadn’t worked yet and he knew it wouldn’t work then and he couldn’t think of a single thing to do – except maybe bring his hand to his jaw, tapping thoughtfully underneath his lips and he was an asshole.

Liam was going to show up in the middle of the goddamn park and haunt him.

He’d deserve it.

“Please,” Emma scoffed, but her voice was still just a bit breathless and something in the back corner of his mind roared to life at that. “You couldn’t handle it.” “Ah, maybe, you’re the one who couldn’t handle it, Swan.” She didn’t blink and the whole goddamn city could have frozen or collectively jumped or teleported through some kind of wormhole in space and Killian would have only noticed Emma and her eyes and how quickly her hands moved when she leaned forward, grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him.

Hard.

Fuck.

There were people everywhere – tourists and not tourists and sounds and it was so goddamn loud and all Killian could think about was how easy it was to fall into her, like he was falling into the middle of the ocean.

Her nails scraped across the back of his head lightly and that seemed to wake him up, right arm snaking around Emma’s shoulders until his fingers found their way into her hair like he was trying to make sure he could hold her against him.

He might have groaned or maybe she did and it didn’t matter one way or another because thinking about any of that would mean he’d have to think about something that wasn’t her lips on his or her hand dragging across his chest. Killian rocked forward and it wasn’t exactly easy – they were sitting on a fountain, the water somehow hitting them from what felt like every angle and he was definitely the one that groaned when her tongue moved against his lower lip.

He’d run out of oxygen.

No. That was...that was absurd. This wasn’t supposed to end.

Killian ducked his head again and if he just kept kissing her they wouldn't have to move or consider the line they’d just obliterated and there went Journalism 101.

They nearly fell off the edge of fountain, Killian’s foot skidding across the ground and the world was still moving – it must have been. He could hear people still yelling, the city moving and existing and Emma breathing just a few inches in front of him.

God, he wanted to kiss her again.

“That was…” Killian started, nearly stunned by the strangled sound of his own voice. Emma hadn’t let go of his shirt.

“A one-time thing,” she said and he felt his eyes fall shut as soon as the words the words registered. “Don’t...don’t follow me. I’ve...I’ve got to go.” He didn’t say anything. And he’d think about that for hours that night, playing it over and over as he wondered when exactly Emma Swan had found her way into every single word he could even think about writing.

Tag List: @jamif ; @alicerubyfloyd ; @courtneyshortney82 ; @jennjenn615 ; @artistic-writer ; @onceuponaprincessworld ; @kmomof4 ; @resident-of-storybrooke ; @whumped-natascha-remi-ronin ; @coliferoncer ; @strangestarlighttree ; @tiganasummertree ; @game-of-once-upon-an-outlander ; @followbatb (Let me know if you want to be tagged or not tagged or your thoughts on the questionable number of fountains in the city)

#cs ff #captain swan #cs #captain swan ff #captain swan fic #video game fic #hey uhhhhhh here's a bunch of plot and other stuff #OTHER STUFF

[aenigmaticdays]

Coda

Summary: The mythic invincibility of Fitzsimmons is just that: a myth. Fitz and Jemma learn the most painful way that even the foundation of a once rock-solid friendship that everyone once thought can weather any the test has its own cracks.

Notes: This fic is based on a very unpopular opinion that I have of how the writers tackled Fitzsimmons in S3, particularly during the Maveth-related episodes and the insertion of Will Daniels. I came to realise that 'Coda' was a story I wanted to read, but more than that; it was a story I wanted to write, so I did.

(Well kids, I think communication is important.)

On AO3, and FF.net

Who would have known that the previously-believed unbreakable bonds of a decade-old friendship wouldn’t have withstood the perfect maelstrom of time, the odd chance and more than a few debilitating circumstances?

Lost in this particularly boat-shaking revelation, Fitz starts mentally taking stock.

That much he is sure about: the confidence he has in his abilities and his understanding of science (and some newfound knowledge on astronomy) to bring Will back from that godforsaken planet.

So sure, that he leaves a hastily-written letter at Coulson’s desk before joining everyone else in the lab for the final but delicate stage of the operation.

The insistence whines of the machines take precedence over his morose thoughts. Fitz parks himself at a computer terminal in a corner of the lab, with an eye on the door and an eye on the screen scrolling data that would revolutionise NASA.

After all, he’d crossed the universe for her, and quite possibly bent and twisted several theoretical laws of physics in the process and is alive and well to talk about it should he wish to. But what could have ordinarily been considered one of the few miracles of his career—the leaps and bounds he’s single-handedly made in pushing through to achieve the impossible—has instead shattered his entire world.

The scene in front is hard to take in.

Fitz averts his eyes and stares instead at his dusty shoes as Jemma lavishes sobbing kisses on a ragged and dazed Will, taking small comfort in knowing that his last deed for her is one that will at least, guarantee her happiness.

Locked in a tight embrace, at this very moment, Will and Jemma form a grotesque parody of a medieval triptych that he’d taken in as a wide-eyed boy so long ago in the National Gallery: a woman who weeps over a fallen man, the folds of her skirt draped carefully over him. The pose is intimately timeless, a perfect framing of devotion between two people so intense that every other subject fades into obscurity in the background.

Fitz has never felt more like the outsider. To keep on looking would be intrusively profane in this sacred moment that relegates him to the role of the dispassionate observer. To insert himself into this would render its perfect symmetry askew and disrupt the harmony of its composition.

He uses that frozen moment as additional validation that his place isn’t here any longer.

Close on the heels of relief in knowing that he’d brought Will back are the tiny pinpricks of resentment, anger and throbbing pain that he’d managed to shoved into a deep, dark box the very moment that Jemma had made it clear where she stood.

Fitz raises his head and forces himself to watch as Simmons reluctantly disentangles herself from Will, her movements awkward and anxious as she moves to prep him for a period in isolation.

Coulson approaches slowly in his peripheral vision, tilting his head sideways at the flurry of activity in front of them.

“I think they won’t miss us just yet. Come to my office.”

Fitz slips from the room numbly. The blankness occupying a huge part of his mind is welcome; he has no more words to give. Having kept a promise he’d made himself a while ago—that is, to do all he can to make Simmons happy—he’s nonetheless still floundering as the realisation dawns on him that this winding journey can end today.

His feet take him past the lab—a place which had once freed him to be in his element, then later became a refuge when Simmons was off to Hydra—and the common area (another place where the memories now weigh like a yoke on his neck) and finally to the office, his walk not unlike a prisoner making his way to the gallows.

Those memories of what he and Simmons had accomplished in the years together, both good and bad, flit past until they’re like intertwined catacombs, a haven in the hell he felt he’d just endured, or maybe like a hell that he needed to carve his refuge from.

His breaths automatically quicken, the sudden onslaught of emotions leaving his bad hand trembling more than usual.

Fitz moves two steps past Coulson’s doorway and tries to shake the panic free. With deliberate slowness, he tucks his hands into his pockets. He clenches his fists, then unclenches them, bunching the already-wrinkled fabric of his trousers.

The suffocating weight of claustrophobia that he’s kept at bay now tunnels his vision to the very spot on Coulson’s desk where the letter lies. Nestled haphazardly in the pile of paperwork on the director’s desk is the envelope that he’d left on top of everything else, which means that Coulson has probably read it.

His acceptance of it, however, is another issue altogether.

In fact, it’s surprising to see the letter in a sorry state, as though it’d been read, crumpled and tossed away, before it was reluctantly plucked from its grave and re-read.

Coulson’s appraising sigh echoes loud in the small space, signalling the reckoning that’s coming.

“I’m not going to mince words, Fitz. The last few months have been hard. On you, on all of us, but on you especially. Too much has happened and I know that you and Simmons haven’t been—”

Hearing this from Coulson himself…excruciating doesn’t even begin to cover this.

Interrupting what he thinks might be a speech—whether a bureaucratic or a heartfelt one—that would deter him from doing what’s necessary, Fitz raises a hand in an uncharacteristic plea for silence which catches Coulson off guard.

“Please, Sir.”

Fitz hates himself already for that weak response, for the plea dripping with a desperation that mirrors all the times he thinks he’s lost Jemma.

In any other circumstance, he would have marvelled at how he’d managed to turn the tide—as short as it is—and take control of a conversation that he doesn’t want to have with a man he’s always looked up to.

Because allowing Coulson to go on would be to allow the director’s blunt words to mercilessly chisel through the emotional fortress that he’d been building brick by brick every sleepless night he’d spent in his bunk since Jemma’s return from Maveth.

And alone in his bed, he can be honest with himself: flaky talk of the cosmos aside, reciprocity had always been at the heart of the problem, and the shy hope he’d constantly nurtured about Jemma actually wanting him for who he is? That had finally disintegrated into nothing more than the dust of Maveth just as he thought they were both getting over his difficult recovery and her absence.

An extraordinary combination of circumstances making up the perfect storm, has moved them past the realm of potential and into impossibility.

The ugliest of the confessions he’s painfully admitted to himself is one where he knows he’s always needed Jemma more than she needed him. And she’s always needed him as a friend, an academic equal and as an esteemed colleague.

But as a romantic partner, he’d be her consolation prize.

It’s a kind of proof that he’d never wanted to face, until the sharp reality of it is shoved deep in his guts.

The conclusion he reaches doesn’t come easy, but what finally pushes him forward is the timid and defeated acknowledgement that he simply needs to de-couple himself from the unbreakable idea of Fitzsimmons.

Hard, fast and cleanly.

Having functioned so long as half of a pair, the time has come to shed this unhealthy co-dependency that has him clinging to Jemma longer than he should be. Her undercover work with Hydra, the quickness with which she’d fallen in love and into the arms of another man, the difficulty she had in facing his quasi-confession of love at the bottom of the Atlantic…aren’t these events proof-positive really, that the way forward is one where he needs to stumble onwards and upwards and alone in the journey ahead?

Maybe years later, their paths might cross again and a professional relationship between them could be in the cards. And if time was really said to flatten some scars, this would all be but an unpleasant memory that’s lost its sting.

Coulson eyes the letter once again, leaving Fitz to wallow in discomfort for a few seconds of absolute silence.

He shifts slightly from foot to foot, stilling only when Coulson asks him very quietly if this is truly what he wants.

Cut this right now, is the sinuous whisper in his mind. Cut it now, cleanly and quickly, and you’ll be free.

All he needs now, is the courage to ask for it.

Taking a deep breath as he battles the roil of guilt and anger in his stomach, Fitz merely nods, curtly and decisively.

He’d dug Jemma—no, he would now only think of her as Simmons—out of rubble and dirt, but perhaps, it’s time to dig himself out of this special hell that no one else will pull him from.

Coulson’s reluctant acquiescence is the executioner’s blade that helps cleave Fitzsimmons in half.

oOo

His bags wait at the heavy doors of the base; he’d packed the last few things of his with a single-minded determination that his mother would be proud of the moment Coulson accepted his resignation letter.

It’s this last bit that has him testy and nervous, but his feet nonetheless take him to the medical bay where Simmons still bustles around a sedated Will.

Leaning against the doorway, Fitz watches her for a minute, taking in the utmost care she gives to the people around her. How often had she done that for him as well, while he’d merely repaid her by being an emotional burden that she shouldn’t have to carry in more ways than one?

Simmons catches sight of him when he finally takes a tentative step in, her smile wide and a little wobbly.

“Fitz! Oh good, you’re here. I wanted to—”

She trails off, as though sensing the struggle in him, the curve of her lips turning downwards into a confused frown.

Best to get this done fast, he tells himself.

Because, despite what he’d seen of her videos and what she’d imagined of them in a planet that brought out the basest of instincts and wants that aren’t really there, she’d still chosen Will. In the moments where she’d thought he wasn’t looking, the distant stare that he’d mistook for fatigue is one that he now knows had been for another man who was stuck a universe away.

And unless he considers Simmons utterly lost to him, he knows that every last shred of hope he harbours for the both of them would merely keep him coming back for scraps even as a small part of him resolutely insists that he is in fact, deserving of more than that.

Finally, the words spill out of their own accord, the finality of this conversation akin to a swinging sledgehammer in his chest.

“I’m here to say goodbye, Simmons.”

Fitz glances once more at the sleeping man on the bed and then shifts his gaze to the familiar, beloved face that he’d grown up with for a decade.

The rush of grief and regret bursts from its dam when he sees the dawning look of wretched understanding in her eyes, to the point where it almost has him marching back into Coulson’s office to tear up that letter and rescind his resignation.

But his eagerness to give Simmons what she needs wars with the only selfish decision he wants to make for himself and as much as he wants to be there for her in any capacity at all as she sorts herself out, he is of little use to her as a pillar of support when his own blind need for her would only cripple them both.

She throws her arms around him in a quick, tight hug that he misses already before the sobs start to come.

In a soft whisper, he tells her not to cry for him, then releases her, in all senses of the word.

She doesn’t offer platitudes or any offers to keep in touch, for which he is grateful. Juggling the hurt she must feel with his own …it’s an unbreakable cycle (she had to have known this, surely?) that could only be ruthlessly broken by one of them somehow.

Maybe it’s the last time he’ll ever see her, maybe not, and in the moment before he spins on his heel to walk out, he turns back partially for a last look at her. But it’s a stolen and mute glance as always, like one of the many he’d sneaked in over the last few months because he always feels as though he’s taking something from her without her express permission.

The approach of quiet footsteps stops him in his tracks when he nears the exit.

“Sorry to see you go, mate.”

Hunter swings a brotherly arm around him then hugs him tightly, the exuberance of the action in stark contrast to the quiet words of farewell, then tucks a slip of paper into his pocket.

Baffled, Fitz fishes the paper out curiously but finds that it’s nothing more than a name and a number, neither of which are familiar to him.

“Call the number when you’re ready. Edwin,” Hunter gestures cryptically at his near-illegible scrawl of that mysterious name, “will be expecting you.”

It’s all Hunter leaves him with before turning back and rounding the corner.

Fitz shoulders his bags and waits for the heavy door to open. His eyes are burning (it’s just a trick of the light, he’s sure of it) as he walks forward into the bright sunlight.

It takes every effort not to look back.

oOo

The journey back to Glasgow is brutal, but that’s because he takes the slow way with too many connections for his liking, eschewing Coulson’s offer to use the quinjet to cross the Atlantic.

With nothing but time on his hands and his meagre belongings sitting in the cargo hold of a commercial flight, Fitz only remembers traversing the distance with lingering pains in his tailbone and the occasional drink that he takes from the flight attendant.

When time is catalogued as an endless stream of memories, night can meld into day and into night again outside the plane’s window, he finds that even jet-lag is no match for the movie in his mind. There’s no transcendental epiphany as much as he wishes for it, but merely an emptiness and a longing that he knows he has to fight, this time, for himself.

He’s come too far now—there’re literally thousands of miles between him and Simmons—to look back.

That decision to leave S.H.I.E.L.D., in truth, had been made the day when he slowly realised she’d increasingly become a crutch for him but had been too deep in denial to say so. The growing distance between them had spoken volumes about their once-in-sync relationship, professional civility replacing the platonic familiarity they once had with each other.

Then the revelation of his feelings which apparently repulsed her so much that she’d gone off on assignment to Hydra (what was he to think, after all?), their tentative truce before the damn planet whisked her away, her admission of love for Will...it’s a cosmic hand dealing him odds he can’t overcome.

He knows that the cracks in this once invincible pairing had formed long ago. Only later can he painfully conclude that excising himself from her life is the only option for his sanity, because he doesn’t think he can bear being there (it’s just perfect timing, innit?) when Will Daniels gets back on his feet and starts building a life with Simmons.

It’s only when he raises his fist to knock on the door of a modest home in Glasgow that he realises the late hour he’s arrived. But just like the stalwart woman he remembers who’d brought him up single-handedly, she opens the door in her pyjamas sans robe, shock and delighted surprise on her face when she sees him.

For the third time in two days, he’s engulfed in a hug.

Clinging to her to as long as he can, he tries to give her a smile when she asks about Jemma, though he doesn’t say a word in reply to her rapid-fire questions.

In fact, just the mention of her now brings up the roiling emotions he’s promised himself to keep tightly locked down—Fitzsimmons is no longer a fixable thing, he’d made sure of it and well…fuckthis skewed crisis of conscience that he can’t get past.

After all, how does he tell his mother that long, complicated story that starts with him nearly giving up the ghost at the bottom of the Atlantic, then giving up on a complicated friendship—if one could even call it that still—that had uttered its dying breath even before he’d walked away?

This close to breaking point, Fitz just shakes his head and avoids the intensity of her stare. He simply tells his mum that he’s tired from all the travel.

That is enough to galvanise her into action. She literally pulls him inside and pushes him into the bathroom to clean up, then sets out to make a full Scottish breakfast for him in the middle of the night.

It’s morning somewhere else around the world, she tells him later after the first helping of tatties and buttered toast and bacon, and her returning, prodigal son gives her an excellent excuse to eat a huge meal at the wrong time.

Much later, tucked into his childhood bed, all scrubbed raw and unpacked, he tosses and turns, and stares unseeing, at the crack in the window that he’d accidentally made the day before he left for the Academy all those years ago, contemplating the journey that has him coming back full circle after far too many losses.

The tears only fall hours later, when there’s no one at home.

oOo

Apart from Simmons, Fitz learns to live with a terrifying vulnerability that he hasn’t felt in years. Having been sheltered by her constant presence and then twinned with her in so many ways for so long, going solo makes him wobble like a new-born foal struggling to find its feet.

After the cathartic breakdown a week ago, he feels just a little bit stronger to face the world, so he ventures out and around Glasgow, keenly feeling the cold Scottish air nipping at his cheeks and nose and reddening the tips of his ears.

So much has changed, yet so many things have stayed the same. He walks past the high street in somewhat of a daze, still fingering the slip of paper that he hadn’t bothered to remove from the pocket of his jacket. He revisits old haunts—these memories, from before the Academy, now take on faded, sepia tones—and tries to remember what that time had been like.

Never has Fitz imagined a life past S.H.I.E.L.D. and in these uncharted waters, it’s either sink or swim. The former is something he’d literally already experienced and has no wish to go through again.

So that leaves him with learning how to swim, just as he tries to put the memory of the last sacrificial breath of oxygen out of his mind and the ill-timed confession that went with it.

Slipping his phone out of his pocket, he dials the number written on the piece of paper.

oOo

People can say all they like about Hunter and his ilk but Fitz is nothing but thankful for the man’s outstretched hand of friendship and help in his darkest hour. The only caveat being, all bets are off when it comes to their favourite football teams.

Edwin (the man with no apparent last name), as it turns out, is an English owner of a large private security firm and apparently, Hunter has said enough to Edwin that he’d been willing to hire Fitz on the spot as a tech-and-weapons specialist, with just that single but lengthy phone call.

Edwin’s proposal is simple and tempting: he wants Fitz in his first team, convinced that the addition of a tech-and weapons specialist of Fitz’s calibre can only be an asset to his expanding business.

The job role after all, isn’t too dissimilar to what Fitz had been doing all along, though he would be expected to participate more in fieldwork this time around and not sit in a van or in a lab behind a screen to remotely toggle switches or calibrate his readings. The lifestyle can be a nomadic one at times, but with the firm’s permanent bases in London, the Middle-East and North America, he’s guaranteed downtime and the choice of several countries to be based in, if he chooses to.

He accepts the offer after the hour-long conversation, then returns to his mother’s house to pack his bags once again.

oOo

As spring breaks the harsh colours of winter, Fitz learns once again, what it means to be part of a team.

It’s different but not unpleasant. Less grounded in alien tech, more focused on immediate threats that don’t come from realms unknown.

The fieldwork training is hard, but whatever he’s taken from those short years with Coulson helps him along somewhat. Whatever foundation S.H.I.E.L.D. had given him, Edwin’s team now build ferociously on it.

Fitz still finds himself out of his depth—it’s knowledge of a different sort after all and acting on it with a calm head under fire is bloody difficult because he’s inclined to give into panic first—but instincts can be honed and sharpened and that’s exactly what his new team gives him.

The leader of the team is not the Cavalry, but he comfortably holds his own in hand-to-hand combat and it’s his patient training that returns some of Fitz’s confidence in his own physical abilities. He isn’t the strongest man around, but he discovers he’s quite a natural at taking shots and that the odd but precise task of packing his go-bag for every mission (one of the first things they teach him) soon becomes a routine that he can do in his sleep.

They also give him a small lab to work in and even if it isn’t the state-of-the-art kind of technology he’s used to, it’s space that he can call his own where no one bothers to disturb him unless it’s a reminder about deployment or down-time. Engineering improvements to their safety gear becomes his creative outlet and soon enough, the teams start squabbling among themselves to see who gets to use the enhanced tech first.

The camaraderie between the guys is solid and despite their intimidating sizes, they’d been nothing but welcoming to him, more so when he manages to save their collective arses (he’d just gotten his own arse singed in the process), first on a black-ops mission in Honduras and then later, during a covert operation where they’d been inserted into deep in the Kamchatka peninsula.

But maybe what Fitz likes about them best is how they don’t see the occasional shake of his bad hand and how they ignore the stutter that still emerges from time to time (they don’t say anything if they notice it anyway). With the ribbing and joking aside (being the new guy can still suck at times and the pranking doesn’t go away just because he’s come highly recommended), he learns that there is a life apart from S.H.I.E.L.D. and it isn’t a dark path as he’d previously imagined without Simmons at his side.

Edwin had merely introduced him as a former agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and that had been enough to stir some gossip amongst the more…curious ones. There are things Fitz knows that the guys are dying to ask him, but it’s not something he’s ready, or will ever be ready, to talk about.

His unnatural silence when they jokingly question him on girlfriends and the other missions he’d been on might show that while he’d walked past the light at the end of the tunnel, but his inability to say the words perpetually stuck in his throat is also a reminder of a dull, lingering ache that still throbs when he slides his own mental shielding up for a bit. The pattern of silence that he takes henceforth when it comes to anything remotely related to Simmons becomes as natural as breathing. Pain and other thorny emotions, rendered into muteness, had become his salvation.

But Fitz isn’t too daft as to think that it’s all sunshine and roses. Such moments are milestones in some ways, or at least, indicators that he has still not fully come to terms with the past few months yet, not when they still feel like a jagged knife in his gut.

Still, he meticulously builds layer upon layer of personal armour, strengthening the walls each time to keep out the thoughts of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and Simmons) that creep unwittingly into his mind.

He slowly gets used to having his own locker in the boys’ room with his name printed on it—the term ‘operative’ is so laughable when it’s applied to him—as well as the tactical clothing that he dons more often now than the shirts and ties that have been stowed and largely forgotten in the bottom of a drawer.

He learns of adrenaline highs and lows during and after missions and how to manage them.

Mostly, it’s found at the bottom of a beer bottle with the rest of the rowdy crew or in an intense lab session where he takes things apart and puts them back together again on his pristine workspace, and on a memorable occasion, in the bed of a young prodigy of a physics professor staying in town for a few nights for a conference.

Maybe it’s a rebound, maybe it’s not; he doesn’t quite know how to classify this thing between them that’s so not him. But he’d loved the past few days of laughter and easy conversations, along with the surprising amount of heat two people can generate when they’re genuinely into each other minus the baggage, the expectations and the heartache.

She looks nothing like Simmons yet speaks his kind of science language, and her own beauty stands on its own. But her exuberant nature is infectious—she tells him quite honestly that the general air of brooding he carries around, along with the delectable accent, are like catnip to some women (he laughs shyly at that)—and by the time she fondly kisses him goodbye at the end of their short time together, she’d inadvertently gifted him with some measure of understanding that maybe, just maybe, his brokenness is not unfixable, and that his world really hadn’t started and ended with Simmons.

Mostly, despite the gaping hole that’s still in his chest, she leaves him in awe of the passion she has for the life ahead of her, though it isn’t without some shock to discover how far he’d come since joining Coulson’s mobile unit.

He learns to disassemble and reassemble his weapons as quickly as the rest of the guys (timed competitions that he can’t resist help make this second nature to him), joins them sometimes in the gym (he develops a fondness for the punching bag in particular because it helps blank his mind) and slowly, starts accepting their invitations for after-work drinks.

He learns, for the first time, what bromance really means after seeing how the guys have each other’s backs, and that he’s actually grateful for this sort of masculine connections that had he’d sorely lacked for the first part of his life. Their don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitudes compel him to shed the last of the awkwardness that he has around them, though it takes more than a few drunken nights to achieve that.

He also learns to call London, Bahrain and Colorado home, where temporary but luxurious apartments house the teams on their downtime. Eventually, he thinks he might want London as his permanent base—it’s the closest to home where he’s just a few hours away from his mum should she need him around.

With the weeks marked by some periods of mad activity and sometimes, even longer periods of lull, the cool spring gradually transitions into the scorching heat of summer. Without really knowing when it happened, Fitz realises that he’d completely slipped into another kind of life—and down a very different path—that he couldn’t possibly have conceived of when he’d first stepped into the Academy.

The only connection with the past is the rare but treasured phone call from Hunter, who never fails to take some credit for this new life Fitz has made for himself. They steer clear of the sensitive topics because Hunter can be perceptive when he chooses to be and he always grits his teeth and swallows back the questions he wants to ask about the rest of the team and well, Simmons.

Or Simmons and Will Daniels.

The only time Hunter tangentially mentions her is when he slips in a side-complaint about her new engineering partner who has had more than a few difficulties filling the shoes he’d left behind.

But Hunter also never fails to make it clear that he is sorely missed.

Just like that, the dull ache returns with a vengeance.

#fanfic #Marvel: AOS #agents of s.h.i.e.l.d. #Fitzsimmons #fitz x simmons #fanfic au #Leo Fitz #Jemma Simmons

[mysteryfanfictheatre3000]

The Bargain and the Inevitable Fall, Part 1

The Bargain & the Inevitable Fall

by Somber_Resplendence

Summary:

Minister Frollo made a bargain and the gypsy gave in to the inevitable fall; or perhaps they both gave in.

This is another Hunchback story, but more “adult” and tagged as “extremely dubious consent.” And by that, they mean “graphic sexual assault.” The consent isn’t “dubious,” it’s just nonexistent. 

So, yeah. Warning: graphic torture and rape.

A snickering guard's laughter resonated within the darkened dungeons, his grip tightening on a blood dripping whip, speckles of the dark liquid covering the floor like stars covering the night sky. A darkened figure, garbed in black judicial robes, a crimson ribbon fluttering behind, swept the empty, forgotten corridors of the dungeons. His footsteps echoed, alerting the hopeless prisoners of the foreboding sense of death. He clasped his pale hands together, spindly fingers entwining as his rings of emerald and ruby gently clinked against one another. The Minister of Justice had arrived.

Well, at least it’s true to how he was portrayed in the movie. Lookin’ at you, Danisha.

"Minister Frollo!" the guard gasped, eyes widening in terror at the sight of the towering, menacing man whose granite eyes shimmered in disapproval as he narrowed his hardened gaze upon the blubbering guard.

"What are the charges?" he asked, his deep, baritone voice sending tremors through the stone walls. The guard shivered, lips quivering in response beneath his thick mustache where bits of breakfast were stowed away.

That’s a description I didn’t need to hear. Though, to be fair, gross mustaches should honestly be the least of my concerns.

"Thievery, Your Honor," said the guard, "She's been restrained for three days."

If they’re talking “restrained” as in “shackled to a wall restrained” for three straight days, I’m willing to assume at this point that Esmeralda is in severe pain if not unconscious, has muscle atrophy, and all the rest. 

 Trembling in the brooding presence of the Minister, he slid to the side, allowing the bright glow from within the prisoner's chamber to spill into the corridor. The orange pool of light cascaded upon the minister's tall frame, accentuating his stark features. He craned his neck and peered in, a black eyebrow shooting up in raw suspicion. Inside, a curvaceous body hung motionless from a set of rusted chains which were bolted to a brick wall; her head hung low, ink black hair shielding a beautiful but battered face.

Mixing the description of a woman being tortured with description of her curves and her beauty comes across as weird and very wrong-feeling. Don’t do that. Pick a mood: threatening or sexy.

Minister Frollo growled in satisfaction. He'd been expecting her. He twisted his dry lips into a wicked grin, and it stretched across his aged face, nearly reaching his ears.

Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew...

"Leave us be," he said, gracefully waving a slender hand towards the guard who quickly scurried away at the command, his clanking armor fading away as he scampered down the lonely corridor.

The Minister entered the grimy cell, slamming the door behind him, causing the prisoner's head to shoot up like a child waking from a terrible nightmare, drenched in sweat and panicking. 

Comparing a woman who is about to be raped to a child and expecting readers to find this alluring is... not right. It comes across as disturbing and makes people want to protect Esme, not have sex with her.

However, her nightmare was existent and on-going. Red-rimmed, emerald eyes fixated on the skeleton draped in Death's garments, and she shivered in alarm.

See, this is tagged and titled as if it were romantic and not horror. And that just doesn’t seem okay.

He neared her, cocked his head to the side, and jutted his chin out, cynical eyes watching her down the length of his aquiline nose; she was delicious. Her arms were pulled back, chained to the brick wall behind her alluring form, causing her chest to jut out due to the uncomfortable position. 

What’s sexier than a terrified young woman who’s been chained up for three straight days and described as being child-like? Boy, does that get people aroused. Innocent girls being tortured is so alluring!

And the Minister's eyes drank in every curve of her plump, succulent breasts, sweat glistening upon them and slipping down their shapely form into the crevice between them.

I feel like just reading this is putting me on a list.

He bit his lower lip and attempted to regain his soundness by straightening his narrow form and placing his needy hands, which longed to run across her shapely figure, behind his back, pale fingers entwining.

Needy is not the word this makes me think of. This makes me think Frollo is a literal demon from hell.

Also, where the hell are Phoebus and Quasi? Did they just vanish? Are they prisoners, too? Are they just okay with this happening to Esmeralda? What the hell?

"I'll make this simple for you, gypsy. You give me what I ask for and I'll let you walk out alive. An offer I'm sure you cannot refuse," he said. His voice slightly cracked due to her appealing position which stirred a burning sensation in his loins. 

Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew....

She teased him. Even in confinement, even in the nethermost, murkiest chamber of his dungeons, she tempted him. 

She is not teasing him, she is dying, and scared, and in pain. Talk about victim-blaming.

And as a means of suppressing his enduring, lustful passions, he began pacing the room, dense footsteps falling upon the blood stained floor, a rosary wrapped around his thin wrist swaying back and forth like a pendulum with his every swift movement.

"However, should you fail to comply with my demands I'll have to bestow upon you a befitting punishment. Is that understood?"

Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew...

"I'm not afraid of you," she hissed, fury brewing within her gut, bubbling forth from her luscious lips. Her emeralds narrowed on his daunting frame, her gaze burning through his robes and setting his him aflame. 

These oddly sexualized descriptions are very out of place. 

She loathed him, and until the end of time, she'd use her every breath polluting his order and denouncing his reign.

"I believe you," he said flatly, "But I do trust that you have neither the authority nor the time to make such accusations, for as we speak my men are on the hunt, searching for that diminutive hideaway you so dearly consider to be enthralling. I, most assuredly, can guarantee you-"

"You'll never find the Court of Miracles," she interjected, her body lunging forward, chains rattling in the dead silence that followed her revolting words. She was lovely when draped in frustration, and the Minister grinned; his plan was unraveling perfectly.

A.) plan? and B.) how the hell did you capture her if you don’t know where the Court of Miracles is? If the charges of thievery are legitimate, that’s pretty racist. And why would she even need to steal, anyway? She made tons of money at the Festival from dancing alone.

"Correct you are, my dear," he said. Drawing near, his large frame towering above her, he forbiddingly ran a thin finger down the side of her hot cheek. His touch sent a cool sensation throughout her body, yet she refused to admit it, for he was a foul, loathsome beast. 

Yes, he is. And why everyone treats him like a sex bomb is beyond me.

And though his peculiar gesture made her stomach churn and her heart ache in a strange and unexplainable way, she couldn't help but to shudder in odd excitement at the feeling his dark and mysterious presence brought her.

*EW INTENSIFIES*

"However," he began, absentmindedly twirling a finger into one of her ebony locks, "I am willing to make a bargain with you. Give me the location of the Court of Miracles, and I'll let you walk out of here alive."

"Never," she said, turning away from him, allowing her lock of hair to gently slip away from his parched finger; the silky touch of her hair had felt heavenly.

Again, weird sexualized description is weird.

"I expected you'd say that," he said, withdrawing from her and steepling his fingers. "I suppose I'll have to change my methods."

Her brows knitted together in confusion as he crossed towards a wooden table which lay to the left of the small, dingy cell. A puddle of dirty water drowned its crooked legs, and a few splotches of crimson, which the gypsy assumed was blood, coated the countertop; the foul decoration of past victim's fluids was a worrying sight.

This entire story worries me. And, by the way if you’re ever trying to make a scene feel intimidating, don’t make half of it scary and half overly sexual. 

 The gypsy swallowed hard, daunting visions of unbearable torture swirling in her head; the crack of a whip filled her ears and made her jump, the pinch of clamps made her knees buckle, and the touch of hot wax dripping onto her goose bump skin nearly had her yelping in fear.

This is just making me want to hug her! The author’s intent is to have these seem arousing but all it accomplishes is making the readers sympathetic for Esme.

Silence entered the room and took a seat, and as she impatiently awaited her death sentence, vowing to seal her lips at all costs, a sound drew her from her thoughts. A golden ring, an emerald stone perched atop, fell to the table. The clanking sound shoved silence out of the room, and the gypsy stiffened, hands balling into fists within the metal restraints, chains slightly rattling. Another golden ring fell to the table, a red diamond hitting the wooden surface, and she clenched her teeth.

What is with this thing with the rings? Does Frollo even wear rings? Even if he does, why are they emphasized so very much?

Minister Frollo rubbed at his naked fingers before turning his attention back to his prisoner. The anxiety in her eyes was captivating, and to know he had sublime power over her weak emotions was gratifying as it was engaging. Growling lowly, he neared her again, his body pressing up against hers, forcing her into the damp brick wall behind.

NOT SEXY, JUST CREEPY.

"Tell me, gypsy. Where is the Court of Miracles?" he asked, a wandering hand climbing up the length of her leg, fingers digging into her flesh and leaving red imprints behind like a trail to be followed.

Poor Esmeralda. Like I said, not sexy. This is flat-out disturbing.

"You're dirt," she said, shivering in disgust at his actions while devastatingly trying to keep her secret kept.

"Don't insult me, you filth!" he snapped, a free hand snatching her by the neck. She stifled a breath and suppressed a cry of fear, but his grip didn't prove to be treacherous, for the rapid beating of her heart pounding from beneath his grip enticed him, and the soft touch of her flesh upon his own aroused once dormant feelings. Slowly, he loosened his hold, fingers gently sliding down her neck.

Prose purpler than Purpleberry Pond.

"Perhaps you aren't so filthy; perhaps you're sweet," he said, his desperate lips sinfully approaching her inviting neck where the beat of her heart beckoned him to draw near. "Shall I have a taste?"

*EW INTENSIFIES MORE*

His words pierced her, created a hole within her chest, and she fell cautious, confused, and oddly curious. But it was the way she parted her delicious lips in hesitation, and the way her shinning emerald eyes lost themselves in his question, which ultimately pulled at the rusted chains binding his suppressed longings. His lips gently brushed against her neck, and she winced; whether it was from disgust or shock, she didn't know. However, his breath warmed her and invited her to lose herself within his madness and to give into corruption. She refused, temporarily.

This is just... incredibly gross and squick-y. And the consent is not dubious. It just flat out isn’t there. This is verging quickly into sexual assault territory.

Tarnishing her, he ran his tongue along the length of her neck, and she gasped, chains rattling from her sudden jolt. His lips pressed onto her flesh, teased her earlobe, and carefully trailed down the work of her jaw line, nearing her quivering lips. A hand entangled itself within her raven hair, and she cursed him over and over; yet, when he claimed her lips with a kiss, darting his tongue into her hot mouth and scavenging every area he could, the world fell apart and burned. Her mind screamed obscenities, her body fell weak, and her lips unfaithfully deepened the forbidden kiss. It was unwelcomed, but needed; it was toxic, but relished. 

Woah, woah, woah. Stop. Quit making rape seem sexy. This is an elderly man molesting a young woman after she’s been tortured and chained to a wall for days on end. Hell, her muscles are so weak at this point (I mean, looking at this from a clinical standpoint, being shackled up for three days doesn’t help your health) that she wouldn’t even be able to stop him, making consent just nonexistent. 

He was warm, as if the sun lived within him, and she craved it; however, it was the fires of hell which warmed his blackened soul, and to the flames they committed.

Quit romanticizing rape.

His hand, stripped of golden ornamentations, lifted her skirts and trailed up her thighs, pausing at her most intimate region which was aching for him. From within their mad entangle, she felt his lips jerk into a wicked smile and before she could pull away and protest, a single finger slipped inside of her hot core. 

Again, literal, actual rape.This is not romantic. She is not giving consent. She is shackled to a wall. This is rape.

Her breath hitched, eyes widened, and her sanity fled her; She wriggled beneath his tall frame, ashamed at her desire to have more of him within her needy cunt. And as she hopelessly forced to break free, her every movement caused him to push his finger deeper, motioning it into a 'come hither' gesture.

She’s actively resisting him. He is penetrating her anyway, without her consent. This is rape and would be treated as such in a court of law.

She trembled and bit her lip in disgust at her sickening needs, but he reveled in the inner war she waged with her conscious.

NOT ROMANTIC. SHE DOES NOT WANT HIM. STOP.

[two VERY graphic passages cut because I may have done a story about Snaoe/Teletubby buttsex, but even I have standards.]

 She was panting, chest furiously rising up and down against his warm body, half-lidded eyes focusing on the blurred gleams of his golden rings lying on the table.

Again, what is with the focus on rings? 

"Tell me," he said in hoarse voice, breath tickling her neck. "Tell me where it's hidden and I'll set you free."

EW HAS INTENSIFIED TO THE POINT WHERE WORDS CAN NO LONGER EXPRESS IT.

She shut her eyes, the golden blur vanishing from her mind, and slumped forward, forehead resting upon his shoulder as his fingers continued to swirl within her. 

[more grossness cut because yuck]

This last sentence in particular is like something out of a romance novel- between an elderly rapist and a young woman chained to a wall. That doesn’t sit right with me.

"No," she gasped, voice hoarse and broken. He growled in frustration.

"Well, I suppose release will never find you," he hissed, removing his fingers, her sweet ecstasy dripping down his hand. He withdrew from her, his sudden warmth leaving her body cold, and she shuddered from the realization of being denied release. 

See, the author is talking about orgasming, but I am getting more of a sense that she wants to be “released” as in “no longer shackled to a wall and beaten.” I mean, she’s just been raped. I doubt she wants him to come back.

He refused to spare another glance at the gypsy and strolled towards the wooden table to collect his valuables. His game had been fun while it lasted, but it was a game nonetheless.

"Disgusting," he said while rubbing his fingers together, her hot fluids staining his pale skin. Scowling, he carefully adorned his slender fingers with the golden rings, as if they gave him comfort in returning to his supposed cleanliness and celibacy.

Again, stop with the weird focus on the rings. What is with this? They’ve been mentioned really often and it’s off-putting.

"Please," she begged pathetically, sweat sliding down her cheeks. "Please don't leave me like this."

Again, author is talking about sex, and I’m just thinking that she probably wants to be not chained to a wall anymore.

He halted, spindly fingers dripping with her ecstasy clutching the brass handle. For a moment he was silent until a thought blossomed in his darkened mind.

"I do not believe it is in your authority to make requests," he said, relishing her sigh of anguish that followed. "Well, no matter," he continued, easing the door open, "I'm certain you'll soon appreciate my generosity, gypsy. I'm a patient man, and should this little escapade of ours continue to carry on, then I shall be more than willing to oblige until your lips have spoken fact." He curtly smiled before stepping into the dim-lit hall and shutting the door behind, leaving her alone to rot in her misery.

Ė̸̡̛̛̥̥̭̼̹͉̗̠̤͔̱͙̟̟̋̈́͂̄͆͒͆̓̀ͅͅW̷̛̤͎̩͖̾̍̒̈́̇̐̉̀̀͠͝

For hours her legs trembled, her heart raced, and her body craved his touch; it was diabolical. However, as Minister Frollo returned to his quarters, gracefully gliding down the dungeon halls, he couldn't resist the urge to slip his fingers into his mouth and savor the gypsy's sweetness.

Į̸̛͕͉͎͉͕̻̬̺̜̺̤̮̫̝̺͎̟̙́̾͒̍̽̆̓͌̀̋̍͑́͆̽̒̀̌͋̀̓͝͝ͅͅ ̵̨̠͔̜̗̫͖̼̫̥̈́̀ͅw̷̧̮̭̦͍͇̫̬̫͔̬͖̝͍͇̭̰̻͚̻̬̕ͅa̴̜̱̍̈́̅̽̃̏̕ņ̸̡̛̛̤̫̩͉̜̞̯̖̥̠͓͓̯͚͉͕̄͊̓̓͗̈́͌̐̑͗̅̎͒͆͂̈́̏͘͘̚͜͜ͅt̷̝̮̻̳͔̜͎̰̤͍̖̗̥́̋̊͂̉́̋͒͒̐̋̉́͘͜͝͝͝ͅ ̸̛̜̥̟̯̜͒̓͂̒͋́͑͌͋̾̚͝͝͝t̵̢̡̡̧̛̺̻͈̮͉͎͙̝̰̝̤̣̦̘̩͇͙́̄͂̆̈́͐̽̏̅̈́̆͊̔͑͋̏͘̚͘o̸̢̞͔͎̩̰̩̥̩̟̪̭͒̽͆̅̃̌̓̅̃̽̐̏̐͋̄̂̃̿͆̚͝ ̶͉͋͂̓̿͗̊̉d̵̛̲̫̳̻͇̭̻̦̫͎̙͚͈̝̘͍͎̭͍̝͉͎̲̒̒́͂́̿̎͆̄́͑̒̑̇̔̈́̿̆̾̔̎̀͋̿̚͜͝͝į̶̭̱͓͖͔̳̦̙͓̮̞̗̫͉͚̞̳͐̂͒̎͒͆͊̀́̊͜͠ͅè̷̦̻̰̤̹̉̉̈́̄͊̀̏̊͒̾́͊

#The Hunchback of Notre Dame #rape tw #esmeralda #claude frollo #whyyyyyy

[andrewuttaro]

New Look Sabres: GM 27 - TOR

2-1 OT Loss

This was 95% of a perfect Buffalo Sports holiday weekend. We got the big, National TV Josh Allen coming out party against Dallas on Thanksgiving followed by a win over the Maple Leafs in Buffalo and an OT loss up in Toronto the following night. Barring Eichel ripping home the OT winner this was almost the best we could’ve asked for. Walking out of the Calgary game in the pouring rain Wednesday I just felt lost with this team. Sure, the last five or so games have looked better than the prior ten in several metrics, but the actual W’s were still few and far between. Friday afternoon in Buffalo we got the win. Saturday evening in Toronto we got damn close to another. Three out of four points in this home-and-home series is awfully nice. I’ve been very forward saying there cannot be anymore moral victories with this team: not in year five of Eichel and year two of Dahlin. This club has underachieved for too long. But in instances like this you got to acknowledge the significance of how a two-game series can make a difference. It’s not just the eye test effects; take a look at the heat maps getting thrown around after these two game and you can see shots coming from the right places. The expected goals, the advanced stat I proclaimed was the harbinger of doom as the hot start faded, its picking up again. Corsi, yeah it’s picking up too! The thing you can take from each game from this one back to the Florida Panthers game, other than five points, is that the Sabres maybe bouncing back from an absolutely ghastly stretch. They maybe bouncing back like they never managed to last season after resurrecting the love of hockey in this City like Easter morning during the ten-game winning streak. If they can’t be consistently good right now, the next best thing is the ability to bounce back. What’s that motivational buzzword: perseverance?

Master motivator Ralph Krueger better be yelling that one in the locker room if we’re getting our bang for the buck out of him. We can ride him all we want about roster optimization but that’s what fans do good or bad and frankly; I don’t think he’s going to mess up the deployment WHEN his boss makes the trade we’ve been waiting for. They’re two points out of second in the Atlantic Division. If you want to get a GM’s attention for the necessity of a single trade, show them how it can make a difference in the standings right now. A top six forward makes a difference in the standings right now. Something about playing the Leafs makes me very long-winded on the prefaces. This game proved what a boon another top six winger would be for this club. Three players scored this game: William Nylander, Rasmus Ristolainen, and John Tavares. You might notice only one of those guys is a Sabre. The next thing you may notice is that Sabre is a guy most would consider not a part of the future of this team anymore. We can point at all the opportunities in this game that didn’t come to fruition while on the other hand also saying, yeah: another real goal scorer in the top six would be nice. Hate them or hate them (those are your only two options) the Leafs know who their guys are. They’ve committed tens of millions of dollars to four or five guys who are therefore paid to score goals or in Andersen’s case prevent them. When they don’t score or block enough the team is screwed. However you may feel about that model it’s gotten them three straight playoff appearances and that’s more than we can say about Buffalo. I’d sell an internal organ for a first-round sweep at this point. They could lose each game by six goals and most of South Buffalo would still be dangerously hammered climbing light poles. Make a trade, Jason. We get it, you find this defensive depth intoxicating but if you listen to what you Head Coach is telling you he certainly isn’t. He wants to optimize the roster and he certainly doesn’t want to get called Housley 2.0. The Bills don’t play for a week, buddy; do you think YOUR boss doesn’t have the time to notice something like that? Get the smart-ass bloggers like me off your back before that pesky fracking baron who pays you realizes how friggin close we are and forces you into another Ryan O’Reilly trade! Where was I going with this?

Oh yeah, another goal scorer taking pot shots at Fredrik Andersen and maybe you seal up the full four points out of this weekend against the Leafs. The Jack Eichel Sabres will respond to that kind of morale bump. Marcus Johansson got called for slashing Cody Ceci and before you know it William Nylander is deking an Auston Matthews assisted shot over Carter Hutton’s shoulder like he was doing a magic trick. We could have a whole separate talk about how special teams is a crapshoot on this team but I’m kinda proud of myself for getting through two Leafs games without putting on the EXPLCIT tag and I don’t want to mess it up now. About seven minutes into the third period Rasmus Ristolainen took a puck in from the boards slowly but surely and this putrid Leafs defense let him all the way to Andersen where he deked in the equalizer. We got the absolute sexiest version of Rasmus Ristolainen this game and not anyone else really. Not even two minutes into the overtime period John Tavares and his unit were just buzzing around with the puck in the Sabres zone. He was covered by Victor Olofsson when we ripped a shot that appeared to not even be on target. However, the hockey gods get the most LOLs out of things going wrong for the Sabres, so Carter Hutton reached his glove out and the puck deflected in off of that. 2-1 OT loss done deal. Okay, to be fair a lot more happened in this game than the score will tell you. Ilya Mikheyev showed us how it’s done in Mother Russia and speared Sam Reinhart right in the nuts without getting called. Jeff Skinner got pissed. Conor Sheary scored a goal that didn’t count because when it crossed the line it was in Andersen’s glove and remember those heat maps I mentioned earlier? Well the Sabres let precisely zero shots from what one might consider the “net front” area while taking a high number of shots from those spots in their own right. Say what you will about the Leafs this season, the Sabres played good offensively and pretty good defensively to get this result.

So you probably don’t want Carter Hutton letting in that OT goal. I don’t see why he wouldn’t put out his glove there though. It probably looked like it could’ve gone in from his angle. Nonetheless it’s an excuse for me to proclaim that the tide has turned: Linus Ullmark is now the starter and Hutton is the backup. We were predicting this would happen last season but here we are with King Ullmark just in time for Christmas. Each time Hutton gets called new Lehner my Ullmark jersey gets a little bit prettier. Enough piling on, I think we can all agree this home-and-home series would’ve been bulletproof had it been four points. Since its three, also more than we probably expected, we probably need a dominating performance tomorrow night against a struggling Devils team to really make it seem like we’re back on track. The very vocal pessimist party on Sabres twitter will probably second guess it until there is an x next to the team in the standings but the resurgence is on. Go beat up the Devils Monday night and fly to Western Canada with the confidence it takes to win in this league. If you have trouble finding that confidence just ask Jimmy Vesey: he went from zero to hero in one week. Confidence is one hell of a drug. Like, comment and reply to this blog to help out. Happy Holidays.

But wait, I’d be a coward to not talk about it. The scandals unfolding right now that originated with Bill Peters and Akim Alui are not a witch hunt. Don’t be a dumbass. Hockey as a sport is not growing. The way the league points to it growing is farcical at best. The sport is shrinking because it’s a rich white kid sport with an ugly culture to match. As North America gets more diverse hockey is not keeping up. Not only is it not keeping up its proving at every turn that it prefers the racist failings of a generation of boomer coaches who get recycled over and over again to any real movement toward inclusivity. Bill Peters thought it was okay to yell the N word about one of his non-white player’s music in a packed locker room. The Ontario Hockey League, twenty something clubs across the most populace province in Canada, thought it was okay to blacklist a kid in his NHL Draft Year as a troublemaker because he got in a fight AFTER one of the most notorious instigators in this sport called him a racial slur. Alui was essentially booed out of Windsor for standing up for himself. Top to bottom this sport is not for everyone and if we have any hopes of saving it for coming generations we have to listen to guys like Akim Alui without feeling like the whole sport is under attack. It’s called learning and growing. It’s something this sport has trouble with far less important issues. The Steve Dangle Podcast is one of my go-to’s on a regular basis. You should listen to it. It’s a lot of Leafs talk but the way they discussed this reckoning here was brilliant. It’s not about what kinda guy Peters or Babcock are. Peters turns out to be a real bad guy. It’s about the fact that hockey allows the culture for people to feel comfortable talking like that. This state of affairs isn’t okay and frankly painting it in your quasi-political culture wars colors is not helpful. That’s harmful. Those last two sentences were me. I felt the need to say this after what’s been going around this week. Please, don’t be a dumbass. I’m looser with the mute button on twitter these days. Don’t be a dumbass, listen. Please just listen. It’s what we need more of these days. That’s it for me. I’m just some blogger. Go listen to someone’s story who’s actually effected by it. Let’s be better people to each other. Let’s Go Buffalo.

Thanks for Reading.

P.S. I feel like close second in Greatest Game Against the Leafs in Sabres history is Punch Imlach’s return to Toronto in 1970. The newspaper clippings are great. Not only did the expansion Sabres beat their Coach’s former team, there was a Sabres fan who gave Imlach a sabre which he had with him for postgame. That’s how you fire the first shot in a rivalry.

#buffalo sabres #hockey #blog #NHL #Toronto Maple Leafs

[elrondsscribe]

The Seventh Avenger: Chapter 2

All rights belong to Marvel Studios and the Tolkien Estate.

Unforgivably early morning, May 3, 2012

Glorfindel always enjoyed his first week back at work after a two month "break," but at the end of each night, he was glad for the day to be over.

It was the first week back in the routine - warming up, stretching, and exercising in the morning, making the long, hectic drive to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and spending the entire day training and rehearsing and dancing. And after the equally long drive back to his apartment, he was perfectly happy to fall into bed and sleep through the night (which he rarely bothered to do). He had not slept much last night, and had been a little sluggish the subsequent day.

Which was why the buzzing of his phone at about half past three in the morning was was an even more unwelcome sound than usual. "Thought I put you on silent," he grumbled, sitting up blearily and grabbing at the offending device to see what was up.

It was an incoming call. There was no number or name on the screen - "Blocked number" was all that was displayed.

He was suddenly wide awake. He didn't get many calls from blocked numbers, and considering he'd recently had a surprise visit from the director of a quasi-intelligence agency . . .

He swiped his thumb over the "Answer" icon and put the phone to his ear. "Who is this?" he asked, not caring how rude it was.

"I trust I don't have to re-introduce myself," came the inimitable voice of Nick Fury.

"Thought as much," said Glorfindel dryly. "I assume there's only one reason you're calling me in the middle of the night. You need me to come in, don't you?"

"I'll put it this way," rumbled Fury. "There's a car waiting for you outside your complex, with one of our best agents inside. He's going to bring you to a facility where I'll be waiting in a chopper, and you and I are gonna take a ride."

Glorfindel arched his eyebrows. "On the off-chance that you are not who I believe you are or you try to take me anywhere funny, understand that I will kill you and whoever's with you with my bare hands and leave the bodies where they won't be found for the next decade." He hung up with another swipe, and stared resentfully at his phone.

Then trudged into the bathroom where he splashed his face and head with water, pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt, and wrestled his hair into two braids. He shoved his feet into his sneakers and pocketed his phone, wallet, and keys.

He slipped quietly out of his apartment, locked it behind him, and walked quietly down the hall, taking the stairs rather than the elevator. The security guards looked at him sideways when he checked himself out at the front desk, but let him out without too many questions.

He stepped outside and paused, looking up and down the curb for an unfamiliar car. Half a block away was a plain black sedan, with a man in a business suit leaning easily against it. As soon as he saw Glorfindel, he waved.

Glorfindel took a breath, quelled his misgivings, and walked up to the car. The man - presumably Fury's agent - was of average height with such a mild expression and unassuming manner that Glorfindel immediately felt uneasy.

"Please get in," said the agent, opening the passenger door of the sedan. Glorfindel swung himself inside, and was pleasantly surprised to find the seat situated well back from the dashboard to accommodate his longer legs.

The agent shut the door, passed around the front of the car, and climbed into the driver's seat. He smiled at Glorfindel and produced a laminated name tag from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. "Agent Coulson, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division," he said.

Glorfindel dipped his head. "You must be Fury's agent," he said.

Agent Coulson's smile did not alter. "Buckle up," he said, and pushed a large button by the steering wheel. The engine turned over and all the car windows lit up with blue and white icons. A bright point of light shone briefly and rather painfully into Glorfindel's eyes, and a rather grating alarm began to blare. "Unidentified being present," said an automated voice.

"Add retinal scan under the name Glorfindel," said Agent Coulson, and to Glorfindel he added, "Sorry about that."

"Not a problem," Glorfindel lied, fastening his safety belt. Now any SHIELD fool can trace me anywhere, and I'm not that good at hacking. Damn you, Fury, this was not part of the deal. "Are you at liberty to tell me what's going on?"

Agent Coulson pointed at the glove compartment. "There's a folder in there with everything we have so far," he said, beginning to pull away from the curb. "Oh, there is one thing, though. Do you know anything about Norse mythology?"

Glorfindel, who was in the act of opening the glove compartment to retrieve the folder, looked around in some confusion. "Norse mythology? You mean the exaggerated stories the Scandinavians liked to tell about the strange race of warriors who fought off alien invaders about a thousand years ago?"

"You saying you were there?" asked Coulson with obvious interest.

"Well, not personally," said Glorfindel candidly. "I was in the Middle East at the time . . . but I did hear about it."

"Huh," said Coulson, seeming to store this little fact away for further inquiry later. "Well, is there anything you can tell us about a Loki?"

"Loki?" Glorfindel frowned. "I don't think I've heard the name from anybody I'd consider a credible source. The tales I've heard over the years say he's good at sorcery and rather mischievous, but fairly harmless as demigods go. Why?"

"He might have honored us with a visit last night," said Coulson placidly. It took a moment or two for the impact of his words to sink in.

"Loki is real?" he asked sharply.

"Real, and here," said Fury grimly. He was seated across from Glorfindel in a SHIELD helicopter, and together with Agent Coulson and an agent in the pilot's chair they were flying from a secured base just outside of New York City. Coulson had driven the sedan into a concealed garage and escorted Glorfindel into the base to meet Fury, who seemed distinctly ruffled and had refused to say anything about the situation until everybody was inside the chopper. "Introduced himself and everything; said he was 'burdened with glorious purpose' or some bullshit. Stole an important artifact and made off with it, in the process destroying one of our facilities, brainwashing a couple dozen of our best men, and killing a couple dozen others."

"Eru, it's too early for this," muttered Glorfindel, rubbing his forehead. But aloud he said, "What did Loki steal?"

"Can you tell me anything about the guy or not?" asked Fury rather irritably.

Glorfindel sighed. "No, I can't. Now you said we had about a ninety-minute ride - tell me more about what Loki stole from you. This," he lifted the folder. "doesn't mention anything about an artifact."

"That's classified," said Fury.

"Sure it is, which is why you're flying me who knows where in the wee hours of the morning instead of just arranging to meet me." The Elf leaned forward. "Do you understand that I just went back to work for the season?"

"Look, I'm sorry about the inconvenience," said Fury, sincerely enough that Glorfindel believed him. "But this is need-to-know for now, you got it?"

Glorfindel's jaw tightened. "Fury, there was a reason I left the intelligence field. I didn't join your precious Avengers Initiative to get back in the game."

"And I'm telling you now what I told you then," said Fury. "I'm not asking you to get back in the game. I'm asking if you're prepared to give us a hand while we track down Loki and the agents he swooped off with."

"Including the one who shoots a bow and arrow," Glorfindel couldn't help saying.

"His choice," said Fury with a shrug.

May 3, 2012

"You've been briefed on the situation already?" asked the redheaded, attractive, and smartly dressed Agent Romanoff as she began escorting Glorfindel across the deck. Director Fury had been whisked away on urgent matters at once, and she had taken the Elf in hand once they stepped off the helicopter onto the paved deck of some enormous vessel in the middle of the Atlantic. Glorfindel had dropped all pretenses and now walked fully clothed in his natural radiance.

He held up the folder Fury had given him on the helicopter. "I know what's in here and the little Fury would tell me," he said. "Is that Dr. Banner?" he pointed ahead.

A man with gently waving dark hair sprinkled with grey and a nervous manner seemed to be trying to stay out of everybody's way - actually to vanish into the air, in Glorfindel's opinion. He turned at the sound of his name, and caught sight of Romanoff and the tall Elf. His eyes behind the specs widened ever so slightly, and he came over to fall into step on Glorfindel's other side. "Mr., uh, Alexander?" he asked uncertainly.

"Glorfindel, please," said that individual with a smile. "My pleasure, Dr. Banner, and thanks for saving Harlem."

The Man blinked, obviously taken aback. "Uh, if that's what you wanna call it," he muttered uncomfortably, adjusting his glasses. "Natasha," he nodded at Romanoff.

"Doctor," Natasha Romanoff nodded back. "Just Glorfindel, or is there a title?"

"Oh, I haven't had a title for nearly five hundred years," said Glorfindel casually, relishing the way Banner seemed suddenly to pull up short as he realized the strangeness of having an immortal next to him.

But Romanoff was of course not so easily readable. "Course not, you've been in America, if I'm not mistaken," she said.

"You aren't," said Glorfindel. "Is this our base, by the way?"

"Until we can track down the Cube," said Romanoff. "You know, ever since Fury reported having found you and basically proved a bunch of really popular literature to be true, people have been geeking out like crazy. Be prepared for celebrity status and nerdgasms. There's our next candidate," she added, pointing.

Glorfindel stopped and took a second look at the tall broad-shouldered fair-haired man just stepping off the ramp of a small jet. "That's not who it looks like, is it?"

Agent Coulson, who seemed to be a person of some importance, was accompanying the fresh-faced celebrity from the past. "Agent Romanoff, Dr. Banner, Glorfindel," he introduced them proudly. "Captain Rogers."

(Glorfindel solidly resisted the urge to break out in song - Who's strong and brave, here to save the American way? - and from cracking age or ice-related jokes.)

"Ma'am," said the Captain politely, shaking hands with each of the three in turn. "Doctor, sir." His gaze lingered disapprovingly on the Elf's nearly waist-length hair.

"Captain," returned Glorfindel with a brilliant smile. "How nice to meet you again."

Captain Rogers blinked, obviously not remembering him and not wanting to say so.

"Good to see you again, Agent Coulson," said Glorfindel, smiling more normally as he shook the man's hand

Romanoff had shot Glorfindel a look that threatened amusement, but next moment was all business. "They need you on the bridge, they're starting the face trace," she told Coulson.

"See you there," said Rogers to Coulson, who promptly vanished.

"Quite the buzz around here, finding you in the ice," said Romanoff to Rogers as they drifted toward the deck railing. "I thought Coulson in particular was gonna swoon." She smirked. "Did he ask you to sign his Captain America trading cards yet?"

Glorfindel stifled a chuckle. Coulson had hidden it well, but there had been a slightly star-struck air about him while in the Captain's presence.

"Trading cards?" Rogers was smiling.

"They're vintage," said Romanoff helpfully. "He's very proud."

Rogers turned away from the subject, and his eye fell on Dr. Banner again, who was silently trailing Glorfindel like a nervous child trails his father.

"You know, I hear you can find the Cube, Dr. Banner," he said.

"That all you've heard about me?" asked Banner skeptically.

"All I've heard that matters," said Rogers firmly.

Banner nodded, seeming to appreciate this.

Glorfindel, looking at the two men, thought suddenly that in Steve Rogers Banner must be seeing the finished project, the result he had so catastrophically failed to duplicate (not that it was his own fault, as Glorfindel well knew from the stories leaked by an anonymous disgruntled underling of one General Thaddeus 'The Thunderbolt' Ross). He felt a pang of sympathy for the physicist.

"Vita rays," he heard himself say aloud.

"Scuse me?" Steve blinked up at him.

"Sorry, I was talking to myself," said Glorfindel.

But at that moment Agent Romanoff, who had just thrown a look over her shoulder, spoke again. "Gentlemen, you may want to step inside in a moment. It's going to get a little hard to breathe."

Almost as she said it, there came a series of clankings and whirrings as people around them began hurrying in various directions and barking orders.

"Oh, this is a submarine?" asked Glorfindel in surprise. The thing didn't seem the right shape and the deck was still littered with jets and copters. He went to the edge with Steve and Banner to look.

"Really?" said Banner wryly. "They want me in a submerged pressurized metal container?"

And then the water beyond the edges of the deck began frothing and foaming, and from beneath the surface rose two great fans with blades each the size of a small cottage. At the same time Glorfindel could feel the concrete quivering under his feet now begin, not to sink, but to ascend. Cataracts of water streamed from various openings as the vessel climbed into the air.

Steve's eyes widened. "An airship?!"

"A Helicarrier," corrected Agent Romanoff. "We'll be airborne for a while."

Banner smiled. "Well, this is much worse!"

#the seventh avenger #elrondsscribe #fanfiction #fanfiction on tumblr #crossover #avengers #lotr #lord of the rings

[joeahj]

It was a spring Friday night when one of Japan’s best-known television journalists invited Shiori Ito out for a drink. Her internship at a news service in Tokyo was ending, and she had inquired about another internship with his network…In a news conference in May and a book published in October, she said the police had obtained hotel security camera footage that appeared to show Mr. Yamaguchi propping her up, unconscious, as they walked through the hotel lobby. The police also located and interviewed their taxi driver, who confirmed that she had passed out. Investigators told her they were going to arrest Mr. Yamaguchi, she said — but then suddenly backed off…Elsewhere, her allegations might have caused an uproar. But here in Japan, they attracted only a smattering of attention. As the United States reckons with an outpouring of sexual misconduct cases that have shaken Capitol Hill, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the news media, Ms. Ito’s story is a stark example of how sexual assault remains a subject to be avoided in Japan, where few women report rape to the police and their complaints rarely result in arrests or prosecution when they do. On paper, Japan boasts relatively low rates of sexual assault. In a survey conducted by the Cabinet Office of the central government in 2014, one in 15 women reported experiencing rape at some time in their lives, compared with one in five women who report having been raped in the United States. But scholars say Japanese women are far less likely to describe nonconsensual sex as rape than women in the West. Japan’s rape laws make no mention of consent, date rape is essentially a foreign concept and education about sexual violence is minimal…The police and courts tend to define rape narrowly, generally pursuing cases only when there are signs of both physical force and self-defense and discouraging complaints when either the assailant or victim has been drinking. Last month, prosecutors in Yokohama dropped a case against six university students accused of sexually assaulting another student after forcing her to drink alcohol. And even when rapists are prosecuted and convicted in Japan, they sometimes serve no prison time; about one in 10 receive only suspended sentences, according to Justice Ministry statistics. Earlier this year, for example, two students at Chiba University near Tokyo convicted in the gang rape of an intoxicated woman were released with suspended sentences, though other defendants were sentenced to prison. Last fall, a Tokyo University student convicted in another group sexual assault was also given a suspended sentence. “It’s quite recent that activists started to raise the ‘No Means No’ campaign,” said Mari Miura, a professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo. “So I think Japanese men get the benefit from this lack of consciousness about the meaning of consent.” Of the women who reported experiencing rape in the Cabinet Office survey, more than two-thirds said they had never told anyone, not even a friend or family member. And barely 4 percent said they had gone to the police. By contrast, in the United States, about a third of rapes are reported to the police, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. “Prejudice against women is deep-rooted and severe, and people don’t consider the damage from sexual crimes seriously at all,” said Tomoe Yatagawa, a lecturer in gender law at Waseda University. Ms. Ito, 28, who has filed a civil suit against Mr. Yamaguchi, agreed to discuss her case in detail to highlight the challenges faced by women who suffer sexual violence in Japan. “I know if I didn’t talk about it, this horrible climate of sexual assault will never change,” she said. Mr. Yamaguchi, 51, also agreed to speak for this article. He denied committing rape. “There was no sexual assault,” he said. “There was no criminal activity that night.” A taxi outside the Sheraton Miyako Hotel in Tokyo. The police interviewed a taxi driver who said he had taken Ms. Ito and Mr. Yamaguchi to a hotel, although the woman had asked to be taken to a train station…Ms. Ito had met Mr. Yamaguchi twice while studying journalism in New York before their encounter on April 3, 2015. When she contacted him again in Tokyo, he suggested that he might be able to help her find a job in his bureau, she said. He invited her for drinks and then dinner at Kiichi, a sushi restaurant in the trendy Ebisu neighborhood. To her surprise, they dined alone, following beer with sake…When she woke, Ms. Ito said, she was underneath Mr. Yamaguchi in his hotel bed, naked and in pain. Japanese law describes the crime of “quasi-rape” as sexual intercourse with a woman by “taking advantage of loss of consciousness or inability to resist.” In the United States, the law varies from state to state, with some defining the same crime as second-degree rape or sexual assault….The driver said Ms. Ito was conscious at first and asked to be taken to a subway station, according to a transcript of an interview with the driver. Mr. Yamaguchi, however, instructed him to take them to his hotel. The driver recalled Mr. Yamaguchi saying that they had more work to discuss. He also said Mr. Yamaguchi might have said something like, “I won’t do anything.” When they pulled up to the hotel, the driver said, Ms. Ito had “gone silent” for about five minutes and he discovered that she had vomited in the back seat. “The man tried to move her over toward the door, but she did not move,” the driver said, according to the transcript. “So he got off first and put his bags on the ground, and he slid his shoulder under her arm and tried to pull her out of the car. It looked to me like she was unable to walk on her own.” Ms. Ito also appears incapacitated in hotel security camera footage obtained by the police. In pictures from the footage seen by The New York Times, Mr. Yamaguchi is propping her up as they move through the lobby around 11:20 p.m. Ms. Ito said it was about 5 a.m. when she woke up. She said she wriggled out from under Mr. Yamaguchi and ran to the bathroom. When she came out, she said, “he tried to push me down to the bed and he’s a man and he was quite strong and he pushed me down and I yelled at him.” She said she demanded to know what had happened and whether he had used a condom. He told her to calm down, she said, and offered to buy her a morning-after pill. Instead, she got dressed and fled the hotel. Ms. Ito believes she was drugged, she said, but there is no evidence to support her suspicion. Mr. Yamaguchi said she had simply drunk too much. “At the restaurant, she drank so quickly, and in fact I asked her, ‘Are you all right?’” he said. “But she said, ‘I’m quite strong and I’m thirsty.’” He said: “She’s not a child. If she could have controlled herself, then nothing would have happened.” Mr. Yamaguchi said he had brought her to his hotel because he was worried that she would not make it home. He had to rush back to his room, he said, to meet a deadline in Washington. Mr. Yamaguchi acknowledged that “it was inappropriate” to take Ms. Ito to his room but said, “It would have been inappropriate to leave her at the station or in the hotel lobby.” “It is not only my mistake but also her mistake to lose control,” he said. He declined to describe what happened in his room or say whether he had sex with Ms. Ito, citing the advice of his lawyers. But in court documents he submitted for Ms. Ito’s civil suit, Mr. Yamaguchi acknowledges that he had sex with her and claims she was conscious and did not resist. And in emails that he exchanged with Ms. Ito in the three weeks after the night at the hotel, Mr. Yamaguchi wrote that he had undressed her to clean her up and laid her down on one of the beds in his room. In civil court documents, Mr. Yamaguchi said Ms. Ito later woke and knelt by his bed to apologize, he said. “So it’s not the truth at all that I had sex with you while you were unconscious,” he said in a message on April 18, 2015. “I was quite drunk and an attractive woman like you came into my bed half naked, and we ended up like that. I think we both should examine ourselves. However, I cannot totally accept the fact that I am the only one to blame.” In a message on May 8, 2015, Mr. Yamaguchi appeared to acknowledge that the two had intercourse by telling Ms. Ito she could not be pregnant because he had an “extremely low sperm count.” In another email, Mr. Yamaguchi denied Ms. Ito’s allegation of rape and suggested that they consult lawyers. “Even if you insist it was quasi-rape, there is not a chance that you can win,” he wrote. When asked about the emails, Mr. Yamaguchi said a full record of his conversations and correspondence with Ms. Ito would demonstrate that he had “had no intention” of using his position to seduce her. “I am the one who was caused trouble by her,” he added. ”I have not done anything illegal,” Mr. Yamaguchi said. “There was no sexual assault. There was no criminal activity that night.” Shame and Hesitation Ms. Ito said she rushed home to wash after leaving the hotel. She now regards that as a mistake. “I should have just gone to the police,” she said. Her hesitation is typical. Many Japanese women who have been assaulted “blame themselves, saying, ‘Oh, it’s probably my fault,’” said Tamie Kaino, a professor emeritus of gender studies at Ochanomizu University. Hisako Tanabe, a rape counselor at the Sexual Assault Relief Center in Tokyo, said that even women who call their hotline and are advised to go to the police often refuse, because they do not expect the police to believe them. “They think they will be told they did something wrong,” she said. Ms. Ito said she felt ashamed and considered keeping quiet too, wondering if tolerating such treatment was necessary to succeed in Japan’s male-dominated media industry. But she decided to go to the police five days after the encounter. “If I don’t face the truth,” she recalled thinking, “I think I won’t be able to work as a journalist.” The police officers she spoke to initially discouraged her from filing a complaint and expressed doubt about her story because she was not crying as she told it, she said. Some added that Mr. Yamaguchi’s status would make it difficult for her to pursue the case, she said. But Ms. Ito said the police eventually took her seriously after she urged them to view the hotel security footage. A two-month investigation followed, after which the lead detective called her in Berlin, where she was working on a freelance project, she said. He told her they were preparing to arrest Mr. Yamaguchi on the strength of the taxi driver’s testimony, the hotel security video and tests that found his DNA on one of her bras. The detective said Mr. Yamaguchi would be apprehended at the airport on June 8, 2015, after arriving in Tokyo on a flight from Washington, and he asked her to return to Japan to help with questioning, Ms. Ito said. When that day came, though, the investigator called again. He told her that he was inside the airport but that a superior had just called him and ordered him not to make the arrest, Ms. Ito said. “I asked him, ‘How is that possible?’” she said. “But he couldn’t answer my question.” Ms. Ito declined to identify the investigator, saying she wanted to protect him. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police would not comment on whether plans to arrest Mr. Yamaguchi were scuttled. “We have conducted a necessary investigation in light of all laws and sent all documents and evidence to the Tokyo Prosecutors’ office,” a spokesman said. ‘I Have to Be Strong’…Scholars say the disparity is less about actual crime rates than a reflection of underreporting by victims and the attitudes of the police and prosecutors in Japan. Differences in rape laws also play a role. Over the summer, Parliament passed the first changes to Japan’s sex crime laws in 110 years, expanding the definition of rape to include oral and anal sex and including men as potential victims. Lawmakers also lengthened minimum sentences. But judges can still suspend sentences. And despite the recent cases, there is still little education about sexual violence at universities. At Chiba, a course for new students refers to the recent gang rape as an “unfortunate case” and only vaguely urges students not to commit crimes…The allegations did not affect Mr. Yamaguchi’s position at the Tokyo Broadcasting System, but he resigned last year under pressure from the network after publishing an article that was seen as controversial. He continues to work as a freelance journalist in Japan. Ms. Ito published a book about her experience in October; it has received only modest attention in Japan’s mainstream news media. Isoko Mochizuki, one of the few journalists to investigate Ms. Ito’s allegations, said she faced resistance from male colleagues in her newsroom, some of whom dismissed the story because Ms. Ito had not gone to the hospital immediately. “The press never covers sexual assault very much,” she said. Ms. Ito said that was precisely why she wanted to speak out.

http://web.archive.org/web/20171229173540/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/world/asia/japan-rape.html

[minrcrafter]

Quasi SMP [Semi-Vanilla][SMP]{17+}{Whitelist}{1.13.1}

Hey there,

Quasi SMP is a 17+, whitelisted Minecraft server established July 2018. Most of our player base is from Europe and USA, however, we also have a few Aussies and fellow South Africans.

Since we are a small, close-knit community, we typically have around 4-6 players online, around 8-15 during peak times and even more during special events and would love to have you join us in our very community-minded MC world.

​

What you get with us/Perks:

Your base is protected from griefing. - No need to worry if you're going to wake up one morning to find your base ruined. It doesn't work like that here! Staff is always just one message away, ready to help out and restore any damage should it happen in an unlikely event.

You are protected from unfair trades/stealing from your shop. - Staff regularly checks every shop to ensure the fairness of trades.

Newer Map! - Since we have started in July, our map has not been explored fully, so you can still go and find all the interesting bits and bobs that suit your play-style. That being said, we do have some infrastructure set up such as various player shops, a mending book shop, enderman and guardian farms, so for all of you builders out there, we’ve got you covered! We are planning on building even more farms and community-oriented builds and would love it if you shared the experience with us.

Multiple new advancement trees

No enderman griefing - Our community has managed to strike a deal with endermen, so they don’t steal our stuff

All mob heads obtainable - We all love having a trophy room, right?

One player sleep

Custom prefixes (ask Sin1ster!)

Go Exploring! - The world is adequately sized with no border currently set which allows for plenty of room for exploration and contains a vast variety of unique biomes! Feel free to claim an area or two, or five, to call your own or take the time to get out there and explore for whatever it is you're looking for, whether it's a specific biome or just a really cool landscape with an awesome view of the setting sun. If you find something cool, let us know!

Quick Travel - We all know how difficult it is to have to walk thousands of blocks to visit a friend’s base, or trade, which is why the community has installed an outstanding nether hub transportation system that allows for very fast travel using ice and boats, or jumping, or even minecarts to get where you need to go. You can quickly get from one end of the map to another in mere minutes.

Active Discord - so that you don't have to worry about typing "Creeper" when one is barreling right for your friend and flashing. ssSsSSsSsS BOOOOOM!!! We all love hanging out in Discord all day long too and sharing interesting stories, jokes, builds, server screenshots and the dankest of memes in our #memes-cave channel. That being said, we support each other when things go south and serious too, so you can think of it as one big, multi-continental family!

Server Owner and Staff that play the game just like you do. - One of the largest complaints seen about other servers is immature staff. You won't find that here since we all know the line between staff duties and being a player so our powers are not abused. The individuals in our Staff team are hand picked, mature persons who know how to conduct themselves in a professional manner whenever needed.

There is always a community-minded build, contest, game, or special event that is occurring. - We have held build contests, theater events, treasure hunting contests, trivia, and other assorted events. Hey, we are currently having a Halloween Skin Contest with some sick prizes!

Community Logbook. Ever joined a server and had no idea what has been done or where to go? Don't worry about that here with us. The entire community maintains a spreadsheet that will help you get started, point to the locations of interest, plugin commands, farm locations, pvp rules and arenas and how to access them, etc. Plus you also get a tour when you join to show you the important things so you'll know what's what.

Quasi Journal. Nothing showcases our community better than a journal of all the important, weird and outright funny occurrences on the server than the Quasi Journal. Come take a look for yourself here.

Be Yourself! Nothing says be yourself than hanging out on Discord and chatting with everyone while chilling in our music channel (plays songs for everyone simultaneously).

​

Rules

No malicious activity which includes griefing, hacking, or theft across the entire map.

If you see a chest that you haven't placed, it is to be considered not yours and left alone. - Taking from the chest will result in a ban from the server.

Player mods that defeat the challenge of playing on a semi-vanilla server are not allowed. An example would be running an x-ray mod or modified resource pack for direct access to ores.

Players are encouraged to lend a helping hand and to do things together like exploring, building, working on large-scale projects, etc. We get that sometimes it's cool to be solitary, but we're trying to avoid the lone ranger types that just go off and you never see them again. Why bother playing Multiplayer?

Be mature (as in, the opposite of immature, not meaning mature as in Rated-R mature) and remember the golden rule, do unto others and you'd have them do unto you. We are all about a positive experience on Quasi SMP and any negative behavior (aside from tasteful pranks) will result in you being banned. We run on a strict one-strike-you're-out policy which applies to staff as well.

Chat away. Here, you can be "adult" if you'd like, but we do expect from you to know when the line of oversharing is crossed.

​

Server Specifications (Great Performance guaranteed!)

Located in top-tier Dallas, Texas data center

RAM: 8 Gigabytes

Disk: 250 GB SSD

Server connected to the web through a Gigabit connection.

​

Additional Information

We conduct surveys periodically to continuously drive for improvement on Quasi SMP.As anything in life, our community is always striving for improvements, so we are always keeping an ear open and a pen and paper so to speak nearby to write down all the ideas on how we can advance as a community

​

Here’s a few words from some of our players about Quasi SMP and why the community was made:

“I created Quasi to nurture a place for creativity and therapy. A place where you can meet people and play with them consistently. A place where you know you can belong.” -Sin1ster, founder of Quasi SMP

​

"I wanted to join an SMP because of the 1.13 update and saw this and got hooked instantly. The people are very friendly, supportive and it's nice to meet new people from all over the world." -ChipsNotFries

​

"Sin1ster being a good friend of mine obviously had some effect on why I wanted to join but I knew from the very beginning that this would be a successful server. From Sin1ster having other successful servers in the past and the way he interacts with the players, I was sure that this server was going to be great. Now 10 weeks in I can happily say that this is a great place to be with friendly players and helpful staff." -BantaBuilds

​

"I just love the server, it’s really fun, full stop." -Effan

​

"I'd been wanting to be part of an SMP for a while, and the 1.13 update seemed like a perfect time to go looking for one. When I found Quasi, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. The people are friendly, and everyone is equal, which is something that seems missing from many SMP servers." -MultiBanana

​

“Was looking for a nice and cozy minecraft community where I can meet new friends and as soon as I saw Quasi SMP, I felt like I no longer had to look anywhere else. Application process was blazing fast, I think that after an hour of applying, I was in game and having my first tour of the place. Few weeks in, and I can say that I feel welcome and like I belong somewhere...like a family really. If you’re looking for a place where you can simply feel at home, look no further!” -AlWolf

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"I sound unorignal chose Quasi SMP because it seemed very fun and because I enjoy servers where you can play at your own pace and don't need to worry about your stuff being gone."

-Nikk_

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Interested in Joining Quasi SMP?

If you are 17 or older, we are thrilled that you’ve decided to give us a chance and we promise to not disappoint!

If you’re interested just find and message, on Discord, AlWolf#7683 [GMT+2] (he’s on discord 24/7 - we really don’t know how he manages this, some even say he’s an Ai) or Liam Is The Name#4535 [GMT+1] (if the Ai...I mean, AlWolf isn’t online), alternatively you can join our Discord server here to go through the process of getting whitelisted.

​

Thanks!

Thank you for reading over this post and we hope that you are interested to come check us out and join a community of like-minded gamers with talent!

We are super excited to be able to provide a great environment for you to play without worry of your creations being wrecked and we'd like to see you develop and cultivate your skills together with us. Whether you are a newbie or an experienced Minecraft player, we'd love to have you be involved with our community.

Thanks again!

#Minecraft servers #minecraft

[broodyauthor62]

This the first chapter from my first book “Baker’s Dozen: a Fantasy Novel”. Available quite cheaply on Kindle worldwide.

Prologue: Goin’ Over Town

 In a reality not far from our own...

 Paul Baker Colson speaks:

 I was heading down Cedric Street, “goin’ over town”, as my late mother would have put it, and stopped on the bridge. It was a hot, extremely muggy afternoon and I was surprised to see a large number of people (mostly men and boys) fishing from the bridge and the shores of the river. This was strange: the Clarke River is not a clean stream; its dark waters are polluted by a paper-mill upstream. “Town” water was taken from Lake Ontario, not the river.

 I quit counting the catches at 30. Most of the fish seemed to be bass. I looked west, down-river, and something caught my eye. Amid the coloured T-shirts and shorts, a spot of black-on-white showed: a figure sitting on one of the benches by the river. It appeared to be an old man, black from broad-brimmed hat, severe suit, and pants, white from shirt and skin.

 I felt drawn to this figure... I couldn’t explain why at the time. I took the stairs to the shore at the south end of the bridge. I walked down the boardwalk to where the man was sitting, dodging excited fishermen as I went.

 The oldster sat quite still, a large, dark green book on his lap. He looked, I remember now, like the old-time preachers you would see in Westerns. Oddly, something made me uneasy. This was even before I had a good look at him. His shirt was bright white and the wrinkled skin on his hands was hardly a shade darker. Looking at him, I could sense, somehow, his great age and youthful intensity at the same time. These two conflicting emanations seemed to cause me to want to talk to him. His hat’s brim shielded his eyes from mine as I stood before him.

 To his left sat a teenager in a Jays’ baseball cap, white shirt, blue jeans, and black high-tops. I couldn’t see his eyes, either. He sat very still, his dark hair forming a duck-tail at the back of his cap. He sat so still I wasn’t even sure he was breathing.

 The elder of the two tilted his head back, gazed at me with pale blue eyes, and croaked: “Have you read from the Book?”

 I figured he meant the Bible; probably that was what he was holding on his lap.

 “I’ve cracked it open from time-to-time,” I answered, glibly.

His eyes hardened at that.

 “Not this Book! This is that which you can’t handle lightly!” he hissed loudly.

 His breath stank of decayed fish. The young man flinched at the outburst. Then he looked up at me.

 Bad drugs, I thought. His skin was paler than the old man’s... if that was possible. His eyes were brown, dilated, blank, and staring.

 “Darrel, here,” said the senior in a more-normal tone, “has read from the Book. He is one with us!”

 “Darrel” flinched again.

 “My name is Ezra Marsh, out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts.”

 “Paul Baker Colson.”

 Okay, I thought, Introductions made. Still, I felt I was getting out of my depth with this conversation so I had to ask: “Okay. So what is this book?”

 “The Hymns of Dagon!” he answered, triumphantly.

 “Dagon,” I repeated. “Who’s he?”

 The wasted face brightened.

 “He is the Render the Seas! The Bringer of the bounty! The Father of the multitude, the Deep Ones!”

 He became agitated, again; he almost fell flat on his face as he snarled the last sentence out.

 I grabbed his slender shoulders to steady him. His suit was damp with sweat. I looked around but the anglers hadn’t seemed to notice his outburst. He had staggered up off the bench; I steadied him back down. Darrel had jerked several times during the man’s rant.

 “I apologize for my zeal... but if you knew... if you knew ... ,” he spoke, thickly; he sounded like he was losing his voice. For a moment, I thought the old guy would have a stroke right there, what with the heat. After a moment, though, he seemed to calm down and his breathing normalized. Marsh looked up at me, a sly look on his emaciated face.

 He asked, “Would you like to hear one?”

 I looked at my watch: almost 4:00 pm.

 I replied, “Well. Okay. You’ve made me kinda curious.”

 I sat down on the bench beside him, to his right. The smell of fish increased incredibly: it was as if he should be covered in scales, flopping by the feet of one of the nearby fishermen. He opened the book on his lap. There were no musical notes that I could see, just script that I took to be Arabic or close to it. I could read Arabic script but the words seemed meaningless to me.

 He began to “sing.” His voice hissed, moaned and gobbled.

It made no sense to me (although I did hear the name “Dagon” in his sighing and sputtering tune). He went on like that for a few minutes, never raising his voice. From the other side of him, I could hear Darrel humming atonally.

 When Marsh was done, he turned to me square and asked, “What do you think?”

 “I think... I hafta go!” I replied. I stood up and added, “Good luck spreading the word! Bye, Darrel!”

 His “song” and Darrel’s moaning undertone had really bothered me. The sun had seemed to dim and the cooling air had given me goose flesh. I hurried away, back up to Cedric Street. I heard Ezra Marsh call after me. I made out the word “again” over the noise of the crowd...

 “Dagon,” I mumbled that night as Andy, my 16-year-old brother and I cleaned up the supper dishes. They didn’t amount to much as we had ordered out for pizza, a habit we were indulging in probably more often than was good for us.

Andy looked at me.

 “‘Dagon’? Have you been into the Old Testament or lookin’ through my library?” he asked. He looked puzzled but amused.

 We’d been getting along well recently, so I replied mildly, “Neither. Just some weird old guy I saw today.”

 I set the last washed plate in the right sink for him to dry.

 “He used that word or name,” I finished.

 “Really!” he responded. “Hmm... the only ‘Dagon’ I know of was a god of the sea worshiped by the Philistines in the O.T... They used to sacrifice people to him for more fish. And... . oh, yeah! He was also a nasty critter from some of those books of mine you refer to as ‘simple horseshit’.”

 “Which horseshit?” I demanded of him.

 I hated it when he knew more about something than I did! He held up his palms in mock-defence.

 “Okay, okay!  In my collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories, Dagon was a god of the sea, too. He was a deity for some humans on land and for his ‘children’, the Deep Ones, under the water. Was this guy an H.P. nut or sumthin?”

 “No... I don’t know!” I growled.

 I was angry with myself for feeling strange about the whole business and mad at my brother for making light of it. Should I tell him that Marsh had used those strange names as if they meant something real to him? I wouldn’t be able to face his knowing smile: Go on, Bro. Have another rum and cola!

 I drew in a breath and said, “Okay. Maybe he was just a senile, old ‘H.P. nut’. That’s probably how you’ll end up, too, if you don’t watch it!”

 I smiled at him; being nice was something we were working on, too.

 We finished the dishes and, as usual, he went to his room in the back of the house to go on-line and I sat down in the living-room to watch the Jays on the 54-inch. The Jays were having a better season than those past, the games were usually good... but Ezra Marsh was still on my mind.

 As the game progressed, my mind wandered. A rum and Pepsi would go good right now, I thought. I shook my head fiercely; I was trying to dry out! Going on the straight-and-narrow! I felt myself getting angry. The Jays scored a run. I inwardly studied my feelings. All my frustrations came from one source: Andrew. My parents had tried to leave it all to him... with the proviso that he looked after me! It turned out that wasn’t legal. But Andy’s lawyer was trying to set some kind of precedent, so...

 So what if I’d alienated my parents by joining the Armed Forces at the fresh-faced age of 16? So what if the bottle had been holding me instead of the other way? So what if they couldn’t practice birth control in their 40s? I guess I wasn’t enough of a son for them! So what if... it was an endless litany that I indulged in often... and it wasn’t a good habit. There had been times since I had left the Forces that I had considered seeking medical help, because I felt the feelings I had were unhealthy. I wasn’t a strong believer that mental illnesses really existed, so I never acted on that idea.

 Mom and Dad had been livid when I signed up but I felt at the time my country needed me... that, and I hated school. Plus, about ten years earlier, the Canadian government had decided to beef up the military. The Nazis hadn’t made any aggressive moves in almost fifty years but the consensus was, “Why take a chance?”

 The Americans were such isolationists and ball-less wonders... at least, as far as I was concerned. They couldn’t be counted on for protection. The government had passed what had been widely known as “Pierre’s Choice”: at the age of sixteen, you stayed in school, got a job (there were few of them) or joined the Armed Forces (you weren’t thrown into the fray immediately; there was a two-year training period) so I headed off to learn how to be a soldier. The infantry was my trade of choice as it had the easiest entry requirements. I had become very good at killing and other “nastiness” over the years. The League of Nations continued to limp along, trying to maintain the peace. They quite often called on Canadians to do the dirty work (I think many of the European delegates considered Canucks quasi-barbarians): clandestine operations that usually occurred in European nations not totally under Nazi control. I took all the right courses that could fit into my schedule and moved up the ranks quite quickly. I was a bit of a wunderkind and my superiors were very happy with me. Ironically, during my career, it was pointed out that an education would be a definite asset. I applied myself, put in many long days, and came out with college equivalence. Of course, there was also a slight drinking problem. My brother had sidestepped the Choice... later governments had liked it a lot... by starting university early, on-line. He was now working on his second year of his Bachelor of Science, majoring in physics. He was a genius.

 The game ended at ten pm. It had been a slug-fest, 10-6, with the Blue Jays winning in the ninth. The news came on: apparently, the princess-in-exile was in trouble with Revenue Canada... again. This bored me. I took a Pepsi out to the front porch (no rum, damn it!), looking to cool off on the chaise lounge. The soggy night heat then wrapped around me like steam in a sauna. The moon was high in the sky, nearly full.  The air’s moisture had placed a faint ring around it. I watched it rise while I drank three cans of cola. Midnight came on and I decided to go to bed.

 Might as well, I thought. Have a whole day of hanging around to do tomorrow.

 I had it in my mind, then, that the scream I heard from the north was wordless. In my dreams, now, it is a pleading negation: “Not me!” or just “NO!” I stood straight from the comfortable chair and dropped my half-full pop can. The shriek sounded like it came from the park by the river. A few dogs in the neighbourhood responded to the sound by yelping but all fell quickly silent.

 I was a block down the street, running in my moccasins before I thought: What are you doing? But I kept on. The park was fronted by the boardwalk where just eight hours earlier I had met that strange man. And Darrel. I cut through the park between the wide-spaced trees, moving on the wet grass as quietly as my military training could supply.

 When I got to the wooden planks, I noticed this first: one of the benches had been smashed in half. There was a coppery smell in the air. The moonlight spotlighted a dark object lying on the dewy, trampled grass. It was a black high-top running shoe.

 I picked it up and was surprised by the weight. I realized the ugly truth... I’d seen it in Czechoslovakia: the foot was still in it. The anklebones stuck out, splintered. I threw it from me with an angry cry of disgust. It hit the water with a loud splash.

After that sound, there came a loud churning of the water’s surface. It became apparent that someone or something was swimming toward shore. I crouched down, going into what I call my “war-mode”. I was ready to fight, weaponless as I was. I only wished that the lights along the walkway had been lit that night.

 Two bright ovals of light caught me in that position.

 A voice yelled out, “Hold it right there!”

 “Okay, okay!” I shouted back.

 I slowly dropped to my knees to put the yeller at ease. The noises from the river ceased.

 Oh, good, I thought.

 The policeman and the policewoman, Drury and McAvoy, were from the O.P.P. Clarkesville didn't have its own policing anymore. They inquired what was going on, had I broke the bench (though they quickly concluded that I couldn’t have done it by myself), and why did I have blood on my moccasins. That question startled me.

 Blood! I said to myself. That smell; I should have recognized that smell!

 In short order, they had me handcuffed. McAvoy held my left arm tightly. I did the smart thing: I did not resist. Drury went over by the busted bench and found where the blood was on the grass. He stood up; put his mike to his lips and contacted headquarters (I supposed), getting info from my wallet, and using the cryptic language police use while so doing. Another patrol car pulled into the park, blinding me with its headlights.

 The next few hours rushed and dragged, alternatively. We rocketed to the HQ. We flew by the front desk, stopping long enough to remove my belt and keys and get my fingerprints. They indicated I was probably going to be charged with mischief (nothing was said about the blood at the scene). We went zooming to the holding cell, which was mercifully empty. They left me there and time slowed to a crawl. It seemed like hours before one officer came back with a portable phone so I could call Andy.

 “I’ll call Sade,” he said and added, “I’m very disappointed with you, Bro.”

 A very large man in a grey suit looked in on me. He held up a detective badge for me to see.

 “I’m Detective Jimmy Cochrane. Let’s talk.”

 He wanted to know what I’d been doing in the park so late at night. I told him about hearing the scream, finding the foot. He sniffed.

 “Divers will find it. We got your ID from your prints. Got them from the Ministry of Defence. You’re some kind of hero, eh? Had a bitch of a time getting anything about you... except awards.”

 “I’m no hero.”

 “Well, you do have a lot of decorations and medals on file... it even says you were a Regimental Sergeant Major.”

 I looked down at my bare feet. “Any fool can win medals! Look. I haven’t done anything. Won’t you guys let me out?”

 “Yes, they will!” called Yvan Sade as he walked up to the cell. “Are you charging Mr. Colson with anything? Substantial?”

 Cochrane replied, “We were originally thinking of mischief but it looks like we need more evidence.”

 Andy’s lawyer smiled his shark’s smile.

 “Then I think we’re done here! Come on, James, that’s a good fellow!”

 They let me go. The short, burly Mr. Sade led me to his car.

 “Cheaper than a taxi!” he enthused.

 During the short drive home (Sade drove like a maniac), I told the lawyer my story.

 “Shouldn’t have chucked that foot away! Evidence, my boy! Evidence!”

 We pulled into my driveway. I asked Sade if he wanted to have a coffee but he declined. “Busy day tomorrow! Or, I guess it’s today!”

 Yvan Sade always spoke using exclamation marks. He wheeled out and was gone in a spray of gravel. I walked into the house in my bare feet, my leather moccasins, bloodstained as they were, being held for testing.

 Andy was waiting for me in the kitchen. It was 3:00 am. He asked me if I wanted to eat, that he was making something for himself.

 “Just wanna go to bed... feel like a bag of shit.”

 “You look it, too.”

 “Screw you.”

 “Just kidding!” he said. “You okay?”

 “Will be... ”

 That said, I went to my bedroom, climbed on my bed and fell asleep without even undressing. Fortunately, I hadn’t any blood on my clothes.

 My dreams were fierce. The worst one had Andy being torn apart, his bones cracking like dry kindling, by something huge and dark, eyes like egg-shaped, glowing prisms. I heard Marsh’s voice screaming in triumph, “Dagon! Dagonnn!”  I could hear waves crashing in the background and smell the ocean. It turned its blazing eyes on me...

 “No!” I shouted as I jerked myself upwards into full wakefulness.

 I was sweating and felt ill. A cool breeze blew fitfully through the west window but all it did was chill me.

 Change in the weather comin’, I reasoned.

 The front doorbell rang. I looked at the clock: just past nine. I got up, knowing Andy was probably asleep, and only the Last Trump could wake him. I straightened my clothes as much as possible and went to answer the door, shaking my head to clear the cobwebs left by my short sleep. Jimmy Cochrane stood outside, his detective’s badge in hand. I’m 183 cm. but the man had a good head on me and probably 25 kilos, too. He extended a large hand to shake.

 “May I come in?” he asked, as I accepted his hand.

 I let him inside and showed him to the kitchen. He pulled out one of the crafted wooden chairs and sat down slowly. You could tell this fellow had broken chairs before then; I worried about my brother’s investment. I offered him a cold drink (“No, thanks”), then a coffee (“Yes, please.”). I went about setting up the coffee maker and we talked back and forth about the heat, the cooling in the air that a.m. and the Jays. Finally, we sat across from each other, coffees in hand.

 Cochrane sat back slightly.

 “Tell me again about last night. Don’t leave anything out.”

 I told him, in detail, all that had happened late Friday night and early Saturday. I spoke with some heat about having nothing to do with the broken bench or the blood. I made a point about mentioning the shoe and the noises from the river again.

 “What does the noise from the river suggest to you?” he asked.

 “I, I don’t know. It was as if I was in shock. Most of the night seems like a blur.”

 “Does the name 'Darrel Spencer' mean anything to you?”

 Darrel! “No. Why?”

 “He was a young offender who had given a DNA sample a few months ago. It was his blood at the crime scene. They dragged the river there, too.”

 “What did they find?”

 “I’m not at liberty to say.” He gave me a cryptic look. “It’s beginning to look like a homicide, though. You’ll be relieved to know you’re not the prime suspect. The lab boys found your footprints in the blood but no other physical evidence. So you shouldn’t worry.”

 He gave me a smile which showed missing teeth, a boxer’s smile. It clashed with his fine, grey suit. He ran his left hand through thinning, red hair.  

 “Sorry to have troubled you. Actually, this news might have made you feel some better.”

 He gulped the last of his coffee and stood up.

 “I’ll let myself out. And, yeah, I know this sound’s hokey but: don’t leave town for the next few days.”

 He grinned at me and patted me on the shoulder as he left. I heard the door open and shut.

 That was weird, I thought.

 I felt strange after Cochrane left. Lassitude flooded over me, leaving me sitting there at the table as my coffee cooled down to undrinkable. The effects of arriving at the scene of Darrel Spencer’s slaughter had unnerved me more than I had realized. Had I been away from action... from war and death so long that this occurrence shocked me into immobility?

 And why, I wondered, haven’t I mentioned Ezra Marsh?

 Sacrifice, Andy had said. For more fish.

 Not tonight! I thought. I won’t let it happen again!

 As I stood up from the table, I appraised my life briefly. I said to myself, I’ve done... questionable things, even evil things. It’s time to balance things out.

 Later, in the early afternoon light, with thunder rumbling in the distance, I went to my bedroom and began my preparations. I wasn’t sure for what I was getting ready but I was sure it involved death... and death was something I knew.

 I knew Andy still slept so I quietly entered the closet in my room. I was quiet because the bathtub in the bathroom next door would act as a sound conduit right into Andy’s room. I didn’t want to take the small chance of waking him, yet. I removed the collection of shoes and boots from the closet floor. Once the floor was cleared, I removed the piece of carpeting, exposing the trapdoor to the crawlspace.

 I opened it. The smell of fresh damp earth surrounded me. Reaching down, I found the waterproof box. I felt around for the handle on one end and picked the container up. Carefully, still trying to be as quiet as possible, I pulled it up through the square hole. I set the heavy box on the floor just outside the closet and worked the combination lock.  

 The khaki combat uniform was still folded neatly. I removed the clothing to get at the smaller box under it. The box opened revealing a GLOCK 37 pistol and several clips of ten .45 calibre hollow-point bullets. I inspected this then closed the tin and set it aside. Farther down in the main box, I found two sticks of camouflage paint.

 There we go, I thought, feeling complete.

 I slid the smaller box, the paint, and my uniform under the bed. The bigger box went back under the floor. I then laid down and waited...

 The storm that struck later that afternoon was intense. Clarkesville hadn’t had one like it all summer. The lightning flashed almost continuously followed by cannonades of thunder. The wind blew up a gale. The power went off twice but neither time lasted more than a few moments. It was bad enough to make me think a tornado was in the works.

 I could hear Andy awake in his room yelling at the more brilliant displays: “Jesus! Holy fuck!”

 The storm rolled its way eastward, leaving cooler air in its wake... plus a few relieved citizens. It was 5:00 pm. so I went to the kitchen. I wasn’t hungry but Andy was always a bottomless pit when it came to food. I began to prepare some spaghetti, using slices of fried sausage in the sauce (Andy’s preference).

 I was quiet during supper. Andy was, too, sensing my mood. The noodles and sauce could have been paper and water as far as I was concerned but my brother enjoyed it. Due to his efforts, there wasn’t any left to be refrigerated. He helped me clean off the table and grabbed a bagel from the fridge. I told him I would wash and dry the supper dishes later. He looked surprised.

 “What’s with the sudden generosity?” he asked.

 “Maybe I went and got religion.”

 He chuckled, stuffed the bagel in his mouth, and went to his room, a can of Pepsi in hand. Excluding forays for more cola and trips to the bathroom, I knew I had probably seen the last of him until morning. I went back to my room. I knew I had some hours to wait.

 What was I going to be facing? A band of cultists of some kind, likely. Marsh couldn’t have butchered Darrel all by himself. Could he? My mind raced.

 I somehow knew that Ezra Marsh and his followers (how many?) would have another victim there by the river tonight. Sixth sense? I didn’t think so. It was just one hunter reading the heart of another.

 I knelt beside the bed and pulled out the box and the uniform. The “COLSON” name-tag stared up at me from above the left breast pocket. I looked at the Regimental Sergeant Major insignia’s lion and unicorn. I sighed and opened the box and took out the GLOCK. Dominic, my supplier, had told me I’d like this weapon. I’d only test-fired it five times while back at the old farm. I pulled the slide back and gazed at the cleanliness of the breech. I sighed again. I set the automatic pistol aside and took out ten clips of ammunition.

 A small voice inside me cried, Tell the police!

 I ignored it. I'd decided to treat it as a “The Black” op but this time I was certain of the ethics of my target(s). I laid the uniform beside me on the queen-sized bed. I put nine of the clips in the pant-leg pockets, four on one side, the rest on the other. I loaded the last clip into the GLOCK and clicked the pistol’s safety, putting it under my pillow. I put the tin box back under the bed. I then reached over to my alarm clock and set it for 11:00 pm.; four hours to wait. I wondered if I’d sleep.

 I stared at the clock until 10:30. I climbed off the bed and stripped to my shorts and put the khaki on. I tucked the shirt in, reached under my pillow, and got the pistol. I stopped for a second; I’d forgotten the holster. I shook my head in disbelief and corrected that by getting the metal container out again.

 As I pulled the holster out of the very bottom, I thought, I had better get a grip or I’m going to die tonight.

 The holster held the pistol under my left armpit. I placed the GLOCK gently, barrel first, into the leather. I then took the camouflage paint out. I didn’t need a mirror. I had done it so many times before. It took a minute, using both shades of green. To finish, I put a camouflage baseball cap (from my collection of caps on the wall) on my head. I then went into “war-mode” and moved like a ghost out of my bedroom. I could hear Andy clicking away on his keyboard but he didn’t hear me. I opened and closed the door to the breezeway silently and in a moment, I was outside.

 There was a stiff breeze blowing from the southwest, pushing fitful clouds ahead of it. I circled the south side of our house and headed north.

 I crouched, crawled, and slid behind the neighbours’ houses on Sandra Street until I reached Babcock Road and the south side of the park. I crossed Babcock like a shadow. The light from the almost-full moon waxed and waned with the passing of the clouds. Gravel pressed against my bare feet, followed by the kiss of cool, wet grass.

 Passage through the conservation area was tricky: some branches had been blown down. As I approached the boardwalk, I saw the path’s lights were lit this night. The bench had been hastily slapped together and was festooned with crime-scene tape. I was rather surprised that any repairs had been done. Two figures were seated there. One of them was Marsh; I could tell from his black hat. I couldn’t tell who the other was. I waited.

 Ezra Marsh stood up. He was wearing a black robe instead of his suit. He held out his hand to the other, who was female. She took his hand and stood up. She was slim with long, dark hair. She was clothed in jeans and a denim jacket. She moved slowly, stiffly... as if she was in a trance. The old man walked her to the side of the boardwalk away from the water.

 “Stay here, Nicole,” he said quite clearly.

 He walked to the water’s edge. I could tell he was singing one the Hymns of Dagon without the book this time.

 Probably has them all memorized! I thought inanely.

 Marsh reached the river’s brink and turned and faced the girl. He dropped his robe, exposing his scrawny, hairless body. He turned back to the water and raised his arms to it.

 Seeing him naked and then vulnerable, I stepped out of the shadows, brandishing the GLOCK and yelled, “Forget it, Marsh, you ass-hole! It’s over! Let the girl go!”

His response was a maniacal cackle. He swivelled his head to look at me.

 “You cannot stop what has been started here! Dread Cthulhu will curse you if you try!”

 He looked back at the water, arms still outstretched.

 “Caleb! In the name of Dagonnnn! Rise up!” he roared, body quaking, the volume of his voice giving a lie to his weak-appearing form.

 Just in front of him, the water erupted and something leapt ashore. The first thought I had was, The Creature from the Black Lagoon!

 Then Nicole started screaming and collapsed into a quivering ball of fear. This was real! The sea animal, half-human thing; it let out a blubbering squeal and moved toward the terrified girl. I acted, filled with rage.

 “No, you don’t scumbag!” I screamed and aimed.

 Marsh saw this and bellowed, in return, “No!”

 I put the laser-sight right on the monster’s chest and fired. It moved sideways incredibly fast but the slug still connected. The right shoulder disintegrated into a cloud of flesh, scales, and bone fragments. The beast howled, the remains of its right arm hanging loose. Marsh yelled out in anguish.

 I ran up to the young woman. I was 5 metres or so from “Caleb”. I grabbed her left flailing wrist and pulled her to her feet. She resisted but I lifted her up with fear-fuelled strength. She looked at me with shock-dimmed eyes. She looked past me and saw the thing and almost withdrew into her ball again. I slapped her hard. Her eyes cleared and she looked at me sanely for just a moment.

 I hollered in her face, “Run! For fuck's sake, run!”

 She turned and scampered south, toward Babcock Road. She cried out as she ran. Answering cries came from the west.

 I felt a heavy impact on the ground behind me. I whirled around. Mortally wounded, the beast stood before me, taller and wider than a normal man could be. It had jumped the five metres! I brought my pistol up and it hit me with its good hand... with claws. Pain splashed through me and I was raised spinning in the air. My right side was aflame and I was sure I was leaving my intestines quivering in the air.

 In that second I thought wildly, Don't drop the GLOCK! Don't drop the GLOCK!

 I hit the ground, bone-breaking hard. I didn’t drop the GLOCK.

 I rolled to my back and looked between my feet. Caleb was now twice as far away. I tried to raise my right arm. Pain! I reached across my chest and took my weapon from my injured right hand. I aimed the pistol with my left, putting the little red dot on Caleb’s chest. Marsh saw this as he stood by the monster and flung himself across the creature in its defence.

 I thought, Get one of you!

 The round hit the old man in the head, taking the back of it off. His body dropped like a stone. Caleb looked down wildly, his eyes like wide green prisms, the gore on his chest now with the addition of Marsh's brain-matter.

 “Poppa! Poppa!” he howled.

 He picked the elderly man’s corpse up with his left hand and turned back to the river. I aimed shakily with my left hand and unloaded a shot at the back of his head. Then everything went black...

 Through waking and losing consciousness, I saw much:

 A tall, wide-shouldered, middle-aged man with a full grey beard bending over me and saying, “Well done.”

 A harried-looking policeman, dripping-wet from rain, yelling, “EMS! Right now!”

 Lightning flashed before my eyes, turning the raindrops silver...

 I laid swaddled in a bed in the ICU of the County Hospital. Worried-looking nurses looked in on me from time-to-time. Andy was by my bed much, holding my left hand, careful of the IV. Doctor Alder was there several times. He looked concerned, too. Over it all was the smell of seaweed. I decided I was dying.

 There came a time, though, when I was alone. I started to close my eyes and enter oblivion once more when movement caught them. The middle-aged man with the full beard entered the room (no other patients were there) without hindrance from the nurses. He walked to the head of my bed. I rolled my eyes to look at him.

 “Well done,” he repeated, reaching into his grey robe. He pulled out a vial filled with clear liquid. He uncorked it and reached over, holding it to my lips.

 “Drink,” he said.

 Dumbfounded, I followed his command. It was bitter but somehow soothing. I noticed the seaweed smell ebbing. The pain in my right side eased markedly.

 “In two days you’ll go home.”

 He walked out of the ICU with the same silence as when he came. I drifted off to sleep.

 Two days later, I was sitting in front of the 54-inch with a Pepsi in my hand. The wounds and infections had cleared up... just like that... after the antibiotics had failed at first.

 Doctor Alder called it jokingly, “A medical miracle.”

 You could see the puzzlement in his eyes.

 I sat there on the LayZeeBoy, with the ounce of rum in my cola taking the edge off the itch in my right side (Andy had agreed one ounce wouldn’t hurt). The sutures were still in but would be dissolved in a few weeks (or less). The Jays were winning on the tube and life was good...

 In the next few weeks of healing, I found out a few things. The girl whose life I’d saved was Nicole Troyer, a friend of Andy’s. I had met her before but under much more relaxed circumstances. She’d actually come screaming to our door. Andy had taken her in and called the O.P.P. and the ambulance. They thought someone had tried to rape her (I was briefly accused of that!). Nicole couldn’t remember anything after the first bad storm. Some teenagers had been smoking marijuana over by the bandstand: they saw everything, they said, but their stories, interesting (and close to the truth) though they were, were dismissed. Any blood and brain tissue had been washed away by the second storm that had occurred right after my meeting with Marsh and Caleb. The river was dragged but no bodies were found.

 Finally, I think the official story ran that I had stopped in the park and rescued Miss Troyer from two attackers. One of them had been in some type of costume, perhaps a wet suit and mask. I had fired at both but they were able to get away. They had, however, had time to stab me repeatedly before leaving. The police then arrived to find me bleeding to death in the rain. End of story.

 My pistol was confiscated, being illegal in Canada. There were a few other charges against me, mostly firearms-related, but Sade was able to have them dropped.

 Most of the information came from Cochrane who showed up one day to see how I was doing.

 Since he had AB- blood, Andy had donated some of his to make up for what I’d lost. This brought us closer together and made us friends for months.

 To make a long story short: I healed well. I still walked, using a cane to help with the pain on my right side: ribs had been broken as well as the gashes and bruises. I walked around town, looking for the middle-aged man with the full grey beard... but I never saw him. After a few months, I gave up, about the same time as I stopped using the cane. In a town the size of Clarkesville, you would see anybody that time.

 I was “goin’ over town” quite a bit during that search. I’ve talked to the anglers (there weren’t many) as I passed, going north or south.

 I was told the fishing sucked...

[welllpthisishappening]

Out of the Frying Pan (32/?)

“Are you crying?” Ariel asked, voice shaking a bit as she rubbed her knuckles across her cheeks, dragging a bit of mascara along with her.

“Absolutely not,” Emma promised, blinking quickly like that would hide the evidence.

“Of course not. Me either. Only saps cry at weddings.”

AN: I owe @laurnorder like sixteen thousand gifts for fixing all of this and making it better and then several more thousand gifts for @distant-rose who is currently reading a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a story that hasn’t been posted yet. 

Living it up on Ao3 and tag’ed up on Tumblr. 

It was blue.

The dress she was wearing was blue.

And, somehow, didn’t manage to cut off any of her circulation or make it all but impossible to breathe.

Mary Margaret had claimed that was some sort of sign. As if dresses could give signs.

It felt like a sign.

Emma would never admit that out loud.

Ariel had come jogging back down the aisle with only a few minutes to spare before the very fancy invitation Killian had shown Emma two days before promised the ceremony was slated to begin. She slid into the chair next to her, hand pressed flat against her chest and trying to shake her hair out of her eyes. “Jeez, I’m out of shape,” she mumbled, throwing a smile Emma’s direction.

“Everything ok?” “Oh yeah, yeah, everything’s fine,” she said quickly and it didn’t entirely sound like everything was fine. Emma raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes just a bit, earning a dramatic sigh from Ariel, whose bangs fell back into her eyes when she rolled her entire body in response. “Ok,” she mumbled, “so Robin was pacing and there was a lot of hugging and somehow Killian’s jacket got all wet.” “Killian’s jacket got wet? Did they go outside?” “Beats me, they were holed up in some shoebox of a room when I went to deliver Rol. He was very interested in your dress though.” “Who, Robin?” “Killian,” Ariel said with all the tact of someone who was still fairly out of breath and not particularly interested in putting up with Emma’s brand of slightly off-color, pre-wedding ceremony jokes. “Obviously.” “Obviously.” She was just about to ask what exactly Ariel had told Killian about her dress when there were footsteps in front of the quasi-altar someone had, presumably, built the night before in this very expensive event hall and Emma didn’t actually need to ask if he’d been interested in her dress – it was practically written on his face.

He barely even scanned the crowd – admittedly a bit intimidating in its size – before landing on her, one side of his mouth turning up immediately and Emma felt her own smile move across her face quickly, a rush of something emotional shooting through her entire system.

Mary Margaret had promised she’d sweep him off his feet,  but Emma was willing to settle for stunned in front of an altar.

The music started and Ariel nudged Emma’s shoulder, pulling her attention away from Killian to find a tuxedo-wearing Roland Locksley all but sprinting up the aisle, a box clutched in his hand and a smile on his face. He skidded to a stop in front of Robin, pushing the box towards his father. Killian reached forward to grab it, shaking his head slightly and Emma’s pulse felt like it was pounding in her ears.

It was painfully adorable and she felt herself wanting before she even realized she’d considered anything remotely like that.

There was a shift in key or rhythm or something and the doors at the end of the room opened again, Zelena walking a few feet in front of Regina.

And it was like she’d stepped into a movie.

Emma shouldn’t have been surprised – she’d seen the scrapbook or the want-to-be Pinterest board, after all – but she couldn’t help the soft gasp she let out when she saw the producer walking down the aisle, a picture of white and fitted silk and, quite possibly, the longest veil she’d ever seen in her life.

It was perfect.

She looked perfect.

She looked perfectly happy too.

There were vows and Roland nearly tripped over his own feet grabbing the ring box out of Killian’s hand to make sure he had his momentduring the ceremony and then were kisses and, maybe, a few tears and some of them might have actually have been Emma’s.

“Are you crying?” Ariel asked, voice shaking a bit as she rubbed her knuckles across her cheeks, dragging a bit of mascara along with her.

“Absolutely not,” Emma promised, blinking quickly like that would hide the evidence.

“Of course not. Me either. Only saps cry at weddings.” “Did you cry at your wedding?”

Ariel shook her head, stepping into the aisle almost as soon as Robin and Regina had walked by them. “Nah,” she said. “I was too busy making sure my dad didn’t kill Eric.” “Your dad didn’t like Eric?”

She made a noise in the back of her throat, something that sounded almost like a derisive laugh and Emma raised her eyebrows waiting for the explanation. “He does now,” Ariel said, lining up behind what might have actually been a hundred people waiting to hug and congratulate Robin and Regina. “But that might have only been because of Killian.” “What?” Emma asked, almost breaking her ankle as she came up short.

“You didn’t know that?” Emma shook her head and Ariel rolled her eyes, taking a few steps backwards as the line continued to move. “He’d probably never admit it out loud, but Killian absolutely talked to my dad about Eric. At the wedding, I’m fairly positive. Told him Eric was a good guy and made enough money to be acknowledged by my family, which seems fairly absurd for the parent of a restaurant hostess, but it seemed to sink in. My dad’s, like, obsessed with Killian now. Thinks he’s the greatest.”

Emma blinked again – and maybe she was crying a little bit again. And she really wanted to see her boyfriend.

“I’ll be right back,” she muttered, ignoring Ariel’s knowing smile as she glanced around the lobby to try and find Killian. He was in the corner, arms crossed over his chest and his jacket didn’t look like it had gotten wet before the ceremony started.

It looked good. He looked good.

Emma was bordering dangerously close to suggesting they find some sort of closet somewhere when she heard Killian’s voice a few feet ahead of her, the concern in his tone obvious even before she’d come up next to him.

“Does Emma know?” he asked, gaze not wavering as he looked intently at Zelena.

“Does Emma know what?”

He moved quicker than she expected, practically knocking over the head of the network, to look straight at her and if she’d thought he was staring at her in front of the altar, it was nothing to the way he looked at her with just a few inches separating them.

Killian took a step forward, hand falling on her waist and fingers gripping the fabric of her dress.

“Swan,” he said slowly. “You look…” “I know,” she said, grinning at him and there was no reason not to be kissing him. Emma tugged on the front of his jacket and she vaguely heard Zelena groan before she started walking away and this was a very good start to a fourth date.

“You don’t look so bad yourself, you know,” Emma mumbled, pushing her fingers into his hair and she hoped he didn’t have to take pictures later.

“Smooth talker.” She laughed softly, forehead falling forward to rest on his shoulder and his hand hadn’t moved a single inch. “I like this dress.” “Yeah, strangely enough, I think I picked up on that.” “Smart.” “What were you guys talking about?” she asked, the question falling out of her mouth before she could stop herself. Emma bit into her lip tightly, glancing up at him quickly and, hoping, she hadn’t quite ruined the moment entirely. “Who?” “You and Zelena.” “Oh,” he said softly, like it was a question he’d hoped she wouldn’t actually ask. Moment ruined. Officially. “Just about what’s going to happen after the all-star stuff wraps.” “And that includes me?”

Killian took a deep breath – she could feel his whole body move with the effort of it – and his hand fell away from her waist as he leaned forward to kiss the top of her forehead. She waited, eyes wide and eyebrows raised and tried to look encouraging.

He looked nervous.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said.

“Ok.”

She answered without thinking about it, without letting herself even try and imagine what could possibly make his face go slack like that, eyes dulling and it felt like he couldn’t get quite enough oxygen to his lungs. Killian grabbed her hand, tugging her across the entryway back towards the hallway, turning a corner to where the ceremony had been and where they were still setting up tables and a dance floor.

“What’s going on?” Emma asked, fingers tightening in his.

He opened his mouth, shoulders dropping in a way she wasn’t entirely sure she’d ever seen before, but he didn’t even get a chance to say a single syllable before someone came sprinting into the room, nearly screaming his name.

“Cap! Cap!”

Killian groaned, eyes closing lightly as he turned around to stare at a manic-looking Eric. “What?” he spat and Emma squeezed his hand tightly.

Eric took a step back and it was only then that Emma noticed his normally immaculate white jacket was smeared with stains, like he couldn’t stop rubbing his hands on the fabric and there was a patch of hair sticking up on the back of his head. “Uh,” the sous chef muttered, “sorry to interrupt.” “It’s alright,” Killian said, voice just a bit calmer on second try. “What’s going on?” “Cora wants to change things again.” “What?”

“She wants to get rid of the sliders and do something else.” “Something else with, literally, pounds of ground beef?” His voice shook with the frustration Emma knew he was barely keeping contained and she twisted around him, sliding up against the side of his body until she’d wormed his arm around her, head resting on the slope of his shoulder.

“I know, Cap, I know,” Eric sighed, rubbing his hands on the front of his jacket again. “And I know you’re not supposed to be worried about this shit tonight, but I don’t know what to do.” “Did Cora, in her, I’m sure, long list of demands, point out what she wanted instead of sliders? The ones we put on the menu for Rol?” Eric shook his head before Killian had even finished talking and he groaned again at the answer. “You got another jacket?” he asked, arms already halfway out of tuxedo before Eric even had a chance to be properly scandalized.

“What?” “Another jacket. We must have brought extra ones right?” “I don’t think so.” Killian rolled his eyes, but he was actually smiling now and Emma knew where this was going. He was going to play hero. And save the appetizers. “Well, I’ll just have to try and not make a complete mess of things,” he said, grinning at Emma over his shoulder and for a moment she almost forgot that he’d been trying to tell her something before.

Almost.

“You don’t have to do that,” Eric sighed. “I only came out to find out what you wanted to make. A will kill me if I make you work.” “She’s the one who was mad about it,” Killian argued. Eric just shrugged, seemingly torn between a wife who wanted things to go according to plan and a boss who would know what to do with several pounds of ground beef. “Swan,” he said, handing her his coat. “You’ll have to make sure Ari doesn’t actually stage some sort of protest in the middle of the reception here, ok? And I want to know exactly what’s going on with Scarlet and Belle, deal?” Emma stared at him, eyes narrowing slightly at the coat he was still dangling in front of her. And if he thought she’d just sit there and wait for him,  he had absolutely lost his mind.

“Swan?”

“Yeah, no, I’m not doing that,” she said, setting her feet and crossing her arms tightly.

“What?” “Let me help.” “What?” he repeated.

“That was English, right?” “It was.” “Then what was confusing exactly?” Killian twisted his mouth slightly, one side of his lips pulling up and he looked equal parts entertained and surprised. He shouldn’t have been either.

“Nothing, love,” he said slowly, pulling his hand back and draping his coat over his forearm. “We don’t have anymore jackets, apparently.” “And if you think the lack of a jacket has ever kept me out of a kitchen, then you’ve got another thing coming. Come on, you know I can, at least, chop things efficiently.” Eric laughed loudly and Killian spun around quickly with, what Emma could only assume, was a very specific type of glare on his face. “Guess I’ll just have to be careful then, won’t I?” she asked.

Killian pressed his lips together tightly, a straight line that was nearly as full of tension as his shoulders appeared to be. “Fine, but we’re doing this quick, ok?” “Of course.” He shook his head, running his hand through his hair as he stalked back towards the kitchen – or where Emma assumed the kitchen had to be. She wasn’t entirely positive where they were going.

“Meatballs,” Killian said, two minutes and one very quiet trek down the hallway later. “We’ll make meatballs.” “You’ve got breadcrumbs?” Emma asked, glancing at the small staff that appeared to be everyone on The Jolly Roger’s payroll.

“We’ve got mini hamburger buns. And I’d imagine there are eggs somewhere here in this kitchen.”

“There are like ten dozen eggs in the fridge,” Eric confirmed.

“That could work then,” Emma said, trying to adjust her feet in her heels as she glanced around for some kind of knife. Killian grinned at her, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt as he moved back towards a counter in the corner, a small pile of vegetables sitting on the formica. “What do you want to do, Swan?” he asked and that caught her off guard just a bit.

“What do you mean?” “I won’t make you mix the actual meatballs,” he laughed, grabbing a knife and slicing across several packages at once with an efficiency that both stunned and impressed her just a bit. “God forbid we mess up that dress. But there are other things you can do.” “Like?”

“Stuffed mushrooms?” Eric asked, jogging past Killian and nodding towards someone who was searing something on top of one of the stoves on the other side of the kitchen.

“You’re making full stuffed mushrooms?”

Killian shook his head, eyes not coming off the mixture he was already halfway done making. “Half,” he said quickly, cracking an egg. “Like half-shell oysters, but, you know, with mushroom tops.” “That’s kind of ingenious.” He looked up at that, blue eyes flashing at her and Emma was struck with the realization that they worked well together. Really well together. What had he said before? They’d been strapped back-to-back at the time and if she was under oath, Emma would have to admit that she hadn’t been listening to him as much as she was trying to document the way his body moved against hers, but it was something important.

We make quite a team.

They did.

And she wondered, all over again, what he and Zelena had been talking about. And what he had to tell her.

“A compliment, Swan?” he laughed, one eyebrow pulled up his forehead.

She shrugged and someone deposited a bowl of cut-up mushrooms in front of her like some sort of vegetable-elf. “Don’t let it go to your head.” Killian laughed, glancing at her and taking a, maybe, unconscious step closer. “Not until we’re home at least,” he muttered, sending a very certain type of chill down her spine.

Emma didn’t say anything, but her back teeth captured her cheek tightly as she tried to keep breathing like a functioning human being holding a very expensive, very sharp knife. He laughed again and that was hardly fair, he shouldn’t know just like that.

They worked in silence for the next half an hour – Ariel only tried to barge into the kitchen once and maybe there was something to be said for red hair and tempers and trying to control situations – sticking to an appetizer schedule Killian had come up with weeks before.

They snuck bits of food off trays as they went out of the kitchen, a seemingly never-ending carousel of uniformed waiters and Killian barking orders at cooking staff like he actually was a captain of some sort of metaphorical food-focused ship.

It was probably best that Emma didn’t mention that.

His shoulders could only hold up so much tension in a single night.

And for as much as she hadn’t expected to be in a kitchen, doing her best not to get a single piece of mushroom or stuffing on her very expensive, very blue, very form-fitting dress, Emma enjoyed herself.

She enjoyed working and cooking and watching Killian in his element.

Quite a team.

The final appetizer tray went out nearly an hour after Eric had interrupted them – and, by Emma’s count, had apologized for that interruption no less than seven times – and Killian’s hand was on hers soon as the kitchen door swung shut, tugging the handle of the knife out of her grip and grinning at her like he couldn’t quite believe she was there.

“We’re done, love,” he muttered softly.

“You didn’t ruin your shirt did you?” she asked, leaning back slowly to glance at the fabric. He hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t.

Killian shook his head, eyes roving up and down her torso. “And you seemed to save your dress too.” “Almost as if I know how to chop cleanly.” “I never doubted you for a second, Swan.” “Yuh huh,” she laughed, walking towards the door and she could hear him following behind her, muttering dinner instructions at Eric and promises that he wouldn’t set a single foot in the kitchen for the rest of the night.

“I’ve got plans,” he said and Emma’s dress felt a bit tight. Mary Margaret clearly hadn’t taken swooning into account when they picked the size.

The hall was a chaotic mess compared to the orderly kitchen they’d just walked out of, but it was also filled with music and dancing and a color scheme that was so incredibly fine-tuned that Emma was a bit surprised Regina hadn’t requested that the staff repaint the walls to match everything.

It was perfect.

“Well,” Killian said, unknowingly snapping Emma out of a potential descent into jealous and wants and, God help her, hopes. “We’ve wasted enough time, don’t you think, love?” She didn’t have a chance to respond with any kind of vaguely witty retort, a million and two slightly sarcastic comments hanging off the tip of her tongue, Killian’s fingers wrapping around her wrist and tugging her towards the jam-packed dance floor, twisting them through the crowd until they were, somehow, in the middle of it all.

“Where have you two been? Adding another location to the list?” Will laughed at them and there may have been a bit of alcohol involved and Belle looked apologetic, pressed up tightly against him.

“Watch it, Scarlet,” Killian muttered. Will’s smile didn’t waver an inch. “We had to cook.”

“Killian saved the appetizers,” Emma said, ignoring the way he sighed dramatically at that.

“Of course he did,” Will groaned. Killian made some noise in the back of his throat, something that sounded like disbelief and Emma shot a conspiratorial smile in Will’s direction. He winked at her.

“What had to get saved?” Belle asked. “Because everything was pretty delicious.” “The meatballs,” Emma answered and she was on some kind of supportive-girlfriend roll, ready and willing to brag to anyone who would listen. It wasn’t a position she was particularly used to, but she liked to imagine she was doing a pretty good job of it.

And if the way Killian’s fingers kept tracing over the back of her neck, left hand anchored on her waist, was any indication, her instinct wasn’t too far off.

“Those were my favorite,” Belle said.

Will rolled his eyes. “You’re going to inflate his ego,” he laughed, but she just smacked her hand lightly against the front of his collared shirt. “Uncle Killian!”

He groaned again, leaning away from Emma slightly to make sure Roland didn’t collide with either one of their legs, reaching down to scoop up the seven-year-old in what was, quite clearly, a practiced movement. “What’s the matter, mate?” Killian asked, shifting Roland as he spoke.

“I don’t have a seat,” he yelled, nearly screaming the words in Killian’s ears.

“Of course you do, up there with your dad and Gina.” Emma glanced the direction Killian had nodded in – only to find a very preoccupied newlywed couple sitting there. In the only two seats that were at the table.

“Uh, Killian,” she said softly, widening her eyes towards the pair. He practically growled, eyes rolling up towards the ceiling and if he wasn’t holding the ringbearer of this wedding Emma absolutely would have kissed him.

And she knew it wasn’t the plan he had – knew there was, somewhere, some plan and some alternate universe that was probably full of dancing and swooning and a fair amount of kissing and didn’t include appetizer disasters or sarcastic bartenders or seven-year-olds who were, apparently, without a seat for dinner.

And she also knew she didn’t care.

Because this, this entire mess was real and that sounded cheesy and ridiculous when said out loud, but right there, staring at Killian with Roland propped against his side, eyes occasionally darting towards her like he was trying to apologize without actually saying anything, she couldn’t imagine wanting anything more.

“I don’t want to sit with Cora,” Roland said, mumbling the words into Killian’s collar. He’d never put his jacket back on.

“I wouldn’t want to sit with Cora,” Killian muttered under his breath, glancing at Emma with one side of his mouth pulled up.

“Why don’t you come sit with us, Rol?” Emma asked and he nearly leapt out of Killian’s arms at the suggestion. Killian grunted when a well-placed knee collided with his stomach. “We can find another chair or push some people around.”

“Really?” he asked and somewhere along the line someone was going to have to teach this kid about volume and voice control.

“You sure, Swan?” Killian asked softly, something flashing across his face.

She nodded quickly as Roland wriggled back towards the ground. “Yeah, of course. Can’t leave him to fend for himself with the appetizer queen.”

Killian’s shoulders shook with laughter, grinning at her with every one of those vaguely ridiculous emotions she’d just told herself sounded far too absurd to actually say out loud. They worked better on his face anyway. “That does make sense,” he said. “I seem to remember being called smart earlier, so it’s only fair I live up to the reputation.” “Emma,” Roland said, cutting in between the two of them and tugging on her hand. “You look really pretty.” And if this wasn’t bordering dangerously close to perfect, it was probably because it was actually something Emma had dreamed up.

“Hey,” Killian said, grabbing him by the waist and hauling him over his shoulder, ignoring Roland’s loud yelp as he flipped him over his shoulder. “Back off, mate. It’s bad form to go after a crewman’s date like that.” “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Roland laughed, kicking his feet slightly as they made their way back towards the table.

“We’ll let this one slide.” “I don’t know, Rol, you might have a bit of an edge here,” Emma said, grinning at Killian and trying to not pay too much attention to the way her stomach kept flipping inside her body. “After all, your outfit is so much better.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, hand finding the back of her neck the moment they sat down. “Was that a challenge, love?” “You going to duel for my honor with a seven-year-old?” “No,” he said, muttering the word against her ear. “I’m going to get us back on the plan.”

The cab stopped outside The Jolly Roger and Emma’s body jerked a bit at the sudden shift in momentum, head colliding almost painfully with Killian’s shoulder.

Her feet hurt.

She should have bought better shoes.

Or brought better shoes.

Or a purse that could have fit flats.

She didn’t do any of that. Instead, she danced until she was positive she had a fair share of cuts on the back of her heels and a whole slew of blisters that weren’t doing anything to make her feel nearly as attractive as she wanted to when the cab was stopped outside The Jolly Roger.

“Still with me, love?” he asked softly and her heart stuttered in her chest a bit, his voice landing in the very middle of her.

And that’s how it had been all night – after the appetizer disaster and Roland missing a chair and Will refusing to stop talking about makeout locations until Killian had actually muttered something about hours and jobs and divulging information to recently acquired girlfriends – a mess of normal that made Emma’s pulse thud painfully in her veins, like it was setting a tone for everything she’d ever wanted.

Or something like that.

She was exhausted.

She hadn’t actually answered him, just hummed in response, cheek pressed up against his tuxedo jacket as she tried to burrow herself against his side. That was easier said than done while he was also trying to pay for the cab, but they were doing an admirable job of it, a mess of limbs that, somehow, managed not get knotted up.

“Come on, Swan,” Killian muttered, leaning them both forward slightly to grab the receipt from the driver, before pulling her onto the curb, letting her rest her weight against him without so much as a single word.

He just smiled at her.

The entire building was dark – the first time Emma had ever seen it like that, had ever really seen it without a line practically wrapped around the block – and neither one of them said anything as Killian directed them towards the back door, keys shaking just a bit as he pulled them out of his pocket.

She pulled her heels off as soon as the door closed behind them, earning a soft chuckle from Killian as he laced his fingers through hers as they made their way upstairs.

It was quiet in his apartment – the only sound the light switch as he flipped it on and the soft pattern of his shoes on the hardwood floor. And she wasn’t entirely sure what she should say or what she would say if she could even think of a single word.

It seemed like a moment,  like something they’d both been waiting for, but had been too afraid to actually hope for it.

And Emma wondered when she’d gotten so goddamn sentimental.

Probably around the same time he said he loved her back in the hallway.

“Hungry?” Killian asked. Emma shook her head. “Thirsty?” Another head shake.

He shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it lightly on the arm of the couch a few feet behind him and she wasn’t positive he had actually blinked since they walked into the room, eyes gazing at her intently like they were trying to find something there.

She wondered what it was.

“I’m sorry it didn’t go according to plan tonight,” he muttered, voice dropping softly as he leaned against the side of the couch, absolutely wrinkling his jacket.

“What do you mean?” Emma’s voice felt scratchy in her throat, like she hadn’t actually spoken in several years instead of the few minutes it had actually been.

“I did have a plan. That didn’t include you cooking tonight. You’re not supposed to cook on a date.” “We both cook all the time.” “Yeah, but this was supposed to be special or something equally ridiculous.” “It was,” Emma said, trying to put every ounce of certainty she’d ever felt when it came to him in those two words. “Special, not ridiculous.” “Yeah?” And her heart might have cracked a bit at the uncertainty in his voice.  

Emma nodded slowly, dropping her heels in the corner behind the door, stepping towards Killian and he absolutely hadn’t blinked, all blue eyes and his hand pushed in his hair and that earnest, little smile on the corner of his mouth.

She pressed her knees against his, thighs practically springing open so she could step into his space, her hands pushing their way underneath the jacket she had forgotten he was still wearing. Killian’s head fell forward, resting on the front of her body and Emma’s hands were in the bottom of his hair before she’d even registered that she had limbs and they were moving.

“For what it’s worth,” she said, whispering out the words while she tried to take a deep breath. “I’m glad it didn’t go according to plan.” His head snapped up, questions etched into nearly every corner of his face including the small crease between his eyebrows. “It shouldn’t have been so hectic.” “It was fun.” “You had fun cooking and listening to a seven-year-old?” “I had fun cooking with you and in case you weren’t listening, that seven-year-old was doling out some pretty impressive compliments all night. So, yeah, I did.” His eyes widened a fraction of an inch and she heard his sharp intake of breath, saw the small way his head shook, like he couldn’t quite believe she was there. It was a look she’d noticed more than a few times that night.

It made buying the dress worth it.

He might have muttered something that sounded like incredible before he was standing up and lifting her slightly and kissing her – hard.

And for all the softness of the earlier moment, the whispers and the slow movements, this was the opposite, bruising and forceful and the culmination of a ridiculous amount of emotions and a brand-new, blue dress.

She groaned against him, hips rolling of their own volition as she tried to keep her feet on the ground. It was difficult to focus on walking, however, when he was doing that with his mouth, pressed up against the slope of her shoulder, teeth grazing along the strap of her dress.

“Did I mention I like this dress?” Killian asked, voice low and she was probably still standing. The mattress pressed up against the back of her calves was a fairly good indicator.

“I think I’d heard some rumors about that. Although most of them were coming from a kid, so, who can really be sure.” He growled against her skin, nudging her forward until she was back against the bed and her dress was a lost cause and her hair was twisted underneath her. Emma’s hands moved quickly, grabbing at belt buckles and tucked in shirts that were dangerously close to being ripped off. Killian’s fingers, meanwhile, were working their own pattern, tracing across her skin until they were pushing up her thigh.

“This dress needs to come off,” he said sharply, tugging on the fabric.

“And here I thought you were such a fan.” “I’m not disputing that. I’m just suggesting that this might be a bit easier if the dress weren’t part of the equation anymore.” Emma laughed – and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that while doing this before she’d started doing both with Killian.

“For the record,” Killian said softly, pulling on the zipper down her side so slowly it was closing in on tortuous. He looked right at her as he tugged the dress off, letting it fall out of his hand and it sounded like an anvil crashing on the ground, it was so quiet in the room. “This was the end of the plan.”

She tried to say something, mutter something about her plan and what she wanted, but he was doing all of it anyway and it almost seemed counterproductive to point out what was already happening.

And it was all right and perfect and overwhelming.

And she was happy.

Emma was halfway between consciousness and not, nearly half an hour later, a tiny fire burning in the pit of her stomach when she felt his lips move against the back of her neck, arm tightening around her waist. She fell asleep with his I love you ringing in her ears.

It was, probably, hours later, but it could have been a few minutes when Emma’s eyes snapped open, trying to figure out where that noise was coming from.

And what it was.

It was loud.

Painfully loud.

And the apartment was still dark.

God, what time was it?

“That’s your phone, Swan,” Killian mumbled, arm still wrapped around her waist, knee nudging lightly against the back of her thigh.

Oh, that’s what it was.

She reached forward, twisting slightly and he groaned when she moved away from his arm, hand falling unceremoniously on the mattress behind her.

Ruby.

Ruby was calling her.

The apartment was still dark and Ruby was calling her and fuck , what if something had happened to Henry?

Emma swiped her thumb across the screen, propping herself up on her forearm and trying to keep the terror she felt in every inch of her body out of her voice. “Rubes?” she asked.

“Em, where are you?” “I’m, uh, I’m with Killian. Is everything ok? Is Henry ok?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ruby said quickly and Emma exhaled loudly, nearly falling back on her arm. She felt Killian’s hand back on her waist, thumb tracing back and forth and she almost felt ok. Something was wrong. She knew it. “What’s going on?” she pushed.

Ruby heaved a sigh on the other end of the phone. “I think you should check your e-mail. You’re going to want to see this.” Emma pushed herself up, clicking through apps and inboxes to find the link Ruby was, presumably, talking about. It was a tabloid – one of those magazines that sit on the front of corner bodegas and the check-out lines of grocery stores.

And she saw her name in the URL.

Jailbird: Cooking star Emma Swan’s convict past, the secrets she’s tried to hide

There was a subheadline too and something about a network source that was, apparently, ready and willing to confirm her time in jail and her kid and her rap sheet and her too hot for cameras relationship with Killian Jones.

And she was glad the room was still dark because she absolutely looked as horrible as she felt, like her organs were twisting and knotting and working their way forcibly out of her body.

“Swan?” Killian asked softly, sitting up next to her. She brushed him off, shaking her head quickly and pulling the phone back up to her ear.

“How did this happen?” Emma said, voice cutting through the room.

Ruby sighed again, groaning loudly into the speaker. “I have no idea.” “Does Zelena know?” “She’s the one who sent the link to me.” “Fuck,” Emma mumbled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” “We’ll figure it out, Em,” Ruby said, but there was a distinct lack of promise in her voice. It was already out there. There was a headline and photos and an anonymous source that actually named her kid in print.

Fuck.

“I just, I thought you’d want to know,” she continued and Emma wasn’t entirely positive she actually did. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry at all. This is nothing. This is good.  It just means you’re popular. It’ll be fine.” “Sure,” Emma said. Ruby sighed again, the lie practically teleporting uptown and slapping her in the face. “Listen, uh, I got to go, ok?” “Ok.” The phone clicked and Emma squeezed her eyes shut, Killian’s questioning gaze practically burning the side of her face. “Swan?” he asked again.

She handed him the phone without another word, pushing the sheets away from her legs and flipping on the light. It was, apparently, time to wake up.

#cs fic #cs ff #captain swan ff #ouat ff #captain swan #ootfp #insert that gif of leroy announcing the curse is here #but #you know #with angst

[fitono]

How to Train the Modern Celebrity

There’s an old rule about success: You have to be before you can do, and you have to do before you can have.

Personal trainers understand it intuitively; it’s hard to act like you know your way around the gym if you don’t. That’s why so many successful trainers start out as athletes and gym rats, and more often than not look like it.

But those who successfully train famous people develop qualities that go far beyond their appearance, knowledge, and experience.

If you’ve ever thought about working with celebrities—whether they’re superstars who’d be recognized anywhere in the world or a local newscaster who’s just famous enough to get a sideways glance in Safeway—here are five key factors that you’ll need to consider.

1. Be Visible

I’ve known Chad Waterbury, DPT, since 2005. Back then, he was still living in Tucson, where he’d gotten his master’s degree at the University of Arizona. But he was planning to move to Los Angeles—in part, he told me, because he wanted to work with A-list clients.

Today, after 11 years in L.A., he’s trained a long list of them, ranging from elite athletes to mostly forgotten reality stars. It all started with proximity. “This is the most important tip I would give anyone,” he says. “You have to get yourself, physically, around the people you want to work with.”

Waterbury first learned this lesson in the ’90s, when he did an internship at the gym in Chicago where legendary strength coach Tim Grover trained NBA stars like Michael Jordan.

“At that time, being a huge Bulls fan, I thought that was the best place to go, and he was the best person I could be around,” he says. Although they never worked together directly, he got to observe Grover working with his all-star clients, taking note of how he interacted with them.

At the end of the internship, he says, Grover told him he was on the right path and predicted he’d do well in the fitness industry. “It was like being a computer programmer and getting a pat on the back from Bill Gates,” he remembers.

Location, Location, Location

There’s more than one way to be visible, as Chad Landers discovered in 2003. After working as a personal trainer in L.A. for 10 years, he opened Push Private Fitness in the Toluca Lake neighborhood. Not only do a lot of entertainers live nearby, his gym is in the heart of the industry itself. Disney, Warner Bros., CBS, and NBC Universal all have studios within a couple of miles.

“It wasn’t like I set out to train celebrities,” he says. “But being in a good location set me up for that. Once I got somebody from the area, they started referring me to their friends.”

Like Waterbury, he’s trained a lot of famous people, few of whom he can talk about on the record. (More on that in a moment.) Unlike Waterbury, though, his entertainment-industry clients tend to be “working” actors and musicians. “It’s like, they were on a show, and now they’re between shows, but they still need to look good so they can get the next one,” he says.

And sometimes they have to look really good, really fast. Which brings us to the next point.

2. Be Ready for Anything

Imagine this conversation with a client:

“I need to lose 30 pounds.” “Okay. How much time do we have?” “Three weeks.”

Crazy? Sure. But when you train actors, it’s part of the deal. In this case, Landers’ client had shot a pilot for a TV series years before. When the series was unexpectedly green-lighted, the actor learned he had less than a month to lose the weight he’d gained in the interim.

They used a protein-sparing modified fast to take the weight off. “I don’t want to have to do things like I did with him,” Landers says. “They were happy with the way he looked, but it was a little bit unhealthy.”

And that’s not even his most extreme example. Landers was training Corbin Bleu, an actor who at the time was best-known for the three High School Musical movies. He’d been cast in a horror movie that included a nude scene, calling for a level of leanness that few trainers outside the world of physique competition ever have to worry about.

Landers helped him drop 14 pounds, getting him lean but not ripped. For the final push, they used what Landers calls the “crazy bath,” which I described in this article in 2013.

The night before Bleu shot the nude scene, they filled a tub with the hottest water a human can tolerate, along with three or four bags of Epson salt and four to six bottles of rubbing alcohol. Bleu sat in the bath as long as he could tolerate it. (He told me it felt “like hell.”)

The goal was to lose as much water as possible without risking his health, and it worked: Bleu lost seven pounds overnight, got shredded for the scene, and suffered no consequences from the short-term dehydration.

Those two examples certainly aren’t typical, but they illustrate one of the challenges of working with clients whose livelihood is so entwined with their appearance. Most working actors go through boom-and-bust cycles, Landers says. Even successful ones get cash-strapped between roles.

“I’ve had situations where they had to stop training until they could book something,” Landers says. “But it’s a catch-22, because they have to look good to book something. When they have the time to come in, they don’t have the money. When they have the money, they don’t have the time.”

3. Be Discreet

I have a friend who works almost exclusively with celebrities. It’s no secret; you can’t miss them on his social media, where they sometimes demonstrate exercises for quasi-instructional videos. But he didn’t want to be interviewed for this story because he doesn’t want his famous clients to think he’s taking advantage of his association with them.

Waterbury didn’t want to talk about any of the celebrities he’s trained, even though we coauthored a book with one of them.

And Landers can only talk about a few of his well-known clients, including Bleu, Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses, and actress Sarah Hyland from Modern Family.

But even if he could talk about the most famous ones, he wouldn’t necessarily want to. “If I started promoting that I train this person or that person, the paparazzi would be here all the time,” he says. “I don’t mind that people don’t know all the people I train. It’s not about me, and that’s okay.”

4. Be Pleasant

Most of the people I know who train celebrities didn’t grow up in big cities. Waterbury and Landers, coincidentally, are both from small towns in Illinois, where being nice to people is the norm. Turns out, those small-town manners are an important tool if you want to work with famous clients.

No matter where you’re from, Waterbury believes How to Win Friends and Influence People is the most important book for trainers in his line of work. “You can’t be an asshole, or a nutcase,” he says. “You have to be someone you’d want to hang around.”

You still have to push those clients, some more than others. But in Waterbury’s experience, the more famous people become, and the more pressure they face to produce hits and make money for them and their partners, the less bandwidth they have for cynicism and snark. “Celebrities never have negative people around them,” he says, “especially here in L.A.”

5. Be Flexible

Over the years I’ve interviewed a handful of celebrities for Men’s Health magazine, usually because they’d transformed their physiques for a particular role. That means I also interviewed their trainers, who told me stories of traveling thousands of miles to help their clients prep for a shirtless scene, or stay in shape for physically demanding roles.

It’s the last thing most trainers would think about when they get a chance to work with a celebrity, but with some clients it’s the most important part of the job. If you don’t do it, someone else will, and guess who’s going to take credit for the client’s physique?

But it’s not just travel. There’s also the day-to-day chaos of a famous person’s life. Here’s how one trainer, who asked not to be quoted by name, explained it to me:

“If you want to work with celebrities, the number-one hardest thing, by far, is scheduling. It’s normal for them to show up late and still want their one-hour session. Or they’ll want to reschedule. The trainer is used to a structured world, but now he has to step into the celebrity’s world and deal with the chaos. You just couldn’t stack eight celebrity clients in a day. I can’t work with more than three a day. It’s too stressful.”

The one bright spot, the trainer told me, is that you can charge them more. Sometimes a lot more. But then again, if they didn’t pay you more you’d lose money because of all the clients you can’t train while you accommodate the celebrities’ chaotic schedule.

Bonus Tip: Treat Everyone Like a Celebrity

“I don’t call myself a celebrity trainer, and I didn’t set out to train celebrities,” Landers says. “I’m training anyone who walks in the door and who’s willing to put in the work. It doesn’t matter if they’re a celebrity or an average person. Except the average person isn’t going to have to do a nude scene, or be naked on a billboard.”

There’s the rub for trainers who work with famous people, whether it’s something they set out to do or something that just kind of happened. You have to treat everyone the same, even though some will demand more of your time and attention than others.

“I’m not going to say it’s not cool to work with famous people,” Landers says. “But at the end of the day, there are two people whose stories I share.”

One is an elderly woman who started training with him in her late 80s. By the time she passed away in her mid 90s, she was still able to get up and move around on her own.

The other is Barbara Garmon, who became a world-champion powerlifter in her 70s, after surviving cancer and a freak accident that shattered her left arm. Her extraordinary story was told in this article, which blurs the lines between his famous and non-famous clients.

When a trainer helps an “average” person do something worth celebrating, is there really that much difference?

  The post How to Train the Modern Celebrity appeared first on The PTDC.

How to Train the Modern Celebrity published first on https://medium.com/@MyDietArea

[teatro-catarsi]

Short fiction #1: Pray for us

It had been a revelation for everyone, not only for her. Articles, essays, conferences, people marching: since the moment in which humanity had found out that the gods of every religion to which mankind had prayed to in the course of the century actually did exist, the world had changed completely. Anyway, the early enthusiasm of the majority of people had faded once a group of scholars had come to a terrible conclusion. They couldn’t choose which god should have attended to their prayers. It was every man’s duty to discover who was the god that fate had decided for them.

Obviously, the most shocking discover arrived for Christians, Muslims and Jews: God existed, and there was only one. Jahvè was Allah, and God almighty at the same time. He had to make sure that all these believers could get along, explaining that he had been the One watching them all from above, while they killed each other “because of faith”, as they stated. It had been a very hard task: he became flesh and bones, and in a titanic enterprise managed to visit all these people,  pulling their ears and make sure there were no more fights among them

But her, the protagonist of our story, had been baptized as a Christian. Still, much to her dismay, she wasn’t meant to be among the millions of people to which the only God, the alpha and the omega, answered to. Her mother, instead, had freaked out completely once she had found out that it was indeed the Holy Virgin Mary, the mother of God, who would have taken care of all of her prayers.

On a day like the others, she had stormed into her bedroom, exclaiming: — She heard me, finally! — — What happened? — the girl had asked. — Mary! The Holy Virgin! She heard me! It has taken me almost sixty years, but a sincere faith always rewards you. — she had approached her, leaving a kiss on her cheek. Then she had left her sitting there, unbelieving.

She was quite overcome from the fact that she had still not found a divine being who would lend an ear to her. She had borrowed a few books that gathered all the knowledge about various religions from the world from the local library, spending a good part of her day there. Era quasi affranta per non aver ancora trovato uno straccio di essere divino che l’ascoltasse. She had tried with the gods of Chinese mythology, with the Hindu ones, the Celtics; she had said simple prayers to them, such as: “August Fuxi, Nüwa e Shennong, please give me the strength to do a three meters high jump”, or “Greatest Ganesha, let me find a four-leaf clover in a field”, but also “Cuchulainn, splendid hero, let me dance like the Riverdance people”. Nothing. Nothing she had prayed for had become a reality. 

Not even when she had prayed to the goddess in which she hoped more, the Greek Athena, had she managed to obtain anything. She had asked her, kneeling in front of Botticelli’s painting Pallade and the centaur in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, to make her choose the men with which she fell in love more wisely. One of the keepers in the room had even giggled behind her shoulders. 

After days and days of failed attempts, she was now losing her hope, all of her faith in this ‘gods are real’ buzz. It was a day of pouring rain when she got out of the library, resigned. She took shelter under the canopy right above the exit, together with those who didn’t want to give up smoking even on a day like that. She glared at one of them, after he had involuntarily blown a foul-spelling cloud of smoke right to her face as she has passed by him. — I’m sorry. — he had told her, with a sly smile. She made a gesture with her head, as if she wanted to say “Of course”. Actually, inside of herself, she would have surely liked to rip the cigarette from his hands, and spill the content of the ashtray he was using on his own head. 

She took a few steps away from him, and opened the ombrella, standing still for a second to enjoy the ticking of the rain on the fabric above her head. She took a deep sigh, and shook her head. In that precise moment, with the corner of her eye she noticed the shirt that one of the annoying smoker’s friends was wearing: it was a celebratory t-shirt for one of the most famous superhero movies ever made. There was one of them, in particular, that was based right on an ancient deity from the norse mythology. One to which she hadn’t addressed any prayer to. She bit on her lower lip, lost in thought. Then, giving herself a boost of courage, shut her eyes. In the end, she had nothing to lose.

— Thor…I beg you. — she took a long breath. — Could you please make this guy understand that it’s surely not pleasant to blow smoke in the face of people? — with her eyes still closed, she waited. 

Then, the thunder. A terribly loud thunder, that had her jumping. And there, at about ten meters from her, a lightning fell. A full-scale lightning, with a noisy crack and all the rest. She heard the few people around curse because of fear, and the shock wave from the discharge making her fall backwards. Through gritted teeth because of the annoying pain on her bottom, the umbrella had fallen next to her. She didn’t even find a way to stand up on her own, so much for the consternation that had appeared on her face, once she had noticed him. A couple of long steps, and she was towering over her. 

Enormous, tall at least a couple of meters; broad-shouldered, and covered by a blood red mantel. The beard was long, golden blond, and the hair of the same color were long until his forearms; the eyes were so fair, of a cerulean so sparkling, that they seemed to shine in the grayness of that rainy day. He was wearing an ancient looking armor, that seemed to be made of indestructible steel, that protected his body up above his knees. Between the fingers of his right hand he was holding what looked like a massive hammer made of steel and black stone, finely decorated. She looked at it for a long time, not aware that her mouth was still open. 

— Stand up, young woman. — the huge figure spoke, holding a stumpy hand out to her. — I ask for your forgiveness, if my arrival has caused your fall. — incredulous, she shook her head.  She placed her small hand in his, and let herself be pulled up. It was like being lifted by a crane. — I will probably earn a bruise, but it will heal. — lei rispose. — I am Thor all-mighty, bearer of Mjölnir, and I am here to answer your prayers. — His voice is powerful, thundering. — Now indicate, which is the mortal that has dared disrespecting you? — the girl kept on looking at the god. She felt so tiny. At the same time though, she felt considered.

Without a word, she turned around and pointed at the guy that had smoked on her face. Thor nodded, and menacingly approached the young man. The boy was petrified, so much that the cigarette fell from his mouth. Thor picked up the ashtray near him, and brought it up to his mouth. He took a deep breath, and blew the entire content of the ashtray directly on the youngster’s face. The girl brought her hands to her mouth, covering an astonished laugh. The friend, the one with the superhero t-shirt, broke into a loud laughter. Once he had inflicted his “punishment”, Thor placed the ashtray on the boy’s head. Then, with a single finger pushed him under the rain. He put a finger as big as a small zucchini on his head, as if he wanted to keep him still. He took a step back, loaded a huge hit with the hammer, as if he was wielding a baseball bat. The girl couldn’t even manage to shout “NO!” once she had realized what was Thor’s idea. She saw the hammer hit the boy from below, and he flew through the air like a shuttle towards space. Very fast, leaving a terrified scream behind him. Thor, bringing a hand above his eyes so he could see better, made a satisfied smile under his blond mustache. — May it occur to you as a warning, you foolish advocate of black lungs. — his profound voice thundered again. — What…WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?! — she ran towards Thor, grabbing his mantel and looking at the boy that had now become a dot high in the sky. — I have fulfilled your request, maiden. — Thor looked at her, lifting up a bushy eyebrow. — Should have I been more merciful to him? — — Will he come down, sooner or later? — she asked. Thor looked up, and leaning onto the gigantic hammer he shrugged his shoulders. — Ask away, hesitant damsel, and you shall receive. — Thor said to her, scratching his beard. She brushed her face with her hands, with a sigh. — I beg you, powerful Thor. — she asked again, gently placing a hand on his vigorous arm. — Bring him back here, safe and sound. — Thor addressed a benevolent smile to her, and nodded. She lift up the hammer to the sky, and another thunder shook the air. After a few seconds, the young smoker was already falling back towards them at full speed, and started slowing down only when he had come a hundred meters above the ground. Thor directed the hammer in his direction, and the boy landed safely under the rain. He sat here, panting — evidently panicking, — before he would stand up to run away as fast as he could. His friend, as he kept on laughing out loud, picked up his backpack as well, and followed him walking peacefully, wiping the tears of joy in his eyes.

Pleased, Thor looked at the boy running away, with a victorious expression on his tough face. Then, he looked at the girl, almost as if he wanted to scout inside her soul. He lifted the hammer again, and the rain immediately stopped. The girl looked up, and let herself go to a smile. — I thank you, Thor, bringer of storms. — she took a very deep curtsy in the god’s direction. He lifted up her face with one of his fingers. — Thanks to you, young lady with a round face, that has finally found the god Thor. — the giant figure made gesture with his head. She looked down at her feet for a second, almost feeling guilty. — Forgive me. — she replied. — It took me a while. — Thor prepared himself to travel back up into the never ending skies, lifting up the muscular arm that held Mjölnir. — Maybe next time I can offer you a beer to make up for it. — Thor looked down at her, and let out a thunderous and heartfelt laugh. — I will gladly taste your mortal beverage, playful follower of Thor. — with another thunder, Thor disappeared flying upwards at great speed. — Until we meet again, farewell! — the god’s voice filled the air around her, and she watched the supernatural entity disappear as it had arrived on Earth. She crossed her arms, and looked at the rainbow that appeared not far from there. She picked up the umbrella, she closed it, and started walking home.

#stories #short fiction #teatro-catarsi #fantasy #imaginary #eng