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Front page of the Tulsa Tribune during the Tulsa Race Massacre, 6/1/1921.

Series: Central Decimal Files, 1881 - 1982

Collection: Records of the American National Red Cross, 1881 - 2008

Transcription:

THE PEOPLE'S PAPER

The Tulsa Tribune

THE WEATHER SECOND

OKLAHOMA - Tonight and Thurs- EXTRA

day part cloudy.

Tulso temperatures: Maximum

today at noon, 85, yesterday, 91;

minimum, 68, yesterday, 61

FULL LEASED WIRE REPORTS OF ASSOCIATED AND UNITED PRESS; UNRIVALED STATE AND FEATURE SERVICE

VOL. XVII - NUMBER 225. TULSA, OKLAHOMA, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 1921. State Edition * * FOURTEEN PAGES - PRICE [TORN] CENTS

COUNTY PUT UNDER MARTIAL LAW

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

7 whites, 68 Negroes Dead --- Fire Rages

PROCLAMATION

All persons not deputied as special officers are ordered to

disarm in a proclamation issued shortly before noon by Mayor

Evans. Persons carrying guns after that hour will be arrested.

The proclamation:

"Armed troops, well equipped, have now arrived who, with

the assistance of the local authorities, will be able to control

the situation in this city. Everyone is directed to preserve law

an dorder and to avoid under every circumstance, the gather-

ing on the streets of curious and excited masses. This only

tends to make the situation worse for the authorities in restor-

ing order, making it more burdensome and complicated. No

loyal citien of Tulsa will willingly commit any act which en-

dangers the peace and security of the city. All parties, without

direct authority from the chief of police or the sheriff or Tulsa

county, who may be found after 11 a. m. today bearing arms and

engaged in any act liable to promote a breach of the peace will

be arrested and prosecuted under the Riot Act.

"Headquarters of the National Guards is established in

Room 306, City Hall, at Fourth street and Cincinnati avenue,

and except for duly appointed policeman and deputy sheriffs

all permission to bear ar mfsrom, and after, the publication of

this proclamation must be countersigned by Gen. Charles F.

Barrett or Col. B. F. Markham, commanding the National Guards.

"Gen. Charles F. Barrett concurs in this proclamation."

Dated 10:30 a. m., June First 1921.

"T. D. EVANS, Mayor."

Barrett is Put in Full

Charge by Robertson

OKLAHOMA CITY. - Martial law in Tulsa was ordered by

Governor Robertson at 11:15 o'clock and Adjutant General Bar-

rett placed in command of the city. The order was given over

the long distance telephone and a proclamation to this effect is

being prepared and will be issued immediately.

The order of Governor Robertson invoking martial law

over Tulsa has been extended to include all of Tulsa county. The

order will displace civil control and place it in supreme com-

mand of the adjutant general.

The governor's telegram to the adjutant general follows:

"I have declared martial law throughout Tulsa county and

am holding you responsible for maintenance of order, safety of

lives and protection of property. You will do all things neces-

sary to attain these objects.

(Signed) "J. B. A. ROBERTSON, Governor."

The governor acted after being in communication with of-

ficers in Tulsa. Attorney General Freeling will go to Tulsa this

afternoon.

"The situation at Tulsa seems peculiar to me," Governor

Robertson said. "With power vested in all city and county offi-

cials there to deputie and put into the law enforcement every

citien of the city if necessary, I cannot understand how this

trouble was allowed to get such a start."

Conversation with Adjutant General Barrett was to the ef-

fect that it was impossible for the fire department to enter the

negro section and that the flames were raging unabated.

All available guardsmen will be placed on duty once in

the negro section, which has been entirely destroyed by flames,

General Barrett said when he r[eceived order?] from Governor

Robertson placing the county under martial law.

Orders have been issued to disarm citizens. Later the

military will issu ecrededntials to men chosen as special officers.

A military commission, composed of seven city officials

and business men, to pass upon the guilt of the 6,000 negroes

now held in concentration camp, was formed shortly before

noon by Mayor Evans and Chief of Police Gustafson and ap-

proved by General Barrett. This committee will pass upon the

guilt of those held under guard in the various camps, naming

those who will be held for trial for inciting the black populace

to riot.

The personnel of the committee: C. S. Younkman, water

commissioner; Albert Hunt, district judge; H. F. Newblock,

city commissioner; C. S. Aver, oil man; Grant McCullough,

banker; F. E. White, business man; Alva J. Niles, banker.

The Tulsa Tribbune

RESTORE ORDER

LYNCH law leads not to law but to lawlessness and

lawlessness is a repudiation of government.

Lynch law is a fire brand in the hands of those

who thoughtlessly elect to establish mob rule for law

and order. Lynch law is an impassioned appeal to the

hatreds of prejudice. It brings ignominy and disaster

to any community that falls its victims.

Whatever ground it may have had, a story starts

that a negro in the county jail was to be lynched. Out

of curiosity a crowd collects. A small band of negroes

brings firearms onto the scene. At first they were few

At the outset there was nothing to indicate that the

whites had been moved to a battling protest. But when

the first small band of negroes added to their armed

forces the war began. Tulsa found itself experiencing

a night of terror and the new day dawned with the

[illegible]nd of battle and the sky clouded with the smoke that

rises above the burning buildings and shacks in the

negro end of town.

At such a time as this it is the first duty of every

citizen to restore law and order as quickly as possible.

The National Guard is equal to cope with the rioting

negroes who are already under control. Let every citi-

zen do his duty and lend his fullest influence to the

prompt restoration of law and order. Do this for the

good name of Tulsa. Keep off the streets where there

are evidences of disorder as much as possible. Make

no needlessly threatening display of arms. The state's

soldiers can do that and do it with the authority of the

law.

Now is the time for every citizen to keep a cool

head, to keep out of mob collections. The quickest and

surest way to restore law is to respect the law. Let the

authorized agents of the law handle those who will

not.

BLACK QUARTER BURNS TO GROUND;

FOUR GUARD UNITS TAKE CHARGE

Seven white persons are known to be dead.

One white woman, shot six times, is expected to die.

Thirty-four whites are wounded in three hospitals. Many other wounded persons are

in their own homes.

Sixty-eight negroes, including men, women, and children, are dead, according to reports

from all districts of the black belt where heavy fighting was waged throughout the night

and up to 9 o-clock this morning.

One hundred blacks are believed wounded.

The officials are in control of the situation and no more armed conflicts are expected.

The entire black belt of Tulsa is a charred mass. The business section of

Greenwood avenue is levelled. Scarcely a building escaped the flames set by

torches when an army of whites invaded that district early this morning to an-

ticipate a general attack on the part of the blacks. Officials at noon today were

unable to estimate the total loss which will extend into many thousands of dollars.

It is estimated that more than 500 homes of negroes were burned. A score of

business buildings and a number of factories were razed. Heavy stocks of mer-

chandise were a total loss.

The fire carried by a strong north wind spread into the white residence

section adjoining the black settlement on North Detroit avenue. Ten homes in a

row were burned before firemen could check the flames. One house was burned

in the immediate vicinity of Standpipe hill.

At 12:30 o'clock the fire in this district was rapidly being brought under

control.

Hundres of white women and children fled from their homes as the leap-

ing flames fanned by a strong wind from the north ate their way to the white

belt. About 11 o'clock the wind subdued, giving the firemen a chance to

successfully combat the flames.

A special train bearing 350 National Guardsmen under the command

of Adjutant General Barrett arrived at 9:05 o'clock this morning. General Bar-

rett issued a statement from guard headquarters at the police station that mar-

tial law would not be declared until he had made a hurried investigation.

Only developments will determine if it is to be invoked,

Barrett added. Companies A and B, totaling 150 men, arrived

on the special train from Oklahoma City, with a second troop

train due from the capital about 11 o'clock. Company B and a

sanitary detachment, both located here, are also on duty and

have been since midnight.

The guards after establishing headquarters in Second

street in front of the police station were ordered to various sec-

tions of the black belt. One contingent was sent to Meulty park,

where several hundred negroes are interned.

General Barrett is now acting under orders issued by Mayor

Evans, Chief of Police Gustafson and Sheriff Bill McCullough.

Following a night of rioting, snip-

ing and open clashes between whites

and blacks hundreds of armed men

invaded the negro district to remove

the menace the blacks there offered.

At 5 o'clock scores of armed men in

automobiles drove to the north side

of the black belt in the vicinity of

Standpipe hill. These white fighters

formed one wing of an encircling

movement entirely surrounding the

negro district. Hundreds of pedes-

trains advanced on the black belt

from the south and west. Hundreds

of shots were fired. Many negroes

were reported to have been wound-

ed while a number of whites were

taken to hospitals with wounds.

The heaviest fighting this morn-

ing was in the extreme northern sec-

tion of the black belt. Hundreds of

negroes were concentrated in a val-

ley at the base of Sunset hill. Fifty

were barricaded in a church.

Machine Guns In Use.

Deadly volleys of steel were poured

[into?] the ranks of the whites as they

[advanced?] in open formation against

the blacks who stood their ground.

Finally the whites were forced to re-

treat. A call was sent to police head-

quarters for reinforcements. A num-

ber of guardsmen with two machine

guns were rushed in automobiles to

the scene of the fighting. The ma-

chine guns were set up and for 20

minutes poured a stream of lead on

the negroes who sought refuge be-

hind buildings, telephone poles and

in ditches.

The heavy firing came to a sud-

den halt when a huge white cloth

was raised aloft by the negroes. The

church where many negroes were

barricaded was riddled with bullets,

it was said.

Hundreds of negroes with hands

held high in the air walked from

the valley under the guard of armed

civilians. They were taken to Con-

vention hall and McNulty park,

where they were interned.

Whites who returned from the

battle-swept valley said that at least

50 negroes, including men, women

and children, were lying dead. At 10

o'clock authorities had been unable

to make a check of the black losses

in this battle.

Most of the blacks who were killed

met death in the early morning

fighting in the negro section near

the Frisco tracks.

___________________________

THE START

The clash had its inception when

several automobiles loaded with

armed negroes and said to have been

led by "Old Man" Stratford, a ne-

gro hotel proprietor, swung up in

front of the courthouse shortly be-

fore 10 o'clock, bent on protecting

Rowland. Not more than 30 blacks

were in the first party but they suc-

ceeded in virtually taking command

of the situation there because few

of the whites were armed and none

displayed guns. The blacks were or-

dered home by Sheriff McCullough,

who it is said, had armed negro

deputies with him on the courthouse

steps. Barney Cleaver, a former negro

police officer, also advised them to

go home. After the first sally, dur-

ing which the blacks dispersed part

of the crowd of whites, the negroes

were still permitted to keep their

guns.

Instead of going home, they cir-

cled around several blocks near the

courthouse and came back with an-

other flourish of shot-guns and

rifles. By this time the crowd of

whites had increased to several

thousand with hundreds of women

and a number of children on the

fringes. Most of the whites wer on-

lookers and there appeared to be

no organized mob. After making

known their intention to protect

Rowland at all costs the blacks were

star[ing?] toward home again. There

was still no move on the part of the

sheriff's forces or the city police to

disarm them although the black

force was not more than 50 at this

time.

Instead of going to the negro sec-

tion to stay the blackss whirled

through the streets of the quarter

and sought recruits. Every negro

they met was solicited to joion their

ranks. At Sixth and Cincinnati two

negroes who refused were threat-

ened, according to residents of the

neighborhood who overheard the

conversation.

Shortly after 10 o'clock the blacks

came back to the courthouse with

their biggest force. Estimates place

the number of armed negroes at be-

tween 100 and 200. By this time

it was estimated that probably 100

of the whites in the crowd had

procured arms. A number of whites

who sought guns at the National

Guard armory were refused. Cour-

iers went through the crowd of

whites and warned women and

children and unarmed men to seek

safety. They said they feared an

assault by the blacks. Only a part

of the crowd complied.

The first clash followed on the

heels of this warning. There are

two versions of how the firing be-

gun. According to some of the spectators

pistols were first fired into the air

in front of the Boulder street en-

trance to the courthouse and this,

spectators say, acted as a signal for

the general firing during which the

blacks fired ten shots to each one

for the whites. The crowd of whites

greatly outnumbered the armed

band of negroes but the whites were

helpless in front of the black on-

slaught because they were in con-

stant danger of firing into other

whites if they attempted to protect

the women and children in the crowd

by answering the blacks fire.

Where First Man Fell

After the first volley one carload

of blacks came north on Boulder

avenue, firing as they raced along.

The first white man dropped be-

fore the crash. He had been stand-

ing against the wall of the garage

on Boulder, just south of Sixth

street.

Across the street men and women

in the crowd sought refuge in the

row of houses on Boulder south of

Sixth. Many of them were unoble

to reach cover before the second

volley so they dropped in their

tracks and clung to the earth.

Others hid behind curbs in the

driveways to the garages of these

homes, running to better cover be-

tween the volleys.

Meanwhile the negroes fled.

Some of them ran through the

crowds of women and children,

brandishing their guns. They had

disappeared from the immediate

area of the courthouse within ten

minutes after the first shot had been fired.

Second Version of Start

The second version of the start

of the firing was to the effect that

a number of unarmed white men,

seeing that the officials were not

willing to disarm the blacks, took

that task to themselves. One man

is reported to have dashed into the ranks of blacks and seized one of the

guns. Spectators who relate this as

the true story of the inception of

the shooting declare that the blacks

immediately opened fire when they

were threatened with disarmament.

Shortly after the negroes fled

from the courthouse battlefield an

automobile load of white youths

sped past and fired into the jail

windows on the fourth floor, spec-

tators declared.

John McQueen, a former county

officer and one of the men who at-

tempted to disperse the crowd at the

courthouse, declared today that

Johnny Cody was the negro whose

shot started the general firing here.

"While I was on the steps Cody

and a band of negroes started up,"

McQueen said. "I went to meet them

and a stranger backed me uo. Cody

pushed a gun against him and fired

just as I pushed the gun away. The

stranger went down. Several bullets

went through my coat."

Immediately after this report came

to the crowd that the blacks were

mobilizing for systematic assault on

the whites. The majority of the

white men were still [illegible]. It

became immediately apparent how-

ever, that the police and sheriff's

force were making no attempt to

prevent the return of the blacks so

the white men themselves took

charge of the situation. Small

groups systematically entered all

downtown hardware stores and

pawnshops and took up all the arms

and ammunition that could be found

Nothing else in any of the stores

were touched.

Black Attack Again.

Soon there were more than 1,000

armed men on the streets. Part of

this crowd defended the Hotel Tulsa

and the section around Second street

and Cincinnati avenue from an attack

of blacks who swarmed back within

three quarters of an hour after the

court house battle.

After this second general battle,

which is described elsewhere, the

whites took rapid command of the

situation. Patrols spread quickly to

cover all the principal streets and

the roads leading into the city.

Special guards were put at all bridges

within a several-mile radius to halt

any incoming blacks. Roving pa-

trols moved up and down Main

street. At Main and Archer streets

desultory firing took place for sev-

eral hours. Blacks from their quar-

ter fired repeatedly from behind the

building at Archer street and Boulder

avenue and Archer and Cincinnati

avenue. They were cleared out with-

in an hour or two, but a second

group took their place and held the

negro block on Cincinnati, at the

Frisco tracks, against assault until

early this morning. Two negroes were

killed here and several others wound-

ed. A number of whites were re-

ported wounded in fighting here.

Could Have Disarmed Blacks.

Fully an hour before the first

shots were fired at the courthouse

citizens stood on the south steps and

pleaded with Police Commissioner

Adkison to call out the National

Guard without delay. The negroes

were just beginning to parade the

streets at that time and they argued

that even a small detachment of or-

ganized and equipped men could dis-

arm them, compel them to return to

their own part of ftown, get the

whites to disperse when this had

been accomplished and so avert im-

pending trouble.

Commissioner Adkison answered:

"We are trying to get them out,"

then turned and told the crowd to

obey E. S. McQueen's advice to go

home while the negroes were patrol-

ling the streets in arms, threatening

death and rapine. The police were

powerless.

An hour after the pitched battle

took place around the courthouse

and northward along Main and Bos-

ton, the Guard got into action.

Guardsmen went immediately to the

police station and began an attempt

to disperse the whites who had

armed themselves and gathered

there in expectation of another at-

tack.

_____________________________

The Dead

Carl D. Lotpeisch, 28, Randall

Kans., shot through breast. Taken to

Oklahoma hospital at 6:30 o'clock

this morning. He died shortly after-

ward.

Unidentified whate man, about

28; light brown hair; light brown

eyes; five feet ten inches; 160

pounds. At the Mowbray undertak-

ing parlors.

F. M. Baker, Havelin, Kan., 27,

short in back with buchshot. Died

this morning at Morningside hospi-

tal. At the Mowbray Undertaking

parlors. An identification card found

in his clothing bore the name of

Norman Gillard, 315 So. Norfolk.

The third white man, unidentified

was killed about 5:45 o'clock this

morning when a squad of white

riflemen engaged a group of ne-

groes on North Cincinnati av. The

body was taken to Mitchell-Fleming

undertaking parlors. He was de-

scribed as about 25 years old, six

feet [ta?]ll, weight 165 punds. He

wore dark green trousers, brown

coat, tan shoes, and a tan belt with

a silver clasp bearing the initial

"W". He was shot in the neck.

Death was instantaneous.

The body of an unidentified white

man about 35, held at the Stanley-

McGee Undertaking parlors still

was unidentified early today. He

was shot in the head.

The body of a white man, about

30, shot in the back of the head, held at

the Mowbray undertaking parlors,

ho[illegible] [ea?]rly last night in the first brush

with the blacks, still was unidentified

this morning.

[1?]0-year-old white boy, though

to [be?] named Olson, home at Sapulpa

died at 8:30 o'clock following a bat-

tle an hour earlier at the Frisco depot

in which two negroes were reported

killed. Olson's body was removed to

the Mitchell-Fleming undertaking

parlors where it awaits positive

identification.

A white girl was reported killed on

North Peoria in the vicinity of the

Texaco plant. the report could not

be verified at 10 o'clock.

____________________________

The Injured

A re-check of the injured revealed

the following at the various hospit-

als:

Oklahoma Hospital.

Earl Hileman, city, shot through

thigh, not serious

G. B. Steck, Sapulpa, shot in back,

serious.

J. E. Wissinger, 150 Admiral or

1202 East Second, shot in knee, not

srious.

G. F. Joiner, 1703 South Main, shot

in leg, not serious.

Ross G. Owens, 1108 South Jack-

son, shot with bird shot, several

wounds but not serious.

E. D. Hartshone, shot in thigh.

Edward Austin, 418 South Detroit,

shot in toe, not serious.

Grocer Slinkhard, West Tulsa, fac-

tured rib.

Robet Elmer, West Tulsa,

A. N. Dow, 401 South Madison,

shot in upper thigh and compound

fracture of arm, serious.

C. C. Thomas, 803 South Main,

shot in leg, not serious.

E. R. Hileam, Fern hotel, com-

pound fracture of thigh, serious.

Garland Crouch, 16 North Quincy,

shot in upper abdomen and right

arm, though serious.

A. T. Sterling, 314 South Zunis,

minor injuries.

Robert Palmore, West Tulsa, shot

in left shoulder, not serious.

E. Belchner, 1437 East Hodge,

shot in hand and leg, not serious.

Lee Fisher, 338 1/2 East First, shot

in left leg and thigh, thought serious.

G. I. Prunkart, Frisco conductor,

shot with bird shot in shoulder, chin

and forehead. He was shot while

sitting in caboose of train just pulling

into city.

There are two wounded patients

unidentified. Fifteen or 20 patients

having only slight wounds called at

hospital and had them dressed, left

hospital without giving name or ad-

dress.

Tulsa Hospital

George Switzgood, 415 N. Detroit;

not serious.

K. G. Logsdon, 308 S. Cincinnatti;

shot in arm; not seriously.

Sergt. W. R. Hastings, 1507 E. Jef-

ferson; not serious. After having his

wounds dressed, Sergeant Hastings

immediately left hospital.

H. L. Curry, Illinois hotel, shot

through neck; serious.

E. F. Vickers, city; arm shot.

M. W. Camble. 220 W. Cam [Iron;?]

thought serious.

Jess Collins, 522 N. Boston; serious.

R. N. Seltzer, 529 S. Utica; leg, not

serious.

Otto Sherry, 112 N. Frisco; face

powder burned.

Thirty-five or forty who were only

slightly wounded were attended at

the hospital. After the wounds were

dressed they walked out, leaving

no name or address.

Physicians & Surgeons Hospital.

R. C. Hankson, Jenks, Okla., tool

dresser; shot through right wrist,

bullet traveling through abdomen

into the left arm; shot at 6:45 a. m.

___________________________

NOTICE TO TELEPHONE

SUBSCRIBERS

______________

Please use your telephones only

in case of emergency. This will

assist us in protecting life and pro-

erty.

SOUTHWESTERN BELL TELE-

PHONE COMPANY

___________________________

CURTIS BROWN CO. sells PHOE-

NIX PURE SILK HOSE. Phone 232.

____________________________

We sincerely trust that the

local disturbance is over. We

do not want to give the im-

pression of trying to drive in

business as the result of a

calamity.

It is our duty, however, to

call t he public's attention to

the fact that the standard fire

policies do NOT cover loss re-

sulting from Riot, Insurrection

or Civil Commotion.

We write Riot, Insurrection

and Civil Commotion Insur-

ance and the cost of same is

very slight. Call us for rates.

Policies are written here in

our office. Phone Cedar 2100.

Pearce, Porter & Martin

500 Palace Building

_______________________

NOTICE

______

Because of the race war

the announcement of the re-

maining entrants in The

Tribune beauty contest will

be carried in all editions to-

morrow and none today.

#archivesgov #June 1 #1921 #1920s #Tulsa Massacre #Tulsa #Oklahoma #newspaper #riots #racism #Tulsa100

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Monday, October 18, 2021

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Celebrity chef’s group feeds the hungry on Spain’s eruption-hit La Palma (Reuters) Working in close proximity to the red-hot lava flowing from a volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma, emergency workers anxiously await their lunch break--and while any food would do, it tastes better when it comes from a celebrity chef’s kitchen. Chef Jose Andres’ non-profit World Central Kitchen (WCK) has been delivering hot food, sandwiches and water to thousands of evacuees as well as the emergency workers overseeing residents’ removal from harm’s way. “Although there are so many of us, it seems like there’s a lack of personnel ... including those who come down to give us a sandwich! It seems silly but after eight hours on the ground it’s fundamental,” said Captain Diego Ortiz of the Guardia Civil police force. The non-profit started cooking 200 meals a day early in the eruption--which began on Sept. 19--and is now making 1,400, with the amount growing daily, said Olivier de Belleroche, a 45-year-old chef from Madrid who works for WCK.

Heavy rains, floods leave 8 dead, 12 missing in south India (AP) At least eight people have died and a dozen are feared missing after a day of torrential rains in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Rescue operations were underway on Sunday after heavy rains lashed the state the day before, triggering flash floods and landslides, the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency reported. The National Disaster Response Force and the Indian Army deployed teams to help with rescue efforts in two of the worst-hit districts, Kottayam and Idukki, where a dozen people are still feared missing.

New crew docks at China’s first permanent space station (AP) Chinese astronauts began Saturday their six-month mission on China’s first permanent space station, after successfully docking aboard their spacecraft. The astronauts, two men and a woman, were seen floating around the module before speaking via a live-streamed video. The new crew includes Wang Yaping, 41, who is the first Chinese woman to board the Tiangong space station, and is expected to become China’s first female spacewalker. The crew will do three spacewalks to install equipment in preparation for expanding the station, assess living conditions in the Tianhe module, and conduct experiments in space medicine and other fields. China’s military-run space program plans to send multiple crews to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional.

Melbourne to ease world’s longest COVID-19 lockdowns as vaccinations rise (Reuters) Melbourne, which has spent more time under COVID-19 lockdowns than any other city in the world, is set to lift its stay-at-home orders this week, officials said on Sunday. By Friday, when some curbs will be lifted, the Australian city of 5 million people will have been under six lockdowns totalling 262 days, or nearly nine months, since March 2020. Australian and other media say this is the longest in the world, exceeding a 234-day lockdown in Buenos Aires.

Shooting in Syria could mark new phase in Israeli campaign (AP) The death of a former Syrian Druse lawmaker, allegedly by Israeli sniper fire, could mark a new phase in Israel’s war against Iranian entrenchment in neighboring Syria. Syria’s state-run news agency said that Midhat Saleh was fatally shot Saturday in Ein el-Tinneh, a village along the Israeli frontier in the Golan Heights where he ran a Syrian government office. Israeli media said Saleh had been assisting the Iranian military against Israel. The Israeli military declined to comment, but if the Syrian claim is true, it would mark the first time that Israeli snipers are known to have killed an Iranian-linked target across the border. Israel has said it will not tolerate a permanent Iranian military presence in Syria and has acknowledged carrying out scores of airstrikes on alleged Iranian arms shipments and military targets in Syria in recent years. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed the strategic territory. Most of the world does not recognize the annexation, though the Trump administration declared the territory to be part of Israel.

Pope pledges to continue being a ‘pest’ in defence of the poor (Reuters) Pope Francis said on Saturday he realises some people, including within the Church, consider him to be “a pest” for defending the poor and most vulnerable, but that it won’t stop him as it is part of Christianity. “Thinking about these situations (of exclusion and inequality), I make a pest of myself with my questions. And I go on asking. And I ask everyone in the name of God,” said Francis, Latin America’s first pope. Francis, 84, was speaking by video link to the World Meeting of Popular Movements, a grouping of grassroots organisations and social movements which bring attention to inequality in labour, land ownership, health care and other social issues in the developing world. Francis said rich countries and financial institutions should cancel the debts of the poorest nations. Weapons manufacturers and dealers should to stop contributing “to those awful geopolitical games which cost millions of displaced lives and millions of dead.” Technology giants should stop allowing hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation, he said, and called for a universal basic income and for countries to consider shortening the work day so more people could have jobs. “This system, with its relentless logic of profit, is escaping all human control. It is time to slow the locomotive down, an out-of-control locomotive hurtling towards the abyss. There is still time,” he said. “And so, I persist in my pestering.”

#headlines #news

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a-vast-horizon · 4 years

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The Ink Demonth Day 14: Arch

Henry and co. escape the Studio and make a pit stop on the way to Henry's house. The McDonald's employee they meet is very, very confused.

Thanks to @lordlyhour for suggesting McDonald's as a way to fill the Arch prompt! Also tremendous thanks to @this-book-has-been-loved who managed to dig up the 1963 operating hours for McDonald’s, holy cow!!! That info is not easy to find, let me tell you

Read on on AO3 here or keep reading below

By nine at night, the dinner rush had tapered off, and by ten-thirty, the parking lot was totally empty of customers. Most nights, this simply meant waiting out the rest of the shift, killing time until the store closed and everyone had to pitch in with closing up.

Tonight, however, Steve caught sight of an old van rolling into the parking lot at 10:37. He suppressed the urge to groan and stopped leaning on the counter to stand up straight as the van parked and two figures got out of the car.

It was pretty late at night to be having dinner; were they on a roadtrip, or just trying to get a late-night snack?

As the two walked a little closer to the window, close enough that the light from inside reached them, all of Steve’s musings about why they were out so late evaporated in a second, because both of them were absolutely drenched in a dark liquid that Steve hoped to God was paint or ink or something.

The man was the one to approach the window, with the woman hanging behind him. Despite his gut screaming at him, Steve smiled and launched into his usual spiel.

“Hi, welcome to McDonald’s, home of the golden arches, what can I get for ya?” Steve asked.

The man in front of the counter looked startled, looking at Steve with poorly-concealed shock. He was old, Steve could see now; maybe this was his first time at a McDonald’s?

“Give me a second,” the man said, reaching into his pocket to pull out a wallet that was also soaked through with dark liquid. In the light from the kitchen behind him, Steve could see that it was pitch black. It was a relief to know that the two people outside the restaurant right now weren’t drenched in blood, but it raised a whole new set of questions, namely what and how.

The man counted through the bills in his wallet, then counted something out on his fingers, then turned to look at the woman standing behind him.

“Hey, Allison, does Tom… have Boris’s appetite?” he asked. The woman, presumably Allison, nodded, and the man turned back to the window, counting on his fingers again.

“Okay, uh, we’ll take, let’s see, eleven? Oh shoot, Norman can’t—ten hamburgers,” the man said.

“Ten hamburgers,” Steve repeated, unable to tell if this was some kind of weird prank.

“Yep, ten. Okay now, let me think… six sides of fries? Or... “ he turned back to counting through his money again, and Steve hesitantly started a ticket with the man’s order for ten hamburgers.

“Henry, what’s a ‘triple-thick shake’?” Allison asked from where she was standing, several feet back from the window, apparently entranced by the menu. As he looked at her, Steve swore her face looked wrong, her eyes too big for the rest of her, but he figured that was just the lighting playing tricks on him.

The man, Henry, took a breath like he was going to try to explain, and then just sighed.

“Two vanilla shakes, two chocolate, and one strawberry,” he said.

“And the fries?” Steve asked.

“Eight sides of fries,” Henry said, apparently making up his mind and aiming higher than his previous suggestion of six. Geez, how many people was this guy ordering food for?

“Will that be all?” Steve asked.

Henry looked Steve dead in the eyes, and Steve was struck by just how exhausted the older man looked, like he’d been awake for a week straight and hating every minute of it.

“I’m gonna need a coffee,” Henry said, and Steve dutifully added that to the ticket.

“Alright, then. Your total is three dollars and fifty cents,” Steve said, and the man pulled a few bills loose from his wallet and handed them over. At this point, Steve wasn’t surprised by the ink staining the edges of the bills, or the black smudges the other man’s hands left on them. He tucked the bills into the register and handed over the change, then sent the ticket back to the kitchen for Leo to cook up.

After giving their order, Henry and Allison retreated back out of the light from the restaurant to wait for it, and started talking to each other in low tones, which only piqued Steve’s interest in them. He lingered near the window, pretending to be busy wiping the counter down as he watched them out of the corner of his eye. Henry had been blocking Steve’s view of Allison before, whether by accident or by design, but now he could at least make out what looked like a sword hanging off of her hip, and some glowing doohickey hung from Henry’s belt. Just who were there people?!

Leo got the food out as fast as usual, and in just a few minutes a number of bags and drink cups were piled at the takeaway window. Henry and Allison stepped forward to collect them, though they obviously weren’t able to carry all of it. The two of them exchanged a glance, and then took a long, hard look at Steve. He started to put his hands up, ready to explain for the hundredth time that company policy meant he couldn’t help them carry their food to their car, but that wasn’t what they had in mind.

“Tom, we need a little help!” Allison called out, and one of the back doors to the van slammed open. The figure (presumably named Tom) that came rushing out was a blur at first, impossible to make out in the dark parking lot, but came into focus as he got closer to the window.

Oh, hell no! Steve had to be dreaming. There was no other explanation as to how a six-foot tall figure he could only describe as a cartoon dog came to be standing in front of his window.

Tom stood in front of the window, glaring at Steve for a long moment during which Steve was pretty sure the temperature dropped a solid ten degrees, and then reached forward and picked up the rest of the bags that Henry and Allison hadn’t been able to carry. Oh, what the fuck, the cartoon dog also had a robot arm?

Allison, apparently oblivious to Steve’s distress, gave the man a cheery grin. Henry offered a sympathetic look, but in the end, followed the other two back to the van without offering any kind of explanation.

Steve leaned out the window to gawk as they walked back. Through the open door of the van, be could make out a bright, flickering light reflecting off of some kind of wet black surface, but then the door was pulled shut and the van drove out of the parking lot.

“Leo!” Steve called. “Leo, my God, tell me you saw those people!”

“Calm down, man,” Leo said, coming out of the kitchen to join Steve at the window. “We’ve seen crowds before. Sure it’s late, but it’s not worth the excitement.”

“Nah, you don’t get it,” Steve said. “They had this dog—”

“I’ve seen dogs before,” Leo said. “Again, not worth the excitement.”

“No, but this dog was up on its back legs like a fuckin’ cartoon, and it had this robot arm—”

“Sounds like you oughta stop workin’ closin’ shifts, if you’re dozin’ off at the window and havin’ these kinda dreams,” Leo said.

“I wasn’t dreaming!” Steve insisted, turning to look out at the parking lot, hoping for some kind of proof of what he’d just seen. It was empty, though. The only sign that there had ever been a cartoon dog, or a lady with a sword, or an old man drenched in ink was the ticket from the absurdly large order they’d placed.

“No way I dreamt all that,” Steve said, already starting to doubt himself.

#the ink demonth #bendy and the ink machine #henry stein #allison angel #zen talks #zen writes #funny #mcdonalds

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entomancy · 3 years

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(Fic) Daywalkin’ in Vegas

...let’s be honest, this ‘short backstory fics’ thing has done what my writing tends to do, and Escalted. So let’s escalate.

Title: Daywalkin’ in Vegas (Wattpad) Setting: Increasingly not even serial-numbers-off-VTM. VTM infact exists in-world as a gaming system, which really annoys Fancy Vampires. Warnings: Gore; depictions of violence/ death against a child. Words: 6537 Summary: A failed siring gets the attention of two very different parts of Vegas Below; and a young blooded nosferatu puts herself in the centre of a dangerous balance.

Beep.

Twenty-eight forty.

Beep.

Thirty-one seventy.

Beep.

Nox watched the till display tick up, comparing the total to her mental tally. She had enough; she knew she did. It might have been in tattered bills, tarnished coin rolls and bits of change so old they were chipped like gears around the edges, but she was always real careful to plan these trips down to the grubby dime. In and out, as unobtrusive as possible.

Beep.

A final bag passed, the green-yellow numbers flickering one final time. The cashier smiled in customer service plastic as she read out the total, then followed it with a look of awkward concern.

“That’s all for you? We - er – we have some good specials,” she said hesitantly, nodding towards the little stack of brightly-labelled packages beside the register. It was mostly sweets and tampons, and Nox bit back on a grin at the sight. Nice thought, but that hadn’t been her ‘bloody’ problem for a while now.

“That’s it,” she replied, adding: “Thanks, though.” Sure, it was an upsell, but a kind one. The girl even managed to keep back any disgust at the state of some of the cash; it had been cleaned up, but people didn’t tend to drop crisp ones into a cup on the sidewalk.

Nox carried everything out to the repurposed shopping cart that she’d left just inside the little bodega’s doors. The thing was unbalanced and took corners like a drunk, but it was better than playing pack mule herself. The new bags settled down on top of the day’s earlier buys: bulk discount batches of toilet roll, bleach and superglue, along with cheap fabric for bandages. Plus, now, thirty-eight dollars and eighty-six cents’ worth of the cheapest mince and frozen shrimp available within a four-mile radius.

There had been a time when she’d had to worry about dietary fibre. Or vitamins.

The cart’s wheels creaked and rasped on sidewalk dirt as she headed it away, hunching down over the handle as she pushed; partly for more control, mostly to keep her face in shade. Her battered baseball cap and hoodie did a pretty good job – accompanied by garish plastic sunglasses and a stained bike mask – but every little helped. It also added to the overall ‘bag lady out on an afternoon shuffle’ aesthetic she was going for. The trick was to inspire just enough awkward pity to be invisible, but not enough to be a target.

Apparently, her act was off today. She’d just turned a laborious corner, distracted by trying to keep the bags all stacked, when she felt a hand clamp down onto the top of her head and yank hard. She didn’t move, but the hood pulled away and she heard a yelp of disgust even before she swivelled around. Two young men stood behind her, gawking in revulsion at the revealed state of Nox’s scalp, in all its piebald, peeling, erratically-thickened glory. A thin braid slithered down her face, torn too-easily free along with the hood.

She gave the scene one more heartbeat to really settle in, before grinning widely. Faced with a mouthful of teeth like broken ivory, the youths managed to look even more horrified.

“Aye, that’s how I caught it too!” Nox cackled theatrically, before snatching the hat back from now-unresisting fingers and jamming it back into place. “Don’t go scratching yerself anywhere pretty fer a bit, eh?”

The lad – and his already-retreating backup – hesitated, then let out a string of bravado-born obscenities. Freak – gross – blah blah blah I-have-a-tiny-dick blah. He kicked at the cart as he started follow his friend, and Nox let just enough spill out to sate the petty spite.

Once they had gone, she picked up the packets again and began to fix her hood. The exposed skin was stinging and smarting already, a poison-ivy prickle that calamine wouldn’t touch. At least it was late enough in the afternoon that she probably wouldn’t blister from the exposure. More annoying was the missing chunk of hair, and she probed at it gingerly. No deep wound, thankfully; which probably meant that the straggly braid had been almost ready to fall out anyway. She tended to keep about half a head of hair going, on average; so it’d grow back.

The lads were long gone by the time she was ready to set off again. With any luck she’d be nothing more than an awkward moment in a day of shoving their weight around; quickly forgotten. Being gross in the eyes of idiots wasn’t a Breech, after all.

The rest of the trip back was uneventful. Streets gave way to alleys, sidewalks to cracked paving, to rotting asphalt, and even the graffiti began to wane as she got closer to home. The main occupants of this ass-end of nowhere – a ghetto’s dumpster of a place – didn’t exactly make it their business to advertise where they were. Those that needed to know; knew. Those that knew, generally didn’t care – which was honestly a hell of a lot better than the alternative. Nox had heard the stories of what it had been like only twenty years ago. It was strange to feel that there was any sort of luck to her history, but six years wasn’t twenty.

Reaching a gap in an otherwise unremarkable wall, she glanced around quickly, making sure that no one was watching. Then she straightened up, gripped either side of the overloaded cart, and hefted it up through the broken brickwork in one smooth movement. She vaulted in after it, dropping down into cool shade, and let out a sigh of relief as the accepting touch of Karloff’s Invitation washed across her. The sense was like a door opening in welcome; like taking the first familiar turn towards home after a long day’s drive. It also meant no more unwanted attention – without that explicit permission, you’d never be able to recognise the entrance, or even keep your attention on what you were looking for. She was as invisible now to all other turned-aside eyes as everything else within the Invitation’s borders.

A few more rattling corners later, Nox finally turned into the Homestead grounds. The whole area had once been a crammed-in mess of squat apartment blocks, copy-paste civic solutions built without charm to fill the need for cheap rooms. The Homestead was the only one of its kin still standing, now surrounded by an opened-out area of recent amateur demolition and scrap-built fencing. Bright splashes of street art cut across sagging concrete and the blacked-out eyes of the windows, although the tags and themes chosen indicated the difference between these creators and the more standard ones of the world outside. Most of this had been painted at night, for example, with rather more variety on the theme of ‘hands’ grasping the tins.

There was a lot more inside, and below, but she felt a particular warmth at these murals. Out here, on the surface. Bright in sunshine that most of them could never see. The Nosferatu might be Vegas Below’s crusty little secret, but they were damn well there.

Bits of cracked paving clicked and skittered beneath the cart’s wheels as Nox made her way through the fences and to the big, bolted main doors. There was a rough porch built around the frame, mostly to give extra shadows, and she looked up at the tiny glints of watchful glass sunk into the surrounding wall. She waved.

“Dimestore-Blade’s grocery delivery,” she announced, and listened to the familiar rattle of bolts start on the other side of the door. A few moments later it swung open and a hunched figure peered out, wincing back from even the thick porch shade. This was Max; an older woman than Nox in both kinds of age, who managed her marks via a combination of extensive bandaging and even more extensive needlepoint. Watery black eyes looked past her, squinting through a gap in the heavily-embroidered scarf wrapped around her head.

“All okay?”

Nox nodded and lifted the trolley over the threshold.

“Fine.” She didn’t mention the youths. Didn’t seem a lot of point. “Let’s get this lot into the freezer before it can walk on its own, yeah?”

Safely inside the slightly-fetid gloom of the entrance, Nox took the opportunity shed her bag-lady layers. True, she couldn’t actually overheat, even on a Nevada afternoon, but being swathed in that many layers was still claustrophobic. Beneath the mismatched fabric strata was an increasingly-threadbare pair of yoga pants and a dark vest, and Nox gave a small sigh of relief as she folded up the rest of her daylight-drag, shoving it onto a shelf nearby.

“Right,” she muttered, as much to fill the air as anything else, and turned back to the trolley. Max had already transferred much of it into precarious piles in her own arms. Her scarf had slipped down, revealing a hairless head webbed with splitting skin; much of it made whole again with patterned patches of colourful thread. The fabric discoloured over time, of course, but it reduced the leaking.

Balancing their burdens, the pair made their way further into the Homestead. Closest to the entrance was the most decrepit part, occupied mostly by shelves and old furniture crammed full of clothes and patched umbrellas for venturing out, and with years of dumped debris building up in corners. Rooms with windows – even those as thoroughly blacked out or bricked up as these were – mostly housed the rat runs or storage, because no one wanted to spend a lot of time somewhere where crap mortar could result in dayburns. Similarly, the roof and most of the top floor was given over to pigeon roosts and No avoided them whenever possible. She’d never much liked pigeons before this, and she still held that even their vitae tasted of garbage, somehow. Still, they were much dumber than rats, and they did lay eggs, so that helped.

The really lived-in part of the Homestead was underground. Everybody knew Nosferatu lived in the sewers, right? Okay, so Nox would admit she hadn’t much understood the difference between ‘sewer’ and ‘storm drain’ before her life had taken its scabby turn, but she sure did now. Vegas had extensive storm drains – large concrete tunnels that lay under much of the city, designed to quickly shift heavy rain away from the tarmacked surface above – and they were ideal: underground, dark, not monitored.

And not actually full of shit.

The arrangement used to be… messier, Karloff had told her. When they hadn’t been so organised; when they’d lived closer together with others who had slipped through the cracks Above. Some of the Family had started off as those same ‘unfortunates’ after all; those who were aftermath-sired in a broken frenzy, or from the bloody jaunt of some fuckfang cutting through the ranks of those who wouldn’t be missed. Splitting their claimed tunnels off from the main circuit and establishing the Homestead proper had happened later, after the Vegas Accord had given the Nosferatu a Clan-status, and hunting them for sport stopped being an acceptable weekend activity.

Six years sure ain’t twenty.

Max chatted away as they walked; an idle litany of gossip, social media tidbits and reports from watchers all over the city, woven together into what Nox tended to think of as ‘Radio Max’. Spying on people was apparently another nos stereotype; but honestly when you didn’t really sleep, were functionally invisible to large portions of society, and had worked out how to divert half-decent broadband from badly-secured leisure networks overhead, it wasn’t difficult to get ahead on current events.

Plus the rats, of course.

Information was power, and they had precious little of any other. Although Nox sometimes wondered how much of those scant threads of power that Karloff put such value on would diminish if Clanpires in general figured out how to just Google things.

They had reached what she thought of as ‘mainstreet’ of the Homestead tunnels – a long space with concrete pillars linking floor to ceiling every thirty feet or so, quite cheerfully lit by a mishmash web of light fittings rigged up overhead – when yelling broke out further down. Nox and Max shared a look of alarm at the commotion, but it was when her name became suddenly clear in the shouts that Nox’s stomach dropped.

“Get this stuff away, will you?” she muttered, carefully setting her packages down beside Max, and turned to meet the oncoming figures. Even wrapped in a heavy coat and thick gloves, she knew the loping form of Skaad instantly.

With features which sagged so violently that his bruise-yellow skin frequently tore at the edges, and a mouth like a lipless sharps bucket, Skaad was nonetheless gifted with some of the keenest senses in the clan, plus a damn-near eidetic memory. Which meant he spent most of his time skulking in hidden places, listening to things he shouldn’t, and following people who thought they were alone in their secret business. Having him sprinting towards you, so fast his eyelids were visibly flapping, wasn’t a great sign.

Back in the world Above – before her life had gone to hell in a weirdly specific way – Nox had been a paramedic. It was useful in the day-to-day, being the closest thing this bunch of ragged immortals had to a resident doctor, but there was only really one sort of actual emergency left down here.

Skaad skidded to a halt, and grabbed her arm with a worrying urgency.

“Got a phresh one. Get yer kit!”

Fuck. A fresh one meant one thing: someone had found a dumped fledgeling, one who’d been showing signs of the Change going wrong and been tossed aside by their disgusted sire. Intervening quickly could help, particularly getting a pigeon smoothie down them fast, but the panic on Skaad’s drooping face didn’t line up with -

“What’s so – ?” she started, but he shook his head, steering her towards the plastic-covered tunnel they used as a makeshift clinic. He leaned in to shove her again, but lowered his voice and muttered just before he did – and the words sent ice down her spine.

“It’sh a kid.”

Oh no.

Oh fuck.

You didn’t turn kids.

When your working knowledge of vampires had been a general pop-culture miasma and some blurry memories of teenage Buffy marathons, finding yourself on the other side of the supernatural coin came as a shock in various ways. One of which was the weird sensation that you should have studied it all harder, somehow. Nox had certainly felt stupid, in her early days, as a man with a face like a charred wasps’ nest listened to her stutter her way through half-remembered fiction and worse-remembered reality. But she’d apparently got a few things right, and somewhere in that muddle had been the idea that you shouldn’t turn kids.

There were all kinds of theories as to why – from the debauched to the practical – but she found that in many ways it didn’t matter. Whatever fucked-up intention you had, it wouldn’t work. Too young just… didn’t take. And when a siring didn’t work, there was every chance the result would end up on her table.

She scrabbled through the assortment of old drawers and boxes that stored her gear, pulling out anything she thought might work. Bandages, thread, craft superglue, repurposed bottles of hard spirits that would do in a pinch for sterilising. The best-case scenario things. And the rest. Old herb pots of fine powders; thrift-store silver cutlery hammered and polished and changed into a very different set of tools. Sharpie-labelled bottles of liquids that moved weirdly in the light, and a range of refillable lighters that definitely didn’t contain hydrocarbons anymore. All the things she’d picked up in the last six years that fitted in with other sort of medicine.

The plastic curtain behind her was yanked back and a sound she had been trying not to hear finally demanded her attention. It wasn’t even a scream, and Nox hated, hated hated hated that she recognised the cadence there perfectly: raw, animal agony of sound torn from a throat that was violently reforming around it. She turned to see Skaad forcing flailing limbs down, looping thick restraints around rippling flesh, and finally allowed her full attention to turn down to the spasming form.

Gore looked different through vampire eyes. It was hard to describe exactly how – partly because wordsmithery had never been one of her strong points, but more because trying to compare feelings from now and then was always going to have a huge fucking hurdle of shifted species in the way. She’d still probably seen more human blood in nine years on the ambulances than during the half-dozen in and out of Vegas’ shadows, and but everything afterwards had been… different. Displaced. Detached. Just didn’t seem as visceral as it used to do.

But this did.

Acid tightened in Nox’s throat as she stared down at the shuddering mess in front of her. Blanched skin bubbled and writhed, tearing as it pulled away from the muscles beneath; themselves little more than contorting ropes of livid tissue that pulsed under dying heartbeats and spilled black fluid from ever-widening rents. The throat was gone, now a bubbling pit of desperate breaths, sucked past exposed tendons that wriggled like furious worms. Half-clotted ichor was pooling from gashes along the arms, down the stomach and further: the marks of peri-sire wounds, those that had been still fresh as the invading blood forced itself into collapsing veins. The eyes were side-to-side a sickly crimson-yellow, bloating out from a face that was collapsing in on itself, and throughout it all, the kid screamed.

It was revolting. Nox had to bite down on the vicious spikes of fight-flight that were going off in her mind, so violently she could feel her hands trembling from the horror and her disgust at her own reaction. It was an instinct, an unbidden response to a failing siring – she knew that – but understanding it didn’t make it easier. Everyone down here had ‘gone nozz’ during their own Turn. Hell, a few of those brought to her were walking around now, not seeming any weirder than any of them, but she’d still felt that awful surge of fundamental wrongness about them before they stabilised.

Nox gritted – all of – her teeth, and slammed her kit down on the table.

Instincts can fucking blow me.

“Let’s see what we can do.”

It turned out what they could do, wasn’t much. Cleaning, sewing, cutting, sealing – nothing held. Stitches fell from uncertain skin, or tore great new holes as fresh spasms pulled at the edges. Wet rags soon littered the floor, sodden with black and yellow fluids that turned the rough concrete into a slippery, stinking mess. The bleeding wasn’t slowing, even as the body seemed to be crumpling in on itself, gradually liquefying around the bones.

The sound had gone quieter, if not softer, and Nox didn’t have much hope it would stop soon. It might be days yet, before the final sparks of vitae or life or cruel continuation finally went out.

Too young. The kid – the girl, most likely, going by anatomy – had been just… too young.

They had to have known that.

“I’m outa tricks,” she said, although the words felt thick and sharp in her mouth. She wanted to keep going. She wanted to, so fucking much. But somebody had done this. Somebody who knew this would happen.

“I’m gonna make her comfy,” she continued, then hesitated even as she pulled out the frankly-horrific cocktail of morphine and street drugs that might make a dent in a system caught somewhere between undead and alive. Skaad looked at her, and held out a clawed hand.

“Want me…?”

“Nah.” Nox shook her head, and swallowed. “You can get the others outta upstairs, though. I need to – to make a call.”

Skaad stiffened, his jaundiced eyes flicking between her and the table for a moment, before he let out a low hiss and ducked away through the curtain. Nox administered the mix and tried to convince herself it would have any sort of palliative effect. Then she went back to the drawers and rummaged again, right at the back, until her fingers closed on the ridged plastic of an old nokia.

There weren’t many numbers in the phone, but it was the first one she selected, under B.

- SUMFCK SIRED KID. ITS BAD -

She threw the phone back into the drawer and hurried out, past the plastic sheet and into the tunnels, leaving sticky footprints in her wake. Not a great look, but everyone would already know what was happening. Nosferatu gossiped like – well, like a society of insomniac, semi-immortal shut-ins.

Overhead, an erratic cluster of repurposed pipes trailed down through the domed roof, emanating from the rat runs above. Drainpipes, corrugated plastic, bits of plumbing, and all of them shaking slightly with the constant pass of tiny feet within. They opened out onto tiny highways of shelving that lined the walls, all heading in the same direction as she was. Pairs of black-beady eyes glanced at her as they passed, and with so many concentrated here, she could feel the faintest flick of Attention in each one. They were all headed to a squat metal door at the end of an offshoot passageway. The rats passed freely back and forth narrow holes punched in either side of the door; but Nox knocked. She knew she was already expected and entered after a respectful moment.

Karloff’s chamber was bigger than it looked like it would be from the doorway. Nox wasn’t sure what the space had originally been – some kind of maintenance room? – but it was now dark, and warm, and smelled less of rats than might be expected given the constant rodent tide. Shelves lined the walls, full of books and occasional pieces of recycled pet furniture. One floor-ceiling tower was filled entirely with old radios, police scanners, walkie talkies and the like.

The old man himself lay where he usually did, propped up in a nest of pillows and blankets in a box-like bed in the centre of the room. He presented an impossibly gaunt figure: papery-brown skin layered like peeling paint across sharp bones, with eyes so thickly clouded they sat like grey-milk marbles in unclosing sockets. His face looked scorched, blackened at the edges of the old dry wounds that had taken his nose, torn away most of his lips, and presumably shattered the broken fangs that jutted from his mouth. There was – as usual – a huge white rat lazing across his chest, nearly the size of a terrier and wearing a dark silken ribbon, and its sharp crimson eyes fixed on Nox as she entered.

She bowed her head, and tried not to leave bloody footprints on the rug.

“I need a temporary Invitation,” she said. It was blunt, but there was no point in dancing around it. He’d already know anyway. As she spoke, the huge rat sat up. It’s pale paws were clasped in front of it, folded in a strangely human-like gesture, but Karloff himself turned his head only slightly.

“’Belton,” he said softly, in the throat-based hush of his voice, and Nox nodded. Her fingers twitched into fists, and she felt the sticky remnants of gore slide between them.

“I… I’m running out of options, and she – ” the words were sticker than her fingers, getting caught on her lips “ – she’s real bad.”

The rat cocked its head and Karloff drew a slow breath.

“You will not do it?” he asked. Nox’ throat tightened.

“If I gotta. But I want him to see her, cos I – I could do this, but I ain’t got a snowball’s chance of doing anything about it.”

Karloff’s head turned further, and the clouded eyes passed over her with an intensity that Nox could feel, as if they skipped sight entirely and went right into her heart instead. There was another stretched moment of silence, then the pressure dropped and the rat turned away, curling itself neatly under its master’s chin.

“It is done,” Karloff said. The long fingers on one hand twitched slightly, and the faintest hint of a frown dug into his face. “...take care with the old death. You have seen little of him.”

“Yeah, I know. Thank you,” Nox added before she headed out again; first to check that the cocktail of drugs had at least calmed the kid’s screams, then back into the upper house. A few rats followed her as she slid into the squeaking, busy dimness of the runs to use the sink that still stood in one corner, using brownish water to at least scrub some of the stains from her hands. Then she set to wait, pacing with nervous energy.

No one joined her. By now, everybody would know what was happening, and no one wanted to be around when he came calling.

The problem – okay, so one of the problems, in a dreadful, tangled ball of ever-more layered problems – was that it was very, very difficult to kill a fledgeling in any way that could be considered humane. A body already in the process of tearing itself apart was resistant to most damage for the same reasons that you couldn’t punch a fog. Getting any kind of drug to land in an even-partly vampiric system was difficult enough at the best of times, and this…

Well, there was sunlight, but everything about Nox’s very being baulked at the idea of using that method. She knew with personal, hellish intimacy that the agony from that would get through even a Change. Torturing someone to death with one of the few things worse than what they were going through was really not the point.

Plus, there was a tiny, tiny part of her mind that hoped she was wrong. She’d only been dealing with this stuff for a handful of years, and while rumours varied widely about how old Belton actually was, he’d seen a lot of shit. Maybe she’d missed something. Just maybe…

It seemed to take an eternity before the roar of an engine outside broke through Nox’ whirling thoughts. She hurried to the door, took a careful breath, and peered out through the little viewing slot. Not that anyone else would have been able to ride a motorcycle up to the Homestead without the permission of Karloff’s Invitation, but it never hurt to keep caution.

A huge bike was settled just beside the front steps. It was black, but in the way a magpie’s wings were black, with oil-slick iridescence hinting around the edges. The rider – dressed to match, in that seamless continuity of clothing that Nox had started to think of as ‘vampire sunscreen’ – had already dismounted and was stood beside his bike, the raven-sheen of his helmet turned towards the door. There was no visible gaze to meet, but the weight of his attention was like ice down her spine, and she opened the door as deliberately as she could.

“She’s downstairs,” she said, as the figure came up the steps. The sun was already going down, barely spilling dying light over the surrounding wall of buildings, and the porch shadow was very deep there. It only got deeper as the big man stepped into it – and then paused, right on the edge of the frame.

“May I enter?” His voice was never as heavy as she expected, with a melodic edge that absolutely did not match what she knew lay under that helmet. Nox rolled her eyes.

“I texted you, and you’re here, right?”

He was always so… old fashioned about this. It wasn’t like it was a general requirement. Nox stepped back, gesturing inwards.

“Come in already,” she added. The man might have been big – although ‘fucking enormous’ would be a better description, needing to visibly turn and duck to get through the doorframe – but he moved deceptively fast, and was well inside the hallway, starting to remove his helmet before she had had time to shut the door. She turned to look, not even pretending not to stare as he unclipped all the security bits and lifted it smoothly free. The dramatic effect was only slightly spoiled by the oddly-bulging balaclava he had on underneath – but Nox supposed that if her ears could meet at the back, she’d want to keep them restrained inside a helmet too.

Belton looked… well, he looked like Belton. There just plain wasn’t anyone else like that. The best description she had ever been able to come up with was that he looked like someone had tried very hard to make a bat in the character creation screen of a pro-wrestling computer game. It was as if the underlying architecture that should have made a human skull had been stretched and tweaked and twisted into something approaching Chiroptera from the other side.

It probably said something worrying about her own psyche that – somewhere in the mess of emotions that Belton inspired – a part of her really, really wanted to see an xray of his head.

No time for this.

“C’mon,” she nodded him to follow her back down the Homestead’s passageways. The rats watched them from every surface; their skittering highways unusually still as the majority of glinting little eyes were fixed on the visitor. They were the only visible watchers, and Nox tried not to notice how empty every space they passed through was. It added another level of eeriness, with the just-abandoned debris of life seeming like some extremely localised Rapture. Even Nox’ rapid explanation of the situation fell muted around them; for his part, Belton just listened and nodded every now and then. He didn’t look around.

How familiar was he, with this place? He’d come a few times since she’d been here – and of course, that first time meant he’d sure known where it was. Nox’ gaze slid sideways. Belton had removed his gloves by now, and the hands revealed couldn’t even remotely be thought of as human; the fingers were too long, bone and tendons standing stark beneath mottled grey skin; capped by black claws that curled from the nailbeds, polished to an obsidian gleam.

How many times had those hands run across the outer walls of the Homestead; at Karloff’s limits; searching for a way in? How many times had those claws torn into sagging flesh, or crushed furry watchers into broken blindness?

How many times had he come before he had brought her here; a crispy mess of fledgeling coated in sand and gravel and gore, spat out by the desert and into hands that immortals feared…?

The plastic curtain seemed to rise up like an exclamation, a cold shot of right now breaking her thoughts, and Nox came to a sharp halt. There was still sound from inside: a bubbling, slurred collage of moans that had made it past the drugs, and her hand froze halfway to the curtain. The swell of renewed, visceral revulsion felt like she’d choke on her own fucking hypocrisy, and she couldn’t suppress a slight hiss.

“It’s – ” she started, through gritted teeth, but cut out as Belton gently touched her shoulder.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Nox’ fingers twitched, then she turned away, moving until she could lean heavily against the nearest concrete pillar and rested her forehead against the pitted surface. The groan might as well have been coming out of the air. It pressed down around her and her skin crawled.

She hated this, and she hated that she hated it like this. Some depraved motherfucker had dragged a fucking child into very literal hell and she’d tried, she’d tried with every stupid, macguivered bullshit tool she’d put together out of garbage; she’d tried everything and it was never going to have meant a damn thing and all she could focus on, really really focus on right now was how fundamentally disgusting that fucking sound was –

And then it stopped.

Nox physically sagged against the pillar, relief and nausea chasing each other through a stomach that was dropping into her boots. There was only one reason for the sudden silence, and she let her eyes slide closed, muttering the same half-wordless prayer she’d always used when a case went bad, or a patient flatlined in the ambulance. Whatever that meant now, she’d never been sure, but it still sort of fit.

She’d known. She’d known when she picked up that damn phone.

But fuck me if hope isn’t a bitch.

It wasn’t long before there was the faint brush of plastic again and Nox opened her eyes to see Belton smoothing the curtain back behind him, covering the sudden stillness. There was a long moment of silence before he turned to her. His eyes were the most human-looking part of his face, and the grey gaze sought hers.

“I’ll be on my way, then.”

Nox nodded numbly. They went out the way they came; still alone, still watched at every step by a hundred rodent stares. Back up, back to the door and out into the thickening dusk of the evening – and it wasn’t until the porch steps were creaking under his boots that Nox’s nerve rose again.

“Hey – Belton?” she managed, and the big figure paused. He looked back at her and one curled brow raised, moving an ear with it. Nox pulled the Homestead door shut behind her as she sought the right words. “This… ain’t your job, right?”

“I don’t have a real tight specification,” he replied, then shrugged. “But broadly? No. To be honest with you, my boss couldn’t give a rat’s twat what happens with the Nosferatu.”

“So why’d you come?” Those words came fast, but Nox didn’t try to stop them. Belton paused again, then hung his helmet and balaclava over the big bike’s handlebars. He sat down on the steps, hunching a little in that strange shape his back took when he wasn’t standing, and Nox slid down beside him at the unspoken invitation.

Belton shook his head, what might have been a wry smile tugging at the edges of his too-wide lips. Glints of needle teeth flashed in the dusk.

“It’s a question of perspective, see,” he said quietly. “For someone like you? This’ll ruin your whole year. Getting all Lady Macbeth with the inevitable. But for me?” He held up a hand and slowly flexed the clawed fingers. Once; twice; and Nox couldn’t draw her gaze away from the mottled skin as it shifted over his bones. Belton sighed. It was an old sound, so old that any hint of what it might contain had worn away like stone under rain.

“What’s one drop in an ocean? Don’t get me wrong – ” he added, with the edge of smile falling away again “ – I’ll feel bad about it; but I’m not losing myself any sleep.”

She should have been angry. She wanted to be angry, at the casual way this bat-faced bastard just said it; as the so-recent feel of the kid’s crumbling flesh slammed against her thoughts and ghosted under her fingers, and bile she wasn’t even sure she had anymore swirled at the back of her throat. She should be angry.

“...thank you.”

“No need for that,” he replied – but Nox shook her head.

“Nah; there is. Things need saying.” She fidgeted with the hem of her pants for a silent moment, before continuing. “Don’t believe you actually sleep, though.”

This time there was no mistaking that Belton grinned; and the resulting expression was exactly as unpleasant as it sounded.

“No? Not even if I say I’ve got little bats on my pyjamas?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Now that there’s uncalled for.”

Nox grinned, and even as she did she could almost hear Karloff’s voice in her head. Be wary of the old death.

And yet…

There was another long silence, although this one felt less tense.

…fuck it. When am I gonna get this chance again?

“They found her in the desert,” she said carefully, scuffing dust across the steps with one toe as she spoke; an idle motion to distract herself from the nerves inside. Belton nodded.

“Aye. Letting lady sun do the dirty work. It’s an almost foolproof method, really.”

Nox looked down at her own hands; where the patchwork of thickened tissue traced patterns like dry riverbeds over her pallid brown skin. The sun burned bits went blistered red, then dark and crackly, then sickly pale when that peeled; slowly edging back to her default. It sure as hell wasn’t pleasant; but it wasn’t the chemical-melting collapse of flesh that she’d seen on others.

“So, that make me a fool or an outlier?”

“I said almost.” Belton leaned back a little, looking up into the dark expanse of sky. “Always going to take a risk when you don’t stay to watch. Although I’ll admit it takes some big balls to stick around for that sort of disposal. What with the deeply ingrained phytophobia of your classic vampire, and everything.”

Nox raised her most intact eyebrow.

“This is more about your junk than I want to know.”

Belton laughed. Really laughed; the kind of melodic tone that bordered on a snatch of song and that was so very out of place coming from within that face.

“Oh, I’m not claiming that kind of testicular fortitude. Sunlight scares the piss out of me as much as it ever did. Don’t think it’s the kind of thing you can get over. Built-in, you know?”

“You ride about in the day,” Nox pointed out, and Belton waved a hand back towards his helmet.

“I’ve got some really bespoke protective gear, see. Amazing what’s been done with polymers in the last thirty years.”

Nox blinked.

“…you’ve got bike pleathers?”

“Technically I’ve got an integrated neo-polymer baselayer,” Belton stopped and his nose crinkled – which was quite an extensive expression. “…ah fuck, that sounds like I’ve got plastic pants, doesn’t it? Keep that one to yourself, will you?”

“Sure.” Nox’s shoulders sagged again as reality dropped back suddenly. She decided to just go for blunt. “With… the kid. Someone did that, and before that they – ” her words choked again, at the thought of where some of those peri-sire wounds had been.

“I know.” The amusement had gone from Belton’s voice as he stood up, heading back to his bike rather abruptly. The engine roared into life as he swung himself astride it, folding his ears into their cover, and Nox had to shout to be heard above the rumble.

“Do they… just get away with this?”

“There’s plenty that think they should,” he replied calmly; oddly easy to hear over the din, as he slid the helmet into place. “It was like that for a long time.”

Nox’s lips drew back, almost of their own accord, working to some defiant instinct she only had partial control over.

“And you?”

“Me? I’m a monster on a chain that I put there.” Belton looked up, and just before the visor snapped closed, there was a flicker of crimson in his eyes.

“But I’ll see what I can do.”

#Entofic #Vampire Nonsense #urban fantasy #The Vegas Masqerade #Nosferatu grocery shopping #terrible daywalkers #this WWE-manbat-looking mofo #I'm not warning for 'blood' on a vampire setting #help the plot keeps happening

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xhaotixaesthetica · 4 years

Text

The Shooting Stars of N.City (Soulmate Au! Jaemin Fluff)

Starlink Intergalactic Navigator

Author’s Note: YAY, a request for one of my ult groups! And one of my biases! It’s a win for me, ladies and gays! I accidentally deleted the original request, so I can’t post an answer to it. (It’s really lucky I screenshotted it before that happened.) Also, keep in mind that I’ve never been to a concert before, so this might not be entirely accurate, but I tried to just use my common sense. This imagine honestly has just as much Jisung X Felix as Reader X Jaemin, I’m sorry I got carried away. Hope you enjoy!

Trigger warning: none

Genre: fluff and slight angst

Word-count: 4.2K+

You are in: The Luck of Fate Star System

“And what’s the name for that?” the barista asked, the bored lilt to his monotoned voice offset by the heady scent of vanilla and coffee in the air.

“Y/N.” you said softly.

The boy didn’t bother to respond, not even nodding as he tapped your name into the register and told you your total.

“Eight dollars and twenty-one cents.” he drawled.

If it wasn’t so early, you would have groaned about the absurd prices — were you ever going to buy that coffee maker? — but as it was still so early, and you were incredibly sluggish, you only nodded, pulling the money out and handing it toward him.

The boy’s brow furrowed at the ink on your arm, suddenly looking a bit more awake as he craned his neck to see it better, like all nosy people did.

You will meet at: N.City.

The boy startled when you yanked your sleeve down over the words, glaring fiercely as he took the money, stammering and dropping change all over the corner.

You had seen the words on your arm for the longest, and you were beyond sick of being ogled at like a zoo attraction for a soulmate link that you had come to hate anyway.

As if you hadn’t looked at every website, in every almanac and encyclopedia, on every map and globe, trying in vain to find N.City.

Only, no matter how hard you looked it up, you couldn’t find the place on your arm.

N.City was not a real place.

But that didn’t matter, you reminded yourself.

Because this, right now, was a real place. The current moment is what you should be focusing on. Not some distant person that might not even exist in the first place.

“Y/N!” another barista called.

This barista, a pretty girl whose nametag read Yeji, gave you an airy smile as you shuffled up to the counter and took your drink. It made you feel a bit better.

The hot drink in your hands warmed from the inside out, a comforting brace against the sharp November breeze.

Despite the resentment for the words on your arm, you couldn’t help the old childhood habit of brushing your thumb lovingly against the words as you walked into your lecture hall and took your seat.

While your soulmate link wasn’t particularly common, it wasn’t particularly rare either. It wasn’t hard to find other people who had it and they all said the same thing: while seemingly helpful, it acted more like a puzzle than a hint.

Many times, soulmates would have different pieces of the location on their arm, like one soulmate having a street name and the other having the city and state its in. Some soulmates had vague locations like ‘bus’ or ‘river.’

And some, most likely in your case, had emotional locations. This could mean somewhere that’s really important to one of the soulmates, but isn’t actually a place with a name, so the soulmate link had to make one.

This was most likely what you had.

At least, that was what you hoped.

This was much easier to accept than the thought that the soulmate system just screwed you over.

“‘Sup N.City,” Felix’s low baritone, still scratchy with sleep startled you out of your pre-lecture stupor.

You gave him a sour look, too tired and too fond of him to have any real malice behind it.

“Stop calling me that,” you said, like you did twenty times a day whenever he used that nickname. If it had been anyone else, you probably would have body-slammed them.

But Felix, with his deep voice and big pretty eyes and heart way too big for his body, was an extremely hard person to get mad at.

When the years went by and you started to resent the writing on your arm, he was the one who distracted you with Mario Kart and the detentions his stupid ideas brought.

When everyone kept asking what N.City was and what it meant and where it was and your stomach dropped when you saw their faces twist with pity when you said you didn’t know, he was the one who told them to back off and mind their business.

And when people started trying to use your confusion toward your soulmate link to their advantage, trying to trick you into believing they were your soulmate, he was the one who protected you. The one who stood by you when you started isolating everyone in the interest of your safety.

The lecture passed by as it always did, your professor’s incredibly boring voice sliding in one and ear and out the other, without a word of his speech actually sticking in your brain.

If it hadn’t been for the notes Felix took in this class, you probably would have failed weeks ago.

“You really need to start paying attention,” Felix admonished, sounding more amused than disapproving.

You pouted, crossing your arms over your chest as you two packed up. Well, Felix packed up, you didn’t have anything out to begin with except your iced coffee.

“Come on, Lix. Statistics make me sad, you know this.”

Felix rolled his eyes as you two left the lecture hall, on the way to get some actual food in when his phone buzzed in the middle of the walk.

You weren’t paying attention to him until you noticed he wasn’t beside you anymore.

You glanced around, confused, before seeing him a few paces back, an upset and pensive look on his face.

“Lix? What are you doing? What’s wrong?”

The moment he heard your voice, the look broke and he grinned.

“Felix, I don’t like that look. That’s the same look you got on your face in sophomore year when you—”

“Oh? Oh, we bring up stuff from the past, are we?” Felix’s brow rose and your eyes narrowed. “Because if that’s the case, then we can always talk about that time when—”

“Don’t you dare bring that up,” you hissed, cheeks already flaming as he smirked.

“That’s what I thought,” he said sliding his phone back into his pocket and catching up to you, throwing a jovial arm over your shoulder.

You really didn’t like that grin on his face.

“So you know what concert I was going to in June?”

“Yeah,” you said warily, swiping your student ID at the entrance to the dining hall.

“Well, the concert’s in Korea and I don’t like going by myself, so I was going to have Chris-hyung come with me.”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

“But he’s going on a family vacation with Lucas and their mom.”

“I really don’t like where this is going.”

“So I want you to come instead.”

“Oh, Felix,” you whined as you two moved down the line.

“No, listen! It won’t be like that time in LA! My Korean is pretty good now and I’ve been to Seoul loads of times before so I can get us around! And Chan already paid for you, so all you have to do is come!”

Your eyes widened, almost dropping your plate as you looked for an empty table to sit at.

“Chan paid for me?”

“Well, he already paid for his stay in the hotel and his concert ticket and his flight and everything so he’s just giving it to you.” Felix smiled brightly, as if he wasn’t asking me to go with him to a country where I couldn’t speak the language and had never been there before to see a band that I didn’t even know the name of.

Felix was an avid K-Pop fan, but I think it was only because of the name that appeared on his collarbone a day before he turned eighteen.

Han Jisung.

A Korean name if I’d ever seen one. Since then, Felix had been to Korea like six times and was very near fluent in the language. Despite always going there “strictly for concerts and conventions,” he always stayed for, like, a week to “take in the sights.”

Normally, any mention of soulmates irked you. You tried to forget about it as time went on, but it kept being thrown in your face. Couples everywhere, your parents and family constantly harassing you about N.City and your potentially nonexistent soulmate.

But you found his dedication to his soulmate so cute and genuine and innocent, that you just couldn’t fault him for it. This Han Jisung was a very lucky person.

And, no matter how much you didn’t really want to give up a week of your hard-earned summer downtime to go frolicking in a foreign country, you had to admit that the idea of Felix being alone there didn’t sit well with you either.

“Ugh, fine. But you better not turn me into Nancy Drew looking for Han Jisung.”

Felix blushed, ducking his head down as he grumbled, “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

The next two months passed by uneventfully. Exams, homework, and copious amounts of finals stress came and went. And though you and Felix were worn and tired, the thought of having another year under your belt and being one step closer to your degree lifted your spirits considerably.

Because you were petty, you didn’t admit to Felix how excited you actually were about the upcoming trip. But he’d known you for years and the grin wouldn’t leave his face as he watched you run around your room, stuffing clothes and toiletries in a suitcase as you babbled nearly incoherently to him, practicing the little phrases of Korean that you had had time to learn.

Something you knew from experience was that traveling with Felix was . . . stressful. At least, at the beginning.

You had both worked out a plan two days earlier to keep everything relaxed and smooth.

However, the day of the flight, that entire plan went out the window.

You both woke up an hour and a half after the alarm went off, had to go back to his house three times for things you forgot (one of which being his passport and ticket), the bus you were on broke down, Felix cause a hold up at TSA cause of all the snacks in his carry-on, you very nearly got questioned by the police when Felix yelled, “This concert is going to be the bomb!” at the top of his lungs, and then you nearly fought a man at the terminal who you were pretty sure was trying to kidnap you and Felix.

“This happens every time!” you complained to him as you both finally boarded the plane, putting your carryon in the overhead compartment.

Felix got the window seat — due to all his whining — but at this point, you didn’t even care, just settled down in your seat with your earbuds, head leaning back, and drifting off into a peaceful sleep.

At least that’s what was about to happen until Felix tapped your shoulder.

“I have to pee, you have to move.”

“Oh, for FUCK’S SAKE!”

You wondered if other people had this same experience, the feeling that everywhere they went, soulmates were all people seemed to want to talk about. But maybe it was just because you were trying to avoid the topic that it kept coming up.

Either way, you were pretty sure that hearing Felix talk about the etymology of the name Han Jisung for the past ninety minutes would have been too much for anyone.

“We’re here!” you said gratefully, nearly crying tears of relief as you practically threw yourself out of the Uber you were sharing with Felix.

The venue was large, and you were elated to see there weren’t too many people in line yet so Felix, hopefully, wouldn’t have time to start talking about Jisung again.

You really hoped they met soon, because, as much as you loved Felix, you didn’t know how much more of this you could take.

“What’s the name of the group again?” you asked as you and Felix walked in, stopping at a merch stand so Felix could buy a shirt and lightstick.

“NCT,” he replied, holding a shirt and lightstick out to you as well as if asking if you wanted one as well.

You shook your head. “Nah, those things are way too expensive to buy one for someone who isn’t even a fan.”

Felix only smirked, buying the extra shirt and lightstick anyway.

“You will be after this, trust me.”

You shrugged, putting the shirt on over your clothes and turning the lightstick around in your hands, examining it curiously. It wasn’t the prettiest thing, but it wasn’t that ugly.

Maybe you could use it to light the way when you go to the bathroom at night.

It was Felix’s money, he could spend it how he pleased. Well, more likely it was Chan and Woojin’s money, but that’s beside the point.

For the next hours, you and Felix spent a generous amount of time talking, beating each other up with lightsticks, and conversing with other fans until finally the lights die down and the music starts up . . .

The summer air was cool, gently ticking your face as you gazed up at the sky. The night was quiet, quiet as it could be in a big city like Seoul, and the only other thing that filled your ears was the sound of NCT’s songs on shuffle.

You’d been impressed by the concert, to say the least.

The way they all performed with such passion and precision made you feel electric and, even though you didn’t know the words to the songs, you almost forgot you weren’t a fan as you waved the lightstick and hummed along with Felix beside you.

When you got back to the hotel, you were still wired, unlike Felix, who fell asleep the instant his head hit the pillow.

You decided to go to the nearest park, only a couple minutes' walk away. Even though you didn’t wake Felix up and disturb him, you made sure to text him the location of the place you were going ahead of time just in case something bad happened.

So far, nothing had happened though. There were other people in the park, but none of them paid much attention to you. It seemed they were all just people who couldn’t sleep either.

At least, that was what you thought until some random guy appeared beside you, pointing at the spot on the bench next to you. “Can I sit here?” his voice was smooth and pleasant, and you nodded before you even realized what you’d agreed to.

The boy — who seemed to be about your age — had a black mask on, but you could see his eyes crinkle cutely so you were pretty sure he smiled as he sat beside you.

“Are you here for the shooting stars?” he asked.

Your face contorted in confusion.

“The what?”

“There’s supposed to be shooting stars tonight,” the boy said. “That’s what most of these people are doing here.”

“I didn’t know that. I just couldn’t sleep. I went to a concert, so I guess the adrenaline still hasn’t worn off.”

The boy rose an eyebrow. “The NCT 127 concert? You went?”

You nodded, a ghost of a smile curving your lips. “Yeah, I went with a friend. He’s an NCT friend. I guess I am too, after what I saw at their concert.”

“Do you recognize me?” the stranger suddenly asks.

You stared at him for a moment, bewildered. It was kind of hard to see past the black hoodie, mask, and sweatpants that covered nearly every inch of him, but even so, you pretty sure you’d never met this person before.

“Uh, should I?”

The boy’s eyes changed and you were pretty sure he was smirking.

“NCT has another sub-unit, NCT Dream. Are you and your friend going to see them perform tomorrow?”

You racked your brain for anything Felix might have said about it and slowly nodded. “Yeah, I think he did say we’re going to see them to— oh. Wow . . .”

At that moment, the shooting stars appeared, brilliants streaks of white painting the sky, enrapturing you so much that you failed to see the boy staring in awe at you, a realization seeming to dawn upon him as he watched your face light up at the sight of the shooting stars.

“Holy shit, it's you,” he breathed.

Your brow furrowed as you looked at him. Before you could ask any questions, he just held a hand out to you. You were even more confused at first, before you saw the words on his palm. They were in Korean at first, but they shifted before your eyes, reforming into an English sentence.

You will meet: under the shooting stars.

Your eyes widened, glancing back up at the shootings tars, now long-gone, leaving behind only the brilliants trails where they once were.

“I....but I don’t understand.”

You yanked your sleeve up showing the sentence inscribed onto your arm, but it only made the boy’s eyes crinkle more.

“NCT 127 is called that because they’re based in Seoul. That’s what 127 is, it’s the coordinates for the city. NCT? N.City? You came to Seoul for their concert and now we met under the stars. We’re—”

“Soulmates,” you whisper in disbelief, your eyes widened to the point of saucers.

The boy grinned, nodding as he finally pulled his mask under his chin, revealing the face of what was probably the most gorgeous boy you’d ever seen in your life, a few strands of soft-looking pink hair falling into his sparkly eyes, curved with happiness.

You let out a choked sob as you flung your arms around his neck, hugging him close without even really being conscious of what you were doing, but your soulmate didn’t seem to mind. He just laughed, arms circling around your waist just as tight, rocking you back and forth, hand rubbing your back comfortingly as he nuzzled his face into your hair.

“I thought you weren’t real, I thought the system screwed up,” you blubbered, hands clenching fistfuls of his hoodie. “I tried to look for N.City and I couldn’t find anything, so I thought . . .”

You trailed off, trying to pull yourself together as you buried your head in his chest, the scent of his sweet-smelling cologne filling your senses and calming you slightly.

Your soulmate nodded in understanding, hugging you a little bit closer.

“I’m real. I’m real and I’m here and I’m yours,” he whispered.

“I can’t believe all those years of being obsessed with astronomy actually paid off,” he said and you scoffed.

“I can’t believe letting Felix drag me to a foreign country actually paid off,” you chuckled.

Your soulmate stiffened, pulling back to look at you. “Felix? Lee Felix? His Korean name is Yongbok?”

Your jaw dropped, brows furrowing as you nodded slowly. “Yeah, how did—”

“I’m friends with Han Jisung.”

“FELIX!”

A loud bang echoed through the hotel room as Felix shot up in the bed, an anguished cry escaping him when his forehead collided with the headboard.

“What? Are we being robbed? Where’s the fire? Fuck, that hurt!”

Felix groaned, clutching his head, only to yelp when he strayed too close to the edge of the bed and tumbled to the floor in a heap of aching limbs.

You barely even noticed, throwing him clothes and speaking so fast that Felix wouldn’t even be able to understand what you said if you hadn’t just woken him up and given him two concussions and a bone fracture in the span of eight seconds.

“Y/N, slow down, what the hell are you talking about, I— DON’T TOUCH THAT, I CAN GET DRESSED BY MYSELF!”

“Hurry up then!” you groaned, shoving a jacket onto him as he put a pair of jeans and a sneaker on at the same time.

You finally made it out of the hotel room, arguing incoherently the entire time as you pulled Felix along to the destination that you and your soulmate had agreed upon before racing to go fetch your respective friends.

Your soulmate had obviously been more adept at explaining the situation as he stood beside an intensely good-looking boy with long-ish messy blonde hair that looked nervous beyond all belief, but otherwise pretty well pout-together for being woken up at three in the morning.

Meanwhile, you and Felix were still arguing loudly as you entered the already-loud restaurant, his shirt on backward, jeans inside out, mismatched socks on, one shoe missing, and hair sticking up at every angle as he shouted at you, the both of you somehow not bumping into anything as you approached the pair.

“— could have died for Christ’s sake Y/N, you don’t even know Hangul, not to mention I have a headache the size of Germany now and—”

“Germany is a small country and headaches don’t have sizes you moron—”

“YOU KNOW WHAT—”

“DO YOU WANT TO MEET JISUNG OR NOT?”

That made him shut up, eyes wide as he gaped at you, still not noticing the two boys now directly in front of you.

“I— wha— Jisung?” he finally stuttered out.

You wordlessly waved a hand toward the boy, who you could now clearly see had Felix Lee/Lee Yongbok written on the back of his hand.

“That’s him. He’s apparently one of my soulmate’s friends so I thought you’d like to finally meet him.”

Felix looked back and forth between you and Jisung, mouth flapping open and closed like a fish as he tried to find the words to say.

Jisung finally found his voice, squeaking out a, “You’re very pretty.” in a timid shaky voice.

That seemed to shake Felix back to his senses as he flung himself onto the boy. They were the same height but Felix still found a way to comfortably nestle his head in the crook of his neck.

Jisung looked surprised but absolutely elated and you could already tell that he was even more whipped for Felix than Felix was for him. You could see Felix’s ears flushing red as Jisung whispered things in his ear in Korean that you probably didn’t even want to know.

“They’re cute together,” you whispered as your soulmate came over to you, putting an arm around your shoulder and pulling you into his side.

“Not as cute as you,” he said, grinning as you groaned.

“Ugh, way too cheesy,” you said in mock disgust as you two sat in a booth, no longer focused on Jisung and Felix at all.

“Get used to it, prince(ss). You’re stuck with me for now. For a long time, hopefully.”

You smiled, anticipation thrumming in your veins as his face advanced closer to yours. You had always thought it was stupid that soulmates got so comfortable with each other, and especially with physical affection, so early on in the relationship, but now you understood perfectly.

You didn’t even care about the fact that you and your soulmate hadn’t even exchanged names or numbers yet as his lips met yours. All you cared about right now was him and the rest could come later.

And if the way he held you so delicately and adoringly was anything to go by, he felt the same.

“Wait, so you’re telling me that my soulmate is an idol?” you gaped, turning to look at Jaemin who smiled sheepishly.

Felix snorted, shoving twelve fries into his mouth at once, as he cuddled into Jisung’s side, much like you were doing with Jaemin in the booth seat across from theirs.

Jisung and Felix were an incredibly good-looking couple. You’d grown somewhat used to how pretty Felix was, but Jisung looked like a prince from another direction and it startled you every time you glanced in his direction.

Still, biased though you might be, you didn’t really think anyone was in the same league as Jaemin, whose name you just found out three minutes ago.

“You’d know what if you actually asked his name before you decided to shove your tongue down his throat.” Felix sassed.

You narrowed your eyes at him.

“You really want to go there, Felix? You really want to bring that up when I saw Jisung squeeze your ass right in front of my salad two seconds ago?”

Jaemin guffawed loudly as Felix choked on his water. Jisung just gave a tiny smile, not looking the least bit ashamed or sorry.

“Touche,” Felix squeaked.

“Isn’t a relationship going to be complicated for you?” you whispered worriedly to Jaemin as Felix and Jisung talked amongst themselves.

Jaemin’s smile dropped and he looked completely serious now, scaring you a bit as he took your hands in his.

“No matter how hard or complicated it gets, I won’t let that get in the way, Y/N. I’ve waited for you way too long to let my work get in the way. I want you to know I’m serious about this, Y/n, serious about you. I can’t guarantee that we’ll last forever, but I’ll do my part in trying.”

You stared, speechless, for a moment, trying very hard to keep your tears at bay.

The moment was ruined when Felix and Jisung groaned.

“You guys are disgusting.”

“WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP?!”

The Luck of Fate Star System

Starlink Intergalactic Navigator

#jaemin #nct #fluff #luck of fate #genetic mutation #nct fluff #jaemin fluff #kpop #kpop fluff #soulmate au #jaemin soulmate au

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years

Text

Moon founded “The World’s Greediest Church”

The cash that built the Moon organization’s “foundation.”

▲ Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han of the Unification Church, now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, with one of the marble pagodas that were sold to the Japanese for eye-watering sums. Moon and Han reportedly denied knowledge of the scam.

_________________________________________

by Ben Hills Sydney Morning Herald May 7, 1993

The Unification Church of Japan stated: “We do not participate in profit-making activities.”

“I don’t feel embarrassment … deep remorse is a better word,” confesses Kiyoharu Takahashi, blinking furiously behind his black-rimmed eyeglasses.

For 400 years, a small plot of land on the urban fringe of Tokyo had been in the family, once retainers of the local daimyo (lord of the manor). Five years ago, Mr Takahashi, then a university student, aged 26, persuaded his family to take out mortgages over the property. Although there is less than a hectare of land, it contains the family home, a turf farm, a rented house and two blocks of flats.

Even so, it still amazes Kiyoharu how much the banks were prepared to lend on it. By the time the credit dried up, he had received $67.5 million, repayments had fallen behind and the banks were threatening to foreclose. Four centuries of family history were about to go down the drain.

What caused this calamity ?

Every cent of the money – plus another $500,000 or so in savings that the Takahashis had put aside over the years – was handed over to an organisation Japanese are starting to call the greediest church in the world, the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, known to the less devout as the Moonie church – the Unification Church (and now The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification).

Its founder and Pope is the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a 73-year-old, thrice-married father of [more than] 13 who now lives in the United States, where he has done time in prison for [document fraud and] tax evasion.

Although he is better known for his mass marriage spectaculars – last year he hired the Olympic stadium in Seoul to celebrate the wedding of 30,000 followers, most of whom had never met each other before – Moon has spent the last 40 years building up a formidable religious multinational.

And Japan is the place where Moon Industries Inc, a conglomerate that trades under more than 100 corporate identities, has made its most spectacular, and some would say ungodly, gains.

Young Mr Takahashi is only one of 8,350 people who have come forward, claiming they have been ripped off by the Moonies, since a national legal network was set up to help them get their money back six years ago. The total amount they claim to have been cheated out of is a staggering $568 million. Cases are listed in more than a dozen courts.

Many of them, like Mr Takahashi, say they have been blackmailed into borrowing beyond their means, then handing the money over. In his case, barely credibly, he was told that his father’s Parkinson’s Disease was due to an ancient curse which could only be lifted from the family by prayer … and enormous amounts of money.

Another reformed Moonie – “Tomiko” is a 34-year-old English teacher from Tokyo – was told her lack of luck in love was because of the “dirty” money which she had saved. She took her life savings, $5,000, to a flat where the Moonies sprinkled salt in the four corners of the room, said prayers, and made it all disappear.

“Unfortunately, Japanese seem more susceptible to this sort of thing than people in other countries,” says Hiroshi Yamaguchi, a member of the lawyers’ network, who is handling cases for 25 former Moonies, including Takahashi, Tomiko, and a woman in Australia who was swindled out of $12,000.

People are being enticed into a range of activities which have no overt connection with the Moonies.

There are about 100 Moonie-owned “video centres” around Tokyo where people are invited in and then recruited.

Another favourite ploy is to organise conferences by front organisations, such as the World Peace Professors’ Academy, the Society of Field Flowers, the Japan-Korea Tunnel Task Force and even the Women’s Federation for World Peace, which last year held a meeting at Sydney’s Ritz Carlton Hotel.

No-one knows how many followers the Reverend Moon has attracted since he went international in the mid-1960s. He claims five million followers in 160 countries (including Australia) but a more realistic assessment by former members of the cult is around one-tenth that number [possibly at the zenith – now many fewer].

Even so, Japan – where there are thought to be around 20,000 hard-core Moonies – is beyond doubt one of the most profitable parts of his empire. Or was, until the recent deluge of bad publicity.

Tokyo’s tabloids have been agog for a month over the disappearance of Hiroko Yamasaki, a 33-year-old former Olympic gymnast, who has provided the church with acres of publicity since her marriage at the mass-wedding in Korea last year to a groom selected for her by the Rev Moon.

She reappeared, renouncing the church and claiming it had all been a terrible mistake.

▲ Hiroko Yamasaki facing nearly 200 journalists in April 1993.

After being indoctrinated the converts are put out on the streets of Tokyo to bring in other recruits, and to make money selling products door-to-door.

Mr Takahashi displays some of the products he was obliged to sell. There is a 300-gram jar of extract from Korean ginseng (a parsnip-like root which tastes a bit like tobacco and is reputed to be medicinal) – this sold for $1,000, when the over-the-counter price in Korea is about $150. The Reverend Moon’s Il Hwa factory near Seoul is South Korea’s largest ginseng processor.

A set of three name-seals, worth about $125, is sold for up to $15,000. All Moonies dream of selling the jewelled pagoda – a model studded with what look like bits of glass that goes for $67,500.

After her conversion, Tomiko became a real cash cow. Even though she had no property to put up as collateral, she borrowed more than $50,000 from eight different banks and handed it over. She sold her family a garage full of Moonie products – her mother paid $20,000 for a kimono, her father $8,000 for a sauna, among other things. “I became a saleswoman … they said it was the way to achieve heaven on earth.“

Gullible? Perhaps. But 8,349 more like her? Sadao Asami, professor of theology at Tohoku University, believes that there is something about the Japanese that makes them more susceptible to Moon’s brand of religion.

Professor Asami has earned a nickname, “the Devil’s priest”, from the Moonies because of the help he has given hundreds of families, “rescuing” their children from the Moonies. He has worked with 500 to 600 former followers. He says that Japanese remain dependent on their parents much longer than people in the West, and that they are thus more immature. As well, the Japanese culture entertains a variety of religious and superstitious beliefs.

They also, says Mr Yamaguchi, have a lot of money.

Until recently, the Tokyo Moonies have been trying to quietly settle most of the claims out of court. However, in January, Michio Fujii, the head of the church in Japan, wrote to Mr Yamaguchi apologising for the “mismanagement of subordinates of the Unification Church” – but saying that repayment of money would be “temporarily stopped.”

This means that Mr Takahashi is in trouble. The church had repaid most of the money and had taken over repayments on the loans. But $3 million is outstanding. The Moonies’ headquarters is in the fashionable suburb of Shibuya, a three-storey building that occupies most of a city block.

Unfortunately, neither Mr Fujii, nor anyone else, was willing to put the church’s point of view on these serious allegations. They later sent an anonymous fax, denying everything and claiming bare-facedly: “We do not participate in profit-making activities.”

The Unification Church’s own publications boast of a global business empire valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The core is the Sae-il engineering company, which began making air-rifles, and now manufactures machine-tools in Korea, Germany and Africa. Then there is the Il Hwa company which produces more than 40 different pharmaceutical products, ginseng and soft-drinks; in Alabama, there is International Oceanic Enterprises which catches and packs seafood; in Alaska, the Master Marine company makes fibreglass fishing trawlers; the Moonies own the Paragon House publishing firm, the Washington Times newspaper and a four-storey complex in Barrytown, New York, where they run a theological seminary.

Although his worries are not over, Mr Takahashi – along with several thousand other former converts – is thankful to be out of it. And not to have to go through with the “marriage” he had in 1988 … along with 6,499 other couples. In a hall at a Seoul soft-drink factory, he saw his bride for the first time. “I had built up expectations of how beautiful she was going to be,” he says “When I saw her I got vertigo.”

Two of his fellow Moonies committed suicide. One, a middle-aged woman who was being pressured into handing over some land, jumped off a building. Another, a man who was married at a mass wedding, jumped in front of a car.

“At the time I believed in it,” says Mr Takahashi, “Now I know it was only blackmail and lies aimed at getting their money.”

▲ In 2006, the Moons were brought 240 gold crowns (120 for each ot them) in a procession at their $1billion palace in the mountains near Cheongpyeong.

___________________________________________

Hiroko Yamasaki (former Olympic athlete in rhythmic gymnastics) joined and left UC

“Moon betrayed his followers and distorted the church’s lofty goals by turning his movement into a huge money-making machine.”

“Japan. Wow! My eyes were opened.” A huge UC scam in Japan is revealed.

Video of Unification Church ABUSE in Japan shown in court

Moon personally extracted $500 MILLION from Japanese sisters in the fall of 1993. He demanded that 50,000 sisters attend HIS workshops on Cheju Island and each had to pay a fee of $10,000.

Japan High Court judge upholds “UC used members for profit, not religious purposes”. This has serious ramifications.

Religious Freedom for Japanese Members! (The FFWPU established a slave caste.)

Sun Myung Moon – Emperor of the Universe

#Greed #Sun Myung Moon #Hak Ja Han #Unification Church #Family Federation for World Peace and Unification

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tilltheendwilliwrite · 6 years

Text

The Bodyguard

Chapter Ten

Master List | Bucky Barnes Master List

Previous Chapter

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x OFC I Word Count: 5212 Warnings: Fluff, Bucky being Bucky, smexy

This chapter brought to you care of @diinofayce through Coffee Updates. Thanks for your support, hun!

Bucky shuddered gently against Penny, while his mind whirled with her revelation. "You have to tell Steve.”

"I can't. Not just yet.”

"Penelope Grace," he growled against her neck.

"Bucky. Not just yet. I'll tell him when I've gone through all the options, but until that time, how can I place more stress on him? He's off saving the world. He doesn't need to be thinking about me while he's doing it.”

"Penny…” Bucky sighed and looked at her, but gave up when she gave him the stubborn face.

"I'm not giving up, Buck. I won't. I promise, but I have to do this my way.”

"Stubborn as a mule,” Bucky grumbled, tugging her close so he could rest his cheek on the top of Penny's head.

"Ma'am? Sorry to interrupt,” Friday said into the silence. "The detective is back, and he brought friends.”

Bucky growled a second time against Penny, far more feral and angrier than before. "What kind of friends?”

"Special Agent Julie Markov and Special Agent Anthony Barrow of the FBI, and his NYPD Captain, Ryan Harris.”

"Run all three.”

"Bucky.” Penny rested her head on his chest. "I'm too tired and worn out for this.”

"I know, baby girl. You head upstairs and get changed. I'll deal with them until you're ready.” He stroked her hair, then her cheek. “I'll even make you some tea.”

She smiled and nodded. "What will you tell them?”

"As close to the truth as I can. But I think it's better to let SHIELD deal with the money aspect. It's still Hydra. Regular cops aren't equipped to deal with them.

Penny winced. "Um, Buck? We need to talk about the money. I have something to tell you about… all that.”

"Pen?”

"Sergeant? The police are still requesting entrance,” Friday interrupted.

"Did you contact Tamara yet?” he asked, still staring at the fidgeting Penny.

"Miss Smith is on her way. She will be here as soon as she can.”

"Let them up,” Bucky muttered. "Talk fast, Penny.”

"I've been screwing with Hydra's finances for years, so even though they've stolen eighty-two million from me, I've cost them eleven times that much.”

"What!” he shouted.

"Through back channels and anonymous reports to the Attorney General, Miss Rogers has shut down numerous Hydra fronts, false charities, and exposed a number of high powered Hydra supporters. In total, Penelope has removed nine hundred forty-six million, three hundred twenty-seven thousand, four hundred eight dollars and twelve cents from Hydra's coffers,” Friday announced.

"Holy fuck!” Bucky bellowed. "That's motive to kill you, Penny! Why the hell didn't you tell me this earlier?”

"I didn't think it was relevant because they don't know it's me! I swear my trail is untraceable. I've been doing this as long as I've had Marquis, and everything is sent via hardcopy and flash drive to the AG's office. Not even a trace of DNA or a fingerprint left behind. I'm good at this, Bucky. Really good.”

"I want to see it. Your files. Your setup. All of it.”

"It's all in my lab at work.”

"Jesus, Penelope! Anyone could gain access to your damn lab!”

Her hands framed his face. "Shut up for one damn minute and listen!” She waited until he nodded before speaking. "Not my regular lab. My secret lab. The one beneath the building.”

"That's some fucking mad scientist crap, dollface,” he smirked when the shock wore off.

She breathed out a sigh and shot him a wink before returning her satchel of serum to the safe in the wall. “What more would you expect from a literal genius?” she snickered over her shoulder.

“Sergeant Barnes. The police will be arriving in sixty seconds.”

“On it, Friday.” Bucky took one more long look at Penny. “You okay, Pen?”

“Too much exertion today, but I'm steady now. I’ll be fine and down in a few minutes. Don’t shoot anyone unless you have too.”

He beat her to the doorway and took her by the waist. “No more secrets. What you know, I need to know. Promise?”

She tilted her chin up and looked him directly in the eyes. “That’s it. I swear.”

“I believe you, darlin’.” Ducking his head, he kissed her quickly, a swift mating of lips which didn’t last nearly long enough. “Go on,” he murmured when he lifted his head.

“I was going until you sidetracked my brain,” she grumbled, heading down the hall to the secondary set of stairs.

Bucky chuckled as he returned to the living room and took a quick look around. He had weapons stashed everywhere from behind the couch cushions to taped to the undersides of the tables and more in the kitchen. There were four of them coming, all armed, all trained. "Friday, can you turn the kettle on?"

"Of course, Sergeant."

He shook out his flesh arm and rolled the metal one hard, calibrating it from the shoulder down like Stark had shown him. “Give me the rundown, Friday.” Having not bothered to remove the Bluetooth from his ear, she spoke directly to him.

“Special Agent Julie Markov. She is a ten year veteran of the FBI, currently assigned to the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. In her years there she has been accredited with taking down a number of dirty business relating to drug or gang crime, as well as white-collar crime. If I had to guess, Penny’s attack and subsequent investigation by the IRS has caused them to launch an investigation of their own. Her partner, Special Agent Anthony Barrow, is an expert in white-collar crime and computer-based crime. It is perhaps better not to inform them of my presence. Knowing she employed an AI to compile the data on Taft will only cause them to collect a warrant so they may compile their own data apart from what I’ve already done, and poke their noses into parts of Marquis they have no business getting into. I have put together a file with all our relevant information, the reports submitted by Taft, and the real data, cross-referenced and correlated, along with the money trail from the subsidiaries Taft was using.”

“Thought we’d decided to leave it to SHIELD?” Bucky murmured when the door announced their arrival.

“Well, I only gave them the money as far as I could follow prior to Jarvis’ involvement. If we stonewall them, Sergeant, they will not let it go.”

“Tricky girl,” he chuckled.

“The Captain, Ryan Harris. I do not know why he is here,” Friday murmured. “His record is impeccable with only a few minor incidents in his beat cop days. It appears he had difficulty with authority.”

“Don’t we all.” This time, Bucky didn’t meet them at the door but off to one side, his gun in his hand. Once all four were out of the elevator, he stepped silently from the shadows with the weapon pointed at their heads. “That’s far enough.”

“Barnes!” McGilvery snarled. “You really want to get arrested, don’t you?”

“Not particularly,” Bucky muttered, “But there’s four of you and only one of little old me, so I’ll thank you to remove your service weapons slowly, and the backups, and place them on the table one at a time. You can pick them up on your way out.”

“Sergeant,” the woman took a step forward but froze when Bucky arched a brow. “My name is-”

“Special Agent Julie Markov. Ten year veteran with the FBI, CCRSB. I know who you are, ma’am. At the moment, I don’t give a flying fuck if you’re the President. You aren’t coming near Miss Rogers armed. Not after today.”

“We want to talk to you-” McGilvery started in.

“Do I look like I care at all about what you want, McGilvery? Last time you were here you made unfounded accusations in regards to Penelope. How was the phone call from Steve? That go well for you?” The first thing he’d done out of the shower was send in his report to Steve. Not all of it, of course, but enough, including McGilvery and his asinine comments.

Steve may have been flying over the Atlantic on his way to a mission, but nothing would stop him from coming to Penny’s defence. And when Captain America called, you picked up the damn phone. Bucky knew McGilvery had gotten an earful, likely Harris as well.

“That’s why I’m here, Sergeant. To offer my sincerest apologies to Miss Rogers and assure both of you Detective McGilvery will be on his best behaviour from here on out.”

“Fantastic. Weapons. On the table.”

“If you think I’m going to give up my gun because some washed out Avenger tells me to-”

“Barrow!” Markov snapped. “The Sergeant is well within his rights to ask us to remove our weapons. Miss Rogers has been put in mortal danger twice. As head of her security, it's understandable he’d be… distressed having four unknown and armed people anywhere near her.”

“Look at you go, doll. Got it in one. Weapons. Table. Then you can sit in the living room and ask your questions. Or you can get back on that elevator, and we can meet you at SHIELD’s New York office and conduct this interview under Director Fury’s watchful eye.”

Markov was the first to relent, pulling her service weapon from her hip and placing it on the table. She dropped into a slow crouch and added the ankle revolver before moving further into the room. “We can all be civilized, can’t we, gentlemen?”

Harris was second, his service weapon and back up landing beside Markov’s. McGilvery gave his up begrudgingly, but it was Barrow who crossed his arms and glared at Bucky.

“It’s not happening.”

“Then get out of my house.”

Bucky didn’t look; he didn’t need to. Penny’s oddly beating heart had betrayed her the moment she made her way down the hall to the top of the stairs.

“Miss Rogers, we’re FBI. Surely this isn’t necessary.” Barrow turned on the charm as Penny descended the stairs.

She’d changed out of the pink dress but was no less stunning in skinny jeans and a floaty white top covered by a grey sweater. The knot she’d worn in her hair had come loose in their mad run through the hospital, but she’d somehow managed to pile her wealth of blonde curls up on her head. Penny appeared casual, but there was no mistaking the quality of anything she had on.

Poised and polished, she stopped halfway down the stairs with her hand on the railing and let the ice queen out. If it was wrong getting a thrill watching her go cold on people, Bucky didn’t want to be right, because when her eyes went glacial, and her chin jacked up, it kicked him right in the balls with a hard shot of lust.

“I don’t care if you’re the Queen of England. You will remain unarmed in my home, or vacate it immediately. I have been blown up, shot at, and shot at again by people who were supposed to be some form of security or protection. Perhaps you can see why I am reluctant to have anyone enter my home with a weapon.”

Tall at six feet two inches, Barrow still had to tilt his head up to look Penny in the eyes. His skin had taken on a ruddy flush of anger, causing the pock marks from acne scars to surface white in the red. He thrust his hand through his shaggy mop of curling chestnut hair, but finally tugged his service weapon from beneath his arm, and crouched to remove the one at his ankle. Both landed with a thud on the table.

“And the one at your back,” Bucky said.

Narrowed eyes of sharp obsidian glared at him, but Barrow complied and added it to the pile. Bucky lowered his gun and returned it to the holster beneath his arm.

“Excellent. Now, we can finish, and you can all get the hell out.” Penny made her way down the final few stairs.

“If someone wanted you dead, Miss Rogers, removing their gun isn’t going to stop them,” Barrow stated, clearly angry as he stomped toward Penny.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Agent. You could try to hurt me, but that’s why he’s here. And if you think for one moment you could lay a hand on me while there was still a single breath left in the Sergeant’s body, well then, you’d most likely be dead. Right, Buck?”

“Right,” Bucky growled from directly behind Barrow who flinched a lot harder than McGilvery had.

“Damn,” Harris muttered. “He is quiet,” he said to McGilvery who only rolled his eyes.

Penny made her way into the kitchen where she turned off the boiling kettle - thank you Friday - and reached for a teapot made of glass. “Can I get anyone anything?” she asked, adding loose tea to the filter.

“Answers,” grumbled McGilvery.

“I’ll take a tea,” Markov spoke over him.

“Tea would be great,” Harris agreed.

“Coffee?” Barrow asked.

“Fresh out,” Bucky said, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed.

“Bucky. Don’t be an ass.” Penny shoved him in the ribs and stuck a cup beneath the fancy coffee maker of hers. “Strong, super strong, or stand a spoon in it, Agent…?”

“Barrow, ma’am. Special Agent Barrow and this is Special Agent Markov,” he motioned to his partner, “and the stronger, the better.”

She set the dial and walked away to place the teapot and three mugs on the island. “I’m assuming this is about the hospital today?”

“Among other things.” Markov sat on a stool at the island, clearly working to make Penny as comfortable as possible. “Miss Rogers, we don’t believe for a moment you have anything to do with the attack on you at your office or the one that took place today.”

“Ain’t that a relief.” Sarcasm laced Bucky’s voice.

“But we do believe someone is using your company to clean dirty money.”

Penny nodded, not bothering to look at any of them. “And why would you think that?”

“Your profit and loss margins are out of sync,” Barrow said, eyeing Penny like she was fresh meat and he was a vulture.

Bucky plucked an apple from the bowl beside him and flicked a knife out of nothing he used to begin peeling it. He'd never seen four people come to attention so hard before and had to fight not to laugh.

“They’ve been taking bigger risks. Moving larger sums of money at one time and causing red flags to show across the board.” Markov frowned. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“Penny. Wait for Tamara,” Bucky cautioned, the thin strip of red apple peel getting longer.

“She’s stuck in cross traffic, and as Agent Markov has already stated, I'm not a suspect,” Penny murmured, returning for Barrow’s coffee. “His name is Marcus Taft. He's been in charge of finances for my company since the beginning, and from what I’ve been able to piece together, he’s been washing money through my company since the beginning.”

“You didn’t think this information was relevant last night!” McGilvery snapped.

Penny’s head whipped up, and her eyes ran cold a second time. “Before last night I knew nothing about it!”

“McGilvery! Zip it!” Harris snapped. “My apologies, Miss Rogers for your poor treatment at the hands of my officer.”

She waved off his apology. “I care very little for the politics which happen within agencies, Captain, but I won’t tolerate being spoken to and blindsided like that a second time.” She tugged her phone from her back pocket, tapped a half dozen keys and swiped upward. All four of them beeped at roughly the same time. “That is everything you will need to charge Marcus Taft with money laundering, theft, and embezzlement. The financial statements go back ten years, since the beginning of my company, and I’ve followed the money as far as I can. You’ll have to work outward from there.”

Barrow was already scrolling through the document. “This is impossible! You couldn’t possibly compile all this data in one night!”

“Agent Barrow, I build and maintain the most complex set of computer servers in the world, rivalled only by those of Tony Stark. Yes, I assure you, I can put that together in such little time.”

The Duchess in her voice made Bucky's cock throb. He just wanted to pin her to the fridge and kiss the sass right out of her. When he finished peeling the apple, he set a single uniform width strip of apple peel on the counter and began to slice small sections off he ate from the blade.

“Why is some of this blacked out?” McGilvery asked, clearly trying to ignore Bucky and his knife.

Penny placed a jar of honey and a small bowl of sugar on the island. “The redacted files are Government contracts. I can guarantee none of you have security clearance that high.”

“I could get it if I needed it,” Markov muttered, still reading.

“No, Agent. You couldn’t. Not even Captain America has clearance to read those files. You certainly won't obtain clearance to know even the names of those contracts.” All four of them looked at her in surprise. “He may be my brother, but I sure as shit don’t tell him everything,” Penny smirked as she poured the tea.

“I’d like a chance to go over these with you, Miss Rogers,” Barrow said, continuing to scroll.

“That won’t be necessary. It’s all perfectly self-explanatory.”

“Is this the real reason behind the attack on you?” Harris asked. “Rather than the bogus story SHIELD fed us?”

“We suspect so,” Bucky answered when Penny glanced his way. “But can’t rule out a Steve connection until Taft is brought in and questioned.” He held out a piece of apple Penny plucked from the tip of his knife and ate without thought.

Harris shot McGilvery a look.

“I’ll call it in,” the Detective murmured and walked away to use his phone.

“We’re going to want first crack at him. We need to know who he’s been laundering the money for. Unless you figured that part out already?” Markov asked.

Penny shrugged. “Not so far.” She blinked innocently, sipping her tea. When the coffee maker beeped, she retrieved Barrow's cup.

The steely eye Markov observed her for a long moment, but Penny didn’t flinch. If he hadn't been able to hear the odd beat of her heart, Bucky would have assumed she was entirely honest.

“Hm,” Markov hummed. “Now, Sergeant. You want to tell us how you deflected three bullets with your arm?”

“Nope. SHIELD tech. Proprietary information. Clearance would have to come through them.”

She rolled her eyes, Barrow gritted his teeth, but Harris only grinned. It appeared the Captain was having a very good time getting out from behind his desk.

“If I do have questions about this,” Barrow pointed at his phone, “is it alright if I call?”

“If you must. Email is better. I’m good at multitasking,” Penny said, wandering toward Bucky. She leaned into him, hip cocked, and one knee bent to drink her tea. Bucky’s arm went possessively around her waist, solidifying the statement she was making. They were a team, and Bucky the only one of all of them she trusted.

Markov ran an appreciative eye over him before sending Penny a smirk and a nod. Evidently, the Special Agent approved.

“The men at the hospital were hired guns. Both had a reputation for collateral damage and more than two dozen confirmed kills to each of their names. No one is sad to see them go, but we’re going to have to get your statement of what happened,” Harris said.

“Can’t you just use the hospital’s security footage?” Penny asked.

“There are discrepancies in how it looks on film. Why did you stop before you exited the ER? How did you know to turn when you did? Where did your car come from to pick you up when, from what we could tell, you two were alone?”

Bucky scowled at McGilvery returning from his call. “You gonna ask if I’m in on it this time?”

“Are you?”

“Watch it, McGilvery. One day your mouth is gonna run, and you’ll find yourself with fewer teeth,” Bucky warned. “I’ve been a sniper a long ass time. You learn to listen to your instincts, and when the hair rises on the back of your neck, you make a tactical retreat until you figure out why. Something didn’t feel right when we made to leave out the front, so I changed the plan. When the guys who’d been milling around out front came at us with guns drawn, I fired back. Then I got Penny out of there as fast as possible.”

“Picking her up was just a bonus?”

He shifted his glare to Barrow. “Faster that way. She always wears these ankle-bustin’ shoes.”

“You opened fire in a crowded hospital. You could have missed.”

Back to McGilvery. “Like I said. Sniper. I don’t miss. Only one with more accuracy than me is the Hawk.”

“Hawkeye? Clint Barton?”

“Yeah. We done here?” Bucky looked to Markov who seemed to be running the show.

“How’d you move the car?”

“SHIELD tech. Classified.”

McGilvery’s lip curled up into a snarl. “Convenient.”

“We’re done here.” Markov pushed from her stool. “Thank you for the tea, Miss Rogers, and your cooperation. We’ll be in touch.”

“I’ll be plugging that hole by cutting off access to those monetary channels as soon as you pick up Marcus,” Penny said, following them to toward the elevator.

“Ma’am, we can’t let you do that until we get in there and follow-”

Penny cut Barrow off with a raised hand. “And is the Bureau going to compensate me millions of dollars if I leave it open? I’m eighty-two million in the hole as it is these last ten years. You want me to leave those channels available you’d best be able to get me my money back.”

“Close the holes, Miss Rogers,” Markov nodded, returning her gun to her hip.

“Will do, Agent Markov.” Penny smiled at the Captain. “And thank you for coming, Captain. It’s allowed cooler heads to prevail.”

He shook her hand when she offered it. “A pleasure, ma’am.”

“Let’s hope the next time we cross paths it’s at the NYPD Gala.”

“Looking forward to your speech, Miss Rogers.”

“Penny, please,” she smiled. “Well, in a few weeks then.”

They collected their weapons as Bucky watched and got on the elevator. Once the doors closed, Penny sagged into him.

“Whoa, Pen. You okay?”

“Tired,” she sighed. “Need to lay down.”

“And call off Tamara.”

“Did that when I found out she was stuck in traffic. Better she isn’t around for the Marcus bits anyway.”

Bucky swept her up into his arms and took the stairs three at a time as he returned her to her bed. “Rest, Pen.”

“Mm,” she hummed, eyes already closed.

He covered her in her red blanket, pressed a kiss to her forehead, and quietly left the room. He and Friday had work to do. “You let me know if there’s any change in her heart, Friday.”

“Yes, Sergeant. And Sergeant?”

“Yeah, Friday?”

“I am… happy she told you the truth.”

“Now all we have to do is figure out a way to fix her.”

“I have accelerated my work with the artificial heart. Already I have had an increase of ten percent in my success rate when paired with Penny.”

“What’s your success rate at in total, Friday?” he asked, a smidge of hope filling him.

“... ten percent,” Friday whispered. “It is not as easy as it looks.”

“Considering it doesn’t look easy at all...” Bucky sighed, returning to Penny’s office. “Keep working at it. We’ve got to do something. Penny dying isn’t an option.”

“I agree. Sergeant?”

“What, Friday?” He pulled up the images of her original assailants. Something about their use compared to the two hitmen of today seemed… off to him.

“May I have a sample of your blood?”

Bucky froze, then slowly sat back to look at the wall. “Why?”

“I have a hypothesis.”

“Which is?”

“A hypothesis is-”

“I know what hypothesis means, Friday! What is it? Why do you want my blood?”

“I’d… prefer not to say. In case I am wrong.”

Bucky pulled a knife from his sleeve. “How much and where?”

***

Penny dreamed. She dreamed of a soft bed and a hard body beneath her hands. Of warm muscles and quiet moans.

She dreamed of Bucky's hands on her skin, calluses and metal. His lips were soft when she kissed him. They felt even softer moving down her throat and over her chest to pull at her nipple.

A moan escaped her lips. “James…” she sighed.

“Penny,” he whispered, his hands touching her everywhere. Then his grip tightened, turned bruising.

"You sure grew up pretty,” hissed maliciously against her skin before sharp pain flooded her belly. When he lifted his head, he wasn't Bucky anymore.

Penny screamed herself awake.

“Pen!” Bucky rushed to her side, and she recoiled. “Easy, easy, Penny. It's just me. You're okay.”

He knelt at her bedside while Penny tried to catch her breath. “It wasn't you,” she whispered and threw her arms around him. “It wasn't you.”

“What wasn’t me, baby doll?” he asked, rubbing soothing circles on her back.

“The one who hurt me. I was dreaming of you, and then you were him…”

“Penny.”

“I want to not be afraid anymore. Just for one damn moment, can I not be afraid?” she sobbed.

“It's gonna work out, Pen. You'll see.”

“Will I?” she whispered. “I have six months to save my life. Six. I've spent so much time working to save everyone else; I haven't done any living.” She pushed away and wiped her eyes. “I wanted to travel. See the world. Visit Tokyo, Paris, London. Instead, I've worked myself into an early grave.”

“No!” Bucky took her by the shoulders. “Don't you dare give up!”

“I'm not! But what am I doing it for? What did I do all this,” she thrust a hand out, “for if I'm not enjoying it! No life. No relationships. I may as well be a damn computer for all the good it's doing me!”

“Then change it! Figure it out and change it! Fix your heart and take a fucking vacation! Hell, I'll take you to Paris if that's what you want, but you're not allowed to quit on me, Penny!”

A smirk twitched her lips. “You're gonna take me to Paris, Barnes?”

“Damn right.”

She arched a skeptical brow. “And what would you know of Paris?”

He rocked back on his heels and dragged Penny around so he knelt between her spread knees with her feet dangling from the side of the bed. It made her heart kick in excitement and breath hitch with the same.

“I've been a lot of places, Pen. I know what colour paints the sky over the Eiffel Tower at dawn. I know the Arc looks like it's made of butter at dusk. Like you could reach out and touch it, and it would melt beneath your palm. I've seen the glass of the Louvre's pyramid sparkle after the rain, and ate pastries and drank coffee from cafés along the Rue de Seine.”

“Bucky.” His eyes were like sapphires, dark with want and memories.

“There's a hotel, out of the way and off the tourist track, with the best beds I've ever slept in, piled with blankets and pillows. The windows all have these fragrant flower boxes and Evangeline who runs it waters them each day. She makes breakfast from croissants and mandolins, fruit and cheese, and fresh squeezed orange juice. There are eggs and sausage, bacon and fruit tarts with fresh cream.” Bucky's arms wrapped around her hips and drew her closer, intimately so until her legs were spread wide around his torso, and his face level with her suddenly aching breasts.

She swallowed thickly. “Evangeline, huh?”

“She's seventy if she's a day, with wrinkles and laugh lines, and a head full of curly white hair. I adore her. Learned French just for her.”

“You speak French?” Penny was astounded.

“Oui, et si la dame veut se lever du lit, le dîner peut être servi.”

She blinked at him for a moment before smiling. “Calling me a lady and serving me dinner? Look at you go, turning on the charm. And here you are enticing me out of bed instead of into it. I'm impressed.”

Bucky's arms tightened around her hips. “Darlin’,” he purred. “I assure you, I want you in bed just as bad, but I'm not gonna seduce you after you wake up from that kind of nightmare, especially when you need to eat. Your body's gotta fight ahead of it.”

“You know, you're kinda sweet when you want to be, Barnes,” she smiled and slid her hand through his hair.

A devilish look came into his sapphire eyes. “Baby girl, I can be sweet, or I can be sinful. You fix your heart, and I'll show you just how sinful.” He turned his head and closed his mouth unerringly around her nipple through the fabric of her shirt and bra, granted neither was overly thick, and scraped his teeth over it, making Penny gasp in shocked pleasure. “Then I'll take you to Paris and introduce you to Evangeline.”

He pushed to his feet and drew her up with him, holding her so she was pressed full length to his body without any hope of wiggling away. When his teeth scraped her ear, she shivered, and a drum beat thudded in her womb.

“And then I'll show you just how soft and sexy the beds can be.” Bucky released her with a wink and sauntered out of the room. “Dinner will be ready in five minutes.”

Penny sat with a thump and pressed her hand to her chest. Her heart raced, but it didn't feel laboured, only excited. He'd seduced her with words and barely a touch, given her an incentive to work toward, but Penny had never been a patient woman when it came to getting what she wanted.

And right now what she wanted most was more of the man whistling as he walked away. The reason she’d been hesitant in agreeing to anything this morning was because she didn’t want to hurt him when he found out the truth. But now he knew. He knew, and he still wanted her. He would be with her till the end, and clearly, he was offering her an incentive to work faster.

But what if she didn’t want to wait that long? What if she still ran out of time? What if this was her last chance to grab for a slice of happiness?

Penny let the sweater fall to the bed behind her. “Two can play that game, Barnes.”

Next Chapter

#the bodyguard #Bucky Barnes #bucky barns fanfiction #winter soldier #winter soldier fanfiction #avengers au

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everlarkchristmasgifts · 5 years

Text

Thanks to all the mods putting this Holiday prompt page together! Thank you for all your hard work and contributions to the Tumblr everlark family now and in the past.

A/N: This is part one of a hasty, four-day attempt to multi-part a drabble set for @everlarkchristmasgifts ‘s prompts. It may not get done on time, but they say it’s good to believe in miracles at Christmas, lol.

This part rated G

Thanks to @alliswell21 for giving it a beta read on quick notice.

And… *deep inhale, because why on earth am I trying to butcher one of my favorite stand alone drabbles with a sequel???**… this follows on the events of Pasty White Raisin.

________________________________________________

“Shopping…”

It was twelve days to Christmas. They’d missed Christmas last year. It could’ve been their first Christmas, but Peeta had been too stubborn to let a woman “waste her life” on a washed-up baker twelve years older than her.

She’d won, by the end of the Winter thaw. He’d already been in love, but he’d finally let himself love, and everything that had seemed to mean to him.

Well, everything within the parameters of being a gentleman.

He’d insisted on her making him work for her good favor, and at first it had been a funny game, his insistence that he court her, a delicious, slow romance of soft kisses and interwoven fingers and getting to know each other over conversations, dinners, or during walks. But the game had given him time to reconsider what he might be getting in to.

Which was robbing her of a future she deserved.

So ultimately, he’d come to use the game as a way to buy time to fortify the barriers so strongly she’d be forced to admit she should cut her losses.

And when she’d still refused, he’d cut her losses for her, before the summer heat had waned, with an “I’m sorry, Katniss, this isn’t working for me,” followed instantly by firing her from doing the bakery’s books, which she’d been doing part-time for the low cost wage of a half-dozen cheese buns a week, and refusing to respond to her texts or voicemails.

At Thanksgiving, she’d shown up at his door, asking if they could spend the evening together, talk. Consider reconsidering.

He’d shaken his head and closed the door on her, but not before his face had presented a few moments of unmasked regret and longing.

She’d almost gone to a hardware store for an ax to chop his door off its hinges.

When she’d called her uncle Haymitch in tears from her car, still sitting in the bakery’s parking lot, he’d agreed chopping down Peeta’s door was an acceptable strategy, except there wouldn’t be a hardware store open on Thanksgiving Day.

So this Christmas season— the Christmas that could have been their second Christmas, or at least their first— just a year after she’d chosen him, the rejection had left its mark on her. She couldn’t face flying out west to spend Christmas with her sister and mother. Would not be able to muster the emotional energy necessary to pretend she was okay for a whole evening spent with her friends, despite their invites.

No, she and Haymitch were going to spend it getting drunk on vodka, eating crock-pot roast and microwaved mashed potatoes, and watching either a marathon of The Profit, or Rocky, depending on which one of them won the coin toss.

So with twelve days to Christmas, Katniss Everdeen decided it was time to say goodbye once and for all.

Well, twelve times, for all.

Twelve ways to say she loved him.

Twelve ways to say goodbye.

Twelve ways to say both at the same time.

Twelve days, twelve gifts.

And it was going to start with a Thursday, lunch hour shopping trip.

“Kat, where you going?”

Odair was the afternoon manager for the restaurant side of the brewery operation where she was a bookeeper. He’d stepped so quickly in her way she almost couldn’t stop before walking into him.

His hands here clasped behind his back and he was grinning. His up-to-something look.

“Lunch,” she said, guarded.

“Right. It’s treason to buy lunch from somewhere other than here. And anyway, you eat lunch from a brown bag. Every day. You’re so frugal, you probably even reuse the same bag until it’s toast. No, Katniss Everdeen looks like a woman on a mission.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“Then it would make sense to get out of my way.”

He studied her as though he could read her secrets if he looked hard enough.

“You off to see that baker guy of yours? Because I would love one of his everything bagels, and Annie likes the peanut butter chip cookies.”

Katniss swallowed and fought off a wave of pain.

“No, I’m going to the mall to do some Christmas shopping.”

“Oh, perfect then,” like magic, his hand was suddenly in front of her face, waving a hundred dollar bill, as though he already knew where she was heading and was just enjoying teasing her about the other, “I need something pretty for Annie. I was thinking a necklace.”

Katniss felt an urge to punch him, but started to step around him instead. He stepped in her way again, grin back on his face.

“Come on, help a guy out. The last time I picked out jewelry for her, it was a total flop, and you remember it.”

“Finnick, the only reason it flopped, was because you thought it’d be funny to give her a used pendant with someone else’s initials on it.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny. That thing was an antique. And it was beautiful, and I knew the emeralds would set off her eyes. And anyway, the first initial matched.”

Katniss just shook her head; his problems were his, thankfully.

“Have to go, bye.”

He snagged her hand, yanking her momentum to a stop and then slapping the bill into her palm.

“Just in case something jumps out at you.”

“You realize how terrible it is to ask another woman to shop for your girlfriend.”

Finnick shrugged. “You’re not another woman, you’re basically family. And anyway, I already have her other gifts bought. I just want a wildcard.”

Katniss scowled.

“Fine, but I’m taking two hours for lunch, without losing the extra hour of pay, and you have to cover in case someone needs a bank run.”

Odair winked, then walked off with a, “Thanks, Katniss. You’re the second-best.”

Katniss shoved the bill into her jean’s pocket, so it could help her debit card burn a hole into the denim.

___

She knew what the first gift for Peeta would be, so she parked near the entrance closest to the woolen shop. Unfortunately, that entrance was the least used, and its parking more like the back forty. With Winter being stubborn about providing snow for Christmas, and the mall neglecting to plow that section, by the time she was inside, her feet were wet and freezing from slogging through patches of standing slush. There was a small hunting shop just inside the entrance, one of her favorite stores, and the moment she saw a pair of boots she’d been drooling over for six months on sale for forty percent off, she decided that if she was going to loosen up on the financial reigns enough that week to buy herself a sense of closure about Peeta, she might as well give herself that one treat.

Fifteen minutes later, she was stalking to the sweater shop in knee-high, front lace brown leather boots with reinforced heels and toes, all weather tread, and Gortex lined. And to make it better, her toes were swaddled in thick, high-tech, sweat-wicking winter socks.

She was even smiling by the time she got to her intended destination.

But then as soon as she was inside, her heart sank.

Peeta’s first present was a sweater she’d been eying for him for almost a month, folded on a center display table just inside the entrance. Imported from Ireland, it was a heavy, rough-finish wool sweater, that had a faded quality to its blue. The first time she’d seen it, she’d wanted him in it. Wanted to see how it contrasted with his light hair, complimented his blue eyes, hugged his shoulders, and layered over the waist of his jeans. Back then, she had still be holding hope he’d snap out of it, that maybe Christmas morning they’d be opening presents together and she’d get to see him in it, run her hands along down his arms to sense the feel of it, rest her palms against the scratchy texture of the wool, but feel the warmth and firmness of his shoulders and chest beneath.

But now, she wouldn’t get that pleasure. He would have the sweater. Hopefully, he would wear it. But regardless, she’d never get to see it.

If things went according to plan, someone else would.

She looked through the stack, finding his size and then laying it out, unfolded, over the rest. Her fingers stroked along the back and inside of the collar, where a beautiful, muted orange line of silky fabric had been sewn in to help prevent the roughness of the wool from rubbing against the sensitive flesh of his neck. It was even almost Peeta’s favorite shade of orange.

A friendly young clerk came up, asking if she could be of help. Her bubbling mood was a knife-stab to Katniss’ heart, so Katniss told her she had other shopping to do and was in a hurry. The girl agreed to wrap it and have it waiting for Katniss to pay for and pick up on her way back out of the mall.

The next stop was Eddie Bauer, where she had a clerk box a wheat-colored Henley on a bed of black tissue, hand it over long enough for Katniss to finger press a dog ear into the collar where the top button would normally be, and then finish with the full-on Christmas wrapping treatment. Her first hour was almost up.

Neiman Marcus covered two more gifts, six depending on how one counted, and fortune favored her in a special find that saved her a side trip to Hot Topic. Plus, the clerks there were fast wrappers. She had thirty minutes left for this trip, and, for this trip, only two more items to go.

The most expensive.

A boutique, ultra-high end men’s store cost her savings account exactly eight hundred, forty-seven dollars and sixteen cents. The gift wrapping took absolutely forever. But everything about the work, from the paper, to the simple ribbon, to the ridiculously expensive, and large, carry out bag, was immaculate. It almost made her cry.

It did make her cry, actually. Because signing her name to a payment slip that size made it crystal clear just what she had committed herself to do, and that she would not be the one to see the end result.

But she made a quick stop at Zales, saw what she instantly knew was the right call. It was just shy of two hundred and fifty after tax, but today was her day to spend on others, and Annie and Finnick were good friends, so she pocketed the hundred for her piggy bank, and paid for it out of her checking.

_____

“You’re late. Nice boots.”

“What?”

Finnick rooted around in the Zales bag she handed him for the necklace box.

“You’re late. You said two hours. It’s been a hundred and twenty-seven minutes. Did you stop at the bakery and bring us the bagels?”

“I didn’t have time.” Thankfully.

“Then I’m docking you the seven minutes,” he said without missing a beat, and when he finally got the red velvet box open, his teasing fell away into a look of confusion, and then a threat of real emotion. “Katniss, how did you…” He shook his head and the red headed prankster looked like he might actually hug her.

“Call it fate,” she said, and then started walking back to her office. “And if you dock me those seven minutes, our next limited run is going to be called Odair Pale, ‘cause that’ll be the vat you’d drown in.”

_____

Katniss was out the brewery doors at 5:00pm sharp. She managed to stop by the barber shop and the youth initiative before they closed by six, and that left only one purchase to go.

First, a stop at the bank.

Then, her final stop at the pawn shop.

The old man who owned the shop had held the item for her, and all that remained was for her to bring in the cash for it.

He was sitting at the counter like he was waiting for her— a sale like that, she was probably the one single person he was waiting for that day— and produced the item immediately, including the silky box that went with it, dull and stained by time. She carefully counted out the money, and he carefully wrote her out a receipt in his shaky handwriting.

Pawn shops didn’t gift wrap, but since it was raining, he found a used plastic bag from the back and gave her that to carry it away in.

It felt heavy, the plastic in her fingers as she walked back to her car.

Heavy like an ending.

Heavy like time moving on without her.

_____

By seven, the drizzle was threatening to turn to sleet with the evening’s cooling temperature. Katniss shivered a little, trying to shrink further into her jacket, and was even more glad for her new boots, because the slush in the alley behind the bakery was even worse than it had been at the mall. The windows above her, on the bakery’s second floor were lit; Peeta was at home, no surprise. He’d be watching television, maybe. Or even finishing dinner. Within an hour, he’d start thinking about bed.

For the six or seven months he’d let her into his life, she’d learned his habits fast. They’d never shared a bed and never spent a night together, because he wouldn’t allow it— because he was going to ‘do things right’— but they’d spent plenty of time together. By the Summer, they’d been seeing each other every day. And she’d found so much joy in the not rushing it. It had given them time to fully appreciate the excitement of almost innocent kisses and the silly, mutual attempts to find opportunities for them to be less than strictly innocent, the almost stolen thrill of sitting just close enough knees might touch, or arms might press. The silences and times where they were just around each other, without having to feel pressure that being out on a date, or on a walk, or going to the bookstore together was somehow really only posturing for a race they were supposed to complete by end of the day.

She knew his hours.

Knew not to text him after seven thirty.

Knew he didn’t actually like texting at all, and preferred a phone call, if a personal visit wasn’t possible.

Knew which corner of his couch he liked to lean into when watching television. Knew where his mugs were, and his glasses. Knew which drawer had the silverware, which hall closet had the extra hand towels for the bathroom. Knew he recycled cans, but often forgot to recycle plastic. Knew which episodes of Big Bang Theory were his favorites.

Each step up the steel-grate steps up to Peeta’s second-floor entry, brought another ‘knew’ to her mind, digging the knife a little deeper.

But she kept going, careful to duck a little near the top in case he happened to be at the kitchen sink window, and then leaning the box with the wool sweater against his door, with a note taped to it.

—Don’t open until six on Christmas Eve—

Just as carefully, she crept back down and then took up a position in the blackness behind the dumpster. A pocketful of little garden stones served as her ammunition, and she chucked three at his door with perfect aim.

From the shadows, she watched Peeta’s face appear at the window, and then a moment later, light came flooding out from his doorway. He saw the present right away, but looked around first to see who was there.

He called her name out and for a second she thought maybe he was able to see her after all, but after a few seconds of him leaning out over the rail and looking both ways down the alley, it was clear he didn’t. He came back to the present, gave it a look over, and then went back inside.

She didn’t know whether to feel honored or sad that after a gift appeared for him, the only person he thought to call out in question to was her.

#everlark #everlarkchristmasgifts #day one: christmas shopping #by dandeliononfire #fan fic #2018 #submission

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prorevenge · 6 years

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Owner screws me over, screws up(s) his business.

To start, I won’t be saying the name of the shipping company franchise I worked for, suffice to say the title is very telling. This is a rather long story, so buckle in. You can skip the backstory and look for the revenge near the bottom. TL:DR at the end.

The Backstory

About five or six years ago I was relatively new to the workforce, having worked one minimum wage job at Mickey D’s. I had been there almost two years, but had little experience elsewhere. Well this one lady always came through early every morning to order a large Diet Coke, and would take a few minutes to talk to me. I mentioned to her that I was displeased with my bosses and the working conditions, and she invited me to come apply for a job at Not FedEx because they were always running low on employees! That should have been my first red flag.

The second red flag went completely over my head, because at this point I was 17 with no previous job experience. When I walked in for an interview, the boss (who I will call Jeph, because it sounds close enough to his name to allow him to remain anonymous) told me it would take five minutes. I wasn’t asked about my relevant experience, my goals within the company, or even told what position I was applying for. I assumed all interviews were different and went along with it, and started the next week with training. Everything went well for the first month. I basically just packed boxes, took down customer information, and sorted mail into the mailboxes we managed. The real trouble started after I was given my one month performance review.

I was deemed to be a valuable asset to Jeph’s franchise, and rightfully so. At 17 I was able to lift more and work better than the 20 and 30 something employees, and due to the work ethic my parents drilled into me I was never slacking off while at work. I was then informed that I would be swapping between Jeph’s two franchises, roughly 30 miles apart. (For context, the franchise I APPLIED TO WORK AT was roughly a mile from my house, so I could walk if I couldn’t get a ride.) Every other day I had to drive out to the location and somehow justify this with my slightly above minimum wage job. ($7.50 for those not in Texas.)

Overall my boss was a massive douche. His physical appearance could best be described as “troll like” with a shirt almost bursting, the top always undone to showcase his aging chest hair, and a face not unlike that of A&F owner Mike Jeffries. He openly cheated on his wife, bragging to coworkers about it constantly. He charged people one dollar for any amount of extra tape they needed on their package, despite the fact that we got roughly two rolls for that price in bulk. He had a special price calculator installed on the computers that charged people roughly 10% more than the package would be elsewhere. He would push employees (who he insisted didn’t work in customer service but sales) to never offer anything less than three day shipping even though we offered standard 7+ days and even cheaper options. I watched him actively lie to customers, claiming it was the price they had to pay blah blah blah, and almost yell at them to go to another store if they didn’t like it. But I digress.

Now here was the first dickish thing that my boss did to me specifically. Until this point, I was only working around 20 hours. After I graduated to working at both stores, Jeph had me sign a brand new W-2 for his second store, which was under a different company. (He owned both, naming one Blue (name for a .44 caliber bullet) and Blue (proper name for visible light)). Again, I had very little idea that this wrong because I had never had to deal with this before. He proceed to add another 20 or so hours to my schedule, bringing me up to 40 hours or more. But since I worked for two separate companies I never earned a dime of overtime or benefits of any kind.

At this point, I started accruing more and more duties, as my boss and coworkers started to trust me more and more. Buy my fourth month of employment (out of a total of eight) I was performing managerial duties such as: opening the store, counting the registers, closing the store, ordering product such as boxes and tape, and preparing shipments for transport. The work alone justified a raise, not to mention the hours I was being asked to work. However when I floated this idea by my boss, he very rudely insisted that since he had a manager for each store already, I was just doing my job and couldn’t earn a cent more.

Then came the second dickish move. We had a large company contract some drop off stuff with us, a telecom company we will say rhymes with Hey Tea and Tea. Customers would bring in their old cable boxes, wires, remotes and the like, and we would scan them and ship them back to Hey Tea and Tea, the company THAT LEGALLY OWNED ALL OF THIS HARDWARE. The customers would not pay us a nickel, but the telecom company would pay almost double what it actually cost to ship the package. There is no way Jeph could look that gift horse in the mouth and decide he was still owed the stable and all the horse’s tack as well, right? Surprise, surprise, Jeph had to take it one step further. ANY and ALL parts/cables/WiFi adapters/USB drives the customer returned to us that didn’t have a scan tag on them, Jeph would pull aside and either strip for copper or sell on eBay. And he would force us, the employees to package his eBay sales or copper wiring into boxes and ship them for him. He even popped batteries out of remotes and recycled them somewhere to get a tax credit. None of his employees ever saw a penny of this money (not that I would have accepted it). We estimated he raked in roughly three to four thousand a month just from stealing alone. For those of you bad at math, that is the price of TWO brand new 2018 Honda Civics.

The Revenge

The third (and fourth) final dick moves are what solidified my hatred for this boss, and my desire to strike back. They both came in the same week, roughly the same time, and both viscerally repulsive. My favorite coworker had recently gotten pregnant, and although the father got the hell out of dodge when he found out, she was doing very well for herself. She and I frequently closed together, and she promised she would bring the baby to sit in the back for the dull hours we had to kill from 6-10. We also had an annual store review from corporate that week, so our boss called a late night meeting after we closed one day. Our boss started out by saying that he was proud of our pregnant coworker for working so hard even with her “disability.” (Yes, even his sense of humor was slimy.) Then, in front of all fifteen employees, HE FIRED HER. He told her that because the Christmas season was coming up, and she would only slow down the store being pregnant and all, he had to let her go.

After she left, hatred seething in her eyes, he turned back to the fourteen of us who were left stunned, and continued on like nothing had happened. He proceeded to tell each of us our jobs for this weekend, leaving mine for last. My job, because I used to drive a decently sized mini van, was to ferry the corporate required supplies, cash for the safe, and OUR ONE WORKING FIRE EXTINGUISHER between the two stores while he kept corporate distracted between visits.

At this point I had taken enough shit from this guy, and I formulated my plan. I started by calling the Hey Tea and Tea fraud department, and telling them everything I knew. I took pictures and emailed them directly to the rep I was talking to, who seemed a little too excited about fraud being committed. I then scheduled a visit from a Hey Tea and Tea rep at the same time corporate was supposed to show up. My next step was to call Not FedEx and explain exactly what I just told y’all, with a few extra things thrown in that I couldn’t share for privacy reasons. They promised to send a rep as well, to the same store, at the same time.

The final step was put into action that Saturday. I dutifully loaded up my van with the supplies, cash (upwards of $4000 if I remember correctly), and fire extinguisher, and headed out. Except I did the exact OPPOSITE of what Jeph wanted. I took the crap to the first store he owned, which was the second one to receive a visit. After he texted the team saying they were moving on, I packed up all the shit and drove it to the other store they just left. Now I am unsure exactly what happened at the other store, but from some coworkers I pieced together that the Not FedEx rep showed up right after I left, but didn’t stay long, and the Hey Tea and Tea rep showed up just before Jeph had arrived and had time to hide his ill gotten gains in his office. The one coworker who was close enough to the office during the corporate meeting said there was lots of angry words being thrown and threats being made towards Jeph and his position as a franchisee. He also lost his franchises the ability to ship for Hey Tea and Tea, at least for a period of time.

Regardless, the very next day I was off because I was (and as cliché as this sounds I swear to God it’s true) helping my grandfather who just got out of the hospital. I receive a call from Jeph, saying I needed to come in right away, and work a double shift as well as close the store. I told him I couldn’t do that, and I was taking a personal day. He fired me right then and there, citing my usage of the work computer to run a photoshop business during work hours. (I’m assuming he was referring to the graphic design work I did FOR HIM, FOR FREE, which he asked me to learn how to do.)

The sad epilogue to this whole story is that he is currently still in business, and still running the same scams he was before. He WAS however fined for not having proper supplies in his stores, as well as forced to use corporate’s package rates rather than his own. So in some small way my revenge worked. He currently has a two star review on Yelp for both of his his businesses, and I hope to have a party outside his store one day when it goes belly up.

TL:DR: Boss is a total douche bag to me and customers, steals from a contract company, fires a pregnant woman for “slowing down the store” then gets his ass reamed by corporate and loses the major contract.

(source) (story by Chewbacca_Q_Wookie)

#prorevenge #by Chewbacca_Q_Wookie #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #revenge story #last10

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bettingoddsapi-blog · 5 years

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Tennis Betting - Recommendations For Trade Betting on Golf Matches

Spread betters chance on cost activities of such a thing from individual gives, currencies and commodities to whole areas like the FTSE, Dax or S&P. It is called distribute betting because the organization providing the company makes many of their money by getting yet another spread about the cost at which anything is being bought or sold.

Industry estimates claim that around ninety per dime of spread-betters lose most or all their income and shut their records within 3 months of starting. There appear to be another eight per cent roughly who produce affordable levels of money on a typical betting odds api and you can find about two per dollar of spread-betters who make fortunes. I've been to a couple presentations run by distribute betting businesses and at one of these brilliant the salesman allow slide that around eighty per dollar of his consumers missing money. Actually many specialists eliminate on about six bets out of each ten. But by preventing their losses and maximising their earnings when they gain, they could improve their wealth.

When you start a demo or true bill, you are certain to get several telephone calls from excessively helpful and useful teenage boys and women at the spread-betting business asking if there is any such thing they could do to help you to obtain going. This really is customer service at their really best. All of the persons contacting you will parrot the range which they only want to help and that they are pleased if you are effective as their company only makes money from the spread. Some will reassure you that they want one to get since the more you get, the more you are likely to guess and the more the spread-betting business will earn.

This could produce you feel good, convince you that the organization is start, honest, reputable and supportive and inspire you to use them for the betting. But additionally it is a lie. It's correct that the business may make lots of their income from the spread. However, with several of one's bets, you're betting against the company and so that they hope you lose, huge time. In reality, during the last month I've seen many businesses modify the conditions on the internet sites to create it much more likely that individuals with them may lose. So, lesson one - distribute betting businesses aren't your friends. The more you eliminate the more they win. It's that simple.

If you bet say £50 a pip and the cost does go the manner in which you want, the distribute betting business takes the very first £50 you win. Therefore the price has to maneuver two pips in the right path for you really to gain your £50 straight back and three pips for you really to arise with £100, doubling your money. However if the cost moves three pips in the wrong way, you eliminate your unique guess plus £50 a pip, offering a total lack of £200, a lack of four instances your unique bet.

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achemicalwriter · 6 years

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I walked down the aisle, deciding which brand would be better. First Response, Clearblue? Would the store brand just work as good? At least it'd be cheaper. What am I willing to do, spend seven dollars or ninety eight cents? I grabbed the First Response without looking at it and quickly walked away from the childcare section. I can't just show up to the counter with a pregnancy test so I head down the candy aisle and snatched a bag of beef jerky, two zero bars, and a blue raspberry jolly rancher drink.

I shouldn't have come here, I thought. I mean like, I needed to come anyway but dammit not at three in the morning. I could've just came here after school but so many people go here that they would automatically just know what I'm doing. Besides, I couldn't sleep. The guilt and regret that was settled in my stomach grew in size with every passing hour.

I strided down past the aisles with my head down because even at three in the morning you just never know who's going to be up at this ungodly hour. Different things on sale catch my eye as I walked, brownie mixes that are buy one get one free, pillow pets (I don't know any child who would want a pillow pet), kitchenettes for the little ones. All of those a reminder of the child that I'm not anymore.

I still keep my head down slightly as I put my stuff on the counter. I feel bad for the employee, he has to work third shift at a 24/7 gas station only to see me walk in and come up to them with a sign that says 'bad decisions'.

I sneak a glance and see his tired face not even batting an eye at my weird purchases. Thank you, Exxon cashier.

"10.27 is your total, ma'am." He tells me handing me the bag.

I hand him the money, take my bag, and got out of there as quickly as I could.

* * *

The moon lights up the sidewalk as I stroll down Amble Boulevard, drink in one hand and a zero bar in the other. The pregnancy test burns a hole in its plastic bag but I'm trying to ignore that.

How could I have been so stupid? Why didn't I think that something was going to happen? I never think, that's why. I know I act totally on impulse but I thought that maybe, just maybe, he would've been different with me.

I stop in the middle of the sidewalk to put my head in my hands and groan. I had sex with Matt Miller and now his girlfriend is after me. I did not know of course that he had a girlfriend because if I did, I never would've gotten into that room with him. I also did not know that the condom broke so now I'm walking home from Exxon with the First Response box in a bag.

I never should've gone in the first place, girlfriend or not.

I start walking again to go home, to put the box inside my side dresser's drawer and hope that no one looks there for the next three days.

* * *

Creeping through the door, I tip toe across the kitchen floor to reach my room. My sister's room is right beside the kitchen and she's home for the weekend; it would be worse to be caught by her rather than my parents, they may be hell raisers but I can't lie to Aniah.

"Kayla, what are you doing up?"

Oh my God, are you fucking serious?

I turn around to see my older sister standing at the doorway, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

"Uh, I got hungry so I came down here to eat something," I quickly lie. I hold the bag behind my back but it rustles so I know I'm done for.d

Aniah raises an eyebrow at me. She points to my back. "Then why do you have a bag behind you?"

I bring it out behind me and stare as if it was ttotally normal to go out in the middle of the night to grab a snack. "Well you can't get candy bars here, can you?" I casually retort .

"God Mickey, you can't just act on your impulses," Aniah sighs and rolls her eyes at me. "Get a melatonin and go to bed." She orders.

I nod swiftly and go to scurry past her but before she grabs my arm.be

"You got another candy bar in there?" I

She smiles as I hand her the other zero bar, I was gonna eat it but whatever. She doesn't know about the box and that's good enough for me.

I go up to my room, as soon as I'm in I throw the box into my drawer where I don't have to think about it too much. Even though I'm hyped up on candy I lay down anyway. The hope of sleep has long been thrown away but I close my eyes in case I do happen to fall asleep before my alarm at six.

* * *

An excerpt from an idea that I had! Hope you enjoyed it 💖

#original idea #achemicalwriterwrites #possible beginning to a book idea

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coolcrusadeland-blog1 · 5 years

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Spread Betting - How To Get Poor Quickly?

As I write this, I'm nursing a bit of a sore head and an empty wallet. In the last four weeks I've lost almost £30,000 spread betting for about an hour a day five days a week. So I managed to blow around £1,500 an hour. That's really quite a chunk of cash. Actually, it's not quite as bad as it looks. Fortunately, I was betting using a few spread-betting companies' demo sites. These are simulations of their live betting sites that allow you to practice before you start betting with real money. I realise that I am no financial genius otherwise I would have been rich long ago. However, the fact that I managed to squander so much money so quickly does pose the question - if spread betting seems so easy, why do so many people get completely wiped out extremely quickly?

We're increasingly seeing advertising for spread betting in investing and money management publications. In the one I subscribe to, four or five different spread betting companies take full-page colour ads each week, outnumbering any other type of advertising. Spread betting ads are already common in the business sections of many weekend newspapers and will probably soon start to appear in the personal finance sections. Spread betting could appear deceptively attractive to many savers. After all, money in a bank, shares or unit trusts will at best give us about a miserable five per cent a year before tax. Yet a reasonable run on spread betting can easily let you pocket ten per cent a week - five hundred per cent a year - completely and gloriously tax-free. So spread betting can let you earn in just one year what it would take a hundred years or more to achieve with most other investments.

Spread betters gamble on price movements of anything from individual shares, currencies and commodities to whole markets like the FTSE, Dax or S&P. It is called spread betting because the company providing the service makes most of their money by putting an additional spread around the price at which something is being bought or sold.

Spread betting appears to have many advantages compared to traditional investing:

You don't have to buy anything - It allows you to bet on price movements without having to buy the underlying assets - shares, commodities or foreign exchange.

It's tax-free - When you buy or sell shares, get paid dividends or receive interest from a bank you will have to pay taxes like stamp duty, capital gains and income tax. Unless spread betting is your full-time job and only source of income, there are no taxes to be paid as it's considered to be gambling.

You can go long or short - When you spread bet you can gain just as much whether prices rise or fall, providing you guess the direction correctly. With most other investments, you need the price to go up before you make a profit.

You can bet on a rise or fall at the same time - If the FTSE, for example, is trading at 5551-5552, you can place two bets, one that it will rise and one that it will fall. These only get triggered when the FTSE actually moves. So if it starts going up, your bet that it will rise gets triggered. Similarly if it drops, only your bet that it will fall is triggered. So it can seem that, come rain or shine, you'll probably win.

Huge leverage - If you bet say £50 a pip (a pip is usually the minimum price movement you can bet on), you can easily win four or five times your original bet if the price moves in the right direction. On a really good bet, you can win much much more.

You can wait for the breakout - Prices on many shares, currencies, commodities and other things people bet on tend to experience periods of stability followed by bursts of movement up or down, what spread-betters call 'the breakout'. You can place a bet that is only activated when the breakout comes.

Loss limits - You can put conditions in your bet that prevent your losses exceeding your chosen level should your bet happen to be wrong.

You can adjust mid-flight - With most bets, such as with horse racing or on roulette, once the race has started or the croupier has called 'no more bets' you have to wait helplessly for the result to see if you've won or not. With spread betting you can choose to close your bet at any time. So if you're ahead, you can take your winnings; if you're behind you can either cut your losses or wait in the hope that things will change and you'll be up again. Given all these properties of spread betting, it should be pretty easy to make a fair bit of money without too much effort. If only.

Industry estimates suggest that around ninety per cent of spread-betters lose most or all of their money and close their accounts within three months of starting. There seem to be another eight per cent or so who make reasonable amounts of money on a regular basis and there are around two per cent of spread-betters who make fortunes. I've been to a few presentations run by spread betting companies and at one of these the salesman let slip that over eighty per cent of his customers lost money. Even many professionals lose on about six bets out of every ten. But by controlling their losses and maximising their returns when they win, they can increase their wealth.

Why it can go horribly wrong

There seem to be several reasons why spread betting is so effective at dramatically demolishing most practitioners' wealth:

The companies want you to lose - When you first open a demo or real account, you will get several phone calls from extremely friendly and helpful young men and women at the spread-betting company asking if there's anything they can do to assist you to get going. This is customer service at its very best. Most of the people contacting you will parrot the line that they just want to help and that they're happy if you're successful as their company only makes money from the spread. Some will reassure you that they want you to win as the more you win, the more you're likely to bet and the more the spread-betting company will earn. This may make you feel good, convince you that the company is open, honest, trustworthy and supportive and encourage you to use them for your betting. But it's also a lie. It's true that the company might make a lot of its money from the spread. However, with many of your bets, you're betting against the company and so they hope you lose, big time. In fact, during the last month I've seen several companies change the conditions on their sites to make it more likely that people using them will lose. So, lesson one - spread betting companies are not your friends. The more you lose the more they win. It's that simple.

It's difficult to break even - If you bet say £50 a pip and the price does go the way you want, the spread betting company takes the first £50 you win. So the price has to move two pips in the right direction for you to win your £50 back and three pips for you to emerge with £100, doubling your money. But if the price moves three pips in the wrong direction, you lose your original bet plus £50 a pip, giving a total loss of £200, a loss of four times your original bet.

Losses can be massive - With most gambling, you can only lose what you put down on a horse, blackjack or roulette. With spread betting you can quickly say goodbye to much more than you wager. I forgot to put a stop loss on one bet and managed to lose over £800 with just one £50 bet. Because your bet is leveraged, you can make both fabulous gains and excruciatingly painful losses. Too often it's the latter. The small size of many bets, often £5 or £10 a pip can lull betters into a false sense of security. It's only when the losses go five to ten times the original bet that they realise the risk they have taken. "The spread betting leverage means that you can get rich which is a wonderfully appealing idea, but it also means you can get poor which most people ignore."

You can waste thousands on courses and systems - At one free spread-betting seminar I attended we were more than strongly encouraged to sign up for a two-day weekend course teaching us how to spread bet successfully. This would normally cost (we were told) £6,995, but there was a special offer for the first five people to sign up of only £1,997. There are many such courses and also gurus offering to sell you their special spread-betting systems, guides, webinars and all sorts of other advice. With so many supposed experts apparently making a living teaching others how to spread bet, there must be a lot of takers. But I've found that all you need to know and more is available free on the Internet. As one specialist said, 'Don't bother wasting your money on 'Guru' books written by so-called experts. Those books are crap and not worth the paper they are printed on. Nobody sells a secret trading methodology if they are really successful. The only reason these guys are writing books is because they didn't make it as traders'.

It's the bobbing about that beats you - We often hear on the news that the price of gold has risen by a few dollars an ounce or the FTSE has fallen by a hundred and thirty points or that the pound has risen by two cents against the dollar. These reports make price changes on financial instruments sound like smooth movements either up or down. However, the prices of shares, stock markets, commodities and currencies seldom move in straight lines. They jump about every few seconds. So, if the FTSE is at 5540 and you correctly bet £50 a pip that it will go up to 5545 you might not necessarily win £200. In between going from 5540 to 5545, it might drop down a couple of times to say 5535 or lower. If you have a stop loss on at 5536 or 5535 to avoid losing too much money, your stop loss will kick in and you'll lose £250 or £300 even if the index did subsequently move upwards as you predicted. I've placed over a hundred bets to test whether I won when my bets were right. On about eighty per cent I lost in spite of being right because the fluctuations triggered the stop losses even though the index did actually move from where it was to where I predicted it would go. This creates a rather odd situation where stop losses can unfortunately make you lose even when you should be winning. Yet if you don't put stop losses on and things go in the wrong direction, your losses can annihilate you.

It attracts losers - At the spread betting seminars I've attended, I've been shocked by the number of low-paid workers - waiters, porters, kitchen staff, healthcare assistants and impoverished, would-be writers like myself - who decide to have a go at spread betting as they believe that, apart from winning the Lottery, it may be the only realistic way they have of making any money. These people will be betting with their meagre life savings against extremely sophisticated financial services insiders with vast knowledge, many years experience and extraordinarily deep pockets. It's not difficult to guess who is going to win.

Sucker or smartie?

Spread betting is a 'zero sum game'. Unlike depositing our money in a bank so it can be lent to businesses or house-buyers, spread betting doesn't create wealth. It just redistributes money from the suckers to the smart. When contemplating whether to try your hand at spread betting, you need to work out whether you are likely to be in the ninety per cent who end up as suckers or the ten per cent who make money by being smart. I found it interesting that not a single one of the amiable young men and women from spread-betting companies that I spoke to actually did any spread betting themselves. By the way, when I did eventually open a live spread betting account and managed to win about £100 a day for ten days, the spread betting company started preventing me getting out of losing bets because they claimed I was "betting unfairly". However, if you do manage to spread bet successfully, please drop me an email, I'd love to find out how to do it sakong online.

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