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renegade--soul498 · 2 years

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I've already seen the story of A Plague Tale Requiem thanks to gameplays on YouTube and God...this game was certainly a journey and an experience.

Without spoilers: the game truly touched my heart, took it out, squeezed it, did whatever the fuck it wanted with it, and left me with what was left. It was a journey full of hope, fear, deception, beauty, comradeship, friendship, love, faith... It tells the experience of war, how it affects you, the burden of surviving and living with scars, the burden of choice and dealing with the consequences of those choices, the importance of letting go... Honestly, A Plague Tale Requiem was worth all the months of waiting.

Now with spoilers from here on...

From beginning to end, I had this sense of calm before the storm. This is an era (Middle Ages) where life doesn't go as we want or expect it to; people are ruthless, careless, greedy, and selfish, so they'll do whatever is in their reach to get their objective.

I believe the Macula is just what Lucas and Amicia said by the end: punishment for all the dark deeds of humanity back then; and we see this in Hugo's reaction to all of it. He tries to prevent conflict, to save others, to protect the ones he cares about. We can see it right away in Chapter I when the beekeepers find Tonin and he tries to save him, he hates that people can be cruel to each other. Still, the Macula is difficult to handle as it's connected to his feelings as well, and he's just a five-year-old who's getting used to the world around him: he doesn't get ahold of his emotions. And throughout the game he never does, because in the end that's his drive, how he feels about the world he's learning to love. (Sincerely, it's the first time I've thought so much about the study of a child character but Hugo was the "perfect" representation of innocence in a cruel world, and how that innocence increasingly becomes darker and stained).

Moving on to Amicia... I believe by the end most of us get the idea that she's just traumatized by all the fighting she had to endure, how she was thrown into fighting without wanting to just to survive and protect. The contrast between Innocence and Requiem is palpable: Amicia is not a cold stranger anymore, but she's assuming her role as big sister, protective and lenient, comprehensive and understanding, playful but careful to Hugo's wishes, games, and attitudes. It's amazing and incredible how wholesome she is in the best moments, and how deadly she can be when backed against the wall. She fights because she thinks it's the only choice she has, because if she doesn't fight, she'll die and everyone she cares for will die as well. As Hugo said in the last chapter, it's the only thing that keeps her going; as Vaudin said when they first met, it's her flame – her wrath. And because that goes unchecked, it affects her mentally and psychologically in a way that doesn't let her really rest, which is what they all want in the end: rest from all the fighting, the running away, the deception, the lies, and cruelty of the world. (I also believe that this might speak of how we as people fight for what we want everyday but sometimes we just have to take a break from everything because we're not invincible? Amicia's character is something really beautiful once you get her journey).

In the end, Requiem is a call for mercy, it's the end of innocence, the assumption of responsibility, the death of hope, the care of trust, the importance of family and bonds. It's truly a masterpiece that grasps the reality of war and life well: not always things will go your way, and you have to live with those things whether you like it or not, and sometimes sacrifices must be made for the sake of others.

Getting out of the seriousness, and getting really biased: I truly want Requiem to get nominated for Game Of The Year, it deserved it. I said it before: I don't care if it doesn't win, I want it to at least be nominated. The De Rune's story is beautifully tragic but I enjoyed it thoroughly, it was worth all the months of wait. I hope it doesn't go under the radar like Innocence and I hope it goes around more because this story deserves to be known all around.

#a plague tale #a plague tale requiem #a plague tale: requiem #amicia de rune #hugo de rune #my thoughts #my opinion

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absolutepokemontrash · 3 years

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Aaa congrats on 666 :D you've been one of my favorite obey me blogs since I joined the fandom! can I request the brothers with an mc that looks/acts like they just walked out of a zombie apocalypse? Turns out that while the demons werent looking, things in the human realm went down hill ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

👀 I love this! Sorry this took so long! I hope you enjoy!

Lucifer

When Solomon popped down into the Devildom earlier, Lucifer had noticed that the sorcerer looked a tad… concerned. After he left, Lucifer thought nothing of it until the second human exchange student appeared brandishing a gun and looking like they hadn’t showered in eight days.

After managing to disarm the human and avoiding the baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, Lucifer managed to explain exactly why the human was in the Devildom and what was going on. In return, the human calmed down and explained what was going on in the human world.

…geez, shit really hit the fan. Uh… Lucifer wished them luck in their exchange year and foisted them off on Mammon. Lucifer was not about to deal with that right then.

(Apparently one of Solomon’s necromancing acquaintances had something to do with the mini apocalypse going on in the human world. Lucifer and MC were assured that the zombie problem was being dealt with)

As confused and annoyed as Lucifer was at first, he quickly became glad that the human had some kind of self defence on them. The Devildom was a dangerous place, and the human could nullify some of that danger by popping a bullet or twelve into some idiots’ heads.

But one of MC’s more annoying habits were their tendency to set traps and hoard food. They didn’t seem to grasp that lack of food wasn’t an issue and that there were plenty of spells in place to make sure-

Okay, Beel just raided the fridge. Maybe MC had the right idea. Up for sharing some spaghetti-o’s?

Mammon

Now listen here! The Great and Amazing and Mega-Sexy Mammon wasn’t scared of the human at all! Got it?! Good. He wasn’t scared of how dishevelled and dirty they were and how they looked like they just crawled out of a horror movie! Not at all! He also wasn’t scared of the baseball bat they threatened to hit him with if he continued to spout threats of eating them.

Pff, he wasn’t scared… totally not scared… *ahem*

Once the human took a bath and stopped pointing their various weapons at him, Mammon quickly began to warm up to the human in their own tsundere kind of way. Fine, he could admit that MC was kinda cool.

The one thing that Mammon just couldn’t deal with was MC’s traps… he kept setting them off while trying to get into MC’s room!

Oi! Don’t look at him like that! He wasn’t tryin’ to steal anything! He also wasn’t goin’ in there to hang out with the dumb human either! Wasn’t goin’ in there to check on em’ and make sure they were comfortable…

Mammon is also #2 in terms of food theft in the house. He just spotted ramen and decided that possibly getting hit with MC’s baseball bat of pain was worth getting his greedy little mitts on some dollar store noodles.

Leviathan

When Levi went downstairs to threaten Mammon for his money back, Levi immediately recoiled at the absolutely fowl smell coming from the human. Ew, normie stink was getting all over him! And why did they look like they just walked out of TellTale’s The Walking Dead?

Once MC explained their situation, Levi took it upon himself to mansplain the zombie apocalypse to the poor human that was going through it. He had played plenty of zombie survival games and he was surely the expert-

AAKSJAKAJANA- PUT THE BAT DOWN! HE’LL SHUT UP! HE’LL SHUT UP!

After that was over and done with, Levi decided it would be his job to reintroduce MC to some quality entertainment. There couldn’t be that many good shows to watch in the apocalypse, so MC (starved for entertainment) agreed to watch whatever Levi wanted.

Food hoarding? Been there done that. Levi keeps at least ten boxes of Pocky in his room at all times, and a crap ton of other snack foods too. That habit doesn’t phase Levi.

The traps on the other hand? HELL YES TEACH HIM MC! THAT’LL WARD OFF SOME SCUMMY MORONS! *insert Levi cackle here*

Satan

Satan was amongst the people who had the privilege of getting a gun pointed at them on the first day of the exchange program. He kept his fake little smile on his face, but he sure as hell wasn’t too pleased with the human.

He kept his distance at first, studying MC from afar and taking note of their weird little habits. Satan found it quite interesting how quickly this seemingly average human adapted to their new circumstances.

After the body switching incident and the murder train incident, Satan developed a fondness for MC. But… maybe MC shouldn’t have brought their weapons with them on one of their hangout sessions with Satan.

It was on that day that MC learned that Satan was as good a shot with a gun as they were… Rest in Pieces to the idiot that decided fucking with the Avatar of Wrath would be a good idea.

The traps… oh yes the traps… that exact skill set transferred perfectly to pranks! Oh if MC would be so kind as to let Satan teach them the way of the bastard (tm) so the two of them could annoy that pompous peacock together?

Asmodeus

Ewwwww! What was that awful stench coming from the- EWWWWW! Why was the human so gross and dirty! Someone get the hose! They summoned a feral one!

Asmo was less concerned with the fact that the human was threatening everyone with an actual weapon and more concerned with how they smelled like a month old macaroni salad.

MC got a bottle of admittedly pleasant smelling soap thrown at them before Mammon dragged them off to the HOL.

Despite the nasty first impression, once MC took a much needed bath and washed all that gross grime off of themselves… they were honestly really hot… man, apocalypses should happen more often if they produce babes like MC~ *eyebrow wiggle*

Though, the poor human still needed some work, Asmo declared himself their fairy goddaddy (I regret ever learning how to type) and took every opportunity to make sure MC looked their best and took care of themselves.

MC’s odd habits don’t exactly phase Asmo much, I mean, look at who he lives with.

Beelzebub

…he doesn’t wanna eat this human.

Listen, Beel will eat anything, but if he has other options, he’s not eating the gross dirty human pointing a gun at him.

At first, Beel’s pretty neutral towards anything and everything MC ends up doing. They barricaded themselves in their room to keep safe out of habit? Okay. They scarily polish and clean their weapons out in the middle of the living room? So does Satan on occasion. They cleared out the fridge- wait they cleared out the fridge?

BEEL WAS GOING TO DO THAT! PREPARE TO BE EATEN, HUMAN!

MC miraculously survived a hungry Beel attack by chucking food at him until he calmed back down. Beel felt a little bad for scaring them, but anyone with more than five brain cells should know not to steal food from the Avatar of Gluttony.

Anyway, once the two get closer, Beel’s always there for a hug and comfort if MC needs it. Just don’t let him near the food hoard. He will reduce it to nothing in less than an hour.

More than 90% of the traps that get set off are set off by Beel trying to get into MC’s room for food.

Belphegor

Father Dammit, Belphie wanted a nice easy defenceless human to murder, not this Rambo-lookalike. Whatever, sure the human looked tough, but Belphie’s a demon.

Well… Belphegor’s plan went to shit when he was in the middle of choking the human, who pulled out a gun and nearly shot him in the eye. He ended up dropping them in surprise when the bullet grazed his face and ended up getting MC’s boot planted into his forehead.

Yeah… Belphie did not fare well. MC: 1 Belphie: 0

After that nonsense, Belphie demanded begged that MC become his full time nap guardian. They were scary and could protect him, the totally defenceless war criminal 🥺, come on MC, don’t be heartless!

Similar to Asmo, Belphie isn’t too phased by MC’s weird habits. As long as they don’t try and steal his pillows, he’s okay. Those traps though… perfect for a certain older brother of his…

He joins in on Satan’s crusade to get MC to join the Anti Lucifer League. Puh-LEEEEEEEAAAAAASE MC?

#obey me #obey me!#obey me! shall we date?#Obey me Headcanons #obey me! headcanons #obey me shall we date #obey me mc #Obey me Lucifer #Obey me Mammon #Obey Me Leviathan #Obey me Satan #Obey me Asmodeus #Obey me Beelzebub #Obey me Belphegor

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c-is-for-circinate · 5 years

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inauspicious-augury replied to your post: Fuck it, today has been confusing and annoying and...

Listen, I’m always down for FMA related anything

Let’s talk about the Ed-in-Ishval AU, then. Let’s talk about Edward Elric, with all his stubbornness and certainty and impossible furious morals, sixteen years old in the middle of hell on Earth. (Or at least, let’s talk about the path that gets him there, because it’s a long one and there’s more of this story yet to go).

Ed is born seven and a half years early. Van Hohenheim leaves Resembool a couple of years late. Nothing else changes, except in reaction to those two things--so everything changes.

Edward Elric is stubborn and fierce and golden and brilliant, and until he’s almost nine, he’s also alone. He learns everything he can get his hands around, everything his mother can teach him, everything every adult in town can teach him, following everyone and asking questions until nobody can answer any more. He reads every single book in his father’s study that his hands can reach, and learns to turn the floor into stepstools to reach for more, and he learns, and he learns, and he learns.

Al is born when Ed is eight and a half, and Ed loves him instantly, wholeheartedly, with everything inside of him. Hohenheim isn’t there when it happens--off on another one of his mystery trips that he never explains no matter how much Ed asks. Ed holds his younger brother before anybody else, before even his mother, because Sara Rockbell doesn’t quite manage to stop him sneaking in the door to the room in time. His father doesn’t meet Al for another week and a half. Ed spends every second of that time doting on his tiny miracle little brother, on his glowing tired miracle mother.

Ed’s mother keeps her house alone for three weeks out of every five. His brother learns to sit, and then to stand, to hold things, to talk, to think, and Hohenheim is gone for so much of it. Ed understands so much about the world, but there are things he still doesn’t get, mysteries he already resents for eluding him, and his father is the biggest mystery of all. Hohenheim answers no questions, not ever, not about alchemy and not about where he goes, what could possibly be more important than this. Hohenheim watches this boy with eyes and hair like every dead soul from Xerxes, with alchemy sparking from his fingertips, with his ravenous hunger for knowledge and his bone-deep entitlement to every answer, his little boy’s surety and hubris, and is so very, very afraid for his child.

Ed runs away for the first time when he’s twelve, when he’s read every single book in his father’s study, even the ones on the topmost shelves, even the ones hidden behind locks that he has to transmute away, even the ones written in code so intricate it takes him weeks to break. He kisses his brother and promises to write (Al is three, almost four, it’s more than old enough to be reading and learning and starting to figure out alchemical code), and leaves his mother a note. He doesn’t say a word to his father, who’s been gone for a week and a half and won’t be home for another two, and doesn’t matter anyway. He spends four weeks on his own in the back country of Amestris chasing down rumors of a woman who can kill bears with her two hands and does alchemy without even a transmutation circle. Izumi Curtis finds him on her doorstep, grinning and alone. She keeps him for six months before Van Hohenheim shows up at that same door with a look of granite annoyance. Ed would stay, anyway, if Izumi didn’t throw him out face-first in the dirt outside her house to send him back to his mother. He’d stay even then, find his own way, learn more and more and more, convince Teacher to take him back, but Hohenheim is still so much taller than him and his hand on Ed’s shoulder is a vise. Ed’s learned enough from Teacher to throw him off, but--not skills to use on his father. Not that. Hohenheim drags Ed all the way back to Resembool, never mind that he’d had plans, that the Dwarf in the Flask’s plans are drawing ever closer to completion, that he wants so badly to age and die. Trisha has a cough that rattles deep in her lungs when he gets back, something it takes more power than Hohenheim ever would have predicted to heal entirely. Clearly it’s not safe to leave entirely. Not quite yet.

Al grows up toddling after his big brother, reading every book Ed pours through and then passes over, as devoted and beloved as any younger brother has ever been in the world. He and Winry are thick as thieves, Winry who’s too smart for the other kids in town too, Winry whose mother and father used to babysit Ed back when they were teenagers and expect him to return the favor. Ed in all his skinny teenage gangliness roams around Resembool and its outskirts with a pair of toddlers who become small children who become older children, following him like ducklings the whole way. He doesn’t bother with the books in his father’s study any more, mostly, except to answer Al and Winry’s questions, to teach them whatever he happens to know about alchemy and engineering and metal, to answer every single question that nobody would ever answer for him when he was small. He teaches himself, instead, tests and experiments, tries and tries again and learns, and learns, and learns. Al grows up with a treehouse just outside his home that his father tried to build by hand, ten years before he was born, that his brother fixed and enhanced and decorated with alchemy in ridiculous wooden gargoyles and spikes a few years after. He hides there, sometimes, when he comes home and Ed and Father are shouting again. Ed shouts at everything in the world except for Al and Mama, and Father never shouts at anything at all except for Ed. It should mean that Al would be able to get in between them, to make them stop, but he hasn’t figured out the magic words yet. And maybe he shouldn’t have to. Mama says it’s not his job, that Father and Ed are just too similar, that it’s up to them to figure that out. Al thinks she’s probably right, but he’s allowed to be annoyed about it.

The second time Ed leaves, he’s sixteen and Al is eight, and this time Hohenheim isn’t the one to bring him back.

They scream at each other before they go. Ed wants more, he has always wanted more, he has spent his whole life starving. His mother has filled his every plate with oatmeal and stew and warmth and let him gorge himself on all of it, and she’s loved him, and he’s grown, just like a parent and child are supposed to do. His father has refused his questions at every single turn and left him to scrounge for every scrap of knowledge he’s found. So be it. He’ll go off and find what he’s looking for on his own. His father tries to stop him with strong words and non-answers, yet more non-answers. “There are things you’re too young and foolish to even realize you don’t want to know!”, he thunders, and Ed growls at him with glinting, golden Xerxian eyes. His mother cries, and it almost makes him stay. “Promise me you’ll come back,” she says. “Promise me you’ll find what you’re looking for and make it back to me.”

Six months later, when Hohenheim leaves, it’s for good. He’s spent too many years already trying to temper his intemperate son, and there’s no helping him now. Al clings to his mother’s side, and she pets his hair and keeps him close, as days turn into weeks into months for both of them. “There’s no keeping either of them, when they want to go,” she murmurs. “But we’ll be here when they get back.”

Ed Elric, sixteen years old and so sure of himself, so very very sure, takes a train to Central and walks into the State Alchemist examination as the youngest test-taker in history. If his father won’t teach him, then there are other experts. There are other libraries. He’ll find the best. There’s no risk in it, he knows, not for him. He is smarter, faster, more powerful in his art than anyone he’s ever met besides Teacher. He’s too good to waste on the front lines. He’ll show them, and they’ll put him in a lab somewhere, to scour ancient tomes and try experiment after experiment, to unfold every alchemical secret the world has to hold. He transmutes a dozen different substances in his practical display, rock and wood, glass and ice and coal and air. He moves from one to the other without a breath, without a blink, as graceful as a dancer, sketching arrays in the blink of an eye and daring the examiners to toss him anything more. He’s as hungry as Gluttony, in his own way, as possessive as Greed, as prideful as Pride. He’ll do, the test proctors report to their Fuhrer, Wrath reports to his siblings, to his Father. He’ll do.

The Quicksilver Alchemist shows up at Ishval Command sixteen years old and skinny, with a too-big uniform and an annoyed glare for the whole endeavor. "I’m not a soldier, I’m an alchemist,” he complains to anyone who’ll listen. It is strange, Roy thinks, to have Elric here. Not a scrap of him is military. State Alchemists are given honorary rank, but most of the ones here so far have basic training and a legitimate military career to go with it. Why Elric? Why not set him to work in some lab, the way he clearly wants? He can transmute anything, the rumors say, any substance he’s handed. He’s been researching cells and biochemistry: how to turn carbon and phosphorous and nitrates and water from base materials into plants, into meat, into food. They call him Quicksilver because he shifts from one material to the next, one array to another, without a single blink as fast as it would take any other alchemist to find the right page in their own journals. What is that worth right now, right here? It’s 1908. The Ishvalan rebel forces are supposedly on the verge of surrender, say the half of the rumors that don’t have them overtaking the entire East in another month. The war’s been raging back and forth for almost seven years, but it’s possible. Maybe, Roy thinks, Quicksilver will get lucky. Maybe he’s just young enough to’ve missed the worst of it already. Maybe he won’t have nightmares about deserts.

Ed doesn’t fit in with the military alchemists, which it takes him about half an hour to decide is fine by him. Grand and Comanche, who can barely transmute anything that isn’t metal at all, watch him with sheer disdain. Major Armstrong gives him a big, beaming smile of encouragement and regales him for an hour with stories of Armstrong warrior-alchemists throughout the past four centuries. Major Kimblee just watches him, quiet and considering and smiling. It’s creepy as all fuck, but as far as Ed can tell, that’s how Kimblee watches everything. Kimblee and Mustang are the only ones here whose alchemy is interesting enough to catch Ed’s attention for more than a few seconds anyway. Talking to Kimblee for more than five minutes makes Ed’s skin crawl. Mustang just smiles, smug and enigmatic, and won’t talk about the secrets of flame alchemy at all, which just fucking figures. Ed can handle alone, though. He’s been alone most of his life. He writes Al, and his mother, and Winry. He scribbles pages full of theories and ideas. When Comanche and Grand sneer in his general direction, Ed sneers right back.

Lonely is easy. Bored, though...bored is hard. Ed managed to squeeze three alchemy texts into his belongings besides his personal notes, which was two more than the orders sending him here suggested he’d have space to bring. They’re the densest and most complicated-looking ones he could find in the week he had to pack, and he has the first one cracked before his train even delivers him to the Ishvalan front. He’s not a soldier, is the problem, and his new CO knows it, which means they’re not about to send him on missions like one. Defend the encampment if insurgents attack, sure, Ed’s ready to do that, but what does he know about ferreting individual terrorist cells out of Ishvalan hidey-holes? So far his only orders have been to wait. Fuck that, Ed figures. Waiting isn’t exactly his game.

They’re stationed on the outskirts of a town five times the size of Resembool, on the edge of an orchard of date palms, where the whole horizon to the north and east is pale and flat with sand. It’s one of the first places the Amestrian army took in the whole action, and it’s been subdued and cowed over and over again for seven years. There are two bars where soldiers cluster and drink and sing, one for enlisted troops and one for officers. There’s a house near the edge of town with no sign over the doorway where soldiers sometimes disappear, on leave, for an hour or four at a time; it takes Ed an embarrassing two weeks to realize it’s a brothel. There are a handful of empty shopfronts down the main street of town, where soldiers don’t buy candles or sandals or childrens’ toys the way the town’s old residents used to, and an open-air market full of cloth-tented stalls where Ishvallans still try to sell fresh fruit and goat’s milk cheese and get by. It takes all of two days and a half before Ed slips out from the neat rows of soldiers’ tents in camp and loses himself, as fast as possible, in the clay tile and brick streets of the city. If he can’t learn from books or the other alchemists around him--and he’s had years of that, years of finding ways to make his own lessons--he’ll find something else to challenge him. The alleys are narrow and the houses are packed close together, nothing like Resembool or Dublith or Central or anywhere he’s ever lived. He’s got chalk in his pocket and all the hand-to-hand Teacher ever taught him, a white cloak over his stupid blue uniform, reflexes and a brain. He’ll be fine.

This is what Ed learns, then, in his first three months in Ishval: The taste of pomegranates, sharp and sweet and juicy-red enough to drip down his chin and stain white robes much too brightly for blood until he figures out the right array to bleach it away again. Three different alleyway games played by children even younger and smaller than his brother, who don’t mind giggling and chasing around a blonde grownup who brings his own chalk for hopscotch and somehow always loses. The quickest way to cross four miles of desert in the middle of the night to surprise Yuiry and Sara in their clinic, and hang around fixing equipment and transmuting scrap metal back into usable ingots for new automail, and chat about home until they kick him out and he has to hightail it back to camp before dawn roll call again. What the stars look like, and the moon, in the widest sky he’s ever seen, in a place where clouds don’t form and it never rains.

He doesn’t kill. Three months in Ishval, and Ed doesn’t make one single kill. He’s been on a handful of missions--patrol this secured area, establish that new outpost--all of them stupid and make-work, all of them pointless. He wanders around the desert and scrapes lines in the sand with a stick to do basic construction because outposts and guard towers are annoying to build by hand. For this they dragged him out of the library in Central. They call it the front lines, but as far as Ed’s seen, ninety percent of the time it’s just a glorified camping trip. The other ten percent of the time is bad, sometimes. He’s there when Cooper gets shot in the shoulder by an enemy sniper. When Sayers falls asleep on watch, and a handful of Ishvalans almost overrun Outpost 37 in the middle of the night. When the bloody, straggling remains of Captain Hughes’s team make it back to camp, two days late and missing three soldiers. But... But Warren has pressure on Cooper’s shoulder in seconds, and Ed has a twenty-foot-high wall of sand between them in their attacker just as fast, and then another shot rings out from the guard tower behind them and Sergeant Hawkeye drops the other sniper anyway. But he hates trying to sleep on overnight missions at Outpost 37 even more than he hates trying to sleep back at main camp, where there are at least a few raw materials that can be transmuted into something softer than solid rock under a paper-thin bedroll, and so do half the men stationed there, so everyone woke up before anyone died and most of the Ishvalans got away. But General Fessler doesn’t put Ed on missions like Captain Hughes or Major Mustang, because he knows better. Because Ed isn’t a soldier.

And Ed simmers, and Roy watches him, and Maes watches him, because who the hell puts a civilian kid like that in a place like this? Roy’s been a state alchemist for three years. He’s been in Ishval for two. Every day, he wakes up in a world that’s hot and dry and empty as far as the eye can see through to the horizon, and hopes that maybe there won’t be another mission today. Another knot of insurgents to flush out and fry, and try to avoid looking in their eyes, and try to avoid recognizing how skinny, how young, how desperate they all look. Another chance for those young desperate rebels to put a bullet through good men and women Roy’s spent two years fighting and serving and living shoulder-to-shoulder with. It all seemed so straightforward two years ago. They’re tired. They aren’t losing, but they’re not winning, either, and there’s news of fighting halfway throughout the East, and maybe the war just won’t ever end. “It will,” Maes says, and then he gushes about his Gracia some more. To Mustang, who can be goaded into a smile if he works hard enough at it. To Hawkeye, who can’t, but who sometimes relaxes her shoulders just that little bit and gets the twinkle in her eye that means she’s laughing on the inside. To Elric, who’s a kid out here in the middle of the desert, stuck on the world’s most fucked-up extended camping trip in the most extreme game of high-stakes tag ever. Elric’s a good kid. It’s worth trying to be there, to keep him from cracking. It’s worth protecting him from what happens to deserters. It’s worth trying to ease him into the slow discovery that war is always filthy, trying to show him how to keep a little piece of his soul clean even surrounded by blood in the sand.

Ed respects Captain Hughes, who’s willing to try him at hand-to-hand and doesn’t even always lose, in spite of Ed pulling out every move he ever learned from Teacher. He respects Sergeant Hawkeye, who pulls him aside and teaches him poker before he can get sharked at the Lieutenants’ weekly game. He even respects Major Mustang, who’s just as smug as ever even now that Ed’s figured out how to goad him out of his silence into argument after argument, daring Ed to try and figure out his array with every challenging smirk. Hughes brings his teams home bedraggled but more alive than dead again and again, and Ed doesn’t know what they do while they’re gone, but he knows Hughes’ only goal is to make it home alive again, and that’s fair, right? Ed can respect that. Hawkeye takes every single shot perfect and clean, like a hunter who doesn’t want their prey to suffer, and every single one of those shots goes through a human head, but that’s how war works, right? Amestrian soldiers survive when she watches their backs, and nobody she hits ends up screaming and dying in agony on Sara and Yuiry’s operating tables, and maybe that’s actually mercy. He’s never seen Mustang use his array in a battle. He’s seen scorch marks, precise and controlled and exact, and black-burnt corpses, but he’s never seen any sign of collateral damage. A weaker alchemist might let flames run wild, but Mustang never hurts anyone or anything he doesn’t mean to, and that’s better, right? That shows he has honor, or something, that he has a code and standards. He won’t even let Ed have the secrets of flame alchemy without proving he can handle them by figuring them out himself, and right, that’s how it should be, that’s what’s right, and it’s fine. It’s all just fine.

(And maybe Ed has nightmares sometimes, after he’s made it back to camp with an hour or two to spare for sleep after visiting Sara and Yuiry, nightmares about blood and moans of pain and seeing people he knows on those clinic cots, but-- And maybe he wakes up in a cold sweat sometimes, sure he’s heard another Ishvalan infiltration team creeping their way into camp, but-- And maybe he wonders sometimes, if he could kill, if he can, if he’ll be able to when he has to, if eventually he’ll have to, but--)

It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine.

Three months in, Fessler and Comanche are standing outside near the Command tent, Comanche looking even more self-satisfied and disdainful in Ed’s general direction than usual. “Not looking forward to dealing with more useless civilians like Quicksilver there,” General Fessler says, and Ed rolls his eyes right back. “Ah, who cares, sir?” Comanche asks. “They’re finally taking the shackles off and using us right. We’ll have the rats cleared out in no time.”

It’s 1908. Ed is 17, barely, just a few days past his birthday, skinny and stubborn and much, much, much too smart, and the sky is wide and bleached pale blue, and the sands of Ishval are still golden and white instead of red. For now. But it’s 1908, and order 3066 came down this morning, and nothing is ever, ever going to be fine again.

#inauspicious-augury #c writes stuff #fullmetal alchemist

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illyrian-bitch-queen · 6 years

Text

Flaming Stars-Chapter 1

I’ve been promising this for I don’t know how long, and it’s been on the backburner for a pretty long time, but here’s the first chapter of the Crossover fic between Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses that @bookworm-addict requested (forever ago, I’m sorry about that).

I’m planning on posting a chapter of this once a week until it’s finished, but I moved to a new country a couple months ago to study abroad and will be going back in a little over a month now (I’m going to sob like a baby when I leave the UK, not gonna lie) so I will be pretty busy at the same time, and I can’t promise I won’t fall behind. I’m going to try really hard to keep to the schedule though. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this :)

~Aelin discovers some strange Wyrdmarks in the Orynth library and struggles to find their purpose~

Chapter Two ** Aelin’s temper was legendary. Everyone in Orynth knew that the queen had as much fire in her temperament as she did in her power. And everyone knew when that fire was stoked, when smoke curled from her nostrils and flames burned in her eyes.

Word got around quickly when the Queen of Terassen was on a warpath, and Rowan typically knew when she was in a mood before he encountered it for himself.

This time was no exception. Apparently, she'd had an encounter with one of the more...difficult Whitethorns. Endy had warned the king about that much. But Fenrys was the only one who knew exactly what had been said when the two collided, and he refused to repeat whatever had put his queen in such a mood.

Rowan had yet to see her, but she had apparently locked herself in her study and refused to see even Aedion when he tried to speak with her. Probably because her pride was hurting over losing her temper, Rowan mused.

When he approached the door, he saw Aedion leaning sulkily against the opposite wall. Rowan raised a brow at Aelin’s cousin and he just scowled over at the door Aelin had barricaded herself behind--the door to her study. Rowan sighed.

“Aelin,” he called, rapping his knuckles briefly against the door before trying the knob. Locked indeed. Not that a locked door could stop him--or even Aedion, if he was willing to risk the queen’s wrath. “Let me in.”

A low snarl echoed from within the room, apparently the only response Rowan would receive. He sighed, shaking his head. “Aelin, you're a queen. That means you don't have time to act like a child.”

“Actually, that's exactly why I can act however I wish,” she called back, her voice no closer to the door than the snarl had been. Her mate huffed.

“Fireheart, I want to talk to you without a door between us.”

She made a little ‘humph’ noise, and he heard papers rustling, the scratch of a pen, but no footsteps.

Rowan widened his stance, growing impatient. “Aelin, if you don't open the door, I'm going to snap the lock.”

Aedion scoffed from behind him. Rowan tossed the male a dirty look over his shoulder. Aedion just smirked.

“Boyo, if you don't find a reason to be somewhere else within the next twenty seconds, I'm going to give you a reason to be in the infirmary,” Rowan growled.

The two usually got along fairly well, but sometimes the young male forgot his place--a youth and prince facing a king. Aedion’s smirk turned immediately into a scowl at Rowan’s threat.

“Both of you knock it off,” Aelin snapped, swinging the door open without warning. She pointed a slim finger at her cousin. “You, get out. Go find Lysandra. She was looking for you earlier.” Aedion narrowed his eyes, probably recognizing that Aelin was just trying to get rid of him. He did as she ordered anyway, giving her an unimpressed look as he did. She waited until Aedion sulked off to turn to her husband. “And if anyone’s cousin is going to the infirmary, it's going to be yours.”

She turned and stomped inside, her long hair swaying with every purposeful step. Rowan sighed and followed her, his eyes going skyward as he prayed to the gods for help to calm his fireheart--enough at least to get her to the meeting they had later with the diplomats from the Wastes.

“I heard you had a run in with Alisto,” Rowan started, naming his least favorite cousin. He had been visiting Terassen from Doranelle, where Selene was leading as Aelin’s head of state. “I promise, he's the nastiest of them.”

She huffed, dropping down to her seat with a half-assed glare in the king’s direction.

“I mean, if you can handle Lorcan, Alisto couldn't have been so bad.”

“He, in fact, reminded me quite a lot of Lorcan,” she said flatly, looking down at her paperwork for a moment before glancing back up at Rowan. “Except he was more devious. He didn’t outright insult me, but did it slyly enough that I could only insult and threaten him slyly in return without looking like the offending party. I hate conversations like that. I’d rather just have it out with people like him than talk circles.”

“But you’re so good at it, Fireheart,” Rowan returned, smiling down at his mate. Indeed, her clever tongue was one of his favorite parts of her, in more ways that one.

Aelin looked up at him through her lashes and fluttered them a little. “Oh, I know. And Alisto knows that now as well. But you see, he wasn’t a very fun partner when it comes to verbal sparring. There was almost no competition.”

“Is there ever competition when it comes to you, love?” Aelin’s lips turned up at the flattery, and she chuckled quietly, raising her eyes to meet his fully.

“You only encourage my ego when it’s beneficial to you, buzzard.”

“That’s just not true,” Rowan purred in return, leaning a bit closer to where she was seated. “I believe that half of the words I speak a day are probably spent telling you how beautiful and intelligent and clever and lovely you are.”

Aelin huffed. “Yes, and they all work towards you getting your way. Not to mention, I’m quite sure Fenrys does the same thing.”

Rowan laughed. “No, Aelin, Fenrys spends at least three quarters of his words on flattering you. I at least tamp down on the flattery enough to keep your head from growing too large to hold the crown.”

Aelin laughed fully then, her eyes lighting up. Rowan smiled back at her, and they fell into a comfortable silence for a long moment before Aelin spoke again.

“We don't have to invite all of your relatives to our wedding, do we?”

Rowan couldn't help a chuckle. The wedding, a mere formality really, was being planned only so that they could have a ceremony that their friends and allies could attend, rather than rushed, secret vows spoken in the middle of a war. “Aelin, if we invited all of my relatives, we would need a much bigger venue than Mistward.”

Her eyes lit up. “We don't have to invite the ass then?”

Rowan laughed, coming forward to lean his hip against her desk. “Not if you really don't want to. He'd probably take it as a personal slight, but his opinion really doesn’t matter.”

Aelin smiled then, reaching out across the desk to take his hand. Rowan tried not to think of how easy it would be to push the papers and writing tools off of the desk and put her on it instead.

It wouldn't be the first time, and probably not the last time, they'd fucked in this room, or even on that desk. It was exactly why Rowan tried not to go in her study unless they had something important to talk about.

He cleared his throat as Aelin looked up at him, her lips curling into a knowing smirk. Her mate glanced down at the papers she'd been looking at to avoid meeting her gaze.

“This again?” he said with a frown, turning one of the papers so he could read it properly. She sighed, leaning back in her seat.

“Rowan,” she whined, her lower lip jutted out slightly in a pout. He knew what she wanted, and he carefully kept his focus on the paper when she leaned forward, purposefully showing her cleavage.

“Aelin,” he groaned, tapping his fingers on the paper. “We don't have time for that today. We have to meet with the Ansel’s diplomats in half an hour.”

She looked up at Rowan through her lashes. “I can work with half an hour.”

He raised his eyes skyward to attempt to pray for some self-control. She knew full well that, once he got his hands on her, they'd be busy for much more than half an hour.

She pouted fully at him now, recognizing that she was getting nowhere. She leaned back in her seat with a huff, crossing her arms over her chest. “Ass,” she hissed.

Rowan chuckled. “Are you really so impatient for me already? You just had me this morning.”

Aelin rolled her eyes. “You're the one who came in here when you knew what always happens when you come in here.”

“Because you were sulking,” he returned, raising a brow at her crossed arms and slouched posture.

She pursed her lips, recognizing that she was, once again, beginning to sulk. She sat up straight, uncrossing her arms and pushing her papers into a pile, shoving a piece of her hair out of her eyes as she did, as if she could pretend that she wasn’t pouting by organizing herself a little.

Rowan put a palm firmly over the papers she was gathering, not moving until she met his eyes with frustration.

“Aelin, you should give this a rest. It could be dangerous, it could be beneficial, or it could just be someone’s rutting doodling. No matter what, I don't think it's worth the stress you’re getting from it.”

Aelin sighed, resting her chin on a fist. “I just can't get it out of my mind.”

She looked down at the papers strewn around her desk. They'd found them a week ago in one of Orynth’s smaller, more secret libraries while Aelin was looking through for reading material. They'd instantly recognized wyrdmarks, and Aelin had ordered the library be scoured for more of the marks, enlisting the help of their closest friends.

They'd found three collections of these new wyrdmarks, written along pages with arrows and words in a strange language between them. Nobody had been able to tell them what the language was. Aelin had been struggling to comprehend them since they'd found them.

“I think they're instructions,” she muttered now, more to herself than to Rowan. “I don't know what they could be telling us to do, though.”

Her eyes flicked rapidly back and forth along the pages. The king began to gather them up again for her, drawing her attention back to him. “Well, maybe they're instructions on how to get yourself out of your damned office and go help me handle the diplomats sent from your lovely friend in the wastes.”

A wry smile curled at the edges of her lips. “I assumed Ansel would send her most difficult emissaries. I would've been disappointed with any less.”

Rowan rolled his eyes. “Well, I would have been thrilled,” he grumbled.

Aelin grinned at him, standing slowly and stretching her arms up with a quiet moan. Although her face was completely innocent, her mate knew that she was aware of what that sound did to him.

Rowan sent his eyes around the room, focusing on anything but the way her tunic rose up as she stretched, showing a sliver of her tanned abdomen.

She chuckled as she came forward and grabbed his hand, drawing his eyes back to her. “Something wrong, buzzard?”

Rowan rolled his eyes. “Absolutely nothing, Princess.”

Her nose wrinkled. She always pretended to hate being called princess now that she was fully crowned as the queen, but Rowan knew she liked it because it reminded her of when things were easy, when it was just the two of them training in the woods at Mistward.

They could use a reminder of the beginning every now and then. It kept them grounded.

“I figure we should go see to the diplomats, then. Hopefully they at least speak our language this ti--”

She stopped suddenly, her eyes widening, her lips parting in shock. Rowan turned to her in alarm, resting a hand on her shoulder. Before he could say anything, she held a hand up, her eyes going to his, asking for a moment to think. Rowan fell silent, letting his queen sort through her thoughts.

Then she rushed back to her desk, shoving through the papers they’d just stacked and leaving them a scattered pile again. She held up the page that had puzzled them the most.

It was just a single, large wyrdmark.

“Translation,” she breathed. “This is for translation. I knew it had some meaning to it,” she said quickly. “I could feel it teasing at my mind, but this is it! I know it.”

Rowan looked at her hesitantly. “Aelin, there's no way to be sure of that. What if you're wrong?”

She paused, her brows furrowing as she lowered the page. “Rowan, I can feel it.”

Her eyes were dancing with the joy of discovery, and they were darkened with passion and surety. She had no doubts.

Yet, Rowan hesitated. Even if she was convinced she was right, it didn't mean that she was. She was wrong every now and then, even if she preferred to pretend she wasn’t.

“It's not safe,” he said, shaking his head and moving over to her side. “Please, Aelin. Just think about it.”

“I have,” she said back, her tone adamant. “I've thought about it for a week now. But I understand.”

Rowan wasn’t near as sure as she was, but he didn't stop her as she reached for the dagger she had strapped to the underside of her desk, a small measure of defense that was useless, really, when she could use flames easier than she could free the weapon to use if someone were to attack her in the study. It was mostly there as a comfort, and maybe as a way to defend herself without taking the risk of setting any important documents on fire.

Or apparently, Rowan noted with alarm, in case she needed to slice her palm open at the drop of a hat. He lunged forward to stop her, but she’d already cut a thin line into her palm. Rowan still pulled the weapon from her. “Rutting hell*, Aelin!” She gave him a look, raising her brow.

“Oh hush, you mother hen.” Her lips twitched at her own sly pun--she loved bird jokes as much as she loved getting him into a panic--and Rowan just scowled at her. “I’m just going to try something,” she assured him. He wasn’t comforted in any way.

She pressed her first two fingers into the blood she'd drawn and paused for only a second before dragging the fingers along the paper, tracing the shape the the strange wyrdmark made.

The second she was finished, Rowan reached forward and pressed his hand over hers to staunch the bleeding and push a little of his healing power into her body. It was a shallow cut, but enough to make him uneasy. Any blood drawn from Aelin made him uneasy.

He was relieved when nothing happened as her blood soaked into the paper. It was rather anticlimactic, and there was a moment of charged silence, but nothing exploded. Nobody came rushing in to say that the world had just been set on fire.

Nothing had happened.

But Aelin’s sharp gasp was enough to draw his eyes back down to the mark. She shoved that paper aside, and Rowan swore under his breath at the papers below it.

She'd been right. It was a translation. The words on the strange papers had arranged themselves into letters and words that he recognized.

And she'd been doubly right. They were instructions. She began grabbing papers and reading them, flipping them under and on top of one another. Rowan grudgingly began to help, and they worked until they managed to get them all in order. Fifty pages in total, all with wyrdmarks and the order of them, the placement.

It was for a ‘transport’.

Aelin read the word aloud, tapping her fingers against the paper thoughtfully. Her eyes were swarming with curiosity and determination, her hair falling around her face and her lower lip caught between her teeth.

Rowan loved when she looked like this, so deep in thought. But these wyrdmarks were giving him a bad feeling. They didn't know what we were toying with here. And transport? Transport to where?

“Fireheart,” Rowan murmured, resting his hand on her back. “We can get to this later. We have foreign diplomats to worry about right now.”

She nodded slowly, but he knew she wasn't really listening to him. Her husband sighed, tugging gently on her arm now. He just wanted her away from this whole situation. He was terrified that it was going to put his mate in danger, danger they had left behind years ago, at least for the most part.

“Aelin. It's time to go. We can worry about this later. You need to go run your kingdom right now.”

She looked up at him before sighing heavily and forcing herself to push the papers away.

“Okay,” she breathed. “Okay. Let's go.” She stood up straight, pushing her hair back and adjusting her clothes so that they sat properly again, giving herself a moment to recollect while she fixed her appearance.

Rowan knew it was hard for her to push back the curiosity boiling in her veins, and he kissed her on the forehead, guilt pulsing in his blood for denying her the indulgence that she wanted to explore this new discovery. She stood, pressing her lips to his briefly in return.

The crown was a weight on her still, even if she had steadily grown accustomed to it. She loved being the queen. There was no doubt about that. But sometimes, like now, she hated having to choose her responsibility to her kingdom over satisfying her curiosity or exploring her freedom.

He remembered her saying once, what felt like eons ago and yesterday all at the same time, that her kingdom was just another set of shackles. He knew she didn’t feel that way anymore, that she loved her kingdom with her whole heart, that she would put it before anything else, even herself or her mate, but he felt guilty for reminding her of her responsibilities when she was so excited to be focused on something else.

Rowan found himself looking forward to the trip they’d planned for after their wedding ceremony, for the weeks she would get a break, and leave Aedion and her other advisors in charge or Terassen for a while. She needed the rest and the escape.

She sighed deeply, exaggeratedly, to cover her disappointment. “Alright. Let's go run this place.” She rolled her eyes. “Gods know that it would fall apart without me.” Rowan smiled slightly at the humor lacing her tone.

He held his arm out for her and she hooked her hand around it, her rings glinting in the light from the lamp.

Always one for accessories, she was wearing three rings on her left hand. The ring Rowan had gotten her for their wedding--once he proposed the idea of a full ceremony--was the most ornate, the bronze topaz stones winking like flames around the gold band, dark diamonds interspersed with light ones. All together, it was still only half as beautiful as her, but even Lorcan had admitted that it was a beautiful piece. Yrene had cooed over it with Aelin, and Lysandra had simply grinned at him, proud to have pointed him to the right jeweler.

Aelin adored it, which gave Rowan unending satisfaction. She cleaned it every few days, ensuring that its shine was as perfect as the day he'd given it to her.

Her other rings were slim golden bands from Eyllwe, given to her by one of Nehemia’s brothers. They were simple and unadorned, and had belonged to Aelin’s friend. The brother had given them to Aelin in memory of Nehemia, and as a token of friendship between their lands. Aelin had nearly cried when she'd unwrapped the silk they'd been passed to her in.

Now, Aelin fluttered her fingers a bit, eyeing the shine and sparkle from her jewelry. Rowan had a feeling it was more than just a vain gesture, although that wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility either.

He kissed her cheek before leading her out of the study. She walked beside her mate, but dragged her feet a little. Rowan found himself tugging on her arm, reminding her that it wouldn't look good to make foreign dignitaries wait.

“Oh, please. It's Ansel’s people. Remember when she sent us a mule as her ‘diplomat’?”

The king hummed in thought. “I think that ass was the easiest to work with out of all the ambassadors that she's sent.”

He was rewarded with Aelin’s laughter as she leaned more heavily against him, tipping her head back and letting her hair fall down her back.

“Gods, I love you,” she breathed. Rowan kissed her again, slowing their steps as they got closer to the throne room where the guests waited.

“And, love, when I said that, I was including Ansel herself.”

Rowan pulled her through the doors while she was still laughing, her hand now wrapped around his upper arm.

Three heads swung towards her laughter as the door opened. Aelin shook off the laughter and released her husband to move forward, greeting them with a somewhat pleasant smile. And so the politics began.

“Welcome to Terrasen,” she greeted. “I trust you had a pleasant journey?”

#rowaelin #rowaelin fanfiction #throne of glass #throne of glass fanfiction #tog #tog fanfiction #fanfiction #Who else literally just KNOWS that Ansel and Aelin would be the best political rivals/allies #Becuase they would #Aelin would literally have the same political relationship with dorian #and manon #and literally everyone who am i kidding she'd never be proper

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sinrau · 4 years

Link

Many American public-health specialists are at risk of burning out as the coronavirus surges back.

Ed Yong July 7, 2020

Shutterstock / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic

Saskia Popescu’s phone buzzes throughout the night, waking her up. It had already buzzed 99 times before I interviewed her at 9:15 a.m. ET last Monday. It buzzed three times during the first 15 minutes of our call. Whenever a COVID-19 case is confirmed at her hospital system, Popescu gets an email, and her phone buzzes. She cannot silence it. An epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, Popescu works to prepare hospitals for outbreaks of emerging diseases. Her phone is now a miserable metronome, ticking out the rhythm of the pandemic ever more rapidly as Arizona’s cases climb. “It has almost become white noise,” she told me.

For many Americans, the coronavirus pandemic has become white noise—old news that has faded into the background of their lives. But the crisis is far from over. Arizona is one of the pandemic’s new hot spots, with 24,000 confirmed cases over the past week and rising hospitalizations and deaths. Popescu saw the surge coming, “but to actually see it play out is heartbreaking,” she said. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Popescu is one of many public-health experts who have been preparing for and battling the pandemic since the start of the year. They’re not treating sick people, as doctors or nurses might be, but are instead advising policy makers, monitoring the pandemic’s movements, modeling its likely trajectory, and ensuring that hospitals are ready.

By now they are used to sharing their knowledge with journalists, but they’re less accustomed to talking about themselves. Many of them told me that they feel duty-bound and grateful to be helping their country at a time when so many others are ill or unemployed. But they’re also very tired, and dispirited by America’s continued inability to control a virus that many other nations have brought to heel. As the pandemic once again intensifies, so too does their frustration and fatigue.

America isn’t just facing a shortfall of testing kits, masks, or health-care workers. It is also looking at a drought of expertise, as the very people whose skills are sorely needed to handle the pandemic are on the verge of burning out.

To work in preparedness, Nicolette Louissaint told me, is to constantly stare at society’s vulnerabilities and imagine the worst possible future. The nonprofit she runs, Healthcare Ready, works to steel communities for outbreaks and disasters by ensuring that they have access to medical supplies. She started revving up her operations in January. By March, when businesses and schools started closing and governors began issuing stay-at-home orders, “we were already running on fumes,” she said. Throughout March and April, she got two hours of sleep a night. Now she’s getting four. And yet “I always feel like I’m never doing enough,” she said. “Like one of my colleagues said, I could sleep for two weeks and still feel this tired. It’s embedded in us at this point.”

But the physical exhaustion is dwarfed by the emotional toll of seeing the imagined worst-case scenarios become reality. “One of the big misconceptions is that we enjoy being right,” Louissaint said. “We’d be very happy to be wrong, because it would mean lives are being saved.”

The field of public health demands a particular way of thinking. Unlike medicine, which is about saving individual patients, public health is about protecting the well-being of entire communities. Its problems, from malnutrition to addiction to epidemics, are broader in scope. Its successes come incrementally, slowly, and through the sustained efforts of large groups of people. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, told me, “The pandemic is a huge problem, but I’m not afraid of huge problems.”

The more successful public health is, however, the more people take it for granted. Funding has dwindled since the 2008 recession. Many jobs have disappeared. Now that the entire country needs public-health advice, there aren’t enough people qualified to offer it. The number of epidemiologists who specialize in pandemic-level infectious threats is small enough that “I think I know them all,” says Caitlin Rivers, who studies outbreaks at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

The people doing this work have had to recalibrate their lives. From March to May, Colin Carlson, a research professor at Georgetown University who specializes in infectious diseases, spent most of his time traversing the short gap between his bed and his desk. He worked relentlessly and knocked back coffee, even though it exacerbates his severe anxiety: The cost was worth it, he felt, when the United States still seemed to have a chance of controlling COVID-19.

The U.S. frittered away that chance. Through social distancing, the American public bought the country valuable time at substantial personal cost. The Trump administration should have used that time to roll out a coordinated plan to ramp up America’s ability to test and trace infected people. It didn’t. Instead, to the immense frustration of public-health advisers, leaders rushed to reopen while most states were still woefully unprepared.

When Arizona Governor Doug Ducey began reviving businesses in early May, the intensive-care unit of Popescu’s hospital was still full of COVID-19 patients. “Within our public-health bubble, we were getting nervous, but then you walked outside and it was like Pleasantville,” she said. “People thought we had conquered it, and now it feels like we’re drowning.”

The COVID-19 unit has had to expand across an entire hospital wing and onto another floor. Beds have filled with younger patients. Long lines are snaking around the urgent-care building, and people are passing out in the 110-degree heat. At some hospitals, labs are so inundated that it takes several days to get test results back. “We thought we could have scaled down instead of scaling up,” Popescu said. “But because of poor political decisions that every public-health person I know disagreed with, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

“I feel like I’ve been making the same recommendations since January,” says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-disease physician who works in public health. The last time she felt this tired was in 2014, after spending three months in West Africa helping with the region’s historic Ebola outbreak. Everyone who experienced that crisis, she told me, was deeply shaken; she herself suffered from post-traumatic stress upon returning home.

The same experts who warned of the coronavirus’s resurgence are now staring, with the same prophetic worry, at a health-care system that is straining just as hurricane season begins. And they’re demoralized about repeatedly shouting evidence-based advice into a political void. “It feels like writing ‘Bad things are about to happen’ on a napkin and then setting the napkin on fire,” Carlson says.

A pandemic would have always been a draining ordeal. But it is especially so because the U.S., instead of mounting a unified front, is disjointed, cavalier, and fatalistic. Every week brings fresh farce, from Donald Trump suggesting that the country should do less testing to massive indoor gatherings of unmasked people.

“One by one, people are seeing something so absurd that it takes them out of commission,” Carlson says.

Public health is not a calling for people who crave the limelight, and researchers like Rivers, the Johns Hopkins professor, have found their sudden prominence jarring. Almost all of the 2,000 Twitter followers she had in January were other scientists. Most of the 130,000 followers she now has are not. The slow, verbose world of academic communication has given way to the blistering, constrained world of tweets and news segments.

The pandemic is also bringing out academia’s darker sides—competition, hostility, sexism, and a lust for renown. Armchair experts from unrelated fields have successfully positioned themselves as trusted sources. Male scientists are publishing more than their female colleagues, who are disproportionately shouldering the burden of child care during lockdowns. Many researchers have suddenly pivoted to COVID-19, producing sloppy work with harmful results. That further dispirits more cautious researchers, who, on top of dealing with the virus and reticent politicians, are also forced to confront their own colleagues. “If I cannot reasonably convince people I’ve been friends with for years that their work is causing tangible harm, what possible future do I see on this career path?” Carlson asks.

Other scientists and health officials are facing the wrath of a nation on edge. Unsettled by months of stay-at-home orders, confused by rampant misinformation, distraught over the country’s blunders, and embroiled in yet more culture wars over masks and lockdowns, Americans are lashing out. Public-health experts—and women in particular—have become targets. Several have resigned because of threats and harassment. Others face streams of invective in their inboxes and on their Twitter feeds. “I can say something and get horrendously attacked, but a man who doesn’t even work in this field can go on national TV and be revered for saying the exact same thing,” Popescu said.

Some critics have caricatured public-health experts as finger-wagging alarmists ensconced in an ivory tower, far away from the everyday people who are suffering the restrictive consequences of their advice. But this dichotomy is false. The experts I spoke with are also scared. They’re also feeling trapped at home. They also miss their loved ones. Louissaint, who lives in Baltimore, hasn’t seen her New York–based parents this year.

“I feel like I’m living in at least three realities at the same time,” Louissaint told me. She’s responding directly to the pandemic, trying to ensure that patients and hospitals get the supplies they need. She’s running an organization, trying to make sure that her employees keep their jobs. She’s a Black woman, living through a pandemic that has disproportionately killed Black people and the historic protests that have followed the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. During the ensuing reckonings about race, “I’ve been pulled into so many conversations about equity that people weren’t having months ago,” Louissant said.

“Someone said to me, ‘I hope you’re getting tons of support,’” she added. “But there’s no feasible thing that anyone could do to make this better, no matter how much they love you. The mental toll isn’t something you can easily share.”

These laments feel familiar to people who lived through the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, says Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist who has been working on HIV for 30 years and who has the virus himself. “I have friends who survived the virus but didn’t survive the toll it took on their lives,” Gonsalves told me. “I’m incredulous that I’m seeing this twice in my lifetime. The idea that I’m going to have to fend off another virus … like, really, can I have just one?”

But Gonsalves added that HIV veterans have a deep well of emotional reserves to draw from, and a sense of shared purpose to mobilize. His advice to the younger generation is twofold. First, don’t ignore your feelings: “Your anxiety, fear, and anger are all real,” he said. Then, find your people. “They may not be your colleagues,” he said, and they might not be scientists. But they’ll share the same values, and be united in recognizing that “public health is not a career, but a mission and a calling.”

Despite the toll of the work and the pressure from all sides, the public-health experts I talked with are determined to continue. “I’m glad I have a way in which I can be useful,” Rivers said. “I feel like it’s my duty to do what I can.”

The Pandemic Experts Are Not Okay

#IFTTT #WordPress

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avereas · 7 years

Text

the antonym of flower

Port Mafia Week Day 5: Childhood

summary: Nakahara Chuuya meets Dazai Osamu in freefall, and Dazai makes a proposal. word count: 2.1k

read on ao3

“Damn you.”

“What?”

“What’d you have to do that for?”

Wrong-footed, Chuuya stares at Dazai Osamu. The boy is a skinny little thing: scrawny, quite pitiful. His hair is a wind-blown mess. He looks like he makes a fruitless habit of fighting monsters much larger than himself.

Or something like that, anyway.

“I was just trying to—“ Chuuya trails off.

“Just trying to what?” Dazai Osamu scowls at him. There’s a flicker of something ugly in his uncovered eye, wide and dark against his white face. He wears an armour of bandages, as though the tape is binding together the remnants of a shattered doll. Up close, this is all rather unsettling.

Chuuya has never seen anything quite like him, before.

Chuuya has never felt anything quite like this, either: pulverised, drained, like the vestiges of wetness wrung from a used towel. He lets himself slump against the concrete wall of the alleyway, the night air cold as it threads through the sweat in his hair. The lullaby of Yokohama traffic lures him to the threshold of sleep. He pulls his coat tightly around himself.

“Hey, gingerhead, I’m talking to you.”

“Whatever. I don’t care what you do.” The awareness of pain hits Chuuya like the drop into freefall. He groans and lets his head fall back; Dazai Osamu’s hand hovers in the air and does not follow. Chuuya realises that Dazai Osamu had been, for some reason, touching his face. A grotesque feeling is spreading from the phantom sensation of warmth, crawling through his body like poisoned honey. He feels sick. He feels empty. Nevertheless: “Next time you should throw yourself into the sea, instead. No one will be forced to see your smashed-up corpse then.”

A rustle of clothing, and then silence. Suspiciously, Chuuya cracks open an eye.

Dazai Osamu’s face hovers above his own, and he’s close enough that strands of his dark hair tickle Chuuya’s cheek. Chuuya tenses.

“That’s a great idea!” Dazai Osamu suddenly seems unduly excited. “If I jump from a cliff, do you think the impact of hitting the water would be enough to kill me, or would that only make me unconscious until I eventually drown?”

“Ugh.” Chuuya closes his eye and turns away. “What the fuck. Go away already.”

“Sorry, no can do! You know, I just wanted to kill myself. I didn’t expect some idiot to come jumping after me. But still, you gave me such a useful tip! Of course, at the least, I’ll have to see you home safely. That’s fair, right?”

No, Chuuya means to say, it’s this time of the year, I don’t want to deal with Ane-san now, but the abject exhaustion steals the syllables from his mind. He opens his mouth anyway.

Before he remembers verbalising anything, though, arms close around him. The incongruous warmth is suddenly very welcoming.

…

Sunlight presses insistently into his eyelids, and reluctantly, he draws himself from oblivion. He stares at his surroundings.

A white-washed room: bare, minimally furnished with a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a double bed. He finds himself in the latter, bundled between white sheets. The open blinds of the single window paint stripes on the opposite wall; it is the only disruption to the spartan economy of the place. Gingerly, Chuuya pushes himself out from the covers.

There is the thump of fallen fabric, and he turns in surprise to see his outerwear and gloves fanned out onto the floorboards. He picks them up from their folded arrangement and idly shrugs on his coat, frowning slightly at the unfamiliar shirt that he finds himself wearing. Then, brazenly, he continues to the drawers.

One by one, he silently pulls them out: folded underclothes, coiled belts, boxes of cufflinks, rolled-up socks. Unopened packets of bandages fill an entire compartment, neatly stacked. He moves onto the wardrobe and finds it much the same: suit jackets, dress shirts, trousers are draped on hangers equidistant from each other. A small rack displays a selection of identical black ties. Altogether, a colourless rainbow; immaculate, as though from a catalogue.

Chuuya stands back from the furniture and stares at them for a while.

He finds Dazai Osamu sprawled on the floor in what appears to be the main living space of the residence, paper maps spread out all about him. He looks up as soon as Chuuya steps out from the bedroom.

“What is this place?”

“Well, you see, Chuuya,” Dazai says, drawing out his name in tuneless song. Chuuya stiffens at the assumed familiarity. “Last night, I didn’t particularly want to deal with Kouyou-nee-san and her whole mother duck act. So I took you to my apartment instead! You can make your explanations to her yourself.”

Chuuya stares at him for a moment, before the rage flashes up his spine, red-hot. “Make my explanations? You say that like I wasn’t there trying to save your stupid ass from becoming dead human pancake. She’s going to be pissed as hell that I didn’t go home at all last night." He pauses to take a breath. "What did you do to me, anyway?”

Dazai’s beam doesn’t waver, even as he extracts Chuuya’s mobile phone from his pocket and waves it around. “You do have a couple of missed calls.”

Chuuya scowls. “You even had the fucking nerve to go through my stuff. Give it back.”

Dazai shrugs and throws it at him.

Five missed calls and seven text messages. In spite of the anger that he’s sure to find in them, Chuuya swallows at Kouyou’s evident concern. He tries to draft up the optimum responses to her questions, but there is only really one thing he could say: I saw Dazai Osamu jumping from the top of headquarters, but I don’t know why I jumped after him.

Put like that, there is no conceivable way he could escape Kouyou’s wrath.

“If it’s any consolation, yesterday was a particularly difficult anniversary for your ane-san. That’s probably why she was especially worried.” Chuuya glances at Dazai, but Dazai has returned to his diligent study of his papers. “She’ll be feeling a little silly now, so she’ll go easy on you when you— when you get home.”

“How do you know that?”

Dazai looks up at him and smiles. The light reflects off his dark eyes, like a cat’s.

Chuuya grits his teeth and growls, “What do you know about her that I don’t?” but Dazai simply swings himself upwards and and pulls his arms into a stretch. Chuuya notices a brown-streaked shirt crumpled on the arm of the couch, and irritation wars with curiosity until he gives in.

“Got into a fight?” Chuuya nods at the garment.

“Oh. That’s…” Dazai is staring at him a little oddly. “That’s not mine.”

“It sure looks like one of your boring shirts.” Too late, Chuuya wonders if that gives away his snooping in the closet. Oh, well. He wanders closer and drops down on the other end of the couch.

“It’s not my blood.” Dazai picks it up gingerly between two fingers. “Do you remember what happened last night?”

“What kind of question is that? I only used my ability to save a suicidal maniac and now I feel like I’ve been hit by a car.”

Dazai’s eyes are keen. “Using your ability feels like that?”

Chuuya scowls. “No. It’s never been like this before. It feels even worse than when Ane-san pushes me really hard during training.”

“Training?” Dazai murmurs. “And how is that going?”

"It's going fine!"

Dazai smiles faintly, a gesture appearing to be borne more of habit than of emotion. “That badly, huh...” he murmurs, and serenely ignores Chuuya’s aggrieved “I didn’t say that!”

Dazai’s stare is uncanny as he absently balls up the shirt. He hums in acknowledgement and glances away, gaze blank even as his eyes skim the maps on the ground.

Curiosity wins again, so Chuuya asks, “Were you working on something for Mori-san?”

“Hm?” Dazai’s gaze sharpens and he finally seems to notice the maps around him. His lips curve down in sudden glumness. “Oh, no. I was just checking out some suicide destinations, you know. Turns out that there aren’t really any cliffs nearby. But Toujinbou does sound really cool, so I was thinking of a holiday—”

Chuuya stares at him silently.

…

The whole experience was rather bizarre. Later, Chuuya tries to forget it all.

As luck — or some other manipulative force — would have it, two months later Chuuya runs into Dazai Osamu again. He has now acquired a set of walking crutches and a stack of thick textbooks, and has commandeered the table of one of the conference rooms in the headquarters. Chuuya immediately considers turning right around and exiting, but Dazai has already looked up at the noise.

Instead, Chuuya asks, “Why the fuck are you reading about quantum mechanics?”

“I’m trialling another method of suicide.”

“Right.”

Dazai glances down again as he turns a page. “I wanted to see if it was possible to bore myself to death. But this is too painful. It’s not worth it. Suicides should be enjoyable, shouldn’t they?”

“I’m just going to go,” Chuuya says. “Goodbye, nice seeing that you haven’t offed yourself yet, I guess, whatever—”

“No, no,” Dazai cuts in. He smiles at Chuuya and in that split-second, he looks so young. “Stay. Sit down.”

“What for?”

“I want to talk to you.”

Chuuya pulls out a chair and warily takes a seat. “So talk.”

“How would you feel,” Dazai says, placing a hand underneath his chin and flipping another text-heavy page casually, “about being my partner?”

“Your partner?”

“That’s what I said, didn’t I?” Dazai flicks his eyes up at him, as though bored. “Mori-san will be the next boss. I’m the mafia’s best strategist. I can help you with your ability.”

“What.” Chuuya says this flatly. He doesn’t even know where to begin to address Dazai’s statements, each one as ludicrous as the next.

“Gravity manipulation, right?” Dazai nods at the books. “I’m afraid that the current science has yet to catch up with the specifics, but I think I have an adequate understanding of how your ability should work. I also have the ability of nullification. I can ensure that nothing like what happened to you two months ago happens again.”

Chuuya stares at him, nonchalant and aloof, lounging in the chair in front of the panorama of the Yokohama bay. He carefully tries to avoid thinking about that night two months ago, but the terror rushes to his throat as though he is watching the scene unfold in front of him now. The fall of the slight figure, as though in slow motion— the wind flapping through his coat, the bile in his mouth as his fingers missed the other’s hand. Serendipity made it so that this failing ensured his survival: if he had made contact with Dazai, For The Tainted Sorrow would have been nullified and they both would have splattered onto the streets of Yokohama. But because he missed, he had done— done something and then spent the next week recovering from whatever it was, but.

But they were both alive. He didn’t fail. Not really. Well, from his own perspective, anyway, even if Dazai's peaceful face haunted his nightmares during sleepless nights.

He says, “Choose another partner. If what you said is true, I’m sure there’s someone who’s interested.”

Dazai frowns at him. “I want you.”

“Well, I’m not fucking interested.”

Dazai stares at him in silence. After a few moments, he says, “Back then, when you jumped after me like a fool. You shouldn’t have been able to use your ability on me.”

“I didn’t use my damn ability on you,” Chuuya snaps. “I couldn’t even touch you, could I?”

Dazai smiles. “So how did you do it?”

Chuuya looks away, into the glare of the afternoon sun. “I don’t know.”

Dazai is still staring at him. After a moment, he says, “This is my hypothesis. For The Tainted Sorrow is a gravity manipulation ability. But there is another form of your ability which is far stronger and exceedingly more dangerous. If we can figure out how you can use that, you’ll be an unstoppable force.”

Chuuya blanches, half at the suggestion, half at the distinctly-remembered pain. “Do you even hear yourself? First you say that you’ll make sure that nothing like that happens again. Then you say that you want to figure out how it works.”

The smile has entirely faded from Dazai’s face. Now he just looks back at him, expression grim and betraying nothing.

Finally, Chuuya says, “Just tell me why you did it.”

Dazai Osamu had the grace not to pretend at ignorance, but Chuuya knew that the tilt of his lips promised nothing but bullshit. “The lights were really pretty that night,” is what Dazai says. “I was just thinking that I liked this city a lot.”

#portmafiaweek #bungou stray dogs #dazai osamu #nakahara chuuya #soukoku #fic

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themansionwrites · 5 years

Text

The Dragon King

-Red, that was your favorite color wasn’t it?

The ominous figure in the center of the room doesn’t answer, maybe startle by their presence, but he knew better, they would come sooner or later, specially since everyone else was already there, and he was already late.

-Is that what you remember?

Keeping his kneeling figure he answer their ask with another one, he doesn’t fear them, their wrath could make him tremble but he know they aren’t mad at him this time, and isn’t like he didn’t miss them, he did every single second as he always does, but after everything that happened, he feel like he fail them again.

-The only kind of color you felt in love when you first come to earth, the first sunset you saw

He only turn his face so he can look at them, surprise is everything that accompany his amethyst eyes, that is true, even now it is true, but it happen long time ago, and so many things happened since then, the rebuilt, the design, the battles, the … war, and even so many years after that, how they could remember something so significant yet so special?

-Your is violet, you told me when you showed me those berries, you didn’t like the taste but the color was interesting for you, specially when those humans started to use it to some dyes

He crack a smile remembering how they did it, the funny face they made when he did dare them to eat two berries and his surprise when they did it anyway, or how they showed him the best spot to view the sunset so they could stargazing that night, or how they escaped time to time so both of them could go to earth again and enjoy this new paradise a little more, both of them were so inseparable, he really had to lose everything to finally appreciate the little things?

-And can I know how is possible for you my dear to remember such things?

-I been doing more things that just hiding, I was studying, practicing, remembering… and making it possible

-Is that so…Even now you still a nerd dear

-Even now you still fashionable late

-Touché

Sarcasm, a weapon they both loved to use a lot as a silly game between them, but any of them feel like using it right now, little fights used to be resolve when in this words fight one of them crack a smile first, but not this time, the elephant still in the room and so many wrong things has been done and still need fixing, so even in the silence of the cave all of the bad blood they still have make the loudest sound, more now since any of them want to approach it.

-So, is finally the time? Who could know th-

-You know, you SHOULD know, the message was delivered to everyone, including you

They interrupt him with the same fury they have every time they fight against an enemy, except this time is for impatience, looks like they don’t want to deal with his evasive speech right now, with a sigh he can only continue.

-Is there something you want?

-You were suppose to-

-I asked if there is something YOU want, not something I should do

Pride always was one of his multiple flaws, and it always show every time they fight, not like any of them want to have an argue right now, they aren’t even mad at him for being late, they know he would try to go late in propose so they would come for him, but pride is something they have too, even if it could be slightly big than his, and even so they couldn’t be so far away from each other for too long, not after the first time they were, and now they both are scare to keep going like that, not because he fear of being alone, not because they can’t fancy their peace alone, but both of them rather be a mess together than in peace away, they both taste being that apart of each other and both hate it.

-For example, I would like to have my crown back, I want this cave to not be so little, I would like to eat some cherries, I want to sleep in the biggest fluffy bed, I would like to stargaze with you again, see sweetheart? Now let’s try again, is there something you want dear?

He says with the biggest grin he can do and with the not so smooth wink he can perform, oh how he loves to get under their skin, making them slightly mad or just admit defeat, no matter if its about a smoothie flavor or the biggest plan he always liked to get under his skin, as if he doesn’t know he is on their mind all the time already without the need to bother them that much and make them smile again, or maybe he actually doesn’t know, and that’s why even know he tries to act so random, so serious and depress starting the conversation only to change it for one more cheerful, just to try another reaction from them, and of course he get what he wanted, a fuming StoryTeller with their face bright and red as a fresh apple, all thanks to his slight flirt mix with the comment about that special activity that some years ago they still loved to do.

-I….I want…That…they would…wasn’t it…i…you know that…Stop it

Now he can’t avoid the loudest laugh, oh how he missed this, just making them blush and finally mess some words on their mouth, something only he still can accomplish, now he really feel in a playful state, now that he knows they aren’t actually mad at him he can feel carefree again around them, besides he rather see them blush and laugh than frown.

-Oh, come on dear I was just joking, you know you don’t have to be all serious with me

-Maybe if you stop clowning around, I should not have such a hard time try to keep myself from-

-Kissing me?

-Punch you into the void

-Ouch dear you are saying that as if you wouldn’t miss me

Even if was another statement that look like he was laughing it off, he knows how serious that statement of them could be, they could actually punch them into the void, and looks like just the tough make the young creator give a free laugh they never did in a long time, because they know that even if something like that happen they take him out barely five minutes after happening, maybe that’s why every creation insist on how painfully obvious is their attraction, even though they deny it, but more to try to avoid public rather than actually wanting to deny it, they already pass that phase long ago, besides there are still mistakes made from both parts that make them both have the kind of scars that are invisible on the skin, both made mistakes, but looks like what ever they had could be stronger than those mistakes, always figuring out a way to keep the other safe, a way to make the other laugh, a way to make the other feel protect, a way for the other to feel loved.

-I may miss you but my aim will get better

-Did you just-

-You perfectly know that two can play the bad puns game and who could win

-Is that a treat sweetheart?

-More like a promise if you keep that up

Their laugh is echoing in the cave, making it sound even louder, definitive the kind of peace and rhythm they both love to have, just a moment to themselves enjoying the simplest things, a bad pun or some happy situation, they both know that they have to go back to the actual rhythm they have to endure, hide, fear, scare, feed, run, regret, fight, even with the little oasis they created they feel the need to still being always alert, ready for all the problems that can happened, be there when their past mistakes come again for them, but they couldn’t deny that having him by their side make it feel worth it, having everyone else too of course, but he is just the cherry on top they love to have.

-Im guessing, the others are waiting for us dear?

-You are guessing right… guess the time is up for this

-Awww dear is so sweet you thing because we will be living there anything will be different

-That’s the actual reason to make that place to ch-

-I mean about us dear

Again with the teasing, it doesn’t actually bother them, but they don’t need to repeat to him why they aren’t openly affectionate and most with them, and isn’t like he could be bother by that either, again he just want to get under their skin, he always has been a gentleman toward them, and he knows his place in all of this hole mess, but he will definitive take every second they could have to remind them how special they are to them, and he know they will do the same to him, just little gestures can show so many things.

-Anyway honey take your disguise back so we can go

-Oh dear I haven’t hear you call me like that in months

-Well enjoy it while you can hon because we are about to close this hell hole for now

-But if I already enjoy every time you pronounce it dear

With a roll of their eyes a smile creep on their mouth, somethings never change, no matter the new clothes he would be always the same, and they cant hope for anything else, even know seeing him changing his tallest bend dark form for a more little and colorful one, making the long black hair take a blue color, making the ornaments get replaced by purple and blue clothes, and the curvy horns and wings disappear, the more than 17 ft high of demonic nature become a little more than 6 ft of steal body, the fast creation of the body plus the innocence of the creator back in the days make them have a face already knew as someone else deed, but it didn’t bother him so he keep it.

-So how do I look?

Instead of answering with words they just reach for his face, caressing slightly the skin as if it would break other way, is being so long since they could touch him, their nature made them incompatible to touch unless they are both using their disguise, but is a wait that is always worth it, and he just smile feeling their hands, a remind that they are here, that this was real, that they can go back home, making him feel so overwhelm with emotions he only can take their hands to put a slight kiss in each one.

-Don’t worry dear, this time I’m not going anywhere, and even if I will be loyal to my promise to always come back for you

This sentence almost make them cry, drowning one more time on their feelings, they aren’t alone, nor anymore, he never failed at his words, even during the hole big problem he made his best to keep them company, to remind them to keep going, to make them laugh with a terrible joke whispered in their ears, little things to make them remember that after every storm there is a rainbow right around, and both of them together like this, make them feel like is true, even if just for a brief second.

-Well the sweet hour is close and we have work to do so we better head back dear before is late dear

-Late? There isn’t even an actual sense of time in here hon

-Oh I know dear but I mean late as in before THEY burn something down

-…Oh shit you are right they are alone right now honey

-See? Better we head fast so…

Without a doubt he pick them up and put them on his shoulders, another old habit they both make when they wanted to take a walk but didn’t have the energy to do it or they are busy and couldn’t multi task at the moment, besides, any excuse to just have them in his arms was more than enough motivation.

-Fine fine but only because we are indeed already late and I guess they already are having a fight on the kitchen

-Guessing right and you can guess my bet to who start it

A mess of a place with lots of problems on the way, with difficult times and different fights every day, a place that without a doubt all of them are calling home, and finally having the heads of the home coming back everything will be more than great, if it wasn’t for that little detail, that mistake some years ago that heavy both of their hearts and the only reason they both would wish to go back in time and fix it, but is not like they could or would, so they both can only hope that some day she understand and maybe someday, all of them, meaning actually all of them, could be a family again, but for now only time could tell.

-Ready for this new adventure dear ST?

-Ready as I will ever be Honey Pops

#Pops #Storyteller #Story #new chapter #chapter update #Mansionoffun #MoF

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thewalkingsnapplecap · 6 years

Text

Kimchi Temper

Illustration by Jovanna Tosello

Kimchi Temper

Euny Hong

Koreans have a culturally specific, ultra-distilled form of rage so potent that some believe one can literally die from it. The Korean word for this rage is han, which is basically the racial memory of thousands of years of being invaded and put-upon.

The disease caused by han is called “hwa-byung,” which translates to “anger illness.” It is an actual, fatal, medically recognized condition. It’s even in the DSM, which refers to it as a “culturally specific disease.” Colloquially, I’ve heard han called “kimchi temper.”

I fully admit to playing the han card, i.e., flying off the handle at people and later saying, “Sorry; I’m Korean,” at which point most is forgiven, even if the forgiving party doesn’t quite understand why.

Within the Pacific Rim, the wrathful Korean is something of a regional stereotype: Koreans are said to drink a lot, to love crying, and to have fits of white-hot, blinding rage that channel the ancestral anger of 5,000 years of being pillaged and colonized.

An Australian veteran of the Vietnam War, for example, once felt it necessary to tell me that Aussie troops knew the Korean troops would be the most bloodthirsty. The Americans seemed to agree: A U.S. Department of Defense report on South Korean participation in Vietnam stated that the Koreans “usually surrounded an area by stealth and quick movement … The enemy feared the Koreans both for their tactical innovations and for the soldiers’ tenacity.”

Han is most likely what James Bond creator Ian Fleming had in mind when he wrote in his 007 novel Goldfinger that Koreans “are the cruelest, most ruthless people in the world,” adding that they have no respect for human life. In this scene, the supervillain of the title is explaining to James Bond why he picked only Koreans as bodyguards, among them the stocky, grunting, subhuman karate expert Oddjob, who decapitates people by hurling his razor-sharp black bowler hat at them.

Fleming’s description of Koreans is widely regarded as racist, but my desire to be offended is contradicted by a sheepish How did he know?sort of feeling.

The world has also become familiar with the Self-Destructively Vengeful Korean stereotype, thanks to films like Park Chan-wook’s 2003 masterpiece, the ultraviolent Oldboy — which depicts a man cutting off his own tongue with a letter-opener and another tricking a childhood nemesis into having sex with his own daughter, among other such gruesome things.

Are Koreans more wrathful than other people? It’s hard to be sure. I can speak only to my experience: Korea is the only nation where I’ve regularly witnessed grown-ass men getting out of their cars to fistfight over road rage. (My dad’s explanation for this phenomenon: “Koreans don’t have guns, so they do not hesitate to confront each other physically.”)

It’s the only nation whose citizens send me emails threatening to show my articles to my parents — more on that later.

(To all the would-be trolls out there threatening to snitch on me: My parents are already painfully aware of my disreputable scribbles. My dad described my first book — a novel called Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners — as “inaccurate and treacherous.” When I appear on TV, all I get from my mom is “That lipstick is very … red.” There’s nothing you can tell them that they haven’t thought of already, and they’re better at this than you are.)

Korea is also the only country in the world whose representative airline is run by a family dynasty that is better known by the term nut rage than by their business achievements or even their actual name.

The moniker originated during a notorious December 2014 incident in which Heather Cho, the daughter of the Korean Air Chairman and CEO, had a Caligula-esque meltdown on a Seoul-bound flight departing from New York’s JFK airport. The triggering event was that her macadamia nuts were served in a bag rather than a bowl. Cho assaulted the head flight attendant and forced the pilot to return the plane to the gate so the cabin staffer could be removed from the plane. Cho spent three months in jail on the charge of endangering a flight.

In April 2018, Heather’s sister Emily allegedly threw a glass of water at someone’s face during a meeting, giving rise to the term water rage.

Violence aside, there is a particular brand of Korean butt-hurt that I have never seen elsewhere. More personally, I’ve been the brunt of Korean han as a writer. The topics I write about usually involve France, the United States, Korea, or Judaism. But among those groups, I only ever get hate mail from Koreans. And lots of it.

In 2014, after I published a piece in the Times of London about Koreans’ reaction to a national tragedy, a bunch of Koreans fired nastygrams at me. One such wounded party, whom I’ll call by her initials, KKK (really!), wrote me a threatening email via my author website: “I am so shamed [sic] that you are identifying yourself as a ‘Korean’-American. I am going to share your articles with your parents as well as all my fellow Koreans.”

KKK also complained to my UK publicist and agent. “I’ve just heard from your new friend [KKK],” my publicist chuckled to me on the phone.

KKK wrote to the Times of London’s editor and to the foreign-news desk as well. The reason I know this is that KKK cc’d me on the email. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you want to know more about what’s been falsely written, I would be very happy to comment by referring each line … please share the apology announcement … I am ready to hear any feedback from you, my dear the Times.” [sic]

I’m sure the Times got straight on it.

The irony is that Koreans were mad at me for describing Korea as a very emotional nation. To which they responded by being even more emotional.

What makes me even more upset about this sort of hair-trigger fit is that I feel, irrationally, that Koreans shouldn’t act like that. And I’m aware of the contradiction here: I get mad at how mad Koreans get and we all get mad at each other in a han clusterfuck. A hansterfuck.

But surely nurture has to triumph over nature at some point. Anyone born and educated in the United States, regardless of how irascible their parents are, is taught by teachers and peers to work out bad feelings through cardio and yoga, to express difficult emotions with “I” statements instead of being combative. Would this not keep han at bay? In many cases, it does not, I’m afraid.

The reasons for han’s persistence are several. For one thing, most Korean-Americans are only a parent or grandparent away from the devastating Korean War (1950–53). Some wartime atrocities like the Holocaust are studied and discussed broadly; this is not true of Korean War–induced trauma. There is no Korean Claude Lanzmann. There is no Korean Elie Wiesel or Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Korean culture does not traditionally encourage therapy. And these unprocessed feelings do get passed on to the children. How could they not?

Han is not at all compatible with American life. It is also not compatible with Christianity, a religion espoused by a great many Koreans at home and abroad. The dissonance between Korean anger and the Western, Christian-influenced belief in forgiveness induces a tremendous internal conflict among Korean-Americans. To be Korean-American is to experience the excruciating pain of one’s innate nature turning against one’s environment.

Why, in modern life, are we discouraged from expressing anger? Why are we told that the solution to negative feelings is to “breathe into it” or to “observe your own anger”? I’m not saying that a better solution is to give everyone in the room a different weapon with which to torture one bad guy (the plot of another popular Korean film). But telling people how to manage their feelings is dismissive. It’s lacking in empathy. It’s smug. And it denies the important role that anger plays in survival.

Anger is part of the “fight or flight” response. It alerts you to danger; it alerts you to injustice. Anger spurs people to action — the #MeToo revolution and the Never Again anti-school-shooting movement would never have arisen if any one of those women, if any one of those kids, had “breathed into” their anger.

After a tragedy, grief is crippling. Sometimes, the only thing tossing you a lifeboat is your own rage. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s wonderful 1966 novel Enemies, a Love Story depicts an all-too-human scene in which a Holocaust survivor, Herman Broder, is about to kill himself but refrains from doing so because he’s outraged with his lover for cheating on him. In other words, he starts out the day being too aggrieved to live … and ends it being too angry to die.

Anger saves lives. Really. It’s worth considering that han is a more normal — and necessary — human instinct than anyone would like to admit.

Euny Hong is a journalist and author, most recently of The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture (Picador 2014). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Times of London, and elsewhere. She would like you to follow her on Twitter: @euny.

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