#be more open with himself and without his own form of dissembling of the self

[tonyglowheart]

Dorian and Bull truly Just Make Sense bc Bull has his whole thing about being what other people need (making himself what other people need) and he's adaptable, but the flip side of that is he is SO adaptable and like ready to mold his very sense of self down to a core level to what he perceives of as "needed" from him. He's very good, to a fault I'd even dare say, at perceiving and then, like... reflecting that back. It's what makes him moldable, it's what makes him personable, it's what makes him a good spy, it's what makes re-education work on him.

Which isn't to say he ISN'T without a sense of self - when one puts oneself in a single shape for very long, even the most "reshapeable" thing will find that it's started taking on and internalizing that familiar shape. But it's something that he, necessarily, tells himself he's not susceptible to, that he still remains moldable and biding as the Qun demands.

But anyway, on the flip side, Dorian left Tevinter because he so very much could not help but be himself, be true to himself, on such a deep and therefore outwardly-projected level, that he couldn't tolerate the concept of compromising his sense of self. He's obviously still flexible and open to learning and changing, as well as to insecurities and doubts, but he has a rock-solid foundation of self to both stand on and fall back on.

Like Bull as a love interest could possibly fall into his same patterns, of where he's trying to be what he thinks the other person needs, which I think also often ends up being not just a complement of the person, but also in some ways a mirror of the person. Depending on the person, this might even be to Bull's detriment as he could let the person's needs subsume his own. Which isn't to say it would all be fake/wouldn't be "real"; just that... maybe like oobleck, without an application of some sort of external force, The Iron Bull might too easily let the strands of his internal sense of self melt away like the tides through one's fingers.

But for Dorian, he has no need of someone who will just tell him what he wants to hear, or is primarily interested in someone who will be/become what they think he wants; he probably could have gotten plenty of that back home, and it probably would have been a main strategy of getting close to him, even.

I feel like a love interest to Dorian almost demands a strong sense of self in return, who will challenge him and complement him in a more active way than a particularly flattering mirror would. This after all is the man who refused to do what was expected of him because it wouldn't be true to his Self. I feel like it's almost a sort of gotcha moment for Bull, because what Dorian both wants and needs, is something and someone absolutely indisputably *real* and solid, and it's like, in perhaps subconsciously or habitually adapting himself to what he thinks the other person needs, he would actually have to solidify his own sense of self to meet Dorian's needs.

And the crazy thing about it to me is like, it's not even something Dorian would ask of Bull, I don't think. It may not even be something they would be actively aware of or point out of each other or to each other. It's like, a function of who they are as people, which so happens to complement each other in such a profound way that both works for each others' core character on such a fundamental level and also like speaks to their character journeys so perfectly. Wild.

Anyway, lol, this shit's crazy lmao, and drives me crazy and lovesick.

#the iron bull #dorian pavus #adoribull #dragon age #me: *waxes poetic about adoribull* #also me: damn this shit crazy. are the rest of yall seein this?? #this is about bull ofc but like on the flip side Dorian has had a lot of learned... maybe not shame but like... that his relations are to be #kept under wraps. for self preservation if nothing else. even if it rankles #and like for all that Dorian is very self assured and outward projecting he DOES use it to like lock down and project his inner self #it's the fish comment you know. like a true showman he knows how to deflect and redirect. put on a show. give the people what they want in > #his own way. Contrast that with how open - to a fault - Bull is. and how that like... openness rubs off on Dorian too and like coaxes him to #be more open with himself and without his own form of dissembling of the self #yeah.... yeah

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Better Than He Can

This is for a request made by @hopefullynotbroken I hope that you like it <3

Warnings: noncon sex (oral and full-on intercourse). You know this blog, you know what I write. Don’t be a fool.

This is dark!Steve and explicit. 18+ only.

Summary: Steve wants Tony’s happily ever after.

Tony had been away for a whole week. You had grown used to his absences during these missions but it never got any easier. You always found yourself thumbing through your text conversation or counting the time until he was due back. He wasn’t always on time; late more often than not, but you had known this would be your reality when you married him and you had said ‘I do’ anyway. Still, it got rather lonely without him.

You were waiting on the jet pad before they even landed. You had this unnatural sense of when Tony was on his way back to you. It helped chase away your loneliness and reassure you in darker times. You waited with arms crossed, your hair stirred in the gust emitted by the jet as it landed and you smiled eagerly. The air stilled as the engine died and the hatch of the vessel opened slowly.

You watched as the team appeared one silhouette at a time, slowly coming into focus as they passed from the shadow of the carrier into the last of the evening sunlight. Nat gave a small smile as she neared, her eyes circled with dark rings. It must have been a long mission indeed. Sam wasn’t far behind and you couldn’t help but dash past Steve as Tony stepped off the jet. 

You felt Steve’s blue eyes as you passed a little too closely and you mumbled an apology before carrying on. Tony wrapped his arms around you instantaneously, swaying you back and forth as he kissed your forehead. 

“You miss me already?” He chuckled.

“Oh, shut up,” You kidded back, “What was it? Ten hours between this one and the last? When exactly are we taking this legendary honeymoon?” You crooked a brow, “I mean, what was it? Two years ago now?”

“Shit,” His eyes rounded, “I didn’t forget our anniversary, did I?”

“Not yet,” You smirked, “But I’m sure you will.”

“Honey, I promise, the honeymoon is coming,” He released you and draped his arm over your shoulders as he led you across the jet pad to the door. Steve’s broad shoulders disappeared down the stairs ahead of you. “It just has to be perfect.”

“That’s what you said about the wedding,” You grumbled, “If I hadn’t jumped down your throat, we’d still be engaged.”

“Isn’t that what you signed on for, dear?” He kissed your cheek before he freed you from his arm, taking your hand instead. “The ever patient Mrs. Stark.”

“The ever waiting Mrs. Stark,” You snapped, “I’m sure your team can handle one week without you. Just one, that’s all I ask.”

He stopped you at the bottom of the first flight and turned to you. The airy sarcasm had left his expression and was replaced by a particular sort of sullenness. It was a rare moment of seriousness for the man. “I promise, I’ll make the time. Soon…” He sighed and brought his hands up to cradle your chin. He leaned in to daintily peck your lips, “The end of the month at the latest. I’ll buy the tickets tonight.”

“Oh, you think you’ll have time for that?” Your fingers danced up his shirt, “I mean, we could get in a little pre-game tonight I think.”

“In the morning then,” He kissed you again, this time deeper. It lasted for what seemed an eternity before he pulled away. “Come on, I’m not doing this on the stairs again.” You giggled as he grabbed your hand and led you further down the stairs. You almost tripped down the steps behind him as he opened the door to your floor; his impatience growing more obvious by the second. These were the moments which made his absence bearable.

-

Steve leaned against the door. A small slit between it and the frame as he listened to the blissful couple. Or at least they pretended to be as much. Between doting kisses and playful jabs, there was always an air of frustration. Steve could sense it as well as any. He had witnessed a few of their rows himself. He had even gone so far as offering to lead the team so Tony could have some time at home. It was never enough for the dutiful Iron Man and he never took up the offer.

Then Steve had stopped trying to help. He was content enough to watch the marriage dissemble. Tony had so much and he took it all for granted. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Steve, well, he had lost everything; lost even more potential. He was torn out of his own time and injected in one so foreign he felt as if he wasn’t truly there. It was a torturous limbo of nostalgia and exasperation. He could try, but he would never fit in...or so he had thought.

Steve could have it all, he just needed to take it. He was tired of just accepting the cruelty of fate; of playing along with Stark’s little fairy tale. He only had to reach out and grab it. He needed her and little did she know it, she needed him too. He could see that Y/N was lonely. She hid it well; acted the loyal wife. One could almost believe she adored Tony despite his inflated self-regard. Not Steve. He could see right through her.

It had dawned on him all so suddenly. He had been at the wedding with everyone else, he had bought into the storybook love. Then the honeymoon was postponed; first a day, then a week, a month, and finally, indefinitely. The tension between the newlyweds began to boil over; little spats here and there. There hushed arguments growing to full out tongue-lashings. Of course, Steve hadn’t paid much thought to it at first. Marriage was hard and it took work. But a whole year in and things hadn’t changed. Tony hadn’t changed.

It was just after a mission much like this. Y/N had reminded Tony yet again of their honeymoon and all his failures as a husband. Exhausted and overworked from the mission, Tony had shrugged her off but she had been insistent. This resilience was both her strength and her weakness. She had kept on him until finally he snapped; “Just one second of peace, woman!” 

She had stood shocked as he walked away; embarrassed as she realized Steve was still there. He smiled at her kindly.

“It was a long mission,” He said to her.

“It’s been a long marriage,” She grumbled, “Sorry, you had to see that.”

“I’m sorry he acted like that,” Steve offered, “You’re right, he should make more time for you. He could, you know?”

He didn’t know why he had said that at first. Tony was his friend; he should’ve been defending him; trying to seal the cracks forming in his young marriage. But he didn’t. He felt too awful for this poor woman who had yet to realize she had signed her heart away to a man who would never truly appreciate it.

“You wanna talk?” Steve asked casually.

“No, I...You must be tired,” He crossed her arms meekly, “I mean, wow,” Her brows jumped in sour disbelief, “My own husband hasn’t got the time for me but you do?”

“I’m good,” Steve assured her, “Really. It was a smooth mission. We don’t have to talk about him.”

She eyed him nervously, her lips drawn as she thought. They got on well enough; had become well-acquainted over the years, but he knew she had only ever thought of him as Tony’s friend. Maybe that should change. “Why?” She asked quietly.

“Because you’re my best friend’s girl and I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I didn’t look out for you,” He smiled. His heart was hammering. A wild rush was pulsing through his veins. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, he told himself, and yet he felt like he was.

“I…” She shifted her weight and stuck her hip out, “Okay. Maybe we, uh…” She chewed her lip nervously, “Do you know how to play Scrabble? Me and Tony used to play all the time but now…”

“Hey, I know Scrabble,” Steve said a little overzealously. It was rare that he didn’t need an extensive explanation of modern entertainment. “Yeah, I’d love to.”

...

Steve was drawn back to the present as he zeroed in on the voices. “The ever patient Mrs. Stark.” Tony sniped.

“The ever waiting Mrs. Stark,” Y/N bemoaned as they passed the door behind which Steve listened, “I’m sure your team can handle one week without you. Just one, that’s all I ask.”

They stopped right on the other side of the door. The tension changed along with Tony’s tone. “I promise, I’ll make the time. Soon…” He sighed, another promise he’d never keep. “The end of the month at latest. I’ll buy the tickets tonight.”

“Oh, you think you’ll have time for that?” Steve felt a spark at the flirtation in Y/N’s tone. Tony didn’t even know what he had. “I mean, we could get in a little pre-game tonight I think.”

“In the morning then,” A silence followed. Steve could guess what was happening just beyond the door. The thought burned him as he struggled to keep the door from closing entirely. Another nip of jealousy rose in him as he thought; Y/N would be too busy to join him for their usual round of Scrabble. He had been thinking of that for most of the flight. “Come on, I’m not doing this on the stairs again.” Tony’s voice drew Steve’s focus back..

He listened to their footsteps as they continued down the stairs and let the door shut at last. He leaned against it and cracked his knuckles. Just wait, he told himself. He pushed himself away from the door and stretched his long fingers as he headed off for his own room. It wouldn’t last. It never did. They’d be fighting again by morning and she’d be running off to vent to him. And when at last the bough did break, Steve would be there to sweep up the pieces. To clean up another of Tony’s messes.

-

You were livid. You had been sleeping quite peacefully until Tony had woken you. Of course, he hadn’t meant to but you were never a heavy sleeper. He had been back for maybe two days and already he was dressing in the dark and packing a bag. You hated when he did this. He’d sneak out and leave you some fucking note about how he’d miss you and be back soon. You sat up as you watched his dark figure move around the room and you yawned, loud enough for him to hear.

“So, what is it this time, sweetheart?” You asked dryly. His promises had quickly dried up and he had yet to buy the tickets.

“Honey, I’ve got a keynote speech in Zurich,” He zipped up his suitcase and leaned against it. “I told you.”

“No, you didn’t,” You pushed the blankets and stood. “You don’t tell me anything. You think and expect me to read your mind.”

“Well, I can’t really cancel,” He said evasively. “Sorry, but I gotta go.” He tried to kiss your cheek and you dodged him.

“Go then,” You hissed. “Go brighten the minds of the world, Tony.”

“Come on, don’t do this now,” He hissed.

“It’s never the right time, Tony,” You barked, “Why did you ever ask me to marry you? It’s a wonder your even had the time for that.”

“Honey,” He touched your elbow, “I love you...I’m sorry.”

“If you would just tell me these things, it wouldn’t be such a fucking hassle. Hell, you could take me to Zurich with you. Did you ever think of that?” You pulled away from him, “Do you ever think of anyone but yourself, Tony?” Through the dark, you could see the stunned expression on his face. You exhaled and shook your head as he remained silent. “Just go, Tony. I don’t wanna fight anymore. Not with you or for you.” You crossed to the door and pulled it open, “Have a good trip.”

You slammed the door behind you and marched through the dim halls. You didn’t know where you were going but you couldn’t spend another night alone in that bed. You couldn’t watch him go again and so this time you left first. You took the stairs up to the next floor where the common areas were; the lounge, the kitchen, the bar, the briefing room, and a few training rooms as well. You went to the bar where you had often found Tony hunkered down with a bottle of aged scotch. Drinking alone was better than sleeping alone.

You dipped behind the bar and took out the scotch and single glass. You stared at the thick neck of the bottle, your thumb resting on the lid as you pondered the night. Was this the end of your marriage? Like really the end? Not even two years and here you were. You heard the jet above as its engines whirred. It quickly launched and the whoosh of its propellers faded into the distance. He was gone. He hadn’t even chased you.

You twisted the cap off the bottle and poured yourself a double. You had never drank scotch straight; you preferred fruity cocktails. You set the bottle heavily on the bar and gripped your glass, gazing into the rich liquor. You shivered as your nightgown failed to keep out the chill. You lifted the glass slowly, shakily, and nearly spilled it as the light suddenly flicked on. You looked to the doorway but it wasn’t Tony.

Steve’s golden hair was a mess as he stepped just inside. He swept it back, his white tee clung to his thickly muscled torso above a pair of plaid pajama pants. He looked tired but not as if he had just woken up. “What are you doing up here?” He asked.

“I could ask you the same,” You lowered the glass back to the bar top.

“I was in the lounge and I heard someone in the hall,” He explained as he neared the bar, “A little midnight drink?”

“A poor attempt at denial,” You muttered, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“Ah, it’s fine. There’s only so many documentaries I can watch before I get bored,” He shrugged as he leaned on the bar, “Especially when I was there.” His eyes fell to your hand around the snifter, “Can I trouble you for a glass?”

“Sure,” You reached under the bar for another glass. You filled it wordlessly and pushed it towards him.

“So, I guess that was Tony leaving,” He pointed to the ceiling.

“Yup,” You seized the glass and swigged, “And this,” You held up the scotch, “Is me leaving.” Your throat constricted as the alcohol burned but you took another gulp, “Don’t think I’ll be here when he gets back.”

“That bad, eh?” His hand wrapped around his glass but he made no move to drink.

“I really convinced myself that he would make time once we were married,” Your glass was already close to empty, “I am so stupid.”

“No,” Steve said softly as you poured yourself another, “He’s stupid.”

“You don’t have to say that.” You took a drink, “Really, I know he’s your friend.” You lowered the glass as the alcohol suddenly kicked in. You had drank so fast you hadn’t a chance to feel it. You felt fuzzy. It was nice. “Whatever, he doesn’t matter.” You raised the glass and chugged half of it.

You set it down with a clink and looked up at Steve. He still hadn’t drank any and merely watched you descend into your despair. You were suddenly embarrassed. You were halfway to drunk and whining in front of this man. “I...should go.” You let go of the glass, “It’s late and I’m not…” You paused and held your head. That was some strong scotch. “...thinking straight.”

You made your way out from behind the bar. Steve was fast; he caught your arm before you could go further. “It’s okay. I don’t mind listening.” He was so nice. Too nice.

“No, no,” Your tongue felt thick, “I really...I gotta go lay down.” You tried to pull away but he clung to you. “Steve, let me go.”

“Stay,” He implored, “Come on, Y/N. Don’t do this to yourself.” His other hand was on your cheek, softly caressing your skin, “You don’t have to be alone.”

Your lips fell open and a sudden heat washed over you. A wave of alcohol and shock. And something else. Something wrong. “Steve,” You gave a low warning, “No.”

“He doesn’t treat you like he should,” Steve’s grip remained firm, “He doesn’t love you like I do.”

“Love?” You closed your eyes as you tried to clear your head, “You don’t...I’m Tony’s wife. I love him.”

“But he doesn’t love you, Y/N,” Steve insisted, “Can’t you see? I could be everything he’s not.”

“I don’t...I want Tony,” Your words were starting to meld together. “Please, just let me go.” You pushed on his shoulder and his hand left your cheek to grab yours. His fingers closed around the golden band and diamond crested ring. He tore them off and tossed them away. You tried to rip your body away from his as you heard them tumble to the floor. “No!”

“I can make you happy, Y/N,” Steve’s arms closed around you, “Can’t you see that?”

“Please, please,” Your hands were crushed between your chest and his torso. “I can’t--” Your head was swimming, “I’m drunk, Steve, let me go.”

“Let me show you how you should be treated,” He guided you backwards and you tried not to stumble as your feet tangled beneath you. You squirmed in his grip but he was too strong. Your cheeks were burning and your entire body buzzed.

In a moment, you were on the leather sofa. You couldn’t catch yourself as the alcohol offset your center. You tried to push yourself up but were easily pulled back down as Steve caught your hips. He slid you toward him as he sat and forced your legs around him. You tried to squeezed them together as you felt the cool air against your thighs. His eyes quickly found your bare pussy and you regretted your decision to forego panties.

“Steve,” You tried to wriggle back but only gave him a better view.

“Shh,” His hands wandered beneath the skirt of your nightgown, “Just let me show you how good I can be.”

He slid back and bent over you. He held you in place, his hands hooked around your hips. He lifted your legs over his shoulders as he dipped his head. You reached down and tried to pushed away his head. He didn’t flinch. His nose met the small tuft of hair around your pussy and you gasp. He nuzzled there and inhaled your scent. Your legs trembled as a shock went up your spine. You shouldn’t be enjoying this.

His warm breath tickled and his tongue surprised you as it swept down between your folds. He twirled around your clit and your legs bent around his shoulders as if welcoming him. Your nails scratched at the leather cushion as you murmured to yourself. ‘This is wrong…’ And yet it felt so delicious. You looked down at Steve’s blonde hair as he delved into you and your heart was in your throat.

A withdrawn moan whisked from your lips as you dropped your head back. Your body felt so heavy from the alcohol and yet the ripples rolling over you made you feel like you were floating. Steve’s tongue played with your bud as his hand slipped from your hip, his finger pressed between your folds. He added another and spread your juices around. The realization of how wet you were was startling.

He slowly circled your entrance before poking a single finger inside. You groaned, your breath hitched, and a sudden fear coursed through you. “Steve, someone will see. Please...”

Your voice caught as he shoved another finger in and you tilted your pelvis against him. He curled his fingers and felt around until he found that special spot. His tongue worked in tandem with his hand as he began to stoke you. You choked back a moan as the tendrils wound themselves around your thighs. You were shaking, breathless, unable to fight the orgasm which rose so sharply that your entire body arched. He didn’t stop until you were writhing and weak, your body limp across the sofa.

He sat back and licked your cum from his lips. “See, I can be so good to you,” He said and you tried to press you legs together. Your hand fell to the floor, a poor attempt to drag yourself away from him. “Let me be good to you.” He reached up and tugged the thin straps of your nightie down your arm, rolling it down until it was bunched around your waist. “God, you’re so beautiful.”

He bent over you, his hands framed your tits as he buried his face between them. He pushed your breasts together, nibbling and kissing the sensitive flesh. He caught a nipple between his lips and sucked, teasing the tip with his teeth. Your hand was on his head but no force behind it. You couldn’t find the strength to resist as the alcohol and pleasure blurred together. His hand went back to your pussy and he once more rubbed your clit. You shuddered and felt the orgasm rising easily. Your grabbed onto a hank of his hair as you came against him.

He sat up and pulled his tee shirt over his head, revealing his perfectly carved muscles. Your gaze fell to the bulge in his pants and he stood to strip the pajamas in kind. You merely closed your eyes as the size of his hard cock sent electricity through your veins. Steve’s hands came up beneath your arms and you were forced to look at him as he lifted you from the couch. You reached behind yourself half-heartedly. He let you stand for only a second on your jittering legs as his hands slid down the length of your body and settled on your ass. He swooped you up in one motion.

His hands glided down your thighs as he bent your legs around him and you felt his cock poking your ass. Your arms fell around his shoulders to keep yourself from falling back. He tilted his pelvis as he continued to prod around until he was at your entrance. He lowered you so that the head of his cock slipped inside of you. He groaned as he drove himself deeper. You shivered as you felt him stretching your walls. He was thicker than Tony.

As he bottomed out, you squeaked. You leaned your head against his shoulder as he moved your body along his cock. He rocked as he guided your pussy up and down his length, his hot breath singed your neck. His nose tickled your ear as he nuzzled your hair and little grunts filled your head. Again, the inevitable spring began to wind, the cord drawn taut and suddenly snapped as you whined out in orgasm for a third time.

A sudden shift had your arms tight around Steve’s neck as he turned around and walked with you across the room. He pushed your back against the cool glass of the long windows and you braced yourself against the skyline of the city. Another rush of vertigo frazzled your drunk mind. “Steve.” You whimpered. You felt entirely exposed and yet lacked the words to protests. Only his name.

“I want everyone to see how good I can treat you,” He whispered, a single hand on your ass to hold you up as his other palm pressed flat to the window.

He continued to thrust into you, his pace intensifying as his breath grew more laboured. The sound of him fucking you, your sweating flesh against the glass, and his gravelly ruts filled the room. You hissed through gritted teeth as you came around his cock once more, you head pressed against the window.

His motion became erratic and he jerked his pelvis against you as his grunts deepened to dusky moans. “I love you so much,” He rasped as he grabbed your chin and placed a frantic kiss on your lips. “So much.”

He gave a final, sharp thrust as his entire body shook and he crushed you against the window. He kissed you again as you felt his hot cum gushing inside of you. He kept you pinned against the window, still inside of you as he tried to catch his breath. 

“He doesn’t deserve you, Y/N.” His lips grazed your cheek as he spoke, “Can’t you see that?”

+

tags: @meaganottiz02 @patzammit @thepettyavenger @biasedtitties @thosecikinnn @glitterypinkkitty @thoughtlesstales @selinbaskaya @lattaex @vitamingrant @lilithhellfire @bbyspiiice @ironlady1993 @blackpantherimagines @kweenkxtrina @heavenlyblyss @letsagomario @shikin83 @collette04 @thirstyforsomeyandere @secretlyactivated @xxm3xxj @roses-and-absinthe @asleep-amid-the-flowers @sunstarskyhappiness @xxxelettaxxx @honeyofthegods @rainbowkisses31 @alphabloodfur @xdatbitch @quant-um-fizzx @peaceloveyesh @scarletlingeries @directionerfae @bodhi-black @kyllorren @breezy1415 @alexakeyloveloki @beautiful-and-strange @phoenix21love @momc95 @buckycaptspideypool @justballoonfishthings @ms-munchkin @whosmarisaaarw @kxllyxnnx @calspixie @imdiegohargreeves @satinprincessxo @amethyst-the-thot @docharleythegeekqueen @iiqueer-vibesii @carol-damn-vers @l0rd-disick @jilldsumner @hufflebucky @lanabanana-86 @nerdypinupcrystal @notyourtypicalrose @pink1031 @agent-spidey @wassupbitchesssss @lucifersnipnips @stuckybarton @ruff-m3rc @rainbowkisses31 @heartbeats-wildly @tea-with-seb @the-lululemon

#dark!steve x reader #tony x reader #steve rogers x reader #dark!steve rogers #dark steve rogers #dark steve rogers x reader #dark!steve rogers x reader #dark!fic #dark fic #dark!verse #darkverse #fic #one shot #request #mcu #marvel #au #tony stark #tony stark x reader

[hobiwonder]

Call out my name | (m)

Pairing: Hoseok x Reader

Genre: Smut. Heavy Angst.

Warnings: Very heavy angst, revenge fucking, oral, dirty talk, creampie, depiction of alcoholism, mentions of abandonment, brief scene of a one night stand, anal fingering, slight non/con but not really. Toxic relationship. OC is very fucked up and so is hoseok.

Summary: Hoseok needed closure.

Words: 10k+

A/n: my beta reader will scream at me for posting it without running it by her khvbwufkbvkwb sorry ily liela but im impulsive. I fixed most things but here ya go. BUT anyway, please read this after careful consideration. It is quite heavy angst. Even i wouldn’t read this type of stuff if i wasn’t feeling it already and then ended up writing it lol. Just tread carefully is all i’m saying. Let me know what you think if you do end up reading this hgjtcdydythmfvujv

For the full experience of pain listen to these songs and perceive the lyrics from Hoseok’s point of view: Call out my name and I was never there by the weeknd, Blue Side and boy meets evil by our beautiful wonderful sunshine hobi that i love very much.

The wind rustled your hair, the cold night air rendering you almost motionless from the chill creeping up your body and settling into your bones. Twigs snapped underneath the weight of your feet trudging through the cemetery. Looking behind and around you every couple of seconds hoping to spot the person you were wishing was still well or at least alive. The night was still relatively young and you were thankful for the call you received before it was too late and you were much too far away to be concerned about anything, much less about a grown man drinking himself to oblivion in front of his mother’s grave. Shaking your head at the thought, your tongue felt bitter at the inner turmoil of your heart, knowing that you still cared. You still fucking cared. Why else would you have left your apartment because of one, barely a minute-long call letting you know Hoseok was nowhere to be found?

“Hello?”

“Hey, Y/N” hearing Yoongi’s voice waver, your stomach dropped, knowing instantly something was not quite right. “Is… Is Hoseok with you?”

“Why would he be?” A sigh. A breath inhaled. The unspoken questions resonating with you without having to be allotted into the air, “To beg you to take him back? Cut his own balls off just to have you back?”

“He’s not at the company. He’s nowhere. I’m… not sure what to do.” Yoongi sounded exhausted, at the end of his faculties at his best friend and business partner’s sudden desertion from the face of earth. Closing your eyes, you asked god above to afford you with the strength you needed to deal with the expected.

“I might know. I’ll give you a call when I find him.” You hang up, grabbing your coat, and head for your car.

That’s how you’d ended up at the cemetery you knew your… you didn’t exactly know what to call Hoseok. What he was to you. He was your everything and he was your nothing. Every holy entity probably cursed you enough to last you a lifetime or two. Knowing how much you had fucked up a perfectly good man, willing to give you everything but you had to go and unleash your demons and be your overbearing self. Making decisions for him, about his love and if he was allowed to give it to you. You knew that Yoongi only asked you as a last resort. He detested you for ever leaving Hoseok and breaking whatever you had built with him. Yoongi was a fierce friend and that meant swallowing his pride and asking the woman who had devastated his friend to the point of relying on alcohol, his least favourite potion, just to have Hoseok safe. Though Yoongi had contemplated for a while if you were a graver danger than the chilling weather outside. Only you would know where Hoseok would be at 2 in the morning, drinking his sorrows away in front of his mother’s grave, that he had learnt about, not too long ago.

Taking out your phone and turning on the built-in flash light, you looked around as you took several rights towards the sound of a bottle crashing against, what you guessed, was cement. You walked for a few more meters and there he was. Leaning against the cement slab on which his mother’s name was carved.

Hoseok knew you were here before you had even said his name. Were you real or just an illusion he had envisaged up in his inebriated state? He wasn’t sure. He was too occupied, an air of melancholy surrounding him. He was cursing his dead mother out enough to put even the foulest men to shame. Anyone who didn’t know his situation would probably brand him as a lunatic, cursing at a grave as the bottle of whiskey steadily disappeared, burning his pharynx, sending him further into his drunken haze, making it easier to blame all of his misfortunes, failed relationships and bonds and his inability to detach himself from toxicity such as you, on his mother. His fucking mother who had abandoned him at the tender age of 9 at a fair. He remembered everything. It made it all the easier to damn her to hell as he drank in celebration of her death anniversary. Another year, without a monster in this godforsaken world. He snickered bitterly, the smooth taste of the whiskey making it easier to swallow the lump in his throat that was threatening to almost cut off his air supply.

A hand on his shoulder, gentle and warm, tentative. Nothing like you.

“Hoseok, let’s go.”

He flung your hand off him like it had been dipped in acid, burning him even through the covered skin it never touched.

“Don’t fucking touch me.” Your expression tightened.

“Okay, then. Yoongi is worried, it’s time to go.” Trying to reason with him, your voice had taken a lower, softer undertone. Your hand reached down, trying to grasp the bottle of liquor that he held so tightly against his chest when he refused to budge, taking another big gulp. A gasp was torn from your lips as your warm hand touched his icy skin as he lacked any form of warm clothing apart from his suit jacket that did nothing to provide him with substantial heat.

“You’re going to freeze if you stay out any longer, let’s go.”

“Maybe then, it’ll hurt less.” The words spoken so softly, you almost think, wish, you had imagined them. They were more chilling than the storm itself and you cursed yourself for being this affected. The silence that ensued after he had spoken was nothing short of throttling. You sighed in exasperation; you didn’t have time to fight with him. Not when he was intoxicated and about to get frost bitten. A million things ran into your head, yet you couldn’t rack one expedient thought out to respond to him. To tell him you were sorry. Sorry that it had to be this way. Sorry that it had to end. But to him, all he saw was the exterior. And he wanted nothing more than to conjure up the strength to scream and shout at you to go away from his life. To stop coming back and ruining him for anyone else. He hated you. He hated you so much for making him want to do nothing but be a pathetic shell of a man, waiting to be accepted by the woman who had rejected and humiliated his feelings over and over and over. Yet here he was. A hypocrite. Rejecting you outwardly but keeping you locked tightly in his heart so the remnants of the lover you were to him, stayed. Feeding the delusional part of his brain, telling him that he stood a chance in your heart that was home to nothing but bitterness and so much self-loathing it had no room for the healing his love, he had hoped, would provide you.

“Hoseok, please. You’re drinking yourself into liver failure. Yoongi is worried.” He looked at you. Really looked at you, and it perturbed him that his damned heart skipped so many beats he thought he was actually having a heart attack. Why did he still see a halo around your head when all you did was break him? He had shared everything with you and you had gone right ahead and torn him apart. Dissembling him, piece by piece until you took and took and nothing but a skeleton was left of what was a loving, caring and giving man he once thought himself to be. You were poisoning him and he knew it. Yet, he wanted nothing more than to be wrapped around in your arms that were currently being held around you, trying to shield yourself from the cold gust of wind that left your cheeks rosy and your eyes watering.

“Why are you here?”

“I told you, Yoo-”

“Why are…Youhere?” A pause. A breath taken in so tranquilly you weren’t sure you actually truly breathed.

“Because no one else had an idea where you were.”

“But you did.” His accusatory tone made you look down as if you were guilty of this fact. Hoseok rested his head onto the stone slab, regretting yet another moment of weakness where he had opened up to you. Telling you a few months back that he’d found his mother, albeit only her grave, but it had given him solace, a sense of relief that he had found her dead rather than alive. Or that’s what he told himself.

“I did.” Nodding your agreement, kicking the rubble beneath your feet, wanting to be anywhere but here. With Hoseok reminding you of what a monster you were. No good for him. The last bit was your own belief, Hoseok was too good to think that.

“Does it make you feel good? Knowing you’ve won once again? That no one will probably ever know me like you do, because you know-”

“No, I-”

“-that I’ll never be able to open up to anyone again? So you can continue to save me, save the fucking day and be able to see me without having to have the burden of loving me. Are you satisfied?”

Clenching your jaw, you barely restrained your tongue, ready to deny all the charges. But you couldn’t. Because to some extent, they were true. You were a coward, too afraid to love him like he deserved so you reeled in your self-righteousness, thinking you were doing a veracious deed by keeping him at an arm’s length, resorting to catching fleeting glimpses into his life through the mishaps he found himself in often and to what only you knew how to pull him out off. It was your twisted way of keeping him in your life while simultaneously telling him he wasn’t worth the fight you’d have to go through with your demons, to keep him. You were a disaster for him, yet he failed to see that.

“Not everything I do is about you, Hoseok.” Yes it is!You wanted to shout from roof tops. “I have called Yoongi, the car will be here in 5 minutes to pick you up.” Hoseok chuckled at your obvious dismissal of his previous accusations.

“You’re a fucking liar, Y/N. Everything you do is to trap me so much so that I can’t even breathe without you helping me.” Hoseok, with much effort, pulled himself to his feet stumbling, coming closer to your figure that was starting to retreat at his close proximity.

“You know what the sad thing is? I don’t even want you to stop. I’m in love with you and you don’t even care.” Hoseok felt like his heart was tearing apart, eyes welling up with unshed tears clouding his vision as he leaned closer to your face.

“You’ve… You’ve broken me.” Tears sliding their way down his pale cheek as his eyes closed themselves, seemingly surrendered in the moment. He looked utterly defeated and it made you want to fling yourself off a bridge. You hadn’t anticipated such defeat from him. You wanted to shake him, tell him to yell at you. Call you a cold blooded monster, anything but this. Anything but this look of pure crushing vanquish and hurt across his face. So clear that you felt it in your bones. Felt the pain he was feeling, almost tasting it on the tip of your tongue.

The sound of a car pulling in the rubble filled parking lot interrupted any measly response you might have conjured up or worse, fell to your knees to ask him for forgiveness. Instead, you gathered yourself and looked him in the eyes one last time as you heard footsteps approaching you both.

“You’re not in love with me, Hoseok.”

Before he could respond, you spun around, walking back the way to your car as if you were being chased, about to be prey to a dangerous predator. When in reality, you were the only predator, praying on Hoseok’s feelings. Being inside the safety and the much needed warmth from the heater you had cranked up on your way before, the events that had conspired just moments before really began to settle in. You had ruined everything with Hoseok. Cut off any chances of a future you might have had with him. Alas, in the end, you were your own demise. The incessant voice and the circumstances, remained at the back of your mind, convincing you that it just had to be this way.

___________________________________________________________________________

Hoseok could feel the worst hangover creeping up to overtake his senses since his college graduation party. Only this time, he hadn’t forgotten anything that had taken place just before he had blacked out in the back of Yoongi’s escalade. Remembering every bitter detail of the night, your indifference to his confession; not even a second glance spared his way before you had rid yourself of him and left him weeping and being a pathetic mess of a man. He had never felt more vulnerable in that moment, hoping to make you realise that what you both had meant so much to him, only to find out that it in fact, meant much more to him than it ever did to you. Vividly remembering the day, you had shut him out of your life, with nothing more than a text. When he had confronted you the next day thinking it was just your insecurities creeping up again, instead he was faced with your calm and apathetic gaze.

“What are you saying? You can’t just ‘terminate’ this relationship. This isn’t a damn contract, Y/N.” Exasperated, he had run his hand through his hair for what seemed like the hundredth time, pacing back and forth in his office as you sat in the chair across from his own, hands in your lap looking ahead. Professional as ever.

“Details are unimportant. I’m sorry Hoseok but,” You had taken a deep breath looking as much composed as he was close to losing his mind at how easy all these words seem to come to the tip of your tongue, spoken with such assurance that had him bewildered, “We don’t want the same things. I thought… I thought I wanted this. Us.”

“So that’s it? You give me a two weeks’ notice of your resignation along with dumping me or whatever the fuck the time we spend together meant to you? Jesus Christ Y/N, are you going to move to a different country next?” He couldn’t believe it, that you had so easily given up your position at the company just because whatever you had with him, was over.

“I’ve been offered a position elsewhere for a while, I can assure you this is just… a messy coincidence. It’ll be best if we don’t work together.” You had stood up, smoothing your skirt over, carefully avoiding eye contact with him, standing in place for a few seconds. He watched you as you stood in silence, looking across his desk to the sun setting outside, hues of orange and pink shining in his office through the various sky scrapers surrounding his company building. He raked his brain for any and every word he could think of to make you stay, understand why and how the sudden change in your behaviour had come about. He knew he was lying to himself with the thought that it was a sudden change. That he hadn’t seen you gradually pull away from him, emotionally and physically, only the skeleton of you remaining in the nights when he’d cradle you against his figure, trying to omit even the slightest bit of sincerity from your form that would lay emotionally torpid beneath him. A mere ghost of the woman he had made love to before. He was sure it was love. So sure that you reciprocated his sentiments as well.

Before you could leave the room, he grabbed your shoulders, spinning you around to face him.

“What happened, Y/N? W-What did I do? Why are you pulling away? Please tell me. Tell me and I’ll fix it.” He was sure he had almost looked manic, desperation lacing his words, hoping to reason with you.

“I told you Hoseok, I-I don’t want this. Please, just let me go.” He knew you didn’t just mean literally. He had fucking known, yet he continued to humiliate himself.

“I know you think you shouldn’t be with me but please, I love you,” he had taken your face in his hands, drawing your body closer as if to convey some of his feelings and pour them into your body and reignite the feelings that were no longer there, “and you love me. We can make this work Y/N, please.”

You had broken yourself from his hold with such ferocity you would think that he had been assaulting you instead of the tender embrace he had captured your form in to. And then you had spoken those words, with such guarantee, they chilled him to the core. The words that tore him apart, let him know that this was a lost cause.

“You know that I have never said what I don’t mean, made any claims that don’t stand a chance. My decision is final Hoseok. I’m sorry but I don’t want this.”

It was then he had realised, you had never once uttered the words, I love you, to him.

And damn it all to hell and back, no amount of liquid poison could make him forget the pain and humiliation you had caused him. No amount of alcohol could cause permanent damage to the part of his heart and brain that still clung to the devotion and ardour he held for you. He would’ve reminisced in his reflections longer if it hadn’t been for the shrill ring of his cell phone. The screen signalling that his best friend was on the line, the only reason he even decides to reach for his phone.

“What the fuck do you want?”

“Thanks Yoongi, for dragging my drunk, delinquent ass at 3 am in the morning from the freezing cold and to my house and in my own damn bed so I don’t freeze to death. Oh no problem Hoseok! That’s what friends are for!”

Hoseok just closed his eyes, letting Yoongi run his mouth and call him out on his obviously lacking mannerisms. Sighing, he thanked his best friend, as he deserved.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, asshole.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, too hungover to fight with his friend. He needed a damn drink and he needed it ASAP. Putting his phone on speaker, Hoseok climbed out of his bed with much difficulty, wanting to do nothing but fall back into the pillowy, literally, heaven that was his bed. Where the smell of you still lingered from weeks ago. Rubbing his face, he walked over to the whiskey bottle on his minibar, the glass cork making a clinking noise as he set it aside to pour himself a drink right before Yoongi’s shout sounded from the phone.

“Don’t you fucking dare pour that drink, Jung Hoseok. I will come down and beat your fucking ass if you got shit faced today when it is barely noon.”

“Time isn’t real Yoongi, get over it.” Pouring himself a drink, Hoseok looks at the phone in his hand, contemplating if he should hang up and be miserable on his own without any damn interruptions.

“Hoseok,” Yoongi’s earnest voice and the way it audibly softens, makes him halt, “as your business partner, your childhood best friend and most importantly, as someone who cares about you, I’m advising you that drinking yourself silly every day like you’ve been doing for the last four weeks is not healthy.”

He lets out a snort in disbelief at himself, as if he didn’t already know that. Yoongi however, goes on after a large exhale as if to prepare himself for what he’s about to say.

“I know… it’s have been hard for you to not fall down that hole. I know it must hurt like hell, believe me. But you have to pull yourself out of it. You can’t change what’s happened but please,” Yoongi almost pleads, “you need to let go.”

“I know, hyung.” Hoseok hears Yoongi, but he doesn’t want to. His heart doesn’t seem to be listening either. He knows that unless he tries, there is no other way to relieve himself of his pain. It’s funny how usually, it’s the other way around. Hoseok is the endless beam of energy and hope for Yoongi and his lethargic personality. Now that the roles are reversed, he truly begins to appreciate his best friend.

“Good… why don’t you come in to the office today, huh? It hasn’t been the same without you, brother.” Hoseok grins slightly at the sincerity in Yoongi’s voice, not being used to the elder’s open display of such brotherly affection.

“Okay, hyung. I’ll see you in a bit.”

“Oh thank god, I’ve been holding down the fort while you sulked but it’s about time you came back.”

“Don’t make me change my mind.” Yoongi laughs before hanging up. Managing a multi-million-dollar enterprise that they built together was never a one-person job. Hoseok feels a pang of guilt deep within his chest thinking about Yoongi being on his own while he’d been too lost in his own mind when he wasn’t drunk, to even check in on him. If for no one else, Hoseok decides then and there, he needs to get himself together at least for Yoongi and tips his glass of whiskey, in to the sink.

“Look who emerged from the bat cave. Sure you got no burns from the sunlight on the way over?”

“Hyung, I will throw my phone at you if you don’t shut the fuck up. Christ, the looks from the staff were enough. Do I look that bad?”

Did he really? It was a wonder no one had bumped into each other or some other dramatic soap opera shit when he had entered the main floor and an audible hush had fallen around him as he passed his staff and went straight for his private elevator to the top floor. It was no better when he had entered his floor and all the staff on his way over to Yoongi’s office, which was next to his own, had parted like he was Moses and they were the red sea. Their hushed ‘Good mornings’ had barely passed his ears and he had appreciated that no one tried to be overly enthusiastic. But he figured it was probably not because he was hungover and more because they weren’t sure if their boss was going to actually going to stay.

“Unfortunately, you look great as always, even when you’re 80% alcohol right now and probably took a shower after a month,” Yoongi murmurs ‘Handsome motherfucker’ under his breath as he pours Hoseok a shot of espresso. He rolls his eyes at Yoongi’s snide compliment.

“Anyhow,” handing Hoseok his coffee, Yoongi sits back in his chair as Hoseok walks over to the floor to ceiling glass window, overlooking Seoul city, “I’m glad you’re here, Hoseok.”

Hoseok nods at Yoongi, not finding it in him to do more, knowing there was still something he needed to get off his chest.

“Why did you send her hyung?” The frustration in his voice evident.

“I didn’t know where you were! How was I supposed to know you were at the cemetery when you don’t tell me shit?”

“You didn’t have to.” The bitterness of the espresso makes it easier to make implications that his best friend definitely didn’t appreciate.

“Excuse me? You’re the one always grilling me about my life, making me ‘lean on’ you. Why can’t I do the same for you? Don’t be a hypocrite.” Yoongi leans back in his chair, trying to find the right words to tell Hoseok that he needs to let somebody in on the thoughts in his head. Especially in a time when he’s so fragile because of you. Hoseok downs the rest of his espresso and runs his hands through his blonde tresses, pulling for a few seconds in sheer aggravation at himself.

“I know… I know. I’m sorry I made you worry. I just… didn’t want to see her.” Yoongi gets out of his chair as he listens to Hoseok’s voice get softer and quieter. Walking over, he looks at Hoseok’s face and truly sees for the first time how tired his best friend looks. Placing his hand on Hoseok’s shoulder, he gives a reassuring squeeze.

“I’m sorry I had to send her. Keep me in the loop and I won’t have to ask… her.” Yoongi stays clear of saying your name out loud seeing how delicate of a state Hoseok was in, not wanting to cause any more pain than necessary as Hoseok nods in agreement.

“Tell you what, let’s go out after work and get a drink at Merlo’s?”

“Hyung, you were just chastising me for drinking.” Yoongi claps Hoseok’s back walking back over to his chair.

“For drinking alone, there is a difference. This time I’ll be there to keep an eye on you. Come on, have a drink with your hyung!” Hoseok can’t help when a laugh escapes him when Yoongi belts out his thick Daegu accent on purpose. In times like these, he really appreciated Yoongi having his back.

“This is definitely not the best bar in Seoul, hyung,” Hoseok takes in the posh décor that makes him roll his eyes and the over pretentious staff and bartenders with their snappy movements to guise themselves as standouts. When in reality, this was an overpriced bar and Hoseok just wanted a drink.

“Well, I thought maybe we’ll change it up a bit… Also Jiwoo might have sent someone to meet you.” Yoongi mumbles the last part, knowing Hoseok wouldn’t have come to a place like this otherwise. And he was right as Hoseok’s eyes widen.

“Noona? And you didn’t think to tell me? What the hell, hyung. You know I’m not ready!” He can almost feel his cool composure melting off him in layers, knowing his older sister’s matches were more often than not, wacky.

“It’s been weeks, Hoseok. You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself and get out there. Maybe this will help.” Hoseok tries to listen to Yoongi, he really does. But he doesn’t want to. It’s too early. His wounds feel like they were inflicted just yesterday, too fresh, too clear. Too agonising. Nevertheless, he knows unless he does this, he won’t get Yoongi off his back. So, nodding, Hoseok agrees reluctantly.

“Also, she’s a recent share holder at our company and new to the city. She doesn’t know you or anything or has any expectations and inclinations of you, Hoseok. This is your chance to try and start fresh.”

“Okay… I’ll try just for you, hyung.” Yoongi pats Hoseok’s back, genuinely appreciative of his friend’s trust in him and that he was sincerely, making an effort. Or so it seemed.

“We also have a lot of pending business to take care of. The collaboration launch party of Kim Inc. and Jung-Min enterprise as well as our conference in Jeju is coming up all in a span of a few weeks and months respectively.” Hoseok was half engrossed in his drink and half listening to Yoongi when a slender figure had joined their private booth. The woman was nothing short of gorgeous as even Yoongi took in her S shaped figure and golden bronzed skin clad in a mildly suggestive knee length dress.

“I’m glad I crashed this conversation at the right time before you two got too carried away.” Her beaming smile, though sweet, was too much for Hoseok.

“Hyolyn, glad you could join us.” Yoongi sits up as Hyolyn slips right in with Hoseok as he comes to term with the fact that this is definitely the girl his sister and Yoongi have set him up with. She was jaw-dropping, but she wasn’t you.

“Hoseok, this is the lovely lady I was just telling you about.” Hoseok conjured up a half sincere smile as he took in her small features gleaming up at him politely.

“Nice to meet you.”

“No, nice to meet you, Hoseok. I’ve heard great things about you from Jiwoo and Yoongi here.” Hoseok sent Hyolyn a tight smile, not being in the business of enjoying hearing himself being extolled. He tried his best to be polite and forthcoming to the newcomer at their table. It wasn’t as if Hyolyn wasn’t nice on top of her already beautiful exterior. She genuinely paid interest in what he had to say and hung on to his every word, paying him entirely too much attention. Nothing he was used to with you.

Get a fucking hold of yourself, he cursed at himself. If even after a month you still clouded his mind this much, he wondered how long it would take him to stop comparing every woman to you.

“Alright then, I have some matters to take care of it seems,” Yoongi complained with his eyebrows furrowed, looking down at his phone after an hour of Hyolyn’s arrival. Hoseok almost let his jaw drop at how unconvincing the older man was at pretending that he had something urgent to attend to. Though, Yoongi probably was trying to spare Hoseok the embarrassment that undoubtedly would come along if he had abruptly left. Which Yoongi has done before. Hoseok could tell that Yoongi was serious about him moving on if he was willing to play a matchmaker with his sister.

“Oh okay, shame you have to leave so soon.” Hyolyn contorted her pretty face in a look of sympathy, looking up at Yoongi who was now standing with his suit jacket in his hand. He looked at Hoseok and Hyolyn, throwing a sly smirk at Hoseok’s glaring face.

“Yeah, shame. Anyway, you take care of him, alright?” With a solute, Yoongi was dashing out of the bar moving faster than Hoseok had ever seen him move in all the years he’d known him.

“Look, you don’t have to “take care” of me like that smug bastard suggested,” Hyolyn stifled a laugh, smiling politely at Hoseok leaning in to talk to her, “I’ll be fine if you would rather find better company. I’m afraid I’m not going to be too entertaining tonight.”

Hyolyn decreased the distance between them even more and brought her hand lightly on top of his, a show of understanding.

“Look, I will be honest, Jiwoo told me you had just gotten out of a relationship and were in pretty bad shape. I understand if you’re not in the right mindset to give someone else a chance but,” Hyolyn took a deep breath and let her kind eyes hold his own as she spoke with a gentle smile on her face, “We don’t have to do anything. I can be here as a friend if you want?”

He could see the glint in her eyes, instantly grasping what she was suggesting. However, Hoseok knew he couldn’t use someone as sweet as Hyolyn as his rebound.

“I appreciate that, Hyolyn, really. I think I may need a friend for now, more than anything.” At that she smiles knowingly, removing her hand atop his.

Time passes a little quicker as Hyolyn makes commendable effort to get to know Hoseok, carefully distracting him from downing his drinks too fast. In fact, Hoseok himself is surprised at the unfamiliar feeling of you being absent from floating in his mind, staining his every thought. That’s until by some cruel joke the universe must be playing on him, he spots a figure strutting inside the bar, a dress clinging to your sinful body and heels that used to drive him crazy. Who was he kidding, they still drove him crazy. It takes him a little longer to notice the man beside you, his hand grasping your own as he’s leading you to a booth in the VIP section he currently himself was in.

He must have been staring for a while since Hyolyn turns to follow his gaze. He’s thankful she can’t tell if he’s watching you or the man you’re with. Which happen to be none other than-

“Isn’t that Kim Namjoon of Kim Inc, the company you’re going in business with?”

Hoseok doesn’t add the fact that he also used to be his best friend, once upon a time. Instead he motions the waiter over without sparing a glance at him, continuing to watch you interact with Namjoon as you lean forward to talk with him, no doubt giving him an eyeful of your luscious breasts. Hoseok could almost feel the steam coming off from him like he was just about a second away from evaporating into the thin air.

“Seems so.” If he gives off any hints of the drastic change in his demeanour and the frequency by which the alcohol is disappearing down his throat almost doubling than before, Hyolyn doesn’t mention.

“I’ve heard he just hired a new PA with crazy high salary.” Hoseok’s attention immediately zooming back on to Hyolyn’s speculations.

“And where did you hear that?” Hyolyn smirks, rolling her eyes as she explains.

“Oh you know the amount of gossip that goes around when you’re a young and handsome man in such a position of power.” Hoseok has to almost force himself to pay attention to what she’s saying. He had known from his sources that you’d taken a position as a PA for Namjoon and had never understood for the life of him, your decision to do the same job you had done for him, and move to another company to do exactly that rather than ask for a promotion. He never entertained the possibility of you actually working for Namjoon for reasons other than not being able to work for the man who was invested in you more than you, him. Reasons like more money. And the thought alone made him want to march up to you to confront your need for a bigger salary than the unconditional love he thought was being reciprocated.

“Yeah? What’ve you heard about me?” Hyolyn turns back to Hoseok, clinking her drink with his own.

“Nothing that makes me want to not give you a chance.” She says with a smile. Just then, he sees you emerge from the booth you’d been in with Namjoon, adjusting your dress. As though you feel his intense gaze on your skin, you look up, making his heart almost stop. You don’t fare much better as you dash towards what he assumes is the restroom. Before he can talk himself out of it, he finds himself following you, vaguely deciphering a call of his name from Hyolyn.

He enters the restroom, not giving you a chance to say anything else, before he confronts you. He just had to know.

“He’s paying you well, huh?” Hoseok is almost seething and there you are, calm and collected as ever. Like his accusations didn’t matter to you. Just like nothing ever fucking matters to you.

“I am a PA to a CEO; Yes, he is.” You state as a matter of fact, reapplying your lipstick that he just notices was a little smudged. Hoseok could feel his heart beating louder and faster in his chest, making it hard to breathe. He never thought you’d be this indifferent to him. The look of panic he had seen on your face just before almost feeling like an illusion now. The woman in front of him now was nothing short of a distant, bitter reality he wanted to never face but was now forced to.

You didn’t want him. You never wanted him.

“Is money so fucking important to you? You could’ve asked me for it and I’d have given it to you!” because I was that in love with you. Though he doesn’t say that out loud he knows you hear it loud and clear. And once again, you don’t spare him a second breath, brushing your hands down your tantalizing dress, staring him straight in the eyes as you approach him.

“I am a PA not a CEO and an heir to a million-dollar empire. Yes, money is of importance to me.” Hoseok groans at your too technical answer, not giving anything away. He was sick and tired of you being evasive.

“Stop with this bullshit Y/N, you know what I’m asking.” He takes a deep breath, closing the distance between himself and where you stood holding on to the sink.

“Are you fucking him? Is he paying you enough to put out, huh?” Your eyes remain focused on his own, refusing to waver like he thought, hoped, they would. Hoped that you’d break out into sounds of horror and surprise, telling him that he was wrong and that you would never do anything like that. Hell, be mad at him, hit him and demand to know how he dare accuse you of being some money hungry whore.

But you don’t. Instead, you leave him with words that dry out his mouth and stop his heart.

“Maybe he is. Either way, who I’m fucking doesn’t concern you anymore, Hoseok.” You give him another chilling look before pushing past him, exiting the bathroom. Hoseok could feel everything slowing down around him. Your words still ringing in his ears. It was as if he was glued to where he stood. No amount of commands his brain sent to his muscles were able to move him. The bitter reality was taking its sweet time settling in his bones, rendering him useless to move until another woman enters the bathroom, gasping out for him to leave.

He sped back to his booth, hastily apologizing to Hyolyn, who looked just as confused as he had felt moments before you had walked out on him.

“Is everything Alright, Hoseok?”

“I just can’t do this right now Hyolyn, I’m sorry.” He sighed beckoning the waiter over to settle his and Hyolyn’s bill. She looked sweetly sympathetic, standing up with him to make sure he was alright. Hoseok wasn’t really sure if he was upset or angry. Maybe both. With the dizziness being from sheer rage or hurt, he wasn’t quite sure. What he was sure of, though, was that he wanted to get out of this bar before he suffocated.

“Can I do something to help?” Her pleading eyes made the pang of guilt that was bubbling away in his chest a tad bit bigger at the fact that he was leaving her to go numb his senses by fucking someone senseless.

He reached over to caress her cheek as his parting vow, “No you can’t, get home safe Hyolyn.”

All Hoseok could think about was your words, your body clinging to Namjoon’s, your scent when he confronted you in the bathroom. Even when the girl, whose name he had forgotten the minute she had said it, took him in her mouth like her life depended on it. It had been hours since he’d left the bar after the debacle with you at the bar where he’d also left Hyolyn and went to the sleaziest club he could find, where he wouldn’t be able to be recognized.

Only thing on his mind was the stagnant truth. No matter how many times he replayed your answers in his mind, picking them apart to see the silver lining to what you’d hinted at but was plainly clear if only he let himself believe it too. You didn’t care about him anymore, possibly never did.

“Fuck,” The girl licking away at the underside of his cock looked up at him smiling around him when he heavily rested his head on the wall he was leaning against. Thinking he’d been responding to her tongue she continued with much fervour, when really, he was cursing himself for not being able to accept the truth. You had ditched him at the first signs he had shown of wanting to deepen his relationship with him. Jumping ship as soon as he shared his heart with you, about his mother, his fears of you leaving him. And you had done exactly that it seems like. Now he knew the catalyst had been the six figure salary Namjoon had offered you. His mind was filled with rage and his heart was filled with betrayal. And even after you blatantly admitting you might be sleeping with Namjoon, he somehow thought of you and your mouth being the one swallowing around him instead. The only thing Hoseok wanted to do was get you out of his system. And of course, why wouldn’t he start with fucking you out of his system.

He’d hooked up with the first willing girl, telling his brain to shut the fuck up when his conscious accused him of trying to find you even in a one night stand he’ll never see again. She’d been all the more eager when he’d pushed her against the wall, making her feel the rigidity of his cock against her to coax her to her knees. He wanted to bang on the walls, pull on his hair, beat the living shit out of himself for being so fucking oblivious to your changing demeanour the months before it had all unravelled while simultaneously still wanting to rush back to you.

Alas, it was easier to hate you now. Knowing how money hungry you were, willing to shamelessly flaunt yourself as such too. But he knew mindlessly hooking up with random women was not about to provide him with the numbness he craved. He needed closure and he was going to fucking get it. Maybe, just maybe, what he was about to do would put his need for you at a halt. He hated you in this moment. He wanted it to blossom so much that it occupied all the space in his traitorous heart.

So what does he do? Go straight to your apartment of course.

“Hoseok? What are you do-” You weren’t given even the courtesy of finishing your sentence before he had his mouth over yours. Your hands had found purchase on his chest and it’d boiled his blood even further. Not sure if at the way his heart had skipped several beats or at you because it was so easy for you to make it do so.

He had wanted to be gentle at first, to share more of those deep sweet kisses that left him dizzy and stunned, but that dress and those heels…

Screw gentle.

He grabbed your wrist and pulled you further inside, barely taking the time to lock the door before he pushed you against it and slanted his mouth over yours. He slid his hands under your ass and lifted you so that you were truly pinned between the wooden door and his pelvis, which he rocked against you as he kissed you. Hoseok looked around to make sure you were truly alone, and then he grabbed your hand and tugged you inside your bedroom. He spun you around so that your ass was pressed against him—pressed against his erection. He put one hand over your mouth and then undid the knot to the ribbon that held your pyjama pants snug to your hips.

“You’re only hungry for money and cock aren’t you?” He said in your ear, not expecting an answer. “Where you get more of any of those, you go running with your mouth wide open.”

And then he slid his fingers down your stomach, slipping under your silk panties. You moaned against his hand, hands tugging on his arm that was relentless between your legs.

“Shhh,” He said. “Sluts like you don’t get a say on what’s done to them.”

You whimper in response. Too responsive for your own good.

God, he loved your pussy. He’d never felt anything softer than the skin between your legs—and fuck you were wet. So wet that he really could pull his slacks down and take what he wanted, right here, right now. But no. You didn’t deserve that.

Not that he wouldn’t fantasize about it as he got you off.

He started in on your clit in earnest now, circling it hard and fast, loving the way you bucked against his hand. He knew it was more pressure and speed than was comfortable, but he also knew that you would like it that way, savour that tiny, tiny bite of pain with your pleasure with the way you were gushing more than you ever had before. You were filthy and he was finally realising that.

“I would’ve done this all day, Y/N,” He rasped in your ear. “I love reaching down the front of your pants, playing with your cunt, making you come. Do you like it?”

You nodded, your breathing jagged against his hand. You were getting close.

“Too fucking bad,” He said, and he almost felt like he was having an out-of-body experience, listening to himself say these words. But he was beyond caring, or more importantly, was beyond the point of denying the reality. You really never cared then and he really didn’t care now. He was drunk on the need to leave you begging and wondering what you’d left behind.

“Now you show that you’re a fucking human being and not a robot? Hm? Rutting against my hand like the gold digging whore you are. You want to come don’t you?”

You nodded again, eagerly, desperately.

“Of course you do. Always wanting more,” and his voice was hoarse now. “You’re nothing to me anymore, Y/N. And you know what? My fingers in your cunt while saying that makes me so fucking hard. Feel me. Feel how hard I am just thinking about it.” He grounded his cock into your ass, and you shuddered again.

He could feel you convulsing around his fingers, clenching and unclenching when he prodded at the spongey bundle deep within you, making you thrash around in his grasp. He stilled his hand, resorting to rubbing your walls.

“Does he fuck you like I did? Hm? Or does that even matter?” Hoseok plucks your clit with his thumb and pointer finger, “It doesn’t matter does it? You’ll run to the next man with a fat cock and an even fatter wallet. I had everything baby but it wasn’t enough for you.”

There was no entity that could stop Hoseok from saying all that was to come out of his mouth like he’d bottled it all up for the past month. He picks up a punishing rhythm, your pussy struggling to clench around his fingers as they left your cunt just as quickly as they had entered. Before Hoseok can stop, you’re tumbling over the edge, breathing hard behind Hoseok’s hand.

You quaked under his touch for a long minute, and finally came down, sagging against him.

He kept his hand in your panties for a minute or two longer, loving the way it looked, loving the way it felt, and then he reluctantly withdrew. He sucked on his fingers as you turned to face him, eyes bright and cheeks clearly flushed even in the dark of the bedroom, looking nothing like the put together statue you had looked earlier. You looked positively ruined and Hoseok fucking loved it. For once feeling like he had a better idea of what was to come than you. Because the ball was in his court.

He walked backwards, sitting on your bed like he had done many times before. Only this time, instead of waiting for you to climb on to him, letting you take the reins, he demanded complete obedience and strangely, you obliged.

“Come here,” He says. “And kneel.”

You did, your breath audible now, kneeling in front of him and crossing your ankles behind you, taunting him with those eyes.

“Take them off,” He said, jerking his chin down to indicate his belted slacks. You did, impatiently tugging them off his hips, and he groaned as his erection was finally, finally let free. You sat there after completing the task as if he was giving you orders like he had before at the office. Hoseok let himself really stare you down, holding your gaze until your, dare he say, embarrassed one strayed far from his face to his cock. “Suck me like the cock hungry slut you are, Y/N.”

You continued to stare at his heavy cock against his stomach, listening to him demean you. Nothing like you’d ever imagined Hoseok to be like. “You don’t get to just take Y/N. Time to give a little baby.”

Hearing the endearment, albeit said in a more sinister context, provides enough of an incentive for you to start laving his cock with attention like never before. You pressed soft, red lips to the silky skin of his cock. “Fuck, just like that.” He breathed down at you. “Suck it good baby.”

He found your lips with his thumb, running it along your lower one and pulling it down to open you up more. “Hold still,” He told you, and then he guided his cock into your waiting mouth.

It had only been a month, and yet he’d forgotten that your mouth was like a slice of heaven, warm and wet and with that flicking, fluttering tongue that danced along the underside of his dick. He laced his hands through your hair—fucking up whatever adorable hairstyle you’d had it in—and then slowly withdrew, savouring every single second as your lips and tongue kissed against his skin. And then he slid in again, less gently this time, his eyes darting from your lips to your crossed ankles to the way your hand circled your clit as he slowly fucked your mouth. You were being so filthy, even when he had been degrading you just before, calling you all sorts of name you definitely should be refuting instead of finding them arousing enough to get on your knees for him.

You kept your eyes pinned to his, peering up at him through those long dark eyelashes, and he thought about all the times they’d distracted the hell out of him at the office and all the times that he’d fucked your brains out before, always whispering his affections for you and how crazy he was for you, at the end. And now, he just wanted to paddle your sweet ass for making him so goddamned crazy about you.

He tightened his grip in your hair. He wanted to go hard, he wanted to make your eyes water, he wanted to thrust until he reached the point where he could barely hold back from shooting down your throat.

“Ready?” He whispered to you, still wanting to tread on the side of consent and caution.

And then you groaned a frustrated groan, as if annoyed that he was asking again.

“Be patient,” he said and thrust hard into your mouth. Hoseok heard you choke as he hit the back of your throat, but he only gave you a minute before he pushed in again, and again. He knew he was longer and wider than most men, he knew he was harder to take, but Hoseok wasn’t going to cut you any slack unless you asked for it, not after that stunt. Because he was so absolutely sure that everything you did was to make him hurt. And hurt he was. Hurt and angry and horny and fucking in love with you. But you were not.

“You like being bad? You like making me punish you by going out with himof all people??”

You managed to nod, your watery eyes blinking up at him to make him even angrier. He knew you were most likely saying it to get on his nerves further. Make him leave, screaming, disgruntled and heartbroken. Jokes on you; his heart was already broke.

He swore. “You’ve made me crazy, y/n.” He sounds like on the bring on an angry yet sorrowful outburst.

But you smirk around his cock, and fuck, he hated and loved you at the same time. He hated love. He drove into your mouth several more times, right up until he could feel that familiar clench in his belly and then Hoseok pulled out, his breathing ragged from the effort it took not to come all over your gorgeous face. Instead, he used his thumb to wipe at your eyes, which were now smudged with makeup and tears. The ever-so-slightly smeared lipstick he left the way it was.

You sat there, breathing heavy, looking up at Hoseok like a deer caught in the headlights. Waiting and waiting until Hoseok is finally threading his hands in your hair again to roughly stand you up, a wince leaving your swollen, lipstick smeared lips. The venom laced in the way his mouth was sneering but it was his eyes that betrayed him. They were sad and you felt the pang of hurt you had so desperately tried to bury. And had been succeeding until he’d showed up at your door.

“You want to hurt me do you? Want to break my heart? Well,” he’s stepping forward, face so close to yours you could smell the whiskey on him, “I’m going to break you first. I’m going to fuck you until you’re crying, sobbing, begging me to stop. And when you’re as shattered as I am; you’ll run back to me to fix you.” Just like I have. But he doesn’t say that.

And in a matter of seconds, he’s tugging you out of your room with a punishing grip on your hair and throwing you on your couch, no gentleness, no warning as he pushes you face first down on the couch. He had no reservations anymore. Nothing. Because all that was repeated in his mind was that hewas nothing to you.

“H-Hoseok. P-Please.” Your muffled moan has his heart tightening and wounded at the same time. Why did you call his name like he was the only one for you when he knew you were already fucking another man? He wastes no time in making your ass bare in front of him, perched up on the arm rest of the sofa as  you race yourself by clutching the cushion of your couch. But he can’t help and take a look before he does anything. Your pink, swollen folds. The labia of your pussy bloomed like a rose, dripping and ready for him to sink in to. And that’s exactly what he does.

“Fuck! H-Hoseok. Oh god.” You’re already crying out like you’d been waiting for him to push his cock inside you for a century. Why was he doing this? Why was he digging this hole deeper than it already was and he couldn’t get out of it no matter how much he tried? Yet, with every thrust of his hardened girth spearing your cunt over and over and over has him digging his own grave. He wanted to die inside you. He was so madly, dangerously in love with you and you knew it. Because when you ask him to go faster in your high pitched mewl – he does. He fucks you like his life depends on it. Over and over and the symphony of your dripping arousal coating his length is something he wants to revel in. Knowing that it could very well be the last time he got to feel you at all.

You were crying now. Sobbing with every thrust like he’d been the one breaking open your insides instead the damage you’d done to him. Why were you so cruel? Why did you want to hurt so bad? And why did you want to hurt himso bad? Hoseok’s lost and torn between the physical pleasure and the emotional pain. Trying desperately to fuck it away.

“Hoseokie,” you cry out when start pushing back against his thrusting hips, “ f-fuck me harder. Tear me apart. You hate me right?” your puffy, teary face is looking right back at him and he’s losing his mind. “then show me.” He’s angry at the use of your nickname for him when you two were together.

His heart is pounding and his loins are firing up when you’re looking at him with your bedroom eyes with a hint of sadness? No you weren’t capable of that. You only liked to hurt others. Never yourself. Hoseok was fooling himself if he thought that this was for his revenge. You knew him and you were using him to your best advantage. And that’s the only thing that makes his grab your hips, pulling all the way out until the tip of his cockhead remains inside and then – he slams right back in. You’re almost howling and Hoseok is gripping your hair again, the silky tresses reminding him of memories he wanted to burn away before he pulls back your head harshly, bowing your back as his hips snap in to yours.

“I’ll tear you apart. Because that’s what you want right? You don’t want love. You want to hurt. And I’m going to make it hurt.” He’s sneering as he snaps hips in to you with each word while your cries accompany the already lewd sounds of skin on skin.

“I’m going to cum inside you. And you’re going to keep it in you until Namjoon wants to fuck. Do you understand me, y/n?” He swats your bottom harshly, making you yelp when you don’t respond at first.

“Y-Yes.”

“Yes what?” He slaps your ass again, the skin going crimson read and heating up as his fluid hips smack brutally against it again and again.

“Yes, sir. Hoseok!” He’s started circling your anus that was so well lubricated because of the creamy mess your pussy and his pre-leaking length had made. Hoseok was close and he needed to cum in you. He wasn’t sure what he was thinking with the alcohol still clouding his brain but he’s circling the tight ring until he can work a finger in.

“Fuck fuck fuck. Hoseok, i-it hurts.” Good. Good. I want you to fucking hurt. Even if it wasn’t the way he wanted to but this will have to suffice. But of course, after a few minutes of him slowly fucking a finger in to your ass – you were moaning already. Dripping and leaking all over his length more than ever and he knew you liked this. But you’ll never admit it. You never admitted anything. You lived your life in denial and somehow he was still so madly, insanely in love with you.

“That’s it baby,” the endearment slips him before he can stop it, knowing this was new to you as he fingers your ass while simultaneously pounding away at your cunt. And he’s close. So close to everything but you.

“I’m cumming h-hoseok I’m-” you don’t get to finish your sentence as you’re squirting on his thrusting cock with a loud shout like he’d just stabbed you a thousand times. But of course. It was the other way around. Maybe not literally but the pain was so much that it might as well be.

“That’s it… fuck,” he’s rubbing the globes of your ass, soothing the inflamed skin as he picks up pace, needing to finish while your walls were still clenching on his cock like a vice and soon enough, he’s buried himself in to you to the hilt and hot, white spurts of cum are pushed inside your battered, swollen and red cunt.

I love you. I love you.

His brain is chanting the phrase over and over while his mouth is only growling and grunting. It’s silent except for the loud breathing of the both of you. Catching your breath while you lay face down on the couch, facing towards the seat of the couch while Hoseok stood behind you.

“I hope happiness never finds you.” His whisper is soft. Sad and pathetic and vituperative. He can only hear you sniffle slightly because it’s so silent in the apartment.

You don’t say anything when he pulls out. You don’t say anything when he calls out your name, once. You don’t say anything when he zips himself up and walks out of the door, watching you not watch him as you lay facing away from the door. Away from him. And that’s it.

a/n: yeah. no part 2 because... this was written on a whim and im not too good with angst usually so hdbucibniuwrn let me know what you think? As always, thank you for reading :)

#bts smut #bts #jhope #hoseok x reader #hoseok fanfic #this is some heavy stuff i only read parts i was told to fix and i wanted to crawl under my bed and cry for my baby hoseok #he doesn't deserve this !!!!

[eksbdan-blog]

New Post has been published on https://passingbynehushtan.com/2019/10/31/man-atonement-sins-of-the-world/

How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World Through His Own Sacrifice? Only One Way. Part 4. The Man.

This is an article in a series. Please see:

How Can a Person Atone in a Sacrifice for the Sins of the World? Only One Way. Part 1. How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World By His Own Sacrifice? Only one way. Part 2. The Messianic Secret How Can a Man Atone for the Sins of the World Through His Own Sacrifice? Only one way. Part 3. Preparation for Sacrifice.

The Sins of the World, A Man and a Cross. How? Two Things

Now, this Messianic secret starts with the two elements I mentioned, which make up the entire image of the Cross: at its bare minimum, stripped of identity and context, a vertical piece of wood, and a man hanging on it.

As I implied before, we start with this by asking about the function of Jesus’s symbolic method: if this is the core, the central and vital symbol of the Christian message, and if Christianity has become a Holy or an evil organization, would we expect this one to reveal it? Yes, we would. Because it is of such value, this would represent a means of protecting the message from being pointedly attacked and lost to those who are always in the world looking for it represents a specific understanding of how redemption works.

I want to speak first on this nature of biblical symbolism as well its means of protection before this man and Cross represents a fundamental specific understanding of God’s mind. If the formal container of the meaning of the Cross is revelational, and this is invaluable, just as something about it which makes it as powerful revealed as powerful concealed, in the following way.

If a plan is said ordained by God, it not only illogical but blasphemous to assume this depiction of Christ on the Cross is different, or any less revelatory, than its meaning. The attachment of meaning is not gratuitous but as an irresistible consequence of the image.  The image in its primary function is for easy access to a precise meaning, which is God’s plan, but only within some mind with as unhypocritical a motive to see it as God’s motive is in preserving it from others.

This is why the message of the Cross is primarily one about the nature of morality because the whole display of the Cross is a spiritual movement to expose spiritual reality, not a physical movement for physical reality. If moral movement is spiritual, and the only kind that counts, I ask in what way would we best legally deal with it if not by our equitable, rational, and fair interpretation? Interpretation of a symbol depicting, whether we want to believe it or not, the single most pressing and implicating religious event in human history?

Why this must contain this deep meaning with life and death implications is because true revealed faith is no such thing if not disclosing of transcendent secrets. Christian people who insist that it is a revealed faith but not disposed toward treating these issues with the gravity that this category implies is not from the start engaging in morality. And for them to only admit that Christ on the Cross in the act follows the same lower form of morality is to admit it represents nothing more than something like “love” or “obedience” or “death.” To assume its accidental functionality or its intentional one of nothing more than another common symbol is the quintessential moral failure. I do not suggest that those who belong to God are only those who understand perfectly, but means that, through the resistant noise produced by these others, they want to, have an overarching concern for it and have enough despite the world’s downgrading.

The Academy finds it divisive and fundamentalist to bind morality and the handling of religious symbolism in this way. The tendency is to treat such symbols as merely incidental to its age and culture, making their meaning malleable, academic, and disposable. But this is no choice for moral spirituality if the claim is that God designed and delivers a kind of communication as a means of revealing his proprietary knowledge, which would be ageless by definition. No matter who you are, your responsibility is to assume the possibility that spiritual life is infinitely more important than physical life. Your ultimate function in life may be the examination and testing of the world faiths, which claim a special revelation from God. Your spiritual morality may be the only kind upon which qualifies any conception of spiritual existence after death. To proceed in, without bias, hypocrisy, and dissembling, that potential toward a decision.

A true revelatory document is one by definition hidden and revealed, with the former representing the symbol and the latter representing its meaning. If a claimed message from God rests only on your faith in some ancient sage’s confidence, and not on a received truth which he delivers from God and subsequently revealed as true historically, this is not a revelation. This the making of a divine symbol to mean another common symbol, not divine knowledge and meaning. God shows himself in some fashion to the subject, which is scriptural and direct and which manifests itself as a possible product only of the mind of God, not man. In reciprocation, you demonstrate the highest kind of morality by its honest handling, since God’s informational object of handling is the highest transcendent value, and the place of its processing is the most valuable dimension of the individual.

Downgrading Made Simple

I am sure most of you are aware after being exposed to the offered hermeneutical and interpretive choices of the World that there is continuously some attempt to retool biblical types, for example, into non-revelatory things. This retooling s an attempt to circumvent this original, unavoidable definition of morality into a kind of lower value. You lower the symbols means of demonstration in a lower place of expression so that when thinking about goodness, we can think of ourselves there without the threat of very harsh, implacable, interdimensional spiritual laws threatening us.

Moses’ serpent on the pole of Numbers 21, for example. The story is that this is not a display of a more significant and later intention of God, but only perhaps for Moses to give a superstitious people hope that God will protect them from serpent bites. Or, we hear, Christ in John 3 did not refer to this serpent on the pole as a type of him, and has no place in his talk with Nicodemus except Jesus just telling him to believe in God and get baptized truly. Or, Moses’ serpent stops at the meaning of “holiness under the appearance of sin.” Or, the Greeks borrowed the image of the serpent in the Staff of Asclepius, the symbol for medicine and healing, and the image means “true healing by God alone.”  Christ is “lifted up,” the serpent was “lifted up,” therefore “lifted up” means Christ raised as the cure for sin.

Do I have a problem with any of these? No, not superficially, except for the first and second. They are all the same interpretation, led by an insularity trying to take a meaning of the serpent on the pole only from a range of possibilities for the purpose of uncoiling and pacifying that serpent, so to speak. The serpent is, however, undomesticated forever, and not defanged unless it is allowed to speak for itself.

That irresistible reflex, an aversion to the idea of any particular thing hidden that may jump out, scare and threaten them, which leads their actions in first making it less threatening, is the problem of a priority of self in the face of truth. Who knows what, if they thought God were speaking certain instead of general things about us, he would say about what is really in our hearts? It’s a lot easier to handle the suggestion that “all those who have no faith can’t be saved” than it is “only those who have [Certain kind of faith here] will be.” Sin defines as a priority of fear of a relatively worthless loss over something of infinite value, so you change the language to avoid the clear threat of identifying against something Holy in which you have no visceral interest. At least “faith” remains open only to an unthreatening species.

We do this for the same reason that Vladimir Bukovsky, in his book Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, said that the West, particularly the liberal West, never really resisted the evil of the Soviet state, they were complicit.

“The movers and shakers of today have little interest in digging for the truth. Who knows what one may come up with? You may start out with the communists and end up with yourself.”1

In the church, the theologians of today have little interest in digging for the truth about real sin. Who knows with what might come up? You may start with Satan and end up with yourself.

The thought is that Jesus of the Cross is axiomatically a particular revelation of God’s plan and strategy of implementing it. It’s not optional for Christianity as a revealed faith but would crumble without it by the hands of those who must somehow place themselves in exclusive control of transcendent meaning so that the idea of God that occupies their thoughts does not haunt it as well.

That brings us to the why and how of the necessity of using something ambiguous for this particular revelation of God’s plan of redemption, but not vague for a certain, targeted few.

If you have something of value, particularly of the highest possible value, you don’t throw it into the street for anyone to pick up and exhaust according to their desires, but by some means, you put it away. If anyone thinks it’s as valuable and wants it, they must show their belief that it carries the approximate value that its provider ascribes. The key to this analogy is “desires,” so keep that in mind.

If you want a loan at the bank for a business project, you convince them that you know what you’re doing, that you see the value of money, that you already have some means in cash reserve for a possible slow start, show you have a familiarity with the work. You present a business plan to show that you know where you’re going. You may complain that the bank does not just empty its coffers and let it rain down over the city like a ticker-tape parade, or give it to you just because you want it, but the fact is that if you place a value on a thing you don’t treat it like trash, and you are not honest in expecting others to.

God’s currency is existential truth. “Truth” is the currency of our theology, but not “God’s truth” as we conceive it. “God” is one thing, and “truth” is another, and God’s truth is God’s revelation in a historical phenomenon of promise and fulfillment that forever establishes his exclusive authorship. In our theology, ‘God’s truth” means any kind of truth, biblical or not. “God” is therefore made a disposable and weak concept because there is a desire to think of it as unsupportable except by insular subjective and idiosyncratic motives.

Please go to the next page…

The world, including our theology, has access to “truth,” but this only appears to be a value, because it is not a concept formulated with an unavoidable transcendental attachment. The way the world handles the ultimate spiritual bank is they make their own currency, and their own bank, and loan it out to their own people, that don’t place upon it so harsh and strict qualifications.

The currency they exchange and spend is a boon to the world. It finances countless books, lectures, seminaries, emotions, churches, and pious intentions very successfully and lavishly, but only because they can’t get into the other transcendent bank and use its currency of truth, which has a firewall around it which keeps them out.

The only way a real revelation of God is of possible success when given into a world with a majority of people hostile or apathetic to it, but still for a small number who are receptive, is to make sure it gets through to the right people and hide it from the wrong people. The bank hides its money by putting it into safe. With God, he protects it from the wrong people by baiting them with what they really love. Those are the things of the world, mystery, puzzles, work, tantalizing questions, and generally a possible view of transcendence taken for the exclusive service to them and their desires. It superficially looks like the real thing, giving a feeling that they are holding something ultimate, but the comparison stops there. At the same time, this symbol that can signify carnal things to carnal concerns, having the competence to appear holy but is not, is for those looking for God also symbols of things that pertain to eternity, truth, spiritual law, God’s mind and the provably miraculous. The one honestly looking for truth gets it, which is entirely abstract but of life and death importance, and the one looking for other things gets it, which can only fuel carnal ambition and die with them. This accomplishes two things.

One, God’s Word, his message, is preserved untouched for those that will receive it since the carnal majority never know it in order to mount a targeted effort to demagogue it too vigorously and widely. Two, God’s Word remains as a foundation for the growth of a larger religion not divinely motivated, but which reveres the “Bible” idea. In this, its members unconsciously create a much broader, global protective context in which that Word is preserved and distributed. Every biblical symbol reflects this same strategy.

There is a temptation to ask if this truth is of ultimate value to everyone, why is it not given unambiguously? After all, if an entire people are dying of some new virus and you have a sure-fire cure, love means offering it freely. Why does the revelation have to be symbolic at all? This is a persistent and loud complaint of liberal, universalist sects and atheists.

I remind you that the spiritual body is not the physical body, and a physical drug is not a spiritual one. The spiritual body, as the physical body, is a body effected by the accumulated attitudes and actions as a result of free will with respect to that life. But the spiritual body is by definition free will, history, reason, love, attitude, and belief itself, not sloughed off in death but remaining to stand as an indelible witness of that person as the being in himself, not the beings corporeal representation device. The cure for spiritual sickness is spiritual and will metabolize successfully only by working in nuclear agreement with the spiritual body of its introduction. Since the spirit is itself a decision and its effects, not only a possible reflection of it, a cure passed out indiscriminately is one that assumes that the spirit will benefit from it like the physical cure, without the synergistic cooperation of the receiver. In all due respect to Calvinists, this is then a denial that we even have spirits (or souls if you will), defined as the strongest and most identifying part of an individual which has to power and responsibility to accept or deny reality. To such an entity, you compassionately make the drug freely accessible. But since it is a transcendent truth, information, and not a thing, it can’t work in a spiritual body which treats it as a medical talisman, but only by being in the sense of a receptor to what it already is. If not, your just an antibody to the divine antibody.

By this same logic, God coming down and appearing on the White House Lawn before CNN cameras is not compassion, it’s the forcing of truth upon the receiver and the removal of his free will in accepting it. It’s not respect, its infantilizing, or thinking of people as programmable androids. In that case, no one can reject God. It leaves no room for your moral conscience to move in the process of search, discovery, and commitment. As such, it gives the holiest aspect of God, his sovereign non-contingency, and inter-dimensionality, which makes him inaccessible except through a mediator, an inconsequential aspect, and, therefore, just a notion.

We are discussing a moral decision and a moral choice made for your spirit when that is a most important act you can perform, emblematic of the soul, is not your moral decision, nor a moral decision of the one who makes it for you.

But if this depiction of Christ on the Cross represents God’s plan of redemption, and the plan demarcates fundamental evil from good, the depiction’s meaning has to be as earth-shattering by its true reveal as it is protective of it. The two essential elements of the Cross of Christ begin with this: rather than an answer, I ask if the Cross is first showing as a question and a moral choice between two things?

This is where it really gets interesting. But if your fear snakes override your need for the truth, don’t even try to follow me from here.

The Man: Sin and Righteousness

There is a cross. There is a man on the cross.

The man, again, tortured and murdered by hanging on this cross. His life, draining away. Bound, affixed, tied to this wood. Abused, crushed, and dying. Finally, he dies by hanging on this device of murder.

Our time now will center on this man. Who must he be a sacrifice for the sin of the world?

The act is not transcendently redemptive if it is not, first and foremost, a revelation. I think we have sufficiently exhausted this. We must then conclude the consequences of you taking this as something primarily designed to be mysterious with benefits that reach out to the individual only from Heaven is a full-frontal coup to its designed power and the crushing of the message.

As I have just discussed, sin is the forcing of a spiritual cure into the function of a physical, “evil” one, that one receives and holds without the necessity of moral reflection, with it giving healing benefits automatically. This is called talismanism, what the ancients called idolatry. Many of us readily insist that before the act of the Cross and the Man can in any way be redemptive, it must be known and believed. But taking the meaning of the Man and the meaning of the Cross as God/Jesus/Savior/Redeemer on burden/death/sacrifice/love are weasel words. They are designed to accommodate the necessity of divine meaning with the ardent love of a religious device transmitting virtue to a person without necessarily any depth of understanding, love, and meditated engagement. These words are conceptual, not revelatory. What would be revelatory is when the meaning reduces to a symbol concept so powerful that it then forces a signification which then stands for the end of the signification process, not the beginning or middle. It is ending in the thing-in-itself, not its mediator. It is ending in a piece of knowledge that could not have come from the human mind. Those words are infinitely re-assignable to another vulnerable concept, such as “political activist,” “radical rabbi,” “hippy saint,” “persecution,” “lover of people,” “ultimate ritual sacrifice,” etc. None of these stops a possible chain of signification because “truth” has arrived by the symbol’s instrumentality. We want an idea that is revelatory outside of the mind’s resources in an engagement with common words.

For this mediation to succeed in producing a revelation, there are some theological keywords for scoping out that apply to this man: righteousness and morality, lust, and sin.  He has to be righteous and not carnal, but by the meaning of carnality and sin, because righteousness is defined by what it is not. We are not going to offer “righteousness,” for example, and leave its definition open or rendered to “lawful obedience” or some similar. The working definition has to be consistent with the spiritual receiver in the act of free will in wanting and choosing to see some revelation which, like the motive, is alien to carnal thought and expectation.

After this, we consider the display of righteousness and sin in the scene of a man hanging on a Cross, which is the display of sacrifice for world sin.

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Now, according to the Bible, some are spiritual and those carnal. Those righteous and unrighteous. God hearers, and God resisters. The Man is one of these, perhaps the righteous, perhaps a deceiver. For him to deliver a revelation for all, it is in the sense of being offered to all but not accepted by all. But to be unrighteously accepted or denied, it will have to be one that is as accessible as it is obscure to all, depending upon the kind of person who is in view. The Man on the Cross is a carnal resister to some and a canal encourager to others. One revelation is for the righteous, and one hidden for the unrighteous.

If he is a sacrifice for the sin of the world in the sense of its possible cure, it is evident that the agent of this task can’t be unrighteous carnal and sinful. He has to be righteous in a way that is not human but possible for humans, long before you consider whether such a sacrifice is possible. But what do these concepts mean?

Well, there is an ultimate sense of these ideas and a common one, just as there is an open and easily appropriated signification to this sacrifice and a closed but accessible one.

The common-sense version is that righteousness is doing things according to a moral code. Unrighteous is doing otherwise.  Carnality is acting and thinking in accord with the world and its devices and rewards, and spirituality is doing things in agreement with God’s world.

If this is so, the moral code is according to that of this other world. Not in law or obedience touted as given from another world, or a code which itself does not have such a transcendent mark. This Man’s moral code, which should be ours, is one impossible for us to obey because the standard is too high for us, or else we could do it ourselves. But this can’t be primarily physical obedience because that is not an obedience of a certain reflection of the spiritual body in itself, not necessarily carried out by the moral spirit itself, but can just as well thought by anti-spiritual motives. The moral code and its obedience have to be of exclusive alien origin and motivation, or else it can’t stand as a witness to a genuinely spiritual state. This origin is not a matter only of faith and personal will. The origin displays openly or will not be an available universal choice, but only for those that are looking for righteousness as a personal attribute of spiritual superiority and functioning selfishly as Hell insurance. A transcendent “righteousness” for the Man on the Cross is not ultimately obeying then a “moral code,” implying any kind, possibly within our common understanding and ability. It implies a specific spiritual, moral code that speaks to the morally intended spirit God’s nature and existence, so the receiver of this Man’s morality obeys it in its right place and way. Not a literal obedience, as in the Man’s sacrifice, but from the standpoint of a witness to it, and a returned faith in its truth.

Some of these ideas are easy. Righteousness means being spiritual, and that means following the moral code laid down by the God of the Spirit, of that other dimension above the temporal. But it’s only easy if they are referring to a conceptual object of the other world, and we have far from finished defining these keywords up to a particular species of transcendence.

Words Mean Things

Lets just back up and think about the difference between mere ideas and predicates as applied to the sinful way that we use spiritual language in a carnal fashion.

I am saying that any working idea of “righteousness” and “sin,” for example, is not represented by a concept which points to predicating knowledge, which is so open that it allows another symbol for it, which is opaque by definition. Both the concept and the predicate must be transcendent, with the concept having the ability to only refer to the divine knowledge, for which it cannot point higher.

A conceptual object means “idea.” An idea is a symbol for a range and quality of knowledge, data, information which necessitates representation and mediation to and between its giver and its receiver. Since this is about God’s ultimate ideas, then it’s between God’s mind and ours. There is something that these words mean that originates in God’s mind and will. Saying that, for example, “righteousness” will predicate and signify by knowledge, by information, by truth defined as “obedience to God,” can’t be the end of this signification search back to that ultimate, it’s just a nudge in that general direction. This means that that the definition is still carnal, still in the world, still lacking connection to God. If we are talking about discreet categories of knowledge, then the meaning of our words that refer to something other than our natural, carnal sense of “knowledge” has to be discreet, or else you are taking ideas which lead only toward and not into it. If so, it must be an example of a world completely outside of mind, the emotions, and the systems which this world invents and uses.

Let me give you an example. You are an auto-mechanic and trained as such, but you want to become a neural surgeon because you’re good with your hands, and you want more money. You can’t become one just because you want it. Let’s say that Joe wants a Doctorate in neural medicine. Still, he figures that the best way of doing this is to read a medical textbook and memorize all the surgical vocabulary and their definitions. Although he is unaware of how to use any of these words in a general conversation on the chemistry, surgical techniques, and biology of the profession, he goes to the medical college and starts composing random sentences and conversing with the professors using all this terminology anyway, expecting that they will accept him as a surgeon and grant him a degree.

If he thinks this possible, he would be quite disrespectful of both the faculty, the profession, knowledge, and generally of reality itself. His aim is more money. He has in real interest in the business, or else he would commit himself to learn it properly and thoroughly. Does he deserve a doctorate in neural medicine based upon his handling of its sacred ideas?

If the attitude and the actions of the mechanic are an indication of his willful and selfish use of higher things in an attempt only to take them for himself, this is unrighteousness. Righteousness shows by pursuing and having higher things. Any talk or actions you engage in with those higher things, as irrational as it is, is but an attempt to steal them for yourself by your superficial attachments.

You might say that this is an incompetent and absurd analogy. First, the idea that you have to know all the technical jargon of theology to go to heaven? And how can I use such an insane and clueless person like this, whom you would never find in the real world? But that’s why I used it because the insanity in how we use transcendent keywords is even more insane and irrational than this auto-mechanic.

No, of course, you don’t have to know all the jargon. But I’m not talking about “biblical pericope” and “hypostatic union.” I’m talking about “righteousness,” “spirit,” and “sin,” fundamental things even a child could handle. The auto-mechanic is not really using medical terms to use in his fake-out that you would likely only get from a medical textbook. He actually thinks that if `he uses “body” and “blood” and “vein,” this is enough to qualify for a surgeon. If not a surgeon, but a theologian, this level of depth is also enough, with the open and unqualified use of such as “faith,” “sin” and “righteousness. So my example is really, really crazy and unlikely except within the spatio-temporal world that uses transcendent things only to pretend its pursuit, love, and learning. Our world of spiritual hypocrisy.

No, if you’re going to use a word, no matter how basic, that refers to the other world, you have to use still another word, or reformat that idea so that it includes and is qualified by something specific that could have only come from that world and is proof of it. You can’t use “duodenal mucosal resurfacing” in a sentence, or use “righteousness” in a sentence, and be said to understand this stuff.  You need a medical or theological qualifier, or you need to keep talking.

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For a theologian, the distance between you and any of your transcendent authorities is naturally much greater than you and the medical certification board when not certified by them, no matter how unqualified you are for their degree. If you’re a theologian, the spatial distance between a simple idea representing a proposed transcendent quality or property and a demonstration that shows the validity of that idea is much greater than “Duodenal mucosal resurfacing” and the case studies in France that demonstrate its effectiveness and safety for the procedures release for the general population. In the context of faith, it is way easier to use “God” without “of prophecy” or ”word,” His transcendent demonstrations, than using “DMR” without referral to its proof-of-concept, “Revita DMR trials.” Without referral to its physical demonstration in a certain paper to the FDA for the purpose of instilling confidence in for that procedures certification and implementation. The theological one is easier because transcendence is naturally far from the heart, instantly thought of cursively and with its unreality leading its apprehension. Its unreality or irrelevance is influencing you more than its proof-of-concept if you use a technical term as a general one.

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Since this is the case, you have to be ten times more careful in how you talk about it if you want to be qualified as a theologian and not a scientist at best, and a huckster or worse. Not to mention your qualification as having a real faith issued/caused/made available by a transcendent authority.

Theology is not the study of God’s theology because “theo” means “God,” but because a study of God is only legitimate if God’s revealed qualities and acts from that dimension in that which is not God is the focus of the study. “God” does not stand alone as a concept, but it implies another dimension that pertains to his fact to be an industry above mere fantasy. “God,” the idea, is an unspoken but highly qualified one. Theology is then the use of words that refer to transcendence in a way that demonstrates God to yourself and others that He is known and understood by the greatest examples of his transcendence. You can’t use “righteousness” and say it means something like “obedience to God’s moral law” and call this proper theology,  because “obedience,” “God,” “moral” and “law” can exist either explicitly or implicitly with no connection to a particular and ultimate example of them which is not from here. They are ideas, they are not divine predicates in a real and objective demonstration of God, and if you don’t have that you don’t have any God to faith, except faith in a nice idea.

Am I beating a dead horse now? Ok, let’s take this forward.

“God” and his Reveal

You might not have thought about it, but the Bible follows all this almost exclusively. The Bible is written not like a clueless, emotional, and groundless tout, no matter how much atheists and far-leftists want to think of it as such. The Hebrew Bible and its combined New Testament are entirely alone among this type of literature in its stubborn insistence that it’s a proven revelation, not just the wishful thinking of its subjectively inspired human authors.

Isaiah 48:3. “I have declared the former things from the beginning; and they went forth out of my mouth, and I shewed them; I did them suddenly, and they came to pass. 4 Because I knew that thou art obstinate, and thy neck is an iron sinew, and thy brow brass; 5 I have even from the beginning declared it to thee; before it came to pass I shewed it thee: lest thou shouldest say, Mine idol hath done them, and my graven image, and my molten image, hath commanded them.6 Thou hast heard, see all this; and will not ye declare it? I have shewed thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou didst not know them. 7 They are created now, and not from the beginning; even before the day when thou heardest them not; lest thou shouldest say, Behold, I knew them. 8 Yea, thou heardest not; yea, thou knewest not; yea, from that time that thine ear was not opened: for I knew that thou wouldest deal very treacherously, and wast called a transgressor from the womb.”

You can confirm that fact even in its most casual use of its key nouns. Its use of, for example, “God,” is always with an explicit or at least strongly implied qualifier to his informational demonstration in the world, or his specific connection to his domain, which distinguishes him from the unrevealed and pagan gods around.

The reason why we are going down this road when I’m supposed to be talking about the Man on the Cross and that display of sin and righteousness is that I’m going to suggest that the miraculous qualifiers that are associated with “God” are much stronger for the association of both the Man on the Cross and the Cross itself. This will show how the meaning was tossed out after the1st century, and why the church is being destroyed by those who are continually let in that have no interest in this whatsoever.

“God of Heaven” (Ge 24:3,7; 2Ch 36:23; Ezr 1:2; Ezr 5:11-12; Ezr 6:9-10; Ezr 7:12,21,23; Ne 1:4-5; Ne 2:4,20; Ps 136:26; Da 2:18-19,37,44; Jon 1:9; Re 11:13; Re 16:11)

“God of Abraham” (Ge 26:24; Ge 28:13; Ge 31:42,53; Ex 3:6,15-16; Ex 4:5; 1Ki 18:36; 1Ch 29:18; 2Ch 30:6; Ps 47:9; Mt 22:32; Mr 12:26; Lu 20:37; Ac 3:13; Ac 7:32)

“God of the Hebrews” (Ex 3:18; Ex 5:3; Ex 7:16; Ex 9:1,13; Ex 10:3)

“God of Israel” (201 instances)

“God of hosts” (39 instances)

“God of truth” (De 32:4; Ps 31:5; Isa 65:16)

God of knowledge (1Sa 2:3)

God of glory (Ps 29:3; Ac 7:2)

God of the spirits of all flesh (Nu 16:22; Nu 27:16)

This is a very truncated list. It does not even come close to representing the point. Search for “Lord of,” with such as results as “Lord of Hosts” (244 instances).

References to Abraham or Israel are references not just to people or collectives, but more importantly, to precisely what God told them and what God subsequently did with them. They are this equivalent. God revealed himself to them, either by the personal presence or by disclosure of that about him and his mind, which only he could know and which proves it.

I point out that your revelation of yourself to another person must go far beyond your bodily presence and incidental actions as this disclosure of who you are. The body is a superficial thing relative to your spirit, and you can have a limitless number of false readings by it. What really does it is when you speak. You relate your beliefs, feelings, history, intentions. A police report also shows a lot and the testimony of others. Therefore, it’s mostly by information carried on spoken words or in documents, not only by sight.

For Abraham and the rest, when a Jew said “Abraham,” they were not thinking just about a guy that is the physical progenitor of the Jewish race. They thought about his connection to God in a relationship in which the two spoke to each other, with Abraham receiving a revelation about God concerning the future of humankind. Abraham talked to God, who promised him physical and spiritual progeny more numerous than the stars of heaven. To Israel, that God brought them by Moses out of Egypt by signs and wonders, sustaining them by the same agency in the desert. They were not fed by “water” or by “manna” or by “quail,” but by supernaturally produced instances of them. God finally brought them into the “promised land,” the land of prophetic promise, and through the miracle of the parting of the Jordan River.

Remember this, because it is absolutely essential to understand the plan of redemption in which we are now supposed to be partakers.  Don’t forget the image of Christ on the Cross when I start to talk about how these things are written this way for a purpose, having the ability to be turned a carnal way or a particular spiritual way, which is the presentation to you of a test by a kind of question.

When the New Testament as a whole comes into view, this question is what its all about, with an answer mostly to what God is and where God is by a fulfilled demonstration of himself.

God of great price, God of peace, God of all grace, God of the holy prophets, God of our Lord Jesus Christ, God of all comfort, God of patience and consolation, God of the living (not of the dead), God of my salvation, Kingdom of God/Heaven. God (Father) of lights.

The Old Testament references often refer to a prophet, an agent of God to whom he spoke and gave a revelation of the future. This includes Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, Moses, and the rest. Then the most frequent mention of them is to their collective children, Israel, the Hebrews, who are the people of prophetic promise.

When we get to the New Testament where is related to a momentous fulfillment and representation of God’s existence, nature, and plan, you can see that a lot of these informational qualifiers are referring specifically to a past promise and its revelation. A realization of a supernatural oath, which forms a context for such ideas as grace, patience, salvation, peace, sin, and righteousness. These are not defined arbitrarily. Each one refers to a particular line of biblical evidence of God’s work, what he has realized and revealed, not only “God.” With each instance, the expositor can open scripture and show you what God has done to give peace, save, build a kingdom, give patience and consolation, which are supernatural events of history toward the outworking of his plan of redemption.

But the greatest is this:

God’s Son

What must be remembered here is that all of these informational qualifiers of the God concept are the product of the Messiah and for the Messiah. Not one of them is attributed directly to a “God” who is only a concept but only to a God who is revealed in the flesh. Messiah is the revelation of God in the flesh. Literally, God’s promise, his prophetic utterances to the Prophets, come true. This looks a lot like this necessary dichotomy of idea and demonstration of which have spoken. It also looks a lot like a man and a Cross.

“Man” is an idea. Even “Messiah,” “Christ,” and “Jesus” is an idea. What God did is not an idea. It’s not the token or representation of reality; it is reality, what the Bible calls “Truth.” You cant use the concept without the reality, or else you have an uncontrolled idea given to carnal culture to redefine according to its wishes. “God’s Son” is a concept, but the concept is qualified with a demonstrative predicate, and like ‘Abraham,” it is put to faith as the equivalent of God himself and identically for God’s Son himself.

1.Moscow in. Vladimir Bukovsky 1942-2019. Vladimir Bukovsky 1942-2019. https://www.vladimirbukovsky.com/judgment-in-moscow. Published 2019. Accessed November 18, 2019. ↩

[gibsongirlselections]

Rod Serling Couldn’t Have Predicted This Twilight Zone

Screenwriter and Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, who died 45 years ago on June 28, was a shrewd appraiser of human behavior and of the American cultural milieu. But could he really have predicted what the country is going through right now? Maybe, maybe not.

But it’s doubly disappointing that SyFy Channel has decided to forgo it’s annual Independence Day Twilight Zone marathon this year—we could really use the fun house mirror turned on ourselves, to remind us of ourselves, during this strange time of both social isolation and civil strife. It’s somehow comforting to settle in for a TZ episode and sense the continuity: while many of our fellow human beings are craven, crass, untrustworthy and downright unsavory, there is always hope and transcendence, of speaking one’s mind, of seeking the truth. Of good people doing the right thing.

There are a number of episodes that writers have noted are especially prescient. One, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” (1960) is about a pleasantville neighborhood, the kind Donald Fagan sings about in “I.G.Y”…the future looks bright…on his seminal album The Nightfly. Dads washing cars, moms cooking, kids buying ice cream from a man in white pressed pants on the corner. A bright light—and then—all the streetlights and appliances go dead. 

Then a teenager touches it all off with a comic book kernel of fear: it’s the aliens. And they may be among us. He might as well be the alien himself, because his words spark such dissembling, neighbors turning on neighbors, glass breaking, a man shot. It’s savage. One mild-tempered character pleads, “let’s not be a mob!” but the mob takes off without him.

Two aliens sit far up on a ridge by their spaceship. When deprived of power, says one, “(humans) pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and it’s themselves. All we need do is sit back—and watch.”

The old divide and conquer. Serling, who wrote the episode, was particularly pessimistic, but we can see today how much this kind of scapegoat hysteria works: neighbors literally turning on neighbors over not wearing masks, demanding that people wear masks, so-called Karens who call the cops, Karen-hunters stalking middle-aged women with cell phone cameras, Nextdoor posts that snitch on teenagers congregating in the park, runners breathing hard without masks on the bike path, chalk-writing in the street. The very worst is the shopkeepers and workers harangued, assaulted and harassed while doing their jobs during COVID, or beaten and looted during recent violence in our cities.

We can also sense familiarity in “The Obsolete Man,” (1961) in which a future fascist state arbitrarily decides who is essential or not, and if the latter, liquidation. “Like every one of the super states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace,” Serling informs us in the opening narration.

 Romney Wordsworth is a librarian in this state. The chancellor is in charge of pending “obsolescence.”  

“Since there are no more books, Mr. Wordsworth, there are no more libraries. The field investigators in your sector have classified you as obsolete,” announces the chancellor from a high perch, judge and jury.

He goes on: 

“And of course it follows that there is very little call for the services of a librarian. Case in point: A minister. A minister would tell us that his function is that of preaching the word of God. And, of course, it follows that since the State has proven that there is no God, that would make the function of a minister somewhat academic, as well.”

“Lie! No man is obsolete!” Wordsworth roars back. “I am nothing more than a reminder to you that you cannot destroy truth by burning pages!”

The chancellor gets his comeuppance in the end, as the little librarian, played by the always capable Burgess Meredith, cleverly shows that the state, like all tyrannies, is brittle, and will eat its own to survive. The chancellor is later attacked by the rabid brown-shirted mob after he himself is declared, “obsolete.” 

For Serling, it is simple, “any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man—that state is obsolete.” 

It is easy to make the connections to today’s “burning” of history, of statues set aflame, flung down, disappeared. An ever growing mob-like organism fueled by the backlash against police violence, erupting racial fury and toxic self-righteousness, seems to think that by vanquishing symbols of the past, pushing them down the “memory hole,” we will erase the injustices of their time, but as Wordsworth said, “if i speak one thought aloud that thought lives, even after I am shoveled into my grave!” 

James Pinkerton noted in these pages this week, that the stories of the men whose visages in the form of Congressional portraits or statues are being tossed away, will indeed live on. Yes, but in the endeavoring to vanish them all, we risk making it too difficult to remember, for our children to learn from the mistakes of the past. If the mob is strong enough it will be successful in supplanting the old and creating a new society that is more fragile, more authoritarian, prevailing over a spoon-fed, infantile populace. Just look at Communist China today, a mere half-century after the cultural revolution set out to “destroy” that country’s history. There is a reason that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four is not banned there, but any review or analysis comparing it to modern China, is.  

But to a young Rod Serling in 1959, he could not have conceived that it would be the progeny of the counterculture that was just awakening with the dawn of the New Frontier that would be the very thing he prophesied in “Monsters Are Due On Maple Street,” “Obsolete Man” and a handful of other Orwell-inspired episodes. 

While conservatives see the counterculture as the beginning of the end of American civilization, what Patrick Deneen has called the failure of liberalism, in TZ’s time (1959-64) it meant something quite different. There was a growing appreciation afoot for independent thinking, of imagination over conformity and the stifling conventions of American middle class life (authors like Ray Bradbury were opening up fissures with their own work on this subject), which included the dumbing down and homogeneity of society spurred on by mass consumption and technology. It also meant pushing back on suburban malaise, industrial pollution, and racial segregation. It especially eschewed Big Brother and the previous decades of snitches, spooks, and black lists. They had enough of war.

Things were happening and seeping into the prime time line-up. Serling was far from “alternative,” but TZ was reflecting some exciting things happening at the margins, and the series mainstreamed these issues enough for the entire family to embrace.

It’s cliche to say things were simpler then—they weren’t. There were just different monsters under the bed and enemies outside the garden door. As we know, things got carried away, and social movements that were supposed to make people more free and equal seem to be ceding control to the extremes, which focus more on control, retribution, payback. Instead of “coming together” as The Beatles implored, we got more tribal. Today, instead of a marketplace of ideas and open debate, news organizations are caving to the prevailing winds and deciding what is and what isn’t in the “sphere of consensus” or “legitimate” topics of conversation. In other words, deciding what we read, watch, and how we are supposed to think. A “cancel culture” has made sure that those who do not conform, even on their own side, are liquidated.

One thinks it would be difficult for the Serling of 1960 to have anticipated any of this. In his view, the burgeoning societal shift was rooted in the values of the Declaration of Independence: the dignity of the human being, liberty, and equality. Maybe when he died in 1975 he was already seeing the project going in an unanticipated direction, what conservatives would say, “off the rails.” Decades later, the landscape is unrecognizable, and it really feels like we are on a precipice, between the America we knew and something looking like Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Maybe at last, as Serling would say, we are truly entering into…the Twilight Zone.

  The post Rod Serling Couldn’t Have Predicted <i>This</i> Twilight Zone appeared first on The American Conservative.

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Of the Silmarils and the Unrest of the Noldor

In that time were made those things that afterwards were most renowned of all the works of the Elves. For Feanor, being come to his full might, was filled with a new thought, or it may be that some shadow of foreknowledge came to him of the doom that drew near; and he pondered how the light of the Trees, the glory of the Blessed Realm, might be preserved imperishable. Then he began a long and secret labour, and he summoned all his lore, and his power, and his subtle skill; and at the end of all he made the Silmarils. As three great Jewels they were in form. But not until the End, when Feanor shall return who perished ere the Sun was made, and sits now in the Halls of Awaiting and comes no more among his kin; not until the Sun passes and the Moon falls, shall it be known of what substance they were made. Like the crystal of diamonds it appeared, and yet was more strong than adamant, so that no violence could mar it or break it within the Kingdom of Arda. Yet that crystal was to the Silmarils but as is the body to the Children of Iluvatar: the house of its inner fire, that is within it and yet in all parts of it, and is its life. And the inner fire of the Silmarils Feanor made of the blended light of the Trees of Valinor, which lives in them yet, though the Trees have long withered and shine no more. Therefore even in the darkness of the deepest treasury the Silmarils of their own radiance shone like the stars of Varda; and yet, as were they indeed living things, they rejoiced in light and received it and gave it back in hues more marvellous than before. All who dwelt in Aman were filled with wonder and delight at the work of Feanor. And Varda hallowed the Silmarils, so that thereafter no mortal flesh, nor hands unclean, nor anything of evil will might touch them, but it was scorched and withered; and Mandos foretold that the fates of Arda, earth, sea, and air, lay locked within them. The heart of Feanor was fast bound to these things that he himself had made. Then Melkor lusted for the Silmarils, and the very memory of their radiance was a gnawing fire in his heart. From that time forth, inflamed by this desire, he sought ever more eagerly how he should destroy Feanor and end the friendship of the Valar and the Elves; but he dissembled his purposes with cunning, and nothing of his malice could yet be seen in the semblance that he wore. Long was he at work, and slow at first and barren was his labour. But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed while others reap and sow in his stead. Ever Melkor found some ears that would heed him, and some tongues that would enlarge what they had heard; and his lies passed from friend to friend, as secrets of which the knowledge proves the teller wise. Bitterly did the Noldor atone for the folly of their open ears in the days that followed after. When he saw that many leaned towards him, Melkor would often walk among them, and amid his fair words others were woven, so subtly that many who heard them believed in recollection that they arose from their own thought. Visions he would conjure in their hearts of the mighty realms that they could have ruled at their own will, in power and freedom in the East; and then whispers went abroad that the Valar had brought the Eldar to Aman because of their jealousy, fearing that the beauty of the Quendi and the makers' power that Iluvatar had bequeathed to them would grow too great for the Valar to govern, as the Elves waxed and spread over the wide lands of the world. In those days, moreover, though the Valar knew indeed of the coming of Men that were to be, the Elves as yet knew naught of it; for Manwe had not revealed it to them. Bat Melkor spoke to them in secret of Mortal Men, seeing how the silence of the Valar might be twisted to evil. Little he knew yet concerning Men, for engrossed with his own thought in the Music he had paid small heed to the Third Theme of Iluvatar; but now the whisper went among the Elves that Manwe held them captive, so that Men might come and supplant them in the kingdoms of Middle-earth, for the Valar saw that they might more easily sway this short-lived and weaker race, defrauding the Elves of the inheritance of Iluvatar. Small truth was there in this, and little have the Valar ever prevailed to sway the wills of Men; but many of the Noldor believed, or half believed, the evil words. Thus ere the Valar were aware, the peace of Valinor was poisoned. The Noldor began to murmur against them, and many became filled with pride, forgetting how much of what they had and knew came to them in gift from the Valar. Fiercest burned the new flame of desire for freedom and wider realms in the eager heart of Feanor; and Melkor laughed in his secrecy, for to that mark his lies had been addressed, hating Feanor above all, and lusting ever for the Silmarils. But these he was not suffered to approach; for though at great feasts Feanor would wear them, blazing on his brow, at other times they were guarded close, locked in the deep chambers of his hoard in Tirion. For Feanor began to love the Silmarils with a greedy love, and grudged the sight of them to all save to his father and his seven sons; he seldom remembered now that the light within them was not his own. High princes were Feanor and Fingolfin, the elder sons of Finwe, honoured by all in Aman; but now they grew proud and jealous each of his rights and his possessions. Then Melkor set new lies abroad in Eldamar, and whispers came to Feanor that Fingolfin and his sons were plotting to usurp the leadership of Finwe and of the elder line of Feanor, and to supplant them by the leave of the Valar; for the Valar were ill-pleased that the Silmarils lay in Tirion and were not committed to their keeping. But to Fingolfin and Finarfin it was said: 'Beware! Small love has the proud son of Miriel ever had for the children of Indis. Now he has become great, and he has his father in his hand. It will not be long before he drives you forth from Tuna!' And when Melkor saw that these lies were smouldering, and that pride and anger were awake among the Noldor, he spoke to them concerning weapons; and in that time the Noldor began the smithying of swords and axes and spears. Shields also they made displaying the tokens of many houses and kindreds that vied one with another; and these only they wore abroad, and of other weapons they did not speak, for each believed that he alone had received the warning. And Feanor made a secret forge, of which not even Melkor was aware; and there he tempered fell swords for himself and for his sons, and made tall helms with plumes of red. Bitterly did Mahtan rue the day when he taught to the husband of Nerdanel all the lore of metalwork that he had learned of Aule. Thus with lies and evil whisperings and false counsel Melkor kindled the hearts of the Noldor to strife; and of their quarrels came at length the end of the high days of Valinor and the evening of its ancient glory. For Feanor now began openly to speak words of rebellion against the Valar, crying aloud that he would depart from Valinor back to the world without, and would deliver the Noldor from thraldom, if they would follow him. Then there was great unrest in Tirion, and Finwe was troubled; and he summoned all his lords to council. But Fingolfin hastened to his halls and stood before him, saying: 'King and father, wilt thou not restrain the pride of our brother, Curufinwe, who is called the Spirit of Fire, all too truly? By what right does he speak for all our people, as if he were King? Thou it was who long ago spoke before the Quendi, bidding them accept the summons of the Valar to Aman. Thou it was that led the Noldor upon the long road through the perils of Middle-earth to the light of Eldamar. If thou dost not now repent of it, two sons at least thou hast to honour thy words.' But even as Fingolfin spoke, Feanor strode into the chamber, and he was fully armed: his high helm upon his head, and at his side a mighty sword. 'So it is, even as I guessed,' he said. 'My half-brother would be before me with my father, in this as in all other matters.' Then turning upon Fingolfin he drew his sword, crying: 'Get thee gone, and take thy due place!' Fingolfin bowed before Finwe, and without word or glance to Feanor he went from the chamber. But Feanor followed him, and at the door of the king's house he stayed him; and the point of his bright sword he set against Fingolfin's breast 'See, half-brother!' he said. 'This is sharper than thy tongue. Try but once more to usurp my place and the love of my father, and maybe it will rid the Noldor of one who seeks to be the master of thralls.' These words were heard by many, for the house of Finwe was in the great square beneath the Mindon; but again Fingolfin made no answer, and passing through the throng in silence he went to seek Finarfin his brother. Now the unrest of the Noldor was not indeed hidden from the Valar, but its seed had been sown in the dark; and therefore, since Feanor first spoke openly against them, they judged that he was the mover of discontent, being eminent in self-will and arrogance, though all the Noldor had become proud. And Manwe was grieved, but he watched and said no word. The Valar had brought the Eldar to their land freely, to dwell or to depart; and though they might judge departure to be folly, they might not restrain them from it. But now the deeds of Feanor could not be passed over, and the Valar were angered and dismayed; and he was summoned to appear before them at the gates of Valmar, to answer for all his words and deeds. There also were summoned all others who had any part in this matter, or any knowledge of it; and Feanor standing before Mandos in the Ring of Doom was commanded to answer all that was asked of him. Then at last the root was laid bare, and the malice of Melkor revealed; and straightway Tulkas left the council to lay hands upon him and bring him again to judgement. But Feanor was not held guiltless, for he it was that had broken the peace of Valinor and drawn his sword upon his kinsman; and Mandos said to him: 'Thou speakest of thraldom. If thraldom it be, thou canst not escape it; for Manwe is King of Arda, and not of Aman only. And this deed was unlawful, whether in Aman or not in Aman. Therefore this doom is now made: for twelve years thou shall leave Tirion where this threat was uttered. In that time take counsel with thyself, and remember who and what thou art. But after that time this matter shall be set in peace and held redressed, if others will release thee.' Then Fingolfin said: 'I will release my brother.' But Feanor spoke no word in answer, standing silent before the Valar. Then he turned and left the council, and departed from Valmar. With him into banishment went his seven sons, and northward in Valinor they made a strong place and treasury in the hills; and there at Formenos a multitude of gems were laid in hoard, and weapons also, and the Silmarils were shut in a chamber of iron. Thither also came Finwe the King, because of the love that he bore to Feanor; and Fingolfin ruled the Noldor in Tirion. Thus the lies of Melkor were made true in seeming, though Feanor by his own deeds had brought this thing to pass; and the bitterness that Melkor had sown endured, and lived still long afterwards between the sons of Fingolfin and Feanor. Now Melkor, knowing that his devices had been revealed, hid himself and passed from place to place as a cloud in the hills; and Tulkas sought for him in vain. Then it seemed to the people of Valinor that the light of the Trees was dimmed, and the shadows of all standing things grew longer and darker in that time. It is told that for a time Melkor was not seen again in Valinor, nor was any rumour heard of him, until suddenly he came to Formenos, and spoke with Feanor before his doors. Friendship he feigned with cunning argument, urging him to his former thought of flight from the trammels of the Valar; and he said: 'Behold the truth of all that I have spoken, and how thou art banished unjustly. But if the heart of Feanor is yet free and bold as were his words in Tirion,  then I will aid him, and bring him far from this narrow land. For am I not Vala also? Yea, and more than those who sit in pride in Valimar; and I have ever been a friend to the Noldor, most skilled and most valiant of the people of Arda.' Now Feanor's heart was still bitter at his humiliation before Mandos, and he looked at Melkor in silence, pondering if indeed he might yet trust him so far as to aid him in his flight. And Melkor, seeing that Feanor wavered, and knowing that the Silmarils held his heart in thrall, said at the last: 'Here is a strong place, and well guarded; but think not that the Silmarils will lie safe in any treasury within the realm of the Valar!' But his cunning overreached his aim; his words touched too deep, and awoke a fire more fierce than he designed; and Feanor looked upon Melkor with eyes that burned through his fair semblance and pierced the cloaks of his mind, perceiving there his fierce lust for the Silmarils. Then hate overcame Feanor's fear, and he cursed Melkor and bade him be gone, saying: 'Get thee gone from my gate, thou jail-crow of Mandos!' And he shut the doors of his house in the face of the mightiest of all the dwellers in Ea. Then Melkor departed in shame, for he was himself in peril, and he saw not his time yet for revenge; but his heart was black with anger. And Finwe was filled with great fear, and in haste he sent messengers to Manwe in Valmar. Now the Valar were sitting in council before their gates, fearing the lengthening of the shadows, when the messengers came from Formenos. At once Orome and Tulkas sprang up, but even as they set out in pursuit messengers came from Eldamar, telling that Melkor had fled through the Calacirya, and from the hill of Tuna the Elves had seen him pass in wrath as a thundercloud. And they said that thence he had turned northward, for the Teleri in Alqualonde had seen his shadow going by their haven towards Araman. Thus Melkor departed from Valinor, and for a while the Two Trees shone again unshadowed, and the land was filled with light. But the Valar sought in vain for tidings of their enemy; and as a cloud far off that looms ever higher, borne upon a slow cold wind, a doubt now marred the joy of all the dwellers in Aman, dreading they knew not what evil that yet might come.

#Silmarillon