#but i will rag on him even MORE for a thousand years of oppression because he was mad at his bf and his gf turned against him

[banyanas]

Okay there is no Way this is gonna fit in the fic wordcount limit (and a lot of it is background understanding to all my other fics too lmao) so who wants to talk about fiddly somewhat mundane toad-centric worldbuilding in regards to Imperial Amphibia -> Caste System Implementation time period??? And even if you don't want to I'm showing it to you anyway.

The 4 tower lords (Cardinal Lords used as an older title when I write) as participants and vassals to the Newtopian military is... pretty new. Especially because toad clans didn't really have a formal military in the first place (and still don't- toad army we see is an arm/branch of the overall Newtopian/specifically Leviathan-ruled Amphibian military). Previously, of course everyone paid fealty (and taxes but we will get to those) to the crown, expected to follow the laws of the united empire under the Leviathan dynasty, but toad clanheads and lords acting in a formal military position in direct vassalage to another army is... definitely new. As far as 'new' goes for a place with an implied-lengthy history as Amphibia does.

Nowadays becoming a Cardinal Lord means becoming an officer- if said lord wasn't already one in the first place. It's a more concrete requirement in the modern era, but before that, hey, remember what I said about taxes? It's relevant just stick with me a bit pls.

So, with the Me-Brand toadbuilding, toads were traditionally nomadic, and likely a more pastoralist society (tarantula cheese...). This did include very few permanent communities toad caravans cycled through, usually as a place of trade/commerce and cultural significance (specifically cairns and mass gravesites) for individual and allied clans. And from there, the majority of toads split into a bunch of much smaller semi-mobile camps that joined and split, in accordance to whatever understanding or trade agreement or alliance or rivalry their clan might have with other clans. These towns are still around despite how vastly different they are, and three of them are in the territory of a Tower- South Tower is the exception to this, since the southern toad population used to be so heavily intermixed with frogs they lived pretty equally spread inside the same township. Which oof, way to show how things change for the worst in a thousand years.

Pre-Andrias, taxes could be paid in both currency and bulk goods or productions- and they could make that work, because of the seemingly-infinite power source music box battery maintaining all their tech and infrastructure. Frequently, this was how toads paid their taxes- a bit harder to do pure currency payments, as well as y'know not rlly paying property taxes due to not privately owning much land.

(It was also, I want to note, supplemented by raiding rival or enemy clans, because they’re still a martial society- they aren’t peaceful nomads before Andrias fucked up everything, they’re violent and there’s inherent problems with gatekeeping someone from community aspects on the basis of whether or not they've killed something/own a weapon. Which we will get to the owning a weapon thing Also in a bit).

Buttttt after the box was stolen, there were a few policy changes. Taxes were required as coppers- ostensibly to bolster restructuring efforts now that the Calamity tech that was the fulcrum for their ENTIRE INFRASTRUCTURE was burglarized. Coppers hich they don’t have much use for and thus don't have much circulating… yeah. But hey, specifically military service can be offered instead of coppers for taxes, at least for toads and some newts. Doesn't hurt that offering an out from taxes via military enlistment keeps toads and some newts from kicking up a very bloody, very messy fuss while the whole 'I invented speciesism and an oppressive caste system because I'm mad at my girlfriend and boyfriend' thing was being pushed through to law. Between breaking the law with all the severe risk of a nasty punishment/heavy fine that entails, or military service with some Perks of Power for an already highly combative culture? Yeah, no-brainer for why we barely see any non-military toads on screen. (This entire thing is a pretty damn slick move when it comes to enforcing ranks and systems. And admittedly less hamfisted than what we see in modern canon because frankly I think Andrias stopped caring about being careful with his enforcement of it once it became more self-sustaining)

The very messy, very bloody messes did happen, btw. After the last rebellion early into Andrias's reign (mostly made up of toads and frogs working together. Man this just makes it even more depressing to see the state of things in modern eras), only toads that were either in training, currently enlisted, or veterans were allowed to own and carry weapons. Which, beyond the practical problems of 'Amphibia is a dangerous place with lots of things that want to kill, eat, and/or poison you', when toad rites of passage and traditions, up to and including standards for being considered and allowed to act as a legal adult, rely on the use, ownership, or exchange of weaponry and blades... hm. Oh dear.

It's even worse for the frogs btw. Unless a frog somehow ended up actively serving a military term (which they are discouraged to), frogs were disallowed weapons at all. Because de-fanging and controlling who is allowed to be armed is kinda one of the first steps to suppressing and controlling groups of people, with one of the OTHER steps being financially suppressing and controlling (see the taxes thing, upward movement being nearly impossible for frogs and toads). Also contributes to casualties for frogs being way higher than they used to, since if they're a law-abiding citizen and get caught by a hungry predator, or bandits on the road, or any number of things they cant just drive off with pitchforks and slingshots, they're kinda screwed! It's messed up! And it's usually disregarded by newts and toads, because frogs are light on their feet, quite springy, they can just run, yeah?

Fun fact tho, this makes the Plantar basement stash SUPER illegal for some spicy revolutionary reasons. Hell yes good for them.

#bañana post #amphibia #overthinking historical/socioeconomic/infrastructural stuff in a childrens cartoon. cringe is dead and i will keep killing it #good ole combo pressure to conform via hard power and pressure to conform vis soft power wombo combo #i will rag on andrias for fatally stabbing and abusing the trust of and trapping a child to be painfully possessed #but i will rag on him even MORE for a thousand years of oppression because he was mad at his bf and his gf turned against him #for a GOOD REASON TOO

[pinkoptics]

*If you have a credit for this pic please let me know.

Underwater AU

McShep | 1072 words | G | AU-gust 2022

When they arrive in Atlantis the city doesn’t rise, but the shield doesn’t fail. They’re stuck at the bottom of the ocean. John’s not feeling it. At all. Rodney to the rescue.

More and more, John spends time here. It’s one of the few places in Atlantis where the ceiling is made of windows, so it’s the only place he can look up, up, up…

It’s an atrium, or would be, if the room was in use.

It’s not.

There are large, empty planters— places where life should flourish, but doesn’t. Hasn’t. Not for thousands of years. Life needs light. Nothing new can grow, not without the sun, which can’t reach this deep, but is somewhere up there, and so far out of reach. The room is an empty vessel without the sun, without life. Scraggly branches, ten thousand years dead, mock the room’s purpose. Uncleared, unimportant, with the room not in use.

John chokes off a laugh. Or is it a sob?

Utterly useless.

Maybe someone will find him here 10,000 years hence, scraggly bones, with as little purpose as the room they find him in.

Head tilted back against the edge of the couch, he stares at where the sky should be, where the water is instead. He feels the crushing weight of it against his bones, shield be damned, until his ribs, his lungs ache with it. He can’t breathe, air coming in ragged gasps.

He’s never told anyone where he goes, sometimes only coming back to the little pocket of the city they inhabit if the radio chirps. If he notices. It doesn’t chirp often.

Then there’s Rodney.

“Major, I have been looking for you everywhere in this godforsaken tomb of a city. I know you’re off shift but most of us keep our radioes on. Emergencies? Ever heard of those? Do I need to put a little bell on you? Subcutaneous transmitter? Or a—”

Apparently all it takes to shut up one Motormouth McKay is one Air Force Major staring into the abyss, barely breathing.

After that, Rodney comes to the atrium often.

“Chess?”

“Raid Zelenka’s coffee stash?”

“Cards?”

“I hear Roberts’ set up something that resembles bowling.”

It’s always hard to move at first, to shift the weight of the sea off him, but he does because he knows, after the first time, how vocally and stubbornly Rodney will insist if he doesn’t.

“Yeah, bowling, sure.”

*

This room isn’t any better than the atrium. There’s no view of the fathomless ocean that envelops them but it’s no less oppressive. The steady ache in his bones deepens.

“What do you want, McKay?”

John’s only been here once, months ago, when Rodney had first asked him to turn on one of funny, near-cylindrical ships. Military officer or glorified light-switch, he’s not sure which anymore. As Rodney babbles out an explanation, John finds it hard to follow. He’s trapped in a pocket of memory he’s tried hard to box up and away…

The ship opening up for him in a way nothing else in Atlantis has. A spaceship. It wants to be flown. It wants John to be the one to do it. It’s been suffocating, needing to break free into the atmosphere and beyond. The whole galaxy used to be open to it, and now… John knows without knowing that it’s something he can do, same as walking, as breathing. He’s the ship, the ship is him, the things they could do together.

But they don’t.

Grounded.

Permanently.

“Major!”

John blinks.

“You haven’t taken in a single word of my brilliance, have you?”

“Uh…”

“This is what happens when you pull miracles out of your ass every day. Everyone gets used to it. You are all witnessing genius and you can’t even see it anymore. I can’t believe—”

“Rodney!”

“Fine, fine.” Rodney crosses his arms, looks put upon. He pauses a moment for dramatic effect. “This.” He points at one of the ships. “It swims now.”

John blinks again. He can’t mean…

“For a race who made their city submergible you would think they would have figured out how to turn their ships into submarines, but no. Oh no. They left that up to one Genius Rodney McKay. Weeks of work. Weeks! Time I will—”

John can’t breathe. “Will it…” he can’t even say it. He just can’t.

Rodney’s voice goes soft. “Yeah, John. It will. All the way up to the surface.”

Something loosens and tightens in John all at the same time.

“Or, well, it makes it in 98% of the simulations which I’ll have you know is—”

Something breaks free.

His arms are around Rodney and they’re staggering back, all but crashing into the ship behind him because John has thrown himself forward, crushing Rodney to him. This… this… He buries his face into the heat of Rodney’s neck. Words build up, too many of them, scraping his throat raw. He gets two of them out, barely. “Thank you.”

Then Rodney is finally holding him back, broad hands scorching him through his t-shirt. He lets out a self-deprecating chuckle and pats him on the back. “It hasn’t worked yet.”

John tightens his hold, stays buried, emotions pinging around him wildly out of control, after being held tight for too long. “It doesn’t matter. God, Rodney, it doesn’t matter. You tried.”

“I did.”

For you.

He doesn’t say it, but John hears it, knows it. This isn’t one of Atlantis’ ongoing projects, though it clearly should have been. Rodney’s done this. On the side. For him.

When he pulls back, with more reluctance than he has ever pulled back from a hug, neither of them comment on the wetness he’s wiping away.

John feels his lips quirk up into a smile. “Wanna go for a ride?”

“In that tin can of death? Are you insane? Are you aware of how much pressure there is at this depth? 98% probability of success still means 2% chance—”

Without letting himself think, John grabs Rodney’s hand and tugs so that they’re pressed close again. His turns his smile into a pout. “Pretty please?”

“Oh for! Don’t look at me like that.” Rodney throws up his free hand. “This is going to be a thing, isn’t it? You do that with your mouth and I give in.”

“Is that a yes?”

Rodney sighs, trying but failing to look put upon. “The first of many I’m sure.”

When they break the surface of the water the steady aching pressure turns into a lightness, his bones going hollow and bird-like. When John looks up, up, up… there’s nothing but endless blue.

He’s home.

Free.

Also on AO3

#stargate atlantis #mcshep #gosh I have feels about this idea #too many for a short fic #but I hope I squished most of them in there #john gives me all the feelings #rodney bb #pinkoptics writes

[rcksmith]

Spring breeze part.4 — Spencer Reid

Icon by @obiwansjedi

Part.1 Part.2 Part.3

Sumarry: After the breakup, Spencer and the Reader follow different paths and lives. But, after 8 years, Gideon's death brings an avalanche of emotions, putting the two face to face again in a reencounter that could break their hearts again — season 10 —

Couple: Spencer Reid /Gideon's daughter!reader.

Warnings: mention of death, mention of violence, death of the father, depressive thoughts, murder, crying, swearing, a lot of anguish, mention of love, fluff (but it has a very fluff too, I'm not a monster)

Word count: 5k.

A/N: This is the most sad chapter that has, I promise that the next will be very cute.💖

I saw Gideon's death episode again to make it as faithful as possible for you guys. I used the original Criminal Minds chronology too, being 8 years from Gideon's last appearance until his death.

English is not my first language, so I so sorry if have a mistake.

Let me know if you want to be added for a taglist for a specific fandom (Criminal Minds, The Umbrella Academy, Riverdale, Roman Godfrey, or all)

Requests are open. Love you ❤️

— — — — —

Hunting bandits. Save people. Improve the world a little bit every day. Those were the three things Spencer believed it was worth to be at BAU. It was worth fighting for, holding on, staying sleepless for days, being haunted by murderers by day and nightmares at night. For what it was worth looking at the abyss, even when it looks to you

Reid could deal with human perversion, with the thousand and one ways to practice heinous crimes, the sowing of evil and cruelty. He could cope with constantly being inside insane minds, learning his whys and mechanisms. He could take it. He put up with it day after day, case after case. He endured being tortured, stay being held at gunpoint, having a piece of his essence plucked with red-hot iron month after month. Spencer knew he could handle it.

But he couldn't handle death. Goodbye. It shattered his soul far more than difficult cases, pushed his own sanity to the limit. Perhaps burying his feelings as deeply as possible was just a method of delaying the wave that would drown him at one time or another. Inevitably.

Each farewell took a piece of Reid away. His father, his mother, Ellie, you, Gideon, JJ, were just a few of the people who left, living their lives elsewhere. But what about those who died? The victims, the children, Hayley, Maeve, Emily (even if only for a short time) and so many others. These took much more than a piece of him. Maybe costu his whole soul.

Spencer felt himself harden over the years, the cases, loss after loss, day after loss. He felt the purity of his own heart slip through his fingers like sand, the faith in humanity to be put to the test. Sometimes even faith in himself.

Was that the price to pay for that job? Being constantly vulnerable? See his life and the lives of the people his loved most at gunpoint?

It was worth?

Maeve's death shook him more than any other, sucking all the pink glow from his world, leaving him with only the cold feeling of hopelessness. A very deep void. It took a long time for memories of she not to hurt like red-hot iron, for his breathing not to be heavy. It took a long time to be happy again.

And when Spencer felt healed from the deepest wounds, the most visceral pains, he was hit again. Deeply. If Maeve's death was a wave that brought him down, Gideon's death was the tsunami that destroyed him.

“It's Gideon.” Hotch's voice confirmed the fear of everyone in that cottage.

Then Spencer felt shattered. Torn apart. Torn like a rag doll and placed on the fire. He wanted to scream, to scream so loudly that he would never regain his voice. He wanted to break something, destroy some, run away.

But run away from whom? From what? That pain or himself? If Spencer had been able to tear off his own skin at that time and be someone else, he would not have hesitated. Not having dropped to his knees in that cottage was a miracle, because Spencer no longer knew what was holding him upright.

Jason Gideon, in many ways, was all that Spencer had. He knew that they took different paths and traveled different roads, living different lives, but he believed that they always end up on the same, even one they was old. Spencer was sure that if he was dying on his knees, Gideon would be to rescue him. For all those 8 years, it was extremely comforting to think that Gideon was out there, living life, finding the hope he had in college, finding the brilliance the world had.

And Reid knew that Jason had you. And you had Gideon. That was the most soothing and comforting thought. No matter what, he knew that you would take care of Jason, just like he would take care of you. But now... now Spencer's world had dissolved in the air. Like a sandcastle knocked over by the wind.

And the pain was surreal.

When he realized, he had left the room, close to the... body. If he could, Spencer would have moved away from himself. How would he take it? One more death, another psychopath. How many other people he love will are died at the hands of the work he did every day?

The answer to all of these questions was frightening, and Spencer wasn't sure if wanted them.

The trip to the coroner was the worst Reid had ever done, talking about the body was the worst conversation he had ever had. And when Morgan put his hand on his shoulder and said that he couldn't close himself now, that they were going to get that son of a bitch, all Spencer wanted to say was that he couldn't take it anymore. That he couldn't breathe. The emptiness was too oppressive. So much visceral pain.

But that was not what Spencer said. He just clung to the only lifeguard in the middle of the rough and deserted sea: justice. Gideon deserve it.

Reid doesn't know how he managed to get back to the Gideon’s house, how he managed to hear Hotch and Rossi talking about what could have happened. But he was there, standing, by some miracle.

“Do you know who might want to have done this?” Hotch asked Stephen, who had arrived, his eyes red from the crying he struggled to hold.

“No. I know he had a list of things he wanted to do before he died... That's how we came back to speak, one of the things was to get back in touch.” His voice was so reminiscent of Gideon's that it was stabbed in the heart of Reid.

“Didn't he talk about being chased? Feeling anything strange?” Rossi commented.

Reid watched Stephen's expressions carefully, first because he reminded Gideon a lot, and second because he looked for any clues in his reactions.

Stephen took a second to think before saying: “No, but we both don't keep in touch daily, you know?” He swallowed a sob, probably with regret, but then his eyes lit up with some information: “'But Y/n surely know, they both spoke to each other every day, if my father was thinking differently, surely she know.”

The mention of your name hit Reid with a very different wave. Bringing a very different feeling than it should. At that moment, he felt himself holding the air.

For a second, a lapse of consciousness, Spencer had not connected any of this with your physical presence. The notion that you were Gideon's daughter was obvious but, for some reason, Spencer didn't think about the fact that you were going to be there. That you would share the same air with him again, the same place...

“We will have to call her, bring her here to see if something has been left, or taken. If there is anything important on the scene.” It was Hotch.

“I called her as soon as you guys called me.” Stephen said “She arrived from California the day before yesterday, my father and she were going to travel.” He tried to swallow the crying, his eyes trembling.

"And you weren't going?" Rossi added.

“I have a son and a wife.” He gave a smile broken by the sadness of the mourning “They would stop by before I go… Y/n was going to tell me the news, since our schedules hardly match much, she works as an astronomer in…”

“Caltech.” Spencer completed, without even realizing it, like a thought out loud.

“Yea.” Stephen agreed.

Spencer felt a chill go from head to toe, and another ton of feelings were thrown at his back. The reality that he was going to see you again hit him hard. Like an arrow. Suddenly, Reid wanted to get out of there. Run as far as possible.

He couldn't see you. He had no ability to deal with those feelings now. Not now, when his life was so overwhelmed with emotions for Gideon’s death that he still hadn't dealt Not when you aroused the feeling of... hope. Spencer can’t could hope, of any kind. Not for them to be taken from him with visceral force. Reid was already hurt enough for handling another fall.

“... But I don't think it's a good idea for my sister to be here, anyway.” Stephen continued to speak.

Rossi and Hotch frowned: “Why?”

“They were very connected. Seeing this scene is not going to do her any good...” he sobs this time “Y/n is not like me… she is sentimental, emotional. ”

“As long as you're trying to stay calm, she'll be the opposite.” Hotch completed.

“I just don't want my sister to suffer anymore and...”

But it was too late for Stephen to complete. It was too much for Spencer to escape. It was too late to be born again, in a different life.

A gray car moved forward on the stone road, at too high a speed not to have washed several road fines. That was so much typical of you who hurt Spencer's heart pieces more than he thought possible. More than he thought he could feel at the time. You were always so wild at the wheel. But Reid didn't have time to finish a thought, not even Rossi, Hotch, Morgan who was with them or even Stephen. Because car brutally stopped it, the door opened and…

And it was as if the sun came out from behind the clouds after years. As if summer had finally come after decades of overwhelming winter. In a burst, everything you've ever represented for Spencer has come back for him once again. And he felt the same thing that he felt when he first saw you, 8 years ago. And he was catatonic.

You got out of the car in a very hurried and desperate way. And as much as there were tears in your eyes and redness in cheeks, Spencer has never seen anyone so beautiful. Your hair was longer, in a brighter shade, maybe you had dyed it. Your features were more lyrical and beautiful, and Reid thought that the passage of time had no effect on you. While he considered himself just less clumsy over the years, you proved to be blooming like Romania's most superb rose.

“DAD!” But that was when your desperate voice brought Reid's consciousness back to earth.

You weren't calling your brother, you weren't asking why, you weren't in mourning. You were in denial. Disbelieving. You called out to your father, with the certainty that he would show up. And the despair in your eyes hurt Reid more than being shot.

But before the agents could do anything, you were running towards the house and Stephen ran towards you, taking you in his arms, trying to keep you from getting inside.

“LET ME GO, STEPHEN!” You struggled, trying to get rid of your brother's arms, your hair messing with the wind, tears streaming down your eyes. “They are wrong! It's not our father! Let me fucking go! DAD!”

“Y/n” Stephen had a broken heart in his eyes, some tears streaming down his eyes “You need to calm down before you get in there !”

“LET ME GO!” Yours sobs broke the hearts of the four agents over there “DAD!” You was cryng out, almost like a prayer, in a desperate call.

"He's gone, Y/n.” Your brother kept his arms stronger in you, trying to contain you while you struggle in trying to break free and go inside the house, under the illusion that you would find your father there.

“NO!” Now your crying was continuous “I spoke to him yesterday! It's not him, Stephen!” Then your brother turned you to him, holding you tight, and you melted into a visseral pain “It can't be him!”

“I know...” he sobbed, looking at you with the same shared pain “I know...”

So you gave yourself up to a painful, loud and desperate crying, the kind that won't let you breathe. And, unlike Reid, you fallen down. Your knees found the stone and grass floor, your hands clasped on Stephen's shirt, who knelt on the floor with you, delivered the pain you both shared.

You knew what your father's risks were in working in such a dangerous profession. Expose yourself to constant and frightening danger. You always knew about the risks, you just tried to ignore them all your life, sinking your fears about your father not coming home at night. Then, when he let the BAU, that fear dissipated. You felt a colossal weight being lifted off your shoulders, like tons of lead, and you let go of a fear so great that you didn't even know you had it.

For 8 years you thought that the chances of him not coming home were over, that the chances of seeing him the next day had increased dramatically. For 8 years you two traveled together, stopping at every type of diner for milkshake, chocolate ice cream and mint - his favorites - For 8 years you had your best friend, the only thing you knew you had in the world. You always knew that if you were drowning in the ocean, it would be your father who would give his lungs for you to breathe.

You didn't see a life without Gideon.

For you, you were crying for hours in what one day was your father's backyard, totally devastated, but for the rest of the world it was a matter of minutes.

Your sobs were so loud and real that Hotch and Rossi caught themselves with watery eyes, perfectly understanding the pain you were going through, the devastation. The two had lost many people, many of them being essential pieces to be able to continue breathing. Many of them felt wounds that would never heal.

But it was Rossi who approached you, the pain at the top of his throat, his mind wandering the day Gideon said he was going to have a little girl. Unlike Stephen, Rossi never saw you in person, but the sparkle in Jason's eyes whenever he talked about you, or with you on the phone, was enough to know that you were one of the essential pieces to keep breathing.

“Hi, my name is Rossi.” He knelt in front of you and your face went towards him, your cheeks and nose as red as your eyes.

“M-my dad talked about you."” You were still sobbing, slowly letting go of Stephen's shirt.

"Good things, I hope.” The two of you laughed like a sigh, and soon the pain returned to your eyes in a visseral way. “I know this is not fair, and I know it is asking too much, but I need you to go inside and try to find something out of place. Something that whoever did this to your father may have taken or left. ”

You closed your eyes in pain, tears streaming as you sobbed. Your hands, trembling and cold, went to your face, perhaps trying to hide from reality, perhaps wiping away tears. Maybe both. When you looked back at Rossi again, you saw the pain in his eyes too.

"I don't know if I can do it.” You admitted, your voice shaking.

"I know.” Rossi took his hand to yours, squeezing comfortingly “But only you can help us now, help other daughters not lose their father to the same killer. Being inside in the house can bring information that is in your subconscious. I promise you will make it, we will all be here with you.”

His handshake got stronger, and it reminded you of your father. That should have been the same way he comforted the victims' relatives, the way he was supposed to act with people.

'Everyone is somebody's son.' That's what Gideon said. It hit you like an atomic bomb. And, for a moment, you thought it was possible to die of sadness.

You squeezed Rossi's hand tightly, as if you were looking for courage. When you opened eyes again, you gave a weak nod. Carefully, as if any sudden movement is capable of causing you more pain, you stood up, your legs wobbly, your heart bleeding, sadness clouding your vision. Rossi put his hand behind your back, in a way to make sure him were there, as an anchorage in reality that would not let you get lost in the valley of sadness and pain.

As you walked up to the house, you didn't see the other agents, you didn't see the trees, the cars. At that time, you didn't even know what color the sky was anymore. It was like a suspended moment, when the world is in slow motion, the hemisphere is terrified. The sadness was palpable in the breeze, in the way that the rays of the sun did not reach the ground. The whole land looked like mourning.

As soon as you stepped inside the house, the smell of home and Gideon hit your nose, and you felt your face tighten in an expression of pure pain. You didn't notice the agents coming in behind you, you didn't notice Penelope and JJ. You just saw the furniture, the decor, his stuff. As if Gideon had just left for the market and was going to come back.

Everything was in was there. Minus the most important thing: him.

You did not notice when Rossi left you, you did not notice who approached. Everything was in a haze of pain.

But that's when you saw the strong blood marks on the floor, stuck to the wood with possession. A cold shiver as sighed from death ricocheted through your entire body, bristling all over your skin. In a burst, like the bursting of a violin string, the mist dissipated, the state of tupor burst, and reality hit you with overwhelming force.

And then the plug fell.

Jason Gideon had died.

You fell again, barely noticing the sobs and loud crying starting to come out again, the most desperate and painful in you life. But this time the arms that took you were different, bringing with you sensations that you haven't felt in a long time. That a long time ago you forgot that you could feel.

They were long, thin, and contained a vigor hidden beneath the thin facade. The smell of his presence was… heaven. That feeling was your anchorage on the high seas, in the valley of despair, and you clung to him for fear of drowning, of not finding your way back home.

You didn't have to see it to know who it was.

You turned to the arms that took you, now Spencer kneels with you on the floor, and you cried in a way that you never cried before, with a visseral pain. Your hands went to the brown cardigan he wore, closing there as if the fabric was your only chance for salvation.

So you looked at the immensity of the his brown irises.

"He was the only thing I had, Spen.” You sobbed loudly with the crying, gently swaying his coat, your voice utterly torn.

Spencer felt his eyes sting, his throat lock and the remains of what was his heart ache in a hideous way.

“I know.” He felt a tear run down his left cheek, his hands on your arms.

At this time, the two of you supported each other. Gideon meant a lot to you two. An irreplaceable role in yours life. And Spencer knew that was what you were talking about when you said:

"He was the only thing we both had.” You closed your eyes, your hands still firmly on his coat, your heart pounding.

But this time Spencer's voice was just as broken when he said: “I know.”

Then he hugged you.He hugged you for everything. He hugged you because it was a pain that only you two could understand. He hugged you because you needed it, and because he needed too.

Jason Gideon had a special connection with you two, a connection that only the two of you had ever experienced. Each relationship with Gideon was different, special in different ways, but only the two of you had him as a protector, mentor, a much more paternal and confidant figure. He was the kind of person you could leave your life in his hands, the kind who would teach you the secret of the worlds, show you what goodness was and at the same time strength. And you two had that.

You stained Reid's coat with tears, and Reid stained you with the strong smell he had. He stepped far enough away to be able to see your face perfectly, at a considerable distance, and, against everything he had ever done before with anyone, he took your face in his hands, his eyes fixed on your in pain shared.

“We will catch how did it.” Reid assured you, as if he had tattooed this words on your skin. You closed your eyes in pain, but he brought you back “Hey, keep looking at me."

So you did it. Because you would always follow Spencer. To hell if he asked.

"Don't take your eyes off mine, okay?” His voice was so sweet, so gentle, and you couldn't have done anything but agree. “When was the last time you spoke to Gideon?”

“Yesterday.” You replied “We were going to travel to the beach today, I took a vacation from work.”

“Was he at home when you two talked?”

The team looked at each other, with several questions in those look.

You denied it, the hiccup now because of the shortness of breath you had because of the crying.

“He stopped at Roanoke for...” and that's when you seemed to remember something.

Your eyes widened softly, your lips trembled, and you let out a stammering sigh as you try to remember something very important.

“What do you remember?” Spencer stroked your cheeks with his thumbs, trying to calm the beating of your heart that went back to being frantic and making you focus on the question, not the sea of ​​emotions you felt.

“He…” was when your eyes fluttered before meeting Reid's again. “He said he saw a woman on the news who was found dead. And ... and that he had to make sure of one thing ”

Rossi looked at Hotch, who gave an attentive and objective expression.

“Did he tell you why?” His eyes closed again and you sobbed. Reid moved closer, bringing your face back in his direction again “Look at me, Y/n.”

As soon as you did, he gave you a gentle smile, but contained all the pain in the world. He understood what you were felling.

“Why was he interested in the case?” He changed the question.

“I-it was something about...” you searched in your mind “Girl named Tara. I don’t know. He mentioned about a blue butterfly tattoo on her ankle as well, and that it was something to do with a… a case or something.”

“1978” Rossi interrupted and everyone looked at him “Gideon and I worked on a case in 1978, the suspect was never caught and Tara was a teenager who we thought had been kidnapped by him. The killer left dead birds in the hands of the victims ”

“But he didn't mention birds and...” That's when your eyes, fluttering, darted around the room and you stopped abruptly.

Spencer turned his attention to you again, seeing that you were staring somewhere. His hands slowly left your face and he asked:

“What?”

“The board.” You pointed to your father's board, which had a beautiful brown bird.

“Does say anything to you?” Rossi turned his attention to you.

You shook your head, your body too exhausted to go to the painting and examine it.

“He shot the board.” You looked at the agents “My father loved that painting, he never would have done that. Even though my father is stunned, he has the best aim I have ever seen.”

“The devil is in the details." Rossi went to the pinting and, after two seconds, turned to the team and said “I already know who did this.”

You let out a gigantic sigh of relief as the agents split up to continue the case, speaking so fast that you couldn't keep up.

“I helped?” You looked at Spencer, tears still shining in your eyes.

He smiled and nodded “Very.”

But when he got up, you took his hand, making Reid turn his attention back to you again, a questioning look on his face.

“You're going to get it, aren't you?” The sob invaded your voice "Promise me that you will catch him, Spen."

Reid took his hand in your, giving you a strong, comforting squeeze before saying:

"I will. I promise.”

And then he left, along with the other agents.

- - -

You thought you knew what pain was, the loss, the tightness in the heart. You thought that your many relationship breakdowns showed you what it was like to suffer. But you have never been so wrong. None of that compared to how you were now, to what you felt.

You would trade that feeling for anything in the world.

This was terrible. A cold, coercive, brutal and cruel feeling. As if you were at the bottom of a black ocean, unable to breathe, falling deeper and deeper, consumed by the overwhelming cold of the water.

It was impossible to say in words how you felt. But if it were you had to define it in one word you would say: pain. A pain that bends you, a pain that makes you want to scream, that pierces your lungs so that it is not possible to breathe, but that even so, you fight for air.

It was pain at its rawest, most brutal, sharp and atrocious like a dagger blade. You would go through Dante's hells for eternity instead of living one day with that pain.

Since Spencer and the agents went after the person in charge, you have sat on the steps of the front door, watching the nature, the shaking of the trees, but your attention was so far, far away. Perhaps unattainable.

Gideon always loved watching the seasons go by, and in that moment, you wondered if looking at the same thing he looked at every day would make you feel close to him. Feel with him. It had only been three days since you last saw him, when he picked you up at the airport, but you felt like you were past three lives. How would you go without it? How were you able to think of living without it?

You pulled your knees up against your chest, hugging your legs, the metallic, atrocious and icy taste of devastation stuck to yours in your mouth. The trees shook hard, forcing the birds to fly away, but you didn't feel cold. You were not feeling the cold breeze hit your body, nor were your muscles contracting in exhaustion from the hard wood of the steps you were sitting on.

The hunger, the cold, the heat or the craving could not reach you, as if the pain had paralyzed all your system. Probably your soul.

You didn't see when Stephen put father's blanket over your shoulders, nor did you hear his sobs for seeing you so devastated. But you smelled Gideon, and the warmth of the blanket was like having his arms around you again. Then the rest of the water in your body found its way to your eyes and crying was as automatic as breathing.

You were clinging to Spencer taking the son of a bitch who did it, trying to chase away any other thoughts that weren't about that. You didn't want to think about what would happen after he was caught. Which meant his capture for you. It would bring justice to Gideon, honoring his name, his life, but it wouldn't bring him back. What was taken from you would not be repaired, regardless of the end of that damned man.

When he was caught, you would have nothing else to focus on instead.

You don't know how long you stayed there. Hours? Days? The those peach and gold tones in the sky is from dusk or the dawn of a new day?

You had lost track of time, as if your watch had stopped since the time Gideon died.

The sound of cars on the road was the only thing that pulled you out of your fucking valley, and as soon as the black SUVs stopped, you stood up as if you had been waiting your whole life for that moment. The blanket fell from your shoulders, heart accelerated at an alarming rate, and for a second, everything was gone from your mind.

Rossi was the first to get out of the car, but yours eyes darted to Reid. You wanted to run, ask what had happened, listen to the answers. But you were paralyzed in place. Afraid of the truth, of reality.

What would become of you after that news?

Spencer came towards you without hesitation, and you couldn't take your eyes off him for a second. He didn't say anything, nor did he explain anything. It was not needed. The way he reached out his hand and placed your father's rings in your palm were enough answers.

Your whole body shook and you looked at Reid with more emotions than askers.

"He is dead." He told you, and it made you fall down again.

But this time you fell into his hugging, clinging to him in despair. There were many meanings in that embrace: gratitude, relief, fear, pain and grief. And Spencer hugged you back in the same way.

You two stayed that way for a while, even when the agents went to talk to Stephen, even when Garcia and JJ left the house, even when the cold wind hit you both.

“Thanks." You heard yourself say it, and Spencer shook his head, signaling that it wasn't necessary, and the two of you moved away.

So you went to Rossi, and hugged him too. In that second, Rossi could feel Gideon in that hug, and it took a second to not cry.

“Your father was a great man." He told you when the two of you walked away, and you agreed on a sad smile.

"He was." You looked down at the rings in your hand, staying a second there before turning to the agents and saying: “You guys are going to the funeral, aren't you? I ... my dad would like it w-very much.”

"Of course." Rossi guaranteed it.

As they walked away and went back to the car, heading for their own houses, your eyes met Spencer's and he whispered in the air to you:

“I will see you at the funeral."

You nodded, giving you a sad, grateful smile. And while everyone was leaving and you were looking at the rings in your hand again, you had a feeling that your story with Spencer had just started over.

A/n: I also lost a very important person to death, and for everyone who went through it too, I mean that no one is alone! My message box is open if you need anything! Love you❤️

Tagged @gublersuvula

@peculiarinsomniac

@measure-in-pain

@nobutalsoyes

🍒 @misshale21

#spencer reid x y/n #dr. spencer reid #spencer x derek #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid x you #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid #spencer reid angst #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds fluff #jason gideon #david rossi #mgg x reader #mgg fluff #mgg x you #mgg imagine #mgg #mgg fanfiction #spencer reid x fem!reader

[crybabyjam]

half empty

ship: bakudeku

rating: g

summary: Izuku calls Katsuki very late at night.

word count: 1.5k

available on ao3

—-

Katsuki blinks his eyes open, alert all at once.

His room is dark, because it’s well past three in the morning, and he doesn’t move a muscle as he tries to figure out what woke him up.

There’s no noise in his apartment; no hushed shuffling from a break in or the like.

But there’s an anxious tingle in his gut that forces him to sit up in bed and stare off into the emptiness, until he makes out the vague shapes of his furniture.

Then, his phone vibrates.

(read more)

“The hell…” Katsuki snatches the device from his nightstand. It was set on do-not-disturb, as it was every night, so something must be happening.

His lips curve downwards at the edges, though, as watches Deku’s name flash across the screen.

Katsuki is, admittedly, still groggy. Which may be why he stares at his phone the entire time it buzzes, wracking his brain as to why Deku would be calling him at 3 am— not through the emergency line, but on his personal cell.

Especially when he was in a completely different part of Japan.

He’d been there for six months, interning with a number of heroes in quick succession. It was a new training program Deku had volunteered for, shortly after his debut as a sidekick.

Katsuki had not volunteered for it, because it sounded like bullshit and an excuse to wring new heroes ragged under the pretense of ‘experience’.

The phone stops buzzing all at once, Deku’s picture fading as it goes black, and Katsuki mutters a soft, “Shit.”

But it rings again, not two seconds later.

Katsuki answers on the third buzz.

“It’s three in the morning, Deku.”

Katsuki rolls back into bed, curling his blanket over his shoulders. His tank top was good at keeping his core warm, but he loved sleeping with an air purifier at night— which left the entire room chilled. It’s soft whirring also helped him sleep, covering the barely-there noise of the street some many floors below.

He lets one shiver roll through him before he shakes his head and pulls the phone away from his ear to look at the screen.

Still connected, but Deku hadn’t said anything yet. A butt-dial?

“Fuckin’ hell,” Katsuki sighs, holding the phone back to his ear nonetheless. He can hear the faint background noise of something (people?) shuffling, though it doesn’t have the thumping bass of a nightclub or a bar.

It sounds like something is rubbing against the phone, though— like fabric. Probably in his back pocket, or something.

Katsuki’s breathing starts to deepen, eyes falling heavy. He mutters nonsense under his breath, a half-baked threat to run up Deku’s phone bill while he sleeps, but they blink open again when he hears a soft whimper.

Katsuki sits up, squinting in the dark. The clock still reads 3:42, four minutes past when he answered the phone.

“Hello?”

There’s a ragged breath, and then the sound of a clearing throat.

“K-Kacchan…”

Katsuki can’t help the way his grip tightens on his phone. Deku’s voice is slurred, and every bad thing that Katsuki can think of zooms through his mind as if played on a fast-forwarded movie reel:

Deku, having misdialed perhaps and needing emergency services.

Deku, mugged and bleeding out, unable to each anyone else at this hour but Katsuki (what… a thousand miles away, give or take?).

Deku, kidnapped, forced to call his contacts one by one and say goodbye to each with no hope of escape.

Deku— hurt, injured, scared.

In each scenario, Katsuki would never be able to reach him in time. Fuck.

But Deku hiccups, and then there’s the sound of a glass bottle clinking against another.

Oh.

He’s drunk.

Katsuki slumps over, fist pressed to his pounding heart.

“Fuck, Deku. Where do you get off calling so late, you ass?”

“Kacchan,” Deku says again, breathlessly.

He whimpers a bit, at the end, and the tone of his voice is so familiar but Katsuki can’t place it, still stuck between sleep and heart-pounding panic.

“Are… are you sleeping?” Deku has the nerve to ask.

“No shit.” Katsuki snorts. “Was, 'til your dumbass called and woke me up.”

He sets the phone beside his head, on the pillow, and turns it on speaker. The noises are a bit more tinny like this, but his ear was getting sweaty with it pressed to his face like that.

And it felt weird, hearing Deku’s voice murmuring in his ear so late at night after so long.

“I’m sorry.”

Deku says nothing more than that, though he clinks his beer(?) bottles together again, and swallows audibly, even through the speaker.

There’s that shuffling sound again, and oh—

Deku’s wiping tears from his face, sleeve brushing against the mic.

Katsuki’s anxiety crescendos. “Deku?”

“I didn’t mean to call,” Deku continues, continuing to rub at his eyes. “I just… I just needed…”

He trails off.

Katsuki pinches the bridge of his nose.

Then,

“Kacchan…” Izuku whispers, voice still lilted with the heavy edge of alcohol.

“What, Deku?”

“I don’t wanna be here anymore,” he finally says. Miserably, as if it had been weighing on his heart for centuries. Then, even softer he says: “I miss… you. I miss you so much.”

…

It really has been too long. Since they were kids, the longest they’d ever been apart was a summer or winter vacation.

They’d gotten closer over the years. They were friends, of course— more than that. Their lives were inextricably connected, from their social lives to their hero work. They were a pair, on their way to something… more.

Then Izuku had to go— had left.

Katsuki thought about it sometimes on nights like this, when the quiet got to be too much.

The second bedroom, adjacent to his own, is an oppressive presence. Especially when it has been left empty, waiting for someone to come and live in it.

Waiting for Izuku.

Katsuki swallows past the lump in his throat, and disregards the sting of tears at his eyelashes. He sits up in bed, and ignores the clock completely as he searches his drawers for clothes and an overnight bag.

The entire time, Izuku softly sniffles in his ear.

“I didn’t mean to call,” Izuku repeats after a moment. “I… I’m sorry.”

Katsuki tugs a sweatshirt over his head and shoves the phone between his cheek and his shoulder as he stalks through the door, bag packed.

“I’m coming to get you.”

“You…?” Izuku shuffles on the other end, and his voice sounds much closer as he incredulously whispers, “You’re what?”

Katsuki shoves his wallet in his bag, grabs two water bottles just so he wouldn’t have to buy one later.

Then he’s out the door, hurriedly locking it behind him.

“I’m coming to get you,” he repeats, firmer. “You’re still in temporary housing right? Send me your address. Get a bag packed.”

“K-Kacchan… I can’t leave.” Deku coughs, turning away from the phone, and Katsuki frowns hard. Nerd was probably getting sick from overworking.

That only further cements Katsuki’s decision to stone.

Katsuki ignores Deku as he shakily goes through the details and exacts as to why he can’t leave, though each reason just makes his voice go softer and softer until he’s just breathing into the microphone. It’s muffled, as if he’d slumped over and was barely hanging on by a thread.

“Deku…” Katsuki inhales slow, eyes shutting.

He can picture the miserable face Izuku must be making, solitarily confined in what was little more than a glorified box, in a city he’s never been to. All alone.

And drunk.

“Izuku,” Katsuki says, instead. “I’m coming to get you, okay? The details don’t matter right now.”

“B-but… heroes can’t just—”

“Do you want me to come get you?”

There’s silence on the other end. Katsuki keeps walking, glaring at anyone who even curiously looks in his direction.

He makes it all the way to the train station before Izuku speaks again.

“Yes.”

Then, Izuku is crying again. Louder this time, entire voice shaking with his blubbering sobs.

Katsuki tsks, shoving his earbuds in. Izuku’s crying cuts out for just a second as the phone registers the new connection, and then he can hear the whimpering directly in his ear. It doesn’t irritate him as much as he would have expected, at almost 4 in the morning.

“Okay,” Katsuki says, as Izuku begins to calm. “Pack a bag. You’re not going back, so take the necessary shit. Got it?”

Izuku responds with a hesitant hum, but it’s affirmative nonetheless.

Katsuki rests his head against the cold metal of the train, listening to it pass over the tracks as he heads to the next city, the one with the closest airport. It’d take three hours to get across the country, to where Izuku is.

The ticket is easy to buy. Katsuki dips into his savings, but he had enough that it didn’t matter.

When he gets off at the next station, Izuku is still on the phone with him. He’s sobered up around the edges, though every so often he’ll cough from his chest and whimper.

“Wait for me. I’m coming to get you, Deku.”

Izuku sniffles, but Katsuki can hear the small smile in his voice as he murmurs back a soft, “I’ll be waiting, Kacchan.”

(And so, Katsuki goes to bring Izuku home.)

#bkdk #bakudeku #bnha #boku no hero academia #long post #fanfic #if you've seen this before it's cause im reposting it from my other acct alshdaljd

[sunnybimbo]

since i actually like this im gonna slap it on tumblr too! 🤭

available on ao3

----

Katsuki blinks his eyes open, alert all at once.

His room is dark, because it's well past three in the morning, and he doesn't move a muscle as he tries to figure out what woke him up.

There's no noise in his apartment; no hushed shuffling from a break in or the like.

But there's an anxious tingle in his gut that forces him to sit up in bed and stare off into the emptiness, until he makes out the vague shapes of his furniture.

Then, his phone vibrates.

(read more)

"The hell…" Katsuki snatches the device from his nightstand. It was set on do-not-disturb, as it was every night, so something must be happening.

His lips curve downwards at the edges, though, as watches Deku's name flash across the screen.

Katsuki is, admittedly, still groggy. Which may be why he stares at his phone the entire time it buzzes, wracking his brain as to why Deku would be calling him at 3 am— not through the emergency line, but on his personal cell.

Especially when he was in a completely different part of Japan.

He'd been there for six months, interning with a number of heroes in quick succession. It was a new training program Deku had volunteered for, shortly after his debut as a sidekick.

Katsuki had not volunteered for it, because it sounded like bullshit and an excuse to wring new heroes ragged under the pretense of 'experience'.

The phone stops buzzing all at once, Deku's picture fading as it goes black, and Katsuki mutters a soft, "Shit."

But it rings again, not two seconds later.

Katsuki answers on the third buzz.

"It's three in the morning, Deku."

Katsuki rolls back into bed, curling his blanket over his shoulders. His tank top was good at keeping his core warm, but he loved sleeping with an air purifier at night— which left the entire room chilled. It's soft whirring also helped him sleep, covering the barely-there noise of the street some many floors below.

He lets one shiver roll through him before he shakes his head and pulls the phone away from his ear to look at the screen.

Still connected, but Deku hadn't said anything yet. A butt-dial?

"Fuckin' hell," Katsuki sighs, holding the phone back to his ear nonetheless. He can hear the faint background noise of something (people?) shuffling, though it doesn't have the thumping bass of a nightclub or a bar.

It sounds like something is rubbing against the phone, though— like fabric. Probably in his back pocket, or something.

Katsuki's breathing starts to deepen, eyes falling heavy. He mutters nonsense under his breath, a half-baked threat to run up Deku's phone bill while he sleeps, but they blink open again when he hears a soft whimper.

Katsuki sits up, squinting in the dark. The clock still reads 3:42, four minutes past when he answered the phone.

"Hello?"

There's a ragged breath, and then the sound of a clearing throat.

"K-Kacchan…"

Katsuki can't help the way his grip tightens on his phone. Deku's voice is slurred, and every bad thing that Katsuki can think of zooms through his mind as if played on a fast-forwarded movie reel:

Deku, having misdialed perhaps and needing emergency services.

Deku, mugged and bleeding out, unable to each anyone else at this hour but Katsuki (what... a thousand miles away, give or take?).

Deku, kidnapped, forced to call his contacts one by one and say goodbye to each with no hope of escape.

Deku— hurt, injured, scared.

In each scenario, Katsuki would never be able to reach him in time. Fuck.

But Deku hiccups, and then there's the sound of a glass bottle clinking against another.

Oh.

He's drunk.

Katsuki slumps over, fist pressed to his pounding heart.

"Fuck, Deku. Where do you get off calling so late, you ass?"

"Kacchan," Deku says again, breathlessly.

He whimpers a bit, at the end, and the tone of his voice is so familiar but Katsuki can't place it, still stuck between sleep and heart-pounding panic.

"Are… are you sleeping?" Deku has the nerve to ask.

"No shit." Katsuki snorts. "Was, 'til your dumbass called and woke me up."

He sets the phone beside his head, on the pillow, and turns it on speaker. The noises are a bit more tinny like this, but his ear was getting sweaty with it pressed to his face like that.

And it felt weird, hearing Deku's voice murmuring in his ear so late at night after so long.

"I'm sorry."

Deku says nothing more than that, though he clinks his beer(?) bottles together again, and swallows audibly, even through the speaker.

There's that shuffling sound again, and oh—

Deku's wiping tears from his face, sleeve brushing against the mic.

Katsuki's anxiety crescendos. "Deku?"

"I didn't mean to call," Deku continues, continuing to rub at his eyes. "I just… I just needed…"

He trails off.

Katsuki pinches the bridge of his nose.

Then,

"Kacchan…" Izuku whispers, voice still lilted with the heavy edge of alcohol.

"What, Deku?"

"I don't wanna be here anymore," he finally says. Miserably, as if it had been weighing on his heart for centuries. Then, even softer he says: "I miss… you. I miss you so much."

 …

 It really has been too long. Since they were kids, the longest they'd ever been apart was a summer or winter vacation.

They'd gotten closer over the years. They were friends, of course— more than that. Their lives were inextricably connected, from their social lives to their hero work. They were a pair, on their way to something… more.

Then Izuku had to go— had left. 

Katsuki thought about it sometimes on nights like this, when the quiet got to be too much.

The second bedroom, adjacent to his own, is an oppressive presence. Especially when it has been left empty, waiting for someone to come and live in it.

Waiting for Izuku.

Katsuki swallows past the lump in his throat, and disregards the sting of tears at his eyelashes. He sits up in bed, and ignores the clock completely as he searches his drawers for clothes and an overnight bag.

The entire time, Izuku softly sniffles in his ear.

"I didn't mean to call," Izuku repeats after a moment. "I… I'm sorry."

Katsuki tugs a sweatshirt over his head and shoves the phone between his cheek and his shoulder as he stalks through the door, bag packed.

"I'm coming to get you."

"You…?" Izuku shuffles on the other end, and his voice sounds much closer as he incredulously whispers, "You're what?"

Katsuki shoves his wallet in his bag, grabs two water bottles just so he wouldn't have to buy one later.

Then he's out the door, hurriedly locking it behind him.

"I'm coming to get you," he repeats, firmer. "You're still in temporary housing right? Send me your address. Get a bag packed."

"K-Kacchan… I can't leave." Deku coughs, turning away from the phone, and Katsuki frowns hard. Nerd was probably getting sick from overworking.

That only further cements Katsuki's decision to stone.

Katsuki ignores Deku as he shakily goes through the details and exacts as to why he can't leave, though each reason just makes his voice go softer and softer until he's just breathing into the microphone. It's muffled, as if he'd slumped over and was barely hanging on by a thread.

"Deku…" Katsuki inhales slow, eyes shutting.

He can picture the miserable face Izuku must be making, solitarily confined in what was little more than a glorified box, in a city he's never been to. All alone.

And drunk.

"Izuku," Katsuki says, instead. "I'm coming to get you, okay? The details don't matter right now."

"B-but… heroes can't just—"

"Do you want me to come get you?"

There's silence on the other end. Katsuki keeps walking, glaring at anyone who even curiously looks in his direction.

He makes it all the way to the train station before Izuku speaks again.

"Yes."

Then, Izuku is crying again. Louder this time, entire voice shaking with his blubbering sobs.

Katsuki tsks, shoving his earbuds in. Izuku's crying cuts out for just a second as the phone registers the new connection, and then he can hear the whimpering directly in his ear. It doesn't irritate him as much as he would have expected, at almost 4 in the morning.

"Okay," Katsuki says, as Izuku begins to calm. "Pack a bag. You're not going back, so take the necessary shit. Got it?"

Izuku responds with a hesitant hum, but it's affirmative nonetheless.

Katsuki rests his head against the cold metal of the train, listening to it pass over the tracks as he heads to the next city, the one with the closest airport. It'd take three hours to get across the country, to where Izuku is.

The ticket is easy to buy. Katsuki dips into his savings, but he had enough that it didn't matter.

When he gets off at the next station, Izuku is still on the phone with him. He's sobered up around the edges, though every so often he'll cough from his chest and whimper.

"Wait for me. I'm coming to get you, Deku."

Izuku sniffles, but Katsuki can hear the small smile in his voice as he murmurs back a soft, "I'll be waiting, Kacchan."

   (And so, Katsuki goes to bring Izuku home.)

#bnha #bakudeku #bkdk #wonder duo #long post #fanfic #jam writes #im more active on twitter if u wanna hmu there buts its Spicy

[rosy-cheekx]

Case #0162406: Fear Factor

Case #0162407. Statement of Katherine Brown, regarding her experience in a Fear Factory. Statement taken direct from subject by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. In your own time, Ms. Brown.

Please, it’s just Katherine. Did you have any trouble getting here? I’ve been told it’s quite hidden away. And I’m sorry again to ask you to come here but, as you can see, there’s really no chance of being able to pop down to London for a little day trip.

No, Ms. Katherine, it was no trouble. From what I’ve heard from the papers you have quite a story to tell.

Oh...you read about me? I was really hoping you wouldn’t. I didn’t want you to think I was crazy before hearing my story. I get why they think I am; I get why I’m here. But I know what happened, I know I’m not--

Ms. Katherine, please. I’m not here to pass judgement on your condition, just to take your statement. Now... In your own time.

Yes. Yes, of course... 

I’ve always been a bit of an adrenaline junkie. When I was a kid, my friends and I would do anything we could. We were kids in the middle of nowhere, so it was mostly shoplifting and riding our bikes down big hills really fast, just to feel that heart-pounding rush of fear and success of survival. Our favorite thing to do, though, was go to haunted houses. From September through to Halloween, we would go to any haunted house attraction we could find and scream ourselves silly. As we got older, it became a more complex game. How long could we last, who would scream the least or the loudest, just kid stuff. Most of us grew out of it eventually, those sorts of attractions only get so scary. Rachel and I, though, we couldn’t get enough of it. We started finding weirder and weirder places to scratch that itch, that need to be terrified. As soon as she had turned 18, being a month and a half younger than me, we had signed up to go to our first touchable house. Typically, haunted houses have a no-touching-the-patrons rule, so the ones that don’t offer that safety were alluring to us. 

It sort of escalated from there, really. In America, there was a guy who had haunted houses so terrifying that you had to sign waivers and take a psych exam to go through. I’ve read all sorts of stories about them locking people in cages, cutting their hair, feeding them all sorts of things. All completely consensual, of course, a whole new level of terror attractions. It was shut down, I think, but that was the kind of scare we wanted. To go through something like that, and come out alive? We wanted to feel invincible, immortal.

Three years ago, I think, Rachel was in this forum, looking for some attractions that would be open in September. The weirder they are, the more likely they were to be open year-round, because Halloween wasn't the point. She found a really buried ad for one called Fear Factory. I think the ad labeled it as “an immersive experience sure to scare the life out of you.” There weren't any reviews on it at first, which was initially a red flag, but with some digging, we saw it was new.  Like, opened-its-doors-a-month-ago new. They seemed to be legit, their website boasted of other locations in America and Canada, but reviews seemed to be locked behind a password, so the experience wasn’t spoiled for first timers. Rachel put us on the waiting list. We were both freshly 21, feeling unstoppable, and weren’t really thinking about the risks.

A week or so later, we both got an email, claiming our application had been accepted and we were being offered an experience at the Fear Factory next Friday. We both eagerly accepted, and they sent us an address of where to go. We looked it up; an old office complex, rundown, but that fit the aesthetic of something like this pretty well. They had us fill out some detailed surveys, asking about fears, hard limits, and random things, like our relationship to each other, where we went to school, our interests.

We drove together to the complex, parking outside the building, and taking time to do our due diligence. We both texted Peter, a schoolmate of ours, gave him the address of the place, and a time to check in with us. Some of these more complicated scenarios take a while, and it was already 9 in the evening, so we told him to call us at 2 a.m. to check that we were okay. 

As we were both on our phones, we heard a woman clear her throat. She was tall, wearing a black jacket and jeans, and her sunglasses reflected the streetlamps off the lenses. She introduced herself as Mara and said she would take us to the “beginning of the end.” We laughed at that, elbowing each other over being scared. She took us up a few flights of stairs, before rapping a fingerless-gloved hand on the door of the third floor’s landing. She told Rachel to go in and someone would meet her there. I squeezed her hand twice before she left. I wish I had something, told her that I loved her, that I’d see her later, something. 

She brought me to the sixth floor and showed me into a small room. There was a small chair, but the room was completely empty other than that. It smelled sickly sweet, like something rotting. Mara let me in and handed me a strip of black cloth. A blindfold. I sat in the chair and tied it, knotting it carefully beneath my ponytail. She told me to count to 100, take the blindfold off, and the game would begin. As she closed the door, something I couldn’t quite call music began to play. It was high pitched and resonant, almost like an echo of laughter layered over itself.

I began to count, feeling like a kid as I added an unspoken “one hundred” underneath to make sure I wasn’t counting too fast or to slow. As I reached one hundred, the creeping music stopped. I took off the blindfold and blinked to adjust to what I now found myself in: oppressively cold darkness. I stood and extended my hand, slowly making my forward to where I knew the door to be. The intense feeling of fear began to creep over me, and I felt an irresistible smile spread across my face. I found what must be the handle to the door and twisted it. I shut my eyes tight against the harsh white light that filled my field of view. I blinked and adjusted to the light of the stairwell gradually, feeling a wave of nausea wash over me. My vision pitched suddenly, the frame of the door bulging impossibly, twisting into what seemed like a smile. I inhaled sharply, like filling my lungs would catch my balance. 

 The sharp descending of the stairs twisted in front of me, my vision still swirling; it would take too long to take the time to carefully step down each without falling. I had to get to the fourth floor. I could escape there. Without really thinking about what I was doing, I leapt, hand on the railing, clearing the full set of steps as my anchored hand guided me down safely. The door for the fifth floor was in front of me, a dull pale metal, but I knew it wouldn’t be safe there. I repeated the process again, using the rail as a track for my hand as I jumped from the fifth floor landing to the fourth, the door with the 4 emblazoned in in black paint rising before me like the pearly gates. I would be safe there. I would be safe there.

I thrust open the door and found myself in the middle of a hallway. The floor was a murky pink and brown laminate, and the white ceiling low. There were no windows. Both ends of the hallway seem to split into two passages. Panic rose in my chest; they were coming. I had to go. I picked blindly, turning left, and running full tilt down the hall. Almost as soon as I had started running, I saw figures turn the corner. Their forms shed no shadows, a part of me registered, but it carried no weight as the bald, rotting, decrepit bodies sprinted towards me, ragged nails and broken teeth glinting in the light of the hallway. They leapt at me, biting and scratching. I’m sure I cried out as one took a chunk of flesh from my hand, but the blood pumping in my ears drowned out most sounds. I don’t know how I fought them off, honestly, adrenaline was overpowering all other senses. I continued running down the hallway.

There was a door. It was identical to the doors that had been in the stairwell, the cold brushed metal distorting reflections. It was only then, seeing a vague version of myself staring back at me that I realized I was no longer feeling that swirling dizziness. Relieved, I opened the door. I wasn’t entirely sure what I am expecting but it certainly wasn’t my dormitory. The tall bedframe, the simple desk, the wardrobe with the mirror hanging over the front of it. It was the mirror, of all things, that beckoned me. I let the door fall shut behind me as I took the few steps to cross the room and stare at myself. There was blood streaked across my face, and it dripped from my hands, which I realized with a start were still curled into tight fists. I had been wearing overalls over a sweater, but the front hung off me like a wilted petal, a snap apparently broken off during my previous encounter. I was a mess. I was dirty. I needed to change.

As soon as that thought had entered my head, I was already peeling off the destroyed overalls, all other thoughts set aside. I should have known it wasn’t over, that fighting a couple zombie-like creatures wouldn’t have been enough. It was too warm in this room, too sterile to be my dorm. But none of those concerns crossed my mind as I opened the creaky wooden door to the wardrobe, where I knew a fresh pair of jeans would be. And there were, I suppose. But opening the door had seemed to interrupt the new occupants of my closet, a massive hive of wasps that had built a nest along the swinging corner of the door and the small magnet that held the door closed. I had effectively torn the nest in two, and my error was not easily forgiven. I did hear myself scream this time as furious insects swarmed me, sharp stings lighting up my body like a thousand electric shocks. I staggered and backed into the wall, hands pressed over my eyes, too instinctively concerned for my sight to try to swipe at the wasps that flooded my senses. My scream didn’t last long, as my open mouth encouraged some stings to my tongue as well, and I gritted my teeth shut, heaving panicked breaths. I wasn’t sure how long I was there, pressed into the corner opposite the wardrobe, until gradually I realized that the stinging over my body was the throbbing of the previous wounds, not the inflicting of new ones. Tentatively uncovering my eyes, I surveyed the room. I was grateful to discover I must have knocked the mirror off its supports in my struggle, unable to comprehend what I must look like now, more histamine than human. I crept forward, avoiding the broken glass, except for a brief pause to stoop and gingerly grab a hefty shard. If there more of those undead bodies, I wanted to be ready. I also saw that the wasp’s nest was gone somehow. The compartment was devoid of the rolls of papery hive and any evidence the wasps had existed besides my aching body was gone. I was relieved and quickly grabbed the first pair of jeans I could find, wincing all the while as I shook out the folds. I refused to be sore and naked for whatever was about to happen next.

As I shook out the dark denim, I watched a handful of tiny specks fall off the pants. I wish it were a lie to say I almost laughed when I saw that they were ants, marching fastidiously along the creases of, upon inspection, every pair of pants I owned. Lucky for me, I suppose, that ants had never bothered me. The bad joke, however? Brutal.

You know how they say that adrenaline and fear help you preserve memories? Flashbulb memories, they’re called. Of traumatic or significant events. Well I think that even the adrenaline that was pounding through me had its limits. I don’t remember what happened next. I must have run out into the hallway, must have tried to find my way out, but it’s all a bit of a blur. I remember something to do with my teeth and a pair of pliers, but I don’t think there’s anything there I want to remember anyways. The next thing I remember, however, is something I don’t think I can ever forget.

I was in another long hallway. Or it could have been the same hallway, I’m not sure how I would know. I saw shadows shift and contract, and a form emerged, completely enveloped in shadow. It looked like a person only in that had two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head. The hands were long, and the elbows crooked at wrong angles. The torso was slightly lopsided, like the head was too big to be supported properly. The legs were also impossibly long, and I couldn’t see feet. There was a sound, too, that was bothering me, but I couldn’t quite place it. It was like a low droning or buzzing, like it was trying to speak to me. We stood, frozen in a face-off before it lunged at me, moving at impossible speeds. I blinked and it was practically on top of me, swiping with its talons for fingers. I took some nasty swipes across my abdomen and stabbed at it with my shard of mirror. I missed once but the second time, I stabbed it where the neck and shoulder met. Shadows spilt from the wound, covering my hand in dark fog.

That was when I heard it. The buzzing sound sharpened and cleared up. I heard Rachel, crying, saying my name. I blinked and the shadow person was gone, and it was Rachel who I saw, Rachel whose blood was pooling around my hand, Rachel who I had stabbed. I dropped the mirror fragment and tried to apologize, but the words couldn’t quite leave my throat. I couldn’t bring myself to explain, apologize, or even comfort her, but the light had left her eyes soon enough and I knew I was ready to give up.

Police found me later. Apparently, we had been missing for two days. I don’t remember much of the trial, honestly, but there was never any evidence of either of us being drugged up or anything. They called it a temporary psychotic episode brought on by panic. I was put here instead, and I spend every night trying to avoid sleeping so I don’t see Rachel’s eyes, staring back at me, begging me to help. The...The wasps were real, though, I remember being treated for them in the hospital later.

Thank you, Ms. Katherine. Have... Have a good day. 

Click.

This has been a frustrating one to research. One would think a story with an online internet ad would lead to something. But no, Sasha hasn’t been able to track down any sort of Fear Factory, except for some Salt Lake City haunted house, but further research didn’t lead to any connections. There’s also a band, but there’s also no connections to anyone with the name Mara. Sasha was also able to finagle her way into old text records between Rachel and Peter, and got the address, near Oxford. Martin took a trip down to take a look at it but didn’t find anything. There was, in fact, an abandoned building, and it was, the site of the homicide of Rachel Tillvale, by Katherine Brown, according to police records. The odd part, however, is that Katherine was certain that she was taken to the sixth floor of the building, and that the fourth floor was her escape. Unless Martin has become wholly incapable at his job, which...is probably not the case, there are only three floors of that building. The weird part was the basement. Ms. Brown had mentioned something but couldn’t recall it. I understand why. In the basement of the building, there was a handful of adult teeth in the utility sink.

#tma #tma fanfic #magpod #magpod fanfic #the magnus institute #the magnus archives #this was literally based on a dream

[dragonrajafanfiction]

“I didn't know you were listening” —Linghao (?) Because it's rare that people ask a fanfic with him as pair

Aroma blinked her eyes, feeling a bit dizzy. The room was hazy and hot, filled with an odd perfume smell. Everyone was in a frenzy, some dancing only partially clothed. Her friends were unrecognizable, reaching for her with grasping hands, leering smiles and empty eyes. She staggered out of their reach. 

“Renata?” She whimpered.

The sound of shouting turned her head.

She didn’t feel well and wondered if the scene before her was a dream. Another boy she didn’t recognize had entered into the dance hall. Renata was standing behind him, looking terrified. Aroma reached out her hand, but she couldn’t speak without gasping for air.

The boy was slapping Anton. “Why did you touch my girl? Why did you touch my girl?” He frowned, not with anger but with impatience.

Anton gathered himself and charged him with fury. With the practice and agility of a professional boxer, this strange young man stepped elegantly aside and drove his fist into Anton’s stomach hard enough to lift his feet from the floor.

He then let him drop laughing loudly.

Anton rolled on the ground, heaving until he gagged and vomited his Christmas dinner.

“Heh. Sorry, my first time hitting someone, it was a little sloppy.” The stranger gave a mocking sneer.

Aroma felt herself gag in sympathy, covering her mouth with one hand.

One of the nurses approached as though to do something about it, but the strange boy lifted his chin, his eyes flashing a brilliant gold. Aroma felt her breath catch in her throat. She’d never seen something to terrifying.

Or so beautiful.

“What are you looking at?” The young man’s voice was frigid. “Never seen a man fight for a woman before?”

Aroma felt his oppressive aura and turned away. Everyone turned away. But she grew dizzy and desperate again and looked back.

Renata and this strange young man were dancing. Aroma staggered to them and heard his voice.

“Someone is going to blow up this port, I just learned. They released hallucinogens through the ventilation ducts, that’s why everyone is acting so crazy. Hallucinogens are like drugs. People who take too much lose their minds and only seek pleasures. The only sober people here are you and me... because your blood is too good... Hm?”

He suddenly turned and looked directly at Aroma. “I didn’t know you were listening.”

“Who are you?” She asked.

He let out a high pitched gleeful giggle. “I’m the Devil in room Zero. How did you escape my notice?”

“I don’t feel good.” Aroma sighed.

“What should I do?” Renata asked.

Zero turned back to Renata. “Take your friend here and go back to the building where you live. Enter through the ventilation ducts, find Room 0 and look for me. Hurry! We have to evacuate to a safe distance before its too late!”

“Do as I ask... both of you. And you will be free... You’ll both be my little princesses.”

Aroma watched as the Boy from Room Zero turned into a flood of gold dust snowing onto the carpet. She had scarcely enough time to react when Renata grabbed her wrist and pulled her out into the frigid night. “Who is he?”

“He’s a boy... a boy I see in my dreams.”

“Is he real?” Aroma asked. 

“He’s real.”

She was telling the truth. Behind the door marked Zero, the room where the nurses told them held monsters and demons, a boy was strapped to a chair, limp and unmoving. Even though Aroma had never seen her enter this room, Renata knew what to do, grabbing a pair of scissors and cutting through his restraints.

Aroma blinked her eyes, confused as to what was real and what was not. 

Despite the dark night moments ago, the room was suddenly lit like it was day time. She turned to the window and saw flames every direction.

Freed from his restraints, the boy named Zero grabbed her hand and pulled her out the door. “Wake up, sleepy head! You’re not dreaming any more!”

The corridors were filled with black smoke. Aroma could no longer see. She could no longer breathe. In her mind, she heard a deep roar, like a raging beast. Renata was leaning against the wall. In the dark gloom of the smoky corridor, her eyes glowed yellow. She drew back her foot and kicked the wall with such force that it burst open.

Dogs were barking. The sled dogs! They were coming towards them! They tackled her and licked her smoky face. Renata hugged them, crying with joy. The boy on the other hand was standing still, eyes forward.

A helicopter was flying over the destruction carrying the limp form of a monster with dark metallic scales and large tattered membrane wings.. It was half eaten away by decay. Aroma had seen this type of creature in story books. 

It was a dragon.

Renata attached the dogs to the sled and the three of them sped away into the night. Aroma could barely keep her head up but the boy from room Zero was smiling at her fondly. “You’re a surprise friend. I thought I had only one... but I had two. Merry Christmas...”

His eyes slid shut and the ground thundered beneath them, throwing them from the sled. Aroma ended up on her back and could see the dark cloud rising against the bright lights of an Aurora Borealis, streamers of fire arcing against the black.

They huddled together with the dogs, hearing the sound of circling helicopters above.

“Don’t move...” Zero murmured. “If you move, you’re dead.”

Unfortunately, there was no way to communicate this to the dogs. As soon as the helicopters swooped low, they panicked, breaking out of their harness, running into the woods. Helicopter fire rained down on them turning them into a crimson mist among the shattered branches of naked trees.

Aroma was now free of the hallucinogen and the smoke. She covered her mouth to keep from screaming, coming to the realization that she, Renata and Zero were the last ones alive.

The helicopter swooped back again and a man was in the open hatch with a gun in his hand. He raised it and it thundered.

The line of bullets ran right next to them.

She could hear Renata murmuring. “We will never abandon each other... nor betray each other until death...”

The man aimed at them again, switching his rifle for a larger metal cylinder that rested against his shoulder.

Zero rolled his eyes up at Aroma. “You really are lovely. Do I really get to have two friends?”

“Yes...” Aroma whispered. “Yes. Forever.”

“Little Aroma, white like snow... Snow White...” Zero was talking nonsense but she seemed to understand. He slid to her and pulled her face to his, his lips brushing against hers as he whispered. “They haven’t seen you yet. Don’t die. Please.”

His voice, the smell of his breath, the warmth of his face, his gentle request. It awoke in her the will to fight. The will to live.

Renata reached for the sled and pulled out a black metal machine gun. Her eyes were the color molten iron. She lifted the gun to the helicopter and opened fire as if she had used the gun a million times before.

Aroma stared at her in awe. What was she thinking? As she asked the question, the thoughts of Renata answered, filling her mind with the knowledge of machine guns. In an instant, Aroma knew how it worked too. She went to the sled and pulled out another gun.

Renata gasped. She had acted a moment too late. A large rocket was heading toward them! Aroma fired her own gun and exploded the rocket before it reached them. The shockwave hit and Aroma was thrown, landing a few feet away. She sat up, tried to stand but fell. She tried again and fell.

She looked in confusion. A bloody twisted wreck was where her foot had been. Crimson blood oozed into the ground.

She turned. Renata was lying not far away, gasping ragged red bubbles through her nose. She was crying.

Aroma crawled, pulling herself to her. “Don’t cry.” She whispered.

“I’m going to die. I’m going to die...” Renata sobbed.

A shadow fell over them.

“Silly girls. How can we be friends now that you’re like this?” Zero, calm in the face of the destruction and death, walked over to them. “Let’s start over. You two...” He wagged a finger to them both, “...must live well and always be useful to me.”

“But... I’m dying...” Renata coughed.

“No... just like the poppies... you will come back again after you die.” He gathered Renata into his arms and went to sit by Aroma. “I promised you freedom as a gift...” He told Renata.  “....and you...” He looked at Aroma with gentle kind eyes. “You’re my surprise Christmas gift. I was so happy to see you.”

He pulled Aroma into his lap like she was a beloved puppy.

“There is still so much out there you haven’t had time to see. Hugs and kisses... and love, so...” He held them tightly, eyes swimming with bright yellow tones. 

“...Don’t. Die.”

He kissed Renata and then turned and kissed Aroma. His lips were soft and warm against hers and that warmth spread to her entire body. She opened her eyes. Her vision cleared and her ears stopped ringing. 

Two more helicopters loomed over her head. Zero caressed her lips in a gesture asking she be quiet.

Then he turned, leaving them in the snow to stand up and face his enemies. “I give my first gift and you want to take it away? You also want to take away my surprise Christmas gift?”

His voice was a mad howl over the sound of the rotors. “WHAT KIND OF EXCHANGE IS THAT?!”

Aroma couldn’t understand what was happening. There were loud booms like fireworks. Bright lights illuminated the sky. Zero was singing and surrounded with a dark and sinister aura. He spread his arms and rose into the air. “At the end of the thousand years... Satan will be released from the prison and come out to deceive the nations of the four corners of the earth! Gog! And Magog! To call them together for the battle! Their numbers... are as the sand on the seashore!” 

[teriiiwrites]

2019 Writing Wrap-Up

I typically do this on my main rather than here because I always forget this exists, but not this year! 

Another year where I didn’t end up sharing a single thing I wrote in its entirety so I’m sticking with my trend there lmao. Good to know that some things never change. But I have taken the first steps towards that - namely, starting this blog to give myself a place to talk more about writing. 

Now, onto the stats!

Total for 2019: 104,374 words!

I actually wasn’t expecting to even near the 100K mark this year, so the fact that I passed it was a pleasant surprise. It’s significantly less than I hit in 2018 (over 170K), but I’m still very proud of what I accomplished throughout the year. 

My focus over 2019 was based a little less in silly concept story ideas (which I still love dearly and want to do more of this next year) but I tried to focus a little more in diversity. In the types of stories, the characters in them, and how they were written. I did my best to push my boundaries with it, which often led to taking longer with my writing and probably is one of the reasons the word count of the year wasn’t as high as last year. But I felt it was important for me, and I’m glad that I worked on what I did. 

The longest piece I wrote was my WIP NaNo novel, Castle on the Hill, which hit 57,037 words. I’m hoping to work a little more on it in 2020 and maybe finish up a first draft over the summer, when I have a little more time. 

With that, here are some of the highlights:

~~

“They say the British are starting to listen to our people there! That they might consider changing some of the voting laws!” He preaches with the pride of a man who has always believed in the good of the British, but it is confusing to hear him speak like this.

Wasn’t it only months ago when his father spoke of the evils of the British invaders? Of the unforgivable things they’d done? How is it that, now, he draws his own family closer to the center of their spiderweb?

(A Wanderer on a Scorched Path)

~~

That night in the motel had turned into a week, which turned into a month, and so on until all Laine’s memories of her early childhood involved Do Not Disturb signs and vending machine dinners. 

(A Walk Down Memory Laine)

~~

In hearing of her success, the townsfolk quietly cheered for her, disregarding their previous contempt for the malicious girl who’d tormented them. She was all at once one of theirs. Hadn’t they laughed with her, waved at her, made faces at the small girl who had seemed so unlike her family? And perhaps all of their attempts at kindness were being paid off. Finally, here was a Grey who would break the curse of her cruel family and be a decent sort. 

(The Grey Manor)

~~

A familiar coach split the crowd, curtains drawn over the windows. It was almost easy to believe that the Greys were inside, eager – if Greys could be eager – about reuniting with their youngest. But there was only one Lady Grey left. 

(The Grey Manor)

~~

It was during one of these heavy snowstorms that the Visitor arrived in town. None could claim to know where she came from, and fewer still knew her name. Even the details of her appearance never quite matched up – some said she was an old woman, with hair like straw and wearing rags better fit for carrying potatoes than being worn. Other claimed she was no older than thirty, that the apparent age was only due to her gravelly voice and wild, fair hair. They said that though her clothes were faded and tattered and too large on her tiny frame, one could still see the frayed ruffles and faint design of what once must have been a fine gown. 

(The Grey Manor)

~~

Years had passed since the doctor’s apprentice had last been to the Grey Manor. He’d been one of many who had taken a thrill at the abandoned house while Lady Grey had been away. He now considered himself above such superstitions. Yet the effect of the snow-covered cemetery and the sprawling, leafless ivy across the outer walls could not be blamed wholly on the overcast sky. 

(The Grey Manor)

~~

The doctor’s apprentice made his way deeper into the house, but the Grey Manor felt more fit for ghosts than the living. 

(The Grey Manor)

~~

“Good afternoon, Clara!” I greeted as I waved for her to take a seat before my desk.

“Doctor,” she responded in kind. She pulled back the chair and fell into it in one fluid motion. “Things are on the up-and-up!”

As much as I appreciated her enthusiasm, having supervillain clients typically meant having to gently discourage their flavor of ‘on the up-and-up’. 

(The Desk of Dr. Isselhardt)

~~

“I think I’ll start off with a vacation. I was initially thinking of revisiting the city I grew up in, but finding a kennel for my hellhounds would be a nightmare, and I just know none of my friends would take them in.”

I had met Jekyll and Hyde once, when I’d bumped into Clara on my morning jog in the park, and I couldn’t blame them.  

(The Desk of Dr. Isselhardt)

~~

The angelic child screamed like a demon, yet Camila adored her more than she’d known she was able. 

(Quinta and Her Cat)

~~

Amara leaned back against the door, staring at the ceiling. “Your Guardians don’t seem as sympathetic as you make them out to be.”

Deirdre kicked out her foot, but only caught the edge of some piping. “They have to choose their battles. They’re strong, but not so strong as to fight all of them.”

“Legal skirmishes between the elite is apparently a higher priority than the oppression of thousands,” was Amara’s reply.

Deirdre didn’t respond; she had nothing more to say. 

(The Great Guardians)

~~

One of the aliens is moving quickly towards me, and I realize my impression that they are humanoid was a little premature. Though its head, neck, and torso are vaguely like mine, the bottom half of their bodies are more like a spider. A gray, spider centaur. With no face.

A small part of my brain asks why I'm not terrified. I have no answer for it. 

(Alien Abduction)

~~

Sir Michel had been in Eastcairn Keep only once before, but the imposing walls of stone were as familiar as if he had grown up here. The halls were cold and impersonal, as though acknowledging that they'd been around long before Sir Michel had arrived and they would stand the same long after he was gone. 

(Foul Play)

~~

"I have a sister." Andromeda's voice was soft, but it carried as though all of the forest had quieted to listen. "The kingdom is in no great danger of losing an heir."

Sir Michel chuckled at her naivety. "Princess, if you believe that your father will allow for this - "

"Then let him come to tell me himself."

Never before had Sir Michel been interrupted by a woman. His laughter caught in his throat, and, for a moment, he was too stunned by Andromeda's audacity to respond. 

(Foul Play)

~~

"The King is busy running a country, as one day your future husband shall."

"And I suppose you think that by carrying me back to the Keep, you'll be given the position?" Andromeda asked bitterly. She brushed a loose braid behind her shoulder. "You, a man with nothing but a meager title, sitting on the throne? No one with sense could expect such a fate for you, yet here you are."

"Yet here I am," was the knight's weak response. He couldn't understand how it was that he spoke far louder than the princess, and yet his words didn't seem to carry half as well or ring half as true. 

(Foul Play)

~~

"One of your men killed Tihomil, but not you. The trial is not fair."

"We don't fight fair when it comes to your life." 

(Foul Play)

~~

Andromeda pushed herself away, pulling her dagger with her. When she lifted a part of her skirt, Sir Michel saw that it was strapped to her leg, a place no honorable man would've thought to check. When she bent down again, her face was no more than a foot from the knight's.

"I don't fight fair when it comes to my life," Andromeda hissed. She wiped the blood staining her hands onto Sir Michel's breastplate, trailing red across its center. 

(Foul Play)

~~

As his vision began to tunnel, Sir Michel the Righteous' last sight was that of the princess stealing off into the night, her movements as feral and graceful as something too wild to be contained in the Keep. 

(Foul Play)

~~

Josef Weber was a quiet and privileged man, and the two together gave him the appearance of being far prouder than he actually was. This view was encouraged by the fact that he surrounded himself with few friends, and that those he kept were similar in stature and wealth to himself. 

(Castle on the Hill)

~~

The night sky was illuminated by fireworks, casting a scarlet glow over the small, German city of Heidelberg. Its castle stood imposingly atop a hill, awash in the red, mimicking fires that had taken the structure from what it had once been to the ruins that now overlooked Old Downtown. Crowds of thousands had flooded the streets, watching the annual celebration in awe as the fireworks reflected in the Neckar River below. 

(Castle on the Hill)

~~

“Shouldn’t you be running back to Hulmarra? I thought you were loyal to your lady.”

Theren’s laugh was abrupt and loud, but when he stopped, his voice was coldly stern. “We’re loyal to two things. Gold and discretion. It just so happens Lady Iltazyara is well equipped with both.”

Verna smirked. “Only those two things? If I paid you to kill your sister, would you do it?”

“That price would cost far more than you have,” Theren said with a condescending smile.

“You’d be surprised how much I have at my disposal,” Verna taunted.

“Then we can talk later.” Theren winked in her direction and grinned broadly at the impatient look on Rowan’s face. 

(The Virtuous Seven)

#writing #2019 writing wrap-up #2019 #writeblr

[dukeofriven]

‘The AfD declares autistic climate activist to be “mentally challenged” and firms-up its campaign platform around the idea of publicly ridiculing a teenager.’ Throw their pathetic fear of a teen back in their faces. Mock them at every opportunity. Smear their faces in their own shit until they can’t breathe without opening their mouths to swallow it. Remind them always that they are small and weak and frightened by a 15 year old - jeer them, giggle in their presence them, howl with laughter every time they try and pass their crayon scrawl as policy.  Make their every waking second a taunting Mean Girls hell in which they can never be free of the knowledge that everyone knows they’re nothing but a pathetic joke. And every time they try and draw strength from that, to try and don the mantle of the oppressed underdog, punch them in the nose and remind them that their bodies are as fragile as their egos and their ideas. Push them down again and again and again. Whisper in their ear that their Nazis forebears used to get treated like this - until one day they found the courage to stand up for themselves and their beliefs and fight. And then they lost. And then we killed them. And then we displayed their bloated corpses for all the world to jeer. And then we destroyed everything they had built and they were powerless to stop us because these failed, pathetic losers put their faith in beliefs that were wrong. Demonstrably false. Literally untrue. The Reich to last a thousand years never grew old enough to get a driver’s license. The Nazis who were humiliated in the Beer Hall Putsch vowed that from that day forward no one would ever treat them like that again. But we did. Because they’re losers who fail. These are people whose ideology gives them cover for advocating some of the most heinous acts this earth has ever seen. The alt-right, whether they openly identify as Nazis or not, are Nazis, and are in accord with the exact same belief system that advocated for genocide, racial supremacy, patriarchy, antiquated conservatism, and other such debunked delusions even if they distance themselves from the Nazi label. When someone’s ideology gives them cover for being a piece of shit like that then you should oblige and treat them as such. Drag them into the nearest restroom and give them a couple swirlies -shit belongs in the toilet, after all. Alright. Despite my bellicose rhetoric above I am a pacifist at heart - violence ultimately begets more violence. So don’t let them drown. Don’t break any bones. Don’t go pulling off fingers the way you might the wings of a tiny, helpless, pathetic, utterly incapable-of-fighting-back mosquito before carelessly squashing it with the tip of the nail on your pinkie finger. Even though you could. Easily. It would not be hard.

But there’s a difference between perpetuating a cycle of violence by starting a blood feud or spending decades abusing someone emotionally and physically and dragging someone who said “you’re a weak effeminate pansy degenerate who wouldn't exist in our pure society and its not hate speech to want a country for white straight men and women with shared moral values” into a park bathroom and demonstrating certain inaccuracies of that argument by clamming their heads into the urinal and forcing them to eat a urinal cake. It’s not the most intellectually robust rebuttal, but you could rephrase “you’re a weak effeminate pansy degenerate who wouldn't exist in our pure society” as “you’re a stinky doo doo head who sucks and when I grow up I’m gonna be strong enough to throw you into space.” They’re functionally identical in terms of tone, content, self-aggrandizement, and mental acuity. There is no intellectually appropriate response to that kind of infantile argument - these are not intelligent people. I don’t mean ‘lacking in formal education.’ I mean they’re stupid. ‘Burn the blankets to warm the bed’ stupid. Leibowitzian ‘Proud To Be A Cretin’ stupid. ‘Smart Men Stay Ignorant; Leaning’s For Libs’ stupid. Their positions should not be treated as intellectually valid out of a misguided belief that a good intellectual should be open-minded to every idea every time it’s proposed. Sure, absolute-free-speech defenders always willing to normalize Nazi “discourse”, I’ll concede that the world-is-flat guy might have had a right to explain what his beliefs were. In 5000 BC, When nobody had heard them before and we didn’t know what he was going to say. Eight thousand years later, though, indulging his ancestor who’s just going to repeat the same points that were wrong eight millennia ago is lunacy.

A good intellectual knowns when something isn’t worth their time and acts accordingly. Sometimes this means not letting someone fill the air with hate speech out of slavish obligation to letter of freedom of expression instead of its spirit (when someone is granted the freedom to debate the idea that everyone who disagrees with them should be purged, you only harm freedom, not celebrate it.) Sometimes this means force-feeding an advocate of genocide a tasty lunchtime treat of urine and quaternary ammonium compounds while cheerfully wondering aloud what might happen if there’s still unswallowed cake in their mouth and you need to resolve certain biological necessities.

The first mistake we ever made with the alt-right was to leave the whoopee cushion at home, when we should have attended their every rally with an armful and play them constantly every time they tried to speak. “There’s nothing wrong with saying I’m pr-THPPTPHTPHPHHPH proud to be THPPTPHTPHPHHPH be white and to stand up for THPPTPHTPHPHHPH the achieveTHPPTPHTPHPHHPHments of the whitTHPPTPHTPHPHHPH of the whTHPPTPHTPHPHHPH white THPPTPHTPHPHHPH white raTPHRRURURURPHH-P-P-P- whiP-P-P-P whP-P-P whiteP-P-P-P WHITE RACTRRHPRPRP-P-P ... ... ... *cough* ... ... WHITE POWFFFFWWWPWPPRPRPRPRPRPRSQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAKTRRRHHPPPP-PPP-RPPP-PPP-P-P-P-PLIPPPP-THRP plip! We should attend their rallies and events with boxes of red noses, rainbow wigs, and buckets of greasepaint and throw ourselves upon them until we’ve forced them into wearing their true colours. Remember: every SS officer who looked so forbidding in their tailored uniform stank of their own disgusting sweat because all that blackened leather couldn’t breathe and every SS trooper standing in that imposing formation was broiling in their own filth. Nothing but bozos in fetish gear. The vaunted Wehrmacht had their uniforms rot off their bodies in the snows of Stalingrad as they had to strip the dead for scraps and rags, freezing to death, starving to death, because Hitler - the great genius who personally involved himself with the running of his forces almost to a tactical level - he didn’t think they needed to be resupplied. The Nazis lost. The Nazis lost so badly their monuments were ground into dust, their leaders bodies destroyed or abandoned in the mud, the dreams of Germania proven nothing but a dusty model in a museum devoted to cursing the Nazi’s memory. Nothing but a shrine to hubris and grossly over-estimating your own abilities. The legacy of the Nazis is humiliation, shame, and utter fucking failure. Neo-Nazis, this ‘new’ alt-right whose philosophies are all old, have as their heroes men who did nothing but fail, who achieved nothing but to have their life’s work expunged, debased, destroyed, and condemned by the world not just in their time but for generations after. Not misunderstood geniuses but understood buffoons. Never, ever, let them forget this - and never, ever let them try to turn it into a virtue. No ‘we shall rise again’ narratives. No abyss-to-transformation in some bullshit Cambellian hero’s journey. Their past was not a defeat to inspire them to future victory. They are not the underprivileged hurdle jumper who against all odds and obstacles wins gold at the Olympics, they’re the guy on your track team who once pushed so hard on a door marked pull that he fell through the glass and had to get ten stitches, the guy who got so drunk at an out-of-town meet that he shat his bed at the hotel and tried to hide the dirty sheets in his bags and stunk-up the bus ride home until Coach found out and chewed him out in front of the entire team for being the biggest fucking tool in the whole wide world. Not the guy who was a loner in high school but who found like-minded friends in college, started a cool band where they sang about their sucky pasts, and wound-up a rich and famous with legions of adoring fans. Nah, they’re the guy who was a loner in high school, and in college, and in the job at the napkin distribution company, the guy who retired without a party, spent weeks at a time with no one to talk to, and ultimately died alone - not because he was socially awkward or shy or struggled to communicate, but because he was really unpleasant to be around and even those virtuous folk who try and make sure that nobody is lonely gave up on him because he was such a nasty, loathsome, turd of a human being whose only impact on the world was that he improved it by leaving it. That’s the past of the Nazis. That, too, is their future. Never let them forget this. Their past should embarrass them. Mortify them. There’s is the ideology of pathetic losers. When you march against them, raise high above your heads images of Nazi Germany - not rigid columns of well-armed soldiers or shining tanks rolling off the lines, but the images of their ineptitude. The shuffling columns of defeated, broken men. Their burnt tanks, their downed planes, their sunken ships, their pulverized cities, and all the equipment abandoned in panicked withdrawals or through sheer bureaucratic incompetence. Show images of Jews defiant, the simple act of their still drawing breath spit in the eye of those who thought to see them erased. Humiliate the Nazis again and again and again. They. Failed. The Jews endured, survived, flourished - won. The conquered nations of Europe rebuilt their cultural wonders and their ruined homes and brought back their stolen treasures. They won. The disposed Roma preserved their ways of life despite the will of an entire conquering empire set against them. They won too. The queer communities persecuted for their ‘deviancy’ not only survived they reshaped the post-war world into a place that could no longer sideline them in history. Another victory. The Nazis lost. The Nazi’s failed so completely that they lost not only the territory they had tried to gain but their own nation lay shattered at their feet - politically, socially, economically, spiritually. The Great and Powerful Nazi Party so failed its own people that Germany was sundered into West Germany, East Germany, and Eastern Prussia, promptly swallowed whole by the Societs - the trauma from that lingers generations on. The Nazis not only failed to achieve any of their goals - they failed in the promise made by any such ideology: in joining us we will protect you. They did not just fail to make Germany greater, they literally destroyed it, and left it in pieces. So when you march against the alt-right, these neo-Nazis, Hoist photos of the bloated corpses of the hanged at Nuremberg - their swollen faces distorted in death. Chant the cry “Morons, Not Martyrs!” Remind every alt-right shit-eating soul that they were nothing, are nothing, will always be nothing but failures, losers, and followers of stupid, incompetent, incapable fools. They were, are, shall always, can only ever be wrong. “These are your role models? This is your dream? Failures! Failures! Failures!” “Be A Nazi To Lose It All” Do not, for a single solitary second, treat their ideas as grown-up. Do not, for a moment, give them the cover of adulthood, maturity, or sober discourse. Do not, for one second of time, treat them with respect so long as they seek to hold power over you, to be feared by you, to be thought of as an enemy and not something foul but forgettable to be scrapped off your shoe. Never give them an inch of fear to feed their starving egos. The man who said that rocks were soft as butter and as edible as custard would be given no weight as a person of substantive ideas - Nazis deserve the same derision.  And do not allow them a moment of privacy to brood on the indignities you heap upon them, to be like a teen sulking in their bedroom crafting fantasies about how one day they’ll be proven right and everyone will be sorry. Drag them out into the light again and again and again, give them no moment of peace, allow no instant of time to pass when you are not holding images of their ideology’s worthlessness and failure above their heads. No hiding. No sulking. No second to plot or brood or dream. Stake them to the earth, keep them forever in the light, and pummel them with pie until even they can not deny that they are nothing but clowns worthy only of mockery, ridicule, and endless savage laughter.

#climate change #germany #afd #alternative für deutschland (afd) #greenpeace #environment #nazis #alt-right #greta thunberg #neo-nazis #Hitler #Mean Girls #fart sounds #eat shit and die #long post #autism #tw anti-autism

[tysonrunningfox]

Smingrid Is Ruining My Life

Part 1 | Part 2

Why.  They just keep...doing this.  Smut incoming tonight after I get home, still haven’t decided how I’m going to post it but whatever.  I can’t sit on it anymore.  I’m so tired.  I need to write an epilogue and smingrid won’t let me.  I hate them.  

Eret offers to fix Ingrid’s hand about three days after he wakes up, the kind of cavalier offer for help he keeps throwing out there to remind himself that he’s not in bed forever.  It should be cheapened by the fact that he’s drunk and his head is on a sleeping Fuse’s lap, but Ingrid can’t help but be offended.  Smitelout made her this hand and now she has to fix it, clearly.  

But that means Ingrid going to the forge and asking her to and that’s not something she wants to do.  

It’s not her problem that Smitelout suddenly likes her.  That’s not something she has to deal with.  She doesn’t have room for it and even if she did, she’s not sure why she should care.  It’s Smitelout.  Smitelout who has thrown a million petty little tantrums about losing to her.  Smitelout who threatened to spread rumors about Eret’s real dad.  

Smitelout who treats Ingrid like she did before she left.  Smitelout who makes Ingrid a new hand without even being asked.  

Ingrid still appreciates it even if it’s bent now.  She didn’t bend on purpose or anything, it honestly surprised her when the healer was trying to set Eret’s arm and he resisted with that much force.  And her fingers fit well enough that she just didn’t think about it, she braced him as well as she could and noticed after that they were bent out of shape.  

She lives with it for a while.  It’s hard to hold her axe but no one points it out until Aurelia is watching her attempt to hit the target in the chief’s front yard.  The first two throws clip the side but the third misses entirely and Aurelia narrows those chiefly but less irritating eyes and pauses, bag of tightly rolled scrolls on her hip.  

“What?”  Ingrid collects her axe, holstering it and adjusting her fingers back to neutral.  They still ratchet but not as well, the bend in the first digit making everything in them harder to move.  

“Nothing,” Aurelia shifts the weight of the scrolls onto her slim hip and when she cocks her eyebrow, she looks so much like Eret a year ago that Ingrid can’t help but feel like she should listen.  “Just that’s not really Hofferson aim.”  

“I just lost half my hand, what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know,” Aurelia shrugs, “it seems like the new one was working out for you pretty well before it got bent.”  

“It’s a grip thing,” Ingrid clears her throat and she knows that a glare won’t help her.  Aurelia wouldn’t be so comfortable with the rest of the family if glaring did anything.  

“You know, I’m sure Smitelout could fix those.”  

“What?”  Ingrid hides her fingers behind her and Aurelia shrugs.  

“She made them, I bet she could fix them.”  

Aurelia was there.  She heard all of that.  Not that it should matter, because Ingrid doesn’t care, but it makes her feel like she needs to try.  Like this stupid situation is something she needs to fix, like all the others were.  A Jorgenson telling a Hofferson something like that with no answer is reason for issue.  

Or it was, back in the world before Eret was next in line for chief.  Ingrid isn’t quite sure how all of that works but she’s sure, at some level, that it’s ultimately in her favor.  

“Like I have money for that,” Ingrid rolls her eyes and Aurelia contests Eret’s best deadpan with far less effort.  

“Right.  That’s the problem.  It’s not that you don’t want to talk to her.”  

“Why wouldn’t I want to talk to her?” Ingrid reaches for her axe to make an argument ending perfect yak’s eye before realizing it’s not guaranteed anymore and pausing.  

“I don’t know,” Aurelia shrugs, “I’m just thinking about how many weapons you have that need sharpening occasionally.   And if Eret isn’t working in the forge anymore, are you planning to leave Berk to get that done—”

“No,” Ingrid scowls.  “You were there, do you think I could just walk in and ask Smitelout to do something for me?”  

Ingrid hates the idea that she could.  That Smitelout might do it just because she likes her, and that’s fake too.  If Smitelout really does like girls and she hasn’t minced words before so why would she start now?  And that means that Ingrid is the only option Smitelout has ever known, aside from Spitleaf.  And Spitleaf never had the same problems that Ingrid did with the forceful proposals.  Her face isn’t so loud and people aren’t so presumptive.  

“I don’t know,” Aurelia shrugs and for a moment, Ingrid sees how pretty she is and how firmly she guards it.  It makes Ingrid jealous, suddenly, because her looks are still causing problems for her and she doesn’t know how to stop them.  But with Aurelia, it’s all words and no bite and somehow it works. “Have you tried?”  

“My hand is fine,” Ingrid lies and Aurelia knows it just how Eret always used to.  It’s irritating, she really didn’t need another Eret running around, especially one who seems to need less advice.  

“Yeah, I can see that.” She rolls her eyes and Ingrid tries not to seethe.  

Before her fingers bent, they were almost as good as the real thing as far as her axe was concerned.  A good solid throw was a single ratchet and it happened perfectly halfway through the swing, just in time for the axe to release at the right angle.  It felt alright if not perfect and that’s all she can ask for.  Except she didn’t ask for it, Smitelout just decided to give it to her.  

It was nice before Ingrid learned why.  It kind of felt like maybe they could be friends or at least consistent rivals, the way they used to be.  But now she knows that Smitelout wants something from her.

“It’s just bent.”  Ingrid ratchets her fingers, acting like it’s not difficult and Aurelia blinks.  

“Just a suggestion,” she rolls her eyes before starting down the hill without finishing the argument, like she knows she won without dealing the final blow, and Ingrid can’t say she’s currently overjoyed with having a new sister.  

She knew it was an inevitability, what with having so many brothers, and Rolf’s wife is great but also more attached to Spitleaf than Ingrid wants to be.  And it’s complicated, like everything is.  But mostly, Aurelia is annoying and pushing her when she doesn’t want to be pushed.   And that’s new too, she’s never had pressure feel so oppressive.  It always felt like something to push back against, people who doubted her were just waiting to be proven wrong.  

Now everything is a little more daunting and she’s lost her taste for being daunted.  

What if Smitelout says no?  Does she suddenly have to leave the island to get anything sharpened?  

That scares her.  She’s not doing that.  Fuck that.  

“Ugh, fine,” she stalks down the hill after Aurelia, turning before she sees the long red braid and almost jogging towards the forge, because might as well get this over with.  It’s not like she’s going to fly off island to get her axe sharpened, that’s a fair point, she has to work this out at some level or she’ll be defenseless.  

The forge is quiet and Smitelout is pounding away at some red hot hunk of metal on the other side of the window.  Ingrid doesn’t let herself pause, she doesn’t let herself feel fourteen and confused and lonely and see Smitelout as safe, because at least she’s predictable.  She doesn’t let herself see Smitelout’s arms, sweat slicked and intentional, or her hands, comfortable around her hammer.  

She doesn’t take the hammer as a potential weapon and she doesn’t think of a thousand ways to stop an attack.  She definitely doesn’t notice the way that Smitelout’s concentration looks more like avoidance, like she knew Ingrid was coming and didn’t want her to.    

“Hey,” Ingrid starts, trying to be neutral and Smitelout fumbles and drops her hammer on the floor.  It’d be funny if Smitelout didn’t like her.  

“What?”  

“Nothing,” Ingrid tosses her braid over her shoulder, “just wanted to ask if you could fix my fingers but if you’re busy…”

“What needs fixed?”  Smitelout doesn’t make eye contact but she moves purposefully, wiping off the counter with a wet, smudged rag.  

“They got bent.” Ingrid avoids the eye contact that Smitelout attempts to make.  

“So explanatory,” Smitelout rolls her eyes, “I need to see the actual damage to fix it.”  

“Here.”  Ingrid unstraps her fingers and throws them on the counter, wincing at the thunk of gronckle iron on wood.  She didn’t mean to hurt them more.  Hel, she didn’t mean to hurt them in the first place.  

Smitelout picks it up, ratchets the joints that she made and sighs.  

“What’d you do to it?”  She glares, heavy eyebrows low over those hostile blue eyes.  That look has always pissed Ingrid off and that’s no different now, except for the fact that she’s still preoccupied with the fact that Smitelout likes her.  

Why?

She knows why, rationally.  It’s always because she looks how she does.  It’s because she’s this perfect Viking wife.  Except Smitelout can’t be concerned about her line or the heirs Ingrid would make and there’s no carrot of redeeming the Hoffersons through marriage to dangle in front of her.  Smitelout can’t have thought that admitting it like that would go well.  But she still did it and it doesn’t make sense and Ingrid has no room right now for things that don’t make sense.  

“I held Eret down while the healers were setting his arm,” Ingrid shrugs, “he’s stronger than he looks.  Don’t tell him, because I can’t take his ego getting bigger than it is but…”  She trails off.  Smitelout looks between her and her fingers, frowning.  

“Why would I tell him?”  Smitelout picks up the fingers, quickly diassembling the rivets that hold leather to metal and moving it to her anvil, like she’s actually going to fix it.  

“I don’t know,” Ingrid crosses her arms, her bad hand folded under her good arm so that no one looks at it.  Smitelout doesn’t even try and that’s worse.  “You might think it’s funny that he can gloat, or something.”

“He’s pretty hurt, isn’t he?”  Smitelout starts taking apart the fingers, treating each part with delicate care that makes Ingrid feel not only guilty but ungrateful.  “Yeah.”  

“Is he…” Smitelout looks up at her and then back down, sorting the parts of her fingers into two piles, presumably damaged and undamaged.  Not that Ingrid cares.  She just wants them fixed.  “Is he going to be ok?  Or…”  

“He’s going to be fine.”  Ingrid sighs and she doesn’t remember the fight leaking out of her this quickly.  The longer she tries to work this out, the less tainted the gift seems.  Smitelout started in on insulting her the second her feet touched Berkian soil.  Hel, she charged Ingrid for the hand in the first place.  “Scarred up, but fine.”  

“He looked pretty fucked up.”  

“Yeah.”  Ingrid leans her elbow on the window and looks across the square.  

Smitelout rustles with the parts on the counter for a second before pausing, her voice rising in pitch and volume when she does speak again.  

“Is it because of what I said?”  She squawks, kind of like a baby terror and Ingrid looks at her slowly, cocking her head.  

“What?”  

“Are you acting weird because of what I said?”  She clears her throat, slumping her shoulders forward and looking anywhere but at Ingrid.  “About the liking you, or whatever.  Is that why you’re being weird?”  

“I’m not being weird.”

“You’re kind of being weird,” Smitelout snorts.

“I’m not.”  

“You—”

“It wasn’t the time to do that,” Ingrid snaps, slamming her good hand on the counter like punctuation.  Smitelout doesn’t flinch.  “I don’t care that you like me.  I’m just here to get my hand fixed—”

“After you broke it.”  

“After I bent it.”  

“It’s pretty fucked up,” Smitelout holds up one of the finger joint pieces, running her finger along the pale seam where the metal bent.  “Like, this used to be flat.”  

“I told you, Eret’s stronger than he looks.”  

“So are you,” she scoffs, “this took a lot of force from both ends.  I can fix it, but it’s going to take a couple of days, I might have to re-forge a couple of parts.”  

Ingrid doesn’t feel strong, not anymore, and the sideways remark resonates as a compliment in a way she doesn’t like.  It feels like it might matter more because Smitelout likes her, and that’s absurd, because she really doesn’t care.  

“How much?”  Ingrid tries to bluff and Smitelout hems and haws, inspecting a couple more pieces with squinted eyes.  Her face is sharper than it was when Ingrid left.  Not lighter, but more purposeful.  It’s not a face that can hide things and more importantly, Smitelout has never been tactful.  Hel, any bartering she’s planning to try is already undermined by the way that she’s blushing.  Ingrid wouldn’t have taken her for someone who blushes, honestly, she never seemed to get embarrassed about anything else.  And in Ingrid’s mind, at least, throwing a tantrum about losing Thawfest is a lot more embarrassing than liking someone.  

Ingrid catches herself staring and looks away.  Smitelout doesn’t comment, for some reason, even though she’s never let Ingrid get away with anything, ever.  She’s the one acting weird.  

“I’ve got some scrap from making…the bombs,” Smitelout stutters through it, “it’s not good metal but this is just a draft, obviously, if you and Eret can fuck it up this bad.  I’ll do it for free with shit materials but you’ll have to pay for the next try.”  

“Fine.”  

“Really?”  Smitelout’s voice cracks again and Ingrid tries not to care that she’s nervous.  Even so, it’s a weird thrill to make someone nervous even with her hand off and taken expertly apart in front of her. It makes Ingrid feel significant in a way she’s been missing ever since Haddocks started talking over her all the time. “I mean, it’s a deal, you should take it.”  

“I already did,” Ingrid stands up, debating for a moment before leaving her bad hand out of her pocket, “that’s fair.  When can I pick it up?”  

“I’ll let you know,” Smitelout shrugs, “depends on how busy I get, it’s been pretty busy with kid saddles since the dragons came back.  But I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”  

“Don’t rush it for me,” Ingrid clears her throat.  “I just mean—”

“I’m not going to make it weird,” she tosses the pile of good parts into a leather bag and sets it on the shelf beneath the counter.  “I get it, I—”

“Ok.”  Ingrid shrugs.  

“Ok what?”  

“You don’t get it,” she bites her lip and sighs, “but you won’t make it weird.  That’s good, considering this is the only forge on Berk.”  That’s too harsh and Ingrid sighs, “I don’t know what weird is.  Everything is weird.  I came back to a different Thor-damned island.  You overcharging me for repairs is about the only thing that feels normal.”  

Smitelout is quiet for a moment and it’s almost comfortable.  

“This one’s free, Hofferson, in what world am I overcharging you?  You’re just looking for something to complain about.”  

Ingrid can’t quantify her relief and she doesn’t try, standing away from the counter and shaking her head at a very red Smitelout.  

“Let me know when I can pick up the hand.”  

“Fine,” Smitelout huffs, “don’t expect me to rush on it or anything though.  It’s a free job—”

“I get it,” Ingrid takes a couple of backwards steps, heels dragging across hard packed dirt, “you know where to find me.”  

“Fine, give me more work, now I have to come get you when it’s done,” Smitelout rolls her eyes even though she basically volunteered for it and if she’s putting on a show to make Ingrid feel better, it’s not exactly failing.  

“I’ll come pick it up, you just have to let me know when.”  

“Whatever,” Smitelout shrugs, picking her hammer up off of the floor and twirling it absentmindedly.  “Are we done here?”  

“Sure.”  Ingrid rolls her eyes, “I’ll get out of your hair.”  

Smitelout waves her off and Ingrid pauses another second before turning back towards the chief’s house.  She’s not entirely sure what just happened.  Smitelout likes her, it’s obvious and she didn’t take it back, but she didn’t shove it forward either.  She didn’t expect Ingrid to do anything about it, at least.  Maybe that’s ok, maybe it can just exist and Ingrid doesn’t have to do anything about it right now.  Maybe it can just hold steady for a while and Ingrid will deal with it when she’s ready to.  

For the first time, everyone’s constant advice that she doesn’t have to take everything on at once makes sense.  This can wait.  

#eret iii #festerverse #smingrid #ingrid hofferson #smitelout jorgenson #aurelia haddock #just gaaahhhhhhhhhhhh #it was a joke ship i swear #i don't know what happened

[encephalonfatigue]

advent reflection #1: nowhere to lay his head

And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have dens, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58) 

The old Nativity tableau vivant of a Jewish peasant family shacked up next to a manger among assorted livestock is a familiar one this time of year. My neighbour has a beautiful inflatable nativity scene (complete with cute little sheep) that distends and glows every evening. Among the sparkling holiday lights though, I find that it’s sometimes easy to forget this Nativity scene is a scene of homelessness, and something as jarring as homelessness and destitution sits unsettlingly at the heart of Advent. Incarnation is the arrival of a Messiah to a people oppressed by an Empire, who arrives as a homeless person to join the unhoused in their homelessness. In so many ways homelessness is a type of dispossession. But this Messiah did not come so that the unhoused remain homeless, but rather that they find a home in the future radically egalitarian ‘kindom of God’. But as we live within this present reality of injustice, the manger outside the inn is where the Divine is made manifest in this narrative. This site of indignity and unjustifiable poverty is what demands our spiritual attention. 

There’s ‘no place’ in the inn for this young Jewish family, just like there’s ‘no place’ for those who cannot afford to pay their rent here in our cities today. Daily all across Canadian cities, faceless landlord corporations are deploying police officers to evict poor families who cannot afford to make rent, through no fault of their own, but because they are treated as the flotsam of a capitalist economy functioning as intended under a global pandemic. These evicted tenants are like the ‘illegitimate’ and ‘dishonourable’ holy family who one might imagine could not afford to shell out the expenses for a clean dry place to lay their head down for the night. 

Under the decree of a census, Mary and Joseph must travel where the imperial bureaucracy demands, but expenses are externalized onto poor working people. And such censuses were acts of imperial domination for extracting wealth from the colonized of Judea. We see the radical tax resistance led by Judas of Galilee in 6 CE at this time urging Jews not to participate in the imperial Roman census. The movement of Jesus would become associated with such a spirit of revolt by people like Gamaliel, who explicitly compares Paul and his rabble-rousing comrades with the likes of Judas of Galilee in Acts 5. 

Yet this old dynamic of the powerful extracting wealth from common people still persists with us today. In this time of Advent, courageous organizers like Sarah Jama and Desmond Cole are being arrested and fined for occupying space on public property, demanding a public meeting with the Herodian municipal powers over evictions and the housing crisis. I say Herodian, because an eviction can effectively be a death sentence for some, especially this winter, and that is why anti-eviction protestors say municipal leaders have blood on their hands, as do landlord corporations and REITs (real-estate investment trusts). Anti-war activists of old used to say nuclear weapons not only killed when they were detonated, but extinguished life by way of all the food they removed from the hands and mouths of poor children where enormous government resources were diverted into creating weapons of mass destruction rather than meeting the basic needs of its citizens. It is not unreasonable for young people today to ask similar questions about how collectively pooled money is being spent on the police compared to goals like guaranteeing housing for all. The number of officers municipalities send for each eviction have a daily wage that could pay someone’s rent for multiple months.

The anti-fascist theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in an Advent sermon he gave on December 2, 1928, said that: 

“The celebration of Advent is only possible to those who are troubled in soul... the curse of homelessness... hangs heavily over the world... we see in many lands people dying of cold in wintry conditions. The plight of such people disturbs us within and amidst our enjoyment; a thousand eyes look at us and the evil haunts us. Poverty and distress throughout the world worries us, but it cannot be brushed away...” 

Bonhoeffer goes on to emphasize how Matthew 25 is central to the way any Christian is to observe Advent: 

“…we face the shocking reality. Jesus stands at the door and knocks. He asks for help in the form of a beggar, a down-and-out, a man in ragged clothes, someone who is sick, even a criminal in need of our love. He meets you in every person you encounter in need. So long as there are people around, Christ walks the earth as your neighbour, as the one through whom God calls to you, demands of you, makes claims upon you. That is the great seriousness of the Advent message and its great blessing. Christ stands at the door. He lives in the form of people around us. Will you therefore leave the door safely locked for your protection, or will you open the door for him? It may seem odd to us that we can see Jesus in so familiar a face. But that is what he said. Whoever refuses to take seriously this clear Advent message cannot talk of the coming of Christ into his heart. Whoever has not learned from the coming of Christ that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, has not understood the meaning of his coming.” 

Christians cannot forget that at the heart of their faith tradition is a homeless Messiah. If Christians are to take Matthew 25 seriously as central to observing Advent, and living out a life of faith daily, the mass evictions unfolding since August of this year should be of unwavering importance. While affordable housing has been a severe issue over the past many years around the GTA, it is especially salient under the cloud of COVID-19. There are thousands of online eviction hearings scheduled in the coming few months, pumping out rulings like a factory with a cold brutality that is chilling. Just last week alone 2000 eviction hearings were held.

Alykhan Pabani has pointed out that the large majority of rental units in cities like Toronto are not owned by so-called mom and pop landlords, but are owned by real-estate investment trusts (REITs), which are faceless corporations that hire management companies as a barrier between them and their tenants, to make the extraction of wealth as painless as possible for them. There is a reason they want to keep at such a remove from their tenants who are faced with high and steeply climbing rents, and perpetually degrading building conditions with more wildlife roaming about hallways and through building crevices than a Christmas nativity scene. Just speak with tenants anywhere in Parkdale, or read reviews or forums for rental units online. There’s a reason tenant protestors call their landlords ‘slumlords’. 

Alykhan Pabani and Aliza Kassam were interviewed on the Red Life Podcast, and it was an extremely informative glimpse into the housing crisis that began well before this ongoing global pandemic. They speak of how city workers and police are deployed to tear down the homes of encampment dwellers on public land and how management companies and landlords like MetCap are conducting mass evictions during this pandemic. Before COVID, some 135,000 people faced homelessness every year in Canada. Some 47% of Torontonians are renters, making a significant portion of the population vulnerable to evictions. Before the pandemic around 10,000 people on any given night in Toronto could be found sleeping rough, without a roof over their head. All these figures are only getting worse as the full gravity of this pandemic under capitalism is being felt. Tents, which are people’s homes, are being destroyed by the City, and despite officials claiming there are shelter spaces available to hold people overnight, there have been documented cases showing otherwise. One can see echoes of the alienating Roman imperial bureaucracy of Jesus’ time controlling where poor people’s bodies must be at any given time, and letting them deal with the consequences of being unhoused.

As long as basic clean sanitary housing remains a commodity, and is not ensured as a human right, this tragedy will persist. We have the resources in this country to provide housing for everyone. There are extremely wealthy families that live within our borders, but it is their interests that ultimately get the final say in government. People need jobs. Labour can be directed towards building and maintaining affordable homes for everyone, but instead labour in our economy is directed wherever wealthy people decide it should be directed, often towards that which is most profitable, which frequently happens to misalign with that which is most useful for meeting basic human needs that cannot be justifiably ignored. 

And so when the knocking on the door of Advent arrives, it is the knock of a homeless Christ figure at our doorstep. It is not a matter of performing individual acts of generosity though. Simply letting someone into one’s house is radically generous, but it is not changing the fundamental structure of property relations, and who controls what, and who has what type of access to what. Everyone needs housing – a safe place that they can call their own. The knock of Advent is the cry of the tenant with nothing but lint in her pockets, demanding they not be evicted from their home. It is the painful groans of the Holy Spirit praying for a day of justice to come (in Romans 8). Part of Advent is, as Bonhoeffer said, “taking seriously, not [only] our own sufferings, but those of God in the world.” And doing so requires a commitment to faith – faith that another world is possible. Or as Arundhati Roy says, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." 

In a sermon Bonhoeffer gave on December 17, 1933, he speaks of this revolutionary spirit that found its way into the Magnificat: 

“This song of Mary's is the oldest Advent hymn. It is the most passionate, most vehement, one might almost say, most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. It is not the gentle, sweet, dreamy Mary that we so often see portrayed in pictures, but the passionate, powerful, proud, enthusiastic Mary, who speaks here. None of the sweet, sugary, or childish tones that we find so often in our Christmas hymns, but a hard, strong, uncompromising song of bringing down rulers from their thrones and humbling the lords of this world…” 

And so more than petty housing reforms, and stop-gap government measures to quiet the rowdy demands of tenants and encampment dwellers trying to survive the brutal winter cold, what we need more than any of that is a total restructuring of the political order. What Alykhan Pabani and Aliza Kassam are doing with Encampment Support Network and various tenant organizing projects (People’s Defense Toronto, Malton People’s Movement) is not only meeting the immediate material needs of their neighbours (providing food, sleeping bags, tents, protection from evictions, affordable rents, etc.) they are also spreading good news that another world is possible. And that it should be made a reality. That this kindom of justice and dignity for all should be on earth as it is in heaven. That it shouldn’t be the job of volunteers to be doing all these things while so many are jobless and desperate for work. The state should be guaranteeing jobs to anyone who wants one and meeting the sea of needs that exist out there. We need a radically different economy. That is what Mary so rightfully recognized in her Advent hymn. She sang all those centuries ago: 

“He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:51-53)

If we are to fill the hungry with good things, and to adequately house everyone, we have no choice, but to send the rich away empty, and that is what is knocking on our door this Advent. Another world. “On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

#Advent #Bonhoeffer #Evictions #COVID

[letscollectallthethings]

Jonathan Meades - extract from “Say Hullo to Heini”, a novel in progress.

The scents of my early teens were barbecued lamb and burning buildings. We listened to Yé-Yé and explosions, doo wop and gunfire, we picnicked on rocks under stone pines, the sea lapped our feet whilst a war raged around us, we danced the Madison on a battlefields edge. We couldn’t admit that paradise was provisional, that our heaven on earth was turning into hell, a hell we would have to flee. Lime sorbet tastes of immeasurable loss.

I can still see it as though it were yesterday, in Dewachter’s window on the Rue Hoche, chocolate brown corduroy, lanyard thick, cardan style, collarless. It was the day before my 14th birthday when my father refused to buy me that jacket, I’d set my heart on it. In his opinion it looked Bavarian. It was Bavarian, the collarlessness. That was it then, nothing more to say. I didn’t know where in Germany Bavaria was, but because he had spoken of it so often, I did know that it was the fount of the greatest evil. The waisted jacket he bought me instead had a collar, and narrow rounded lapels, three buttons, raised stitching, a flap over the breast pocket, a single vent. I liked it well enough. His uncle and two cousins had died in Buchenwald.

Was I even then, all those years ago, a Jew? My mother was not Jewish, so I was not a Jew according to the dictates of Judaism. My father was non-observant. He could not reconcile the modern science with the ancient faith of his and my ancestors, even though one of them, a Rabbi, had given his life for being a Jew – the Ottoman military governor that’d decayed before the French arrived. We French…

None the less, so far as he himself was concerned, my father was not a Jew, or only on his own terms. He considered himself above tribalism, above cults, and sectarianism. Ahavath Israel was divisive. He insisted, for example, mistakenly, with wearisome obstinacy, that Eichmann’s crimes had been against all humanity. In his version, it was humans, not Jews, whom Eichmann had deported to their deaths. This does not accord to Eichmann’s own statements to Höss, the Auschwitz commandant. My father believed that being Jewish didn’t mean belonging to a religion, obeying what he called its “archaic foibles and murky prescriptions”. He even claimed to despise dietary regulations, he pretended to take pleasure in eating pork, but in truth ne never touched it. I doubt that he’d ever tasted, for example, sobressada, or blanquicos, or longanisses. What he might, had he’d lived so long, have learned to call “King Rabbit”. Being Jewish on his own terms meant having a Hippocratic duty to the sick, whoever they were, irrespective of faith, and having a humanistic duty to succour the oppressed, idem. We who have been oppressed throughout all history must side with anyone else who is oppressed. We must care for them because only we have shared their fathomless suffering, only we have both the competence and the charity to alleviate it. We are chosen because we own extreme empathy. It is a duty and a curse. It implies no divine favouritism. We must side with justice. We must not think of ourselves. We must, above all, not allow ourselves to be defined as victims for that strengthens the tormentors (I had observed, at the Avenue Jonnart baths, that many Catholics too were circumcised).

I learnt from him, the paramountcy of justice. There are many forms of justice, mine differed from his. The figure of Judex that I have incarnated throughout my life derives from the god whose justice is vengeful, stern, pre-Christian: Jesus was not much of a Jew, he was the first appeaser, a Duke with faith in rehabilitation and redemption.

A Jew must believe in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a pyre for a pyre.

His parents and, especially, his sister considered my father’s exalted compassion to be mere vanity. For them, his humanitarianism was an expression of guilt, a form of masochism. They thought his work at the hospital was show off self-denial, that’s what I thought too. His work and his library frightened me. He was a proctologist, you see what I mean about masochism. He was an expert in venereal infections of the anus. The malignant anal melanomias and anal fistulas, suppurations and abscess’. He was the author of “a Haemorrhoid Atlas”, his bookshelves were no incitement to sexual congress. He cured filthy incestuous Arabs of their filthy incestuous diseases, diseases I wished never to suffer. What sort of gratitude do you get from such people? This sort of gratitude – a slit throat, a bomb in a bar, a van packed with plastic explosives. His family wanted to bind him to his race, he was always trying to slip away from the ancestral burden, but in the end, you can’t. He was too good a man to understand the frailty of goodness.

Was I all those years ago French? My passport said I was. My mother was French – Français de souche, “frangaouie”, as they say. She came from Talence, and was brought up in a reformed church, a protestant, and, I have to say, worthy of that name. She protested at the least injustice, provided it was an injustice done to someone other than herself. She believed, as my father did, that she should work for the good of others – the poorer, the more backward, the more downtrodden, the more wretched these others, the better. The more resistant to her efforts, the better. My mother was a paragon of Republicanism. Imparting the values of the Republic was an act of necessary charity, and a virtuous mental flagellation. Training ingrate barbarians to be French was the finest of callings, and most trying. They were 80% illiterate and would remain so, they wished to remain so. She had reservoirs of energy to spend on making excuses for the thieving behaviours of her charges at youth camp. She strove for equality. She could never see that those whom she had treated as equal, were not her equal, she demeaned herself. She offered friendship, knowledge, sympathy, succour to people whose only reaction was to consider that she must be weak to do so. They despised her enduring attempts at brotherhood, she was blind to the chasm that divided her from them. She saw the good in everyone, even when they spent half the day kneeling and keening to Allah, and beating their wives, and stealing, never getting their rotten teeth fixed because they were too superstitious to go to the dentist. She did not rail against our fate, she accepted the wrong that had been done to us, that was being done to us, that would go on being done to us as though it were inevitable and deserved. She believed, for example, that no wrong that was done to us could match the iniquity of the wrong done to the indigenous people who shared our country. My mother did not consider us indigenous. What does indigenous means? How is indigenousness measured? How long does it take to become indigenous? How long have your ancestor’s ancestors to live somewhere? How many generations? Are we not indigenous? Will half a millennium do? Five and a half centuries ago, that’s when my mother’s husbands people, my fathers people, my grandmothers people, arrived on this blessed shore to till and worship and procreate and cook and build. How are we connected to the earth? Familiarity. Use. We frequent the place, we attach ourselves to it. It responds with fruit and plenty, that is its side of the affectionate bargain. My mother wrapped herself in penitence, she made herself bear the burden of illusory crimes, invented crimes, crimes that had not been committed by people dead before she was born. In short, crimes created by our enemies to promote her penitence, and the penitence of all who thought like her. That penitence about our being in someone else’s land, of our being there, which was, then, here.

She did not hate our enemies, she did not castigate them. She did not even regard them as enemies, rather as victims. Victims? Victims to be pitied. In the last days she went back tidying the house as though it were guests who were expected rather than Arab squatters. Word had spread fast. Thousands had left the ‘ghreb for the city, and the promise of a house. They had already, for example, taken over Jani’s parents’ house. They awaited out house, they lingered in the shade watching our every move. Entire extended families waiting menacingly. They were surrounded by sacks and kit bags, chickens and bantams, by wheelbarrows, bucking pram frames and handcarts all piled high with the scraps and rags that are the destitutes riches. Soon these lurking thieves would add to their wealth, they would appropriate what was ours. My mother says it’s what was due to them. It is not due to them. It was not due to them. There wouldn’t be “them” had there not been French medical science in Algeria, there would’ve been no Algerians to give birth to the generations who killed in pursuit of independence. They’d have died from malaria, cholera, typhus, small pox, they could not cure themselves. And independent they would soon contaminate our home with smoke and spit and shit.

My father was French, his passport said so. His family had been French since the premiers écrits, since my great great grandfathers time. My father had studied medicine at the faculty in Bordeaux, which was unquestionably in France, but France was now our enemy. French barbules, among them collaborationist criminals who had worked for the Gestapo, tried to pick us off with sniper fire, they hurled grenades at us, they shot is with automatic weapons. French soldiers drove armoured vehicles at us, French policemen besieged us, French judges imprisoned us. The French state had made an alliance with our enemy. The terrorists who had been its enemy only months before. Its army stood proudly side by side with murdering Arabs who were now known as “freedom fighters”. It attacked its fellow citizens. It remained callously passive whilst we were prey to the psychopaths of independence. The state, a traitor to itself, made truce with its habitual opponents, the self-righteous Parisian traitors of the Marxist imperium, the bag carriers, the big hearted fifth columnists, the ones who financed terrorism, the unthinking thinkers who cheered the FLN from the grandstand of their ivory tower, the fellow travellers in their cafes on the Boul'Mich, who filled their precious journals and reviews with calumnies about us. These smug grotesques with their complacent manifestos had no idea of our life, save through the misinformation they fed each other, they lied to themselves, they claimed we were fascists. What did they know of our history? What did they know of our silent suffering? Why did they hate us? We were French, that is what we believed, naively. I had yet to realise that when the French have no one else to turn against they turn against themselves. It was a lesson quickly learnt. France was a nation mutilating itself, it was chewing off a limb which it reckoned gangrenous, but which would haunt us. The amputee is forever revisited by the leg that is long since hurled into a hospital incinerator and turned to agri-fertilizer.

Before we fled, there was work to do. There were selected tasks to be undertaking. There was a legacy to be created, I was 16 years old. Park de Galland – they’ve changed the name, of course they’ve changed the name. Park de la Liberté. The dusty public garden off Rue Michelet, also changed, now named Didouche Mourad, one of their sacred fucking terrorists. Everyone knew about this park, a roofless house of assignation which I had never previously wished to visit, now I needed to. Late afternoon, I sat on a stone bench beneath contorted dragon trees, argons, and planes. The hard, fissured ground was littered with leathery seed pods and sloughed bark which was holed and popped. Twenty minutes. There were occasional footfalls and indeterminate figures on the terrace above, I wandered if that was where I should be. Was this the right part of the gardens? A further twenty minutes. There was a breath in the stiff leaves. A shadow passed against the sheer wall, veering and bending against the terraces balustrades. There was gust of fairground scent, Maderas de Oriente or it’s like, and sweet kief smoke, assassin smoke, an Arab whore stood before me. In those days I used to believe that they were all whores, Arab women, if they looked good enough. The others were failed whores, veiled to conceal their hideous faces. I waved a deck of banknotes then held it away from her. She stood over me and raised her skirt to reveal a deep forest of glistening hair in the midst of which was discernible a red sunset. She stroked it raspingly, a liquid colour version of the monochrome studies in my father’s library of venereal shame.  She moved towards me and put her hand on the part of my trousers which corresponded to my penis. She blew smoke at me, showed me a full horse-mouth of blue green teeth stopped with gold. She asked me what I wanted. I guided her onto the ground in front of me. She knelt, her tongue pushed out of her foul mouth, she was swift with my zip. My worry was blood and tissue on my ice blue jeans, on my punched toe-cap chisel toes, that was the last thing I wanted, almost the last. More than anything, I did not want any part of her to penetrate my clothes and touch my flesh. The pistol was in the inside pocket of my cobalt blue, chamois blouson, a Beretta M1951, which, when he handed it to me, Bébé called “one of our little Egyptian friends”. I shot her through the head just as he had instructed me, diagonally, a clean neat strike, a selective task, expertly prosecuted. She looked surprised. The last thing she did was to implore me with her eyes to undo what I had done. Too late. Even silenced, the report was cracking loud. Maybe my fear accentuated it? No, it was loud. The suppressor was not worthy of the name, yet if anyone heard there was no reaction, such was the frequency of shots in the city. It was quite interesting in a way to watch her go from life to death, an experience to learn from no doubt. Arab blood nourished Arab soil, the soil to which they claimed exclusive right. I wouldn’t say I felt elated. Satisfied, yes. I did up my zip and extinguished her drug cigarette with my foot. Ennio Conte was open. I celebrated the loss of my virginity with a lime sorbet. A special occasion merits the best.

#jonathan meades #literature #extract #books #reading #lit #algeria #france

[xtruss]

Opinion/Racism

On Ahmaud Arbery and the Video

What does the video of Ahmaud's murder show and was it wrong to post it?

"A white supremacist public will not be moved to action after viewing videos of anti-Black murders. It is their cinematic tradition," writes Yannick Giovanni Marshall for #AJOpinion.

— by Yannick Giovanni Marshall | May 11, 2020 | Al Jazeera English

Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot and killed by two white men in Brunswick, US on February 23, 2020, is seen in an undated photo provided by Marcus Arbery

One of the first things one notices when looking at the photographs of lynchings in America in the first half of the 20th century is the faces in the crowd. They are smiling.

Although the more popular descriptors used when referring to anti-Black terrorism are "sad", "tragic", "horrific", the word that should most readily come to mind is "pleasure". Lynchers smiled. They enjoyed the killing. They divided up the body, kept parts as souvenirs and used photos of the lynching as postcards. White supremacist society takes pleasure in the display of prostrate, vulnerable, tortured and murdered Black people.

In such a culture, it is easy to think of the circulation of the Ahmaud Arbery video as continuing that tradition. And it is. Most viewers watch the video with sadistic curiosity in their private spaces even if they later declare their outrage and let people know that they are upset in public.

Despite what some activists will argue, a white supremacist public will not be moved to action after viewing videos of anti-Black murders. It is their cinematic tradition. They are the directors, the producers, the stars and the consumers.

Images of Black people dead and dying is the raw meat that sustains a Negrophobic world. Kenyan social media was livid when photographs of the dead bodies of African people during the Dusit Hotel attacks in Nairobi last year were published before the friends and family of the dead were notified. Black people are not seen to be property owners of their own deaths. Their deaths are meaningless but their dying is clickbait and newsworthy. The Black corpse is a spectacle - not private, not wept over.

Of course, Black people are humans and there are many who share the racist erotophonophilic curiosity of the wider society, even if they represent their circulation of the video as an effort to demand social change. But appealing to white supremacist society betrays a faith in white supremacist society. It is faith in a society that has demonstrated a profound disinterest in the value of Black life every hour of the past four centuries. It is faith that this society is now on the cusp of being anti-racist.

That faith is misplaced.

It was misplaced when groups of enslaved people argued that if they smiled wide enough they would be let go. It was misplaced when new Black political representatives in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era believed that a non-racist America was on the horizon. It was misplaced when Civil Rights marchers believed that their singing sounded the death knell of racial discrimination. It was misplaced when people shouted "never again!" after Trayvon was killed. And it is misplaced now.

Racism does not grow old and die. It metastasises. This public will not be moved to action by Ahmaud any more than it was moved by Trayvon, by Sandra, by Eric, by Aiyana, or by the name we will hear two weeks from now, or the name we will hear two weeks after that.

This public can pull the plug on the economy, it can take the planes from the sky, but it will not willingly disband its lynch-mobs - uniformed or non-uniformed.

Do not offer up the bodies of the killed to win the sympathy of an unfeeling public. Decommission your hope. It polices you.

Many Black people have demanded and pleaded that the video of Ahmaud's murder not be shared due to its re-traumatising effects. They are hoping not to discover what they already know is the reality - that Black pleading is about as action-spurring as Black killings.

Black trauma is, however, real, intergenerational, and should be taken seriously. Our ancestors were gathered and forced to witness lynchings and floggings as well, be they in Basra, in Nairobi, in Cape Town, in Bahia, in Port-au-Prince or in Alabama. This is to say nothing of the millions of Black people who at this moment are being groped by police, separated from their families in prisons, or condemned to suffer the indignities of American totalitarianism in housing projects and ghettos.

Racist murder was the knife-point of racial oppression that drove waves of Black people from the American South during the Great Migration. Black people fled both the murderers in pick-up trucks and the local courts and governments that harboured them. They fled because the men who owned the white gun stores refused to sell them the arms they needed to defend themselves after Black-owned gun stores were broken into and the guns confiscated. Black people fled Ahmaud's killers tens of thousands of times.

Conservative media, like the white supremacist rags of the centuries before them, will instinctively search for a way to protect the murderers and to dehumanise and criminalise the victim. It does not matter how the Black person was killed.

The right-wing intelligentsia will try to frame them for their own murder. They will demonise and tar and feather the body, and problematise the dead person's choices in order to feed white supremacist talking points to their yapping audiences.

This while the mainstream liberal press will try to pass white supremacist bothsidesism off as objective journalism.

But these efforts work less effectively on most Black people. We can still see that a person is being killed. Killed arbitrarily, in broad daylight, and in the open. We see a family being killed. We see us being killed.

Still, Emmett Till's mother said leave the casket open.

Parallel to the radical desire for the protection of Black mental health and wellbeing runs the demand for the interruption in the regular procedure of sweeping Black corpses under the rug. To show their faces, #saytheirname, stay the broom. The discourse of white innocence and the notion of America's fundamental goodness are accomplices in white supremacist murder.

They work in tandem to quickly paint every incident of anti-Black violence as an exception to the rule. When this is persuasive, the anger is defused, and the incident no longer threatens to become a catalyst.

Mamie Till flung open the casket. In pain, she interrupted their arguments and forced a stop to the slow-walking of change.

It should not be assumed that all Black people who ask for the video not to be circulated are acting out of concern for Black mental wellbeing. Some of the loudest voices asking not to circulate the videos have made a career out of preaching the possible rehabilitation of the settler-colony. They too, do not want to be interrupted. Every open casket drops into their "HOPE" mugs and they recoil like an English lady finding a Hottentot's skull in her soup tureen.

These people know very well that Ahmaud was killed in February to absolute silence. They know that it was this very same video that led to the arrest of the killers, led some Black people to become genuinely fed up, led to #justiceforahmaud's trending, and led some to speak openly of revolution.

These people are whom Frantz Fanon, the pre-eminent theorist of the white supremacist settler-colony, called the colonised intellectuals. These are the Black academic influencers who are always nearer in proximity to white power than they let on. It is their task to compose the dull prose and type out the hot takes with which they intend to barricade the doors of the state against an incensed people.

It falls to them to convince the outraged natives that the abattoir in which they have been living - and which has not for one hour in the last 400 years churned out anything other than their misery - will one day spew out roses.

I have not made any determination about whether, in the end, it is good for this video to be out there or not - but I don't have to. It is not my decision to make. The decision about whether or not the video should be circulated (or whether it should have been published in the first place) rests with Ahmaud's loved ones. Only Ahmaud's loved ones.

But it is folly to think that bringing about the end to the circulation of videos depicting racist murder is an achievement. Whipping people in the privacy of the slave quarters rather than publicly against a plantation tree in front of the enslaved is not the victory we might think it is.

Enslavement in prisons and on prison farms is allowed to grow in size and atrocity because they are imagined to exist in some hidden away place, somewhere else. They are thought to be outside of society - even if they are located in the centre of Chicago. Hiding anti-Black atrocity from Black people is a poor substitute for ending anti-Black atrocity. Worse, it dulls our ability to see its full magnitude. If prisons were in the town square, their walls knocked down and their conditions and demographics were laid bare, there would be a Watts uprising every day.

It is also true that we must make a world where the photos of Mike Brown Jr's body left on the street for four hours inspires at least as great a bodily shudder as the mental image of a white person, say Shirley Temple, dangling from a lynching rope - an image many would find more disturbing. But that world is not made through silence. It is made through trauma.

The video, and the debate surrounding it has also, for me, revealed something about how I have been trained to see (and not see). It has taken me a while to recognise what is so clearly there in plain sight. The video is not a video of a Black person being killed.

The video is a record of a Black person fighting back despite being outnumbered and out-gunned. A Black person who fought back against the white supremacist culture that attacked him from nowhere and for no reason. It is a record of Ahmaud standing up, like Trayvon Martin, like Mike Brown, like Sandra Bland, like Eric Garner, like countless others who defended themselves against a murderous culture that has never in its existence been able to conceive of the noble, nor a fair fight.

It is disingenuous to pretend to know Ahmaud outside of the few seconds of tape that is circulating. We did not know him as he lived and so we cannot claim to know him in death. It is for this reason that it is crucial that we not reduce his life to his death. He lived and fought in that video. He lived and fought against overwhelming, unfair odds. In this, he embodied another tradition that has always run counter to white supremacist culture - resistance.

Ahmaud is not reducible to his death and the video is not merely or even primarily a record of his murder. It is a record of him outgunned, outnumbered, and valiant.

100 years ago, Ahmaud might have been the inspiration for Jamaican Harlemite Claude McKay's poem If We Must Die, written during the Red Summer of 1919:

"If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot...

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!"

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

— Yannick Giovanni Marshall is an academic and scholar of African Studies.

[whispersofwriting]

Exploring Power in Julius Caesar (essay)

I am incredibly proud of this essay, both because it was about a piece of writing that I thoroughly enjoyed, and the topic definitely piqued my interest. In addition, I felt like I could put all my formal writing skills to use and demonstrate all that I learned. This essay details how power changed Marc Antony, and follows his transition from a man grieving his friend’s death to when he is a man who will do anything (even kill) for a little power. This transition demonstrates the seductive nature of power and how it leads to corruption. 

Power is the possession of control, authority, or influence over others. Dictatorships often form when a leader gets a taste for power, or as Lord Acton succinctly puts it “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. This recurring theme is seen in literature in the growth and abuse of power of the pig Napoleon in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and in the transformation of Shakespeare’s Marc Antony character in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare demonstrates, in Julius Caesar, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely through his characterization of Marc Antony after Caesar’s death. At the beginning of the play, Shakespeare’s Marc Antony is a loyal man who when he sees his friend dead, has only thought for his loss.  Later, after having gained some power, he revels in that power, and in the final Acts, he is so consumed by his power that he has not thought for the sanctity of life and he creates a hit list.

When the reader first meets Antony he is an honorable man, walking into the Senate, distraught at discovering Caesar there, dead. Antony has no thoughts of power or glory when he begs the conspirators to kill him. He declares “I do beseech ye, if you bear me hard, Now, whilst your purpled hands do reek and smoke, Fulfill your pleasure...Live a thousand years, I shall not find myself so apt to die; No place will please me so, no means of death, As here by Caesar, and by you cut off, The choice and master spirits of this age” (III.i.xxxvii) He would rather die right there at the hands of those that killed his friend rather than wait and not know the time of his death.

Antony's true character is revealed after the initial shock of his friend being assassinated, when Antony derives power from words. Although he is livid with the men, Brutus especially, who killed his friend, Antony convinces Brutus to allow him to give a speech at Caesar’s funeral.  His goal is to convince the crowd gathered there that Caesar’s murder was unjust, without indicating anything untoward about the conspirators.  He appeals to the crowd’s emotions, by giving his eulogy over Caesar’s body, to their logic, by asking what reasons they had to hate him, as well as dropping hints such as “Let but the commons hear this testament/...And they would go and kiss dead Caesar's wounds/And dip their napkins in his sacred blood” (III.ii.xxxxv).  After the plebeians hear Antony say these things, they seek to kill Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators for ending such a good man’s life in his prime. Caesar goes from being a “traitor” in their eyes (III.ii.xxxxiii) to being a noble, good man. Unfortunately, Antony spins such persuasive words that they lead to the deaths of many people at the hands of his supporters. Some of the citizens are walking down the street looking for conspirators to kill when they come across Cinna, a poet, and innocent man, and begin to berate him with questions. When he clarifies that he is not Cinna the conspirator, but rather Cinna the poet, they kill him anyway. One of the citizens says “It is no matter, his name's Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going” (III.iii.xxxxxi). While Antony did not know the citizens would kill innocent people, his power of his words are what instigated these attacks.

However, by Act IV, Antony is a changed man.  He no longer innocently is responsible for tragedies and he actively is responsible for taking lives.  The power is getting to his head.  After he drives Brutus and Cassius out of Rome in Scene I, he forms an alliance with Lepidus and Octavius and with them, creates a hit list to block any political opposition. In Scene I,  Antony says “These many then shall die, their names are prick'd” (IV.i.xxxxxi).  He is beginning to take lives less seriously, and the reader can see him focusing more on power, fame, and glory. Why he isn’t taking lives more seriously since his friend just died at the hands of power-hungry politicians. Antony gets more and more comfortable with taking lives to solidify his hold on power. Later in the scene when Lepidus says “Upon condition Publius shall not live, Who is your sister's son, Mark Antony”(IV.i.xxxxxii). Antony is both happy and more than willing to kill his sister’s son just to reduce political opposition. Without a doubt, Antony answers Lepidus with “He shall not live; look, with a spot I damn him” (IV.i.xxxxxi). Antony then sends Lepidus on a mission to get him out of the way in order to convince Octavius to remove Lepidus from the triumvirate.  the reasons Antony uses to convince Octavius, one of the more prominent ones is that Lepidus won’t share the spoils, and with him out of the scene, they will not have to either. He suggests they use Lepidus and then cast him aside like a discarded rag.  Towards the end of his monologue, Antony pulls rank on Octavius and orders him “Do not talk of him but as a property” (IV.i.xxxxxiii). In this way, Antony gets more time in the spotlight and more fame and riches from the Battle of Philippi.

The changes that Marc Antony undergoes in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, demonstrates the seductive nature of power and how it leads to corruption. That corruption and power go hand in hand is not only a theme in literature, but it is also quite prevalent in history.  The rise of the Third Reich and Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Lenin’s ideals of Bolshevism transformed into the oppression of Stalin’s Russia, the McCarthy era blacklisting of Hollywood stars, history provides many examples of hunger, power, and corruption. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar blends history and literature in an apt study of the dangers and seduction of a little power, a danger that is evident and applicable in politics even today.

[howtolistentomusic]

So Chris Jay and his Army of Freshmen bandmate Aaron Goldberg made a movie. Chris, if you recall, is the alpha dog behind Fresh Talk, the Ventura-based "podcast about everything." We have some history.

Prominent local music promoter Brian Parra once called Army of Freshmen the hardest-working band he knows, and The Bet is a testament to that. While the rags-to-iTunes story GoldyJay (which is a well-chosen name for the duo's production company but an even better portmanteau for your slash fiction) has been peddling seems slightly exaggerated—the initial loan of a few thousand dollars that got the project off the ground came from Jay's parents—it's true that the guys were complete filmmaking outsiders that made a movie largely through sheer moxie and shameless favor-pleading. For chrissakes, pro wrestling legends Diamond Dallas Page, Jake "The Snake" Roberts and "Rowdy" Roddy Piper are in this thing.

I wish I had some of GoldyJay's do-it-yourself spirit. As my own artistic endeavors languish and I continue to struggle with some digital-age equivalent of stage fright, I can't help looking at The Bet's existence with a bit of envy and admiration even as I hate the final product.

Oh, did I bury the lede? Sorry! This film is fucking terrible.

The Bet follows Denton Baker (Alex Klein), a down-on-his-luck video store clerk that stumbles semi-reluctantly into the titular bet: if he can have sex with all of the women (and one dude) he had crushes on while in school (12 people in all, one for each grade), he gets to take over Lucas Gourmet Condoms, the company that bought out the building which houses his video store. If Denton fails, movie antagonist and heir to the condom business Brandon (Michael Consiglio) gets Denton's house. It's a ridiculous only-in-the-movies-type premise where the assets at stake are wildly out-of-sync with the juvenile score being settled. While not every movie has to be Citizen Kane,  GoldyJay does little to disguise the sense that The Bet is simply an excuse to ogle attractive actresses while simultaneously belittling them.

But let's back up a bit; there's plenty wrong with the film before we even get to its deeply embedded misogyny. It's unclear, for instance, how a video store employee with presumably shitty pay can be his own landlord capable of placing his house on the line for a bet. Another problem here is the movie has to cycle through a lot of characters in a runtime of a mere hour and 29 minutes, which forces some disorienting editing. There's a stripper character (Erin Marie Hogan) and a Satanist character (Erin Rose Morse) that are clearly different women, but the former's scene morphs into the latter's so suddenly that I had to rewind and double-check anyways.

Too many characters on Denton's list have conveniently remained in his orbit of adulthood: 11th grade crush Denise Davids (Stacey Kaney) is the condom company's receptionist; 9th grade crush Kirsten Kelly (Mindy Robinson) is the trophy wife of Mr. Lucas (Jake "The Snake" Roberts). And so on. The Bet also cheats on its premise by playing loose with that pesky "consent" nonsense. The guiding principle here is less "seduce these women" and more "force a sexual act on these women by any means necessary," which paves the way for blatant deceit. Denton is clearly meant to be a "lovable loser" type but the considerable charms of actor Alex Klein are constantly undermined by this kind of ignorant misogyny. Our protagonist begins the movie so hapless in the romance department that a blind date abandons him after spotting a former hook-up partner; he ends it with 12 new notches in his bedpost (more or less; again, the movie cheats often). It's an improbable transformation that depends on lies and manipulation to activate a woman's inherent stupidity and/or sluttiness, which inevitably causes her to cave to his advances.

Early in the film, Denton picks up Hailey Matthews (Katie Hilliard) for a night out and discovers that his 7th grade crush is now a nun. At a bowling alley he relays tall tales that demonstrate cliché bad-boy desirability: He cagefights! He gets tattoos! He rides a motorcycle! Hailey becomes so hot and bothered that she renounces her sisterhood on the spot in order to do the horizontal mambo with her suddenly irresistible date. Later in the film Denton attempts to seduce 5th grade crush Kendra McNulty (Nikki Leigh). He visits her wearing a long white overcoat, the standard uniform of doctors everywhere, and again bullshits his way into some action before the two are interrupted by Kendra's  fiancé (Chris Jay).

GoldyJay apparently never stopped to think about the real-world consequences such actions would have. Hailey and Kendra are throwing away entire lives because some random former classmate they probably forgot existed suddenly decides he wants to get laid. It's a cynical and dehumanizing view of women that suggests heterosexual male desire always trumps female agency.

Two years ago Vice published an article that explored whether sex earned through lies and deception should count as sexual assault. Neil McArthur wrote:

In 2013, Tom Dougherty, a philosophy professor at Cambridge University, published a paper arguing that if you lie or withhold information about anything that would be considered a deal-breaker by your partner—anything that, had they known it, would have changed their mind about sleeping with you—you have sexually assaulted them. The logic is simple: If your partner had known the truth beforehand, they wouldn't have consented, and the sex wouldn't have happened. Therefore, there was no consent. And sex without consent is assault. Fiona Elvines, of the UK national charity Rape Crisis, put this view bluntly to the Telegraph in 2014: "If you need to trick someone into having sex with you, you're a perpetrator."

These are excellent points that paint a damning picture of a film like this. But if you somehow aren't horrified yet, don't worry! GoldyJay also finds more traditional forms of sexual assault utterly hilarious. 6th grade crush Sarah Dawn Samuels (Ali Rose) once had a cosmetic surgical operation to "fix" a "moose kunckle," and Denton's wingman Jackson (Brian Allen) possesses her "embarrassing" pre-op photos. Blackmail ensues.

It's a fucking shame when such scenarios are played for laughs, especially because The Bet can be pretty funny when it isn't so busy belittling women. GoldyJay somehow managed to score legitimate actors for the project, and the more clever bits of screenwriting are often further elevated by the cast's line deliveries and Improvisational skills. But despite valiant efforts from Klein and his cohorts, GoldyJay created a group of ruthless sexual predators that no decent person should be rooting for.

In the lead-up to The Bet's release, GoldyJay hopped on any podcast that would have them to get the word out. Vaguely aware of the kind of film they made, the guys offered some feeble logic in an attempt to mitigate the inevitable criticisms. The Bet is a throwback movie, see. GoldyJay is trying to evoke the spirit of the raunchy classics of yesteryear. Like American Pie! You know, the film where a group of boys broadcast a classmate's sexual encounter without her consent to a significant chunk of their school's student body? Ah, the good old days.

There's a total double standard, see. A women-led film like Bridesmaids can get away with so much! That's why the duo's next masterpiece, tentatively titled Wedding or Not, is going to be another raunchcom, but this time it will star women! Take that, haters!

GoldyJay clearly lacks an understanding of the uneven playing field oppression creates. The guys treat raunch (a vulgar brand of comedy that depicts sexuality frankly and/or explicitly)  and misogyny (views and actions that are actively detrimental for women) as interchangeable, but those are very different concepts! Pursuing sex with attractive people is not necessarily bad! Deception and sexual assault, on the other hand: not cool!

It's possible to create a raunchy film that also respects women. The Bet is no such film.

#New Art City #ventura #805 #army of freshmen #fresh talk #the bet

[nothingnewunderheaven]

QUEERS READ THIS         A leaflet distributed at pride march in NY              Published anonymously by Queers                         June, 1990   How can I tell you. How can I convince you, brother, sister that your life is in danger:  That everyday you wake up alive, relatively happy, and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act. You as an alive and functioning queer are a revolutionary.   There is nothing on this planet that validates, protects or encourages your existence.  It is a miracle you are standing here reading these words.  You should by all rights be dead.  Don't be fooled, straight people own the world and the only reason you have been spared is you're smart, lucky or a fighter.   Straight people have a privilege that allows them to do whatever they please and fuck without fear.  But not only do they live a life free of fear; they flaunt their freedom in my face.  Their images are on my TV, in the magazine I bought, in the restaurant I want to eat in, and on the street where I live.  I want there to be a moratorium on straight marriage, on babies, on public displays of affection among the opposite sex and media images that promote heterosexuality.  Until I can enjoy the same freedom of movement and sexuality, as straights, their privilege must stop and it must be given over to me and my queer sisters and brothers.  Straight people will not do this voluntarily and so they must be forced into it.  Straights must be frightened into it. Terrorized into it.  Fear is the most powerful motivation. No one will give us what we deserve.  Rights are not given they are taken, by force if necessary.  It is easier to fight when you know who your enemy is.  Straight people are your enemy.  They are your enemy when they don't acknowledge your invisibility and continue to live in and contribute to a culture that kills you. Every day one of us is taken by the enemy.  Whether it's an AIDS death due to homophobic government inaction or a lesbian bashing in an all-night diner (in a supposedly lesbian neighborhood).               AN ARMY OF LOVERS CANNOT LOSE   Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are.  It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred. (We have been carefully taught to hate ourselves.)  And now of course it means fighting a virus as well, and all those homo-haters who are using AIDS to wipe us off the face of the earth.  Being queer means leading a different sort of                                                            2 life.  It's not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It's not about executive directors, privilege and elitism.  It's about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it's about gender- fuck and secrets, what's beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it's about the night.  Being queer is "grass roots" because we know that everyone of us, every body, every cunt, every heart and ass and dick is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored.  Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility. We are an army because we have to be.  We are an army because we are so powerful.  (We have so much to fight for; we are the most precious of endangered species.)  And we are an army of lovers because it is we who know what love is.  Desire and lust, too.  We invented them. We come out of the closet, face the rejection of society, face firing squads, just to love each other! Every time we fuck, we win.  We must fight for ourselves (no one else is going to do it) and if in that process we bring greater freedom to the world at large then great.  (We've given so much to that world:  democracy, all the arts, the concepts of love, philosophy and the soul, to name just a few gifts from our ancient Greek Dykes, Fags.)  Let's make every space a Lesbian and Gay space. Every street a part of our sexual geography. A city of yearning and then total satisfaction. A city and a country where we can be safe and free and more. We must look at our lives and see what's best in them, see what is queer and what is straight and let that straight chaff fall away!  Remember there is so, so little time.  And I want to be a lover of each and every one of you.  Next year, we march naked.                           ANGER   "The strong sisters told the brothers that there were two important things to remember about the coming revolutions, the first is that we will get our asses kicked.  The second, is that we will win."   I'm angry.  I'm angry for being condemned to death by strangers saying, "You deserve to die" and "AIDS is the cure." Fury erupts when a Republican woman wearing thousands of dollars of garments and jewelry minces by the police lines shaking her head, chuckling and wagging her finger at us like we are recalcitrant children making absurd demands and throwing temper tantrum when they aren't met.  Angry while Joseph agonizes over $8,000 a over for AZT which might keep him alive a little longer and which makes him sicker than the disease he is diagnosed with.  Angry as I listen to a man tell me that after changing his will five times he's running out of people to leave things to.  All of his best friends are dead. Angry when stand in a sea of quilt panels, or go to a candlelight march or attend yet another memorial service.  I will not march silently with a fucking candle and I want to take that goddamned quilt and wrap myself in it and furiously rend it and my hair and curse every god                                                            3 religion ever created.  I refuse to accept a creation that cuts people down in the third decade of their life.   It is cruel and vile and meaningless and everything I have in me rails against the absurdity and I raise my face to the clouds and a ragged laugh that sounds more demonic than joyous erupts from my throat and tears stream down my face and if this disease doesn't kill me, I may just die of frustration.  My feet pound the streets and Peter's hands are chained to a pharmaceutical company's reception desk while the receptionist looks on in horror and Eric's body lies rotting in a Brooklyn cemetery and I'll never hear his flute resounding off the walls of the meeting house again. And I see the old people in Tompkins Square Park huddled in their long wool coats in June to keep out the cold they perceive is there and to cling to whatever little life has left to offer them. I'm reminded of the people who strip and stand before a mirror each night before they go to bed and search their bodies for any mark that might not have been there yesterday.  A mark that this scourge has visited them.   And I'm angry when the newspapers call us "victims" and sound alarms that "it" might soon spread to the "general population." And I want to scream "Who the fuck am I?" And I want to scream at New York Hospital with its yellow plastic bags marked "isolation linen", "ropa infecciosa" and its orderlies in latex gloves and surgical masks skirting the bed as if its occupant will suddenly leap out and douse them with blood and semen giving them too the plague.   And I'm angry at straight people who sit smugly wrapped in their self-protective coat of monogamy and heterosexuality confident that this disease has nothing to do with them because "it" only happens to "them." And the teenage boys who upon spotting my Silence=Death button begin chanting "Faggot's gonna die" and I wonder, who taught them this? Enveloped in fury and fear, I remain silent while my button mocks me every step of the way.  And the anger I fell when a television program on the quilt gives profiles of the dead and the list begins with a baby, a teenage girl who got a blood transfusion, an elderly baptist minister and his wife and when they finally show a gay man, he's described as someone who knowingly infected teenage male prostitutes with the virus. What else can you expect from a faggot?   I'm angry.                       QUEER ARTISTS   Since time began, the world has been inspired by the work of queer artists.  In exchange, there has been suffering, there has been pain, there has been violence.  Throughout history, society has struck a bargain with its queer citizens:  they may pursue creative careers, if they do it discreetly.  Through the arts queers are productive, lucrative, entertaining and even uplifting.  These are the clear-cut and useful by-products of what is otherwise considered antisocial behavior.  In cultured circles, queers                                                            4 may quietly coexist with an otherwise disapproving power elite.   At the forefront of the most recent campaign to bash queer artists is Jesse Helms, arbiter of all that is decent, moral, christian and amerikan.  For Helms, queer art is quite simply a threat to the world.  In his imaginings, heterosexual culture is too fragile to bear up to the admission of human or sexual diversity.  Quite simply, the structure of power in the Judeo-Christian world has made procreation its cornerstone. Families having children assures consumers for the nation's products and a work force to produce them, as well as a built-in family system to care for its ill, reducing the expense of public healthcare systems.   ALL NON-PROCREATIVE BEHAVIOR IS CONSIDERED A THREAT, from homosexuality to birth control to abortion as an option. It is not enough, according to the religious right, to consistently advertise procreation and heterosexuality ... it is also necessary to destroy any alternatives.  It is not art Helms is after .... IT IS OUR LIVES!  Art is the last safe place for lesbians and gay men to thrive.  Helms knows this, and has developed a program to purge queers from the one arena they have been permitted to contribute to our shared culture.   Helms is advocating a world free from diversity or dissent. It is easy to imagine why that might feel more comfortable to those in charge of such a world.  It is also easy to envision an amerikan landscape flattened by such power.  Helms should just ask for what he is hinting at: State sponsored art, art of totalitarianism, art that speaks only in christian terms, art which supports the goals of those in power, art that matches the sofas in the Oval Office.  Ask for what you want, Jesse, so that men and women of conscience can mobilize against it, as we do against the human rights violations of other countries, and fight to free our own country's dissidents.                      IF YOU'RE QUEER,   Queers are under siege.   Queers are being attacked on all fronts and I'm afraid it's ok with us.   In 1969, there were 50 "Queer Bashings" in the month of May alone. Violent attacks, 3,720 men, women and children died of AIDS in the same month, caused by a more violent attack --- government inaction, rooted in society's growing homophobia.  This is institutionalized violence, perhaps more dangerous to the existence of queers because the attackers are faceless.  We allow these attacks by our own continued lack of action against them.  AIDS has affected the straight world and now they're blaming us for AIDS and using it as a way to justify their violence against us. They don't want us anymore.  They will beat us, rape us and kill us before they will continue to live with us.  What                                                            5 will it take for this not to be ok?  Feel some rage. If rage doesn't empower you, try fear.  If that doesn't work, try panic.                         SHOUT IT!   Be proud.  Do whatever you need to do to tear yourself away from your customary state of acceptance.  Be free. Shout.   In 1969, Queers fought back.  In 1990, Queers say ok. Next year, will we be here?                         I HATE ...   I hate Jesse Helms.  I hate Jesse Helms so much I'd rejoice if he dropped down dead.  If someone killed him I'd consider it his own fault.   I hate Ronald Reagan, too, because he mass-murdered my people for eight years.  But to be honest, I hate him even more for eulogizing Ryan White without first admitting his guilt, without begging forgiveness for Ryan's death and for the deaths of tens of thousands of other PWA's --- most of them queer.  I hate him for making a mockery of our grief.   I hate the fucking Pope, and I hate John fucking Cardinal fucking O'Connor, and I hate the whole fucking Catholic Church. The same goes for the Military, and especially for Amerika's Law Enforcement Officials --- the cops --- state sanctioned sadists who brutalize street transvestites, prostitutes and queer prisoners.  I also hate the medical and mental health establishments, particularly the psychiatrist who conviced me not to have sex with men for three years until we (meaning he) could make me bisexual rather than queer.  I also hate the education profession, for its share in driving thousands of queer teens to suicide every year.  I hate the "respectable" art world;  and the entertainment industry, and the mainstream media, especially The New York Times.  In fact, I hate every sector of the straight establishment in this country --- the worst of whom actively want all queers dead, the best of whom never stick their necks out to keep us alive.   I hate straight people who think they have anything intelligent to say about "outing."  I hate straight people who think stories about themselves are "universal" but stories about us are only about homosexuality.  I hate straight recording artists who make their careers off of queer people, then attack us, then act hurt when we get angry and then deny having wronged us rather than apologize for it.  I hate straight people who say, "I don't see why you feel the need to wear those buttons and t-shirts.  I don't go around telling the whole world I'm straight."   I hate that in twelve years of public education I was never taught about queer people.  I hate that I grew up thinking I was the only queer in the world, and I hate even more that most queer kids still grow up the same way.  I                                                            6 hate that I was tormented by other kids for being a faggot, but more that I was taught to feel ashamed for being the object of their cruelty, taught to feel it was my fault.  I hate that the Supreme Court of this country says it's okay to criminalize me because of how I make love.  I hate that so many straight people are so concerned about my goddamned sex life.  I hate that so many twisted straight people become parents, while I have to fight like hell to be allowed to be a father.  I hate straights.   WHERE ARE YOU SISTERS? I wear my pink triangle everywhere.  I do not lower my voice  in public when talking about lesbian love or sex.  I always  tell people I'm a lesbian.  I don't wait to be asked about  my "boyfriend."  I don't say it's "no one's business." I don't do this for straight people.  Most of them don't know what the pink triangle even means.  Most of them couldn't  care less that my girlfriend and I are totally in love or  having a fight on the street.  Most of them don't notice us  no matter what we do.  I do what I do to reach other lesbians.  I do what I do because I don't want lesbians to assume I'm a  straight girl.  I am out all the time, everywhere, because  I WANT TO REACH YOU.  Maybe you'll notice me, maybe we'll  start talking, maybe we'll exchange numbers, maybe we'll become  friends.  Maybe we won't say a word but our eyes will meet  and I will imagine you naked, sweating, openmouthed, your  back arched as I am fucking you.  And we'll be happy to  know we aren't the only ones in the world.  We'll be happy  because we found each other, without saying a word, maybe  just for a moment. But no. You won't wear a pink triangle on that linen lapel.  You won't  meet my eyes if I flirt with you on the street.  You avoid me  on the job because I'm "too" out.  You chastise me in bars  because I'm "too political."  You ignore me in public because  I bring "too much" attention to "my" lesbianism.  But then  you want me to be your lover, you want me to be your friend,  you want me to love you, support, you, fight for "OUR" right  to exist.                       WHERE ARE YOU?  You talk, talk, talk about invisibility and then retreat to  your homes to nest with your lovers or carouse in a bar with pals  and stumble home in a cab or sit silently and politely by while  your family, your boss, your neighbors, your public servants  distort and disfigure us, deride us and punish us.  Then home  again and you feel like screaming.  Then you pad your anger with a  relationship or a career or a party with other dykes like you  and still you wonder why we can't find each other, why you feel  lonely, angry, alienated.                 GET UP, WAKE UP SISTERS!!                                                            7   Your life is in your hands.   When I risk it all to be out, I risk it for both of us. When  I risk it all and it works (which it often does if you would  try it), I benefit and so do you.  When it doesn't work, I suffer  and you do not. But girl you can't wait for other dykes to make the world safe  for you.  STOP waiting for a better more lesbian future!  The  revolution could be here if we started it. Where are you sisters? I'm trying to find you, I'm trying to find you.  How come I only see you on Gay Pride Day? We're OUT, Where the fuck are YOU?                                                            8   WHEN ANYONE ASSAULTS YOU FOR BEING QUEER, IT IS QUEER                      BASHING. RIGHT?     A crowd of 50 people exit a gay bar as it closes. Across the street, some straight boys are shouting "Faggots" and throwing beer bottles at the gathering, which outnumbers them by 10 to 1. Three queers make a move to respond, getting no support from the group.  Why did a group this size allow themselves to be sitting ducks?   Tompkins Square Park, Labor Day.  At an annual outdoor concert/drag show, a group of gay men were harassed by teens carrying sticks. In the midst of thousands of gay men and lesbians, these straight boys beat two gay men to the ground, then stood around triumphantly laughing amongst themselves.  The emcee was alerted and warned the crowd from the stage, "You girls be careful.  When you dress up it drives the boys crazy," as if it were a practical joke inspired by what the victims were wearing rather than a pointed attack on anyone and everyone at that event.   What would it have taken for that crowd to stand up to its attackers?   After James Zappalorti, an openly gay man, was murdered in cold blood on Staten Island this winter, a single demonstration was held in protest.  Only one hundred people came.  When Yuseuf Hawkins, a black youth, was shot to death for being on "white turf" in Bensonhurst, African Americans marched through that neighborhood in large numbers again and again.  A black person was killed BECAUSE HE WAS BLACK, and people of color throughout the city recognized it and acted on it.  The bullet that hit Hawkins was meant for a black man, ANY black man.  Do most gays and lesbians think that the knife that punctured Zappalorti's heart was meant only for him?   The straight world has us so convinced that we are helpless and deserving victims of the violence against us, that queers are immobilized when faced with a threat.  BE OUTRAGED!  These attacks must not be tolerated.  DO SOMETHING.  Recognize that any act of aggression against any member of our community is an attack on every member of the community.  The more we allow homophobes to inflict violence, terror and fear on our lives, the more frequently and ferociously we will be the object of their hatred.  Your immeasurably valuable, because unless you start believing that, it can easily be taken from you.  If you know how to gently and efficiently immobilize your attacker, then by all means, do it.  If you lack those skills, then think about gouging out his fucking eyes, slamming his nose back into his brain, slashing his throat with a broken bottle --- do whatever you can, whatever you have to, to save your life!                                                            9     reeuQ yhW     Queer!   Ah, do we really have to use that word?  It's trouble. Every gay person has his or her own take on it.  For some it means strange and eccentric and kind of mysterious.  That's okay, we like that.  But some gay girls and boys don't. They think they're more normal than strange.  And for others "queer" conjures up those awful memories of adolescent suffering.  Queer. It's forcibly bittersweet and quaint at best --- weakening and painful at worst.  Couldn't we just use "gay" instead?  It's a much brighter word and isn't it synonymous with "happy?" When will you militants grow up and get over the novelty of being different?                         WHY  QUEER   Well, yes, "gay " is great.  It has its place.  But when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay.  So we've chosen to call ourselves queer. Using "queer" is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world.  It's a way of telling ourselves we don't have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world.  We use queer as gay men loving lesbians and lesbians loving being queer.   Queer, unlike GAY, doesn't mean MALE.   And when spoken to other gays and lesbians it's a way of suggesting we close ranks, and forget (temporarily) our individual differences because we face a more insidious common enemy.  Yeah, QUEER can be a rough word but it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal from the homophobe's hands and use against him.                       NO SEX POLICE   For anyone to say that coming out is not part of the revolution is missing the point.  Positive sexual images and what they manifest saves lives because they affirm those lives and make it possible for people to attempt to live as self-loving instead of self-loathing.  As the famous "Black is beautiful" slogan changed many lives, so does "Read my lips" affirm queerness in the face of hatred and invisibility as displayed in a recent governmental study of suicides that states at least one third of all teen suicides are Queer kids.  This is further exemplified by the rise in HIV transmission among those under 21.   We are most hated as queers for our sexualness, that is, our physical contact with the same sex.  Our sexuality and sexual expression are what makes us most susceptible to physical violence. Our difference, our otherness, our uniqueness can either paralyze us or politicize us. Hopefully, the majority of us will not let it kill us.                                                            10                        QUEER SPACE   Why in the world do we let heteros into queer clubs?  Who gives a fuck if they like us because we "really know how to party?" WE HAVE TO IN ORDER TO BLOW OFF THE STEAM THEY MAKE US FEEL ALL THE TIME!  They make out wherever they please, and take up too much room on the dance floor doing ostentatious couples dances. They wear their heterosexuality like a "Keep Out" sign, or like a deed of ownership.   Why the fuck do we tolerate them when they invade our space like it's their right?  Why do we let them shove heterosexuality --- a weapon their world wields against us - -- right in our faces in the few public spots where we can be sexy with each other and not fear attack?   It's time to stop letting the straight people make all the rules.  Let's start by posting this sign outside every queer club and bar:            RULES OF CONDUCT FOR STRAIGHT PEOPLE     1. Keep your display of affection (kissing, handholding,  embracing) to a minimum.  Your sexuality is unwanted and  offensive to many here.  2. If you must slow dance, be as inconspicuous as possible.  3. Do not gawk or stare at lesbians or gay men, especially  bull dykes or drag queens.  We are not your entertainment.  4. If you cannot comfortably deal with someone of the same sex making a pass at you, get out.  5. Do not flaunt your heterosexuality.  Be Discreet.  Risk  being mistaken for a lezzie or a homo.  6. If you feel these rules are unfair, go fight homophobia in straight clubs, or:  7. Go Fuck Yourself.                      I HATE STRAIGHTS   I have friends.  Some of them are straight.   Year after year, I see my straight friends.  I want to see them, to see how they are doing, to add newness to our long and complicated histories, to experience some continuity. Year after year I continue to realize that the facts of my life are irrelevant to them and that I am only half listened to, that I am an appendage to the doings of a greater world, a world of power and privilege, of the laws of installation, a world of exclusion.  "That's not true," argue my straight friends.  There is the one certainty in the politics of power: those left out of it beg for inclusion, while the insiders claim that they already are. Men do it to women, whites do it to blacks, and everyone does it to queers.  The main dividing line, both conscious and unconscious, is procreation ...  and that magic word --- Family.  Frequently, the ones we are born into disown us when they find out who we really are, and to make matters worse, we are prevented from having our own.  We are punished, insulted, cut off, and treated like seditionaries                                                            11 in terms of child rearing, both damned if we try and damned if we abstain.  It's as if the propagation of the species is such a fragile directive that without enforcing it as if it were an agenda, humankind would melt back into the primeval ooze.   I hate having to convice straight people that lesbians and gays live in a war zone, that we're surrounded by bomb blasts only we seem to hear, that our bodies and souls are heaped high, dead from fright or bashed or raped, dying of grief or disease, stripped of our personhood.   I hate straight people who can't listen to queer anger without saying "hey, all straight people aren't like that. I'm straight too, you know," as if their egos don't get enough stroking or protection in this arrogant, heterosexist world. Why must we take care of them, in the midst of our just anger brought on by their fucked up society?!  Why add the reassurance of "Of course, I don't mean you.  You don't act that way." Let them figure out for themselves whether they deserve to be included in our anger.   But of course that would mean listening to our anger, which they almost never do.  They deflect it, by saying "I'm not like that" or "Now look who's generalizing" or "You'll catch more flies with honey ... " or "If you focus on the negative you just give out more power" or "you're not the only one in the world who's suffering."  They say "Don't yell at me, I'm on your side" or "I think you're overreacting" or "BOY, YOU'RE BITTER."   They've taught us that good queers don't get mad. They've taught us so well that we not only hide our anger from them, we hide it from each other.  WE EVEN HIDE IT FROM OURSELVES. We hide it with substance abuse and suicide and overarhcieving in the hope of proving our worth.  They bash us and stab us and shoot us and bomb us in ever increasing numbers and still we freak out when angry queers carry banners or signs that say BASH BACK.  For the last decade they let us die in droves and still we thank President Bush for planting a fucking tree, applaud him for likening PWAs to car accident victims who refuse to wear seatbelts.  LET YOURSELF BE ANGRY.  Let yourself be angry that the price of our visibility is the constant threat of violence, anti- queer violence to which practically every segment of this society contributes.  Let yourself feel angry that THERE IS NO PLACE IN THIS COUNTRY WHERE WE ARE SAFE, no place where we are not targeted for hatred and attack, the self-hatred, the suicide --- of the closet.  The next time some straight person comes down on you for being angry, tell them that until things change, you don't need any more evidence that the world turns at your expense.  You don't need to see only hetero couple grocery shopping on your TV ...  You don't want any more baby pictures shoved in your face until you can have or keep your own.  No more weddings, showers, anniversaries, please, unless they are our own brothers and sisters celebrating. And tell them not to dismiss you by saying "You have rights," "You have privileges," "You're                                                            12 overreacting," or "You have a victim's mentality."  Tell them "GO AWAY FROM ME, until YOU can change."  Go away and try on a world without the brave, strong queers that are its backbone, that are its guts and brains and souls.  Go tell them go away until they have spent a month walking hand in hand in public with someone of the same sex.  After they survive that, then you'll hear what they have to say about queer anger.   Otherwise, tell them to shut up and listen.