#i would walk out if I was getting flack no matter how minor it was cause I’ve now got the beginnings of a standard of how to be treated

[sometimesbeforeitgetsbetter]

Off the Record | Stiles Stilinski

Pairing: Stiles Stilinski x reader

Summary: High school in Beacon Hills, as told through the eyes of one inquisitive journalist who has a knack at getting on Stiles Stilinski's nerves.

Warnings: idk there's like a couple curse words lmao. also, spoilers? if you haven't finished teen wolf I guess??

Word count: 8,227

A/N: hi hi this is my first fic I'm posting on Tumblr (not to say that this is my first fic ever...anyway)! before you start, I just wanna say that there's a couple things that might be off from the show but please just ignore them. like I think it's bs Lydia brings Stiles back and not Scott in 6b so I righted that wrong. but I hope you enjoy and please let me know what you think of it! thanks for reading!!

--

All my life I’ve wondered why people didn’t question what happens in Beacon Hills.

It’s no secret that our town is unusual, but when odd things seemed to happen, people would just turn a blind eye and go about their business.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t let it go. I was inquisitive by nature, and my mom never knew how to answer my questions.

Why do we have so many animal attacks?

What happened to the people that disappeared in the Preserve?

Why did his eyes glow like that?

That last question almost caused my mom to get me a therapist – which probably would’ve helped me regardless – but she just continued to answer with her usual responses.

They just feel threatened by us, dear.

They’re in a better place now.

I’m sure it was nothing – you probably just saw some reflection in his eyes.

But no matter what she told me, I wasn’t satisfied. I knew there was something bigger going on, something my mom couldn’t explain, but I wasn’t sure what. As I got older, however, I realized that if I kept voicing my concerns, I’d be seen as the local crazy person – which, at the time, was the title reserved for my neighbor, Donna Romano, who always went to Town Hall meetings to complain about how some supernatural creatures were traumatizing her dogs every time she took them out at night to urinate.

Out of fear of sounding like Donna, I kept my suspicions to myself. I observed the strange actions of those around me and kept note of the bizarre events that happened in town. I found that it was something I was good at – observing. Always watching, but never voicing my opinions. Eventually, it got the best of me because I grew really quiet at school. But I didn’t mind. I liked being a wallflower.

One day in the fifth grade I saw my mom reading the Beacon Chronicle and I had an epiphany – journalists investigate weird, inexplicable events, so I should be a journalist. Reading the news became my favorite pastime, and by sixth grade I decided I would join the high school newspaper, The Daily Beacon, when I became a freshman. I figured maybe it would give me an outlet to investigate the odd occurrences in the town without looking like a lunatic.

But in sixth grade, I noticed that some of the odd things had stopped happening. There were less animal attacks and disappearances from the Preserve. Some people had even left town, including the last of the Hales, whose house had burned down that same year.

I didn’t give up hope though. I kept my head down and waited for things to get weird again. In the meantime, I wrote for enjoyment. In eighth grade I started shadowing a girl named Anna that was a part of the Daily Beacon, and I started writing articles – album reviews, movie reviews, school news.

Everything was going smoothly until my sophomore year of high school. Suddenly the weird things were happening, and I was sure that there was one person that was at the epicenter of it all – Scott McCall.

--

“...Angela, you’re covering the new faculty; Thomas, you’ve got the new Vegan Support Group club some juniors just created; and y/n, you’re covering lacrosse try-outs,” said Andrew, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Beacon.

I groaned slightly. “Andrew, couldn’t I write something a little bit more...my style? Like what about the one freshman class that boycotted their summer reading and is facing suspension?”

He gave me a slight look. “y/n, you know how important this lacrosse piece is. You know what that sport means to the school. You should be glad I’m giving you this opportunity,” he scolded. “Besides, Marlene is covering that class and is already interviewing their teacher.”

I nodded slowly and tried to refrain from rolling my eyes. I knew that Andrew meant well – he had been like an older brother to me ever since my freshman year – and he was right about the importance of lacrosse. I stayed quiet until he dismissed us, then mentally prepared myself to spend my afternoon watching some jocks exude machismo on a field.

When my last class was over, I walked over to the lacrosse field and found myself a spot on the top of the bleachers. It gave me an excellent vantage point – until a couple girls sat down right in front of me. The redhead I recognized to be Lydia Martin, the school’s resident popular girl. We’d been in class together all our lives, but I couldn’t remember a time she ever talked to me. I’m sure she didn’t even know I existed, just like the majority of the other people in our grade. The other girl, however, I didn’t recognize. I found out her name was Allison by overhearing their conversation. She was new and must have just moved to Beacon Hills.

The shrill sound of Coach’s whistle knocked me out of my thoughts. Tryouts started, and I watched as Scott McCall, a boy from my grade, was nearly knocked out by a lacrosse ball to the face. I winced but wrote down the event in the notebook I had out for documentation.

The next ball that went Scott’s way didn’t hit his face though. He managed to catch it in his goalie net. I couldn’t help but be a bit surprised – like Lydia, I’d known of Scott my whole life though he probably didn’t know me at all. But that meant I knew he was an asthmatic that wasn’t particularly skilled at sports.

“He’s actually pretty good,” I mumbled to myself as Scott continued to catch every ball that came his way.

I didn’t realize how loud I must’ve said it though because at my remark Allison turned around. “I was just thinking the same thing,” she said, obviously surprised. “Do you know him?”

I shook my head and quickly turned my attention to my notebook to write down the surprising turn of events. “Are you writing about this for the school newspaper?” I looked back up at Allison’s question. She was paying attention to me?

“Um, yeah, I am. I’d rather not write about sports, but here I am,” I joked lightly.

She let out a beautiful laugh at my statement. “Well, I’m glad you’re here. I’m Allison, and you are…?”

“y/n,” I answered. “Nice to meet you, Allison.” Suddenly the crowd roared, and I remembered why I was there. Allison, too, smiled and turned her attention back to the game. Lydia hadn’t said a word, but she was focused on watching Scott absolutely demolish Jackson Highmore, who, in my opinion, needed to be knocked down a few pegs anyway.

The more I watched Scott though, I got this weird feeling. He was good – too good. I tried to ignore my feelings and just focus on writing notes for the ridiculous lacrosse piece, which would include the headline: “Sophomore Scott McCall shines at lacrosse tryouts and becomes team co-captain.” But deep down I knew there was something up with him.

A few days later, I was sitting behind Stiles Stilinski, Scott’s best friend, in English class. Even though I’d had nearly all of my classes with him, we never talked. It originally was because I had a minor crush on him and was afraid I’d pass out if I spoke to him, but eventually it just morphed into me not speaking to many people and being convinced he didn’t know of my existence anyway.

But this one day, I was committed to speaking with him. I had to know what was going on, and if there was one person that knew anything about Scott’s new-found lacrosse talent, it was Stiles.

“Hey, Stiles,” I spoke up from behind him.

The brunette turned around, slightly confused but with that soft smile on his face. “Oh, hey, y/n. What’s up?”

I swear my heart stopped beating for a second. He knew my name? He knew who I was? I shook myself out of my thoughts before I went down the rabbit hole of the implications of him knowing me.

“Oh, nothing much. I’m just writing a piece about lacrosse tryouts for the school newspaper and I was just wondering if you had anything to say about it,” I explained.

He tilted his head slightly and shifted in his seat to more fully face me. “Um, yeah sure. I think it’s going to be a great season, especially since we’ve gotten some new leadership. My boy Scott’s co-captain now, so those Devenford Prep guys won’t know what hit them!”

“Speaking of Scott, when did he get so good at lacrosse? Would you say it’s natural talent?” I pressed a bit, hoping he’d say something that would give me a hint as to what was going on.

Stiles’ eyes squinted a little, and his head tilted slightly again. He seemed to be at a loss for words, which was unusual for the fast-talking, sarcastic boy, but he quickly recovered. “It’s definitely...natural...talent. He’s been working extra hard recently to hone his talent and skills so he could bring his A-game to this year’s tryouts.” When he finished speaking, he looked pleased with himself, and I could tell he had let out a small sigh of relief.

What are you hiding?

Though I didn’t know it yet, at that moment my rivalry with Stiles Stilinski began. He and Scott were hiding something, and I was going to find out what it was.

--

“You’re telling me that a girl is in a coma after the school winter formal and you don’t want me to write a story about it?”

Andrew leaned against the desk and crossed his arms. “It’s not that I don’t want you to write it. I just think it’s a tense time right now. The administration is receiving a lot of flack right now because of the winter formal fiasco, and Ms. Blanchard told me that we may want to avoid stirring the pot right now,” he explained. “That is not to say that we abandon our journalistic integrity and commitment to informing the student body, but we just may want to be sensitive to our environment right now.”

I trusted Ms. Blanchard, the faculty sponsor of the Daily Beacon, but not reporting on Lydia’s comatose state felt wrong. She was well-known at school, and students deserved to know the facts of her situation and how it had happened.Well, maybe I was lying to myself by saying that the real reason I wanted to pursue the story wasn’t the fact that something inexplicable had happened at the dance and I had to figure out what it was.

Andrew could sense my disappointment. “Look, maybe for now you can start collecting information and sources, and I’ll talk to Ms. Blanchard. Maybe she can advise us on how best to proceed.”

I threw my arms around Andrew in a quick hug. “Yes, thank you! I promise I’ll be sensitive when asking sources. I know how difficult this must be for the people close to her.”

“I know you will,” he said, chuckling lightly.

With a smile plastered on my face – perhaps a little inappropriately considering the topic I was excited to cover – I left the small newspaper office in search of my first source: Stiles Stilinski. He had been Lydia’s date to the dance, so surely he must know what happened to her, right? “No, I don’t know what happened,” Stiles angrily responded when I cornered him at his locker. “We were separated for a bit because she went looking for someone. When I went looking for her I–” he stopped suddenly, as if choosing his words carefully. He wouldn’t meet my eyes as he spoke.

“The next thing I know, she was at the hospital in a coma. They told me Jackson had found her out on the field when I went to check on her at the hospital,” he explained.

Something wasn’t adding up. “Ok, but where were you the rest of that time? You didn’t go looking for her when you didn’t see her for a while? What about when she had already been checked into the hospital?”

“What is this – an investigation?” Stiles shouted as he slammed his locker shut. I took a step back, eyes wide at the sudden display of aggression. Maybe I pushed too hard, I thought. Stiles rubbed a hand over his face and took a deep breath. “Sorry, I….I didn’t mean it like that. There’s just a lot going on, and my dad has been up my ass about those details too. To be honest, I can’t tell you where I was. The time just flew by and all of a sudden I’d realized I hadn’t seen Lydia for a couple hours. I wish I had been there for her, but there’s nothing I can do for her now other than check up on her.”

Running a hand over his buzzed head, he shot me a forced smile and said “good luck with your article” before walking away.

I was at a loss for words, trying to put the pieces together in my head. Surely he couldn’t have had a part in Lydia’s injury? There’s no way. But his defensiveness was off-putting–

“Hey, y/n!” I was snapped out of my thoughts by Allison approaching me from behind. “What were you talking to Stiles about?”

“Huh? Oh, um, I was just asking him about…” I remembered that the funeral for Allison’s aunt was happening and didn’t want to mention the additional stress of her best friend being comatose, so I opted for a white lie. “Biology homework. I wasn’t really paying attention in class today.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize you two were friends,” she said as she leant against the lockers.

I shook my head violently. “We’re not.” I’d grown too close to Allison for her to not pick up on my feelings though.

“You say that now, but–”

“I have to get to class. See you at lunch, Ally!”

--

Other things that year were weird, but none warranted any further investigation via newspaper article. Sure, I was wondering about Erica Reyes’ sudden transformation into the ultimate baddie, the mysterious deaths of a mechanic and Isaac Lahey’s dad, numerous paralyzations at the Jungle, and a death of someone at a secret rave, but Andrew thought it would be best for the Chronicle and Ledger to cover those bigger events. In fact, the only other unnatural event that happened that I had to cover for the newspaper was Stiles’ unbelievable winning streak at the lacrosse championship. I would have quoted him after the game, but I really didn’t want to speak to him and anyway, he had disappeared for a bit right after the team won.

I could tell that things were happening, but it was all hidden from public view. I even noticed Allison’s behavior fluctuating. The arrival of her grandfather shook things up, and while he gave me a bad feeling, I couldn’t exactly figure out why. Lydia was more troubled than usual after coming back from the hospital even though she tried to act normally. Jackson was going through something and was more angry and aggressive than usual, but I wasn’t close enough to him to ask him if he was okay.

Over the summer, I spent a surprising amount of time with Lydia. Allison spent her summer in France, but she asked me to keep an eye on Lydia to make sure she was okay, especially since Jackson had moved to London during the summer break. I was surprised how much I enjoyed spending time with the redhead, and we hung out when I wasn’t working at my internship at The Beacon Chronicle, which my mom had convinced me to apply for after she noticed how irritated I was that I couldn’t pursue some of the stories I wanted.

By the time Allison came back before the start of school, it felt like Lydia and I had been best friends for the longest time.

“So, Allison, have you talked to Scott at all this summer?” I asked when I was sitting in the backseat of Lydia’s car, Allison in the passenger seat.

She shook her head. “No, I think I still need some time. He...hides things from me and I don’t know if I can trust him.”

I nodded my head, understanding the feeling. I still couldn’t place my finger on what had happened between them or what Scott was involved in. Though I comforted her when I found out they broke up, I didn’t really know why they’d done it.

“What about you, y/n? Have you talked to Stiles at all?” Allison asked, looking back at me in the backseat.

“Why the hell would I talk to Stiles?” I questioned, confused.

She and Lydia shared a small look that I couldn’t decipher before she shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know, but you guys are more similar than you may think. I don’t know why you guys act like you don’t like each other though.”

The car rolled to a stop at the stop light, and all of a sudden I noticed a familiar baby blue jeep approach next to us. “Speak of the devil,” I mumbled. Lydia and Allison didn’t notice Stiles staring and waving at first, but when they did the car was filled with awkward tension.

The next events were a blur: Lydia running the red light, both cars stopping in the middle of the road, and a deer running straight towards us, nearing killing me in the gap between the front seats. We were shaken, and the boys ran towards us when they saw what happened.

“Are you okay?” Stiles asked Lydia, but he kept looking at me. I nodded slightly and he turned his full attention back to Lydia.

“What was wrong with it?” Allison asked as Scott got closer to the deer.

“It was scared,” he explained. “No, terrified.”

Things got progressively weirder after that. On the first day of school, I interviewed our new English teacher, Ms. Blake. She was nice enough, but it was unfortunate that her class was the one that a whole flock of birds decided to burst through the classroom windows. By the time the police arrived, I was already drafting up a story in my brain: Why are the animals acting weird in Beacon Hills?

I had overheard Stiles talking to Scott about the deer’s weird behavior and the number of deer-related incidents in California, so I swallowed my pride so that I could talk to him and maybe get some stats and information on the whole situation.

I walked up to him when he was sitting alone, texting on his phone. “Hey, Stiles.” “y/n? What’s wrong?” He had genuine concern written on his face.

“I overheard you and Scott talking about deer-related incidents earlier,” I noticed how he tensed up at my statement, “and I was wondering if you could help me with a piece I’m writing? It seems like you know all the stats, so maybe...you could write it with me?” It pained me to finish that sentence, but I figured it might be easier to figure out what was going on if he was helping – especially if he already had inside information.

I think for the first time in his life, the talkative boy was speechless. “I understand if you don’t want to or you’re busy–” I said quickly, trying to give him a way out.

“Yeah, sure.”

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t caught off guard by his response. “W-what?”

He smirked slightly. “Yeah, sure. I’ll help you out with your article, y/n. Collaborate with you, if you will. We can work on it at my house tomorrow afternoon if you want.”

Nodding and agreeing with the plan, I left the chaotic English classroom.

The next afternoon, I felt like I was walking into the lion’s den. Going to Stiles’ house felt foreign, but what was even stranger was seeing him in casual clothes in a comfortable environment.

He answered the door wearing some sweats and a t-shirt, looking more comfortable and confident than I’d ever seen him. “Hey, y/n. Come on in,” he greeted.

I thanked him awkwardly, and we walked to his dining room table to get set up. “Sorry, I need to go grab my notes from my room. Be back in a sec,” Stiles said before leaving me alone in his dining room.

After a moment of silence, Sheriff Stilinski walked in wearing his uniform. “Oh, y/n! What are you doing here?” He had seen me a couple weeks ago in the police station when I was requesting documents for a story for the Chronicle. Though journalists and cops don’t often have a jovial relationship, he said that he liked me because of my commitment to the truth and respectful nature.

“Hey, Sheriff. I’m writing a piece about the animals acting weird, you know, with the deer accident and bird incident, and Stiles said he’d help me since he has a bunch of statistics on deer related car accidents.”

“Stiles is helping you? Well, I’ll be damned.” When he saw the confusion on my face, he rushed to explain himself. “No, not like that. It’s just, you’re all organized and focused, and Stiles is….Stiles.”

I was laughing heartily when the boy himself walked back into the room. “What’s going on, Daddy-o?”

“Nothing, son. Just catching up with y/n here. I’ve got to get to work, but you’re welcome anytime, y/n.” He said before patting Stiles on the shoulder and heading off to work.

Stiles looked over at me oddly when he placed his notes on the table and sat next to me. “Since when are you all buddy-buddy with my dad?”

Shrugging, I said, “Ever since we started grabbing beer every Thursday night while you’re at lacrosse practice.” His jaw dropped slightly, and I laughed again. “No, idiot. We’ve just interacted a lot because of my internship. Now, can we get started on the article?”

--

After the article was published, my next assignment was writing about the track meet a couple weeks later. I found out Allison and Lydia were riding together to the meet, so I tagged along.

Both girls were extremely tense the whole ride, seemingly concerned about something going on in the bus. We were only a few cars behind the bus full of track runners (and lacrosse players who were forced to attend the meet), but the stand-still traffic was a force to be reckoned with.

“Do you think we’re too close?” Allison asked.

“Honey, if you were any closer I think you’d mount the bus,” Lydia said sarcastically. She got a call from Stiles and looked over at Allison. “Hey, Stiles,” she dragged out the ‘hey,’ tension obvious in her voice.

She listened to what he was saying, something clearly wrong. “What do you mean he’s not–” she stopped when she remembered I was in the car, “healing?” She finished the question quietly, probably hoping I wouldn’t hear.

Healing? Is he injured?

“Yeah, ok, just find a way to get Coach to stop. We’ll meet you there.” She hung up and told Allison to pull off at the next stop.

When we got to the rest stop, I could see everyone hurrying to get off the bus. Allison parked the car, and we quickly went to the bathroom where I saw Scott nearly passed out on the floor. “Oh my god, is he okay?”

“Yeah, y/n. He’s fine. At least, he will be,” Stiles responded. He positioned his body in front of me a little bit as if he was trying to block my view of Scott.

I gently pushed him aside so I could see and was shocked to see black blood coming from the injured boy. “What the hell is going on? Why is his blood black?” I ran forward to get closer, kneeling next to Allison.

“It’s nothing. We just need to stitch him up and he’ll be fine.”

“Stiles, don’t fucking lie to me. I can see that he’s obviously not fine.”

“He’s right,” Allison said quietly. “We need to stitch him up. I need something to stitch him together with.” She looked around before remembering something in her bag.

I shook my head. “We need to tell Coach. Take him to a hospital or something.”

“No!” All three of them yelled at me.

It was quiet for a moment, all of us deciding where to go from here. “Just…” Stiles started, “please go and make sure the bus doesn’t leave without us. We’ll handle this.” I got up and slowly made my way to the door.

As I reached for the door, a hand grabbed my wrist. “y/n,” Stiles said, “it’ll make sense someday. Just trust us for now. Trust me,” he pleaded quietly out of earshot of the girls and Scott.

“I do,” I replied quietly, not meeting his eyes, before pulling my hand from his grasp and leaving the bathroom.

That night, we all had to stay at the Motel Glen Capri because of the postponed meet. I didn’t like its energy, and neither did Lydia. “A lot can happen in one night,” she said.

Though it was supposed to be two to a room, I convinced Coach to let me room with Allison and Lydia. Admittedly, Coach didn’t need much convincing because I was saving the school money by doing so. Once we got our room key, we went up to our room on the second floor.

“I’m going to go get a snack from the machine,” I told Lydia once Allison was in the shower.

She nodded. “Sounds good. I’m going to the lobby. There must be something we can do about these towels that reek of nicotine.”

Grabbing a couple one’s from my wallet, I made my way down the hall to the vending machine where I ran into Boyd and Stiles. As I approached, I could hear Stiles trying to talk to an unresponsive Boyd, who subsequently punched a hole through the glass of the machine, grab his snack that the machine refused to give him, and walk away.

“What the hell was that?” I asked Stiles as I walked up next to him.

He shrugged. “I don’t really know, to be honest.” He reached into the machine to grab his snack and tossed one to me as well.

When I got back to my room, a shaken Allison and Lydia were hurriedly talking about something. “Oh, y/n! You’re back. You won’t believe what just happened…” Allison started

She recounted the story of Scott’s bizarre behavior in the bathroom, and Lydia filled me in on the counter that they have at the front desk. “Can you imagine having a counter for the number of suicides that take place in your hotel? Crazy,” Lydia said. Taking her phone out, she sent a quick text to Stiles telling him that we all needed to talk.

We met him in the hallway a couple minutes later. “What was the text for?” Stiles asked when he saw our little gathering.

“There’s something going on with all the…” she looked over at me before continuing, “guys. You know, Scott, Boyd, Isaac, probably Ethan too.” I tried to connect the dots between all of them, but I didn’t really know what they all had in common. Scott and Isaac were both on the lacrosse team, but from what I could tell they didn’t have a particular fondness for each other or Ethan.

“I think someone’s going to die tonight,” Lydia said decisively.

“Why do you think that?” I asked, but it seemed like I was the only one questioning her line of reason.

She shook her head slowly. “I just...have a feeling.” After a moment of silence, she told us about hearing something from the room next to ours through the vent, so we decided to investigate it. Room 217 seemed empty and locked, but all of a sudden we heard the sound of a saw from behind the door.

Stiles busted the door open, and we opened it to find Ethan turning the saw on himself. “Ethan, stop!” I yelled as we ran into the room. Stiles started wrestling him for the saw, but luckily Lydia saw where it was plugged into the wall and unplugged it.

The next thing that happened was completely unexpected to me. Ethan grew fangs and claws, his eyes blazing red. What the fu–

Allison and Lydia rushed forward, wrestling his claws away from his torso where he had been planning on slashing himself. In the struggle he fell on the space heater, which apparently brought him out of whatever state he was in. He ran out of the room soon after. When we tried to question him about what he was doing, he couldn’t answer us. He had been out of control, and it made Allison realize we were forgetting someone.

“Where’s Scott?” She asked suddenly. When no one could answer, we all decided to split up – I’d go with Allison to look for Scott while Stiles and Lydia went to find Boyd and Isaac.

Scott wasn’t in his room. Allison and I ran all over the motel, looking in every crevice. At last, we decided to check the school bus, and that’s where we saw him. Standing drenched in gasoline, a flare lit up in his hand.

“Scott…” I approached quietly, careful to not make any sudden movements.

It was then that Stiles and Lydia joined us. I watched as Stiles walked into the gasoline, my breath catching in my throat as he nearly sacrificed himself. Scott was talking, but I didn’t really understand what it meant. He said that his life was better before the bite.

Stiles eventually talked Scott down, but the flare rolled into the gasoline. Luckily, Lydia was able to make sure we had all gotten out of the way. I’d ended up next to Stiles on the ground, and though we made eye contact, no words were spoken.

We spent the night in the bus because none of us could bear the thought of spending another second in that cursed place. Coach woke us up in the morning, definitely thinking the worst about what we may have gotten ourselves into, but whatever he was thinking wouldn’t possibly compare to reality. What was reality? I couldn’t have really told you at that point. I didn’t understand what we’d just lived through.

Before the other students started loading onto the bus, Stiles slid into the empty space next to me. “y/n, you know that all of this,” he made a grand gesture to Scott and the others as well as the motel, “is off the record. You can’t tell anyone about this. About what happened.” I held eye contact with him for a moment before nodding. “I wouldn’t tell anyone. To be honest, I don’t even really know what I would tell people, but I wouldn’t.” He nodded, a sad smile on his face as he looked down and fidgeted with his hands. “But Stiles,” I said as he looked back up at me. “Please help me understand it all. You can trust me, I promise, I just want to understand. I want to help.”

With a deep sigh, Stiles nodded once more. “Okay. I’ll tell you everything.”

--

When Stiles said he’d fill me in on everything, I didn’t realize he meant everything. I couldn’t believe how oblivious I had been to everything that had happened in the past year. Sure, I knew something weird was going on, but how was I supposed to know it was supernatural?

Finding out that my little corner of the world, little old Beacon Hills, California, had werewolves (and a kanima, pack of alphas, and whatever the hell a Darach was) was a lot to process. It was unbelievable, but Stiles helped me believe it.

I could tell that he didn’t fully trust me though. There was something in the way he looked at me that told me he was wondering when I would be done with my source acquisition and I’d write the next big exposé: Supernatural Beacon Hills: How Werewolves Have Been Hiding In Plain Sight. I didn’t know how to assure him that I was on their side and wouldn’t expose their secrets.

As the year progressed, things simultaneously made more sense and less sense. To defeat the Darach, we had to perform a sacrifice for the parents that had abducted, and Deaton – the veterinarian that had taken care of every family pet we’d ever had – told me I had to hold Stiles down during it. He said we had some sort of connection, but I guess that’s what mutual loathing does to people.

In the end, we won. We beat the Darach, the alpha of the alphas Deucalion left, and Scott became an alpha himself. But it was still just the beginning.

--

The sacrifice did something to Scott, Stiles, and Allison that we didn’t fully understand. Deaton said they left a door open, which only made it harder for Stiles to trust me because he could barely trust himself.

Knowing about the supernatural didn’t preclude my other responsibilities though. I still wrote for the Daily Beacon, much to Stiles’ displeasure, but I enjoyed it. So, on the first day of school I interviewed our newest faculty member – Mr. Yukimura. He and his family had just moved from New York, and his daughter Kira was in our grade. She was nice, but shy, so I invited her to have lunch with us.

Surprisingly, Kira jumped right into the conversation at lunch by mentioning bardo, the Buddhist concept of being in an in-between state.

After lunch, I caught up with Allison to walk to our next class. “Hey, Allison, could I ask you a favor?”

“Of course! What’s up?”

“Well, I don’t really know how to ask this but...I need help learning to defend myself, I guess? It’s just that I’m going to be helping you guys now, and I actually want to be helpful, so I want to protect myself so you guys don’t have to worry about me,” I admitted.

Allison smiled softly. “I’d love to help.” I returned her smile, suddenly giddy, yet nervous. “But, I think you should know that my...aim...has been off since the sacrifice.”

I could hear the disappointment in her voice. “Nonsense, I’m sure that you’re still the best shot in this school.” She shook her head. “It’s never been this bad.”

Touching her arm lightly, I gave her a reassuring smile. “We’ll figure it out together.”

A few days later, I was surprised when I was paid a visit by both Scott and Stiles while I was sitting in the library. “To what do I owe this pleasure, boys?”

“We need your help.” I perked up at Scott’s statement. “We’re trying to solve the Tate case, you know, the one where Malia Tate disappeared all those years ago after that car accident, and we could use your help tracking her down.” He looked over at Stiles and nudged him with his elbow.

“And, you can write a piece about it. Not including all the details, if what we think happened is true, but you can still write something factual,” Stiles said, still displeased that I was writing for the newspaper.

To annoy Stiles, I acted like I was really thinking about it for a minute, but then laughed lightly. “Yeah, I’ll help you guys. Where do we start?”

--

Pull yourself together, y/n. You’re a journalist. You’re supposed to report on tragedy all the time. Be objective.

I took a deep breath and wrote the first line for what would be the cover story of the next Daily Beacon issue.

Junior Allison Argent, 17, died in an unfortunate carjacking incident last fall.

Before I could write any more, I got a phone call from Stiles.

Oh, thank god. “Stiles?”

“Do you want to come with us to Mexico?” He blurted out.

I couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled from my chest. “What? Mexico? Why? When–”

“Tomorrow.”

“Stiles, are you insane? Even if I wanted to, there’s no way my parents would ever let me go.”

“We’re all telling our parents we’re going camping, if that helps at all,” he said with what seemed like a hint of disappointment in his voice.

I was quiet for a minute, but my mind was already made up. “Why? And who exactly is going?”

“Scott, Lydia, Kira, Malia, and I have to visit some hunters and see what they know about Derek being missing.”

As soon as he mentioned Malia, my mouth started curling into a frown. It’s not that I disliked the werecoyote, it’s just that she and Stiles had been pretty full on since they hooked up at Eichen and started dating. I wasn’t jealous – though I’m sure Lydia would argue otherwise since she’s convinced I like him or something – just...weirded out by their relationship.

I sighed. “I want to help, but I really can’t tomorrow. School starts back up in a couple days, and I need to finish this elegy for Allison and come up with a bunch of assignments for the staff writers…” I trailed off, thinking about all that I had to do before the coming week.

“Oh yeah, I forgot. Ms. Editor-in-chief over here has a life outside of us,” Stiles joked.

Andrew graduated at the end of last year and left his glittering empire to me, though suddenly I felt overwhelmed at the prospect of running a newspaper while being way too involved in the town’s supernatural endeavors. It didn’t bother me last semester, but after Allison…

“I’ll just see you guys when you get back, okay?” I told Stiles. He made an unintelligible noise of agreement. “And try not to let anyone get killed.” “Yes, mom,” Stiles said sarcastically. I could almost hear the smirk in his voice.

When the pack got back, I was surprised by the events that had taken place. “What do you mean it’s a young version of Derek?”

A few days later, I had to cover the spring lacrosse tryouts. Though I wanted to assign it to someone else, I had to do it myself because everyone was busy with the assignments I had given them.

To my surprise, a new freshman, Liam Dunbar, showed everyone up at tryouts – even Scott. I took note of how he seemed almost athletically superior to everyone, and I wondered if he was supernatural.

“He’s human, I’m sure of it,” Scott said as he came up next to where I was sitting on the bleachers, scaring me out of my mind in the process.

“Jeez, Scott. A little warning next time would be nice. But how do you know?”

He shrugged. “I can just tell. He’s just a really great athlete.”

“He’s going to be a great pain in my ass, I can tell,” Stiles said, sidling up next to Scott.

I took note of their reactions, writing down Scott’s comment – about being a great athlete, not human – to consider while writing my piece.

“Oh no, don’t tell me you’re writing a story about him,” Stiles groaned.

“You know I have to write one about the tryouts, and he just happens to be the star player of today,” I told him. “Sorry, Scott.”

Scott waved me off, but Stiles was still upset about the situation. “No, don’t give him the ego boost! He’s already a little shit, and an article about him would make it worse.”

Taking a break from my note-taking, I looked over at the brown-haired boy. “Stiles, have you even talked to him?”

He looked at a loss for words. “N-not really...but I can see his arrogance from a mile away!”

I rolled my eyes. “Well then, if you’d excuse me, I’m going to write up a fantastic story about a talented up-and-coming lacrosse player.”

The article became the next issue’s front page, but I almost wished I hadn’t given him as much attention when Scott turned him into his beta.

The rest of the year didn’t go as planned either, but isn’t junior year supposed to be everyone’s worst year?

As much as I liked helping out with the supernatural problems Scott and the rest of the pack were having, it was hard knowing about what was going on and not being able to write about it, especially when all of the mysterious killings started up. We eventually found out about the deadpool, but I could write about a kill list of Beacon Hills’ resident supernaturals, could I?

At the end of the year, I finally had to make the trip to Mexico with the rest of the pack. “Stiles, I’m going. You can’t stop me!” I attempted to open the passenger door of the jeep when he reached out and shut it from behind me.

“No, it’s going to be dangerous. We don’t even really know what we’re facing,” he tried reasoning with me. “I can protect myself,” I said, thinking of the training that Allison had given me. “Besides, I can’t just sit by and wait for you guys to come back. I need to try helping Scott.”

Realizing that I wasn’t going to back down, Stiles removed his hand from the side of the door and opened it for me. I nodded a quick thanks as I hopped into the vehicle.

I wasn’t expecting to fight Scott that day, but we all did in order to return him from his Berserker form. At the end of the fight, I had a few cuts and bruises, but nothing I couldn’t deal with.

As Derek drove away with Braedan, I could feel that things were changing. “I can’t write about any of this, can I?” I asked somewhat jokingly.

“Off the record,” Stiles replied from where he stood next to me.

--

“Stiles, what’s wrong?”

“Oh thank god, you remember me!” He said as he grabbed my hands. He’d been running down the hall frantically when I saw him.

I looked at him with concern on my face. “Yeah, of course I remember you? Why wouldn’t I–”

“y/n, it’s the Hunt. The Ghost Riders. I saw them, and now they’re coming for me.” He was breathing heavily, eyes sweeping the surroundings for signs of the Ghost Riders. His eyes locked on something to his left, but when I looked, I couldn’t see anything. “They’re here. We have to go,” he said, pulling me towards the parking lot. We got into his jeep, but he didn’t start the car. “Stiles, what are you doing?”

“It’s too late.” I could see the look of grief on his face. “No, don’t say that. It’s not–”

“It’s the truth,” he cut me off, turning to look at me. “Promise me you won’t forget.”

I shook my head. “I won’t. But Stiles, I can’t do this without you,” I could feel a tear escaping my eye and slipping down my cheek, my emotions getting the better of me.

Stiles reached forward and wiped the tear away before placing his hand on my cheek. “What do you mean? You’re one of the smartest, most inquisitive people I know. If I had to trust anyone to find a way to stop the Ghost Riders, it would be you.”

I couldn’t help but smile at his honesty. “Yeah right. Lydia will probably figure it out before me.”

He shook his head. “You can do it. I trust you.” I could tell there was more he wanted to say, but he turned to look at something through the window over his shoulder. “Can I tell you something? Off the record.”

I couldn’t help the laugh that escaped my mouth. “Yes, of course. What is it?”

He took a deep breath. “I don’t hate you. I know it may seem like I’ve never trusted you or that I don’t care about you, but it’s actually the opposite. I...really really like you,” he admitted.

I was stunned. Stiles likes me? He was searching my face for any indication of feelings as I sat there silently.

“Oh, shit,” Stiles mumbled. “Ok, forget I said that. Well, you won’t need to forget when you forget me in a minute–”

I cut off his rambling by placing my lips on his. They were warm and familiar, as if they were made for mine. “I like you too,” I mumbled when I disconnected, my eyes still closed from the interaction.

But when I opened them, I was alone in the baby blue jeep.

--

All semester, I’d felt that something was missing, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Or who it was.

But after months of searching for it, we finally figured it out. Lydia had gone into a banshee trance to discover the word “Stiles,” and it brought back vague memories for me when I heard it. The feeling of soft flannel. A sarcastic laugh. Red string around my finger. A hefty wooden baseball bat.

The collection of memories made sense when we all finally got our memories back and remembered the person we were missing from our lives.

We traced the trail of clues to the sewers, where Scott tried to bring back Stiles because of their brotherly love for one another. I thought it would work, but the portal closed and Stiles hadn’t appeared. Come on, Stiles. Where are you?

We had to fight the Ghost Riders off, making sure they didn’t turn our beloved Beacon Hills into another ghost town. I’d run into the high school, looking for something to use as a weapon when I ran into someone in the hall. A tall, brown-haired figure wearing a flannel shirt. “Stiles?”

He turned, and smiles emerged on both of our faces. I broke into a run again, right into his arms. “I can’t believe you’re here. You’re really here.” I mumbled, the sound muffled against his shirt.

“I knew you could do it,” he said.

I pulled back slightly and looked up at his face, suddenly nervous. “That night in the jeep...did you hear what I told you before you disappeared?”

A soft smile rested on his face. “Of course I did. It was the one thing that kept me going, especially when I was stuck with Peter.”

“Peter Hale? Why the hell were you with Peter Hale?”

Stiles shook his head. “We can go over that later. For now, there’s one thing I’ve been wanting to do.” I was a little confused, but I understood once he leaned in and connected our lips.

This is what I’d been missing, and I was never going to let it go again.

--

I watched from afar as Stiles gave his trusty baseball bat to Mason, who didn’t seem to appreciate the hunk of wood.

“Have you told him yet?” Lydia asked as she appeared next to me.

I shook my head. “We haven’t really had time to talk about that stuff. I think he doesn’t really want to think about it just yet and what that might mean for us.”

She nudged me with her elbow, silently telling me to go over there and talk to him. Rolling my eyes, I walked towards the familiar blue jeep and familiar mess of brown hair.

Liam and Mason had already walked away, and Scott and Stiles were standing and talking at the jeep’s trunk. “Hey, y/n. I’m just heading out, but I’ll see you guys later,” Scott said as I came up and Stiles threw his arm around me.

We waved as Scott left, and Stiles pulled me closer. “Hey,” he said, looking down at me with an affectionate expression.

I pulled him over so we could sit in the open trunk. “We need to talk.” I could see the panic flare up in his eyes.

“Oh, um, okay? Is everything okay?”

Chuckling lightly, I nodded. “Yeah, we just haven’t talked about college at all,” I explained.

His head dropped. “Yeah, I know. I just don’t want it to ruin what we have here, and I don’t even know what life will be like outside of Beacon Hills, and I feel like we just got together and now–”

“Stiles,” I cut him off. “I’m going to GW too.”

His eyes widened at my confession. “You...you’re going to GW?”

I nodded, a small smile on my lips. “I committed a while ago. I’m going to study journalism there.”

I watched as a smile spread across his face. Then, it was replaced by a quick smirk. “Oh great, you’re following me there, huh? I just can’t seem to get rid of you.”

I shrugged. “What can I say? I’m going to need someone to give me the inside scoop on the FBI’s antics.”

He looked pensive for a moment. “I think what you’re describing is illegal.”

“Not if it’s in the public’s interest. But maybe it just needs to be off the record,” I admitted. Stiles laughed. “Oh, it’s definitely going to be off the record.”

#stiles stilinski #teen wolf #stiles stilinski fic #stiles stilinski x reader #scott mccall #lydia martin #allison argent #hot take: scott should have brought back stiles in 6b not lydia #teen wolf fanfiction #stiles stilinski imagine #stiles stilinski one shot #dylan obrien #isaac lahey #dylan o'brien

[watermelonlipstick]

Dean’s Jeans 2

What better day to post a sweet little family oneshot than Mother’s Day? This is the same setup as Dean’s Jeans, just a different late summer afternoon on your cul-de-sac with Dean, Sam, your daughters, and their cousin DJ. I already have bare-bones drafts of a few other installments for these cuties, especially considering this one got a little deeper than I had intended. Stay tuned!

Title: Dean’s Jeans 2

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Reader

Word Count: 5561

Summary: Spending the afternoon working on the driveway with Dean, Sam, your daughters, and nephew.

Warnings: fluff, some family angst, minor injury, little dollop of smut at the end

           It was a big day for driveways and garages.

           You had been sitting in the apron of Sam’s drawing loopy pastel paths with DJ and your eldest daughter for your youngest to roll her cousin’s old matchbox cars down, watching adoringly as everyone’s palms and knees got covered in chalk dust. When the concrete was relatively full and the older two started getting a little antsy, you decided to try to stave off any bored bickering ahead of time.

           “Babe, is our garage unlocked?” you called over to Dean where he was trying to snake an extension cord out of Sam’s front door and down the porch.

           “Should be. Why, what’s up?”

           “I thought maybe DJ could take Picasso here over to the park to break in her new bike.” You turned to your nephew, sitting with his arms resting on his knees. He was just barely starting to fill out around the delicate Winchester features that had made him such an angelic looking child, the angle of his jaw seeming to sharpen every day, growing rapidly though you might still be able to throw him over your shoulder in a pinch. Hopefully it was a sign that he wasn’t destined for the late puberty you knew had frustrated Sam so much when he was younger; at least he could have one gift from his other parent, lost otherwise to the wind without as much as a periodic birthday card. Not the time for that thought, you reminded yourself, refocusing on the child’s glossy hair, carbon copy of his father’s with sun-lightened tips this late into summer. Dean would’ve taken him to get a haircut about a month ago, but as you and Sam both reminded him: not his hair, not his kid. It made you smile and likely made Sam proud that at his age, where so many kids were rebelling against their parents, DJ didn’t mind looking exactly like his dad. Somehow you had a hard time believing Sam would want to rush that process of teenage rebellion along. “What do you think, Deej?”

           Your elder daughter squealed and threw her arms around his neck, nearly tackling him onto the driveway. “Please please? Maybe Sarah and Davey can come too.” Her inclusion of the Fiore siblings into the mix was smart. They lived between your cul de sac and the park and were pretty similar in age to DJ and your older daughter. You suspected she thought on some level that DJ was on the cusp of being too cool to hang out with his baby cousin, but hanging out with the Fiores as a group gave them a little more social grace. Hopefully she’d realize, as you had, that DJ absolutely adored her and would likely rather catch some flack from his peers than drift apart.

           “Yeah but I’m not carrying your bike up the hill if your legs get tired,” he grinned at his cousin, who immediately took off across the street to get her bike from the garage.

           Sam and Dean had to move their whole setup from in front of Sam’s garage door so DJ could get his own bike out, the step ladder, extension cord, and electric drill going into the lawn next to the rest of their project, the basketball hoop. He almost got to the end of the driveway, swinging his leg over the seat, before Sam stopped him. “Nice try. Helmet, please,” he called out after his son, who reluctantly dropped the mountain bike onto the pavement and trudged back into the garage to pull a sticker-covered helmet out of a box and throw it on his head. By the time he made it into the street his cousin had done the same, yelling out over her shoulder for you to Mommypleaseclosethegaragethankyou as she tried to pump petite legs to keep up.

           You were thankful that your youngest seemed to be fully engrossed in the chalk patterns on the driveway and hadn’t seemed to notice the other kids’ leaving, not interested in having an argument about whether she was too little or not to go with them alone. Trusting the older kids or not, she was small and curious in a way that led to her sometimes running off to explore, and you didn’t want to add that into the mix. After a while, she picked up the green again, moving up the driveway to draw a picture of a dragon and immediately swipe hair out of her face, covering it with fluorescent dust. She got to her feet, and the amount of colorful powder on her made you beyond thankful that it was Dean’s turn to give her a bath that night. Crossing the driveway in a few skittering steps, she wrapped herself around Dean’s legs, practically leaving a silhouette imprint of herself on his jeans as he ruffled her hair. The way they had worn out and lost much of their dye over the years highlighted the contrast.

           “Daddy, come look! It’s a dragon!”

           Dean and Sam exchanged a smirk and Dean winked at you. “A dragon? Sounds scary.”

           “No, he’s a nice dragon,” she insisted, grabbing his hand and dragging him down the driveway, leaving Sam to drill holes into the wood above his garage door.

           “A nice dragon, huh? What’s his name?” Dean asked, grinning as he let her lead him.

           “Maurice,” she said, so matter of fact it made you laugh out loud. Sam did too, pulling the drill out of the wall to keep from wiggling the holes. “Can you do the fire?”

           “’Course I can, princess. How big are we talking?” He eased down to sit cross-legged next to Maurice The Dragon, accepting when you offered him yellow and orange sticks of chalk. You leaned back in the afternoon sun with a lap full of matchbox cars listening to the radio Sam had brought out to the porch, the chalk scratching on the concrete, and the rhythmic drilling of holes into siding for a few minutes.

           “Dean?” Sam asked, backing down the step ladder.

           “Got it,” he answered, putting a little flair on a lick of fire that went around Maurice’s nose and handing your daughter the chalk. “I need to help Uncle Sammy for a minute but I can come right back, sound fair? Your mom is better at scales anyway.” The girl seemed to consider it for a second then pouted her lips out in agreement, tilting her head to the side just like her dad did all the time. Dean got up creakily and brushed off his hands on his back pockets, the orange joining the other stains like an abstract painting.

           “You guys need any help?” you called over to Sam, who was trying to stabilize the hoop with long arms and struggling a little bit to keep it balanced in the light wind, powerful muscles rippling in his forearms and impressing upon you how heavy it must truly be if even he was having trouble with it.

           “Actually, yeah, that would be great,” he chuckled, jerking his chin to Dean to suggest his brother help him hold it up. He did, grabbing one side and having to reach up to his tip toes to match Sam’s stretch.  They were both standing on a kind of bastardized stool Dean had thrown together for this purpose, a few planks of wood balanced on some huge cinderblocks that had been in the garden holding up one of Sam’s compost setups. “It’s just those 12 screws, holes should already be lined up.”

           You climbed up on the ladder with the drill, having to crane to reach over even with the added height. When the last was in, the Winchesters carefully removed their hands. Seeing that it didn’t immediately fall, Dean grabbed the bottom corner and tried his best to rattle it to no avail. “Good job, babe,” he said, lightly smacking your ass as you backed down the ladder.

           “Watch out,” Sam said over your shoulder, and you saw him walking backwards a handful of steps down the driveway, being cautious to avoid his niece and her drawings.

           “Dude, there’s no way you can—” Dean started, cut off by Sam taking a running jump and leaping into the air, catching the rim of the hoop like nothing and doing a baby pull-up on the metal.

           “Can what?” Sam cackled, punching Dean’s arm playfully as he dropped to the pavement. “Don’t be jealous, old man.”

           “Jealous of Sasquatch? You can practically reach it standing, Lurch.”

           “Yeah, okay. Let me know when you can get up there without a stool and a trampoline.”

           You were giggling as Sam and Dean started putting all their tools way when DJ’s bike came flying around the corner. Neither he nor his cousin were wearing helmets, and she was wrapped around his chest like a novelty monkey backpack, her legs circling his waist and her arms clinging to his neck. He had to arch around her to see, but you could tell from the half-block length away that he was saying something to her. By the time they got close enough to get reprimanded for the lack of helmets, or for one of their dads to ask where the other bike was, you could hear the crying.

           Sam crossed over to his son in long, purposeful strides, holding his handlebars so he could dismount without letting go of your daughter. “What happened?” he asked, taking the girl from DJ’s arms and smoothing her hair back with a soothing palm. As he turned, you could see the blood trickling down her raw knees and elbows.

           DJ was visibly rattled, trying hard to calm his breathing down and tensing his bottom lip when it began to quiver. “Davey and I went down that big hill and, she—she was going too fast, and, um, she fell—I, I told her we could practice later but these guys were saying only babies couldn’t do it, I swear I didn’t know she would—” and then his voice broke, fat tears finally breaking through and crashing down his face. Sam nodded to you and Dean, murmuring some comforting things to your eldest as he carried her up the porch steps into his house. At the exact same time as if practiced—that same rapid, implicit communication they’d had on hunts now used to coordinate hugging their children in tandem, you thought to yourself—Dean wrapped his nephew up in a big bear hug, cradling the boy’s head and sweeping his hand up and down his back.

           “Hey, come on, you’re okay. She’s okay, she’s just shaken up, kid. Shhh shhh shhh, hey, come on, deep breaths. You’re okay,” he hummed into DJ’s hair. He gave you a tight nod over the kid’s shoulder to keep drawing with your daughter. Only a few steps away, you could still hear him as he continued. “I’m so proud of you, Deej. Got her all the way home on your bike, that’s pretty badass.” He waited for a few moments of silence until his nephew caught his breath a little. “Probably scared you, right?” he asked, his voice low and calm as DJ nodded through tears into the growing wet spot on his uncle’s chest. “That’s okay, chief, I would’ve been freaked too.”

           You noticed he was rocking a little, almost like he did when he was trying to get the girls to sleep as babies, and it really emphasized the way that no matter how wise DJ seemed or whatever signs of puberty he might be showing, he was still a child, still the same baby you’d fallen in love with when Sam had gotten that call however many years ago. It took a few more minutes for the crying to subside to hiccupping breaths and seeming to sense that the moment had passed in some way, your baby girl grabbed your hand gently. “Mommy, is DJ okay?”

           “Yeah, sweetie. He was just scared for a minute.”

           “That’s why he needs a hug?”

           “Exactly. Everybody needs hugs sometimes.” Just as she had before when considering your ability to draw cartoon scales on a dragon named Maurice, she tilted her head and pouted in agreement. When you realized what she was about to do next you almost had to wipe a quick tear away yourself, watching her get up to hug DJ and sandwich him between herself and Dean.

           “It’s okay, DJ,” she whispered, the high tender pitch of her voice like one of those unsettlingly extreme medieval harmonies with her dad’s but so much sweeter, the bright welcome sting of lemon juice in a dense poundcake.

           A moment later, Sam came out onto the porch with his eldest niece. One of her knees was wrapped in gauze but the other and both elbows had what looked from the driveway like a collage of Spiderman band aids. Sam appeared to have a matching one on his forehead, and both of them were giggling, though her eyes still looked a little puffy and red.

           Dean looked up and turned DJ to see both of them, cradling the back of DJ’s head in one palm. “See? She’s okay, just needed a couple band aids.”

           Sam winked at his brother as he walked over and patted his son on the back, taking the band aid off his forehead as he went. “Buddy, we’re going to go grab the bike and your helmets. Is there anything else you think you left at the park?”

           His son shook his head up at his dad and leaned back from Dean’s embrace to rub his eyes. “Are you mad at me?” he croaked.

           “Mad at you? Why would I be mad at you?” Sam asked, crouching down to a squat to look up at DJ. You had noticed he tended to do this in sensitive moments with all the children, trying his best to seem less looming. The first time you’d identified it, it made you a little sick to your stomach, realizing it likely wasn’t part of how inherently good he was with kids but because he knew what it was like to have an angry man towering over you. Thinking of it now had the same effect, especially compounded by the emphasis Dean had put on telling DJ he was proud of him even if his daughter had gotten hurt, that he too knew a protective kid was still just a kid.

           DJ sniffled hard once more, finally able to take a truly deep breath. “I didn’t wear my helmet home because I couldn’t see arou—”

           “Aw, DJ. No way am I mad at you.” Sam hugged his son and stood up, planting a kiss on his forehead. “I’m proud of you for getting both of you guys home safe. That was really smart, to get her on the bike with you like that.” You caught DJ’s tiny smile of pride at his father’s praise, watched it deepen a touch as Sam kissed his hair again. “So just the helmets and the bike?”

           He nodded and rubbed his eyes before peeking around Sam a little bit to see your daughter. “You’re really okay?” he asked, as though he didn’t trust the adults to be telling him the truth and would have to ascertain her safety for himself. You wondered if Sam and Dean would find that nice or insulting, that ultra-fierce, trust-but-verify loyalty.

           She nodded sort of sheepishly. “Sorry I didn’t listen about the hill, DJ.”

           “It’s okay.”

           The moment seemed a bit heavy for a half-second before Sam wrapped a big hand around your daughter’s shoulder with a reassuring smile. “Let’s go find that bike.”

           After helping Dean get his wheels back inside, DJ went up to his room. You had to resist the urge to follow him, cuddle up with him like you used to when he was small enough to tuck into your lap. If he wanted to be alone, he was old enough to decide that for himself. Dean put the rest of the tools and things from putting up the basketball hoop away and walked over to you where you were laying on the ground so your youngest daughter could trace your body with chalk.

           “I think we need a pick-me-up around here. How do you feel about i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m for dinner?”

           You smiled, knowing you only had a bit longer of these spelling secrets left as your baby got closer and closer to proficient reading age. “Works for me. I think we have 2 or 3 kinds in the garage freezer.”

           He smirked down at you. “Can you bring him over in about 15 minutes? They should be back by then.”

           You tossed him a thumbs up and watched him walk across the street, the way the denim draped around his bowed legs as he went.

           It was only five or six minutes later when Sam came up to the driveway, jogging alongside your daughter with DJ’s helmet in his hand. Of course Sam would know that she needed to get back on that bike right away, and of course he’d come up with something to make her laugh all the way home, even if that meant he had to run the entire distance on a late summer afternoon. He was slightly out of breath when he helped her dismount in the driveway.

           “My kid okay?” he asked, taking the other helmet so your daughter could go back to what was becoming a pretty spectacular chalk surrealist piece spanning the driveway.

           “He’s in his room, I think he will be. Your brother’s got a very Dean style plan for dinner in a few minutes if you’re hungry.”

           Sam looked down at his watch. “Yikes, I didn’t realize we were even close to dinnertime. Let me go wash my hands and grab DJ then we can go over together?”

           “Sounds perfect to me. And hey—Sam? Make sure he knows everyone thinks he did the right thing.”

           He nodded, and you watched his Adam’s apple jump in his throat as he swallowed hard. Sam reached down and squeezed your hand, saying thank you without reopening the situation in front of the girls.

           They came out a few minutes later, Sam in a fresh t-shirt and DJ looking a little more cheerful coiled into his dad’s side. You bundled up the girls and walked over to your house, tipping your head in thanks as Sam opened the door. The girls were the first to see the spread and took off squealing into the kitchen, where Dean had effectively set up a tiny ice cream shop on your kitchen island. Sprinkles of all different kinds, those 3 tubs of ice cream you’d been right to remember were in the freezer, syrups and whipped cream and cherries and bananas and even chopped up peanut butter cups and Butterfinger bars from the stash Dean hid from the kids. He was already handing out bowls before you got into the kitchen.

           “Ah, ah! Hands need to be washed before anyone gets ice cream,” you insisted, shooting Dean a look of teasing reprimand.

           He rolled his eyes to your oldest daughter, sending her giggling conspiratorially to the kitchen sink. DJ, presumably having already washed his hands at his place, helped your youngest daughter reach by picking her up to the faucet when her sister was done. You crossed over to Dean, kissing him on the cheek and grabbing his hands for inspection. “Babe, you’re literally covered in chalk.”

           “You should be happy about me getting some extra calcium,” he winked, sticking out his tongue at you as you grabbed his ass on the way to the sink. “Mrs. Winchester!” he said in a faux-scandalized voice.

           As you washed your hands Sam manned the ice cream scoop, doling out much bigger bowls than he would normally, seeming to know as Dean did that a little levity might help the events of the day pass faster. After all the kids doctored up heaping mounds of ice cream and toppings to beat the band, you and the Winchester brothers stood around the island while they piled onto the couch to find a movie they could all agree on.

           “How’s our champ?” Dean asked, keeping his voice low.

           Sam shook up a can of whipped cream as he spoke. “He’s okay. Just feels guilty, I think. He says he should’ve stopped her from going down the hill.”

           “You think any kid of hers would’ve let someone tell her she couldn’t do anything?” Dean ribbed, accepting the gentle elbow you hit his side with.

           “I know that, but you know what it’s like. I think once he sees she’s really okay and no one blames him then he’ll be fine.”

           “Poor guy. Feels like that Winchester ‘weight of the world’ thing must be genetic.” You were partly joking but also partly not and they both knew it, looking pitiful and pitying for a beat before trying to cover with smiles. “He’s a great kid, Sam.”

           “Pretty much feels like you guys raised him as much as I did, I should be thanking you,” he murmured, drawing a lattice of butterscotch syrup over his whipped cream.

           You snaked an arm around his waist and gave him a sideways hug. “No, we’re lucky you let us know him.”

           Sam bent over and pressed his lips to your hair. “Seriously, thank you. I’m—I don’t know where we’d be if we didn’t, you know, I mean if we—”

           “Don’t strain yourself, Sammy,” Dean smiled affectionately, giving Sam a merciful out. “Tell you what, I sure wouldn’t have made it in damn Themyscira without you two around.”

           Sam chuckled down at the counter while you disentangled your arms. You took the chocolate sprinkles from in front of him and scattered a few in your bowl. “Themyscira? The hell is that?”

           Dean set down his ice cream exaggeratedly and rolled his eyes so hard he put a backwards bend in his spine, holding onto the island to keep his balance. “Babe. Themyscira. Home of the Amazons? Wonder Woman?”

           “Riiiight. I forgot I was married to such a dork.”

           “As long as you don’t forget how this ‘dork’ makes you screa—”

           “Dude, enough,” Sam groaned, exasperated. Dean waggled his eyebrows at you as his brother followed into the living room with the kids, taking the opportunity of temporary privacy to slip his tongue along your neck where it sloped into your shoulder.

           “Dean,” you hissed playfully, pushing his chest away from you. “They’re in the other room!”

           “You taste like chalk,” he smirked, before holding your gaze for a gooier beat than you would’ve expected. His eyes softened and he glanced down. “Thank you for letting me—letting us—take that, today. I know you’re better at the Mommy Dearest stuff or whatever, but it sometimes feels like, ah, getting a redo?” He cleared his throat where it had gotten a little thick. “You know, um, like proving that it doesn’t have to be the same?”

           It was a specific vulnerability he doesn’t often let you see, but you could tell by the softness both he and Sam had with all the kids, how they beat themselves up for days if they raised their voice for even a second, that they both thought about it all the time. In so many ways they were still those same little boys who wished they could’ve drawn on driveways with their parents, that their dad could’ve given them Spiderman band aids and told them everything was going to be okay.

           He didn’t have to explain further, and you gripped his hand to tell him so. “They needed you two, not me. For what it’s worth, I think you guys were a pretty great team today.”

           Dean smiled, and it was almost like the sleepy thankfulness he had on those nights when he got home and you’d charitably done a couple of his chores for him. He closed his eyes in invitation and you leaned forward, meeting his lips with the smell of ice cream in the air. “So come on, Super Dad. Let’s go watch a movie with these great kids everyone keeps talking about.”

           The ice cream had gotten put back in the freezer immediately to keep it frozen, but the toppings had all been left out during School of Rock. Sam and DJ had left a bit after the movie, playing a round of LIFE that had been pretty ambitiously started, considering the time, and ultimately abandoned when all the kids’ yawns started to sync up. You came downstairs after trading with Dean for bath/shower duty to get out of cleaning up all the sticky dishes, the girls falling asleep too quickly for a bedtime story after you’d made sure they were thoroughly scrubbed clean and any wet gauze was replaced.

           He was rinsing some bowls in the sink, the majority of the toppings slid to one side of the now wiped-down island. You sauntered up behind him, putting your chin on his shoulder. “Your jeans are still covered in chalk,” you sighed into his neck.

           “Your kid was practically using them as a napkin, so I’m not surprised.”

           “Like father, like daughter.”

           You felt the rumble of his laugh through your chest where you were pressed up against his back. “Can’t argue with that. They asleep?”

           “You’d think I drugged them.”

           He chuckled again, putting down the last bowl in the sink and shutting off the water before drying his hands on a dishtowel deliberately. When he turned around, his face was inches from yours. “Is that right?” he asked, and his voice was as smooth and silky as any caramel drizzle you could’ve eaten that night. You nodded into a smile as Dean slid a washing-warmed hand to the nape of your neck and wound into the hair there, pulling you into him where he leaned against the sink and slipped his tongue into your mouth. He tasted like maraschino cherry and chocolate and you pushed up into his kiss hard, jamming him into the counter in a way that made him groan into you, tug that hair tighter. “Careful, baby. Been thinking about scandalizing the mother of my children for hours,” he growled, smirking through a voice rough like the sandpaper calluses of his hands.

           You bit his bottom lip and dragged it back, leaning away from Dean just enough to reach over to the island behind you, finding the whipped cream and starting to shake it fast. “That’s funny, because I’ve just been thinking about sundaes,” you purred into his ear, nipping at his earlobe before tipping back. Dean’s eyes practically glittered as his pupils blew wide. His shirt was off so fast you almost didn’t see it, feeling like you blinked and opened your eyes to him already yanking his belt open to shuck off those chalk-covered torn jeans. Before he could, you turned over the whipped cream on top of his collarbone, dripping a stream of white foam down his chest and letting it drift for a second, melt down his skin then lapping it up with a tongue flattened wide.  You shook the can again, draping a strip onto Dean’s stomach that trailed to his belly button and laying a palm on his chest, leaning him back to the counter on his elbows to watch as you licked the whipped cream with lazy swirls until you were at the hem of his boxers, sinking to your knees and taking them down his legs along with his now-opened jeans. He was already hard as rock when you took him in your palm, laying one last spray of whipped cream along the length of him and humming in delight at the “holy shi—” that punched out of Dean and fizzled into the ether when you sucked it off.  

           It was only a few minutes before he couldn’t take it anymore, bending down to kiss you rough and dirty, tongue darting out to get the little dribbles of cream around the corners of your mouth and dragging you to your feet. With one hand Dean flicked open your jeans, using the freed slack to dive into your panties, middle finger dipping into you as he held your jaw with the other palm. He breathed hot and sticky along your jugular. “Not even close to how wet I want you.” The viscous pour of his words onto your neck sent goosebumps spreading over your skin in a delicate fan and you couldn’t help but smile as he scooped under your thighs and lifted you easily onto the island, slipping the denim off your legs as the same time he stepped out of his. You relaxed onto your elbows, watching those long eyelashes drift open and closed as his kissed a path down your abdomen, gripping handfuls of your t-shirt to get to skin. A lazy hand offered Dean the can of whipped cream.

           The smirk he gave you, bare shoulders between your thighs as he kneeled on the kitchen floor, might as well have been through a time machine for the way it made you see the cocky playboy you’d first met over a decade ago, before the faint wrinkles of years in sunny cars and staying up nights with colicky babies that accessorized his big doe eyes now. It had the same effect on you in a t-shirt that was older than DJ as it had when you were pounding through shots with eyeliner artfully smudged by the power of hangovers: pooling all the blood in your stomach and making you lightheaded. He slowly bit his bottom lip. “You taste way too good to be adding anything,” he rumbled, and when you threw your head back in a shaky laugh his tongue reminded you exactly why smudged-eyeliner girl was ready to drop her independence, jump in the Impala and follow that mouth to the end of the world.

           Dean built the earth up and cracked it into pieces beneath you twice perched on that kitchen island before grabbing the counter edge to haul himself up. “Were these tiles always so fucking hard? Feel like I just took a hammer to the kneecaps.” He shook out each of his bare legs, spring of his erect cock as he did looking silly and out of place with the glisten of his lips and chin, the sultry cast of his eyelashes on angled cheekbones. The juxtaposition made you laugh, breathy as it was with muscles that had been turned to jello, thrown in a blender, and scattered about the room by the deft movements of Dean’s tongue and fingers.

           “You’re thinking about your knees right now?”

           “That’s how hard these fucking tiles are,” Dean chuckled, deep and still sexy somehow, bending forward to catch your lips. When you reached down to stroke him, a hand wrapped around your wrist. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, I’m nowhere near done with you,” he murmured through kisses, a shade of playful challenge in his throat.

           You giggled, leaning back as he dragged a wet path of suction down your neck. “I don’t want to torture those legs, old man.” Running a hand through hair you’d sent spiking in all directions in your writhing, you dragged Dean’s head back on his neck, giving you a chance to meet his eyes, still the same dusted olive they’d been since that first wink. Long past the honeymoon stage when it was appropriate to do that kind of thing, you’d been content to spend hours searching them, cataloguing every spindly muscle of iris for posterity, trying to gather up every grain of him for when he inevitably was lost forever to a hunt or the solitude of the road.

           But here he was still.

           Here you were still. Living a life—living two selves—you never thought you’d get, lucky to have grown in and around each other like mangrove roots. Those eyes still every inch as beautiful, every spark of that electric heat still there now cloaked in layer after layer of what you’d built together: the complete trust and fanatical admiration he had of you flowing out like fountains of sunlight, strong enough they streamed through any raunchy waggle of his eyebrows.

           No time to think about it now with a hungry coil of desire tightening in your stomach. You traced the length of him with your fingertips, feather-light and teasing. “If you give me fifteen seconds to get my sea legs back I’ll show you who’s got tougher knees.”

           “All right, that’s it,” Dean said. He tipped his head forward and bit your bottom lip with that impossible pressure that made you whimper. “I’ll show you how old these knees are.”

           Before you could react, he’d put his shoulder below your sternum and thrown you over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. When you squealed he smacked your ass. “You’re going to wake up the girls,” he buzzed, starting toward your bedroom without a stitch of clothing on, you draped over his back.

           “Dean, Jesus Christ,” you giggled. “Get the clothes at least!”

            “Don’t need any jeans for what I’ve got planned—quit—squirming—or I’ll give you something to squirm about,” he continued, lowering his voice to a lascivious whisper and giving one of your upper thighs an impish bite as he headed up the stairs.

-

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[andrewcolomy]

I think Donald Trump is gonna be re-elected.

There are many posts on this site that seem very excited that Donald Trump was impeached and I think some very important things have been glanced over that may very well help him retain his position in 2020. First off, we all knew this was gonna happen. As soon as the members of his House were revealed, and Nancy Pelosi was made leader (again), I knew it was gonna happen. Hell, the Washington Post, a leftwing newspaper basically made an article right after the election happened stating that the impeachment process has begun. They we’re gonna do this all along, and were simply waiting for a reason, any reason at all, to do so.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/20/the-campaign-to-impeach-president-trump-has-begun/

So then it begun, between obstructing all of his actions, leading to the longest government shutdown in history, over funding for the southern border wall, which he eventually got through various means of funding, as well as bending over backwards to make sure that none of his legislation was passed (although with some bi-partisan action his legislation was passed), to various fake news stories about sex-scandals such as Stormy Daniels, which was dismissed, and then her lawyer wound up in jail for some other shit, and then E. Jean Carroll, whose interview with Anderson Cooper did nothing but make CNN look extremely bad for having an insane woman on their show talking about rape is kinky and then hitting on Anderson (whose gay by the way). Both of those things fell apart completely.

Then you have the various scandals going on with the parties. You have the Covington kids case which led to lawsuits towards media companies for inaccurately portraying the actions of a group of high-schoolers on a field trip, openly promoting their doxxing and leading to death-threats, in which CNN ultimately reached settlement, but many lawsuits against companies and people still remain. You have the Jussie Smollett thing, in which a celebrity, very poorly I might add, tried to orchestrate a hate crime (in Chicago, during a blizzard, in the early morning, with bleach and a rope that would be frozen). The case has led to not only the humiliation of Smollett, but the potential ending of his career as an actor for trying to claim that some white men wearing MAGA hats were trying to lynch a gay, black liberal actor. Both hoaxes framing white Trump supporters (some real supporters, some fake), and attacks on supporters by ANTIFA, have become rampant, from the Charlottesville incident which occurred because ANTIFA showed up at some right-wing rally and started fucking with people and assaulting people, to various caught-on camera incidents involving supporters (many not even white) occurred. You look at left-wing rallies they are very peaceful usually, save for maybe some Trump-supporting hecklers in the stands of various Bernie, Biden or Liz Warren rallies or events.

https://youtu.be/eTKQad3kR-0

You got fake news rampant trying to make him look bad and getting caught. Such as when ABC falsely detailed an event in Kentucky as a Syrian battle as means of promoting an anti-Trump agenda for him pulling the troops out of Syria. You have other left-wing news site Washington Post, referring to Al Baghdadi is an “austere religious scholar”, which has since been changed due to flack from the press, but was caught in time.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/28/abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-washington-post-austere-headline/2483340001/

Then there’s also the fact that any time there’s a major success with Trump, it always has to get covered up by something else. There’s a reason Nancy declined to submit the articles of impeachment right away, and that was to stick it to Donald Trump once again, as the same day the articles were submitted, was the same day he signed the phase one of his trade deal with China, and the day after was the day the USMCA was passed.

There’s this never-ending battle to see Trump’s tax returns, which he keeps defending under his 4th amendment rights to freedom of privacy. The harassment never stops. There’s misinterpreting various things he tweets as spelling errors or fits of insanity. Such as the “covfefe” tweet which goes “despite the constant negative press covfefe”, which is actually referring to the COVFEFE Act, but was promoted as utter insanity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVFEFE_Act

Now lets get on to the candidates, as of right now that are running against him. Lets see, you have an old-school Democrat, Joe Biden, a man whose presence around women and children is constantly under question, who behaves very inappropriately around people, sniffing their hair and kissing them and acting very overly affectionate towards strangers, a man who nibbles on his wife’s fingers, and who if you actually listen to, sounds like a rambling old man who has no idea where he is at all. Not only that, you have a man whose openly admitted to silencing the investigation of his son’s illegal money laundering activities with Burisma by threatening to withhold aid if the investigator into Hunter Biden wasn’t fired. Joe Biden doesn’t even have the endorsement of Barack Obama who put him in second in command. This is one of the top running contenders.

Next you have Elizabeth Warren, who is arguably one of the phoniest women I’ve ever seen in my life. She pretends to be Native American for brownie points with minorities, then retracts the position once it’s found out she’s not actually Native American. She drinks on camera with her husband in the background to feign this unbelievable likability and humanity and it comes off as immediately laughable and insincere. Liz Warren comes off like an alien trying to assume the position of a person in power and for that reason I don’t believe she can beat Trump at all. Say what you want about Trump but with arrogance and egotism like his, that can’t be faked. He has been that way his entire life, where Liz Warren has actually had a much greater arch politically than Trump has. She actually used to be a conservative Democrat, and in time, has morphed into this faux progressive librarian shill. Her policies are basically Bernie Sanders lite so she really has nothing to offer politically.

Third and probably most beloved of the top 3 candidates is Bernie, who realistically, is the only one of the 3 I see standing a chance against Trump on the debate stage. He has an incredibly loyal fan base that could even rival Trump in just how protective they are of him. Out of the top 3, Bernie is arguably the most sincere of the top 3, which isn’t saying much. A lot of the problems that arise for Bernie have to do with not only his health (the man recently had a heart attack so he has to be getting at least monitored to a certain degree), but also the fact that (like Trump) the MSM is heavily slanted against him. He was utterly screwed out of the nomination by the DNC, which was very clearly in Hillary’s pocket last time, as well as CNN and MSNBC, who treat him, honestly, pretty unfairly. I hate to say it but I think Bernie’s gonna get screwed again, and this time it’s gonna be Joe Biden. I’m calling it. MSM and globalists don’t want a progressive president, they want an old-school Democrat with a very shady background, just like they did with Hillary, and just like they do with Biden. Basically throw Biden in a dress and he’s Hillary Clinton. Considering Bernie’s age and his health, this will likely be the last opportunity he has to run. Being a very likely one-term candidate doesn’t help Bernie much either.

So all in all, I think Trump will win 2020. He’s not as weak of a candidate as you guys make him out to be. Do NOT underestimate him. He has his loyal and devoted base that doesn’t trust you, or the mainstream media or any of the lies about him and a base that really wants to gut our current, disgraceful congress. He has run on the basis of infamy, which, honestly can be just as powerful, if not more than fame. He has constant attention on him, which is driving attention away from other candidates. For everything that has been done to him, from the several times destruction of his Star on the Hollywood walk of fame (which is still there and getting replaced, as I was just there in Hollywood a few weeks ago), to the impeachment which many people feel is just some partisan scar on his presidency, all he’s done is grow stronger. He is constantly the center of attention, and I really think he wants it that way. I don’t think it matters to Trump whether or not the attention is positive or negative so long as he’s drawing it away from the Democratic party. He will continue to do his rallies, which at this point have evolved into full-on stand up comic routines, continue to tweet, continue to call his oppressors silly names and insults. He will continue to belittle the left and the press will just eat it up. I’m honestly starting to think that the whole coverage of his presidency and constant negativity are just for ratings. I’m starting to think that these big media companies WANT Trump to win because their coverage of him is the only thing keeping them afloat.

#donald j trump #donald #trump #politics #2020 election #bernie #sanders #bernie sanders #elizabeth warren #elizabeth #warren #joe #biden #joe biden #republican #democrat #news #opinion #donald trump #maga

[captainstrekkinlog]

Star Trek: Picard - 1x01 “Remembrance” In-Depth Analysis

Let me start this off by saying, I think this is the strongest series premiere of any of the live-action Star Trek shows to date. 

There is a confidence in this episode that none of the other shows had. It’s no secret that every single Trek show has sometimes struggled in finding its footing in the beginning, it’s not easy to make these shows after all. But it seems that from the onset Star Trek: Picard was a show that knew what it wanted to be and what it needed to be. What struck me the most watching this episode is how very deliberate each action is taken. This story was crafted with meaning and intention, they knew what they wanted to convey and they’re going to take their time walking down the path they set. 

If the rest of this season are at the level of this premiere, then this might just become one of the best first seasons of any Trek show.

Now with that out of the way, let’s get to breaking down the episode in all its delicious details. This will be a long one as I break down scene by scene.

SPOILERS AHEAD

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So we begin with a dream sequence as Blue Skies (sung by Bing Crosby, grandfather of Tasha Yar’s actress Denise Crosby) plays. A wonderful shot of the Enterprise D with Picard and Data playing poker. Picard looks to be in civilian attire, while Data is seemingly in his Nemesis era uniform. The way this scene is set up immediately feels dream-like, especially with the song, which we heard Data last singing it at Riker and Troi’s wedding.

There is a feeling of melancholy in the scene, almost as if Picard’s own consciousness knows this is not real but he wants to keep pretending that it is. As he even says, he doesn’t want the game to end. He much rather wanting to cling onto the past than be awake in a present-day that he isn’t enjoying. As he even says later, it’s the waking up that he’s beginning to resent, and as we find out later on in the story, this dream world is probably a happier place for him than what life is like for him in the years since Data died. 

Here in Picard’s dream, he gets to keep holding onto the past - more time with Data, more time playing the poker game that he never got to enjoy until the end, more time for all the things he was in many ways, robbed of doing.

One funny note, Picard offers Data milk, but we did see in one of the TNG episodes where Data comments that he hates milk.

Data is also holding 5 Queen of Hearts, which Picard frowns at. I’m not sure exactly yet what this may represent, it is possible that this could be a foreshadowing to something else down the line. As I said before, the writers and director were very deliberate with every single detail, so I would imagine this Queen of Hearts thing to have a meaning, we just may not know it yet.

This scene ends with the Mars attack that we saw in the Children of Mars Short Trek and leads to Picard awaking rather violently from his dream. Now if this is how all his dreams end, I can definitely see why he wouldn’t want to wake up because that’s rather horrifying.

Now one thing I have to mention, simply because it’s being made such a big fuss over, the whole thing with how Ten Forward isn’t in the right location. First of all, it’s a dream. Dreams never make sense. I dreamed once that my house had wings and was full of plants and my bathroom was outside. Dreams are weird because they are suppose to be. Secondly, this sort of fuss over technicalities, and rather pointless ones at that, are what I would like to call “missing the forest for the trees”, because what is mattering in this scene isn’t the location of Ten Forward, but rather the scene of Picard and Data and what this means for Picard’s state of mind. THAT is the story, THAT is the substance. The location of a place in a dream sequence really is not what should be the take away of the scene, nor should it somehow ruin a scene. Honestly, people need to realize that the STORY is what is important, any small technical things are not the point. We don’t watch Star Trek because we want to point out all the inconsistent and illogical and wrong continuity details. We watch Star Trek because of the stories and the characters. If I was to let every single of those technical details bother me so much that it ruined the story, I would never be able to watch any Star Trek because quite frankly, there’s a whole lot of it in Star Trek, and acting like that one detail is what ruins a perfectly written and acted scene that sets up Picard’s state of mind for his character development is quite frankly very disingenuous. 

Now, moving onto the rest of our story. We have Picard waking up to Number One running to him. I imagine Number One is in many ways a service dog, especially given how he was immediately there noticing Picard’s disturbance. The most interesting part of this scene with Picard waking up and looking out into the vineyard where people are working is that he keeps saying to Number One “it’s alright”, but really, he’s not saying it to the dog, I think he’s trying to convince himself that everything is alright, even though he knows it isn’t, and we know he certainly doesn’t feel it.

Then we move locations to Greater Boston, where in the night time skyline, we notice some glowing light ads with the Federation News Network symbol, some Ferengi Alliance and ad products, a London Kings banner, and it looks like Kasidy Yates is still somewhere in the galaxy with a booming interstellar freights business. Good for her!

We finally meet Dahj with her boyfriend who is a Xahean, a nice link to our beloved Queen Po, whom we met in Discovery. I am now curious who is the ruler on Xahea at this time, after all, we don’t really know how Xaheans age. But it looks like Xahea is a part of the Federation, which also makes me curious if Po did eventually reveal her innovation for recrystalizing dilithium crystals. Oh and the eagle eyed folks at Trekcore noted from Dahj’s call logs later that her boyfriend’s name looks to be “Caler”.

So they’re having a great time, Dahj reveals she got into the Daystrom Institute and that she’s a fellow in Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Consciousness, which is an interesting field for her to go into given how she reacts later on to Picard calling them “soulless murder machines”, which seems to reveal her bias. Which also makes me wonder why she wanted to study something that would only be theoretical and she already had judgement against.

Oh and we also see in Dahj’s apartment is the flower, Orchidaceae Dahj Oncidium, that her father made.

This nice moment with the couple gets ruined, as usual, by Romulans. Always out there spoiling people’s fun. They immediately kill Dahj’s boyfriend and capture her. They put some devices on her head, likely to scan her and commenting on the fact that she’s not been activated yet. Somewhat hilariously, one of them gets admonished for speaking in their native alien language and to speak English. I guess it’s still called English? Or is it Federation Standard? Or is it both? 

They ask her “where’s the rest of you” and where she’s from. She says Seattle. I guess if you’re from Seattle these days, you should check if you’re either an Android or a Klingon spy. 

And just as she put a bag over her head and try to knock her out, she finally “activates” and kills them all. This was a very well choreographed fight scene where we got to see a good amount of the action. Now I’ve heard some people out there complaining about shaky cam, but that’s not what we have here. The camera didn’t shake, and it only does a minor tilt in one scene. Otherwise, this is one of the calmest camera movements in a fight scene. In fact, the directing for this whole episode is very steady and calm. Honestly, it’s a bad faith take to say this show is just all action crazy shaky cam, because it’s not true. In both of the fight scenes we get, there is considerable restraint on the camera work to make sure that we as the audience can still see what is going on and know what’s happening in the scenes at all times. The rest of the show is all steady cam work. I know that people often like to label “New Trek” to be all action and weird camera angles and “not real Star Trek”, but Picard’s camera work is much more in tune with TNG’s steady cam work than it is to anything else. Other than the two big fight scenes with Dahj, every scene is very steady.

So as Dahj is leaning over her boyfriend and mourning him (note that he is bleeding the same orange color that Po did in the Runaway Short Trek), and then she gets a vision of Picard. The interesting thing about this vision is that it looks to be the same shot from one of the very early teasers. I am curious why she keeps seeing this specific scene and if there is any meaning to it.

Now there is one issue I’ve seen pointed out that the first character to be killed on Picard is a character played by a black man. And this is a very valid thing to be concerned about considering the treatment of characters of color, particularly TV’s issues with black men that both Agents of SHIELD and The Walking Dead had gotten flack for before (the rotating door of black characters), and certainly horror movie tropes have been criticized extensively. So I definitely understand if someone saw this and was worried about this sort of thing becoming an issue. I can’t speak for how black people may feel about this, as I am not black and I do not know all the nuances of this problem, but I wanted to bring to attention what director Hanelle Culpepper commented on in a twitter conversation with someone who had brought up this very concern.

I think this is the thing that could sometimes feel like a double-edged sword. In our current entertainment and media, we are still not there in terms of fair and equal representation, and thus when female characters, characters of color, or LGBTQ+, and other minority group characters die or are treated badly in a story, we pick up on it. But I think with the Star Trek shows, both Discovery and Picard, they are trying to show vast array of characters and treating characters from various minority groups in a normalized way. They can be heroes, they can be villains, they can live and they can die. This kind of normalization in treatment of characters is what we hope for, but I just think the rest of TV have not caught up yet, so when characters of color in this case, do die, we notice.

But hopefully, as Hanelle Culpepper states, we will see more characters of color show up. And as we do know, we will be having more characters of color in lead roles joining us soon.

Now, onto this opening credit sequence. There is a lot of unravel here and I could probably talk for hours about what this opening makes me feel. Let’s first talk about the music. Jeff Russo deserves an award. Seriously. He does. If you guys have not seen the Ready Room aftershow where Jeff Russo talks about the choices made for this theme, you really need to. Because you see the care and attention to detail that he brings into even just choosing what instruments to add to the music and what chords used to call back to the past. The flute at the beginning alluding to Picard’s time in The Inner Light, representing his past. And then the cello and the occasional chords of the TNG theme, just slowed down and slightly in a different tone, all building up to what feels like a triumphant rebirth. The flute sneaks back in showing the past and present coming together for Picard. The use of the cello and strings is just perfect. It really gives a melodic and somber feel to it. And as a violin player myself, any time I hear the strings, it’s like coming home. I’ll be very excited to get back on my violin at some point and play this.

The imagery of the opening credit sequence also tells a story. We see a piece of the sky breaks off like glass, it floats down to the vines in the vineyard, then to the quantum archive, which forms into a borg cube, and the broken piece falls through the cube and forms into fractals, and the pieces float around seemingly becoming like a neuro-pathways which becomes like the iris of an eye, and then it becomes a borg eye maybe, and then the planet Romulus, and finally the cracks form back into Picard’s face. It’s all very beautiful imagery and clearly very deliberate as no doubt all these elements will somehow come into the story that we are seeing. 

And also interesting to note that only Patrick Stewart, Allison Pill, Isa Briones, Harry Treadaway from the main cast are credited, with Brent Spiner as “special guest star”, which means that I guess actors will only appear in the credits if they actually appear in the episode, much like how Discovery season 2 did the same with Shazad Latif and Wilson Cruz, and how Game of Thrones used to do this with their cast members too. So this should make it easy for us to notice which characters will appear in an episode or not.

Now back to the Chateau in France, Picard is walking through the vineyard with Number One and joking with him in French. I’m pretty sure this scene existed to poke fun at the people always saying why is Picard so British if he’s French. So LOL, now he speaks French finally!

We get to meet Laris and Zhaban, two Romulans who seem to live with Picard and basically be his attendants. Some people may not know, but Laris and Zhaban both appear in the Picard Countdown Comics, the three issue comic series shows us their relationship to Picard. Long story short, they are former Tal Shiar agents who broke the rules falling in love and wanted to leave because they wanted to help people instead. They feel indebted to Picard for helping them and sees him as their rescuer/savior. I also thought it was funny that Laris jokes about Number One being “our little assassin”, given what she and Zhaban used to do for a living with the Tal Shiar. 

It is also interesting to note that Laris doesn’t have ridges on her forehead but we do see a slight bit of ridges on Zhaban, making this the first time we see both types of Romulans on screen together. Usually, it’s either one or the other. But it’s nice to see finally some variety even within one species.

Zhaban comments that Laris heard Picard talking in his sleep, Laris notes that he’s not sleeping and wonders if it’s bad dreams, which leads Picard to comment that his dreams are lovely but it’s the waking up that he’s beginning to resent, connecting back to the moment at the beginning of the episode with Data where he says he doesn’t want the game to end. His dreams are happier than his present.

So it seems that Picard has to get ready for an interview, and as he enters, Zhaban says that Number One still won’t take breakfast from him with Picard joking “old dogs”, to which Zhaban replies “which one?” 

The relationship between Laris, Zhaban, and Picard is very well established even in these early scenes. There is an unspoken bond, camaraderie, and care. Even if Picard says sometimes Zhaban treats him as if he was “a benign old codger”. They act like a family, a family that’s found each other since Picard no longer has his old Enterprise crew family anymore. Also Picard is drinking decaf Earl Grey tea.

Now as all three of them are talking though, the news report plays on in the background. I couldn’t make out all the words because of the dialogue on top of it, but it looks like something about disturbances continue across the Alpha and Beta Quadrant due to the commemoration of the destruction of Romulus, so there seems to be some unrest still even to this day about what’s happened. And there is also something about a new Romulan capital, and maybe some three state council or something like it that declared it an interplanetary day of mourning for all citizens. I thought this interesting because we do not really know yet what the state of the rest of the galaxy is feeling about all of this, or how Romulan politics may have changed since then, so this news report is giving a tiny glimpse of the status of the galaxy. It’s good background world building, which is always a good thing, and sometimes Star Trek tends to falter at doing things like this beyond just details about Starfleet and its ships. It’s nice to get a look at the civilian part of life, which is the majority of the galaxy after all.

As the first of the visiting news crew arrives, Laris reminds Picard to not forget to wash his hands, and that ten years and she still has to remind him. She also jokingly calls him “your highness”, which I think it’s a funny nod to both the Romulan culture and also her being aware of herself being a “butler/housekeeper” for Picard as if this was a royalty sort of thing. The ten years mention though seems to point to Laris and Zhaban having stayed with Picard from at least 2389 to current day 2399.

Among the news crew doing set ups is a Tellarite, the first we see on screen in the 24th century outside of just archival footage. There is also a Trill among them as well. It also looks like there is some screen projection thing that does make up touch-ups? Oh man I would love to use one of those instead of having to put on real make-up. I really hate make-up, well, I should clarify that my skin hates make-up, SO MUCH. Someone please invent these screen projection make up things! I need it!

Picard is all dressed up and insisting that he’s not nervous, and asks Zhaban if he went over the terms with the news people and Zhaban says “three times, sir” that they wouldn’t inquire about his separation from Starfleet. Laris says that she thinks sometime he’s forgotten who he is and what he did but they haven’t, and Zhaban reminds him to “be the captain they remember.” These two clearly care about Picard a lot, genuinely. And it’s a really lovely moment as they send him off to this interview. 

It’s kinda of fun to see the intro to his interview is showing off a bunch of TNG promo photos and episode screencaps. I always find this funny because I’m like, wait, there were no cameras there in those moments, how did they get those pictures! 

So we learn in this scene that Picard has never agreed to an interview before until now, and that he’s been writing books on various historical analysis, and that he’s very passionate about working on raising awareness of the lingering impacts of the supernova. It’s clear from the beginning of this scene that the interviewer is looking for something else, that all this stuff they agreed to talk about is not what she actually wants to hear, she very deliberately steers the conversation to things about the Mars attack and why Picard left Starfleet.

Through her, we also start to see the view point of perhaps people who aren’t a part of Starfleet, the civilian side of the galaxy, which she noted that many felt there were better uses for their resources than aiding the Federation’s oldest enemy. And I have no doubt that there were people who did think that. This plays to exactly the sort of sentiment we saw in ENT, when after the Xindi attack, humanity shrank back and started to be xenophobic towards all alien life, not just Xindi. Terra Prime and that whole “Earth First” mentality are all playing again with what we see from this interviewer and her implications. She deliberately pokes at Picard calling for the massive relocation of Romulans. She points to Romulans as an enemy, and she points to the mass number of 900 million Romulan citizens they had to relocate, and how 10,000 warp-capable ferries had to be constructed for the rescue fleet. All of this is clearly a roundabout way of saying that it was a waste of resources, that those resources shouldn’t have been used, and the implication that if they hadn’t build the rescue fleet, then maybe Mars wouldn’t have been targeted and thousands of people wouldn’t have died.

Now, I’ve seen many bad faith takes saying “oh they are making the Federation behave like Nazis!!” or “they are making the Federation into xenophobic racists!!!!” but all of that is disingenuous and ignores what the story actually says. Picard was able to persuade the Federation to help the Romulans, and we know clearly that Spock was also working on the matter to help. The Federation intended to help but only stopped after the rescue fleet was destroyed and thousands upon thousands of people died. There is a HUGE DIFFERENCE between outright refusing to aid and stopping aid after you’re attacked and your rescue fleet got destroyed. There is a HUGE DIFFERENCE between maliciously deciding you don’t want to help someone and just watch them drown, and trying to help but you got injured and you are tired and you gave up.

Of course we all want the Federation to keep going and never give up. Of course we want the Federation to always stand up to its ideals of hope and justice. But giving up when you’re hurt is not the same as outright xenophobia, and it certainly doesn’t make you a Nazi. We KNOW from previous Trek shows AND films that the Federation isn’t perfect, that sometimes the Federation makes mistakes, and even has a hard time letting go of grudges and prejudices. I’ve said it many times before, utopias are pretty to look like but they don’t just magically grow out of a vacuum, a perfect world needs work. The moment you become complacent and you don’t put in the effort, a utopia can easily fail. Hell, in this very moment, we are seeing exactly how democracy CAN fail if we don’t work hard to maintain it. And I get it, some people are mad about political allegories, some people are mad that the perfect utopia of escapism isn’t happening. But Star Trek has always held up a mirror to our own world, it has always pointed out our own failings and how we can be better. And THIS is no different. The Federation gave up and shrunk from its duties, yes. They gave into grief, pain, and fear. But it does not mean they are evil. It is telling us that very same thing. We are not evil if we give into fear, but we can also be better, and do better. The world isn’t just magically built, democracy didn’t just happen one day out of the blue, we worked at it, even if it’s sometimes one step forward and two steps back. 

Anyways, as we go on with this interview, there’s the bit where the interviewer says it’s only “Romulan lives” at stake and Picard counters her with “No. Lives.” Picard’s very powerful statement that we are all lives, doesn’t matter Romulan or not, is something that is necessary to say not just in the context of the plot, but also in the context of our current society. Right now in this very world we live in, people of color, people from minority groups, are all being dehumanized and otherized, and a populace is basically being fed propaganda hating on people not like them, dismissing people not like them, and somehow forgetting that we are all living breathing beings. So what if our skin pigmentation are different? So what if we speak different languages or have different cultures or beliefs or love different people? We are all still breathing, still living. And this continued otherization has only caused more harm to not only the groups being oppressed, but also to all of us as a species. And yes, I know some people don’t want to hear it, they don’t want “leftist politics” in their Star Trek, but this message has been the same message that Star Trek has been sending out for over half a century. You understood it as kids, you took all that in, so where along the way in your growth did you forget that message?

As Picard stated, lives were at stake and the Federation and Starfleet understood that, they had all those ships out there in the shipyards because they had every intention to help. And if not for the attack on Mars, it would have happened. If 92,143 lives weren’t lost, and 10,000 warp capable ferries weren’t gone, they would have been ready to help. Instead the galaxy mourned, and Starfleet and the Federation withdrew because they too were licking their wounds. 

The interviewer compared this logistical feat to the Pyramids, which Picard calls vanity. He points out Dunkirk, the rescue of 400,000 troops on the beaches done through calling in civilian boats. And it’s a more than apt comparison. 

We learn that the planetary defense shields were dropped, and Mars’ defense net was hacked, all of this indicates that I think something more than just the synths themselves were involved. Picard says they still don’t know why the synths went rogue. So I think that the synths were nothing more than someone’s means to an end. Either someone in the Federation wanted a reason for the Federation to pull back from helping Romulus, or Romulans from the Tal Shiar wanted to prevent the Federation from helping because they didn’t want to be indebted to Starfleet and the Federation. Whatever it is, it’s covert, and the synths were just the scapegoats for the attack. 

And as if the 9/11 analogy isn’t more complete, we know the Mars attack was the reason that synthetic life-forms are now banned. And just to give it some sort of scale that we can understand, it is said that 2,977 victims died from 9/11, the attack on Mars had casualties at least 30 times that of 9/11. Not to mention the shipyard and all the vessels. It would have shaken the Federation, and especially those on Earth, to their core. The fact that the interviewer points out that Mars is still on fire to this day is another thing to note of the effect that is still lingering, much like how 9/11 still is a collective trauma for those who lived through it, even to this day.

Now we see the interview becoming more and more heated, in many ways, the interviewer bringing up Data and asking if Picard lost faith in him, to which Picard says “never”. And we also know that Picard thinks that banning synthetic life-forms was a mistake. The interviewer finally gets to what she clearly wants to ask, why he left Starfleet and what was it that he lost faith in. And Picard answers that he left because “it was no longer Starfleet”, he angrily states that Starfleet had slunk from its duties, and that the decision to call off the rescue was not just dishonorable because they had sworn to help, but also downright criminal, and he wasn’t going to be a spectator about it. 

Now, there is something interesting in this moment that I don’t see mentioned much, and it’s that you see Zhaban and Laris watching the interview, and they hold hands. This is clearly something that hurts them too. You can see the emotions on their faces. And while this interview is focused on Picard, we should not forget that this matters to them too. This was Laris and Zhaban’s home that was destroyed, probably people they knew too that died, their families and friends. They are watching an interview that is not just disparaging their race but also discounting the meaning of their lives. And this moment will speak to anyone who has been part of any oppressed groups seeing themselves dehumanized by their lives being an “other”. Picard is standing up not just for Romulans or synthetics, but he is also standing up directly for the two of them, two refugees who have lost everything except each other. It’s a small moment, but it really meant a lot to me watching it, because I understood those feelings. And it made me connect to Laris and Zhaban so much more as characters.

Picard at this point is ready to tear into the interviewer, stating that she has no idea what Dunkirk is, because she’s a stranger to history and stranger to war. And how it isn’t easy for those who died and those who were left behind. Now this moment is very powerful, and clearly the meaning of this scene is meant to be also calling us as viewers to realize how much of our own history that we are a stranger to, and how forgetting that history is the reason we get into the sort of messes that we have today. And I am sure that the writers and director didn’t intend for this to be viewed as anything other than Picard giving all of us a lesson. However, as is with the case of the Xahean boyfriend who died, it is noticeable that it is a white man lecturing a black woman about history. Of course, in universe this isn’t an issue, and as with the issue from before, this is no doubt them wanting to cast actors of color in as many roles as possible, and this is a big scene to have with Picard so of course they cast a brilliant actress for it. But nonetheless it is something noticed, and I think if people make a criticism of that, I would understand, even if I understand also that this is clearly not the intention of the writers or the director.

By the way, the interviewer’s name is credited as Richter, which is a german word meaning “judge”, though I was reminded of the richter scale for earthquakes, and giving she looked to be causing her own little earthquakes during this interview, and being a judge in many ways, both meanings are appropriate.

Finally, Picard walks away from the interview, and this interview is going down, we see Dahj walking in the rain, seeing Picard on the screens nearby doing the interview and recognizing him. 

There is also a sign in that scene that says “behold the future, preview next year’s padd tech today” so I guess even in the future, we still get new tech updates like those Apple iPhone conferences and whatnot.

We get a “commercial break” and we’re back at the Chateau. Picard is sitting with Number One quoting "there is no legacy as rich as honesty” from Shakespeare's All’s Well That Ends Well. Number One barks at Dahj approaching, runs over, but seems okay with her. Picard wants to know what she’s doing here and Dahj says she saw his interview and wants to know if he knows her. He does a “what????” expression that kind of made me chuckle because I can just see the question marks in his head. He’s just so confused.

Now there is an interesting thing to note here, Dahj immediately comments “you’re not sure, how do I know that?”, as if she is reading his mind somehow. So could this mean she has some sort of mind reading abilities too? Or is it just that she can read people really well?

Dahj describes all the things that’s happened, saying that her abilities came to her like “lightning seeking the ground” and she’s clearly very upset. Picard, who has every reason to turn away someone who could be rather alarming, instead takes her hands and tries to calm her down. I’ll expand on this later in another scene, but the kindness that he immediately has towards Dahj’s situation is just such a good thing. Compassion is something so lacking right now in the world, and having him being kind to her and not push her away even though he doesn’t know her, is so important. And when Dahj says “everything inside of me says that I’m safe with you”, we the audience certainly believes that.

We cut to Laris healing up Dahj’s cut, and Zhaban puts a blanket on her. Again, showing how kind these two people are, and the caring and kindness that surrounds Picard. No wonder Dahj feels safe. Picard gives her Earl Grey tea and says it “never fails”. The whole scene that follows is just a really sweet and lovely scene of two people connecting. Picard never treating her as if she isn’t to be believed. She asks him if he’s been a stranger to himself, and he answers “many, many times”, which we have seen throughout TNG. If anyone knows how Dahj is feeling, it is Picard. And I love that he connects with her, never dismissing her feelings.

Picard also comments on Dahj’s necklace, saying it was unusual. Dahj said that her father gave it to her. Now some have wondered why it would be an unusual necklace as it doesn’t look unusual, but I don’t know, I guess it looked kinda strange to me. Or maybe Picard recognized the symbol from somewhere and thought it was strange. Dahj says she doesn’t just know Picard because he’s famous, but she knows him from something older and deeper, and Picard says she may be right, clearly feeling like maybe he does know her from somewhere. He again reiterates that he believes her, joking that if she were dangerous, Number One would let him know.

Laris takes Dahj to her room, and she thanks Picard before she goes, clearly very grateful for someone believing in her. Dahj does leave the necklace behind on the table, which Picard looks at.

Next day, he opens up the window and nobody is working. I realized at this point immediately it must be another dream sequence and sure enough Data is in the fields painting. Both him and Picard are in their TNG era uniforms, and Data asks if Picard wants to finish the painting which has no face and is a hooded figure standing overlooking an ocean. Picard says he doesn’t know how, but Data says that’s not true. The moment Picard takes the brush, he’s awoken by the clock, and he immediately turns around to look at the painting behind him hanging up on the wall, which is almost exactly the painting from the dream, only the head is turned away. Obviously his dreams are a way for him to work out things he’s busy thinking about when he’s awake. God if only my dreams work out life’s problems for me. It would be so useful!

Laris comes in to say that Dahj is gone. Now this scene is logistically a little bit oddly placed. I don’t know when Picard wakes up from his dream, but it doesn’t look like 5am. And Laris comes in rather calmly to tell Picard that Dahj is gone, so did Laris just get up at 5am, saw Dahj gone, and went about her day until Picard woke up? Now Picard could have woken up just minutes before too. They just didn’t exactly make it explicitly clear. She did note that Dahj’s door was open, Number One was on her bed but she was gone, and they checked the feeds and she’s not on the property.

Picard, who now has an idea of what to look for, says he has to go but for them to contact him if Dahj returns.

We then change locations to Starfleet Archives, which uses the same museum symbol that the Star Trek Tour folks have. So that’s a nice little touch, nodding to the fans. It’s really sweet. Star Trek Tour is canon now! :D

Now at this moment when we see Picard approaching the archives, the Jerry Goldsmith theme from the Motion Picture plays a little in the background. Again, a beautiful addition from Jeff Russo knowing exactly where to add in the music to make everything feel perfect.

Picard is with a program called Index, who seems to keep an eye on the quantum archive. Picard wants to be sure that his archive is locked in stasis and no one has access, Index makes a joke about selling tickets with Picard noting the humor and saying “don’t give up your day job”. I love funny snarky holograms. 

We then see Picard going into his archive and this is certainly a room full of easter eggs, so I’ll just note the items I saw and double checked with Memory Alpha to make sure I had the correct names:

USS Stargazer model

USS Enterprise D and E models

Captain’s yacht from Enterprise E model

Kurlan naiskos – ceramic figurine statue made by Kurlan civilization – gift from former mentor Richard Galen?

TNG era Bat’leth and D’k tahg

Captain Picard Day banner

Picard’s edition of The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare: The Complete Works, usually seen in his ready room/quarters – book is opened to first two pages of Act III of All’s Well That Ends Well – quote from earlier

It was noted from the Ready Room aftershow with Hanelle Culpepper and Michael Chabon (the showrunner), that the Captain Picard Day banner is an interesting way to tell the story of Picard’s change. He used to not like that day at all, and now he keeps that memento as if to remind himself that he maybe should have had more of those moments, showing a bit of his regret.

We get some updated LCARS, which the Picard production crew did give a shoutout to Mike Okuda on twitter. It’s always great to see these original designs get a little update with the times. It’s got more muted colors, which I quite like. And also, the object that covers the painting and retracts back is similar to the mechanical hood device that they used in the Ask Not Short Trek that Pike wore.

Index notes that this painting, which we see has Dahj’s face, is item 227.67, painted by Data in 2369, one of a set of two, gifted to Picard on the Enterprise, and the other is hanging on the wall at the Chateau. And the title of the painting is called Daughter. This confirming that Dahj somehow is Data’s daughter, which makes sense given her resemblance to Lal.

Picard asks Index to be sure that no one has been in the archive, not even for servicing. This means that no one else could have known Dahj’s face unless they were someone who actually knew Data or somehow had access to Data.

Back in France, Dahj seems to be hiding in an alleyway. She contacts her mom who tells her to get somewhere safe. Dahj notes that she did tried but she couldn’t stay because she didn’t want to put anyone else in danger. Her mom says she has to go back to Picard, Dahj frowns because her mom couldn’t have known. We see the image of the Mom glitching somehow? At this moment we don’t know if she’s a hologram or a memory or maybe a person who is being used or coerced? Her mom insists for her to find Picard and that he can and will help her. I can’t be sure if the mom is good or not, but her insisting that she goes to Picard does seem like she wants Dahj to be safe. So maybe the mom is also Dahj’s own defense mechanism? A program that makes sure she stays on course and doesn’t stray? The mom tells Dahj to close her eyes and focus, as if giving her directions on what to do. Next we see that the transmission has terminated and Dahj pulls up new information to find Picard’s location.

We also note that in her call list of favorites, there’s Soji’s name too, which connects to the later scene we see.

Back at the Starfleet Archives again, Picard sees Dahj and is clearly relieved that she’s okay. Dahj points out that she knew how to track him here, “I know stuff now, I can hear conversations a block away.” She then tries to insist that she did research and that she must have schizophrenia or something. Picard says she doesn’t have that and tries to assure her that she isn’t a freak, and instead that she may be very special. He starts telling her about Data, and you can hear the emotions in his voice about what Data meant. Dahj doesn’t know why Picard is telling her that and Picard gently tries to let Dahj know that she may be like Data and that the attack may have acted like a positronic alarm bell. But Dahj doesn’t react well to that, comparing synthetics to the ones who attacked Mars, even at one point calling synths “soulless murder machines”. We can see from Dahj’s comments that resent and fear still exists in the Federation towards android/synthetic life-forms, which from what we know, the attack was only about 10 years ago, so it would still be rather fresh on everyone’s minds.

Picard tells Dahj that Data painted her over 30 years ago, she still tries to resist, stating that she’s from Seattle and that her dad was a xenobotanist who spliced two genuses and named the offspring after her. Dahj clearly feels like she’s losing her sense of self if she is not real, but Picard tells her that her beautiful memories are hers and that no one can touch it or take it away. Picard’s insistent kindness and compassion are just SO VERY IMPORTANT. It is not always in entertainment media that we get these unabashedly kind characters, especially with male characters. And sometimes I think Star Trek is the only kind of show where truly kind and loving male characters are allowed to thrive because that’s the world we expect it to be. But even so, having characters like Picard, an older white male in a place of authority, still being so kind and caring and willing to help people instead of judging them, is important. Because this allows younger generations watching this to have someone good to be their role model, to teach and instill in them that kindness is what you need to have more of in this world. I am especially thankful that new Trek has been able to bring forth these kinds of kind characters, and especially white male characters. We see it with Picard, and we saw it with Christopher Pike in Discovery season 2. Both of these characters’ kindness is what allows others to not only feel safe, but allow people a place to grow and learn, and to have people standing in their corner even when they feel alone. That sense of safety and love, like having a safety blanket over you, is so essential to characters that are eschewing the toxic masculinity that is often very prevalent in entertainment media these days. In many ways, Star Trek, through Picard and Pike, are pointedly stating that men, especially white men, being kind and understanding, is not something to be belittled or dismissed, but rather important things because kindness is its own super power, and it’s with that kindness and love that they can stand up to institutions’ whose ideals have gone astray. Picard standing up to Starfleet is really no different than the scene of Pike calling out Starfleet’s use of drones and stating that “giving up our values in the name of security is to lose the battle in advance.” 

Principled and kind lead white male characters are what we need more of these days. 

Picard insists to Dahj that she was “lovingly and deliberately created” and that “You are dear to me in ways that you can’t understand, I will never leave you.” And adding that they will go to Okinawa to the Daystrom Institute and get this all figured out. He brightens up when Dahj mentions her having been accepted into the institute, happy for her even if Dahj is no longer happy anymore after all that’s happened. Picard reminds her “You are the daughter of a man who was all meaning, all courage, be like him”

This whole thing of him talking about Data to Dahj is just really emotional, you can see how much he wants to protect her, and how he genuinely means it that he will not leave her. And you can sense the guilt that still clings to him about Data dying for him.

Of course, nice moment again gets interrupted by Romulan assassins, because Romulans just love to ruin your nice moments. Dahj notices someone coming after them and runs with Picard, who can’t really keep up with her. They get to the roof and the assassins start shooting. Dahj tells Picard to stay down and gets on with some serious ass kicking. Again, as I said earlier, this whole fight scene is just so well done. The action is steady that you know exactly what is happening at all time and what she is doing and who she is fighting. You’re not lost, it’s not shaky and blurry. 

One of the assassins gets his helmet taken off and as he falls down the stairs, Picard notices that they are Romulan. Another assassin gets knocked over a railing but seems to beam away. Dahj is about to shoot another one when this assassin bites down on a capsule and spews out some kind of liquid acid which gets on the gun and on Dahj’s face and her clothing. She and Picard exchanged a horrified look, she screams and Picard tries to reach for her as the energy gun blows up and Picard is knocked back and blacks out.

Now this moment was certainly a surprise. Through all the marketing, they kept talking about Dahj being the mysterious girl, they never mentioned someone else, so we just always thought it was one character. And I remember looking at the trailers and thinking, did Dahj get out of the cube and run to Picard and then gets taken back to the cube somehow and Picard has to go get her again? But it looks like they were just hiding the surprise of the twins in plain sight and we just didn’t have the information to realize it until now. Dahj’s death is certainly very tragic. Though I don’t know you could call it fridging a female character given that she was always meant to be a catalyst role so they could get to saving her sister? I’m not sure, simply because the story is set up in this way and I’m not sure it would work as well if they told it another way simply just to avoid character death. But perhaps someone would disagree.

But we get back to the Chateau where Picard wakes up after having numerous flashes of previous scenes that’s happened. We see Laris and Zhaban worriedly leaning over him as he’s laid up on the couch. He’s got a bad knock but other than that he’s okay. Picard reveals that Dahj is dead and Zhaban and Laris are surprised because the police didn’t mention her. They only said that Picard was alone when they found him on the roof. There was no one else on the security but him running. Zhaban suggests Dahj could have had a cloaking device and that’s why she wasn’t seen on their property feed either, and Picard thinks it may have activated automatically. So this explains why Dahj couldn’t be seen. But this doesn’t necessarily explain why even the Romulan assassins weren’t seen either or why the police said he was found alone. Which means that between the time the police found him, someone, possibly Romulans, could have wiped all the traces of what happened, and maybe even administered some healing stuff on Picard. OR as some have suggested, it could be that the Federation police could be involved in it, maybe it is some massive cover up. Maybe the Federation is infiltrated somehow by Romulan agents. This certainly wouldn’t be unusual tactics for the Tal Shiar, and we know even back in Discovery, the Klingons made one of them look like a human just so he could be a sleeper agent. So there’s no reason to not think that Romulans couldn’t do the same. 

Picard tells Zhaban and Laris that Dahj was a synthetic and that the assassins were Romulans, which surprises both of them, given that they are Romulans, can’t be easy to hear their people are up to something shady. Of course Laris and Zhaban wants him to rest and that he’s done a lot for everyone. But Picard delivers a really powerful and brilliant line that really explains a lot of things.

He says: “Sitting here, after all these years, nursing my offended dignity, writing books of history people prefer to forget, I never asked anything of myself at all. I haven’t been living, I’ve been waiting to die.”

If you look back to the interview when the interviewer asks him why he left Starfleet, that he left in protest, and how angry he got. I think Picard left Starfleet to try to force their hand to help, essentially doing a last desperate bid of if you want me then you better go help these people. And Starfleet basically called his bluff and let him go. That is the “offended dignity” that he’s been nursing. That he tried to do something, using his reputation and importance, and Starfleet basically said, yeah okay, you can go then. I think, more than just Starfleet and the Federation deciding to withdraw, he felt a personal betrayal. The organization that he had given everything to didn’t even bother to fight for its ideals or fight to hold onto him, they gave up on their ideals and they gave up on him, so therefore, he lost faith in them as well. And all this time he’s been wallowing in anger, guilt, and essentially being the spectator that he said he didn’t want to be. He’s been wallowing in self pity, and in that moment, he’s realized that’s not what he wants to do, he’s not going to just slink away from his duties like Starfleet did, he’s now going to do something about it.

We then go to a new location, finally the Daystrom Institute on screen for the first time, in Okinawa. There is this little orbital station in the sky, it looked like one of those stations from The Girl Who Made The Stars Short Trek that young Michael and her dad were on.

Picard meets up with Dr. Agnes Jurati, and asks if it’s possible to make a sentient android out of flesh and blood, she laughs. I find her to be very adorable, a quirky scientist type but not entirely socially awkward, so it’s not the full on nerd girl trope. Once she realizes that he’s serious, she tells him that “even before the ban, a flesh and blood android was in our sights, but a sentient one, not for a thousand years”. She also notes that a sentient synthetic inside and out was the grand slam they were hoping for.

She leads Picard into the Federation’s Division of Advanced Synthetic Research – now a ghost town - because the Androids that attacked Mars came from this very lab - so now they can only operate theoretically – study, publish, run simulations, but they can’t make anything because it would be a violation of galactic treaty.

Jurati shows the drawer containing B-4 to Picard, says he was an inferior copy of Data, but noting that Data tried to download the contents of his neural net into B-4 before his death, almost all of it was lost. Note that she said ALMOST all of it. Which means that they did have some pieces of Data to create things from him. She also brings up Bruce Maddox, whom we saw in the TNG episode “The Measure of a Man”, and despite him trying to get Data to be declared property, we know that he and Data did keep in contact afterwards. Jurati says that Maddox recruited her out of Starfleet, and apparently they came close to create other synths like Data before Data died, and then when they got shut down, it crushed Maddox and he disappeared after the ban.

Now, I suspect that someone may have taken Maddox, and maybe used him to somehow get the synths to go rogue and attack Mars. Maybe even got him to somehow bring down the defense nets. And maybe Maddox could have even created Dahj and her sister Soji for whoever is controlling him as well? Agnes does say that if they had Data’s neural net, then making a flesh and blood body is relative simple, but Picard says Data’s neurons died with him, and thus Jurati says that’s why she kept telling Picard it wasn’t possible to create any other synths. Picard then shows Jurati the necklace from Dahj, and Jurati recognizes that the symbol is for fractal neuronic cloning, an idea of Maddox’s where the theory was that Data’s entire code, even his memories, could be reconstituted from a single positronic neuron. 

So given that Jurati said they almost lost all of Data, I assume Maddox took that bit of Data they still had from B-4 and somehow got his theory to work to make Dahj and her sister, modeled from Data’s painting. 

Picard learns that the cloning would be created in pairs, twins, realizing that there is another one. And showing us who were surprised at Dahj’s death that the rest of the season must be with the sister instead.

I’m still not entirely sure if Jurati knows something more about what’s going or not. I also don’t know if maybe she helped Maddox create the twins? It’s possible but maybe she is also just a good person and I’m being way too suspicious. But who knows. Anything is possible. TV is making it hard for me to trust people.

Then we get this beautiful transition shot from Dahj’s necklace symbol to a similar shaped rings of light in space as a new looking Romulan warbird flies through space and reaches the Romulan Reclamation Site.

We get the first shot of Narek walking through some smoke with purpose as the Romulan theme from TOS episode “Balance of Terror” plays on in the background like the Imperial March every time with Darth Vader. I LOVE this newly updated rendition. Honestly, someone please give Jeff Russo some awards because his music in this episode is just SO SPOT ON!

Narek is clearly the president of the Romulan division of the Emo Spock Fashion Fan Club? I’m just waiting for him to actually be Spock’s secret son with some Romulan, I mean, we know Spock was on Romulus for a time. And Narek sound close to Sarek. (I’m secretly hoping for this because it would just be hilarious to me!)

He meets with Doctor Soji Asha, Dahj’s twin. I noted that Dahj sounds like an Indian name perhaps? And Soji is a Japanese name. Which seem to be appropriate given that actress Isa Briones is also Asian, being part Filipino, and having spoken about Asian representation in entertainment. 

Narek comments on her necklace, which Soji says her father made it, one for her and one for her sister. There was some confusion as to if only Soji knew about her having a sister, but as the earlier call list from Dahj shows, she knew about Soji too. They clearly just held it back from showing it for this reveal. Narek says he had a brother and they were really close but that he lost him last year very unexpectedly. I have a feeling we will get to see what went on with that, or maybe we even know who his brother may be? I originally thought it was Elnor, but I don’t think it works with what we know about both characters, as Elnor was said to have been raised by female warrior monks? So the “last year” comment wouldn’t work for timeline purposes. So the brother is likely someone else who died in 2398, again I don’t know this may be a character we know from any other of the older Trek shows.

He’s clearly trying to flirt with her and get close to her. He also notes that she spends her day fixing “broken people”, so is she fixing Borg survivors or androids or maybe both? We do see in the this season promo of her with Hugh somehow, and other people who look like they got implants, so are the Romulans kidnapping Borg survivors and trying to use them to make androids or something?

Anyways, Narek seem to succeed in ingratiating himself to Soji, looking like they’ll be spending some time together. And the camera then pulls back to reveal the site is in a Borg cube. Meanwhile, that beautiful Romulan theme comes back and plays til the end of the episode.

There’s a “this season on” promo that I’ll probably talk about maybe in a separate post. But YAY we have reached the end of this LONG analysis. If you’ve managed to get through all of it. I commend you and thank you for reading my ramblings.

This episode was a really solid start, setting up great characters and mystery, and reminding us why we love Jean-Luc Picard.

I can’t wait to see where the story will take us next and meet the rest of the cast!!!!!!!!

#star trek picard #star trek picard spoilers #in depth analysis

[thelightningawardsofficial]

Review | K A T H A R O S

Judged by Shawn (Snowwhitewolf09)

Category: I'm Not A Mary Sue

[ Author: ArimaMary ]

>Title (5/5): I'm a sucker for Greek and Latin words, and Katharos is a word I find to be on the beautiful side of the Greek language. The title itself gives much of the work immediately, the chosen word obviously being a reference to Kiyoshi's emphasis on purity. Ergo, readers know what to expect the story to revolve around. However, I like the charm that it has to it, a lingering sense of mystique that persists.

>Summary (7/10): It's short and sweet, and manages to summarise what Katharos is. I am just docking a few points because I feel that you could have added a bit more to give a better picture of the story and hook readers. I also wouldn't really call Kiyoshi an 'average student' of Teikoku, since he seems to be more of an outcast if he gets flack for being a "foreigner".

>Plot (22/25) -> [17.6/20]: The overall plot is straightforward, and there aren't any twists and turns that make it complex. It might not be an intriguing stand-alone story, but since the book is a spin-off that is supposed to highlight the character and philosophy of Kiyoshi, I'm lenient regarding that matter.

I like how each chapter shows an important part of Kiyoshi's personality. They are well-picked, highlighting different facets each time, and adding a little bit more background on why Kiyoshi thinks like this or acts like that. I didn't feel a 'filler chapter' and that gives you quite a boon. The pacing was also adjusted enough to show the perspectives, though perhaps it leans a bit to the slower side.

The way I see it, though it is in third person, the narrator is attuned with Kiyoshi, appropriately moving slowly where Kiyoshi would be slow himself, like the almost-drooling-over-Kidou scene. Sometimes, it would feel a bit dragging, but that doesn't affect it too much, since it is covered with splendid character portrayal.

I didn't give you full points because the plot didn't make me crave to know what would come next (Partially because of the speed, and partially because there wasn't really much action to be looking out for), and it feels a tad lacking in events due to brevity and (I assume) the focus.

Regardless, the plot itself managed to bring out Kiyoshi's character with events, dialogue, and the pacing, so kudos to you.

>Characterization (18/20) -> [13.5/15]: I've little to say other than you've done great with Kiyoshi. After going through some of the chapters, his actions seemed to become easy to understand, since his character had been shown well. I enjoyed seeing his convictions and his vulnerabilities, as well as his view on 'purity'.

If purity is staying true to oneself, I find Kiyoshi to be creating many exceptions: he is merely staying true to what he feels at the moment, believing that it is his true self. He says rather early that he needs nobody else, reinforcing what he felt at the time. Later on, he shows that he actually is rather lonely, and convinces himself to mend his relationship with Keima. It's an interesting, yet utterly desperate (fitting of his character), way to view purity.

I do have a problem with how he saw Teikoku as his Paradise, as the earlier outburst gave me the vibes that he was not exactly fine with his place in school. Considering his vulnerable side that is shown later on, such irritability rubs me off as the result of having a negative view of the people in his school. Perhaps he frequently convinces himself that Teikoku is Paradise (which is why he also had his view of Teikoku changed into some sort of place of dark deals). Maybe it just strikes me as odd.

Keima is also well-done, but I honestly feel like he just seems a bit lacklustre before he talks with Kiyoshi about mending their relationship. That said, I look forward to seeing a bit more of him.

Grammar and Writing Style (13/15): While I did spot a few sentences that were oddly constructed (either run-ons or have pronouns that seemed to be ambiguous) and 'Hachidan' alternated with 'Hachi-dan', that is not what I want to mainly discuss.

The way you unfurled Kiyoshi's character was made effective by the well-written descriptions and the use of figurative language/symbolism. Of course, the most prominent would be the mention of the Garden of Eden, as it was what summed up Kiyoshi's motivations.

I also appreciated the use of 'Kin' as a human face for weakness and past mistakes, as though I am not sure who this Kin is, Kin has come to personify concepts that Keima and Kiyoshi find negative. I also particularly liked how his box of dreams was a literal cardboard box that had his hopes and dreams contained within—now that he was dead-set on following them again, they did not need to be boxed up and kept to the side anymore, but brandished. The hissatsu of Keima comes to me as a sort of representation of his reformation—Cortana was the blade that had its tip cut off, similar to how the once forceful Keima was trying to cut off his 'edge'—and makes me think of how much he contrasts with Sir Tristan of the Round Table (Tristan being the sorrowful Knight). He also had the Tristian-Igraine relationship with Kiyoshi back then, as Tristian married another person named Igraine, but always compared her to his first love.

It was a little hard to catch, but I saw a subtle "light at the end of the tunnel" derivation which made me read again just to make sure. As Kiyoshi was doubting whether or not he would actually be able to reach his dream through these dirty methods, walking through uncertainty, he drew nearer to the end. That was where he would face his dream. The scene was a transition from doubt to hope.

There's also this little bit that gives me a better view of Kiyoshi and Keima's relationship. I didn't get it at first, but I then realised it after studying up the names. Kiyoshi was the dragon to Keima's knight back then, reflected in their names Ryuugamine and Keima. Kiyoshi was the one who challenged Keima's moral code.

The mention of a red oni brought into my mind the 'red oni, blue oni' trope. The red oni is a symbol of passion and desire, or simply emotions. The red oni within Kiyoshi was being quenched, the void of loneliness being filled with the forgotten feeling of having someone to complete you.

I had to dock points for the little mistakes and some portions with descriptions that seemed to be a tad long, but those are just minor problems.

>Originality (9/10) -> [4.5/5]: Okay, I docked a point for the Teikoku Spy trope, and the lack of much things that are 'shockingly original'.

However, I will say that Kiyoshi himself is someone I find to be original in some ways amongst IE fanfiction characters. His desperate view of purity is something I haven't really encountered, and I find his foreign blood to be uncommon (Though Suabara also has foreign blood). I also liked how Kiyoshi was learning Killer Slide, a hissatsu that doesn't get much love, as it usually is seen as a show of brutality.

Also... Kiyoshi's later motivation for being a spy is refreshing to see. It was first much like desperation, but later on hope and optimism. Guess Keima did rub off on him.

>Feels Factor (14/15): I have to say, you made me feel much for Kiyoshi. He reminds me much of a friend of mine, and I sometimes I would be whelmed by Kiyoshi's shows of his desperation to cling to purity and what little bit of his dreams he has left. His mother was portrayed well enough for me to almost want to slap her across the face, while the contrasts made between Kiyoshi and Keima's backgrounds made it much more difficult to not feel anything for the blond.

I felt less for Keima, though it was to be a given since he was not the focus. Nonetheless, your words managed to make me connect with his doubts about how he treats others, though I feel like there could have been a bit more to him.

Seeing Kiyoshi come to terms with his dream and his interactions with Keima was a blessing. You averted one of the things that I find too often—a spy doing it because of some threat. You gave Kiyoshi a positive reason to become a spy, which is not to prevent damage to himself, but to finally reach his dreams that had been suppressed.

I had to dock a point because of Keima and how I wasn't particularly craving to know what would happen next, but that's minor.

🅞🅒 🅡🅔🅥🅘🅔🅦 -> [➊➍.➊/➊➎]

>Name(5/5): Ryuugamine means "dragon's peak", and is not too odd of a surname. The contrast with Keima's name gives it a little bit more substance, though the name itself isn't telling of too much. Additionally, I thought of the Seiryū, and how its connection to Wood fitted soundly with the elemental affinity of Killer Slide.

Kiyoshi's name reflects who he is, as well as the ideal that he strives to achieve. Ultimate purity, stainless, at all costs. Kiyoshi's name means "pure," and is fitting.

>Appearance (6/8): I get enough description from Kiyoshi to have a general idea of what he would look like in a crowd, but details of his physical appearance aren't as focused on as Kidou Yuuto's.

I like the little detail that he likely has some pimples on his face, as it makes him look more human in a world where practically every character looks like their face never needed cream nor shaving their entire life.

I had to dock points for the scarcity of description. Aside from the colour of his hair, the presence of red-rimmed glasses, and his pimples, there is little else. His physique nor skin colour isn't touched upon, even his eye colour isn't something I've found.

Furthermore, I cannot seem to get around him being called foreign-looking because of his blond hair, considering the fact that there are many who also have blond hair, and that green hair isn't anything odd.

>Personality(10/10): Kiyoshi's personality is definitely well-developed and well-shown. I've already touched most of this in the Characterisation, so it'll be redundant here. You've done a good job of showing how strongly he clings to his idea of purity. Especially that fixation on Kidou, that is almost unsettlingly detailed.

The development of Kiyoshi's character with Keima as the trigger was pleasing. Early on, he was against having friends, and came off as an individual who was fiercely independent. Just as he was back then, according to his talks with Keima. But talking with Keima showed that Kiyoshi still had the capacity to truly connect; it had only been boxed up and put to the side like his dreams.

>Strengths and Weaknesses(11/12): His vulnerabilities are well-exploited. His desperation made him lean to Kageyama, and his hesitation to act upon his passion was made apparent many times. You managed to show Kiyoshi's weaknesses and bloodily ripped them out for people to see.

His strengths don't really shine all that much, though they do show themselves. The most prominent is his dedication, especially to his own idea of purity and his dream. Kiyoshi's skills were mentioned or shown, though not particularly highlighted—he has great body coordination, notable skills with technology, and a commendable cooking ability. It's a bit hard to see, but Kiyoshi also has a sort of childish charm at times that slips through the cracks.

>Interaction With Canon (10/10): It doesn't wreck or affect canon all that much, and happens at a time when Teikoku likely would have sent spies to Kidokawa, so no problem here.

>Relationships With Canon Characters (5/5): It's mostly Kidou, and they share a relationship I see as something that wouldn't be off. Kidou maintains an attitude towards him that is like most Teikoku subordinates, while the crush that Kiyoshi has doesn't seem to far of a stretch considering his status and charm.

Kiyoshi's relationship with Kageyama isn't expanded much, but it can be seen that he has a pretty... typical relationship with the man. It is not odd, rather it is something that is reasonable given Kageyama's notorious reputation. Kiyoshi seems to see him as the blood-stained path that would lead him to his dream, the evil benefactor that offers him his deepest desire. He sees that Kageyama is shady, and Kiyoshi seems like he does not want to concern himself with the Coach anymore than he has to, but he is willing to put those aside for football.

[Raw] 74.6/100 + 47/50 [Scaled] 88.7/100 [Final] 88.7%

Banner by -artxyuki

#review #fifth critique #katharos #inazuma eleven #original characters #pre-canon #prequel #slice of life #introspection #friendship #ryuugamine kiyoshi #kirishima keima #short story #I'm not a mary sue

[camjkerman-blog]

Why

My existence is real. I’ve verified this numerous times with myself. I get hay fever in March and don't lose it until October, check. It hurts when I get hurt, check. So with that all in the clear, what the fridge is up with me. Why is there this churning feeling every time I walk to school, I exist, and have come to terms with what that entails, so why does it matter. Why. Just Why do I respond how I do. Why. Just Why do I put headphones on, hide away in the shadows. Why. Just Why do I stare blankly at the universe when volumes get too high. Why. Just Why enjoy the fact that I am one in a marginalised minority that doesn’t require looking any different. Why. Just Why do I make myself so obviously known to be part of it all. Why. Just Why.

Well. I have yet to answer most of these.

Since this is my first post on here, I had better introduce myself. My name is Cameron. I’m British. I’m 15 years old. I’m diagnosed with ASD. And. I’m a big fat homo. I’ve been on this earth for over a decade and a half yet I know barely anything. I’m one of the top performing students in my classes, but I still know nothing I need to. My individuality has been stripped from me and I get but a fraction of it back at the weekends, when, mercy be put upon me, O! The endless fruits of life, etc, I can wear my own clothes and need not worry about assignments, classes, grades, revision, and all that other stuff that leads to corruption of such the young and active mind. I do not care about my intellect, there’s enough there, some would probably say, too much. In the 2/7ths of my lifetime that I can actually live, I build essential skills, I build my dress sense. I build my social skills. But most importantly, I learn to fight against the wrongdoers in my life, no matter how minor a misdeed, I will come back with a vengeance, every wrong alters the right, wrong cannot be fought with right in this world, right is only rewarded by the actual wrongdoers. These poor, misguided people who live on autopilot, day in, day out, do wrong, not due to mal intent, but because of societal norms. Think about it: racisim- always minorities getting the flack, the majority is the norm, why would it be the other way around. Homophobia- a mis-translation in the bible is what started all of that off. But why should I forge my own path through this muddy forest of life. I’m not forging but a mere footpath. I’m crafting a highway.

Or, at least, I would be, if ASD didn’t come with the necessary micro-transaction that is anxiety.

In recent times, I have started to exercise a policy of snarkiness, when I am wronged by one, make my presence unbearable for all, perhaps bar 1, this simple crutch is carrying me, day by day, night by night, through life. Of course, I have people to be my crutch as well, I have my besties, and my amazing boyfriend. To them I give my endless thanks for being there for me, even if they weren’t, if you’re good to me a number of times, you’re good to me for life, I’m not as unforgiving as I made myself out to be. I simply have no middle ground and do not wish to have one in the slightest. Get in my good books, and you’ll stay there, get on my bad side, and you’ll never come around.

As I touched on, I’m a raging homosexual (gay, to all of the normal folk out there), I dress well, I care about how I’m seen (not necessarily to ensure I’m seen well, depends on if you’ve been good or bad to me), I’m out and proud. 

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

[feverhalo]

Anon prompt! I did Voltron:Legendary Defender for this.

Contains vomiting, minor anxiety descriptions, and cheesiness. Its set in the start of the Garrison time when Lance, Hunk, and Pidge all meet up. Using he/him for Pidge because thats what was used for them at the time in series. Im putting the readmore before the fic starts this time because it goes into the content pretty quickly. Its just shy of 1500 words (or just over after some editing)

“Thats it. If you throw up one more time we’re going to the hospital” Any pairing/person you can think of is all good with me, thank you so much in advance!

Hunk coughed harshly and spat into the sink. The lingering taste of sick was turning his stomach still, but he had promised himself he would be quick. Nobody needed to have their schedule thrown off because of him. He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, it had been a rough week. Garrison training really ramped up this semester.

He cupped a handful of cold water to rinse his mouth with before washing his face with haste. When he turned to leave, his newly assigned teammate was standing behind him, staring- or glaring? Whatever he was doing it was making Hunk’s palms sweat with anxiety.

“You okay?” That was it. Hunk waited a second, staring blankly. No berating came, no scoffing, no ‘if-you-can’t-take-the-training-leave’ spiel like he got from some of the others when he threw up during the pacer test.

“Uh, yeah. Sorry.” His voice stung and was thin and cracking from the abuse of being so violently sick just a few minutes ago. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

“Cool. Um, I’m Lance. It- we didn’t really get properly introduced.” He smiled at Hunk, a thousand kilowatt smile that made Hunk’s own face crack into a grin even though he still felt shaky.

“I’m Hunk.”

————-

“Simulation complete.” The pneumatic door locks hissed as they disengaged and Hunk pushed his way through as fast as he could manage. Today was even worse than the day before. They finished a hard obstacle course with him barely keeping his stomach in line- even a few of the other students had tapped out or thrown up on the sidelines from the strain of it. Then they ran simulations. Then more simulations. This was their introduction. No sit down, here is the manual these are your controls. Blindly being thrown into three different cockpit styles with different layouts and jostled around inside. Every mistake being berated by Commander Iverson, even though they all had never set foot in a cockpit before.

“At least he knows to hide his face after such a disgraceful display!” Hunk could hear the lecture on the peripheral of his attention. He was going to be sick, and right there in front of everyone if he wasn’t fast. That thought sent a jolt of panic through him, making the nausea spike. He left his new team there to take the flack all by themselves. Oh, god what kind of team member was he? He gagged into his hand. Times up. He pushed the lid off of one of the bins just around the corner- recycling or garbage who cared in a bin was better than on the floor.

The distant shouting faded out of his awareness entirely, his head was swimming and he felt like his skin was buzzing. A heady wave of heat rolled down his shoulders and ice cold sweat dripped down his face. He felt his shoulders roll forward before he was aware he was gagging into the bin. It was rather quiet, save for the harsh cough at the end that tore his throat. His stomach bubbled and he felt choked, he couldn’t breathe. Saliva pooled in his mouth and he choked on it trying to hold back. He tried to swallow again but it caught and he coughed harshly again, bringing up a bitter taste.

Somewhere off there was an explosion of sound, and he wanted to look but his eyes were stinging, his face ached with pressure from the unwilling exertion his body was taking. Loud, slapping footsteps crossed behind him and his face burned with humiliation. He couldn’t help it. He retched again, the spit and a small spurt of vomit mixing together and splattering on the cans below him. His body tingled with another wave of nausea crashing over him like an icy bucket of water.

He coughed up a huge wave of half digested breakfast and it didn’t seem to stop. He tried to breathe, really, he did. It hitched after he tried to inhale and he curled further forward as his stomach clenched so harshly it made his muscles scream. And again, barely a breath and he was sent forward with another gush of sickness. Something patted at his back, knocking the air back into him. He gasped, greedily sucking in as much as his lungs could hold before coughing. He swiped his wrist under his eyes carefully. They were streaming, his nose was running like a sieve and he could feel the tacky strings of mucus and vomit trailing from his mouth and nose.

“That’s it,” the smacks to his back turned into someone rubbing smooth circles as he shuddered in breath after breath, “You got it, now.”

His face burned, someone was there. This was not him wishing one of his moms was there, this was most definitely a real person. He tried to spit, but ended up coughing again and bringing up another string of sick. He could breathe, though, that’s what mattered. He finally spat, and blew through his nose to try and dislodge the, no doubt charming, mess dripping from his face.

“You okay now, uh Hunk, was it?” Lance’s face was in his peripheral vision, hand still on his back. Hunk nodded, but stayed hovering over the, yep that was the recycling bin. He was scared to respond, his throat felt thick and burned so badly.

“Good. Here.” He handed over a wad of napkins from the Garrison cafeteria. He pulled another fresh wad out of his other pocket too, as Hunk started swiping them under his nose.

“Thank-“ Hunk tried, but it caught in his throat and he coughed until he gagged again. He threw up. Again. He heaved a shaky sigh after it was over and went back to wiping his face in silence.

“That’s it. If you throw up one more time we’re going to the hospital.”

“It’s the Garrison, there’s no hospital for miles.” Hunk croaked. “It’ll be fine.”

“Then I’ll take you to whatever passes for a medical centre here. You’ve thrown up, like, every day this week.” Hunk straightened up a little and looked down at his shoes, best to avoid looking at the mess. He could feel his face going red again. “Come on, Iverson told me to take off for the day anyway.”

“What?” Hunk blinked up at him.

“I kind of told him to stuff it and walked off. He was getting way too much enjoyment out of us suffering, and I mean…” Lance took his hand off Hunk’s back, content the taller boy was going to be able to hold his own for a moment. He shrugged. “We’re a team now or whatever, so, you’re more important than an ego driven tirade.”

“Aww geeze,” Hunk ran his hand through his damp hair, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get you guys in trouble.”

“Its fine, seriously, you okay?”

“Its embarrassing,” Hunk looked up and down the hall. It was surprisingly, and thankfully, empty. “I’m okay, for real. I just get sick to my stomach really easily. I got kicked off the bus coming up here because I kept throwing up, actually.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Motion sickness, and stuff.”

“That’s all? Thank God,” Lance held his hand to his chest as he sighed, “We can work with that, man. Come on, you look trashed. How are you even standing? If you get sick like that every time, you have to have some serious strength.”

“Hey, can I stop running interference now? I swear one of these older guys is gonna deck me!” A new voice grumbled from behind Hunk. His other new team mate- small kid with glasses, what was his name?

“Thanks, Pidge. Sorry about that,” Lance shot the smaller boy a smile past Hunk’s arm. “You’re a real cool kid, you know that?”

“Shut up,” Pidge rolled his eyes, “You okay there, guy?” Hunk nodded, he shifted from side to side under their attention. It felt so weird, they were already willing to get in trouble on his behalf, after only, what? A day and a half maybe?

“Yeah, I’m good. Thanks.” He cleared his throat again, his voice was so wrecked, “Didn’t catch your name, sorry.”

“Its Pidge. Come on, you look like crap. Lance, don’t stand there and talk to him all day, we had a plan.”

“What?”

“Yeah, sorry,” Lance gently pulled on Hunk’s arm. “C’mon. We’re kidnapping you to get some rest and some ice cream- if you’re feeling up to it. Vanilla ice cream does wonders for a sore throat, and isn’t so bad on an upset stomach either.”

“Not to be rude, but it was kind of obvious you’ve been sick. You’ve been looking pretty wrung out for a couple days now.” Hunk smiled sheepishly. He knew that, everyone was looking rough. He kept that to himself, even though the small boy in front of him looked pretty haggard and had dark circles on his own pale face.

“Aw, geeze. Thanks guys.” Hunk smiled, he could feel his eyes prickling. Okay, maybe they weren’t totally like his moms, but this was really bringing back some memories. If he could get his throat to feel a bit better, and sound a little less awful, maybe he could call home and tell them about this. They’d be so proud to know their son was lucky enough to be teamed up with some pretty alright guys.

#voltron legendary defender #voltron sickfic #tw vomit #hunk vld #lance vld #pidge vld #sick hunk #garrison era #fh fic

[smoothshift]

Review of my 2017 Prius (5k miles) via /r/cars

Review of my 2017 Prius (5k miles)

Hey there r/cars, I bought a 2017 Prius in the summer of last year.

Why did I get a Prius, you might ask? Well, for a bunch of reasons. I used to be the type of person to shit on Priuses (Prii?) as cars made for lesbian vegan crossfitters, for those too busy sniffing their own farts to notice their intoxicating personalities. It was definitely a meme car, but damn do I love it.

Before this, I was driving a 2006 GMC Envoy gotten from my family, and lemme tell ya that thing was an absolute pig. Big, comfortable, but also loud and slow as hell, not to mention terrible gas mileage. Things inside were slowly breaking, it felt like every 2 months we had to take it to the shop to fix another minor problem, and I just wasn't a fan of it. My dad and I initially went to the dealerships here looking for a Toyota Camry, ya know the 2018 cars? Was a huge fan of it after seeing online reviews praising it. It was just what we needed, a comfortable, quiet, fuel efficient sedan with a record for reliability. At the dealership, they told us they didn't have any inventory of the Camry as it got sold out, it's apparently in really high demand here (Middle East). This was a huge bummer to me, but the guy pointed me in the direction of this - the 2017 Prius. That single lone car sitting in the show room floor. I didn't know they even sold those things here, keep in mind this is the Arab world, gas prices are some of the lowest in the world here, why the hell would Toyota sell a hybrid? I had no intention of driving it, but the more I learnt about this one model, the more I started to like it.

​

It was a model left from the previous year, and since they couldn't manage to sell it to anyone (since it doesn't have much of a presence here), they were offering 30% off the MSRP. This is huge, especially considering it's a Toyota and they're known for not budging around with price much. I looked around it, it looked clean as a whistle, brand new everything. I never sat in a hybrid before this one, so everything was weird to me. The car made no sound when i pushed the start button. It had a Heads up Display, blindspot monitoring, automatic up and down settings on all 4 windows. Now this might seem kinda basic to most of you reading this, after all you see this on alot of new cars, but considering what I came from these all felt like luxury features. The center screen was massive and almost felt like a smartphone with how many menu settings I could modify to suit my needs. The JBL speakers sound amazing compared to the old Envoy's, and the AC was pretty cool (heh). I could select the exact temperature I want and let the car do the rest in turning the inside into an Ice Box. The cloth seats were decently comfy, altho admittedly not quite as comfortable as the old Envoy, but hey I guess this was one of the sacrifices I had to make. All in all, it cost me the equivalent of $18.5k, which isn't too bad for a (Saudi spec) fully optioned out Prius.

​

Interior

Interior quality isn't a Benz by any means, as there are a bunch of plastics here and there, but overall I'm satisfied. There's soft spots for where my arms rest, and overall the interior has mostly soft touch plastics, with very few hard scratchy surfaces. The seats are cloth, and are reasonably comfy, but anytime I take a trip of about 3 hours I definitely feel some lower back pain and need to walk around for a bit to be better. The speedometer being in the center display was a little weird for me at first, but the HUD fixes that problem and I barely every take my eyes off my windshield when I'm driving. You sit really close to the ground in this car, like honestly I don't think your butt gets above a foot and a half from the gravel, and that has it's pros and cons. Pros being that you feel like you have more control over the car and the low center of gravity makes turns more confident, along with lower wind noise at high speeds. Main con of this is that you have to lower yourself into the car, and I can see why older drivers might not like this. The headroom and leg room in this car is phenomenal, at least for the front two occupants. I don't ever feel claustrophobic in here, I have more than enough space to stretch out and not hit my head on the roof (I'm 6'0). As for the back passengers, I tried rolling the driver's seat all the way to the back, yet even then when I sat behind myself, I had more than enough room to stretch my legs out. Leg room is a huge plus in this car, altho my hair does slightly brush against the roof in the back seat, but not enough to be a concern. Hatch space is cavernous, easily much bigger than any trunk of a camry or corolla, and especially when the seats are folded down. I was once able to fit in 40 wooden canvases inside, it's definitely very practical in that regard. It's noticeably quiet inside the car too. Like on startup, you hear nothing since the electric motors are pulling all the work, and if you push the accelerator hard enough, you'll hear the subtle whirr of the engine as it starts up and warms up. If you keep a light foot though, all you hear is the very slight, futuristic purr of the electric motors. Even at high speeds, like on highways, at 70 mph I've been able to hold conversations with people without raising my voice, something I couldn't do in the Envoy (had to damn near scream just to be heard on the highway). Ooooo also one more minor thing, the overhead lights on the inside slowly turn on when you approach the car and slowly turn off when you leave, instead of abruptly turning on and off. A small feature, but one that I really like and which contributes to it feeling more high classed than an equivalent Corolla. Overall, a functional, utilitarian, reasonably comfortable, spacious, and quiet interior.

​

Exterior

Now the exterior is gonna be more controversial, everyone loves to shit on the 4th gen Prius'es design as weird, edgy, too sharp, and not going to age well. Personally, I thought the same thing of it at first, but it's a design that grows on you. It's not as pretty as an LC500, no doubt, but it really isn't that bad. The shape of the car gives it one of the lowest coefficient of drag in the industry, so you could argue that form follows function here? The sharp edges on the car aren't the easiest on the eyes, but it's different. I like that about it, it gives it character, to be a car so weird and different looking that it almost looks cool in my eyes. I saw the Prius redesign for 2019, it's honestly a prettier car but you know what? I'm proud of owning this thing, it's not pretty, but it's mine and that's all that matters to me.

Besides that, it has sensors behind the door handle that automatically unlock the car for you if it senses the key in your pocket, along with a small touch pad on it to lock the car as you leave. This system has worked for me flawlessly, everytime it opens and locks accurately without me even attempting to look "visible" to it. Love not having to pull my keys out anymore. Reversing camera is standard, along with LED lights on the front (which I gotta admit, really brighten up the road compared to halogen lights). Overall, a unique design that's gonna catch alot of flack from people but hey, I like it.

​

Performance, economy, and driving dynamics

Yeah, if you came to this car for performance, you will be sorely disappointed. With a whopping 121 horsepower, this car is not fast. It actually has a decent pull from 0-20 mph since those electric motors have the instant torque, but beyond that, yeah it's a drone fest. When you floor it, you can just count along with the speedometer as it slugs it's way up. I think it's just physically impossible to get a speeding ticket in this. That's not to say it's horribly slow, like for any normal person the acceleration is totally adequate, but you won't be replicating any Mad Max scenes with this thing. One thing I think Toyota really perfected with this car is the subtlety at which the engine turns on. It's quiet. In the beginning, you can't really tell whether the engine is off or not without developing the ear for it, you learn to notice it after a couple hundred miles or so. Really impressive and seamless transition between electric to engine power, and vice versa. Honestly, the driving dynamics are not bad. From what I've seen in reviews, the older gen Priuses felt like dead bars of soap to drive, but this new one actually livens things up. It's got independent rear suspension, and a low center of gravity, so those two at least contribute to it being somewhat fun to drive. It can take turns pretty well, the suspension feels good and sturdy, and it handles potholes pretty effortlessly. What about economy? This thing excels. Idk how EPA reports this as around 52 mpg, I easily exceed 60 mpg without even trying. I'm able to travel about 600 miles on a single tank (11 gallon capacity), and that's without even triggering the low fuel level indicator. If I try to hypermile, I can sometimes exceed 80 mpg on a good day. Considering the old Envoy got 15 mpg on a good day, this car is leagues ahead of that and I never find myself worrying about gas anymore.

​

Cost to own

I have long held the opinion that the Prius is the absolute lowest cost to own non-EV car that exists, ignoring depreciation. This thing sips gas like it's in a drought. Converting the currencies, I can travel 600 miles for the equivalent of $12.40 (Thank God for Arab oil prices). That's about 2 cents per mile driven. I had to double check the numbers just to make sure it was right, because that sounds so absurdly low I was sure there was a mistake in there somewhere. The car being this cheap to drive is what made me love driving everywhere. Before, in the Envoy, I was always cautious with how I drove, tried to be more efficient, take the shortest possible route, because that thing drank gas like it was nothing. But with the Prius, I'm always happy to drive anywhere. Friends wanna go out to eat? Sure thing, I'll drive us there. Forgot a very minor, dollar store item in uni? It would be cheaper to drive there and get it than to buy a replacement. Long trips out into the desert visiting hidden lakes and natural sites? Prius is ready for it. I love to drive. And with how cheap this thing is to fuel up, I can drive anywhere I want anytime with no pressure to save money in mind. This is true economic freedom. Insurance for this came out really cheap too, I pay about 22 dollars a month. What about maintenance?

The engine isn't even on half the time, so despite the manual saying to have 6k mile oil changes, I feel like I could double that to 12k miles and get away with it trouble free (not that I would actually do that tho). It's got a 100k mile warranty for the hybrid battery, but I don't think I'll ever really need it. I've read online that most priuses can easily last to 200k miles on the original battery, some even surpass 300k miles. Considering that the winters here are never really that cold, and the summers are good to the Ni-MH battery chemistry, I have no doubt that these things will outlive the car itself. I don't expect the engine to ever die, after all 1) It's a low power, understressed Atkinson cycle engine, 2) The electric motors drive the car half the time and 3) It's a Toyota. I don't think I've ever heard of a Prius engine failing. The transmission is an eCVT, and to be frank with you it's still kind of like wizardry to me. I don't exactly know how it works, aside from the fact that it uses the electric motors as a sort of power transfer and transmission instead of the traditional automatic or CVT we're used to. It doesn't have any gears, any belts, any clutches, complicated parts at all, and I think it's a pretty simple design overall. All that contributes to it being a reliable beast, I don't think I've heard any stories of Prius transmission replacements. Finally depreciation. Toyotas have great resale value, and I'm sure this Prius would be a king in that regard, but I don't plan on selling this, at least anytime soon. I love this car, it does everything I want it to, and knowing how long it's expected to last, I wanna drive it into the dirt, maybe past 500k miles before I buy a replacement for it.

​

This car may not be considered an enthusiast car by any means, but in my eyes, it's truly what I would call the car for the people, the car that does everything you need it to, and is one of the greatest achievements in the history of the automotive industry.

​

Tldr it's a good car

#reddit #autonews #auto #cars

[societypress]

Stacey Dash On "Why I Say What I Say"

Why I Say What I Say, Even Though I Drive Whoopi, BET, and Most Other Black People Crazy ... After reading the article above, here are my thoughts... Stacey Dash drives me crazy, and I'm not even BLACK!  She having grown up in the South Bronx, having voted for Obama in 2008, and now a right wing representative of the most extreme kind, I agree with her much of the time, but she sticks to the script when she knows it is WRONG.  I'm not really disagreeing with this current post, except in terms of the way Republicans always attack social programs when working on the budget before they attack our inflated military budget.  I'm all for a strong defense.  I'm not a pacifist in that way, but we don't spend the money on our weapons program for the people of this country as much as we spend it for the people making money off it.  Sure, we need reforms in the welfare system, but not cuts, at least not yet. I can't argue with anything Stacey Dash has said in this article. In fact, it is very well said. Besides the "Now, in the promised land of freedom, we seek the lost Eden of separatism?" statement, which I don't understand, I totally understand where she is coming from, but when she starts making the states rights argument in support of the Confederate flag, she loses me.  Her adamant support of all things from the right, and her partisan support of Trump loses me.  But, it makes sense in our bi-polar nation.  When you go from voting for Obama, to voting for Trump, nothing can exemplify that more. The states rights argument for slavery is, and always has been a cloak of justification, which is not much different than what she points out about modern Liberalism.  Donald Trump is just another fat cat that told people what they wanted to hear to get the vote, appealing to their confirmation bias. And, that's just the way things work, she might, and really did say, in this article. That's what's wrong with American politics, it's just hype from the rich to the poor. Neither party is perfect, and it's like I told someone just this morning... I don't believe in the legislation of morality. I don't support blue laws and I don't support laws on sexuality either. The government does not have a place in your church, your bedroom, or your garden. There shouldn't even be any such thing as a government issued marriage license. We have TOO MUCH government; on this we agree. The downfall of conservatism for minorities lies in the lie of "self-sufficiency". Even if there was only one person on the planet, s/he would have to rely on other things to survive. That is a very far fetched example, but so is the idea of self-sufficiency. It DOES take a village for all us to live. One person on the planet wouldn't last very long, don't you agree? So, we have an entire populace of people stuck in public housing without any real upward mobility. Well, we should be thankful that it's there, or we would have people lying in the dirt starving to death like they do in Ethiopia. Without Liberalism we wouldn't have welfare and the like. But, they go way too  far in not just trying to care for people, but in forcing their own moral agenda down the throats of everyone like a blue law that says you can't buy alcohol on Sunday, from the other side of the fence. Where we are in this system is where we need to be with a balance between the free market and the government supplied social safety net. Perhaps, welfare recipients should be required to work. That would make a difference. Anything FREE is taken advantage of and while the exteriors of many public housing projects are well built the interiors may not be all that well kept. It all depends on who is living inside, no matter what color they are. Stacey Dash goes way too far in the other direction from her days supporting Obama, by embracing things that are seemingly racist. The middle ground is the better place if you want to maintain credibility with the masses instead of just the Republican party. They have their shtick and the Dems have theirs. It's a script and when she says some of the things she does, one can't blame people for giving her flack. I agree with her on BLM, but I don't discount that there is racism. Is BLM there now with all the shootings that just occurred in Chicago, or are they just waiting for another cop killing to protest. I know what she is saying. To randomly kill cops is asinine and doesn't solve anything. But, to discount the entire movement is unfair. However, ALL lives do matter, including BLUE lives and 99% of cops never kill anyone each year...  So, you, reactionaries, have a 99% chance of killing an innocent cop if you randomly kill one. The Oscars, who really cares, but as I've written on her page many times, she deserves one for her work as a Conservative. I am glad to know about her past, in that she grew up in the Bronx and saw street life, for real. I just feel like people who aren't finding solutions in one group often jump into another which is like going from the frying pan to the fire. I've always aligned with the right in my way of thinking in terms of family values, even my religious beliefs, and on social issues to the point of personal behavior but not the point of legislating my beliefs over someone else. I've also always been exposed to people of different view points and lifestyles. I've also read our Constitution, and when the other day she made a post about Libertarianism I took issue with one of her readers after he took issue with me. Unfortunately, people are not able to self-govern themselves without posing a threat to others.  Libertarianism is just another unrealistic, pie in the sky, elitist idea based upon one's own self in determining how we should be governed and it is usually embraced by good people, but it doesn't work for society as a whole. We need laws, we need government, just at a minimum and certainly less than we have, but Republicans always attack social programs first when it comes to the budget based on their fallacious idea of self-sufficiency, and never want to mess with the military budget even though it consumes over 50% of our spending, and only the fat cats are making money off it. The same with petroleum. It's not the guy at the convenience store that's making money off the gas sold. He's not making hardly anything on gas sales. He's making his money on over priced items at a convenience. The gas is almost, if not, a loss leader. So, who is making the money? Donald Trump??? Bill Clinton liked to say it was the economy... but without the environment we don't have an economy. Unless these jokers are planning on gobbling up our planet to ruin, and then somehow escaping to a new one to destroy they haven't told us about, then it doesn't make any sense to rape our  land the way THEY do. Is there some planet THEY'VE already discovered and THEY aren't sharing with us? And, even if there is, why wouldn't we want to prolong life on this one before we race to destroy it? I am not a global warming alarmist, but I do believe we could do a much better job of taking care of this place. That's why Bernie almost got me to vote. That, plus he exposes the expensive lifestyle of being poor where your interest rates are higher, if you can even get a loan, and everything else is too. Food deserts lead to people eating at convenience stores instead of grocery stores, which isn't just higher in price, but higher in the price on your health too. However, on an individual level, people are just too lazy to go to the store in many cases, and they are ignorant of healthy eating habits. That's their own fault especially in this day and age of the Internet where you can learn anything besides, and not only, the latest song, or rap, but where it was once thought that religion was the opiate of the masses, today in America, entertainment is the opiate of the masses. I just get frustrated with absolutists and both parties exemplify that characteristic. Maybe I'm naive in that I think we can do better than bullsh*t, and 'that's just the way things work'. Stacey Dash is right about that as long as bullsh*tters are in charge. So, what gives? What really matters in the end is how you treat your neighbor, good old fashioned Bible stuff. We can pass all the secular laws we want in our secular government trying to be controlled by people of varying opinions that want to try to force their ways of thinking on others when we don't need any laws on how we should relate to one another in a brotherly, loving way. The civil rights movement... It didn't end racism. It just threw a blanket over it, and while I realize that's a broad statement and there have been tremendous strides toward more equality in the last fifty years, it's still there, and then we get a guy like Donald Trump to come in and stir that pot again like a witch and her brew. What's more is that somehow he got Evangelical Christians to vote for him which is downright revealing that they can't tell the difference between Jesus Christ and Donald Trump... And, I consider myself to be evangelical, at least in the sense that we are to spread the good news... just not through legislation! In other words, I hear Stacey Dash humming, but I cannot walk past her posts without saying something. I agree, I agree, I agree and then she will tow that company line, and I'm like PLEEEEAZE! If we can just get past the bullsh*t we might actually make progress. By progress, I mean we get past the bullsh*t on both sides. Do you know, without documented evidence, and only by my own observation that BULLSH*T has to be the word most used in the jailhouse. I base this on my ten arrests in the last ten years, which were pretty much all BULLSH*T... Of course, because everyone is INNOCENT in the jailhouse... There are also two other words that make up the top three words used in the jailhouse, but I'll skip those so as not to be INFLAMMATORY as seems to be the custom of so many political people on EITHER SIDE. We lost Prince this year, but he knew all about CONTROVERSY, didn't he? So, I'll commit to you this. I'll never post on the Stacey Dash page again because I don't think I have anything else to say. Yes, black folk need a new narrative. Yes, they need to believe there is at least a way out of public housing, which they don't in many cases. But, along with that, they need to realize they're probably not going to be the next great rapper, or athlete. Don't get me wrong that crosses racial lines  because, black or white, everybody wants to be a rock star. It is the rock star mentality of our youth that holds them back the most, and in continued disappointment under our current system of "mansion capitalism". Much of this stems from the idea projected by our leadership. Even the Obamas are moving into a $5 million dollar mansion. Why don't our leaders live in the village? It stems also from modern American Christianity which by translation is misleading. When Jesus said there are many mansions in his father's house, the Greek word translated as "mansions" does not mean anything more than a home, or dwelling place. I don't have a problem with capitalism. It's fat pig mansion capitalism I have a problem with, and the usage of this word in translation and interpretation sets up a wrong "fat capitalist pig" image of what Christ was talking about. He's the one who turned over the tables in the temple because they were being "fat capitalist pigs".  Simply, put "mansion capitalism" sets up a false image for people to aspire toward and leaves most in disappointment when they only have an apartment to live in.  Tell that to a homeless person, ok? This is the same kind of capitalism that would argue against any government regulations. That's HOGWASH! So, on this journey of life long learning, if that's what we take it for, I've learned a lot. Don't believe anything anybody tells you. Don't make promises you can't keep. Keep the promises you make. If you make promises, under promise and over deliver. This is quite the opposite of how our political leaders work where they over promise, or over objectify, and way under deliver.  This is the biggest problem we face as a nation. But, this is what I was taught as a salesperson by some of the best sales training programs there are. Maybe the first one negates the rest, but I try to live by these things to this day even though I stay in a homeless shelter among people that often behave just like some of our wealthy leaders who are consumed with greed, and hardly ever keep the promises they make, and don't really seem to have any intention of doing so. Perhaps we could throw a suit and tie on one of the homeless and nominate them for president. They behave the same way. What's the difference? Just wealth, that's all; while the fact of the matter, even our poor live like kings in this country compared to the truly "poor" around the world, unless they just choose to live in squalor. So, while Stacey Dash is adored by many, probably by even more before she started down her political path, I still "love her'"!  I just hope she stays on her lily pad, and I don't let her knock me off mine! Such 1st World Problems!!! from BLAHG, BLAHG, BLAHG!!! http://ift.tt/2iIYB2t via IFTTT

#IFTTT #BLAHG #BLAHG!!!

[societypress]

Stacey Dash On "Why I Say What I Say"

Why I Say What I Say, Even Though I Drive Whoopi, BET, and Most Other Black People Crazy ... After reading the article above, here are my thoughts... Stacey Dash drives me crazy, and I'm not even BLACK!  She having grown up in the South Bronx, having voted for Obama in 2008, and now a right wing representative of the most extreme kind, I agree with her much of the time, but she sticks to the script when she knows it is WRONG.  I'm not really disagreeing with this current post, except in terms of the way Republicans always attack social programs when working on the budget before they attack our inflated military budget.  I'm all for a strong defense.  I'm not a pacifist in that way, but we don't spend the money on our weapons program for the people of this country as much as we spend it for the people making money off it.  Sure, we need reforms in the welfare system, but not cuts, at least not yet. I can't argue with anything Stacey Dash has said in this article. In fact, it is very well said. Besides the "Now, in the promised land of freedom, we seek the lost Eden of separatism?" statement, which I don't understand, I totally understand where she is coming from, but when she starts making the states rights argument in support of the Confederate flag, she loses me.  Her adamant support of all things from the right, and her partisan support of Trump loses me.  But, it makes sense in our bi-polar nation.  When you go from voting for Obama, to voting for Trump, nothing can exemplify that more. The states rights argument for slavery is, and always has been a cloak of justification, which is not much different than what she points out about modern Liberalism.  Donald Trump is just another fat cat that told people what they wanted to hear to get the vote, appealing to their confirmation bias. And, that's just the way things work, she might, and really did say, in this article. That's what's wrong with American politics, it's just hype from the rich to the poor. Neither party is perfect, and it's like I told someone just this morning... I don't believe in the legislation of morality. I don't support blue laws and I don't support laws on sexuality either. The government does not have a place in your church, your bedroom, or your garden. There shouldn't even be any such thing as a government issued marriage license. We have TOO MUCH government; on this we agree. The downfall of conservatism for minorities lies in the lie of "self-sufficiency". Even if there was only one person on the planet, s/he would have to rely on other things to survive. That is a very far fetched example, but so is the idea of self-sufficiency. It DOES take a village for all us to live. One person on the planet wouldn't last very long, don't you agree? So, we have an entire populace of people stuck in public housing without any real upward mobility. Well, we should be thankful that it's there, or we would have people lying in the dirt starving to death like they do in Ethiopia. Without Liberalism we wouldn't have welfare and the like. But, they go way too  far in not just trying to care for people, but in forcing their own moral agenda down the throats of everyone like a blue law that says you can't buy alcohol on Sunday, from the other side of the fence. Where we are in this system is where we need to be with a balance between the free market and the government supplied social safety net. Perhaps, welfare recipients should be required to work. That would make a difference. Anything FREE is taken advantage of and while the exteriors of many public housing projects are well built the interiors may not be all that well kept. It all depends on who is living inside, no matter what color they are. Stacey Dash goes way too far in the other direction from her days supporting Obama, by embracing things that are seemingly racist. The middle ground is the better place if you want to maintain credibility with the masses instead of just the Republican party. They have their shtick and the Dems have theirs. It's a script and when she says some of the things she does, one can't blame people for giving her flack. I agree with her on BLM, but I don't discount that there is racism. Is BLM there now with all the shootings that just occurred in Chicago, or are they just waiting for another cop killing to protest. I know what she is saying. To randomly kill cops is asinine and doesn't solve anything. But, to discount the entire movement is unfair. However, ALL lives do matter, including BLUE lives and 99% of cops never kill anyone each year...  So, you, reactionaries, have a 99% chance of killing an innocent cop if you randomly kill one. The Oscars, who really cares, but as I've written on her page many times, she deserves one for her work as a Conservative. I am glad to know about her past, in that she grew up in the Bronx and saw street life, for real. I just feel like people who aren't finding solutions in one group often jump into another which is like going from the frying pan to the fire. I've always aligned with the right in my way of thinking in terms of family values, even my religious beliefs, and on social issues to the point of personal behavior but not the point of legislating my beliefs over someone else. I've also always been exposed to people of different view points and lifestyles. I've also read our Constitution, and when the other day she made a post about Libertarianism I took issue with one of her readers after he took issue with me. Unfortunately, people are not able to self-govern themselves without posing a threat to others.  Libertarianism is just another unrealistic, pie in the sky, elitist idea based upon one's own self in determining how we should be governed and it is usually embraced by good people, but it doesn't work for society as a whole. We need laws, we need government, just at a minimum and certainly less than we have, but Republicans always attack social programs first when it comes to the budget based on their fallacious idea of self-sufficiency, and never want to mess with the military budget even though it consumes over 50% of our spending, and only the fat cats are making money off it. The same with petroleum. It's not the guy at the convenience store that's making money off the gas sold. He's not making hardly anything on gas sales. He's making his money on over priced items at a convenience. The gas is almost, if not, a loss leader. So, who is making the money? Donald Trump??? Bill Clinton liked to say it was the economy... but without the environment we don't have an economy. Unless these jokers are planning on gobbling up our planet to ruin, and then somehow escaping to a new one to destroy they haven't told us about, then it doesn't make any sense to rape our land the way THEY do. Is there some planet THEY'VE already discovered and THEY aren't sharing with us? And, even if there is, why wouldn't we want to prolong life on this one before we race to destroy it? I am not a global warming alarmist, but I do believe we could do a much better job of taking care of this place. That's why Bernie almost got me to vote. That, plus he exposes the expensive lifestyle of being poor where your interest rates are higher, if you can even get a loan, and everything else is too. Food deserts lead to people eating at convenience stores instead of grocery stores, which isn't just higher in price, but higher in the price on your health too. However, on an individual level, people are just too lazy to go to the store in many cases, and they are ignorant of healthy eating habits. That's their own fault especially in this day and age of the Internet where you can learn anything besides, and not only, the latest song, or rap, but where it was once thought that religion was the opiate of the masses, today in America, entertainment is the opiate of the masses. I just get frustrated with absolutists and both parties exemplify that characteristic. Maybe I'm naive in that I think we can do better than bullsh*t, and 'that's just the way things work'. Stacey Dash is right about that as long as bullsh*tters are in charge. So, what gives? What really matters in the end is how you treat your neighbor, good old fashioned Bible stuff. We can pass all the secular laws we want in our secular government trying to be controlled by people of varying opinions that want to try to force their ways of thinking on others when we don't need any laws on how we should relate to one another in a brotherly, loving way. The civil rights movement... It didn't end racism. It just threw a blanket over it, and while I realize that's a broad statement and there have been tremendous strides toward more equality in the last fifty years, it's still there, and then we get a guy like Donald Trump to come in and stir that pot again like a witch and her brew. What's more is that somehow he got Evangelical Christians to vote for him which is downright revealing that they can't tell the difference between Jesus Christ and Donald Trump... And, I consider myself to be evangelical, at least in the sense that we are to spread the good news... just not through legislation! In other words, I hear Stacey Dash humming, but I cannot walk past her posts without saying something. I agree, I agree, I agree and then she will tow that company line, and I'm like PLEEEEAZE! If we can just get past the bullsh*t we might actually make progress. By progress, I mean we get past the bullsh*t on both sides. Do you know, without documented evidence, and only by my own observation that BULLSH*T has to be the word most used in the jailhouse. I base this on my ten arrests in the last ten years, which were pretty much all BULLSH*T... Of course, because everyone is INNOCENT in the jailhouse... There are also two other words that make up the top three words used in the jailhouse, but I'll skip those so as not to be INFLAMMATORY as seems to be the custom of so many political people on EITHER SIDE. We lost Prince this year, but he knew all about CONTROVERSY, didn't he? So, I'll commit to you this. I'll never post on the Stacey Dash page again because I don't think I have anything else to say. Yes, black folk need a new narrative. Yes, they need to believe there is at least a way out of public housing, which they don't in many cases. But, along with that, they need to realize they're probably not going to be the next great rapper, or athlete. Don't get me wrong that crosses racial lines  because, black or white, everybody wants to be a rock star. It is the rock star mentality of our youth that holds them back the most, and in continued disappointment under our current system of "mansion capitalism". Much of this stems from the idea projected by our leadership. Even the Obamas are moving into a $5 million dollar mansion. Why don't our leaders live in the village? It stems also from modern American Christianity which by translation is misleading. When Jesus said there are many mansions in his father's house, the Greek word translated as "mansions" does not mean anything more than a home, or dwelling place. I don't have a problem with capitalism. It's fat pig mansion capitalism I have a problem with, and the usage of this word in translation and interpretation sets up a wrong "fat capitalist pig" image of what Christ was talking about. He's the one who turned over the tables in the temple because they were being "fat capitalist pigs".  Simply, put "mansion capitalism" sets up a false image for people to aspire toward and leaves most in disappointment when they only have an apartment to live in.  Tell that to a homeless person, ok? This is the same kind of capitalism that would argue against any government regulations. That's HOGWASH! So, on this journey of life long learning, if that's what we take it for, I've learned a lot. Don't believe anything anybody tells you. Don't make promises you can't keep. Keep the promises you make. If you make promises, under promise and over deliver. This is quite the opposite of how our political leaders work where they over promise, or over objectify, and way under deliver.  This is the biggest problem we face as a nation. But, this is what I was taught as a salesperson by some of the best sales training programs there are. Maybe the first one negates the rest, but I try to live by these things to this day even though I stay in a homeless shelter among people that often behave just like some of our wealthy leaders who are consumed with greed, and hardly ever keep the promises they make, and don't really seem to have any intention of doing so. Perhaps we could throw a suit and tie on one of the homeless and nominate them for president. They behave the same way. What's the difference? Just wealth, that's all; while the fact of the matter, even our poor live like kings in this country compared to the truly "poor" around the world, unless they just choose to live in squalor So, while Stacey Dash is adored by many, probably by even more before she started down her political path, I still "love her'"!  I just hope she stays on her lily pad, and I don't let her knock me off mine! from BLAHG, BLAHG, BLAHG!!! http://ift.tt/2iaPYdj via IFTTT

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