#if you think I skipped a president no I didn’t he’s from California

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #252: DECIDING FACTOR!

February, 1985

Who on Earth is strong enough to smash Hercules? Hint: there’s two of them!

Well I have my guess but I happened to guess right so I won’t be sharing. Let’s sayyyyyyyy.... Más y Menos.

Its very rude of DCAU’s Más y Menos to be picking on Hercules. Maybe sí podemos but that doesn’t mean ustedes should.

Anyway.

Last times on Avengers, Vision walked through a null field created by Annihilus and promptly fell in a robot coma and had to be put in a tube. He regained consciousness and Starfox hooked him up to the Titan supercomptuer ISAAC after which Vision started behaving oddly. When half of the Avengers got back from Secret Wars, Vision convinced Wasp to step down as chairman and nominate him. He’s created a second branch of the team in California under Hawkeye’s leadership. He’s pushed the president into making the Avengers chair a member of the Cabinet. He hid Starfox’s secret sexy power from the rest of the team. And just last issue, it was revealed that Vision and ISAAC have built a take-over-the-world-for-its-own-good device with Vision only lacking the will to pull the trigger on it.

So, uh, stuff is afoot.

Vision stuff. And, oddly enough, Doc Sampson stuff.

Vision is very impressed on seeing what seems to be Doc Sampson’s demo reel and offers him membership in the Avengers.

Doc Sampson turns him down because he doesn’t see himself as hero material and he already accepted an offer to join the faculty of Northwestern University.

Vision: “That needn’t rule you out, doctor! What would you say to heading a new, Midwestern branch of the Avengers? I should think you’re make an excellent group leader!”

Wow, Vision. You’re coming on a little strong there.

Midwest Avengers seems like the kind of thing that would be made up to spoof the expansion team idea, kinda like the Great Lakes Avengers of later. But if Vision seems desperate to get Doc Sampson to join the Avengers, well I think he is desperate.

Vision talked to ISAAC of his frustrations on trying to spread the power and influence of the Avengers. He has his take-over-the-world-for-its-own-good device but he doesn’t seem to want to use it. So he’s trying to repeat the trick with the West Coast Avengers. Sign up more and more Avengers. If you told this era of Vision about the 50 State Initiative, he’d be all over it.

But Doc Sampson turns him down. For the best. God only knows who Vision would have finagled into being on the Midwest Avengers in Chicago.

Doc Sampson: I wonder if I made a mistake in turning down the Vision’s offer? Being part of such a team would have given me an opportunity to observe some highly unusual psyches up close. But, no... I could hardly maintain an impartial detachment in such a situation.

Yeah. A Doc Sampson led Chicago-branch would have been an implosion waiting to happen. And Sampson will get his chance to pick the brains of a superhero team later with X-Factor. He does not maintain an impartial detachment.

On his way out, Starfox very much wants to discuss this newspaper headline. As he’s from a more advanced space civilization that doesn’t have prejudice probably, this is very baffling to him.

He hasn’t been on Earth long enough to learn that “ANTI-MUTANT FEAR GRIPS U.S.” is Tuesday.

I wonder if it corresponds to anything going on in the X-books. I tried to look it up but the same month as this issue, X-Men was doing a Kulan Gath thing.

Anyway, Vision and Doc Sampson agree that anti-mutant fear gripping things is bad and could tear society apart.

So in case anyone was ever wondering: the Avengers officially think anti-mutant fear is whack.

Anyway, on the mansion’s back patio, Captain America and Scarlet Witch are just having some old friend hangout time.

It’s a nice moment, really.

Wanda is drinking tea and Cap is just sketching her because they’re comfortable enough friends to hang out in a tea sketch party.

Anyway, Cap is also familiar enough with Wanda to know that she’s well vexed.

And she admits that she’s well vexed by two things. Of course, by the new wave of anti-mutant phobia because it really seems like a cruel cycle where every time people seem like they’re chilling out or there’s a swell of tolerance, it just gets yanked back. A cruel yo-yo of intolerance.

Also, its happening when she’s having personal trouble with Vision. He’s keeping secrets and he has some really extreme moods.

Scarlet Witch: “One moment he’ll be friendly and open, and the next he’ll get so remote!”

I wonder if its possible for Hank Pym’s bipolar disorder to have skipped a generation and somehow been inherited by Vision. That’s entirely not how anything works but I dunno. That sounds like Hank.

Since Cap has been wondering about Vision’s behavior (he and Monica Marvel had a discussion about it in the previous issue, remember?), he agrees to go talk to Vision.

Vision is having solemn thoughts in the mansion’s library, having been upset by the Daily Bugle that Starfox was waving around.

Vision: The world is beset by so much strife. Humanity cries out for peace... Yearns for life and prosperity... but in the end it denies itself that which it most desires! Mankind might never put aside its prejudices. Too many have refused responsibility for their own actions. How can they be expected to save the world? And, yet, who am I -- a synthezoid, an artificial being -- to rail against men of flesh? My encephalatron command chair would give me the power to bring peace to the world... and yet I hesitate to use it! Can I find the courage... make the sacrifice necessary to use that power?

That’s when Cap wanders in to give Vision a talking to. A supportive, helpful talking to.

Since he assumes that what Vision has on his mind is the burdens of leadership, he confides that he knows how tough it can be to have to always make the right decision at a moment’s notice and that he’s here if Vision needs a sympathetic ear.

Vision admits that chairmanship isn’t what he expected. He’s not unaware of the strain that its putting on his marriage. Especially since he insisted that they rejoin the team when Wanda would have preferred to return to their civilian life in New Jersey.

Cap tells him just talk to her more, ya goof.

So this is a very nice conversation between friends and peers that Vision drops a bomb of a totally-a-hypothetical into.

Vision: “Cap, what would you do if you discovered that you could bring peace and prosperity to the entire world... but only at the cost of your personal well being, perhaps of your own existence?”

Cap: “What?!”

Vision: “We have all put our lives on the line many times to stop world-threatening menaces, but it occurs to me that we’ve seldom tried to do anything to cure the world of its ills.”

Cap: “We do what we can, Vision. There are no fast and simple ways to eliminate want or fear.”

Vision: “But what if there were a way to insure a lasting peace to the world, to bring about a new golden age? What if you could only bring it about by sacrificing yourself? What if you could make the world a paradise, but you could never enjoy it yourself? Could you do it?”

Cap: “It pains me to say this, Vision, but I honestly don’t know. I don’t believe I could know unless the situation actually presented itself. Life should never be given up lightly, but... if there were a way to truly save the world... I’d like to think that I’d make the sacrifice. But I’d have to be certain that it would work!”

Vision: “Yes... Yes, there could be no room for doubt.”

I do really like the slow unfolding of whatever Vision’s Supervillain Actually Its Well-Intentioned plan is. His doubts and how he poses a very specific hypothetical to Cap to see what The Iconic Avengers Leader thinks.

At this point my guess is that Vision is going to turn himself into a supercomputer like ISAAC to take over the world, for its own good. Since it was apparently inspired when he was plugged into a supercomputer and was running the mansion.

Anyway, Wanda runs in and interrupts the totally-a-hypothetical discussion with big, alarming news that their house from the Vision and Scarlet Witch series is on fire.

That’s rough.

By the time Wanda, Vision, and emotional support Captain America show up, the ire is unstoppable and the firefighters just let it burn down.

That’s rougher.

Later, Vision and Wanda pick through the smouldering rubble.

And worse of all, this wasn’t a random electrical or grease or magic fire. It was arson. And the arsonist even called the cops to make sure everyone knew it.

Scarlet Witch: “So! I should have known! The blind, unreasoning fools! Do I have to fight them for the rest of my life?!?” This is so maddening! Losing my temper won’t bring our house back... all I’ve done is frighten the neighbors. That’s always been the biggest problem in being a mutant... No one will let you act human.

=(

Some random bystanders basically gloat that the “weirdies are finally leaving” causing Captain America to go off.

Captain America: “For your information, mister, those ‘weirdies’ have saved your hide a dozen times over! They’ve fought and bled so you could have a home!”

Bystander: “N-now hold on, Cap! Me, I don’t have anything against ‘em... but why’d they have to move into my neighborhood? I mean, all our houses coulda caught fire from that blaze! This never woulda happened, if they hadn’t moved here!”

Captain America: “Mister, today somebody decided that he didn’t like mutants. Tomorrow, maybe someone will decide he doesn’t like blacks... or jews... or you! We’re all in this together. The American dream has to be there for everyone, or it can never truly work for anyone! It’s our duty to do everything we can to make sure it works!”

I doubt Bystander is very convinced. Maybe momentarily shamed. But in an hour he’ll be like “am I wrong about mutants? No, its the tolerant people who are wrong.”

But Vision... Vision has made up his mind.

Vision: ‘Do I have the right to take over the world for its own good?’

Vision: ‘Moral quandary resolved.’

The next morning, Vision has exciting new terrible news for the team. The US Army Corp of Engineers have dug up Thanos’ secret base in Arizona from his first appearance in Iron Man #55. And despite Vision protesting how dumb it is to poke unknown alien technology in hopes of finding a cool new weapon for America’s strategic arsenal, the Department of Defense is having the army poking unknown alien technology in hopes of finding a cool new weapon for America’s strategic arsenal.

Captain America: “Blazes! I believe in a strong defense as much as anyone, but the hardware Thanos used is way out of the army’s league!”

Starfox: “Perhaps more than even you can imagine, Cap! My brother Thanos was a ravager of worlds... he coveted power and worshiped death! His hidden base could well hold the means to rip this planet asunder!”

Cool, cool.

Man, I hate it when the US Army blew up the world in 1985 by poking alien gewgaws.

Anyway, Vision did manage to talk the government into allowing a small group of Avengers to act as advisers.

Instead of rounding up scientific geniuses slash superheroes like they did for Bruce Banner’s lab, Vision just selects everyone he has handy.

He says he’d like to assign the West Coast Avengers (who in fairness do have two scientific experets - Mockingbird and Wonder Man, kinda) but they’re busy with an off-panel mission in the Pacific. Just because they don’t have a book doesn’t mean they stop doing stuff.

So instead Vision selects Captain America, Hercules, Scarlet Witch, and Starfox (who in fairness is a great choice since he knows space science and Thanos) and sends them off.

Yeah. Vision is totally going to get up to stuff while they’re gone.

This foreboding is enhanced when Captain Marvel shows up and Vision tells her he has a special assignment for her.

Vision: “Our deep space monitor has picked up some disturbing signals -- that seems to be emanating from Sanctuary II, the starship which once belonged to the mad Thanos! After the arch-fiend’s final defeat, we left his ship to drift beyond the orbit of Pluto!”

Since she’s the fastest Avenger he asks her to leave at once, fly out to the ship to check it out, and then report back.

So. Light is the fastest thing, the speed limit of the universe. Give or take tachyons which are FTL and also hypothetical. And I don’t know if Captain Marvel can turn into tachyons. Point being, the speed of light is really friggin fast but the universe is really friggin big. Even something as ‘close’ as our solar backyard where Pluto is located is 4.9 billion miles away and takes light 4.6 hours to get there from Earth.

He is definitely getting Captain Marvel out of the way where even her nyoom will take a while to get back.

The Vision slowly stalks through the corridors of Avengers Mansion. On the second floor, he pauses before the door of the quarters he for so long shared with his wife... recalling past joys and sorrows. And then, he moves on -- solemnly descending the grand staircase, as if for the final time.

O_O

Uh...... plus side is that he gives Jarvis the day off to take his mother to Montauk Point!

I just like seeing Jarvis in Avengers.

He’s always around but only occasionally seen.

My god. His vacation clothes though.

Of course, Vision being nice to Jarvis who deserves good things is only partially because Jarvis is a cool guy who deserves nice things.

Vision has managed at this point to clear everyone out of the mansion and he locks the doors behind Jarvis so that NO ONE CAN INTERRUPT WHAT HE MUST DO.

Meanwhile, team ‘prevent the military from doing anything stupid’ arrives in Arizona and at the site of Thanos’ former base.

Huh. I was half and half on whether Vision was just making shit up to get the Avengers out of the house but I guess something really is going on.

Makes sense. If they went there and found nothing, they’d return too soon.

I wonder if there’s something really going on with Thanos’ ship Sanctuary II too.

If so, was it just a great coincidence that Vision had two different emergencies he could divert the team with the day after he decided to go through with his plan or is it just the Avengers’ lot that there’s constantly emergencies going on and he had his pick of them?

Anyway. Colonel Farnam of the US Army is convinced that they have everything under control at Operation: Prize Package and don’t need any Avengers supervision.

Colonel Farnam: “If we can figure out how just a fraction of this gear works, the United States will never again need fear an enemy power!”

Captain America: “I’m told that similar sentiment was expressed following the development of the crossbow, Colonel.”

Nice sass, Cap.

But, like, the instant that the Avengers are escorted inside the base, Starfox spots some technicians messing with a machine to see what it does and they tell him to screw off when he tells them not to mess with things they don’t understand.

Starfox: “GET AWAY FROM THERE!”

Scientist: “What are you, crazy?! We’ve spent twelve hours trying to goose this transmitter to life... we’re not going to stop now!”

He has to drag them away from a sudden energy surge as the machine activates by itself with a programmed homing signal that will bring Something to the base.

Colonel Farnam: “Now hold it right there, Avenger! Only my men are authorized to monkey with these machines!”

Starfox: “Colonel, I was raised among machiens such as these! If I can’t fix these settings, your men don’t stand a chance!”

Colonel Farnam: “I don’t care if you were raised in... GOOD LORD!”

Geez. It may have been partially a ruse to get the Avengers out of the house but its a good thing Vision sent the Avengers here. The US Army was clearly going to doom the world unsupervised.

GOOD JOB RANDOM SCIENTISTS

NOW HERCULES IS GETTING HIS ASS KICKED

IS THAT WHAT YOU WANTED, YOU MONSTERS??

Anyway, the Blood Brothers are some Thanos minions from early days. Weird that they never showed up for the MCU. Like, look, they didn’t need to be part of the Black Order. They don’t have the theme naming.

But these two dinguses would have made great antagonists in one of the earlier movies.

Though Starfox and Hercules get wrecked for being the nearest to the Blood Brothers when they appear, Cap and Scarlet Witch do better for being slightly forewarned.

Captain America can do the backflips to keep from getting punched and Wanda’s do anything powers are as helpful as always.

Meanwhile, back at Avengers Mansion, Dane Whitman (sometimes the Black Knight, sometimes just exhausted), arrives and tries to use his old Avengers ID card to enter.

The security system does not like that.

Anyway, back in Arizona, Starfox rejoins the fight. That’s good.

Wanda tries to do her patented ‘all oxygen play keep away from this guy’ move on one of the Blood Brothers but his super strength lets him slam the ground to break Wanda’s concentration.

The other Blood Brother tries to strangle Captain America who got knocked into a pile of rubble but Hercules emerges from underneath the rubble to do that greatest of comic book tropes.

Ah, grievous harm with a body. How I love you.

But though the Blood Brothers heads are hard enough to knock each other out, the fight did do some lasting damage.

TO MY PERCEPTION OF HERCULES!

When the Blood Brothers beat the shit out of Hercules at the beginning of the fight, they apparently tore his Hercules skirt.

And Hercules isn’t wearing anything under his Hercules skirt.

So the other three Avengers get to see Hercules’ mighty adamantine mace, so to speak.

That’s all well and good.

Except its not!

Hercules? Being ashamed of public nudity??

That doesn’t sound like the Hercules I know!

Tsk tsk, how retroactively out of character! Annnnd possibly not retroactively? Didn’t he compete in the original Olympics which were no pants allowed?

You’ve corrupted him, modern society!

Anyway.

Captain America starts yelling at the colonel because if the Avengers hadn’t been here, it would have been a major disaster.

Captain America: “You were warned -- Washington was warned -- that something like this could happen! But those warnings were almost totally ignored!”

But back at Avengers Mansion, Dane Whitman wakes up and sees this argument being broadcast on a jumbo screen.

Vision: “People never listen to those who know better! I shall have to change all that!”

Vision: “Hello, Dane. I’m sorry you had to be incapacitated. But your arrival was most unexpected... and I really can’t afford any interruptions now! You see, I have to save humanity from itself!”

Something about you seems different, Vision.

Did you become one with the universe? It’s a pretty popular move.

Follow @essential-avengers​ because whoa what huh? Vision what? Also, like and reblog. Its necessary to save humanity from itself.

#avengers #Blood Brothers #the Vision #Scarlet Witch #Starfox #Hercules #Captain Marvel #Monica Rambeau #Black Knight #essential avengers #essential marvel liveblogging

[sincerelyella]

Everything Has Changed - First Love Chapter 4

Book: The Royal Romance (AU)

Song inspiration: First Love by Adele

Pairings: past Liam x MC (Ella)

Characters belong to Pixelberry; MC Ella Brooks belongs to me

Summary: What if Liam was promised as a child to another kingdom’s princess?

Warnings: angst

Words: 838

“The Royal family is missing.”

Liam’s eyes widened but he wasn’t able to speak.

“They’re what?!” Constantine bellowed. He plucked the phone from Bastien’s hand and continued to bark out questions.

Bastien moved to stand in front of Liam and placed his hands on the young man’s shoulders. “Liam.”

“Missing … they’re missing,” Liam spoke in a whisper. “Missing?”

“Yes, they’re missing,” Bastien repeated cautiously. “We don’t have any answers yet, so I need you to focus, okay?”

Liam nodded and quickly sat down in a chair before he fainted.

Four years later

Drake and Maxwell walked through the palace towards the west wing where Liam’s room was.

“Do you think this is a good idea?” Maxwell whispered as he nervously skipped next to his friend.

Drake nodded. “I think it is, he needs to get away from here.”

“To California here we come! There are just beaches there right?”

“There are cities there too, Beaumont,” Drake rolled his eyes as they approached Liam’s door.

“I’ll knock!” Maxwell banged his fist on the door and clapped his hands when the knob turned.

“Oh, hey guys,” Liam stepped aside to let his friends in. “What brings you here?”

Drake sighed.“Li, I’m worried about you” - Max elbowed Drake in the ribs - “I mean we are worried about you.”

Liam shook his head and wandered into the living room. “There’s no need to be worried about me. I’ve been looking for Ella for four years and there’s nothing. My brother abdicated and left me with the crown. So now, I have to participate in the Social Season and choose a wife that I don’t even want,” Liam sat on the couch and covered his face with his hands. “So you see? There’s nothing to be worried about.”

Maxwell and Drake turned to each other with widened eyes.

The Royal family had been looking for Ella and her family but there were no leads; it’s like they disappeared and never even existed. Liam did his digging outside of Bastien’s research and found out that the Philippines had been in turmoil for many years. King Danilo never mentioned to Constantine the issues, he was a proud man and didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him. A man that worked for Danilo betrayed him and grouped many activists against the monarchy to carry out a coup d'é·tat.

Liam’s eyes watered as he read about how the royal family - how Ella - fled the country, and nobody knew whether they were still alive. Bastien found out that the group that overthrew the monarchy was called the Samahan ng Mga Nagkakaisang Palabang Filipino (United Filipinos Resistance Front); they were similar to a group in Cordonia called the Sons of Earth. Their bank accounts showed that they funded each other, and transferred large sums of money back and forth. Both groups hated the monarchy and wanted to either take over as King or establish democracy and become the President over the country.

Liam made it his life’s mission to find Ella and her family, but after four years of nothing, along with Leo abdicating, he couldn’t concentrate on trying to find her full time. He hardly spent time with Drake and Maxwell and threw himself into training to become the next King of Cordonia.

Max plopped onto the couch. “We’re taking you somewhere so you can relax, be the Liam you used to be!”

Liam turned to look at his happy friend with unshed tears in his eyes. “What?”

Drake stepped forward. “Pack a bag, we’re taking you somewhere.”

“Taking me where?”

“Somewhere you’ll forget all about your problems,” Max patted Liam on the thigh. “Let’s go!”

An hour later

The trio stood in the royal jet, Liam still in the dark about where they were headed. Drake gave the pilot some information about their destination, but only Liam could give the okay to fly.

“Tell me where we’re going or I won’t authorize this trip,” Liam’s arms were folded across his chest as he stared at his friends.

“You’re no fun,” Max whined.

Drake threw his arms in the air in frustration. “Alright, fine, we’re going to California. Everything else is a surprise so stop being a spoilsport.”

Liam nodded to the pilot and went to sit by the window.

“Hey,” Drake sat next to his best friend. “Just try to relax okay? I can’t even imagine losing someone as you did, but you’re going to be a king soon. You can’t rule your country effectively if you keep all your loved ones out.”

Liam continued to stare out the window as the jet lifted into the air. “I know, but it’s like I’m giving up on ... her,” his voice hitched and he cleared his throat.

“You did everything you possibly could, Li,” Drake squeezed Liam’s shoulder before he stood to grab some snacks. “Bastien is still looking, so let him do that while you become king, okay?”

Liam turned away from the window and gave Drake a small smile. “Okay.”

#Everything Has Changed #trr au #trr #trr fandom #trr fanfic #trr fanfiction #the royal romance #the royal romance fandom #the royal romance au #the royal romance fanfic #the royal romance fanfiction #Liam Rys #Liam x MC #Liam x Ella

[midnxghtsunwrites]

SMOKESTACKS | 4, PAT-A-CAKE

previous chapter

SKIP TO OCTOBER

"WAKE UP, ASSHOLE!"

Jax is jolted awake by his mother's loud voice and heavy hand. She'd slapped his jeans-covered calf with her freshly done nails and dropped her handbag beside him. The run that the Sons did last night did nothing but feed into Jax's exhaustion. As President, he was meant to be on guard at all times but nobody ever really sees Gemma Teller-Morrow coming.

The man rubs a hand over his face, his ring cool against his skin. He rises from his position on the bed and glares at his mother, "What the hell is your problem?" His voice was gruff with exhaustion. He left when the sun was still high in the sky and returned when the sun was beginning to rise.

Gemma looks taken aback, "Where are your manners, you jerk?"

Jax resists the urge to roll his eyes but he just wants to go back to sleep, "Sorry," He corrects himself, popping his neck, "Rough night."

"Yeah, tell me about it," Gemma hums as she chews on her gum, "I got some stuff to handle at the shop. You gotta pick up Thomas from daycare and Abel from kindergarten."

Jax glances at the clock on his side table, ready to argue that it's too early for that, only to see that it's past four. "Shit," He mumbles before jumping to his feet. Passing the kutte on the dining room chair, he grabs the keys to his truck and turns to his mother who was following behind him.

Taking in the mischievous smirk on her face, the man furrows his eyebrows, "What's up with you?" He pulls on his hoodie despite living in California just days before Halloween.

Gemma tilts her head at her son's gaze. For the past three months, she'd gotten closer to Abel's teacher, often engaging in conversations about the little boy that would veer off into more personal topics. And by personal, she means sharing cobbler recipes and cooing over videos and pictures of Abel and Thomas when they were younger.

After Tara gave birth to Jax's second son, Thomas, she tried to rat and take the boys away from the MC President only for him to run her out of town without them. Of course, she didn't go easy so Jax was left to threaten her — either go voluntarily or in a body bag. He kept his boys and with the help of his mom, they'd been raising them for the past year.

Now, Jax deserves some love coming from someone that doesn't have a problem with his status. And that might come in the form of a kindergarten teacher. The only reason it took so long for her to start meddling was because she had to make sure that Nadine is a good person with no ulterior motives for being in Charming. Gemma doesn't know if she'll be okay with Jax's presidential status or what, but it's worth a try.

Gemma doesn't have to do shit at the shop. This ruse is to get Jax to finally meet the woman. It'll be a surprise for them both considering Gemma said nothing to the teacher about Jax picking Abel up.

"Nothing, baby, I just think Abel will be very excited to see his daddy." She plays it off, before cradling her son's face and pressing a kiss to his cheek, "Later."

"Later, ma."

NADINE STOOPS AT THE DOOR OF the classroom, playing Pat-A-Cake with Abel. It was an hour past the time everyone was picked up. Well, everyone but Abel Teller here. Nadine had no qualms about staying after school to wait with him until Gemma picks him up, but she finds it unusual that she's so late.

Gemma is usually the first one in the door.

"No, you're supposed to —" Nadine says with a giggle as she tries to show Abel how to play the hand game that goes with the nursery rhyme, "There you go, you got it!"

The game goes on for a little while longer before the door to the kindergarten building is pushed open and a blond man dressed in a black hoodie and baggy jeans steps over the threshold. In his arms is a boy younger than Abel by about two years — they look very much alike. The man's hair is slicked back and a smile is wide on his face when his blue eyes set on Abel's.

For a second, all Nadine can think about is how crazy this man must be to be wearing a thick, black hoodie in the heat of California. Maybe he's used to it.

"Hey, little man," The man greets the boy. Looking at him, Nadine can see the resemblance — must be his dad. Abel rushes over to his dad and brother and jumps into his arms. With sheer strength, the man lifts both of his boys into his arms and kisses Abel's forehead.

"Daddy!" Abel squeals, excitedly. Nadine watches silently from her corner of the room. She stands and grabs Abel's backpack, waiting for the right moment to step over and hand it to them.

"Hey, I'm sorry for being late." The man apologizes to his son as he puts him back down so his feet hit the floor, "You had fun at school today?"

Abel nods eagerly as he looks back at his teacher who sends him a small smile, "Yeah, Ms. Parker taught me Pat-A-Cake!"

The man follows his son's gaze and looks to the woman standing by her classroom door. Taking this as her cue, the woman steps towards the man and his children, a meek smile on her face.

The closer she gets, the more attractive this man is. Damn. His face is rugged, a bright white smile on display and beautiful blue eyes sparkling in the sunlight. While his hair is slicked back, it still looks soft and tempting to run her hand through. "Nadine Parker." Instead of sticking out her hand for him to shake, she extends the arm with Abel's backpack.

The man moves in a suave motion, taking his son's bag into his grasp. He takes a hold of Abel's hand in the same grip and tilts his head at the woman.

"Jax Teller," He greets her.

Nadine smiles in greeting before turning to the young boy in his arms, "And you must be Thomas."

Jax glances down at his son and motions towards the teacher, "Say hi, little man." Thomas waves quietly. The two stir in silence for a millisecond before Jax continues, "Sorry for being so late and thanks for watching Abel."

Nadine shrugs, "Don't worry about it, stuff happens. I understand if you were late."

Jax nods and smiles a bit at her understanding nature. Looking around, he scans the empty area seeing that she was the only one there, "You good here alone?"

"Yeah, I have Ted the Janitor to keep me company," Jax's heart skips a beat at the sound of her soft laugh. Nadine was too caught up in her joke that she doesn't even see when his jaw clenched in interest, "Sorry, that was a bad joke."

Jax chuckles, "You're hilarious, Nadine. Don't worry."

The woman in question fights the heat that creeps up her neck and settles on her cheeks. Luckily, she's dark enough for it to not be visible.

The two sink into another bout of awkward silence. Jax's charming nature is suppressed in the presence of this soft-spoken woman, which surprises him in ways he didn't even know was possible. He scans her face before he feels a tug on his hand.

"Daddy," Abel speaks up, looking up at his father, "Can we go get ice cream now?"

Jax tears his gaze from the teacher and looks down at his son, "You up for ice cream right now?" His question was in the form that all babies receive questions — hypothetical.

"Yes, daddy," Abel nods eagerly.

Jax looks back to the teacher with a smirk on his face, "The boss has spoken."

"It seems he has," Nadine nods along, a smile growing on her face, "You guys have a good night."

"You too, Ms. Parker," Abel lets go of his dad's hand and hugs Nadine. She almost audibly awes before realizing how weird that would be. She doesn't even notice Jax staring at the two with a look of interest clear on his face.

It's only when Jax tells her goodnight and walks out the door towards his car that he realizes why his mother sent him here today.

He's not surprised — she's always sticking her nose somewhere.

TAGLIST

@gwenspacy @complacentviawattpad @dollyhoess @rosenoirwrites

#charlie hunnam #charlie hunnam imagine #charlie hunnam fanfiction #jax teller fanfiction #jax teller imagine

[myluciferiscody]

Dancing With Your Ghost p.1 (Request)

anon: Can u write a fic (or series if u want) where reader goes camping with some frens & she's the only 1 who can c the ded counselors. She makes friendly w/ Xavier & they get rlly close. They begin dating & no 1 knows y she's so happy. She has a whole other life when she's with the counselors & likes it more than her normal living 1. After some thinking, she pops the question & asks Xavier 2 find a way 2 kill her and keep her there with him, he asks y & she says it's cuz she's in love w/ him :o

I was going to wait until I finished “i loved you first” before posting, but the ideas kept coming and they won’t stop coming, so here it is!

pairing: Xavier Plympton x Reader

word count: 2,706

warnings: non (yet)

part 2

You scrambled out of the van, staring up at the faded sign of Camp Redwood. Your friends were laughing as they gathered their belongings, but you were too busy observing the abandoned murder sight from over thirty-years ago. You had read countless books and television documentaries of what transpired here. It was odd seeing it in all of its run-down glory.

"y/n! Catch!"

You turned just as your friend Winter tossed your bag of belongings. You caught it with one hand, shouldering it, while still looking around. As interested as you were in both massacres that occurred here, it wasn't your idea to choose it as a camping site. Your friends were real crime buffs, and this was their next stop, but taking it to the next level by staying overnight seemed a little much to you.

Winter trailed next to you, followed by Riley and Dorothy, who trailed behind with their phones at the ready. You stepped over the piles of leaves, tripping over random holes in the ground as Winter teased you.

"This place is awesome!" Riley said, taking a picture of a cabin with boarded-up windows and graffiti. "Why didn't we come here sooner?"

"I wanted to go to Briarcliff," Winter said, "After all the bodies they found there a few years ago, no fucking way!"

The four of you walked around, taking pictures, and enjoying the California sunshine on your skin. You and Winter had moved here for school almost four years ago now, meeting Riley and Dorothy in one of your classes. You were not looking forward to moving back to Michigan after graduation.

You had found a decent place by the lake, the one rumored to be bottomless. Riley wanted to sleep in one of the cabins, but most were boarded up entirely and inaccessible. It seemed like you'd be setting up the tents you brought instead.

Winter urged you to take off your clothes to swim. The swimsuit you were wearing was from the Summer before, but it still felt nice. You laid in the sun while the others tested the waters, yelling that it was cold, and their nipples were hard.

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw movement in the woods surrounding the lake. It was very brief, but you knew you saw a dark purple shirt and shorts. You sat up, squinting against the sunlight. There was nothing there.

"y/n! Come and swim with us!" Dorothy splashed water your way, barely reaching the towel you laid out on.

You glanced back toward the woods, seeing a bird hopping along the ground for some food. You stood up, preparing to jump in with the girls. It was ridiculous, it was only the four of you here.

***

Some hours later, the coolers had been drug out onto the sand, and drinks were being passed around. Your belly was full from dinner, and you laughed as Dorothy and Riley were talking about how hot Captain America is.

"I'm gonna use the bathroom," you set down your drink, standing up. Winter laid sprawled out beside you, singing a Lana Del Rey song under her breath.

You grabbed the small bag of toiletries you had brought, planning on finding a bush to use. You felt slightly embarrassed, never imagining that you'd be relieving yourself surrounded by nature. The sun was starting to set, and very few lights worked around the camp. You fumbled with your phone, about to turn on the flashlight when-

"What's that in your hand?" You screamed, dropping your bag and phone, turning around to see a young woman with the blondest hair you had ever seen. She smirked at you, and you realized she had a striking resemblance to Winter.

"Who are you?" you wheezed, bending down and grabbing your stuff, keeping your eyes on her.

"I'm Montana!" she outstretched her hand towards you, "I'm a frequent visitor,"

You hesitantly shook her hand, seeing that she was kept nicely. "N-Nice to meet you, I'm y/n,"

"What are you holding?" she asked again, gesturing towards your phone.

"It's my phone, haven't you seen one?" you laughed lamely, showing her your smartphone.

"May I?" she asked.You hesitated before placing it in her hand. You watched as she toyed with it, her mouth falling open as you heard a random YouTube video playing. "This isn't a phone!" she exclaimed as she simultaneously smacked the screen a few times.

You were very confused as she handed it back to you. You forgot you were fighting the urge to pee yourself. Montana noticed the look on your face and grinned, before looking directly behind you. "Xavier!"

"What's going on over here?" you whirled around, starting to panic, thinking you were being ambushed. You saw a man wearing a plum shirt and shorts, a perfectly sculpted tuft of dirty blond hair on top of his head. You were entranced by his striking blue eyes that brightened at the sight of you.

"I'm talking to my new friend, y/n!" Montana grinned, "She's very nice, check out her phone!"

Xavier stepped closer to you, craning his neck as you showed him with a trembling hand. Montana was telling him about the random video that was playing, and he looked interested.

"Are you guys camping here too?" you asked finally, interrupting them when Montana wondered if you'd be able to find Aerobics tapes on them.

"You could say that," Xavier smirked at you. "Is this your first time here?"

"Yeah, I came with my friends," you nodded. Montana was grinning oddly at the two of you.

"You wanna hang out? You could tell me more about this device," Xavier handed your phone back that was running low on battery life.

You looked at the eager looks on their faces. Off in the distance, you could still hear your girls talking and laughing, probably getting drunk as you speak. A few minutes wouldn't hurt.

"I'd love that." you smiled.

***

The sun had set as you sat with Xavier and Montana under one of the only working lights in the camp. The subject changed from your phone to the current president, all the way to what exercises were popular. As odd as you found their questions, Xavier explained in a rather flat tone that they were people of nature and had quite the Amish existence.

Montana left after a while, talking about some guy named Trevor, leaving you alone with Xavier. He seemed very comfortable around you, which made you feel slightly better. He kept a safe distance, asking you about your life and the friends you came with. Xavier listened intently, a look of confusion appearing every once in a while when you mentioned social media.

He has to have some idea of what things are like now, you thought to yourself.

The more you spoke with him, the more he felt familiar to you. You couldn't quite put your finger on why or how. You never met someone like him; his beauty was one of the ages. He told you about his life before they moved out here, saying he was a gym instructor and was trying to break out into the acting scene that never worked out.

"It's getting cold," you commented, still wearing your tank top and shorts from earlier. Your now dead phone and bag sat at your feet.

"I'm sorry for keeping you this long," Xavier said, rubbing the back of his neck. His earring sparkled in the moonlight. "You can-"

"Y/N!" voices called your name, some louder than others. You had jumped, standing up from your spot on the wooden stairs when Xavier froze in his place.

"I'm over here!" you called, seeing flashlights heading in your direction. You saw Winter first, as she spotted you and skipped over, her cheeks flushed after the alcohol she consumed.

"There you are!" she gasped, bringing you in for a hug - a clumsy one at that. "WE WERE SO WORRIED!"

"Yeah, y/n, you've been gone for like an hour," Riley said.

"I'm sorry you guys, I was just talking to Xavier and Montana," you explained.

The three girls gave you a questioning look, despite being intoxicated. Winter stared at you, "Who?"

You frowned, pointing behind you with your thumb, "I met a camper, his name is Xavier-" you had turned around, only to stop in your tracks where the seat he once sat in was now empty. "Wait!"

"y/n, y/n, y/n, are you high?" Winter snorted at you. "There's nobody else here!" 

You turned around now, looking for a sign that you weren't making this up. There were no footprints, no butt marks on the seats beside your own, nothing. You stuttered, attempting to explain who was sitting with you while your friends gave you concerned stares.

"I think you've had a long day!" Dorothy cooed, gently grabbing your arm. "Let's go back to camp! We have a long day tomorrow!"

You grabbed your stuff, your mind reeling as you followed them back to camp. You glanced behind you one last time, not seeing either of your new friends anywhere.

You woke up bright and early the next day, quietly creeping around as you changed into your new clothes. You made some breakfast, the little fire providing some much-needed warmth. You had shared a tent with Winter, who hogged most of the blankets. You gazed around, trying to spot Xavier and Montana, but they were nowhere to be found.

You unplugged your phone from the battery pack you brought, thinking if you got a picture with at least one of them, they'd believe you. You made sure the fire was kept low before setting off.

The sound of small animals and birds was the only thing you could hear now that the girls were asleep. Xavier and Montana never explicitly said where they were standing. They couldn't be that far away from you.

You stopped walking, looking off in the distance, and seeing the incredible hills and valleys surrounding the camp. You took a few pictures, smiling at the beauty of it all when you heard what sounded like a branch creaking above you.

You looked up, seeing nothing.

You took a few steps away, hiding under the shade as you continued to admire your surroundings. It wasn't long before you heard it again, looking up with a scowl when-

"CAWWWWW!"

You screamed when a towering figure jumped down, threatening to squash you. You dodged it just in time, nearly tripping over a root when you heard hysterical laughter.

A young black man was holding his sides, his overalls red and clean as a whistle as he buckled over. You stared at him with wide eyes, your heart beating a mile a minute.

"Aw shit, aw shit, that was better than I could have imagined!" he cackled, before two figures appeared from behind him, laughing along. It was them.

"Ray, you could have killed her!" Xavier said through his quiet laughter.

"She's fine! Aren't you, darling!?" Ray laughed again before going into a coughing fit.

"I-I think my heart stopped for a moment," you said, starting to laugh a little yourself.

"I know what that's like." Montana sighed dreamily.

Xavier gave her a comical look, before turning his attention to you. "Don't mind her, she's one of the most morbid people I know."

You smiled a bit, shaking Ray's hand when he offered it to you.

"You're friends, I take it," you said, before realizing how stupid it sounded.

"For a long time," Ray tossed an arm around Xavier's shoulder, who shrugged it off. "Tough love..." he mumbled.

"Come on, Ray, let's leave them," Montana said, now putting her arm around Ray, leading him away. Ray waved at you before making kissy faces at Xavier, who glared at him.

"I'm sorry about him, he can be a little much," Xavier smiled awkwardly.

"Where did you go last night?" you questioned. Xavier's face immediately fell, looking towards the scene you were previously admiring.

"I get a little nervous around people, anxiety, you know?" Xavier replied.

"Oh," you frowned, deciding not to push him any further. "I'm sorry if my friends scared you off, they can be loud when they're drunk,"

Xavier laughed at that, taking a seat in the dirt. You were surprised at this, as his appearance always seemed to be impeccable. You followed him, crossing your legs as you strained your neck to glance down at the sparkling water below.

"It's fine, I used to be like that too," he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, "I stopped a long time ago, it didn't interest me anymore,"

Just like the night before, you started talking about many things. You once again showed Xavier your phone, attempting to bring up Instagram in what little connection you had on this side of camp. His eyes lit up when you joked about how influencers were treated like celebrities most of the time.

"You should make an account, you'd have a cult following," you laughed, making him smile.

"Maybe one day, I don't even have a Snapbook,"

"Facebook," you corrected, hiding your giggle.

"Oh, sorry," Xavier wrinkled his nose. "What's the other one?"

"Snapchat," you masked your laugh again.

"It's not polite to laugh!" Xavier teased you, squinting his eyes as you finally lost it, knowing you would remember this moment forever to tease him later.

"I'm sorry, but that was the cutest thing I ever heard anyone say," you admitted, not realizing the implications of your words.

"Oh, you think I'm cute, huh?" Xavier teased you again, "That makes two of us."

You playfully shoved him, before asking him to take a photo with you. Xavier seemed hesitant at first before you took his very first selfie. Xavier asked when the film was supposed to pop out, tapping around your phone case.

"No, no, phones don't do that," you took it from him, showing him the picture from the gallery. Xavier's jaw dropped again, and you told him to go ahead and swipe. He saw the pictures you had taken earlier, as long as a few photos of your car ride with the girls on the way here before he gave it back.

"That's unbelievable, when I was growing up they said we'd have flying cars, not phones with touch screens and cameras!"

You laughed, believing him to be joking, but Xavier really wasn't. He didn't say anything, only laughing with you to avoid the real reason why he was at Camp Redwood.

Xavier encouraged you to walk around with him, and you took turns taking photos of each other, individually and together. He got the hang of it pretty quickly, not making any burst shots after the first fix or six times.

As much as you didn't want the day to end, you had already spent nearly four hours with him. Winter had texted you, saying they had just woken up and wanted to go on a hike.

Xavier seemed to realize it was time to let you go. He led you back towards the lake, asking when you were leaving.

"We're supposed to head back tomorrow afternoon," you explained, "Our spring break is over in a few days," you sighed, thinking of all of the homework that would be piled on your desk in the coming weeks.

"You go to school here, right?" he asked, trying to remember their conversation from last night.

"Yeah, I graduate in June," you sighed, "Then it's back home to Michigan with Winter." you frowned a little, realizing Xavier would be one of the friends you'd be leaving behind now.

Xavier didn't say anything, only stopping near the same cabin you met him yesterday. He smiled at you, "Uhh, if you're free later, Ray said something about a full-moon tonight if you wanna see it." he said lamely, and you could see the amusement in his eyes.

"I'd love that!" you smiled, "I can meet you here?"

"Awesome!" Xavier smiled. You both stood there, staring at each other before Xavier finally said, "I'll see you later." you nodded, watching as he headed back the way you came. You stared until his back disappeared from view before you met your friends at the lake.

taglist: (feel free to ignore)

 @the-walking-daryl @trichy-knitts @shydragonrider @thefandomzoneisdangerous @lemonwhiskers @jetblackpayne @langdonsvcrd @okoktrinity22 @uwonman @stefanmikaleson1864 @sevenwonderwitch @rubbrninja @iamnotjesha @leatherduncan @imshakingandcryingrn @bratzblitz @goblackcat69 @brookethompsonownsme @bookoffracturedescapes @zodiyack @bitchchatter @guiltyfiend @psychobitchtess​ @aangrana​ @thexmancometh

#xavier plympton x reader #jim mason x reader #michael langdon x reader #duncan shepherd x reader #Cody Fern #ahs1984 #ahs imagine #request #ray powell #montana duke #xavier plympton imagine

[aion-rsa]

1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything Review – The Revolution Is Hummable

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Apple TV+’s 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything is immersive and fairly ambitious. The eight-part documentary series wants to run 33 revolutions per minute, and only comes up about a third short. It captures how musicians’ fingers were on the pulse of the day’s headlines and the laid the tracks for the nights’ rhythms.

Artists sang the news, sometimes causing it, other times reacting. Rock and roll had grown up and rock musicians took on responsibilities. Rhythm and blues got loose and soul musicians took to the streets. A former University of California philosophy professor named Angela Davis was charged with aiding and abetting the murder of a judge and Aretha Franklin personally offered to post bail.

The documentary series points out how The Beatles took the lead on youth culture movement during the 1960s, and how the elder society tried to beat it down in the 1970s, only to have John Lennon read the news and write “Gimme Some Truth,” before breakfast. Or to charge Oz Magazine, a British underground newspaper, with obscenity, and find Lennon outside the courtroom with a bullhorn in his hand and a single about it on a flipside. British television tried to celebrate the wake of the Beatles’ breakup with regressive programming. American TV fought to stay as progressive as its radio stations.

The docu-series was inspired by the book Never a Dull Moment: 1971 the Year That Rock Exploded by David Hepworth, but leaves out all the more gossipy bits. We don’t get cake from the Mick and Bianca Jagger wedding, but we get exiled with the Rolling Stones right on Main Street. Co-directed by Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy, Diego Maradona), James Rogan and Danielle Peck, 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything doesn’t look away from rockstar excesses, but it also doesn’t indulge them. We get the feeling albums by the Stones and Sly and the Family Stone may have achieved perfection through the sloppiest of accidents.

The artistic stories are a lot of fun to watch, though. Listening to Keith Richards talking about getting out of France minutes before both the mob and the cops were about to bang down the door is almost as much fun as sitting in the mid-section of the speedway concert at Altamont. Far enough away from the Hell’s Angels pool cues, but close enough to feel the danger, and still at the right place for the sound mix.

The best part of 1971: The Year Music Changed Everything is the footage. We get a clip of George Harrison and Bob Dylan rehearsing a song they didn’t do on stage at The Concert for Bangladesh. Home movies capture the Stones in Villa Nellecôte, scoring dope and nodding out during sessions for Exile on Main St. There is footage of James Brown performing in Paris which hasn’t made its way to his fans here. Gritty black and white celluloid shows David Bowie awkwardly miming his way through his first visit to Warhol’s Factory. Candid photos capture insanely intimate moments like a fan biting Marc Bolan’s hair. It is fun to watch Dick Cavett try to crawl up his own ass while trying to interview James Baldwin and Sly Stone. One highlight is the Ike and Tina Turner Review, along with the Staple Singers and dozens of other Black musicians visiting Ghana for a concert.

It is exhilarating to hear Marvin Gaye explain, in his own words, why What’s Going On was the record he was put on this earth to make. It is very cool hearing Lennon say how much it means to have revolutionary music coming from Gaye. There are no talking heads. Interviews, like those done with Elton John, are only heard through voice-overs. This adds to the intimacy of Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders remembering how personally she took Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s song “Ohio,” after having been on the campus at Kent State during the shootings. It stands in stark contrast to President Richard Nixon declaring his love for “square music” while he gives an “off with their heads” glare at the most civil of disobedient young people.

The documentary mixes the musical stories with the period’s news. Archival footage includes protests, police brutality, the My Lai massacre trials, Charles Manson, and Lance Loud, who taught American families to embrace differences on the proto-reality TV show An American Family. The documentary also shows Nixon launching the war on drugs as a military offensive. It takes on the Attica prison uprising, and the prison study at Stanford, which proved anyone can be a mindlessly cruel bastard if they have something to hide behind, like a badge and a baton. The documentary doesn’t mention it, but the study seems even more accurate when considering the attempted damage done by anonymous Internet trollers. The documentary also offers a broad spectrum of retro-fashion tips.

The post-counterculture musicians didn’t only face political pressure. The documentary also highlights how newer artists were challenging the established pecking order of rock. A slightly premature delving into Glam Rock rebels Bowie and T. Rex’s Marc Bolan replaces any segments on heavy metal and hard rock. “We were creating the 21st century in 1971,” Bowie says in the opening of every installment. We applaud as Kraftwerk fires their drummer for a drum machine.

Because the series focuses on the theme of interactive social change, it skips a lot of what was happening musically in 1971. Some of it is understandable, and some appears arbitrary. Not to let one bad apple spoil the whole bunch, but the series includes a segment on the Osmonds but doesn’t mention The Jackson 5. While we get a broad overview of world music, we get precious little of the electricity of Latin percussion which propelled Santana and War. 

The doc talks about the growing Jesus Saves movement which was sonically represented in Jesus Christ Superstar, but they don’t even offer a sound clip of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, which proclaimed “man created god.” I get it, a lot of the rock and roll press, and I’m looking at you Rolling Stone, has had a bug up their ass about prog music for years. The documentary relegates all of eight seconds to Yes, but only as an example of the snobbishness of dinosaur rock. But this is 1971, even T-Rex is new. The Flintstones hadn’t been off TV for a decade.

“Rock stars, is there nothing they don’t know?” Homer Simpson once asked, reverently. That kind of thinking began in 1971. Musicians were the most influential people on the planet. When Carole King told you to get up every morning with a smile on your face, you felt beautiful. If Gil Scott-Heron warned you about the cop’s “No Knock” policy, you double locked your door. 1971: The Year Music Changed Everything is an excellent time capsule of music from a time which was a lot less innocent. How do we get that lack of innocence back?

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1971: The Year Music Changed Everything begins streaming on Apple TV+ on May 21.

The post 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything Review – The Revolution Is Hummable appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3hBH4ad

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[lovemesomesurveys]

Do you and your parents like any of the same bands/singers?  Yeah, especially my mom and I. Is there any food in your bedroom? Just my ramen bowl from last night that I haven’t taken out, yet, but it’s empty. Do you know anyone who has road rage? Yes. How expensive is too expensive for a pair of shoes?  I admit to liking my Adidas, which are pricy, but the kind I get are at least under a $100. How far away do your grandparents live from you? They live in another state, about a 12 hour drive away.

What kinds of cereal are in the cupboard? I think there’s just Cinnamon Cheerios at the moment. My family and I don’t really eat cereal much anymore.  Is there anything related to cats in your bedroom?  No. Whats the last thing you spent over 10$ on?  Stuff from Bath & Body Works. They have their fall/Halloween collection in and I just had to get some stuff. Over 30$?  ^^^^ Do you know who lives three houses down from you?  Nope. Do you think Canadians all really love maple syrup? Do they Lane? lol. I’m not Canadian, but I do love maple syrup.  Is there a bulletin board in your room?  Yep. Is your mom a big health freak or your dad? Or neither? Neither of them really are, but out of the two my mom is more than my dad. My dad has a major sweet tooth and he likes his junk food.  Easter or Halloween? I enjoy both. Do you know anyone who wants to be the president one day? No. What kinds of chips are in the cupboards?  I don’t think we have any at the moment. Do you have your moms or dads hair?  I have my dad’s hair color, but my mom’s waviness. She actually had curly hair and has all my life, but she says when she was a kid and teenager it was wavy and then it became curlier as she got older.  Whats the first thing you see when you walk into your bedroom? The 4ft giraffe stands out a lot.  Have you ever skipped history class?  In college I probably did sometimes. I didn’t make a habit of missing class, but it happened now and then either because I didn’t feel well or just didn’t feel up to it that day. I always made sure I knew what was going on that day (like nothing had to be handed in that day or there wasn’t a quiz or exam, of course) and thankfully because of the syllabus I could keep up with the reading and assignments. I just allowed myself to miss a day or two. Do you own any yellow clothes?  I have a yellow shirt and a yellow Adidas hoodie. Do you have any friends who have naturally red hair?  I have a cousin who does. Have you ever cried when a teacher retired?  No, but I cried on the last day of 4th grade because I just really liked my teacher lmao. Everyone loved him, he was awesome. It was cool because he ended up being an 8th grade teacher later on and I got to have him again. Does your kitchen looks like it was designed in a completely different decade? No. Whens the last time you wore heels?  Never. Do you have your moms or dads eyes?  My mom’s.  Is there anything shiny in the room youre in?  Yeah. Whats the best date movie? I wouldn’t know. How long has your current best friend been your best friend? All 31 years of my life. Have your parents ever been out of the country? Yes, they’ve both been to Italy before I was born and I’m super jealous. Actually, my mom went once when she was pregnant with me so I kinda went haha. I’d like to experience it for real one day. Are you older then the last person you laughed with?  Yes. How many pairs of jeans, all together, are in your house? I am not even going to attempt to figure that out. Do you swear and yell while playing video games?  No. Would you rather name your daughter Andrea or Eva?  Not having kids, but I do like the name Andrea. Is there any alcohol in the fridge?  I think there is. If you had to get up at 6am tomorrow morning, would it be painful? I’d be up considering I don’t even go to bed until like 7/8AM. :X Have you ever seen the last person you watched TV with drunk?  Yeah. Has a best friend ever ditched you for a girlfriend/boyfriend?  I had a friend do that. Would you rather get a new brother or sister? No new siblings at this point. My mom had a hysterectomy anyway, so unless she’s adopting, which she’s not, it’s not happening.  Do you have anything in your room youve had for ten years or more?  A lot of things. Do your pets chase after bugs?  My doggo chases flies sometimes lol. She sees me going after them with the fly swatter and she tries to help.  Would you ever kiss the last person who messaged you on facebook/MSN/etc? No. Do eat at home or in restaurants more? Well, I haven’t ate out at a restaurant since February. We do a lot of takeout, though. We did that a lot even before all this, I prefer it. Whens the last time you were so excited you couldnt sleep? Why?  Back in February the night before my Disneyland trip. Audrey Hepburn or Audrey Kicthing?  Hepburn. I’ve never even heard of Audrey Kitching.  Do you e-mail more often then you talk on MSN/AIM?  I don’t know about MSN, which I’ve never had, but AIM hasn’t been a thing for awhile. It’s been over a decade anyway since I’ve used it. I don’t email either, except recently to try and dispute a charge. If your best friends birthday was next week, what would you get them? Well, her birthday is actually next month so I’ve been thinking about what to get her. What is your moms favorite movie? Grease haha. <<< Ha, that’s one of my mom’s faves as well. How much older is your dad then you?  He’s 27 years older than me. What TV family reminds you of your own family?  Hmm. Do you own any flip-flops? Nope. I don’t wear flip flops, sandals, slip ons, or any open toed shoe. Did you ever really believe that the stork brought babies? Nah, my parents didn’t tell me that. Do you have any relatives who really spoil you?  My parents. Are there any drawers in your house that are just filled with junk?  Yeah, we have the designated junk drawer. I personally have a few :X Is the last person you spoke to in love?  Not that I know of. How far away is Chicago from where you live?  It’d be a 32 hour drive and like a 4 hour nonstop flight. Do you know anyone who always looks perfect? Who? I think my mom does. She likes to wear makeup, but I truly don’t think she needs it. I’m also super envious of her flawless skin, which I sadly didn’t get. Do you know anyone who has security cameras in their house?  Yeah. Do you think Zac Efron is really that good looking?  Eh, honestly I’ve never really found him attractive. What was the last movie to make you cry?  Hmm. I’m blanking at the moment. Has anyone you know ever pulled the fire alarm in school, joking around?  No. Who was the main character in the last book you read? Her name is Emma Griffin.  Is the last person you said goodbye to single?  One of them is. Who are the last people you saw kiss?  People on the show I was watching. Have you ever posted a fan fiction on a website?  No. Do you ever fantasize about your future wedding? Whos the bride/groom? Nope. I don’t plan on ever getting married. I’m also not the person who has dreamt of their wedding since they were little. Chapstick or lipgloss? Chapstick. I like ones with a tint of color. What was the last unplesant thing to wake you up?  A nightmare. Do you have any friends who are ALWAYS kissing their bf/gf?  Does that get annoying? Would you rather look at clouds or stars?  Stars. If you could trade appearances with the last person you hugged, would you?  Like I said, I’m super envious of my mom’s flawless skin and I think she looks beautiful with or without makeup. Do you have any relatives who are expecting a baby really soon?  No. Do you ever wonder what the opposite sex do at sleepovers?  Probably play video games, watch movies, and eat. When you get married, who will be the maid of honor/best man?  Sigh. Does your best friend get along with their parents? This same question was in a previous survey I just did. Anyway, yeah she was very close with them when they were alive, but sadly they both have passed away. :( If you were to walk to Florida from where you live, would it take long? Uh, yeah. I live in California and Florida is all the way across on the opposite side. According to Google it would take 912 hours to walk there! Do you understand why 'To kill a mockingbird' is called what it is? I know I learned about the reason why, but I don’t recall. Okay, so I just Googled it because I was curious and yep the explanation is what I was told. When's the last time you broke plans? Why? It’s been a few years now since I’ve had plans, but I started having to cancel and not make plans at all because of health stuff and just for the fact I was really going through a hard time. Have you ever been in a wedding? What were you?  Nope. Would you feel safer with an alarm systen or security camera? Both. Does the last person you touched smoke?  No. Do you know someone who is CONSTANTLY texting? Does that annoy you?  It only annoys me when I’m trying to talk to them because so often they’re too focused on whatever they’re doing on their phone. Does it matter to you what kind of shampoo you use?  Yeah. Rate this survey from 1 to 5 (1 worst, 5 best):  I don’t like rating stuff, but it was fine.

#personal #text #survey #surveys

[elopez7228]

Scenic Route 9/47

Read on AO3 : https://archiveofourown.org/works/18268208/chapters/43229774  

Start over : https://elopez7228.tumblr.com/post/620919089893933056/scenic-route-0147

***

The telephone blared again. He was standing in front of the bay windows which, fittingly, looked out onto the San Francisco Bay. It was drowning in fog as usual, in the swirling tendrils re-emerging from the ocean. The red headed man stood frozen in place. The ringing recommenced. He didn’t make a move. It began once more. He ignored it.

Once the device on his polished desk finally shut up, Hux checked his watch briefly and retrieved a cellphone from his pocket. She responded.

“Phasma.”

“I’m listening.”

“I hear there has been a development.”

“Everything has been set in motion. The car is heading north. Ms. Skywalker has booked a flight, the Tico sisters closed up shop and are headed south.”

“Where are you?”

“Following the car. The driver is a girl I don’t recognize. She must be a new recruit. English accent, has a dog with her. Haven’t been able to ID her yet.”

“Photo?”

“I sent it to you.”

“I’ll look into it. Anything else?”

“Yes.”

Her breathing quickened as though her heart had just skipped a beat. Hux froze, not daring to breathe. She would have to spit it out sooner or later.

“Sir, I...I was caught red handed. The girl made a scene out in the middle of the street too, she’ll probably gut me alive if she sees me again.”

Hux cursed under his breath. Whoever this girl was she was a fresh recruit for Earth Soldiers. Ever since he began dealing with these eco terrorists he had noticed that their mascot of a car rarely ever appeared, and even when it did it was always in the hands of the old-timers. And no one that he knew of ever got close enough to Leia Skywalker.

The moles that he had planted with care, excellent professionals like Bazine Netal, Boba Fett,  or Lando Clarissian never approached Skywalker level. Not even after months of distributing flyers and manifestos as stand-in rebel scum. Some were even kidnapped or worse...others switched sides. Hux slid his thumb over the screen to observe the photo Phasma had sent.

His eyes widened. She was young, likely under thirty, clad in denim and boots. Her demeanor entirely jaded.

She had been observed talking discreetly to Rose Tico, then spotted again at Leia Skywalker’s hideout, and finally caught in the act of driving the Millennium Falcon.

That made no sense. The heart of their pathetic born-again organization was in Denver, centered around old woman Skywalker. Her every move was monitored. Where did this girl come from? Who had trained her? How was she able to escape all of the eyes on the field until now?

He closed his eyes as his hand tightened into a fist. He had to regain control of his breathing. He held the phone to his ear again.

“Phasma.”

She was still on the line. No one hung up on Armitage Hux.

“Sir?”

“Come back. Don’t give her a reason to sound the alarm. Who else is in play?”

“Ren. And his clique.”

“Come to my office first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Yes sir.”

Hux hung up. Then he composed a series of directives to send from his smartphone. The Tico sisters had disappeared. They had to be located, never to be out of sight. Leia Skywalker was on 24/7 watch, they had to know where she was, what she was doing, what she was carrying, who she was talking to. The entirety of Earth Soldiers was moving at once, like a disoriented nest of ants. Connix, Antilles, Milham...he was had received notifications sent by his field agents from all over Colorado. But he knew it was merely a distraction. Skywalker would end up in California sooner or later. It was only a matter of time and patience.

His phone vibrated in his hand and he paled at the caller ID. Snoke.

The president of the First Order was certainly already aware of the movement of the activist group, he demanded a full debriefing.

Hux pursed his lips, placing his hands behind his back. He didn’t quite know what was going on himself, he hadn’t succeeded in figuring out the rebel strategy. But he was confident in his ability to counteract their plans, whatever they were.

Nevertheless, he wasn’t sure what to tell Snoke. It would have to be enough to let him know that the situation was being handled.

Taking a deep breath, he adjusted his uniform cuffs with impeccable precision and cleared the surface of his desk.

“Stop, Syed,”

Ben’s voice was frigid and it made the rocker’s eyes widen. The Kylo and the Knights crew were catching up at a bar in Pinedale, Wyoming. Kylo was there of course, along with the six other musicians.

Their guitarist, who went by Syed Ren, was grinding against Kylo’s shoulder while she traced his neck with a trail of tender kisses—which he had just rejected.

Syed was a woman of intriguing beauty, her flawless bronze complexion glowing softly under the red and blue neon lights. Her curls rose over her temples in a crowning mohawk, revealing her pierced ears and the elegant curve of her neck.

“What?” she demanded. “Are you done sulking? What’s up with you these days?”

Ben shrugged, fiddling with his phone. It hadn’t left his side in days, and she had noticed. She took it from his hands.

“You’re glued to this thing twenty four hours a day. Are you expecting a call or what?”

His eyes darkened and he held out his hand for Syed to give back the iPhone, but she kept scrolling through the contents while ignoring his glare.

She stopped at a random photo, her gaze turning ice cold. It was the picture of a young woman, definitely taken without her realizing because it was blurry and misaligned. Where had she seen her before? That freckle-faced brunette with the messy topknot and the large knapsack. Her face was oddly familiar.

It slid out of reach as Ben snatched it from her and locked it before slipping it into the pocket of his jeans.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he warned, and she could tell he wasn’t kidding. “Our little cover story shouldn’t make you forget why we’re here. If you can’t manage, I’ll find someone else to get the job done.”

“Okay, I get it, my bad,” she grumbled.

But she proved incapable of keeping all the venom out of her voice. “But you didn’t mention anything yesterday while you were enjoying yourself in my bed. Or any of the other times, for that matter,” she hissed.

Ben’s gaze hardened. “I thought we agreed that there were no strings attached here. No feelings between us and definitely no jealousy. Instead, I need you to be professional for once. This is the first and last time I’ll tolerate what you just pulled.”

“Go fuck yourself, Kylo fucking Ren,” Syed spat, knowing still that the conversation was over. Before he was her lover, he was her boss. And he demanded absolute discretion and loyalty. He wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of her for the smallest mistake.

She raised her bottle to her lips and turned to Saul Ren. But her conversation with the drummer took a rather debauched turn.

“If you’re feeling lonely tonight Syed, I’m happy to provide my services,” he offered.

“Shut up!”

Strangely enough, this cynical exchange greatly de-escalated the situation and Syed remained silent afterwards. She approached the circle of fellow rockstars to find them playing a casual game of pool. The ladies, Kelsi, Shakti, and Tyra, were far ahead of the gents, Skylar and Saul. The score would have been more even if Kylo had decided to play. The man was talented with a cue in his hands. Looking around, Syed noticed that he was far off, leaving the bar with his phone in hand.

Leaning against the wall, he lit a cigarette.

Syed was right. He was waiting for a call.

But just what was he hoping would happen? He wasn’t even sure she had found his number where he had stashed it. And even if she had found it, she surely would have thrown it away, cursing the arrogant and meddlesome Ben Solo. And she would be right. He went too far when he called her ex, that Finn guy.

Ever since she was at the mercy of the wheels of his car, he had stopped thinking rationally. The minute he had looked at her, something had collapsed.

Destabilized by her red-rimmed golden eyes (had she been crying too often?) and by her English accent which had taken him by surprise, he had lost his faculties and purposely scared her off. That would put some safe distance between them. But what was he safe from? Her smile? Her tears?

When their eyes had met from across the room at Howl at the Moon, his heart had skipped a beat. He’d tried to keep a neutral expression, but it had been so obvious that even Syed has belatedly realized that something was up with him. A twitch here, a shaky exhale there—she had felt it and she had instantly hated the intruder who had come between her and Kylo.

Ben had wanted to stay on top of the situation, but he had found himself discarding Syed and walking directly towards Rey in a single motion. It was magnetic.

She was slightly drunk and their conversation was marked by a caustic sort of tension by the time he lost control. She had left and he had chased after her, as though trying to break through the surface of something after being plunged deep inside for so long.  

When she knocked herself senseless against that streetlight, all he had to do was drop her off at some motel. Or just call an ambulance and trust the authorities to take care of the rest. But his curiosity had gotten the better of him and the excuse was too good to pass up. So he dialed Jessica from his own contact history and asked his way into Rey’s life. Now he knows who she was and why she was here.

He hailed a cab to the Four Seasons and booked her a room. But a voice inside his head warned him that the situation was getting out of hand.

She wasn’t just some well-meaning tourist looking for kicks. She was definitely someone else. She had immediately contacted Rose Tico, someone he had already been following. The next day she had ended up at Leia’s and then she had taken off with BB8 and the Millenium Falcon.

Ben had reported his findings to Snoke, and he knew that Phasma was on the trail. His task was done. But he remained on the look out, ready to strike at the president’s word.

It was all too perfect to be a coincidence. She probably threw herself at his car on purpose. She was a rebel spy for Earth Soldiers and had made the whole “damsel in distress” persona up. And it had worked perfectly—hook, line, and sinker.

That was real mistake on his part, a weakness.

Rey was a weakness he could no longer permit. She was a trap and he had fallen for her.

His phone rang, snapping him back to reality.

#reylo #fanfiction #scenic route #Modern AU

[mikenips]

Do Sitting Ducks Take Acid

Woke up today with the same fear I wake up to everyday.  The mail on the table isn’t addressed to me.  But I’ve been known to break the law here and there.  So I read the open letter anyways.  The federal government with the news of the oncoming impending doom.  Twelve hundred in the bank account.  Sincerely.  President Donald J. Trump.  It feels surreal.  A sittin’ duck listenin’ the broken record skip for the past four years.  The loop echoes in the news and Facebook comments.  But just now recognizin’ that every revolution brings you back to where you started.  Recognize you’re stuck in the loop and there’s no way to spin on.  Move past it.  Pick up the needle at his signature copied to millions of people.  It’s real.  There’s nothin’ left to do now but face it.  And hope you can jump the acid loop.  Skip past election day.  And it’s all over.

All things must pass.  Everyone out here strokin’ the Beatles off.  But don’t wanna face the reality of George Harrison’s oncoming impending doom.  All things must pass.  The lines of ecstasy drip into the nosebleed.  Eventually come down.  Left sweaty and shirtless in your room.  Alone.  Watchin’ Big Bird sing at Jim Henson’s funeral.  Made it through years of revolution.  Revolution is comin’ to a doorstep near you come this November.  Look outside.  Wish the sun good morning.

Grow up.  Jim Henson’s dead man!  Step on the porch.  Nose clogged with baby lax and amphetamines as the hundred from unemployment unravel into ones.  Light a cig with coffee as the sunrises.  Maybe it’s the ketamine or acid or the fuckin’ coffee.  But step outside and realize you don’t remember how to get to Sesame Street.  And the neighbors you’ve lived next to for three years but don’t know their names don’t wanna see this shit outside their doors every morning.  Shit man.  There’s kids that live here.  They don’t wanna see you gaspin’ for air.  Hidin’ from the sunlight.

“I’m fine grandma.  Just sat down to play Scooby-Doo with the homies.”  Heathcliff the Big Cheese spits the oncoming impending doom into the phone.  Another story for her to tell her friends.  The needle keeps spinnin’ on the edge of the wax.  He tells you if you don’t beat the game the whole world is gonna implode.  Shit.  Between the Pentagon confirmin’ the dude from Blink-182 isn’t just a cook from our childhood but was onto aliens long before the CIA.  California is lookin’ like Blade Runner 2049.  Or some other movie set Hollywood uses to make underdeveloped countries look overly polluted.  A facist is paying our rent while plannin’ a coup.  And the hundreds of thousands dead are just sacrifices to keep Wall Street above the risin’ sea levels in the midst of a pandemic.  2020 is really turnin’ into some type of apocalypse film.  Arthur Lee always said the news of today will be the movies of tomorrow.  But I’m not so sure I wanna stick around to see the ending.  Not sure if I want this chapter included in my semi-autobiographical choose your own great American adventure novel.  I want the thrill of meetin’ new people and them sayin’ they’ve heard a lot about me.  Just don’t know if this is a part I want them to hear.

Drag on the cig while takin’ in the drag of reality outside the living room.  The grass seems more vivid.  More harsh.  But the neighbors don’t see the cosmos exhaled.  They don’t see the constellations of ash and clouds smoked through your nostrils to avoid a dry socket and another couple hundred dollar dental bill.  They don’t see the cliche survival story of hours spent researchin’ sellin’ plasma to pay the bill.  They don’t see that me and my friends are out here birthin’ our own cosmos.  We know the world can be as simple as Fraggle Rock.  And now without Jim Henson it feels like someone is pullin’ the puppet strings in a different direction.

We are the lonely and desperate people John Sinclair told you about.  We collage together sound bites and Harmony Korine B-rolls.  News broadcasts and Instagram photos.  Makin’ our own vibe boards.  Boredom is the vibe.  Cause no matter how far you move the needle.  You keep revolve in the same loop.  The constant struggle to make the moment bearable.  The Guilty Undertaker tries to drone it out behind chord organs and omnichord beats.  File it under the audiobooks on Bandcamp.  Like some self-help book that didn’t include an instruction manual.  It reads like noise.  But in relative pitch plays back like a symphony on the reel to reel.  But it just revolves back to where you started.  Nothing.

“Yeah.  I think hating yourself is just part of your twenties.”  PJ Banana tells you this.  While pissin’ into the oncoming impending doom in my front yard.  Takes a bump with a Gumby like omnipresence.  Downs the beer with toddler like chaos but is too old for childhood games like kick the can and nitrous oxide.  Somethin’ about that last third makes ya puke up all the drunken coherence.

We resist.  We take the streets.  We play rock and roll music in sweaty basements till one in the morning.  Record revolves in the living room.  Nobody is listenin’ to any of it.  No matter how much the record skips we just fall into the loop.  We grow into somethin’ we hate.  Throw in the towel after he says he deserves a third term for reckless endangerment.  Then pack it up for the burbs.  A place the news and movies don’t wanna go.  Replace the familiar characters of Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster with Phil the dentist who treats himself to another year of golf at the club on your unnecessary root canal financed by your plasma.  The lobotomizing mundane doesn’t hurt as much as the oncoming impending doom.  Call it god or Santa Claus.  But at the end of the day we’re still gettin’ punished.

Unwind in a hammock without the sound of duster cans firin’ in the distance.  Unsure if your actions are an ironic joke at your own expense.  You always said don’t take yourself so seriously.  Shove metal through your flesh.  The good memories never stay.  Only the nasty wounds scar.  You let your life imitate the art you once lived.  Masochistically ink yourself.  Tattoo the good memories that burnt up with the braincells from aluminum foil bowls.  You don’t remember the stories.  But you can still see Skaterino outside the club askin’ where the party’s at.

You can’t see his face or the Carhart beanie that probably stays on durin’ sex.  But you can see his smile.  Nicotine stains in his teeth glisten with childlike optimism at the oncoming impending doom.  Every morning I wake up with the same fear his question left with me that night outside the ol’ OLL.  Every morning I wake up to the shower head I don’t recognize.  But the familiar dirt on the ground.  Every morning I wake up to images of people that did terrible things to their bodies taped to my walls.  Everyday I wonder if I know where the party is at when I wake up.  A room of burnouts and drunks like sittin’ ducks gets you the fix we all crave when they say they’ve heard a lot about you.  We all live in the hopes someone else shares our urban legend to people we may never know.  A room of burnouts and drunks like sittin’ ducks in the rain dancin’ their cares away with the fraggles will always be more aware than Phil the dentist pullin’ a tooth from your skull with pliers in the most unprofessional medical procedure.  How much college do you need to learn how to destroy lives?

Everyday I wake up with the same fear that this is the day the party ends.  The drugs come down.  The fascists burn the Constitution in an Antifa organized wildfire to spread climate change propaganda.  Everyday I wake up with the fear that this is the day the fear ends.  I meet Jim Henson in the dead end alley where Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock converge with the oncoming impending doom.  Everyday I wake up with the fear someone just moves the needle forward and we’re still in a loop but with a different revolution bringin’ us back to where we started.

I see his name signed on a piece of government mail.  It surreally makes this apocalypse film a reality.  The Guilty Undertaker hits a bowl of salvia.  PJ Banana screams his head hurts.  His hands are sweaty.  And his face is hot, man!  His face is hot!  Before lockin’ himself in the bathroom with a fifth of Hornito’s.  But I know outside my door.  And outside my neighbors’ doors.  Revolution is happenin’ all around us.  People are birthin’ their own cosmos in the midst of space and time and whole damn continuum.  We’re all writin’ our own semi-autobiographical choose your own great American adventure novel.  Somewhere outside all our doors the ducks are on acid, dancin’ their cares away in the puddles and rain.  Somewhere Skaterino is askin’ where the party’s at.  Nicotine stains glistenin’ with childlike excitement and naivety.  Somewhere the angels are screamin’ at every single one of us sellin’ our bodies to the plasma bank.  While tryin’ to make the most of the oncoming impending doom and over inflated cost of dental work.

All of this must pass.  And we all wake up with the same fear that this is the day the scene ends.  This is when we forget how to get to Sesame Street and move to the burbs instead.  We wake up with the fear that someone is gonna skip our needle forward to a new loop on a broken record.  But hopefully someone sees the constellations in the clouds we smoke.  And are comforted by the hope someone out there is sayin’ they’ve heard a lot about us before we even meet ‘em.  But everyday we wake up with the fear that the reassurance our urban legends of cosmos we create are recognized won’t be enough to end the revolutions of the dronin’ loop of our oncoming impending dooms.

#psychedelic vomit #vague glimpses of beauty #brief moments of clarity #grown up fucked up #somewhere the angels are screaming

[bountyofbeads]

Latinos, Sanders's secret weapon in Nevada, could make him unstoppable on Super Tuesday

https://news.yahoo.com/latinos-sanderss-secret-weapon-in-nevada-could-make-him-unstoppable-on-super-tuesday-015922411.html

BERNIE SANDERS SECRET WEAPON, LATINOS, COULD MAKE HIM UNSTOPPABLE GOING INTO SUPER TUESDAY

By Hunter Walker and Andrew Romano | Published February 22, 2020 | Yahoo News | Posted February 23, 2020 |

LAS VEGAS — Bernie Sanders’s Nevada caucus campaign ended with a convincing win Saturday afternoon, thanks in large measure to a 37-percentage-point victory among Latino caucus-goers. But the seeds of that victory were sown five years ago when a staffer on Sanders’s first presidential bid had trouble reading a Spanish website.

It was Memorial Day weekend 2015, about a month after the Vermont senator launched his long-shot challenge to Hillary Clinton. Sanders was short on resources; his staff was a skeleton crew, with no one who could translate Spanish. So the campaign summoned Chuck Rocha, the founder and president of Solidarity Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in reaching Latinos and blacks that was launched by Rocha in 2010. He charged Sanders triple his usual rate to work on the holiday.

“I remember sending him an invoice for $824, which was a big invoice for me,” Rocha told Yahoo News in an extensive interview five days before the Nevada caucus. “Little did I know that that $800 invoice would turn into millions and millions of dollars of work for Bernie Sanders.”

In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted two Sanders events, claiming the candidate wasn’t paying enough attention to racial issues. Jeff Weaver, the 2016 campaign manager, hired Solidarity Strategies to ensure that the senator’s work was, as Rocha put it, “reflective of the larger diverse communities.” Soon Rocha was consulting on minority hiring, outreach and advertising for Sanders. By the end of the race he was in charge of all of the campaign’s print communications.

Now Rocha, a 51-year-old self-described “Mexican redneck” who campaigns wearing a cowboy hat and driving a rented pickup truck, has become a leader of Sanders’s 2020 operation. While he remains in charge of his firm, Rocha officially joined the campaign last year as a senior adviser with a broad purview that includes general strategy, hiring staff and overseeing print ads and merchandise. Rocha also crafts the campaign’s Spanish-language ads on television, radio and the internet. If anyone is responsible for the huge Latino outreach effort that has helped propel Sanders to the front of the Democratic pack, it’s Rocha.

The innovative program is a dramatic contrast to 2016, when Clinton had highly specialized minority outreach operations and Sanders struggled to woo voters of color.

“This time around the Sanders campaign really has invested, and you see them everywhere,” says an operative who worked on Latino outreach for the Clinton campaign in 2016 and then worked with a 2020 candidate who left the race. “They are the ones who have consistently shown up at community events, in radio ads and newspapers. It’s very different from what they did in 2016. You have to understand the community first and then build your program around it — and I think they've done that."

That strategy could help make Sanders the nominee. The last time the senator competed in the Nevada caucuses, in 2016, he lost to Clinton by 8 percentage points. The defeat blunted Sanders’s momentum after his near-victory in Iowa and his New Hampshire landslide, and it put Clinton on a trajectory to win the nomination.

Yet there was an upside for Sanders that day: The Nevada entrance poll showed him beating the former secretary of state by 8 points among Latinos. The exact percentages were later disputed — the sample size was tiny, and precinct-level data suggested that Clinton did better than the poll indicated — but the larger implication was clear. In a race against America’s best-known Democrat, Sanders could hold his own in the Latino community.

The revelation took the senator’s own team by surprise.

“We didn't learn ’til the campaign was almost over how popular we were with Latinos,” Rocha said. “We had an idea, you know; 19-to-22-year-old Latinos thought Bernie was cool in ’16. But we didn’t realize that we could win their votes the way that we did, and we didn’t have enough time to take advantage of actually building the infrastructure to capture those votes.”

The lessons of 2016 gave Rocha an advantage heading into 2020 — and it was an edge that paid off Saturday, when entrance polls showed Sanders topping his nearest rival, Joe Biden, 53 percent to 16 percent among Nevada’s Latino caucus-goers. The same statistical caveats from 2016 still apply today. But this wasn’t an isolated incident. In Iowa, the entrance poll showed Sanders winning 43 percent of nonwhite voters; the next closest candidate was Pete Buttigieg with 15 percent. In New Hampshire, Sanders was nearly as dominant, winning nonwhite voters by 18 points and Latino voters by 22, according to the exit poll. Across the board, national surveys also show Sanders with anywhere from 30 percent to nearly 50 percent of the Latino vote.

To date, the Democratic Party has awarded only 2.5 percent of its 3,989 pledged delegates, so Sanders’s growing strength with Latinos hasn’t made much of a dent in the delegate math. But that’s about to change on Super Tuesday (March 3), when nearly 40 percent of the remaining pledged delegates will be doled out.

The good news for Sanders is that Super Tuesday’s two biggest prizes are California (415 pledged delegates) and Texas (228 pledged delegates) — states that also boast the largest Latino primary electorates in America (31 percent and 32 percent, respectively).

The calendar, in other words, is about to heavily favor the candidate who’s leading among Latinos. Mathematically, it could even make that candidate unstoppable.

The Sanders campaign has been preparing for this moment since last summer. On Saturday, the candidate skipped the usual in-state victory party in Nevada and traveled instead to Texas for a series of rallies. Two polls released this month show the senator leading in the Lone Star State for the first time. The day before the caucus, Sanders opted to leave Nevada to campaign in California, where the latest surveys show him ahead of the competition by more than 10 points overall and by more than 20 points among Latinos. Along with Texas and California, Rocha noted that Florida and Arizona primaries are both coming up, are heavily Latino, and are “loaded with delegates.”

“The math is right,” he said.

If Sanders wins both California and Texas, he will likely amass an insurmountable lead in the delegate count — and Rocha’s innovative Latino outreach effort will be a big reason why. Rocha believes campaigns have long botched their Latino outreach efforts by relying on largely white teams, insufficient investment and messages that aren’t “culturally competent.” He has sought to mount a push for Sanders that is historically diverse, large and involves a tailored advertising blitz.

“People say Latinos don’t vote. It’s because motherf***ers don’t ask them to vote,” said Rocha.

With his East Texas drawl and colorful sayings, Rocha is a natural raconteur who veers between swagger and self-deprecation. He’s clearly fond of telling his personal story. It begins in the town of Tyler, where he was born to two teenagers: a Mexican immigrant father and a white mother. After Rocha’s dad left five years later, he grew up eating “government cheese” in a mobile home on the grounds of his mother’s parents’ farm.

When Rocha was 18 years old, he had a child of his own. The experience led him to reconnect with his own father, who got him a job at the local tire factory. The gig ended up being Rocha’s entrée into union organizing — and ultimately, politics.

“Nobody in my family was involved in politics at any level,” Rocha said. “Nobody in my family had ever really graduated from high school, much less college. I was not a rabid activist in any way. I just wanted to get off my regular job to do union work, if I could, so I could drink more beer.”

Rocha became an officer with the local chapter of the rubber workers union, which merged with the United Steelworkers of America in 1995. Through the union hall, Rocha also began working on Democratic campaigns. In 1998 the national union summoned Rocha to Pittsburgh to serve as political director at the age of 30.

A decade later, Rocha left the union to start his firm. His career survived a potentially fatal setback in 2013 when he pleaded guilty to one felony count of embezzling from the union during his tenure as political director. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $2,000 after paying about $12,000 in restitution. Rocha describes the case as a partisan prosecution but also admits he “totally messed up” his expense reports, and he’s well aware the issue could have made him a liability for a presidential candidate.

“I am a convicted felon,” Rocha said. “And when you work in politics, that's not cool.”

Rocha claimed he tried to work for Clinton’s 2016 campaign before Sanders entered the field but wasn’t hired because his conviction came up during vetting. He nearly choked up while recounting the early meeting where he told Sanders and Weaver about his background. According to Rocha, they were both adamant that he shouldn’t spend his life paying for a past mistake.

“I’m not politically afraid of this story at all,” Weaver said in 2016 after Politico highlighted Rocha’s conviction, adding that he wanted the world to see that Sanders believed in giving a former felon a chance. “Please, I’m asking you to print.”

Staff diversity has, in turn, become the cornerstone of Rocha’s Latino outreach efforts for Sanders. He said the campaign has “Latinos in senior management in every department of the headquarters and in every state” — including 76 Latino staffers in Nevada alone, where Sanders also opened 11 offices and spent more than $3 million on Spanish-language advertising. Despite the encouraging signs from 2016, not everyone on Sanders’s campaign thought that a substantial investment in the Latino electorate — which typically turns out at a rate of less than 50 percent — would pay off. But Sanders himself was a believer, according to Rocha.

“It's something he talks to me about every time he sees me,” Rocha said of Sanders. “‘How is it going? What are we doing?’ He wants to know because he’s such an organizer. … He wants new people to vote, and he knows that there’s a treasure trove in the Latino community.”

Rocha’s ads for Sanders aren’t straightforward translations of his English messages; they are written specifically for Latinos and focus on the aspects of Sanders’s platform that most resonate with that audience, including raising the minimum wage, eliminating student debt, reinstating the DACA program, breaking up ICE and the Border Patrol and placing a moratorium on deportations to allow for an audit of past immigration policies.

The pitch is also heavy on Sanders’s own immigration story, which has been much more central to his 2020 campaign than it was in 2016; in fact, the first Spanish-language ad that Rocha ran in each medium focused on Sanders’s father coming to the United States from Europe “broke” and unable to speak English.

“Guess what? That's my grandfather’s story,” Rocha said. “That’s Latinos … somebody in our family. It’s their story.”

But while the overarching messages may be similar, the Sanders camp also adjusts its ads for different audiences within the Latino community. Ads targeted at Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans have slightly different scripts; print and radio ads designed to reach older Latinos have a different emphasis than digital commercials. And some ads aimed at Latinos aren’t in Spanish at all. In Iowa, where the population skews toward more recent immigrants, the campaign largely spoke Spanish; on Spotify, where they’re aiming for young Latinos, many ads are entirely in English.

Because Rocha’s own Spanish is “horrible,” he mainly relies on a 30-year-old undocumented immigrant named Luis Alcauter to design and write them. (Sanders speaks the language haltingly; Rocha told The Hill that he discourages his Anglo clients from using Spanish on the trail “because it normally does not go well.”) Rocha describes Alcauter as his “right-hand man.” He may also be the brash Rocha’s polar opposite: a soft-spoken Mormon who came to California’s Central Valley from Mexico as a teenager.

“It’s an incredible opportunity and a lot of responsibility to make sure that I represent my community and I talk to them and they’re able to understand,” Alcauter told Yahoo News.

Alcauter and the other Latinos on Sanders’s team aren’t just helping with campaigning. They’ve also influenced policy and helped craft Sanders’s immigration platform.

“We care about the issue, and it affects our lives,” said Alcauter. “So we wanted to make sure that we gather together, we put our minds together and we work on something that we're going to be proud of.”

It’s a clear example of one of Rocha’s core beliefs — that minority outreach work should be fully integrated into larger operations.

“We do all of this without a Latino department,” Rocha explained. “I was sick and tired of Latinos being window dressings for campaigns ... of seeing Latino outreach programs that were siloed off, underfunded, understaffed and never listened to.”

According to Belén Sisa, another undocumented staffer, this integration is emblematic of Sanders’s approach to politics.

“It shows what a Bernie Sanders presidency will be,” Sisa told Yahoo News. “It will be the people who were in the frontlines fighting for these things for years who are going to be putting together the solutions.”

Besides advertising, the Sanders campaign is reaching out to Latino voters personally. Bilingual staffers and volunteers are deployed to voters’ homes and have mailed out handwritten notes. Rocha has used databases to identify phone numbers that likely belong to Latinos to receive bilingual texts.

Over the past eight months, Sanders’s Nevada campaign hosted a slew of community events while also dispatching its massive volunteer army to knock on doors around the state. The day before the caucuses, the Sanders campaign announced that it had visited 500,000 homes in the state.

Jose Mariscal-Cruz, a 23-year-old Mexican-American from Reno, told Yahoo News that he made at least 2,000 of those visits. He took a year off from college to work as a field organizer for the Sanders campaign in Las Vegas. On Monday, Yahoo News followed Mariscal-Cruz as he campaigned among the colorfully painted bungalows in the heavily Latino neighborhood of East Las Vegas. He was accompanied by José La Luz, a prominent Puerto Rican labor activist from New York who served as a surrogate for Sanders in Nevada ahead of the caucus. The pair visited about 40 homes to deliver their fluent, finely tuned message to potential voters.

At two of the homes, Spanish-speaking elderly residents indicated that they were from Guanajuato in Mexico. Mariscal-Cruz rattled off his own family ties to the region, and La Luz piped in with a few lines from a ballad about the area by the famed Mexican singer Pedro Infante. The song brought a smile from a woman named Maria who said she and her husband had already voted for Sanders.

“We have a lot of faith,” Maria said.

“With faith, we can move mountains, God willing,” La Luz replied. “We know that the vote of our people is the vote that will be the difference.”

The Sanders campaign has already set up similar ground operations in California and beyond. During a debate watch party Wednesday at Sanders’s East Los Angeles field office, L.A. County Area Director Daniel Andalon and L.A. County Area Field Director Lewis Myers stepped outside to discuss how the operation in America’s most Latino metropolis has expanded over the last eight months.

“I get goosebumps just thinking about it,” said Andalon, a longtime operative who managed Hilda Solis’s winning 2014 campaign for county supervisor. “In the summer it was just us. We were meeting at McDonald’s and Denny’s and working out of our homes, much to our wives’ chagrin.”

According to Andalon, “Sanders has not spared any expense here.” That means opening four offices in L.A. County alone — including East Los Angeles, where the population is more than 96 percent Latino.

“We’ve knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors and made millions of phone calls out of this office,” Myers explained. “Last weekend we knocked on 62,000 doors. The weekend before that was 58,000 doors.”

As a result, Andalon said, “we’ve been able to broaden Bernie’s base to include “a lot more brown faces.”

Both Andalon and Myers said they haven’t seen their rivals competing for Latino votes in the area, with less than two weeks until the vote.

“There is no one who is running a program this robust,” Andalon said.

For Sanders, the hope is that California as a whole is a similar story to Nevada. The campaign is the largest in the field, with 105 staffers and 22 offices statewide — “most of them,” according to California State Director Rafael Návar, “in heavily Latino communities,” with “more in the [blue-collar] Central Valley than any other region.” Sanders’s own travel to the state has followed a similar pattern. According to a tally compiled by the Sacramento Bee, Sanders has held far more public events (37) in the state than any other candidate.

“Bernie came to Coachella for an office opening — a place no presidential candidate has come to since JFK,” Návar told Yahoo News. “That’s just not a place you have a presence usually. We’re in every congressional district and we’re playing for every delegate in the state. We’re not just focused on the urban hubs.”

In 2016, Sanders hoped to make a last stand against Clinton in California’s June primary, but he lost by more than a dozen points in part because she trounced him in the state’s top Latino areas. Sanders’s team also wasn’t sophisticated enough to focus its efforts on the less-populated, less-contested inland areas where they could claim a disproportionate number of delegates, some of which are awarded by congressional district. Ultimately, Sanders carried just eight of California’s 53 districts, allowing Clinton to widen her delegate lead and clinch the nomination. But Návar insisted that “having that experience means we have a lot stronger strategy than in the past.

“In 2016, we weren’t here until a month before the election. This time we’ve been very strategic about where we’ve homed in and are building up our base,” he said.

And Sanders’s campaign isn’t just courting Latinos in states like California and Nevada. Latinos make up just about 6 percent of the population in Iowa, which was the first state to vote in caucuses on Feb. 3. Still, Rocha mounted a Latino outreach effort there. According to a report from the UCLA Latino Politics and Policy Initiative, Sanders won a majority of the vote at Iowa’s high-density Latino caucus locations. That edge helped Sanders win more votes than anyone else in the crucial first state.

Rocha said the results in Iowa helped soothe skeptics of the campaign and gave him “some job security” by demonstrating that the campaign had not “spent all this money for nothing.” Rocha and his team plan to continue targeting smaller Latino populations in other key states, such as Wisconsin.

For Rocha and the other Latinos on his team — particularly the undocumented immigrants — the effort is deeply meaningful. Over lunch at a Mexican café in East Las Vegas, Sisa said the experience was beyond her “wildest dreams” — an opportunity to make the case that “immigrants deserve better, regardless of being documented or not.”

“I think no one [else] has been bold enough to say, ‘You may be undocumented, but you deserve health care,’” Sisa said. “‘You may be undocumented, but you deserve tuition-free college’ — because we all deserve those things.”

With his decisions to limit legal migration, end the DACA program and separate undocumented immigrants from their children, President Trump loomed large over the conversation.

So, it turns out, did his plane. In keeping with his strategy to shadow the Democratic primary by holding rallies in each early voting state, Trump visited Las Vegas during caucus week. As Alcauter left the café, he pointed to the sky.

“Look,” he said. “It’s Air Force One.”

As an undocumented immigrant, Alcauter said he believes Trump “from day one has been fighting against me.” But if the campaign is successful, Alcauter could go from feeling targeted by the president to being on his staff and taking flight with Sanders on Air Force One.

“I definitely dream about it,” Alcauter said. “That’s the reason we’re doing the work we’re doing.”

_____

#super tuesday #bernie sanders #bernie sander for president #bernie 2020 #2020 presidential election #2020 candidates #2020 election #politics and government #political science #us politics #politics #justice democrats #democratic party #democrats #u.s. presidential elections #u.s. news #election security #latino #minorities

[marnivanross]

★ have you seen [ MARNI VANROSS ] since the storm? some say they look like [ zoey deutch ] but they’re [ 21 ]  & go by [ THE SKEPTIC ]. [ she’s ] lived in halloway for [ 12 years ] & they are originally from [ LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA]. before the town vanished they were studying [ astronomy ] and lived at [ UNI BLVD ]. most people knew the [ CISFEMALE ] as [ + INTELLIGENT ] but i’ve heard they can also be [ - COLD ]. for some reason, they feel [ uneasy ] about the town’s disappearance. ( pepper, twenty three, s he/her, est )

ABOUT THE MUN.  what is that? that freaky thing? yes, that’s right, it’s a naked mole rat.

hello all, my name is pepper and what you’re about to see is about to be peak mediocrity. i am usually pretty decent at intros but i really have spent most of today watching love island, and i just spent the past two hours watching pilot pete make horrible decisions, so my brain is officially mush. that said i am going to do my best to make this coherent. to start, a bit about me, i am a taurus. i like trash tv. i’m really craving chicken fingers. i have never met a plate of nachos i didn’t like, and if i could be anything other than a human person i’d be a cloud i think. alright onto the good stuff. 

BIO. *has my feelings surgically removed*

first of all here is her pinterest board (keep in mind marni was kind of the skully inspired muse in a scooby doo rp so that’s why stuff looks a bit spooky)

marni was brought into the world into a weird situation by anyone’s standards, but especially by hers. to start, both her parents were hippies. yes, weed smoking, chakra cleansing, organic grown kale that they got from the farmer’s market where the only store clerk walked around with her tits proudly out, hippies. but they weren’t just any hippies, they were rich hippies. and that somehow made it worse. 

clint ‘storm’ vanross and clementine vanross were the proud owners and entrepreneurs of a whole food organic grocery store (think whole foods or trader joe’s), and clemetine later went on to ride the success of their company to create her own website and brand (think goop basically. yes, marni’s mother has sold a candle that smells like her vagina, and yes marni is deeply ashamed of it). both businesses were wildly successful, and so clem and storm quickly went from living and travelling the world in their van to having about six mansions across the world. marni came into their life as their first child around the time they bought mansion two. she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but that spoon’s handle was made of moon quartz and the silver was organically sourced. 

from there on out marni was raised in a weird way. you’d think because hippies were all about free love, that marni would be raised with an abundance of it but that wasn’t exactly the case. her parents were all about giving marni her aunotomy fairly early in life, which sounds good, but really means that marni was simply treated as an adult from the moment she could walk by herself. and she was the adult really. after all, marni was the one who had to convince her parents to enroll her in school (they were determined to let the world be her teacher, and marni simply wasn’t having any of it), the one who had to fix her own meals when all that was left in their fridge was raw tofu, the one who had to clean up her mother’s vomit whenever she went a bit to hard on the moonshine. yes, marni had parents, but she also had forty-something year old children in boho chic attire.

and marni’s parents never understood it. after all, with the way they were they could never understand how their genetics combined to make such a serious girl. one who would look at the moon and not just admire it, but ask how it stayed up there in the first place. how far away was it? how could she get there? and when told to simply enjoy and love it for what it was, would instead march herself to the library and find out the answers herself. marni’s parents and her truly never saw eye to eye, and at a certain point marni stopped trying to. she wasn’t expecting her parents to follow suit, but follow suit they did. marni’s parents gave up on trying to understand her her around the time she was nine. that’s when she moved to halloway, or rather, that’s when they moved her to halloway. 

they said it was because of business. the fact was, marni’s parents had been marching her around the world, from state to state and country to country whenver they wanted to start up a new store or run down a new story. yes, sometimes they would leave her (alone, in an empty house, with only the occasional eccentric ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle’ to come by and make sure marni wasn’t dead) for a while for short business trips (the longest being about two weeks) but they always came back eventually. but this was different. her parents set her up in halloway with a nanny named paola, and then they left for the foreseeable future. her mother, to go down to africa to chase a story. her father, to go down to europe and expand the business. they both promised to be back within a month, and they were. but then they left again. and again. and again. 

but it was fine. marni and paola got along great. she learned very quickly how to forge her parents signature on school forms. she didn’t need them. she didn’t miss them. but she did desperately want them to want her, and it took marni a long time to realize they just didn’t. 

marni was the new girl for a while. she struggled a bit to make friends as the little girl who got more excited by science experiments than barbies. the one who was always the first to raise her hand in class, and the one with the famous parents. most of the kids didn’t know who the vanross’ were but the parents did. and having the occassion adult come up to marni and tell her how they just loved her mother’s zuchini bread recipe, or the all organic popcorn they sold at her father’s store was just... weird. and other kids found it weird too. marni struggled for a while, and was picked on quite a lot but what was she to do other than accept it? all that marni had in her arsenal were facts and scathing words, and mean kids didn’t usually tend to let those stop them. 

eventually marni grew up. she went to high school. skipped prom. remained fairly anonymous other than becoming president of the chemistry club, valedictorian and being known as the girl known for making friends with her teachers. she got accepted to harvard and yale for university, but not knowing if it was because of her own accomplishments (which were countless) or because of her parents, she refused them both and decided to stay in halloway. to go to university here. to try and make her own way. 

honestly in university marni’s life was similarly uneventful because for the most part she was the quiet type that went to class, went home, and back. she didn’t cause any stir unless you could hear the occasional scathing comment murmured under her breath, or you were a neighbour who marni was screaming at to keep it down. she didn’t even attend a single party unless coerced. she was nobody, and honestly that was how marni liked it. she had never been one for the spotlight. she genuinely preferred to be more behind the scenes, unless there was a need to rise to the occasion. 

and then all of this happened y’all. it really went to shit huh. marni is terrified honestly and she just wants to know what’s going on. a lot of people who barely know who she is have probably seen her speaking up and asking questions and getting almost frenzied in her attempt to find the truth because the mystery of all this is driving her insane. no she doesn’t miss her parents particularly, but she does miss what the world used to be and she wants to go back to that, desperately, but she also really just wants to know. like if marni understood what was happening here or even just played a part in future generations understanding, and she was literally still never able to get back... honestly she could still die pretty happy i’m ngl.

PERSONALITY. *eyes snap open at 3:52am* nobody likes me

blunt. painfully painfully blunt, god. if marni thinks you’re an idiot she will tell you to your face, she really does not care and that absolutely will get her into trouble one day

painfully curious! wants to know what’s happening with this whole situation, god desperately wants to know the truth and mechanics behind it. 

cold honestly?? like marni doesn’t know how to comfort people really, she was never really taught how. she isn’t very compassionate, she’s genuinely more on the logical side. will give you the most rational answer even if it does sound kinda of cruel

the voice of reason! the person in your friend group who is the designated driver. also the person in your friend group who would say ‘i told you so’

an overachiever. lives for academic acknowledgement, like those little gold stars on your papers in elementary school are what kept marni going man. huge ass nerd. huge ass bookwarm. 

super stubborn. refuses to even entertain the idea of anything magical happening here, and is honestly kind of judgmental of people who think that way because of her parents like marni has very little respect for any hippies i’m not gonna lie 

skeptical as hell but we been knew 

a know it all! think she’s right about everything !! she usually is but still !!

does not know what to do with emotion. has had a couple, and does not recommend it. would rather die than admit to a feeling. 

trust issues galore! does not trust literally anyone ever. if marni trusts you than you’re truly special

HEADCANNONS. it takes me 3-7 business days to process my feelings

has never learnt to ride a bike cause her parents never taught her rip

loves the smell of books

laughs at horror movies generally. the kind of person who is really hard to scare. 

was raised a vegan but loves eating meat. stress eats meat when she’s truly like anxious, and so is really bummed about the dwindling meat supply for more reasons than one. 

needs coffee to survive, so the rationing has got her going a bit crazy even though she knows it’s necessary. 

has never really gotten truly drunk. 

keeps a detailed journal about all of her thoughts about all of this and takes meticulous notes. 

is left handed. 

can shoot a gun and does have one on her person pretty much at all times. i headcannon that her nanny paola taught her to shoot, and marni isn’t strong at all but she’s a pretty good shot. it’s the only way she has to defend herself honestly. 

is redheaded/strawberry blonde zoey and redheaded/strawberry blonde zoey ONLY

bi as hell!

WANTED CONNECTIONS. baby’s first words are ‘i’m not here to make friends’

i really am too lazy to make a whole ass sexy list rn and i apologize sjsdjjdf but !!! best friends, friends, confidantes, someone who used to drag her to parties, someone who used to pick on her, someone who used to defend her, flings, exes (marni is a horrible gf and she probably DIPPED the moment she started to feel something so give it to me folks), crushes she used to have in high school or middle school or elementary school, people who had crushes on her in high school or middle school or elementary school, current crushes on either end, enemy (just someone she butts heads with man!), old academic rivals, partner in crime in trying to figure this shit out, someone who hates her man, sibling like relationship, a girl squad, someone who tries to get her to loosen up, someone who is really chill and okay with the current situation who marni just wants to strangle with her bare hands!!! and anything else your heart desires okay, thank you for listening to me ramble ilu already. 

#hallowayintro #this is a new blog so i already know this won't show up in the tag but still #m.v. | intro.

[lobotheduck]

Her heart was old and tired, but the day, she thought, the day was glorious, bright and new.

New in an almost blinding kind of way.

New in that, if she were younger and could move as freely as she once did, she would hold the promise of renewal and rebirth.

But she was not young, and her heart sat heavy in her chest as a phoenix who could not rise once more from the ashes.

A cage, really, covered with scraps of bones and stretched, tattered skin.

Her body was a sheet that had served its master well throughout the years.

Through the heartaches, heartbreaks, and hot summers.

Through the pain that death brought, the intimate knowledge of abandonment, and bitter winters.

But it was torn now in a manner that could not be repaired, not enough of the original fabric left to cover her. And her shoulders hung too loosely from her collarbones as her knees knocked too loudly above toes that were permanently curled from years of long wear.

The years had been cruel to her, taunting and swift in how it had robbed her. Unyielding and merciless in how it cut her down. Time did not like her, despised her for continuing to get back up each time she was cast down. Time was envious of her grit, envious of her strength and so it made every stroke of its blade that much deeper. Every time she got up, time only got that much crueler, but time was finally running out.

Thank god, time was finally running out.

The smell of death was clinging to the hot morning sun, and goddamn if she wasn’t welcoming it with open arms.

‘I’ve lived a long life,’ she thought.

‘I’ve lived a hard life,’ she conceded, ‘and I’ve fought the entire way here.’

The whiskey didn’t burn the way it used to when she was younger, and it didn’t numb a damn thing anymore, but she guessed it was more routine than anything now as she threw down the glass beside her bed. The bottle was hers. She paid for it in full, might as well finish it.

She didn’t believe in wasting. Waste not, want not, and close the door behind you.

She didn’t love anything she couldn’t leave, and she left a lot.

A busted lip, a baby on her hip, it didn’t matter how far she got.

A lot of leaving had been done to her as well. A lot of swearing and missed opportunities spat back in her face. A lot of other men and women and bottles and children.

All of her children had died before her.

All four.

Four, she had loved that number, once upon a time.

Once upon a time, it was whole and wholesome, even and round.

One by one, she lost them all.

One to a love affair with a gun.

One to a love affair with a dirty needle.

One to a man who claimed to have loved her daughter too much.

And the last one...the last one the recollection of simply hurt too much to recall.

From four back to none, she lost them all.

She kept a garden in the years since. It was dead now, too.

The breath in her rattled like the tail of a snake when predators grew too near. She may have been an old woman now, but she still had fangs laced with poison ready to inject. The low soulful moaning of Johnny Cash wafted in through the windowsill, carried by a low summer breeze, and her head tilted ever so slightly to the left as memories came pouring in like a sudden rainstorm.

She had visited Folsom prison once. To take a letter to her brother written for and by their mother. The next day, he would go on to hang himself in his cell.

“Why California?” She used to ask him. “Stay in Texas,” she used to say.

Stay loyal to the Lone Star State, no matter how cruel of a mistress she could be.

She never quite got over that.

She never quite got over a lot of things.

The voice that sang to her understood this. Understood regret and sinful living. Understood the demons that could occupy the mind.

“I think the biggest punishment god could have given me, he gave me,” she mused, petting the quilt above her knees. “I’m a hundred and one years old, and I haven’t lived a day.”

She hadn’t lived a day.

“Don’t have no one to see me off. My body will rot right here in this room, and I say let it!” she shouted, the crackle in her voice choking on the phlegm in her throat. She hadn’t spoken in years.

“Let my bones rattle in this old house, let my voice be the wind...then maybe once, just once, someone might hear me.”

And maybe then someone would finally understand her. ‘ No alienation in what the earth was telling you.

No fear of rejection when your body returns to the soil the nutrients it needed in order to thrive.

Death had eluded her for so long.

The day she was born was the same day Mother’s Day was afforded a national holiday. A month after that, her own mother had tried to drown her in a basin. She spent most of her childhood picking cotton for a man she had no idea was her father until the day he went and had a heart attack and died

In 1930, oil was struck in Kilgore.

In 1931, the depression crept in from all sides around her.

She had been poor before, and she was most certainly poor after.

She had no way with money, you see, and that was when she could get her hands on it.

She was twenty years old when Bonnie and Clyde were shot down in Louisiana and shipped back to Dallas to be buried. They should have known better, she always said to anyone within hearing distance, but in the deepest recesses of her mind she thought: what fun. She paid a visit to Bonnie Parker’s grave before it was moved in ‘45 merely to spit on it, saliva coated with envy.

She made an effort during the war, but that all changed when the men came back. It was probably the closest she ever felt to being anywhere near a state of contentment. She was nearly fifty when President Kennedy was shot and killed.

A shadow cast a wide net upon Dallas that day, and she welcomed it for she thought it meant the end was nigh, the few rays of sunshine dissipating, one by one. She was wrong, of course.

She’d spent most of her life being wrong and backhanded and thrown out of bars.

‘Not today,’ she thought, a faint smirk hinged on the corner of her dried, cracked lips.

Her day had come.

And as she inhaled deeply for one last time, the needle on her old record player skipped.

‘I hear the train a comin’ It’s rolling round the bend’

Skip.

‘I hear the train a comin’ It’s rolling round the bend.’

Skip.

‘I hear the train a comin’ It’s rolling round the bend And I ain't seen the sunshine Since I don't know when.’

#personal #writing #short writing #short story #blah blah blah #blurgh

[evien-stark]

✧I Need You✧ Chapter 44

On December 15th, construction officially, finally, began on Stark Tower, and you were more than happy to give the eager press a few more sound clips to pad their papers with the next morning. It had been a hop and a skip over to the site from the penthouse where you and Tony were still anniversary-ing it seemed. But Pepper was on top of things back in California, and SHIELD could wait because you needed time to yourself for once. It would have been nice to keep it that way.

So it was extremely unfortunate that only twelve days later a news story broke over every single one of your devices in that room that the Roxxon Norco tanker had spilled millions of gallons of crude oil off the coast of Pensacola.

Even more unfortunate that your newly elected President Ellis seemed to care very little about punishing the people who were responsible for it. Several calls to him went unreturned. So several more got put out into the sphere that Stark Industries was working on a solution-

At least until Tony took the phone out of your hand late the next night and gave you a look that broke your heart for one reason or another.

“We’re not responsible for everything that goes wrong in the world, you know.”

“We’re not.” You knew why he was trying to impart this to you. Not working for this long had perhaps driven you just a touch cabin crazy, in mostly all good ways. But now the earth had a problem. And… “But we can help. We have the means.” Which meant you couldn’t turn your back on it.

That seemed to be just enough for him. Either that, or your resolve. “Alright. I’ll get to work on something.”

While the boys down in California probably could have come up with something to clean this up on their own, you realized you doing this yourself was putting Tony in the position of having to help. Or that must have been what he felt like. It made you feel terrible. But… it was also good to have him on board. “Thank you.” Reaching up to wrap your arms around him and press an all too brief kiss to his lips.

“Vacation’s over, huh?” Mumbled half into it so he wouldn’t have to stop kissing you to get it out.

“We’ll have another one again soon.” You lied.

                                -----------------------------------------

Your lying continued into the new year, where you and Tony shared a celebratory glass of champagne at the office. Not the most ideal setting, but one that worked for the both of you. He’d taken a meeting with investors and you’d somehow become the new face of a cleaner earth movement. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world but it put a lot more on your plate to deal with. The only sensible thing to do was to leverage the moment for good press with Stark Tower also running on clean energy.

But that put you all over the map. Meetings with politicians and environmental groups and foreign ambassadors looking towards Stark Industries for the lead on how to save the planet. This was at least a more sensible superhero-ing that you could deal with. And things on that other front seemed quiet. Suspiciously so. But being as busy as you were, you let it go.

He met up with you in a quaint little hotel room in Brussels for Valentine’s Day. While the both of you couldn’t yet promise an extended stay somewhere together, you tried to make room for the little moments. He showed up in a fetching suit with a bouquet of flowers- and you may have had an evening planned to go out. But once he was there, it was over. You got lost in his embrace and found yourself pining by the time he left the next morning.

His birthday became another pinpoint on your calendar, and you wondered why it was always the marker your life revolved around. But for this year he said he wanted something quiet, so you invited the only people that seemed to matter. Rhodey, of course, eagerly put aside time to sit down with the two of you at some restaurant bought out for the evening. And Happy was just as happy to be invited and thought of. Even though Tony could very much look after himself, you thanked him on the side for keeping an eye on him while you were away so often. A thought kept between the two of you.

It was almost too nice to be reminded of what a normal night looked like. An evening with friends, good drinks, good food, and more laughter than you’d had in a while. This year was flashing by and you barely had time to even think about how much it bothered you that you were losing such large swaths to meetings and emails and talks and phone calls and plane rides and speeches and pitches and…

The small briefing you had at SHIELD in the middle of it June further signaled your attention that they were actively including you in their smaller dealings. However, the table you were sitting at was full of faces you didn’t recognize. And the piece of information that you really cared about…

“General Ross has suffered a heart attack. He’s scheduled for surgery today. This down time is crucial for some movement.”

That monster, you assumed. Emil Blonsky. You didn’t know if they wanted it gone or wanted it brought to them. While you agreed with them that it was better put in a place where you could control the means of its possible escape- and definitely the possible means of it being weaponized, you weren’t equipped to go out and get it. Then why put you in the room to hear that news…?

You’d never know.

But when you came home that night to tell Tony, his response was just as callous. “Should I bring it up in the interview? Send my well wishes?”

The two of you had a joint interview at WhiH on the 30th. And while they were putting out headlines daily that really hurt the company, your image, his image, you decided it would be better to go and confront the empire Christine Everhart thought she was building by spewing out garbage every day to an ever growing rabid fanbase. Left unchecked, things like that could become dangerous…

In early July you saw yourself back in New York City to check on the Tower, and to set up a press briefing in the coming days to talk about how far along the construction was. Everything had been moving according to plan, which was very excellent news. You hadn’t had much time to watch over anyone’s shoulder- and even if you had, construction itself wasn’t really your forte. The workers seemed to be carrying out your and Tony’s vision well enough, and the estimation came back that it was about 40% complete.

Which is exactly what you told reporters the coming morning. That and that things were still on track to have the Stark Tower completed in early May of 2012. You used the platform to again talk about the importance of clean energy, and sung the praises of the large amount of work that was going into laying pipes and wires to power the building once it was finished. Everything due to Tony’s genius reworking of his father’s old tech, of course. None of this could have been done without him.

“Where is Mr. Stark now?”

But when posed with this question… you just had to let them know he was hard at work. Just not at that exact thing. No, instead, he’d taken back his Mark II armor from Rhodey some time ago so that he could build him a proper suit.

War Machine the military was calling it, and you put in your very loud objections about that.

“I don’t like this. I don’t want Stark rebranded as giving the military weapons again. This is bad for optics.”

“Hey, I don’t like it anymore than you do, but at least we know it’s me piloting the thing. You know you can trust me to make the right calls.”

You had to. And you did. Rhodey was definitely the man meant to wear that suit (and of course the only one capable of doing so. Tony had double and triple checked that). Even though he would be given orders to carry out missions inside of it, you knew you could trust his judgment if something seemed wrong. It was about the only thing you had to rely on. So… you did.

It was only around September that things finally started to cool down. You’d have to be back in New York in another month to see to the closing of the Expo and maybe start plans to host another one the coming year, but that was something for a later date. Instead, you relished in the change of waking up in your own home, next to your very warm and welcoming boyfriend who was just as eager to have some time alone.

He had seemed to be chugging along with the progress of the Mark VII, an Iron Man suit that hosted some sort of tracking device- able to be loaded up in any situation. Even dangerous ones. When posed the question of, “Why don’t you just do one like mine?”

Tony, of course, had an answer at the ready. “Because that’s yours. And, no offense, but the capabilities of mine are far more powerful. One day we’ll up the specs on yours. But I think it’s good for now. ...unless you want more?”

“No. It’s fine the way it is.”

You didn’t want to throw him immediately back into work. And you hadn’t gotten much, if any, use out of it anyway. You preferred it that way, too, in fact. But it was that exact thinking that may have tempted fate. Such was your life.

Getting called to another SHIELD briefing had become almost sort of standard. It fell in line with some of your other training sessions, all of which were… mildly progressing. You still felt stronger with Natasha’s guidance than you did with Coulson’s. No matter how hard you worked on the thing you just seemed to be stuck. Putting too much pressure on yourself, perhaps.

Immediately you realized something was up when there were no other agents present in the room. Even early, there were usually one or two before you. And the meeting head. Sometimes it was Fury, and the two of you had come to a mutual understanding of basically ignoring each other. It worked better that way. He’d be in the room, talk to everyone, and you’d keep your head down for the most part.

But today was different. Today no one was in the room. And you sensed something was very amiss. There was something in the air. Something that made you very nervous.

It was that thought alone that may as well have brought down the house. Lights went out all over the compound, including the room you were in- and sirens started sounding. The entire warehouse seemed to plunge itself into lock down, as grates slid down over the windows.

Reaching up you pressed once on your cuff earrings, “LUNA, give me night vision. And call Tony-”

The sound of gunfire just outside the room drew your attention. Seconds after, your eyes adjusted as LUNA did what you asked. And then again when you heard his voice, “What’s up? What’s happening?”

“SHIELD is on lockdown.” You tried to keep your voice hushed, although it may not have mattered as the sounds of gunfire continued, only interrupted by pained shouts. Backing yourself against the wall closest to the door you took a breath in. This was a trick right? Some sort of test?

“I’m coming. Stay where you are. Don’t move.”

But was that really the correct course of action? Agents were taking fire in the hallway. Several feet from you. And you had the means to do something about it? ...didn’t you?

“LUNA identify bodies. How many are we looking at out there?”

“I told you to stay where you are, damn it.” It was hard to ignore Tony’s ire. But… you couldn’t just stay put.

“Five injured. Suspect is two corridors down.”

“Only one?” It seemed strange there was just a single person behind this sudden onslaught. Then again, with everything you’d been through, maybe you should have expected that. “Light the way for me.”

LUNA zeroed in on the target’s heat signature- and with them moving farther away, you chanced stepping out of the room. Agents were down. But you couldn’t stop to help them right now. Someone had broken into SHIELD- probably get something. You had to try and put a stop to it.

So around the next corner you went- and then the next- until LUNA’s voice interrupted you again as you came to an open door at the end of the hallway. “Director Fury’s inside with the suspect.”

Fury could handle it, right? You should just lay low? But as you approached, another gunshot spooked you, as did the sound of a body falling. “Where is it? Give me the files. No one else has to die.” You didn’t know the voice.

 Where was Natasha? Or Coulson?

 Sliding the zipper down on your jacket, the Heart Reactor’s glow burst forward in the darkened hallway. You gave it a single tap. “LUNA I need a glove.” Maybe it would have been smarter to go in full. It probably was. But you only needed one shot.

And that’s exactly the one you took.

Busting into the room you thrust your hand out, bracing yourself for the impact that threatened to throw you from your stance and to the floor as the repulsor shot out, taking the aggressor to the back of the room in one clean move.

Quickly you moved to Fury, kneeling. “Get up. Now.” You didn’t have a lot of time.

“Just get out of here.” He growled back. Unable to move? You had no idea. And no time to ask LUNA for vitals. Sense of duty took over.

You slung his arm over your shoulder. “Come on. Help me help you.” Lifting him to his feet was not an easy task, but somehow you managed. And with that you started walking him towards the door. Almost home free- you didn’t know where you’d hide, but you only needed to last as long as it would take for Tony to come-

“Projectiles coming in from behind!!”

LUNA’s warning was too slow. Without a second thought you shouldered the brunt of them, turning sideways to keep Fury out of the line of fire. Two very sharp- something- knives it felt like- slammed into your back, almost right into your spine. Leaving you lurching forward on your feet with a punched out breath that you immediately sucked back in.

Fury tried to steady you but it wasn’t enough. So you did the next best thing.

You gave the Heart Reactor a double tap with your free hand, and a pained grunt, drawing the nanobots out with a quick sweep of your arm, letting them rain down the rest of your body. It took seconds. And two more for you to turn around and face him. “Let’s try this again.”

“Incoming!” LUNA zeroed in on the next projectile coming right at your face, spurring your quick reaction to reach out and catch an arrow midair seconds before hitting you. So you did the next best thing you could think of.

“Here, you can have it back.” And with every ounce of force, after locking on through the visor, you threw it back at him, sinking into his shoulder- yes, him you realized, as he got caught with a sharp hiss and a growl. “And this too, while we’re at it-” Opening your hand again to blast him right off his feet- right through the wall. “Let’s move.” Talking to Fury.

Making it about five steps out of the room before everything shifted on an uncomfortable axis and you weren’t sure who was holding on to who anymore. Your legs stopped working.

“Ma’am your vitals are dropping- you’ve got tetrodotoxin and datura innoxia running through your system- you need to stop moving or there’s a chance of critical failure in-”

“Not now LUNA-” Breathing out of control very suddenly. And then you were no longer standing- pinned against the nearby wall- and then dropped to a tumble on the floor. Body on top of yours. No thought in your head. Seizing in pain-

Survival became the only thing you could think about. Putting your hands up to block a blow, you shunted his fists off next, lifting your hips to roll him forward. Bracing his chest you threw him up and over and then followed blindly in a backwards roll, spinning around to pin him. Bringing your hands up in a lock and then down smashing his windpipe-

Your vision cut- perhaps LUNA failing on you. You just knew you weren’t in that darkness alone- but it lit up in just another moment. And you felt the wave of a ripple brush against your hand. Then. Finally. You were moving. One- two- three in-

Seeing that man standing there. In stilted movements you crept up to him, and then put your hands on him- lowering in like he was made of water- in him-

It’s when you knew your eyes were no longer your own. Your hands were not yours as you struggled to reach for a gun on the floor.

 But you heard your own voice- Don’t you feel terrible? All these people you’ve hurt-

 And an answer, No. I don’t. I did exactly what I was supposed to.

 So you wondered- Don’t you feel like being honest? Who do you work for?

 Finger on the trigger. Hammer cocked. Barrel on a temple.

 Panic came to a boil.

 I’m on your side-

I’m on your team-

I work for SHIELD-

I don’t want to die.

 Solid fear shoved you back. And you belonged to you again. Briefly. For seconds. And then you were falling again. Shuddering a breath in and then-

And then-

 ...and then….

                                 -----------------------------------------

 Voices faded in and out around you. Your entire being told you it was better to keep your eyes closed. To keep drifting. To let the room sway back and forth…

“So far as I can see it, the Avengers-”

People were yelling. They were always yelling.

“I warned you once-”

“She nearly killed him-”

“I’m fine-”

“I’m sorry- was that not the point?- get better risk assessment-”

They were all yelling on top of each other. A door slammed close to your head. It startled your eyelids open finally. About a quarter of the way. All you could manage. You already felt him. “Tony…?”

“Right here, honey.” The bed dipped as he came to sit next to you. His hands were cool against your forehead. Something you appreciated immensely. “I have JARVIS running your vitals, but tell me how you’re feeling.”

“What happened?” Your voice came out in a croak. “Why is everyone screaming at each other?”

“Wonderful team we’ve got going here, wouldn’t you say?” It was hard to get him into focus, so you gave up, closing your eyes again and just listening to him. “Training exercise, he says. Very close to failure until you put in your bid- and I came in with mine.”

Training exercise-

Training exercise-

 Anger rose up in you hotter than any you’d felt before.

 “I will kill Nick Fury with my bare hands.” Blinking your eyes open again, seeing the brief and very fond line of a smile on Tony’s lips as he watched you. But his hands were quick, stilling you as you went to sit up.

“Not before I do.”

“You won’t be the first ones to try. And you won’t be the last.” He came through the door, crossing his arms. “Just so we’re clear, I’m only very generally considering today a mild success. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Rest up. Debrief is in fifteen. If you can make it.” And then just as he’d let himself in as quickly, he was gone in the next breath.

Through the fog- and the much heavier ire- you surprised yourself, “So. SHIELD’s version of a fire drill?”

“Not nearly that competent.” Despite Tony’s mood matching yours, you saw a small light of a half grin.

“Who does that say more about?” Shifting, finding your body belonging painlessly to you again, you sat up halfway. Tony’s hands were quick to your shoulders. “So one of theirs did this to me.” But you knew that already.

You remembered.

“Yeah, well, he’s lucky he’s not in a hospital right now. Or a morgue.”

“You do that much damage?” No doubts in your mind that if Tony had come blasting in as Iron Man and seen that man attacking you- or whatever had happened after everything went black- he probably would have killed him.

But Tony’s lips curved further into a slightly satisfied smile. “You did. There was barely anything left for me.”

There was a light sense of pride here. And relief, too. Knowing that you could defend yourself if it came down to it. Knowing that LADY had perhaps served as enough protection- and really, had you activated the whole suit when you should have… Beginner’s mistake. “Yeah but. According to LUNA, I’m pretty sure I was almost poisoned to death. I remember… having him but then everything went dark-”

“That wasn’t from the tetro and innoxia. You basically sweated them out.” And, of course Tony knew exactly what had been ailing you. He’d probably been running diagnostics since the moment he’d gone in probably right up until a few seconds ago. But hearing him say this confused the hell out of you. The little tilt of your head got him to continue. He was much softer when he finally did. “That was- …if they’re worth listening to, anyway, that was you using too much. Of the thing. And passing out.” And then, quieter still, “...I saw the footage. I think you scared the hell out of everyone in this place.”

Including him, it seemed. And hearing him put it that way- and catching those brief flashes- maybe even yourself. “I… I went further. It’s impossible to explain. But I think for a few seconds I...”

“Made him put a gun to his head? Because that’s the way he’s telling it. And much as he deserved it, if you’ve got a different side to that story, it might be worth telling.”

Your mouth opened but nothing came out. Slowly you looked up at him. “...I don’t.”

                                 -----------------------------------------

 The air in the debriefing room was extremely tense. Not unusual for this entire compound, but after everything that had just happened, you couldn’t imagine it getting much worse. There were agents in the room you didn’t recognize again, and everyone looked like they’d taken equal turns beating on each other.

Fury had his hands on his hips, surveying the crowd of tired faces. “Let’s start off simple. This test operation was run by Agent Romanoff and Agent Barton.” The two of them stood at his sides, and while you knew Nat, this Barton man you didn’t- ...except that you did. “Romanoff was tasked with the west wing, Barton with the east. They were unsuccessful. But just barely. And I don’t put bets on teams that just barely squeak by.” Leaning in he put his palms hard on the table. “And it’s hard for a team to win when all their players aren’t on the same page. We’ve got Team Stark over there in their own faction.”

“And this is the part where you segue into thanking us for our service, I’ll bet, since you were down and we pulled you back up.” Tony’s arms were crossed tight as he spoke. Tone dry and very displeased.

“Nice suit you’ve built for her. When were we gonna get let in on that?”

You looked up at Fury, “It had nothing to do with what I was being trained on.”

“Oh we can talk about your training. Barton here says we’re playing with a telepath. Not an empath. So you’ve been lying this whole time?”

Tony’s rebuff was quick, “Wasn’t that your intel? You’re gonna blame her for your mistakes?”

This was an unfair hole for you to be in. Because there was no way to climb out. No way to convince them one way or the other. Yet still it upset you. “No! It’s not like that. It wasn’t like that- I can’t just- I can’t just make people do things- I was trying to do what I learned but I was panicking- and full of fucking poison I might add- I went further than I ever have that’s all.”

Barton turned his sharp gaze towards you, clearing his throat somewhat painfully, “Well if that’s how far you can go, I’d rather have you on our side. But that was not someone messing with my emotions. I’m not really in the habit of trying to shoot myself during missions. No matter how I might be feeling about them.” His candor both surprised and upset you.

Tony put a hand on your bouncing leg underneath the table, but kept his eyes up. “Turnabout is fair play. You surprised her, she surprised the hell out of you.”

Fury locked his gaze again. “I can’t direct players on a field if I don’t know what they’re capable of.”

You were frustrated beyond belief. “Even if you did, would that have changed the outcome? If we’re trying to set up a scenario where a rogue person comes in looking for information- or whatever- and they don’t know everything- then I’d say we did fine.” Since, it appeared, you had one-upped them and kept them from completing their objective.

It was hard to tell. You’d been slightly unconscious for the end bits.

“Fine is not gonna be enough when the big dogs come to play.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “What big dogs are we talking about? You know- you’re all about being a big leader. Director. But you don’t have a habit of speaking very plainly. If you wanna keep the analogy up, your team can’t make the right calls if they’re missing information on their plays.”

Natasha finally spoke up, “So the team’s full of information holes on both sides. Is that what we’re saying?” This sort of hurt you. You’d been growing closer to her, but then again, was she really your friend? She worked for SHIELD. Not for you. “But- everyone did their part here. And I think it’s fair to say Agent Barton and I are not easy to get a leg up on.”

You could practically feel Tony’s eye-roll, and caught the dramatic loll of his head to the side. “Save the self praise, would you?”

“It’s a two way compliment.” Natasha smiled. You noticed Barton turning to hide one as well. She was right, anyway. She’d been in a whole other part of the compound doing who knew what- stacked against who knew how many agents. Barton had been alone on your side, as well. And he’d taken out two hallways worth of agents. And put Fury on his knees.

It was safe to say they were very good at their jobs.

“Compliment or not, you’re missing a big part of this picture.” Tony spoke again, standing soon after, leaning with his palms on the table. “Are we putting together a team to face threats the military can’t handle? Or are we putting together a team to protect SHIELD secrets?”

“You are a SHIELD secret, Stark.” Fury was quick to comment.

“No. See, I control my own headlines. Pretty sure the whole world knows who Iron Man is. So if that’s a threat-”

“And how’s that been working out for you?” He looked directly at you, next. “And you? The world knows about your secret little operation? I remember you asking me for a mask to keep that secret off the streets.”

This was not headed to a productive place. You stood aside Tony. “Stop being so combative. You’ve been so terrible to me the second I met you- yet for some reason I keep coming here-”

“Something that we’re grateful for.” Natasha chimed in very quickly.

“Everyone else out.”

At Fury’s hard order the unfamiliar agents got up mere seconds after being told to do so and filed out. Fury crossed his arms, turning to the window. You looked up at Tony, as if to ask if you should even bother staying, and he simply shrugged with another roll of his eyes. He was getting to his limit, if he wasn’t already over it. So were you.

Fury cleared his throat and started with your name. It almost surprised you that he even knew it. “I think I need to be very clear about this.” He turned around to face the four of you left in the room. “The Avengers are a secret team, right now. The world is not ready for this. What it means. What it could mean. We need to protect that. At all costs.”

Tony’s reply was as quick as it was angry. “A secret spy organization needs to protect its secret spy files. Color me surprised. Let me be clear. I haven’t so much as seen a mission statement. Not for the Avengers. Not for SHIELD. If any of it is worth protecting, working for- you damn well better start trying to actually convince me.” He turned to leave. “I’m gonna start billing you for miles by the way, next time I have to come over here to clean up.” Just like that he left. To go to the recovery room, you knew. His suit was still in there.

Natasha and Barton were next, sent out of the room with a wave of Fury’s arm. He came up behind them and you stood your ground, feeling something awful on the horizon. It always was with him.

He looked down at you. Sizing you up probably. You didn’t waver.

But when he finally spoke, “It’s been expressed to me in fuller language that I have not been easy on you. And up until now, it was because I didn’t trust you.” He was being entirely too honest, really. None of this was helping your feelings over him if that’s what this was about. “But you’re right. You keep showing up. You keep putting in the hours. And back in that room you didn’t hesitate.”

You were not hungry for Nick Fury’s acceptance, which drove your next statement, “That was your own mistake.” You knew who you were.

“That’s what I’m saying.” His hand came off his hip, holding out to you. “You might not be an agent, but you’ll make a fine Avenger.”

This in no way made up for everything else he’d put you through. Being the bigger person wasn’t always a fulfilling feeling. But if your reevaluation period was up and he’d finally figured it all out… you took hold of his hand and shook it. “I’ll do my best. Not for you.” Whatever this team was, whatever it would end up fighting for, standing for, if it was the right things, you absolutely would. “This doesn’t make up for everything, by the way.” But you had to at least let him know this.

Finally, for once in his life, he grinned. “Of course it doesn’t. You’ve got a lot of work to do if you wanna make everything up to me.”

Your brow popped up before you could stop it. “Fell face first right out of the gate.” Turning away from him with a shake of your head, you ignored his lighthearted chuckles behind you.

Going back to the recovery room, Tony was waiting, all suited up. “Ready to go?”

Both doors were open, and Fury was standing in the hallway now with his arms crossed. Watching you. It was why you derived much pleasure with a nod at Tony. “Yeah.” And then gave a tap-tap to the Heart Reactor, bringing your arms out and then crossed in, finishing off with a flourishing press of your cuff earring to activate your visor and helmet. “Let’s go.”

It was those notes of anger and resentment and disbelief that were oh so delicious as Fury stood aside while the two of you jetted out of the room and up through yet another hole Tony must have made in the compound’s roof when he’d come in. “He have anything good to say?” Tony asked as he kept speed aside you.

“Does he ever?”

“Very good point.”

As you broke through the line of clouds, “He said he was going to be less of an asshole to me. In much fewer words.”

“And all you had to do was nearly kill one of his favorite agents. Be careful or you’ll be teacher’s pet by the end of the year.” You couldn’t help the eugh that rose up from your throat, and the sound of Tony’s quiet warm laughter in your ear provoked a smile. “Anything else?”

“Oh. Yeah. I’m an Avenger now. I guess.”

“Should I order some champagne? Or is this more of a boxed wine occasion?”

You blew out a sigh. “After everything I’ve been through today…?” There probably wasn’t enough creature comfort in the world to soothe this over. Or the looming promise of what it was slowly becoming.

“Fancy wine in a hot bath. Complimentary shoulder massage.”

At this you really couldn’t help the smile. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” As long as you could decompress with Tony… maybe you could handle it all. Together.

Maybe.

#Tony Stark #Tony Stark x Reader #INY Chapter Forty Four

[senor-plume]

Reunion

   Henry throws on his favorite shirt, a concert tee that he got at an Arlo Guthrie concert some years back. Pulling the shirt over his head, he eyes the bottle of ale that sits on the kitchen table. Reaching out with his left hand he grabs the bottle and takes a long pull from it. Friday night and not a thing going on. Luckily.     With the drink in his hand he walks over to the living room window and takes a peak at the great outdoors. Folks arriving for a CYO event at the school across the street. Looks like a basketball game as he spies on the young girls showing up in their cheerleader outfits. Some adults walking in and a young man about 20 has his head stuck into his cell phone, texting as he moves straight ahead. Henry closes the curtain tight and walks away quite glad that he is not playing a game of basketball tonight. As much as he complains about the loneliness of his life, he has adapted to it and some nights, such as tonight, he is glad for his solitude lifestyle.      The television is on but thankfully muted while the record player spins the vinyl album around at 33 and a third. A collector of sorts, he stops and stares at his records. A massive amount that must be well into the thousands. His father started him out young to the pleasures of music and he never looked back. His dad left him his old records from the 40's to the 70's when he passed away. Alphabetized, he goes down to one knee to look through the Z's. Pulling out Frank Zappa's first album he takes the record from its sleeve and stares at the grooves that the needle reads. Henry can, and will spend hours now gazing at his collection with pride bursting up through his soul. Nothing can or will make him as happy as rummaging through these records and trips to the Salvation Army for more is his true joy in life.      Stopping only to gather up a plate of nacho's and a few beers, Henry has just spent the complete Friday night alone with his records. He plans to leave the house tomorrow morning for a trip to the local hotel where a huge record sale will be going down. Once a month there is a gathering of all types of venders selling off their albums and other music related items. Henry looks forward to this with unbridled glee. He takes to the computer and after seeing there was not one email waiting for him he begins to compile a list of albums that he must have and hopefully he will be able to find them there. Some records he just never stops looking for. Years and years he has waited for somebody to sell them off. A Beatles record nicknamed the Butcher Album due to the cover showing the Fab Four dressed as butchers covered in raw meat and doll parts. A true and rare collector's item. He saw one once when he was visiting his sister in California. He had it in his hands and as he always does, he smelled the inside of the cover. There really is nothing finer than the scent of an old record Henry believed. The asking price for the album was a hefty 1000 bucks which he did not have at the time. He has saved up for the day it would appear to him again. He would not miss out on it twice.     With the need to take a piss Henry, drunk now, as he always is on the weekends, stumbles to the bathroom. Holding on for dear life he lets out a long sigh and out of the blue the telephone rings. He usually unplugs the fucking thing on the weekends but he must have forgotten.  The answering machine pick up. It is a woman's voice and it is unfamiliar. Without washing his hands, Henry walks to the bedroom to hear the voice say goodbye and then the tape rewinds. Who the fuck could that be? Henry presses play and he listens in carefully.   "I'm looking for Henry Coda. If this is the wrong number I apologize but I really want to find him. This is Anna Baez. I went to school with Henry back in the 80's and I would like to invite him to our schools 25th anniversary. It's this upcoming weekend…seven days from now and it will be a ball. So Henry, please if you could join us at the school at 7 in the gymnasium… I would be thrilled to see you again. We all would. It will be a blast. I hope this is the right number. Call me at 722-5733 to let me know if you can come. Thanks and goodbye."     Christ. Anna Baez. Henry takes a long drink from the bottle…killing it and he heads to the bookshelf to pull out his senior yearbook. The cover says Binghamton Central High School. It has been years since he has looked at this thing. He takes a seat on his bed and opens the book. He flips through the pages with a bored look on his face until he comes to the page he wants. Under his nose is a picture of Anna. A blonde beauty that was quite popular in school. Unlike Henry she excelled in school, running for class president and winning. A cheerleader and if he remembered correctly, she was crowned prom queen…a prom in which Henry did not attend. His book was signed a few times and he reads a few. "Have a great summer Henry…see you at the college." "Henry, keep playing that guitar and I am certain you'll be top of the pops in no time." "You are one weird fellow man. Don't change."    Henry never ended up going to the local community college and he never made it to the top of the charts. He was still weird and he has barely changed since the 80's. He closed the book and placed it back on the shelf. He remained on the bed thinking of school. How he hated it and most of the kids there…except for one girl…Nancy…or Nan for short. Nan, he had the biggest teenage crush on. She was always friendly with him but she was dating the same guy from their freshman year right up to the senior year. They were friends…she was kind to him and although her boyfriend hated him she didn't care. She was nice. Rising from the bed he began to think about her. Nan, I wonder if you are even still alive and if you are I bet you have fourteen kids and a beefcake husband. He wandered out of his room and made it to the kitchen to grab a fresh beer. Cracking it open he heard the needle hit the label on the record he was playing and he knew it was time to flip it over.    Playing the Stones now he could not get his mind off of that girl. Nan. Henry hardly left his house for any kind of social event. Skipping family reunions and the like. But this…this could be…interesting. He wanted to see Nan and that was the only thing that made him pick up the phone to call Anna back.     She answered right away and sounded genuinely pleased to hear from him. She told him that he was all set. That it was to be a casual party and that he could bring a friend or spouse if he wanted to. Henry asked how many people have signed up to go and she told him that it will be a packed event. "Expect at least a hundred kids to be there. It will be lots of fun. And Henry, feel free to bring some of those records of yours with you. I bet we would all like to hear them." After saying goodbye and hanging up Henry crawled into bed and found himself…drunk and daydreaming about Nan and just what he could say to her. It made him nervous just thinking about it and soon he blocked it out and fell asleep with the full bottle of beer next to his head. ——————————————————————————————–                    After about four beers Henry was ready to leave for the reunion. Dressed in khakis and a seersucker shirt he bent down to tie his shoes when he felt the urge to throw up come over him. He ran to the kitchen sink and made it just in time. Four beers down the drain, all sudsy and wiping tears from his eyes he went to swig some mouthwash around in the bathroom.       Outside now Henry tucked the cuffs of his pants into his socks and jumped onto his bicycle. The school was only a few blocks away and it was a pleasant night. He had no intention of trying to impress anyone there. His bike was fine and he enjoyed riding it more than driving anyway.      Along the way there his nerves grew worse and he checked the time on the side of the bank on the corner. 7:15. He was late and he did not care. He toyed with the idea of not showing…no one would miss him anyway but Nan…he was dying to see what became of her. He stopped his bike in front of the tavern Rocco's and parking his bike on the side of the building. He went in. "Henry! Long time no see my friend. How goes it?" Rocco extended his hand and Henry shook it with a weak smile on his face. "Get me a cold one please Rocco. Lord knows I need one tonight" "What's the big occasion? You got a hot date tonight? If you do, bring her here. I'd love to see the kind of girl you could pick up Henry."       The bartender, a black guy with muscles that would put Schwarzenegger to shame cracked the top off the bottle of Bud and handed it to Henry. He took hold of it and brought it to his mouth and drained half of it in a mere two seconds. His eyes darted around but he found himself slowly calming down. The television above the bar was on showing some soccer match and the jukebox was playing the old Turtles tune.. .'Happy Together.' "Henry, it's been a while, a few days now perhaps since you last walked into my establishment. What's been happening to you? You depressed? Did a fire destroy your record collection or something?" "No. Just been busy is all. Listen Rocco, I need your advice here. I'm now headed to my 25th reunion at school and I am rather nervous about it all. There is a girl there…or a woman now and I really want to talk to her but I am a social dud. I have no idea what to say to her. What's a good ice breaker? Something that won't make me look like a total dick head. Just a little dick head." Rocco smiled and said " Ah Henry, you seeing an old flame tonight? Some girl who used to give you hand jobs in the basement? Something like that eh?" "No…not at all. Just a girl who I was friendly with. Though I have to admit that I dreamed of her and those hands giving me some relief. I don't know. I can't think of what to say to her when I see her. I need your help here."   Rocco pulled up a stool and thought for a while. "What did you guys used to talk about in school? Back then. What did you talk about?" Henry thought for a while and he said `music.' "Ok, then you talk about that. Just say that you heard an old song on the radio and that it made you think of her. She'll be pleased to hear this…hopefully and there you go. You'll be off to the races." "But I never listen to the radio…all those commercials and that terrible hip hop music they play now a days…It gives me a head…" “Then, forget the radio part…just say you heard a song…somewhere… and it made you think of her. Just wing it from there. She'll want to know what song and then you'll be in a real conversation and I bet it will be the first one with a woman for quite some time. Am I right?" Henry sighed and took a drink from the bottle. "Yeah, music, that's kinda what I had planned on anyway." "That's all you ever talk about actually Henry. This is the first conversation we've had that wasn't about music or music related. You must really be nervous." "Yeah, I am. What time is it Rocco?" "7:30." "Shit, I gotta go. Thanks for the help. I appreciate it, man."     Rocco wished him good luck and said that if he gets lucky with the girl to bring her over to the bar so he could see what all this nervousness was all about. Henry killed his beer and slammed the bottle down on the bar with a determined thud. He stood and with a wave left the bar and found his bike waiting for him. He climbed aboard and began his trek to the school. ————————————————-      Inside the gymnasium it was sweltering. He was informed at the front desk, where old Anna Baez was sitting, that the air conditioners were on the fritz and to expect it to be a little warm in there. Warm? It was horrible. Henry went immediately to the bar and ordered a beer. A nice cold beer would really hit the spot and maybe calm his nerves a bit.    Drinking, he looked down to his name tag. Henry. Who the hell is going to remember me anyway? This is a mistake. He had a few friends in high school and they all went to universities and left him in his hometown alone and friendless. Sure, he knew some of the guys and gals at the record conventions but he wouldn't be able to really call them friends. He was a lonely guy who simply loved his records and beer. He looked up and watched all the people milling around and some dancing. A few guys whom he recognized as old jocks were standing at the bar, drinking and laughing, without a care in the world. Henry felt the sweat dripping down his back and he flapped his shirt a few times to get some air in there. His ears pricked up when he heard a Duran Duran song playing and he was just about to head over to the DJ booth to talk to the guy about his CD's when he saw Nan walk in. The light from the gym was weak at best but he knew it was her although he could not read her name tag. My goodness…there she is he thought to himself. I'll just wait for a while to let her mingle with the people that she really wanted to see and then, then he would walk up to her and reintroduce himself to her.        Henry wiped his brow with the back of his hand and struck up a conversation with the DJ. They shot the shit for a few minutes when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around and saw Nan smiling ear to ear. "Henry Coda…my God…you look exactly the same. You really do. My goodness…how are you?"       Henry's shirt was sopped with sweat as he opened his mouth to return her greeting when a group of guys walked up to Nan and began to talk excitedly to her. Henry shrunk back to the DJ booth and just stood there watching them enjoying their conversation. I wish I was normal he thought to himself. I wish I could talk and feel carefree with others. Instead I am a sweating fool all alone with social anxiety and a drinking problem. He took a swig from his plastic cup and turned around to stare at the wall.     A few minutes passed while a Van Halen song played. Henry began to recall the time he had bought the album which this song came from when he heard a woman's voice say something. He turned around to see Nan staring at him. "Hello…anyone home? I've been trying to get your attention for a minute now silly. Daydreaming about music I bet. This Van Halen song sure brings back the memories don't you think?" "I was just playing this song a few days ago actually. All in all it's a great album with very little filler. Sure, a few of the songs aren't all that great on it but not many records from that period were masterpieces. You know what I mean?" Nan smiled at him and told him that he has not changed all that much from 25 years ago. Henry smiled and tried hard to think of something to say to her. He decided to ask her about her life now but she spoke first. "So tell me Henry…tell me about your life. Are you married? Is your rock and roll wife around here somewhere?" "Wife? Ha, no…No wife. Never. Never was married. You?" "Well, remember Davey? My boyfriend in school? We married after college and 10 months later we were divorced. Still to this day I have no idea what went wrong but that band of gold on my finger just cursed us. It was something else, I'll tell you, I won't be walking down the aisle again, you can count on that." Henry looked down at her finger and even in the bad light he could see that she was not sporting a wedding ring. "Gee, I'm sorry about that Nan. Geeze…will he be here tonight? Davey?" "No, he moved to Washington State after our divorce was finalized. I haven't seen him in years now. No kids…thank God." "Oh…well that's good I guess…divorce can really be hard on kids; at least that's what I've read in magazines and all. So…you live around here?" Nan answered his questions and boy was there a lot of them. Henry at times felt like he was interviewing the poor girl but he really had nothing else to say to her so he asked questions. Query after query but she didn't seem to mind at all. They talked for a while when he realized he was in dire need of a drink. He tried to back step a bit to get closer to the bar hoping that she would follow him…slowly but two steps back into his plan she stood right there, not moving an inch. He would have to ask her if she would like a refill on her wine…or what appeared to be wine. Maybe it was punch. It was red and that was all he could tell. In a break in the conversation he asked her if she would like a refill and that he could really go for a cold beer in this stifling heat. "I know! It's so hot in here…I can't stand it. Want to go outside for a bit? I could use some fresh air and besides…and don't tell anyone but I am dying for a cigarette." "Outside? Certainly. I'd like that. I'm beginning to melt in here. Please just let me refill my beer here. Can you wait?" She nodded her head and Henry went to get a beer. Turning to Nan he asked her if she was good. She replied that another cup of wine would be great and she handed him her now empty cup. "…A nice cold Michelob and a wine please Jerry."    The bartender filled up the two glasses and they headed outside. On the way to the front doors Nan was greeted with many hellos. Henry couldn't remember her being so popular in school. It was mighty crowded and Nan grabbed his arm and pulled him along and he was happy to be lead away out of there. Outside the cool air was a Godsend. They both needed the cool night air on their hot skin. "Now this is much better, don't you think Henry? So, tell me now…back in school you loved music more than anyone I've ever known. You ever made a career of it? You in a band or anything?" He felt like he was letting her down as he went on to say that not only was he not in a band but that as a career he chose media marketing. "What exactly is that Henry?" "You know those jingles you hear on the radio? I write them. I make commercials for the radio and television." "Oh my, how interesting…anything I would know?" "You know Champs Fried Chicken? The chain of chicken places? Well that one ad..the one that goes:

`Champs…is the place to be when your down and hungry, a dollar 99 is all you got? you'll dig our chicken, you'll dig it a lot.'

I wrote that." "Holy shit Henry, I know that song! It's the catchiest tune like ever! Wow…I'm with a celebrity here!" "Ha…well…it pays the bills. It's not going to get me a gold record but I suppose I can't complain." "Well, I think it's awesome…simply awesome Henry. I'm not as famous as you but I guess my job is ok…I sell real estate in North Carolina. I'm not rich or anything but like you, I can pay the bills."     Henry found himself relaxing a bit. The cool night air did him well and he found that he could keep up his end of the conversation. He went in a few times to refill their drinks. He was feeling alright by the time of his 7th beer of the night and Nan was really knocking the wine back. They talked about many things and a few people even recognized him as they made their way out of the gym to return home.    Around the time of Nan's fifth cup of wine she realized that the party inside was dying down. "I should really go back inside and mingle a bit more. You wanna come along with me? There has to be other people you want to see besides me." "Not really, Nan…in fact the only reason why I came to this high school heat wave was to see you. You were always so nice to me…don't think I've forgotten it these many years later." "Oh Henry, that's so nice of you to say. Shoot…I should go back though. You sure you don't want to come with me? I'll buy you another drink." Henry thought about it and decided not to go in. "I'm sorry Nan but it's really too hot for me in there. I'm going to head to Rocco's for a nice air conditioned beer." "Sounds splendid. Ok…I understand. "It was nice to see you again Nan…really. Take care now." "I will. Thanks for visiting with me. I had a ball. Enjoy Rocco's" And with that they hugged each other goodbye and went their separate ways.

      Around 1AM Rocco was placing the chairs up on the tables when there was a knock at his front door. He checked the time on his wrist and went to tell them he was closed. Through the door he saw a woman standing there. "I'm sorry Ma'am but I'm closed now. I open at 9 if you still need a drink in the morning." The girl was swaying a bit but managed to steady herself. "Is Henry there? Henry Coda? I'm a friend of his." Rocco opened the door and told her that she just missed him. "He left about 10 minutes ago. You don't happen to be Nan are you?" "Yes..why?" "Oh boy was he going on and on about you. You made quite the impression on him tonight. He usually only talks about music but not tonight. It was Nan this and Nan that. Sorry you missed him." "Yeah, me too. Please tell him I stopped by ok?" "I will. Goodnight." And with that she turned away and headed back to her waiting taxi. “Thanks for waiting. Please take me to the Serling Hotel.”   The driver nodded and turned the key in the ignition and pulled away from the tavern.  Nan, drunk… rummages through her purse as the taxi speeds through the early morning darkness as the car radio plays an REM song and Nan smiles to herself as she zips up her bag and quietly sings along to the tune as it plays.    

#Tumblr Short Story #short story #tumblr writer #writing #werealllight

[justsomeantifas]

What the Fuck is Going On News: June 6th 2018

1. Paul Ryan goes against Trump; says there's no evidence he was spied on and warns him not to pardon himself.

Speaker Paul Ryan dealt another blow to President Donald Trump's "Spygate" theory Wednesday, saying he's seen "no evidence" to support claims that the FBI spied on Trump's 2016 campaign for political purposes.

...

Ryan also echoed recent comments by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in suggesting Trump "shouldn't" consider pardoning himself, despite the president's recent tweet suggesting he has the "absolute right" to do so.“No one is above the law,” Ryan said. (source)

2. Major primary elections occurred yesterday in several states. Highlights:

Election Results: Key House Primaries in California, New Jersey, Iowa, Montana and New Mexico

Deb Haaland’s primary win means she will likely be the first Native American woman in Congress

118,522 voters left off Los Angeles County polling place rosters

Voters recall judge who sentenced Brock Turner to 6 months in jail for sexual assault

3. Trump commutes the life sentence of Alice Marie Johnson.

Flexing his clemency powers once again, President Donald Trump on Wednesday commuted the life sentence of a woman whose cause was championed by reality TV star Kim Kardashian West. “BEST NEWS EVER!!!!” was the exuberant Twitter response from Kardashian West, who visited the White House last week to press the case.

Alice Marie Johnson, 63, had spent more than two decades behind bars, serving life without parole for drug offenses. She was released hours later and ran into her family members’ arms. (source)

4. Facebook shared data with Chinese company that has been under U.S. suspicion since 2012.

Facebook's longstanding agreements that led it to share users' data with device-makers included Chinese phone-maker Huawei – a company of which the U.S. government has long been suspicious, and which intelligence officials view as a security threat.

The social media company also made data-sharing deals with other Chinese companies, including Lenovo, Oppo and TCL , The New York Times reports. They're among the roughly 60 companies for which Facebook says it built private software — giving them special access to users' data so that their devices could mimic Facebook's online tools. (source)

5. Mexico imposes tariffs $3 billion worth of exports including steel, pork, apples, potatoes, bourbon, cheese, and more. 

Five days after President Trump imposed a new set of heavy tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum imports, Mexico hit back, announcing its own set of sweeping tariffs on US pork, steel, cheese, bourbon, apples, and other goods.

According to Mexican officials, they specifically chose to target goods from Republican strongholds, to hit Trump’s party where it hurts ahead of the midterm elections.

Overall, the new penalties will affect about $3 billion worth of US goods. The tax rates vary depending on the product, but most of them are high: There’s a 20 percent tariff on US pork shoulder and legs, and some bourbons and cheeses will be hit with 20 to 25 percent taxes. (source)

6. Jeff Sessions defends separating children from families at U.S. border

On Tuesday, the UN called on the US to "immediately halt" the separations. When asked whether it was "absolutely necessary" to separate children from their parents, Mr Sessions replied in the affirmative. Speaking to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday, he argued that many US children are taken away from their families if their parents are serving prison sentences. 

Mr Sessions said migrant children were "being well taken care of"."It's certainly not our goal to separate children, but I do think it's clear, it's legitimate to warn people who come to the country unlawfully bringing children with them that they can't expect that they'll always be kept together," America's top law officer said. (source)

Related: Taking Migrant Children From Parents Is Illegal, U.N. Tells U.S.

7. The Pentagon admitted it will never know how many civilians it has killed fighting ISIS.

The United States is four years into its war against ISIS — and it has no idea how many civilians it’s killed to date. We know this because the Defense Department admitted it. “As far as how do we know how many civilians were killed — I’m just being honest — no one will ever know. Anyone who claims they will know is lying,” Col. Thomas Veale, a top spokesperson for the US-led coalition against ISIS, told reporters on Tuesday.

...

Veale was responding to a journalist’s question about a recent Amnesty International report that claims the US killed thousands of civilians when it tried to wrest Raqqa — which ISIS considered its capital in Syria — from the group in 2017. On June 2, the Pentagon said the US military killed roughly 500 civilians in 2017 while injuring 169 more. (source)

Related: Full transcript of press briefing by Colonel Veale

Related: Amnesty International’s full report on civilian deaths in Syria

8. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, attempted to tamper with witnesses.

President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who has been indicted by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, attempted to tamper with potential witnesses, Mueller said in a court filing on Monday.

Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, asked the judge overseeing the case in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to revoke or revise an order releasing Manafort ahead of his trial. (source)

Related: Former US attorney says Manafort will likely go to prison Friday

9. ICE arrests 114 immigrants in Ohio raid and sends them to detention centers.

A swarm of immigration agents arrested more than 100 workers at an Ohio gardening and landscaping company Tuesday morning, one of the largest of several recent workplace raids carried out as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration enforcement.

About 200 federal officers blitzed two locations of Corso’s Flower and Garden Center — one in Sandusky, on the shoreline of Lake Erie, and another in nearby Castalia, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told the Associated Press.

Agents surrounded the perimeter of the Castalia location, blocking off nearby streets as helicopters flew overhead, AP and local television stations reported. They arrested 114 workers suspected of being in the country illegally and loaded many onto buses bound for ICE detention facilities. Dozens of the workers’ children were left stranded at day-care centers and with babysitters. (source)

10. During call with Justin Trudeau over trade tariffs, Trump incorrectly blames Canada for burning down the White House.

President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had a testy phone call on May 25 over new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration targeting steel and aluminum imports coming from Canada, including one moment during the conversation in which Trump made an erroneous historical reference, sources familiar with the discussion told CNN.

According to the sources, Trudeau pressed Trump on how he could justify the tariffs as a "national security" issue. In response, Trump quipped to Trudeau, "Didn't you guys burn down the White House?" referring to the War of 1812.The problem with Trump's comments to Trudeau is that British troops burned down the White House during the War of 1812. (source)

Other news to note:

Rudy Giuliani says that Robert Mueller is “trying very, very hard to frame him to get him in trouble when he hasn't done anything wrong.”

After skipping last year's WH event, Trump will be hosting an Iftar dinner in commemoration of Ramadan; so far no Muslim-American community leaders have been invited.

The European Union takes steps to protect the Iran nuclear deal after Trump’s exit.  

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#what the fuck is going on news #politics #donald trump #trump administration #immigration #dismantle ICE #u.s. news #Mod H #long post

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Cory Booker went to Iowa. Michael Bloomberg re-registered as a Democrat after years as an independent. Former Secretary of State John Kerry would not rule out another presidential run, even though it’s very unlikely he will actually pull the trigger. And that’s just the 2020 campaign activity that made the news this week.

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary started the day after the 2016 election — let’s not pretend otherwise. But we’re hitting a new phase of the campaign: the last few weeks of the midterms, when prospective presidential candidates campaign across the country, officially in support of other politicians, but unofficially to build their own brands. And right after the midterms, I would expect a few Democrats to formally announce that they are running in 2020, others to start hiring staff and taking other concrete steps toward a run without quite fully jumping in, and a third bloc to bow out before they have to pretend to enjoy spending the winter in Iowa and New Hampshire

At this point, however, it’s hard to distinguish “I’m keeping my options open” from “Hell yes, I’m running.” So rather than wildly speculating about who’s going to do what, let’s try to answer this question: Who’s already doing the things that eventual candidates typically do at about this point in the election cycle? We’ll use the same rubric we used back in May 2017 for our article “The 7 Signs That Someone Might Be Running For President in 2020”: whether a candidate appeared at a political event in an early primary state (Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina), whether they were profiled for a major magazine, whether they campaigned for their party’s candidates for senator or governor, whether they released a book during this campaign cycle, and whether they’re being included in polls of the Democratic field.1

Here’s the latest tally2:

Who’s acting like they plan to run for president?

Based on indicators between the 2016 election and the 2018 midterms

Visited Iowa N.H. S.C. Book Poll Magazine Profile Campaigned Score Sanders ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 7 Biden ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 6 Bullock ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 5 Booker ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 5 Castro ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 5 Garcetti ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 5 Holder ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 5 Ryan ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 5 Steyer ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 5 Avenatti ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Buttigieg ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Flake ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Gillibrand ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Harris ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Hickenlooper ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Kasich ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Landrieu ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Merkley ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Moulton ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 O’Malley ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Swalwell ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Warren ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 4 Bloomberg ✓ ✓ ✓ 3 Inslee ✓ ✓ ✓ 3 Klobuchar ✓ ✓ ✓ 3 McAuliffe ✓ ✓ ✓ 3 Schatz ✓ ✓ ✓ 3 Hassan ✓ ✓ 2 Patrick ✓ ✓ 2 Sasse ✓ ✓ 2 Schultz ✓ 1

Visits to Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire include formal political events only, including scheduled visits that haven’t happened yet. Candidates count as having a book out if they have published a book or are scheduled to publish a book during the 2018 election cycle. For polls, we’re counting any national, nonpartisan primary surveys that include the potential candidate. A national profile is defined as a piece in The Atlantic, New York magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine or Time that is more than 1,000 words long and includes an interview with the potential candidate. Campaigning is defined as participating in an event for a gubernatorial or Senate candidate.

There are a lot of names there, though even so we probably still missed a few. Because we started with a list of candidates who had visited early primary states, we were more likely to capture candidates who met that criteria and less likely to capture people who have been campaigning in other ways. And since much of this information is pulled from news reports, we may have missed events that didn’t attract much media attention, like a campaign stop in support of candidate whose re-election looks like a sure thing.3 With those caveats in mind, let’s run through this list we have in groups.

Basically running right now

Lawyer Michael Avenatti; South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Montana Gov. Steve Bullock; former Vice President Joe Biden; New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker; former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro; Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti; New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand; California Sen. Kamala Harris; Former Attorney General Eric Holder; former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu; Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon; former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley; Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts; Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio; Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders; Rep. Eric Swalwell of California; businessman and pro-impeachment activist Tom Steyer; Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren

I should emphasize that these signs are a general rubric — a way to test our impressions of the field against reality — not some kind of formal system for predicting who will run for president. That said, I think these indicators do give you some sense of which politicians seem to really want to run.

This first group is potential candidates who have taken at least four of the seven steps toward running. I think of the people in this group as running for president right now, even if some of them end up never launching full-blown campaigns. (For example, at this point, the more interesting story would be if Bernie Sanders didn’t run for president; he is the only person who hit all seven of our indicators.) It’s worth noting the diversity of approaches in this group. Some of them, like Michael Avenatti and Eric Garcetti and Sanders, are making visits to multiple early primary states, which is the equivalent of saying, “I’m really, really thinking about running for president and I really, really want the national media to cover my explorations.”

To be fair to people like Garcetti, if you’re not a nationally known figure, going to the early states is perhaps the most efficient way for an aspiring president to get his or her name in articles like this one. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, is already well-known among Democratic activists, so she can skip the activities that seem very self-focused — she hasn’t gone to Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina — while making moves that keep her profile up (campaigning for Democrats in key gubernatorial races).

There are 20 people in this bucket — a fairly large group. That said, I don’t expect all 20 to run, and I would be surprised if even half of them ultimately do. People who have taken this many early steps often bow out because they decide that they are unlikely to win. Jeff Merkley, for example, is an economic populist who was the only U.S. senator to endorse Sanders in 2016. In terms of message and policy views, the two have a lot in common. So it’s hard to see a path to victory for Merkley if the much-better-known Vermont senator runs too.

Two governors in this group, Steve Bullock and John Hickenlooper, are presenting themselves as more centrist candidates. If Joe Biden decides to run, he will likely enter that centrist lane too, and I doubt there is room for both him and those other two.

Indeed, Biden and Sanders would enter the contest as two of the best-known candidates. But you could imagine one or both of them deciding that the possibility of winning both the primary and the general election is outweighed by the possibility that they will lose one of those races and taint their strong political brands with another presidential defeat.

Of these 20, I’m most skeptical of the idea of Holder and Landrieu running. The former attorney general could be publicly teasing a presidential campaign not because he really wants to run but because the national coverage will bring more attention to his project to mobilize Democrats against what he considers unfair Republican-engineered gerrymandering in states across the country. Or I could be wrong — Holder might launch a formal campaign over the next year, and we could have a field with three high-profile black candidates (I think Booker and Kamala Harris are almost definitely running).

Landrieu has been downplaying the idea of running, and he’s the kind of person with low national name recognition who should probably be overhyping himself if he really wants to compete in 2020.

Notice there are only three women in this group. To be sure, Harris and Warren, in particular, seem more likely to wind up being the Democratic presidential nominee than men like, say, Eric Swalwell. That said, despite the rise of women candidates in the Democratic Party after President Trump’s election, the majority of Democratic presidential candidates will likely be male, in part because the ranks of senators, governors and House members are disproportionately male.

Taking steps but not being as aggressive

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii

This category covers anyone who hit three of our seven signs. I don’t want to overemphasize the distinction between this group and the first one — some people in this group are almost definitely running. Michael Bloomberg and Jay Inslee, for example, are being quite open about considering candidacies, so I just as easily could have included them in the section above.

Amy Klobuchar has a lot of potential appeal: She’s expected to cruise to a third term in a closely divided state; she has gotten fairly strong support in Minnesota’s rural areas, an unusual quality for a Democrat; and she’s a woman at a time when Democratic voters appear to be seeking more gender parity in their elected officials.

I don’t think Brian Schatz has any plans to run, and his visit to Iowa really seemed like an exercise in helping party activists there and not raising his personal profile. But you never know.

Doing fairly little

Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire; Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick; businessman Howard Schultz

Deval Patrick and Howard Schultz are fairly high-profile figures. Neither seems to have closed the door on the possibility of running, but they have been less aggressive than others in laying clear groundwork for a campaign.

Whew. That’s 27 people. And that’s not all. Remember, Rep. John Delaney of Maryland has been an official, declared candidate for over a year. The third-term congressman is not being taken too seriously — many outlets doing polls of the 2020 field aren’t including him. I’m keeping my eye on a businessman named Andrew Yang, who has also officially declared his candidacy. He could run at least a semi-serious campaign for two reasons: He is making a universal basic income, a buzzy idea in left-wing circles, the center of his candidacy, so he is getting some media attention, and, yes, reporters like me are going to cover more out-the-box candidates to avoid missing the next Donald Trump.

Also, and we may come back to this in a later piece, at least three Republicans (Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska) have emerged as anti-Trump figures in the GOP and visited at least one of the early primary states. I would not rule out the possibility that one of them (probably Kasich) will run against the president in the Republican primary.

But let me finish with this: Who seems likely not to run?

On the sidelines

Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, former first lady Michelle Obama, media mogul Oprah Winfrey

After Trump was elected in 2016, it seemed like the rules of politics no longer mattered and so we would see a lot of actors, corporate titans, musicians and other political neophytes run in 2020. That seems fairly unlikely, at least as of now. Avenatti, Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, in particular, would be non-traditional candidates with some Trump-like characteristics. But we’re not seeing real, bonafide celebrities making active moves to run for president.

Michelle Obama, for example, has been included in polls and is coming out with a book, so I could have put her in the section with Deval Patrick, but those are pretty weak indicators in her case; I really, really, really don’t think she is running. Winfrey has two post-2016 books and she polls well, but I don’t think she is running either. In an interview last year, The Rock expressed interest in running for president, but far in the future (2024). And he wouldn’t really fit into our analysis here anyway, since the actor is not affiliated with either party.

It also seemed, in the days immediately after the 2016 election, that the Democrats would be desperate to draft anyone who could appeal to white working class men in Ohio and push those candidates into the presidential field. So far, not so much.

Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey are likely to win re-election this November in key states that Trump flipped to the GOP side in 2016. The fact that Democratic party activists are not clamoring for any of these three to run in 2020 is a sign that the party is not singularly obsessed with finding an “electable” candidate. Democrats might regret this choice if Trump defeats, say, Sanders or Warren in 2020, carrying Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin along the way.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

[lovemesomesurveys]

Do you and your parents like any of the same bands/singers? Yeah. My mom and I like a lot of the same music. Is there any food in your bedroom? What? No. Do you know anyone who has road rage? Who? My dad. How expensive is too expensive for a pair of shoes? I can’t believe people pay $100 and more on shoes. $50 something is about my limit, and that’s expensive, too. To be honest, my more expensive shoes, like my Adidas, were gifts. How far away do your grandparents live from you? It’s about a 12 hour or so drive. We’ve made that trip a few times and it’s torture. 

What kinds of cereal are in the cupboard? I’m actually not sure. I haven’t had cereal in so long so I don’t pay much attention. Is there anything related to cats in your bedroom? Nope. What’s the last thing you spent over 10$ on? Starbucks. Over 30$? A present for my mom. Do you know who lives three houses down from you? Nope. I don’t know any of my neighbors. Do you think Canadians all really love maple syrup? Can you answer this, Lane? Haha. Is there a bulletin board in your room? Yes. Is your mom a big health freak or your dad? Or neither? My dad is a big snacker and he loves his sweets, so definitely not him haha. My mom avoids sugary things as a diabetic and tries to eat healthy. She and my brother are really into cauliflower mashed “potatoes” and “rice.” Her weakness is tacos. Easter or Halloween? I like both. Do you know anyone who wants to be the president one day? Nope. What kinds of chips are in the cupboards? I think we have some Pringles. Do you have your moms or dads hair? I have my mom’s natural hair color, but not style. Her hair is actually really curly, while mine is wavy.  What’s the first thing you see when you walk into your bedroom? My TV. Do you prefer the truth, even if it’s harsh? I guess. :X ha. It’s definitely hard to hear and I’m a sensitive soul. If you were going out with your celebrity crush, what would you wear? Omg. I couldn’t let him see me like this, I am an absolute mess. I’d have to get all fixed up first and then pick something nice. I would DIE if he saw me now. Have you ever skipped history class? In college sometimes. Do you own any yellow clothes? Yeah. Do you have any friends who have naturally red hair? No, but I have a cousin who does. Have you ever cried when a teacher retired? Not for that reason, but I cried at the end of the school year in 4th grade because my teacher wasn’t going to be my teacher anymore. He was everyone’s favorite. It was really cool; though, because he ended up teaching 8th grade and so I got to have him again when I got there.  Does your kitchen look like it was designed in a completely different decade? No. When’s the last time you wore heels? Never. Do you have your mom’s or dad’s eyes? My mom’s. Is there anything shiny in the room you’re in? Yeah. What’s the best date movie? Hmm. I don’t know. I am a sucker for the romantic comedies, though. How long has your current best friend been your best friend? All my life. Have your parents ever been out of the country? Yes. My mom has been to Italy, which I’m quite envious of. Are you older than the last person you laughed with? No. How many pairs of jeans, all together, are in your house? Pfft I don’t know. There’s 4 adults living here and we all wear jeans. We each have several pairs. Do you swear and yell while playing video games? No. Would you rather name your daughter Andrea or Eva? Andrea. Is there any alcohol in the fridge? I don’t think so. If you had to get up at 6am tomorrow morning, would it be painful? It absolutely would be. I don’t even go to bed until like 2 or 3 as it is. Have you ever seen the last person you watched TV with drunk? Yes. If you were adopted, would you want to know? At this point... no. Has a best friend ever ditched you for a girlfriend/boyfriend? Yes.

Would you rather get a new brother or sister? I’m almost 30 now, I’m pretty much good on siblings. My mom couldn’t have any more kids anyway. Unless she adopted, of course. It would be weird to have a baby in the house. My younger brother is almost 21, so it’s been a long time. Do you know anyone who has grossly skinny eyebrows? No. Do you have anything in your room you’ve had for ten years or more? Yeah, a lot of things. Do your pets chase after bugs? No. Would you ever kiss the last person who messaged you on facebook/MSN/etc? No. Do eat at home or in restaurants more? We get takeout to eat at home a lot. 

When’s the last time you were so excited you couldn’t sleep? Why? It’s been a long time since I haven’t been able to sleep for that reason. Audrey Hepburn or Audrey Kicthing? Hepburn.  Do you e-mail more often then you talk on MSN/AIM? I often check my email, but I don’t send any. I haven’t used AIM since like 2009. If your best friend’s birthday was next week, what would you get them? A couple Game of Thrones shirts. What is your mom’s favorite movie? She has a lot. How much older is your dad then you? He’s 28 years older than me.

What TV family reminds you of your own family? I don’t know.

Do you own any flip-flops? Nope. I don’t wear flip flops or sandals.

Did you ever really believe that the stork brought babies? I don’t think I ever thought that.

Are there any drawers in your house that are just filled with junk? Yeah. We have that designated kitchen junk drawer that a lot of people seem to have, but I personally have a few junk drawers in my room. My parents have theirs, too.

Is the last person you spoke to in love? Not that I know of.

How far away is Chicago from where you live? It would be a 31 hour drive. I would definitely be flying should I ever go to Chicago. 

Do you know anyone who always looks perfect? Who? I think my mom does. She’s always had really nice skin and looks great with or without makeup. I didn’t inherit that at all. Do you know anyone who has security cameras in their house? Yeah.

Do you think Zac Efron is really that good looking? Not really, honestly.

What was the last movie to make you cry? Endgame. D:

Has anyone you know ever pulled the fire alarm in school, joking around? No.

What time do you usually go to sleep at sleepovers, if ever? I was always the last one to fall asleep and the first to wake up. I hardly slept at all.

Who was the main character in the last book you read? This girl named Althea. 

Is the last person you said goodbye to single? No. Who are the last people you saw kiss? My parents. Have you ever posted a fan fiction on a website? Nope.  Do you ever fantasize about your future wedding? Who’s the bride/groom? No. I can’t see myself ever getting married, honestly.  Chapstick or lipgloss? Nowadays just chapstick. What was the last unpleasant thing to wake you up? My nightmare last night. Do you have any friends who are ALWAYS kissing their bf/gf? No. Does that get annoying? Uhh it would get uncomfortable and awkward. Would you rather look at clouds or stars? Stars. If you could trade appearances with the last person you hugged, would you? Yes. Do you have any relatives who are expecting a baby really soon? No. Do you ever wonder what the opposite sex do at sleepovers? Nope. When you get married, who will be the maid of honor/best man? Like I said, I probably won’t ever get married. Does your best friend get along with their parents? She did, yes. Unfortunately, they both have passed away. If you were to walk to Florida from where you live, would it take long? Uh, yeah. I live in California. Not happening. I’d never even attempt to walk to next closest city to me. Omg, according to Google it would take 885 hours to walk to Florida. :O  Do you understand why ‘To kill a mockingbird’ is called what it is? I don’t remember why, so I Googled it cause now I’m curious and apparently “Mockingbirds” symbolize innocence, so it’s “to kill innocence.” When’s the last time you broke plans? Why? I haven’t made any plans in such a long time. My friends kept trying for so long, but eventually they gave up cause I’m a mess. Have you ever been in a wedding? What were you? No. Would you feel safer with an alarm system or security cameras? We have both. Does the last person you touched smoke? No. Do you know someone who is CONSTANTLY texting? Does that annoy you? My brother is always texting, but no it doesn’t annoy me. Does it matter to you what kind of shampoo you use? I use a salon style shampoo for red colored hair.

#personal #text #survey #surveys