#in which his agency is taken his independence. losing a job to someone something that copies him and does it better than him | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

canary3d-obsessed · 4 years

Text

Restless Rewatch: The Untamed Episode 06 (first part)

(Masterpost)(Episode 05)

Warning: This contains spoilers for All 50 Episodes

Bad Boys Bad Boys What You Gonna Do

Nie Huasang’s brought his nuts, and someone’s brought wine, so the boys are drinking in Wei Wuxian’s guest house. Finally he gets to drink some of the Emperor’s Smile wine that he’s been doing all those product placements for.

Boys, get a bowl or something for your shells, were you raised in a barn?

Wei Wuxian hits on waxes poetic about the wine, and Jiang Cheng tells him to shut up.

Wang Zhuocheng’s raw-fish-eating face may have failed him, but his drunk faces do not disappoint.

Wei Wuxian teases Jiang Cheng about his list of standards for a chick: She should have natural beauty, be virtuous and caring, from a good family, not too talkative, with a gentle voice, and not too capable. Also she should not spend too much money. Drunken running ensues.

Cue Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin

(more behind the cut)

Much of the fandom has decided this list is a good fit for Nie Huaisang himself, and it sorta is. But he is both talkative and unvirtuous, what with all the current sneakiness, and all the eventual murders.

This also definitely doesn't fit Wen Qing because she's capable as hell.

This list is, however, a 100% a match for Jiang Yanli. Not in a weird, Jin Guangyao way--a lot of men want to marry a woman like their sister. In a gender-divided and generation-divided society, a man’s sister might be the only woman he’s ever known well. Jiang Cheng adores Yanli and she’s his ideal model of a woman, as opposed to his mother, who...isnt.

All these robes and talismans over the door do nothing to stop Lan Wangji from strolling in.

Okay so - Lan Wangji is the senior disciple of the Lan Clan, yea? There is no way that patrolling the guest area is in any way his job. He is just walking around here at night specifically to see what Wei Wuxian is doing.

I already did a gifpost of the boys and their totally nonsexual horseplay, over here. I’ll just add, for sad factor, that Jiang Cheng is play-choking Wei Wuxian when they’re all on the bed, and later in the running-and-crying episode he is gonna for-real choke him. Foreshadowing! or maybe just coincidence!

One fun thread running through the young-cultivators episodes is that Nie Huaisang is legit terrified of Lan Wangji while also having a major aesthetic crush on him. Look at how flustered he is here, trying to act sober while also checking him out.

Lan Wangji is shocked and visibly upset - what are you guys doing? This is not his busting face, this is, for a moment, his vulnerable and disillusioned face. He is super not used to what normal people are like.

Wei Wuxian doesn't lie or otherwise try to get off the hook, which has got to have Jiang Cheng and Nie Huaisang grinding their teeth in frustration. He invites Lan Wangji to join them for a drink. LWJ cites a the “no drinking on campus” rule and WWX tries to convince him to chill.

Then we have this lovely coordinated faint by the boys, to get out of going to get punished. Nie Huaisang has been practicing fainting in front of a mirror just in case he ever needs a skill like that in the future.

Wei Wuxian keeps trying to turn this into a date. Eventually Lan Wangji is so upset he admits he can’t take all three of them by himself.

Then the boys run away fake-barfing and Wei Wuxian hits Lan Wangji with a talisman.

Steal His Agency That’s What You’re Gonna Do

What Wei Wuxian does to Lan Wanji here is definitely wrong. But it's not entirely a disaster. It allows some crucial information to be shared between them, and it results in Wei Wuxian getting the utter shit beat out of him and never doing this again. I mean, he continues to mind-control his enemies and their eventual corpses, but he doesn't intentionally violate a friend or ally's autonomy in the future. Uhh not counting that whole golden core surgery-without-consent situation. And probably some other situations I’ve forgotten. He improves slightly, okay?

It’s important to note, incidentally, that the Lan rules about drinking and other “vices” should not be viewed through a Christian lens. The Lans are neither puritans nor ascetics (look at their clothes, furniture, and jewelry, for starters). Being drunk is forbidden probably because it’s a loss of self-control.

Speaking of self-control, mad props to Wang Yibo for being able to have zero physical reaction to fingers snapping in his face.

Drunk Lan Wangji

Under duress, Lan Wangji knocks back a cup of wine and promptly passes most of the way out.

Wei Wuxian puts Lan Wangji into bed not unkindly, but pretty much like a sack of potatoes. Compare this to how tenderly he handles Lan Wangji the next time he’s drunk.

WWX tells LWJ to call him Wei Gege, and giggles. Is this a term of endearment in this context? So far the various boys are calling each other -xiong, not -ge or gege. In Western media, men calling each other “bro” is basically saying “no homo,” but brotherhood and sisterhood in C-Drama is often a way of indicating stronger love than friendship, without saying whether it's sexual or not.

They finally start to have a conversation, and when Lan Wangji explains that no-one can touch his headband except, etc etc, Wei Wuxian stops trying to touch it. So at least he's not a handsy bastard in addition to all his other faults.

Wei Wuxian tells Lan Wangji that his clan is boring and women won't want to marry him. Lan Wangji says that's fine. On one level this is the show acknowledging that he's gay, but I think he's responding in a gender-neutral way; he doesn't want to marry anyone. Marriage, from his perspective, is the literal worst.

We don't know how he felt about his father, but he definitely loved his mother deeply, and she had a profoundly unhappy marriage, in which her husband did not provide companionship and her children were taken from her.

A note about all that: The dynamics of heterosexual marriages in The Untamed are not based on contemporary companionate marriage. Sex and reproduction is a wife's job in this world, and giving a gentry woman the option to choose her husband is radical. Wei Wuxian is the only one who dares say that Jiang Yanli should have a choice when Jin Guangshan casually tries to give her to his son in front of everyone.

OP made this today but will totally reuse it when episode 23 rolls around

So Lan Wangji’s parents' marriage was extremely problematic but not necessarily for the reasons it would be in contemporary terms. Having signed on to marry Lan Dad, Mom would have expected to live together and get laid regularly (important for health, in some traditional views, regardless of love/no love) and to have the company of her children. Instead, she was isolated. Lan Dad wanted to have it both ways and so even though he loved her and apparently hooked up with her sometimes, he didn't do his duty by her. She didn't love him but she did her duty.

Wei Wuxian continues to not get it, calling Lan Wangji dull and babbling about Lan Wangji’s parents until he realizes that LWJ is an orphan like him.

A nice shift happens here. Once the penny drops, Wei Wuxian doesn't ask a single additional question - he just sees - by reading Lan Wangji’s face - what the deal is, and shares his own story to show he understands.

This is the first time Wei Wuxian mentions being chased by dogs, which is kind of a big deal, because why was he left all alone when his parents died?

Why didn't anyone take him in before Jiang Fengmian found him? How isolated are independent cultivators in this world?

Tea Time

Lan Qiren and Lan Xichen are having tea, and the Lan Clan is so uptight they don't touch each other's teacups. I don't know what this thing is called so I'm going to call it a tea speculum.

Lan Qiren is back from the cultivation conference and says the red crack plague is happening over in Qinghe where the Nie clan lives. Lan Xichen fills him in on the water demon, specifically saying Wei Wuxian figured out the connection to the red crack dudes, and explaining who WWX is, as if Lan QIren hadn't already thrown stuff at him and threatened to eventually kill him.

Fun fact that I just noticed this week so didn't make it into earlier posts: In Episode 46, when Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian are in the Jiang ancestral hall, WWX says he was often punished to kneel there, and LWJ said that they heard about this in Gusu.

So when WWX came to Gusu he already had a reputation as a troublemaker, and the Lan brothers were aware of it.

Busted and Beaten

A Lan snitch comes in to say that Wei Wuxian has successfully corrupted Lan Wangji, which really shouldn’t cause as much surprise as it does.

“Wei Wuxian got drunk”

“Lan Wangji got drunk”

Lan Xichen takes a moment to consider carefully whether Wei Wuxian is a good friend for his little brother and whether perhaps he was too hasty in throwing them together. Ha ha ha no he doesn’t.

On the punishment porch, Lan Xichen tries to lecture Lan Wangji in a calm way, but Lan Qiren wants to beat him and Lan Wangji wants to get beat. Wei Wuxian can’t understand why Lan Wangji doesn’t let him take the blame for the drinking.

Lan Qiren goes way the fuck overboard with this punishment because he's angry--losing control and losing his sense of proportion--and Lan Xichen is shocked. The drone camera watching from above is also shocked.

Lan Qiren has a few (very few) redeeming qualities, but his extreme rigidity and chronic resentment of anyone he perceives as bad are serious problems. His nephews are both struggling with complex moral quandaries as they get older, and he is absolutely no help to them in resolving their conflicts.

This is definitely...a style of parenting & teaching, but you can see how poorly it works, with Lan Wangji straight up saying “fuck it” after many years of conformity. Lan Xichen is devoted to the middle path and tries to be obedient. But he is actually not walking anywhere near the middle path, as he gets pulled into colluding with a murderer at the same time as getting dragged onto his brother’s carnival ride. These men need parenting that isn’t so, uh, fucking stupid. (Yes, grown adults still need good parenting; watch Go Ahead if you doubt me)

Wei Wuxian initially yells and falls down when he gets hit, but then he sees Lan Wangji is taking the beating without any reaction and he tries to do the same.

Aftermath

Jiang Yanli gently lectures the boys, blaming Jiang Cheng for Wei Wuxian's drinking. Jesus Christ, he's the younger sibling, could you just NOT, Yanli?

Both boys ask Yanli not to tell their parents. The boys bicker about who's at fault and then Wei Wuxian shifts to baby voice and starts whining to Yanli about the pain.

Yanli tells him to suck it up, and says after school she'll -- ok and I know this will be a surprise for everyone -- make soup for them. The boys immediately get back on the same team, which is team Please Put Meat In the Soup.

There's a nice character building moment for Wei Wuxian here. When he sees Lan Xichen he initially turns away to avoid running into him, but then he adults-up and goes to face him and greet him, giving him a half of a bow because of the pain, the pain. Rather than complaining about his punishment he meekly asks if he's broken another rule.

Lan Xichen tells him that he did wrong but that Lan Qiren’s punishment was too harsh, and then in what is one of my favorite Lan Xichen moments, invites Wei Wuxian to use the cold spring to heal, but doesn't invite Jiang Cheng to go with him even though Jiang Cheng also was beaten. Lan Xichen, Matchmaker Auntie Extraordinaire.

Then he answers Wei Wuxian’s question about his mom by saying she was just like Wei Wuxian and drove Lan Qiran up the wall. Jiang Cheng's reaction to that is really sweet. He does enjoy Wei Wuxian at the same time as being constantly irritated by him.

Lan Xichen does his patented “breaking off in the middle of saying something and leaving out a chunk of the story” maneuver, although this time he doesn't include a flute solo.

OP is mildly obsessed with Xuan Lu’s shoulders in this outfit. Also Yanli has an interesting sword, that's got some wood carving similar to Subian, but without the organic look, which OP only noticed because of screen capping Xuan Lu’s shoulders.

Club Ruohan

Wen Qing continues to be pretty and slightly evil at this stage, sending magic fire notes to her boss using this talisman that is definitely floating in the air and not just hanging from a string.

Wen Ruohan is in the mosh pit with his zombie groupies while he reads Wen Qing’s extremely vague status update and says "it all makes sense."

Reach out and touch faith

Soundtrack

Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode

Writing Prompt

How did Wei Wuxian’s parents die?

Admin Notes

I’m going to start spacing out my “first part” and “second part” posts by a few days. I’ll update this post to link up the second part once I post it, and my masterpost is always up to date.

Also: if you want more of my original content but don’t want to follow my whole blog (not following is fine!), I keep a pinboard of fun stuff at the top of my blog. I try to post original content at least once a week.

Continued in the second part later this week!

#fytheuntamed #wangxian #the untamed #cql #the untamed gifs #the untamed meta #my gifs #restless rewatch the untamed #restless rewatch #canary3d #the untamed spoilers

350 notes · View notes

prose-for-hire · 4 years

Text

Ats headcanons

I enjoyed doing the btvs characters, so I thought I would do some hcs for working in a store they frequent and meeting Angel characters, perhaps an obstacle to your relationship and how things would develop thereafter.

[Yes, there is some overlap with some of the characters that I did for the btvs hcs but it’s different stores and scenarios and a lot of the characters have had a bit of development since then!]

Warning: Spoilers for probably every season. Sex reference (only in one or two). Reader is cheated on by someone else in one hc.

I feel like these are slightly darker themes in some just cos the show is a little more like that than btvs. Some are so long I might as well have written out a fic but I like doing lots of different characters at once.

Feel free to request Hcs for any buffyverse characters I enjoy doing these !! 💖

Angel:

- Independent book store - He likes to go and buy from independent stores, he doesn’t trust buying from the internet - You are always extra helpful and you don’t mind that he’s usually quiet apart from thanking you - You often tell him if you’ve read one of the books and you liked it, or you tell him to tell you if its any good - You only ever see him in the dark or by the glow of the dimly lit store - He seems lonely to you, insular - You always enjoy that first Sunday evening of the month, because he pretty much comes in regularly - He really enjoys hearing you talk, you have lots of opinions on literature and the characters and some of them, he had never heard not in the centuries he had been around - You interested him and he liked that you didn’t know anything about demons, it meant he could feel almost human for the first time in a long time - You were his secret, none of his friends knew that he now exclusively shopped there because it meant he could see you, he had started talking just as much as you did - Sometimes, he cleared his whole evening and he would find himself caught in such an interesting conversation with you that time would fly by and you were supposed to have closed the store hours ago - He offers to drive you home, you accept happily and you really get on he might even invite you in and allow you to stay over if it gets too late (he would 100% take the couch no arguments srry) - So someone either barges in that morning or they insist they need to go to the bookstore with him next time he goes - I’m guessing Wes or Cordy - Both would sense the familiarity between you straight away and squint at him, checking if he’s gone evil because his face is actually contorted into a… pleasant smile - Either way they’ll start running their mouth about demons and angel will panic and pull them away leaving you confused - He’ll have to hurry away to take care of some demon, neither of you can stop thinking of the other for the full week - He’ll come in, sheepish, having to explain himself. Demons, all that. Probably feel guilty if he didn’t tell you he was a vampire too (cue an explanation of the curse) - You’ll surprise him, shrug, and ask if he wants to get a drink after your shift - First date of many, you might even join angel investigations after a while (not just bc you’re now in a very committed relationship with the boss)

Spike:

- You work in an electronics store. - His PlayStation stopped working (he threw it out of the window when he lost) so he’s demanding you fix it - You tell him it’s a write off. But you show him some good deals on a new one. - He smiles, thinking you were flirting, but it’s something you are supposed to do for your job - He pays with a debit card, that says it belongs to ‘Angel investigations’ - You presume he’s the named Angel, and say ‘Thanks Angel’ as he leaves - He turns back, starting to scowl, but then realises what’s happened. He keeps up the pretence so that Angel doesn’t figure out he’s taken the company card - He’s pretty lonely, so when he’s not swearing at his PlayStation, he’s thinking about the brief interaction with you at the store - He comes in a few more times, asking about accessories or extras he may need to make him win better - He sticks around for slow evenings sometimes. You start to chat to him, getting to know him, always giving him the warmest smile - Your hands probably brush against each other when you’re showing him something and he cannot stop smiling – it’s been the best thing that’s happened since he became corporeal again. Human touch. Your touch - Finally asks you out, you decide you’d love to spend time with him - There’s only one problem - You think his name’s Angel. So, he spends most of the evening telling you wild and very obviously made up stories about being an investigator and then becoming a CEO. - You go into a bar together and who should interrupt but the real Angel and he keeps calling your Angel by the name Spike. - You frown, having had enough and he’s caught up in some demon killing so he can’t come after you - He is too embarrassed for a while to talk to you again, but eventually waits for you after work - He explains everything, you roll your eyes and smile. The times you actually liked him had been when he was himself at the store. He would come in making you laugh and insulting customers under his breath to make you smile - You agree to have a do-over, introducing yourself again and smiling softly as he holds your hand under the counter before he continues to mutter his insults towards the customers.

Cordelia:

- You work for a temp agency, Angel investigations takes you on in their busy period (LA demons don’t listen to the curse of Halloween so it can get busy) - Real busy - So you are drafted in temporarily to help pick up calls - You have experience and you know all about demons (you used to live on a Hellmouth) - Cordy doesn’t get on with you at first, thinking you’re too perfect taking over her job - She wants her wage and its stretched thinner with a new employee - You reorganise the filing, make detailed notes and are really good on calls to potential clients - And you’re really friendly with her and she finds herself enjoying your company but she still gets suspicious of how good you are at her job - aka she gets a little jealous and it boils over one evening and she starts to ask Angel how long it’ll be until you leave - You overhear, ofc, and Angel’s eyes widen making Cordy turn and see your hurt face - And she feels really guilty when she sees she’s upset you - You just walk past her, pass Angel the files you had finished, and took your jacket to leave - Angel and Wes talk to Cordy, hinting that a lot of her attention has been on you recently – maybe she should think about why that is - You call in sick the next few days, thinking about checking if you can change your contract and be transferred somewhere else. She can’t stop thinking about you - When you’re finally back in, you start the day off in silence, trying to keep up your usual cheery phone voice - Cordelia comes straight in and apologises, handing you a hot drink exactly the way you like it - She hangs the call up that you were on, clicking the button in, losing you a client but this is more important - She tells you that she really likes you and she didn’t realise until she hurt you how much you meant to her in such a short time - She wants to know if she can make it up to you with maybe a dinner date? Say, tonight at that new place - Angel knows someone and helped her get reservations and you agree that it’s the least she could do which makes her smile

Wesley:

(sorry this isn’t in the best moment of his character arc)

- Hardware store - You get suspicious when he’s buying a list of things that makes you think he might be doing something he shouldn’t - You honestly don’t get paid enough for this, but you had to confront him in the car park for your own moral conscience - He has purchased a bucket, some rope, heavy-duty chains and a large mallet - So you shout, ‘Hey! Are you planning on killing someone?’ (you’re not great with tact) - He whips around so fast and stalks towards you it honestly scares you - He has a certain level of menace, like the English villains in cartoons - “That, would be none of your business” he mutters, realising he would have to go back in and buy more if he wanted to keep you in his closet too - “You know, if it’s something supernatural you might need more than a mallet” you offer, you can tell when someone’s seen something supernatural. Something behind their eyes - He just shakes his head and leaves, but all the while he’s apart from you he can’t stop thinking about you - He glares at the woman he has held hostage, wishing she would just give up her information do he could find Angel - He finds himself walking back to the hardware store - Some dithering excuse about the strength of the chains or wanting you to show him some alternative rope - Gets into a conversation with you about either how you know about demons or why you thought he was gonna kill people - You tell him very obviously he is at least holding a hostage, it makes him crumble slightly - He’s been through a lot, what with the almost dying. Twice - He tells you to follow him and you shrug, chucking your apron at your friend on shift, asking him to cover you - You spoke in the shadows, not able to see each others faces. He told you everything, like everything since he had moved to the U.S, Sunnydale, everything. - He could tell there was something about you, I mean asking him if he was gonna kill someone? You were intelligent, perceptive and to him: better than the job you were in - You then told him of your own darkest moments - Bonded through this, you parted ways, but your minds never left that spot. Never left each other - You met up regularly after this, you hinting that he should probably let the woman go now. Maybe there could be another way to find his boss - Then one day she was gone, his mood lifted and he pulled you into him and landed a kiss - You start dating, helping him sort through everything and you probably eventually join Angel Investigations, Wesley thinks you’re better suited with him anyway

Gunn:

- You serve coffee at a local diner 24 hour diner.

- He comes in every Friday, but he’ll start coming in more regularly when he spots you behind the counter

- After his shifts, before his shifts for a morning coffee even if he’s late into the office

- Finds himself spending more money than is feasible on eating out just because you’re there

- Decides he had better ask you out. So he does.

- Very cool, very collected

- you can’t help smiling at the way he’s leaning ever-so-cool across the counter

- You’re so pleased he likes you, he had definitely caught your eye, and you jump at the chance to go on a date with him

- There’s only one problem: he finds out you’re half demon and you have a big hatred for a certain mystical law firm that had ruined your family

- He’s cool with the half-demon thing, but it does mean he’s lying about where he works now

- He likes you too much to ruin it over anything like a job

- But one day, after dating a few months, you find out. You were summoned to a meeting at the top floor of the building, the only one that could translate as you passed for human

- There was some misunderstanding over the sacrificial killings being presumed murder by the CEO and his team

- You walked in to find your boyfriend shuffling his papers waiting for this translator he didn’t want to have to deal with

- This results in an argument in front of the whole team and your extended family who don’t really get what’s going on

- You storm away and Angel lets your family off due to the bad publicity he’s informed will take place if they do anything else

- Gunn lets you cool off but eventually can’t stay away and comes into your work and you try to ignore him

- he follows you into the back, apologising over your boss who is shouting at him for coming into the employee-only area

- he takes your shoulders, looks into your eyes and promises he’s working there for the right reasons, telling you that he’s on the right side of this but if you asked he could see about looking for different employment

- he wouldn’t stop saving the world, but he could transfer to some kind of ‘consultancy’ status

- you smile, appreciating the gesture but insist that he shouldn’t lose his job for you. You accept his apology and start to make things work - promising to be honest from then on

- he kisses you, cupping your cheek and moving your head towards him, the verbal promise sealed with the kiss you shared

Fred:

- you’re a barista in a coffee shop

- she’s always in early mornings and late nights, sometimes you open a little later knowing she’ll want her coffee with extra cream and sugar

- she always bashfully thanks you, insisting you shouldn’t have waited, so you have to admit seeing her is often the highlight of your day

- she’ll blush and shake her head, sipping slowly on her drink. She’ll grin and say it’s exactly how she likes it (you had it waiting for her, she didn’t have to order)

- you get to know her over the months she’ll pop in, becoming a really close friend of hers.

- which soon leads into more, both of you being very affectionate. It comes so naturally

- problem is that the tension in her office could be cut with a knife. Almost everyone had a crush on her, whether she was aware of it or not

- you became very insecure, distancing yourself from her after you noticed

- thinking maybe she would be better off with one of the others. she was so upset, her brow furrowing and her work not being her best

- she felt alone again, like she had when she was trapped on Pylea. she just wanted to speak to you about it but she couldn’t. she didn’t get why you were being so cold

- One day you notice one of the men in the lab harassing her at work when you pop in (your coffee store does deliveries now) and you cuss him out

- she smiles, grateful. Her nose scrunching as she smiled. You nod awkwardly, handing her drink and leaving which makes her deflate a little (she wanted you to stay)

- finally, she comes in on her day off - which is odd cos it’s so far from her apartment. she tells you she wants to spend time with you and she wants to know why you suddenly stopped seeing her

- you explain everything, on your break. She shakes her head and smiles fondly at your explanation.

- she promises the only one she has eyes for is you. You grin and she insists you should have spoken to her about it sooner

- you mysteriously come down with an ‘illness’ after your break and ask to take the rest of the day off and spend it in bed with Fred

Lorne:

- you work in an exclusive theatre, work in the ticket office for premiers

- You see Lorne a lot and always give him a winning smile

- He knows you by name straight away, he’s a people person

- But it was so more than that, he was absolutely entranced by you but you couldn’t tell - he was always around celebrity types what with his job so you felt like he wouldn’t want to look at you twice

- he always stopped to talk to you, savouring the moment you had together

- he was thinking of asking you to dinner, or to accompany him to a premier one time instead of you mostly staying in the ticket office

- however one time, before he had chance to ask, he brought a friend with him. Wesley

- he talked to you, Lorne visibly tense at the way he took a shine to you

- you start to date Wesley on and off after that evening,

- Lorne gets annoyed at the way he treats you, dropping you any time that Fred so much as gave him a second glance

- you felt lonely and sad, the only person able to cheer you up being Lorne

- he kept you company a lot, growing so close to the point you trusted him more than anyone. You were so comfortable with him, in the way

- he desperately wants to hold you in his arms, take care of you the way that you deserve

- one evening you say that you had better leave, Wes was supposed to be taking you out

- you walk to his office and find Wes kissing Fred. You scream, shout and then storm away

- Lorne hears the commotion, following you out and scooping you up and holding you into him

- the warmest embrace one you didn’t ever want to move from

- he stayed with you for months, building you back up for entirely selfless reasons.

- one day, way after everything that happened with Wes, he looks at you and his feelings let slip

- you smile, shocked. You hadn’t realised he felt that way - you had thought you would never have a chance with someone like him. You tell him this and and pulls you close

- you kiss, the passion that has been building since the day you met finally pouring between you. You both smile at each other and you pull him in again for another kiss

Doyle:

- You work the register in a liquor store

- He came in fairly often, the hard stuff the only thing that would help with the visions

- you like his humour, and his accent, and he always has a smile for you even if he’s had a crap day

- he really likes you but he doesn’t know how to tell you

- won’t shut up about you to Angel. So much so that even Angel was gonna march him over to your store and demand he ask you to put him out of his misery

- but luckily, you took a shine to him so you were the one doing the asking. Or, more hinting that you would be getting off your shift soon and that you could share one of his fine bottles of cheap liquor if he wanted company

- almost choked on his words in his enthusiasm, so he just nods and waits for you to grab your stuff

- you spend a lot of time just talking, sharing intimate details and connecting

- his irish lilt was music to your ears and he smiled in that boyish way he does when you tell him this

- You finish a bottle and since that night, he’s addicted. He wants to spend all of his time with you

- He keeps the visions secret at first, but eventually one night he has a bad one – needs to see Angel and you tell him he needs to rest

- You worry, but he’s insistent

- So you come with him and find out about the demons that you had never quite managed to notice before

- He shares, explains about everything while he’s holding you in his arms. Only thing is he manages to avoid the fact that he’s half demon himself.

- You become closer, noticing Angel and Cordelia (you were friends with them both now kind of) seemed to be hinting he needed to tell you something

- You only caught whispers, the end of conversations but you decided to ask him

- He avoided the question, he didn’t feel good enough. He didn’t want to lose you, you were too important to him – he thought you finding out he was demon would make you run a mile

- And then, one evening he had left to help at Angel Investigations when there was a knock at the door. It was a spiky green demon, apparently a distant relative of your guy

- You invited the demon in, making sure to be the perfect host(/ess)

- Doyle eventually came in, eyes wide and panicked when he saw the relative. You continued to pour the tea, offering him a cup which he declined and went straight for the hard stuff

- The relative stayed the night, at your insistence, and when you and Doyle went into his room to sleep you asked him to show you that part of him

- He reluctantly did, incredibly embarrassed. But you just kissed him softly and slipped into bed, patting the other side for him to join you

- He grinned, thanking his lucky stars and your relationship only grew from there

Harmony:

- You serve at a Demon bar.

- You make drinks and various cocktails of slime and blood

- Starts as a fling, she doesn’t expect it to be anything more

- Sometimes she’ll talk down to you or start nibbling on your neck. You get on at her to stop, she knew you were human to begin with

- She tries to use sex to distract you, but you want the romance too

- She isn’t used to people wanting a romantic relationship, so she expects you just want sex like her past relationships

- When she realises how soft you can be and how much she enjoys it, things change

- Harmony slowly starts moving her stuff in, suggesting brunch and calling you cheesy pet names that you find adorable.

- You find yourself excited about this, she appears well-meaning and she’s very sweet with you. A little bit fang-happy sometimes but you can let that slide

- You treat her with kindness that she isn’t accustomed to in relationships, she decides because of this its true love. Like in a romance novel.

- Absolutely not used to such kindness.

- You’re happy with her excitement, not because she was treated so bad, but because she feels for you like you feel for her.

- When she double-crosses the people she was supposed to be loyal to, you have a big argument

- You love her, but she relies on the ‘I’m a vampire’ excuse and won’t take responsibility

- There’s a rough patch and both of you are so upset without the other

- But she comes back to the home you shared one evening, calling you the sweetest pet-names and apologising in her own way

- You accept, continuing to date and explore a healthy relationship, trying to help her with her own self-worth too

Lindsey:

- Gas station

- You have served him both on his way in and out of town, the many times he has left and come back

- You don’t usually remember customers, but you do remember customers that have the seeming ability to grow back hands

- You were always kind to him, maybe a little extra friendly but he never usually stayed to chat

- He had been in a bad mood the last time you saw him, but he had nodded at you before he left

- He was coming back into town again this time, stopping for gas and you hadn’t thought you would see him again

- It had been such a long time, you figured he had finally moved away for good. You liked making up stories about the customers that stopped by, it made time go a little faster on slow nights

- Tonight you were on your break when he rolled up in his truck, looking pleased with himself

- You were outside, catching some fresh air and he struck up conversation. He had a glint in his eye, some purpose he was coming back for

- He smiled, actually started sweet-talking you. It appeared that he had you in his memory too

- He asked if you wanted to see each other, now he was moving back to LA

- You have nothing to lose so you say yes agreeing to drinks to see where things went

- Things start out good, for a while. Until he asks you to quit your job and get a job and infiltrate a formerly evil law firm

- You have no experience, no anything but he manages to swing it for you. He just wants you to watch them, for now

- You realise you feel like you’re being used, there’s more to the plan than you realise

- You come home one night, a black eye after Angel ‘asks’ you if you know anything about the amulet – some girl that’s supposed to be dead said you weren’t the real liaison with the senior partners

- Lindsey apologises, gets mad at them for being cruel to you. Tells you everything, his plans, his reasoning. Says he wants to hurt them more now they’ve done this to you.

- He cant stop apologising while he holds you close to him in bed

- He loves you, he tells you and you choose to trust him. feeling it so intimately

- He looks out for you and he’s protective of you if you come with him to Wolfram and Hart ever

- Instead of getting caught up on the fight he catches your eye and decides, for the last time, to leave LA this time – he wants to take you with him

Lilah:

- Hotel check in. you’re a receptionist who basically runs the place

- Lilah’s having sex with someone senior for information that will get her a promotion

- You’re always nice to her, she’s always short with you

- One day you snap, asking why she’s such a bitch. You weren’t usually like this, but you had a bad day and it suddenly came out

- She smiled, arching an eyebrow and just turned to leave satisfied that nobody is as nice as you had been pretending to be

- She had been pushing your buttons on purpose, seeing how long it would be until you snapped

- It had surprised her and been a couple of months of her being rude to you

- she smiled, saying her door would be open if you wanted to do something about it

- It of course, started off with an angry passion, sex just because you could. for convenience and just to get frustrations out (from both of your jobs)

- It was easy for both of you, but suddenly after a while of your arrangement you let something slip in the throws of passion

- The ‘L’ word

- Boy was she mad at you for saying it. Shoving you almost off the bed, snatching up her clothes and calling you pathetic before she stormed away

- she refused to answer you calls after this, for a while. You didn’t realise she was scared of her won feelings that surfaced when you said what you did

- You came to her work, she threatened to call security but you mentioned a few confidential cases she had left around the hotel room that you managed to cast a glance over

- she agreed to let you into her office so you could talk

- and surprisingly, you did. She tried her best to keep you at arms length but the promise of someone to actually care about her with no ulterior motives was too much

- she agreed to meet you that night, the first tentative feeling of a relationship coursing through you, hopefully you could convince her to take a chance on you

65 notes · View notes

split-n-splice · 4 years

Photo

you live, you learn / you love, you learn / you cry, you learn / you lose, you learn / you bleed, you learn / you scream, you learn ~ "You Learn" by Alanis Morissette Time for a brief intermission for some backstory. I have my reasons. This may clash with the flow a little bit, but oh well. Regular linear timeline will resume Ch27: Aura Of Others

[Chapter Guide]

26. Intermission: Jagged Little Pill

New Years Eve held promise. A new year, a new start, a new resolution, a new her. The troubled city now knew her not as Shilo Gough, a local nobody, but as a rising superheroine by the alias of Shego.

It had taken a heap of good behavior to get out on probation just to go home in time for the winter holidays, though her siblings had been deemed low-risk and returned officially months ago once the restoration of the neighborhood had been completed. It helped that the grand unveiling of Team Go and her return to Go City had come a month early out of necessity.

At first, she eagerly embraced the new double-lifestyle, even if she wore an anklet at all times to track her whereabouts and the activity level of the new innate gift only Shego was permitted to use. It at least meant getting out of the facility and distancing herself from the research teams which wanted to dissect her under the guise of helping.

She’d thought going home to rejoin her family would mean returning to some normalcy, but December hadn’t gone great, as she’d been called into action no less than three times a week. Overall, it really hadn’t been her year, so it didn’t surprise her that even the season of gift-giving, comfy sweaters, and cookies was put on the back burner in favor of demanding hero duty.

She convinced herself she didn’t mind the distraction from Yuletide festivities. It beat sitting at home looking at gift tags signed From Santa in inelegant print or noticing the distinct lack of music that somehow made the house several degrees colder. Spending time with family was disheartening when it was incomplete anyway, but she’d run herself so far into the ground by Christmas that the best gift she could hope for was to be buried in her blankets – not running through the streets after the criminal of the week. Even with Global Justice’s so-called assistance, she’d hardly had a good night’s rest since coming home.

End of the month meant another refill on her prescription. The narcotic was uniquely formulated for her and came from no ordinary pharmacy.

Shilo – Shego – and her brothers-turned-teammates, Hego and Mego, had just wrapped up the Christmas caper and smiled and waved for the press and wished an early Happy New Year to all of Go City when they were collectively pulled aside by agents in the shadows. A woman with an eye patch congratulated them on a job well done, but a pat on the back was the extent of their reward when it came down to it. Mego sniffed and grinned, happy for the attention from a pretty lady doling out compliments, and Hego proudly announced it was all in a day’s work. Shego sighed and held out her hand in anticipation of the usual delivery she’d received from Betty personally for the past three months.

From there, they dressed back into street clothes in one of the agency’s many secret boltholes found throughout Go City, and Shego shook herself out in relief to be Shilo again. Her brothers wanted to walk home together, her sandwiched between them, so the relief was short-lived.

“There’s safety in numbers,” reminded Hugo, grabbing her arm to tow her along. He was filling out around the shoulders and torso, and lately his idea of a gentle grip had begun leaving bruises.

“Oh, come on!” Shilo whined. She recomposed herself quickly then to tease her older sibling instead, “What do you need me for? You can walk home yourself. You’re a big boy.” It was no exaggeration either. Hugo was little more than seventeen, but over the past year had developed a pair of guns capable of intimidating professional wrestlers. The jocks at their new school, which Hugo had been attending for months now, gave him a wide berth, so she heard.

Milo sprang three steps ahead in the snow suddenly, proclaiming his independence, “I don’t need either of you! Anyone comes after me, I’ll sock it to ‘em.” He boxed at the air with pale bony knuckles, a far cry from Hugo. Affected with the onset of puberty and ganglier than ever, the tween tripped over his own legs and slipped, falling to the icy sidewalk. In a perfect world, he’d be home next to Mom, taking a piano lesson or baking sugar cookies – not out on the streets, excited to pick up the slack for policemen or secret agents.

Shilo’s fist curled in her pocket, palm growing warm around her refilled prescription. Her other hand reached down to grab one of Milo’s as he stuck both of his up in the air, expectantly waiting for a sibling on either side to grab hold. Shilo was glad Hugo released her to take Milo’s other hand, and while she would have been happy to drag her little brother through the slush, her big brother spoiled the fun by lifting him to his feet with ease.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m just going to the mall,” she swore. “I’ll be home by three.”

“That’s what you said last time,” noted Milo, ambling along next to her. At least his tiny body put something between her and Hugo now. “Dad made dinner! Do you know what he made?”

“Fishcakes,” she sighed, nodding. She’d barely choked down the cold leftovers that night when she snuck in at six in the evening. Anyway, 6:00PM wasn’t that late. Back when she still visited her best friend at her house down the street, she used to come home at a quarter to nine, if at all. But that was before Lady Fate came to Go City. Now that she had a superpower and could defend herself better than ever, it made an early curfew pretty silly.

Shilo opened her mouth to argue when a fluttering past her head made her duck and topple into her spindly little brother. A curse nearly escaped her lips as she locked her eyes on the offending – pigeon? – flapping away to join its flock in a skeletal snowy elm at the corner. In the past month, she’d had a lot of things hurled her way, and it was becoming second nature to dodge at the faintest sign of a projectile. So her heart hammering in her chest was justified as Milo shoved her away.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose when a nasally voice behind them called, “Excuse me?”

Hugo turned, even though Shilo grabbed Milo and kept towing him along. “Can I help you, sir?” asked her big brother to the civilian behind them. Shilo clenched her jaw. Didn’t they have a rule? Don’t talk to strangers. Not outside of uniform, anyway. It wasn’t conducive to keeping a secret—

“You’re Team Go. Right?”

Shilo whipped around to lock her eyes on the stranger, freezing on the spot.

Milo on the other hand bounced free of her grip. She grabbed for him again, but he’d bound up to Hugo’s side to proudly announce, “Yes! Yes, we are.”

Hugo cuffed him on the shoulder, and just about threw him into a snowdrift by doing so had he not caught him in his other paw. “I’m – we are not,” corrected Hugo in a practiced statement. “But maybe I can help you?”

The man stood in a grungy old parka trimmed with a collar of white, stained and weathered. He wrung his hands, duct-tape mending the holes in his leather gloves. “I’m Dr. Robinson,” he introduced, and struck out a hand to shake. The grimy man didn’t look like a doctor. He wasn’t one of Global Justice’s anyway.

Hugo didn’t take the hand and he most certainly didn’t give his name. It was probably the smartest thing he’d done all day. “Pleasure,” he said, and repeated once more, firmly, “Can I help you?”

The man’s beak-like nose pointed at them all in turn. Shilo’s stomach twisted as it was aimed in her direction for a millisecond too long, and she stepped forward to take her place between her brothers. The thin lips of the down-on-his-luck doctor, if he was even a doctor at all, split into a wide grin he quickly smothered. That was enough of a clue there was a screw loose. “Actually, I was thinking I could help you.”

“We’re good,” said Shilo, grabbing her brothers by the arms.

Hugo was unmovable. He crossed his arms over his chest and scoffed. “You. Help us? Do we look lost to you?”

“They might need help,” mumbled Milo. Shilo elbowed him sharply in the ribs.

“I can – I have – you are Team Go!” Robinson insisted. “Aren’t you?” He sounded a little desperate.

Hugo had been about to steer them away when he shot a look back at the sketchy figure. “I told you, if you need help—”

“I don’t need help,” swore the prideful shivering man, his laugh wavering as he flapped his hands about and lurched forward. “I don’t need you. But you could really use me. I can – I’m like you, see?” He stuck out his hands as if to flip them the bird or show them his fingers. All ten digits were accounted for, but by the wild flick of his eyes as he waited for them to react, he had lost his marbles.

Eyebrows rose at Dr. Robinson. An exchange of glances, and Hugo and Milo burst into laughter. Dr. Robinson looked to his hands, all over himself, and up at them as something strange crossed his face. Disbelief, maybe. Disbelief that two young heroes were laughing at him.

“You can’t see it,” he muttered, sounding halfway out of his mind. “I-I have a gift like you!” he defended as the boys doubled over in infectious laughter. “You just can’t see it! You don’t have the eyes for it,” he squawked, voice shrill with desperation.

“Someone needs to come take Dr. Cuckoo back to the funny farm,” chortled Milo.

Hugo had a hard time reining it in. He thumped Milo so hard on the back that the boy fell into the snow again. “Get me a phonebook!” he guffawed. “We need to find this guy a shrink.”

Milo looked up at Hugo from where he lay, beaming ear to ear, and a new wave of laughter shook him and brought him to tears.

Shilo shoved her big brother, but he didn’t budge. “Leave him alone, you guys.”

The balking man shrank back from them. “I’ll show you!” he squawked, as if it were a threat. He looked beyond them, a hand outstretched and fingers clawing the air in a vaguely come-hither motion, but nothing at all happened. He paled. He shook his head like a wet dog, greasy ginger hair splattering droplets of melted snow. Shilo backed out of range as the man ground out something animalistic she couldn’t decipher. His face twisted and he clawed at his features.

He looked undoubtedly crazy in that moment. He was probably on something, she decided.

She couldn’t complain when Hugo took her by the shoulders, pulling her back from the sketchy derelict tripping out. She caught Milo by the hood of his jacket as the three of them left the questionable individual to have a meltdown there on the snowy sidewalk.

++X++

By the time Shilo reached the mall, the cuckoo lunatic had been left behind along with the worries of Shego’s hero duties, if only for a little while. She peeked over her shoulder, casting a quick glance about for signs of her brothers she’d barely escaped from, before ducking behind the hedge and around the wall to the side of the shopping center where the average civilian had no business loitering.

She smelled her before she saw her. Debatably cooler than the snow around her and seemingly indifferent to the winter chill, a fair blonde leaned against the brick and mortar wall, pink mini skirt daringly short and snow-white stockings spotless. As Shilo sauntered up to the pink-clad girl, striving to match her flippant air, a cigarette was offered to her. She took a drag – she couldn’t not with Priscilla’s critical eyes surveying her – and licked her lips to taste the trace of Priscilla’s cherry lip gloss left on the filter.

Shilo fought against the urge to choke. She swallowed and kept her cool. “So. The usual?”

“Yeah. Why not,” said Priscilla between drags, and patted a fanny pack on her hip to jingle the change inside. “I won a bet with Mickey, so it’s on me.”

“What was the bet?” Shilo was handed the smoke again too soon, Prissy’s smirk egging her on. Unenthused but compliant, she took another puff as the mischievous girl grinned at her. She couldn’t help laughing back and coughing as she did so. It was a good excuse to drop the spent butt on the ground. “What?” she snickered in demand and shook the girl’s shoulder. “Priss, what did you do?”

When her best friend since daycare made a sly gesture with hand and cheek, Shilo shoved her and stumbled away, an awkward bark of laughter erupting from her.

“That’s disgusting!” Shilo declared through her laugh. She wove her fingers behind her back to hide the unsettled burning in her palms as they walked back around toward the front. She grinned nonetheless, cheeks pinched as she failed to fight off a blush. “Don’t even joke like that.”

“Call it what you want, Shi. I call it easy money. It got me ten bucks.”

Priscilla was as proud and smug and comfortable in her own skin as ever. After the hectic year she’d had, Shilo’s gut twisted as she doubted she’d find that level of confidence. The extent of her experience on that front had been Seven Minutes in Heaven with Mickey at Priscilla’s thirteenth birthday party a few years back, and given the resulting locked braces, it wasn’t such a fond memory. And now with her new looks, boyishly short hair, and sickly pasty-pale skin, she was in no hurry to expand on that experience.

“Jeez,” muttered Shilo with a shake of her head. She got a grip on herself and glanced back to the cigarette butt smoldering in the snow. She stopped herself from wiping her mouth before she could smudge Shego’s makeup, and kept her disbelief or disgust or whatever it was she felt to herself as they made for the mall arcade.

As per usual, ten dollars split between two players went quick. Just to extend their stay a little longer, Shilo forfeited some of her own hard-earned babysitting money to the machines.

She wasn’t complaining though. It was a scrap of normalcy she couldn’t find back home. Back home, there was no Mom, no cookies, no music, no joy – only phone calls for appointments with doctors and for interviews, toddlers who never stopped crying, and a father who drank too much these days. It was hardly home at all, and she was hardly even Shilo there anymore. She was just Shego, waiting on standby to be called upon for a hero emergency. Even her prohibited rendezvous with Priscilla felt too much like just going through the motions, but she refused to think of that.

Tickets were redeemed for a handful of cheap toys. Fake spiders and bouncy balls were thrown off the second-story to the level below, landing in the hair of unsuspecting passerby, or bounce-bounce-bouncing across the plaza to inevitably bounce out of sight, disappearing either into a shop or into the expensive indoor garden sporting a water feature at the heart of the mall.

Eventually a beer-bellied security guard walking toward them was their cue to scram.

The small rush paled in comparison to the adrenaline surges she’d have in the heat of battle over the past month, but it was enough to bring a smile to her face and feel normal. Shilo laughed along with Priscilla as they held each other’s hands, taking turns practically dragging the other as they made the dash for the far end of the mall.

Suddenly she was tugged aside and into a parlor. The parlor Shilo had her sights on was still several shops away and involved pizza, not piercings, but she humored Priscilla as the girl sought out the gaudiest hoops and filled her in on a spiel of flimflam about what was trendy at the school they once attended together.

It was a blow she wasn’t ready for, but Shilo tried to keep the smile on her face. They didn’t go to school together anymore. There had been years they didn’t share the same classes, but they’d always shared the same school – until now. Shilo was due to start private school clear on the other end of town soon, and Priscilla would go on attending in the local district. That alone was enough to feel like a guillotine had separated them – but Shilo shook her head and smiled at her reflection as Priscilla held up earrings featuring the eyes of peacock feathers to her ears, still pressing she should have them re-pierced.

With no extra cash for earrings, let alone even considering paying for piercings, Shilo wasn’t so sure about trying the old ice and needle trick again.

Her mouth stayed shut as Priscilla fidgeted with the rack of earrings, taking a nicer pair to hide in her sleeve. Shilo said nothing still as a hand smacked her on the butt, earrings slipped into her back pocket with a sleight of hand. She shot her friend an unhappy look through the mirror.

Priscilla coughed into her fist, “Wet blanket.”

Shilo was soon casting a glance back as they left the parlor. A few shops away, Priscilla retrieved the earrings from Shilo’s back pocket. “These will look good on you,” she said decisively, brandishing the stolen item. “Don’t you think?”

The tag sporting a pair of green rhinestone earrings was deposited in her hand. “Yeah,” said Shilo, pushing the evidence back out of sight into her pocket. She scanned the crowd of shoppers, seeking out anyone in uniform, but even when her search came up empty, she couldn’t relax. The best of GJ’s spies didn’t stand out anyway.

They finally made it to the food court. Shilo pulled out her change and counted nickels and dimes for a slice of pizza that once tasted like greasy cardboard but was now a delectable slice of heaven after the diet she’d been restricted to at the research center for the better half of the year.

Priscilla, with her bowl of chili cheese fries, criticized her for her choice in grub as she joined Shilo at a table. She showily unzipped her jacket, letting her crop top show for all to see, like she was really all that. Still, Shilo pulled into herself just a little, fixing her eyes down on the pizza that had gone cold while waiting for her friend. She was sweltering hot, but she zipped her own coat up a little tighter. She couldn’t go around showing off her skin like that anymore. Her sickly complexion attracted enough stares, and she didn’t need to be recognized as Shego for her pallid green skin alone.

Shilo had taken all of two bites, more focused on digesting the gossip around school and the neighborhood than she was on eating, when Priscilla licked her fingers suggestively and Shilo had to look back down again.

“Eleven o’clock,” said Priscilla, plucking up another chili-saturated crimp-cut fry. Shilo raised her brow in question, and Priscilla rolled her eyes. “My eleven,” reiterated her friend, and a chili cheese fry was used as a pointer before being scarfed down. “Don’t look now, but there’s a total creep checking you out.” If anyone was looking their way, it sure wasn’t because of Shilo.

“What?” she blurted and looked anyway. She didn’t find anyone staring at her, but she did see something just familiar enough to catch her eye: a raggedy parka and a head of dirty red hair.

It was the raving lunatic from earlier. He was counting change in the palm of his hand. Looking to menus. Checking his pockets and finding a hole.

The mall food court wasn’t the best place to find a meal on a budget, but Shilo turned back to her pizza, choosing not to think too hard on it. Where the beak-nosed man chose to scrounge a meal was none of her concern.

Except, now it sort of was. It was Shego’s concern. An oath to protect and aid the citizens of Go City and adjacent towns had been sworn on live television for thousands to see just a few short weeks ago. She’d been given a crash course on emergency aid, combat, and etiquette in preparation for her introduction as a guardian of the public.

She hadn’t needed a whole lot drilling to be told to be a Good Samaritan, even if she’d protested the extremes the supervising agency wanted her to go to. Shego had a reputation, but she wasn’t Shego right now. She was Shilo, and Shilo’s best friend was giving her a funny look at she stood.

It was no big deal. She had some leftover change in her pocket. Enough for something more substantial than an overpriced plain corndog she could see Robinson settling for as he stepped toward a counter.

++X++

By the time the sketchy man sat down at their table, he’d already blathered a bit about himself, as if in an attempt to put her at ease and make up for the poor first impression. He dealt with exotics, namely wildlife, so he claimed. The winged world was Dr. Robinson’s specialty, and he’d devoted his life to rescuing and rehabilitating birds of all kinds, from condors to hummingbirds. A glimpse at scars decorating his arms stood testimony, carved into him from beaks and claws of every size, worn like badges of honor.

“So…you’re a veterinarian?”

“Was,” corrected Dr. Robinson, and corrected himself again. “I-I mean. I’m qualified! I just…don’t have my office anymore.”

Across from Shilo, Prissy Priscilla heaved a sigh and leaned heavily on her fist. For the first time since the scruffy panhandler sat down at their table, she spoke, wondering, “Now what do you do?” Shilo knew better than to believe her friend was genuinely interested. It was merely a dig at an exposed sore spot.

Dr. Robinson was quiet for a moment before answering, “I’m in between jobs,” in between bites of chili cheese fries. Prissy had forfeited the snack to him after claiming she was on a diet anyway.

Shilo relaxed only slightly. He was just a veterinarian. There was a distinction between a mere animal vet and the doctors that had poked and probed her and studied her for weeks – months – on end in the name of science and the greater good.

It was no surprise Priscilla didn’t share the same concerns. After all, she hadn’t been quarantined after the incident back in April. She was eyeballing the man, relaxed and critical, not leery or suspicious as Shilo was, and not even a crowd of shoppers to eavesdrop deterred her from asking aloud, “You got bud? You stink like it.”

Before Shilo could kick her under the table to silently reprimand her for going around saying rude things or inquiring on illegal substances so openly, Dr. Robinson scooted his chair back. His eyes flickered from Prissy to Shilo and back. He was in no rush to voice a reply.

“She can keep a secret,” promised Priscilla on Shilo’s behalf, lowering her voice. “Right, Shi?”

“I…I do not have any on hand,” said the man carefully, withdrawing the tray of fries with him.

Priscilla puffed. “Well, you’re old, right?” she said. Shilo almost kicked her again, but she must have known it was coming, because her boot met open air.

Robinson frowned. “I’m only thirty—,” he began indignantly.

“Perfect,” said Priscilla with a smile.

Shilo couldn’t say she agreed with Priscilla’s newfound interest in the man or the ploy she was weaving. If she had a choice, she’d choose not to be part of it, but as things were, she didn’t have much of a say in the matter – because Prissy would do what Prissy pleased, and whether Shilo tagged along was up to her own moral code, which at the moment was a grey area. She couldn’t just leave her best friend to venture off with a strange man alone without someone to back her up.

Dark snow clouds made it impossible to see the sun setting, but it was growing ever darker by the minute as they left the mall, a clear indicator it was past curfew and high time she head home to fix dinner and prepare for a grand countdown on live television tonight – but Priscilla was pushy and always got her way, grabbing Shilo by the hand to insist she not be a spoilsport. The thought of leaving her alone with the shifty man made her stomach twist, so she yielded easily to the pressure and let Prissy pull her after the guy.

A tobacco store was soon located, and while Prissy was getting her latest nicotine fix, unabashedly chain-smoking away as they waited around the corner of yet another shop they legally had no business with, Shilo had to whisper over to wonder why they were still following Dr. Robinson. The man had just left them a second time to run inside the liquor store to make another purchase with Priscilla’s cash.

“Psh. Because he’s cool?” answered Prissy under her breath. She held up the cigarette as though it were proof, and passed it over.

Shilo took a hesitant drag, but couldn’t help shuddering to think of where Prissy’s lips may have been just hours ago. Whispered chatter and answers to questions she wasn’t sure she wanted to ask in the first place were interrupted soon enough by Dr. Robinson’s return.

“Cool,” praised Prissy, inspecting the label on the bottle she was presented with. Shilo recognized the brand as something her own father drank. The sight of hard liquor in her friend’s hands made her insides writhe.

“Well. I’ll see you girls around,” said the nervous man as he began to retreat into the shadows of the alleyway. It had begun to snow again, and it seemed to concern him as he glanced skyward. “I really must be getting home.”

“I thought you were homeless?” blurted Priscilla, already following him before Shilo could make a grab for her. “I’ve got a garage you can crash in if you need it.” Surely she just wanted to squeeze more favors out of him in return for her pocket change.

“Oh, no. I have an apartment. Not far from here.” Nerves flashed in his eyes as Priscilla sauntered toward him. “There’s no – it’s – it’s really no place for girls like you. It’s condemned, you see—”

Prissy sounded giddy as she grinned and giggled, “Sounds creepy. That where you keep the goods, Robby?”

“Priss!” Shilo called, still standing cemented to the spot where she’d been left.

Her best friend shadowing the scruffy man paused and glanced back just as she’d been about to grab his arm. “What?” she asked back, smiling innocently. “Too good for a little fun now? Is that it? Don’t be a drag, Shi.”

Shilo glanced back toward the street, and back to Priscilla slowly backing away toward Robinson as the man retreated. “We need to head home,” she insisted.

“I don’t have a curfew,” scoffed Priss. “You can go home if you’re so afraid of the dark.”

It wasn’t the dark she was afraid of. Most of the criminals she’d dealt with so far didn’t care what time it was. But leaving Priscilla alone with a strange man wasn’t happening. Shilo at least had a means of defending herself and others too, and if anything bad happened because she left Prissy alone with some creepy exiled veterinarian, she’d never be able to live with herself.

So for the sake of her best friend, she followed.

Shilo knew they didn’t belong there the moment they entered Robinson’s neck of the woods. She had a hunch Priscilla knew as well. Her best friend began to look nervous for a change as they ventured deeper into the sketchy neighborhood.

The uneasy girl even reached across in an attempt to hold Shilo’s hand, as she used to when they were in a rough area – but after an accidental zap, kept them to herself. Alienated by her own alien fire, Shilo did the same, keeping her fingers safely tucked in her armpits and accepting the chill in the gap between her and her best friend. If she didn’t get a grip on Lady Fate’s gift soon, the organization overseeing her underaged superhero team might insist she wear “fire-proof” gloves full time, for the safety of those around her, like Priscilla.

Priscilla didn’t seem terribly concerned for her own safety though, considering how willing she was to follow the strange man through the driving snow. They were led further from home with each step they took, and it was indisputably past sundown when Robinson cut into a dead-end alley.

He waved for them to follow him into the dark niche, out of view of potential witnesses. If it weren’t for the blanket of white snow, it might have been too dark to see anything at all. It didn’t make the rickety old fire escape the man gestured to any more welcoming though.

“It’s. Up here,” he said through chattering teeth, and breathed on his hands, still bound up in soggy worn gloves. He strained to smile, barely visible in the dark, and tried to jokily add, “This would be so much easier if one could fly.”

Shilo unfolded her arms and cast a glance up and down the street. There was no one coming from either direction. This man and her best friend already knew her secret. There was no harm in lighting up a hand to let some of the energy burn off. If anything, it served as a warning for Robinson, and might cause the ankle bracelet to ping for Global Justice to send out an agent to investigate or collect her for the unauthorized use.

She didn’t expect Priscilla to scoff at the sight of her green luminescence. Lip raised and eyes rolling, the girl turned her back to Shilo’s glow. Shilo recalled it, snuffing out the lantern-like plasma radiating and bubbling from her hand. She at least used the residual warmth in her palm to rub her other hand and return some feeling to her frozen fingers.

Her stomach twisted into a knot as she watched the tall man lift Priscilla up by the waist to aid in getting her footing on the hanging ladder above.

“You should wait down there, Shi,” called Priscilla through her exertion as she meticulously scaled her way up to the first landing. “Don’t think it’ll hold ya.”

Shilo said nothing. It was a dig at her feather-light weight. It wasn’t hard to see she was still on the scrawny side, still recovering from her bad experience at a research facility that had allegedly been shut down. Knobby bones, gaunt features barely filling out, and pants that needed help staying up on her hips wasn’t a good feeling, but she was making progress day by day. Personal trainers had been helping her recondition with diet and exercise, but she still felt like a shadow of her past self. She really wasn’t fit yet to be out fighting criminals of any degree – not that any minor should be out doing such risky work in the first place.

Eyeing the man extending his grubby paws out toward her, she knew without a doubt she could at least take him on, glow or no glow. Before he could assist her, with or without asking, she leapt up as high as she could, catching a grip on the slippery bars and scrabbling with her feet as her hands melted the ice coating the metal. She climbed and clawed her way up after Priscilla as her friend stepped back, clapping slowly.

“Me-ow,” jibbed Prissy. “Where’s the catsuit?”

“It’s not a catsuit,” Shilo hissed. At least she hadn’t called her Team Go uniform a onesie again.

She felt the shake of the metal platform underfoot then, and shot a glance down to Robinson hefting himself up. He was tall enough he didn’t have to jump, but his upper body strength was unexpected as he hoisted himself up. Being cornered on a fire escape wouldn’t concern Shilo so much if she was alone, but Priscilla was already climbing precariously higher.

Several stories up was a broken window, fully kicked in to allow safe entry. Snow blew in after them as they trespassed into the condemned building. The man’s so-called apartment exceeded expectations – at least in terms of how decrepit and dilapidated it was. Robinson might have known his way around in the dark, and Priscilla might have made a show of rolling her eyes about it, but Shilo lit the way with her radium-green plasma as there were no working utilities. Still, water could be heard dripping as if they were walking through a cave system, and filthy icicles hanging like stalactites in places didn’t bode well. Graffiti decorated the walls, some partly obscured by the mold and stains. Rats could be heard squeaking and scurrying about out of sight.

Shilo was barely glad Robinson led the way because the last thing she needed was his malodorous breath on the back of her neck to urge her onward. She had to continuously remind herself that the only reason she was following him at all was to keep herself between him and her friend.

Up a multitude of staircases and finally through a door that had been busted off its hinges, and Dr. Robinson sighed hugely and spread his arms abruptly, making Shilo jump back and snap out an arm to stop Priscilla in her tracks.

“Home sweet home!” he announced. “Mi casa es su casa.” He ducked around the wall, and a dim orange light flickered on with the hiss of propane, and then he was popping back into view, shuffling away into the dark depths of the cluttered room. “Top floor. You’re welcome to come meet my friends up on the roof, if you’d like. If you’ll excuse me, I’m late with dinner.”

Robinson was already heading for another staircase, grabbing a sack of birdseed off a shelf as he went. A door opened at the top, a gust of freezing air and a few snowflakes blew in, and then he was gone.

The moment they were left alone, Shilo shook her hand as if to put out a match, and she turned to Priscilla. “We shouldn’t be here,” she stated. It was true. It had to be true – because what teenage girl should be hanging around with some creepy thirty-whatever year old homeless man squatting in a condemned building?

“No way,” Priscilla protested, holding up the bottle of booze and cracking it open. “This guy’s cool.”

Their definitions of cool had seriously diverged over the past year. Shilo grabbed the neck of the bottle and pulled it down before Prissy could take a gulp. “You can get high at home. This isn’t worth it,” she pressed. She shouldn’t have even had to say so.

Prissy cracked a grin then and jerked the bottle away, taking a defiant swig anyway. The alcohol looked like it tasted bitter. “I’m exploring my options,” she said nonchalantly. “This guy might be able to hook me up with a little more. Y’never know.” She shrugged. “If he can, you’ll try it with me, won’t you?”

Shilo gawped, rendered just short of speechless. “No!” she blurted, the answer one of pure reflex.

The bleached-blonde’s mischievous smile vanished, replaced by a frown. “God, Shi. Don’t be a prude,” she hissed, shoving Shilo’s shoulder. “Don’t tell me that goodie-two-shoes shit has gotten to you?”

It had and it hadn’t. She was being pressured into the lifestyle with ultimatums, and there was a new code of conduct she had to follow, but even if she didn’t have to save face as an up-and-coming superhero, what Prissy was asking was still out of the question. Otherworldly gifts and an outrageous double-life had nothing to do with her resolve to get out of Robinson’s shabby niche of the city.

“That’s not it,” Shilo argued. “I have responsibilities! I have to get home for dinner, and get ready to go on air tonight for the countdown, and—,” she was interrupted before she could go over the entire list of reasons she couldn’t stay – why they shouldn’t stay.

“If you’re too busy to be my friend anymore, just say so, Shilo.” The words stung, but they were second to Priscilla’s dark eyes boring into her like a stake to the heart.

She reeled then, but Priscilla caught her wrist before she could step back. She was drawn into a sudden hug, Prissy’s arms nearly crushing the breath out of her in a hold that didn’t feel so great. It was a far cry from the buoyant girlish embraces they used to bounce and crash into when they were seven, ten, twelve, a year ago – and Shilo’s stomach twisted into a knot now as newfound reservations made her pause to peer over her best friend’s shoulder to check her hands for warning signs of igniting before letting her own arms loop around the girl to squeeze her back. Prissy didn’t stay long enough.

Cold sticky lips pressed to Shilo’s cheek, the ginger kiss devoid of affection. “If you need me to disappear from your life, I can do that for ya,” was not what she needed her best friend to whisper in her ear.

The arms around her slipped away, leaving Shilo bewildered and cold and hugging herself as she reluctantly let the girl withdraw from the hug. Priscilla spun around on her heel then to trot off after the shabby creep up the creaky staircase and onto the roof. A momentary cold gust blew in again, chilling Shilo to the bone.

Her throat was too thick to swallow, much less call after her friend to tell Priscilla she was being too melodramatic. The girl was the sort for theatrics – but the past month since Shilo had been home, things had been indisputably different. She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t noticed. She knew Priscilla’s fake smiles when she saw them, knew when Prissy was kidding around, knew when she was overreacting. She knew her best friend. And she knew her well enough to know she’d just made neither an offer nor a threat.

It was a promise.

Shilo didn’t even feel her legs move when she lurched forward suddenly. She flew up the steps and just about kicked the door open, her heart hammering as she burst out onto the snowy rooftop. She whirled around, scanning the white-blanketed surroundings as icy wind blew through her, a flurry of snowflakes breezing past the hems of her jacket to sting her burning skin.

Dr. Robinson was spotted beside a shack-like structure, chattering and gesticulating to himself. The bottle of liquor in his hand made her stomach churn and she scanned the snow for signs of tracks that lead to the parapet, but there were none, as far as she could see. He cocked an eyebrow as she stalked toward him, fists glowing.

“Where’s Priss?” she demanded, stepping past him to take a look inside the stinking little rooftop shed. There was nothing but racks and cubby holes to be found inside, filled with dozens of sleeping and cooing pigeons.

“Your friend? I haven’t seen her,” said Robinson. “But I can help you look.”

“Bullshit.” Shilo whipped around to face him, her eyes drawn to the liquor in his grip. “She just came up here. Who were you talking to?” Her voice was rising. Frantic sparks of green energy were jumping from her fingers. She clenched her fists tight again.

“My pigeon,” Robinson answered, sweeping a small white dove off the nearest roost outside the coop. The symbol of peace, white as the falling snow, perched serenely on his finger. His smile was less white, less peaceful, as he offered a reasonable explanation, “It’s dark inside. Maybe your friend slipped past you.”

Shilo was backing away now, blinking and reeling, if not a little dazed. She scanned the rooftop once more, hardly hearing his offer again to help her look as she circled the one and only thing her best friend could possibly be hiding behind, but the girl was nowhere to be found. No tracks in the snow lead to the edge to indicate foul play.

With the cold of desertion sinking in, Shilo didn’t waste her breath calling for a friend who clearly didn’t want to hold a friendship any longer. At what point her shoulders fell in defeat and she traced the path back through the dark condemned high-rise, she wasn’t sure, but it came shortly after the threat of tears welled up.

She was freezing and soaked from head to toe by the time she trudged home to her own neighborhood, crushed and hours past curfew. She was already late, but stopping by her best friend’s house on the way to ask if she was home hadn’t helped anything. She’d worn a fake smile and everything – but as promised, the girl had vanished. It felt that way anyway, when the girl’s parents refused to answer the door. Unsurprising, as they’d made it clear weeks ago that they didn’t want her around once they’d learned of her tracking anklet and supposed probation, as if she was the bad influence or some kind of criminal now.

Given everything that had turned her life upside down the past year, questioning if the girl ever existed at all really was the last thing she needed.

What she needed was to forget about the empty space left by the stake yanked out of her heart like a massive thorn, and her numb fingers and toes, and her stuffy nose, and the scolding she’d received the second she came walking through her front door.

Discarding sodden slush-covered clothes to the hamper, Shilo reached into every pocket, as per habit, to empty them. A few pennies, a soggy receipt, a plastic spider, shoplifted rhinestone earrings – something was missing. Heart beginning to thud a desperate beat as her hands grew warm, Shilo turned each pocket inside out to be sure.

Shego’s suppressant medication had gone missing.

#The Company You Keep fic #Shego #Team Go

10 notes · View notes

thecoleopterawithana · 4 years

Note

What does your tag "Paul is a concept why which we measure our pain" mean?

Hello, Anon dear!

I applaud your sharp eye! You know, I actually thought twice about adding the tag to that particular post; even going as far as deleting it and then putting it in again. My reticence came from the fact that the reference was quite oblique (even for my standards). Nevertheless, this is a subject that I’ve been mulling over lately, so I thought, “Whatever, these tags are mostly for me, anyway!”

But you caught me! (Though I appreciate that you did.)

I first came across this brilliant phrase in a tag by none other than the ever-insightful @amoralto. I’ve since found out that Rob Sheffield has a chapter of the same title in his Dreaming the Beatles (2017), though he doesn’t go exactly where I thought he would with it; I don’t think we give it the same meaning.

It is, of course, a variation of John’s “God is a concept by which we measure our pain”, whose meaning didn’t hit me fully until I read his 1971 interview with Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali (the post in which @amoralto used the tag). Here he describes how Janov’s Primal Scream Therapy had been for him until that point about acknowledging and facing his own pain, going to the root of it, instead of seeking refuge in the usual distractions and God-like figures absolution. I can not recommend this quote enough. It is, in my opinion, essential to understanding John Lennon.

In fact, the deeper understanding about this side of John was so important to me that I made a whole post about his patterns of disillusionment immediately after. There, I try to express, among other things, what the phrase "Paul is a concept by which we measure our pain" means to me.

In short, what all this God/Idol/Parental-figure talk boils down to is Agency and the existence or absence of a conscious exercising of it. It’s about the perception of control and how that translates to notions of power.

To reach the absurdity of quoting myself:

“I can’t say that I’m familiar with theology or the exploration of the purpose of faith, but I see John as addressing how people use God - and all the other things he claims he doesn’t believe in anymore - as coping mechanisms for the pain in their lives. The greater the pain, the more you cling to these “distractions” from reality.

Though, this is not simply about distractions, like drugs, sex and success, as a means of escapism. When the despair is overwhelming, you want someone or something you can hand it all over to, and an all-powerful entity to whom you can just turn everything in and absolve yourself of the responsibility. And this Father figure will either make it better and make the pain go away, or it will tell you that there is a grander purpose to the pain, life works in mysterious ways, and it is as it is destined to be.

But the main point here is John’s need to hand over responsibility.”

My hypothesis is that John was made to feel so unloved, his self-esteem was destroyed in such a way as a child, that he doesn’t believe himself to have agency over his life, to have the power to actually chose. Or if he does, he’d rather hand-over that power to someone else and be simply taken care of, instead of having to face the world alone and vulnerable, a possible victim of his own mistakes.

But if John’s strategy in the face of pain and fear was to give up control, Paul’s response was to seize it.

I have explored the possible origins of this coping mechanism in a post about Paul’s childhood. There I propose that the pain of suddenly losing his mother and then feeling he couldn’t count on his father in the aftermath convinced him that he couldn’t really rely on anyone but himself.

To quote myself again:

“Not only had the only reality he’d ever known been destroyed by his mother’s sudden death, his own father – who was supposed to be this strong, unshakable pillar in his life – couldn’t be relied on to hold it together.

Paul had been let down. He was on his own.

Fear steems from a feeling of powerlessness. You feel painfully vulnerable to whatever life might throw at you, at constant risk of being hurt again, and the only solution is to be on the lookout. Be prepared.

Paul was caught unawares because the people he’d counted on to always be there suddenly weren’t. And with his compassionate and reasonable nature, he probably didn’t even blame them at all. But the facts were that Paul had been left hanging, not once but twice, when he needed them the most. So he kind of lost his faith in everything.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable; and people, through no fault of their own, are just as inconstant.

And so, in order not to risk being let down again, Paul took matters into his own hands. He tried to escape the pain and dread of being powerless by seizing control of whatever he could. And that was mostly himself.

And so begins Paul McCartney’s saga of isolating independence and other control-issues.”

It’s that last bit about the “isolating independence” that I haven’t explored fully yet, though it’s something I hope to put out soon.

The thing is, Paul got really good at being self-sufficient. He was confident and had his hands firmly placed on the steering wheel of his own life. He felt he had agency; he had control; he had power.

In a world where people mostly feel afraid, lonely, and powerless, someone who presents such strength is magnetic. You can’t help but admire and love them; you want to be watched over by them and be loved in return.

And there were those who felt rejected from the start, and so grew hateful of their Idol (Yoko Ono, Allen Klein, Phil Spector, Jann Wenner).

But then there were those who felt the Grace of God shining upon them, but by then, they didn’t want to feel such an imbalance in the relationship. Anyone can be a god, after all.

So now Paul’s self-reliance didn’t just mean strength; it meant detachment. As John put it in that Blackburn interview:

“The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them.”

John’s biggest fear and hurt was that of feeling like he needed Paul a lot more than Paul needed him.

That’s why we reach a point where Paul’s way of showing love (especially by trying to help and “ease the pain”) is no longer welcome because it only served to increase the perceived imbalance in the relationship. Paul was seen as always fine and unbothered, so much so that he could afford to be “charitable” with his bandmates. It made them feel inept and redundant.

And this is not just in John’s “head”. This was exactly George’s main complaint during the breakup: that even though Paul always helped him with his songs, he never took George’s own suggestions, which made George feel infantilized, unappreciated and no more than a “backing band”.

Of course, things get infinitely more interesting once we also look at them from inside Paul himself! But I’ll leave that to its own post; I feel I’ve given enough spoilers as it is.

In summary, that tag is used when I feel there is an instance of people treating Paul like God: an unknowable, generally-benevolent, omnipotent being, whose grace you seek so he may deliver you from pain and fear.

And you both adore his steadfastness, his unconditionality, and resent him for being invulnerable, unaffected by your behaviour.

And when you suddenly feel abandoned by this God, if you no longer feel his love or as if he didn’t do his job of saving you from harm, you may as well cast him and his “religion” away; accuse him of being a false idol and everyone who still loves him to be ignorant mislead fools.

(Of course, needless to say that Paul was no unshakable god. But like I said, more on that later.)

#asks me why #paul mccartney #John Lennon #yoko ono #George Harrison #paul is a concept by which we measure our pain #I've seen religion from Jesus to Paul #i just believe in me #I don't examine myself that way #the person I actually picked as my partner #macca #johnny #geo #(unexpected #meta #my stuff #(you really caught me unawares anon... I was wanting to talk about this on a post of its own. Oh well! I'll just repeat myself probably #(And dig a little deeper with actual quotes to support my theories)

134 notes · View notes

monicalynnthings · 4 years

Text

My Experience Working at TT Electronics and Why I was a Bad Candidate

I didn’t sign the exit interview so I can talk about it.

The last two years that I spent in Corpus Christi, TX working for TT Electronics would seem to most like something out of a sci-fi horror film. I can reference two documentaries that detail similar experiences. Had certain events not fallen into place it is likely this story would have never been told. Most people who have worked for TT Electronics would deny the events that took place, but it makes no difference to me if anyone believes me or validates what happened. I’m writing this because there isn’t really anyone that it makes since to talk to about this. The only conclusions that can be drawn from any of this is that there truly are undocumented atrocities within our government agencies and that there are a number of reasons why I was never going to be a good candidate to be lured into one of these programs. So now I’ll tell you all of the things I’m not supposed to say.

The events that occurred as a result of me working at TT Electronics were not random. Some background information is needed leading up to that to fully understand. Something my father will never talk about, and even deny, is that in college his nickname was “Spook” in reference to Einstein’s Spooky Theory. I never put the reference together until recent years because if we would ask him about it he would tell us the nickname came from being short and he would sneak up on people, or something to that affect. If he actually had come to any conclusions to expand on this theory I always thought he would have done so years ago. He would never talk to me about anything like that so any work I did later in life relating to that was completely independent. Part of the reason I resent the notion of people having some sort of profound purpose is because my being born was likely the result of some crazy idea for a science experiment. I also understand the irony in that statement now, but I’m not my father (I’ll elaborate on this more, we have completely different intentions). I was walking around unassisted at 7-months old and was pulled out of class fairly regularly during elementary school for extensive testing. I was never really allowed to have friends over other than the neighbors I lived around. A lot of the early details I was never given an explanation about. Now as an adult my parents have made it abundantly clear that I am of no value to them or their business.

When I started working at TT Electronics it seemed like a normal place to work and most people had worked there for a long time so I assumed it would be a good company to work for. The only thing that seemed odd to me when I was first hired was that many of the employees seemed to argue more often than previous companies I had worked at and they hired me just before starting to lay people off. I have always been an exceptional employee so after being an electro-mechanical technician for almost two years I was promoted into a new position because of some of my qualifications from my military experience and my assertiveness in taking initiative to improve the maintenance department. I always made it a point to keep my personal life and work life separate so I never spent time with anyone outside of work until after my ex-boyfriend and I unexpectedly broke up, and even then my involvement with anyone from work outside of work was minimal.

I first started to notice something was going array at my place of employment was when I got my boyfriend a job with the company. I later learned that it was part of the process to break us up. Employees would spread rumors, my boyfriend was moved to work a different shift, and at one point he was unknowingly given drugs that caused his behavior to change. He would become very easily agitated and argue with me until it became unbearable and I was worried about him. Still not fully understanding what was going on I knew he would be better off with his family so after nearly seven years together I didn’t think I had another choice but to break up with him. We had always had a very honest relationship and told each other everything so I would have known if he had decided to knowingly use a drug at that time. I was also familiar with how some substances affected him since he sometimes struggled with anxiety. Medication for anxiety tended to make him very angry and that is how he started to behave. After he left things for me increasingly worsened.

I was promoted into a position intended to fail, so when I didn’t completely fail no one at the company knew what to do. Around the time I was promoted into an office job many employees left, most of them expressing that they didn’t agree with the direction the company was going. There was never any sort of signup sheet or consent form, nothing was ever fully explained, only vague comments were made that I was going through some sort of training. At one point when I was having a difficult time with everything one of the engineers showed me a file cabinet that was filled with files about me. After going through Marine Corps training I knew that in some training it was not always in my best interest to excel. I was under the impression at that time that they didn’t expect me to make it through the training so I helped empty the file cabinet into the trash. One employee told me that they didn’t like the people who worked there to be too clean, this way if anyone tried to come forward and explain what happened they could be discredited. I was unknowingly given drugs in my food and drinks and then observed to see how I would respond or how my behavior would change. I wasn’t only drugged at work, but the food in my apartment and my dog were also regularly drugged. When I tried to say something was wrong people tried to make me think I was losing my mind. They underestimated me. I confirmed I was being given methadone and barbiturates by taking an at home drug test. At the time I took a prescription antidepressant so it wouldn’t have made any sense that I would willingly take either of those. I woke up in the middle of the night that day to hear someone I thought I could trust laughing with my roommate at the time about how I didn’t like being drugged. I finally had to give my dog away because she wouldn’t eat her food and was constantly getting sick. I lost so much weight at one point I barely weighed 100lbs., but everything still continued. This was also part of the process, to separate me from anything I cared about. I was referred to as a “thing” at work, trying to minimize me to something less than human. Separating me from anything I cared about also extended to being separated from my daughter. I love being a mom more than anything, but this was also taken away from me. I always struggled with not understanding why this happened. After serving my country my rights and freedom were taken away from me. My daughter was told I was a junkie, she was told to call another woman mom, and I was even given hormones without consent to prevent me from being able to be a mother because it was something I wanted. The worst part was that my parents were fully aware, and even supportive, of what was going on. My father finds it funny to taunt me, letting me know that he knew what was going on.

I was always somewhat of a perfectionist, but this was taken to an even more extreme level during the time I worked at TT Electronics. At work there were times when working on something on my computer, or giving a presentation I would start to hear a strange sound throughout the building and would start to feel odd. Whatever it was made it more difficult to focus and anytime I did something wrong or differently than normal I would hear the strange noise and start to feel like my head was being scrambled. I had to do everything perfectly or there was a punishment. I was like a literal concentration camp or sorts. I was expected to perform the same under all conditions.

In addition to being drugged at my apartment there were also times when something was distributed through the air ducts. There were times when I wouldn’t sleep for days or the opposite would happen, I’d be completely exhausted. As part of the supposed training I was led to believe was being conducted my apartment was broken into in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. I am usually a light sleeper so my immediate response was to grab the gun I kept in my bedside table and clear my apartment. This didn’t happen again since I of course had real bullets loaded. What did happen though was that I would be sedated, I assume through the ventilation air ducts, and people would come into my apartment in the middle of the night and inject something into my neck. I started to really notice the injections after getting a suntan and spots appeared on my neck. I wasn’t supposed to remember what happened during these night visits, but I did remember. When given truth serum, rohypnol, and small doses of anesthesia I was still able to remember what happened, and that was not the expected result. So again, most of this was never meant to be told. It would have been better for the company for me to end up going crazy, ending up in jail, or even dead, which they would have been completely okay with happening.

I was also exposed to different illnesses, I assume to see what I was immune to. What should be infuriating to the public is that I was usually exposed to some sort of illness before one of the few times I let on vacation, meaning I would be exposed to an illness of some sort and then sent out into public airports or other public areas putting others at risk of also getting sick. Luckily, I didn’t actually get sick very often. Apparently the company liked to employee veterans, especially those who had been deployed because we would have received more vaccinations than most. Apparently I became ever more interesting to observe because I wouldn’t always respond in the way expected.

I had always kept a secret about my daughter and myself. I became fairly in tune with varying degrees of telepathy from a young age. I knew it was something I could never tell anyone so I always kept it secret. My daughter and I kept secret that we were always able to communicate with each other. Things became rather interesting when someone at work started to figure this out. No one was ever supposed to know. I would be given truth serum and asked questions about my military training and about my daughter and I communicating. Not only could I remember things on truth serum, I also gave false information. I started testing the people who were supposed to be testing me. At work they didn’t know what to do with me anymore. I wasn’t doing drugs so there were concerns about me talking to anyone about what was going on. The company needed me to stay “dirty” so my credibility would be questioned. At this point I’m sure anyone reading this probably has some questions for me. Why did I stay for as long as I did for starters? There isn’t a single answer to this question. I knew if I left without proof of what was going on no one would believe me, people would think I was crazy. Not that I’ve ever been one to care much what other people think but after everything I’d already lost it was important to me to know I could prove the people where I worked were wrong. I was also concerned about some of the other employees who worked there and wanted to help them if at all possible, even if that meant having to deal with a lot of my own turmoil. Really, I didn’t have anything else to lose. I also couldn’t leave. Everything I did was watched and my finances in many ways controlled. I couldn’t go to my parent’s house because I knew members of my family were aware of what was going on. When I did get back to my parents house this was confirmed by finding more marks on my neck from injections. My parents are just as guilty as the people I worked for at TT Electronics. Some of the events that I knew my parents knew about I would have never allowed to happen to my daughter. We always want to think the most of those we are related to, and I would have never spoken against my parents without good reason.

I’ll elaborate more on my parent’s involvement with by explaining what happened next. You’ll never find accurate information about the STAR program, but I’ll tell you what I know about it. My understanding is that it was a program geared at exploring communication, specifically geared toward telepathy. There was never any conclusive evidence and the program ended up as more of a failed investment by the US government. TT Electronics is actually based in the UK. This was also never something that a manufacturing plant that makes electrical components would be involved in. A microchip manufacturing plant should also have no involvement in the above-mentioned events or what I am about to speak of. Since I wasn’t doing drugs TT Electronics needed me to be involved in something that would be damning to my reputation and credibility to protect themselves. At this time things were starting to go downhill for the business with decreased orders. There was more emphasis placed on projects that were out of the scope of the business objectives and backend trafficking and prostitution to makeup for lost profit. You can read on glassdoor.com about the local management having God-like complexes and not treating employees well. The men in the management staff would actually lead women to believe that if they had sex with them they would somehow have special powers. I honestly found some humor in this absurd notion. While it’s known to improve relationships pushing that some people could give you special abilities through intercourse seemed farfetched. Before this the company tried to sell people on the idea that these injections were the secret to better communication. Without going into unnecessary details about this the company started experimenting with this idea which resulted in selling sex and unconsensual pictures, films, and in-person observations in conference rooms at work. The other idea was that my eggs could be sold without my permission and that somehow the same result could be achieved. My parents supported both of these ideas. My fathers reasoning for why my opinion did not need to be taken into consideration was that since I couldn’t get it right the first time, referring to me being divorced and my daughter not living with me (even though the circumstances of both of those events were not my fault), that I shouldn’t be allowed the opportunity to try again. There are so many things wrong with anyone having that much of a say in another able-bodied persons life. Besides, they were benefiting so they didn’t care. After everything my daughter and I have been through they thought this magical process could be minimized to sex being the answer, so why did no one figure this out before? To try to get me to comply with this prostitution venture I was promised many things, people even going as far as to try to lead me to believe that someone would help me with getting my daughter to live with me.

I love myself too much to sell myself so that didn’t happen, yet another problem for TT Electronics and anyone else who knew what was going on. My daughter is awesome so we’re both obviously great. The issue with the company telling everyone my secret was that after working at TT Electronics I had to be very careful who I worked for next, not wanting the wrong people to try to benefit from intellectual property that didn’t belong to them. As it currently stands any mothers who agreed to the original process created by TT should expect to separate from their children at age 2, that’s what they signed up for knowingly or not. Although I don’t see how someone could argue they didn’t know. They need another process to corroborate the events that are claimed to be key to mine and Faith’s relationship and communication. The only way to try to prove that is by showing it makes a difference in another mother-daughter pair. I want nothing to do with that process. I also can’t elaborate any further on the details of my personal research. So much could have been avoided if someone had just asked me in the beginning what was going on.

I never had a drug problem. I had a problem with people entering where I resided without permission. I had a problem with those who claimed to be close to me lying to me. I had a problem with not really having control over my own life (being lead to believe I did, but we know that’s not true). I had a problem with anything I cared about being taken away until I just stopped crying. I had a problem with needing to escape. Might I remind you all that there was no problem until the fear of what I loved the most being taken, and then it happened. I never wanted anything to do with any of it and never had a choice either. I quit!

References

The Fifth Estate. (2017, December 15). Brainwashed: The Secret CIA Experiments in Canada - The Fifth Estate [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i82trFGtY24

NATGEO. (2008, March 6). CIA Mind Control | CIA Secret Experiments [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUW-frxo2X4

After moving back to Texas to work for another company something similar happened again. I filed for a Protective Order June 2, 2021 against a Bell employee after complaints to HR and on June 4, 2021 a letter was drafted to terminate in retaliation. Please review the following emails of Wrongful Termination:

3 notes · View notes

goldenchildkatsuki · 6 years

Text

SORRY, WHAT’S THE TIME?

Kacchako Positivity Week Day 2: Roses

Summary: Bakugou Katsuki, now Pro Hero; Ground Zero, tries to protect his welcome home gift for his wife whilst racing against the clock.

Writers note: Here's my contribution for Day 2 of the Kacchako Positivity Week. (see the end for notes)

Word count: 6.000

AO3 link: (x)

"Any questions? No? Fantastic. You're all dismissed."

Bakugou spun his chair around and stood up groaning. He was truly not made for being in a chair all day. His body felt sorer than after a day out patrolling the streets. Had the meeting gone on for any longer he probably wouldn't have been able to stand up.

The man put a hand on his lower back and curved it as his employees bowed and told him goodbye before leaving the conference room.

"Ah! Ground Zero! I'm glad I was still able to catch you, I thought you had already left," Bakugou's assistant stopped him as he took his coat.

He tried to go around the eager boy but kept getting blocked by his large clipboard, swaying in the way of every step he set forward.

"I was about to, and I'm in a hurry, so what is it Danno?" Bakugou barked.

The young assistant put on his glasses he had shoved in his hair and flipped through several pages on his clipboard, licking his finger for every page he had to flip. Bakugou impatiently nodded along with every page he flipped, glaring at the student as if didn't hear him just say: ‘I'm in a hurry'.

Eventually, the assistant reached the page he needed and tapped with his finger on the first note he scribbled down. "Tamashiro Shinta," Danno slowly read out, "He wants to go over the plans for the renovations for the agency. Remember you-"

"-Yes, yes I remember now." Bakugou rubbed the folds between his brows with his thumb and index finger.

Lately, appointments had been piling up on him. The Pro Hero used to be very careful with filling up his schedule, knowing that when he first opened his agency he worked himself close to a burn-out. So excited to finally be operating as an independent Pro, he took on every meeting, every interview, every shoot and every bit of hero work that there was to do around his agency. Carelessly running around with a chicken without a head from location to location. Barely giving himself room to breathe and let stand rest for a minor moment.

One time, when he inevitably fell ill from not getting enough hours of sleep, he came close to dying on the job. At when he thought were his last moments he thought about home, and he was disappointed in himself when he realized how in that week he was rarely ever there. He couldn't even remember when he last ate at the dining table.

From that moment on Bakugou stopped being a yes-man. Not only did he realize it would've been such a lame note to end his life on, he started seeing it wasn't doing others in his life good either. In an attempt to better his unhealthy managing skills he interned Danno, a young and bright business class second-year student from UA. He asked him to work at his side to help him go through a clear and organized schedule, day to day.

But it seemed like Bakugou had managed to fall into his old habits again, unintentionally nonetheless. He had been too distracted by preparing Uraraka for Congress abroad. He knew how heroes abroad could act standoffish and he had to prepare her for that. Of course, he also had to double check the reviews on the hotel she booked, if the internet connection was crap he was bound to lose his mind that week. And what kind of husband would he be if he didn't take the time to read and give feedback on every single version of Uraraka's speech she had emailed him?

During that time he now remembered letting a few things slide. Or so he thought. It seemed like everyone had taken note of the mood Bakugou was in and had taken advantage of that. Asking for new additions to the agency or a day off, but mostly squeezing themselves into his schedule. This whole week had been particularly stuffed, but today especially was a hectic day. Meeting after meeting. Everything could be run without him and needed his consent and input, which most of the time he lived for but that day he wondered if it was really that important. Did he really have to be at a two-hour conference about the usage of plastic stir sticks at the agency?

"I tried to reschedule with him, sir, since today was already a very busy day and I know you couldn't afford that. My apologies, I should have noticed this sooner and canceled a few things. But when I tried to you almost insisted to put the appointments in your planner so I didn't know what to do! I understand if you doubt my abilities now, because honestly? I am too, maybe I shou-"

Bakugou took the clipboard from Danno hands and hit him in the head with it. The boy instantly stopped his rambling and blinked at him with wide eyes. The kid sure reminded him over a certain someone. He couldn't help but laugh at it, something he really wouldn't have done a decade ago.

"That's enough blabbering for now. You know damn well you did what you could."

As he spoke to him something outside the conference room caught his eye.

A cup he hadn't seen before.

"What the fuck is that?" Bakugou squinted and pointed over his assistant's shoulder.

Danno peeked over his shoulder and squinted too. "Eh…Oh! Those are cups that came with the new barista machine that recently came in? You know, the one that's located on the third floor, with all the syrups and whipped cream?"

"Whipped cream?! Are you fucking…? God damn it."

How could he have not thought twice about a stupid barista machine? Out of all the request, he let slide, he didn't think he would let this ridiculous one slide. Those people should be satisfied with straight black coffee, like the rest of the sleep-deprived world. Who needs syrups and cream, that eliminates the awful taste that keeps you awake and in the moment.

Those sweet tooth morons.

Bakugou started putting on his coat and pushed past Danno. "Never mind. Tell Tamashiro that I'm afraid we have to reschedule."

"I tried to but-!"

Right before the Pro Hero could make a right to go to the elevators a man popped up out a corner. With a wide grin and an armpit full of blueprints, he went to stand in front of Bakugou, almost causing them to bump heads. Bakugou cursed under his breath. The idiot almost got himself blasted to the other end of the hallway.

Based off Danno's deep sigh he had a fairly good idea of who the man was. He looked as eager as he sounded on the phone.

The man hurried the blueprints underneath his other arm and stuck his hand out.

"Tamashiro Shinta. It's truly an honor to finally meet you Ground Zero! It's even more of an honor that I was picked to work on one of your very first agencies. I've always admired the structures of your buildings, honestly, quite an inspiration for me. I'm sorry if I'm rambling I'm just…"

Nervous laughter escaped from Tamashiro's mouth and now Bakugou felt even worse for having to cancel on him. Not only did he have to disappoint him by rescheduling right in front of his face but he also turned out to be some sort of fan of his. A super fan judging by how sweaty his hand was.

Bakugou had no idea how to deal with this kind of things. No matter how many fans he met, if it was on the street or during happenings like this, he still didn't know how to handle the situation well. He remembered so well that when he was still in school he practically dreamed of having a fan base and having people fawn over him. But now he finally had people that admired him it wasn't all that great as he imagined.

Fans cry, scream, come close to passing out, throw themselves at you, cry. What was he supposed to do with someone that was crying because he existed? The first time he encountered a fan who cried was at his own agency. The fan literally bawled her eyes out. Bakugou started panicking so hard he ordered Danno to call Uraraka for advice on the situation but all his assistant came back with was;

"My apologies Ground Zero but all your wife did was laugh."

And that was the thing. You couldn't say no to those people. You couldn't say no to someone that's so full of emotions because of you. So how was he going to reschedule with Tamashiro without making a whole situation out of it?

Bakugou let go of the man's hand after shaking it for an uncomfortably long amount of time and awkwardly started shuffling towards the elevator.

"Alright. I did not prepare for this meeting so how about we…" The Pro Hero stretched out the pause in his sentence as he rapidly tapped on the elevator button going down.

"No biggie, Mister Ground Zero, I came prepared for the both of us!"

Tamashiro slipped into the elevator before him and waited on him to step in. Bakugou tried to hold in his sigh and dragged his feet into the elevator. The doors didn't even close or the man started opening up his prints and showing Bakugou things that looked familiar since he had seen them before in his father's office but didn't look familiar enough to know exactly what he was looking at.

The architect's hands slid from one corner of the paper to the other as he muttered to himself.

"Ah! Tiles, what do you think about tiles? I was thinking we go a tint darker than the ones you have now?"

Bakugou watched the numbers of the floors go down. "Fine." He flatly replied.

"Expansion of the reception and waiting area?"

"Why not?"

"How about we add a little patio?"

"Fuck it."

"And concerning your office, I was also thinking about creating something involving your wife? Something that reminds you of her?"

The elevator dinged, having reached the ground floor and Bakugou was the first one to walk out. He turned around and walked backwards over to the exit of his agency.

"Good that you mention her because I have to go do something that involves her."

Tamashiro just about managed to worm himself through the closing doors and tried to run after the hero.

"Oh, I-!" He stammered.

"We'll reschedule. Or do whatever the fuck you want, the fuck do I know about patios right?" Bakugou shouted from across the reception area.

He made sure to check Tamashiro's face before he went through the revolving door. He let out a relieved sigh when he saw the guy determinedly stuck a fist in the air and continued to smile as wide as he had been doing the whole time.

Thank God for that little opening Tamashiro created because he still had no idea how to interrupt the guy. Bakugou put on his battle gloves and started speed walking, constantly shaking his watch out of the sleeve of his black trench coat as he did. Like he expected he didn't have that much time left and every time the analog shifted he tried to speed up his pace.

Bakugou took some shortcuts, paced through alleys avoiding the busy areas of the city. Soon enough the buildings got lower and less modern and he ended up in the older parts of the city, the part that was yet to be renovated. In this particular uneventful area, it looked like everything moved slower. As if every single person, every single thing even, took their time to do whatever they were doing. Not because it was particularly important, but because they knew there was no need to hurry. Time seemed to be infinite there after all.

It was the exact reason why he enjoyed bringing Uraraka to that area. It felt good to step out of their busy and hectic lives for a moment and truly enjoy each other's presence. Especially, when time felt like it moved slower there. Though they would only go for a walk or to a café for lunch, it would feel like they had spent the whole day together and it would leave Bakugou less frustrated with the workload he left behind at the office as he looked forward to spending more time with her later on that day.

After a bit of zigzagging, the Pro Hero reached the lane where a small flower shop was located. When Bakugou and Uraraka were still students, they interned at the same agency during their last year of high school. And when they walked to the metro station Uraraka always managed to make them walk past the shop. She would linger around it and admire the flowers that had been stalled out. Ogling at the vibrant colors and taking in the peculiar scent of all the freshly watered flowers mixed together.

There was one flower she could spend hours looking at.

The red roses.

The roses in the flower shop were always in their prime and we're a real eyecatcher. The blood red color being insanely engulfing, the stems with thorns that looked so sharp they could seep blood from your finger just from grazing them. No matter what new and exotic flowers had been stalled out that day, she naturally gravitated towards the red roses.

A hopelessly pining Bakugou decided to hand her one, one day after passing them by for the umpteenth time.

"I don't want to miss the train again, so fuckin' bring it with you, alright?"

Bakugou tried to cover up his romantic gesture with a poor excuse.

Though it was poor, it was a smart move. But the execution could have been a bit better.

Not only did he panic and take a rose by its thorny stem in a last minute decision. The owner of the shop also thought he was about to steal the flower since he had been acting weirdly suspicious for a while and took the rose in such a hurry.

There was a lot of shouting, cursing, and blood, but it was the start of something. A stupid stunt, that hadn't been thought through at all, it has led them to what they had now. And though Bakugou refused to admit it, he could be a big old sap, and so for every special occasion, he would get roses from the same flower shop for Uraraka.

Since being invited to a global heroine Congress as a special guest was quite the special occasion he had to stop by the shop, yet again.

Bakugou walked through the door and a bell above him jingled. He frowned as he couldn't remember the last time he met the door shut. He looked around the shop and heard rummaging from the back. The shop owner came out stomping with a baseball bat in his hands, ready to swing.

The hero raised his hands and gestured for the old man to lower the bat. When he recognized his face, he laughingly lowered his guard and leaned on the bat.

"Oh, Katsuki! Sorry if I scared you there," the man continued to chuckle.

He walked over to the check-out and took out a pair of heavy gloves from underneath and slid them over his hands.

"So, what's the occasion? Does the missus finally have a bun in the oven?"

Bakugou jerked his head back and choked on the air he sharply inhaled. He put his hand in front of his mouth and tried to hide the red flush that was spreading across his face.

"W-well, uh, n-n-not yet, Imada. Ochako has been invited as a special guest to speak at a global heroines Congress. She's coming back home in a couple of hours so…"

"Roses it is," The flower shop owner smiled, took out every red rose he had out of their buckets and walked back to the counter.

Bakugou nodded, walked over to the bat the man dropped next to the counter and kicked at it. Confused he looked at Imada who was busy making the bouquet. Without looking up he scoffed.

"Ah that," he exhaled. "See, Katsuki, the neighborhood is not what it used to be. People have started to take advantage of the quiet. There have been three robberies in the past month and the police have done squat about it."

Bakugou stayed silent and continued to kick the bat. He couldn't say it out loud but he did feel responsible for what had happened. His agency was the closest to this neighborhood and should've been responsible for the crime rate. Especially since the police haven't noticed that it has risen in this area.

He laid a hand on the counter and drummed with his fingers on the top of it.

"Imada, listen. I should've-"

Before he could finish his sentence the glass of the door suddenly shattered. Shortly after two plant pots got shattered as well, the dirt they contained covering the floor. Whooping followed after the shots and overly loud voices came close.

Bakugou pulled Imada down behind the counter and listened closely to the voices that had now entered the shop. Another couple of shots flew through the shop and destroyed the vases stalled behind the counter. Imada cowered as the glass fell before his feet and shot a worried look at Bakugou.

"Hey, old man!" someone yelled from a part of the shop. "Did you really think we wouldn't come back just because you started swinging some bat around?"

The hero hung his head. He could make out about four different voices coming from behind the counter. Based on how many times the gun was cocked and the type of bullets on the floor it was safe to say there was only one gun involved. And the person speaking so cockily had to be the one wielding it.

God fucking damn it. They all sounded like punks. Bakugou was even more disappointed in himself thinking about how easy it probably was for them to get a weapon and carry it around in the neighborhood. But he had to put his feelings aside for a moment since they were young brats with a bit of nerve there was no telling what they were going to do. It didn't sound like they burst in with a plan, so they were bound to act recklessly.

Bakugou thought about the best course of action and he saw Imada's hand move upwards in the corner of his eye. The man took the plastic of the finished bouquet he and took it between two fingers. In an instant, the hero held on to his arm tried to hiss at him that it was the least of their concerns but he got shut up immediately by another bullet. It scathed one of the flowers and the petals fell among the glass.

Fuck.

"Oi, I see you there old man! Why don't you make it easy on yourself and come out?"

The delinquents gave them some sort of window. Perfect. Imada wanted to rise but Bakugou continued to hold on to him. Instead, he rose up his hands in the air. When they stuck out from behind the counter he heard the boys fall silent.

"T-those gloves…I recognize them from anywhere…" one of the delinquents said.

The gun cocked again. "Shut up! D-don't play with us old man. Come out!" The leader yelled. He stomped closer to the counter and came close to hanging over them.

Bakugou ignited his palms and sparked a few small explosions. The gun hit the floor and the leader scurried away from the counter.

"Fuck, it really is Ground Zero!"

"Forget this, we're out of here!"

Bakugou stood up from behind the counter, intending on not letting them go that easily but when he did he saw them standing, frozen, in front of the broken glass door.

"Uh, boss…We might have a bit of a problem." One guy pointed out.

The lane was slowly filling itself with cops running through and cop cars flying down the street.

"Did that old fucker really have to call the police too? And that many? Man!"

Bakugou walked over to the guys and kicked over the gun to the side when it met his boot. The delinquents instantly cowered as he came near, folding their arms over their head and squeezing their eyes shut. Only opened their eyes when they felt the hero push right past them. Bakugou stood in front of the broken door and squinted at the sudden commotion that arose in what seemed to be in a matter of seconds.

He stepped through the frame and halted one of the cops hurrying down the street. He turned the cop to face him, grabbing him by the shoulders, eyes growing wide as he realized who stopped him. Bakugou not having time for yet another freak out quickly forced his words out.

"What's happening? What's all the fuss about?!" Bakugou barked.

"A villain! Pro Hero Deku is already on the scene but he's having trouble with defeating the villain and preventing casualties, so we-"

Bakugou looked back at the bunch of delinquents that were gawking at him. He checked his watch, rolled his eyes and dragged the cop to them.

"Listen here. You bring these punks to the station, they tried to rob this shop and are carrying an illegal firearm, write that down somewhere. I'm going to go assist that dweeb."

"Erm. Y-Yes sir, Ground Zero, s-sir!" The cop saluted him.

The hero stretched his hand out. "Imada!"

The flower shop owner stood up from behind the counter and took the bouquet. He rushed over to Bakugou and put the set large set of roses in his hand. Quickly the hero promised to pay him as soon as he had the chance and left to go to the source of action.

Couldn't criminals and villains pick a better time to fuck things up?

Bakugou ran towards the screaming and the sound of collapsing buildings and sighed at the state of the area. Deku must have been fighting with last resort because the whole main street had been left in ruins. The guy was really pushing his luck with him. He couldn't tell him that he didn't know damn well that his agency would have to clean this mess all up, could he?

Before jumping right into the action he assessed the situation. There were indeed a lot of civilians that needed help. The villain looked like a bit of a challenge so Deku didn't have a choice than to focus purely on the battle since it would be the best course of action. The police were at a loss. It was obvious that they had been sitting on their asses for too long. They definitely needed his help.

Bakugou looked at the roses, then at the giant twenty feet tall bear-like mutant, and then back again at the roses.

He took off his coat. "For fuck sakes!" the hero yelled before blasting himself in the air with his free hand.

He landed on a piece of debris next to a roughened up Deku.

"Kacchan! Where did you come from?" The hero winced as he smiled and looked up at his childhood friend.

He got silenced by a bouquet of roses slapped against his face. "Doesn't matter. Came to clean up your damn mess," He threw the roses back over his shoulder. "Tch. This better not take longer than fifteen minutes."

Deku chuckled. "Ah yes, Uraraka is coming back today. So we're you two to join me and Todoroki for dinner on Sunday? We ta-"

"Now is not the time for small talk, idiot!" Bakugou avoided the hairy fist that came crashing into the debris he stood on. He held onto the ledge of a balcony and swung himself on the steady platform. Deku then nodded at him and jumped back into battle.

Without having to communicate with words the two went to work. Over the years they had fought many battles together and it did take them some very close encounters before they reached the stage of perfectly aligning their minds. They were one of the few heroes that were able to cooperate as they did and it was often fawned about by veteran heroes and hero fanatics online. Heavily speculated how it was possible for them to only have to share looks with each other to know what the other was planning to do.

Bakugou knew from the instant he met Deku's eyes that he had been getting frustrated, though trying to keep his smile it was obvious he was annoyed by the circumstances. From that moment on Bakugou had decided to take care of the civilians first, giving Deku the room to finish what he started. Though he really felt like beating a villain considering how terrible things had been going, he had no information on the beast. Deku was already more than aware of what he was fighting. Knew about the quirk and the weak spots. It would've been extremely stupid for Bakugou to get involved.

The Pro Hero Ground Zero blasted himself past the beast, as steady as he could with one hand and went to help every civilian that was stuck underneath rubble or trapped in buildings. The violent blasts caused a few petals to fall from the roses and scatter on the floor like a romantic trail. It showered over rescues as he tried to tug them from underneath half a wall and pathed the way for rescues as he aggressively pointed to an exit with his bouquet.

After scolding the police for their incompetence he gave them further demands to search for more people that needed help and then attended his attention back to the villain.

Deku was still holding back his attacks, still trying to mind the civilians in the area. Now those were out of the way it was time for some good old-fashioned brute force.

"Gah!"

And it looked like he had to deliver that. Bakugou winced at a Deku that got thrown into a building. The guy had been on defense and taking hits and got flung around for the longest of time.

Bakugou looked at the roses that were starting to become thinner and thinner. He ticked on his watch and the analog stick fell off.

He turned to of the officers.

"Hey you, what's the time?"

"17:12?"

The grip around the bouquet tightened and he blasted his way through the concrete wasteland to Deku. The hero coughed out dust and could barely keep his eyes open. Bakugou carried the almost lifeless body on his back and blasted them out of the building that was ready to collapse, landing meters in front of the villain. There he laid Deku who had slowly been coming to on the ground. Ground Zero shoved the roses against his chest and pointed at him sternly.

"If you ruin them, I will piss against your mailbox!" He yelled.

Deku clutched the bouquet and threw his head back. "That's a bit over dramatic don't you think?" He huffed.

The explosion hero rubbed his now to free hands together and sparked his palms. "You don't think I will do it?"

"Oh, I know you would one hundred percent do that, I'm just saying it's overdramatic."

Bakugou scoffed before blasting off. He maneuvered himself around the air now stable as can be and confused the bear-mutant by appearing from all sides. All that attacking had seemed to wore the villain out because the reaction time of them was considerably slower than when he first showed up.

It was going to hurt like a bitch, but he had to finish the guy off with a big move. He flew himself past a half-destroyed building and found a steady platform. There he only had a couple of seconds before the monster knew where he was and he took the time take a deep breath. After he emptied his lungs, he steadied his stance and shot a huge blast from his palms, which destroyed the rest of the building and crashed right onto the mutant. The heavy rubble only left them twitching and as the pressure got heavier the mutant stopped moving.

People started coming back out on the street, waving and cheering the names of the two victorious heroes. Bakugou tried to ignore the pulsing of his veins and hasted to Deku who had now stood back up and was waving at his fans. He grabbed the roses from him and inspected every flower.

Bakugou lifted the petals. "You know you owe me big time for cleaning your mess on my free afternoon right?" He murmured.

Deku nodded as he continued waving at the gathering crowd.

"I know."

Bakugou began walking away from the scene only to get stopped by another crowd that had been gathering behind him. However, this crowd seemed to consist entirely of journalists and cameramen. Microphones, recorders, and cameras went right into Bakugou's personal space as soon as he approached them. Flashing lights and rapid-fire questions all came his way. A dozen pictures per second and questions ranging from his unexpected appearance to what was on his mind during the battle.

He only cared to answer one question and it was to the latter.

"I only had one damn thing on my mind and it was to get these roses to my fucking wife. Now let me through, jackasses!"

The crowd in response fired more questions at him, but the hero bulldozed through them, glaring at every single journalist to make it known that was his first and final statement about today's battle.

Whilst wading through Bakugou had heard a journalist mention the time and he had exactly ten minutes to get his ass and the sad looking bunch of flowers to the other side of town. Which seemed impossible at this point since the whole road was blocked by the mess they created during the battle. He had no choice but to run to the nearest halt for public transportation and go on from there.

And Bakugou thought the nearest halt was a station, where he planned to jump in one of the taxi's and pay the driver extra to floor it. But he actually first came across a bus halt instead. He saw the bus approaching and decided last second to take it. Extremely out of place he sat in a very small bus seat, with his gift on his lap whilst everyone on the bus stared at the dirt-covered hero, including the bus driver in his rearview mirror.

Ignoring the stares and whispers, Bakugou panted, recovering from the sprint and tried to make the petals stand up firm again. Cursing under his breath as he realized that the sad bouquet was too far from saving, he gave up when getting close to the halt closest to his house. He put the roses to the side and went to press the stop button. Right before he went to smash it a little girl came up to his seat.

With a trembling hand, she clutched to a chair and tried to look him in the eye. Bakugou heard the whole bus hold their breath as the little girl lifted her other hand and showed him a notebook and a pen.

"Mister Ground Zero…" She began, her voice wavering heavily, tone unsure and full of nerves.

Bakugou had to choose between signing this girl's fairy princess diary or pressing the stop button in time.

It wasn't that tough of a choice.

"Sorry…" He began.

"…I spaced out for a second. What's your name kid?"

He couldn't say no after all.

Bakugou ended up reaching his front door a whole hour and twenty minutes later than he intended to be. If he was lucky Uraraka's taxi would have been delayed since they had to pass through the roughed up area as well. If he continued to hurry like he had been doing all day he could still put the roses in a nice vase and start dinner.

He raised his arm and smelled underneath his arm.

Maybe he should shower before starting dinner.

He fished the keys from out under his doormat since he had left in the pocket of his trench coat and opened the door. The sound of voices meeting him as he stepped into the hallway.

He didn't remember leaving the tv on this morning?

Bakugou walked into the living room and to his surprise saw his wife, sitting in her suit watching on the couch and watching the news. They were reporting the battle that happened moments ago. They had blown up his mean scowl all over the screen when they did.

"Ground Zero threatens to pee on Deku's mailbox during a heated battle in the city? More at seven!"

Uraraka turned around and saw a defeated Bakugou standing in the doorway. She burst out laughing, stood up and walked over to him with her arms wide open. She wrapped her arms around him loosely and kept giggling as she planted little kisses on his face. Bakugou let her affection wash over him, still confused as to why his wife was home already in the first place. He was so sure he had at least a little bit of time before she came home.

The woman rubbed the dirt off Bakugou's face with her ring fingers and dusted off his shoulders.

"Ah, it's so good to be back!" she sighed.

Bakugou looked at the clock hanging above the television.

"I thought you were supposed to be home at…Never mind. Welcome home Angel Face, I got you-"

"-Roses? I saw, sweetheart."

She took the flowers from his hand and looked at the butchered state of them. Bakugou averted his gaze from them, not able to stand to look at them anymore. He could barely look Uraraka in the eye. Not only had he mistaken the time she was coming home at but he also came back with a shitty welcome gift and no food on the table.

However, Uraraka didn't seem to care one bit. She laid a hand on his dirty cheek and placed a kiss on his lips.

"Thank you so much." She said softly.

Bakugou groaned and hung his head. He couldn't even be bothered to argue that this was the worst welcome home he could've given her. There was no way he had enough energy to go into discussion with Uraraka, a discussion he knew he was bound to forfeit anyways. He simply wrapped his arms around her too, closed his eyes and rested his chin on her head.

"Today fucking sucked. No, the whole fucking week sucked. I'm proud of you but never leave home ever again."

Uraraka took her head out from under Bakugou's chin and looked up at him.

"I've missed you too."

Bakugou opened an eye. "Really? You seemed to had the best fucking time there."

Her hand slid off his shoulder and traveled down his chest. Hand becoming a single finger which traced the outlines of his abs. She slid the finger into the waistband of his pants and pressed her chest closer against his.

"Want me to show you how much I missed you?" She whispered deviously next to his ear.

Uraraka pulled his lower half in closer by the waistband and pressed her thigh against his groin. Bakugou could feel her smile next to his ear and it sent shivers right down his spine.

"Or are you too tired after today?" Uraraka breathed next to his ear.

Bakugou gave her words a solid second of thought before picking her up by the hips, slinging her over his shoulder and walking to the bedroom.

"Tired? Me? No way. Why would I be?"

Writers note: beta reader: @kyuubaee

205 notes · View notes

lilacflamesss · 7 years

Note

do you have any hcs about ayato as a model??

Hcs???? Bruh, it’s canon. Lmao jk, but anyway, here have some model Ayato with his supportive uncle, sister and brother-in-law being his number one fans. And Hinami. It got long so I had to cut it.

When everything is over and a peaceful world is achieved and ghouls are somehow accepted, Ayato is at a loss and he doesn’t really know what to do since there’s no more fighting. Touka offers to pay for him if he wants to go to college or something since she has some money saved up, but he asks her to use it for Hinami instead. In the first place, even if he goes to school, he doesn’t know what he wants to study.

He helps out at Touka’s cafe for the moment, even though he knows that he can’t just keep relying on her. Touka’s fine with it, but Ayato wants to be independent.

For no particular reason other than so I can have something to say, some big shot modelling agency’s CEO happens to drop by their cafe one day for some business meeting with a client. Things are going downhill for their company and they’re in desperate search for a model who’s just… the one™. So far, no one has been satisfactory and they’re really annoyed.

Ayato happens to serve them and one look at him is enough. CEO dude is like “Who are you?” Ayato is confused and for a second, he’s worried that these people maybe know about him being Rabbit in the past and all. Touka sees what’s going on and being the good big sister and manager that she is, she comes in between them. She asks them if there’s a problem and she apologises in advance in case he did anything wrong because he’s still new at the waiter thing, but CEO is like “No, he’s just what we need.” And now we have two confused rabbits.

CEO explains his situation and he tells them how he thinks Ayato has the looks, body and poise to pull off their latest campaign. Ayato is even more confused because like, he knows he’s good-looking, but he never thought he’s that good-looking. On the other hand, Touka’s like “Yeah, it’s about time someone offered him a modelling contract.” Touka thinks it’s a good opportunity but Ayato’s unsure about it, so CEO gives him an offer. He’ll give Ayato a few days to think about it and if he wants to try it out, they can conduct a trial photoshoot for him in a few days. CEO leaves his name card with them and he goes on his way.

Later that day, Touka brings the topic up to the rest of Goat and no one is even surprised that he got offered something. Tsukiyama thinks it’s an amazing opportunity and that if Ayato ever becomes a big shot model, he’s gonna get Ayato to model some of his clothes for him. Nishiki can’t stop laughing. The Aogiri gang (because Naki isn’t dead) tell him to take it up since they know he’ll do amazingly. Hinami gets excited because it’s not everyday your boyfriend is a model and tells him that if he’s going to be on magazines and all, she’ll buy every single one of them to support him. Touka counters saying she’ll buy ten copies of each and put it up (cue more laughter from Nishiki because like lmao since when do you have a bro-con you shitty Touka). Kaneki tells Ayato to follow his heart because he only has one heart to follow unlike Ken who has like 7 or 8.

Ayato’s a little worried because he’s been spending his whole life hiding his face from everyone but accepting this means he’s exposing himself to the world. Yomo notices this and he pulls Ayato aside to talk. Ayato admits that he wants to do it because he wants to be able to stand on his own and not be a burden to his sister anymore. Yomo assures him he isn’t a burden to Touka, but it is natural to want to be able to feel that way and he says that no matter what decision Ayato makes, Touka and the rest of Goat will definitely support him. Ayato eventually decides to just try it out and he contacts the CEO saying he’ll go for the trial.

Touka and Kaneki end up tagging along with him because on the day of the photoshoot, Ayato was right on the verge of chickening out. Hinami wanted to come along but Kaneki stopped her saying that if she followed, Ayato will probably be too shy to do anything. Touka promises that she’ll get some photos for Hinami instead ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Surprise! It’s a photoshoot for some kind of underwear brand. Ayato’s so embarrassed, he was about to walk out the door, but Touka tells him that he might as well pull through with it since they’re already there. Kaneki points out that it’s better he goes all out during the trial to see if he’s comfortable with the extremes. At least, he won’t have to worry about being uncomfortable later on. The CEO admits that that was their intention as well and Ayato doesn’t have to worry too much about revealing too much if he actually takes up the job since their agency doesn’t really do underwear modelling that frequently.

It takes a while for the make-up and all to be done. Ayato’s still insecure about it, since his body’s quite scarred from all the fighting he did in the past. He admits to the CEO that he’s a ghoul and all but the guy doesn’t really give two fucks. Bodies with scars are attractive anyway, at least it’s not a plain canvas. Besides, for magazines and all, they can easily cover them up.

The photoshoot takes quite long since Ayato’s new at it and they needed to take the shots a couple of times while teaching him how to do things. But eventually it wraps up well and CEO says he’ll send the photos to their cafe when it’s ready. While on the way back, Touka and Kaneki tell him that he seems to really fit the role and based on the photos they saw, they think he’d make a good model. Touka shows him some of the photos she took with her phone (for Hinami) and he finds himself surprised by how it turned out.

Touka shows the photos to everyone in Goat in the end and Ayato can’t meet anyone’s eye for the next week. Hinami only saw them once though because her nose started bleeding every time she sees them. Hinami tries to get Ayato to take up the job anyway, since she believes he’ll do well and she wants to see him model even more. Ayato tells her that even if he doesn’t end up taking it, he’ll model for her some times.

CEO shows up a week later with developed and edited photos which take everyone by surprise because he really looks every good. The CEO tells Ayato that he is talented and he seems to have the kind of face that could pull off any concept. He shows them the contract he has prepared and asks Ayato if he’s willing to sign it. Protective family instantly jumps in and starts analysing the contract. Kaneki and Yomo go through every line of the contract while Touka questions the CEO about the working conditions and all. CEO says that if Ayato does work for them, he’ll make sure Ayato’s well-taken care of because he’s probably their big break anyway. But for their sake and since he has nothing to lose anyway, CEO says that the contract merely lasts two years and if he wants to end things after that, he can, or if he wants to continue he could renew it in the end of the two years.

While still unsure about it, Ayato eventually accepts it because he realises that he might not get a similar chance. It’s not like he can work anywhere else as well since he doesn’t have any education.

Since he did end up in a bigshot company, despite it’s difficulties, Ayato’s first job is a large-scale one for some really well-known men clothing line. Eventually, he starts getting more jobs for different kinds of products because he was really well-received by the public.

As he starts getting more popular, people start pressing him about his personal life. Touka tells him to be careful because it’s still not completely safe for ghouls to be out in the open. He stays silent about his past but at some point, someone from the company leaks the fact that he’s a ghoul out to the public. There’s a lot of controversy over this and people start fearing him and talking ill about him. Ayato’s normally used to hearing people badmouth him, since in Aogiri times Rabbit wasn’t that well-liked by many ghouls as he was a killer anyway, but he starts getting really worried about this. Having people know that he is a ghoul is one thing, but he really doesn’t want people to find out that he’s a former SS-rated ghoul who’s killed a lot of people, mainly because he’s absolutely ashamed of his past.

Now that Ayato’s reputation is a little tarnished it’s getting hard to get jobs, especially since a lot of products worry about using a ghoul as their face. Most of the bigshot products are mainly bought by humans in the first place. Ghouls don’t have that kind of cash. Ayato, who’s been taking his job really seriously because he’s a Kirishima and they’re totally all about that hard work and all, gets stressed out by this and also upset because he wonders if he’s going to end up back in square one after everything he’s done.

Good brother-in-law Kaneki comes to the rescue. He goes up to the CEO and suggests that they include Ayato’s kagune in their next photoshoot since the Kirishimas have beautiful kagunes in the first place. CEO wonders what such photos could be used for, but Kaneki tells him to just take the photos and leave everything to Kaneki. He then tells the CEO that he’s the OEK and they’re the ones responsible for upholding ghoul rights and with Ayato’s photos maybe they’d launch some kind of campaign about it.

Ayato is super worried when he hears about this because letting people see his kakugan and kagune is like unravelling himself completely, even more so than being naked. It takes awhile for Kaneki to convince him and Kaneki tells him to have some faith in himself and in Kaneki and that Kaneki won’t just let his wife’s brother fail just like that after working so hard.

The photos end up coming out beautifully, especially thanks to the kagune. CEO is so surprised, since he didn’t expect ghouls to be so beautiful. Along with big organizations that champion ghoul rights, the OEK launches a campaign to advocate for further acceptance of ghouls in their society and he uses Ayato as the face for it. Whether or not the campaign turns out well is undeterminable, but Ayato’s reputation starts getting better again because the pictures of him with his kagune started going really viral for being so beautiful.

As time passes and his popularity builds up again, Ayato starts getting asked to show his kagune more and more, which he does. Ayato realises that he’s also starting to feel more confident about himself.

True to their words, Hinami does buy every magazine he appears on while Touka buys 10 copies. Touka even collects the different posters of him and has them up in their apartment. She’s so proud of her brother she wants it everywhere– except Nishiki slaps her on the head because it doesn’t suit the cafe’s atmosphere at all so they couldn’t put it up in there and Kaneki isn’t having it up in their bedroom since there’s no way he’s having sex with Touka in front of a poster of her brother.

Hinami gets bragging rights in college because that model everyone is crazy over right now? That’s right, he’s my boyfriend.

With everything settled now, Yomo feels a huge burden off his shoulders. Touka is a manager of her own cafe with her own family. Ayato’s a successful model able to stand on his own two feet. He can now look up at the sky and smile to Hikari and Arata. “Are you proud of them, Sis?”

#tg #tokyo ghoul #kirishima ayato #ayahina #imma just tag ayahina since there are hints anyway #blah whatever #okay but the actual modelling happens under the cut i guess #answers #Anonymous #tokyo ghoul model AU

63 notes · View notes

leonawriter · 7 years

Text

I Burned So Long, So Quiet

Gods AU fic masterpost

Fandom: Ace Attorney

Characters: Phoenix Wright, Miles Edgeworth, Trucy Wright

Ships: Phoenix/Edgeworth

Summary: The words are said in the silence of night, while they both could have been sleeping, and Phoenix's fiery warmth surrounds them. An answer comes so long that Miles starts to wonder if they were in the process of being forgotten.

...

I slept there the night you said ‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ igniting a great unendurable belongingness, like a match in a forest fire.

I burned so long so quiet you must have wondered if I loved you back. I did, I did, I do.

Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone, Annelyse Gelman

...

It's years - only one or two, really, but in some ways it feels both longer and shorter - after he's admitted to Edgeworth, albeit in not the easiest nor best way, that he isn't human. That sometimes he thinks of what it would be to choose to no longer exist. Although those thoughts have been coming less frequently, as of late.

They're at Edgeworth's place, when it happens.

He'd always remember what it had been like not long before, either - him and Miles on the couch, with Miles even leaning into him in a way that he'd have never imagined might be possible before this - before everything - before his world was turned upside down, and everything was taken away. You win some, you lose some, had come the thought, although he'd winced slightly, just a little, at the reference to gambling when he was nowhere near the Borscht, and they didn't play poker at Miles'.

Trucy's sat in a plush armchair, fast asleep, swamped in it. He could see the soft rise and fall of her chest and the relaxed look on the girl's face from where they were.

...

Phoenix and Trucy were staying the night. It had been decided only within the week, only in the amount of time it had taken their most recent landlord to decide that they weren't paying enough rent, that they weren't doing enough. It would take time to find a new place, if they didn't want to just start living out of the Agency offices - which Miles was still opposed to on principle - but for now, they were treating it like a... sleepover, was what Trucy had called it.

Trucy had her own room in his place, from the sheer amount of times her father stayed out so late in his 'job', and the times when he didn't come back for days due to independent investigation. He'd even given her a key, just in case of something like this happening - or if there was an emergency and she had nowhere else to go. He'd seen her off to bed a while ago after they'd woken her up to tell her that she'd get aches if she slept in the chair all night, comfortable at first or not. He should know.

The habit he and Phoenix had gotten into of the both of them sleeping in the same bed was something that they had fallen into both gradually and all at once, both of them feeling more at ease and more rested because of it, and because of that, not wanting to stop.

As for his own reasons, Miles had even admitted to Phoenix's face that part of what helped was the fact that Phoenix tended to be so warm. Never enough to overheat, even in summer, but always warm.

This isn't the height of summer. It's autumn, and there's rain drizzling down outside. Even though his own central heating was enough to stop the cool breeze from bothering either of them, one of Phoenix's arms was drawn around him, and the comparison between Phoenix and a bird extending its wing wasn't lost on him, and given that his friend's name was more than a little literal, it had probably come into his head for good reason.

With Phoenix's warmth around him, the nightmares that still came on other nights from time to time faded away into merely bad dreams, unable to have any real hold on him.

He found himself thinking of the way that Phoenix would look when he woke up, sunlight streaming through the windows and making it seem as though for just a moment Wright had just forgotten to shave and hadn't brushed his hair.

Remembered that it wasn't his imagination showing him these things, because he'd lived through those mornings, too many times to count, now, too many hotels when they weren't even at home in America.

His mind wandered from that realisation to the smile he'd seen Phoenix wear when they'd been in London just a few weeks ago, the one he'd worn when he thought no one was looking, when they'd taken Trucy to the Harry Potter Warner Bros. Studios for her birthday and she'd started giggling when they'd found the animatronic of Fawkes. How he'd leaned in and said, with all seriousness, that they'd had a few details wrong in the feathers and beak, but not to tell Trucy herself.

He remembered with fondness the various exasperated and frustrated expressions Phoenix wore whenever they'd sat in on a trial that had a jury, whenever they'd argued the points of how it worked and how it failed.

Miles sighed, content, a feeling settling somewhere in his chest. Something that was hard to put words to at first. And then, when he had, it was obvious.

"I think," he said, more of an under-the-breath mutter than fully spoken words, "I think I'm falling in love with you."

And the moment he's said it, he freezes, unsure if Phoenix has heard, despite it being the dark and silence of night when spoken words hurt the ear, and unsure if he wanted them to have been heard - not at all, no, but yet, maybe not yet - and there's nothing he can do either way.

Phoenix's breathing hitches around him as though maybe he has heard, which doesn't help Miles' stress levels, but he doesn't say anything, and eventually, they both sleep, Phoenix's warmth still encompassing him all around.

This is what it must feel like, Miles thinks. Love. It's warm.

...

Phoenix wakes up to the warm feeling of sunlight against his face, and a coolness that means Miles is already up, as well as the sounds of both birdsong and coffee being made.

The words he heard the previous night still ring in his head, like a chant or prayer he'd heard long, long ago that had given him power from belief - but unlike then, this is making him heady from just one person, from one person's words.

I think I'm falling in love with you, Miles had said.

Phoenix's breath hitches, the fire of his heart rising and burning brighter, and he looks up when Miles puts his head through the door of his room - their room, it could be said, when he comes to stay with Trucy, but he hadn't wanted to assume too much - and says that breakfast is getting ready, and Trucy is waking up as well.

Miles, who looks at him warily, cautiously.

They don't talk about it over breakfast, not with Trucy there, and they don't talk about it when Miles drives Trucy to school and drops her off at the gate, hugging both him and Miles before heading off.

It's an awkward thing to bring up as Edgeworth's driving to work, and certainly not in the car park under the prosecutor's office where they part, Phoenix in his hoodie and sandals surrounded by displays of wealth in the form of expensive cars and suits worth more money than he's ever had to his name - in this lifetime, at least.

It's a few days and nights later when Miles sighs and looks away, caught between some fear and longing he hasn't yet put into words, and maybe won't ever will.

"I didn't know if I should say anything," Phoenix says, sitting safely on the edge of the couch, beanie in his lap and hair ruffled, looking up into his friend's startled eyes. "I knew what I felt, after all. I didn't know how you felt, not until you said... that." If anything, the look on Miles' face was becoming more anxious, not less, which wouldn't do at all. "You weren't the only one. Falling, I mean."

Which was ironic, wasn't it? He was a bird, he was fire, and fire rose up - it didn't fall. But then, he was more than a bit human as well, especially right now and after all this time, and falling came all too easily to gravity-struck humans.

Somehow, despite the fact that he was the one sitting down right now and Miles was standing up, it felt more like Miles was the one looking up at him.

"I wondered. I - you didn't say anything. I wondered if perhaps you hadn't heard. Or you were pretending that you hadn't."

Phoenix is up in a single moment, looking Miles dead in the eye.

"I did hear. I did - I always did love you, even when I don't think we'd realised that's what it was yet. And I do now. Gods, I love you." He laughs. It isn't the bitter laugh that he gives to other people nowadays, but it isn't entirely unbroken, either. "I was more worried that you'd start to think I wasn't the man you once new."

Miles shrugged, hands upturned in the air, smile far warmer than when he'd ever been in court.

"And how many times have we both changed? Wright - Phoenix. When I said that, the other night... I meant all of you, not just the presentable parts."

...

AN: I'd been going through Doctor Who fanfics after rekindling my love of the fandom after several years, and found a work that referenced the poem, and said that it'd been doing the rounds on Tumblr, which made me curious, which made me want to look it up, and when I did... I had an almost immediate mental image of the middle scene. One that I absolutely had to write out.

Timeline wise, set not long after 'Once, We Were Gods'.

#ace attorney #narumitsu #once we were gods au #phoenix the phoenix #Leona fic #aw look we finally have some narumitsu in this au!#at last!#also slightly helped by axoioti saying nice things about the au as well!

21 notes · View notes

moiraineswife · 7 years

Text

Azriel Meta - Shadows

I started replying to this post by @abookandacoffee but, well, I’ve been meaning to talk about this theory/idea for ages and it got...long...and it kind of started going beyond the scope of the original post SO NOW IT GETS ITS OWN (alo *apologises in advance because I’m going to disagree with a few points of yours SORRY*)

I’ve seen the shadows disappearing/leaving him completely theory a few times and it’s always confused me a little bit? For a start I think it’s something that’s inherent in Az, like Mor’s magic or Rhys’s daemati powers but for another I could never figure out why people wanted them to go. Then I realised people figured that they were somehow sinister, that they might even whisper bad things to him, make him worse, that they were connected to his trauma and I never read them that way? (Which apparently makes me in the minority here but what else is new?)

I never actually saw the shadows as a symbol of Azriel’s childhood trauma? (I think that the scars on his hands do that more than anything else and there’s soooo much symbolism in there especially given what he does now for his court but that is a meta for another day)

As for the shadows I always thought of them as...Well the opposite actually?

In the centuries I’d known him, he’d said little about his life, those years in his father’s keep, locked in darkness. Perhaps the shadowsinger gift had come to him then, perhaps he’d taught himself the language of shadow and wind and stone.

I think the shadows are a positive thing for Azriel actually? I don’t want him to lose them, I don’t think he wants to lose them either. They’re a part of him. A good part. I think they represent something like freedom to him. When he was chained up in a dark cell the shadows connected him to the outside world. They told him what was happening, warned him about what was coming, probably made it far easier for him to protect himself and for him not to fear the darkness that surrounded him when it confided all its secrets to him.

I also think those shadows lead to his release. The incident with his burned hands happened when he was eight but he wasn’t released and allowed to go to the war camps to be trained until he was eleven. When he arrived he knew nothing - nothing of fighting, nothing even of flying. But he was a shadowsinger. Rare and coveted I think if anyone sought to use Azriel and his gift it was his father and that that was the only reason they let him out, let him go to the war camps to be trained. (That’s all very guessworky I admit that but it’s not too huge a leap.)

I don’t think the shadows are a result of of his trauma, not exactly, or that they were somehow caused by what he suffered. Maybe that caused them to wake sooner than they might otherwise have done (I don’t think the high fae for example come fully into their power before they mature (for Mor it was reaching 17 and her first period) But I don’t think it’s a manifestation of it - I think they’re a shield.

I think they protect him. I think they tell him things to keep him and the people that he loves safe. I think they’re a defence mechanism, they’re a kind of armour:

It was almost enough to distract me from noticing Azriel as those shadows lightened, and his gaze slid over Mor’s body: a red, flowing gown of chiffon accented with gold cuffs, and combs fashioned like gilded leaves swept back the waves of her unbound hair.

A wisp of shadow curled around Azriel’s ear, and his eyes snapped to mine. I schooled my face into bland innocence.

(Az’s shadows warning him Feyre is being an interfering little so and so is one of my favourite parts of this and I’ve been meaning to parallel it with Mor for ages but it’s coming out here so WHAT CAN YOU DO?)

This is obviously a fairly bland example since Feyre isn’t actually causing him or Mor any kind of harm - but it’s something Az clearly wants to know about and so the shadows tell him. I’ve never been able to see them as negative or bad in any way. I think they’re positive. And I think the only reason that they lighten around Mor is that he trusts her and that he allows himself to be vulnerable with her. Rhys has told us that Mor is the only one who can get Az’s guard to drop and get any real truth from him about how he feels. I think the response of his shadows is symbolic of that more than anything - it’s his guard dropping around her. He doesn’t need his shadows to protect him as much around her, it’s instinct.

So like on a personal level I think the shadows are good for him? And I don’t want him to lose them. But I also don’t think that it’s something Rhys uses and I don’t think what they offer Azriel is...Inherently negative. (This is...complicated...because in a lot of ways those shadows are tied to Azriel’s self-worth and the value he feels he has to his court because they’re a huge part of him being able to do his job. But I think that’s more...a personal thing than a thing that’s exploited)

I think Rhys definitely worries about Az and if Az were to say he was done with this/he couldn’t do it any more that’d be that no questions asked from Rhys. Whether or not he would is another story but I think...I don’t think it’s a result of power imbalance. I don’t think it’s because Rhys has made him feel like he can’t tell him. Rhys isn’t putting any pressure on Azriel here - Azriel is putting pressure on Azriel.

As with what we’ve discussed about Moriel this is something that comes from Azriel’s personal insecurities and it is not up to anyone else to ‘fix’ that for him. That’s just downright disrespectful of Azriel’s independence and agency as a person tbh. Rhys can’t take Az’s job away from him/lessen his demands on him for the same reasons Mor won’t go to him and try and force his hand about their relationship. It’s Azriel’s choice. Even if they think his insecurities and what he does to himself is unhealthy, I think it’d be more unhealthy if either of them (in this case more specifically Rhys as he has more direct ‘power’ over Az if you like as his High Lord) tried to stop. It’s not Rhys’ place to decide what Az can or can’t handle, that’s up to Azriel.

I also think that....There’s something of Mor and the Court of Nightmares in what Azriel does. I don’t think it’s exactly good for him (torture probably doesn’t do wonders for one’s mental health after all) but I also don’t think it fully prevents him from healing and moving on from his trauma. I think in a lot of ways it’s like Mor and the CoN and giving some control over something that was directly used to hurt them. (Azriel’s is just...a much darker, more twisted and uncomfortable and difficult thing to talk/think about version of that but there’s similar logic)

People often made the mistake of assuming Cassian was the wilder one; the one who couldn’t be tamed. But Cassian was all hot temper—temper that could be used to forge and weld. There was an icy rage in Azriel I had never been able to thaw.

I think this is a part of Azriel that is entirely his own and it’s not something that Rhys (try as he might) has any great influence over. There’s a darkness in Azriel that’s hinted at a fair few times and while I don’t think he relishes what he does I think he’s capable of it. In a way that say Cassian would not be, I think Az has the ability to...compartmentalise in a way.

I also think that it’s important to note, when talking about Rhys and Az which I’ll get to more in a minute, that Rhys is aware that Az has a support system in place? He knows that he won’t talk to Cassian about it and he won’t talk to him (which implies that they’re both concerned and have both tried, probably more than once) but Rhys knows that Mor will talk to him and that Azriel will (eventually) talk back. He knows that Az isn’t fully dealing with this all on his own and that he does have an outlet and someone he can discuss these things with and who will help him work through things if he’s struggling which is important. Rhys isn’t indifferent to what Az is doing or oblivious to it either he’s aware of it and he’s aware of the support Az has as well. (Also I think it’s important to note that the only thing we see Az torture in ACOMAF is the Attor. Which was....vile. Az isn’t out there torturing innocent servants for information and tbh I don’t think he had any great issue chopping the Attor into tiny little pieces)

Okay last point (I PROMISE) is the power imbalance thing you mentioned between Rhys and Az and Azriel maybe feeling beholden to Rhys and therefore somehow obliged to keep doing this. This idea makes me...Uncomfortable. It’s too Tamlin-ish for me to entirely happy with it but I also don’t think it’s happening? Not in that way. Okay this is also Complicated (goddammit Az) but I think it comes back to the same thing of self enforced pressures vs external pressures. And there’s basically none of the latter coming from Rhys in this equation.

Theoretically there’s a definite power imbalance between Rhys and Az (and Rhys and.....Everyone in the entire Night Court since he is their HIgh Lord after all) but....The thing with that sort of dynamic is like anything in these books. The thing itself is not inherently unhealthy or toxic or abusive. (This is also seen with Tamlin’s protectiveness: the desire to protect someone is not inherently negative. It’s only negative when it’s taken to the extreme where it starts to wear on their mental health and the protective person doesn’t take that into account because they’re too busy making themselves feel better to care. Protectiveness= not unhealthy Using that protectiveness as a way to control someone while dressing it up as caring about them = deeply unhealthy)

So yes Rhys has power over Azriel which creates an imbalance between them in a theoretical sense. Practically though...Rhys doesn’t enforce those ideals. He doesn’t pull rank. He doesn’t order any of his court to do things that they haven’t consented to. (Which is something that opposes what Tamlin does with say Lucien - he uses his power to force Lucien to do things he isn’t comfortable with) There’s a dialogue with them. When they’re deciding what to do it’s a group decision, they talk things over, they debate plans, they’re encouraged to offer their own input. Rhys isn’t running a dictatorship. He has the final say and his court will obey him I’m sure if he does give them a direct order but that’s rare.

I also don’t think Az is in a position where he feels he can’t say no to Rhys/challenge him. (This is...Something that we do see with Lucien/Tamlin which I keep coming back to because it’s a good parallel. The few times that Lucien actually pushes back or attempts to stand up to Tamlin and make his own view heard he’s belittled, intimidated and outright violently punished for it. That’s a power imbalance. That’s a situation where a person cannot speak up or say they are uncomfortable or unhappy with what they’re doing.) This is not what Rhys is doing with his court. Az can and has voiced opinions that Rhys flat out does not like:

Azriel pushed, “It’s a solid plan. The king doesn’t know our scents. We wreck the Cauldron and vanish before he notices … It’ll be a graver insult than the bloodier, direct route we’d been considering, Rhys. We beat them yesterday, so when we go into that castle … ” Vengeance indeed danced in that normally placid face. “We’ll leave a few reminders that we won the last damn war for a reason.”

Cassian nodded grimly. Even Mor smiled a bit.

“Are you asking me,” Rhys finally said, far too calmly, “to stay outside while my mate goes into his stronghold?”

“Yes,” Azriel said with equal calm.

Az is perfectly comfortable with, and capable of, disagreeing with Rhys even when it comes to Feyre. And this is a plan that Rhys ultimately accepts and agrees to (with Feyre’s consent) Azriel’s opinions are validated and properly considered and I have no doubt that if he ever personally feels like he wants to walk away from his job telling Rhys about it wouldn’t be the thing that stops him.

Which is important because it’s not that Rhys has set up an environment in which Azriel feels forced to keep doing something he doesn’t want to. It’s more like Azriel himself is an environment that forces him to keep doing this. But that’s on Az to sort out and come to terms with. It’s for Az to set his own boundaries and decide what he can and will do. Mor tells us the lengths Az pushes himself are bordering on sadistic but I don’t think anyone in the Inner Circle ever even comes close to agreeing with this or encouraging it. In fact they do the exact opposite.

But there’s a limit to what they can do without imposing their own wills and agencies on Azriel which would then be a power imbalance because that would involve Rhys using his authority over Azriel to compel him to do something that he doesn’t want to that would likely damage him. (Atm I think what Az does (and does well) is important to him. It makes him valuable. It makes him important. It gives him worth. And obviously he doesn’t need to do that for his court/family to love and protect him and value and respect him but he needs it personally for himself.)

(I know you said you didn’t think that Rhys was expressly doing this but I think it’s more like he’s...actively avoiding doing so and I don’t think he ever would. Azriel has never and will never be put in a position where he feels he’s being forced to do something that he personally - for his own reasons not because he feels indebted to any member of the circle - does not want to do)

So...yeah. I think the shadows thing is...An entirely positive thing for Az. And...just because it means someone covets him doesn’t mean he’ll be used? Those shadows give him power - and power over people - since he can read their feelings, intentions and possibly thoughts (we’re not sure, we just know they tell him things he shouldn’t otherwise know) But that puts him in a position of power. And I suppose he could be exploited and used for it but...tbh I think the shadows would protect him from that? (We’ve already seen that they rush to tell him about Feyre being nosy which is an incredibly innocent thing to ‘protect’ him from. If someone was using him...He’d know it.

ANYWAY THIS WAS REALLY LONG AND I’M REALLY SORRY YOU ONLY MADE A TINY POINT AND I TURNED INTO A WHOLE THING BUT I’VE BEEN MEANING TO TALK ABOUT THIS FOR LIKE SIXTEEN YEARS SO HERE WE ARE.

TL;DR: Azriel’s shadows are a positive force that do nothing but actively benefit him and protect him and why do people want to take them away from my shadow son/think he will lose them and this would be a good thing, I am confused?

#azriel #moriel #rhysand #morrigan #acomaf #acotar series #acotar meta #my meta #azriel meta #look i love azriel too much okay #i have a great many Thoughts #and i did not want to clog up your post with all my drivel #SO HERE WE ARE #text post tag

119 notes · View notes

morganbelarus · 6 years

Text

Trumps Numbers Near a Tipping Point

Public opinion can take off like a runaway train once it gets going. President Donald Trump, already polling lower than any of his predecessors in his first year, might soon be hearing the hoofbeats of history.

At 32 percent in the most recent Pew and Monmouth polls, he is perilously close to what most historians and political scientists say is a tipping point of 30 percent, below which a president can no longer effectively lead.

President Nixon was at 22 percent when he resigned in August of 1974 and Republican Party affiliation had dropped to 18 percent, recalls Reagan historian Craig Shirley.

Going below 30 percent kept Truman from seeking another term and going below 30 percent eventually drove Nixon out of office, he says. In the modern era, beginning with FDR, presidents get into trouble when they fall below 30.

Nixon won a landslide re-election in 1972 with 61 percent of the vote, but it was all downhill after that. For most of the next year, his polls lingered in the mid to high 30s, a downward trajectory that began even before the White House taping system was revealed in July of 1973, exposing his legal jeopardy.

Prior to that, Watergate had taken a steep toll on his numbers, along with campus discord over the Vietnam War and an oil embargo that led to long gas linesall of which led to a general sense of America in decline, says Shirley.

Trump, much earlier in a presidency predicated on his promise to make America great again, is facing his own challenges. The GOPs loss of a Senate seat in ruby red Alabama thanks to the sexual misconduct allegations against Republican Roy Moore has to make President Trump uneasy about the power of todays newly awakened movement. Over a hundred members of Congress are calling for an investigation into claims of sexual harassment brought by multiple women against Trump before he was president. While the lawmakers are all Democrats for now, public opinion doesnt always abide by party lines.

The Monmouth University poll released Wednesday found Trumps biggest drop in approval was among Independent women. Just 24 percent of women overall approve of Trumps job performance.

Public opinion is everything, says Shirley, pointing to how the anti-war movement finally forced the hand of government when the Democratic-controlled House cut off funds for the Vietnam War. The Environmental Protection Agency came about because of public-health concerns about our air and water. People were wearing surgical masks in California then like they do in China today.

The public demanded it, says EPAs first director, William Ruckelshaus. Nixon wasnt an environmentalist. He told his domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman: Just keep me out of trouble on the environment. Do what you have to do. In private, he mocked tree-huggers. He did it for political reasons, Ruckelshaus told The Daily Beast.

Thats the way the system is supposed to work. Hed never run on the environment, and he didnt know much about it. He realized he had to do something because the public demanded it.

No president has been as unpopular so early in his first term, but what we dont know is if Trump can go a whole lot lower, says Jack Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College. He boasts about his base being so loyal he can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any support. A certain hard core is never going to leave him.

How big that base is, whether its 20, 25, or 30 percent, we could soon find out if his numbers keep dropping. Nixons supporters abandoned him because they believed in reality, says Pitney, recalling how California Rep. Charles Wiggins, the ultimate Nixon loyalist who led Nixons defense in the Watergate hearings, withdrew his support after being summoned to the White House and hearing the smoking gun tape. The difference today is the hard core can cocoon itself in their own reality, says Pitney.

Republican pollster John McLaughlin says Trump isnt as bad off as the polls suggest. He says the ones getting headlines deliberately under-sample Republicans and dont screen for likely voters. He does agree that Trump spent a lot of political capital in Alabama, and got nothing. A Republican should be ahead by 20 points in Alabama, he says. If youre behind in Alabamawhere Trumps approval rating is now below 50 percentyoure behind everywhere.

Trump is having trouble because hes his own enemy. Hes looking for an opponent, McLaughlin told The Daily Beast, whether its [Sen. Kirsten] Gillibrand or Hillary [Clinton]. Hes looking for an antagonist to his protagonist. Hes running against himself, and they dont have the political operation to wage a campaign.

McLaughlin has a history with Trump. When Trump was looking at running for president an election earlier, McLaughlin drew up a plan for him, but it wasnt the right time, and it wasnt the right race. Last year, after Trump lost the Wisconsin primary, he brought in McLaughlin, who counseled him to double down on Hillary Clintons corruption because a crook always beats a fool, and Clinton was trying to turn him into a fool, which he said is why she was going after his temperament.

The advice was distilled from his time working with legendary pollster and master of negative campaigning, Arthur Finkelstein, who died earlier this year. In the Nixon-McGovern race of 1972, Finkelstein told McLaughlin, We made McGovern the fool, tagging him as the candidate of amnesty, abortion and acid.

Trump heeded the advice to wake up every day and go after Clinton, and sometime in October they found enough voters who were ready to vote against Clintons corruption instead of against Trumps temperament.

Today, the line of demarcation is on Capitol Hill. A legislative victory on taxes will buy Trump time, but politicians are fair-weather friends. Political capital is about popularity, and Trump has a negative balance.

More From this publisher : HERE ; This post was curated using : TrendingTraffic

=> *********************************************** Read More Here: Trumps Numbers Near a Tipping Point ************************************ =>

Trumps Numbers Near a Tipping Point was originally posted by 16 MP Just news

#16 MP Just news

0 notes

reg-darling · 7 years

Text

Fire, Feces, and Healthcare

My grandfather was born in 1900, in a small village in Forest County, Pennsylvania. During his early teens, his neighborhood was inhabited by a fairly standard curmudgeon—a perennially ornery character who confiscated baseballs that landed in his yard, and shouted angrily at children who took a shortcut across his covetously owned property. Naturally, the neighborhood kids hated him.

One Halloween, my grandfather and his friends decided to go well beyond the realm of soaped windows and smashed pumpkins in their annual rite of revenge against the tormented soul who tormented them. They picked up the man’s outhouse, moved it back several feet, and laid sticks and leaves over the pit to disguise their trap. Shortly before sunrise the following morning, their victim made his customary trip to the privy and fell into the hole.

Unable to extricate himself, the man yelled, as loudly as he could, “Fire! Fire!” All the adults in the neighborhood came running to the scene immediately, bearing buckets, shovels, and axes. After they rescued him from his predicament, someone asked, “Why did you yell ‘fire’?” He replied, “Would you have come running to help if I’d yelled ‘shit’?”

The desperate man yelled “fire” because a house fire was a huge catastrophe that could strike by such sheer happenstance or small oversight that it was universally perceived as an affliction of innocents. Coping with it was regarded as a collective responsibility. Such shared responsibility has, for millennia, been one of the founding principles not only of community, but of civilization itself.

In a small village, all it took for the shared responsibility of dealing with a fire’s horrific threat to be recognized and summoned was a shout or perhaps, a bell. As communities grew to encompass distances beyond earshot, and rising individual anonymity veiled personal disasters in abstraction, coping with collective responsibilities became more organized. A small town needs a volunteer fire department. A city needs a crew of full-time professionals. Instead of running to the scene with a bucket, we now respond to a scream of “fire” with a phone call to 911 and an annual tax bill. No one calls this socialism.

There is no movement to abolish fire departments and replace them with corporate, profit-making enterprises (which would bill the victims of disaster for their services) on the grounds that such enterprises would be intrinsically more efficient and effective. Although I’m sure they carry their standard, inevitable share of human dysfunction, I’ve encountered no credible suggestion that fire departments are doomed to inadequacy and fiscal irresponsibility by virtue of being governmental agencies. I believe the same could be said of our police and military forces. But the reason any proposal to privatize these aspects of government would be generally regarded as absurd is at least as universal as theoretical cynicisms about the mythical impossibility of governmental efficiency. The needs they address are fundamental aspects of the collective responsibility that is the raison d’être of community and government. As such, they do not rationally or morally belong in the realm of commerce. The values they represent are not, and should not be, for sale.

Consider the fundamental purpose of government. It’s not something defined by a constitution. The purpose of a constitution is to confine the action and power of government within a structure, so that it can effectively fulfill its purpose without violating individual rights in overzealous or misguided pursuit of that purpose. The purpose of government is to act as the agent of society’s collective responsibility. I realize I’ve taken something worthy of a long book and reduced it to a couple of sentences here, but the mostly ignored issues at hand in the current pseudo-debates about health care are so fundamental that there is far more risk of simplistic thinking to be found in arguments about pre-existing conditions or public options than in bringing the discussion down to the level of basic moral, social, and philosophical issues.

Though the ways and means may differ, human freedom is as constrained in an authoritarian society with a democratic government as it is in an open, democratic society with an authoritarian government. Protecting the open space of democracy is a collective responsibility that extends far beyond simplistic definitions of legal rights. This is why we have public schools and public libraries. Without universal access to education for the young, and to all forms of literary culture for adults, society would devolve into feudalism with frightening rapidity—a calamity every bit as devastating as an earthquake or flood. We do not abandon these things to the limited and capricious mercies of the marketplace because nurturing the spirit of democracy is a responsibility and a blessing shared by all; they are not items of commerce. Everyone benefits from living in an educated, literate, well-informed society.

In a civilized society, the sick, wounded and infirm are neither shot nor eaten. They are not abandoned. We pay taxes to support schools, police, fire departments, the military, libraries, and a postal system. When someone runs from a house screaming “fire”, we call 911 and perhaps run to help. But what is the greater undeserved calamity, a house fire (assuming the occupants escape relatively unscathed) or pancreatic cancer? In this country, when someone cries out “cancer!” or “heart attack!” or when someone who makes ten dollars per hour and drives twenty-five miles each way to work cries out “My child has a sinus infection and the antibiotic of choice costs $150!”, any claim to collective responsibility is dismissed as “socialism”.

If we lack the common decency to be ashamed of our lack of compassion, we ought to at least be angered by the insult to our intelligence; the straw man of socialism is bullshit so shallow it would embarrass any self-respecting con man. Indeed, it is the degradation of health care to a market-driven commercial enterprise that is functionally an instrument of repression.

By taking the place of government in addressing a basic aspect of natural collective responsibility, the health insurance industry is a de facto government controlling our health care from outside the constitutional and moral constraints of democratic government and social responsibility. The health insurance industry’s profits are taxes paid into the pockets of its leaders (and their corporate shareholders) rather than their ostensible purpose of protecting us from calamities that are often far worse than fire or flood. Taxes levied and taken by authorities other than a legitimate, democratic government are taxation without representation and should be regarded just as the founding fathers regarded such taxation—as tyranny and thievery.

Requiring a family to mortgage their home in order to keep their child alive is not entrepreneurship or even capitalism; it is extortion. That it is legal in this country does not diminish the intrinsic criminality of its spirit any more than it excused the Nazis who engineered the Holocaust or the soldiers who eviscerated unarmed Native American women and children. To call it free enterprise is a vicious insult to every independent businessperson, entrepreneur, farmer, and crafts person in America. Hell, it should insult drug dealers, mobsters, and prostitutes, who all stand on moral high ground by comparison.

Is universal health care a right? Perhaps that doesn’t even matter. Providing universal health care is a responsibility we all share by virtue of being civilized. Our failure to embrace it as a collective responsibility has nothing to do with free markets, socialism, the Bill of Rights, the theories of Karl Marx, or even concerns about administrative efficiency; it is savagery.

Our political leaders have not, and are unlikely to truly address this issue, and it’s not because they’ve chosen to take a tough, principled stand as guardians of our liberty—it’s because they don’t want to. They’re afraid that attempting to row against the torrent of right-wing swill pouring forth from the health insurance industry and talk radio into the public’s collective cynicism and fear would dump political careers in the outhouse. Without the votes of Bubba and Bubbette, our elected representatives might lose their jobs and their health insurance.

The pervasive, institutionalized anxiety of an insurance-dependent system contributes to a widespread spirit of apathy, impotence, and defeatism that is toxic to all the social and political possibilities of democracy. You’re not going to see much dissent or even thinking outside the box coming from people whose families will lose access to health care if they lose their job. You’re not going to see people up to their necks (or over their heads) in medical debt seeking creative new career possibilities. People living in constant, solitary fear—whether of fire, lawlessness, foreign aggression, or medical catastrophe—cannot be truly free in mind and spirit, regardless of the legal rights guaranteed to them by a constitution. Our insurance-dependent system is the whip that drives the galley slaves rowing the ship of state. A single-payer public health care system would not diminish democracy; it would enable and enhance it and, frankly, that’s why both sides of the aisle are yelling “shit” instead of “fire”.

I would like to believe that the semi-literate demagogues who are braying so loudly that universal health care would be the beginning of the end of human freedom are merely deluded, but I suspect the reality is far sleazier than mere dysfunction. There’s nothing we can say to them that wouldn’t apply equally to the horses they rode in on.

The real issue isn’t a matter of pre-existing conditions clauses or public options. The issue is that we’re all Americans and we’re all in this situation together. Are we going to join hands and take care of each other, or not?

#prose #nonfiction #politics #Healthcare #writers on tumblr

3 notes · View notes

asafeatherwould · 4 years

Text

Divorce Lawyer Riverton Utah

Marriage is a contract which imposes on both parties the obligation to support each other financially. In this it differs from cohabitation. But the extent of the obligation is tested only when the marriage breaks down, a divorce is obtained and the parties apply to the court for financial relief. If you are seeking a divorce, contact an experienced Riverton Utah divorce lawyer.

In order to obtain a divorce, the husband or wife who petitions has to assert that the marriage has irretrievably broken down, and has further to add the evidence that he or she relies upon. For an immediate divorce evidence on one of two bases can be used. The petitioner can add to the statement that the marriage has irretrievably broken down an allegation of adultery and assert that with the husband or wife. Alternatively, the petitioner can allege unreasonable behavior, which has to be behavior which is so intolerable that the petitioner could not be expected to put up with it.

youtube

The distinction between an unhappy marriage and one which has irretrievably broken down can only be made by those who have already divorced. Ironically, the fact of divorce is not proof that the marriage did irretrievably break down. It is not unknown for unhappily married couples to divorce because their unhappiness is unresolved although the marriage relationship may not have broken down. Conversely, many husbands and wives stay together for financial convenience or because they consider it to be in the best interests of the children even though their emotional relationship has ceased to be of any significance.

Every married individual, or couple if they are able to discuss their problems together, has to consider whether a relationship has ended. In recent years the relevance of their financial condition has usually been at the forefront of their problems. It is essential they should consider whether difficult financial circumstances exacerbate other problems. If there is no prospect of the financial situation being improved they have to consider how divorce will resolve it.

For instance, if a warring couple are in arrears with mortgage payments on their home, a voluntary sale is more likely to produce a better offer than a forced sale by the building society, but it is unlikely that two homes can be purchased with the proceeds. Perhaps debt counselling in this situation should precede marriage counselling.

youtube

Matrimonial counselling should enable a couple to decide whether they can bear to live together in an attempt to recreate their relationship. Often there is no question of joint consultation: if one partner has decided to leave, and is convinced that the marriage is at an end, he or she will not necessarily accept the need for counselling. The partner who remains will be in urgent need of counselling in order to learn to accept the situation or to learn how to persist in trying to save the marriage. He or she may however be forced into proceedings to prevent the other from taking unwise financial decisions such as emptying a bank account.

Legal advice should be obtained at an early stage before any final decisions are taken. Divorce is, after all, a legal process. No responsible solicitor or other adviser will recommend that divorce be undertaken lightly because its consequences, unless they can be agreed, may be unforeseeable. Too frequently, couples separate and make separate arrangements without finding out whether the agreed solution is feasible. Of course if a marriage between financially independent partners ends in circumstances where there are no dependent children it may be that that neither wishes to incur the costs of legal advice; and the only significant asset may be a home which is to be sold and its proceeds equally divided. Many eventualities can be anticipated which should be considered and prepared for in advance. It would be unfortunate if, having divorced on an agreed basis, the husband or wife were later to lose work or earning capacity and find that there was no possibility of claiming maintenance from the other.

youtube

Equally, if a claim for maintenance was made in a petition and was not dismissed later by an agreed order, the later inheritance of money by the other party could result in a financial claim being pursued. There are limits to what divorce and financial proceedings can achieve. One purpose of early legal advice is to obtain information as to the likely range of settlement which, in each case, it may be possible to expect. If a client is prepared to discuss matters with his or her spouse in an attempt to resolve matters it may be useful to refer the couple to mediation. Mediation is a process designed to help couples resolve their disputes in relation to children and money. There are many different models, some involving one mediator and others two. It can take place before or during the divorce and financial proceedings. It may result in no agreement at all or agreement on some or all issues. Each party should always obtain independent legal advice on the proposed terms of settlement.

Annulment or Divorce?

If you are married, you may have an alternative to divorce under Utah law. Legal separation and annulment are substitutes for divorce— one quite feeble, the other quite powerful. Legal separations keep a thin version of a marriage alive. Annulments are hard to get (in theory). But if a marriage is annulled, both parties can remarry; indeed, this is usually the point of an annulment. Both annulments and legal separations appeal mostly to people with religious scruples against divorce. Annulment is another way of ending a marriage. Annulment wipes a marriage off the books, as if it never existed. In American courts, annulment proceedings are much less common than divorce proceedings. The formal rules have always been—on the surface, at least—quite strict. Annulment is possible only when something was radically and fatally wrong with the marriage from the very beginning. A decree of annulment tears up a marriage “by the roots.” State statutes list various “grounds” for annulment—typically bigamy, impotence and fraud. The law of annulment distinguishes between “void” and “voidable” marriages, based, at least loosely, on the severity of the marital defect. Speak to an experienced Riverton Utah divorce lawyer to know if you can get your marriage annulled.

youtube

Choosing The Right Lawyer

Lawyers who represent clients act to protect legal entitlements by asserting them in litigated disputes or negotiations, counsel their clients on what the law permits, and structure their clients’ affairs with reference to the law. As this term will be used here, a legal entitlement is a substantive or procedural right, created by the law, which establishes claim-rights (implying duties upon others), privileges to do things without interference, and powers to change the legal situation of others (e.g., by imposing contractual obligations). Familiar examples of substantive legal entitlements include privacy interests that are protected by statutes and common-law rights against wiretapping, public disclosure of private facts, illegal searches by law enforcement officers and the like; real property rights that protect against trespass, encroachments, and seizures of property by the state without the payment of compensation; intellectual property rights that prohibit the appropriation of valuable ideas; and common law tort rights that seek to deter accidental injuries by providing remedies for those who have been harmed through the negligence of others. Entitlements may be created by courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, or by citizens themselves, using legal tools for private ordering, such as wills, trusts, contracts, partnerships, and corporations. In addition to substantive entitlements, the law also establishes procedural entitlements, which regulate the manner in which substantive entitlements are investigated and adjudicated.

youtube

For example, a lawsuit must be commenced with pleadings which are formally served using specified procedures. This process ensures that someone who is made a defendant in a lawsuit has notice of the claims being asserted against him, and an opportunity to defend himself. The rules of evidence also create procedural entitlements, which ensure that substantive rights and obligations are adjudicated in an orderly way, on the basis of admissible evidence only, and without unjustified interference with the rights of the litigants or of third parties. The hearsay rule, for example, prevents the introduction of evidence that is generally deemed unreliable, while the rule against introducing evidence of a party’s insurance coverage seeks to prevent the jury from acting out of bias against “deep pocket” insurance companies. Procedural rules may also be designed to protect more substantive interests. For instance, the rule against admitting evidence of a subsequent remedial action taken by a party is intended to avoid creating a disincentive to modify products or change safety procedures out of fear that these changes will be admitted at trial to show wrongdoing. Legal entitlements should not be confused with the legal merits of a case, if by “merits” one means a judgment about guilt or innocence, liability or nonliability, or some similar factual and legal conclusion.

Legal entitlements may conflict, and the job of a lawyer or judge may be to make a judgment about how a conflict among entitlements should be resolved. That resolution is what is commonly meant by the merits of a lawsuit. The possibility of conflicting substantive and procedural entitlements is familiar from criminal litigation, in which important dignitary interests of the defendant are protected by procedural entitlements against abuse by state officials. These entitlements, in turn, are backed up by remedies that may have an impact on the determination of the guilt or innocence of the accused. For example, the remedy for a wrongful search of the defendant’s premises may be exclusion of the wrongfully obtained evidence from trial. If that evidence is crucial to the prosecution’s case, the exercise of the defendant’s procedural entitlement may result in a verdict of acquittal.

youtube

One of the fundamental principles structuring the law governing lawyers is that a lawyer’s role is defined and bounded by the client’s legal entitlements. To put it another way, the lawyer is an agent for a principal, the client, and as such can have no greater power than that possessed by the client. In legal terms, an agent is someone empowered to act on behalf of another. Because of the agency relationship between lawyer and client, the lawyer’s decision making authority is structured and limited by the client’s legal entitlements. As an authoritative summary of American law puts it, a lawyer has a legal obligation to “proceed in a manner reasonably calculated to advance a client’s lawful objectives, as defined by the client after consultation.” This duty may require a lawyer to argue the client’s legal position in litigation, counsel the client on what the law requires and permits, or structure a transaction to avoid legal penalties or take advantage of legal benefits. But in any event, when a lawyer is acting in a representative capacity, her legal obligations are constrained by the client’s legal entitlements. Acting on any other basis, such as ordinary moral reasons or the interests of clients, would exceed the lawful power of the lawyer as agents. It would be ultra vires, in the language of agency law, and thus a legal nullity.

A corollary of the principle that the client’s legal entitlements structure the attorney–client relationship is that lawyers may not permissibly assist clients in legal wrongdoing. The lawyer disciplinary rules state that lawyers may not “counsel a client to engage, or assist a client, in conduct that the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent,” and agency law provides that the lawyer retains inherent authority, which cannot be overridden at the instance of the client, to refuse to perform unlawful acts. The lawyer may not assist the client in illegality, because the lawyer–client relationship is created by the legal system for a particular purpose, which is to enable clients to receive the expert assistance they need in order to determine their legal rights and duties. As the United States Supreme Court noted, discussing the attorney–client privilege, a relationship of trust and confidence between a client and an attorney is necessary “to encourage full and frank communication between attorneys and their clients and thereby promote broader public interests in the observance of law and administration of justice.”

youtube

On the other hand, lawyer–client communications are not privileged ab initio if the client consults a lawyer for the purpose of committing a crime or fraud. These legal principles show that society tolerates lawyers (albeit sometimes grudgingly) because lawyers contribute to a process by which people can regulate their interactions with one another with reference to legal entitlements. Take away the idea of legal entitlements and lawyers would literally cease to exist as a distinct profession. Thus, whatever lawyers do for their clients must be justified on the basis of their clients’ lawful rights, permissions, and obligations.

Lawyers often talk as though the bounds of their role obligations are given by client interests rather than legal entitlements. In any principal–agent relationship, however, the agent’s rights and obligations are derivative of those of the principal. Someone who retains a broker to sell property conveys legal authority to the broker to transfer only whatever title the owner has. Similarly, a lawyer’s professional role is defined with reference to the rights and duties vested in the client by the law. Lawyers may lawfully do for their clients only what their clients lawfully may do. The lawyer’s professional role also excludes any permission on the part of the lawyer to try to exploit “arbitrariness, whimsy, caprice, ‘nullification,’ and the like.” A lawyer may be able to get away with some action that goes beyond her client’s entitlements, but this would lack significance as a lawful act, and thus not be something that can properly be said to be within the role of lawyer (as opposed to some other kind of adviser).

youtube

This is such an obvious point that it is hard to understand why lawyers sometimes fail to appreciate it. But it may be the most pervasive feature of the normative framework of practicing lawyers that they proclaim an obligation to defend their clients’ interests within the law, rather than vindicating their clients’ legal entitlements. The difference between “interests within the law” and legal entitlements may seem like a semantic nicety with no theoretical significance, but in fact it reveals a vast gulf between attitudes of fidelity to the law and indifference to the law except as a potential source of sanctions to be avoided. Entitlements are what the law, properly interpreted, actually provides, while working “within the law” seems to suggest something broader and looser—equivalent, perhaps, to “whatever one can get away with.” The question of whether the lawyer’s obligation ought to be oriented toward client interests or entitlements may therefore be resolved in part by considering basic jurisprudential issues regarding the nature of the law.

Loophole Lawyering

Many legal ethics problems, which seem to present a conflict between legal entitlements and moral values, actually raise legal-interpretive questions. Once the interpretive issue is resolved, the moral issue dissolves. In general, this can be called the problem of “loopholes” in the law. The idea of exploiting loopholes is a staple of the popular criticism of lawyers, but it is important to be careful in defining these and other cognate terms. Members of the public sometimes complain about lawyers “getting the defendant off on a technicality,” where the reason for the acquittal, or dismissal of charges, was to remedy the violation of a constitutional right held by the defendant. The problem perceived by observers is that the result of the proceeding did not track the substantive guilt or innocence of the defendant—in other words, whether he actually did the act of which he was accused. But the purpose of a trial is not only to ascertain guilt or innocence, but to do so within a framework of procedural entitlements that are designed to safeguard important values such as the privacy and dignity of all citizens, and to protect against abuse of state power. These procedural entitlements are no less part of the law, and no less a part of the legal justice of the matter, than the determination of factual guilt or innocence. While one might criticize the existence or content of a particular procedural entitlement, perhaps on the grounds that it ties the hands of law enforcement personnel or is not necessary to protect values like privacy or dignity, the possibility that the entitlement is ill-considered does not make it a loophole.

youtube

Similarly, procedural entitlements are available to parties in civil litigation which may have the effect of defeating the resolution of issues related to the substantive entitlements of the parties. Again, there are good reasons for the legal system to recognize certain procedural entitlements. The statute of limitations, for example, serves the dual purpose of ensuring that trials are not conducted on the basis of stale evidence and also of permitting citizens to form stable expectations that, at some point, their right to something will not be challenged. Legal ethics scholars sometimes talk about the “merits” of a case, and when that term is used, it is important to query whether merits includes the correct resolution of interpretive questions related to procedural entitlements. The lawyer in a case like the statute of limitations hypothetical may take an action that vindicates her client’s procedural entitlement, but defeats resolution of the substantive merits of the opponent’s position. This is consistent with the lawyer’s obligation of fidelity to law, because the legal system includes both substantive and procedural entitlements, and because the lawyer has a legal duty, as an agent of her client, to assert her client’s legal entitlements, whether substantive or procedural.

On“Zealous” Representation

Lawyers quite properly understand themselves as having demanding obligations of client service, including following their clients’ instructions, keeping confidences, and delivering legal services in a competent and diligent manner. Curiously, American lawyers at least tend to include in their normative self-understanding an obligations to provide “zealous” representation, which gives competence an oddly affective dimension. The term “zealous” appeared in the ABA’s Model Code of Professional Responsibility, which has since been superseded in virtually every U.S. jurisdiction by the Model Rules. The modifier “zealous” does not appear in any of the legally enforceable obligations of the current Model Rules, although the Preamble to the Rules does continue to recognize that “as advocate, a lawyer zealously asserts the client’s position under the rules of the adversary system.” Nevertheless, if one were to ask practicing lawyers to justify actions in the hypothetical cases that appear to violate ordinary moral obligations (i.e., pleading the statute of limitations, filing the motion to terminate benefits, or aggressively questioning the plaintiffs about their sexual practices), the argument would more often than not make reference to the duty of zealous advocacy.

youtube

The enduring popularity of this notion in the thinking of lawyers is noteworthy, because it seems to prescribe an affective state, as opposed to an action, and as a general rule lawyers do not think of legal obligations in terms of emotions and attitudes. It would be an unusual lawyer who advised a client that the duty of reasonable care in tort law required the client to feel a sentiment of concern for third parties; the lawyer’s advice would rather be that the client had to take such-and-such a precaution, and that would be the end of the matter. My hunch is that lawyers are attracted to the idea of zealous advocacy because it simplifies their normative universe to a considerable extent, by resolving ethical dilemmas in favor of the client’s interests. It only does so, however, by begging all of the important questions about how the obligation of zealous representation is to be weighted against the obligation to respect the law, which is also a feature of the lawyer’s role.

It would be an unqualified intellectual advance if the expression “zealous advocacy” disappeared forever from legal ethics. Its overuse seems to encourage two significant conceptual mistakes. First, lawyers tend to forget the second half of their little mantra. The ABA Code said that lawyers should represent their clients zealously within the bounds of the law. As the Restatement provides, the lawyer’s basic duty is to “proceed in a manner reasonably calculated to advance a client’s lawful objectives, as defined by the client after consultation.” The reference to the client’s lawful objectives shows that the client’s legal entitlements, not the client’s autonomy, moral commitments, or the lawyer’s own moral projects, are the yardstick against which the lawyer’s duties should be measured. In other words, the Model Code underscores the agency-law position taken here, which is that the lawyer’s basic duty as an agent for her client is to act competently and diligently on behalf of the client, but only to the extent that the client’s interests are recognized as legal entitlements. Even in litigation contexts the lawyer’s obligation is to pursue the client’s legal entitlements by lawful means, not to be unboundedly zealous. The law governing lawyers in litigation recognizes numerous limitations on zealous representation, including the prohibition on presenting frivolous legal arguments in federal and state rules of civil procedure, and duties of candor to the tribunal in the lawyer disciplinary rules. Although in some areas of practice, such as the representation of indigent criminal defendants by grossly overworked public defenders, lawyers may be rightly accused of being insufficiently zealous, by far the more pressing problem for legal ethics is the lack of respect by lawyers for the bounds of the law, defined in any sensible way.

youtube

Nothing is more familiar than the charges that lawyers are a rather sleazy lot. This criticism comes in a variety of forms, from op-ed pieces in the newspaper, to campaign speeches by politicians, to endlessly repeated lawyer jokes. Beyond that, it is probably a rare lawyer or law student who has not been harangued by an acquaintance at a party or by a seatmate on a long flight about the legal profession. Criticism of lawyers encompasses a bewildering variety of themes: greed, including the closely related theme of overcharging clients; serving the fat cats at the expense of the little guy; preying on the misfortunes of others; being prone to lying and cheating on behalf of clients, and also to sometimes lie to clients; hyper-aggressiveness in litigation, or clogging up the legal system with frivolous disputes; being a drag on productive activities— writ small this is the familiar criticism that lawyers are deal-breakers; writ large it is the lament that lawyers impose costs on productive activities, rather than producing anything of value themselves; and of course the familiar claim (which many lawyers would cheerfully concede) that criminal defense lawyers help guilty people escape punishment, sometimes by obfuscating the truth at trial, other times by taking advantage of procedural technicalities to secure acquittals. To sum it up neatly, the public seems to believe that “the lawyer’s skill is the instrument by which justice is defeated; or, if justice prevails, it is because of a lawyer’s craftiness rather than for a respectable reason.

Lawyers often use the term “legal ethics” to refer to the rules of professional conduct promulgated and enforced by public institutions. Philosophers would be baffled to hear lawyers say things like, “That may be unethical, but it isn’t wrong.” That phraseology can be explained, however, by the use of the term ethics to denote the rules of professional conduct under which lawyers practice. In the United States, the highest court in each state has the inherent authority to regulate the practice of law within the territorial jurisdiction of the state; these courts issue rules governing matters like fees, advertising, conflicts of interest, and confidentiality. These rules in turn are enforced by some kind of administrative agency, often loosely referred to as the bar association of State X. Lawyers are also regulated by the generally applicable law of agency, torts, contracts, evidence, procedure, criminal and constitutional law, and, if applicable, specialized law such as tax and securities regulation. Taken together, the entire law governing lawyers is sometimes also called legal ethics, particularly in the United States where instruction in “the history, goals, structure, values, rules, and responsibilities of the legal profession and its members” is mandatory in nationally accredited law schools.

youtube

Principle of Partisanship

The lawyer must act out of exclusive concern with the legal interests of clients. She is permitted to disregard the interests of affected third parties and the public interest, if it would be in the client’s interests to do so, and if the law permits the violation in question of the third party or public interest. Although the lawyer may counsel the client that disregarding the interests of another is morally wrong, if the client insists on taking the action (and again, if it is legally permitted), the lawyer is obligated either to do it, or to withdraw from representing the client if withdrawal can be accomplished without prejudicing the client’s interests.

Principle of Neutrality

Nor may the lawyer let her own moral convictions stand in the way of doing something that she otherwise would regard as wrong, if the client instructs her to do so. Ordinary moral values are excluded from the lawyer’s practical reasoning and from the retrospective evaluation, by the lawyer herself or by others, of the lawyer’s actions. Citizens should not be denied entitlements secured by the legal system solely because a lawyer finds that person’s objectives unjust. The lawyer may—and indeed, in many cases must— refuse to pursue an objective that is unlawful, but may make this judgment on the basis of considerations internal to the law, not extra-legal moral reasons.

Principle of Nonaccountability

The third principle is not really a prescription for lawyers to follow, but a rule of inference that third-party observers should respect. The Principle of Nonaccountability means that, as long as the lawyer acts within the law, her actions may not be evaluated in ordinary moral terms.40 People should not call lawyers sleazy just because they represent sleazy clients, or do nasty things on behalf of clients. An observer evaluating the actions of lawyers representing clients should be limited to approving or disapproving the lawyers’ actions as a matter of lawyering craft. It is impermissible to step outside the practice of lawyering, and appeal to standards that are not part of the professional normative domain.

The Changing Meaning of Marriage

Out of the radical and reform movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the changes in social norms that accompanied those movements, came a transformation in the legal significance of marriage. The constitutional principles of equality and liberty toppled ancient rules about families that were based on hierarchy and conformity. The seeds of valuing all families were planted.

When the movement for gay and lesbian rights and liberation emerged during that time, marriage was considered part of the problem, not part of the solution. Marriage was a problem because it regulated the lives of men and women along gender lines—both within and outside of marriage—and because it policed the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable sexual expression. By themselves, the small number of those willing to live openly, proudly, even defiantly as gay men and lesbians could have made little headway against this institution that sought to channel them into, and keep them within, acceptable heterosexual norms.

But they didn’t have to do it themselves. They had heterosexuals who were increasingly open about rejecting the sexuality-channeling function of marriage, and they had feminism. Feminism had the support and the momentum to demand an end to the limits on women’s life choices attributable to the expectations of women’s roles within marriage. For many women, these demands included the right not to marry. The contemporary movement for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people owes a great debt to the feminist movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, including its critique of marriage and the family.

In an astonishingly short period of time, feminist agitation and the social and cultural changes of this era produced a seismic trans formation of the law of marriage. The old set of laws punished sex outside of marriage, imposed catastrophic consequences for bearing children outside of marriage, assumed and fostered “separate spheres” for men and women, and denied the ability to exit a marriage except under penalty. These laws had endured for hundreds of years. In less than a decade, a completely revised set of laws emerged. The new laws discarded the gender script, made entry into marriage more optional, and made exit from marriage more ordinary. In doing so, they made marriage a different institution and opened avenues for recognition of new family forms, including those of gay men and lesbians.

The first changes to the legally prescribed roles of husband and wife occurred in the mid-nineteenth century with the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts. These laws at first permitted women to keep property they owned at the time of the marriage. Later, after feminist advocacy, the laws were expanded to allow married women to enter into contracts and to control money they earned, although this change did not occur in some states until well into the twentieth century. Some legislators who resisted these changes as against God’s law declared them certain to lead to adultery and divorce.

Surprisingly little had changed since the nineteenth-century Married Women’s Property Acts. Although women gained the right to vote in 1920, they could still be excused from jury service solely because they were considered “the center of home and family life.” In 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Texas law that allowed a wife to avoid repaying a loan from the Small Business Administration because she had not received court permission to sign the note as required of married women under state law. Married women could still be required to use their husband’s surnames, and, for the most part, a wife’s legal residence followed that of her husband, affecting her ability to vote, hold public office, receive government benefits, qualify for free or reduced college tuition, serve on a jury, pay taxes, or probate a will.

Giving the husband the right to determine the couple’s legal residence meant also that if he moved and the wife refused to move with him, she would be guilty of desertion and could be divorced based on her fault. An Arizona court writing in 1953 upheld the husband’s right to decide where the couple lived, because he had the duty of financial support and “there can be no decision by majority rule as to where the family home shall be maintained.”

The right of a wife to support—what she got in exchange for ac ceding to the husband as the head of the household—was not a right she could enforce during a marriage. In a 1953 Nebraska case, the wife asked a court to order her husband to pay for indoor plumbing, a new furnace, and money she could use for clothing, furniture, and other expenses. She testified that her husband had not given her any money for four years, that he would not allow any charge accounts, and that he did not permit her to make any long-distance telephone calls. The trial judge ordered the husband to buy some items and to provide a monthly allowance to his wife. The state supreme court reversed that decision, holding that a wife could proceed against her husband for support only if they were separated. “As long as the home is maintained,” the court wrote, “it may be said that the husband is legally supporting his wife.”

Gendered roles within marriage had always affected women’s opportunities in public life. Until 1963, it was legal to pay women less than men for doing the same job. That year, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women spearheaded passage of a federal law guaranteeing equal pay for men and women. The following year, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act, with Title VII prohibiting discrimination in hiring, promotion, and other areas of employment on the basis of sex as well as race. Even after the mandate of equal opportunity for women, employers were slow to change their practices; into the early 1970s, newspapers routinely divided job advertisements into “Help Wanted: Male” and “Help Wanted: Female.”

The Divorce Revolutions

Until the 1960s, social and legal consequences of nonmarital birth demonstrated strong condemnation of sex outside marriage. Pregnancy and childbirth were hard-to-avoid consequences of sex, as abortion was illegal and effective contraception was either illegal or difficult to obtain. Teenage pregnancy rates peaked in the 1950s, but half of those pregnancies resulted in shotgun weddings, pressed by the woman’s family to preserve a daughter’s honor and avert shame and disgrace. Of those who did not marry, over twenty-five thousand a year were sent to more than two hundred “unwed mother” homes where they gave birth secretly and almost always relinquished their children for adoption. Women who gave birth and kept their children, including the black women who were excluded from most of the unwed-mother homes, faced harsh state policies, including eviction from public housing and denial of public assistance. Doctors sometimes sterilized them without their knowledge or consent.

The cultural changes that accompanied the social and political movements of the 1960s included a revolution in sexual mores. The birth control pill, introduced in 1960, for the first time provided women a reliable means of being sexually active and avoiding pregnancy. “Make love, not war” was a refrain for a generation that questioned the authority of its elders. A sexual double standard lingered for women and men, but this was decried by second-wave feminism. The groundbreaking studies of sexuality researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson identified women’s sources of sexual satisfaction, demonstrating, among other things, that women could achieve sexual fulfillment without men. As hostility to nonmarital sex decreased, legal doctrine reflecting condemnation of such sex became less tenable. Demand for divorce also increased. U.S. courts had granted divorces since the late eighteenth century, but only on specified grounds requiring that one party be at “fault.” The idea behind fault-based divorce was that divorce should be the exception, not the rule, and should be available at the option of the “innocent” party only.

One spouse’s fault not only gave the other grounds for divorce, it also to a large extent determined the consequences of divorce. Adultery was a ground for divorce everywhere. Although in the mid twentieth century a “tender years presumption” meant that mothers of young children would be awarded custody if there was a divorce, this only held true if they were without fault. Sex outside marriage rendered a mother “unfit” and cost her not only her marriage but her children as well. A woman’s fault also relieved her husband of any obligation to support her. Even though a divorced woman could keep property she owned in her own name or had purchased with her own money, the rigid gender roles assigned husbands and wives made it unlikely that she had such assets. With no access to property in her husband’s name, no entitlement to spousal support or child custody if she committed marital fault, and limited options for economic self-sufficiency in a marketplace rampant with sex discrimination, the consequences of extramarital sex for a woman were severe.

By the 1960s, social practice was out of step with divorce law. Cohabitation became more accepted and more common as “desertion” occurred, and without divorce there could be no remarriage. The divorce rate rose, in part due to liberal divorce laws in Nevada and in other countries, where the wealthy could travel to dissolve their unions. Many couples who wanted to end their marriages manufactured grounds—such as physical cruelty or adultery—to get divorced. This was particularly rampant in New York, where adultery remained the only ground for divorce until 1966.

Legal Transformations Involving Marriage and Family

The law reform strategy of liberal feminists achieved extraordinary success in a series of cases in the 1970s. The first Supreme Court case to strike down a distinction between men and women as unconstitutional arose out of an Idaho statute that presumed men more capable than women of administering the estate of a person who died without a will. When a child named Richard Reed died, his mother and father, who were separated, each sought to administer his estate. The judge appointed Richard’s father. The Idaho Supreme Court held that “nature itself” created the distinction between men and women and the legislature could conclude that in general men were better qualified than women to administer estates. When this case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, the Court ruled for the first time that a sex-based statute was “arbitrary” in a way that violated the equal protection clause. The Court required the judge to hold a hearing to determine who was better suited to administer the estate.

This case was not about “family law” narrowly defined as the obligations of a husband and wife toward one another. But the law at issue was the explicit product of the gendered view of men and women under the doctrine of coverture. Writing the brief for Sally Reed, future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg protested the “subordination of women” inherent in preferring men without regard to the ability of the applicants. Reed v. Reed, decided as the demands of second-wave feminism became audible across the country, signaled the beginning of the end of legalized, formal inequality between women and men. Notably, most of the cases in the decade following concerned either sex-based classifications in family law or notions of gender with their origins in the laws of coverture. For example, two years later, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law that extended benefits to married male members of the armed forces but gave those benefits to a married female service member only if she could prove that her husband depended on her for more than one-half of his support.

The scheme dated back to the 1940s and 1950s and reflected the legal reality that a husband was obliged to support his wife and the corresponding factual reality, as found by the trial court that heard the case, that husbands were typically breadwinners and wives typically dependent.

The government argued in favor of retaining the distinction between men and women because of “administrative convenience.” It said that because most wives were dependent on their husbands, it was cheaper and easier to presume dependence and automatically award the benefits. But because few husbands were dependent on their wives, it was appropriate to require proof of the husband’s dependence before spending government funds. The Supreme Court eliminated the sex discrimination by allowing all married service members additional benefits.

In 1975 the Supreme Court heard the case of Stephen Wiesenfeld, whose wife, Paula, had died in childbirth. Their child was entitled to receive Social Security survivors’ benefits as a result of Paula’s death, but Stephen was not; a surviving mother could receive benefits after the father’s death, but a surviving father could not receive benefits after the mother’s death. This sex-based classification had been included in amendments to Social Security enacted in 1939 when it was a “generally accepted presumption that a man is responsible for the support of his wife and children.” The Court found that the purpose of the benefit was to allow women to forgo paid employment and stay home with their children. By focusing on the interest in providing a child with a stay-at-home parent after the other parent died, the Supreme Court concluded that it was irrational, and therefore unconstitutional, to provide the benefit only to surviving mothers. In 1977 the Supreme Court found sex discrimination in another Social Security regulation, this one providing survivors’ benefits to all elderly widows, but to elderly widowers only if they had been receiving more than one-half of their support from their wives.

Some Supreme Court cases decided in the decade after Reed lay within the realm of family law. In a Utah case, the law eliminated a parent’s obligation to support his daughter at eighteen, and his son at twenty-one. The state supreme court upheld the law based on the belief that “the man’s primary responsibility is to provide a home and its essentials for the family,” and the extra education or training enabled by the requirement of parental support until twenty-one would facilitate that. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed. In 1979, the Court invalidated the sex-based classification in an alimony statute that denied husbands the opportunity to get alimony from their wives, and in 1981 it invalidated a Louisiana law that made the husband the “head and master” of the household and thus gave him the power to dispose of all community property without his wife’s consent.

These cases made progress in achieving formal equality through elimination of sex-based classifications. Although the law today does allow some sex-based distinctions, it permits none of the distinctions once linked to the gendered nature of marriage. As a result of the Supreme Court decisions, all benefits and obligations once tied to the legally mandated dependency of women upon their husbands have been eliminated or expanded to include both spouses. Both have a right to request alimony; both have the right to manage community property; both are entitled to survivors’ benefits under Social Security and workers’ compensation laws.

Feminist efforts resulted in gender neutrality superimposed on a set of laws grounded in the gendered nature of marriage. The resulting regime singles out marriage for special treatment, but only as a byproduct of the remedy for ending gender inequality, not as a reasoned conclusion that marriage entitles people to special treatment that other relationships cannot claim. In other words, the special treatment accorded marriage in family law, Social Security, employee benefits, and other critical areas masks the original purpose of those areas of law.

Alimony is a good example. Alimony enforced a husband’s obligation to provide lifelong support to his wife. He had to assume this obligation at marriage because she lost the ability to support herself. He could be relieved of this obligation only if she died or, in the rare circumstance of divorce, if she married another man who assumed responsibility for her support. Feminist success in achieving formal equality eliminated the gender component, and now, where appropriate, either a husband or wife may seek alimony, even though neither spouse loses the ability to support himself or herself when marrying and easy divorce means that whatever obligations spouses have toward one another are not inherently lifelong. Formal equality for women made alimony gender-neutral, but did not detach it from marriage. Yet the justifications for alimony today are completely different from those of the earlier, gendered era. Contemporary justification for ongoing support after a relationship dissolves rests on the economic consequences of one person forgoing individual financial stability while making uncompensated contributions to a family. This may occur whether the couple is married or not married, and there is no principled basis for restricting support awards today only to husbands and wives.

Ending Illegitimacy

The long-standing social stigma of illegitimacy was accompanied by harsh legal consequences. The law permitted and endorsed discrimination against children born outside marriage as a means of expressing condemnation of nonmarital sex. For centuries such children were fillius nullius, the child of no one, meaning they had no legally recognized relationship with, including no right to support from, their mother or father.

In Stanley v. Illinois, Peter Stanley challenged an Illinois law that automatically made his children wards of the state when their mother died. The state would not have stepped in if he and their mother had been married. The Court ruled that the state could not presume Stanley unfit simply because he was never married to the children’s mother, with whom he had lived intermittently for eighteen years. Stanley had a constitutional right to raise his children; marriage was irrelevant. With this case, the Court overturned centuries of law that created a father-child relationship only for a man married to a child’s mother. The next year the Court ruled that children’s right to support payments from their father could not turn on whether their father had been married to their mother.

A 1973 decision limited the government’s ability to deny benefits to households with unmarried parents. New Jersey Welfare Rights Organization v. Cahill challenged a New Jersey program that extended benefits to financially needy households consisting of “two adults of the opposite sex ceremonially married to each other” who also had at least one biological or jointly adopted child, or one child born to one spouse and adopted by the other.

The trial court ruled in favor of the state. It determined that the state could favor married families because such families provided norms, preventing a breakdown in social control. The court described marriage as a “permanent, or at least semi-permanent institution.” It noted that “a living arrangement which does not have the aura of permanence that is concomitant with a ceremonial marriage, often does not provide the stability necessary for the instillment of those norms with the individual necessary for proper behavior.” It concluded that it was proper for the state to refuse to subsidize a living unit that violated its laws against fornication and adultery and that New Jersey could use its program to discourage immorality and illegitimacy. According to the trial court, the program did not unconstitutionally discriminate against nonmarital children, because their parents could cure the problem by getting married, and this was a proper incentive for the state to offer.

The Supreme Court reversed the lower court. It found “no doubt that the benefits extended under the challenged program are as indispensable to the health and well-being of illegitimate children as to those who are legitimate.” Therefore the program violated the equal protection rights of nonmarital children. Justice Rehnquist was again the lone dissenter. He argued that the state could require marriage as an essential ingredient of a deserving family unit and said that, “the Constitution does not require that special financial assistance designed by the legislature to help poor families be extended to ‘communes’ as well.”

No-Fault Divorce

Marriage was no longer necessary to create legally recognized relationships with children. Marriage was no longer necessary to stave off moral judgments enforced by law. People could be sexually active and remain unmarried. The final seismic shift of this period transformed the law of divorce, enabling people who did marry to leave those marriages for reasons unheard of in previous centuries.

In 1964 the California legislature held hearings on the state’s divorce laws. Professor Herma Hill Kay, among others, testified about eliminating fault as the basis for divorce. Two years later, the governor appointed a Commission on the Family, and the commission’s report became the basis for the nation’s first pure no-fault divorce law, enacted in 1969. During this period, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws studied marriage and divorce law, culminating in a draft in 1970 of the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act, which recommended no-fault divorce. The impetus toward no-fault divorce did not come from the women’s movement. To the contrary, some men wanted a way out of marriage that removed the leverage that wives had over husbands who wanted divorces but could not get them without their wives’ collusion, obtained in return for generous financial packages. But once women began considering law reform from a feminist perspective, they supported a range of divorce-reform issues, including the grounds for divorce. New York NOW, for example, called for nofault divorce in 1971. Feminism turned the private and personal dissatisfaction that some women experienced in their marriages into a socially acceptable reason to leave a marriage to escape rigid sex roles and male domination. It also helped open the employment opportunities that made it financially feasible for women to live independently from men. These accomplishments were consistent with new laws approving easy exit from marriage.

No-fault divorce brought with it new thinking about the role of fault in determining child custody. The rule that a parent who has sex outside marriage was automatically unfit to have custody was out of step with increased acceptance of nonmarital sex. Responding to changing sexual mores, when the drafters of the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act considered a model statute on child custody, they included the provision that “the court shall not consider conduct of a proposed custodian that does not affect his relationship to the child.” This constituted a rejection of the rule automatically linking sex outside marriage to unfitness. While it is unlikely the drafters had lesbian and gay parents in mind, the idea that parents’ sexual behavior should not automatically keep them from having custody was an enormous boon to those who would soon advocate that lesbian mothers leaving marriages should be able to keep custody of their children. Combined with the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders in 1973, this became the backbone of the legal strategy in support of lesbian mothers.

The Family Redefined

Looked at together, these changes in the law of gender, sex, relationships, households, and families were adjustments to the dramatic social changes and political demands of the 1960s and early 1970s. Some of these developments, most notably in divorce laws, occurred through enactment of new statutes, reflecting a political consensus to conform law to modern life. As important, however, is the role that the Supreme Court played in constraining both federal and state legislators unwilling to adapt to a society in which people organized their lives less and less around marriage.

The Financial Consequences of Splitting Up

The plaintiffs in marriage-equality cases do not say that they want to marry so that if they split up the property division and support rules that accompany divorce will apply to them. Like all couples who plan to marry, they do not expect to divorce. But the different rules for settling money issues at the end of a marriage versus an unmarried relationship can cause indefensible hardship.

Until the changes in divorce laws in the 1970s, the forty-two “common law” property states did not treat the end of a marriage as an event needing specific rules for determining who got what property. The person whose name appeared on the title to land or the bank account kept it. Untitled property belonged to the spouse who paid for it. Obviously, this meant the husband owned most of the property during the marriage and kept it when the marriage ended.

For example, in a 1974 case at the end of a twenty-two-year marriage, a wife who had no outside employment for the first ten years while she cared for the children, and who kept homemaking even when she had paid employment, received her personal items and her car. Her husband kept a 265-acre farm, the family home, machinery, and livestock. The court said the result was “harsh” but required by the law.2 With no-fault divorces and many more marriages ending in divorce, courts and legislatures in common law property states came to see the outcomes as unfair because they failed to take into account noneconomic contributions to the household. They established new laws allowing judges to transfer title to property—something that would have shocked our ancestors—to achieve a result that was “equitable.”

The law governing the end of unmarried relationships has not caught up with the times. Traditionally, the law would not even enforce deals in which a man agreed to provide for a woman with whom he “cohabited.” The law considered such arrangements no different from prostitution. When the California Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that actor Lee Marvin could be required to support Michelle Triola Marvin if he had agreed to do so, it heralded a more modern treatment of unmarried couples.

Unfortunately, Marvin v. Marvin proved to be an end point, rather than the beginning of a more appropriate legal treatment of all families. Law books are filled with decisions denying assets and support to “stay-at-home moms” who lived with male partners, raised children, and got nothing when those relationships ended. Some were together for decades. All they had available to them when their relationships ended was the opportunity to prove a contract with their former partner or financial contributions to the former partner’s property. Their status as a partner who devoted years to home and family counted for nothing.

In fact, Michelle Triola received nothing. She was unable to prove a contract with Marvin, and the court refused to approve an award of temporary support based solely on the equities of their situation. Contracts are hard to prove. In a 2006 case at the end of a thirteen year lesbian relationship, Harriet argued for compensation based on her partner Sara’s pension, which was valued at close to $250,000 for the period the couple was together. The judge ruled against her, finding that Sara had not agreed to share her pension if their relationship ended. Even when couples have agreements, a few states still adhere to the pre-Marvin rule and refuse to enforce them.

ALI Principles

The vast increase in the number of unmarried couples living together prompted the American Law Institute to include “domestic partners” in its Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution. If a cou ple meets the criteria for domestic partners, then the rules governing the financial consequences of their dissolution are the same as those applied to married couples, unless they make an agreement to the contrary. The authors, including law professor Grace Blumberg, base this doctrine on “the familiar principle that legal rights and obligations may arise from the conduct of the parties with respect to one another, even though they have created no formal document or agreement setting forth such an undertaking.”

The ALI principles define as domestic partners two individuals who are “not married to one another, who for a significant period of time share a primary residence and a life together as a couple.” They presume that a couple who lives together for three years meets this test. If they have a child, they meet it after two years.

The principles list thirteen factors relevant to determining whether two people “share a life together as a couple.” They include written and oral statements and promises made to one another about the relationship; statements to others and the couple’s reputation in the community as a couple; commingling of finances; economic interdependence, or dependence of one person on the other; assumption by the parties of specialized or collaborative roles; changes in the life of either or both as a result of the relationship; naming of each other as financial beneficiaries or in documents, such as wills; participation in a commitment ceremony or partnership registration; jointly raising a child; and the parties’ emotional or physical intimacy.

Marital and Separate Property

Utah like most states differentiate between “marital property” and “separate property.” Separate property is owned before marriage or acquired through gift or inheritance. When people divorce, most states divide only marital property. Some allow a judge to divide separate property to avoid an unfair result. Still others consider all property either party owns up for grabs.

Certainly a divorcing spouse with inherited wealth might be surprised to learn that his spouse could get a share of it, especially if his brother, who lives in a different state, was able to shield his inheritance during his divorce because it was separate property. He might say he never thought marriage would give his wife a claim on his inherited wealth. The wife might also have assumed she had no claim on those assets until she consulted a lawyer. The law is set to establish a norm for all regardless of what they think or intend.

Even marital property rules differ from state to state. Some statutes require a fifty-fifty division. Some presume a fifty-fifty division but let a judge rule otherwise. Some instruct a judge simply to do what is “just” or “fair” or “equitable.” Some states consider why the marriage ended; some think that’s irrelevant.

Spouses don’t know when they marry whether their sexual infidelity or other marital “fault” could have economic consequences when they divorce. They couldn’t. The law on that also differs from state to state. An unfaithful wife will be barred from alimony in North Carolina but not in New Jersey. An unfaithful husband may have to “pay” for his transgression in North Carolina but not in Delaware. In some states a divorced spouse cannot receive alimony unless he cannot support himself.

Alimony

Family law gives divorce courts three (and only three) financial tools: child support, property distribution, and alimony. While child support orders are commonly entered at the time of divorce, their focus is not the spouses’ responsibility to each other, but rather their responsibility to common children. The distribution of marital property is a more appropriate tool for imposing divorce consequences, but its usefulness is limited by the fact that while most divorcing couples have the ability to produce future income, they have few existing assets. Alimony is thus often the only available tool for addressing the financial consequences of a divorce. To be sure, alimony is not always a practical tool. When spouses have barely enough income to keep one of them out of poverty, an alimony award is useless. But in very many middle and upper-class marriages, alimony is an important tool for ensuring that the long-term costs of marital roles do not fall exclusively on family caregivers.

Alimony is complex—more complex than Alimony Nightmares or popular fiction can fully convey. Alimony is a mirror of American culture, a reflection of changing views of women, of marriage, and of personal commitment. Its history is a richly layered account of the tension between individual and collective responsibility for dependency, of aspirational reform surprised by the intractability of gender-driven roles and the cruel judgment of well-intentioned dreamers. Alimony is a tale of notoriety and hype, of risk and high stakes, of the danger of myth and the powerful symbolism of money. It is at once a grand narrative of the evolution of law, and a personal story of an intimate relationship—a story of betrayal, desperation, and bravado, of investment, regret, and freedom to start over, a story of self-sacrifice aging into lost opportunity and financial responsibility hardening into involuntary servitude. And it is a tale without a grand finale, a still evolving story of what is sometimes cast as the lone holdout in family law’s dramatic progression from coverture to partnership marriage.

Divorce and Pension

No-fault divorce rested on a “clean-break” principle that influenced alimony and property distribution. Divorcing spouses were supposed to get on with their lives, as best they could. Yet, even during a short marriage, one spouse sometimes greatly enhances his earning power, while the other drastically reduces hers by staying home with the children. Earning power is often the most valuable asset of the marriage. If so, then it is unfair to confine the distribution to traditional property, and without taking future earnings into account. Hence, modern divorce law has begun to focus on “new property”—things that can’t be touched or held, but nonetheless have economic value: pensions, business goodwill, professional licenses, and professional degrees. An experienced Riverton Utah family lawyer can advise you on how you can protect your earnings in case of a divorce.

Divorce Lawyers

Divorce lawyers vary in their understandings of professionalism in divorce practice. Some of these differences are shaped by the nature of their practices. Some derive from individual variations in character and values, while others are rooted in gender roles, age, and experience, and still others in the organization of their law firms. Specialists often understand their roles in divorce cases differently than do general practice lawyers. Unlike sole practitioners who do divorce work, lawyers employed by law firms face demands to be attentive to the interests of partners and to firm policies. Attorneys whose clients have few resources find themselves pressed to structure and limit their time in ways that lawyers with well-to-do clients do not.

Riverton Utah Divorce Lawyer Free Consultation

When you need legal help with a divorce in Riverton Utah, please call Ascent Law LLC (801) 676-5506 for your free consultation. We can help you with divorce, child custody, child support, alimony, prenups, postnups, annulments, adoptions, guardianships, conservatorships, and much more. We want to help you.

Ascent Law LLC 8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite C West Jordan, Utah 84088 United States Telephone: (801) 676-5506

Ascent Law LLC

4.9 stars – based on 67 reviews