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vizhi0nw · 3 years

Text

Ghost

Pairing: Kenny Ackerman/OC

Warnings: Violence, Language. This chapter in particular contains extremely graphic content - rape, as well as disturbing gore. There is consensual smut, as well.

Words: 5.5k

Summary: Kenny Ackerman had never met someone with a reputation just as bad as his own.

AO3

Part 1 Part 3 Part 4

Part 2 of 4

Citadel

Eight months passed before another stranger burst through the door to Leyla’s shop.

The bottle of booze she’d shared with Kenny still sat, half empty, on the shelf. She hadn’t touched it once - it remained stationary, a reminder of her meeting with Kenny that she still, eight months later, couldn’t get out of her head.

She couldn’t get him - that cocky smile emphasized by pearly white teeth, the smell of tobacco and sweat and blood, out of her head. Part of her had hoped he’d return, maybe offer to purchase something from the shop even though it wasn’t a shop anymore, it was just Leyla’s getaway.

When the strangers entered, Leyla looked up, eyebrows raised, as she expected to see him - but instead she saw an unfamiliar face. Two unfamiliar faces, rough looking men with somber demeanors. They weren’t MP’s - they would have worn their uniforms, all poised and professional. No, MP’s weren’t this quiet.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” Leyla finished wiping down the countertop, tossing the rag aside and bracing both arms on the slick-clean surface. “This isn’t a shop. I know it says it on the sign but...we’ve been closed for a while.”

The two men looked at each other, exchanging glances. Leyla pushed herself up, fingers creeping beneath the countertop where she’d tucked a gun away, right between two bottles of liquor. Her hand closed over the handle right as the two men moved.

Two bottles crashed to the floor as Leyla yanked her hand back, raising the gun and firing off a shot that caught the first man in the stomach. The impact of the buckshot knocked him back, and before Leyla could fire again, his companion had vaulted over the countertop. Ensuring that she had a firm grip on the weapon, she braced herself as she was slammed, hard, against the liquor shelf. More bottles toppled from their resting place, crashing against the floor. Wet, sticky wine cascaded down Leyla’s face, obscuring her vision, but her fingers managed to grasp the neck of a bottle.

She screamed and smashed the half-empty bottle of booze that she and Kenny had shared together against the side of her attackers face. He groaned and covered his eyes, face marred from glass - Leyla fired off another shot from her gun at random and felt something splatter against her skin.

Blood, not wine.

Furiously wiping her eyes, Leyla blinked. There was a body slumped in front of her. Her other assailant was approaching, knife in hand, seemingly oblivious to the hole Leyla had blasted through his gut. She barely had time to brace herself before she was caught and flung across the countertop, tumbling and landing on the other side, hard. She heard something crack, but wasn’t sure what it was - a wrist, perhaps?

Leyla’s gun was gone, missing. She lay, disoriented, on the ground.

“Stupid bitch,” the man spat, palm clutching his stomach to prevent his guts from leaking out all over Leyla’s nice, clean floor. He snarled and kicked her in the abdomen with a steel-toed boot. Leyla grunted, teeth clenching together. “Gonna...fucking kill you. Gotta kill you.”

“Like hell you are.”

Precision.

With what little strength she had, Leyla launched herself forward and caught him by the legs. He fell, arms flailing. Leyla immediately went for the wound, gushing blood - she slammed her fist over and over into the bloody pit until her hands were stained crimson. Then, she reached down and twisted. His guttural screams filled the shop, until they didn’t.

By the time she was done, he was dead, or very nearly dead. His fingers were twitching, eyes open but glossy.

“Fuck,” Leyla grasped the lapels of his coat. “Who the fuck are you?”

She received only a groan. She reared back and slapped him, hard, and she seemed to refocus.

“Answer me! You’re about to die anyway - tell me so I can fucking kill whoever sent you on this mission!”

“L-Lord Byren. He s-sent us.”

“Who the fuck is that?”

No response. There was no more life in his eyes.

Leyla released him and let his head fall unceremoniously against the wooden tiles.

The shop was silent, save for the drip, drip, drip of spilt wine and liquor. It was all over Leyla’s face, shirt, and arms. The red liquid mingled with the blood and she couldn’t tell which was which or how much of each there really was. It made her nauseous.

She slipped off the corpse, finally realizing just how badly she hurt. Her ribs ached, throbbed, and she assumed they were broken. She had a split lip and she could feel a bruise coming in on her cheek. Her left wrist was most definitely sprained.

Still, she lived.

______________

Kenny’s usual nightly walks through the alleyways of Mitras were normally the only time he truly had to be alone.

It reminded him of his “wild days,” as he’d fondly referred to it, sneaking around and slitting throats by order of the King. Now, he was the leader of his own squad, and while he relished in the fact that he got to leap into action-head on and wield guns instead of knives, part of him missed it. The solitude. The mystery. The patience it took to stalk his prey and move in for the kill. Each time he walked along the riverside, he was reminded of the many times he’d frequented the water to toss corpses. He’d lost count of how many MP’s he’d stripped and dumped. It had to be in the dozens - hundreds, maybe? That’s what the legends were saying.

Kenny never listened to the legends. He, for some wild reason, found strangers recounts of his “wild days” to be boring. It was much better to do, not hear.

The cigarette between his lips was starting to taste bitter. He discarded it, grinding it beneath his foot. When he looked up, he caught a flash of grey before he felt a surprisingly firm hand lay flat against his chest and back him against the alley wall.

His knife was in his hand before the figure could even speak.

“Don’t you fucking dare.”

Kenny paused. He was close, oh so close, to spilling the girls guts across the ground. He recognized her voice immediately, pausing only when she lifted her head to look him in the eye.

A bruise marred the deep brown skin of her cheek. Her eyes were bloodshot, as if she hadn’t been getting enough sleep. Her full lips were stretched into a line, nose crinkled as she glared daggers at Kenny.

“I need your help,” her voice was strained. “Kenny.”

He raised his eyebrows. She eased off him, stepping back a few feet. She wore an oversized jacket, hood flipped up over her head. She looked just as grimy and suspicious as Kenny did, and he almost laughed at the comedy of it all.

He’d tried to kill her eight months ago. Yet here she was, asking him for help.

“You know, I never caught your name before.”

“Leyla.”

“Leyla,” he tested the name on his lips. It was a pretty name for a pretty girl, he concluded. “What exactly do you need me for, Leyla?”

“I need information.”

“Information on what?”

Leyla glanced around. It was the dead of night, and Mitras seemed even deader. There were no MP’s slinking around at this time, nor were there any civilians out. This was Kenny’s hour, and nobody else’s.

Except for now.

“Two men attacked me yesterday. I managed to kill one and interrogate the other before he succumbed to his own wounds,” Leyla gestured to her bruised face with one jabbing finger. “Before he died...he said that a man named Lord Byren sent them. Does that name sound familiar to you?”

Lord Byren.

Kenny winced. He almost considered lying - he knew Lord Byren, of course. Or, he knew of him. The tales were far from delightful. The idea that he was going to potentially get involved with Leyla’s drama with Byren made him hesitate even telling her the information in the first place.

Part of him, however, couldn’t lie. The stories about Byren painted him as relentless. He’d send more men and Leyla would die.

Kenny coughed. He needed another smoke.

“I know of him. Evil bastard, he is. He ain’t someone you wanna mess with.”

“I never stole from his estate-”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kenny hummed, lighting another cigarette and letting it hang from his mouth. “I told you last time, the people up here talk about you. The phantom. He probably sent those men because he assumed you’d come for his shit next.”

“I don’t know how he found me.”

“I sure as fuck didn’t tell him. Byren isn’t someone who’s company I frequent,” Kenny waved a hand. “You’re shit out of luck. That’s all I can tell you.”

Leyla reached up and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She let out a deep sigh, eyes closing for a minute, before they opened, shining with renewed determination.

“I need you to take me to him.”

“Oh, for fucks sake, Leyla-”

“I have a plan and I need you for it. Please. You’re my way in,” Leyla gulped. “I need to get these people off my back before I can keep doing what I’m doing-”

“Have you considered that what you’re doing is stupid?” Kenny snapped. He tilted his head back and blew a long stream of smoke into the night sky. “I know you care about those people in the Underground, but take it from an old timer - they ain’t worth it.”

“Maybe to you.”

“You really wanna get yourself killed for those people?”

“Why the fuck not?”

Kenny stubbed his cigarette a little too hard against the alley wall, ashes and embers falling to the floor. She was a stubborn brat. A stubborn brat who needed to wake up and realize that she was going down a path that would eventually get her killed.

It had taken Kuchel’s death for him to finally, officially, shed the mantle of Kenny the Ripper and let his notoriety fade away. He knew that Leyla didn’t have the same luxury of family.

“You’d toss it all away. Your life,” Kenny murmured. “For a bunch of bottom-feeders. Fucking pathetic.”

“I want this asshole off my back and I want you to help. You can either pussy out now or I’ll do it myself-”

“You ain’t doing it yourself. I’ll help you,” Kenny pushed himself off the alley wall, glancing down at Leyla. “On the condition that, once you’re in, I be nowhere near the scene when all hell breaks loose.”

“Deal.”

____________

Kenny was staring.

Leyla had caught him, multiple times. He’d tear his eyes away and pretend to be fiddling with his anti-personnel gear, his guns and his hooks. Then, his eyes would wander. His gaze would float across the expanse of her thigh, up past the corset squeezing her waist, to the mounts of her breast, the curve of her neck. He’d lick his lips, and when Leyla would gesture, he’d sharply turn his head and pretend not to be looking.

Rinse, and then repeat.

Leyla hadn’t donned her work uniform in several years. She’d only worked at the brothel after her grandfather had died - he would have been ashamed to see her dressed like a harlot and taking cock for cash. She’d needed the money and had been desperate. She’d been lucky to have avoided the more...primal clientele, and when she’d left, she’d managed to save up a decent amount of cash to get by. It was then that she’d realized her true purpose.

She’d kept the outfit for sentimental reasons, having never thought that she’d be putting it on again. She was painting her face, now making sure her cheeks were flushed pink and her lips were a deep ruby red. She’d styled the coils atop her head into a neat bun, with Kenny having observed, mildly fascinated, for part of the time.

“Women and their hair,” he’d snorted and gone back to cleaning his gun.

“Men and their guns. Always so volatile.”

Kenny had ducked his head to hide his smile, then.

Now, they were ready, with Leyla having donned an overcoat to hide her outfit, while Kenny’s own coat was hiding the armory of anti-personnel gear he’d strapped to his body. Then, they linked arms and began walking towards Byren’s palace, with Kenny taking the lead.

The sun was beginning to sink beneath the horizon, and Mitras was winding down for the night. It was the first time Leyla had ever dared reveal her face to the above-ground public, though she knew she wouldn’t be recognized by any of the civilians, or even the MP’s.

She truly was a phantom.

“Keep your mouth shut and let me talk,” Kenny pinched her arm as they approached the Byren estate. It was a mansion, similar to that of other nobility, right near the east side, near the wall. The house was a beautiful, architectural wonder with an impressive courtyard and columns made of bright, white stone. The gates were tall and made of iron.

There were guards - two of them. When they saw who was approaching, they stepped forward.

“Kenny.”

Kenny tipped his hat. He slipped his arm from around Leyla’s and gripped her shoulder, hard. “I have a gift for Vibro. I heard he’s collecting whores.”

Leyla bit her lower lip. This part had been Kenny’s idea - he’d revealed to her that Byren had a particular taste for women who couldn’t fight back, something that disgusted Leyla to her very core.

“He is,” the guard said. He approached Leyla rather languidly, reaching out to unceremoniously grip her chin with one gloved hand. Resisting the screaming urge to bite his fingers, she allowed him to tilt her face upward, a thumb tapping her lips and indicating for her to open her mouth. “She has all her teeth. Good.”

“I thought he’d want them toothless. Less bitin’.”

“Will do.”

The guard shrugged. “He likes to take risks. She’s good - we’ll take her in.”

Kenny’s smile was wide and almost grotesque. “Tell him this is a ‘thank you’ for getting me out of a tight spot with the MP’s. I owe him.”

Kenny spun on his heels and walked away, not even bothering to shoot Leyla a final look. She could only watch him go for a moment, her heart pounding in her chest before the guard began dragging her past the gates and towards the house.

The courtyard and the columns were becoming less and less beautiful by the second. The architecture seemed demonic instead of angelic. She felt as if she were being dragged into hell.

_____________

Lord Vibro Byren was a disgusting creature. Middle aged, relatively solidly built. He had these blue eyes that seemed to swim with smug malice, and the shock of red hair atop his head was thin, but no less vibrant. He was the opposite of Kenny - dignified, polished, but Leyla knew it was all fake. It was all a ruse. There was a monster lurking beneath his nobility.

Unlike Kenny, he tried to hide it. Perhaps it was because he had an image to keep up.

The mansion's great room was open, with shockingly high ceilings and hanging chandeliers. The floorboards were a polished, deep brown wood and the walls were plastered with family portraits and painted landscapes. Leyla had been discarded before Byren, who was seated on a large, velvety couch. There was a woman splayed across his lap and a book in his hand, though he’d snapped it shut the minute Leyla had been tossed like a ragdoll into the room.

Now, he was staring, eyes narrowed to slits.

“She’s a gift, from Kenny,” the guard said. “This is his ‘thank you’ for what you did last month.”

Byren hummed. The woman laying across him lifted her head from his chest and looked at Leyla’s with big, glassy doe eyes. She seemed under the influence of some sort of narcotic - opium, most likely - though Leyla saw no pipe. She moved at Byren’s command, scrambling off towards the kitchen when he lightly tapped her on the shoulder.

Leyla could see a few other girls seated in the corner, huddled around. They were all dressed like her. Something about them seemed familiar, but Leyla didn’t have time to analyze their faces before Byren’s harsh voice snapped her back into reality.

“Leave.”

The guard nodded and disappeared through the double doors from which he’d come. Leyla was alone with the beast, sitting before him on her hands and knees.

He sat up fully, adjusting his crinkled dress shirt.

“Name?”

“Rose.”

“Hm,” Byren looked her up and down, his eyes, of course, lingering on her breasts. “You look decently fed. A bit too thin for my taste but...a whore is a whore. I’ll make use for you.”

“T-thank you.”

“Kenny brought you, huh?”

Leyla’s face felt hot. In a soft voice, she said, “yes.”

“Did he fuck you before he brought you here?”

Leyla shook her head. Byren seemed pleased, rubbing his hands together. He stood up, suddenly, and headed towards the kitchen. When he returned, he held a bottle of wine in his tight grip. Very slowly, be beckoned for Leyla to come closer. She obeyed, shuffling forward until she was standing in front of his seated form, the toe of her foot end-to-end with his own.

He brought the uncorked bottle of wine to his lips, taking a massive swig. Then, he offered the bottle to Leyla.

“Drink.”

“I...I’m not-”

“Drink.”

It wasn’t anything other than a direct order. Leyla’s snatched the bottle from his hand and down a massive gulp, gritting her teeth at the bitter taste. He took the bottle back and let it sit on the table by the arm of the couch. Leyla still stood, awkwardly fiddling with the hem of her skirt before she was yanked into Byron’s lap.

Big hands fondled her cheek. His lips were rough against Leyla’s own, and she had to kiss him back - she hated it. She hated how, for good measure, she shoved her tongue into his mouth and scraped her fingers across his scalp.

He needed to believe her. He needed to believe her for just a few more minutes.

There was a knife strapped to her upper thigh, and he had yet to find it.

Leyla placed suckling kisses against his lower lip, tugging at the skin with her teeth. His hands were planted firmly on her waist, keeping her in his lap. Leyla’s own hands were free, one creeping very slowly beneath his dress shirt to palm the firm muscles of his chest, the other slipping beneath her skirt to grab the -

He seized her wrist, suddenly.

No.

When Leyla ripped her lips from his own, he was smiling.

“I knew a Rose, back in the day. She looked surprisingly like you.”

Leyla was discarded from Byren’s lap and onto the floor. His cheeks were flushed red, the buttons of his dress shirt popped open to reveal a heaving, tan chest. Those sick blue eyes were wide, and as Leyla scrambled to unsheath the knife from her hip, she heard the click of a gun.

It was the doe-eyed woman. She held the weapon steady, though Leyla could see the faintest tremble in her hand.

“She had a knack for poking her nose where she shouldn’t,” Byren began buttoning his shirt. “As did her husband. They were smart as a whip, both of them.”

Leyla sat back on her haunches and watched as Byren stood, sauntering back into the kitchen and returning with a gun of his own. This one was older, with a wooden handle carved with what appeared to be the estate’s official insignia. He held it up, angling it so Leyla could get a full view of the weapon. “I shot them with this gun, right here in this very room.”

Leyla’s throat went dry. Her tongue felt huge in her mouth, and she could only glare at Byren as he continued to talk as casually as if he were addressing the weather. There was a ringing in her ear and Byren’s next words sounded muffled, as if she were hearing him through a tunnel.

“The woman choked on her own blood while her husband tried to save her. I shot him in the head. It was far quicker than what he deserved. I killed them both because they didn’t like what I was doing here. They didn’t like how I ran my estate and how I spent my own money. A shame, really. I considered them friends. They had a child, too. Cute little thing. Her name was Leyla, if I recall. I never forget a face, even if that face is all grown up.”

“You killed my parents.”

Byren tilted his chin upwards. He extended an empty hand and barked, “Marissa!”

The trio of girls huddled in the corner of the room all perked up. One of them - a plump girl with round cheeks and bright, blonde hair, walked over on shaky legs. All color was rapidly disappearing from her face as she came to stand beside Byren, shoulders bunched up, head ducked.

“They didn’t like what I did to my toys.”

Leyla gasped as Byren cracked Marissa in the back of the head with the butt of his gun. The girl collapsed, letting out a keening wail. The double doors to the great room burst open, and half a dozen guards rushed in, guns drawn.

Despair settled over Leyla like a raincloud. Byren was very slowly kneeling, having pulled his belt free from its loops. Marissa was lying on her back, trembling, as Byren very slowly peeled her skirt away from her legs. His fisted his cock and began to stroke, while the barrel of his gun prodded at the exposed lips of her cunt.

“They didn’t like what I did,” Byren seemed to be speaking to himself, now, furiously getting himself off, eyes glued to Marissa. “They didn’t...they didn’t think it was right.”

He slipped the barrel of his gun past her hole. Marissa gave a wail. Leyla’s nails were scraping against the floorboard, and she was going to move - she had to move, gun be damned. She could move fast enough only if she -

BOOM.

Blood splattered against Leyla’s cheek and she screamed.

She heard one of the guards stumble away and vomit.

Leyla turned her head away before she could fully take in the gore. She heard Byren grunt as his orgasm ripped through his body, and Leyla could only imagine him painting Marissa’s corpse with evidence of his release.

She was dry heaving, the panic truly setting in. She heard Byron zip up his pants, the floorboard creaking as he stood. When Leyla finally dared to look up at him, she saw that his once pristine, white shirt was doused in crimson, and his hand, along with his gun, was drenched.

“I’m going to keep you,” Byren said wearily. “I couldn’t keep your mother. But I can keep you-”

“Like hell you are!”

Byren’s hand, the hand that was clutching his gun, practically exploded in a mist of flesh and fingers. More loud pops rang out, and several of the guards dropped dead. Leyla caught a glimpse of a figure zooming above the rafters of the high ceiling and out of sight.

Leyla ran, fully expecting to feel a bullet pierce through her back. The guards were busy with Kenny, firing up at the ceiling, only to drop like insects when Kenny returned the favor.

She didn’t. When she looked back, the woman, the doe-eyed woman, was still standing still, gun trained on the spot where Leyla had been lying moments ago. Byren was curled up on the floor, clutching his ruined hand.

Leyla only had a moment to enjoy the fresh air of the outdoors before she was swept up by Kenny. She screamed and wrapped her arms around his neck, hearing him chuckle as he latched his hook onto a nearby building and soared over the gates of the Byren estate. Leyla kept her head buried into his shoulder, eyes squeezed shut as the wind tickled her bloodstained cheeks, tearing away her tears before they could fall.

Any other time, she mused, she might have enjoyed flying.

_____________

“You’re shaking, kid,” Kenny said softly. His own bottle of beer was half empty. Leyla hadn’t even touched hers.

The amount of rules Kenny had broken for this girl was astronomical. Internally, he was screaming at himself, cursing, for even getting involved to begin with. He’d intended to walk away when he’d dropped her off at the Byren estate. Walk away, maybe creep in for just a moment to see how it was going, and then leave and, hopefully, never speak to the girl again. He hadn’t wished ill will on her - he would have been quite content, had she been able to kill Byren like she’d planned. But he hadn’t wanted to reveal himself like that, though he was unsure as to whether or not Byren, or the guards, had even seen him or really heard him to begin with.

Still, it had been stupid. He’d come back, and for what? Some girl? Some girl he’d been tasked to kill a year ago? Now, she was here, sitting at his kitchen table, wearing one of his shirts and a pair of pants that, back in the day, had belonged to Levi.

“He killed my parents,” Leyla said, her words barely audible. “I met him. I...I knew him. It was him. It was fucking him-”

“You still don’t know why he sent those men after you?”

Leyla shook her head. “I don’t know why. He’s sick, Kenny. He’s sick in the head.”

Her fingers were shaking so hard that her nails were clicking against the table. Kenny reached out and placed his hand over her own, stopping them. They sat like that for a moment, until eventually, Leyla seemed to come back into herself. She reached out and finally down some of her beer.

“I’m going to kill him.”

“Fuck, Leyla-”

“I won’t be able to do my job properly until he’s dead,” Leyla replied. “He knows who I am, now. He knows that I’m alive. He’ll keep sending people after me.”

“Not unless you leave. Get the hell outta’ the Underground. Go to Trost, or hell Shiganshina,” Kenny urged. He knew it was useless. She was a stubborn bitch. “This ain’t worth it, I swear.”

“I don’t fucking know anything else, Kenny!” Leyla erupted, her voice rising to a shrill cry. “I sneak and steal. Sometimes, I kill people. That’s all I fucking know how to do!”

“You can learn.”

“I can learn when he’s dead.”

“This ain’t even about those people anymore. It’s about your parents. You’re on a goddamn revenge trip.”

Leyla’s slap stung. Kenny was anticipating it, but he’d forgotten that the girl could put some power behind her hits. When he turned back to look at her, there were tears in her eyes and her hands were trembling yet again.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“See, that’s when I know you’re stuck. Ain’t nothing better you have to say,” Kenny ran a hand down his face. “Start livin’ in the real world, kid. There’s only one way this shit ends, and it’s with you six feet under.”

“I’m killing him. You can’t convince me otherwise. I’ll do it alone, too. You don’t have to get involved.”

“Good, cus’ I ain’t,” Kenny chuckled. “This one is on you.”

“That’s fine,” Leyla levelled a steely eyed gaze at Kenny, sinking back into her chair. She crossed her arms and stared at her bottle of alcohol. Letting out a tch noise, she pushed it across the table. “Finish this for me.”

“Can’t. I’m done for the night,” Kenny’s eyes flickered to the window. It was dark out. “You headin’ back home?”

Leyla followed his gaze to the night sky. She seemed to ponder over something for a moment, tongue flicking out to wet her lips. After a while, she made a low humming noise and said, “I feel like...I feel like I should do something thank you. I want to do something to thank you.”

“You can thank me by not going on a suicide mission,” Leyla shot him a sharp look, and Kenny raised his hands in a placating gesture. “Fine, fine. I’ll drop the damn topic.”

“I saw you staring at me, when I was getting ready.”

“I didn’t know you used to be a whore.”

“Only for a little bit, after my grandfather died.”

“The profession doesn’t suit you,” Kenny mused. Part of him wished he’d been more direct with his staring. Leyla was attractive. She was half his age, probably, but she still filled out a corset rather well, and her tits were nice. “You don’t take too kindly to men telling you what to do, it seems.”

“Who says they were the ones telling me what to do?”

“When I fuck a whore, I like her to be responsive. When I tell her to cum, she cums. When I tell her to suck me off, she sucks me off,” Kenny sneered. “I like being in charge.”

“So do I.”

“Then thank me this way,” Kenny murmured. “Let me take the lead.”

The noise Leyla made was intoxicating. Kenny’s dick twitched in his pants as Leyla languidly tiptoed over to him, her soft palm cradling his face. Then, she casually slipped her shirt over her head. Next, her pants, and then, her undergarments. She stood naked as the day she was born before him, shameless.

She jerked her head towards Kenny’s dingy little bedroom, and he’d never stood so fast in his life. All thought flew from his mind and the only thing he could focus on was Leyla’s cute, round ass, her perky tits, the smooth plane of her stomach and the sparse, dark curls between her thighs.

When her lips met his, he was in heaven. Or something close to it.

“Kenny,” his name rolled off her lips like sweet, sweet honey. His clothes were everywhere, on the floor, across his headboard - he didn’t care. He was tossing everything off as quickly as he could, craving raw, skin-on-skin contact with the woman currently lying beneath him. How long had it been since he’d taken someone? Years, possibly. Most definitely since before Uri’s death.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Kenny pressed his forehead against Leyla’s shoulder. She’d taken his long cock in her small, yet rough hands and was stroking fervently. He turned his head and caught her in a quick kiss. “Gonna make me bust - let me in.”

Leyla kissed him again, chuckling against his mouth. He’d prepared her well with a few pumps of his finger into her tight cunt, and now, she was ready for him - all tight and wet and hot, just like he’d remembered. No, better than he’d remembered. Leyla wasn’t like the others he’d had before. She was different.

He couldn’t put a finger on why, she just...was. Perhaps it was the familiarity.

“So good. So fucking good,” Kenny gasped. He curled over her, pounding her into the mattress, one hand reaching up to grab the headboard. Her legs curled around his hips and her mouth was open, her moans punctuating the wet smack of skin against skin. There was fire twisting within Kenny’s gut, a raging inferno that made him feel as if it could burn an entire forest, an entire town, to the ground. It was all rage, all pent up energy - he needed it out. He needed it inside of her, nowhere else.

“K-Kenny,” Leyla gave a strangled gasp, reaching up to drag her nails down his back as she came up. Kenny yanked himself out and painted her thighs with his release, reaching down to squeeze the last few drops against her skin, for good measure. He collapsed by her side, and Leyla leaned over to press a kiss against his shoulder.

“Just stay the night,” he breathed. “I’m not going to be able to walk you home after that shit.”

“Didn’t know you’d offered.”

“I’m a...goddamn gentleman. And an old man, at that,” Kenny’s eyes fluttered shut, and he heard Leyla chuckle. “Don’t start takin’ advantage of my generosity, though.”

“I won’t,” Leyla’s lips found his forehead. “I...thank you. For everything you did today.”

Kenny was already asleep. He dreamed of Kuchel, that night, like he always did. Her corpse, cold and hollow, lying in the bed. He dreamed of Uri as well, though he hadn’t gotten to witness his friends death, and he was glad for it. The dreams never got any more pleasant, any happier. Shorter, maybe, but never better.

He wondered what Leyla dreamed about. He would have asked her the next morning, but when he awoke, she was gone.

#kenny ackerman x reader #attack on titan #snk #shingeki no kyoujin #attack on titan fanfiction #kenny ackerman #kenny ackerman/reader #my writing

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aestheticsfandomsandmore · 4 years

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IN DEFENSE OF THE ORANGE ISLANDS (PT. 3)

If you want to read part 1 and/or part 2, here they are.

The Orange League’s Gym Leaders were different from normal Gym Leaders: they put some very unique fights on, two out of four even without an actual battle. These trials were meant to make the trainers work with their Pokémon, to sharpen their minds, to make them experience new things (the last badge, for example, was the first tag battle we ever saw in the Pokémon anime).

Satoshi (Ash) did all of that.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that he became this great strategist all at once, or that every gym battle made him change his way of battling: he adapted his attitude and style to the task that was demanded. Sometimes he won in very funny ways, sometimes he was helped, either way he put all of himself into the fights and managed to get through them. I really cannot say that he didn’t deserve any of the badges he got. He worked hard and the results were shown (and none of the badges was for fucking free, as some of the Indigo League).

I particularly enjoyed his last battle, because it demonstrated that not only Satoshi was going through a growth-process, but so were his Pokémon: seeing Pikachu and Lizardon (Charizard) get along with each other and trusting each other in the middle of a fight was amazing; one being the mainly partner of his trainer, always off to defend and protect him, and the other being the prodigal son of the squad, it was nice to see some good teamworking between them. It was also the first official battle in which Lizardon actually listened to Satoshi (excluding the battle against Katsura (Blaine), but it listened to Satoshi back then only because he wanted to fight Boober (Magmar) and continued to ignore him after it won), so that’s pretty satysfing to see as well.

But something else was necessary to prove Satoshi that he actually learned a great deal through the islands he visited. And what’s a better proof than a god damn league victory? Now, I know that the battle against Yuuji (Drake) wasn’t this great, but the anime had still a lot of work to do in this matter. At the very least, it showed us the first six vs six Pokémon battle in the entire Pokémon anime! And damn, it was captivating! Satoshi even used his Kentauros (Tauros) since his Kabigon (Snorlax) was asleep — lmao. He was helped by his friends way less than he had been in the Indigo League, he really showed us his worth defeating a strong opponent.

I feel like Satoshi needed this experience after the Indigo League: knowing to be able to win, knowing to be capable of standing out and put on some amazing battles, knowing to be worth of being called a trainer and being respected by his Pokémon (he still has a lot of work to do with Kabigon though lol); all of this was necessary and so welcomed I almost cried to see him that happy for his victory.

Something else I absolutely adored about this season is the fact that, yeah, Satoshi wins and everything, but he also understands the it isn’t enough. It’s good, sure, but he can, he must do more and do better.

And who makes him realize that? Who could possibly make him realize that, other then the greatest asshole rival before Shinji (Paul) was yet to arrive? Yes, of course: Shigeru (Gary).

Now, I have mixed feelings about Shigeru. Do I like him? Not sure. Do I see his worth as a character and as a trainer? Sure. Do I have a crush on him? Absolutely fucking sure, since I was 10 years old — but that’s a story for another time.

What I really don’t like about him is how he makes Satoshi feel. As I previously stated, I love Satoshi, despite everything. I get so damn mad when someone puts him down with no reason and Shigeru mocked him from the first fucking second, while Satoshi only wanted to make friends with him. From that moment on, he never once has been kind toward him, even though there were a couple of situations in which Satoshi proved him his worth.

I thought that Episode 63 (トキワジム! さいごのバッジ! Tokiwa Gym! The Last Badge!) was going to be a fresh start for the two of them, since what happened at the end, but clearly I was mistaken, since he continued to be a jerk all along, Indigo League included.

I cannot avoid looking at him differently though, since that episode, because it’s clear that he can brag all he wants about being so much better than Satoshi, but in the end he actually admires him.

But the turning point for their relationships and his character comes in Episode 117 and Episode 118 (かえってきたマサラタウン! Return to Masara Town! / ライバルたいけつ! サトシVSシゲル!! Rival Showdown! Satoshi vs. Shigeru!!). In the first episode, here comes Shigeru to save the day after Satoshi and co have been trapped by Rocket-dan (Team Rocket); after that, Okido (Oak), Kasumi (Misty) and Takeshi (Brock) start talking about how amazing Shigeru is and has become and Satoshi, as always, gets jelaous and needy for attention, so he tells Shigeru that he has won the Orange League and starts bragging. Shigeru then congratulates but also tells him something like, Yeah, great, but apparently this win wasn’t enough against Rocket-dan, was it?. Therefore Satoshi complains that he did better in the Indigo League than Shigeru did and Shigeru replies that now he’s a completely different person from back then. So Satoshi challenges him to a battle and he accepts.

Besides, something else I noticed is how, since he lost the League, he became more and more aware of his limits and his weeknesses as a trainer. When his grandfather greets him and thanks him for saving them, he replies that it’s all Nidoqueen’s credit and that he still has a lot of work to do. That’s, like, the most humble thing he’s ever said since Episode 1. And it’s refreshing, because he would have never said anything like that at the start of his journey. He grew up.

So, I guess that’s what he wants Satoshi to understand as well: stop being such a child and thinking that winning once is enough for you to be a great trainer: it isn’t. Which he proves by defeating him in Episode 118.

That’s why when Satoshi hears that Shigeru decided to go to Johto, he wants to do the same. Despite being an hell of a jerk, Shigeru really is capable of inspiring Satoshi and pushing him forward.

That’s pretty much it for part three. There are going to be, at the very least, other two parts.

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redhoodedwolf · 4 years

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hey so maybe someday I’ll stop bring up dcoms but has anyone done a sterek Z.O.M.B.I.E.S. au yet??? like ignoring the whole second movie of course

W.E.R.E.W.O.L.V.E.S.

Beacon Hills was a normal town, with normal people, and everyone got along.

And then, werewolves.

Now, Beacon Hills is divided with Wolvenland. But times are changing, and werewolves are finally allowed to join back into society, but very very slowly. First, high school.

But relegated to the basement, completely separated from humans, with the only teacher being the janitor is not how Derek thought the year would start, alongside his best friends Erica and Boyd.

Stiles Stilinski, on the other hand, is the samest person as everyone else. Well, except for his moles that kind of, like, glow? For no reason? But he just cakes foundation on his face and it covers it all up, and that’s the way he has done it since he was a baby. No one has ever thought anything weird of him and he wants to keep it that way. Especially since it’s junior year and he’s finally old enough to be a junior member of the protection squad: the group that, when a part of, makes you a shoe-in for any security job he could ever want after graduation. Which as always been his goal; to follow in his fathers footsteps.

On the first day, Stiles meets Isaac, a timid kid who brightens only when talking about the protection squad. He gets it out of the tall teen that he used to be abused and wants to do what he can to stop that for anyone else. They quickly become friends, and Stiles introduces him to Scott, his step-brother, a senior, and the captain of the junior protection squad.

Scott is really against the integration of werewolves, secretly terrified of the power they have but refuses to show his fear and hides it behind a wall of hatred. See, werewolves used to be all feral and destroyed a third of the town before the government stepped in and solved the problem with W-Bands. Every werewolf wears one, and it emits electronic pulses that “contain” the wolf and calm them, supposedly. Though they still retain the fang and glowing eyes look most days. And Scott is very vocal about his dislike, but Stiles isn’t so sure.

He’d seen, that first day the way the senior protection squad had members posted up at the werewolf entrance and sneered at them, trying to antagonize them into lashing out. He watched as the one with glowing blue eyes held back the buff wolf next to the frizzy-haired blonde wolf when something had been said about her appearance. Blue Eyes had deescalated the situation quickly and ushered them into the building, but not before their eyes caught each other. Stiles had felt a shiver course up and down his spine, and it wasn’t out of fear. He was intrigued.

He became even further intrigued when Derek tried to show up for the first meeting of the junior protection squad, wanting to sign up. Derek knew that keeping the last of his family safe was the most important thing possible, and, joining the protection squad would make that possible. He would do whatever he could to stop hunters form coming after them again.

Tried is the opprative word, though, because the school principal expressly forbid werewolves from joining school clubs. Scott stood by, arms crossed and head shaking back and forth as Derek backed out of the gym, feeling dejected.

Stiles didn’t see him again until that evening, during their unofficial junior protection squad initiation which, unknowingly to Stiles and Isaac, took place in the middle of Wolvenland.

Scott hands them a jar of some ash and jerks his head towards the run-down homes on the block. “Line the front doors with this mountain ash and you’re in. It’ll keep them locked in their houses, which is the best way to keep humans safe. That’s your first task.”

Stiles and Isaac are left alone with this jar, staring at the house in front of them, both unsure if this was the right move. A door bangs and lights blink on, and they both duck out of view, just in case.

They hear footsteps, and Stiles glances up from the ground to see Blue Eyes stumbling down the front steps they were hiding against, head swinging side to side.

The wolf spots the two of them, and Stiles clenches his fingers around the jar. The werewolf glances down at it, eyes widening, and then—

“Derek!” A woman’s voice shouts form inside of the house. “Anyone there?”

Derek, apparently, what a normal name, takes a deep breath. Stiles winces, waiting for the retribution. Isaac is next to him, shaking.

“Nothing Laura.”

Stiles’ head shoots up at that, staring in shock at Derek as he stares back, frowning slightly.

“All clear,” Derek adds, for good measure, and then leaves, back into the house

Stiles and Isaac duck back to Beacon Hills as quickly as possible, the jar of mountain ash tossed into a trash bin. When Stiles got home, he just gave Scott a nod, letting him think what he wanted, and went to bed.

The next day, Stiles snuck down to the basement to apologize or maybe thank Derek for not ratting them out. They find a minute to sneak away, and after Stiles apologizes, he admits he doesn’t know a lot about werewolves but he doesn’t see the big deal. Derek, afraid to trust a human, as doing so has never been historically helpful for a ‘wolf Hale, tentatively accepts Stiles’ friendship and can admit to himself he may have a bit of a crush. Stiles is cute, okay? He has golden eyes that almost seem to glow like a werewolf’s, and he smells soft. Just, soft.

Stiles was trying to figure out how he could sneak around and spend time with Derek, maybe get Isaac involved if he be willing (he seemed sympathetic to the werewolves and supported Stiles’ confused rambling as to why they couldn’t join clubs), when a minor disaster struck.

It was the first official mission of the year for the squad and Stiles was excited to show his skills. It was just a routine patrol, something Scott told them would happen usually once a month. They were patrolling the school campus during the evening lacrosse game, Stiles leading his group, Isaac at his back, around the locker room entrance.

Sudden screams came from the field, and because Stiles’ team was they closest, they were told to investigate.

The field was chaos, the game abandoned as a crowd of hooded figures with guns and crossbows pointed their weapons at the scattering crowd. Hunters, Stiles realizes, and then his second thought is that there must have been werewolves in the stands, to encourage the illegal “vigilante” group out of hiding.

Stiles’ dad had dealt with them a few times he knew, but he never thought he’d have to on his first mission.

He’s prepared, though, but no one can prepare for trigger-happy hunters who, at the first sign of movement of Stiles’ team, aimed a crossbow at them and shot. Well, not them. At Stiles.

Stiles hears his name shouted and suddenly he is on his back and someone is flattening him into the ground and breathing heavily.

“Derek?” Stiles chokes when he recognizes the figure. “What..?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Are you?”

Stiles looks over Derek’s shoulder and sees an arrow sticking out of his arm. He screams.

“I’m fine,” Derek assured him. “No wolfsbane.”

Stiles doesn’t really understand wolfsbane, but he knows that means Derek won’t die from the wound.

Once Stiles was on his feet, he saw the hunters had vanished, naturally.

Stiles watches Derek heal right in front of his eyes and stares at him in awe.

The very next day, due to Derek’s rescue in front of many witnesses, he is probationarilly allowed to join the squad.

“You do good on these missions, protect the humans, and maybe we’ll think about letting the werewolves participate more.” This was the principal’s stance.

Suddenly, Derek was the poster boy for werewolves, which he never wanted but knew he now had to keep up, in order to maintain a friendship with Stiles.

Meanwhile Stiles was feeling a lot of pressure from Scott at school and at home for his obvious connection to werewolves. Scott warns him not to trust easily. You never know who could out you as a freak.

Stiles coats his makeup extra heavily for days afterwards, which is how Derek notices his excess palor. Stiles finds himself spilling his whole story, how he was born with these illumiscent markings on his face and he and his parents never knew why, though he suspects it has something to do with the werewolf attack his grandfather Stilinski barely survived right before meeting his grandmother. Residual magic is his best guess.

Stiles doesn’t let Derek see it, but Derek tells him he shouldn’t be ashamed of the things that make him different.

As each mission Derek is sent on with a wary and uncooperative team comes back successful, the students and the school begin to relax. Soon, werewolves have lockers in the same hallway as humans and are sharing classes and the cafeteria. Derek gets pats on the back from strangers in the halls.

But no matter the betterment of the reputation of werewolves, Scott is still scared and wary of being usurped from his position by a “monster”. So he keeps Stiles away as often as he can and never lets them go on missions together.

So Derek gets sneaky, using Erica and Boyd to pass messages to Stiles for him. Erica is against it, having been burned many times in her life for being a werewolf as well as an epileptic who never gets proper treatment for her condition. Boyd doesn’t care through, silent and stoic, and passes notes surreptitiously.

Derek’s most recent note had them meeting at the gate into Wolvenland, and Stiles tried to shake off his nerves because he quickly realized it was a full moon night. But Derek reassured him he wasn’t about to be eaten, he just wanted to invite him to their monthly festivities where everyone in the community gathered to be together, though it had originally started as a necessary meeting to protect the young from vigilante hunters who wanted to eradicate werewolves from Beacon Hills for good.

Stiles was having a blast, getting along with Erica for the first time, meeting Laura and Cora and them not clawing his intestines out for kindasorta dating their brother, and he was this close to finally kissing Derek when— BAM. The senior protection squad arrived, as apparently they did every time, to chase everyone back into their homes. Which means Stiles causes a diversion so that Derek can get away and not be spotted with him by Stiles’ father.

Back home after being thoroughly chastised by not only his dad but also Melissa and a silent glaring Scott, Stiles thinks about everything and realizes how deeply screwed he is and that he’s be willing to give it all up for Derek, which, that is what’s scary, not werewolves.

Derek stops Stiles in the stairwell the next day to apologize for leaving him alone, but Stiles waves it off, a determined glint to his eyes. If Derek looks close, he can see a faint glow under the power on his cheeks.

“If my family can’t accept werewolves, maybe I don’t want to be on the protection squad anymore.”

“But that’s all you’ve ever wanted to do. That ambition is what makes you you. It’s what I like about you.”

Stiles scoffs, a tad bit wetly. “I just wish I could flip a switch and solve everything.”

Derek stares down at the W-Band, which Erica had tampered with to alleviate the pain that came with it (hoping that by changing the level of the pulses, she could up her wolf powers and heal herself of her illness) and thinks, huh.

Maybe if the band made him less wolf, it could make him more human. If he could be human, they wouldn’t have these problems. He and Stiles might...

But it all goes wrong, because the hunters knew about the W-bands and their lax security and were just waiting for the right moment to strike. And Derek was the perfect folly.

The hunters set up a trap, calling an emergency meeting of the squad, junior and senior, to go after a false alarm. Stiles sneaks his way into Derek’s group, finally, but their joy doesn’t last for long.

Derek glances down at his wrist, sees the screen flash a bright purple, and then feels a sharp pain lace up his arm from his wrist, through his shoulder, across his back, and down his spine.

Stiles shouted for him when he saw something was wrong and watched as the band was disconnected, and Derek went full feral wolf. A slave to his basest instincts, Derek set off a howl that shook the ground and set blazing blue eyes on the squad, claws out, readying to attack.

“Derek, stop! This isn’t you!” Stiles screams.

Scott stumbles back, fear overcoming anything else in his body at the sight of the feral werewolf who has apparently set his sights straight on him.

But Derek stumbles as he approaches, and Scott watches in amazement as he reaches out towards him with one clawed hand, the other wrapped around the extended forearm, trying to...pull it back?

A flash bang went off, Derek screamed, and the next anyone could see, Derek was tackled to the pavement, shackles around his wrists, and features back to nearly human.

Scott, still baffled by the internal battle of Derek that he’d just seen, stood as the rest of the squad started yelling, shouting curses at Derek, damming werewolves, declaring they knew it was a bad idea all along it was only a matter of time before the monsters turned on them.

And Stiles snaps.

“He was your monster!” Stiles shouts as Derek, looking utterly defeated, is dragged away. “You did this to him! You made him into a weapon— no, a shield.”

“They’re freaks!”

Stiles wipes an arm across his face, revealing his glowing moles, striking the crowd silent. He did not meet his father’s eyes.

“If he’s a freak, than so am I.”

Stiles ran after Derek, spewing apologies, promising that he’d get him out, he would, don’t worry.”

When Stiles, having run the whole way to Wolvenland, panted out to a stunned Erica and Boyd what happened, he accepted the slap across the face.

“This is why we don’t trust humans. We can’t have human friends. They only betray us.”

School is scarily the same the next day, except for the gaping hole the lack of werewolves left behind. The tale of the previous evening had spread, and werewolves were back to being ostracized in the basement.

Stiles quit the squad. He hadn’t even gone home, spending the night at Isaac’s apartment where he lived with his older brother when he wasn’t stationed overseas in the army. He didn’t want to see his dad or Melissa. He really don’t want to see Scott.

The hunters got what they wanted, the town was back to distrust. It was time to finish this once and for all.

Words were whispered in the ears of important people, people of power, words like “stop them now, eradicate them, and erase them”

These words were whispered to Scott by a leggy blonde who wore the biggest smirk on her face that he felt like prey. But the words didn’t resonate with Scott.

Because Scott had spent the night awake replaying the event over and over in his head. Derek had tried to stop himself. He hadn’t wanted to attack. He was conscious enough to try and stop himself. Derek was human inside, he just had a bit extra. He wasn’t a monster unless they made him that way.

And he quickly formed a plan with his step dad, knowing some of the squad would not be on board so they had to keep it in a small group. He was approached that evening differently than earlier with the hunter, by a skittish girl who looked sort of familiar, maybe one with an itchy trigger finger, who admitted her family was involved with the hunters but she didn’t want to be part of it anymore and she wanted to convince Scott to help her stop them.

The three of them cornered Stiles, and once Scott apologized, his dad praised him for being brave, and Allison admitted to almost shooting him, Stiles joined in on their plan.

He promised to get Derek out and save him and he would fulfil that promise.

So there’s a big fight in here now where there’s another emotional speech, hunters disband or did, and then Derek is released. But I’m too tired at this point to write all that angst out.

Finally, Derek is back next to Stiles, and they smile at each other. Derek reaches up and stroked his thumb over Stiles’ cheek, over the glowing, and Stiles is less chicken and leaned into the touch and kisses Derek.

Happy ending, collective dance sequence, reprise of the opening song, beautiful moments, and happy wolves.

So, anyone write that yet?

#sterek #fanfiction #guess I ended up writing it sorta??#sterek fanfiction #this became nearly 3k oops #eternalsterek #sorry for any typos

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jq37 · 4 years

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The Report Card – Fantasy High Sophomore Year Ep 15

Love Wins!

Welcome to an insanely chaotic episode of Fantasy High--even by the very high standards of this show. How chaotic you may ask? Well, the first thing that happens is that Bill Seacaster point blank shoots Gilear to death for being in a relationship with Hilariel. Full dead. He is full dead. Strangely, his plan to bring him back as a janky devil does not do much to comfort Fig. Imagine that.

Bill’s pirates are looting the Bottomless Pit (Gorthalax’s domain in Hell) and Vraz orders Fig to make them stop. When she instead orders Vraz to eat her ass, Vraz nullifies all warlock deals Gorthalax made and brings none other than Johnny Spells (and his greaser pals) to join the fight!

Really, this fight is insane and it’s better served by a highlight real than a play by play so I’m just gonna give you some bullets:

All the PCs rolled super low initiative this fight which really kinda screwed them. Like Fabian was down to 16 HP one point and it was like, “Lol, this is the end of round 1.” YIKES.

A big part of this fight was just surviving long enough to get to the second level of hell and rescue Riz’s dad which I think was probably good for morale because the thought of this fight dragging on for more than a couple of rounds exhausts me.

Fabian rolls off against Johnny right off the bat for the Hangman’s loyalty and Fabian wins with a 25 (and by coming out the gate with the word ENSLAVED which isn’t the word *I* would have used but a 25 is a 25 I guess).

He also has to contend with fighting Allistair who has a massive hole in his head filled with fire from Wicklaw eating his brain. It seems like Chungledown Bim is in hell too based on how Allistair keeps saying he’s gonna get him so he can shit in Fabian’s mouth. Of course, Fabian gets the better of him, but not before he deals out a fair bit of damage.

Adaine uses an Arcane Hand plus her portent roll to just whole-ass throw Johnny off the ship. Like, he gets back up but it’s so funny to instead of fighting an enemy to just throw him off a set piece (see eg: Bloodkeep ep2).

Kristen Revivifies Gilear and Bill, the mercurial sunuvabitch is like, “We love the same woman! I just want her happy!” and gives him a gun. Kristen immediately is like, “Bro, you need to hide,” and Gorgug protects him while he does so (in a sarcophagus that has a 50/50 shot of being launched as ammo).

Penelope shows up to the fight, eyes all black, wearing a shredded prom dress, and with shards of silver embedded in her forehead like a crown. Dayne and Daybreak also join the fight as messed up Harvestmen! It’s a veritable Smash Bros lineup of people the Bad Kids have killed!

Adaine and Fabian are christened the “Posh Squad” which is important to me, not to the fight.

Adaine gets to counterspell a counterspell from Penelope, one of the sexiest things you can do in D&D.

Fabian declares toxic masculinity dead. Shortly afterward, he makes Brennan eat a die when Daybreak tries to Frighten Fabian, a condition he is immune to due to his eyepatch I gather based on the table reaction.

Daybreak’s punishment in hell is a complete lack of self-awareness of why he’s there. He still thinks he should be sipping Mai-Tai’s in corn heaven with Helio while Kristen and Ragh are attacking him with gay spit (their words, not mine). Gay spit and, also, a ton of radiant and thunder damage.

Ragh gets some emotional catharsis by getting to body Dayne before Gorgug decapitates him. Very important step in the stages of grief. Decapitating the source of said grief.

Penelope gets Sparta-kicked off the edge of the boat by Fabian after Ayda dispels her protective globe and Riz shoots Daybreak again for old times sake. Unfortunately, Penelope Misty Steps back up and Daybreak is hurt but not killed. Ayda does a cool Dr. Strange teleportation thing and does a bunch of damage to both of them. Fabian finishes off Penelope with a sheet/sword combo and between Booming Blade and a Psionic Blast (does she have this ability as a Bard or as a Warlock? Relatedly, when she felt something leave her was that her Warlock deal being nullified or was she feeling the deals leave her since she is sort of the temporary Gorthalax?) Fig destroys Daybreak. Johnny just falls off the ship with no PC intervention because he sucks.

Bill also falls off the ship but Fig (with an assist from Gorgug) saves him and steals a scroll from Vraz on the way back up. By the by, earlier in the fight, she also had Baby Invisbly steal a random item from her.

Anyway, as they reach the end of the end of the fight, Bill loads Riz into a canon (!) and shoots him into the city, hopefully towards his dad (to the distress of his party). He crashes through the window in a familiar looking building and, when he finds a hallway that he’s pretty sure leads to his dad, he goes towards it.

He sees a familiar light coming out of a doorway (the interrogation room light) and a doorway next to it that is slightly open with steel thrones in it. There’s a two-way mirror between the two rooms and if he goes into the open one, he can see who is in with his dad. After checking for illusions and finding none, he stealthily walks in and sees, in the other room, his dad with a hulking pit fiend (30 ft tall, winged, almost dragon-y devil).

The pit fiend is questioning Pok about any regrets he had in life and Pok answers very uncharacteristically from the man we saw in the video saying he had nothing but high hopes for baby Riz. He says he had no regrets, his job was just a job, and that he only had a kid because Sklonda wanted one before going into a snarling goblin rage. The pit fiend smiles at that and says that Pok has promise so they won’t create a lemure out of him (a lemure is a weak, blobby devil). Two devils in the room with them whip him unconscious and then leave the room to go send more people to deal with Bill.

Riz Misty Steps into the room and does a self-imposed Wisdom check to steady himself after what he just heard--Nat 20 baby. Then, he opens his Briefcase of Holding, ready to scoop his dad into it when, the two lesser devils open the door and catch him in the act. But Riz persists in the scooping. They try to grapple him and he rolls a Nat 1 to avoid it. He *still* tries to get him dad. But then he notices, his gun is missing.

BLAM. The devils heads are blown clean off. He turns and he sees his dad has taken the gun--his gun originally--and shot the devils. Pok, who is amazed that Riz is there and no longer feigning apathy for the situation asks for an extraction into an earpiece, causing a halo to appear over his head and a beam of holy light to come down like a tractor beam.

“Wait,” says Riz. “You’re an undercover angel?”

“You got it, kid.”

Murph goes feral. The table goes feral. I go feral. What a way to end an episode!

And now for an all-Dad round of superlatives:

Detention

Bill Seacaster for KILLING GILEAR

I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain myself here.

Honor Roll

Pok Gukgak for Officially Joining the Fantasy Fathers of the Year Club

Here either.

I will, however, add a Hell Yeah!

Random Thoughts

If you haven’t seen it yet, the trailer for S5 of Dimension 20 just dropped and I won’t spoil it but, from the looks of it, it is gonna be a doozy.

“Do not metagame with my freaking Dad!” Oh to have the support of an NPC Emily Axford has decided to imprint upon.

Gorgug: It’s been one year. We’re sophomores.

“We support you as a DM and as your friend but also you’re our enemy.”

I think it’s very interesting that with just a little space and time from his dad, Fabian is finally having the proper reactions to his dad doing what I will charitably call shenanigans.

The level of distress and outrage from Emily when Gilear got shot was just *chef’s kiss*. I aspire to create an NPC that provokes that level of reaction from one of my players. Similar energy in a different direction from Ally when Daybreak attacked Tracker.

“Adaine, the jocks are being feisty! Get out of there!”

Vraz calls Fig “the Faithless” as her devil title and she insists on instead being called, “the InFaethable”. I wanna know how long Emily’s been sitting on that one or whether she came up with it on the spot.

Fabian upon seeing Johnny: Fuck off dude. I have too much going on right now.

Brennan being the eternal DM mood: How do I get out of this?

Very wild how little time has passed since Leviathan. Like, Fabian’s had this whole arc and grown so much but, like, OF COURSE Allistair still wants to murder him! It’s been like two days.

“I want to crumple up Gilear like a wrapper.”

A seven is a Murph 10.

The very specific way Brennan does foley for sword fighting (“Clang! Cling! Clang!”) is so funny to me.

Cannot overstate how much of a power move it was for Kristen to go, “I’ve been PRAYING FOR YOU,” at Daybreak and knock him on his ass.

I feel like I bring this up all the time but I love when Brennan is counting dice for a ton of damage and all the PCs are BSing reasons that it’s not a big deal like, “He’s just getting D4s,” or “Well I should get advantage for the reason just made up,” with everyone else fully playing along. ”

Allistair Ash, man. He is fascinating to me. I am so curious about what Brennan had planned for him originally because I feel like we barely scratched the surface before things took a TURN. He had two little moments in this ep that made my heart break for him a little: (1) When he says to Fabian, “If I die, I just come back a little bit worse but, if you die, you’re stuck down here with me.” and (2) when Fabian kills him and Bill grabs his soul and is like, “You know it’s gonna cost you X gold to revive you,” and he sighs and says, “Put it on my tab I suppose.” Like, I know he spent all ep trying to kill Fabian but I can’t help but be like, poor guy. He just has this pathos in his haplessness. I’m surprised Fabian didn’t make more of an effort to connect with him instead of being like, kind of like, “I will throw hands if I must.” Talking is a free action my dude. Anyway, I would love to see Brennan’s DM notes for this guy.

Lou was really doing some expert D&D with all the second winding and bonus actioning and burning spell slots for extra damage he was doing. He was like, “My initiative is trash so I have to do approximately a million damage per turn.”

Lol at Ayda asking if it’s weird to talk about sex stuff in front of friends in a group that involves both Kristen and Adaine.

Fig wishing she could do something cool in front of Ayda as if Ayda didn’t try to flood Hell on her behalf last week. My girl. You’ve already locked that down.

Not really an issue that’s we’ll run across during the run of FH but tieflings live 20-40 years longer than humans according to the official D&D lore. So lets say Fig lives to be 120 years old. And let’s say she sticks with her high school girlfriend and marries her. It’s possible they die at around the same time and then Ayda has to Deal With That in her next life but that’s not what I’m interested in. What happens if you’re a full elderly woman and your partner phoenixes into a child? What are the ethics of that? How do you deal with that? Chronomancy?

The horrified, “Love wins!” from Daybreak.

Is there a reason the viewing room Riz was in had thrones in it or is Hell just very about the ~aesthetic~

Every time a DM asks for a HP total, my entire being clenches in prep for a Power Word Kill.

“I’m gonna need a Dexter--”/”Counterspell.”

“You guys murdered me too but we hashed it out.”

I totally forgot that the Bad Kids lied that Ragh had shat his pants until the moment Adaine was saying it this episode. Freshman Year was WILD.

Also, just wanna take a second to talk about the elevation of Ragh from this side-note bully to a fully fledged, likeable character with depth and and an arc and gay spit. D&D is crazy.

Summoning Boggy via Bloody Mary is such a delightful image.

So, Kalina is the one that led Riz down the path that led to him finding out Pok is an Undercover Angel (!!!), which means one of three things: (1) She knew but miscalculated hard, (2) she didn’t know and made a different but also big miscalculation, (3) she did know and she’s doing some kind of 4-D chess thing we don’t know about yet.

Ayda hitting Fabian with a portent and then swooping in and saving Adaine. So clutch. What a good NPC to befriend.

Speaking of, I think we all kinda figured, but Brennan officially said on Twitter or the Discord (I don’t remember which) that Ayda is autistic. Like, I was pretty sure but I didn’t wanna assume.

Lol at the absolute lack of respect Kalvaxus got in this episode.

Pok as an Undercover Angel is SO GOOD. Like, I didn’t think he was really bad for a second but I never could have guessed he was an UNDERCOVER ANGEL. That’s such a dope combination of words. Undercover Angel (which my computer keeps trying to correct to undercover agent which isn’t wrong to be fair). Man. I love this. I love this for me and I love this for Riz. Riz deserves this. After so much crap in his life and so many mind games from Kalina and all this turmoil, he deserves to know that not only is his dad a good person who loved/loves him, he’s SO good that he’s an ANGEL and he was such a good spy in life he still is a secret agent in death. God, what a reveal. I can’t believe Riz got Spy Kids-ed TWICE by the same parent. Can’t wait to hear what exactly is going on with him.

Wait, what’s goblin heaven like? Which god is sanctioning this? Who is he working for exactly?

This episode, Kristen and Gorgug rolled 1 Nat 20 each, while Riz, Fabian, and Brennan each got 2. On the flipside, Adaine got 2 Nat 1’s, Fig and Fabian each rolled 1 that was cancelled, and Riz rolled 1 (in addition, Murph rolled two more which were lair actions and one of which was cancelled by a luck point so they don’t really count but it was very funny so I wanted to note it).

#fantasy high #fantasy high live #fantasy high spoilers #dimension 20 #dimension 20 spoilers #wow a recap that isn't a million pages for once #turns out I can do it

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cremedelacremefanfic · 4 years

Text

Crème de la Crème: 39

Ashton

“So what? You about to just fuck and duck?”

She laughed as she used a towel to dry her damped hair “To my defense, I was trying to be as quiet as I could be.”

“You got somewhere to be?” I asked looking over at the clock seeing that it was barely nine o'clock.

I could see her momentarily debating if she should tell the truth or not “No, I actually don’t.” She finally said.

“Then why you tryna get away from me so fast? You regretting last night or something?” I said as I sat up

“Yeah, because I’m going to just give my virginity to someone and move on with my life.” She said and rolled her eyes

“That’s how it seems.” I countered

She probably was having second thoughts about us having sex but didn’t know how to admit it.

She sighed before walking over to where I was “Let’s be honest here…” She began “What did us having sex even accomplish? Yeah, we got rid of all sexual tension that’s been built up for all these months but what else?” She questioned.

I cocked my head to the side as I looked at her. My eyes wandered over her thick ass frame. I couldn’t help myself, shorty was bad as fuck and I just wanted her to drop that towel and get back in bed with me.

“ASHTON!” She yelled, breaking me from my thoughts. “What Eve?”

“What are we really doing? Huh? We fucked but the question still remains the same, what are we doing?” She asked as I sighed, running my hand over my face.

“I like you, Eve, I don’t see how you don’t see that shit. I brought you a dog and threw you that party. I legit have feelings for you baby.”

“That don’t mean shit!” Clearly, she wanted to argue while I, on the other hand, want to slide back between her thick ass thighs and give her some more of this dick.

I threw the sheets off my body and sat on the side of the bed and stood to my feet. “Come here.” Looking up to her she stood at the end of the bed and gave me a stupid ass look.

I walked over to her and grabbed her, pulling her roughly to me and wrapping my arms around her body. “Why the fuck you make shit so fuckin’ complicated for?”

“Ashton, I’m not about to be like Adrienne, you’re not gonna do me like you do her. I’m not anyone’s fuck buddy that’s go-”

“Shut up, Evie. Did I say you were just a damn fuck buddy? You and her are not even on the same level. I like you, shit I see myself building some shit with you. I fucked you raw, something I’ve never done in my adult life, so trust me when I say that I’m not gonna treat you like that girl. That was just sex but, us, this is something different.”

I looked down into her eyes, as she stared back at me. I knew she thought I was running game on her but I wasn’t. I really liked this girl even when I tried not to like her, I caught myself missing and wanting her every day.

“Ashton, don’t play me. I will beat your ass.” I chuckled and placed my lips by her ear. “I’m not gonna play you, now drop the towel, Eve.” I whispered in her ear.

She dropped her towel as I stepped back and admired her naked body. I licked over my lips and smirked.

I turned her body around and pushed her back on my bed. Automatically, she spread her legs for me. My eyes went straight to that pretty ass pussy of hers. I swear she got some gold between her thighs.

I would never admit that to her though. Arming her with that kind of ammo would surely be the death of me.

Evie:

I looked up at Ashton who wore a smirk on his face as he eyed me with hunger in his eyes. I can’t even lie and say that this man didn’t rock my entire world. If this was the kind of dick I was missing all these years then I was mad as hell.

He grabbed my ankle and pulled me towards him forcefully, he gripped my thighs. He laid down on top of me, stroking his already hard dick. I didn’t know why he was making me feel like this.

I didn’t want to get attached to this nigga but the way he put it down on me, I just knew he was going to have me doing things I never even thought of doing for a man.

He pushed inside of me, causing my lips to part.

“Shit... slow down,” I told him, he pushed all the way inside of me as my walls gripped and tugged on his long, thick pole. I felt myself gushing over his dick as soon as he entered me.

He grumbled sexily as he got on his knees and placed my thighs in the cooks of his arm as he hammered his pole into my spot.

My moans soon turned to screams as he hit a spot that I didn’t even know I had. I swear a bitch felt this nigga dick in my fucking stomach. “I’m a turn yo little ass out.” He growled into my ear, biting it softly.

His words alone turned me all the way on. My clit throbbed as he kissed my lips sloppily. His tongue intertwined with mine while he pounded inside of me so hard that the bed shook along with my body.

I had a big problem on my hands with this man for sure. Since getting a sample of this dick, I swear I didn’t want to share and I wasn’t.

____

“How you feel Eve?” Sean asked as he slid into a seat next to me

“Tired,” I said as sunk into the plane’s plush seat

“How you come off a vacation feeling tired?” He questioned

My eyes closed as I leaned against the window “Extraneous activities.” I said softly.

The last couple of days of the trip, Ashton made it his mission to try to wear me out and he definitely succeeded. My body was sore and I planned on spending the entire plane ride home resting.

“Whatever nigga, you barely did anything,” He said sucking his teeth

I waved him off “Just because I didn’t do much with you negros, doesn’t mean nothing was accomplished. It ain’t always about you, Sean” I teased.

Ashton boarded the plane next, taking a seat on the opposite side of me. “What y’all over here talking about?” He questioned as his hand brushed against my skin softly and quickly.

it was so quick that I don’t even think that Sean even noticed. My eyes met Ashton as he wore a slick smirk on his face before I ripped my eyes away from his.

I shouldn’t even be attracted to this jack ass but my crazy ass found everything about this fool attractive. From the way he licked his perfect lips to his asshole persona.

I was as crazy as he was.

“Nigga where you been at for the last few days?” Sean asked, his brows dipped in confusion. I looked back and forth between the two before staring at Ashton.

“Yeah, where you been?” I wanted to see the excuse that he came up with. I knew that the crew knew that we liked each other or whatever. I was curious as to what this crazy fool would say.

“Unlike you two, I actually had to work.” he said looking in between Sean and me "And remember, we did that thing yesterday” He responded looking at me as my eyes grew widely at his response. My head snapped towards Sean who wore an unreadable expression which kinda scared me.

Sean and August were super overprotective of me and damn near worst than my own blood brother.

“Y’all did a thing, without us?” August overhead Ashton talking and came and leaned on Sean’s seat

“I-it was a last-minute thing, it was a concert thing that we stumbled upon” What we had was low key a date. Ashton wanted to do something fun together before we left so he took me to dinner and a show.

“Y’all fake as fuck, I like Spanish music” August said

“It was Portuguese.” I smiled

“Same shit bro, we do things as a squad! No man left behind.” August

“Y’all left me behind that one time” Ashton interjected

“She didn’t like you at the time nigga, that shit don’t count.” he said causing us to chuckle

Sean has yet to say anything and his silence was starting to get to me.

“We should leave Evie alone, she said she was tired earlier.” he finally spoke “You know we will talk about this shit when we get home.” Sean stated lowly in my ear as he kissed my cheek and headed to his original seat

August followed suit.

I let out a heavy breath, taken aback by his response. “He knows and he’s going to murder me when we land.” Ashton smirked as he took the seat Sean was previously in, he lacing his long fingers with mine “He don’t know shit.”

“He will if you continue doing shit like this.” I mumbled throwing my blanket over our hands

Ashton

10 1/2 hours later.....

We had finally landed back in Los Angeles and I was over-excited about being back home. I loved vacationing but this vacation was one for the books. From the business part to Evie finally letting a nigga in and breaking her walls down.

“So....”

Evie's sweet voice filled my ears as she stood in front of me. I leaned against my car, watching her nervously place a strand of hair behind her ears. “So what? Why you acting like this?” I palmed her waist, pulling her close to me.

We’d just pulled up to her home from the airport. I wanted her to go home with me but she was adamant about going home to spend some time with her best friend and brother.

“Acting Like what, Ashton?”

“Acting timid and nervous.” I leaned down, kissing her lips softly.

“This.” she said simply looking up at me “It all happened so quick, how do I know I’m not just some fling that you’ll get bored within the next two weeks?” she asked

“You really think sex is about to change everything we been through over the last few months?” I asked

I knew she was untrusting, her bitch ass step-pops was the blame for this being the main bump we always had to get over but, I needed her to understand that I wasn’t going to switch up on her.

“Eve, I promise you, you’re the only woman that has ever had me like this. I’ve never been tied up in a relationship because if I did it’ll distract me from my work and responsibilities. So I hit up bitches from time to time but nothing like this.” I broke down to her

“I’m not a bitch.”

“Out of everything I said, that’s what you heard?” I chuckled

She opened her mouth to speak when her front door swung open. “EVIE!!” My eyes widen with shock as his voice sounded through the yard

“What are you doing?” there was annoyance in her voice

“Tell your company you need to come in the house.” my face scrunched up “Sean, I just kno-”

“I SAID, tell yo company you gotta come in the house.” he repeated

“I’m literally both of y’all boss.”

“Look, don’t even argue with him, just go home, Ash.” Evie said

I kissed my teeth “I’ll hit you a little later.” I bent down and kissed the side of her mouth “I’ma beat this nigga ass one day.” I went to place an actual kiss on her lips but Sean cleared his throat.

I kissed my teeth, I looked back at that nigga and mean mugged the fuck out of his ass. “Nigga shut the fuck up.” I grumbled. I kissed Evie lips softly, gripping her waist.

“Bye baby.” I glared at Sean one more time as he stared at me with a blank expression.

I didn’t know what the fuck was this nigga problem but I was surely gonna find the fuck out what the fuck was going on.

Sean

Evie slipped past me with her luggage and forcefully dropped her duffel bag on the floor next to her carry-on. She had the only attitude and I wasn’t with it.

I looked over at Tish who avoided my gaze.

“After almost an eleven-hour flight, before you go home and get some rest, you come to my house causing a scene?” Evie’s arms were now crossed as her foot tapped away at the floor

“Nobody caused no scene, plus I said we were going to talk when we got home, you rushed out the airport with that nigga so quick I couldn’t even get a word in.”

She kissed her teeth “Because I just know you’re gonna wanna argue with me about this shit Sean and I just don’t don’t have the energy for it.” She said

I shook my head “You should be thankful you got somebody looking out for you. I’m going against my own best friend for you.” I fussed

No one else was going to tell her, they would sit back and watch her get played then talk shit behind her back just like they do with Adrianne.

“And what exactly are you going against him for? He’s done nothing to you for him to be on your shit list.”

I’m convinced women just don’t be picking up on context clues. They see and hear what they want to and because of that, shit comes back to bite them in the ass.

Of course, I don’t want to throw my mans under the bus but Evie is a good girl and the last thing I’m tryna let happen is him do this girl wrong because she got a fat ass and pretty face.

“Eve.” I pinched the bridge of my nose “I’m 27 years old, I’ve known the man since I was 6. He’s not a bad person, but I’ve never and I do mean, never, seen him take any woman he’s messed with seriously. You’re fucking with a nigga that’s never been in love let alone a relationship.”

Her face scrunched “Wait… huh?” She scratched her head softly “Never?” She questioned

“No, when we were younger it was “none of these hoes impress me” but now as we’re older he says he’s not about to let no girl come in between him and his success.” I broke down to her “I’m not saying any of this to sabotage anything y’all got going on or trying to build, but as my homegirl, I just wanted to give you a fair warning of the type of nigga you dealing with.” I said

“And I do appreciate you for that, Sean. Whatever Ashton and I are doing is fairly new, I wasn’t trying to keep anything from either of you.” She spoke up, her attitude seemingly evaporated as she looked between Tish and me

“No one said you were, Evie, Sean is just telling you how his friend is. Regardless of what’s going on, this is your business but he’s just looking out for you.” Tish said finally breaking her silence

I nodded “Look, Eve, if you feel like you’re different then by all means, keep what y’all doing going. All I’m saying is that I think you should watch out for certain signs. Don’t let what I said change how you feel because Ash is older now and could be ready for a woman like you, just be careful sis.”

* * *

Flopping down on the bed, I pulled Tish down with me and onto my lap “You sure you don’t have to go get your baby?” I asked

She shook her head “Apparently she’s house shopping with her daddy.” She said with a slight roll of her eyes “I’m going to go get her in the morning though, we have a flight to Oakland tomorrow so she can meet the rest of the family.” She signed

Rubbing her thighs, I kissed her shoulder “How’s that going?” I asked

I was flabbergasted by Tish’s whole situation. At one point I saw where everyone one was coming from when they called her selfish but hearing her speak about her experiences, I got why she had to be selfish. Feeling alone at such a young age would drive anyone to do selfish irrational shit. I don’t agree with everything she did, but I understood and I believe that’s all she wanted from people.

She shrugged as her arms found their way around my neck “I hate that I have to be in this mess but I did it to myself, I’m dealing with it the best I can.” She smiled weakly “Enough about me, how was Argentina? Have fun?” She questioned

“If you’re trying to see if I was good or not, I was. I wasn’t fucking with none of those hoes.” I said

“You’re not my man, so I don’t care.” She said with a smirk

I chuckled “Ouch! That’s cold nigga.” I said in a joking tone

She shrugged as her smile grew wider “But it’s true.” She said

“Nah, see, because you been talking shit from the moment I boarded my plane to Buenos Aires.”

“Whatever, Sean.” she rolled her eyes

I couldn’t help but smile “Argentina was cool, I needed the vacation.” I finally answered her questioned

“Yeah because you work like a dog.” she said with a raised eyebrow

My fingers strummed her side softly “Work hard now, spend all my money and chill when I’m old.” I simply said “How do you feel about your interview next week?”

“I don’t know... I never saw you in super work mode before and I can’t thank you enough for getting me this interview.”

“You know you’re my girl, I gotta make your you got a secured job by the time you graduate and don’t even sweat it. You already know me, just because I’m one of the people conducting your interview shouldn’t make you sweat and my director is cool, so you have nothing to worry about.”

I already knew putting Evie and Tish under one roof was a recipe for chaos but definitely a risk I was willing to take. She was swiftly becoming one of my favorite people and making sure she was straight was a top priority.

#chrisbrown #chris brown #chrisbrownff #chris brown fan fic #chris breezy #Chris brown fan fiction #chrisbrownfanfiction #chrisbrown ff #chrisbrown fanfiction #cbff #fan fic #fanfiction #ff #fan fiction #big sean

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beautyinthemoonlight1124 · 4 years

Note

Do you think Ali and Ash will make the Olympic roster? ANd do you think the CONCACAF tournament is structured in a way that will make it hard for us to qualify? I’m a new USWNT fan, I became a fan before the WWC because I found woso fanfics (yours included) so I don’t know a lot about soccer but I’ve somehow become I diehard USWNT and NWSL follower

Hi there. Welcome to woso! That’s women’s soccer, just in case you don’t know that yet. lol. First of all, thank you for reading the story. I appreciate it very much. :)

Now to your soccer questions… I’ll take the easier of the two first. I think the CONCACAF tournament is as good as it’s gonna get anytime soon. CONCACAF is probably just as corrupt as the rest of the FIFA, etc. But, in general, I think it’s a fair tournament and the USWNT should have no problem qualifying for the Olympics. But you never know. I think it was before 2012 Olympics (or maybe 2011 World Cup??) when the USWNT lost to Mexico and almost didn’t qualify! So you just never know. But there’s absolutely no reason the team shouldn’t win the CONCACAF tournament. They’ll certainly at least come in 2nd place and still qualify.

Whether or not Ali and Ashlyn make the Olympic roster is a much more difficult question. I believe with all my heart that the team is better with them both on it. They’re excellent players who could both still start (in my opinion anyway), and even more importantly, they’re experienced veterans who know what it’s like to play and win on the biggest stages. They were also both part of the 2016 Olympic team (Ashlyn was one of the alternates and Ali made her first Olympic squad ever - she missed the 2012 squad because of her knee injury) and I think it’s important to bring many of those players back so they will give it everything they’ve got to erase the embarrassment of their worst finish ever in Rio. I’m hoping Ashlyn will get an official spot this time around because I believe she deserves it. I personally think she’s a better keeper than Alyssa but I know most people disagree. I watched Alyssa when she was with the Boston Breakers and she’s a great keeper, but she’s not nearly vocal or bossy enough back there. She never has been and I don’t think she ever will be. It’s just not in her DNA. Her timidity back there is why a lot of the miscommunications happen along the backline. It’s Alyssa’s job to tell them all exactly what to do. Anyway, I digress. Ashlyn should make the team as the 2nd keeper because she’s the only one with any true leadership skills. You’ll notice that most of the time Jill Ellis tried some crazy grouping of newbies on the backline over the past 2-3 years she had Ashlyn in goal. Alyssa almost always gets the best and most experienced defenders on her backlines. This is certainly not always the case, but it does happen more often than not. So I think Ashlyn should make the Olympic roster. It’ll be her first time and I’ll be super stoked for her.

I also think Ali should make the squad. She’s certainly good enough to play on that backline. She more than proved that at the World Cup. All the horseshit US Soccer and Jill Ellis tried to feed everybody about how old and slow Kriegs was over the past 2-½ years was exposed as exactly that - horseshit. I think Ali is a better outside back than Sonnett and Davidson (and Purce for that matter too). I think Crystal Dunn did a fabulous job at LB at the WC and I think Casey Short would be a great backup for her. I think Kelley O’Hara is the starter at RB and nobody is going to change that. US Soccer markets her like crazy and I just don’t see anybody taking that spot from her. I still think Ali is a better defender than KO, all day every day. But I agree that KO is a better offensive player than Ali is. It depends on what the coach is looking for. It’s just that simple. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Ali was the first and only defender off the bench in the biggest games in the World Cup. That says it all right there really. Why would you not bring her to the Olympics with you too? Also, on a side note, I think Kelley’s too aggressive and reckless to be a starting defender. I feel the same way about Sonnett too. You shouldn’t have to worry about your defenders getting yellow cards. You want your defenders to be solid back there and tough, no doubt, but you have to be able to rely on them for the full 90. And if a player has to change the way they’re playing the game to avoid getting a second yellow card and leaving the team down to 10 players, then that’s a problem. That’s just my take on defense in general. Ali plays tough, physical, aggressive defense - that’s what attracted me to her in the very first place back in 2011 at that World Cup. But she rarely commits a foul and hardly ever gets a card. That’s how I like my defenders. But that’s just me. Another good thing for Ali is that she can play Center Back too. She’s played CB quite often for the Pride in the NWSL over the past couple of years and she does a really good job of it. A lot of people assume it’s because she was too slow and old to play RB anymore. But that’s simply not the case. Tom Sermanni moved her to CB because she was easily the best defender on the team and he wanted her in a more centralized position so she could help more on defense and so she could lead and command more from that centralized position. She’s also really fast and he wanted her to play there in CB because the other CBs on the team were kind of slow. Zadorsky isn’t slow though, but she wasn’t there when Sermanni made the move. We all know how dynamic Ali can be from that RB position and she still sends in some of the best crosses in the game, NWSL or USWNT. If the Pride ever get a decent backline again, Ali might move back to RB where she truly excels.

The point is, she can play multiple roles along the backline and that’s a big asset for her when it comes to making the Olympic roster. Instead of taking 23 players (20 field players and 3 keepers) like we do for the World Cup, we only get to take 18 players to the Olympics. 16 field players and 2 keepers. Nobody knows what Vlatko’s going to do because he’s too new to get a feel for yet, but making the Olympic roster is one of the hardest things to do for the USWNT players. Theoretically, you could take the WC roster and eliminate 1 keeper and 4 field players and you’d be all set. But that alone is a difficult task. Add to that the players who just missed the cut for the WC, like Casey Short, and the decision gets even harder to make. Players like Julie Ertz and Crystal Dunn and Ali Krieger who can play multiple positions become very valuable now.

And for God’s sake, everybody has to be healthy!! Ellis screwed up big time in 2016 by bringing Megan Rapinoe who wasn’t ready to come back after her torn ACL. It was ridiculous. I love Pinoe - I truly do. But she wasn’t healthy and shouldn’t have taken up a roster spot. I hope Vlatko doesn’t do the same thing with Alex Morgan after she has her baby. I love Morgan too, more than most people do, and I think she makes the team better just by being on the field and keeping the defense honest so the other players have room to do their thing and score goals. I think Morgan is one of the most selfless strikers I’ve ever seen and she gets crap for it all the time. The stats don’t show it but she changes the game just by being out there and keeping defenders busy and opening up space and setting plays up. She’ll never get the credit she deserves for that either. Anyway, I love her ok? But if she’s not 100% then I don’t want her on the team. Period. End of story. I know Sydney Leroux just came back after giving birth and played in the NWSL 3 months afrer having her daughter, but ask Syd how she did after having her first baby? Syd was able to do that because she knew what her body needed after pregnancy beause she’d done it already before. Morgan is an amazing athlete and I’ll be thrilled for her if she can do it, but I also don’t want her to try so hard either. You just had your first baby. Relax and enjoy it. You’ve already got an Olympic gold medal, you know? Here’s another advantage for Ali Krieger - Kelley O’Hara is injury-prone and can’t stay healthy these days. That’s a big risk to take with you into the Olympics. We’re gonna need a really good backup for her. Ali Krieger.

So this is a whole lot of words to say I don’t know if Ali or Ashlyn will make the Olympic roster. They both deserve to be there. I think the team will benefit greatly from having them both there. But we’re just gonna have to wait and see what Vlatko does.

Here’s what I think I’d like to see for my Olympic roster:

Strikers/Wingers: Rapinoe, Heath, Press, Lloyd, Pugh

MF: Lavelle, Ertz, Horan, Mewis, Brian

D: Dunn, Sauerbrunn, Dahlkemper, O’Hara, Krieger, Short

GK: Naeher, Harris

cut from WC roster: Franch, Sonnett, Davidson, Long, MacDonald, Morgan (I know this is 6 players, but I put Casey Short into the roster instead of Sonnett)

Morgan Brian has been playing really well lately so I think I’d take her instead of Allie Long right now. I personally don’t like Pugh very much - I don’t think she’s improved at all since she started playing with the team in 2105/2016. I honestly would take MacDonald over Pugh but that’ll never happen in a million years. And I really like Tierna Davidson a lot. I like her much better at CB and I would seriously consider taking her over Dahlkemper because I’m not a huge Dahlkemper fan to begin wtih. But, again, that’ll never happen. Although who knows? Jill Ellis got rid of Ali Krieger for less reason so who the hell knows? I like bringing 6 defenders because Crystal Dunn could slide up into MF or Forward if necessary during the Olympics. She’s the ultimate utility player who can kick ass on any line on the pitch. Legitimately. And I don’t like when they move JJ back to CB because she’s so good at that holding midfield spot. The team plays totally differently when she’s not in midfield (they play worse). So take 6 defenders. Keep JJ at MF and move Crystal around if injuries happen and we need another body up top for some reason.

There. I’m done. I’ll stop now. Aren’t you sorry you asked? lol

#the sea captain's house

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stolethekey · 5 years

Note

Hellohello I just read “it’s your love I’m lost in” and it was AMAZING. I absolutely loved it. idk if you take requests or not but if you do I’m begging you to write something abt Jake and Amy reuniting after the snap is reversed. It’s totally okay if you don’t want to, I just figured I would ask. Your writing is amazing and I hope you have a great day!!

hiiiiii wow thank you so much this is so nice i’m –

anyway this took SO long but i did write it finally so here u go

(also tagging @johnny-and-dora bc they also asked for it. hi friend hope this isn’t disappointing)

if ao3 is more your jam you can find this here!

and if you missed the first part you can find it on tumblr here or ao3 at the link above!!

Five years is a long time.

It is long enough for Amy to develop a rapport with her officers that is almost as familial as the one back with the Nine-Nine’s detectives. It is long enough for Cagney and Lacey Jeffords to complete middle school and start high school, and it is long enough for baby Ava to start fourth grade.

Five years is also not long enough.

It is long enough for Holt to hire a new assistant, but not long enough for the assistant’s desk to feel less empty. It is not long enough for Rosa to stop eating honorary takoyaki for lunch on the second Tuesday of every month, even as she gags while opening the bag.

It is not long enough for the precinct to heal.

The pain is duller now, and there is generally more laughter in the air, but there is still a palpable sense of grief and loss that underlies the daily hustle and bustle of the building.

It’s why Amy keeps a bag of sour candy in her office at all times – it’s why she sits through Die Hard every Christmas, even if she would rather be watching It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s why the ring on her left hand has not yet disappeared off her finger.

It’s also why she really, really, does not want to answer her phone on her day off.

The name Gary Jennings glares at her from her phone screen, and she groans as she reaches to grab it off the coffee table.

“Santiago.”

“Hi, Sarge, it’s me, Gary – “

“It’s my day off,” Amy grumbles, letting her copy of Pride and Prejudice fall into her lap. “Give me this one day of peace. Please.”

“I know, and I’m so sorry, but – “

“Is someone hurt? Someone dying?”

“Um, no, but – “

“Then find a way to deal with it,” she interrupts, trying vainly to keep the exasperation from entering her voice. “Please and thank you.”

She hangs up without listening to him apologize, and has barely returned to her book when her phone rings again.

“What?” She snaps, not bothering to look at the caller ID.

“Did you just hang up on Jennings?”

Amy sighs as Rosa’s gruff voice comes through the receiver. “Why, did something happen?”

“You could say that,” Rosa says, and something in her voice makes the hair on Amy’s neck stand up. “You should really get here. Now.”

Amy somewhat reluctantly slides her bookmark between the pages, stretching her legs before getting off the couch. “Okay. Give me twenty.”

She parks the car with a vague apprehension, and as the elevator doors ding open on the fourth floor, it takes her a few seconds to understand what is happening.

The bullpen is full, for starters – all of her uniformed officers are there, plus a bunch of people she doesn’t recognize, and as she takes a cautious step forward she notices the top of Rosa’s hair among the sea of people.

“Hey,” she yells over the noise, fighting her way through the crowd. “What’s going on?”

Rosa turns, her face sagging with relief at the sight of her. “Oh, good, you’re here. Come with me.”

Amy starts to say, “What – “ but before she can finish her sentence, Rosa’s hand is clamped around her wrist and she’s being dragged away from the bullpen and into the hallway.

“Where are we going?”

“Interrogation room.”

“But why – “

“You’ll see,” Rosa answers roughly as they come to a stop. “Ready?”

“For what?”

By way of answer, Rosa opens the door.

The first thing Amy sees is a wall of beige slamming into her. “Amy!”

She stumbles backwards, arms reflexively rising, but even as adrenaline rushes into her system she feels a chill run down her spine at the voice she has just heard. “Charles?”

“Yeah!” He says happily, releasing her. She sucks in a breath, trying to see if her ribs are broken. “I’m back, I missed you so much, even though I guess I didn’t even know I was gone – is it even possible to miss someone if you’re unconscious? I feel like it is – “

“Boyle,” a dry, lazy drawl says from behind him, “If you say one more word, I will find Thanos myself and ask him to snap us back into oblivion.”

A head full of mousy, brown hair pops up next to Charles, and Amy feels another shock run through her body. “G – Gina?”

“The one and only,” she says, grinning widely. “What up? I am now officially way younger than you – how does it feel to officially be a grandma?“

“I – wait, does that mean – “

“Hi,” another voice says, soft and timid, and Amy’s heart stops in her chest.

Jake makes his way toward the door, his movements nervous and eyes almost shy, and Amy barely notices Rosa dragging Charles and Gina out the door behind her.

A sob makes its way up her throat as the door shuts quietly behind her. “This isn’t real.”

His lip twitches slightly, and he reaches hesitantly for her hand as she tries to remember how to breathe.

“It’s me,” he says softly. “I’m here.”

His hand touches hers, and in that achingly familiar touch, everything comes crashing down around her. She throws herself into him, burying her face in the shirt she thought she’d never see again, and as he wraps her in a tight hug all the grief from the past five years starts to pour out of her.

“I’m sorry,” he says into her hair, his voice wavering slightly, “I’m so sorry, I can’t imagine – “

“Not your fault,” she mumbles, tightening her grip on his shirt. “Thanos is a dick.”

Jake laughs, watery and shaky but very much him, and the sound makes her heart soar.

“Never thought I’d hear that laugh again.”

He quiets at that, his hands stilling against her back.

“Ames, I – “

“It’s okay,” she says, pulling back to look at him. “It’s okay – “

“No, it’s not,” he says, his voice tight with pain. “I can’t imagine what a mess I’d be if it had been you instead. I just – five years. God.”

She clears her throat, holding desperately onto his shirt as if it may dissolve into ash at any moment. “How – do you know if this is permanent? I mean, are you – is this – “

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Holt said he’d brief us all later, but apparently they brought us back and then killed him, so there really isn’t – I mean, this is it.”

Amy lets out a shaky breath and nods, forcing herself to smile. “You did miss a lot,” she says, trying valiantly to lighten the mood. “My squad is so dope now, Rosa and her girlfriend showed up in matching outfits one day, and Holt and Kevin renewed their vows – “

“They did what?”

She grins. “Yeah, and I got to speak at the ceremony – “

“Oh, my God,” Jake says, looking genuinely offended, “I cannot believe my two dads held a vow renewal and my wife spoke and I wasn’t there. Tell them to do it again. They have to do it again, right? I’m, like, practically their son – “

“We can talk about it,” she laughs. “Later.”

His expression softens, and the longer she stares at him the more it starts to sink in.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “Later.”

And there is so much to talk about, so much they need to talk about, but for the moment, none of that is important. Because their friends are waiting for them outside, together for the first time in five years, and there are drinks to drink and proper reunions to be had.

Time is a fickle, dangerous thing – Amy knows that now. But it is also the vessel through which one moves through the world, and as she walks out of the precinct, holding hands with someone she thought she’d never see again, she feels nothing but grateful.

They have lost more time than they can count, but they have, too, gained it back. And now – now, they have all of it they need.

#im-a-rocketman #finished prompts #my fics #b99 #jake x amy #peraltiago #my b99 fics

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pip-n-flinx · 5 years

Text

The Fall of Earth

I decided to start working on a Mass Effect fic. Not sure any of my followers are interested, but I decided to post the WIP here. I’d love constructive criticism if you have any! Preface, I’ve gotten tired of seeing Ashley Williams hate. I just wanted to write something that painted her in a better light than most of the stuff I’ve seen recently. I also want a happy ending for her. Hell, I want a happy ending for all the Mass Effect characters. I just haven’t seen much fan-based content that does her justice IMO.

EDIT: moving it to tumblr I lost some of my formatting as well as bold and italics. It doesn’t read quite as cleanly anymore. Sorry about that!

It was hard being cooped up in this apartment under house arrest. Harder than Shepard would admit to anyone, anyways. There was little to occupy his time. Sure, they provided him a holonet uplink, even occasionally asked what he wanted for dinner. The officers assigned to guard his room were polite, sometimes even stopping to make conversation. It just made it worse. Many of them couldn’t seem to decide if he was still the hero of legend, or if the first human Spectre had been replaced by the husk in the room.

Relieved of duty. He could see it now. It had taken time, but he had begun to agree with them. As far as the Tribunal was concerned he had never died, never been resurrected. They thought he had defected. No one comes back from the dead after all. No one.

They thought he had signed on with Cerberus. They thought he had agreed to be cybernetically implanted. No medical personnel would back that assertion if they got a look at his file, certainly, but it didn’t matter to the Brass.

He was a terrorist. He’d blown up the Alpha relay. He’d sided with a rogue splinter cell headed by a war criminal. And then, inexplicably as far as they were concerned, he had turned himself in, along with a trove of Cerberus tech.

He was concerned what had happened to EDI and Joker. Garrus would be fine, he’d never trucked much with the Turian Hierarchy so far as Shepard could tell. Tali was safely back with her people, though he couldn’t help but be furious at the admirals for trying to exile her. Thane was on his last legs anyway, and he had released Samara to her Justicar duties before returning to Alliance space. Jacob and Miranda “disappeared” three days before they Sol System, but he couldn’t blame them. He certainly didn’t begrudge them the escape pods. But Joker, Edi, and the Engineering team were another matter. An unshackled AI? A ex-military Cerberus pilot? More alliance crew members that had left for Cerberus? He hoped they were treating the crew well.

He watched the shuttles go by outside his window, a few military craft sprinkled among them. New York was a major city, and there was a ton of air traffic. Watching them fly by he wondered if any of them were rushing home to see family after a day of work. Maybe there were doctors and other emergency services personnel rushing to the office to relieve exhausted co-workers. Probably a few people who’d had a drink or two taxiing home. But he could never be sure who was who.

His thoughts inevitably turned back to Ashley. Gunnery Chief Williams as he remembered her. Or just Ash. He’d heard fervor in her voice when they’d met on Horizon. Called him a god, back from the dead. But she was hurting inside, and he was too slow on the uptake. For him, it was a matter of months since they had spoke. But for her, it had been two years. Two years since the commandeered the Normandy. Two years since they saved the citadel together. Two years since he had ordered her into the escape pod without him. Two years since Joker had landed, alone and tormented, to report that Shepard had been spaced before his eyes.

And he had the gall to ask her to join him. But she was Alliance, through and through. They had finally promoted her. She wasn’t going to turn her back on the Alliance then. What’s worse is it was Cerberus. Every Alliance soldier, from the grunts to the brass, had been shaken when he and Ash revealed what Cerberus was doing to MIA Alliance soldiers.

He could tell afterwards he had shaken her faith. Siding with Cerberus had rocked her to her core. It was a bridge too far for her.

But Shepard had an AI designed for cyberwarfare onboard. Besides, he was no slouch on an omni-tool himself. No matter how classified her file was he was going to check in on her. And that was when he had found it. The irony had taken his breath.

Many of the details about the founding of Cerberus were redacted, including the Illusive Man’s real name. But one thing was clear. General Williams had created the organization in the wake of the ground invasion by the Turian forces. The same General Williams who resigned. The same General Williams who began the “Williams Curse.” The same General Williams whose granddaughter had saved the Citadel with him.

And Shepard had to admit, he was proud.

You could argue it was in her upbringing: when he had met Ashley she was bordering on open xenophobia. She had stood up to the Terra-Firma party on the Citadel, but only after working side by side with Tali, Garrus, Wrex and Liara for the better part of several months. Live-fire scenarios tended to breed understanding faster than any immersion course, adrenalin and the squad broke through Ash’s barriers quickly.

You could argue it was in her blood: her grandfather had founded and funded Cerberus himself after being forced to surrender his troops on Shianxi. It wasn’t as if the Alliance had done her many favors. Only Kaiden’s good word and Captain Anderson’s sense of character had raised her out of the ground forces. All this despite and impeccable record and being the sole survivor of her unit on Eden Prime. But she stuck with Alliance in the face of that and in the face of her former CO and lover returning from the dead.

He paused to consider that. He’d lost his unit on Elysium, held the line himself just long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And he’d only done that because the Batarians didn’t expect the Alliance to have sophisticated stealth technology. Ashley had survived an invasion by a force with weapons that shredded shields, and had done so without the benefit of any advanced training. Survived, reported to her reinforcements, and then carried the battle back to the Geth, retaking the spaceport and disarming the nuclear warheads set to blow a quarter of the planet into a nuclear winter.

The Alliance granted him the star of Terra and the title of “Commander.” All Gunnery Chief Williams got was a post on a starship. And barely even that.

To say he admired her was an understatement. That woman could have walked on water and only he and Alenko would have ever noticed. He got the feeling Wrex begrudgingly admired her by the end. Alliance brass still couldn’t see past her Grandfather’s overreach though. And there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.

There was a child, playing with a model fighter down below. Modern blue paint job if his vision wasn’t going. It was another painful reminder that normal life wasn’t coming for him.

Bitter. It hadn’t helped yet, but maybe another month of bitterness would turn that around for him.

The door behind him hissed open.

“Commander.”

“You’re not supposed to call me that anymore James.”

“Not supposed to salute you either. We gotta go, the Defense Committee wants to see you.”

“Sounds important” Shepard said, tossing aside his data pad. To be honest he had forgotten he was holding it. He tried to refocus and bring his mind back to the room, the here and now, where for the first time in weeks he was needed. He followed Vega out of the room, but he was struggling to keep pace.

“What’s going on?”

“Couldn’t say. Just told me they needed you, now.” said the Lieutenant, barely turning his head to check that Shepard was keeping up.

Shepard then noticed a well decorated dress uniform bearing down on them. Not knowing what was going on, Shepard decided to take a play out of Wrex’s handbook.

“Anderson.”

“Admiral.”

“You look good Shepard.” Anderson made a point of shaking his hand before standing the Lieutenant at ease. A curious move. He followed it up with more wit than Shepard had heard since his tribunal: “Maybe a little soft around the edges. How are you holding up since being relieved of duty?”

The admiral strode off, staying just a step ahead of him and setting a brisk pace at odds with his informal greeting.

“It’s not so bad once you get used to the hot food and soft beds.” Shepard quipped back.

“We’ll get it sorted out” Anderson still strode purposefully onwards.

He’d had enough of being strung along. “What’s going on? Why is everyone in such a hurry?”

“Admiral Hackett is mobilizing the fleets. I’m guessing word has made it to Alliance Command,” Anderson finally turned to look Shepard in the eyes. “something big is headed our way.” The Admiral was still striding briskly onwards, now ascending the last set of steps before the committee room.

Shepard, though, had stopped cold. His stomach had fell through the floor.

“The Reapers?” He already knew the answer. He didn’t need to ask. But Anderson was still playing coy. Turning to look back, he gave the official answer even though he seemed to find it distasteful.

“We don’t know. Not for certain”

“What else could it be?”

“If I knew that... “

“You know we’re not ready for them. Not by a long shot.”

“Tell that to the Defense Committee.”

“Unless we’re planning on talking the Reapers to death, the committee is a waste of time”

“They’re just scared.” Anderson cut him off, earning a glare that would have blanched a junior officer. “None of them have seen what you’ve seen,” he continued. “You faced down a Reaper. Hell you spoke to one, then blew the damn thing up!” And there was a fire in his eyes. “You’ve seen how they harvest us. What they plan to do to us… You know more about this enemy than anyone”

The bitterness that had consumed him minutes ago flared back to life. He had warned them. Time and again he had warned them, dammit. So he lashed out.

“That why they grounded me? Took away my ship?”

Anderson rounded on him. “We both know that's not true. When you blew up the Batarian relay, hundreds of thousands of Batarians died!” There was a finger cocked at Shepard now. Reminded him of basic is all it did, and he was no recruit anymore dammit!

“It was that or let the Reapers walk through our backdoor!”

“I know that Shepard. And so does the committee. If it wasn’t for that you’d have been court martialed and left to rot in the brig.”

“That, and your good word” Shepard admitted dejectedly. Still hard to admit the Admiral had a point, but he didn’t want Anderson thinking he hadn’t noticed how light his sentence really was.

“Yeah. I trust you Shepard. And so does the committee.”

“I’m just a soldier Anderson. I’m not a politician.” Shepard hated to admit it, but he didn’t see what he could do now. His warnings had been ignored, and he had only beaten the Reaper forces through thorough planning and his team. The best team. And his team was long gone.

“I don’t need you to be either. I just need you to do whatever the hell it takes to help us stop the Reapers”

A door hissed open and the orderly stepped forward. “They’re expecting you two Admiral.”

As they rounded the door to the hallway labeled “Courtroom Access” his jailer surprised him. “Good luck in there, Shepard.” He hadn’t known what to make of Lt. Vega, but he was damned if he was going to ignore a fellow officer. He turned to see his arm outstretched, took the hand and shook it. The man was shredded like he lived at the gym, and he tried his best to crush Shepard’s hand. Every young officer seemed to have decided that a firm grip was the first step to getting a grip. It wasn’t true of course, but he humored the LT with a lopsided smile before a voice behind him stopped him cold.

“Anderson.”

“Lieutenant Commander.”

“Shepard?”

He knew that voice. He turned so fast he almost gave himself whiplash. “Ashley?” it was soft enough he wasn’t sure had said it aloud, but she heard him.

And that was it. He was lit with an irrational hope again. It reminded him of the ride through the conduit. Yeah this shit was bad, but he and Ash were playing for the same team again. Lieutenant Commander huh? Damn, turns out the Alliance Brass pulled their heads out of their asses long enough to promote her. Hell itself must have frozen over. Pride swelled up in his chest again.

“Lieutenant Commander, how’d it go in there?” Anderson had interrupted his temporary reverie.

“I can never tell with them. I’m just waiting for orders now.”

Aaaaand Ashley still detested politics. Shepard grinned from ear to ear. He could scarcely believe it was really her. He decided to press his luck and stepped forward.

“Lieutenant Commander?”

“You hadn’t heard?” Anderson replied, clearly not that startled that Shepard was behind the times.

“No. I’m a little out of the loop these days.” But as he said it he could see Williams tense up a bit.

“Sorry Sir. Didn’t mean to keep you out of the loop.”

It’d taken him a moment to parse what seemed odd about her. Gone was the tomboy he had commanded two and a half years ago. Her hair was down, and that outfit couldn’t be within regs even if they had loosened up considerably. She must be too valuable an asset to discipline over little things now. I can’t believe it. She didn’t just break the Williams Curse, she made herself indisposable. How many years of service did it take her to prove her worth to them? I wonder if it was worth it....

“That’s okay. I’m just glad I bumped into you Ash.” He favored her with what he hoped was his best smile. Not full teeth, but heartfelt. He didn’t have a mirror to see if he looked like a damned fool, but it had the intended effect: she smiled back.

“Me too.”

But then the orderly was back, ushering them into the committee room. Anderson was all business. Ashley Williams gave him a smile and a nod and for a second he was a younger man again, stepping forward to become the first human Spectre. Alright then. I can do this.

#mass effect #mshep #ashley williams #fanfic #WIP #mass effect 3 #ME3

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dylanjonferguson-blog · 5 years

Text

S01E07: “Target For Terror”: Dichromatism

Our misty, videotaped dreams of the un-human Hobo as an actor of radical freedom may have been premature, if not delusional. The dog's narrow focus on interpersonal justice leaves no room for ideology, politics, or other forest-over-trees considerations. “Target For Terror,” the seventh episode of TLH, is a mix of menace, moral clarity, and naiveté that mimics a dog’s worldview, but draws uneasy parallels with our own.

The fairly fantastic characters of “Target For Terror” literally leap from the headlines. The first thing we see is the bold, 72-point pronouncement at the top of a broadsheet, filling the screen: "TERRORISTS MAKE MORE DEMANDS." The unidentified newspaper reader then folds down the page, which, like an upside-down opera curtain, has the effect of revealing our human hero. Paul Hamilton – young man, snub-nose, Lego-hair, jacket-collar popped, flared pants swishing – is striding confidently into a train station. Following closely behind are two sketchy characters, who we immediately surmise are the terrorists. It is as if the dramatic headline conjured these players, or as if we have passed through the headline, into the world of ALL-CAPS anxiety, entering the fear-soaked deathscape of broadsheet news.

Briefly now, let’s jump ahead to an almost unaccountably strange moment that occurs halfway through the episode. One terrorist walks in on the other, who is perusing a thick paperback, and tells him to “Stop reading that junk!" Why were we invited to this moment? The title of the book, unfortunately can't be glimpsed. The only part of the cover we can see in an element in the lower left-hand corner: a swastika! Is it a book about Nazism? Are we being told that the terrorists are Nazis? Or that they're anti-fascists who consider Nazism "junk"? Perhaps it's a red herring to focus on that graphic detail. But surely there's a reason the one terrorist is chastised for reading a book.

I think it has to do with the newspaper headline at the start, which introduced our setting as a reductive and fearful world. Being in the world of a panicked newspaper means rejecting the world of books, which would include depths of context and greater stores of information, reasoning, empathy. Even the terrorists reject any intrusion from that world, which is foreign to the territory of the tale.

A dog must naturally see the world as tense and simple, but we are coached that way by broadsheet profiteers. And those who manipulate their message.

Paul Hamilton is a kind and rich fellow. The terrorists want to kill or capture him as part of an obscure plot to get at the boy's grandfather, Chief Justice Hamilton, played by John Carradine. Carradine, very old at this point, sometimes struggles with his delivery, but still has a large, theatrical presence, and beautifully gnarled, expressive hands that cling to fine lapels in his opulent office, which is replete with mahogany furnishings and a deep, patterned carpet that no doubt hides expensive Cuban ash. The camera films that office with a certain staid reverence: we’re not to scoff at this man, we’re to see his perspective as right and proper. The terrorists, in comparison, have weird, strained faces, natty clothes, and awkwardly-carved facial hair (one is played by the great Cronenberg regular Geva Kovacs). The dog – named Nick, this time around – saves Paul in the train station, but Chief Justice Hamilton warns his grandson that the rugged schemers are still out there. Now that the terrorists have spooked their prey, they take another line of attack. By successfully kidnapping Paul’s fiancée, Pam, they force the groom-to-be to come out to a remote hotel in the country, where he too is kidnapped.

“We have a cause,” the terrorist tells Paul, warning him not to try any funny stuff. “We live for it, and we’re willing to die for it.” But what this cause might be is, glaringly, never even hinted at.

In the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, US intelligence officials initially concluded that Syria was behind the attack, as retaliation for America’s downing of an Iranian passenger jet earlier that year. President Reagan, however, shifted the blame to Libya’s President Gaddafi, who was a more convenient villain (and happy to play along, to boost his anti-American cred). The U.S. president-cum-actor even participated in the creation of a neo-conservative conspiracy theory that had Gaddafi and Carlos the Jackal heading a deranged hit-squad hellbent on assassinating Reagan. A similar form of narrative alchemy happened in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration shifted the story to point blame at the unconnected Saddam Hussein, even though almost all the attackers were Saudis. The point is that American government ideologues seem to kind of like terrorists because, unlike a state army, their origins and motives often seem unclear, and so can be manipulated in the public mind. Obviously, anyone willing to kill and die for a cause has strong beliefs, but American governments would rather obscure the meaning, or even existence, of a cause. We can all remember George W. Bush nonsensically asserting that the terrorists simply “hate our freedoms.”

This matters, because our films tend to reflect, intentionally or not, the false storylines being peddled. At the height of the Bush-era terrorism panic, The Dark Knight was released, starring a Bush/Blair-style Batman battling an anti-ideology lunatic who just wanted to “watch the world burn.” Why? Oh, no reason. Terrorists, we’ve been counterintuitively led to believe by state propaganda, don’t really need a reason. Apparently they just want to fuck shit up (or “maximize chaos” to use the ridiculous description of Nazi motives peddled by Jordan Peterson). It’s clear why we’re fed this lie. Obfuscating the position and ultimate aims of the terrorists makes their actions seem mad, and any opposing actions seem justified.

With both Pam and Paul captive to the villains, it’s up to the dog Nick to save them. And here we’re introduced to the episode’s most sympathetic character: Osborne, the meek, bespectacled man who runs the dilapidated country inn where the criminal action is happening. Unlike Paul, Osborne is not aligned with state ideology; he’s motivated by narrow, everyday concerns, like ensuring no dogs loiter on his property. We’re clearly meant to identify with Osborne: when Nick sprays the hotelier with a water hose, to get his attention, the water is first sprayed directly on the camera lens, at us.

Nick rouses the non-ideologic self-interested character to the defense of one political side. However, he does this not by appealing to ideology, but by threatening the comfort of the passive actor. This is reminiscent of how the newspaper is always declaring our comfort to be under threat. The sleight is possible, since the terrorists’ positions have been strategically re-written so that it appears that threatening stability is a goal unto itself, rather than a means to an end.

The Hobo is of course not actually acting in defense of state ideology, but his narrow focus on context-free morality (and waking up the non-ideological actor with his moral concerns) can be exploited to that end.

The dog comes from a third world, not of power or of resistance, but the world of the woods. Among the trees, living as an animal, there are only immediate concerns, so of course he can’t see the greater context of his actions. But at times, this can also be an advantage, for him. When the terrorists chase Nick, he leads them off into the trees, and there they become hopelessly lost. In the woods, among individual trunks, their ideology can't follow, so they're easily duped.

Osborne has a “No Dogs Allowed” sign on his property. By forbidding dogs, Osborne wishes to keep the wildness of apolitical moral action at bay (the forest, after all, is cut down a safe distance from his beloved lawn). And yet, even though he appears unaligned, Osborne’s cherished obsession with self-concern is policed by the channels and apparatuses of the state (which are nourished by a particular ideology, though he doesn't see it).

The wildness of the dog's morality runs outside of these channels. And yet, it is the dog, the apparently-radical actor, that draws Osborne's actions to a political side, for it is a roused Osborne who eventually unties and frees the kidnapped couple.

Here we see the dangers of radical actions being co-opted to state ends, if the actions don't have their own, competing ideological compass.

This is why Osborne changes his sign at the end, crossing out the “No,” so it says simply “Dogs Allowed.” Since the moral-ideological motivation of the terrorists has been successfully hidden from him, and his own morality has been manipulated to be indistinguishable from self-interest, he is now able to see morality, state ideology, and his own comfort as compatible, and indeed mutually-reinforcing.

The freed Paul Hamilton says he wants to make the dog his “best man.” Nick has been granted humanity because he is perceived to have collaborated with the correct (state) ideology.

The Hobo naturally flees this.

2 stars

#dogs #thelittlesthobo #littlesthobo #canadiantv #terrorism #vintagetv #politics

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ohmytheon · 6 years

Text

Karma in Retrograde (1)

title: Karma in Retrograde

summary: When Dabi is struck by a de-aging quirk that regresses him to the most important part of his life, he finds himself turned back to a sixteen year-old U.A. General Studies student with a lot of self-esteem issues, parent problems, a destructive quirk that he can't manage, and no memory of the five years that he's lost - not the mention the fact that his little brother is now the same age as him and one of the top students in the U.A. hero course. In U.A.'s attempt to make up for what they missed and help the Dabi of the past, present, and future, he is placed with the only students that know him and have yet to find out what truly makes the difference between a hero and a villain. There, they must face the question of whether he can change or if his destiny is already set in stone.

– Chapter 1: An attack on a hero support equipment warehouse goes terribly wrong when Dabi is hit with a de-aging quirk.

notes: This is going to be a massive endeavor (no pun intended) on mine and @mistystarshine‘s behalf, but I could not ask for a better co-conspirator, partner-in-crime, and co-author for this fic. For all we know, this whole thing could be debunked in this current manga arc, but you can pry the "Dabi is a Todoroki" theory out of my cold dead hands. I hint at it in a lot of my fics, so it was high time that I just did it. Mistystarshine and I went back and forth with a lot of jokes and ideas, but she came up with the de-aging idea and my brain ran with it like I needed it to live. I'm so excited for where this is going. It's a lot of headcanons, all things considered, and we've come up with ideas that range from totally silly to dead fucking serious. I'm not joking when I say that we've talked about this fic every night for like three weeks, maybe more. This is going to be crack treated very seriously. Are there plot holes? Sure. Would this actually happen? Probably not. Do we care? Hell no. We're having fun with this! A ton of fun! And I hope you do too reading it. I've got a lot of feels and so does Mistystarshine and apparently this is our outlet.

When he had joined the League of Villains, Dabi had expected to be dealing with pro heroes, not children, but sometimes it was more interesting that way. Maybe it had been a coincidence or fate, but something had aligned in the universe to bring together all his desires. Sometimes the League was fractured and they didn’t always agree or even like each other, something that was inevitable when a lot of strange and wackjob personalities were in one room, but hate could make even the worst work with one another for a common goal.

And right now, the goal was to bring down the false hero society that so many people worshipped.

To be honest, Dabi wouldn’t mind heroes if they actually did what they had been created to do. However, besides All Might, it had been a very long time since heroes were legitimately heroic. It was hard to be a true hero when all heroes were human and most humans were flawed. Could he fault them for that? No, he was plenty flawed as well. The difference between him and these so-called heroes was that he could admit it. He revelled in it, in fact. The heroes needed to be brought down a level so they could see their distorted reflections as well.

These days, heroes were more about fame and fortune than they were about saving people -- about being good. Even the best of the best could also be terrible people behind closed doors. They weren’t the pure-hearted individuals that so many people made them out to be. Greedy, self-centered, brutal, cold. None of those things were in the definition of a hero and yet they applied to many of them out there right now. A true hero would know their flaws, accept them, and work every day to overcome them.

Not too many heroes were willing to do that and so it was the League’s job to show them how. It was more fun than Dabi had anticipated. He should have started doing this ages ago. The years that he’d wasted doing little more than passive aggressive petty crimes on his own were nothing compared to what he was doing now with the League.

Perhaps the most opportune moment of his life, and a surprising one at that, was when Dabi had been put in charge of the Vanguard Action Squad. Although they had attempted to come to blows at first and Dabi still thought that the guy was more than a little broken in the head, Shigaraki had still seen Dabi’s ability to lead. It wasn’t something that was immediately noticeable, the scars, staples, and dead but bright blue eyes too distracting, but he had spent his entire life raising himself, making it easier to guide others.

It had given him access to the newest U.A. students. Not one of his original goals, but something that had definitely turned into an opportunity to do even more with his time in the League. He wasn’t certain how long he planned on being in it, but for now, it worked to his advantage. In the beginning, he had been aggravated over the idea that he had to deal with a bunch of children, but then they proved to be a lot more interesting than many of the pro heroes that he’d seen so far.

What better way to bring down the hero society and start anew than by attacking the very beginning of the process? U.A. and schools like it were where every hero began their journey. Cutting them down right there, destroying all that they believed in, would cause a ripple effect throughout the entire hero community.

Dabi could see all of it -- the past that brought him to his lowest point, the present that he was fighting in, and the future that could go either way -- whenever he saw Shouto Todoroki.

It had been curious to see Todoroki’s face on the kill list when he and the Vanguard had attacked the U.A. Training Camp in order to kidnap Katsuki Bakugou. Not very surprising, if Dabi was being honest. Like most people, he had watched the U.A. Sports Festival and seen the raw power that made up Endeavor’s youngest son. With his mother’s ice powers in tenfold on one side and his father’s fire on the other, he was the perfect storm to make up a hero.

His unwillingness to use the fire half of his quirk had been of note. Dabi had known at least some of what he was capable of and yet Todoroki had clearly avoided using it until that Midoriya kid had forced him into a corner. He could have crushed Bakugou in the last round had he used his fire power -- and yet he hadn’t. A hero obsessed with power and being on the top, Dabi doubted that Endeavor had liked that, which had been a pleasure in itself.

To be honest, Dabi had expected to confront Todoroki at some point when they’d been on the mission to kidnap Bakugou. There was no way that someone like him would let something like a classmate being taken lying down. Perhaps he had lingered too long on Todoroki’s photo back then because Shigaraki had actually asked if killing him would be a problem. Many people gravitated towards people with similar quirks and even felt connected to them on some level.

No, being put into a position where he might have to kill Shouto Todoroki wouldn’t be a problem. Actually doing it was another matter. Dabi rather liked the kid being around. Both he and Midoriya were prime examples of who heroes were supposed to be. It would almost be a shame to put them down, not when Stain himself had decided that Midoriya was worthy of being kept alive. Dabi liked to think that if Todoroki had been in the other boy’s position, Stain would have made the same decision.

Maybe it was wishful thinking.

Or maybe Dabi just liked direct conflict.

It had been decided the League would strike again when the Class 1 students began to get their provisional hero licenses. After the whole Overhaul business, Dabi was itching to get back into the swing of things. He’d gotten a taste of what it felt like to completely overwhelm a hero and it had been addicting. Bringing a hero to their knees had been exhilarating, even more so when Dabi had been recognized for his most recent work.

Endeavor had been officially announced as the new number one hero. All Might was a shell of who he was once. Todoroki finally passed his test and Dabi, being one of the strongest in the League, was given the opportunity to attack the beginning stages of hero society and turn them to ashes. Things were coming together nicely.

They waited a few days before attacking a warehouse that created much of the support equipment for heroes. Not a lot of civilians realized that so many heroes relied on equipment to strengthen or control their quirks. Dabi had never had proper access to it while growing up with his destructive quirk. Who knew where he would be if he had? Destroying the main manufacturer of such equipment would not only cripple the heroes that depended on them, but also deal a devastating economic blow.

Dabi had been quite proud of the idea. The fact that the warehouse was in the sector where Todoroki had his provisional hero license was a bonus.

Those false heroes wasted little time in reaching the scene, but it was too late to save the warehouse or whatever was inside. Dabi’s cremation quirk was overwhelming in its destructive abilities. With the equipment added to his outfit to give him an actual villain costume, he could unleash it even further. Every time he used his quirk now, he felt a wild sense of power and relief. For the first time in his life, his quirk felt better than good. It felt great. He could go to one hundred percent without ever having to worry. This was power, all in the palms of his hands.

And then, without warning, it was all taken away from him.

A warehouse employee was cowering in the corner, trapped in the building by the blue flames. Dabi was thinking that it might be kinder to simply turn him to ashes when a wall of ice sliced through the room and cut Dabi off from everyone else in the building. He spun around and let off another burst of flames just in time to greet another row of ice. Steam, water, smoke, and ice exploded in the room the second the two opposites met each other. Dabi threw an arm up and let flames consume him to protect himself. He built them stronger, pulling them to his arm, and threw them at the young hero who had joined the fray.

Todoroki sliced through the blue flames not with his ice but with his fire and Dabi’s blood boiled. Fighting fire with fire was a power move that few thought of. While Todoroki’s fire wasn’t nearly as hot as Dabi’s, it was enough to break Dabi’s flames apart. Even better, as Todoroki countered with his flames using his left arm, he was able to slam his right foot down on the ground and attack with his ice, which forced Dabi to dodge to the left and shoot off another powerful explosion of flames.

“Why don’t you leave this for the big boys?” Dabi taunted, bolstered by the fire that surrounded them, blue and orange alike. It was hotter than hell in here, melting Todoroki’s ice like a popsicle on a summer day.

Todoroki grit his teeth in frustration, though he didn’t look anywhere near his limit. Dabi would have to drag Todoroki there until the kid was past collapsing. If he kept fighting, then he’d prove himself to be a hero. Didn’t mean that he might not still be killed, but Dabi would prefer it if not. The kill list meant that the targets could be killed if the situation called for it. Not exactly a hit list. They weren’t going out of their way to kill U.A. students, after all. Dabi would just get close.

“Looking for a rematch?” Dabi asked as blue flames shot out of his left palm like a tornado. Todoroki skated out of the way with his ice, smothering flames as he did so, and slid his right hand along the ground like he was rolling a ball and then an over-aggressive amount of ice jutted towards Dabi, just as he’d done during the Sports Festival. Dabi couldn’t dodge it this time, so he threw both hands out and let off an explosion of fire so massive that it knocked both him and Todoroki backwards and blew a hole in the roof. The building shook around and above them. Another blast like that and the whole thing would come crumbling down.

So focused on his fight with Todoroki, Dabi had completely forgotten about the civilian that he had considered giving a quick death. As far as he was concerned, the only person that mattered now was Todoroki. The villains that he had brought with him must have been dealing with the pro heroes outside. Good. That left Todoroki to him. Dabi wanted to see how they compared.

An ugly grin cut its way across Dabi’s face. He opened his mouth to attempt to goad Todoroki into talking when Dabi was suddenly struck by something sharp in the back. It sent him to one knee and he had to put a hand on the ground to keep himself from falling over. Nothing happened at first. He didn’t feel anything. But then a cold chill went over his whole body until everything began to tingle and his vision began to swim. With his free hand, he clutched at his chest, like he might be able to pull his erratically beating heart right out, and then began to struggle to breathe.

Somewhere around him, he thought he heard a voice shouting, “Dabi?” but he couldn’t be sure. Especially when his body froze without the help of any ice. He gasped in pain and shut his eyes tight as it felt like every muscle was being pulled together by a string and everything was turning upside down and he was drowning and he--

He--

He opened his eyes, finding himself lying on his back and staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling that had a huge hole in it, the rafters covered with fire and ice. The fire. He blinked. There were spots of blue and orange. That was a familiar, if not welcomed, sight. His head hurt like a bitch, feeling like someone had whacked him in the skull with a textbook about twenty times.

Groaning in pain, he pushed himself up with his hands and then looked down in confusion when he found himself lying on a cold concrete ground half covered in ice. He slid his fingers across the ice, taking in the soothing feel of it, but the heat of the fire that surrounded him was beginning to make him uncomfortable. Finally, he raised his eyes and gaped at the scene around him.

Why the hell was he sitting in the middle of a completely destroyed warehouse filled with burning crates and large melting walls of ice?

A bolt of panic shot through him and he jumped to his feet, although he nearly collapsed all over again when a wave of dizziness overcame him. He put a hand on his head, willing it to go away, and then began to search for an exit, lifting his shirt over the bottom half of his face so that he wouldn’t breathe in so much smoke, but he was starting to hyperventilate.

Where the hell was he? What was he doing here? How had he gotten here?

He abruptly took notice of the shirt he was holding over his face. It was somewhere in between white and grey, but the biggest detail was that it was too large for him. It hung on him like a loose tent. Half his chest was hanging out of the v neck shirt, making him feel exposed. The black pants were also too big for him, so he went to tighten the white belt around his waist when the jacket took him off guard. It hung over his frame like his shoulders were a coat hanger, but it was the sleeves that caught his attention. There was some sort of metal on them, like something the support course would put on a hero costume.

What the fuck was he wearing?

There was little time to consider what the hell was happening when someone called out, “Ryouta?” and his eyes snapped forward, landing on a teenage boy gawking back at him in shock.

It felt as if a rock fell into the pit of his stomach and he choked on the smoke. The familiar face sent him reeling for multiple reasons. He looked like… With that two-toned hair and those mismatched eyes and that angry scar over the side of his face, the kid looked dead up like… “Shouto?”

The kid jerked back at the name, clearly affected by it. He shook his head. No, that had to be impossible. This kid was tall, sharp, muscular -- this one was older. Shouto was eleven. He might not be the soft, little boy that always rested in his mind’s eye, but this kid was…

Shouto was a boy.

But how likely was it that there was someone running around that looked exactly like Shouto, just a few years older?

“What the fuck is going on?” Ryouta demanded, pointing an accusing finger at him. “Who the fuck are you? I swear, if this is some kind of sick prank, I’m going to flip!”

The kid -- Shouto? (No, it wasn’t him!) -- couldn’t hide the disbelief from his face. His eyes (one gray and one the same blue he saw in the mirror) were wide and his eyebrows raised past his messy bangs. There was even a patch of ice on the right side of his cheek, just the way Shouto’s would do whenever he used his ice half of his quirk more than the fire half.

“This whole time it was you?” the kid asked, sounding utterly gutted.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Ryouta shouted back, panic and dread threatening to swallow him. He took a few hesitant steps back, but then had to shy away from a patch of blue fire. “I don’t know…”

That dizziness was coming over him and his vision began to swim again. The kid stepped closer to him, but he waved a sharp hand at him to get him to stop. The kid actually raised his arms in reaction, fire and ice both flaring up. Oh fuck, it was him. It was Shouto. It was his little brother. Except he wasn’t so little anymore and he didn’t know what was going on and there was so much fire and destruction and he was scared and his head was pounding and swimming in a fog.

This time, when he collapsed, he didn’t wake right back up, leaving Shouto to stare in utter confusion at the unconscious body of his older brother.

end notes:

A lot of thought was put into deciding what Dabi’s given name would be, since we don’t have it in canon yet. I (Mistystarshine) initially saw ‘Ryouta’ used in another work. The kanji 燎 means ‘burn’ or ‘bonfire’ while the kanji 他 means ‘another’. Quite literally ‘another fire quirk’. However, because I cannot just let myself be content, I did some more research and boy am I glad I did! It turns out that Ryouta can also be spelled with the kanji 凉 , which means ‘cool’. Specifically, this kanji generally applies in a pleasant sense, so like ‘nice and cool’ or ‘cool and refreshing’, but it is written using 冫, the radical for ice. A radical is essentially a root word that can be narrowed down with more specific variations. For example, for the words ‘sunny’, ‘sunshine’, and ‘sunlight’, ‘sun’ would be the radical. All three words, while having different specific meanings, refer to the sun.

What does this mean and why is it worth giving a linguistics lesson over? It means that the name ‘Ryouta’ could mean ‘another fire quirk’ or ‘another cold quirk/another ice quirk’. That means that (although it would require changing some legal documents if they guessed wrong at first, since it is spelled differently, but the pronunciation is at least the same) the name would have fit whether the child manifested a fire quirk, an ice quirk, or both.

If we get a given name reveal and it turns out we guess wrong, we may go back and edit it. If we’re right, I will be insufferable. (Lanni edit: I’m a stubborn fool and will probably want to keep Ryouta out of spite because I LOVE IT.)

Also, did you know that Dabi’s scars have been shown smoking after he uses his quirk? Fun fact.

#dabi is a todoroki #dabi #shoto todoroki #shouto todoroki #bnha #mha #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #crack fic #dabi fic #bnha fanfiction #mha fanfiction #mistystarshine #league of villains #the things of songs

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sassylavellen · 6 years

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The official SassyLavellen headcanon timeline (Part 1 of 3)

Might be subject to some minor tweaks as not everything in my storyline is 100% developed yet. This is more a point of reference for myself, but you might find it interesting too lol

Also forgive me if I don’t quite understand the Thedas dating system (No not dating as in courting, dating as in time of events)

Some canon characters births and the OC’s important interactions with them are included, some of which may NOT be accurate to canon (namely Shianni’s date of birth and Leliana’s age being 19 in Origins instead of 32)

Some other characters and events I had previously created (namely Siobhan Hawke and Lyra Hawke) have either been removed or had their involvement significantly changed.

PRE ORIGINS:

8:94 Blessed -

- Tara Tabris is born to Cyrion and Adaia.

9:00 Dragon -

- Alyssa Trevelyan born to Jonathan and Shana

9:02 Dragon -

- Amanda Trevelyan born to Jonathan and Shana

9:06 Dragon -

- A mysterious pregnant elf wonders wounded into Clan Sabre’s camp. That night she gives birth to a daughter. The mother abandons her with the clan. The baby is taken in by Ashelle and named Gillan.

9:07 Dragon -

- Holli Trevelyan born to Jonathan and Aria

9:10 Dragon -

- Mari Hawke born to Malcolm and Leandra

9:12 Dragon -

- Tara’s cousin Shianni is born

9:13 Dragon -

- Tara Tabris becomes pregnant with her lover Rin. She loses the baby in childbirth due to complications

- Bethany and Carver Hawke born to Malcolm and Leandra

- Sophia Cousland born to Bryce and Eleanor

- Tara’s aunt and uncle taken and killed by humans, leaving Shianni an orphan. Tara adopts her one-year-old cousin.

9:14 Dragon -

- Evelyn Lavellan born to Revan’nain and Niera

- Stephen Trevelyan born to Jonathan and Aria

9:16 Dragon -

- Ezra Lavellan born to Revan’nain and Niera

9:18 Dragon -

- Moira Lavellan born to Revan’nain and Niera

- Tara’s mother Adaia is killed by humans.

9:21 Dragon -

- Evelyn Lavellan captured by Dwarven slavers and rescued by Fredric Glenn. Her father sends hunters to kill the dwarves and and has Glenn killed.

ORIGNS:

9:31 Dragon -

- Gillan finds the tainted Eluvian on her 25th birthday and is saved by Duncan.

- Gillan wakes up three days later and agrees to travel with Duncan and become a Grey Warden.

- Mari and Carver encounter Darkspawn in the fringes of the Kokori Wilds and realize a blight is coming. Mari and Carver join the King’s Army and travel to Ostigar

- Tara’s wedding is interrupted by Vaughn, Shianni is taken and raped, Tara kills Vaughn, Tara is conscripted by Duncan.

- Duncan, Gillan and Tara visit Highever, saving Sophia Cousland from Rendon Howe’s betrayal and attack. Sophia is recruited to the Wardens after her parents are murdered.

- Duncan, Gillan, Tara, and Sophia arrive at Ostigar. Alistair leads the new recruits into the Kokori Wilds and meet Morrigan and Flemeth

- Gillan, Tara, and Sophia all survive the joining

- The Battle of Ostigar, The King and his army are slaughtered after Loghain’s reinforcements pull out of the battle. Sophia is injured in battle by arrows. Alistair, Sophia, Gillan, and Tara rescued from certain death by Flemeth. Mari and Carver narrowly escape the battle with their lives.

- Morrigan joins the Warden’s team.

- The Wardens team arrive in Lothering. Leliana and Sten join the team.

- Gillan leads the Wardens team to the Brecilian forest to find the Dalish.

- Mari and Carver return to Lothering right before it was overrun by darkspawn. Mari, Bethany, Carver, and Leandra flee Lothering during the attack. They meet Aveline Vallen. Carver is slain by an ogre. Mari, Bethany, Aveline and Leandra rescued by Flemeth, who then helps them travel safely to Kirkwall with the promise that Mari will deliver an amulet to a Dalish clan there.

- Loghain sends Zevran after the Wardens team.

- Evelyn Lavellan runs away from her clan after her father attempts to arrange a marriage for her without her consent.

- The Wardens find the Dalish clan in the Brecilian forest. A peaceful resolution is reached between the Dalish and the werewolves. The Dalish join the Wardens’ army.

- Sophia and Leliana’s relationship begins

- The Wardens team travel to Redcliffe. They help the town prepare for the battle. Sophia, Alistair, Gillan, and Leliana slip into the castle to rescue the Arl’s family. When they find out what is happening, they agree to try to get the mages to save Connor from possession

- The Wardens team sets out for the Circle of Magi.

- Mari Hawke and family arrive in Kirkwall.

- The team is attacked by assassins. Zevran is captured and interrogated, Tara wants to kill him, but Sophia and Gillan decide to let him live. Zevran joins the Wardens’ team.

- The team arrives at the Circle, the team sides with the mages. Alistair, Sophia, Tara, and Gillan go with Wynne to save First Enchanter Irving. Gillan has panic attacks due to her fear of demons. Alistair, Wynne, Sophia and Tara fall prey to the Sloth Demon, and Gillan has to face her fears to go into the fade after them to save them. First Enchanter Irving saved. The mages join the Wardens’ army. Wynne joins the Wardens’ team.

- The Wardens team travel back to Redcliffe with the mages to save Conner. Wynne is sent into the fade to rescue him.

- The Wardens set out for Haven to find the Urn of Sacred Ashes

- Tara has her 37th birthday.

- The Wardens arrive in haven, find the temple, kill the dragon, and take a pinch of the ashes.

- Arl Eamon is healed with the pinch of ashes.

- Gillan and Alistair’s relationship begins

- The Wardens team set out for Orzammar.

- The Wardens encounter Shale, Shale joins the team

- The Wardens arrive in Orzammar. Tara fights in the provings in support of Harrowmount. The Wardens fight Jarvia and the carta.

- The Wardens venture into the Deep Roads to find Branka. Oghren joins the Warden’s team. The Wardens side with Caridan against Branka. Anvil of the Void destroyed. Harrowmount crowned king of Ozammar

- The Wardens return to Redcliffe to consult with Arl Eamon to begin the Landsmeet.

- The Wardens travel to Denerim. They learn that Queen Anora has been imprisoned by Arl Howe. Sophia is forbidden by Eamon to confront Howe, fearing she will compromise their position.

- Gillan, Zevran, Wynne and Leliana sneak into Arl Howe’s estate to rescue Queen Anora. Sophia secretly sneaks out to confront Howe with the help of Tara. Sophia kills Howe, taking her revenge. Gillan and her squad rescue Anora, but Sophia realizes she has put them in great danger. She and Tara get themselves captured so that Gillan, Wynne, Zevran and Leliana can escape with Anora. Sophia and Tara are both taken to Fort Drakon. They realize that to the larger world, neither of them are known to be Wardens, Loghain simply believes that Sophia was out for revenge and that Tara is just an elf accomplice.

- Leliana and Morrigan sneak into Fort Drakon to rescue Sophia and Tara. Sophia is held in a cell, Tara was tortured after it was finally discovered she was the one who killed Vaughn. They free all the prisoners to cover their escape and fake Tara’s death to avoid anyone coming after her.

- Anora informs the Wardens about the uprising in the alienage. Sophia, Gillan, Leliana and Tara go to the alienage. They are reunited with Shainni, who tells them that Tevinter slavers are taking elves under the ruse of a plague. They confront the salvers and kill them.

- The landsmeet starts, The Wardens gain the favor of the landsmeet and Sophia duels Loghain. Loghain executed. Alistair is made king.

- Gillan and Alistair’s relationship ends.

- Warden Riordan reveals that the Warden that kills the archdemon must also die. Gillan, Sophia, and Tara agree that Alistair must be kept alive so he can rule Ferelden. They draw straws to decide who will be the one who must die, and Sophia draws the short straw. Morrigan comes to her and reveals the ritual that will let all the Wardens live, only if Alistair has sex with her. Sophia at first agrees to it, but can’t bring herself to make Alistair to do it. She goes back to Morrigan and refuses the ritual. Morrigan leaves the team.

- The Wardens lead the battle against the Darkspawn. Gillan is wounded (almost fatally) in the battle. Sophia and Tara break away from the rest of the team to face the archdemon. They manage to defeat the archdemon, but Tara takes Sophia’s place and makes the sacrifice to keep Sophia alive.

- Alistair is officially crowned king. Sophia is named the new Warden Commander of Ferelden.

- Sophia and Gillan return Tara’s personal effects (including her Warden’s Oath amulet) to Cyrion and Shianni. Sophia promises that Tara’s sacrifice would never be forgotten. Alistair commissions a statue of Tara be constructed in Denerim’s market square.

#My OCs #My Girls in Grey #Sophia Cousland #Gillan Mahariel #Tara Tabris #Sassylavellen Timeline

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illustrious-rocket · 6 years

Text

ultraericthered said: The problem still remains that Anabel as a major returning character and her being older while Ash is still 10 wouldn’t make any sense given how she was in AG, which is why I can’t see her ever being adapted into the SM anime. She, the International Police, and the whole Fallers business were as likely to make it in as the Ultra Recon Squad.

I don’t know, I’m clicking back and forth between her official art from Emerald and from SM to compare them, and I’m not seeing something that couldn’t be easily disregarded by at most just letting the SM anime style balance out the change in her appearance. She doesn’t have to age to have long hair and different clothes, and the anime already changed her personality dramatically from the games years ago so her serious personality from SM wouldn’t be brought in now anyway. The shipping hints from Battle Frontier would simply be ignored. I can’t imagine the writers would want to poke that hornet’s nest by bringing back any other crush on Ash from the past when it looks increasingly likely Serena isn’t going to appear this series.

As for the International Police, there is one thing that’s been bothering me from a recent episode that relates to them.

The way this scene is set up initially, Faba could have accessed any public documentation of Team Rocket. It certainly wouldn’t be hard when the aircraft had giant R logos on it.

....but where did Faba get this file? Would detailed information on an elite force within Team Rocket just be publically available to anyone, especially when the unit appears to be unknown enough for Jessie, James and Meowth to appear to not know about it themselves?

As far as I think there’s only two places Faba could have gotten that specific information from. Either he got it from Nanu, and Nanu had it because of whatever his past connection to Giovanni is, or he contacted the International Police.

They’re not going to show up for the UBs like they do in the games. They’re going to show up to help stop Giovanni and the Matori Matrix in the anime’s adaptation of Episode RR. The UBs will just be a small part of that, so all the lore involving Fallers is unnecessary. There’s even a space that opens up for them to play a role because of another character who would be even harder to translate from the games’ Episode RR to the anime:

There’s no way the anime could reasonably explain away Colress being a hero after how he was in Episode N, let alone how he got out of jail. I guess the closest they could come is saying that he cut a deal to help the International Police, but his relevant appearances prior to Episode RR have already been cut (thanks to the Ultra Recon Squad being gone and the N-Solarizer and N-Lunarizer being unneeded) and his biggest moment in Episode RR is his confrontation with the alternate timeline Ghetsis, which absolutely is not going to happen in the anime.

So the outside help the Aether Foundation could call for against Team Rocket almost certainly won’t be Colress like in the games. The likely source for the information Faba received would be the International Police investigating Team Rocket like they did with Team Galactic and Team Plasma, so that scene with Faba could be a very early start to set things up for later. There’s also Nanu’s connection to Giovanni that likely won’t be revealed next week still to come, so while Giovanni said he was surprised Nanu became a police officer we simply do not know enough of anime Nanu’s past to understand the context of that comment yet. For all we know, he could have been an undercover agent within Team Rocket spying for the International Police back then.

I mention all of that because it establishes a plausible case that the International Police already have an investigation of Team Rocket underway, hence the existence of a case file on the Matori Matrix that Faba was then able to acquire. If this is correct, the International Police will absorb Colress’s role in the adaptation of Episode RR, and if they do then the agents sent to Alola would be Looker and Anabel to cover the SM Looker Episode as well.; Anabel being assigned to the mission not because of anything involving her being a Faller but because of the recurring use of Ultra Aura and the one-sentence handwave of her having stronger Ultra Aura than normal to explain it. Everything else aside from a brief mention that Ash battled her in the past would be irrelevant to the story now and go unacknowledged, while she would maintain her more lighthearted personality the anime already gave her. Her empathic abilities, if they were acknowledged, might actually be a useful loophole to demonstrate what “unusual Ultra Aura” actually means.

#pokeani #Team Rocket #Looker #Anabel #speculation

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not-close-to-straight · 7 years

Text

Letters to Bucky (Part Three)

Master List HERE -----------------------------------

“Excuse me, Master Sergeant Barnes.” The young soldier snapped a salute and Bucky tried not to laugh at the formality.

“Soldier, don't bother with a salute, I look like I came out of a two week stint in a pigsty, and smell just as good. What's the problem? I can't even get a shower in before someone needs me?”

“Sorry sir, but there is a phone call for you.”

“A phone call?” Bucky shot Steve a look, and the big blond just shrugged. “Ok. Five minutes. In the main hall?”

“No sir. In General Ash’s office. And you are requested immediately. General Ash’s time is limited and he would like me to emphasize how big of a favor this is and how he would appreciate you concluding your phone call in a timely manner.”

“General Ash-- son who exactly is the phone call from?” Steve broke in, and the soldier straightened up with another salute.

“Captain Rogers sir, I have no knowledge of that. I was just instructed to deliver the message.”

“Thank you.” Steve released him with a salute of his own, and the soldier turned on his heel and marched away. “Bucky who do you know who could be calling through General Ash’s private line?”

“Hell if know, Cap. Damn, you know I barely miss base when we are gone.” Bucky sighed, rubbing a weary hand over his face. “Protocol and orders and enough saluting to make me want to--”

“Don't.” Steve shook his head. “It's easy to forget when we are out there doing what we do, but we are all still soldiers under a flag. Protocol and salutes are just part of it. You signed up, now don't complain. Now go answer the phone. It could be your family.”

“Yes sir.” Bucky rolled his eyes at his Captain, his best friend, and tossed him a half hearted salute. “You know if I knew you were such a stickler for protocol I wouldn't have joined the squad with you.”

“Whatever.” Steve laughed, “You knew how I was back when we played ball down at the park and I would kick you off the team for fouling another player.”

“Yeah you were a stick in the mud then and you’re a stick in the mud now.”

“Yeah, but now I’m a dangerous stick in the mud, so you have to listen.” Steve punched his shoulder good naturedly and walked off.

Bucky hurried towards the general's office, stripping off his filthy jacket and trying to wipe his face and hands clean of muck as he went.

The pretty secretary at the desk waved him through the open office door and Bucky jogged through it, dropping into the wheeled chair with a sigh.

“This is Master Sergeant Barnes. Who’s calling?” He snapped, rubbing his eyes. If it was his family calling to ask for more money or to complain about something he might put the generals phone through the wall.

“Uh, Master Sergeant Barnes? James?” The voice on the other end sounded nervous and Bucky frowned.

“Yes. Who's calling?”

“This is Tony. Um, you're pen pal?”

*********************

Tony held his phone a little tighter against his ear when there was no response. Was this a bad idea? Was Bucky weirded out? Damn it, he shouldn't have called. He should have just waited and accepted that Bucky probably didn't want to talk to him and--

“Tony.” The gruff voice dropped into something gentler, a Brooklyn accent coming through in a soft roll that made his stomach tighten a little. “What the hell? How did you track me down?”

“I um, pulled some strings?” Tony tapped a pen on his desk nervously. “Got a phone call through to the General and asked him to let me know when you got back from your rotation.”

“You pulled some strings? With who?” Bucky asked incredulously, pressing the phone tighter against his ear. “With General Ash? How?”

“I just know some people.” Tony said evasively. “So listen. Um, you never wrote me back. I wrote like three letters and you didn't write back and I just...worried. So I called. I hope that's alright. I just didn't know what was going on.” He bit at his lip anxiously. “I um, realize that this might be crossing a line, but I've never been real great at respecting boundaries.”

“You were worried huh? That's sweet, Tony.” Bucky ran a hand through his longish hair. Ugh, it was time for a cut.

“Sorry about the letters, I just barely made it back to base from a long rotation. Haven't even showered yet. Haven't checked my mail either, or I would be writing you back right this minute, I promise.”

Bucky hesitated, lips twitching into a smile. “Even though, I got to say hearing your voice sure is nice. I'm sure glad you called. Can't tell you how glad I am to hear from you. This is definitely the best part of my day, Tony, thank you.”

Tony closed his eyes, shivering when a ripple of interest wound through him when Bucky said his name. “Say, um, James I was--”

“It's just Bucky, remember?” He interrupted. “Only my mother calls me James. Friends call me Bucky, and I definitely want you to call me Bucky.

“Right. Sorry, I'm…” Tony cursed himself silently for not being able to string together more than a few words at a time. “Sorry, usually I never stop talking but I'm finding myself a little… stuck for words right now.”

“It's alright, honey.” Bucky said, trying not to smile at the thought of Tony, speechless just from a short phone call.

“So what's up?” Bucky prompted when Tony was quiet for a minute. “What's the real reason for this call? I'm not complaining, not at all, but you know. This is kind of odd. And I have a General who will be pissed as hell if I spend too much time lingering in his office.”

Tony took a quick breath before blurting, “I just wanted to know if you were safe! It's been a couple months and I haven't heard anything from you. And like I said, I know this is probably crossing some sort of boundary but--”

“No, no no boundary crossed.” Bucky assured him. “I'm safe, Tony. We all made it home safe. It was just routine rotation, but longer than usual. That's all. Nothing to be anxious about.” Bucky tried not to smile so big over the thought of Tony being worried about him... but it was pretty sweet.

“I'm really, really glad.” Tony breathed a sigh of relief. “That's-- yeah. That's great.”

They were quiet for a minute, just listening to each other breathe on the other end, and Tony brought it up with a little laugh, “Does this seem weird? How relaxed I am just...sitting here like this? Is it the same for you?”

“This is the most relaxed I've been in weeks.” Bucky admitted. “It means a lot to me that you would--” he cleared his throat and decided to say something else.

“Does is bother you?” He asked, so quietly Tony almost didn't hear it. “Does any of this...bother you? Letters and what we say and… anything like that?”

“It…absolutely doesn't. Absolutely not. Not bothered at all. In fact I couldn't be less bothered.” Tony said quickly. “Nope. I'm uh-- I'm good, you know? If you're good with all this, then I definitely am too.”

“Glad to hear it.” Bucky replied, and Tony could hear the grin in his voice. “But listen, sweet thing, I really hate to cut this short but--”

“Sweet thing?” Tony echoed. “Is that what you just called me? What am I, a snack?'

Bucky laughed, sounding relieved, and happy and exhausted all at the same time. “Tony, I bet you are sweet as a snack, but really, I have to go. I desperately need a shower, and apparently I have a stack of mail to read, and the General will lose his mind if I take up his office for much longer and trust me, I don't want to be on his bad side.”

“Okay.” Tony sighed reluctantly. “Yeah, um you probably do need a shower. And maybe avoid the pissy General. Good idea. And yeah, definitely go read your mail. You've got a lot of it.”

“I’ll send you something today.” Bucky promised. “Will you write me back, Tony?”

“I always do.” Tony said quietly, then, “Oh. The name is fine by the way. Whatever you want to call me. It's… fine.”

Bucky grinned into the phone, letting his voice drop low and easy, his accent coming in thick. “Sure thing, sweet thing.”

************************

Freshly showered, fed, and laying across his bunk, Bucky sorted through the stack of letters from Tony, grinning because he had six new ones to add to his pile.

After the phone call, he could re read all the letters and hear Tony's voice in his head and he couldn't stop smiling about it.

“Your girl write you?” Steve dropped onto the bunk across from him, and raised an eyebrow. “Wow, did multiple girls write you? Damn, Buck. Save some for the rest of us, ya know? Can't be trappin' all the pretty ones for yourself.”

“Uh, it's a guy actually.” Bucky said slowly, looking up at his best friend cautiously. “Tony. He got my name in that pen pal program. We’ve been writing since January, and um, well it was him on the phone earlier. Calling to check on me because it's been a couple months since I wrote back. So yeah, um it's… a guy. Now.”

Steve looked away, then back with one of the biggest grins Bucky had ever seen cross his face. “Bucky that is… dammit Buck, that is so great. That is so GREAT!”

Steve folded his arms to keep from reaching over and hugging his friend, but he didn't stop smiling.

Growing up in their neighborhood hadn't been easy, and even though Bucky had known for a long time that he was more interested in boys than girls, he and Steve had both known to keep that a secret.

Bucky had never officially dated anyone, but he ran around with Steve and whistled at the pretty ladies, and was always seen with a girl on his arm just to avoid any questions.

It had been hard on him to hide that piece of himself, and hard on Steve to watch, knowing his closest friend was always lonely, knowing that Bucky only ever smiled for show when a girl stood on her toes to kiss him.

The military wasn't all that much better than their neighborhood, even with same-sex marriage being legalized. It was still hard for some people to accept anyone in the LGBT community at all, much less in the army, and Steve could only imagine what Bucky went through every single day.

That's why he always joked about Bucky having a girlfriend whenever they were in public, and really even when it was just them. Less questions that way. Less questions, less chances to see that sad look in Bucky's eyes, easier for them to brush it off and move on.

But Steve had always known where Bucky's heart really lay, and apparently this pen pal thing was giving him exactly what he had needed for so long.

“Bucky.” Steve ran his hand through his hair and shook his head. “Man I know you’ve been waiting for something like this for--”

“Yeah.” Bucky interrupted, knowing what Steve was going to say, and not able to keep the grin from his own face. “It's pretty great. Nothing serious yet, but--”

“But it's something .” his friend replied firmly. “And that's great. It's more than we used to think you'd have, right? Back growing up?”

“Yeah. It...it really is.” Bucky reached for his notebook. “Not to kick you out or nothing, Stevie but I'm gonna write him back right now.”

“I'll head out.” Steve got up to give him some privacy, but paused as he stepped through the door. “Happy for you, Buck. You got a real dumb smile on your face right now and it's just great .”

“Get out Steve.” Bucky threw a boot at him, and rolled over onto his stomach to start writing.

*************************

To: Tony

--I read all your letters, so sorry for making you worry. What was supposed to be a three or four week rotation turned into six weeks. I must have left right before your first letter got here, and then I was out for a month and a half you know?

--So in case you worry again… my squad does three week rotations (usually) then I'm on base for about ten days before going out again. So if we time the letters right, I'm back in time to get one and to write you back real quick, otherwise it could be a month or more before you get a response again.

--Steve and I are absolutely not together. Never have been. Neither one of us are the least bit interested in the other. His neck nearly breaks every time a pretty dame walks by, and one time he decked a guy who squeezed his ass, but he's never had a problem with me. Never outed me growing up or to any of the other soldiers. We go chasing tail together and if anybody notices he's the only one who takes a girl around back, well no one says anything.

--By the way, you did sound like a teenage girl asking that, but it was adorable as hell.

--I'm glad your recovery is going so well. I'm sure you'll be glad to get home and out of the rehab center. What's home like for you? Big place? Small and cozy? You don't like New York? Other than my old neighborhood, I sort of love the city. If you stand still long enough it's like you can hear it breathe, you know? There's always a new place to go, always something else to see. And there's always something to do. Not like here. When I can't write you or I'm not on rotation I'm just bored.

--I changed my mind. Now I don't know if we'd surf if I visited you out in California. I feel like there's way more interesting things you and I could be doing than letting the waves make us their bitch. Things that specifically include very little clothing.

--How's that for picking a side? No more dialing it back since we both are on the same page, yeah? I checked the ‘yes I like you box’ so we're good now? I'll make you a deal, you say whatever you want to me, stop crossing things out, and I see how hard I can make you blush via letters. I feel like that's a win win.

--Should it worry me that you have enough pull to get a call in through the General? Because it kind of does. More worrying is that I kind of love that you have that kind of clout. Didn't think I had a thing for guys with power but you are changing my mind pretty quick. I'm not worried about you being an asshole. I can be pretty terrifying myself when the mood strikes.

-- I think your phone call is just about the best part of these last six months. It was so good to hear your voice. I never really thought about how you would sound, and it's crazy how much I like it. Sat and re-read all your letters just so I could hear them in your voice and its amazing, Tony. Amazing.

--write me back sweet thing

*******************

To: Bucky

--Is it rude to say I'm relieved that you two aren't together? He sounds solid, I feel like I could buy him a beer just because you say he's good. And not outing you, that's big. Not something I really have to worry about on my end, so I can't imagine how hard it would be for you. Glad you have a buddy like Steve to get your back. Glad Steve is just a buddy. By the way, I'm kind of petty. Fair warning.

--I've been home for a week and a half now, and all I keep thinking is how quiet it is. Minus my overly happy nurse, I kind of miss all the noise of the rehab center. Even when it was quiet there was still something going on.

--Home is… big. I live on a top floor, so I never even hear other people in the building. Too big for just me, but I'd never settle for anything smaller. I'm more of a go big or go home kind of guy. You got a place of your own when you're in the states? Or just barracks.

--yeah, I like to think we are on the same page now. I like you, you like me. I feel like we could really

--And if we are talking about voices… I certainly don't doubt that you are from Brooklyn anymore. It's nice it's like… honey or something. Licorice maybe. Can a voice be like licorice? I know you said no crossing out but that was pretty stupid so yeah. Crossing it out.

--I feel like letters shouldn't make me embarrassed or blush or whatever. I'm not usually the blushing type, or at least I don't think so but I'm not going to complain if you want to try. Hit me with your best shot soldier.

--Don't worry about who I know to call the General. Just you know, be glad you know me cause I'm a good person to know. I think between the two of us I would be the one with the power kink right? You answered the phone Master Sergeant Barnes and I almost fainted.

--Is that girly? I don't really care.

--if you call me sweet thing what am I supposed to call you?

--be safe

*****************

To: Tony

--Sweet thing believe me when I say you can call me whatever you want.

--I told Steve about us writing and that you were who called me and he just lit the fuck up. He was so excited about it. I told him it's not like we're going steady or whatever, but he's known me my whole life you know? Watched me never have anyone and I think he's just happy I know you now, even if it's just a few letters and a phone call.

--I've always just lived at the barracks. No sense owning a place when I'm gone for most of a year at a time. Your house does sound lonely. You should get a dog. Like a cocker spaniel or a Great Dane. Something. I don't know. Do you like dogs?

--my voice is like honey? I think I like the licorice thing better. Even though honey reminds me of that old song ‘pour some sugar on me’ and I like that.

--Tell me Tony. Are you a screamer? You sound so smooth over the phone I think; I'd love to hear you scream. We should try it some time. I'll say things in my Master Sergeant voice and you tell me when you’re close.

--I just barely got this in time, heading out on a rotation as we speak, gonna drop this off on my way.

--I'm being safe don't worry

--I feel like i miss you, is that crazy?

--Meh. I don't care if it's crazy.

--Write me back, Tony.

********************

To: Bucky

--Pour some sugar on me indeed. I'm almost positive no good music was made after the eighties so I love that reference. I said licorice because I like dark licorice and your voice brought that taste and texture to mind. Like thick and sweet

-I wouldn't say I'm a screamer. It's been a while though, with the accident and all. I'm usually the one trying to get a scream out of someone if you know what I mean. Is that an issue? You seem like the one to be making people scream too. We might have to flip for positions. (See what I did there?) the voice thing could be fun though. We could try. I'm not usually a submissive type but I think I'd be all about your master sergeant persona.

--I thought about a dog, but I travel a lot and that's rough on everybody, especially four legged kids right? And while I’m secure enough in my manhood, carrying a tiny dog around in a purse is pushing it for me. And Great Danes… are you kidding me? I'm only five nine remember? I don't want a dog that can look me in the eye.

--I'm glad Steve is on board with...this. Whatever we are. Can we even say we are going steady if all we've done is write each other? Also, are you from the forties? Who even says going steady anymore?

--Rotation makes me nervous. I get it, it's your job but I hate it. Not even really sure what it means and I hate it. I just worry until I get another letter from you and that's such a bitch.

--Stay safe Bucky bear. Bucky baby. Baby buckeroo.

--I will be calling you one of those three nicknames from now on. Deal with it.

PS. I feel like I miss you too

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

#winteriron #tony stark #james bucky barnes #steve rogers #love letters #pen pals #soldier #winteriron au #falling in love #so much fluff #its so fluffy I could die

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celticnoise · 4 years

Link

CQN continues its enthralling and EXCLUSIVE extracts from Alex Gordon’s book, ‘That Season In Paradise’, which takes us through the months that were the most momentous in Celtic’s proud history.

Today, we look at another dramatic step along the team’s destination towards their crowning glory.

JOCK STEIN was only too aware of the date as the Celtic coach transported his players from Seamill to Hampden for the Scottish Cup semi-final against Clyde on April 1, traditionally known, of course, as ‘April Fools Day’. It was a potential banana skin against part-time opponents who went into the encounter as 5/1 rank outsiders.

Davie White, the bold and aspiring thirty-three-year-old Clyde manager, was earning deserved acclaim for what he was achieving at the prudent Shawfield outfit. He made no brash or outrageous boasts before the match and merely announced he hoped his team would do enough to make their supporters proud. He wasn’t quite in the same class as Stein in the kidology stakes, but he had a fair stab at it, anyway. White, who spent his entire nine-year playing career at the homely Rutherglen club, was asked if he had anything special lined up for his team as they prepared for the big game. Producing the underdog card, he replied, ‘Well, if I could get all the players off their work at the same time that would be great.’

Stein, the master in the specialised art of deception, might even have smiled at the bluff by the ambitious young pretender. The shrewd Celtic manager would have been well primed about the form of Clyde during their 1-0 league win over Dunfermline at Shawfield the previous month. He wouldn’t have forgotten their 5-1 trouncing of a fine Hibs team in November. Nor would he have overlooked a 1-0 victory over full-time Morton at tricky Cappielow in an earlier round of the Scottish Cup.

There was more than just a ‘let’s-forget-about-the-ball-and-get-on-with-the-game’ approach from his last-four opponents. One newspaper scribe had watched in obvious awe at White’s assembled bunch of butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers and wrote, ‘Clyde move the ball out of defence into attack with the grace and accuracy of a conjurer opening his scarves to reveal a dove.’ Nobody’s fools, then.

Jock Stein wasn’t buying into the notion that the game was already a foregone conclusion. Emphasising that outlook was the fact the Celtic medical staff had worked all week in an effort to have Bobby Murdoch one hundred per cent fit to play after missing the Partick Thistle game with the ankle injury sustained the previous Saturday against Hearts. The broad-shouldered midfielder with the svelte touch underwent two x-rays before Stein reluctantly ruled him out and once again played Willie Wallace in the right-hand side of his midfield twosome. On this occasion, he would be partnered by Bertie Auld with Charlie Gallagher dropping onto the substitute’s bench.

Drizzle greeted Billy McNeill and Harry Glasgow, the respective captains, as they led their teams out of the tunnel, across the red ash running track and onto the drenched pitch. The infuriating Hampden Swirl was once more making its annoying presence known. This was to be Celtic’s seventeenth domestic Cup-tie of the season, including the League and Glasgow Cups, and Stein’s team had won the lot. Clyde, with combination of true grit, exceptional organisation and generous fortune, were ninety minutes away from ending the sequence. The encounter finished all-square without either keeper being invited to retrieve the ball from his net.

HEADS I WIN…Tommy Gemmell clears from a young Harry Hood in a rare Clyde attack.

HEADS YOU LOSE…Clyde defender John McHugh clears an effort from Billy McNeill effort off the line.

And, yet, Celtic claimed with validity for a penalty-kick four minutes from time; the proverbial stonewaller that was witnessed by everyone in the 56,704 crowd with the curious exception of the only man who mattered, referee John Gordon. The match official was no stranger to controversy and, in 1978, was banned by the Scottish Football Association after receiving gifts to the value of £1,000 from AC Milan before a UEFA Cup second leg tie which the Italians won 3-0 against Levski Sofia following a 1-1 draw in Bulgaria. The suspension was just twelve years too late for the frustrated Celtic contingent congregated around the vicinity of Mount Florida that afternoon.

Photographs in the following day’s newspapers showed incontrovertible proof that Clyde defender Davie Soutar had used an elbow to divert a goalscoring shot from Jimmy Johnstone off the line. Remarkably, Gordon waved play on to utter disbelief of the Celtic players and obvious relief of their Clyde counterparts. It would be trite to imply the part-timers did not deserve something following their superhuman efforts, but it is difficult to ignore the fact that luck intervened on sporadic occasions to keep them interested in the national competition. Billy McNeill twice powered headers beyond Tommy McCulloch and resolute defender Glasgow cleared the first and, moments later, John McHugh performed another last-ditch rescue from under the crossbar.

One watching scribe observed, ‘To be truthful, it was a dour battle, fought without marked inspiration by either side. The general standard of passing and finishing was deplorably low and, although there was perhaps more excitement in the second-half during which Clyde were facing into a troublesome wind, it was fleeting and, as often than not, completely unproductive. It is perhaps indicative of the afternoon’s trend of events that all the players who passed muster were in defence. Billy McNeill, as well as being a masterful centre-half, was the game’s most effective attacker, even if he did confine his efforts in that sphere to corner-kicks.’

The reporter continued, ‘Such was the ineffectiveness of the forwards that it was not until thirty-one minutes had elapsed that either goalkeeper had to make a save of any consequence and, even then, it was by a defender, Tommy Gemmell, who brought out the best in Tommy McCulloch with a tremendous shot from twenty yards which looked netbound all the way until the goalkeeper miraculously turned the ball over the crossbar one-handed.’

Jock Stein left immediately after the game to catch a plane bound for Czechoslovakia to watch European Cup semi-final opponents Dukla Prague. He admitted, ‘Yes, it’s disappointing not to finish the tie and we had the chances that would have gone in on another day. An extra fixture at this stage of the season is something we could do without, but we are still in the tournament and we will just have to win the replay.’

The second game would have to be played again on the following Wednesday which would give the Celtic manager, scheduled to return from the Czechoslovakian capital on Monday, forty-eight hours to prepare his players for another Hampden tilt. His mood was heightened somewhat when he was informed Rangers had lost 1-0 to Dunfermline at Ibrox and Celtic were now two points ahead at the top of the table with a game in hand and only five matches left to play. The Parkhead side were now massive favourites to achieve their second successive championship.

In front of a crowd of 55,138 in the replay, Celtic were two goals ahead by the twenty-second minute, courtesy of efforts from Bobby Lennox and Bertie Auld, and had as good as booked their third successive Scottish Cup Final berth during Jock Stein’s reign and their fifth in seven years. Willie Wallace again lined up in the No.4 shorts, but, on this occasion, was hardly a direct replacement for Bobby Murdoch. Stein gave that position to Charlie Gallagher with Auld playing beside him on the left. By the time Davie White had cottoned on, his team were heading for the exit.

The opening goal arrived as early as the second minute when Stevie Chalmers had a shot blocked and Lennox swooped on the rebound. And Auld, displaying his usual quick thinking, claimed the second after Chalmers had nodded the ball into his path. The midfielder flummoxed his marker Stan Anderson with a swift shuffle of his feet and a change of direction before belting an effort high past Tommy McCulloch. Jimmy Johnstone had looked out of sorts and it was no surprise he was replaced by John Hughes just before the hour mark. It was later discovered the winger had been suffering flu symptoms and he wasn’t even considered for inclusion to the squad for the game against Motherwell three days later as Celtic travelled to Fir Park, the scene of the previous season’s joyous title celebrations.

NINETY MINUTES FROM GLORY…Celtic players John Clark, Tommy Gemmell, Ronnie Simpson and Billy McNeill line up before the European Cup semi-final against Dukla Prague.

The players may have had their focus somewhat blurred with the European Cup semi-final first leg against Dukla Prague at Parkhead due the following Wednesday, but they failed to spark on this occasion. It was a fairly dismal confrontation and the nearest Celtic came to breaking the deadlock in the first-half was a trademark header from Billy McNeill that was knocked off the line by Davie Whiteford with his goalkeeper, Peter McCloy, out of position and in distress. Charlie Gallagher limped out of proceedings at half-time and was replaced by Jim Brogan, whose forte was more destructive than constructive, but it didn’t prevent the champions from winning 2-0 to keep their place at the pinnacle of the First Division with four games remaining and a match in hand.

The barrier-breaking goal arrived just before the hour mark when Bertie Auld crossed for Willie Wallace to strike an awesome volley wide of McCloy. Tommy Gemmell made certain in the seventieth minute with another blistering penalty-kick. It was a vital win to put Jock Stein’s team on fifty-four points while the best Rangers could have managed was a total of fifty-eight. Celtic also had the distinct edge on goal average, with one hundred and five strikes compared to the Ibrox side’s ninety-eight while Ronnie Simpson had conceded twenty-eight as opposed to their twenty-seven.

On a crisp, still Wednesday evening of April 12, Celtic moved within an hour-and-a-half of a place in the European Cup Final. Jock Stein’s pre-match requirement was stark: a two-goal advantage to take to Czechoslovakia. The players responded and Dukla Prague were dismissed 3-1 in front of 74,406 excited supporters who were beginning to believe their team just might be in with a chance of conquering Europe. The thought would have been disregarded as a combination of irrational, unreasonable and absurd only eight months beforehand.

JINKY’S DINK…Jimmy Johnstone lifts the ball over Dukla Prague keeper Ivo Viktor for the opening goal.

Willie Wallace went some way to replay his £30,000 transfer fee with two splendid goals in his debut appearance in Europe’s premier trophy. Jimmy Johnstone, a source of inspiration on this occasion, claimed the other. But the encounter kicked off in controversial fashion when Stevie Chalmers had a goal disallowed. Tommy Gemmell flighted an inviting ball downfield, Wallace got a touch to Chalmers, he slipped it to Johnstone coming in from the right and the little winger chipped it back for Chalmers to nod in at the near post. The referee ruled Johnstone’s foot was dangerously high while collecting the ball and cancelled the effort.

Dukla, it must be pointed out, were no dummies on an evening that was perfect for football. Josef Masopust would never be invited to blow out the candles on a thirtieth birthday cake again, but he was looking very comfortable in his team’s engine room as he dictated the flow of the game with masterly poise. In the gangly Stanislav Strunc he had a willing accomplice in making life a trifle uneasy for the Celtic defence. Ronnie Simpson had to look lively on two occasions before he actually set in motion the game’s opening goal in the twenty-eighth minute.

The keeper, who normally initiated attacks with throw-outs, mainly to Bobby Murdoch and Bertie Auld, elected to launch a clearance down the middle. Chalmers got a flick and it fell for Auld who teed it up for Wallace. His shot deflected off a defender into the path of Johnstone and he gleefully lifted it over the head of the outrushing Ivo Viktor, another internationally-acclaimed goalkeeper. However, that effort was nullified on the stroke of half-time when the Celtic central defence got into a real muddle on their own eighteen-yard line. Strunc pounced and stroked the ball away from Simpson. Celtic Park was struck dumb.

PARKHEAD SILENCED…Stanislav Strunc levels for the Czechs just before the interval.

Simpson remembered, ‘Masopust created the opening with a through pass to Nedorost. The inside-left slipped and looked as though he had handled the ball, but he managed to flick it to Strunc, the tall, ungainly outside-right, who fairly crashed it where I didn’t want it to go.’

Tommy Gemmell said, ‘In the dressing room, we got the usual pep talk from Big Jock and, rather obviously, conceding a goal just before the interval is horrible timing. But you can’t come off the pitch feeling sorry for yourself.

‘You must not dwell on it; you have to concentrate fully on what is still to come. “Just play like you did in the first-half and you’ll win,” urged the Boss. Actually, we were already thinking along those lines, anyway. I know I was.’

Just before the hour mark, the left-back punted the ball forward and Wallace was running free of the Czech defence to get a wonderful touch off the outside of his right boot to send the ball soaring into the net for the second goal.

PICK IT OUT…Willie Wallace flashes an effort high over Ivo Viktor for the second goal.

Five minutes later, a desperate Ladislav Novak pawed away a high ball from Bobby Murdoch and received a booking for his goalkeeping tendencies. It didn’t get any better when Bertie Auld stepped up to take the resultant free-kick. He dithered a bit to unsettle the defensive wall and then touched the ball sideways to Wallace who bulleted an unstoppable first-time drive past Viktor. The ball was stretching the netting before he even had the opportunity to twitch a muscle.

With twenty-five minutes still to go, the Czech champions were on the verge of collapse and surrender. They were there for the taking as Celtic rolled forward in numbers, the fans urging them on for more goals. Chalmers slashed one past the post, Wallace wasn’t far off target with another and Murdoch sent a left-foot belter just over the crossbar. Wallace even knocked one against the face of the bar from a Chalmers cross.

Masopust the maestro had disappeared under the onslaught, but he and his team-mates held out until the end and Celtic had to be content with a 3-1 advantage to take to Prague.

Willie Wallace said, ‘There has always been the suggestion I should have taken my European bow in the quarter-final ties against Vojvodina. I have heard that, although I was registered to play in the domestic competitions, someone had been a little late in getting the forms to UEFA to allow me to play in the European tournament. I signed for Celtic on December 10 1966 and the first leg against the Yugoslavians was on March 1 1967. That’s a fair period between signing and that game and, to be completely honest, I don’t know how long you had to be registered back then to allow you to play in Europe.

‘I am not complaining, though. You never know what might have happened if I had played against Vojvodina – maybe we wouldn’t have got through! As it was, I was more than delighted to play against Dukla Prague in the following round. I had been sitting alongside the injured Joe McBride in the stand at Celtic Park to witness that astounding quarter-final against the Slavs and I thought, “Wispy, this is the place for you!” I wanted a slice of that, believe me. I know the other lads would all say the same thing, but the atmosphere generated by our support during those European occasions was just breathtaking. Quite staggering, really.

‘I was well up for the Dukla game. I had anticipated it for weeks and just hoped I would get the go-ahead from Big Jock to play. You never took anything for granted with the Boss because that would have been a huge mistake. But everything just went so well for me on my European Cup debut. I couldn’t have scripted it better myself. A 3-1 victory and two goals from me.

‘Okay, it would have been nice to have claimed a hat-trick, but I wasn’t grumbling. I came close, you know. I actually hit the crossbar near the end. Big Jock had told us beforehand, “Get a two-goal advantage and I’m sure we’ll get through.” My first goal came just before the hour mark when Big Tommy launched one downfield. It might have been a clearance, but he has always assured me it was an inch-perfect pass! Anyway, suddenly I had a bit of freedom in the Dukla penalty area, and managed to flick the ball with the outside of my foot and it carried past their keeper.

‘About five minutes or so later, Celtic Park just went crazy when I scored again. It was all down to the cunning antics of Bertie Auld. He stepped up to take a free-kick, paused and looked as though he was about to recentre it. I knew what was coming next, though. Bertie merely slipped the ball to the side and I was coming in behind him to hit it first time. The ball flew through their defensive wall and was in the net before Ivo Viktor could move. It looked like an impromptu bit of skill from Wee Bertie, but, take my word for it, that little bit of trickery came straight off the training ground. We practised that move every day.

‘It was an idea from Big Jock who was always looking at ways of developing free-kicks and corner-kicks. He continually urged us to put variety into deadball situations and Wee Bertie seized the moment against Dukla Prague. The Czechs were startled. They began pointing at Stevie Chalmers and claiming offside. Stevie had followed my shot into the net, but there was no way he had been off. It was just his speed getting round the back of the wall that got him into that position. When I connected with the ball, I can assure everyone that Stevie was well onside.’

TOMORROW: Celtic’s Wembley wonders and stalemate in Prague.

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The Father-Son Story Of The Two Michael Sams

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The Father-Son Story Of The Two Michael Sams

Michael Sam Jr. doesn’t talk to his father, who has been caricatured in the press as an anti-gay man who abandoned his family. But there’s a lot more to the story.

In a yellow-walled room in a Texas nursing home this July, a man in a wheelchair watched a flat-screen TV. He saw Michael Sam Jr. kiss his boyfriend and hug his small team of supporters — agents, coaches, and Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown. The first out gay player drafted into the National Football League strode to the stage to receive ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Award, an honor previously bestowed on Muhammad Ali, Pat Tillman, and Nelson Mandela. It was the climax of a star-studded evening in Los Angeles meant to announce Michael Jr.’s arrival as a national icon.

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Michael Sam accepts the Arthur Ashe Courage Award onstage during the 2014 ESPY Awards in Los Angeles. Michael Buckner / Getty Images For ESPYS

Michael Jr. thanked his agents, his publicist, the couple who welcomed him into their home in high school, supporters from the University of Missouri, and top officials with the St. Louis Rams, the team that had drafted him only two months earlier.

Finally, he gave a brief nod to his roots. “To my mother, a single mother who somehow raised eight kids. I love you dearly.”

Back in his cramped room at the nursing home, Michael Sam Sr. picked up his battered, flip-style phone and found his son’s number. He left a message.

“So that’s what you’re going to do?” he recalled telling his son. “After all I’ve done for you?”

Since Michael Jr. publicly announced he was gay in February — just days after he let his father know by text message — Michael Sr. has been vilified in the press. In the New York Times, Michael Sr. came off as a callous homophobe when he said, “I don’t want my grandkids raised in that kind of environment. … I’m old school. I’m a man-and-a-woman type of guy.” When the ESPN documentary declared that Michael Sr. had “abandoned the family” and left his mother to raise Michael Jr. and his seven siblings on her own, Michael Sr. seemed the archetype of the intolerant and absent black father.

In none of these accounts did Michael Jr. come to his father’s defense. “I’m closer to my friends than I am to my family,” Michael Jr. told the Times.

But the father-son story of Michael Sr. and Michael Jr. is more than a conflict over whether Michael Sr. loved and supported his son. It’s the tale of man who’s been reduced to a caricature but whose actual life was shaped by the loss of child after child, some to death and some to crime. The rift between Michael Sr. and his youngest son started long before Michael Jr. came out and stems in no small part from those family tragedies.

Of course, those losses shaped Michael Jr. too, but he isn’t saying how. Through his agent and publicist, he declined numerous requests for an interview. But it’s not hard to see how, in order to succeed and perhaps just to survive, he might blame his father, fairly or not, for what happened to his family.

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Joel Anderson/BuzzFeed

Michael Sr. spends most of his days at the DeSoto Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, about 15 miles southwest of Dallas. His electric hospital-style bed and almost all of his few belongings — a mini-fridge and a rolling dinner tray, mostly — are crammed into a corner of the room he shares with another patient. He locks his drawers because someone has been stealing his snacks.

He gets around in a wheelchair, having lost his ability to walk almost three years ago. He wears a gold chain around his broad neck, which bears a deep and long surgical scar that runs from the bottom of his hairline to somewhere past the neckline of his white undershirt. It’s not clear he knows exactly what ailment has left him in a wheelchair. “I have a hole in my neck,” he said. “But I ain’t gonna die in this motherfucker. I’m getting out of here.”

At 55, he’s one of the youngest and most vibrant residents at the nursing home. He has a paunch and false teeth, but he still possesses the thickly muscled shoulders and arms of someone nicknamed “Hammer,” a handle he got on the football field and in the streets. His hands still make large fists; kicking ass was a family pastime.

“Maaaannnn, I used to hit hard,” he said. “I taught all my sons to play football.”

He often rolls his wheelchair to a shaded patio, where he goes through Kool cigarettes like some people do cups of coffee. He banters with almost everyone. Especially the women. “Better quit bending that ass over like that,” he tells one of the women staffers, a smile creasing his fleshy face. The woman smiles back. If she or other women staffers are offended by his behavior, they don’t show it. At least a couple jokingly call him their boyfriend.

His phone rings throughout the day, bearing calls from his children or friends named ”Frank Tha Cook” or “Little Leroy.” The conversations usually cover his health, upcoming casino trips to Louisiana, and football, particularly the Cowboys, his favorite team since he was a boy.

One person who doesn’t call is Michael Jr., who kept his distance as he ascended to fame and more recently when he tumbled out of big-time football.

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Michael Sam in 2013 playing for the University of Missouri. Joe Robbins / Getty Images

After Michael Jr. publicly came out in February, even President Obama praised the announcement. On May 10, the St. Louis Rams drafted him, generating more praise. But despite the fact that he had been a star at the University of Missouri, where he became Co-Defensive Player of the Year in the powerful Southeastern Conference, he was chosen late. Only seven players were selected after him. He performed well during training camp and the preseason — but was still cut from the final roster on Aug. 30, touching off a debate about whether homophobia played a role in his release. The Cowboys signed him three days later to their practice squad, then dropped him on Oct. 21. He is now a free agent.

For the nearly two months that Michael Jr. was with the Cowboys, he lived a half hour away from his father. It was the closest they’ve lived to each other in about 15 years. A family friend, Sean Woods, hoped it would finally bring the men together. “Now,” he said, Michael Jr. “has to deal with his daddy.”

Yet the Michaels have exchanged only a few text messages and haven’t spoken a word to each other, a quiet that has now lasted at least several months with no end in sight. Michael Sr. has mostly kept up with the vicissitudes of his son’s career through updates on ESPN and phone calls from friends and family members.

Shortly after Michael Jr. was released from the Cowboys’ practice squad, Michael Sr. sent a text to BuzzFeed News: “Hey they cut Mike.” Asked if he’d heard from his son recently, Michael Sr. texted back that Michael Jr. “wouldn’t say a word to me honer [sic] thy father.”

“It’s like he was looking for an excuse to separate from us,” Michael Sr. said. “Now we’re just letting him have his limelight. We’re tired of begging him to stay in the family.”

On the room’s walls, Michael Sr. has pinned Father’s Day cards, a corkboard with a calendar and pictures of his family, and, over his bed, a lengthy poem about angels. On a special spot on the wall — right over his flat-screen TV — are two pictures of Michael Jr. in his University of Missouri football uniform. Pointing at the pictures, Michael Sr. said he knew from the start that Michael Jr. would be special.

“That boy, he had some big nuts,” Michael Sr. said. “He was big when he was born. That boy had some big-ass balls.”

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Paul Moseley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram / MCT

Wesley Sam, Michael Sr.’s father, was also pretty ballsy. In 1947, he was living in Opelousas, Louisiana, when he heard on the radio about what’s generally considered the deadliest industrial accident in U.S. history, an explosion at the Monsanto plant near Galveston, Texas. He headed right to the scene, figuring he could get work there.

He loaded cotton at the Galveston wharves for a few months before landing a job at the Monsanto plant. Yes, it had blown up, killing nearly 600 people, but he could make more money there than a black man could expect almost anywhere else.

He married Alberta, a fellow Opelousas native who spoke Creole, little English, and who couldn’t read or write. With their 10 children, they moved into a three-bedroom, one-bathroom home at 1732 Thompson St. in La Marque: Wesley and Alberta had a bedroom, the girls had one, and the boys had the room at the back of the house. “I had a white boy type of life at home,” Michael Sr. said. “There wasn’t nothing I couldn’t have wanted and gotten.”

Alberta died at 46 following “a brief illness,” according to her obituary in the La Marque Times. Wesley Sam was a loving man, a capable cook, and obsessive about cleanliness — he would dust off his car every day, his surviving children said. But he wasn’t quite up to the challenge of corralling all of those children. Who could? Instead he set his example through his work ethic, putting in a full day at Monsanto then mowing lawns with his sons in the evening. They’d do 18 yards a day, Wednesday through Sunday.

“My dad was a workaholic before anyone called it that,” Michael Sr. said. “He’d think you were sorry if you didn’t have that work mentality in you.”

Michael Sr.’s siblings went off to college, joined the military, and found middle-class jobs. His sister Geraldine would become La Marque’s first black mayor.

Michael Sr., meanwhile, dropped out of school over the protests of his father but earned a GED. He wasn’t much of a student anyway, and finding work in the area was a cinch for anyone who didn’t mind getting a few smudges on their shirt. He worked in construction, at a chemical plant, and as a crane operator and a forklift operator.

Away from work, Michael Sr. and his brothers drank, chased women, and kept up the family tradition of fisticuffs. “We’d be out in the front yard fighting,” Michael Sr. said, grinning at the memory. “Real fighting. Not no slapboxing.”

One night in 1978, Michael Sr. met a woman named JoAnn Turner at a local nightclub. “She was fine and good-looking,” Michael Sr. said. “And I walked her out.”

Little more than a year later, JoAnn gave birth to a boy they named Russell. A year later, they had daughter Chanel. Julian was born in June 1982. They were young and in love, with three kids and jobs that paid middle-class wages. It didn’t take long for Michael Sr. to settle into life as a family man, or long for it to be destroyed.

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Photograph by Dylan Hollingsworth for BuzzFeed

Here’s a news brief from the Associated Press on Sept. 23, 1982, with a dateline from Texas City: “The body of Chanel Roshaun Sam was found Monday night in about eight feet of water near a pier on which she had been playing. Her parents and neighbors searched for three hours before finding the body.” The little girl, 2 years old, had apparently drowned.

After several days of grief, and desperate to rescue JoAnn from her despair, Michael Sr. suggested they go to the courthouse. And so, six days after their daughter died, they were married.

“I felt like she needed some support,” Michael Sr. said. “It was the right thing to do, to bring something positive from it.”

It wasn’t enough. JoAnn turned to religion and became a Jehovah’s Witness. Her conversion deepened the fissure in her marriage, because Michael Sr. was raised as a Baptist and felt his wife’s new religion was too restrictive. She insisted the family not celebrate Christmas. “I celebrated it,” he said. “But she didn’t celebrate it with me. I still bought the kids gifts.�� (JoAnn didn’t respond to requests for an interview.)

Michael Sr. found his solace shooting dice. On Friday and Saturday evenings, he would take his paycheck to a little wooden shack in Texas City and gamble away the family’s money. JoAnn suspected the absences were because of another woman, Michael Sr. said. But a mutual friend of the couple gave her the scoop. In Michael Sr.’s version of the story, the woman told JoAnn that “he ain’t screwing none of us” but was just gambling.

One Friday night, Michael Sr. recalled, he won $700 and left the shack with two friends on an impromptu trip to Boy’s Town in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, an infamous red-light district just across the Texas border. He didn’t bother calling JoAnn to tell her that he was leaving town.

“Weren’t no cell phones back then, and I didn’t stop and spend the 25 cents to call,” he said. When he returned Sunday, “she bitched at my ass. But it was pretty funny. I had a blast.”

The marriage continued to spiral, though Joshua was born in 1984 and Christopher in 1985. Michael Sr. finally filed for divorce in February 1986. A brief attempt at reconciliation resulted in the birth of Michelle in 1987. But the divorce was granted in 1988.

JoAnn was awarded primary parental responsibilities. Michael Sr. would have access to the children two weekends each month, and they divided up the holidays.

Michael Sr. was also ordered to pay JoAnn $250 each month for child support. Within a few months, JoAnn returned to court to complain that Michael Sr. wasn’t meeting his obligation. Thus started a four-year battle over child support. Michael Sr. was charged with contempt of court at least 10 times stemming from his failure to pay, according to court records. Twice he was sent to county jail.

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The District Clerk’s Office of Galveston County

“It was because I was running around and spending money and shooting dice,” Michael Sr. said. JoAnn “needed more money, and I was doing the very minimum. I should’ve been doing more.”

Typical of their on-again, off-again relationship, JoAnn gave birth in 1990 to Michael Jr. — right in the middle of their child support dispute — and the next year to Ashley, the eighth and last child they would have together. “Man, I had some phases with JoAnn,” Michael Sr. said.

In July 1992, JoAnn went to court to sign off on an agreement to release Michael Sr. from county jail and to clarify the terms of the support payments. At that point, according to court documents, Michael Sr. was behind nearly $4,000 in payments.

During the Christmas holidays that year, Michael Sr. said, JoAnn made a surprise visit to his house. “She wore one of those Mormon dresses — she knows that I like dresses,” he said, laughing. This time, he said, she demanded more than a night together.

On May 3, 1993, Michael Sr. and JoAnn went to the county courthouse once again — to get remarried.

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Photograph by Dylan Hollingsworth for BuzzFeed

Michael Sr. took no small pride in raising sons who were every bit the hell-raiser that he was. People around the neighborhood called him a man’s man. “My dad didn’t take no shit off nobody, and I didn’t take no shit off nobody,” Michael Sr. said. “I wasn’t a bad guy. But I was a ‘I’ll kick your ass’ kind of guy.”

“All of his kids were muscular and some bad dudes,” said Charles Sam, Michael Sr.’s brother.

The toughest of the bunch was also the oldest: Russell. As a freshman, he was pegged as a future football star at La Marque High School. Michael Sr. fondly remembers how Russell would walk around the neighborhood, “always ready to slap a motherfucker.”

But, he said, “I kept telling him to get out of that gang shit.”

Here’s a clipping from the Galveston County Daily News. It reports that on Feb. 27, 1995, Russell was sent home early from La Marque High School for “creating a disturbance.” A school administrator allowed Russell to walk home since his mother couldn’t leave work to pick him up.

Instead of heading straight home, the newspaper said, Russell stopped at a house about a half mile from the school. He was breaking into the back door when the homeowner fired at him three times through a metal door. Russell was clutching a screwdriver when his body was found. No charges were filed against the homeowner (who was also black).

The anger welled up within Michael Sr., who casually knew the man who had killed his son. There weren’t many strangers on that side of town. Michael Sr. got himself a handgun. “I was going to kill him,” Michael Sr. said. “I was going to go over there and end him. But my daddy saved me. He wouldn’t let me go over there.”

His father saved him. But Michael Sr. couldn’t save his own sons.

At 5 feet 4 inches and 125 pounds, second-oldest son Julian had an unusually slight build for a Sam boy. He went by the nickname “Ice Pick.” But he had a left arm that was made for pitching. “That boy could throw,” Michael Sr. said. “He used to strike Russell out all the time. Those were the funnest days.”

But, Michael Sr. said, “he wanted his own money” and begged his father to let him work. Michael Sr. eventually gave in, and Julian took a job with a local cable company.

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The Daily News

Here’s another headline from The Daily News, this one from Oct. 22, 1998: “La Marque mother looks for clues into son’s disappearance.”

Julian was last seen outside La Marque’s high school football stadium, where he had gone to buy tickets to the homecoming game. JoAnn told the newspaper, “What has me afraid is that he had just gotten paid, and had $200 on him.”

“I should just not have let him work,” Michael Sr. told BuzzFeed News. “I should have let him throw that ball. He would’ve been a left-handed pitcher.”

Julian hasn’t been seen since that homecoming game, and 16 years later the police maintain his disappearance is still an open case.

When Michael Jr. was born, his parents were scarred by the drowning of their daughter and were feuding over child support. When he was 5, his oldest brother was gunned down. When he was 8, his second-oldest brother vanished.

His remaining brothers, Josh and Chris, tormented him constantly. “His brothers picked on him,” said Michael Sr., who also grew up as the youngest brother in his family. “I’d have to go in there and tell them to quit that shit and leave him alone.” Michael Jr. told Outsports he was a “punching bag” for his older brothers.

Josh was also showing a precocious ability to find trouble in the streets of La Marque. “No one had reached 18 yet,” Michael Sr. said of his children. “I didn’t think [Josh] was going to reach it either.”

Michael Sr. and JoAnn decided that Hitchcock, a town only four miles away, might do them all some good.

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Population 7,000, Hitchcock was founded in 1873 as a railroad station between Houston and Galveston. Today, it’s a quiet two-stoplight town that sits along a state highway. By most socioeconomic markers — home ownership, median income, residents with college degrees (just 8.2%) — Hitchcock ranks below the Texas average.

The Sams settled into a well-kept rose-colored wood-frame house that sat along the railroad tracks and unkempt ditches on the black side of town. It seemed isolated enough from the troubles that La Marque had visited upon their family, but it wasn’t.

La Marque police reopened the investigation into Julian’s disappearance after getting reports that people had seen him in the area. “We think he left on his own free will and we feel strongly he is alive,” the police chief told the Texas City Sun in October 2000.

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An age-progressed photo of Julian Sam. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children / Via missingkids.com

JoAnn told the Sun that she also believed he was still alive. “He was at that age of rebellion,” she said, suggesting he had run away from home. She told the newspaper that she wanted him to come home or at least call someone in the family to let them know he was OK.

In grief, Michael Sr. had quit his job at the post office. “I had always had a steady job, but I couldn’t handle it no more,” he said. “I felt closed in. Just thinking of it.” He found work as a crane operator but was laid off soon after. He got a job working for a local pipe company and was let go again. Finally, in the fall of 1999, a family friend told him he should consider truck driving. Michael Sr. went to school in Dallas, and four months later was on the road, coming back to Hitchcock when he could, mostly on weekends.

“It was a steady job,” he said, and one that answered a deeper need: “I had to get away. I wanted to get away.”

The marriage crumbled. Michael Sr. and JoAnn remain legally married but haven’t lived as a couple since he moved to Dallas in 2000.

Michael Jr. was 10 when his father started his life on the road. With JoAnn working late hours and taking extra shifts to provide for the children, Michael Jr.’s older brothers had their run of the house — and the streets. “It was bad,” Michael Jr. said in an ESPN documentary about his life. “I’m a kid and I’m seeing some hardcore drugs in my house. My mother didn’t know about it. If I told her anything, my brothers said they would kill me.”

Craig Smith, one of his high school football coaches, saw it for himself. “Sometimes I’d drive over to pick him up and honk the horn and one of his brothers would come out to see if I wanted to buy” drugs, he told a crowd at the school’s annual football reunion dinner in late July.

The criminal records of Michael Jr.’s brothers support these accounts: Josh has been arrested more than 40 times, including four convictions for drug possession, and Chris has tallied nearly 20 arrests.

In April, Chris was sentenced to 30 years in state prison for breaking into a woman’s home, choking her into unconsciousness twice, then using her credit card at a nearby restaurant. Josh was put in the Galveston County Jail in July on a minor offense and was released last month.

“I got caught up in them streets,” Josh admitted during a June interview with BuzzFeed News, a rare evening this year when he wasn’t locked up.

Little of this came as a surprise to family members. Cousins remember being warned to keep their distance. “We knew it wasn’t the ideal upbringing,” said Joseph Sam, a nephew of Michael Sr. “They were always in trouble.”

With his childhood saturated with grief and his older brothers descending into crime, Michael Jr. would have had to be a saint not to look for someone to blame. Conveniently, his father was already blaming himself.

Out on the road, far away from home, Michael Sr. remained tormented by the loss of his boys. Teaching them toughness had backfired; he’d armed them with tools for survival in one world that wouldn’t work in almost any other.

“Life was going to be tough on them,” he said. “Your skin had to be tougher than the others. But I also wanted them to make the right decisions.”

Somewhere in these years, Michael Sr. began to lose the last of his sons — not to death or crime, but to rejection.

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Courtesy of Robert Dohman

On his first day of third grade, in a new town and new school, Michael Jr. was seated next to a chubby, snowy-haired boy. Michael Jr. wasn’t saying much to his new seatmate. The silence went on for so long and got so awkward that eventually the boy spoke up.

“I told the teacher that I didn’t want to sit next to him because he was too quiet,” said Robert Dohman. “He turns around and goes, ‘Hey, blondie boy, I’m not quiet!’ And that’s the way me and Michael get along now.”

Michael Jr. was voted “friendliest” by his sixth-grade classmates and elected homecoming king in eighth grade. His popularity was a testament to his ability to navigate the unspoken color line of a small Southern town; most of his close friends were white.

“My grandma,” said Dohman, “was very old-school and wasn’t into all that racial mixing. But when I had Michael over, he’d always be the first one to come over and give everybody a hug. Even her. He really changed the way my grandmother looked at black people. She would even smile when he came around.”

Michael Sr. said he saw little of the outgoing side of his son, saying he was quiet at home. But coaches and teachers remember him as a precociously self-assured teenager who could start a conversation with anyone. After football games, Michael Jr. was known for going into the bleachers — uniform and pads still on — to introduce himself to parents.

Michael could “talk to a group of 15-year-olds and then set there and talk to a group of 55-year-olds and not feel out of place either,” said Smith, now head football coach at Hitchcock. “I just never had a student that could just go and talk to a group of people. He would make friends all the time.”

Even in what was ostensibly enemy territory. Smith recalled a track meet at Danbury, a nearby town that is 90% white, less than 1% black, and had developed a reputation for being unfriendly to minorities. Except, apparently, Michael Jr.

“I can remember some Danbury parents cheering and rooting for Michael running the 100-meter” dash, Coach Smith said. “You just didn’t see that, if you know anything about Danbury.”

Maybe the biggest benefit of playing sports is that it kept Michael Jr. away from his brothers. The coaches, who also worked as teachers in the district, knew all about Josh and Chris: Their obvious athleticism had never proven to be worth the trouble. But Michael Jr. was charting a path different from the men in his family. Michael Jr. greeted people with hugs, not fists. He was going to be the first to graduate.

“Michael was a good kid,” Michael Sr. said. “He said he didn’t want to be like his brothers.” Left unsaid was that Michael Jr. clearly felt the same about his father.

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Courtesy of Robert Dohman

On fall Friday nights, Michael Sr. said he would find a seat somewhere in Hitchcock’s football stadium, away from the crowd and sometimes with his father, Wesley. After nearly 30 years as a father, he said, he could finally engage in the autumn ritual familiar across Texas.

“I didn’t miss [any] home game his senior year,” Michael Sr. insisted.

There isn’t anyone who can corroborate his perfect attendance. Family and friends say they’re sure he went to some games but don’t know about all of them. The coaches at Hitchcock High can remember seeing or, rather, hearing, Michael Sr. only once in four years: a game in Michael Jr.’s sophomore year.

“I heard this guy yelling at Michael and I turned to Michael and asked him, ‘Who the hell is that guy?’” Smith recalled. “Michael said it was his father. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen him.”

Those stadiums can be hubs of activity on Friday nights, and coaches are notoriously focused on the events unfolding well away from the stands. It would be easy to miss someone on game night, right?

“Let me say this in a nice way,” Smith said. “I didn’t know him, and I know a lot of people in town. I can look up in those stands and know who’s there.”

Michael Sr. said he didn’t make it a priority to spend any time with the parents of Michael Jr.’s friends or the alums and other regulars who would show up at school events — most of them white. “I never did know them,” Michael Sr. said. “And I never tried to go out of my way.”

Michael Sr. said he took a job with a trucking company based out of Ada, Oklahoma, so that he could arrive in Hitchcock by the start of kickoff Friday night. He assumed his son appreciated what he considered a significant sacrifice of time and money; coming back to Texas without a load meant he wouldn’t get paid for the drive home.

It wasn’t until earlier this year, when media outlets began saying that he had abandoned his son, that Michael Sr. learned he was being phased out of the story of his son’s childhood. He never thought all those years on the road would mean that he wasn’t there.

“Michael’s family was the city of Hitchcock,” said Dohman, Michael Jr.’s childhood friend.

Told what Dohman said, Michael Sr. looked straight ahead, the anger washing over him. Sitting on that patio at the nursing home, he was, for a few moments, that angry Sam boy ready to fight.

“The city of Hitchcock didn’t buy his goddamn clothes, a roof over his head, or the bed that he slept in,” Michael Sr. said. “The city of Hitchcock can kiss my ass.” He paused. “I should have kept those gas receipts.”

Of course, Michael Sr. never thought he would need them. He also never thought the family of a high school teammate — a white one — would get so much credit.

Once Michael Jr. revealed in February his plans to become the NFL’s first out gay player, the two media outlets with which his publicists coordinated the announcement wrote this:

The New York Times: Sam found a comfortable place off the field as well, in large part because of Ethan Purl, a classmate and the son of Ron Purl, the president of the local branch of Prosperity Bank. Ron’s wife, Candy, made sure their house was part recreation center and part counseling hub for their children and their friends. By Sam’s senior year, he had his own bedroom in the Purls’ house, along with chores like cleaning the pool and carrying the grocery bags. “I look at our house as a kind of safe haven,” said Ron Purl, who keeps a photograph of Sam in his Missouri football uniform in his office. “He is just another son. If he did something wrong, he got yelled at just like the others did.”

ESPN: The relationship started when Candy Purl, Ronnie’s wife, invited Michael to dinner during his freshman year of high school. Ronnie, a man with a personality much bigger than he is, discovered a kid he didn’t recognize and demanded to know, “And who are you?”

“Without skipping a beat, my brother replied, ‘I’m Michael Alan Sam Jr.!,’” said Ethan Purl, Ronnie’s son. “And after that, he never left.”

“That’s a bunch of shit,” Michael Sr. said. Sure, he said, his son went to the Purls’ on weekends, but “Michael lived at home to the day he graduated.”

“He lived with the rest of us,” agreed Michael Jr.’s sister Michelle.

“The Purls only helped [him] in [his] senior year,” his aunt Geraldine said. “If the Purls were really good people, they’d tell Michael that he was wrong. That he should acknowledge his mother and daddy.”

After a brief phone conversation in which he said he didn’t have time to speak, Ethan Purl did not return repeated phone calls. Ronnie Purl declined a number of interview requests. “Without Michael’s approval I will not be able to speak with you,” he said in an email. “Being in banking, I am very aware of privacy issues.”

Michael Sr. said he met the Purls at least once, when he accompanied Michael Jr. on one of his visits over there.

“I just wanted to see where Michael was going, to make sure where he was going was the right environment,” Michael Sr. said.

In fact, Michael Sr. liked that his youngest son had white friends. He was convinced his association with them might mean better grades, a high school diploma, and maybe even college — the chance at success that his other sons never had.

“He wasn’t messing with the black guys trying to sell drugs and doing drugs — I thought that was a good thing,” Michael Sr. said. “As long as he wasn’t doing nothing crazy, wasn’t in no cult, I was all right with it.”

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A yearbook page shows Michael Sam during his high school days in Hitchcock, Texas. Scott Dalton/The New York Times/REDUX

When Michael Jr. was at the University of Missouri, Michael Sr. began noticing some changes in his son, he recalled. There was that road trip from Dallas to Houston with Michael Jr. and one of his college friends, Vito Cammisano, a member of the men’s swim team. What struck Michael Sr. was his son’s taste in music.

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Michael Sam with his boyfriend, Vito Cammisano. Michael Buckner / Getty Images For ESPYS)

“He knew all of them white songs,” Michael Sr. said. “He knew country, Taylor Swift, all that stuff. I’m like, What brother knows all of them white songs? That tripped me out.”

On another one of Michael Jr.’s trips home with Vito, Michael Sr. noticed their relationship seemed much closer than a simple friendship. How else to explain Vito coming home for the holidays? Michael Sr. waited until they returned to Missouri to broach his suspicions to his wife. “I told JoAnn, ‘You know, Mike ain’t bring his girlfriend but he brought this dude. That’s kinda funny,’” Michael Sr. said. “But she swore up and down” that he wasn’t gay. “I kept asking Mike was this boy funny? ‘No, Daddy, no. Ain’t nothing wrong with Vito,’ he’d say.”

“He didn’t act gay then either,” Michael Sr. said of Vito.

But during a visit to Missouri for one of Michael Jr.’s games last fall, Michael Sr. became certain about Vito.

“I shook that boy’s hand, and that boy’s hand felt like a woman’s,” Michael Sr. said. “And the boy looked different. I told my brother that that boy right there is gay.”

When they went out for dinner later that night, Michael Jr. showed them a picture of a woman he said he was dating; Michael Jr.’s Instagram account has lots of pictures of him in college posing with young women.

“I still had some suspicions,” Michael Sr. said. But other family members “didn’t wanna believe it. I had intuition about that boy.”

That intuition was finally confirmed this year. On Feb. 4, Michael Sr.’s birthday, he received a text message from his son. “I could tell his PR guy wrote that message because Mike don’t talk like that,” Michael Sr. said. “It was some bullshit. ‘I wanted to inform you that I’m gay.’”

“That’s all you’ve got to say?” Michael Sr. remembered texting Michael Jr. in response. “He texted me back, ‘Happy birthday.’ So I went out and got drunk.”

Five months later, in his room at the nursing home watching the red carpet show before his son would receive the Arthur Ashe Award, Michael Sr. grew wildly upset. He started calling and texting family members and friends.

With Vito at his side, Michael Jr. had been asked what was the most difficult part of coming out. He told the interviewer that it was telling his friends. Michael Sr. was incensed.

“If it was so hard to tell his friends, why didn’t he tell us first?” Michael Sr. said. “It was harder for him to tell us.”

And it probably was. One recent afternoon, Michael Sr.’s brother Charles asked if Michael Jr. might go back to women. Michael Sr. responded, “Women don’t really want to mess with you after doing all that gay shit.”

Michael Sr. is never going to be the spokesman for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. He’s not thrilled about his son’s sexual orientation. But he also hasn’t disowned his son. He never says his son is going to hell. He doesn’t talk about trying to cure him or make him straight. In his own rough-hewn, coarse way, Michael Sr. has accepted that his son is gay. “I love my son,” he said, “and I don’t care about what he do.”

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Michael Buckner / Getty Images For ESPYS

The family rift that the ESPY Awards exposed to a national audience had been there, deep and wide, for a while.

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Will Ebner L.G. Patterson / AP Photo

Seven months earlier, in December 2013, Michael Jr. came to Houston as one of the nominees for the Rotary Lombardi Award, which is awarded to the best college lineman or linebacker. Instead of asking his family to attend as guests, he invited the family of Missouri football teammate Will Ebner.

“We found out Will and I were going to be part of his family representing him,” said Elaine Ebner, mother of Will Ebner. “If someone else had come from his family, I would have wanted them to be center stage. I know my place. Mainly, I just wanted to be whatever he wanted me to be.”

Michael Jr.’s aunt Geraldine managed to score tickets from a friend who was a member of the Rotary Club. She also sat in the area designated for family. “When I got there, [Michael Jr.] was glad to see me. It’s always good to have family there,” she said.

Days later, Michael Jr. graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in parks, recreation, and tourism. Everyone in the family — except Josh and Chris, who were both in jail — made the 600-mile road trip from Texas to celebrate the first of JoAnn’s and Michael Sr.’s children to graduate from college.

To commemorate the occasion, Michael Jr. posted a picture on Instagram of himself in a cap and gown, a wide smile on his face and an elbow comfortably resting on the mantle of a fireplace. “It’s been a long time coming,” read his caption. He was alone in the photo and made no mention of anyone else being there — in that or any of his other public social media posts from the time.

Later in December, during the week of the Cotton Bowl in Dallas — Michael Jr.’s final college game — Michael Sr. said his son borrowed his car and spent all of his time with Vito and teammates. Michael Sr. also said his son lied to him about the location of the team hotel and then didn’t call him, or return any of his calls, for the rest of the week.

“I had to call him to get him to bring me my car back,” Michael Sr. said. “I kept calling and calling. He didn’t bring the car until the last day, and the game was the next day. He didn’t talk to me or nothing.”

In May, on the weekend of the NFL draft, Michael Jr.’s family was conspicuously absent when TV cameras followed him around at his agent’s home in San Diego. He declined an offer from his father’s family members to attend a draft party they wanted to host in Dallas, his aunt Geraldine and Michael Sr. said. Instead, he spent the weekend in California with Vito, some friends, and his agents.

“If he’s so ashamed of us,” Geraldine remembers one of his sisters telling her, “why doesn’t he just change his name?”

The day the Rams drafted him — when he was so happy that he kissed Vito and smeared his face with celebratory cake — might end up being the pinnacle of Michael Jr.’s NFL career. Now, cut from his second team, he is learning something his father learned long ago: Life can take what you want most.

Since 2000, Outsports noted, every single Defensive Player of the Year from the five major college football conferences made it onto an NFL team — except Michael Sam Jr. And it’s not that he played poorly in preseason. Far from it. He totaled 11 tackles and three sacks, a figure that left him tied for fourth in the league. His bold announcement of his sexuality, which garnered him glamorous accolades, may have also destroyed his football career.

Disappointment and loss are feelings Michael Sr. knows well, of course, so the two Michaels have more in common now than they may have ever had. And yet Michael Jr. doesn’t come to his father — or anyone in his family — for comfort. He keeps his distance.

To Michael Sr., sitting in his wheelchair or taking a drag on one of his Kools, that distance can feel like death. He doesn’t want to lose another son.

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Photograph by Dylan Hollingsworth for BuzzFeed

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/joelanderson/the-two-michael-sams

#Dallas Cowboys #Football #gay #LGBT #St. Louis Rams

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