#making holding hands a science experiment to justify the exchange | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

greetjk · 4 years

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0814

Fic Submission for @friendly-neighborhood-exchange: By: @gr-eet for @badmcuposts Rating: Teen+ Warnings: Hydra!Peter, brief discussion of human experimentation, torture, and kidnapping. Read at your own risk. Words: 19k Characters: Tony Stark, Peter Parker, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanov, Mentioned (Bucky Barnes, Pepper Pots, Norman Osborn, Wanda Maximoff, Curt Connors, Secretary Ross)

Summary: Tony scrolls through all of the documents then, trying to ignore the nagging feeling in the back of his mind that something is really wrong. Each document he skims through only solidifies this feeling in his gut until its crawling up the back of his throat like bile. Osborn and his disgusting ambition somehow found a way to justify human experimentation for his cross-species bullshit. And it all seems centered on this TS 08-14 individual.

All he feels for that brief, fleeting moment of consciousness is pain. That’s all he knows now: pain. It’s not always the same type of pain. Sometimes it’s sharp and it takes his breath away as needles dig into his skin. Sometimes it’s dull and throbbing, the waves of agony rolling on him in waves, worsening with each breath he takes. Sometimes it’s so bright and blinding that all he sees for hours is white. He can sometimes feel his teeth crack as he bites down on a thick, rough object wedged between his lips. Whenever he’s awake, it’s just pain. He vaguely remembers a time where the pain wasn’t a constant. He remembers warmth in the form of a golden smile and a warm embrace, but each time the faceless men with white coats visit him, he remembers less and less of that warmth. It grows colder with each passing minute.

“We’ll need another round of Benzos,” a voice says. It’s a voice he recognizes as one of the faceless men. But as he cries out in agony, teeth and jaw clenched, body rigid, he’s not sure which one it is. “We can’t keep working with the Паук squirming.”

He hears a sickening crack, and another sharp wave of agony strikes through his side. It takes his breath away; he’s gasping against the cold, metal slab beneath his bareback. It’s so cold. He’s always been so cold.

“Boss, the mutation has severely altered… his body burns right through…” The words are lost to him in his pained haze. He tries so hard to latch onto each word. It’s impossible, it’s always been impossible. He feels a prick and an insufferable burning in his arm before a familiar heaviness seeps into his bones. It spreads through his body like water, and with each passing second, the excruciating pain dulls into a constant buzz in the background. In only these moments, he finds rest.

“So Hydra has another little base doing their lame science experiments,” Tony says as he faces Steve, arms crossed against his chest. “What’s that got to do with us right now, Rogers? I’ve got a gala to attend, and you know, I’ve really got to put more thought into what I’m going to wear. The red satin is really calling my name, but Pepper thinks that sapphire-”

“Tony, focus for one second please?” Steve says with his arms crossed against his chest. He’s staring at Tony with as much disappointment as he is sure Rogers can muster. It’s impressive, really. “We’ve made good progress destroying major Hydra bases. All that is left are the smaller, sister locations. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t equally as dangerous.”

“Can you even uncross your arms, Rogers? Like, is it even physically possible?” Tony asks, tilting his head as he looks at the Captain. It’s not that he’s totally against the raging excitement of taking down a useless little Hydra base. The suit was itching for a run-in with some bad guys, but he really did need to attend this party. Not for himself, really, but Pepper would have his head on a silver platter if he didn’t at least pull through with one Stark Industries event this year. “Why do you need me? I mean, I’m flattered to know you have such a big crush on me. But I’m sure it’s nothing you and Romanov can’t do yourselves.”

“Usually you’re the one talking us into doing stupid things.” Natasha quips from her place across the room, although her voice is too weary to seem teasing. She stands against the kitchen counter, arms braced against the granite behind her. “C’mon, you’re too lazy to show us up?”

“Not lazy,” Tony insisted. “Just self-concerned. I, for one, don’t see anything wrong with that.” Again, he’s self-concerned because he knows that if he misses this gala that Pepper will have his head. But he thinks that Steve and Natasha don’t need to know anything about that. His fear of his girlfriend should be kept entirely to himself. Otherwise, he’s sure Rogers will use it against him.

“Tony,” Natasha huffs, stepping forward from her place by the kitchen counter. “You know it’s serious if I’m asking you for help.” The corner of her mouth tilts up in a half-smirk. She kept walking until she stood in front of Tony, arms crossed. She looks up at him, expression shifting into something more jaded. “It’s Oscorp. We think they’re making mutants, like the twins.”

Her words give Tony pause. It’s been a while since he’s heard any wind of the rotten Osborn and his company. It wasn’t long ago that the bastard horrifically failed at his attempts at using cross-species DNA mutation to solve medical crises across the globe. Tony’s fairly certain that that fiasco ended with him imprisoning a very scaly, slimy Dr. Curt Connors in the Raft. However, that was over three years ago, and Norman Osborne managed to cover it all up and the world would be none the wiser to the mad science hidden in Oscorp’s walls. Really, Tony hates the building more than anything. A tall, slate black skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan? It’s tactless and ugly if Tony has anything to say about it. At least Avengers Tower has some character to it. Now they’re involved with Hydra of all people?

Tony’s sure his luck is just rotten at this point. Hydra and Oscorp in one day? It’s like the universe is screaming for his overinflated ego to get involved and rub their sorry faces into the dirt just one more time. “The last thing we need after Sokovia is more mutants running around,” he says. “I’ll bite. You get in there, free a bunch of mutants? What’s your plan there, Spangled?”

Steve breathes a deep sigh. He moves from where he stands near the doorway towards Natasha and Tony. Tony still thinks he looks a bit constipated. “On our last raid in Oslo, we found… files in their databases. I think they’ve been drawing our attention to these bigger outposts to distract us from something bigger going on.” He pulls a thumb drive from his back pocket, holding it up between two fingers to show Tony. “We think Oscorp is involved in this smaller base, but we need you to look at these and tell us where and who they come from.”

Natasha stares up at him, face like a stone. “We wouldn’t come if it wasn’t serious, Tony. This is bad.”

Tony presses his mouth into a line. “Gotta admit, Stripes, didn’t think you knew how to work a flash drive.” He extends his hand out as an invitation. “Give it here. If we’re going in, I better know that it’s actually worth it.”

Steve tosses him the flash drive, and Tony turns it over in his fingers. He doesn’t waste a second spinning his chair around to face his laptop. He pushes his glasses up further on the bridge of his nose as he plugs it into the side. “Got some data coming in, Fri,” he says. Before he can finish the sentence, virtual files unfold themselves on his laptop screen, extending out into holograms across the desk and through his glasses lenses. There are thousands of files, each titled with an encrypted code that Tony can’t decipher at first glance.

“There are 14,657 files stored on this drive, sir,” FRIDAY speaks across the speakers. Natasha and Steve move in closer, their eyes glued to the broad spread of undecipherable data and folders across the table. “Where would you like to begin?”

“Scan all the files,” Tony says. “See if you can grab anyone’s faces from any of this and run it through the database.”

“On it, boss.” The display of holographic files starts to turn and flip, each image and document from every folder folding out like a deck of cards. FRIDAY moves quickly, unraveling each folder and zip file until only a few images are pulled up on his screen. The first shows a group of three men standing in a room. To Tony, it seems like nothing more than a slightly glorified solitary confinement cell. Even the cells at the Raft rivaled this tiny space. But what stands out most to him is the three men. They wear large, white medical masks that obscure most of their faces. All he can see are dark, steely eyes staring back at him through the camera. “Play it back for me, FRIDAY.”

White noise fills the room as the video starts. The man in the middle- the tallest of the three- steps forward and looks down at his clipboard before he speaks. “TS 08-14,” he reads. “Day 15 of Prototype testing, beginning now.” The clip ends there, leaving the three of them in a moment of stunned silence. Tony notices a timestamp in the bottom left corner of the video: January 4th. Two weeks ago.

Without comment, Tony swipes away the previous recording and selects the last photo. It’s a frame from what seems to be a security camera -- a man in a suit stands in an empty hallway with a phone pressed to his ear and a lab coat draped over his arm. Tony grabs the corners of the image, stands, and enlarges it over the whole table. “I’ll be damned. Osborn, the son of a bitch.”

“His name and Oscrop were all over the files in the base in Oslo,” Natasha says. Her eyes move to Tony’s as they both look away from the projection.

“And if he’s getting involved with Hydra, it means he’s up to no good,” Tony muses aloud. He knows Norman Osborn, unfortunately, and as hard as it is to admit, he’s not that different from Tony himself. He seems to have a few more screws loose than himself, but Osborn has always been the man to go beyond the limits for his science. Tony knows his limits. He knows when he needs to stop. When his work is no longer used for good. He doesn’t think Norman Osborn has this same capability. The man has proved himself time and time again to be unhinged. “Wouldn’t be surprised if…” Tony pauses for a moment. He’s got an idea as to what Osborn could be up to.

Steve moves to Tony’s right, placing a hand on his shoulder. He tries to catch Tony’s eye, but he’s too deep in thought. “Tony, what is it?”

Tony shakes Steve’s hand off of his shoulder. “FRIDAY, do a deep dive. Search for anything with the words cross-species or hybrid.” If Osborn felt the need to team with Hydra, then that meant he needed help with something. Something he’s failed at before in the past.

“He’s trying again?” Natasha balks. “After what happened with Connors?”

“Isn’t insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Einstein said that, right?” Steve ponders, moving to the opposite side of the table to try to see what FRIDAY is unraveling. Several files pop up across the screen, all with different encrypted labels and dates ranging from August 2014 to three days ago.

“That’s actually a myth. Einstein never said that,” Tony teases. “As much as I think Osborn is a nutcase, I’d chalk this up to Hydra having the resources that Osborn doesn’t. I just don’t know why.”

Tony opens the most recent document, dated just a few days before the video that he watched. When it opens, it looks like some kind of medical lab report. The top left corner reads TS #08-14, and below it are several charts like electrolyte levels, a complete blood count, cholesterol levels, and pages upon pages of EEG charts. He scrolls through, unsure of how to interpret the overwhelming amount of medical information and jargon. At the very bottom, there’s a handwritten note.

TS #08-14 exhibits adequate progress in Prototype testing. The patient is alert and disoriented to time and place. The patient is tachycardic and hypertensive but is now easily subdued with enhanced tranquilizers. The patient presents with no memory. Receptive to Electroconvulsive Therapy, plan to continue with this treatment as indicated. The projection for 08-14 deployment on track. Cross-species mutation and enhancement considered successful for the first trial.

“That’s what they did to Bucky,” Steve mutters under his breath, starting at the report with a mixture of horror and confusion. “The therapy-- it’s how they completely wiped his memory.”

Tony scrolls through all of the documents then, trying to ignore the nagging feeling in the back of his mind that something is really wrong. Each document he skims through only solidifies this feeling in his gut until its crawling up the back of his throat like bile. Osborn and his disgusting ambition somehow found a way to justify human experimentation for his cross-species bullshit. And it all seems centered on this TS 08-14 individual.

“There’s a video attached to this file, boss. Would you like to open it?” FRIDAY asks, breaking the silence.

Tony goes silent for a moment. He’s not sure he wants to see it. A gross, selfish part of him wants to stuff this in a drawer, eat a nice dinner with Pepper, and go to this stupid gala. But he knows he can’t. He hates to admit, but Natasha and Steve are right. He was sure that they had eradicated whatever human-experimentation whackjobs were left in the fragmented Hydra structure, but he was wrong, and now someone is in danger.

“Open it,” Natasha says. She’s now standing opposite of Tony and Steve, her arms crossed over her chest as she stares at the hologram in anticipation. The video plays without a beat of hesitation. It’s footage from a security camera poised at the top corner of a room. Tony immediately recognizes it as the bland, white solitary room from the first video, but instead of three masked men in white, there’s a figure sitting upright in the bed. Despite the low quality, Tony can immediately tell its a young boy, no older than 16 years old, sitting on the bed with his head hung low and hands tangled in the sheets pooled in his lap. He can only see the side of the kid’s face which is completely covered by a mess of curly, matted brown hair.

As the video carries on, the boy doesn’t move. He sits still in that bed like a statue, so still that Tony thinks for a moment that it’s a freeze-frame rather than a clip. A heavy feeling settles into his gut. He should’ve listened. “A child,” he says, somehow standing angry, confused, and dumbfounded all at once.

“Yes,” Natasha replies, her face stone-cold and her mouth set in a thin line. There’s no hint of emotion on her face. Her gaze flicks over to meet Tony’s, something determined and stern there, before turning on her heel and walking towards the exit.

She pauses for a moment as she reaches the door, tilting her head ever so slightly to the side. “We’re leaving tomorrow,” she calls coldly, before walking out of the room.

“What is your name?”

He forgets his name. It’s somewhere deep inside his head, but it hurts too much that he can’t be bothered to search for it. That’s how they start each day, asking him his name. He used to answer it with his own-- that much he remembers-- but the sound of his own name is foreign to him now and he forgets. They seemed pleased now that he forgets his name, but he also forgets his new name, which makes the faceless men angry.

He doesn’t respond this time when they ask him. They want him to answer a specific way, and they’ll hurt him if he doesn’t. But something in him tells him that it’s wrong-- that he shouldn’t say what they want them to, because it isn’t true. At least, he thinks it isn’t true.

“I said, what is your name?” They seem angrier than before. He doesn’t look at them, his eyes glued to the surface of the shiny table he’s sitting at. He can almost see his reflection in the stainless-steel. They’re going to hurt him. If he doesn’t answer, that means he’s not ready yet and they’ll put the thick, metal band around his head again. They’ll strap him down into that chair and all he will feel is pain. Every hair on his body stands up, and he feels the fear creep under his skin, crawling like an army of insects and screaming for him to get out. Danger, his body cries out, but he can’t answer it, chained down to the table by his wrists and ankles.

“I… it’s,” he tries. The words are falling flat on his tongue, and despite the desperation nestled in his chest, he cannot say the words. He hears the faceless man’s deep sigh of disappointment. The boy curls his fingers around the arms of the chair and the metal crumples underneath his touch. The sharp edges of the bent alloy slicing into his palm and pads of his fingers. The pain is dull, and he almost welcomes it as a disruption to the dull white noise constantly buzzing in his head.

“Паук,” the faceless man says. His voice is cold and unforgiving when he speaks. “You’re a Паук designed to obey. Won’t you obey, boy?”

The boy suffocates in his silence. He’s biting at his tongue, too afraid to speak. They’re going to hurt him again. He’s failed-- he is only meant to obey. He can’t even obey. He hears the man to the left stand, moving around the table to stand at the boy’s side. He snaps his neck around, unable to ignore the scream of terror his senses give as the man draws close. There’s a prick in the side of his neck, and the world turns on its axis. He registers hands grabbing him from all sides, a thick copper ring clasped around his neck as he’s forced into a new chair.

He can’t see or hear. The world passes by in twisted, colorless blurs, but he knows where he is based on the cold plunge of dread barrelling through his stomach. There’s something locked onto his head, and he can feel the whirring of the machine staring vibrate throughout his entire body. “Please, no,” he whispers, though he can’t hear the sound of his own voice over the roaring of blood in his ears and the sharp ringing that’s screaming at him to RUN.

The haze clears just enough to hear the faceless man’s final request. “I’ll ask you one last time.” His voice is dripping with venom that causes his blood to run cold. “What is your name?”

The only thing he can manage is a pitiful whimper. The fear is so debilitating that he can’t move, he can’t breathe. He can’t do anything but suck in strangled breaths through his trembling lips, strain his wrists against whatever cold restraints, and wait for the pain to come.

When Tony meets with Steve and Natasha that next morning, he is not well-rested. Not that sleeplessness is new-- he’s gone several nights in a row with 30 minutes of sleep and sixteen cups of caffeine-- but it’s been the first time in months that something other than his own trauma and self-destructive behavior kept him awake. He spent the majority of the night standing in his lab, the Hydra files pulled up and organized across the entire room. He managed to make some resemblance of a timeline. There was no evidence of this base even existing before August 2014, when the first documentation of TS #08-14, who he assumes is the kid in the security footage, was created. Since then, there have been weekly reports, updates, and test results for subject TS #08-14 up until a few days ago, January 15, 2016.

He tried running pieces of the kid’s face through any type of database or scanner that he could to no avail. Nothing from foster care or missing person cases from all over the country. It was as if the kid never went missing, or as if he didn’t even exist to begin with. There was absolutely no paper trail that Tony could find to link this kid in the video to anything or anyone across the globe. It kept him up for hours, as did the files he couldn’t access with the encryption codes embedded into them. Typically, Tony could decrypt codes like these in his sleep. However, he wasn’t sure if its the sleep deprivation or if maybe for once in his sorry life Osborn has actually outsmarted him, he can’t get them to budge.

His night is also ruined by the very difficult conversation he has with Pepper when he, yet again, has to bail on another Stark Industries gala. He knows that she understands, deep down, but the feeling of disappointing her is one of the worst things he thinks he can feel. Well, other than the knowledge that there’s a kid in an underground hydra base and he almost completely abandoned him for a gala he didn’t want to go to in the first place.

So he prepares to raid the base with heavy, dark bags beneath his eyes and his nerves buzzing. He prepares his newest suit-- the Mark 46-- as Captain Rogers straps his shield to his arm and Natasha waits for them by the car. She seems just as pissed and impatient as she did yesterday. He can’t blame her now. He can be insufferable, he knows, but he’s ready to help them bust down the last of these Hydra bases, and hopefully, that will be the end to both them and the madman Osborn.

“I trust you’ll get us into Oscorp without an issue,” Natasha says as Rogers walks over to meet her by the car. She prepares to get into the driver seat, securing the gun at her waistband as she watches the rest of the Iron Man suit close around Tony. “We’ll meet you there.”

Tony watches as the two climb into the car, taking off towards midtown. For now, Tony has a slightly less low-key job he has to do. He should’ve guessed that Osborn was too far up his own ass to base his secret experiments anywhere other than the Oscorp building itself. He wishes that maybe the mission will go just a little bit wrong, that way he could erase that hideous building from New York’s skyline. It’s a wishful thought, but no, the priority is to bust these assholes and make sure that Hydra and Oscorp won’t crawl out from the remains like a cockroach. Best case scenario, they’ll be able to release whatever sorry souls are trapped in there, and then that will be it. He’ll make it up to Pepper, throw a whole fundraiser in her name, end world hunger, and all that shit. He’s just got to take care of this first.

He takes flight, FRIDAY’s HUD directing him towards Midtown. It isn’t long before the towering, black building enters his sight, giant silver letters spelling OSCORP vertically across the side. Tacky. Tony thinks that Osborn really needs to hire a new architecture, but he, unfortunately, won’t have the opportunity once he’s thrown into jail. Hell, maybe he’ll share a cell with his best buddy Dr. Curt Connors, Tony jokes to himself.

“Arriving at Oscorp Industries at 200 feet,” FRIDAY tells him as he approaches the building. Tony takes a nose dive into the busy streets of Midtown. Taking the front door wasn’t really his style, but Rogers insisted that crashing through the top stories of the lab was gratuitous. He wasn’t wrong, but that doesn’t mean Tony isn’t bitter about it.

He lands on the sidewalk directly in front of Oscorp’s revolving front doors, the pavement beneath his iron-clad boots cracking from the force. He wastes no time peeling the suit from him, the iron and machinery folding down again and again until it sat in his hand in the form of a briefcase. It’s a new addition he managed to whip up last night during his long, sleepless hours in his lab. He holds the briefcase in his left hand, reaching up to fix the collar of his shirt before he steps inside.

There are people staring as he enters Oscorp’s lobby. A group of what looks like high school students stand to the far right, tucked against the back of the wall beneath a giant screen with the newest Oscorp project statement playing on a loop. They’re no longer paying attention to their teacher, their heads turned around like owls to stare at Tony Stark as he strolls through the front doors of Oscorp Industries. Tony hopes there are no paparazzi or press around. The last thing he wants is for a picture of him standing anywhere near Oscorp to exist. He shudders at the thought of it.

He walks to the desk, the frail-looking woman sitting behind it staring at him with disbelief when he clears his throat to get her attention. “Mr. Stark,” she fumbles, standing up behind her desk and reaching up to push her glasses further up her face. “What are-- How can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Norman,” he says. He leans against the desk, his elbow braced on the marble as he bears forward to look at the elderly receptionist. He glances down at her nametag. “Linda, dear. If I could just slip past you here.”

The woman, Linda, starts clicking at her keyboard, squinting between Tony and her computer screen in confusion. Obviously, he actually has no scheduled meeting with Osborn. He’d rather be caught dead than in that man’s conference room. “I’m sorry but I don’t see any such meeting on Mr. Osborn’s schedule,” she stammers.

“Ah, well you see it was more of a last-minute arrangement,” Tony says, rubbing at his brow with his free hand. Linda reaches a hand towards her earpiece as if moving to make a call, and Tony sucks in a sharp breath. “Best not to call him, I know how precious Norman’s time really is.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stark, but I really can’t just let you in without authorization. I’m sure Mr. Osborn wouldn’t mind me calling.” Before Tony can come up with another excuse, her hand is on her ear, and Tony can hear the muffled dial tone through the phone.

He sighs in faux defeat, twisting around to take a glance over the entire lobby. With his back facing Linda, he clears his throat, reaching a hand up to fix the position of his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Intercept that call would you, FRI?”

“On it.” He turns back to find Linda speaking to someone on the other side. She can’t seem to get a word in edgewise, and Tony holds his breath. If Norman catches wind that Tony Stark is here to see them, it will bust their plan wide open before it even has a chance to begin. He picks at the cuffs of his shirt as he waits, trying to mask his nerves as Linda speaks a hushed goodbye and taps on her earpiece once more.

All suspicion she seems to hold against Tony falls away. “I just spoke to Mr. Osborn’s assistant,” she says, plastering a large grin across her wrinkled face. Tony smiles back at her, trying not to look as pained as he feels. Linda opens a drawer beneath her desk, pulling out a guest pass and handing it to Tony. He tries not to feel offended. A guest pass? For Iron Man? “You can go ahead, I’m sure you know where Mr. Osborn’s office is. I’m sorry for the trouble, sir.”

“No trouble, dear,” he says with a wink. He tightens his grip around his briefcase, taking the guest pass and clipping it to the front of his shirt with poorly-hidden disgust. He wastes no time headed towards the entrance gate to the left of the receptionist’s desk. He steps up to the large, slate elevators, pressing the down button. He glances over his shoulder; no one seems to be too keyed on his presence now that he’s left the lobby. Now the only people that pass him by are business officials with their heads shoved too far up their Bluetooth headsets to notice him. The elevator arrives in a beat, and he steps in, spamming the close door button. They slide shut. There are three buttons beneath the lobby floor, and Tony presses the last one, but the elevator beeps at him. He furrows his brow and notices the fingerprint scanner beneath the last button. As idiotic as Osborn was, he at least knew how to protect his darkest secrets.

“FRIDAY. Let’s get into the mainframe, see if we can’t persuade this bad boy to go down.” He rests the suitcase at his feet, turning his head to see the tiny lens of a security camera embedded into the steel ceiling of the elevator. “And let’s knock out that camera while we’re at it.”

Tony watches as code dances across his glasses lenses, and he searches for the override key that he knows Osborn is too idiotic to hide from his mainframe. It’s as easy to hack into the central system as it was back when he put Dr. Curt Connors away, just with some more firewalls. It’s child's play compared to what Tony is dealing with. It makes him wonder even more why Hydra, a top-secret organization that has been working in secret for decades, would work with Norman Osborn, the most moronic genius Tony has ever had the displeasure of meeting.

As the last piece of code flies across his lenses, he instructs FRIDAY to push past this last firewall, implementing his own little invisible virus to disable their algorithms. “And we’re in business,” he says as he presses on the bottom floor button once more. The button lights up, the fingerprint scanner fizzling out until only a black screen remains.

“Security camera disabled, boss,” FRIDAY informs as the graphics on his HUD disappear as quickly as they came. Tony smiles with satisfaction, picking up his briefcase once more as the elevator starts its descent.

At the bottom floor, the doors slide open and Tony is met with what looks like a glorified storage room. Thick, metal containers line the walls on all sides with numbered locking panels on the sides. He looks at them warily as he walks through the narrow hallway, approaching the doorway at the end. The next room is just another hallway void of the shipping containers. There are two doors on either side of him with labels in silver plating across their metal surface. They seem mundane enough: a boiler room and crypto-storage. He moves towards crypto-storage first, checking over his shoulder before approaching the door. There’s what appears to be an iris-scan lock on the door, which FRIDAY makes quick work of. Within a second, Tony’s shoving the door open.

The room is freezing; Tony can instantly see his breath the moment he steps into the room. A soft, emerald glow basks the room, the light illuminating from clear glass containers taking up every inch of the room. In one glass case, there’s what Tony thinks is an ant farm, but the ants are alarmingly large. They’re frozen in place as if time had stopped in the middle of them constructing their home. The sight is unsettling. Tony swallows a lump forming in his throat.

At the back of the room, there’s a large display that takes up the entire back wall. There are multiple subdivisions in the class case-- at least 15 of them-- each filled with a singular branch, and…. spider-webs? He struggles to hold down a shiver of disgust. Spiders aren’t the most loveable creatures, he thinks, biting his lower lip. He approaches the cases and sees a singular spider occupying each box. He first stares at one in the center-- its body is bright blue and about as large as Tony’s palm. Its legs are long, thick, and black as night. It’s frozen as well, stuck in a place where it was sitting perched on the slender branch. Tony notices half-eaten flies and crickets littering the bottom of the case. He steps to the side, looking to the next spider. But the case is empty, to his surprise. In fact, it’s the only case out of all 15 that is empty.

There’s a label on this case. It’s a series of numbers that Tony isn’t sure how to decipher, but he sees a few numbers that strike him as familiar-- 0814-- and beneath the numbers is a singular word: dead. He’s not sure what it means, but despite his curiosity, he knows he can’t stand around and try to figure it out. He can’t waste precious time exploring Osborn’s dirty secrets. Well, he is exploring his dirty secrets, just not these ones. He’s got human experimentation and torture beneath his feet that he needs to figure out first. If he has time before his dinner reservation with Pepper, he’ll come back to solve the mystery of the missing spider.

“Can’t waste any more time, FRIDAY,” he whispers. “Can you see anything beneath me? Any secret lairs I should know about?” His glasses burst to life and he can see holographic outlines of structured beams and tunnels beneath him. Bingo.

“There seems to be an extensive structure beneath this boiler room. It extends at least two miles deep,” FRIDAY reports. A red line travels across the holographic floor plan, leading him out of the crypto-storage room and across the hall. “There’s an entrance in this room. I can see what seems to be an elevator shaft leading down into the basement.”

“How convenient for me,” he remarks with a triumphant smirk. He turns his heel, leaving the creepy spider cemetery behind as he leaves the storage room, shoving the door shut behind him. He heads straight for the boiler room, the eye-scanner already short-circuiting before he even has time to reach the door.

In the boiler room, he finds what appears to be a trap door. It’s hidden behind the large furnace on the left side of the room, practically camouflaged against the ground. If Tony hadn’t asked FRIDAY to scan the room, he would’ve easily missed it. It has an old, snake-like symbol stamped into the metal. He can’t see any retina scanner, fingerprint sensor, or even a simple keypad keeping the hatch locked. It’s odd, he thinks, that Osborn would leave such a secretive entrance without any technological protection. He kneels down, curling his fingers beneath the lip of the door. He pulls on it with all of his strength, but it doesn’t remotely budge. This will likely be a problem best solved with Rogers’ super-strength. Or maybe a blast from his propulsors. He’ll try Rogers first.

He taps into the comms channel through FRIDAY’s HUD. “Romanov. Rogers. You copy?”

He hears Steve respond through FRIDAY’s specs. “Loud and clear,” he says. “We’re a minute out. What have you found?”

“Our golden ticket,” Tony says. “There’s a trap door beneath the building in this boiler room. The structure extends a few miles down. If it’s anywhere, it’s here, but I need some help cracking it open.”

“Copy that,” Natasha responds. “We’re approaching Oscorp on the east side. Find us a way in.”

After nearly ten minutes of searching, he finally finds a back door emptying out into an abandoned alleyway. Romanov and Rogers announce their presence through his earpiece, and by the time he opens the door into the derelict alleyway, they’re already there waiting for him. Natasha looks restless, her face pressed into a cold, grim expression with her arms held tight at her side, pistol gripped in her hand. “We’ve got a potential mutant factory under our feet and you get lost on a tour of Oscorp?” she says bitterly. She pushes past Tony into the building, her steps careful as she scans the basement they’re in. Steve follows her, and Tony lets the door shut behind them.

“First, never say mutant factory again,” Tony insists, setting his briefcase down at his feet. He kicks against the case, and it completely unravels, the metal uncurling and climbing up his legs like vines. Metal plating and wires cover every inch of him until the Iron Man suit completely reforms around him. He leaves the helmet down, watching Natasha with crossed arms. “Second, it took a shitload of finessing to get down here. That Linda lady was much harder to swoon than I expected.”

“No one asked you to flirt your way in,” Steve says, deadpanned. He takes the lead towards the boiler room, outwardly confused when he enters. Tony points him in the direction of the door hidden behind the furnace, and the three of them crowd into the small space around the hatch.

“This isn’t Hydra’s symbol,” Steve notes as soon as he sees the logo stamped into the metal trapdoor.

“It looks more like a cheap knock-off,” Tony remarks, shifting his weight to his left side and leaning against the wall. “Poor logo design aside, I can’t hack my way through this one. Think you can muscle it open, Cap?”

Steve leans over the trap door, curling his fingers around the lip and pulling up. Tony expects him to rip it off the hinges without any resistance, but the door hardly budges. Rogers seems surprised at this too. He readjusts his grip, bends his knees and pulls up again. Slowly, the metal creaks and the door starts to move, the heavy slab of metal tilting up and back on its hinge. Tony steps in to help, bracing his iron-clad arms on the underside of the hatch and using a little extra power to tilt it open. Steve lets out the breath he’s been holding as soon as the door falls against the cement flooring. “Haven’t had that much trouble lifting something since I was 90 pounds.” The corner of Tony’s mouth tilts.

“Was that supposed to be a joke?”

Natasha audibly stifles a groan. “We don’t have time for this,” she says. The assassin is already climbing down into what appears to be the elevator beneath the trap door’s opening. Rogers climbs down, hot on her trail, leaving Tony to stand in his own shock that the ever up-tight Captain America just told a semi-decent joke.

“I’m being serious, that was kinda funny,” Tony defends, arms spread out at his sides as he looks down at his teammates. “Didn’t know Cap could be funny.” He drops down into the elevator behind them. There’s only one button on the stainless steel, and there’s no key or fingerprint lock to prevent them from pushing it. They’re in.

When they enter, the first thing Tony notices is quiet. They come out into a long, white hallway that resembles a hospital. Something about it immediately makes him uneasy. It’s not that he’s particularly afraid of hospitals. It’s the quiet that unsettles him. It’s not quiet he’s accustomed to at the Tower. There’s no background humming of machinery, no distant conversation, or far-off footsteps. It’s a completely empty silence.

The lights in the hallway are bright, and his glasses dim automatically to block out the fluorescence. There are doors on all sides of them, discrete and unlabeled. They look almost as if they are meant to be part of the wall. “You know the plan,” Steve says as he starts walking forward. His shield is raised to his chin as he advances down the hall, ducking his head around the corner where the hallway splits. Natasha isn’t far behind him, her Glock 26 drawn and her Widow’s Bite bracelets sparking to life.

Tony raises the head plate of his suit, FRIDAY’s HUD coming to life before his eyes. In the immediate area, his AI detects no heat signatures. “Let’s find their terminal,” he whispers to FRIDAY. He can see the flow of wires and electricity pulsing through the walls, stemming from all of the doors along the sides and converging together on the ceiling. Tony follows it through the twisting, labyrinth halls until he finally comes upon a large door at a dead end, the same snake-like symbol stamped on the front. He reaches for the handle on the door, but before he can, a deafening alarm shattered the quiet.

The hallway is blanketed in red in a second, flashing with each pulsation of the alarm.

The boy doesn’t know why the alarm starts, just that it jars him from his already restless slumber. His entire body buzzes with fear and anxiety. His senses are overwhelmed with suffocating danger and it’s coming from all different directions. He crawls out from under his thin sheet, pressing his back in the corner, staring at the door with wide eyes. He’s never heard this noise before, but it’s piercing and the pain that ripples through his skull reminds him of the copper headpiece they force on him when he’s been bad. It hurts, it hurts so bad he’s pressing his shaking hands against his ears. There’s danger, but the collar is locked around his neck. He’s trapped.

The normal, binding fluorescence falls to black before harsh, red light blankets the room. The boy stares at the door. He expects the team of faceless men to burst through the door, torture on their fingertips. There’s a sudden, loud sound behind his door, and he flinches, curling in as close to himself as possible. He feels something wet and sticky on his hands, the warm substance pooling around his ears and dripping down the sides of his face. The pain is unbearable, his skull feeling like it’s splitting in two.

There’s pounding at his door again, louder and more frantic with each passing second. He covers his eyes with trembling fingers. The terror crawls into his veins, his sense screaming at him to run, to fight, to do anything, but he can’t. He hasn’t been given instruction. He doesn’t know what to do. The thick scrap of metal around his neck prevents him from crawling up the wall into a safe corner like he does when he’s scared. He can do nothing but sit there as the metal of the door caves in and splinters.

He looks at the last moment, and through the crimson light of the room, he sees a large silhouette with glowing white, empty eyes and a bright circular stamp at the chest. He freezes, breath caught in his throat. His fingers are burning to move, but they’re frozen where they’re locked on either side of his face. He stares unblinking at the figure, and it seems to stop in its tracks when it sees the boy. Suddenly, the figure takes a step forward, and under the dim light, he can see the glistening of metal. Something about this figure triggers something-- he thinks they may be called memories-- but he shakes the thought from his head. Memories will only get him hurt. Memories will hurt him. An iron-clad arm reaches towards him, and the boy’s eyes lock on the circular lights stamped into its palm. Fight, his instincts scream. It crawls beneath his skin and chews at his nerve endings. Get up and fight!

He launches himself from the bed, twisting the arm at the wrist and pushing the figure back. He’s shocked at the cold of metal that meets his hand when he shoves the silhouette back into the darkness of the doorway. The boy trips over his feet, the sheets from the bed tangled around his ankles as he flees to the opposite corner of the room. He stares at the camera that’s perched near the ceiling pleadingly. Usually, that camera brings him fear, but the only thing he can think now is how much he wants the faceless men to come in and save him. At least with them, he knows what to expect.

“It’s okay,” a voice comes from the metal suit. The voice seems soothing, but it reminds him of when they speak to him through the radio in the ceiling. Cold, calculating, synthetic. He whimpers and clambers further into the corner as if it will swallow him up whole. “Kid, take a breath.”

He wants to fight, his fingers curled so tightly into fists that he can feel the blood budding in his palm. He waits, the figure in metal standing so still by the doorway with its arms outstretched. He seems cautious, but the eyes of light that stare at him with nothing-- all he can see is the blank stare of the faceless men glaring back at him. The alarm is still blaring, and his senses are exploding and going haywire. He can hardly focus on one thing at a time, and it takes all of his strength to hear what the intruder is saying. The figure lifts an arm slowly to its head.

“Turn this damn alarm off, FRI,” he whispers, but the boy can still hear it as he holds his breath. He continues to hold his breath until suddenly the alarm stops. He still cowers in the corner, shell-shocked and dumbfounded. He can’t remember a time when he’s seen anyone other than the men in white. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t remember any face or any name. In the few seconds he’s managed to see himself in the reflection of his empty dinner bowl, he doesn’t even recognize the person staring back at him. That’s why he stares in wonder at the intruder when suddenly the metal falls away and someone is staring back at him. His hair is dark and his face is pulled taut. The boy can’t recall the last time he’s seen such a face, but the moment they lock eyes he feels an undeniable amount of recognition spark in his brain. It’s a deep, hidden part of his brain. But it’s there. He recognizes this man, but he’s never seen him before. His headaches.

The man won’t turn away from him, and he slumps in the corner with defeat. There’s nothing he can do to defend himself when the collar is locked around his neck. He sucks in a shaky breath and holds it there, waiting for whatever pain the familiar man is going to inflict on him. “It’s okay,” the man says again, and now that the metal mask is gone, he sounds so human and kind. The tenderness of his voice is enough for tears to start burning in the boy’s eyes. He quickly wipes the tears away. He knows how much the faceless men hate his tears. He’s not supposed to cry anymore.

The stranger shifts and the boy thinks he hears a muffled, distant voice before the man is speaking again, but not to him. “I found him” he mutters as if trying to be discrete. “Can you guys hold them off?” There’s a muffled reply from somewhere inside the suit he’s wearing, but he can’t understand the words. His brain is screaming at him, still reeling from the overwhelming amount of input it was trying to process at once. He stares at the stranger with wide eyes as he inches forward, his eyes taking in the entire room before locking on the collar around the boy’s neck. “That’s gotta be uncomfortable, right bud?” the man whispers, kneeling down at the knee and holding his hands out towards the boy like he was approaching a cornered, wild animal.

He gnaws on his lower lip. Bud? No one has called him that before, but the feeling it gives in his gut reminds him of the warmth he has somewhere buried in his brain. It’s distant, and each day it grows colder, but he can still feel it at times when he’s deep in sleep, or right now when he’s staring into a stranger’s eyes. The constant screaming of danger settles into the background, now a dull buzz compared to the excruciating screeching it had been before. He can finally take a breath. He breaks contact with the stranger for one second and glances down at his hands. They’re coated in blood, both from the crescent-shaped cuts in his palms and the blood pouring from his ears and spread down his jaw and neck. He pitifully whines.

“I can take it off,” the man speaks, his arms still frozen in the air where they’re outstretched towards him. There are still a few feet between them, and it takes the boy every fiber in his being to stay still, staring at the man. He has to analyze and calculate his targets, the faceless men tell him. Watch for weaknesses, they whisper in the back of his head. He shudders. But he doesn’t want to hurt the man. At least, not yet. For the first time since he can remember, his overwhelming sense of danger has almost completely subsided. He almost feels… safe. But somehow that frightens him even more. He doesn’t want to fight anymore.

“Let me take it off,” he insists, voice still low. “I can hack into it and get it off. Easy peasy.”

He nods uncertainty, and the stranger starts to creep towards him, his steps careful and calculated. At a certain point, the boy flinches and presses himself further into the corner of the room, watching the man through the corner of his eye with distrust. What if this was a test? How would the faceless men want him to react? He can’t take off the collar, can he?

“Wait-” he chokes out, his voice hoarse from disuse. He raises his arms, shielding himself from the stranger advancing towards him.

The man pauses in his movement, eyes staring at the boy in surprise before softening. His face is gentle and, surprisingly, he smiles at him. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “I just need to see. You’re alright.”

Next thing he knows, the man’s hand is on the collar around his neck. His fingers curl beneath the edge of it, the cool metal of his gauntlet brushing up against his neck. He flinches, trying to squirm away but the man has a tight grip on the copper band. He hears a mechanical whirring after the man whispers something beneath his breath. In an instant, the collar falls from his neck in two parts, dumping in his lap. He reaches up, shocked, rubbing at his bare neck. The man retreats a few inches back, his hands held up. “See? Isn’t that better?”

As soon as the copper falls away, he can feel his strength return to him in surges, dancing at his fingertips. He can hear everything again, and the sound of distant shouting, gunfire, and banging catches his ears. He can hear the heartbeat of the man in front of him-- it’s fluttering and irregular, and he can tell the man in front of him is riddled with nerves.

“Alright, up and at ‘em, kid. I know you’re probably scared, but there are a lot of bad people here. I’m sure you know that,” the man says. He glances over his shoulder, and the boy can hear the increase in his heart rate. Something’s coming. “You have to trust me.” The man extends a metal hand out towards him.

There’s a sudden gunshot. The fear returns, crawling all over and burning through him like fire. He jolts upright, kicking aside the broken pieces of copper before launching himself towards the ceiling. He clambers along the top, launching himself out of the room. It’s the first time he’s seen this hallway, he has no idea which is the right direction but regardless he starts to run. He clambers along the walls, away from the sound of gunshots and shouting. He goes wherever his panic leads him, tries to find a corner where the constant feeling of danger will finally go away.

As he rounds a corner, he slams into something hard and solid, and he falls to the ground. The base of his skull cracks against the cold tile; his head surges with a black wave and he sees stars. He lies there, stunned, with his arms cradling his neck as he curls up into himself. He scrambles back, cradling his skull as he stares at the broadness that had blocked his path. It’s another man, his hair blond and eyes bright but troubled as they stare down at him. He looks like some kind of soldier with his tactical gear and helmet, and his circular shield poised on his arm stirred some sort of recognition. He thinks he’s seen this symbol before, but he can’t take another moment to ponder it. He swallows his fear, climbing to his feet in panic before the man secures a hand on his shoulder. “Calm down, son,” he says. “We’re here to help.”

Instinct takes over, his vision goes black, and he’s flipping the soldier over his shoulder, twisting the man’s wrist with a sickening crack. He can’t hear the man’s strangled cry as his back slams against the tile. The boy pulls up on the man’s arm, planting his foot on his shoulder as he yanks up with as much force as he could possibly muster. There’s a short pop and tear, and the downed soldier cries out for help, hissing out a curse. He’s about to let go and run when a boot sweeps his legs out from under him and he crumples to the ground. Before he can bound to his feet, the base of his skull explodes with MOVE, but he’s sluggish. He’s been slow to understand this extra sense buzzing beneath his skin ever since they started locking that horrific collar around his throat.

The moment he hesitates is enough for something sharp and burning to hit him in the small of the back. A ripple of blinding, white agony tears through his body, and he completely loses control of his limbs. There’s electricity running through him, seizing his muscles and stopping his breath in his throat as he crumples onto the floor.

He’s tied to the chair again. They’re wrapping thick straps across his wrists, ankles, middle, and forehead. He can’t move, but his entire body is screaming at him to run. It’s crying out as he lies still in that chair waiting for the pain to come.

When the pain does come, it comes all at once. It’s an insufferable wave of agony that starts in his head, tightening around his skull like an iron band. The electricity dances on his skin, running from his fingers to his toes. His heart skips a beat in his chest, and over the sound of the constant, violent hum of electricity, he can hear his own heartbeat fluttering in his chest and bounding against his ribcage. They’re going to kill him. They’re going to kill him.

He sees a woman with brown hair and kind eyes framed with emerald green glasses. He hears her whisper sweet nothings into his ears and feels the way she kisses him in his hair. He hears a name-- Peter-- and the gentle murmuring of “I love you” before what he thinks are memories are pushed far back into the darkness.

Natasha stands behind where the boy had been standing seconds prior, yanking Steve’s arm from his socket. Her wrist is still raised with her active Widow’s Bite aimed at the body convulsing on the ground. She watches carefully as he falls, the electricity jerking his muscles into a stop before its effects fade away. She expects him to leap back to his feet and lunge at her-- which is an expectation she feels with horror as she looks at the boy’s scrawny frame-- but the boy remains crumpled on the floor. His body tremors against the floor.

When the boy is finally unconscious, only then does Tony have a moment to think. Things went south fast. To be fair, he wasn’t sure what he had been expecting when attempting to rescue an enhanced child from an Oscorp-Hydra lab. If someone were to tell Tony that this is what his Thursday night would look like a few days ago, he’d laugh in their face. Now he wishes this was just a dream. He never felt as horrified as he did when he burst into the kid’s room. When the alarms were triggered and the entire facility went into an impenetrable shutdown, he had no other way to enter the room. And after he hears the boy screaming through the metal door, he knows he has no other choice.

That’s how he finds the boy, curled up in the corner of his bed against the wall with his hands clamped over his ears. Even beneath the red, pulsating light, Tony can see the blood pooling from the kid’s ears as he writhes at the horrific wailing of the sirens. While FRIDAY can’t undo the entire shutdown, the least she can do is disable the sound of the alarms blaring through the room. Almost immediately, he sees the child relax.

It was one thing to see the boy in a blurry photo on his computer. It almost seems fake that way-- that the reality of this child being a subject of human experimentation is nothing more than what he would read in a Sci-Fi novel. But it’s another monster to see him in person. Tony’s never felt less equipped for a mission in his life, though he’ll never admit that to Natasha or Steve. Children have never been a demographic he has particularly appealed to in the past and thus has very little experience with. The closest he’s ever come to interacting with a damaged super-kid was with Wanda. And he’s not entirely proud of his handling of that situation.

What haunts him the entire car ride home is the relief in the boy's eyes once he was freed from the collar. When he first saw it, Tony recognized it as a model similar to those power-suppressing collars Secretary Ross uses at the Raft. Based on how much of a fight the kid put up against Steve, Tony isn’t surprised that they would take such measures to keep him contained. If he was at his full power, he could rip those spineless bastards to bits.

It should bother Tony that the thought of those men dying doesn’t face him. It doesn’t.

The car ride home is a quiet affair. Natasha and Steve sit in the front, their face pale and taut as Tony sits in the back seat with the kid’s head cushioned on his thighs. The boy’s wrists are bound at the front in vibranium hand-cuffs. It’s the last thing Tony wants to do- to tie the kid up again after just setting him free- but Steve was adamant. It was for their own safety, for the child’s safety as they transported him to the tower.

If Tony says he has any clue what he will do with the little science experiment once he gets to the tower, it would be a total lie. Though he’ll never admit to that. He sits in the back seat of the car, his palm absent-mindedly resting on the kid’s burning forehead as he thinks. If Nick Fury or the rest of whatever was left of S.H.I.E.L.D find out about this, they’ll surely have a field day. It’ll be only a matter of time before Secretary Ross gets involved and throws the kid in the Raft.

It’s a horrifying thought. Tony can’t even consider Steve Rogers spending cold, hard time in the under-water deathtrap, and Tony really didn’t like that man sometimes. He needs more time to think, more time to stall so that he can have some kind of plan in place before any government office comes raining down on Avengers tower like napalm. However, for the first time in Tony’s life, he draws a blank.

When they arrive at the tower, Steve and Tony settle the boy into a small, metal interrogation room in the basement. It’s not the place Tony would have loved to put a probably traumatized boy, but they didn’t know what they were dealing with. They had just kidnapped a Hydra-Oscorp hybrid experiment, and other than the fact that he could hold his own against Captain America, they had no idea the extent of his capabilities.

It hurts to see him in this tiny room. It’s hardly a step up from whatever hell they had the kid locked in beneath Oscorp. But Steve, ever the cautionary, insisted that the kid was too dangerous to trust yet. He was a product of Hydra, after all, and Tony had seen first hand what Bucky had been able to do. As much as he hated to admit it, Spangles was right. They have to air on the side of caution.

He stands outside of the cell on the opposite side of the one-way glass, pacing holes into the floor as he waits for the boy to wake up, Natasha leaning against the opposite wall across from him, while Steve heads to the infirmary. Inside the small room, the boy is strapped down to a chair with vibranium, his half-shaved head lulled against his chest. “Still want to go to that gala, Tony?” Natasha murmurs, her eyes unwavering from the limp figure on the other side of the glass.

Tony can see the strain in her lips as she presses them into a thin line. Her eyes are narrowed and cold, as they usually are, but Tony can tell by the way she leans into the wall, her jaw clenched, that she’s worried for the boy. Tony can’t deny that he isn’t worried either, nor can he deny the gnawing guilt that eats away at him for trying to bail on this child. Someone who needed saving.

“First of all, I resent that,” Tony chides, planting his feet firmly into the ground and turning to face Natasha. He can’t bear to look at the kid, not yet anyway. “You don’t think I know I messed up? I get it. But we got the kid, we did what you wanted.”

Natasha shifts, her lips twitching to the side with a grimace. “I guess I just didn’t expect it to be like pulling teeth,” she says, breaking her stare at the boy and finally turning to look at Tony. “When I tell you something’s important, I mean it.”

Tony’s mouth opens before he presses it shut again. He doesn’t have a quirky comeback. He’s messed up, and he can admit it, or at least not verbally deny it. All he can offer her is a curt nod before moving towards the window. He steps up to the class, leaning his forehead against the cool surface.

He’s not sure how long the two of them stand there in a tense silence before the kid finally stirs. Tony thinks he’s hallucinating— just for a moment— before the kid’s head lazily rises from his chest. His eyes are squinted and bleary, and for the first time, Tony notices the thick purple circles beneath the kid’s eyes. His skin is ashen and translucent. The kid just looks sick.

Tony waits for the boy to realize what happened, to realize he’s in a foreign space. He waits for him to start jerking against his restraints, to try to escape. Except, the kid doesn’t do any of that. As the cloudiness clears from his eyes and is replaced with sobriety, the kid’s shoulders roll back, his posture erect against the chair. His mouth is pressed into a line with his jaw squared off, but he doesn’t struggle. He doesn’t attempt to get free but instead stares ahead as if he can see right through the two-way mirror. Right at Tony.

“Interrogation time,” Natasha chimes, though there is no joy or amusement in her tone. She moves towards the door to the cell, but Tony catches her wrist.

“Nuh-uh.” He steps in front of the door, pressing his back to it to cut off Natasha from entering the room. ”Gentlemen first.” It isn’t that he doesn’t trust Natasha— he would trust her with his life— but something, call it his pride, insists that he has to speak to the kid immediately. Natasha can get to her business later, but Tony needs his own questions answered.

Natasha stares at him long and hard, her eyes flickering over his face until she relents. She steps back waving Tony away with the wave of her hand. “Suit yourself.”

Tony nods and turns to the door, fiddling with his silver cufflinks. He can feel Natasha’s presence behind him, a silent expectation in the soft lull. He presses open the heavy metal door, stepping into the barren interrogation room.

Immediately, the kid’s eyes lock onto his. He watches with calculated silence as Tony walls forward, slowly, towards the single chair at the opposite end of the steel table. It’s nearly six feet long, but Tony is sure it won’t matter. If the kid gets loose, he could be dead in seconds. It didn’t matter if there was a table there as a buffer. But the kid shows no signs of fighting. His white-knuckles fists are baller around the arms of the chair, his honey-brown eyes bearing into Tony’s own as he finally takes his seat.

The metal chair scrapes loudly against the tiled floor, and the boy cringes away at the sound, his head ducking down in a violent flinch with his eyes scrunched shut. Tony recognizes the exact defensive posture from when he first found the boy hunched in the corner of his cell.

“Don’t worry,” Tony says, and he can’t help but since at his attempt to sound comforting. Nurturing wasn’t his thing; he sure as hell didn’t learn it from Howard, so where else was he supposed to figure out how to talk to teenagers? “Just a loud chair. What, you’ve got super hearing or something? You could hear us coming, couldn’t you?”

The boy doesn’t say anything right away. He blinks his eyes open, squinting at the bright fluorescent light radiating from above the room. His chapped lips part, only for a moment. Then he snaps them shut. His eyes scan Tony up and down, his head tilts, and Tony swears he can see the slightest flicker of recognition in his eyes.

“You’re Tony Stark.” The boy’s voice is gravelly and rough, probably from disuse, Tony hypothesizes. But it’s nonetheless the voice of a child. He says the name with curiosity, the edges of his lips tugging down as he speaks. Tony expects to hear a product of Hydra to speak of him with disdain and contempt. But this boy simply seems confused.

“The one and only,” Tony sighs. The boy’s faint expression of curiosity doesn’t change. “Though you look like a roughed-up cabbage patch kid, so I guess that’s Mr. Stark to you.”

“Who’s the other one?” The kid asks. His eyes dart to the one-way mirror poised behind Tony, and a knowing smile tugs at the corner of Tony’s lips. “So you do have super-hearing, huh?” He looks over the kid— his skinny ribs, protruding collar bones, bright wide eyes. “Who are you? How old are you? Where did you come from?” He leans forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the edge of the table and clasping his hands together. “I need answers, kid.”

The boy seems taken aback at the questions— his lips parted in surprise and eyes wide as he stares at Tony. His fists are still tight from where they grasp the arms of the chairs, yet Tony can see the faint tremble in his grip. “Fifteen.”

Tony blinks. “What?”

“I’m fifteen… I think,” the boy whispers, his eyebrows knitted together. “I had a job to do, but I.. wasn’t ready yet. I wasn’t good.”

Tony fights the frown that’s tugging on his lips. He shouldn’t be surprised. This is Hydra’s entire M.O— to destroy these innocent people’s lives and turn them into superweapons. But to kidnap and torture a fifteen-year-old kid to do your dirty work? Tony wants to go back to that base and give them another beat down.

Instead, he maintains his composure and looks the boy in the eye. “That doesn’t do much for me, cabbage patch, but it is a start,” he says. “Let’s try something easy… what’s your name?”

“What is your name?!”

Zap. Pain. Bloodcurdling scream. There are hands all over him, and no matter how hard he tries to buck them off, they never let go.

“Please, don’t do this-“

Agony. It ripples through his skin like a million volts of electricity. It’s burning him from the inside out.

“What is your name?”

“Hey, kid!”

Tony isn’t sure what had happened. Upon asking for the kid’s name, the poor boy’s body went rigid, his eyes immediately springing with tears. He tried to crawl away and curl himself up in the chair, but the vibrating cuffs are keeping him bolted in place. He writhes and cries, head hung low as his breath comes in ragged and uneven pants.

Tony stands from his chair, completely terrified. He’s sure Romanov is watching him through the mirror with the smuggest look she can muster, but Tony’s not ready to give up just yet. He was never the best at dealing with his own panic attacks, so he doesn’t even comprehend how he will approach the kid. However, with each passing second, the boy is hyperventilating more and more until Tony is sure he’s not inhaling any air at all. He rounds the table, his hands held out in a peaceful gesture. The last thing he needs is to set the boy off, but if he continues to hyperventilate his way into a panic attack, Tony will get nothing out of him. Cautiously, he inches towards the boy from the side, but he flinches from where he’s bound in the chair. The boy whips his head around, wide, tearful eyes staring Tony down with a distrustful look. He pulls his bony wrists against the vibranium cuffs, and if Tony’s eyes don’t deceive him, he’s sure that the metal is slowly bending.

“Hey, hey.” Tony’s voice is low and quiet, and he keeps his hands out in front of him to show he’s not a threat. Without his suit, he really isn’t any kind of threat compared to this kid. “I won’t hurt you. No one’s going to hurt you anymore.”

Tony intends to keep this promise. He will figure out everything he can to keep this kid safe, even if he has to go through S.H.I.E.L.D, Nick Fury, Secretary Ross, or even Hydra to do so. The tears budding in the kid’s bright, wide eyes is enough to solidify this.

However, Tony’s words calm the kid down one bit. He’s openly crying now, ducking his head down and away from Tony’s outstretched hands. His posture is defensive and tense, his eyes scrunching shut as he tucks his chin to his chest in an attempt to make himself seem as small as possible.

“Kid, relax.” Against his better judgment, Tony rests a hand on the kid’s tense shoulder. He jerks violently at the touch before his eyes lock onto Tony’s. To say he’s unnerved by the horror in the boy’s face would be an understatement.

“I’m supposed to hurt you.” The boy’s voice surprises Tony, and the man can only stare at the kid as anger, disbelief, and horror cross his face all at once. “That was what I was supposed to do. I had to eliminate Iron Man and Captain America. That was my mission. That… is my mission.”

Tony steps back, just a bit, but manages to keep a grounding hand on the kid’s shoulder. It’s disconcerting that the enhanced teenager had means and motive to literally murder him, but he was trapped in a room of vibranium with Black Widow watching from outside. He has to stand his ground; this is the most amount of information he’s gotten.

“Do you want to hurt us?” Tony asks. It’s the last question he should be asking. He should be demanding more information about the Hydra-Oscorp laboratory, about why he needed to take out the two heads of the Avengers, about who was in charge. But the forefront thought on Tony’s mind is that this is a child who’s been kidnapped, manipulated, and experimented on. The kid’s face draws blank for a moment before his lips curl into a deep frown and he shakes his head. “No… Please, I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to hurt anyone--” Tony shakes his head, his brows knitted together. “You don’t have to hurt anybody,” Tony whispers. “No one here is going to hurt you either. We just need some answers. Who… gave you that mission? Who’s in charge under that building, kid?”

The boy, his head lowered so that Tony can only look at the shaved side of his face, shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

Tony takes in a sharp breath, releasing his hold on the boy’s shoulder and backing away, stowing his hands into his blazer pockets. He doesn’t want to push the kid too far-- after all, he’s basically trapped in a room with an enhanced individual who could kill him in the blink of an eye-- but he’s short on time and has way too many questions to ask.

He figures that he needs to do some of his own digging before he’s ready to talk to the kid again.

“Alright, no more talking,” Tony relents as he heads back towards the door. “Are you hungry? Who am I kidding, of course you’re hungry. I’ll make sure someone brings you some lunch. Got any food allergies I should know about?”

The boy raises his head, exhaustion tugging at each movement he makes, his eyelids drooping as he stares at Tony in mild confusion. He can’t help but think that the kid looks like a lost puppy. A really sad kicked puppy, but a puppy nonetheless. “I’ll take your silence as a no,” Tony mumbles, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The kid is difficult to figure out, but Tony knows he has to give it time-- as much time as he can buy. “I’ll just avoid anything with nuts then.”

With that, Tony closes the door behind him, fighting the urge to look back through the window. When he enters the observation room, Natasha is long gone. Tony frowns. There goes his one safety net.

“FRI, pull up any missing kid cases in the eastern United States between 2001 and 2015.” He kicks his feet up on the table, narrowing his eyes at the array of computer monitors as FRIDAY pulls up thousands of case files from the public record. Thousands of child’s faces ranging from infants to young teenagers flash across his screen. He runs his hands over his face, humming to himself. There are simply too many cases to sort through each one.

“Narrow it down to caucasian boys from the New York area,” he says as he watches the files consolidate to a few hundred. “Body never found.” Even fewer files, probably no more than 150 are left. Still too many to choose from. “Any of their faces match the Hydra kid, FRIDAY?” FRIDAY scans through the files in the blink of an eye, countless unfamiliar faces flashing across the screen. Tony has never realized how many children go missing in such a small area in only a few years. He makes a mental note to come back to this for his future general welfare project. Green energy can wait.

“Negative, boss,” FRI chimes, her voice tight in frustration, “But I have found one case file dated from 2007 that appears to be tampered with. It’s completely encrypted.”

Tony’s brow furrows. That definitely seems fishy. “Well, what are you waiting for, dear? Decrypt it for me.”

FRIDAY gets to work immediately, the case file pulling up though its contents are completely scrambled. It’s an intense firewall, similar to the one Tony dismantled back at the Hydra base. It isn’t anything Tony couldn’t crack, and with the help of FRIDAY, it will be a piece of cake.

“File decryption at thirty-seven percent,” she says, a small green progress bar scrolling across the bottom of the center monitor. “The firewalls are incredibly thick and complex. This may take a moment.”

Tony watches the bar scroll by bit by bit, anxiously biting at his nails as he leans far back in his chair. This is a shot in the dark, at best, and Tony might walk away from his research project none-the-wiser. However, this kid was fifteen, and he had to have come from somewhere. There must be someone looking for their son. At least, that’s what Tony hopes. It takes a special type of monster to torture children. He witnessed this first hand with Wanda. She was far too young to enter their world, but a lifetime of suffering was bestowed upon her by that one Stark Missile. Tony will never let go of that guilt, and for some reason, he can’t fully understand, he feels that guilt with this boy as well.

“Any luck?” Tony jumps and turns in his chair to see Rogers standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed over his broad chest. He’s changed out of his uniform, now wearing a simple gray t-shirt and jeans. The domestic look is something that Tony never gets used to seeing on Steve Rogers. “What have I told you about sneaking up on me?” Tony snaps. Ever since the Battle of New York, he doesn’t particularly take well to being startled. He faces enough of that in his nightmares when he remembers what kinds of creatures live out of their reach. He shakes his head. Aliens are a problem for a different day. He turns to face the computer again, placing his feet back on the floor and leaning over the keyboard with his elbows braced on either side.

“No luck so far,” Tony says, defeated. “The kid’s face doesn’t match any missing person records. FRIDAY detected one being tampered with back in 2007, but it’s locked behind a pretty hefty firewall.”

Steve steps into the room, standing behind Tony as he looks at the screens-- at all of the missing persons reports still displayed across the monitors. His eyes flicker from screen to screen, his eyebrows knitted together as if trying to make sense of what he is seeing. “What’s your plan, Stark?” Steve tears his gaze away from the computer to look at Tony. He sits with his back still to Rogers, staring at the small progress bar at the bottom of the screen as it inches along, though he can feel Steve’s stare in the back of his head. The bar moves little by little-- forty-six percent, fifty-nine percent, sixty-two percent, and so on. He taps his fingers on the table impatiently. He needs to reconfigure FRIDAY’s hacking mainframe.

“Tony,” Steve insists, stepping up to Tony’s side in an attempt to catch his eye. Tony has no desire to talk with him about his plans because he has no clue what he’s going to do. Caring for mutant teenagers is far out of his genius scope, so he feels like he’s a fish stranded out of water. If he doesn’t think of something quick, Secretary Ross will be on him before he can blink, and the kid will be taken from him. The child may have been kidnapped and experimented on by Hydra and Oscorp, but that doesn’t mean the rest of his life should be doomed in an underwater holding cell. The kid has done nothing wrong.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Spangled,” Tony sighs, shaking his head. He finally tilts his head to look at Rogers, whose eyes are narrowed and lips are tugged into a scowl. “Do you have something to add Captain Righteous, because I’m open to suggestions.”

Steve Rogers doesn’t seem fazed by Tony’s sting, as usual, and he instead moves to face Tony, leaning against the side of the table with his arms crossed. For the love of God, uncross your arms and stop looking at me like I’m a delinquent teenager, Tony thinks. He has to hold himself back from saying it. “I don’t know, Tony,” Steve admits, the crook in his brow finally smoothing over. The man shakes his head and glances over the room. “He’s a product of Hydra, Tony. He’s dangerous.”

Tony scoffs. The nerve of this man-- everything just has to be a threat. “He’s a kid-”

“A dangerous kid,” Rogers retorts, pressing his palm on the table. Tony stares at the blond, not wanting to hear another word he has to say. “It’s hard to admit, but you saw the way he fought, Tony. He’s just like Bucky. They had to have been training him for something. Oscorp was just helping Hydra make their next super soldier.” “You seem like you’re an expert with curing Russian super soldiers, so why don’t you take point on this, then?” Tony is getting tired of hearing Steve’s voice. It’s utterly exhausting, and he can’t bear to think of that fifteen-year-old kid as anything other than a victim. He’s no super-soldier-- he’s absolutely nothing like Barnes. Tony didn’t see a single ounce of fear he saw in that kid’s face in the face of Bucky Barnes.

Steve hesitates. Tony can see the gears turning in his head as he pushes himself off of the table and paces across the room. He pauses by the opposite wall, running a hand across his jawline with thought, “I might want to bring Bucky in. He knows firsthand--”

Tony blanches and leaps to his feet, his chair sliding backward as he whips around to face Rogers. He clenches his jaw. “If you think for a moment that I will allow Barnes to come within one-hundred feet of this building, you are even more delusional than I thought. I barely managed to forgive you, but you’re a fool if you think I will--”

FRIDAY’s cool, calculating voice interrupts his tirade. “I’m sorry to interject, Boss, but I have finished decrypting the file.”

Tony shifts his weight from his right leg to the left, spinning on his heel to turn his back on Rogers and return to his seat in front of the computer. He pulls himself closer to the desk, tapping on the uploaded file in the center of the main screen. The digital document folds out, an old security photo of an alleyway pinned in the top corner as his eyes skim the following police report. “Tell me what I’m looking at, FRI.” “August 11th, 2007. Two parents and their six-year-old son were driving home along Queens Boulevard at 11:00 PM when they were rear-ended by another vehicle. The bodies of both parents-- later confirmed to be May and Richard Parker-- were found deposited in an alleyway adjacent to the crash site. Their son, Peter Parker, who was reportedly in the vehicle, was never found.”

Tony’s brow furrows at that. There was what seemed to be a minor fender bender that ended with two parents disposed of in an alleyway while their son was nowhere to be found? “Any witness reports?” Tony asks, to which FRIDAY denies. The rest of the file is suspiciously blank. There’s nothing that stands out in the report that would justify it being blocked behind mile-wide firewalls. He feels Steve step up behind him, reading over the report himself. Tony gnaws at his lower lip. If this Parker kid was six when he went missing in 2007, then he would definitely be fifteen now. This could be the kid.

Steve is the next one to speak up. “Is there a picture of Peter Parker attached to the report?” he asks. “The original missing person report seems to have a photo attached, but it’s been retroactively removed,” FRIDAY reports. “Attempting to recover now.”

On the screen, the Parker file along with all other missing person reports closes. After a tense minute in which Tony and Steve sit in silence, FRIDAY procures a single image on the screen. Tony feels as if his breath is punched from his chest.

It’s the kid-- with his eyes just as wide, brown, and innocent as they are now. His hair is long and curly in the photo, and the boy smiles. He has his hands on a fork as he stuffs birthday cake in his mouth, a small blue party head secured to the top of his head with a thin elastic band. Tony never thought he liked kids, but the innocent face staring at him through the photo is absolutely adorable. His heart aches for the child. He was stripped of this warm childhood when he was only six? The kid-- Peter, his name is Peter-- has been with Hydra for almost ten years?

“That’s him.” Tony mumbles. It still feels like a dream. He finally has a face to the name. He only has one more unanswered question. “FRIDAY, any surviving family of the Parkers?”

She’s scanning through several different files, all moving too fast for Tony to properly read before she comes across the face of a woman with long brown hair and clear-rimmed glasses. “May Parker, the wife of Richard Parker’s brother Benjamin Parker, is the only living relative in my database. She currently resides in an apartment building in the center of Queens. Would you like me to contact Mrs. Parker?”

Tony shakes his head. “No, no, that’s enough. Thanks, FRI.” She powers down, the files on the screen disappearing until all of the monitors mounted on the desk are black. Tony scowls at the reflection in the dark screen staring back at him. He’s horrified.

He leans forward, burying his face in his hands. “He has family,” he mumbles to no one in particular. It was one challenge that there was an unnamed, unclaimed kid on his hands, but now he has a name-- Peter Parker-- and he has family that may still be wondering where the hell their baby nephew disappeared to.

“All the more reason to get help,” Steve says. Tony stirs and lifts his head from his hands, casting him a wary glance. The last thing he wants is for Rogers to get his way, but if he has any chance at fixing a boy who's been brainwashed by Hydra for ten years, he’ll need help from someone more experienced, no matter how much it may hurt his pride.

When he comes back to the interrogation room, Natasha is sitting inside. She’s poised across the table from the boy, balancing on the edge of the table. Her body language is relaxed as she speaks to the boy, whose head is hung low, his eyes bleary and exhausted. Through the glass, he can’t hear a word she is saying. Well, he hopes that she won’t mind him crashing their party.

He pushes through the door. Natasha turns to face him as he enters and clicks the door softly shut behind him. He notices a small dinner tray sitting in front of the boy, completely untouched. Peter’s face is twisted into a scowl as he stares down at his lap, eyes flickering between the sandwich and Natasha from the corner of his eyes. Natasha and Tony exchange a brief glance. She gestures to the empty chair on the opposite side of Peter. “Come sit, Tony,” she insists. “I was just trying to get him to eat.” Tony looks at the kid, then down to the plate. Forcing food down his throat obviously wouldn’t be a smart option, but the boy looks so wasted away in that stainless steel chair already that Tony’s sure he’ll be nothing but bone after another day. “No appetite, cabbage patch?”

Peter doesn’t look up at Tony when he speaks, his lips pressed into a line. He can tell by the way his tense shoulders tremble that the boy is terrified. “Don’t want to talk either? You were talking to me lots earlier, kid. Or should I say, Peter?”

The boy goes rigid, his head shooting bolt upright as he stares at Tony, tears filling his eyes. His forehead creased and his eyes started to dart around the room as if solving a complicated equation. Tony watches with unease, and he can feel Natasha staring at him from his side.

He turns his head to face her. Her eyebrow is raised inquisitively. He nods her way, hoping she understands that she needs to trust him if they want to get anything out of this kid. The boy definitely reacted to his name, which means Tony was on the right track. From his brief conversation with Steve, he learned that making connections with his past life was the best way to clear whatever mind-control Hydra may have on him. It’s not much, but until Steve can find a way to get Bucky here quickly, this is the best Tony’s got.

“How do you-- what?” The boy finally speaks. He trips over his words, averting his gaze and staring a hole into the surface of the stainless steel table. “No, no, that’s not my name--”

“I think that is your name, bambino,” Tony says, folding his hands together and interlocking his fingers. He rests his elbows on the table, never taking his eyes off of the boy. “Peter Parker. That was your name, at least. Before whatever this is.” Peter’s eyebrows scrunch up, his mouth twisting, and his fingers starting to curl and uncurl around the arms of the chair. The cuffs are off of his wrists; Natasha probably let him lose for a moment so he could eat his sandwich, but the skin of his wrists are red and rubbed raw. “No, no,” the boy whispers. “No. You’re just trying to trick me.” Tony tilts his head. He can’t fathom why the boy would think that pointing out his name could possibly be a trick. Unless, Tony wonders, they stripped him of his name. It wouldn’t be too far of a stretch. After all, Bucky Barnes turned into the Winter Soldier upon being kidnapped by Hydra. It is expected that they would strip any of his remaining identity from him in an attempt to gain power over him. But Barnes was a grown man. Peter Parker is-- was-- a child. An unsuspecting child who has done nothing in his life to deserve this much turmoil.

“Okay, I’ll bite. What did they call you? What did they tell you your name was?” Before Peter can tense up just as he had earlier, Tony interjects. “There’s no wrong answer, kid. Just tell me the truth. No one is going to hurt you.” “Tony, what are you doing?” Natasha whispers, but he lifts a hand to her. He’s onto something, and he can’t have Romanov throwing the kid off, not when Tony has him right where he wants him. He needs to get Peter to trust him, to believe that he will do nothing to hurt him. Because it’s nothing but the truth.

Tony wants nothing more than to take the kid under his own wing and protect him from anyone who may come for him. Realistically, however, Tony knows that he can’t do that. Not without enough information. The boy hesitates, his eyes overflowing with tears that silently roll down his reddened cheeks. Tony wants to wipe them away-- a very overwhelming yet out-of-character urge of tenderness that completely takes him by surprise. Peter looks up at him, squinting through his tears before he croaks a quiet, “No… wrong answers?”

Tony forces a slight smile onto his lips. He nods at the kid. “No wrong answers.” Peter sits for another moment as if contemplating the consequences of answering the question. Tony’s ready to admit that he hadn’t expected to get this far with the kid within one day-- he had expected a completely stoic and abrasive soldier just as Barnes seemed to be. But at the end of the day, it’s just another stark reminder that the soldier in front of him is a fifteen-year-old kid.

“They called me all different names,” the boy admits. “But they didn’t want me to… remember my old name.”

Tony clears his throat. Patience, he reminds himself. Before he can ask further questions, Natasha beats him to it. She leans forward from where she’s perched on the table, offering the cowering boy a gentle smile. Tony thinks she’s never appeared this warm before. “What other names did they call you then?” she asks, her voice quiet.

Another quiet tear slips out of the boy’s eyes, and he doesn’t seem to notice it by the way he stares at Natasha without blinking. Tony can see the way his fingers shake.

“The scientist called me a bunch of numbers,” the boy whispers, shaking his head as he searches his brain for the right words. “Like… zero four… something.” “08-14?” Natasha recites from the initial data collection she and Steve presented to Tony the other day. It’s the subject number associated with the kid, though Tony guessed it was used for confidential record-keeping, not naming a literal child.

The boy nods at Natasha’s words before licking at his lips and parting them to speak again. “But the faceless men were the ones who made my new name,” he mutters as if the words filled him with deep shame. “Паук.”

Natasha goes rigid beside Tony, though he has no idea what the kid just said. It sounds Slavic-- Russian, maybe. He turns to Natasha, his eyes narrowed as he stares her down. She looks to him, her eyes sparkling with recognition. “What’s that mean, Nat? You’re gonna have to help me out here, I haven’t touched by DuoLingo Russian lessons in a while.”

She rolls her eyes at him and shakes her head. “I’ll tell you later,” she insists, before turning to Peter, her expression softening. “Thank you for telling us, Peter.” She doesn’t react to the way the boy flinches at the name. Tony thinks she’s smart for using it-- it’s better they start ingraining his actual name into his head now rather than waiting until it’s too late. She stands up, her eyes still locked on Peter as she gestures to the sandwich. “Why don’t you eat? Unless you would like something else.”

The boy eyes the bread, tentatively reaching his hand up to poke at the food, as if he’s never seen it before. He scrunches his eyebrows at it, his hands trembling as he moves to pick it up. “What… is it?” he asks.

Tony has to fight the urge to turn and leave the room that instant. He’s not sure why the kid not knowing what a sandwich is is his final straw but for some reason he is and Tony wants to abort. He knows he’s bitten off more than he can chew, and he can thank his ridiculously large guilt-complex for that. However, he’s come this far, and he cannot abandon this kid now. As much as Tony wants to deny it, Peter needs him.

“It’s a sandwich, cabbage patch,” Tony says with an encouraging smile. “Nothing really but meat, cheese, and bread. Don’t tell me you’re used to something fancier, because while I may be a billionaire, I’m not in the mood to splurge on some filet mignons for a fifteen-year-old.” Natasha elbows him hard in the ribs.

The joke flies over the kid’s head, but that’s okay. He carefully picks up the sandwich and holds it to his nose, sniffing it tentatively. “It’s food?”

Natasha nods at the boy, urging him on. “It’s food. I promise it’ll be good,” she says. “Just give it a try.”

There’s an unusual amount of trust and vulnerability in the boy’s eyes as he raises the sandwich to his lips with trembling hands. The tears in his eyes are gone, replaced with a cautious yet prevalent look of wonder as he takes a bite into the soft bread. His cheeks are still red and stick, coated with his silently-shed tears, but Tony’s sure they can get him cleaned up and maybe in an actual bedroom soon. Or, he hopes. He has no idea what’s going to happen from here.

The boy silently eats, the first bite devolving into a second, then a third, and a fourth until suddenly the sandwich is gone and the kid’s cheeks are stuffed full of bread. Tony bites back a smirk-- at least the kid has a decent appetite.

“We’ll bring you more soon, okay?” Tony chimes as he moves to stand up. Natasha moves to the door, and Tony takes note that she isn’t strapping him back down to the chair. The room is made of mostly vibranium, and FRIDAY has close monitoring on the security of the room, so Tony doesn’t see the harm in it. The boy’s wrists are far too raw and bruised anyway. “Sit tight.” Tony follows Natasha out of the door.

He shuts the door tight behind him, raising his eyes to see Natasha standing in front of him with her arms lax at her sides, her eyes darting across the floor. There’s a deep, unsettling feeling stirring in his gut when thinking of her reaction to the kid speaking Russian, so he assumes the worst when she finally looks him in the eye. “He can hear us,” she says instead, gesturing vaguely towards the one-way mirror. “We should talk somewhere in private.”

That’s how he ends up sitting in the main dining area on the fortieth floor with Natasha and Steve. Tony stares at the bowl of cereal sitting in front of him. When he stepped out of the elevator he had made himself a bowl. It must have been out of pure stress, because now as he stares down at his Cap’n Crunch, which is now soggy from sitting in the milk for too long, he has no appetite. He pushes the bowl away from him with an exaggerated sigh. “Are you going to tell me what the kid said or are you enjoying leaving me in absolute suspense?” Tony quirks with frustration. He doesn’t understand why Natasha is being so secretive about it. After all, the more about Peter they knew, the faster they could figure out how to fix him and how to protect him from prying government eyes.

He hasn’t discussed it between Natasha and Steve, but he knows neither of them want to turn the kid over to the Feds. Under Secretary Ross, there’s no telling what may happen to the kid. For the first time since the incident went down, Tony thinks he can somewhat understand what Rogers felt when the Accords were first presented. Albeit he literally met this kid today and Barnes was Rogers’ old war buddy, Tony can now understand the need to protect someone from another’s actions. For now, he shakes it off. No time for existential dread today.

“The kid’s file mentioned progress with cross-species experimentation,” Natasha says instead of answering his question, which draws a long, tired sigh from Tony. He’s tired of beating around the bush, but he supposes he’ll humor Romanov for a moment. “The way that kid moved along the walls… I should’ve realized it sooner.”

Tony isn’t sure what she’s hinting at, but he suddenly, with a start, remembers the way the kid launched himself onto the ceiling and started to crawl across it as if it was second nature. In the moment, he had been too shocked and bustling with adrenaline to think much of it, but now that he considers all the information he has gathered, there’s already a formed conclusion. “Паук means spider,” Natasha says, leaning back in her chair and kicking one foot up onto the edge of the table. Tony thinks back to the basement network beneath Oscorp, remembers the boxes of fluorescent spiders frozen in time, with one box in the center missing. #08-14.

“Oscorp helped Hydra make a spider-hybrid super soldier?” Tony wonders aloud. It’s the only plausible option-- the way the kid clung to ceilings, the corresponding serial numbers, the name.

“They failed with Bucky,” Steve chimes in. He’s not sitting at the table but instead lingers a few feet away with his hands tucked inside his pockets. He’s been watching them from afar, though Tony can always feel the stare of those brooding eyes bearing into the back of his head. “They’re trying something bigger. Something stronger. Oscorp gave them the means to do it.” Tony nods. Oscorp’s infamous work with cross-species genetics was bound to catch the attention of a few bad apples. It’s just his luck that those bad apples happen to be Hydra of all things. God, he’s so tired of dealing with these bastards.

“So we’re dealing with a spider-super kid,” Tony states, his voice monotone as he struggles to unpackage that sentence. Handling teenagers seems difficult enough, but dealing with a teenager that’s part spider? Tony doesn’t think even all of the worlds’ parenting books can prepare him for that. “Now what?” “Bucky will come,” Steve announces, turning to face Tony. He doesn’t speak with hesitancy as he had before. He’s no longer afraid of what Tony has to think because, in reality, they have no other choice. “He can help us figure out what we’re dealing with, and we go from there.”

“Until then, we should continue interrogations, or whatever the hell it is we’re doing,” Natasha says. She plays with the sleeves of her shirt as she speaks, twisting the loose fabric around her fingers before stretching it back out again. “The more information we can get from the kid the better. By the time S.H.I.E.L.D or Ross get involved, we’ll have more than enough evidence to prove he isn’t a threat.”

Steve, ever the pessimist it seems, has to rain on their parade. “What if he is a threat? Then what? You saw how he attacked me back at the base. Who’s to say he won’t do it again?”

Tony sits upright in his chair, lazily grasping his spoon and shoving a soggy mouthful of Cap’n Crunch into his mouth. If anything, he hopes it’s an insult to Steve Rogers. This is Tony’s captain. He swallows, his throat aching. “That’s not an option, Rogers,” he insists. “We’re bringing Barnes here, endangering everyone in this building to ensure that. Aren’t we, Captain?”

Steve relents, allowing his arms to relax at his sides. “We just have to be prepared for the worst-case scenario.”

“Yeah, and in my plan, there is no worst-case scenario,” Tony snarls. “We prove that he isn’t a threat, we get him assimilated, and we find him a place at the tower. Simple as that.”

Steve turns and blinks at Tony with surprise. “You’re going to take him in? What about that woman, May Parker? She has a right to know where her nephew is.” “As far as Mrs. Parker knows, Peter Parker has been dead for years,” Tony retorts, reaching a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. He feels a massive migraine coming, but he figures any time he talks to Rogers for an extended period of time the headaches come. It was only a matter of time. “He’s not a normal kid anymore. He’s fifteen and has a lot more changes to deal with than puberty. We keep him here and shape him up until he can control his powers.” Neither Natasha or Steve have anything to say in regards to his plan, so Tony takes his small victory. The Cap’n Crunch is bitter in his mouth, so he snags the bowl from the table and dumps it down the garbage disposal. The flip phone in Rogers’ pocket begins to ring, so he pulls it out, presses it to his ear, and excuses himself from the room. Natasha stands from her place at the table and trails over to where Tony aimlessly stands in the kitchen.

“Are you sure you can do this?” she asks, her forehead creased in concern as she leans in close to Tony to ask him in a hushed voice. Tony’s grateful for her-- for so many reasons-- but she’s ever the diplomat, and in such a polarizing time, he can really appreciate that. Even though she did technically turn on him with the Barnes business. Regardless, he puts that behind him. “Taking in this kid will be a lot of trouble. It may not go how you want it to.” “I don’t have another choice,” Tony admits. Because in truth, he doesn’t. Either he takes this kid under his wing and attempts to undo whatever evil Hydra implanted in his little head, or the government gets its grimy hands on him and he rots for the rest of his days in some kind of prison or another research facility. The decision is an easy one in Tony’s book. “It has to work.” “I’m with you,” she assures him, covering his hand with one of her own and brushing the top of his knuckles with the pad of her thumb.

Tony makes a decision then. If he’s going to start treating the kid as part of the large, dysfunctional family, he needs an upgrade. “I want the kid to move out of that room by tomorrow,” he insists. “There’s plenty of bedrooms. Put him in one and we’ll reinforce the doors to be safe. The kid needs a proper bed.”

Natasha nods. Surely she understands how awful it was to see the kid chained to a stainless steel chair in a bleak interrogation room under harsh fluorescent lighting. “Consider it done,” she says.

Only then can Tony relax, just a tiny bit.

The next several days pass with repetitive motions. Steve moves Peter to a lone room on the eightieth floor of the tower, where two of Tony’s labs reside. He kept that empty bedroom there in case of late nights he spent at the lab in which he got the rare moment of shut-eye, but for now, it will function as a base for the kid where Tony can keep a close eye on him. The boy doesn’t take well to the room at first. It takes several nights for Tony to fully convince him to sleep on the bed instead of under or beside it, but once the boy settles in the sheets, he’s usually out like a light. Each day, he enters the boy’s room, a housing unit for his gauntlet hidden in his watch for emergencies, with a tray of different breakfast foods and an array of different questions. The first few days, he learns very little, though through observation he is able to see how the boy functions. He spends lots of time suctioned onto ceilings, either tucked in the top corners of rooms or hanging by his feet in the center. Tony walked in on more than one occasion to see the boy dangling there, his eyes peacefully closed as he gently swayed back and forth. At first, it had been quite jarring, but Tony supposes now he’s just used to it.

When Barnes finally does visit, they learn a lot more about the boy. He sheds light on the type of experiments and treatments he underwent to initiate mind control, but upon meeting Peter, the Winter Soldier is optimistic. His tentative diagnosis, if Tony will, is that the kid has not undergone more than a year of soldier training. From there, Tony hypothesizes that Hydra and Oscorp had been working together for the majority of Peter’s time there perfecting the cross-species genetics. After all, that seemed to be the hardest part. Hydra was pretty efficient at making psychotic super soldiers after all.

Bucky deems it beneficial to spend time with the kid alone, which Tony hates to admit makes him uneasy. He hardly trusts the Winter Soldier to begin with, but Tony was starting to develop a comfortable pattern with the boy and he’s afraid Barnes will ruin their progress. The boy had finally started to let Tony get close to him, even so much so the pair could sit on the couch, at least five feet apart, without the kid fleeing to the ceiling.

Barnes talks to Peter for a long time, and Tony’s left to watch it through a security camera from the comfort of his lab just down the hall from the room. And ever since, Tony starts to see more of Peter shine through instead of the tortured boy that Hydra spit out. It’s small changes-- starting with the spark in the kid’s eyes as Tony sits with him in the room, tinkering with a faulty motherboard as he watches Peter from the corner of the eye.

Peter’s eyes are wide in wonder as he watches Tony tinker, but he doesn’t look at the boy. He knows that the slightest attention may spook the boy away, so he continues to work, whistling under his breath. Peter’s perched on the ceiling as he watches Tony work in wonder, and once the sun sets and it’s time for Tony to retire for the night, he makes sure to leave the broken motherboard on Peter’s table.

It’s hardly dangerous-- there’s nothing that the kid could possibly make out of the shot piece of technology, but he figures if the boy is so interested in it, there’s no harm in fostering a bit of scientific exploration. Maybe this kid will take after Tony after all. However, when he returns the next morning with breakfast for Peter, the motherboard is sitting by the door. The fried edges are smoothed over and fixed, and the previously shattered North Bridge entirely repaired. He gapes at it, and he has to rub his eyes and look over the board one more time before he realizes that the kid must’ve fixed a typically deemed unfixable motherboard. To say he is impressed is an understatement.

Before Tony knows it, three weeks have passed by. He’s sitting with Peter in his room, just as he usually does after Peter eats his dinner. Tony notices how much healthier Peter looks even after a few short weeks. Extensive research into Peter’s abilities left Tony with the conclusion that the boy probably has a potentially enhanced metabolism, so Tony has made an extensive effort to feed the kid as much as possible. The bruising around his wrists and beneath his eyes are completely faded, and if Tony didn’t know better he would’ve guessed Peter was a normal fifteen-year-old. The only dead giveaway is that Peter hardly speaks, his words carefully chosen as he stumbles over them. He’s painfully awkward in each interaction, but Tony can hardly blame a kid who’s most likely been in isolation since he was a very young child. For now, the boy’s social skills are the least of his pressing concerns.

It’s peaceful as he sits in Peter’s room, mindlessly working on his tablet as Peter sits in the top left corner of the ceiling. It’s become a comfortable routine for the two of them. Peter, unfortunately for him, had imprinted on Tony early on, so the boy found peace in Tony’s presence in the room. The billionaire is happy to oblige. They typically sit in silence, no more than a few words exchanged between them.

Today, however, Peter speaks. “Mr. Stark?” His head snaps up, his eyes roaming the ceiling until he finds where Peter is perched with his back to the wall, his feet and bent knees supporting him upright. Tony smiles at him. “Yeah, cabbage patch?”

The boy carefully climbs down from his hiding spot against the ceiling. Shyly, he walks towards the couch, flinching back with hesitation when Tony shifts to allow him some room to sit beside him. “It’s okay, bambino. Sit.” It’s the closest the kid’s come to him since he found him curled up in the cell beneath Oscorp Industries. So, he sits still and waits for Peter to come to him, however slowly that may be.

Eventually, the boy does sit beside them, a few feet separating them. Peter’s posture is tense and careful, but he cranes his neck to catch a brief glimpse of what Tony is working on with his tablet. Tony turns it in his direction so the kid can see it, but his interest is quickly lost.

Peter twists his fingers in his lap, his forehead creased and brows knitted together as he seems to build the courage to speak. Tony’s learned that patience is the key to getting anywhere with this kid. So he sits there, scrolling through his newest suit designs on his tablet when finally, the kid spits it out. “My mission was to hurt you and Mr. Rogers,” Peter whispers, and there is so much turmoil and guilt on his face that it controls his features, pulling his lips into a harsh frown, and his forehead creases terribly. An icy, sharp rod stabs Tony in the heart, and he slowly lowers his tablet into his lap, turning his attention to Peter. “I don’t want to do that, but… sometimes at night, these dreams come and… it’s like they’re in my head all over again.” The kid’s fingers snake up the sides of his face and tangle in his curly chocolate hair. He tugs at the thick locks, and it takes all of Tony’s self-control not to intervene. “I want to be good,” the boy whimpers. “I don’t want to do this-- but they’re still there and I’ve been trying so hard, and-”

“It will take time,” Tony assures. “Do me a favor, kid?”

Peter nods, staring at Tony with wide eyes. “What’s your name?” he asks. It’s a simple question, but one that all these weeks later that Peter still seems to struggle with. Tony imagines its more symbolic than anything, that Hydra took every measure necessary to beat the name out of him-- to strip him of whatever humanity and dignity he had left until he was an empty shell for them to mold. But that wasn’t Peter. Tony got him out, so now this kid can be whoever he wants to be, and Tony wants to be around to see it. He wants to watch this kid become Peter Parker. “I…” the boy hesitates, his eyes falling to his lap where he cracks at his knuckles and taps his fingers mindlessly on his thigh. It’s a nervous tick Tony has noticed him picking up, but if it keeps him relatively composed, Tony sees no issue with it. “My name is… Peter. Peter Parker.” There’s a subtle glint of recognition in the boy’s eyes as he says it, and Tony thinks that this is the first time that the kid says it and actually believes it.

Tony reaches out hesitantly, to ruffle the kid’s hair lovingly. To his surprise, Peter doesn’t flinch when he rakes his fingers through the boy’s thick curls. Tony scratches the top of his head and ruffles his hair before pulling away. “You are Peter Parker,” he affirms. “You always have been and you always will be. For now, that’s enough.” It really is enough. While there are still so many unanswered questions, Tony’s main priority is making sure that the kid is okay. Seeing the fullness of his cheeks and the small sparks of life returning to his eyes, for now, is more than enough. Whatever happens down the road with Ross, S.H.I.E.L.D, Hydra, or Oscorp, Tony can deal with it. Because Peter is Peter again, and that was the first step.

#friendly neighborhood spider man #friendly neighborhood exchange #irondad #spiderson #Tony Stark-centric #irondad fanfiction #marvel fanfiction #Spider-Man angst #spider-man fanfic #Hydra peter parker #fanfiction #peter parker fanfic

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phantomphangphucker · 4 years

Text

Phango - Danny’s Family Only Body Worlds Interactive Display

(Family Reunion + Dissection + Post-Reveal) *PP Compliant

Fenton’s are a family of scientists and Danny’s basically a scientific marvel. Now that the whole family, and the world, know they’re even more curious. Sure, dissection was not a listed family reunion activity, but Danny’s honestly a bit of a messed up person.

“And this is my liver”, Danny holds up the organ and lets the kids and a couple of adults inspect it, many mouthing ‘wow’. Danny tilts his head down and points into his open chest and abdominal cavity, pointing to where the organ had been inside him. “You can see how it would be cuddled up with my one lung and kidneys. And if you really look you can see how it’s already reforming”, Danny tosses his liver up in the air playfully, while a few people do indeed lean closer; gaping a little at being able to actually watch the organ slowly reform.

Danny grabs and flips around a scalpel and uses it to push around his lungs some, making his core more noticeable. Grabbing clamps from his metal medi box to pin back either side of his dissected skin flaps a bit more securely. Tracing his fingers over the unusual shape of his lungs, “now for those of you familiar with organs you’ll probably notice my lungs are a bit funky”, poking at his core and looking at the little crowd and smiling slightly, “my Core’s much more important so really, makes sense my lungs just got the fu-Hell out of the way”.

Jazz watches from one of the setup tables as Danny is rather animatedly wiggling around one of his lungs after popping it out, still fully attached to him at least. This was firmly not how she was expecting today to go. For one, a Fenton family reunion seemed like more than just a bad idea. That many eccentric hunters in one place? Yeah, bad. Add in Danny revealing himself to the entire world -seriously little brother, why? Why did you do that in front of the live tv crew?- and she was sure this was going to go bad. And yet... Jazz has to make a damn point of not gagging at Danny just letting one of the curious youngsters poke at and squish at part of his small intestine. How was this not going to be traumatising to such impressionable minds?

Danny chuckles down at the kid before just deciding to pull out a length of intestine and lay it across a table he just levitated over, leaning back with his hands behind his head after pushing a container of scalpels at everyone. “Feel free to dig around”, chuckling again at all the gathered adult relatives not even wasting a beat before slicing open portions of his intestine; promptly poking around the insides with their gloved hands, children leaning over their shoulders.

Danny barks out a laugh at the sight of Aunt May pulling out half a pencil and looking at him with confusion. Making Danny fall back off the little stool he’s sitting on, yanking his intestines with him and sending a few scalpels flying; one of which stabs him in the eye.

Danny floats back onto the stool cradling his intestines before plopping then back onto the table; everyone looking at him with either worry or mild annoyance while he yanks the scalpel out of his eye.

Waving everyone off, “sorry ‘bout that, here”, handing Jester -who’s apparently the grandfather of his dad’s brother's wife’s adopted sister- back his scalpel. Danny points at the pencil aunt Mays still holding and chuckles a little, “I have swallowed a great many things. A pencil is honestly one of the least weird things”. This seems to get everyone rather curious again, digging around his intestines with renewed vigour; curious over what they may find.

Danny’s leaning back on his hands when his mom comes over, smiling down at him a bit sweetly before looking rather unimpressed, “care to tell me why little Levi is running around with what’s clearly a green liver?”.

Danny blushes a bit and rubs his neck, “they’re not, like, playing hacky-shack with it or something are they?”.

Maddie opens and closes her mouth, having been about to say that even for Fenton’s that would be a bit weird but based off of Danny’s growing knowing smirk...She turns and looks back to the kids, sighing at them doing exactly that. She’s honestly a bit impressed and curious at her boy’s organs being durable enough to tolerate being kicked around very literally. Looking back to Danny and glaring slightly, “their shoes are going to be horribly stained now. They’re not even wearing protective gear, Danny”.

Danny shrugs while the other relatives look at the kids a little worriedly, Danny replying with slight amusement, “oh ecto-contamination isn’t nearly as bad as hunters have always thought”, chuckling and gesturing to his displayed intestines and eyeballing uncle Fezz who is honestly getting a bit close to overstepping boundaries by just digging in Danny’s torso to prod a kidney. Looking back up to his mom after uncle Fezz has the awareness to look a bit sheepish, “I mean, Sam’s handled my innards without protection more times than I’ve gone to class this year”.

Maddie sighs, at least school was going easier on him now that the school board was accommodating his heroism. Looking over the gory viscera covered table with a slight smile, it was a bit nice the rest of the family getting to join in with this, even if she herself had become quite familiar with toying with Danny’s organs. Before looking back to Danny and pointing towards his chest, “you’re healing up a bit”.

Danny tilts his head down, the flaps of his skin have partly stitched themselves back together over his chest and some new skin reforming underneath the pinned sections. Danny wags a finger humorously at his chest, “ah ah ah, I don’t think so”, before grabbing up one of the scalpels and slicing away at the skin. At least no one here was going to cringe or question his pain tolerance, that’s Fenton’s for you.

Jazz sighs over Danny’s antics and buries her head back into her book, it was a pain being the only relatively normal person in the family. Or at least the only one that actually still associated with the ghost hunting side of the family anyway. Though this was just her dads' side of the family, none of mom’s relatives were here. And thinking of Danny, that was probably for the best. Mom was the only ghost hunter on her side, and arguably the only really weird one.

Tilting her head back and attempting to ignore Danny explaining how his stomach acid could dissolve ectoplasm and likely proving it. With Danny being public news she’s sure mom's side of the family will want a little reunion as well. She seriously hopes Danny knows better than to even consider putting himself on a halfa body works field trip with that part of the family. Shaking her head at remembering this morning, since of course, like always this had been sprung last minute.

-Cut To This Morning-

Jazz had just finished stirring the creamer into her morning coffee when her mom came into the kitchen, clearly having just gotten off her cellphone. Mom glares at dad, “you’ve been ignoring your phone, Jack dear. Julian just called, there’s going to be a Fenton reunion in Elmerton and”, looking to Danny, who’s got a spoon in his mouth, “they are insisting the ‘world-saving hybrid’ just needs to be there”.

Danny quirks an eyebrow and swallows, “they're not going to dissect me are they?”. Jazz isn’t sure if Danny’s being justifiably paranoid or smirking ever so slightly; which is honestly more concerning than it has any right to be.

Dad shakes his head, “we may all be weird but they’re great! There’s no way they’d hurt you!”. Mom nods, clearly agreeing, “they don’t want you there as a science experiment sweetie”.

Danny over dramatically snaps his fingers, “drat, I’m going to have to take the initiative then”, before kicking off the ground and phasing through the ceiling, returning with an arguably oversized metal box.

Jazz sighs, Danny needed way too much therapy. While her parents exchange a glance and smile slightly. Mom ruffling Danny’s hair, “I’m glad you’re so comfortable with our science but maybe don’t open up with an invitation for dissection. You haven’t even met many of them”.

Danny laughs, “oh no, I’ll be opening up much more literally. But I’m not just going to walk in and scream ‘who wants to dissect me!’. That’s more for after mingling a little. Granted no one tries to shoot me”.

(No one was really surprised when one person, a distant relative named Hames, really did try to shoot Danny. But that’s what you get for revealing yourself internationally)

-Return To Present-

Jazz gets jolted out of her thoughts when someone yells, “Danny! Put yourself back together! Food’s ready!”. Closing her book to the sounds of disappointed moaning and groaning from the little circle that had come to surround Danny’s little horror show.

Danny smirks at Jazz as she walks by him, shaking her head, as he’s scooping up his intestines and stuffing them back in haphazardly, popping his lung back in to slip comfortably around his core. Unpinning his skin flaps and tying them into a little bow around his waist to hold everything in, then throwing a stained shirt over the exposed mess.

Pausing after taking a couple of steps, he felt a little too light, tilting his head before muttering, “well shit, kinda need that”, and then tilting his head up and yelling, “alright! Who’s got my stomach!”.

Multiple people laugh while twice removed aunty Ali -who clearly has a similar sense of humour to Danny- comes over with said organ on silver plated platter and bows to him exaggeratedly. Danny grins wide and makes a show of looking both overwhelmed and blessed, “but I couldn’t possibly stomach something so one of a kind”, before taking it.

Sitting down and holding up the base of his t-shirt with his mouth while he busies himself with reattaching his stomach, since it was honestly faster than regrowing organs. He would actually like to be able to stomach his food thank you very much. Though he does appreciate someone loading up his plate for him.

Danny can’t help but smirk at how all the food is green coloured in some way. Though that does make him ever so slightly paranoid that someone could have possibly accidentally added in a bit of his organs.

(In retrospect, he probably should have paid better attention to people running off with his internals. Since someone absolutely did exactly that. Though he’s pretty sure no one else noticed and it’s probably better that way).

End.

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myvoicenottheoneyougiveme · 3 years

Text

Well, since you have a problem with every way I could ever pass time--time not spent on you--it should be no surprise by now that you could find some pathos or shoehorned fit for how even the most benign or even positive uses of ("my") time actually represent what's awful, evil, or terrible about me.

The mental gymnastics are beyond ridiculous. But you have decided something in advance, and you pick and choose and frame and bend and slant and twist absolutely everything you can get your hands on in order for you to bolster your platform of total dominion over a life.

Oh, but [insert great grandiose mission here (usually framed in terms of your victimhood)].

Yes, I distract myself, engage myself, follow curiosities, do things entirely intellectual and devoid of emotional content. [”grey rock”] This leaves you with the least to work with in your campaign, but even here, LOOK AND SEE, I TOLD YOU ALL WHAT A GRANDIOSE NARCISSISTIC... uh, what is it? It's, my narcissistic supply, my image, my "character" that knowing I am being stalked I "choose" to show.

Look how smart I am everyone?

...and look how ...uh, non-reactive I am when you invalidate that "crutch" of a mirror? Oh, but it's where my grandiosity lives don't you know? And for every inflation you've ever offered to "help" me with over any supposed things I put stock into, just so you can moments later burst that bubble or rip some carpet out from under me... I mean really, endless examples of you doing this over the last year alone in the workplace... As you can see, I'm a ticking time bomb. And I have "exploded" reliably on every occasion when my "greatness" was not validated.

Yes, yes indeed. You are right in everything you do, and I am deserving of everything you put me through. You are justified. You are contrasted. You are everything right with the world, and I am everything wrong.

I am your scapegoat.

You're getting more subtle all the time and less pointed. You're getting a lot closer to actual "science" being "done to" someone. You've been trading bad science for less bad science of late. I can only guess why, but I don't really care. ...Maybe I'm just, maybe it's just that much more difficult for you to... you know. Is your envelope cooperating with you the same? Or is accountability being aimed backward on you the one supposedly above reproach? It'd be a positive shift in "this" alternate reality you've constructed. You being forced to play by certain rules of engagement takes power away from you. You having to actually honor results of your "experiments" and be less of a hack, it's a positive thing.

But after almost a decade, I can say there is nothing in the world that could ever make you stop. ...There's no such thing as a false result. You can accuse and accuse and accuse and accuse and accuse of everything under the sun, and you don't even have to present an ounce of evidence to substantiate such grand claims. It's almost as if, it's guilty until proven innocent, only without the latter caveat. There are only positive results to your "experiments" and false readings repeatedly over years count for absolutely nothing. There are no false results. Only "inconclusive" ones. I can never be... there can never be a point where you say "mission accomplished" that doesn't result in some kind of... conclusive evidence of what an awful thing I am.

What's real and what's true, has nothing to do with what you've been doing to me for years. If it were, you'd have listened to that handpicked jury of YOUR peers right off the bat when after months with no exit strategy... oh, but that's an even worse reflection for you than one where you'd done nothing at all in the first place. The more harm you do day after day after day only fuels your need to justify what you've done and continue to do. It's a hole you've been digging, a debt, and a level of accountability that becomes more and more and more impossible for you to swallow as time goes on.

You being wrong in every way, from being wrong about me to being wrong for the things you do and have done, it's an impossible bill for your ego to swallow. You can't be what's wrong with "this" picture.

So, you live and breathe a fantasy, a version of reality where you double-down on everything you've used to build "this" in the first place. The hole gets deeper. The potential reflection on you gets even more impossible to contend with.

I have to be everything you've ever said I am, or else you're actually the kind of monster you've spent all your time trying to tell me (and everyone else) I am, simply for what you've been putting me through, me--someone who never deserved any of "this".

I have to be because it is zero-sum. The longer it's ever gone on, the greater the "responsibility" for the strife and the grief has gotten. Someone has to be responsible for everything wrong in your life, and that someone could never be you in any measure.

...for nearly half my life now, you've played "this" zero-sum game with your mirror at my expense. Absolute and total with no nuance and absolutely no personal responsibility for your part in any of it. All of "this" is the herculean effort to continue holding up that house of cards. It can't stop. You can't allow it to stop, without the whole thing toppling over in the breeze. You validate yourself, you lift yourself up, you "know" who you are, at someone else's expense.

You the victim.

You only need a villain.

There are fancy names for what you're "supplied" with in conducting such a "campaign", that you'll notice I didn't even need to use to describe what the fuck you've been doing to me for ages now.

The reality of it doesn't work backwards from the diagnosis as it does with you in regard to me. There isn't some foregone conclusion and constellation of whatever the hell that needs shoehorning. Reality here speaks for itself. It doesn't need any of your mental gymnastics or any fancy words.

You assault me, and I've found a name for that assault. By contrast, you decide in advance what's true about me, and you look desperately for anything you can find to support that.

But in order for you to be the victim to end all victims, I have to be everything wrong, especially the things you can't accept about yourself. "This" exchange can never be allowed to stop.

I've long since accepted that I have no power over my circumstances so long as you're in the picture. But I've also decided, that there's another way out, me. I have only to act. And I am taking such action. I don't need to trade with you in "this" and manage the unmanageable. I'm not locked in your coliseum anymore. ...I do in fact have the final say in how I will and will not live. The power has always been mine; I only need to claim it. I have.

I am coming to the point where I can finally say, that I've done everything in my power to be free of you. Whatever comes of it, I can promise you, I will be free. "This" is over. It's beyond over. It's been over for years. But I'm not waiting on you anymore to let go, and I'm not going to do battle in your arena to manage the present in vain telling myself that it can end within "this" framework you've "created". ...I am simply going, one way or another.

Edit:

Effort is not the metric. Although what you’re doing to doctor reality as it happens as well as rewriting the past, is herculean, any proportional response to “this” will have to go to great lengths on its own.

But this isn’t golf where the one who tries the least gets to be crowned the winner. But effort is a pretty good indicator of the size and scope of what’s being overturned. It’s relatively easy for me, though, because all I have to do is tell the truth. You, on the other hand, require that your narrative go unchallenged and spread virally and, most importantly, back to me. You mobilize an army of distorted mirrors for yourself and lock me and yourself inside. You create a new reality by way of others, and you fight fiercely to protect and uphold it.

But the lengths a person has to go to, to get away from a psycho-stalker such as yourself, to get away from being swallowed alive in “this” way, can’t be compared to the action you yourself commit first and most spectacularly. (Spectacle and effect is literally important for selling/propagating it.) I’m not trying to construct a hall of mirrors made out of validators, I’m just trying to break through one. I’ve never in my life needed what you can’t seem to live without--a stage.

You bring the stage. You put to me a role and lines to read. I do the opposite, or I do nothing at all.

If “this” stage ceased to exist, I wouldn’t myself cease to exist as you would.

Where you do everything within your power to rewrite me and yourself in the process, my only desire is to just be.

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margdarsanme · 4 years

Text

NCERT Class 12 Political Science (World) Chapter 4 Alternative Centres of Power

NCERT Class 12 Political Science Solutions (Contemporary World Politics)

Chapter 4 Alternative Centres of Power

TEXTBOOK QUESTIONS SOLVED : Q 1. Arrange the following in chronological order: (a) China’s accession to WTO (b) Establishment of the EEC (c) Establishment of tlr EU (d) Birth of ARF

Answer: (b) Establishment of the EEC – 1957 (c) Establishment of the EU – 1992 (d) Birth of ARF – 1994 (a) China’s accession to WTO Q 2. The ASEAN WAY: (a) Reflects the lifestyle of ASEAN members. (b) A form of interaction among ASEAN members that is informal and cooperative. (c) The defence policy followed by the ASEAN members. (d) The road that connects all the ASEAN members.

Answer: (b) A form of interaction among ASEAN members that is informal and cooperative. Q 3. Who among the following adopted an ‘open door’ policy? (a) China

(b) EU (c) Japan

(d) USA

Answer: (a) China Q 4. Fill in the blanks: (a) The border conflict between China and India in 1962 was principally over……..and……..region. (b) ARF was established in the year…….. (c) China entered into bilateral relations with ………(a major country) in 1972. (d) ………..plan influenced the establishment of the organisation for European Economic Cooperation in 1948. (e)……….. is the organisation of ASEAN that deals with security.

Answer: (a) Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin, (b) 1994, (c) the US, (d) Marshall, (e) Asian Regional Forum. Q 5. What are the objectives of establishing regional organisations?

Answer: The regional organisations are established with the following objectives: 1. To make regional development at par the fast growing global economy. 2. To accelerate economic growth through the social progress and cultural development. 3. To promote regional peace and stability based on the rule of law and the principles of United Nations Charter. Q 6. How does the geographical proximity influence the formation of regional organisations?

Answer: The geographical proximity influences the formation of regional organisations because: 1. It is influenced by almost some historical enmities and weaknesses. 2. Sometimes the similar interests come together. 3. Even fruitful areas for regional economy are also the result of geographical proximity. Q 7. Wha.are the components of the ASEAN Visiong020?

Ans: The com10nents of ASEAN Vision 2020 can be summed up as follows: 1. An ou.ward looking role in internatioial community. 2. To encourage negotiations over conflicts in tie region. 3. To mediate tc end the conflicts i.e. Cambodian conflict, East Timor Crisis, annual discussion on East Asian Cooperatioi through meetings. Q 8. Name the pillars aid objectives of ASEAN community.

Answer: The ASEAN community established the following three pillars: 1. The ASEAN Security Community 2. The ASEAN Economic Community 3. The ASEAN Socio-cultural Community. The objectives of ASEAN community are as follows: 1. Territorial disputes should not escalate into armed confrontations. 2. To accelerate economic growth through social progress and cultural development. 3. To promote regional peace and stability based on the rule of law and the principles of the United Nations Charter. 4. To establish dispute settlement mechanism to resolve economic disputes. 5. To create Free Trade Areas for investments, labour and services. Q 9. In what ways does the present Chinese economy differ from its command economy?

Answer: The present Chinese economy has adopted the ‘open door policy’ to generate higher productivity by investments of capital and technology. It differed from its command economy in the following manner: 1. It broke stagnancy of command economy. 2.Command economy lagged behind the industrial production but Chinese economy recovered it by privatisation of agriculture and industry. 3. The present Chinese economy established new trading laws and created Special Economic Zones leading higher rise in foreign trade. During Command economy the international trade was minimal and per capita income was very low. Q 10. How did the European countries resolve their Post Second World War problem? Briefly outline the attempts that led to the formation of the European Union.

Answer: After the end of Second World War in 1945, the European States confronted the ruin of their economies and the destruction of assumptions and structures on which Europe had been founded. European countries resolved their Post Second World War problems in the following manner: 1. Under the ‘Marshall Plan’ the USA provided financial help to revive European economy. 2. The US also created a new collective security structure under NATO. 3. Under the ‘Marshall Plan’ the organisation for European Economic Cooperation was established in 1948 to extend cooperation on trade and economic issues among the Western European States. 4. European Union was founded in 1992 for a common foreign and security policy, cooperation on justice and home affairs and creation of a single currency. It evolved from an economic union to political one over time. The following attempts led to the formation of European Union: 1. The Council of Europe was established in 1949 for political cooperation. 2. The process of economic integration of European Capitalist countries led to the formation of European Economic Community in 1957. 3. The above mentioned processes acquired a political dimension with the creation of European Parliament. 4. The collapse of Soviet bloc put Europe on a fast track and resulted in the establishment of European Union in 1992. Q 11. What makes the European Union a highly influential regional organisation?

Answer: As a supernational organisation, the European Union bears economic, political diplomacy and military influence as a regional organisation in the following manner:

1. Economic Influence: (а) Three times larger share in world trade than the US. (b) Its currency Euro, can pose a threat to the dominance of the US dollar. (c) The EU functions as an important bloc in the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

2. Political and Diplomatic Influences: (a) Two members of the EU, Britain and France hold permanent seats in the Security Council to influence the UN policies. (b) The EU also includes various non-permanent members of the UNSC. (c) The European Union play an influential role in diplomacy and negotiations except the military force i.e. the EU’s dialogue with China on human rights and environmental degradation is remarkable.

3. Military Influence: (o) The EU’s combined armed fo^fees are second largest in the world. (b) Its total expenditure on military is second to the US. (c) Its two important members— Britain and France also experience nuclear ascends of 550 nuclear warheads. (d) The EU is world’s second most important source of space and communications technology. Q 12. The emerging economies of China and India have great potential to challenge the unipolar world. Do you agree with the statement? Substantiate your arguments.

Answer: The Indo-China relations experience strategically organised as rising economic powers in global politics and to play a major role in Asian economy after the end of Cold War. It can be proved on the following grounds: 1. The new economic policies of India and China have broken their economy from stagnancy. 2. The creation of special economic zones led to a phenomenal rise in foreign trade. 3. China has become the most important destination for foreign direct investment anywhere in the world. Hence, it has large reserves for foreign exchange to allow it to make big investment in other countries. 4. At the global level also, India and China have adopted similar policies in World Trade Organisation to deepen integration with the world economy to challenge unipolar world. Q 13. The peace and prosperity of countries lay in the establishment and strengthening of regional economic organisations. Justify this statement.

Answer: This statement represents the ASEAN Regional Forum and the European Union, where ASEAN Regional Forum is based on the notion not to escalate territorial disputes into armed confrontation: 1. The ASEAN is rapidly growing as a regional organisation with the Vision 2020 including an outward looking role in international community and to encourage negotiations over conflicts in the region. 2. ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) maintains coordination of security and foreign policy. 3. The EU has also been funded on the ground of common foreign and security policy, cooperation on justice and home affairs. 4. The European Union has also extended cooperation while acquiring new members especially from Soviet bloc. Q 14. Identify the contentious issues between China and India. How could these be resolved for greater cooperation? Give your suggestions.

Answer: The relations with China experience friendly gestures from India as India signed popular ‘Panchsheel’ to develop Indo-China relations in 1954 and advocated China’s membership to the United Nations. Still, after 1957, various contentious issues arose in Indo-China relations: 1. In 1962, military conflict over a border dispute of MacMohan Line resulted on unwarranted claim by China which now lie in Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin region of Ladakh. 2. Differences arose from Chinese take over of Tibet in 1950 which was protested by India against China. 3. After Panchsheel, attack by China on India in 1962, to occupy larger territories of India, created humiliation. 4. China’s assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear programme also created differences. 5. China’s military relations with Bangladesh and Myanmar were viewed as hostile to Indian interests. All the above mentioned differences/ disputes could be resolved for greater cooperation- 1. Both the countries should make some more efforts to revive harmonious attitude between themselves. 2. Both the countries should move hand-in-hand to fight against terrorism, nuclear race and economic disparities. 3. Both the countries should develop understanding and respect. 4. Hence, both of them have signed agreements on cultural exchange and cooperation in science and technology.

Very Short Answer Type Questions [ 1 Mark]

Q 1. What is meant by ‘ASEAN WAT?

Answer: ‘ASEAN WAY’ is an interaction that is informal, confrontationist and cooperative to promote supernational structures in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Q 2. Correct the following statement and rewrite ASEAN stands for Association of South East African Nations. Or What does ASEAN stand for?

Answer: ASEAN stands for Association of South East Asian Nations. Q 3. In which year the European Union was established?

Answer: 1992 Q 4. What is the common currency of EU?

Answer: EURO Q 5. Name any two older members of EU.

Answer: Austria and Denmark Q 6. Name any two new members of EU. Answer: Estonia and Poland. Q 7. What does the circle with golden stars on the European Union flag stand for?

Answer: The circle with golden stars on the European Union flag stands for solidarity and harmony between the people of Europe. Q 8. Mention the major challenges faced in Europe after Second World War.

Answer: 1. Shattered many assumptions and structures on which European states maintained their relations. 2. The European states confronted the ruin of economies and the destruction on which Europe had been founded. Q 9. What is European Union?

Answer: European Union is a group of European capitalist countries established in 1992 for common goal of foreign and security policy, cooperation and home affairs. Q 10. What was Marshall Plan?

Answer: Marshall Plan was introduced by America to provide financial help for revival of European economy. Q 11. Name two countries of European Union who opposed America’s Iraq invasion.

Answer: Germany and France. Q 12. What is ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF)?

Answer: ASEAN Regional Forum was established in 1994 to carry out coordination and foreign policy among ASEAN members. Q 13. What is the significance of ASEAN flag?

Answer: In the ASEAN logo, the ten stellas of paddy (rice) represent the ten South East Asian countries bound together in friendship and solidarity. The circle symbolises the unity of ASEAN. Q 14. When did China get independence?

Answer: 1949 Q 15. What is SEZs (Special Economic Zones)? Answer: Special Economic Zones are created to set up their own enterprises by foreign investors. Q 16. Mention the three pillars formed in ASEAN.

Answer: 1. The ASEAN Security Community 2. The ASEAN Economic Community 3. The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Com-munity.

Very Short Answer Type Questions [2 Marks]

Q 1. Which four common symbols make the European Union look like a nation state?

Answer: The European Union has its own flag, anthem, founding date and currency. Q 2. Mention any two steps taken by China to improve its economy.

Answer:

1. Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were created to invite foreign investors to set up their own enterprises. 2. The privatisation of agriculture and industry in 1982 and 1998. Q 3. Mention the agreements signed between India and ASEAN.

Ans: 1. India signed Free Trade Areas (FTAs) with two ASEAN members, Singapore and Thailand. 2. India is trying to sign on FTA with ASEAN itself. Q 4. What are the odds which limit the ability of EU?

Answer: European Union is a supernational organisation but in many areas its member states have their own foreign relations and defence policies that are often at odds as- 1. British Prime Minister Tony Blair supported the US’s Iraq invasion and many new members made US led ‘coalition of willing’ while Germany and France opposed it. 2. Denmark and Sweden have resisted the Maastricht treaty and the adoption of the Euro. Q 5. “The European Union is a nation state more than a Economic Union”. Justify the statement.

Ans: The European Union has now started to act more as a nation state because: 1. European Union has its own flag, anthem, founding date and common currency. 2. European Union bears common foreign and security policy. 3. The EU has made efforts to expand areas of cooperation while acquiring new members especially from Soviet bloc. Q 6. How can we say that ASEAN is an economic association?

Answer: To more extent it can be said that ASEAN is an economic association: 1. ASEAN Economic Community aims at to create open market and production based activities within ASEAN states. 2. ASEAN has created Free Trade Areas (FTAs) for investment, labour and services. 3. The current economic strength of ASEAN as a trading and investment partner to the growing Asian economies as India and China make this attractive proposition. Q 7. What are the objectives of ASEAN Economic Community? Answer: The objectives of ASEAN Economic Community are as follows: 1. To create common market and production based activities within ASEAN states. 2. To aid social and economic development. 3. To resolve economic disputes, the existing dispute settlement mechanism has been improved. 4. Free Trade Areas for investment, labour and services have also been created. Q 8. How do ASEAN members commit to uphold peace and neutrality?

Answer: ASEAN members commit to uphold peace and neutrality- 1. ASEAN security community is based on the conviction that territorial disputes should not escalate into armed confrontation. 2. By 2003, ASEAN had several agreements among members states to uphold peace, neutrality, cooperation, non-interference, respect for national differences and sovereign rights. 3. ASEAN Regional Forum was established in 1994 to coordinate security and foreign policy. Q 9. What are economic challenges of China despite its economic development?

Answer: Though the Chinese economy has improved dramatically, still everyone in China has not been benefitted by the reforms which can be judged by the following facts- 1. Unemployment has risen. About 100 million people are looking for jobs. 2. Female employment and conditions are bad as in Europe of 18th and 19th centuries. 3. Increasing environmental degradation and corruption. 4. Rising economic inequality between rural and urban residents. Q 10. How did relations improve after the conflict of 1962 between India and China?

Answer: Indo-China war of 1962 had complicated Indo-China relations. After 1976 the relations began to improve slowly because: 1. China’s policy became more pragmatic and less ideological due to change in China’s political leadership in the late 1970s when China got ready to settle the contentious issues. 2. A series of talks to resol ve the border issues were also initiated to develop harmonious relations.

Short Answer Type Questions [4 Marks]

Q 1. How has the European Union evolved over time from an economic union to an increasingly political one?

Answer: The European Union has evolved over time from an economic union to an increasingly political one. The EU has started to act more as a nation state. While the attempts to have a constitution for the EU have failed, it has its own flag, anthem, founding date, and currency. It also has some form of a common foreign and security policy in its dealings with other nations. The European Union has tried to expand areas of cooperation while acquiring new members, especially from the erstwhile Soviet bloc. The process has not proved easy, for people in many countries are not very enthusiastic in giving the EU powers that were exercised by the government of their country. There are also reservations about including some new countries within the European Union. Q 2. Explain the political, diplomatic influence of European Union as a supernational organisation.

Answer: Political and Diplomatic Influences: (a) Two members of the EU — Britain and France hold permanent seats in the Security Council to influence the UN policies. (b) The EU also includes various non-permanent members of the UNSC. (c) The European Union plays an influential role in diplomacy and negotiations except the military force i. e. the EU’s dialogue with China on human rights and environmental degradation is remarkable. Q 3. What led to the evolution of the EU from an economic union to an increasingly political one?

Answer: The European Union has now started to act more as a nation state because- (i) European Union has its own flag, anthem, founding date and common currency. (ii) European Union bears common foreign and security policy. (iii) The EU has made efforts to expand areas of cooperation while acquiring new members especially from Soviet bloc. Q 4. What are the objectives behind the formation of ASEAN?

Answer: The objectives behind the formation of ASEAN are as follows: 1. Territorial disputes should not escalate into armed confrontations. 2. To accelerate economic growth through social progress and cultural development. 3. To promote regional peace and stability based on the rule of law and the principles of United Nations ; charter. 4. To establish Dispute Settlement Mechanism to resolve economic disputes. 5. To create Free Trade Areas for investment, labour and services. Q 5. Describe any four significant characteristics of ASEAN.

Answer: 1. To create common market and production based activities within ASEAN States. 2. To aid social and economic development. 3. To resolve economic disputes, the existing dispute settlement mechanism has been improved. 4. Free Trade Areas for investment, labour and services have also been created. Q 6. What role has been played by European Union in solving the problems of the European countries?

Answer: 1. The EU functions as an important bloc in international organisation as World Trade Organisation to intervene in economic areas. 2. The EU has expanded areas of cooperation while acquiring new members especially from Soviet bloc. 3. The EU has an influential role in the UN policies because its two members—Britain and France hold permanent seats in the UN Security Council. 4. The EU is influential in the areas of diplomacy, economic investments and negotiation. Q 7. Why India and China both view themselves as rising powers in global politics in spite of tensions between them? Substantiate your answer by giving any four events that have brought cordiality in their relationship.

Answer: Due to Indian initiatives, Indo-China relations improved. In 1954, India signed famous Panchsheel starting a new era of Indo-China friendship. But after 1957 some contentious issues had been arisen between them: (i) Tibet Problem (ii) Border Issues (iii) Chinese Attack in 1962 (iv) Chinese Assistance to Pakistan. Gradually, both the countries came together to develop harmonious relations between themselves: 1. Attempt to normalise relations were restored by exchange of ambassadors. 2. Joint Working Group was set up by both the countries to resolve border dispute. 3. Both of them committed to reduce the forces on Indo-China border. 4. Indian and Chinese leadership and official visits with great frequency. 5. Increasing transportation and communication links, common economic interests and global concerns. Q 8. Why was European Union founded? What were its objectives and significance?

Answer: The European Union was founded in 1992 for a common foreign and security policy, cooperation on justice and home affairs and to create a single currency. Objectives: 1. The circle of gold stars on the flag stands for solidarity and harmony between European Union States. 2. To expand areas of co-operation while acquiring new members especially from Soviet bloc. Q 9. Why ASEAN was established?

Answer: ASEAN is the regional association to provide a political forum to discuss political and security concerns- 1. Before and during the Second World War, the southeastern region of Asia suffered the economic and political consequences of repeated colonialism, both European and Japanese. 2. At the end of war it confronted problems of nation building, the progress of poverty and economic backwardness and the pressure to align with one great power or another during cold war. Q 10. “China has emerged as third alternative to world power”. Examine.

Answer: China emerged as the third alternative to world power since its economic reforms of 1978 as China has been the fastest growing economy since the reforms first began there- 1. China is projected to overtake the US as the world’s largest economy by 2040. 2. Its economic integration into the region makes it drive of East Asian growth. 3. Its strength of economy are population, landmass, resources, regional location, political influence, added to its power. Q 11. How did China end its political and economic isolation?

Answer: China has introduced open market economy which is moving China towards global economy due to following facts- 1. The integration of Chinese-economy and interdependencies has enabled China to have considerable influence with its trade partners. 2. The open door policy has stabilised the ASEAN economy. 3. China’s outward looking for investment and aid policies in Latin America and Africa are protecting China as a global player.

Passage Based Questions [5 Marks]

1. Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions: ASEAN was and still remains principally an economic association. While the ASEAN region as a whole is a much smaller economy compared to the US the EU, and Japan, its economy is growing much faster than all these. This accounts for the growth in its influence both in the region and beyond. The objectives of the ASEAN Economic Community are to create a common market and production base within ASEAN States and to aid social and economic development in the region. The Economic Community would also like to improve the existing ASEAN Dispute Settlement Mechanism to resolve economic disputes. ASEAN has focused on creating a Free Trade Area (FTA) for investment, labour, and services. The US and China have already moved fast to negotiate FTAs with ASEAN. Questions 1. What is the objective of ASEAN Economic Community? 2. Why did ASEAN establish Free Trade Areas (FTAs)? 3. How ASEAN Economic Community would resolve economic disputes? 4. Which countries have already moved fast to negotiate FTAs with ASEAN and why?

Answer: 1. To create common market and production based activities within ASEAN states itself and to aid social and economic development. 2. Free Trade Areas have been established for investment, labour and services. 3. By improving the existing ASEAN Dispute Settlement Mechanism. 4. ASEAN is rapidly growing into areas of regional organisation with its Vision 2020. 2. Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions: The conflict of 1962, in which India suffered military reverses, had long-term implications for India-China relations. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were downgraded until 1976. Thereafter, relltions between the two countries began to improve slowly. After the change in China’s political leadership from the mid to late 1970s, China’s policy became more pragmatic and less ideological. So it was prepared to, put off the settlement of contentious issues while improving relations with India. A series of talks to resolve the border issue were also initiated in 1981. Questions 1. Why did India suffer military reverses as a result of conflict of 1962? 2. When did the relations between India and China begin to improve? 3. What was the change in the policy of China in the seventies? 4. Which efforts were made to resolve the border issues between India and China?

Answer: 1. Due to territorial claims principally in Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin region of Ladakh. 2. From the mid to late 1970s. 3. China’s policy became more pragmatic and less ideological in the seventies. 4. 1. It prepared to put off settlements of contentious issues. 2. A series of talks to resolve the border issues were initiated in 1981.

Long Answer Type Questions [6 Marks]

Q 1. How did China rise to be an economic superpower? Assess.

Answer: China had adopted Soviet model of economy. Despite development, China faced economic crisis as industrial production was not growing fast, international trade was minimal. Under these situations some major policy decisions were taken- 1. China established relations with the US in 1972. 2. China proposed four areas of modernisation as agriculture, industry, science and technology in 1973. 3. Open door policy was introduced to generate higher productivity by investment of capital and technology from abroad. 4. Privatisation of agriculture and industry in 1982 and 1998. 5. China set Special Economic Zones to remove trade barriers. 6. The integration of Chinese economy and inter-dependencies has enabled China to have considerable influence with its trade partners. 7. The open door policy has stabilised the ASEAN economy. 8. China’s outward looking for investment and aid policies in Latin America and Africa are projecting China as a global player. Q 2. Why is the EU considered a highly influential regional organisation in the economic, political and military fields?

Answer: Because- 1. Economic Influence: (a) Three times larger share in World trade than the US. (b) Its currency Euro can pose a threat to the dominance of US Dollar. (c) The EU functions as an important bloc in World Trade Organisation (WTO). 2. Political Influence: (а) Two members of the EU, Britain and France hold permanent seats in Security Council to influence UN policies. (b) The EU also includes various non-permanent members of UNSC. (c) The European Union plays an influential role in diplomacy and negotiations except military force i.e. EU’s dialogue with China on Human Rights and environmental degradation is remarkable. 3. Military Influence: (a) The EU’s combined armed forces are second largest in world. (b) Its total military expenditure is second to the US. (c) Its two important members— Britain and France also experience nuclear arsenals of 550 nuclear warheads. (d) The EU is world’s second most important source of space and communication technology. Q 3. Discuss Indo-China relations.

Answer: The relations with China experienced friendly gestures from India as India signed popular ‘Panchsheel’ to develop Indo-China relations in 1954 and advocated China’s membership to the United Nations still, after 1957, various contentious issues arose in Indo-China relations- 1. In 1962, military conflict over a border dispute of MacMohan Line resulted an unwarranted claim by China which lies now in Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin regions of Ladakh. 2. Differences arose from Chinese take over of Tibet in 1950 which was protested by India against China. 3. After Panchsheel, attack by China on India in 1962, to occupy larger territories of India, created a humiliation. 4. China’s assistance to Pakistan’s nuclear programme also created differences. 5. China’s military relations with Bangladesh and Myanmar were viewed as hostile to Indian interests. All the above mentioned differences/ disputes could be resolved for greater cooperation. 1. Both the countries should make some more efforts to revive harmonious attitude between themselves. 2. Both the countries should move hand-in-hand to fight against terrorism, nuclear race and economic disparities. 3. Both the countries should develop mutual understanding and respect. 4. Hence, both of them have signed agreements on cultural exchange and cooperation in science and technology.

Picture/Map Based Questions [5 Marks]

A1. Study the picture given below and answer the questions that follow:

Question. 1. The given cartoon is related to which country? 2. Which two symbols in this cartoon helped in identifying the country? 3. What message does this cartoon convey to the world?

Answer: 1. This cartoon is related to China. 2. The Dragon and the Great Wall helped in identifying the country. 3. This cartoon conveys a message to the world that China is emerging as a great economic power. 2. Study the picture given below and answer the questions that follow:

question. 1. What does the cartoon represent? 2. Name the policy that is being represented in the cartoon. 3. What does the ‘Competition’ refer to in the cartoon? 4. “We’ll have to get used to it”. What does it denote?

Answer: 1. India’s policy towards ASEAN. 2. ‘Look East’ Policy since 1991 to interact with ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea. 3. Competition among various countries to develop potential relations with ASEAN. 4. It denotes India’s strategy towards using free trade areas with ASEAN B. On a political outline map of world locate and label the following and symbolise them as indicated:

Questions 1. An older member of EU between Portugal and France. Symbolise (A) 2. An older member near Belgium and Netherlands. Symbolise (B) 3. The four new members of EU. Symbolise 1, 2, 3, 4. 4. Four old members of EU. Symbolise 5, 6, 7, 8.

Answer: 1. Spain 2. Germany 3. 1. Estonia 2. Poland 3. Hungary 4. Lithuania 4. 5. Finland 6. Denmark 7. Austria 8. Ireland

from Blogger http://www.margdarsan.com/2020/08/ncert-class-12-political-science-world_11.html

#NCERT Class 12 Political Science

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hegemonicpolitics-blog · 7 years

Text

An Introductory Rant

Part 1

"All I know is that I am not a Marxist." So allegedly said Marx on the topic of a particular French self-proclaimed Marxist party. My own self-application of this idea has come at a mild sense of disappointment, but I think is fundamentally reasonable.

I've attempted to move by thought towards the neo-communism of writers like Alain Baidou and Slavoj Žižek. In understanding Marx I still wish to hold to the idea of the historical dialectic, at this current stage with its worker/capitalist antitheses, is only resolved in communism, that is, the complete abolition of wage labour and private property. However, the 'human nature' argument that I've desired so long to ignore has continued to resurface.

In a situation where the wealth of society is held in common, we understand from game theory and the 'tragedy of the commons' concept, that self-interest threatens a collective-interest when it comes to the commons. As soon as self-interest triumphs, all self-interest becomes necessary because the collective-interest is diminished in its returns.

The necessity then is to impose collective-interest, which fundamentally is what we do in democratic societies a lot of the time. While neoliberalism and the right has continually said that unbridled capitalism shall eventually, through the 'invisible hand' or 'trickle down economics', distribute wealth in a fair fashion, this is simply not the case, and we have observed the impacts of decreasing regulation and control on people and the environment.

Social democracy naturally mediates between pure liberalism and pure communism; we place regulation, restriction, taxation and the other thing upon society in order to reign in the worst excesses. Naturally this is not perfect; if democratic it exists in conflict with power interests, and thus cannot survive indefinitely unlike communism, and on the other hand it keeps intact capitalism as a system, only emulating or simulating a more egalitarian approach artificially. Wage labour relations and the relations of production still exist, they are simply softened.

However communism, in the forms we have witnesses develop in the world, has the same problems. Fundamentally capitalism still exists, simply in another form: state capitalism. The state exploits surplus value and converts workers' output into exchange-value, continuing the same alienation as under capitalism.

The key differences are two-fold: it removes the progressive tendencies of wealth distribution of capitalism (in creating new wealth through investment), thus rendering it considerably less prosperous, and it requires significant energies to enforce. In this way it is less efficient, less free and continues the same fundamental capitalist functions.

In order to de-commodify the labour of humans, it abolishes market mechanism and gives birth to economic planning. In this sense, it becomes even worse, because it replaces liberal democracy with bureaucracy.

It has its advantages. The exploited surplus value can be redistributed or put into building the commons for the collective-interest. But once again this relies on the new bureaucracy to hold as its class-interests the interests of the proletariat.

So this is my opposition to neocommunism. It is utopian in a sense, in that it fits in with an old fashioned Hegelian concept; that of the ideal, which is somehow achieved through the resolution of the dialectic. It is fundamentally unscientific, and also seems to rely too heavily on the Hegelian concept of the Geist.

Even in Marxism's anti-humanist materialism, there is fundamentally some sort of Geist at conflict with itself who discovers its alienated parts are in fact part of its whole. It is obfuscated by cries of 'materialism!' and 'science!', but the former doesn't resolve the inherent idealism in Marxism Hegelian roots, and the latter only works in the context of the 19th century German notion of 'science', which is thoroughly rejected by scientists today who adhere to genuine rigour and genuine physical phenomena.

Neo-communism understands the Soviet experience, but it shrinks back into its shell and proclaims the vaguest of all possible concepts of communism in order to justify its righteousness. It proclaims that we cannot allow ourselves to throw in the towel to capitalism and accept wage labour as necessary. But it provides absolutely nothing except a fetishisation of the word that indicates not political, economic and philosophic thoroughness, but the sad musings of ex-communists pining for the Soviet era with their own petty devolved Leninism.

Žižek is a sad old curmudgeon who can't quite accept being called a social democrat, and so gives into to old fashioned Leninism hidden behind a 21st century democratic mask. Communism is dead, wake up.

PS: Communism can survive, so long as it asserts itself as fundamentally utopian, rather than making claims to scientific truth.

Part 2

Hegemony is the perfect launchpad for those departing Marxism for social democracy, or, as Laclau and Mouffe refer to it, radical democracy. While the two terms are not the same, they are similar in philosophy if not in modern application. I would attach myself to the socialist strains of social democracy, not those deliberative and technocratic ones that have developed since the 1990s.

But why hegemony? For this we must return to Marx. Many aspects of Marx have been rejected by an array of thinkers. His economics requires serious refinement and tries to distill it down the fundamental scientific laws that do not necessarily materialise. Aspects of his critique are certainly useful; his explanation of the labour theory of value and how that gives way to surplus-value are innovative concepts that need to be integrated into any critique of capitalism. But the tendency for profits to fall, for wages to fall, and crises of overproduction have not surfaced to the degree that he believed they would.

His dialectics have been problematic as well, due to the issue of the collective-interest that is supposedly completed by the synthesis of the capitalist/workers antitheses. I discuss this in my rant on neo-communism in more detail.

But his conception of capitalism in the sense of the base-superstructural relationship, integral to the creation of sociology, is important. While the crude economic determinist explanation of this phenomena has been discounted, that of the Second International, we can nonetheless understand it as a great model for interpreting society.

We cannot, as will be demonstrated by putting even the slightest amount of thought to it, assert the 'primacy of the base'. The base-superstructural relationship is the totality of human experience; neither part spontaneously generates new conditions or relations, they solely feed into each other. Thus, the only distinction between the two is perhaps which exists first. There can be no primary role that is anything but a human distinction.

Alternatively a distinction can be made; the base is the only 'real' element, while the superstructure is fundamentally unreal. But this ten effectively becomes a reductionist philosophy, which undermines sexual, gender, racial and environmental struggles down to anti-capitalism. This we cannot do once again, as the economic determinism of old fashioned Marxism does not provide any ability to make scientific predictions, and is thus we cannot assert this reductionism as truth. If we could determine in which ways scientifically that capitalism enshrines the gendered, sexual, racial and environmental issues that we come up against, certainly those could be integrated, but understanding them as coming solely from the base is disingenuous and beyond what we can prove, and in the end undermines many aspects of these struggles.

But a nuanced, reciprocal base-superstructural relationship does help us understand one thing: hegemony.

To be continued...

#neocommunism #marxism #post-marxism #hegemony

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orangebatsanctuary · 7 years

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Hungry for InaSure? Have a seat and enjoy~♥

Worst Day of His Life

by Liza0111

It might be worst day for someone in story, but it’s the best day for us readers especially when you read to the end. Heal your heart with his LOVE as it can be unexpected, to be looking for.

Read on OrangeBat Sanctuary website:

http://www.orangebat-sanctuary.com/liza0111

or click ‘Keep reading’ below.

Happy Sunday Reading!

Love,

Rosiel

Worst Day of His Life

by Liza0111

Tag: alternate universe, fluff, university AU, mention of past SureAse

☂

Inaho never considered himself a charitable or caring person. Actually, most who know him would say he was the exact opposite. “Machine”, “insensitive”, “unsympathetic” were all words that had been thrown at him in the past, and Inaho never bothered to refute or correct them.

While there was a certain amount of personal bias that had to be taken into account, Inaho did not agree that he was emotionless. He had friends whom he deeply cares about, and his older sister Yuki was the most important person to him in the world. With that being said, he couldn’t argue that he tends to lack certain aspects of interest in the world around him. He rarely connected with people he didn’t regularly interact with and he wasn’t as invested in building new relationships with others as he probably should.

That was why he was so unexpectedly surprised on that one rainy day, the first time he laid eyes on him at the bus stop after finishing some work he had to do at the lab.

The fresh smell of summer rain. The unpleasant feeling of his socks getting soaked through his shoes. The sound of raindrops hitting against the ground. A boy with pale blond hair. He couldn’t turn his head away, nor could he tear his gaze from him.

He was beautiful, breathtakingly so.

There was only one piece that was out of place. It was impossible to ignore the tears falling from his eyes. Crying, an emotional response that signals extreme emotions.

Anger…….Happiness…...Sadness. Inaho crossed out the first two options in his head. Sadness it is.

The boy was wearing plain jeans and an oversized blue sweatshirt with their university’s name on the front, a clue that hints they may be students from the same school. He was carrying a large travel bag with both hands. His pretty blond hair is soaked by the rain and drips water continuously, while he stared off into the distance.

Inaho felt like he was disrupting something important as he opened his mouth, but he didn’t let the thought stop him from speaking aloud. ‘Sometimes people just want to be left alone when they are sad’. He remembered one of Yuki’s lectures to him on proper social etiquette. ‘And you should give them space.’ He took her words to heart, but what if the person is standing out in the rain without a raincoat or an umbrella? He determined that the risk of catching a cold was enough to justify his intrusion on the unknown boy’s alone time.

“Your clothes are wet. You can get sick like this.”

As the boy flinched and gawked at him wide eyed, Inaho realized he forgot a crucial part of his dialogue.

It might have been better if he began with something like “Are you alright”.......Well, it’s too late now.

✢✢✢

“Inaho Kaizuka, junior, bioengineering and computer science double major.” Inaho said flatly as he pushed a box of tissue across the small dining table to the blond, who had been sobbing since they first met an hour ago. It took him quite a bit of work to coax him to leave the bus stop, which is something he didn’t have much experience to deal with. Long story short, they were now in Inaho’s modest studio apartment.

He thought he should begin with some sort of introduction, making sure the boy didn’t mistake him for someone suspicious. He merely wanted to make sure he was alright.

“U-um, thank you. My name is Slaine Troyard.” The blond (now identified by the name Slaine) sniffled, grabbed a couple of tissues and blew his nose. “I am also a junior, biology major.” He added the last part with a bit of an awkward tone. Perhaps this wasn’t the format of introduction he was used to. Inaho quietly analyzed the situation.

“Nice to meet you, Slaine.” Another line picked right out of How To Make Friends In A New Environment, a book he received from secret Santa his lab group had last Christmas. Heavy silence filled the air, and Inaho truly had no idea how to proceed any further in this conversation. If this were him a few years back, he would have probably said something insensitive and blunt for such occasion, but he had been trying pretty hard to change that aspect of himself. With the help of his sister and his friends, Inaho believed he was getting better. So now instead of having an untimely exchange, they were subjected to this awkward moment of wordlessness, which was equally as uncomfortable.

This was perhaps not the time to ask Slaine why he was crying at the bus stop by himself, since it was quite obvious whatever the reason was, it was most likely also the cause of his distress. Therefore, it would be an inappropriate topic to bring up. Even he knew that.

“Um…….actually, I was wondering, do you know anyone who is renting out their apartment for a cheap price…….the conditions don’t have to be great, it just…...has to be livable. Bare minimum is fine.” Slaine, still red-eyed and despondent, asked tentatively while still staring at the table between them. “I kind of…….got kicked out of my apartment, this is all I have, and I don’t have a lot of savings…….so……”

“You can stay here.” The words came as a surprise for Inaho himself. He blinked blankly for a few times, his gaze settling on the boy sitting across from him, who seemed shocked to say the least.

“This is a one bedroom apartment, but the couch is usually unoccupied. You can use the space here in the living room too.” Inaho couldn’t exactly pinpoint the reason why he was offering to share his personal space to a stranger, but for some reason, it felt like the right thing to do. “And…...you don’t have to pay me.” He attempted to once again justify his actions, perhaps having a roommate would be nice, he hadn’t had that since his first year in college. Slaine seemed…...trustworthy, and not too difficult to get along. Yuki-nee would be happy to hear that he made a new friend.

“Thank you.” Slaine wiped off the tears on his face, thanked him carefully and promised. “It will only be temporary. I will find a place soon, before school starts in the fall again.”

✢✢✢

Turned out it didn’t take long before the truth of Slaine’s backstory revealed itself, taking Inaho no effort at all.

Slaine was crying over everything. By that, he meant, absolutely everything. One morning Inaho was preparing breakfast for the both of them, and Slaine just started sobbing into the palm of his hand without any sort of warning.

“What is wrong?” Inaho asked, one hand holding the frying pan and the other frozen in mid-air while passing the plate of pancakes to Slaine.

“We used to make pancakes together. It almost always ended up failure…...b-but she had so much fun with it.” Slaine said sadly as he took the plate, sinking back to the comfort of the couch. “Thanks, Inaho.”

That was right. Her. Asseylum Vers Allusia, Slaine’s childhood best friend slash ex-girlfriend of seven years, also the source of his seemingly endless anguish. At first Inaho offered to have Slaine create a list of things that reminded him of Asseylum so he could avoid making him relive his pain, but Slaine merely smiled ruefully and told him “everything reminds me of her”.

And that statement was found to be accurate; there were ample evidence, to the point where Inaho stopped asking him about it all together. He no longer questioned anything when he caught Slaine sighing at the sight of very commonplace objects, knowing that he probably recalled memories he shared with Asseylum again.

He didn’t ask about the details of their breakup, it would be a violation of privacy and he felt that Slaine would not be interested in discussing this topic with him. Now wouldn’t be the best timing, he believed.

Instead of asking questions, he decided that another approach would be more preferable. He tried to stay around Slaine whenever he found him sad and alone in the apartment, until Slaine slowly pulled himself away from the memory and moved on to different tasks.

✢✢✢

There were plenty of other things he was discovering about Slaine besides his past romance with a girl named Asseylum Vers Allusia. Inaho found out that Slaine was a decent choice for a roommate. Unlike Calm, his friend and freshmen year roommate, Slaine mostly kept to himself, and hardly complained about anything. He was more than grateful to Inaho for taking him in, and made efforts to show that in various ways.

“This is?” Inaho inquired when he came home to a plate of unidentifiable object on the dining table. Slaine scratched his cheek, looking away embarrassedly.

“Uh, it was an attempt at omurice……”

“Is it?” Inaho poked the “omurice” carefully with his chopsticks, assessing whether or not eating this would put him at the risk of foodborne illness. “Thank you, Slaine.” It's the thought that counts, not so much the taste. And ultimately, Inaho didn’t feel like betraying the hopeful gaze belonging to Slaine Troyard.

Luckily, the omurice made by Slaine didn’t make him sick after eating it. It only took him several cups of orange juice to get the burned flavor off his tongue.

He was also starting to learn more about Slaine as a person through his observations. The way he liked his eggs cooked (scrambled), the time he usually wakes up (around 12pm), and the type of food he can make (primarily sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were his expertise). He memorized them without a second of thought. It is essential that he at least had some knowledge about Slaine if they were to become friends.

Most of the days, Inaho spent time at his research lab. Summer classes were another option for him, but he didn’t feel the need to as he could fit in all his major requirements just fine before graduation. Usually, when he came home, he would be greeted by Slaine on the couch. He would ask Slaine what he spent the whole day doing, or what he planned to do with his future, but he wasn’t sure if that would be a violation of social norms, especially when Slaine was still so obviously affected by his breakup with Asseylum. The topic of Slaine’s family seemed even more sensitive to bring into conversations. The frequency of his breakdowns had been steadily decreasing, but he still woke up to the sound of Slaine crying in the living room, every once in a while. He still looked at pictures of the two of them together on his phone, Inaho was 97% sure. There was no need to confirm it.

He made sure to leave enough food in the apartment, a copy of the keys, and a bit of cash he told Slaine could access in case of an emergency. From Slaine’s narrative on the day of their encounter, he surmised that he wasn’t in the most ideal financial situation. Slaine never touched that cash. He knew at least Slaine wasn’t starving himself, and was rather relieved when he came home to his kitchen restocked with food.

Inaho had never been in a relationship before, so he couldn’t exactly relate to what Slaine was going through. But at least Slaine was motivated enough to go out and purchase food for the both of them on his own. That was promising, wasn’t it?

✢✢✢

“Oh my god, I can’t believe that was the ending. What a disappointment.” Slaine huffed as he shoved more popcorn into his mouth, glaring at the ending credits shown on the TV disapprovingly.

“The plot was obviously flawed…….none of the problems were solved and the screenwriters made it seem like it was a happily-ever-after.” Inaho commented, taking a sip of his orange juice. The show they just watched was utterly disappointing, although he didn’t exactly feel “disappointed” because his expectations dropped drastically after the third episode.

“The action was cool though, wasn’t it?” The mention of the actions in the show seemed to lift Slaine’s spirits. The show had no shortage of breathtaking fight scenes that were still very enjoyable to watch. “And the soundtrack is great, too!”

“Yes.” Although Inaho was still more or less hang up on the disastrous plotline and the dissatisfying ending, it was not the worst thing he had ever seen. It served its purpose as entertainment.

He realized that his movie-watching had only started recently, under Slaine’s influence. In his spare time, he read up some more of How To Make People Feel Better After a Breakup, he grasped the idea of “coping by distraction.” After noticing how Slaine seemed to enjoy watching various TV shows, he went ahead and signed up for Netflix, and he could tell Slaine absolutely loved it.

At first, Inaho left Slaine to use the account on his own, but Slaine had looked too lonely watching by himself on the couch. Something was lacking.

A week passed by, and Inaho came to learned that Slaine’s taste in TV shows was quite terrible, and consistently picked out the worst one on the list. Thanks to Slaine’s “training”, Inaho’s tolerance to horrible television had increased exponentially.

“Are you hungry? I can fix up something for dinner.” Slaine took a look of the white board on the wall and promptly got up from the couch. Inaho didn’t mind cooking, but Slaine insisted that it wasn’t fair for Inaho to do everything while he was basically a freeloader. Under Slaine’s instructions, Inaho created a schedule for the both of them, evenly splitting up chores around the apartment.

“I can help.” Slaine’s cooking skills were not good to begin with, but he did improve a lot under Inaho’s teachings. At the very least, he stopped burning food on a regular basis.

“Let’s have pasta tonight. That’s quick and easy.” Slaine took out a box of pasta from the kitchen cabinet, humming softly, apparently in a good mood. Inaho watched as Slaine happily took out cooking pots and the tomato sauce they had left in the fridge, a strangely comforting feeling settling inside his chest.

It was weird, but even though it had only been a little more than a month since Slaine moved in and entered his life, he was started to think that he wouldn’t be able to get used to life without seeing the blond every day.

Sure, there were still plenty of things he didn’t know about the blond, plenty of things he would like to know about him. He didn’t even know if they could be considered friends or only roommates, but he’d like to spend more time with Slaine. It was becoming a habit of a sort, to return home from his work to see Slaine. He didn’t want anything to change. It was uncharacteristic for him to think this way, but he truly believe that they would get to know each other better and become even closer-

“Slaine…….there is something I would like to ask your opinion of.”

“Yeah, Inaho?” He replied cheerfully as he turned around to face him.

There was a hint of hesitation in his voice; uncertainty in his action was rarely seen in him. He came up with the idea a few weeks ago, and he thought that it would be a good decision that served their best interest. “What do you think about finding a new apartment for next semester? There will be more room, and you won’t have to sleep on the couch. I can help pay for your half of the rent if you need me to.” He paused before continuing.

“You can start fresh, I think it would be good for you.”

The smile on Slaine’s face froze, then it slowly slipped away from his features, until there was only sadness left.

✢✢✢

Inaho didn’t understand what he did wrong. He didn’t understand what was in what he said that made Slaine react that way. He was running out of ideas, his mind going a million directions as they ate their dinner in complete silence. He wanted to follow his usual protocol, to give Slaine the space he needed when he gets sad, but for some reason, he couldn’t allow himself to do that.

In preparation of the worst case scenario, Inaho even made freshly baked cookies for calming Slaine down. He had never tried this strategy before, but he hoped it would be effective in reducing his stress level.

“Slaine…...do you want to ta…...lk.” Carrying the tray of cookies to the couch, Inaho carefully sat next to Slaine, who was staring out the window. Slaine sighed heavily, like there was a million tons of brick on his chest.

“I am sorry for ruining the mood tonight.” He began, his gaze still fixed on the window. It was raining outside, exactly like the day they met. “I…...I just remembered something because of what you said.”

“What I said? About finding a new apartment?” Inaho asked. Slaine shook his head.

“No…….the part about starting over.” Slaine smiled weakly at his unforgettable memory.

“It was what Asseylum told me the day we broke up.”

✢✢✢

Dreams are stupid. Slaine learned it at a young age when his parents got divorced. His life didn’t play out like how he imagined it to be. His parents did not stay together like he had always prayed for. He thought his life was falling apart. There was no happy ending. His parents didn’t even remained in friendly terms.

However, his hopes were rekindled when his father took him and moved to another district. There he met Asseylum Vers Allusia, a girl who was the same age as he. Her smile was like the sun. Her voice, the most melodious tune. Her hair, like a river of gold. She was more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen, and he thought he would never have the chance to speak to her. But as it turned out, it was her who came to him first.

“You must be Slaine! My grandfather knows your father! He has been talking about how you two are going to move here! He said we could be great friends!”

“Can I call you Slaine? I have been really lonely for the past few years, there isn’t anyone our age! Please, Slaine! Be my friend!”

Asseylum was ecstatic when he visited her house. Her joy was his honor. Her company was the greatest gift. He wanted to stay with her, protect her, to become her knight.

The happier times of their childhood soon ended. The burden of carrying the family name was placed on Asseylum’s shoulders. Despite generally liking Slaine as a person, Asseylum’s grandfather disapproved of their growing friendship.

Slaine didn’t need verbal confirmation to know that he was no longer a welcomed guest. He took the cue and distanced himself from Asseylum, trying to ignore the ache in his chest whenever he saw another blond showing up around her. Klancain Cruhteo. A respectable young man with the right family name. He was Rayregalia’s plan for her. Their future together was inevitable.

Their final year of high school before college, Slaine made plans to bury his memories and go somewhere far away. He was accepted into the university of his choice, one that is located hundreds of miles away.

He didn’t expect to see Asseylum standing right in front of his house. With two large suitcases by her side, she grinned at him, holding out her acceptance letter to his face.

“Let’s run away together, Slaine.”

She whispered as she hugged him with all her strength.

Some dreams do come true. He believed it with all his heart when it first started. They found an affordable apartment together. University was refreshing and exciting. And he didn’t think he could be any happier. They each found part-time jobs in order to support themselves. Everything was new to them but they accept the challenge that came with their freedom.

He thought this could continue forever. He thought that they could work out everything as long as they were together. But it didn’t work out that way. Asseylum always tried to put up a brave smile and tell him nothing was wrong, that her grandfather would surely come to understand their perspective one day. But he never did. He tried to pretend he didn’t see the pain in her eyes, didn’t hear the desperate plea she made on the phone. At the end, their love didn’t help them survive reality.

The last hope was shattered when Asseylum fell ill and was no longer able to work. Bills were piling up; he had to skip class in order to earn the money he needed. He was beyond exhausted both emotionally and physically, and the impact was not subtle. It bled through every aspect of his life, and soon he found himself in the worst state possible, financially, psychologically, and academically.

Rayregalia came for his granddaughter the day Slaine had organic chemistry final exam. He didn’t show up to his exam and instead stayed with her till she had to leave. They both knew this was the end of their relationship.

“Slaine, please, forget about me.” He still remembered the way tears rolled down her pale cheeks, yet her smile was bright and hopeful as she held his hand.

“Forget about me, and start your life over.”

✢✢✢

“How could I have forgotten about her? She was everything to me; our time together was a part of me. I could never do that.” Slaine sobbed as he buried his face into his hands. “That is just…….impossible. I can’t do it.”

For a few minutes, Inaho was left without words. He couldn’t possibly understand the pain Slaine felt for losing his future with Asseylum, but he was sure that he had to do something. Because this couldn't be what she had wanted.

“Slaine.” His voice was softer than he imagined. There was a lot that needed to be, but he didn’t know if he could express them properly. “Perhaps, what she meant was for you to let go of the past, so you can move on with your life.”

“I know…….and for the longest time I believed that there was no way that I would be able to let go. She was just too important to me.” Slaine let out a broken chuckle. “But until you said that, I was actually doing alright for a while. I didn’t realize that, and it made me feel horrible. I haven’t talked to her since, and here I was saying how much I loved her. But a month passed and I already stopped thinking about her. Everything I said before turned out to be a lie.”

“You don’t need to punish yourself for letting go, and you weren’t lying.” Inaho frowned. He didn’t think that would make any sense. In a way, it was like Slaine was punishing himself for letting go of Asseylum. He felt guilty for not holding on longer because his misery was evidence of his affection and devotion. “It’s human nature to long for happiness.”

“I don’t know…….” Slaine sighed as he closed his eyes. “I just…….didn’t expect it to be this easy.”

The next day, Inaho woke up to an empty living room.

Slaine was gone.

✢✢✢

Inaho didn’t feel hopeful for multiple reasons, for example, the fact that Slaine didn’t take the copy of the apartment key was an indication that he didn’t plan on returning. He didn’t leave note. He didn’t have anyway of reaching Slaine, as Slaine’s phone broke a few days after he moved into here.

Of course he wondered countless times where Slaine was, but he also recognized that Slaine was a legal adult. If he decided that leaving this town altogether was the cure to his heartbreak, then he should be able to do so without interference.

Summer was ending, and Inaho’s lab was collecting the final set of data before they worked on publication. Days without Slaine felt empty and dreadful, but he tried his best to focus on his work.

It would be selfish to keep him. Inaho told himself over and over whenever he thought of the blond. This was his life, and he believed after that night, Slaine made some kind of decision. He should respect his choice.

Two week passed and there was nothing. Inaho thought of what he told Slaine about letting go, and somehow, he felt like he could relate more to Slaine’s thoughts now. He didn’t want to forget either.

It would be easier to move on without Slaine Troyard, but he wanted to hold on just a little longer.

“You seemed stressed out lately, Inaho. Why don’t you take a few days off? School is starting soon again and you should get some rest.” His professor patted him on the shoulder as he walked out. “Come back next week, we are almost done here anyway.”

There was no place he wanted to go. Inaho mulled over his choices, and concluded that nothing was particularly attractive. Heaving a small sigh, he decided that he might as well just go grocery shopper since he skipped that last week.

Walking over to the bus stop, he took out his phone to make a list of items he need. Some vegetables, bread, orange juice, eggs…….

“Hey, you taking the bus too?” The familiar voice made him raise his head in a heartbeat. He almost couldn't believe his eyes.

“.......Slaine?” Inaho stared at the boy standing before him, carrying the same travel bag he had before, wearing a brand new outfit and a new smile. “Where did you go?” He could feel his heart beginning to soar, even though he had so many questions.

“I…...I am sorry I disappeared on you, Inaho.” The blond said sheepishly. “I thought a lot about what you said to me, and I came up with the idea that maybe, I needed closure. So I bought bus tickets and went back to see her. Turns out she was doing well. I think she moved on too, and she is getting along with her grandfather better now. We talked a lot and cried a lot, but I think it is what I needed. I don’t feel as guilty anymore.” He took a deep breath. “I have decided…...I am going to get my life back together. I think I’ll have to delay graduation for a year to retake the classes I failed, but I’ll work hard on it. I just called my previous boss and she said I can come back to work. I still don’t have a place to go, so I was thinking…...the idea you had about getting a new apartment would be great.”

“Sure.” This was the first time Inaho felt like he couldn’t keep up with the load of information getting processed. Is this reality? “And if we can’t find anything, we can stay at my current place, if you don’t mind.”

“Great! Well, please take care of me, Inaho.” Slaine beamed. “Let’s make this year great!”

✢✢✢

His name is Slaine Troyard, junior, biology major. His life was a mess, and he is still in the process of getting back on track, but so far, life is getting better.

He also has one secret that he was keeping.

He might be falling for his roommate, just a little. He wouldn’t have been here without him. He seemed emotionless at first glance, but it was him who turned the worst day of his life into something that changed his life forever in a positive way.

He can’t say for sure, but he thinks, his feelings are mutual.

Now isn’t the time for all that romance stuff yet, because he is more worried about his upcoming organic chemistry exam. Inaho has been helping him study, though, so he thinks he’ll be fine.

He now knows for a fact that there are a lot for him to live for, and moving on doesn’t mean he is selfish and heartless.

He is starting his life over.

The future is still bright.

Mistakes can be corrected.

And…...he thinks he is ready to love again.

END

☂

Author’s Note:

Hello! Thank you for reading this story! I have lost count of how long I have been in az hell, but somehow I am glad that I am still here. Even though az left a lot of salt in my heart, I was able to meet some really amazing people in the fandom and I have to thank az for that. Thank you to Rosiel who organized this amazing project! <3

Liza0111

#ALDNOAH ZERO #az anthology #liza0111 #inaho kaizuka #slaine troyard #orangebat #inaho x slaine

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datingadviceonreddit · 6 years

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IT’S NOT ABOUT YOUR LOOKSI work with a lot of guys who are self conscious about their looks, so I thought I’d throw this in here to reiterate what has already been disproven over and over again. Looks do not matter. Can they help? Absolutely! But if you’re good looking and you’re still insecure, you can bet your pretty little face you won’t be getting lucky tonight. I guarantee it. Some of my clients are above average in looks, yet still have difficulty attracting girls they want and desire.Women experience attraction differently than we do. Their attraction dials go up and down depending on how you act. Yours, as a man, remains static. She’s either hot, or she isn’t.Guys. I’ve seen some of the HOTTEST women with the sleeziest, turdy-looking, head-turning-cause-he’s-so-puny, sons of bitches. It’s amazing what confidence can do, and I feel unbelievably blessed to have been born a man.You should be glad, too.Point taken: Looks don’t matter for shit.EMOTIONAL ARMORIf feeling safe is one of the strongest precursors to confidently entering a world of complete muck, then get ready to put a fat, smirky smile on your face.Anxiety is a bitch. This is not a new concept. A pretty and perky woman can can tear apart even the strongest, most masculine-looking mother*cker, and anxiety is all to blame.If you put on some armor and a sword and shield…you’d be able dive in head first into the world knowing you’d be just fine. Instead of providing a physical analogy for you, understand it is necessary to equip yourself with emotional armor.At first, you do this by diving in without any of that.Don’t worry. A little kick in the ass won’t hurt, right? Wrong! It’s might hurt a little...at first. It’s the emotional equivalent of going into military bootcamp, and the endurance of pain is in a man’s prerogative, meaning it is a masculine thing to do. Women practically melt at the thought of a man being able to endure endless amounts of searing, white-hot pain.Once you finish with this stage (it’s always the hardest, but here comes the good part), the second stage is more of a realization. All of that pain you just went through? Look at your body now. Your face. The metal in your hand. You’re completely covered in armor now, and you’re holding a sword and shield in your hands. You feel powerful. Hardened. The most important thing you’re protecting, however, isn’t your body.It’s your heart.If you know you’ll do anything to protect your integrity and emotions, you won’t be worrying about anything. You will no longer be afraid of hurting others. Why? Because self defense is justifiable. Your physical and emotional wellbeing is always a priority unless you’re protecting someone you deeply care about (girlfriend/wife, family, kids, etc). This means you won’t be going out and actively hurting others. Growing a set of teeth that you’re willing to use exudes your capacity to hurt others. But choosing not to use them is extremely honorable. It’s the equivalent of a military flexing its prowess in front of another country. It communicates, “We come in peace, but if you screw with us, get ready to get your head blown off.” The response you receive is respect, admiration, and in the context of women…attraction.Ever hear of the phrase: “You learn to fight so you don’t have to” ?It’s self explanatory. You learn to fight in order NOT to fight. Your unwavering confidence alone will be enough to deter your enemies. This is why overly aggressive males aren’t seen as attractive (and sometimes scary) to women; they’re clearly hiding their own insecurities. By contrast, however, truly confident males capable of steering away enemies will be highly, highly confident and relaxed.Point taken: Go into the world knowing your heart will always be protected by you when threatened, then paradoxically, you won’t have to. Women will find the underlying confidence attractive as hell.TRUSTHave you ever gone about your day and asked someone for the time? What about asking someone to pass you the ketchup? Or asking someone to do a favor for you?Anything that requires skill (socializing) requires a set amount of trust. The only way to build trust that you’re not going to get burned (rejected) is by doing something small, then working your way up to something bigger (getting laid).As stated before, ask the time to an elderly person. They can’t hurt you. They’re weak and frail, have fake teeth, and probably walk around in a diaper. They’re harmless. Ask them for the time. There. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?Now go up to the cute cashier and ask her for the time. It’s okay. She’s there because she has to be. It’s her job. No issues there. She told you the time yet? Excellent! You had a quick exchange, and it didn’t hurt you. So far, so good. Now keep going.Go and say hello to the cute girl standing in line at Starbucks. Just a “hello, how are you?”. No conversation. Just hello as you stand next to her in line. See? That wasn’t hard at all.Now go say hello to the good looking cougar across from you at the gym. No worries. This time you can say “Hey. Good workout?” with a smile. No conversation. Just let her talk and answer the question.Before you know it, she’ll be babbling away about how great or bad her day was, and your natural replies to the conversation will start flowing. Beautiful. Excellent. 10/10. Great job.But hold on a second. Where’s the pain? No pain this time. And all we did was start off by asking that cute little old lady what the time was.Point taken: Start off small. Build your way up.FEELING GOOD ALL THE TIMEWhether you know it or not, whether you believe it or not, your positive emotions are heavily affected by the food you eat. How can you expect to get out of the house when your brain has all of its neurotransmitters crapped out? I’m not going to get into all of the complicated science behind depression, but I guarantee your life is being ruined by all the crap you might be eating. Bad, addictive foods are literally drugs. Sugar is a drug similar to cocaine (That’s no joke. Look it up). Gluten severely spikes up inflammation in the body. And both substances cause long term, severe depression and anxiety in otherwise healthy individuals, both of which affect socializing DIRECTLY. Though slower in their negative effects toward your health, they are no different than doing actual drugs such as meth, cocain, or heroine (users report high anxiety and depression after using…not a coincidence in relation to food).I can’t emphasize this portion enough. It’s about the neurochemicals that directly affect your behavior on a daily basis. Individuals overlook what they put into their bodies, yet expect some kind of magic pill (or article) to fix all their problems. In my opinion, diet alone can fix all these problems, like anxiety, and even approach anxiety. Big changes in your neurochemical activity take place. Women are attracted to men for their brains and not their looks, so why would a woman, from a biological standpoint, want to reproduce with a guy with an unhealthy brain? She wouldn’t, just as a female lion wouldn’t reproduce with a weaker male who can’t protect her children. On men, instead of muscles, their greatest weapon is right inside their skull.Do some research on the ketogenic diet. It completely changed my life with women, and it can change yours, too. Increases dopamine sensitivity so you'll want to socialize with people. No more feeling like its a chore. Serotonin and GABA, both responsible for feelings of confidence and calmness, are also increased/regulated. All thanks to ketones.Point taken: The shit you eat, matters.FAITH – WHAT IT REALLY IS, AND HOW TO GET ITThis is the most important point I will make in this post. Get ready to have your brain probed a little.Faith does not require religion. I repeat – faith does not require religion. You don’t have to believe in religion at all. In fact, if you think of doubt as a negative version of faith, then you more clearly understand what it is you’re doing in your head on a minute-by-minute basis. Approach anxiety, for example, is doubt. You might be imagining going up to a hot, sexy, beautiful girl in a purple dress and heels. You might imagine the girl throwing acid in your face in order to brush you off, or you think you’re as ugly as Steve Buschemi after getting run over in the face. Regardless of the matter, the scenario is negative. There is an imaginative, creative mind at work. Unfortunately, this mind is working against you, and you’re doing it unconsciously.The good news, however, is you can flip it through the power of conscious choice until it becomes ingrained in your mind. The following is a process I outlined on how we create our reality.Thought -> Faith -> Belief -> RealityAs you can see, faith is the bridge between thought and belief. Once a belief kicks in through REPETITION (this is the key, because you’re starting to create neuronal connections that exhibit confident behavior), you’ll begin to notice the world around you changing. Instead of conforming to the world and all its whims, the world will eventually conform to you through your unconscious behavior.Pay close attention:The most important thing in this world, regardless of all the content out there, is our human need for unconditional love. You cannot, under any circumstances, function at your best emotionally if you feel you do not matter. Sure, you can imagine an approach scenario going well (such as the girl in the purple dress), but if the root of all your issues with socializing/flirting stem from this one need, then we can focus on creating a reality where you feel unconditionally loved, not necessarily from one person or thing, but just to feel it. Some people may consider this madness.But if we as humans are nothing but our beliefs, then we are mad from the moment we are born?Thought, faith, belief, and reality are the keys to extreme and unwavering confidence.How to: Close your eyes. Get very relaxed, drowsy. Imagine yourself being loved by everyone and everything around you. Repeat voraciously for desired results.And that’s all there is to it, gentlemen. via /r/dating_advice

#dating #dating advice #reddit

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cynthiamwashington · 6 years

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The Health Toll of Financial Stress

Sure, this post comes right on the heels of Cyber Monday…but is there ever a perfect time for a message like this? Yes, I run a business, but I still don’t mind kicking the cultural hornet’s nest. Some things don’t change.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t contradiction. Here I am doing my own holiday shopping today (don’t tell Carrie)—and offering my own deals to those who are interested. The holidays—with all the shopping and parties and prep—are fun. No doubt. Simultaneously, I know financial stress takes a major toll this time of year, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Estimates for last year’s Christmas gift spending placed the average American in the vicinity of $936—with the average parent spending an additional $422 per child on top of that already princely sum. (Whether that figure still holds true in a family of four or five is debatable.)

And that may not even be the half of it. Holiday dinners, events, decorations, clothing, and trips add to the price tag. The result? More than half of us rack up debt for holiday expenditures, a sizable portion of which will take more than half a year to pay off.

Financial stress carries over past the festivities of the season, and its costs can be much higher than a credit card total.

Financial Stress at The Holidays

Let’s talk numbers. According to the National Retail Federation, U.S. retail sales during the 2015 holiday season surpassed the GDP of 181 other countries. That’s more spending on presents, food and holiday sundries than the combined GDP of countries like South Africa, Sweden and Norway…amounting to a whopping $630+ billion.

Perceived social expectations set the stage. A few years back, a survey of 1000 Americans across all income brackets found that 45% of those polled were under so much financial pressure that they’d prefer to skip the holiday scrabble altogether. Another 45% said they didn’t have enough money set aside to cover holiday expenses.

It gets worse. While 41% of people are unable to survive more than two weeks without a paycheck, 59% of people are carrying debt into the new year. Not surprisingly, a 2015 Healthline survey showed that over 60% of people get stressed out just thinking about the holiday season, with finances being the biggest cause of that stress.

The Health Costs

Even within the Primal community, there’s a tendency to focus on tangible sources of stress—inflammatory foods, toxic compounds in our living environment, etc. Yet, financial woes crop up again and again as one of the most pervasive forms of stress.

A 2008 study found that college students with a debt of $1000 or more were at significantly higher risk of obesity, excess TV viewing, infrequent breakfast consumption, fast food consumption, binge drinking, substance abuse, and lack of exercise.

In another study, financial strain held a particularly strong association with heavy drinking and smoking among elderly men. Further research indicates that smokers with financial stress are less likely to try to quit, less likely to succeed if they do try, and more likely to relapse. Presumably, it’s something of a vicious cycle, with smoking leading to financial strain, which in turn promotes more smoking. Stress can send us into a cul-de-sac of bad habits.

Over time, these stress-justified bad habits are likely to create their own slew of health problems, the most common of which is weight gain. In a study involving 1,355 U.S. men and women, increasing levels of psychosocial stress in the form of “difficulty paying bills” was associated with a higher propensity for weight gain. The mechanisms behind this are well understood, with higher levels of stress leading to the development of “palatable food” (aka junk food) motivation and engagement in overeating to offset the negative emotional effects of stress. This higher energy intake, coupled with a reduction in physical activity, stimulates visceral fat accumulation. The rest is history.

Perhaps most famously, higher levels of stress, both acute and chronic, have been associated with impaired cardiovascular health and life-threatening complications. Research shows that work-related stress, which often goes hand in hand with financial stress, can increase a person’s risk of a first coronary heart disease (CHD) event. Among existing CHD patients, long-term stress can increase the risk of repeat CHD events and mortality. Other studies indicate that psychological stressors can lead to sudden death, myocardial infarction, myocardial ischemia, and wall motion abnormalities.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the brain, stress undermines well-being by releasing corticosteroid hormones that control neuronal and network responses tied to behavioral adaptation. In acutely stressful scenarios, this process is beneficial to our survival, heightening awareness and honing reflexes. But over the long term, such as is the case in chronic financial strain, these corticosteroid binary control mechanisms can erode mental health and promote brain disease.

In the early days, this detrimental effect of stress on the brain can manifest in impaired cognitive function. For example, male rats exposed to 21 days of restraint stress exhibited both reduced visual and spatial memory, while chronic unpredictable stress can drastically alter the behavior of rats and promote a rapid shift towards habitual tendencies. The mechanisms by which humans respond to stress aren’t all that different.

Then there’s sleep. Even among the elderly, financial stress appears to be a key contributor to poor sleep, with ongoing financial strain correlated with difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, and impaired sleep efficiency. Another study involving a wider age range of subjects found that financial strain was associated with decreased sleep quality and lower sleep efficiency.

And if you’re not sleeping well, you’re probably not aging well. Researchers postulate that chronic psychological stress “is significantly associated with higher oxidative stress, lower telomerase activity, and shorter telomere length, which are known determinants of cell senescence and longevity.” In other words, financial stress leads to oxidative stress, which undermines the health and longevity of your cells—making you age faster.

Then there’s all the digestive issues that come with chronic stress. In animal models, stress has been shown to promote the “development of gastric ulcers, altered gastrointestinal motility and ion secretion, and increased intestinal permeability.” Stress also teams up with other pathogenic factors in the GI tract, including H. pylori and NSAIDs, to encourage gastrointestinal disease.

Indeed, the type of stress induced by financial strain has been associated with almost all of the most common chronic digestive diseases, including functional gastrointestinal disorders, inflammatory bowel disease, and gastro-oesophageal reflux disease. So many of us have been there at some point….

Final Thoughts: Sidestepping the Financial Circus

Short of packing the car and whisking the kids away from all civilization, there are plenty of steps we can take to keep budgetary sanity. I’ll share a couple thoughts, and I invite you to offer your own strategies for keeping a handle on the finances as you enjoy the best of the season.

Ditch Debt

With the deceptive ease of credit cards, it’s all too easy to blindly spend and worry about the consequences later. No rocket science here of course, but we can all benefit from figuring what we can afford to buy without borrowing this month, and to stick to that amount. Clarity around financial matters isn’t a killjoy. It just offers the objective facts we have to work with.

Smart shopping, deep discount or consignment bargains, secret Santa exchange, or a one-gift-per-family-member policy can ensure present spending doesn’t break the bank. For the holiday meal, consider taking a drive to the farmgate to purchase your turkey and ham and save a considerable sum.

More importantly, make a point of not using your credit card for your holiday spending— meaning when the cash runs out, the buying stops and there’s no debt accruing. (Anybody still use the old envelope system? Some things shouldn’t ever go out of style.)

If need be—and there’s nothing wrong with hardcore accountability, give your credit cards to a (trusted) friend and tell them not to give it back until after the festivities are truly done and over.

Forget the Crowds

We’ve all been there: a shopping mall packed to the rafters in the weeks leading up to the holidays, filled with people like you desperate to get their last minute gift buying and food acquiring out of the way. It’s not an enjoyable time in anyone’s life, even if there are no budgetary constraints. I know I personally don’t make good decisions in that environment.

My solution is to ditch the crowds altogether and do most of my holiday buying online. It means something to shop from the sanity of your own home and walk away from the computer when you’ve had enough—financially or otherwise. It’s open anytime, so I can research, mull, and make decisions when I’m ready to make them. And let’s be honest…the experience is more pleasant with a glass of wine anyway.

Thanks for reading folks. What’s your strategy for staving off financial stress over the holiday season? Take care.

The post The Health Toll of Financial Stress appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Article source here:Marks’s Daily Apple

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friend-clarity · 7 years

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Leftism: Retreat from Reason

Understanding the Left (see below for source):

We need to understand postmodernism, because that’s is the dogma of the Left. We are up against it far more than we know or think, and it’s a much more well-developed and pervasive, pernicious, nihilistic, intellectually attractive doctrine than has yet come to public realization. It absolutely dominates the humanities and increasingly the social sciences in the universities. It has also started corrupting the science faculties.

Postmodernists completely reject the structure of Western civilization. Jacques Derrida, a head trickster for the postmodernist movement, regarded Western culture as phallogocentric (post-modern leftists are crude; there is no sense of the sacred). “Phallo” refers to the male organ of procreation--so that’s the insistence that what you see in Western culture is the consequence of the male-dominated oppressive self-serving society rooted in the Bible. Values such as hard work, self-discipline and honesty are the tools through which old white men dominate the oppressed; these values must be deconstructed and then eradicated.

“Logo” is logos a root word meaning speech, logic, and reason. Leftists believe that logic is part of the process by which the patriarchal institutions of the West continue to dominate and to justify their dominance. So they don’t believe in logic and reason. Thus they also don’t believe in dialogue. The root word of dialogue is logos — again, they don’t believe that people of good will can come to consensus through the exchange of ideas. They believe that that notion is part of the philosophical substructure and practices of the dominant culture, which needs to be destroyed. So you don’t reason with your opponent. You demonize him

So the first thing that you might want to know about Postmodernism is that it doesn’t have a shred of gratitude — and there’s something pathologically wrong with a person that doesn’t have any gratitude, especially when they live in what so far is the best of all possible worlds. So if you’re not grateful, you’re driven by resentment, and resentment is the worst emotion that you can possibly experience, apart from arrogance. Arrogance, resentment, and deceit. There is an evil triad for you. For more, read Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks.

Perverse Postmodern Climate: Retreat from Reason

June 6 2017, by Ron Clutz

The recent marches for science were an amazing irony: People actually think that science is a matter of protesting in the streets. It was a demonstration all right, a full-throated display of postmodern contempt for reason, especially as embodied in the scientific method.

This virus has already taken over many universities, the most extreme case being Evergreen State College in Eastern Washington. Black students decided there should be a No White day on campus to protest the history of blacks mistreatment. One professor refused and tried to hold his class, arguing that free speech was not a matter of race, creed, gender or anything else. A riot erupted against him and his students, shutting down the class.

Afterward, the Evergreen State Faculty Turned on the Professor, Saying He ‘Endangered’ Students

This post is to call attention to a war correspondent issuing a recent report on the state of this cultural conflict. Professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto writes from the front lines where higher education institutions and students are in upheaval.

Jordan Peterson: Why You Have To Fight Postmodernism explains why young people need to organize and rise up against nihilistic postmodernism. The full transcript is worth reading, and a video presentation is also available. Some excerpts below present some of his key points.

JORDAN PETERSON: I want to recommend a book first to everyone here: It is called Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks. You need to understand postmodernism, because that’s what you’re up against. You’re up against it far more than you know or think, and it’s a much more well-developed and pervasive, pernicious, nihilistic, intellectually attractive doctrine than has yet come to public realization. It absolutely dominates the humanities and increasingly the social sciences in the universities.

It’s not like any given person is absolutely possessed by the spirit of postmodernism, because often they’re not educated enough to know all the details about what it is that has them in their grip, but if you get 20 of them together and they’re all 5% influenced by the postmodernist ethos, you basically have the spirit of the mob. It’s a mouthpiece for that particular philosophical doctrine.

See the postmodernists completely reject the structure of Western civilization. And I mean completely, so I can give you an example, in one term — Jacques Derrida. He is head trickster for the postmodernist movement, and he regarded Western culture — let’s call it the patriarchy — as phallogocentric. Phallo comes from phallus, and so that’s the insistence that what you see in Western culture is the consequence of the male-dominated oppressive self-serving society.

So you have to educate yourself about postmodernism.

So here’s what the postmodernists believe: They don’t believe in the individual. That’s the logos. Remember, Western culture is Phallogocentric. Logo is logos. That’s partly the Christian word, but is also partly the root word of logic.

They believe that logic is part of the process by which the patriarchal institutions of the West continue to dominate and to justify their dominance. They don’t believe in dialogue. The root word of dialogue is logos — again, they don’t believe that people of good will can come to consensus through the exchange of ideas. They believe that that notion is part of the philosophical substructure and practices of the dominant culture.

So the reason they don’t let people who they don’t agree with speak on campus, is because they don’t agree with letting people speak.

You see it’s not part of the ethos.

They believe that since you don’t have an individual identity, your fundamental identity is group fostered, and that means that you’re basically an exemplar of your race.

And so the postmodernist Marxists just basically pulled a sleight-of-hand, and said, ‘Okay if it’s not the poor against the rich than it’s the oppressed against the oppressor.’ We’ll just re-divide the sub-populations in ways that make our bloodied philosophy continue in its movement forward, and that’s where we are now.

So for the postmodernists, the world is a Hobbesian battleground of identity groups. They do not communicate with one another, because they can’t. All there is, is a struggle for power, and if you’re in the predator group, which means you’re an oppressor, than you better look out, because you’re not exactly welcome. Not exactly welcome, and neither are your ideas. So that’s what you’re up against.

You young people out there who are university students, you need to take over the student unions, you need to take them back, because they are absolute snake pits, and have been since the 1990s.

Our society needs to figure out how to stop shunting public tax money to radical left-wing activists. If we were doing that for the radical right-wing activists, there would be an absolute storm, but it’s happened incrementally since the 1960s and needs to stop.

So that’s what conservatives and also liberals –true liberals in the English sense– are up against. What’s happened also as a consequence of this postmodern neo-Marxist intellectual invasion, is the center keeps moving way to the right now, so if you’re a classical liberal, you’ve become a conservative.

Conclusion

And then finally with regards to talking to young people. You finally have something to sell to them. It is not easy to sell conservatism to young people, because they want to change things. That’s not what conservatives want to do, they want to maintain things. Well now you got something to sell — you can sell them freedom of speech, and you can tell sell them responsibility.

The left is selling them rights, you can sell them responsibility.

I can tell you, because I received many letters of this sort … young people are absolutely starving for someone to provide them with a sense of responsibility, and say look here, here’s something worth living for.

We’ve got this beacon of freedom and wealth in the West, which works, although it doesn’t work perfectly. And one of one of the responsibilities of young people is to find out what’s at the core of that, the great core of that. The paramount importance of the individual, and the divinity of speech. That’s something to sell, its what our whole culture is predicated on.

Footnote:

Tom Wolfe first opened my eyes to this assault on reason. I posted on his essay along with the obvious connection to climate change/global warming. See Warmists and Rococo Marxists