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#people's revolution of the 25th of may
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dimity-lawn · 10 months
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A prediction.
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aeshnacyanea2000 · 10 months
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People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
Terry Pratchett - Night Watch
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pratchettquotes · 2 years
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"Now, this is a soldier's song, see? You don't look like soldiers but by the gods I'll see you sounds like 'em! You'll pick it up as we goes along! Right turn! March! 'All the little angels rise up, rise up, all the little angels rise up high!' Sing it, you sons of mothers!"
The marchers picked up the response from those who knew it.
"How do they rise up, rise up, rise up, how do they rise up, rise up high? They rise heads up, heads up, heads up--" sang out Dickens as they turned the corner.
Vimes listened as the refrain died away.
"That's a nice song," said young Sam, and Vimes realized that he was hearing it for the first time.
"It's an old soldier's song," he said.
"Really, Sarge? But it's about angels."
Yes, thought Vimes, and it's amazing what bits those angels cause to rise up as the song progresses. It's a real soldiers' song: sentimental, with dirty bits.
"As I recall, they used to sing it after battles," he said. "I've seen old men cry when they sing it," he added.
"Why? It sounds cheerful."
They were remembering who they were not singing it with, thought Vimes. You'll learn. I know you will.
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
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justafterjericho · 2 years
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The 25th of may. I plan to do other characters this way in the future (and not a near future), but for now, here’s Vimes and Vetinari
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beardedmrbean · 2 years
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weepylucifer · 2 years
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It’s remarkable to me that the Rallying Song that Pratchett made up for Night Watch and the Glorious Revolution (How Do They Rise Up) is deliberately NOT Do You Hear The People Sing, because that’s a song that... glorifies revolution, and that’s not what Night Watch is trying to do. It is always, from the moment we first hear the song, established as being about the dead. “People die” is the point.
That said, Do You Hear The People Sing (Reprise) is, weirdly enough, pretty much describing the things that happen during the Vetinari Patricianship
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demonahw · 2 years
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It’s the twenty-fifth of May: this is a beautiful little fic about remembrance from my bookmarks.
Maybe the mess the world was now was the kind of muck that things could grow in.
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todayontumblr · 10 months
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Thursday May 25.
The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May.
It's May 25th, but it's not just any May 25th. It's a particularly glorious one, after all, as it is The People's Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, as depicted of course in Terry Pratchett's beloved Discworld series. It also happens to be Wear the Lilac Day. #gnu terry pratchett—you know what to do, folks.
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But wait—what is Wear the Lilac Day? you once again enquire.
"Wear the Lilac Day was adopted by Discworld fans the world over as a day to commemorate Terry Pratchett's writing, and following his diagnosis in 2007, to support research into Alzheimer's Disease.
On May 25th, certain members of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, and a few others around the city, wore a sprig of lilac. The 25th of May was the day that they remembered those who fought and fell for hardboiled eggs, truth, justice, and reasonably priced love, who died, and in Reg Shoe's case rose and kept fighting, in the Glorious Revolution of Treacle Mine Road."
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Happy May 25th, comrades x
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nightingaleym · 2 years
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Today is the 25th of May. An important day for all Terry Pratchett's enthusiasts. An important day in the life of Samuel Vimes, a man from whom you might learn a couple of interesting things.
"That's the way it was. Privilege, which just means 'private law.' Two types of people laugh at the law; those that break it and those that make it."
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"You took an oath to uphold the law and defend the citizens without fear or favor," said Vimes. "And to protect the innocent. That's all they put in. Maybe they thought those were the important things. Nothing in there about orders, even from me. You're an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government."
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"You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast."
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"Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people."
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
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Credit to the artists I manage to find :
@stivaktis (twitter)
Jaearts (tumblr)
Ukropstales (tumblr)
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comicaurora · 10 months
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Happy Glorious 25th of May. Thank you for getting me into the discworld books (at least in an indirect way). They have quickly become one of my favorite series of books, even if I've only read a handful of them. As for a question, what have been your biggest takeaways or lessons from the discworld books? Whether it be how you write, how you engage with stories, or even how you look at the world.
we got another one lads
It's a little hard to boil it down! The books cover so much ground, and I read them at such a formative age it's hard to tease out how much of me is made from them.
On the most basic level, I love how angry those books are. Every POV protagonist is seething at unfairness and injustice and this is never framed as a bad thing - just something that needs to be controlled, directed, weaponized.
I like that everything is a joke, but in-universe everybody is absolutely sincere. The characters are charicatures and punchlines because of their sincerely-held beliefs and ideals. Captain Carrot is shiny and literal-minded and perfection personified and it's funny because he really is that good. Nanny Ogg is an outrageously horny and boisterous old woman and it's funny because she's having such a good time with it, especially when contrasted with her stern and serious foil Granny Weatherwax, and it's funny because the two of them know each other incredibly well and deal with each other's eccentricities with the practice of decades. The dwarves are funny because they're goofy little guys with big beards that think about nothing but gold and new songs to sing about gold, and as the books go on, the complexities of a culture that looks like that punchline become the deepest and most fascinating element of the worldbuilding in the entire Disc. The world is mounted on the back of four elephants and we made a book called the Fifth Elephant, how wacky, hey let's casually integrate the worldbuilding consequences of massive deposits of perfectly-crisped organic matter caused by the collision of a planet-sized elephant with a planet-sized planet. The discworld tells a joke and then commits to the consequences with its entire ass, and I love that.
A lot of the characters are in some way one-of-a-kind and unprecedented, or at least appear to be on the surface because nobody like them has even been publicly known, and the stories frequently explore how these unique people navigate their existence without a roadmap and trailblaze the way for the people just like them to someday follow. People who break rules by existing and make the world question what purpose those rules serve if they aren't actually unyielding principles of reality. The dwarf gender cultural revolution, the female wizard, the golem given a voice, the entire existence of Susan Sto Helit. It produces a world that feels like it's absolutely full of protagonists, like every story is one-of-a-kind and every individual person matters and has the right to choose the way they want to live, no matter what anyone else thinks. can't believe some terfs really think these books are for them as if they aren't precision-built to tell them to go fuck themselves
The cast full of protagonists makes the crossover events a delight. All these characters existing in the same universe means they can just run into each other sometimes, and they're all such absolute weirdos that their interactions never fail to be absolutely incredible. The world feels very thoroughly lived-in, to the point where the stories sometimes almost feel like they're telling themselves.
they're just really fuckin good ok
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gerardpilled · 1 year
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New fan here!! What exactly happened at pro rev? I see people talk about it a lot but I can't find out exactly what went down
Lol I love seeing this question asked on my dash and thank you for trusting me with the response. This kinda became longer than what I was expecting but I love to over explain sorry:
Okay so pro rev is kinda famous in the fan community because of how insane everyone seemed to have been acting during it. mcr was always known for their stage antics - even in the early days - and specifically for how they responded to homophobia (and to be clear- they faced a lot of it) by not denying being gay, but encouraging the idea. Specifically Gerard and Frank would kiss each other or Gerard would kinda feel-up the other guys in what people coined as “stagegay”. Although mcr fans were kinda weeded out to expect and accept this, festivals like Warped Tour were always the biggest issue for them because they were in front of thousands of people who didn’t necessarily want to see guys in eyeliner and eyeshadow*.  
Then comes 2007 - Linkin Park hosts another “Projekt Revolution” which was kinda a mini traveling festival with about 10 or so bands in the lineup and would run from July 25th to September 3rd. Mcr was actually second bill so while not nobodies, most of the audience still consisted of Linkin Park fans. I know nothing about the music or guys of Linkin Park, but they simply attracted a different kind of crowd and might have heckled mcr more than a mcr-headlining show. The guys really played this up and seemed to turn up the stage antics A LOT. (I say ‘seemed to’ because I do think the number of people in attendance and the fact more people had access to digital cameras in 2007 than 2004 might have just resulted in more examples being recorded and uploaded)
They were grinding on each other, chewing on condoms, licking each other, fake masturbating, fully making out, and fighting on one occasion. Gerard would ask the boys in the audience to take their shirts off during Prison to which Ray joined in once. Frank specifically was acting kinda wild and was just commonly writhing around on the floor and flinging his guitar a lot. The main famous “frerard kiss” was said (by Gerard) to be the result of Frank rubbing his bloody finger on Gerard’s face and Gerard opting to seek revenge by kissing him.
The funniest part of all this is that it could theoretically be explained away by the fact they were probably just frustrated from being away from their families on tour for so long at this point (notably, Mikey did not attend prorev because of his recent marriage and/or mental health issues) if it weren't for the fact that at the start of tour Gerard began dating Lindsey (m. Ballato) who played bass in another band. Gerard was seen watching her play a few times and the couple would also have matching slogans written on their bodies (presumably by each other). The couple then got married on the last night of tour by an ordained member of the crew backstage while wearing matching airbrush unicorn shirts with each other's names. This was all very sudden for fans especially because it was only around May of the same year when Gerard is thought to have broke off an engagement with his ex girlfriend.
Another notable point is that this was the first time mcr had two tour buses because Frank brought his WIFE. I don't see a lot of people pointing this out, but I believe Jamia was there. Also Frank appeared on an episode of Kat Von D's tattooing show in the middle of tour lol
The aftermath of the tour has kinda become equally as famous due to rumors and theories. Specifically the fight has been speculated to be the result of deeper drama where people think Frank was hurt by Gerard's new relationship or whatever. All that is speculation and mostly baseless. Bottom line is this did influence a ton of fanfiction and kinda made the band known for their stage behavior. They really calmed down on the more homoerotic aspects of their stage personas in later years which more conspiratorial fans contribute to Gerard's marriage. More likely is that they realized the intended reaction of pissing homophobes off was being lost, and instead people were into and sexualizing it more than anything. Gerard once tweeted about it.
I think it's all very funny because to be honest and until they talk about it in any meaningful detail, we still have no idea what going on with them. Just a fun period in mcr herstory.
Links to magazines covering the tour:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Other stuff I couldn't think of a place to mention:
David Cassidy
Gerard singing Umbrella
"it's like having buttsex"
gerard hugging worm
infamous hickey gerard had that he tried to cover with a bandana
Gerard on "my super sweet 16" in the middle of tour
____
*That's not to say mcr was facing the most discrimination ever at this show. I have no knowledge of how people who were outwardly lgbt (such as Brian Molko of Placebo) were treated. Also it's important to note that there was a severe lack of racial and gender diversity when it came to this tour's lineup. There was not a single band with a non-white front person and only 1 band with any women in it.
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dimity-lawn · 10 months
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theblissfulstars · 6 days
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March 25th, 3AM EST, Full Moon Lunar Eclipse
The upcoming Full moon lunar eclipse is taking place March 25th 3am est.
Welcome eclipse season! This full moon is in the zodiac sign of Libra. With major themes centered around collective empowerment, financial reallocation and holy blessings.
Mars is stationed 1° in the zodiac sign of Pisces, denoting a time of dreaminess, confusion and hidden secret motives. With this energy piloting the Sun, there's a lot of spiritual understanding and epiphany going on this full moon. We're going to be having a lot more psychic understanding of our destinies And realities and may even experience spiritual visions, visitations or other happenings of a supernatural nature. Not only is the sun's ruler stationed in Pisces, the sun himself is loosely conjunct Neptune. Pay close attention to your dreams during this full moon as they actually will have messages for you.
On a world stage level, we can expect lots of moisture and condensation on and around this full moon, and for some it maybe is extreme as flooding.
All this spiritual energy is undergirded by Jupiter in Taurus. This denotes a major Reformation and revolution surrounding how we interact with financial institutions in their relation to religion, and religious institutions in their relation to the environment and our values. This moon is going to be calling many of us back to seeking faith in a tangible and real way. With Saturn transiting through Pisces, religion, spiritual institutions then faith have been in the wringer, however are going to be slightly alleviated during this time with harmonious aspects between Jupiter and Saturn.
Big wins for environmentalism on government reform with Ceres in Capricorn trine Jupiter in Taurus. This shows major changes in dietary issues, rectification of impoverishment and starvation and an influx of food and nourishment as well.
We're going to be clearly seeing our values collectively with Venus exalted conjunct Saturn and sextile Jupiter. This configuration is deeply positive and points to some uplifting and helpful changes surrounding religious issues, hierarchical systems and how they interact with our values. And on a personal level speak to the development of sweetness in our relationship with spirituality, are collective and our values. Some of us may be developing deeper relationships during this time, learning how to cherish solitude or even deepening our faith.
Venus has been conjunct Saturn, and despite Saturn being malefic, Venus and Saturn are allies, so this energy is actually refined and we're going to be craving love and romance that is mature and in alignment with our souls path.
Collectively, we can expect significant legal proceedings to take place during this lunar cycle with the Libra full moon and Pallas Athene Square Mars, Venus and Saturn, major instances of injustice are going to be brought to light which will be quickly rectified when she goes retrograde on the 30th of March. These injustices are surrounding places people and things deeply connected to religion and belief. Similarly, we can expect issues in the world of sports and athletics to come to light particularly water sports.
There's an overall positive energy to this eclipse cycle, it has a momentous and progressive quality that speaks to massive change. However, you can't have change without unrest. We can expect this full moon to come with societal unrest, protests and major issues with government polity and control. This feels like a victory for the collective and like change for the better.
Tarot Cards: 9 of cups, 6 of cups, 3 of cups, 6 of swords- Major themes of wish fulfillment, celebration, and overarching sweetness. We have the numbers 369, these numbers in some metaphysical circles in the west are considered master manifestation numbers. We're leaving things behind collectively and coming into a type of abundance after going through a very difficult time. However, this marks the beginning of a new difficult cycle but one that will yield rich fruit.
Workings for this full moon:
Money
Transformation
Love/lust
Domination
Justice work
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anna-neko · 6 months
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I need to fully commit to becoming an old lady, and get into jigsaw puzzles
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quietpagan · 10 months
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What if Vimes couldn’t go home?
AO3
In belated honor of the Discworld fandom’s ‘Feelings Day’, and in order to cause some more Feelings, I’m curious about a version where Vimes doesn’t go home. The hole opened and closed, and will stay closed; the cards are shuffled and cannot be unshuffled. The Glorious 25th of May happens and keeps happening, and Vimes lives by the skin of his teeth and sees the dawn of the less glorious 26th of May, and the cleanup of its bloody yesterday. There are six new graves to be dug up in Small Gods, and Vimes looks at the grass where the seventh should be and feels sick.
The monks are very sorry that this has happened to him, and endure his raging and his ranting with the sad patience of people who know the volcano is going to erupt and where the pyroclastic flow will have to land, and have to deal with it anyway.
And Vimes does the only thing he knows how to do, and goes to work. He weathers the punishments that come with laying his captain out and fields the rest that come with commanding a barricade against the military in a city-wide demi-revolution, and is commended for his efforts toward the future of the new administration. He stands before the newly-appointed Lord Snapcase and salutes as best he can without wincing, and leaves as soon as he’s allowed, twitchy and eyeballing every guardsman all the way back to the watchhouse. Sam Vimes the Current follows him all the way and he realizes that he has a responsibility to this boy, one that now lasts more than just a few days. The only watchman who knew his secret was dead; the monks keep to themselves. John Keel lives now, and Vimes has thirty years of knowledge to try and put things right.*
             *Or, at least, thirty years give-or-take the two decades where his memories swam in a sea of alcoholic blurr. He’d just have to fish out whatever bits he could from there.
He makes a List. There are various watchmen who die who don’t need to, crimes remembered that he can now predict, and as time goes on Sergeant Keel of the Night Watch gains a reputation for being disconcertingly there, present at just the right time. He catches a young lad before a cart runs the boy over; Sergeant Maroon doesn’t take an unfortunate dive onto the upturned pike of a belligerent thief, because Keel is there, grabbing the back of his armor just in time to haul him up. He sees the directions the city turns in before it even moves its head; Madam and her friends are fascinated with him but he denies her anything, right up until it’s suddenly five years into the past and he sees Sam take his first drink outside of the social sphere, and realizes that he’s actually allowed to change, really change things. Big things. And personal things, as well.
Vimes watches Sam like a hawk and steers him well away from the bottle when failed romances (Vimes watched with cringing sympathy, but the poor bastard had to learn somehow) or the dirty hands of the city begin weighing on him; they talk, instead, and Vimes desperately looks around for something he had never seemed to have time to acquire before: a hobby. It leads him to Schoone Avenue where, upon the notice of the death of Lord Ramkin and the beginnings of the dragon sanctuary, Vimes drags Sam along to inquire about getting a watch-dragon for Treacle Mine Road. He’s worked hard to see to it that watchmen are no longer back-door visitors, but he shines Sam up just the same.
Sybil looks so young; at twenty-five she already towers over Sam Vimes the Younger and Older both, and hasn’t quite acquired that middle-aged forthrightness of someone who knows it’s late and is determined not to care. Sam is enthralled, and Vimes takes the opportunity to volunteer him to help at the sanctuary, extracting himself as quickly as he can before anybody notices his eyes getting red.
He’s built up the reputation as a dedicated husband; everybody knows that his cigar case was a present from his wife, and he’d mentioned once that when he’d arrived she was about to have a baby. But there are no letters, no notes saying how the baby is and when is he coming home and what the big city is like. Ol’ Sarge didn’t like to talk about his wife, and looked rather wretched when she was brought up. So the men decide that Mrs. Keel had died in childbirth, and that ol’ Sarge was still too heartbroken to tell about it. Vimes has to go up to his room and sit in the dark for a very long time upon hearing that rumor, clutching the silver cigar case until his hands ache.  
Carcer is a problem. He’s stuck, same as Vimes, and has no compunctions whatsoever about doing absolutely anything he wants to anybody who gets in his way. Vimes works and works and works, night and day until he nearly collapses, trying to find something to pin the bastard with, something to tear him down from the pillar of terror he’s affixed himself to, and can’t. The city isn’t ready for a watchman who can arrest the unnerving head of the remains of the Particulars, even when the man comes up for murder. Nobody cares about murders; certainly not when an Authority is doing them, and particularly not when said Authority is known for making people disappear. But the Particulars, though they’d been granted another base and were endorsed by Snapcase, were just as much afeared of Sergeant Keel as they were Captain Carcer, and when the time comes and it’s Sam, of all people, who manage to arrest Carcer for murder, nobody stands to speak for him. Poor Constable Battock exits life almost twenty years too early during that mess, but they have Carcer for his murder and for an attempted murder on Vimes himself, and Snapcase, who is insane but at least could read the mood of a mob, sentences the man to swing.
Sam the Younger is making rather some headway into his gentle Understanding with Lady Ramkin the Younger when she introduces him and his mentor to her very good friend, the bastard himself: Havelock Vetinari, fresh from his Grand Sneer and ready to grab Ankh-Morpork by the horns or, knowing Vetinari, to gently steer it by way of a sharp instrument on a more sensitive body part.
Vimes isn’t expecting the black-clad kid in front of him to watch him with an admiring eye, and he certainly isn’t ready for him to call Vimes ‘sir’. And Havelock and Sam get along, all under the smiling eye of Sybil, who’s looking entirely too smug at what’s supposed to be a friendly tea and chat. And Vimes knows the boy now as Havelock, because that’s what Sam keeps calling him. His new friend. It’s eerie.
And there’s the good bits about being stuck in the past, and the bad bits too – and then there’s the very bad bits. Sam wheedles and huffs and side-eyes Vimes until the man finally gives in and lets Sam drag him to Cockbill Street for dinner, under the aching need to put the horrible rumor of him being Sam’s runaway father to rest, and the even more painful ache of getting to see his mum for the first time in nearly twenty years. The familiarity is awful; Vimes had moved out of Cockbill Street when he’d first taken the badge and had only visited briefly over the years, in the bare, somewhat put-upon dutifulness of a son who didn’t realize that his mum wouldn’t be around forever. His mother – younger now than Vimes is, and isn’t that just the worst realization – serves everything that he’d been dying to taste just one more time, and it all turns to ash in his mouth. Young Sam is visibly disappointed to find that Sarge is completely unknown to his mum, and Old Sam finds that lack of recognition distressing for another reason entirely. He urges the boy to take better care of his mother, and sees that he visits her at least once a week.
It's about this time, or a little while afterward, that the silver cigar case disappears. Vimes had built a nervous habit of patting his pocket, and took it out just to look at it often. Twelve years through the past runs by and Rust has finally seen to boot (Vimes’s cardboard-soled boot, to be specific. He’d caught the bastard having indecent and altogether unwilling relations with a maid in the man’s manor, and Vimes had worked very, very hard to impress upon the city that being a nob didn’t mean you were free to fuck around and not find out. Rust, being nobbier than most, wasn’t arrested, Ankh-Morpork just wasn’t there yet, but he was encouraged to leave the city in disgrace, and Vimes supposed that it would just have to do for now). The office upstairs is Vimes’s once more, and has already accumulated a familiar forest of paperwork. It’s late, and he’s alone, and that’s what makes it hit so hard. If he’d been on the street, or even downstairs in company, and the possibility of the case being pinched was even fractionally available, he would have kept hope. He would have grabbed that possibility with both hands, treading red-eyed through the city year after year, holding onto the notion that he’d eventually find it. But he’s in his office alone, and when he habitually reaches down to pat it he feels the solid weight of it disappear under his hand. He checks his pocket, checks all of his pockets, nearly tears his trousers checking, and then throws up. He pulls on his cloak and runs into the night without a lantern, dodging the hustle of the city with unseeing eyes as he lets his feet walk him up to Schoone Avenue, where Sam is having dinner with young Sybil. Vimes can see only vague shadows in the windows from his spot on the distant street, only hear muffled laughter, and feel only lint and broken pencil lead in his pocket, and that’s it. That’s the only future now, up in the huge house ahead. The anchor that Vimes had held onto, even after Sweeper had told him that he could never go back…that one shining, delicate thread connecting him to his world, is gone. It’s all gone.
Vimes walks. He walks over the bridges, across the streets, and the shadows welcome him home. He notices nothing of the city around him; a thief from the newly appointed Guild hops in front of him, waves a knife, and then says ‘Er…sorry, wrong person,’ and hops all the way to the other side of the street; Vimes has pulled the night in around him, let it seep into his bones, and it shows on his face.
Everything is gone. Sybil, the baby, Detritus, Carrot, Vetinari, Angua…even Dorfl and his slowly-growing army of free golems, even Buggy and Cheery and Willikins and the little old lady who brought them biscuits on Hogswatch because they’d carried her husband to the hospital after he’d fallen, it was all gone gone gone. Was it all disappeared? Was everybody dead, an entire future erased as if it had never been? Or was Sybil waiting for him in a distant dimension, alone in that house with the baby, telling it stories about a father who disappeared into a storm, never to return? He doesn’t want to know. Each is as horrible as the other, and it doesn’t matter now because it’s all gone…
Sergeant Keel returns to the watch house at noon, several hours after he was supposed to have signed out for the day, and when he returns the watchmen note that he’s missing something, like a layer of skin has been flayed away. And in the cemetery of Small Gods, the tiniest plot has been paid for. It’s nothing but a small box, empty and the size of his hand and damn had Leggy First objected, but it was there, filled with the remains of Sam Vimes the Elder, and the future he had left behind.
He digs in, the way he had held off digging in before, because what else was there, now? Captain John Keel becomes nearly a force of nature. Thieves walk on the other side of the street, licenses clearly visible. The Assassin’s Guild raises his fee to over a half-million dollars, after the incident with the last fellow and the ornamental topiary. The Watch opens its arms to its first dwarf officer several years before Cuddy’s time, and with it comes the call for a troll officer, and though it’s not Detritus yet Vimes feels something slot into place. A female officer (human) follows, and it’s like the opening of a floodgate; suddenly the Watch isn’t just some rude men, but your neighbor Thor Thorsson’s in uniform now, and your daughter’s making noises about getting some chainmail. Vimes feels the familiar headache that comes with new recruit chittys coming in every week, but this time without Carrot here to prod him into organizing the files. And Havelock takes power far earlier than he had originally; Lord Snapcase had yet to commit something that Vimes could stick him with without getting nailed to a dungeon wall by his ears, but the guild leaders and even some of the nobs could sense how the wind was blowing through the streets, away from the idea of a cruel, insane tyrant who deplored upon a city that was opening its doors to new people and new ideas and, most importantly, all the money that they brought in. Havelock took up the robe of office nearly ten years ahead of time, right from the cooling body of its previous occupant, backed by the majority of the guilds and, for the first time, the surprisingly reputable City Watch.
Things are going well for Sam. There’s no way to avoid being torn down, when you’re a person with such an open heart and all the anger required to want to kick the gods for trespassing, but in this time he has a support system and a mentor who don’t let him do it alone. Vimes feels like he’s given the young man a proper education on all the reasons why the nobility as a whole is a festering parasite on the populace, and now he’s marrying one and is, uh, very good friends with another. Very good friends. Vimes wouldn’t have noticed except that he went to pick up Sam from the big house a bit early one shift, and noticed Havelock there, just relaxing in the sitting room with a cup of tea and a book, in the middle of the settee with Sybil on one side and a recently-vacated spot on the other. Vimes tried and failed to work his way around the question of ‘Are you and your wife fucking the Patrician, Sam?’ and instead spent the entirety of his patrol examining every ‘Ah, Vimes’, and every covered smile or invitation to stare thoughtfully out of the window and that one time where Vetinari had called him ‘my dear Vimes’ and how often he’d visited with Sybil and – and – how to possibly compute all of that while remembering this Havelock asking him, Sam Vimes/John Keel, for tips on how to disappear better into the shadows. He still takes in their invitations to dinner or tea on the regular and little details suddenly start to make sense, especially when Sybil looks at him over her teacup the next day and simply remarks that it was about time. Her and Sam have a baby well ahead of Vimes and his Sybil, and the little boy is dark-haired like neither of his parents, at opposites to his fair-haired sister, who comes a few years after. Vimes is named godfather to both, to his proud disquiet, his heart wrenching somewhere in the region of his stomach as he holds the children that, if not for a freak storm, would have been his own.
It all comes to a head, of sorts, when it’s been twenty-five years and Sybil says ‘Sam, dear?’ and Sam and Vimes both answer. He’s about two weeks from retirement, everybody knowing full well that ‘retirement’ for Ol’ Sarge will actually mean remaining exactly where he is, just with helping the new Commander Vimes (and doesn’t that just stab his proud, proud heart) with the paperwork instead of wrestling with it himself, and being less shy about falling asleep in his chair. He’s pushed it off for as long as possible, but even Havelock has started to become gentle in his persistence, and Vimes is…tired. Policing is hard on a body and soul, and Vimes has policed Ankh-Morpork for sixty damn years. Completely incognito, too, until that one tiny little misstep, and now Sam’s looking at him funny. It should be an easy enough mistake to attribute to age and familiarity, but Vimes knows the look of having Figured It Out when he sees it on his own blasted, blasted face, and Sam is coming up to it fast. The mannerisms. The voice. The way they look like father and son, if father and son happened to look and age and smile and frown exactly alike, with the same color of eyes and hair, the same hands, the same knob on their right pinky from a broken finger in childhood. Sam’s mother hadn’t recognized it but Sarge looked so stricken when he’d met her, like he’d seen a ghost. Sam had sneaked a look at Sarge’s cigar case once, had seen the writing and never made sense of it. Sarge had introduced him to Sybil. Sarge had met Havelock without surprise, Sarge had figured out that whole Leshp business before anybody could even organize an army, Sarge knew things. Sarge had nearly started weeping when they swore in Sergeant Detritus, and had made friends with him instantly. Sarge was the only one not surprised by Captain Carrot’s indelible manner, or by young Cheery’s fashion choices. Sybil and Havelock sometimes looked between Sam and Sarge like they were waiting for either to answer a question, like the answer would be the same no matter which man it came from, and Sam realized – probably thirty years behind everybody else, dammit, that it really wouldn’t matter which man the answer came from, because they were the same. Damn. Man.  
Sam corners Sarge in his little room above the watchhouse, shoves a chair under the door, and asks him what his name is.
And Sam Vimes, after a very long, long moment, sighs, and answers him.
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