#somehow just expects this kid to go along with them and this particular disconnect

[nobodyfamousposts]

Helluva Deal (Miraculous X Helluva Boss)

Well, since Miraculous crossovers with Helluva Boss/Hazbin Hotel are a thing now, I figured I’d write my own on how I think it would likely go. Since this IS the Helluva Boss universe, expect mentions of death and the afterlife, allusions to violence, innuendos, and general inappropriateness:

“Let me get this straight.”

Blitzo stared down the demon before him.

Said demon simply looked back, unimpressed. The little thing was small with blue skin, dorky-looking round glasses, and uneven horns. It wasn’t even a notable demon. Just a random weaker demon who somehow got the funds to pay for their services.

And normally, Blitzo was hardly one to turn down money—or a job that offered money. But this…

“You want to pay us to kidnap someone from Earth—not murder, which is in our company’s name, but kidnap. Which is decidedly more difficult and less fun.”

“Yep.”

Blitzo steepled his fingers together and held them up to his face. “And you want this person kidnapped—not so you can kill her yourself for whatever issue you may have, but because you want her to make you a jacket.”

“Yep.”

“A plain old jacket you could just get anywhere here in Hell.”

The demon gasped in offense. “It’s not just ANY jacket! It’s an MDC original piece and I want one!”

Blitzo took a breath, getting the feeling he was going to regret this. 

“Why?”

This…made the demon pause and eventually shrug. “Well, I did say I would have died for an MDC jacket. And I’m dead now, so…gimme.”

Well, who was he to argue with that logic?

Although…

“That is going to require quite a bit more effort…” He started, obviously leading…

The demon gave a flat look. “I’m not paying you double. I need the rest to pay her for the jacket.”

“Why would you want to pay for it?” Blitzo demanded. “This is Hell! You’re a demon! Just steal one!”

“It’s a commission! I have to pay for it!”

Blitzo would have spit out his drink if he’d had one.

“What are you even in Hell for, anyway? You won’t kill. You won’t steal. You just want to pay some human for a jacket you could get anywhere. What’s the point of that?” He asked, giving the other demon a strange look because really, what kind of demon WANTED to pay for things?

The demon stared flatly at Blitzo, his tail flicking against the chair in apparent increasing agitation.

"Are you saying that a commission shouldn't be paid for?” The demon asked curiously, sounding a little...too polite. “Because the last guy who tried to skip out on paying for a commission died. Eyes stabbed out and everything. Do you want to risk that kind of thing happening to you?"

…

Blitzo paled.

“Oh.”

The silence lingered to the point of long past uncomfortable as the demon continued to wait for an answer and Blitzo’s not so subtle attempt to desperately press his secret security button under his desk had no effect.

This would turn out to be because of Loona disconnecting the thing due to her hangover. Though in the moment, Blitzo would choose to blame Moxie.

After a good minute of no response from his team, Blitzo started to sweat when the determined artist demon seemed to grow bored and pulled out a pencil.

He jumped to his feet.

“We’ll take the case!”

And immediately fled the room.

_______

Once on Earth, the problem came up rather quickly that they had no idea who MDC was or how to access them. The client only knew the target was a fashion designer in Paris, which narrowed it down to one city at least but still was little help when the city in question was one of the fashion capitals of the world.

Blitzo, naturally, took the lead in trying to work out a means of information gathering.

And by “naturally”, what was really meant was “horribly failing”.

“I’m telling you, the plan is foolproof. We hold someone for ransom until MDC trades herself.” Blitzo said with apparent glee.

“Sir, that would be the exact opposite of subtle and get us the wrong kind of attention!”

Moxie, for his part, was trying to come up with what he would call “sensible plans”. Millie was simply scouting the area while the two argued. Ever faithful Loona stayed behind to try using her own connections…a magazine.

Needless to say, Blitzo was the one carrying the team. Or at least in his not-so-humble opinion.

Blitzo rolled his eyes. “I don’t see you coming up with any plans, Moxie.”

The smaller demon gave his boss a disgruntled glare. “I already told you! We should just go back and ask the client for more information!”

“Hmm…” Blitzo paused, before pulling out his phone. “Hey, Loona. The client still in my office?”

“Yeup.”

Blitzo immediately closed the phone. “Yeah—nope.”

“Sir—”

“He gouged a guy’s eyes out, Moxie! I need my eyes! I’m too pretty to lose them! They frame my face!” Blitzo exclaimed, bringing his hands up to his head in a fit of dramatics. “Is that what you want, Moxie? Do you want me to lose my precious, precious eyes?”

Moxie stared at the man like he was insane. Granted, Moxie had long had doubts about his boss’s sanity, but still...

“Hey, fellas?” Millie called, interrupting the two as she waved them over to the side of the building they had set up a temporary base atop of. “Listen to this!”

Blitzo immediately headed over, with Moxie following along behind looking annoyed. As they got closer, they heard what Millie had called them over about. Blitzo leaned over and peeked into the room in question.

Below them was an open window of the building where apparently a number of teenagers were gathered within for some inexplicable reason. And in this specific room, a group of the teens were gathered around one particular girl with a large forehead and hair that appeared to be made of meat. It was this girl who had their attention.

“—really friends with MDC?” One short blonde asked, looking overly excited like Blitzo did when he got a paycheck.

“Of course!” The meat-girl replied, looking smug. “We go way back! I was even the one who encouraged him to start in fashion and inspired his Heroes line.”

Blitzo looked back up at his team. “I thought MDC was a girl?”

Moxie shrugged. “If no one knows their real identity who's to say if they're a boy or a girl?"

“What else are they saying?” Millie asked, which returned the focus to the room.

More talking from below, using words that none of the demons really understood or cared about.

“—which was why he even made the Fox outfit for me!”

“Wasn’t that design based on Rena Rouge rather than Volpina?” One other girl with blue hair asked from the doorway of the room. She appeared to be rather annoyed for some odd reason.

The meat-girl looked somber. “Well, that was before he had to change it. After all, as bold as he is, not many people would support an akuma line, even if he had kept my idea to donate the funds to charity for the victims.”

The group “oo”-ed over the girl and praised her for her thoughtfulness. The meat-girl preened at the attention. The bluenette rolled her eyes. Some other blond guy looked on in disappointment.

“How amazing!” The little blonde exclaimed, clasping her hands to her cheeks. “I’d love to be able to meet MDC!”

“So would we!”

All eyes fell to the window which Blitzo, Millie, and Moxie used to make their entrance.

Honestly, he thought it was one of his better displays of dramatics. It certainly warranted some applause. Or screams of fear. Maybe one fainting.

“Akuma!”

Honestly, he was rather disappointed by the underwhelming response.

“I know we're demons and all, but I thought this place was French, not Japanese!"

“Nevermind that.” Blitzo replied to his workers before stepping forward to face the students.

Or rather one student in particular.

“Greetings! I am Blitzo. The two behind me are Millie and Moxie.”

The class stared as one of the two glared at them while the other waved cheerfully—or would be considered cheerfully if her teeth weren’t so razor sharp.

“We represent IMP, a for-hire group out of Hell. We take contracts, complete tasks, and make wishes come true!”

The teens looked at the demons in wariness and confusion.

“That sounds nice…” The little blonde in pink said.

“Those wishes generally involve murder.”

“I take it back! That sounds horrible!”

Blitzo grinned. “We are the ‘Immediate Murder Professionals’, dealing with the unfinished business of those poor wretched souls who are seeking some small vindication in their current status in Hell.”

“Then…why are you here?” The bigger male demanded.

Blitzo ignored him in favor of his true target.

“You! Ugly girl!” He shouted, grabbing the meat-girl.

“Hey!” She exclaimed, insulted.

He shook her. “Take us to MDC and we’ll rip out those sausage-links you call hair!”

“…don’t you mean ‘or’?”

He grinned ferally.

“No.”

She shrieked in fear.

“Lila!” Others cried out in horror.

Ah, yes. There was the fear. This, Blitzo was good with. It made him feel better about the previous lackluster response to his entrance.

“Why do you want me?!” The girl—Lila shouted, looking panicked. “I don’t know where MDC is!”

He raised an eyebrow at this. “But you said you were friends.”

She glanced around, taking note of the fact that her cohorts were still in the room. Though he didn’t know why that should matter for her answer.

“We are! But…I don’t know where he lives now! He’s moved since his name got out there and hasn’t given me the address yet!”

A glasses-wearing girl frowned in confusion. “But didn’t you just say that he invited you to his house for fittings?”

“Yeah, you said it was for the latest line that just came out.” Another girl with multi-colored hair added.

“That was months ago. Before he moved.” Lila replied quickly. “So I can’t help you.”

“Sure, you can!” Blitzo replied jovially. “We can just use you as ransom until MDC agrees to hand himself over.”

Moxie approached the two, keeping his gun leveled at the other kids. “We can save some time and see if she can’t call him.”

“Hey, yeah!” Millie agreed, grabbing Lila’s bag off of her and searching for her phone. “If they’re friends, she’s gotta have his contact info!”

“It’s not in there!” Lila replied quickly. “I was worried someone would steal my phone to get his info so I don’t keep his number in my phone!”

Millie frowned, before holding the now open phone up to Lila. “Then just type in the number yourself.”

Lila glanced around the room in growing agitation. “I can’t! I don’t have it memorized!”

“Then where did you write it down?”

“I lost it!”

The demons were looking particularly vexed.

“When and where?”

“It was a while ago. I don’t know where.” Lila replied.

A girl with glasses looked at her in confusion. “But didn’t you say you just called him this morning to congratulate him on the new line? And that he promised you a free outfit as thanks for all your help?”

Lila paled. “I—”

“Then the number should still be in the phone under its call history.” Moxie noted. Millie grinned and looked back to the phone screen to look through the data.

“I deleted it right after!” Lila shouted desperately.

Millie looked up at her in irritation.

Then promptly crushed the phone in her grip.

Lila shrieked, though it would be up for debate as to whether it was in shock at the loss of her phone or in fear that she may soon share that same fate.

Blitzo seemed similarly put out, but ended up shrugging it off as he pulled Lila closer to him. “Then it’s back to Plan A to hold her for ransom. Or torture her to see if she can’t remember the details.”

“No, please!”

“Lila!”

“Let her go!”

Lila grabbed at the arm holding her, panicked but not enough beyond reasoning. She couldn’t afford to reveal she lied now. She could only hope that these monsters would take her somewhere private where she could manipulate them with less witnesses.

Marinette, for her part, was also analyzing the situation.

These were three unknowns. Definitely not akumas. If they were to be believed, they were actual demons. From Hell. Which existed, apparently. And was where Lila would likely find herself in the next hour if she kept this up.

But from Lila’s expression, it seemed she was insistent on staying tight-lipped about her lies. Marinette figured as much due to her history. But she would have thought that Lila would have had some measure of self-preservation. Though perhaps that only applied to the preservation of her lies and manipulations rather than her own well being.

It was clear that Lila wasn’t going to get herself out of this. Not in any way that would spare her and everyone else in the room, at any rate.

As it was, the classmates were about to rally in Lila’s defense. While they had stood their own against akumas in the past,Marinette didn’t want to see how well they would fare against demons. Nor did she want to have to test if the Miraculous Cure would be enough to fix whatever would be left of them if they tried.

Marinette looked to the doorway.

No one was paying any attention to her right now. She could escape. She could go out, find a place to transform, and come back to deal with these…demons.

But by the time she returned, who was to say what could happen. The demons could kill Lila. They could kill all of her friends for being witnesses.

Ladybug may not be able to fix this.

But Marinette…as Marinette, she could.

“I’m MDC.” Marinette admitted.

Everyone froze.

“Come again.”

“MDC.” Marinette enunciated. “It stands for Marinette Dupain-Cheng. My name. I’m MDC. I’m the one you want.”

Alya stared. “Girl?”

Moxie looked at her in consideration. “That would fit with the client’s report of MDC being female.”

Millie, frowned in suspicion. “How do we know she’s really MDC?”

Marinette took a breath and slowly pulled out her tablet. “Well, my signature is in the clothes, so if you’ll let me pull up one of the shots, I can point it out and—”

Blitzo cut her off, grabbing her arm. “Yeah, I think we’ll just take you both and let the client sort it out. Sound good? Good, because we’re leaving.”

“Bye all!” Millie said, waving to the group. “Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do!”

Moxie rolled his eyes. “That’s a pretty short list…”

Blitzo ignored them an opened a portal, dragging both girls after him. Without a glance back, both Millie and Moxie followed him through the portal. Before anyone else could move, the gateway closed behind them.

A long pause followed.

“Not so fast!”

Suddenly, the door was kicked open as Chat Noir burst into the room.

The much less enemy-filled room.

“Um…did I miss the party?”

_______

The room they soon found themselves appeared, for all intents and purposes, completely normal. It looked like an office of the sort they’d find anywhere in Paris. Complete with a secretary’s desk, a few chairs, and a table littered with magazines.

The difference was made quickly apparent, however, through the view out the window. The landscape the deceptively quaint room was mostly a collage of red and black, with a sunless sky above and a myriad of strange buildings. Also of note where the various denizens of…distinctly non-human appearance wandering the streets outside.

“All right, ladies! Welcome to Hell!” Blitzo announced with a flourish, causing the girls to pale.

Lila fell back with a screech, landing on her butt and immediately attempting to scuttle back away. Her path was quickly halted as she bumped into something. Looking up, that “something” was actually a wolf monster, making Lila panic even further.

Loona, for her part, was not having a good morning—ignoring, of course, that it was actually the afternoon. And as if it wasn’t bad enough that her hangover still hadn’t cleared, now some…thing had shoved into her, followed shortly by an ear-piercing shriek that only made her head feel worse.

Seeing the way the wolf demon growled, Lila opened her mouth, possibly to scream even more when Marinette quickly shoved a hand over her mouth with a smile to Loona.

“Oh my! Your hairstyle is quite lovely!” She lied. Blatantly lied to the wolf girl’s face.

“It’s bed-head.”

“I couldn’t even tell. It looks so sleek and shiny!”

“Whatever.” Loona grumbled and stormed off to the break room, slamming the door behind her (and then immediately regretting it due to the noise agitating her headache).

Marinette decided to take the initiative. “So…what do you want with us, anyway?”

“Our client paid us a pretty penny—”

“Basic contract.” Moxie interrupted.

“Pretty. Penny.” Blitzo continued as if he hadn’t heard. “For a chance to meet with MDC.”

Okay, they had mentioned that before.

“Then what?”

“If you are MDC, you can do whatever the client is wanting. If you’re not, you’ll at least make for a decent distraction while we escape and blow up the building.”

The humans in the room blanched at that.

“WHAT?!”

“I know. She was a beautiful building.” Blitzo said mournfully as he actually wiped a tear from his eye. “And I just got my office arranged how I like it, too. But it

Marinette stared.

Lila whimpered.

“I second that ‘what’.” Moxie interrupted. “Nobody at any point discussed blowing up the building!”

“It was on page 3 of the handout I gave you this morning, Moxie.” Blitzo exclaimed, covering his eyes in exasperation. “At least read the mission briefings!”

“Sir, the ‘handout’ was a paper napkin. There was no third page!” Moxie insisted.

Beside him, Millie for her part was looking over the aforementioned napkin for the part that was supposed to mention the circumstances in question…or really any of the plan.

“We’ll discuss it later.” Blitzo said over his shoulder to Moxie as he proceeded to grab both human girls and drag them over to a previously closed door.

“Hey wait—!”

“Hang on!”

Within seconds, Blitzo opened the door and proceeded to shove both girls through before slamming it shut behind them, the last thing they heard being him mentioning where to buy explosives.

_______

So.

Recap.

Hell was real. Demons were a thing. And the two human girls were getting a first hand view of the less than pleasant or holy side of the afterlife.

Marinette was…actually taking it all in stride.

Lila was less so. She was sitting ramrod straight in the chair, keeping a tight grip on her knees and trying very hard not to move as her eyes glanced quickly around the room at the assembled demons.

Marinette actually felt bad for her. And probably should have been panicking herself, all things considered. Maybe she would have been had it not been for her extensive experience as Ladybug.

Sure, it was Hell, but floating gods and people turning into monsters had already broadened her horizons of the possibilities of the universe. Plus despite the name of the company that had kidnapped them both, murder didn’t appear to be on the table. All in all, despite the circumstances, Marinette didn’t feel that scared.

The fact that the “client” in question who hired the group was actually a fan of hers wanting a commission helped quite a bit with that.

As did the flattery.

“OMG! OMG! I can’t believe it! It’s you! Can I get your autograph?! No—wait! I need to focus! Can I get a jacket with your autograph?!”

“Thank you.” Marinette said, somewhat flustered. Honestly, she hadn’t thought she had gained THAT much fame. Especially not enough for someone to want to commission her from the afterlife.

…was that a thing? Could that be a thing?

“What I don’t get is why the other girl had to tag along?” The demon asked, curiously. “Is she your assistant or something?”

Lila brightened, looking ready to speak—likely to try to lie her way out of this. Or mess up what little peace Marinette had managed to create.

“No!” Marinette interrupted quickly, ignoring Lila’s petulant glare. “No, she’s not. There was just a mix up since they didn’t know where I was or who to bring.”

Blitzo rolled his eyes. “Well, how were we supposed to know?!”

“You could have asked me when I contracted you.” Said the demon, somewhat annoyed.

“I have a website, you know.” Said Marinette, very annoyed.

They paused.

“…the fuck’s a website?”

Silence.

Marinette coughed. “In any case, you wanted to commission me?”

“Oh, yes!”

_______

It didn’t take long to make the arrangements. Marinette named her prices and the demon was more than willing to pay her for her services. They made use of Blitzo’s office to negotiate and fine tune some details regarding the arrangement. From determining the materials to writing up the contract to negotiating the costs, it was all pretty professional.

And ultimately involved the humans not being murdered and the building not being blown up, which was always preferable.

It finally came down to determining just how the demon customer wanted the jacket to look, and Marinette started drawing out some sample sketches on spare paper in the office that may or may not have been important documents for Blitzo which she may or may not have particularly cared given the whole “kidnapping and being used as a sacrifice” matter.

The only issue seemed to be that the demon customer wanted the jacket to be made of materials that were only available in Hell. Which made sense, she supposed, since she wasn’t sure how long anything she made on Earth would last in this environment. Millie and Moxie had been sent out to gather the necessary material in question, and what they returned with was a strange sort of leather. It was unique and of a color she had never seen before, and part of her really wanted to get a bit more detail about the make.

…given how pale Lila had already gotten, Marinette kindly decided to refrain from asking questions.

“Well then, let’s go over a few sketches and determine which one you like.”

The demon looked almost giddy at the prospect. The IMP team looked relieved. Except Blitzo, who still seemed to be pouting over their takeover of his office.

Lila was…less enthused. “WHAT?! What are you thinking?! He’s a demon!”

Marinette shrugged. “Well, I do have a non-discrimination clause.”

“That shouldn’t apply to demons!” Lila hissed lowly.

“The demons who have brought us to Hell and are currently our only way of getting back.” Marinette pointed out, dryly.

Lila huffed and went back to her chair.

So, with Blitzo and his team begrudgingly kindly being forced willing to donate their office for her use, Marinette sent to work to try and design a jacket to the client’s taste as quickly as possible.

The sooner she got done, the sooner they could go back to Earth.

…hopefully.

Lila, for her part, was terrified and miserable and just wanting to go back to Earth. Immediately would be preferable. Even without Marinette.

Yeah, thanks Lila.

“Why do I have to stay here? Why can’t I go back home? Or do anything else?”

The client tilted his head. “Are you saying you don’t like art? Because the last person who told me they didn’t like art had their eyes stabbed out. With pencils. Would you want that to happen to you?”

“…can’t I like art and not stay in Hell?”

“No.”

Lila paled and sunk lower in her seat, where she remained quiet for the next couple of hours while Marinette worked.

It was mostly in silence as Marinette drew one sketch after another. Asking occasional questions about preferred length, how many pockets, special embellishments, and which parts of the various jacket styles did he prefer. Eventually, they had come to an agreement about the set look he wanted, the materials needed, and when he wanted it completed by. And from there came the matter of payment…

“Um…I’m not sure what the exchange rate is for Hell currency.” Marinette said, looking at the coins he handed her.

The demon frowned, tilting his head in consideration. “I could always rob a human bank and pay you with that.”

Marinette paled.

“This is fine. Really. I can probably buy some things from Hell with this.” She said with a forced smile.

“There are tons of things you can only find here.” Millie said, brightening. “We could deliver them for you!”

Well, that was a good point.

“That’s true.” Moxie agreed. “You could make other things with the fabrics here. Hats. Shirts.”

He paused, looking over his shoulder at Millie who was busy chatting with the customer regarding the fabric he chose. Seeing she was suitably distracted, he turned to Marinette. “So…how much would it be to make a dress. Just out of curiosity.”

Aww. Even in Hell there was love.

She smiled. “We can certainly discuss it.”

The moment was ruined as Blitzo stepped in and slung an arm around Marinette’s shoulder.

“How about one of those sexy maid outfits for the bedroom? You’re French, right?” He asked before giving Moxie a nudge. “You could stand to have a little more fun in the bedroom.”

“Sir, I’m 14.” Marinette replied dryly.

“And what we do in the bedroom is none of your business!” Moxie rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Didn’t we just have a discussion about this last week?”

Marinette coughed as the two started to argue. “So…um…are we going to return to Earth so I can start working on this?”

Blitzo sighed. “Fine, fine. Killjoys.”

Lila heaved a sigh of relief. “Oh thank God.”

_______

With an agreement forged between Marinette and IMP to have the customer’s order completed and delivered within two week’s time, Marinette and Lila were safely deposited back in their classroom no worse for wear.

…well, physically. Mentally, there were probably going to be a few scars.

Several of their classmates had apparently remained since the earlier incident. Perhaps it was out of worry? Or maybe classes had resumed after their disappearance—akuma attacks and strange circumstances had become rather common, after all.

Still, it was Alya’s cry of surprise and then being pulled into a hug that assured Marinette she was, in fact, back home.

“You’re back!” Alya exclaimed, relieved. “We were so worried!”

It wasn’t every day your best friend and classmate was dragged to Hell, after all.

“—and I’d been trying to reach out to Ladybug and Chat Noir, but only Chat showed up and Ladybug must be busy or maybe she already knew? Did she help you? How did you escape?”

Part of her wondered if Alya had even stopped to breathe. The rest of her was just basking in the happiness that they had made it back safe and nothing too terrible had happened in the meantime.

The absolute LAST thing she needed was to come back and find out Hawk Moth had let loose another akuma that destroyed Paris while she was gone.

Alya suddenly gasped as though struck by a thought.

“Oh my god, Marinette! I can’t believe you did that!”

Marinette smiled. “Well, I had to—”

“You claimed to be MDC just to protect Lila! And here I thought you hated her!”

Happy feeling gone. Gone like a punch to the face. Knocked out. Dead, even.

Alya beamed. “I’m so proud of you, girl! I knew deep down that—”

“Nope!” Came a quick interruption. “That’s not what happened. It was just a lie. Completely and utterly.”

The interruption was half expected.

The fact that it came from Lila was not.

Everyone froze.

“What?”

“I never met MDC.” Lila explained, wasting absolutely no time with subtleties and just blurting it out. “I never knew Marinette was MDC. I just lied about knowing him because I thought he was the next big thing and I knew you would all believe me.”

“…what?”

Lila sighed. “I lied about knowing MDC. And being the muse behind his fashion line—well, hers. Since Marinette is MDC. She never lied. I did.”

The classmates were startled, but seemed to be taking in the information.

Rose, for her part, tried to be positive. “Oh...well, you didn’t have to lie about knowing MDC—”

“No, I mean about everything. Ever. In fact, there’s probably not a single time we’ve known each other that I was ever honest with any of you.”

Everyone stared.

“I’ve been lying since the moment we’ve met.” Lila continued. “I am a liar. Always have been. I am a horrible lying liar who lied about everyone I ever claimed to know and everything I ever said I did just to get you all to admire me because it was easier to manipulate you that way and get you to do things I wanted. From interviewing me for the Ladyblog to carrying my lunch tray to buying me things. I lied about having tinnitus just to get to sit next to Adrien and lied about not being interested in him to manipulate Nino into guilting him into letting me come to his house. Ladybug herself even called me out for lying. And when Marinette got upset that day I came back over the seat change? I threatened her in the bathroom because she was wise to me from the very start.”

A few stares were sent Marinette’s way. She didn’t have any explanation for them though. She was just as surprised as they were. More, even.

Lila shrugged. “Everything I’ve said. Everything I’ve done. All lies. Ever.”

Everyone gaped in shock. Nobody even really knew what to say.

Marinette started. “But why—”

“Because that was Hell, Marinette. HELL. The bad place you go to after you die, reserved for bad people. And until today, I didn’t even think it was real. Or that there could be a chance I could end up there. But I imagine if anything would warrant that, it’d be lying, manipulating, and trying to get revenge on a superhero.”

Nino blinked. “Wait…what was that last one—”

As if a great weight was lifted from her shoulders, Lila sighed. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go join a convent to try and save my soul now that I know I have one.”

With that, she promptly exited the room, leaving the group staring after her in complete bewilderment.

Alya gaped. “...what?”

_________

Epilogue: 

Marinette completed her commission to the demon and later for Moxie. Her fame increased in both realms and she eventually did open up her own design house. The only issue came in the customers who wanted to pay her by removing her competition, which she was mostly able to prevent until IMP took a hit on Gabriel Agreste. While Marinette did stop the attempted murder, this did still reveal his secondary identity of Hawk Moth, allowing the Butterfly and Peacock to be recovered and peace to return to Paris.

The classmates were shocked at the reveal of Lila’s true nature, but were more bewildered than anything given how it happened. They did all feel foolish and embarrassed for trusting Lila, but considering what could have happened, they all chose to take it as a life lesson to be more cautious in the future. They all remained friends and moved on to live quite fulfilling lives.

IMP formed a contract with MDC and gained a secondary job of delivery service as well as assassins, which increased their profits.

And Millie loved her new dress.

Lila Rossi convinced her mother to send her to a convent, where she became one of the most pious and devout members, spreading the message of being good in life more than any other.

#ml fic #ml crossover #marinette dupain cheng #Lila sucks #lila redemption #helluva boss

[meili-sheep]

do you think if he lived crepus would have a good relationship with his grandkids? there might be a possibility that they wouldn't get along (plus I think crepus makes 1 bad move and childe and diluc would be like well into the retirement home you go, old man.) BUT i know from real life that many times people can be better (not necessarily good but better) grandparents than parents. like somehow they don't have that high expectations or they realise some of their mistakes (not all lol) and want to do better.

I definitely don't want you to try to look at crepus in an other way because fuck him, he deserves all the shit we, crepus slanders want to give him.

I'm more curious about your opinion on how this would affect diluc (and kaeya maybe but he's not important here actually) since he had to endure all the bad things when he was little and even if it's a positive thing, it must hurt him to see how crepus can love children in a healthy way (I know u headcanon that kaeya was the golden child so diluc has actually experienced this before but i still think that it's different because kaeya is his brother and we could maybe even say that they were "rivals" in crepus' eyes). so what I'm saying it must hurt him because he thinks about it and just doesn't understand that why couldn't *he* get this unconditional love from his father, what changed, was it his fault?

So I firmly believe people can be good people, but not good parents. And this extends to being not being good parents but being good grandparents.

Because when you are a parent. You have direct responsibility for everything. And it can be a pretty thankless task at times. But good parents will not care about that. A good parent would get their rewards from having a happy and healthy child.

This is why I think both Elzer and Kaeya speak highly of Crepus as a father figure. Because Crepus had the disconnect of responsibility with them. He wasn't responsible for bringing them into the world, but he could choose to take them in. Wherewith Diluc, he had complete responsibility. Any failure with Diluc was a failure with him, and he simply couldn't handle that, especially not alone. It was much easier for him to just use Diluc to full fill his personal dream than to actually take the burden of parenting.

So Crepus as a grandfather... He'd actually be a pretty good grandfather. Because again, he has that disconnect of responsibility. Though Childe, in particular, would be watching him like a hawk for any toxic behavior. And he would be the one to fight Crepus not only to protect his kids but his husband. Because yes. It really does fucking hurt Diluc so much to see that Crepus can be a good father figure to everyone but him. Diluc probably would have difficulty being around Crepus when with the kids. But he'd stay because he'd need to watch his kids.

I think it would eventually hit a boiling point if Crepus ever caught Diluc alone and tried to recall 'good' memories with Diluc.

"Ah, I remember when the first time we went hunting. You were so quiet and patient."

"That's because I hated it..."

"What?"

"I never wanted to go hunting. I went because it was the only time you'd spent with me. But I hated hunting and seeing blood. Especially early on."

"But we spent plenty of time together."

"No, father. We didn't. You spent time lecturing me on being a knight. Or I would just have to sit quietly in the background while you worked."

"Well, you helped me paint."

"No. That was Kaeya. Kaeya helped you paint. You always told me to go back to my lessons when I said I wanted to paint with you."

"Surely your knight training wasn't all we did. You have to be miss remembering."

"Father. You know my memory is perfectly clear. You simply need to wake up. You were a good man. You've done a lot for the city. But you really don't deserve to be called my father. The only reason I'm tolerating this. Is because my children deserve loving grandparents. And well, I know you have no love for me. You have it for my children. So please stop trying to speak with me, Crepus."

And well, I personally think Crepus wouldn't really be able to change or fix the damage he's done to his relationship with Diluc. I think he would at least be able to start to respect Diluc's boundaries. Even though something about Diluc starting to call Crepus by his name over calling him 'Father' hurts.

But he deserves it.

Kaeya honestly thought would be a great uncle and defiantly would put in a ton of effort into improving his relationship with Diluc for his kids. Even cutting his contact with Crepus in more support of Diluc's feelings.

#crepus ragnvindr #crepus #crepus genshin #crepus headcanons #diluc headcanons #diluc #diluc ragnvindr #chiluc #chiluc kids #long post #lolol #bad dad crepus

[prismatales]

A thousand stars

Word Count: 1.6k

Bingo slot: Stargazing

Pairings: Midoriya Izuku x Reader

Tag/Warnings: Fluff, Soulmate AU, Aged up characters, Slight Mentions of alcohol.

Prompt: “Happy Birthday!” “It’s pitch black and I can still see you blushing.”

Synopsis: “Now I have the stars in the palm of my hands!” That bright, flushed smile as you squished his sparkly cheeks captivated the hero instantly, and at that moment he was certain of one thing.

Here’s entry number three for @bnhabookclub ’s bingo and celebrating deku events! I want to thank my friends @savagetrickster , @dragonhrte , @samanthaa-leanne , @hawks-senseis for helping me out with some ideas, and @fanfic-me-up for beta reading this for me!

Looking up at this vast, starry night reminded you of how big this world really was. Compared to the bright stars scattered across the wide, limitless sky, the both of you were seemingly like nothing but little specks of dust. 

Yet somehow, you were able to find each other amongst the billions of people walking around the earth.

Bodies snuggled together, craving for more of that soothing warmth that could only be offered by the one whom you shared this special bond with. Not even the heat of the bright bonfire eating its way through the wood, with sparks flying above it, could warm up your tangled bodies just as nicely as the male hugging you closer to himself.

“Did you ever think that we would be here?” Your fiance’s husky voice broke the comforting silence. Turninging slightly in place to look back at him, your questioning eyes begged for him to continue. “I mean, since I was a kid, I just…thought that after becoming a hero, I’d never have the chance to find my soulmate.”

His scarred hands encircled themselves around your sides, grasping tightly around your psyche. Izuku’s hold was practically desperate like he was fearful of letting go. Because in a way, he was afraid that this was all just a dream, too good to be true, and if he dared to let go, everything he worked so hard for alongside you, would end up disappearing into nothingness.

A soft, smaller hand laid over his own comfortingly. Making him look down at your hands. Even in the dark night, you both could still watch the bright glow coming from the red string bonding you together for life.

“And yet,” Your other hand caressed his cheek, bringing him closer to lay a soft peck on his freckles covered cheek, smooth lips lingering in place as he nuzzled his face gently against yours. “It was the very thing that brought us together in the first place.” 

You couldn’t help giggling tenderly by his displays of affection as he continued nuzzling your face, before kissing your shoulder delicately. A lot of people may not know this, but when both of you are alone, Izuku can be the most affectionate, sweetest guy to exist. You couldn’t have asked for a better soulmate than him.

Meeting your soulmate was a moment in life that neither of you would be able to forget. Not even once your memories eventually start fading with age, and the people may only remember Deku as a retired number one hero and previous symbol of peace. 

“Did you ever think that we would be here?” You asked softly, looking back at the black sky littered with thousands and thousands of never-ending stars “Camping together, cuddling under the stars as we celebrate the birthday of the greatest hero?” 

He shook his head in response, rocking your bodies together back and forth, thinking back to the time you guys met. A moment in life that he would always cherish since he never expected to meet you in the first place, but as always, fate usually has their ways of bringing people together.

Izuku would have never imagined meeting his soulmate in the middle of patrolling. The memory of the red string becoming shorter and shorter, pulling him forwards with great force, until it made him crash into a girl too busy running late for work, to notice the string on her pinky going in the same direction as her. Both groaned painfully when they fell down together, and papers flew everywhere around them.

You could still remember the way that red string tangled your bodies together, glowing brightly as it signaled the end of a search. Neither of you would stop staring at each other, or even bothered to get up as you greeted one another with a shy smile, and a breathless greeting as your hearts kept beating erratically with nothing but pure joy the moment you held hands for the first time. 

And I’m thinking ‘bout how people fall in love in mysterious ways

Maybe just the touch of a hand.

Oh me I fall in love with you every single day

And I just wanna tell you I am

Don’t get him started on the first time you spent the night together. He’ll always cherish the way you smiled at him as you held a glitter pen close to his face. An empty bottle of wine laid at the other side of the couch, along with a pair of empty cups. All ignored in favor of tracing inky, glitter-covered patterns all over his face, and laughing cheerfully at his flustered expression for having your bodies so close to each other. 

“Now I have the stars in the palm of my hands!” That bright, flushed smile as you squished his sparkly cheeks captivated the hero instantly, and at that moment he was certain of one thing.

He wanted to spend his whole life with you. Tracing galaxies all over each other’s skins, while laughing at nothing in particular...although that last one, was actually the wine’s fault. But he couldn’t complain if it meant seeing you having the time of your life with your beloved soulmate.

It made your one year anniversary just as magical as the day you met. 

When the day finally came, and he kneeled down in front of you, pulling out that golden band to propose under a starry night. That wide, euphoric and teary-eyed smile as you looked down at him, before tackling him down, all while yelling out “yes!” at the same time you began to blissfully kiss your now fiance, over and over again. 

It made it clear for Izuku, he knew it had been a decision he’d never come to regret as he laughed wholeheartedly by his soulmate’s euphoric attitude. 

So honey now

Take me into your loving arms

Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars

Place your head on my beating heart

I’m thinking out loud

Maybe we found love right where we are.

Now here you were, taking a break from everything and everybody a few weeks before the big day finally arrived. And what a better way to disconnect from everything, than to go camping together and enjoy one of the things that brought so much happiness to you both.

“Izuku?” Your voice snapped him out of his recalling, and he turned back to look at his dear, albeit worried fiance. “Everything okay?”

“Ah! Y-Yeah! Just, thinking about something!” He may be a grown man now. But Midoriya Izuku will always be that sweet, shy guys from his high school years. The same one that would always stammer whenever he happened to get lost in his own thoughts.

“Babe, It’s pitch black and I can still see you blushing.” He ignored your squinting with a burst of light-hearted laughter and intertwined your hands together. 

He brought them closer to his face, kissing the back of your hand softly, right above the finger where a small, red string was tied around the very same place where a gold ring, adorned with little stars signals for an upcoming future together, where you shall both live happily together.

“Oh! Right!” 

Untangling yourself from Izuku’s embrace -much to his dislike-. You crawled inside the shared tent and began rummaging through your bag in search of something. When Izuku saw you coming out of the tent with a wrapped gift in hand and a big smile, he couldn’t help looking at the gift in your hands with curiosity.

“Happy birthday!” 

When you gave him the box, he stared at it silently for a whole minute, before looking at you with a growing smile. Turns out the gift wasn’t actually wrapped, it was only a decorated box he opened easily. 

And when he saw his gift, it was like watching the same boy from high school that couldn’t help crying over the smallest gestures. 

Inside the box, laid an All Might hardcover notebook decorated with the words “Hero Analysis: Pro Hero Edition” in bold, metallic red lettering. 

He stared at his gift silently, finger tracing the white outline of the letters, feeling the texture of the leather, the material felt, and looked pretty expensive, almost like something only a professional would carry around.

Something a pro hero like Deku would carry around.

“Where did you get this?” He looked up at your cheerful, quiet self. Who only kept swaying from side to side with hands intertwined behind your back.

“I ordered it from a website that makes personalized notebooks! Your mom told me how much you adore All-Might related merchh, and I just happened to remember this site a friend told me about.” You sat down beside him, pleased by the way he looked at his gift with sparks in his eyes.

“Do you like it?” 

He looked back at you with small, happy tears prickling the corners of his eyes, which he quickly wiped away before they could fall on top of his newest notebook.

“It’s perfect.” His arms wrapped around your shoulders, pulling you closer to him as he gave the crown of your head another kiss in gratitude. “Just like you.”

“I’m glad you like it.” Once again, you snuggled closer to his body, lifting your head up to give your dear soulmate a kiss, that he happily returned with all of the love he had to give under the light of a thousand stars.

He couldn’t wait to spend the rest of your lives happily together, and being able to start a family with the one fate decided would be the right one for him. 

@bnha-ra @bnhabookclub @freckledoriya @gallickingun @godtieruwu @hanniejji @mysticalite @samanthaa-leanne @savagetrickster @shoobirino @songsforbnha @sugacookiies @t-amajiki @unbreakableeiji @wesparklebitch

#bnhabookclub #mha imagine #bnha imagine #bnha imagines #mha imagines #midoriya izuku x reader #midoriya izuku #event: celebrating deku 2020 #bnha midoriya

[razaks-wheel]

[In her research into Imperial-funded overhaul events, Meryse contacts the Nerevarine. This probably isn't canon. Unless]

3E 432

Meryse set up a sound wall around the projection room she had booked for the afternoon. She wished she could do this somewhere more private, like her own home, but even the "modern-style" projection that many mages made use of was still a little ways beyond her current skill level, and so she was stuck using a device at her local Mages Guild.

It was a dangerous game, she knew, doing research that could be considered anti-Imperial in an Imperial-funded facility, but she was fairly confident that she knew how to take the appropriate precautions. Besides, if the rumors could be trusted, the person she was going to be talking to was at least nominally considered a friend of the Empire, and so even if the projection could be tracked, she should be safe.

In their brief exchange of letters, they had provided each other with a pointer gem, a tiny crystal infused with a small amount of magicka, to make it possible to target each other with a projection. When the designated time came, Meryse placed Ildari's pointer gem in the device's slot and powered it up with a bit of her own magicka. She sat at the desk in the rune on the floor and set her notebook down in front of her while the device whooshed to life and sent its projection to what she imagined was a fabled mushroom tower all the way in Morrowind.

A few moments later, a translucent form appeared in front of her of a Dunmer woman with hair flopped to one side of her head. She had heard that the Nerevarine had been young, but she was still surprised to see that this mer barely looked older than she. Of course, it was hard to gauge an age from a projection, especially of a mer. Maybe she was older than she looked, or maybe Meryse was really just older than she felt.

As they exchanged introductions and pleasantries, Meryse noticed a ring on Ildari's finger decorated with Azuran symbology. She had heard of that ring, Moon-and-Star, in her studies when preparing for this meeting. It was said to give Nerevar, and only Nerevar, a substantial boon in interpersonal abilities. She wondered whether Ildari was wearing it for symbolic reasons, or if she was just as nervous to be interviewed by a stranger as Meryse was to be conducting the interview. Either way, Meryse wished she had a ring like that, though preferably one that wouldn't kill her.

"So, I'm studying some of the major events that the Empire has seemed to have a hand in, as part of a larger research project, and I wanted to talk to some of the key players in those events," Meryse said. "You were employed by the Emperor himself to fulfill your Nerevarine prophecies, correct?"

"Ah...not exactly," Ildari said. "The Emperor selected me, yes, and tried to get me into his service, but I never even ended up talking to the guy the Empire wanted me to go to."

"Oh," Meryse said, her pen hovering above her notes. "Can I ask why?"

"Someone intercepted me outside the Census and Excise office and gave me a better offer if I would take the orders they'd given me to his boss instead of the Imperial contact I was told to meet. His boss was on the council of House Telvanni, which I wanted to connect with anyway, being my ancestral House, and it gave me the option not to work for the Empire, so I took him up on it."

"And the Empire was fine with you not following their orders?"

"'Fine' would be a stretch." She laughed. "Let's just say that when I visit my mom in the Imperial City these days, I stay clear of Green Emperor Way. They probably know better than to mess with me, honestly, but I also know better than to dangle myself in front of them."

Well, that was a deviation. Maybe this was more dangerous than Meryse had anticipated, if this Ildari was less of a friend of the Empire than she had previously believed. On the other hand, it might mean that her answers would be more useful than she expected, as long as any of the questions she had prepared still applied. She probed her wards to make sure they were holding up, and then glanced down at her notebook to decide where to go next.

"You were still initially set on your path by the Emperor, right? Do you know how he picked you?"

"Oh, Uriel absolutely orchestrated my involvement, even if I broke away the second I had the chance," Ildari said. "Certain entities have the ability to identify 'Heroes'—agents of prophecy. Gods can do it. I suspect Moth Priests can, too. Something about it being written in the Elder Scrolls. I assume an emperor has connections and probably makes it his business to keep tabs on any Heroes that pop up.

"Here's the thing, though: they did have to mess with my life to make it work. They killed my parents before I was old enough to remember them, because the prophecy said the Nerevarine has to have 'uncertain parents.' And they made up the charges that landed me in prison, because apparently being in prison is important to trigger the start of a prophecy, at least according to my friend Vivec. That tells me two things. First, they identified me as a Hero early on, long before the prophecies were actually set to be fulfilled. Second, they're willing to force a prophecy's conditions to be met, if it suits them."

"Wow, I...didn't realize they would go that far. Not that it's surprising, exactly. I guess I just didn't know they had the resources and the drive to act on prophecy so long before it's relevant."

She took a moment to consider the implications for her own research, and jotted a few notes down. She looked at her next question. It would sound strange, she knew, but Ildari seemed open-minded enough. Clearly, she was already aware of the implications of prophecy; she might not balk at a question about the nature of time and the aurbis.

"Did anything...strange happen while you were fulfilling your prophecies?" she asked. "I know that's broad. Anything that's hard to explain or understand, maybe relating to the flow of time?"

"That's very broad," Ildari agreed. "There was the part where I got all my memories back from my past seventeen incarnates' lives. That was strange and somewhat relates to the flow of time. But that's pretty specific to me. Probably not what you're looking for." With half a smile, she asked, "So, you're studying the Warp in the West?"

"Ah...yes," Meryse said with a nervous laugh.

"Don't buy the idea that it was a miracle from the Divines?"

"Not exactly," she said. "Not even a little bit, really. I want to figure out what really happened. Everyone sort of waves their hands around what happened, and no one seems to remember it. I do, sort of, but I was a kid, so no one believes me. I want to know what the Empire is hiding, and what else they might be hiding—who else they've hurt."

"Well, if you're looking for people the Empire has hurt, you've come to the right place," Ildari said dryly. "Be careful, though. The Empire doesn't always look kindly on its opponents, much less on people trying to uncover its secrets. I can say what I want, within reason, because quite frankly, I have power—both politically and in terms of combat ability. If you can't say the same, you should take care who you say these sorts of things to."

"Oh, I am careful, don't worry," she said. "I've got wards set up right now, I obscure my notes, and I keep my exact research questions largely to myself."

Ildari nodded. "That aside, though, you said you remember the Warp? The whole thing?"

"I remember three distinct days, when everyone talks about it being one or two. And when it was over, we were bending a knee to Uriel, and suddenly everyone was talking about the Nine like Talos had been there all along."

That seemed to interest Ildari. She paused, brow furrowed, and opened her mouth a few times as if to talk, but changing her mind each time.

After a few moments, she finally said, "I wonder if you're a Hero."

That was, somehow, not what Meryse was expecting.

"Me? I doubt it. I'm not strong or powerful or...special in any particular way, and I've never noticed the Empire messing with my life specifically, like you say they did with yours." She shrugged. "I'm just a mage, a researcher."

"So was I, before they shipped me off to Seyda Neen."

Meryse considered it for a moment longer. "I don't know. If that's all it is, it just feels like such a disappointing answer. And even if it is true, I still want to know how it happened. I guess I'll keep researching until I know better."

"Good idea. I'm sure there's plenty that the Empire is hiding; you being able to tell that they're hiding something is more of a compass than a solution," Ildari said. "Still, you might want to consider picking up some survival skills, maybe learn how to use a sword or armor, just in case you get tossed on an adventure without warning."

"Yeah, couldn't hurt," Meryse said. "Well, thank you for taking the time to talk to me. This has been...enlightening, really, even if not in the ways I expected." She added a small laugh at the end.

"Research is never boring, is it?" Ildari said. "I hope you find what you're looking for. And if you publish your work, I'd love to read it."

"I will be sure to send you a copy. Thanks again, Ildari." She waved awkwardly and disconnected the projection.

Once the projection device was back to its inert state and she had taken Ildari's pointer gem out of its slot, she glanced down at her notes one more time. There was not much there, but she still felt like she had learned a lot, and come out with more questions than she had entered with. Naturally.

She added one more note about picking up some new skills, and then passed an encryption spell over the page. When she was satisfied that her notes were sufficiently obscured from prying eyes, she closed her notebook, slipped it into her bag, lowered her wards, and headed back out into the Mages Guild as though her concept of the world had not just been shaken.

#meryse #ildari #razak's ocs #this is pre-hok meryse ofc #and pre-eso ildari #this is one of those things where its like #its not particularly great or compelling but i wanted to write it so i might as well share it #it has some hero lore if you're into that sort of thing

[fayevalcntine]

It makes so sad that Rory had those romantic experiences. She struggles so much to say no and assert herself in romantic relationships. I really really wish we could have at least once really dove into her extreme people pleasing tendencies. The show and fandom is so willing to let other characters off for their bad behavior and approach it with nuance but I think Rory doesn’t often get that same treatment

I agree, the show never makes it explicitly clear that Rory is a people-pleaser to her own detriment, and this often leads to her either shrinking herself in her romantic relationships with other men or adapting to other people's expectations and wishes of her, namely her family, instead of her own. I wish that some of the big decisions she made in her life (like picking Yale over Harvard or not wanting to go back to Yale until she figured out what she wanted) were used as a catalyst for Rory to suddenly ask herself what she wanted out of her life and experiences in college. It would've been such an interesting way to see her assert herself as her own person, separate from that of being the kid of a single teenage mom, or the "shining new hope" that her grandparents wanted her to be. Instead we're left with a Rory who feels more like a shell of the person she used to be in the original series, and while I would like to think that she finds her way around in her life and puts it back together by herself and continues to live it on her own terms, I hate that what we're left with in the canon material is just Rory being viewed as a failure. It's a disservice to the fans who love her or used to love her for her drive and a disservice to the character itself.

The fandom generally seems to favor characters that have much stronger personalities in comparison to Rory. People love Lorelai the most, which I can understand since the Lauren is an incredible actress and plays the part amazingly for all the seasons, along with Paris as well because she's the epitome of what generally middle-class white women often strive to be or love. This isn't me dragging Paris btw, it's just that people comparing her to Hillary Clinton or loving her for her no-nonsense and aggressive attitude seem to forget that she's also another privileged rich girl like they often accuse Rory of being, and Paris often behaves like what women are told they must behave like in order to make it in a world that is often dominated by men. I can't say I blame Paris for that and I certainly can't blame her for her wealth, but the way people idolize her reminds me too much of white feminism. Speaking of wealth, people acting like Lorelai somehow "made it on her own" and her wealthy upbringing having zero to do with her success don't realize how being brought up in a rich family can shape your identity and attitude in a vastly different way than being brought up in a poor one. I love Lorelai and her drive for working and getting what she wants, but her confidence and charisma definitely comes from her being raised rich and not having to worry about money. This doesn't even take into account that she still has a large amount of money at her own disposal from her parents, which allowed her to even get Rory into Chilton in the first place. Rory is by simple definition privileged, yes, but so is her mother and so is Paris. The only young woman on this show that isn't as privileged as any of them is Lane, and frankly Lane gets too little from the fandom for what she manages to go through.

I veered off track for a minute but to put it simply, yes, the fandom likes to favor other characters and excuse their negative traits and even history in comparison to Rory, and I think that's definitely for a multitude of reasons, one of them being that her personality isn't as strong or "out there" enough as the likes of Lorelai or Paris. Another reason is this disconnection from the hidden depths of her character that are never brought out as loudly as they should be, given the format of the show. For example, Lorelai has a strained relationship with her parents and this is signified multiple times throughout the show. Lorelai is allowed to complain and yell about it because the narrative gives her the space to, and it even excuses it by us constantly seeing Emily meddle in her business. In comparison, Rory is never given the chance to even realize how terrible the expectations that are placed on her are. I love Lorelai and Emily and Richard are interesting characters, but all of them have a lot of thinking to do with what they place onto Rory and a lot of it has to do with how she even came to be in the first place, which has never been her own fault. The narrative is also not Rory's friend in any way. In comparison to her family, I don't think Rory is ever given the space or sympathy from the narrative the same way they are for us to understand why she is the way she is or why she does what she does. I've seen people prefer Emily and Richard above all else to the other characters on the show, and while I think they're pretty charismatic characters, they're also likely rich Republicans who love to be snappy and catty towards other rich people. The narrative just frames all of this in such a way that allows the audience to love them or like them.

Another particular reason that I can think of as to why people dislike Rory more is namely the fact that fandom always prioritizes male characters, and unfortunately, Rory has more significant relationships with young men than her mother has. Even if characters like Logan are never given much depth beyond the bare necessity to be a love interest for Rory, or to drive a specific arc for her, I've seen women gladly frame Rory as an antagonist or even villain simply because she......didn't tell Logan, a full grown adult at the end, to leave his fiancee? It's more or less the same with people who love Jess, only in this case they would gladly make Rory be viewed as a terrible person by Jess in order for him to move on to some other female character that will take care of him. Even Dean, who is such a terrible person to Rory, has fans who call Rory awful or think she was "stringing him along" on purpose during their relationship in season 3 simply because he's played by Jared P*dalecki. Overall, Rory's treatment in the fandom has not been kind, and the revival only made it worse.

#gilmore girls #rory gilmore #answered #anonymous

[trainsinanime]

Runaways Season 1

I know I'm years behind on this. That's because somehow Disney forgot to license the rights for Germany of this show to someone useful, so I had to wait for Disney+ to be a thing before I could watch it. Anyway, I thought I'd write some notes about how much I liked it. As background information: I'm a big fan of the comics, both the original runs and the current revival.

Episode 1

Content Warning: Attempted rape, murder

That's, like, a lot of shaky cam. More than I personally like.

Karolina's church background could be interesting, but I also feel like I might not have enough cultural background to really get what they're saying, because the religious landscape here is very different from the US.

They establish Chase as a jock and a genius inventor at the same time, and I'm not sure how to feel about that. It makes sense given his role later in the comics, but it seems like it makes the disconnect between him and his father more generic.

I'm okay with no Hayes family. I honestly can't remember their deal. For the others, mob boss, evil wizards, mad scientists, alien conquerors and evil time travelers all seem obvious, but what were the Hayes again? Evil geneticists, or evil doctors, or something? Can't remember, don't mind them being gone.

That said, how old is Molly supposed to be? Like, less than the others, right, but how much less?

There are some nice character interactions, like Gert's hopeless flirting with Chase, Chase being unable to think of any insult for Molly, those are nice.

But there's also some really awkward exposition. Like when Karolina literally says to the news reporter, "Look at this bracelet. I've never taken it off. That's not a weird thing to bring up at all! The bracelet hides that I'm a space alien from both the world and myself. Being a space alien is a metaphor for being gay, by the way."

Making the kids discover their powers before discovering the Pride, instead of as a result, makes a lot of things really awkward. In one day, Molly discovers that she's a mutant and that Gert has a dinosaur; Karolina decides to rebel and discovers that she's an alien; and later they all discover that their parents are evil, and all of that is just coincidence.

That has to be the most generic "teenage parties are evil" party in TV ever. I'm okay with Karolina and Chase both being there, that makes sense, but everything goes kind of the way you'd expect it to. In particular, there's the part where two boys want to sexually assault the passed out girl, and another boy comes in to save her. Now, obviously, those things happen in real life and are horrible. But in the context of this show, it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't affect Karolina, it doesn't affect Chase, it just happens and gives them an excuse to both leave together. Compare Veronica Mars where kind of the same thing happens (full disclosure: The show had so many twist reveals that I can't remember what the actual canon line of events at that party was at the end), and it is treated as the incredibly big deal that it is.

When they arrive at Alex's house, Karolina is questioning the nature of her reality, Chase is questioning what it means to be a jock, Molly is freaking out because she's a mutant and she just saw a dinosaur, and… they're all just bored. The tension in the scene seems to be mostly about remembering good old times they used to have back when Nico still had a sister, and how they can't go back there. All those revelations Molly just had? No, she doesn't want to talk to Gert about it.

Once more, the show proves true what everyone has been saying all along: Don't use built-in flash ever, except for literally taking portraits, it'll just cause trouble.

All in all, as of the end of episode 1, my favorite Marvel teen TV show still firmly remains Cloak and Dagger.

#runaways #marvel's runaways

[transracialqueer]

WHAT WE LOST: UNDOING THE FAIRY TALE NARRATIVE OF ADOPTION

by Liz Latty

January 3 is my Special Day. It is the anniversary of the day I was adopted. The day my parents bundled me up and brought me home to live in our red brick ranch house on West Chicago St. in a sprawling suburb just outside Detroit. As I grew up, I would hear the tale of this auspicious day time and time again. Sometimes even now, in my thirties, my parents like to retell it. Their eyes still shine with something expectant, something new.

We drove through the snow that morning to pick you up at the adoption agency. We were so excited. We’d been waiting so long for you; had prayed so hard. We held you in our arms. Your new brother made silly faces at you and you smiled and laughed at him. We took you home with us and our family was finally complete.

Although the Michigan court proceedings that legalized my adoption wouldn’t happen for another year and a half, my parents decided the January day they brought me home would be the symbolic day we celebrated our family making itself again each year.

I was told versions of the tale of my homecoming so many times over the years, it became somewhat like a myth. Perhaps the same way one’s birth story might feel mythical. And since this was the closest to a birth story anyone had to give me, it became part of the fabric of our family culture, like the storybook romance of my parents’ courtship that began with a canceled blind date in south St. Louis in 1963 and unfolded into their long prayed-for children arriving safely in their arms.

My brother had his own Special Day, having been adopted three years before me from a different family of origin. Our Special Day celebrations always included the retelling of the sweet tale of our arrivals, a small gift, and a special meal or dessert in our honor. I remember lovingly wrapped presents of longed-for books and shiny lip glosses, new CDs and all-you-can-eat dinners at the local Olive Garden. I liked feeling as though I had something akin to a second birthday. It made me feel different in a good way—like I got more than other kids to make up for the feeling that I somehow had less, or was missing something everyone else just naturally had.

At the same time, I felt acutely aware of how happy my mom and dad were on my Special Day, and how sometimes my feelings didn’t quite match up. Sometimes I would feel disconnected from the party, as if some other ghost girl were being celebrated as I watched. A girl who had one family that loved her, one family she belonged to, one name, one home, one story that began on that cozy January day and stretched on into happiness forever after. I would watch this girl celebrate with her family, watch them celebrate together, and I would feel hollow, empty in comparison. Eventually, as I grew into my teen years and my identity began shaping itself in part around this absence, I would come to an understanding that for my parents, my Special Day holds within its memory unbridled joy and relief—finally. But that for me, it holds something far more complicated.

*

Most mornings I sift through news stories from around the globe in search of content for an adoption news website I curate. As a result, I can safely tell you the majority of adoption-related news that doesn’t have to do with a celebrity adoption rarely makes it past small, local, or adoption-specific media platforms, or into the average person’s newsfeed on a regular basis. Yet this summer, when a five-year-old girl named Danielle had her adoption finalized in a Michigan courtroom, nine Disney princesses showed up to celebrate her, and a video of the joyous occasion went viral. Media outlets the likes of BuzzFeed, NBC, Refinery29, and Today.com ran the piece with headlines such as, “This Little Girl’s Adoption Hearing is a Real-Life Fairy Tale,” “Girl, 5, Gets Happily Ever After When Disney Princesses Surprise Her at Adoption Court Hearing,” and “Fairy-tale Ending as Disney Princesses Show Up for Adoption Hearing.”

I hesitated to watch the video. The all-too-familiar storyline linking adoption and fairy tales registered in my body as a flash of anxiety and exhaustion: Here we go again, I thought. But I clicked on it anyway and watched as a representative from the foster agency told us of Danielle’s obsession with Cinderella and everything Disney princess. My heart melted a little as I learned about the foster care workers who had arranged the elaborate surprise in an effort to make Danielle’s adoption day special. At the front of the courtroom next to Danielle sat her elated foster family of two years, for whom everything had lead up to this day in which they officially adopted Danielle, and another foster child, one-year-old Neveah, into their family. The anticipation in the room was electric as the judge offered Danielle the job of banging the gavel, symbolically sealing her own adoption, and the entire courtroom called out in unison, “It is so ordered!”

As the gavel crashed into its sounding block and a smiling, sweet-faced Danielle wobbled almost imperceptibly with the weight and force of it, I realized I’d been crying. The overwhelming sense of joy in the video, the love, the celebration of a family making itself, was beautiful. And, at the same time, I felt a familiar dull ache that often arrives as I watch adoptees at the center of someone else’s narrative.

I think what Danielle’s foster care workers and family did to make her day extra special was an incredibly loving gesture. And even though I can’t help but wonder what Danielle’s story is, what else she might have been feeling that day, or how she will come to think of that day in the future, what’s really troubling to me is why this video went viral when most adoption news goes quietly or not at all. What’s troubling to me is the particular brand of magic that Danielle’s story conjures for the rest of us.

There is no denying this video tugs at the heartstrings, but I believe it went viral for a very specific reason. With its fairy tale imagery and language, this video, and other sentimental representations of adoption, offer us the opportunity to further cement a narrative that we, in American society, have constructed over the last century and seem to need to believe in our individual and collective conscience: Adoption is a happy ending. Adoption is a win-win. Adoption is happily ever after. Unfortunately, this heartwarming narrative is a dangerous tale to tell and has far-reaching consequences.

The singular, unavoidable truth about adoption is that it requires the undoing of one family so that another one can come into being. And because of this, it is a practice, an institution, and a mode of family-making that is born of and begets trauma, loss, and grief. The fairy tale narrative of adoption denies adoptees the acknowledgement and support necessary to process their experiences across a lifetime. It delegitimizes the trauma of adoption loss and directly and indirectly influences the overwhelming statistics that show us adoptees are far more likely than the general population to struggle with trauma-related mental illness, suicide, and addiction.

By ignoring the complex reality of adoption, we are also corroborating a sentimental narrative that drives a billion-dollar, for-profit adoption industry whose sole purpose has been successfully shifted in modern American history from finding homes for children who legitimately need them, to supplying hopeful prospective parents with kids to call their own. The fairy tale narrative of adoption uncomplicates these truths and it lets us off the hook. It makes us feel good about each other and ourselves without having to face difficult complexities and integrate them into our understanding of not only what it means to be adopted, but also what it means to be human.

Inside the fairy tale, we don’t have to think about the darkness, the underbelly, or the unspeakable grief lying just below the surface of a child who has been severed from their home and family of origin. We don’t have to think about the countless pregnant people in the United States and across the globe who have been tricked, bribed, forced, and coerced into relinquishing their children or whose children are kidnapped and sold to agencies or intermediaries who stand to profit from their adoptions. Inside the fairy tale, we don’t have to think about all the first mothers and first families who would choose to keep their children or whose children might not have been unnecessarily or unjustly taken from them if they had access to the right kinds of support. The kinds of support that could be provided countless times over, both in the US and abroad, with the money currently invested in keeping the for-profit adoption industry and the child welfare industry in business.

So why do we love the adoption fairy tale so much? Most of us agree that modern day fairy tales have set us up for failure when it comes to beauty standards and romantic relationship expectations, but what about family-making?

*

I have the date of my Special Day tattooed on my left forearm along with the initials of the three first names I have been given—my birth name from my mother, a variation on her own mother’s name; my foster name from the people who cared for me in the interim; and my adoptive name from my parents, after the first American saint. Because people change children’s names, for a better fit, for a different life.

In my experience, most people that don’t know me well assume I inked my Special Day on my arm as a tribute to my adoption. A tribute to my forever family. To my happily ever after. Oh, how wonderful!, they exclaim smiling wide, knowing smiles. Except this is not at all why I wear the date on my arm. I wear it as a tribute to and an insistence on complexity. The complexity of a day that marks a beginning and an end, all at once. The beginning of my life with my adoptive family and the end of any possibility of returning to my family of origin. A family whose absence I felt as though my small body housed a haunting.

As a child, I never let on that I didn’t feel as excited as my parents did to celebrate my Special Day. This is a complicated hallmark of an adopted childhood. Adoptees often take on the emotional labor of holding our difficult feelings in places where no one can see them because we want to protect those around us from feeling hurt. There also often exists a very real and primal fear of further rejection. We understand we are loved and we understand love is tenuous, so we hide our feelings away because what if we didn’t? How will you feel? Will you be mad at me? Will you be hurt? Will you love me less? Will you send me back? I don’t want you to feel sad or think that I don’t love you, so I hold this hard truth. I hold it for you. I celebrate this day, in this way, for you.

In pictures of the day my parents brought me home from the adoption agency, I look like a baby. Utterly remarkable and yet not at all. In some pictures I look solemn, expressionless. In some I look happy, rosy-cheeked and smiling. There is no and every inference to be drawn as I sift through them, turn them over to see my mom’s handwriting, hold them up to the light. I can insert my adult feelings about this day into these pictures or not. I can choose how to narrate this story. I can tell a true story about a loving family that came to be. How long my parents had waited, had prayed. How they held me, finally. How I laughed at my brother because he made silly faces at me. How we went home together, forever. A family.

Twenty years later, although my parents (and consequently I) were told differently through agency records, I would find out that my eighteen-year-old mother had not wanted to give me up for adoption, but, like most original mothers, did not have the means to support me on her own and lived in a country unwilling to invest in helping single people, poor and working class people, people of color, queer people, immigrants, and young people keep their families sustainably intact. Though they were in love, my mother was not married to my seventeen-year-old father, and her family was Catholic. The answer was clear.

I was told her father made the decision that I would go away. A decision the family held against him for years afterward. A decision I believe I could see behind his eyes when he would try to look at me across a room or expanse of yard two decades later, after I found them.

I kept your newborn picture in my wallet for ten years or more, my mother’s younger sister tells me in a hotel bar. We always thought of you as The One That Got Away.

There is no record of the first five days of my life. I do not know if I was taken from my mother immediately or if we spent those last days together in the hospital. She was never able to speak of it during the time I knew her as an adult, before our reunion unraveled. Her sisters indicated to me they believed she no longer had access to these memories. That they had been too painful and she’d found somewhere to put them. I imagine a shoebox buried in the backyard of her parents’ home, the banks of the Detroit River eventually eroding, giving way, washing the memory of our time together into the tributaries and lakes that were the landscape of my childhood carrying on mere miles away.

The adoption agency placed me in a foster home on the fifth day, but my mother, not wanting to let me go, would come visit me. She asked her parents to take her there and they obliged. Once, she came alone. For two months, I lived in a stranger’s home without the person I’d come to know as intimately as one can. Except that sometimes she would come back for me. And then she would leave. And then she would come back. And then she would leave. As my body began to learn: this is what love is. Right up until that snowy January morning when I was taken to the adoption agency to meet my new parents and my new brother who made silly faces at me and I smiled. I laughed.

*

The late adoption scholar and activist, Reverend Keith C. Griffith, once said, “Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful.” I come across this quote time and time again, more than any other, in the online adoptee and first mother communities. It is so often quoted I think, because it succinctly points to the glaring misconception, misrepresentation, and misalignment that exist between society’s narrative of adoption and our actual lived experiences as adopted people and first families. There is such a gulf, such a divide, and one that is valiantly defended by society’s deep need to believe a singular, uncomplicated truth about adoption, that those of us who have experienced the interior of an adopted life often feel completely erased and utterly silenced.

Society’s narrative of adoption tells adoptees, in no uncertain terms, if we were given to a loving home, we shouldn’t feel this pain, this chasm, this rip, this tear. We were saved, after all. We’re so much better off. We’re the lucky ones. Our parents must be such wonderful people. We must feel so grateful. How lucky. How special. We were meant to be together. Everything worked out just the way it was supposed to in the end.

It is here—in everyday encounters, in saccharine and reductive media representations, and even in our adoptive families—where adoptees are expected to embody the fairy tale narrative of adoption. A hopeful, well-intentioned narrative, but one that is historically steeped in white saviorhood and colonialism. One in which people with more financial resources, social capital, and most often racial privilege, feel entitled to the children of those with less privilege, opportunity, and support. And we have accepted this not only as an unquestionable good, but also as the best possible outcome.

But what exactly is being measured when weighing this out? Are we certain a child will be “better off” living with the irreparable wound of parental separation and more financial resources than with a low-income or working class parent in their family of origin? Certainly socioeconomic status is often a clear indicator of one’s opportunities in life, but what’s the trade off? I have often wondered what our lives would have looked like had my mother and father made the decision to strike out on their own and raise me. And I wonder too how much of our future might have been determined by the biases that are alive in these very same assumptions. Am I better off? Am I lucky? The truth is, we will never know. And this, too, is a loss.

*

I found my original family in my early twenties and for the last fifteen years, I have experienced wild anxiety, deep joy, profound grief, complex gratitude, rage, fear, alienation, belonging, contentment. I have made primal noises and shapes alone on the floor of a studio apartment when my mother stopped answering my letters after two and a half years of knowing her. I have gotten to watch new siblings grow into stunningly kind, caring, creative, bold, and generous young adults. And I recently reconnected again with my original father for the first time in nearly ten years. Perhaps it will be different this time. Perhaps it will stick. I hope so.

Three years ago I met my original grandmother and three aunts on my father’s side for the first time. I stood barefoot on a cold, tiled kitchen floor during a sweltering Southeastern Michigan heat wave, surrounded by four brazen women who looked and laughed and cursed just like me. I stood there in that kitchen as my grandmother tearfully handed me a jewelry box containing a pair of delicate earrings, tiny gold hoops with sparkling lavender gems—a family heirloom. I stood there as they apologized for not knowing about me. Apologized that I’d been a secret. Apologized for whom?

We didn’t know, they said to me. If we’d known, we would have kept you. We would have raised you ourselves.

In that moment, I felt wanted, I felt important, I felt loved beyond measure, and at the exact same time, another ghost girl was born. A girl who was raised by four strong, independent, take-no-shit, hilarious, hardworking women in a working-class town. She had one family and one name and one home and she knew where she belonged. I watched the ghost girl’s whole life unfold in that moment. I fell in love with her. And then I began the task of grieving her. I’m still grieving her. I’m not sure how to let her go.

*

Adoption loss is an ambiguous loss. While it changes shape over time, it is often life-long. It is without end. I have lost my entire family and yet, there are no bodies to bury, no socially acceptable ritual or process meant for me to understand this loss and how to live with it. My mother went on living, became someone else’s mother, while I lived my young life with only the presence of her absence and the fracturing unknown. Maybe she’s alive; maybe she’s dead. Maybe she loves me; maybe she has forgotten me. Maybe anything.

Even after reunion, if it is possible or desired, there are new losses, new lives, and new selves to grieve. Loss of this magnitude and with this kind of ambiguity most often does not simply resolve itself. Adoptees must learn how to live with it over time, yet we must do so in the face of society insisting we exude joy, gratitude, and luck. An insistence that often means the kind of support we need to manage our grief is either nonexistent or unavailable to us. Imagine for a moment, if we treated other losses this way. Imagine losing a loved one—tragically, unexpectedly—and then being expected to behave as though it was the best thing that ever happened to you.

We need a new adoption narrative. We need to ask ourselves why we have historically needed to perpetuate the sentimental fairy tale narrative of adoption that only serves to hurt those at the center of it and to support an industry in dire need of reconstruction. We need a narrative that can celebrate love and family-making, but which does not insist that adoption is always the best option. That in fact, it is often unnecessary and the most generous, altruistic thing we can possibly do is to help prevent another child and first family from having to live with a lifetime of loss and grief. We need a narrative that centers the voices of adopted people and can hold the complexity of our multiple and fractured truths. That can hold all of it. Because I think this is the reality of being adopted—holding these seemingly contradictory, disparate, complicated truths, in the same body, always. Holding deep grief and profound joy in the same breath. Holding love for one mother that does not negate the love for another mother. Belonging partly to one family or country or culture, partly to another, but maybe never feeling as though we belong to either. Feeling both wanted and unwanted, both chosen and abandoned. Wanting to belong here and wanting to go back there.

What if we, as a society, chose to hold all these truths at the same time, at the same pitch, without the need to push one out in favor of the other? How might our questions or actions or beliefs about adoption change? How might our ideas about loss change? About healing? About family?

*

Though we live on opposite sides of the country now, sometimes my parents and I are in the same place on January 3 and we celebrate my Special Day together. We still eat, we talk, we laugh, we remember. And at some point, later that day or the next, I mark it in my own way, privately, for me. I meditate, I cry, I go to nature—the ocean especially. The ocean rebalances me, stirs a kind of biological rhythm in my body, a point of origin. And the ocean is always bigger and stronger than whatever you bring to its shore. There is comfort in the humbling, in one’s own smallness.

This past January, after thirty-six Januaries, I finally told my parents that my Special Day means something very different for me than it does for them. Fear and shame and guilt licked at my heart as I opened my mouth to say the words. I still wanted to protect them. I wanted to protect them from me. But because the impulse to protect others from their own feelings about my adoption ignites resentment in me, a desire to be the one protected instead, I was cold and forceful in my telling. It’s the day I lost my family. Why would I want to celebrate that? This wasn’t the plan. I didn’t mean to, but this is what happened. I wasn’t prepared for the force with which a truth, held inside a body for thirty-six years, would emerge. I can still see the sadness in their eyes as they listened carefully and nodded, Yes, ok, we hear you.

I left their house later that day, the day before my Special Day, without saying much. I went to a friend’s place a few hours away, in a town I used to call home and didn’t return for a week. I felt guilty about how I handled it and I wasn’t ready yet to try again. The truth is, my parents and I haven’t always had an easy relationship. My unresolved childhood grief made for an angry, rebellious adolescence that left my parents at the end of their rope. When I came out of the closet at eighteen, it proved irreconcilable with their devout Catholicism and there were years of deep distance before we were able to find common ground again. When I found my original family, my parents acted threatened and scared and were unable to figure out a way to support me around it for many years. This is not a laundry list of anyone’s failings. This is complexity. This is a family.

*

Watching Danielle’s adoption hearing reminded me of how much I adore adoptees. How fierce, independent, resourceful, hard-loving, loyal, brilliant, and creative we are. Not in spite of, but alongside this grief we carry. How the first time I was ever in a room full of adoptees, I felt an atmospheric shift. I mean this in the planetary sense. I was never the same again. I had been given permission to be myself for the first time without having to navigate someone else’s need for my story to reflect a fairy tale ending.

This was when I began to dream in earnest about what it would be like for adoptees to exist in a world that understands the paradoxical experiences that we live. A world that does not insist on reducing us to cheerful assumptions and sentimental media representations. A world that accepts adoption not as an unquestionable, benevolent good, not as a fairy tale ending, but as an event that forever changes and complicates the lives of everyone involved. That when the gavel crashes into the sounding block, literally or symbolically, it is both a fracturing and a coming together, a severing and a multiplication, a derailment and a hope for the uncertain path ahead.

(source in the notes)

#adoption #long post #transracial #transracial adoption #queer

[geekygoddesss]

Moving Along

Youngblood series

Love can suck major ass.

Those were the words that Calum should get tattooed on his forehead for being a dumbass who once believed in it. At least that what was he has concluded after such or a long time hoping for something that was never going to happen, her comeback, he waited and waited and waited some more until he realized it was just not happening and he knew, Love sucks and it is not worth it. The end.

He has already stopped counting how many days have passed since he last saw her, the truth is, he already lost count nor he cared to know how many days he’s had worth of misery, because at this point all that he knows is that it’s been a lot and he doesn’t know if he can even take it anymore.

As much as he tried, he couldn’t get her out of his head, she was permanently there, driving him crazy, reminding him of his stupidity. He has learned to live with it even when it pained him. Sometimes he hated to admit it, sometimes he didn’t but still he wanted her back, at least for a couple of minutes for him to explain himself and maybe, just maybe, she would leave it all in the past and come back to him. But that only happens in movies.

What happened with them wasn’t something he was proud of. The first six months of their relationship went on smoothly and beautifully, He was happy, She was happy, they were happy, just like one would like a normal relationship to be, after those months they decided it was time for them to finally share a place to live (which might have seemed a little rushed into everyone else’s eyes, but they didn't care) and ever since then, without them realizing, things went slowly downhill until they finally hit rock bottom. Funny story, apparently he was the only one to even notice they were standing there, and he didn’t know if that made him an asshole or just a realistic being, but he couldn’t stand the fact that she acted like they were never in that place, maybe he was an asshole after all for being the first one to point that out to eventually end it all.

At first they were just small comments being thrown here and there, comments that would affect one or the other but still hurt in some way, after that it turned into straight-up fights, the kind of fights that were ugly but still had somehow of a happy ending (if you could even call them that), but they were still fights and one thing was for sure, the words said in those had hurt like knives, in both sides.

They would live with that, because even when they fought, they loved each other, until that very night, that fucking night when he snapped and just like that he ended it, he let her go and walked out, and there was not a day that went by where he wouldn’t remember, because just the fact of waking up in the morning was a brief reminder that she was no longer here. He let her go.

And it was his own stupid mistake, that’s the worst part of it.

Damn, he wishes he didn’t know her.

The days went by and shit was still the same, He was here at the same apartment where she used to live in, the bed where she slept at and the room she was always in, but she wasn’t there, he was. Sad. Somehow he would always fill up himself with hopes that maybe, if she didn’t come back, he could make himself feel better and maybe someday it will happen and he would finally move. Someday.

Sometimes he wondered if he dwelled in her mind just as she dwelled in his.

His days have been narrowed down to going to the studio, put on a fake smile for the camera, write songs and get home again, where he would get naked, lay on the sofa and open up a whiskey bottle, was that weird?.

Day after day after day. that was his life now and no one could change that except for himself, but right now was not the time for him to do it. He still needed some time.

that’s the same thing he’s been saying for this past months though. “I need time”

The day he finally saw her again was really confusing. It was the kind of day where for some crazy reason he didn’t think about her as much as he did on a regular basis, it was good, but at the same time a little weird, so weird it concerned him a little. He let the day go as normal as he could, he slept at his own apartment, woke up early and a little hungover, went to work, stayed for a bit and as a little alteration for his day, he went to a party.

Well, not a party, if you could even call it that, it was more of a little get together at one of his closest friends, thing that he just agreed to go because it was just a good excuse to not drink alone, but overall, it didn’t seem like that much of a bad idea, he would get to see his friends, maybe have some pizza, drink a little and just… disconnect, from all of the crap around him.

But little did he know, this wasn’t going to be like he expected at all, because when he first saw her, nothing felt real to him. He was sitting by his friend’s pool, far away from everyone and sitting on the floor, trying to enjoy a cigarette before someone came to remind him that smoking killed, which he perfectly knew and didn’t care. There she was though, walking up to him and rocking his world without even knowing. She looks beautiful.

At first he thought he for sure must have been high, but then he remembered that he barely even had a drag of any blunt and he wasn’t that weak to get high that quickly (or was he?), then he thought it could be some kind of Optical illusion and it might be some other girl, but it wasn’t, it was her, right here right now, walking towards him with a smile that could easily make him weak, a smile he did not understand.

She looked happy, way too happy for his liking. Why was she happy?.

“Am I hallucinating?” he said to no one in particular as rubbed his eyes and look over at the girl walking up to him. The image getting clearer and clear as she got closer. It was her, It was really her and she looked fucking beautiful.

Holy fucking shit.

“Unless a cigarette makes you have delusions, I don’t think you are” she said and she giggled, she was definitely happy and he didn’t know why or how. How can she be so happy when he was so miserable?.

His nerves went from zero to a hundred the moment she decided to sit on the floor right beside him and actually start a conversation, thing he definitely wasn’t prepared for even when he has repeatedly thought of her every day for months. He has imagined this exact moment in his head plenty of time and he has planned exactly what he would say, but still, he was blank, right now he had no idea what to do, that’s just how unprepared he was.

“Hi Calum, It’s been a while” she smiled at him, while he was still trying to not freak out over her, but who was he kidding he would always freak out for her.

“Yeah, hi” he said, still really shocked and hiding the fact that she was here and talking to him. What the fuck?.  

He didn’t have much to say but at the same time, he could give a full speech about what his feeling was at this exact moment, because this was crazy, maybe too crazy for his liking.

“You still do that” She said, pointing at the cigarette in his hand that burned out faster than he wanted it too as he kept staring at her closely, because nothing about her was different, everything was looking the same and for him that was just perfect because he wouldn’t like her to change one bit.

“Can't seem to leave it” he managed to say, taking a drag from the cigarette, hoping it would help his nerves “ I tried”

“I know, you always are” she said with certain sass, even though she knew he was telling the truth, he’s tried to leave this bad habit, but it always finds its way back to him. “you don't happen to carry one more in your back pocket do you?” she asked with a little innocence in her voice, he thought it was adorable and even though it surprised him a whole lot, he still dug in his pocket and gave one to her. She deserves it. “Awesome”

“I didn't know you smoke” He said in surprise as she placed the cigarette between her lips and turned to him.

“I do now” she chuckled as she said “surprise” in a small voice.

He took a second to dug in his other pocket and took the liberty to light her cigarette and get her poison going. Also, taking a full second to get rid of his old one and light up a new one, because if he was going to stay here talking to her, he might as well have a little more time with his favorite poison.

“You know? normal people don’t usually come and say hi to their exes just like so” he said taking a blow of his new cigarette.

“Oh really?” she said like she really didn’t know “What do they do then?”

he raised an eyebrow, was that really a question? “Usually they mutually pretend they don’t exist, or so I’ve heard” he points out, trying to not get in detail about it.

“Would you rather I just pretended I don’t know you?” She said with a very notorious laugh at the end, letting the smoke from the cigarette escape from her lips so easily it almost looked natural.

“I don’t know” He said honestly. He didn’t know.

“That’s not nice Calum, not at all” she shook her head as she looked right at him “Because I do know you, In fact, I know you really well”

“Indeed”

He didn’t even know if that is a good thing or a bad one, he just knows that this is too much.

They fall into a bit of a silence for what seemed like forever, but judging by the way her cigarette looked, he could assume there has been about a minute and a half, but to him, it seemed like a lifetime, which scared him in so many ways. That was the effect she had on him, she made him feel like the time ran slower and every second was an eternity. God damn.

“You look great” He said to break the silence as he took another good look at her. He meant every word of it because she looked absolutely beautiful. Mature, Stunning, gorgeous and any other adjective that could be used in that sense. She took his breath away.

“You too” She smiled back at him, doing the same and eyeing him up and down.

He scoffed “What a liar”

For his rejoice, she laughed. Calum didn’t need to point out the fact that he was a mess because he thought it was pretty obvious that by the way he looked, he was not doing as well as her. Lately, his fashion choices have simply reduced to a black shirt and black jeans just like when he would pretend to be an emo kid, his hair was just a big mess, he has given up on shaving, or at least on shaving too often because he was “too busy” to care, he was just a different person and he knew that very well, he’s heard it from many people now and hearing it from her would be for sure hard for him but all he could do is suck it up and take it like a man.

“I'm sorry” she said still laughing as she blew a cloud of smoke out of her lips  “you don't look bad, just different” she explained almost as she was trying to make it all better “last time I saw you, you shaved”

“Hey” he laughed a real laugh, it was funny she pointed that out “it's a manly look, people take me seriously now”

she laughed back “Good” she nodded “I’m glad they do because I doubt someone would If they found out you like mint cigarettes” she said and only God knows how that got him. “That’s something I didn’t know you like, Geez” she said glancing down at her cigarette as a chuckle left her lips.

There was a slight flush of color across Calum’s cheeks and he was not going to lie, deep down, he was hoping she wouldn’t notice and call him out for that, because she was the kind of person who would definitely make a joke about it and while it was funny in a way, it was kind of embarrassing on his behalf.

“Hey, they are good, okay?” he tried arguing as he smoked some of it himself, realizing he has been too distracted looking at her to remember he even had that in hand.

She just nodded and smiled “Whatever you say buddy” she shrugged and smoked some more.

If he ever saw her again (and he sure hoped he would) he was never going to hear the end of this he was sure.

“Rude” he shook his head a little, deciding that it was now time to change the subject completely “How’s school?”

Her head leaned back and she sighed, School was a tricky subject for her, it could be either good or bad and he knew that well, but it was (Y/n), he was sure she had it covered. “Oh, you know, same old I guess” she said with a shrug  “I am graduating next semester, I am taking a break for the next two months”

Oh wow, she is graduating already?. Did he missed that much in her life?.

That was good news though and he felt genuinely happy for her, as much as she loved her major, it got in her head badly sometimes and actually going out and doing what she loved was a great accomplishment for her.

“That’s good, you need a break from all that” It’s all he managed to say, even when he wanted (and wished) to say more.

“It gets stressing sometimes” she said like it wasn’t a big deal for her even when he knew it was, but before he could even say a word she turned to him and nudged him with her shoulder, sending a small flicker of electricity down his spine. Again, that is just the effect she has on him.  “How’s work? I’ve heard you guys have been doing pretty great” she mentioned completely changing the subject.

Oh god, please don’t ask questions about his life, anything but that. If they are good or bad, he didn’t care, he just wanted to know about her that’s all.

“Yeah, I’d say it’s been a good year, workwise” he said with certain discomfort in his voice as he answered.

It was not a lie though, this year has been big on him in great ways too, a couple of months after their breakup his band released their third album and it was kind of a big impact for them and their fans, the feedback was great and it was something he was really proud of, he hoped she had listened to it though, because that album carried a big part of his heart in it, the stories told there reflected a lot of his feelings to perfection and he for sure hoped she saw that not to make her feel bad or anything, but just to see that he was sorry and he meant every word he wrote in those songs.

He was waiting for her to comment something about it, anything, something that let him know that she listened to those tracks, but instead, she laughed and he was very confused about it for a full second. he masked it well though, otherwise, he would look like a total idiot.

“You know the other day, I-” she started saying on a very cheery tone that he was liking a lot, but she was interrupted by a voice in the back, it called her name once, then twice and before he could even notice there was a face matching that voice and walking outside of the big house and into the patio looking for her.

it was a guy, a very muscular and good looking new guy.

She sighed when he showed up and Calum didn’t know if that meant anything good or bad but it meant something. In his head there was a whole bunch of possibilities on who the hell this guy could be but as far as he knew, he didn’t know who he was or where he came from, he even went down all the way to try and remember if he was one of her ten thousand cousins that she had around the world, but no, he had no idea who he was at all and that worried him,.  

New boy was dressed very casual but still very nice, he sees how he hasn't noticed him before because he could easily blend as one of his mates if he was judging by the looks, he was definitely taller than him, blond and for sure went to the gym more than Calum this, it actually made Calum realize he probably go for a run more often. He wondered what he was for her and he hoped it was not what he was thinking because if it was, he would be pissed.

.The guy called her again and waved a hand at her, getting her attention before pointing at his wrist, laying his finger on the clock he wore and making clear that it was time for them to go, or at least that what Calum got from it, maybe it was something else.

She nodded harshly and lifted an open hand in the air for him to see it as she mumbled a small but understandable “5 minutes?”

The guy looked at her for a second and then at Calum, almost analyzing the scene carefully, he definitely knew how Calum was or else he would not be thinking about it. the guy nodded and showed her a thumbs up turning around and going back in the house. Now Calum had five minutes to make all questions he wanted so he better get on it starting now.

“On a rush?” he asked, doing his best to sound casual.

she nodded “Yeah a little” taking a long sip of her cigarette before letting the smoke out of her lips “Long story, need to catch a flight” she shortly explained, turning to look directly at Calum, who still looked straight back at the big house, where her new friends just disappeared in.

He did not ask further questions about where she was going because really, there could be many logical answers to that and he did not want to seem like he was trying to be a snoop on her life. Instead, he went the other way, he decided to ask the one question he knew he had to eventually make and just rip off the band-aid at once and for all.

“Who's that, though?” he said turning back to meet her beautiful eyes and make sure everything she said was completely true, even though a lie wouldn’t be that bad if the truth was the one he was not looking forward to.

“A friend” she simply said, but they both knew it was bullshit.

“He doesn't look like a friend” he mentioned keeping an eye on her even when she looked away from him. He had to admit that he was kind of afraid of what the answer to that was.

“Maybe he isn't” she chuckled nervously as she looked shown “He works with my dad, we've been talking for a while, he's nice to me, I think we’re going somewhere, I don't really know”  she mumbled those last words, almost as if she was giving Calum an explanation, one he didn’t really need or had the right to have, but she still felt like she had to tell him, he was her ex-boyfriend after all, in fact, he was her only ex-boyfriend.

“Is he from here?” he asked, suddenly actually curious on where the hell was he from because he was dead sure, he hasn’t seen him around ever, not even at her dad’s job when he used to come around that place.

“No” she giggled, shaking her head a little “Funny, enough, He’s Australian too, he came over to LA a couple of months ago to start, you know, working”

he nodded, trying his best to look like he gave a damn even when he didn’t. “Sydney?” he asked.

“Melbourne”

“Nice” he said, taking the longest sip through his cigarette hoping that maybe it would calm him down “Looks like a great guy” he said and for some reason, he meant it. Yes, he was jealous and everything, but overall, He seemed like a great guy and he hoped was, for her sake.

he took the liberty to take a big and deep breath to calm his nerves and from all sudden, her guard was up and she was finding words to say. He didn’t need her to explain herself but he for sure needed to speak his feelings up, because even when wants to see her happy, he was very fucking jealous. of her, of him, of everyone.

“I made you uncomfortable, I'm sorry” she apologized, looking down at her lap and smashing the half done cigarette on the ground. This is the beginning of the end, he thought, she will be walking out soon.

“No it's alright” he waved it off like it wasn’t a big deal, but it was. “you're moving on, that's… good” he mumbled, looking down at his own lap. This is a bit awkward.

Deep down, he wants to be the kind of person who would support her no matter what, but he can’t. It’s been a long time, but still not that long and she already has a boyfriend, she is already moving on from Calum when he isn’t even able to have one night stand without thinking of her and instantly regretting it.

Is it bad that he's wishing she's broken? Because he wants her too in a way, so she can feel all that he’s been feeling for the past months. He is such a bad person.

Maybe it is because even when he likes to see her happy, Deep inside he wishes she was still as broken as he was and feeling as bad as him.

“and are you?” she asked innocently and god damn, he wants to snap, but he won’t, not now, not ever, not with her.

“I’m working on it” he said with certain difficulty, he was really having a bit of a hard time with this. “hey, I knew… this had to happen sometime, right?” he tried to mask his feeling with a chuckle but it came out really awkward.

“Yeah but you aren’t comfortable with it” she confirmed instantly and from this moment on, everything felt very serious. it brought some memories, not good ones.“I really liked being with you Calum, but it’s been a while now and if he is interested in.. you know, something else, I am not going to be the one to turn him down” she started explaining.

“I understand” he cut her off.

“No you don’t” she interrupted back, now sounding pretty upset “Calum, we’ve been over this, you’re doing that… that thing with your face, you’re not happy” she said pointing at his face and now he actually realized she was right, he was doing that fucking face he did everytime he was upset about something, he tried to mask it but couldn't.

“Of course I am not, we were together for nearly a two years, excuse me if it is hard for me to see you move on so quickly” and without any warning, he thought, she moved on way too quickly and he wasn’t ready for that. He felt bad for snapping at her but he meant every word of it, Somehow it felt like he was taking a big weight off his shoulders but not entirely, still, it felt good to speak up his mind.

Her face softened at the tone of his voice when he raised it slightly as he said what he had to say. He could swear he saw her flinch at it and he didn’t like that, it made him feel bad like he was going to be the bad guy at the end when she was trying to be friendly and he was just snapping his thoughts out. That wasn’t nice.

“I’m sorry I snapped” he apologized, rubbing his face in frustration with the palm of his hand and squishing the last bit of his cigarette on the floor. He really wanted to leave now.

“It’s okay Calum, really” she said with an understanding smile that confused him just a little. Why was she being this kind to him?  “I understand” she said, laying a hand on his shoulder “I waited for you, you know? but if it isn’t meant to be…”

“I guess we aren’t” he finished for her, nodding at the statement.

It was true. As much as it hurt, he had to face this at some point. He had been told plenty of times before how long she waited for him to come back for her, but he was a coward and couldn’t bring himself up for it, there were so many things going on, he was scared to come up to her and fuck everything up all over again, break her heart, break his own heart, he didn’t want any of that. Instead, he decided to do nothing and now here they were, he was hurt and she was… gone, gone from him and his personal life, looking for a better life while he was still struggling to figure out his own.

He wanted to get passed everything by the truth was, he was too scared to move on because she was now gone and he was scared to get his heart broken one more time.

“Yeah” he sighed, trying to get something out of his mouth that could speak his mind up  “I just want to say-” he managed to say, lifting his head to look her in the eye, she was looking up at him too, both of them staring at each other right in the eyes, giving certain intensity to the moment “You meant a lot to me, you still do and it was an honor to be yours… at least for a while”

He hasn’t been more honest in his life.

“You meant a lot to me too Cal” she said, a soft smile pecking on her lips. She has been honest too, he could tell and that warmed his heart in a beautiful way.

“Is it wrong if I tell you I love you?” he said, not really thinking by now, it’s just something that came out “I never do it when I'm sober but I mean it, I always do”

She felt for him. He could tell because of the sympathetic smile she gave him as she grabbed his hand and mumbled “Maybe you shouldn't”

“Maybe I shouldn't”  he mumbled to himself, knowing that if he did, it would just break his heart a little more than it already was. “I ended it” he said “it's late to mend it now, is it?” he said, the sympathetic smile grew harder and she squeezed his hand. It was late for trying anything, she has moved on from him, maybe it was time for him to turn the page.

“I hope you're happy” he said with certain difficulty as he watched her get up from her spot and helped him get on his feet as well.

Maybe this was the time they will finally say goodbye.

“Calum” she called him out, resting her hand on his shoulder for him to look at her “you will be happy too”  

He didn’t know if he should believe that or not, maybe someday he will, but right now his life just felt like a wreck.

“You aren’t scared of hugs are you?” she said with a smile, giving a small step towards him, looking like if she was a little she was too shy to come close to him “Come here” she said, pulling him into a hug that he really needed “I missed you Calum, I really did”

He savored the moment more than any other. He missed too, she had no idea how much, he needed her in her life, but it was time to let her go. He took a deep breath letting all of those memories from the past fill his mind just by the smell of her perfume, the feeling of his arms wrapped around her body, how small she was when he held her. Oh man, it was really hard to let her go.

“You aren’t mad at me?” he asked shyly as she took a step back and separated from their hug.

“No, I could never” she truthfully, lifting her hand to caress his cheek softly. he trembled.

“I love you” he let out, knowing that he probably shouldn’t say it, but it was too late now, he needed to let her now.

she stayed silent “I love you too” she said after a couple seconds of pure silence. Maybe she was just saying that so he didn’t felt alone, or maybe she really meant it, he didn’t care. All that counts right now is that she feels it too, or at least he hopes she does.

He wanted to tell her something, he didn’t know what but just something to make her stay for at least one more minute, but her new boyfriend was already calling for her and they both knew, it was time to say goodbye.

“I’ll see you around” she said to him, wrapping him in one more hug before finally taking off “Good luck” she said walking away slowly.

“You too” he said in a small voice as he stared at her.

He saw her leave. How she walked back to her new boyfriend and let him wrap her in a hug as he pressed a soft kiss on her cheek. Calum was so Jealous. They said their goodbyes to their friends and got into their car, leaving the party just like that. Now she was really gone, she was gone. Maybe forever, maybe not. But she is gone now.

Somehow something flickered inside of him. He felt better, like the weight that has been resting on his shoulders for the longest time was gone and now he was free to live his life without worrying so much. He was going to miss her a lot, that’s for sure, but maybe now it was time to look for more fishes in the see and amplify his horizons

Maybe this was a good start. Now he really felt like he was finally moving on.

#Youngblood Series #Calum hood imagines #Luke Hemmings Imagines #Michael clifford Imagines #Ashton Irwin Imagines #5sos preferences #5sos imagines #5sos #5 seconds of summer #5 seconds of summer preferences #5 seconds of summer imagines

[lusilly]

Wings

What good is this ridiculous secret I am asked to keep? With the feathers ripped cleanly away, I tuck the stems along my spine. I bandage them down— cloth wound under my armpits, tightly wound around my chest. I fashion myself into an ordinary boy.

- An Ordinary Boy, C. Dale Young

finally this is fucking done. it was so hard and it’s not even good but it does bridge the damian/talia relationship between home safe & tucked away and fiat iusticia, as well as set up more of leviathan. this fic is Steeped in e28 canon tbh, references to rise of arsenal, restoration, to be seen, tbatb, and some distant set up for wheel in the sky (oh and the disneyland fic). tho ultimately it can also hold up on its own!

in which damian sees his mother for the first time in nearly a decade, and gets his spine ripped out (again). jason is there, tho he doesn’t do much.

on ao3 here

             The safehouse by the docks was Jason’s least favorite. Little more than a glorified attic crawlspace, it was one bare room with a plain mattress in the corner, shelves of medical supplies, nonperishables, and weaponry covering the walls. Jason had to stoop to get in through the entrance, and the ceilings were so low he always found himself dropping his shoulders, lowering his head and curving his spine against the claustrophobia. It made his heart race, his pulse quickening for unknown reasons. He figured it out eventually, during an extended stay after he almost got shot to death. In the middle of the night he’d woken up with his chest tight and heavy, like steel wires wrapping around his lungs and heart. Coffin, he’d thought. Feels like a coffin.

            On this particular night, in the suffocating heat of the last throes of summertime, Jason had been stitching up a shoulder wound when an old comm rang, a line he’d thought had been long since disconnected.

            Answering it felt strangely familiar, like slipping into old clothes he hadn’t fully expected to still fit. He didn’t want to run it through his commlink in case Oracle was listening in, so he put the old comm on speaker and set it down beside him as he tugged surgical needle through the wound in his shoulder. “How do you expect me to know?” he asked, sounding slightly impatient. “I’m only there for Hanukkah and Alfred’s birthday.”

            On the phone, Talia’s voice was tinny and distorted, but still as characteristically haughty as he had always known her to be. “Don’t lie to me, Jason,” she said sharply, like an accusation. “I know you have a relationship with my son.”

            “A relationship?” he echoed, wiping the wound with a rag and turning around to take a swig of whiskey. He dragged his arm across his mouth, then admitted, “I mean, sure. Legally speaking he’s my little brother, but that doesn’t mean we get brunch on Sundays and gossip.”

            Talia let out a very derisive grunt of laughter at the word brother, which Jason politely decided to ignore. “You owe it to me.”

            “Oh, do I?” asked Jay, his tone mild as he disinfected the wound, which burned badly. “How long am I gonna hang on to that debt, Talia?”

            “Until it’s repaid,” she said shortly. “This is the second time I have asked for your help where it concerns my son. Don’t disappoint me again.”

            “Is the first time back when you asked me to kidnap him?” Something like four years ago Talia had been desperate to get Damian back for reasons she’d never fully explained to Jason. 

             “Not kidnap. Retrieve.”

            “Listen,” said Jason, wiping his hands on a rag, then picking up the communicator. “I know that – y’know, I know that you and I have a few very specific things in common, so I see why you think you can come to me for this, but if you’ve got beef with Bruce you need to talk to him directly. I’m not gonna be your henchman. I’m not henching for you, T.”

            “It isn’t safe for him in Gotham. I’m asking you to help me protect my child, it has nothing to do with the Batman-”

            “Didn’t say that,” said Jay, cutting her off. “I said Bruce, actually-”

            “Do not interrupt me,” she said coldly, and even through the distorted comm line her voice sent a chill down Jason’s spine. “You, like his father, think me so petty and possessive. You think I want to own him. He is not a pet, and you are all so quick to forget it was I who gave him away to begin with.”

            “OK,” sighed Jason, swinging his legs up to lay down on the shitty mattress. “You do know that talking about giving him away sounds like he is a pet and you are possessive, right?”

            “I am trying,” she insisted, “to protect him.”

            “From what?”

            Talia’s line went so silent Jason thought she’d closed the line. He called her name, and when she responded, her words were clipped and wary. “There are always threats, Jason.”

            “Sure,” agreed Jay, nodding his head. “Don’t have to tell me. Why do you think Bruce can’t handle it? He’s done a halfway decent job of taking care of his boy this far.”

            This obviously rankled Talia. “My boy.”

            Jason let out a little chuckle. “Not really helping the whole possessive angle.”

            “It doesn’t matter. It has been brought to my attention that Damian has returned to the streets, and what he doesn’t know could get him killed.”

            “So tell me,” said Jay. “I’ll tell him.”

            “No.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because,” said Talia, icily, “you are not my son. Some things must stay within the family.”

            “I’m family. On the other side, that is.”

            The idea was a little disconcerting to Jason, though, so he was glad when Talia ignored this comment. “My son is no longer a child,” she said, firm and regal. Jason could imagine her standing alone on the craggy bluffs beyond her headquarters, though he didn’t know for certain where she was today. He imagined the white cliffs of southern England, or the Rock of Gibraltar, or maybe the rooftop floor of the Burj Khalifa, or some cold outcropping in the Himalayas. Then he thought of Damian, sullen and irritable Damian, with whom Jason had somehow grown pretty close over the past year. Though he said nothing, Jason had to disagree with Talia. Damian was absolutely still a child. “His father cannot keep him locked away from me on his whim,” Talia continued. “If Damian will see me, it is his decision.”

            “A decision he’d be more inclined to make if you gave him all the information,” Jason pointed out. “Best way to get a Robin’s attention is to give him a mission. Tell me what’s up and I’ll do what I can.”

            “I want to see him, Jason.”

            “I understand that. But I can’t guarantee anything.”

            “I need to see him. Not a call, not a letter, I need him here. With me.”

            “No promises,” repeated Jay. “Where’s here?”

            “I will send you the coordinates.”

            Jason sighed. “Guess that’s the best I’ll get. I’ll talk to him. But again, he’s your son, so he can be just as stubborn as your ass. He probably won’t even listen to me.”

            “I listen to you,” countered Talia. “And you’re right. He is my son.”

            There was a short silence.

            Talia said, “Thank you, Jason,” and terminated the connection.

            For a few minutes, Jay laid there on the mattress, the wound on his shoulder stinging. Then he let out a short sigh, and he opened another line on his commlink.

            His call was instantly acknowledged. “Oracle,” came her voice.

            “Hey, O,” said Jay. “You got a read on Robin?”

            “If you need backup, Ember’s in the area.”

            This took Jason by surprise; he hadn’t known Ember was cleared to work as official backup. He’d thought her and her team were still considered amateurs. “Nah, I’m good. I gotta talk to him about something.”

            “Little late for that,” Barbara replied. “He’s in for the night.”

            It was almost three AM. “Oh, damn. Already?”

            “He’s only been back in the saddle for a few months now, so he’s taking it easy. Usually heads in by two.”

            “OK,” sighed Jay. “Guess I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. Thanks anyway.”

            He closed the line, grimacing. Sure, Jason had grown closer with his youngest brother over the past few years, but in that time the topic of Damian’s mother had come up maybe once. He knew it was a sore spot for the kid, and he didn’t want to poke an old bruise, particularly not when he was just beginning to get back on his feet. Damian was returning to Robin after a difficult year. Jason had no desire to interrupt his rhythm, make him lose his balance.

            And he certainly wasn’t going to kidnap Damian. If he didn’t want to see Talia, Jay wouldn’t make him; but Talia had had a point. Bruce’s feelings where Damian’s mother was concerned were clear, and he would categorically refuse to let Damian see her. He'd have a better chance to speak freely if Jay could get him out of the house, talk to him somewhere he wouldn’t feel pressured to put on that performative al Ghul hatred, where his loyalty to his father’s family would be less airtight.

            Flipping through options vaguely in his mind, Jason looked at his phone. He had a few calendar notifications, mostly about dinner with Tam so he wouldn’t forget, a few reminders to collect money from his lieutenants, and then he stopped, staring at a upcoming reminder for next week. An idea crept up in the back of his mind.

            All of this led up to Jason coming down the steps from the Manor three days after Damian’s nineteenth birthday, which according to Dick apparently wasn’t even his precise date of birth, though Jay wasn’t really clear on the mechanics of that whole business. Upstairs, Alfred had offered him a slice of leftover birthday cake.

            Bruce didn’t turn around when Jason entered the cave, which didn’t surprise him. But not for nothing, Bruce had been putting in some decent effort for a while now to invite Jay back into the family, taking great care to include him in family events, even going so far as try to have the occasional heart-to-heart. Serious conversations always wound up flat or devolved into an argument, so though Bruce had toned it down, Jason thought that all things considered they were on exceptionally good terms.

            “You and Damian leave tonight?” asked Bruce, without turning around from the computer display before him.

            “Yep,” answered Jay, lingering by the specimen analysis table. “As soon as he’s ready.”

            Bruce took pause; it was unlike Damian to be tardy to something he’d be anticipating. “He’s not finished packing?”

            “He is,” said Jay mildly, poking around at the delicate equipment. “I think I just caught him in the middle of the nap. I’ll give him a minute.”

            This made sense, so Bruce gave a short nod. “He’s having some trouble adapting to the new schedule. I’ve asked him to dial back on his work with Neon Knights, but he won’t hear it.” There was also the fact that Damian had recently changed his medication, and as such was struggling to get use to the side effects, one of which being near constant drowsiness. But Bruce didn’t think that was his information to share.

            “Oh, yeah,” said Jay, glancing up at Bruce. “Tam says he’s doing great. Says she’s about ready to recommend him for a promotion.”

            In a very uncharacteristic admission, Bruce bowed his head in acknowledgement and said, “We’re very proud of him.” The royal We, Jason thought, because saying I would be way too personal for the Batman. Bruce paused, then asked, “How is Tamara?”

            This took Jay aback, but he rolled with it. “She’s good,” he said. “Yeah. I heard you had a conversation with Lucius, uh, thanks for that. We,” We, guess Jason wasn’t ready for that level of personal connection either, “appreciate it.”

            But Bruce had nothing to say to this: he merely nodded without looking away from the computer. “When will you be back?”

            “Friday at the latest,” answered Jay. “Probably sooner, knowing him.”

            “I suppose I shouldn’t hope that this is actually a secret trip to Disneyland, like last time.”

            “No,” laughed Jay, leaning back against the table. “I don’t have Cass’s sense of humor, unfortunately. I might hit her up and see if she wants to get in on this, though.”

            “She’s got her own assignments.”

            “Yeah, but I’m sure it gets lonely all the way out in Hong Kong. She might like a change of scenery.”

            Bruce could not argue with this. Turning slightly in his seat, finally glancing away from the computer, he eyed Jason.

            “Be careful,” he said. “Keep him safe.”

            “It’s the other way around,” countered Jay, shaking his head. “He’s a whole lot better than I am, he’ll be looking out for my ass.”

            “Jason.”

            “I know, I know,” he sighed. “I won’t let him jump in front of a bullet for me, or anything. Don’t worry, Bruce,” he said, with a tight grin. “I’ve got a pretty good track record when it comes to getting my partners out alive,” far above them, he heard the sound of the secret door from the grandfather clock slip open and closed, “unlike some people I could name.”

            If Bruce had a response to that, he was silenced by Damian coming down the stairs. “Jason,” he barked, from three quarters of the way down. “Are we going?”

            “Sure,” said Jay, getting up. “Bruce,” he said, nodding at the older man, offering him a one-handed salute.

            He headed up the stairs, and Damian turned to follow him. But then Bruce called, “Damian.”

            Jay turned around to catch Damian’s gaze. He rolled his eyes, and then he held up his index finger to Jay, as if to indication, One moment.

            He turned around. “Yes?”

            Bruce gestured with one hand, motioning for Damian to come over to him. Though he let out a little sigh of annoyance, he did so dutifully, descending the rest of the steps and crossing over to the computer station. Jason turned away casually, pretending he wasn’t straining his ears to hear what was being exchanged between Bruce and his favorite son (maybe second favorite – Dick still ranked pretty high up there).

            But Bruce had mastered the art of speaking low enough not to be heard, and Jay could not make out words from the quiet burr of his voice across the Cave. He could hear Damian, though. “Yes. I will. When I get back, yes. Of course.”

            Then Bruce cocked his head slightly, as if to say Go, and Damian jogged back across the Cave, skipping steps on his way up. “Let’s go,” he said to Jay, as he passed him.

            They took one of the jets, Jason in the pilot’s seat, Damian beside him. When Jay headed due east, Damian asked, “So this isn’t a secret Disneyland trip?”

            Jay laughed. “You know what? Your dad said that same exact thing. Nah, I’m not as fun as Cass.”

            Peering out at the sky before them, Damian reminded him, “As I recall, you were there too.”

            “Yeah, 'cause she asked me to come.” He glanced around at Damian. “Why? Would you prefer that to a real mission?”

            “No,” answered Damian shortly. “I was prepared to be disappointed, is all. Besides, I really didn’t think you had it in you.”

            Shooting a grin over at Damian, Jay asked, “In me? To do what?”

            “To take me home,” said Damian mildly, without looking back at him.

            The temperature in the cabin instantly dropped. Jason said nothing, but he looked over at Damian again, concern knit across his brow. There was a loaded silence.

            Then, carefully, Jay began, “Damian…I’m not – of course I’m not gonna-”

            “What?” asked Damian, arching an eyebrow at Jason. “Do you think I don’t know the locations of all my mother’s bases? Did you think I wouldn’t put two and two together when I saw your coordinates?”

            “Listen, I’m not taking you back to her, that’s not why I did this-”

            “I know you know her,” said Damian dispassionately, studying Jason’s face. “I don’t know how, but I know you do. Better than Dick does, anyhow.” Jay struggled to come up with a reply to this, and Damian asked, “Is she looking for me?”

            For a long moment, Jason didn’t answer. And then, grimly, he peered out at the sky before them. “She says she just wants to talk.”

            “Yes. Because we make a habit of taking supervillains at their word.”

            “She’s your mom, Damian. She’s just trying to look out for you, she says you’re in danger or something, and she can help.”

            “Textbook manipulation, Jason,” Damian told him, sounding almost bored. “She’s manufacturing a threat to make herself look like my savior. You really shouldn’t fall for it.”

            “Look,” said Jay, his grip tight on the controls. “I’m not taking you back to her. I’m taking you on a mission that happens to be a little close to one of her compounds. She called me and told me she wanted to talk to you, so I thought I’d give you the option. If you didn’t want to, we were gonna take care of the mission and go straight back home.” He added, “To Gotham.” When Damian said nothing, Jay glanced at him. “Damian,” he said. “I’m not either of your parents, I’m not gonna make any decisions for you. I just thought maybe you’d like the chance to decide for yourself, without your dad breathing down your neck.”

            “You think he doesn’t know?” asked Damian sharply. “He’s been keeping track of her for years.”

            “That would be why I gave him false coordinates."

            “And you think he didn’t see right through that?”

            “I think if he had any suspicion at all that I was willingly putting you in danger, he wouldn’t have let you leave the goddamn house. So I don’t know, maybe. But he decided to trust me anyway.” Jason paused, glanced at Damian. “Maybe you should try it.”

            With his arms defiantly crossed, Damian said, “Not when you manufacture some pretend mission to get me back on her radar.”

            “It isn’t pretend, it checks out.”

            “She certainly would orchestrate it so you’d think it did.”

            “You don’t want to do this?” demanded Jay, glancing back at Damian. “’Cause if you don’t, fine, I’ll turn this around, or maybe we’ll keep going ‘til we reach Hong Kong or something and we can hang out with Cass. That’s fine by me, all I wanted to do was give you some time away from your dad.”

            “I already had that,” said Damian sharply. “Didn’t he tell you I went to London?”

            “London?” echoed Jason doubtfully. “Everyone and their brother knows that was a cover, though I don't got any idea for what. You didn’t talk to your mom then, did you?”

            “No,” said Damian stonily. “I haven’t spoken to her since before my father came back.”

            “What, from being fake dead? That’s a long-ass time.”

            Damian didn’t answer this. He looked away, busying himself with a display panel before him. After some time, he looked back up and asked, “What’s the mission?”

            “It’s a trafficking deal,” said Jay, without hesitation. “Your specialty. Would’ve invited Arsenal to help but I heard you and her had kind of a falling-out.”

            “She did try to kill me,” said Damian coldly.

            “Way I heard it, you all tried to kill each other,” countered Jay. “By way of an angry supervillain mom who wasn’t your own.”

            “Got to change it up occasionally,” said Damian, leaning back in his seat. “Keep things exciting.”

            They said nothing more for a moment. Jay didn’t know all the details of what happened with the Titans, but he did know that Damian left them all – including his first girlfriend – in a bad way. “Well,” sighed Jay. “Like I said. If you don’t want to do this, we can turn back around.”

            For quite some time, Damian said nothing. He seemed agitated, though it was nothing compared to toxic pit of anger and aggression he’d been this time last year, right after things fell apart with the Titans. Jason hadn’t been around for much of that, but he knew that Dick had to come home for a few months to help Bruce, and that whatever Damian did resulted in him being banned from patrol for almost a year. Jay badly wanted to know what had gone down, but he had no desire to poke the bear, and Tim had only given him a shrug, claiming he didn’t know anything. “Something about going on a bender,” he’d said, from behind his desk in Wayne Tower, focused on the computer screen before him. Jay had thought Tam, for whom Damian interned over the past year, might know something, but she too came up empty-handed.

            Finally, after so long Jason thought he wasn’t going to say anything at all, Damian asked shortly, “What are the mission details?”

            “Human trafficking ring in the Caucasus,” Jay answered immediately. “They funnel into the European sex trade, mostly refugees and people looking to get out of poverty or war-torn areas.” He glanced at Damian, who looked unhappy. He knew this was the type of mission Damian – hell, Robin – couldn’t turn down. “Got a big detainment center in the mountains, a bottleneck into the continent. That’s where we’re headed.”

            “Their center of operations?”

            “I mean, corporate HQ is probably some rich asshole in the financial district of some fancy European city or something,” Jay said fairly. “But this is their main hidey-hole, and hitting it is gonna eat up their time and money while we hand over the evidence to Interpol.”

            Damian nodded; it made sense to target wherever the most people were being held. Rescue was the top priority. “Security?”

            “Not exactly high-tech, but plenty of goons to punch. Should be a breeze.” Damian didn’t say anything, so Jay continued, “And then we pack up and leave. Back to Gotham before you know it.”

            “What about my mother?” asked Damian. He sounded annoyed.

            Jay shrugged. “We don’t see her. It’s fine, I told you I wouldn’t make you.”

            “Maybe I want to.”

            Glancing at Damian, Jay began uncertainly, “OK. I’m starting to get some mixed signals here, kiddo.”

            Still irritated, Damian gave an emphatic shake of his head. “I don’t – not want to see her. It’s been almost a decade.” He broke off abruptly, his jaw tightly clenched. Refusing to look around at Jay, he muttered, “I’d just like it to be on my own terms.”

            “Yeah,” said Jay immediately, nodding. “Sure, that makes sense. I’m sorry, I should’a told you all of this before we left, I just thought if Bruce found out he’d make that decision for you. I thought you deserved more than that.”

            “She shouldn’t have had to go through you to begin with.”

            “Maybe not,” answered Jay. “But what else was she supposed to do? Bruce won’t even listen to her.”

            “She could have contacted me directly.”

            “How?”

            “I don’t know,” Damian shot back, venom in his voice. “But I’m nineteen now, not twelve. There’s no reason she should have to go through daddy to get to me.”

            There was something fundamentally funny about Damian referring to Bruce, even derisively, as daddy, but Jay stopped himself from saying anything. “Listen, I don’t know what she's thinking,” he replied plainly. “I can’t answer for her.” He paused, then added, “But if you do want to see her, when we get there. I can ask her to meet us at a safehouse or something. Our terms, not hers.” He glanced at Damian. “Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

            Damian let out a sigh of resignation, peering out the display before them. “Fine,” he said. “Let me think on it.”

            Jason did so, saying nothing more for the remainder of the journey.

            When they arrived, Jay took them to a safehouse in the mountains. Entering through a secret door, visible dislike was evident on Damian’s face for reasons that Jay couldn’t discern, but which had to do with the memory of a mountain safehouse much like this one, and the ache of broken ribs and a broken friendship with Lian Harper. They scouted the location, found it teeming with activity, and laid out a plan for the next day. At nine PM Eastern Time, an alarm went off on Damian’s phone, and he went back into his quarters and rooted around until he pulled out something that rattled like a pill bottle.

            Everyone in the immediate Batfamily was aware that Damian had been in treatment for his OCD for years now, though Jay had always gotten the feeling he’d been the last to find out. Ultimately it had been Alfred who told him, a few months after Damian received an official diagnosis of PTSD. “What?” Jason had asked, almost in disbelief. “How? From what?”

            “I imagine a great number of things could trigger post-traumatic stress, Jason,” Alfred had replied, assembling cucumber sandwiches. “I imagine that I don’t have to tell that to any of you boys. You, especially.”

            As always, Jason didn’t want to talk about that, didn’t want to acknowledge the big dead elephant in the room. Ever since he died, his entire life had been centered around death, revolving around the horror and the trauma and the anger it had stirred up inside of him. The thought of getting treatment – getting better, which seemed impossible because there was no better this was just the way he was now – frightened him.

            The Damian Jay knew was surly, occasionally depressive, and almost as obsessive as his father. He wondered what the fuck the kid was like when he was unmedicated.

            Damian slept soundly for a solid eight hours. Jason, who slept lightly and rarely for more than a few hours at a time, passed the time on his own, poring over files, bouncing a ball against the wall, clicking through some shitty Azerbaijani television. When night fell the next day, they took off in an off-road Jeep. “You draw fire,” said Damian. “I’ll go in and disable defense inside. Then we rendezvous and take them out.”

            “Sounds good,” answered Jay. “Let’s go, kiddo.”

            “Don’t call me that,” said Damian.

            Doing exactly as Damian said, Jay made a big noise and fuss to draw most of the guards out to the front of the compound, allowing Damian to enter unnoticed. Damian wound through the dark corridors, finding the ceiling oppressively low. He encountered far fewer obstacles than he’d anticipated; more men had apparently been attracted to Jason’s diversion than he thought. Or maybe there was something else going on. It unsettled him, made him cautious and slow.

            He reached a large steel door, industrial-looking. It brought back memories from a similar mission years ago, which brought back memories of Lian, which brought back the Titans which brought back Iris which made him feel bad again, so he merely broke the padlock on the door and tugged hard.

            It rolled open. To his surprise, the room was well-lit inside, fluorescent lights buzzing on the ceiling, revealing several rows of bunkbeds as if military barracks. Damian’s stomach lurched only slightly, because as terrible as the sight of kidnapped children handcuffed to their beds could be, this was already not as bad as he had anticipated. They looked up at him vacantly, making no sound when he entered the room. None of them could have been any older than fifteen.

            The first thing he did – the first thing always to be done when rescuing abused children – was put his hands up, displaying no weapon nor intention of violence. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, first in Azerbaijani, then repeated it once more in Turkish. “I’m here to help you.”

            When this only garnered him blank looks, he tried Russian, then Farsi. On the bottom bunk of the nearest bed, a girl asked, “Min’ant?” and Damian could’ve breathed a sigh of relief.

            “My name is Robin,” he answered, in Arabic. This time the kids looked like they understood. “I’m going to get you out of here. Please stay quiet.” He went to the girl’s bed, taking lock pick tools from his belt. Gesturing at the handcuff, he said, “I’m going to help you out of this. I promise I’m not going to hurt you.”

            When the girl nodded, staring at him with wide eyes, he moved in to work on the cuffs. It didn’t take long, but with each precious second his chances of getting them all out before the goons made it back decreased. He could only hope that Jay was putting on a good show.

            Damian was so tall and the bunks so low that even hunched over the handcuffs, he still had to be careful not to bang his head. Having undone the cuffs, he straightened up, asking the girl, “Can you walk?” when suddenly a hand shot down from above him – the child in the top bunk – and grabbed hold of his yellow cape, giving it a sudden jerk. His guard down, the force of the tug slammed his forehead into the base of the top bunk, and he groaned in pain. The girl he’d just freed kicked hard at his left knee, blowing it out and sending him stumbling away, lights flashing behind his eyes. “What?” he asked, his brain working sluggishly, trying to understand what he’d done wrong. His cape was still about his shoulders, and he didn’t fully realize he’d lapsed back into English. “I’m trying to help you-”

            A searing pain rent through him, so cataclysmically powerful he felt like he’d been struck by lightning, nerves screaming in pain, his brain instantly alight with fear and dangersense. Blood pounded through his ears as a blade struggled down his back, resisting down the length of his spine. Adrenaline rushed into him, spilling out in the form of fresh scarlet blood weeping down around him, turning the air sick and coppery. The pain felt paradoxically distant and deafening, but he could not form words, only gaped at the room of captured children before him. They were sitting up now in their beds, staring at him. In their uncuffed hand, each of them held a knife.

            Sensation trickled out of his hands, and his legs buckled beneath him. He gasped for breath: it felt like there were steel wires around his heart and lungs, squeezing, squeezing, and his entire body screamed at him to move but he could not.

            Before he blacked out, it registered in the back of his mind that the children were no longer watching him.

----

            When Jay could not raise Damian on his commlink, he knew immediately something was wrong. “Ah, fuck it,” he muttered to himself, and he took out his handgun and shot twice. Both bullets landed true, and the two remaining goons he’d been trying to incapacitate fell to the ground, a hole in their skull.

            He sprinted into the base, expecting to find more resistance, Damian maybe in the middle of combat or else captured or else – Jason felt sick, and he put that far away from his mind. But as he raced through the steel corridors, he found no one. Everyone must have come out to defend the place. That didn’t bode well.

            The stench of blood reached Jay before anything else. He retched, but he didn’t have any time to investigate the bodies on the bed, or the two children who lay bleeding on either side of Damian. Two large daggers, possibly hunting knives, lay discarded near the children’s hands; one was longer and sharper, sharp enough, Jay could tell, to cut right through Damian’s Kevlar reinforced uniform.

            The scar on Damian’s back had been reopened top to bottom in a brutal, ragged slice. “Oh, fuck,” said Jason aloud, and he dropped to Damian’s side. “Hey! Robin! Come on, talk to me.”

            Jay could not turn Damian onto his back without risking further damage, but he didn’t know what the fuck else to do, so he sat there uselessly, his hands hovering above Damian’s frayed wound. He could not believe what was happening, was halfway still convinced it was a dream, how could he have fucked up so bad? How could he have let this happen?

            His cheek pressed against the bloodstained floor, Damian made a quiet gurgling sound in the back of his throat. Jay’s heart started to pump again and he came back to the present, digging into his own utility belt for medical supplies though he could not imagine he had anything which could help Damian in a state like this.

            Damian said something, but his voice was so faint Jay could not hear. “Hey,” said Jay. “Stay with me, kiddo. Don’t go anywhere, it’s gonna be OK. I’m gonna get you out of here, it’s gonna be OK.”

            Voice still weak but slightly louder, Damian managed to mumble, “Don’t – call me that.”

            With a shaky laugh, Jay nodded, his head bobbing up and down. He unspooled the bandages he carried, laying them across Damian’s back, knowing they’d do nothing. “Sure thing,” he said. “We get out of here, I promise, I’ll never say it again. Just stay with me, OK? Keep talking.”

            Though his eyes had never fully opened, Damian’s lashes fluttered downwards once more, closing completely. Dutifully, he still spoke. “Two,” he said. “Three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen.” He continued without pause, counting prime numbers to help him stay conscious. A classic Robin tactic.

            As the initial shock wore off, it took about three seconds for Jay to realize what he had to do now. He keyed his commlink, and when the line opened he barked, “Hey, I need you. Now.”

            Talia al Ghul arrived within minutes. Damian lost consciousness somewhere around 941, and Jay could do little more than try and stem the bleeding. When she came through the doors, she came with an emergency medical team, who took Damian on a stretcher immediately back out, no doubt to a helicopter waiting to carry him back to his mother’s compound. Jason had expected Talia to go with him. Instead, she stood there beside Jason, who was still on his knees,  covered in Damian’s blood. They were left alone in a room full of corpses.

            There was a heavy silence. Talia did not look down at Jason.

            “What happened?” she asked quietly.

            “It was a trafficking ring,” said Jason, his voice hard, defensive. “It checked out. It’s been active for years, reports going back a decade, there’s no reason it should’ve been a trap, no way they would’ve known-”

            Before he could blink, the back of Talia’s hand came soaring through the air, connecting solidly with the side of Jason’s face. “Idiot,” she hissed. “Of course they knew. You absolute buffoon. You don’t listen to me.”

            Jason did not reply, his hand pressed against his stinging cheek. “Will he be OK?”

            “He’ll live,” answered Talia, without pause. “No thanks to you.”

            Relief washed over Jay, permitting him to breathe once more. He got to his feet, his knees now stained with blood from the floor. Beneath him, his legs felt unsteady. “How’d they know we were coming?”

            “I have told you,” answered Talia. Her eyes raked around the room, observing the gore dispassionately. “He is in danger. They have eyes on him.”

            “They who?”

            “It isn’t your concern,” said Talia, shaking her head, refusing to budge a single inch.

            “Whoever they are, they almost just killed my little brother,” said Jason, his voice hard and dangerous. “You bet your ass I’m concerned, Talia.”

            Finally, she turned to look at him. Her eyes were a honey-brown color, lighter than her son’s, but in this room surrounded by blood they seemed curiously flat, all variation smoothed into cold, glassy fury.

            She gestured to the room full of children slaughtered by their own hand. “Children,” she said loudly, as if she could fill the room with her voice, cover up the terrible things that happened there, “born and bred to die.” She knelt and took the hilt of the knife red with Damian’s blood. “A stab in the back,” she said, “with an assassin’s blade. You were supposedly trained by a detective, were you not? What do you think?”

            Jay stared at the knife, then out at the dead bodies on the bunks. His stomach squirmed, and he tasted bile in the back of his throat. But suddenly, all at once, it clicked into place.

            He glanced back at Talia, a crease on his brow. “A League splinter cell.”

            Talia was already shaking her head, but Jay now understood why she had refused to tell him: to admit there was a group of rogue assassins would be to legitimize them, and as the Demon’s Head, she could not risk that. “I have made many enemies, and inherited those of my father and my sister,” she said, her head held high, regal as ever. “There are those who seek to decapitate a dynasty. To strike at me through my son.”

            But this raised even more questions. “Why not just kill him now, then?”

       ��     “Perhaps they believe they did.”

            “Nope,” said Jay. “If an assassin was trying to take him out, they’d stayed alive long enough to confirm the kill. All of this,” he gestured at the room, the stinking miasma of blood heavy in the air, “is just set decoration.” He paused, watching her. “This is a message, T.”

            This deduction seemed to satisfy Talia, reassure her that she could let him in on the secret. “They wish to frighten me into submission,” she said lowly. “And they would not dare kill him here, not with you to bear witness and hear my explanation.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because,” she said harshly, slicing her gaze towards him, “then you go home to Gotham, and you come back with the Batman, and he ends them. That is not a gamble they’re willing to take.”

            “You think I’m not gonna be telling Bruce about this?”

            “I think his first instinct is to defend, not aggress,” said Talia. Her hands were clasped tightly behind her back. In the stark fluorescent light, shadows flickered across her face, making her look older. Or maybe she’d stopped using the Pits. Or maybe Jay just hadn’t seen her in enough years to make a difference. “I think that instinct dies with his sons.”

            Jason stared at her for a long moment, eyes locked on hers. He flinched first, looking away.

            “I tried to tell him,” Talia continued, no softness in her voice. “But he would not listen to me. Neither did you, and now because of you my son is in pain. I blame you as much as I blame they who did this.”

            Jay protested, “Talia-” but she held up a hand, her expression stricken.

            “Do not argue with me,” she said. “Leave here, Jason Todd.”

            “No,” he said.

            “Do not test me.”

            “I’m not going anywhere until I know he’s OK,” said Jay stubbornly. “You take me right back to wherever the fuck he is, and when he’s better I’m taking him home. Besides,” he added, “you just said it. I go back to Gotham, I come back with Batman. Don’t make me do that to you.”

            Talia said nothing for a long moment. Then, wordlessly, she turned and left the room, abandoning the bodies of children growing cold. Jason followed her.

            It was a short ride in a military-grade chopper Talia’s base, which was a surprisingly utilitarian compound in the Chechnyan foothills. On all sides it was surrounded by barbed wire and guards patrolling the perimeter. Jason followed her inside. Without speaking to him once, she led him directly to a laboratory. She entered only halfway, lingering by the door. Jason peered into the room from behind her.

            Stripped to the waist and suspended weightlessly in viscous green liquid, Damian was unconscious. Wires and needles and mechanical arms worked deftly on his back, skin peeled back to facilitate access to his spine. Deep in the bottom of his stomach, Jay felt a stab of recognition, a memory from years ago of a baby in a biotube. Back then he had only caught a glance of it out of the corner of his eye, and in the moment, with Talia by his side, he’d thought it was funny. Something you gotta tell me, Talia? he’d asked her, grinning. Her expression severe, she had granted him no reply. The memory made him ache with guilt. He should have done something.

            “The biotube makes his physiology more malleable,” said Talia abruptly, her eyes on her son. “He will stay there until we repair any nerve damage.”

            “How long will that take?”

            “Not long. Hours, maybe.”

            This sounded impossible. “He got shanked down his spinal cord and you’re telling be he’s gonna be all fixed up in an hour or so?”

            “Topical damage can be healed after he is removed from the biotube,” Talia told him coolly. “And it works quickly, Jason. Not as quick as its source, but better than any modern medicine can do.”

            For a moment he didn’t know what she meant, and then his eyes widened. He looked back at the biotube, at Damian’s body through the haze of green liquid.

            “Why bother fixing him at all?” asked Jason, but all warmth had vanished from his voice. “Why not just give him a good ol’ dunk?”

            “Lazarus Pits are precious resources,” said Talia stoically. “There is no need to contaminate one when we can safely draw from it instead.”

            Jay suspected it was more than this. He knew that, like him, Talia too had experienced firsthand the burning madness of the Pit. He could not blame her for wanting to spare her son the agony. Though he wondered if that wasn’t oversimplifying it, if maybe all things touched by the Pit had a touch of madness to them. Maybe growing a child in a biotube instead of the womb did things to him neither Jason nor Talia could even imagine.

            While Damian was in the biotube, Jason refused to leave his side. Talia came and went, apparently having other matters to attend to and confident in the abilities of her medical team. By the door, two guards stood armed to the teeth. They weren’t Ubu, and they couldn’t have been much older than Damian himself. On their chests they wore a patch of red, inlaid with an upside-down black triangle.

            Finally, the biotube was drained, and Damian was removed. The medical team required that Jason wear a surgical mask when they did so, and they refused to let him touch Damian, citing potential risk of infection. They wheeled him to a secure medical bay which Jay could not enter, though they permitted him to continue his watch through an observation window the size of a wall. Damian was lain on his stomach, the ugly, jagged wound along the length of his back facing upwards. Expertly, the doctors began to close the wound. The two guards with the red insignia on their chest stood at the foot of Damian’s bed, at attention.

            Transfixed by the image before him, Jay almost didn’t notice when someone sidled up slightly behind him. Expecting someone else, he turned around to say, “Talia-” but then he stopped short.

            A woman smiled back at him. She was smaller than Talia, dressed in the gold and green of those most favored by the Demon’s Head. A scarf was wrapped loosely around her head, obscuring her hair. On her breast, she wore the red and black insignia shared by Damian’s guards.

            She spoke with an accent. “Hello, Jason Todd.”

            “Uh,” said Jay. “Hi. Who are you?”

            “My name is Yasmeen.” She had to be around Jay’s age, if not younger. She stepped forward to join him at the window, and then turned her gaze to peer softly out at Damian’s unconscious form. “I owe you thanks for calling us so quickly. More serious damage could have been done.”

            “Nothing Talia couldn’t fix in her little Lazarus kiddie pool,” Jay replied warily. “You wanna tell me who you are? And you know I don’t mean your name.”

            The woman – Yasmeen – did not answer right away, still watching the boy behind the glass. Then she glanced at Jason, and she said shortly, “I was his first teacher.”

            Jay stared at her.

            “I was there when they took him out of the biotube for the very first time,” she said, turning once more to watch Damian, as if soaking in every detail. “I was his caretaker when he was little more than a baby. I taught him English and his mother tongue. When Talia could not, and she often could not, I raised him.” She offered Jay a smile. “So, again. I am grateful to you.”

            Jason knew, of course, that Talia had not been able to care for her son like most mothers did, but he had always thought of that in abstract terms, in vague impersonal words like teachers or trainers. ‘Caretaker’ was something he had never thought of before, though it made perfect sense. Some jealous corner of his heart rebelled against this for inexplicable reasons, an unfamiliar and strangely possessive emotion clashing with the relief of knowing someone had loved and looked after Damian long before he came to his father’s family.

            He cleared his throat, then he held out his hand to her. “It’s good to meet you,” he told her. “Guess I forget sometimes he had a whole childhood before Talia sent him off.” Her handshake was brief, but firm. “You haven’t seen him in a while then, huh? What’s Talia had you doing since then, training more baby assassins?”

            “Not quite,” answered Yasmeen absently, still looking through the glass at Damian. “Talia released me from her service when she released her son from her care. I’ve been at Oxford since, studying Philosophy and Modern Languages.” She cast another small smile Jason’s way. “Two of his favorite subjects. I’d like to think of that as my influence on him.”

            Jay eyed her, sizing her up. “So,” he said, “why are you back? Don’t tell me she went and got you just ‘cause Damian got himself all banged up, did she?”

            Yasmeen blinked, and then she looked up at Jason curiously. “No,” she said, sounding almost confused. “Talia invited me back because of Leviathan.”

            Before Jay could ask what the fuck Leviathan was, a loud crash came from behind the window, accompanied quickly by a ragged roar of fury. Both of their gazes snapped back to Damian, now conscious and on his feet. One doctor was already on the ground, having been tossed aside by Damian as if nothing more than a bag of flour. Damian ripped the IV out of his arm and staggered over to the fallen doctor, shouting at him in Arabic. Though Jay knew a little Arabic, the words tumbling out of Damian's mouth were hoarse and garbled, and he couldn't understand any of it. It looked like Yasmeen could. “What’s he saying?” he asked, urgently.

            Yasmeen only shook her head, her lips a tight line. “He’s not in his right mind,” she replied. “They must have incorrectly adjusted the sedative dosage. He’s awake, but he’s not lucid.”

            This made sense: Jay had heard from Dick and Bruce that Damian required a much higher dose of sedatives to keep him out than his size would suggest. Once Dick had offhandedly contributed this to “Talia’s genetic meddling,” which Jay had never really believed. Until now, perhaps.

            Damian kicked the doctor in the face, and they collapsed on the ground. One of the guards moved forward to stop him, placing a hand on his shoulder, but Damian violently threw them off, then flipped them overhead, slamming them into the ground. The other guard and two more doctors moved in, trying to restrain him. Damian acted on instinct, methodically disabling them.

            “That’s it,” said Jay, tearing himself away from the window, going to try and find a door. “I’m going in.”

            “No need,” called Yasmeen, still at the window.

            “He’s going to tear those people apart,” Jay replied, anger in his voice. “And listen, you’re part of the League so maybe you don’t care about them, but if you know the same kid I do then you know he’ll hate himself for what he did while he was under, and I’m not about to let that happen.”

            Unimpressed, Yasmeen looked around at him. “Talia has this under control,” she said.

            “Doesn’t look like control to me,” Jay spat, but Yasmeen merely motioned through the window. Warily, Jay moved forward to join her once more.

            Inside the room, Talia had entered. Flanked by no guards, she moved towards Damian. Around him lay the doctors and guards, either unconscious or otherwise pretending to be in order to avoid his wrath. Damian was scratching at his hands, then rubbing his bloodied fists on his eyes in a childlike caricature. “What’s she doing?” asked Jay tensely, one hand pressed against the glass. “He’s freaking out, she shouldn’t be in there alone-”

            Talia said Damian’s name. She said it accented, Dah-mian, not Day-mian. It then occurred to Jay that since she was the one who named him she was also the one who said it correctly, and therefore it was he and the rest of Bruce’s family who said it with an accent. It was a strange and sad realization, that none of them spoke his name the way his mother had intended. Unexpectedly, it stung at Jason’s heart.

            She said it again. Damian’s scratched-up hands moved from his face, and he said something in Arabic that sounded like a threat before slamming his foot down onto the arm of one of the guards, kicking violently at the semiautomatic weapon at their side. “Damian,” said Talia once more, and she held out her arms. He shouted something at her, furious, primal, but she didn’t stop. She reached her son and she placed her hands on his cheeks, watching him with her amber eyes, and then she wrapped her arms around him and held him close to her.

            Talia was a tall woman, but Damian’s last growth spurt had sent him shooting over six feet. He stood stock still above her for one moment, and then he seemed to collapse into her arms, gently dropping his face into the crook of her neck.

            Murmuring something in Arabic, Talia ran her fingers through her son’s hair. Jason wondered how long it had been since she last held her son.

            Once Talia coaxed him back to the hospital bed, she held his hand until the doctors could administer more drugs. He slipped back into unconsciousness once more.

            “Not surprising,” remarked Yasmeen.

            Jay glanced around at her. “What is?”

            Gesturing towards Damian, she replied, “His reaction. Talia always thought he would get used to the trauma of invasive medical procedures, but it’s impossible for a child to build up the necessary resilience for that. He has always feared the helplessness of the biotube, I think, and reliving the traumatic circumstances of his previous spinal injury can’t be easy either.” She watched Damian, worry clear in her eyes. “I had hoped he might grow out of those fears. But I suppose they linger, whether we hold onto them or not.”

            Jason too looked through the window at Damian. Talia remained by his side, though he was no longer conscious. His heart hurt once more.

            In time, Yasmeen invited Jason to rest, or to share a meal with her. He refused, choosing instead to stay there by the window into Damian’s room, waiting for him to wake up. For a while she left, but eventually returned to wait in silence by his side. Hours passed.

            Lying face down on the hospital bed, Damian stirred. Jason leaned forwards, his nose almost touching the glass. Talia shifted in her seat, blocking Damian’s face from view. He felt an uncharacteristic surge of anger towards her, but put that aside. At least someone would be there holding his hand when he woke up.

            The sound within the room was transmitted through a line into the observation area where Jason stood. Damian’s voice was hoarse, but he murmured, “Mama?”

            Talia replied in Arabic, gently. Jay saw her lift her hand, cradling her son’s cheek.

            Damian did not reply at first. Then he seemed to shift, and he asked a question. Though Jay didn’t catch the words exactly, he heard Damian say, “Jason,” and felt a burst of affection for the kid. In response, Talia sat up straight, and then she turned halfway around to peer out at Jay.

            Though it was a one-way mirror, Damian’s gaze followed hers. He looked tired. Looking back once at his mother, he pushed himself up to sitting position. “Get me out of here,” he muttered, in English. “I don’t need a hospital bed.”

            “You need rest,” responded Talia, following his lead and switching to English.

            “I can rest perfectly fine anywhere in the compound,” announced Damian, getting to his feet. A flickering expression passed over his face, brief admittance of pain, but it disappeared quickly, professionally. “Or in Gotham, for that matter.”

            “You will stay until you are healed,” said Talia, too getting to her feet, looking her son up and down.

            Without glancing back at her, Damian replied, “I will stay until I want to go.”

            There was a moment of tension. He looked at his mother, no real cruelty on his face. Then he looked back around the room, and headed towards the only exit, the padded door through which Talia had entered.

            Immediately Jason jogged around to the door, and he apparently wasn’t the only one with that idea. A whole cadre of Talia’s attendants appeared, carrying with them every possible amenity Jay could think of. None of them wore the red and black insignia, except of course Yasmeen, who waited patiently behind Jay.

            The door to the medical bay opened, and Damian emerged. His dark eyes glanced around, finally landing and lingering on Jay. He stepped forward, and was met with a flurry of motion from Talia’s attendants. They wiped his brow, cleaned the edges the bandages covering his back, offered him a set of pills from a comically lavish tasseled pillow (which he took and swallowed without hesitation, though it made Jay’s heart pound), and then he lifted his arms to allow them to slip a cloak over his shoulders, a cloak of emerald green and spun gold. Jay wondered if it hadn’t once belonged to his grandfather.

            All of this happened at once, quickly and smoothly. Jay was surprised that Damian didn’t seem at all surprised; but, he supposed, Damian had been raised like this, like royalty. Dick had tried his best to get rid of Damian’s natural sense of entitlement, the haughty arrogance of having been termed from birth a boy king. This was the first time Jason had ever seen Damian like this, and he seemed comfortable, calm and in control. It was like watching an animal finally returned to his natural habitat.

            One of the attendants bowed before Damian and offered him a long knife encased in a jeweled sheath. He glanced down at it, then waved it away. Damian's hand was bandaged. The attendant did not move.

            From behind Damian, Talia said, “No son of mine would walk in an enemy compound unarmed.”

            Damian glanced around as Talia slunk forward, meeting his gaze. “You called yourself my enemy, Mother,” he told her, his voice quiet. “I never did.” Then, without waiting for her answer, he turned back around to look at Jay. “Are you alright?” he asked.

            “Me?” asked Jay, taken aback. “I mean, yeah, but I’m not the one who got his spine ripped out.”

            “It’s certainly still there,” replied Damian, grimacing. He rolled his shoulders, stretching his neck, wincing when it hurt. “Though I imagine it’d be less painful if it weren’t. Did you call her?” he asked, to Jason. “Or did she come on her own?”

            “He called,” said Talia.

            Damian didn’t look at her. Jay glanced between them, then echoed her answer. “I called her. Why does that matter?”

            “Because,” answered Damian coolly, “the latter would be proof.”

            “Proof of what?” asked Jay.

            “That she did this to me,” said Damian. “That she engineered violence in order to bring me back into her home-”

            “Damian,” said Talia harshly, striding forward and placing a heavy hand on his arm. “Had I devised this violence, believe me, it would not have ended with two dozen children dead.”

            “Why not?” he shot back at her, whipping his arm away from her. “Destroying children never seemed to prick your conscious before.”

            All softness cracked away from Talia’s expression as if it had been no more than a brittle shell. Lowering her voice dangerously, she told him, “I made you stronger. Every hurt you endured was intentional, my son. It is incomparable to the meaningless death-worshipping chaos of whoever did this to you.”

            Damian watched his mother for a long moment, his mouth tight. Jason glanced between the two of them, then leaned in. “If it helps,” he said, apologetically, “I don’t think she had anything to do with this. It was – something else.” Leviathan, Jay thought, his mind going back to the cryptic comment Yasmeen had dropped. But he held his tongue, waiting until he had a clearer picture of what was going on. Jason added, “She saved your life, Damian,” but by then Damian was no longer looking at him. His gaze had wandered beyond Jay, and the expression had dropped from his face, replaced by something that resembled shock.

            Jay glanced around. Yasmeen stood there, smiling, her hands clasped behind her back. “Hamdellah assalamah, Damian,” she said. Welcome home.

            “No,” said Damian, staring at her. He moved forward; behind him, Talia reached out and took the blade from the attendant Damian had refused. Stopping just past Jay, several feet away from Yasmeen, he looked at her warily, disbelievingly. “No. You don’t work for my mother anymore. I asked my father about you, you were in England, you were far away from this-”

            Yasmeen shook her head, but did not remove her hands from behind her back. “I heard my very first student was coming home,” she said simply. “I thought to myself, Yasmeen, wouldn’t you like to see the man he became?”

            She offered him a contented smile, though the look in her eyes was enigmatic. Damian’s eyes flickered down to the black and red symbol she wore.

            Talia strode past the three of them. “Come,” she said, over her shoulder. “You must eat.”

            She led them to what looked like an industrial kitchen, everything clean steel and hard chrome. Damian and Jason sat with Talia, but Yasmeen chose to stay on her feet, standing at attention by the door. Other attendants brought food and drink, pouring tea for Damian. It made Jason feel weird and out of place, uncomfortable being served. Neither Talia nor Damian seemed to notice.

            “What happened to me?” asked Damian, his voice low. “Who were those children?”

            “Victims to some mother more cruel than I,” answered Talia, raising a teacup to her lips. “I cannot tell you their names. My guess is that they all died without one.”

            Talia took a sip of tea. In the small pause she took, Jason leaned forward. “Hey, listen,” he said. “My intel must’ve been bad. I shouldn’t have let you walk in there alone.”

            Damian only glanced at him, unsatisfied. He sat up unnaturally straight, his spine rod-like. Exertion in any direction probably meant pain.

            Looking up at Talia, Damian said, “Repairing my body does nothing to endear yourself to me. Not after what you did last time.”

            Jason didn’t know what this meant, but Talia merely bowed her head in acknowledgement. “Forgive me,” she said. “But I don’t regret it. I did not send you to your father’s house to be trained by anyone but your father, certainly not some circus freak.”

            “Dick Grayson was the first father I ever knew,” said Damian stubbornly, an admission of loyalty Jay had never heard stated outright. “I won’t listen to you speak ill of him.”

            “Dick Grayson,” said Talia, sounding unimpressed, “is unworthy of you. He is a relic of your father’s pathetic penchant for self-pity, and a habitual liar who twists and poisons all things to his advantage.” Jay wondered, vaguely, if they were thinking of the same Dick Grayson. But then she said, “He is duplicitous by nature. Disloyal and nomadic by blood,” and Jason suddenly realized what she was getting at.

            “Talia, come on,” he said, leaning forward on the cold steel of the table. “You can call Dick a lotta things, but disloyal is some big bullshit, and nomadic is just kinda racist.”

            “Then why does he endanger you?” demanded Talia, her eyes glinting, focused on her son. “Why does he work with those who oppose me?”

            “Because you’re a supervillain, Mother, obviously,” answered Damian, dismissing this. “What do you mean, endangering me?”

            She watched him without reaction, but it was clear that she hadn't wanted to tip her hand so early. She glanced behind Damian, at Yasmeen; the woman turned to the attendants surrounding her and they dutifully emptied the room. Yasmeen closed the door behind them, and stood before it.

            “What do you know,” asked Talia, her voice very quiet, “of Leviathan?”

            An instant reaction crossed Damian’s face. “Leviathan,” he echoed. He narrowed his eyes slightly, as if struggling to recall a memory. “They tried to kill me, didn’t they?”

            “No,” answered Talia shortly. “They saved your life. I formed Leviathan five years ago, when a faction within the League of Assassins began to sow the seeds of discontent, and I learned of a plan to strike at me through that which I hold most precious.” Her eyes burned into Damian’s. “You.” She paused for a moment, then added, “You see when I asked for you back then, it was not to transform you into some brainwashed assassin, like your father suggested. I wanted to protect you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

            “Lies,” said Damian, cutting her off. “No parent destroys their child in the name of protection.”

            “I broke you here,” Talia insisted, her hands on the table before her, “so that you would never break out there. So that you could meet pain, and become its master. So that you would become more powerful than that which would try to hurt you. Faster, and stronger, and smarter. Not better but the best. Believe of your mother what you want. I did this to prevent you from ever winding up like him.”

            It took Jason half a moment to realize Talia was pointing straight at him. He raised a hand almost defensively, speechless thrown off balance, but Damian did not look around. He glared directly into his mother’s face.

            But Jay’s heart sank as he realized Damian did not have an answer to this. He let it hang in the air for a long moment, then, the fury in his voice gone cold, he asked, "What does Dick have to do with Leviathan?”

            Sharply, Talia responded, “As if you don’t know. He’s always hated me. He would take any opportunity to undermine me.”

            “Undermine you how?”

            Talia watched Damian. Her eyes narrowed, and then she leaned back in her seat. Thoughtfully, she asked, “You don’t know, do you?”

            “Know what?” asked Jason, interrupting before Damian could speak. “That Dick’s tryna stop whatever evil plans you’re cooking up now? I mean, it’s not exactly a stretch of the imagination, T.”

            A flicker of annoyance passed over Damian’s face, though at first Jay wasn’t sure what it was for. T, he realized. He didn’t like the nickname.

            Well. It was awfully familiar, and Jay wouldn’t blame Damian if he wasn’t feeling particularly friendly towards any friend of his mother’s at the moment. He pulled back, as if removing himself from the conversation.

            Talia glanced upwards, towards the door. Yasmeen moved forward, placing a file before Damian, which she opened. She stayed by his side, which seemed to distract him; for one moment his gaze flickered up towards Yasmeen's face, an unsettled look in his eye. Then he turned his attention to the pages before him, examining them carefully. “What is this?” he asked, his voice flat.

            Talia cocked her head. “You don’t recognize the symbol?”

            Damian looked up at her, and shook his head. Jay leaned over, and Damian slid the file toward him. There was a shadowy photograph of what appeared to be an eye, behind which a series of crisscross lines intersected. It felt intensely familiar, but Jay couldn’t place it.

            “We don’t know who they are either,” continued Talia. “Only that the circus brat is one of them, and that they’re doing all they can to put you in harm’s way, Damian.”

            “Impossible,” said Damian. “You’re lying to me.”

            “I am not,” answered Talia coldly. “Leviathan has had eyes on you for years now. They go where you go, and they combat threats you cannot imagine. They keep you safe.” She gestured at the file. “This organization fights me at every turn. At every opportunity they block Leviathan, putting you in direct danger.”

            There was a long silence as Damian regarded the symbol before him. Then, brow furrowed, he looked up. “No,” he said again, sliding the file away from him. “I can’t trust this, Mother. You’ve tried to turn me against him before.”

            “I am trying,” she insisted, “to protect you.”

            “I don’t believe it,” said Damian stubbornly. “And I think it’s sick that you’ve brought me here with obvious intent to manipulate me.”

            He placed his hands firmly on the table before him, and struggled to get to his feet, obviously fighting the pain of his healing spine. Beside him, Yasmeen gently took his arm, steadying him. “Khalti,” he said to her, taking her hand. “I don’t want you here with her any longer. Please permit me to take you wherever you want to go when I leave here.”

            With a sad smile, Yasmeen reached out to place her hand gently against his cheek. “Habibi,” she replied, “you are very brave, and very clever, but where I want to be is here with her.” She watched him pleasantly, that same small smile on her face. “You are making a mistake,” she told him, slowly and clearly, as if speaking to a child, “by refusing to believe her. Your past blinds you.”

            Damian said nothing for a moment. Then he took hold of her hand, and pulled it away from his face. “If it does,” he said quietly, “it’s her own fault, for leaving wounds that take too long to heal.”

            “Maybe,” said Yasmeen softly, “this is her offering you a bandage, habibi.”

            There was a thick silence. Talia watched another woman handle her son with a mother’s touch, and then she looked away, her expression blank and unchanging. Jay felt distinctly uncomfortable, on behalf of all of them.

            Finally, Damian turned away from her. “Jason,” he said. “We’ll leave at dawn.” This, at least, was a relief: even Damian had to admit he was in no condition to travel at the moment, though Jay didn’t imagine he’d be all that much better come morningtime. Regardless, Jay got to his feet.

            “Sounds good,” he said.

            “Yasmeen,” said Talia, from her seat. “Please show Damian to his quarters.” To her son, she said, “Rest assured, you aren’t headed back to the medical bay.”

            But Damian shook his head, standing straight as ever. He was at least a full foot taller than Yasmeen, who still held one of his hands. “I’m staying with Jason,” he said. “I told you already I don’t trust you, Mother, and I meant it. He’s not leaving my side.”

            Jay felt a rush of affection for the kid once more, but he leaned forward and said, fairly, “Listen, I appreciate that, but I’m pretty sure if your mom wanted to off me, she would’ve done it already.”

            “I’m not negotiating,” said Damian plainly, his eyes on his mother. “I know I need rest. Either he stays with me, or we both leave now.”

            Talia considered this, her jaw clenched once more. Then she waved her hand. “Fine. Yasmeen, show them their quarters. Jason can sleep on the floor like a dog for all I care.”

            Dutifully, Yasmeen did so. Damian let go of her hand as they headed through the compound – they moved slowly, as Damian was obviously still unwell – but once they were out of Talia’s earshot he moved to her side. Quietly, he spoke to her in Arabic. She considered his words, then replied. Jason lagged behind them slightly, trying not to intrude on what was obviously a private conversation, even though he couldn’t fully understand the language. Though he did his best to mind his own business, he caught a few words there. Khalti again, which wasn’t a name – maybe an honorific, or a term of endearment? Habibi he knew, though he’d heard it from Talia under extremely different circumstances, and the thought of that made him feel a little uncomfortable, weirdly guilty.

            They exited one building and crossed a short courtyard into a different one. Above them, the moon shone down, bathing the compound in a pool of silver light.

            The second building was made of brick and stone instead of steel and concrete, and felt less like a laboratory and more like a home. On the second floor Yasmeen took them to a room with a tall wooden door, and Damian nodded at him, gesturing for him to enter. He did so, leaving the door slightly ajar. Sure, he wanted to give Damian a little privacy; but they were also still in Talia’s territory, and he didn’t want to let Damian out of his sight.

            He busied himself inspecting the room, but before she left, he caught a glance of Yasmeen holding Damian tightly in her arms.

            The room itself seemed oddly out of place in an otherwise utilitarian compound such as this. There was a bathroom attached, fully stocked with medical supplies, as well as a big four-poster bed and a collection of couches and futons strewn about the room. Two large wardrobes held a number of clothes, though only one contained anything that would fit Damian. The other was full of clothing which seemed comically undersized. Jay rifled through it for a few moments, confused, and then he realized: these must have belonged to Damian when he was a child, back when he lived with Talia.

            He closed the wardrobe to find Damian closing the door to the room. “Everything OK?” asked Jay, as Damian hobbled over to the bed, obviously in pain.

            “I’ll live,” answered Damian, sort of falling onto the bed, dropping his face into the pillow. He sounded exhausted.

            Jay stood there for a moment, and then he crossed the room. “Hey,” he said, dropping a knee beside Damian on the bed. He lowered one of his hands, hovering above Damian’s shoulder cautiously. “Can I take a look?”

            Turning his head onto his cheek, Damian nodded at Jay. Gingerly, he slipped Damian’s arms out of the cloak, then pulled it off of him, revealing his bandaged back. Methodically, Jay inspected the bandages. “These need to be changed,” he muttered. “You wanna wait til the morning?”

            “And give my mother another opportunity to delay our departure?” asked Damian doubtfully. “No. Do it now.”

            Jay didn’t like that tone and he almost said something snarky about how demanding he sounded, but then he stopped himself. Really felt like the wrong time to point out Damian’s similarities with either of his parents.

            After collecting medical supplies from the bathroom, Jason returned to Damian’s side, working very carefully.

            “Hey,” said Jay.

            Damian gave a vague noise of acknowledgement.

            “I thought that was pretty brave,” he said, honestly. “Y’know, everything you said to her. It takes guts to stand up to someone who loves you that much.”

            Another grunt, this one unhappy. “She doesn’t love me.”

            Jason didn’t reply to this, because he figured Damian already knew that wasn’t true.

            There was silence for a while as Jason cleaned and drained Damian’s wound, then replaced the bandages. When he was almost done, Damian, his voice slightly muffled against the pillow, asked, “How do you know her?”

            No easy answer to this, especially not one Jay could admit to her son. But back in the jet, he’d gotten the impression that Damian already had an idea of how Talia al Ghul, sole inheritor of the Lazarus Pits, might have known Jason Todd, formerly dead Robin.

            “She helped me out,” Jay told him, finally, “a long time ago.” Not technically untrue. “You know, in a big way.”

            “Why?”

            “What do you mean why?”

            “Did my father ask her to do it?”

            “Nope,” answered Jay, pressing the bandages against Damian’s dark skin. “Sometimes even supervillains do things outta the goodness of their hearts, Damian. Nobody asked her to do what she did, but she did it anyway, and I owe her for that. I’m always gonna owe her for that.”

            Sharply, Damian said, “I don’t owe her anything.”

            Jason took his hands away. “I didn’t say you did. We’re talking about me, not you. Believe me, I’m not trying to soften you up to her or anything, I’m just saying.” He said nothing, finishing up on Damian’s back. “A woman brings you back from the dead, and you wind up getting to know her pretty well. That’s all.”

            On the pillow, Damian’s eyes were closed. “When?” he asked.

            “When what?”

            “When,” repeated Damian, with a hint of impatience. “When did this happen?”

            Taken slightly aback, Jay took a moment to consider this. “I dunno,” he said. “Gotta be about fifteen years or so now.”

            “Fifteen,” echoed Damian.

            “That’s what I said.”

            Damian said nothing.

            Then, his voice very low, he asked, “Did you see me?”

            It felt like Jay’s heartbeat slowed down, as if the blood in his veins were ice. He knew that the truth would hurt Damian, but he also couldn’t bring himself to lie.

            He settled on, “Maybe. Whatever I saw or thought I saw or, hell, hoped I didn’t see, I sure as hell never expected to wind up here.”

            This was unsatisfactory, but Damian had no choice but to accept it. Taking a syringe out of the medical supplies, Jay said, “I’m gonna give you a mild sedative. Won’t knock you out, but it should help you get some sleep. That OK?”

            “Yes,” said Damian, unhappily.

            Jay hesitated, and then he experimentally laid a hand on Damian’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, with genuine regret. “I shouldn’t’ve brought you here. I should’a known it was gonna go south.”

            “No,” said Damian, shaking his head. “It’s all right.” He turned his face away from Jay. “I wanted to see her.”

            Eventually, Damian’s breath slowed as he drifted to sleep. Jay sat with him on the bed the entire night. He was struck with a profound sense of déjà vu, the sense memory of sitting on a bed next protecting a sleeping child coming back to him across all these years. He wondered where Lian Harper was today. Though the dissolution of the Teen Titans had hit Damian hard, Lian had ultimately been the mastermind, manipulated by her mother into violence against her teammates. Jay wondered if maybe Damian didn’t have more in common with Lian than he’d like to admit.

            At some point, Jason must have fallen asleep. He had a dream that he was sixteen years old and stuck behind eyes that could not see, inside a body which did not obey him. He dreamt of himself in Talia’s arms, lowering them both into the Pit together. He dreamt he saw a boy, a scar down the length of his spine, floating face down in the eerie green water.

            In the morning, Jason had to help Damian to his feet. Any pain medication must have worn off, because he seemed wracked with it, hardly able to move. When Damian was in the bathroom, Jay stood outside the door, feeling bizarrely paternal. He supposed it made sense, given his relationship with Damian’s mom, but also acknowledging that whole dynamic was weird as hell so he tried not to think about it.

            Not long after that, there was a knock on the door, and a team of Talia’s medical staff streamed in, replacing Damian’s bandages, giving him several injections, and fitting him in a spinal brace. Yasmeen oversaw this, and when it was done, she smiled at Damian and said, “We took the liberty of fetching your jet. Your mother asks that you consider staying until you are healed, Damian.”

            “No,” replied Damian shortly, as Jason helped him slip a shirt over his brace. “I want to leave now.”

            Yasmeen bowed her head in acknowledgement, then gestured to the door. Without another word, Damian headed out. Jay followed him.

            On the runway behind the compound, Talia stood before the jet. Wind blew in from the mountains, whipping her long dark hair about her face, her cloak of white and gold around her body. In the morning light, she seemed to glow. She must have been wearing heels, because she looked ungodly tall, majestic, fearsome. Despite himself, Jay felt a nostalgic tug of attraction.

            Damian stopped before her, far enough that she could not reach out to touch him. “Mother,” he said.

            “Son,” she replied, cutting him off before he could say any more. She offered him a sly smile.

            Stoically, Damian continued, “I’ll tell my father what you’ve done for me. I imagine he’ll want to look into this Leviathan business himself. I expect he’ll contact you.”

            “I promise I won’t try and kill him,” she told Damian, smoothly.

            “Don’t play games with me,” he said, his voice hard and his brow knit. “If you wish to speak to me, don’t lure me halfway around the world. I’ve left my comm codes with Yasmeen. Use them to contact me directly.”

            If it smarted that Damian gave the codes to Yasmeen instead of to her directly, Talia gave no indication of it. “I didn’t bring you here, Damian.” Her eyes flickered to Jason. “He did.”

            “On your request,” Jay shot back at her.

            “I asked you to bring him to me,” Talia replied coolly. “Not to some underground base fifty miles away where they would carve him up like a bird.”

            Mercifully, Talia didn’t think to make a crack about Robins. “Wouldn’t have done it at all if you hadn’t called me to begin with,” Jay told her, resentful. He hadn’t liked this encounter, top to bottom – he felt bone-deep guilty for getting Damian hurt in the first place, and it had not been easy to watch mother and son be so unkind to each other. It was clear, too, that Damian was struggling with something much bigger, something a whole lot deeper. In Talia's absence Damian had had a lot of time to reflect on his childhood, and Jay’d gotten the impression he wasn’t ready to forgive his mother just yet. Well. Jay could relate to that.

            “This isn’t his fault,” said Damian, without looking around at Jay. “Don’t bother him again.”

            Talia let out a tinkling laugh. “I will bother him all I want,” she said to Damian. “He owes me a debt.”

            Damian shook his head, but Jay spoke before he could. “Come on,” he said. “You can’t hang that over my hand forever, T.”

            “Then repay me,” she answered, cocking her head slightly. Her dark eyes focused on Jay, roving up and down his body, as if she could see right through him. “Last time I checked, you’re in the red for two hundred fifty thousand, about ten of my best assassins, and a helicopter, Jason.”

            Ah. So maybe the helicopter was fair: she’d lent it to him for his reintroduction back to Gotham, and he’d wound up crashing it pretty bad.

            “Those assassins were assholes,” he replied lamely. A hint of a smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

            Her gaze raked back to her son, who watched her warily, suspicious of this exchange. “I was sorry to hear about the Titans,” she told him, causing Damian’s eyebrows to immediately shoot up in surprise. “I liked Miss West very much. The two of you could have been very powerful together.”

            Damian said nothing, but Jay caught the bitterness in his expression, the resentful anger, fire with no oxygen to burn. He glanced around, away from Talia’s gaze.

            “I understand Jade Nguyen was responsible for that wreck,” Talia continued, almost offhandedly, as if commenting on the weather. “I don’t imagine it would be too difficult to hunt her down and punish her for what she put you through.”

            “No need,” murmured Damian, his eyes sliding back to Talia. “Her daughter is already on the job.”

            Talia arched one elegant eyebrow. “Is she now?” she asked, and Jay didn’t like how intrigued she sounded. When Damian refused to reply to this, Talia let out a small sigh and moved forwards, taking hold of one of her son’s hands. Damian did not pull away.

            “Ya amar,” she said to him, lifting her free hand to his face, swiping her thumb beneath his eye. “Ya rouhi.” Jason knew that one, and felt a flush of awkwardness, knowing he was intruding on something deeply personal. He looked away, trying to give them some privacy. “Ana bahebak, ya ibni. Ya’aburnee.”

            Damian said nothing, refusing to look his mother in the eye. He gave her a short nod, little more than a bob of his head.

            She slipped her hand behind his neck and pulled him downwards to press her lips against his forehead. This bent his bound back at a bad angle, and he grimaced in pain.

            For a moment, something seemed to fade from Talia’s ever-perfect veneer, and with both hands she held her son’s head, kissing him on both cheeks. There was urgency in the way she held him, a deep longing, a desperate regret. She looked like a mother who loved her son too much to let him go; and in the end, Jay figured, that wasn’t too far from the truth.

            But then she stepped back, her hands on her son’s shoulders. “Be safe,” she instructed him, stern once more. “Leviathan will be watching over you. You will not be the downfall of our line, my son. You are my pride, and my joy.”

            “I’m not an al Ghul,” he said to her, quietly.

            Her hands tightened on his shoulders, her grip vicelike. “Yes,” she said, peering hard into his eyes, fierce conviction in her voice. “You will always be an al Ghul, Damian. You will always be my son.”

            Jason and Damian left Talia on the tarmac, guiding the jet away from the rising sun. For a long time, Damian said nothing.

            “We'll need to make a stop outside Gotham,” he said. It was the first thing he’d said in hours.

            Jay glanced at him. “Why?”

            “A rudimentary inspection,” he answered, sounding bored. “For explosive devices, any kind of toxin release mechanism. Just in case.”

            “In case what?” asked Jay, frowning at him. “You think your mom hooked some kind of suicide bomb into your spine, or something?”

            Damian would have shrugged, but that hurt him so he didn’t. “Last time this happened she installed a failsafe. I wouldn’t put it past her to do it again.” He looked around at Jay and added, “I’ll have my father do a complete scan when I get home, but before we get there I’d like you to take a look first.” He repeated, “Just in case.”

            Jason’s instinct was to tell Damian that Talia would never do that to her son, but he stopped himself. It wasn’t his place to tell Damian what his mother would or wouldn’t do. Jay didn’t know her the way Damian did, and he didn’t have any right to intervene. Too much baggage Damian had to figure out how to carry for himself.

            As Damian requested, Jay found a spot outside of Gotham to set down before they reached the Manor. Damian shed his shirt and the brace, allowing Jason to inspect the wound. The jagged incision had been closed with surgical staples, which meant that a metal detector was functionally useless, so Jay used his eyes and his gloved fingers and a multipurpose scanner Bruce had developed years ago. He detected nothing amiss, which was what he’d expected, but he did a thorough job anyway.

            When he pressed too hard, Damian winced. “You want me to help you explain all this to Bruce?” Jay asked, still working.

            “No,” answered Damian. He sounded unhappy. “He’ll get angry with you for it, and that isn’t fair.”

            “Eh. I’m sorta used to it, by now.”

            Damian did not reply to this, so Jason too fell silent. He finished as best as he could, running his thumb along the staples one last time. The scarring was going to be intense, even worse than before.

            “Jason,” said Damian.

            Jay glanced up, but Damian didn’t turn around, so he could only look at the back of his head, the dark curls there. “Mhm?”

            “Thank you,” he said.

            “Aw,” said Jay, shaking his head, reaching for the bandages to cover the wound once more. “I didn’t do much. If anything, I really just fucked things up.”

            Still looking away from him, his voice low, Damian said, “You…gave me the choice. My father was never going to give that to me, albeit maybe for valid reasons, but still.” He shook his head slightly, but fell silent.

            When he did not speak again, Jay returned to reapplying bandages. He was reminded, viscerally, of sitting in the bathroom of a safehouse what felt like a thousand years ago, stitching a bullet hole closed on Damian’s arm. Damian had been fourteen years old. Back then they’d barely known each other, but Jason’s heart ached for that kid and for the kid sitting in front of him, son of the Bat, son of the Demon, a boy tugged in all directions at the mercy of those who thought they knew best for him. Though he was brilliant and competent and stronger and better than anyone Jay had ever known, Damian had never asked for any of that. Perfection came at the expense of personal freedom. First by his mother’s hand and then by the strict code of his father, Damian had been denied the luxury of choice his entire life. Now like then, Jason felt for him, an ache deep in his chest, somewhere untouchable.

            “I missed her,” said Damian. His voice sounded distant, like his head was far away.

            Jason didn’t have anything to say to that. He understood that: the searing pain of separation, even though in your heart you knew you should never, ever want to go back.

            He finished bandaging Damian up, then clapped him on the shoulder.

            “You’ll be OK, kiddo,” he told him.

            Damian let out a long breath, then reached up to run his hand through his hair. He glanced around, catching Jason’s eye.

            “Don’t call me that,” he said.

#jason todd #damian wayne #talia al ghul #earth 28 #cw for gore blood and unfortunately some child death #it was so great to have an opportunity to write talia The Right Way #catch me having a revelation about the biotube i'm so stupid for missing for 5 years

[nyxelestia]

I'm caught between 5 different plotbunnies for the Teen Wolf Big Bang.

TL;DR version:

1.) Scott sleeps with Deucalion in exchange for Deucalion taking his memories of his loved ones (ab)using him. Pro: Emphasis on Scott's trauma and martyrdom. Con: Not a big fan of the ending and can't think of a better one. 2.) Turns out Rafael molested Scott, and everyone finds out because nogitusne. Scott still resents Rafael more for leaving him than for abusing him in the first place. Pro: Emphasis on Scott's tendency to put up with a ton of abuse from people as long as they don't leave him. Con: No satisfying ending. I know how to end it, plot-wise, but no idea how to end it emotionally. (Mixed feelings about combining #1 and #2.) 3.) Chris/Melissa/Sheriff fic about the three parents growing into and embracing their new reality, and each other along with it. Pro: Lots of fluff and emotional development. Con: Plot is shitty and cliched as all hell. 4.) Sheriff gets turned into a werewolf, but with alpha!Scott. Emphasis is on the Sheriff's changing relationship with Scott (father-figure-come-beta). Pro: Father-son-figure fluff, and the dark reality of the Sheriff trying to cope with lycanthropy. Con: No real plot or narrative beyond that. (Mixed feelings about combining #3 and #4.) 5.) Scott dies in 5A, everything goes to hell. After Beacon Hills becomes a corpse-ridden ghost town, Lydia and the Nemeton arranges for Allison, Scott, and Stiles (and/or herself) to wake up that first morning all the way back in the pilot/101, with all their memories up until their death. Pro: It's the ultimate fix-it fic, with a greater emphasis on the real cost and stakes of the supernatural drama (and the value in protecting them). Con: Like zero plot whatsoever, just an idea and some vague, disconnected scenes.

Detailed explanations below cut.

Idea #1: Dark Scott/Deucalion fic.

After Season 4, Scott starts sleeping with Deucalion in exchange for Deucalion taking some of his more traumatic memories involving his loved ones (i.e. Derek's assaults of him in the first two seasons, Chris' early mistreatment of him, nogitsune!Stiles stabbing him, etc).

Despite how exploitative it sounds, Deucalion does somewhat care for Scott (as a mentor/mentee thing). Scott ends up falling in love with him a little, but this is also happening in tandem with his relationships with Kira (and later, Malia). Main Appeal: The emphasis on Scott's trauma, and how his experiences leave him open to a certain type of exploitation and vulnerable in a certain way. He's not getting rid of all traumatic memories - just the ones of people who he cares about, but have hurt him, because it was getting difficult for him to spend time around his loved ones without being scared all the time. He lets people continue to hurt and use him because he'll be able to later pretend it never happened. Main Drawback: Not sure about the ending. Part of  the reason I'd abandoned it before is that I never came up with a good ending. I kinda like how Season 6B fits into this - that ultimately, Deucalion dies, and in the absence of another alpha willing to help Scott take a short-cut through is trauma, Scott finally has to confront his trauma and self-martyrdom. I'm not sure of an ending which is just the beginning of another story or process which I know I'll never write/the reader will never see.

Idea #2: Very Dark pedophile!Rafael fic

Original plot bunny has the nogitsune revealing to all and sundry that Stiles figured out Scott was "looking for his own kiddie porn" when he broke into Rafael's laptop for Kira. Things...devolve from there.

Allison lives for no discernible reason and she and Derek debate the merits of just killing Rafael, together. Chris is hurt that they didn't invite him. :P Stiles taps into the void the nogitsune left in him to put Rafael down for good. Main Appeal: I've seen fics where Rafael abused Stiles and I've always just been like - he's got his own kid right there and for some reason never touched him? I also really want to emphasize that much like the show, Scott resents his father abandoning him more than any abuse - including this sexual abuse. This plays into his current mental state, that he'll accept almost any level of use, abuse, and mistreatment if it means his friends and pack won't leave him. (Also, given how often stories like this involve the McCall family being subsumed by Stilinski drama, I like the idea of reversing that script.) Main Drawback: I feel like this would be a little OOC for Rafael (6B made me actually like him!). While I do not say this as a gesture of abuse erasure or apologism, I quite liked his arc in the show (and was upset to not see more of it), and I'm afraid I'd be shitting on that a little with molestor!Rafael. Also, no idea how to end it. Narratively, I have the idea that Derek tries to actually get Rafael arrested and tried and convicted, wanting Scott to see and experience how wrong Rafael's actions were...but Rafael's too good to be caught, and the pack/friends just work together to kill him. Great for "rallying around and protecting Scott" feels, but no real emotional development from Scott, who would probably resent them for this, and I don't know how to fix that. (Kinda tempted to combine with #1, but that might be rather cliched - Scott getting away from one sexual abuser only to fall hard for another? I know I get irritated by "everyone's trying to fuck him/rape him" fic when it comes to Stiles, and I'd have mixed feelings about subjecting Scott to that. I think it would be very true to his character, post-Rafael, to fall into that pattern of exploitation with Deucalion - but the Deucalion fic was a little more oriented to Scott's tendency to martyrdom, whereas this one is more about Scott putting up with (ab)use to keep people close to him.)

Idea #3: Chris/Melissa/Sheriff fic (+Allison lived AU)

What it says on the tin, it's just the story of Chris, Melissa, and the Sheriff developing a relationship.

Original plot bunny was that after Season 4-ish events, Rafael is poking around, mistakes some post-supernatural circumstances for a threesome, and gets mad. Team Root Cellar initially just rolls with the farce to keep Rafael from finding out about the supernatural, but also to troll him, only for it to turn real.

But now I'm also inclined to something post-6B/show? Main Appeal: Lots of fluff, and lots of everyone starting to settle down into a new life and embracing their new reality for good. Part of that new reality is the whole "kids leaving the nest" thing (Scott, Allison, and Stiles going off to college or wherever, the trio having to build a life that isn't about/around parenting).

It’s also kind of embracing how far they've come from who they used to be (Chris going from hating werewolves to dating the True Alpha's mother and his Emissary's father, the Sheriff embracing the supernatural in terms of dating a Hunter and someone so heavily involved in werewolves, and Melissa growing as a more confident and self-assured person). Also, accidental baby is sort of a representation of a new future with these three once-disparate forces of Beacon Hills now united as one. Main Drawback: There isn't much of a plot to this. My current ideas, post-S4 or post-6B, are basically a series of interconnected one-shots. I also feel that in most ways, it would be a little cliched - older parents finding a new love life after their kids are gone, accidental baby feels cliche (even if what it's representing is not).

Idea #4: Turned!Sheriff with Alpha!Scott

Exactly what it says on the tin. At some nebulous point during or soon after the events of the show, somehow the Sheriff gets Bitten by a rogue alpha or something. He turns, but now has to deal with being a werewolf.

In particular, what I intend to be different about this AU is that the Sheriff doesn't magically cope well with the changes. While he is level-headed, he isn't the best at self-control, and does have a lot of issue that'll make full moons downright nasty. And while the enhanced strength and senses are nice (especially as Derek teaches him how to use them), the loss of alcohol/drinking is not. Main Appeal: I see so many fics that focus on the Melissa and Stiles relationship, I wanted to flip that on its head a bit, and focus on Scott and the Sheriff. Ironically, Stiles isn't actually in it all that much, with the focus being on the Sheriff's relationships with Scott (and somewhat, Derek). Scott has to be the Sheriff's alpha, despite also being like his second son. It's a hard transition for them both, for different reasons. And since I did love the Derek and Sheriff relationship, Derek teaches the Sheriff to use his senses to benefit his job. (Also, while Stiles isn't in it much, he is still in it - and he's there for the Sheriff's first Full Moon. It's exactly as horrifying as you'd expect. Main Drawback: Again, no real plot. I have a premise and I have some scenes in mind, but no overarching plot, and no real character arc beyond "Sheriff and Scott forging a new relationship in their new reality, while still maintaining a bit of the older paternalism". (...maybe I could combine this with the threesome fic...? Except that that fic was intended to be about all three parents, whereas this would make it overwhelmingly Sheriff-focused.)

Idea #5: Time Travel Fix-It fic.

Basically, Scott actually dies in the end of 5A and stays dead, and everything just goes straight to hell after that. After a lot of 6B-like tensions, bloodshed and carnage, and the Ghost Riders, Beacon Hills is a desolate Ghost Town with nothing left but corpses, and Lydia left wandering around in it.

She goes to the Nemeton and ~magic happens~ and her, Scott, Stiles, and Allison all wake up the very first morning from the pilot with all their memories of the future until they died. (And maybe not even Lydia, just the trio. Or, alternatively, only her, and she has to try to prevent everything.) Main Appeal: A huge re-focus back on Season 1, and how all of the insanity of later seasons holds up against that. The events of the later seasons make the Season 1 drama look so small - yet at the same time, the stakes are higher because of those consequences. Part of what I think was lost in later seasons was that there was less grief and shock in lost lives, so even as the body count rose, the stakes didn't feel like they were rising, too. But going back to Season 1 would put the focus back on that loss of life (with everyone alive and well, again - but all that darkness and evil just waiting for them).

I also like the idea of characters getting to see each other at different stages of development - Allison getting to see the the awesome alpha and badass banshee Scott and Lydia came to be, Scott coming to admire her powers (since she didn't learn how to use them outside of death knells until 5B), and a lot of wary respect of the kind of capable yet dark person Stiles ultimately became without Scott (or Allison) to temper him. Main Drawback: This idea has the least plot out of all my ideas. You can probably tell by the fact I'm not even 100% sure who I'd want effectively going back in time to fix things. Even if they do - I'm not sure of the ripple effects and consequences, what I want to happen, etc. I have a vague idea that they kind of...speed up the rate of attacks (basically, instead of pacing over several years, all the villains pop up almost at once), and the heroes ultimately using that to their advantage by turning/using all these villains against each other, somehow.

But I have no concrete plans for any of this, just a cool idea and a lot of individual scenes in my head.

#teen wolf big bang #twbb #teen wolf #nyxie talks about her writing #nanowrimo #nanowrimo 2017

[texanredrose]

Handle With Care

Zearth asked me a while back about this headcanon in the context of a Bee’s Schnee relationship and... well, this is my answer, expanded. Also, featuring a younger version of the Bee’s Schnee twins from Odd One Out. (I didn’t expect it to get this long or this... heavy.)

Yang trudged through the door, weary down to her bones and only managing to punch in the alarm's code through muscle memory. Her brain and all thought processes had shut down a while ago. Taking the missions every now and again to thin the remaining Grimm was a necessary byproduct of their lives but, sometimes, it wore on her harder than others. This particular group had consisted of several Alphas, long enough in the tooth for her to have not even a second's respite throughout the grueling battle. The next time the mission alert recommended two Huntresses tackling the task, she wouldn't be so quick to assure her wives that she had it well in hand.

The blonde rolled her neck, trying to work out some of the tension still present while activating the alarm again; riding in an airship's cargo hold as opposed to an actual seat had left her unable to sleep on the long trip back, but it would be worth it in the end. The next regularly scheduled flight didn't leave for another four hours and that was just too long to wait. She missed her lovers and her kids and, considering it would take at least a day to recover from the rigorous mission, she wanted to be at home as soon as possible to begin that process. Weiss and Blake wouldn't mind if she missed the next doctor's appointment, but she'd never forgive herself if she did.

Yang did her best to shut the big, solid oak door softly, kicking off her boots and pushing them to the side. She'd probably get an eyeroll for not putting them up in the little cubby holes off to the side of the entry way but she'd apologize for it. Honestly, she didn't even have the strength for a shower and her thighs protested just the thought of climbing the staircase to get to the bedroom. Not to mention all the racket she'd likely create in the process- it was the middle of the night and her family deserved to sleep.

With a quiet groan, she knelt down by the reinforced steel box beside the doorway, flicking her wrists to put Ember Celica in their expanded forms and popping open the bolt covers so she could reach the fresh belts of ammunition. She would usually do this before even setting foot in the house but her coordination wasn't the best and dropping the blasted things wouldn't do her any good. Clumsily, she pulled the belts free and punched in the code, activating the latch beneath the lid and waiting for the beep before opening the box and depositing the live shells. She flicked her wrists again to collapse the gauntlets, shutting the box and waiting for the locks to engage once more before forcing herself to her feet, expression pinching into one of agony. Yeah, she definitely wasn't getting up those stairs tonight, and her aura had taken too much of a beating for her to risk speeding along her recovery just yet.

With a sigh, she lumbered over to the doorway leading into the living room, bleary lilac eyes falling on the couch. It wasn't the most comfortable or preferable, but it would do in a pinch, and she really didn't have the strength to crawl into bed with her wives right then. The blonde didn't even bother easing herself down, effectively faceplanting onto the furniture and releasing a quiet groan of relief. Tomorrow, she'd make it up to Blake and Weiss, she swore, but tonight she just wanted to get what sleep she could before sitting down to breakfast in the morning.

The only thing she managed to do before drifting into a deep sleep was turn so her artificial limb was on the inside of the couch, preventing her from a rude awakening if the weight of it happened to pull her off in the middle of the night. She should probably disconnect it, but the stand for the blasted thing sat on the triad's dresser and she'd already made her decision on that front.

At least she'd wake up in a few hours to see her family; that alone would be worth taking the earliest possible flight back.

Blake sighed fondly, leaning against the doorway into their living room with a smile on her lips. She'd awoken sometime last night, thinking she'd heard the front door, but had gone back to sleep convinced it was her imagination. Apparently, she was very wrong, seeing as one of her wives was currently passed out on the couch, somehow sprawled across the thing despite how uncomfortable it looked, having one leg thrown up and over the back of the couch like that. Judging from the slightly awkward angle of her right shoulder, the Faunus could surmise that Yang hadn't bothered taking off her prosthetic, which meant she was definitely exhausted from her latest mission.

"Blake? Is everything alright?" She turned, seeing Weiss carrying the twins down the stairs effortlessly despite their size. The healthy six year-olds looked just as confused as their mother, Noire's ears cocking forward just in time to catch the soft snore coming from the living room at about the same time the woman continued, blue eyes falling on the doorway. More specifically, the muddy boots sitting just to the right of the door. "Ah, I see Yang's home."

"Momma's home?" Zise looked around, as if the blonde would materialize simply because her name was said.

"Momma's home!" Her sister cheered, having heard the proof herself.

Almost immediately, the twins began squirming, not enough for Weiss to lose her grip on either but getting their point across regardless. The moment she reached the landing, their mother set them down, allowing the two to rush over to the doorway, where Blake stopped them in their tracks.

"Momma's sleeping and she's very tired. Don't wake her up just yet, okay?" Although it was hard, she managed to stand firm against the dual pleading looks. "I mean it; you can go in, but at least wait until breakfast is ready."

"Okay!" They responded before darting past her, suppressing their giggles as much as possible as they rushed over to stand beside the couch.

"I could've helped, you know," she said as Weiss came to stand beside her, adjusting her bolero. Yang's last message indicated she might not get in until early afternoon, so they'd decided to have everyone dressed and ready first thing in the morning to ensure they could meet the woman at the airport. Naturally, their wife had somehow managed to get home earlier, negating that, but they were still happy to have her home and in one piece. Plus, now they didn't have to worry about getting the girls dressed or the mischievous duo playing with their food at breakfast, seeing as they were both wearing their favorite outfits that they consciously tried to avoid getting dirty.

If only they had more outfits they held in such high regard.

"Nonsense; you're pregnant, Blake. You don't need the added stress, trust me." The woman waved off her comment easily. "Besides, Zise loves wearing her overalls and Noire absolutely adores that dress; they practically did all the work for me."

The Faunus rolled her eyes but let the subject drop, smoothing out her maternity shirt. Five months along and she was beginning to show, which, while exciting, also had her nervous. The doctor's appointment just around the corner should soothe her worries though- or at least, that's what she hoped. "I suppose we should-"

"I will take care of breakfast." Weiss patted her shoulder gently, a smile on her lips. "Stay here and watch the kids; you know they'll fidget in place until they wake her up if you don't keep an eye on them."

"And then we'll both catch the third degree for it, too." It felt so strange, being treated so delicately after years of fighting tooth and nail for every little bit of ground gained, but she full well knew it had nothing to do with her wives' confidence in her abilities. Now that they were mostly at peace, with the Grimm a resilient but minor threat being chased to extinction in the kingdoms' wilderness, there was time to relax, and she just happened to be the one enjoying it for the moment. She and Yang had already agreed that Weiss was next in line to be pampered, once the newest addition to their family was old enough to start on formula. Until then, she would just have to accept that her wives weren't inclined to let her do anything strenuous or stressful.

While Weiss went off to start on breakfast, Blake watched as the twins sat in front of the couch, just staring at the sleeping blonde. Neither had yet to truly understand the concept of patience, so it was only a manner of time before they tried to crawl onto the furniture and 'accidentally' wake Momma up, but the Faunus had a sneaking suspicion that Yang wouldn't mind in the slightest waking up to their daughters' poor attempt at being courteous. All three of them loved the twins but the blonde had taken to motherhood quicker than a duck to water, though she could be a bit... extreme in some regards. She effectively raised Ruby after the death of Summer, and a child as energetic and curious as their team leader had likely warranted such measures. It was Yang's strict policy that one of them be with the twins at all times and she'd taken the most convincing when it came time for them to begin sleeping in their own room. It wasn't paranoia, per se... but it veered along those lines sometimes.

As the faint smell of cooked eggs wafted from the kitchen, Blake inhaled deeply, utterly content with the morning thus far. She'd finally passed the morning sickness portion of her pregnancy, and her appetite now vastly exceeded her diet even during the height of her huntress training. Just smelling the sure-to-be delicious food had her mouth watering.

"I think it's time to wake Momma up," she said, taking a few steps into the room. "Then, we can eat."

Suddenly, everything was in slow motion, or maybe it just felt that way because of how quickly she processed the information because her body simply couldn't keep up. The twins jumped up, excited to wake the sleeping woman, and they'd gone with their first inclination- shake her awake. Tiny little hands reached out, and that's when she saw the problem as it unfolded; Zise wasn't watching where she was about to touch, her gaze focused on Yang's face.

Before she could say a word, though, the blonde snapped awake.

Yang awoke on high alert, brought to that heightened awareness that came so easily to those with small children the instant she felt tiny little fingers brush between the skin of her forearm near the cool metal of Ember Celica. She immediately jerked her arm away, eyes opening so crimson red could scan the immediate area before landing on the two little ones standing by the couch, one looking markedly more guilty than the other.

"ZISE! WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT TOUCHING MOMMA'S BRACELETS?" She sat up, created distance, checked her wrist twice to ensure the weapon hadn't activated, all the while her heart thundered in her chest. A thousand possibilities flashed through her mind's eye, each one more terrible than the last.

"Yang, calm down-"

"S-sorry, Momma-"

"I DON'T WANT TO HEAR 'SORRY' ZISE!" Yang checked her other arm, ensuring that the lack of sensation in her right limb hadn't led to the gauntlet being activated without her being the wiser. Once satisfied Ember Celica was in the same condition as she'd fallen asleep- with no changes made without her knowledge- she turned her heated gaze on her daughters, both of whom looked chagrined. She could hear the blood pounding in her ears, the pure shot of adrenaline from sheer terror just barely beginning to subside. "I'VE TOLD BOTH OF YOU SEVERAL TIMES. NEVER TOUCH MOMMA'S BRACELETS, EVER."

"Yang." Her gaze snapped to Blake, standing just on the other side of the coffee table and leveling an impressive glare her way. "Stop yelling at them."

"I'M NOT-" She growled, rubbing at her wrist absently with her artificial hand and switching tracks, her mind too fuzzy from the abrupt wake-up call to register how the Faunus had gotten downstairs or dressed so quickly. "You were supposed to be watching them!"

That, as it turned out, was the very wrong thing to say, amber eyes alighting as the Faunus prepared to launch into a tirade of her own.

"What is going on in here?" Weiss came into the room at a jog, wearing an apron over her clothes and showing the barest hints of recent use, a splotch of something shining wetly on her chest. One look around the room was all she needed to assess the situation, snapping off crisp orders before anyone could start explaining themselves. "Nevermind. Blake, take the twins into the den. Yang, in the kitchen, now."

"But-"

"Now, Yang." She pointed for emphasis, blue eyes turning hard as diamonds. "I won't repeat myself."

Clenching her jaw, Yang shot up, her muscles protesting the movement but she was too angry to care, marching past both of her wives. She stormed across the foyer, into the other hallway, and ducked into the first doorway on the left. She immediately turned around, crossing her arms over her chest and fully prepared for the impending argument.

She wasn't quite ready enough, however.

"Just what do you think you're doing?" Weiss started the moment she rounded the corner, her voice low but edged with ice.

"We have a rule, one I thought all of us agreed on," she replied, keeping her voice just barely below her normal speaking tone. "They know better. If Zise had-"

"They were trying to wake you up, Yang; they weren't trying to play with your gauntlets." Although shorter, the woman had always possessed the ability to seem larger, the straightening of her spine doing little for her physical height but intimidating all the same. It had been years since the last time she'd actively employed the 'patented Schnee intimidation technique' on the blonde, yet here it was, plain as day. "They were excited and not paying attention. Can you really blame them? You've been gone three weeks-"

"Oh, so just because I haven't been here, the rules go out the window, huh?" She refused to back down, beginning to pace around her wife to throw off the sensation of being towered over. Yang was fully aware she had to tilt her chin down to look the woman in the eye but their arguments always put them on equal footing somehow, in a way she could never properly articulate. "It's for their safety, Weiss. You know what happens when Ember Celica is triggered. What if she'd gotten her hand caught in the gears when it opened or the back plate shot out too quick and she freaked out? She could've been hurt!"

"And instead, she's crying her eyes out in the den thinking her Momma hates her!" Weiss snapped back, positively incensed and willing to match the blonde step for step.

Yang jerked back, furrowing her brows. "Don't blow this out of proportion, Weiss; I just told her-"

"You didn't tell her anything! Or Noire, for that matter!" The shorter woman took a step forward, jabbing a finger in her face. "All you've ever told them is to not touch your 'bracelets', and they don't. But you've never told them why. They both have no idea why you're overreacting like this. To them, Zise accidentally did something, and you immediately yelled at her after being gone for three weeks. That's the first thing you did after coming home. Noire's scared she did something too; they just don't understand why you're so upset!" She drew back, a scowl on her features. "Do you have any idea what that feels like, Yang? Neither of them were paying any attention to what they were doing, they were just sitting there waiting for the opportunity to wake you up because they missed you, and now they're convinced you're angry with them."

The blonde exhaled heavily through her nose, flexing her hands while trying to keep her anger in check. "I'm trying to keep them safe."

"I understand that, but you're being overprotective and needlessly aggressive." The severe line of the woman's shoulders relaxed slightly, blue eyes softening. "You're exhausted and you've always been a bit too strict with them- and I know you have their best interests at heart, but really, Yang? You really don't see anything wrong with how you handled the situation?"

"I-" She paused, taking a moment to actually think about the question. Weiss had a point. They'd rarely, if ever, raised their voices at the twins, either in anger or reprimand. A stern tone was usually all they needed to get their point across, and even then it was rarely warranted; they were well behaved and the most mischief they got into usually included Ruby visiting, helping them sneak sweets before supper or something of the like. Even the dreaded 'terrible twos' weren't that bad, from what Weiss recounted. "I... could've handled it better."

Her wife nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. "I know most of that was the jet lag and the mission; you're still exhausted and you didn't mean to be so short with them. But they don't really understand that. None of us have returned from a mission this long, or this difficult." She took a step closer, reaching up to cup the blonde's jaw, lithe fingers gently working at the lingering tension. "You know Zise wouldn't intentionally disobey us, or Noire. It was an accident."

"But what if she'd triggered it?" Raising her left hand, Yang looked at the slightly tarnished metal, the newest coat of paint already showing signs of wear. Years of fighting had turned the metal underneath to a black mess of carbon that she'd never be able to get completely clean and the heat from long, sustained firing during battles long past had nearly made both of her weapons inoperable, warping the metal to conform to her forearms even more. She'd probably need to upgrade to something new soon, or rebuild the model; her fighting style had altered slightly over the years and Ember Celica did the job, but she could do more. Not that she had an abundance of opportunities to look forward to, though. "You know it doesn't take much- a flare of aura, a flick of my wrist."

"Neither of them have unlocked their aura yet and the mechanism relies on your movement anyway; we both know no one can operate Ember Celica if you're unconscious or you'd never have fallen asleep with them on in the first place," Weiss said, shaking her head with a small smile. "You'd sooner walk around in full plate armor than risk them activating while you’re taking a nap. And they're both unloaded, correct?"

"Yeah..." Her muscles relaxed somewhat, the anger bleeding away as her head cleared. Without the fog of waking up in a panic, she could at least acknowledge that the chance of anything happening was minuscule at best. That was part of her argument for keeping her weapons on her person at all times; unlike Myrtenaster and Gambol Shroud, Ember Celica posed virtually no threat when unloaded, possessing no sharp edges. Her wives' blades were locked up in a bulletproof glass case in the foyer, on display but still within reach and fully loaded for those possessing the access code- and one of the triad's fingerprints. Blush and Wilt sat in Blake's reading nook under lock and key, and Blitzkreig in Weiss' study if they needed means of self defense and couldn't get to the foyer, plus a few cheap, run-of-the-mill weapons Ruby had confiscated from cache raids while chasing the last remnants of militant groups across Remnant. Yang kept Ember Celica, though, seeing as they could be discreetly hidden from the naked eye and would provide her a way to defend herself and the twins if anything were to happen... which, considering the veritable fortress they'd built for a home and the eradication of the White Fang and the SDC's unsavory business practices, their enemies numbered less than ten, if that. "Maybe I am a bit... overprotective at times."

"Try 'all the time'." Her fingers slid to the back of the blonde's neck, tracing along her hairline. "If they understood why you don't want them touching Ember Celica, it might help them understand why you reacted so badly. But being hard on them without explanation or due cause won't help them understand; they'll just jump to conclusions the same way you jump to the worst case scenario. You need to talk to them, Yang, and especially Zise."

"She doesn't really believe I hate her... does she?" Yang frowned, brought down from her rage entirely by the soothing fingers on her neck and her wife's voice. Even if it was the worst way to wake up, it was finally sinking in that she should've at least greeted her family before reprimanding the twins; three long weeks trekking through wilderness had brought with it the bittersweet longing for home that wouldn't go away for a few more days. She didn't want to spend them with one of their daughters cowering from her.

A cloud passed over the woman's face, prompting her to retract her hand. "I can't say if she truly believes it... but she remembers how my father acted around her and Noire, and there were certainly enough times growing up that I believed he hated me." Weiss turned, heading back towards the stove, which had a frying pan filled with half cooked scrambled eggs sitting atop a cold burner. "Go talk to them and apologize to Blake."

She winced, scratching at the back of her head. "I... did kinda snap at her too, huh?"

"Yes, you did, and you are digging yourself out of that one." With a practiced flick of her wrist, she turned on one of the other burners and moved the pan over. "Smoothing things over with the twins is one thing, but you definitely earned the doghouse this time." She paused, just before grabbing the abandoned spatula on the counter. "Or would it be the scratching post?"

"Princess, babe, I love you, but you still need to work on your sense of humor," Yang said, chuckling at the terrible attempt at a pun that somehow brought a smile to her lips anyway.

"And you need to work on not spending another night on the couch- this time, involuntarily. Mommy Blake is not happy you were yelling at the twins and while I'm not too crazy about it myself, I wasn't there to witness it. You still need to talk to her before it's all said and done."

What little mirth she had fled at that reminder, heading out of the kitchen and back across the foyer, opting to skip the lecture while she could and putting her boots up as she passed. It was little more than a stall tactic, true, but it did make her feel a little better knowing that she wasn't trying to earn her wives' ire. However, she couldn't avoid the reckoning forever, and found herself standing just outside the den before she could really process how she'd gotten there. She still felt exhausted from the trip and the long weeks away, but all that fell away as she heard a tiny voice thick with tears speak.

"I didn't mean it, Mommy." A hiccuping sob. "I didn't. I'm sorry."

"Hush, little one, Momma knows that and so do I." Blake soothed, her voice soft and it nearly broke Yang's heart. "You'll see. Mommy promises you; Momma's not mad."

"B-but-"

"Zise," she said, stepping into the den and seeing the twins curled beside Blake, one on each side. Noire was quiet, more so than usual, with her ears pinned back against her skull and silent tears slipping down her cheeks. Her twin was louder, crying softly as she pressed into the Faunus' right side, face screwing up more as the blonde entered the room and a fresh round of sobs spilled forth. Yang's brow knit together, heart clenching painfully even as Blake shot a glare her way. "Come here, Zise. I'm not mad. You too, Noire."

There was a single moment of hesitation that tore at her, where it looked like neither of her daughters might leave their Mommy's side, but both carefully clambered off the den's couch and ran over to her. Yang knelt down, just in time to catch the twins, one in each arm, as they buried themselves into her shoulders. She held them tight, tears stinging at her eyes; it felt so good to hold them both again, and she swore they were bigger now than before she left.

"I'm s-" Zise started but she quickly cut the little one off, her tone soft.

"No, I'm sorry. Momma shouldn't have yelled," she said, turning her head to plant a kiss against each of the little heads pressed against her. "Momma was tired but that's no excuse. I'm sorry, Zise." The little girl continued crying, though her sobs had died down some. "Hey. Look at me." She waited for purple tinged blue to look up at her- unlike the blonde, her daughter's eyes changed with every powerful emotion, not just anger- before she repeated herself. "I'm sorry."

"'s'okay." She scrubbed at her face, eyes returning to their normal baby blue. "I'm sorry I touched your bracelet."

Yang sighed, weighing her options. Unfortunately, it really only left her one path to take, because she could still hear the warble in her daughter's voice. She had to make sure both of them understood what got her so upset. "We're gonna go to the practice room now, okay? Just for a little bit, and then we'll sit down for breakfast." The blonde looked up, seeing surprise evident in Blake's expression. "There's something I need to show you, first."

Slowly, the Faunus nodded; between the three of them, it was Yang who vehemently argued against the twins starting any sort of combat training. They'd lost so much during the years fighting against Salem that just the thought of the twins following in their mothers' footsteps made her panic a little, and the Grimm threat was so reduced now that it might be completely eradicated by the time they were old enough to attend a combat school. Surely her little ones could take a nice, safe desk job at the SDC or something, right?

Weiss and Blake doubted it. They'd told her several times that a lack of Grimm didn't always mean a lesser need for Huntresses and Atlas still had a standing army to consider. Plus, if they were anything like their mothers, they'd get the itch for adventure, especially if Ruby kept bringing over those storybooks Yang used to read her when she was their age.

Yang looked down, seeing the confusion and surprise in her daughters' eyes, the twins exchanging a glance before nodding. Noire still hadn't said anything, not even a mumbled 'okay' like her sister, which had the blonde a bit worried, but she hoped it would all make sense soon.

She stood up and turned to head back out into the hall, bending down a little to take a small hand in each of hers. With a deep breath to steady her nerves, she led the twins down the hall, back across the foyer and down another hall to the practice room. There, she had to release Zise's hand to activate the keypad, the door sliding open a moment later. When it closed behind the three, she led them to a little area off to the side that acted as a sort of observation deck, elevated just slightly and surrounded by bullet proof glass, with a bench for sitting. They'd originally installed it so one of them could watch the other's technique, ensure they weren't getting sloppy now that they didn't have Beacon's full facilities or a seemingly endless supply of people after their necks, but it would work well for what she had in mind now.

"I need both of you to stay in here, okay? Watch me, but don't leave this box."

"Okay, Momma," Zise replied, her twin offering a slightly subdued response, but at least she said something. It seemed curiosity was winning out over concern they might be in trouble.

"Good. Just watch me. That's all I want you two to do." Tension brought her shoulders together as she turned around and went back out, towards a little staging area outside of the 'hot zone', as they'd taken to calling it. The room itself was reinforced and designed to withstand their standard attacks and the projectors could only create hard light opponents, so it wasn't the same amount of utility as the ones back at Beacon, but it suited its purpose just fine. With only a small tremble in her fingers, Yang input the code to access the ammunition box, pulling two fresh belts out and laying them on a nearby table for the moment.

It felt strange, to some extent. She was the one who didn't want them training, she was the one who absolutely forbade anyone from carrying loaded weapons in the house, and she was the one who would glare at anyone who didn't immediately store their weapon when they came to visit, aside from the exceptions of close family. Even then, she would watch them, because- unlike everyone except her own father- she remembered all too vividly when Ruby got to the age of playing with whatever happened to be lying around. They didn't have any weapons in the house at that point- she never learned what her father did with his, and he was often too morose to mention anything that could lead on a tangent back to Summer- but that didn't stop her little sister from getting into a whole world of trouble.

"Alright." She wasn't sure if that was for her benefit or the twins' but, when she turned around, both sets of blue eyes were upon her. "I'm going to show you why I don't want you touching my bracelets." She held out both her arms. "I don't say it because I want to be upset with you... I say it because it can be dangerous." With quick motions of her wrist, Ember Celica began to expand, the mechanisms clicking and whirring while the twins jerked back in surprise. "You know Mother and Mommy have their weapons, right?" Although a little delayed in responding, the duo nodded their heads. "Good. These are my weapon. They're called Ember Celica." She walked closer and knelt down, allowing both of her daughters to marvel over the shotgun gauntlets. "This is part of why I didn't want you two touching them. It doesn't take much to activate, and they could hurt you."

Zise and Noire looked up at her then, surprise showing clear in their expressions, and Yang mentally acknowledged that she'd have to bite the bullet and admit Weiss was right. They likely had thought they weren't supposed to touch the bracelets simply because she told them not to, completely bereft of the context to what an unintentional activation could cause.

"You can touch them, if you want." She bit her lip lightly, curling her hands into fists so they wouldn't see the way she trembled. "Only now, though."

The twins looked at each other, exchanging one of those silent conversations that none of them could begin to decipher before reaching a decision. Carefully, they laid their tiny little hands on the cool metal. They traced along the different pieces as lilac eyes watched, trying to look everywhere at once as the irrational fear mounted. She hadn't put the ammunition in and it took kinetic force to trigger the pump action, but knowing that and not thinking it could happen anyway appeared to be two different things.

"That's why we can't touch them?" Noire lifted her gaze, but retracted her hand at the same time. "Because they move?"

"It's part of the reason," she replied, gently pulling her arms back and out of Zise's reach. "Go back behind the glass. I'm going to show you the other reason, okay?"

With a few nods, the twins retreated back to their previous spots while the blonde went back to retrieve the ammunition belts. She made sure to keep an eye on the little ones, that they were well behind the glass before opening the bolt covered and fitting the belts through. Normally, she wouldn't be as careful or as nervous, but neither would Zise and Noire be present. Keeping that in mind, she made sure the barrel of her weapons always towards the blackened back wall, scored by fire and chipped by ice and bullets from use. They would probably need to replace that top coating on the door before it got too weak; the last thing they wanted was to create a ricochet prone backdrop and pouring tonnes of dirt to create a mound inside wasn't entirely practical. Ruby would be able to fix the problem easily, though, and she made a mental note to ask about that, later.

With both belts in place, she closed the bold covers and took a deep breath. "Polly, begin simulation."

"Simulation active." Perhaps it was a bittersweet form of torture but, when Ruby had partnered with SDC scientists to create a suitable program to run their practice room, she's used the copy of Penny's audio files General Ironwood had given her years prior. She didn't have a physical body- at least, not yet- and this version didn't posses the ability of sentience like the real Penny did but it reminded them all of the odd little ginger they'd met back before everything went to shit. Memories of those 'good ol' days' flashed through her mind, as they did every time she came to blow off some steam or just brush up on her skills, bringing both the melancholy of lost friends and appreciation for what they still had, even after fighting to the edge of oblivion and back. "Welcome back, Yang. Please select your regimen."

"One beowolf, stationary target," she said, looking over at the twins. "Remember, you're safe right where you are. It's okay."

Noire and Zise looked confused for a brief moment before the holograms hummed to life, constructing a life sized beowolf in the center of the hot zone. Hard light shaped the planes of its bone plates much better than the texture of fur, but when the light fell away and it turned darker, more closely resembling the actual creature, she heard two gasps from her left. Now they recognized the creature, having seen them occasionally in those damned books Ruby brought. She honestly had hoped they'd never become familiar with the creatures of Grimm at all.

"Simulation begin."

"This is the other reason." She waited until the twins looked at her, ensuring they saw what was about to happen, before raising her left arm. Then, she flared her aura, activating the trigger and sending a single round flying into the hard light construct. It immediately shattered into pieces- the years of fighting had allowed her to upgrade to a bigger caliber, and Ruby's innovations with Dust from the SDC certainly hadn't hurt- in tandem with the sound of the blast echoing off the walls, causing Noire and Zise to jump closer together. With smoke still rising from the barrel, Yang lowered her arm.

"Simulation end."

"Polly, begin simulation." The blonde raised her right arm. The prosthetic had undergone a few... revisions since that fateful day. Between Ruby, Ironwood, and a few others, the simple replacement had been transformed into a weapon all its own, strong enough to deflect all but the red Dust blades that could cut through anything and with a built in, Dust infused power core than transformed Ember Celica's rounds from a simple projectile to a highly modded blast of destruction whenever she fired. "Five beowolves, 'I' formation, stationary targets."

The holograms sprung to life once more, hard light forming into five more beowolves standing in front of her.

"Simulation begin."

Unlike with her left, firing with her right arm took a few seconds to charge. The dull hum was just white noise to her now, like the sound of her own breathing, something she could consciously acknowledge but usually filtered out completely. The sharp crack of the round firing, however, resounded ten times louder than the previous shot, blowing all five of her conjured opponents into fragments that dispersed in the blink of an eye. The startled cry her daughters gave, however, nearly broke her focus, a glance confirming the two had started clinging to each other with wide eyes as the hard light projections disappeared, leaving only a faint trail of smoke from her arm and a fresh scorch mark on the wall.

"Simulation end."

Lowering her artificial limb slowly, Yang waited until the faint whir of the mechanics died down before popping open the bolt covers again, removing the nearly full belts and replacing them in the ammo container. When she turned around, she waited for the little ones to calm down before speaking.

"Do you understand now?" Her expression lost some of its severity as she took a few steps forward, holding up both of her forearms. "Momma's bracelets aren't just jewelry; Ember Celica is just as dangerous as Mytenaster and Gambol Shroud. Not all the time, but they can be." With a flick of her wrists, the weapon began collapsing again until they were nothing but bracelets once more. "That's why I don't want either of you touching them. You could get hurt, and I would never forgive myself if that happened."

She walked back over until she was in the safe zone, somewhat relieved when neither of her daughters drew back from fear. Instead, they seemed a bit... confused.

"But, Momma..." Noire bit her lip, ears twitching slightly. "Can they do that without the box things?"

"Do what?" Both twins looked to the side, at the scorch mark that just now had stopped smoking. "Oh, the bullets. Well, no. They can only do that if they're loaded. Uh- if they have the things in box."

"Then... they won't go 'boom', right?" Zise's eyes flew open, hiding her hands behind her back. "We won't touch 'em! Just... they can't do that, right?"

"You always put the box things back." Her twin noted, also tucking her hands away from view. "We can't hug you until you put the box things back when you come home. You always put the box things back."

Yang sighed, kneeling down to look at her daughters. "Yes, I always put the box things back, and yes, they won't go 'boom' without the box things. But... what you have to understand is that... Momma's afraid." Her brows drew together as she tried to formulate an explanation they would understand. She didn't want to worry or scare them but she needed to be certain they understood. "Before you were born, Your Mother, Your Mommy, and I all went to school, so we could learn how to fight creatures like the fake ones in here." She looked back to where the hard light beowolves stood. "Back then, they were everywhere, and we had to fight every day to keep them from hurting people. Then things got worse." Her gaze then fell to her artificial limb. "A lot worse. Momma... lost some friends. We all did. We lost a lot during that time. And I almost lost your Mother, your Mommy... and you two." Taking a shuddering breath as tears stung at her eyes, Yang reached out to her daughters, pulling them into a tight hug. "That was the most scared I'd ever been, and I swore I would do whatever it takes to keep you safe. You two, Mother, Mommy- everyone, because I'd already lost so much and I was scared of losing even more. I... I can't lose my babies, too." A sob burst from her chest as she squeezed her eyes tight, trying to stymie the tears. "So even if it doesn't make sense, Momma's gonna worry. Momma's gonna be scared. Because I love you two so much and I don't ever want anything bad to happen to you."

Tiny hands fisted her jacket, the twins burying their heads in her shoulders and making soft, calming noises. She didn't mean to cry- she tried to never cry in front of them, because she remembered watching her Dad's agony and Qrow's drunken pain and it always hurt knowing she couldn't make things better- but the tears came anyway.

"I love you both so much."

"We love you too, Momma," Noire said, her own voice thick with tears.

"Uh huh!" Zise chimed in as well and it didn't take visual proof for her to suspect that the little girl was crying already. "I'm sorry-"

"I'm sorry, too." It took a few shuddering breaths for her to regain composure but she somehow managed it, drawing back from her daughters to wipe at her eyes. "This morning was an accident and I was wrong to yell at you two." She sniffled. "So... what did we learn?"

"Don't touch Momma's bracelets, 'cause they could hurt us," Noire said.

Zise continued. "And be more careful when we wake Momma up."

The corner of her lips pulled up in a small grin. "And Momma learned not to yell over nothing. It was just an accident." She stood up, turning towards the door. "Now, come on. Mother's making breakfast and I'm sure it'll be delicious."

When she didn't hear the patter of little feet following after her, the blonde turned around with a raised brow, left to wonder for a few moments more as the twins had another of their conversations. Blake and Weiss insisted it was common for twins to be able to read each other's microexpressions and the like much easier than other people could, making verbal conversation unnecessary, while Yang asserted they were essentially telepathic in contrast. Either way, the two came to a conclusion and, in very soft voices while holding their arms up, posed their query.

"Will you carry us?"

Normally, she wouldn't. Weiss would coddle them- that's what the blonde called it, anyway, but it was certainly something the triad would never see eye-to-eye on- and lavish the twins with all the physical contact and loving affirmations she never received as a child. She, on the other hand, advocated for doing so sparingly, encouraging them to carry themselves and gain as much experience and reliance on themselves now, while the triad was there to watch over them, because she knew kids never stayed kids long enough, not in their world. Blake struck a middle ground, saving some gestures for when they'd done something well or when they asked for it but mainly leaving them to their own devices. Yang was never cruel or neglectful but the twins knew that, if it wasn't play time, she wasn't going to pick them up.

But after the excitement from the morning, and being gone for three weeks, and missing her daughters more than anything, she could let some things slide.

"C'mere." She knelt down, arms open wide, and wasn't the least bit surprised when the twins shot forward without further prompting, already trying to find themselves solid holds on her jacket. That's when she got an idea, her grin widening a bit. "Hey, you two wanna be top of the world?"

The twins looked at each other for a moment before nodding.

Carefully, she lifted them up until they were sitting on her shoulders. She used to do it with Ruby, when her sister was small enough, and she did it with Weiss and Blake on occasion, but those times were distant memories now and it worried her, even though she had her hands curled around their legs to keep them in place.

"Hold onto Momma's jacket, okay?" She turned back towards the door. "... and don't grab Momma's hair."

Both of them giggled, because the one time Qrow had done it as a joke she'd managed to maintain her tenuous grip on her fury until well after the twins were out of earshot, though she did turn an impressive shade of purple from the force of holding her rage in, according to Ruby. Regardless, much like her gauntlets, the twins were told expressly to not play with the blonde's hair. They just didn't know what would happen if they did, yet. That would be a lesson for another day.

But, she wasn't going far and everything would be okay, even if her heart was going a mile a minute as she walked, being very careful as she reached for the keypad.

"Hold on tight, Noire," she said, as much as a warning as to soothe her nerves, only feeling somewhat relieved when the door opened and she could secure the little Faunus once more. "Watch your heads." They weren't quite tall enough to reach the top of the doorway, and she knew that, but the words left her mouth regardless. "Alright, breakfast time."

Yang started off taking small, steady steps, paying special attention to their weight on her shoulders with every move. When she heard Zise's inhale and felt the twitch from Noire that seemed to halt any words from leaving her sister's mouth before they'd formed, she chastised herself for being so cautious.

Jumping out of an airship over a Grimm infested wilderness? No problem. Just the slightest chance some harm could come to her children? A complete basket case. Her younger self would laugh and call her a worry wart, but those were better times.

She'd grown so serious since then.

Lengthening her stride, Yang turned to bring them into the kitchen, where Weiss was setting the dirty cooking instruments in the dish washer. Blake was just finishing setting everything on the table in the adjacent dining room, the smell of fresh cooked eggs, bacon, sausage, and traditional Atlesian bread hanging heavy in the air.

"Just in time!" The woman's smile was genuine when she turned around, though it fell a moment later, turning into a blank, flat look. "Really?"

While the twins seemed curious as to their Mother's consternation, the blonde merely smiled. "Everything good, short stuff?"

"Unbelievable; I'm finally not the shortest, and you take it from me so soon? How rude; I thought I'd have another six years, at least." She huffed, marching over and looking up at their daughters. "How's the weather up there? Having fun?"

The twins shifted slightly, as if looking at each other, before responding.

"It was hot..." Zise started, allowing Noire to continue.

"... but it cooled off."

Yang's face screwed up. "Wait a minute- did they just make a joke about my temper?" Judging by the stifled laughter from above them and the twinkle in Weiss' blue eyes, they'd done just that. "Hey!"

"It's about time you've met your match," Blake said, entering the kitchen with a smile. "But before Mass Pun War Seventy Six kicks off, let's eat."

"Agreed. We've already had enough excitement on empty stomachs." Reaching up, the shorter woman carefully accepted the precious cargo from Yang's shoulders, turning to carry the twins into the dining room while the Faunus remained behind.

"Blake... I'm sorry for-"

"I know." She sighed, shaking her head. "I'm not saying I forgive you, not yet, but I probably would've snapped too if I'd had the same three weeks you did. You were cranky and scared but... Yang, you have to let go of the past." Her hands reached out, cupping the blonde's face. "We have two beautiful daughters and a third child on the way. Now's not the time to let those old demons back into your heart."

Yang wrapped her arms around the Faunus' waist, pulling her close and bending down just enough for a kiss. She could feel Blake's baby bump pressing against her own belly, bringing a smile to her lips despite the morbid topic after the kiss ended. "I'm trying."

"Now you are." Blake chuckled, gently breaking the embrace and heading towards the dining room. "I think it'll take baby steps but, in time, I think we'll be alright. We can talk more about it tonight."

"Tonight?" She raised a brow, hoping it meant she wouldn't be exiled to the couch. Although such instances were rare now... well, their first year living together had brought with it a few more adjustments than any of them had anticipated.

At the doorway leading into the dining room, the Faunus paused. "I'll let Weiss explain."

Before she could inquire further, Blake went to the table while their wife quickly returned to the kitchen while the faint sounds of silverware clinking indicated the twins were sitting at the table and awaiting their parents' arrival. Yang thought about asking- or at least being the one to initiate the conversation- but quickly found herself pinned in place by a sharp look as the shorter woman approached.

"Listen closely, Yang, because I'm saying this once and only once." Weiss got close, poking her in the chest with a single finger. "Despite your efforts to completely derail mine, I've spent the last two weeks getting Blake comfortable and 'in the mood' and, even considering this morning's events, she's still... open to the idea." She narrowed her eyes. "Now, we're going to have a talk about this whole fiasco tonight and you're going to be on your best behavior, because after that, we might have a chance for a little fun." Before the blonde could open her mouth fully, she was shushed by a finger against her lips. "Between the two of us, who's been pregnant? That's right, me, and even if she's a tad hesitant about it, I absolutely believe a little... stress relief will be beneficial for her, and us as well. So, if you fuck this up, I'm going to spend the next month giving you so many chores you won't want to move at the end of the day, am I clear?"

Yang weighed her answer for all of two seconds. "Yep. Crystal."

"Excellent." The shorter woman sighed, the severity in her face and voice gone as a small smile claimed her lips. "It's good to have you home, Love. Now, let's go eat."

The blonde followed her wife into the dining room, where their children and other wife were already seated, with the twins staring at each other very intently. Given the slight furrow in the older Faunus' expression, this must've been going on for some time, and at first she worried that they might've overheard the conversation in the kitchen. However, once Yang and Weiss had sat down, they looked towards their plates as if nothing was the matter. Without much further ado, they started eating, passing plates around while Weiss and Yang took turns making sure the twins had enough of whatever they wanted to eat. Normally, the blonde would be a bit more concerned about the portions, but now that she'd completely calmed down, it was a struggle in itself to not scarf her own food down, nevermind chiding the kids on eating more eggs and less bacon.

Blake finally broke the silence. "So, how was your mission?"

"Good. Long, tiring, and we probably could've used an extra few hands or so, but we cleared out the nest with no casualties." She sighed, a small smile on her lips. "At the rate we're going, it might be just another generation or two before the Grimm are gone for good."

The patter of plastic being set down drew her gaze towards the twins, both of whom were staring intently at their plates.

"Zise? Noire?" Weiss' brows furrowed. "Is there something wrong?"

Slowly, the little Faunus looked up, blue eyes darting to all three of them before she replied. "Can we learn to fight?"

Yang set her own fork down, completely forgetting about the big of egg and sausage she was just about to eat. "What?"

Her tone was probably a bit more severe than entirely necessary, and the tension mounting in her shoulders probably didn't help, but Noire didn't back down and Zise came to her sister's aid rather than hide away.

"You said you all learned to fight the monsters. We want to learn, too."

"And why do you want to learn to fight?" Blake took a sip of her orange juice, no inflection in her tone.

"To defend ourselves," they said.

"Well, I don't believe that for a second." Weiss scooped more eggs onto her plate. "There's more to it, and if you two want an answer, you'll have to tell us."

Again, the twins exchanged a look. "So Momma doesn't have to be scared anymore."

Yang blinked.

"How will learning how to fight keep Momma from being scared?" Blake raised a brow, just as skeptical.

"If we know how to fight, we can protect ourselves," Zise replied.

"And, we can keep the monsters from coming back."

"And we'll know how to be careful with weapons."

Slowly, the blonde raised a hand to her face and sighed, rubbing at her forehead. This was exactly why she didn't want to show the twins how her gauntlets worked in the first place. Banking on them not somehow inheriting their Aunt's curiosity when it came to weapons- regardless of how genetically impossible the notion seemed- was just asking for too much, and she'd known that all along.

Yet... she had the same feelings when Ruby got that look in her eyes the first time, but she didn't have all the negative experiences to intensify them. Instead, she had nothing but admiration for Huntresses, and she'd supported her sister's enrollment in the combat schools. She still remembered how proud she was when Ruby, a full two years younger than most, was expressly invited to Beacon by the Headmaster himself.

Lilac eyes lifted to look at her wives, both of whom had their minds already made up, and sighed before looking at the twins.

She'd definitely lost this battle before it had even begun.

"Here are the rules. You can't start until after the baby's born; fighting to protect yourselves is one thing, but you need to have someone to protect, too. The innocent, the helpless, the weak- that's what Huntresses do. So once your sibling's born, it'll be your responsibility to keep them safe, and we'll teach you how to do that. To start, anyway." She pressed her lips into a thin line. "But we'll take no excuses. If you want to quit at any time, that's fine, but neither of you will rely on Auntie Ruby's position as Headmistress of Beacon to gain acceptance to any of the combat schools. You'll do the work, you'll attend every lesson, and you'll gain every inch of progress through your own merits, individually. Am I clear?"

"Yes, Momma."

"You'll only have one instructor at a time," Blake said, sitting back in her chair. "Momma will be first. Once she deems you're ready, I'll train you. And when I say you can advance, you'll learn from your Mother. We use three very different styles and techniques, so whichever seems to fit you best, you will pursue on your own with us as your sparing partners. But we can't go easy on you."

"Yes, Mommy."

"This isn't just lip service, sweethearts; take this very seriously." Weiss turned towards them, crossing her arms over her chest. "The moment your training begins, we're not your parents. We're your teachers and we're covering subjects that could very well save your life or the lives of others. We will always love you, whether or not you choose to pursue this, but we will be hard on you during training. We will be strict and we will be exacting." She reached out, waiting for the little ones to put a hand in each of hers before she continued. "We will push you, but we will never put you in harm's way. We don't want you to get hurt but, in that same vein, we can't allow you to get lazy or sloppy, either. We'll hold you to a much higher standard that any of your potential classmates, and we do it because we care. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, Mother."

"Okay," Yang said, taking a slightly unsteady breath. They still had at least five months before the baby was born, so that gave her some time to truly accept the idea, but it was honestly a fool's hope that their children wouldn't follow in their footsteps somehow. "Then... that's settled. Finish your breakfast."

As the twins returned to their meals with renewed gusto, Blake reached over and lightly squeezed her hand, drawing her attention to her wives. Both of them were smiling, encouraging her that they'd made the right choice. Frankly, she didn't think so, not really, but she couldn't help but admit that there were worse things than their eldest daughters becoming Huntresses...

... still, she really hoped the next one would become an accountant.

#Bee's Schnee #TRR writes #Odd One Out

[garywonghc]

Practicing the Good Heart

by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Many years ago His Holiness the Dalai Lama was in the Lahoul Valley where I was living. At that time, he was giving a number of empowerments and talks. He was there for about one week. After one of his talks which had lasted for several hours, I asked one of the Lahouli women, “Do you know what the Dalai Lama was talking about?” And she said, “Well, I didn’t catch much, but what I understood was that if we have a good heart, that’s nice.” Well, basically, that’s it. What more is there to say? If we have a good heart, that’s nice, isn’t it? So what do we mean by a good heart?

Our society is very concerned with the development of the individual. We are very concerned with realising our own unique potential yet at the same time, conforming very much with the society in which we were born. It’s like a paradox, because on the one hand, we are encouraged to be individualistic, but on the other hand, even within the alternative society itself, everybody’s being alternative in more or less the same way. Have you noticed this?

Traditionally society was based on the family. When I was a child, we played games together as a family. We played monopoly or we played cards or we played other games together. It was a family thing. The mother was at home: she cooked and she took care of the children. One identified oneself with being a part of a family framework. Then beyond that, we identified ourselves with a particular class, caste or society and still further with one’s particular region, country, race and so on.

The point is that in a traditional society, each person knew who they were in relation to everyone else around them. They had their allotted position and within that position — be it high or low (or high to some and low to others) — one knew how to act and what was expected; there were also duties and responsibilities which were a part of being in a group, of being part of a family, of being part of this small society in which one lived. I remember that although I was brought up in London, if anyone in our neighbourhood was sick, all the neighbours were there. There was this sense that being a neighbour gave you the responsibility of caring for one another.

During the time when I was brought up, this sense of being part of a whole network of interconnections was still very strong. But nowadays, as the call to be an individual becomes stronger and stronger, it seems that society is becoming more and more alienated. So, this sense of being able to communicate with others gets less. No longer are we brought up with the sense of respect, duty and responsibility, but more with the sense of asserting “my rights” and doing “my thing”.

We would think that this should lead us to being able to express ourselves, being able to get exactly what we want and being able to do whatever appeals to us. The idea is that this individualisation will make us very satisfied; that this will help us discover who we really are, so that we will feel a great sense of fulfillment. This is the idea, isn’t it? That if we act exactly how we want to act, say exactly what we want to say and think about what we want, this will somehow make us happy, satisfied and fulfilled because we are getting just what we want. So how does this go so very wrong?

We can see this clearly in a place like Australia: outwardly, Australia looks like a paradise, does it not? I mean, coming from Delhi, let me assure you that Australia looks like a paradise! It’s so clean, it’s so well organised: traffic goes into the right lanes, there are no cows wandering across the roads (the cows are in the pastures not in the streets). There is no overt poverty; there are no lepers and beggars on the streets. When you look at it, it really looks like something out of a picture book. So why is it that Australia has one of the highest suicide rates in the world? What’s gone wrong?

This is a deep and troubling question. I’m not a sociologist and I’m not a psychiatrist, so I am not going to go into this in too much detail. But behind that question, lies this darkness because our society, the media and the education system are trying to encourage people to think that success is what counts; and that being beautiful and popular, having lots of money and beautiful clothes is going to bring eternal happiness. And clearly, this is not true. If it were true, you wouldn’t be here tonight. Because if it were really true, then that would be enough. We would not have a need to go beyond that.

Nowadays, the East — especially third-world countries — are beginning to absorb this consumer consciousness. They are starting to plug into this ethic that says “more is better”, and that life without a television, a car or fancy clothes or whatever is deprivation. Therefore, to be happy, we have to have these things. But most people don’t have these things; there is a rising middle class, but the majority still does not have much above the bare essentials. But they see these fancy consumer goods on the television and so they think “if we only had these things, we would be eternally happy.” They see these American programmes dubbed in Hindi showing incredible American homes, and so they imagine, “Now, if we had a home like that, this would be nirvana”. But because they don’t have it, it has a distant glitter. But in the West, we have these things. Most people have been brought up in homes which have all these things already.

I remember a German friend who lived in our Tibetan camp. She was going to buy a vacuum cleaner and she was so excited about it! For weeks, she went around looking at the various makes that were on offer and she finally got one. So she cleaned up her whole house and was so happy. Can you imagine being ecstatic over a vacuum cleaner?

But if we don’t have these things, there is the very strong idea that if we could have them, they would really bring long-lasting satisfaction. Of course, she was German, and although she was excited, she also knew this was very silly. But if we have never had these things, we could be lulled into this false sense that here is the answer ….if only we could have these things.

Now in the West, because we do have so many of these material goods — and if we have any intelligence at all, — we would have realised that these are not the answer. Because the emptiness is still inside, and however much we try to fill it up with things, that inner sense of lack is still there. This is not to say that we shouldn’t have a television, a car or a vacuum cleaner. The problem is not to do with the external object or how much or how little we have. The question is whether we believe these things will really bring us deep-seated satisfaction. So this is the advantage for the West: that if we can get over a sense of wonder with material possessions, one is at a stage where one starts to think that there must be something beyond these.

We hold what we think are very contemporary values but they are usually only the superficial values which have been spoon-fed to us by the media, by our environment and by our society. In ten or twenty years, we will look back and think, “Good Gracious, did I really wear that?” “Did I really think that?” Because thoughts and opinions, judgements and biases can quickly become as outmoded as the clothes we wear. Sometimes when we look back at something that was so revolutionary a few years ago, it has already become obsolete.

In our society, we are taught to think about ourselves; we are trained to develop ourselves in order to succeed. We are taught that it’s very necessary to get on in life — in whatever is our particular sphere — and prove to everyone else how well we are achieving so that everyone else will envy us. As a result, our society builds more and more a culture of alienated beings. This of course is aided by the age of the computer where people can relate more easily to their computer than they can with members of their family. Typically the husband and wife go out and work their heads off. They come home and what do they do? They carry home some take-away food — nobody cooks any more — and collapse in front of the television. The kids come home and off they go to their own rooms to watch their own programmes. Everybody’s plugged in to the Internet, or they’re answering their e-mails. Where is the communication with each other?

So we have this society of adolescents who are growing up unable to communicate with one another. Even when they see each other, they’re often logged into their own entertainment. We see people walking along the road listening to music through earphones or chatting on their mobiles. In other words, they’re walking to their own beat. They’re completely enclosed in their own world — not the world outside them — but the world blasting in their heads. So, we become more and more alienated, and as we become more and more alone with others, we become more and more depressed. It’s so ironic.

So why do Westerners often experience alienation, this deep dislike of themselves, and a sense of disconnection with other people? The cause seems to be a deep sense of alienation from within, and not just from the others outside. People are not happy with themselves, they are not at peace with themselves. They don’t like themselves. Now, if we don’t like ourselves, then the fact is, we are always going to have problems with others.

2500 years ago, when the Buddha talked about the practice of loving-kindness, he said there were two ways in which one radiated loving-kindness to all beings everywhere. Firstly, we could send out thoughts of love in all directions — the north, the south, the east and the west up, down and everywhere. We just radiate loving-kindness to all the beings in the world. Or we could start with people we like — our family or our partners, our children — and then extend that to people we feel indifferent towards, and then to people we dislike and finally out further to all beings everywhere.

But before we start doing all that, the Buddha said that we begin by radiating loving-kindness to ourselves. We start by thinking, “May I be well and happy. May I be peaceful and at my ease.” Do you understand? If we do not first feel that sense of kindness towards ourselves, how are we ever really going to be kind to others? We have to feel love and compassion for all sentient beings: humans, animals, insects, fish, birds — beings both seen or unseen, beings in the higher realms, beings in the lower realms, beings throughout the universe. All sentient beings are the object of our love and our compassion. So how is it that we omit the being right here? The one who’s supposed to be feeling this endless love? It’s like we’re radiating so much light but yet we are standing in the dark. And that’s not right — we first have to extend our kindness towards the being who’s also in need of our kindness at this moment - that is our own self. This has to do with developing a good heart.

Ironically, in our society, it is traditionally considered that one should think of all the bad things one has ever done and feel deep regret and guilt — lots and lots of guilt; because we are sinners, we should feel bad. A low self-esteem is a good thing because we are meaningless worms unless we are saved by someone else.

But that is not the Buddhist view. The Buddhist view says that since the very beginning, we are all utterly pure and utterly perfect. Our original mind is like the sky — it is vast, it has no center and no limits. The Mind is infinitely vast. It is not “me” and it is not “mine”. It is what interconnects us with all beings — this is our true nature. Unfortunately, right now our genuine nature has got a little bit obscured by very thick clouds and we are identifying with the clouds; we are not identifying with the deep, blue, eternal sky. And because we are identifying with the clouds, we have very limited ideas of who we and others really are. If we take the point of view that from the very beginning, we have always been utterly perfect but somehow confusion arose and covered up our true nature, then there is no question of being unworthy. The potential is always there, if only we can see it. Every single one of us possesses that potential, that Buddha potential, that potential for enlightenment. So where is the question of it being a meaningless world? Once we understand that the inner potential is always there as the very basis and ground of our being, then this question of having a good heart makes sense. Because what we are doing is reflecting our essential nature through kindness, through compassion and through understanding. It’s not that we are trying to develop something we don’t already have.

To change the metaphor, it is like we are coming back to a pure spring. Inside, we have a spring of everlasting love, wisdom, compassion and understanding which is our true nature. It’s always there, but it has got blocked up, so we feel dry inside. We look and all we see is dry earth. Or we see this huge garbage heap. And we think, “I’m this garbage heap. I don’t have a pure spring of wisdom and love. I’m just a big heap of garbage. I’m just junk!” And this is a terribly false identification. We’re identifying with the junk heap, we’re not identifying with what’s underneath. Underneath all that junk — and it doesn’t matter if it’s a huge mountain of garbage — the spring is always there. It can never, never, never stop. What we have to do is uncover the spring and there it is leaping up as a fountain! So it’s very important to know that since the very beginning, our essential nature is good. It may have got a bit covered up, but it’s always there.

Now, of course there are various ways to begin to remove the junk. The six paramitas or six perfections are the path which the Buddha laid down for attaining enlightenment. These include not only exotic things like meditation and wisdom, but they start with very basic practical factors like generosity, patience and tolerance, ethical conduct based on harmlessness and having the enthusiasm to transform our lives. All these qualities are very important for our inner transformation because we cannot alter the outer world until we change ourselves. The outer world is the reflection of the minds of the beings who inhabit that society. We have the society that we deserve. Our society is just a multiplication of the minds of the humans in that society. We cannot just blame the politicians and the businessmen. Who gave them the power? Who elected them? Who buys their products? If everyone tomorrow refused to buy these products, the economy would collapse. Then they would have to think of something else. But we do buy them and so the businesses prosper. Our society is us. Until we transform our minds, society isn’t really going to change very much. We have responsibility. Society isn’t just a big conglomerate out there. Society means the family, lots and lots of families, lots and lots of relationships, businesses and shops. This is what society is. If one person knows how to transform his/her own mind, that will change the dynamics of the relationship of his/her family, of the place where s(he) works, of the people that s(he) meets during the day. Each of us is responsible for transforming ourselves from within.

So, we start in a small way. When we talk about loving-kindness, there are specific meditations for developing this quality. In different traditions, it is practised slightly differently. But if one is not careful the meditation becomes very abstract. We sit there radiating our loving-kindness in all directions to all beings everywhere. We are sitting there and the whole universe is full of loving-kindness but then our kid comes in and says “Hey! I want to put the television on!”, and we say “Go away!! Don’t disturb me! I’m doing my loving kindness meditation”!

Loving-kindness starts from just where we are. It’s obvious. First, it starts with ourselves. Coming to terms with ourselves and then coming to terms with all those around us. If we cannot even have kindness and understanding towards ourselves, it means that we have a low self-image, and this is not something good spiritually. Some people think that because Buddhism goes on a lot against self-cherishing, if we feel at ease with ourselves, it means that somehow we are a bad person and that it is just ego. But that is a big misunderstanding.

Shantideva, the seven century Indian philosopher, points out in his Bodhicharyavatara that there is a big difference between pride and arrogance — that self-cherishing of “me” and “mine” and the “I’m so wonderful” feeling - and self-assurance, which is that sense of being friends and at ease with oneself, so that one has the confidence to go forward. In the West, we so often undercut ourselves the whole time because we don’t believe in ourselves. The first time I met His Holiness the 16th Karmapa, in Calcutta back in 1965, he said to me within the first ten minutes, “Your problem is that you have no confidence. You don’t believe in yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will believe in you?” And that is so true.

We have to be friends with and kind towards ourselves. If we tend to be the kind of person who zeroes in on all our own faults, we can acknowledge that we have faults — of course, everyone has faults — but we also have to acknowledge and encourage the good within us. Because if we ignore it, it will wither, like a plant that has no sunlight. We can think: “Well, I’m really an angry person but on the other hand I’m also quite generous.” Now, if we just say “I’m an angry person” or “I’m angry and I get jealous” and leave it at that, then we just think of all the bad in ourselves. But even the worst person has good qualities and these good things need to be encouraged, they need to be acknowledged.

The Buddha said that there were four powers. First of all, the power of getting rid of those negative qualities which have arisen and seeing that other negative qualities do not arise in the future. The second was acknowledging the good qualities which we have and encouraging more of these to arise. So, we have to acknowledge what is good as well as what is negative in us. And that goes for other people too — even people we dislike must have some good qualities.

Everybody wants to be happy. We may define happiness in many different ways — we all have our own ideas of wherein happiness resides and some people have very peculiar ideas of what happiness is — but nonetheless, we all basically want happiness and a sense of fulfillment. Very few people wake up in the morning and think “How can I be really miserable today and make this day as miserable as possible for everybody else?” Most people, if given a choice, would prefer to be happy. So, when we meet somebody, we should remember that “This person wants to be happy”. Basically, that’s all they want. However mistaken their ideas of where happiness lies, they basically just want to be happy. And most people would appreciate a frown much less than they would appreciate a smile; most people don’t really want to be spoken to rudely; most people would appreciate some politeness.

So during the day, with every person we meet — whether it’s someone very close to us — our partner, our parents, our children, our siblings or our colleagues at work or strangers we meet in a shop, or anybody we meet in the passing — think, “They all want to be happy” and “How, in this moment can I do something to help establish a little pleasure or joy in their life?” With every being we meet, with goodwill we can reflect using words or without words “May you be well and happy” It doesn’t matter whether we like that person or not, or whether that person is beautiful or ugly, old or young. We feel from our heart: “May you be well and happy”.

A Bodhisattva takes on the suffering of the world, but Bodhisattvas are always shown smiling. This is because their compassion is conjoined with understanding. It’s very important to appreciate that however outwardly prosperous and successful some of us might seem, we might be very sensitive sentient beings inside. Underneath that mask which everyone is wearing, is something very tender and delicate. The pain, the insecurity and the fear are there. And we feel great kindness and compassion for that.

A genuinely good heart is based on understanding the situation as it really is; it’s not sentimental. Nor is it just going around in a kind of euphoria of fake love, denying suffering and saying that everything is all bliss and joy. It’s not like that. A genuine good heart is a heart which is really open and listening to the sorrows of the world but with understanding too. It is a paradox that the more we are centred on our own suffering, the more we suffer but the more we think about the suffering of others, the more we come to feel an inner sense of fulfillment and a kind of joy. I don’t mean that we rejoice in the suffering of others, obviously, but we can get off our own backs when we think of others.

People who have a mental illness are usually obsessed with themselves. They talk and think about themselves all the time. If someone tries to introduce a more general topic, they bring it back to themselves, because that’s all that interests them. They’re obsessed with themselves — their sufferings, their life, their memories. It’s like they’re completely locked in on themselves. And they suffer. People who are completely sane and inwardly well-balanced think of others. They take care of themselves, but their main concern is for the happiness and well-being of others. And in thinking of the happiness and the well-being of all the others, and not primarily of their own happiness and well-being, they become well and happy!

So our society is wrong in thinking that happiness depends on just fulfilling our own wants and desires. That’s why our society is so miserable. We’re a society of individuals, all obsessed with trying to obtain our own happiness. Therefore, we are cut off from this sense of interconnection with others; we are cut off from reality. Because in reality, we’re all interconnected.

As long as our hearts are closed, and we think only of ourselves — even if we are only thinking of how horrible, stupid and worthless we are and how we’re always going to be failures — it is a closed heart. And that closed heart is going to cause both ourselves and others a lot of pain. If we have a mind which is only thinking of how to get our own gratification — “what pleases me is good for the rest of the world because it pleases me. And that’s all I care about and to hell with everybody else. They can do their own thing, I’m going to do my thing” — that’s also a very pained mind. It is not a happy mind. It might be frenetic and it might get euphoric sometimes, especially when it’s high on substances but it’s not a happy, centred or contented mind. It’s only when we learn how to open up our hearts to include in a genuine way the well-being of others, that we find that this inner space, this inner sense of lack and emptiness can be filled.

So we start from where we are and who we are. It’s no good wanting to be somebody else; it’s no good fantasising about what it would be like if we could be like this or if we weren’t that or whatever. We have to start from here and now, with who we are and where we are, in the situation we are in, right now. And we have to deal with that — we have to deal with who we live with, who we work with and the people that we are meeting. That is the challenge. Sometimes we avoid our present circumstances, thinking that over the years we are sure to meet with the perfect situation somewhere, but there is never going to be that ideal time and place because we are taking the same mind with us everywhere. The problem isn’t out there — the problem is usually within us. So what we need is to cultivate this inner transformation. Once we have developed our inner change, it’s all the same wherever we are; we can deal with whatever happens.

What does love mean? In the West, we mistake the meaning of love; we bandy the word around all the time, from “I love ice-cream” to “I love God”. But we mistake love for desire, for greed, for lust, and for attachment. We think that to love something or someone means to hold on very tightly and to think of it as “mine”. And because of this grasping mind, we suffer very much. We suffer from the fear that we will lose what we desire, and we suffer from grief when we do lose. Think about that. We usually mistake attachment for love. But attachment is not love. Attachment is grasping, attachment is clinging. And this is the root cause of our being in this state of suffering.

The Buddha said that there is a truth of suffering and that there is a cause of suffering. The cause of suffering is grasping. We hold things so tightly because we don’t know how to hold things lightly. But everything is impermanent. Everything is flowing — it’s not static or solid. We cannot hold on to anything. As long as we try to hold on to the flow of the river, we either end up with nothing — because we can’t grasp water in a tight fist. Or else, we dam up the flow and end up with something very stagnant, smelly and stale. The actuality is movement. If we try to hold on tightly, we kill it. And that causes so much pain; it causes so much fear in our lives. That’s not love. Love is a tremendous opening of the heart. It’s a heart which thinks ”May you be well and happy” and not “May you make me well and happy”.

In order to cultivate that kind of heart which wishes for the happiness of others, we can start first by opening with our family. This means by trying to make them happy and being open towards them. But not clinging or grasping — just being there for them. Showing them love, showing them affection, because they are the first people who need our love and affection. But it’s not a tight grasping affection.

When I was 19, I decided to go to find a Lama, and I said to my mother “I’m going to India” and she said, “Oh yes, when are you leaving?” She didn’t say “What do you mean you are going to India? How could you leave your poor old mother?” She said, “Oh yes, when are you leaving?’” not because she didn’t love me, but because she did love me. She loved me and she wanted me to fulfill my own potential and be happy. She was not thinking “Oh, but if you’re going to leave me, I’m going to be lonely. I’m going to be miserable. How can you abandon me?” So, because of her non-attachment, she rejoiced in my happiness. Even while I was away, though I am sure she missed me very much, but she rejoiced in all the things I did, the places I went and the people I met. She came to India for a year and stayed with me. But then she went back. All the time that I was there, she never once wrote and said “Ok, now come back. I’m getting old and it’s your duty as my daughter to come back and take care of me.” The most she’d write was “Well, I know you really belong in India, but you’ve been away for 10 years. So, if I sent you a return ticket, would you come back for a month?”

That’s love. And that heart of warmth is not something impossible. It’s something we can all develop. That joy in making others happy, in thinking how we can give a little happiness, a little joy to others that we meet, through a kind word, through a smile, through a gift or whatever. Not always thinking “Oh, but they never gave me anything, so why should I give them anything?”, or “They never smile at me, so I’m not going to smile at them.” That’s such a petty, small mind. Think about a society in which everyone is at least nice to each other. That would be heaven, would it not? And yet it doesn’t take that much to be pleasant, even to people who are not pleasant in return. If we were affable to everybody, then on the whole, people would be agreeable in response.

Because it’s really true that we get out of life what we put into it. And if we are always radiating negative thoughts and feelings – anger, resentment or just self-absorption — then that’s what we’ll get back. If we think it’s a horrible world and that everybody is rotten, then we’ll be totally miserable. Well, that’s our freedom — we can do that. But if we give out genuine good thoughts; if our attitude towards people is wishing that they should be happy — and that as much as we can, we contribute to that in some way, with a kind word or a smile (and with our family, we can contribute in big ways) — then eventually, what we’ll get back is what we put out. On the whole, people will be nice to us; on the whole, people will like us. If our feelings are genuine, we will get a genuine response.

We project our own world. Our mind is like a big projector so that two people in the same place can experience completely different versions of what is going on. And once we realise that, we understand that we have the freedom to change. We are not computers who are just programmed in one way. We can all change. But no one can do it for us. It’s up to us. We have to change ourselves. We have to make the decision.

We have this lifetime. This lifetime is going to be full of challenges. We are not just in this world to be happy and comfortable. Animals want to be comfortable. What do animals want? They want shelter, they want food, maybe they want sex, (if they’re given the opportunity not to be sterilised when they are too young to protest). They want affection. They want warmth and comfort. So do we. But if this is all we want from life, we are no better than animals. But we are humans and we have the chance to really develop our inner qualities — our intelligence, our spiritual impulses — which make us specifically human. Because, if we spend our lives just trying to be comfortable, just trying to have a nice life, and trying to avoid anything painful and only going after what is pleasant, then not only are we going to be disappointed, we’re also not going to learn anything.

Somebody said that this life was like the gymnasium of the soul. This is true. This world is where we train, this is where we learn, this is where we develop our muscles. We can sit curled up in a chair and get flabby. That’s up to us. But we can also say “Look, here I am. This is my situation, this is the kind of person I think I am. I have this kind of upbringing, I accept it all. Now what?” And all those things which are negative, which cause pain to ourselves and others, can be transformed, or used, can be acknowledged and then released. And those qualities which we need to develop can be developed. The only reason why we don’t do it is that we are lazy. We think: “Oh no, other people can do these things, but I can’t”. But all of us can.

So it’s up to us. We create this world as we project it from our mind. We can make this world into something meaningful. We can make some genuine contribution to our environment. Even just within our own circle, by helping others to feel better, we can have a life that has some purpose. So that at the end of our life, we can look back and say, “well, at least I did what I could.” Or we could waste it — we can go through life grumbling, and moaning and complaining and blaming other people in the family, an unhappy childhood and one’s parents or the government and society.

Whether we go up or whether we go down or whether we stand still, is up to us. And if we want to be miserable, we can be absolutely miserable. We have full permission. But if we don’t want to be miserable, that is also up to us. Things can change. Things are changing moment to moment. We can change. And if we change ourselves, everything changes. Everything changes.

#buddha #buddhism #buddhist #bodhi #bodhicitta #bodhisattva #compassion #dharma #dhamma #enlightenment #guru #khenpo #lama #mahayana #mahasiddha #mindfulness #monastics #monastery #monks #path #quotes #rinpoche #sayings #spiritual #teachings #tibet #tibetan #tulku #vajrayana #venerable

[erinkappeler]

Seeing Straight

“I question everything

My focus, my figure, my sexuality

And how much it matters or why it would mean anything

…

I've been thinking about it every night” – Bully, “Trying”

When I moved to southwestern Missouri, I knew that I was moving into a new cultural scene. I wasn’t worried that it would be completely unfamiliar – I was born and raised in rural Iowa – but I knew that I would have to reacquaint myself with some social expectations and small talk questions that I had largely been able to sidestep during my time in college and grad school on the east coast. I was warned that I would get asked what church I attend, for instance, and I was ready to cheerfully out myself as an atheist. But what I was not ready for was how often I would be asked about my husband.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose, when someone at a party asked me what my husband did, even though I had not mentioned my husband and was not wearing a wedding ring. Nor should I have been surprised when a Walgreen’s clerk asked if I was watching the Super Bowl, and then, when I said no, followed up by asking if I’d have to put up with my husband watching it. I have, after all, been dealing with forms of this question for virtually my entire life (the “do you have a boyfriend yet”s of my teen years have seamlessly morphed into the “do you have a girlfriend yet”/“when will you get married”/“no really, why aren’t you married yet”s of my twenties and thirties).

I have known on a visceral level for as many years as strangers have been asking about my romantic life that marriage is not right for me. My sense has always been that it’s a raw deal for women, and that sense has only intensified as I get older. I remember being upset by the first weddings I went to when I was in elementary school – not only was I forced to wear girl clothes, but I hated watching fathers hand off their daughters at the altar. At the time it was the ceremonial severing of a familial connection that bothered me, but it didn’t take long for me to develop an even deeper discomfort with the affirmation of patriarchal order those ceremonies offered. Small surprise then that I have never been able to imagine my own wedding or my own children. As a kid, I would listen to my friends talk about what songs they would play when they walked down the aisle and what they wanted to name their daughters, and I would play MASH with them and dutifully try to imagine my own adult future, but I just couldn’t envision the wedding or the kids. And yet I still assumed that at some point I would want these things, and that they would naturally be part of my life.

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that it struck me with real force, for the first time, that I could choose not to have kids. I was with someone at the time who I wanted to stay with, but I also started to realize that staying with someone didn’t have to mean marriage (these were not realizations my then partner had along with me). Feeling “no” as a possibility felt like breathing for the first time after being held underwater. The ticking clock stopped – I didn’t have to worry about convincing myself I wanted kids before my fertility diminished, and I didn’t have to get married to enter into adulthood.

The relief has never left me, but I still struggle to maintain my visceral feeling that no – to marriage, to children – is the right answer for me. Every seemingly friendly question about my husband is a reminder that my personal internal logic – the protest against organizing life around marriage that I live daily – isn’t legible to the rest of the world. The available figures people have to understand me are “unlucky in love,” “developmentally delayed,” and “closet case,” to name the least damning options. As I always do when I’m struggling, I’ve been reading to try to feel my way through the disconnect between how I identify internally and the identity I’m given by others. I re-read parts of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse this weekend and was struck by how concisely Barthes is able to pinpoint what makes the tangles of lived experience feel so knotty. A Lover’s Discourse is about many things, but mostly about a lover after love has ended. Who are they? Where do they fit? What is an adult who is not part of a couple? Barthes explains,

The world subjects every enterprise to an alternative; that of success or failure, of victory or defeat. I protest by another logic: I am simultaneously and contradictorily happy and wretched; ‘to succeed’ or ‘to fail’ have for me only contingent, provisional meanings (which doesn’t keep my sufferings and my desires from being violent); what inspires me, secretly and stubbornly, is not a tactic: I accept and I affirm, beyond truth and falsehood, beyond success and failure; I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance … Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic.

(Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?)

I am a failure in the eyes of the world, tragic not in Barthes’ sense, but tragic as a cautionary tale of what happens when you don’t commit yourself to adult life as we insist it must be lived – with a monogamous partner, raising children. But I protest by another logic. I feel my other logic strongly and am committed to it the way most people are committed to the ideal of long-term monogamous coupledom. This doesn’t mean that commitment is easy to maintain in the face of a world that wants to know, “What does your husband do?”

 ***

I have a pattern of choosing to be with people who I know are, in some fundamental way, wrong for me, because I then always know that, whatever happens, marriage will not be a possibility we will have to confront. I do this fairly consciously most of the time. And I still find myself angry and hurt when those relationships end. This is partly just being human – knowing a relationship is going to end doesn’t preclude the development of real feelings and of real attachment. But these feelings of anger when relationships end also come from the unshakeable sense that you win or you lose, in love as in life, and that I have set myself up to lose in both. When such a relationship ended a few years back, I shocked myself (and my ex) by how mad I was at the other person, as if they had failed me by being exactly what I wanted them to be. The more I thought about where my anger was coming from, the more I realized that I was upset because I knew this person would get married pretty much immediately once we were over (they did), and I was angry about their ability to step into the role expected of them, without sacrifice or trouble or doubt. I was angry even though they were stepping into a role they truly wanted and that I truly didn’t.

This is the lure and the trap of coupledom Barthes so perfectly describes:

How is it that the sistemati around me can inspire me with envy? From what, seeing them, am I excluded? Certainly not from a ‘dream,’ an ‘idyll,’ a ‘union’: there are too many complaints from the ‘pigeonholed’ about their system, and the dream of union forms another figure. No, what I fantasize in the system is quite modest (a fantasy all the more paradoxical in that it has no particular vividness): I want, I desire, quite simply, a structure … Of course there is not a happiness of structure; but every structure is habitable, indeed that may be its best definition. I can perfectly well inhabit what does not make me happy; I can simultaneously complain and endure; I can reject the meaning of the structure I submit to and traverse without displeasure certain of its everyday portions (habits, minor satisfactions, little securities, endurable things, temporary tensions); and I can even have a perverse liking for this behavior of the system (which makes it, in fact, habitable): Daniel Stylites lived quite well on top of his pillar: he had made it (though a difficult thing) into a structure.

I don’t want the structures available to me, but I want to be legible within those structures. This is a larger and more impossible desire than it might appear.

 ***

A few years ago, after much too much scotch, a few friends and I found ourselves in an intense argument about sexuality and privilege, among other things. At some point, exasperated, one friend responded to another, who had been referring to himself as a straight man frequently throughout the night, “What does it mean to you to be straight? Why is that identity important to you?” I don’t think I’ve really stopped thinking about that question since that night. The world usually (not always) takes me to be a straight woman. In the coarsest sense, I suppose I am – my sexual desires usually involve male-bodied people. If I try to quantify my sexuality, I can calculate that 92.5% of the people I’ve had sexual encounters with have been male. If I try to think about it historically, it’s blurrier – at certain times the configurations of acts and bodies I have enjoyed have been illegal in parts of this country (anti-miscegenation laws, broad-ranging anti-sodomy laws…). Does that make these acts straight or queer? Is straightness always on the side of law and order? What is the difference between the way I was straight when I was 16 and 21 and 28, and the way I will or won’t be straight when I’m 50 or 68 or 73? Can my sex life be straight and my romantic life be queer, in the sense of opposed to heteronormative structures?

What does it mean if I claim to be straight, and what does it mean if I refuse to claim it?

Identity is of course always about power relations, and it matters that, if I could somehow force my erotic and domestic desires to coincide, if I could bring myself to want the state to be involved in my legal identity as it relates to who I have promised to sleep with (and to not sleep with), I have always been able to marry most of my former sexual partners. That’s important. But so is the fact that I am unable to want that, and that my sexual orientation means I am supposed to want that, according to all those nice folks asking me about my husband.

 ***

Barthes describes the person who isn’t pigeonholed, who is not taken up by the system, as the child who loses a game of musical chairs: “the clumsiest, the least brutal, or the unluckiest … remained standing, stupid, de trop: the lover.” De trop – too much, excessive, superfluous, without a place, unable to be contained. I want to be legible as de trop, not as femme manquée. This was one of many reasons why, when I stumbled upon a review of Emily Witt’s Future Sex, about a thirty-something single woman exploring the cultural obsession with organizing all aspects of life around marriage and potential alternatives to that model, I ordered a copy immediately.

Witt and I are roughly the same age and went through breakups while staring down the barrel of 30, when your failure to get married starts to become either suspect or tragic, and so I found myself identifying with many experiences in Witt’s account (giiirrrlll, the chapter on dating sites and apps…). But I was sad to find how sad Witt often recalls feeling about being de trop. Witt is essentially narrating a process of apostasy, of course, and so the sadness makes sense. As she explains,

When I turned thirty, in 2011, I still envisioned my sexual experience eventually reaching a terminus, like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center. I would disembark, find myself face-to-face with another human being, and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future. I had not chosen to be single but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated. Without love I saw no reason to form a permanent attachment to any particular place. Love determined how humans arrayed themselves in space. Because it affixed people into their long-term arrangements, those around me viewed it as an eschatological event, messianic in its totality. My friends expressed a religious belief that it would arrive for me one day, as if love were something the universe owed to each of us, which no human could escape.

Witt describes herself at this stage as “a person in the world, a person who had sexual relationships that I could not describe in language and that failed my moral ideals. Apprehensiveness set in: that this was my future.” I have felt this apprehensiveness and I understand it well, but I have also felt the possibility of that future as a non-tragic choice. The persistent reminders that single people are failures and the way so many of us internalize that message is what makes me sad – the way linear heteronormative expectations diminish, bury, and squander erotic opportunities. I prefer to live in the realm of the erotic rather than the domestic, but we don’t have a structural place for a woman who wants to sleep with men without ending the monorail ride with one of them. This is, in short, what Future Sex is about – the search for that structural place, which is quite possibly a structural impossibility.

Even if it is an impossibility, it’s a search that matters to me because I want a way to express the value of the non-teleological relationships that have made up my erotic and romantic life for the past six years – those relationships matter to me even though they don’t count as anything other than losses in our culture. The truly erotic (read: not future-oriented) encounter, which is about shared pleasure, is incredibly hard to come by in the “straight” dating world as its configured now, Tinder notwithstanding. On one side are the domestically inclined – the people who believe that starting from a place of eroticism dooms a relationship to failure – and on the other are those interested only in their own bodily pleasure, not a shared experience. It is profoundly meaningful to me when I find someone who enables me to stay in the realm of the erotic with them without expecting that it will lead us anywhere (if you have or are currently enabling this and are somehow encountering this piece of writing, I appreciate you).

What is the name for a present-oriented female sexuality? Is it straight?

 ***

Many of the individuals profiled in Future Sex are involved in diligent searches for the new rules and principles of sexuality that could give structure to their relationships without replicating patriarchal models; many of these individuals are also, not coincidentally, well-off Silicon Valley tech workers. I’ve spent a little time around the world of gentrified sexual exploration, and if anything, it’s less satisfying to me than the future-oriented straight world. (If I never listen to another polyamorous white man with a trust fund explain how liberated he is when he’s not working at a financial consulting business I will die happy.) It’s not just the hypocrisy of the well-to-do playing at liberation while working for oppressive institutions that turns me off; it’s the attempt to continue to codify and regulate desire, as if more or better rules could keep us from pain or disappointment or failure.

What I find myself trying to describe when I think about why the codified scenes Witt describes turn me off is nothing more nor less than the singularity of desire, which of course Barthes describes better than I ever could:

what is it in this loved body which has the vocation of a fetish for me? What perhaps incredibly tenuous portion – what accident? The way a nail is cut, a tooth broken slightly aslant, a lock of hair, a way of spreading the fingers while talking, while smoking? About all these folds of the body, I want to say that they are adorable. Adorable means: this is my desire, insofar as it is unique … Yet the more I experience the specialty of my desire, the less I can give it a name; to the precision of the target corresponds a wavering of the name; what is characteristic of desire, proper to desire, can produce only an impropriety of the utterance. Of this failure of language there remains only one trace: the word ‘adorable’ (the right translation of ‘adorable’ would be the Latin ipse: it is the self, himself, herself, in person.

There is something in a current object of desire that is located in the arms and hands but it’s not just that. I can’t describe it because it’s more like a feeling triggered by a visual cue, and neither feeling nor cue have precise names. It’s hardly even worth talking about except that it’s something I keep thinking about. It’s both banal and exceptional, universal and particular to a current configuration. But I don’t want anything aside from that feeling. What is the name for that desire?

 ***

I don’t want rules, but I do want representation.

There are representations of desiring women who are not destined for marriage – the party girl, the femme fatale, the Samantha. They are usually tragic figures (we all know the party girl parties to keep from crying, the femme fatale must be domesticated or die, the Samanthas of the world think they are liberated but are the most compliant subjects of capitalism). I don’t need a new language for desire; I am not, like Witt, bothered by being “a person in the world … who ha[s] sexual relationships that I [can’t always] describe in language,” probably because these relationships don’t “fai[l] my moral ideals.” But I do need a way to be read as an adult human woman who is not a failure because I’ve made and continue to make choices that aren’t based on the fantasy of a husband. Witt argues that “a straight woman who hooked up with people she met online in her search for a boyfriend was not different, in behavior, from the gay man who made a public declaration about looking for noncommittal sex,” except of course that we have names for the latter (cruising) that makes it legible as a practice, which makes the individuals engaging in the practice legible as adults making choices rather than as adults who are failing. I can count on one hand recent representations of women who have sex with people without expecting to marry one of them eventually. There is no straight cruising because we can’t escape the expectation that straight sex will eventually have a purpose.

My specific desires are singular, but I am not. Barthes:

Confronted with the other’s brilliant originality, I never feel myself to be atopos [“unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality”], but rather classified (like an all-too-familiar dossier). Sometimes, though, I manage to suspend the action of the unequal images (‘If only I could be as original, as strong as the other!’); I divine that the true site of originality and strength is neither the other nor myself, but our relation itself. It is the originality of the relation which must be conquered. Most of my injuries come from the stereotype: I am obliged to make myself a lover, like everyone else: to be jealous, neglected, frustrated, like everyone else. But when the relation is original, then the stereotype is shaken, transcended, evacuated, and jealousy, for instance, has no more room in this relation without a site, without topos – without what in French we call, colloquially, ‘topo’ – without discourse.

I want to stay within the “true site of originality and strength,” the unique relation that isn’t of a type that has to have a predetermined outcome (success or failure). Can there be a structural place for the person who desires to live in that space? What does it mean to be able to represent a person whose most desired relations are without discourse?

 ***

Over Christmas break I was driving somewhere with a newly sober family member. We were catching up on our lives and they jokingly asked about my singledom, “My therapist says I shouldn’t date for another year. What’s your excuse?” It was a question from one de trop individual to another, borne of anxiety about where we fit and what we are if we’ve failed to become the type of adults we’re supposed to become. What I want for both of us is not to need an excuse.

At the end of Future Sex, Witt explains that her journey through various scenes of modern sexuality left her with “a heightened perception of the power the traditional story had over the sense of my standing in the world, especially when I traveled to places where the old social order was intact, where small talk began with ‘Are you married?’ or ‘Do you have children?’” I do not know that I believe in the possibility of structural change in places like these (my home), even as I fight for it. In his review of Future Sex, Dion Kagan points out that “[s]ingle women who want to encounter different models for sex and life remain a potent source of anxiety because of their tendentious relationship to the systems of labor and kinship that reproduce capitalism.” The 20th and 21st centuries have taught us nothing if not the power of capitalism, of patriarchy, of white supremacy, to force us into all the old structural relations every time we try to escape them.

For now, I would settle for a corner, to the side, where I am seen as myself – someone whose desires have exceeded rather than failed her, who exists outside of an imagined relationship with a husband who doesn’t exist.

#future sex #feminism