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i-am-a--lionheart · 9 months

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Between Fire and Ice

SuNor week 2023 – Day 3 Kingdom of Sweden & Norway

@sunorweek2023

Stockholm, 29th of December 1827

He was not sure when the fire in the chimney had died down, leaving the room cold, dark and quiet. Lukas was sitting in one of the old armchairs, trying to get at least a bit comfortable. The world outside was grey, he guesses it was late in the afternoon, but he was not sure about this.

This place was absolutely timeless anyways and he could not even remember when he had been allowed to leave his chambers, which obviously meant it had been a couple of years already.

Those wooden doors were always locked, and he was not even sure if Berwald possessed any keys or if the lock was just always frozen. Of course, the Norwegian had tried to use his magical flames to escape a couple of times since he had been forced to stay here, but it was useless. After weeks of cursing and literally destroying half the interior decoration and burning his skin countless times, he had given up. He could have tried to escape through the windows but his chambers were placed in a tower and if he was ever brave enough to jump, the ground below would shatter at least half of his bones. Even though he would not die and possessed healing abilities, they would catch him before he was able to stand up.

Not that he wasn’t used to be caged, but at least Matthias had never kept him in a rather small area in an abandoned wing of his castle. The Dane had always kept him extremely close by his side, which of course had left him with scars and nightmares too, but at least he had never felt abandoned. Not at all. Matthias’ fire had been either a lot weaker than Berwalds or Lukas had grown even more frail. He liked to believe the first option more if he had to be honest.

The whole castle was filled by the cold, bluish-golden aura that suffocated his own with each passing day. He could never know if or when the Swede would come to this part of the castle until he was able to hear his steps on the floor outside.

Since he was shivering all over – nothing new at all – he stood up, his joints cracking in the silence of the room and put a few pieces of wood into the chimney, enlightening it with his own flames.

With a small sigh of relief, he stayed put in front of the growing fire, it was a shame that he didn’t possess enough energy to heat himself up with his magic. But with the little amount of training – basically he had no space to train his abilities at all – combined with his extreme low nutrition income, he didn’t have the chance to get stronger at all. With an extra piece of wood, not much thicker than his thin wrist, he settled down again, his small knife in his other hand.

His rooms consisted of two chambers, both too large for their own good. The little furniture, a desk with a wooden chair, two armchairs on an old blanket in front of the grey chimney. His bedroom was even larger with just a canopy bed that was also too huge. All walls were grey, empty and lifeless. He had tried to decorate them and his desk with those carved pieces of wood. Well, he could have tried and ask for colours and canvas, just to keep himself busy. But Berwald would possibly not grand him any of these things. Sometimes Lukas thought that the older one wanted to drive him crazy in some way, perfectly knowing that Lukas could barely stand being bored.

And still he, as well as his sanity, had survived gods-knows how long.

He had transformed the rough wood into a small bear as he finally heard something other than the crackling sound of the flames consuming the branches. Lukas couldn’t help but quiver a bit as the clacking noises came closer – it wasn’t necessary a bad thing when the Swede came over, once in a while. The Norwegian kept counting the times when the older was nice enough to visit, mostly just to bring him letters from either Matthias or Emil, sometimes little packages from Sanders or even Ivan as well. It had been snowing for at least five weeks by now and since then the older had been here three times. He wouldn’t count one of them as a meet though, he had just woken up the next day to find a couple of letters on his desk. Not that he was too keen on seeing him again, it was just relaxing for his mental health to know that he wasn’t completely alone in this world. Not even servants were allowed to actually interact with him, causing them to mostly refill his storage of bred in the night.

The Swedes Aura was incredible strong as the steps stopped and with a long, hissing noise, the crystals on the locked door begun to melt. Lukas hated this sound more than the individual that caused it. Still, he wasn’t sure how to feel about the other, not at all. Surely, he could hate him for breaking every single promise they had, surely he could despise him for forcing him into this union and locking him away, as far from his lands as Matthias had done. Whenever he was sitting in front of his chimney, thinking about the older one, he could feel his heart getting cold and icy from all the pain that he had inflicted on him in the past ten, or fifteen (?) years. But in the evening when he was laying on this mattress – he had not been sleeping in an own bed for nearly four hundred years – he yearned for his attention. It was more than a bit maddening, he had the feeling he was turning crazy. The noise that turned louder and higher in its frequency did not really help him to clear his mind.

Finally the hissing died down and for a couple of seconds he tried to relax and put on his mask of indifference, but then the silence was broken by the crackling sound of the old door swinging open. Luksa didn’t turn around, why would he? He was never sure if he hoped for a conversation or if he just wished that he would be left alone, because seeing the older one made him feel a toxic cocktail of emotions.

“Norge.”

Well, he had forgotten that they were on such distant terms by now. Still, Lukas did not turn his head to look at him – the other did not deserve talking to him anyways. Either of them had always, always known that, to him, there was nothing as important as freedom. Either of them had known and still both had broken his wings and thrown him in a cage as if his free will meant nothing to them.

And still, he had to control himself to silently stare at the fire in the chimney, watching the shadows the flames casted on the black of the chimney, he had to control himself although…

“I know you hear me.”, another few steps, the clacking sound of his boots would turn him insane in no time, nearly as insane as the silence that kept him caged. With a sound too loud for his good, a couple of letters, no, a whole pack of letters, were slammed on the little, wooden table placed between the armchairs and then, the other one placed himself on the other armchair. The strong need to burn the chair including the Swede sitting on it, filled his mind and he balled his hands to fists. His deep eyes scanned the different letters. It were so many that he could not believe that they were just the once that had arrived during the last weeks. Additional to this, a few of the envelopes had been opened. Lukas’ gaze turned from forced indifference over nervousness to anger.

“What have you done?”, he was always surprised how he sounded – his voice was dark for a person looking as androgynous and frail as he did, and it cracked a couple of times. He wasn’t used to talking at all, having no one around to talk to. He had not seen his magical friends in decades. They had disappeared as the abuse had turned too cruel for them to look at, as his soul had turned to sharp, shattered pieces of glass, cutting everyone that tried to come too close, human or not.

Berwald’s gaze was not friendlier than the one of the Norwegian, not at all. The presence of the younger one in the heart of his country bordered him, the fire he could feel burning inside of his opponent threatened his ice, his aura did not surrender to his own.

“Nothing.”, in contrast to Lukas’, the Swedes voice was clear and sharp as ice.

The coldness in his tone was enough to make Lukas snap, finally, finally. His hand shot forward, got a hold of the letters and brought his gaze up to stare draggers into those ocean eyes.

“You call this nothing?!”, he pulled out one of the opened envelopes, it was from Rosenholm, Emil’s residence in Denmark. “Why are you reading my letters?”, his voice grew louder and he slammed the letters down again. “Isn’t it enough you keep me here? Now you are spying on me as well?”, he could feel his face heat up in anger.

Berwald just looked at him with disdain, neither saying a word nor moving in his armchair even as Lukas jumped out of his own.

“I don’t trust you.”, he finally answered, his tone seeping with a mixture of scorn and dander.

“Oh, you don’t trust me?”, the sarcasm in his voice was stinging, hiding a bitter laugh.

“You don’t trust me? I am sorry, haven’t I been a good little dog, staying in this freaking rooms all the time so that you don’t have to deal with me? What bothers you so much that you read these petty letters that are all I have left from the world outside this disgusting castle?”, dangerous little sparks flew from his tightened fist and slowly but surely he didn’t care anymore that Berwald was probably a whole lot stronger than he was.

“I never trusted you since then.”, he would not lower himself to answer his stupid questions or be provoked by his attempts to play a little game with him. He was old enough to not embark himself in the mind tricks of the younger, knowing how perfectly skilled he was in manipulating others. With or without his magic.

Lukas rolled his eyes.

“Since I chose to stay with him? But what does this count now, Sverige? You are just the same as him. You always think you are so much better, don’t you?”, he hadn’t even faked the grin that appeared on his pale lips as he stepped closer, the sparks in his palm multiplied.

Berwald supressed a mixture of a sigh and a noise of anger as he rose from his seat. He should not have come here, not at all. He did not know why he could not send Lukas back to Christiania, because his presence made him sick, but his absence would probably kill him. He could not be with him, he could not be without him. If he let go of him, Matthias would most likely come and take him back, as always neither caring what either of them wanted. He had never cared. Maybe he was bad in showing it, but Berwald did indeed care. Lukas was just blind and ignorant, like he always was. He walked past him without a second gaze, reached the door and froze as he heard his partners voice again.

“And you dare to treat me like that, all while claiming to have freed me and god-knows what else? Just because I am not your little beloved Finland, you think you can just lock me away and let me rot here?”, Lukas couldn’t even blink twice before a sharp pain on his cheek send him to the wall in his back. Of course, he had forgotten this unspoken rule that haunted this place as well as every single location in which the Swede socialised. No one, no one ever spoke about the Finn. It sparked a blinding anger in the Swedish Kingdom, but on the other hand, Lukas knew that it was hurting him and why shouldn’t he hurt him? He left him here, he abandoned him, he did not care at all about he felt, he wouldn’t let him see his lands, he kept him here, suffocating in his own loneliness, turning him crazy from the mixture of love and hate he felt for his keeper.

He had bit his tongue and with a toxic gaze he spit a bit of blood into the direction of the Swede. Berwald was closer now, too close, and the air around him seemed to cool down rapidly. Lukas did not regret provoking him – in a way he was attracted to the danger that radiated from his elder, plus he could see the pain reflecting in his seablue eyes.

“Don’t you dare bring him into this.”, a hand grabbed the collar of his white shirt, pressing him closer to the stones in his back. Lukas raised a hand and clenched it around the taller one’s hand, activating his heat.

Berwald hated it when someone talked about Tino, reminding him how much he had failed the Finn, failed to protect him, failed to grant him a decent life, failed to win his heart, failed to gain anything. He was cursed with Lukas, cursed with his love, cursed with his presence, cursed with the flames that slowly crept up his shirt. With frost spreading over Berwalds skin, the flames were put down again and he lift Lukas up, slamming him against the stones in the hope to whip the grin out of his face. Lukas felt like laughing but he didn’t. He felt like crying, but he didn’t do this either. Instead he continued to stare at him, ignoring his aching back.

“You don’t deserve him. You don’t deserve anyone. And you know that, you know that perfectly. Remember Emil’s words? He said you would become a monster as well.”, his midnight eyes lightened up, bringing flames to Berwalds boots what caused the latter to let go of him.

Still, Lukas wasn’t quick enough to escape from the wall that prevented him from eluding, and he knew the silence of the other wasn’t a good sign at all. While Lukas’ tongue turned sharp the angrier he got and Matthias turning all loud in his fury, the Swede got more and more quiet with his actions getting insanely brutal. The ice formed crystals on the ground, frost shed over the stones, climbed over the walls, the armchairs and finally formed small patches of ice on Lukas shoes and pinned him to the wall. He kept his distance to the Norwegian though, avoiding to gaze into his face, because Lukas could easily lit flames with his gaze. Despite being weaker than Berwald physically, his magical abilities were more complex and his control of them was more advanced.

The anger that turned his blood to ice, tainted his vision red, and he was not able to restrain himself. How could the other compare him with this stupid, cruel Dane? He wasn’t like that, he wasn’t like that. Never. Whatever Emil had said, curse him and his fortune telling abilities, curse this little child, god damn. With his vision distorting more and more, the ice was growing and no matter how Lukas increased his heat, he couldn’t escape the crystals encaging him. The coldness was stinging, and he pressed his hands against the ice around his hips, melting it bit by bit with his flames.

“Finally shut up, haven’t you?”, Berwald didn’t really care about the danger anymore that came with the shrinking distance between them. His greenish blue eyes had darkened, his vision consisted more and more of twisted shadows and with one hand he grasped the smaller one’s hand, freezing them above his head in an instant. The other clenched around his throat in a still rather light hold, forcing him to look upwards.

Oh well, maybe he wasn’t that much better than the Dane but what did that matter right now?

Lukas wanted to play this game and now he had to bare the consequences.

The cold drained the Norwegian of his energy and although he tried to focus his energy to produce new flames preferably on the others hair, he wasn’t able to lit any. Instead, the hand around his neck choke him and he had to bite down harshly on his lips to prevent himself from producing any miserable sounds. With blood trickling down his chin and a stubborn, cold gaze, he eyed Berwald.

If he thought this would scare him, he was oh so wrong. His darkened, dangerous eyes, provoked Lukas to mock him more, maybe because he couldn’t stand the indifference the other held for him. He wanted to be loved, he wanted to be hated, he wanted anything, anything.

Not a little sound passed his lips though because from one second to another, sharp teeth made their way into the sensible flesh of his neck, the cold breath of the other mixing with his own heat.

Lukas’ heart stumbled in horror, froze for a second and his eyes turned dull.

(An extract from an old fanfic of mine written in 2019 when i was still active in the fandom, slightly pinched to fit the theme better)

#aph sweden #hetalia #hws sweden #sunor #aph norway #hws norway #swenor #aph #hws #norsu #sunorweek2023 #backinhell

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theculturedmarxist · 6 months

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How many in the U.S. are disabled? Proposed census changes would greatly decrease count

The U.S. Census Bureau may soon change the way one of its nationwide surveys asks about disability. But alarm bells are ringing for many researchers and activists, because the proposed change would dramatically decrease the official number of people in the United States who are considered disabled.

“Disabled people are already underserved,” says Scott Landes, a sociologist at Syracuse University who studies disability. Altering the way the Census Bureau gathers disability statistics, he argues, will generate “inaccurate information.” In an 18 October letter, he and other disability researchers and advocates called for the Census Bureau to reconsider.

The change concerns a section of the bureau’s annual American Community Survey (ACS), which serves as an important source of demographic, social, and economic data. The ACS uses a set of six yes-or-no questions—related to difficulty with hearing, vision, and other functions—to determine disability status. A respondent who answers “yes” to any of those questions is counted as disabled. Many state and federal programs rely on ACS data when allocating funding, and the data are used to evaluate whether disabled people are being given equal opportunities when it comes to things like housing, education, and health care. But the ACS is also a vital resource for researchers. “It certainly has the ability to drown out a lot of better designed sources of disability data,” says Jaime Seltzer, a disability activist and researcher at Stanford University who uses the data for her own work on chronic fatigue syndrome. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Seltzer says many are also using the data for research on Long Covid.

Now, bureau officials are recommending replacing those questions with a set developed by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics, a United Nations–convened organization that creates disability data collection tools for censuses and national surveys. The agency’s Decennial Statistical Studies Division made the recommendation at a 21 September meeting of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC). The Washington group’s method, known as the Washington Group Short Set on Functioning (WG-SS), also consists of six questions that cover the same topics as the ACS questions. Instead of answering “yes” or “no,” however, respondents rate their level of difficulty on each function by choosing one of four options ranging from “no difficulty” to “cannot do at all.”

Compared with the current questions, the WG-SS will “capture information in a manner that reflects advances in the measurement of disability,” an agency spokesperson said in an emailed statement. But it would also reduce the prevalence of disabled people in the U.S. to 8%, down from the ACS’s current estimate of 14%, bureau statisticians reported at the September CSAC meeting. This decrease has to do with how the WG-SS defines “disability,” as Washington group protocol states that only those who indicate “a lot of difficulty” or “cannot do at all” for one or more of the questions should be categorized as disabled.

Jennifer Madans, who serves as chair of the Washington group, says this cutoff was chosen because it yielded the most consistent responses when the WG-SS was tested internationally. “You want everyone to be using the same definition of disability” when comparing across countries, she says. Madans notes, however, that individual countries should use the cutoff that will best inform their policy decisions.

Bonnielin Swenor, who serves as director of the Johns Hopkins University Disability Health Research Center, says the change would have “massive consequences for a group that is already struggling, pleading, begging for our data to be collected in a more robust way.” Swenor, who served as the lead author of the 18 October letter, also says asking respondents to rank their difficulty level “entrenches a hierarchical view of disability” that implies some within the disabled community are less deserving of accommodations than others.

Madans says the scaled response system better captures the “continuum” of disability. The yes-or-no format of the ACS questions, she argues, may obscure crucial differences in functionality, making it seem as though people with significant functional difficulties are doing better than they really are. “You don’t need to limit yourself to a dichotomy,” she says.

Neither method is perfect, however. Both the ACS and WG-SS questions do a poor job of accounting for people with psychiatric and chronic illnesses, says Jean Hall, director of the Institute for Health and Disability Policy Studies at the University of Kansas. To alleviate this gap, Hall and her colleagues developed the National Survey on Health and Disability (NSHD), which allows respondents to describe and self-categorize their disability type. In a recent study she and her colleagues found that the ACS questions failed to identify nearly 20% of people who reported disabilities to the NSHD, and the WG-SS missed 43%. Switching to the WG-SS would mean “going from a measure that’s not great to one that’s much worse,” she says.

Seltzer, for her part, agrees that the more comprehensive WG-SS could “potentially yield greater insights into disability” in the U.S., but worries that many policymakers will use the 8% statistic to cut funding to programs that help disabled Americans.

Daniel Mont, who serves as chair of the Washington group’s Analytical Working Group, says the Census Bureau could report two different numbers: one representing the prevalence of people who face significant difficulties—the 8% figure the bureau calculated—and a broader statistic that captures more of the disabled community. At the September CSAC meeting, for instance, the bureau’s statisticians reported that expanding the definition of disability to include those who reported “some difficulty” put the prevalence of disability in the U.S. at almost 32%.

Swenor and others also claim that the bureau didn’t discuss the change to the questionnaire with the disability and disability research communities before proposing it. Bureau officials told Science the agency “regularly engages with disability researchers and data users,” but the October letter alleges that the bureau’s plan was to engage with the disabled community after the change was made. “This approach to community engagement is not acceptable,” the letter states, while also calling for the creation of a national task force to develop better methods for gathering disability data.

Mont says that, although the bureau’s proposal may have left some U.S. researchers feeling blindsided, the WG-SS itself has undergone extensive testing internationally.

The proposed change will be open for public comment until 19 December, although the National Advisory Committee, which advises the Census Bureau on policy and research issues, will discuss initial comments on 16 November. Landes hopes policymakers will listen to the voices of disabled Americans and not move forward with the change. “The power of the disability community is strong,” he says.

#census #disability #disabilties #long covid

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