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the-evil-authoress · 3 years

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GX Month Day 1: “Hero Signal”

We’re kicking things off with everyone’s favorite hero Judai/Jaden Yuki’s birthday! Show the fluffy boi some love!

This chaos ran away from me. But I’m quite happy with it.

Jaden’s knee bounces, one eye on the game in his hands, the other on his phone. He’s played this game a hundred times before so he doesn’t really need to pay full attention unless it’s the boss fight. His duffle bag is already packed. He’s ready this time, he’s waiting, he’s...excited? That’s a new concept. He can’t remember the last time he’d been excited for his birthday. But last year his friends had gone out of their way to surprise him, so-

Maybe he’s expecting too much.

No, no, we’re trying to be positive here!

Jaden shakes his head, misses the timing for a jump, and has to start the virtual obstacle course over. Today’s gonna be a good day. Clutching the console tighter, Jaden tries to ignore the thick, slimy feeling bubbling up his chest.

His phone vibrates and he dives for it.

[come meet me at central park]

Yes! He snaps the GameBoy shut without saving, chucks it in his bag as he shoulders it, and runs for the door. The park, huh? Maybe he’s not supposed to bring his stuff? Whatever, won’t be their first impromptu sleepover.

He snaps to a halt at the sight of his mother slipping her shoes off at the genkan. “Mom?”

She looks up as if startled to see him. “Judai?”

And there goes his good mood. His mother eyes the bag on his shoulder, what would have been a pleasant but entirely fake smile crinkling into a frown.

“I’m heading out,” he grumbles as he walks past her to get his own shoes.

“I got off early today so I thought we could go get a cake.” Ugh, she sounds so damnably confused, like really? What did you expect?

“I’m heading out!” Jaden snaps, shoving his shoes on, and throws himself out the door before she can get another word in edgewise. It slams behind him. He takes off running.

Geez. Breathing through his teeth, he tugs on his hair. No one even calls him that anymore. ‘Cept that freaking voice in his dreams-

Nope. Not thinking about that. Today’s gonna be a good day.

Winged Kuriboh trills by his head but it’s Neos’ voice that startles him. “She seemed like she was making an effort.”

“Too little, too late.” Jaden huffs and steadfastly plows forward to the train station and out of their middle of nowhere suburb. “I’ve already got plans.” He tightens his grip on the bag strap. And he’d much rather spend the day with people who actually know him and what he likes. He cringes in delight at the memory of the mountain of presents from last year. Wonder what they got him this time?

The train ride is dull like usual; Jaden sticks himself in a corner and plays on his GameBoy until Kuriboh alerts him to their stop. Then the console is shoved back in his bag as he shoulders it and shoves his way through the other passengers toward freedom. The park is a ten minute walk from there, and his friends are conspicuously easy to spot.

There’s a gazebo deck out in balloons and streamers and one of those shiny fucking rainbow “Happy Birthday” signs with his name. Sweet Neo Space, Jaden wants to hide in a trash can like Syrus did at the tournament.

“I can’t.” Jaden spins on his heel, hoping no one has spotted him yet. Sparkman actually goes out of his way to grab Jaden’s shoulders and spin him back around, and Jaden lets him despite the fact he could easily break out of the ghostly hold. “Alright, alright. Gods, my friends are embarrassing.”

As if on cue, someone must have noticed him because a chorus of voices call out.

“Jaden!”

“Jaden, over here!”

Yeah, like he hadn’t already seen the giant sign announcing his birthday to the world. That had to be Atticus’s idea. Walking up to the gazebo is an odd cocktail of emotions, somewhere between please let me die and I will die happy. A mountain of presents sit on the table. It’s...it’s bigger than last year?

“You look like you’re about to faint,” Bastion says, already offering an arm to steady Jaden.

“I might,” Jaden squeaks, a rare moment of vulnerability that is both terrifying and insanely freeing. “You guys... This is a lot.”

“And nothing less for such a special day!” Atticus throws his arms out in a grand display and Jaden winces with a strained laugh.

“A little too much,” he admits.

Atticus’s expression falls into confusion as Christina snorts and Alexis gives her brother a critical look. “I told you his name on the banner was too much.” Jaden nods in silent agreement, not daring to meet their eyes. Bastion’s arm remains a comforting support around his shoulders.

As extravagant as Atticus likes to act, he actually stops to consider this before shrugging. “I’ll keep that in mind then. I guess I do get carried away.” Scratching the back of his head, he smiles sheepishly.

“Oh you think?” Chazz scoffs. “Should have seen what my party looked like.”

Jaden latches onto the ability to swerve the conversation away from himself. “Oh, yeah! Sorry I missed that.”

“You weren’t even invited!” Chazz snaps. “That dolt went and invited himself!”

“You had fun and you know it,” Atticus says, undeterred.

“I have photo evidence,” Syrus says with a smug grin from where he sits on a table bench, and Chazz snaps to gape at him in horror.

“Delete them! Delete them, you little rat!”

“Make me!” Syrus challenges, deftly dodging Chazz’s lunge and darting behind Hassleberry, a solid wall of muscle who Chazz still tries to lunge around.

“Oi! Who said you could drag me into this?!” Hasselberry shoves both of them away as Chazz flails his arms uselessly at Syrus.

Snickering, Jaden moves away from Basation to drop his bag under the bench next to Christina as the game of chase continues. “You brought your bag.”

“Crashing at your place after this,” Jaden says. A statement not a question, and Christina sends him a look but thankfully doesn’t ask.

A screech pulls their attention to Chazz awkwardly dangling from the gazebo railing after what must have been an epic nosedive. “You did that on purpose!” he screams at a smug Syrus, and Jaden’s hands fly to his mouth as the laugh spills out of him.

“Think twice about chasing me next time!”

Just damn his friends are insane and Jaden loves it. Atticus and Bastion take pity on Chazz and help him back into the gazebo, while Jaden cautiously looks over the spread on the table. One side is the pile of colorful boxes, a giant cake with whip cream and strawberries on the other, and Jaden baulks at the figure with a book in his hand at the far end of the table.

“Zane??”

Without looking up, Zane points directly at Atticus and flips the page in his book. “Don’t get used to this.”

“Suuuure,” Christina drawls with one of those I know something you don’t want me to smiles. Ever the king of poker faces, Zane doesn’t react. He doesn't even react to Atticus dropping a party hat on his head on his way to the-

That’s a deep fryer. That’s a deep fucking fryer that Atticus pulls a fresh batch of fried shrimp out of. “Atticus,” Jaden croaks. “I love you but I hate you.”

“Awww, I love you too Jaden!” Atticus doesn’t miss a beat and Jaden slumps onto the bench to bury his face in his arms. These people will be the death of him!

And he will still die happy.

“I think we broke him.” Syrus pokes his shoulder.

“Just leave him alone for a bit.” That’s Alexis’ voice, a brief but firm hand on his shoulder to remind him she’s there if he needs her but will give him space. It’s a little terrifying how well she’s come to know him, that they all have really; Jaden can’t remember ever making the decision to let them get so close. But maybe it’s a good thing, Jaden thinks, as Atticus passes out plates of the best fried shrimp Jaden has ever tasted, he and Bastion eagerly exchange deck theories, and the mountain of presents turns out to be mostly snacks, new video games, and useful but themed items rather than more stuff that will collect dust in his room. The E-Hero throw blanket and the Winged Kuriboh pillow are coming with him to the dorm.

[I’m sorry I couldn’t make it! Happy birthday, Jaden!!! Send pictures!] Chumley texts part way into the festivities with a liberal amount of heart and party popper emojis, and Jaden has to take another moment to recollect himself.

“I tried to get Aster out here too, but the guy said he was too busy.” Atticus holds his hands aloft and shakes his head like this is such a tragedy.

“Hey, I’m surprised you got Zane in on this.” Jaden looks up from the pillow of his arms. He’s starting to tire in the high energy atmosphere but he doesn’t want to leave yet. Maybe his friends won’t care if he just zens for a bit? They didn’t seem to notice last time when he quietly retreated to the side with Christina, but they’d also been screaming over a board game.

“I had the day off anyway,” Zane says, still not looking up, and no one bothers him for not engaging. Then again, Zane has never been much for engaging in anything.

“Just keep pretending you don’t care.” Atticus ruffles Zane’s hair and Jaden sniggers at the way Zane’s poker face cracks the tiniest bit.

Syrus and Hassleberry start arguing over who’s gift Jaden liked better - Jaden refuses to choose much to their dismay - Christina and Alexis seem to be talking about a show they’re both into, and Chazz and Bastion are debating the existence of other realities - really, Chazz? They already know those exist. They’ve been to one.

Jaden smiles, hidden by his arm, left to chill in peace and interact as he pleases.

Yeah, this is a good thing.

Maybe us against the world doesn’t have to just be the two of them anymore.

#gxmonth2021 #ygogx #ygo gx #yugioh gx #yugiohgx #yu gi oh gx #jaden yuki #syrus truesdale #alexis rhodes #chazz princeton #atticus rhodes #zane truesdale #tyranno hassleberry #bastion misawa

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kolmogorov-is-sad · 3 years

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The Swan. Harmony under the starry sky.

Translator’s note: Today is Yuzuru Hanyu’s 26th birthday. To celebrate the date, wonderful Yulena gave us this technical and emotional analysis of the Notte Stellata, that I would like to share. Yuzuru has become an inspiration and has brought hope to so many people. And in the times of adversities, I cannot think of a better program to keep in heart than Notte Stellata.

Notte Stellata (”Starry night”), a program choreographed by David Wilson, is one of the best exhibitions of Yuzuru Hanyu. A song by Italian trio Il Volo set to the music of Saint-Saëns’ The Swan and of the same name became an unexpected gift to Yuzuru.

In April of 2016 renowned Russian coach Tatiana Tarasova told Yuzuru: “I have a song for you, a song I would like to see you skate to very much”. And she gave him a recording.

“I was very happy that coach Tarasova reached out to me. I admired the rivalry between Plushenko and Yagudin that made me desire to get serious with figure skating and to become Olympic champion. That’s why I was truly happy to receive music directly from the coach of the sportsman that once stood at the very top of the victory podium in Salt Lake City.” (c)

Yuzuru has already turned to the swan theme in his short program White Legend. With this beautiful program set to the music from Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake arranged by famous Japanese violinist Ikuko Kawaii, Yuzuru competed in 2010-2011 season. In the first part of the autobiography Aoi Honoo (Blue Flame) Yuzuru shared that the melody of the White Legend is sorrowful but despite that it gives a feeling of setting wings free and brings strength to fight the adversities. After the Great East Japan Earthquake, this program for him became connected to the restoration after the disaster, that is why Yuzuru chose that program for the first charity show in Kobe (in April of 2011) and as the exhibition program of the season as well as the exhibition in Olympic Sochi.

youtube

Japanese papers named that program 星降る夜 (“The Night of the Falling Stars”)

Yuzuru’s recollections of the first days after the tragedy spent in the evacuation center come to mind. All the lights were cut off the night following the earthquake, and the sky full of stars could be seen above.

Even though both programs share the same theme, Notte Stellata shows us a different Swan, delicate and fragile. A symbol of light, love and hope.

This symbolism can be seen in the pattern on the rink and in the skating elements, in the choreography’s delicately reflecting the lyricism and gentleness of the music, and the dynamic accents of the vocals.

The composition of the program consists of several key elements that come together with the music to bring laconicism but also sophistication to the choreography. Prolonged lobe on the left foot, multirotational twizzles, Ina Bauer, hydroblade, spread eagles with the change of edges and sit twizzles are scattered across the program as if they were pearls on the thread of the melody. Those elements create unique harmony between the music and the movements.

Composition-wise, there are two main ways in which choreography is used to highlight those central elements: execution of the elements at the peak of the melodic phrases and the execution of the elements as accents to the rhythmic patterns of the music.

This new Swan image is also shown through the shining white costume with deep-cut neckline both at the front and at the back, that might represent the purity, delicacy and fragility of the beautiful creature.

Starry night on the forest lake. A swan glides across the water...

The program starts with a soft intro and laconic choreography highlighting the tranquility and serenity of the music. There is some choreography posing into back inside three-turn, followed by a couple of running steps and a prolonged forward-outside lobe on the left foot.

The LFO lobe last through the last two parts of the melody. This lobe and the right arm softly going down at the end speak of tranquility.

The vocals come in to three variations of the half-lunges, gentle and ceaseless movements of the body and hands in harmony with the soft intonation of the melody.

Guarda che lago che luna c’è.

The image of a beautiful bird is created with the vocabular made of delicate movements of the body, the head and the arms, even with the simplicity of the basic running steps.

The main element of this part is the multirotational RFI twizzle at the peak of the musical phrase, that brilliantly highlights the prolonged vocals.

In the next part, choreographic accent is put on the expressiveness of the body and arms. There is a mazurka jump at the change of the musical phrases into a lunge and a knee slide with soft “enveloping” arm motion.

The elegant pose in the lunge with the lowered head and the smooth line of the outreached arms with the loose wrists evoke the image of a bird spreading the wings.

What a pity that this lunge lasts just a second!

Arms wrapping and enveloping the body in the knee slide highlight the tenderness of the melody and the softness of the vocals. Yuzuru melts into the music, his expressiveness incredible.

At the end of the phrase there are two crossed chassés, followed at the beginning of the new phrase by a waltz three (вальсовая тройка) on the left foot into a rittberger three turn (BO three turn with the free leg in front of the main one) set right to the music.

Then, at the culmination of the melody, Yuzuru executes his signature Ina Bauer, the key element of this part of the program. Arms spread softly become the main feature of the element, their movement lasting through all the long vocal part. Those arms speak in the very language of the music.

Beautiful bird sets the wings free and then folds them again gently at the end.

The next phrase of the music is accompanied by a series of similar choreographic elements that highlight the rhythmic structure. After a LFO three turn with prolonged exit lobe set to the vocals, Yuzuru executes four side half-lunges together with delicate arm movements of a beautiful swan.

Despite choreographic simplicity, you can watch and re-watch this part forever.

Then comes a combination spin set carefully to the music. Once again arm movements draw the attention during the spin with their nuanced musical interpretation:

a feather-like swing of the right wrist and rounded soft lines in the camel spin;

arms being spread open smoothly in the sit spin;

soft movement of the left hand before the Biellmann;

both arms being gracefully spread after the Biellmann at the spin exit, accompanied by the tender sound of the cello.

Difficult variation of the Biellmann at the culmination rightfully becomes the highlight of this spin.

Exiting the spin, Yuzuru does some choreographic posing at the beginning of the new musical phrase, a three turn, a slide on both feet with accentuated arms movements, and a waltz three turn, and then dives into a gorgeous hydroblade at the peak of the melody.

And once again during the prolonged vocal part there is the right arm’s expressive movement of a wing being softly spread open. Incredibly subtle motion of the same hand’s wrist becomes a choreographic touch at the end of the musical phrase.

Flight of the beautiful swan.

At the beginning of the next part the structure of the musical phrasing is highlighted by three inside spread eagles.

Guarda che notte stellata!

Yuzuru wonderfully expresses the music with the intensity and the duration of the spread eagles that fit the rhythmic pattern. Every element is accompanied by one arm softly moving up to the high notes.

Then there come a Jackson, a LFI bracket, a crossed step and a double back outside choctaw into a half-flip. And then a signature half-sit twizzle into inside Bauer with both arms elegantly going up.

This skating transition reflects the growing intensity of the music. The intricacy of the arms and body movements expresses the nuances of the phrase and adds complexity and volume to the choreography.

Then there are a waltz three turn on the right foot and three crossovers in preparation to the culmination of the phrase - a gorgeous choreographic combination of the delayed and triple axels.

The delayed axel and the following triple axel out of the twizzles and into the twizzles excellently highlight the change of the musical intonations, they are performed in complete harmony with the soft and lyrical vocals. Both the take-offs and the landings of the jumps in unison with the lines: Guarda che notte stellata! L'amore per noi...

Incredible composition and performance.

There is a half lutz after the twizzles at the triple axel exit and into some turning steps.

Yuzuru’s body and arms language expresses tender motives of the final musical phrase with the words of choreographic accents.

A half-sit slide creates another bird image.

The swan folds his wings.

Beautiful final spin perfromed to the music fading away, and to the deafening applause of the audience, makes the perfect ending of the program:

an incredible camel spin with accentuated change of variations as the musical parts change;

a sit spin in the difficult variation “leg behind”, the rounded shape of the arm position resembling wings.

In the deeply touching final pose, Yuzuru’s arms and eyes are turned to the sky above. To starry sky of his.

“This is not just about being harmony with the music by one hundred percent and about emphasizing with it, not just about the most difficult elements that fit every single note this is some completely incredible unity of the human soul and the music. I have seen something like that only twice in my whole life, and not on the ice, but in the ballet: when Maia Plisetskaya danced to "The Dying Swan“ under the accompaniment of Mstislav Rostropovich, and in the New York dance studio where Diana Vishnyova danced with Valery Gergiev as conductor. Yuzuru Hanyu’s skating is a phenomenon of that same scale.” Tatiana Tarasova

On the 7th of December Yuzuru celebrates his 26th birthday.

I would like to with him all the very best and bright that there is on the whole Earth. Most of all - to be in great health. Then there will be power to fulfill all of the plans. Fly high, beautiful and strong Swan! Those wings behind your back will carry you lightly and freely. Fly towards your dream that will definitely come true.

At the Continues With Wings show Yuzuru once said to the audience: “Your eyes are like the stars to me”. The source of that light are all the incredible emotions that Yuzuru’s skating brings us, his skating where the technical mastery intermingles with art.

Yuzuru Hanyu is the brightest star on the figure skating horizon.

#yuzuru hanyu #notte stellata #translation #happy birthday yuzuru

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kissingcullens · 3 years

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Sam killing Dean at the end of the show is so big brained, thank you for sharing it with us

Listen!!

They could never pull it off, but if it was done WELL, I think that would have been amazing. Again, in a perfect world, I personally would have preferred a happy ending and atonement from Dean...

...and TBH my gut instinct is that having Sam kill Dean himself would be too fucking brutal, if only for how much that would fuck Sam up... (haha, unless...? 👀)

...but if the writers “always knew they wanted to kill Dean...” smh! They could have really gotten some flavor and some DRAMA by making Dean Vs. Sam the final conflict??

Maybe under the leadership or manipulation of somebody else, maybe not... idk how it would happen but of course it would have to have a good amount of buildup; a few seasons at least- and it would have to be done in such a way where both men have powerful motivation so that the audience FEELS the conflict and it feels genuine and inevitable.

But what could be more climactic, personal and impactful for the FINAL season than to finally have that battle between Sam & Dean the writers kept flirting with and flinching away from!?

Silver vs. Flint!! Betrayal! Drama!! Tragedy!!! Brothers on opposite sides of a divide too great to cross... Dean knowing Sam so well that it’s easy to anticipate his next move, and vice versa...

Like the way that the central conflict in the series was so often Sam and Dean being pitted against one another- (Lucifer vs. Michael obviously, and they had a whole thing about the goddamn Mark of Cain for gods sakes; the original fratricide)

-and how much of their dynamic is Sam shrinking to fit into this box of acceptable behavior to avoid violence from Dean, while Dean loses sight of his original justifications for his own violence (to protect Sam, to protect people...)

The way that in S1 John told Dean “You will have to either save your brother, or you will have to kill him.”

The way S4 Dean said he’d rather let Sam die than allow him to be a monster... the many Sam stand-in characters that Dean murders or tries to kill, like Amy, Cyrus, Jack, the Rugarou, etc...

And that becomes an overarching theme for the show, and we see a Dean who, for whatever reason, comes to believe that he and Sam are on opposite sides of a conflict... planning to do something SO heinous that Sam finally believes that Dean is out of control and needs to be stopped. (Maybe it involves Jack?? Or even the return of Amy’s young son, who would be a teenager or a young adult by now...)

The way that the show could expand on how Dean’s tragic flaw; the thing that Dooms him, is that he can’t grow beyond the tiny box that Hunting and his father have put him in, and that he would even kill his beloved baby brother to maintain that status quo... as long as Dean cannot accept otherness or ambiguity, he and Sam are inevitably fated to clash.

Dean becomes his father... becomes even worse than his father, because for Dean, Hunting and annihilating the Other becomes THE End Goal in itself, and his motives and moral qualms get obliterated one by one as with each hunt he crosses his own boundaries of morality...

And yeah, maybe there’s a huge fight, or maybe Dean accepts another possession-style bargain, or maybe Sam just chooses to side with the Monstrous and they fall out and Dean hardens his heart against his brother. (“I don’t have a brother.”)

OH and you know how you can compare “first and last scenes” for parallels?

What if the last fight was Dean breaking into Sam’s living space, just like he did 15 years earlier when he was just a young man breaking into his baby brother’s apartment in the middle of the night... but this time it’s with deadly intent.

And Sam’s original goal to escape his abusive family (a family that is unable to accept him, and equally unwilling to let him go) finally comes to its shocking and inevitable, violent conclusion. So good!

It would be tragic of course; maybe Dean has his Darth Vader moment where he flips at the last moment and saves Sam from the villain sneaking up to stab him in the back and sustains a fatal wound himself, and you have that heartbreaking scene dying in your brother’s arms, repenting... the pain!? The DRAMA!!!

#/#//#///#////#/////#supernatural for ts #SPN for ts #Dean critical

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sillyrabbit81 · 3 years

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Her Heavy Cross

Summary: Three years after tragedy hits, Lana she decides to start dating again. She meets Will through a dating app and they begin an online romance. After months of constant requests, Lana relents and agrees to meet and go on an irl date with Will. But is Will who he says he is? Lana is quickly pulled into an intense relationship forcing her to confront her tragic past. Will Lana face it or will she close her heart forever?

Pairing: OMC x OFC

Word Count: Approx 2.5k

Warnings: Swearing, smut, spanking, Dom vibes.

Authors Note: The story started as a Henry Cavill fanfiction but I changed it to be an original character, but shades of Henry are still there. Hope you enjoy the story and thanks for reading.

Part 8 Part 10

Part 9

We went to bed not long after that. I think we were both tired from staying up late the night before. Liam went to bed in his underwear, and I wore a singlet and PJ shorts. We talked some more before we fell asleep.

I asked Liam a bit more about his work. He told me the next two weeks were costume fitting, rehearsals, fight training and a few media events. "It's more of a nine to five thing at the moment. It'll be different after Easter when filming starts."

"How is it different?"

"Really long hours, usually fourteen to sixteen hours. There are a few weeks where I'm not needed, though. Although I'm the male lead, the female role is the central one."

"Who is the actress?"

"Myra Roberts."

"Oh, she's Australian."

"Yeah, most of the cast is Australian. I'm the ring in. I'm for, and I'm quoting here, international appeal and name recognition."

Liam asked me about my job. "I told you most of it before," I replied.

"You told me what you did, but you didn't tell me about it."

I told him about my work in a mainstream school support classroom. Most of the kids have cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities. The classes are small. I was teaching a combined year 3 and 4 class.

Without mentioning specifics or names, I told him some funny stories about the kids, some of the challenges they faced. Some of the feel-good moments when they finally achieved goals they were working towards. Some of the goals were as simple as being able to feed themselves or to write more than a few lines without tiring.

I opened up and told him about the girl who passed away from aspiration pneumonia the first year I was teaching full time. She was in a wheelchair and had a genetic disorder that required ventilation at night. I smiled as I talked about her. I wasn't surprised when a tear rolled down my cheek.

"It's tough, but I love it. I like knowing that the kids get to have a real school experience, be part of the whole school community. They go on excursions, go to assembly, play at lunchtime with the other kids and its good that the mainstream kids grow up with people with disabilities around them. They get to be kids, not hidden away from the world like they were in the past."

Liam wiped my tear away with his thumb. He asked tenderly, "why do you do it?"

"Why do you act?" I asked rhetorically. "It's a calling, a passion, I guess. It's like nine days out of 10, I go home from school happy. Feeling like I've achieved something and feeling like I've supported eight kids to achieve their own small victories. It makes me feel satisfied that I'm doing good in the world. You know, adding something positive."

"That's really beautiful," Liam said. Then he laughed, "It makes what I do feel ridiculous. All I do is play make-believe all day."

"You help people too; you make us feel things. You show us truth and beauty. Give us hope when we feel hopeless. Laughter when we are sad. Make us inspired instead of apathetic. It's no small thing. Our scale is different, that's all. You can effect millions of people for a short time. I aim to effect maybe a hundred people over my career for the rest of their lives. Both are noble causes that will help to leave the world in a better place than when we found it."

"Did I say that you were intelligent earlier?" Liam asked. I shook my head. "I should have."

"Is that more important than being an excellent shag?"

"I don't know about that." Liam laughed, "But I know I like it."

Not long after that, we fell asleep.

When I woke up the next morning, I was trapped by Liam's heavy arm over me, and his hand was cupping one of my breasts. He was still asleep. His breathing was long and deep with a soft snore. I didn't want to disturb him, but my bladder wouldn't wait.

I tried to lift his arm off me and climb out from underneath him, but he pulled me closer. I could feel his morning erection against my bum. As much as I wanted to snuggle into it, I couldn't wait. I lifted his arm again, and I was able to sneak out.

I went to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth and washed my face. Then hopped back into bed. I looked at Liam while he slept. I brushed his hair off his forehead. His dark hair was so thick and soft. He had a few lines on his forehead that just seemed to make him appear more manly. His eyelashes seemed even longer as they laid against his cheeks. Up close, I could see a few faded freckles scattered across his cheeks and nose.

I traced my finger down his nose. He had a slight bump on the bridge. Somehow it didn't make him less attractive. His lips were so kissable, and I couldn't resist touching them either. I ran my fingertip down further, tracing his lips and then down to his dimpled chin. Liam opened his eyes and nearly made me shit myself when he growled and tried to bite my finger.

"Cunt!" I cried in shock, pulling my finger away.

Liam's face took on his own look of shock at my language. Then he laughed and tried to kiss me. I turned my head.

"Nuh-uh. You scared me half to death. How long have you bloody been awake for?"

"A while." He admitted, still smiling. My heart was racing, so I gave him a look exaggerating my anger. "Come on, Sweetheart. That was funny."

"Don't Sweetheart me. Here I was, innocently laying in bed thinking about how gorgeous you are. Meanwhile, you're laying there thinking wouldn't it be funny if I scared the shit out of her." I was trying not to smile, but I'm sure he could tell I wasn't really mad.

"You called me a cunt, though, so I guess we are even."

"That's a term of endearment in Australia." I grinned widely.

"Really?" Liam raised his eyebrows, looking dubious.

"Yeah, for sure. You'd say something like 'Oi mate! You're a sick cunt'." I was enjoying this.

"Which means?"

"Hey, friend! You're a good person, and I like you."

"I'll stick to calling you Sweetheart if that's ok?"

"Alright, cunt."

"Just bring your bum over here so I can fuck your cunt," Liam said, reaching for me.

My stomach flipped, and I felt myself getting aroused. Liam manhandled me onto my stomach and climbed on top of me. His bare hairy chest tickled my shoulders. I could feel him hard, thick and ready against me.

"Let's see if your tight little cunt is ready for me." Liam forced his hand down the front of my shorts. His fingers found their way to my centre, and I moaned as his fingers easily slid between my folds, my desire evident by how wet I was. He slipped a finger into me and my muscles clenched around it.

Too quickly, he removed his hand. Liam's wet fingers made their way to my mouth. "Open up, Sweetheart. Taste how much you want me." My lips parted for him, and he shoved his finger in. I closed my mouth around it, and my tongue lapped the sweet taste of my arousal.

Liam withdrew his finger, and his weight lifted off my back. I turned my head to see what he was doing and saw the condom in his hands. I continued to look over my shoulder as Liam dragged his underwear down, leaving them on his thighs. He held himself at the base and used the other to apply the condom. I watched in fascination as Liam rolled the condom down his shaft, his head was down, and his shoulders were hunched over the task. I really wanted to watch him masturbate one day.

When he was finished, he grabbed my hips and wrenched me up by them until I was on my knees. My head was still on the bed, and I was forced to look away by the new position. My shorts were pulled down my thighs. There was nothing gentle about Liam this morning. Then I panicked, realising how on display I would be. I tried to lay back down, but his firm hands gripped my hips, keeping me in position.

"Don't move," Liam ordered roughly. His hands moved from my hips, and he ran his hand over the curve of my bottom. "You should see yourself from this angle, Sweetheart."

He pressed his hand against my slit and put two fingers straight in. I jumped in surprise, pulling away as his thick fingers stretched me. I felt a sting on my arse cheek, and I flinched in pain.

"I told you not to move. Move again, and you'll get another one." Liam's voice was stern. He rubbed the spot he had just spanked, soothing it.

I waited, not moving, for what seemed like an eternity. The anticipation was killing me. I wanted to move, to tell Liam to stop, but I also wanted to scream at him to hurry up. I needed him inside me. Then I felt the tip of his cock rub against my wet opening, sliding smoothly up and down. Every time it grazed my clit, my anticipation built.

"Please," I murmured.

"Please what? Tell me what you want."

I licked my lips. "I want your cock."

I heard Liam inhale through his teeth. "I'm not going to be gentle."

"I don't care."

I felt Liam position himself at my entrance, and it was all the warning I had. Suddenly he was in me all the way. "Fuck," I cried out in relief and pain.

Liam didn't wait for me to adjust to his size. He started ramming into me like a piston. His hands were back on my hips, pulling me onto him with each thrust. The slap of our bodies meeting was so loud it was nearly all I could hear.

Grabbing my shoulder, Liam lifted me on my knees until our bodies were flush. He grabbed my head and turned it to the side. His lips met mine, and he forced his tongue into my mouth. His kiss devoured me, consuming me completely. His other hand lifted my singlet, freeing my breasts, and he kneaded one roughly before he found my nipple. He gripped me and pinched hard, but I barely felt it. My body reacted to the pain as though it was a pleasure, and electricity seemed to flow through my veins as my whole body felt ablaze.

Liam wrapped his fingers around my neck. The pressure was only slight, but it felt dangerous. He was so strong. If he wanted to destroy me, he could, and there would be nothing I could do about it. Instead of terrifying me, the thought thrilled me. I knew it was insane, wanting to play at the edge, confusing fear and arousal, but the combination was intoxicating.

He broke our kiss. I felt his lips tickle at my ear, and his voice was husky with exertion. "You fucking love this, don't you?"

"Yes," I panted. My voice was ragged and breathy. "Yes, I fucking love it."

I was thrown down on the bed again. My arse still in the air, and my head was pushed down into the bed. Liam held me that way while he unrelentingly pounded me. I felt like a plaything, a toy for his pleasure, as he threw me around where he wanted me. I felt helpless, but I didn't fight him. I submitted to his desires, knowing my body gave him pleasure was its own reward. I let him use me, dominate me, own me, and I knew I would beg for it to happen again and again.

He wasn't completely selfish though, his other hand found my clit, fingers moving over it in rapid little circles. "I need you to cum, Lana. I need to feel you cum."

He played with me varying his speed and firmness. He seemed to understand my body, my moans, my breathing because quickly, he found the rhythm I needed. I shattered beneath his touch. I shouted into the sheets as my release ripped through me. Liam didn't stop rubbing me until I was still.

Giving me no time to recover, Liam continued to rail me, but now he seemed to move impossibly fast. His fingers were digging into my hips, rocking them violently against his thrusts. I felt him engorge, and I braced myself for his release.

"Fuck!" Liam's voice thundered as I felt him pulse inside me. He held my hips still, his movements controlling his orgasm now. He grunted as he made each of his final drives.

Liam finally collapsed next to me, withdrawing himself as he did. I fell to the bed, unable to hold my own weight now that he wasn't holding me up. I took deep, calming breaths, and slowly I felt my strength return.

Shyly, I looked over at Liam. He was on his back, his chest heaving. A sheen of sweat glistened over his body in the morning light. He saw me peeking at him, and he half-smiled. A giggle escaped my lips.

"What are you laughing at?" He sounded amused.

"Nothing, I just feel really..." I didn't know exactly how I felt. I was sore, but that good way you feel sore after a hard workout. I was also calm, relaxed and euphoric. "Content."

"You really liked it?" I nodded. "I'm not too rough?" I shook my head. "Good, cause that was fucking amazing."

I giggled again and looked away. I felt Liam's fingers caress my back. My singlet was still pulled up, and my shorts were still around my ankles. He moved on the bed, and I felt him shuffle closer.

"Your bum's got a perfectly shaped red handprint on it. Did I slap you that hard?" He asked with a hint of concern.

"Yeah, it was hard. Good hard. I mark pretty easily." I turned to face him. He was laying on his side, his elbow bent and his head rested on his hand. He was looking down at my bare bottom, rubbing the spot where he marked me. "Bruises also show up pretty bad. They usually look worse than they feel. I rarely remember where I got them."

"You'll need a safe word if we keep this up." Liam looked up. He smiled briefly when he saw I was looking at him. "I don't want to go too far and really hurt you."

"Yeah, it's probably a good idea." I rolled over and laid on my back. I lifted my hips and put my shorts back on. Liam leaned down to kiss my exposed nipple before helping me pull my singlet back down. He laid his head on my chest, and I played with his soft hair, curling it around my fingers.

"Any ideas?" He asked. "For a safe word, I mean."

"Freeze?" I suggested.

Liam was quiet for a moment before nodded in agreement. "Freeze," he repeated. "I like it."

Part 10

#original character #original fiction #romantic story #happy ever after

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real-jaune-isms · 4 years

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Volume 7 Chapter 3 Review

My first time with this, it’s probably gonna be longwinded and awkward...

Starting off with 3 scenes basically happening at once is interesting. The airship flying them in to start the mission, Ruby and Jaune getting briefed on it, and the whole crew getting their gear upgrades. The briefing conversation plays over shots of them all getting their personal briefcases of stuff, and of some normal soldiers fighting smaller Grimm in the tundra. The new clothes scene is most important though. We see: Their happy faces, Blake and Jaune both pondering haircuts while Jaune runs his hands over the sash he kept from Pyrrha (ow my heart), Yang attaching her arm upgrade, and Ruby getting at a new cape before Oscar approaches her. Oh, and on the briefing screens RWBY and JNR are registered as civilian Huntsmen. They have their licenses!!!!

Let’s talk about the cape for a sec. Her red cloak has been an heirloom she’s kept for 6 volumes now and about 17 years. The last vestige of her mother. So is it really such a good idea for her to get a new one and just go with it? Is that abandoning the sentimental value and very essence of the original cape? It’s been worn and weathered since Volume 4, so an replacement or a stitch job would be good, but the latter would be ideal. I don’t really mind the new one so much because she asked for it and clearly she had a reason for that. It’s the exact same in every visual way as far as I could see, and she’s keeping the old one. The message is still alive in her wearing it, and times must change. It’s better to get a new one than risk damaging the original any more.

Anyway, after we see the few shots of them prepping for this mission, a very old Geist possessing a bunch of ice and hiding in a Dust mine, the airship doors open and we see the team in all their new glory. They jump out accompanied by the Ace Ops, and all make stylish landings. Ruby only uses her pogo gunshots to slow her descent, and Blake swings her weld fixed Gambol Shroud to Spider-Man swing around the buildings to land. But Weiss and Yang use their semblances to do it, and the aura percentages on Blake’s scroll later represent that accordingly. Good attention to detail. And we hear from Weiss that using your Aura can keep you from freezing, a good reason why they can all wear such stylish clothes and not die of frostbite.

After Clover checks in with all the groups about keeping in contact and keeping an eye on Aura levels, Blake catches Yang staring and they have an adorably awkward exchange about Blake’s haircut and how Yang likes it but doesn’t know how to express that. Marrow seems annoyed he has to watch a high school love story unfolding in front of him, but Harriet teases him about being childish and that shuts him up. They head toward the mine entrance, but Team RWBY hangs back to discuss how uncomfortable they all are with having lied to Ironwood last episode about Salem and the lamp. But Ruby reasons that they don’t know if Ironwood is in the right mindset for that bombshell right now and they WILL tell him soon. Fair enough. A flashback to Oscar’s interruption earlier reveals he’s pretty torn about it too since it’s exactly what they hated Ozpin for doing to them. Either way, they enter the mine and a comment about the path being blocked leads to a chilling realization. This is the mine that caved in and killed Ilia’s parents. This is why her life went so terribly, and it’s a major reminder of the awful relationship between humans and Faunus and how bad things can get. That prompts Weiss to try and apologize for her own bad attitude about it all in Volume 1, and some harsh truths from Marrow about complacency with injustice for the sake of living free of making those hard moral choices. Wise words, a lot to think about with this world and even our own.

But there’s no time for thinking about changing the world’s prejudices, they need to send Blake through a dark opening in the rubble to see if it’s safe for them to blast a hole big enough for everyone or if there’s any nearby Dust they might agitate. I get the whole faunus seeing better in the darker area of the cave thing but... couldn’t Marrow have done it too? Or was he too big and thicc and they had to send the lithe teenager? I tease, I tease. Height and muscle mass may be the legit reasons, plus her weapon is also less bulky. Before she goes in, both Blake and Yang see the SDC logo printed on some discarded boxes, likely a reminded of the last place they saw it: branded on Adam’s face. Not a good memory to recall in a tight situation, but it shows they’re still dealing with that. Good news is, when Blake goes through there’s no Dust on the other side. Bad news, the Geist gives a legitimate jumpscare that literally makes Blake jump back in surprise and pull her weapon to shoot at it. That of course clues the others in that she found something, and we see Harriet’s weapon as she deploys mechanized armor to go over her arms and boost her punching strength. Reminds me of the controls for a mech, fake arms you wear and move in the cockpit to move the real giant ones. But these have plenty of power all on their own and bust open the wall of debris. Makes sense to boost her upper body strength to counterbalance the power in her legs.

They chase the Geist into the mine until they encounter the new Centinel Grimm burrowing up from the ground. Team RWBY gets to show off their weapon upgrades/new moves as they dispose of them: Blake does a lot of slashing and stabbing as usual and Weiss does mostly the same plus shooting ice at the bugs and using glyphs to stop them from lunging. But the real stars seem to be Yang and Ruby. Yang added sticky bombs to her gauntlets’ arsenal, and Ruby can now spin Crescent Rose’s blade 180 degrees to slice a severed centinel half on her backswing. Cool. But Marrow shows off his own party tricks with his rifle that becomes a large blade edged boomerang and the ability to stop two Grimm still with nothing but a snap and the word “stay”. Clearly a reference to dog obedience training and possibly showing the power words can have, a reference to The Boy Who Cried Wolf, which I still believe he’s based on. All that kid had to do was say the word and the entire town came running to face a supposed threat. However, I’ve also heard that his inspiration is actually “A Dog and it’d Shadow”, which might suggest he’s going to go down a bad path for the sake of his own benefit... Regardless, Harriet zooms up and tosses the centinel against a wall, which seems to stop it. They report sighting the target and engaging with further hostiles to the others, who take that as a cue to speed things up. When next we see them, Harriet runs past Weiss and Ruby to take down the last Centinel with a single punch before Ruby had time to even take a shot at it. Instead of being petty about a kill steal, our little rose goes gaga over Harriet having a speed semblance like her, while the Hare of course boasts she seems to be faster based on Ruby’s reaction time. They suddenly hear Clover announce he’s fighting the Geist with Qrow, and when it eludes them too everyone converges in a central cavern.

Now let’s talk about JNR’s section of the mission until they meet up with the others. They make their jump too, Jaune having added Hard Light Dust to his shield and using it like Link’s paraglider in Breath of the Wild to float down gently, and then gravity Dust from the central crest to negate the final impact and bounce into a flip landing. Stylish~ We don’t see how, but Ren and Nora landed fine too. And their accompanying Ace Operatives Vine and Elm give rather indirect compliments, much to Jaune and Nora’s annoyance. As they walk through an ice tunnel and Vine reports its stability and their approximate time of convergence, Nora gushes about how exciting it all is before turning her enthusiasm on Ren. He handles a direct compliment about his new outfit about as well as Ren handles any show of emotion... he does not. He just tries to redirect the topic to the mission. Annoying to all the Renora shippers, absolutely, but also kinda his MO. His semblance, his very nature since the tragedy of Kuroyuri is to not get emotional because that can get them in trouble if it’s at the wrong time. He still needs to learn there are plenty of right times to have emotions, LIKE WHEN YOUR UNOFFICIAL GIRLFRIEND WANTS YOU TO RETURN THE COMPLIMENT!!! He better learn from that mistake... But at least there’s dense as a rock Jaune to compliment Nora instead and miss the point of what she was doing. The good boy is trying his best to be nice.

When they hear RWBY’s squad announce the fighting has started they start booking it and slide down an icy slope that’s revealed to have Centinels emerging at the bottom. Vine uses his semblance to stretch out and grab hold of the walls and Elm uses her’s to root her feet in the ground, both so they can stop moving toward the enemy. But that’s not JNR’s style, so they charge right into the Grimm and take them out quickly. A gravity burst shield bash from Jaune, new grappling hook mode for the blades on Ren’s guns, and Nora just bashes some skulls. This approaches earns another indirect compliment before they took finish the journey to the main mine cavern.

Meanwhile Qrow is with Clover and looking very cool in his new digs. They head in and discuss Qrow’s history of teamwork and how he doesn’t really do that anymore... cue sad STRQ vibes. Also he almost trips and Clover catches him, a perk of having someone at your side. After he gets the rundown from Elm, we don’t hear from thes two until they’re chasing down the Geist. It reaches its icy armored body, and gathers extra pieces from the walls around them. Qrow notices one bit it’s trying to get will pull down a support beam and warns Clover to stay back... just in time. The Geist gets away, but in its wake the two men share a conversation about Semblances. Qrow reveals his misfortune and how it burdens him to solitude or else situations like that one could go way worse. But Clover surprises him with the fact that his own Semblance is, of course... generating good luck.

The look Qrow gives him... a lot of people say it’s gay panic as he falls head over heels for this charming military man who can balance him out. I’ve come to see it a bit differently thanks to another post I saw. It’s regular panic. Panic and self-loathing, because he sees his perfect mirror image. Clover is sober, charismatic, a good leader, doesn’t ruin things with his very presence, and has skill and wisdom beyond anything Qrow has been able to demonstrate. This is everything he wishes he could have been for the kids from Volumes 4-6, the kind of huntsman he wants to have been at Beacon... a version of him who might have been able to keep Team STRQ together. But it might also be him getting a crush on a charming guy who balances him out. Regardless, they call everyone to meet up in the middle.

And meet up they do, the various types of Dust in the large central chamber having such effects as floating the dirt their boots kick up and evaporating a drop of Jaune’s sweat when it hits the ground. Cool set piece, though they need to be careful with how they fight otherwise they could set off the Dust and ruin the Amity Satellite launch site... and kill them. The Geist is hanging from a giant piece of ice jutting from the ceiling, and when the teams spot it the big boy dramatically drops down to fight them. Ruby panics upon seeing it added Dust to it’s body so they’ll have a harder time fighting it safely, but the Ace-Ops kick into action almost immediately. Elm and Vine use their Semblances to keep it in place and expose the Grimm joints between its ice limbs, which Marrow throws his weapon to sever. But that leaves some Dust crystals falling through the air, so the Flash gets the lightning in his eyes and speeds in to catch them before they hit the ground... Oops! I mean Quicksilver does his Days of Future Past thing to move around the falling debris at superspeed and grab the Dust... DAMMIT! I mean Harriet gets the lightning in her eyes and pulls a Days of Future Past to move around the falling debris at superspeed and grab the Dust. But the boomerang cuts another part of the arm and knocks more Dust off out of her reach. Lucky for them, Clover is there to catch it just in time. He passes the crystal to Qrow and jumps into the action.

The Ace-Ops continue to run around the Geist and to distract and disorient it, and they get the other arm off. With a flick of his lucky charm, Clover jumps up and loops his fishing line around the Geist’s mask face, and it actually hooks. What comes next brings a look of astonishment to Team RWBY’s faces. He pulls the Geist out of the ice by its face, and Harriet runs up its torso to give a jumping Shoryuken with her mech fists to kill the Grimm. But that leaves a lot of Dust crystals falling through the air, and the Ace Ops scramble to grab all of them. One remains and Harriet runs to get it... it’s a close call... and Ruby beats her to it. Who’s faster now?~ But much to Ruby’s surprise, upon seeing her in action Harriet claims Ruby’s Semblance is unlike any speed Semblance she’s ever seen, that there’s probably more to it than she realizes... or we do for that matter~ I can’t wait to see what they do with that. Yang points out that Ruby has an awful lot more going on in terms of power than Harriet realizes, earning a grin from Weiss and a very cute giggle from Blake. Regardless, mission accomplished and Qrow and Clover have a little banter over if Ruby’s catch was luck or talent. Glad to see the Atlas MVP’s acknowledge our Team has some skill of their own. Even happier to see Elm effortlessly put Ruby on her shoulder and carry her around to celebrate while Yang and Nora start dancing.

Next thing we know we’re back in Mantle as the police ship drops Forest off. He goes into an alley, where Tyrian suddenly appears under a flickering light to creep us all out and kill a short lived fan favorite character. RIP, good good protest boy.

And that’s pretty much it. Sorry it took a while.

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stillthewordgirl · 5 years

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LOT/CC fic: Same Time Next Year

Leonard is a demon. Sara is an angel. Still, they've learned to work together over all the millennia--and to appreciate each other. But when Leonard wants to change their...arrangement, will Sara manage to face her feelings enough to figure out what she really wants?

***

Inspired by my recent reread of “Good Omens,” though I haven’t managed to see the show yet. A warning that it is fairly long for Tumblr, coming in at more than 7,000 words.

Many thanks to Pir8grl! Can also be read here at AO3 or here at FF.net.

***

Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

“Good Omens,” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

***

It was a lovely day, really. The sort of day that generally put people in a wonderful mood as they walked in the sunshine and gloried in one of the first truly beautiful days of the spring.

As such, Leonard thought as he sauntered toward the meeting point, it was probably the sort of day he should dislike intensely. He couldn’t quite muster the feeling, though. He liked Central City enough that he rarely voluntarily left it these days, and he wasn’t horribly fond of cold weather (ironic as that was, really). He was as pleased with the day as everyone else.

Maybe that had something to do with his plans for it, though.

And he certainly shouldn’t be thinking that.

Leonard was, not to put too fine a point on it, a demon. Fallen child of heaven. Devotee (as much as he was devoted to anything) of Lucifer himself. He’d been on Earth a long, long time, tasked with keeping a weather eye on humanity and his opposite number. Which was what he was doing today.

Really.

Well. Sort of.

Despite the weather, he was all in black. It was sort of his thing. Skinny black jeans, black turtleneck, black leather jacket. Icy blue eyes—well, he was an ice demon—were hidden, at the moment, behind dark glasses. Very short salt-and-pepper hair (which showed an annoying tendency to curl manically if he let it grow any longer, despite all his demonic efforts) gave him a look of experience (or so he liked to think). And the line of 5 o’clock shadow on his jawline was classic “bad boy,” at least by current standards.

Certainly plenty of people, men and women alike, were watching the saunter that fine spring day. (And the ass, especially in those tight jeans.) Well, temptation was part of the job. Perhaps to their sorrow, however, passive temptation was all they’d be getting today. Leonard’s mind was elsewhere.

To be specific, it was on the being sitting on the rim of the fountain in the park just up ahead. Her attention was, to all appearances, wholly on the other people walking by around her, and Leonard let his steps pick up, just a little. As long as she wasn’t looking. It wouldn’t do to look too eager.

He wasn’t that far away, though, when she glanced up. Leonard immediately went back to the saunter. Nothing to see here. He wasn’t that glad to see her.

Something in Sara Lance’s face, as she got to her feet, told him that she saw right through that.

But because she was glad to see him too, neither of them would dare say anything.

Sara—properly, Sarai of the Holy Lance—was an angel. Leonard’s opposite number, here on Earth, to be honest (which, as a demon, he probably shouldn’t be). And she was beautiful, all that the modern image of angels tended to be—blond with bright blue eyes and the, well, face of an angel. Innocent and sweet and naïve.

One of the things Leonard lov…liked about her, though, was that that image was absolute garbage. Even That Book (as demons tended to refer to the Bible) noted that angels appearing to humans often had to say, “Fear not!” Angels could be scary.

Sara was no exception. And Leonard, frankly and completely counterintuitively, found it utterly and deliciously intoxicating.

She was badass. Leonard, lurking as only a demon could lurk, had seen her as a shining warrior of the light more than once, including as she took on a group of neo-Nazis in 2017. (Leonard hated neo-Nazis and Nazis alike. They were, he thought, a measure of how much evil humans could come up with completely on their own.)

(And some things, even a demon couldn’t countenance—at least, this demon. He’d never truly claimed to be a very good one, after all, even if that was a contradiction in terms.)

Sara had left a trail of bodies behind her that day, more (Leonard thought) than he’d ever personally accounted for. (He was rather fonder of breaking the eighth commandment, himself.) And when she’d stopped and turned toward him, as if sensing his presence, the beatific smile on her blood-splattered face had made something deep in his chest do a weird little flip-flop.

If he hadn’t known better, he’d say it was his heart.

He was a demon. He wasn’t supposed to have a heart.

Today, Sara was wearing her usual white leather jacket, he saw as he sauntered closer, trying (and failing) to look cool. Over a blue T-shirt, and blue jeans just as tight as his were. Not that he was looking at her ass, or anything.

Leonard noticed the pin, a tiny heart with stripes in pink, blue, and purple, on her collar, and smirked a little, tapping his own lapel. An equally tiny circle, with stripes in pink and yellow and blue, appeared.

(A wise man—two wise men, really—had once written that “For those of angel stock or demon breed, size, and shape, and composition, are simply options.” Leonard knew perfectly well that he and Sara both enjoyed exploring all those options. In more ways than one. Neither of their sides really cared who did what, consensually, with whom, contrary to common belief.)

He saw her lips twitch as she noticed, but she didn’t comment. Instead, she just folded her arms, lifting an eyebrow at him.

“You’re late,” she informed him.

Leonard smirked at her, sitting down smoothly on the fountain’s edge and then sprawling comfortably like a cat. She always said he was incapable of sitting in any way that approximated “normal” human behavior. “Oh, you know,” he drawled, watching her intently. “Places to go. People to tempt. Trouble to cause.” A pause. “You look...well.”

Sara didn’t react to the abrupt change in tone. She sat back down on the fountain too, curling her legs under her. “So do you,” she said after a moment, quietly. “I didn’t see you much this past year. Been busy?”

“Eh.” Leonard hesitated. The tone was already different from most of their meetings. Where was the playful flirtation, the banter, the back-and-forth he was used to?

He pushed back his sunglasses, wanting to see her better. Was there a shadow there, in her eyes? He was surprised by the surge of anger he felt at the idea something or someone had caused that.

He was her opposite, damn it, and he was the one supposed to be the one giving her hell, in whatever respect. No one else better try it. Or...or...

Oh, hell. Literally.

He’d take on any being, diabolical, angel, or human, who hurt her.

“You know,” he repeated, a little more subdued as he tried to figure out how to deal with this realization. “I honestly don’t need to do much. People seem to do it all on their own, these days. And worse than I could manage.”

It was true, although Leonard wasn’t precisely a conventional sort of demon. There were things he wouldn’t do—although he really didn’t want the Powers That Be knowing that.

“I know.” Sara watched the water of the fountain play a bit, shifting closer. “That’s...I guess that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?” She glanced over at him as he sat up, watching her. “They do it all on their own,” she said, lowering her voice. “And so many times, they talk themselves into thinking they’re doing good. And really believing it.”

He did know what she meant. Far too well.

And sometimes it hurt, even to him.

Leonard and Sara, they’d come to their agreement long ago. Earth was a fascinating place, and (for the most part) they really rather liked it and all its opportunities. (And its food. And its entertainment. And its booze.) So, they played their scripted chess match, never a temptation without an instance of grace, and let humanity handle its own highs and lows.

And once a year, they met to check in. That had started, years ago, as just a way to get enough dirt on “the other side” to appease their respective sides. It’d grown into the need to talk to someone else who understood, who just got the highs and the lows. The intriguing and confusing and sometimes heartbreaking nature of these humans they lived among.

Sara, as she’d come to know Leonard better, discovered that he was less inclined to actually harm than merely tempt, and rarely in a way that was truly evil. And Leonard had discovered that Sara, angelic or not, had an ironically wicked sense of humor and fewer illusions than most about her “side” of the coin.

One might say they’d even become friends, over the years. Confidants. And then….and then…

Leonard cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said quietly, looking at the water and then glancing her way out of the corner of his eye. “Sorry I ain’t been around much.” He’d been trying to avoid getting pulled into the sort of plot “his” side was so fond of right now. The trend was for true evil dressed and posing as lofty moral good these days, and it made him gag.

Give him a good ol’ fashioned sinner any day, rather than those devils in fundamentalists’ clothing. Or even worse, their smug, self-satisfied human patsies, so convinced of their own holy rightness that they’d tell themselves that their fellow humans deserved the worst of punishments for their alleged failings.

Yeah, Leonard was trying to stay far away from that. Or he’d get rather too involved—and not in the way he was supposed to.

Sara gave him a sad little smile, and he decided that that was enough introspection for now. He stood, turning with a little flourish and holding a hand out to her.

“C’mon,” he said, wriggling his fingers. “I think I owe you dinner this year. And I know a great place in this very city.”

Sara considered him, then reached out and took the hand, allowing him to pull her to her feet.

“Aw, no Ritz this year?” she asked a little playfully.

“Nah. I got something better.”

Sara hadn’t meant to let her current state of pessimism show quite so much. She should have known that Leonard, of all…entities…would see and hear it and react.

She’d just been so dam...so darned glad to see him, smirk and saunter and all. He could be a jerk and a jackass, but long experience had taught her that there was no true evil in him, despite everything she’d once been taught about his kind.

He understood her better than anyone else at this point, she thought, glancing across the table at him and toying with her glass of wine. The angel Ripkiel, her mentor, would choke, but it was true. The ones who never spent much time here, among the humans and all their amazing and horrible creations and potential, they didn’t get it.

As if he’d read her mind, Leonard, who’d been focused on the remnants of his meal at the little hole-in-the-wall steakhouse he’d taken her to, glanced up.

“And how’s ol’ Rip?” he asked laconically.

Sara sipped her wine. “Oh, you know. Harried and self-important, but still one of the better ones.” She paused. “And how’s Mik?”

Leonard’s brother, for lack of a better word, was a fire demon. His name was close enough to the name of one of the most famous archangels that he now refused to use anything other than a nickname.

Sara had met him, memorably, at the 1666 Great Fire of London, when she’d shown up, suspicious that the blaze was a demonic ploy. (The angelic host had been on high alert all year.) There, she’d found a big man with a fiery aura staring raptly at the flames and Leonard hovering nearby, his own icy aura evident as he kept an eye on the fire as well.

Mik had been inclined to great dubiousness when it came to Sara, but Leonard had quickly talked him into a sort of truce. In the end, parts of the city burned, but only six people died—and the flames had the counterintuitive benefit of cleansing great swaths of the city after the bubonic plague outbreak (which had killed a whopping 100,000 people) the year before.

(People still claimed it was the wrath of God that had caused the fire—because of the Catholics or the city’s sin of gluttony, depending on who you asked. Sara was still sighing over that one.)

“Mik is…Mik.” Leonard smiled briefly. “He’s OK. He keeps his head down. Still about as fond as…ah, authority…as I am.”

What did it mean when a demon hated authority? Sara wondered, given the authority to whom said demons were supposed to answer.

And what did it mean when an angel felt the same way?

That question led down paths she was still uneasy with. Her gaze dropped to her wine glass again.

“I’m glad,” she said, staring at the pale liquid. “I like…”

She liked Mik. But how could an angel like a demon? They were evil, her side taught. Unworthy of redemption or grace. You didn’t like a demon. Let alone lov…

Sara’s head jerked up. Her gaze glanced off Leonard’s, then ricocheted around the room before resting, finally, on the wine glass again.

Silence, except for the quiet bustling of the restaurant. Sara heard and partly saw Leonard pick up his own glass, half-full of a deep red wine, and take a drink.

Imagined his throat working as he swallowed. Imagined his lips, stained red from the wine. Considered a warm, solid, nonjudgmental presence, intelligent and thoughtful, all the things she’d been told and taught were not for her, and…

Sara lifted her eyes again, letting her gaze meet his, acknowledging the spark—hell, far more than that—that traveled between them.

“Your place is near here, right?” she asked, tossing back the glass of wine. “It’s been a long year.”

Leonard was a little nonplussed.

He sprawled on the black leather couch in his apartment, feet up on the back just because, watching Sara prowl around the space, perusing all his bookshelves and looking out the windows with a restless sort of energy. It was a great spot, he'd admit that, and he had the penthouse and an utterly remarkable view.

He hadn’t paid rent in, well, ever. He'd just sort of moved in, way back when this building had been shiny and new and state of the art, and stayed there as others slowly filled in the apartments below. No one thought about the penthouse after that day, and that was just how Leonard wanted it.

He didn’t pay for utilities or Wi-Fi either. Nevertheless, both seemed to work just fine.

The area was trendy again, now, and Leonard was vaguely surprised that he hadn’t had to “remind” anyone that the penthouse not only existed but was off-limits for years. He wasn’t too worried about it, though.

He was, however, worried about Sara. Something was definitely off. This wasn’t even the sort of brittle, hard-drinking cheer she had about her when there were things she just wanted to forget. This was more. This was worse.

“You OK?” he asked, watching her from half-lidded eyes.

After a moment, Sara turned away from the bookcase—the shelves dedicated to books that people had tried to ban in schools and libraries, always an amusing (if somewhat depressing, for people who liked books) selection. She crossed back to the couch, flinging herself down on it in a way that caused his feet to slide off the back and fall into her lap, a development she ignored in favor of reaching for her wine.

“Just...discontented,” she said simply, after draining half the glass.

“With?”

Sara studied him a long moment, face unreadable even to him. The only sounds in the apartment were the faint noises of traffic far down below.

“With the way things are,” she said finally. “In general. Your side...my side...the lines are blurring, aren’t they? And I'm so tired.” She put her head back against the black leather with a sigh. “So many evil people have always thought they’re doing good, but I feel like it’s getting worse. Does it even matter, anymore?”

The words fell starkly into the quiet.

This was where he should take a stab at tempting her to change sides, Leonard thought suddenly.

The successful temptation and turning to the dark side (to borrow a term) of an angel hadn’t happened in eons. If he pulled it off, it would be an incredible coup, a feather in his cap. He might get a dukedom out of it. More so, he’d probably get the Powers That Be off his back for a few more centuries or even millennia.

Leonard took a breath. He started to speak. And...

He just couldn’t get the words out. And nothing was stopping him but his own damned (literally) conscience.

Go...heav...well, something help him, he liked Sara as she was. And he didn’t want her to have to deal with the trials and tortures of hell, or even the guilt of knowing you...

He glanced away. Then back, seeing her watching him.

The corner of her mouth ticked up, wryly. “And you?”

And him what? Leonard, still mentally reeling a little, struggled to think of what she meant.

Sara didn’t let him struggle long. “You OK?”

Ah. The immediate answer was simply, of course, no. But he didn’t really want to explain that.

“Kind of...discontented,” he told her quietly. “With the way things are.”

He waited for her to try to redeem him, to change him. If temptation was the logical move for a demon, the reverse had to be true for an angel, right? He wasn’t sure it was even possible, but surely that was beside the point.

But she didn’t. She just watched him silently, an intent and unnerving blue gaze that Leonard met unflinchingly.

Maybe...he wondered. Maybe she liked him the way he was, too? Flawed in ways an angel simply wasn’t supposed to be?

The quiet stretched out for a bit, long enough that Leonard could see the pink of sunset starting to tint the sky outside. Somehow, they’d moved a little closer, and he could smell the faint fragrance of something around Sara. Something lovely and somehow green, more earthy than he’d expect from an angel.

She was close enough, as a matter of fact, that she could look up at him, that smile hovering around the corners of her mouth again.

“Well,” she said with a sigh. “At least we can be discontented together.”

And with that, Sara reached up, wound her hands in the lapels of his jacket, pulled him down, and kissed him in a way that was distinctly non-angelic.

Or maybe that depends on your definition of the word.

It’d happened the first time back in 1554, though they’d been dancing around each other in a certain way for far longer.

(Sometimes literally—the thought of that sword dance back in 15th-century Scotland could still get his cold blood stirring.)

And maybe predictably, they’d been angry at each other that evening, at least at first. Well, more with circumstances than with each other. And Sara had been far angrier than Leonard. Something that wasn’t surprising, given that she’d blamed him for Lady Jane Grey.

Now, in reality, Leonard had nothing to do with that, nor with the rise of Bloody Mary—though he supposed he couldn’t be sure others of his ilk hadn’t been pulling strings somewhere.

But he had been lurking about the English court when Sara had returned to England in the midst of Mary Tudor’s rash of executions and found out about Jane’s death. She’d confronted him outside the apartments he kept and marched him into them at sword-point, scary and beautiful and so close to losing control that he’d been a little worried for her.

And himself. That too.

She’d accused and he’d retorted, and they’d sniped back and forth at each other until Sara had placed both her hands on his doublet and accused him of breaking their little arrangement of balance. It’d been the hurt in her voice, breaking through the anger, that had finally pushed him to tell her the unvarnished truth.

“I didn’t do it!” he’d snapped back at her, finally, staring down into her furious eyes. “I tried to help her, for Go-… for someone’s sake!” He should stop. He didn’t stop. “I tried. And I did it for you.”

He wasn’t really sure why she’d believed him that time. Demons were supposed to lie, after all. But he hadn’t been lying, and he really had tried to help.

For no other reason than he knew how Sara would feel.

Sara had blinked. Had stared at him, the rage slowly fading from her eyes. Her hands were still lying on his chest, and they’d slowly contracted into fists as she stared. Leonard was starting to wonder what she was thinking when she…well, growled.

And then she’d dragged his head down and kissed him. Hard. A rage-kiss, the kind one wouldn’t think an angel, even a badass and unstuffy one, would be capable of.

He’d been stunned into a gasp, and she’d taken advantage of that, claiming his mouth rather ruthlessly. She tasted of spices, he thought incongruously, just before her weight against him sent them crashing backward into the wall. That’d brought Sara flush against him and his arms went around her, pulling her close almost involuntarily.

All right, then, he thought, in the one corner of his brain that was still running the show. (He was in a fully human body right then, after all,) All right. It’s not like you haven’t dreamed about this.

And he kissed her back, arms curving around her ass, boosting her against him, even all the layers of clothing of the time not fully concealing his arousal. Sara growled again, then bit his lip, drawing blood, wrapping her own arms around his neck.

Somehow, they’d made it to the bed.

Barely.

It couldn’t really be called lovemaking. He was supposed to be immune to that particular four-letter world, after all, and Sara was supposed to be more, ah, into the platonic notion thereof. No, it’d been raw, passionate sex, and mind-blowing for all that.

It’d been said (and written) that angels were sexless unless they really wanted to make an effort. But somehow, this had seemed...effortless, at least in terms of forgetting that they probably really, well, shouldn’t. Inevitable. Right.

Sara had been gone when he’d woken, hours later. He hadn’t seen her again for a year.

Then, as they met in Augsburg, she’d hadn’t mentioned what had happened, a coolness about her manner that suggested he shouldn’t either. So, he hadn’t. They’d exchanged reports and moved on without even spending a day in each other’s company. And Leonard, restless and oddly unhappy, had promptly taken himself off to cause trouble somewhere, complete with some judicious seduction of both women and men he’d had an eye on.

A full-on orgy been a fun distraction. For a while.

Their meetings continued, though, and eventually, they’d settled back into the bantering friendship that’d been there before. Leonard procured a deck of French playing cards and they’d started teaching themselves the rules of twenty-one, one of the popular games of the time, which led to lots of good-natured arguing and late nights of talking.

Then it happened again, in 1616.

They’d both decided to get utterly plastered in honor of William Shakespeare, whose death hadn’t had anything to do with angelic or demonic influence but was still something they both mourned. And the drunker they got, the more hands had started to roam, the more a little physical release had seemed like a good idea. Still, they could have gotten rid of the alcohol in their systems immediately, sobering up and probably making better decisions.

They hadn’t.

Sara had still been gone the next morning, and they’d still pretended nothing had happened. But there was no coolness at their next meeting and, Leonard thought, they’d both known it would eventually happen again.

It did. Not long after the Great Fire, when the embers had still been cooling and Leonard had gone looking for Sara, to let her know Mik had left with a gruff “Tell Blondie she was right.”

And then it’d happened again. And again. Sara stopped vanishing afterward. They’d wake up curled up together the next day and continue squabbling about the Enlightenment, or what side the whole American experiment would end up benefiting, or the Industrial Revolution.

By the 1900s, finding their way to a bed (or a table, or a wall, or a handy patch of grassy ground) every year had just been what they did. Oh, sometimes they saw each other more often than that, but their yearly “appointments” were the times that not only including reporting on the state of things to each other and figuring out how to keep their state of balance going, but also hours of intense sex—and conversation and argument and venting and companionship.

But it was just sex, they’d told themselves. That was all.

This, though, Leonard thought, so many years later, lying in his bed amidst tumbled gray satin sheets, running his thumb gently over Sara’s hipbone as she slept.

This had been lovemaking.

There. He’d thought it. He was a demon, and he’d fallen in love with an angel, and what they’d done together here had been love, at least on his part.

With a sigh, he shifted his other arm, and his fingers grazed something soft that wasn’t skin. Leonard felt around the sheets a few moments, then pulled out a feather.

One of his, he thought, staring at it. More than a foot long, and glossy black. Had he really lost control that much?

He ripped his mind away from that thought and what it might entail. Instead, he smirked, reaching out to run the feather carefully, up Sara’s side. She twitched a little, and he moved the tip over, teasing other portions of anatomy until she batted it away.

“Mmmm...” Sara stretched, opening one eye to regard him, then focusing on the feather. “That’s mean.”

“Well. It is me.”

“True.” She stretched, long and slow, and Leonard licked his lips, wondering if he could get her to stay a bit longer.

“Same time, next year?” she asked lazily—and, Leonard thought suddenly, a little wistfully. It was that perceived wistfulness that gave him the nerve to say it.

“Would it be so...bad...” He was supposed to be bad; he was a demon. Leonard soldiered on. “If we…if we...”

Sara raised an eyebrow after a moment. “Uncertainty isn’t usually your thing. If we…what?” she asked, amusement in her tone. Her eyes darkened, just a tiny bit, and she sat up, letting the sheets fall away around her. “Come up with something new and creative, have you? Tell me.”

“Not in the way you’re thinking.” Leonard met her eyes. “Can we see each other more than once a year?”

Sara blinked at him. “We usually do,” she said slowly, after a moment.

“I don’t mean...on work.” Leonard let out a long breath. He was still lying there, looking up at her, the sheets caught around his hips, and he felt very vulnerable indeed.

“Stay with me,” he said simply, watching her. “We’ve both said how...discontented we feel, lately. We’re better together. Let’s do something different.”

Sara stared at him. Her fingers curled around the sheets. “You mean...”

“I’m not tempting you.” Leonard felt his lips curve in a humorless smile. “Well, maybe I am, but not in that way. Not to...my side. The other side. Whatever.” He sighed, closing his eyes, then opened them again, thinking.

“They get free will,” he told her a bit recklessly, flinging a hand out, encompassing all of humanity in the gesture. “Why don’t we? Why can’t we make this choice?”

Sara’s laugh was a little breathless. “I think the idea is that we do,” she told him. “Hence the whole ‘fall’ thing.”

“Yeah. But what if I...choose again? I can’t, can I?” He gave her a slightly pointed look. “And what would your bosses say if they looked in on you now? Is that really free will?”

Sara glanced away, flushing. Leonard would have enjoyed watching the pink color spread down her neck and farther if he wasn’t so concerned about her reaction.

“Exactly,” he told her simply.

Silence reigned in the apartment for a few minutes more. And then, to Leonard’s great disappointment, Sara got to her feet, reaching down to pick up some white, silky clothing item she’d shed on their way into the bedroom. She stared at it as if she couldn’t figure out quite what it was, then looked up at him again.

Were those tears in her eyes? But angels didn’t cry. No more than demons did.

“Stay with me,” Leonard repeated quietly, not moving.

“What would we...”

“Don’t know until we try.”

Sara took a breath and dropped the piece of clothing. She closed her eyes—and was suddenly clothed, all in white and blue again, pulling her garb directly from the ether in a way she rarely did. She’d always said she liked humanity’s creations too much to do that sort of thing.

“I have to go,” she said, turning toward the door, not looking at him now. “We are what we are, Leonard. And we have a job to do, no matter how...how we feel about it at times.”

Leonard found his voice again. “If you feel so strongly about it, why have you helped me hold the balance?”

But the door clicked shut behind her.

Sara avoided him again. For a year.

There were so many times she wanted to go looking, but she resisted, every time. Partly because she didn’t know what to say. Mostly because she was scared.

And tempted.

For long years, she’d expected the demon to try to tempt her, to try to get her to fall, to join the host of hell instead of the side of heaven. Leonard never had, not even when she’d given him openings with her sense of...discontent. He’d listened, and he’d vented as well, but he’d never tried to really change her. He’d understood. And, she’d realized at some point, he had a lot of issues with the way things were himself.

His words that night in the apartment, though—he hadn’t been trying to change her, nor tempt her toward hell. He just wanted...her.

And Sara wanted him.

Heaven help her, she wanted him too.

By the time the year had passed, she really wanted to see him again. Needed to. And she still wasn’t sure what to do or say if he brought it up again, but one way or another…something needed to happen. She couldn’t continue without seeing him. She couldn’t.

When she arrived at the fountain at the Central City park, a little early as usual, she was stunned to see that tall, lanky, black-clad figure already sprawled on the fountain’s ledge, one foot tucked over the opposite leg, looking off in the other direction.

Sara’s footsteps sped up, and her breath caught. Leonard must have heard or sensed something, because he sat up at her approach, still facing in the other direction, but clearly aware.

And, as she slowed and came nearer, he turned to face her.

Sara stopped.

Leonard was...

He was human.

On the surface, he looked exactly the same. But to her eyes, there was something indefinably different. Something missing.

But also something more.

“Leonard,” she whispered, staring at him. No other words would form, so she just whispered it again. “Leonard.”

“Hey,” he said quietly, watching her. No sprawl. No smart-ass comment. No explanation.

“What...how...” Sara had a hard time getting words out. There was too much.

Leonard gave her a tiny smile. “How long have I been…?” He looked down at his hands—those long-fingered clever hands that she knew so well. Human hands, now. “Almost a year. Not too long after…after I saw you last.”

“But…how?” She was whispering and wasn’t quite sure why. There weren’t many people around and they were ignoring the pair by the fountain. But there was a knot in her throat, and it was choking her.

His eyes were distant. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” he told her. “Be what I was. And I...changed.” His gaze focused and fixed on her, intent. “It turns out that’s a thing you can do. No take-backs, though.”

Sara figured there had to be more to it than that, but she’d also had another sudden, horrifying realization. “You’ll die.”

And Leonard, that jackass, nodded. Far too calmly. “Eventually. I’m told I’ll probably get a bit longer than the usual run, ‘specially since I started out in a body that wasn’t exactly newborn.” His smile was a little wry, but his eyes were still direction.

And suddenly Sara was angry. At him? At herself? At the world? All three? She took a deep breath, hands folding into fists. By the way Leonard’s eyes flickered, he sensed it.

“You’re leaving me,” she said, voice breaking on the words. “No, you left me.”

You’ve gone where I can’t follow.

“I didn’t mean to,” Leonard said quietly.

And then, even quieter: “You could join me.”

Sara’s heart stopped.

She stared at him. He stared back.

And then it started again.

“I can’t. I...” She took a step backward. Then another. Saw the hurt in Leonard’s eyes—human eyes, pale blue, no longer truly icy—a hurt that he quickly concealed.

“I get it,” he told her, looking away again. “You have a mission. A good one. I get it.” He unfolded himself from his seat, standing, still tall enough to nearly tower over her—though he’d never once used his height that way.

And he turned away.

There was, apparently, nothing else to say.

Sara struggled to breathe.

“What about the balance?” she asked the back of his black jacket helplessly. How could he do this to her? How was she going to keep going, throughout all the years, without him?”

Leonard paused. Then he looked back over his shoulder.

His face was still, his eyes…

“Gotta feeling it’ll keep going, one way or another,” he told her. “Think about it. I have. A lot.” An odd expression crossed his features, but it vanished before Sara could try to identify it, leaving only regret behind.

“Good luck, Sara,” he said softly. “I’ll be rooting for you.”

And she watched him leave.

“Rip!”

The angel Ripkiel had a place he liked to go sometimes. He told the others of his kind who asked that it was where he went to meditate on the nature of the world and time itself. In reality, he just liked the quiet and the fresh air.

It wasn’t much, really. A meadow in the mountains, a place humanity—and other angels—rarely approached. Ripkiel rather liked humanity, really (sometimes more than he liked other angels), but he also liked quiet.

“Rip!” the voice shouted his name again. He opened his eyes and sighed, then looked up from his seat on a large stone, dragged to the meadow by a glacier thousands of year ago.

The angel Sarai, a protégé of his once, approached him, eyes bright and posture tense. She must have flown up here, but she was on foot now.

And she looked pissed.

Ah. So they were going to do this now. Rip (and, yes, he knew about the nickname) smiled a little, sadly, as he turned to face her.

Sara’s steps stuttered to a halt a few feet away. She took a deep breath, eyes fixed on him. “Did you know?”

“About what?” Rip asked mildly, then continued before she could get another word out. “That you’ve had a partnership with a demon for millennia? That you’ve worked against heaven’s stated goals with him?” He paused. “That you’d fallen in love with him?”

Sara didn’t deny it.

“No,” she said, without missing a beat. “That he’s human now. That...that's a thing that can happen.”

Rip nodded, glancing away and out at the view. “Yes,” he said quietly. “I think I came very close to it myself once.”

Sara blinked. He’d surprised her. After only a moment, she came a little closer, seeming a little more subdued.

“There was a woman,” Rip told her, simply, answering the question before she could ask it.

Sara paused. “What happened?”

Rip gazed out at his view again. “I couldn’t leave…what I am…behind. She died. The end.”

Silence, except for birdsong and the faint whistle of the wind.

“Why couldn’t you?” Sara asked finally. She leaned against the larger rock next to him.

Rip looked at her. Really looked, seeing the conflict and the regret on her face.

“Too much doubt,” he said, wanting her to understand. “I just wasn’t sure. And you need to be.”

“I don’t understand. Do you…do you turn yourself human?”

Rip sighed, studying Sara. “It’s not that simple,” he told her. “Or…perhaps the point is that it’s ultimately simpler.” He looked up at the sky again, the sun and the clouds, and thought of Miranda. With regret, always.

“You decide,” he said simply. “That’s all. You decide and you change, and that’s it.” He glanced at Sara, holding out his hands before him. “Free will.”

She didn’t say anything. An interesting expression crossed her face and she looked up at the sun too. Rip wondered what she was thinking.

“Are you going to go with him?” he asked, after a few minutes, keeping his tone wholly unjudgmental.

Sara’s gaze snapped back to him. “I can’t do that!”

Rip shrugged. “No?” he asked. “You’ve been unhappy. I’ve seen that. You’ve changed.” He held up a hand as her gaze sharpened. “That’s not a criticism. If anything, maybe it’s a compliment.”

He sighed. “Sometimes I think the reluctance to change is our downfall,” he mused. “I know it was mine.”

The younger angel let out a long breathe. “But…” she said. “The world…”

Rip listened to her voice drift off before he spoke again. “You know how much good a single determined human can do in the world,” he told her. “And I have a feeling that in the end, that might be the most important thing of all.”

Rip looked back at the view. Sara didn’t say anything.

After a moment, though, he felt a shadow fall over his face as she unfurled her wings again. He felt the downdraft as she stepped back and took off.

And he reached down to pick up a single white feather from where it’d fallen to the grass.

“Goodbye, Sara,” he said quietly, looking out over the mountains. “We’ll miss you.”

Trying to decide what to do with your life was an interesting process.

Leonard, sitting on the rim of the park fountain and perusing a newspaper, put it down and sighed. Millennia of experience as a fallen angel didn’t really translate to any sort of job experience, as it turned out. Well, maybe as a politician, but he wasn’t touching that with a 10-foot pole.

It didn’t matter as much as it might have. Any amount of higher or advanced knowledge he’d once had was gone now, but Leonard wasn’t stupid. And he’d always been very pragmatic.

Between the money he already had in a nice, safe bank account and the investments he’d made, he didn’t really have to work—even though his landlord had suddenly realized there was a tenant in the penthouse, which existed after all. (Fortunately, he also had a signed, witnessed rental agreement, whether or not the man remembered it.)

It was even legit. Leonard was more or less trying to walk the path of the angels—so to speak—these days.

His decision had reset his personal scales, but Leonard knew better than pretty much any other human on Earth right now that good and evil were a good bit more complicated than most people believed. Still. Should he wind up in hell one day, there were a lot of…entities…who’d particularly like to see him scream. Better to walk the line.

He pulled his long legs up on the fountain rim and sprawled out again, putting his hands under his head and looking up at the sky.

For the past few weeks, he’d held out hope. He’d looked for Sara everywhere, hoping she’d come back. Hoping she’d decide, like he had, and she’d show up on his doorstep, beautiful and badass and human.

But he wouldn’t ask more than he already had. Pressuring her wasn’t something he ever wanted to do, and it wouldn’t work. It had to be her decision, and it had to be for her.

He closed his eyes, feeling the sun on his eyelids. He liked it. When he was a demon, sun had always felt a little…too good. He was supposed to be a creature of darkness, after all.

He might have stretched out there for a minute or an hour, just enjoying the peace, when a shadow fell over him. Leonard thought about opening an eye, then just decided to hope the person went away.

He felt someone pick up the newspaper by his head.

“Job ads, hmmm? Looking for a new career?”

His eyes popped open.

Sara was standing there, next to him. She had the paper in hand, studying it, and…

She was human.

And the most incredible, amazing thing he’d ever seen in his long life.

Leonard sat up so fast that he had to blink, unused to the sensation of vertigo. Sara gave him a wicked little smile, then dropped her gaze to the paper again.

“Substitute teacher…no. Landscaper…no,” she mused. “Telemarketing…isn’t that a fairly demonic profession? Maybe not.” She set the paper down and regarded him. “Guess you’ll have to find something else to do.”

Leonard just stared at her.

After a few moments, Sara started looking a little uncomfortable. “Leonard?” she asked quietly. “I mean…if this OK? Do you want me to leave? I…”

But then she stopped. Mostly because Leonard had stood, taken a step forward, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her.

Distantly, he could hear wolf whistles in the background from park passers-by, and a few suggestions to “get a room!” They didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that Sara was kissing him back. Fervently. Her hands wrapped around the back of his head and her body molding to his.

When they finally broke away, they were both breathless.

“I…” Leonard cleared his throat, letting his hands drop to his sides. “Well, I had a city CSI I met suggest looking into law enforcement. Because I seemed to have some experience with…certain criminal elements.”

He gave a look from under his lashes. “I don’t know. Personally, I think I’d made a hell of a thief.”

Sara smiled at him. “I don’t know,” she said, thoughtfully, running her fingers down his jacket. “I think you’d make a better hero.”

Leonard coughed. “Maybe we can figure out something more...in-between?” he suggested delicately, holding out a hand to her.

Sara took it. “As long as it’s with me,” she told him. “We’re in this together, and don’t you forget it.”

“Me and you, angel. Me and you.”

#captain canary #sara x leonard #inspired by good omens #legends of tomorrow

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lia-nikiforov · 5 years

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Spring 2018 Anime Final Review

So, uh, this is six months late. I’ve had half of this post in my drafts forever. To make it short, as I’ve mentioned previously, mom lost her job, which has not only been a heavy hit to my sense of stability for the last six months, but also means my time to watch anime was seriously reduced and even now a slight change of plans fucks up my whole schedule and sets me back for a full week. Anyway, nobody cares about any of these shows anymore so let’s get straight to it? I’m gonna ommit the two-cours that continued into the Summer - hopefully I’ll be able to make that post soonish? idk. Worst to best, same as usual

The crappy gender politics pit of shame

Darling in the FRANXX: I think everyone has ripped this show to threads at this point and there isn’t much I could add to that. It is quite funny to me to see how many people flipped out when the show went completely bananas in its last few episodes. Feels a bit like KADO, I’ve been telling y’all this was a ton of empty crap since episode 2, it just took the writing to completely self-destruct for everyone else to notice. A part of me feels tempted to do a long post breaking down just how badly the show collapsed in its final shebang, specifically how every single twist and turn completely nulled any remote kind of message or central thesis the show may have had, but at the same time it doesn’t seem worth the time. In the end, I may have given What is Internal Consistency, The anime way too much credit. It’s not hateful antigay propaganda, it’s just dumb as shits, with a writer and creators who didn’t think for half a second of the implications of what they were doing, and who were so incompetent they couldn’t even conserve the minimal plot and character coherency within a single episode, let alone 24. In other words, Darling isn’t saying “gays shouldn’t exist” but “I have no idea of anything regarding gay people”. What makes it egregious is that the show spent so much time acting like it was “meaningful” and “important” and yet it ended saying absolutely fucking nothing. Except mayb “have babies”. Down to oblivion you go, along with the likes of KADO, to the void of shows that couldn’t even be offensively bad and no one will remember a year from now. Bonus garbage points for the half-assed “bury your gays”.

Nil of Libra Admirari or whatever this show was called: I’m not trying to diss on the show, I just genuinely never remember the title because I have the JP and EN all mixed up. Not that it matters much, as far as I could tell, the show could call Shalabalabatuna and it would have the same significance in regard to the content. But the title isn’t important. In fact, it may be a bit unfair to have this show in this section. For the most part, Main Girl is very self-determined and has an active role in the story.... but then the last two episodes heavily featured a lot of rape threats or rape themes and forced pregnancy (real and threat) and I don’t really understand why they’d go there all of a sudden. One of them was treated relatively well, even empowering the victim in the process, but when the ikemen bad guy was rambling endlessly about how he wanted to impregnate the protagonist it really turned me off :/ I’m also not a fan of “main boy was her secret fiancé all along”, but at least they also handled that somewhat decently. It’s a very disposable series, but since I watched all of Amnesia, I think I owe every otoge adaptation at least the smallest chance to clear that very low bar, and Libra of Nil does it, more competently than most other stuff in the same genre.

Hisone to Masotan: I really, really wanted to love this show. Even now, as I put it in the pit of shame category, I’m pained. There was a good show in this, and a lot of it made it to the screen: an adorable, charming little story about a woman finding her place in the world, making new friends, finding her calling and bonding with an adorable dragon. Unfortunately, it got buried down under this opressing, horrendous gender politics that tried to do something with bringing attention to sexism in the military only to cancel it out making the one dude that embodied that sexism getting rewarded with the affections of a girl he explicitly tried to crush. It also called back on the virgin or whore fallacy and even managed to shove in a “bury your gays” trope. Even though Hisone challenges the ritual bullshit, it’s too little, too late, and she does end up carrying it out anyway, so the defiance to the status quo is of little importance in terms of problematizing the ritual itself. Sorry BONES, it wasn’t meant to be this time.

The ni fu ni fa section

Ni fu ni fa is a Mexican colloquialism for “It was okay but it didn’t change my life.”

Binan Koukou Chikyuu Boueibu HAPPY KISS: This soft reboot of the franchise had some really great episodes and did an actually good job of developping its characters. For the most part, it achieved what its predecessor did in terms of satirical comedy and I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, what bunked it down so low in the list was the final episode. At some point, the writers forgot they were doing a parody and made the show somewhat self-serious, way closer in tone to the magical girl anime it was supposed to be making fun of, rather than the satire its predecessor was. Whereas S1 ended with the whole Magical boy stuff being revealed as a crappy space reality TV show, this one ended with a real cheesy conflict about happiness and family and blablabla. Which is not bad by itself if this were a Precure show, but that kind of self-serious plot development just didn’t work for this series. I still enjoyed it, and the fanservice episode is one of the best of the whole franchise, but I’m a bit sad the finale missed the mark so badly.

Hinamatsuri: Hinamatsuri was very hit-or-miss for me. There were some truly brilliant episodes, a lot of funny vignettes and heart-warming stories, and then there was some stuff that made me uncomfortable -like every single Hitomi story- or felt unnecessary and dry. It also threw me off that the superpower dynamic completely disappeared in the second half of the show, especially in Anzu’s part of the story. It was okay but I feel like I needed something that felt like a closing, and choosing to end it with Mao who featured very minimally in the show overall didn’t cut it. It’s a fun show, I’d reccommend people check it out, but it felt a bit too disjointed for me

Persona 5: The Animation: This is a hard show to place because I love the looks of it and I think the concept is interesting and pretty cool, but there is something that’s keeping me from connecting emotionally to the story. The part where changing the villains’ heart makes them repent from their sins and become “good” feels very artificial and very tasteless when you’re dealing with rapists and abusers. I ended dropping it at episode 16, I just couldn’t find the motivation to catch up with the 6 episodes i’d fallen behind on because my schedule is a tragedy

Tokyo Ghoul: Re: I guess it’s fair to say I’ve kind of outgrown Tokyo Ghoul. There’s something messy and confusing about how this season panned out, and there comes a point in which misery porn just doesn’t cut it anymore. I still watch because Ishida has a way to make every single goddamn character extremely sympathetic, which makes for an emotionally engaging viewing even when you’re not sure of what the plot is supposed to be or who you should be rooting for. I tried picking up the new season that just started airing and immediately found I had no idea of what was going on, who was on who’s side and in general, who the fuck were 90% of the characters, so I dropped it.

Nanatsu no Taizai: Imashime no Fukkatsu: I’ve mentioned it before, this second season had the opposite problem than the first one: the pace was too slow. It took more than half of it to get to Escanor, and then the season ends at a kind of random spot. I really thought we’d get further along on the story, since Gowther’s backstory was hinted at in the openings, but no such thing happened. They did manage to give us a variety of cool moments and fights, and I love Ban so his scenes with Zhivago and Elaine made me quite happy, though I really wish the romance between Elizabeth and Meliodas wasn’t su dubious and cringy. In light of some revelations that take place further along the manga, going out of their way to emphasize that Meliodas was a sort of mentor figure for Elizabeth when she was a toddler seems unncessary and just very squeamish. I do hope we get a third season though, and an OVA of the Vampires of whatever side story would be great too.

Rokuhoudou Yotsuiro Biyori: I was pleasantly surprised by this show, and it’s closer to being one of my top of the season than it is to “meh”. It had some weaker, cheesier segments, but it also managed great whacky moments and a genuine soothing atmosphere. What surprised me most is that the vanilla looking cast of moderately handsome dudes managed to develop into interesting, funny individuals with a dynamic that made every episode enjoyable. A solid reccommendation for anyone wanting to see delicious looking food and moderately handsome dudes being ridiculous. Also, the cat episode is the best episode of anime ever produced.

The I’m probably the only person alive who enjoys these shows

Mahou Shoujo Ore: This is a difficult show to place because it wasn’t quite as great as I wanted it to be and its parodic nature took me by surprise, but somehow I was still seriously entertained more often than not. The twists in the final quarter and the absolutely bonkers finale was a total riot, but I definitely advise caution before going in, given that some of the jokes may seem insensitive or in poor taste in regards to gender presentation, sexuality and there are even some mild harrassment jokes that certainly made me roll my eyes.

Yowamushi Pedal: Glory Line: I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but I think through half of the show’s 25 episode run, I was convinced the title was actually Glory Road. It’s kind of anticlimactic that it’s called Glory Line if they don’t actually reach the final Goal btw. Anyway, I feel I say this a lot, but really, if you didn’t like the previous Yowapeda seasons, there’s nothing here for you, and if you did, you’re probably not gonna hop off this late in the game. This season does suffer from the same dragging than its predecessors, with the added issue of being quite pessimistic for no reason in about half the episodes, and a diminished presence for Onoda. I really wish they hadn’t dragged the Day 2 goal so long, I really hoped we’d see the end of the race, but no such luck I guess. Still love most of it and hope we get one more season or a movie to complete the story.

The favorites of the season

Golden Kamuy: In spite of its pacing issues, terrible animation and general clunkiness, I can’t help but love this show. When season 1 ended my feelings for it had mellowed quite a bit, but as soon as I picked up season 2 this Fall I just fell in love all over again. It’s fun, unique, over-the-top in some ways, incredibly grounded in others, and the dynamics between the characters are incredibly charming.

Hozuki no Reitetsu: It’s hard to talk about this one because it feels repetitive, given how tonally the show remains just the same across its three seasons. It could’ve very well been a one-season, 36 episode show, for how little it changes in spite of the time that transpired between the first season and the second. But in short, the comedy continues to be as spot on as always, the Zashikiwarashi twins are the best addition to the cast. It’s definitely a show I could watch endless episodes off, and the rare case of an episodic series with no overarching plot that I can enjoy wholeheartedly.

Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card arc: Over the course of the series, I’ve expressed a few concerns and misgivings about how the story of this 20th anniversary sequel was playing out. The final episode was particularly troublesome in that it left the story unfinished in spite of deviating from the manga. In spite of this, more than anything I’m very happy that this continuation still retains what made the original so special, that they captured the magic behind Sakura’s “everything will be alright” spell and gave us the chance to spend more time with these beloved characters and see their stories continue. The slow but sweet development of Sakura and Syaoran’s puppy love is a definite highlight. Needs more Touya/Yukito and Yue in general.

Piano no Mori: This show got heavily overlooked because it was kidnapped by Netflix (pls stop immediately), and then when it was finally unceremoniously dumped a month or two ago, it came under fire for the wonky CGI during the piano scenes -and it is indeed very wonky-. But beyond that, I found the story very engaging, especially because Kai is such a fascinating protagonist, his intense rivalry-friendship with Megane-kun (sorry, it’s been six months, i can’t remember names) is exactly the type I can’t help but root for. Kai’s participation in the final episode gave me goosebumps. I’m very happy we’re getting a continuation, can’t wait to see how the Chopin competition develops.

Wotaku ni Koi wa Muzukashii: Sweet, funny and absolutely delightful from start to finish, Wotakoi was easily one of the highlights of the season. Although there were some aspects about Cosplayer-senpai and Yuri Otaku-senpai’s (I’m really trying to remember the names, I’m sorry!! ;---;) that didn’t work for me -namely the izakaya segment- Narumi and Hirotaka more than made up for it with their clumsy yet adorable romance. I spent the entirety of the amusement park episode screeching. I really hope we get a continuation -and get a chance to see more of Hirotaka’s brother and his gamer friend too- and that in general we can get more anime about adult stories

Megalobox: Who would’ve thought that a show that wasn’t even in my radar before the season started would’ve end as one of my favorites, possibly of the year? Even as someone who’s only marginally acquainted with Ashita no Joe and has no interst in the sport of boxing, I was completely enthralled by the style and passion of this production. As I said a bit above, intense rivalries are very appealing to me, and the build up in the tension between Joe and Yuri was almost palpable, their mutual respect gave me chills. Definitely the surprise of the season, made even better by its optimistic happy ending to contrast with its predecessor’s tragedy. Megalobox is a unique anniversary project that is closer to an homage and it works perfectly. Definitely check it out.

That’s it for the Spring season! I hope i can do the summer season this weekend and maaaybe even my watchlist for the Fall season. Fingers crossed i won’t get swallowed up in other stuff :’D

#anime final impressions #spring anime #god i've forgotten 95% of my tags #darling in the franxx #megalobox #wotaku ni koi wa muzukashii #piano no mori #card captor sakura clear card arc #hozuki no reitetsu #golden kamuy #yowapeda #mahou shoujo ore #rokuhoudou yotsuiro biyori #nanatsu no taizai #persona 5 #tokyo ghoul: re #hinamatsuri #hisone to masotan #binan koukou chikyuu boueibu

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asidian · 5 years

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Week 14: Crawl

February 28, 2038

The room is bathed in harsh white light from the caged bulbs that dangle overhead, and the thrum of machinery almost sounds like the beating of a heart. There’s a surveillance camera in the corner, but cutting the wire was their very first order of business, so it's not surveilling a whole lot of anything anymore.

They’re in the clear.

The floor's black tile, and there are no windows; the air holds an uncomfortable chill. There's only the one computer, projecting its hologram display into midair. Xia is bent over it, frowning at the readouts, but Jacob isn't paying them as much attention as they deserve.

He keeps glancing away, toward the open-topped glass case that's standing less than five feet behind them.

"Room settings," says Xia. "Temp controls, overhead lights."

"What," says Jacob, "they got alien mood lighting or something?"

He doesn't take his eyes off the creature in the glass case. It looks like a formless blob, dormant and benign, all its countless eyes closed. It resembles nothing so much as a three-dimensional black oil slick that occasionally pulses or twitches.

"Check it out," says Xia, and the lights shift to deep, blood red, a sickly shade that spills over the whole room.

"Great," says Jacob. "Cool. Feels like those things're fixing to break through the clouds any second now."

In the glass case, the creature shifts slightly. A limb peels free from its side and then rejoins the central mass. It does not move again.

"Jackpot," says Xia, suddenly — tone bright with victory — and Jacob turns to look.

There up on the screen is the 3D projection of a a grenade — model 6453ix, the kind in Nemesis' launchers — and a series of stats scrolling down the side.

Damage effectiveness: average. Damage permanence: extremely reduced. Reaction: negative. Recollection: high.

Xia flips the page, and a force blast device shows up on the screen, the kind that Chroma's sniper used to have before her suit got trashed. Next up are Hurricane's blades, and Justice's sideguns, and on, and on.

"Guess we know why they kept the thing," says Jacob, voice low.

"Yeah," says Xia. "They musta been testing its regen the whole time."

The holo-projection keeps going, as Xia scrolls through: past an electro-shock device that's still in testing, and Sandstorm's laser axe, and Sentinel's stun bolts.

There's a soft squishing sound behind them, as the creature shifts again in its tank.

The next weapon on the screen is something that Jacob doesn't recognize.

Model 9873ig, it's labeled, and it looks like a small box with a circle imprinted on the front. The stats scroll down the side: highly effective, in every category.

"Yeah," says Jacob, "but what's it do?"

Xia keeps scrolling, down past the stats, to the chunk of text underneath. It's classified as a sonic weapon, designed to scramble the harbingers' mental patterns and incapacitate their ability to project disruptions. It sounds good. It sounds great, actually. Which is why he doesn't get it when they reach the bottom and find the flashing red text that reads PROJECT: DISCONTINUED.

"What gives?" says Jacob, frowning.

He's skimmed through most of it already, but he skips back up again and starts to read in earnest.

"Wasn't stable," says Xia. "That sucks."

"Jesus," says Jacob, still reading. "Three casualties?"

He shares a glance with Xia; her eyebrows are drawn down, mouth curved into a frown.

"How the hell didn't we hear about this?"

Jacob looks back up at the holo-display — keeps reading, eyes flying over the words. And suddenly, he knows.

"We did," he croaks. "Check out the date."

It's up there, right next to all the other specs: date of trial. January 15, 2038.

It's the day Chroma crashed and burned. Three suits, wrecked beyond repair. Three pilots killed, and the rest of the team in the hospital. It had been all over the news.

Every report had said that the harbingers' disruptions had just been too loud that day — those whispers in the back of their minds a little too much. The mental break was a tragedy, and the resulting deaths an even worse one.

But the test results are hovering up in the air, clear as day: model 9873ig, responsible for the same number of deaths, on the same date. Jacob keeps reading, and reading, and sure enough, there it is — the monetary value of the damages done, calling out Chroma's suits by name.

He kind of wants to puke. The red light's giving him a headache.

Behind him, there's a squish as the creature shifts again, but Jacob doesn't turn to look. He feels frozen in place, incapable of moving.

"This," says Jacob. "They."

"They covered it up," says Xia, voice tight.

Jacob opens his mouth to respond, not entirely sure what he means to say. He never finds out, because that's when he feels a touch, almost gentle, against his left leg.

When he looks down, his brain won't quite process what it's seeing for a second.

The creature has crawled out of its enclosure. Its eyes are open, dozens and dozens of them, liquid black. Its wings beat weakly at the air, gaunt and gangly things. A mouth opens along the side of it, and another along the back, revealing rows upon rows of gleaming white teeth, and where its tendril brushes, the fabric of Jacob's flight suit dissolves and begins to melt away like cotton candy in water.

He yelps and jerks backward — falls against Xia, who says, "What the hell?"

He can tell when she catches sight of it, by the sharp inhale that follows — by the way her hands catch at his shoulder, to haul him out of range.

"When did it get out?!" she says.

"I don't know," says Jacob. "I was looking at the readouts!"

The creature crawls forward across the floor. A limb extends from inside of it, and then another, long and spindly, black like fresh asphalt. Everywhere it touches, the title is eaten away, a bit at a time.

The backdrop behind the text on the holo-display flashes red. A woman’s voice, calm and pre-recorded, says, “Time limit exceeded. Return subject to enclosure or assure personnel security.”

The creature levers itself up — flaps harder, and lists into the air.

Jacob reaches to eject his blades from their wrist mounts, by instinct, but his suit’s half a building away, in the hangar, and the blades are with it.

“Go,” says Xia, and shoves him toward the vent they came through.

“Dude,” says Jacob, “The lights.”

“Go,” says Xia again, and hauls him away by the arm.

The woman’s voice speaks again, calm and flat. “Subject displays signs of agitation. Engage shields or begin sedation immediately.”

There’s no time to go.

The creature makes an odd, prolonged hissing noise, like steam escaping; a thin black tendril slips from the glistening surface of its flesh and whips toward Jacob, wrapping around his ankle.

Pain shoots through him, sharp and bright and sudden; he yelps and goes down, smacking hard against the tile. In the back of his mind, those hushed whispers begin, the nightmare words that sound too much like what he tells himself late at night, lying in his bunk bed when sleep won’t come.

He shoves them down and away, like he always does — just has time to think, frantically, that they should have come armed, borrowed something from R&D. They’re gonna die here, and that’s how they’ll go down in history, the only Tenno pilots to ever bite it in the biotech wing.

Then Xia’s there, gloved hands curled around the metal pole that was holding a boatload of wires aloft for the banks of monitors along the wall, and she’s swinging it like a baseball bat, straight at the creature. The metal connects with the black flesh, and the creature screeches and ripples; its tendril withdraws from his ankle, and the voices withdraw from his mind.

Xia hits it again, and again; the impact against the floor sounds loud enough to break the universe.

There are voices outside in the corridor now, tense and alert, and Xia drops the metal pole to let it clatter on the floor.

She holds a hand out to Jacob, and he grabs hold and hauls himself to his feet.

This time, she doesn’t have to tell him to get moving. She dives for the vent, and he’s just a second behind, pulling it into place after him. He can hear the beeping of the door’s security panel as someone punches in the access code, then the whoosh of the door sliding open. Shouts of alarm follow immediately. "Security!" a man is saying. "I need security in here right now!"

It’s twenty seconds before the gunfire starts, a rapid staccato that sounds like a machine gun echoing out behind them.

Jacob ducks his head and keeps going, hardly daring to breathe. Ahead of him, Xia rounds a corner in the vents and he turns to follow. His ankle burns, sharp and throbbing; the metal under his palms seems to make far, far too much noise as they pass.

They crawl, and crawl, and crawl; they can’t hear anything behind them anymore, but they left the screen as they’d set it, light settings and temp settings and the damning evidence of what had happened to Chroma. They have maybe minutes before the commotion calms down enough for security to realize the only way in was the vents.

“Here,” says Jacob, as they pass another offshoot. “Here, turn.”

Xia does — takes a hard left away from biotech and into R&D. They know the way to Yoshioka’s lab like the back of their hands, and half a minute later, Xia hauls aside a ceiling panel and they drop down onto the metal table one at a time, then slide it back into place.

Jacob strains his ears for sounds of pursuit — catches nothing. Beside him, Xia’s eyes are wide and a little wild, glasses askew, a smudge of dust streaked along one cheek bone.

He catches her gaze for a minute and holds it — reads in her expression the not-quite panic that’s charging through his mind like the rogue robot in some sci-fi thriller.

Move, Jacob tells himself, and forces his feet to take one step, and then another. His ankle still burns, but it holds his weight, and that’s the important thing.

“Hey,” he manages, voice shaky and kind of strange. “Only in trouble if we get caught. Right?”

Xia opens her mouth, like she’s searching for the words. Then she nods, tight.

“Yeah,” she says. “So come on already.” She hauls open the door into the hallway. “Let’s not get caught.”

#jacob cross #Xia Igarashi #my ocs #the way the world ends

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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Isekai, Ranked

If Anime is escapism, there is no better way to escape than plunging Into Another World, where our niche skills and routine possessions may shake the fabric of reality! From MMO-inspired, to hard fantasy, there are many types of shows on this list but no movies nor series we haven’t seen recently. Bring all disagreements to the comments below!

1. Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World Re:Zero takes Isekai’s love for fish-out-of-water stories on step further: through brutal, expectation breaking blind sides, it makes the viewer a fish out of water too! Dripping with fantastic animation, Re:Zero true strength is the balance of its highly detailed world without over explaining its magic system, time loop mechanic and political systems. It also earns bonus points for limiting the application of its protagonist’s powerful magic and technological advantages.

2. Sword Art Online (1st season) In the narrowest of second places, SAO pairs top shelf animation with an approachable cast and easy to appreciate central conflict. Its lovingly constructed MMO setting aside, Kirito’s mistakes and occasional darkness elevate him above his potentially generic good-at-everything character type and Asuka plays the strongest heroine/love interest on the list.

3. Now and Then, Here and There Imagine if Digimon told a bleak about story sex trafficking child soldiers trapped on a waterless world with a maniac king? NTHT’s intense swerve from adorable into darkness is on par with Re:Zero and, much like Natsuki Subaru, HTHT’s Shu must rely on ‘durability’ and ‘heart’ to make it through. While some of it’s later tragic moments are predictable, this f’ed-up little anime scores major points for telling a complete story and having that story grow Shu from simpleton into a conflicted young adult.

4. Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet While Red’s post-earth scifi origin may stretch the common definition of Isekai, being trapped in a primitive culture that treats him (and his AI-driven mech Chamber) like a hero of old does not. Beautifully, Gargantia flips the script and makes Red’s overwhelming power, and killing in general, at odds with the local people.

5. Yōjo Senki / The Saga of Tanya the Evil Give us World War I with magic, a gender swapped villain as our protagonist, and God as our antagonist, and you’ve given us something pretty damn original. Like Gargantia, this reborn in another world captures thinking differently about the world can be as powerful and terrifying as unworldly strength. Without question, Yojo Senki’s cast is the most uniquely imagined on this list.

6. No Game No Life Like Tanya, the Blank twins piss off god and are sent to another world as punishment. However, their punishment is much more stylish and… harem. Underneath NGNL’s acid-soaked panties, over the top protagonists and the psychedelic color pallet, lives a show featuring thoughtful puzzles and imaginative spins on classic gamble to win story telling. Sadly, its story ends unfinished…

7. KonoSuba One part jab at Isekai and one part love letter to the starting town of every fantasy MMO, KonoSuba is all parts ruthlessly funny! While this reborn in another world (with a goddess!) show is not be as smartly written as NGNL, and it becomes repetitive after a time, the constant frenetic action more than makes up for it.

8. Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash Quiet, thoughtful, and full of sadness, this hard fantasy Isekai doesn’t care if its heroes are reborn in another world or trapped in a dungeon crawl afterlife. Building family bonds and connecting with people who would not normally be friends is all that matters… and it’s lovingly animated to boot!

9. ReCreators As a reverse Isekai, ReCreators distinguishes itself by bringing the other world to us. The experience is fantastically animated and packed with clever dialog that somehow breaths sincerity into a profoundly silly plot. The cast is quite diverse, both in design and personality, which keeps the action fresh, yet somehow cohesive throughout. It’s only major flaw is, the final act, which is way to drawn out.

10. The Devil is a Part Timer No I’m not kidding! This reverse Isekai’s premise that the Devil is trapped in our world and must work at McDonnald’s to get by is charming. While DiaPT’s humor isn’t particularly specific to the devil, the jokes are punchy, and the overall plot develops at a respectable pace. As an added treat, the opening gothic fantasy fight scenes are surprisingly well animated.

11. Log Horizon (1st season) Most exposition heavy, trapped in an MMO themed Isekai featuring ‘top ranked’ players crumble after a few episodes. More often than not, these shows try too hard to sell the coolness of their game worlds, user interfaces, and central characters. Miraculously, Log Horizon gets better mid season with a simple question: if former NPCs have personalities, can grow and learn, and even die, are they more human than the former players that dismiss them as background texture? Still, it takes Log Horizon six episodes to get going and good lord is it gray looking…

12. Overlord (3 Seasons) This transported into an MMO Isekai mirrors its main character: it is competent but not sure what it should be doing at any given moment. Sometimes the protagonists are villains and sometimes they are heroes. More often than not, characters are given lavish screen time to develop, only to be slaughtered whimsically. The resulting narrative is full of call backs and revealed foreshadowing… yet hasn’t gone very far in 3 seasons and hasn’t asked any interesting questions along the way.

13. El Hazard – The Magnificent World (OAV/TV) Predestined paradox, trans-dimensional time jumping high school students (and their drunk gym teacher) are trapped in an Arabian Nights’like land besieged by sentient bugs, a secret tribe of assassins from another dimension, and a death star like eye of god orbiting nearby. If you watched anime in the 1990s it will all be familiar but it still manages to feel original yet cohesive production. The character abilities are wonderful, the tragedy is nice, and plenty is left up to your own imagination to fill in the blanks. A bland, fault free, protagonist and a boy-crazy harem vibe are the only reasons it isn’t higher on the list.

14. Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri This invading the other world Isekai flips the script to deliver political intrigue, clash of culture, and commentary on Japanese society. It loses points for being a overly harem, relying on super dumb/super evil antagonists, and a dull protagonist but it’s fun enough to watch.

15. Drifters Stylishly violent, strikingly ugly, historical character filled and utterly bonkers, this reborn in another world Isekai’s uniqueness will hold your attention. Even if you do not want it to.

16. Rise of the Shield Hero (2 Seasons) On paper, this transported to an MMO world Isekai’s “treat the hero like crap,” “watch him accept the role of a slave-buying villain” and ultimately “rise to become the true hero” concept is great. Revealing that the world he’s saving may be less redeemable than the world the invaders are trying to save is also great. Too bad its padded and many of the arbitrary delays and narrative dead ends feel like cop outs.

17. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime While it lacks the initial hardcore’ness of Shield Hero, this reborn in another world Isekai is pleasantly animated and full of heart. The idea that naming monsters grants them power is a pretty neat mechanic too. It just sort bounces from idea to idea without a sense of purpose of resolution. One minute it’s a story of unlikely friendship, then magic destiny, then town builder, then harem, and onto magic school and isn’t about anything in particular until a hastily thrown together plot ties it up at the end. It scores points for making its hero a slime… although the reborn aspect never feels played with or justified.

18. Angel Beats! If the gun fetish, kids fighting a loli-angel instead of attending school in the afterlife plot weren’t so dumb and drawn out, this rebirth story’s touching moments would push it much higher. There’s a really good tale of life cut short, reunion after death, and again after rebirth here and it gets major bonus points for finishing the story it had to tell. Totally squandered.

19. Death March / Kara Hajimaru Isekai Kyousoukyoku Like Shield Hero, this reborn in an MMO Isekai is actually quite good looking. However, its Gary-Stue protagonist, harem and absurd narrative padding make it far less interesting. OMG how many episodes are about making lunch?! That’s too bad because the concept of code-like “copy and paste” magic system is pretty neat.

20. Wiseman’s Grandson / Kenja no Mago Despite opening with a modern day man being killed, this reborn into a fantasy world Isekai is more Magic School than Isekai. The only thread that connects the protagonist’s lives is that he can look at magic with an eye for process instead of outcome. The result is harmless easy watching but harem elements, a slow pace and lack of getting anywhere narratively hold it back.

21. How Not to Summon a Demon Lord This summoned into an MMO Isekai starts off as charming, but ecchi-heavy, before abruptly turning dark at the end of the season. We’re talking ‘make a child watch as her best friend is slowly tortured to death’ and creepo ‘finger-bang a loli cat girl in order to give birth to the demon inside her’ level dark. While those elements elevate HNtSaDL above niche appeal of its harm and MMO content, they aren’t so interesting to earn my recommendation.

22. Problem Children are coming from Another World, Aren’t They? The non-ecchi poor man’s No Game no Life features a talking cat that only some characters can understand and dreadful music. TFW smooth jazz? There’s some cuteness to be had, and the solutions to gambling games can be clever, but the overall vibe is low energy. It loses drama points because its protagonist is as smart as a god and physically stronger.

23. Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? This poor man’s Konosuba is occasionally funny, satire of RPG conventions and family relationships. Mama’s skill that interrupts whatever her son is doing, no matter what it is or where he is in the game world, is particularly charming. Unfortunately, there’s no avoiding the creepo factor of sexualizing that family relationship.

24. Restaurant from Another World My mom is secretly from another world and my restaurant’s front door connects back to that world each day is certainly unique, but it’s structured more like a food-porn show than Isekai. While the linkages of each patron become clear over time, few characters are not aware of those connections themselves. The result never feels like it gets anywhere.

25. In Another World With My Smartphone Stories without risk are still watchable when they immerse us an interesting world, or delve into niche details like food or how magic works, or sleeze us with harems and sex appeal. Smartphone fails all of these things. Worse, it does nothing with it’s one idea: protagonist Touya is reborn in a fantasy world with smartphone. Except, GOD GIVES HIM GOD TIER MAGIC FROM THE GET-GO! Ironically, Re:Zero and No Game No Life both use of a cell phones in more interesting ways, and Tanya’s God isn’t even comparable. Unoriginal, unfunny, not dramatic, not sexy, not worth watching.

26. Maou-sama, Retry! This transported to an MMO Isekai’s trash production values, and bizarre characters are hard to take seriously. The results are sometimes so terrible they are funny, such as incompetent background music transitions and detailed horses hiding at the edges of the frame. Sadly, a bland harem and complete lack of narrative objective kill the mood.

27. Isekai Izakaya Imagine a low energy, public access style show, with a tourism theme, that featuring a modern Japanese restaurant that serves fantasy world patrons…

28. Isekai Cheat Magician A loveless summoned to a fantasy world Isekai who’s protagonists are the most powerful and purely good characters could deserve a niche rating. Not this one. The narrative sort of ‘skips the boring stuff’ and, in doing so, skips character development. Hilariously, what the narrative does show is poorly animated, always underwhelming magic battle scenes or people standing around talking.

29. Endride Without dialog, this stumbled into a magic world Isekai’s vibrant color and crisp art would be watchable. The fact that the world is somehow inside of Earth’s core and the sparse use of mythology are unique, but its dumb-as-bricks whiny teen protagonists have the maturity of a small children. There are many unintentionally funny moments like scientists using gigantic laptops or the king’s magic weapon looking like a safety pin. Ultimately, the cast is so unlikeable that the show itself is unwatchable.

By: oigakkosan

#Anime #News #RABUJOI – An Anime Blog

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johnfkennedyjunior · 5 years

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Citizen Kennedy On the run from the press all his life, John F Kennedy Jr. joins the media pack. (September, 1995)

It is an overcast, chilly Friday, but the crowd in the ballroom of Detroit’s Westin Hotel is feverish. In the Adcraft Club’s ninety-year history, only Lee Iacocca has drawn more people to a speech. But today’s guest has set pulses revving faster than even Iacocca ever could.

Sighs (“I made eye contact with him!”) and whispers (“His jawline is perfect!”) and four burly guards accompany John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. as he circles the room to the blue-swagged dais. Women creep forward, their cameras flash-framing to capture that famous, evocative face.

After lunch, Phil Guarascio, the sleek advertising master of General Motors, takes the podium and ticks off the handsome young speaker’s accomplishments: his education at Brown University and NYU Law School; stints with the United Nations in India, with economic-development outfits in New York, and with the U. S. Attorney General’s Honor Program; his role in founding a group that helps educate health-care workers; and, most notably, his four years as an assistant district attorney in the office of New York City crimebuster Robert Morgenthau.

But it’s not his resume that’s brought this mob out to hear the thirty-four-year-old son of the country’s thirty-fifth president and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the eternal icon. It’s not even their moist interest in his celebrated romances with Daryl Hannah and other beauties. Nor is it to stare at the buffed pecs and thighs, often captured in Central Park grab shots by New York’s tabloids but today hidden under a dark, conservative suit. No, this crowd has come to learn about the future of the man they still think of as John John.

“I’m well aware of the expectation that sooner or later I would be giving a speech about politics,” he says. “So here I am, I’m delighted to say, fulfilling that expectation.” He speaks a bit more about his career, his prospects, his hope that he’ll do the right thing. Finally, the excitement building, he tells the crowd what it wants to hear.

“I hope eventually to end up as president,” says John F. Kennedy Jr. Three beats. “Of a very successful publishing venture.”

The nineteen hundred car and ad people explode into laughter and applause. They know that this charmer has come to their city to flack the riskiest venture of a pampered life indelibly marked by tragedy: a magazine he’ll launch in September about the family business-politics. More than a few of them will buy ad pages in the publication curiously named George (for George Washington), gambling that Kennedy’s sizzle will attract readers to a subject that Americans love to hate and have never much wanted to read about.

What they don’t fully realize is that they are present at the creation of the latest and most dramatic chapter of the Kennedy saga: a rite of passage of the family’s-if not America’s-crown prince. For much of his life, John F. Kennedy Jr. has been what he seemed-a dilettante, unable to commit to a woman or a career. Now he thinks he has found a way to fulfill his daunting genetic destiny-one that shows his sure grasp of what being a Kennedy is really all about. In his grandfather’s day, money was power. In his father’s day, politics was power. In his own day, media is power. By charging boldly into its realm, John Jr. may prove to be the most genuine Kennedy of his generation.

* * *

“DON’T LET THEM STEAL your soul,” Jackie Onassis would warn her children. John has seemingly spent the last dozen years trying to distance himself from the family legend. Until his full name turned into an advertising draw, he preferred to style himself simply John Kennedy, like at least a half dozen other New Yorkers.

For most people, the montage of images,, triggered by mention of this John Kennedy begins with the picture of a little boy saluting his father’s coffin on a gray November day barely within his memory’s reach. Ever since, he’s held himself a little apart. At the fashionable parties he frequents, he’s had a way of inching his back around to fend off the approach of strangers. That practiced self-protective instinct, the flip side of the intense attention he pays when he does decide to engage someone, has usually served to wall him off from unwanted overtures.

That wall was constructed, solidly and with great difficulty, by his mother. From the moment of her son’s birth by cesarean section on November 25, 1960, two and a half weeks after his father was elected president, the new First Lady tried to shield him and his older sister, Caroline. But President Kennedy didn’t play that way. He plainly understood how the image of a happy family could protect him, as it had his own father, from the consequences of his own philandering. So when Jackie was out of town, he’d contrive to sneak photo opportunities with the kids in the Oval Office.

President Kennedy was assassinated three days before his son’s third birthday. Within a year, Jacqueline Kennedy had created a new life for herself and her offspring in New York, where she later enrolled John and Caroline in private schools. The children became independently wealthy in 1968 when their mother married the squat Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. By the terms of President Kennedy’s will, a trust fund he’d inherited from his father passed to his children upon his widow’s remarriage. John H. Davis, a Bouvier cousin, believes that trust fund doubled in value during the sixties, leaving John and Caroline with about $10 million each.

Onassis helped shield the Kennedys from prying eyes and provided them with the money to support a lifestyle even more lavish than the one they’d experienced in the White House. But the billionaire degraded Jackie by blatantly continuing his longtime affair with diva Maria Callas. And when he died in 1975, he showed his contempt for her by leaving her, John, and Caroline a pittance in his will. An ugly legal battle with Onassis’s daughter, Christina, ended with a settlement that gave Jackie more than $20 million. Maurice Tempelsman, the diamond merchant who became Jackie’s consort in later life, helped her invest that money and plump her estate to somewhere around $100 million, Davis estimates.

The money didn’t free John Jr. from his family’s past and expectations-at New York’s Collegiate School, he was shadowed by Secret Service agents and regularly saw a psychiatrist-but his whispery lioness of a mother raised him to sidestep the family’s darker edge. His cousins might act like a pack of druggy Keystone Kennedys, Uncle Ted might screw and screw up, and Aunt Lee could wind up a fashion flack, but John and Caroline kept their heads down and emerged as decent, intelligent, modest, and good-natured young people.

* * *

POLITICS BECKONED early; public service had a strong plan on John. “He has a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility” his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said a few years ago. “Whenever any of the cousins need help on one of their projects-whether it’s the Special Olympics or the RFK Human Rights or journalism awards or the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation awards John participates.” He helped his cousins Joseph and Patrick Kennedy win House seats and pitched in on cousin Kathleen Kennedy Towns end’s successful bid for lieutenant governor in Maryland. He showed up in court for his cousin Willie Smith’s trial on rape charges. “He’s got a very strong sense of responsibility, but he’s not overwhelmed by it,” said Bobby Jr. “He’s very comfortable with it.”

Comfortable, perhaps, but strangely without passion. When Kennedy went to law school, he was following his sister and six cousins who had studied or were studying to become attorneys. Even his mid-1989 decision to become an assistant district attorney in New York tracked the family record: His uncle Ted had prepped for his first Massachusetts Senate race by serving as an assistant DA in Suffolk County. “John said his heart was never really in it,” says someone who served in the DA’s office with him. “He was doing it for his mother.”

While he waited for the verdict on his New York State bar exam, which Caroline had passed on her first try a few months earlier, John started work as a $30,000-a-year prosecutor. Although this was a competitive position, Bob Morgenthau’s office was also a hiring hall for famous sons. Andrew Cuomo, Cyrus Vance Jr., and Dan Rather Jr. have worked there, as have the sons of Rhode Island senator John Chafee, labor leader Victor Gotbaum, and New York City Council speaker Peter Vallone. So had John’s cousin Bobby Jr., before his resignation amid charges of drug abuse.

John was assigned to the Special Prosecutions Bureau, which handles low-level crimes ranging from corruption, fraud, con games, and check bouncing to arson and car theft. Kennedy was placed thereat first because “we clearly didn’t want him in the trial division,” says Mike Cherkasky, then chief of the DA’s investigative division. “We didn’t want the attention to distract him.”

That fall, John learned he’d failed the bar exam. “John didn’t take the test seriously,” says a fellow assistant DA. He learned he’d flunked a second time (by 11 points out of a needed 660 at the end of April. Although more than half of the other twenty-five hundred aspirants failed as well, only Kennedy was ridiculed on the front pages of the New York tabloids, all three of which used variations of “Hunk Flunks.”

Even so, John kept his cool. “I’m clearly not a major legal genius,” he said.

“He held up under unbelievable pressure,” says Owen Carragher Jr., his officemate at the time. John even kept smiling when a maitre d’ with wobbly English accosted him while he was having a consolation beer, and said, “I heard news you failed! I’m glad!”

Kennedy played his part in the public perception that he was a lightweight. He made his first courtroom appearance as a witness in a case against an immigration officer who’d been charged with making illegal raids and pocketing confiscated money only to have to admit that he didn’t know the title of the landmark Supreme Court case that made the Miranda rights part of every cop’s lexicon. Even after Kennedy laid out $1,000 for a six-week bar-review course, it wasn’t clear that he cared about the exam, especially after he was photographed “studying” poolside at a Los Angeles hotel. But he did pass, earning a $1,000 raise and the right to try cases in court. In his first solo prosecution, he went up against a burglar who was caught asleep in his victim’s bed, his pockets stuffed with her jewelry. He eventually graduated to bigger cases involving Mafia families, labor racketeering at a big newspaper, and construction fraud, but one state-supreme-court judge before whom he’d appeared said, “I don’t think he had the potential to be a great trial lawyer. His passion lies elsewhere.”

Eventually, he won a share of respect from bosses and coworkers. “There’s a premium on certain intellectual as opposed to advocacy skills in investigations,” says Cherkasky. ` John fit that.” Working on what’s called “intake” once a month, interviewing complainants off the street, he proved a natural at getting people to open up and at judging when they were telling the truth.

After two and a half years in the DA’s office, Kennedy transferred to a trial bureau. “He wanted something quicker,” says Carragher. “He wanted the action. He wanted to do a trial where the defendant wasn’t asleep.”

In his first case in the trial bureau, he prosecuted two men who’d run a chicken stand in Harlem that burned down just after they took out fire insurance. An accelerant had been lit with a match in the store, but the evidence against the owners was circumstantial, and the only witness was a felon who didn’t want to testify. Kennedy extracted the testimony he needed during a complex, three-week trial. “It was a loser and John won it,” says Carragher.

That, and others. In four years as an assistant DA-a year longer than the normal term of service-Kennedy had a perfect 6-0 conviction record. A political career now seemed logical. When Kennedy had introduced Uncle Teddy at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, he’d electrified the delegates by invoking his father’s name. “So many of you came into public service because of him,” Kennedy said in a prime-time speech. “In a very real sense, because of you, he is with us still.” The two-minute ovation that followed seemed a fitting kickoff to his first campaign.

During John’s law-school years, he and several friends had convened weekly “issues meetings,” sessions that Bobby Kennedy Jr. characterized as “just a private thing that he does.” Might they lead to elected office? “It’s something that, you know, you never say never and it’s obviously a source of interest, but I’ll just see,” John equivocated shortly before quitting the DAs office. “I don’t really know.”

* * *

JOHN MAY HAVE OWED at least some of his indecision to a more pressing interest in the Kennedys’ other familial pursuit: sexual conquest. A glorious mosaic of women threw themselves at John Jr. At the district attorney’s, a cleaning woman who’d squabbled with Carragher and stopped cleaning his office began spending hours a day in it once John moved in. “She dusted the underside of the desk,” Carragher says. “She just wouldn’t leave.” Paralegals had to screen deliveries and open John’s mail, which often contained unsolicited pictures of women. Once, an admirer sent a cappuccino machine.

Kennedy is a gentleman. “He doesn’t pick up girls and screw them and dump them out of the car,” says a woman who has known him a long time. “He’s pretty tame for a guy who’s that good-looking.” But at the same time, he’s no innocent. Womanizing-and pride in it-is, as historian Garry Wills has pointed out, “a very important and conscious part of the male Kennedy mystique.” John, blessed with looks almost as stirring as his name, was an early enthusiast. A prep-school classmate, when asked what he thought young Kennedy would be doing in ten years, answered plainly: “Dating.”

As an old friend puts it, “He got around a lot. He didn’t capitalize on it. Things just came his way.”

John’s one foray into filmmaking, a 1990 coming-of-age movie written by, produced by and starring college friends and called A Matter of Degrees, played on the young man’s studly proclivities. Identified in the credits as a “guitar-playing Romeo,” he had a tiny role as a fellow consumed with coupling. In one scene, he strums his instrument and tunelessly proclaims to an adoring paramour, “Oh, baby, I can’t live without your love.” Moments later, he is shown quarreling with the woman.

“What does it matter what we do when we’re not together?” he pleads with her.

“Because when we’re not together,” she answers, “you’re fucking Alison,” referring to another of his love interests.

Like his grandfather, who used to keep Gloria Swanson around even while his wife, Rose, was on hand, and his father, who pursued Marilyn Monroe, Angie Dickinson, and Gene Tierney. John Kennedy Jr. has long favored actresses. His longest and most notable liaison was with Daryl Hannah, herself rich and social. They first met as youngsters on vacation with their families on St. Martin. They met again after John’s aunt Lee Radziwill married Herb Ross, who had directed Hannah in the film Steel Magnolias.

That this affair-and numerous others-was carried on in public showed John to be more like his mother than his father. Just like Jackie O., her son can be a furtive exhibitionist. When he strips off his shirt to play Frisbee in the park, when he smooches girls on street corners or coaxes them into shorts at sea, he’s cruising for the cameras, just as his mother was when she unknowingly “posed” for her famous topless photos on Ari Onassis’s island, Skorpios.

Kennedy has kept his voice out of the public record except in carefully crafted snippets, but he puts himself on view with insouciance. He can afford the privacy and luxury of limousines, yet he propels himself around town on Rollerblades and a bicycle. “Aristocrats are dangerously uninhibited men,” writes Nelson W Aldrich Jr., a chronicler of the American upper class. “Like David the King and [Fitzgerald's] Tom Buchanan, they are sensual, ruthless, and intemperate.”

The story is told that John used to walk around the campus of Brown in gym shorts so brief they emphasized an endowment almost as impressive as the university’s. In New York, he has continued to flaunt himself. When he lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, even after he was declared the sexiest man alive, he used to sprawl at an outdoor table at the Jackson Hole hamburger joint, shirt off. One neighborhood woman says Kennedy would stop her to ask for the time. “My sense was that he was dying for attention, dying for people to look at him,” she says.

* * *

JOHN KENNEDY DEVELOPED a public image as a dilettante and nourished it as he grew. As early as 1983, he was dubbed “the least competitive Kennedy” in a book about the family. Once, asked whom he had admired as a child, he said, “I guess I have to answer that honestly. My role models were Mick Jagger and Muhammad Ali, actually.” Even as he spent his days prosecuting petty thieves and swindlers, he seemed to pour his heart mostly into partying and exercising; at one point, he belonged to three Manhattan health clubs at once. “If I had to pick a defect on him, I’d be hard put to find one,” Bobby Kennedy Jr. once said, “except that he pays more attention to his clothes than the rest of us.”

The effect wasn’t always salutary. He showed up at his thirtieth-birthday party in a custom-made maroon zoot suit and leopard wing tips.

His one consistent interest apart from women-acting-heightened the impression that he was unserious. By many accounts, he was a natural and precocious actor. “He’s got an incredible ear for mimicry, and he used to tell us all stories in an Irish brogue or in Russian character or Scottish,” his cousin Bobby once recounted. “This is starting when he was nine or ten years old, and he’d have all the grandchildren listening to him … A lot of us were a lot older than him, and he could keep us entertained.”

It didn’t take long for Kennedy’s hobby to bloom into a potential career path. He was only eighteen when the film producer Robert Stigwood offered him a role playing his father as a young man. That. didn’t happen, but other professional parts did.

Jackie Kennedy soon showed the world how iron her will could be when it came to her son’s future. “Jackie was a loving but extremely demanding mother,” says her cousin John Davis. “John wanted to be an actor, and she dissuaded him. She didn’t think it was a dignified profession. She didn’t like Hollywood at all.”

But Jackie’s friend Rudolf Nureyev criticized John for giving up the stage. “Show some balls!” the ballet star told him, according to author Diana DuBois. “Do what you want!”

One of John’s closest friends heatedly denies that his mother’s influence steered him from his own chosen path. “John has a compass,” he says. “He’s usually pointed in the right direction. Did Jackie guide him? Probably. But he went to law school because he likes to learn and law was a natural thing for him to do.”

Whatever the reason, John abandoned acting for membership on the board of Naked Angels, a society-oriented company that produces plays in Manhattan and benefit galas in the Hamptons.

With an acting career out of the question, John left the district attorney’s office in mid-1993 and seemed to plunge ever deeper into triviality. A very public manwithout-anything-special-to-do, he grew a goatee, showed up at parties for rock groups, and appeared at the opening of a technology installation created by his brother-in-law, Ed Schlossberg, that was held in the lobby of an office building.

He glided around the city like a tomcat. He moved from the Upper West Side to an apartment he shared with Daryl Hannah, then bought a loft in TriBeCa. It looked as if he was finally going to marry the big blond starlet: She was spotted buying an antique wedding dress at a flea market, and the couple went on a scuba trip to the South Pacific and Asia. “Daryl really liked him,” says Chicago gal-about-town and novelist Sugar Rautbord. “She was desperate to marry him.” But John couldn’t, or wouldn’t, commit. Only two months after tabloid reporters descended on Cape Cod, expecting a Kennedy-Hannah wedding, John was seen kissing Carolyn Bessette, a PR woman for Calvin Klein, near the finish line of the New York City Marathon.

* * *

FOR ALL HIS LESS THAN ZERO gadabouting, John was still struggling with the driving Kennedy will to succeed. “You don’t want to be a passenger on the liner,” he’d told Carragher when he quit as an assistant DA. Would he enroll at Harvard’s John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government, or join the Clinton administration, or perhaps even run for Congress? Nothing came of any of it. (He turned down a House race, says Carragher, because “any semblance of privacy John has ever had, he’s had to fight for. The only claim he has to keep it is to remain a private citizen.”)

But the dynastic imperative can overwhelm an American aristocrat. “If society as a whole is to gain by mobility and openness of structure,” a former Harvard president, Charles W Eliot, once said of his class, “those who rise must stay up in successive generations, that the higher level of society may be constantly enlarged.” As Aldrich puts it, this craving for success follows a set pattern. For the founding generation, it’s all about money, ruthlessly acquired (by, say, bootlegging. For the next generation, public service (serving as senator, attorney general, president, for example becomes the vehicle, because nothing better highlights the freedom money conveys than selflessly boosting the commonweal.

The third generation, though, is often swept away by the liberties unsheathed by trust funds. They “exert a terrific centrifugal force on the spirits of their inheritors,” writes Aldrich, “constantly threatening to shoot them out into trackless space.”

Young John Kennedy has certainly seemed more trackless than most. But he was actually trying to keep his end of what Garry Wills calls the “Kennedy contract,” a compact whose components are “power, money, fame.” John Jr. had the latter as a birthright. He had enough of the second to keep him comfortable. All he lacked was the first.

* * *

JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS died of lymphatic cancer at 10:15 P.M. on May 19, 1994, in her Fifth Avenue apartment, with John, Caroline, and Maurice Tempelsman at her bedside. “John was at his desk at 8:30 A.M. the day after the burial,” a friend says. “He did exactly what Jackie would have done. He went back to work.”

What he was working on was a magazine. It was the first real risk of his professional life.

The idea had come to him a year and a half earlier, on a night shortly after Bill Clinton was elected president. Over dinner, John and a pal, Michael Berman, started talking about how the way people looked at politics had changed. “Politicians have taken their cue from the entertainment industry” is how John puts it. “Al Gore on David Letterman was that show’s number-one-rated show for that year.” He pauses and shakes his head in wonder. `Al Gore.”

Was there something in this for them? No one is sure who said it first, but the question was asked that fall night: “What about a magazine?”

The idea was intriguing. Existing political magazines, Kennedy believes, haven’t “caught up with the moment.” Then there were the other, larger issues a publication could capture-”power and personality, triumph and loss, the pursuit and price of ambition for its own sake and for something larger,” all subjects with which John has more than a nodding acquaintance. Despite the irony inherent in running precisely the sort of venture he’d been running away from all his life, he and Berman decided to give it a try.

They’d been friends for years. The son of a real estate developer from Princeton, New Jersey, Berman had prepped at Lawrenceville, earned a degree in history from Lafayette College, and then gone. into public relations. He met Kennedy through mutual friends on the city’s party scene in the early 1980s.

When John entered law school in 1986, he stayed in touch with Berman, and in 1988, they first went into business together. Kennedy had gone kayaking and come home raving about some handmade boats he called “the Rolls Royces of kayaks.” John wanted to buy out the small company in Maine that made them, manufacture kits, distribute them nationally, and teach others to make the kayaks. Nothing came of the plan, but the two men never abandoned the corporate entity they’d established to do the deal. It was called Random Ventures, which for the next six years seemed an apt description of John’s approach to life.

After Kennedy became an assistant DA, Berman evolved into John’s Sancho Panza. “The press became an issue,” says a close friend. So whenever a media problem came up, John suggested that the DA’s overworked press office hand it off to Berman. “At first, it was once every three months,” John’s friend says. “Then it was every three days.” After John failed the bar exam for the second time, the calls started coming every couple of hours.

Meanwhile, Berman was building his own PR business, representing clients like Cointreau, Pfizer pharmaceuticals, DuraSoft, and the Mexican tourist board. Although he was and remains a Democrat, he also helped run the annual White House Easter-egg roll throughout George Bush’s presidency. But by mid-1993, Berman was as eager to move out of PR work as John was to find a direction, so when the men came up with the idea for a magazine, they threw themselves into it with equal fervor.

Working first at a desk at Kennedy Enterprises and later from space in Berman’s office in New York’s Flatiron district, John used his name to secure meetings with potential backers, including Edgar Bronfman Jr., who, like young Kennedy, traced his money to the liquor business but wanted to make his own mark in the world. “Every door was open to them,” says a friend of John’s. “But that was good news and bad news. Did these people believe, or did they just want to meet John?” Berman and Kennedy would joke about charging a million dollars for a first meeting with potential investors, because that was really all many of them wanted.

Kennedy’s mother set up a meeting between John and her friend Joe Armstrong, who’d worked in magazine publishing for twenty years. “John was determined not to do what people expected,” Armstrong says. Soon, he, Kennedy, and Berman were meeting regularly.

The impulse behind the magazine, at least at first, was high-minded. Berman and Kennedy wanted it to be populist, nonpartisan, and centered on process instead of personalities or party politics. They thought that would appeal to people aged twenty to forty who felt disenfranchised by politics but still wanted access to the circles of power. The magazine would have a small circulation based more on subscriptions than newsstand sales. “Publishing,” says Armstrong, recounting his meetings with Kennedy, “looked like a way to approach public service and keep a balance in his life.”

Unfortunately, few of the people they talked to were interested in helping young Kennedy work it all out. When Jann Wenner, a longtime Kennedy-family friend, heard of the project after reading about it in a media newsletter, he was irate. “What’s this about?” he allegedly asked John. “You better see me immediately. Politics doesn’t sell. It’s not commercial.”

Using some of the family’s media contacts, Kennedy and Berman wended their way through the tight inner circles of the New York-based magazine industry, a gossipy enclave whose nervous denizens simultaneously pray for new publications that might employ them and denigrate any new idea that isn’t their own. In connect-the-dots fashion, they talked to several former editors at 7 Days, an upscale New York weekly that flamed and then flopped in the early 1990s. “It was very much amateur hour,” says one of the many people whose brains were picked.

* * *

BY FALL 1994, BERMAN AND KENNEDY were getting dispirited. “People didn’t get it,” a friend of John’s says. “It wasn’t an easy sell.” They’d won the promise of about s3 million in funding, but their advisers warned that it wasn’t enough. Finally, to scare up more interest, they leaked the venture to the gossip columns.

Some were surprised that Kennedy was joining the very craft that had hounded him so mercilessly throughout his life, forgetting that his grandfather had palled around with journalists-had even chased skirts with New York Times Washington columnist Arthur Krock-decades before. His mother, too, had built a sweet career in patrician publishing, editing celebrity and art books at Doubleday, and President Kennedy, so his son was told, had hoped to run a newspaper after leaving the White House. “I think the idea was somewhat inevitable,” John says of the magazine he’d started calling George. “Both my parents not only loved words but spent a good part of at least their professional lives in the word business.”

Undeterred by the naysayers, Berman and Kennedy decided in late 1994 to test their idea by mailing solicitations for the nonexistent George to 150,000 people whose names were drawn from other magazines’ subscription lists. The offer, for a twenty-four-dollar-a-year charter subscription, was aimed mostly at media junkies; the copy said less about George than about other magazines. “George is to politics what Rolling Stone is to music. Forbes is to business. Allure is to beauty Premiere is to films,” read the piece. It was a “soft” offer that didn’t require a check, but the response was encouraging. Mailings that didn’t mention Kennedy’s name got a solid 5 percent response; those that did attracted even more, 5.7 percent.

Sensing, finally, that something might happen with their project, Kennedy and Berman also began changing. The high-mindedness with which they’d originally approached the venture began slowly giving way to a desire to succeed, whatever changes in tone, look, or content that required.

George Lois found this out shortly after he got involved with George.

The rumpled veteran adman, whose Esquire covers in the 1960s set the pace for international magazine design, was one of the many approached by the duo for input. “I’m the kind of schmuck, I got excited,” he says. “And suddenly I was designing his magazine.” Lois designed a logo-a truncated version of George Washington’s signature, pared down to his almost unreadable initials. Beneath it, Lois put the words WE CANNOT TELL A LIE.

Using his own money, Lois also produced a series of outrageous covers. Richard Nixon had just died, so he got Alger Hiss to pose for one, over a headline derived from a classic Esquire line about Nixon: WHY IS THIS MAN SMILING? A photograph of a torso in a pinstripe suit was captioned, TOTALLY NEW ADVICE TO FUTURE CANDIDATES: KEEP IT ZIPPED! A photograph of Barbra Streisand with a smudge on her nose ran with the line BROWN-NOSING: HOLLYWOOD DOES WASHINGTON, WASHINGTON DOES HOLLYWOOD.

Kennedy and Berman loved the covers-at first. “A week later, they’d tell me, `Everybody says you can’t do that,”‘ said Lois. After a few more meetings, he gave up. “If you want a safe magazine,” he told them, “you’ve got the wrong guy.”

Eventually, the notion of using George to stimulate involvement in politics joined irreverence on the sidelines as John and Berman started talking about politics as theater and their magazine as a glossy journal for the not entirely engaged.

“The basic concept,” says Roger Black, the design director of Esquire, who was consulted by the pair at that point, was “to be a half-fan, half-insider magazine, not a New Republic or a political-science journal. They felt people were ready for a magazine treating politics like entertainment.”

“Michael positioned it as a Vanity Fair-ish product,” says one of their consultants. “That wasn’t necessarily John’s first instinct.” But Kennedy quickly got with the program. “They wanted Herb Ritts, Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, nonpolitical writers,” says John’s close friend.

They edged even closer to glitz after Hachette Filipacchi Magazines got involved. The American arm of a giant French media company, Hachette is the nation’s fourth-largest magazine company, with twenty-two titles and $750 million in revenues. The company, which owns Elle and the successful but unglamorous Car and Driver and Road & Track, has expanded mainly via high-profile acquisitions. Here was an opportunity to get credit for starting something hot and turn America’s crown prince into a corporate hood ornament.

Hachette CEO David Pecker had been pursuing Kennedy and Berman ever since he’d heard about George at a benefit dinner in June 1994. After several months of unrequited messages and letters, John finally called him back. “I just want you to know we have a lot of interest, and not just in having lunch with John Kennedy” Pecker told him.

They finally met in December. Pecker subsequently studied the George projections and called some key potential advertisers, concentrating on the Detroit automobile manufacturers he’d dealt with in his fifteen years as a publisher of car magazines. Other meetings were arranged, with Jean-Louis Ginibre, Hachette’s editorial director, and then, over lunch at Le Bernardin, with Daniel Filipacchi, its chairman.

A fifty-fifty agreement was signed in mid-February between Hachette and the duo’s company, Random Ventures. Their venture wasn’t random anymore. Berman, now George’s executive publisher, sold his PR business and, with editor-in-chief Kennedy, moved into a conference room on the Hachette floor where Elle is produced. Not long afterward, they moved to a floor they share with, among others, the staffs of Elle Decor, Family Life, and Metropolitan Home.

Hachette, a company with a strong newsstand emphasis, isn’t interested in an earnest subscription-based magazine about issues and ideas. “Suddenly, the struggle over the direction of the magazine is very serious,” says someone who’s been inside George. “There are different conceptions. John is smart, but he lacks an edge. He’s one of the least assertive people you’ll ever meet; he’s never had to assert himself-he’s John Kennedy! Now, suddenly, he’s in a huge corporation. He wants a magazine of ideas with a sugar coating. They want a political People.”

Early on, Ginibre suggested renaming the magazine Criss-Cross, after the lines of power, money, and culture that circumscribe the fluid boundaries of its beat. Then, when some of the initial designs seemed to resemble Elle Decor and one of the editors expressed’ his doubts, the art director assigned to the project supposedly snapped, “I was hired by Hachette-I work for Hachette!”

“They got off to a bad start,” John’s friend admits. It was worse for Berman than for Kennedy. Walls had to be torn down to make the executive publisher’s office comparable to the editor in chief’s, although Kennedy’s still has the better view of New Jersey Central Park, and all of northern Manhattan. Pecker won’t discuss the reports of internal discord, but he seems to refer to them in one pointed comment: “Normally in business, the person who puts up the money has the last say.”

Pecker is a happy guy these days, and not just because he has America’s prince in his pocket. George has booked 160 pages in ads for its first issue. “We’ve already sold ads for eight issues,” Pecker crows. “We know where we’re going to be.” It’s said that Ginibre has suggested in a memo that the magazine must go all soft and gooey toward the powerful people it hopes to feature in its pages in order to gain their cooperation, and that John must be as public as Tina Brown. How he’ll cope with that expectation is yet to be seen, but he’s already been reported to have interviewed George Wallace and to have requested a chat with everyone’s favorite undeclared presidential candidate, Colin Powell.

* * *

SO IT IS THAT THESE DAYS, John Kennedy has finally abandoned his directionless life, all but vanished from the club scene, and joined the working class. He gets up early every morning and exercises, then bikes from TriBeCa to his midtown office, carrying his front wheel upstairs in elevators where JFK Jr. sightings have ceased to incite hormonal frenzies. In an office decorated with images of the magazine’s namesake (including a blown-up dollar bill on Kennedy’s door, he meets writers, makes ad calls, and often works late. He’s even issued a memo instructing his staff that he expects them there when he arrives at 8:30 in the morning.

Off-hours, he still sees Bessette, but there are others. “We’re talking about John Kennedy!” his friend guffaws. Finally, he has bigger things on his mind than whom he’ll be with at night; he’s made his bed in a much different place than the one he and Berman first imagined that night after Bill Clinton’s election.

Initially Hachette promised only to produce and distribute two issues of George. But soon, the company upped its commitment, pledging to go bimonthly early in 1996 and monthly in September ’96, two months before the next presidential election, at a total investment it puts, vaguely, between $5 million and $20 Million. “I pushed them to do a magazine that connects with a lot of people,” says Ginibre. From Kennedy and Berman’s original idea of a small journal that encouraged participation in politics, George has grown into a magazine its publishers hope will sell three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand copies on newsstands each month-or about what vanity Fair, with its Hollywood covers, manages to sell.

If George does, the magazine will connect not through the language of politics or journalism but through the new voice of success in America: entertainment. John has made this clear in the way he has described George to potential advertisers. It will showcase “politics as miniseries, suspense thriller, comedy, sometimes even great drama,” he’s said.

Examples? George has commissioned an article on Newt Gingrich’s lesbian half sister, a piece by Roseanne titled “If I Were President,” and a review by James Carville of the new A1 Pacino film, City Hall, which a source says will actually be ghostwritten by a George staffer, and it has considered a story by a New York gossip columnist on fundraising benefits. But the biggest tip-off is George’s covers. The first issue will likely feature Cindy Crawford, shot by Herb Ritts and posed like Washington. Anthony Hopkins, made up for his role as the star of Oliver Stone’s Nixon, is in the running for cover number two.

“They don’t even feel the need to pretend to serious intentions,” says rival Martin Peretz, the editor in chief and owner of The New Republic, a magazine that became indispensable for a time when President Kennedy made it a favorite read (right up there with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels). “A magazine like this will reflect the interest of the public but cannot stimulate it,” Peretz sniffs.

Samir Husni, the acting chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, has made a ten-year study of consumer magazines. “So far, George has had a great reception in the advertising community because of JFK’s name,” he says. “The danger, of course, is that when you have this high expectation, everyone is going to judge it with a sharp razor edge.”

The big question, concludes Husni, is this: “Is there a magazine behind the hype?”

Even some of the people who worked on the prototype of George are leery about its intentions and prospects. “Glitz is a tightrope walk,” says one. “Run enough stories on Hillary’s dressmaker and Tabitha Soren, and serious people won’t return your phone calls.”

But perhaps they will anyway-showing that John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. may know more about the power of politics and the politics of power than anyone suspects.

By: Michael Gross for Esquire Magazine

#articles

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theonceoverthinker · 6 years

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OUAT Rewatch: 1X01 - Pilot

Who says you can’t go home?

The “Pilot” of Once Upon a Time is almost divine in how adored it is. I write this intro just as I prepare to press play on it, and I feel an undeniable tension in my heart. Is there anything that can be said about this episode that hasn’t been said a hundred times before? Am I able to say hello again so soon after saying goodbye?

Only one way to find out. *Presses play*

This gets a little long, so I’m going to be a good Tumblarian and stick my thoughts below the cut! Hope you give them a read!

-Press Release There’s no actual press release for the “Pilot,” but let’s be real, we know the deal. Emma Swan, a bail bondsperson has one hell of a 28th birthday when the son she gave up for adoption 10 years ago - Henry Mills - comes to her doorstep. A trip back to Henry’s hometown introduces Emma to an assortment of townspeople and an even more uncanny story of heroes and fairy tales. Meanwhile, in the past, we see Snow White and Prince Charming cope and fight for their love and family as the Evil Queen threatens them with a curse most vile.

-General Thoughts For a series that needs to weave a central theme around at least two separate plots, simplicity can be one’s best friend, and the “Pilot” is the epitome of that. The plots in and of themselves are simple - a war against a tyrant with a major threat in the flashback and a woman who has never had a family now dealing with one being thrown her way. However, it feels so much bigger, and that’s because hanging around our mains are characters and settings that you just know are going to grow in addition to our mains and transform these simple realms into something greater, something epic. Surrounding Snow and Charming during their discussion in the war room are a set of dwarfs, a fairy, and a cricket, and those same characters show up in our world and at the very least, Archie and Graham hold a promise of a larger role if for no other reason than their professions. We are being promised a more epic story without ever taking away time from the main story, and that’s simply incredible. I feel like there’s so much to gush about when it comes to performances, and because I don’t want this to be super long, I’m just going to highlight some of my favorite moments from each actor and actress in a single sentence. Jennifer as Emma walking towards Ryan like she was the God damned Terminator made me laugh hard and it characterized her as someone cool and confident, allowing for later scenes to paint more of her nuances by showing her vulnerabilities and desires for people in her life. Lana as Regina has a commanding presence during the wedding scene and shows off just what kind of threat she will be to all of those in her way going forward. Ginny as Snow giving up her baby and eternally coining the line “her best chance” is heartbreaking in such a profound way and allows the tragedy of their 28-year separation to subtly play out here and more overtly carry weight throughout the rest of the series. Jared as Henry’s pleas to Emma to listen to him convey a sense of innocence and vulnerability that can bring one back to the most frustrating moments of their childhood. Josh as Charming’s determination as he rides upon his steed in those opening moments allow the audience to feel every bit of intensity and immediately give his relationship with Snow - however obvious the turnout will be - some stakes. Finally, last but certainly not least, Bobby’s chilling performance as Rumple in the jail cell - from the movements of his long fingernails toe the sickly sweet way some of his lines come across - make him suo mysterious and scary as well as give Granny’s lines about him owning the town added weight. Finally, on a funnier note, I’m not gonna lie, but I always wanted an episode that would canonize the “prettier than I” line. Come on - throw Leopold in there, we get a bit more nuance into their relationship as well as see the effects on Regina of Leopold’s neglect for her needs over Snow’s and make a Regina/Snow present plot and there could’ve been something cool!

-Insights Here’s something I noticed during the wedding scene - The necklace Regina wears is the same one that Samedi brought to her in 7x12’s flashback. See “Flip My Ship” for my feelings on that, but I will point out that this gives us new insight as to when Facilier and Regina first met, although as she’s seen wearing it as the curse hits, it’s safe to say that at least one, if not both, of them could be replacements. Another thing I noticed shortly after that I just found funny was how during Regina’s speech to the Charmings, a lot of the guests weren’t cowering as much as gently averting their gazes. While watching the war scene, I couldn’t help but contrast it to the one in the finale. Snow lacks all manner of optimism in the one in the premiere, but by the finale, she’s the epitome of optimism! The wolf always seemed really weird to me, and now that I’ve seen its full schtick throughout the seasons, I gotta say, I’m not impressed. At first, it seems like the wolf was supposed to be a protector of Storybrooke, acting as an agent against Regina. But we’ve only seen it a handful of times and it’s acted like more of a MacGuffin than anything. And MacGuffins are fine, but this one was clearly supposed to mean something and it never really did, not even really in relation to what one would think would be its focal character (Graham).

-Arcs It’s hard to do a segment for arcs when a series has just begun because, well - every arc, in essence is beginning! And honestly, they’re all good, so I’m just going to write out the arcs that have been introduced here. Emma journey of belief Snow finding Charming The power struggle against Regina

-Favorite Dynamic Emma and Regina. I wanted to point this out somewhere, but the framing of their dynamic works so well. Parents who adopt children are more parents to a child than the parents who gave them up for adoption (Unless of course the birth parents died). This is something that we (should) fundamentally understand, especially in a case like this. Regina’s lines about changing diapers, enduring tantrums, and the like are true, and we - as well as Emma - sympathize and agree with that. Her position as mayor as well as the mother of a runaway boy also asks us to question our own feelings towards Regina throughout the episode. The animosity also doesn’t happen from the moment Regina and Emma meet. However, the conflict between them is not so simple. Due to both Regina’s harsh attitude and her actions in the Enchanted Forest, there’s an unease as we watch her, and while Emma’s situation in this matter is far from ideal on any level, we trust her and believe in the bond between her and Henry because while there is harshness there, there’s also an understanding. It’s such a nuanced conflict and knowing now where it has ended - in such a state where both mothers can co-parent Henry and enjoy each other’s company - allows for me to enjoy experiencing it again and appreciate the intricate steps taken making their relationship what it was.

-Writers As you all know, this was Adam and Eddy’s first episode, and it’s pretty freakin’ good! Unfortunately, until I’ve examine more of their episodes, I don’t have a lot to say here. The one thing I do want to point out is that - just like Regina in today’s episode - they are really good at making a strong entrance!

-Culture What made the “Pilot” of Once Upon a Time so popular? I didn’t watch this episode during its initial airing, but what I do know about the time it was released was that a lot of the dramas that were released tended to be gritty. There were exceptions like ABC’s Desperate Housewives, but it was a turn for the edgy in media. And then a show like OUaT came out, one that not only promised hope, but actually allowed for a payoff in the first episode, no matter how small it was in terms of plot. The score especially sells it. While there’s a tone of sadness to it, it’s overarching theme is hope, and that come off so clearly as it plays when the time on the clock changes.

-Rating How can I give it anything other than a Golden Apple? For those that didn’t read my intro, that’s essentially 10/10 with an * for it being truly something else. This episode is marvelous from top to bottom and its barely existent weaknesses are naught but nitpicks. Not only that, I feel like it left me with so much. I just wrote two and a half pages about this episode and I still feel like I’ve done a disservice to it. I didn’t talk about how just relatable and charming and magical everyone is. I touched upon performances, but there’s still so much to be said about everyone. How is it that Robert Carlyle wasn’t even on screen for five minutes and still left one of the biggest impacts of anyone, even some of those more featured than he was? I still have loads to say about Henry and Emma’s dynamic (I was tempted to cheat and put them up there too). I could talk into eternity about the parallels and the setups and the goofy moments in the background. I could speak to how even in episode 1, Storybrooke becomes more not of a place, but a character. I want to read all kinds of things into the line “There’s not a lot of things I’m great at in life.” This episode is so great that it makes me feel guilty for not glorifying it enough, and that’s what makes it worthy of a Golden Apple.

-Flip My Ship Shadow Queen - HE HAD HER PILOT NECKLACE!!!! OMG! MY SHADOW QUEEN SHIPPER HEART IS JUMPING FOR JOY! Snowing - Snowing’s connection throughout this episode was just awe inspiring. You feel the connection between them in every word they spoke and every exchange of expressions they held. It’s demonstrated the most clearly when Snow asks Charming to go and see Rumple. Just the way that she says “him,” and with a look, you just see how he gets it. At the same time, they’re not without conflict and distinctions between the two of them. They have disagreements and act on their own, but are still unmistakably meant for each other. There are many relationships on the show that attempt realism, and even Snowing itself in Storybrooke will encounter that, but moments like these paint Snowing as fantastical and paint a picture of romance here that becomes iconic. Swan Queen - I love me some FoeTP’s and their’s was one hell of a start! The ambiguity of Regina’s intentions and motives as well as sprinkles of selfishness and coldness with and on Emma’s part make their chemistry truly delightful! I reflected on what I liked about them above in my “Dynamics” section, but everything there works fully down here too.

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()

And that about covers my thoughts on the premiere! I promise you that future posts won’t be nearly as long (Fingers crossed. This took quite a few hours to put together). Hope you liked them and thanks once more to the fine folks at @watchingfairytales for putting this rewatch together! Season Tally (10/220) Writer Tally for Season 1: A&E (10/70)

#watching fairytales #ouat 1x01 #ouat #ouat rewatch #jenna watches ouat #ships mentioned #snowing #swan queen #shadow queen

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tsundozer · 6 years

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Pride for Auction, Pt. II

You can read Pt. I here!

It had been a bell. Where the fuck were they? Larkson tapped a foot impatiently, as he watched item by item come and go from the center stage. He watched a spindly looking man, with nervous fingers and no business wearing a suit make off with an ancient Khopesh, once used by a Sil’dihn lord to fend off an initial Ul’dahn attack. The story behind it? Magnificent, of a man repelling an entire patrol from not just his home property, but then managed to rally the city against the invaders (this was of course, ultimately in vain when you consider what happened not weeks later).

He doubted the buyer appreciated the significance.

Hells, not even he did. Not really. That was Gray’s role in all this, and he was more than happy to leave him to it. It shoulda been Gray, he found himself noting quietly. All of this shit belongs with someone who appreciates it, it’s not--fucking. Trophies on walls.

He was sure that his companion would have been interested in the relics going up for display, if only he had remained around. As soon as Askoya’s voice crackled over the linkpearl, letting him know that there was a delay--in how long it’d take her to kill the power ( distracted, she explained. Sure.) and when the dagger (a Mhachi scian, Gray was always quick to elaborate) would be put on, to begin with.

That was half a bell ago, and Gray had immediately given him the slip. ‘Gotta check on th’kid’ he had said. Really? The kid? What kind of irresponsible man would bring a child to such a dangerous event as this? Why did he even keep the kid around? The justifications prattled off in his mind, over each and every previous discussion on the matter: She ain’t got nowhere else, Larksy.

She’s just like us at that age, Larksy.

She’s useful. She’s clever, Larksy.

She’s almost an adult now! She can handle this, Larksy.

Just look at that smile! Y’can’t tell her no, Larksy!

Larkson felt hot, uncomfortable coals settle in the pit of his stomach. Something within him had steadily burned over the past several years, and he would later in life realize it as jealousy. For now, all he felt was confusion, as to why Gray saw fit to pick up every person he met and drop them into their little crowd. He had, at least for a time, been the primary object of Gray’s attentions. He was his support, and Gray was his. They made it this far together. They came to Sharlayan together, they graduated together. He didn’t--he didn’t see, why they needed anyone else. Least of all some rebellious, bratty whelp who demanded so much of his focus, or students who he was fairly certain were more interested in drinks and empty laps, than a proper education.

( Why was he like this? He’d never been this way before. Why did Gray cause him to foster such anger, and resentment, towards those who came into his life?)

His thoughts were interrupted, by the chiming of the pearl:

AK: Hey! Look alive, boys~ I’ve got my little problems taken care of, and got your little dagger scheduled to come up in five. I’ll be killing the lights shortly. Careful that you aren’t caught unawares, hrm?

Shit. Larkson muttered into the pearl, ducking his head low and fading off into the schmoozing crowds, “Shit. Gray, y’hear that?”

Nothing. Not a single goddamn w-- PG: Yeah, yeah. Jus’ hold on a minute. Dealin’ with somethin’...

AK: Professor? Not to question your authority, but I’m not so sure you’ve got the time to--

Click.

Thal’s fucking stones. Couldn’t anything ever go--simply? He stormed off, looking for whatever trouble Gray must have gotten himself into.

Gray had been more than happy to take a bit of time to relax. Once he’d heard that plans had changed, he decided he may as well take the opportunity to enjoy himself. Who wouldn’t, right? What’s the point in getting all tense, in waiting with bated breath and winding gears until he was so tightly coiled that he burst? He made some excuse to get over to the liquor--that he had to check on Svana, and make sure she had her part down. A few hors d'oeuvres plucked with a muttered thanks, a wave, a nod, a smile to various people he had never met but gladly pretended he did, and a stop at the cocktail bar later (whiskey, chilled coffee, and a bit of brown sugar), and after a brief discussion with his resident disaster for the sole sake of appearances, left to find himself mulling about a library upstairs from the main ballroom, marveling at his ‘host’s’ collection.

He plucked a familiar book from the shelf. A Treatise on Modern Potentials of Allagan Aetherochemistry: Suggested Benefits to Medicine and Agriculture.

Erik Gray.

“Ha. Whaddya know? Wouldn’t think you’d have been a fan, Gravatte.” He gazed at the product of several years of dedicated research, the culmination of all of his experience--and was interrupted, by an inquisitive hum.

“You didn’t think he’d have been a fan of what?”

Gray snapped his head towards the door, holding the book ( his book) to himself almost protectively. There was a woman, a Keeper, leaning in the frame with wide, expressive eyes flecked with gold and an even wider, welcoming smile--the sort of smile that showed you all you needed to know, even the teeth, while managing to withhold everything you didn’t. It was hard to find words, he found, looking into that smile. He fumbled for the briefest of moments, caught off guard. “I--ah. My book? My book. I didn’t think he’d be a fan of my book.”

“ Your book?” The woman strode confidently, snatching up the book from his hands. “A Treatise on Modern..hmnmhmhm, mhm. Erik Gray.” The eyes narrowed, “You don’t look like an Erik. Or a Gray.”

Her words caused bile to rise up in his throat, and his fists to clench, briefly--he stayed himself. It’s not like she knew better, right? He held up his hands towards the woman, and gave a flippant shrug.

“I wanted to ditch the tribal stigma,” he explained, “I got--tired, of bein’ assumed I was some illiterate mountain man, some stupid forest dweller who ain’t know his way ‘round a book, let alone a mattock. I took th’name when I got my papers here. S’on my degree, too.” The irritated huff belied the presentation of flippancy and carelessness over the matter. Why were the cute ones always so fucking grating? She was cute, he gave her that. The lovely teal to her eyes, with gold flecked throughout, the sandy blonde to her hair. The lithe, athletic look to her--even the scrapes on her right knuckle, and a bruise on her forearm. She’d been in a fight, he noted. The woman laughed, loud and rich, “Oh, so that’s how it is? And what, you leave your culture, your birthright, heritage, behind?”

“My culture is shit. Ain’t never cared for it, much.” It was hard to hold back the irritation in his voice, now. He reached to snatch the book back up, only for her to yank it just out of his reach.

“Hey! Hey. No, I didn’t mean it like that.” Two steps back, and the woman flipped through the pages with a little hum in between each turn. “..I get you. I was never a fan of mine, either. What’s your real name, though?”

Gray was caught off guard by the camaraderie, the empathy. He felt the churning irritation in his chest soothe. Whatever lake of fire that churned at the heart of him, and kept him going all these years, reluctantly grew quiet (it was how he knew, that someone was important to include in his life--as soon as it happened, he picked them up. Larksons, Svana, As’koya--whoever this was). “You first. Precaution.”

The woman flicked her ears forward, and her tail lashed about with a sudden energy. There was a glint of mischief to her eyes, as she picked up on what wasn’t being spoken: “You shouldn’t be here. I get it. Well, don’t worry. I’m no Gravatte.” With a little flourish, she offered the book back to him. “Siri, of the Relanah. I’m a journalist, here for a story. I won’t tell, if you won’t.”

Quite the olive branch, announcing her own name, her own intentions. She was either reckless, or confident--a quick look over near enough confirmed it the latter. “G’rha,” he responded. “Folks back in Eorzea, they call me Rha.”

“A Tia?”

“Nah-- just Rha. A Tia...suggests, by its nature, that I still subscribe to their cultural norms. There’s a lot of meaning, in what title you take, and how, an’ even more meaning in taking a title despite something. A, ah. A good friend taught me that.”

Siri nodded, smiling along to the explanation. It was a good enough one, though she felt, perhaps, she could offer something better: “Well, Just Rha seems pretty good, to me. Better than calling yourself ‘Gray.’ It’s, like--taking back, yeah? It’s poetic. It’d make a good story. I don’t know your reasons, but if it was enough to leave behind the person you were? I think, there must be quite a tale, there.”

Gray averted his gaze, at that. In all of three ticks, this woman had waltzed into his life and cut to the heart of him. That was a first. “A sad story, I s’pose. But--one that has a happy endin’ in the works.”

“Aren’t sad stories the best? It sounds to me, Rha, that you put your pride up to the highest bidder, if it meant getting what you wanted. If that was your name, to fit in with academic life? So be it. Maybe it’s time you reclaim that pride.” Siri pulled herself up onto the central coffee table, swinging her feet casually as she studied the man. “Anyway, happy stories are boring. They’re trite. There’s something beautiful, in tragedy. The way people find meaning in the worst of things. Happiness can’t forge empathy, y’know. Only hurt.”

Gray barked out a dismissive laugh (though, in later years, he would come to appreciate those words and hold to them desperately, a frail reminder that there was something good, at the bottom of it all). “Nah. I prefer stories of adventure, stories of intrigue, mystery, thrill. An’ ultimately? Triumph. I’m lookin’ for Belah’dia!”

“Belah’dia?” “Yeah. Belah’dia. I’m lookin’ for my Belah’dia. Where I can hold the sun itself, in the palm of my fuckin’ hand. Just like their temples.” He cracked a confident grin, though his widest, most fiery smile couldn’t hide the lines that had already crept into his face so young.

“Well, I don’t see why it can’t be both.” Siri gave a little shrug, just as flippant as he had demonstrated before. “Every hero worth his salt has a bit of tragedy. It makes them relatable. Flaws, failures, sadness. -- I wouldn’t write about anything less than imperfect, you know.” She winked, as though she knew him. Saw him.

Gray wasn’t sure how to handle that. So he--ignored it, opting instead to ask about her work. “You wanna write?”

“I do write, Rha. Just not what I want. I write what the crowds wanna hear. What I want? I want a story. I want to tell a tale that moves, inspires.” She looked about the room, then parroted him verbatim: “I want to tell a story of adventure, stories of intrigue, mystery, thrill. And ultimately, triumph!” A delay, “but I think Nym is better.”

“Yeah, well. S’alright in bein’ wrong, I suppose.”

A laugh was shared--then his pearl went off. Showtime. “Yeah, yeah,” he spoke into it before giving Siri an apologetic smile. “Jus’ hold on a minute. Dealin’ with somethin’...” Click. He shut off the pearl, and gave a little shrug. “Sorry ‘bout that! Nice talkin’ to ya, really. I suspect my pal’s gonna be bargin’ in here, and I’d rather him not give you any more a taste of the hells than necessary. I’ve got a lil’ magic trick to put on.” Siri’s eyes glinted, as she realized--she was looking at the story of the night. “A magic trick?” “Yeah!” Gray strode for the door, casting a smirk over his shoulder. “Get downstairs in five. You’re about to see a vanishin’ act.”

#pride for auction #drabble #basically a short story by now???#legacy of allag #ffxiv #ic #g'rha nunh #svana heart #as'koya renha #larkson odh #siri relanah

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