#washington liberation front

[angelkissiies]

CLOSE CALL

pairing : abby anderson x reader x ellie williams

cw : canon violence, angst, hurt/comfort, fluff, use of alcoholic beverages, a little more angst as seasoning.

proof read : yes | no | kinda

a/n : this is taking place in jackson, joel is alive and well. ellie and abby are good friends and the world is still gross and infected but a little more peaceful.

word count : 3.8k

The crisp morning air bit at your fingers as you held your rifle to your chest. It was only 5am and you found yourself walking alone outside of Jackson's walls with nothing but a gun and a place in mind. It sounded like a good idea in your earlier state of delusion, but now as you trekked towards the abandoned ski lodge- the regret crept in. As much as you enjoyed the solitude of the lodge, something kept nagging at you to turn back. A voice in your head was screaming, but the forest remained silent. No infection, no people, no danger. So, despite your self preservation instincts begging you to turn around, you continued to push forward.

“Goddamn I hate this hill.” You huffed, coming to a stop in front of the town's lookout tower. The road to reach the lodge went directly through the heart of the tiny town, taking you along through the ancient routes of people long forgotten. Though, the sentiment wasn’t enough to keep you from hating this place. Through the past few years living in Jackson, you’d had quite a few secret rendezvous outside of the walls, most of which took place here. With it being the most easily accessible, empty, town- teens quite enjoyed the trek. Especially when it led to what was now duped, ‘the love shack.’ A,K.A. The only house on the block that still had a bedroom intact. One that you had fallen victim of more than once with all the wrong people.

Though, you weren’t allowed a moment to dwell on your regrets as your ears tuned into the familiar sound of infected. Their growling sent your body into flight mode, and before you could even figure out where they were, you began to run. “Fuck.” You hissed, hearing the sounds grow nearer, as you ducked into a cluttered alleyway. The nook was nestled between two old apartment buildings, giving the illusion of an escape route. Yet, as you pushed your way through the maze of old, rotting trash from years gone by- the only hope was to crawl on top of the dumpster and into one of the broken windows of the building.

As you pushed yourself up, ignoring the possibility of more infected- or god forbid, worse- being inside this unmarked and unsearched building, you took half a second to recall the patrol schedule for today. A monday, early morning- Abby and Ellie. As always. Whilst that gave some comfort, you had to focus on the situation at hand- not the possible rescue from the girls you’d been actively avoiding. Now, It was not knowing or death and for once you chose the former. From the eyeline on top of the dumpster, you caught a small glimpse of a pack of at least six infected running directly past the alleyway in search of a meal. For now, they seemed to be off of your trail but surely, your luck would run out eventually. So gingerly, you swept the glass shards from the window seal, avoiding giving away your position, before stepping into the wrecked studio apartment.

From a glance, you could tell that someone had really loved this place. There were remnants of posters and artwork that hung on rusted nails, torn into pieces from the years as they wore the paper thin. The walls had taken on a dusty green color from the pursuit of moss but before, it patched together in a shade of blush unbeknownst to most people who had passed through this place before you. It was enough to let your guard down, to slow your reactions as the world felt a little gentler in that moment.

What a mistake.

Before you could even take a breath, the hands of something unknown to you had wound its hands in your hair, violently jerking your head back to access your arteries. It had been completely silent, giving you no time to reach for your gun that you had let rest against the wall.

“Fuck! Get the fuck off!” You screamed, attempting to grip the mutated stump that posed as a head. It growled, something deep and raspy near the lobe of your ear, sending a jolt of undeniable panic into your bones as you struggled to get the upper hand. You couldn't die like this, no, you wouldn't die like this. So with a harsh kick, you threw your leg back against the stalker's kneecaps, sending the being onto the floor and promptly allowing the smallest of windows to unravel yourself from its grip.

It was going to work, you were almost free, when a gut wrenching noise echoed out through the building. Clicking. From this distance, you couldn’t tell how many there were, but from the sounds of it there was more than one. Anything could’ve happened on this short trip, but somehow it just happened to be the absolute worst thing that could've happened on any trip. Survivors' luck, right?

You couldn't open your mouth, the idea of alerting the clickers too much for you to handle. So you had to maneuver silently, using what strength you had left to keep your grip on the stalker's throat- which in turn kept its mouth arms length away. You didn’t have much on you, as you thought this was just going to be a short day trip to the lodge, so you made due with the things you had. Things being a ballpoint pen that was nestled into your front jacket pocket, just within reach.

Suddenly, gunshots rang out. Startling yourself and the creature vying for your flesh. Giving you just enough time to grab the pen and jam it into the eye socket of the stalker, shoving it as deep as you could with the palm of your hand before it finally slumped over- its weight collapsing completely on top of you. With a shove, you rolled the thing onto the floor and found your footing, smoothing your hair down as you grabbed your gun and catapulted yourself out of the clicker infested apartment building, throwing no hesitation to your fall onto the iced over ground.

“Abby, behind you!”

Oh fuck.

You dodged through the mounds of trash, throwing yourself back out onto the street. The scene was quite what you expected, seeing the two girls dismounted from the horses slaughtering the infected that you had just been running from.

Abby noticed you first, her eyes widening before moving back to look at Ellie. “Uh, Els. Don’t look now but we have company.” She grunted, throwing the infected off of her and crushing its skull with her boot. It was one of the last ones, the other being nestled in Ellie’s arms- head disconnecting from its spine.

She didn't hesitate to spin around with her gun aimed directly at you, arm slacking gently once she realized it was you. “(Y/n), what the fuck are you doing out here?” She chided, tucking her gun back into her waistband, moving her hand to wipe the sweat from her brow. Her brown jacket was now splattered in blood, adding an intimidating aura to the woman as she zeroed in on you.

You didn’t dare look over to Abby, the idea of the both of them staring you down with such vexation making your knees weak. “Nothing, I'm doing nothing. No need to worry.” You assured, keeping your destination a secret as you shifted your weight from foot to foot. You had made a show out of avoiding the two women within the walls of Jackson that now you had no escape from the uncomfortable tension that saturated the air as you spoke.

Abby approached slowly, eyes skimming over your body before they landed on the semi-hidden splatter of blood by your neck. Not even to mention the bruising that had begun to develop in place of the stalkers ravaging fingers. “Is that blood?” She asked, raising a hand to brush your hair back, away from the harsh contrasting blood against your skin.

“What happened, are you bit?” Ellie voiced her worry, moving to your opposite side, eyeing Abby’s hands as they moved to scour the area for any signs of infection. She was one to worry, after all, her immunity protected no one but herself- which made it hard to stay grounded when the possibility arose.

“No, no bites. I'm fine.” You responded, attempting to wriggle out of Abby’s soft yet firm grip. “Seriously, I handled it. No need to worry.”

The women exchanged a look before Abby turned her attention back to you, “That aside, you are not supposed to be out here. We have to take you back.” She stated matter-of-factly, her arms winding back to cross over her chest. The tan jumper she wore pulled at the seams, stretching to account for the tensing of her muscles as she moved.

An exasperated sigh left your mouth before you could control it, earning a sharp look from the girl to your right. “No, I'm sorry guys but I'm not going back right now. I’ll head back in when I'm done.” You stated firmly, moving to turn away from the women, only halting when a hand clasped around your wrist.

Ellie’s grip was tight, not tight enough to hurt you though.“Done with what exactly?” She questioned, her green eyes piercing into your soul as you spun around to face her. You were now stuck between the two of them, avoidance paying into the situation you found yourself in now. “Where were you going?”

You internally kicked yourself for saying anything at all, shaking your head as you jerked your wrist back. Taking a fleeting step backwards to gain some distance, despite the situation at hand- the glow in her eyes took you back to that night.

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ begin flashback ˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆

The haze in the bar hung low as people chatted back and forth about town and social matters alike, the sheer volume deafening as you took another sip from the glass of whiskey before you. It wasn’t your drink of choice but between that and Seth’s homemade hootch- you’d make due with it.

Ellie and Abby sat at a booth on the other side of the room, chatting about god knows what, as they sucked down shot after shot of something you didn’t quite recognize. You tried not to stare, as everyone knows it's not polite, but there was something so captivating about seeing the two of them so happy. So much so that you took to stealing glimpses of the pair, not letting yourself linger too long incase they began to notice. Ellie was wearing a long sleeved green top, the sleeves shoved up to rest around her forearm exposing her tattoo. The sight made your stomach twist, watching in awe as she challenged her companion to an arm wrestle.

Abby happily obliged, knowing she would win. She always won, with her arms three times the size of Ellie’s even whilst relaxed. So she braced herself on the tabletop, stretching her fingers out before locking hands with Ellie. Her soft dirty blonde hair framed her face, leaving you unable to makeout what she was thinking or even feeling in the moment, so you tore your eyes from the sight.

“Hey, (Y/n).” Joel settled beside you at the bar, motioning towards Seth for a drink. He was still chilly, his jacket shedding snow as he shrugged it off and laid it on the seat beside him.

You jumped slightly at the greeting, not expecting someone to actually acknowledge you in your preoccupied haze. “Hey,” You began, your brain moving faster than your mouth. “Joel, hi. What’s up?”

The man chuckled lightly, accepting a glass filled with a dark liquor from Seth’s hands. He took a sip, grimacing, before turning his attention back to you. “Hey yourself, how long have you been here?” He questioned, noting the way you’d been nursing the glass before you. Not many would’ve noticed the way the glass's condensation had created a puddle on the bar, nor how your fingers had pruned slightly from the way you’d been gripping the wet glass. But Joel did, he always did.

“Too long, I think.” You admitted with a shaky laugh, moving to wipe your hands on your pants. It was true, you’d been sitting in your own delusion fueled haze for what felt like nothing. “What time is it now?”

Joel flipped his wrist, checking his watch before turning back to you. “Just about eleven. What’s keeping you, honey?” He asked, finishing off his drink in another fast sip. He coughed lightly, shaking his head as he pushed the glass away. Not even he could stomach more than a little of the homemade bunch. “Why aren’t you with your friends? I saw Ellie when I came in, she’s with that girl- Abby. They seem to be having a lot of fun.”

The mere mention of the duo in the corner made your stomach flip, in a good or bad way- you hadn’t yet decided. The truth was, you’d come to realize you’d harbored feelings for the women, and you didn’t know how to handle it. Their presence made you nervous and the idea of being alone with them felt like you might actually stroke out (lucky eugene, you found yourself thinking). “I-i couldn’t.” You managed, taking a harsh gulp of air before letting your head fall down to rest on the wooden bar top.

“What’s going on with you? You used to hang out with them all the time, right?” He halted, mind running with ideas to figure out what could possibly be keeping you from the company of the women you called friends. “Did they do something to hurt you? Is that it?” He knew it was unlikely, the two being pretty tame in nature, but he wasn’t willing to knock anything out- seeing as your usually bubbly personality had been replaced with a dreary, anxiety ridden one.

“No, no. Never.” The words left your mouth before you could stop them, needing to make sure that he knew that it was you. They’d done no wrong, you just couldn’t get past your stupid crush on the duo. “They would never hurt me, They’re too nice. Even Abby, though she seems really mean.” You paused, hesitating as you glanced over at the man.

“Joel, can I ask you a question?”

The man nodded, turning his body to look at your barely noticeable eyes peeking up at him from the bar. “Anything, shoot.”

“Do you think someone is capable of loving two people at once?”

The question had been weighing on your mind, the possibility of you being able to encapsulate that much love in your one body was unlikely. So did it exist? The ability to have fallen head over heels for two people instead of one? You found yourself daydreaming about a life you could share with them, a long life bursting at the seams with love. How could you ever expect to recover from the longing that had engrained itself inside of you, fusing with that makes you who you are.

Better yet, how could you ever not love them?

Joel hesitated, his eyes momentarily darting from you to the girls who sat unknowingly at the center of attention across the room, and for once- things finally started adding up. “Well, sure.” He began, nodding along as he spoke. “I mean at one point it wasn’t believed our bodies could hold so much water. People used to say that, that was too much- but it was true. So, how can we deny the ability for our bodies to hold that much love?”

His words weighed on your heart, the familiar anxious thumping picking up as you found yourself looking to him for help. “I don’t know what to do, Joel. I’ve never felt this way and everytime i look at them- it starts all over again.” You gushed, quieting for a moment before finding the words you had wanted to say the entire time. “I’m not sure what falling in love feels like, but from what I can tell, I feel something like it when I see Abby.. and Ellie.”

A cough drives you from your reticent confession, ripping your eyes from Joel to figure out who might've had the balls to interrupt at such a time. That was, until your eyes landed on two people instead of one. Two women, THE two women you had just confided in your close friend about.

You saw stars with how fast you jumped to your feet, moving to dodge the extended hands that attempted to deter your departure. “Fuck me.” You groaned, throwing open the door to the bar before sprinting out into the snow.

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ end flashback ˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆

“The Lodge.” You gave in, pointing up to the ski lodge that sat snug at the top of the hill. Doing this, then gave away your personal haven- but for the chance to escape this situation, you’d do just about anything. “I was going there to clear my head.”

Abby hummed in acknowledgement, following your eyes up to the massive ski lodge, it was easily a full day's walk with the way the snow had piled onto the roads. Though, she didn’t quite expect you to know that, considering you usually kept inside the safety of Jackson's walls- tending to the farm animals and harvesting crops in the fall. She liked that about you, you didn’t go putting yourself in danger if you didn’t have to. “You wouldn’t have made it there before dark, you know that right?”

With a sigh you shrugged, avoiding being too close to either party as you shifted your weight from leg to leg, distracting yourself by any means necessary.

Ellie groaned, crossing her arms tightly across her chest as she looked at you. “Okay, out with it. I'm sick of this.” She began, giving Abby a glance as she began to step forward towards you. “We heard everything, yes, but that is no reason to avoid us. I mean-,”

“No, Ellie, you can’t just tell me how I can feel about this.” You laughed breathlessly, shaking your head as you took another step back. “I wasn’t ready for you guys to know, I mean fuck! I was barely ready to know myself.”

The rush of emotion led you to back up directly into Abby’s solid chest, successfully trapping yourself between the two women. If the unexpected intervention wasn’t overwhelming enough, now you had every reason to allow your eyes to well into tears. Their usually bright demeanor being hazed over with a lul of sadness. The two people you valued most in your life witnessed a moment of vulnerability and now you felt they hated you for it, or worse, they were disgusted with you by it.

“Hey, hey.” Abby cooed, hands landing on your shoulders to swing you around- facing her now as the tears began to race down your cheeks. There was nothing holding you back now, the wall was broken- truth splayed out for everyone to see. “Look at me.” She spoke, her left hand sliding under your chin, tilting your head up to look her in the eyes.

The sight was almost enough for her to lose her composure, instinctively wanting to pull you close and wipe away the tears that now streaked down your blushed cheeks. She restrained herself though, using the pads of her thumbs to gently swipe the cascade of tears from your jaw. Abby wasn’t the softest person, in fact- most people in Jackson referred to her as emotionless, but as she stood before you something inside of her felt the need to deaden around you- to create a barrier between the world and you. Something inside of her yearned to protect you, even if it was from herself.

“We wanted to talk to you, that night. After you left, Joel told us everything.” The woman explained, nodding over to Ellie.

Ellie nodded as well, moving to rest her hand on your waist. The contrast of touch was making your head spin, firm and soft. Loving and protecting. “It’s true, I tried to follow you outside but it was snowing too hard. I lost you.”

The tears had slowed, your glossy eyes moving from one girl to the other- searching for the unsaid words they had been dancing around. “I don’t understand, why?” You asked, eyebrows furrowed as your eyes searched Ellie’s for an answer.

Say it.

Please, god, say it.

“We want you.”

“We want to be with you too.”

Your head spun, the words falling from your lips in the form of an inaudible gasp. This wasn’t real life, there was no way that this was real life. Things never work out so well, the girl never gets exactly what she wants- so what was the catch? What was about to be thrown at you in exchange for the love of two women who meant more than the world to you.

“What?” Was the only thing that left your mouth, making Ellie release a small laugh in turn.

Abby chuckled, rolling her eyes playfully before dipping down to your height and pressing the lightest kiss to your lips. It was a mere brush, but the sensation sent a chill down your spine. Her mouth lingering before yours for a couple more seconds, allowing her breath to fan across your face- giving birth to the bursts of color in your cheeks. “I’m with you.” She whispered, taking a step back.

The empty space was quickly filled with Ellie, her smile sending a pang of nerves into your stomach. Her touch was gentle, but beneath the facade, you could see the restraint she was showing. Ellie’s nimble hand slithered around to the back of your neck, the other placed firmly on your collar bone before she pulled you into her. Her kiss was rougher than Abby’s, the surprise falling from your mouth in the form of a small whimper- in which Ellie devoured gratefully- But just as it began, it ended. She pulled away from you, letting her forehead rest against your own. “I'm with you.”

“We’re together. What the fuck.” You laughed, partly in disbelief and partly in delight. The anxiety you’d been harboring dissipated, being replaced with waves of adoration for the women before you. How was this real life? It didn’t even matter anymore, real or not. Staying or fleeting. You’d take what you could get.

Ellie chuckled lightly, glancing back at Abby before checking her watch. “C’mon. You’re on patrol with us today. If we have time at turnover, we’ll head up to your lodge.” She stated matter-of-factly, motioning towards the horses that shuffled back and forth in anticipation. The feeling of momentary bliss refused to fade, engulfing those around you in a haze of new love.

Today was day one of many more to come, and whether it was for the better or for the worst, they were with you.

a/n : part two following the events of the lodge? smut would take place then, let me know your thoughts on a continuation !

#tlou #the last of us #tlou2 #the last of us 2 #abby anderson x female reader #abby anderson x you x ellie williams #abby anderson #abby anderson ff #ellie williams x you #ellie williams x reader #abby anderson x reader #hbo the last of us #abby x ellie x reader #pedro pascal #bella ramsey #wlf #Washington liberation front #the fireflies #tlou abby #ellie tlou #joel miller #tlou ff #tlou x reader #part one #plotless smut #smut coming #abby the last of us #ellie the last of us #joel the last of us #Jesse the last of us

[abbysthighs]

Butch women are so much better than men.

#tlou2 #tlou2 photomode #abby anderson #the last of us part 2 #abby tlou #virtual photography #the last of us #abby's arms #abby's thighs #washington liberation front #wlf fob

[arelyhb]

You know who you killed and then you blow up my horse? You brought this upon yourselves, motherfuckers. Start praying.

#Be scared. Be very scared. NarcoEllie is on her way #Ellie Williams #Ellie #TLOU2 #The Last of Us Part II #My gameplay #WLF #Washington Liberation Front

[coochiequeens]

Women held a permits to demonstrate for their rights. Police don’t respond when they were attacked and trans activists are trying to pull a DARVO when recounting the events.

Women peacefully demonstrating against gender ideology were physically attacked by trans activists on Wednesday in Tacoma, Washington, during a planned counter-protest that has resulted in one woman sustaining a severely injured hand.

A group of women assembled on Wednesday at Tacoma’s Tollefson Plaza to publicly express their concerns about gender ideology and its impact on women and children. The demonstration was one of several that had been organized as part of a tour featuring UK-based women’s rights campaigner, Kellie-Jay Keen. Keen is known for having founded Standing for Women to raise awareness of issues surrounding sex self-identification policies.

Organizers of the protest included Lierre Keith, founder of US non-profit Women’s Liberation Front, April Morrow of Washington-based organization Sovereign Women Speak, and Amy Sousa, a women’s rights activist who has been involved in setting up public speech events across the United States modeled after London’s Speaker’s Corner tradition.

Demonstrators held signs which read, “Woman: Adult Human Female,” and “Girls’ Privacy is Not Yours to Give Away.”

Counter protesters arrived prepared with signs reading “No TERFs in T Town” and “Trans Women are Women.” Many were students from the local high school, Tacoma School of the Arts, located nearby. Their group quickly outnumbered and surrounded the women in the plaza, removing signs that had been posted by the women’s rights collective in the vicinity.

Serve the People Tacoma (STP), which describes itself as a “socialist mutual aid program,” called for followers to stage a counter demonstration in order to “show them they aren’t welcome.” 

STP’s co-chair, a trans-identified male named Zev Cook, was present at the event and was holding a sign which read “stop harassing me in the bathroom you weird perverts.” 

In one of the recordings available of the demonstration, an anonymous trans activist wearing a skirt was seen aggressively lunging towards Lierre Keith while she was speaking. Amy Sousa quickly intervenes, holding the man back as he screams, “get the f*ck out of here.” The anti-feminist protesters can also be heard in the background chanting, “Go home, TERFs!”

In another clip, the same skirt-wearing man can again be seen charging at the group of women.

At one point, Tacoma School of the Arts principal Jon Ketler was also spotted near the protest, claiming he had no power over the students and could not force them to stop participating in the harassment and abuse of the women.

During the event, one women’s rights demonstrator was forced to use self-defense spray against a trans activist after he tried to spit directly into her face.

Jeanna Hoch had been one of multiple demonstrators attempting to hold the line around where the women had been speaking, using a sign to create a physical barrier between herself and multiple males who had closed in on the space.

At one point, one of the young trans activists appears to try and spit directly in Hoch’s face, something she responds to by holding up her sign to protect herself, and then issuing a blast of self-defense spray. The two men who had been flanking her tried to then physically intervene on behalf of the trans activist, and Hoch defends herself against them as well. 

One of the other men flanking Hoch, seen wearing black sunglasses, is a local women’s studies graduate named Sweet Pea Flaherty. Flaherty owns King’s Books, a specialty bookseller on St. Helen’s Avenue. On the store’s site, Flaherty boasts that he mainly reads “young adult books with strong female protagonists.”

On social media, trans activists quickly spun the news into a claim that Hoch had “pepper sprayed high school students,” with no apparent cause. But the trans activist who had attempted to spit on Hoch, and was subsequently pepper sprayed, was over the age of 18 by his own admission. 

Trans activists on social media also claimed there was another incident of Hoch apparently mass-spraying a group of minors, but have not substantiated the claims in any way.

Hoch, along with other women, had previously been assaulted in Portland, Oregon, on October 25.

In addition to Hoch, another woman was physically assaulted and sustained a severely injured hand as a result. April Morrow’s hand was “crushed” by an adult male trans activist attempting to wrangle her phone out of her hand. Morrow provided an update to Reduxxthrough Amy Sousa on her condition, noting that her fingers were still “swollen and stiff” and that she had an appointment for an x-ray to determine the extent of the damage for Monday.

During the live-streamed broadcast of the demonstration, viewers were urged to call the Tacoma Police Department and request that they provide protection for the women’s rights protestors, who had obtained a lawful permit to hold their event. 

But, according to Kellie-Jay Keen and other pro-woman demonstrators, Tacoma police had been unresponsive to their requests for help. The event was forced to conclude early as a result of increasing safety concerns.

Originally, the Standing for Women event had been scheduled to take place in Portland, Oregon. However, after receiving threats from Antifa and a statement from police insinuating that the demonstration would not receive the protection of authorities, the location was changed to Tacoma.

The following day, October 27, several of the women at the Tacoma event spoke at a school board meeting, articulating frustration at the violence and threats they endured and at the lack of police intervention. 

In one largely inaccurate local news report of the demonstration, the women involved were smeared as “virulently anti-transgender,” and the violence against them was massively downplayed.

Speaking to Reduxx, women’s rights advocate Amy Sousa said she was still “flushed with outrage” over what had happened on Wednesday.

“We are living in a time when women are being attacked in broad daylight for simply standing up for sex-based safeguarding for women and girls,” Sousa says.

Sousa, one of the event’s organizers, physically intervened in an attempted assault on Lierre Keith mid-speech, sustaining a bruised chest as a result. But Sousa says that, despite the risks, she felt compelled to defend Keith.

“When I saw that man running to tackle a woman from behind, my instincts took over and I responded by rushing in to defend her.” 

Sousa says that the male who attempted to assault Keith was not a student, but had been one of the Antifa proponents who had come to intimidate the women. She points out that the activist had been wearing reinforced gloves with hard-knuckles.

She goes on to explain that the attack on the pro-woman demonstrators appears to have been well-organized between multiple Antifa-style groups in the area, noting that many of the trans activists even had “ear pieces” in for coordination. 

“Male violence against women is being publicly condoned. As I also said in my speech, women do not consent,” Sousa says. “I’m proud to stand up at events like these knowing that more and more women are standing up to affirm our boundaries, instincts, and bodily integrity as women.”

Sousa has been regularly involved in setting-up pro-woman demonstrations in the west-coast this year, most notably in support of Julie Jaman — an senior woman who was banned from her local swimming pool after objecting to the presence of a male in the women’s shower room.

Jaman, 80, had spoken at an August event in Port Townsend, Washington, which was organized by Sousa and RevFoxxUSA in response to Jaman’s ban from the local YMCA. During the event, Jaman and the other pro-woman demonstrators were hackled and shouted down by trans activists, one of whom even ripped down a suffragette flag. 

Reports of violence against women organizing for their sex-based rights has seen a definite uptick over the past year.

In both July and August, lesbian activists in Germany were physically assaulted by trans activists for holding signs displaying the definition of lesbian as “female homosexual.”

During the July incident, trans activists heckled and harassed the women, and at one point a masked man rushed a young woman who had been holding a lesbian pride flag and put her in a headlock, wrapping his arms tightly around her neck and strangling her. 

During a protest against sex trafficking held in Paris on International Women’s Day, members of L’Amazone, as well as Osez le Féminisme and Résistance Lesbienne, all groups who are known for their strong stances in favor of women’s sex-based rights, were assaulted seven times in the span of just 20 minutes by trans and “queer” activists.

#Tacoma #washington #kellie-jay Keen #standing for Women #Liters Keith #Women’s Liberation Front #April Morrow #Sovereign Women Speak #Amy Sousa #Women: Adult Human Female #Girls Privacy is Not Yours to Give Away #Zec Cook and male projection #Jon Ketler is a weak man with no control over his students #Boycott King’s Books #Violence from Antifa members #Tacoma police didn’t protect women

[starblaster]

October 9th is Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day

“The problems of the ex-patient are more subtle but no less pressing. Many ex-patients try to cope with what has happened to them by pretending that the experience never occurred. However, because the experience of having once been a mental patient teaches you to think of yourself as less than human, this is not a satisfactory solution. People feel emotions. They are justifiably happy or sad, angry, calm, elated, and so forth. As patients, however, we were taught to think of ourselves as permanently crippled, and we tend to react to the normal ups and downs of life as affirmations of our secret deformity. In addition, society imposes penalties upon ex-patients which affect you whether or not you acknowledge your identity. For the rest of your life, you will lie on applications for jobs, schools, and driver's licenses, and worry about being found out. Your friends and acquaintances will be divided into two groups, those who know and those who don't, and it will always be necessary to watch what you say to the latter. Ex-patients are full of anger at what has been done to them, but alone and unorganized this anger is not expressed and is often turned inward against oneself. Our anger is the fuel of our movement, and when we come together, acknowledging our identity to ourselves and to each other, we will have made the first and largest step in striking back at our oppressors.”

— "Mental Patients' Liberation: Why?  How?", originally distributed in the early 1970s by Mental Patients'  Resistance of Brooklyn, New York

[image ID] Seven photographs from antipsychiatry demonstrations. They are described below, in order of appearance: 1. a picture taken at the National Association for Rights Protection & Advocacy (NARPA) Conference on November 10, 2000 in Sacramento, California. Fifty to sixty people stand around a red sign with white text that reads: NO FORCED TREATMENT EVER. 2. a picture taken on October 9th, 1999 in Toronto, Ontario during a march for Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day. Several people march in a line, including one man at the start of the march playing bagpipes. Behind him is a hand-painted sign being held up that reads: Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day. 3. pictures taken at a demonstration outside the California State Capitol building in Sacramento on February 28th, 2000. The signs in each of these pictures say: Psychiatric drugs can kill! 4. a picture taken at a demonstration outside the American Psychiatric Association's 156th annual meeting in San Fransisco, California. The activist's sign says: PSYCHIATRY IS NOT A MEDICAL PROFESSION: IT IS A TOOL OF OPPRESSION. 5. a picture taken at a demonstration outside the Jacob Javits Center, hosting the American Psychiatric Association's 167th annual meeting in New York City on May 4th, 2014. The picture features an activist wearing a printed t-shirt and is cropped so as not to feature the face of the wearer. The t-shirt says: TO HELL WITH THEIR PROFITS, STOP FORCED DRUGGING OF PSYCHIATRIC INMATES! 6 and 7. pictures taken at a demonstration outside the California State Capitol building in Sacramento on February 28th, 2000. The signs in each of these pictures say: Psychiatric drugs can kill!, STOP expansion of forced treatment, Mental illness is NOT a CRIME, and FORCED MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT IS INHUMANE. 8. a picture taken at an antipsychiatry demonstration on May 2nd, 1998 in Freedom Plaza, Washington D.C. Two people hold a hand-painted banner-sign that says: BET YOUR ASS WE'RE PARANOID. 9. taken at an antipsychiatry demonstration hosted by the Mental Patients Liberation Alliance during Mad Pride Week in 2000, between July 13th and 16th on the lawn in front of the New York State Capitol Building in Albany. [end of ID]

#antipsychiatry #psychiatric abuse #psychiatric survival #psychiatric survivor pride day #psych abolition

[deepouterspacecandy]

Ink and Paper Hearts

I wanted to write something for Valentine's Day, and wound up with over 8k words. Sheesh! Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks for being here! Be kind to yourself and others. 18+ only. Violence and sexual themes. Angst, fluff, etc.

Raised on a cattle ranch, you spent your early days on horseback tending to the farm and living off the land. When disaster left you orphaned, a ragtag group of survivors embraced you as one of their own. Over time, they had become your family, and together, you’d endure natural disasters, famine, and hordes of infected.

It only took one sweep of malevolent raiders to destroy your home and turn everything you’d ever known to dust. You escaped the attack within an inch of your life.

Isaac was the one who discovered you withering away in an old diner off the freeway, fending off the infected with nothing but your integrity and a baseball bat. His medical team, which accompanied him as they moved between compounds, took care of your recovery, and nursed you back to health.

The leader of the Washington Liberation Front admired any person who possessed the strength to fight and the compassion to care for animals simultaneously, and in exchange for a safe place to lay your head, you promised to do just that.

It was a relinquishment of power; you learned early on. Anything involving Isaac came at a cost. Your bond with him was duty-bound, but he offered you another chance at having a family and a purpose. After being all alone in that desolate place, you’d been more than willing to fall in line.

Still, you were a different person when you first arrived in Seattle.

Some would say naïve. You saw yourself as a practical optimist. Now, you’re not so sure.

It’s truly astonishing how a year of unrelenting conflicts with the Scars can diminish the brightness of your silver lining.

The ability to find distraction in your work is a double-edged sword.

A jack of all trades, you spend most of your time working with the four-legged soldiers of the WLF. You have extremely limited patience for the human variety, on both sides of the fence. You tolerate a handful of your comrades, but between assignments, you’re happiest with your nose in a book, savouring the quiet and escaping into distant realms.

The drive for escapism hasn’t been a difficult undertaking lately.

A group of thirty soldiers left the grounds on assignment last month, and only two returned.

It left the stadium halls quieter, heads hanging lower than what you’d ever witnessed. Interactions that would otherwise leave you with a sunny lilt, instead left you carrying a heaviness that you couldn’t quite shake.

Few civilians choose to dive into surface level banter like they used to and the collective fear and sadness shrouding the compound has kept it that way for some time.

It serves as a reminder that even with extensive training and the most advanced military equipment, tragedy can strike without discrimination.

Unchecked and alone, the infected will forever wander through the shadows, driven by an unending quest to find their next victim. Maybe the same idea is true for all adversaries.

Your primary objective is to ensure the community remains united and intact. If you manage to stay sane, that’s a plus.  

“How are you today, my little sunflower?” Manny asks, mischievously tugging your jacket.

“You better be talking to the dogs.”

“And if I’m not?” he asks, kneeling to offer unlimited ear scratches to the newest litter.

“Well, then I guess I’ll have to refer you to every other time you’ve ever asked,” you say, giving the bottom of his boot a kick. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

“Yes, he does!”

A woman’s voice booms from the other side of the unit, and Manny forces a smile.

“The bane of my existence.”

You chuckle at his misery, knowing little about his relationship with Abby outside of the kinship they portray in combat and their supposed insufferable roommate arrangement. Something you’re only privy to after running into her after hours at the library as she was trying to catch some shuteye on the couch there.

“Will you quit harassing pretty girls and grab a damn dog already?”

As she approaches, tails of all shapes and sizes wag with incredible speed, exuding pure happiness. You wonder how much time she has spent in the kennels when you’re not around. Isaac has her spearheading every mission from here to Chicago, so you rarely see her. But the dogs never forget a kind face.

You exchange a few pleasantries with Abby before she drags her unenthusiastic partner to work. Manny’s womanizing ways at the stadium serve as a constant reminder of your boundaries in relationships.

You’re safer by yourself.

Abby does seem like a sweetheart, though.

----------------------------------------

“We ship out tomorrow morning,” Abby says, handing you an empty canteen and a backpack, a clipboard braced to her side by her white knuckled grasp.

Her abrupt tone makes you jump when it normally wouldn’t. She’s struggling to keep her voice steady, but you suspect she has more important things to worry her mind about. 

“Right,” you nod. “Any idea how long?”

As she’s rushing to complete the next task, your query hits her at the worst possible second, adding to her already teetering stress load. You recognize it a moment too late and your teeth ache at the back of your jaw when she spins on her heel, pinning you with a glare.

“Do you expect a serious answer, or are you just trying to piss me off?”

“No, I—”

“Promises around here are as worthless as the ETA themselves, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Promises? What did that have to do with anything?

“I’m sorry, I swear I wasn’t trying to—”

“Anything else I can assist you with, soldier? Or can we finish wasting my time?” Abby bellows.

You knew it would be a mistake to leave the K9 unit, but circumstances with the Seraphites have forced your hand. They not only invaded WLF territory, causing destruction and casualties among your people, but they’ve also been blocking your teams from conducting supply runs, leading to a rather grim situation in the reserves.

“You don’t have to bite my head off,” you say, feeling the tension rise as you widen your stance against her more imposing one. “We’re all stuck in this mess.”

“Oh, really?” she seethes. “Good to know. I’ll be sure to hand you a shovel next time our people turn up in body bags. Give you a break from scooping dog crap to help us grownups with the actual shit.”

Abby is your superior and you know better than to test the hierarchy. The moment you denied Isaac’s advances, you tumbled from the top spot. But you’re no chump.

“What’s your problem?”

In a split second, Abby’s body looms over you as she detonates, “You’re my problem,” her breath hot against your face.

She flinches when you lose your balance and stumble backward, narrowly catching yourself. If her instinct was to rescue you, she restrained herself just in time, her hand frozen in mid-air. A twitch nags at the corners of her tired eyes.

“You’re no different from the rest,” you say, walking backward, chest heaving. “It’s all the fucking same.”

You’re down the hall and veiled by the four walls of your room before the opportunity to fumble your conversation further buries you in shame.

It’s going to be a long night.

----------------------------------------

Manny runs through his roll call sheet twice, inspecting each soldier with every measure but a squat and cough. If he thought he’d catch you on a minor clothing infraction, hell, a mismatched pair of socks, he’s sadly mistaken. You wouldn’t give Abby the satisfaction and besides, you hadn’t slept a wink preparing for this assignment.

“Where’s Anderson?” Manny asks under his breath. The team surrounding him dip their heads and you try to avert your attention. Brush it off like you had been too busy inspecting your gear to overhear him.

“We’re not going blind, are we, Alvarez?” Abby says, shouldering through the group to drop her bag on the tailgate of the Humvee.

When her arm brushes yours, you recoil, your fist hitting your stomach with a muffled thud. Her head snaps in your direction, but her gaze is less volatile than before. You make a point not to place too much trust in that emotional assessment, finding solace in the familiar sensation of your twisting hands.

“Alright,” she shouts above the murmurs of your unit, the quiet chatter falling into silence. “You will work in pairs, at all times, even when we are in proximity to each other. This is unnegotiable, so don’t ask me if you have to bring a friend to the pisser. The answer is yes.”

The group’s attention is undeterred, even as a faint chuckle escapes them, their eroded black boots facing her commanding presence.

“If you hear something, say something,” she continues, her chin bowing slightly. “It may save a life.”

You swallow thickly and lean against the armed vehicle, its cold steel biting into your back. It’s possible that your sleepless night will affect your performance, but you decide not to emphasize it and hoist yourself upright before anyone notices.

“Our destination is approximately sixty miles from here, and we will cross into Scar territory temporarily, so we’ll need to be cautious. Eyes on rooftops, balconies, you know the drill.”

The group divides between the Humvee and a military truck, and it’s only after twenty minutes of driving that you realize Abby has chosen you as her combat partner for the time being. You feel the weight of her thigh against yours, as she adjusts her legs to accommodate her backpack, and you’re left pondering her decision.

There is a clear sense of trust between her and Manny, making him not only her closest friend, but a lifeline in warfare. Does she think you’re weak and in need of a stronger match? You gnaw on your bottom lip at the notion, focusing on the greenery flitting past your window.

“Come on, Anderson, your balls aren’t that big,” Manny teases, gesturing to her outstretched posture, particularly the way her legs take up enough room for two. You shift toward the door to free up some real estate between you and concentrate back on the road.

As their banter fades into background noise, your attention shifts to observing the deserted surroundings, vigilant for any indication of danger. Apart from a pair of rabbits hopping around, the streets are completely motionless.

--------------------------------------------

The cavalry parks outside a derelict warehouse, its craggy roof adorned by a lush carpet of moss. Rust-bitten chain link fencing surrounds an expansive lot at the rear, cube vans with faded labels scattered throughout. It’s a tempting location to scavenge, but the prospect makes your stomach lurch.

The presence of tall grass and the lack of windows on each vehicle creates ample opportunity for trouble. A lurking enemy, dead or alive, is something you’d like to avoid. It’s possible that someone has already searched the vans, despite their undisturbed appearance.

“Let’s break this down into teams and tackle it all at once,” Abby announces, nodding at the parking lot and the adjoining building. “Six outside, inspecting the trucks, and six inside. We’ll scour the property first, and then we can set up for the night.”

“Wait,” you say.

She blows out a frustrated breath.

“This better be good.”

The temptation to tell her to fuck all the way off is intense.

“Maybe we should put a couple scouts up high, search the grounds together,” you say, pointing to the safest vantage points. “Eyes in the sky.”

“Any other suggestions?” she asks.

“I mean, no—but,” you begin.

Abby interrupts, holding her hand up. “Like I said. Six and six. We don’t need to be out here longer than necessary.”

“Fine.”

She guides you toward the building, her palm on your lower back, and you jerk away from her grasp. She may have the authority to call the shots, but you decide where you place your neck on the chopping block.

“I’m with them,” you say, trudging toward the trucks.

“Hey!” Abby says.

“Oh, Jesus Christ. What?”

She gives you a once over, gritting her teeth.

You throw your hands up and let them slap against your sides, waiting for her to hurl her discontent at your head, clearly eager to tear a strip off you in front of your squad. With a distant gaze, she fixates on the hollow space behind you before heading towards the warehouse.

----------------------------------------

It took several hours to secure the perimeter and set up camp inside.

Your heavy eyelids rejoice at the promise of rest. The team in charge of the mail trucks uncovered a mother lode of undelivered packages, chock full of useful supplies. It was almost as impressive as the haul the WLF brought back from the airport a few months back.

Within the building, soldiers set up their bedrolls among a labyrinth of cluttered offices. It’s quite comical to overhear the entertainment value of some dusty, redundant telephones and keyboards. You catch snippets of the amusing conversations while rearranging your own space, the sound of playful jabbering rising from the ashes, finally allowing you to release a deeply trapped breath.

Abby eases up on her protocols to make the rounds and ensure everyone is okay. You make use of the time alone to freshen up and explore, gathering candles from various boxes to arrange in your shared office, the wax and wicks a rare, comforting find.

Abby spots them as soon as she returns.

“Nighttime always feels darker away from home,” you explain, worried she might find them frivolous.

She doesn’t.

“Candles are good,” she says, picking one up to roll in her hands. She scrapes her thumbnail along the wax base and shifts on her feet. “I like them.”

“Alright,” you say, fiddling with the hem of your shirt.

You try to ignore the intensity of her gaze as it grazes over you, but beads of sweat build along your lower back. It might be time to crack a window. Occupying yourself with that activity, you grow increasingly frustrated as the most accessible ones refuse to budge.  

“Let me try,” she offers.

“I’ve got it, thanks.”

“Suit yourself,” she huffs, and you glimpse her crossing her arms over her broad chest.

You reckon Abby isn’t used to being turned down, and it sours your stomach a little to be the outlier.

By climbing the desk closest to the wall, you gain some leverage and drive your palms into the ridge of the window. You feel the sharp edge digging painfully into your flesh, your back muscles tightening to an impossible degree.

“For fuck’s sake,” you grunt, putting all your might into another attempt, the image of a bottle smashing through the pane something you’d seriously consider acting upon if you were alone.

“Stop being stubborn and let me help.”

“I don’t need your help,” you groan, the tickle of sweat now threatening to break into a full stream down your spine.

“Sure seems like you do,” she says, the arrogance in her tone combined with the weight of her gaze on your back, sending your lid rocking chaotically over a burgeoning boil.

You suck in a rigid breath and ignore her remark.

“Look, if you just—”

“Abby!” you say, jolted by your own shout.

Manny must overhear the commotion, slinking against the door frame to clear his throat. As they murmur behind you, you bow your head and brace your hand against the glass, waiting to be reprimanded.

When you twist your body to offer an apology, the room is empty.

----------------------------------------

Even as the sun disappears below the horizon, the air in your office, as well as the rest of the building, becomes oppressively warm. You dig through your bag for a less cumbersome shirt but resort to stripping down to your sports bra and a pair of boxers. Abby hasn’t come knocking for a while, long enough for a clicker to obliterate you ten times over, but you temper your outrage.

Downstairs, there’s a treasure trove of unopened loot piled on racks, beckoning your interest. Abby abandoned her rule of two and frankly, you couldn’t care less.

Truthfully, she never wanders too far from her pack.

It’s possible she’s unaware of your whereabouts while you gather boxes from the metal racks downstairs in your underwear.

But it’s also possible she has eyes on you wherever you go.

----------------------------------------

“What’s all this?” Abby asks, lingering in the doorway.

Lost mail spills from the bins surrounding you. You’re captivated by the untold stories inside them. A peek into a world you’d never known.

“Letters, mostly,” you say.

Just inside the entryway, Abby slouches against the wall, absentmindedly playing with the fibers of the carpet using her socked feet.

“What kind?”

You’ve torn through dozens of envelopes, the contents of each one wildly different. It’s almost disturbing to imagine how many people had an entire universe they experienced through their eyes only.

You’ve already envisioned yourself journeying from one post office to another, gathering historical accounts and breathing new life into forgotten tales.

“I’m a bit lost with most of them,” you say, credit card debt and bank statements flying straight over your head. “Structures before the outbreak are a lot different from ours.”

Abby clicks her tongue, moving further into the room to sit across from you. She’s careful not to encroach on your space and a twinge of remorse worms into your belly. You offer an olive branch, handing her a photograph.

“But then there’s stuff like this,” you continue.

Abby’s eyes widen at the provocative image of a woman, her slender figure draped across a pristine silk sheet, the vibrant red of her lace panties and sharp stilettos creating a striking contrast. Attached to it is a note that reads:

When you’re alone, close your eyes, and I’ll be whispering your name.

Abby puffs a quiet laugh as a flush of pink creeps along the high points of her cheekbones.

“Who’s it addressed to?” she asks.

You search for the envelope among a sea of scribbled addresses and realize it’s a futile endeavour.

“I’m honestly not sure,” you admit. “I think I lost it.”

“Damn,” Abby smirks, running her thumb over the curled edges of the polaroid. “Lost in transit twice.”

You give a half shrug, noticing how enraptured she is with the picture. Her blonde lashes catch the candlelight at an angle that cast long shadows across her freckled skin.

“Manny would lose his mind,” Abby says, rolling her eyes. “He’s obsessed with shit like this—women in general, really. Horny bastard.”

You can feel the giggles bubbling up inside you, and you clamp your lips together to keep them from escaping. Abby Anderson, the most revered soldier of the Washington Liberation Front, sitting criss-cross applesauce talking smack about her best friend.

It is about the funniest thing you’ve seen in weeks.

“Have you—ever sent one?” you ask, treading dangerous waters and bracing yourself.

She blows out a ragged breath, pocketing the evidence.

You wonder if it’ll be a gift for Manny or something she keeps for herself. The notion causes vicious heat to rise across your forehead and down the bridge of your nose.

“Not a chance. It’s not really my thing.”

The mountain of mail between you becomes a welcomed distraction, and you make use of having a focal point to stare at.

When she tosses the question back your way, it throws your stuttering heart into a full gallop.

“Have you?” she whispers, leaning back to study you with a leg outstretched. The heel of her foot rocks to a slow tune only she can hear.

Her muscular arms bulge as she balances herself and you do your level best to pretend you don’t care. You expect her to wriggle uncomfortably or try to change the subject, but she doesn’t. Instead, she waits on you to bounce the ball she has rolled onto your court.

It’s you who can’t stop squirming.

“I haven’t found anyone worth the effort,” you say, and it feels a little embarrassing, maybe, but you figure honesty goes a lot further with Abby. “People suck.”

“Would you?” she asks. “If you found someone.”

Your racing heart leaves you dizzy.

It’s too goddamn hot in this office. You crane your neck to fire silent vitriolic arrows toward the stubborn windows, desperate for a fresh gust of air to grace the back of your damp shoulders. Abby stumbles to her feet, stepping over you to solve your problem once and for all.

With a soft click, the lock releases, and the window glides open, allowing the cool evening breeze to sweep through the space.

You squeeze your eyes shut and groan.

“I didn’t want to say anything,” Abby smirks, dropping back down to her spot on the floor. This time, she lies on her side, head propped up by her arm. “You almost had it.”

The crooked smile quirking up on her mouth hits you like a flashbang.

“I kind of hate you right now,” you say without venom. “But I should probably say thank you, huh?”

“Probably,” she grins, teeth raking slowly over the pout of her bottom lip.

She has freckles there too, and you’re suddenly envious of them.

“I won’t,” you blurt, tearing open another envelope. “Say thank you.”

“I wouldn’t either,” she laughs, and it’s a deep, warm cadence. A laugh meant only for your ears. She gestures to the letter in your hand. “What’s that one?”

The grin you’re desperately trying to hide causes your face to ache.

The brash woman you’re hardly accustomed to sharing a home with at the stadium is full of surprises, it seems. There’s a side to her that isn’t militant and melancholy, but rather the opposite.

She’s playful and witty. Her eyes, a staggering blue lake, are gentle and kind.

You could fall madly, painfully in love with a woman like Abby.

Abby herself, even. If she wasn’t an unstable box of dynamite.

You skim the handwritten letter with the tip of your finger, and another wash of warmth blooms inside you at the bulk of the sentiment.

“It’s a confession,” you explain, fixing your attention on the last paragraph. “He’s been in love with her for a long time, since they were kids.”

“Will you read it to me?”

Her gentle query sends a shiver of sunshine down your spine. Her eyelids are heavy like yours, and the shadows beneath hers speak volumes about the burden she carries. The weight of the world.

“Only if you promise to read the next one.”

“Deal,” she murmurs, sliding your bag over to use as a pillow. She snuggles into it and your whole body vibrates.

----------------------------------------

The trip home is lighter, despite the nearly crippling load. Clothing, toys, garden seeds, tools, home goods, toiletry items — the list is a mile long. You couldn’t take everything, but the mass of what hadn’t deteriorated or spoiled made it through the gates.

It’s a hopeful thing, not only to witness your group returning home unharmed, but with enough supplies to ease the strain taken from a new fruitful avenue.

The moment you and your squad walk into the chow hall together, you’re met with a chorus of cheers and applause. As Abby vanishes amidst the swarm of people, you exchange a few handshakes before seeking escape from the cacophony.

Your sleeping quarters are the chaotic aftermath of hurried packing and abandoned reading material, with your mattress being the only semblance of order in the disarray. It was Manny who taught you how to make your bed to military standards and perhaps his goal was to inspire more in you than routine, but either way, the habit stuck.

Gratitude simmers for it now more than ever, the crisp, clean sheets offering respite. Freshly showered and dead on your feet, you crawl into your cozy bed and drift away.

A thunderous crash shocks you awake.

You blink against the abyss, immediately comforted by the stadium lights leaking through your curtains. It drives other citizens insane, the absence of darkness, but you’re thankful for it.

Someone appears to be banging your door down.

“Cool it, already,” you say, scrambling for your cotton robe. The brutal assault on your sleep at this hour deserves to be outlawed—prohibited by the laws of the WLF. “Holy hell, are you trying to wake the whole neighbourhood?”

You tear open the door and any visceral anger coursing through you evaporates at the sight. Tall, fierce, and devastatingly gorgeous, all blended with the rich spice of amber liquor.

Loose tendrils of hair cascade along her shoulders and collarbone in protest of her braid.

“What are you doing here?”

“I have something for you. Can I come in?” Abby asks, and it’s not a question.

Before you can even request a moment to compose yourself, she unceremoniously dumps a heavy grey bin on your living room floor, adding to the chaos, before collapsing onto your couch.

“What’s going on, Abby?”

She may be a delightful, luminous drink of water when she wants to be. But damn, can she ever snore the walls down in record time.

You plop yourself onto the bin beside her and try to make sense of her unexpected visit. Should you venture down the hall to wake her roommate? There’s likely a sock hanging from the doorknob by now, but it’s an option.

“Anderson?”

The sound of your hands drumming on the sides of the plastic container fills the room, while you contemplate the amount of bourbon your crew has consumed from lunchtime until now. An indulgence that landed on your doorstep all the same.

When Abby whimpers and curls in on herself, you resolve to drape her in your heaviest blanket, hoping to help her tackle the unsteady beats of her sleep cycle and a looming hangover. She bundles the fabric in her fists and clenches it underneath her chin.

Captivated by her klutzy aura, you nearly trip on the forgotten bin.

The lid doesn’t want to come apart from its secured spot and you have the presence of mind to check for a locking device, just to be sure. There isn’t one, of course, but you’ll never let yourself live down the office window debacle.

It’s going to require elbow grease and a hefty tug. You hiss as it separates in several loud pops. Luckily, the noise only costs the weary girl on your couch a flinch or two.

Letters fill it to the brim, and you’re enthralled by Abby’s decision to bring them back with her. Your instinct is to open each one, but it doesn’t feel right without her there to chirp commentary at you.

“I don’t get it,” you breathe in disbelief, expecting your words to meld with the shadows and disappear.

Her ghost-quiet voice turns the thermostat up a thousand degrees.

“I was mean,” she stammers. “You didn’t deserve it.”

It appears that you’re tapping into her guilt-ridden subconscious, which feels so delicate you consider shaking her awake. You doubt she’d want to lay it all bare.

Does she always talk in her sleep?

“No, it’s okay,” you say. “Water under the bridge.”

Your response seems to placate her overworked brain. You can relate, as your own tries to lure you back to the land of lonely slumber.

You notice her face doesn’t relax, even when her breathing slows, the lines in her forehead streaked with dirt. To never find peace, even during sleep, must be exhausting beyond what most can fathom. It seems cruel to disturb her, even if she’s restless. You settle for leaving a glass of water on the side table for her before settling in at the end of the couch. If she startles awake, you’d rather she doesn’t do it alone.

Cramped onto the only slice of cushion she hasn’t claimed, you let the commotion of the day pull you under.

As morning greets you, you find yourself back in your bed.

The familiar scent of Abby drenches your blanket, but she’s long gone.

----------------------------------------

It’s your first day off in months, but you check the work assignment list to confirm. On your way back from the bulletin board, the classrooms are abuzz with joyful energy. Children eagerly play with the toys and delve into the books your squad brought home, and it gives you a sense of belonging. A goal beyond surviving.

Until now, you have thought little about your life beyond protecting the community. It always made sense to put your neck on the line for the greater good. While casually strolling past the gym, not in search of a certain soldier, you can’t help but wonder if there might be other adventures awaiting you.

Abby’s breath tickles your ear, and you leap a mile out of your skin.

“Looking for me?”

“Son of a bitch,” you wheeze.

She doubles over with laughter, imitating the strangled noise you make when you’re caught off guard. She takes a minute to catch her breath before she gives you a generous shove.

“You’ve got quite a potty mouth,” she teases, wrinkling her nose impishly at a passing group of young ones. “There are little ears around here, you know.”

“Yeah, well, they probably know better than to sneak up on a person,” you say, finding Abby’s laughter rather infectious. You bite back a grin. “Who does that? Is an apocalypse not enough for you people?”

Abby breaks into another bout of giggles, seeming to enjoy your newfound passion for merging the old world with the new one.

“Is it our apocalypse though, if we were born into it?”

“Yes, Abby, it is,” you huff, eager for your heart rate to return to baseline. “We’re in an active apocalypse and you’re awful.”

As she leans against the large window you’d been peering through, the sounds of the gym fade into the background. She tilts her head at you, eyes sparkling with intrigue. Clad in workout gear that accentuates her sculpted body, she doesn’t appear sweaty.

You must’ve caught her on her way in.

“Are you busy later?”

“Not really,” you say, fidgeting with a frayed string on your sleeve. “Are you?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Okay,” you say, staring at a scuff on your sneaker before catching her gaze.

“Okay,” she mimics, directing her nose scrunch at you this time, turning your mouth dry. “Feel like being busy later?”

It’s not as if her tone is explicit or even her language, but this woman is a supernatural force. So, tingles rise into gooseflesh from your head to your toes, regardless.

“What do you have in mind?” you ask.

The roars of a lively group of soldiers reverberate through the gym, their spirited chants urging their champion to hurry her ass up. They beckon to her as if they are a part of the kindergarten cohort, causing both of you to snicker and shake your heads. One of them wolf-whistles, the rise and fall of the pitch echoing into the hallway. Abby wastes no time throwing up her middle finger in response.

“I can come by around seven. Does that work?” she asks, reaching for your wrist. She gives it a quick squeeze and slowly pulls away, her fingers sliding to the tip of your pinky.

Her simple touch is unexpected, and it electrifies you.

“Works for me.”

She beams, walking backwards through the gym doors, brows jumping at your frozen form.

You amuse her. This much is obvious.

----------------------------------------

A rhythmic tap grabs your attention, a stark difference from the first time Abby came knocking. But to keep with tradition, she doesn’t arrive empty-handed.

“You didn’t have to do this,” you say, gesturing to the dishes balanced precariously in her arms.

“I wanted to.”

She sets the meal fit for an army battalion down onto the counter and searches your kitchen cupboards for something to drink from.

With a single, forceful movement of her forearm, she clears space by shoving your knick-knacks aside to make room.

“Juice cool?”

The way she effortlessly makes herself at home in your space leaves you speechless. You nod.

“Good,” she says, a repentant grin tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Pretty sure I’m off booze for the rest of my life.”

With the same delicate touch she used to tidy your countertop, she pours the freshly squeezed liquid, causing both glasses to hover on the verge of spilling. Abby takes a step back to assess the situation before bending over the rims, producing the most obnoxious slurping noise. It nearly sends you into hysterics as she levels out both glasses.

She hands one to you with droplets of orange decorating her chin and the collar of her shirt.

“Thanks,” you chuckle. “Quality service right here. Plus, I love germs.”

Balancing the glass to the best of your ability in your right hand, you pull your sleeve over your left and use it to pat her face dry. Abby snorts, her normally lively body becoming static under your ministrations. She swallows heavily, and a calmness settles over you.

“I don’t have germs,” she pouts. Her eyes drop to your mouth for a split-second before her cheeks erupt in swaths of vibrant pink. “I swear.”

“You’re a mess,” you scoff, enamoured by this clumsy woman, blazing a path directly into the pit of your stomach. “Did you know that?”

As she nods, her broad shoulders relax, and her frenetic breathing begins to slow.

“Nobody else sees it,” she says, her words hanging heavy in the air.

The pressure of that emotional cargo would cause any person to buckle under the weight sometimes. It’s a strenuous life for everyone on base, but the expectations placed on her are especially burdensome.

“I see it.”

Your confession doesn’t offend her; instead, it seems to liberate her.

She sighs an exhale of relief, and it makes your heart squeeze.

“I can live with that,” she whispers.

The food was prepared with love as is anything set aside for Abby, and she tells you all about the cook who put it together. An original member of the Salt Lake crew, and a phenomenal chef, he got them through their bleakest days.

When the WLF opened their arms, he committed fully to helping Abby achieve her goals, working tirelessly to support her training and keep himself on the straight and narrow after their tragic end with the Fireflies.

She doesn’t go into detail about what happened, and your instinct is to let that be okay. The heart-wrenching rumours are more than enough to go on for now.

“He’s stoked for me to have a little downtime,” she says, waving her fork at the spread now spilling onto your coffee table across various plates. “Hence the whole smorgasbord situation. As soon as I told him—”

She pauses, letting out a little whimper of embarrassment, seeming to scold herself for being so open.

“Told him what?” you press, detecting a subtle grin playing at the edges of her eyes.

“He wanted to make an impression on my friend, I guess.”

Your neck tickles with heat and you attempt to ventilate by pulling the collar of your shirt away from your collarbone for a moment.

“The man can cook,” you say with your mouth full. It comes out funnier than you expected, muffled by chewing. “Sorry.”

“You’re quite a mess yourself,” she smirks, leaning to drape her arms along the back of your couch, scanning the state of your apartment. “Your poor books.”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with my books!”

She hauls herself off the couch to make an example of you, crouching at a cluttered stack. So, an earthquake must’ve hit only your room—what of it?

“I mean, this is just sad.”

“We can’t all have bookshelves and organizational skills, Anderson.”

“Says who?” she chuckles, her attention diverted by a novel that has piqued her curiosity. “This isn’t a lack of skill, either. Where’s your discipline, girl?”

Maybe it’s crouched in front of you, a blonde bombshell waiting to go off and properly reduce you to human rubble.

“I’m plenty disciplined, thank you very much.”

“Yeah?” she says, tongue tucked behind her teeth in challenge.

The audacity, when you’re currently over the moon about this delicious meal, you’ll likely never get to enjoy twice.

“Yeah,” you retort, wiping your mouth with the back of your sleeve like a feral beast. You strip off your shirt and toss it into the abyss, grabbing a clean one from its home on a toppling lamp.

Her bright bursts of laughter make you giddy, a woman who never finds time to play, sitting on your carpet waiting for you to join her.

“Who even are you?” she asks, and it’s so gentle it stops you midway through redressing to ponder her question.

The cotton tank top falls past your hips and you smooth it out, sensitive to the wrinkles in a way you haven’t previously been.  

“It looks good,” Abby blurts, reading you like the sea of books strewn about. “You’re—good.”

There’s something about the fortitude of her honesty that helps you decipher between barbs and a genuine fondness for your idiosyncrasies.

Maybe she’s someone you can trust after all.

She shuffles across the floor to the bin filled with letters and lifts it above her head with ease.

“What on earth are you doing?”

As her brows jump mischievously, she dumps the skeletal remains of a past life onto your floor, filling the room with a waterfall of bones. It ignites a fierce desire to protect this girl—create a time capsule of this moment for the next generation to build upon.

A reminder that not all broken things are hopeless things.

“Well, now you’ve gone and ruined my tidy apartment.”

“My bad,” she giggles.

----------------------------------------

Each passing moment feels like tiny punctures in an hourglass, causing time to trickle away. You’re both aware of it, trying to stretch the night. Abby leaves for a spell to hunt down her chef, in pursuit of caffeine. She returns flushed and sleepy, the bitter aroma wafting through the door alongside her soothing presence.

Curiosity and exhaustion get the best of you, and you ask about her friend. His thoughts on your late-night rendezvous with history. She does a goofy impression that makes you want to wrap your arms around her, and you watch her in fascination like an old cowboy reel, projected onto your heart.

“He says you’re a bad influence.”

“Bullshit,” you snicker, tossing her another envelope.

“Okay, so he didn’t say that. But he did tell me to give him a heads up if I decide to run away with you.”

You try to push that thought aside.

“Really, now? And why does he think that’s in the cards?”

“He thinks you’re my dream girl.”

She speaks as if she’s describing weather patterns to you, and you’re bewildered. The blunt force of her words mixed with the softness of her tone leaves you shell-shocked. You search for a tether; silently categorize every reason it can’t be true.

“What did you tell him?” you ask, busying yourself with a letter you read while Abby was away.

A tale of woe between two quarrelling families. It reminds you of Romeo and Juliet, some less violent, modern-day version, and based on the contents of their struggle, you gather at least one of them was grateful for the pandemic.

“Do you really want to know?” she asks, pinning you with her gaze.

You nod, a buzz of energy flitting through you.

“Yes,” you say.

“I told him to go fuck himself.”

Cackles burst from your chest, finding her candour rather precious. Of course, Abby told the guy off. But she doesn’t look away after she tells you; doesn’t shrug or scoff. She studies your reaction and holds her breath until a tiny smile breaks her anxious expression.

You forget where you are in proximity to the earth for a second.

“I guess I’ll debrief you on that situation at a later date,” you say.

“I hope so.”

----------------------------------------

The sound of her steady breathing is peaceful as the light of early morning whispers through the fog. She idly sips at her coffee and takes her time, setting each letter into their respective piles. It’s engrained in her to keep things orderly, an obvious clash with your paper heap. Unlike you, she finds the government letters intriguing, even the boring ass mortgage and debt related ones, and reads them all thoroughly.

Your hand catches on an envelope shaped differently from the rest. Inside is a card, with a dozen raised hearts adorning the front in varying shades of red. When you flip it open, it reads:

With you by my side, every day feels like Valentine’s Day. Thank you for being my rock, my love, and my everything.

Your family never spoke of this while you were growing up.

“Valentine’s Day?” you yawn. “What’s that all about?”

You show her the card, and she rubs her eyes, nursing the tail end of her own yawn with the back of her hand.

“Give it here, woman.”

She looks it over to confirm her suspicions, and with a knowing smile, sits up straight. She taps the card against her knee.

“My dad told me about this.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, it’s um—it’s a tradition people celebrated near the end of winter. A day to do things for the ones you love, I guess.”

“Like a holiday or something?”

“Sort of,” Abby says, fumbling a bit with her own understanding of it. “Romantic stuff, mostly.”

She rubs her neck, mulling something over while you try to wrap your head around this new information. One day out of the year to do what exactly? Who was supposed to do the things—both people? Did the traditions start after breakfast or were you meant to wait until suppertime? Was it an endeavour meant to last the entire day?

“My dad didn’t really make time to celebrate it,” Abby continues. “He was always too busy at the hospital and then my mom—well, she worked there too, so.”

The veil of exhaustion lifts when you realize she’s peeling back a wound right before your eyes. You suck in a breath and hope she doesn’t mistake it for anything but your desire to let her speak. She drops the card on her lap and wrings her hands.

“They did these small things instead, you know? On regular days,” Abby explains. Her body droops as she seems to pick through her retention of their conversations.

“Like what?” you ask, your voice just a hair above a whisper.

“Like—okay. My dad loved to dance,” Abby says, leaning forward with a sad smile, the slouch of her shoulders regaining composure at the happier memory. “He was fucking terrible at it,” she puffs a laugh. “But he was a music buff and when he met my mom, he said it was the best excuse he could find to get close to her.”

You ache for her to have them here to tell the story, instead.

“So, they danced together a lot?”

“All the time, according to him,” Abby says, her face lighting up. “He told me that my mom was super shy, so she’d always give him hell about it. But he’d ask her to dance pretty much anywhere. Parking lots, gas stations, one time they danced in the middle of the grocery store.”

You try to imagine what Abby’s mom looks like, but your mind can’t seem to conjure up anything beyond Abby’s own image, a showcase of strength and grit.

“Do you remember much about her?” you ask.

“Not really. She died when I was a baby,” Abby explains, adjusting the cuffs of her shirt. “She loved being pregnant with me, though, apparently.”

“Well, duh,” you murmur.

Abby crinkles her nose at you and bites the edge of her smile.

“Dad said her stomach got so big that he started dancing with her from behind. She’d rest her head on his shoulder, and they’d just sway back and forth.”

“I love that,” you say.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, fondness heavy on her breath.

Abby’s speech becomes slurred as the birds on your balcony greet the dawn.

“Every time they danced, the scent of her reminded him of a cabin in the woods, surrounded by these giant pine trees he used to pass on his way to work. He’d dream up this elaborate plan for them to quit their careers and live off-grid. I think he promised it to her about a thousand times.”

“That sounds kind of amazing, actually.”

“Yeah,” she says, tapping her nose with the Valentine’s card, her sleepy gaze drifting to yours. “He was a sap.”

She finishes with the most outrageously loud, cavernous yawn and you’re too tired to do much more than giggle at her larger-than-life spirit.

“You can crash on my couch again, if you want,” you offer.

She wobbles to her feet, reaching for your hand to help pull you up.

“I’m on assignment in a couple of hours anyway,” she says, supporting your elbows while you try not to slip on the paper graveyard below. “I’ll be MIA for a while, but let’s meet up when I’m back, if you’re up for it.”

“Totally.”

“Cool,” she whispers, her fingers tracing patterns on the tips of yours before reluctantly letting go.

As she turns to walk away, her steps falter, and she abruptly spins around to face you.

“Can I hug you goodbye?” she asks.

“Of course.”

Before you can blink, Abby’s arms wrap around you, and you’re a puzzle piece, snug in her embrace. She melts you from the inside out, the comforting rhythm of her heartbeat thrumming against your body. The heat of her chest against your cheek lifts blissful sleepiness from the edges of your resolve and a part of you wants to ask her to stay.

As she gently moves to cup your head and support the back of your neck with her warm hands, you instinctively wrap your arms around her waist, afraid she might drift away.

“I feel so safe right now,” you whisper into her shoulder, and she nuzzles closer, squeezing you tight. Your feet are nearly off the ground before she relaxes her grip.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

----------------------------------------

Two weeks have passed since your visit with Abby and it’s hard to think about much else. It’s a pleasant distraction, even when the memory of her makes your insides flutter as if she tipped a bucket of butterflies between your ribs and set them free.

An unusually large number of soldiers from different stations have packed the grounds, and you’re grateful to have a unique job to keep you relatively separate from the chaos.

Dogs are coming home, but not all of them, and it shatters your heart to toss out their registration papers. You understand the nature of your contribution to this war machine, but it never gets easier. If you could, you’d gather up all the puppies and take them to the same cabin in the woods Abby’s father always dreamed about. Let them bask in the warm sunlight and frolic together amidst a maze of towering trees.

It’s a lovely thought followed closely by the sobering reality before you.

“You’ve done well.”

You drop the leash you were holding, and it clatters on the concrete.

“Isaac. You scared me.”

If Abby is a rare sight at the stadium, Isaac is a ghost. You haven’t seen him in months. He has expanded the WLF across several locations along the west coast and the number is only growing. Reports of a nearby prison piquing his interest have been swirling for a while now.

You’re not sure where he rests his head at night, but it’s almost never here.

“It’s nice to see you too,” he says, inspecting the four-legged fleet without getting close enough to pet them. “I hear your training program is working wonders.”

“I try. They make it easy,” you say, noticing that many puppies have tucked their tails between their legs. “What brings you to the stadium?”

“I’m—restructuring,” he explains, his footsteps echoing as he paces the unit, meticulously inspecting the facility.

Your heart sinks.

“What does this have to do with me?”

He exaggerates a smile, and it sets you on edge.

“You always ask the right questions,” he drawls, heavy hands landing on your shoulders. “I respect that about you. There’s never any fat to trim, just straight to the point.”

It’s more than you can say about him, frankly.

“I suspect you’ve heard about the prison.”

“I have,” you say, bending to pick back up the leash. A narrow excuse to put space between the two of you.

Isaac is still standing uncomfortably close, so you wrap the nylon around your wrist as an act of self soothing.

“Well, it’s proving to be an integral training facility. It’s both secure and unaffected by the flooding, which has been my biggest obstacle up to this point.”

You’d never seen the inside of a prison before, but you’ve read about them. A cold cement cage without access to sunlight, its surface striped with iron. It offered zero curb appeal. You made it a priority to give your dogs a comfortable enclosure for that very reason.

“They need me here,” you say, desperate to get ahead of his plan. “This is where I’ll be most effective.”

“I disagree.”

Your arms tingle with an icy chill as he turns to walk in the opposite direction.

“You said I’ve done well here,” you call out.

“It’s true,” he says over his shoulder. “And your expertise will be crucial. Transport leaves at oh-six hundred.”

---------------------------------------

You should pack to leave, but you’re frozen.

Isaac isn’t one to sugarcoat things and for once, you wish he would’ve.

You curl up in a plastic chair on your balcony and take in the fields below. Neatly organized rows of vibrant crops bordered by fruit trees, bursting with hues of orange and red. Berries snaking through walls of trellis, sweet and ripe. People milling about with baskets of laundry and boxes of produce, keeping society peaceful.

“You should’ve married him,” Manny sighs, dropping beside you. His hand rests on your knee. “Are you okay?”

“No,” you admit, pressing your fingers to the bridge of your nose. “All these fresh faces, and I’m the only one leaving.”

Manny moves his hand to your arm, offering a kind squeeze.

“You are not the only one,” he says, handing you a clipboard.

It’s a short list of dogs you’ll be taking with you, and you’re caught between wanting to laugh at Manny’s ridiculous disposition or sob at your utter misfortune. You wish the dogs could stay behind. They love when the little ones throw the ball for them in the afternoon.

“I have a life here,” you say, and it’s a plea to the universe. “This is supposed to be my home.”

Manny offers you a freshly picked apple and you roll the waxy surface between your palms. The image of Abby’s face flashes in your mind. Maybe it’s silly to feel so much, but you can’t stop it. The weight of never seeing her again makes you nauseous.

“I’m fucked,” you groan.

He wraps an arm around your shoulder to pull you in.

“Keep your chin up, Hermosa. Something tells me you won’t be gone long.”

----------------------------------------

Hey you,

I’ve tried to write this about a dozen times, and I still don’t know where to start. Fuck it, right?

I barely know you and somehow you made me miss you so fucking much while I was away. When I got home and you weren’t there, it felt like someone shot me in the chest.

Manny brought me your bin of letters and I swear I cried for the first time in years.

How did you get under my skin so fast?

I hear you were sad when you left, and that breaks my heart. It kills me thinking of you being unhappy. I hate that you’re somewhere I know nothing about.

What is it like over there? Are you safe?

I check in on the kennels every day. You’re missed around here a lot.

Keep your head up for me. I’m going to make this right.

Please write me back,

A.A.

You’re busy fixing the fence with a skeleton crew when a delivery truck arrives, and someone throws a letter at you. The thrill of it causes your heart to pound in your throat, a rush of adrenaline washing over you. It takes every ounce of self control to keep from disappearing to read it somewhere private.

Trucks come and go regularly, as they divide resources between stations. Isaac seems to prioritize the prison, especially on the artillery front.

You finish reinforcing the fence and race to your cell to lose yourself in your first piece of mail.

You can’t wait to steal a pen to write her back.

Abby,

I read your letter every day.

Okay, maybe more like three times a day, but who’s counting? Seriously… this place has no concept of time and I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single clock to be found.

It makes me sad you were sad. I feel like we’re on a carousel of sadness! We should change that. (Have you seen a carousel before?)

The dogs aren’t doing too bad. They like the open fields here and they’re allowed to sleep in bed with these smelly ass soldiers, which I think is more for us than them, truly.

Thanks for checking in on my crew there. Means a lot.

My bed feels like a hard slab of steel because it is, but at least I don’t have to make it every day. Don’t tell Manny.

It’s nothing like the stadium here. We don’t have gardens and schools and we definitely don’t have a gym. I know, devastating! How will I ever beat you in an arm wrestle now?

The hot water is a work in progress, so I’m learning how to not die during cold showers. That’s also a work in progress, but I squeal less now. Which is something, right?

Try not to worry your beautiful head. I’m tough. I miss your face, though. There’s so much I want to ask you.

Please tell me something about you that nobody else knows. I promise I’m the best secret keeper, ever.

P.S.

If you find any letters from actual prisoners, be sure to fill me in. I feel like they’d have some great tips!

Yours truly,

Me

You hope she lights up as much as you did when her letter arrives. It’s all you can hope for, aside from her safety and possibly a warmer blanket.

To: My Favourite Inmate,

You sure know how to make a girl laugh.

It’s good you don’t have clocks. That way, you can’t obsess over how long you’ve been gone the way I do.

Shit, I should send Manny over there for one of those cold showers. I gave him that polaroid we found, and he hasn’t come up for air in weeks.

It helps a bit to know those pups are there to keep you warm at night. I hope I can be that for you soon. I considered writing another letter because I was afraid to say it, but I think I want you to know. You belong in my arms.

Something I haven’t told anyone before…

Sometimes I miss being a Firefly, especially since things around here are getting worse by the day—but sometimes I guess I don’t want to be anything.

Maybe I’d like to try being just Abby for a while, you know? I’ve never tried that before. What do you think that would look like? Would you want to be a part of it?

I wish you were here beside me.

I’ve made it my mission.

A.A.

P.S.

When you wrapped your arms around me, it felt like lightning.

#abby the last of us #abby x fem!reader #abby tlou #abby x reader #abby x you #tlou abby #abby anderson #lesbian

[criptochecca]

Hamas 26.02.2024

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful We in the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) express our heartfelt condolences and our full solidarity with the family and friends of the American pilot Aaron Bushnell, whose name has been immortalized as a defender of humanitarian values and the plight of the oppressed Palestinian people who are suffering due to the U.S. administration and its unjust policies, like the American activist Rachel Corrie who was crushed by a zionist bulldozer in 2003 in Rafah, the same city for which Bushnell paid for with his life to pressure his country's government to prevent the criminal zionist army from attacking it and committing massacres and violations in it. The administration of US President Joe Biden bears full responsibility for the death of the American military pilot Aaron Bushnell due to its policy that supported the Nazi zionist entity in the genocide war against our Palestinian people, as he gave his life in order to highlight the massacres and zionist ethnic cleansing against our people in the Gaza Strip. The heroic pilot Aaron Bushnell will remain immortal in the memory of our Palestinian people and the free people of the world, and a symbol of the spirit of global humanitarian solidarity with our people and their just cause. The tragic incident that cost pilot Bushnell his life is an expression of the growing anger among the American people who reject their country's policy that contributes to the killing and genocide of our people, and rejects their government's violation of global humanitarian values, by providing cover to ensure the impunity of the Nazi entity and its leaders from punishment and accountability.

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine 26.02.2024

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine expresses its full solidarity with his family and with all the American sympathizers. The act of an American soldier sacrificing himself for Palestine is the highest sacrifice and a medal, and a poignant message to the American administration to stop its involvement in the aggression. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine affirmed that the act of the American soldier Aaron Bushnell from the U.S. Air Force by setting himself on fire in front of the zionist embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest against the war on Gaza, which he called for the "liberation of Palestine," confirms the state of anger among the American people due to the official American involvement in the zionist genocide war being waged on the Gaza Strip. It also indicates that the status of the Palestinian cause, especially in American circles, is becoming more deeply entrenched in the global conscience, and reveals the truth of the zionist entity as a cheap colonial tool in the hands of savage imperialism. The Front expressed its full solidarity with the soldier's family and all the American sympathizers who took a honorable stance and whose struggle and pressure to stop the genocide on the Strip have not ceased, confirming that the act of an American soldier sacrificing his life to draw the attention of the American people and the world to the plight of the Palestinian people, despite its tragic nature and the great pain it involves, is considered the highest sacrifice and medal, and the most important poignant message directed to the American administration, that it is involved in the war crime in Gaza and that the American people have awakened and are rejecting this American involvement, calling on the American administration to stop this support and bias for the zionist entity. The Front sent a message to the Arab soldier to take this American soldier who sacrificed his life for a noble cause like the Palestinian cause as an example and role model, and to leave the trenches of waiting, incapacity, and move to the trench of confrontation in support of Palestine and its people who are being slaughtered, besieged, and starved in full view and hearing of the world and just a few kilometers from Arab lands and meters from the borders. Palestine will be victorious as long as it has deeply engraved itself in the conscience and consciences of the world, and history will record in golden letters the names of all the sympathizers and free people of the world who stood with it and sacrificed their lives for its sake.

Via RNN

[ellieluvr420]

Eye for an Eye - teaser!

MASTERLIST (and information about Palestine) Please read!

The walk was long, not physically but figuratively. Your feet dragged from exhaustion and hunger but every time you tripped or stumbled or faltered in your pace even slightly, you were pushed forward or prodded in the back with the gun that had been trained on you since you were marched out of your cell.  

The closer you got to the podium, the clearer the commotion was. You had always been popular, so the crowd didn’t surprise you in the slightest. The execution of the crown jewel of the WLF, executed for treason no less, that’s a show they’d never miss. It almost flatters you, the grin on your face appearing subconsciously. You felt like you were sleepwalking, floating even but the drag of your feet reminded you of the reality.  

The corridor was dark, dingy, it had never felt like this before but then again, the double doors at the end were never closed. Maybe that’s the point, hide the darkness that infects the prison you had once called home, hide it and convince everyone that they themselves weren’t the darkness, that the whole mission of the WLF wasn’t darkness. Washington Liberation Front, but there was no liberation, only further oppression and further violence. It infected its soldiers, festered inside of them until they weren’t people anymore, machines designed to kill and destroy without mercy, without reason, without guilt. Guilt was part of what kept people human, and you knew now the soldiers here, they were devoid of guilt, they weren’t human. But then again, were you?  

That question loomed over your head and the closer you walked to your death, to be slaughtered like an animal, the clearer the answer became, not because you thought you were an animal, you were above these people, if you could call them that, a fallen angel. The darkness infected those waiting to watch your demise but not you, the darkness bathed you in its glory and you became a vessel for it, you were a soldier for the darkness, not the WLF and that’s why there was no fear, not an ounce, even a shred in your body. You had done its bidding and it had done yours so there was no fear, no panic, no regret.

She was the blood that ran through your veins, the breath that inflated your lungs, the muscle that pumped your heart, you knew it was the same for her and now your paths would cross again, over and over again. You’d make the last thing you said to her a reality, she knew that, she always knew. 

The doors opened and the muffled commotion became a deafening ringing in your ears as the sun blinded you, the light blinded you. The crowd only got louder as you walked up the steps of the podium, louder as you halted and turned to the crowd, hundreds, maybe thousands, livid faces screaming obsenities at your smiling one. Louder and louder as you’re pushed down, your knees hitting the ground beneath you, sending shocks up through your body. You don’t bow your head, you don’t make eye contact, your chin remains lifted to the sky, you’re above them all, you know that, even now, you know that even more.  

Cool metal, the barrel of a gun, pressed into the side of your head, it was refreshing somehow. 

“Any last words you traiterous bitch?” You scoff before turning your head slowly to face him, he was faceless in your eyes, a means to an end, your smile grew, sickeningly twisting on your face. 

psa: just stay with me on this one guys, I swear, this is the most excited I've been to write a fic yet so just stay with me <3

@emiliabby

#ellie the last of us #ellie tlou #ellie williams #ellie williams tlou #ellie x reader #abby the last of us #abby anderson x reader #ellie x fem reader #tlou ellie #abby anderson x female reader #ellie williams angst #ellie williams fanfic #ellie williams imagine #ellie williams the last of us #ellie williams x reader #ellie williams x you #ellie x you #abby tlou #abby anderson #abby and ellie #abby anderson fanfic #abby anderson fic #abby anderson tlou #abby anderson tlou2 #abby anderson x fem!reader #abby anderson x you #abby x reader #abby x you #tlou abby

[brickmvster]

Savior [Abby Anderson x Reader]

Synopsis: You and Abby, best friends, aren't quite sure where you both stand with each other. After you get attacked while out on patrol, you begin to experience feelings of inadequacy; Abby, however, reminds you of just how important you are, and it is during this conversation that both of your true feelings come to the surface.

Tags: minor violence, non-graphic violence, near death experiences, panic attacks, minor injuries, friends to lovers, love confessions, emotional hurt/comfort, nightmares, fluff, a little suggestive toward the end but not explicit

Word Count: 8k+

Author's Note: this is my first time posting a fic of mine to tumblr (also my first time writing for Abby)! I'm nervous and also excited 😭 this has been proofread quite a few times but apologies in advance if any spelling and/or grammarical errors slipped by me, mistakes are all mine! I almost cried writing this bc my god do I want an Abby of my own. Anyway I hope you guys enjoy! Feedback is always welcome. This was cross posted on AO3 as well.

For the first time since joining the Washington Liberation Front, you finally felt like you were doing some real work. Fear and inexperience prevented you from going out on patrols, and for several months you stuck with doing laundry and food preparation. But many grueling and difficult weeks of weapon training and learning about basic self defense left you feeling confident – a feeling that, up until now, was wholly unfamiliar to you.

You were currently sitting patiently in your room, bag packed with all of the essentials and necessities for your first patrol trip. You were just waiting for your roommate and patrol partner, Whitney, to knock on the door and announce when it’s time to go. 

You could tell from the way your stomach felt like it was upside down that you were feeling a little nervous. Just months ago, doing anything that meant leaving the stadium absolutely terrified you; it was a safe haven and leaving it meant you were no longer protected from the unforgiving nature of a post-apocalyptic city. You weren’t afraid of the infected – you had encountered plenty of them prior to being recruited, and you couldn’t even begin to count how many you had taken down during your years as a lone survivor. 

No, you were far more scared of your own species . Within the once densely populated city of Seattle, you were completely by yourself with no sense of stability as you packed your stuff and relocated once every few days, paranoia never allowing you to stay in one place for any longer. Of course, there was also the looming threat of being captured by the Seraphites or brutally killed by other survivors. You were a true pacifist, having mastered the art of being light on your feet and narrowly avoiding getting into physical altercations with other people. Trees, tall grass, and anything else nature provided you with helped you in silently escaping without leaving a single trace. You had your fair share of close calls, like anyone would, but what you lacked in weapon knowledge and fighting skills you made up for in quick thinking.

One day, though, your luck had finally decided to run out. 

Your recollection of that day was hazy, but you could vividly remember sleeping on a raggedy couch within an abandoned house, before raiders had forcefully entered your home. You don’t really remember who started shooting first. There was so much screaming, and your ears were ringing from the piercing and relentless sound of gunfire. There had to have been three guys. Maybe four, you weren’t exactly sure. They were clumsy and missed a lot of their shots. Until they didn’t, and suddenly there was a hole in your leg. Although they couldn’t aim well, you weren’t any better. Your shots usually ended up in a wall or going through a window. But you did manage to take them all out. Almost all of them, because one guy had taken you completely by surprise, pinning you against a wall and attempting to inflict a stab wound.

But that was when a mysterious woman with a braid showed up.

There were other people with her but you could only remember seeing her. She took out the guy attacking you swiftly, her aim incredibly precise, the bullet going straight through his head. She aimed it at you, and immediately your arms went up – that was when you locked eyes with her, her gaze sharp and unwavering. Your eyes were blown wide, your heart rate never slowing down and adrenaline still pumping through you. You were pleading to her silently.

You knew you had managed to sway her when she had slowly lowered her pistol. She gazed down at your leg, and you’ll never forget the unexpected softness in her voice when she told you:

“I got you.”

Then, she let you wrap your arm around her shoulders, and she helped you exit the bullet-ridden house. She took you in and taught you how to shoot better; but you refused to help out with patrols, and that was when your fear of leaving the stadium had begun to blossom. You felt powerless in that moment back in the abandoned house. You almost died because of your cluelessness, and your inability to kill, let alone even hurt another human.

After having been rescued, your time spent doing busy work at the stadium is when you found yourself growing closer to the woman, who you had soon found out was named Abby. Despite Whitney being your roommate, she barely ever saw you – you were always spending time with Abby, whether it be eating together in the cafeteria, having in-depth conversations about random books that Abby may have found while on patrol (because that was one major thing the both of you had in common, surprisingly), or just enjoying each other's company and not exchanging any words at all, comforted by the mere feeling of the other person being in the same room. 

You soon realized, though, that you weren’t supposed to be experiencing a spike in heart rate after your hand accidentally brushed hers. You weren’t supposed to feel that stupid fluttery feeling your stomach whenever she laughed at something you said or smiled at you. You weren’t supposed to feel warmth spread throughout your cheeks at the sight of her sweaty and breathing heavily from exertion after working out. You told all of this to Whitney, and she only laughed at your suffering, telling you to your face that you had a crush on your best friend.

But it didn’t feel like a crush. Crushes were fleeting. You wanted Abby. You yearned for her closeness and thought about sleeping in her arms every single night, her lips pressing against your forehead. 

All of this, of course, terrified you. You had never experienced any feeling as strong as this. You always rolled your eyes at some of the cheesy romance novels you read, as the main characters always seemed so overdramatic to you. You never thought the feeling of desire could be so painful. You saw Abby everyday, and yet she felt so far away at the same time. Suddenly those romance novels felt too real.

You suppressed these feelings the best you could, because you weren’t even sure if Abby felt the same way. You had a strong feeling she didn’t, and you weren’t going to severely embarrass yourself by confessing your love to someone who you were sure wasn’t going to reciprocate those feelings.

You weren’t sure how well you’d be able to suppress your feelings for any longer, though, knowing that Abby was actually going to be joining you on patrol. 

Maybe that was the true reason for your nervousness.

Three knocks on your door pulled you out of the recesses of your mind. Whitney’s muffled voice could be heard on the other side.

“You ready?” She asked. 

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” You replied with a sigh. You stood up from the bed and grabbed your backpack, slinging the straps securely over your shoulders. Whitney had opened the door, meeting your eyes with a smile. You returned the warm expression, exiting your room, and locking the door behind you. The two of you made your way down the hall.

“How’re you feeling? Excited? Nervous?” Whitney questioned. You shrugged.

“Honestly? I’m feeling all sorts of things. I just hope everything goes well.” You replied. Whitney playfully nudged you with her shoulder.

“Hey, don’t worry too much. Most of the time, patrol runs go pretty smoothly. You’re bound to have some mishaps here and there, but usually everyone comes back safely. We’ll be alright, I know it.”

You felt reassured by Whitney’s words, grinning at her as a silent thanks for soothing your nerves. A comfortable silence settled between the two of you for another few minutes, but it wasn’t long until Whitney was speaking again, deciding to discuss another topic.

“So… about you and Abby.” She began.

You groaned in annoyance,feeling warmth immediately spread to your cheeks at the mere mention of the woman’s name. Whitney only chuckled at your obvious suffering. “I was wondering… did you two fight?”

You turned your head to look at Whitney quizzically. “No? What makes you think we fought?”

Whitney looked at you like you just asked her what two plus two was. “The both of you haven’t talked to each other in like… 10 years. I can’t help but think something happened.”

“We still talk to each other, Whitney.”

“Does only saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ count as talking?” She asked.

You rolled your eyes, but you couldn’t deny the truth in Whitney’s words. You hadn’t actually held a conversation with Abby in days . She would always make an effort to spend time with you but you always had some kind of excuse at the ready. They were often lousy ones, and you could tell that Abby could see right through them but decided against saying anything about it.

“I admit, things are… awkward between us, but-”

“She feels the same way.”

You paused in the middle of your sentence, sighing exasperatedly. “Whitney… how can you be so sure?”

“Because I see it. Just take my word for it, okay?” She replied, giving you a teasing smile. You didn’t even have time to respond, since the two of you had already reached your destination.

Eventually, you made it to where Abby and Alice were waiting near the vehicles. You saw Abby kneeling on the ground, gently petting Alice and showering the canine in all of the praise and affection in the world. While grabbing your weapons and extra ammunition, you stole a few glances at her, feeling a smile creep up on your lips as you watched Alice lick her face happily, to which Abby tried to move away, the sound of laughter cutting through all the chatter and extra noise that you heard around you. 

You’d never be able to get over the way Abby’s smile lit up her entire face, or the way her cheeks gradually took on a redder tint the longer the laughing continued. Abby would react the same way whenever you told her a stupid joke, or whenever you told about a funny line of dialogue in a book you took turns reading–

“When you’re done making googly eyes at your crush, come get in the truck, please.” Whitney’s voice, once again, pulled you out of your pleasant trance.

You cleared your throat, looking away shyly. “Right. My bad.”

You made sure your pistol was snug in your holster before slinging your rifle over your shoulder and making your way toward Abby. She stood up from her kneeling position on the floor, a certain something in her eyes that you just couldn’t decipher. She smiled at you a little awkwardly, brushing a loose strand of hair that fell in front of her face behind her ear.

“Heya.” She spoke. You grinned, ignoring the slight jump in your heart rate just from standing in front of her.

“Hi.” You replied, butterflies viciously attacking your stomach against your will. 

“First patrol. You got everything you need?”

“Believe so.”

“Alright, then. Let’s get moving.” She said, to which you nodded curtly.

Whitney opened the door to the passenger’s side, allowing Alice to jump in. As Abby was already climbing into the back of the truck, you threw a glare in Whitney’s direction, to which Whitney only smiled deviously. 

“What? Alice loves riding shotgun!” She said innocently before getting into the driver’s seat and giggling to herself like a plotting supervillain in a movie.

You shook your head, reluctantly getting into the back of the truck with Abby. When everyone was all settled, Whitney took off, eventually exiting the stadium. All that could be heard for several minutes was the sound of the tires on the dirt road and the songs from the birds that flew overhead. Abby seemed to be looking everywhere but at you, and Whitney’s eyes were focused on the road ahead, so you took this time to let your eyes take in the view directly in front of you.

Abby had settled for her usual loose tank top and cargo pants, and her hair was in her usual braid. There were always strands of hair that managed to fall in front of her face anyway, and you found it absolutely adorable how she would occasionally blow the strands out of her face in annoyance. You let yourself relax in your seat a little, admiring the constellations of freckles on her arms. Briefly, you were taken back to your last training session with her, remembering the way those same arms wrapped around you to “help you adjust your fighting stance.” You could easily recall her proximity during the session and the look of genuine proudness on her face when you successfully demonstrated a specific move she had taught you. Of course, you’ll never forget the moment you had her totally stunned, using a newly learned takedown move to pin her to the ground. A flame had been ignited in both of her eyes as she looked at you with something other than pride. It was an expression that you couldn't quite pinpoint, but you knew that if you had kept her pinned for any longer that you would've ended up doing something you'd regret; so, you were off of her quickly, laughing the obvious tension away and completely burying Abby's heated gaze in your mind and storing it for later.

When your eyes moved up from Abby's biceps and to face, you found she was already looking at you. She offered you a small smile, to which returned, feeling heat creep up your neck in embarrassment at being caught ogling. Either Abby didn't notice or chose not to comment, and whatever the case was, you were thankful.

She rested both of her elbows on her knees, spreading her legs as she leaned forward. Abby man-spreading was another sight to behold.

"So. How have you been doing?" She asked. 

Miserable. Because I miss you and I'm sorry for pushing you away but I'm in love with you and can't find the words. 

You opted for a simpler response. "I've been good. Honestly, this is the only exciting part of my week."

Abby chuckled. "Yeah, I hear you. How are you feeling about this, by the way?" 

There was some silence as you carefully picked out your next words. "A little anxious. But I'm proud of myself for being able to get this far away from the stadium."

"You should be proud. Overcoming your fears like this isn't easy," she said. "And just for the record, I always feel a little bit of anxiety before patrol. I think it's a good thing; it makes me more focused, and I feel like my senses are heightened." 

You nodded, clinging on to her words. "That's a nice way of looking at it. It's kind of comforting to know that Isaac's top Scar killer still gets a little nervous, too." You replied. 

Abby laughed at the statement, and there was that familiar warmth that spread through you. 

"Of course I do. I'm not fearless, you know. Aside from heights, there are plenty of other things that make me nervous." 

"Like what?" You inquired. 

Abby shifted in her seat. She looked away from you, turning her head to look at the scenery surrounding her. Immediately, your mouth soured, and you began mentally chastising yourself for making her feel uncomfortable. You were about to apologize and forget about the question all together until Abby spoke again. 

"Losing the people that I care about." She said softly. The tone of the conversation shifted from casual to something much more serious, and you looked at Abby pitifully at her confession. With the way Abby's eyes were downcast, you could tell that she was reminded of something – or someone. 

You wanted to reach out and place a comforting hand on her knee or squeeze her hand. Instead, you stayed put, opting to console her only verbally. 

"I'm sorry, Abby." Was all you could muster.

"Don't be." She replied, finally looking at you again with a barely noticeable grin on her face. 

There was a silence that settled between the both of you as the two of you continued to gaze at the scenery as Whitney drove. At some point, Whitney had called from the passenger's seat that they were almost there. 

The sound of Abby's throat clearing brought your attention back to her. 

"Hey, so… I wanted to talk to you about something." She started. 

You stiffened in your seat but you hoped that it didn't look obvious. "Shoot." You said in response. 

"It's about us." 

"Us?" You swallowed.

"Yeah. I mean, things have been weird, right?" 

Your eyebrows furrowed in slight confusion. "How so?" You asked.

"Has something been on your mind lately? You know you can tell me anything, right?" 

Not this time.

“Don’t worry about me, Abs.” You chuckled nervously. You threw her a smile that didn’t quite reach your eyes to ease her worrying.

Abby sighed. "But you’ve been so quiet these past few days. I really miss-”

"We have arrived!" Whitney yelled from the driver's seat after finding a place to park. Abby was immediately getting off of the truck, and you honestly wanted to forget all about patrol and continue the conversation you were having with her. But you knew what was the priority right now, and so you brushed off Abby's words, focusing on the task at hand.

The four of you exited the truck and began making your way toward a gas station. 

"Alright. Let's check for supplies." Whitney said, leading the way toward the entrance of the small store. She opened the door, her weapon at the ready, looking in all sorts of directions to make sure it was clear. She stepped aside to make room for you and Abby when she deemed it was safe. 

While Alice kept watch like the good girl she was, the three of you silently put whatever you could fit in your bags in terms of food and any other items that might be deemed useful. You managed to scavenge some good items, and you were amazed at just how many worthwhile supplies had been left behind. 

Everything was awfully quiet, almost too quiet. But you weren’t complaining.

You took a small break from scavenging when your eyes landed on a display of sunglasses. There were only a few on the rack, and many of them had broken lenses, but then you saw a pair of pink cat-eye glasses that looked practically untouched. You giggled in amusement, taking the glasses and trying them on just for the hell of it. 

There was a small mirror next to the rack, and when you stole a glance at your reflection, your quiet snickering turned into a louder, sharper laugh that you couldn't contain. Abby, upon hearing the sound, stopped browsing the aisle she was roaming in and went to go find you, only to smile at you fondly when she finally saw what you were up to.

For several minutes, you were pulling silly faces in the mirror, and even with something as small as a pair of funny looking glasses, you found yourself completely entertained.

You heard Abby walking up to you, so you whipped your head around to look at her. 

"How do I look?" You asked her, striking an absolutely ridiculous pose. You may have been hearing things, but you thought that you even heard Whitney chuckling from wherever she was in the store. 

Abby could only shake her head at your antics, but she did give you an answer. 

"Those really suit you." She replied. 

"Why, thank you. I think the hot pink goes really well with the tan of my cargo pants." You said, jokingly. 

Satisfied with your little fashion show, you put the glasses back where you found them. Abby was still standing next to you, her amused smile never leaving her face. Her expression was something you'd never seen her sport. Her gaze was soft as she looked upon you with eyes full of complete admiration, and you found yourself being locked in place, as if in a trance, returning the eye contact. 

You cleared your throat. "Did… did you want to try them on?" You asked. Abby shook her head, laughing to herself quietly. 

"I know these aren't really your style but… I don't know, I think you could rock them. Please?" You pleaded, drawing out the "e" in the word.

"You just want to laugh at me." Abby responded through a fit of giggles. 

"Nope, I swear I won't laugh." You said, shaking your head vehemently. But the smile tugging at the corners of your lips revealed your true intentions. 

Abby reluctantly agreed.

"Will you put them on for me?" She asked. Nodding excitedly, you picked up the glasses again and gestured for her to come closer to you. 

"Come here." You said. Abby did just that, standing directly in front of you. You swore you could feel her breath fanning across your face from the proximity.

Just as you were about to place the glasses on Abby's face, you heard a short and sharp whistle pierce the air. 

You and Abby froze, and you immediately dropped the glasses, removing your pistol from its holster. Abby did the same thing, recognizing that sound instantly. 

"I'm not the only one who heard that, right?" Whitney asked as she rounded the corner from one the aisles. 

"Definitely not the only one. We've got Scars in the area." Abby confirmed. You felt every hair on your body stand on edge. You saw Abby, Whitney, and Alice take cover, so you followed suit, hiding behind the counter where the now useless cash register sat. 

You closed your eyes, trying to recall all the hours of gun and defense training that you learned in this very moment, but it was all hazy. You were starting to feel the effects of fear now, your palms sweaty, causing you to constantly re-adjust your grip of the gun. You found that what Abby had mentioned earlier was definitely proving to be true – although you were terrified, you felt hyper aware of every noise and small movement in the corner of your eye. 

You heard another short whistle again, but this time, you could definitely hear the barely there footsteps of a group of Seraphites walking toward the store. 

From the counter, you slowly raised your head, trying to see how many there were. You counted three from where you were crouched. 

While you were making a mental note of how many Seraphites there were, you failed to notice Abby sneaking up next to you. You felt her touch your arm, and you flinched, but Abby was quick to cover your mouth before any sounds of surprise escaped. 

"Sorry. It's just me." She whispered, removing her hand. "There's six in total. Three inside and three outside. We're gonna try to take them out quietly." Abby spoke. You nodded, trying to cling onto her words but all you could hear was your heartbeat in your ears, beating wildly.

Abby could sense the anxiety coursing through you and placed a comforting hand on your shoulder. "This is what you're good at, right? All those moves we practiced, now you finally get to use them. You can do this." 

You shook your head. Your eyes began to sting, serving as a telltale sign that tears would soon follow. You wanted the ground to swallow you up in this moment, feelings of inadequacy bubbling within you. Abby saw the faraway look in your eyes and immediately tried to quell any negative feelings you were experiencing.

"You can do this. Repeat it." 

"Abby-" 

"Say it." She urged, but there was no harshness in her tone. 

"I… I can do this." You said, and maybe you were beginning to give into false hope, but even just saying those words out loud seemed to put you in a different mindset. Abby grinned, and with that, she scurried off, probably to go get her first kill. You could hear the sound of quiet struggling from elsewhere in the store, followed by dead silence, and you made the assumption that Whitney probably already took care of one, leaving five still standing. 

You heard another go down, this time hearing the soft thud of the body hitting the floor. You couldn't let them do all the work, no matter how badly you wanted to.

With one final exhale, you were set in motion. 

There was one checking out the storage room in the back of the store, making sure the coast was clear, you followed behind the unassuming Seraphite, who carried a pistol. 

You replaced your gun with a handy combat knife that you carried around, closing the distance between you and the Seraphite slowly but surely. It looked like it was going to be a perfect kill. 

Until you stepped on a discarded bag of chips, the sound loudly making your presence known. 

The Seraphite froze, and slowly turned around. When her eyes landed on you, she gasped, her eyes wide. 

"There's a Wolf in here!" She yelled, and in a split second, the pistol was fired, but you managed to dodge out of the way in time. The Seraphite didn't waste a second in trying to shoot again, but you were quicker than her. 

The Seraphite's alert quickly caused chaos around you; you heard gunshots in the store, and you briefly thought about Abby and Whitney and hoped that they were holding up okay. But that thought was fleeting, and instead you focused on your own safety. 

With your knife, you went straight for her stomach, the gun in her hands dropping to the ground almost immediately. You pushed her up against a wall, and her hands were trying to grip anything that she could reach. She tugged at your arms and even tried to claw at your face, but you pushed the knife in deeper, and soon enough her body began to relax. You were looking directly at her, and it was during this moment that you finally understood what it meant to truly watch the life leave someone's eyes. 

Despite the fact that this woman had tried to kill you mere seconds ago, it was a sorrowful sight, watching the realization hit her like crashing waves against the shore that she was going to die. When she completely stopped moving, and fell to the ground, blankly staring into space, it was only then that you realized the entire store had fallen silent. 

You wiped your knife clean on your cargo pants, the vibrant color of the woman's blood staining the fabric.

You calmly walked out of the storage room, letting your feet guide the way as you currently felt like you were outside of your body. You thought you heard Abby and Whitney saying something to you, but their voices fell on deaf ears. All you could think about was how you couldn’t breathe in this damn store and needed to get out.

You slammed open the doors, your knees immediately falling onto the ground below. You felt like you were suffocating, your chest tight and your stomach feeling as if it had been flipped upside down. 

There was an incessant ringing in your ears, a ringing sound so loud that it was all you could focus on. You didn’t even notice the Seraphite that was barreling toward you until it was too late.

It felt like the wind had gotten knocked out of you as the man straddled you. Whatever had possessed you to take out the Seraphite woman in the storage room was not returning. There were sirens going off in your mind, and you knew you had to do something, anything to get this man off of you otherwise you would die . You knew this, and yet, when the man had his hands around your throat, you couldn’t lift even a finger. His face, scrunched up in pure anger and hatred, was getting blurrier and blurrier, the trees around the both of you becoming large blobs of green. The man was practically crushing you with his weight, and it was then you realized the futility in fighting back.

You were lying there for what felt like an eternity, wondering which breath would be your last, until the man was suddenly thrown off of you. 

You sat up immediately, air rushing back into your lungs all at once as you you coughing uncontrollably. When you regained your vision, you saw Abby beside you, now on top of the man, beating the ever living shit out of him.

The sound that was produced when Abby’s fists met with the man’s face made you physically cringe, and it was even harder to watch, so instead, you opted for closing your eyes, relishing in the fact that you were still alive to feel the sunlight hitting your skin. 

“Abby! Abby, stop!” You heard Whitney say, and the sound of Abby’s punches eventually ceased. 

When your eyes opened again, you took in the state Abby was in. Her eyes were blown wide, her chest rising and falling in quick breaths. Both of her knuckles had been painted red, and you knew that she was probably going to wake up with pretty black and blue bruises the next morning with how forceful her punches were. 

There was a silence that fell over the three of you as you all waited for the adrenaline to leave your systems. You knew that just sitting here out in the open may not have been a good idea, but in the haze of your fatigue, you were more than grateful for those few seconds of tranquility. 

"We should go." Whitney said, grabbing Alice and heading toward the truck. You and Abby had waited for a few more moments. 

"Are you hurt?" Abby asked. 

You shook your head wordlessly, emptily staring at the ground below you.

"You're sure?" 

You nodded your head this time to confirm. You didn't trust your voice enough to speak. 

Abby nodded, standing up and offering out her hand to you. You took it, and when she pulled you up, you made the mistake of looking at her face. 

The expression on her face could not all be compared to the one she had in the store when she watched you put on those stupid glasses. No, this one was much more hardened, her eyebrows furrowed ever so slightly. 

She's upset at you. For being so careless. 

No, worse. She's disappointed. 

Abby always knew when you were drifting, and she placed a hand on your shoulder to pull you out whatever thoughts were brewing up in your mind. You felt your eyes stinging again. 

"Are you with me?" She asked, and it was then you realized that the two of you were standing right in front of the truck bed. You didn't realize your thoughts had halted you in your tracks. Looking away apologetically, you just nodded again, knowing that if you opened your mouth it would all come crashing down. 

Abby helped you onto the back of the truck, and when everyone was seated, Whitney drove off. The entire ride was unsettling. You could feel Abby's eyes on you the entire ride, but you couldn't return the eye contact.

When you returned to the stadium, you wasted no time in getting off of the truck and heading back toward your room. Whitney was quick to stop you, gently touching your shoulder.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” She asked. You shrugged.

“Don’t worry about me, Whitney. I just need to be alone for a few minutes.” You replied. 

“I understand. Abby and I were gonna grab a bite to eat. You want me to get you something?” She asked. At the mention of Abby, you glanced over Whitney’s shoulder, and you saw the woman in question leaning against the truck, her worried eyes already staring you down. 

“No thanks.” You muttered quickly, tearing your eyes off of Abby, her concerned expression burned into your mind. You ran off to your room, and before Whitney could ask if you were sure, you were already long gone. 

You had taken a quick shower before heading to your room, staying in there for longer than necessary as you relentlessly tried to scrub away the build up of dirt and crime from today’s patrol. When your skin had practically been scrubbed raw, you changed into your typical loungewear, an old, slightly oversized shirt and sweatpants.

When you made it to your room, you closed and locked the door behind you, walking with hurried steps to your bed. As you relaxed atop the firmness of your mattress, it was then you realized just how exhausted you were. Patrol had drained every bit of energy from your body, and the soft cotton of your clothing as well as calming effects of a hot shower was only adding to your tiredness. You didn’t even try to fight it when you felt your eyelids getting heavy…

But once your eyes closed, you didn’t see darkness. Instead, you saw the Seraphite woman’s face. You saw her eyes and the way they slowly took on that cold, blank stare. You saw the man that had attempted to strangle you and the pure, murderous intent in his eyes as he tried to take your life.

You shook your head as if that would dispel the images that came to your mind, eyebrows furrowing as your body began reacting on its own. You could feel the intensity of your rapidly beating heart, perspiration coating your skin, as if you were back at the convenience store and not in the comfort of your own room. 

Your brain was replaying the events at the convenience store today, except it was slightly different. The man was on top of you, strangling you, but this time, Abby wasn’t there. Nor Whitney. Not even Alice. You were all alone as the man on top of you kept you pinned to the ground. The world around you was hazy as your vision began to weaken. The ringing in your ears was back and stronger than ever before; it was deafening.

Right before your consciousness left you, you saw another person standing above the man. It was the woman you had stabbed. The knife was still plunged in her stomach, but she was clearly alive and standing. She wore a smile that was far too wide and had far too many teeth on display. 

You shot up in bed, letting out a loud shriek.

You heard pounding on your door.

“___? What’s going on? Please, open the door!”

You could recognize that voice anywhere.

You stood up, slowly and on shaky legs to open the door. Abby was standing on the other side, clutching a burrito in her hands, her eyes wide. Her hair was down, dressed in another one of her tattered tanks and sweatpants.

“Please tell me you're okay.” She said urgently.

Just from Abby’s presence alone, you felt like you could relax. Like you were truly safe.

“Yeah… I’m fine,” I’m fine now that you’re here . “It was just a bad dream.” You replied, and neither one of you could deny the clear shakiness in your voice. Abby’s gaze softened immediately, and she wasted no time in wrapping her arms around you, holding you close against her rigid body. Your arms, almost instinctively, snaked around her back, and you buried your face in one of her broad shoulders. You could tell she had just washed up as well, the scent of pine completely engulfing you. She was still standing in the doorway, and you had no doubt that some people were walking by and watching all of this go down, but in the moment you couldn’t care less. 

You were clinging to Abby for a bit longer than what would be considered normal, and once you felt the heat rush to your cheeks in embarrassment, you pulled away. Abby’s hands lingered around your waist for a fraction of a second but to you, it felt like they were there for an eternity, and when she removed them you swore you could feel the ghost of her touch.

Abby awkwardly glanced at the burrito in her hands, oblivious to your panicking. “I, um… brought you this, because it’s been a couple of hours and you haven’t eaten anything yet, so…” She said, holding it out to you.

A faint smile tugged at your lips. “Thank you.” You said, accepting it, even though you weren’t terribly hungry at the moment; but you were appreciative nonetheless.

“No problem.” Abby responded. “Can I… come in?”

You cleared your throat. “Yeah, of course.” You said, stepping aside. Abby returned the smile, doing just that, and you shut the door again once she was inside. 

She sat comfortably atop your bed, and you joined her, sitting close next to her, your leg brushing against hers. You set the still wrapped up burrito on your bedside table where you knew it would grow cold. 

“I, um,” Abby began. “I wanted to check on you, too. I couldn’t stop thinking about you today.” 

You froze, not sure how to react to the fact that Abby just admitted to you she was thinking about you. You knew you had to say something, though, or else Abby would start getting worried.

“Oh… really?” You asked, mentally cursing yourself for sounding so out of it. 

“Yeah. I saw you storm off earlier when talking to Whitney. I wanted to follow you but I knew you probably wanted space. The whole time I was eating, though, I was just… really hoping you were alright.”

Your heart warmed at Abby’s words. “I’m sorry for worrying you.” You said. Abby shook her head fervently.

“No, it’s okay, I was just in my own head. How are you feeling right now, anyway?”

You paused to deeply consider your response. You could’ve easily just told her that you were doing fine, to rid Abby of any concern over you; but she was always truthful with you, so it would only be right to be truthful with her. She always knew the best ways to comfort you, anyway, and you knew she would never judge you for anything. In the relatively short time that you’ve gotten to know her, that was one thing she made clear to you from the beginning.

“I’m still a little… shaken by what happened today. That’s what my dream was about, actually.” You started, speaking softly. 

“Oh.” Abby said quietly. “I totally understand. Patrol today was scary for everyone involved.” 

You shook your head. “Yeah, but… I can’t help but think it’s all my fault…”

Abby looked at you quizzically. “What’s all your fault?”

“I stepped on a fucking bag of chips,” you laughed, but it was completely humorless. “And then after I killed that woman, I just ran out. It was stupid of me. I’m sure I scared the shit out of you and Whitney.” 

Abby remained silent.

“And of course, you had to save me. You literally trained me, taught me everything I needed to know and I still got myself in that situation. I just feel like I don’t belong here. What good am I to anybody if I can’t… If I can’t…” 

The tremor in your voice returned, and Abby was quick to get off the bed and kneel in front of you, cradling your face with her large hands.

“Hey. Look at me. Please.” She said softly.

It took you several long seconds, but eventually you met her eyes. 

“You do belong here. I don’t want you thinking otherwise for so much as a second. Every WLF in this stadium brings something to table and you are no different.”

“But Abby, I–”

“Please, listen to me.” Abby interjected. You didn’t say anything else and let her continue.

“It was your very first patrol. People make mistakes. You were frozen in fear, and that’s okay . That’s why we go in groups in the first place, so when another person gets themselves into trouble, someone else is there to help. You are alive and breathing and that is what’s most important, right?”

You nodded.

Abby removed her hands from your face, opting to hold your hands instead. “You are stronger than you know. You conquered your biggest fear of leaving the stadium, and you did well for your first patrol. You should be proud of yourself. I am definitely proud of you.”

You looked at Abby with surprise all over your face. “So you’re not… disappointed?”

Abby released an incredulous laugh. “Oh my god, no. Never.” 

You smiled. It was a wide smile, one that stretched from ear to ear. Abby felt herself instantly mimicking the expression. 

“I’m so glad I have you around,” you said. Abby chuckled.

“I got you. Always.”

As the two of you stared at each other, there was a blanket of silence that fell over the both of you. Both of your faces were mere inches apart, and suddenly the eye contact was making you feel shy. 

Now is your chance. 

You might not get another opportunity like this.

You ignored the voices in your head.

“Well, um… It’s getting late. I’m sure you have stuff to do tomorrow morning.” You said, your heart beating so fast you thought it would pop straight out of your chest. Abby stood up, and you could’ve sworn you saw her frown for half a second. But your mind was probably playing tricks on you. Right?

“Yeah… No doubt Isaac will have something for me to do.” Abby said. She began walking toward the door. You already missed her and she hadn’t even left yet.

She stood in front of the door, hand resting on the doorknob. She turned to you. 

“Well… goodnight.” She said.

“Yeah. Goodnight.” You replied stiffly.

Abby opened the door. But before she could even put one foot outside, you stopped her in her tracks.

“Actually, wait.” You said, standing up abruptly.

Abby didn’t say anything, waiting for you to continue.

You sighed. You could hear your heartbeat in your ears now and your palms felt clammy.

“I… shit. I didn’t prepare for this.” You said, laughing out loud. Abby found herself grinning but she was still visibly confused.

“We haven’t known each other for that long. But honestly it feels like I’ve known you my entire life.” You began. Slowly, Abby closed the door, leaning against it as she listened to you.

“I don’t even know what I would do without you. I’m just… so grateful for you, and… fuck…”

You went back and forth in your mind, contemplating your next words carefully. Months of friendship was on the line, and what you wanted to say next had the potential of throwing it all down the drain. But it was a risk you were willing to take.

“I love you.” You confessed. “And not in the– the platonic way. I… shit… I’m sorry if that was too forward but–”

Abby said your name softly, stopping your rambling. You stood there, nervously waiting for rejection.

But rejection isn’t what you got.

“I love you, too. So much.”

You could’ve fainted. “Really? Abby Anderson, are you messing with me?” You said, a smile lighting up your face.

“I am dead serious. I am so fucking glad you said something or else I was going to go crazy.” Abby laughed.

You found yourself laughing too, completely dumbfounded. “My god… we both felt this way for so long and neither of us had a clue. What the hell.” There were tears in your eyes now, but not the sad kind.

When you had calmed down, wiping the wetness from your face, you spoke again. “So, what now?” You asked.

With a smirk on her face, Abby walked over to you, placing her hands on your waist. You were starting to feel like they belonged there.

“There’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Can I show you?”

You already knew what Abby was asking, nodding fervently. “Holy shit. Yes. Please.” You replied.

Abby closed the small distance between the two of you, her lips connecting with yours gently. The both of you stayed like that for several moments, Abby being the first one to pull away. She rested her forehead against yours.

Kissing her is exactly what you thought it would be. It almost felt magical – it was like her lips had put a spell on you, a spell that made you want to continue kissing her forever. It was as if you were floating, electricity running through your veins.

“Do it again.” You whispered softly. 

Abby didn’t need you to repeat yourself, capturing your lips in yet another passionate kiss. The second one was much more intense, your hands tangled in Abby’s hair as the both of you slowly waddled over to the bed.

Abby laid down first, allowing you to settle on top of her, your lips never staying apart for more than a couple of seconds. You could barely breathe but you couldn’t get enough. In a frenzy of lips, tongue, and hands everywhere, neither of you heard the sound of the door opening until it was too late.

“Hey, how’re you– oh shit!”

The sound of Whitney’s voice had the two of you breaking apart immediately. You scrambled off of Abby, straightening out your clothes and wiping away the wetness that coated your lips. Abby sat up, but instead of being mortified, she kept that smirk on her face, clearly amused by the situation.

“Whitney– Jesus Christ, have you ever heard of knocking?” You exclaimed. Whitney doubled over in laughter, clearly finding joy in your suffering.

“I’m so sorry! I was distracted!” She said, holding up her PS Vita that you just now noticed she was holding.

“You and those goddamn games,” You muttered under your breath.

“Well, I see you two finally came around. God, I can’t wait to rub this in Nora’s face.”

“What?” You said, visibly confused.

“Oh, me and Nora had a bet going. Now she has to do my dishes for a week straight.” Whitney said. Your jaw dropped.

“A bet? Whitney, I can’t believe you.” You said through a fit of chuckles, not being able to suppress your own laughter either.

“I’m not even surprised.” Abby chimed in.

Whitney crossed her arms, leaning against the door. “Okay, so. Tell me everything. Who confessed first? Who kissed who first?” She asked. You rolled your eyes.

“I can give you the details later.” You said.

Whitney sighed, but she didn’t bother trying to pull the information out of you. 

“Fine.” She said, walking over to her bed and plopping down atop the sheets, her eyes returning to the PS Vita screen. 

You and Abby stood there awkwardly. Whitney glanced at the two of you, and then gasped.

“Oh! I’m so sorry, I should give you guys privacy, huh? Do you want me to go?”

You immediately shook your head. “What? Whitney, no. I’m not kicking you out of our room-”

“You can stay in mine.” Abby interrupted. You whipped your head around to look at her.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Manny is hanging out with some woman tonight, so it’s just me.” 

“Okay, then.” You said, smiling happily. Abby looked back at you with pure adoration in her gaze, leaning in to kiss you again. And again. And again.

“Okay. Ew. Leave.”

You chuckled at Whitney’s disgust. “Goodnight, Whitney.” You said, grabbing Abby’s hand and going toward the door.

Whitney decided to say one last thing before the both of you left.

“Remember. We have thin walls around here. So don’t be too loud-”

“Oh my god, shut up.” You cut her off before she could even finish her sentence, leaving the room. You could just faintly hear Whitney’s breathy laugh as you closed the door.

“She’s so annoying.” You muttered, but there was nothing but fondness in your tone.

“I just can’t believe that she knew we were into each other before either of us realized it.” Abby said. The two of you began walking down the hall to her room, hands clasped together and arms swinging slightly as you both walked.

Abby’s words had reminded you of an earlier conversation with Whitney. “Holy shit. She literally told me.”

“Told you what?” She asked.

“Before we went out on patrol, she… she told me you felt the same way. I thought she was crazy so I asked her how she knew, and she just said ‘I see things’ or something like that. You know, all cryptic and shit. But I guess she really does see things.”

Abby shook her head, chuckling at Whitney’s antics. “Wow. Again, I really can’t say I’m surprised.”

Eventually, you two made it to Abby’s room, and you both wasted no time in getting in bed together, holding each other close. It was a small bed, just like yours, definitely not made for two people, but you made it work. You were practically on top of Abby in order to fit, but it was clear she didn’t mind it one bit.

You had one leg over her midsection while one of Abby’s hands stroked your back calmly and gently. You could die happy in this position. 

The stadium wasn’t your home. Abby was.

— epilouge —

“Hey, Bri,” You greeted, getting ready to help her wash some clothes for today. As you began scrubbing the clothes over the washboard, you started humming a random tune, a light smile decorating your face.

“You’re in a good mood.” Bri noted. 

“Aren’t I usually in a good mood?” You asked, chuckling at nothing in particular.

“I mean, I guess, but… you just seem extra lively today.”

From where you were in the bleachers, you looked out and saw Abby walking down the stairs, heading out to do patrol. She knew you were washing clothes today, and she turned her head to look at you, a killer smirk resting on her face. She winked.

“Yeah… I guess I am.” You replied, the fondness in your eyes clear as day.

#abby x reader #abby anderson x reader #abby anderson fanfic #abby anderson fic #abby anderson fanfiction #abby anderson fluff #abby anderson tlou2 #abby tlou2 #abby the last of us #abby anderson the last of us #abby anderson x you #abby x you

[j0elmill3r]

That Girl Is a Monster

Pairing - None really, there's some Tommy Miller x Niece!Reader at the end

CW - Violence, Murder, it's implied heavily that the reader could be mentally ill, gore (please let me know if i missed any!)

Summary - Baby girl gets her promised revenge on behalf of her father, and god does she make it bloody.

Word Count - 1.4k

A/N - This is a pretty dark one, baby girl is simply ✨unhinged✨ in this. As always, feedback, likes, and reblogs are always appreciated!

Joel Miller Masterlist

Your newfound obsession with getting revenge for your father's death was at this point concerning. You were hellbent on it, and would kill anyone who stood in the way of your long-term goal - Your uncle, Tommy, had noticed your recent bout of mood instability, and he knew it wasn't just grieving, as you had made it out to be. You never believed yourself to be a violent person. You had seen the animalistic and almost feral way your father could be when he wanted to be, you never thought you could ever feel as much anger as he did to make him act that way.

That was, until, you stumbled across the woman who had murdered your father in cold blood.

You limped your way through the facility, injured in your fight against who remained of the Washington Liberation Front - Consisting of those who you hadn't crossed paths with in your bloody quest for revenge; Even if it meant the deaths of Abby's ex-boyfriend Owen and his heavily pregnant girlfriend Mel and their unborn baby. You couldn't take any prisoners, what kind of example would you be setting if you did? You had everything taken from you - Your family, your childhood, your chance of a normal, happy life - What had you done in a past life to deserve this? To lose everything you'd ever known, only to be left with your uncle Tommy. You staggered up the metal stairs up to a platform, in which its beyond was the location of the very woman you had been hunting - As if she were your prey.

You had never experienced such anger as you did the moment you met eyes with Abby Anderson, if you didn't know any better, you would have sworn you saw a slither of remorse in the girl's eyes. She did, however, almost seem terrified by your heaving chest, an almost animalistic look of fury on your face. She picked up the knife which sat on the table beside her, arming herself as you charged towards her with a yell.

"I told you! I told you I'll fucking kill you!" You cried, tackling the girl to the floor with a thud, your chest continuing its heaving motion as you straddled the girl. Abby swiped her knife at you, and you cried out in pain as she cut along your arm, pushing you off of her as you yelped in pain. She groaned as she pushed herself up onto her feet, stalking over to you as you too got up onto your feet. "You're fucking dead, Anderson." You threatened her.

"Oh yeah?" She humoured you, chuckling as she shook her head at you. "You know what? You look like your dad, but I'm sure you'll look even more like him with a fucking crack in your skull." Abby charged at you, bending you backwards over the table behind you, her knife held at your face, stopped only by your struggling hands, holding the knife away from your face. You whimpered as you struggled, face to face with the girl who had so brutally killed your father. As Abby pressed further onto you, you grunted out as you pushed her away from you and onto the floor once more. Coughing from being winded as a result of being forcefully backed into the table, you held your wounded side, taking a running kick at Abby as she lay on the floor.

She cried out as your heavy boots collided with her face, once, and then twice - As you went in for the third kick, she shoved her knife into your calf, dragging it down as you screamed out in pain. You fell to the ground beside her, face to face once more. This was when you knew only one of you were getting out of this fight, and you would be damned if it wasn't you - You refused to have come all this way to avenge your father and lose.

"Why?" You asked her. You didn't know what had driven you to ask the question, but you wanted to know. Why did she take your dad away from you.

"Because. He killed my dad," Abby told you. Further anger boiled within you, fuelling your desire to inflict pain on the girl who lay beside you. Forgetting about your injuries and fuelled by pure adrenaline, you kicked Abby's knife away from her, stomping on her hand below you. Your chest continued to heave with your heavy breaths, your face void of emotion as you considered the most efficient way to hurt Abby - Your inner self knew that this wasn't you, that there was something dangerously wrong with you for wanting to inflict so much pain on one person; You knew that if little you saw what you were doing, she would be terrified, you now the kind of person that you needed your dad to protect you from.

But now your dad was no longer here, you realised that this, this is what you had to do to survive.

You staggered over to where you had kicked Abby's knife, picking it up and inspecting it carefully as you held the weapon in your hands. You stopped in your tracks as you looked down to realise Abby was no longer where she had been laying, but she left you no time to consider her whereabouts before jumping onto your back. You cried out as she held a wire to your throat, pulling on it tightly to cut off your airways. You struggled as you clawed at your neck to try and release the wire, but it done no good and you continued to struggle and gasp for air until you remembered the knife in your hand, quickly stabbing it into Abby's thigh and running backwards into a wall as she let go of the wire which she had held against your neck tightly. She fell to the floor with a grunt, and you turned quickly, kicking her in the face once again.

"I warned you, even before you killed my dad, that I would kill you," You knelt down beside Abby, who grabbed at her bleeding thigh. "And you still didn't listen, even with a pre-warning." You gave her no time to react before you stabbed her in the chest with her own knife, listening as she groaned and then gasped, you took the knife out. Stabbed her.

Take the knife out.

Stab.

Knife out.

Stab.

Knife. Out.

Stab.

It became a steady pattern, even as Abby bled out, already dead. You repeatedly stabbed the girl, taking out all of your pent up anger and sadness on her, her blood coating your hands and clothes. You didn't notice your uncle enter the room, him stopping as he took in the sight in front of him - You were covered in blood, both laughing and crying hysterically.

"Y/N," He couldn't lie, he was terrified of you and what you could do to him as he watched you continually stab the body under you. "Y/N!" He pulled you off of Abby's lifeless body, grabbing the offending weapon from your tight grasp and throwing it across the room away from you.

"I told her! I fucking told her Tommy!" You screamed, struggling in your uncle’s tight hold. "I warned her! Now she knows! I killed her and I showed her!" You were hysterical as you yelled, leaving Tommy with the only option of knocking you out so he could get you out of the building and somewhere safe where he could tend to your injuries. He couldn't help but think about how Joel would react to how you had acted - Violent and almost animalistic in your attacks towards the girl who had taken him from you.

He also thought of the promise he'd made with Joel - If anything happened to him, Tommy would look after you, no matter how old you were, you would always need someone. And Tommy intended to keep his promise to his brother.

Joel Miller Taglist - Want to join? Fill out this form here!

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#joel miller x daughter!reader #joel miller hbo #joel miller x reader #joel miller #joel the last of us #joel tlou #tommy miller #tommy miller x niece!reader #hbo the last of us #the last of us #the last of us fanfiction #angst #x daughter #x daughter reader #x daughter!reader

[angelkissiies]

in this light, you’re mine

abby anderson x reader

cw : angst, fluff, pining

wc : 1K

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ for a more immersive experience, it’s recommended that you listen to the song attached ˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆

The day had come and went, casting a familiar haze onto the walls of your bedroom. The large windows of the stadium rooms proved useful, showering your intertwined bodies with the last haze of sun before the night's frost took over. It was times like these you wished the days never ended, you wished the night never came. With the slow descent of the sun, you saw the rift begin to pull the two of you apart, because every night like clockwork- she made her way back to him.

“Abby..” You spoke, hand running through her honeyed waves as you felt her shift on your chest. You loved her, in every sense of the word, which is why you’d taken to being the best friend she needed. Though, now, the feeling had blossomed in your chest- making you want to be much closer than friends.

The girl made a small noise of acknowledgement, her face buried in the fabric that covered your stomach, muffling her words- if she spoke any.

It was moments like this where you thought, for just a second, that she loved you. Her body was relaxed, full weight tossed upon you as if you were the only person in the world. She hadn’t spoken in an hour, allowing the silence to fill the drift between the two of you, something you’d noticed she couldn’t do with him. It was reserved solely for you. And as much as it hurt, you soaked these moments up- taking the love she’d give you greedily. God only knows when she’d take it away and trade it for the comfort of the man she called boyfriend.

“I-..,” You couldn’t find the words to say to her, though you had so much to say. You wanted to spit it all out, to tell her the depth of your devotion to her, to let her know that you would always be hers. Even if she wasn’t yours. Your heart was trapped in a limbo, perpetually captured by a girl who seemed to only have eyes for one other and wrapped up in these moments of pure bliss that furthered your deluded imagination. “Nevermind.” You whisper in defeat, not willing to risk the domesticity you’d become so familiar with.

How did it even come to this? How did you go from being friends to whatever this was? Just a year ago you’d never imagined even being able to hug the wry girl but now here you were, watching the sunset drop below the horizon with the girl so close she might as well have been a part of you. It would never make sense to you, the pace in which you’d gained the trust and love of someone so naturally off put by people. Maybe it was the whole reason you were found by the washington liberation front, maybe it was some fucked up fate you’d been allowed for the sins of your past. Whatever it was, you thanked it.

You always knew that somehow this would end in heartbreak, as you only were granted these moments when Owen was away. When the dove in your arms felt free enough to fly home to you. Was it real? You didn’t know and didn’t want to ask.

In the light of dusk, she was yours.

Abby shifted, turning enough to be able to look up at you with doe eyes. “I love you, (y/n). I don’t know what I'd do without you.” She whispered, settling back in to rest on your soft tummy. It was so simple with her, or at least it should’ve been, the love was so pure. You couldn’t imagine anyone else being in a place you reserved so especially for her.

The words made your heart leap, and once she turned away, your eyes pricked with the blossom of tears. As she rested upon you, you watched as her free hand toyed with the necklace that Owen had gotten her for her birthday. You wanted her. You needed her. She was so close but somehow still out of reach, yearning did nothing when the object of your affections was actively thinking of someone else whilst with you. You tasted metal from how hard you bit your tongue.

“I love you too, Abs.” Was all you could muster, chest slightly hiccuping as you bit back the sobs that bubbled in you. You dared not disturb the girl, watching as her hand dropped to rest upon your free one. It was so simple, but it filled your stomach with guilty knots. You spent so long longing for her touch, only to get it and think of the man she had waiting for back in her room. It made you sick to your stomach to think of how she loved him, how much he took for granted as he complained about her excessive display of care. It made you so fucking sick.

But right now, she was yours.

Softly leaning into your touch every time you ran a hand through her hair, sighing in contentment as you drew tiny patterns into her exposed shoulders, murmuring small ‘i love you’s’ as she fell in and out of love sleep.

Before you knew it, the girl had begun letting out small snores, falling asleep and effectively trapping you beneath her. Her back rose and fell with every breath she took, mesmerizing you as you mapped out constellations her freckles had made a map of. It was as if her life story was here, recorded in tiny brown dots along her rosy skin. It made you draw a soft breath as you let your hand ghost over the spots, thinking of how much love you carried in the depths of your heart for her. More love than she had freckles to account for.

The silver chain of her necklace caught your attention as you admired her, and for a moment you wanted to laugh. Owen had gotten her silver. You never really paid much mind, but now you wished you had.

Everyone knew that Abby Anderson wore gold.

Everyone but Owen.

#abby anderson ff #abby the last of us #abby x reader #abby anderson x female reader #abby anderson x reader #abby anderson brainrot #abby anderson x reader x ellie williams #abby anderson x you #abby anderson tlou2 #tlou #tlou2 #tlou part 2 #tlou ff #Spotify

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is an excellent summary of research that was done on two major mainstream news publications--The Washington Post and The New York Times--regarding whether the content of their front pages (from Sept. 1 to Nov. 8, 2022) provided readers with information that would help them to better understand policy differences between Democrats and Republicans in the leadup to the 2022 election. Unfortunately, the study discovered that these "liberal" newspapers of record both tended to post entertaining "horse race and campaign palace intrigue" articles rather than articles discussing political party policy differences.

When these two newspapers did report on policy issues, surprisingly (especially given its liberal reputation) the Times covered more topics related to Republican interests (i.e., "China, immigration, and crime"); whereas, the Post covered more topics of greater interest to Democrats (i.e., "affirmative action, police reform, LGBTQ rights")

Below are the opening and closing paragraphs from the article, which sum up the importance of how the mainstream media shapes public perceptions of election issues--often in ways that could wittingly or unwittingly help dangerous politicians like Trump win powerful positions in our government.

Seven years ago, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, media analysts rushed to explain Donald Trump’s victory. Misinformation was to blame, the theory went, fueled by Russian agents and carried on social networks. But as researchers, we wondered if fascination and fear over “fake news” had led people to underestimate the influence of traditional journalism outlets. After all, mainstream news organizations remain an important part of the media ecosystem—they’re widely read and watched; they help set the agenda, including on social networks. We decided to look at what had been featured on the printed front page of the New York Times in the three months leading up to Election Day. Of a hundred and fifty articles that discussed the campaign, only a handful mentioned policy; the vast majority covered horse race politics or personal scandals. Most strikingly, the Times ran ten front-page stories about Hillary Clinton’s email server. “If voters had wanted to educate themselves on issues,” we concluded, “they would not have learned much from reading the Times.” [...] The choices made by major publishers are not wrong, per se, for the same reason that one newsroom cannot objectively know how to cover an issue, or how much to cover it: no one can. Still, editorial choices are undeniably choices—and they will weigh heavily on the upcoming presidential race. Outlets can and should maintain a commitment to truth and accuracy. But absent an earnest and transparent assessment of what they choose to emphasize—and what they choose to ignore—their readers will be left misinformed. [color emphasis added]

[edited]

#mainstream media #political coverage #warped front pages #donald trump #republicans #democrats #the new york times #the washington post #columbia journalism review

[mariacallous]

“How much evil we must do in order to do good,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors to do great evil to prevent the incalculably greater evil of a world ruled by its most aggressive regimes. He was witnessing the onset of another global conflict in which the United States would periodically transgress its own values in order to defend them. But the fundamental question Niebuhr raised—how liberal states can reconcile worthy ends with the unsavory means needed to attain them—is timeless. It is among the most vexing dilemmas facing the United States today.

U.S. President Joe Biden took office pledging to wage a fateful contest between democracy and autocracy. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he summoned like-minded nations to a struggle “between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Biden’s team has indeed made big moves in its contest with China and Russia, strengthening solidarity among advanced democracies that want to protect freedom by keeping powerful tyrannies in check. But even before the war between Hamas and Israel presented its own thicket of problems, an administration that has emphasized the ideological nature of great-power rivalry was finding itself ensnared by a morally ambiguous world.

In Asia, Biden has bent over backward to woo a backsliding India, a communist Vietnam, and other not so liberal states. In Europe, wartime exigencies have muted concerns about creeping authoritarianism on NATO’s eastern and southern fronts. In the Middle East, Biden has concluded that Arab dictators are not pariahs but vital partners. Defending a threatened order involves reviving the free-world community. It also, apparently, entails buttressing an arc of imperfect democracies and outright autocracies across much of the globe.

Biden’s conflicted strategy reflects the realities of contemporary coalition building: when it comes to countering China and Russia, democratic alliances go only so far. Biden’s approach also reflects a deeper, more enduring tension. American interests are inextricably tied to American values: the United States typically enters into great-power competition because it fears mighty autocracies will otherwise make the world unsafe for democracy. But an age of conflict invariably becomes, to some degree, an age of amorality because the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts.

Expect more of this. If the stakes of today’s rivalries are as high as Biden claims, Washington will engage in some breathtakingly cynical behavior to keep its foes contained. Yet an ethos of pure expediency is fraught with dangers, from domestic disillusion to the loss of the moral asymmetry that has long amplified U.S. influence in global affairs. Strategy, for a liberal superpower, is the art of balancing power without subverting democratic purpose. The United States is about to rediscover just how hard that can be.

A DIRTY GAME

Biden has consistently been right about one thing: clashes between great powers are clashes of ideas and interests alike. In the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years’ War was fueled by doctrinal differences no less than by the struggle for European primacy. In the late eighteenth century, the politics of revolutionary France upheaved the geopolitics of the entire continent. World War II was a collision of rival political traditions—democracy and totalitarianism—as well as rival alliances. “This was no accidental war,” German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop declared in 1940, “but a question of the determination of one system to destroy the other.” When great powers fight, they do so not just over land and glory. They fight over which ideas, which values, will chart humanity’s course.

In this sense, U.S. competition with China and Russia is the latest round in a long struggle over whether the world will be shaped by liberal democracies or their autocratic enemies. In World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, autocracies in Eurasia sought global primacy by achieving preeminence within that central landmass. Three times, the United States intervened, not just to ensure its security but also to preserve a balance of power that permitted the survival and expansion of liberalism—to “make the world safe for democracy,” in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s words. President Franklin Roosevelt made a similar point in 1939, saying, “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” Yet as Roosevelt understood, balancing power is a dirty game.

Western democracies prevailed in World War II only by helping an awful tyrant, Joseph Stalin, crush an even more awful foe, Adolf Hitler. They used tactics, such as fire-bombing and atomic-bombing enemy cities, that would have been abhorrent in less desperate times. The United States then waged the Cold War out of conviction, as President Harry Truman declared, that it was a conflict “between alternative ways of life”; the closest U.S. allies were fellow democracies that made up the Western world. Yet holding the line in a high-stakes struggle also involved some deeply questionable, even undemocratic, acts.

In a Third World convulsed by instability, the United States employed right-wing tyrants as proxies; it suppressed communist influence through coups, covert and overt interventions, and counterinsurgencies with staggering death tolls. To deter aggression along a global perimeter, the Pentagon relied on the threat of using nuclear weapons so destructive that their actual employment could serve no constructive end. To close the ring around the Soviet Union, Washington eventually partnered with another homicidal communist, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. And to ease the politics of containment, U.S. officials sometimes exaggerated the Soviet threat or simply deceived the American people about policies carried out in their name.

Strategy involves setting priorities, and U.S. officials believed that lesser evils were needed to avoid greater ones, such as communism running riot in vital regions or democracies failing to find their strength and purpose before it was too late. The eventual payoff from the U.S. victory in the Cold War—a world safer from autocratic predation, and safer for human freedom, than ever before—suggests that they were, on balance, correct. Along the way, the fact that Washington was pursuing such a worthy objective, against such an unworthy opponent, provided a certain comfort with the conflict’s ethical ambiguities. As NSC-68, the influential strategy document Truman approved in 1950, put it (quoting Alexander Hamilton), “The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.” When the West was facing a totalitarian enemy determined to remake humanity in its image, some pretty ugly means could, apparently, be justified.

That comfort wasn’t infinite, however, and the Cold War saw fierce fights over whether the United States was getting its priorities right. In the 1950s, hawks took Washington to task for not doing enough to roll back communism in Eastern Europe, with the Republican Party platform of 1952 deriding containment as “negative, futile, and immoral.” In the 1960s and 1970s, an avalanche of amorality—a bloody and misbegotten war in Vietnam, support for a coterie of nasty dictators, revelations of CIA assassination plots—convinced many liberal critics that the United States was betraying the values it claimed to defend. Meanwhile, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, a strategy that deemphasized ideological confrontation in search of diplomatic stability, led some conservatives to allege that Washington was abandoning the moral high ground. Throughout the 1970s and after, these debates whipsawed U.S. policy. Even in this most Manichean of contests, relating strategy to morality was a continual challenge.

In fact, Cold War misdeeds gave rise to a complex of legal and administrative constraints—from prohibitions on political assassination to requirements to notify congressional committees about covert action—that mostly remain in place today. Since the Cold War, these restrictions have been complemented by curbs on aid to coup makers who topple elected governments and to military units that engage in gross violations of human rights. Americans clearly regretted some measures they had used to win the Cold War. The question is whether they can do without them as global rivalry heats up again.

IDEAS MATTER

Threats from autocratic enemies heighten ideological impulses in U.S. policy by underscoring the clash of ideas that often drives global tensions. Since taking office, Biden has defined the threat from U.S. rivals, particularly China, in starkly ideological terms.

The world has reached an “inflection point,” Biden has repeatedly declared. In March 2021, he suggested that future historians would be studying “the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy.” At root, Biden has argued, U.S.-Chinese competition is a test of which model can better meet the demands of the modern era. And if China becomes the world’s preeminent power, U.S. officials fear, it will entrench autocracy in friendly countries while coercing democratic governments in hostile ones. Just witness how Beijing has used economic leverage to punish criticism of its policies by democratic societies from Australia to Norway. In making the system safe for illiberalism, a dominant China would make it unsafe for liberalism in places near and far.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforced Biden’s thesis. It offered a case study in autocratic aggression and atrocity and a warning that a world led by illiberal states would be lethally violent, not least for vulnerable democracies nearby. Coming weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin had sealed a “no limits” strategic partnership, the Ukraine invasion also raised the specter of a coordinated autocratic assault on the liberal international order. Ukraine, Biden explained, was the central front in a “larger fight for . . . essential democratic principles.” So the United States would rally the free world against “democracy’s mortal foes.”

The shock of the Ukraine war, combined with the steadying hand of U.S. leadership, produced an expanded transatlantic union of democracies. Sweden and Finland sought membership in NATO; the West supported Ukraine and inflicted heavy costs on Russia. The Biden administration also sought to confine China by weaving a web of democratic ties around the country. It has upgraded bilateral alliances with the likes of Japan and Australia. It has improved the Quad (the security and diplomatic dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan) and established AUKUS (a military partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom). And it has repurposed existing multilateral bodies, such as the G-7, to meet the peril from Beijing. There are even whispers of a “three plus one” coalition—Australia, Japan, the United States, plus Taiwan—that would cooperate to defend that frontline democracy from Chinese assault.

These ties transcend regional boundaries. Ukraine is getting aid from Asian democracies, such as South Korea, that understand that their security will suffer if the liberal order is fractured. Democracies from multiple continents have come together to confront China’s economic coercion, counter its military buildup, and constrict its access to high-end semiconductors. The principal problem for the United States is a loose alliance of revisionist powers pushing outward from the core of Eurasia. Biden’s answer is a cohering global coalition of democracies, pushing back from around the margins.

Today, those advanced democracies are more unified than at any time in decades. In this respect, Biden has aligned the essential goal of U.S. strategy, defending an imperiled liberal order, with the methods and partners used to pursue it. Yet across Eurasia’s three key regions, the messier realities of rivalry are raising Niebuhr’s question anew.

CONTROVERSIAL FRIENDS

Consider the situation in Europe. NATO is mostly an alliance of democracies. But holding that pact together during the Ukraine war has required Biden to downplay the illiberal tendencies of a Polish government that—until its electoral defeat in October—was systematically eroding checks and balances. Securing its northern flank, by welcoming Finland and Sweden, has involved diplomatic horse-trading with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, in addition to frequently undercutting U.S. interests, has been steering his country toward autocratic rule.

In Asia, the administration spent much of 2021 and 2022 carefully preserving U.S. ties to the Philippines, at the time led by Rodrigo Duterte, a man whose drug war had killed thousands. Biden has assiduously courted India as a bulwark against China, even though the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has curbed speech, harassed opposition leaders, fanned religious grievances, and allegedly killed dissidents abroad. And after visiting New Delhi in September 2023, Biden traveled to Hanoi to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Vietnam’s one-party regime. Once again, the United States is using some communists to contain others.

Then there is the Middle East, where Biden’s “free world” coalition is quite the motley crew. In 2020, Biden threatened to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. By 2023, his administration—panicked by Chinese inroads and rising gas prices—was trying to make that country Washington’s newest treaty ally instead. That initiative, moreover, was part of a concept, inherited from the Trump administration, in which regional stability would rest on rapprochement between Arab autocracies and an Israeli government with its own illiberal tendencies, while Palestinian aspirations were mostly pushed to the side. Not surprisingly, then, human rights and political freedoms receded in relations with countries from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. Biden also did little to halt the strangulation of democracy in Tunisia—just as he had decided, effectively, to abandon Afghanistan’s endangered democracy in 2021.

Indeed, if 2022 was a year of soaring rhetoric, 2023 was a year of awkward accommodation. References to the “battle between democracy and autocracy” became scarcer in Biden’s speeches, as the administration made big plays that defied that description of the world. Key human rights–related positions at the White House and the State Department sat vacant. The administration rolled back sanctions on Venezuela—an initiative described publicly as a bid to secure freer and fairer elections, but one that was mostly an effort to get an oppressive regime to stop exporting refugees and start exporting more oil. And when a junta toppled the elected government of Niger, U.S. officials waited for more than two months to call the coup a coup, for fear of triggering the cutoff of U.S. aid and thereby pushing the new regime into Moscow’s arms. Such compromises have always been part of foreign policy. But today, they testify to key dynamics U.S. officials must confront.

THE DECISIVE DECADE

First is the cruel math of Eurasian geopolitics. Advanced democracies possess a preponderance of power globally, but in every critical region, holding the frontline requires a more eclectic ensemble.

Poland has had its domestic problems; it is also the logistical linchpin of the coalition backing Ukraine. Turkey is politically illiberal and, often, unhelpful; nonetheless, it holds the intersection of two continents and two seas. In South and Southeast Asia, the primary barrier to Chinese hegemony is a line of less-than-ideal partners running from India to Indonesia. In the Middle East, a picky superpower will be a lonely superpower. Democratic solidarity is great, but geography is stubborn. Across Eurasia, Washington needs illiberal friends to confine its illiberal foes.

The ideological battlefield has also shifted in adverse ways. During the Cold War, anticommunism served as ideological glue between a democratic superpower and its autocratic allies, because the latter knew they were finished if the Soviet Union ever triumphed. Now, however, U.S. enemies feature a form of autocracy less existentially threatening to other nondemocracies: strongmen in the Persian Gulf, or in Hungary and Turkey, arguably have more in common with Xi and Putin than they do with Biden. The gap between “good” and “bad” authoritarians is narrower than it once was—which makes the United States work harder, and pay more, to keep illiberal partners imperfectly onside.

Desperate times also call for morally dexterous measures. When Washington faced no serious strategic challengers after the Cold War, it paid a smaller penalty for foregrounding its values. As the margin of safety shrinks, the tradeoffs between power and principle grow. Right now, war—or the threat of it—menaces East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Biden says the 2020s will be the “decisive decade” for the world. As Winston Churchill quipped in 1941, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” When threats are dire, democracies will do what it takes to rally coalitions and keep the enemy from breaking through. Thus, a central irony of Washington’s approach to competition is that the same challenges that activate its ideological energy make it harder to keep U.S. diplomacy pure.

So far, the moral compromises of U.S. policy today are modest compared with those of World War II or the Cold War, in part because the constraints on unsavory methods are stronger than they were when Hitler and Stalin stalked the earth. But rules and norms can change as a country’s circumstances do. So Biden and his successors may soon face a daunting reality: high-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go.

When the Cold War started, few officials imagined that Washington would conduct covert interventions from Afghanistan to Angola. Just three years ago, hardly anyone predicted that the United States would soon fight a proxy war meant to bleed Putin’s army to death in Ukraine. As the present competitions intensify, the tactics used to wage them could become more extreme.

Washington could find itself covertly trying to tip the balance in elections in some crucial swing state if the alternative is seeing that country shift hard toward Moscow or Beijing. It could use coercion to keep Latin America’s military facilities and other critical infrastructure out of Chinese hands. And if the United States is already ambivalent about acknowledging coups in out-of-the-way countries, perhaps it would excuse far greater atrocities committed by a more important partner in a more important place.

Those who doubt that Washington will resort to dirty tricks have short memories and limited imaginations. If today’s competitions will truly shape the fate of humanity, why wouldn’t a vigilant superpower do almost anything to come out on top?

DON’T LOSE YOURSELF

There’s no reason to be unduly embarrassed about this. A country that lacks the self-confidence to defend its interests will lack the power to achieve any great purpose in global affairs. Put differently, the damage the United States does to its values by engaging dubious allies, and engaging in dubious behavior, is surely less than the damage that would be done if a hyperaggressive Russia or neototalitarian China spread its influence across Eurasia and beyond. As during the Cold War, the United States can eventually repay the moral debts it incurs in a lengthy struggle—if it successfully sustains a system in which democracy thrives because its fiercest enemies are suppressed.

It would be dangerous to adopt a pure end-justifies-the-means mentality, however, because there is always a point at which foul means corrupt fair ends. Even short of that, serial amorality will prove politically corrosive: a country whose population has rallied to defend its values as well as its interests will not forever support a strategy that seems to cast those values aside. And ultimately, the greatest flaw of such a strategy is that it forfeits a potent U.S. advantage.

During World War II, as the historian Richard Overy has argued, the Allied cause was widely seen to be more just and humane than the Axis cause, which is one reason the former alliance attracted so many more countries than the latter. In the Cold War, the sense that the United States stood, however imperfectly, for fundamental rights and liberties the Kremlin suppressed helped Washington appeal to other democratic societies—and even to dissidents within the Soviet bloc. The tactics of great-power competition must not obscure the central issue of that competition. If the world comes to see today’s rivalries as slugfests devoid of larger moral meaning, the United States will lose the asymmetry of legitimacy that has served it well.

This is not some hypothetical dilemma. Since October 2023, Biden has rightly framed the Israel-Hamas war as a struggle between a flawed democracy and a tyrannical enemy seeking its destruction. There is strong justification, moral and strategic, for backing a U.S. ally against a vicious proxy of a U.S. enemy, Iran. Moreover, there is no serious ethical comparison between a terrorist group that rapes, tortures, kidnaps, and kills civilians and a country that mostly tries, within the limits war imposes, to protect them.

Yet rightly or wrongly, large swaths of the global South view the war as a testament to American double standards: opposing occupation and appropriation of foreign territory by Russia but not by Israel, valuing the lives and liberties of some victims more than those of others. Russian and Chinese propagandists are amplifying these messages to drive a wedge between Washington and the developing world. This is why the Biden administration has tried, and sometimes struggled, to balance support for Israel with efforts to mitigate the harm the conflict brings—and why the war may presage renewed U.S. focus on the peace process with the Palestinians, as unpromising as that currently seems. The lesson here is that the merits of an issue may be disputed, but for a superpower that wears its values on its sleeve, the costs of perceivedhypocrisy are very real.

RULES FOR RIVALRY

Succeeding in this round of rivalry will thus require calibrating the moral compromises inherent in foreign policy by finding an ethos that is sufficiently ruthless and realistic at the same time. Although there is no precise formula for this—the appropriateness of any action depends on its context—some guiding principles can help.

First, morality is a compass, not a straitjacket. For political sustainability and strategic self-interest, American statecraft should point toward a world consistent with its values. But the United States cannot paralyze itself by trying to fully embody those values in every tactical decision. Nor—even at a moment when its own democracy faces internal threats—should it insist on purifying itself at home before exerting constructive influence abroad. If it does so, the system will be shaped by regimes that are more ruthless—and less shackled by their own imperfections.

The United States should also avoid the fallacy of the false alternative. It must evaluate choices, and partners, against the plausible possibilities, not against the utopian ideal. The realistic alternative to maintaining ties to a military regime in Africa may be watching as murderous Russian mercenaries fill the void. The realistic alternative to engaging Modi’s India may be seeing South Asia fall further under the shadow of a China that assiduously exports illiberalism. Similarly, proximity to a Saudi regime that carves up its critics is deeply uncomfortable. But the realistic alternative to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is probably a regime that remains quite repressive—and is far less committed to empowering women, curbing religious zealots, and otherwise making the country a more open, tolerant place. In a world of lousy options, the crucial question is often: Lousy compared with what?

Another guiding principle: good things don’t all come at once. Cold War policymakers sometimes justified coup making and support for repressive regimes on grounds that preventing Third World countries from going communist then preserved the possibility that they might go democratic later. That logic was suspiciously convenient—and, in many cases, correct. Countries in Latin America and other developing regions did eventually experience political openings as they reached higher levels of development, and democratic values radiated outward from the West.

Today, unseemly bargains can sometimes lead to better outcomes. By not breaking the U.S.-Philippine alliance during Duterte’s drug war, Washington sustained the relationship until a more cooperative, less draconian government emerged. By staying close to a Polish government with some worrying tendencies, the United States bought time until, late last year, that country’s voters elected a coalition promising to strengthen its democratic institutions. The same argument could be made for staying engaged with other democracies where autocratic tendencies are pronounced but electoral mechanisms remain intact—Hungary, India, and Turkey, to name a few. More broadly, liberalism is most likely to flourish in a system led by a democracy. So simply forestalling the ascent of powerful autocracies may eventually help democratic values spread into once inhospitable places.

Similarly, the United States should remember that taking the broad view is as vital as taking the long view. Support for democracy and human rights is not an all-or-nothing proposition. As Biden’s statecraft has shown, transactional deals with dictators can complement a strategy that stresses democratic cooperation at its core. Honoring American values, moreover, is more than a matter of hectoring repressive regimes. A foreign policy that raises international living standards through trade, addresses global problems such as food insecurity, and holds the line against great-power war serves the cause of human dignity very well. A strategy that emphasizes such efforts may actually be more appealing to countries, including developing democracies from Brazil to Indonesia, that resist democracy-versus-autocracy framing because they don’t want any part of a Manichean fight.

Of course, these principles can seem like a recipe for rationalization—a way of excusing the grossest behavior by claiming it serves a greater cause. Another important principle, then, revives Hamilton’s dictum that the means must be proportioned to the mischief. The greater the compromise, the greater the payoff it provides—or the damage it avoids—must be.

By this standard, the case for cooperation with an India or a Poland is clear-cut. These countries are troubled but mostly admirable democracies that play critical roles in raging competitions. Until the world contains only liberal democracies, Washington can hardly avoid seeking blemished friends.

The United States should, however, be more cautious about courting countries that regularly engage in the very practices it deems most corrosive to the liberal order: systematic torture or murder of their people, coercion of their neighbors, or export of repression across borders, to name a few. A Saudi Arabia, for instance, that periodically engages in some of these practices is a troublesome partner. A Saudi Arabia that flagrantly and consistently commits such acts risks destroying the moral and diplomatic basis of its relationship with the United States. American officials should be more hesitant still to distort or destabilize the politics of other countries, especially other democracies, for strategic gain. If Washington is going to get back into the coup business in Latin America or Southeast Asia, the bad outcomes to be prevented must be truly severe—a major, potentially lasting shift in a key regional balance of power, perhaps—to justify policies so manifestly in tension with the causes the United States claims to defend.

Mitigating the harm to those causes means heeding a further principle: marginal improvement matters. Washington will not convince leaders in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, or Vietnam to commit political suicide by abandoning their domestic model. But leverage works both ways in these relationships. Countries on the firing line need a superpower patron just as much as it needs them. U.S. officials can use that leverage to discourage extraterritorial repression, seek the release of political prisoners, make elections a bit freer and fairer, or otherwise obtain modest but meaningful changes. Doing so may be the price of keeping these relationships intact, by convincing proponents of human rights and democracy in Congress that the White House has not forgotten such issues altogether.

This relates to an additional principle: the United States must be scrupulously honest with itself. American officials need to recognize that illiberal allies will be selective or unreliable allies because their domestic models put them at odds with important norms of the liberal order—and because they tend to generate resentment that may eventually cause an explosion. In the same vein, the problem with laws that mandate aid cutoffs to coup plotters is that they encourage self-deception. In cases in which Washington fears the strategic fallout from a break in relations, U.S. officials are motivated to pretend that a coup has not occurred. The better approach, in line with reforms approved by Congress in December 2022, is a framework that allows presidents to waive such cutoffs on national security grounds—but forces them to acknowledge and justify that choice. The work of making moral tradeoffs in foreign policy begins with admitting those tradeoffs exist.

Some of these principles are in tension with others, which means their application in specific cases must always be a matter of judgment. But the issue of reconciling opposites relates to a final principle: soaring idealism and brutal realism can coexist. During the 1970s, moral debates ruptured the Cold War consensus. During the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan adequately repaired—but never fully restored—that consensus by combining flexibility of tactics with clarity of purpose.

Reagan supported awful dictators, murderous militaries, and thuggish “freedom fighters” in the Third World, sometimes through ploys—such as the Iran-contra scandal—that were dodgy or simply illegal. Yet he also backed democratic movements from Chile to South Korea; he paired rhetorical condemnations of the Kremlin with ringing affirmations of Western ideals. The takeaway is that rough measures may be more tolerable if they are part of a larger package that emphasizes, in word and deed, the values that must anchor the United States’ approach to the world. Some will see this as heightening the hypocrisy. In reality, it is the best way to preserve the balance—political, moral, and strategic—that a democratic superpower requires.

[arelyhb]

Don’t make a fucking sound.

#Me la rifo con el photo mode #Ellie #Ellie Williams #TLOU2 #The Last of Us Part II #TLOU #Whitney #WLF #Washington Liberation Front #Photo mode #My gameplay

[vague-humanoid]

@midians-world @dirhwangdaseul

Missing pronouns and double-entendres

Historians have traced the roots of country music at least to the 17th century, but the “big bang” moment for the industry didn’t happen until the 1920s.

In 1927, record producer Ralph Peer traveled from New York City to Bristol, Tennessee to hold recording sessions with “hillbilly” artists from the surrounding areas. The Bristol Sessions, as they came to be known, introduced the world to artists like Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, foundational figures in what we now call country music.

That same year, in New York, an artist named Ewen Hail recorded “Lavender Cowboy,” a story-song about a boyish figure “with only two hairs on his chest” who takes on a group of outlaws and dies a hero’s death. Adapted from a 1923 poem by pulp writer Harold Hersey, “Lavender Cowboy” appeared in the 1930 film Oklahoma Cyclone and has since been covered many times, most notably by Vernon Dalhart in 1939. 

A couple years later, the Prairie Ramblers recorded “I Love My Fruit,” a Western swing-style novelty song so ripe with double-entendres that the group recorded it using a pseudonym. Attributed to the Sweet Violet Boys, “I Love My Fruit” is gloriously homoerotic, with lyrics that extol the virtues of (among other things) chewing on banana skin.

The 1960s saw the emergence of Wilma Burgess, a mainstream star who wasn’t able to be out but also never hid her identity. A protege of prolific producer Owen Bradley — who saw her as a potential successor to Patsy Cline — Burgess insisted on recording songs where the love interest was not referred to by gendered pronouns. When she did occasionally record songs addressed to male lovers, she did so under the agreement with Bradley that her next recording would be a song of her choice. Her songs “Baby” and “Misty Blue” both cracked the top 10, and she still holds the record for the most charted singles by a gay country artist.'

Burgess left the country music industry in the late 70s, but she remained active in Nashville’s queer scene, opening one of the city’s first lesbian bars in the early 80s. 

Queer country music’s “lost pioneer”

No queer country history would be complete without the story of Patrick Haggerty, the man responsible for what’s widely considered the first openly gay country album, Lavender Country. 

Haggerty grew up on a dairy farm in rural Washington, the sixth of ten children born to hard-working parents. Despite growing up in the repressive climate of the 50s, Haggerty has said his father was accepting of his sexuality, which was evident from a young age.

After getting kicked out of the Peace Corps for being gay in 1966, Haggerty decided to devote his life to activism, becoming involved with the Gay Liberation Front. His anger over the injustices of the era became the basis for Lavender Country, the 1973 album that would define his legacy.

The album, which Haggerty recorded with his band of the same name, is scathing and often funny, featuring would-be classics like “Back in the Closet Again” and “Cryin’ These C**ksucking Tears” delivered in a loose, folky style. 

With the support of the Gay Community Services of Seattle, 1000 copies of Lavender Country were created, advertised in gay periodicals, and sold at gay bookstores. Despite the limited number of copies, the album attracted a fair amount of attention in the gay underground. “Lavender Country” played at Seattle Pride and other gay events in the region.

The band disbanded in 1976, and Haggerty thought his music career was behind him. A self-described “screaming Marxist b***h,” he became further involved in activist circles, later co-founding the Seattle chapter of ACT UP and running for Seattle City Council and the state House of Representatives as an independent. 

the article goes into more, like Lang's Shadowland

#Youtube

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Is Lula Anti-American? It's complicated.

It’s the question in Washington that won’t go away: “Is Lula anti-American?” Since returning to Brazil’s presidency on January 1, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has repeatedly caused alarm in the U.S. capital and elsewhere with his comments on Ukraine, Venezuela, the dollar and other key issues. An unconfirmed GloboNews report in June said President Joe Biden may have abandoned any intentions of visiting Brasilia before the end of the year because of frustration with Lula’s positions.    

The question causes many to roll their eyes, and with good reason. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, some in the United States continue to see Latin America in “You’re either with us or against us” terms. Washington has a long record of getting upset with Brazil’s independent stances on everything from generic AIDS drugs in the 1990s to trade negotiations in the 2000s and the Edward Snowden affair in the 2010s. A large Latin American country confidently operating in its own national interest, neither allied with nor totally against the United States, simply does not compute for some in Washington, and maybe it never will.   

That said, there is a long list of reasonable people in places like the White House and State Department, in think tanks and in the business world who are perfectly capable of understanding nuance — and have still perceived a threat from Lula’s foreign policy in this, his third term. The list of perceived transgressions is long and growing: Lula has repeatedly echoed Russian positions on Ukraine, saying both countries share equal responsibility for the war. In April, Lula said blame for continued hostilities laid “above all” with countries who are providing arms—a slap at the United States and Europe, delivered while on a trip to China, no less. Lula has worked to revive the defunct UNASUR bloc, whose explicit purpose was to counter U.S. influence in South America. He has repeatedly urged countries to shun the U.S. dollar as a mechanism for trade when possible, voicing support for new alternatives including a common currency with Argentina or its other neighbors. Lula has been bitterly critical of U.S. sanctions against Venezuela–”worse than a war,” he has said—while downplaying the repression, torture and other human rights abuses committed by the dictatorship itself.    

For some observers, the inescapable conclusion is that Lula’s foreign policy is not neutral or “non-aligned,” but overtly friendly to Russia and China and hostile to the United States. This has been a particular letdown for many in the Democratic Party who briefly saw Lula as a hero of democracy and natural ally after he, too, defeated an authoritarian, election-denying menace on the far right. And for the record, it’s not just Americans who feel this way: the left-leaning French newspaper Liberation, in a front-page editorial prior to Lula’s visit to Paris in June, called him a “faux friend” of the West.  

To paraphrase the old saying, it’s impossible to know what truly lurks in the hearts of men. But as someone who has tried to understand Lula for the past 20 years, with admittedly mixed results, let me give my best evaluation of what’s really happening: Lula may not be anti-U.S. in the traditional sense, but he is definitely anti-U.S. hegemony, and he is more willing than before to do something about it.  

That is, Lula and his foreign policy team do not wish ill on Washington in the way that Nicolás Maduro or Vladimir Putin do, and in fact they see the United States as a critical partner on issues like climate change, energy and infrastructure investment. But they also believe the U.S.-led global order of the last 30 years has on balance not been good for Brazil or, indeed, the planet as a whole. They are convinced the world is headed toward a new, more equitable “multipolar” era in which, instead of one country at the head of the table, there will be, say, eight countries seated at a round table—and Brazil will be one of them, along with China, India and others from the ascendant Global South. Meanwhile, Lula has lost some of the inhibitions and brakes that held him back a bit during his 2003-10 presidency, and he is actively out there trying to usher the world along to this promising new phase—with an evident enthusiasm and militancy that bothers many in the West, and understandably so. 

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