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eyelinerda3euro · 3 years

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The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

In the temperate and tropical regions where it appears that hominids evolved into human beings, the principal food of the species was vegetable. Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food. The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fat was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains, adding bugs and mollusks and netting or snaring birds, fish, rats, rabbits, and other tuskless small fry to up the protein. And we didn’t even work hard at it — much less hard than peasants slaving in somebody else’s field after agriculture was invented, much less hard than paid workers since civilization was invented. The average prehistoric person could make a nice living in about a fifteen-hour work week.

Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things. So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn’t have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn’t the meat that made the difference. It was the story.

It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrestled a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats.... No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood sprouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.

That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.

When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, “Glossary”; she had thought of reinventing English according to her new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as “botulism.” And hero, in Woolf’s dictionary, is “bottle.” The hero as bottle, a stringent reevaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero.

Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.

If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you — even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn’t it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.

The first cultural device was probably a recipient.... Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.

So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.

And yet old. Before — once you think about it, surely long before — the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger — for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in — with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.

This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. (“What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization,” Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.

That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.

It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story.

It sometimes seems that the story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

It’s unfamiliar, it doesn’t come easily, thoughtlessly, to the lips as the killer story does; but still, “untold” was an exaggeration. People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels....

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.

I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.

That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. “Technology,” or “modern science” (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the “hard” sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).

If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.

It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars. by Ursula K. Le Guin

#ursula k leguin

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siren-virus · 3 years

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Hey there, another ask that isn't about Luckyboy!AU (don't worry, I have some questions for another day XD), would you mind telling us a bit about your OCs? I noticed there are more than one. Also it doesn't matter if you give almost no info about them since it's perfectly possible that you only though on their looks and nothing else, heavens know that that has happened to me before XD

Howdy!

Goodness me there's so much I can say about my OC's. They're more than their looks! In fact their looks keep changing (this is the curse of always wanting to change ur style and getting bored on your concepts)

I'll go through only 2 stories for now, cause I got a few.

SWUP and Flee (working title)

(Gecko and Intergalactic Fugitives are another 2- There's also a concept I play around with called Space thief, but it's nothing serious)

(this might be a long one ;;;) Also lucky you, you get to see my old hideous art!

To begin with we have SWUP. Super Warrior Unicorn Princess. The main character, Vicky has been through a few design changes and a few personality changes too haha ;;

What I have set in stone for her was she was abducted by aliens turned into a "unicorn" (in this story unicorns and dragons are two different alien species- cause I like unicorns and dragons. that's literally the only reason lol.) Dumped back on earth and told she would be taken to their planet in 30 days to protect their planet. Hence the warrior part of her name.

I only just finalised a human version of her - the OG look per say.

Her design inspiration was from Legend of Korra- cause I love the buff women!

James is another character- I cannot design him for the life of me. Originally he was supposed to be a love interest/sidekick. Than I realised I could make my characters gay. So yeah. He was going to be Cactus boy. Cause unicorns have sharp horns- and cactus's are sharp too. I was but a fetus when I came up with this! I'm almost considering booting him out completely, however.... his dad does play an important role to the story. So I dunno.

Following up we have the actual love interest! Sara, She's kinda a new addition to the story, a sweet barista who pops up at the most inconvenient times with coffee. Cause as you can tell already, I love the coffee shop dynamic.

Felidae, another victim, I mean unicorn. She's supposed to be like, the wise old man character achetype to the story, but It's kinda in and out. She was originally designed to be school aged, but I thought it'd be more interesting to have a 48 year wine aunt character. She was also a model.

So basically SWUP is coffee shop + action super + aliens. The story is still very much developing and always changing.

Next up is Flee (working title) I had this concept going for 5 years now And I still can't think of a better name.

The only reason it's called Flee is because the main characters were fleeing from a nasty village.

Basically the idea is about a post apocalyptic wasteland inhabited by humans and mutants(?) just animal people i guess. A nuclear explosion went off a couple hundred years ago, wiping out most of the population. Think Mad Max vibes (even tho i've never watched the movies ;;;)

The few humans/mutants that do exist live in caves (for the mutants- they hide from the humans cause humans hunt them for food and sport) And the humans live in villages. But there are also humans who live in Domes. These Domes are cities, only the rich could live in them. They were built before the nuclear downfall.

Anyways the main trio. I'm a huge sucker for the found family dynamic.

Leo, a bearded vulture-like mutant, his og goal was to fly out and look for water for his cave colony. Unfortunately he ran into an annoying human. I keep playing with the idea that he was shot down by hunters. But I dunno. I mean it's probably the only way he'd stay grounded- badumptsss

Tristian, the said, annoying human. A happy go lucky, optimistic kid. Originally I designed him as an adult, buuut nah, I wanted Tristian to be like a little brother to Leo. He lived in the Dome his whole life, but escaped because he wanted to explore the outside. Turns out it's a lot more dangerous than anticipated. So Leo has to take him back.

Robin, the feral gremlin child. She's vengeful beast of a kid, living in an isolated cabin with her parents. Tristian and Leo ran into her accidentally. She's like baby sister. Another annoying child to drag back to the Dome for Leo.

Anyways that's those lot done. I had to be brief because like I said, there;s a lot i have to say.

I hope you could read that, cause I certainly can't!

Art @siren-virus

#original characters #oc #swup #flee #tristian #robin #leo #SWUP #sara #felidae #james

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meowdymista · 4 years

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Van der Driscoll Pt 3

Arthur Morgan x Fem!Reader

Part 2 & Masterlist

Part 4

Word count: 1890

Warnings: threat of domestic violence

Now on AO3 with added soft Morgan loving

The two of you ride in silence. The wagon wheels keep rolling. The pit in your stomach rolls along with them. Which is it going to be, gentlemen? Black or red?

He hasn’t bothered binding your wrists today. You can’t pretend like there’s any possibility of you attempting to escape; an anchor of lethargy has long since made its home in your chest.

The landscape begins to change rapidly as you descend into Lemoyne. The air thickens, choking you, the cries of seagulls filling your ears.

He hasn’t confided his intentions to you yet, but the ride is slow and heavy on both of your shoulders. Saint Denis or Van Horn - both were known for their ports.

"She can't go free. Not with the Pinkertons after us."

"I know. Don’t I goddamn know it...”

The bridge welcomes you with false joy. Fumes pollute the sky, horses clop over cobblestones, beggars call out for pennies from the sidewalks. You look on morosely as he steps off the carriage to speak with the mail man behind the counter. He checks a pocket watch you didn’t know he had and nods, thanking him before rejoining you.

Your lips are sewn shut, even as he rides the cart up to a saloon a couple of streets over. He helps you down, leading you inside wordlessly, paying for a room and a bath for you both. On autopilot, you follow the bath girl to the steaming water, Arthur’s assurances inaudible over your thoughts.

She tries and fails to make conversation with you. You’ve never hired help for a bath - you enjoy the rare splash of solitude too much, especially in the soft steam of hot water. You start to wonder when you last bathed as she scrubs soap into your hair. Usually your wounds aren’t fresh enough to sting.

She guides you to the room Arthur has rented. The bed looks sublimely soft. Even the evening sun gleaming through the windows is gentle and welcoming. You strip to your underclothes and crawl under the duvet, groaning as you fall asleep.

****

You wake up, surprised to find the bed empty. Turning your head, you spot Arthur in a chair, sketching in the leather bound journal you’ve found him writing in on more than one occasion.

He sets the book aside and walks up to the bed hesitantly. You move back, inviting him to sit. After all, his money has paid for this.

“I’m sorry, Y/N. About all of this.”

You shake your head sleepily. “It’s my fault. When I heard the boys had caught a Van der Linde, I let curiosity get the better of me. I wasn’t supposed to be there, I just wanted to see the face of… of one of her murderers.”

You hum as fingers trace your face and neck. “Well, I’m still sorry for everything that happened after.”

You turn your head to kiss his palm, dismissing the hitch in his breathing. “At least it was with you.”

“Because being tied up is preferable in my company?”

“Something like that,” you laugh, smirking into your pillow. His hands lowers hesitantly to your shoulders. You shrug the duvet down, extending his reach. Hearing the bed move, you open your eyes finding his face next to you. Before you can change your mind, you press your lips against his with determination.

His grip tightens as you deepen the kiss, breaking away to kiss his neck as you tug on the buttons of his shirt. He shifts his weight to make it easier for you to push it off him before climbing carefully between your now exposed legs.

Your heart flutters as he kisses the crook of your neck, fingers still tracing your body as though committing them to memory. His boots clatter to the floor, his belt clinking as you tug on his trousers, eager to release him.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says suddenly, his lids heavy as he searches your face. “We didn’t know then-”

“We know now,” you counter, your chest heaving with anticipation. “Do you still want to..?”

“It ain’t about what I want.”

“Then take me, cowboy,” you whisper into his mouth. “Anything, as long as we’re together.”

****

You groan. Something doesn’t feel right. You can feel heartburn building it’s way up into your throat and your stomach is twisting up a storm. A clatter of spurs across floorboards make you sit up.

“O’Driscolls. Downstairs.” Arthur is pulling his trousers up, slipping his arms into the suspenders as he peers down into the street. “We need to leave.”

“They ain’t gonna recognise me,” you mumble, sitting up. What is wrong with you? “I’ve passed them in the street before now and they have never said anything.”

“I’d rather not take the chance.” He gathers your clothes, throwing them at you as you dress slowly. “We overslept anyway. We were supposed to be at the docks for eight.”

“The docks?” Arthur takes over dressing you as you slow to a halt. “Arthur, where are we going?”

His lips press together as he hooks the back of a new dress he had brought from the tailors. Suddenly you’re feeling even more sick than you did before.

You slip out without seeing any familiar faces. The O’Driscolls Arthur saw must have only been passing through. He’s clearly nervous as he rides you both down to the docks, touching your hand, squeezing it, then letting it go before holding it again. You can’t think about what’s happening - your entire focus is spent on not throwing up.

A large ship is waiting to sail. Arthur helps you down, guiding you over to a young gentleman by boarding.

“We ain’t too late, are we?”

“No, sir! Thirty minutes til we set sail!”

“Great.” He pulls out a wad of cash. “A feller down by the stagecoach said you still had space?”

“For yourself, sir?”

You force yourself to take deep breaths. The ringing in your ears, the hot flush and cold sweats - you force yourself to swallow, trying to overcome the knot of nausea.

“For the lady.” Arthur is surprised when he turns to find you leaning against the railings. “Y/N, y’alright?”

“Do you have medical papers?”

He turns back to the man, his hand still on the small of your back. “What for?”

“If anyone is showing signs of ill health at or before the point of boarding, they cannot sail with us.”

"She’s fine. Her fiancé's waitin' on her."

"I'm sorry, sir, but it’s company policy. We can't allow anyone showing signs of ill health to board, especially if it’s contagious." Arthur scoffs loudly, but the boy is looking at you. Your curses are weak. "There's a doctor round the corner - if you're quick he might be able to help you."

"How much to get the lady onboard?" he asks, shuffling the money between his hands, shoving notes into the boy’s chest. "Fifty? A hundred?"

"Sir, I can't-"

"Two hundred?"

"Arthur, stop!" Your heart is ricocheting against your ribs. "Let's just… go to the doctor. Get a note like he said to say it ain't contagious and renegotiate."

Arthur gives the boy a dark look before shoving the money back into his bag. "Fine," he mutters darkly. "But you had better let us on!"

“As long as it ain’t contagious.” The boy wipes his brow in relief.

****

"Pregnant?"

You close your eyes as they leak down your cheeks.

"Yes, sir." He washes his hands in the small basin. "Newly so, but the fetus seems to be a strong one. Congratulations."

"Did you-?" Both of you look to Arthur who is squeezing the bridge of his nose so tightly his fingertips are white. "You do this on purpose, Y/N?"

"The mother doesn’t get much of a choice in all this-"

"Was I talkin' to you?" he snaps, eyes blazing. "Y/N?"

"Of course not, Arthur!"

"You playing me for a fool?"

Your stomach sinks. This was something else. This was the face of a murderer. "Arthur…"

"How much to get rid of it?" he demands, startling the doctor.

"I beg your p-"

"How much to get rid of it?"

"I don’t do that business here-"

Arthur whips out a pistol and points it at your stomach. "How much to deal with a gunshot wound, then?"

Blood drains from your face as you stare down the barrel of the gun, the doctor stammering wildly.

"I understand this may come as a bit of a shock-"

"A bit of a shock?" He pulls back the hammer, still glaring with white hot fury. "She needs to be boarding a ship now!"

“Arthur.” Your voice is barely a whisper.

“There’s nothing stopping a woman sailing whilst pregnant!”

“And when she gets to the other side with a baby?” he growls, eyes wild. “A baby and no family to support her? Then what?”

“Are you not travelling with her?”

“Arthur,” you choke.

His hand falters, but his glare remains steady. “Y/N.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“You have to - it’s too dangerous for you here.”

“I’m staying.”

The pistol lowers as his face crumples with indecision. “You can’t. Colm, the Pinkertons…”

“Then come with me!” He drops the pistol on the table, pulling his hair as he walks away to the window. “Leave Dutch - we already have a head start! If you want to leave America, we can do it together-”

“I can’t, Y/N. It ain’t that easy.”

“I swear on my life, I won’t breathe a word to anyone about anything. I’m not going to chase you to be a father, I’ll do it alone!”

“Do you really think I don’t want this baby?” His voice cracks. “We can’t keep it, Y/N. What life can it have with parents like us?”

“I’ll give it a life! I- I’ll go straight. I’ll settle down. It’s not like I can go running back to the O’Driscolls, especially now.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t let you do that.” “Why not? You can tell Dutch whatever you want. Just leave me here and pretend we never happened-”

“It ain’t being a father I’m worried about! Y/N, I-” He slumps against the wall, staring into space, his brow riddled with worry. “I’ve done it before. My son… he lived with his Ma and I would visit when I could, gave them money so they had enough to eat, I loved them both and… they died. Killed for ten dollars.” He meets your gaze, begging. “We ain’t made for anythin’ good, Y/N. We do bad things and we get it back tenfold. If you and the baby- if anything happened-”

A bowl appears in front of your face just as your stomach turns. When you’ve finished, Arthur’s handkerchief is there to wipe away the tears and bile. You lean back, panting, eyes closed.

“I’m going to step outside,” the doctor announces as Arthur pushes back your hair, kissing your crown apologetically. “And I’m taking the pistol, sir. You can have it back when you leave.”

Arthur ignores him, crouching beside you to kiss your knuckles gently.

“Please,” you murmur. “Please don’t take the baby.”

“I won’t,” he promises. “I can’t leave America. I have nowhere else to go!”

He hushes you, peppering your face and temples with kisses. “We’ll work it out. I promise.”

#rdr2 fanfic #rdr2 fic #red dead fic #red dead fanfic #arthur morgan #arthur x female reader #Arthur Morgan x Female Reader #Arthur Morgan x Reader #Arthur Morgan x O'Driscoll #MeowdyMista

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moodboardinthecloud · 3 years

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The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin

Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.

That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight thereand THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.

Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.

That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction

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keywestlou · 3 years

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ABORTION, CATHOLIC CHURCH, U.S. CONFERENCE OF BISHOPS, AND PRESIDENT BIDEN

First a personal reflection. It is Father’s Day. Happy Father’s Day to me and all you Dads out there.

The telephone call came early. Lisa and family. All talking at once. Even Jake getting into the act.

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!

Love it!

Now for a difficult topic. Abortion. Abortion has been more prominently reported these days by the media. The reason involves the Catholic Church, the U.S. Conference of Bishops and President Biden.

I begin with “Let Him Who Is Without Sin Cast The First Stone.” John 8:7.

The Biblical reference will play into the theme of today’s blog as it develops.

The U.S. Conference of Bishops. There is a need to know who and what they are. A conglomeration of Catholic bishops in the United States. Its organization comparable to our Congress in that its members cannot agree. Most items a close vote.

The group is made up far right thinkers. Very few middle of the road liberals. The Bishops’ group dislikes Pope Francis I. They constantly work in the background trying to come up with a winning procedure to dump him.

The Vatican is a state and operates with the same scabs and boils as any other government.

Two lay confidants are Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich. Their affiliation with the Bishops though informal says it all.

A certain group of the Bishops should have been politicians rather than clerics. They are deeply involved in U.S. politics.

Political influence began building in the Catholic Church in the 1960s. Along the way the Bishop Conference came into play. At some point, the Bishops Conference and far right Republicans married.

The Catholic Church is buried in the abortion issue. As is the Bishops Conference.

A very important meeting of the Bishops Conference was held friday. The world was aware before hand that abortion and President Biden would be the prime topic.

Biden, though Catholic, supports the right of a woman to choose. The Bishops group do not. The Group decided to go after Biden and embarrass him with his position. In a down and dirty manner.

The world was aware the Conference wanted to put forth a preliminary document, whose intent would be to rebuke Biden and other Catholic lawmakers from receiving Communion while supporting abortion.

The U.S. has only had two Catholic Presidents. Kennedy and Biden. Though abortion an issue in Kennedy’s time, it was not so much in the forefront as it has been the past 40 years.

Respectfully and with no intention of negating Kennedy in any fashion, Biden is not only the most Catholic person to be President, he wears his religion on his sleeve. Mass and Communion each week. What he does in private is for him alone to know.

The Bishops intended to submit a “draft” of a “teaching document” for approval. If in its final analysis it passes, technically it would prevent Biden from receiving Communion.

Note I earlier advised not everyone supports the Bishops position. The Bishop of Washington several weeks ago in no uncertain terms said no one was going to prevent Biden from receiving Communion in his Washington Diocese.

Francis I had a strong sent to the Bishops to cease and desist. Everyone thought that would end the problem. As you can see, it did not.

The Bishops group is like our present Congress. Most of the Republican Congress do not respect Biden. Most of the Bishops group do not support the Pope.

The vote approved the “draft.”

The cry by those not supporting the group’s position is “stop the partisan politics.” One prominent cleric described it as a “right wing hit job.”

We are at the let him without sin cast the first stone portion of this blog.

The Catholic Church has not been the most moral of organizations for centuries. The Church has either sinned all over the place or put its nose where it did not belong.

A wrong is the Church’s active efforts to influence political decisions. Centuries ago, it was wrong in promoting the Crusades. A sin as grave as the one to embarrass Biden.

Something rarely discussed is the Catholic Church’s involvement in the 20th century with nationalist states. Then there is financial corruption seemingly in an ongoing basis with the Vatican Bank.

In yesteryear, many bishops and archbishops in addition to being clerics were feudal lords equivalent to counts and dukes. They lived in opulence. treated their serfs badly.

The French Revolution was a direct shot at the Catholic Church. Louis XIV was not the prime reason the French government was overthrown. It was the Church philosophy that “monarchs rule by God’s will.”

In modern times, the Church in many instances supported or remained quiet when an autocratic leader took over a government. Pope Pius XII provided little assistance to the German people, those suffering at the hands of the Nazis in other countries, and Jews.

Spain’s Franco enjoyed the support of the Catholic Church.

The Church’s misdeeds in relative times involves the abuse of children (primarily young boys) and an issue receiving public attention since 2019: Nuns having sex with priests, becoming pregnant and then an abortion.

Priests have been forcing themselves on nuns for centuries. Or, enjoying consensual sex with nuns. Either way a no no.

An Irish saint whose name escapes me performed abortions on nuns by taking a cross and pushing the cross down with force on the nun’s stomach until the fetus evacuated the nun’s body.

“#metoo caused many nuns to go public. The nuns even have their own hashtag “#nunstoocarespeaking out.”

Francis I came forth also in 2019. He issued the First Remake on Sexual Abuse of Nuns by Priests.

Many nuns have spoken out, formed societies whose sole purpose is to reveal sex by priests with nuns. One of the nun leaders claims priests felt free to do what they wanted with nuns because their power was extremely strong when compared to the power a nun had. She said, “It was abuse of power, they climbed up a career staircase of evil.”

Enjoy your Sunday!

ABORTION, CATHOLIC CHURCH, U.S. CONFERENCE OF BISHOPS, AND PRESIDENT BIDEN was originally published on Key West Lou

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welivingindreams · 3 years

Text

Compilation of 2014

9 May 2014

Playing street and alley with Mr Soo and Mrs Chew. Make my bed and leave for the toilet. Toilet too complicated and deep inside an unfamiliar place. While walking saw Jason & Kaixiang and a few boys fighting at an abandoned place. Found a worn out toilet among the abandoned building. I had to pee because I had no choice. After peeing I saw a jelly-like substance. It looks like a fetus. Like I just had a misscarriage. So I threw it away. So I went out of the toilet, a group of ah beng who i saw earlier fighting with Jason & Kaixiang saw me ask how much money i want. They were asking how much I charge for the service. I was scared because it was me to a few ah bengs which i know i won't win if i fight them. So I ran 4 April 2014 Having some classes like PE lessons near the canteen, there is a girl who hated me and 2 other orphanage girls. I also saw Young Sub, he was getting handsome. He went back to continue sec 5 after his JC. So I leave the place before things get worse. Next I went to a mall and saw Acat. I keep calling his name. There's a guy who runs so fast and rides a bicycle in the mall. I run to level 2 to ask him where his power ranger uniform is. Then I went to the basement to buy food. I said something nasty to either Nasa or Dhaz and ran away from them after throwing vulgar words . When i was running, two of my friends saw me. The girl ran with me while kakit ran after me. I kept running like I was running from embarrassment that two of my friends saw what I did. I then give up and drown myself in the nearest pool. Kakit saved me and he regretted running after me because I was so embarrassed that I decided to drown myself 26 March 2014 Love Story where I had a lover but I had to go away from my lover due to some circumstances that i can no longer be with him. So we met at the bridge and i told him that i have to break up with him and have to be far away from him and his life. I ran away from him for her whole years and during that period I had a daughter and a son with him. He was not aware of the children because they were born after the breakup. Not only was I running away from my Ex, I was running away from the Gangster who wanted to kill me. I took the train before the gangster could board it. From there I know I have to find shelter for my daughter and son. I was finding shelter for my kids and ended up in Jelapang. I end up bumping into my Ex at Jelapang. That’s when he knew that he had to have a child with me. So we concile because he said that his family was looking for him as he was the 3rd son in the family. His family was finding him because his mother is dying and the mother wants to meet him before she dies. So he brought me to meet his mother and his mother finally decide to approve me and we reconcile and get married

22 March 2014 I was having assembly in my old primary school. I tried to escape from assembly. I was running around the school and saw zul Sara get detention. Went in toilet happily and bathed with some children who were supposed to perform for the assembly. The principal got it wrong and asked everyone to come out. I was dressing and my bra cannot hook. After I left the toilet I saw everyone was killed like those in hunger games. I begged the principal to spare me because I have 2 mothers. The Principal goes into the office to prepare some maze to kill me. I run with the discipline master and begged him that I should be spared. I jump near a fence which was half way built and find myself out from the sch 21 March 2014 I dream that I went somewhere I'm not familiar with. I was about to go home but I had to walk past the dormitory to go to the bus stop and take the bus which will bring me home. The aisle is so dark with no light. There was something in the dark but I had to walk past it so I went with it. Suddenly I was with some people and they were walking behind me. So I shine them with torch light. Suddenly everyone kena possessed. I grab my 2 important friends out of the aisle. The next moment I was in the bus reaching home. When i alight i feel like "something" following. So I decided to call you(I can't remember who is this you). You say ok but you asked to meet at Yew Tee's McD. When we met, you started to confess that you were in a relationship with some dukun. But you broke up the relationship even though you were heartbroken. Then you commit suicide infront of me before I could even end our conversation 15 March 2014 I finally got into a relationship. I was in a relationship with my own roommate. We just started to date each other when we found that both our family members know each other. We also found out that my 2 brothers in my dreams are also in the relationship with his sisters. We vowed that we will not leave each other until death does us apart. When exchanging vows, we exchange neckless and keep it in a time capsule as a memory for the future. He brought me to meet with his parents and other family members. The day where I met his family, his grandmother did not approve of us together. She was strongly against us as she thought that I am not the one for her grandson. The situation went wild. When his grandmother disapproved, the whole fami.ly members agreed and decided to “disown” me in the family. They too did not want us to be together. My boyfriend was pleading and trying so hard to convince his family to accept me. He was thorn and kneeling to them and begged them to accept me as his soulmate. All along, I was witnessing all that happen at one corner, that’s when I thought to myself that I should not let my boyfriend suffer and let his family disown him too just because he wants to be with me forever. So I decided for myself that I should stab myself so that when one of us dies, the vow will be broken. So I grab the nearest knife and stab myself in front of his family! 9 March 2014 I dreamt that I was going to JB. I was packing my back to bring things for my JB trip. Then Abang came with his friend, which is Kak Linda’s brother. He just got out of prison. I feel like it took eternity to pack my clothes to jb. So I just stayed in my room packing. While packing in my room I have the thought of killing people

12 January 2014 I was learning how to act from Rain. I learned how to act when you are stuck in a lift like how to act panicked, then I learned how to do a sad scene. When I wanted to move to the 3rd scene I felt so happy and skipped out of the room. TOP saw and joined in the fun. We dance when GD wants to join but I made a mistake and we start again

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outlawpoet · 6 years

Photo

“If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you--even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home?

So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.

“The first cultural device was probably a recipient .... Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.”

So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).

But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.”

~ Ursula K Le Guin “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”

#ursula #goodbye

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aion-rsa · 4 years

Text

Raised by Wolves Ending Explained

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This piece contains spoilers for the Raised by Wolves season 1 finale.

Once HBO Max’s Raised by Wolves introduced a seeming immaculate conception for its necromancer android Mother (Amanda Collin), there was no doubt that the season finale would revolve around her giving birth. However, it is anything but the miracle that the humans and androids alike have hoped for, and only further complicates the question of how this ragtag pack will continue to survive on an increasingly deadly planet.

The series concludes its first season with a lot of unanswered questions, including some new ones posed in this episode alone. From the identity of the Mithraic prophet to revelations about Kepler-22b’s inhuman inhabitants, we sort through what we know about this planet and its various factions, and make some educated guesses about next season.

Mithraics vs. Atheists: Who Will Win?

By the final episode, “The Beginning,” Earth’s warring sides are both still building to a final showdown. Sue (Niamh Algar) has escaped the increasingly fracturing cult led by her increasingly unstable husband Marcus (Travis Fimmel), with the children in tow. She reluctantly allies herself with Mother while they escape to another part of the planet where Mother thinks it will be safest to give birth.

Meanwhile, Marcus hasn’t been doing a good job of keeping the few remaining Mithraic soldiers together. He killed one soldier who questioned his plans, prompting Lucius (Matias Varela), whose father Marcus supposedly killed in battle on Earth, to trick him into revealing that he is actually an atheist.

Lucius and Marcus fight, with the former shoving one of Mother’s killer eyeballs into Marcus’ mouth and leaving him for dead. After the Mithraics continue on after Mother, Marcus gets up and follows Mother and Father’s (Abubakar Salim) lander, led by what seems to be an altered state caused by the eyeball. Eventually he makes it to the snowy part of the planet, where he witnesses a hallucination of Hunter (Ethan Hazzard) with a snake for a hand, telling Marcus that he is Sol’s one true servant before the snake bites him in the neck.

Marcus later encounters a group of atheists, though it’s unexplained how they made it to Kepler-22b. After killing all but one, he makes contact with their leaders and introduces himself as “the king of this world” there to bring about Sol’s judgment. While he guides the survivor to pray with him, the atheists’ ship emerges overhead. It would seem that Marcus is embedded so deep within his own delusions to believe himself a Mithraic, despite being reunited with his supposed allies from the war.

Who Are the Planet’s Other Inhabitants?

When one of the creatures tries to attack Mother while she’s still pregnant, she easily kills it. At first she and Father believe that the humanoid-looking body is proof that the more feral creatures are evolving, like humans did on Earth. Then they discover that it is holding a Neanderthal skull—but it didn’t come from Earth. The androids realize that these creatures are humans whose existence on the planet far predates their warring settlements.

The humans aren’t evolving, Mother further realizes, they’re devolving. Father backs this up by suggesting that “this planet has a history [that] I fear we are dangerously ignorant of.”

Exploring the caves on her own, Mother discovers the lifeless components of the strange creature she glimpsed in her vision (after scanning the atheists’ tarot cards): a dodecahedron with a helmeted head swiveling on it, spitting out the androids’ white blood. When she removes the helmet, she discovers a petrified head that looks as if it could be some sort of android (with wiring), but whose expression looks very human and tortured.

It’s unclear how these figures relate to the devolving humans, but it clearly has some significance to Mother’s fetus, because it compels her to give “birth” to whatever is inside her.

Who Will Save the Children?

The children seem to be doing a commendable job taking care of themselves. Tempest (Jordan Loughran) finally gets closure with regard to her rapist Otho, who the group encountered in the remains of the Mithraic Ark. While initially Mother stopped Tempest from killing him, in favor of draining his blood to feed her fetus, he soon reverses the process to strengthen himself with her android blood. After he attacks Mother, Tempest and Holly (Aasiya Shah), the latter emboldened by the Mithraic relic of Romulus’ tooth, steal the head of Otho’s android guard. By throwing it ten feet away from him, they cause his helmet to crush his head, killing him right before he manages to strangle Tempest.

True to his self-professed smarts, Hunter notices that Father has been tapping out a message in Morse code: Sol is the light. When Marcus cuts off Father’s finger to stop him from communicating, it prompts a system reset. Recalling the password, Hunter is able to revert Father to his old, bad-joke-sharing personality.

Meanwhile, Paul (Felix Jamieson) discovers a cave with paintings predicting various events of the series, including Mother and Father’s initial landing on the planet… and an eerie, shifting, snake-like figure. He also hears voices from what he believes is Sol. While initially he told his mother Sue that he was only faking it because Marcus had mentioned voices, this time he proves that he is communicating with someone because he learns that Marcus and Sue are really Caleb and Mary. With this information, he shoots Sue in the stomach.

Paul is also obsessed with helping Mother safely birth her baby, believing it to be a holy mission from Sol. Poor kid is about to get a nasty awakening…

What is Mother’s Baby?

Raise your hand if you saw Mother’s “fetus” starting to warp her belly before eventually emerging through her throat, and thought Raised by Wolves might wind up as part of the Alien extended universe. Instead, she gives “birth” to something resembling a lamprey eel, down to the circular mouth full of sharp teeth. It immediately begins suckling on her stomach, initially drinking her milk, she says, though she fears that next it will want human blood.

Previously, Mother had thought that the baby was somehow a gift from the memory simulation of Campion, her and Father’s creator. But once she gives birth, she seems to think that the creature’s origins are due not to Mithraic culture but to “something else,” presumably some unknown force on the planet. The androids agree that the eel cannot be allowed to reach the children or anyone else, as it will kill them all.

Who Dies in the Season Finale?

Shockingly, almost no one except the Mithraic soldier and Otho. By the end of the episode, Sue is still bleeding from her stomach wound, but it doesn’t look fatal. And even though Mother and Father willingly take the lander in a suicide mission to destroy her eel baby, they both survive the flight through the planet’s core and the subsequent crash on the other side.

What’s Causing All the Visions?

By the end of the first season, various characters have all experienced some form of visual and/or auditory hallucination that has something to do with the strange workings of the planet. It could be ghosts—especially as Campion has glimpsed his deceased sibling Tally—but it could also be some chemical or radioactive effect of the planet’s atmosphere. Likely Raised by Wolves season 2 will delve more into how and why Campion, Marcus, Mother, and others are seeing and hearing figures that aren’t there.

Who is the Mithraic Prophet?

Believing Mother and Father to be dead, having seen them fly into the pit, Campion seems to accept that he must become the leader of the surviving humans. They all look to him at the end, Sue included, and the final shot is him walking over to them.

Yet Marcus is still alive and believes that he himself fulfills the Mithraic prophecy. It’s unlikely that the atheists would put much stock in that, but if he is still firm in his conviction, he may be able to make them doubt their own beliefs.

But now that Paul knows that Marcus and Sue aren’t his real parents—not to mention his recent visions from Sol—he might believe that he is the orphan boy in an empty land, meant to lead. No doubt he and Campion will clash next season.

What’s in Store for Season 2?

While Mother and Father’s Mithraic enemies have not yet caught up to them, they have a new and pressing threat to face next season: Mother’s eel baby was not destroyed in the lander crash, as they had intended, and escaped the wreckage to fly away to parts unknown. Based on how eager the fetus was for blood, however, it seems clear that the eel is going on a bloodthirsty spree from which humans, devolved humans, and androids alike will not be safe.

Due to its accelerated growth, the eel is also much bigger than it was at birth, resembling somewhat the serpentine skeletons at Mother and Father’s original settlement. Is this the planet’s dominant species? Do they normally reproduce via a womb, or is this a dangerous new evolution?

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

No doubt the second season will explore what kind of threat these creatures pose. The attempt to destroy the offspring also revealed that the planet is pockmarked with deep pits—perhaps carved by the eel creatures—and that it is possible to descend into a pit, through the center of the planet, and out another side. Up until now, the pits have seemed like endless holes that have meant certain death; knowing that they are traversable may change how these new colonists explore the planet, and who they might cross paths with while doing so.

Raised by Wolves is available on HBO Max.

The post Raised by Wolves Ending Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3jjkrFK

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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kookie-vith-suga · 7 years

Text

Rumors

Word count: 1820

Warnings: ANGST

Author’s note: I feel like I got a lot to say right now. Sorry about that in advance.

First of all this scenario is inspired by K.A.R.D.’s “Rumor”. At first I didn’t liked that song but I started liking it eventually. And damn this photoshoot gets me everytime. Also I don’t have the feeling I wrote a good Jimin story yet so I hope this will be poppin.

Second thing: I guess you noticed that I am repeating the members now. I mostly pick who I think would fit the role but there hasn’t really been any request regarding a certain group/member. Just to let you know that I am open for any suggestion! If not then I am willing to continue my own comeups ;)

For the third and last thing I just reached 400 followers!! ♥♥♥ For that I wanted to welcome every new companion and of course thank you all :D It is overwhelming to me how this blog grew out of nothing :) I will continue as long as you guys like me to ;) But now we will get going!

Check out my masterlist ;)

Most recent release: Second chances

rumor

/ˈrumər/

Definitions: noun; A currently circulating story or report of uncertain or doubtful truth usually spread by word of mouth.

Y/N’s POV

This one is gonna be about rumors and how they can destroy everything despite how perfect it seemed to be.

“Y/N take a seat. I gotta show you something you won’t like”, my friend’s voice was serious.

“Woah what is with thos bad vibes? Did you accidentally bought the wrong colour of nail polish?”, I joked knowingly that Maia tended to be overdramatic from time to time.

“No, really Y/N. Sit down. I am not joking.”

“Okay, now you are actually scaring me.” I took a seat on our usual spot in our favourite café “Puzzles”.

“It is really not easy for me. On the one side I feel terrible to be the one to deliver you these bad news but on the other hand I know it is my duty as your best friend to protect you and your fragile heart.” She reached over the table and took my hands in hers. Slightly weighing them from side to side. A sign of nervousness?

“Spit it out already or else my oh so fragile heart is going to explode!”, I tried to joke again but this time only a uneasy laugh escaped my lips.

She let out a heavy sigh before loooking straight into my eyes. “Jimin is cheating on you.”

The smile faded. My mouth went to a straight line. I couldn’t say a word. My lips felt like they were glued together. My mind on the other hand was going crazy.

“I saw him with a girl the other day. They were all lovey dovey and about to go to the cinema. I couldn’t get too near since he would have noticed me but I took a couple of pictures from afar. There are not the best quality but they speak for themself.” She slided her phone towards me, showing a picture of a boy and a girl in his arms. I could regocnize him immediately. Out of hundreds of people I could regocnize this figure, these hands, this lovely face. This is Jimin! I felt my chest tighten. It was shoot from behind but their faces were close enough for a possible kiss. My eyes widen and I picked up the phone to look even closer.

“Y/N. Say something”, she pleaded while watching me contemplating silently.

My knuckles began to turn white because my grip was so tight around the phone. Then I through it back on the table and rose my finger threateningly. “You better are not joking about this Maia. I swear to god.”

How her features sunk down to form a pitiful look. That was when I knew she was not lying. “I am so sorry Y/N.” She took my hand again and gently stroked over the back.

Tears had started to burn down my cheeks. I let my head sunk down on the table and started sobbing. My shoulders were shaking uncontrollably.

“Please tell me you are lying! Tell me this is not true!”, I pleaded between my sobs.

“Oh how I wish I could do that”, she repeated like a mantra while rubbing over my back in a soothing manner. But I could not calm down. This was nothing to calm down over. Nothing to forgive.

The door bell disturbed the deadly silence in my apartment. I ignored it at first. In my current condition I did not need any visitors to come along on top. I rolled myself into fetus position. The ringing continued and even intensified. I grabbed a pillow and pressed it to my ear to shut out this annoying noise. It took another minute before the ringing died out. I sighed relieved as I put the pillow aside. Just to hear loud banging. Is this person nuts?!

Loaded with a wave of anger I stood up and stomped towards the door ready to fight anyone who would greet me on the other side. I tore the door open.

“Who the fuc-”, I broke off mid-sentence, “Jimin”, the name felt so heavy on my lips.

“Y/N. Thank god you are alive. You worried me to death. Why haven’t you answered any of my calls or text messages the past days?! I was about to call the police!” He wrapped his arms around me so tightly.

One hand around the back of my neck and one on my lower back. I felt like I was his most precious possession and he had to make sure I knew that. Jimin carassed slowly up and down my back. He did it exactly like I was used to. But knowing he must held another girl like this, changed everything. Now I felt tiny in his arms. Easy to crush. Like he had done it with my heart. Yes, indeed it was a fragile heart.

As I snapped back to reality I shoved him away forcefully. “I don’t want to see you ever again, Park Jimin. Leave my house. Leave my life.” I closed the door with a bang right in front of his face.

He will not give in so easy. I knew him good enough to know that.

Maia‘s POV

The significant “bling” noise indicated that I got a message. I picked up my phone as I read “Jiminie” my heart started beating.

Jiminie: “Hey Maia, do you maybe have an idea what is up with Y/N? She just threw me out without a proper explanation and since then I cannot reach her at all. I think she blocked me.”

Me: “Oh hey Jiminie! It is so good to hear from you! How are you?”

Jiminie: “Well not so good according to my previous question. So do you know something?!”

Me: “You should not be so bitchy if you want something from me.” I scoffed.

Jiminie: “I am sorry. I know that. But this is nagging me the whole time. I cannot focus on anything or sleep properly. My thoughts are always circling around her. I did not forget an important date right?”

I rolled her eyes before typing again: “To be honest with you I think Y/N changed a lot in the past weeks. She is always moody and-”

Jiminie: “No, this can’t be our anniversary is next month and her birthday was already.” He send before I could finish my message. I smirked to herself. Let us see how your oh so stable relationship will crumble down. I continued typing to finish the message: “is picking fights. I cannot explain myself why she is like this.” Send.

Jiminie: “Me neither. It was exactly the same situation with me. I really am afraid to lose her, if he is acting like this. She is so unpredictable. I would to anything! I am willing to change myself but I do not know what I did wrong.”

Y/N, Y/N, Y/N is she everything he thinks about?!

Me: “You really should not take the blame onto yourself. Have you considered that maybe it is just Y/N who does not know what she wants anymore.”

Jiminie: “What are you implying? Did she mentioned anything towards you?!”

Now I got you! My smirk grew even wider.

Me: “Well not exactly but she hinted a week ago or so that she thinks your relationship is kinda boring.”

This reply was coming in faster then the ones before.

Jiminie: “Boring?! How…?”

Me: “How dare her right? I immediately told her what an awesome boyfriend you are and that she should be lucky to have you! I would never treat you like this by the way. But…” Keep him in suspense a little longer.

Jiminie: “But?! What?! Tell me!”

Me: “Maybe we should meet up? I think I rather tell you this in person.”

Jiminie: “Is it that bad? Please tell me!”

Me: “Let us say we will meet in one hour in front of “Puzzles” ?”

Jiminie: “I head out right away.”

I put my phone aside and started walking towards the bathroom. I gotta look good for our first date though.

Y/N’s POV

I knew I could not lock myself up at home forever. I needed to buy groceries and attend classes. Although I was always scared of meeting Jimin. I have not seen him for over a week now. Not since I told him to fuck off. At first he called about thirty times a day and showered me with messages. Eventually they became less and yesterday they were none at all. I guess he moved on with his new bitch. I gritted my teeth to suppress the lump in my throat. Good for him.

Strangely I could barely reach Maia for the past days. I tried it a couple of times to ask if she want to hang out. She always told me she was busy. Apparently she had a new lover. I should be happy for her, right? It was hard but I tried my best. At least my better half found someone she can trust. While I was wondering if I could do that ever again.

I was just heading towards my history lecture but I wanted to fetch a coffee beforehand. So I obviously made my way to “Puzzles” since they do have the best coffee in town. Their cappuccino was sent straight from heaven. As I waited for my order to be ready I scanned the shop. Some loners were hanging over their laptops typing furiously or had headphones on and nodded their head with the music. But mostly this spot was filled with couples. A little envious I looked at them sitting next to each other while they were whispering sweet nothings to each other ears.

“Miss Y/N? Your coffee is ready”, the barista called out. I snapped back to reality and smiled at the girl who was handing me my cup. I paid and made my way out.

I had only took a small sip as the cup of coffee slided out of my hands. Not out of clumsiness as you may think. More out of shock. Because the scenario in front of me let me loose every faith I had to humanity.

Maia’s arms slung around Jimin’s figure. There was really no space between them and he was obviously hugging her back. His head nuzzled into the crook of her neck while one of his hand rested around the back of her neck and one on her lower back. My heart felt like it has stopped beating and all the air in my lungs had vanished. As everything went black in front of my eyes a last thought stroke through my head.

Maybe this was about toxic friends all along. Whom I should have cut out off my life way earlier. Not that it would matter anymore. Everything was shattered right in front of my eyes and I didn’t do anything to stop it…

I do am really proud of this! I hope you like it too! ♥

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void-galaxy-shenanigans · 5 years

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Why the United States in in chaos & almost everyone wants to leave

Hello Tumblr. I am a United Statesian (or, as some say “American”, despite the fact that there is a North, Central, Latin, & South America as well & all of them are technically Americans but not United Statesians), and not proud of it. Here’s a list of angsty reasons why. There will probably be a few side rants but I want to clear up exactly what is going horribly wrong in this shitty ass country. I will give a list overview, then expound upon each item.

1. The abortion laws/bills in over a dozen states that may go federal because the administration sucks. Alabama refused to make exceptions for the death or incapacitation of the mother, for rape, or for incest in their abortion law. 26 white male lawmakers passed the bill and the governor signed it, despite being “representatives” of the people. This means the mother (or anyone with a uterus, because remember transgender men and nonbinary people can have one too) is just a fucking INCUBATOR for a child if her spouse decides so. An 11 year old girl got raped by a 26 year old man in Louisiana, but thanks to their Heartbeat Bill she’ll have to carry & deliver a child at ELEVEN YEARS OLD. Let that shit sink in, because that’s horrifying. What happened to “the land of the free and the home of the brave”?

2. Mental Health, & how people view mental health & use of hospitals. We live in a very individualistic society. Everyone is afraid of everyone else. Everyone assumes the other people are insane druggies and alcoholics who will murder or steal from them given a second’s chance. If a person (say, someone suicidal) decides to seek therapy or a mental hospital for assistance, everyone is even more afraid! They assume crazy and refuse them jobs, homes, financial aid, and all kinds of basic human decency & respect. They say they don’t do this, but the proof is in the statistics. Majority of United Statesians will, at some time during their life, develop a serious mental disorder--and of these 90% or so who do, only 10% of that crowd will seek help because it causes so much grief. 1 in 5 adults (around 20%), 1 in 5 youth between 13 & 18 years of age, and about 13% of children aged 8-13 years old will develop a serious mental disorder IN ONE YEAR, but very little is done about this because it is so hushed and frowned upon to admit distress and seek aid. Everything has to be done on your own and support systems are gone so things like Shaken Baby Syndrome have sprung up (from overwhelmed parents who probably haven’t slept in days and shake their child out of frustration, and this causes the child as it grows up to be unable to walk in a straight line, always drifting left or right).

On a similar note, the bystander effect. Kitty Genovese (Catherine Susan Genovese) was brutally raped and murdered over 20 minutes in 1964, while 20 onlookers did NOTHING. The attacker left and returned to finish the job, and no one did anything. This was the only reason people were interested in studying this effect, because these people were everyday apartment livers, not psychopaths. This happened in broad daylight, in an open courtyard where help was easily accessible if anyone had had the worry to do so. The bystander effect means if the people around you are doing nothing or seem unconcerned, you are likely to assume crackhead or druggie or not a big deal instead of possible emergency, or to assume others will act, and to do NOTHING about serious events like Kitty’s death.

3. Monetized Healthcare. Sometime during the Nixon administration, this administration signed a bill into law allowing insurance companies to monopolize healthcare. They are now allowed, by this law, to charge as much as they want, however ridiculous. Ambulances cost around $6,000 to take a dying person to the hospital. If you get shot it’s about $154,000 (per person) to get it treated in a hospital. A stab wound costs around $12,000 (per person). The legal, federal poverty line right now is $20,000, and at $65,000 a year my family (medically unable to work mother, working father, two children) was living paycheck to paycheck with about $20 to spare after taxes, bills, and necessities were taken care of. Stanford researchers reported that between 2006 and 2014, more than $6,600,000,000 was spent on gunshot injuries (6.6 billion was just in-the-door costs, not including treatment). Following the mass shooting in Las Vegas, an article describing the costs of those victims was published…& it reported that in-and-out patients on average spent $5,254, and anyone kept one night or longer spent on average $95,887—as if their day wasn’t already bad enough!

4. LGBT+ concerns. LGBT+ hate crimes are on the rise. Between 2016 and 2017, the FBI’s Department of Justice reported 2206 hate crimes based on sexual orientation, 243 based on gender identity, and 77 based on sex. This means about 16% of hate crimes were sexual orientation, 2% were gender identity, and 1% were sex. This seems like a small number, but that is a solid 2,449 attacks (rape or murder) based on LGBT+ status and 77 based off a physical, genetic trait we do not choose. That is a terrifyingly high number. 1 in 5 LGBT+ people remain silent, because of statistics such as these and (often religiously inclined) pressures from their family and social circles. People still openly hate and discriminate against these people for something they cannot change. They are called delusional, confused, and broken because they are certain of who they are and what they like, love, and enjoy.

5. HATE CRIMES are on the rise again, and it’s terrifying. See above (#4) obviously, but also racist & religious crimes are on the rise. There were 642 more crimes in 2017 than in 2016, and between the two years this totals 7,620 race-based hate crimes. Each crime can mean one person got hurt or attacked or killed, or it can mean hundreds at a time…it varies depending on the perpetrator and what they hope to achieve. Religious crimes, especially towards Muslims and Jews, are on the rise again, with places of worship being shot up or burned down. In 2016 and 2017, 2837 hate crimes were committed because of religion. This includes a 291 incident rise from 2016 to 2017, and it’s still rising.

6. School shootings, and the NRA’s response. The NRA (National Rifle Association, the main distributor of weapons) refuses to admit that mental health concerns should be taken into account when distributing weapons. They’re so worried about profits they don’t care that children are getting ahold of their weapons and killing and injuring hundreds to thousands of innocent children and adults in schools. One incident occurred because a girl turned a boy down when he asked her out, and instead of accepting this and moving on he tried to kill her. She escaped due to the aid of classmates, but it was a very close call. In other cases children went after their bullies (many of whom had their own issues), and we’ve had hundreds of innocents die while the NRA does absolutely nothing and denies any involvement or responsibility. When it comes to abortion people shout “what about the children” (despite the fact that the fetus doesn’t even have a heart until about 5 weeks, and the heartbeat bills sit at 3) but when it comes to school shootings they ignore the children who have families and lives and hopes and dreams in favor of their guns, because it is written into law that is very difficult to change the people have a “right to bear arms.” But this amendment was added when one-shot rifles were it, and now we have automatic rifles with 300 rounds, but people still scream they have their right because it’s written down somewhere.

7. Lack of respect in the police force & authorities. Tying into number eight…the police (among other authorities) have an overall lack of respect for the people they serve. Naturally there are remarkable exceptions, but it is commonplace. They are taught to act before they think and to profile people. They will go after women and people of color far more often than men and white people. They will criticize women and trust men’s judgement over women’s. They assume people of color or women are always (or almost always) in the wrong, no matter their surroundings. Women and people of color are taught to be on edge always and to fight dirty and run, and never to expect respect.

8. Single-parent families, & views of their parenting skills. My friend’s mother just got screamed at for her “horrible parenting” skills. She is a single mother with a 5 year old daughter, an 18 year old daughter, and a 10 year old son. She works full-time on top of caring for her children and doesn’t always have the energy or time to pay attention to them…unless they act out. Learning this, her son decided to start running away all day without telling her where he was. He could be gone 8am to midnight the next morning. The last time, he refused to get out of his therapist’s car so she called the police (with mother’s permission). The police, rather than realizing from the story of a neighbor whose 17 year old child had been beat up by the 10 year old or from the family who insisted that this child had been acting out a lot recently and had called his mother a whore several times, a bitch, and told her to burn in hell…decided to lecture this single mother on her parenting skills because “ten year olds can’t be dangerous”...and possible because he is the only male in the household. There is now concern, after a night in a psych ward where this child called her abusive, that the 5 year old will be permanently removed from their home despite no abuse having occurred. Single-parent families are only given attention when they fuck up, and never any aid or counseling or financial support to prevent massive explosions like this one.

9. LGBT+ families, and scrutinized views of their parenting skills. Oftentimes LGBT+ families are amazing parental systems. They love themselves and as such are free to love their children unconditionally and expect nothing but encourage everything. Their parenting skills have been scrutinized due to doubt of this fact, and it’s been proven true. A few states have now banned LGBT+ families from adopting children, as if their sexuality or birth gender (“what’s in your pants” again) is any of the adoption agency’s fucking concern.

10. EXTREME POLARIZATION over party lines. Everyone is turning party on party. It’s always the Democrat’s fault or the Republican’s fault if something goes wrong. There will be a blind eye turned to any information to the contrary that possible one’s own party has done something they do not approve of. This results in dog-piling of anyone with a solid opinion. 20 people leapt down my mom’s throat for suggesting people try to change the administration rather than complain about it on social media, and she was called an “unAmerican Nazi”. People throw things like this around nonchalantly, as if they’ve forgotten its roots—and most of them have.

11. Lack of policy knowledge before voting. People are so focused on party lines (“Independent”, “Democrat”, “Republican”) that they don’t do any research on the policies of whom they choose to elect to lead our country. Our electoral college system is fucked and refuses to be changed. It was supposed to represent the people’s choice, but majority vote chose Clinton and the electoral college landed us with Trump. This is not how our system is supposed to work. We are living in a capitalist oligarchy lead by corporations, not a democracy.

12. Ethnic heritage, & loss of policies. Our administration proposed removing all protections for the remaining land of the native peoples of the First Nations, as well as all the scholarships for their education so they can participate as functional members of our society. A person of Cherokee descent told me on the university campus that 6 year old children are still being quietly kidnapped from the nation and brought into white society, never to see or hear from their families again (or be seen or heard from) due to a systematic destruction of their culture. Racist hate crimes are back on the rise, since hate-filled people are emboldened by the current administration’s open hatred of certain ethnic groups and sexes. Petitions are not enough, peaceful protests get brutally shut down by cops with batons, and nothing is right.

13. Unemployment and homelessness. This is a huge crisis that is being dealt with improperly by our management, AKA the Trump administration. They bring back unhealthy jobs that will destroy our world and call it a job well done while kicking more people to the streets. Every homeless person is assumed to be a druggie or an alcoholic, especially the men, but this is extremely wrong. Many of them do have disorders, this is true (schizophrenics and sometimes druggies will end up homeless), but not ALL of them are. Most are simply everyday people living paycheck to paycheck, reduced to begging money from high-and-mighty classist (often racist or sexist) closed-minded people who rarely care enough to offer aid.

14. Breathable air, & drinkable water (that doesn’t light on fire, thank you very much), AKA lack of pollution. Our president, who is supposed to represent WE THE PEOPLE, abolished clean air and water acts preventing coal companies saying he was “bringing back jobs for the people”. What this means, in reality, is that we won’t be able to breathe in about five years, water will all be polluted by offshore drilling, and climate change may well envelope the world and kill all life (grim and dramatic, but a very real possibility). The water within miles of any natural gas fracking fills with fracking chemicals and will LITERALLY LIGHT ON FIRE, and it causes various cancers and other illnesses. Vast majority of these people can’t afford to move, or are too old or sick to do so. Pollution is everywhere. I have asthma…it sucks hardcore.

15. Obesity, overweight, & physical health problems.

The corporations keep everyone so stretched living paycheck-to-paycheck above the 20 year old unchanged poverty line that they’re forced to consume everything offered. A soda or energy drink is $2 or $3 LESS THAN WATER, and when you’ve got only $20 to buy food that may make you more inclined to buy the corporation’s syrupy nutrition-less crap. A McDonald’s meal, to call out a corporation, costs about $4 (compared to $20-$60 for a decent, healthy restaurant with good non-GMO healthy food), but scientists were legitimately unable to figure out some of the chemicals in the food—and the human body sure as hell can’t use that for energy, but it costs so much less it’s a necessary evil sometimes when budgets are thin! This leads to severe obesity (especially in children), cancers, heart failure, and clogged arteries, among other complications.

16. Anxiety & depression are so commonplace they’re dismissed as actual disorders. This is a terrifying revelation. These are severe disorders…that are being overlooked. Depression means the person has a severe lack of motivation, the things they used to enjoy are no longer enjoyable, and sometimes they even desire an early (very soon) death. But due to the fact that this is very commonplace and almost everyone is depressed, people with this disorder are told to “suck it up” because “life sucks”, or to “just smile” or to “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or to “get over yourself” or that “other people have it worse. This makes depression a much grander monster to tackle, because there is no social support system for a disorder that nearly everybody suffers and considers a normal state of mind.

Anxiety in and of itself is perfectly normal. It’s why we care how we look, why we get up to go to school or work on time, why we look presentable and friendly, and part of how we engage with others around us. However, too much anxiety can be crushing. It seems every person at my university has an anxiety disorder of some kind (social, general) or is distressed (not just stressed, but so over-stressed their systems are failing and they’re getting headaches and finding themselves unable to cope). The pressure of finals or midterms that will determine your fate for the next semester or year, the pressure of clubs or kids or other commitments… it’s all too much. We’re all overwhelmed. Our systems are overridden. We’re running on 4 hours of sleep and an energy drink or a coffee every day, and the greasy sort-of-food in the cafe with its heavy salt and heavy oily fatty foods draw in swarms of distressed and hungry students and staff. Everyone is on a grind. Our brains are overwhelmed, constantly slammed into overdrive. There is no reprieve. It’s school, work, kids or homework, studying, tests, repeat…over and over until people drop out of school or social groups they used to enjoy. 90% of college students will develop a mental disorder in their time on campus due to the financial and emotional stress of attending school.

17. Retirement age keeps going up (it’s around 70 for full benefits) despite life expectancy going down. One can reap the rewards of Social Security by 62 for a loss of 30% of the money you put in there out of your own hard-earned paychecks, or full benefits at 67, or 21% extra benefits if pulled at age 70. This is despite the fact that kids are committing suicide and people are dying of poor health (at the hands of corporations and processed foods and chemicals leading to heart failure and severe obesity and cancer) between 45 and 65 years old…and most people will never reach 70.

18. Suicide rates are on the rise as young as 11 years old. Kids as young as eleven are committing suicide. It’s extremely common for 13-18 year olds to self-harm, starve themselves, or commit suicide. The pressure of society to have sex as young as possible, to get married as soon as possible, to know what they want to be when they’re older, and to fit in is so strong it crushes their will to live. This is terrifying.

19. Pressures of social media & the Internet. Kids learn very fast that if you don’t have a good “brand” or persona online, you will fail socially. Now they have to learn Internet lingo as well as proper grammar, despite how difficult grammar on its own is to learn, and they learn from social media influencers that what they have to do to get attention and “followers” is to flash bare skin or beat someone up or take part in a “challenge” that may harm or kill them. With the way school is taught and how white-washed it’s become (especially in Texas), it is increasingly difficult to convince children this is NOT what they want from their life and why they can’t become a YouTube star overnight like some kid who reviews toys and makes millions of dollars doing it (he’s only eight by the way).

20. Lack of filtering for children...and dangerously adult “children’s” websites. So-called “children’s” game sites full of games such as Mafa.com, where it’s supposedly for children but it’s games with injured or pregnant favorite characters and a game that the entire purpose is to hit Dora’s bare buttocks as fast and hard as possible (it even has a scream effect with it). This is advertised as ‘the best girl games for children’. What is this teaching our kids?

21. EVERYONE IS TRIGGERED BY EVERYTHING. This ranges from the words “flesh” and “moist” (especially together), politics, the news, and school shootings to actual abuse and rape (abuse and rape are legitimate reasons, don’t get me wrong, but these are things we need to talk about and people are too triggered by everything & kind of wimpy (don’t hate on me for that, it’s true that people have lost majority of their ability to handle stress & there are legitimate mental health reasons for that)).

22. College is encouraged but funding is shitty & most students can’t afford to eat. There are federal grants/scholarships but they’re so so limited in scope and what they’ll give, and 3/5 of the students at my university (a commuter campus mostly composed of middle-aged & young parents with 5-11 year old children) CAN’T AFFORD TO EAT FOOD while they attend school, and the stress levels are high enough it’s almost guaranteed (about a 90% chance) that the average university student, regardless of prior ability to handle stress, will develop at least one mental disorder, and this is usually some form of anxiety or depression. This is so “normal”/commonplace no one cares.

23. COMPLACENCY. Because let’s face it, if even half of these things happened in France or someplace else there would’ve been a full-scale revolution that overthrew the whole administration, but we’ve had nothing. No one wants to talk about politics, we all get angry and depressed/suicidal talking about it, and unless the bad stuff DIRECTLY, IMMEDIATELY, & STRONGLY affect people, no one cares. If you drink water with natural gas in it & get cancer/get sick, maybe you’ll care a little. But if you watch someone do that or light their tap water ON FIRE, you can just turn the screen off and go on with your life like Oklahoma and all other natural gas sites have nothing going wrong.

24. On that note, corporations are polluting everything, and no one is stopping them. We need purified water & ice from the refrigerator or some purification system now because natural gases & all kinds of unhealthy chemicals have infected our waters. A military facility dumped 3 tons of nuclear waste into the Puget Sound despite it being illegal, and no one said a damn thing. No one cares that fish and other marine life are swallowing plastic and dying, or that we drink plastic, or that plastic is literally made from oil, or that these toxic wastes getting dumped in the water will cause cancer in 2 to 5 years, or that they soon won’t be able to breathe the air, because right this second it doesn’t seem to affect them. We’ve gotten so used to pollution that we don’t really notice it anymore.

25. Public transport is unreliable & sucks. Unless you live in a huge urban city, public transport is unreliable. In big cities it comes every fifteen minutes to all ends of town; in a suburb, it comes maybe every forty-five minutes (they’re often late)...and though it goes to all the commerce centers and downtown, public transportation from one end of town to the other where the university is doesn’t exist, because society doesn’t care enough about education to complain. Everyone is so overwhelmed with work and home life and survival stress they have no time to care about the things that should matter, because it doesn’t directly affect them.

26. Living is expensive as hell! This especially applies in big cities, where a one-bedroom shitty apartment can cost as much as a full three-bedroom 2-bath house in a small city. The more immigration comes to the city or suburbia, the higher the prices. Just two years ago my parents’ 3 bedroom 2 bath house cost $300,000; the same house now costs $500,000, and it’s still going up. This is good for the seller, but horrible on the buyer.

27. Education is there to brainwash you & tell you how to think, and to pit people against each other in a fight for “good grades”, not allow freedom or true creativity. We are told from age 6 that money is everything. We are told how to do math and how to write, but never to understand what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. We’re not taught to truly think for ourselves, or the consumer society would ultimately collapse. Schools are too busy cramming tests in for everyone from kindergarten to senior year of high school that the kids aren’t really learning, just temporarily memorizing. Kids are starting to hate school. 5 and 6 year olds are skipping classes. Everything is about tests and grades, tests and grades. No true learning takes place. It’s all about the numbers, not about the reality.

The No Child Left Behind program seemed like it would help keep kids from socially falling behind, but instead it resulted in 18 year olds who still can’t read (though by 5 most kids can) and kids who slack off because they legitimately can’t comprehend what’s going on. Kids compete for “good grades”, a concept made up by someone many decades ago that no one fully understands except as a statistic for performance. If one child asks why they’re told to shut up and take notes; if a kid takes a creative approach to an assignment such as turning an essay into a thorough powerpoint or an art project they’re given a failing grade; freedom and creativity and critical thought are being crushed. Children now learn to keep their heads down and be shy, to be a bully, or to be an outcast because those are their only offered options.

28. Rape culture. “She was asking for it.” “She shouldn’t’ve gotten drunk.” “She shouldn’t’ve worn those clothes.” “She didn’t say no.” “Rape doesn’t happen to men.” “Oh, boys will be boys.”

These phrases are commonplace on the Internet and all around the country. We hear them all the time. Just because the woman was dressed comfortably or fancy because she was comfortable in her own skin, she wanted to be raped. Just because she wanted to have a good time that night and decided to drink, it’s her fault it happened (even if a rape drug was involved). Just because she didn’t outright say no to him (or her), it’s her fault she got raped. “Boys will be boys”, used to excuse anything a man does. Rape never happens to men and it’s somehow funny to suggest it might. Women never rape people. It’s bullshit, plain and simple. Everyone likes to excuse behavior like that. If you raise a boy, girl, or nonbinary child to respect people and see them as personalities and lives instead of toys and prey, rape wouldn’t be viewed this way. If you raise a boy, girl, or nonbinary child to expect respect and not give in to pleading or coercing or allow anything under standard, rape wouldn’t be viewed this way. This culture is changeable, but no one is willing to make the change. There are legitimately people out there who laugh about men getting raped. Statistically, 1 in 6 men will get raped in a year…and that’s just the ones, in this fucked up culture, who are willing to report it. Statistically, 1 in 3 women will get raped…and again, just the ones, in this culture, who are willing to report it. In high school I couldn’t find a single girl who had not been raped at least once (whether orally or whatever form doesn’t matter), and I (physically female but genderfluid) was the only person I knew who had not experienced it. I came very close around 9, but luckily my older brother caught the guy in time and thanks to him I was the only one untouched by high school, by 18 years old. …Shouldn’t that be terrifying? By the time this generation is reaching adulthood, 1 in 100 kids has not experienced rape, and most of it is because we are taught to sexualize and objectify everyone instead of befriend and love them. We are taught apathy or pity, not empathy.

Now do you understand why we’re in chaos? Why I want to escape? Why everyone wants to leave?

I’m really stressed every time I turn on the news because it’s always more and more bad things. We live in chaos. There are days I don’t want to wake up, days I contemplate self-harm, and days I want to leave the country entirely. This chaos is enough to crush a society.

#fml #anxiety rant #why #united states #united states government #united states policies #politics #stress #mental health #health #anxiety #depression #distress #rape culture #public transportation #the system sucks

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huntertales · 7 years

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Part Two: Some Habits are Hard to Break. (Good God, Y’all! S05E02)

Useful Links: Last Part | All Episodes Word Count: 5,763. A/N: So one of my resolutions this year was to post more frequently, I wonder how that's coming along...Seriously, I meant to post earlier this week, but with the last of the holidays, I have found myself a bit busy. Sorry about that! I hope this part was worth the wait. The next part should be out very soon~

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Lowering the shotgun to your side for safekeeping, you stepped into the room after Ellen, carefully observing the crowd of people that were all huddled together. The room seemed like any other you would find in a church basement, it was furnished with a long wooden table and at least a half dozen chairs occupied by an array of people, all sharing the same petrified expression that probably hadn't left their faces since this trouble began. You noticed a priest, a man who looked to be at least in his thirties, huddled in the back of the room with a few blankets cradled close to his chest. You gave him a weak smile when you accidentally made eye contact with him, but yet again, your attention drifted to the woman sitting at the table closest to you.

She kept her gaze on the floor as her husband comforted her by rubbing her shoulders, you presumed they were married from the gold wedding rings on their finger. You noticed she kept running her palms over her swollen stomach as she almost mumbled something, not directly at herself, but the tiny fetus growing inside her body. Reading her lips, you made out the keywords of “It’s okay” and “Everything's gonna be fine, sweetie.” You wondered if this was her first child.

“This is Y/N, Sam and Dean.” Ellen’s introduction brought you out of your thoughts and your gaze over to her. “They're hunters. They're here to help.”

“You guys hip to this whole demon thing?” A male voice made you look over your shoulder to see who spoke up. The man guarding the door stood just a little bit shorter than Sam, but from heavy arsenal he was holding, there wasn't a lack of threat he could strike in someone. You presumed he was a hunter himself, the woodsy kind, at least.

“Yeah.” Dean answered. “Are you?”

“My wife’s eyes turned black. She came after me with a brick.” One of the men sitting at the table confessed to what he had witnessed first hand right when this entire mess started. He leaned his right elbow on the table and nervously chewed on the nail bed of his thumb, you noticed a gold band was on his index finger. You presumed he moved it after ending his unfortunate marriage to his wife from guilt after what he was forced to do in order to protect himself. "Kind of makes you embrace the paranormal."

You inhaled a deep breath from the sticky situation that had unfolded. The demons possessing the poor townsfolk weren't here for some big agenda, it was probably for the hell of it, see how much of a body count they could rack up before being run out of town by hunters. "All right," You glanced over at Ellen and dropped your voice to a whisper, making sure nobody could hear this conversation besides you or the boys, knowing even more panic was what you were trying to avoid. "Catch us up."

“I doubt I know more than you do. Rufus called—said he was in town checking out some omens. All of a sudden the whole town was possessed.” Ellen explained. You furrowed your brow in confusion at how quickly the situation escalated. “Me and Jo were nearby—”

“You're hunting with Jo?” You cut her off, surprised to hear the information come out of her mouth. The last time you had seen the young Harvelle she was working in some little bar, far away from the once standing Roadhouse after her mother refused to even think about letting Jo out of her sight to go hunting. You presumed she had been out on her own, taking cases where they popped up. Never could you think Ellen would join her daughter in the lifestyle that killed her husband many years ago.

“Yeah, for a while now.” Ellen said. You looked away for a moment to see if you could spot Jo anywhere, but she was nowhere to be seen in this small crowd of at least a dozen people. "We got here, and the place—well, the place was exactly like how you've seen it. Couldn't find Rufus. Then me and Jo got separated. I was out looking when I found you three."

You gave her a sympathetic look when you noticed the worry starting to settle in the woman’s face at the troublesome thought, it was her nightmare that she thought about frequently when Jo left on her own. But for this to actually happen, you knew it must have been eating her up inside. “Don't worry, we’ll find Jo.” Dean said with reassurance.

"Either way, these people cannot just sit here." Sam whispered. His gaze lingered for a second or two on the folks who quietly kept themselves quiet with their heavy thoughts. "We got to get them out now."

"No. It's not that easy. I've been trying. We already made a run for it once." Ellen protested the idea, knowing it was foolish to think of such a thing. Sam asked her what happened from her answer. "There used to be twenty of us." You found yourself subconsciously making a mental headcount of the bodies in the room, you made it to about nine, and subtracting the number Ellen said, you realized the danger you would be putting everyone in if you tired to repeat history. Who knows how many would come back if you attempted to make an escape for it. "There's four of now. " Dean said, but you doubt the numbers would match how many dozens demons that were outside, just waiting for their next target. "You don't know what it's like out there. Demons are everywhere." Ellen said. You knew even if you paired everyone off into groups of three, you couldn't risk the chance of having someone fall behind from a demon you couldn't see from the corner of your eye. "We won't be able to cover everybody." "What if we give everyone guns?" Sam suggested. You nudged your elbow softly into Sam's side to give his attention into the flaw of his faulty plan. "What—are you gunna arm up baby bump over there?" "More salt we can fire, more demons we can keep away." Sam said, adding more reason for his plan.

Dean thought about his brother’s plan for a second when he presumed it might just work. Time was on your side, if you gave everyone a proper lesson of what to do, even taking the risk of taking out a few outside again, maybe….just maybe this plan could work in your favor. “There's a sporting-good’s store we passed on Main we passed on the way. I bet they have guns.”

“All right, we’ll go. You stay here.” Sam nodded his head to Ellen to man down the fort as you looked over at the woman, who opened her mouth just a moment later, bringing up the people she was searching for before spotting the three of you. “If Jo and Rufus are out there, we'll bring the back.”

Ellen wasn't particularly pleased with the little room of control you were giving her for the situation, but she nodded her head in agreement, looking away to hide her growing nervousness. You gave her one last look before you turned around to head for the door, the man keeping guard waited for the three of you to head out before locking back up. Giving him a small smile, you stepped out first into the small hallway and headed for the staircase. You grabbed ahold of the banister with a free hand as you made it about two steps. But when you heard the lack of shuffling feet when the door closed back up, you looked over your shoulder to see the boys were standing just outside of the devil’s trap. Dea reached out a hand to stop his brother from going any further.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. Why don’t Y/N and I go?” Dean’s suggestion wasn’t like him. He normally liked it when all of you worked as a team, and knowing the threat outside, it seemed this was a risk you didn’t want to take. Sam’s reaction to share the same apprehension about letting the both of you head out there without possible backup. “Somebody’s got to stay here and start giving them shotgun one-oh-one.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed with his brother on that point. “Ellen.”

Dean refused to let this argument die. You felt yourself arching up a brow when you saw him leap forward to stop his brother, yet again, from making his way to the staircase to join you. "It's gonna go a lot faster if you stay and help, okay?"

"What's your big plan, Dean? You gonna go look for guns and salt while Y/N looks for Jo and Rufus? That's a stupid idea." Sam said. His older brother would have known better than to juggle too many tasks at a dangerous point like this. All of you could tackle the small jobs before heading out for a quick search of the town to see if you could spot the hunters. Dean shook his head, mumbling something about him and you being able to handle it. Sam narrowed his eyes ever so slightly at his older brother, suspicion of what his true motives were starting to become clear, despite the nonchalant stare Dean was giving him. "You don't want me going out there."

"I didn't say that." Dean said, being quick to defend himself.

"Around demons." Sam continued on when he gotten a hunch of what Dean was hinting around.

“I didn't say that.” Dean argued the same line, yet again.

"Good God, y'all." You muttered underneath your breath, rolling your eyes in frustration before you glanced over at the brothers to defuse this argument. There was a time and place for them to hash out their passive aggressive remarks, but today was not one of them. "You boys wanna wrap this up? We've got a town full of demons, two hunters missing and eight survivors—nine if you count that unborn baby. Now if you want to sit here arguing like a bunch of amateurs, fine. I'll head out there myself. Just give me the knife and I'll be on my way."

You outstretched your arm and made a gesture with your hand for Sam to give the demon knife so you could stick to your promise. The brothers broke their concentration away from one another and pretended like their argument had never took place. You gave a nod with your head for them to follow behind as you turned around on your spot from the second step on the staircase. As you began jogging up to the to of the top level of the church, you heard the brothers follow behind from their heavy stomps on the wooden staircase from their boots.

Heading back outside, you cautiously observed the area to see if there was anyone that might have stepped out from the woodwork and take a jump on all of you. But you were greeted with the same sight that hadn’t changed when you first arrived into town. You noticed the small market was right across the street, and the sporting-goods store Dean mention had to be at least a few minute walk from here. One of the good things about small towns, all your daily assistencials were just a five minute walk away. Positioning the shotgun, you glanced over at the boys while you crossed the same car with the baby stroller tucked underneath the wheel.

"Y/N and I'll get the salt. You get the guns." Sam said, deciding to be the one for making up the plans for this situation as he began walking just a bit faster, until he was in sync with you. "We'll take a quick look to see if we can find anything before heading back, too."

“No We’ll go together.” Dean suggested.

"Dean, it's right there." Sam argued with his brother. You kept your concentration ahead of you, restraining yourself from rolling your eyes once more. "Can we at least do this like professionals?"

Dean listened to the command as he slowly fell back, stopping in the middle of the road, letting Sam catch up with you before the two of you disappeared into the building. You opened up the door to the store, hearing the familiar jingle of the bell signaling your presence to whoever might be inside. You and Sam split up by taking different sides of the small store to see if there might be any other customers that were here for other reasons. When you checked every aisle and behind the counter, you made the safe conclusion the both of you were here alone. You grabbed a few plastic bags and tossed them over at Sam to get what supplies you might need.

You made a mental checklist of what you might need beside the salt, it wouldn't hurt to be extra cautious. You wandered down the aisles looking for some small items you could carry back to the church for safekeeping before you and Sam headed back out into town to look for Rufus and Jo. The entire store was silent except for the very faint sound of Sam moving the canisters of rock salt into the bags you gave him. You wandered through the store with the shotgun until you stopped in the beginning of the aisle where Sam was. For a moment you watched as Sam quietly fill up the bag with as much salt as he could possibly fit. Leaning yourself against the shelves that displayed an array of canned goods, you realized this was the first time you and him were alone since this chaos started.

""How are you holding up, Sammy?" Your question could be translated to however the younger Winchester personally wanted. It could have been a genuine approach of concern about how he was really handling the situation at hand, with no brother around, maybe he would feel comfortable enough to admit a few confessions. You watched as he stared at you from the corner of his eye for a moment or so, as if he was contemplating to finally break down and see there was someone on his side. "You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

"Can you grab some more bags?" Sam, just like the Winchester way, diverted the conversation to something else. He pointed a finger across the store, you tried your hardest not to let your lips stretch into a frown of annoyance. "These are kind of getting heavy." Sam's neutral expression is something that is of complicated matters, in which, he's too good for you to be able to see just a scrap of what he's really feeling. You can't see a spec of emotion in his eyes that detect sadness or guilt, there's nothing but a look that reads like a classic aura of seriousness. He wants to get the job done. You bite the inside of your cheek, a habit that seems to be forming out of stress, and nod your head. Pushing yourself to a standing position, you head over to the front of the store and go straight to the register. Running your fingers across the counter, you bend over slightly to find where you gotten the plastic bags from before. But you barely made a second of searching before you hear Sam violently whisper your name from across the room. You look up slightly to see what he wants, yet you follow his index finger that hovers over the aisle that hides his ginormous frame. Furrowing your brow, you look over to the door just in time to see there's two guys coming to the store, from the black eyes and baseball bat one of them is holding, you had a feeling they weren't survivors. Throwing yourself to the dirty floors, you managed to hide yourself from the demons just as the bell chimes, announcing a new customer. You curl your lips inward so your teeth are keeping them tightly shut, a precaution to make sure they can't hear you breathe. You hear the heavy thumps of boots across the floor. One of them heads to the back of the store while the other lingers in the front. A few swear words slip out from your mind when you realized the shotgun was still in the back of the place with Sam, along with the salt. You have no weapon to defend yourself. For someone who kept berating the boys for being unprofessional, you sure were making a lot of rookie mistakes on a hunt with some much at stake. But you decide to make one more, you need to figure out where the demons are before you could try and make some sort of escape. Inhaling a quiet breath, you place your hands on the ground, feeling the dust and accumulation of the tiniest amount of crumbs that touch your skin, while it's an unpleasant experience, it gives you enough leverage to lean just the slightest to see what's going on. As your eyes are the only thing visible behind the counter, your eyes widen ever so slightly when you hear the thumping sound of a can hitting the ground. Sam tried to play a distraction when he spotted one of the demons right across from him. He had two shotguns and the demon knife tucked in the back of his jeans. It could have been the perfect way to take out two more demons, but it ended up being the worst things he could have done. You scrambled to your feet when you noticed one coming your way while his friend dropped whatever he was trying to steal to the ground. You barely make it across the counter before the demon gets his hands on you. He roughly shoves you against the wall, pinning you in place for just a second. But you retaliate by swinging your fist, managing to throw a punch that sends his head at just the angle which doesn't look pleasant. You notice the shotgun lying on the ground, if you're fast enough, maybe you could grab it and momentarily stun the demon. Just as you were about to lunge forward, you suddenly find yourself staring at the end of a knife. You barely manage to block a swing, you hiss in pain when you feel the stinging sensation prickle across your skin. The demon managed to slice through the fabric of your shirt and give you a nick, but it's not what he wants. Your hands quickly grab ahold of the knife by the handle, and by using every single fiber in your body, you try your hardest to push the blade away from you. You try your hardest to push him away, but the demon is stronger than you, and before you could stop it, you feel a gasp of pain escape your throat.

It had been barely four days since the incident Bobby had put himself through to save you and Dean from being slaughtered at the hands of Meg, the demon who you could never really shake off for too long. You glanced down at the knife to see that the blade had disappeared, and from the intense pain in your side, the demon lodged it into you. You felt yourself hitting the wall when he pulled out the knife from your body, with the blade dripping red, it was near impossible to protect yourself from what was about to come. You shielded yourself with a free hand as the other quickly put pressure on your wound, but before the demon could do anything, Sam roughly grabbed a hold of his wrist. You watched as everything unfolded, but you couldn't keep up with what was happening, it was going too fast. Before you could steady yourself, you felt yourself slowly dropping to the ground.

You landed to the floor with a soft thud, the pain subsiding in your legs had passed, but the ache in your stomach had grown almost a million times worse. You pressed your palm against your wound, hopeful the shirt you were wearing would be enough to keep it from bleeding it too much before you could get back to safety. Letting out a shaky breath, you slowly looked away from your shirt that was starting to become soaked, and to the two bodies lying on the ground just a few feet away from you. It was supposed to be a simple run for supplies. How the hell did this happen?

Sam roughly held onto the demon knife with a iron tight grip while the other inspected the hunting knife one of the demons had been carrying. The stench of blood filled his nostrils and he steadied his breathing to a normal pace from the extrusion he put himself through. He glanced down for just a second to see how you were dealing with your wounds. You sat on the floor with your legs stretched out and both hands pressed against your stomach. From the looks of it, there wasn't too much loss of blood, and thankfully, your legs twitched every so often. Sam sniffed the air once more when he noticed the pool of blood surrounding the bodies. But without even a second thought, he found himself lifting up the knife the demon had used to harm you. He examined the blade. Stainless steel, perfect for hunting and skinning animals. What Sam was most interested in was the blood, how it slowly dripped off the blade, almost effortless. Suddenly he felt his mouth go dry when he sniffed the blood again ,but this time, it smelled different, almost...comforting.

Without much of a thought, he reached out his hand, and by balancing the demon knife, his thumb brushed across the cold blade, picking up just the tiniest amount of the blood. There was not an ounce of demon blood left in his system, he hadn't craved it for the past five days. But suddenly Sam was tempted all over again. This blood was a new strain of a drug, and, dammit, if he was being honest with himself, he wanted more. He wanted more than just a smell. Sam tilted his head to the side and wondered for just a moment What harm would come if he just...took a little taste? For old time's sake. Nobody would know. Not you, not his judgemental brother.

Yet the thought vanished straight from his mind like the demon blood in his veins when he heard the jingling echo coming from the store entrance. Sam dropped himself to a crouch as you cautiously tried your hardest to somehow make yourself smaller, wondering if there was another demon wondering why their partners were taking forever. But relief flooded through you when you heard Dean ever so quietly call out, “Sam? Y/N?”

Dean wandered through the place after he dropped the duffel bags crammed with all sorts of different guns and ammunition he stolen from the sports store. He examined every single aisle he passed by, but when he gotten to the one where you and Sam were, he stopped straight in his tracks from the mess that had unfolded. The first thing he noticed was the two dead bodies on the ground, and slowly following the blood trail, Dean noticed right away Sam was hovering over it, red handed from the demon knife still caked in blood, and another knife. But his eyes slowly wandered down to the ground, where he noticed you, and the growing dark stain on your shirt. You moved a hand away to try and push yourself into a better sitting position against the wall so you could explain what happened, but all that came out was a muffled groan of pain.

“What the hell happened here?” Dean questioned the both of you. He rushed to your aid, dodging the dead bodies as he dropped the shotgun to your feet before placing a hand over yours to keep your wound from bleeding.

“Demons.” Sam tried to explain to his brother. “We got jumped—”

“Damn it, Sam! How could you let this happen?” Dean snapped with a venomous tone.

“It's not his fault.” You manage to speak, despite how much it hurts. “I left my gun when they came. I should've kept it on me. Sam saved my life. Don't bite his head off.”

Dean found himself taking your advice when he changed the subject, knowing all of you needed to get out of here before someone else came. He slowly helped you to your feet, quieting down your swear words and protests about the pain, ushering you that it wasn't too far of a walk from the church. Sam tried to step in and help, but was brushed off when Dean passed him with his arm wrapped around your waist, taking much of your weight on him as he could. As the both of you got closer to the front entrance, Dean looked over his shoulder to give his brother a look. A look which Sam could translate into one simple saying he's been hearing for the past week, “This is all your fault.”

+ + +

You and the boys arrived back to the safety of the basement level of the church, where you were greeted with an unpleasant Ellen when she saw you with a blood soaked shirt. If you thought she had been stressed before, you had only added fuel to the fire. You gotten the chance to inspect your wounds further, and thanks to Brett, the man who had been guarding the door when you arrived, he and Dean worked together in getting your wounds cleaned up. You learned through small talk with him that he had served two tours in Fallujah. He gotten back a little after a year ago, during his time in the army he saw a thing or two. Your wounds weren't drastic as you presumed them to be. The "scratch" you gotten while trying to dodge the first attack and your stab wound just needed some stitches. But you settled with some gauze and flimsy medical tape Dean found buried in the bottom of the first aid kit until you could get something better.

You kept yourself busy by helping whoever might need a more intimate lesson on gun safety on who might need it. As you helped Roger, the one you remembered as confessing to his wife attacking him with a brick, you observed him as he tried loading a few rounds into the chamber of the gun. Dean watched for a few moments to see that you and Ellen had most of this under control. He glanced around the room to see that his brother was sulking across the way. Dean headed over to the man and took a seat down on the steps, thinking the younger man's sour face was partially his fault for what he'd said.

“What’s wrong?” Dean asked him.

Sam wouldn't answer right away. He fell into a moment of silence when he glanced away from Dean, his eyes wandered around the room, subconsciously looking over at you and watching as you worked, almost as nothing happened, but the blood on your shirt told a different story. He wished that everything happened differently. "Just...at the store. I know I had to do what I did. But it's bothering me. Those demons were possessing teenagers." Sam admitted. "I mean, I had to slit some kid's throat."

"Come on, Sam." Dean muttered to him, annoyance could be detected in his tone as he rolled his eyes from his brother's too good of a heart. "You had to. If you didn't, Y/N might be dead."

"I know. I just—it used to be..." Sam trailed off, as if he was trying to find the right way to explain how he was feeling. "I just wish I could save people, like I used to."

"What," Dean seemed to have read clearly into what this little brother was trying to say without even realizing it. "You mean when you were all hopped up on demon blood?"

Sam tried covering himself as he fumbled out an excuse, "I-I didn't say that."

"I'm heading out." Ellen's voice brought the brothers away from a conversation that could have possibly turned into a petty argument. You looked over your shoulder when you noticed she had wandered off, you noticed she was with the boys. Sam looked at her with a serious expression, asking where she going. "I can't sit here on my ass. My daughter's out there somewhere. My daughter's out there somewhere. I'm not back in half an hour, go. Get these people out of here."

"No, wait." Sam pushed himself to his feet, his brother followed in his actions just a second later. "I'll go with you."

"Whoa. Hold on. Can I talk to you for a second?" Dean asked, stopping the younger Winchester. You watched as the both of them wandered off into the outskirts of the doorway. Ellen turned her head to look at you, slightly curious to see what this was about. You found yourself wondering the same thing when you headed for the doorway, hiding behind the closed door, you listened to what this was about. "You're gonna go out there again?"

"Well, crap doesn't hit the fun with coffee breaks." Sam said. Dean didn't waste a single breath when he offered the chance to go with Ellen instead. "It's fine. Just stay here with Y/N, get 'em ready. I'll cover Ellen."

"Why's it got to be you?" Dean questioned his little brother.

You could detect from Dean's voice what this argument was all about, and it seemed Sam did, too. "Oh, that's right. I forgot.” Sam mumbled with a snarky tone. “You think I'll take one look at a demon and suddenly fall off the wagon, as if, after everything, I haven't learned my lesson."

Dean stared at the younger man for a second, knowing well enough what he seen at the store. There was something in his brother's eye when he was surrounded by the pool of demon blood, it was swinging a bottle of whisky in front of an alcoholic. His mind was somewhere else for that moment as you laid bleeding on the floor, it was almost like Sam forget everything about him, except for that droplet of blood on his thumb. Dean was just insinuating a presumption from mere observation. "Well, have you?"

Sam couldn't help himself when he roughly pushed his brother against the wall, overcome with frustration at the accusation being tossed around. He could live with the fact that the man didn't trust him. But it was another for him to start an argument that was just asking for trouble. "If you actually think—" Sam hissed at the man with anger, but he stopped himself when he noticed you were lingering in the doorway.

“Is everything okay?” You asked the both of them with a quiet voice.

"Fine." Sam muttered underneath his breath.

You stepped out of the way just in time when Sam made his way back into the room. It seemed they settled who was going when the younger Winchester grabbed his shotgun from the table and went back out to the hall, passing by his brother without even a second glance. Ellen rolled along with the situation, heading out to the streets to find her missing daughter.

+ + +

Ellen said they would be gone for half an hour, it had been going on over an hour since she said she would be back with Sam. You glanced down at your phone one more time to read the time before you put it back to the table, trying to mask your worry of what was going on. Maybe they had found Jo and Rufus, maybe they were jumped by a bunch of demons. You bit your lip and forced the thought out of your mind. The goal here was to keep everyone calm, including yourself. You tried getting yourself to listen at the bible verse the priest had been reading to keep everyone's spirits high, but you kept observing Dean from the corner of your eye as he kept pacing back and forth, wanting some kind of sign to know what was going on. He got it just a second later, from the knock on the door.

You jumped out of your skin from the noise you weren’t expecting. You turned your head to the door, along with everyone else, curious to see who it was. Dean didn't waste a second when he headed over, moving the heavy wooden statue out of the way after cautiously looking out the peephole when he noticed it was Ellen. Swinging open the door, you watched as Ellen stepped into the room. She didn't make eye contact with anyone, the woman just came inside the room and headed for the table, putting down her gun. You noticed the look on her face, she was distraught, as if she'd witnessed something terrible.

“Where’s Sam?” Dean asked the important question when he noticed Ellen had come in alone.

You could feel your heart jump into your stomach when you saw Ellen respond with a shake of the head. She took a seat right next to you, guilt creeping into her expression from what she let happen without much of a choice. "They took him? Demons took him?" Susan, the pregnant woman, asked what you had dreaded to hear. You could hear the fear in her voice from what was happening. "What if they're in here--the demons?"

"No." You managed to give her answer, despite how quiet your voice came out.

"Everybody sit tight. I got to..." Dean grabbed the shotgun from the table, thinking this problem could be solved by handling this situation himself with just adrenaline alone. You watched as he got far as the closed double doors, all before he stopped in his tracks, realizing this plan was more of a suicide attempt if he were to go out there alone. You called out the man's name, dragging him back into reality. Despite how much the brothers argued, they wanted the best for each other. Dean cursed underneath his breath and turned back around, deciding to do the smart thing, by figuring out what the hell was going on. "Okay, we need to get a plan together. Tell me everything."

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neakco · 3 years

Text

Vixen & Crow Ch. 11

Ao3 First Prev Next V&C Masterlist

Where our heroes discover a lair of evil that no one knew existed. They may need a miacle.

Crow was about to head home when Gem forced him to land.

With a look of concentration Gem managed to make a glowing projection of a masked women wearing black.

“Thank the spirits it worked. I will explain but I need you back at our park now!”

“On it.” The image of what he assumed was a civilian Vixen faded away and he leapt up in the direction of their park.

When he arrived, he spotted the same masked women standing with Nathanial and pacing. “Vixen?”

“It’s me. I have a lot to explain and I fear not much time. Can you wait until I am done to ask questions?”

Crow nodded and made himself comfortable.

“I used to work as a thief for hire. I am technically retired but a young child asked me to steal something back for her. I saw it during our patrol and went back for it.” She paused in her pacing and tried to stand still. She really didn’t want Crow to know this about her. She didn’t want to taint their partnership. She shoved the thoughts aside and continued, “I need you to understand that I would never use my powers in this.”

Crow looked thoughtful but nodded.

“When I unlocked the door, I could smell the rot, I could see it. Nathanial says I shouldn’t be able to when not transformed. I could though and the scary thing is that there was no trace outside the place, not even a glimmer.”

Crow could tell Vixen was terrified, but he wasn’t sure if it was this spirit or his opinion that terrified her more. “Well transform into the Vexing Vixen I know and let’s terminate this trouble.”

She smiled, “Thank you.”

“For what?” He was actually confused by the gratitude. “You are a hero Vixen. That little girl will always remember that someone out there fought for her. The police probably couldn’t help or they ignored her.” They were running now. Crow followed Vixen closely to their destination.

“Why do you say that?”

“She would need to be desperate to find the contact information for an ex-thief. I wouldn’t even be surprised if she got it from a cop.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. It would make the most sense.” She smiled, “Thank you again Beanna Bàn.”

“Anytime you need a pick me up, just ask.” The stopped in front of the looming house. “This it?”

Vixen nodded.

“It is huge. Maybe not mansion or manor huge, but at least three floors.”

“Let us hope we don’t have to search each room individually.” Vixen pointed to the window he had made her sniff, “That is where I saw my target. It is also our entry point.”

“Not through the front door?”

“The room had a layer of dust on the floor. I want somewhere mildly safe in case we need to collect ourselves.”

Gem and Nathanial came towards them from opposite sides of the house. Gem’s feathers were fluffed out making her resemble a flying pompom and Nathanial’s tail was twitching.

Gem tried to speak but it came out as pure bird noise.

“We cannot even pick up a hint of the spirit from outside the walls.” Nathanial turned towards Vixen. “I am taking your target home for you.”

“But...”

He had lost his calm demeanor, “I don’t care, I want you two to stay in that room until I get back. If the spirit shows himself first, I need you to escape. Do I have your word?”

“It is that strong?” Crow didn’t realize he had spoken until he heard how frightened his words were. Both guardians were on edge and that worried him.

It was Vixen that answered, her tone mirrored his, “The energy isn’t leaking from the spirit’s control. Without breaking the law, we would never have suspected.”

Crow swallowed his worries and smiled. “Lucky we did. We do not want it getting stronger on us. You have my word Nat.”

“Mine too.” Vixen straightened up; she couldn’t fail her partner now.

“Thank you.” Nathanial jumped to the window and was out again with the heirloom in moments. “I will see you soon.”

Vixen held out her hand for Crow and as he grasped it, she brought them up to and through the window.

Crow gagged and turned green at the smell. “This is how spirits smell to you?”

Gem cackled quietly, “No boy,” She glowed for a moment and her voice overlapped with Nathanial’s, “This is how spirit’s smell to her.”

Crow collapsed on the ground trying very hard not to throw up as the glow faded from Gem. He stayed that way for a few minutes before finally looking at Vixen, “I don’t envy you anymore.”

“You envied me?” Vixen had her head cocked to the side in curiosity again.

“I felt useless, I am unable to do anything to help you track down spirits, it is frustrating.” He sat back against the outside wall under the window as another wave of nausea hit him.

“It isn’t too bad once you adjust. The energy actually seems like it is old and absorbed by the walls more than it is a fresh scent in the air.” She smiled, “I envied you too. You get to be the bright one while I stay stuck in the shadows.”

“What a pair we make. Want to switch costumes?”

Gem scoffed at them, “You made your colors unusual; it proves that you are both extremely suited to the roles you got.”

Crow and Vixen shared a glance before hearing Nathanial speak behind them.

“Was that actually a compliment Gem?”

“Shut it Red.”

Vixen was about to move forward when Crow stopped her. “How do you stand the smell? You never acted like it was this bad.”

“Rot was a common smell where I grew up.” A shadow dimmed her eyes for a moment, “Plus the smell doesn’t seem as bad through a fox's senses.”

Crow nodded in understanding and let Vixen take the lead.

She was trying to follow the strongest glimmers of scent in the air. It was hard when even the walls glowed in her sight.

Finally, the four entered what appeared to be an ornate dining room.

The dark lights all sprang to life to reveal a man seated at the table grinning. “Ah, Crow, Fox, welcome. Please have a seat and join me. I insist.”

Vixen and Crow cautiously made their way closer but didn’t take the offered chairs. The man was dressed in a tailored silken suit and appeared to be in his mid to late thirties.

The man gestured with his hands and two chairs smashed into the backs of their knees; forcing them to sit. “It has been a long time since I have seen the fox and crow. I don’t think I have ever seen them in quite these colors though. It is quite fetching.”

Vixen was glaring with barely contained anger, Crow was starring in disbelief. It was Gem that spoke. “You have met the previous one?”

“Ah, and you still have the guardians. Lovely to finally meet you. I normally don’t encounter your champions until after you have let them off their leashes.” The smile he gave sent shivers down the human’s spines.

Nathanial had his hackles raised, “How are you here? Hosts die.”

“For a long time I had female hosts. It is simple enough to transfer myself over to a fetus.” He grinned wider, “That isn’t what you are really asking though.” He stroked the glass in front of him with a singular finger causing it to ring eerily in the silence. “You want to know if I am the cause of all the disappearances of your past champions over the years. Usually once they hit a certain milestone in their powers.” He looked at his guests, “You two are still new, congrats are in order.”

“What?” Vixen was hyper aware and looking for either the trap or the escape.

“No one has ever discovered me this quickly before. The two of you could have been very powerful one day.”

Crow and Vixen stood up at the threat as their guardians moved to their shoulders.

The man just laughed, “I am disappointed in you guardians. The trainees have an excuse at least. You all followed my energy and never once realized.”

“Speak quickly spirit!” Gem snapped.

“This isn’t my energy at all. It belongs to the house.” As he stood up it was as if a dame had broken. The energy was a solid thing that brought all of them down under its weight.

“I think I would have enjoyed killing you two once you were stronger.” He began to approach slowly around the table knowing they were at his mercy, before he stopped short.

Vixen painfully rose to her feet, her back was straight, her eyes burned with fury. “I would like to see you try.” She grabbed Crow’s shoulder and teleported the four of them away.

The man laughed to the room, “Next time I shall close the blinds.”

Crow gasped for fresh air as I looked around the familiar surroundings of their park. He spotted Vixen lying face down next to him and rushed to roll her onto her back. “Hey? You okay?”

Nathanial nosed her a couple of times, “She appears fine for someone that just pulled off the impossible. She shouldn’t be able to teleport somewhere unless she can see it.”

Vixen coughed slightly and trembled as she sat up with Crow’s help. “I did see it. I pictured our park in my mind as clear as I could and prayed.” She started to cough a bit more.

“I for one am happy. We were almost goners.” Crow sat next to her, “How did you stand up?”

“Under all his energy there was a small speck of other. I focused on that.” She grinned, “I think he can still be defeated.”

Crow looked her over carefully, “That is well and good for the future, but are you even able to make it home tonight?”

“Yeah, I used a lot, but I think I have enough energy. I just need to sit for a few moments to catch my breath.” She smiled through another coughing fit, “I will see you next Monday for patrol?”

Crow stood, "Of course.” about to leave, he turned back. “Thank you, Vixen. You saved my life. I owe you one.”

“You owe me nothing, we’re partners.” Vixen wasn’t sure if he heard. She had another coughing fit as her transformation faded away.

“Liar.” Nathanial stood next to her, “You held onto your transformation through sheer will because you didn’t want to worry Crow. You can barely walk.”

“It’s fine. There is an old tree fort at the edge, I just need to make it there.” She stood slowly and limped towards the tall fence.

“I am not even sure you can make it that far”

Amelia laughed before wincing. “I feel like my insides are bruised. Remind me to practice the impossible before I try such a long distance again.”

Nathanial sighed, “How are you going to climb into a tree fort?”

She grinned foolishly, “I guess we will find out.”

In the end, Nathanial had to teleport her up himself.

“Wake me in the morning.” Amelia managed to utter before collapsing in exhaustion on the floor.

And so we have our big bad. This was actually the first scene I fully wrote out for this story.

#rin writes #original work #original writing #vixen & crow #paranormal superheroes #paranormal #superhero

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