#//And at first impression feels such ANGER; thinking this must be another deception he's hitting him with

[dutybcrne]

Kaeya most definitely tried to rehearse the first thing he would say to Diluc when he'd heard the man was back in Monstadt. Only to have spat out the most silver-tongued, sickly saccharine yet bitingly snarky little remark bc he happened to panic upon seeing the man and immediately knew just how bad he fucked that up by the utter look on Diluc's face.

[isnt-it-loverly]

little birdie (3)//five hargreeves

Warnings: blood, poorly written fight scenes

Summary: When Five lands in the Sparrow Academy, he must convince one of them to help him reset the timeline. 

Word count: 1600

Author note: super short and not the best. This week i got some pretty rough news so updates may not happen as often as I want them too. I do have a plan and its officially going to be a series now! I’m going to try to get an update out at least once a week. Thanks again for all the love on the first two parts it means a lot!!

Part one, Part two , Part four, Part Five

There was a loud bang that awoke Five from his restless slumber. He grumbled groggily as it felt like he had just fallen asleep. He wondered what the hell you were doing out there. There was another crash and Five decided that it’d be best to check on you. Pulling himself out of bed was hard as he was now incredibly sore. He half expected the door to be locked again, he was wrong. Another one of your flaws, he noted, you were far too trusting. 

He pulled the door open quietly as to not to give himself away if there was trouble. Unfortunately, his fears were confirmed. Ben has you pinned to the wall, tentacle around your neck, and hand over your eyes. 

“Where are they, I know you’re helping them!” He yelled. Five watched silently as he watched you struggle, trying to pry yourself out of your brother’s grip. He gulped in fear that you would break and tell Ben all that you knew. 

“I- I don’t know,” you choked out. You were trying everything to get him to let go. Kicking, squirming and digging your nails into his skin. 

“You’re lying, I know you didn’t go on patrol yesterday. You’ve been spending a lot of time down here. Something you do when you’re hiding something,” Ben snarled. He squeezed harder and you felt all the breath leave your lungs. You gasped and coughed trying to get any air at all. Five grumbled to himself, knowing full well what he had to do. At least now you two will be even. 

“Hey asshole,” Five yelled with a cheeky grin, “looking for me?” 

“I knew you were lying, you little bitch,” Ben growled as he quite literally threw you across the room. You felt like all the air had been knocked out of you, and there was a high pitched ringing in your ears. You looked to Five but there was nothing but black dots dancing across your vision. You decided it might be best to give yourself a minute for everything to stop spinning.

Five looked to you worriedly, you definitely had taken a beating. This version of Ben was much more ruthless than his, and if he was being frank, it kind of scared the shit out of him- especially in his weakened state. He flashed in front of Ben and landed a punch square in his jaw. The Horror stumbled back, surprised that such a little guy packed such a powerful hit.

“Your family will be dead by nightfall, too bad you won’t be there to see it,” Ben roared before releasing the beast within him. A tentacle reached for Five, but he blinked out of the way. However one managed to strike him down

, and another pinned him into a wall. He looked down to see the blood seeping through the clean shirt you had given him, shit this was not good. He heard his brother yell out in pain and the grasp on him loosened. There you were, arms wrapped around Ben’s neck and bringing him to the ground. Five watched in amazement as you fought, it was like you were dancing. He was impressed, you were amazingly trained- even by the commission’s standards.   

Going toe to toe against your brother was not a simple task, especially when he had a giant octopus monster coming out of his stomach. All you could do was dodge his swings until you could get close enough. You manage a kick right into his jaw, and you watched with pride as he stumbled back with a bloody lip. You felt guilty for doing this. All over a boy, you had met less than a day ago. There was truth behind Five’s words, you knew that the apocalypse was coming and that your family was the spark that ignited it. You knew the consequences, you had to get him back to the umbrellas, whatever the cost. You landed another hit before that royally pissed him off. He came rushing at you, right into your trap. You knew that he’d be blinded by rage. Ben grabbed you by the neck and hoisted you into the air. 

“Rookie mistake,” You muttered while looking directly into his eyes. Just like that, it was over, Your dimwitted brother was much easier to take over than Five. In Number One’s body, you carefully set yourself down. You looked over to Five and rushed to his side.

“(Y/n), please tell me that’s you because I really don’t think I have it in me to kick his ass at the moment,” Five muttered clutching his stomach. You grimaced and you lifted his hand to see the fresh blood. You don’t know why but you hated to see him in pain.

“I’ll fix you up, but not here. It won’t take long for them to realize Number One has gone missing,” you explained while helping Five his feet. He looked exhausted and you were determined to keep him safe. Nothing was going to happen to him on your watch. 

“Now,” you looked Five dead in the eyes, “how hard can you punch?

“What?” He responded with a quizzical look on his face. 

“Like on a scale of one to one hundred, what would you say?” You asked with a small smirk. 

“I don’t know, 94?” He replied. 

“Perfect! I need you to knock me out,” You instructed nonchalantly. 

“Fine by me, but it’s not gonna hurt you right? I’m punching Ben not (Y/n),” Five questioned as he prepared his stance. 

You nodded to let him know that it was okay. Sure you’d feel it but he didn’t have to know that, besides a little white lie never hurt anyone. Five really went for it, all the angry built up in one hit. You stumbled back, closing your eyes tight. When you opened them you found yourself back in your own body and Number One splayed on the ground.

“Ninety-four my ass, that was like a 200,” You complained. You rubbed your jaw slightly trying to ease away the pain that had transferred over. Five mumbled a small apology. You just shook your head and rolled your eyes. 

“Come on,” you said in a hushed tone, “sleeping beauty won’t stay down forever.”

You pulled him along as fast as the both of you could move. You were definitely sore, two big fights in the span of 24 hours was draining. Rest was not a luxury either of you could afford right now. Slipping out of the basement and into the corridor, head whipping as you did. The coast appeared to be clear. Before you could move Five pulled you into his chest, with a hand over your mouth. 

“Now, I’m gonna trust you. Which I don’t normally do. If, for even a second, I think you’re gonna double cross me and my family- I will kill you,” He whispered in your ear harshly. You pulled his hand away gently and looked into his eyes,

You could tell he was searching your face for any signs of deception but he wouldn’t find any. All he could see was a severely pissed off (Y/n).

“If I wanted you dead, I would’ve let bleed out the first time my brother kicked your ass,” You snapped back. You pulled away in anger, after all you did for that little shit. If any of your siblings found you, they’d kill you- didn’t he realize that you were on his side. That you had already lost everything to reset the timeline and stop an apocalypse that may not even happen. You looked around the corner again and signaled for him to move. He followed you closely before grabbing your shoulder. 

“Hold onto me tight,” He instructed. You did as you you were told and held on to his arm for dear life knowing exactly what he was about to do. Five did a quick run forward and suddenly the both of you were outside in the courtyard. You covered your mouth and bit your lip to keep from vomiting everywhere. 

“I’m gonna be sick,” you groaned. 

 “You can do that after we’re far away from the academy,” Five said in a hurried tone. He grabbed your wrist and begun pulling you along into the street. To be honest, most everything looked the same to Five. All of the shops were the same, the people looked normal, nothing except the academy was out of place. 

“Do you know where West Street is? There’s a place where we can hide out. Its safe, I promise. Clean clothes and fresh food too,” You asked with hope in your voice. 

“There's no time for comfort, Ben knows where my family is. We have to find them first,” Five said with determination. 

“He was bluffing, I checked. They have no leads,” You confirmed, “ and on top of that, two kids in bloody clothes will raise too many questions.”

Five looked at you wearily, You hadn't lied to him so far so why would you start now. He knew that you were right about your appearances, they’d be a dead give away. He sighed in defeat and told you he knew the way. You smiled and slipped your shades on, ready to take on the next chapter of this adventure. 

“Here,” You said while slipping off your blazer. You handed it to Five and he gave you a quizzical look. 

“To cover up the blood, you look like Carrie after the prom,” You joked. Five slipped it on, it was snug yet it felt very familiar. The material was the same as his old one, just red. He sighed and ran his hand over the emblem, that bird did not belong there. You noticed his discomfort but decided not to press it. The faster you got to West Street, the better life would be for the two of you. 

[iwrestlenow]

Many More To Die - Chapter 4

TITLE: Many More To Die (Chapter 4)

FANDOM: Sanders Sides (Necromancer AU)

SUMMARY: Roman discovers that even the power of a king has its limits--but at least he has the power to help Logan in one critical fashion.

Logan is a needy wreck, and can't figure out which way is up, and as desperately as he needs someone--one man--to hold his hand through it all? It only makes things worse somehow.

Meanwhile, through all of this, another chess piece steps out of the shadows and onto the game board--and he's not going anywhere until he gets what, and who, he came for.

SHIPS: Logince (Logan/Roman), future Moceit (Patton/Janus) and Dukexiety (Remus/Virgil)

WARNINGS: Panic attack, but that’s it for this chapter. It’s mostly me having feelings, being TOTALLY UNABLE TO STOP WRITING WHAT THE HELL SOMEONE SAVE ME XD, and more self indulgent garbage that just felt good to write. So there. :P

Also, no betas, we die like men.

NOTES: This is based on the gorgeous piece of art by @gretacticdraws that can be found here. I ended up writing a ficlet for it, and then my brain got swallowed up. Breathe at me wrong, and I’ll write more…hell, who am I kidding? I’ll write more anyway because this? Is self indulgent drivel. XD

Also located at AO3 over here.

“Lord Janus? I want this man dead.”

“Certainly, Your Majesty.”

“Please—mercy, Your Majesty!”

“Now hang on there just a gosh darn, berry pickin', mother lovin' moment, buster! Janny, if you know what's good for you, you will just stop with this nonsense and put the flippin' sword down!”

Roman would have burst out laughing if he wasn't fighting so hard to keep his composure. It could hardly be helped—Patton came up to Logan's shoulder, but only just, and was standing in his cell with his hands on his hips, glaring at the captain of the royal guard like he was a child being scolded for a broken dish.

Janus hardly looked intimidated—but the fact that he stilled after drawing his sword, leaving a terrified guard trembling against the bars of the cell next to Logan's was telling. Seven years, Lord Janus had served as the head of the assassins' corps before retiring to become the captain of the royal guard. Roman had heard stories, but never met the man until today, which was hardly unusual given that Janus was a drake—the son of a human and a dragon. They were notoriously gifted shapeshifters, even with a handicap like his.

Lord Janus was powerful, deadly, and highly skilled at remaining an enimga...but a hobbled child necromancer in a cell had the power to stay his hand.

Janus raised an eyebrow at Patton, but finally glanced at Roman.

Roman nodded. Janus refocused on the guard, pushing the tip of his sword against the hollow of his throat, hard enough to draw blood.

“Majesty, I beg you! I don't want to die!” the guard begged.

Roman let out a bemused little laugh.

“How strange,” he replied as calmly as he could manage, “I was under the impression you did, given the fact that you refused, a second time, to obey a direct order from your king.”

“The Necromata must be bound! It's the law!”

“I am the law!”

Storming up to the guard, Roman let his emotions fuel him—exhaustion, grief, anger, confusion, and the tearing, unspeakable ache that throbbed through him every time his gaze ventured too close to the open door of the cell where Logan still leaned.

The wail he'd let out when Roman pulled free of his grip to order the cell door opened was going to haunt his sleep. The way he stood now, so carefully still, features so meticulously schooled into calm, unfeeling lines, was going to rob him of that breath of life Logan had only just returned to him.

“I am the king now, and I am the ultimate authority.” Roman spat. “Now, I fully understand the need to shackle a prisoner being removed from his cell, but as far as I am concerned, this man is no longer a prisoner here.”

“You can't--”

“I think you'll find that I can.”

“Your Majesty.”

Roman turned at the sound of Logan's voice, cool and even but too quiet, hoarse and thick with the tears he'd finally managed to stop from streaming down his face.

“The law is such that the king cannot overrule it.” Logan declared with deceptive calm. “The Necromata, once imprisoned by the royal family, can only be pardoned for the crimes of their birth with the blessing of the people. A vote, if you will...and no such vote has ever been successfully passed.”

“How do you know this?”

“I have been here for ten years with little more to do than read. I have the entire legal code of the Kingdoms and the criminal rules of order memorized, along with the family tree of the royal family and all available star maps of the area.”

Roman wanted to scream. He wanted to hit something—for a terrible moment, he wanted to order Janus to proceed with the guard's execution for real, rather than just trying to make a point.

Then inspiration struck—bright, blinding, and blessed as it filled him with light.

“My order will still be obeyed.” Roman announced. “These two necromancers—they may not be pardoned, but they will be imprisoned at my pleasure...and it is my pleasure to have them confined to guest quarters upstairs. Have extra guards posted at all available palace entrances. They are not to leave the grounds until the vote has been passed. Successfully.”

He shot a look at the offending guard.

“And the first person to shackle either one of them without violent provocation will be hung at dawn.”

Janus lowered his sword and slid it back into its sheath—the cane he'd been carrying with him—before moving to Roman's side.

“Bit extreme, don't you think, Majesty?” he murmured once he was close enough to ensure that only Roman would hear him.

“My father is dead, Lord Janus.” Roman shot back bleakly. “I have yet to shed a single tear for him--'extreme' feels like an appropriate response right about now.”

“Touche. Of course—and it has nothing to do with the traumatized necromancer you're apparently well acquainted with?”

Roman didn't answer as he moved towards the open door of the cell. Standing before Logan, he extended his hand...

...then suddenly realized that was a bad idea as he put his hand back down again.

********** More.

Logan could hardly string a single coherent thought together around the constant chant in his mind, his marrow, his soul for the prince to touch him again. He couldn't let him, not when it was so agonizing, fire and pressure and somehow affecting every nerve in his body when it was focused on such a small area...

More. More. More.

He didn't understand why restraining himself was so hard. It hurt, it was clearly doing him some kind of physical and psychological harm...and yet he wanted. Needed.

He couldn't remember ever experiencing the sensation.

It very nearly caused another panic attack when the prince dropped his offered hand—and that was another problem entirely, standing before a cell door standing wide open, and the use of the word pardon being thrown around like it wasn't capable of changing the world as Logan knew it—but the pause that seemed to last for an eternity must have only been a few seconds long.

Because a moment later, the Green Man—the prince—was reaching into his pocket and producing a pair of pristine white gloves. A missing piece of the military uniform, how had Logan not noticed? He usually noticed things like that...

When he finished tugging them on, he offered his hand to Logan again. He said nothing...just waited.

Logan shook with the force of effort it took to reach, slowly, to accept the offered hand. The gloves blocked some of that heat from skin to skin contact—and when he gently folded his fingers around Logan's, barely any pressure, it was still intense...but better.

“All good, Berry?”

Logan looked into his eyes sharply, the name ricocheting around in his skull in a manner he hadn't experienced in literal years—not since he'd first discovered his power was awakening again, all concussive force and electricity crawling against the underside of his skin.

All at once, the years fell away, and he was asleep in his cell that first terrible night, dreaming of every monstrous shadow transforming into a protector as green eyes lit the dark.

He opened his mouth to answer yes, he was fine—then realized...

“I do not know which of the princes you are.” he admitted with a bemused huff.

That got a smile from the other man—too brief, far too brief before it fractured to pieces, a crystal goblet slammed to the floor, raining shards of razor sharp light.

“Roman.” he replied. “Pr—King Thomas Roman II, but you may address me by my name.”

“Hardly acceptable, is it, Majesty?” Janus mused.

“Given that my life is currently in this man's hands—and the future of my father—I'd say he's earned a few niceties, Lord Janus.” Roman announced, raising his voice to ensure everyone within earshot was aware of it. Logan had a strange feeling that Lord Janus spoke up for precisely that purpose, to make his situation known.

Logan's, not Roman's—Logan knew that anyone with a shred of loyalty to the king would probably kill him if given the chance. There was no question that someone would likely accuse a necromancer with ties to the crown prince of the murder. Fear for Roman's safety would keep him protected.

Janus was that kind of man, shrewd and shameless—Logan knew precious little about Prince Roman, but to discover that he was equally blessed with the gift of strategy was...intriguing.

“Lord Janus, see to it that Logan's cell mate is made comfortable, and shown around the north wing of the palace. That is where I would prefer they spend the bulk of their time.” Roman declared. “I will take custody of this prisoner myself. When you are done, I want you, the dungeon master, the head prison mage, and a heart healer in the war room, immediately. Send for my brother as well.”

“Yes, Your Majesty—but I cannot send you alone.” Janus replied. Surveying the guards in their presence, and grimacing with impatience, he finally took a few steps down the corridor and flagged down another guard.

“You! Fetch the cadet from the graveyard patrol, now! I want him on the king's detail.”

Roman nodded his thanks, finally turning his attention back on Logan. Between those green eyes and the warm pressure enfolding his hand, ravaging his nerves and making his chest throb with pure emotion, he wasn't sure he could stand it much longer without losing his composure.

“Are you all right?” Roman asked quietly, stepping closer and into Logan's personal space. Strangely, Logan realized he could feel that as well, radiant heat and buzzing static crawling across his skin, too close and not enough and everything.

More. More. More.

“I am not.” he admitted. “Hardly unusual, given that touch starvation is a common condition among the Necromata, to say nothing of the Claim.”

“The Claim? What's that?”

Logan's mouth snapped shut, very real panic rising in his chest again.

“Whoah—Logan? Logan, breathe. Look at me, you need to breathe.”

The Claim. He knew, knew what Logan had done, was holding his hand and Logan could feel it, but now he'd spoken about the Claim, about his power, and he was going to die this time...

...two...three...four...hold for one...two...three...four...five...

“That's it, Logan. There you go, can you do it again?”

...good job, now again: in for one...two...three...four...

Pressure. Pressure, pressure, pressure, everywhere, pressure pressure unrelenting pressure...

“Hey!”

Logan blinked, attention snapping to the young man suddenly standing in front of him. He was nearly Logan's height, with straight black hair that hung in dark eyes, flinty as stone.

“Name five things you can see.”

“I...what?”

“Do it. Five things.”

Logan shook his head, and almost immediately his gaze was drawn back to Roman.

“Green Man.” he managed to reply. Roman smiled, and Logan felt that mantra start tattooing itself against the inside of his skull, blotting out the fear and panic.

“Okay, keep going. Let's keep going.”

Logan only realized they were moving because Roman still held his hand, was tugging him with the barest of pressure—and Logan's traitorous body followed. Between the cadet, demanding Logan name more things he could see, along with touch, smell, hear, and taste, and Roman's silent encouragement, he found himself moving out of his cell and towards the stairs of the dungeon.

Moving up each stair. Moving through the gate, and into the palace...moving, traveling, with only Roman's hand to restrain him.

Then he was in the palace, above the dungeons...and if he never saw the outside world again, Logan still felt like he could call himself a free man.

********** “Thank you.”

The cadet flinched a little, looking towards the king. “What?”

“Thank you.” King Roman repeated, still crouched motionless by the chair the prisoner had all but collapsed into. He'd basically passed out when they reached the war room, but didn't seem to be in any distress—just exhausted and overstimulated.

“That trick, focusing on his surroundings—it's greatly appreciated.” he went on, his gaze never leaving the sleeping man's face. He still held his hand, like he might vanish if he let him go. “How did you know it would work?”

The cadet had to grit his teeth for a second, finding himself watching the sleeping prisoner despite his best efforts not to. He looked...well, he looked like shit, and it was hard. It was so hard to watch, but he had to do it.

He was finally here, and he had to make sure that he didn't screw up again.

“I have anxiety.” he finally replied, keeping his tone even. “Nightmares, panic attacks, the works. My brother used to help me through them with tricks like that. He'd have me focus on my surroundings, or make me pick out colors—he even made me a special blanket to help me sleep. It, uh—it might be good for him? The guard who got me mentioned that this necromancer can feel your touch? If he's not used to contact, it could...”

“You'd be willing to do that?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Go and fetch it, then.”

“Sir, I was ordered to stay with you.”

“I'm the king. I overrule your orders.” King Roman replied.

The cadet lifted his gaze to the king's face, his stomach sinking when he realized he was being stared at. Hard.

Ohhhhh, shit.

“You don't call me 'Majesty.' Why?”

The cadet tried to be discreet about taking a steadying breath as he shrugged. “You have a pet necromancer now. All due respect, but I don't think you'll have the job long.”

“What do you know about necromancers?”

“I know they're not evil. Only reason I'm still here is that you seem to know it, too.”

King Roman nodded, gaze flicking down before it returned to the sleeping necromancer.

“Cadet...do you know what a Claim is?”

The cadet swallowed thickly. No...oh no.

“It's a binding ritual.” the cadet replied. “The Necromata are capable of manipulating death, but when they can't? They take it.”

“Away?”

“No—into themselves. They take the victim's dying breath, infuse it with their blood, and return it to the person it belongs to. That way, when the victim's time comes, they survive it.”

The cadet looked to the necromancer again.

Gods, Loganberry—what did you do?

“And the necromancer dies in their place.”

To his credit, the king paled, his free hand lifting to touch Logan's hair like the cadet itched to—so close for the first time in ten years, but he couldn't even comfort him.

He had to stay put. By the door, protecting the king and his charge.

After a decade, Virgil was finally, finally within reach of Logan in every way that mattered, and he would die before he jeopardized his one chance to save him.

Virgil was the one who got his big brother caught and imprisoned in the first place—he was damn well going to make sure that he was the one to set things right.

[breathings-of-the-heart]

To Love Another

Levi Ackerman x Reader

A/N: Hey guys!! Back after a long hiatus, sorry hehe. I know y’all must hear this a lot and be sick of it, but there was a lot going on in my personal life that I needed to deal with. (I.E. an parent custody issues and succession of court cases) But everything has been settled in my favor so I’m back and excited!! 

Anyway, this is a part two I promised like years ago which can stand by itself kinda so u don’t have to go back and read part one lol. I wrote so much that I’m dividing it in two; part three will be out most likely by tomorrow. If you want to read part one, link for it is here: Imagine Relating to Mikasa about Loving someone in the Military

(requested by @a-single-uwo @dracq and @little-diva-gurl and to you three specifically, so sorry for the wait! But I didn’t forget :3)

“He loves you, more than he’s ever loved anyone. Surely you know that,” Hange tried to plead, taking (Y/N)’s small hands into her own.

With an inability to overlook the throbbing in her chest, the girl simply met her gaze with a sorrowful smile. Her friend’s expression was sympathetic, conveying her sentiment with a sense of urgency and conviction; such a gesture was appreciated, but considering the events of today leading the broken girl thus far, easy to brush off. Levi’s own harsh words and hard-set countenance were forever etched into (Y/N)’s memory-- speaking louder than any other subconscious that told her he didn’t mean the things he’d spoken. All she could see now was the Captain’s anger trumping all the blinding endearment she thought the two of them to shared. There was no room in her brain for two such vastly different images… the young woman viewed herself an idiot.

(Y/N) was barely able to speak, a thousand words at once caught in behind her pursed lips as she shook her head, wishing Hange’s statement was true.

“With all do respect, Section Commander…” weak voice trailing off, the petite beauty cleared her throat and willed herself not to cry. “I don’t believe you. I was a fool to think of myself as more than my true worth to Levi.”

Said man of the conversation stood on the other side of the door, a whole world away, fist lifted mid-knock. He stilled, gray orbs downcast as he heard the girl’s reply echoing in his ears. 

The documents in his hand fell from his fingertips as his body slacked, the pages fluttering in the air and settling with the ambiance. He hadn’t realized he dropped them, and when he did, Levi could not bring himself to care. His eyelids squeezed shut painfully and the stoic male turned heel, footsteps rhythmically sounding off the lacquer floor as he shuffled away in defeat and heartache.

And only when the stoic man reached the privacy of his room did he realize his fingernails were dug so tightly into his palms that crescent moon scars would indent the skin for life.

A cruel, constant reminder. A testimony to his greatest pain--- your heartbreak.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Commander Erwin sat at the head of the office table of one of the many meeting rooms littered along the castle, a serious expression cast on his defined face. There was a tired yet determined look fixed on his shadowed face; deceptively aged with worry lines creased across his forehead: a tell to the stress and conflicting passion his position required. Untold horrors must have crossed the man’s mind on the daily, yet, the disciplined, solemn facade did well to suggest otherwise.

Even in another dim scenario such as this one, he remained the epitome of strength.

As Erwin studied a long paper in front of him, there was a flicker of deep thought that passed just as quickly as it came. The thought grew smaller in his eyes, and the put-together authority figure stroked his freshly kempt chin.

Having not seen the Scouts since their rescue mission to save Eren, you were shocked at the change in the head of the regiment. With an arm lost and the deceptively young-looking appearance faded, it was only then when you realized his hair told stories as well-- speckled with select gray strands, the stress-revealers hid amongst a thicket of slicked away blondes.

Things seem to have shifted. From what I’ve read in the reports… Eren controlled the Titans with his scream without knowing how. It feels like we’re moving forwards and backwards at the same time.

You touched the bandaging around your torso, wincing a tad as you pressed too hard.

If I’d been more careful last mission I would’ve seen it all for myself.

A map was spread out across the wooden surface of the ancient worktable, the parchment’s top ends brushing against your fingertips. It gave off a beige hue with ink blended in a thoughtful, delicately beautiful layout of Wall Maria’s charted territory. Sunlight filtered through the window shades and illuminated the figurines representing another formation of the Commander’s. Clusters creating an almost horseshoe shape laid out in front of the spectators in the room, squads labeled accordingly. The symbols representing the Special Operations Squad were located on the innermost circle, standing out in bright yellow.

You took a moment to gaze up and break away from the lull of the deafening silence.

You were painfully aware of Captain Levi’s presence next to you. Eren sat on your other side, with another squad leader directly across. Hange was at Erwin’s left side, and Moblit peered past Mikasa’s shoulder in order to see properly as the head of the Survey Corps spoke, finally leaving the separate worlds of his own mind. Armin and stood behind the blonde man, absorbing each of his words carefully.

“There’s many obstacles to be dealt with, naturally” Erwin intoned, officially beginning the meeting. “For starters, we cannot risk any casualties on the journey to Shiganshina. Knowing the enemy, they will be prepared for our arrival and not a single soldier can be spared until we get to the battle field.”

Erwin brought up a lingering, troubling issue that already started to make your head hurt. As a key strategist and extension of the Brain Trust, however, your mind was your strongest weapon. There had to be a way to work around it all.

“Traveling at night is yet another risk,” you relayed, resting your weight on your forearms. “Considering the events experienced the night of the Beast Titan’s appearance.”

The light of the full moon must have been bright enough to give the titans energy.

“How are we supposed to work our way around that?” Eren groaned in exasperation.

You wracked your brain, biting your lip in frustration as all came up blank. All motion came to a halt, though, as you felt a hand grip your knee firmly. Electricity shot through your body as you met the penetrating gaze.

Levi.

“Calm down, brat. Tapping incessantly will only piss me off.”

You hadn’t even known you’d been doing it, but the second the Captain touched you, you were frozen.

Your eyes met his, fully, for the first time in months. And from that instant on, they were trapped in the blue-gray you had drowned in so many times before. You couldn’t help but absorb the sight and engrave it to memory, the art of Levi himself a blessing you had nearly forgotten. But he was different from last time. Maybe it was the illusion fading, or your distant memory. Of him, never.

He looked tired, like you, the fire in those orbs dulled into dying embers. Was that the mission’s doing? The loss of nearly half the regiment?

Or was it something else entirely?

Then your focus shifted to his hand, which dared to travel the smallest bit upwards. Levi kept it there, as if stuck in his own trance. A minute, hour, day could have passed and still, in that moment, you wouldn’t have noticed.

Until reality hit and you remembered everything anew.  

As if he had been burned, Levi retracted his hand as quickly as you looked away. The illusion faded once more, just as tragic as last time.

Breath, (Y/N). This is bigger than you.

“I suspect,” you sighed, regaining yourself, “the indirect source of sunlight the moon reflects, is enough to generate energy for these new titans. The solution is simple.”

“We can initiate the expedition next new moon!” Armin exclaimed, pointing at you excitedly.

“Mhmm, that is our most promising option. But I doubt it will be safe doing it on horseback. We need to be quiet, stealthy, and aware of our surroundings considering the dangers of the dark. Our vision will be limited,” Hange pointed out. “We’ll need to walk them and our supplies, and find a better source of light.”

Erwin nodded, looking slightly impressed.

And as your nonchalant front solidified, you realized it was becoming easier to smile than to remember the hurt. It seemed that way for Levi too, who took an elegant sip of tea as if nothing fazed him at all.

There are more important things, clearly.

[anghraine]

“the jedi and the sith lord” - chapter nine

It’s a little surreal, but after the years on hiatus, this fic is now longer than either Adventures or Imperial Menace.

last chapter:

“That is not your destiny,” said Vader.

She could nearly have beaten her head against the bars on his window.

“As if you don’t take destiny into your own hands all the time,” she said. “Did you call it destiny when you killed Anakin Skywalker?”

Vader’s hand unclenched.

“What?” he said.

this chapter:

“Miss Lucy? Miss Lucy!”

Lucy ignored her, hurtling down the hall and around the nearest turn. She had no idea where she was headed, couldn’t think of anything so trivial.

She had to get out. Away. Away was all that mattered.

chapters: The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker– prologue, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five, chapter six, chapter seven, chapter eight, chapter nine, chapter ten; The Imperial Menace–chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five, chapter six, chapter seven; The Jedi and the Sith Lord—chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five, chapter six, chapter seven, chapter eight

-

Lucy took a full step backwards, her next breath short and harsh.

“No,” she said, her voice distant in her ears. Everything was. “That’s impossible!”

He was lying. He had to be. Her father was Anakin Skywalker. He wouldn’t—couldn’t have—he was lying!

Vader’s regard didn’t falter. Without any sign of anger or conciliation, anything but relentless assurance, he said,

“Dità juradiiyad.”

It was the same thing he said so often, as Ben had before him: search your feelings. But in their tongue, Anakin’s tongue, and for all that she’d condemned him over Basic, the smooth Alsaraic hit her like a blast. She couldn’t help but stagger back again, shaking her head as if it could make the words go away.

He added, “Sepaiha aeiren-khir.”

But she didn’t know it to be true. She couldn’t. Desperately, Lucy reached for the Force. Her father—Anakin—he was—

The rush of certainty was anything but gentle, this time. She felt almost crazed.

“No!”

Urgency touched his voice now.

“Lucy,” he said. “You can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen it! Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and daughter.”

Valì en aiya, she thought numbly. He’d talked of new leaders for the galaxy, not one—not just himself. This was what he had meant.

Her.

“It is the only way,” said Vader. 

No, not Vader. That was just the … the trappings. He was Anakin Skywalker.

She stared at him as if the armour and mask were something altogether new to her. Then, stifling another gasp or scream—she didn’t know which—Lucy whirled and ran, picking up her skirts to rush right past the waiting Tuvié.

“Miss Lucy? Miss Lucy!”

Lucy ignored her, hurtling down the hall and around the nearest turn. She had no idea where she was headed, couldn’t think of anything so trivial.

She had to get out. Away. Away was all that mattered. 

Clinging to the Force, she raced ahead faster than her short legs could usually take her, until she could no longer hear the metal clatter of Tuvié or any other droids. She only stopped when her breaths began to burn and the lights along the walls dimmed. Lucy slowed down, dropping the skirts of Padmé’s gown and gulping for air. 

Even blind, she’d never been quite so lost. Nothing felt familiar; no sound met her ears, except a low hum from a room ahead of her. She couldn’t make out a door, though, just a wall.

But it didn’t really matter where she was, did it? Regardless of her exact position in Vader’s castle, she was still there, still a captive. A captive of—

Lucy shuddered. Ben, she thought, betrayal a suffocating weight. Ben, why didn’t you tell me?

He’d lied. There were no two ways about it. He’d set her up to loathe Vader as her father’s murderer, when all the while—he must have known. Even if he couldn’t have told her the full truth at first, he didn’t have to lie, and he could have revealed the real story later, the story she still didn’t know. He certainly could have done it before she rushed off to face Vader. 

Yoda would have known, too, wouldn’t he? Was that the reason he’d been so reluctant to teach her, the cause behind all his dire warnings? Surely he’d come to realize that she wouldn’t, that she wasn’t—

Again, Lucy remembered her failure in the swamp, her face in Darth Vader’s helmet. She stumbled, almost tripping over her skirts and falling down. Instead, she instinctively reached ahead, her hands pressing up against the stone wall. 

The wall opened up, and she nearly fell down once more. Instead, she righted herself and squinted at the brightly-lit room ahead of her. 

Like the practice room, it gleamed white, except the floor, which was unrelieved black. Both made a jarring contrast with the stone walls framing the doorway, as did the curves of the white wall along the edges of the floor and ceiling. More strikingly, a large white sphere—it could have contained two of her—had been raised out of the center of the room. It seemed the source of the humming sound; however enigmatic its appearance, it must serve some mechanical function.

Despite her horror and anger, a spark of curiosity touched her. Lucy examined the sphere in some bemusement, unable to make out any purpose to its existence. Peering around herself and listening for any approaching footsteps, she heard nothing but the hum of the sphere. 

Lucy stepped through the doorway, wincing as it grated closed behind her. Quickly, she glanced around, but the room was empty of anything but a tall, cylindrical tank filled with some indistinct liquid. 

She looked from the sphere, to the tank, and back again. Even for Vader—for—for this place, they seemed decidedly bizarre. 

Drawn by some impulse beyond conscious will, she walked into the room, towards the tank. There was something intriguing here, something she felt she should understand. The humming, which grew a little more pronounced as she passed the sphere, mingled oddly with her sense of the Force. It felt even stronger here than in the rest of the castle, and not just the Dark Side, either. The Light Side and the Dark tangled together into a particularly unpleasant chaos that beat at her mind.

Lucy shook her head, trying to clear it. Mark that up for another thing she didn’t understand.

Still half-entranced, she laid her palm against the plastiglass of the tank, reaching as well as she could for the Light Side. 

Pain exploded in her—not her own, but an overpowering impression of burning agony that permeated her own body. Lucy flinched back, drawing her hand away, and the pain receded into what felt like hundreds of hot pricks, and then into nothing. It reminded her of nothing so much as her vision of Han’s torment in Cloud City, but there’d been a—a remove there, a sense of it without the experience of it. 

A new realization flashed into her mind: Han had suffered because her father wanted to find her. She’d guessed by now that the purpose had been to draw her in, but this made it somehow immeasurably worse. Her father had done that. Her father had done so many things. Just not the one she’d particularly hated him for.

Her anger swung back towards Ben and Yoda. How could they let her believe that? They’d known she was going to face Vader. Had they hoped she would kill him, her own father? Had that been the plan all along—to use her against their enemy, and never mind patricide? Had it really not occurred to them that Vader would tell her the truth when she revealed their deception? Did they think it simply wouldn’t come up?

Lucy lifted her clenched fists to her head, then forced herself to uncurl her fingers, burying them in her hair. She didn’t know what to think. She didn’t know what to think of any of them. 

She’d wanted to believe that Vader was lying. She still wanted to believe it. But she couldn’t, not with her feelings screaming otherwise. If she could trust them—if she could, then he was the only Jedi who hadn’t lied to her.

He’d committed worse crimes than Yoda’s and Ben’s deception, of course, worse by far. She thought of Han again and flinched. But it mattered, that her … her enemy was the one telling the truth.

Did Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru know? Does anyone know who he was? Does—

She felt like bombs were going off in her brain. No, going off somewhere in the distance, boom after boom after boom. Her head ached and her ears rang. 

Then she tilted her head, brows furrowing. Were those voices?

Another boom resounded, echoing about the room. It seemed louder and closer, resonating through her body.

Lucy’s eyes went wide. No, not in her brain at all. The castle was under attack.

-

She raced to the door, which remained stubbornly shut. Struggling to remember where she’d placed her hand on the other side, she slid her fingers over the wall, desperately hoping she’d be able to leave before she was caught or trapped. Vader would have the castle shielded, surely. But if it was the Rebellion—and who else would it be?—this might be her only chance.

Lucy heard a grating sound and pressed her hand flat. The door opened and she rushed through, looking wildly about as more explosions sounded. 

Still lost and unable to think of anything else to do, she ran down the hall, her sense of the Force fading to its usual Dark Side miasma. She was too frantic to grasp the faint Light Side, so she could only run down halls until she found something or someone familiar. 

Thankfully, the twists and turns of the halls soon resolved into a wider hall where a mixed group of droids and organics of various species—so there were some here—were arguing, the organics gesturing wildly.

“We’ve got to—”

“Lord Vader was quite clear—”

“In an emergency, my programming dictates—”

“Well, my orders are—”

“Excuse me,” Lucy said, and ran down the most brightly lit of the connecting corridors. It took her a good ten minutes to find her bedroom—ten minutes of mingled excitement and panic. The castle didn’t seem to be trembling or anything like that. Yes, a stronghold of Vader’s had to be defended somehow. But hopefully there would be enough chaos that she could slip through.

In her bedroom, Lucy rapidly changed into Padmé’s most normal outfit, a grey tunic and trousers. It took up more valuable time, but she’d never get out in the purple gown she’d been wearing. Then she took a few slow breaths, calming enough to tug at the Force, trying to find some direction. 

Lucy took off again, only to run right into Tuvié.

“Miss Lucy!” she cried. “Where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere!”

“I’m not sure,” said Lucy. “I was upset, and that was before all the explosions. What’s happening?”

“An attack!” Tuvié said, shaking her head. “I’d never have thought it, not here. Just ships, right now, but it’s chaos, absolute chaos—”

Good. 

“Where’s Lord Vader?”

With a cringe, Lucy realized that she didn’t want anything too terrible to happen to him. Not before she got some answers, and maybe even after.

“Flying,” said Tuvié. “He always goes to lead his forces personally. It’s very worrisome. If anything were to happen to him … but it won’t. He’s the best starpilot in the galaxy.”

Lucy bit down hard on her lip.

“But never mind that. You should take this.” 

Tuvié shoved a small remote of some kind into her hand. Lucy blinked at it.

“What is it?”

“A personal force field,” said Tuvié. “I’m sure nothing will happen to the castle walls, but if the structural integrity were compromised, it would be fatal to you—the air is toxic to humanoids.”

Thank the Force that Tuvié thought ahead. Or maybe it was standard procedure, though she hadn’t seen the humans in the hall with anything of the kind. She’d been going pretty fast, though.

“Shouldn’t you get some of these to the other humanoids?” Lucy said.

Tuvié made an indistinct gesture. “Yes, but I can’t leave you. My orders are to protect you at all times!”

Lucy thought as quickly as she could. 

“I don’t know how I’d live with myself if someone died because of me,” she said, and tried not to think of how many people had died in Vader’s search for her.

“Well—”

“Especially when it’s not necessary,” Lucy hurried on. “I’m sure you’re very competent, but if an army breaks through, you won’t be able to stop them. I’ll lock myself in my bedroom, okay? And you can get fields to the others as quickly as you can and come back to guard me.”

Tuvié whirred. “Are you quite sure?”

“Very sure,” said Lucy.

Tuvié dithered for another impossibly long moment. “If you think it’s what the Maker would want …”

“Oh, absolutely,” Lucy said.

With a decided nod, Tuvié clasped her shoulder without another word, then turned on her heel and ran off—thankfully in the opposite direction from the front of the castle. Lucy waited a minute, then poked her head out the door, looking all around. The area immediately in front of her seemed empty, so she slipped out and hurried towards the center of the chaos, trying to look less desperate than she felt, just worried like the others.

A clump of grey-uniformed soldiers—and no stormtroopers—stood by the massive main gate to the castle. 

“All right, everyone!” shouted one who appeared to be in charge. “Droids, stay inside and guard the castle. The rest of you, light your shields and fan out. If any Rebels land, we’ll find them!”

Lucy could think of nothing else to do. She joined the soldiers, switching on the force field. It formed an amorphous bubble around her—hopefully amorphous enough to blur her clothes into something resembling a uniform.

The gate swung open, unpleasant greenish light pouring through. Lucy took a deep inhalation—not fresh air, inside the field, but at least clean and new. 

“March!”

It was just lucky, she thought, that Vader had found her after she’d already been a soldier. Lucy marched in tandem with the others, peering around. The landscape appeared to be mostly rock with some crystal, craggy cliffs rising on either side of the castle. She saw no sign of any plant life; the place seemed entirely desolate. 

She should have expected that, really.

As soon as it seemed that the troop’s attention was wholly directed forwards, Lucy split off, hurrying towards a large boulder that seemed like it could hide her.

“You there!”

Damn it. She turned around, not risking a dash away that would reveal her intentions.

The man who’d called after her was, reassuringly, a grey blob. “Who are you?”

Lucy’s mind went blank. She hadn’t thought that far. Fumbling for anything other than her real name, she said,

“Dala Padmi, sir. I’ve been sent to scout ahead.”

The blob studied her for a moment—at least, she assumed he was. Then he said,

“Well, go on, then. Let us know if you find anything suspicious.”

“Yes, sir,” said Lucy. 

It was lucky, too, that she’d spotted some women among the troops. She couldn’t fault Vader for that, at least, even if none of them were as small as Lucy. She crept forwards, darting behind rocks and crystals, and dodging the occasional explosion, though none actually penetrated to the surface. Her breath came quickly. That was probably dangerous; she didn’t imagine the field would last forever. 

Within a few minutes, she’d made her way to the nearest cliff, which seemed her best shot. At least the uneven surface and ledges would give her decent footholds. Abruptly grateful for the rungs in the practice room, Lucy grabbed at the furthest side of the cliff and began to climb.

-

Despite her exercises, the climb was exhausting. Sweat poured down Lucy’s face, not helped by the hot, heavy air, and her bare hands were covered with scratches and abrasions. At least the rock itself didn’t seem to be toxic—thank the Force for that, at least. But she made it at last to a high ledge of the cliff, pushing herself onto it and collapsing for a few weary seconds.

She peered around the edge, keeping an eye out for the soldiers. In the masses of rock, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to make out much except the bubbles of the force fields—was that them lining up in front of the gate? Or Rebels? Did they even know the planet’s conditions? 

Or maybe, from this distance, she’d just imagined them. In reality, getting out of here had to be nearly, if not completely, impossible. But she had to try. 

Lucy pulled her head back and folded her legs, settling into tranquillity as much as she could. She had to find the Rebels, and she could only think of one way. Please, she called out to the Force, remembering the monk saying that she couldn’t say please and expect nothing to follow. Something had to follow. 

Please, help me.

For a few moments, she felt only the trickle of the Force flowing through her, but nothing more than that. She knew she could use it to figure out her location, or affirm truth, or lift some of the rocks around her, but she didn’t need those. She needed to find the Rebels!

Lucy retreated into further passivity, pushing her anger at Ben and Yoda away long enough to remember their advice. Breathe in, breathe out. Her chest still ached from the climb, but that wouldn’t matter for much longer, if she could just—

Her eyes flew open. Out of nowhere, it seemed, she could see, as she’d seen Cloud City. It was the inside of a starship; instinctively, she knew it was one of the ships above them, attacking Vader’s stronghold.

How did they even find it?

Never mind that. She concentrated, focusing on the controls of the ship. The panel was broad; it must be pretty big, not an X-Wing. She turned her head, and saw smooth, stark grey walls. Odd. It didn’t look like any Rebel ship she knew.

“There he is!” someone said, pointing through the front viewfinder at what looked like a large team of elite TIE fighters. If Tuvié was right, Vader would be one of them. Her father. He might be shot down. He’d survived Han’s blast, so maybe he’d be all right. 

She shouldn’t hope for it, but she did. But she couldn’t hope for more than that, against Rebels.

“Fire at will!”

Several of the TIE fighters exploded, but the leader swerved away from the blasts with what seemed ease. That’d be him, all right.

Lucy narrowed her attention to the man who’d spoken. He was wearing rather odd clothes—not any uniform she recognized, just ordinary clothes. So were the men around him. Several idly pulled at the fabric, as if uncomfortable. Why … ?

She reached out further with the Force, longing for someone, somehow, to hear her.

Help! I need help! I’m trapped down here!

Even as she thought it, she knew no one would hear. She could feel presences up there, but nothing receptive. Nothing familiar at all. She didn’t know all the Rebellion’s fighter pilots, of course, but … it just seemed strange. Surely they would feel at least a little bit like the Rebels she knew. They didn’t, though. They felt more like—

Her breaths burned, each one of them.

Like Imperials.

This wasn’t a Rebel attack at all.

Lucy released the Force, a wave of desolation sweeping over her. There would be no rescue. This was some Imperial machination. Not one she understood, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she’d come out here for nothing. She leaned back against the rock, trying to take slower, cooler breaths, but she couldn’t. Her whole chest felt hot and heavy, like the echo of pain she’d felt at the tank, and her head spun. 

Then she saw it: the field around her flickering her, first just in hints, and then wildly. 

I’m going to die here!

A completely pointless death, achieving nothing. Would Han and Leia ever know what had happened? She missed them so much. Leia—oh, Leia. At least she was all right. Maybe Lucy would be able to talk to her the way Obi-Wan did, and the monk in her dreams. She could haunt her father, anyway, if she died right under his nose. When she died. Dimly, she wondered what he would think. Would he feel any guilt at all? Would he even care, except for the ruination of his plans? 

Her chest felt even heavier, her throat tight and her vision blurry. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe.

-

It didn’t take Darth Vader more than a few minutes to realize that the fight against the Rebels was … strange. He didn’t recognize any of the ships, though they had the Rebel insignia emblazoned on them. Their tactics were straightforward, unoriginal. And the presences aboard the ships felt—not quite familiar, but something.

Even as he shot down Rebel ships, he felt that something was wrong. This was too easy, too inexplicable. Too weak an attack, too; they must know that so few ships could hardly penetrate the shields on his personal fortress.

Something flickered at the edges of his awareness, though he couldn’t say what. He hadn’t survived this long by ignoring his senses, however. Vader concentrated.

Please, someone said, the mental voice exuding desperation. 

Lucy? She should be safe in—where was she?

He dodged more fire, and in a bare flicker of a vision, saw the interior of the ship directly ahead of him. An Imperial ship.

It might be repurposed by the Rebellion, of course. That sometimes occurred; they used whatever they could get their filthy hands on. But his feelings told him that it was not the case, this time. Anyone could paint the Rebel symbol on a ship. This was simply a maneuver of one of his enemies—clearly, an incompetent one. 

More annoyed than angry, he targeted the weapons of the next ship. It exploded in a satisfying ball of flame, but he could feel something was still wrong. His every nerve was on edge, adrenaline flowing to the point of nausea. He felt a distant panic—and then, Lucy’s voice again.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!

Not his panic. Hers. His daughter’s. She’d escaped the castle somehow, and it was going to kill her.

He flipped on the comm. 

“Clean this up,” he ordered. “I have business on the surface.”

He disengaged easily and raced downwards as fast as his TIE fighter would take him—very fast, thankfully, after all his personal adjustments. But he had to spend precious minutes searching for her, guided by his equipment’s optical enhancements and the guidance of the Force. The latter did more than the former; he followed the frail flicker of the Light Side to a ledge high up one of the cliffs overseeing the castle. It was a miracle she’d gotten this far.

Quite impressive, really, but that wasn’t his uppermost concern. He could see a woman crumpled on the ledge, looking for all the galaxy as if she were dead. The Force told him otherwise, but … no, it couldn’t be. It could not.

Vader lowered the ship onto the ledge and leapt out, hurrying over to Lucy’s body. No, to Lucy. Without hesitation, he scooped her into his arms; she was so small that she made for little burden. He could feel her take weak breaths. All right. She definitely lived. But not for long, like this.

He carried her to the ship and swiftly closed the door, hoping its clean, oxygenated air would help. Otherwise, he had no real idea of what to do, except to get her to the castle and its medical facilities. He’d never been a healer.

She stirred, then coughed.

“Lucy,” said Vader, feeling more helpless than he had since—for a very long time.

Lucy opened her eyes, as blue as his own. But hers were hazy and unfocused. 

She mumbled, “Valì?”

[skyhooks-notebook]

My John Wick/Jason Bourne movie which will never be made

(Bourne, of course, is a brutally disillusioned idealist. He had no idea he was signing away his soul. Wick likely sold his soul with his eyes wide open, though he probably only understood the ultimate cost later on - a naive pragmatist.)

I don’t post much at all, but here is a thing that happened on my computer. I was thinking about how John Wick and Jason Bourne could be brought together. My thoughts became long, and I started writing it down. This isn’t a story, just a sketch of how I think such a movie could be made. It’s not really edited either, this is all off-the-cuff.

[I only know what’s in the movies. I don’t know other canon from either ‘verse.]

So, if I were making a movie…

The universes of John Wick and Jason Bourne have very different styles, creating a problem.

Problem: - Bourne lives in a Universe where government is large, powerful, knowledgeable and nearly competent. - Wick lives in a Universe where a vast and elaborate criminal underworld exists, where we’ve never seen those major criminal figures worry about law enforcement or government.

The discrepancy must be resolved.

Simple.

Jason Bourne has never dealt with crime. Everything has been political and confined to the intelligence community.

Wick has never dealt with politics or the intelligence community.

So.

We must assume that the intelligence community is perfectly happy to leave common crime in the hands of law enforcement.

- Law enforcement has an unwritten and fatalistic attitude that there will always be some level of crime no matter what you do because it’s innate to human nature. And if you’re going to have crime, it might as well be organized. Let the strongest and most dangerous criminals accumulate power and influence, because they will go a long way to controlling the stupid, the excessive and the disruptive crooks. Better to have one major weapons trafficker controlling the traffic than have a thousand slightly smaller and more disruptive dealers completely out of control. (You can strongly hint that there’s an uneasy, unwritten and largely unspoken agreement between crime and law enforcement, and that it’s often a two-way street.) And if the big crime gets too big, it’s easier to knock it back down to “acceptable” levels because you’ve got bigger targets, which are easier to hit and which make a large and impressive splash across the front page when you throw RICO charges at them.

Plus it would also illustrate that Wickian Law Enforcement at its highest levels is just as dirty, amoral and underhanded as the Bournite Intelligence community.

- So, with a little work and willing suspension of disbelief (which wouldn’t be hard, because who wouldn’t want to see Wick and Bourne on the same screen provided it’s done with at least half an ass), it’s possible to bring the two Universes together.

- We start with Bourne. Someone else, like an hard ass, experienced reporter, is snooping into the government’s history of creating conditioned assassins. Maybe because a public face, like a former intelligence director, has left the shade to become a politician. And many strongly suspect that he’s dirty as fuck, but our snoopy reporter is just figuring out how deep the rabbit hole goes. Our politician was, of course, instrumental in developing programs like Treadstone, Blackbriar, et al.

- The Snoop finds out, one way or another, that one of the earliest failures of these programs was an “asset” who experienced a psychological break, went “off the res”, starting killing people and still turns up now and then to kill more people. To our Snoop, it appears that the government has created an uncontrollable monster who is still on the loose and possibly lurking right outside the White House, dear reader, are you scared now?

- The story, scanty, incorrect and harshly spun, gets printed as above. A few names are named, but mostly dead people (and maybe someone who has already been publicly discredited.) Our politician is not named because our Snoop doesn’t yet have absolute proof linking Mr. Politician to the Treadstone/Blackbriar/etc. machine.

- The evidence still exists. Witnesses still live, in numbers too great to be cleanly eliminated.

- Mr. Politician is sweating bullets.

- The Snoop isn’t done. He wants to find Bourne so he can say, “Here’s your monster, where’s my Pulitzer?” As investigation continues, the story becomes clearer to the Snoop, and the monster starts to look like little less monstrous and little more victimized. Which is an even better story.

- Now Mr. Politician is not only worried that he will be named, he’s worried that if Snoop makes contact with Bourne, or simply as a consequence of Snoop stirring the shit, Bourne will find out who our Politician is and how complicit he was in the program that destroyed David Webb. Mr. Pol knows this is likely to be a death sentence.

- It has become obvious to everyone who isn’t deeply deluded that Jason Bourne is practically indestructible and that sending more valuable and increasingly scarce ‘assets’ against him is just going to result in the loss of those assets. Agents available may be trained and conditioned to within an inch of their lives, but Bourne’s psychological break caused him to exceed his limits, training and conditioning in a way Black Ops programs haven’t been able to replicate. Those with a pragmatic attitude believe that they have no agent who can measure up to Bourne. Politician believes this as well.

- But Mr. Politician knows some things that the intelligence community has never concerned itself with. In his many years of government service, Mr. Pol was also involved with Law Enforcement at various times. Maybe he did a stint with the effa-bee-eye. Whatever. He knows about the Criminal Underworld, he knows that to maintain the ugly equilibrium, the Underworld may be influenced to comply with certain requests. And he knows a name. John Wick.

- Mr. Politician is also savvy about recent developments in the Underworld. He’s got a friend who’s still in the business of monitoring organized crime and keeping tabs on what’s going on down there. Mr. Pol has listened to recent stories with fascination because of certain similarities to a well known government failure who has haunted his dreams for decades. It has become a fact in Mr. Pol’s mind that the CIA will never be able to take down Bourne, but maybe there’s another way.

- Mr. Politician approaches a major Crime Lord and tells him point blank to activate John Wick by any means necessary and set him on the trail of one Jason Bourne. If Wick can’t be activated, Crime Lord will receive his own personal set of extensive criminal and RICO charges, delivered to his doorstep by the entire FBI

- Crime Lord knows if he gets charged, he probably won’t survive because other crime lords are going to want to make sure he doesn’t talk - about them. Also, his family will be endangered no matter which way the sword swings; either the FBI will be targeting them or his fellow criminals will be.

- Crime Lord knows John Wick. They’re old friends. Crime Lord feels a bit conflicted about it, but his first loyalties are to his family and his own hide. So he swallows his fondness for John Wick and commits falsehood, deception, a calling in of favors, maybe a little blackmail and the old Rock-And-A-Hard-Fuck-You-Up-Place on Wick. An elaborate, manipulative lie, that sets a misinformed John Wick on the trail of a man potentially as dangerous as himself.

- Now, we’ve got Jason Bourne being hunted by the Snoop, which has him on alert. We have John Wick hunting Bourne because he believes, once again, that he has no choice.

- We also have a Jason Bourne who is somewhat confounded. We need the scene where Bourne finds out, before contact ever takes place, that someone has taken out a contract on him with an Underworld assassin. Bourne doesn’t know much more about the Criminal Underworld than Joe Schmoe from Kokomo, just what he’s seen in the news and largely ignored, because it never had anything to do with him. Even in all that training years and years ago, there was this gap, because organized crime wasn’t the CIA’s beat. Maybe at first, Bourne even assumes that this Wick character isn’t a threat because he’s just a murderer, a thug, and not a highly trained government operative like himself.

- So in a riveting scene where Bourne and Wick first come into contact, we see Bourne - under the influence of his ignorant assumption - nearly getting killed by Wick and making an extremely narrow escape by use of desperate measures. We also have Mr. Wick limping away, suitably impressed with the skills of his opponent.

- Now we have that stretch of the story where Wick is on the hunt, Bourne is on the run and Bourne is trying to uncover any information he can find about this assassin. Wick doesn’t research much, though, because that’s not how he works. Bourne is a machine; the gears must grind. Wick is a force of nature, like a tornado; most of the info he gets he just picks up along the way, either paying for it or having it given to him by friends.

- Bourne discovers that Wick had a military past, Special Forces, maybe he was fucked over by the military/government in his own way. Or Bourne sees it that way. Bourne finds out about Helen and her death, and maybe not the whole story, but quite a bit about how John cut through a small army of Russian mob mooks for vengeance. He identifies with Wick’s grief and anger. He sees something of himself in John Wick. He sympathizes with the devil.

- John hasn’t done the heavy research. He understands that Bourne is dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than anyone he’s ever met. He consolidates his resources and finds someone else to do his research. He is awaiting a report on Jason Bourne when…

- Bourne stops running, goes to confront Wick and ends up trying to explain, while fighting of course, what he knows about the Dirty Politician and the Crime Lord who has called John out of his troubled retirement yet again, and how Wick has been used and betrayed (this time) until he says something that causes Wick to call truce long enough to hear it all.

- Bourne can see the beginning of a way to solve the whole mess. After some persuasion, Wick is on board and has some ideas of his own.

- Now we’ve got our boys on the same side and it’s only left to decide whether the war will be conventional or nuclear.

- There are two victories we need to see. We must see the destruction of Mr. Politician and Mr. Crime Lord.

- You might-could send Bourne, who doesn’t really give a shit about the covenants and conventions of the criminal world, to the Continental - probably breaking in, instead of checking in. Luring the Crime Lord out into the open, perhaps on the intimation that Mr. Politician is about to take up backstabbing. Draw the Crime Lord out to confront the Politician. Bourne’s plan, reluctantly agreed to by Wick, is to draw the Politician and the Crime Lord together, get evidence and even a full recording of the meeting and expose them both to the world.

Or course, this backfires. Bourne finds himself in a position where he has to kill either Crime Lord or Mr. Politician in self-defense. Probably the Crime Lord.

- It would also be immensely satisfying to see Wick take out the dirty politician with a head shot. Bourne would, of course, be stoically pissed about it all, but it also illustrates the difference. Bourne is willing to let even unrepentant bastards live because he’s tired of having blood on his hands. Wick doesn’t let anybody live who’s fucked him over. Bourne is still conflicted about who and what he is. Wick has come to terms with himself. Bourne believes in atonement. Wick believes in damnation. Bourne still cares. Wick doesn’t give a fuck. Bourne still dreams of inner peace. Wick would settle for a little peace and quiet, would you motherfuckers just leave me the fuck alone already. Get off my lawn. And stop teasing my dog, you bastards.

(Bourne, of course, is a brutally disillusioned idealist. He had no idea he was signing away his soul. Wick likely sold his soul with his eyes wide open, though he probably only understood the ultimate cost later on - a naive pragmatist.)

- You must also show Wick taking an active role in planning, because if Bourne does all of it and says here’s what we’re going to do, then 1) he’s just using Wick as a tool or weapon, instead of treating him like a person and an equal and 2) Wick once again is being controlled by someone else instead of doing what he does best, which is take matters into his own hands (shooting Santino may have looked like a misstep, but who in the audience didn’t love it?)

- I’ve forgotten our Snoop reporter.

We could let Bourne track him down, in which case he will almost certainly die, because going by canon everybody who sympathizes with Jason Bourne must die.

We could let Wick find him, in which case he probably has a much better chance of surviving to publish his Pulitzer Prize winning story provided he’s not armed when he meets Mr. Wick. Hell, Wick could give him a coin, which could buy him entrance and protection at the Continental (even the government doesn’t want to mess with that bunch - like stirring a hornet’s nest with a stick; you might survive, but it will be excruciatingly painful and you’ll look like an idiot the whole time with all the screaming and flailing and jumping around in a panic.)

John Wick’s name will not appear in the story. Only a vaguely defined “other sources”.

- And after all is said and done, Bourne and Wick part company, with mutual respect and recognition. Though they really don’t like each other very much.

So that’s my John Wick/Jason Bourne movie which will never be made. But I had fun.

P.S. Please excuse crappy photoshop, I just wanted something there.

[old1ddude]

Living With Pink

Since @seasurfacefullofclouds did a lovely review on ‘Harry Styles’ (post) after living with it for more than a year - I felt inspired to write up my own observations and opinions.  

For the sake of brevity and the fact that it seems to irritate certain haters - I will refer to Harry’s album as “PINK” throughout.

Melody!  There are ten good, fully developed melodies in an era where a four note hook combined with a bass loop is thought to constitute a song.  Really, there are more than ten, Sign of the Times has three distinct melodies, seamlessly woven together.  (On an intellectual level, I understand that some people don’t think melody is the most important element of music.  On a gut level, I just don’t get it.  Melody is it for me.)  I’ve listened to PINK straight through hundreds of times.  The  beauty and quality present in every song, nearly every moment never fails to impress.  I’ve never really been an album guy, because, even among my favorite artists, at least half of the songs seem there just to take up space.  (I used to make mix tapes, back in the day.)  With PINK, I feel that every song has real merit and is fully worthy of it’s place.    Harry’s voice (which I have always really loved - even X-Factor era) and vocal technique have reached a superlative level.  I think Harry is at absolutely peak performance, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.  The instrumentation and arrangements are breathtaking.  Even the angry Kiwi has deep beauty and avoids shrill, unpleasant sounds, often found in hard rock.  For those who are willing to look below the surface, PINK’s honesty, vulnerability and frankness are noteworthy.  I feel that Harry is speaking directly to me and the album is providing a window into his soul - into his humanity.  PINK grapples with internal conflicts omnipresent in the human condition, good and evil, love and hate, selfishness and sacrifice.  I am very confident that PINK will sound just as good 20, or 30 years from now - it won’t ever become stale, or sound dated.  Some wished for a more cohesive album, but for me, the variety makes it really hard to grow bored of PINK.  I was infatuated with the album from the start.  As time goes on, my love for it only deepens.

This ended up getting pretty long - track by track under the cut.

Meet Me in the Hallway was a bit dreary to me at first.  Now I find myself absorbed in it.  The aching and longing, the vulnerability, the pain - it all feels so close, honest and real.  The repetition of  “gotta get better” is slightly irritating to my ear - for that reason, I will occasionally skip the track.  I do wonder, however, if that irritation was intentional - meant to provoke some unease in the listener.  The guitar part on this song is achingly beautiful, as is Harry’s voice.

Sign of the Times is a masterpiece by any measure.  Sea pointed out how difficult it is to sing this song in a way to do it any justice.  Precious few artists could pull it off.  Every time I hear it, the song transports me - it lifts me out of myself.  The rich, full sound and deft combination of three distinct melodies is no small feat.  Guitar slides, strings, gospel choirs - it could so easily be overblown, or too grandiose, but it strike the perfect balance.  The song moves at a stately sixty beats per minute.  I would imagine this is very close to Harry’s resting heart rate.  There is nothing rushed - every moment is given it’s full due.  Also, I am of the old fashioned belief that art should be beautiful.  Every second of SotT is achingly beautiful and I love it.

Carolina is great fun and incredibly clever.  May artists try to be “edgy,” or “cool” by referencing drugs.  Carolina recreates in music what I imagine it would feel like to be high on coke.  (I’ve been around people who were jacked up before.)  The manic “la la la la la la la la’s,” the fuzzy sensation, “she feels so good!”  If you listen carefully, Harry sings it as if he is in a slight haze - king of nuance, as always.  The metaphor is nothing short of brilliant - “get’s into parties without invitation” -  “she feels so good.”  Layers of sound, particularly on the second verse, are extraordinary.  This song gives you the same kind of sugar rush a hit pop song can deliver, but backs it up with plenty of vitamins and protein, so you don’t get that “sugar low” and grow tired of it.  

Two Ghosts has some of the most compelling word images - “Fridge light washes this room white,” for one.  It’s a deceptively simple, easy to sing song, but a lot of artist would turn out a boring rendition.  The album version is lovely, but the performance he did, just Harry and his guitar, was breathtaking.  Once again, we have deep vulnerability and profound honesty.  I do wish he had done the vocal “ooo’s” on the album version.  We’ve all seen how hyper aware Harry is of his surroundings.  He stared right at the camera trying to snag a sneaky snap.  He spots people, way up in the nosebleed seats, trying to leave early and gently chastises them.  He’s too finely tuned of an instrument to handle fireworks easily.  I believe he is much more aware of all his senses than the average person.  Touch, taste, sight, sound - he sculpts and paints with his music.

Sweet Creature is a song I will often skip back and repeat as once through just isn’t enough.  It’s not a sugary, or fairy tale version of love, but honest, vulnerable, real.  “Runnin through the garden, oh when nothing bothered us,” paints such a beautiful picture.  “Sweet Creature” is such and odd phrase and yet conveys such warmth and deep connection for Louis another person.  Harry’s voice brings an incredible warmth to this song - a warmth utterly unique to his quite distinctive voice.  Again, it takes great artistry to impart such feeling on a relatively simple song, like this.  The guitar part is certainly inspired by the Beatles’ Blackbird, but any similarity ends there, in my opinion.  For my ear, Sweet Creature is a better song - it moves me in a way Blackbird never could.

Only Angel sets up a beautiful dichotomy.  The angelic, SotT inspired, into and outro envelop the hard rock interior.  The contrast intentionally reinforces the song’s story.  Harry’s voice doesn’t quite have the anger, or hardness one might expect at on a first listen - the warmth in his voice was very intentional.  The angel (which is Harry himself) is also a devil between the sheets.  Mother (authority figure) doesn’t approve of how the angel presents “herself.”  Harry loves attention and the stage, but hates fame.  He’s good and kind, but also has a dirty side.  (I could go on and on, but I’ve  written on my OA interpretation extensively, ages ago.)  A plus for using a flawed angel as a metaphor for himself - brilliant.  The melody is catchy as hell - it’s a “bop” and great fun to hear, but there’s so much meat it’s almost ridiculous.  The sound is rich and beautiful throughout and I love that he brings back the angelic sound to close it out.

Kiwi has so little movement in the melody, yet it works beautifully - somehow, it’s still a great melody and hard to get out of your head.  The instrumentation is angry and hard, yet rich, full and pleasant to the ear.  Harry’s voice has just the right amount of anger and derision.  “She” is Simon Cowell.  She tempts the boys with fame and fortune, but she’s hollow inside.  It’s an angry song, but it feels so good, joyful even, to hear it.  Harry’s stage performance reveals how cathartic it is to finally tell Simon what he thinks of him - in front of a massive audience.  I love Kiwi so much, I’ve made the most raucous chorus into a ringtone on my phone.  “Oh I think she said, “I’m having your baby” [heyyyy] “it’s none of your business” [hoooo......]  Harry has such a great, raspy rock voice - it really isn’t fair.

Ever Since New York sounds like some combination of Bruce Springsteen and the Statler Brothers.  The accompaniment is beautiful and rich with a really great, solid melody.  Harry’s vocalization suggests someone who is TIRED and DONE with the situation.  “Tell me something, tell me something new.  Don’t know nothing, just pretend you do...” is sung as a plea - a plea devoid of any hope of being answered.  Harry is vulnerable, broken and through putting up a front, or playing games.

Woman has been compared to Elton John’s Bennie and the Jets a lot - way too much, in my opinion.  There are similarities in the structure of the song, but Woman has a completely different sound.  I like a lot of John’s music, but when he sings “B-B-B-Bennie” he squeaks like a rusty hinge.  Harry sings “W-W-W-Woman” in a different key and melody (and with a deep, pleasant vocal.)  “Selfish I know...”  It’s one of the best jealousy songs I’ve ever heard.  He knows he’s selfish - knows it’s wrong, but can’t help his feelings.  I love Harry’s unflinching look at the darker side of human nature and wholly realistic view of his own failings.  Woman has a very good melody and those little “la-la la-la la-la la-la’s” give it just the zest in needs.

From the Dining Table might just be too honest.  While the artistry was immediately apparent, I was a little slow to warm up to this song, because it’s a bit depressing.  He sings about masturbating as a distraction to his pain and loneliness (and some said the album wasn’t honest enough!)  This song is pure vulnerability.  It’s arranged with such simplicity and great restraint.  (Harry understands the beauty of restraint, you can hear it in If I Could Fly.)  This is another song which must be sung with great artistry, to prevent it being dull.  The addition of strings and lovely female harmonies (”maybe one day you’ll call me...”) is a master stroke.  I am perplexed as to why he didn’t have Sarah and Clair sing the harmonies on tour.  Beautiful, beautiful song, but it is still a bit depressing - as it was meant to be.  Harry loves angst and drama.

Speaking of restraint, Harry has a habit of doing just enough, but never too much (nuance again.)  He changes vocal inflection and flavor with ease, but never adds gratuitous vocal embellishment.  Harry is quite capable of singing runs and all sorts of vocal gymnastics, but chooses a simple, restrained beauty.  (Sometimes, less is more.)  He maintains this restrained discipline in the accompaniment, as well.  PINK is a rock album, but also so much more.  In ten, or twenty years it will still sound fresh - and I think more people will realize what a masterpiece it truly is.

[skyhook-sly]

My John Wick/Jason Bourne movie which will never be made

(Bourne, of course, is a brutally disillusioned idealist. He had no idea he was signing away his soul. Wick likely sold his soul with his eyes wide open, though he probably only understood the ultimate cost later on - a naive pragmatist.)

I don’t post much at all, but here is a thing that happened on my computer. I was thinking about how John Wick and Jason Bourne could be brought together. My thoughts became long, and I started writing it down. This isn’t a story, just a sketch of how I think such a movie could be made. It’s not really edited either, this is all off-the-cuff.

[I only know what’s in the movies. I don’t know other canon from either ‘verse.]

So, if I were making a movie…

The universes of John Wick and Jason Bourne have very different styles, creating a problem.

Problem: - Bourne lives in a Universe where government is large, powerful, knowledgeable and nearly competent. - Wick lives in a Universe where a vast and elaborate criminal underworld exists, where we’ve never seen those major criminal figures worry about law enforcement or government.

The discrepancy must be resolved.

Simple.

Jason Bourne has never dealt with crime. Everything has been political and confined to the intelligence community.

Wick has never dealt with politics or the intelligence community.

So.

We must assume that the intelligence community is perfectly happy to leave common crime in the hands of law enforcement.

- Law enforcement has an unwritten and fatalistic attitude that there will always be some level of crime no matter what you do because it’s innate to human nature. And if you’re going to have crime, it might as well be organized. Let the strongest and most dangerous criminals accumulate power and influence, because they will go a long way to controlling the stupid, the excessive and the disruptive crooks. Better to have one major weapons trafficker controlling the traffic than have a thousand slightly smaller and more disruptive dealers completely out of control. (You can strongly hint that there’s an uneasy, unwritten and largely unspoken agreement between crime and law enforcement, and that it’s often a two-way street.) And if the big crime gets too big, it’s easier to knock it back down to “acceptable” levels because you’ve got bigger targets, which are easier to hit and which make a large and impressive splash across the front page when you throw RICO charges at them.

Plus it would also illustrate that Wickian Law Enforcement at its highest levels is just as dirty, amoral and underhanded as the Bournite Intelligence community.

- So, with a little work and willing suspension of disbelief (which wouldn’t be hard, because who wouldn’t want to see Wick and Bourne on the same screen provided it’s done with at least half an ass), it’s possible to bring the two Universes together.

- We start with Bourne. Someone else, like an hard ass, experienced reporter, is snooping into the government’s history of creating conditioned assassins. Maybe because a public face, like a former intelligence director, has left the shade to become a politician. And many strongly suspect that he’s dirty as fuck, but our snoopy reporter is just figuring out how deep the rabbit hole goes. Our politician was, of course, instrumental in developing programs like Treadstone, Blackbriar, et al.

- The Snoop finds out, one way or another, that one of the earliest failures of these programs was an “asset” who experienced a psychological break, went “off the res”, starting killing people and still turns up now and then to kill more people. To our Snoop, it appears that the government has created an uncontrollable monster who is still on the loose and possibly lurking right outside the White House, dear reader, are you scared now?

- The story, scanty, incorrect and harshly spun, gets printed as above. A few names are named, but mostly dead people (and maybe someone who has already been publicly discredited.) Our politician is not named because our Snoop doesn’t yet have absolute proof linking Mr. Politician to the Treadstone/Blackbriar/etc. machine.

- The evidence still exists. Witnesses still live, in numbers too great to be cleanly eliminated.

- Mr. Politician is sweating bullets.

- The Snoop isn’t done. He wants to find Bourne so he can say, “Here’s your monster, where’s my Pulitzer?” As investigation continues, the story becomes clearer to the Snoop, and the monster starts to look like little less monstrous and little more victimized. Which is an even better story.

- Now Mr. Politician is not only worried that he will be named, he’s worried that if Snoop makes contact with Bourne, or simply as a consequence of Snoop stirring the shit, Bourne will find out who our Politician is and how complicit he was in the program that destroyed David Webb. Mr. Pol knows this is likely to be a death sentence.

- It has become obvious to everyone who isn’t deeply deluded that Jason Bourne is practically indestructible and that sending more valuable and increasingly scarce 'assets’ against him is just going to result in the loss of those assets. Agents available may be trained and conditioned to within an inch of their lives, but Bourne’s psychological break caused him to exceed his limits, training and conditioning in a way Black Ops programs haven’t been able to replicate. Those with a pragmatic attitude believe that they have no agent who can measure up to Bourne. Politician believes this as well.

- But Mr. Politician knows some things that the intelligence community has never concerned itself with. In his many years of government service, Mr. Pol was also involved with Law Enforcement at various times. Maybe he did a stint with the effa-bee-eye. Whatever. He knows about the Criminal Underworld, he knows that to maintain the ugly equilibrium, the Underworld may be influenced to comply with certain requests. And he knows a name. John Wick.

- Mr. Politician is also savvy about recent developments in the Underworld. He’s got a friend who’s still in the business of monitoring organized crime and keeping tabs on what’s going on down there. Mr. Pol has listened to recent stories with fascination because of certain similarities to a well known government failure who has haunted his dreams for decades. It has become a fact in Mr. Pol’s mind that the CIA will never be able to take down Bourne, but maybe there’s another way.

- Mr. Politician approaches a major Crime Lord and tells him point blank to activate John Wick by any means necessary and set him on the trail of one Jason Bourne. If Wick can’t be activated, Crime Lord will receive his own personal set of extensive criminal and RICO charges, delivered to his doorstep by the entire FBI

- Crime Lord knows if he gets charged, he probably won’t survive because other crime lords are going to want to make sure he doesn’t talk - about them. Also, his family will be endangered no matter which way the sword swings; either the FBI will be targeting them or his fellow criminals will be.

- Crime Lord knows John Wick. They’re old friends. Crime Lord feels a bit conflicted about it, but his first loyalties are to his family and his own hide. So he swallows his fondness for John Wick and commits falsehood, deception, a calling in of favors, maybe a little blackmail and the old Rock-And-A-Hard-Fuck-You-Up-Place on Wick. An elaborate, manipulative lie, that sets a misinformed John Wick on the trail of a man potentially as dangerous as himself.

- Now, we’ve got Jason Bourne being hunted by the Snoop, which has him on alert. We have John Wick hunting Bourne because he believes, once again, that he has no choice.

- We also have a Jason Bourne who is somewhat confounded. We need the scene where Bourne finds out, before contact ever takes place, that someone has taken out a contract on him with an Underworld assassin. Bourne doesn’t know much more about the Criminal Underworld than Joe Schmoe from Kokomo, just what he’s seen in the news and largely ignored, because it never had anything to do with him. Even in all that training years and years ago, there was this gap, because organized crime wasn’t the CIA’s beat. Maybe at first, Bourne even assumes that this Wick character isn’t a threat because he’s just a murderer, a thug, and not a highly trained government operative like himself.

- So in a riveting scene where Bourne and Wick first come into contact, we see Bourne - under the influence of his ignorant assumption - nearly getting killed by Wick and making an extremely narrow escape by use of desperate measures. We also have Mr. Wick limping away, suitably impressed with the skills of his opponent.

- Now we have that stretch of the story where Wick is on the hunt, Bourne is on the run and Bourne is trying to uncover any information he can find about this assassin. Wick doesn’t research much, though, because that’s not how he works. Bourne is a machine; the gears must grind. Wick is a force of nature, like a tornado; most of the info he gets he just picks up along the way, either paying for it or having it given to him by friends.

- Bourne discovers that Wick had a military past, Special Forces, maybe he was fucked over by the military/government in his own way. Or Bourne sees it that way. Bourne finds out about Helen and her death, and maybe not the whole story, but quite a bit about how John cut through a small army of Russian mob mooks for vengeance. He identifies with Wick’s grief and anger. He sees something of himself in John Wick. He sympathizes with the devil.

- John hasn’t done the heavy research. He understands that Bourne is dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than anyone he’s ever met. He consolidates his resources and finds someone else to do his research. He is awaiting a report on Jason Bourne when…

- Bourne stops running, goes to confront Wick and ends up trying to explain, while fighting of course, what he knows about the Dirty Politician and the Crime Lord who has called John out of his troubled retirement yet again, and how Wick has been used and betrayed (this time) until he says something that causes Wick to call truce long enough to hear it all.

- Bourne can see the beginning of a way to solve the whole mess. After some persuasion, Wick is on board and has some ideas of his own.

- Now we’ve got our boys on the same side and it’s only left to decide whether the war will be conventional or nuclear.

- There are two victories we need to see. We must see the destruction of Mr. Politician and Mr. Crime Lord.

- You might-could send Bourne, who doesn’t really give a shit about the covenants and conventions of the criminal world, to the Continental - probably breaking in, instead of checking in. Luring the Crime Lord out into the open, perhaps on the intimation that Mr. Politician is about to take up backstabbing. Draw the Crime Lord out to confront the Politician. Bourne’s plan, reluctantly agreed to by Wick, is to draw the Politician and the Crime Lord together, get evidence and even a full recording of the meeting and expose them both to the world.

Or course, this backfires. Bourne finds himself in a position where he has to kill either Crime Lord or Mr. Politician in self-defense. Probably the Crime Lord.

- It would also be immensely satisfying to see Wick take out the dirty politician with a head shot. Bourne would, of course, be stoically pissed about it all, but it also illustrates the difference. Bourne is willing to let even unrepentant bastards live because he’s tired of having blood on his hands. Wick doesn’t let anybody live who’s fucked him over. Bourne is still conflicted about who and what he is. Wick has come to terms with himself. Bourne believes in atonement. Wick believes in damnation. Bourne still cares. Wick doesn’t give a fuck. Bourne still dreams of inner peace. Wick would settle for a little peace and quiet, would you motherfuckers just leave me the fuck alone already. Get off my lawn. And stop teasing my dog, you bastards.

(Bourne, of course, is a brutally disillusioned idealist. He had no idea he was signing away his soul. Wick likely sold his soul with his eyes wide open, though he probably only understood the ultimate cost later on - a naive pragmatist.)

- You must also show Wick taking an active role in planning, because if Bourne does all of it and says here’s what we’re going to do, then 1) he’s just using Wick as a tool or weapon, instead of treating him like a person and an equal and 2) Wick once again is being controlled by someone else instead of doing what he does best, which is take matters into his own hands (shooting Santino may have looked like a misstep, but who in the audience didn’t love it?)

- I’ve forgotten our Snoop reporter.

We could let Bourne track him down, in which case he will almost certainly die, because going by canon everybody who sympathizes with Jason Bourne must die.

We could let Wick find him, in which case he probably has a much better chance of surviving to publish his Pulitzer Prize winning story provided he’s not armed when he meets Mr. Wick. Hell, Wick could give him a coin, which could buy him entrance and protection at the Continental (even the government doesn’t want to mess with that bunch - like stirring a hornet’s nest with a stick; you might survive, but it will be excruciatingly painful and you’ll look like an idiot the whole time with all the screaming and flailing and jumping around in a panic.)

John Wick’s name will not appear in the story. Only a vaguely defined “other sources”.

- And after all is said and done, Bourne and Wick part company, with mutual respect and recognition. Though they really don’t like each other very much.

So that’s my John Wick/Jason Bourne movie which will never be made. But I had fun.

P.S. Please excuse crappy photoshop, I just wanted something there.

[gizkasparadise]

Rebelcaptain & meeting in the ER please

The coffee ran out in a slow, steaming stream into his flimsy styrofoam cup. Cassian lifted it up to eye level and immediately regretted it, seeing black specks from an unchanged filter settling on the bottom of the amber-colored liquid.

“Which intern is in charge of this?” He muttered in a voice gone raspy from lack of sleep. Alliance Hospital was understaffed on the best of days, and this week was far from it.

“That would be Biggs Darklighter,” came a perpetually monotone voice from behind him. After four years of working together, Cassian still wasn’t sure if Kay T. So’s inflections were programmed or a default state of being.

He turned around. And looked up. The trauma resident was freakishly tall and spindly. “Fire him,” he said, half genuine.

“I haven’t the pay grade for managerial matters.” Kay wordlessly handed him a chart. “We’re in need of a surgical consultant.”

“You and half the hospital.” But Cassian began to flip through the papers neatly arranged on the clipboard.

“There were three concussions, a broken wrist, four dislocated shoulders, five lacerations-”

Cassian turned another sheet on the patient’s chart, looking up with tired disbelief. He must have heard Kay wrong. “That’s too many shoulders.”

The tall resident slowed in his steps, his expression as always a completely blank slate. “No, Dr. Andor,” he stated in all his divorced enthusiasm. “These are the injuries the patient has inflicted since her arrival.”

He stopped. Clearly he needed to reread the chart. “What was this patient brought in for, again?”

Kay, as always, did not blink. But Cassian had grown used to the night shift doctor’s more off-putting mannerisms. “Blunt trauma.”

“What kind of blunt trauma?”

“Mild to severe.”

He counted to five before responding, as was suggested by the hospital’s director, Mon Mothma. “As in context, Dr. So.”

“Ah.” Kay took a moment to think about it. “Criminal, from what I understand.”

Cassian frowned. He pulled back the curtain. On the bed lay a woman with smudged make-up and one hand resting lightly against her abdomen. Her lip was split, and he could see the blossoming of an impressive bruise over her cheek–likely fractured.

Her other hand was handcuffed to the railing of the hospital bed. She looked up at his entrance, chin tilted and green eyes boring a hole into his forehead.

“Yes.” Kay muttered from behind his shoulder. “Definitely criminal.”

“Who’re you?” The woman snarled.

She was either still in a confrontational mood, or was suffering an injury that impaired cognitive functions. Cassian, based on the list of damages, was going to assume a high probability for both. Too tired to foster up a proper bedside manner, he stood above her with the chart, pulling a pencil from his scrubs pocket.

“Any allergies or adverse reactions to anesthesia or medication?” He intoned in the actual voice of death.

She felt her eyes scanning him. They settled on his face, before landing on the name neatly embroidered on the less-than-pristine white coat. “No,” she bit out. “What happened to the men in the waiting room?”

He sent her a dark look, less than amused. “We apparently need to treat half of them. Pain on a scale of 1 to 10?”

“I need to get out of here,” she demanded. It was clear that her attention was less on the stab wound on her side and more on the men she somehow managed to hospitalize in a hospital.

“You can explain that to the police.” Cassian stepped forward. “I need to feel your stomach, are you going to be hostile?”

Her lips tugged into a sneer. “I’m always hostile.”

“Empirical observation would confirm that statement,” Kay agreed, taking his own notes.

“Are you going to trust me to provide your medical care? Yes or no.” He did not have time for bullshit.

She grit her teeth. Her skin was pale, sweat plastering hair to her forehead and neck. She rolled the wrist attached to the railing, the cuff making light clanks, before drawing a deep inhale. “Fine.”

Cassian’s mind went into acute mode. “Lift your shirt.” And, only because she seemed to be in a considerable amount of pain: “Please.”

She rolled up the edge of it with her free hand.

Shit, Cassian thought immediately. “What happened?”

His fingers run over the skin of her abdomen. It felt rock hard underneath his touch, and was clearly distended.

“Baseball bat,” she said flatly. “From one of those men in the lobby.”

“Kay, her blood pressure?”

“Low.” The resident looked up at her monitors and let out a slight sigh, as if they had disappointed him. “Now lower.”

Cassian gave a grim nod, annoyance filtering to the back of his mind in the face of what he suspected was a ruptured spleen. “Any nausea, light-headedness, or blurred vision?”

“…a bit.”

A bit. As a surgeon, he had little patience for liars. “Dr. So, prep an operating room immediately.”

“No Computed Tomography?”

“No.” And, for the patient’s benefit: “No CT scan. We need to move.”

“Something the matter?” The patient asked, with the voice of someone accustomed to bad news.

“Your spleen is ruptured, we’re going to perform an emergency surgery to remove it.” His eyes met hers, and he was surprised to find that her main response was still anger from whatever led to her arrival in this ER. “Are there any pre-existing conditions I should know about? Anything in your family medical history?”

She snorted, but shook her head. She was looking paler, so he was surprised once again when her non-cuffed hand grabbed tightly onto his forearm.

“Don’t,” she rasped. “Leave me alone.”

He stared down at her, trying to parse the meaning of her statement. “You’ll be watched by staff after the surgery-”

“No!” She swallowed. “Krennic’s people might kill me.” Her expression took on an edge, half-desperate. “Do you know who he is?”

Assumed leader of the Imperialists, the closest thing Coruscant had to an organized crime syndicate. With her arm outstretched, the sleeve of her green shirt tugged up. Cassian saw the bottom half of a tattoo that signified the Partisans.

So she was in a gang. The revelation didn’t change anything about his initial perceptions, just another checkmark in the boxes he was drawing of her in his mind. The woman looked at him, and he was yet again taken off-guard when her voice became pleading.

“I came here because I heard rumors about this hospital. Are they true?”

Rumors. Alliance Hospital was full of them. But there was only one that would matter to someone like her. That they were an official front for the very unofficial Rebellion. If she was a Partisan, that at least made her an enemy of the mutual enemy.

Cassian managed to soften his voice as best he could.

“We’ll take care of you,” he promised.

Her fingers tighten around his arm. “Don’t let me out of your sight,” she begged.

He rested his hand over hers for a moment. Let her feel its reassurance. Before he pulled it off him so he could start prepping her bed for transport to the OR.

Cassian gave her a final nod. “I won’t.”

“Unless he blinks,” Kay supplied, unhelpful.

–

The surgery is routine. And Cassian values his word above a lot of other things, so instead of sneaking a few hours of sleep in the on-call room, he sat in the chair next to her bed. Exhaustion always wins over posterity, and so he dragged out another chair to rest his feet on. It’s been a thirty-six hour shift of pure hell, in no small part due to a gang brawl in the ER lobby.

His tired eyes go to her. He’d pulled her records. Jyn Erso. This wasn’t her first trip to the ER for criminal activity. And her emergency contact was Saw fucking Gerrera.

But she was smart enough to make up for her recklessness. A man in a white suit had stopped by a few hours ago. He walked in, saw Cassian, and wisely continued walking past. Cassian didn’t know if that was a result of new paranoia Jyn had instilled hin him, or if his presence had legitimately saved her from a hit. He ran a hand through his hair, looked up at the ceiling.

It was a long wait until she regained consciousness.

“You,” her voice sounds terrible and weak. “Actually stayed.”

“Despite better judgment,” he replied in a voice equally terrible.

She let out a low hiss of air that he imagined was an attempt at a snort.  The woman just lost her spleen and still felt the need to put up a front. “Does this mean I have to make you my primary surgeon?”

“You have enough surgeries to need a primary one?”

“I’m unpopular these days.”

That, he believed.

They sat in silence for a few moments, as Jyn no doubt attempted to acclimate to her new situation and Cassian attempted to fight a migraine. Eventually, he heard the clank-clank-clank of the handcuff.

“So this is still here,” she mused. Her gaze slid to him. “I imagine you’ve called the cops, then.”

He stared at the woman, at the cuff. And made a gamble. “It’s either them or Saw Gerrera.”

Jyn grimaced, proving his hypothesis correct. “Cops.”

Cassian dropped his feet back to the ground, leaning closer to her bedside. He doesn’t grab her hand, but there was an odd sensation of closeness that somehow felt inappropriate. Despite the waxiness of her face and the split in her lip, Jyn’s eyes were still bright with that barely simmering fire he recognized earlier in the ER.

“We’ll observe you for two weeks,” he stated. It’s longer than what’s customary, but Cassian had a thought that he can’t let go of.

“Ah. A vacation,” Jyn whispered. The sentiment seemed sincere.

Her arm shifted on the bed, the back of her knuckles grazing over the side of his hand. He stared down at the appendage in confusion, before flexing it.

“No fights,” he warned.

“…no fights,” she compromised.

He stared into her eyes, looking for a hint of deception. Unnerved to find none.

A knock at the door broke his evaluation. Jyn immediately tensed, but Cassian only nodded at the newcomer.

“You asked me to come by?” Bodhi Rook, an orderly, asked from his place at the threshold. He was off-duty, but still in scrubs.

“Do you know him?” Jyn asked, the edge from before returning to her tone.

“He’s a friend.” Cassian stood, rolling his shoulders and hearing something loud pop in his neck. The rest of the sentence is finished around a yawn. “Who owes me a favor.”

“Hi,” Bodhi greeted, lifting his hand in a gesture torn between a salute and wave.

“Hi,” Jyn echoed, some but not all of the edge fading.

“I’m going to sleep,” Cassian said flatly. He looked down at Jyn. “I’ll be back tomorrow after my rounds. Kay, the tall man with me earlier? Will be replacing Bodhi.” Again he caught his tone going softer, not sure why and not wanting to dig into it. “You won’t be left alone while you’re here.”

Jyn visibly swallowed. “Alright.”

He nodded, making a slow shamble to the door as Bodhi stepped in and took his chair. He was stretching his arms over his head when he heard her voice call out behind him.

“Cassian?”

It should be Dr. Andor. But he’s too exhausted to put up a fight at the moment. “What?”

“Thank you.” The two words sounded like they’ve never been uttered. “For not leaving.”

It’s what any surgeon would do, he wanted to start. But that wasn’t true, and they both knew it. So instead of a response, Cassian sent her a last, lingering look before he turned and made his way to Mon Mothma’s office.

It was, he suspected, going to be a long two weeks.

[ringabelldimly]

Mission Priorities

So. Yeah, I got to chapter 3 and I just couldn’t help myself. Have this event through Ringabel’s eyes, probably.

This was not his mission. He knew that. He knew this wasn’t his mission, but…

“It- It was Yoko, you see? She kept following the party, the fact that I always so happened to be by my dear Edea’s side when she needed me most was nothing more than happenstance because I was following orders!”

Yes. That’s what he would tell his superiors.

He planned it all out in his head as he stayed just out of sight in Florem. He’d seen the Empire storm the city and he was naturally worried. Florem wasn’t known for having the best defences…

And he was right to be on guard. He didn’t like the look of that Geist fellow.

His judgment rang true when the man proved to be less than savory. Ringabel had a distaste for people who thought that they held life and death in the palm of their hands.

Mission be damned, he would not stand by when Edea needed his help. He had pledged his life to her many times over, and he would not stop now. That fiend had just harmed Edea!

“Step no closer!” He jumped down from his hiding spot, fully donned in his Black Knight armor. Without a second thought he cut down the Empire soldiers at Geist’s side.

“Alternis!” The name was a thundaga to his heart. “What are you doing here?”

He turned to Edea, walking to her. “Whenever you are in peril, there I will be!” He had to admit, he would prefer he not need these pretences, to get all the credit and not his alter. But, he had always been his own worst enemy when it came to love. He stopped, just close enough to touch her… But his objective was not her. He turned, glaring down Geist through the visor. “I will protect Edea against any foe!”

“You are in my way…” Geist was none too thrilled about his sudden entrance. “Time that you disappear!”

Geist’s blade cut true and deeper than Yoko’s before. “Ungh-!”

“Alternis! Are you alright!?”

Oh, he was more than alright. The concern in her voice warmed his heart. He laughed, channeling his pain. “Heh… Never better!” He jumped back and charged forward. “Minus Strike!”

The look of confusion on Geist’s face as the blow hit was something Ringabel honestly enjoyed.

“The more pain I suffer, the more powerful I become!”

Geist staggered a bit. “Impressive…!”

“My blade knows no mercy.” Especially not for those who would seek to hurt Edea. “My wounds become yours. This is the way of the Dark Knight. Gladly I give my own life to vanquish my foe!”

He readied for another attack, smirking behind his helm. “Care to wager on which comes first? My running out of life to give… or you falling to my blade?”

Geist chuckled. “We may be made to clash, you and I… Your proposition amuses me, but I have had enough amusement for today.” He turned his cold eyes to Edea. “We will meet again… I suggest you say farewell to your loved ones before we do.” He ran away.

Ringabel sheathed his blade, considering this a job well done.

“Thank you, Alternis. You saved me again.” Edea looked so relieved, and she had the cutest smile on her face.

Ringabel should honestly track Alternis down and get his other self to pay him for all the credit he’s getting. But, “And that is all that matters to me, Edea. I would come running from the farthest corner of Luxendarc if you only called my name.” It was just a shame Alternis would be the name she called.

“Alternis…” The way she said it, ah, another thundaga to his poor heart.

“Oh! What a power couple!” Power couple? “The girl who risked her own life to save our city, and the dashing knight that came to her rescue!” Dashing? “Why, they’re our saviors! Who better to be our Flower Maiden and Bloom Groom?” Flower Maiden? Bloom Groom? Power couple? “No doubt about the inner beauty of these two selfless souls!”

Ringabel’s mind started to spin, his face grew hot. Oh he was thankful for his helm now! He must’ve been blushing like crazy.

“What!?” Edea was just as shocked, but, he could tell she wasn’t as happy. “Wait, you’ve got it all wrong!”

“A power couple, they say?” He wondered if Edea would act the same if she knew it were really him. She probably would...

The MC cleared his voice, “Without further ado, let us resume the festivities! Our final contenders are these two last minute entrants, Edea and Alternis!”

He almost corrected the MC, but he bit his tongue.

“Let’s hear some noise from all of you who think they deserve to be this year’s Flower Maiden and Bloom Groom!”

The crowd erupted in cheers, leaving both Ringabel and Edea stunned.

“What a reception! Looks like we have a runaway winner! Ladies and gentleman I give you your Flower Maiden and Bloom Groom- Edea and Alternis! Let’s give them another round of applause! Wouldn’t you all like to know a little more about our winners? I know I would!” The MC shoved the microphone in Ringabel’s face. “Tell us, how does it feel to be voted the finest couple in Florem?”

He smiled, still blushing. “None to bad. It seems even with my helmet donned I cannot hide my manly charms.” He realized a second too late that that did not sound like something the Alternis of this world would say.

“What the-” Oh god, Edea would find him out. What sort a beating would he receive for this? Her eyebrows furrowed. “Cool your jets there, buckethead!”

That cut deeper than any blade. She really didn’t…

“Yes well,” The MC cut in, “This year’s contest does place an emphasis on inner beauty over mere good looks. And the inner beauty within you two has clearly charmed our audience today!”

Perhaps he could get away with a bit more…? “I have every confidence that Edea would have been chosen even if the contest was still one of looks alone.”

She huffed, but he could see the tiniest of blushes. “Ugh! Can it, Alternis!”

Oh how he longed to see that anger turned at him and not Alternis. Ringabel zoned out for a moment, imagining what he would do if he didn’t need to keep up this farce. He would take Edea’s hands in his, place a gentle kiss to her knuckles… And then she’d drive those same knuckles right between his ribs just like old times!

He snapped out a moment later when the MC announce the end of the festivities.

“Well, today’s just been full of surprises.” Edea huffed.

“I was quite taken aback as well- if not entirely displeased with the outcome!” Quite the contrary, he loved this, even if he couldn’t be him while it happened.

Then a man came up to their party, speaking some foreign tongue that the Lady Magnolia seemed to understand. Ringabel stepped away, thing seemed like something that didn’t concern him.

It was when Edea brought up concerns for Florem’s safety he cut back in.

“I’ll speak with the Matriarch about shoring up the city’s defences. In the meantime count on me to watch over Florem.” Oh, he’d get an earful for this later, but Edea was always the priority, no matter what his mission actually was.

The smile on Edea’s face when she thanked him would make it all worth it. He turned and walked towards the Matriarch’s home. He slowly pulled off his helmet when he was out of the group’s sight. A heavy sigh escaped him.

“Ah, Master Ringabel.” The Matriarch greeted him with a smile. “Odd, Edea called you Alternis.”

He could only muster a tired smile. “Alas, I am not permitted to reveal the truth to my old comrades. So I would appreciate it if you could keep this little deception between us, Matriarch.”

“But of course, now, what have you come to discuss.”

“The city’s defences, measures must be taken to ensure its safety once more...” He spoke all the strategy he knew, all the ways he could think of to help defend Florem.

But all the while his thoughts were with Edea. He hoped for her safety. He longed to talk with her, to just hold her hand, even.

Alas, his Mission kept him from her. All he could do was protect her under the pretense he was Alternis...

[guitarrod]

                           Strictly For The Birds

                          ( Holden Caulfield at 80 )

 Holden Caulfield was you when you were fourteen. Now he knows you´re a phony. The difference is erudition. It´s impossible to be a close reader and read the Catcher in the Rye. A closer reader is a doubting reader. He has read much and knows enough to double-guess first-person narrators. When you´re fourteen you take Holden at his word. That is Salinger´s big joke. Your education has wrecked you as an aesthete. You were better off deaf and dumb. At least you could listen to Holden Caulfield. Your aesthetic values are based on your education instead of your knowing. You are hell-bent on psychoanalysing characters. There is no common trust.  You got to the point where you even look to study Holden´s idiomatic speech. J.D Salinger writes to the reader you used to be. It only took you a couple of years to be a phony. You cannot pretend to be a blood brother of Holden´s anymore.  The more experienced you become as a reader, the worse off you are for Salinger. It is almost as if he sticks his tongue out at you for having spent the better part of your intellectual life reading the canon, the experimentalists, the post-modernists, Faulkner, and Robbe-Grillet. Your education has taken you adrift. You catch yourself wondering if he would apply himself to his next school come next September. You remember that you knew exactly the answer when you were fourteen. But it is now a fleeting remembrance, a dispersed feeling. You can hardly remember what you thought, because you keep trying to remember what you felt. The discrepancy in your two readings of The Catcher - one at fourteen, and one at forty - is the distance you have neglectfully trodden. Salinger´s portrayal of Holden as genuine and anti-phony comes across in the way that Holden sounds. Salinger, in order to create Holden´s character could not hit one wrong note. It is much akin to what John Lennon said about Bob Dylan. If you want to know the truth, if you want to get to the bottom of it, you have to listen to how he sounds, more than what he says. Holden´s song is lost to the deafened years of erudition.   You have betrayed Holden´s trust.

He is a case study to most, that´s what critics do to human beings. Here´s more :

On July, 16 1951, The Catcher In The Rye was published to a profusion of reviews and sales went up as time caught on. By 1963 it was surmised that critics had written more about the Catcher than any other contemporary novel. BY 1965 it had sold 1,500,000 copies and by 1975 it had sold 9,000,000. Certainly, Holden had hit a nerve, and while Salinger once made sure to dedicate one of his books to the few dwindling “amateur readers” still out there, criticism abounded. Everyone had a word to say.  Every word seemed extra, seemed off.  What needed to be known was well explicated in the book´s text. It is hard to be more on target than loving a girl for keeping all her kings in the back row. Critics aimed and tried. Nash K. Burger said “ Holden´s mercurial changes of mood, his ‘ stubborn’ refusal to admit his own sensitiveness and emotions, his cheerful disregard of what is sometimes known as reality are typically and heartbreakingly adolescent” S. N Berman for the New Yorker wrote that “ Holden is not a normal boy. He is a hypersensitive and hyper-imaginative” while Harvey Breit for the Atlantic thought the opposite “ [Holden is a] bright, terrible, and ´possibly´ normal sixteen year old. The “possibly”  is how a critic plays it safe.

The fact is that criticism centered on two basic points : whether Holden was what we all were once in our inner lives or whether he was a depiction of an eccentric and possibly disturbed young man. The other point of curiosity was whether Holden would resolve his problems after ending up interred in a mental hospital. This is a much wider and essential question. It pokes at your very sense of self and society.   It pokes at your discomfort of giving in to that society, selling out that which is only yours to sell, your sense of self inside the society you imagine yourself to be in and how much being a part of that society really takes you apart from yourself. This belongs to the realms of psychology or the spiritual, depending on the critic´s intellectual dependences. Critics are people too and they mostly agree with the amateur readers that Holden was a sensitive person – as we all are or were – and was going through the trials of growing up. But a critic ponders and moils about this. All that is implicit is put to discussion by criticism, when itshould be left to settle inwardly, as a matter of course, as a matter of decency.  A critic vacillates. If you really want to hear about it, where Holden was born and what his lousy childhood was like, you´re too old.

Maybe the greatest achievement of the Catcher In The Rye is that it is really a token to literature. It couldn´t be sung or put to music.

The Catcher needs to speak to you. It needs to speak to you when you are alone. Nobody else is watching, waiting to see your impressions. You can lend yourself to it. The book is a brother, as you were Holden´s Allie. And he hopes to God you won´t end up like D.B, the brother prostitute writer.

 Simple when you were fourteen, it is now deceptively simple when you hit forty. It was direct, because it was your voice, not a performance of your voice.The voice that speaks to you when you are quiet. That screams amidst the silence when you were growing up. The voice which told you a certain kid in school was cool and everything and a great friend if you wanted to be more popular, but not the real deal. It was the voice that spoke to you as a young bilingual kid as you rested before sleeping, thinking seriously about whether “maison” sounded better than “home”  and deciding on “maison”, because everyone in America is housebroken.  Americans went a little adrift. They were obviously too self-conscious about being “cool”.

Kids, young teen-agers, the younger they are, know when you pretend. They know to pretend is pretentious.

Dylan stopped being Woody Guthrie and deemed him his last idol when he took notice that Guthrie was a phony. Surrounded by statesmen and kings and leaders of every ilk.His music a national treasure. Woody was a phony just as he tried his hardest not to be one, but that´s when you knew he couldn´t remember how. A wrong word will bind you in shackles and pronounce you guilty.

The suggestion is that you were Holden because he sounded not just like you but like your very best friend. It was in his idiom, in the way that he talked.  Before he even told you the facts of his life, you were aware of them, and accepted them. Because you both spoke the same language. It is like spotting a friend in a crowded room before you even get to know him. Language to Salinger is like a knowing glance.

The Catcher was book written for kids.Salinger´s kids. Kids old enough to teach you everything you forgot.  The fact that they are kids only makes it easier for them to preserve that knowledge from contamination. Socialization, for Salinger, is having the cowardice to adapt yourself. Cut a piece out to fit in. This is perfectly summarized in a set of short lines. In the end of the book, Holden responds to the psychiatrist´s archetypal prodding, searching for the cure, suggesting he should apply himself and receiving the only sensible answer. “ How do you know what you´re going to do till you do it?  The answer is, you don´t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it´s a stupid question.” The psychiatrist will tend to see Holden as caught up in a crossroads.  The psychiatrist will try to empathize with the boy that is growing up. The psychiatrist is a critic who forgot how to read.

 Holden can either grow up and adapt, or he can be true to himself and end up in a loony bin. Of course another alternative would be seeing him ending up in the crest of a mountain as a sage. Another one, still, would see him living on, one of many millions in the city streets, having resisted the fold in his teens and never having betrayed himself ever since. These are diametrically opposing paths. They are survival choices. The real tribulation, the crisis of adolescence is a test to see if you will be able to grow up to be yourself. To understand rationally, or outwardly, what you knew innately as a child. But now you speak and sound like the critic, not like the fourteen year old you once were. The real dilemma, of course, is that Holden´s crisis stopped being important and was almost forgotten until you re-read the book almost 30 years later. It is in how fast you forget that makes you reach for the nearest bottle.

It was feeling affection for a girl that leaves all the kings in the back row while playing checkers, which is also akin to thinking about your poor mother the moment you are packing up your belongings after “given the boot again and having to leave another school” and thinking of how she must have asked a million questions to the person selling the ice skates that she wanted to give to you which ended up being the wrong ones, anyway, and left in a corner of your closet in your boarding school as a relic of her caring. The skates she wanted her son to wear while swooning over the ice, playing hockey with his friends. It is exactly the same as wishing to relive the memory of the girl which made you smile when she would just leave the kings in the back row because she liked the way they looked or something.

It is like being angered at the fact that a common flashy fool like Holden´s roommate, Stradlater, is very possibly having sex with her,  after chatting her up quite easily, with the same lines he uses with every girl. Holden apparently doesn´t understand girls. He repeats that he doesn´t understand girls. He stops necking when she play-acts telling him she is not ready. He cannot get involved if he doesn´t genuinely like the girl. But then, by the next day, he is necking with another one he genuinely doesn´t like and life goes on. Holden doesn´t understand girls because of the unfairness of an unworthy person being attractive to them. As if the evaluations and assessments were based on the same prerogatives as friendships. That one lusts for whom one feels affection.  To Holden it is an injustice that tops off the general corruption. The icing on the cake. An injustice he is liable to commit. Holden is running the mortal risk of growing up. Sex would shut out the child and usher him promptly into manhood.

The problem, the glaring attestation of Holden´s personality and that he is much older than what most critics shunned him for is his humor. Holden is hip, attuned to the absurdity of all around him and when the world does not smother him he is willing to leave it with a laugh. And not just a sneer.A good laugh. The typethat will make your opponent throw in the towel and hand you your victory in the end.

The facility for making jokes is to sense the disjointedness in what is purported to be real and the obvious truth. It is to shred away the pretense. One example : After being enraged with Stradlater´s  inane yet effective gifts at womanizing, Caulfield calls out to him as he is going to the bathroom “  to stop off on the way to the can and give Mrs. Schimdt the time. Mrs. Schimdt was the janitor´s wife.”  This is appropriately toilet humor. Rowdy humor.Like hearing Brown Sugar for the first time in a honky-tonk. Any rumor of childishness was a gross misinterpretation. Holden´s way of talking has the natural lash of the wit.  To bleed the victim vacant. Holden has the natural lash of the wit. His humor, however, is not restricted to a specific understanding of a precise idiom. It is not borne in time, or trapped in its streets. It makes the whole world laugh whether it finds it constructive or not.  It makes the Upper East Side of New York seem universal. More evidence :  “ I´m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It´s awful.If  I´m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I´m going, I´m liable to say I´m going to the opera. It´s terrible.” The analyst would say Holden lies to overly protect that which is most vulnerable : his true nature. One that is on assault, almost contagiously-prone to the phoniness, or let´s be clear, the pure mediocrity of being a sheep. The problem is that the analyst is never as clear as Holden. Holden´s jokes keep you on your feet. You almost start talking like him. The critic waivers between what he should sound like and what he has grown to sound as.

Holden isn´t a child for cherishing a girl who keeps her kings in the back row, Holden isn´t just loving a girl that he kissed all over as he saw a undisguised tear fall on her cheek hard as a stone when she saw her stepdad, an insensitive, distant, and for that very fact abusive- aberrant to the core of human sensitivity - for nothing more than his distance, for choosing not to care for a child who no longer belongs to anyone, the helpless girl Holden caught and kissed all over “ anywhere – her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows and all- her ears – her whole face except her mouth.” Except the mouth…Stradlater´s date.

On second thought, the notion that Holden confuses sex with the stain of a loss of innocence  say perhaps a little more about other people´s notions about sex than Holden.  He says he is extremely horny.  Maybe he kicks himself for being attracted to a girl who he doesn´t like simply because he doesn´t enjoy half-measures. He´d prefer to keep love and lust attached.Maybe you´re the one who is innocent.

Phoniness goes deeper than a lost innocence, or a love for the unself-conscious simple gesture of truthfulness as I understood Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker critic, implying in a Charlie Rose interview commemorating Salinger´s genius. Phoniness is the innate, the natural, the commonplace, human and (humane) ability to hear when somebody strikes the wrong note while playing the game of life wrongly, or half-assed, or cowardly as is often the case. Phoniness is a cop-out.

“ The band was putrid. Buddy Singer. Very brassy, but not good brassy, corny - brassy” ( Pg. 69 Catcher In The Rye – Little, Brown and Co. Edition). Or Ernie, the pianist “ He was really stinking it up. He was putting all these  dumb, show-offy  ripples in the high notes, and a lot of very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass.”   The show-offy ripples are the same as prodded laughter. Audiences laughing on cue are more than a betrayal, they are a disappointment for betraying themselves.The superficial difference is in the fact that while Ernie was doing the entertaining, trying to impress an audience with his playing,  an audience that laughs uproariously at any joke in a movie is trying to accommodate One comes with the other. One size fits all. It is still the sheep needlessly scared of the shadow of their own kind. Thinking they have missed something, they try to keep up with the bleating and the laughter, missing the fact that nothing is being said, nothing is being played, nothing is being written. The sheep are afraid to stand still. Stay silent.

(People who would rather laugh their hearts out at stupid movies or critics who care extensively about the correct academic annotations are also one of the same. They are facsimiles of the Stradlaters who you are told to laugh at because he thinks that being able to mark commas in the right places is part of fine writing.)

Art appreciation is perhaps the most discernible measure of the true ability to detect phoniness. Or as in the Taoist tale Salinger has Seymour read to a baby Franny, in the beginning of Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, it is the ability to tell a superlative animal from one that just looks good. Without hesitation.Scarcely even looking.  And Franny, at tenmonths old, is expected also to know the difference. You were born knowing. You choose to forget.Blinded by the faux-gold and the flash of a grin.Deafened by words like “faux-gold”.

The critics see meat where another man sees a goldfish. They speak of “adolescent disaffiliation” – ( Carl F. Strauch, Pg. 65 “ Kings in the Back Row : Meaning through Structure – A reading of Salinger´s The Catcher in the Rye” and of a “thoroughly pessimistic novel”. “ The phony world of corrupt materialism and Holden´s private world of innocence” ( Carl F. Strauch; Pg.65; Pg, 66) “ Phrasings (that) transcend their merely conversational usage and become psychologically portentous.” ( Carl F. Strauch Pg. 68). Phoniness is, - according to S. N Berhmam ,as quoted by Carol and Richard Ohmann ( Reviewers, Critics and The Catcher in the Rye; Pg. 125) “ a heading under which he  {Holden} loosely gathers not only insincerity but snobbery, injustice, callousness to the tears in things, and a lot more.”  Phoniness is in a lot of things, including in its being overstated. What it isn´t is a loss of innocence or a fall from grace. You are expected to know what it is. It is self-explanatory. It is found more easily in the voice of one who is desperately trying to be heard, or who is completely oblivious of being heard at all. Both ways will work.

Little Shirley Beans. -“ It was a very old terrific record that this colored girl singer Estelle Fletcher made about twenty years ago. She sings it very Dixielandand whorehouse, and it doesn´t at all sound mushy.”(Catcher, Pg.115; italics mine). In fact, it is incredible how much art criticism Salinger wedges in the book, not even bothering to fictionalize examples. Holden says how Lawrence Olivier plays Hamlet “like a goddam general instead of “ sad, screwed-up type of guy” ( Catcher, p. 117) Salinger doesn´t fictionalize, as if he were dying to put his point across. At the point of a bayonet, Holden is man enough to laugh if he wants to, if that is what needs to be done. Or holler and cry.

Even the informality shown to highly respected artists is more than the homage many understand it to be, the wish to call an author up on the phone after reading his book is like a secret handshake between men in the know. Salinger´s realistic optimism is in his undying faith that you know, and that you are, uniquely, one of his own. As a book is addressed to anyone willing to read it, Salinger is embracing everyone, personally, body after body. It is the natural facility in literature, the reading in silence, that makes it the only art that treats everyone, individually, as the same. And Salinger knows you will agree with Holden, if you will only reciprocate the gesture. If  there is the same implied propensity for treating someone you have just met with recognition and respect. Someone who won´t criticize, someone who isn´t forty, anybody who just “reads and runs” (Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction, dedicatory passage.) Holden will state the bare-faced obvious -if you want to know the truth, if you´ll give him time, if you´ll just let him talk.

 At school, that biggest killer of artistic affinity, Holden was taught in a public speaking class never to digress, when he tells, passionately hurt, that what he liked most about the class was when somebody digressed, when somebody went with an idea and let it carry him in its gust.“ I (Holden) was still feeling sort of dizzy or something and I had a helluva headache all of a sudden. I really did. But you could tell he was interested, so I told him a little bit about it ´It´s this course where each boy in class has to get up and make a speech. You know. Spontaneous and all. And if the boy digresses at all, you´re supposed to stop and yell ´Digression´ at him as fast as you can. It just about drove me crazy. I got an F in it (…) The trouble with me is I like when somebody digresses…it was terrible because he was a very nervous guy (…) his lips were always shaking whenever it was time for him to give a speech (…) When his lips sort of quit shaking a little bit, though, I liked his speeches better than anyone else´s (…)It is in those unguarded moments that not only you show your nature, but what great art is made of. Great art is made of artists who did not look askance for approval and went with the ebb and crest of their inspiration. Art is not performed for anybody else. To digress is to free yourself from duty. To scream for joy. Salinger, through Holden, seems to say that great art is a feverish gush, or a little girl brushing her hair out of the way and creasing her forehead,  paying attention, in earnest, to what her big brother is awkwardly trying to say. Great art is to convince yourself no one is ever watching.  Great art is when you stop explaining yourself  “He {Kinsella}´d start telling you all about this letter to his mother got from his uncle, and how his uncle got polio and all when he was forty-two years old, and how he wouldn´t let anybody come to see him in the hospital because he didn´t want anybody to see him with a brace on. It didn´t have much to do with the farm- I admit it –but it was nice. (…) I don´t know it´s hard to explain.’  “ I had this terrific headache all of a sudden.”( Catcher Pg. 184)

(Holden´s descriptions of his psychic pain come always muted, as if he didn´t quite understand himself where they came from. Psychiatrists will say anxiety. Sages would say they come from the moldings of the soul. He just says he had a terrific headache. All of a sudden.)

Perhaps Mr. Antolini is the most ambivalent character in 20th century American Literature. Holden is shocked when the man with whom he seeks advice and - why not? - salvation) accidentaly wakes him up while tousling his hair, soothing his head. Holden runs away like acur from hell. But maybe Mr. Antolini recognizes the adorable likeness of the boy he also once was from the distance of the man he turned out to be. Maybe Mr. Antolini seeks to protect a boy coming of age who is impossible to protect. It is in the design of life that these people are impossible to protect. They shouldn´t be. They shouldn´t be guided at all.

Maybe Mr.Antolini agrees with Holden, maybe he doesn´t. Maybe he wishes he could feel himself like Holden, maybe he is happy he has grown up and doesn´t. Maybe he suffers still. Maybe he´s gay.  The most meaningful passage in the book, however is a quote by old Antolini quoting a psychoanalyst named William Stekel“ The mark of the immature man is that he wants do die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one”.  

Oriental sages lived long lives in silent repudiation. Forget Oriental sages. Billions of people lived, anonymously, until the day they died without raising a stink about themselves while following a way to peace of mind, to generosity, to the humble sacrificing of losing face in public but never to themselves.

Throughout this article you have intermingled Jerome David Salinger with Holden Caulfield as if author and character were the same person, throughout this article you have committed that which is the ultimate sin and the fatal blow of the critic. Age will do that. While, the truth of the matter is that, at best -risking a guess – Holden can be viewed as someone with a choice to make, a definition, he is at that crux of the moment where he can go along  – which many critics and psychoanalysts call “growing up”, or he can grow up maintaining his true self, his innate abilities to discern between the real and the false now evolved into a conscious knowledge of having irrevocably made his choice and lived with it.The wise man is the one who has an inner child brightening his eyes. Billions of people have died with that knowledge firmly grasped in hand. From J.D Salinger, who died at ninety, to a teen growing up in New York. The immature man is the one who sacrifices himself nobly and publicly for a cause. Kills himself. It took Him three days in his assisted suicide. Jesus never lasted it out in the ring.

It is important to note that you don´t fight for innocence, you fight for yourself. Holden liked whorehouse music. The Holdens of today can tell the truth from MTV darlings. There is a salaciousness to truth, a wicked malice. Being truthful is not “  I cannot tell a lie” speeches common to George Washington and the politician subspecies.  Their place is up in the screen.  Living life like a puppet masquerade.

“ The goddamn movies. They can ruin you” – Holden Caulfield

Perhaps the timely aspect of the Catcher In the Rye, that which traps itself in a certain period of time, is this rolling and tumbling with the movies. The tear and wear to keep your identity with so many facsimiles of personalities being applauded and lauded. Badly constructed characters as models for the living.   It is this constant doubt about what is truly yourself and what you have added on from so many movies that is the real failure of today, as it was in 1951, when the Catcher In The Rye was published.

(At least, in 1951,  even city kids like J.D played stickball in the streets while today´s monetary interests reach into your house and trap your kids at home in front of a computer.)

(The pervasive discrepancy of a life which included a childhood and one which doesn´t is the contrast between yourself and what you see on the screen. It doesn´t show up in exams and college applications, but it is easily seen in art.)

Holden knows how corrupted he is by the movies he has seen. He has enough wisdom to know how they stray him from how he feels, how they fabricate feelings and sensations he has not picked up in direct experience from the streets. As every non-conformist he knows how much of his core has been dictated and formed by unworthy forces. But, nevertheless, he cannot help but have fun with them. In the most emotionally-laden moments of the book, in the moments when he is feeling physical pain, he resorts to the movies. His imagination is filled with scenes once concocted and purported for a profit. The secondary reason for the movies may well be to entertain.But a distant second.And within boundaries.Of the moral kind and the marketing portfolio.

Holden´s imagination is corrupted and he must flail and hit against it to keep whole. Perhaps the tendency to interpret this as a yearning for innocence and purity is the trap. It is the exact opposite. There is nothing threatening about blearing sheep and dogs that lose their bark. You see Holden as a child clinging to childhood when you have already long forgotten what it is to be a man. When you have so far lost the constant battles of staving off what you gather from touching and feeling to what you perceive you are really seeing from second-hand experience. It is living in a time when the phrase “keeping it real” is repeated and accepted without a hint of irony.

 Contrary to the aforementioned Taoist tale told by Seymour Glass to a ten-month old Franny – the one where the sage can see a roan horse for the superlative animal he is without even bothering to look - is that this sage only sees what he wants to see. He can filter the world, the good from the rotted. Holden´s angst stems from his inability to filter, he is overcome, he is bereft with the abundance of fakery : “ I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I´d hate it. I wouldn’t´ even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player. I´d play in the goddamn closet.” (Catcher, pg. 84).

Please don´t you think he´s being bashful. It is self-preservation. Or even more, just good taste.

If conscience had good manners having to hide yourself from gratuitous applause would be a direct correlative to keeping your kings in the back row, to being able to differentiate good looks from Yearbook Stradlater good looks, hating people who laugh themselves silly at any dumb movie; From being depressed while being expelled, again, from school,and packing your stuff, picturing your poor old mother taking all her great motherly cares in picking out the ice skates which you never used and were the wrong size anyway, to calling for a hooker and seeing a little girl named Sunny.To suffer and suffer with every wrong note a so-called artist plays or performs,  to loving writing about your young dead brother´s catcher´s mitt in which he wrote poems just so he could read something while wasting time deep in left field.  And warmly smiling at the memory of that kid brother who let himself go so much he would laugh with all the joy of the world at a joke somebody happened to make at the dinner table.

Being able to digress, play and sing and dance to the point where you don´t even feel the girl´s back against your outstretched hand, kissing her everywhere, the neck, the throat, even the eyes more endearingly while avoiding her mouth, feeling at the hip and gut the whorehouse bawdiness of a song hurled with feeling, crying about where the ducks at a pond in Central Park would spend the winter because if there is no shelter or cover for them there might be no Master Plan for us, and for, ultimately, trying to make it all work true in the madman fantasy of wanting to catch children before they fall. For a living, as a means for survival.Holden said he reads a lot, yet is illiterate. He said this in the same way he kept confusing the definition of the word intelligence for intellectual.But, don´t we all. At forty, the best critics can hardly read while pumping out pieces on the meter and measures of style. At forty you have gone to the finest schools and have turned into an intellectual while becoming more and more stupid. At forty you are a phony and the transference or relinquishment of the promise you were born with that held you together has been sold in an affair hardly of notice to even yourself. It was done smoothly, while the wool was being pulled over you, your eyes conscientiously shut until the transaction was complete. Holden was hurt with affected jazz players. We are stuck with Justin Bieber.

At forty it is somebody else´s world. And concern. As a flash of hope we remember the old Taoist tale that opens Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters,  where the aging Chiu-fang Kao “sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not to be looked at.” Perhaps like Holden, you, like everybody else, had the same eye for treasure but too angered by the overladen torrent of mediocrity that got you so mad you wanted to flee, play deaf and dumb, anddie, ever so nobly.  You had to be able to filter. Holden loved too much. That is what angered him. He saw the lost potential.

At forty, you psychoanalyze the excessive anger at words such as : “  The next part I don´t remember so hot. All I know is I got up from the bed, like I was going down to the can or something, and then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his goddam throat open” ( Catcher, pg. 43. Italics mine. Obviously not Holden´s).

Agression occasioned by the suspicion that roommate may have partook in sexual intercourse with close childhood companion.

Boy also confuses old horny song about meeting somebody in the rye with catching a body in the rye. Transplants casual sexual encounters  intosalvation.A real nut job.

Or:“ I  slept in the garage the night he (Allie) died and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken (…) It was a very stupid thing to do, I´ll admit, but I hardly didn´t even know I was doing it, and you didn´t know Allie.” (Catcher,pg.39Italics mine)

Outlandish violence, unleashed fury.. Indications of (P)ost (T)raumatic (S)tress (D)Disorder which likens the rites of passage from childhood to adolescence.  The mention of the dead brother a  feeble attempt at overcompensating with insufficient explanation.

At forty everything is aberrant, agitated, and violent. When you were fourteen you understood, perfectly. Without even looking, or batting an eye.

The Catcher in The Rye is self-explanatory for those who really love to read. The universal and timeless amateur readers who read and run. You don´t need more analysis.I am sneaking the book inside your son´s room. I   hope to catch him at dawn reading under the lamplight.  If he´s like you at all…

Maybe he will, maybe he won´t.