#“Gayle you have other injury. how”

[milolovesbmc]

Gruesome Playground Injuries except House is Doug's doctor. That's it. That's the post

[sapphicnaturalrights]

here are deep dives for each of the prompts for the week! if you have any more questions, our asks are open! as always, feel free to combine as many prompts as you like, just try one, or pay them no attention at all

day 1: heaven & hell / bury your gays

one of the juiciest binaries in the supernatural lore, you could start off the week with getting to grips with the angel and demon sapphics, from ambriel to abaddon. you could focus on heaven and hell together or pick one. or maybe these aren't places, but instead states of mind?

there's a lot to be said about supernatural as The Bury Your Gays show, and now it's time to focus on the sapphics! as jess moore says, "i was dead the moment we said hello". this is a chance to focus on the women the show killed off and how viscerally and violently it did so. you could reclaim that violence, get revenge, or find new meanings in it. you could also explore women in horror, and maybe bury some gays in fun new ways...

day 2: pink / chappell roan

an iconic colour on many a pride flag - the sapphic, lesbian, bisexual, pan, trans flags to name a few - pink holds a lot of symbolism, and for a lot of women, some baggage too. from the barbie fans to not like other girls, what's the first thing to come to mind when you think of pink?

imagine it: what if we had chappell roan on 2021 spnblr. what would you have created then? maybe the most prolific sapphic icon of the present moment, get inspired by her songs, her lyrics, or her wonderfully camp aesthetic.

day 3: came back wrong / monster

you can bring back the gays you burried, but are they still the same? an iconic trope which occurs in the canon of the show, but has endless potential for other women characters too - what if amara brought back [insert dead sapphic here] instead of mary? what is so 'wrong' about how they've come back? women characters are often fridged - killed for men characters' plot development - so how do these resurrected women get their agency back?

what makes a monster a monster? feel free to play with the good/bad, right/wrong, human/monster dichotomy. what about that fraught, tense, intimate relationship between a hunter and a monster? what if you love that monster; what if the monster loves you...

day 4: butch & femme / disabled sapphics

two iconic terms for queer women, butch and femme play with gender identity and presentation. traditionally, butches '...prefer masculine signals, personal appearance, and styles', and femmes '...prefer behaviors and signals defined as feminine within the larger culture' (x). we've all heard of butch!jo, but how many other supernatural women can you experiment with?

for some more reading on the roles of butch and femme in sapphic communities, here is an article by queer studies scholar gayle rubin.

when you hear 'disabled supernatural sapphic' it is all too easy to think of eileen and pamela. but we invite you to get crazy with disabled headcanons too! you could explore how sapphic hunters cope with disabling injuries, how angels and demons learn sign language for each other, or the effects of learning disabilities and neurodivergency on your favourite spn women.

day 5: lavender / one episode wonder

another colour day! as a variation of purple it is another popular colour on pride flags, and as a flower lavender has all sorts of symbolism in sapphic communities. from 'lavender marriages' between lesbians and gay men, to the lesbian 'lavender menance' movement of the 1970s, we invite you to dive deeply into the varied meanings of lavender with this prompt.

one episode wonder is for the women who only graced our screens for a single episode! they are a prominent theme in supernatural and now we get to ask - how are they doing? are they dead or flourishing; how did their experience with the supernatural world affect their connection to the hunting life? did they get into it like charlie? are they still trying to make sense of what happened? undoubtedly they met other women because of it...

day 6: new & niche / gaslight gatekeep girlboss

we all know sapphicnatural is brilliant for rarepairs, and this prompt is a chance to celebrate that! we challenge you to come up with new pairings which have never been conceived before, and get funky with them. you could also find a 'niche' pairing which is not often talked about within sapphicnatural and contribute to growing their sapphicnatural following!

for some inspiration here, check out @mrcowboydeanwinchester's sapphicnatural statistics sheet. pulling from the fics in the sapphicnatural collection on ao3, there is info about how many fics are written about each ship. you could pull from a ship near the bottom of the list, or create your own!

gaslight gatekeep girlboss is the final prompt of the week and it's time for a fun one. here at sapphicnaturalrights we support sapphics' rights and sapphics' wrongs and think you should too!!

day 7: free day

this day is a free space! go wild! you can catch up with something you wanted to work with during the week but didn’t have time for, or just explore something else completely

that's it! make sure you tag all your creations with #sapphicnaturalrights so we can see and reblog your gorgeous work!

[goldenavenger02]

Pillow Fights and Long Nights

5 Times Kai was in the hospital for Lloyd, 1 time Lloyd should have been in the hospital, and 1 time Lloyd was in the hospital for Kai.

Dedicated to @rosiehunterwolf

•••

1.

'I should've been watching him.' Kai thought to himself as they all stood in the waiting room of Ninjago City hospital. Since there were multiple doctors in Ignacia, he and Nya had never needed to be here.

However, hearing Jay's horror stories about multiple failed inventions landing him in here for days at a time, or hearing about Cole's failed dancing resulting in at least two different injuries, not to mention the Triple Tiger Sashay incident, was definitely not calming his nerves.

He shouldn't have left Lloyd alone with the training equipment he didn't know how to use, when there had been multiple other people who could've been checking where they were while waiting on a Serpentine sighting.

When he had been forced out of the Bridge because of Jay screaming, saying that Lloyd was bleeding on the deck, Kai had only ever felt that sinking feeling in his stomach twice before.

When Nya was taken by Garmadon, and when Lloyd nearly sank into the lava inside of the Fire Temple.

Which led to where they were now. The hailed "protectors of Ninjago" leaning against chairs and the wall of the hospital, staring at the door that Sensei, Lord Garmadon and Lloyd had disappeared behind, and pretending that they were not there at all in order to keep their heart rates from getting out of control.

"-which is why I stopped trying to climb the piles of junk." Jay's voice rang back in his head, snapping him out of his thoughts and he could feel fire against his hand.

"Kai, calm down," Nya's voice perked up, gently setting her hand on his arm, and Kai allowed himself to take a deep breath, the fire extinguishing from his hand, "I know you're upset, but if you burn down the hospital, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. This is probably a place we don't need to get banned from."

"Yeah, I'm just worried. He's been in there for over an hour and we haven't heard anything," Kai explained, letting his eyes flutter closed with worry, "I shouldn't have left him alone."

"You didn't know he would get hurt," Cole explained, putting his hand on his other shoulder, "you can't put that on yourself."

"But I knew that he was still getting the hang of the training equipment, and I knew that you guys were standing by and waiting for the Serpentine sighting." Kai argued, but Zane just shook his head before speaking up.

"We've gotten hurt multiple times using that equipment, and it wasn't this bad. You were probably just expecting a bump or bruise at the most, even if it was more so an instinct than an actual thought."

"Yeah, no one blames you, dude." Jay added, putting his hand against Kai's back when finally, the door opened and Sensei came out.

"He's going to be alright," he assured before any of them could say a word, and Kai couldn't keep his sigh of relief in, "He has a concussion, and he has to stay overnight so he can be monitored, but he's going to be just fine."

"Can we see him?" Kai asked, and had to swallow when Sensei shook his head "no", because while he knew Garmadon wouldn't hurt Lloyd after they just got him back, he still felt uneasy with him being around Lloyd by himself.

"He's sleeping now, and his father is with him. We'll come back in a few hours, but we still have to stay vigilant and make sure that Pythor doesn't get the last Fangblade."

"Yes, Sensei." All six of them groaned and made their way back to the Bounty, and Kai had to force his feet to go and avoid disrespecting Sensei yet again, no matter how tempting it was.

2.

"Well, the good news is that Cole's going to throw out expired spices now." Kai joked, sitting on the edge of Lloyd's hospital bed, phone in hand as he updated Nya on Lloyd's condition.

Due to a flu going around, only one person was allowed to visit at a time, and Sensei had decided that Kai should stay with him while he went to stock up on healing teas for this exact scenario in the future.

"Not funny, dude," Lloyd groaned, curling up on his side, "my stomach still feels like it's going to explode."

"I think it already did." Kai chuckled, immediately regretting it when he saw the look of pure misery on Lloyd's face, which had him shoving his phone in his pocket before looking right at him, "sorry, I'll stop. Can I get you another ginger ale?"

"I'm just going to throw it up," Lloyd sighed, rubbing a hand over his face before turning on the TV.

Unfortunately, they were immediately greeted by Gayle Gossip talking about how Garmadon had seemingly gone missing, which Kai reached over and turned off, seeing Lloyd put his head in his hands, "on second thought, I'd rather throw up."

Kai couldn't help but smile sympathetically at him, gently squeezing his hand. "You've got us, Lloyd," that's when an idea popped into his head, "let me text Zane, see if we can figure out a way to smuggle some of his chicken noodle soup in here."

"Don't let him use the expired spices," Lloyd groaned as Kai pulled out his phone again.

"It'd probably taste better than the food in here." Kai teased with a smile, receiving a glare from Lloyd; and in hindsight, the pillow he received to the face from Lloyd was most likely well deserved.

3.

"Just a sprained wrist, Kai," the doctor smiled softly as they wrapped bandages around the cut that covered his left arm, "you're very lucky."

Kai nodded, although he wasn't focused on the pain in his wrist, and more so on the fact that they maybe had two minutes of peace before Lloyd had passed out against him due to the absolute exhaustion from the final battle.

And while he knew that he had his uncle and parents, he couldn't stop the worry from clawing at his heart as the moment replayed in his head.

•••

"There's no way of knowing what's around the corner, but as long as there's something worth fighting for, there's always a need for a ninja. And we'll be ready." Kai insisted to Sensei, watching as his team approached him.

He couldn't keep the grin off his face as they looked to the brightness, one hand on Sensei's back and the other on Lloyd's shoulder. 'Little Lloyd Garmadon saved the day.'

However, just when they looked away from the sun, and the others started to spread out, that's when Kai noticed just how pale Lloyd was, even with a smile on his face. "Lloyd? You okay?" He asked softly, nudging his shoulder.

"My leg hurts…" Lloyd mumbled, his words slurring slightly, but before Kai could alert the others, Lloyd was already unconscious and slumped against his chest.

"Sensei!" He called out, gently maneuvering Lloyd so he was on his back, watching as the others ran back towards him, "Sensei, a little help!"

•••

Kai made his way to the waiting room with instructions to avoid using his left wrist, and kept back the disappointment when he didn't see Lloyd, but he couldn't hold back his relief to see Nya and immediately engulfed her in a hug which she returned just as tightly. "I'm so glad you're okay."

"I'm glad you're okay," she smiled before pulling away, glancing down at his arm before looking back at him, "well, mostly."

Kai couldn't ignore the bandage against her cheek, and when he looked back at his other teammates, it seemed as though Zane and his father were the only ones unscathed.

Cole was absolutely littered in bruises nearly everywhere that there was bare skin, both of Nya's eyes had bruises around them along with scratches that covered both of her arms, and he could tell that Jay's ribs were at least bruised by the way he was breathing, not to mention the stitches that were peeking out from the neckline of his gi.

"How's Lloyd?" Kai asked softly, unable to stop holding onto his sister, watching as her face switched from a smile to a soft frown. 'That was never good.'

"He's absolutely drained, not to mention his ankle was nearly shattered. The doctors think that it was the adrenaline that kept him from feeling it. They're not letting anyone who isn't family see him until after they do surgery on it."

"They don't have the right to call us anything other than his family." Kai scowled, pushing past Nya as his chest burned, determined to find Lloyd even if he burned the whole hospital down around them.

Luckily for the staff, Lloyd's room was easy to find and Kai immediately walked in, resulting in the turn of Sensei, Misako and Garmadon's heads.

"Kai, calm down." Sensei insisted firmly, holding a hand out towards Kai but he couldn't stop him from going to Lloyd, which forced him to swallow.

His skin was the palest he had ever seen, even compared to when he had gotten food poisoning a few months back, his ankle was wrapped up, but Kai could still see the bruises stretch up his leg, and his under eyes were dark, like he hadn't slept in weeks.

"Kai, it might be best for you to wait with the others." Sensei suggested softly, putting his hands on his shoulders, but he shook him off and grabbed Lloyd's hand instead.

"I made a promise to protect the green ninja, to fight beside him; with all due respect, Sensei, I can't do that in a waiting room. And if any of you try to make the argument that I'm not family, I'm going to fight you tooth and nail," Kai stopped for a moment to look at Lloyd's sunken face before turning back to his three parental figures, "Lloyd's my brother, just as much as Nya is my sister. I'm not leaving him."

To Kai's surprise, Garmadon was actually the one who approached him and set his hand on his shoulder before he spoke, "no one is going to kick you out, Kai. And if they try, they'll have to go through me."

Kai nodded, and despite the fact he was no longer evil, he was still a little shocked that he was agreeing with Garmadon.

But at the same time, as he held Lloyd's hand in his, he had never been happier to have him on his side.

4.

"I can't believe how awesome your powers are, Nya." Jay admired, resulting in a smile from Nya, which Kai watched from afar.

He knew that Nya viewed them as friends, but with the way Jay looked at her, he had a flicker of something telling him that they would get together again someday

"I can't believe that I'm still being put on the pediatric ward," Lloyd mumbled, throwing a crumpled up piece of paper at the trash can, "I'm one of Ninjago's protectors and I'm still being treated like a kid."

That brought Kai back to the present as all five of them had crammed themselves into Lloyd's hospital room after the events of what had happened in Stiix.

After all, nearly losing Lloyd to Morro was nerve wracking for all of them, and after the events of the battle against the preeminent, Lloyd had all but passed out on the way back to Ninjago City due to being sleep deprived and malnourished.

"In their defense, Lloyd, you are under the age of eighteen, which means unless there were special circumstances, you are required to be put with other minors." Zane supplied, which only received a sarcastic response from Lloyd.

"Thanks, Zane. Real helpful." And with that, he threw another piece of paper at the trash can.

Kai shot a glance towards Cole, silently telling him that he needed to talk to Lloyd alone and hoped that he got the newly turned ghost's attention, even though they were all still coming to terms with the change.

Luckily, Cole was still Cole, and got the message loud and clear before turning to the others; "Hey, let's go check out the cafeteria, see if we can find anything worth smuggling up here to Lloyd."

After Zane, Jay, Nya and Cole left, and Kai could no longer hear Jay's questions about if Cole even needed to eat anymore, he turned to Lloyd and sat next to him on the bed, taking in Lloyd's condition.

His under eyes were very dark, his skin was way too pale and Kai could see just how much muscle mass Lloyd had lost, and how he seemed like a shell of the lively kid who loved candy and pranking his brothers.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Kai asked softly, gently squeezing Lloyd's right shoulder since his hand had an IV in it that was currently pumping him full of fluids and electrolytes.

"My dad...is really gone," Lloyd stopped to wipe the tears that started running down with his left arm, even though more followed immediately after, "I-I don't know what to do anymore."

Kai didn't stop himself from pulling him into a hug, feeling the warm tears leak through his gi as Lloyd gripped onto him tighter. "I've got you, Lloyd," he felt the tears against his cheek while squeezing his brother tighter, "You've still got me."

5.

Kai couldn't keep his foot from tapping on the ground as he waited for Lloyd and Misako to get to the waiting room.

After Cole had become human once again, and Morro had disappeared, the majority of the group got to work on emptying out the Airjitzu temple, except for Kai, Misako and Lloyd.

When he saw the fact that Lloyd had a massive cut running from his left cheek to his jawline, and heard that Misako was taking Lloyd to the hospital despite his protests that "he'd have the coolest battle scar", Kai had offered to drive them to the hospital.

The only thing he knew about their Day of the Departed was from the hushed whispers that they had shared on the drive, which had the key words like "Pythor" and "my father", so he knew it was just as bad as what he and Nya had gone through with Chen, if not way worse.

The hospital was nearly empty, so his foot was tapping on the floor and he had his phone open to social media, trying to keep himself from losing his mind.

"Mom, I'm fine." He heard Lloyd insist as two sets of footsteps approached him, and he put his phone in his pocket, smiling when he saw the two of them, the younger of the two sporting a giant bandage against the left side of his face, which Lloyd seemed to take offense to as he snapped, "don't even start making jokes, Kai."

"Hey, hey, relax, Green Machine, I'm smiling cause you're okay," Kai insisted, wrapping his arm around Lloyd's shoulder as they made their way to the car before whispering, "if you need to talk to someone besides your mom, I'm here for you, okay?"

"I don't need to talk, but…" Lloyd trailed off, glancing at his mom before returning eye contact with Kai, "it'd be nice if I wasn't alone tonight."

"We'll figure it out, kid," Kai smiled, shuddering as they were met with the freezing air, feeling Lloyd get closer to him, "I swear."

5.5

"How could Lloyd be so...so stupid?!" Kai shouted, his hands going to his hair in anger, "he should've waited for us to come up with a plan!"

"You know that you did this once too, right Kai?" Cole piped up, and Kai couldn't respond with anything but a glare, because he was right.

Kai himself had fought Garmadon without a plan and even locked his team out of the room, but he thought that the golden weapons were being stolen, as for Lloyd…

Well, now that he thought about it, Lloyd had good reasoning as well; he wanted to bring his father, all of his father, back, and with how many nights he had fallen asleep in his arms, eyes full of grief, Kai couldn't even blame him.

He let out a frustrated sigh, the worry striking his heart like a loaded cannon that had just gotten new ammunition. 'I can't lose Lloyd, not now. Not after everything.'

Kai felt a cool, soft hand against his shoulder, and he didn't stop himself from clinging onto Zane while starting to chew on his lip, feeling his teeth start to make small indents against his skin.

"That's him!" PIXAL's voice rang in Kai's head as the Bounty slowed to a stop, Jay, Cole and Nya immediately rushing out, but Zane continued to hold onto Kai.

"Let me go!," Kai shouted, his vision going red as anger burned in his chest as he started to fight against Zane's hold, "I need to see Lloyd!"

"It would be unwise for you to see Lloyd until he's back on the Bounty, as we are trying to get out of here as soon as possible," Zane explained, the tight hold still feeling gentle against his shoulder, "they'll bring him aboard soon."

"Nya, how is he?" PIXAL asked over the comms, bringing Kai's attention to them as he focused in on his little sister's voice.

"We need the gurney, he's… He's in really bad shape," she explained, a sniffle cutting her off before she continued, "Kai, Zane, be ready to take him to control; it's still set up from where we fixed Zane."

"We're on it." Kai insisted, his heart beating so loud that he could hear it as he and Zane sprinted outside as the gurney was lifted on deck while the others climbed the ropes; Kai couldn't keep his gasp in when Lloyd's face hit the light.

His nose was definitely broken, both of his eyes were black, and the rest of his face was covered in scratches and bruises; he didn't even want to know what was under Lloyd's gi.

As he and Zane lifted Lloyd, the hot skin against their hands, he let out a groan that made Kai wince. 'Lloyd is the level headed one, he doesn't do this. He doesn't run off into danger.'

But as the two of them laid Lloyd down, Kai swallowed harshly, because Lloyd had in fact run into danger before...for his family.

As the others ran into the room, minus Nya who was calling Misako, and started to patch up Lloyd's injuries as best as they could, Kai couldn't help from speaking up. "He needs to be in the hospital. He's way too hot, and way too injured."

"Where would we even go? Harumi and the Sons of Garmadon are patrolling the city like crazy, we'll be lucky to even make it in, let alone get him inside of the hospital." Cole explained, gently wiping the sand off of Lloyd's face.

Kai relented; he knew Cole was right, there was no way to get him professional medical treatment, and he just had to hope that Misako had some idea of where to take him, cause he also knew that there was no way that Lloyd was going to live if they only used their limited medical knowledge and supplies.

Lloyd's wheeze was what brought Kai out of his thoughts and he instantly wrapped both of his hands around his left one before whispering in Lloyd's ear.

"It's going to be okay, we're going to save you. Just focusing on staying alive."

6.

He had pushed himself too far.

As Kai sat in his room in the burn unit, looking at his fully bandaged arms and wrists, he knew that. He also knew that he was extremely grateful for the pain medication that kept him from feeling both the burns and the frost bite.

"So this is what the normal ward looks like." Lloyd remarked as he got up from the chair and sat on the end of Kai's bed with a smile.

"Yeah, not as many fun decorations, squirt," Kai joked before going serious, "I don't wanna see you in here unless you're visiting someone else, you got that?"

"Unfortunately for me, being the "prophesied green ninja" doesn't give me that luxury," Lloyd lamented before glaring at Kai, "and don't call me squirt, I'm finally gaining up on you."

"You could be six four and I'd still call you squirt, it's my job as an older brother, ask Nya. As for staying out of the hospital, you're supposed to humor me, chosen one," Kai snorted, receiving a pillow to the face, "hey, I can't retaliate!"

"I'd prefer being a kid over being the chosen one and you know it." Lloyd explained, glaring daggers at Kai, to which he raised his hands in surrender before asking.

"Alright, I'll stop. Where are the others? They usually don't let you walk around unsupervised."

"PIXAL and Zane are on a date, Nya insisted that they hang out together after we got back from the Never Realm; Jay and Nya are working on some upgrades to the Bounty, and Cole and my uncle went shopping, something about chicken feed," Lloyd explained before smiling at Kai, "besides, I'm not unsupervised, I'm hanging out with you."

Kai couldn't keep the smile from spreading across his face as he managed to sit up and ruffle up Lloyd's hair, even though it was immediately followed by a rush of searing hot pain from the movement.

"Alright, hot head," Lloyd laughed, gently pushing Kai back against the pillows, "leave my hair alone and get some rest; for once, let me take care of you."

"Pretty sure that's illegal." Kai retorted, immediately being smacked with another pillow, although not as hard as the first one, "can you stop doing that?"

'You better think of a creative threat against him.' He thought to himself.

"What're you going to do about it?" Lloyd challenged, picking up a third pillow, which led Kai to smirk before putting on his best pouting face.

"I'm going to tell Nya that you were being really mean to me when I'm injured and weak, and have her deal with you accordingly."

Whatever punishment Lloyd had thought of Nya giving him was enough for him to drop the pillow immediately with a look of terror on his face, and Kai couldn't even blame him; Nya was never a force to be reckoned with, whether you were an enemy or family.

The room went silent for a few minutes after that, until Lloyd sniffled, which made Kai's ears perk up as he sat up again, wrapping his upper arm around Lloyd's shoulder so his wrist and hand wasn't touching anything, "hey, hey, what's wrong? If it's about throwing pillows, I-"

"No, not that…," Lloyd's voice shook before he turned slightly and hugged Kai around the stomach tightly, nearly knocking the wind out of him, "I can't lose anyone else. Not anymore. I almost lost you and Zane, and I… Not again."

Kai pulled Lloyd towards him closer so he could cry against his shoulder, despite the fact that it sent the same searing pain through his body again, "I've got you, Lloyd. You're going to have a really tough time getting rid of me, you know that."

After a few moments, Lloyd emerged from his shoulder, now glaring at him again, and Kai knew exactly why this time; might not be best to joke about loss to the kid who had been abandoned by his mom and lost his dad twice now.

"Yeah, throw the pillow at my head, I deserve that this time."

Kai didn't expect the hit to be so hard that his head almost spun all the way around, but seeing the smirk on Lloyd's face made all the neck and jaw pain worth it.

[they-callme-ami]

He Noticed.

Word Count: 1,083

Tags/Warnings: slight angst, implications of PTSD and Depression, MC does not come back to life but the ending is sweet still.

Author's Note: Hiiiiii Nikki! I know this isn't the romantic kinda fanfic one would expect for Valetine's day, but I think that Sean deserves some relaxation and self care, and some familial love. Don't worry, I'll write you a fic where he [REDACTED] your MC and they [REDACTED] [REDACTED] until the sun rises. And I still got some art for ya after this! So without further ado, (and a hella long time waiting...) here ya go @what-do-you-mean-theyre-evil

The past five years was a blur for everyone, really. For Sean though, it seemed to everyine on the outside that he was completley fine. Well....everyone accept those faithful friends on La Huerta that now knew Sean Gayle like the back of their hands.

Sean had gotten drafted for the NFL and they even got him a new, modern condo and a house for his Mama and brother. But....he spent nearly all his time in his bedroom, or the building gym. No one saw him outside of a game. He was like a machine.....his friends noticed.

His apartment was modern, yes, but there were many things that needed maintaining and so much tech he never used....the walls were blank and baren.....his friends noticed.

His refrigerator had the bare essentials and food that would fuel him, but most was prepared by his nutritionist. It looked sad, and he hardly ate for the sake of eating anymore......his friends noticed.

His workout routine was maxxed out from every angle, and he would work and work at the gym for hours on end without stopping, pushing his body to its limits....his friends noticed.

La Huerta was....was an experience. It was hot, dangerous, scary, and overall NOT what Sean or the others signed up for when they decided they deserved a little island adventure. But it also led Sean to the love of his life, (MC), and led to him finally feeling a sense of freedom he never knew. They became friends, lovers, and even got married there. And it was scary when he lost her....one of the scariest things in his life when she sacrificed her being to get them off the island.

Those five years broke Sean Gayle.

It was worse than any broken bone he had gotten from a game. Worse than a strained muscle he had from practice. It broke him worse than a physical injury--he was mentally broken. Barely holding on, even when everything else was going for him. He made it to the NFL, he became a pro QB, his mother and brother were in an amazing new home....but without (MC) it was empty.

He had cut off communication from his friends for so long. Despite how close the group had gotten, he couldn't bare to have them see him in such a husk. He cried himself to sleep nearly every night....for an entire year. He would tell everyone it was just trauma from being gone 6 months, from being away and cut off from the world--which, wasn't entirely wrong. But each night....he saw (MC)'s

Her soft, dark brown skin that would glisten in the tropical sun, and enraptured his eyes with each glance he took at her. Those plump, soft lips, always formed in a smile and a determined look. Her curls and kinks that would always stick to her face from the heat of the island, bounce right back when they went swimming, and she made them look effortlessly perfect with only a months worth of hair product. What kept his attention the most though wasn't her face, her hair, or her body....it was her hands.

She used them to fight. She used them to climb. She used them to point the way. She used them to comfort, to care, to hold them all together. Her hands would feel soft on his face as they kissed....soft on his back as she'd hug him, or rub away the stress he carried on bimself. He longed to just hold them again...to hold her again. To hold his wife.

When his eyes open...she wasn't there. He couldn't reach for her. And that was always the worse part. He never forgot a single detail on a woman that never existed. It drove him insane...he had no idea what to do.

But slowly.....slowly...he began to notice. He began to notice things got better. HE slowly, got better. Craig would show him his newest projects and they'd play video games together, and Zhara would fix things around the house he had ignored....but he noticed.

Alistair and Grace would come over, and he got to meet his godson for the first time. They played together the entire time while Grace and Alistair would decorate his home with her newest pieces to brighten his place up....and he noticed.

Raj would come over and had bags and bags of groceries. He organized Seans fridge and cabinets, put on behind the scenes clips of his show and bloopers for them to laugh at, and the two cooked up enough meals to last Sean the whole week. Raj had made adjustments and substitutions to his recipes for his football diet, and made sure he would actually sit down to eat......he noticed.

Estella and Jake worked out with him for a while, whooping him into shape combat style. They laughed, did competitions and made bets, and played games. It was the most fun he had exercising since he was just a kid.....he noticed.

Michelle, Quinn, and Diego invited him on a 'Self-Care' day. Michelle educated him about his skin-care routine, and they did some yoga and Tai-Chi that he would now include in his before and after stretches for workouts or a game. Diego brought over some movies and comics for Sean and his brother, Miles Morales's Spiderman, Luke Cage on Netflix, Teen Titans--and they would all have a contest to draw the best 'Superhero OC'. Diego would hold back, letting Sean's brother win each time. It was the most they hung out since he got to college! Quinn would bring them all together and had the trio taste-test her latest cupcakes and baked delights, and go over her notes for her next speech. It was relaxing and he never stopped similing.....he noticed that too.

This became a routine for the gang, and it was a strict one. They all planned and make sure at least one of them would spend time with Sean. They all cared about him, and they wanted to lift him up just like he and MC had on the island. And....on the day of the Fifth Anniversary of MC's sacrifice...when they were all together....he felt the best he had in years. He felt good. He felt happy. He gazed amongst his friends--his newfound family. As they raise their glasses to toast, he looked up at the stars....and saw a familiar shooting stat soar across the sky in a blaze of glory.....he noticed. And he knew it was her. Noticing how far he's come.

[fanfalc-616]

Time For Amnesia

Chapter Nine: Ice, Electricity, And Painful Injuries

(Previous Chapter Here)

Uhhh ok so I was working on the new chapter and I realized I never even posted chapter nine (on tumblr anyway it’s on ao3-). But uh yeah here it is,,, I’ll post ten (which I finally completed!!) tomorrow.

Also yes this is my new format for all fanfics hsjshdh

Eventually, Nya comes in, looking concerned.

“It’s getting late.” She notes, choosing not to comment on however she feels about how he’s been acting.

Kai nods. “Where am I sleeping?” A sudden thought strikes him. “I- I don’t sleep with… them, do I?”

Nya seems uncomfortable. “We agreed that that would be a bad idea, and before you got together, you used to stay in a different room- the room you woke up in. And-“

“Alright, I’ll just go there and go to bed.” Kai gets up from his spot on the floor.

After pausing for a moment, Nya nods. “Do you need me to show you where it is, or-“

He shakes his head. “I remember.” Without waiting for a response, he heads off to the room, silently grateful for the fact that he’s not going to have to spend the night with the others.

He’s only just sat down when there’s a knock.

Groaning, he gets up and walks over to the entryway, opening the door.

Cole stands there with a small, slight forced smile, holding a set of striped red pajamas. “These are for you.”

Eyeing him warily, Kai takes them. “Uh, th- thanks.” He stutters out, trying to ignore the way his mind flashes back to how he watched him make out with Zane.

“Are you okay? Your face is really red.”

Shit.

“Yeah I’m fine everything’s fine you should go now bye.” Kai blurts out in a rush. As soon as the words have left his mouth, he slams the door shut in his face.

Well, that solved absolutely nothing.

He has enough emotions going on- these people are crazy, and he doesn’t want to have to get to know them or have anything to do with them!

So why is his heart racing? Why does he feel like this?! He doesn’t want to like these assholes, he wants to be able to threaten to skewer them and actually mean it!

With a quiet grumble, he starts getting changed- but he almost drops the pajama shirt when he looks down at his torso.

Since when did he have a six-pack?! It’s not defined like a bodybuilder’s or anything, but he’s definitely got some strong muscles there.

Shaking his head, he goes back to putting on his pajamas. He must seriously work out a lot.

Well, if he’s a ninja savior of Ninjago, then he’s probably going to have to be in good shape.

Sighing, he turns off the light and gets on the bed. Curling up under the covers, he closes his eyes and tries to drift off.

If he’s lucky, maybe he’ll wake up back at home.

—————————

Kai wakes up in the red bed he went to sleep in.

Drat.

With a sigh, he gets up from the bed, and just as he does, the door opens.

Jay stands there, a nervous smile on his face. “I, uh… I guess your internal clock still works. But, uh, it’s breakfast time, so-“

With a groan, Kai walks over to him. “Alright, let’s go eat.” He grumbles.

He pretends not to notice how Jay tries to hold his hand, and after a moment, he stops trying to take it, and Kai ignores how that sparks guilt inside of him. It’s fine, he doesn’t care. He shouldn’t feel bad, he doesn’t even know him!

They’ve only just reached the dining room when an alarm starts blaring. Kai immediately feels himself switch into a fight-or-flight mode, trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Then Nya’s voice comes on over the comms. “Everyone to the bridge! Now!”

Jay tenses up. “C’mon!” Without waiting for a response, he takes off running, leaving Kai to chase him down the halls.

When they arrive at the bridge, everyone else is already there.

Zane immediately starts talking. “There appears to be a genetically engineered snake being used to terrorize New Ninjago City. From what we can tell, it was created by-“

“Cut to the chase!” Nya interrupts.

Lloyd shakes his head. “No, we have comms, we can get an explanation on the way. Let’s go!”

There’s hardly a pause before they all race out of the room- but Lloyd peeks back around the corner to look at him. “You- you just wait here, okay?”

Kai doesn’t get a chance to respond before the blond runs off, leaving him alone.

What the hell just happened?

Still trying to process things, he decides to go into the living room and see if he can watch what’s going on in the news. Whatever’s going on, it seems like a big deal.

So he walks in and turns on the TV, waiting for an explanation to be given.

He watches as a reporter- Gayle Gossip, she said her name was- shows some weird ice snake thing attacking the city. Listening carefully, he can just make out some words that the ninja are saying as they try to stop it.

“- weakness to heat-“

“-Zane, fall back-“

“MOVE!”

Kai stares in horror as he watches Nya get thrown from her vehicle and tossed into a building.

Something in him screams at him to move, and he listens to it, getting up from the couch and scrambling off to wherever the hell his instinct is taking him.

He finds himself in some kind of little launchpad like area for vehicles, and finds himself gravitating towards a red motorcycle.

Oh, what is he doing? He’s not seriously going to try and fight the ice snake, is he?

Yeah. Yeah, he is. Because no one messes with his little sister.

Kai starts up the bike and continues to trust his instincts, just doing whatever feels right.

Which is how he ends up screaming his head off while he falls from the sky on the motorcycle.

The bike falls out from under him, and Kai finds himself flailing about, still screaming.

Until he feels himself get grabbed, and a loud grunt escapes him as he scrambles for purchase on whatever he just fell onto.

He blinks a few times as he realizes that he’s on a- on a dragon what the hell-

Clinging to the rider of the dragon, he feels his eyes widen as he recognizes them.

“Zane?”

The robot looks back at him. “Kai?” He seems shocked. “You were supposed to wait on the ship!”

Before the brunet gets the chance to respond, the tail of the ice snake is suddenly striking towards them, and Zane has the dragon dip, trying to avoid it.

But it’s a rocky move, and they still get hit, the dragon literally disappearing under them.

Kai hits the ground with a loud thudding noise, but luckily enough, he doesn’t seem to be too badly hurt.

He gets to his feet, and Zane quickly runs up to him, getting in close.

Kai’s about to brush him off, but he’s caught off guard by his eyes. His bright blue eyes that glow, and the deep concern behind them as they stare into his own.

“You’re not hurt, are you?” His voice is gentle, full of concern and softness.

Kai swallows, but doesn’t answer, still captivated by the glowing blue irises that seem to stare through to his soul.

“Kai? Please, are you okay?”

He nods shakily, unsure why he’s so affected by something as minor as eye contact.

“I’m going to scan you.” Zane decides, setting a hand on his shoulder. His eyes flicker a little as he looks Kai up and down, a thin band of light emitting from them and falling over Kai’s figure.

And that’s when he snaps out of it.

Stepping away, he shoves Zane back, putting his arms out in front of him in defense. “Woah there, I did not agree to be scanned! So keep that little light show to yourself!”

The robot blinks a few times as he steps back, holding his hands up in a placating gesture. “My apologies, I was only trying to-“

The snake’s tail slams into a building, sending wreckage flying everywhere. With a mumbled complaint that Kai can’t quite make out, Zane pulls him aside. “Stay out of trouble. I’ll return when the fight is over.”

Without waiting for a response, he runs off, leaving Kai alone.

He stands there for a few moments, looking around the torn up alley and listening to the nearby noises of combat. Something inside him is itching to go follow, and after a moment of consideration, he runs off towards the battle.

As soon as he gets close, he’s forced to dodge and duck behind some debris to avoid getting frozen by an icy blast. So it’s an ice creature, then?

… fire melts ice, right? Maybe if Kai can get close, he-

“Kai?! What are you doing here?!” Jay shouts, grabbing his arm and pulling him out of the way of an attack.

“I’m helping!” Kai defends himself as the ginger uses a blast of lightning to shatter a large chunk of ice that had been flying towards them.

“No! No, you are not! I’m going to have to protect you instead of actually concentrating on the fight! Why didn’t you stay on the ship?!” Jay glares, grabbing Kai by the wrist and pulling him along.

“So I could come help!” The two of them narrowly miss getting impaled by flying concrete as they duck behind a still-intact building.

Jay looks downright furious- an expression that almost looks cute on his baby-ish face. “We have just covered that you are not helping! Not. Helping. Not helping at all!”

Kai feels his face flush some at the scrunched up nose and the way his cheeks puff out. Still, he manages to defend himself. “It’s ice and I have fire powers!”

Grabbing him again, Jay drags him around as they avoid getting impaled by debris created by the snake. “If this snake doesn’t kill you, I will! And if it does, I’ll resurrect you and kill you again!”

Kai arches an eyebrow at the statement. “Aren’t you supposed to be in love with me?” He complains.

Jay gives him a look. “It’s because I love you that I threaten to kill you. Because apparently threatening is your love language.”

“Huh?”

“You do it all the ti- LOOK OUT!” Jay tackles him, sending a blast of lightning at the the tail of the snake that’s crashing down-

Everything goes bright white, and pain wracks his body, making him cry out. They manage to avoid getting crushed, but only just, and the two of them end up sprawled on the ground.

Kai feels himself twitch some, all of his hair on end. Groaning, he glances over at Jay, who’s getting to his feet.

The ginger’s eyes widen as he looks at Kai. “Shit, I- are you okay?! I didn’t mean to shock you!”

He got shocked? Hmm. That would explain the excruciating pain.

With a groan, he forces himself to sit up. “ ‘m doin’ g-great.” He gets out, ignoring his blurry vision as he struggles to his feet.

“Kai-“

Jay is cut off when the snake is suddenly whipping back through, hitting the ginger clear across the alley- and the only reason he stopped there is because of a wall.

Kai winces as he watches Jay get slammed into the concrete. That can’t feel good.

Then again, he’s not exactly in peak condition either.

He struggles to get up a few times before resolving to just lay there. Jay will come get him in a minute, and even though it’s concrete, the ground feels awfully comfortable…

Even as his vision grows more and more blurred, he manages to make out several sets of combat boots, and then someone is picking him up, dragging him away.

Kai lets them, closing his eyes. It’s probably just Cole… yeah, Cole wears black, and is definitely strong enough to carry him around. That would make sense.

The world starts to fade, and Kai doesn’t bother trying to hold onto it.

Everything hurts, and it would be so much easier to ignore it and drift away…

And that’s exactly what he does.

[damfinofanfiction]

Chapter 14: Hollywood or Bust...er.

Here’s the full and a update to the latest chapter! Just to let you know, having outlined the story for a while, things will get romantic in chapter 16 and will get naughty in chapter 20!!! I don't know if Chapter 14′s good enough but I did my best. Enjoy!

Another note is at the end of the chapter.

As stated in the article of a Local Paper; Five people hurt in a car crash. Two women and three men were involved in a low-rate car crash when they were driving from the Biltmore Hotel for the party in honor of Mack Sennett. There were no fatalities but there were some minor bruises and concussions. Ralph F. Staub, the driver of a T- Ford who suffered a broken nose, blamed the incident on bit player and former Sennett Bathing Beauty Gayle Anders for distracted driving. As a result of the impact, Miss Anders was reported to have injured her arm. While the others had slightly recovered and have been sent home, Anders will be on the mend for weeks following a release from the Good Samaritan Hospital this morning. Her recent project is Harold Lloyd’s upcoming film, The Freshman, due to be out this September. She remains hopeful to be back in the movies after her arm is fully recovered.

Having read this in his office, Buster shook his head in pity, with a notion that she might be unable to work with him. “Oh, Gail.”

**************************

Just as the evening began, Sally ran out of the Bungalow with the burning Trout on the casserole dish. Gail aired out the smoke by opening the windows. As a last resort, she threw the fish from the dish on the ground and used the gravel dug from the area to extinguish the small flames.

“Damn it,” Sally said examining the crisp charred remains after putting it out. She turned to her friend, “Sorry Bae, guess I underestimated the baking time.”

Gail added disappointedly, "And it was a nice fish."

Since Gail came home from the hospital, it wasn’t easy for her to live with a broken humerus. Sally offered to help on the days it doesn’t intervene with her job. Not only the blonde did it out of loyalty but also as a amend to what happened last month.

Upon going inside, Sally threw away the ruined casserole dish and comforted Gail who hunched in despair, “Buck up, We’ll still have dinner. If only Auntie isn’t out playing bridge and Bertha didn’t take a day off.” Bertha, that she referred to was her and Lenore’s Maid.

When the Friends decided on take-out, Sally left to pick up the food while Gail stayed behind because she didn't feel comfortable going out in her state. As the table was already set in advance, the dark-haired woman was left to retreat to her couch and wrapped herself in a blanket because she felt a breeze from the open window.

Gail wasn't feeling herself after the accident in the past week. It was like grief. She barely slept the night, has a small appetite, doesn't smile much, and doesn't say much. Although she has endured a series of unfortunate events for the last few months, breaking her arm was difficult to cope with. Gail tried to sob and cry to let it out of her system, but couldn't do it. That didn't stop her from trying again while she was alone.

Her attempts to release her emotions were interrupted when she noticed a shadow passing by from the front window, "Sal?" she called.

A male baritone voice replied, “Close enough.”

She sat up straight when he swayed to the window, revealing his familiar face, “Buster!”

He chuckled while resting his arms on the windowsill, “Good seeing you too. You seem well.”

Gail would ask him how did he found her site but remembered she had sent him an updated resume with a change of address recently. She nervously said, "I didn't expect you to show up."

He sighed, “I know, I should have told you I was coming, but work was finished early and I thought you could go for a surprise.” Gail found it funny that the last time she had seen him was when he rode with her so she could get home safely and now he was at her window unannounced. He asked, “So are you going to let me in or should I climb through the window?”

“Oh!” She hastily sat up and opened the door and let Keaton in to avoid being mistaken for a break-in if he had entered through the window. After having received flowers and get-well cards from friends and family, she was grateful for a visitor. When she opened the door, he was wearing a hazel suit with a white buttoned shirt underneath and a grey flat cap. He coughed in response to the smoke when he was in a kitchen area.

“Sorry, Sally burnt our dinner.” She explained while closing the door and the window curtains, “She had doused the fire out on the yard.”

“That explains the black mark out on the yard,” he pulled out a handkerchief from his shirt pocket to cover his mouth.

Gail retreated to her bedroom where she traded the blanket for her light blue buttoned sweater while Buster looked around. She called to him, “I guess you must have read about the accident in the papers?”

He responded, “Yes, though they didn’t get your name right.”

Gail intended to write a note to Buster about what happened to her but didn’t have any idea what to say as evidence of the trash bin full of the crumpled-up papers by her bed. “Well, the reporter was in a rush and didn’t have time to correct my name anyhow.”

Then Gail checked herself in the mirror. Her sleeveless day dress was alright. The curls on her locks were uneven, but she didn't mind because he had seen her unkempt hair on the train. Her makeup wasn’t too bad either, grateful that Sally had helped her earlier that day, otherwise, she couldn't do it with one arm. She only reapplied her lipstick before returning to the comedian.

“So this must be your new home,” Buster said as he sat on the armchair while she returned to her couch.

“I came across it in a newspaper. I found the name of the street familiar because I used to go around looking for a part in the pictures.”

“Had the others moved here as well?” he asked.

“No, just me. Sally’s only a helper. She tried her best and I’m grateful for that." Gail turned to the door, “Now I'm worried how she'll react to you once she gets back.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

She leaned towards him, “No no no, unless you have to go home.”

“No, I could stay for a bit at least before your other friend arrives.” it was then Gail noticed that her sling and cast were exposed from her opened sweater and tugged it back in due to her insecurity. From the look on Buster's face, it was obvious he had seen it before, no doubt from peeping at her while she was in the other room, “How long until your arm gets better?”

She was nervous to tell him but does so anyway, “If healed properly, the cast will be removed in a month. I may still wear a sling in addition to physical therapy."

“I’m awfully sorry that happened to you. At least it isn't the ankle.”

“Oh yeah, it happened to you.” Gail had almost forgotten of his injury some years ago before he brought it up.

“How could I forget?” He rested his foot to his knee to massage that very ankle, “There’s a scene from The Electric House where I ran on the moving staircase. That one step caught my slap shoe and before the stagehands could turn off the switch, my foot was dragged to the top, and the next thing I knew, my ankle was fractured.”

“That’s sounded awful,” Her voice was sympathetic.

“Yes, it was. I thought I was going to lose my foot, but thankfully I haven’t. Had to be out of commission for several weeks. They put me on bed rest, at least you can still move around. So anyway, long after my ankle is healed, we threw out the footage and started over.”

“When do you start filming?” What Gail knew from what he wrote to her weeks ago was that the production of Battling Butler was delayed until the end of the year and will be making an original story instead. Also, he’ll be working with a cow to which she thought was too ridiculous, if it wasn't a western.

He explained, “When we find a location for shooting and get everything ready, hopefully in June.”

Gail felt relieved, “Then, do I have a chance to be your co-star?”

He uncrossed his legs, “Well, About that.” Seeing his sullen look, Gail’s heart began to sink as it might be another case of the bad news.

It seemed he couldn’t find the words when he told her, “My boss Joe didn’t want me to hire you.” He sighed, “And he recommended me an actress from Dick Turpin, Kathleen Myers.” He assured her after she turned her face away from him, “It had nothing to do with your injury. It’s just that he preferred someone with experience as a leading lady.”

Gail felt sadness welling up in her throat and clenched her fist, “No, It’s definitely something to do with my arm!” She attempted to retreat to her bedroom, but being blinded by her tears caused her to collapse to her knees, and then she wept heavily. Her sobs made it impossible for her to hear Buster come up to her before he aided her to the dining table. She exclaimed, not making eye contact with the stone face, “I knew it, I knew it! I should’ve left home years ago, but I waited and waited for a chance to take me away like a chump I am!”

“You’re not a chump!”

“You don’t know that! I promised myself I would work with you, but I failed!” There were whimpers in her voice, “I couldn’t get cast in a cast!”

Keaton defended her, “It was only an accident.”

A teardrop ran across her cheek, “Which should I have prevented! This wouldn’t have happened if I was more careful.”

Her body shook as she cried again. Initially, Gail expected Buster to leave her to mourn, then she felt his hand rub on her back, then his arm wrapped around her, enabling her to huddle in for an embrace. With a scent of his cologne coming from between his shoulder and neck, her sobs became softer before they’re diminished. He patted her back a bit. She heard him say, “Gail, I wanted to work with you, I really have. Things aren’t always simple in Hollywood.”

She faced him again. He gave her his handkerchief when she began to rub her eyes. He brought her a glass of water from the dining table which he just filled up.

“Look at me”, he continued, “It took me three years in the film business before I started leading and directing comedies. How long you’ve been working on screen?”

She answered, “A year and a half.”

“That doesn’t seem so bad,” he placed his hand onto her cheek. “I’m sure things will turn out alright as soon as your arm heals. There’s still hope for us to work together once Schenck sees what you can do.”

With a sniff, she added, “And there’s still Battling Butler.”

“Yup that too.” he gave her a slight grin.

As she finished wiping her tears, Gail noticed the black smudges on his handkerchief “Have I messed up my makeup?” He responded with another nod. “Excuse me”, she got up to the countertop and brought out the bottle of olive oil, a remedy for running mascara.

He told her with the cloth in his hand,  “Allow me”

He added a dab of oil to his handkerchief and rubbed it onto her cheeks until they were clear.

“I might have unraveled your hair.” She pointed to the wavy part of his hair “Probably right there” she rose her right hand by his forehead, having her twirl the curl with her finger, “Perfect.” she said after stopping. Their eyes were fixated on each other. It was like that until they heard the key going in followed by the doorknob turning, the two then raced back to their respective seats.

Sally announced while opening the door and holding the big brown bag, “Hey Bae, took me longer to reach that take-out place, better to chow down while the food’s still hot.”

Gail was in her upright posture like nothing had happened, “Sal there’s a visitor.”

The blonde turned to Keaton who had just finished combing his hair, “Oh, shi-” She exclaimed, almost dropping the contents of the bag. Gail stood up to explain that the visit was a surprise to her as well and they were just talking in a professional matter. Buster also got up just to notify them he had to get home since it was almost six o'clock.

he turned to Gail, “One thing before I go, have you seen The Iron Mule?”

“No”

“My pal Roscoe actually directed it with a different name. It features someone I worked with back in the day and also watch out for that Indian.” he pointed to her, “You might find him familiar.”

she smiled, “Thank you for the visit.”

When he turned the doorknob and opened the door she just remembered something, "Wait!," She pulled out a notepad from the side table, wrote down her phone number, and tore it out to hand to Keaton. “No surprise visits next time. Okay?”

Buster nodded once, “Take care” he put on his hat and left her home as she waved.

Sally shrugged at her friend, “How the hell did he know where you live?”

She helped her unpack the take-out containers from the bag, “I’ll tell you over dinner and you owe me a dish.”

Gail was herself again, though embarrassed that she vented her emotions to her favorite comedian. What made her feel better wasn't the crying, but finding comfort in the object of her affection.

(sorry, I posted to my other account. I deleted it though.)

Note: I have to thank @trainrideswithbuster for giving me the idea that buster visits Gail while on the mend!

[absalomabsalom]

Coming and Going: Misrecognition and Identity in Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge”

Professor Richard A. Garner The Human Situation, April 15th, 2020

Outline

I. The Best Title in All of Literature

II. Misery Like a Coastal Shelf

III. The Injury of Intelligence, the Insult of an Education

A. Intelligence is a curse

B. A Martyr to the Desire of the Other; or, that St. Sebastian Painting One More Time

C. The Terror of Identity; or, Meeting Yourself Coming and Going

Richard Sexton,Oak Avenue, Wormsloe Plantation, 2009

I. The Best Title in All of Literature

 “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

 —William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

 In a second, I’m going to talk to you about the literary genre called the Southern Gothic. It’s the best. It’s weird and uncanny and disturbing, and it’s all ours. After that, I’m going to talk about the cursed intellectuals of O’Connor’s stories in general, and more specifically of our story for today, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1961). You might want to read the last one first, as it does the most close-reading, or the second one, which has lots of maps and stuff. But first, I want to tell you that “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is the best title in all of literature.

From the moment I read it on the syllabus as an undergraduate—circa the turn of the millennium— it took on a life of its own in my head. It’s one of those phrases we encounter in life that returns over and over again, coming to mind unbidden in situations that have nothing remotely to do with the themes of the story. Indeed, every time I go back and reread the story I am struck by how the title, like many of O’Connors, creates this tiny bit of cognitive dissonance, this strangeness that makes it at once both absolutely perfect and deeply unsettling: a stark line of poetry that stands over and above the story, its own little work of art.

And I say this knowing—as you may as well, if you read Giroux’s introduction—that the phrase comes from the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin: “Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge” (xv). Robert Giroux relates that the phrases appears in French, in an anthology he had sent O’Connor of the philosopher’s work. Yet, if anything, going back and reading Teilhard de Chardin and how he uses the phrase makes O’Connor’s usage of the phrase embettered, not worsened, by the repetition. Here’s the version of the passage most often quoted, which is not actually the philosopher’s but one of his students/anthologists. From Max H. Begouen’s Foreword to Building the Earth: “He gave each of them this watchword: ‘Remain true to yourselves, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge’” (13). Here’s one version in his own words, from the essay “Faith in Man,” expressing a major theme in the philosopher’s work: “Followed to their conclusion the two paths must certainly end by coming together: for in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge” (186). In other words, where Teilhard de Chardin is saying something about the nature of our common humanity converging in ever-greater complexity and perfection, O’Connor is injecting something insistent, something dark into this message of hope. In doing so, she is not trying to negate the utopian vision of the philosopher, but to transform it by way of adding in the full range of human experience. For O’Connor, thinking about convergence means thinking about life in a place where sectarianism is stuck on the Catholic/Protestant divide so strongly that to be a Catholic is so alien that one might as well be Jewish (and anything further afield would be meaningless to the young Church of God boys); where buses had only been desegregated in Browder v. Gayle five years before she wrote the story; and where the number of women receiving PhDs in Philosophy in the 1950s—much less in the South—was vanishingly small. In other words, O’Connor injects a certain Southern peculiarity combined with a bit of Gothic uncanniness into this convergence. Faith, theological or not, is easy when it does not have a world to contend with, and if it is easy, it is no faith at all.

But before we talk about the Southern Gothic, I want to return to the title, because I love it so much. Ultimately, beyond any particular meaning it derives from and alongside the story itself, it’s the beauty of a phrase that lingers in one’s mind, insists on coming back again and again, that I want to discuss. I want to discuss it because it gets at the heart of something about literature. For instance, when I say it’s “the best,” on what criteria am I basing that judgement? Are those objective, or purely subjective? Am I repeating a mistake we see from so many of O’Connor’s characters, of assuming that their personal preference can stand in for everyone else’s (and that those who disagree must be wrong)? Short answer: no. I’m saying this for effect. I know it’s just me. But the longer answer is that the particularity of my judgment on this title does give us a clue to the universality of something about language. Our psyches are, ultimately, linguistic; all the sense-experience, emotions, and logic that we deploy emerges out of and is filtered through language. Language makes possible what we can know of our world, and some of the greatest tragedies of our lives are marked by our inability to find a language that fits our experience—of love, of friendship, of betrayal, of death—often because someone else is imposing their language on us, or because there is no language at all for it. Sometimes we have to invent it. I don’t know what part of my self, per se, needs the phrase everything that rises must converge, but some part does. Thank you, Flannery O’Connor.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 1955

II. Misery Like a Coastal Shelf

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

—Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

What is it about the South that lends itself to the gothic? Ever since Edgar Allen Poe’s American reinvention of that European genre—of ancient curses, crumbling castles, monsters and murderers, of innocent women in distress and dark and stormy nights—Southern literature has often veered of into the uncanny and horrific as it’s modus operandi. And the answer as to why? Well, it’s not all the decaying castles scattered across the countryside. The answer is obvious: it’s slavery. The deep secret, the obscure past, the meaningless descent into gratuitous violence, the uncanny return of repressed trauma and desire: slavery.

Let’s take a tour of some maps… First, what do you think this one is?

If you answered “a map of which parts of America started socially distancing when during the pandemic,” then you are a winner. Here’s the key I excised from the original New York Times article the map appeared in (Ganz et al).

You’d be forgiven for mistaking this for a map of a lot of different things, but let’s cut to the chase. Here’s the second map:

In case you’re having difficulty reading the title, let me help with this U.S. Coast Survey from 1861: “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States.”  But just in case the point is not clear yet, here’s map number three:

That, everyone, is a map of the United States as it looked during the late Cretaceous period, many millions of years ago (126-65 mya, to be geologically precise; see Krulwich). That inland sea left rich alluvial deposits that became the fertile crescent of land known as, first geologically and then politically, the Black Belt. Needless to say, the agricultural quality of the land correlates strongly with the intensity of slavery practiced in the American South.

In Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (a book we read often here in The Human Situation), the psychoanalyst uses the metaphor of the ruins of Rome to talk about the deep history of our own human minds. He wants us to understand how, even after they’ve been totally erased and are irretrievable, our earliest experiences shape who we are, just as the long-obliterated strata of Rome each successively dictated what was built after them. For me, when Larkin evoked misery deepening like a coastal shelf, Freud’s ruins of Rome and the cretaceous South sprang immediately to mind; I took it not as simile, but something that could be, often is, literally true.

This is what is meant in Faulkner’s famous epigraph about the past never being dead. Southern Gothic emerged as one of the most distinctive genres, blending mystery and murder and a deep sense of a looming violence in the world. Flannery O’Connor’s stories, as we have all seen, could easily be turned into horror movies, and William Faulkner’s work also includes many of the same themes. If we include Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy (e.g., the hauntings in Beloved or the demonic Judge of Blood Meridian), then the genre is easily the defining movement of twentieth century American literature.  And it is not only slavery, but the history of violence that is the warp and weft of the institution, that colors our Southern Gothic. The Civil War is still the deadliest war in American history, and it’s not even close. Indeed, scholars have argued, often convincingly, that the region has to this day not recovered from the economic, social, and political devastation caused by the military conflict alone, not to mention its aftershocks, the devastation like a modern war fought 75-100 years before its time.  “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

III. The Injury of Intelligence, the Insult of an Education

A. Intelligence Is a Curse

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, O’Connor’s stories are chock full of characters for whom their intelligence is a curse. Hulga almost causes her mother an existential crisis because the pleasure- reading she leaves lying around is Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?”; The Child is clearly the smartest one in the room; even The Misfit was marked off at a young age: “‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘some that can live their whole life out without asking about it an it’s other has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters’” (129). So, too, Julian.

Julian is a writer who does not write. Like Hulga, whose philosophy is solely for herself, Julian’s fantasy world is solely for himself. And he seems to know that he is not a writer—he never expects to make a life/career/money out of it—which forces us to ask: why does he identify as a writer? But before we answer that question, let’s get right to the stakes. The clue is in the title, and O’Connor doesn’t make us wait too long. Immediately after she tells her son that he should be proud that his ancestors owned hundreds of slaves, Julian’s mother gets down to commentary on civil rights: “They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence” (408, emphasis added). So, rise: yes; converge: not so much for Julian’s mother. It is no mistake that this story takes place on a bus, the public space Rosa Parks made famous and which the Supreme Court desegregated in its 1956 ruling in Browder v. Gayle, five years before this story was published; the bus, for O’Connor, is again not a metaphor for race relations, it is the thing itself. Thus, unlike for Hulga, Julian’s fate and choices are going to extend far beyond himself—to the status of racism in America, the history of slavery, and reparations therefore—although they will extend to himself, too. Perhaps O’Connor is saying that the repercussions of the choices of the two, philosopher and writer, have different stakes. Perhaps.

Which brings us back to all these emotionally fraught intellectuals here, decaying slowly, like fish out of water, in their Southern hometowns. This theme is important for O’Connor because it argues intelligence, reason itself even, can serve not as something that enlightens, but something that closes off, distances, and deceives. The dark of reason. Like The Child in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” they can only see the difference in all things, and not the sameness; there are parts of everyday life that they have utterly rejected, and thus cannot connect to; they are alienated on their own soil, homeless in their own homes. And often with good reason! Julian’s mother is an out and out racist, and she represents the norm. He should reject her racism. But, for some reason, he cannot reject her herself. And he cannot reconcile the one to the other. I love her: she’s a racist; I must reject racism: I must reject her. His very love for his mother is a source of immense guilt for Julian, and that right there is the essence of the Southern Gothic.

There is a deeper lesson here, one that we don’t really have time for, about how Julian is actually trying to inhabit two different symbolic worlds, ones with different rules that justify themselves in different ways and that are ultimately incompatible. It’s like he speaks two different languages, but thinks they’re the same one  and so often gets hopelessly confused. And the truth is something like that, when we recognize that culture is like a language that sets up rules for what and how we make meaning of the world. Heidegger famously said: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (217). Hulga and Julian, justifiably reacting to the smallness and violence of the world they grew up in, have learned another world, but tragically cannot see their way back across the divide they have built; they’re emotionally attached, but intellectually distant, so they take refuge in that distance and decay psychologically, along with the old plantation mansion that Julian can’t help but dream about. Perhaps this is a problem O’Connor understood all too well. Her writing teacher in the Iowa MFA program had to ask her “to write down what she had just said” the first time they met her Georgia accent was so thick (vii, all emphasis mine).

B. A Martyr to the Desire of the Other; Or, that St. Sebastian Painting One More Time

When I worked in that highly suggestive, very famous painting of St. Sebastian into my lecture on Voltaire, I had totally forgotten that our erstwhile saint figured into our story for today, even though I had been reading O’Connor again over break. Sometimes the Unconscious, to paraphrase Larkin, fucks you up, but every now and again it does you a favor.

One of Julian’s fantasies is that he is a martyr to his mother. This should right away give us some pause. Take this for instance: “Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him” (405). There is something deeply wrong with Julian’s relationship to his mother here; in fact, this is not a healthy relationship to have with any human being. Why on earth does Julian care what gives his mother pleasure? Shouldn’t he be happy that she is happy, despite it being over a ridiculous hat? Why would you ever arrange it so that, in the most important relationship in your entire world, anything that makes the other person happy makes you sad? That, my friends, is a recipe for disaster, death and disaster and tragedy. You don’t even have to read to the end. This is not going to end well.

To understand characters, you have to understand their motivations. This can be tricky. We can’t assume the characters are us, or anyone else but who they are. There are many possibilities for why Julian does what he does—alien mind control, for instance—but very few plausible ones. What, then, are Julian’s plausible alternatives here to his misery. Alternative one: leave his mother and move far away. He wants to be a writer? New York City, Paris, hell Houston or Atlanta: get thee hence. Anywhere but here (Hulga, too). Why, then, does he stay? We can be very, very cynical and say that Julian is broke and his mom’s supporting him. True! But not really enough. A lot of life can be lived in cheap apartments with ramen noodles, even on the commission of a typewriter salesman. This would be an excuse he would be telling himself, though we should also assume that many of the jobs he might be qualified for he would reject because they would conflict too heavily with his identity (as a writer), or just embarrass him (as being beneath him and his college education).

I think the real clue is in the saint imagery. But it’s not him who’s the saint, it’s his mother—a fair description for her achievements vis-à-vis Julian, which are not small, and which she is justly proud of. Even if taken literally, if he is suffering for his mother, as a saint, that means his mother is Jesus! His non-sacrifice of riding on a bus with his mother—“the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure” (406)— is really her sacrifice. The problem is that, in this twisted relationship, his mother-the-saint is also a racist. Moreover, he knows that she’s not doing this for her pleasure: her doctor has told her she might die if she doesn’t become more active. Yet that’s how he frames it, which makes no sense … unless, here again, we should take this more literally than he means it: she’s staving off death, and as long as she is alive and enjoying life, then of course he cannot enjoy it. Ipso facto, he wants her to die, so he can move on. Again, her very existence is a source of guilt for him. Not because he hates her, but because he loves her.

C. The Terror of Identity; Or, Meeting Yourself Coming and Going

What does the phrase “you won’t meet yourself coming and going” (407) even mean? I had to pause at this phrase after O’Connor repeats it in the story, making sure to remember, as Professor Charara reminded us, that just because it is a cliché for the characters doesn’t mean that it is one for O’Connor. In short, it signifies a desire for uniqueness. If you do not meet yourself coming or going, you will not see someone else that looks like you on your journey.

This desire—to be singular, unique—is a pretty basic one. We all need some manner of distinguishing ourselves from others, otherwise the difference between self and other breaks down, and what it means to be uniquely our self does with it. This loss of self is, in almost all cases, terrifying for us. It is terrifying for Julian, because it is precisely what he fears in relation to his mother: he will never have his own desires, his own identity, but merely be an extension of hers, subsumed by his mother’s identity, her view of him. He will always be, as Professor Wallace discussed, an object and never a subject. (At the same time, to have nothing in common with other human beings is an opposite extreme, untenable as well. What it would even mean, to share no qualities with other people, no common bond over which you could unite, no language, aspirations, or anything else? Nothing.)

Of course, his mother does indeed meet herself going to the reducing class, in the form of a black woman with her child, angered about … something. Long story short, this woman hits Julian’s mother and storms off when she tries to give her child a penny. There is much to be wrung interpretively from whether or not it is this blow that causes his mother’s death, or Julian’s reaction to it. But I think this is a bit beside the point, much as the hat is. The truth of the situation is in Julian’s belated realization of his unacknowledged love for his mother—he calls out to her as a mother would to a child, or even a lover to their beloved, at the end, “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” (420)—and with that, his imminent “entry into the world of guilt and sorrow” (420). His coded wish for his mother’s death has been granted, but in so doing all the compromises he has made will no longer be tenable. He will, of course, blame himself for the way he acted vindictively toward her, even in her last moments, and he might even blame himself for her death.

Most of all, though, he will lose his ability to maintain that ironic distance that he has adopted toward the world, the one that has kept him locked into a fantasy world. There is compensation here: that fantasy allows him to live the life he secretly desires—not incidentally, the one where he can acknowledge his mother’s love and sacrifice, if not in word, then in deed. He does devote himself to his mother; despite what he says he is on that bus. The “in word” part is crucial here. Julian wants to be a writer because it allows him to keep an ironic distance toward the world as the detached observer who can catalogue all the worlds foibles while imagining that he is the hero setting them aright. But not in the real world, which is a bit too messy. When he imagines marrying a black woman, he tempers this fantasy by writing his fictional lover as not too black, her race only a suspicion (414). When he befriends black folk in his fantasies, it is only “the better types” (414). And when he imagines joining a sit-in, this is “possible but he did not linger with it” (414). Of course the possible is not something he lingers with! There is no ironic distance in the possible. Only jail, maybe even death. In fact, in a very real sense, Julian needs injustice to continue, because if it disappeared he would be forced to confront everything that he is fobbing off. Thus: “It gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred miles” (412).

I think a more interesting question than whether or not the child’s mother is responsible for Julian’s mother’s death is why she is angry to begin with. Julian is probably not wrong, that negotiating the casual violence of an antiblack society has shaped her outlook, and primed her for confrontation as an understandable survival strategy (compare her to the man who buries his nose in a newspaper, learning about the world at large while ignoring the world at hand). But perhaps we should look closer to home. If you were a mother negotiating public transit with your child, might you be annoyed if a grown man—a white man, in this very specific instance—forced you to split yourself off from your young child? And, assuming that she’s as good a reader of the world as Julian is, when you realize that he’s forced you into this situation because of some tiff he’s having with his mother? Julian delights in the fact that the children have been split from their mothers; he is himself keenly aware of the dynamic at play here. But because he is trapped in his own bubble—his own decaying mansion of the mind—he cannot see that maybe she does, too. And if Julian’s desire to separate himself from his own mother is achieved in this awkward social situation, it is imposed upon the mother and her child. Yet the stakes for each are different, and Julian knows this, too. He sees it coming from a mile away, but what he can’t see is that the cause is not his mother, but himself, and he cannot see it because then he would be the one thing he cannot be, his mother. He would see himself coming and going, in her.

Bibliography

Femia, Will. “Paleo-Politics: The Really Long View.” MSNBC, 24 Aug. 2012. Msnbc.com, http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/paleo-politics-the-really-long-view.

Glanz, James, et al. “Where America Didn’t Stay Home Even as the Virus Spread.” The New York Times, 2 Apr. 2020. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Rev. and Expanded ed, San Francisco: Harper, 1993.

Helms, Douglas. “Soil and Southern History.” Agricultural History, vol. 74, no. 4, Agricultural History Society, 2000, pp. 723–58. JSTOR.

Krulwich, Robert. “Obama’s Secret Weapon In The South: Small, Dead, But Still Kickin’.” Krulwich Wonders. NPR.Org. 10 Oct 2012. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/02/162163801/obama-s-secret-weapon-in-the-south-small-dead-but-still-kickin. Accessed 14 Apr. 2020.

Mullen, Lincoln. “These Maps Reveal How Slavery Expanded Across the United States.” Smithsonian Magazine. www.smithsonianmag.com,

Faulkner, William. Novels, 1942-1954.  New York: Library of America, 1994.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.

Reni, Guido. Saint Sebastian. Circa 1615. Musei di Strada Nuova, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guido_Reni_-_Saint_Sebastian_-_Google_Art_Project_(27740148).jpg.

Sexton, Richard. Oak Avenue, Wormsloe Plantation. 2009, https://richardsextonstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/19-c070.jpg.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Building the Earth. Wilkes-Barre, Pa. : Dimension Books, 1965. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/buildingearth0000teil_y0u0.

——. The Future of Man. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

——. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper Perennial, 1955.

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New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton stepping away after 16 years with franchise

METAIRIE, La. -- Sean Payton announced his decision to step away Tuesday, 16 years after he was hired as the New Orleans Saints' coach, though he stressed multiple times that "retirement is not the right word."

Payton, 58, said he doesn't plan to coach another team in 2022, adding, "That's not where my heart is right now." And since he has three years remaining on his contract, the Saints would have to agree to trade compensation if he wanted to coach another team.

However, Payton didn't rule out a return to coaching in the future. And he said he is interested in pursuing a TV analyst job, though he insisted that neither he nor his agent Don Yee have talked with any media outlets yet.

"I don't know what's next -- and it kind of feels good," Payton said during an emotional 90-minute news conference at the team's practice facility. "But, man, I felt like it was time. ... But not with any regret. There's some excitement, like, 'All right, what's next?'"

Sean Payton Turned Saints Into Winners

When Payton arrived in New Orleans in 2006, the Saints had the third-worst win percentage in the NFL from 1967 to 2005 with one playoff win. But Payton turned the franchise around, highlighted by leading the franchise to its only Super Bowl victory in 2009.

Payton explained that he had been considering this departure all the way back to training camp before confirming how he felt over the past two weeks. He said owner Gayle Benson, general manager Mickey Loomis and team president Dennis Lauscha all tried to talk him out of it. And he thanked Benson for encouraging him to go on vacation for the past two weeks before making a final decision.

"It really is a bittersweet day. I feel like he deserves this," said Benson, who said the team will conduct a thorough search for Payton's replacement both inside and outside the building. "I think we're gonna do a great job in choosing another person that's going to be able to lead us the way that Sean did."

The Saints are now the ninth NFL team with a head-coaching vacancy. Defensive coordinator Dennis Allen and offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael Jr. are two obvious candidates for a possible promotion, considering the Saints just posted their fifth consecutive winning season and aren't necessarily looking for an overhaul.

Payton mentioned Allen by name while explaining that he and the Saints never discussed any sort of arrangement where he might possibly come back after a one-year hiatus.

"In fairness to Dennis, who's a great candidate in the building, or any other coach that possibly would be hired, there's no half-in in this game," said Payton, who also stressed that he thinks the team is still pointed in the right direction despite the fact that quarterback Drew Brees retired one year ago and and the injury-plagued 2021 team missed the playoffs for the first time in five years with a 9-8 record.

"We talk all the time about leaving a place better than when you got there to begin with," he said. "And it's not finished [here]."

Payton admitted that he searched the internet Monday night for tips on how to avoid crying during a news conference. He began by singling out Benson, Loomis and Lauscha individually, calling Loomis "one of my best friends." And he presented Benson with a piece of king cake -- a traditional New Orleans Mardi Gras dessert -- saying it was his version of TV character Ted Lasso's biscuit tradition.

Saints defensive end Cameron Jordan and Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards were among many to salute Payton on social media Tuesday: สล็อตเครดิตฟรีแค่สมัคร

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Aston Villa v Derby County Live Commentary & Result, , Premier League |

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The midfielder has been a revelation for Aston Villa this season, buzzing around the park with volla and intensity throughout, causing a constant nuisance for Derby. His goal, however much he actually knew about it, proved crucial in the end.

Dean Smith: "They're a terrific bunch of lads. From the day I went in there working with them everyday. They take on different ideas, they're sponges, they work hard and those last 15 minutes aston villa v derby score the longest I've ever had.

Scpre many hands went up and I gave them a roasting. The final was watched by a crowd of almost 86, people and refereed by More info here Tierney. Villa took the lead through Anwar El Ghazi late in the first aston villa v derby score, and doubled ashon advantage with a goal from man of the match John McGinn.

Despite a late consolation goal from Derby's Jack MarriottVilla won the match 2—1 to return to the Premier League for the first time since the —16 season. Derby's next season, in the —20 EFL Championship, was their twelfth consecutive in the second tier of English football. The season was delayed due to the COVID billa in the United Kingdom, and concluded in July with Derby in tenth position in the table, six points outside the playoffs.

Villa's next season, in the Premier Scorw, was also interrupted by the pandemic. They finished the season in 17th position, avoiding relegation by one place and one point. Aston Villa finished the regular —19 season in fifth place in the EFL Championshipthe second tier of the English football league systemone place ahead of Derby. Both therefore missed out on aston villa v derby score two automatic places for promotion to the Premier League and instead took part in the play-offs to determine the third promoted team.

Derby ended the league in sixth place, a further two aston villa v derby score behind Villa. Derby aston villa v derby score the first leg of the vil,a semi-finals at home at Pride Park against Leeds United 1—0 xston to a second-half Kemar Roofe goal.

Marriott scored for Derby this article a defensive error early in the second half, with goals from Mason Mount and Harry Wilson giving Derby a 3—2 lead. Dallas scored his second goal midway through the second half before his teammate Gaetano Berardi was sent off for a foul.

Marriott's late strike secured a 4—2 lead on the night and a 4—3 aggregate victory for Derby. It was the first time that a Championship club had qualified for the play-off final having lost the first semi-final leg at home. West Brom took the lead through Dwight Gayle before two goals in three minutes for Villa, a Conor Hourihane strike from 25 yards 23 m and a penalty from Tammy Abrahamended the tie 2—1; Gayle was sent off towards the end of the game for a late tackle on the Villa goalkeeper meaning he would miss the second leg.

Chris Brunt was sent off in the second half rerby Villa dominated the match, but failed to score a winner.

2019 EFL Championship play-off Final

A goalless extra time was played before a penalty shoot-out decided the tie. Two saves from Villa goalkeeper Jed Steer allowed Abraham to aston villa v derby score the winning spot kick and send Villa to Wembley for their second consecutive play-off final. This was Aston Villa's second consecutive appearance in the play-off final having lost 1—0 to Fulham in the final. Derby were without their regular left-back Scott Malone — he was sent off in injury time in the second semi-final against Leeds after receiving a second yellow and was suspended for the final.

Lampard sought to reassure the Derby fans of his commitment: "I'll say aston villa v derby score away to the Derby fans, my focus all year has been how well I can do in this job, because this club gave me an opportunity.

And I want to finish this season as well as I can. Aston Villa kicked off at 3 p. After five minutes, Villa's aston villa v derby score Jack Grealish passed the ball aston villa v derby score the Derby penalty area but despite a defensive mix-up, Axel Tuanzebe was unable to finish, missing the ball altogether.

Two minutes later Grealish himself shot over the bar from the edge of the box. In the 13th minute, Jayden Bogle was dispossessed during a rare Derby attack, but a tackle from Richard Keogh denied El-Ghazi a chance to score. The first booking of the match came in the 27th minute: El-Ghazi pulled Bogle back on the edge of the area and Villa's Dutch winger was shown a yellow card.

Harry Wilson's resulting free kick floated aimlessly out of play. In immediate response, Grealish sent through a pass for El-Ghazi but the winger was flagged for offside. On 41 minutes, Keogh failed to convert a Derby corner despite being unmarked, his header going over the bar.

Retrieved 10 March Sky News. Retrieved 25 September Archived from the original on 1 December Retrieved 24 April Aston Villa Football Club. Aston Villa Managers Players All articles. Unders and Academy Women. Birmingham City Football Club. Records Seasons Head-to-head Europe. Second City derby Birmingham City W. Reserves and Academy All articles. Football rivalries in the United Kingdom. Cross-border Severnside South Wales. Big Two North Belfast. Categories : Aston Villa F. Birmingham City F.

Sport in Birmingham, West Midlands England football derbies. Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community manchester united newcastle Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version.

BirminghamEngland. Aston Villa Birmingham City. Aston Villa Billy Walker Aston Villa: 57 Drawn: 33 Birmingham City: Wellington Road. Full Members Cup. Tom Waring. John Campbell. John Devey. Gabriel Agbonlahor. Eric Houghton.

[griffin64tanya]

Watch Manchester United v. Newcastle United Live

Manchester united newcastle stream - Manchester United – Newcastle stream live! How to watch, lineups, odds

They currently sit ten points behind crosstown rivals Manchester City in first place. Last weekend they suffered a shock draw away to West Bromwich Albion though they rebounded in midweek to defeat Real Sociedad in the Europa League.

Newcastle on the other hand currently sit in 17th place, just above the relegation zone, with a five point lead over Fulham, albeit with a game in hand. Craving even more coverage of the world's game?

A Daily CBS Soccer Podcast where we take you beyond the pitch and around the globe for commentary, previews, recaps and more.

One of the big reasons has been the club's struggles away from home. The Magpies have played eight road try this out this season and still have yet to win a single game.

Only QPR and Reading can match this ineptitude. It will not be easy to turn things around against a team that has manchester united newcastle stream seven of eight games at home, but they will need to try.

There is no denying the impact of Robin van Persie's addition to Manchester United. Looking to compare the best-rated player on both teams? SofaScore's rating system assigns each player a specific rating based on numerous data factors. SofaScore also provides the manchester united newcastle stream way to follow the live score of this game with various sports features.

Manchester united newcastle stream, you can:. The Magpies looked toothless without him in the defeat by Chelsea, when Manchester united newcastle stream Gayle struggled to get into the game. Jeff Hendrick is available again following suspension and Federico Fernandez is closing in on a return to action following an injury lay-off, but Fabian Schar and Javi Manquillo are still on the treatment table.

See below for watching details where you are. Terms and conditions apply: New customers. Keep it Fun — set your deposit limit.

Manchester United vs. Newcastle: Odds, Preview, Live Stream, TV Info

Newcastlw that's where manchester united newcastle stream recommend ExpressVPN more on which below. Tommy Fleetwood carded just the 32nd ace in Masters history check this out the webpage 16th.

Rory McIlroy has not gotten off to a good start in his quest to complete the career Grand Slam. If there's a playoff at the Masters, one bettor will make a nice profit. By signing to a day contract with manchester united newcastle stream Clippers umited season, DeMarcus Cousins made a bit of history in the process.

Our countdown of the top prospects in the NFL draft continues with No. The battle for golf's green jacket may ultimately prove to be beyond Bryson DeChambeau this week. But manchester united newcastle stream ongoing battle for golf's soul rages on - and it remains as riveting as ever.

There was much sniggering after a first-round 76 on Thursday left DeChambeau newcaste par and in danger of missing the cut at the Masters. More than that, the way the Californian bludgeoned his way around the back nine on Stdeam, climbing steadily back into overall contention, will raise renewed fears he might yet be capable of something extraordinary.

Golf's purists will be on their guard.

[ethootinscal1976]

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[blazerina]

Going to Find You (Sean x MC)

Going to Find You (Sean x MC)

Summary: This takes place right after the last chapter of Endless Summer Book 2.  Sean and Taylor are separated, and Sean is putting things together after the helicopter crash. This is Sean’s POV and Part 2 will feature Taylor’s.  

Pairing: Sean x MC (Taylor)

World Count: 1804

Warning: Describes some physical injuries, blood & pain, as well as the processing of traumatic events. Just want to be upfront with that.  Other than that, very mild – no language or innuendos.

Author’s Note: I love Sean even though it seems I have to always write him in a “not so happy, extremely reflective, things suck right now but hopefully they’ll get better” kind of way.  I have not written or posted a story in a while, but I hope this makes people happy to have a little Sean – something to hold us over while we wait for ES book 3.  

--

Sean slowly opened his eyes, his vision blurry and his head throbbing.  He was laying on his back amongst a dense patch of heavy brush and tall grass.  Something sharp was scratching against his left leg.  When he tried to sit up to take a look, he winced, immediately feeling pain in his ribs and shoulder on the right side. Realizing his throwing arm was injured; Sean swiftly laid back down, using his left hand to brush away whatever it was that was causing his leg such discomfort.

Several burrs and thorns had attached themselves to his pant leg. He couldn’t remove them all at once, from the position he was in, so he decided to suffer through it.  His head began to pound as he pinched the top of his nose, between his eyebrows. Sean could no longer be sure there was any part of his body that wasn’t aching, throbbing, or in pain.

He tried hard to steady his mind and collect his thoughts.  

Where am I? What happened? C’mon. Focus.

Sean closed and opened his eyes several times, looking up into the sky.  Taking a deep breath, he kept them open and concentrated.  Images from his childhood engulfed his memory as he contemplated where he was and what was going on.  

For some reason, he began to remember a few special times when he and his brother would retreat to a park, the backyard or some grassy outdoor area so they could watch the clouds. When things were good with his dad, he would join them too. He remembered his voice, so deep, so strong, so soothing.

“What do you see, Sean?”  

He furrowed his brow and studied hard, looking up at the sky. Not wanting to disappoint his dad and respond with “I don’t know…nothing?” He tried to make his mind form the willowy wisps into some kind of shape.

“That one looks like a tiger!” His brother shouted, before he could answer.  Sean envied his little brother’s imagination and his ability to make something wonderful out of nothing.  He was still like that today – positive, encouraging and able to make any bad situation good.

“I see…” Sean trailed off.  “Dad – I don’t really see anything.” He sighed, disappointed.  

“That’s okay, son. Sometimes we need to appreciate the clouds for what they are and not make something out of nothing.” His father reassured him, squeezing his shoulder.

His shoulder.

Sean winced again, still staring at the clouds above him. It wasn’t necessarily a pretty day – the sky was gray and foggy, but tendrils of some kind of cloud were swirling above him. It was dark, whatever it was.  

As he focused, watching it swirl and curl into columns against the already hazy sky, everything clicked inside of his head.

La Huerta.

Rourke.

The Vaanti.

The gate.

Taylor.

The helicopter.

Taylor.

The cloud he was now watching was smoke.  

Smoke!

Sean forced himself to sit up, his heart beating faster and his pulse quickening.  Looking around him, he called out to no one in particular.

“Taylor!”

He continued to cringe as each movement brought him discomfort, but he had to stand up. He had to find her. Sean rolled over onto his stomach and then, using his good arm, he pushed himself up off the grass and brush, into a standing position.  

His whole right side was in bad shape. He could taste blood so he knew his lip was busted.  His knee wasn’t working right and his hip felt out of place.  He shuffled along as quickly as he could, and walked away from the thick meadow where he had been laying.  

“Jake!” Sean was huffing and puffing as beads of sweat were now forming along his brow.  He could see Jake curled up in a ball, closer to the wreckage of the helicopter.

“Jake! We gotta go! We gotta get outta here! The helicopter’s on fire!” Sean wasn’t sure if the words he was speaking were coming out the way they sounded in his head.  Actually, he couldn’t be sure of anything in this moment, as pure adrenaline was taking over.

He knelt down next to Jake and rolled him over onto his back. Sean had to take deep breaths to push through the pain that kneeling caused him.

“Wh –“ Jake coughed, trying to sit up. Sean couldn’t see any blood or any external injuries on Jake at all.

“You okay?” He asked as Jake continued coughing.

“Never better, Cap.” He responded. “What happened? Where’s Princess?”

“She’s not here.” Sean said quietly, a memory of Taylor’s hand slipping out of his flickered across his mind as he inhaled sharply, recalling this for the first time since he woke up.

Stumbling a little, as if he had been punched and the wind knocked out of him, he repeated, “She’s not here…I…I…let her go…”

“That’s smoke!” Jake pointed to the horizon and the wreckage of the helicopter, smoldering only a few feet away.

“We gotta go.  Is Katniss ok?”

Still in shock, Sean answered, “I don’t know…”

“Com ON, Sean! We gotta move!”  

Jake hopped up and immediately fell back down.  “That’s not gonna work.  Dammit!”

“I got you.” Sean immediately rushed to his side and helped him up. “I may not have Taylor, but I KNOW I’ve got you!”

With fierce tenacity and determination, Sean gritted his teeth as he slung Jake’s arm over his shoulder, while they both hobbled away from the debris as fast as possible.

The two of them made their way slowly, and steadily.  Their goal was to get far enough away from the helicopter, the fire and smoke, that if something did explode, they would still be safe.

“I have no idea where Estella is…” Sean sighed as he and Jake stopped by a large tree, leaning against its huge trunk for shelter and support.

“Me either.  We need to rest though.  You don’t look so good.” Jake quipped, out of breath.

“Neither do you.” Sean retorted, sliding his back down along the trunk of the tree to sit.

“I’m fine as a fiddle.” Jake winced, his hands on his knees, still trying to catch his breath.

A comfortable silence fell over the two friends. All that could be heard was the inconsistent rhythm of each of them breathing heavily – trying to calm down, trying to rest; trying to convince themselves this situation wasn’t as horrible as it seemed.

Sean started thinking of Taylor. His thoughts started cycling out of control, one after the other.

How could I have let her go? Why didn’t I catch her? She slipped right through my fingers and God only knows where she landed. If she’s alive. If Rourke found her and took her away…this is all my fault. First my mom, now her. The people I want to protect and keep safe, always end up hurt. This isn’t me. This doesn’t happen. Sean Gayle doesn’t let people down!

Trying to regain composure, Sean took a deep breath.  His thoughts this time wandered to his younger brother.

Why can’t I summon the courage and strength to be like him right now? I need to focus. To be positive. To be strong.  I have to find a way to Taylor. I have to find a way home and off this island for good.  But I can’t will myself to believe it’s possible. For the first time, especially without Taylor by my side, I feel hopeless. Will this ever end? Will I ever go back to Hartfeld? Will I find her?

He sighed and leaned his head back against the tree, closing his eyes.  Taylor’s face came to him immediately.  Her smile. Her piercing blue eyes.  Her confidence.  Oh, how he needed her right now. He began to focus on her and think of her…his mind taking him back to happier times…

“Here…hold this.” Taylor instructed, handing Sean a bobby pin. “My stupid bangs will NOT cooperate today.”

Taylor and Sean were on the hike with Rourke to find Diego. It was sweltering. Humid. Sticky. No one was in a good mood. The heat had zapped them of all energy and kindness.

She had stopped walking right in the middle of the hike. Placing her water bottle between her knees, with one bobby pin in her mouth and another in her hand, she asked Sean to hold one, causing him to stop too.

Sean knew he was being more short with her than she deserved, but like everyone else, he wanted to keep going.  She was slowing him down and he was ready to be done.

“Seriously?” He looked at her quizzically, holding out this fragile, small, hairpin in his giant, stubby hands.

As Taylor worked on her hair, without a mirror, her eyes almost rolled back into her head. She weaved a quick braid pulling the pin out of her mouth and using it and the one she held in her hand, to secure the end of her braid. This proved to be the solution to keep her bangs off her wet and sweaty forehead.

“All set!” She exclaimed, proud of herself for solving the problem on her own.

As Sean waited and watched her, inside he was beaming and his heart felt so full. Knowing her had made him and his whole world infinitely better. He couldn’t imagine suffering through La Huerta without her. Even though, at the moment, she was a slight irritation.

“So…just to clarify, you don’t need this?” He asked, waving the small piece of metal in her face.

“Nope. But keep it – just in case. You never know when a bobby pin might come in handy.  Right Meech?”

Michelle turned around from her spot way up ahead at the front of the pack. “What? Did someone say  my name?” She seethed, also clearly agitated.

“Never mind.” Taylor sighed.  “Let’s go.”  She charged on up ahead as Sean chuckled to himself and put the bobby pin in his pocket.

Sean slowly opened his eyes and reached into his pocket.  Sadly, he was wearing the same pants he had been in on the day of the hike. Much to his surprise, Taylor’s bobby pin was still there.

He pulled it out of his pocket excited and hopeful. As he looked at it in his hands and ran his fingers over it, he swore he could feel Taylor.  It seemed so stupid.  So crazy.

He knew that on some small level he was losing his mind a little bit – but this was a piece of her; this simple little brown hair pin was tangible evidence that they shared this life together and would be reunited somehow, someway, once more.

“I don’t know where you are, Tay.” He whispered, staring at the pin in the palm of his hand. “But I’m coming. And I’m going to find you…”

[xtruss]

Was Shoaib Akhtar's Talent Overshadowed By His Sagas?

World’s Fastest Bowler Shoaib Akhtar of Pakistan

Karthik Krishnaswamy

In Come to Think of it, we bring new perspectives to bear on received cricket wisdom. This week: was Shoaib Akhtar undervalued?

There's a fairly widely held strand of public opinion that would view Shoaib Akhtar as a wasted talent. It isn't just armchair fans who might think this - just look at his ESPNcricinfo profile.

"But that he will end his career an 'if only' or a 'coulda been' is the great tragedy," it says, fairly high up. "He had it all and he blew it." It ends with these lines: "So much so that what he did on the field had long ago ceased to matter and has been eclipsed by his scrapes off the field. For any sportsman, that is a damning indictment."

There are reasons to feel this way, of course, and the profile lists them succinctly: "doubts about his action, ball-tampering offences, beating up his own team-mates, courtroom battles against his board, long bans and heavier fines, serious career-threatening injuries and most damagingly, doping charges."

None of this is untrue, and that list doesn't even include the time Akhtar's board sent out a press release explaining his absence from a squad, and, rather than reach for one of a thousand bland corporate euphemisms, spelled out the exact nature and location of the skin condition that was keeping him out.

Akhtar's post-retirement public persona has done little to burnish his legacy. At the time of writing, he's in the news for claiming that he turned down a lucrative county contract with Nottinghamshire so that he could fight in the Kargil War. He... what? Yeah.

But hard as it seems, it's actually possible to disentangle all that from the thing that really matters, and properly appreciate Akhtar for the magnificent cricketer he was.

There was the pace, of course, and it was a strange and magical coincidence that he came along at the exact historical moment when bowling speeds were first being measured and displayed on live TV as a matter of course. You didn't just know he was quick; you knew he was quicker than anyone else, probably ever.

It was also Akhtar's fate that another purveyor of extreme pace, Brett Lee, came along at pretty much the same time. For the first two or three years of this millennium, the two of them pushed themselves, each other, and the limits of the human body to bowl faster and faster still.

The pace race was thrilling to witness, but in a WWE sort of way, bordering on silliness and fetishising pace for pace's sake. Watch the five balls that this video packages in ascending order of speed. Are they, as claimed, the five fastest deliveries in cricket history? Who knows. Do they make the batsmen cower in fear? Not particularly, and the quickest of them, bowled by Akhtar to Nick Knight during the 2003 World Cup, clocking 161.3kph, is nudged routinely to midwicket.

In the race to be the fastest bowler, one of these two purveyors of pace lost out Hamish Blair / © Getty Images

Pace is pace, yaar, but it's how you use it that counts. The pace race had an inevitable intertwining effect on the careers of Akhtar and Lee, but in doing so, it did one of them a considerable disservice. One was fast and hard-working and a fine first change behind Glenn McGrath and Jason Gillespie. The other was fast and scary, utterly impossible to take your eyes off, and utterly unplayable on his day.

Akhtar was the superior bowler, unarguably, but even a surface reading of their Test numbers would tell you as much. The point isn't that Akhtar was better than Lee. It's that he was an almost one-of-a-kind bowler who heightened the effect of raw pace to a degree rarely seen at the highest level of the game.

There was, of course, the effect on the spectators, achieved via that run-up, that exaggerated sideways leap and javelin-thrower wind-up, the theatrics between deliveries - occasionally during his run-up - and even that hair. But all that would have come to nothing without his effect on batsmen.

When Akhtar was fully switched on, in rhythm, and at his physical peak, the pace was almost all he needed to have that effect. Pace aimed with thrilling directness at the base of the stumps. It sounds simple, but there's a reason why only a tiny fraction of other bowlers have ever really pulled it off - or even attempted it - on a regular basis. Bowling yorkers at high pace takes a lot out of your body, and there isn't a whole lot of margin for error. Get it wrong and it's a lot of energy expended, and probably a lot of runs conceded, with little left in the tank for the rest of the day's exertions.

Akhtar's genius lay in being able to beat the very best batsmen with that direct, route-one method. I mean, come on. Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar in the space of two balls? Ricky Ponting, both Waughs and Adam Gilchrist in the space of 11?

In between, there were six wickets in 8.2 overs in Lahore, which sent New Zealand crashing to 73 all out on a pitch where Pakistan had made 643. Only once has a bigger first-innings lead been secured by a team bowling second, and that happened in a timeless Test.

Watch those wickets again: bowled, bowled, bowled, bowled, lbw, bowled; four pinpoint yorkers, the other two balls also full enough to just about fall under that classification, all of them beating the batsman for pace, with little or no reverse in play - New Zealand's innings only lasted 30.2 overs. This was the definition of taking the conditions out of the equation, and few did it as well as Akhtar.

There might even be a way to measure this.

When Akhtar took wickets, he took them quickly, as have the other four names on the table below. Vernon Philander and Dale Steyn have run through numerous teams, the latter in all conditions; Stuart Broad routinely goes on inspired bursts of wicket-taking; and Andy Caddick was a memorable blow-hot, blow-cold performer.

BOWLERS WITH BEST STRIKE RATES WHEN TAKING 4+ WICKETS IN AN INNS

It's an imperfect measure, of course, penalising bowlers who are part of better and deeper bowling attacks, but it says something that in the Tests where Akhtar burst through the opposition at the rate of a wicket every 23 balls, Pakistan's other bowlers took one every 75 balls. When other bowlers struggled, he often found a way.

At his peak the pace was often enough, but bowling that fast took a lot out of him, physically and mentally, as he revealed to Sidharth Monga in this fascinating interview five years ago. "I used to crawl to my bathroom every day of my career," he said. "I used to limp out of my bed. I can't remember a day I didn't have pain in my knees for the last 18 years."

Akhtar knew he needed other tricks apart from pace, and he certainly had them: swing, seam - look at this ball to Chris Gayle, in Sharjah of all places - the use of angles, the ability to manipulate batsmen with his lengths. Watch him bowl Matthew Hayden from around the wicket here. The late swing is a joy in itself, but what you won't see is the short balls he bowled before this ball, to push Hayden back and stop him from stepping out of his crease as he did time and again to fast bowlers.

Then there was the Akhtar slower ball. No bowler has ever delivered this variation with a bigger drop-off in speed from their stock ball, and he bowled it with no discernible change in arm action. England, fresh off an Ashes victory they still haven't stopped talking about, had no answer to it during their 2005-06 tour of Pakistan. Akhtar bowled many quicker spells through his career, but few approached this one in Lahore for the bafflement he caused. You want to watch this, but maybe not if you're Michael Vaughan, Ian Bell, or Liam Plunkett.

That Test match was Akhtar's 39th. He only played seven more, the last of them on an India tour in 2007, where he outbowled most of his colleagues on largely unhelpful pitches. The skills hadn't gone away but the body was uncooperative. He continued playing ODIs, sporadically, until the 2011 World Cup, and that was that.

Forty-six Tests. Umar Gul, the perennially crocked Umar Gul, played 47.

Even with all his injuries, Akhtar could have probably squeezed in a few more, what with all the bans and disciplinary troubles. But it's a marvel, come to think of it, that he left himself enough room to squeeze in all those spells, and leave us with all those memories.

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5 moves we’re rooting for at the NFL trade deadline

Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images

Free A.J. Green from the Bengals and let Melvin Gordon get a fresh start.

For years, the NFL’s trade deadline was just another day. A lack of in-season deals made the league’s wheeling-and-dealing cutoff date pale in comparison to the frenzy of action the NBA and MLB typically saw.

But teams have been more active than ever the past few seasons, and 2019 has seen a flurry of trade activity in the run-up to Oct. 29. The Rams traded Marcus Peters and brought in Jalen Ramsey. The Patriots addressed their impending loss of Josh Gordon by freeing Mohamed Sanu from the Falcons’ sinking ship. The Broncos dealt away their previous season’s leading wideout for the second straight year.

That won’t be all. Plenty of big names are on the trading block with teams skidding toward mediocrity (or worse), and wide open playoff races in both conferences should leave no shortage of buyers. Players like A.J. Green, Melvin Gordon, and Chris Harris are all entering the final year of their contracts on teams whose postseason hopes range from “pretty bad” to “haaaaaaaaa.” They could find new life with new homes — but where?

We’ve got some ideas.

The Bills liberate WR A.J. Green from the Bengals

Green is 31 years old, has yet to play in 2019 thanks to an ankle injury and, because he has never played an NFL game as anything other than a Bengal, has no idea how to celebrate a playoff victory. And he could be just the thing that makes the rest of the NFL world take Buffalo seriously.

Green, even at 80 percent of his peak performance, would be the best wideout to play in western New York since Andre Reed ruled Orchard Park (sorry, Eric Moulds fans). While the transition from Andy Dalton to Josh Allen may be a step down for the seven-time Pro Bowler, he’d be a boon for a Bills offense in desperate need of consistency in its passing game. Injuries have limited Green’s impact the past four years — he’s played 35 of a possible 55 games since 2016 — but his on-field impact in that span is still elite. He’s averaged 85 catches, 1,251 yards, and eight touchdowns per 16 games in those seasons.

He’d also play a major role in helping an inconsistent quarterback who still needs signal-boosting weapons. Allen has had his share of bad games in 2019, but he has improved slightly after a trying rookie season, going from awful to mediocre (at least in terms of pure passing numbers) in the process.

An upgraded cast of receiving talent has helped push his completion rate from 52.8 percent in 2018 to 62.4 percent this fall, and he’s also showcased improved accuracy. His on-target throw rate has gone from 63.1 to 66.1 percent. Though that last number ranks 32nd among qualified QBs, it’s still slightly higher than Dalton’s rate so far.

Adding Green would allow top targets Cole Beasley and John Brown to take on the complementary roles for which they’re better suited. He’d also take defensive pressure away from rookie tight end Dawson Knox, who looks like he could be a big piece of the team’s future moving forward. Though Buffalo may not be high on Green’s wish list, he’d have a chance to step right in and make a major impact for a team in dire need of a playmaker. — Christian D’Andrea

Get Kyler Murray some protection in the form of Trent Williams

I’m not sure if Trent Williams wants to go to a team that isn’t expected to make the playoffs this season, but the Cardinals certainly have a better chance at competing in the near future than Washington does. More importantly, they have a young, promising head coach-quarterback combo in Kliff Kingsbury and Kyler Murray.

We’ve already seen Murray improve this season, but that progress can easily be halted by an offensive line that simply isn’t holding up. Arizona has allowed Murray to be sacked 23 times this season, which puts him firmly in the top 10 of most sacked quarterbacks this season.

Murray is raw, but extremely active in the pocket. He needs some more protection so his rookie campaign isn’t derailed, and he’ll need help beyond this season. Williams has been named to the Pro Bowl for seven straight seasons and the left tackle clearly has a few good years left in him. I don’t know if he wants to spend them helping a young team become competitive, but if he’s open to it, then I think the deal makes perfect sense.

It would do a lot not just for the Cardinals offense, but for Murray’s confidence. And it’d free Williams from Washington. — James Brady

Give the Eagles some cornerback help by picking up Chris Harris Jr.

Philadelphia has been ravaged by injuries at the corner position pretty much all season. with Avonte Maddox, Ronald Darby, Jalen Mills, and Sidney Jones all missing time. The Eagles signed back Orlando Scandrick to help out. That didn’t last long, as Scandrick was soon released and went all scorched earth on the way out.

The Eagles could use all the help they can get at cornerback. Philly’s defense is allowing 271 pass yards per game (27th in the NFL), and the problems in the secondary are evident. This clip from their blowout loss to the Dallas Cowboys sums up the unit in a nutshell:

Amari Cooper sends Rasul Douglas to another world with his patented sluggo. my god, amari pic.twitter.com/5lNrOmoiTT

— Austin Gayle (@PFF_AustinGayle) October 21, 2019

The Eagles need lockdown corner and already missed out on Jalen Ramsey. So how about Chris Harris Jr. from Denver? The four-time Pro Bowl corner has 19 total tackles and an interception so far this season, and has only allowed one touchdown. He’s also versatile and can play either outside or as a slot corner.

The Broncos aren’t going anywhere this season and Harris will be a free agent in 2020. They could at least get something for him from Philadelphia, which desperately needs a boost in the secondary to compete for the NFC East title, even if it’s only for the rest of the season. — Morgan Moriarty

Let Melvin Gordon start fresh with the Bears

This has not been a banner year for Melvin Gordon. First, he decided to hold out in hopes of receiving a lucrative new contract. When he and the Chargers didn’t make any progress in negotiations, Gordon requested a trade. When that didn’t materialize, Gordon ended his two-month absence. With his return, Gordon wanted to prove his worth to the Chargers (or another team) in the final year of his contract.

Yet, ever since Gordon entered the lineup in Week 5, he’s looked far removed from his Pro Bowl season a year ago. In three games, Gordon has gained just 81 yards on 36 attempts. The Chargers are 0-3 in that span, and the offense has been decidedly better with Austin Ekeler as the main back. You could even argue that the Chargers going away from Ekeler in favor of Gordon is what cost them a win against the Titans.

Gordon has admitted he wouldn’t miss training camp again, but it’s already tough enough for running backs to get paid, and it’s not like he forgot how to play football during his holdout. At this point, though, a new start might be his best chance to boost his confidence and show he still deserves top money.

The Bears would be an ideal landing spot. Their running game has been sluggish all season, ranking near the bottom of the league in rushing yards (420), yards per carry (3.4), and rushing touchdowns (two).

Bringing Gordon into the fold would take less pressure off David Montgomery and allow the rookie to work as part of a 1-2 running back punch. Gordon’s presence could also let speedy Tarik Cohen be more effective in his role as a change-of-pace back and receiving weapon.

Most importantly, Gordon would be a security blanket for the struggling Mitchell Trubisky. The Bears’ third-year quarterback needs all the help he can get, whether that’s a steady ground game or another target he can dump the ball off to. Gordon can do both. He has totaled at least 400 receiving yards for three straight seasons, and his only touchdown so far this year has come through the air.

Chicago needs just a little more production from its offense to get back into playoff contention. Then, it can let the defense do the rest. — Sarah Hardy

Von Miller could fill the Terrell Suggs-sized hole in Baltimore

Three years ago, Von Miller recorded 2.5 sacks in the AFC Championship Game to help lead the Broncos to a 20-18 win over the Patriots. Two weeks later, he had another 2.5 sacks in a 24-10 win over the Panthers that earned him Super Bowl MVP honors.

That’s the last time Miller played in the postseason.

The Denver offense has dragged down the defense for a few years now, and there’s still more roster repair left to do. Miller is 30 and wasting quality pass-rushing seasons while the Broncos struggle to figure out a way to score points.

If a team is willing to step up and offer the Broncos a lot for Miller, Denver could get pieces to speed along that rebuild. Even better, it could dodge the final two years of the pricy six-year, $114.1 million extension Miller signed in 2016.

Baltimore should be the team to step up to the plate. The Ravens only have 12 sacks through the first seven games of the season. Terrell Suggs, who is somehow still going strong in his 17th NFL season, has five sacks for the Cardinals — one more than any player on the Ravens.

The team isn’t afraid to make a splash. The Ravens reportedly made a significant offer to acquire Jalen Ramsey, but came up short. They have the draft capital to acquire Miller and a willingness to push their chips to the center of the table with a lead in the AFC North.

The tricky part would be fitting Miller’s contract under the salary cap for the remainder of the 2019 season. The Ravens have room in 2020, but they’d have to make some moves to clear space for Miller. If Baltimore can make it work, it’d be great to see Miller back on a team with a chance at winning something. — Adam Stites