#Also while I’m here can I say Lorenzo is definitely not white either. There’s no way either of them art white

[cartbarnie]

Whenever someone interprets her as a white woman an angel gets shot to death

[misssophiachase]

With or Without You

For Klaroline AU Week - Day 4 - Enemies to Lovers

Rebekah is diagnosed with a virus and sent to the hospital for observation. To help stop the spread, the two people closest to her in the past two weeks need to self-quarantine. The problem is her best friend and her brother can’t stand each other. Forced to live in the same house, will they kill each other or do something entirely different before 14 days is up?

(Please note: I realise this is a difficult time and the subject matter is serious but this drabble is designed to be just a bit of fun during a tough time.) 

“I can’t live with or without you.”

Day 3

“Honestly, Kat, I’m not sure if I can last much longer,” she groaned. “He sings in the shower, badly. he leaves the toilet seat up constantly and don’t get me started on his remote control form. He switches channels that fast I feel like I’m at a rave.”

Caroline lived in Los Angeles with Rebekah Mikaelson, they’d been friends for years. Her brother had shown up recently from London, where he was based, only for Rebekah to develop the virus. She was going to be okay but had been sent to hospital purely for observation purposes meaning they were imprisoned together as a precaution for fourteen whole days. 

To say she wasn’t coping was an understatement. 

“So, you haven’t had sex yet?” She asked matter-of-factly. Even though she was currently staring at Caroline through a computer screen, she still had the annoying ability to cut straight to the awkward part.

“Kat! She hissed, looking down the hall to check he wasn’t listening. “Your inappropriateness knows no bounds even via Skype.”

“The way I see it is the sooner you have sex, the frustration you feel towards each other and the situation will dissipate. And who knows? If the sex is good you’ll not only have something to do to pass the time but you’ll also be getting your required cardio.”

“Seriously,” she growled. “Is sex all you think about?”

“About 90 per cent of the day,” she quipped. “Tell me you have a better idea?”

“Ah, not to sleep with him because he’s an arrogant asshat who thinks the world revolves around him?”

“I don’t think, love, I know,” he called out. Unfortunately, she chose that exact moment to turn around and copped an eyeful.

“Wow, does he work out?” Kat cooed, obviously she’d had the privilege of seeing him too dressed only in a white towel tied low on his hips, his bare chest and six-pack on full display. Caroline felt her mouth go dry and was struggling to form words he looked that delicious. 

“If you use all of the hot water again, Mikaelson, I swear I’ll come in there and..” she paused, realising what she’d alluded to.

“By all means, love,” he murmured, the dimple in his left cheek making an ill-timed appearance. “Maybe that way we can conserve water.”

“You are unbelievable,” she muttered. “Not if we were the last two people on the planet and we had to repopulate the earth.”

“Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me, Forbes,” he chuckled, shutting the bathroom door behind him.

“You are so screwed figuratively and literally, ” Kat laughed. Caroline didn’t respond knowing her friend was right. 

She should have hated him, in fact she had since they met eleven years earlier. Caroline had befriended Rebekah during sophomore year at high school. They were both cheerleaders and had bonded over music and drama club. 

Rebekah was new to her school, so too her brothers Kol, Elijah and Niklaus. The first two were polar opposites personality-wise but she got along with them famously. The problem was with Niklaus, or Klaus as he liked to be called.

They’d clashed from the outset. It started with a few stray insults and developed into more insults and pranks. Apparently everyone thought it was a passing phase but it wasn’t ending anytime soon. 

However, being locked up with him in quarantine was doing all sorts of strange things to her. In fact, she was experiencing all these not-so innocent urges. She wanted to blame it on Kat’s innuendo or that fact he swanned around the house barely clothed but there was definitely something bigger at play here.

Day 5

“She keeps making me watch all of these bad movies, only cooks meals with weird and unidentified grains and apparently the living room is her personal gymnasium,” he complained. 

Klaus Mikaelson didn’t do roommates and there was a very good reason why. He liked his space and he liked walking around partially naked but suddenly he was thrown into this quarantine situation which was a complete minefield. 

“I said I’d only take this Skype call if you didn’t complain about Caroline Forbes, Niklaus, but yet here we are again,” Enzo growled. “You two need to get a room and pronto.”

“We have rooms, in fact, we have a whole house of rooms and yet that still isn’t enough distance between us,” he muttered. “I am going to go crazy locked up in here with her.”

“And the best dramatic Oscar performance goes to...”

“You would feel exactly the same way, Lorenzo,” he argued. “Caroline Forbes is nothing but a spoilt princess who thinks the world revolves around her.”

“I don’t think, I know, asshat,” she drawled finding her way into his room while repeating his sentiments from two days earlier. No doubt just to push his buttons that much more. 

What Klaus wasn’t expecting was for her to look so wet doing it. Yes, she was wearing yellow, rubber gloves but her white t-shirt was soaked through revealing a very lacy bra and some rather pronounced nipples no doubt due to the temperature. 

“Holy...” Enzo murmured before Klaus shut his laptop with a bang. He figured it was the least he could do to protect her innocence and it had absolutely nothing to do with jealousy whatsoever. Or that’s what he told himself.

“You’re here in my room...wet,” he mumbled, trying to look anywhere but exactly where his eyes wanted to go. 

“I’m trying to clean up after your lazy ass,” she groaned. “You do realise how germs spread right? Maybe if you took better care to clean up after yourself then we wouldn’t be experiencing our current predicament.”

“I’m aware of our current predicament, trust me,” he shot back. “Since when did cleaning end in a drenching. I know you like me, Forbes, but I can see everything.” She looked down in complete shock, his comment having the desired effect.

“Unbelievable,” she muttered, pulling off her wet gloves and throwing them in his direction before leaving his room, no doubt to change her top. 

“I’m the one who’s spreading germs?” He cried out, attempting to remove the dirty gloves from the bed. 

Klaus and Caroline had never gotten along in the eleven years they’d known each other. Klaus decided from the outset that Rebekah truly was evil bringing her into his life and home. Caroline had this annoying ability to get under his skin and Klaus unfortunately let her.

His friends and brothers told him it was because he liked her deep down. Sure she was hot. there was no denying that, but he’d prided himself on maintaining his distance. Well, that was until he was forced to live in such close quarters for two whole weeks. 

His willpower was waning and Klaus wasn’t sure he could go the distance.

Day 7

“Would you stop switching channels so fast, it makes it a little difficult to see what’s actually on,” she offered, rolling her eyes as she said it. 

They were seated on the couch, the long, uneventful days were taking their toll and the fact they still had another week to go wasn’t doing much for their morale. 

“There’s nothing on so it doesn’t really matter,” he replied in frustration. “I’m so bored! And if you dare suggest cleaning again I will confiscate your rubber gloves.”

“Well, what else is there to do?” She mumbled. “And please spare me from running around the place half naked again, I’d like to keep down my dinner.”

“Come on, you secretly love my naked form,” he smirked. Her tell-tale blush was giving her away instantly. “You know I’m not that bad once you get to know me.”

“Funny, the past week hasn’t unearthed any new or redeemable features that I can tell,” she answered. 

“Just so you know those little insults of yours don’t offend me in the slightest bit so please just give it a break, Forbes.”

“Well, what do you suggest we do to pass the time?” She asked, obviously not realizing just how loaded her question was. 

They were seated on the couch, only a few feet apart, if either of them were to just lean forward they could do something really stupid. Or really fun, depending on who you asked. 

“Fine,” she said, reading his mind. “But if we do this, don’t think this means I like you in any way, Mikaelson,” she clarified.

“The feeling is mutual, trust me, sweetheart,” he agreed. They paused momentarily almost as if they were thinking about the very prominent line they were about to cross and weighing up the pros and cons. 

It didn’t take much consideration as he pulled her greedily towards him so she was straddling his lap. Caroline never knew just how crimson his lips were from this vantage point, Klaus was thinking the same about her blue eyes.

He ran his hands along her cheek, his thumbs rubbing circles over her skin. Her heart was racing and given she was practically touching his chest she knew his was too.

There was no going back.

His lips found hers, slowly at first almost like he was taking his time to discover every inch of her mouth. She moaned against him as his tongue dipped into her warmth. She tasted like a heady mixture of mint and chocolate from dessert and now Klaus had tasted her once he wasn’t ready to give her up anytime soon.  

Caroline grasped his neck, her fingers playing with the stray curls at the nape as she melted into his kisses. Klaus knew it wouldn’t be long given just how much he’d wanted her all these years.

He stood up, and wound her toned legs around his waist, careful not to break contact. They made their way quickly to the bedroom excited for what was in store. 

Turns out the sex continued longer than seven days and also out of quarantine. In fact, the sex turned into dating and the dating turned into an engagement. At their wedding, Kat, Rebekah and Enzo regaled the guests with stories about how they got together when they were forced together in lockdown. 

Who said quarantine was necessarily a bad thing?

[hvrtlings]

                               “ no matter how fast light travels, it finds                                    the darkness has always got there first “

* ╰   lorenzo zurzolo ;  18 ;  he/his  —— wow,  lachlan hawthorn  sure has changed. i guess  he  is feeling isolated from the other  gryffindor  members. guess you can’t really blame him. i still remember him being so  curious & adaptable  now he just seems  frustrated & evasive  guess being a  halfblood  isn’t helping matters much either.  i’m hopeful though. they’ll be just fine.  (  zoe ; cst ; 21 ; she/her  )  

WARNINGS:  infidelity, murder, car crashes, mention of war & hospitals & general bigotry    ADDITIONAL MATERIALS:   lachlan’s stats page, playlist, & pinterest board   ADDITIONAL NOTES:  this is fully a few thousand words longer than either nate’s or alecto’s intros and i should edit it down but i also need it to not be in my drafts. really sorry about that. if you want a tldr version please hmu!! or if you just want to plot!!!

when lachlan’s biological parents married, rumors abounded. plenty of couples from their class got married right out of hogwarts   ---   but none of those other couples were such a puzzling case to their peers. no one knew what sweet serena alessandri saw in declan glynne. sometimes, even serena wasn’t quite sure what it was about him; he was a dark beauty, something she could only call him in her head. he was the sort of boy who’d bristle at such a feminine compliment as beautiful; never mind that it was true. but for all his good looks, no other girl had been interested in him. maybe because he wasn’t a sweet guy   ---   just a guy who was sweet to her. 

sweet serena alessandri: deposed princess of a new money pureblood family, she hailed from italy and had lived her whole life in clueless luxury. right up until her new money family found themselves newly penniless, and escaped to england to hide their shame. 

the girls and boys she’d grown up with, gone to school with   ---   they turned on her and her family the moment they lacked the funds to support the frivolous life italian purebloods led. 

oh, but they were mean. they rubbed her family’s new poverty in her face with well calculated cruelty. they were the reasons she vowed to keep her head down when she transferred to hogwarts. she was wary of befriending muggles and muggleborns, but wary of hating them, too. haughtiness got you nothing; she knew this well. 

serena was hurt and young and foolish   ---   not to mention ever fearful of seeming those things. declan never acted like she was; maybe that’s all there was to her love. a sense of safety, if only from ridicule. 

surly declan glynne: why, he hardly warranted a full backstory. he was an angry pureblood boy from a long line of angry pureblood boys who’d never had enough money to back up their feelings of superiority. 

he was almost militant in his hatred of muggleborns and muggles; he hated muggles with a quiet passion, but muggleborns were the real problem. muggleborns infected his everyday life, stole opportunities directly from him. 

hardly a radical feeling, but still   ---   his bigotry and working-class roots didn’t make for a winning combination. swimming in friends and admirers, he was not. 

so the unlikely hogwarts sweethearts settled down months after graduating, and bets were made among their peers on how long they’d actually last. 

everybody who bet that the answer was  ‘ not long ‘  had plenty of evidence to support their stance   ---   namely, that while declan scrounged up a job in the magical maintenance department at the ministry, serena went to muggle university   ( excelled there, in that world of finite answers and figures, like she never could in the magical theory and feeling and pronunciation at hogwarts )   and ended up working at a muggle accounting firm. 

that while serena was making more money than the highest ranking official in declan’s department, declan stewed in his anger. 

his resentment bled into the relationship. they’d never had too much in common; when the sweetness declan used to treat her with left, serena was so confused. but she hated asking questions   ---   fearful as ever of seeming young and hurt and foolish, wary as ever of showing a chink in her armor to people far better equipped for cruelty. just as she learned that the purebloods of her childhood were crueler than her, she knew without needing the lesson that her husband was crueler, too. 

serena’s muggle coworkers and classmates had always liked her. 

she’d always told a version of the truth, to explain why some simple things confused her so much   —   after all, it wasn’t a lie that she was grew up in a rich italian family who lost the fortune when she was in her teens and left her kind of adrift. 

her confusion at taxis and ball point pens could be laughed off as a sign of her former rich-girl ways. 

as could her need to be liked. they all knew she attended a string of elite boarding schools but ended up having to pay her own way through university   ---   knew that she worked hard and wanted people to see that about her. 

so, yes: they’d always liked her. she was kind. 

her coworkers noticed the seemingly sudden shift in her mood, and one brave man she’d worked on a few projects with took that notice a step further   ---    friendly and concerned about her, just as kind as serena had always been to him, andrew reynolds asked her out to lunch one day. and there, he asked why serena was feeling so low.

the sweetness and the kindness from him was enough to open the floodgates. maybe, she could admit, she’d felt a little starved for those two things. declan’s moods had only ever gotten worse. she answered andrew’s questions with all the honesty the ministry allowed. 

she revealed that her husband wasn’t sweet to her anymore, that he was actually kind of cold. she revealed she was hurt and unsure of what she did wrong. andrew paid for her meal and told her that she hadn’t done anything wrong. 

that one lunch, where he said he’d be there for her, devolved into many lunches, and then late-running meetings, and finally time spent out of the office. they fell in love   —   and she became pregnant.

she hid it from declan for a while; they hadn’t been having sex all that frequently, with his sudden ire at her putting a dent in romance. but she hurried to initiate it as often as she felt was  ‘ normal ’  for a happy marriage, after she found out she was pregnant.

she wasn’t happy being married to him, but the idea of separating was alien to her   —   so she needed him to think that the baby was his.

she only got more unhappy with him, when she figured enough time had passed that she could reveal the pregnancy without suspicion. serena wasn’t sure how she’d have felt if declan had been pleased to hear they were having a baby   —   if any excitement or warmth would have won her back to him, if a return of love would’ve erased all her hurt. but the news only seemed to make him more miserable; so serena never had to find out. 

fast forward: lachlan is born, the staff at st. mungo’s hurrying as best they can to get out of a room so tense where it should be joyous. declan named the baby, and serena let him. a pang of something wrong rang through her but she ignored it in favor of plastering on a warm smile.  

then the trio returned home. 

apparently declan   ( who’d never been all that smart, whose suspicions never seemed to touch his wife, for all his anger at her and the world at large )    had wondered at serena’s change in mood before the pregnancy. he hadn’t really noticed she’d started feeling small and hurt and lost at home until she was happy again. and when she was happier, he got suspicious. he followed her physically when he could, spied on her magically when he could, and never got proof of an all-out affair   ---   but declan glynne had been born suspicious. he could wait. 

here’s the thing: all babies kind of look the same. lachlan’s looks weren’t a shocking departure from declan’s and serena’s. andrew reynolds had been white, too, so it wasn’t like baby lachlan’s skin tone was super different. but declan had just made a deal with himself, like   —   serena and I both have light hair; if this baby’s hair isn’t almost transparent, I’ll know. 

baby lachlan was born with a shock of honeyed-brown curls. so that was that. 

declan was, all records would show, an anti-muggle wackjob. and he was beyond furious that serena   ( his wife. he may not have loved her any longer, but she was his )   thought to pass off some  ‘ muggle’s bastard ‘  as his son. 

they lived in a little wizarding neighborhood a small ways away from godric’s hollow; some might say, kindly, it was more quaint than godric’s hollow. others, honestly, might point out it was a way cheaper godric’s hollow. a neighbor saw and understood what the flash of green light in the glynnes’ windows meant, and alerted the aurors. 

baby lachlan was left generally parent-less, as serena was dead and declan ended up in prison. he might have ended up dead himself, had the aurors not arrived on time. godric bless nosy neighbors, and all that. 

declan wasn’t a smart or wealthy enough pureblood guy to get away literally murdering his wife over an affair. 

some people probably sympathized with him   ( serena cheated on him with a muggle. when that saucy story hit the news, that fact was hammered in and plenty of people got where he was coming from )   but it wasn’t enough to keep him out of prison. 

lachlan definitely did have a still living parent who would’ve jumped at the chance to take care of him   —   but the wizarding authorities never even considered andrew reynolds for any real length of time. 

a peek into the auror office’s thought process:  if we give him the baby we have to explain how and why and that serena’s dead. and it’s just easier to not do that.

a peek into the world of wizarding adoptions: even smarmy, blood purist wizarding society is all about preserving magical blood. so magical orphans aren’t long left without homes; magical orphanages aren’t a thing. wizarding families are often huge. so orphaned wizards are shopped around to even distant relatives and then, if that doesn’t work out, given to other families.

scandalous, family-less, little baby lachlan wasn’t long alone.

meet the hawthorn family   ---    edmund hawthorn was born edmund shafiq and was quietly exiled from his sacred twenty-eight family when he came out. which was fine, because his husband travis hawthorn came from a sprawlingly big and welcoming half-blood family and they took edmund in right away. 

edmund still wrote to his parents, and they wrote back; they hadn’t disowned him out of bad blood. he knew his parents still loved him. they just loved the family’s image more, and needed to give him the boot in order to name his brother orlando the heir  ...   since he could give them more heirs. 

travis, conversely, had a lovely relationship with his family. 

both edmund and travis were pretty high ranking ministry workers. edmund worked in the office for the department of magical law enforcement   —   not an auror, but someone who puts together files and goes over paperwork and traces patterns. travis was a liaison minister with the department of international magical cooperation. they’re good guys with good reputations and the ministry was honestly relieved when they offered to adopt lachlan. 

lachlan grew up with two sisters: della, who was five years older, and laurel, who was just ten months older. he loved them with all his heart. 

people tended to think he and laurel were twins, especially growing up   —   the dads cut her hair a little short because she was always getting into a mess, and it was easier to clean mud and neon paint out of shorter curls than long ones   —   but with their matching hair and their alliterative names, their propensity to always cause trouble as a team   ...   they just seemed like twins.

him and laurel seeming like blood related siblings to the outside eye made it easier for the world to forget that the hawthorn’s son was the baby that caused that big scandal.   

edmund and travis never lied to the two of them and said they were blood related twins or siblings, outright. but they did let the world outside their family assume that. they figured life would be easier for lachlan if that was the readily accepted truth.

lachlan wasn’t all that adventurous on his own, but found himself dragged into his sisters’ adventures; he could vouch from experience that mud and neon paint were a pain to wash out as it was, and couldn’t imagine adding more hair into the equation. 

his sisters might’ve been better at getting into messes, but lachlan made up for it by being a mess. he was always having a crisis as a kid   —   his stuffed dinosaurs were just ravaging the block city, dad, but what about the finger puppet people in that apartment building? do they even sell dinosaur insurance?? why didn’t I think of the implications here  ... 

he and laurel played knights a lot, with toy swords and helmets modeled after the suits of armor in hogwarts  ( travis asked edmund if that wasn’t a little much, when they bought them; they were a few years out from school, after all, they didn’t care that the helmets were accurate   —   )   and lachlan always wondered about the ramifications of two knights fighting each other. laurel always took the ensuing soliloquy of hypothetical questions as opportunity to knock him flat backwards.

he was a needy kid   —   he always had questions at his lips, a thousand moral quandaries to discuss. he had an active imagination and a tendency to let situations snowball into situations.

he was often hilarious, and rarely on purpose, and very easy to like. anyone who knew his birth mother would’ve been surprised to see lachlan   —   he truly was nothing like serena. he was bright and sweet and openly curious about everything. he loved storytelling and art and music; a perfect case to show that nurture always won out over nature.

when it was time for him to go to hogwarts, he wasn’t at all sure what house he’d get sorted into   —   it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d ever been hung up on thinking about, for all that he’d wondered about every other part of the hogwarts experience. his dads had both been in different houses, and he had no way of knowing what houses his birth parents belonged to. the sorting hat cried out GRYFFINDOR a scant few moments after touching down on his unruly curls, and lachlan decided that felt right.

he loved hogwarts.  

 lachlan made friends easily and often   —   he’d grown up in the constant companionship of his sisters and knew well how to start conversations and shift them from uncomfortable topics, was skilled at asking questions that made people feel good and liked. 

he was a little overzealous in class, but most of his professors liked him well enough. lachlan was still a curious guy, and seemed to genuinely care about each subject   —   something that went a long way towards endearing him to hogwarts’ staff.

though, some of the staff might’ve been endeared to him even if he wasn’t generally endearing. 

his interesting past wasn’t a secret from most of the professors; travis and edmund had done well enough redirecting people’s memories around their son, but then most people had already forgotten about serena and declan, or else had never really known them in the first place. but many hogwarts professors recalled teaching the couple, recalled the shock their ending gave them, when the news hit.

lachlan’s  ‘ story ‘  wasn’t something his dads had shared with him just yet, so lachlan himself didn’t know. it was a little maddening walking around the castle, when it felt like all the adults looked like they knew something he didn’t. 

dumbledore, being dumbledore, took it upon himself to tell lachlan the whole sordid tale himself, when lachlan was just starting his fourth year. it was a shock   ( it majorly pissed off travis and edmund, who never found out why the old man did such a thing )   but the next time he went home for the holidays his dads sat him down and explained that, no they weren’t hiding it from him and yes, they’d had plans set to tell him when he was seventeen and of age.

wizarding authorities could have hunted down andrew reynolds and told him he had a son, but they didn’t. travis and edmund, however, wanted to find andrew just in case lachlan ever wanted to meet him. so lo and behold   —   once lachlan knew, his dad’s set up a meeting for the four of them in muggle london. it went well; kinda full of shock and crying, even without breaking the  ‘ wizard ’  of it all to andrew, but still well.

lachlan was perfectly happy with his sisters and his dads; for all that he’d always known he was adopted and for all that he’d always been curious as hell, he’d never really pushed his dads about his birth parents. his dads just were his dads. end of story   —   no need for questions. 

which was part of why it was easy for him to go fourteen years before learning about his past. lachlan could not be paid to stop the flow of his curiosity, but there were somethings that seemed so solidly true he never thought to question them.

so while it was kind of cool meeting andrew, it was also kind of weird. knowing about andrew at all was weird   —   because it meant knowing that his mother had died days after giving birth to him, alone and scared and unhappy. and that her husband had been a bigot and a murderer; that declan glynne was still alive in prison somewhere. it was a suckerpunch to the gut knowing that lachlan had come close to being killed himself, if a neighbor hadn’t called the aurors on their house just in time to save the baby he used to be.

listen, he’d never wanted to know where he came from. 

but he knew he’d feel, like, kind of bad if he just never saw andrew again. so with his dads’ permission   ( and encouragement; edmund and travis thought this would be good for lachlan, like getting to know his Muggle Heritage from his Muggle Birth Father )   he hung out with him on occasion, during holidays and school breaks.

even though the professors clearly knew about his past, and his dads did, and his sisters did once he decided he wanted to tell them   ...   lachlan kept it all under wraps around his friends at school. he liked to think he was an open book, before. but learning where he came from made him want to play his cards a little closer to his chest. he couldn’t put his finger on why   —   he knew it worried his dads, he knew it did, and figured he’d get over it in due time, once he settled into the truth.

it just didn’t seem like the truth wanted to settle around him.

declan glynne had family. he was a middle son from a whole gaggle of bigoted, disillusioned glynne brothers. the ministry just never considered them when they were trying to figure out who would take lachlan on. they looked at serena’s family and saw no options, but declan was not lachlan’s father and, like andrew, was never even considered. 

ian glynne had a bone to pick with this   —   had a bone to pick with lachlan’s whole existence, too, had a problem with that almost more than being overlooked. 

( he thought that if serena had just kept her legs shut she’d never have gotten herself pregnant and gotten herself dead and gotten her husband sent to prison. more than that, he thought if she hadn’t gotten the idea of a muggle career into her head and made his brother upset, what with her math and her decent paycheck, she really would’ve staved all this off. but serena was dead   —   so it was easier to blame the baby, who wasn’t. )

he was a fan of simmering in his anger and hatred and kept up with the news about lachlan, at least enough to know who he ended up being adopted by.

and from there he got an idea; the hawthorns were good people   —   a compliment that would’ve come out as a sneer if ian voiced it, the judgement and sarcasm inherent in every syllable. he figured at some point, they’d tell lachlan who his birth parents were, maybe even introduce him to that homewrecking muggle. and if they did, and if ian kept a low profile, kept observing   …   they’d lead ian right to the muggle at the root of his brother’s injustice. 

he wasn’t always watching lachlan, just keeping an eye on him by keeping an eye on his dads. he’d never been all that smart or ambitious   —   the glynnes were a family that thrived in their self-righteousness and self-importance and didn’t feel like they should have to act on those things to get what they deserved.

but his anger, his half baked plot, was enough to spur ian to action for the first time in his life. he rose through the ranks of the ministry through pure determination and will and ended up working in the same office in the department of magical law enforcement as edmund. they almost became friends; not earnestly, not honestly   —   not on ian’s part. but they did. friendly enough for ian to ask after edmund’s kids and get answers, friendly enough to hear about the trip into muggle london to visit someone edmund described as one of the kids’  ‘ distant relatives. ‘

he followed them.

and he didn’t do anything that time lachlan and the muggle were in the same place, but he started to plan.

it would’ve been too hard to keep magical surveillance over lachlan and the hawthorns, so he hadn’t, not ever. just kept an eye on them the old fashioned way, through word of mouth and casual water-cooler conversation. but andrew reynolds had no means of catching ian glynne in the act of spying. so, spy he did.

muggle police would later rule it a tragic car accident   —   shaking their heads at the carnage as they carted lachlan off to the muggle hospital while he clung with bloody hands to consciousness. it took hours for the dads to find him there and by the time his family reached him he decided he wouldn’t tell them any of the truth of what happened; told the official from the auror department once he got relocated to st. mungo’s, but only because he had to. 

he never asked if that official told his dads. none of the hawthorns talked about the situation anymore than they had to, after that.

here was the situation:

ian glynne tailed lachlan and andrew all day   —   a saturday during easter hols during lachlan’s fifth year wherein andrew showed lachlan around muggle london. the pair had lunch together, looked in a few shops, and were set to drive out to andrew’s home outside of the city, where edmund and travis and lachlan’s sisters would meet them later for tea. 

ian glynne got them on a secluded section of road just far enough away from both the city proper and andrew’s home to cause immediate alarm.

he came out in front of the car and andrew made to swerve around the man, but ian cast some defensive spell lachlan had yet to learn at the hood. it exploded   —   felt like they crashed into another vehicle even though they were the only car on the road.

lachlan and andrew both slammed into the windshield, but neither crashed through it. ian came ‘round to andrew’s side of the car and started screaming questions at him about serena and declan; then he shot him with a muggle handgun, something lachlan had surely never laid eyes on before.

andrew did not die from that initial gunshot   —   ian was a terrible shot, and was half out of his mind besides. the bullet just grazed him, and he inelegantly dragged andrew out of the car after. 

lachlan made his way out of the vehicle too, bleeding and hurt, all cut up and bruised from the crash and the glass he had to wade through. he thought, maybe, he was in shock. he was certainly in shock once he finally bambi-legged his way out of the demolished vehicle and saw ian cast a cruciatus on his biological father. 

and, still in shock when he saw ian whammy andrew with a killing curse after that. 

ian did not attempt to turn his wand on lachlan   —   this was the second time in his short life that a glynne brother forgot to kill him once done with a more satisfying target. ian took for the bare april greenery lining the road and lachlan   ( curious, trauamtized dumbass that he was )   ran after him. found a gun pointed at him for a terrifying moment before the muggle police sirens cut the air and sent ian apparating on out of there.

he fought to go back to hogwarts right away; it was only the first saturday of the holiday that all this went down, so lachlan felt, since he spent the whole rest of it in hospitals and bed, surely he was fine. the dads disagreed, and his sisters disagreed, and the auror working on ian’s case disagreed. he’d just become, in a way, an orphan. and it felt like no one around him cared to see him recover in the way he wanted to.

lachlan managed to bargain that he’d get to return to school as soon as ian was sent to join his brother in prison   —   none of the world any wiser that he’d been there when the newest glynne family crime was committed. 

laurel decreed that it’d look less strange if both of them stayed home until then, and that was that. the dads wouldn’t begrudge lachlan the company of his sister, if he couldn’t return to full normalcy just yet.

della was graduated at this point, technically an adult working a fancy job at some boutique robe shop, but she came home every day from work and glued herself to her younger siblings’ sides. lachlan recovered his new, strange orphan-hood with his not-twin and big sister at his side, dads hovering around as much as their jobs allowed.

the hawthorns were tight knit and loosely configured all at once   —   always brimming with love and independence in spades, care expressed tenderly and roughly, like no one was sure how to be earnest. edmund and travis had always expressed affection like that: through arguing and debating and ribbing more than any big displays. 

the kids worked the same way. family dinners used to be more running jokes and teasing than anything, raucous like none of them knew the definition of serious.

the five hawthorns weren’t really sure if that old normal was still achievable; lachlan’s brush with near-death met the daunting news lurking on the edge of their world. the whispers of war.

things became very real for the carefree family   —   the fact of edmund’s disownment, and travis’ famous half-bloodedness.

that all three kids were adopted with far-from-simple origin stories   ( even if lachlan’s was the loudest, neither laurel nor della came from a closet free of skeletons ),   that the dads were gay and the kids were open in their opposition to anti-muggle and anti-muggleborn sentiment

ian glynne might not’ve gone after lachlan for any of that, not really. but the possibility started to hit with dizzying closeness.

two weeks after the holiday officially ended, laurel and lachlan returned to hogwarts. if lachlan had seemed new and different upon receiving the news of his biological parentage, then he seemed really different following his brush with death and new witness to murder. it was the kind of different that was hard to put your finger on. he smoked now, and drank more; he was liable to fall into fits of melancholy. 

cynicism did not come easy to him, but he found that wariness did, that secrecy did. it was shocking.

he finished his fifth year chomping at the bit to do something, anything, about the awful ways in which his world was changing. the next year only held more tragedy   ---   attacks and deaths and disappearances. no one knew what happened to him unless he chose to tell them   ( and in truth, there was almost no one he chose to tell )   but he couldn’t help but feel a kinship with everyone newly hurt by this world. he’d been hurt by it, too, after all. 

there was a small degree of safety offered within hogwarts’ walls, but he couldn’t help but want to be free of them. to be out there, doing something. lachlan would wait for now, ask questions and notice things and store them away the way he always had. but it started to feel like he was just biding his time until he had something to do with every new thing he learned. 

[carmenlire]

With this Ring

Inspired by this tweet by @prayformalec!

read on ao3

Alec looks down at the box in his hands. He feels the weight of it, almost overwhelming but so damned good.

It’s the weight of expectation, anticipation.

The rings shines dully in the late evening light. Alec’s in his office and it’s a rare quiet moment. Most of his shadowhunters are out on patrol and Alec had been working through an extensive Excel spreadsheet when his thoughts had snagged on the box hiding in his middle desk drawer.

The Lightwood family ring was always dangled over Alec’s head like a particularly tasty carrot. He remembers his grandfather wearing it on his middle finger like the most prized jewel. He’d died when Alec was fourteen but Alec had always remembered spending a few weeks in the summer languishing in his family’s home in Alicante.

Even so young, that summer reprieve had been chock full of lessons. His grandfather had been an imposing man, a stalwart shadowhunter to his core with little patience for frivolity. Still, he’d had a special fondness for Alec and Alec still holds a few good memories from his summers in Idris.

Mornings had been reserved for humanities lessons. While the Academy had touched on Machiavelli's The Prince-- in its original Italian-- and Sun Tzu’s Art of War, their curriculum had focused on works that were directly applicable to being a shadowhunter and Head of the Institute one day. One of his grandfather’s only pleasures had been reading. He’d loved the classics just as much as paperback romances and he’d made sure to have a reading list ready for Alec as soon as he arrived on the estate every summer.

Alec remembers cool mornings spent the library whose shelves were fit to bursting with books ranging from antique weapons catalogs to Jane Austen’s entire collection to old, leather-bound family journals.

After a quick lunch in town or in the kitchen, Alec would spend his afternoons training. While his grandfather wasn’t quite the soldier he’d been a few decades ago, he’d been one of the best in his class and was still a master instructor. When Alec had first been debating on his weapon of choice, his grandfather had ran the gambit but after trying dozens of different weapons, Alec had finally decided on the bow.

It was pure coincidence that his grandfather had also favored archery.

Spending several hours training, Alec had then gone upstairs to his room, showered, and come down to dinner at seven sharp every evening. There, he’d been taught the proper way to eat soup, which fork was used for which course, and how to converse with a Clave official on any topic of their choosing.

It had been daunting and exhausting but a part of Alec had thrived. He’d been sent off to the parlor while his grandfather enjoyed his after-dinner glass of scotch and Alec had used that time to wander around the room, looking at family pictures and heirlooms that had been passed down through the generations.

Sometimes, he’d just go over to the open french doors that overlooked the balcony and stand at the edge of the room, letting the warm summer breeze wash over him.

He’d think about how fast summer always seemed to pass and how he only had a month until he’d be back at the Academy. The summer he turned twelve, his thoughts had been preoccupied with a boy in his class and the way that when he laughed, it was like the whole damn sun was hidden in his smile.

Alec hadn’t let his thoughts go much further. Even in his own mind, he shied away from the truth, that inevitable truth that he knew-- deep down, instinctively-- would go over about as well as a grenade.

In Idris for the summer, alone with just his grandfather and housekeeping staff, Alec was as free as he could be. While his grandfather was strict and had very definite ideas of how a Lightwood should behave, Alec loved it there. Alec had learned a lot from the gruff, brusque man including just how important family was and the importance of heirlooms that signaled just how high the Lightwood's pedestal was. Alec doesn't remember ever seeing his grandfather without the sturdy family ring on his hand, a symbol to everyone of his place in the world.

Those summer nights, after twenty minutes or so, his grandfather would come into the room with a maid and teach Alec different dances. There was the waltz, the quadrille, and a few country dances specific to Idris that Alec painstakingly learned. The maid, just a few years older than him, was an unwitting friend of Alec’s and distantly he wonders what she’s doing now.

The house had been shuttered when his grandfather had died and the staff let go, Robert’s mother having passed on almost fifteen years prior. He can still see the way pristine white cloths had covered the furniture, the house staff hurrying around making arrangements.

Robert and Maryse had been in the middle of things, barking orders. Robert had been given the ring after the funeral ceremony and Alec remembers the way his father had clutched at the ring like it was a living thing.

Catching Alec studying him, Robert had said, This ring will be yours someday, Alec.

He’d winked. I won’t make you wait until I’m dead and buried in the City of Bones, though. This will be yours when you find your perfect wife. Any girl would be love to have the Lightwood family ring in her possession. She’ll know just what an honor it is that you’re bestowing upon her.

Alec had stared at the ring and all of a sudden, it wasn’t a warm memory of his grandfather twisting it around his finger in thought. No, as Alec looked at the ring, it felt like a noose was tightening over his neck.

He remembers thinking that he’d never want the damned ring, that he’d rather throw it into the fucking ocean that give it to some girl that he could never love, not really and not in the way either of them deserved. The truth is, by the time Lydia had come around and Alec had proposed, they very thought of the ring had been too much for him and he'd resolved to buy her a ring whenever he had the change. Now that he thinks about it, he never did give Lydia a ring, which he supposed is all well and good for how that engagement turned out.

What a difference a decade makes, Alec thinks.

As he looks down at the ring now, Alec doesn’t feel that crushing shame and guilt choking him. No, instead he sees possibility and a future so bright he can hardly stand it.

Things might be shit now but Alec swore ages ago that he’d never leave Magnus’s side and he can’t think of another way to show his boyfriend that than to become his husband.

Husband.

Just the word makes Alec catch his breath, nerves and hope wrapping around each other tight enough to make him dizzy.

He wasn’t lying to Lorenzo, wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest. It’s an old shadowhunter wive’s tale for a reason. Their kind loves once and loves fiercely and Alec had known the minute he’d started striding down the aisle at his disastrous wedding-to-be with Lydia that he’d found his person, the one man he would love above all others and for eternity.

He hopes to hell Magnus feels the same, that he sees a future with Alec in twisting shades of gold and blue.

With this ring, Alec wants Magnus to know the love and pride that’s become a constant hum under his skin. He wants everyone to know Magnus owns his heart and that he’s proud to stand next to the love of his life, for the rest of his life.

Still though, as Alec starts to think about, something starts to niggle in the back of his brain.

Alec would have to be a fool not to realize-- belated but eventually all the same-- that maybe Magnus wouldn’t want his ring-- this ring. He’s heard Magnus talk before, about the way shadowhunters sneered at him and his friends, the way they broke plates and hid their prized possessions in their prejudice and ignorance.

Maybe, Alec wonders, his family ring would be another ugly reminder to Magnus of shadowhunters and their hateful, ignorant behavior. Too traditional, too possessive.

With that thought in mind, a piece of Alec-- a very small, tiny piece-- is disappointed. While he now sees nothing but pride and security in the metal, he realizes that he’s fortunate in that regard.

Angel knows he doesn’t want to give Magnus any reason to say no. If Magnus didn’t like the ring-- if there was a piece, no matter how minuscule, that was wary to accept-- Alec didn't want to taint the start of their forever with an archaic, admittedly one-sided display of his love.

He sighs a little, sweeping a thumb over the ornate ring before closing the box with a snap that rings with finality.

Tossing the box back into his drawer, Alec turns towards his computer and starts looking up New York jewelers.

It’s an exhaustive mission but Alec’s never been one to back away from a challenge. He goes to a dozen jewelers in the city looking for the perfect ring. While his wealth can’t quite measure up to Magnus’s, the Lightwoods have always been affluent and money’s practically no object.

Alec visits a few places by himself, wary of inviting anyone else to join him lest they try to steer him in a different direction.

He has a vision in his head. He’ll know it when he sees it.

Still, it takes longer than he’d thought to find it. He finally brings in Jace and Izzy when he finds himself studying yet another glass display hopelessly. Texting his siblings the next address on his list for the afternoon, he’s a little surprised to see them standing about on the sidewalk outside the jeweler’s when he arrives.

“What are you doing here,” he asks, approaching them.

Izzy rolls her eyes, glaring at him. “You text us an address with no message? We thought you’d run into a group of demons and needed help. We ran over here.”

“Speed runes activated and everything,” Jace adds, looking a little miffed that there are no demons to kill.

Shaking his head impatiently, Alec brushes past them, towards the door of the jeweler’s in Midtown. By the looks of their website, it’s a small, family run business that was established over a century ago. While Alec’s hopes have severely dampened over the past weeks of fruitless searching, there’s something about this place that makes him think that his luck might just be turning.

“There are no demons here. I just need your opinion.”

“On what,” Jace asks absently as they walk into the jeweler’s, a cheery little bell signalling their entrance.

“Oh, Alec,” Izzy breathes as soon as she steps inside, turning to face him. “We’re at a jewelry store.”

She blinks rapidly, and Alec sees the sheen of tears just forming as Isabelle realizes why they’re here.

“Don’t you start,” he warns, though he can’t stop a grin from stealing over his face. “Or I’ll start too and Jace will have to dry both of us out.”

Alec’s barely finished speaking when Izzy steps closer, wrapping tight arms around him, hugging him so hard that Alec’s lungs constrict.

“I’m so happy for you, mi hermano, and I can’t wait to hear how Magnus reacts.”

“Wait,” Jace asks incredulously. “You’re proposing?”

Rolling her eyes, Isabelle pulls way from Alec to punch Jace in the shoulder. “Of course he’s proposing. Why else would Alec ask us to meet him at a jeweler’s?”

Alec watches as the light bulb flares over Jace’s head before he starts grinning and pulls Alec over to him for a hard hug and rough pat on the back. “Congratulations, Alec. This is huge!”

Standing back, Alec rubs the back of his neck in a nervous gesture that’s betrayed him since he was little. “Thanks, man. Do you guys think he’ll say yes?”

Resting his hands on Alec’s shoulders, Jace’s fingers press into Alec’s skin, grounding him as he makes an effort to glare right into his skull. “There is no world where Magnus Bane doesn’t want to marry you, Alec. The entire shadow world knows just how gone he is over you.”

“Jace is right for once,” Isabelle says, voice certain. “Magnus loves you, Alec. He’s going to say yes.”

“Let’s hope so,” he mutters under his breath. Taking a deep breath, Alec shakes the nerves out as best he can before looking up at his siblings who are staring at him with a mix of joy and pride.

“Okay, I’ve been searching all over the city for a ring and you two are here for moral support.”

“Got it,” Jace says easily before wandering over to one of the nearest display cases. “Anything we should be on the lookout for?”

Alec’s voice is distracted as he replies, “No, not really. I’ll know it when I see it.”

That might be getting old but Alec clings onto the hope stubbornly.

The three of them spend the next hour looking over the jeweler’s selection. Alec looks at rings, talking with a sales associate about what he’s looking for.

No matter that this is the twenty-third place he’s been to this month, Alec still feels indescribably happy to explain that he’s looking for an engagement ring.

He’s just about given up hope when he comes to the last section of the rings display. Jace and Izzy are across the store bickering as his sister tries on a bracelet but Alec barely pays them any mind as his eyes sweep over the last half dozen rings.

His eyes sweep over one before jumping back. Studying it, Alec tries to move on again but something won’t let him go.

With a sharp nod towards the ring in question, Alec straightens as the jeweler carefully takes it out of the case, placing the display on top of the glass counter.

Reaching for it, Alec feels something restless climb up his spine as he picks it up, shifting it so that the light bounces over the white gold band. His eyes narrow as he considers the design before a thought pops into his head.

Isabelle and Jace, seeing Alec carefully studying the ring, wonder back over and as he explains what he’s thinking, Isabelle’s eyes widen before she starts nodding enthusiastically.

What follows is a long, arduous consultation as Alec commissions a ring to fit his specifications. While the jeweler didn’t have anything like it in stock, they’d prided their family’s business on being willing to provide custom orders.

Alec watches as the jeweler sketches a design, pointing to a dozen areas he wants changed. There’s back and forth but finally, finally Alec pulls the sketch closer and takes in every detail.

It’s perfect.

He places his order and Jace claps him on the back as they all stand up from the meeting, declaring that this special occasion called for a special dinner.

They all go to their favorite steakhouse on the Upper West Side. Alec can’t quite remember the last time he’d spent such a pleasant evening with his parabatai and sister. The drinks had just kept on coming and the food had been delicious. As Alec walks into his apartment, the home he shares with Magnus-- the love of his life, the very beat of his heart-- a little unsteadily with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, Alec can’t quite believe his good fortune.

It’s late when he gets back and Magnus is already in bed, ancient text that he must’ve been translating for a client sprawled over his chest, moving in time to steady, deep breaths.

Carefully, Alec lifts the book and marks his boyfriend’s place before setting the book down on their bedside table. Crawling in on his side of the bed, Alec shifts closer to the warmth radiating from Magnus, laying his head over his heart.

Distantly, Alec thinks that there’s no better place in the world than right here, as close as he can get to his boyfriend-- and if he has anything to say about it, his soon to be husband.

A couple of months later, Alec gets a phone call from the jeweler’s letting him know that his ring is ready for pickup. He tries to focus on work but within the hour, he’s heading over to the jeweler’s.

He’s greeted by the same salesperson who’d helped him earlier and as he sees her set the blue satin box onto the counter, something in Alec rises, the sheer emotion in him staggering as it squeezes his heart in a vise grip.

Slowly, he reaches out and thumbs the box open, the breath stilling in his chest as he sees the finished product.

By the Angel, he thinks. It’s perfect.

The white gold band reflects the overhead lights. Along the length, there are a dozen miniature sapphires circling around the band in alternating tones of blue and gold. Their color is warm, deep, and Alec can’t stop shifting the ring so that the light catches deep inside the gems.

It’s a mix of them and Alec hopes the sentiment comes across. Blue for warlocks, gold for shadowhunters, winding shades of love and marriage and a happily ever after that Alec never could’ve dreamt up.

He doesn’t bat an eye at the final bill, at the several zeroes rounding out the total, instead swiping his credit card with an almost jittery sense of satisfaction.

He’d pay that price a hundred times over if it meant the finished product would give him the same happiness and anticipation.

Alec’s ready for this. Half of him thinks that he’s never been ready for anything else as much as he’s ready to be the other half of Mr. Lightwood-Bane.

Just the thought of the name makes him shudder, an almost overwhelming weight settling over his shoulders.

It’s a welcome weight though because it means that this matters. This is the biggest gesture of Alec’s life but he’s so, so ready for that next step.

As Alec walks out of the jeweler’s, box secured in his pocket, his mind spins with plans.

He’s been brainstorming proposals for ages and now that he has the ring, there’s nothing else holding him back from asking Magnus the biggest question of his life.

Once, ages ago, Magnus had said in a cold, bitter voice, Marriage is a wonderful institution, not that I should know.

As Alec walks home, ring a heavy presence in his pocket, he vows to show Magnus just how wonderful marriage can be.

Please say yes, Alec prays to every angel he can name and a few more besides. He continues on his way, lost in thought and so damn happy he wonders how a body's supposed to contain it all.

[janiedean]

Question, I'm working on a fic with a character born and raised in Roma. Do you have little tips about the fic he'd like to do/go: we're speaking about a giant scientist nerd with not much money and a giant anticlerical atheist attitude. Thanks for the help!

PS: Because I just realized I forgot about this. The character also has a unhealthy addiction to caffeine. Thanks :)

Roma anon: He's in his late teens/start of twenties. So born in the 90s.

hmmmmmmmm okay I’d say (also pls link me this thing when you’re done because ATHEIST CHARACTER RAISED IN ROME I wanna read it):

depends on when they grew up but if it was pre-nineties they’d probably think about the times when they walked through the center and it was full of cats and taxis were yellow and now it’s all white taxis and no cats (I swear all of us who grew up in the 90s have the OH GOD I MISS THE CATS AND YELLOW TAXIS moment, the cats were more or less driven away at the beginning of the 00s and the yellow taxis as well) I wrote this before you specified so they probably don’t remember the yellow taxis and shit but their parents might

thing is, SCIENCE stuff here isn’t that great but if they grew up before the 90s/in the 70s they might have enjoyed going to the historical planetarium which used to be in the center near the main station but then it was closed and moved to the EUR in I think 2004 and now is in san lorenzo so if they grew up in between 80s/90s they missed that window, if they grew up in the 00s or were teenagers in the 00s they might have gone to the EUR one, this is the website - it’s supposed to be in english but obv it’s NOT but maybe you can figure something out? > post specification: if born in the 90s he DEFINITELY went to the planetarium u__u

if this person’s into animals he definitely would have visited the local zoo/the bioparco in villa borghese which has a lot of animals and is actually pretty ethical as far as I know, I personally never was much into it but it’s a favorite with kids (also back in the day you could pay to ride a pony always in villa borghese, I’ve done it a couple of times and it was fun so if they’re into horses they might have done that but it was like mid-90s I have no idea if they still do it), there’s also the zoology museum inside the bioparco so they might have liked that as well

these days there’s a cat colony in piazza argentina so if he likes to pet cats (which are all neutered/kept clean thanks to volunteers) he can go there once in a while

OR if he’s into physics there’s the physics museum in enrico fermi’s house which opened in 1999 that he might like to go to

that’s for the science stuff you could do other than going to libraries and check books out and stuff, sadly this city never was The Science Place, but about the rest:

if he’s atheist/anticlericalist, there’s two most likely ways it might have happened: his parents are also atheists and never baptized him, or he comes from a catholic family (either REALLY practicing or enough to baptize him/get him to take his sacraments) and changed his mind later. this brings to two fairly different outcomes/possible backstories.

if option one: he’s never taken the religion hour in elementary/middle/high school (you can opt out), he most likely was the only one in the class or maybe two people unless he had jewish/muslim/other-religions people in his class but a lot of people don’t opt out even if they’re not catholic, he thought it was weird af when his friends talked about going to catechism and stuff, he might have tried going to church with relatives once in a while and found it highly boring af, he never got the point of it and then got fed up with the church and stuff when he realized that they don’t pay taxes to the state and the various other church misgivings TM;

if option two: he probably didn’t get the point of sacraments but went through with them (and catechism) to make the family happy and took religion hour while hating it, at some point decided he was atheist during his teenage years or so on, he’d insist to not take religion hour and depends on how practicing the family is, that could have brought him a few issues because people actually do argue horribly about this and there’s the immortal BUT IF YOU DON’T GO TO CHURCH YOU’LL MAKE YOUR GRANDMOTHER SAD;

obviously it varies but those two are the most common atheist experiences around here as far as I know - if your entire family is or if they’re lowkey practicers it’s fairly fine, if they’re practicing it might cause you problems (unless he has enlightened parents who respect his choices ofc), but count that option two tends to make you a lot angrier at the church/at religion in general, like someone who comes from an option two background is a lot more likely to have the dawkins approach than to just appreciate him as a scientist lol

also: when you take religion hour, you’re put with a teacher who’s supposed to do something *alternative* with you. every time it happened with me, they asked me if I didn’t take religion hour because I was Jewish, then when I said no they went through a few other religions before going like ‘... wait, Muslim?’ until I went like ‘no I’m atheist’ and the last reply was always, ‘but then why don’t you try religion out’. always. at some point you just laugh so you don’t cry.

THAT SAID someone who’s into science and who’s an atheist AND MILITANTLY SO would totally read dawkins, hitchens and be into that shit a lot so like, consider that xD like it’s the magical combo ;)

if he’s a Proper Nerd he saves money to buy books at fahrenheit 451 in campo dei fiori;

(guys srsly fahrenheit is a staple of roman independent bookshops I love that place, also they have a signed bradbury copy of that book in the entrance made just for them and they also sell like science books and stuff so someone who maybe is also into scifi would totally love that place)

(if he’s desperate for cheap stuff there’s used books sold for not much in a small market in front of termini station though)

this person most probably wouldn’t like to hang around the vatican - like he’d go there to bring friends and stuff and he’d go to the vatican museums once in a while but unless you’re an art student you tend to avoid that area

also remember that john paul II died when I was in high school and it was what, 2005, and the funeral day all the schools were closed and for the previous two weeks you couldn’t move through the center/the vatican because it’d be full of people going to pay respects to his burial chamber and so on so like if he remembers it he’d probably be very ‘I don’t get what’s the deal about all of this’ about it (and anyway if he was going to school he definitely missed that day since they were closed for the entire city)

this person also would not go to churches in general if not for a) tourism, b) weddings, c) funerals and they most probably would try to avoid baptisms and further sacraments if they could (obv if it’s they’re little brother’s they would go but if it’s a cousin or smth they’d just tell their mother to say hi from them)

they might want to be an uaar volunteer;

also if they’re as lucky as I was, nine times on ten they say they’re atheist to someone they don’t know they get the usual horrid questions ie ‘how do you get up in the morning, how do you live without God, so do you think it’s fine to kill people since you don’t believe in heaven, so are you a satanist’ and so on. they might lie and say they don’t practice if they don’t want to have an argument. or they might tell those people to fuck off if they’re done. or they might try to argue. anyway you usually try to not touch the subject if you’re not sure of how people might take it especially if you don’t know them and especially if you’re older than you;

if their parents are atheists they most likely give the eight thousandth of their taxes to the waldensian church (they only use it for secular purposes) and he would too if he lived in italy and paid taxes there; he wouldn’t give it to the state because that money ends with the catholic church anyway;

if the parents are not atheists they might have gone to a nuns’ run kindergarten. spoilers: everyone I know in italy (catholic or not) except maybe two people has horror stories about kindergarten with the nuns so it could totally be a the reason why someone starts having issues with religion;

(if they’re atheists obviously they sent them to a normal kindergarten)

at some point he has read the bible so that he could tell people that no, reading it didn’t make him want to convert;

coffee stuff:

most people around here like espresso as all italians do, and you start drinking it at SOME POINT in high school (I started at fifteen/sixteen but I know people who started later and who never got any until uni for one, but they’re a rarity);

if he’s like me, he started drinking espresso made at home and then couldn’t stay awake through high school for six hours in a row so had always one or two at the school’s coffee machine (at some point when I was seventeen/eighteen I drank like six espressos per day DON’T DO IT IF YOU HAVE HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE)

anyway most of us addicts make it at home with a regular moka

but if he has money to splurge once in a while or if he wants to treat himself/others he might go have coffee at sant’eustachio, it’s a historical bar in the center that has the Best Coffee Ever and IT COSTS A LOT BUT IT’S WORTH IT

random:

if he doesn’t have much money he most likely goes around with public transport. the public transport is shit. always has. always has been. the 00s weren’t a good time. if he lives on the A metro line he hates that it’s full all the time, if he lives on the B line he hates that and that it has old-ass trains from the 80s still, if he lives outside any metro area it takes him at least forty minutes to go anywhere with the bus so he hates that, the bus company and both metros for not reaching his place, if he lives in the center sometimes he thanks his lucky stars

he most definitely doesn’t use taxis if he can’t absolutely help it

he might have lived to see the ending of the emos vs truzzi debate of the 00s. to give you a context: you remember emo music? people who were into emo in the 00s used to hang around piazza del popolo all the time so like the place was full of people dressed in black and singing evanescence and shit, and those people were picked on by truzzi who were basically... like, outskirts kids without manners who listened to hardcore rap music and shit, idk, in english it’d be something like hicks, you know those people who dress brightly and have no manners and speak terribly and think they’re the center of the world? more or less. anyway these people hated each other and there was an entire culture of making fun of how they hated each other and like it sounds dumb but is2 it was a fundamental part of our high school experience so idk if this guy went to middle school in the 00s he’d... probably know. and think it was ridiculous. I’m sorry this probably makes no sense but like let’s just say it was srs young subculture to make fun of this rivalry shit I DON’T EVEN KNOW and you probably don’t need it but here now you know it’s ano option

he was probably very politicized in high school. most likely went to marches especially if he had pOLITICAL ideas about the vatican. in the way 15yo people are anyway, but like italian high schools are all politics arguing where everyone thinks they’re communist or fascist no in between and especially here it happened

he most likely did like a thing we all did in hs where for a week every year students would organize lessons instead of teachers and talked about stuff they felt strongly about/know more about and he might have been a students’ representative

if he’s gay/bi, he’d probably go near the coliseum to find a date because there’s the so-called *gay street* nearby and most bars have rainbow flags outside and back then if you weren’t straight and wanted a date you’d go there

if he wanted to buy cheap stuff but decent quality he’d go around campo dei fiori for anything other than books

especially if he wanted good cheap-ish alcohol and absinthe (which btw is banned here but you could get for cheap in most bars in campo dei fiori bless them)

if he does cosplay and stuff he’d go to romics which is our... cheapass horribly organized comicon

he’d remember fondly the nokia 3310 that never got destroyed and you could only use to call, text and play snake

... I hope it helps if you need anything else just ask :)

[partapotso]

So who's the best/worst artist?

(This is gonna be a long post, so I’m posting most under the read more option. But hey, you asked for it! And probably regret it now. This isn’t as serious as it probably should have been considering the length of this post, though.)

There are plenty of great artists that have done decent or even amazing work drawing John, and I’m mainly going to concentrate on them because every Rockerduck is beautiful deep within. 

So, let’s begin: some of the official artists who have successfully drawn him - a.k.a the only relevant ones - are…

Francesco Guerrini

Excellent fluffy sideburns and he either looks very handsome or utterly adorable. Guerrini has a very beautiful style overall, I mean, even the brush strokes make me sigh in adoration.

Salvatore Deiana

I really like the way Deiana draws John’s hair and glasses. They’re much closer to his eyes and on top of how good it looks it’s probably more convenient too - I’d imagine they sit better closer to the face. His shoes look so small though. I wonder how his feet fit in there? Nevertheless Deiana’s John is one of my favourites. His inking is also lively and clean, which I appreciate a lot.

Alessandro Perina

Starting this with something completely unrelated, but one of the many reasons why I liked Scrooge’s Last Adventure was the way Perina drew the backgrounds, more specifically the buildings and how they were decorated. Obviously that’s not the reason why he’s on this list, even if I also adore the way he draws expressions and how dynamic the characters can look… cough, anyway, he draws a very adorable Johnny and that’s what matters the most to me.

Giorgio Cavazzano

… except that what I just said was a big lie, because this mean man on the left is what makes Cavazzano one of my biggest favourites on this list. His style has changed a lot during his career and, in all honesty, I liked his old style a lot more. (Both of the first pictures are from the 70’s, the third one is from 2002). The 70’s Johnny’s hair was actually quite perfect and he generally looked great just like all Cavazzano’s ducks did, if you ask me. He still remains one of my favourites despite the changes in his style. (I even have his autograph and a sketch of John by him! Sometimes life sucks but then I remember that drawing and everything’s suddenly better.)

Romano Scarpa

Sometimes his ducks look oddly rubbery and bouncy, but that doesn’t make his John any worse. Excellent hair, I wonder why he only gets so few of them in the comics today? ((Let this man have more than six hairs on his head now that Scarpa isn’t here anymore to do it himself, goddangit)) One big difference between Scarpa’s and most artists’ style was that his John had hair growing not only on the cheeks but in the back as well. I wish I could draw John’s hair as nicely as he did.

Massimo De Vita

I always associate Massimo’s Rockerduck to his, well, a bit more criminal tendencies, especially because Massimo was perfect at making his ducks look so cunning (which, ironically, isn’t pictured here). A 5/5 Rockerduck with the Good kind of hair™, also drawn by one of the greatest duck artists there are. (That is obviously just my humble opinion. I guess old Italian ducks just mean a lot to me.)

Giovan Battista Carpi

Just like Cavazzano, Carpi drew ducks for decades and that means his style varied a lot during that time as well. I only included here my favourite looks, because even if the hairdo with a bald patch on top was pretty much the same as which Scarpa drew, it, uh, didn’t have the same appeal as the ones shown above. For once he’s been given more than small tufts of hair and he looks absolutely great. Okay, that hair was a bit out of control and all over the place sometimes but it’s still one of my favourite hairdos for him, it’s a pity it always looks bad when I try drawing it.

–

Other great examples of quality Rockerducks, pictured below, are by Lara Molinari, Carl Barks, Guido Scala, Flemming Andersen, an artist remaining a mystery from the comic studio Staff di IF (even inducks couldn’t help me identify the artist) and no other than Silvia Ziche.

… and let’s not forget these two boys that I love despite their strange or silly looks. The one on the left by Pier Lorenzo De Vita deserves to be mentioned just for his excellent dandy looks - he even wears a bowtie and gloves, he kinda looks more like a cartoon penguin, if you ask me. On the other side we have Jan Gulbransson’s, erm, more original version of the character, which definitely deserves to be on this list simply because he has a special place in my heart, even if it’s true that he doesn’t look much like himself, hah.

Those two unfortunately aren’t really good compared to many above them, but they have my special permission to be counted in the good ones instead of the bad and the ugly. Actually I have a hard time calling any Rockerduck either one of those. Sure there are some I don’t find as interesting or nice-looking as others, but even when I look Giuseppe Perego’s Johnny in the eye I can’t tell it that it’s ugly. 

Like, Perego is far from the best, but there isn’t really much wrong with the way he draws John..? He looks much older than he usually does, though, that I have to say. He looks like he’s actually losing hair.(Btw, check this panel out, he is SO SMALL)

 I’m struggling to come up with any particular artist that makes him look really BAD to me, there hardly is any and I definitely can’t remember any even if I try my hardest, but I have to say that one thing that really makes a difference to me is his hair. The way most artists nowadays draw it looks a bit funny compared to the ones I praised earlier (but as you can see, some of my favourites gave him only like ten separate hairs anyway, so it isn’t that black-and-white either). Some artists that didn’t impress me with their Johnny first were, among the few that I haven’t bothered learning the names of, Stefano Intini, and more recently Donald Soffritti, whose way of drawing ducks never really appealed to me, but the more I look at his ducks, the more I tolerate them. I mean, look at Soffritti’s John (on the right), he’s absolutely adorable even if I’m not a huge fan of his style in most cases.

Conclusion: every Rockerduck is beautiful to me and I am a bad critic. I can’t say a bad word about any of these artists after this all. There’s always something positive about them that I see after looking at their works for a while. I’m planning on practicing drawing his hair some day (hopefully) soon and I’m going to try different styles, so that will probably result in some stronger opinions about his hair because, seriously, otherwise there’s hardly anything in him that could look weird or wrong to me. Thanks for asking and I’m sorry for my messy answer!!

[lovemesomesurveys]

5,000 question survey series--part thirty-eight

3601. What brands do you like? Ya gotta narrow it down a bit. 3602. What do you think of the 'don't ask don't tell' policy of gays in the millitary? A person’s sexuality shouldn’t matter. Like, the question regarding sexuality shouldn’t even be asked because I don’t see how that has anything to do with someone wanting to be in the military.  3603. Why do you think that so many people have such a problem with gays? There’s various reasons. I don’t think a person’s sexuality should be an issue because it’s not their life and it doesn’t affect them. 3604. It seems like it is more accepted for a woman to be bi or gay than for a man. Why do you think that is? Because there’s the beliefs and stereotype that people have regarding how men should be and beliefs and stereotypes about gay men, and I guess the two don’t line up for some people.  3605. When a kid kisses another kid on the playground is it sexual harassment? I wouldn’t say that. It is likely that the kid isn’t aware of that being inappropriate and should be taught about it. It would become a problem if it continued to happen.

3606. If you had to name your self after an object in the room with you what would you pick? Mac. It could be short for Makenzie. ha. 3607. Pick the two most important things out of these: writing deep thoughts, expressing your self clearly, being honest, finding new novel ways to waste time, being organized, practicing what you want to do, trying to be famous Being honest and practicing what you want to do. 3608. You were only waiting for this momen to ----- “arrive. Black bird, fly.” 3609. Knowing historically that native American indians were and are the first americans, how do you feel about america and current americans? It’s almost 3AM, bud. I can’t try and get into this. 3610. Just what exactly determines whether or not one is 'mental'? We’re going to go with this, “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) defines a “mental disorder” as “a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning.” 3611. is it true that people with depression CAN'T function in society? Absolutely not true.  3612. fill in the word: half of what i say is ----------- Fake. Ha. 3613. Some people believe the Holocaust was a hoax?. What do you think of this? I think that’s incredibly stupid. I mean, there’s evidence and documentation. 3614. Does EVERYONE in the world care about how they look except YOU? Ha, no, not EVERYONE. I definitely have given up on putting much effort into myself I admit and it’s a problem. I’ve really neglected myself in a lot of ways.  3615. Do you love italian names like Lorenzo, Gaetano, and Grazziano? Not particularly, no offense.  3616. Everyone does horrible things: Do you think that people are more acceptiong of the bad things they do themselves or the bad things others do? That’s difficult to say. Some people justify their actions and make excuses but aren’t understanding of others who do the same thing. Others are more accepting of others and can see it differently on the outside looking in and are much harsher and less accepting of themselves.  Which are you more accepting of? I’m definitely more understanding and sympathetic of others. I fail to see the positive or good in myself that I see in others in similar situations. I’ll think I’m the most horrible person on the planet but not someone else who does something similar. 3617. Is it true that NO ONE wants to date grumpy people? I can’t say that NO ONE wants to cause it happens. I’m sure it’s not something they actively seek in a person, but that grumpy person could have other great qualities. 3618. Bush and his henchmen have now come up with a list of people for the CIA to assassinate. What do you think of this? I think this survey is super old for one. I also don’t know anything about this to give an opinion. 3619. Why is it that in many states sodomy and oral sex are still illegal, even if they are consensual? I wasn’t aware oral sex was illegal in some states. I don’t feel like researching this and seeing if that’s still the case cause this survey is very old and it’s possible that’s no longer true.  3620. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of: liberals? conservatives? hippies? nobel peace prize winners? black panthers? time magazine? feminists? 3621. Order these issues from most important and needing to be dealt with to least important and we can put it off: cloning, racism, aids cure, the middle east, putting power back in the hands of the people, the environment, better education 3622. Do you feel like you are missing out because you can only know a certain number of people in this world and you can't know everyone? I honestly haven’t thought about that. I’m not a very social or outgoing person to be honest and I couldn’t handle knowing that many people. Like, my friend group, when I actually had one, was less than a handful of people and I was perfectly fine with that. It is sad to think that I’m missing out on knowing some really cool, interesting people, though. 3623. What do you imagine being a soldier in a war is actually like? I imagine it’s very traumatic and scary to say the very least.  3624. Do you agree that woman should be allowed to enlist in the army? Uh, yes. I know this survey isn’t THAT old. 3625. What is the purpose of government? It’s supposed to protect our rights, safely and fairly enforce laws, prepare for common defense, support the economic system, and provide public services.  3626. Why don't people believe in free love anymore? People still do that. 3627. Do you make desicions with your head or your heart? Both. One sometimes outweighs the other, though. It really just depends.  3628. What is the differance between sympathy and empathy? Sympathy is understanding and offering support and comfort, while empathy is actually sharing the feelings with another and being able put yourself in their shoes. 3629. Can you think of any person or group you cannot empathsize with? Abusers, rapists, pedophiles, and murderers.  3630. Like creme savers? I used love these strawberry ones I’d get in middle school.  3631. Your best friends asks you to marry them Out of the blue. You say: My best friend is my mom, so that would never happen. 3632. What makes you feel seriously depressed? My health and my life. And my brain with its messed up serotonin.  3633. Have you personaly worked for peace? No. 3634. Do you suppress parts of yourself because you are afraid of judgement? Yes. Like I keep a lot of my opinions and feelings to myself.  3635. Do you take in the ideas and opinions of others too often?/ I mean, I’m open minded and willing to hear other opinions and ideas.  3636. 36 - 24 - 36? Why are over 10 questions missing? 3637. What just isn't right? All the hatred and violence in this world for one. 3638. What make syour blood boil?? Children and animal abusers. 3639. Have you ever gone to the bathroom in aplace that wasn't a bathroom? Uh, no. 3640. Want some water melon? Nah. 3641. What's your favorite gum? Minty ones. 3642. What do you imagine going to Harvard is like? Hard and expensive, ha. 3643. What would you get rid of forever if you had to choose snow or rain? Yikes, I wouldn’t want to get rid of either one. 3644. Is there a santa clause? No, but it’s still fun to believe and pretend.  3645. Do you understand yourself? Haaaa. Nope. Do you understand everyone else? Absolutely not. 3646. Do you think there is a connection between understanding yourself and understanding others? Yeah in some ways. I mean, if you’re able to understand why you might do a certain thing then perhaps you can understand why someone else might, too. 3647. What's good? Nothing. 3648. Have you ever played dodge ball? I avoided that game at all costs out of fear. Getting balls thrown at you isn’t my idea of fun. People would get really into it and throw with such force like damn.  3649. Is there anything you feel men can do better than woman? How good someone is at something depends on the person themselves. 3650. Is there anything you feel woman can do better than men? 3651. What do you think of jazz? It’s nice. Can be relaxing. 3652. Why do you suppose Christmas has more hype than Chanucka? Because Christmas became a commercial holiday and people lost sight of the real reason.  3653. What is like a rock? Jesus. 3654. Who do you 100% trust? God. 3655. Are you dreaming of a white christmas? Yes! I wish it snowed here. I’d love to experience snow during Christmas. 3656. Have you done anything nice for your neighbors this year? No. 3657. What is the most courageous thing you have ever done? I don’t know. I don’t feel very courageous.  3658. What things (not people) would you miss most if you were locking the big brother house for weeks on end? My laptop, phone, and having time alone. 3659. Use five words to describe your life now. Frustrating, irritating, hard, sad, and unmotivated.  3660. Use five words to describe your family. Loving, supportive, caring, protective, and funny. 3661. Use five words to describe your childhood. Happy, fun, enjoyable, imaginative, and innocent.  3662. Who has seen the wind? No one. 3663. what's the point of MLA format? Why can't students just freely write their gathered info and opinions the way they feel is best for them? 3664. What's your favorite fairy tale? Alice Through the Looking Glass. 3665. How will explain god to your children (or a child)? In a kid way with kids books and activities. They’ll be able to ask me anything. 3666. Is this question satanic? No...? 3667. Name a person that you love. My mom. Describe how they look: Black, curly hair, about 5′5, brown eyes, freckles. Describe how they sound: I don’t know how to describe how someone sounds. Describe how they smell: Like vanilla. Describe how they feel: Soft. Describe how they taste: I haven’t tasted my mom... 3668. What will last longer, the moon or the human race? The world will end entirely one day. 3669. Whose lives do you value more; those of your country or all of humanity? I don’t want any innocent lives lost. 3670. If the jehovas witnesses dropped by your house what would you do? Nothing. I don’t answer the door for anyone. 3671. Someone you work with or go to school with is giving you a surprise gift. Would you like it better if it were a talking teddybear or a mini tarot deck? A teddy bear. I don’t use or believe in stuff like tarot cards, so I’d have no use for them. 3672. Where does the sky begin? Just above the ground? Sure. 3673. What's the most romantic thing to do? There’s a lot of things. 3674. What's your most twisted, perverted or odd fantasy? I don’t have any. 3675. What's wrong with lieing? It can be really hurtful and cause a lot of problems. 3676. If you could have lunch with any _______ who would it be? rock star? actor/actress? Alexander Skarsgard.

political leader? historical figure? dead person? person from your past? My grandma who passed away. person in the world? writer? artist? fictional character? The Riverdale gang at Pop’s Diner. Disney character? Winnie the Pooh cause he loves to eat. A samuri? 3677. Dedicate a song to someone right now. Nah. 3678. It's christmas eve at ten o'clock at night and YOU HAVE NO SHOPPING DONE! The only thing that's open is the grocery store and the drug store. Do you do all your christmas shopping in the grocery and drug store? Omg I would never do that, but I’ll play along. If those were the only places open then I guess I’d have no choice.  3679. If superman is so powerful how does he get with Louis Lane? Wouldn't he kill her? Apparently not. 3680. What do you think of Jane Fonda? Alan Alda? 3681. Remember Mary Popins? Yes. Feed the birds tuppence a bag. What is 'tuppance'? It’s apparently old British slang for “two pence.” 3682. What was the saddest most tear jerking heart wrenching moment of the movie Titanic? When the old couple is lying in bed together holding hands as the boat is sinking. 3683. Would you like a nice hot bath? No. 3684. Why is jesus always pictured as white when he came from the middle east and was probably middle eastern? 3685. Which is worse: Sand in your underwear or Sand in your mouth? Ew. I guess my mouth, but blech. 3686. Has President Bush made his case for war with Iraq? 3687. Should Senator Lott resign (or have resigned) his leadership post? I don’t know about him and since this survey is old he’s probably not even in office anymore.  3688. If you could pick time's person of the year who would you pick? I don’t know. 3689. Name all the people you know who you are attracted to and what is attracctive about them? Alexander Skarsgard. Well, I don’t know him, but still. He’s gorgeous. 3690. What does RSVP actually mean? It’s French asking you to please respond.  3691. Is rhyming fun? Sure. 3692. Are your dreams violent? Not usually, but omg the dream I had last night was. It was horrible. 3693. What 3 questions would you love to ask either your mom or your dad? I don’t know. 3694. What are the hardest words to say? The hardest thing for me is talking about my feelings. 3695. Should I smile because we're friends or cry because that's all we'll ever be? I’ve been in situations like that a couple of times and it’s hard. Ultimately; though, I wanted them in my life, and I had to accept that we would only be friends. Doesn’t mean it was easy, though. I couldn’t just switch off my feelings.  3696. What do you think of the slogan 'you laugh because i'm different. I laugh becuse you are all the same' I mean yeah it’s better to be yourself than be like everyone else. 3697. How do you stop dry elbows? Lotion? 3698. Why don't people MAKE gifts more often? I don’t know. For me, I’m not crafty or creative at all.  3699. Tell it to the world! Read my lips: What. 3700. Do you like those plastic couch coverings? Nah.

[thebewisepodcast]

Eight Other Worlds In Our Solar System Might Have Life Beyond Earth

"If I had to describe myself to an alien I'd say I was bigger than the average human, enjoy a drink or two with a good meal and have a bigger head than most. 

 I'd also say I'm really handsome  -  especially if they were a female alien."

Dwayne Johnson

In all the known Universe, to the best that we've examined it, 'only' our home planet, Earth, contains confirmed signs of life. 

 But the raw ingredients required for life appear everywhere, from the interiors of asteroids to interstellar gas clouds to protoplanetary nebulae to the exploded remnants of supernovae. 

 The chemical combinations associated with the building blocks of life, and even complex, organic molecules are found literally everywhere we look in space.

 But we might not have to venture so far to actually encounter life at all, as eight worlds beyond Earth all offer unique possibilities for the presence of organic, biological activity.

   Signatures of organic, life-giving molecules

are found all over the cosmos, 

including in the largest, nearby star-forming region: 

the Orion Nebula. 

Image credit: ESA, HEXOS and the HIFI consortium; E. Bergin.  

It's true that here's a big gulf between "organic molecules" and what we consider today to be a living organism. 

 Although there are a huge host of interesting possibilities for what's out there, we've so far found nothing else on another world that we'd consider to be "alive," nor have we found 'remnants of past life' on any worlds.

 But the Solar System is a great place to start, because it's so close and accessible! 

 While nothing is for certain, we have a number of intriguing possibilities for where the first signs of life beyond Earth might be found.

 In order of what we consider most likely to least likely, here are the top eight!

 1.) Europa

 Jupiter's second of its four large moons, Europa might at first seem like it's too far from the Sun to be a good candidate for life.

 But Europa has two special things going for it: 

a ton of water  -  more water than is present on all of Earth

some internal heating due to the tidal forces of Jupiter

Beneath a surface of ice, Europa has an enormous ocean of liquid water, and the heating of its insides due to Jupiter's gravity may create a situation very analogous to the life-giving hydrothermal vents on the Earth's ocean floor. 

 It's not likely to be life like we see on the surface of Earth, but life that can survive, reproduce and evolve is life any way you slice it.

   Europa, 

one of the solar system's largest moons, orbits Jupiter. 

Beneath its frozen, icy surface, 

a liquid water of ocean is heated

by tidal forces from Jupiter. 

Image credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SETI Institute

Cynthia Phillips, Marty Valenti.  

 2.) Enceladus

 Saturn's icy moon is smaller and has far less water than Europa, but it announces its liquid ocean (beneath a surface of solid ice) uniquely: 

by spewing 300-mile plumes of water into space! 

These geysers let us know for certain that there's liquid water, and in tandem with the other elements and molecules necessary for life, such as methane, ammonia and carbon dioxide, there just might be life beneath the oceans of this world, too. 

 Europa has more heat, more water and hence  -  we think  -  a greater chance, but don't count Enceladus out, since it has a thinner ice surface and erupts far more spectacularly, meaning that we could find life with an orbiting mission, rather than having to drill down beneath the surface!

   One of the most intriguing  -  and least resource-intensive  -  ideas

for searching for life in Enceladus' ocean

is to fly a probe through the geyser-like eruption, 

collecting samples and analyzing them for organics.

Image credit: NASA / Cassini-Huygens mission

Imaging Science Subsystem.  

  3.) Mars

 The 'red' planet was once clearly very, very Earth-like. 

 For perhaps the first billion years of the Solar System, water flowed freely across the martian surface, carving rivers, accumulating in lakes and oceans, and leaving remnant evidence that shows us, today, where they were once located. 

 Features associated with a watery past, like hematite spherules (often associated with life on Earth), are common. In addition, the Curiosity rover has found an active, underground and variable source of methane, a possible signature of life today. 

 And now that we know liquid water appears on the martian surface, albeit in a very salty environment, the door is definitely open.

Is there life?

Was there life at one point, but no longer? 

Mars remains a tantalizing possibility...

   The flow of a dried-up riverbed

is an unmistakable signature of

a water-rich past on Mars. 

Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum).  

4.) Titan

 Enceladus might offer the greatest possibility for Earth-like life in the Saturnian system, but perhaps life takes on a different form from the water-based biology here on Earth? 

 With a thicker atmosphere than our own planet, the second-largest moon in our Solar System, Titan, was found to have liquid methane on its surface: 

oceans, rivers and even waterfalls! 

Could life make use of methane on another world the same way it makes use of water on Earth? 

 If the answer to that is yes, there just might be living organisms on Titan today.

   The surface of Titan, beneath the clouds, 

was found to contain methane lakes, rivers and waterfalls. 

Could it also be home to some type of life? 

Image credit: ESA, NASA, JPL, University of Arizona;

panorama by Rene Pascal.  

5.) Venus

 Venus is hell, literally.

 At a constant surface temperature of some 900 degrees Fahrenheit, no human-made lander has ever survived more than a couple of hours while touched down on our nearest neighboring planet. 

 But the reason Venus is so hot is because of it's thick, carbon-dioxide rich atmosphere laden with heat-trapping clouds of sulphuric acid.

 This renders the surface of Venus thoroughly inhospitable, but the surface isn't the only place to look for life. In fact, speculation is rampant that perhaps something interesting is happening some 60 miles up! 

 Above the cloud-tops of Venus, the environment is surprisingly Earth-like: 

similar temperatures, pressures, and less corrosive material. 

It's conceivable that with its own unique chemical history, that environment is filled with carbon-based airborne life, something that a mission to Venus' upper atmosphere could easily sniff out.

   The surface of Venus, 

from the only spacecraft to ever successfully

land and transmit data from that world. 

Image credit: Venera landers / USSR.  

6.) Triton

 You might not have heard much of Neptune's largest moon Triton, but it's remarkable and unique among all the worlds of the solar system.

 It has "black smoker" volcanoes, it rotates and revolves the wrong way, and it originated from the Kuiper belt. 

 Larger and more massive than both Pluto and Eris, it was once the king of all Kuiper belt objects, and now, in orbit around our Solar System's final planet, we recognize that it's covered in many life-giving materials, including nitrogen, oxygen, frozen water and methane ices. 

 Could some form of primitive life exist at these energy interfaces?

 It's certainly worth a look!

   The Voyager 2 spacecraft

took this color photo of Neptune's moon Triton

on Aug. 24 1989, at a range of 330,000 miles. 

The image was made from pictures

taken through the green, violet and ultraviolet filters. 

Image credit: NASA / JPL.  

7.) Ceres

 It might sound crazy to think of the possibility that life might exist on an asteroid. 

 Yet when asteroids fall to Earth, we find not just the 20 amino acids essential to life, but nearly 100 others:

the building blocks are all there! 

Could the largest asteroid of them all, the one with those bizarre, salt-deposit "white spots" on the bottom of its brightest craters, actually house some form of life? 

 Although the answer is "probably not," it's conceivable that it was actually collisions with asteroids and Kuiper belt objects that brought either the raw ingredients for life or pre-existing, primitive life to Earth. 

 What we consider, today, to be active biology, might have begun before Earth ever formed. If so, the signatures might be embedded within a world like Ceres, which is the best candidate for life in the asteroid belt. 

 We just have to look to find out. And finally…

   This global map

shows the surface of Ceres in enhanced color, 

encompassing infrared wavelengths

beyond human visual range. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.  

8.) Pluto

 Who would've expected that history's outermost world  -  at a temperature just 100 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero  -  would be a candidate for life? 

 And yet, Pluto has an atmosphere, it has remarkable, changing surface features, it has the same ices that Triton has, and objects just like it may be responsible for bringing much of what looks like Earth's atmosphere and oceans to our planet.

 Could it have brought life as well? 

 New Horizons will bring us hints, but to find out for certain, we'll need a landing mission.

   Pluto's atmosphere,

 as imaged by New Horizons

 when it flew into the distant world's eclipse shadow. 

Image credit: NASA / JHUAPL / New Horizons / LORRI.

We always think of ourselves as 'alone' (sic...) in both the solar system and in the greater Universe, and yet that may be more a function of us looking for things exactly like us than of us actually being alone.

   The "holy cow" mosaic of the Mars Phoenix mission,

with revealed water-ice clearly visible underneath the lander's legs. 

In order to learn the maximum amount possible

about the presence or absence of life on a world, 

you absolutely must touch down

and look, explicitly, for the surefire signatures. 

Image credit: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

Max Planck Institute / Spaceflight

Marco Di Lorenzo, Kenneth Kremer

Phoenix Lander.

  If we go and investigate, we might not only find life in unexpected, thought-to-be-inhospitable places, we might wind up finding life that looks very little like the life we currently understand...

 Our logic, our intuition and our inklings can only get us so far. If we want to know, we have to go and look. 

 Every time we've done exactly that, the Universe has had a wonderful way of surprising us...  

[rcrawfordjournal-blog]

Journal 8

“Just the Way it Is” – 1986 – performed by Bruce Hornsby

Instrumentally, this song includes some very calming piano music as well as a very 80’s synthesized drum beat and a little bit of synthesized horn sound. About a minute into the song, a muffled and echoey voice enters. Hornsby’s singing voice is very smooth and clear. The lyrics are interesting because they come from the perspective of about twenty years after the Civil Rights Act was passed. Today, being about fifty years removed, it’s easy for us to distance ourselves from the civil rights era, but I bet people even in Hornsby’s time also had an attitude like, “it’s been twenty years already, just give it a rest!” Therefore, Hornsby sings about his frustration with the public’s feelings of complacency with the status quo in racial inequality, suggesting that the main attitude is: “that’s just the way it is / some things will never change.” He suggests that the problem is not necessarily with the law but with individual attitudes: “well they passed a law in 64 to give those who ain’t got a little more, but it only goes so far because the law don’t change another’s mind when all it sees at the hiring time is the line on the color bar.” Evidently, these individual attitudes can add up to create systemic harm for African Americans seeking employment or other goals that would necessitate equal treatment. Interestingly, the song doesn’t necessarily sound either happy or sad; in fact, if anything, it’s a happy song, because the last minute of the song is super upbeat, fun piano variations on the main melody. I think maybe this mood of the song is a comment on how people see problems of racial injustice as “that’s just the way it is” instead of being outraged.

“Fuck tha Police” – 1988 – performed by NWA

I am so excited about this song and so upset that I am missing the class discussion today for ethics bowl. Anyways the song starts with the classic record scratch sound of hip hop from this time. It mostly features a repetitive staccato saxophone line, an intense drumbeat, and quite a few record scratches throughout. The rappers’ voices are super 80’s sounding, just very loud and forceful but almost a little bit high pitched. The song features some interludes of police skits, similar to that Stevie Wonder song we listened to. I like how the song is framed as a “trial” in which the MCs are putting the police on trial. In general this song is a major reversal of a harmful dichotomy that provides the police with an undue amount of power over black lives. For example, when they say, “Without a gun and a badge, what do you got? A sucker in a uniform waiting to get shot, by me, or another nigga,” this line is highlighting something people unquestioningly take for granted, which is that police are exempt from being vulnerable to street violence, even though they themselves can shoot people if they deem it necessary. In general, this song suggests that police are two things: 1. inherently evil (and yes, all cops) because they systematically victimize black people, and 2. cowards because without the uniform, the gangsters would be the ones with power over the police’s lives on the street. My favorite part is the last skit, which imagines a reversal of the power dynamic: “the jury has found you guilty of being a redneck, white bread, chickenshit motherfucker” “wait, that’s a lie! that’s a goddamn lie!” “get him out of here!” “I want justice!” “get him the fuck out my face!” “I want justice!” “out, right now!” “fuck you, you black motherfuckers!” While I’m sure this song was (and still is) extremely controversial for literally encouraging the violent death of police officers, I think it is very effective in its exposure and imagined reversal of the existing power dynamics among police officers and “criminals,” i.e., urban-dwelling black men.

“Negro wit an Ego” – 1990 – performed by Salt n Pepa

This song mainly involves a breakbreat drum and synthesized organ. There is a short instrumental intro and then this moaning wail in the background to transition to the verse. Their voices start quick and unapologetic: “here, we, go. I’m a negro wit an ego.” Salt n Pepa’s voices/affects sound similar to the style that NWA has, which is a style I associate with the Beastie Boys for some reason, which is probably problematic. Salt n Pepa do of course have feminine voices, though, so that does change the style a little bit, especially in the sung chorus, “Put some faith, in your race.” I appreciate the message of this song because black women are often accused of having a bad attitude, so I love that they are owning their right to have what is pejoratively called an “ego” but could otherwise be described as self-assurance or confidence: “I’m proud of who and what I am so call me a negro with an ego.” Since African Americans are so discouraged from loving themselves, this kind of self-love is almost a kind of radical political statement. Additionally, for women (especially black and Latina women), self-confidence is usually understood as something sexual, which is why they say “No, we ain’t trying to be sexy.” Their confidence is for themselves, not for anyone else. My two favorite lines are one after the other: “When I drop a nine-eleven on my 200C the cops are surprised to see a minority behind the wheel of this car it must be narcotics how else could she have got it?” This is similar to the line from NWA about “me and Lorenzo rolling in a Benzo” – black people are not allowed to be opulent without suspicion of crime, which is a concept rooted in the economic and ideological oppression of black people. Then, “A brown skinned female with two problems to correct – wrong color, wrong sex.” This line shows the intersection of how black women are oppressed by both race and gender inequalities.

“Black or White” – 1991 – performed by Michael Jackson

This song is about unity across racial lines, or at least equal treatment. The percussion is really interesting. It involves a regular drumbeat plus claps and something kind of twangy and tropical. Plus, there is a bass line that zips up and down, and a bright happy guitar line. Michael Jackson’s voice is really pleasing, kinda half-shouty but also really smooth not super raspy like James Brown. He includes lots of vocalizations, like “eee,” “yeah,” or “jam on,” which I guess is also similar to James Brown. I thought it was interesting how this song blurs the lines between black and white, because other songs like James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud” and Salt n Pepa’s “Negro wit an Ego” very much assert being proud of one’s blackness, but MJ is almost advocating a kind of colorblindness here that would come into conflict with that idea. My own personal bias is that I believe colorblindness is ultimately harmful because it can be used as an excuse for insidiously racist assumptions or behaviors. However, it’s interesting to think about the intersection between racial justice and “colorblindness” in the context of Michael Jackson’s life because he was in this middle ground between blackness and whiteness – he was black by heritage but towards the end of his life he looked very white due to medial complications and different changes to his look. So I definitely think that influenced his take on this issue, and it gives me more to think about why I might have a problem with the idea of colorblindness or what I am overlooking in how that idea might be good for people who don’t fit in a neat box of either “black” or “white.”