#BUT NOW WHAT SEEMS TO BE ONLY A FEW MONTHS LATER ITS ALMOST 2018

[choicesficwriterscreations]

CFWC Writer of the Month - Aug 2023: ao719

Each month CFWC highlights one of our talented fanfic writers, and this month’s writer of the month is @ao719. We hope you will enjoy learning more about them and their work below! The writer is selected at random. More info can be found on the navigation page.

Quick Links:

Tumblr Blog: ao719 Blog Masterlist

How do you want to be known on Tumblr? Anitah

1- When did you start playing Choices? What was the first book you played? 

I first started playing in June 2018. The Royal Romance was the first book I played, and I got hooked from the end of the first chapter. At the time, they were midway through releasing TRR book 3, so I binged books 1 & 2 and finally caught up on the day of the wedding, where the chapter ended with the attack at the boutique. Then I didn’t know what to do with myself because it was the first time I had to wait a week to find out what was going to happen.

2- When and why did you join Choices fandom?

Finding Tumblr was a complete accident. I was googling something really dumb about Liam and TRR and happened to stumble across a link for a fic on Tumblr. At the time, I didn’t know what Tumblr was; I’d heard of it but had no idea what it consisted of. The fic I came across was around 40+ chapters, and I was in my glory reading this angsty story about Liam, but it wasn’t finished, so when I reached the last updated chapter, I was like, “I need more.” So I opened Tumblr and searched for more Liam fics and found a trove. I lurked for another month or so before finally making my account in September 2018.

3- How did you pick your blog name? 

I wish I had some good story for it, but it’s the most basic thing, lol. It’s just my initials and a significant date. I think if I came into the fandom with the intention of actually doing something with the blog, I would have tried to come up with something a little more clever and creative, but I had zero intention of doing anything but reading. I thought about changing it a few years ago, but when I learned that I’d have to relink everything in my masterlist, it didn’t seem worth the hassle.

4- Pull up the first post in your archive, and tell us about it!  

It’s from the day TRR 3 ended and it’s about how I was sad that it was over but was glad that I had all these stories to read.

5- How long have you been writing fanfiction?

I’d never written anything until I joined the fandom, so I’ve only been writing for almost five years now. The thought of writing didn’t even cross my mind when I joined the fandom, but within a couple of weeks of making my blog, I had a random idea pop up in my head, and for some reason, I decided to write it down. A few days later, after talking myself out of posting and then talking myself back into it, I bit the bullet. For me to post a story that I wrote was entirely out of my comfort zone. I’m pretty shy and tend to be more of a wallflower, so I don’t usually put myself out there, especially like that, and I’ve never been someone who does something where I intentionally set myself up, knowing there is a very good chance that I will fail. And social media on any platform can be a pretty intimidating and terrifying place when you open yourself up, especially to strangers, even by way of posting a measly little fanfic. So to say I was terrified of posting that first fic is an understatement, but I’m so glad that I did.

6- What is your favorite Choices book, and what is your favorite Choices book to write about?

The Royal Romance will always be my favorite. It was the first book I ever played and was the only one I played for well over a year (I just kept replaying over and over and over until @cocomaxley convinced me to give MotY a try, which I fell in love with). It’s my comfort book. And like every book, it definitely has its flaws, but I love it and the characters so much. And TRR is my favorite book to write about. Liam will always be my number one guy.

7- Share the first fanfic you wrote with us. Do you still like it, or would you change it if you were writing it today?

The first fic that I wrote was I Dare You. It’s not an all-time favorite of mine, but I like it well enough that I wouldn’t change anything about it.

8- What is your favorite fic that you’ve written?

This is tough because I have a few that I love for different reasons, but I think Always You will always be the most special to me because it was the first series I wrote that I can truly say I poured my whole heart into. I love that story, and I love the history between Liam and the OC, their bond, and their relationship. 

9- Do you have a fic that you didn’t expect to be well received, but it was? What about one you expected to be but found could use a little more love?

When I decided to start Hopeless Hearts, I didn’t think it would be received any differently from most things I’d written before. It was an idea I’d kept on the back burner for over 2 years prior to writing it because I didn’t think it was anything spectacular or out of the box. It turned out to be my most well-received series, and it became one of my personal favorites as well.

I don’t think anything I’ve written has left me feeling as though I wished it had gotten more. I’m still surprised to this day that anyone wants to read anything I’ve written at all, so any love that my fics get is beyond appreciated.

10- If you could write only angst, fluff, or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why? 

Angst (but with a HEA). I love putting my characters through the wringer before giving them that happily ever after they deserve. Whether I’m reading or writing, there’s something about feeling the pain and longing they’re going through that gets me emotionally invested. I think that’s why I love the second chance romance trope so much, too. It’s a really versatile trope, but there’s a lot of room for angst in those kinds of stories because of that established history between the characters and a past that tore them apart the first time around.

11- Do you ever recognize yourself in any of your MCs or in your writing?

I think I sprinkle a little bit of myself into all of my MCs/OCs. It’s usually something small like a favorite food, a hobby, certain mannerisms, etc. I think the one that I’ve added more of myself into than any other and can relate to the most personality wise would definitely be Charlotte.

12- What element of writing do you struggle with most?

I struggle with all of it here and there, and I’m constantly questioning whether something makes sense, if it’s flowing together, if it’s too descriptive or not descriptive enough, etc. I think the one area I most consistently struggle with is deciding where and how to end because I always want to leave my chapters with a cliffhanger or if I’m finishing something for good, I want to give it the ending it deserves. 

13- Do you have any neglected work you really want to finish?

I have quite a few that are unfinished that I know I more than likely won’t ever pick back up, mostly because I just lost my mojo for them, but there are definitely some that I want to finish. I’d really like to get back to Past Meet Present one day. I don’t even remember why I got off track with writing it, and it’s been at least two years or more since I last updated it 🫣 so I’m not sure if anyone would even still be interested at this point, but I’d really like to finish that along with Breaking Point and Us Again.

14- If someone you know in real life (who isn’t involved in fandoms) asked to read your work, would you let them? If yes, what would you recommend they read first? 

No. Maybe. I don’t know, lol. I try to be a “never say never” kind of person, but writing is something that I’ve done for almost five years that literally no one in my real life knows about. Not my friends, not my family, not a single soul. It’s like my dirty little secret. And it’s a little tough because it does get lonely sometimes when you have something that you love doing so much but you just feel like you can’t share or aren’t ready to share that part of yourself with even those closest to you. I’m a pretty self-conscious person, and posting on here where I can hide behind a screen is hard enough; I get nervous and have a good spike of anxiety every time I post something, no matter what it is. I don’t know if I could handle someone who knows me personally even knowing that I write, let alone actually reading something I’ve written. I’ve got the bubble gut just thinking about it 🥴

15 - Are there any writers (published authors and/or fanfic writers) who influenced your writing? 

I’ve been lucky enough to talk to and befriend some amazing and talented people in the time I’ve been here who I’ve certainly looked up to when it comes to their writing talents. And there are also those writers who I got to know after I’d been writing for a while that not only continued to inspire me with their amazing stories and talent but who also became a huge support and really close friends. They were and/or are always willing to brainstorm, look over snippets, help in those moments when I’ve been extra critical of myself and feeling very unsure, and/or have just been the absolute best cheerleaders and constantly supportive and encouraging to not only me but others as well. I don’t want to make a list because I always end up forgetting someone and I don’t want to leave anyone out, but anyone that fits that bill above, you know how much I love and appreciate each one of you.

16- Which one of your stories would you most like to see as a movie/series? 

I’d say either Always You or Hopeless Hearts for a movie. Series I think Full Disclosure with some Charlotte shenanigans would be pretty fun 😂

17- Do you write original fiction? 

I haven’t. I’ve been asked a few times about whether I’ve thought about turning a couple of my series into original stories, but I just don’t think I’ll have the confidence to ever do it 😬

18 -  What other hobbies do you have?

I do photography. I love calligraphy and making hand drawn quote signs on wood or canvas. I love to read — I’m currently in my fantasy girl era and have been obsessing over the ACOTAR series for months, lol. 

19 - What’s your favorite emoji? 

I use so many to express myself in conversations that I think it would be hard to pick just one. My most commonly used ones: 💀 😂 🥲 😬 😍 🥴 🥹

20: BONUS - tell us anything you’d like (if you want to).

I just want to thank CFWC for working so hard to help keep this fandom active and supporting everyone here. 

To anyone who’s taken any time to read my stories and interact with me in any way, I appreciate it more than I can say. 

This place has been such an escape for me over the past (almost) five years, one I’m still very much in need of. So, whether you’re a content creator, writer, artist, reader, whatever the case may be, whether we’ve interacted before or not, thank you for what you’ve done to help keep this fandom alive.

[actionfigurebullshit]

Eight Years On A Project Not Worth The Time

I've said it a few times already, this is the general era in which I thought a regular return to AFB would be possible.

How did the whole thing go in the first place? A recap:

I wanted to do a spiritual follow up to an action figure project I did as a kid, a summer of stop motion and newspaper delivery. It all seemed like part of a moment in my life, right before things went really wrong for many years.

And I think AFB got started because of a similar "meet you on the other side" kind of stuff. Not to say that the years between when this started and how have been bad. There have been many good years, many hard years... this has probably been the only year that has sucked, and yet it's had its share of goodness to go with it.

But I wanted to do a spiritual follow up because I wanted to have my own characters, not one from a video game, with characters that look very much like Star Trek. This was what was so neat about my Cadet Data action figure. I remember feeling so much disappointment when I got him for Christmas several years prior. I was tired of these action figures for a time- fatigued, wanting to move on. I was... maybe 13? These were the same kinds of toys I was getting since I was 7, and I think people in general were getting tired of them. Anyway, all that changed with the first project. Suddenly, Cadet Data was John O'Connor, and a very different kind of persona came over the character. Cadet Data, of course, then became Newton many years later, and this action figure... didn't really show the way so much as a demonstration of their potential. I wanted those Starfleet Academy action figures, but they were cost prohibitive in part because of the CD-ROM included. Pfft! Funny to think about now, something I'm sure is a glorified PDF or Flash, a mock up of a LCARS interface with biographies on the character that the disc came with, and perhaps some text only or minimal image ads for Playmates? I never found out what was on them, even though I have two of these discs.

Anyway, after some thought, some test shots, and an experimental video, I started filming in October 2015. There was the first shots of the TV room done around midnight, October 1st, and then there was the "film bonanza", which occurred over nine days in the latter half of that month. By the end of the year, I had about 12 minutes. Then it got a little stuck, and I'd go on to film some more in the middle part of the year, then there were setbacks in my life, coupled with feeling like I reached an impasse in the project. Then good things happened, life changed up consideraby, and I felt like I would not be able to get back to the project for years, so made one last go animation in April of 2018.

I made an attempt to get back into it in April 2019. This was cut short when I learned of the death of my friend, long time collaborator, and lead actress who voiced both Moxie and Newton. I did not find out about her death until 8 or 9 days after it happened, and this footage was filmed in this timespan. I'm not sure if I will keep this footage.

I was ready to try again two years later, my momentum killed when I recovered from my first COVID-19 vaccine shot. That was 2021, and I might have eventually started up, but we got a heatwave which took things up to almost 120 degrees.

This is the last time I've tried to film AFB, and it's been two and a half years since I filmed anything. It's hard to find room for this project, literally and figuratively. In between the last time I filmed and now, it seems like we ran out of space in our little home. There's just no good place to do it, though if I were to give it a go... The exact spot where I filmed at the very beginning!

In light of everything, I don't know if the movie can proceed, though I remember that all this stuff I've been working on was just the set up for WEIRD SHIT, though I never got a clear idea of what was going on besides our heroes getting lost in this corridor, where things start to get REALLY, REALLY WEIRD... right?

There is a chance this can still be done with Moxie and Newton having reduced roles in this part of the story- we just find out that these guys just weren't meant to be stars of the show. I might be able to voice Newton. I could do Moxie, too... but I can't...

Or maybe I'll say "fuck it", and do it anyway, relish in my first role as a woman. I think it could be fun to conjure Moxie, conjure the ghost of my friend. I am thinking about those various scenes from the second season of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Austin St. John had been fired, but his character stayed on for a long while through use of stock footage and a voice actor. Jason would still be Jason when you see Austin, but when it's Dude-In-Red-Suit, it's clearly someone else, but it's all action noises and grunts. If you were 9, you wouldn't notice.

I think I would leave it to that. Moxie is now the person-on-the-screen, as I was in so many of Jane's videos. She's on screen, or on the phone, or a dream, or a hallucination, or a doppleganger.

The weirdness of what could lay ahead might have some expected meta- all that this project has encapsulated, a weird little fucking movie with action figures labeled "bullshit".

Which it is.

At the very least, I want to finish the scenes that Jane did dialogue for. It will probably be many years, at this rate, before I have to worry about what to do once all those lines run out.

And maybe it's time to start running the clock. Suppose my talent comes rushing back like I never stopped after a day or two, moving like Vamanos Pest Management. From XX to XX, complete set up, shoot, and break down. People come home and it's like nothing happened. There's nothing saying I can't go full speed ahead like I did in the ancient film bonanza during the Obama administration.

It's not likely to happen... but I want to pretend for a bit. There's nothing keeping me from being able to finish the "coconut and $#!%" scene in about 9 days. I don't know when those nine days would happen, they would certainly not be in a row.

...

Let me think about it. Let's see if we get any footage in 2023.

[bluejayblueskies]

the before, the after, the in-between

Chapter One: white daisies Words: 2.9k

Relationships: Jon & Daisy, Jon/Martin Tags: Post-Canon, Scottish Safehouse, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Mute Jon, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies

Summary:

There was no knife, no blood, and Jon was not dead. And when he heard a strangled noise from beside him and looked over to see Martin standing in the doorway of the safehouse, flung open and letting in the frigid bite of near-winter and sunlight, there was sunlight, he felt such a dizzying, intense wave of relief that he could hardly breathe around it.

Then, he opened his mouth to say Martin’s name, and nothing came out, and all of the relief fell away in an instant.

.

Jon wakes up in the safehouse in October of 2018, alive and well but without the Eye and without his voice. In the days that follow, he finds himself confronted with a world that has reset itself in space and in time, a version of himself that is no longer the Archivist, and the fact that death during the end of the world had not been so permanent as it had seemed.

Read on Ao3 (link in source)

Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five| Chapter Six| Chapter Seven

Or read below:

(cw for mentions of knife violence, mild blood)

There are white daisies on the kitchen table.

They’re what Jon saw first when he opened his eyes, awake and gasping for air, sprawled on his back on the floor and staring up at a brown ceiling and a brown kitchen chair and the bottom of a brown table and, amidst it all, a splash of white that caught his eye. He stared at the flowers, a memory tickling at the back of his mind—Martin cutting the flowers from a patch just outside the cottage, tucking them into a vase on the center of the table, Jon running a finger along the waxy petals and whispering, Daisies for Daisy—and then, with a rush, the rest of the memories came flooding back and he sat up so quickly his head spun, his hand going almost instinctively to his chest where the knife was—

But there wasn’t a knife. He was in the safehouse and there were fresh-cut daisies in a vase on the table and there was no knife. There was, however, when he pulled his jumper up to look, a scar—thick and raised, like it had been there for years.

There was no knife, no blood, and Jon was not dead. And when he heard a strangled noise and looked over to see Martin standing in the doorway of the safehouse, the door flung open and letting in the frigid bite of near-winter and sunlight, there was sunlight, he felt such a dizzying, intense wave of relief that he could hardly breathe around it.

Then, he opened his mouth to say Martin’s name, and nothing came out, and all of the relief fell away in an instant.

There are still white daisies on the kitchen table less than two days later, when Jon has fallen apart and picked himself back up again and fallen apart and picked himself back up again, more times than he cares to count. He sits in the hard wooden chair, legs crossed and elbows resting atop the varnished wood, and stares at the flowers, still as vibrant as the day they were picked nearly… six months ago? He wishes he knew how long it’s been, but he can’t. He can’t Know, and the Eye is gone, and he can’t speak, and his tears are soundless as he buries his face in Martin’s chest and grapples with the fact that for the first time in years, he’s never felt quite so human.

Martin thinks they’ve gone back in time. Jon thinks that time has caught up to them. Like the world, stitched back together and made anew, has simply picked up where it left off, unaware of how deeply scarred its inhabitants have become. Though Jon really doesn’t think it matters much at all.

It’s not the first argument they have. And it certainly will not be the last.

For now, though, Jon stares at the daisies, one hand tap tap tapping the cheap ballpoint pen on the moleskine notebook Martin had given him and the other wandering down to his left calf, where bite marks as wide as dominoes sit in even rows across his skin, scarred up before they’d even reached the next domain.

He rubs a thumb over one of the raised scars—the second set that had been left on his body by the same hands, both born from violence yet so distinct and different in Jon’s mind—and thinks, with a twinge of something deeply longing, I miss Daisy.

He’d missed her in intervals after he’d collected the bite mark scars on his calf. There had been so much to think about, so much to focus on, but in the quieter moments, he would think about the fact that she was gone—really, truly gone, in a way he couldn’t explain away like he could their first time in the safehouse—and feel the loss as acutely as a knife in his side. (Though now that he has experience with that specific brand of pain, he knows that the feelings aren’t quite the same. A knife is sharp and cutting, radiating pain. That ache was deeper, and it settled next to his bones, preparing to make itself at home within him forever.) Now, there is sunlight streaming in through the lattice windows and Jon closes his eyes when he sleeps and fear is as dull as a butter knife, and there is no limit to the moments of quiet. He looks at the white daisies, and he aches.

“Jon?” Martin says quietly, and Jon startles, still unused to not Knowing when somebody is near to him before they announce themselves. “Is… is everything all right?”

Jon nods reflexively, then bites his lip and slowly shakes his head. He looks down at the table for a moment before flipping open the moleskine, uncapping the pen, and scratching words neatly on the next available line despite the way his hand shakes ever so slightly as he writes. I miss Daisy.

He holds up the notebook, and Martin steps closer until he can make out the cramped words on the page. His forehead furrows like he hadn’t been expecting it, but after a moment, he says softly, “Me too.”

Jon gives him a flat, disbelieving look, and Martin sighs. “Okay, maybe I don’t. At least, not- not like you do. But I… I know you cared about her, Jon. I know she was there for you when I- I wasn’t, and I… I wanted to meet the version of Daisy that you pulled out of that coffin. Really meet her, I mean, without all of the loneliness and fog and- and end-of-the-world drama.” A corner of Martin’s mouth turns up into a sort of unhappy smile. “I guess I miss what could have been, then.” Quieter: “I’m sorry. I know that she… she meant a lot to you.”

Jon nods once, folding his hands together on his lap and worrying them together. He opens his mouth, then closes it with a frustrated sigh and reaches back for the notebook. Hastily, he scrawls, I think she would have liked you. Then: I wish you could have met her too. Then, hesitantly: I told her about you. I talked about you a lot. She never understood why I left you alone with Lukas, but she respected my decision to do so.

He holds it up, and Martin’s eyes scan the page quickly. Jon can see the moment Martin reads the last line, the way his jaw tenses and his throat bobs as he swallows. “Only nice things, I hope,” he says after a moment with a bit of forced cheeriness.

Jon exhales loudly through his nose—a breathy laugh, the only kind he can manage anymore—and shrugs.

Martin’s lips twitch into a smile, but it quickly folds under the pressure of the troubled look upon the rest of his face. “I’m glad that you had her,” he says quietly. “And I’m sorry you lost her.”

She had me as well, Jon scratches, holding it up for Martin to see. Then, his train of thought continues and he holds up a finger, pulling the moleskine back down to the table and inking a few more lines onto the page. It was hard to be human, but we helped each other. I wish I could have helped her during the apocalypse, and I wish I could help her now. It hurts to know that she could have had this, truly separated from the Hunt, but that she wasn’t given the chance.

He holds it up, trying to keep his hands steady as he gives Martin time to read through it. Then, Martin takes the moleskine from him and sets it carefully on the table before folding Jon’s hand in his and squeezing gently. He rubs his thumbs across the back of Jon’s knuckles as he says, “I know, love. I know.” He lifts Jon’s hand to his lips and presses a gentle kiss to it. His lips brush against the back of Jon’s hand as he says, “Would you… would you like to do something for her? A memorial, or- or something to remember her with? I know there wasn’t much of a chance to do so back when—back before, and it… it might help.”

Jon looks down at his lap, considering. He knows that Daisy is gone; he doesn’t know if this would make the ache in his chest lessen or grow tighter, and to do nothing and stay the same feels like the safer of the two options. Then, he catches a glimpse of white out of the corner of his eye—the daisies, sitting on the table, vibrant and alive and glowing slightly in the bright sunlight—and, eyes still locked on those waxy petals, he nods.

“Okay,” Martin says quietly. “All right.”

.

.

.

They stand atop one of the grassy hills close to the cottage, a thick scarf wrapped several times around Jon’s neck to keep away the cold and his mittened hands holding the bouquet of cut daisies, their petals fluttering and stems bowing in the wind. The moleskine is tucked away in his coat, but he hasn’t used it since they arrived out here. Martin’s arm is tucked around Jon, hand resting on his opposite hip as he pulls Jon close to his side, and they’re both silent as they stare out over the grassy knolls, peppered with orange and white cows and brown pickets with wire strung between them.

Jon takes a daisy from the bouquet, holding it carefully in his hand lest it blow away too early, and watches it wave back and forth in the wind, flimsier without the support of the rest of the flowers. He remembers calling Daisy’s name with dirt clustering at the corners of his mouth and filling his nostrils, feeling terror grip him as the soil around him began to shift and move, rivulets of water trickling into his eyes and stinging as he tried to blink them away. He recalls the relief, all-consuming and so potent he thought he would choke on it (if he hadn’t already been choking on dirt, so much dirt, soil and clay and sand and gravel all mixed as one), when she had called his name in return. He takes a deep breath in, lets it out, and releases the flower, watching it catch in the wind and be carried away, down the hill and out of sight.

He pulls another flower out of the bouquet and thinks of the way Daisy’s hand felt in his when he finally made contact, fingers calloused and rough and fingernails ragged and caked with dirt. Her grip was so weak, muscles unused to the trial of being made to grasp and cradle and hold, but she held on as the dirt pressed down on them and they struggled to breathe and, still, with their lungs compressed and weary, they used them to form words. He thinks about not alone, though, not alone, and lets the flower go, watching it tumble away on the breeze.

He pulls another flower and thinks of when Daisy said that she’d planned to kill him, and how he wasn’t even able to muster up the energy to care.

The petals on the next flower are wet. For a moment, Jon thinks that it’s started raining and he just hadn’t noticed. Then, he feels Martin’s hand brush against his cheek, wiping away the next few tears with his thumb, and his next breath rattles in his chest.

He remembers being with Daisy in his office, him sitting in the chair behind his desk and her standing in the corner, trying to remember what it felt like to be vertical. He remembers sitting across from her at a sticky pub table, his hands wrapped around an equally as sticky mug of beer as she pulled a surprising amount of laughter out of his mouth. (He suspected that the warmth running through him by the end of the night was only partially due to the flush of alcohol in his system.) He remembers sitting on a now-ratty cot in document storage, one earbud in his ear and the other in Daisy’s as they leaned against the wall, thighs pressed lightly together and hands clasped in a way that felt easy, his nose wrinkling as The Archers played tinnily through the earbuds. He remembers being slumped against the brick wall behind the Institute, cigarette held between two shaking fingers as he tried to pretend like the nicotine would satisfy the burning hunger growing within him, and the shoulder that had pressed firmly against his as Daisy had slid down to sit next to him, a similar sort of hunger clawing relentlessly within her as well. He remembers standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom in the Archives, staring at his own eyes and wondering if they looked just a bit greener today, just a bit less human, and finally walking back out to see Daisy leaning on the wall next to the door, her voice leaving no room for argument as she said that she’d bought a bottle of whiskey and they were going to share it between them. He remembers lying on one of the cots and staring at the darkened ceiling, hearing her breathing deep and even beside him, one thin arm slung over his chest, and thinking about how much stronger than him she was, that she would rather die than be who she was before. (She never thought he was a monster. He hadn’t quite believed it, but he had been grateful for it all the same.) And he remembers what it felt like, slipping into the tunnels beneath the Institute and leaving Daisy and Basira behind to deal with the chaos that lay above ground, unable to shake the horrible, sickening feeling that it was the last time he would ever see Daisy.

Their last night together had been spent listening to the historical podcast that Jon had managed to convince Daisy to try. He thinks she only put up with it as long as she did because she spent much less time listening to the hosts and much more time listening to him talk over them, supplementing their research with his own and going off on long, rambling tangents that more often than not ended up a few subjects away from history. She never minded when he rambled, and he never felt that choking, itching feeling at the back of his throat that caused the words to die halfway through a sentence that he so often got when he felt that he was boring those around him.

They hadn’t even gotten to finish the episode they were on.

Jon remembers it all, and he lets the flowers go one by one, watching them tumble away down the hill until his hands are empty, hanging uselessly in the air for a moment before he drops them limply to his sides. He knows he’s crying in earnest by now, and he hates it. It’s a terribly vulnerable feeling, to be mourning out in the open, and he hates it. His breath hitches in his throat—he would choke his words if he could form them—and he hates it.

He hates it, but he doesn’t stop Martin when he wraps his other arm around Jon and pulls him gently into his chest, whispering soft platitudes into Jon’s hair as Jon buries his face in Martin’s scarf to hide his tears. Martin’s hands rub circles across Jon’s back and his lips press against the crown of Jon’s head and he whispers, “It’s all right, love. It’s all right,” and Jon allows himself one abrupt, hiccuping sob before he pushes all remaining sounds deep within him where they cannot escape.

And down below, near the base of the hill, the daisies lie scattered amongst the grass and the bushes and the weeds, like the first flakes of winter snow.

.

.

.

There are daisies on the kitchen table again. These ones are yellow, collected from the garden in the back before the frost has a chance to set in and wither them. Sunlight makes dappled patterns across them as Jon sits at the table and drinks tea for the third morning since he found himself able to do so once again, made with no milk and two sugars just as he likes. He can hear the gentle rumble of water from the bathroom, his own hair already shower-damp and pulled back into a loose braid. The jumper is Martin’s, too large and draped over his hands where they wrap around his mug, and the kitchen smells of tea and daisies and home. If Jon closes his eyes and shuts off his mind and focuses only on the seep of heat into his palms and the brush of fabric against his arms, he can almost pretend like everything between before and now had been a dream.

Almost.

Jon takes a deep breath, opens his eyes, and takes a long sip of his tea. He’s halfway back to setting the mug on the kitchen table when there’s a creak, a rattle, and a burst of cold air as the front door of the cottage swings open.

The mug slips out of Jon’s hands and knocks sideways on the table, spilling tea across the varnished surface and rolling dangerously close to the edge before its handle strikes the table and brings it to a halt. He distantly registers that his jumper sleeves are stained with tea and that the puddle is seeping towards him, preparing to drip off the edge, but the thought is buried beneath an icy wave of shock as he stares, wide-eyed, at the open doorway. At the figure standing within it.

Daisy stares back, eyes wide with surprise, face streaked with mud and blood, one hand still on the door handle, and says, “Jon?”

[lastsonlost]

Many of the women promoting the “cancellation” of men in comics, and demanding they post the recent empty promise known as #ComicsPledge, are in fact hypocrites.  In this article, I’m going to present evidence of lies, collusion, rumor spreading, and, in my opinion, defamation and contract interference.

I personally know that they’ve colluded for YEARS to take down men. Specifically those with conservative politics and philosophies. This is an ongoing, coordinated effort. How do I know this?

Because I obtained access to their PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP.

This is Part 1 of the #Hypocralypse leaks

There is simply too much to put in one leak, so I will make the following three points for now.

1. The so-called Comic Book Whisper Network, which has been dismissed as conspiracy since 2016, is real, and I have hundreds of screenshots to prove it.

2. The Whisper Network has been targeting men and trying to destroy their careers, and use their connections in the comic book media to do so.

 3. Whisper Network members have acted unprofessionally and unethically at best. At worst, they have engaged in what I believe could be illegal behavior.

MY STORY

I first heard about the Whisper Network back in mid-2016 from folks I knew at Image, DC, Marvel, and later, Valiant.  Depending on who I chatted with, sometimes the group was called ‘The Women’s Network’, other times ‘The Whisper Network’, occasionally ‘The Whisper Campaign’, and eventually there were more conspiratorial names used mockingly (a friend called them a gender-swapped 4Chan, which became ‘FemChan’ to some insiders).

Regardless of the name, it was all the same group.

The same five or six names kept popping up in conversation over and again. As time ticked on, I noticed a trend on Social Media: half a decade of rumors, false allegations, cancellation attempts , and they almost always traced back to these same five or six people.  The goal of this Whisper Network, according to industry folks, was simple: choose a target, smear them until they lose their reputation, their income, and are ultimately blacklisted – opening up job opportunities for the same people who started these smear campaigns in the first place.

 Behind the scenes these “cancellations” are painted as morally or politically motivated, but in the end it’s all financial. As time passed, the group in question seemed more and more like a reality. I saw their influence. I saw things I knew to be verifiably untrue go viral online, appearing in what I thought were legit news sources. I felt angry and helpless seeing innocent people getting attacked, but did not know what to do. 

A few years passed and by 2018 almost everyone I interacted with in the industry seemed to know about the Network, from top level editors right down to the letterers. It was an open secret, but no one was willing to speak up for fear of being targeted themselves. They knew the consequences.

And after all, this was a secret network. Without proof, there was no point in going public because members would just deny its existence, and use their media connections to smear anyone who challenged them.

 THEN THINGS GOT INTERESTING

December 16, 2018, Whisper Network member Gail Simone, who joined the Network 6 years ago (4 years before the following tweet was posted), mocks “doofuses” who speculate that a “whisper campaign” exists.

At this point in late 2018, I was still skeptical of the Whisper Network’s existence. I’d heard many stories of individuals spreading rumors and lies, and plenty of malicious behavior was going on behind closed doors. Though I wasn’t ready to believe it was a coordinated effort, or collusion was involved.  Then, certain people began openly mentioning the Whisper Network and my attitude changed.

 March 26, 2019, Heather Antos, a member herself, did not outright mention the Whisper Network or her involvement, but she made what some took as a veiled threat to those who got on her bad side.

 Heather “milkshake girl” Antos’ colorful backstory at Marvel, and later at Valiant, is notorious in the comic industry. A conversation about office rumor-spreading and bullying is never complete without someone bringing up a juicy Antos anecdote. Everyone has one.

Up until then, I still hadn’t seen ACTUAL PROOF of a larger scheme. But then, something changed in 2020.

January 8, 2020, Alex de Campi, who I would discover is one of the most active Whisper Network members, openly admits there is a Network. I have no idea if this was a slip or a brazen attempt to show off her power and influence, but this appeared.

Eventually, everything I had heard and read was confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt after I gained access to their private Facebook group.

I WAS INSIDE THE WHISPER NETWORK!

This is the place where the Whispher Network has been colluding for years. And although their activity is not confined to just this site, from what I can tell, this was where they first met, and started their coordinated campaigns.

Members of the Secret Group called “Comic Book Women”

At present time, there are 440+ members of the secret Facebook group, called COMIC BOOK WOMEN. From what I can tell, a few are regular users, though many of them have never posted.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/comicbookwomen/ 

*unless you are a member, this will not show up in a search

Secret Facebook groups offer the same level of privacy as closed groups, but operate under a cloak of invisibility. No one can search for secret groups or even request to join them. The only way to get in one is to know someone who can invite you. Everything shared in a secret group is visible only to its members.

This secret group includes a list of members whose actions and connections speak for themselves. Members such as:

Zoe Quinn

Gail Simone

Alex de Campi

Heather Antos (aka Heather Marie)

Mags Visaggio (aka Magdalene Francis)

Mairghread Scott

And several key members of the group are women who work in the comics media and can be used to run damage control, including women like Heidi MacDonald of Comics Beat.  They have contacts outside of the secret network as well, with some male allies in both comics and the media.

Just the fact that all of these folks were secretly linked in a private network came as a shock to me, considering their reputations and the accusations that they’ve made. Immediately I began to connect the dots…

They’ve denied for YEARS that they coordinate their actions in private. And yet they always coincidentally appear on Twitter, retweeting and amplifying each other’s accusations, signal boosting one another, and helping them gain traction. And their allies in media – Bleeding Cool and CBR specifically – will turn those same tweets into stories almost instantly & with no fact-checking or verification, sometimes within the hour.

I’m going to start explaining who the key actors are, and, from my perspective, how they coordinate these attacks.

KEY ACTORS

There are too many people to focus on at once, so I will have to break this into several posts, but I will start with one of the clear group leaders IMO.

Alex de Campi is well connected, despite never being part of the Big Two (since, from what I’ve been told management is well aware of her bullying, harassment, rumor-spreading and unethical behavior that goes back years, and depending on who you talk to she’s almost as notorious as Antos or Tess Fowler).  She just wrapped up a graphic novel campaign on Kickstarter with David Bowie’s son, the Hollywood film director Duncan Jones. It grossed over $366K

All the while she makes baseless accusations while demanding transparency from everyone else.

Now, I’ll take you into their private network.

Two years ago, on May 13, 2018, De Campi launched a private campaign to target an independent creator, claiming she was using her connections to have Simon & Schuster cancel their book.

In addition to contacting the publisher, others in the Whisper Network coordinated their efforts to contact media outlets to have the narrative changed, according to the posts in this thread.  Again, in my opinion, this could end up as a defamation or tortious interference case, and has many implications regarding media bias as well.

 

The following month, on June 23, 2018, de Campi posted private text messages between herself and writer Max Bemis in what appeared to be an attempt to damage his career. Despite Bemis being mentally ill (diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2014), de Campi still posted the private messages with malicious intent IMO. According to US and UK law this is an actionable offense: posting private texts without both parties consenting.

[frenchly-anxious]

If James Bond was French, she would be a 54 years old woman working as a business coach, and there would be no movie because all the villains would be insanely bad at their job

Or: if we French people can’t make good spy/mercenary movies, it’s simply because our real spies/mercenaries absolutely suck.

Story time.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon the craziest news report of my life so far. It started small: an assassination attempt last July, just outside of Paris. Like, wow, that sucks, but okay. Yet as I’m watching the news, I realized they made a full documentary on that. Weird, I thought.

Except no, it made perfect sense to make a big deal out of it because seriously, that story just keeps on giving to the point I'm still waiting to be told it was a joke. Let me share this masterpiece.

The story starts unexpectedly with... a father driving his son to daycare. And as he’s driving, he spots a car haphazardly parked, with 2 men inside. As soon as he meets their eyes, they seem to panic: one feigns to sleep, while the other ducks forward to hide his face. They’re both dressed in black and are wearing gloves in the middle of July. The father drives on, stops a few streets away and call the police.

At this point, I was like “Who are those 2 buffoon? They reacted the way a child does when he knows he stayed up past his bedtime”.

The police arrived and searched them. They found out the car had fake license plates but more than that, they found a bag containing a loaded gun and its makeshift silencer, as well as 2 army knifes. The men were obviously arrested on the spot.

The police, expecting some kind of burglars, was in for quite the ride.

Very quickly, one of them started talking. He told the police he was a member of the DGSE (= kinda the French equivalent of CIA, in less popular), and they were on an official mission. In what I can only assume was an amazing show of self-control, an officer succeeded in not laughing out loud and instead asked him to elaborate. Which he did. He calmly explained they were on a mission to assassinate a woman who was actually working as a spy for Mossad.

I imagine the officers politely nodded as they were taking notes and then after leaving the room they started laughing hysterically while filing papers for a transfer to a psychiatric ward.

Except than when they checked, the 2 men were indeed working for the DGSE.

The what the fuck intensified, but not in the expected direction.

The police obviously turned to the woman they said they were about to assassinate. The victim indeed lived right where the DGSE agents were waiting. She was a successful “business coach”, living a quiet life and was absolutely not expecting to see police show up at her doorstep saying “hey, so, you basically almost got killed by two men waiting in front of your house, who had been following you for a few days and had also put a tracker on your car, and, well, they’re saying you’re actually working for Mossad. Can we come in?”

I can’t imagine how baffling that conversation must have been.

That 54 years old woman, Marie-Hélène Dini, had obviously no link with the Mossad. At all.

In this story of ridiculously bad mercenaries, the only one who acted correctly was her: after answering to the police, who probably told her “well that was unexpected. Better be extra careful from now on. Have a great day, ma’am!”, she turned off her phone, packed a few things and left her home, not telling anyone where she was going, and kept moving from place to place every couple of days to make sure no one could find her.

She was scared and confused, because who could want her dead?

The answer to that question is as baffling as the rest of the story: it was another “business coach”, who didn’t appreciated the fact she wanted to regulate their profession and thought the appropriate solution to that what to eliminate her.

But that’s not all! How did this guy found mercenaries to begin with? Well that’s easy: he had contacts because he was part of masonic lodge, just like our two stupid mercenaries.

Yes, freemasonry has entered the chat.

The story just shifted from mercenaries to secret organization.

One of the suspect, who was seriously talkative for a secret agent from a secret organization, explained they had other contracts like that. Only one resulted in an assassination so far: Laurent Pasquali, an ex-driver of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He had indeed suddenly disappeared in 2018, his squeleton only found a year later without much clues of what had happened. Well, he apparently scammed the wrong sponsor, who decided to engage someone to bring back their money... and that someone apparently failed spectacularly because “the contract went wrong” and they killed him. Talk about going wrong.

The police linked a few other cases to these guys and a few of their “friends”: arson, violence, assassination attempts,...

All eyes obviously turned to the DGSE. Who went: “We can’t deny a few of those lunatics were working for us, but we don’t have ANYTHING to do with their mercenary/freemason job on the side!”

And if it looks like they’re not lying, it still isn’t very reassuring to see who is working for our foreign intelligence agency (granted, they were apparently just security guards for a DGSE site, but still)

So anyway. As I was saying:

James Bond isn’t French and there is a reason for that.

(because if she was, she would be a 54 years old woman working as a business coach, and there would be no movie because all the villains would be insanely bad at their job)

[ectonurites]

Conner Kent in Suicide Squad/the Infinite Frontier era: wtf is going on

Alright lads hello I just need to type out some theories/thoughts about what’s going on with my boy Kon right now. This is more for myself than anything else (just trying to organize my thoughts) but since some of y’all like to hear me talk about comics (and some of this discussion has already been happenin in my inbox) I figured i’d format it and put it on here too! its like 4k words and written over the last few days mostly at 3am. sorry <3 

this is basically just me going like

Also fair warning that like, I can be wrong and misinterpret things just as much as anyone else can, like I use panels to support why I think what I do but a lot of this stuff is subjective/complicated to understand so like... in general somethings should be taken with a grain of salt, especially because exactly what changes to the universe were made by Death Metal/Infinite Frontier haven’t been super super clearly defined yet. Also sometimes comic writers make the most random nonsensical shit happen, so I as a fan am also allowed to theorize about random nonsensical shit.

But to start: let’s backtrack!

Many months ago when Infinite Frontier was first announced they dropped some promotional art, and I remember being a little confused because. Well:

(Variant Cover spread for Justice League (2018) #59)

(Variant Cover spread for Superman (2018) #29)

Notice how Conner is back to his Teen Titans 2003 look up top, but in his YJ 2019 look at the bottom? This seemed weird to me! But then they announced that Conner would be part of the Suicide Squad ongoing title, in the T-shirt look, so I wrote this discrepancy off in my brain as ‘oh I guess that cover was just the last hurrah for punk Kon’ and moved on with life.

In Suicide Squad right away we learn he’s very much so there against his will:

(Suicide Squad (2021) #1)

Which corroborates more or less what we were also shown in Future State: Suicide Squad, although admittedly it tells... a slightly different version of the events. When I first saw both of these together I just chalked it up to being a bit inaccurate as it’s shown as a memory in Future State:

(Future State: Suicide Squad #2)

Issue 2 we saw him in action with the Squad, trying to do his best to still be a hero despite the team, but things get a little more interesting in the following issue. It starts off with an account of his history

(Suicide Squad (2021) #3)

This page gave me a few immediate red flags, mostly minor things that had to do with coloring, so more irl problems than things to take seriously in-universe (Kon’s pants are the wrong color in the first Superboy shot, and Bart’s Impulse costume is in Kid Flash colors instead of the correct Impulse ones) but then also it just bugged me the phrasing “he joined Young Justice” when he was a founder of the team, he didn’t join it he made it with Tim and Bart.

But again, chalked that stuff up to just.... writers/artists being inconsistent/unaware of things that they should be aware of, or even Nocturna just not being specific with details. But it did still strike me as a little odd considering the very accurate use of villains in those same shots, Scavenger who was a reoccurring bad guy from Kon’s solo days and showed up basically nowhere else (even holding the Spear of Lono and everything!) and Billy/Harm (Greta’s brother) from Young Justice.

But then a few pages later we got this:

(Suicide Squad (2021) #3)

Which is interesting. My first instinct was to think he’s being drugged w kryptonite or something thats leaving him hazy/out of it, but my thoughts on that have kinda changed, we’ll get there in a bit. But in general the context of ‘something’s wrong’ made the slight discrepancies on some details of his own history make more sense.

I also want to then bring up the next part to this story, the crossover issue in Teen Titans Academy.

(Teen Titans Academy #3)

So a few things. Does it feel weird to anyone else that Conner Kent, a known previous Titan who literally has a framed picture of himself in a case there, would set off alarm sensors like that? Wouldn’t he be... recognized as a Titan not an intruder by their sensors? Interesting! Anyways.

He looks really pained looking at that picture, and sad, and almost frustrated, which ya know makes sense and hurts my heart because he misses them! He misses his friends and being happy. 

But, importantly for a criticism I wanna make thats less theory related and more just me bein annoyed at Tim Sheridan, that’s a picture of Conner. Right there. That’s Superboy, on display at Teen Titans Academy, so the people who frequent this building would know who he is and what he looks like and be able to recognize him, he’s even in the same outfit and everything. Alinta recognized him at the end of Suicide Squad #3. 

So why does only one person during this big fight then comment on his presence?? Why doesn’t it get a bigger reaction???

(Teen Titans Academy #3)

And after the fight we don’t see any on panel moment of Wallace going up to the staff Titans (who weren’t present for the fight) and saying like “HEY NIGHTWING UHHH SUPERBOY WAS WITH THE SUICIDE SQUAD?” we just see him talking with his friends upset about Crush leaving. We see Alinta talking to them but we don’t see the exact dialogue. So I do just wanna take the writer by the shoulders and shake him a little bit and ask WHY because that just feels like... something you’d wanna address on panel! This is like the first time since joining the squad that Kon’s at all in contact with people from his life before Waller got involved, I feel like not addressing those people’s reactions to it/not discussing it at least a little bit on panel (especially when Conner CAME UP in the previous TTA issue, Dick brought him up and everything!!!) is a really odd choice. Maybe it’ll happen next issue and i’m just impatient, but who knows. Anyways, gripes with Sheridan aside, lets move on.

I wanna bring up how Conner... doesn’t really respond to Wallace’s question? At all? Except to just fight him off, not even an attempt at a ‘Sorry’ or anything? (the ‘Ha! That all you got?!’ seems to be coming from Culebra not Conner, although the placement of the bubble is vague enough it could be that it was supposed to be Conner? but it seems more like what she’d say, especially as she’s grabbing Emiko like that) That just feels weird. It feels off. In general he speaks so little in Suicide Squad #3 and this issue. Tbh it almost feels like he doesn’t really recognize Wallace which I mean I suppose they never exactly met (they would have theoretically during Death Metal, basically all past/present Titans were together for a while during that), but Kon’s been back in existing long enough he’d have a sense of who current heroes are anyways.

But right, so, lots of little things that feel weird... that gets us caught up to the most recently released comics... but in this household we look at solicits as they drop. Which gives us some info on what’s coming up a few months ahead of time, albeit without full context obviously. Issues #4 and #5 don’t mention Conner in their descriptions or show him on the covers at all, because there’s just other plot things going on, so ya know seems things will be quiet for him for a bit.

But then we got the August solicitations and oh BOY it’s a doozey for him! And some things start to kinda connect perhaps!

I want to just take a moment to look at that specific wording. “The teen calling himself Conner Kent” I’m probably reading too much into it but that feels deliberate, like why wouldn’t you just say ‘Conner Kent’? Usually these kinds of descriptions are trying to keep a low word count, not add in extra words that don’t need to be there. It makes it feel like that’s a name he’s using that... doesn’t actually belong to him.

So the theory I want to propose (that has been floating around already) is that based on these covers and the description, and how the Conner we’ve been seeing in Suicide Squad apparently talks about his own personal history like he’s ‘reading a wikipedia entry’ and had little response to people he should be aware of like Wallace and apparently isn’t recognized as a Titan through a bio-scan and also bearing in mind those initial promo arts with two separate looks at the same time for him... I think we're looking at a situation where the Conner in Suicide Squad so far has actually been a clone of original Conner (like... like he’s Match 2.0 or somethin) the whole time, that’s just not aware he’s not the original. 

Now that’s the base theory I wanna work with and build off of, but there’s MANY different directions that could go in/ways that could work.

For example, one idea is that the Conner we saw in #1 who was chained up is the original Conner, and he’s been being cloned and held captive, so everything else with Conner in Suicide Squad so far has been this Match 2.0 

Another idea could be the original Conner in #1 is also the Conner in #2 who Waller had then commented wasn’t ready during the mission in Arkham and had zapped with a lil Kryptonite, and after that moment she took him off the field because his spirit hadn’t been broken enough to be obedient (as he was a lot quieter in Issue #3 & the TTA crossover compared to #2, and #3 is when the Nocturna thing with the history happened)

Or it could even be original Conner in #1, then in #2 was one clone that wasn’t ‘ready’ that after that point she stopped using him, and switched to a diff clone for #3, because like that first cover did show a LOT of clones. That could be more just ‘artistic interpretation’ or something, covers sometimes do exaggerate/mislead, but it also could indicate we’re looking at a lot of clones.

(Suicide Squad (2021) #2)

With all of those in mind I also wanna bring up this little bit from Future State Suicide Squad:

(Future State: Suicide Squad #2)

Again Future State is a ‘possible future’ so stuff from it isn’t set in stone, but the idea of ‘she still has his YJ 2019 outfit somewhere’ makes me think it could be something along the lines of like, Clone!Conner finds original Conner and frees him and he gets back his YJ outfit, which could lead to like the imagery on that variant cover/the idea from my very first part of this post where I was talking about Kon being shown in both outfits in different places.

Alternatively entirely from all that, another option is that she maybe got ahold of what was needed to clone Kon, but doesn’t even have the original Kon in her possession. (again with the Future State thing, she could be lying since elsewhere in Future State we did also see a copy of YJ 2019 Kon’s costume in one of the Jon-focused Future State comics in a display case 🤷‍♂️) Which could also lead to that confrontation on the variant cover & the promo art thing... and could also explain why we have seen nothing about anyone looking for him, because in that sort of scenario he wouldn’t have even been missing in the first place.

There’s a lot of possibilities! It’s still too early to solidly know anything, but I feel pretty confident we’re entering another cloning related plot with our Clone Boy so it’s... ya know. Clone time. On the one hand it’s annoying because god we have done clone/multiple Kons plots before. We’ve done them so much.

BUT on the other hand, I think it could be interesting to use this situation to tie into some older stuff from pre-reboot that I can see some connections to, because due to Infinite Frontier altering the world and people’s memories it’s all technically fair game storytelling-wise again (and like, the use of Scavenger specifically in that flashback way above, who’s not a super well known villain in general, makes me think maaaaybe the writer did do some of their Kon homework)

Something also just dawned on me that i’m not quite sure what it means but still is worth mentioning: The Conner here in Suicide Squad is back in his Teen Titans Vol. 3 outfit, and his history as he tells it stops during Teen Titans Vol. 3. And doesn’t... mention when he died? It feels like it... stopped before that, because like I feel if he was telling his life history (even the wiki version LMAO) the part where he died and came back would be pretty important to bring up?? And Nocturna specifically says that he didn’t explain how that stuff from TT Vol. 3 then led to him in his current situation. That’s a pretty big gap (like uhhh everything from resurrection until he got lost on Gemworld + all the rest of the Young Justice 2019 stuff?) So like.. there could be something funky going on here that has to do with that. 

Similarly when he flashes back in Future State: Suicide Squad to his past it also goes right from Teen Titans Vol. 3 to the current Suicide Squad run? Like I get it’s one page so they can’t show that much, but the fact that there’s now two places that flash back to that same specific time period and nothing past it until the Suicide Squad feels just... noticeable! Not concretely indicative of something, but noteworthy.

(Future State: Suicide Squad #2)

Like...this almost has me thinking maybe it could be something where like, they tampered with his dead body and cloned from that? BECAUSE, for those of you who may not be familiar with how Kon’s resurrection (during Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds) worked, when he came back there was time travel involved! He was brought back to life in the future (like. Legion of Superheroes era) because it was a process that took that thousand or so years to work/heal him (essentially because of his hybrid dna the process that healed Clark when he had died back in Death of Superman/Reign of the Supermen in the 90s just took a lot longer, but its the same Kryptonian healing chamber thing) meaning when he came back to the present alive again, his dead body was still also in the present just in it’s process of healing. Meaning especially if we’re bringing back stuff from before the reboot, Kon likely has his dead body just vibing out there while he’s goin around living life 🤷‍♂️

SO them doing something related to that could explain the choice to put him back in the T-shirt (since thats what he wore in the era his brain would be caught up to if we’re relating this to when he died) and why he’d recognize himself in a group photo with Bart, Cassie and Tim but maybe not someone like Wallace who didn’t exist back then. I don’t know, this branch of thought is still half baked. Will maybe come back and elaborate on this later. But I’m now really thinking there might be a connection to the early Teen Titans Vol. 3 era specifically because of it being referenced twice in stuff with this Suicide Squad.

ANYWAYS moving on, this is probably a shot in the dark and I only thought of it because I just was reading 90′s Superboy, but right away when thinking about ‘Amanda Waller’ and ‘Cloning Kon’ I was reminded of some stuff about the circumstances around the first clone that was made of Conner: Match.

(Superboy (1994) #35)

Match was created by an organization called ‘The Agenda’, that was after a while primarily under the control of The Contessa, Lex Luthor’s ex-wife, aided by Amanda Spence who had a personal grudge against Kon bc her dad was Paul Westfield the guy Kon was originally cloned from (before the Lex/Clark retcon). They were the big bad guys of an arc called The Evil Factory in Superboy (where Cadmus personnel got replaced with clones) which also then tied into the Sins of Youth event over in Young Justice (Remember how Match was posing as Superboy for a while there? yeah). After those plot lines finished the Agenda was pretty defeated (Amanda Spence was still out there and came back later but still) and... who got their hands on the remaining Agenda tech?

(Superboy (1994) #87)

Why none other than Amanda Waller herself!

If they re-canonized pieces of this (which also tied into Young Justice which ya know, YJ 2019 was all about re-establishing stuff from YJ even before Death Metal happened soooo) it would totally make sense for Waller to have complete access to the exact technology used to clone Conner before. 

Now, a thing to consider here though is what happened to Kon after he’d been cloned that first time, where his DNA got all destabilized by the process (and he needed to go through a procedure with Roxy as a genetic template to keep him together, which was how he got stuck at age 16 for a while). This was something where he was fine for a period of time before the side effects began to kick in. Now, I think it’s worth mentioning that was also back in the days where he was not yet Lex & Clark’s clone, but still Paul Westfield’s. So there could easily be a ‘now that certain Kryptonian genes have kicked in as he got his newer powers it doesn’t destabilize him the same way’ reasoning or something along those lines to avoid this problem. Alternatively, it could be an interesting thing to embrace rather than retcon away, especially if we’ve been seeing Clone Conner in action and Original Conner hasn’t been in our focus, things could be wrong with him that we just don’t know about.

Another branch of thinking that I think is even MORE a shot in the dark but could be interesting (or again even related to what I just said, could be a combo of things) is if this somehow ended up related to those clones that were reverse engineered from the remains of Match from the very end of Teen Titans Vol. 3

(Teen Titans (2003) #99)

All of them were then taken down with Kryptonite and killed in battle (by Rose & Damian) 

(Teen Titans (2003) #100)

But like... idk man if Waller got her hands on those corpses or even just the data from Dr. Caligan that he extracted from Match to make them... that could also be a potential way to make some new Conner clones, and that could be why the bio-scan thing at Titans Tower wouldn’t work properly because of the thing he says above about it not being a “complete match’

One thing I don’t think is the case, but has been brought up to me, is stuff with New 52 Kon. I’ve talked extensively about New 52 Kon in recent weeks because I read through all his stuff, but the thing that makes me shy away from him being part of this situation is the fact that... he’s not interchangeable with Kon the way I think some people think he is. He wouldn’t visually be recognized as Original Kon because he is literally on a genetic level a separate person. They’d prob look related, sure, like they’d pass for brothers because they both have Clark’s DNA, but New 52 Kon has Lois’ DNA and Original Kon has Lex’s. New 52 Kon would likely look more like Jon, rather than Kon. Lois specifically commented in an Action Comics issue that Kon had some resemblance to Lex, even. So like, things like Wallace recognizing him or him looking at his own matching reflection alongside the group picture at the Tower... those wouldn’t happen the same way if this was New 52 Kon.

Now I think it coooould theoretically be possible for Waller to have gotten her hands on that future N.O.W.H.E.R.E. cloning tech that had been used to make New 52 Kon, like I wouldn’t rule that out. Because she knows where the remains of their bases are as shown in Red Hood and the Outlaws (2016) #16-17, and like, Harvest is dead so she could easily just send teams out there to gather shit if she wanted. 

Onto some other things I don’t think are actually related but that I was reminded of/wanted to address:

I feel i’d be a bad timkon fan if during all of this discussion of past stories with cloning Kon I didn’t even bring up Tim’s cloning attempt stuff, but I think it would ultimately be unrelated. His tech was stolen from Luthor, and his attempts didn’t succeed because he was trying to build from scratch without Cadmus’ the data about how they altered the DNA from the original process. 

(Teen Titans Vol. 3 #34)

Then that initial cover for the annual really reminded me of part of the Hollow Men story from Superboy Vol. 5 just with like... Kon in a room full of copies of himself. I don’t think this story would be related either because it was more magic Tannarak stuff rather than regular cloning, but ya know. It’s the imagery.

(Superboy Vol. 5 #9)

It also really reminded me of the stuff from Hyper-Tension which was hypertime stuff not cloning but again just... visually.

(Superboy Vol. 4 #62)

In general I don’t think we’re EVER gonna see Black Zero or any of these multiverse Superboys again LMAO.

To try to sum up all of this in a way that might make sense here’s kinda a... flowchart of some of my main ideas for what the cloning situation could be/how the logic could work. Again this is borrowing stuff from across continuities because Infinite Frontier means theoretically anything’s fair game. (Also I don’t think I mentioned this earlier but I do mention it in the chart, but I think it’s also reasonable that Waller could get her hands on Cadmus tech if Cadmus is like properly made canon again. She just has funky government connections!)

Also I just now thought of this now several hours after I already made the chart and I don’t wanna remake it so sorry not incorporating it there but I remembered there was also that bit during House of Kent where Clark took Kon to the Hall of Justice and they were running some tests on him, so I’m thinking it’s also possible Waller got ahold of that data/that might be how she found out about Kon in the first place for this timeline. And they indicated that there was something wrong with him there, where he might eventually lose his powers or something, so maybe she tried to do cloning stuff to be able to have a copy of Superboy in his prime or something??? before that started kicking in. I don’t know, just more things to consider:

(Action Comics (2016) #1028)

ANYWAYS in conclusion: there is clone fuckery of some sort happening, I’m curious where it’s gonna go, and I just want Kon to be okay.

If you actually read this uhm. props to you bc this probably makes no sense to anyone but me its just word vomit <3 

[alaskatalks]

Abuse in the Youtube Vlogging Community — My Experiences

Note 07/07/2021: My original posting was removed by unknown so this will now live here. Please be aware of the content warnings.

Apr 26·14 min read

2012–2018

CW Mention of; Suicide, Assault, Blood, Rape, Deceased Person(s)/‘Suicide Forest Video’

I’m writing this statement to not only provide background on the toxic and abusive culture of the community at the time but to support the multiple other people who have recently come forward detailing abuse from within the UK vlogging Youtube community, and to finally talk about these incidents publicly after carrying them for so long alone.

As I am writing this, one of those mentioned has contacted several mutual acquaintances to stop me from sharing my own story to those people privately,then when they and I didn’t, this person quickly began to smear my name. Because of this I want to begin with some basic background and thoughts which will be most likely be used/twisted in the coming days/weeks by those I mention.

I will only be discussing physically abusive events I was personally privy to but to keep this specific I will be omitting the many micro and macro-aggressions I experienced as usually the only black mixed/non-white and working-class individual in the room/group. It was clear to me quickly that if you were an “other” in certain ways, you’d be open to mockery, namely also if you were working class or lacking financially, I’d heard Chris repeatedly make remarks and mean comments behind the backs of his own guests/friends at various events and parties in his own home in addition to others making similar comments. Because I appeared white passing that time especially; I made my heritage/ethnicity explicitly clear when it first began as a failed attempt to minimize racial remarks around me and then from then on, kept my private life private from many in the group. I learned quickly to ignore a lot directed at me — as I was younger and possessed no media industry contacts or clout/followers at the time, I had to accept my place in this kind of mostly elitist clique/working environment as the only way to continue working with the people I looked up to.

I met everyone personally and got into the community when I was 16/17 after being a fan for many years, contacting CB via post and then emailing him, I wanted to get into television eventually and thought working with YouTube vloggers I looked up to would be a great first step in that direction. Everything detailed below I had previously tried to discuss with those involved privately, but was unsupported and thrown away both professionally and personally.

Rachel

I want to talk briefly about Rachel as I was around just before she joined the general group so was witness to a lot of things. I have spoken to Rachel privately but want to share the frustration and bitterness I feel and felt publicly. Please read her statement via twitter for their story. (In addition to addressing the dangerously hypercritical individuals I have seen crawling out of the woodwork to send her empty public displays of ‘support’ whilst in the past they contributed heavily to the environment which fostered abuse or carried it out themselves.)

The first few times I met Rachel it was at different pubs, and so I had always assumed that she was at least 18 on joining the general group, I was also told (unprompted) about her familial connections within the media/television industry — something that I now believe contributed to many of the youtubers mentioned overlooking basic welfare issues and red flags, and instead thinking of furthering their careers. I spent close to a year trying to help as I could see certain red flags in her ‘relationship’ with JSL, him struggling very heavily and publicly with alcoholism at the time, and Rachel seemingly struggling also. I made my concerns known repeatedly because I was worried, having myself suffered from various abuse from a young age I instinctively wanted to help.

However, close friends of Rachel herself and others, namely Bown, sent me the repeated and clear message that I was “in the way”, this was a message Bown kept telling me once he was living with JSL, who I had begun seeing months prior to Rachel meeting him. I was told by them that my concern was only jealousy and experienced an abundance of side eyes, verbal abuse, bad mouthing, and gossip — I was just a ‘jealous bitch’ in many eyes. (This all despite me being polyamorous with my primary partner from before dating JSL to this current day) I continued to help Rachel whenever I saw her in person before ending things with JSL and distancing myself because not only was I incredibly uncomfortable dating someone who was in a unhealthy situation, but I was very selfishly fed up receiving so much hate when I did speak my mind on the subject. In hindsight, especially after finding out recently that Bown was aware of Rachel’s age, I wish I’d have stuck around.

Rachel is incredible and I hope the following can contribute in some way to validating all those who were victimized by these same people in addition to others with similar stories. For Rachel’s full statement please read it on her Twitter in its entirety @rachelkiki_

MT

Beginning with MT, I had been a huge fan of The Man Time Podcast and The Fratocrats for years before so on meeting him at a party for the first time at C.B’s place, I was excited to talk to him, however, as soon as he found out I had a partner (literally the first thing he asked/said to me after hello) he walked away from me and didn’t interact with me in any way for the rest of the party. A few months later when I was single we slept together for the first time, halfway through he held my wrists down suddenly and just as I thought he was going to kiss me he instead spat in my mouth. I did not ask for, nor want this and reacted as negatively as you’d expect, then feeling incredibly uncomfortable made some excuses and tried to stop things physically.

It was a little while later I found out that he had spoken to a group of very popular youtubers, one of whom was Tom. I found out that not only did MT “report back” to these youtubers detailing a story about how we had had sex and I was in fact, horrendous at it, but hearing about it from C.B. in the form of the question whilst he smiled jokingly “Is this true?” was not only super inappropriate but humiliating.

These were people I had looked up to for years and really wanted to work within the future, but now that seemed like it wouldn’t happen, especially if I ‘made a fuss’. MT wanted to meet up with me at a later point (once I’d confronted him repeatedly afterwards) though when we met it was clear he just wanted to have more sex and the half assed ‘apology’ was more tokenistic. He was sorry “If” anything he did upset me. Because of my own previous trauma (and low self-esteem admittedly) I thought the only way to redeem my reputation would be to continue to see him — I thought if others knew or saw us flirting casually even, it would negate his rumors. This obviously didn’t help and the damage had been done.

Tom*

Shortly after that, whilst on a work trip with CB and others, Tom approached me at a bar and asked me for a photo, I thought it was odd but perhaps he was just being friendly. I was a big fan of Eddsworld so I was okay with it, he took a photo of us both, making sure I smiled and then sent it to MT who was sitting a few tables away in our group as a further way to humiliate me. I spoke about it with some of the others privately after being laughed at, who seemed used to that kind of behavior. I just needed to get used to it and/or “lighten up” so I tried to remain professional and focused, though it seemed more and more like certain people viewed me as disposable entertainment almost, rather than a person.

*I do want to note, as of writing this today, Tom is the only person to reach out to genuinely apologise, which I highly appreciate.

Bown

I could fill multiple pages with the amount of racial charged, sexist and abusive things Bown has done and/or said to me, for example, he berated me the day I got my first big television job, calling me stupid, useless and implying I was only hired because of my ethnicity. He almost always sent his hate via text or instant messaging, I mention that because he commonly expressed all his negativity behind a screen, then in person, he would do a lot of gaslighting. When drunk at his worst, his understanding of the word no became non-existent when I would repeatedly ask not to be touched or requested space.

On one occasion when I had made clear it was a platonic hang, we were watching a film when he suddenly reached over and pressed his fingers into my breasts. I felt instantly violated, I froze for a few seconds and then pulled my shirt up to cover more of my chest/create a visual barrier. I said don’t/stop and continued watching the film. In shock — we weren’t even touching or hugging before- that but he nonetheless did it again and laughed as if it was some kind of game. I made it very clear I was not interested and did not like what he had done. This repeated when he was drunk and said he wanted to apologise, it was at a party which wasn’t the time nor place for that kind of conversation, then, with me saying so then no multiple times, he kept grabbing my waist, then arms and shoulders, refusing to give me the space I was requesting.

CB

There was a lot of disrespect and ugliness I experienced from my first experience ‘working’ (unpaid at first and then at or under minimum wage afterwards) to present but again, I’m only discussing the physical stuff. The first physical time he hurt me was when on tour sharing a room (due to a lack of space as we were out of London) I was sharing with JSL on the floor and Bing had the bed alone. I was awoken in the early hours of the morning to a small piece of metal (which turned out to be a zip as I recall) from a pillow, hitting me hard. I was confused and so thought it was an accident — I assumed the pillow had fallen off the bed by mistake so reached over and put it back on Bing’s bed before going back to sleep. I was then awoken repeatedly by Bing’s hand hitting me in my face hard and repeatedly, though I tried to turn around with my back to him, I then experienced the same but on the back of my head, and my hair being pulled. He had thought the very loud snoring which was waking him up was me, but it was in fact JSL (most who have lived with him or slept in close corners knows he can be a snorer) the next morning I woke having a panic attack which I dealt with before asking him why he did that as it really hurt, he replied that I was snoring but when I told him of the mistake he just looked at me funnily and that was that. No apology ever appeared.

The worst experience I had with him was at his house during a party; it was winding down and I could sense him rushing people out the room in a hushed tone; I was looking at his bookcase, filled with cd’s at the time. On hearing the hushed tones I could sense something was wrong/odd and looked around to find myself suddenly alone in his room. I said a quick sorry, that I didn’t realise and will go join everyone else upstairs if he wants to sleep, he said it was no problem and I should have a drink before bed with him. I was content looking at the cds and before I could answer he brought me a cup and poured out a drink for me (clearly over pouring). I had just eyed a specific CD from my all-time favourite band (they were very niche at the time) and exclaimed in joy before showing it to him, he responded that a fan had sent it to him, I laughed because I was that fan, I had included the CD in a fan letter I sent to him years back. He was giving me a really odd look and then as I said ‘anyway,’ laughing in that british ‘I should get going’ kind of way.

He grabbed the CD before putting it on and pulling me towards the bed. We were sitting side by side and as soon as he grabbed me towards the bed I gave a nervous laugh saying something along the lines of ‘no, I don’t’ when he interrupted me to say it’s all fine, just one song and I need to drink, pushing my cup up which I’d been holding with both hands motionlessly since he gave it to me. As soon as I took a sip, he put his hand on my waist, I kept protesting as he pushed more towards then against me and repeated things like “It’s no big deal” and “It will be fast” ignoring my physical resistance and me audibly saying I did not want to. He placed his hand on mine and pulled it towards his groin area — this was when I finally stopped freezing and pulled away forcibly, I then sat up off the bed and made a beeline for the door — apologizing as I went. As soon as I was on the other side of the door I burst out crying and having a severe panic attack, I muffled the noise and went upstairs where I knew others were sleeping before I couldn’t keep quiet. I cannot remember who else was upstairs but there were multiple people (at least 5) sleeping in various places, I woke up quite a few before being calmed down and going to sleep. He hired me one last time after that as a producer.

H H S

H.H.S is the long time editor of the Paul brothers, he’s worked with many large youtubers and was one of (if not the main) editor of now notorious Logan Paul’s “Suicide Forest Video”,– the following happened around that time for context and is one of the biggest catalysts in my completely giving up on working within the YouTube vlogging sphere. H.H.S had been lightly dragged on his Facebook by friends on a post where he apologized for the Logan Paul video he responded with a fundraiser event post (both this, and the fundraiser have since been deleted) the fundraiser itself was to a suicide prevention charity, although he created it, he hadn’t and didn’t invite anyone directly to it — in hindsight, it’s clear it was just lazy personal pr. I had my own mental health and neurological episode and had attempted to take my own life a little before, so I had created an event with friends to celebrate being alive and beginning new/better things. Not many could come on short notice, though H.H.S was the first (and only) person to click ‘attending’ on the event page, which he did very quickly once I sent out invites.

He never was overly kind or supportive emotionally, so I thought that because of the amount of mutual colleagues, close friends and vloggers invited he would look very crass not to come. I was upset that many couldn’t make it and drank far too much, though I could Just about walk by the time we left the bar — the last 4 of us decided to head back to H.H.S to drink and hang out more as a group. I was meant to text my friend and her partner the address whilst they went home quickly to grab a coat as they lived nearish. H.H.S helped me into the cab and we made our way to his place, it’s then he put his hand behind the seat and began touching my leg. I thought he had a partner at the time and so was confused as he mentioned her earlier in the night, I asked him about this roughly over drinks at his house (which he poured himself) and he said it was fine, I accepted this as I was very drunk by this time and being ethically non-monogamous at the time; I assumed naively that they talked before this. I don’t remember what happened after this until later, I know that I was so drunk I completely forgot to ask H.H.S again for the address, let alone that I had to contact my friend at all.

I remember roughly that things seemed to me above board, but then I experienced a huge amount of pain as he had pushed me onto my front and put his entire weight onto me, I started to say stop, and no as he put more weight onto me and was trying to enter me anally. I told him to stop and that it hurt (he had done this before to me but stopped after a few seconds of me saying no and we discussed how it wasn’t okay with me especially without prior consent so I didn’t expect this). He then put his weight further on me so I was prone and continued for several minutes, I managed to move my body so it wouldn’t hurt as much, though by this point I was stuck under his weight and could barely breathe. Once he had “finished” he got off of me and said something about how this was a good “purge” for him but he loves his girlfriend and so should sleep in the living room. I was in total shock as he just exited the room.

I had no way of getting home by myself and triggered , drunk and confused I went to sleep. I woke up to H.H.S typing away on his computer next to my bed and I shouted “bucket” multiple times so he ran and got me one which I then projectile vomited into. I apologized and went to the bathroom to continue throwing up before heading back to his bedroom to find my things and get home. As I was doing this I asked about the video, he wasn’t talking otherwise and I was extremely uncomfortable trying to hold back a panic attack and further barfing. I waited for my taxi to come as he confirmed everything about the video that I had expected, he boasted about being the main editor of that video, how it was his idea to blur the body, how they wanted more views and they (him and Logan Paul) obviously didn’t care genuinely for anything to do with suicide prevention — this was after excusing various racist acts and remarks made by Logan.

H.H.S didn’t contact me for a full week after this incident, when I got home I discovered I was bleeding from his forced entry, and went into another panic attack. I tried to contact Bing, who had introduced me to him in the first place, when I was met with a barrage of blame. He told me a lot of things like ‘What did you expect?’, ‘That’s on you’ and on me beginning to cry and get emotional, he quickly started to distance himself saying that we aren’t “really friends” anymore, and further slut shaming. I wanted help and was rejected, not only by him but the few others also who I contacted. I figured if my friends would not help me, why would the Police believe me?

I reached out to H.H.S privately but was ignored, he read my messages but did not respond, though remained friends with me on facebook. He now has his own channel with 134k subscribers and won a Streamy Award for his editing work with Logan Paul. If you’ve read all of this, thank you sincerely. I’ve carried this for far too long alone, every time I heard of the people involved and even the Paul brothers names, things just came rushing back violently. After being rejected by so many I believed to be my friends, I decided I shouldn’t come out publicly at the time as I thought no one would believe me, that in addition to the fact that I valued the content they created to such a vast degree that I thought it more important to keep quiet.

Thanks to a sadly long list of brave people, I now know that I matter and so does my voice. I hope that with this, I can finally begin to let all these incidents go and know I appreciate every single person who has been an ally and/or spoke their own truths.

#MeToo #BlackLivesMatter #StopAisanHate

Alaska Harrison

[buckthegrump]

Are You Leaving My Love Behind?

Summary: At lot can happen in five years, but even more can happen in a few months.

Warnings:  Angst, pregnancy stuff, mentions of violence, fluff kind of

Word Count: 4.9k

A/n: this is for @wkemeup​ ‘s writing challenge my prompt was “please tell me that isn’t your blood” sorry it took me so fucking long to get it out

2018

“Ok, we’re gonna start trying,” Charlie smiled as his wife, Y/n, who smiled back at him. 

“I think now’s the best time, I mean we’re never gonna be really ready, ya know?” She lifted her wine glass.

He lifted his glass to tap against hers. But they never touched. Just as they were about to, Y/n’s fell to the ground and shattered. Charlie turned his attention to the mess she had made while Y/n stared at her hand in horror. He looked back up at her with a question on his lips that was never fully formed.

Painfully slow, they watched as Y/n’s body slowly turned gray then to dust. She looked her husband in the eye.

“I love you,” was the last thing she said before she disappeared. 

Charlie sat on the couch watching as the dust particles of his wife slowly fell to the ground.

2023

Y/n was sitting on a couch in a house. Her house, but this wasn’t her couch. The room looked like her living room, but there was something off about it, something different that she couldn’t identify. And it was more than just the fact that the couch was different.

“Y/n?” A familiar voice filled her eyes and relief washed over her. That is until she turned around.

Charlie was standing there with another woman. He looked different, older, tired, still hot though. But it was the other woman that stood there with him that had most of Y/n’s attention. It was the possessive hand on his bicep, and more so the blinding ring on her left hand.

“Charlie,” Y/n whispered, unable to hide the fear and hurt in her voice, “Who’s this?”

* * *

Y/n stared at the snack table in front of her. All the donuts had been sliced in half despite the fact that it was a full dozen and there weren’t even six people in the room. And she highly doubted that anyone else would join, her therapist said that it was a smaller group. 

Maybe it was so small because not many people knew about it. It didn’t help that it was in the gym of an old high school that was not only creepy but a little hard to find. Or maybe people were scared off by the superheroes that were sitting around the circle. Even though there were only two of them.

Y/n grabbed two whole donuts silently daring anyone to say anything about it and sat down in a chair. The two superheroes and one civilian sat next to each other and the leader of this grief group sat in a chair that was meant to be the head of the circle. While Y/n had secluded herself from the group.

“I think now is a good time to start,” the leader spoke, “My name is Sarah, for those of us who are new.”

Sarah very pointedly looked at Y/n who was still chowing down on her donuts trying to turn invisible.

“Anyway -” Sarah then made everyone introduce themselves and share something.

Sam and Bucky were here because they’d lost their friends. Y/n couldn’t tell if they were talking about Tony Stark or Steve Rogers, or maybe both. Maddi was there because while she’d just given birth when she got dusted and came back to a child that she didn’t know, which made Y/n feel stupid for her thing.

So she told them that she was just having trouble adjusting to life after ‘the blip’. Which wasn’t a complete lie but at this point, she was much more interested in finishing her donut.

Y/n didn’t talk much the rest of the time and let the others speak and work through their problems.

“Y/n,” Sarah addressed her at the end of group, “Are you sure you don’t have anything you’d like to share?”

“Not this week,” she answered.

And for a few weeks, she would answer the same way and Sarah would give her the same look. As time went on a few more people joined the group until there were a whopping eight people there, not including Sarah. (Still not enough for them to have any real reason to cut the donuts in half, in Y/n’s correct opinion.) Y/n hadn’t really bothered to commit their names to her memory but it’s not like she ever talked to anyone outside of this.

She hadn’t planned on saying much in group at all, she only came because her therapist said that if she continued to come he would bring some of his wife’s baking to one of their sessions. And she really wanted some cookies.

But, earlier that day she’d sat in an office across from Charlie. 

“Y/n, anything you’d like to share this week?” Sarah asked as she did every week. She was clearly expecting Y/n to say no.

“I shouldn’t hate Daniella, I know logically I shouldn’t but apparently the smart part of my brain is much smaller than the stupid part,” Y/n said. She almost left it at that just to get it off her chest.

“Why?” Bucky asked. Y/n and he locked eyes for a moment that seemed way too long for the setting there were in before she answered him.

“Why what?”

“Why do you hate her?”

Y/n laughed humorlessly. “She’s living the life I want. I know how that sounds but it’s true. I was dusted out of existence and when I came back apparently it was five years later and my husband, who watched me die, had fallen in love with someone else and asked her to marry him. So you can imagine his shock when I reappeared on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon as if nothing had happened.

“He still wants to marry her,” she could feel the lump in her throat begin to rise and did nothing to stop the tears from flowing. “So he asked for a divorce. And I know that it was five years ago and he’s changed, he had to live through my death. But he didn’t. . . I didn’t change. It’s only been four months since I’ve been back and he didn’t even try.”

She paused but no one spoke. They all sat there staring at her.

“And I know that my problems aren’t half as bad as some of the shit that y’all are going through but I just -” Y/n tried to swallow but it was hard. “Why the fuck does she get my life?”

* * *

Y/n was sitting in a forgotten hallway of the school, yes with the box of donuts in her lap. But she had lost her appetite.

“Ya know it’s considered rude to run off with the donuts.” She looked up to find Bucky Barnes standing next to her. She opened the box and offered him some. He grabbed one of the jelly-filled ones and sat down next to her. 

“We were going to try for kids, probably adopt some too, he really loved kids.”

“It’s really shitty of him for doing that to you,” he whispered.

“I lied, he didn’t ask for the divorce,” she admitted, “I did.”

“Why?”

“For the first month, I lived with them. I watched them interact and I -” she paused to compose herself. “He used to look at me like that. It’s not his fault I’m still living in the past. For a week I thought I was pregnant, and I was so relieved when I wasn’t. I don’t think I would’ve kept it if I had been.”

Bucky didn’t say anything and he hadn’t taken a bite of his donut yet.

“Sorry, group is over I shouldn’t be unloading all my bullshit on you.” She began to stand.

“It’s fine I don’t mind,” he told her.

“You’re very sweet, but it’s not like we’re friends or anything,” she smiled down at him.

He stumbled to his feet before she could walk away. “We could be.”

She looked at him expecting to see pity behind his gaze but she found none. What she did find was something that she couldn’t put a name to.

“Ok,” she agreed, “I don’t have many friends these days. Walk with me.”

So he walked her ‘home’ which was more of a temporary living situation. She had always been a babbler, it was something that Charlie constantly said would get her in trouble sooner rather than later. That day had finally arrived.

“I was sorry to hear about your friends,” she said as they walked.

“Thanks,” he said with a shrug.

“Do you miss him? Captain America, I mean. What do I even call him? Captain America seems so formal but calling him Steve Rogers seems too casual ya know?”

“It’s complicated. It’s not like we were dating or anything but I thought -” the nearly forgotten donut in his hand made its way to his mouth. Y/n walked silently waiting for him to continue his thought or change the subject. “I just assumed that we were something different.”

“Were you in love with him?” She blurted and he nearly choked on his bite. “You don’t have to answer that. In fact, forget I even asked.”

“I think so,” he answered once he was able to speak. “But clearly he didn’t feel the same way about me.”

“Why do you say that?”

Bucky chuckled. “That’s a little harder to explain.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” she said as she stopped in front of a dingy motel. “This is me.”

Bucky’s brows knitted together and his lip twinged in disgust. “You live here?”

“Well, I couldn’t really continue living with the happy couple, could I?” She asked. “Good night, Bucky. I’ll see ya next week.”

* * *

Charlie was talking about something to do with the divorce, but Y/n wasn’t really listening.

“Y/n,” he said pulling her from her daydreaming.

“Huh?”

“I know when you’re spacing out, is everything ok?”

Y/n let out a quiet sigh. What a loaded question. But the short answer was no. Of course, she wasn’t ok. How could she be? She was about to get a divorce that she wasn’t sure she wanted. Sure, she was the one who asked for it, but the look of relief on Charlie’s face when she suggested it-

If she hadn’t had said it when she did, sooner or later, he would’ve.

The paper was just sitting there on the table in front of her. The legal side of the divorce was pretty straight forward with a little leeway for Y/n after being gone for five years.

“I’m fine, Charlie,” she said. After taking a deep breath she flipped the pen in her fingers and signed the paper without a second thought. “I’ll see ya around, Ace.”

“Y/n,” he said.

Before he could get another word out she rushed through the doors. She walked faster than she needed to away from the building once she was outside knowing that Charlie would probably try to follow her. Well, at least her Charlie from five years ago would’ve. 

She wandered around the city for hours until she found herself outside the high school, that had recently reopened, where the grief group was held. It wasn’t until she saw Sam and Bucky walking towards her that she remembered that it was Thursday and they did have group today. She was also painfully aware of the tear streaks that stained her cheeks.

Sam made a b-line for the high school entrance, while Bucky walked right to her.

“What’s wrong?” He started to lift his had but put it back down at his side thinking better of it. She began to shake her head ready to deny that anything was wrong. “Don’t bother lying to me.”

“I signed the divorce papers today,” she whispered.

Bucky pressed his lips into a thin line. “Do you wanna skip today?” She nodded and he gave her a small smile. “C’mon, I know of something way more fun than dealing with our emotions.”

* * *

Y/n was still crying but now they were tears from laughing too hard. Bucky had fallen on his ass for the seventh time in two minutes. One would think that a highly trained assassin would know how to stay upright on a pair of roller skates.

“Who knew that all they need to defeat the great Bucky Barnes is a pair of skates,” she giggled as she rolled over to him to help him up.

“Keep laughing,” he grunted, “I’m about to get the hang of this stupid thing and lap you so hard.”

“Oh, I don’t think so baby blue.” She offered him his hand, which he gladly took. But once he was standing he instantly almost fell again but Y/n caught him helping him balance. He was gripping her for arms as he steadied himself. He looked up from his feet to her face.

The lights of the roller rink dimmed and the disco ball was the only thing illuminating the floor, some 80’s love ballad started playing, and the rest of the people skating around them ceased to exist for a brief moment.

All the pain that she’d been feeling for that past few months, every thought of Daniella and Charlie, everything, except for Bucky, melted away. And for one glorious second, her heart wasn’t heavy.

But then the moment was over and it all came rushing back hitting her like a semi-truck barreling down the highway. 

She smiled and gently prompted Bucky to stand up on his own.

“Here’s your chance hot-shot, get the hang of it and lap me.” She stuck her tongue out at him and skated away from him.

Once she was facing away from him her smile dropped. If she had stayed in that position even a half-second longer she would’ve done something stupid. Like, try to kiss him, which only could’ve ended with him rejecting her. For a multitude of reasons on his end, and she just wasn’t ready for something like that. 

The universe was clearly playing some sort of cosmic joke on her.

About an hour later they were walking down the street in the general direction of Y/n’s temporary home but she almost didn’t want the night to end.

“Thank you,” she said bumping her shoulder against Bucky’s as they walked. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I meant it when I said I wanted to be friends.”

She looked down at the ground smiling. He shouldn’t be affecting her like this, she’d just signed divorce papers for fuck’s sake.

“Give me your phone,” she said when they stopped in front of the motel. He handed it over to her unlocked and she put her number in and handed it back. “There, now we don’t have to wait a week to talk to each other.”

“You might regret this choice,” he teased then bid her goodbye.

Later that night she got a text from Bucky. It was some video with the caption ‘I thought you would find this funny.’

* * *

A few days after she signed the papers, she found an apartment that was move-in ready. Things were finally starting to look up for her. She wanted to text Charlie and just talk to him but she restrained herself.

Instead, she distracted herself with social media, and apparently she hadn’t unfollowed her ex-husband because the first thing she saw on Instagram was a picture of him and Daniella. It was obviously some of their engagement photos, and whatever good feelings she’d had, flew out the window.

On a whim, she texted the only friend she had these days. She wasn’t expecting anything to come from it, but about forty-five minutes later Bucky was knocking at her door.

“What are you doing here?” She asked as she opened the door.

“I brought treats,” he said walking in not waiting for her to invite him in. He set the brown bag down on her coffee table and sat on her couch. “And there are a bunch of movies that I’ve been told are classics that I haven’t seen yet, so help me catch up.”

She smiled at him as she sat next to him on the couch and dug into the bag of snacks.

They were halfway through the first movie when she was hit with a sudden wave of emotions and she started crying.

“Woah,” Bucky whispered putting down his drink on the coffee table. He turned to her. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s my best friend, or he was,” she wiped the tears off her cheeks, “Any time someone talks about getting a divorce they don’t talk about that you lose your best friend. I saw something stupid on the street a few days ago like right after the signing and I wanted to text Charlie so bad. And I had the message all typed and ready to go when I remembered that I can’t do that anymore.

“Not to mention that all my friends pre-blip weren’t blipped away and now they have all moved on and I’m still in the same place I was five years ago.” She looked down at her hands and picked at her thumbnail. “I just - all my life I was afraid of being left behind, and now I have been.”

“Well, I like stupid things,” Bucky said, “so next time you can text me. We’re friends, and I know what it’s like to be left behind.”

* * *

As the week went on Y/n realized a pattern in her behavior. Any time that she found something funny or just wanted to talk to anyone, Bucky was her first choice. She had other friends but Bucky had quickly become her best friend.

Thursday came faster than she expected it to. And for once, she was actually looking forward to it. 

That is until she opened Instagram. Charlie had posted again, and it used to be that he would post maybe once every month if that. So him posting again so soon after the most recent one, surprised her a little, but, she could handle Charlie and Daniella being cute in one post.

She was sitting in the chair in the circle while the rest of the patrons trickled in, and that’s when she finally really looked at the post and her heart nearly stopped.

“Alrighty,” Sarah said calling attention to herself, “Let’s begin. Does anyone want to start us off?”

Everyone was silent, Y/n sent a pleading look to Bucky who was across the circle from her. She knew that if no one else started it Sarah would -

“Y/n,” Sarah said as if she could read minds, “We missed you last week. Anything you’d like to share?”

Y/n snorted. “Two seconds before I was turned to dust, my husband, well ex-husband, and I had just decided to start trying for a kid. And now we’re divorced, and his new fiancee is pregnant. Or at least they just announced it, which means they’ve known for a few months. But I’m just trying to figure out what the fuck I did in a past life to warrant this kind of bullshit. Ya know?”

“Well,” Sarah started but Y/n wasn’t paying attention. All of her attention was on Bucky who was staring back at her. His gaze was unwavering. He offered her a small smile, which she returned.

At that moment, something deep inside her sparked back to life. She knew the feeling, she hadn’t had these feelings since the beginning of her relationship with Charlie. She had this feeling of almost despair with the knowledge that she could easily fall in love with this man if she wasn’t careful.

And Y/n was one clumsy fucker.

* * *

Y/n would like to say that she held out for months before she fell in love with Bucky.

It would be a lie, but ya gotta lie to yourself sometimes.

Three weeks had passed since Charlie’s announcement and Y/n hadn’t thought about it in a long time.

No, instead she was spending most of her free time acting like a high school girl who had a crush. When she was in bed at night texting him she would be grinning like an idiot. Or anytime he called her, her heart would skip several beats.

It even got to the point where one time at the support group he said something to her that was mildly flirtatious and her palms started full-on sweating. It was getting ridiculous.

Crushes weren’t supposed to feel like that as an adult. The butterflies in her stomach were supposed to be subdued, her heart wasn’t supposed to completely stop every time he so much as smiled at her. And yet, that’s exactly what she was going through.

* * *

There was one Thursday when Bucky wasn’t at group. He had sent her a text telling her as much, but she’d hoped that he was lying and was going to show up anyway. Because yes, they were friends and hung out outside of Thursday nights, but with the group, they got to see each other every week.

But then she didn’t hear from him for a few days, then a whole week. Which wasn’t the biggest deal in the world, people get busy Y/n understood that. She didn’t start to worry until another Thursday came and went without a word from Bucky.

Y/n was pacing her living room after group and was three seconds from calling Bucky and then the police if he didn’t respond. Then there was a knock at her door.

She opened it to find a beaten and bloodied Bucky standing at her door, and her heart dropped to her stomach.

“I forgot to text,” he whispered, but she was no longer worried about the lack of contact for the past week.

“Please tell me that isn’t your blood,” she whispered.

He gave her finger guns and the weakest smile. “I can’t.”

“Jesus, Barnes,” she pulled him in and closed the door behind him.

Y/n led him to the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked as he watched her sort through everything in the bathroom looking for the supplies she needed.

She glanced at him sideways before wetting a washcloth with warm water. As gently as she could, she began to wipe the blood away from his face. Y/n focused solely on his blood-stained cheeks, but she could feel Bucky’s gaze glued to her.

“Ya know that I’ll take a shower and be fine, I’m a super soldier I don’t need you to patch me up,” he said softly sending a shiver down her spine.

“Do you want me to stop?” She started to pull her hand away but Bucky caught her wrist in his hand.

“No.”

Y/n continued silently cleaning off his face, he hissed when she found a cut on his left cheekbone. She mumbled an apology but then found yet another half-healed gash on his face.

“Is this punishment for not telling you I had to go on a mission?” He teased.

“Is that where you were?” She raised an eyebrow at him and he smiled sheepishly. “Well, now the lack of communication during the week makes sense. But what I still don’t understand is why you decided to forego a shower before showing up at my doorstep battered and bruised? Especially if you knew that you would heal up in a few hours. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll tell you what’s going on next time. And shower before I come over.”

“As long as you come over,” Y/n shrugged.

* * *

Sam was sitting on the couch when Bucky returned to their shared apartment. The grin on Sam’s face didn’t go unnoticed but Bucky was trying to ignore him.

“You didn’t even bother to shower before you went over to her place,” Sam unnecessarily pointed out. “How bad do you have it?”

“I do not have it bad-”

Sam interrupted him with a laugh. “Barnes, she got you acting like a damned fool. And don’t think I haven’t seen the way that you stare longingly at her during support group. And the stupid smile you have on your face anytime she texts you. Not to mention -”

“Ok, ok, I get it. You know I like her.”

Sam stared at him in disbelief. “That’s what you’re calling it? ‘Liking her’? Boy, I got some news for you.”

Bucky sighed and sunk into the couch next to Sam. “I can’t be in love with her Sam. We only met a few months ago. Not to mention she just got a divorce.”

“Well, you were apart of two different fights for the universe with no break in between. Your concept of time and the time you have left on earth has been altered. The timeline that you normally would’ve given yourself doesn’t really apply anymore. And if I’m right, which I am, you’re probably not gonna tell her that you’re in love with her for about 80 years after being on ice for 70 of those years, fighting a war or two and then leaving your best friends with little to no warning. Then somehow making your way back to your friends only to, I don’t know, take off your arm and saying ‘you’re in charge now’,” Sam said only mildly bitterly.

Bucky snorted.

“If it’s any consolation,” Sam said after a moment, “I think that she could be falling in love with you too.”

* * *

Y/n was sitting on Bucky’s couch. It was only the second time she’d been to his apartment. And she was trying to relax but she was trying not to think about the fact that she was falling in love with Bucky.

It was the fact that she was already so enamored by him and she’d just gotten a divorce.  She felt guilty. For what? Having feelings? Moving on with her life?

“Steve isn’t dead,” Bucky blurted.

Y/n looked at him, eyes wide. “What?”

“Rogers,” Bucky continued. “He didn’t die in the same fight as Tony. He went back in time to be with Peggy, which is his own choice. But it’s like every time I got him back I lost him again, and this time he chose it. I don’t know, I just feel like I’m wanted.”

“I want you,” she said. His eyes were wide when he looked at her. “No, that’s not really what I meant but like -”

“I get what you mean,” he said then whispered, “I think.”

“Do you want pizza?” Y/n asked getting off the sofa.

“We’re not gonna talk about how you want me? Specifically for my body,” Bucky got up and followed her.

“I’ve decided to kill you and then you would be a joke in your community. A supersoldier, taken out by little old me, a human. You have a metal arm, Barnes, why was I able to take you down?”

“Well, I hope that you do well in your life after you murder me in cold blood.”

“It wouldn’t be in cold blood, besides I don’t even know how to throw a proper punch,” she shrugged.

Bucky chuckled. “Don’t worry, I’ll teach you how to fight.”

Y/n looked down at the floor with the hint of a smile on her face. “Ok, thanks.”

“But do you actually want pizza?” He asked as he grabbed his phone. Y/n looked up from the ground at him. “Because I could order some and then have Sam pick it up on his way home.”

“Pizza sounds good.”

“Great.” Bucky unlocked his phone and started typing away. 

“You’d really teach me how to fight? I’m not coordinated at all, but I’m great at giving people bruises, so prepared for that,” she gave him finger guns.

Bucky chuckled. “Ok, Sam is gonna pick up the pizza and -”

“I think I’m falling in love with you,” Y/n blurted.

She and Bucky stared at each other silently for a moment. Y/n let out a noise that was halfway between a squeal and a laugh before running towards the door. Bucky grabbed her arm before she got far.

“It’s not fair to tell me something like that and then run away,” he said softly.

“But what if you judge me?”

“I have no place to judge you.”

“I shouldn’t have blurted it at all because now you might feel pressured to say something you don’t mean. Listen if you don’t feel the same way and want to just say friends just tell me right now, I can handle it.”

Bucky tilted his head to the side. “What makes you think I don’t feel the same?”

A beat. 

The tension between them got so intense Y/n almost couldn’t stand it. For a brief moment, she thanked her lucky stars that Sam wasn’t in the apartment because he definitely would’ve made a joke that ruined the moment.

“Do you wanna kiss me as much as I wanna kiss you?” Bucky asked.

“No,” she said and his face twisted in confusion, “Clearly I want to do it more.”

She cupped his cheeks with her hands pulling him into her. Once their lips met every worry she had about falling in love again went out the window. All the guilt and anxiety that had been building up over the last few months was gone. 

The door to the apartment opened and in walked Sam. Bucky and Y/n were still in each other's arms and they stared at Sam who stared back blankly.

“Shit, the pizza,” was all he said before he walked right back out the door.

“Just so there’s no confusion, I’m pretty sure I’m falling in love with you too,” Bucky said.

“Good because that would’ve been awkward,” Y/n chuckled.

[rivahisu107]

The Unresolved Baby Subplot Chapter 4: Two Ackermans & Two Plotholes

With Levi and Hange out of the way, the island of Paradis is descending further into unrest: the Jaegerists are gaining control, the wine plan has been exposed, and Marley is on its way for retribution. Would any of this had happened if the Queen were not having a child under the strangest of circumstances? 

Meanwhile, Eren’s friends have been hurt by his apparent betrayal, but Mikasa has taken the worst of it. Eren claims that as an Ackerman, she latched onto him as a host due to her genetics and claims that he has always hated her. And now they are being held in prison as Yelena provides her side of the story. But what does this have to do with the baby? And what else can we learn about the Ackermans?

Hold on, we’re in for a wild ride and a callback to an overlooked but vital clue from Clash of the Titans in the latest install of this (conspiracy) theory for the unresolved baby subplot! Because let me tell you, there is a key piece of evidence here that almost certainly proves the paternity of the child.

Yelena is coolly explaining the logistics of Zeke and Eren’s secret plan to the Corps. With sterilization, the Jaeger brothers will save the world from the curse of the Subjects of Ymir by taking out their reproductive abilities. Unfortunately, this is met with complete disgust- and mockery on Armin’s part- from the Corps. But how exactly will this plan protect Paradis from invasion until the last of the people die out? Let’s let Yelena explain with a cameo from Historia:

To compare to the fifty year plan:

Both involve using a partial Rumbling as a deterrent force.

Both involve maintaining the Founder.

Both need the royal family. 

The problem is... on repeat readings, Yelena is not making much sense here, and the euthanasia plan has a huge plot hole. Why? Let’s do a breakdown. 

“Both the Founder and the royal family must be maintained.” 

Problem one. Assuming euthanasia succeeds, there will be no more possibility of Historia having more royal blood children, but she will have one child- and from the reader’s perspective, this is her child who is assumed to be born of her and of the normal, humble farmer. Sounds good so far, right? But what is Yelena saying here? The Founder can only be used as a deterrent if possessed by either 1. a person of royal blood or 2. a non-royal blood user of the Founder and a royal blood Titan. And Yelena is saying that these must be maintained separately. Huh? And what happened to Historia inheriting the Beast Titan? It could still be part of the plan, but that leads to problem two. 

“So long as a few Subjects of Ymir inherit the Founding Titan until that child passes from the world.”

See? Nothing about the two remaining members of the royal family inheriting the Titan Shifters. Only a few non-royal Subjects of Ymir are going to be getting the Founder. Even assuming the Beast Titan would be inherited by Historia and then her child, their life spans would only be totaled twenty-six years. This is not enough time to wait for all the Subjects of Ymir to die off. Besides, Yelena only mentions the child. It seems that the royal family would have been spared turning into Titan Shifters. 

The problem is: How is a child of royal blood, who is not going to be given a Titan Shifter to inherit, going to protect the island for at least fifty or so years until the population dies off by working together with the non-royal Founder users?

I’m sorry, dear readers, but I will just say here. If you still think that this child is supposed to be the child of a nameless, faceless farmer at this point, then you are fools. Yes, Historia doesn’t have to love somebody who has special abilities that could be passed on to her children, but with a plot hole like this, there has to be something bigger going on. You do not have to be special to be born into the world, but clearly there is something special about this child that could be easily exploited by Yelena and the like. 

...

Alright, time to travel back to Clash of the Titans arc! Wait, what? Why here? It features a huge moment with the main couple of the manga. Remember, Eren thinks back to this time during the time skip when he realizes just how he activated the Coordinate for the first time. 

As he and Mikasa were about to die and he promised to always wrap that scarf around her, Eren, unknowingly possessing the Founder along with the Attack Titan, got the strength to punch back the Titan who later turned out to be Dina Fritz, the royal blooded mother of Zeke, and activated the Coordinate to control the Titans and get revenge for Hannes’ death. We all know that now, correct?

The Corps is making its getaway, but then they have Reiner and Bertholdt to deal with as well. Reiner correctly predicts to us readers that Eren is the most dangerous person to possess the Founder. And then Eren uses its power again. 

What’s going on here? Eren activated the Coordinate again without being in contact with a Titan of royal blood! The only person he is in physical contact with is Mikasa Ackerman.

Ackerman. 

We all know Eren lied about the Ackerman slave thing, but he mixed in some lies with the truth about Ackermans. This is what else he had to say based on his conversations with Zeke, who has all these memories of Tom Ksaver’s work with the Titan Research Society with all kinds of info about Titans and the Ackerman clan.

“A bloodline that could partly manifest the strength of a Titan while in human form.”

Oh! So that explains why Mikasa and Levi are so strong and heal faster than normal Eldians and why they are also immune to memory wipes. Okay, they’re Titans in human form, so how could Mikasa activate the Coordinate at least partially?

Well. In Chapter 107, the same chapter that Historia is revealed to be pregnant under unusual circumstances, we have a flashback and visit from Hizuru, the land of some of Mikasa’s lineage on her mother’s side. And what do we learn from Kiyomi? Mikasa is the descendent of the shogun- the royal family- who was left behind and lost on Paradis for at least a century! A lost princess! 

Dear readers, Mikasa has been the key this whole time. She, a person of Ackerman, normal Eldian, and royal blood of Hizuru, managed to activate the Coordinate by being in contact with Eren, even if it was only a partial activation. 

This here is the answer to the euthanasia plothole. This is also almost absolute proof that this child was intended to be Levi and Historia’s child. An Ackerman with Eldian royal blood would have the ability to manifest the strength and powers of a Titan without having to turn into a Titan. And when in contact with the Founder, they would be able to use the Coordinate to defend the island. And the child would be able to live out a full life, so no worries about Titan shifting. 

But unfortunately, this would mean using the child as a tool, used for causing mass destruction no matter if one is pro-euthanasia or pro-Rumbling. The parents of the child would likely be opposed to this, and Eren himself has qualms with using children. It’s no wonder that Yelena and Floch were more than happy to get their number one threat, Levi, out of the way, and Hange as well.

Oh. Oh oh oh. And if you want to see some classic Isayama trolling, check out this Q & A from the August 2018 magazine- you know, the magazine with Chapter 107, the pregnancy plot reveal. 

Um, yeah, so it seems that this was what Isayama was going for all along with the pregnancy subplot. 

Unfortunately, it never amounted to anything really, not even symbolically. We still don’t have all our answers for it explicitly made. It’s rather too bad, because there is potentially further proof I found- and a plothole- that connects to this, also about Ackermans.

...

Chapter 126 opens with Hange killing off several Jaegerists while protecting a comatose Levi. She tends to his wounds and delivers some exposition about Ackermans which fits with the previous chapter about euthanasia and the child. 

What is the problem here? In story, we never find out the reason how Hange even knows this. In Chapter 108, the Corps was discussing inheriting the Founder, and Jean mentioned that at the time about a year before the Rumbling, they didn’t even understand what the Ackerman clan was. 

So, how does Hange know this, and why is it so important to know that Ackermans can’t turn into Titans? Sure, the two known members of the clan were the only two people who were left to kill Eren because they were immune to the centipede which just vanished for unknown reasons after Eren died, but I am asking how Hange knew this in the first place. Why?

“Everyone was turned into Titans, but only you survived.”

Hange hadn’t seen Levi in at least a month. There is no way that Hange could have asked him if he drank the tainted wine or seen him drink it and then go on to conclude that Ackermans can’t turn into Titans without affirming the former was done while he was unconscious. 

One thing about Hange post time skip is that the focus is on her being commander without much for the Titan science aspect. There is one obscure moment from Chapter 109 that got me thinking. While she is having a moment of frustration, she suddenly collects herself and states:

What does she need to study? Is she trying to find more solutions to the problem at hand? I don’t know if books will really help them in the situation of, “What to do when the Queen is pregnant and can’t become a Titan Shifter to guarantee the island’s safety while trying to prepare for a global strike because Eren was an idiot and acted alone”, but I do have to wonder here. Could Hange have been trying to study something about the Ackerman clan, something about a potential child with mixed genes? 

The above is more of a guess from me than anything, but it’s the only thing I could find that would explain how Hange would make such a bold statement without seeing the evidence- that would make her a bad scientist. 

Funny enough, as readers, believe it or not, we might have proof that at some point, even if not in the forest, that Levi did drink tainted wine. It’s blink and you miss it. 

A few chapters back, I speculated about the banquet and Levi being counted as top brass, the only section of the military permitted to drink the wine. Again, without seeing the banquet ever, this point is hard to prove, but it’s not impossible to think that it would happen. It’s in Chapter 112 when Zeke’s plan goes into action that we can see something happen to Levi’s body.

There is a twitch effect surrounding his body going through his hair and clothes. The brass from many miles away felt a reaction go through their bodies too akin to a shock or a twitch. And to see what the anime staff did, check out this blink and you miss it GIF.

Furthermore, check out this dialogue.

“When’d he start tainting it?” 

Oh dear. He really screwed up in many ways this arc. But he is one of the lucky ones indeed. If he weren’t an Ackerman, he’d be long dead in the story. 

...

That was a lot of ground to cover in this chapter, but perhaps we have struck through the surface of the mystery of the Ackerman clan in the most unexpected ways. 

The next chapter will feature bits and pieces of odd evidence that could be key to the unresolved baby plot. After Chapter 123, it seems that the whole thing is almost forgotten, so I do question if there really was a retcon or a change to a more open ending with it all. Even if what is said in the following chapters has nothing to do with the baby, the buildup theorized about here may unlock a few of the creative decisions made.

[serpentinesarang]

Playing Dress Up

pairing: changbin (seo changbin) x fem reader [because he’s my ult, OKAY?]

genre: idol!au, verrrrry little smut if you look under a microscope, the gentlest of fem-dom tones, suggestive, self-insert first-person POV (no y/n), reader has an overly sensitive spine that turns her on (integral to the plot), reader speaks konglish (key below)

word count: 1538

content warnings: one swear but that’s about it

summary: it’s post-covid era, and your newish boyfriend changbin, who doesn’t live with you yet, comes over under the guise of catching up after skz’s long-awaited world tour. he surprises you at first, but he doesn’t know you too have a surprise up your sleeve.

a/n: yet another super old piece i wrote in early 2018

korean key:

⦿ annyeong (안녕) = hi (in the context of the plot); pronounced “on-yawng”

⦿ jalsaenggin (잘생긴) = handsome; pronounced “jahl-seng-geen”

⦿ areumdaoon (아름다운) = beautiful; pronounced “ah-room-dah-oon”

⦿ ne (네) = most common form of yes; pronounced “neh”

⦿ gamsahamnida (감사합니다) = most common form of thank you; pronounced “kahm-sah-hahm-nee-dah”

⦿ cheonmaneyo (천만에요) = formal version of you’re welcome; pronounced “chun-mahn-eh-yo”

⦿ yangbok (양복) = suit; pronounced “yahng-bohk”

♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤♤

Perched on the couch, I glanced at the clock again: 7:27 PM. I buried my face in my sweater-paws in a burst of adrenaline. 

This is it; this is it; this is IT, my inner voice screamed. He’s gonna be here any motherfluffing second now! In my building! In my apartment! With ME!

A sharp knock at the door snapped me out of my anxious thoughts. At long last, the moment I'd played out in my head so many different ways was finally transpiring before my wide eyes and thumping heart. After months of texting, selfie sharing, and videochatting, my boyfriend would finally be on the same side of the world as I.

I shot off the couch in pure, unfettered excitement but forced myself not to skip to the door, employing a calculated casualness as I took a deep breath before gripping the knob and twisting it open.

My poor little heart slammed harder against its cage as I gazed at Changbin, absolutely decked in an all-black suit and holding a bouquet of unusually dark red roses. Leave it to Binnie to go all out with his fondess for all things dark. 

I let out a much-restrained giggle as he grinned ear to ear, giving me an expression so much more happier than any of the ones I’d seen when I answered his video calls. His eyes crinkled as he took me in and let the attraction bloom across his glowing face.

He emitted a contented hmm before I finally broke the smile-off and said softly, “Annyeong, jalsaenggin.”

“A-annyeong, areumdaoon,” Changbin replied, adorably nervous.

I beckoned him inside the apartment, closed the door, and turned to face him. Eyeing the flowers in his hand, I said, “You've been planning to give me flowers even though I told you they’re not necessary, haven’t you?”

He glanced down at the floor with a sinister chuckle. “Ne.”

I shook my head with a smirk. “You didn't have to, but gamsahamnida.” I bowed my head at him, genuinely thankful for this sweet surprise.

“Cheonmaneyo,” he replied after bowing at me as well, still smiling with those tantalizing, full lips.

Segueing from the bouquet, I eyed his sleek outfit and touched a hand to his shoulder. “And you put on a suit for me?”

Changbin bit his lower lip—something I’d stupidly admitted turns me on when I was tipsy one night—and took a small step closer. “When we were in New York, when you and I talked about award shows, you said I look good in yangbok.”

This boy and his memory...

Dramatically planting my hands on my hips, I raised my voice a little: “Well I lied, Binnie. You look sexy in yangbok.”

His eyes had instinctually widened when I said “lied,” but then he scrunched his face into a disgustingly cute (≧◡≦) expression of childlike joy.

After we shared some shy chuckles, I sighed, still alive with energy. “Well,” I began, reaching for the bouquet, “let me put these in water.” I started toward the kitchen before he grabbed my wrist, gently yanking me back.

Unmoved, he stood in the entryway with raised arms and expectant eyes, and I realized he had been patiently waiting the whole time to embrace me.

I cackled in my mind for a second before saying, “Two minutes; I promise. Put your shoes there.” I pointed to a small, makeshift closet area wedged between my bedroom and bathroom, then I slipped into the kitchen, our eyes glued to each other the entire time.

Once I'd dropped the roses into a long-forgotten vase I dug out of a seldom opened cabinet, I pivoted on the smooth tile and boosted myself up onto the counter, near the sink, in one fluid motion. Changbin had been patiently leaning, hands in pockets, against a pillar directly across the kitchen with seductive, hooded eyes.

Time to make that a shit-eating grin.

I locked eyes with him and opened my bent legs outward, heels against the cabinets. I raised my arms and fought the urge to espouse a flirtatious expression while he wasted no time marching across the kitchen and wrapping his firm arms around me as I wrapped my legs around his torso. He nuzzled his head into the crook of my neck, and I rested my head atop his.

I tenderly stroked his abundant black hair with one hand and gripped a toned shoulder blade with the other. My heart had slowed down a bit, but it was still abnormal enough for him to feel my jugular throbbing against his cheek. He held me so tightly—not uncomfortably... but passionately. Making up for all the lost time and lost touch.

I felt Changbin starting to trail a finger up my spine, and just as he was hoping, I involuntarily lurched against him. So he’s gonna play that game with me... I thought. I exhaled loudly and whispered into his ear, “You can either save that for later or much sooner than later. Your choice.”

He laughed against my neck, finally pulling away just enough to see my face. He paused, taking his sweet time mining my bright eyes for clues. In this moment, I realized despite my nervous fervor that he’d done his whole skincare routine before coming here, and the scent of his favorite cologne was emanating from his visibly pulsing jugular.

“Sooner, please,” Changbin answered quietly, gazing at me with begging eyes.

“Sooner,” I nodded, leaning in to delicately kiss him, not pressing my lips too hard against his. I wanted to savor the feeling of his unfairly beautiful lips on mine. But, mashing his lips deeper, he slid his hands beneath my ass to whisk me off the counter, still tightly wrapped around his back like the precious cargo I am.

He carried me to my bedroom as I placed random kisses on his smooth skin. At the foot of the bed, he let my body, almost unwillingly, cascade to the floor, keeping his hands on my waist.

“‘Just hang out and talk,’ huh,” I remarked sarcastically with a chuckle. I weaved my arms underneath his and hugged him closer, holding my face just a few inches from his.

Biting his lip again, Changbin paused to compose the perfect reply as he tucked my hair behind an ear. “We didn’t mention what we would do while we talked...” he trailed off, his eyelids drooping suggestively. 

I smirked and maneuvered my hands to undo his jacket button. Pausing, I looked up at him and said in a solemn voice, “I think I'll undress you, unlike that one night I chickened out before you left.”

“I knew you had it in you,” he murmured in a playfully patronizing tone.

“Oh, it's gonna be in me,” I lobbied back, narrowing my eyes and smirking again. I snaked my hands up his chest and over his shoulders to slide off his jacket. “I'll hang it all up so nothing wrinkles.”

Changbin followed me to the closet as I hung the jacket.

“Tell me, baby: what are you thinking about?” I asked, working on his shirt buttons.

While he paused to think up a good answer, I unbelted him and tugged out the edges of his shirt.

“Just you,” he said, confidently.

We worked his pants off together, and I hung them too. “Great minds think alike.” 

Then I removed his dress shirt as he stood there, just smiling like an idiot in love. After what seemed like forever, he was down to his last undergarments, which I left for the fun to come.

“They’re gone,” I noted in a soft voice while caressing his stomach, devoid of the abs he’d talked about so often during their tour.

Changbin groaned quietly, putting on a comical frown. “Don’t talk about it...”

I laughed, bent down to plant a kiss on the curve of his supple stomach, and led him back to the foot of the bed. I sat him down and backed up a few steps, preparing for something I rarely had the courage to do for boyfriends. He watched me intently, and I realized that his lips had seldom turned downward since he'd arrived.

“So,” I began, hands in my sweatshirt pocket and my excitement painfully, embarrassingly obvious, “you must feel like the best dressed person here.”

He nodded innocently as I weaseled out of the baggy sweatshirt and tossed it aside to reveal a scarlet open-cup bra with strategically placed, intricately lacy flowers adorning the cups. I watched his eyebrows rise as he assessed me feverishly.

“Well, I dressed up too,” I continued in my best velvety tone of flirtation.

Slowly and purposefully, I shimmied out of my equally baggy sweats and kicked those aside too. Now my full outfit was on display, and I felt a chill come over me. This time, I revealed a scarlet, gartered thong that featured more strategically placed lace and several strappy pieces holding the lace bits together—a barely-there kind of piece that emphasized the curves of my figure.

Finishing off the look was a pair of scarlet thigh-high stockings with matching lace at the top... his only clue if Changbin had noticed my toes enrobed in sheer red hosiery.

I stood straighter, sucked in my stomach, shifted my weight on either foot to demonstrate a few cheesy poses before giving him the full turnaround. He was dumbstruck, speechless, and empty-eyed, his face alight with intrigue as I inched forward and straddled him. Cupping his jaws below the ears and leaning in, I whispered, "Now undress me and touch my back again."

[thoughts-of-a-bibleophile]

family

not me jumping onto the shusumi week train when there’s only a few days left 

i apparently used all my braincells to make this fic and saved none for the title

i...was very much possessed by a writing ghost when doing this. i was just reading some fics and suddenly had the idea for this and then an hour later, i had this fic. i was actually going for seasons when i first wrote this, but it very much turned more into a family piece, so here we are.

i’ve been a persona fan since about 2018, but this is my first work and, honestly, i’m really surprised it’s not shuake/akeshu since they’re usually my main ship. but the beauty of multi-shipping is that i can also love shusumi! i just think they’re really neat.

also, gonna be honest, i... think? this counts as shusumi? even though the focus is a lot more on family than anything else. i wanted to do a more internal piece about sumire and her thoughts after the events of royal, which i think i more or less got across here. there is definitely some shusumi in the end, though!

anyway, without further ado, i hope you enjoy!

if you’re in this tag, you probably don’t need this, but just in case: ***persona 5 royal third semester spoliers ahead!***

word count: 1.6k summary: sumire visits kasumi a year after the accident and reflects on everything that’s changed in the last year.

no beta, we die like men (i’m sorry in advance if there are mistakes, though!)

“I can’t believe it’s been a year.”

It was spring. The trees were green and blooming with flowers, the air perfumed with their sweet scent. Below them, rows upon rows of stones lined the grass, gray and somber, though some holding a pop of color from leftover flowers. A lone girl stood at one, clutching her own bouquet in hand, sakura petals clinging to her red hair.

She should be with her friends right now, celebrating their graduations and having their going away parties. But she couldn’t. Not after everything that had happened. Not without telling Kasumi first.

Of course you’d be the stick in the mud who had to ruin their days, a far too familiar voice seethed in her mind. She did her best to ignore it.

She bit her lip, wondering where to begin. How to begin. So much had happened that it seemed almost like a dream.

“I don’t even know where to start, but I guess the beginning is better than nothing, right?” Sumire sighed. “Honestly, you were always better at this than I was, but I’m going to do my best.”

And so she began. From living life as Kasumi for so many months to cope, to her short time as a Phantom Thief and battling monsters they had only heard of in storybooks, to her days of being lost as Sumire and denying the truth, to finally accepting herself with the help of her friends and-

“Akira...” she trailed off and felt herself smiling just at his name. “You would have loved Akira. He’s the one who was there through it all. He met me as, well, you, but he still likes me as Sumire and-“ She felt her cheeks warm, thinking of his ridiculous, yet romantic antics since she had blurted out that confession. And the fact that he had reciprocated-

Sumire shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts and her blush. That was a story for another time, another visit.

“Anyway, he’s actually the leader of the Phantom Thieves, but he also goes to Shujin. Things didn’t start out that well for him there, but he faced it all head on and did some incredible things. And he met so many people and has so many great friends.”

She paused. “Well, I guess they’re kind of my friends, too, now.” She shrugged to herself. “I wish you could meet them, Kasumi. You would fit right in, as usual. They’re all so kind and caring and funny and- I never thought I would meet people like them. Like I know you always had amazing friends, but for so long, I didn’t think I would ever meet people like that.”

I didn’t think I deserved friends like that, the thought rose in the back of her mind.

The stone in front of her said nothing. Not that she expected it to, but it felt nice talking to it anyway. She played with the edges of her bangs, lost in thought for a moment.

“But...that’s in the past.” She gripped the flowers in her hand tighter, her voice rising as her resolve hardened. “I made a lot of mistakes before, Kasumi, but I’m not going to make them again. I’m going to live my own life and make our dreams come true as Sumire Yoshizawa!”

Again, the stone said nothing. Her words hung in the air for a moment, only to be blown away by the breeze. She fiddled with the violets in her hand.

“I thought you’d like these. I know they’re your favorite.” She tried to smile, only for it to fall moments later. She tried to swallow the lump quickly forming in her throat.

“I know I didn’t tell you this when you were here, but I miss you. I miss you so much it hurts.” Her throat felt tight, her chest hollow, like something had carved a hole into it, never to be filled again. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes as her head dropped, the old familiar feelings of guilt and despair slipping through the walls she had carefully built back up the last few months.

“I feel like I’m messing this up; I was never good with speeches like this.” She sniffled, pulling off her glasses to swipe at her eyes. “I just wish you could be here somehow.”

She closed her eyes, wishing just for a moment, for a sign that her sister was listening. The spring breeze picked up again, rustling the leaves of the trees around her. She opened her eyes to see the petals spinning in a circle, almost like they were dancing in a swirl of pink. It reminded her of the pink ribbons she and her sister had first practiced with, of dancing with her friends and of gymnastics and everything that she loved.

Perhaps it had been simply a coincidence or perhaps she was making something out of nothing, but it was enough. It was a reminder to live. To live their dream, to live her life.

Sumire smiled and sighed when the petals fell back to the ground as the breeze lessened.

“I’ll be back soon, Kasumi. I’m going to a graduation party for two of my friends! Makoto and Haru, I’ll tell you more about them next time.” She placed the flowers carefully into their designated spot. “And I’ll make sure to bring new flowers next time, too! And... maybe I’ll bring Akira next time. So you can meet him.”

With nothing in her hands, she fiddled with the hem of her coat, feeling like there was something left to say still, despite knowing that she likely didn’t have much time left.

“I don’t know what’s coming next, but I know you’ll be there with me, Kasumi.” Pink flowers fell on the gray stone and for a moment she could imagine them caught in brown hair instead. “I’m sorry it took me so long to realize that, but I’m glad I know now. I really am going to do my best to make our dreams come true, Kasumi. And I’m going to keep on going and live my own life! I promise.”

With a firm nod to herself, Sumire cast one last look at her sister’s headstone before returning to the walking path. Sakura blossoms covered the top, with purple violets at the bottom. Small sprouts of white flowers had begun to bloom at its base, leaving little gray showing through. Colorful and full of life, just like Kasumi.

Sumire turned back to the pathway and made her way back down to the entrance, full of hope for the future to come.

-

At the entrance, a boy with black hair and glasses stood, lost in thought, his hair covered in sakura petals as well.

Whether it was from leftover abilities from the Metaverse or he was just that perceptive - she was betting on the latter - he turned toward her as she descended the last few steps down to meet him.

Akira said nothing, just opened his arms to pull her close and rest his chin on the top of her head. She sank into the embrace, feeling the heaviness in her heart lighten just a bit. His hugs were great, but they weren’t magic, even if he liked to say they were. They had a long road ahead, especially her, but she knew they could get through it together.

“Thank you for waiting,” she said, more into his coat than to him. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

“It’s fine. I knew it was important.”

Sumire tightened her arms around him, nestling further into his chest, wishing they could just stay like that forever. But she knew that wasn’t possible, so instead, she looked up.

She had seen a lot of his smiles in the time she’d known him, but she’d only seen this one once before. It was on Valentine’s Day, when his usual smirks and grins had softened into the one he wore now, a quiet little thing that held such care and love that it made her heart clench.

“I’m proud of you, you know that?”

She blinked at him. “Why?”

“I know how hard it was to handle everything, let alone talk to your sister about it. But you did it. That takes a lot of guts, Sumire.”

She felt her face redden and that soft smile edged slightly into his familiar grin.

“I-It wasn’t that big of a deal,” she stammered out. “I mean, I wouldn’t have had the guts to even come here if you weren’t with me, senpai, and even then I didn’t do anything that special!”

Akira laughed, probably at how easy it was to still make her blush around him. He was so annoying sometimes and he knew it.

But then he was serious again and searched her eyes for a moment.

“Are you going to be okay? We can always just stay at LeBlanc and watch movies if you don’t feel up to the party later.”

Sumire shook her head, feeling more okay than she had in a long time. “I want to go and be with our friends. I’ll be okay.”

He smiled and kissed her, a simple, short thing that had done a dozen times at this point, but it never failed to make her head spin and her heart sing.

“If you’re sure,” he said as they separated, only to link their hands as they walked to the station. She squeezed it and felt herself smile, more of the heaviness in her heart lifting at the thought of seeing her friends soon.

“Time to celebrate!” she cheered into the early April sky, the sun seeming to shine brighter in agreement. Hand in hand, they ran toward the station, to meet their friends and celebrate the start of something new.

-

so that was sure something. i hope you enjoyed it?

sorry, it’s not on ao3 - i just...have not set my account up, so all of my fics are very much just vibing on tumblr. one day i’ll finish setting up my ao3.... one day...

anyway, let me know if you like this! i honestly have no idea if i’m going to be doing any of the other days, but we’ll see.

[simplybakugou]

The Villain - Ch. 7: The Unsolicited Attack

A/N: Not even joking, I have like 20 things in my drafts because I have so many ideas to write about but I’m also too lazy and unmotivated to execute them omg. Also, because all of my classes are online now, that means I have literally 5 months of doing nothing so expect more updates because IM SO READY TO FINALLY FINISH THIS FIC. THE FACT THAT I STARTED THIS FIC AT THE END OF 2018 AND NOW ITS 2020 AND I STILL HAVEN’T FINISHED IT DJIFJEWBEHFOJEWVQOJ

Remember, if you want to be tagged in future chapters, comment below and I’ll add your username to the list!

Pairing: villain!bakugou Warnings: swearing Word Count: 3,703

LINKS TO NEW CHAPTERS

✐posted 04.10.2020✐

“Man, I really just bombed that exam,” Kaminari groaned, burying his face in his hands.

“It’s okay, Mina and Sero are probably going to join you in your failure,” you teased, earning yourself some glares from Sero and Mina. Kirishima laughed and you looked at him. “Don’t laugh too hard, Eijirou, you’re not that far ahead either!”

Kaminari, Sero, and Mina took their chances to make fun of Kirishima this time, the boys fooling around while Mina rolled her eyes. The sun was beginning to set as you and your friends waited outside of U.A. before walking back home.

“Where the hell is Katsuki?” You muttered.

Mina heard you over the sound of the boys arguing and put her arm on your shoulder. “Aw, look at you worrying about your boyfriend.”

She made kissy faces at you and you rolled your eyes, pushing her face away. “You know it’s not like that. He just seems down lately.”

Mina raised her brow. “Really? If I’m being honest, I haven’t really noticed. Then again, you’ve always been observant and see things I would never even think about noticing.”

You sighed, shrugging your shoulders as Kirishima waved at you and Mina. He showed you his phone, revealing messages between him and Bakugou. “Bakugou said that he’s going to see us tomorrow. Apparently he has to talk to a teacher about one of his assignments.”

“Alright, come on let’s go home,” Kaminari said as the group began walking away.

You stayed back. “I think I’m going to wait for him out here.”

“Are you sure? I can wait with you if you want,” Mina suggested.

You shook your head, smiling. “I just don’t want to leave him alone so I’m going to annoy him a little. I’ll see you guys tomorrow!”

The four of them waved good-bye to you as they walked away. You turned back around, leaning against the gates opening up to U.A. You had a feeling in your gut that was telling you to stay back and wait for Bakugou and low and behold, Bakugou came walking down the entrance. When he saw you, you could practically hear him groaning despite the amount of distance between the two of you.

As he came closer, you pointed your finger at him. “I knew it, you’re trying to avoid us!”

Bakugou rolled his eyes as he continued walking. You caught up to him, walking beside him. “Whatever. If you knew I was avoiding you shits, why’re you here?”

“‘Cause I’m worried about you,” you said truthfully.

Bakugou scoffed. “I’m not a kid, I don’t need you to fucking worry about me.”

“Just because you don’t need me to, doesn’t mean I’ll just stop.” You stood in front of him, causing him to stop walking. “You need to talk to someone about the Kamino incident.”

Bakugou’s eyes widened slightly before he gained his composure once more. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

This time it was your turn to roll your eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with feeling upset about what happened. No one blames you or thinks you’re in the wrong.”

There was a long pause before the corners of Bakugou’s lips turned upwards into a small smile. He placed his hand onto your shoulder as he walked forward. You stood dazed and confused before being able to recollect yourself and catch up with him.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m walking you home. It’s only been a few weeks since what happened to your mom and I’m still going to follow you around to make sure you’re not gonna do anything stupid.”

***

The walk was quiet, but it wasn’t awkward. Bakugou seemed to be deep in thought and you couldn’t help but study and observe Bakugou, attempting to decipher what was going on through his head. His hands were in his pockets and his lips were almost like they were permanently down turned. Once you got to your house, you could see your dad peeking through the window and sigh in relief once he saw you. Bakugou looked over there and looked back at you. “Your dad must’ve been worried about you. You need to take care of yourself for him.”

You sighed. “I know and I am taking care of myself now.”

Bakugou nodded, walking in the other direction to go to his own home. He lifted his hand to you to say goodbye. You stood in front of your driveway and called out to him. “Katsuki!”

Bakugou turned around and narrowed his brows at you. “For the last goddamn time, you’re the only one I know who calls me by my first name and I swear to god—“

You cut him off quickly, knowing he was going to continue rambling on. “I’m going to beat you.”

Bakugou was taken aback. “What?”

“I’m going to beat you and become the number one hero. I’m going to beat you, Midoriya, and Todoroki.” You paused. “You know what that means?”

“What?”

“It means that you’re still a hero to me. What happened in Kamino wasn’t your fault and that shouldn’t be a reason for you to want to stop pursuing your goal. You’re still the same hotheaded Bakugou Katsuki who is loud, driven, and the one who saved me a few weeks ago. You’re a hero, Katsuki.”

Bakugou’s eyes widened but he turned back around so you couldn’t see his expression. “Whatever. Go inside, your dad’s waiting.”

And after all this time, you always wonder what kind of expression he had on his face then.

***

Your eyes shot open and you sat up immediately in bed. You rubbed your eyes, groaning. It was a dream... But it also wasn’t. It genuinely happened and you can recall that day so easily despite how long ago it was.

The door in your room opened and Mina sighed in relief. “Thank god you’re awake, I thought I had to wake you up.”

She threw a few envelopes at you, indicating that it was some mail that you got. You went through them, most of them being bills. However, one of them was from a famous agency you had heard of. Many old heroes were signed under this agency and you immediately ripped open the seal.  The letter was addressed specifically to you.

Dear (H/N),

I hope you’ve been well and that this urgent letter reaches you. I’m going to get straight to the point; I know that you’re the number one hero and that you deserve to be involved in every important villain issue there is.

But, I don’t want you to interfere in any issue related to Ground Zero unless we need your help.

The reason for this is that I’m afraid your personal connection to him will make you biased and refrain you from stopping him if the chance that you meet him ever comes again in the future.

I know you’re a strong hero, which is why you’re number one, but my agency will take care of him if needed.

I understand that this is maybe unfair and I may be intruding, but I’m doing what is best for the world and for you. I’m asking you to step back, not forcing you to.

I hope you can trust me to do this.

—Hawks

You sighed, shoving the letter in your pockets and getting up to get ready. Once you were done, you checked your phone to get a text from Natsuya to stop by his place. You went into the kitchen as Mina set a plate of breakfast for you.

“You look worn out,” Mina commented, sitting down in front of you.

“I just have a feeling something’s going on.” You sighed, eating the food Mina made you. “I’m stopping by Natsuya’s before going to the agency today.”

“Okay.” Mina narrowed her brows in confusion at you but didn’t bother to question you further. “You’ve been at Yamashita’s place more than you’ve been here. Are you sure there isn’t something else going on?”

Mina nudged your arm and you swatted at her. “Absolutely not. I just want to hang out with my boyfriend. Sue me.” You got up to put your plate away, grabbing your coat from the rack in the process.

“But you’re hanging out with him at his apartment. Where his bed is.”

“I’m not going there for his ‘bed.’” You rolled your eyes at your best friend, bending down to tie your shoelaces.

“Hm, then again you don’t need a bed, you can have sex pretty much anywh—“

“Okay, see you later, Mina!” You exclaimed, quickly leaving the apartment only to hear Mina’s snickers as you left.

***

You knocked on the door, patiently waiting for your boyfriend to answer. Once he did, Natsuya’s face broke out into a smile as he was genuinely happy to see his girlfriend.

“Hey, you,” he said, kissing your forehead as he opened the door wider to let you in.

You smiled, walking in and he closed the door. “Why’d you call me here?”

“What? A man can’t see his girlfriend or is that a crime?” Natsuya joked and you playfully rolled your eyes at him. “I just wanted to check up on you before you and I headed out for work. I have a feeling that everything is going to escalate from here, especially since the League hasn’t done anything and it’s been three weeks now.”

You plopped down onto his sofa, letting out a loud sigh. It was evident that something was bound to happen and lately, it felt as if you were just sitting back and waiting for something to happen. It didn’t sit well with you that you couldn’t really do anything during this time. But there wasn’t anything that you could do, for now at least.

“You’re right, which is why I’m glad you called me over. I need to show you something.” Natsuya sat down beside you as you pulled out the letter from Hawks from your pocket. You handed it over to him, allowing him to read it over briefly. “What do you think about it?”

“If you want my honest opinion, I’m happy you’re not involved with all of this anymore,” Natsuya said, earning a sigh from you. You knew how he would react but nevertheless you wanted to see for yourself what he would say. Natsuya chuckled at your expression. “Don’t give me that look. You get reckless when anything Ground Zero related is called and it’s because you’re biased. Otherwise, you’re a great hero. But I’m glad Hawks stepped in and is taking care of this.”

You groaned. “I know but I’m still worried. What if I can help but it’s too late or if someone gets hurt instead of me?”

Natsuya wrapped an arm around you, rubbing your shoulders. “Y/N, Hawks is an amazing hero. He was number two back when we were still in high school and he’s still strong. Have some more trust in him, I’m sure he’ll have everything under control.”

You nodded, knowing that he was right. You felt guilty for not being able to decide to deal with Bakugou by trying desperately to understand that he’s not a villain and by trying to reprimand him because of his villainous actions. Natsuya sighed, kissing your head. “Don’t beat yourself up over this. I know you want to help but you don’t have to save every single person in the whole world. You’re not the only hero here. There are so many heroes, your colleagues, who are here for you and will support you.”

You nodded once more, wrapping your arms around his torso. “I know. Thanks, Tsuya.”

“Well, as much as I’d love to stay here like this, we’ve still got to go to work.” He patted your back as he got up, extending his hand out for you. You took it and he pulled you up, the two of you leaving to go to your respective jobs.

***

“It’s finally over!” Jirou cheered loudly, raising her arms into the air.

You sighed, rubbing the sweat from your forehead. You were asked to patrol areas that were considered “critical areas” that were most likely going to be attacked by the League by the Hero Public Safety Commission, the center that is run my non-heroes and it is involved in investigating the most criminally dangerous cases. Jirou was also in the area so she decided to tag along and help you out, just in case there was a scenario in which the League actually did attack.

“Are you headed home?” You asked.

Jirou nodded, stretching her arms out. “Yeah, this has been one of the longest days of my life. I’ve never felt so worked up. The League really needs to be stopped.” You nodded in agreement.

The two of you made your way back to the Commission Center, having to send in reports of what you had seen and the areas that you patrolled. The two of you waved to passerby’s, especially to the children who were ecstatic to have run into two major pros. Your phone rang in your pocket, continuing to vibrate uncontrollably as you fished it out. It was from the police station.

“Hello?”

“Y/N?” A female voice asked from the other line. “This is Tsubaki from the station. Yamashita’s really busy right now but he wanted to make sure to make me tell you that you need to get to the Commission Center immediately.”

You began to worry. “Yes, I’m on my way now. Did something happen?”

“It’s awful, please hurry. Bring as many people as you can, I don’t know how much is left of it.” Tsubaki hung up.

Jirou read your facial expression. “That doesn’t look good.”

“We have to get to the Commission Center now!” You exclaimed, shoving your phone back in your pocket. You began running towards the Center, Jirou following suit. “Something’s going on there, and we have to check it out. Call as many pros as you can, I’ll do the same.” Jirou wearily nodded, wanting to know what’s going on just as much as you want to.

Dear god please let everything be okay…

***

The bar was quieter than usual, only the bartender keeping Bakugou company. But he liked it that way, finding the crowds of people who usually come to be intrusive and bothersome. Thankfully there weren’t any women trying to hit on him like most nights as they try and become the girlfriend of the most wanted man alive.

“Man, you didn’t have to yell at everyone to leave like that. You know it’s bad for my business,” the bartender, Watari, complained.

Bakugou rolled his eyes, setting his glass down on the table. “Oh, please, I’ll pay you triple my fee if you quit your bitching.”

Watari laughed, being used to his number one customer’s prickly attitude after the years he’s spent with Bakugou. Watari was the only man Bakugou fully trusted, someone he turned to when he was asked to abandon his family, friends, and his old life. Watari was also the only one who’s aware of Bakugou’s true identity, understanding that he had to become a villain to help out the pros.

Watari studied Bakugou, the now grown man that he saw as his own son. He set down the glass he was wiping. “You know every time I look at you I keep seeing that hopeless kid that came to me all those years ago.”

Bakugou scoffed. “Tch, I wasn’t hopeless. And I didn’t come to you, you saw me and came to me.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I’ve never seen a kid with such a defeated look in his eye.” Watari chuckled at the memory, running a hand threw his gray hair. “I know the pros are the good guys, and I do trust them. I’ll just never understand what they were thinking asking a child to give up his dreams and his friends and family to help them out.”

“It’s not like they fucking forced me, I agreed to it, you know.”

“I know but I can’t stop thinking about that look on your face. You had to say goodbye to your classmates, to your dream of becoming the number one hero. Hell, if you ask me, you basically handed your dream over to (H/N) without any fight at all! And don’t get me started on you having to abandon your parents, your mother was pissed when you just disappeared all of a sudden.”

Bakugou’s lips turned upward, staring down at his glass as he reminisced with Watari. “That old hag was ready to fucking kill me, calling radio stations and news channels to find me. Must of surprised her when three years later her only son ‘murdered’ the leader of the League to become the leader himself.”

Watari laughed, shaking his head as he recalled the numerous amount of times he saw Bakugou Mitsuki stampeding through the streets to find her son. “You think you’ll ever talk to her? Once you’re done being the bad guy and can go back to your normal life?”

Bakugou sighed, leaning back on the table and staring at the ceiling. “That’s the thing, Pops, I don’t think I can go back. Not to the old hag, to my friends, to being a hero. I haven’t heard from my folks in fucking years, but I don’t blame them since they don’t know the truth. The minute I accepted this job, I knew that I wouldn’t be treated as a kid pursuing heroism like I was before. I’ve been in this shit for over seven years now, no one’s gonna accept me with open arms like that.”

“You’re wrong.” Bakugou turned his head to face him, confused. Watari smiled. “(H/N) would accept you. She’s been accepting you for all these years and she hasn’t been quiet about it either. Also, don’t forget that you have me, kid.”

Bakugou smirked as Watari patted him on the shoulder. “Yeah, it seems like you and that shitty girl are the only ones who believe in me.”

Bakugou turned his head back to the ceiling, closing his eyes and taking a breath in. He stills remembers being a broken down mess, agonizing over the decision he had made. Although he didn’t regret the decision he made, the initial reaction to being given the offer by Hawks was one that he could never forget. He was a high schooler, a teenager, a kid being asked to work with adults to help them out. He was a kid asked to become a double agent and he had to sacrifice everything for it, too. But he didn’t regret it. The minute he got abducted by the League during the Kamino incident, he knew he wasn’t the same fifteen-year-old U.A. student anymore. No matter how many times anyone told him otherwise, Bakugou couldn’t help but blame himself for the incident. And no matter how hard he tried to conceal how he was actually feeling, mostly everyone bought his act, believing that he was fine, believing that he was a tough kid that could put up with the aftermath of the incident.

That is, everyone except you. You saw straight through him and didn’t hesitate to call him out on his bullshit either.

As much as he had missed seeing his friends and his parents, he couldn’t describe the loneliness he felt when he realized he wouldn’t have the shitty girl who he saved from the rooftop of U.A. High nagging him everywhere he went. He couldn’t describe the feeling inside of him when he first saw your face after ten years those few weeks ago in that flower shop. He couldn’t describe the relief he felt when he heard you spew out your drunken yet supportive words for him. You always believed in him, you always cheered for him, and here you were ten years later continuing to believe in him.

Bakugou opened his eyes, shaking his head. It happened again; he couldn’t stop thinking about you.

His fingers subconsciously, like it was practice now, typed your name in the internet browser on his phone. He looked at the images that popped up with the search result. He internally wanted to puke at the picture of you beside your shitty police boyfriend on the day you were announced as the number one hero. What a fucking tool…

“Katsuki.” Watari broke Bakugou away from his thoughts. “Turn the volume up.”

Bakugou looked over to what he was looking at, getting concerned over the news reporter covering what was read as “BREAKING NEWS.” He turned the volume up.

“This is breaking news and I’m coming to you live from the Hero Public Safety Commission. As you can see, the building is completely burnt down, exploded from the inside. Police have been investigating all night, concluding that the explosions from the inside were not caused by notoriously wanted criminal, Ground Zero,” the woman on the screen said to the camera.

Bakugou stood up from his seat, his eyes widening. He had no idea what was going on. “What the fuck?”

“Officials have confirmed that the villain known as Kurogiri was involved in the attack. However, as he is a part of the League of Villains, he does not have a fire type quirk that would cause such an explosion. Officials have also confirmed that there was another figure involved in this atrocious attack, concluding that it was not villains Ground Zero or Dabi.

“To make matters even worse, the only pro hero that was able to get to the scene before all of this unfolded was Hawks. Kurogiri and the second individual involved managed to hurt Hawks so badly that he is currently critically injured and is in intensive care. Officials have confirmed that they do not know when or even if Hawks will be able to recover from this—“

Watari turned the television off, looking over at Bakugou who was absolutely furious over the events. Kurogiri had worked independently, taking orders from someone else, most likely the true leader of the League, and had hurt Bakugou’s actual boss. “Katsuki… Don’t do anything irrational.”

Bakugou grabbed his coat, slamming the bar door open. “I’m gonna kill that Warp Gate fucker.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Tagging: @chims-kookies @bokunoheroes-stories @iamthe-leaf @simplysymphonic @mylittlesunshineblog @imyourliquor-youremypoison @sxperhuman @sunflowerchild27 @miraculouskatsuki @geesshoku @ghoularaki @katsukiwonu @mochirecipe @kotakingly @giornouh @tyongflight​

[radiojamming]

[WARNING: In-depth discussion of human remains along with relevant images, some of which may be disturbing.]

In the electric hustle of the mid-1980s, there weren’t many eyes turned toward the loneliest corners of the Canadian Arctic. It was a forward-momentum period, caught up the 20th century’s mach-speed technological progress and cultural change. In all of this movement, it took something quietly monumental to turn heads toward the past and look, quite literally, into its eyes. The world looked into three 140-year-old graves in permafrost, and found three sets of eyes wearily looking back.

Their names were John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine. In Victorian society, they would have faded into the backdrop of the social tapestry. One was a working-class petty officer, another a former shoemaker that had recently joined the Navy, and the third a private in the Royal Marines. In their world, they were perfectly ordinary—but it was their deaths that made them extraordinary. In time, they would be called the Beechey Island or Franklin Expedition mummies, and would become instrumental in helping to solve one of the greatest mysteries in exploration history.

In this first Mummy Monday, we’ll explore the lives and deaths of the Beechey Island trio, as well as their forensic results, cultural impact, and a further look into their unique process of mummification.

The Franklin Expedition

In international news, the Franklin Expedition has been something of a hot topic as of late. New artifacts, incredible discoveries, and potential vacation routes; not to mention a critically-acclaimed television series in 2018! Its impact is present in multiple facets, but it can be hard to gain a full scope of what it was and why it matters.

The quickest, dirtiest summary is this: in 1845, the British Admiralty sent two well-fitted bomb vessels—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—into the Arctic to ply the waters for the fabled Northwest Passage. It got very, very cold to the point that the land was inescapable and all 129 men aboard succumbed to any number of horrible fates—disease, starvation, exposure, and possibly even more violent ends. Say what you will about ominous-sounding names for these ships and risking fate, but the results were horrifying across the board. Scottish explorer John Rae even made discoveries of cannibalism among the wreckage of what was to be the most promising of Her Majesty’s exploration attempts, much to the public’s disgust, chagrin, and fascination. 

There is, of course, so much more to the story than just a few quick notes about the horrors nature can inflict and the question of imperialistic hubris. One peek into the fae realm of Franklin-related academia is a little bit mind-boggling, and there have been plenty of glorious attempts to parse it all out. The sources range from contemporary to theoretical, and as much as people agree or disagree, the siren call of Frankliniana can be hard to resist.

So where the hell do you start?

For the sake of Mummy Monday, we’re starting where most of Franklin’s rescue attempts did:

Beechey Island.

Beechey Island

It’s a forbidding corner of the Canadian Arctic, even today. Nestled at the foot of Devon Island in the Wellington Channel of modern-day Nunavut, it can appear either unremarkable or dread-inspiring, depending on the day and the weather. Its nearest inhabited neighbor is the town of Resolute, although its name in Inuktitut gives a better sense of the landscape: Qausuittuq or ‘the place with no dawn’. 

Most explorers tracing the steps of Franklin stop in Resolute to charter passage to Beechey Island. Although there are animals living near the area (different species of sea bird and the iconic polar bear), the tourism sector of Beechey Island is profoundly dedicated to the quiet contemplation of the remains of Franklin’s first winter camp. Scattered across the stones are broken pieces of wood and rusted rings of old Goldner’s cans. To this day, it’s possible to see the ongoing decay of history in the shadow of memorials left behind by past searchers. 

And then there are the graves.

The original headboards are now stored at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife. Weather-resistant replacements still bear the same messages as the originals, each recalling the names, statuses, and death dates of three of Franklin’s men. Two graves, from Erebus, have ominous-sounding Bible verses tacked on to the epitaphs. 

There is a fourth grave belonging to Thomas Morgan, an able-bodied seaman (AB) from the HMS North Star who died during a search for Franklin in 1854. Morgan is entombed alongside his Erebus and Terror predecessors, but he has not yet been exhumed.

And yeah, exhumations. That’s what we’re here for on Mummy Monday, after all!

In 1984, Dr. Owen Beattie of the University of Alberta led a crew of researchers and scientists to this lonely point in the Arctic Circle. At the time, he was entertaining the possibility of lead poisoning being a factor in the ultimate fate of the Expedition. Part of this consideration came from the bajillion cans littered across the extensive trail, each soldered shut with clumps of lead that Beattie believed leached into the food the men were eating. Beattie had good reason to pursue this theory! His belief was that the acidic nature of some of the canned food would have caused a breakdown in the lead solder, causing the food to become contaminated. Even without this theory, he wouldn’t have been off the mark at all. Later discoveries contemporary to the Expedition found other cans manufactured and sealed by Stephen Goldner to have gone completely rancid. That, outside of the lead-poisoning theory, certainly wouldn’t have helped matters. Another explanation pointed to the lead piping installed in the ships themselves. Would water passing through these pipes have poisoned the men in the process of drinking or breathing? What about lead-based paints, often needing to be applied throughout the year in new coats, and condensation to follow on steam-powered and heated ships? What about the nature of being a person in the Victorian era in the first place? You were probably about as leaden as a musket ball.

So Beattie made his trek north, intending to exhume John Torrington and crossing his fingers on the possibility of exhuming John Hartnell. People knew these men had died young, even by Victorian standards. Torrington was 20 years old, Hartnell 25, and William Braine 32. Torrington and Hartnell died within three days of one another at the beginning of January, 1846. Braine died only a few months later in April. If Beattie’s theory was correct, then lead may have played a part in why these men were dropping like flies after only a few months on the Expedition. 

As detailed in his book, Frozen in Time, great pains were taken to get permits and carefully exhume John Torrington. It was far from easy. Beattie and his team had to dig, pick, and melt their way through around six feet of gravel and cement-hard permafrost. They had entertained the possibility that permafrost might have preserved the bodies; they had no idea how right they were.

After uncovering one black coffin, edged in decorative white tape and bearing brass handles (one was still in the ‘up’ position), they carefully melted through layers of ice until one researcher reached a piece of blue wool cloth. As gently as possible, he tugged aside the cloth and revealed the frozen face of John Torrington.

Petty Officer and Lead Stoker John Torrington seemed to wearily peer back at the researchers. And he was, in fact, peering. Torrington’s body had been almost perfectly preserved, including his eyes, other soft tissue, and cartilage. His striking appearance startled the researchers, understandably. They had been expecting some degree of preservation, but not this. 

He was only 5′4″ (163 cm) and weighed just under 88 lbs (40 kg). Dressed simply in clothing that showed exactly how underweight he was at the time of his death, something about his appearance struck some emotional chord with the team. In Frozen in Time, Beattie quietly makes the comment that Torrington looked, “just unconscious” and “anything but grotesque”. 

“The expression on his thin face, with its pouting mouth and half-closed eyes gazing through delicate, light-brown eyelashes, was peaceful. His nose and forehead, in contrast to the natural skin colour of the rest of his face, were darkened by contact with the blue-wool coffin covering. This shadowed the face, accentuating the softness of its appearance. The tragedy of Torrington’s young death was as apparent to the researchers as it must have been to his shipmates 138 years before.” (pp. 171-172)

His jaw was bound shut with a polka-dot kerchief (think Jacob Marley) and his limbs were tied together using cotton wrapping. Researchers made note of his hands, which showed some of the greatest degree of his preservation.

What was even more incredible was the full degree of flexibility his body retained. Beattie and a team member lifted Torrington from his coffin for his full autopsy, and as they did so, Torrington’s head rolled onto Beattie’s left shoulder. Beattie also noted how light and limp Torrington was more or less like lifting an unconscious child.

Samples were taken of Torrington’s hair, nails, organs, and brain. The fact that these samples could be taken at all was incredible, especially in their state of preservation. After this was done, Torrington was reburied with the utmost respect and the expectation that the grave itself would refreeze from encroaching water. Not only would Torrington be preserved physically, but his photos were about to preserve his memory in ways no one could really expect.

But, of course, he was just one of three.

John Hartnell and the ‘Face of Death’

Researchers literally brushed the surface of Hartnell’s grave in 1984 as time constraints prevented them from doing a full exhumation. They had enough time to do an initial dig and uncover part of him, which was enough to sate their curiosity for the moment. Undoubtedly, they still thought of Torrington’s repose and his more delicate features.

They weren’t really prepared for, uh...

Probably the most pissed-off mummy known to man. At least, that’s what he looked like. One researcher, Walt Kowal, might have summed it up best when he remarked, “This guy is spooky. The quintessential pirate. This guy is frightening.” (p. 184)

He wasn’t entirely wrong. Something about John Hartnell’s face seemed angry, and it didn’t help matters that his right eye was missing. As the water drained away, John Hartnell grimaced where Torrington had just seemed to passively observe. In time, the entire figure of AB John Hartnell emerged.

Dark-haired and hazel-eyed, Hartnell appeared to be something of Torrington’s opposite. Both men had the distinct features of mummification-in-ice, such as the receded and pursed lips from the water and the half-open eyes. That was where the similarities ended, however. Hartnell was bundled up in a blanket and shroud with his head resting on a pillow, where Torrington laid on a bed of sawdust (often mistaken in pictures as his hair). Pains had been taken to make Hartnell look presentable; his hair was combed and cut, his nails trimmed, and his body dressed in three shirts and a hat (no pants, though). 

The question remained almost tangible: why were these men so different?

As the researchers reburied the remains and returned to Alberta to pore over lab results, so to am I going to take a step back and look at their lives in detail.

The Men Behind the Mummies

There’s not much I can say about Torrington that hasn’t been beautifully covered in magnificent detail by my Torrington research counterpart, @entwinedmoon​. Her Torrington research series absolutely floored me with its depth and clear passion for the subject! Literally everything about his life, death, and afterlife is covered in there, so I can’t recommend it enough. And I absolutely agree with the sentiment that tracking Torrington down is like cryptid-hunting. Oof. 

What I can say in a pale shadow of entwinedmoon’s work is that John Shaw Torrington was born around 1825 in the city of Manchester, making him around 19 or 20 at the time of his death. He hadn’t served in the Navy prior to being assigned as a petty officer on HMS Terror, but his lung tissue showed that he’d definitely been exposed to the amount of smoke expected of both a lead stoker and a Manchester resident (given its Victorian reputation as a pollution-belching beast of a city). Exact details of his life are hard to follow, making him something of a shadowy figure for being so front-facing after his death. Examination of his hands showed that at the time of his death, he probably hadn’t done much work between his illness and the fact the ships were frozen in and thus not really needing someone to work their locomotive engines.

And he’d been sick. Really sick.

In the end, it was a combination of tuberculosis and pneumonia that sent John Torrington to his premature grave. He’d been, as discussed, incredibly underweight, but had been well enough to pass a health check in Greenland when some of his comrades had been sent back to England for similar health issues. The when of his illness isn’t known, but it had lingered long enough to thoroughly emaciate him. Had he been sick prior to leaving England and just covered it up? Possibly. Had he been sick but had a flare-up at some point after the health check? Also completely possible. 

In short, after his autopsy it became clear that everything about Torrington’s body was at active war against his life. He’d been small in build and had lungs so scarred with smoke and illness that lung tissue adhered to his chest wall. This wasn’t a man destined to live very long.

As opposed to his neighbor.

A personal aside, John Hartnell is my favorite. I’ve spent years researching his life, his family, and every detail I can hunt down about him, and it’s taking a lot not to just fly right into overshare mode. I can say that Hartnell’s mummy wears a lot of reminders of his life, along with the life of another one of the Expedition’s non-mummified members.

John Hartnell was born in 1820 in Gillingham, Kent. He was the oldest of five siblings and after the death of his father in 1832, immediately went to work as an apprentice shoemaker. Yeah, not a Navy man or a dockyard worker like his father. He signed his name on a form dedicating his time and effort under one Henry Sarge and went to work crafting footwear. A necrotic right wrist bone tells a story of repetitive movements and damage. Growth arrest lines in his ankle bones say that the 5′11″ (180 cm) Hartnell had actually had his growth stunted around the onset of puberty, possibly owing to malnutrition. However, letters from his mother Sarah and brother Charles paint the image of a close-knit family avid to support one another.

So close-knit, in fact, that John was one of two Hartnells on Erebus. His brother, Thomas, was two years younger than him and accompanied John as an AB. Their names appear beside one another in the muster books (possibly including a cousin, John Strickland) and John was buried in one of Thomas’ shirts, with the initials embroidered on a shirttail. 

Although no known letters exist from John or Thomas Hartnell, the grave contents alone paint a remarkable picture of family ties in extraordinary conditions. 

A new question arose, however. Torrington may have been marked by fate with his illness, but Hartnell had been healthy even past the health check in Greenland. What had happened to him? 

For that, we need to go back to Beechey Island in the summer of 1986.

‘Son of a bitch! He’s been autopsied!’

Beattie and his team returned to Beechey Island in June, 1986 with a renewed sense of purpose and, of all things, an x-ray machine. It was set to be the first time such a machine would operate above the Arctic Circle and the team was both eager to try and dreading the worst case scenarios. Results from Torrington encouraged them, as the lab gave the news that Torrington’s hair had showed lead levels far above average, further pointing toward the lead-poisoning theory. Now the researchers were prepared to see if the same held true of John Hartnell and William Braine.

Unfortunately, very little is known of Royal Marine William Braine, aside from the fact that he was a private from Somerset. He’d been married prior to his departure, and seemed to come from a large, poor family. Economic reasons may have led him to join the Royal Marines, and he’d had no choice in where he was set to be assigned. Just as with the rest of the Marines in the Expedition, they were to serve in the Arctic regardless of their choices, and at a regular pay rate as opposed to the regular crew’s double pay. Aside from this, Braine’s life is well-obscured by history at the moment, so I won’t go into his results as much as Hartnell’s which can be correlated with his personal history.

The team re-exhumed John Hartnell after a good deal of difficulty, as shown in this incredible NOVA documentary aired in 1988. In the two years since the last exhumation, very little had changed in Hartnell’s appearance. The main difference was that his remaining eye appeared more sunken, but clearly the ice had done its job in preserving him.

This time, the team cut away his toque and revealed, of all things, a full head of hair.

Brian Spenceley, a physics professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, stood in as a photographer during this exhumation. What made his presence remarkable was the fact that he was John and Thomas Hartnell’s great-great nephew. It’s somewhat eerie to see him in the NOVA documentary, juxtaposed with images of Hartnell that are clear enough to show some family resemblances. 

Like Torrington, Hartnell was removed from his coffin for a full autopsy. Unlike Torrington, Hartnell was subjected to x-rays which required removal of his clothing. And very much unlike Hartnell, removal of his clothing revealed another detail that, at risk of sounding clickbait-y, shocked the researchers.

He’d already been autopsied.

Hartnell bore the scars and stitches of an upside-down Y-incision that terminated at his hips rather than his shoulders. It correlated with some initial results of his x-ray which showed a scrambling of organ material, some in places where it shouldn’t have been (his liver in his shoulder, for instance). 

According to Beattie, John Hartnell had been autopsied while still on Erebus, presumably under the hands of assistant surgeon and naturalist Harry D.S. Goodsir. The autopsy appeared hurried, with Hartnell’s chest plate being replaced upside-down as well. Beattie estimated that the entire procedure lasted no more than a half hour. However it had gone, someone had quickly cut out his organs, examined some (such as his heart) in detail at the point of a scalpel, and then shoved the organs back in without a care as to where they went. There are plenty of explanations for the time constraints, including the cold, the threat of disease, and the possible pressure of doing an autopsy under the scrutiny of superstitious sailors and a distraught younger brother. All in all, it gave the team a remarkable chance to observe a Victorian autopsy as they did their own.

As with Torrington, the team took samples of organ, bone, nail, and hair for later analysis. Hartnell’s appearance pointed yet another accusing finger at tuberculosis, but not with the lung damage as sustained in Torrington’s body. It was possible there was something else at work with Hartnell. 

Also, a polar bear interfered, leading to one of the best forensic case notes I’ve ever seen.

Once autopsies and x-rays were concluded (the x-ray machine worked fine, provided it was being warmed by a fish tank water heater), Hartnell was wrapped in a linen shroud with his clothes placed in a bag to be buried with him. With Spenceley present at the reburial and the thought that Thomas Hartnell had been at the graveside 140 years prior, the whole situation carried an extra emotional weight. As Spenceley recalled, at the end he felt as though he was burying someone he knew. 

Once the grave was replaced as accurately as possible following archaeological diagrams and photographs, the time came to exhume the third mummy, William Braine.

And he didn’t look quite right.

Whereas Torrington and Hartnell had retained something of a lively appearance (loosely, at least), Braine looked well and truly dead. He had clearly decomposed to some degree before the preservation qualities of the permafrost could take effect. His eyes were sunken into his head, his skin wax-like, skull prominent, and body slightly twisted in the coffin. One arm was tucked under his body to make him fit into what seemed to be an ill-fitting coffin that, unlike the other two, was not fitted to his measurements. Even the lid had been shoved down until it pressed against his nose and deformed it slightly. And even worse, the skin of one arm showed rat bites. Obviously, it had taken a good while for poor Braine to actually be buried. Like I said, he was 32 at the time of his death. His body sure doesn’t make him look 32.

His x-rays were far more conclusive in the cause of his death, but less so in the case of his burial. Braine’s spine had been literally twisted by tuberculosis.

It clearly had more time to wrack his body. He weighed about as much as Torrington had but stood at 6′0″ (181 cm). A theory arose that Braine had possibly died in a sledge group, causing his companions to haul his body back to shore. He had probably been kept in the hold for some time, in accordance with the bite marks and level of decomposition. 

Sadly, as said, little is known of Braine’s life. He was illiterate, having made an X mark in the muster records. No letters have been found addressed to him or from any of his siblings. While one cursory biography was written by a possible descendant, not much research has been done to solve the mystery of his life (yet).

Braine was thereafter reburied, and this chapter of the Beechey Island’s saga was nearly done. And yet, the exhumations only provided more questions than answers.

Heavy Metal

Lead. Pb. Atomic number 82. 

Zinc. Zn. Atomic number 30.

Neither are innocuous, and both bore some of the blame for what killed the men of the Franklin Expedition. The question is to what degree is the blame well-placed?

Dr. Owen Beattie set about to find out. Sample results from Hartnell and Braine came back from the lab with more bad news on the lead front. Both bodies showed high levels, furthermore damning the solder and piping. However, both Hartnell and Braine showed markedly less lead in their systems than Torrington. 

Results left the cozy realm of academia and out into the great, wide international world. As will be discussed, the photographs of the mummies alone had caused something of a media frenzy, inspiring a new cultural Franklin-themed wave of music, art, and literature. But the lead-poisoning theory rang some discordant bell in the public’s imagination and became less of a theory and more of an accepted fact. Most decided that Franklin’s men had been killed by the lowest bidder of the Admiralty’s victualing department.

Those naughty, naughty Goldner’s tinned foods.

It would be some years before this theory was questioned. In fact, by all appearances, it was Hartnell who seemed to question it the most. After all, the lead content of his body had gone down after leaving England. And how did we know that?

His nails told us so. And that wasn’t the only information they decided to divulge. Because of these findings, scientists could figure out when his sickness began nearly down to the day. Not only that, but they also discovered that John Hartnell had a very severe zinc deficiency.

‘Hartnell’s time machine’ as it was nicknamed became an incredible source for vital clues to the mysteries posed by the Beechey Island trio. The spike at the end of the chart shows the point that Hartnell’s body began to break down and essentially devour itself for one last effort at keeping itself alive. What this revealed was that Hartnell’s illness was practically a flash in the pan; he’d only really been sick for about a month and a half before his death. How did such a dramatic downturn occur?

So far, it seems like a combination of bad genes and that little demon of a zinc deficiency. John Hartnell’s autopsy reports revealed a whole slew of issues from a sprained ankle to a compacted vertebral disc (which would have been painful). It was clear he had lived a hard and active life, with the wear and tear showing on his very bones. The zinc deficiency’s symptoms would have manifested as weight loss, fatigue, poor wound healing, night blindness, and an increased risk of infection. The last symptom in that last may point the most damning finger at what finally killed John Hartnell. If he had a zinc deficiency as severely as it appears, his immune system would have been compromised and he wouldn’t have been able to fight off infection as well as some of his comrades.

Not only that, but lining up historical hints adds another sinister factor to the list.

In 1853, an exhumation attempt was carried out on his grave under the auspices of Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield of the HMS Isobel and his physician, Dr. Peter Sutherland (the group that put the pickax through his arm). One letter refers to the body as:

“perfectly preserved by the intense cold, exhibited no trace of scurvy or other malignant disease, but was manifestly that of a person who had died of consumption, a malady to which it was further known that the deceased was prone.” (Sir Roderick Murchinson, Royal Geographic Society, 1853)

Again: “known that the deceased was prone.” Someone apparently knew or believed that John Hartnell had previously been consumptive. Not only that, but plying a Maidstone newspaper brought up another point:

John Hartnell’s father, also named Thomas, died from a ‘lingering illness’. While there are multiple possibilities as to what this illness was, it lines up nicely with both the historical record and the clues in Hartnell’s body. It’s possible he was ill with tuberculosis prior, had his immune system compromised by his zinc deficiency, and had his previous illness exacerbated by Arctic conditions. 

And all this was learned from one mummy.

While this doesn’t solve the deaths of every member of the Franklin Expedition, the findings at Beechey Island provided incredible insight into their lives and deaths, and may have opened a door into further understanding. 

‘God have mercy on the frozen man’

The forensic results of the exhumations were astounding in themselves, but the cultural impact can’t be understated. The world was taken by the images of Torrington, Hartnell, and Braine. Torrington in particular had his image splashed across magazines and newspapers, becoming the quintessential poster boy of the Expedition. He haunted no lack of dreams (mine included, circa age 7) with his gaunt face and hazy, half-lidded eyes. One might say something about a man straddling the precipice of life and death, as it isn’t often that the dead look at you.

As said, the trio inspired a small but noticeable culture wave, with just a few key and oft-cited examples provided below:

Iron Maiden’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ 

James Taylor’s ‘Frozen Man’

Margaret Atwood’s short story ‘The Age of Lead’

Also, this particularly recognizable scene from AMC’s The Terror!

Paintings, sculptures, tattoos, poems, short stories, cosplay, dolls, and on and on! You could even argue that the discoveries on Beechey Island reignited new interest in the Franklin Expedition, creating a wave of discovery which eventually culminated in the discovery of the shipwrecks of Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016. Suddenly, the men of the Expedition were real, as tangible as you or me. People saw their faces, realized that these men were reaching across from the Victorian era into the 20th century. Sure, now they’re mostly condemned to Listverse-type categories of scariest mummies, but they’ve certainly drummed up emotional reactions in their time.

The Process

Now that we’ve covered the who, what, and when, it’s down to the how. How is a body preserved so well in ice and permafrost? The answer, my dear, is as simple as this picture.

It’s refrigeration on a natural level! Just as a refrigerator or freezer slows or completely stops bacteria from causing decay in food items (freeze your meats, my dudes!), permafrost and ice extends the same courtesy to anything buried in them. Of course, the conditions have to be specific! Other bodies found of the Expedition haven’t had even close to the same amount of preservation as the Beechey Island mummies. Wind, animals, and other natural processes have left a trail of skeletons rather than mummies. Clearly, something about depth of burial and level of protection is important as well.

Other ice mummies set to be covered include Ötzi the Iceman, and the Qilakitsoq mummies of Greenland. While there’s some variation as to their causes (glacial freezing and cold, dry air, respectively), the process is essentially the same. Cold stops naughty bacteria! The deep freeze kept the Beechey Island mummies from complete and utter decay, like freezing beef in an ice cube. Granted, if the mummies were ever exposed to warmer-than-freezing air for a pronounced length of time, they would eventually decay. 

Conclusion

The Beechey Island mummies are an invaluable information source for questions about the final, mysterious fate of the men of the Franklin Expedition. Their bodies have provided incredible clues and beautiful insight into their lives as well as the lives of men like them. Not only that, but their cultural impact inspired a new wave of interest and the thought that the border between life and death is a surprisingly fragile one. While their initial appearance may be frightening or shocking to some, it’s important to remember that these were young men thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Their memory and impact is still felt to this day (which I hope makes them happy, wherever they are!). 

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on this inaugural Mummy Monday, feel free to hit me up through my askbox or DMs! It’s a lot of fun for me and I’m totally open to any and all comments about how I’m doing! And the next Mummy Monday installment will be about the Qilakitsoq mummies!

Thanks for reading!

[becausegoodbye]

About a month ago, I went back to Celeste.

I originally played and finished it in 2018, and absolutely adored it. It was one of the most effective harmonies of story and game-mechanics I'd ever encountered: a proper humming marvel of a game, crafted to perfection. I was aware that there was optional post-game stuff to do (I'd unlocked a couple of the B-side levels along the way, though only finished one), but I honestly just felt so satisfied by the way the main story ended, I had little interest in delving into that stuff, which seemed more about blunt mechanical challenge than the subtle emotional balance the rest of the game had achieved. (I was also playing on Switch in handheld mode, which made some of the tougher post-game gauntlets feel a little more on the 'impossible' side of 'challenging'.) I set the game down, and aside from warmly recommending it whenever it came up, I didn't think too much more about it.

Then, for whatever reason, years later, I felt compelled to revisit those mechanics. The precision of its movement, the cleverness of its levels, the joy of its art -- even if the story had kinda blurred for me in the years away, all of that stuff was sharper than ever. I played the couple of B-sides I'd already unlocked, and found the challenge stirring, so I unlocked the rest of the B-sides and finished them too. Then I collected the hidden crystal hearts in each level, enabling me to finally play the eighth chapter, 'The Core', and later its B-side. Then I finished the free 'Farewell' DLC (which was >shockingly< hard, taking literally thousands of attempts and some portion of my sanity). After that, as a comparative 'rest', I went back to the main game and collected all the strawberries I'd missed on my initial playthrough. Then I finished all of the C-sides. And finally, last night, as a final challenge, I got the secret Moon Berry. Finally, again, I think I'm done. I'm satisfied -- though in a curiously different way to the first time.

It's bewilderingly impressive that Celeste has managed to be two radically different games to me, both of which I loved at different stages of my life. The first game was vivid and story-driven, an allegory about coming to terms with the parts of yourself you try to ignore, embodied in the ludonarrative with incredible tact and precision and kindness. The second game was brutal and demanding, a borderline-masochistic bootcamp focused on strict mechanical challenge, sweat, and execution. 'Farewell' was the exception in this regard -- a beautifully-told story about the 'denial' part of grief -- while also, funnily enough, being the most mechanically punishing bit. I've loved these post-game challenges, but I think I absolutely made the right decision in not playing them in 2018. They would have felt like too drastic a lurch toward the mechanical and away from the emotional; to me they would have felt, in comparison with the main game, cruel. But coming back to them in 2021? They felt bracing. They felt apt. They felt like a mountain worth climbing.

As far as I've been able to read, there's just one extra level of challenge provided by the game: the Golden Strawberries, which you win by going through entire chapters (including the B-sides and the C-sides) without dying once. That seems fully bonkers to me, and I'm not going to even try to attempt it right now -- my way of getting through these levels has involved, uh, dying a lot -- though who knows? Maybe in another few years, I'll experience a familiar itch.

Celeste was already one of my favourite games back when I'd only completed the first game. It took me about 15 hours to reach the Summit, if I remember correctly, and I died around 3000 times along the way. But now that I've done almost all of the post-game stuff and my stats are significantly more grizzled, the conclusion is inescapable that Celeste is ... two of my favourite games. Two radically different but complementary approaches to what a video game can do to you, both bullseyeing me in different sweet spots. If the whole game had been as sadistically difficult as the B- and C-sides and Farewell, I never would have gotten very far into it. The comfort and trust built up in the base game was what, for me, made the after-game feel possible. I knew these developers weren't going to fuck with me -- that however difficult it got, it was never going to be unfair. And likewise, I can now look back at the main game, and the version of me that felt so satisfied finishing it, with a different and deeper fondness.

A doubly special game.

[angrylizardjacket]

mouth full of white lies {Machine Gun Kelly} 2

2. i been fronting that it’s just for the summer

Summary: So you’re together, sort of, and it’s great! Everyone seems to be convinced, that’s not the issue. The issue comes when you fly to LA for filming, and you decide to stay with Colson, but the room only has one bed. And the paparazzi crash your first “date”. And he kisses you and your heart feels like it’s going to burst out of your chest, which is not supposed to happen because this isn’t a real relationship! But it’s fine. Probably. 

A/N: So bare with me, it’s a very long chapter. Also, pretend the Tunnel of Love remix by haroinfather came out before 2018 and not in 2019. Enjoy. 

the brainstrust: @sataninsatin @silvertonguedserpent @juliarose21 @kellysimagines @estxxbritt @machine-gun-casie @harringtonstudios @misscharlottelee @narcvissa @hiworlditishumbleme @angelwarner28 @nevilles-insinuations @rumoured-whispers @mgkobsessed @edwardtriggerhandzz @suckerforbarnes @wastelcve @bakerkells @local-troubled-writer @freddiessmallnipples @oopsiedoopsie23

----

It feels like you’re braced for impact when you walk into rehearsals the day after you release the video. Douglas has already seen it, of course he has, he messages you minutes after it’s posted.

[Dig Doug: Not gonna say I Told You So, but im glad you’re happy. 🦆🦆]

It gets you to smile, despite your anxiety surrounding the whole situation.

“Now what?” Colson asked after the video was posted, sitting next to you on his bed. The duvet is so soft, and somehow the whole situation is so inherently soft. Maybe it’s that you’re both in hoodies and sweat pants. Maybe it’s that you’d just told the world that you’re dating. His eyes are so blue.

You phone goes off. 

His phone goes off. 

Both of you have Twitter muted, but even so, it needed to let you both know that you were getting a lot of mentions.

“Now we’re dating,” you say, flipping your phone over, while Colson picks his up, opening Twitter and beginning to scroll through his mentions. Where in the Hell were you meant to go from here.

“Alright, cool; you wanna get pizza or something?” He asks, simple as that, and it’s now you seem to realise that you’ve been so stressed from everything that had been happening that you hadn’t been remembering to feed yourself.

“Honestly, I’d love to.”

The next day, however, it’s the elephant in the room; the others don’t say anything, but everyone, even Douglas to some extent, was wondering how in the hell they had missed your apparent relationship. But it’s not awkward; you and Colson act the same as always, you take notes for Josy, and get coffee, and type away on your laptop. 

They break for lunch, and you look up from your work only to see Josy making a beeline for you, an intimidating look of determination written all over her face. Ah, here’s where the interrogation begins. Glancing over your shoulder you see Colson shoot you an amused, if concerned look, glancing to Josy. In response, you shrug; it can’t be helped.

“We need to talk,” Josy tells you, steers you from the room, across the parking lot, into a whole new building, where she paces for about three minutes, unable to look at you, hands basically pulling out her hair, all of which amuses you greatly. When she comes to a stop in front of you, it’s as if you can see the cogs of her brain turning, her fingers steepled in front of her mouth as she tries to order her thoughts.

“You know you’re my favourite assistant in the world and I treasure our friendship, right?” She asks, and you fix her with a fondly exasperated stare.

“Of course, you see fit to remind me every time I bring you coffee -”

“Then why, my little duck, my little goose, apple of my eye, enchilada of my bosom,” she says with an almost poisonous sweetness, looking you directly in the eye, “would you date one of my actors?” And you have to hold back your laughter in the face of her sincere and rather angry confusion.

“Josy, please,” you start, and she already looks like she wants to interrupt, “I like him is all, okay? I won’t be a distraction -” you can already see her trying to protest, but you hold up your hand to stop her, “and he won’t distract me; if anything, it means there’ll be no outside distractions, hopefully.”

“[Y/N] you test me,” Josy sighs deeply, scrubbing at her face, “how long?”

This gives you cause for hesitation, because neither you nor Colson had thought to get your whole story straight the night before. He had ordered room service and you’d just talked about music until you finally went back to your own room. An oversight, sure, but you had been glad to have a plan, and were happy to figure out the details later.

“A few weeks -” when you say this, Josy makes a choked, wheezing noise, and you pause, “since... uh, since he took us around the city at the end of the first week.”

“Does Douglas know?”

“He’s not my handler,” you fire off reflexively, and Josy winces, a little sheepish, “but yes.” You paused. “Now.”

Josy lets the whole conversation slide with some reluctance, and she asks you to get her lunch from the deli a few blocks away. You agree, partially because it’s your job, but mostly because you’re just glad to get out of the building and away from her exasperated, judgmental stares.

He’s corrupting you. It’s what the media thinks. It’s what Josy thinks. And something about the assumption is already starting to get under your skin. But right as you start to get truly annoyed by the subtext she had been blasting you with, you hear your phone chime.

[Colson: am i gonna get The Talk from my AD later on? Ducky: wot Colson: like u no... if you hurt my daughter im gonna hurt you Ducky: Josys not my mom??? shes like 3 years older than me???? Colson: its a joke. chill ducky. everything alright tho? Ducky: told her wed been dating since that night i filmed a few weeks ago Colson: smart. everyone thinks weve been together since then nyways Ducky: you want anything from the deli? Colson: what Ducky: im at the deli. u want a sandwich? Colson: yeh sure. surprise me. maybe chicken idk. webber wants a chocolate milk Ducky: milks bad for vocal cords Colson: he doesnt care 😈]

It makes you laugh. He makes you laugh. It’s as easy as that; you’re still friends, it’s just that you spend more time together, are closer, when you go out for dinner with the cast, he’s invariably beside you. You’re both always on time to rehearsals, and he keeps sending you selfies from costume and makeup tests, and it’s going fine, great even, despite all the nasty DMs you were still receiving. Of course the supportive ones always outweighed the negative, and even the negative didn’t really bother you, because it’s not as if there was a real relationship in jeopardy, so it actually took a lot of weight off your shoulders.

Filming is set to start on location in LA after about a month and a half of rehearsals, and while the first month had primarily been working on scenes, the extra fortnight you’d been there had been almost consistently rehearsing as a band for eight hours a day, six days a week. The day before you’re due to fly off, the whole cast looks exhausted at brunch. 

“Pass me the salt,” Colson yawns, half asleep with his head against the window of the cafe.

“It’s right in front of you,” you counter, knocking his knee with yours beneath the table.

“My arms don’t work,” he groaned, but he was smiling now, just a little. You look to the other cast members all enjoying their own respective breakfasts. Daniel’s on voice rest, despite the fact that they’re going to be using recordings of Motley Crue themselves for the actual film, they still want him able to perform covers for when they’re filming; currently he’s nursing a lemon and ginger tea with enough honey to drown a bee. Actually, Colson was the only one out of the four of them not to be drinking tea; both Iwan and Douglas both having ordered a cup with their breakfasts. Iwan was the only one who looked ready for the day, with the rest of them all slumped over in various states of exhaustion.

“Ducky, come on, please?” Colson actually whined, and you rolled your eyes, passing him the salt.

“You’re so needy,” you tell him, but your smile is enough to let him know that you’re joking.

“Why’re you called Duck, if I may ask?” Iwan asks, and you heave a sigh, knowing Douglas was already smiling before you even turn to look at him.

“Because when our parents first brought her home, all she did was follow me around like a duckling,” his tone is all fond, and he wraps his arm around your shoulders, pulling you in for a side hug despite your indignant noise of protest.

“Adorable,” Iwan grins over the lip of his cup. You just groan, and steal a bite of Douglas’ pancakes, though he doesn’t seem to mind, “have you worked much in the industry?” Iwan’s accent sounds like home, and despite how quiet and bitter he is in character, he’s rather bright and talkative as a person.

“Here and there; I actually spent quite a few of my teenage years as Doug’s assistant when he would be filming in London,” you say with a half-smile, “still a bit of a duck I suppose, but it looks good on my CV. I do odd-jobs on sets here and there back home, have been a runner for a few TV shows, but I don’t really go out of my way to be on camera, you know,” you shrug, before hearing your mistake. Both Colson and Douglas are already laughing, while Daniel and Iwan just seem confused. “Apart from, like, my actual job, you know? Like I’m on camera for YouTube, but not for a real movie or anything.”

“Well you seem very good at your job, we’re glad to have you onboard,” Iwan nods with a surprisingly sincere smile. Beneath the table, Colson’s hand is on your knee, and he gives you a small squeeze.

“I thought your hands didn’t work?” You raise an eyebrow at him, and Douglas almost spits his drink all over Daniel at the implication.

“Excuse me?” His eyes are wide as saucers and Colson’s quickly turning red.

“I said my arms don’t work but damn, call me out why don’t you?” He splutters, raising his hands in the air in mock surrender, with only mild wincing. It’s about now that you realise the assumption that your brother had jumped to.

“His hand was on my knee, Doug, I was trying to make a joke,” you explain, flustered, though Daniel and Iwan on the other side of the booth have collapsed on top of each other with laughter. You, Douglas, and Colson, however, are all equally mortified, and make a point to move so neither of you are touching as you finish your breakfast quickly.

“I just appreciate,” Daniel was still chuckling as you all left the cafe, as was Iwan, “that Doug genuinely thought Colson was getting busy with his sister at brunch, like, right next to him under the table.

“Nah,” Iwan actually laughs, his smile sharp, “they’re just really in character.”

“Hello! Hello and welcome back, ducklings! Today we’re flying all the way to sunny L.A, which honestly isn’t that far from Portland, but the production company was nice enough to not make us road trip it.” 

The video starts in your hotel room, and follows you as you pack your things, and cuts to a montage set to some royalty-free music, of you heading to the airport, of the cast yawning. Your brother buys you breakfast at a fast-food restaurant in the airport, and you check your bags; a panning shot in the waiting area, of every single member of the cast and crew that are taking this flight on their phones.

“You look cute,” you mutter very quietly to Colson, who’s sitting next to you, scrolling through Twitter with a travel pillow squished up around his neck. He gives you a toothy smile, leans his cheek against the pillow, and winks at the camera. 

The hotel you’re staying at is beautiful, all marble pillars in the foyer and beige and cream counters, and it feels like it might be too much. This is where the stars stay, and you? You know you’re absolutely not a star.

“Duck?” And there’s Josy’s voice, hesitant, about to tell you the jig is up, hand you keys to a water stained motel room a few blocks away. When you turn to her, she’s got two separate key cards in her hands.

“Yes, Josy?” You ask sweetly; it’s not her fault, after all, that you’re not a top-billed star. 

“So corporate wanted to put you with some of the other crew, they’re staying in a place down the road - it’s really lovely, trust me, and if you want it we can still get you a room - but,” Josy glanced to the cards in her hand, before holding them out, one in each hand, “if you’d like to stay here, both your brother and Colson are happy to share with you.” And at this, your brain stalls, looking at the key cards being offered to you.

“Why didn’t they tell me this?”

“Because they’re already heading up, but they wanted me to let you know that the offer’s there.”

So it seems that in the three minutes that you were mooning over the architecture, and giving the guys their space, since you’d assumed you’d be staying elsewhere, both your brother and your fake boyfriend happened to mention that you’re able to stay with them if you want. Douglas is not a surprise; Colson is. 

“How big are the rooms, I don’t want to -” you start, but Josy’s quick to cut you off.

“The size isn’t the matter; they’re big enough rooms, got really comfortable sofas from what I could see, but...”

“But?” You prompt, and Josy gives a smile. 

“Of course, it’s all about what you’re comfortable with; you know Doug’s more than happy to take the sofa, I just know you and Colson haven’t been together that long -” And here it all starts to make sense, and you hope the smile you give isn’t nervous as you ask which key is which. You take Colson’s.

The elevator ride up to the cast’s floor has you wracked with nerves, which you think is ridiculous; you can sleep on the sofa, it’s no trouble, and he wouldn’t have offered the room if he hadn’t meant it. So why does the idea of staying in a room with him, with only one bed, have your heart beating so fast? You’d been teasing each other, flirting and being cute together, in front of other people, that was easy, but since the night you’d released the video, you hadn’t really been alone together. You hadn’t needed to be. It seems like all you can think about as you walk down the beige hallway to your room, on auto-pilot as you scan your key card and enter the room.

It’s quiet.

There’s the gentle whistling of wind that comes from the balcony, the overhead sun beating down on the pristine, Hollywood beaches. He sits on the balcony, plush armchair, smoking a joint with his shirt off. Inside, it’s all white walls and gold accents, his suitcase on the bed, already open the contents inside surprisingly neatly folded. There’s a door beside you that you’re pretty sure leads to the bathroom, and the room itself is spacious, with a gorgeous, gray sofa sitting off to one side, and a wall-mounted television on the other. Just for the moment, all the fears and anxieties in your mind vanish at the sight of this pristine serenity.

Quietly, you wheel your own suitcase to the sofa, and pull out your phone. 

He’s stunning, like that, his feet up on the coffee table on the balcony, free hand tapping a lazy beat on the arm of his chair. You take a candid photo of him as he exhales smoke, and it catches the sunlight beautifully, with the water out of focus in the background. 

“Can I post this?” You ask, and he jumps a little, not having heard you come in, before his concerned expression morphs to a genuine smile when he realises that it’s you. Turning the phone to him, you show him the photo you took, and he lowers his sunglasses to get a proper look at it. After a beat, his gaze flicks to yours.

“’course, it’s a nice photo.”

“You’re very photogenic,” you brush of his compliment with a smile, and he pushes his glasses back up his nose, looking out from the balcony.

“You crashing here?” 

“If it’s not too much trouble,” you respond, and he actually laughs, though the sound is kind.

“Wouldn’t have offered if it was.”

Easy. Like everything else about him, it seemed, this was easy.

You caption the photo ‘the view from my balcony 😍’ and post it on both Twitter, and your Instagram story, tagging him in both, and you set about checking out the room’s facilities. It’s a normal, if fancy hotel room. Little bottles of soaps and shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom, TV with a bunch of standard channels, and a whole ton more that you could pay for if you wanted, it even had a set of cables so you could charge your phone, either side of the bed. The singular bed. Which Colson has clearly already claimed.

Maybe it had been a mistake to not board with your brother. 

“I’m getting lunch, you want anything?” You call, needing to get out of your own head for a bit, wanting to explore the city a little. He’s quiet for a moment, then you hear a strained ‘yeah’.

“Gimme a moment, let me put on a shirt and I’ll come with you,” he tells you through a lung full of smoke, putting the joint out in the ash tray provided, tucking the other half in his pocket for later.

“You not gonna vlog this?” He asks, half smiling in the elevator, hands tucked into his pockets. 

“Oh, shit, knew I forgot something,” you mutter, and you go to punch in the number of your floor again, but his hand catches yours. 

“We’re coming back after, don’t worry about it.”

And, well, you don’t.

It’s easy to talk to him, you swap stories about life in the entertainment industry from two wildly different perspectives, and you find a cute and overpriced restaurant to have lunch in. All the while, you’re so aware of where you are, how there could be any number of people snapping photos of the pair of you. It’s not like you’re being overtly couple-y, you’d only been putting on this ruse for three weeks at this point, but he pays for your lunch.

“Oh, I didn’t realise this was a date,” you admit, a little surprised, a little flustered. He shrugs, eats the last bite of his burger, and smiles.

“Why not? We haven’t had the chance to go on one yet, let’s take it for a test drive. Do they- are boardwalks still a thing? Is a boardwalk carnival still a thing or was that just the nineties?” You’re actually rather taken aback by his suggestion, and can’t help but grin, picking up your mostly empty glass to swirl the ice at the bottom.

“Pretty sure boardwalks are a thing, not sure about carnivals on them, but we can check it out.”

You each finish your drinks and leave, setting off for the waterfront. Feeling bold, you tuck your arm in his, and enjoy the Spring-time sunshine. The boardwalk, as it turns out, is still definitely a thing, as are the kitschy carnival rides along it. 

“I feel like a fuckin’ teenager,” Colson mutters under his breath, knowing you’ll hear it, “if we see a couple where they’re both wearing braces, looking like they just got out of school, I’m throwing myself straight into the ocean.” He informs quietly, and you snort at that.

“Not a fan of traditional cute date shit?” You ask, as the pair of you approach the ticket booth. 

“Not in the slightest,” Colson admits through his teeth while trying to smile at the attendant. The attendant, who obviously recognizes at least one of you, is doing her best not to look like she’s staring. You each buy a ride pass and head in, and the girl tells you to have a good afternoon, with a nervous sort of excitement. 

“This feels like somewhere I’d go with my daughter,” Colson looks doubtfully up at the ferris wheel that sat ahead of you at the end of the pier, looking more than a little perturbed, but his words struck you in a way that you hadn’t expected.

“Have you told her about us?” You asked, and he casts an unreadable glance at you.

“Listen, if we’re going to talk about... stuff like this, let’s at least do it somewhere a little more private?” It seems he, just like you, is acutely aware of how busy the little set of attractions is, and having already been recognized once, it’s almost certainly not going to be the last time today.

The gangly-limbed teenager working the ferris-wheel doesn’t even hide that he’s staring at Colson with hero-worship in his eyes, and he gives you a look over, followed by an approving, rather smug nod, before closing the door of the carriage. It makes your skin crawl.

“Why does everyone get to decide if I’m good enough for you based on my looks?” You hear yourself mutter, but Colson’s slinging his arm around your shoulders as the pair of you are raised steadily into the air. 

“Who gives a shit? They’re jealous, and it doesn’t matter because we’re not really together anyways,” he’s got a point, but your expression is still downcast, and there’s a strange sadness settling in the pit of your stomach. 

“I suppose.”

Once you’re high enough in the air that no-one from the ground should be able to hear either of you even a little bit, Colson sits back, lets his gaze drift across the horizon.

“I told Cassie about us, told her the truth.” He doesn’t sugar coat it, doesn’t try and explain his way out of it, when instead he looks tense, like he’s read to defend himself. You, however, nod, giving him an understanding smile.

“Of course, she’s your daughter,” you pause, and he finally looks back at you, and you think you see some hint of relief in his eyes, “I never expected for you to lie to her.”

“She’s a good kid,” he assures softly, “got a good head on her shoulders.” And now he’s turning fond, giving your shoulder a squeeze, “fuckin’ who knows where she got it, ‘cos it ain’t me.” Laughing a little, he’s surprised when you answer, voice soft and sincere.

“You’ve gotta give yourself more credit,” you tell him matter-of-factly, “you wouldn’t be half as successful as you are if you didn’t have a good bit of sense.”

“I knew there was a reason I was dating you,” he teases, pulling you in close, but you play along.

“Yeah, it’s that good sense of yours,” you returned, and he gave you a gentle shove. “Am I going to meet her at all?” You ask finally, and Colson gives another shrug.

“Yeah, I mean sure, she wants to come to set, so if you’re around you’re welcome to meet her,” his fingers are drumming lightly against your shoulder, “I should warn you though, she tends to vet any girls I’m getting serious about pretty hard, fake or not.” And yeah, you’re laughter’s a bit disbelieving, and though he sees the humour in it, he doesn’t seem to be joking, “she’s a good judge of character, and I’ll tell you now, I’m mad protective of her, but she’s mad protective of me too.” The thought of it is actually endearing, and you lean into him, letting yourself heave a sigh of contentment, glad to have talked this through.

“This would have been real nice to film,” he muttered, a teasing edge to his voice as the two of you stared out at the glittering ocean.

“Don’t even start,” you gave his ribs a shove, which only made him laugh, the sound warm and easy in the afternoon air, the sun moving slowly to the horizon.

Slowly but surely Colson was warming to the little boardwalk carnival. The two of you play obviously rigged games, and ride the rollercoaster that creaks ominously, and he even convinces you to share some fairy floss. He snaps a picture of you grinning wide and genuine as you offer him the treat, and posts it to Twitter with the caption ‘sweet’. 

There’s a Tunnel of Love ride that Colson had adamantly refused to go on at first, but as sunset was drawing closer, he relented. 

“I’m not a cliche! I’m not a fucking cliche!” He huffs, sitting beside you with his arms crossed, his legs so long that his knees came up almost comically. You’re filming on your phone for your Instagram story, and will later add at least two heart gifs, but for now you’re just obnoxiously singing the Tunnel of Love remix, thankful that you’re the only two on the ride at the moment.

“You so fucking cute, when I see you, I uwu, can you be my fucking boo? Can you be my sailor moon?” Hearing the smile in your voice, he turns to you, something about his expression softening as he sees the joy written all over your face that the camera can’t see, “and I don't wanna fight, I just wanna treat you right; I was aiming at your heart and I don't wanna say goodbye.” 

He just laughs, and shakes his head as the ride takes off, fond adoration written all over his face.

The sun’s setting by the time you’ve ridden all the rides you wanted to, eaten all the candy you could possibly stomach, and failed at enough rigged games that you were about ready to call it quits. 

“Hey I didn’t just wanna come here for the carnival shit,” he said, and you’ve got your arm tucked into his again as he steers you both to the edge of the boardwalk, where there was a set of steps down to the beach. 

“Under the boardwalk,” you nod knowingly, which he parrots back with a smile. Beneath the boardwalk there was a gaggle of youth, looking slightly older than teenagers, some still in uniforms from boardwalk rides, some smoking, most looking intimidating, but when Colson asks them for a light, they seem to get much less hostile.

“Hey are you MGK?” One asks, and when Colson lights the half a joint he had from earlier, he nods. “Sick.” The kid nods sagely, before his gaze turns on you. “And you’re that Booth chick, aren’t you? I’ve seen you on Twitter.” It’s not hostile, it’s genuinely curious.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Eddie, that’s [Y/N], do you live under a rock?” One of the girls pipes up, decked out in black, with a thick piercing through her septum, and an intimidating amount of eyeliner. The boy, Eddie, flushes scarlet, and snaps that not everyone watches the same shit as her. “I’m Samara,” the girl offers with a grin, offering her hand to you, which you shake, more than a little pleased with their various reactions.

“I heard yous was boinking -” a third girl interrupts, wearing a boardwalk uniform and hitting a vape pen pretty hard. 

“Emma!” More than one of them shout, though Samara is the loudest.

“Is boinking still the term?” Colson snorts, taking it all in stride, though he’s got an arm around you now, “Jesus fuck I feel ancient.”

“You are -” Emma interrupts, much to the rest of the group’s chagrin, but Colson just laughs.

“I’m twenty-seven you fucker!” He crows, and Emma cracks a smile, and takes another hit off of her vape pen. “Whatever,” he shrugs, “just tryin’ to show my girl everything LA has to offer.” 

“So you come under the boardwalk?” Eddie asks, with a skepticism that made you all flustered at his insinuations.

“Can you blame us for wanting a bit of privacy?” Colson smirks, to which the group of youths all collectively ‘ooh’ at, and he gives your hip a squeeze. 

“Try the one a quarter of a mile that way,” Samara points further down the beach, “less carnival, less people.” She winks, before adding, surprisingly hopefully, “but could we get like, a photo or something first?” 

Of course you both agree, and among the group photos, you learn that they’re all working around town during winter break for college. Samara specifically asks for a photo with you, where she plants a kiss on your cheek, looking a little flustered herself, muttering a quiet thanks. You follow her back on Instagram, and she gives you this starry-eyed look.

“She’s got a crush on you,” Colson snickers as the two of you head down the beach, well and truly out of earshot of the others, and you smile, finally looking up from your phone, a little endeared at the young woman’s antics. 

“Jealous?” You ask, loftily, and you expect him to laugh, but he goes quiet. When you turn to him, he’s regarding you with amusement, and something else you can’t quite identify. “Colson?” And you slow, now near enough to the next section of the boardwalk. As promised, it was rather secluded. 

After a beat, he leans in and kisses you, soft and unexpected, but his lips fit against yours like you were made for each other. Leaning into him, you wrap your arms around him, letting him pull you close. Not exactly sure what triggered this, you’re just happy to lean into it, enjoying the moment. And then he’s pulling back, forehead resting against yours.

“You see the guy to our left who’s just left the group of kids under the boardwalk? Hawaiian shirt and expensive camera?” He asks quietly, and you glance out of the corner of eye, only to spot the exact person he’s talking about, you make a quiet noise of confirmation, and you keep up the ruse, hand coming up to cup his jaw, butterflies going ballistic in your stomach despite now knowing that it was obviously for show, “been following us for the past hour.”

“Fucking paps,” you hiss, but before your expression can sour, he kisses you again, gives you a squeeze, as if to remind you to put on a show of not noticing him. Much to your surprise, he bites gently at your bottom lip, and you let out a quiet but pleased noise that neither of you had expected, and when he leans back, he looks both surprised and kind of into it, what’s more unexpected is that the exact same expression is written all over your face too.

“Back to the boardwalk, uber back to the hotel?” You ask, resolutely not talking about what had happened, but still smiling and all up in his personal space.

“Love it, let’s get out of here,” and he takes your hand, and leads you back to the safety of the street. It’s the first time the two of you had kissed, not that you’d realised it in the morning, but it was good, you reflect, it felt like it made sense. If you’re a little more giddy than you probably should be on the way back, Colson doesn’t seem to notice, in fact, he’s grinning too, humming to himself.

There’s two posts, one right after the other on Samara’s Instagram story when you check it that night, after having briefly seen it in the uber on the way back to the hotel. 

The first is a video captioned [gross thats my mom and dad] The video was pixelated as hell, and she hadn’t tagged either you or Colson, but you knew it was the two of you, wrapped up in each other, half a mile down the beach. In the background, her friends are arguing about something much closer, though one voice cuts through louder than the rest.

“Hey, Hawaiian shirt hipster paparazzi fuck! Yeah you! Give ‘em some fucking privacy!” And as the voice, who you think is Emma, shouts, Samara turns to focus the camera on the paparazzi Colson had spotted earlier, still incredibly zoomed in, capturing his sheepish, angry expression in all it’s rather pixelated glory.

“Fuck you kids!” He shouts back. Someone throws a can at him.

“Piss off!” Samara shouts, “we know you’re not taking photos of seagulls, cunt!” He goes to respond, but the group just starts chucking things at him. In the background, you can see yourself and Colson heading back up to street level, oblivious to what was going on.

The second post is a screenshot of a set of DMs between yourself and Samara.

@yourinstagramhandle mentioned you in their story

6:28pm

@yourinstagramhandle responded 😍 to your story @yourinstagramhandle: god i fucking love you guys, it was so great to meet you @unholy-samara-tin: 😅😅😅 it was the right thing to do lmao no stress he was a creepy fucker

It’s captioned [HOLY SHIT I’VE DIED AND GONE TO HEAVEN].

You get dinner with Douglas and tell him about your day, and he gives you this sweet, if a little smug smile.

“You seem very happy.” He says, knowingly.

“I am, it was a good day!” You tell him, and he hums, but won’t say anything else on the matter. The conversation is taken up mostly by excitement regarding the makeup and costume fittings that they have over the next week and a half before filming starts, and then it’s back to your own rooms. At your door, Douglas calls out to you, three rooms away.

“It’s strange to see you so grown up, duckling,” he hasn’t called you that in so long, not since you were children, even your mother had abandoned that nickname for the mildly less embarrassing ‘Duck’ in the past few years, and while it warmed your heart, you couldn’t help but tense in anticipation for some sort of gentle, sibling embarrassment, probably to do with you sharing a room with your ‘boyfriend’. 

“And?”

“And nothing,” he shrugged, “never thought you’d become cool is all, a star in your own right, aren’t you?” 

“Of course I’m cool, would you like me to give you some pointers?” You asked sweetly, and Douglas couldn’t help but laugh at that.

“I walked into that one, didn’t I? Anyways, have a good rest of your night, Colson and Dan have gone out drinking.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” you tell him, and the two of you finally go into your separate bedrooms. He’s right, of course, there’s clothes strewn all over the bed, and the shower’s been recently used, and the whole little place has a warm, clean smell, like the last mist of some spiced cologne was still lingering in the air. The only light on is one of the bedside lights, and the lights of the city outside twinkle brightly, though you can’t see many stars for the light pollution. You crack the screen door to the balcony open, and shiver a little, though you tell yourself it’s from the cold, and not because the rather comforting and clean smells were quickly dissipating. 

You are alone when you try to fall asleep on the plush but desperately uncomfortable sofa, alone and struggling to pass out with the bedside light still on, not wanting Colson to have to stumble around in the dark when he gets back. You spend almost a full hour on your phone blocking people who send you nasty DMs, and responding to a few kind ones, and you post a photo of the roof just captioned ‘cant sleep’.

It’s just gone one when the door clicks open, and Colson steps in, pretty well coordinated, and trying to keep quiet. But then there’s you, staring back at him in the lamp light.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” 

Awkward silence.

“Why are you on the sofa?” He asks, hauling his bag from the bed, shoving his loose clothes in haphazardly, before patting down his pockets. “Sorry if I woke you,” it’s almost an afterthought, and he pulls out a box of cigarettes.

“You didn’t,” you tell him with a yawn that says otherwise, but you power through it, “and I didn’t want to intrude.”

He casts a dubious glance at how you’re angled on the sofa, but doesn’t say anything, and opens the sliding door wider to sit on the porch and have his cigarette. Without even hesitating, you join him, and your spine thanks you the moment you stand.

“Nice night?” You ask, sitting out on the balcony with him.

“Nice night,” he agrees, adding, “nice day all around.” And something about it makes your heart flutter. “You know you can take the bed; I’d rather sleep on the floor than have you get scoliosis.”

“I don’t think that’s how scoliosis works,” you say with a huff of laughter, but he just hums, “and you don’t need to do that, I’m fine,” you try to insist.

“You know you’re welcome to just share the bed, it’s fucking massive, I feel like I’ll get lost in it,” he actually yawns, takes another drag of his cigarette. 

“So you want me to, what, ground you somehow?”

“I just wanna know that if I roll over in the night and there’s something solid there, that it’s your arm and not like, the lightpost in fuckin’ Narnia,” he tells you, and breathes out a lung full of smoke. You watch it hang in the air, pale and silver in the light of the moon. 

“We’re gonna be in the tabloids tomorrow,” you tell him quietly.

“No-one reads tabloids anymore, we’re gonna be on like, those snapchat news things,” he says, and laughs but it doesn’t sound very amused. “Have you been getting less shit?”

“Actually,” you consider, “yeah, most of your fans are mad supportive when you ask them to be. What about you?”

“Your fans are cute, you know that? I was scrolling through twitter and I saw a whole bunch of photos of us like, photoshopped together,” he paused to chuckle, “some had flower crowns.” You can hear the smile in his words, and he seems quite enamored by the phenomenon. It’s a nice moment; he’s drunk and a little high and you’re exhausted, and you fall into bed like it’s a sitcom.

“Tell your spine I said ‘you’re fucking welcome’,” he tells you, and it’s so absurd that you laugh, even as you pull the covers up over you and snuggle in, comfortable as all hell, before turning the light off.

Then, there’s movement, and a loud ‘thwap’ as Colson’s hand comes to knock your shoulder, landing on top of the duvet. 

“Narnia?” He asks, and you give a small smile in the dark.

“Just me.”

You wake in the morning to the sound of Colson’s alarm, or more accurately, his groaning at his alarm. And swearing. And muttered ‘fucking makeup tests’. 

He’s dragging himself into the shower while you relish your days off, nose and eyes peaking out from the covers when he comes out of the shower wrapped in a towel. The two of you make direct eye contact before you mutter a flustered apology and flip away from him, though he doesn’t seem to know how to react, just quietly getting dressed. The rest of his morning routine passes mostly in silence, before you hear him open the door.

“If you wanna get like, lunch or dinner or something, lemme know, or I’ll let you know if the boys are organising something,” he tells you, and you call out a sleepy thanks in response. The door closes. Silence. You could go back to sleep, but you’re curious about the turn around time for paparazzi media, and you were not disappointed.

MTV’s snapchat story posted “MGK and New Boo [Y/N] Booth Caught Getting Steamy Under the Boardwalk” the headline.

The self-proclaimed ‘Rap Devil’ Machine Gun Kelly, best known for his album bloom, has managed to find himself locking lips with YouTube’s darling [Y/N] Booth, though you may know her best as the vlogger, and entertainment industry insider, DuckDuckBooth.

It seems new media’s hottest couple have finally landed in LA after their surprising hookup in Louisiana, set to continue working on some mysterious project that they keep hinting at, and they seem to still be going strong!

The pair were caught after a cute date along the Hollywood seaside - 

[And here they’d entered your Instagram story, from the Tunnel of Love, as well as Colson’s Twitter picture of you with the fairy floss.]

- after meeting a group of fans, they found somewhere a little more private to get a little bit romantic in a way that 90s kids truly will appreciate; making out under a boardwalk. It feels like it should be ripped straight from a John Hughes movie set in Hollywood.

However unlikely this pair may be, you can’t deny that they’re cute together.

[And here’s those traitorous, and almost painfully HD photos of yourself and Colson, wrapped up in each other, that the paparazzi had taken the day before, though with the legs of the boardwalk, as well as the ocean and the sunset as your backdrop, the photos themselves are surprisingly stunning.]

“Fucking paps,” you mutter under your breath, and screenshot the photo anyways. If it’s your lock screen, well, it’s what any real girlfriend would do, right?

[brooklynmuseum]

Join us for a virtual tour of JR: Chronicles, the first major exhibition in North America of works by the French-born artist JR. Working at the intersections of photography, social engagement, and street art, JR often collaborates with communities by making portraits and wheat pasting them in nearby public spaces. See how JR has expanded the meaning of public art through his ambitious projects that give visibility and agency to a broad spectrum of people around the world.

Created by Sharon Matt Atkins, Director of Exhibitions and Strategic Initiatives, and Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator, Photography, Brooklyn Museum.

Born in Paris in 1983 to Eastern European and Tunisian immigrant parents, JR began his career as a graffiti artist under the alias Face 3. 

JR (French, born 1983). Expo 2 Rue, Action à Paris, 2001–4. Gelatin silver photograph. © JR-ART.NET 

After finding a camera in the Paris Métro in 2000, he started to document his posse of friends in the act of graffitiing and eventually pasted photocopies of these images onto exterior walls and added painted frames, creating Expo 2 Rue (Sidewalk Galleries). 

Since the pasted images almost always get washed and worn away, documentation of these installations, including the voices of the participants through video and audio recordings, is central to JR’s practice.

In 2004 JR initiated his first major public project, Portrait of a Generation, which featured photographs of young people from housing complex in the Parisian suburbs of Montfermeil and Clichy-sous-Bois.

28 Millimètres, Portrait d’une génération, Amad (2004). Gelatin silver photograph. © JR-ART.NET

JR and his friend Ladj Ly, a filmmaker and resident of Les Bosquets, worked with these communities to produce black and white portraits. 

JR used a camera with a wide-angle lens, which not only distorts their faces but also conveys extreme proximity and intimacy, as opposed to photojournalists who use telephoto lenses from a distance. 

28 Millimeters, Portrait d’une generation: Amad, Paris, Bastille, 2004. Installation image. Wheat-pasted posters on building. © JR-ART.NET

JR and his collaborators then pasted the enlarged images in the surrounding neighborhood of Montfermeil and, eventually, throughout central Paris. Each pasting included the name, age, and address of the sitter.

This photograph of Ladj Ly and friends was the first large-scale image that JR and his friends wheat pasted in the neighborhood prior to the riots there in 2005. It appeared as the backdrop in photographs accompanying newspaper articles and television footage about the uprising, thereby becoming JR’s first published work.

JR (French, born 1983). 28 Millimètres, Portrait d'une génération, B11, Destruction #2, Montfermeil, France, 2013. Installation image. Wheat-pasted posters on building. © JR-ART.NET

In 2013 JR learned that the housing towers in Les Bosquets were going to be demolished, so he and a group revisited the Portrait of a Generation project by pasting portraits in the interior. As the buildings were being torn down, the monumental images of residents were slowly revealed.

In 2005 JR traveled to Israel and Palestinian territories, where he and his friend Marco were inspired to carry out a public project similar to Portrait of a Generation. 

The following year, during a period of fierce tension and fighting in the Gaza Strip, they began meeting with and making portraits of Palestinians and Israelis who held the same jobs.

Ayman Abu Alzulof, a Palestinian actor from the town of Beit Sahour, said he agreed to be photographed because the images would be seen on both sides of the border. "It shows that both parties look like each other, as human beings,” he explained. “It's difficult to differentiate between a Palestinian face and an Israeli face. It will also show that we live here. I think a lot of people will talk about it.”

In 2008 JR initiated Women Are Heroes after learning about the deaths of three young men in the favela of Morro da Providência in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the subsequent riots ignited by the involvement of the Brazilian military. 

The exhibition includes this multi-media diorama that narrates the stories of the participants and project.

28 Millimeters, Women Are Heroes, Action dans la Favela Morro da Providência, Stairs, a Few Days Later, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2008. Color lithograph. © JR-ART.NET

After meeting with residents for a month, the artist collaborated with them to make photographs of the eyes and faces of local women, including some related to the murdered men. Together, they pasted the blown-up images on staircases and buildings around the favela.

28 Millimètres, Women Are Heroes, Action dans la Favela Morro da Providência, Favela de Jour, Rio de Janeiro, 2008. Installation image. Wheat-pasted posters on buildings. © JR-ART.NET

Giant faces and eyes appeared to be staring down into Rio from the hilltop.

Casa Amarela, in Morro da Providência, Brazil. © JR-ART.NET

JR continues to work with the communities with which he partners. In 2009, he established the Casa Amarela (Yellow House) in Morro da Providência in 2009. 

The moon on top of the house is actually a room, where artists from all over the world can stay in exchange for conducting workshops for the children and adults of the favela. They just celebrated their 10th anniversary! 

The exhibition includes a model of Casa Amarela, created by Brazilian artist Raphael Truffi Bortholuzzi

Between 2008 and 2010, JR also completed Women Are Heroes installations in Cambodia, India, Kenya, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

Here is an installation that shows portraits of some of the participants alongside an aerial shot of the images printed on vinyl and installed on rooftops in Kibera, Kenya in 2009. 

The images both transformed the landscape and provided protection from the rain.

In 2008 JR began his project The Wrinkles of the City in Cartagena, Spain. As he had done for Women Are Heroes, JR collaborated with the community to create large-scale portraits. This time he photographed the oldest inhabitants of the city.

This gallery also demonstrates more of JR’s process, including the rolls of paper shown here and mockups.

In 2011 JR won the TED Prize, a $100,000 award given to “leaders with creative, bold wishes to spark global change.” The prize enabled JR to launch Inside Out, a global public art project. He began encouraging others to use his process and providing the means to do so, expanding his collaborative practice to a fully participatory art project.

This installation highlights many of the Inside Out projects (@insideoutproject) through more than 50 videos created by the organizers and participants of actions around the world.

Since 2011 more than 400,000 portraits have been pasted in 141 countries worldwide, including visitors to the Museum’s First Saturday programming last August!

In September 2017 JR installed a monumental photograph of Kikito, a one-year-old boy from Tecate, Mexico, in a location near the child’s home along the U.S.-Mexico border. The giant toddler, seeming to peer over the fence, prompted the viewer to wonder, What does a child think about a fence he sees every day?

Kikito, 2017

Although the nearly 70’ tall image stood in Mexico, it could best be viewed from the United States. Kikito’s mother remarked: “I hope this will help people see us differently than what they hear in the media. . . . I hope in that image they won’t only see my kid. They will see us all.”

JR (French, born 1983). Migrants, Mayra, Picnic across the Border, Tecate, Mexico—U.S.A., 2017. Installation image. Wheat-pasted poster on table. © JR-ART.NET

On October 8, 2017, for the last day of the Kikito installation at the U.S.-Mexico border, JR organized a gigantic picnic on both sides of the wall. Kikito, his family, and dozens of guests came from the United States and Mexico to share a meal. 

People at both sides of the border gathered around the eyes of Mayra, a “Dreamer,” eating the same food, sharing the same water, and enjoying the same live music (with half the band’s musicians playing on either side).

In 2016 JR returned once again to Clichy-Montfermeil with the filmmaker Ladj Ly to photograph more than 750 people from the Parisian suburb in order to create a large-scale mural, inspired by the work of the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. 

In 2017, the mural was installed at Les Bosquets. Here the work is shown as a large-scale transparency print in a lightbox. 

In early 2020, JR started teaching a course titled “Art and Image,” at the École Kourtrajmé, a film school in the neighborhood founded by Ladj Ly.

Still from The Gun Chronicles, 2018. Video, black and white, sound; 4 min. loop. © JR-ART.NET.

Commissioned by Time magazine for its cover on November 5, 2018, this video mural visualizes a spectrum of views on guns in the United States through collaged portraits of 245 individuals, including gun collectors, hunters, law enforcement officials, shooting victims, emergency room teams that treat victims of mass shootings, and gun industry lobbyists. 

Participants were invited to share their individual views, describe their own experiences, and search for common ground; their accounts are accessible on the project's website.

At the center of the exhibition is JR’s new monumental mural project, The Chronicles of New York City (2019). In the summer of 2018, JR and his team spent a month roaming all five boroughs of New York City, parking their 53-foot-long trailer truck in numerous locations and taking photographs of passersby who wished to participate.

JR (French, born 1983). The Chronicles of New York City, 2018–19 (detail). © JR-ART.NET

Each of the 1,128 participants was photographed in front of a green screen, and then the images were collaged into a New York City setting featuring architectural landmarks. 

The participants chose how they personally wanted to be represented and were asked to share audio recordings of their stories, which are now available on a free mobile app.

In keeping with the public and collaborative nature of JR’s art, the museum partnered with organizations in Brooklyn to install murals throughout the burough.  

The Chronicles of New York City, JR and Triangle Stack 2, LOT-EK at Domino Park Photo credit: Marc Azoulay - JR-ART.net

A monumental version of The Chronicles of New York City is on view in Domino Park (@dominopark) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The project has been conceived in collaboration with LOT-EK, which designed Triangle STACK #2 to help bring JR's mural into the city's open space. 

Installation view of The Chronicles of New York City at Kings Theatre, 2019; and Inside Out project at Brooklyn Academy of Global Finance, Bedford-Stuyvesant Courtesy © JR-ART.NET

JR’s murals are also on view at Kings Theatre in Flatbush and the Brooklyn Academy of Global Finance in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Thank you for joining us on our tour of JR: Chronicles. Tune in next Sunday for another tour of our galleries! 

Installation views of JR: Chronicles by Jonathon Dorado