#David's Thoughtful Thursday

[izacore]

... Oh. You made it all yourself?

[mylambandmartyr]

Do you ever feel like this should be officially the end?

And that you should be the one to do the ending, but you can't?

And do you ever feel that everyone is slowly letting go—

Do you ever feel that... that incredibly alone?

David Lieberman x Drowning in the Sound / Amanda Palmer

[beepbeepdespair]

GOD i wish i had the power and/or contacts to get people performance roles. there's a busker out today and she is one of the best fucking singers i have ever heard i'm not joking. she did i will always love you and i cried in a shop bc it was so beautiful. someone needs to put her in their musical right now

[vlindervin7]

category five listened to a song attached to a special memory on the tram and almost started crying moment

[fans4wga]

"The studios thought they could handle a strike. They might end up sparking a revolution"

by Mary McNamara

"If you want to start a revolution, tell your workers you’d rather see them lose their homes than offer them fair wages. Then lecture them about how their “unrealistic” demands are “disruptive” to the industry, not to mention disturbing your revels at Versailles, er, Sun Valley.

Honestly, watching the studios turn one strike into two makes you wonder whether any of their executives have ever seen a movie or watched a television show. Scenes of rich overlords sipping Champagne and acting irritated while the crowd howls for bread rarely end well for the Champagne sippers.

This spring, it sometimes seemed like the Hollywood studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were actively itching for a writers’ strike. Speculations about why, exactly, ran the gamut: Perhaps it would save a little money in the short run and show the Writers Guild of America (perceived as cocky after its recent ability to force agents out of the packaging business) who’s boss.

More obviously, it might secure the least costly compromise on issues like residuals payments and transparency about viewership.

But the 20,000 members of the WGA are not the only people who, having had their lives and livelihoods upended by the streaming model, want fair pay and assurances about the use of artificial intelligence, among other sticking points. The 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists share many of the writers’ concerns. And recent unforced errors by studio executives, named and anonymous, have suddenly transformed a fight the studios were spoiling for into a public relations war they cannot win.

Even as SAG-AFTRA representatives were seeing a majority of their demands rejected despite a nearly unanimous strike vote, a Deadline story quoted unnamed executives detailing a strategy to bleed striking writers until they come crawling back.

Days later, when an actors’ strike seemed imminent, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger took time away from the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho not to offer compromise but to lecture. He told CNBC’s David Faber that the unions’ refusal to help out the studios by taking a lesser deal is “very disturbing to me.”

“There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic,” Iger said. “And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”

If Iger thought his attempt to exec-splain the situation would make actors think twice about walking out, he was very much mistaken. Instead, he handed SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher the perfect opportunity for the kind of speech usually shouted atop the barricades.

“We are the victims here,” she said Thursday, marking the start of the actors’ strike. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly: How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right, when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.”

Cue the cascading strings of “Les Mis,” bolstered by images of the most famous people on the planet walking out in solidarity: the cast of “Oppenheimer” leaving the film’s London premiere; the writers and cast of “The X-Files” reuniting on the picket line.

A few days later, Barry Diller, chairman and senior executive of IAC and Expedia Group and a former Hollywood studio chief, suggested that studio executives and top-earning actors take a 25% pay cut to bring a quick end to the strikes and help prevent “the collapse of the entire industry.”

When Diller is telling executives to take a pay cut to avoid destroying their industry, it is no longer a strike, or even two strikes. It is a last-ditch attempt to prevent le déluge.

Yes, during the 2007-08 writers’ strike, picketers yelled noncomplimentary things at executives as they entered their respective lots. (“What you earnin’, Chernin?” was popular at Fox, where Peter Chernin was chairman and chief executive.) But that was before social media made everything more immediate, incendiary and personal. (Even if they have never seen a movie or TV show, one would think that people heading up media companies would understand how media actually work.)

Even at the most heated moments of the last writers’ strike, executives like Chernin and Iger were seen as people who could be reasoned with — in part because most of the executives were running studios, not conglomerations, but mostly because the pay gap between executives and workers, in Hollywood and across the country, had not yet widened to the reprehensible chasm it has since.

Now, the massive eight- and nine-figure salaries of studio heads alongside photos of pitiably small residual checks are paraded across legacy and social media like historical illustrations of monarchs growing fat as their people starve. Proof that, no matter how loudly the studios claim otherwise, there is plenty of money to go around.

Topping that list is Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive Davd Zaslav. Having re-named HBO Max just Max and made cuts to the beloved Turner Classic Movies, among other unpopular moves, Zaslav has become a symbol of the cold-hearted, highly compensated executive that the writers and actors are railing against.

The ferocious criticism of individual executives’ salaries has placed Hollywood’s labor conflict at the center of the conversation about growing wealth disparities in the U.S., which stokes, if not causes, much of this country’s political divisions. It also strengthens the solidarity among the WGA and SAG-AFTRA and with other groups, from hotel workers to UPS employees, in the midst of disputes during what’s been called a “hot labor summer.”

Unfortunately, the heightened antagonism between studio executives and union members also appears to leave little room for the kind of one-on-one negotiation that helped end the 2007-08 writers’ strike. Iger’s provocative statement, and the backlash it provoked, would seem to eliminate him as a potential elder statesman who could work with both sides to help broker a deal.

Absent Diller and his “cut your damn salaries” plan, there are few Hollywood figures with the kind of experience, reputation and relationships to fill the vacuum.

At this point, the only real solution has been offered by actor Mark Ruffalo, who recently suggested that workers seize the means of production by getting back into the indie business, which is difficult to imagine and not much help for those working in television.

It’s the AMPTP that needs to heed Iger’s admonishment. At a time when the entertainment industry is going through so much disruption, two strikes is the last thing anyone needs, especially when the solution is so simple. If the studios don’t want a full-blown revolution on their hands, they’d be smart to give members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts they can live with."

[miley1442111]

birthday fights & other lies- a.hotchner

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summary: aaron forgot your birthday which spirals into something much deeper.

pairing: aaron hotchner x fem baureader

warnings: cheating, panic attack, fighting, no happy ending :(

-----------------------

12:08. Your birthday was over. 

And Aaron hadn’t said a thing. 

-----------------------

1pm that day

“Happy birthday Y/n!” Spencer smiled, handing you a small cupcake with a lit birthday candle on it. The icing was pink, strawberry, your favourite. The cupcake was vanilla, with little sprinkles in it that made it all the more colourful. 

“Thank you,” you chuckled as he pulled you into a hug, his long arms and tall stature dwarfing you in his hold. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Well, I wanted to,” he shrugged. “I have tickets to a play this weekend, it’s in the Ford’s Theatre so it’ll be a bit of a drive but-”

“I’d love to go. Thank you Spencer,”  you smiled. “When is it?”

“Tomorrow night at 7pm, we can get dinner as well, my treat.”

“Thank you Spencer,” you smiled and hugged him again. 

When you’d woken up that morning, you’d been alone in your bed, despite it being full of two people the night prior. Aaron had come over, as he usually did on Thursday nights. He’d get off work late and something in him made him drive to your small townhouse, and fuck you in your bed. He’d spend the whole night convincing you he loved you, only to pretend it never happened the next day. It was like clockwork. 

-----------------------

3pm that day

“Happy birthday sweetheart,” Derek smiled, placing a card and a gift box on your desk. 

“Thanks Derek,” you smiled and hugged him close. Earlier Penelope, Jj, and Emily had dropped off gifts at your apartment this morning, and you all had plans to go out to dinner tonight.

David had mailed you a gift, and an invitation to his home for Sunday with the rest of the team. Everyone had accepted, apart from Aaron. 

When you thought about it, you didn’t know much about the unit chief you served under, in more ways than one. You knew he was kind and tender, but only behind closed doors. You knew he was intelligent and pragmatic, good at his job, and logical.

But what was he really to you? Fuck buddies? Friends with benefits? Was this a power imbalance? Were you doomed to never know?

-----------------------

Your phone dinged and you turned it on, tired from the night with the girls. 

Are you awake? Aaron asked.

Not for you.

What do you mean?

I don’t know if you noticed but it’s kind of an important day. 

What do you mean?

I’m 24 now. You missed my birthday.

He didn’t respond for a few minutes. 

I’m sorry. 

I don’t care. Don’t call or text me again. I’m not just your fuck doll, I’m a real person. 

I know that.

Then act like it Aaron. For fuck’s sake. 

I love you.

No you don’t. 

I’m coming over.

The door’s locked.

We have to talk Y/n.

Read 12:14am

-----------------------

Knock, knock, knock.

“Fuck off,” you called from your kitchen, ignoring the banging on the door. 

“We have to talk,” he demanded. 

“No we don’t. We’re not anything anymore.” 

“Please Y/n,” his voice sounded a lot more… emotional than you were used to. Raw and unusually soft. Aaron did everything he way he led the team, with confidence and strength, that included your sex life and relationship. Not once had he been vulnerable the way you’d been. You’d spent nights thinking about your future together and the way you’d tell the team. He’d been asleep beside you, or in his own bed. 

You unlocked the door and he came barging in, engulfing you in an all-consuming kiss. For a moment, you allowed yourself to be swept up in the moment, imagining this is what he’d wanted to do all day but he couldn’t, the team didn’t know you two were together. You pulled back and crossed your arms. 

“Hi,” you sighed, trailing back into the kitchen with him hot on your heels. 

“Hi my darling,” he smiled softly. “I’m so sorry I forgot about today, I just… it slipped my mind, it’ll never happen again, I swear.” 

“Aaron, it really hurts that you just… forgot about today. I’m not asking for a gift, I just wanted… acknowledgement. Is that too much to ask?” Your eyes trailed down to his hands where his fingers played with a… wedding ring? 

What the fuck? Aaron had never spoken about being married. He’d never told you he was married. You would never, ever be the one to break up a marriage. Ever. 

“Are you married?!” You shouted. Anger bubbling in your stomach like bile. “You fucking asshole!”

8 months of your life, wasted. Someone else’s entire marriage ruined. All because of his selfish actions. 

“What? No,” he shrugged, then realised his fuck-up. His hands solidified themselves in his trouser pockets and he started. “I thought-”

“Are you separated? Who is she? Did I really just become a homewrecker?!” 

“Baby please-”

“NO! Do not ‘baby’ me! Tell me everything about this woman right now! Do you two have kids?!” 

“Yes,” he answered and you genuinely stopped breathing. 

“W-what? So- so this entire fucking time y-you’ve been mar-married,” you panted, a hand over your chest to try and make yourself breathe, but you were. You were having a panic attack. Aaron could see the signs. He walked closer but then noticed the way you were shielding yourself from him, making your body smaller, leaning down, and ultimately ending up on the floor as you shut your eyes and tried to focus on breathing.

“Yes.” 

“Why didn’t y-you tell me?” you rasped. 

“We’re getting a divorce.”

“What!? I ruined a marriage? Y-you’re getting a divorce? Is it becau… because of me?”

“Yes and no,” he answered, just observing you, his voice calm and assertive, like it always is. 

“What the fuck does that mean!?” you shouted. Thank god your walls were thick and the neighbours next door wouldn’t hear a thing. This would’ve been awkward to explain at the next neighbourhood meeting. 

“I didn’t tell her… about you. She asked for a divorce on her own terms, but we were already separated the first time me and you had sex.”

“So then how is this about me?” you were calming down, Aaron could see it. It fucking hurt that you were anxious of him like that. That he’d set off a fucking panic attack and you wouldn’t even let him within meters of you. 

“I signed her papers the day she sent them over. Because I’m in love with you.”

“Aaron, what the fuck? Me and you aren’t in a relationship, you’ve made that very clear. The only thing we do is fuck in my house! We don’t go on dates, we don’t celebrate each other’s birthdays, as you’ve so kindly demonstrated, and we aren’t ‘together’. You aren’t there when I wake up every morning, and you don’t come home with me from work in the evenings. You keep telling me that you love me but where is it? Where is this supposed love? I don't see it, do you?”

“I love you. I love that you call me out on all of my bullshit,” a step closer. “I love how smart and driven you are,” another step closer. “I love the little notes you leave on everyone's desks,” his hands wrap around your waist. “I love how good you are at your job,” a small kiss over the fabric of your jumper. “I love how you care about other people,” a kiss to your neck. “I love the little things you do to make me laugh throughout the day,” a kiss to the cheek. “I love everything about you,” a kiss to the lips. “And I’m so sorry that I ever made you feel like I wasn't completely and utterly devoted to you.”

“I don’t trust you at all,” you admitted, a sad smile on your face. “I’ll never trust you again.”

Aaron’s heart broke, but he understood. He’d been lying to you for months, what did he expect? He didn’t tell you he was a father, a husband. For god’s sake he’d take his ring off in the car every morning. It’s not like him and Haley weren’t rocky. Had this divorce been a long time coming. Had he only been served the papers two weeks ago? Yes. Had he and Haley just separated? Yes. Did he still live with her and Jack? Yes. What was one more lie if it meant he got to keep you? Lying to you was killing him, but it was also saving him, because it meant you were his. His girlfriend, hsi love, his everything.

“I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you,” he promised. 

“I don’t want to see you again,” you sniffled, small tears running down your cheeks. 

“Please-”

“Just leave. Like you always do.”

-----------------------

And Aaron did. When you showed up to work the next week, it was Spencer who was clinging to you like a lost puppy. 

Something must’ve happened at the play.

Now Aaron had truly lost you.

-----------------------

criminal minds masterlist :)

navigation for my blog :) (criminal minds, obx, the bear, marvel, top gun, the hunger games :)

[blueiscoool]

A photo of the body casts of two adults and two children who died in what's now called the house of the golden bracelet in Pompeii. A new DNA analysis shows that these four people are not genetically related to one another. (Image credit: Archeological Park of Pompeii).

DNA Analysis Rewrites The Stories of People Buried in Pompeii

An ancient-DNA analysis of victims in Pompeii who died in Mount Vesuvius' eruption reveals some unusual relations between the people who died together.

Ancient DNA taken from the Pompeii victims of Mount Vesuvius' eruption nearly 2,000 years ago reveals that some people's relationships were not what they seemed, according to a new study.

For instance, an adult who was wearing a golden bracelet and holding a child on their lap was long thought to be a mother with her child. But the new DNA analysis revealed that, in reality, the duo were "an unrelated adult male and child," study co-author David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement.

In another example, a couple who died in an embrace and were "thought to be sisters, or mother and daughter, were found to include at least one genetic male," Reich said. "These findings challenge traditional gender and familial assumptions."

In the study, published Thursday (Nov. 7) in the journal Current Biology, Reich and an international team of researchers looked at the genetics of five individuals who died during the A.D. 79 eruption that killed around 2,000 people.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted, it covered the surrounding area in a deadly layer of volcanic ash, pumice and pyroclastic flow, burying people alive and preserving the shapes of many bodies beneath the calcified layers of ash. The remains of the city were rediscovered only in the 1700s. In the following century, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli perfected his plaster technique, in which he filled in the human-shaped holes left after the bodies had decomposed to create casts of the victims.

The casts of two people who died about 2,000 years ago in the house of the cryptoporticus in Pompeii. A new DNA analysis found that one individual was biologically male, but the sex of the other could not be determined. (Image credit: Archeological Park of Pompeii).

The casts allowed scholars to study the victims in their last moments and make hypotheses about their identities based on details such as their locations, positions and apparel. The problem with this approach, however, was that their interpretations were influenced by modern-day assumptions — for instance, that the four people at the house with the golden bracelet, which included the adult holding the child, were two parents with their children, when in reality none of them were genetically related, the researchers wrote in the study.

For their research, the team analyzed 14 casts and extracted DNA from fragmented skeletal remains in five of them. By analyzing this genetic material, the scientists determined the individuals' genetic relationships, sex and ancestry. The team concluded that the victims had a "diverse genomic background," primarily descending from recent eastern Mediterranean immigrants, per the statement, confirming the Roman Empire's multiethnic reality.

The cast of a person who died in the villa of the mysteries in Pompeii in A.D. 79. (Image credit: Archeological Park of Pompeii).

Our findings have significant implications for the interpretation of archaeological data and the understanding of ancient societies," study co-author Alissa Mittnik, an archaeogeneticist at Harvard Medical School and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said in the statement. "They highlight the importance of integrating genetic data with archaeological and historical information to avoid misinterpretations based on modern assumptions."

It's possible that past misconceptions led to the "exploitation of the casts as vehicles for storytelling," meaning that curators may have manipulated the victims' "poses and relative positioning" for exhibits, the team wrote in the study.

Sex misassignment is "not uncommon" in archaeology, Carles Lalueza-Fox, a biologist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona who specializes in the study of ancient DNA but was not involved with the study, said in an email.

"Of course we look at the past with the cultural eyes of the present and this view is sometimes distorted; for me the discovery of a man with a golden bracelet trying to save an unrelated child is more interesting and culturally complex than assuming it was a mother and her child," Lalueza-Fox said.

By Margherita Bassi.

[sonofarathorn]

return the favor

Pairing: Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw x Reader

Word Count: 2.9k

Warnings: Fem!Reader. Mentions of Pregnancy. Reader and Bradley Have A Son. Dilf!Bradley. Oral Sex (m! receiving). Dirty Talk. Domesticity. 

Summary: He’d traded flight suits and fatigues for sweatpants and a t-shirt. And despite the fact that both items of clothing tended to get covered in spit-up by the end of the day, he still managed to make them look sexy. You wanted him every time you saw him, and judging from the little smirk Bradley wore whenever he caught you staring for a beat too long, he knew it too.

A/N: Honestly, I blame @withahappyrefrain​, @ouralcohol​, and Bud Light for this. 

Little Nicholas “Nicky” Bradshaw came into the world kicking and screaming. Though he chose to make his grand entrance at around 3:30 AM on a quiet Thursday night, he was hell-bent on letting the whole world know about it. And so, with a whirlwind of forms, bills, and the shrill cries of the darling baby boy, you and Bradley were thrust into the throes of parenthood.

You both handled it well, or as well as you could for first timers. Working as a team to tackle midnight bottles, blowouts, spit-up and the frequent sleepless nights. You’d settled into an easy rhythm over the past seven weeks. Bottles every 2-3 hours. Naps in-between. Diaper changes. A little tummy-time when Nicky would tolerate it. 

Day in. Day out.

You were worried the Navy-issued twelve weeks of parental leave would make Bradley squirrely– the repetition would become tedious–but here you were more than half-way through, and you hadn’t heard him complain about a thing. 

If anything, Bradley took to the role of fatherhood eagerly. Sure, he might have missed being on base, the camaraderie, the planes, but he has other things to think about now. And he wouldn’t trade all the excitement for the joy of spending time with you and his son. 

Everyday was another milestone, and so far Bradley had been there to witness them all. 

“Nicky blinked at me today.” 

“He almost turned his head.” 

“I think I heard him try to say da-da.” 

“He drank his whole bottle!”

“Do you think he’s old enough to wear shoes yet?” 

Deeper down inside there was the growing fear of his impending absence . It wasn’t a question of if, but when . A mission would come, the phone would ring, and the goodbyes would begin. Pictures and grainy videos would stand in for the real thing.  

But he was here now, and he was determined to soak up as much as he could.   

Fatherhood suited Bradley. 

He’d traded flight suits and fatigues for sweatpants and a t-shirt. And despite the fact that both items of clothing tended to get covered in spit-up by the end of the day, he still managed to make them look sexy. 

It would be infuriating if it didn’t turn you on so damn much. Of course, it didn’t help that he’d opted to let the stubble on his chin get scruffy now that he didn’t have to comply with on-base grooming standards. 

For you, hopped up on hormones and the longing that comes with forced post-birth abstinence, it was a truly lethal combination. More than once, you’d gotten lost in your daydreams about what the coarse hair would feel like as his lips caressed your skin. Trailing down your neck, over your sensitive nipples, scratching between your thighs. 

You wanted him every time you saw him, and judging from the little smirk Bradley wore whenever he caught you staring for a beat too long, he knew it too. 

You try to push the horny thoughts to the furthest recesses of your mind, as you enjoy the quiet afternoon. It’s a rare occasion. Nicky’s nap is going longer than usual–probably because he kept you and Bradley up the entire night before–so you’re trying to relish the stillness.  

You doze on the couch, head pillowed in Bradley’s lap while he scrolls through the endless black hole of his phone. His thumb circles mindless patterns into your upper arm and shoulder. He hums quietly under his breath. 

The TV is on, David Attenborough going on and on about the ocean and all its wonderful creatures. Sleep tugs heavy on your eyelids, aided by the soothing drone of his voice, and the patch of warm sunlight that falls over you. 

You’re thinking you might finally be able to catch up on lost sleep, when a wail crackles through the baby monitor. Harsh and breathy, it shatters the silence, snapping you to attention. A hunger cry. 

You sit up, rubbing a hand over your face. “He’s due for a bottle.” You stretch your arms to the sky, groaning as the muscles in your back and shoulders stretch and loosen. “I’ll go warm one up.”

“Hey.” Bradley’s hand curls around your waist. “I got it.”

“You fed him last time,” you protest, turning to face him. “Stayed up with him for half the night, and changed his diaper three times in a row. S’not fair for you to do everything.”  

He cups your face, rubbing his thumb over your lower lip. “I got it. He’s my kid. ‘Sides you were falling asleep.”

“Bradley–”

He cuts you off with a quick kiss. “Baby. Don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll take care of Nicky.”

“I’ll pay you back,” you promise, eyes not-so-subtly scanning over his body. 

Bradley chuckles. “No payment necessary.” He kisses your forehead and then your lips once more. “Get some rest, yeah?” 

You nod, and stretch back out onto the couch. Bradley pulls the crocheted throw blanket over you and, with one last smile, heads upstairs.   

The door to the nursery squeals, and then you hear his voice through the baby monitor. 

“Hey, Nicky,” Bradley whispers. “Look at you. Sleep okay, bubba? Yeah? You ready for lunch?” 

The one-sided conversation continues as Bradley changes Nicky’s diaper. He asks about Nicky’s dream, tells him some of the facts he picked up from Our Planet, and shares his latest sports predictions. 

“Your Auntie Natasha thinks the Padres have a shot this year. I told her she was crazy at first, but I might be eating my words soon.” A pause. “That means I’ll have to admit I was wrong. It’s an idiom. Your mama’s the English teacher though, she can teach you all about that later.” 

You smile dopily at his words. The easygoing way he interacts with your baby. He’d been so worried at first. Scared to fail, scared Nicky wouldn’t like him. But there was no denying the simple fact that Bradley was meant to be a father. He proved that more and more everyday.  

The steps creak as Bradley begins his descent. “Gotta be quiet, okay? Your mama’s sleepin’. Yeah, you tired her out last night.”

You hear him moving around in the kitchen and then the soft gurgling of the bottle warmer. Nicky whines impatiently, and Bradley distracts him with more stories. The effect of his words are two-fold, soothing both your baby and you. You blink sleepily, snuggled up on the couch all comfortable and warm. A few minutes later, aided by the hush of Bradley’s voice, you fall into sweet unconsciousness. 

When you wake later, the room is wrapped in shadows. The once bright sunlight has started to dim. You swallow thickly, tasting stale breath. Your body aches from sleeping in the cramped space, limbs still heavy with sleep. 

You reach for your phone sitting face down on the coffee table. The screen is bright in the dark room. You squint to make out the round numbers. 5:52 . Fuck. You’d been asleep for hours . 

“Babe!” You call out. “Why’d you let me sleep this long?” No answer. “ Bradley .” 

Still nothing. The house was uncharacteristically quiet. The baby monitor wasn’t picking anything up either. Your heart twinges painfully in your chest, stomach turning with the thick ice of dread. 

You tap your phone screen again, looking for a message or a missed call. Any kind of clue as to where Bradley had disappeared off to. There’s a text waiting for you, must’ve missed it in your initial alarm. You scan it quickly and breathe out a sigh of relief. 

Almost out of diapers. Went to the store with Nicky. Don’t freak out. Love you honey. 

Panic now abated, you drop the phone back onto your chest. You should probably get up and do something, anything . There was no shortage of chores to do around the house. Laundry to fold. Dishes to wash. You were due for a pumping session too. But try as you might, and admittedly you don’t try very hard, you can’t bring yourself to disturb the peace. So you stay on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep.

You must have fallen asleep again, because sometime later you’re startled awake by the click of the front door. 

“Bradley?” you mumble, rubbing the heel of your hands into your eyes. 

“Hey, honey.” He kicks the door shut behind him. “Sleep okay?” 

“Yeah.” You stretch. “Freaked me out a little when I woke up and you guys were gone.”

Bradley kisses your forehead and flicks a lamp on. “Sorry, baby. Didn’t mean to, but I didn’t wanna wake you up.”

You draw in a sharp breath when you see him. He’s looking sinful in a pair of jeans and a dark blue Henley. A backwards baseball cap rests atop his unruly hair. Your eyes flit over his body, head to toe. He prattles on about his errand, completely unaware of the fact that you’re currently undressing him with your eyes.

Somehow, at this moment, he’s the hottest he’s ever been. 

“Got more diapers. They’re in the car. I wanted to bring Nicky in first and get him settled. He fell asleep on the drive back. He got a compliment from the lady at the register. Honestly I think all this attention is starting to go to his head. Can’t help that he’s so cute though, he got it from you. I also got more onesies, cuz I saw them in Target and couldn’t help it. Oh and those peanut butter cups that you like from Trader Joes, and…” He trails off, catching you staring. “What?” 

“Babe,” you mumble, still in your lust-fueled trance. 

“Yeah?” Bradley’s eyebrows knit together. 

“C’mere.” 

He sets Nicky’s carseat down gently. “You’re looking at me weird. Did I do something wrong?” He asks, moving over to you slowly. 

You shake your head. “You let me take a nap, and you went to get diapers without me asking you to.”

“Uh huh. So?” He looks down at you, lips pursed. “I still don’t understand why you’re looking at me like that.” 

You don’t answer. Instead, you grab the waistband of his jeans and pull him towards you. 

“Whoa, baby.” Bradley stumbles forward. His hand covers your fumbling ones. “What are you doing?” 

Your tongue darts out to wet your bottom lip. “What does it look like I’m doing?” You undo his belt and pop the button of his jeans. 

“I mean it looks like you’re about to–” his gaze flits to where Nicky rests still fast asleep in his carseat. “Suck my dick,” his voice comes out in a hoarse whisper. “Wait, right here? Shouldn’t we move–”

There was definitely logic in his words, but it didn’t really register at the moment. The only thing on your mind was him . Emerald tinted lenses colored your world. Greed plain and simple. For the taste of him. For the weight of him on your tongue. For the sound of his throaty groans to fill the air. 

“Bradley,” you whisper, lips following the trail of dark hair down his stomach to where it disappears into his elastic waistband. 

Your husband swallows thickly. “Yeah, honey?” 

You free his cock from his boxers. “Stop talking.” 

“But, sweetheart– oh fuck .” Bradley runs a hand over his face. 

“Let me return the favor.” You shush him. 

“You don’t have to do–” Bradley chokes as you swipe your tongue over his hip bone. “ Shit . Okay, yeah.” 

You spit into your palm and stroke him slowly. He’s halfway there, but getting harder with each languid flick of your wrist. You sink your teeth into his thigh and he groans throatily. The noise settles deep into your stomach, pulsing against your clit. 

You missed this. The heady paradox of being on your knees, yet having Bradley completely at your mercy. Making him feel good. Pulling him apart piece by piece. 

You mouth at the base of his cock, tongue laving at the underside of it. Bradley rests a hand at the nape of your neck. There’s no force behind the gesture, it’s more like he’s anchoring himself than pushing you further onto him.

“Fuck, baby.” His eyes are squeezed shut, jaw slack, and lips slightly parted. “ Christ. ” He rocks his hips forward into your hand. 

A wordless plea. You know what he’s asking for. Your mouth slides up his shaft slowly, and you swirl your tongue around the head, still pushing, still teasing. It’s only when Bradley moans brokenly that you decide to have mercy on him. 

Your lips part, and you swallow him down slowly. His head tilts forward and he lets out a breathless whisper of your name that has you squeezing your thighs together as your clit throbs. 

Bradley’s a perfect picture of debauchery above you. Shoulders drooped and leaning over you slightly. His face is flushed, eyebrows screwed together. The veins on his neck and arm bulge prominently. His grip on your neck tightens, and he gently guides you forward. 

You take as much as you can handle, stroking what you can’t fit into your mouth. Your jaw aches from the lack of practice. But it’s worth every bit of discomfort to hear the moans and praises he levels your way. 

“Your mouth feels so goddamn good, honey,” he whispers, when his cock hits the back of your throat. “Just like that, baby. Such a good girl. You’re doing so good. Keeping going, sweetheart.”

Your hand drifts downward of its own accord, and dips into the waistband of your leggings. You rub insistent circles into your clit to relieve the ache. It’s been so long, you think you could come from this alone.

“Look at you getting off,” he says, hazel eyes blazing into your own. “Wish you could see how pretty you look with my dick in your mouth, baby,” he mumbles, lazily thrusting forward.

Bradley cups your jaw, thumb rubbing over your cheek where he can feel his cock moving. He rolls his hips forward again, biting his bottom lip as he watches your lips stretch to accommodate him. 

“Pretty girl,” he coos, brushing your hair out of your face so he can see you better. “Taking me so well. Gonna make me come.”

You moan, and Bradley chuckles.

“That what you want? Want me to come down your throat?” 

You blink up at him, pleading with watery eyes. You wanted it more than anything. 

“Yeah? Gonna swallow every drop, like a good girl?” The thought sends a shudder down his spine. “My good girl. Won’t last long with you looking at me like that.” 

That’s the plan . 

You move the hand on his thigh around to gently squeeze his balls, and Bradley thrusts forward sharply.

“ Shit –sorry, baby.” His thumb brushes at the newly shed tears that track down your face. “You okay?” The fire in his eyes dies slightly as he searches your gaze for any sign of pain or reluctance to continue. 

Instead the only thing he finds there is hunger and greed. 

This time when you squeeze, you’re ready for his reaction. You take his next roll of his hips easily. And the next, and the next. Letting Bradley gently fuck your face. He was close, you could tell by the slur of his words, the inconsistent buck of his hips. 

“Goddammit,” Bradley says through gritted teeth. His fingers snag into your hair, tugging at the nape. “Gonna fucking kill me, honey.” His chest heaves with shallow breaths. “‘M gonna come, sweetheart. You ready for me?” 

Please, oh please . Your thoughts chant, words blurring into a slurry. You hope your eyes convey the desperation you feel. 

Bradley’s eyes roll into the back of his head. He bites his pointer finger, trying to muffle the shameless groan he lets out as he unravels. 

You take all he gives, and he gives you so much. His cum coats your throat, and you swallow as much as you can, but you have to pull away for air. The last dribbles of his cum paint your lower lip and drip down your chin. You tilt your head back and stick your tongue out to show off your empty mouth. 

Bradley stares at you, eyes crossed and unfocused. He pushes his hat off and runs a hand over his face and through his hair. “Holy shit,” he mutters. “Fuck, baby.” 

He swipes at your lip, smearing the cum and spit into your skin. “Don’t look at me like that.” 

“Like what?” You smirk. 

“All innocent and shit.” Bradley pushes his ring finger into your mouth. “I’ll fuck you right here.” 

You clean the digit off with your tongue and pull away with a pop . “You promise?” You arc an eyebrow up.

“Fuck.” He leans down and gives you a kiss that leaves your toes curling. “Give me five minutes to put Nicky in bed, and I’ll be right back.” He whispers. 

You lean back and peel your shirt from your body. “ Tick tock .” 

Bradley bites his bottom lip, eyes sliding hungrily over your body. “Don’t go anywhere.” He points a stern finger at you. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” you chuckle. “Hurry up so you can fuck me.” 

He grabs the carseat, and still manages to be gentle despite his obvious excitement. “Five minutes, baby, I promise.” 

Bradley’s never one to break a promise. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Cigna’s nopeinator

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Cigna – like all private health insurers – has two contradictory imperatives:

To keep its customers healthy; and

To make as much money for its shareholders as is possible.

Now, there's a hypothetical way to resolve these contradictions, a story much beloved by advocates of America's wasteful, cruel, inefficient private health industry: "If health is a "market," then a health insurer that fails to keep its customers healthy will lose those customers and thus make less for its shareholders." In this thought-experiment, Cigna will "find an equilibrium" between spending money to keep its customers healthy, thus retaining their business, and also "seeking efficiencies" to create a standard of care that's cost-effective.

But health care isn't a market. Most of us get our health-care through our employers, who offer small handful of options that nevertheless manage to be so complex in their particulars that they're impossible to directly compare, and somehow all end up not covering the things we need them for. Oh, and you can only change insurers once or twice per year, and doing so incurs savage switching costs, like losing access to your family doctor and specialists providers.

Cigna – like other health insurers – is "too big to care." It doesn't have to worry about losing your business, so it grows progressively less interested in even pretending to keep you healthy.

The most important way for an insurer to protect its profits at the expense of your health is to deny care that your doctor believes you need. Cigna has transformed itself into a care-denying assembly line.

Dr Debby Day is a Cigna whistleblower. Dr Day was a Cigna medical director, charged with reviewing denied cases, a job she held for 20 years. In 2022, she was forced out by Cigna. Writing for Propublica and The Capitol Forum, Patrick Rucker and David Armstrong tell her story, revealing the true "equilibrium" that Cigna has found:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-medical-director-doctor-patient-preapproval-denials-insurance

Dr Day took her job seriously. Early in her career, she discovered a pattern of claims from doctors for an expensive therapy called intravenous immunoglobulin in cases where this made no medical sense. Dr Day reviewed the scientific literature on IVIG and developed a Cigna-wide policy for its use that saved the company millions of dollars.

This is how it's supposed to work: insurers (whether private or public) should permit all the medically necessary interventions and deny interventions that aren't supported by evidence, and they should determine the difference through internal reviewers who are treated as independent experts.

But as the competitive landscape for US healthcare dwindled – and as Cigna bought out more parts of its supply chain and merged with more of its major rivals – the company became uniquely focused on denying claims, irrespective of their medical merit.

In Dr Day's story, the turning point came when Cinga outsourced pre-approvals to registered nurses in the Philippines. Legally, a nurse can approve a claim, but only an MD can deny a claim. So Dr Day and her colleagues would have to sign off when a nurse deemed a procedure, therapy or drug to be medically unnecessary.

This is a complex determination to make, even under ideal circumstances, but Cigna's Filipino outsource partners were far from ideal. Dr Day found that nurses were "sloppy" – they'd confuse a mother with her newborn baby and deny care on that grounds, or confuse an injured hip with an injured neck and deny permission for an ultrasound. Dr Day reviewed a claim for a test that was denied because STI tests weren't "medically necessary" – but the patient's doctor had applied for a test to diagnose a toenail fungus, not an STI.

Even if the nurses' evaluations had been careful, Dr Day wanted to conduct her own, thorough investigation before overriding another doctor's judgment about the care that doctor's patient warranted. When a nurse recommended denying care "for a cancer patient or a sick baby," Dr Day would research medical guidelines, read studies and review the patient's record before signing off on the recommendation.

This was how the claims denial process is said to work, but it's not how it was supposed to work. Dr Day was markedly slower than her peers, who would "click and close" claims by pasting the nurses' own rationale for denying the claim into the relevant form, acting as a rubber-stamp rather than a skilled reviewer.

Dr Day knew she was slower than her peers. Cigna made sure of that, producing a "productivity dashboard" that scored doctors based on "handle time," which Cigna describes as the average time its doctors spend on different kinds of claims. But Dr Day and other Cigna sources say that this was a maximum, not an average – a way of disciplining doctors.

These were not long times. If a doctor asked Cigna not to discharge their patient from hospital care and a nurse denied that claim, the doctor reviewing that claim was supposed to spend not more than 4.5 minutes on their review. Other timelines were even more aggressive: many denials of prescription drugs were meant to be resolved in fewer than two minutes.

Cigna told Propublica and The Capitol Forum that its productivity scores weren't based on a simple calculation about whether its MD reviewers were hitting these brutal processing time targets, describing the scores as a proprietary mix of factors that reflected a nuanced view of care. But when Propublica and The Capitol Forum created a crude algorithm to generate scores by comparing a doctor's performance relative to the company's targets, they found the results fit very neatly into the actual scores that Cigna assigned to its docs:

The newsrooms’ formula accurately reproduced the scores of 87% of the Cigna doctors listed; the scores of all but one of the rest fell within 1 to 2 percentage points of the number generated by this formula. When asked about this formula, Cigna said it may be inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.

As Dr Day slipped lower on the productivity chart, her bosses pressured her bring her score up (Day recorded her phone calls and saved her emails, and the reporters verified them). Among other things, Dr Day's boss made it clear that her annual bonus and stock options were contingent on her making quota.

Cigna denies all of this. They smeared Dr Day as a "disgruntled former employee" (as though that has any bearing on the truthfulness of her account), and declined to explain the discrepancies between Dr Day's accusations and Cigna's bland denials.

This isn't new for Cigna. Last year, Propublica and Capitol Forum revealed the existence of an algorithmic claims denial system that allowed its doctors to bulk-deny claims in as little as 1.2 seconds:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims

Cigna insisted that this was a mischaracterization, saying the system existed to speed up the approval of claims, despite the first-hand accounts of Cigna's own doctors and the doctors whose care recommendations were blocked by the system. One Cigna doctor used this system to "review" and deny 60,000 claims in one month.

Beyond serving as an indictment of the US for-profit health industry, and of Cigna's business practices, this is also a cautionary tale about the idea that critical AI applications can be resolved with "humans in the loop."

AI pitchmen claim that even unreliable AI can be fixed by adding a "human in the loop" that reviews the AI's judgments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

In this world, the AI is an assistant to the human. For example, a radiologist might have an AI double-check their assessments of chest X-rays, and revisit those X-rays where the AI's assessment didn't match their own. This robot-assisted-human configuration is called a "centaur."

In reality, "human in the loop" is almost always a reverse-centaur. If the hospital buys an AI, fires half its radiologists and orders the remainder to review the AI's superhuman assessments of chest X-rays, that's not an AI assisted radiologist, that's a radiologist-assisted AI. Accuracy goes down, but so do costs. That's the bet that AI investors are making.

Many AI applications turn out not to even be "AI" – they're just low-waged workers in an overseas call-center pretending to be an algorithm (some Indian techies joke that AI stands for "absent Indians"). That was the case with Amazon's Grab and Go stores where, supposedly, AI-enabled cameras counted up all the things you put in your shopping basket and automatically billed you for them. In reality, the cameras were connected to Indian call-centers where low-waged workers made those assessments:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

This Potemkin AI represents an intermediate step between outsourcing and AI. Over the past three decades, the growth of cheap telecommunications and logistics systems let corporations outsource customer service to low-waged offshore workers. The corporations used the excuse that these subcontractors were far from the firm and its customers to deny them any agency, giving them rigid scripts and procedures to follow.

This was a very usefully dysfunctional system. As a customer with a complaint, you would call the customer service line, wait for a long time on hold, spend an interminable time working through a proscribed claims-handling process with a rep who was prohibited from diverging from that process. That process nearly always ended with you being told that nothing could be done.

At that point, a large number of customers would have given up on getting a refund, exchange or credit. The money paid out to the few customers who were stubborn or angry enough to karen their way to a supervisor and get something out of the company amounted to pennies, relative to the sums the company reaped by ripping off the rest.

The Amazon Grab and Go workers were humans in robot suits, but these customer service reps were robots in human suits. The software told them what to say, and they said it, and all they were allowed to say was what appeared on their screens. They were reverse centaurs, serving as the human faces of the intransigent robots programmed by monopolists that were too big to care.

AI is the final stage of this progression: robots without the human suits. The AI turns its "human in the loop" into a "moral crumple zone," which Madeleine Clare Elish describes as "a component that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

The Filipino nurses in the Cigna system are an avoidable expense. As Cigna's own dabbling in algorithmic claim-denial shows, they can be jettisoned in favor of a system that uses productivity dashboards and other bossware to push doctors to robosign hundreds or thousands of denials per day, on the pretense that these denials were "reviewed" by a licensed physician.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

[thedemoninme141]

Her Heartbeat, Chapter 6: Her emotions

Summary: Friday's therapy session turns into camping with you.. where accidents happen.

Warnings: DRUNK WEDNESDAY! Light Angst. EmotonallyConfusedWednesday!!!! Getting Drugged Accidentally

(Note: It is a veryyyy long chapter, Tell me how you guys liked it, or if drunk Wednesday seemed out of character, I won't mind)

Chapter 1

Previous Chapter

Worklist

By the time Thursday rolled around, the pattern had solidified itself, like a storm cloud hanging persistently on the horizon. Every morning, you’d sit beside Wednesday in the quad, annoyingly persistent but never enough for her to feel justified in telling you to leave. You had a knack for toeing the line—just far enough to irk her but never enough to earn her outright rejection.

In class, the routine was much the same. You’d slip into the seat beside her as if it were your rightful place. The second you sat down, her entire world seemed to narrow, every sense heightened in your proximity. The faint rustle of your clothes, the soft sighs you made when the lecture got particularly dull, the slight tap of your fingers against your notebook—it all became a package of distractions.

She tried to make sense of it all. Why would you go through such efforts to get close to her? You are definitely working for someone. Perhaps Thornhill? Or worse—another follower of crackstone? Could you have been a spy? Sent to observe her? To get closer and learn her weaknesses?

"What are you really doing here?" Wednesday’s voice was low, more to herself than to you. Her eyes remained focused on the blackboard, but her thoughts were elsewhere—specifically on the constant, irritating sensation of your presence. You blinked in surprise, your pen pausing mid-word. "Uh… learning? Isn’t that why we’re all here?" "Don’t insult my intelligence." Her eyes narrowed, her voice growing colder, “Why are you always here? Sitting beside me, following me like a shadow. It’s pathetic.” You leaned in closer, your breath warm against her ear. “Maybe I just enjoy your company.” Wednesday's eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Enjoy? You find my disdain enjoyable?” A shrug. “I find you enjoyable. Everything else is just part of the package.”

That caught her off guard. For a moment, she didn’t have a response and it took all her self-control to avoid showing how much that unsettled her. She hated that you always had the upper hand in conversations like this. She hated that your attention felt like a weight she couldn’t shake. Most of all, she hated that a part of her—however small and buried deep—wondered what it would be like to let you in.

Wednesday didn't particularly care for or against Fridays. They were simply another day in the endless monotony of her existence. But this Friday? It was different. It was another one of those irritating anger management sessions—a pointless exercise orchestrated by fools, for fools. And now, she had to endure it with you. As if her tolerance for idiocy wasn’t already at its breaking point.

She had barely gotten herself dressed when the inevitable, irritating sound of knocking echoed through her door. "Do you ever get tired of existing so obnoxiously?" she asked, her voice cold and flat. You smirked, unfazed. "Not if it means I get to hang out with you." "Ugh," Wednesday muttered under her breath, reaching for her black trench coat. Before you could say another word, Enid popped into the doorway. "Ooh, look at you!" she said, her eyes lighting up as she saw you. "That dress is so cute! It really suits you." You beamed. "Thanks, Enid! Thought I’d try something different." Wednesday rolled her eyes. "Different? You look like a walking garden. I half expect bees to swarm you the moment we step outside." You shrugged with a grin, clearly enjoying her jabs. "I’ll take that as a compliment." "It wasn’t," she deadpanned, slipping into her coat. "Let’s go. If we’re late, David will prolong the session for me."

As you two made your way out of the dorm, Enid waved goodbye cheerfully. "Have fun at therapy!" Wednesday shot her a glare that screamed ‘I’d rather die,’ "So, you excited for today?" you asked, the teasing lilt in your voice grating against her already thin patience. "Excited would imply I feel any sense of positive anticipation," Wednesday responded coolly. "No. Today is just another unfortunate event in a long string of unfortunate events." "Yeah, that sounds about right," you agreed with a chuckle. "Though, spending time with me can’t be that bad." Wednesday shot you a side glance. "Your self-delusion is truly remarkable." "Oh, I’m well aware of my delusions, but hey, they keep me going."

She sighed, trying to ignore the warmth of your presence next to her. It was irritating, how familiar the rhythm of walking beside you had become. You always matched her steps perfectly, never rushing, never falling behind.

Wednesday would've preferred the taxi ride to be as silent as it can get but of course, you filled the silence with light conversation, asking her the most mundane questions imaginable, while Wednesday sat stiffly beside you, arms crossed, staring out the window. "So, I was thinking," you began, pausing for dramatic effect, "do you think if I ordered a black coffee today, I’d be more like you?" "No," she answered immediately. "You didn’t even think about it." "Because I already know the answer. You could drink a gallon of black coffee, wear all black, and listen to Beethoven’s most haunting symphony, and you’d still be as painfully cheerful as you are now." You grinned, clearly enjoying the back-and-forth. "Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. I think there’s a part of you that secretly enjoys my company. You’d miss me if I stopped hanging around." "I’d miss you like I’d miss an infection," she said coldly, her eyes never leaving the window. But even as she said it, there was a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach. The truth was, your absence would be noticed. After all, you were always there. And when you weren’t, it left a strange, hollow space in her day. Not that she would ever admit it.

"Ah, there they are!" David called, his voice loud and cheerful, as if he had been waiting all day just for your arrival. He was wearing his usual obnoxiously bright scarf and smiling wide enough to make Wednesday wish she’d turned back sooner.

"Wonderful to see you both! We’re doing something a little different today!" he announced enthusiastically as you and Wednesday approached.

Wednesday narrowed her eyes. "Different how?" she asked, already expecting the worst.

David motioned toward a minibus parked just outside the café. "Today, we’re going on a therapeutic field trip! Under the open skies, connecting with nature. It’s going to be great!"

Wednesday’s entire demeanor stiffened, and her gaze darkened. "I refuse," she said flatly. "I did not sign up for some kumbaya nonsense in the middle of a field. If you think—"

"If you refuse," David interrupted, holding up a finger, "I’ll have no choice but to report to Principal Weems that you’re not making progress. And we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?"

Wednesday’s expression turned venomous. She stood still, glaring at David with pure disdain. "You are a stain on humanity." "Not the first time I’ve heard that!" David replied, still grinning. "Now hop on the bus, both of you." Wednesday clenched her jaw, resisting every instinct to turn and leave. The bus was small and cramped, all those fools were already there. and Wednesday had already claimed the farthest seat in the back, as far away from everyone as possible. You slid in next to her, earning a sideways glare. "Don’t get comfortable," she said icily. "Too late," you replied, settling in with a smirk. As the bus rumbled to life and began its journey to the woods, Wednesday stared out the window, her mind racing. She hated every second of this. But more than that, she hated how… unsettled she felt with you next to her. She hated how she could feel your presence, how your every movement drew her attention. And she hated that she didn’t want you to leave. Maybe this session would offer more than just torturous fresh air—maybe it would give her the chance to figure out why you were really here. Because Wednesday knew one thing for certain: you were hiding something. And she was going to find out what it was, whether you liked it or not.

David, at the front of the bus, was chattering to the driver, too excited for whatever nonsense he had planned. "How much longer do you think this torture will last?" Wednesday muttered under her breath, her eyes fixed out the window, watching the trees blur by. You leaned closer, a smile tugging at your lips. "Not a fan of the great outdoors, Wednesday?" "No, I had my fair share in the woods. I prefer my environment to be hostile," she replied coolly The bus finally rolled to a stop at the edge of a dense forest. David hopped off first, "Alright, we’re heading to the lake! It’s about two hours walk, but don’t worry—we’ll take breaks if anyone needs it! Stretch those legs—we've got a nice hike ahead" Wednesday let out a sigh, muttering, “And thus, the descent into idiocy begins.” She glanced at you, fully expecting to see that infuriating grin of yours, and she was not disappointed. "Come on, Wends," you said, using the nickname you knew she despised. "It’ll be fun." "It will be insufferable," she corrected, stepping down from the bus with her usual grace. She was already too bored to correct you. “Man, I thought we were gonna talk about our feelings. Not… hike.” Alex complained. "Alex. It’s about the journey—learning to appreciate nature and each other." David answered from up ahead Wednesday stayed near the back as the group began to march forward, already regretting every moment of this cursed field trip. You, of course, kept pace beside her, walking with that irritating bounce in your step. "So," you said after a few moments of silence. "What do you think the lake looks like?" "Water," Wednesday deadpanned. Rick whistling low under his breath. “Can’t believe we’re actually doing this. You still got the shovel?” Ashley elbowed him in the ribs again, her voice a low hiss. “Shut up, Rick.” “So, like, do you think there are any wolves around here? Or, ooh, maybe bears! Wouldn’t that be so dramatic?” Brooked chipped. Mike looked like he was seriously considering abandoning her in the woods. “I… really don’t think there are bears, Brooke.” “Oh, but wouldn’t it be romantic? You saving me from a bear or something?” Mike just groaned Wednesday caught snippets of their conversation, her irritation growing with every inane comment. She muttered under her breath, “I would gladly throw her to a bear.” “Isn’t this just wonderful? The fresh air, the sound of birds, the gentle rustle of leaves! A perfect day for personal growth!” David cheered from the front. You were trying to stifle a laugh beside Wednesday, but it slipped out. “You gotta admit, he’s really into this.” “I have nothing to admit,” Wednesday muttered darkly. As they walked. Wednesday found herself paying far too much attention to your reactions—the slight smile on your face, the way you occasionally glanced at her when you thought she wasn’t looking. It was intriguing irritating.

Eventually, the trees began to thin out, the scent of water growing stronger as the lake came into view.

Mike was the first to notice it, squinting at the far side of the clearing. "Uh… guys? What’s with the tents?"

David clapped his hands together, that annoyingly chipper smile still plastered across his face. "Ah, yes! About that—"

Wednesday's eyes narrowed.

David gave an exaggerated shrug. "Oops! Did I forget to mention we’re staying the night?"

The entire group froze.

"What?" Alex’s voice dropped, his fists clenched. "Staying overnight?"

Rick stared at David like he’d just been sentenced to death. "Nah, no way. I’ve got plans. You can’t just spring this on us."

Ashley threw up her hands. "David, you didn’t say anything about camping! I didn’t even pack!"

Brooke, unsurprisingly, clapped her hands together. "This is amazing! We’re going to spend the night under the stars—just like in the movies!"

"Of course you’re excited," Mike grumbled. "This is a disaster."

Meanwhile, Wednesday stood there, silently seething. Her mind was racing with all the ways she could strangle David without leaving a trace. "You ambushed us," she said, her voice cold, each word clipped. "Do you have a death wish?"

David chuckled nervously. "Oh, come on, guys. It’ll be fun! A little nature retreat, some time away from distractions—" Wednesday interrupted, her tone venomous. "The only thing distracting me right now is the overwhelming desire to set this entire campsite ablaze." You, of course, were clearly enjoying this, "Well, this is unexpected, but kind of exciting, right? At least the lake is beautiful!" She stared at you with her deadpan expression, trying to comprehend how anyone could be happy about this situation. "I sincerely hope the lake swallows you whole." You only grinned wider. "Guess I’ll take that as an invitation for a swim later." "Ugh," she muttered under her breath, rubbing her temples as though she could ward off the headache brewing in her skull. David, trying desperately to salvage the situation, raised his hands. "It’s not that bad, I promise! The tents are already set up, and we’ve got food, water, and supplies. This will be a great opportunity to unwind and connect with nature." You nudged her lightly with your elbow. "Hey, at least you’ve got me here to keep you company." "You’re the worst part of this." "Aw, don’t be like that. I’ll make sure you have fun." Wednesday resisted the urge to shove you into the lake. Each person got their own tent, which was the one small mercy in this nightmare of an outing. Wednesday glanced at the others, some fumbling with their tents or laughing awkwardly, completely unaware of how insufferable they were. Of course, you were helping David get the campfire going, your face lit up with a soft smile as you fumbled with the firewood. Wednesday watched you from the corner of her eye, wondering how you could seem so content in this ridiculous situation. You didn't seem annoyed or put off like she was—you were just… happy to help. She couldn't understand it. She had been relegated to "supervision duty," which meant standing around doing absolutely nothing while everyone else bustled about with assigned tasks. Mike and Alex were handling the food, Brooke was talking to some random birds like they were her long-lost cousins, and Rick and Ashley were off near the lake, laughing about who knew what.

David, with his typical cheery disposition, waved everyone over. "Alright, everyone, gather around! The fire's going, and it's almost time for our session!" Great. The therapy session. The exact reason Wednesday wanted to bury herself in the woods and never return. But she had to stay—for now because she had to find out why you were everywhere. She watched as you placed a few more logs on the fire before stepping back and joining the group. She hated how naturally you fit into all this, while every second felt like torture for her.

As the sky darkened, the session began. Wednesday sat at the edge of the group, her fingers twitching toward her coat pocket where her knives were hidden. Five knives. She let her mind wander to the logistics of taking them all out. David was the priority. Strangling him would be more satisfying, but a quick knife to the throat would be efficient. She could— "Wednesday?" She blinked and glanced at you, irritated at being pulled back into reality. You looked at her expectantly, probably wondering why she was spacing out. David cleared his throat, obviously oblivious to her thoughts. "Okay, let's start! Today's session is still all about discussing our most recent challenges. How we handled them, what we learned… you know the drill." Wednesday's expression tightened. Oh, she knew the drill all too well. Each session was the same monotonous routine—listening to everyone talk about their mundane problems and pretend they were making progress. It was a miracle she hadn't stabbed someone by now.

Alex started first, talking about how he got into a fight with his dad over some trivial matter. "But I didn't punch a wall this time," he added proudly, and Milo gave him a sleepy nod of approval. "That's great, Alex!" David beamed. "You're learning to manage your anger better."

Next up was Brooke, who dramatically recounted some "epic argument" she'd had with her mom over her phone privileges. "But I didn't give in! I stood my ground, because self-care is important, right?" David nodded enthusiastically, clearly buying into Brooke's theatrics. "Absolutely, Brooke. Boundaries are important."

Wednesday's eyes flicked to the campfire. Maybe she could just throw herself into it. That would be preferable to listening to more of this.

Mike's was about some misunderstanding with his sister, while Rick rambled on about his mother. Wednesday could feel her patience thinning with each passing second.

And then... it was her turn. David looked at her expectantly. "Wednesday, how about you? Have you faced any challenges lately?" She stared at him, the burning firelight reflected in her dark eyes. The group was silent, waiting for her to share some deep revelation. Of course, David had to push a bit, flashing his annoyingly encouraging smile. "It helps to talk, you know. We're all in this together." That was it. That was the final straw.

Wednesday's eyes narrowed, and she felt something snap inside her. "You want to know about my challenges?" she began, her voice dangerously calm. "My challenge is sitting here, surrounded by imbeciles, pretending that anything you people say has any merit. I don't care about your 'self-care' or your 'boundaries' or how you didn't punch a wall for the first time in months, Alex." Everyone froze. The campfire crackled in the silence as Wednesday's words hung in the air. "And you," she turned to Brooke, "standing your ground with your mother over your phone privileges, are you serious? That's not a challenge. That's pathetic. The fact that any of you think you're achieving something meaningful by whining about your trivial lives is insufferable." Then she pointed to Rick "You keep whining about your mother but you are so dependent on her that you can't even move out. How about you fix that and then whine." David opened his mouth to speak, but Wednesday cut him off. "Don't. Just don't. I've had enough of this ridiculous charade." She stood abruptly, her black coat swirling as she turned on her heel and stormed away from the group. You sighed, David giving you a look. "Yeah I know I know, I am going to get her, but umm.. if I do not return, look for me in the lake, that's where she might throw my body." The water shimmered in the fading light as she reached the far side of the lake. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes, trying to calm the storm raging inside her.

But then, she heard footsteps behind her. Of course it was you.

"Wednesday," you said softly, your voice cautious as you approached. She didn’t respond at first, her eyes fixed on the shimmering water in front of her. For a moment, you wondered if she even heard you. But then, slowly, she turned her head, her dark eyes locking onto yours. There was a storm in those eyes—anger, frustration, something deeper that she was too proud to acknowledge.

"I don’t want to talk," she said flatly, "Go back to the group. I’m fine here."

You ignored her dismissal, walking closer until you were standing beside her, staring at the same water. "I’m not leaving you alone, Wednesday. Not when you’re this upset."

She let out a sharp breath through her nose, clearly irritated. "Upset? I’m not upset. I’m annoyed. There’s a difference."

"Right. Annoyed." You nodded, as if you were going along with her, but your voice remained soft, patient. "You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to, but... I just don’t think it’s as bad as you’re making it out to be."

Wednesday shot you a glare, her eyebrow arching in disdain. "Do you enjoy this?" she snapped. "Being part of David’s circus, listening to everyone complain about how tragic their lives are?"

You met her gaze, unfazed by her sharp tone. "It’s not about enjoying it, Wednesday. It’s about trying. Everyone has something going on, and sometimes, talking about it helps. Even if it seems pointless at first."

"Pointless is an understatement," she muttered, turning her eyes back to the lake. "All they do is whine. They don’t solve anything, they just sit around, waiting for someone else to fix their lives for them."

"Not everyone’s as good at handling things alone as you are," you replied gently. "But even you—sometimes you don’t have to handle everything by yourself. Opening up doesn’t make you weak."

She clenched her jaw, her fingers twitching slightly as if she was fighting the urge to argue. "Opening up is a waste of time. It accomplishes nothing. People think sharing their problems will magically solve them, but in the end, they’re still the ones who have to deal with it. Words don’t change that." You sighed softly, recognizing the walls she was building around herself. But you didn’t give up. You couldn’t. You had a mission.

"It’s not about solving everything in one conversation. It’s about letting go, even for a little while. It gives you room to breathe, to think clearly without all that pressure building up inside."

"I don’t need to breathe," she said finally, though her voice was quieter than before, less sharp. "I’m perfectly fine handling things on my own."

"I know you are," you said softly, turning to face her fully. "But that doesn’t mean you have to. You don’t always have to be so... closed off."

Wednesday didn’t respond immediately. Her eyes flickered, something unreadable crossing her expression before she quickly masked it with her usual stoic demeanor. She sighed, clearly exasperated, but there was a hint of something softer in her voice when she finally spoke.

"Why do you even care?" she asked, her tone quieter now, almost vulnerable. "Why do you insist on dragging me into these... emotions?"

You smiled softly, knowing how hard it was for her to even ask that question. "Because I care about you, Wednesday. And I don’t want to see you carrying everything by yourself. I don't want to see you ending up alone. Even if you think you’re fine, it doesn’t hurt to let someone else in every once in a while."

She turned her head slightly, her eyes studying your face as if she were searching for some hidden motive. But all she found was sincerity. That seemed to bother her more than anything else.

"I’m not... good at this," she muttered, her voice almost too low to hear. "You don’t have to be," you replied.

For a long moment, Wednesday was silent, her expression unreadable as she stared at the lake. Then, with a resigned sigh, she turned on her heel and began walking back toward the campfire, clearly unwilling to admit that she was even considering your words.

You followed, relieved that she hadn’t completely shut down.

When the two of you returned to the camp, the group was still sitting around the fire, chatting quietly. To your surprise, no one seemed particularly upset about Wednesday’s earlier outburst. In fact, David greeted her with a bright smile, completely unfazed.

"Ah, Wednesday! Glad to have you back," he welcomed her cheerfully as if nothing had happened. Wednesday narrowed her eyes slightly. "Did you call Principal Weems to notify her about my "failure"? " David chuckled, waving a hand dismissively. "Of course not! Everyone needs to vent sometimes. It’s healthy." The others nodded in agreement. Rick smirked a little, but even he didn’t seem too bothered. "Honestly, I kind of expected you to blow up sooner. That was nothing compared to what I thought you’d do." Ashley gave Wednesday an exaggerated wink. "I like a girl who speaks her mind."

Wednesday blinked, clearly taken aback by their nonchalant reactions. She had expected them to be offended, maybe even hold a grudge. But they seemed... fine. Completely fine.

She sat down reluctantly, her posture stiff as ever, but there was a faint crack in her emotional armor. "I still think this is a waste of time," she muttered, though her voice lacked its usual venom.

Your phone buzzed in your pocket. You pulled it out and winced. “I have to take this,” you muttered to Wednesday, who shot you an irritated look. You mouthed an apology and stepped away, leaving Wednesday sitting awkwardly with the group.

David gently steered the conversation back to her. “Wednesday, do you want to share? You don’t have to, of course, but we’re here if you want to talk.”

The urge to reject him outright surged within her, but something—perhaps your words, perhaps the nagging feeling in her chest—made her hesitate. Her fingers tightened on the fabric of her coat, and she looked away from the group, staring at the flames instead.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she spoke. “There’s someone... someone who’s been getting under my skin. Someone who I can’t seem to get out of my head.”

The words felt foreign on her tongue, uncomfortable and raw, but she couldn’t stop them. The group remained silent, waiting, not pushing her.

“This person,” she continued, her voice cold but wavering, “is... everywhere. They keep showing up in my life, in my thoughts. And I don’t want them to. But I can’t stop it. It’s... infuriating.”

David nodded, encouraging her gently. “And how does that make you feel?”

“How do you think it makes me feel?” Wednesday snapped, her temper flaring. “Annoyed. Angry. It’s like they’ve invaded my mind, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t shake them. I don’t like feeling out of control.”

David nods, his tone patient. “How would you feel if you could get rid of those thoughts? Push them out entirely?” Wednesday frowns, the question catching her off guard. She thinks for a moment, her eyes narrowing as she considers it. She felt strange.. she thought she would feel better but she feels.. "Empty." The word tasted bitter on her tongue, foreign and unwelcome. She didn’t realize she had said it out loud until she saw the group’s reactions—or lack thereof. No judgment, no pity. Just quiet acceptance. She didn’t know if that made her feel better or worse.

David nods. “Sometimes, the things we resist the most are the things we need to hold on to. They can fill a part of us we didn’t even know was empty.”

Rick leaned forward with a grin on his face,

“So... is this 'someone' on the phone right now?”

Wednesday's head whipped around, her eyes narrowing into a deadly glare. "If you value your life, you'll stop talking."

Rick held up his hands in surrender, but the grin remained. Ashley quickly elbowed him, muttering, “Not the time, Rick.”

Alex groaned loudly, clutching his head in mock agony. "Ugh, All the emotional talk is making me sleepy, I need coffee, like, now. Someone, please, for the love of all that’s good in this world, make some coffee." David looked over at Rick and Ashley. "Alright, Rick, Ashley, why don't you two get the coffee started before Alex dies." Rick gave a half-hearted salute. "On it, boss." He turned to Ashley, who was lounging beside him. "Hey, go grab the sugar from my bag, will you? Ashley rolled her eyes but obliged, getting up with a huff to retrieve the 'sugar' from Rick's bag. Meanwhile, Rick turned to Wednesday, a sly grin on his face. "So, Addams, how do you take your coffee?" "Bitter," she replied finally, her voice flat. "Just like life." Rick snorted, shaking his head. "Of course. Should’ve guessed."

As Wednesday sat there waiting for the coffee to be made, she found herself growing restless. That hollow, gnawing emptiness she had tried so hard to ignore began to surface again, tightening in her chest. Where had you gone? You were always right there, standing beside her, but now you were out of reach well you weren't actually, you were just gone for a few moments and she hated it.

As the minutes ticked by, Wednesday’s thoughts drifted further. What did it mean?

The quiet chaos of her thoughts was interrupted when Rick handed her a cup of coffee. "Here you go, black as death itself."

She took the cup without a word, the warmth spreading through her hands as she stared into the dark liquid. She sipped it, expecting the usual bitterness. But this...this was different. It tasted...a bit weird but more than the coffee, it was her feelings for you that occupied her mind. How had she ended up here? Talking about her emotions, exposing herself in ways she never thought possible? She wasn’t the type to dwell on uncertainty. She preferred things to be direct, to have answers and solutions, but when it came to you—everything was blurred. Once these therapy sessions were over... where would you stand? Where would she stand?

She felt strange. The warmth of the coffee spread through her, loosening the tightness in her chest. The more she drank, the more that strange, comfortable haze settled in, drowning out her usual sharp clarity. She finished her cup without realizing it,

"More," she demanded, holding the cup out toward Rick.

"Whoa, didn’t take you for a coffee fiend," he teased, but he refilled her cup without hesitation.

What would happen once this was over? Once you both returned to your lives outside of these campfire confessions and group therapy? Would you drift apart, as people often do, or would you stay? And more importantly, did she want you to stay?

Everything felt off, but not unpleasantly so. The others were acting weird—dancing, laughing—but she didn’t care. She just wanted more of this feeling, more of the numbness that let her ignore the confusing emotions you always brought out in her. So, she drank more coffee. And more. And more.

Meanwhile, you wrapped up your call . “Yeah, Dad, YEAAAH, I GET IT. I’ll be careful. I already took them, okay? Yes, I’ll call tomorrow. Gotta go. Bye!” You sighed heavily, tucking your phone back into your pocket. That conversation had gone on way too long. You started heading back to the camp, but as you got closer, something felt... wrong. The group was acting strange. They weren’t just sitting and talking anymore—they were dancing. Not the casual, awkward dancing of people who barely knew each other, but wild, like they didn’t have a care in the world.

“What the hell?” you muttered under your breath, scanning the group. Where was Wednesday? You searched for her, but she was nowhere near the fire.

“David,” you called out, hurrying over to him. “Where’s Wednesday?”

David looked at you, his eyes glazed over, a lazy grin on his face. “Wednesday? Today’s Friday... right?”

You blinked. “What? What does that have to do with—never mind.” You looked past him and saw Wednesday, walking by the lake with a... distinct wobble. Your heart skipped a beat. Wednesday Addams didn’t wobble. She is as steady and composed as a statue.

As you approached, you heard her voice—low, muttering, and oddly slurred. "You... why do you do this to me? Always... being there. Except when you're not, which is even worse. But then you're there again, and I hate it, but... I don’t hate it."

You blinked, utterly confused. "Wednesday?"

She turned, almost tripping over her own feet, and gave you a look that could only be described as... perplexed. But not the usual cold, calculated Wednesday-perplexed—this was more... tipsy.

"Ahh, it’s you," she said, squinting at you like you were a strange object she couldn’t quite figure out. "Why are you always... there?" She waved her hand in a vague circle. "Like... just there, making everything... feel... confusing."

You stared at her, unsure whether to laugh or panic. Wednesday never talked like this. "Wednesday, what are you talking about?"

She pointed a finger at you, jabbing it in your direction with surprising force, but her balance was completely off. "You! You make everything so... so... confusing. I don’t like it. But also... I kind of like it. And I hate that I like it. You’re... annoying. But I get more annoyed when you’re not here."

"Okay, Wednesday..." you took a step closer, noticing how she swayed again, her expression shifting between annoyance and something else—something vulnerable. "What’s going on with you?"

"I don’t know!" she exclaimed, throwing her hands in the air dramatically, completely out of character. "I never know with you. I think about you, and it’s like... ugh, why are you in my head?"

Realization slapped you harder than Will Smith's slap to Chris Rock.

“Wednesday, are you... drunk?”

She squinted at you as if your question was offensive. “I don’t get drunk,” she declared. “I’m above such mortal weaknesses. But you... you make everything so complicated. You and your... your stupid face.”

You grabbed her hand to steady her. Her skin was cool to the touch, but the moment you made contact, she froze, staring down at your hand in hers. “Why does this—this thing always feel weird?” she muttered, her voice lower now. “Your hand… it does this thing... makes me feel… something. I don’t like it. But I do. And that’s the problem.”

You ignored the way your heart raced at her words, focusing instead on what was clearly the problem. You glanced back at the camp, suspicion building. Rick. It had to be him. You reached into Wednesday’s coat, pulling out her knife, not paying attention to the fact that you felt several knives, and marched back toward Rick, who was still swaying around, laughing with no care in the world.

“Rick,” you growled, grabbing him by the collar and pressing the knife to his neck. “What the hell did you do?”

Rick blinked, eyes glazed, a goofy grin on his face. “Whaaat? Nothing! I just made the coffee... best coffee ever, man.”

Your eyes landed on the open box near the coffee pot. You picked it up, sniffing it. This wasn’t sugar. Your heart dropped. “Rick, you idiot,” you groaned. “You spiked the coffee!”

Rick just laughed, completely oblivious to the chaos he’d caused. Meanwhile, you glanced around at the others—dancing, laughing, totally out of their minds. Great. You were now in charge of nine drunk people,

And a high Wednesday Addams.

You sighed heavily. This is going to be a long night.

Next Chapter

[peyton-warren]

Help a girl break her writer's block

I have been fighting bad writer's block for a while (years). And dealing with some mental health issues. So I am running away this weekend to a place with no cell service, just mountains and a river and a tent and my dog, with a brand new notebook and a pretty pen that writes beautifully.

Now here's where you come in....

I need prompts. I need new prompts. I wanna ignore my WIPs and dive into new stuff, drabbles, one shots, what have you to get my writer's block out of the way. I'm hoping by doing this it'll help me get back into the stories I know some of you are patiently waiting for me to finish (Blinded by the Fog, The Art of Resilience, Stick Handling ).

So send me your thoughts, thots and prompts for our favorite muses. You have til Thursday Night (Mountain Time Zone in North America) to make it into my new notebook.

Here's a list of characters I will write for/ want to write for.

Anders Lassen

Aril Levinson

Billy Butcher

Cavillrine 

Curtis Everett

Daryl Dixon

David “Deacon” Kay 

Dean Winchester

Eddie Munson

Evan Marshall

Franklin Clay

Geralt of Rivia

Gus March-Phillipps

Hannibal King 

Jake Jensen

James 'Logan" Howlett/ Wolverine

Lloyd Hansen

Ransom Drysdale

Raymond Smith

Sherlock Holmes (Cavill Version)

Syverson

Wade Wilson/ Deadpool

Walter Marshall

Tagging my tag lists for more traction. Please reblog and share.

General Tag List: @littleone65, @mysweetlittledesire, @jvanilly, @identity2212, @avengersfan25,

@ellethespaceunicorn @foxyjwls007 @gummydummy19 , @cynic-spirit , @rosecentury Anders Lassen Tag List: @wunder-blunder Blinded by the Fog Tag List: @mis-lil-red, @sconnie-doesnt-know, @ronearoundblindly @toooldforobsessions , @hooomansstuff HC Tag LIst: @m07belzen, @used-to-be-bourbonwithice, @hawklin, @geralts-yenn @summersong69, @sillyrabbit81 @mistressmkay Syverson tag list: @mrsevans90 Between a Wolf & Hard Place Tag List: @zealoushound Hidden Sun Tag List: @enchantedbytomandhenry @red42985 @liecastillo @lokislittlewarrior @littleone65

@inlovewithhisblueeyes

[ladykailitha]

Grief (A Friend Indeed) Part 9

Hello, everyone! We are almost to the end. I have all twelve parts completed and will be posting them every Thursday until the story is fully published.

So what's next? With Royal Pain being done as well, I'm going to try and finish Well Met By Moonlight and Find Your Shade By the Moonlight. I will be back working on the soulmate AU Batshit Soulmate and the next book in the Boy with a Bat series called Never Hold Back Your Step for a Moment. I'm also starting that omegaverse story I thought up here.

We meet Steve's family and find out more about why Steve's parents didn't like that side of the family much.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

****

Eddie and Steve wandered around town for a couple of hours, doing a little sightseeing, a little shopping, and a lot just being themselves for a moment or two.

Soon it was getting close to time and they headed to the diner. They pulled up and got a booth.

Eddie and Steve slid into one side and told the waitress that they were waiting for someone and to just grab them a couple of waters.

The waitress nodded and quickly came back with the waters.

They didn’t have to wait long before Percy came through the door, the little bell announcing his arrival.

Steve waved him over and he smiled in return, hurrying over to the table. Once he was settled he told the waitress they were waiting on one more but if they could get a pot of coffee and two cups please. Eddie and Steve both got sodas.

“Who are we waiting for?” Steve asked nervously.

Percy twisted the ring on his ring hand, looking down at the table. “A friend.”

Eddie and Steve shared a glance, wide-eyed.

Eddie wrote something down on a paper napkin and slid it over to Percy.

Percy took the napkin with frown and then he gasped. “Both of you?”

“Both for me,” Steve murmured.

“Just men for me,” Eddie added.

Percy glanced around the diner nervously, but no one was paying any attention to them at all.

“Oh.” He let out a shuddering breath. “Just him.” He pointed to someone walking up to the diner through the window.

He was a tall man, thin. Long black hair, braided to the small of his back. He wore a suit just as nice as Max’s in a beautiful silver color.

He came over when Percy waved at him. He slid next to Percy and looked Steve and Eddie over.

“Who are these boys, Percy?” he asked gravely.

“This my nephew, Steven and his friend...” Percy began.

Eddie stuck out his hand. “Eddie. Eddie Munson. We’re actually in Kentucky because of my own grandma’s funeral. Steve wanted to come visit his grandma’s grave so we took a drive.”

“Where you from?” Percy asked. “I catch a bit of twang to your voice.”

Eddie grinned. “Indiana mostly, but my family’s from Ashland.”

Percy smiled. “Nice town.”

Steve smiled. “It has been so far.”

“This is David Estevez,” Percy said, shyly. “The reason you’re parents haven’t spoken to me in over a decade.”

“Ah,” Steve said. “Yup, Clint Harrington is a lot of things, but tolerant isn’t one of them and of course my mom just went along with it. Even though it’s her money and her family.”

Eddie clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Let’s see, not white, not from here, judging from the accent, and not straight... anything I missed?”

David burst out laughing. “Not the right kind of rich. I’m a self-made man. I worked hard to be where I am today and they hate that. I grew up poor in New Mexico and made my money building computers in my mom’s basement. Now, I’m a multi-millionaire CEO of a major tech company.”

“Dustin would love you,” Steve and Eddie said together.

“Who?” David asked with a chuckle.

“He’s this kid we know,” Eddie explained. “He built a CB tower just so he could talk to his girlfriend in Utah and not rack up his mom’s phone bill.”

“He sounds like fun,” Percy said, rolling his eyes.

David dug his fingers into Percy’s side, causing him to squirm and squeak. “As if you wouldn’t love it if I did that for you.”

Percy blushed. “Maybe.”

He cleared his throat. “How are your parents, Steven? I saw on the news that there was a horrible earthquake last March.”

Steve gulped and Eddie gave his hand a squeeze.

“I really wouldn’t know,” he mumbled, looking down at the table, tucking his hands between legs. “I haven’t seen them in a while.”

David and Percy shared a glance.

“They did come back after the earthquake, right?” Percy pressed. “To see if you were all right if nothing else.”

Steve shook his head. “They didn’t come home when I was caught in the mall fire, why would they come home for something as inconsequential as an earthquake?”

“Mall fire?” Percy asked.

“You remember, darling,” David said, “the one from last year where there were thirty people who died?”

Percy expression cleared as understanding dawned, and then it turned horrified. “They didn’t come home for that?”

Steve shook his head again. “They didn’t come home when I got a concussion so bad I was out for several hours, or anytime I got hurt.” He rubbed a scratch that was in the surface of the table mournfully.

“Mom follows Dad around to make sure he keeps it in his pants. Not that it deters him,” he explained. “I heard him bragging once about how it’s a game to him now to see what he can get away with.”

The waitress appeared with their drinks. “Are you guys ready to order?”

“I’m not hungry,” Steve murmured.

The rest of them ordered, with Eddie ordering a side of cheese fries in addition to his regular side of fries.

Once the waitress had gone, Percy leaned forward. “How long has this been going on?”

“The trips started when I fourteen or so,” he continued. “But the older I got, the longer the trips were, until they just stopped coming home sometime around Christmas of last year.”

“Stevie...” Eddie whined. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Steve shrugged. “I’m an adult. It’s not as though I’m a kid anymore.”

Percy took his hand in his. “No, Steven. That’s not how parenting works. Ever. They’re supposed to care about you enough to at least tell you were they’re going and when they’ll be home.”

Steve looked up and into his uncle’s eyes. “The money changed them. They haven’t been my parents in over a decade. I’ve just been this trophy they pulled out whenever it suited them. Had to be first in everything. I’m surprised they only let me get away three sports instead of making me try everything.”

Eddie looked stricken. “The sports weren’t your idea?”

Steve shook his head. “It was a way that they could legally pawn me off to other adults. Probably the reason for all the piano lessons and the tutoring. How I met Nancy by the way. Gotta have the best grades, until someone puts a plate through my head, then I was just as disappointing as they feared I would be.”

Everyone else at the table let out noises of distress.

“You never should have had to go through that,” David whispered fiercely. “Ever. I’m sorry your parents were awful.”

Steve shrugged. “It wasn’t all bad. I have had adults in my life that cared about me. The Chief of Police always kept an eye on me. Dad stopped hitting me after the second time Hop, Chief Hopper, I mean brought me home after...” he trailed off and looked anywhere but at the people in the booth with him.

He cleared his throat.

Their food arrived and that last sentence was left to dangling in the air like the sword of Damocles over their heads.

Percy watched as Eddie pushed the side of cheese fries between him and Steve, taking a bite periodically, but mostly focusing on the rest of his food.

Steve reached out and took one of the fries, chewing mindlessly. And then another and then another.

David smirked when Percy indicated to what Steve was doing.

Eddie pushed them in front of Steve and he just dug into them like a starving man. He took half of his burger and handed it to Steve, too.

Steve took the half with a blush. “Thanks, Eds,” he said softly.

Eddie just smiled fondly and finished his half of the burger.

David started talking to Percy to help fill the silence and soon the sense of dread dissipated as they fell into easy conversation.

Soon they were done and their plates taken away.

David lifted his chin to indicate to Steve. “Where did you learn that if you got cheese fries Steve would eat?”

Eddie and Steve glanced at each other and Steve blushed.

“Is that what he did?” he muttered.

Eddie laughed. “It’s trick I learned from his best friend. When he’s upset he won’t eat, even when he needs to, but if you put something like cheese fries or onion rings near him, he’ll graze until it kick starts his appetite again.”

Steve looked over at him in shock. “Holy shit, I never realized. Who else does that?”

Eddie smiled at him, that closed mouth, fond smile that he was got around Steve. “Dustin and Max mostly. But El and Will have been known to do it once or twice.”

Steve blinked.

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of people that care about you, Steven,” Percy said with a grin.

Steve nodded, blushing. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

He looked at his watch and sighed. “How’s this,” he said, “why don’t you use that business card I gave you when you get home and David and me will come out to visit you for a few days?”

Steve lit up. “Yeah? You’d do that?”

Eddie grinned. Steve had just gotten his boyhood wish of having an uncle that cared and he could feel the joy and surprise radiating off his friend.

“I’d love to,” Percy said. “I would love to meet your family.”

Steve grinned. “You’ll love them.”

David smiled, too. “I’m sure we will.”

They got up and hugs were passed around everyone and they said their goodbyes.

“Goodbye Uncle Percy,” Steve said, his voice a little rough with emotion. “Bye, Uncle David. I’ll see you both soon.”

David looked happy and shocked at being called Uncle. Jasper’s daughter would never. But here was this nineteen year old boy whom his partner hadn’t spoken to in literal years being more caring and decent after a single afternoon with him, then Beatrice had her whole life.

So he did the only thing he could, he hugged Steve again, more fiercely this time. “Thank you.”

Steve nodded. He wasn’t sure exactly why David was so grateful, but he understood enough.

As Steve and Eddie walked away, Percy and David watched them get into their car.

“How long do you think it’ll take before those boys realize they’re in love with each other?” David asked.

“I don’t know Eddie very well,” Percy said, thoughtfully, “but I imagine they’ll figure it out before we come visit Hawkins.”

David hummed. If he was a betting man, he would have said the end of the week.

But he just had to wait and see.

****

Pt 10|Pt 11|Pt 12

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[zombee]

I feel like the luckiest Our Flag Means Death fan in the world after the season 2 finale. By a series of incredible circumstances - including a significant metatextual realization that came in at the 11th hour - it was close to perfect for me.

This essay has everything. Completely normal behavior over a television series. Steven Universe references. The David Jenkins School of Whatever is Best for the Bit. Humbling catharsis.

First: this piece does not exist with the central thesis of “it’s okay to not like something but that’s not the same thing as it being bad.” I feel like thousands of words have already been written on this since Thursday, so I’m going to try to not get too in depth on that.

Second, cards on the table, because it’s relevant and I don’t want to waste your time if this is going to sour your ability to hear me out: I’m an Izzy Canyon hater. For MANY reasons, but from way before the concept of the Canyon existed, (some) Izzy fans pinged me in the same way as Snape/Kylo Ren fans did, and before May 2022 was over I went from genuinely enjoying Izzy’s character and place in the narrative to hating him because his fans made it impossible for me to enjoy him anymore.

(SOME! of his fans. Please don’t keep making me say this, although I’m not going to talk about the Canyon directly anymore after this. I know there are a ton of normal Izzy Enjoyers and even Canyonites, I am literally friends with many of them, please take this all in the good faith it’s intended and if you’re not One Of The Bad Ones then you’re fine! I very carefully don’t go anti-Izzy on main, and when I stopped enjoying his character, I stopped writing him into fics. I’m not trying to be a dick, I just want to be honest. Anyway.)

The season 2 finale made me weep over Izzy Goddamn hands.

ALL season long, I was disgruntled. All season long. I really, truly, DEEPLY appreciated what they were doing with his character and arc, I thought it was wildly on brand for the themes of community/queerness in the show, I saw the vision, I liked it!!! But. I wanted a fucking apology, yall. I needed three seconds of “sorry I called you a slur, Ed :/” and that would have been enough. But I had to let it go. It was poisoning my enjoyment of the whole season, which I loved with very little exception (not none!) and I just had to let it go. I wasn’t getting an apology. That didn’t negate what they were doing with his character.

Yall. They withheld the apology on purpose.

THIS FUCKING SHOW!!!

Let’s go back a bit. I was at the episode 6 + 7 screening, and the breakup shook me. Probably a LOT more than if I had watched it alone in bed at 3am on my laptop - five days of no sleep after NYCC, lots of emotions, seeing it on a big screen with a hundred other intense fans, etc etc - but I did see other folks reacting in parallel ways to me when the episodes aired to the regular public, so maybe I would have felt the same way. Regardless, I was mad at Stede and to a lesser extent Ed. I NEEDED AN APOLOGY FOR THAT FISH LINE. I needed it! “Whativah” autocorrects to “WHATIVAH” in my phone. I was going through it.

(When I rewatched the episode when it aired it was not nearly as bad as I remember, lol)

So now the episode 8 screeners go out and the reviews drop and I think I catch one half-glimpse of a “What a heartbreaking ending!” kind of snippet, and some of my friends who are spoiler fiends unintentionally drop little hints about similar ideas (devastating/heartbreaking/split the fandom) type shit.

And I was a fucking WRECK! about it.

I do love this whole show with my whole chest. I do!!! But I’m not rotted because this is an excellent television show, I’m rotted because two old men kiss each other! On the MOUTH!!! in an excellent television show. You get it, right? I’ve written 700,000 words across almost 100 fics and 98% of them are dedicated to those two men falling in love in different universes. 

So it just did not even occur to me the “heartbreak/devastation/fandom split” would be about anything but Gentlebeard.

Another piece of this that was fucking me up - David Jenkins and his “satisfactory” ending biz. My brain was reacting like this show was ENDING ending, even if I knew logically! that this is just season 2!!! And I wasn’t ready for that, because what if it wasn’t personally satisfying, and I’m a mess about it? Why was I so worried about not liking it? I’d liked the whole season! Even if they didn’t nail the landing I wasn’t going to stop writing fic or hanging out with my pirate community & friends. 

…is what I kept trying to tell myself, but the way anxiety disorders work is funny like that lol. What if I did stop writing fic and hanging out in pirate spaces? That would hurt much more than a show I like disappointing me. And for anyone who’s having that experience with ofmd s2, I’m so very, very sorry. It sucks and that’s where my epiphany came from on Wednesday before the finale.

Because it has happened to me before.

I flit from hyperfocus to hyperfocus, as ya do when you’re spicy, but the last thing to get its hooks in me PROPERLY like pirates was Steven Universe. And I did NOT like the way the regular season ended!!! (I actually really did like most of Future; that’s not what I mean. I mean season 5). I don’t like how they handled the Diamonds, tldr; I think the scope of their villainy got too out of hand, and I was left grieving the thing that had meant enough to me I ran a fan convention for four years based around it. 

Side note: imagine if I had channeled the hyperfocus of almost a million words of fanfiction into an American OFMD con instead. We could have made magic :( I did consult with Our Con Means Death though so I am at least a teeny tiny bit of that one!

I did not like the way Steven ended… but I do respect the story they were telling and think they told it well.

I’m still sad about it. Steven is still one of my most beloved, it will always be beautiful and great to me, but that experience did and does sully my memories. There is so, so, so, SO much more good than bad from being in that fandom, and I cherish it. And I hope, if you’re having this experience with OFMD right now, that you’ll find similar comfort.

But, like I said at the top, “it’s okay to not like something but that’s not the same thing as it being bad” has been belabored already by people better at writing about it than me. I just had the incredible privilege to remember my brush with lower case T trauma and having that experience in my last REALLY big deal fandom. That’s why I had been so extra anxious about being disappointed. Because it happened to me before. It helped so much to connect those two.

So the finale happens, and it’s actually about twelve hours of me going from “eh, rushed but fun, whole season was great” to “THIS MAYBE IS THE BEST SHOW OF ALL TIME, ACTUALLY!”

BECAUSE THIS SHOW MADE ME CRY OVER IZZY FUCKING HANDS!!!!

They literally told me this was the story they were telling this season. “Men can change” “The end  of piracy” “Ed leaving Blackbeard behind (ish).”

As for me? I didn’t get an apology for the fish. Instead, I got “Sorry I was a dick.” “You weren’t a dick. Life’s a dick.”

Just… fuckity BAM. THREE FUCKING SENTENCES resolving that fight. Saying so much in so little.

In real life, should these two men have an actual conversation about this shit? Sure!!! But that’s not how OFMD tells its stories!

It works in symbolism. It works in vibes. It works in an hour’s worth of content into each half-hour episode, and for how much lamenting I have done about the pacing, I would prefer that 100x to having to stretch it out too much.

I have said since March 24, 2022 that OFMD wields anachronism as a weapon. First and foremost, it’s fucking funny, but in addition to that, it’s stating clearly: “This is a fantasy world. This is not real history. This show is about romance (and so much more than that), and the rest is just VIBES!!!”

Sometimes vibes can be historical accuracy. Sometimes vibes can be true emotional poignancy. Sometimes vibes can be Ed finding his sunken leathers in the sea, changing underwater somehow, and coming out of the ocean like the Birth of Fucking Venus, because water and rebirth and mermaids and shit is all very prominent this season. And ALSO, and this is very important! BECAUSE IT LOOKS FUCKING COOL!

I don’t want to do much real Izzy meta here. It’s been said by others, and better than me. But it was telegraphed and it was symbolic – he was the paragon of Traditional Piracy in season 1, for goodness’ sake, and Traditional Piracy is Toxic Masculinity, and he was a part of Blackbeard and Ed had to leave Blackbeard behind (yknow, ish), and he got this ABSOLUTLEY FUCKING LOVELY! storyline about appreciating what a (queer) community can do, and god fucking shit fucking dammit… most of all, best of all (for me), was Buttons landing on Izzy’s grave at the end. Men can change. And Izzy DID!!! He did it for Ed. For love. For community. I am puzzled by “it’s fucked up to use Izzy to further Ed’s storyline” because… this was Ed’s season, in the way that season 1 was Stede’s. And Ed cannot be removed from piracy as a whole (neither can Stede!) so to have this old, set in his ways, coded-queerphobic character blossom to the point he can give this gift to Ed and to piracy… idk man. I just find it so fucking beautiful.

It is okay not to like what they did. It’s okay!!! It’s okay, and it’s okay to mourn, and while it’s not okay to do [insert vile behavior here], it’s okay to carefully examine what you think is “bad writing” vs “what you would have preferred to happen” and give good-faith, textually-based criticism on that.

But I want to remind you over and over and over again, this show works on vibes. It tells its stories leaving many, many, many gaps. There are many things I would have liked to see, and y’know what? I would have told the Izzy story differently. I would have personally done it differently. But it’s not my show! It’s not my show, and I am humbled and delighted to remember that, and to appreciate Our Flag Means Death for what it is and not what it isn’t.

Other words have been written better than I could about the 18 months between seasons 1 and 2 and what that does to us as rabid fans with expectations of how things will go. Millions and millions and millions of words have been written about OFMD, fictional and non, and that is going to color our expectations and experience. We had built it up SO MUCH in our minds and along the way I think some of us forgot (INCLUDING ME!!!) that it is first and foremost about Vibes.

The vibes of Izzy’s death are about rebirth and forgiveness and leaving traditional piracy behind. And he got to die in Ed’s arms, knowing (HAPPILY!) that he had been wrong, and giving Ed the gift of letting him know he is loved, and being a part of something. We had a funeral but we also had a wedding. The only constant is change. Men, piracy, Blackbeard; it all changes. And Izzy found peace in that.

Before my last point, I want to @ myself on things I felt versus realizing in the end it is (I will say it until I’m blue in the face) about vibes.

· I was convinced they left Buttons’ transformation ambiguous because they wanted to leave room for it not having been real. NO!!! It is real, until they decided it isn’t. Magic in the OFMD universe? Fucking why not!!! IT’S SYMBOLIC!!! IT’S IMPORTANT TO ED’S STORYLINE AND THE CENTRAL THESES OF THE SHOW!

· I was unhappy, and still am a little, about the Polycule Situation, but now that I realize Oluwande is Zheng’s Stede… I am less so. The Zheng : Auntie :: Ed : Izzy vibes, btw? Fuckin immaculate.

·        Obviously they touched on Stede/Ed’s “killing people trauma” but I’d reallyyyy like Stede to address it, and even though I think Ed’s is left on a very satisfying note, I’d like him to dip a bit more into it as well. But if they don’t, oh well! It’s not like they ignored it, they just didn’t have a Deep Dive like I Wanted Them To!

· They didn’t deal with Ed throwing Stede’s shit away. They just ignored it! Stede started to collect new trinkets, and I believe that was as much about giving the audience back the old feeling of the Revenge as it was anything important (not to say it wasn’t also important thematically!!!). Just like Ed going back to his leathers is both Extremely Important thematically and about putting Taika back in the leathers because that’s what Blackbeard should be wearing for the epic final scenes for the sake of visually keeping the show consistent. That’s Blackbeard’s uniform.

· Stede’s frilly little outfits my beloved. God I hope they give him back some of his frippery in season 3. I think they will re: cursed suit BUT his journey this season was about something else, so!

· Ed’s stupid little non-profit non-apology, oh my god. It was so funny. And there is a transition from eps 5 to 6 where Ed is back in his leathers and the crew is more comfortable around him. They didn’t have to have him do a Real Apology, it’s implied it was all settled. What was the timeline? A day? DOESN’T MATTER, BABY, VIBES!!!

· Lots more, I’m sure, but now that I’ve tried to let it all go, I’m remembering less of what I wanted and appreciating what I got!

And, last point here, I think it is also very very very important to remember that a lot of people are normal about this show. In fact, WAY more people are normal about this show than aren’t. And that is EXTREMELY! IMPORTANT!!! because otherwise it wouldn’t be profitable and we all know what would happen then. We are the core of it, to be sure. Without word of mouth that stems from our intensity, this show would not be NEARLY as successful as it is. I truly, truly believe that.

But.

Do normies need deeply emotional discussions dissecting the central relationships? No. What normies need is Ed and Stede running dramatically toward each other on the beach and kissing. And I am happy, so fucking happy, to realize that’s what I need too. I’ve got fanworks for the rest.

I love this fucking show and this fucking fandom and its fucking creators so much. Fuck.

[old-type-40]

"She's a scientist on Starbase One. I tend not to stay in the same place for very long, which is... a growing problem, because Carol is... pregnant."

I had noticed back when the episode aired on Thursday that this comment from Kirk about his on again/off again but currently on again relationship with Carol Marcus caused confusion for some in the Trek fandom. They thought from the events in TWOK that Kirk didn't know he had a son.

But the dialogue from a couple of scenes indicates he did know that David was his son but he hasn't seen him since he was a child because Carol didn't want him to be a part of their lives. And Carol never told David who his father was.

Right after Kirk, McCoy, and Saavik beam into the cavern on the Regula asteroid, David attacks Kirk with a knife and Kirk disarms him.

Kirk: Where's Doctor Marcus? David: I'm Doctor Marcus! Carol (rushing out): Jim! Kirk: Is that David?

And later when Jim and Carol have time alone together -

Kirk: I did what you wanted. ...I stayed away. ...Why didn't you tell him? Carol: How can you ask me that? Were we together? Were we going to be? You had your world and I had mine. And I wanted him in mine, not chasing through the universe with his father. ... Actually, he's a lot like you. In many ways. Please tell me what you're feeling. Kirk: There's a man out there I haven't seen in fifteen years who's trying to kill me. You show me a son that'd be happy to help him. My son. ...My life that could have been, ...and wasn't. And what am I feeling? ...Old. ...Worn out.

So Kirk's comment about Carol are consistent with canon. And speaking of consistency with canon, did you catch Spock mentioning that there are 200 crew members on the Enterprise? This matches what Pike said in The Cage/The Menagerie when he said he was tired of being responsible for 203 lives. So by the time of TOS, they more than doubled the size of the crew.

[literatemisfit]

Thoughts on my second viewing of Macbeth at the Harold Pinter Theatre, Thursday October 3, 2024

For posterity.

(SPOILERS ON EVERYTHING)

Okay I cannot describe to you how much I absolutely ADORE the folk dancing scene. So playful, so rugged:

It begins with the cast (sans Macbeth) spinning in two circles hand in hand and laughing, then Macbeth joins to stand in the centre (back) opposite Lady Macbeth (front), they join in the middle and put each others arms around their shoulders, hands held on shoulders, and then they hop and march, turn, hop and march, turn, then all chaos breaks out (my favourite part of the entire play maybe???) and Macbeth and the others all shout and howl and whoop as they spin fast fast arm in arm in circles, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth meeting in the centre to spin, then returning to their respective circles to spin fast fast, then returning again and again and then:

Bam. Everyone freezes as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stare each other down in the centre, lights whitish blue on them as they share in their plot secretly, everyone else slow-motion clapping as they stand chest to chest and then:

Zzzzip. Everything speeds back up to normal time and they spin and howl and whoop as if nothing happened, showing that the freeze frame was a mental picture, the exact thoughts they are having as they are outwardly acting happy and normal.

David's WOO! with finger pointing up as he shouts red-faced and rough and aggressive is maybe one of my favourite things he's ever portrayed. I'm just so happy to watch them play within the play.

Tonight was different from opening night. The actors played more with the rhythm, speaking more slowly, pausing in different places and emphasizing different parts of the speeches. It was completely fascinating to watch, having just seen it done differently. And David's performance was so much more emotional than opening night, I think. The slanted eyebrows and big sad eyes were more prominent, his voice cracked more, his eyes were maybe even more teary, his speeches turned to whines and wails in his grief.

The boy was played by a different actor. Both of them are good, though I found the first one to be more energetic and wild like the cast. This time around, the entire cast seemed a little slower with pacing, less "On It", which maybe was because I had already seen it and knew what to expect, or maybe in line with them speaking slower, the rhythm of movement maybe also changed.

Because the rhythm of the words was slower and more experimental, it felt like the emotion was more palpable and the words felt more conversational and real, coming from humans rather than a slightly more formulaic rhythm of lines being said as they're written. Not that it was ever that stiff or strict, but there definitely seemed to be a loosening of the rhythm and there was freedom there to play with it and feel it out.

The second witches scene. Fuck. I completely forgot that they grab him by the hair and drag him down (how could I forget that???) before they make him convulse and whimper and moan and shake and tremble, then they drag him to the other side of the stage, feet dragging on the ground, before they surround him and one witch slowly slowly approaches his chest and YANKS outwards making him cry out and bringing him back to consciousness.

David also had shaking hands during at least one scene where Macbeth was frightened and tense, which I thought was a great acting choice: showing some weakness, some fear, some un-put-together-ness as he's trying to prove himself to be manly and brave and unbeatable.

I also think that maybe - just maybe - David made a mistake tonight. After he washes off the blood from his face and hands (opening scene) after returning from war, he puts all the rags back in the bowl before handing it all over to Ross who brings it off stage. Well, tonight David had one of the rags wrapped around one hand for the entire following scene and I didn't notice him wrapping it but I think he may have left it behind? It added nothing to the scene, just wrapped it around his hand as he bowed to the King, stood to attention with the others, and was ushered offstage to warn his wife of the incoming guests.

I felt the Banquo's Ghost breakdown scene was even more pathetic and emotional, his legs getting caught under him as he writhed and kicked to run away from the imagined spectre, ending the scene a bit crooked and not looking so comfortable.

The self-harm scene. I don't know how I forgot about it but gosh it's good. He's so desperate, so guilt-ridden, so willing to accept pain and punishment for the crime he committed. Same as the emotional, distraught lilts in his voice during this speech, so moving:

No son of mine succeeding. If ‘t be so,

For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind;

For them the gracious Duncan have I murder’d;

The word "murdered" was almost cracked, almost whispered, for how much shame and guilt he displayed tonight. It really hit me. Similarly when he talked of Duncan sleeping peacefully when he never would "Macbeth shall sleep no more" he whines desperately.

The Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech: I thought he might actually cry. Then at the end, bitter shame and anger on the words "signifying nothing" almost spat out in a growl with how much he resents the meaninglessness of his actions and of his own existence.

This time around, it was delightful to hear the audience gasp when Macbeth snaps the young boy's neck, "you were born of woman" /snap/. So badass.

The slap slap slaps on Macduff to taunt him in the last scene. Macbeth's final moment of fear "I'll not fight with thee" then Macduff calls him a coward and he squares his shoulders and goes on to fight, and win, and taunt, and die.

Still no blood on the stage during his death. I wonder if they plan to bring that back? Also still no lifting-david-by-the-witches which I assume they've just removed from the scene although I do wish I had seen it.

It was so fascinating to watch the same play, only two days apart, and to realize how they were both exactly the same and surprisingly different. Live theatre is alive, and it moves and changes and breathes life and lives on, to be repeated and yet reinvented night after night for audiences who (most likely) would never know it.

David was right, theatre is alive, it's there and then it's gone. Just as we cease to exist, so does a performance the moment it comes to an end, never again to be repeated exactly, only the same but somehow entirely different.

[scotianostra]

It was a sad day for the people of Buckie when the Fishing boat Carinthia went missing with the loss of six men. The following report was read out in Parliament on the 29th of June 1979….

“Carinthia” sailed from Buckie at about midnight on 24–25 June bound for the fishing grounds off Noup Head, north-west of Orkney, with a crew of six on board.

At 1900 hours on Wednesday 27 June a lifebuoy marked “Carinthia” was found on the west side of Rousay, Orkney. This caused inquiries to be made by the coastguard to try to establish the ship’s whereabouts.

It was established that the vessel’s last known contact had been at 0900 hours on Tuesday 26 June, when “Carinthia” radioed the fishing vessel “Crimmond” that she was making for the Minches. Her position at this time was about 27 miles north-west of the mainland of the Orkneys. There was a north-westerly wind of force 8 at this time. The fishing vessel “Crimmond” was unable to regain radio contact with “Carinthia” an hour or two later.

Following the finding of the lifebuoy, coastguard and coastal radio stations in Scotland immediately broadcast an alert, and ships in the area started searching. The Kirkwall and Stromness life-boats 778 were launched, and an RAF Nimrod commenced searching at first light on Thursday 28 June in the Wick-Orkney-Shetlands area. The search area covered approximately 2,500 square miles, and it was hampered by low cloud in the initial stages. I regret to have to inform the House that, following a thorough search of the area, the search and rescue operation has been abandoned and the “Carinthia” must be presumed lost. “

There is very little online about this tragedy the men who perished were Eddy Lawson 30 , James Lobban 52 , Murray ‘Partan’ Lobban 21 , David Flett 24 , Richard Mair 41 & Charles Cargill 28 . five of whom came from Buckie and one from nearby Findochty, the ship nor the bodies were never recovered.

Spare a thought for the friends and family of the crew who lost their loved ones.