#Eternal Flame: A Maria Hill

[untoldreader]

Forever Bound

Natasha Romanoff x Reader x Maria Hill

Summary

In the final chapter, Maria, Natasha, and Y/N embrace their love fully, embracing a future filled with hope and possibility. They realize that their love is timeless, an eternal flame that will guide them through whatever challenges lie ahead

Warnings

none?

Tag list

@nayarianna1302 @alexawynters @tigerlillyruiz

Chapter 6

In the depths of their love's resilience, Maria, Natasha, and Y/N found themselves on a journey that would forever intertwine their lives. Their connection had grown from a hidden flame to an unyielding fire, and they were ready to embrace a future where their love would know no bounds.

As they embarked on this new chapter, they faced moments of profound joy and profound sorrow. Life's challenges continued to test their resolve, but they stood united, their love serving as an unbreakable foundation. They celebrated each other's triumphs, finding solace and strength in the knowledge that they were not alone in their struggles.

Their personal lives flourished alongside their professional endeavors. Maria, Natasha, and Y/N created a home filled with love, trust, and understanding. They nurtured their individual passions and supported each other's dreams, knowing that their shared love was the fuel that allowed them to reach new heights.

Together, they explored the world and embraced the beauty of life's simple pleasures. They reveled in stolen moments of serenity—a sunrise shared, a quiet evening by the fireplace—cherishing the precious gift of time spent together. Their love had become an anchor, grounding them amidst the chaos of the world.

As their relationship deepened, they began to envision a future where their love would endure. They dreamed of building a life filled with love, laughter, and shared experiences. They knew that the road ahead would still be filled with challenges, but their unwavering commitment to one another gave them the strength to face whatever came their way.

In this chapter, they also faced the inevitable passage of time. They witnessed the changing world around them, bidding farewell to loved ones who had played significant roles in their lives. They learned the bittersweet lesson that life was fleeting and that every moment spent together was a treasure to be cherished.

Through it all, their love remained constant. It was a love that had weathered storms, conquered doubts, and defied expectations. It had grown from a seed of secrecy into a love that was unafraid to shine brightly in the world.

========================

Chapter 6 ended with Maria, Natasha, and Y/N standing together, forever bound by the unbreakable thread of their love. They knew that their journey was not without its challenges, but they faced them with courage, knowing that their love would guide them through the darkest of times.

They embraced the unknown future, hand in hand, hearts intertwined. Their love had become a story of resilience, strength, and unwavering commitment. And as they walked forward into the horizon, they did so with the knowledge that their love would endure, forever binding them together in a tapestry of love that transcended time and space.

The End :)

[roger-that-cap]

right where you left me

summary: this is the fourth prompt of @caplanbuckybarnes ‘s summary challenge! this idea kind of went a little crazy on my part, but the prompt is: remember when you said you’d marry me? today’s our wedding day and you’re not here to see it. 

warnings: y’all, i really said that i didn’t write angst and then made cardigan, and then this after one serious talk with @teenwonder - yeah, so this is angst? i wrote this while extremely vulnerable so this is very messy- deepest apologies

note: yes, the title is a taylor swift song. it is a must listen if you haven’t heard it, please!

word count: this is literally a baby, the shortest thing i’ve ever written- 1.4k

also guys, i got to 300 followers sometime last night- thank you!! i’m so glad that other people are enjoying my stuff, it’s such a great feeling.

If you had known that one person wasn’t coming back after retrieving the soul stone, you would have gone with Natasha instead of letting Clint go, and you would have forced her to let it be you. At least, that was your main thought for weeks and weeks, until the hole in your heart grew bigger and the rock on your finger grew almost too heavy to carry. Then, after your anger at her for leaving you in the dark and alone faded, you realized that it was just sadness. Nothing but. And for a while, it seemed to be going on a steady incline, and nothing was even close to getting better. 

You woke up every morning in emotional pain. Every morning, the right side of the bed was cold. Every morning, there was a lack of eyes on your face, and of feather light touches going down your back. There were no whispered Russian words or sweet nothings spoken in English. It was just you and no one else, and you could have never imagined that peace and quiet could have ever been so destructive. You would never be over the fact that it seemed like everyone had gotten their loved ones back, clicked right back into place like they never left to begin with, but you were stuck. Stuck in time, stuck in emotions, stuck with your body still aging but your heart never moving on. You were on a spinning platform, watching everyone grow old and renewing old vows and having kids, and you couldn’t get off. You would be there for the rest of your life, right where she left you. And then, that was when you took your original thought back. 

You would have never been able to leave her in the amount of sadness that she left you. 

You knew that she was always self-sacrificing, no matter how much she liked to pretend that she wasn’t the sort of team player that the world needed. It showed in the way she spoke about certain topics, the way she always secretly cared for the underdog, how she always stood up for recruits trying to prove themselves,  and even how she always watched out for the little guy and stuck her neck out for the people she knew needed a little more help than others. Hell, she met you by sticking her neck out for a stranger. You were fighting a man inches taller than you who had a knife swinging at you so wildly that you were sure that he was actually going to get you with his manic jabs. She came flying in out of nowhere without a sound like some sort of battle angel, and before you even realized who she was, she stepped in, took a shallow stab for you, and then dropped him so quickly that you were scared he was dead. 

  She sported that scar for the rest of her life, and at first, it brought shame to you. It made you feel guilty; knowing that your weakness caused another person to wear a scar on their body. Especially her and her body, because she was flawless. Because as hard as she seemed, she was beautiful inside and out, and she didn’t deserve to have any scar of any kind. As your love grew on, things changed, and that godforsaken scar became the flame to your hovering moth. Your fingers always managed to find it, even over her civilian clothes or tactical suit, and your lips always brushed over it when the lights were out and the air was thin between the two of you, when all there was was you and her and the candles that burned on the other side of the room. 

Now, you couldn’t imagine not wanting to see that scar. All you wanted was to trace it with your fingers even though you knew every single puckered spot that hadn’t healed correctly, and every curve of the scar itself. You couldn’t think of a more peaceful scene than placing light kisses on it and then looking her in the eyes, watching her smile that pretty little smile she did every time, the one that said that she would jump in front of the knife a thousand times over again. 

 So, yeah, you knew that she was self sacrificing. But you would have never thought that she would leave you in shambles. And shambles was what you were in as you sat in the apartment, the one that you used to share that you had nearly cleared out with the help of a pitying Sam and Maria Hill, in your beautiful white gown that you were so certain matched the one that Natasha had picked for herself. 

You still hadn’t seen it. 

  You were in the entire outfit. Your shoes were strapped on lazily, your veil was pushed back and crinkled, your mascara was running, but your dress was perfect. Your dress was frozen in time, stuck in a day that it had never even seen play out. Your sobs echoed louder than any laughter in the apartment had now that all the picture frames and decor had been torn down. 

  She was supposed to marry you. That was the promise that the both of you made when she got on one knee after the best day at Coney Island, surprising you only because you had a black box in your pocket, too. You were supposed to marry Natasha Romanoff, and your wedding day was here, knocking loud and proud, standing on your doorstep. It was the day, the one that was staring at you in the form of the glaring pink sharpie that you two had used to circle the day on the calendar. The calendar was the only thing still up in your apartment, as if you could ever forget the date. 

Suddenly, the dress that fit you perfectly began to feel tight. The necklace that you picked because it was elegant and light felt heavy around your neck, like a collar of sadness preparing to choke you at any second. You stood up, ready to take it all off and throw your dress and all of it off of the top of Stark fucking Tower, but then the heels that were your perfect height felt too tall. You collapsed back onto the couch, bawling your eyes out and whispering her name like a prayer over and over again, like it would bring her back to you, standing in a radiant white dresses that you could have only dreamed of. You could imagine it, her staring down at you with the soft smile she reserved for you that you missed so much, hand reaching out for yours, and you would have stretched to the point of desperation just to touch her. The door to your apartment had been unlocked and there was a quiet shuffling that signaled people coming in, but you didn’t care. 

You didn’t care that they were her friends, or yours. You didn’t care that they had somehow gotten a key to your apartment, or that they looked almost as heartbroken as you did, sitting on the floor of the apartment that used to be shared, and so full of life and love. You didn’t care that you could hardly breathe through the pain or through your chest rattling sobs, nor did you care that someone had their arms wrapped around you and was trying to break through your eternal wall of grief. 

You and your dress were stuck in time. Stuck in a place where nothing bad ever happened to you or Natasha, in a timeline where you two managed to get married. In your mind, you were looking at Natasha while you threw your bouquet at your small group of friends, wide smiles on the both of your faces as you heard their playful squeals. In reality, you were sobbing on your floor, dust collecting on you and your true emotions as pages of reality and dream world stuck to each other. She left you, and she left you with no choice but to stay in a moment that would never happen forever. You flinched when you felt the arm squeeze you gently, forcing you to look at who was truly there in the flesh in front of you. It wasn’t her. 

  But it was your wedding day. And she was never going to be there to see it. 

****

i got sad and selfishly decided to make it other people’s problems- this is the result

[teabooksandsweets]

A selection of first and last sentences of Elizabeth Goudge novels

Linnets and Valerians

First: Robert gave the storeroom door a resounding kick, merely for his own satisfaction for he knew that only the kick of a giant would have made any impression on its strong oak panels, and sat down cross-legged on the floor to consider the situation.

Last: Uncle Ambrose also visited him and the greatest pride and joy of his old age was to walk down the Oxford High Street arm in arm with his brilliant nephew, with Hector, who appeared to be gifted with eternal life, sitting proud and erect upon his shoulder.

The Dean’s Watch

First: The candle flame burned behind the glass globe of water, its light flooding over Isaac Peabody’s hands as he sat at work on a high stool before his littered worktable.

Last: Isaac walked out into the sunshine and said to himself, “I shall make the celestial clock again. I shall make it for Mrs. Ayscough.”

The Rosemary Tree

First: Harriet at her window watched the gulls with delight.

Last: “Then it’s an odd thing you thought yourself alone,” said Harriet.

Green Dolphin Country

First: Sophie Le Patourel was reading aloud to her two daughters from the Book of Ruth, as they lay upon their backboards digesting their dinners and improving their deportment.

Last: “Oh, my!” ejaculated Old Nick in mocking tones. And then, very doubtfully indeed, “Oh, my?”

The Bird in the Tree (The Eliots of Damerosehay, no. 1)

First: Visitors to Damerosehay, had they but known it, could have told just how much the children liked them by the particular spot at which they were met upon arrival.

Last: “It’s true,” he thought. “The spirit of man has wings.”

The Herb of Grace (The Eliots of Damerosehay, no. 2)

First: The sun shining through the uncurtained east window woke Sally to a new day.

Last: But the sap rose from inexhaustible depths, and the spring would come again.

The Heart of the Family (The Eliots of Damerosehay, no. 3)

First: Meg, wearing mackintosh boots and a red mackintosh, and with a red sou’wester tied beneath her chin, splashed down the drive, and under the dripping oak-trees, in a state of happiness deeper and more perfect than any other she was likely to know while she lived in this world.

Last: The old house seemed to hold them both, and to hold, too, a welling up of freshness, as though it renewed its youth in the youth of this marvelous child.

Gentian Hill

First: On a clear August evening, borne upon the light breath of a fair wind, the fleet was entering Torbay.

Last: It was eight o’clock, and in a world at peace, they had come home.

Towers in the Mist

First: The first gray of dawn stole mysteriously into a dark world, so gradually that it did not seem as though day banished night, it seemed rather that night itself was slowly transfigured into something fresh and new.

Last: “God bless you and increase your sons in number, holiness and virtue. Farewell, Oxford, Farewell. Farewell.”

The Little White Horse

First: The carriage gave another lurch, and Maria Merryweather, Miss Heliotrope, and Wiggins once more fell into each other’s arms, sighed, gasped, righted themselves, and fixed their attention upon those objects which were for each of them at this trying moment the source of courage and strength.

Last: He would come towards her and she would run towards him, and he would carry her upon his back away and away, she did not quite know where, but to a good place, a place where she wanted to be.

A City of Bells (Torminster, no. 1)

First: Jocelyn Irvin, sitting in a corner seat in a third-class railway-carriage and watching the green and gold of England in the spring slip past the windows, meditated gloomily upon Life with a capital L.

Last: He was a magic man, a fairy-tale man, and it seemed to her quite natural that he should have got lost, for fairy-tale people are always easily mislaid, but warm inside her was the certainty that now at last he was found for good.

Henrietta’s House (Torminster, no. 2)

First: Once upon a time there was a railway station waiting for a train.

Last: So this is the end of the story of Henrietta’s house, and even though it is not strictly speaking a fairy tale – because except for the possible exception of the disappearance of the motor car nothing out of the ordinary happened on Hugh Anthony’s birthday – it can be turned into one by saying that everybody lived happily ever after.

Sister of the Angels (Torminster, no. 3)

First: The moment she woke up Henrietta was conscious that she was happy, unusually, deliciously happy.

Last: Nine o’clock struck and, as always at the conclusion of the carol service, the Christmas bells began to ring.

[getluciferoutofthecage]

Do you not understand the concept of alternate universe?

hi there! i assume this is regarding this post. of course i do! the thing is, the What If...? series tells us that ONE thing is different, and from that point forward many things change (i just don't think they all make as much sense)

now before you read this I'd like to say sorry, you kinda tapped my hyper fixation with that ask uwu

What If...? 1x07; What If... Thor Were an Only Child?

Odin enters his Odinsleep, Jane and Darcy are where they were in the first Thor movie, so we assume this all takes place in 2011.

Jane Foster tries to contact the director of S.H.I.E.L.D (in the movie Jane doesn't even know what S.H.I.E.L.D. is until they take all her research, which does not happen here.)

Where is Erik Selvig? (In the movie Jane called Erik to come because she was 'absolutely sure something is going on', just like she was in this episode.)

Loki as a baby being held by Laufey is the size of a Frost Giant baby, in the drawing we see at the start of the episode. (In the movie, Odin took Loki because he was way too small for a Frost Giant offspring, and was left alone to die. Now this (Loki being a regular sized Frost Giant baby,) could be the thing that changes the timeline, and Odin giving Loki back to Laufey is presumably the Nexus event that makes this branch timeline into its own reality, aka alternate universe.)

Odin discovers baby Loki after he and his Asgardian troops stopped the 965 A.D. invasion of Tonsberg, Norway by the Frost Giants. (In the movie once the Frost Giants were forced back to Jotunheim, Odin took their power source, the Casket of Ancient Winters, and baby Loki to Asgard.)

The Grandmaster is on earth for a party, which is, of course his thing, but I don't think he left Sakaar often, but as it is a party, I get it.

Howard the Duck is partying with them but he's supposed to be locked up in a glass box with the Collector on Knowhere.

Korg and Meek are here, they could have come with the Grandmaster but I don't think he'd bring his fighters (who fight against their will) to a party on another planet. Could be that Korg and Meek were not yet found by the Grandmaster and they came with someone else, though.

Valkyrie is at the party even though in Thor: Ragnarok she hadn't been to Asgard or spoken to another Asgardian since she fought Hela, which was before Thor was even born, and she wanted nothing to do with Asgardians then, so why would she join the Grandmaster at this party hosted by Asgardians?

Nebula has her orange/gold headpieces she got after Infinity War, so after the snap that didn't take place here. (I think Tony made them for her after Nebula saved him on Titan.)

Drax is here even though he was on a rampage after Ronan killed his family and after that he was imprisoned by the Nova Corps in the Kyln. Now this timeline could have been affected by the Party Prince, but I don't think so.

Rocket is here without Groot, still plausible, but I thought Rocket & Groot knew each other already by that point.

Like I said in my previous post, Fury never told anybody about the pager Captain Marvel gave him, so how does Maria Hill know about it and Carol? If anyone would know about it it would be Coulson in my opinion. (In Infinity War, 7 years after this, Maria has no idea what that thing is or what it does. Fury would have had to tell her right before he got knocked out by Korg, but knowing Fury that seems unlikely.)

Some of the Sovereign are here, still plausible but I don't think they'd be into partying with 'inferior beings'.

Skrulls are partying like they aren't being hunted to extinction by the Kree, which okay sure who wouldn't feel safe around Thor. But you'd think Carol would at least talk to one of them?

Surtur is on Earth chatting up and melting Lady Liberty, but Surtur was confined to Muspelheim when Odin took his power source, the Eternal Flame!!! (I get it though, it was really funny! But it messes with canon so much, that why-just why-.)

Yondu and the Ravagers are here too, which, yeah, why not.

But there is no way to explain what Mantis is doing here. She serves Ego, Peter's father on his planet and she never leaves Ego's side.

The most unrealistic part of all of this is that there was no Tony Stark at the biggest party on Earth, in 2011, years after becoming Iron Man too, so he'd have flown there, right?

Uatu didn't know Ultron was coming, so this means this will be an important plot point in future episodes. Ultron in the Vision's body shows up, with all six infinity stones. He could be from the future in this universe or, he's from another universe and found a way to travel between them and that's why Uatu, the omniscient, was surprised. But in the Loki show it was stated that infinity stones only work in their own universe so I'm not sure about that.

[wished-bone]

astrological asteroids

Asteroids seem to symbolize different facets of the feminine and represent a fresh way of regarding the feminine principle in astrology, going beyond the relatively simple categories of wife and mother, as represented by Venus and the Moon. 

Juno (partnership): The divine consort, or the principle of relatedness. Juno, the wife or rather paredra (sacred sexual partner) of Jupiter, Lord of the Gods, was the protectress of women in Roman times. Although she came to be identified with the Greek Hera, her Roman, Etruscan and Sabine origins show her also as a warrior goddess. Astrologically, she governs wifely relationships, and the role of woman as covenanter and partner. In this way she governs such things as contracts and binding agreements, through her association with marriage. According to Graves and others, Juno's ancient rule was overthrown by the victory of the Indo-European sky father Jupiter, which introduced the custom of marriage and a patriarchal social system.

Juno, worshipped from prehistoric times by the ancient Romans, had several major temples devoted to her in the Eternal City. The first of each month, the kalends, was her sacred day, with a special festivity on February 1, as Juno Sospita (Juno, the Saviour). Her birthday was celebrated on June 1, the kalends of June. She was worshipped under many names serving different functions, for example:

Juno Regina: Juno the Queen, a member of the Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva), with a temple on the Aventine Hill.

Juno Moneta: Juno, the Warner, or Exhorter. The sacred geese of Juno warned the Romans when the Gauls tried to take the Capitolium in 390 BCE. The temple of Juno Moneta stood on the Arx Capitolina, one hump of the Capitoline Hill, where the church of S. Maria Aracoeli ("Altar of Heaven") and the Vittoriano now stand. A mint later set in the temple has given us the word moneta, money, coin, the extension of governmental power.

The third of the asteroids to be discovered (September 1, 1804, by Karl L. Harding), Juno can be fierce, as befits a war goddess (!) and is bound by a sense of duty and social obligation. Her dark side also rules such things as divorce, and separation, infidelity and open conflict between partners. In the natal chart, Juno indicates the true color of the marital partner that we need—and will get. Astrologically Juno describes the ways in which we face the issues of compatibility, receptivity to others, mutual sharing, trust, jealousy, possessiveness and power struggles. 

Vesta (self-sufficiency): The eternal flame, which burns forever in the hearth. Vesta was the goddess of the living flame, the virgin goddess of home and hearth. Sister to Jupiter, Neptune, Ceres, and Juno, as a goddess of fire she was esteemed as a virgin, for as Ovid remarks, "she sends forth no seed, nor receives it, and loves the attendants of virginity". He means that the flame purifies all and is itself pure, the vivifying soul that ensouls matter with a spark of divine spirit. 

She was considered the calm, central foundation of the Earth, the centre of our visible universe. Her retinue were known as the Vestal Virgins, an ancient, actually prehistoric, sacred order originally filled only by the daughters of the ruling class. In primitive times, the daughters (especially the eldest) were given charge of the precious fire, the mother as head of the household being generally occupied with other tasks.

As the principle of focus and commitment, Vesta was one of the most revered of the goddesses. Her name means "the essence", "the fire", the true nature of things. Although she is little-known today, in ancient times she was widely worshipped as the central goddess in the Roman pantheon—the burning energy at the heart of life, home and society. Her domed, circular temple was set in the centre of Rome and her call to purification is still the rallying cry of truth. It shows us where we can be most dedicated, focusing our energies to achieve the best outcomes.

Vesta was the fourth asteroid to be discovered (by Heinrich Olbers, March 29, 1807, in the constellation Virgo). Under favourable conditions, Vesta, the brightest of the asteroids, can actually be seen with the naked eye. NASA in 2007 sent a spacecraft ("Dawn") on a five billion kilometre journey to investigate Vesta and her sister Ceres; this craft moved to contact Ceres in February 2015. 

It is interesting that due to a proposed collision with another asteroid long ago, a massive chunk of Vesta was splintered off and shattered into many smaller pieces—a number of which have since fallen to Earth as meteorites. Astrologically Vesta describes the ways in which we face the issues of personal integration, work, devotion, commitment, sacrifice, alienation from personal relationships, and a range of sexual complexes based on denial and fear of intimacy. (133)

Eros 433 (passion): Eros is the god of love and erotic desire, a son of Aphrodite by war god Ares, from whom he derives his bow and arrows, piercing both gods and mortals with divine passion. In mythology, Eros was the god of sexual love and desire. He was considered irresistible. In Roman mythology, Eros was known as Cupid. In Greek art Eros was depicted as a youth, slight but beautiful, often with eyes covered to symbolize the blindness of love. Winged to ensure a swift response, he is one of the erotes, minor gods of Aphrodite’s retinue, along with Anteros (“Love Returned”), Himeros (“Impetuous Love”) and Pothos (“Desire or Longing”). 

Eros’ most well-known story involves his union with Psyche (see Psyche for details). Eros overpowers the mind with love and sex. In astrology, Eros represents sexual objectification, passion and desire, and creativity. Note that Eros is not always sexual, per se, as Eros represents creative passion as well. In the chart, it can point to areas into which we pour a lot of passion.

[anika-ann]

Heart Too Cold, but Friends of Gold - Pt.9

The Flares

Pairing: Steve Rogers x reader     Word count: 3090

Summary: Avenger!reader AU. Part 2 of Melting Hearts series. Part 1 HERE.

In which Steve has too many redheads in his life and they are a lot to handle. (Dealing with A:AOU, pt.2)

Warnings: swearing, light angst,... eh

Story Masterlist

────── ·❆· ──────

But did you see the flares in the sky? Were you blinded by the light? Did you feel the smoke in your eyes? Did you, did you? Did you see the sparks filled with hope? You are not alone 'Cause someone's out there, sending out flares

(The Script – Flares)

 The hallucination – the vision, perhaps – was a true eye-opened. Not because it was any news that Steve was the one to blame for your departure, no, but because actually seeing possibly a very true picture of what was happening to you was something that felt like a bullet to his brain. It was maddening and it should have made him spring into further action; yet, Steve couldn’t find himself having a strength to get mad. He was just too tired. Exhausted, with the weariness settled deep inside his bones.

And while he never had been the one to weep over the universe apparently hating him, he allowed himself to feel that way; especially when Maria Hill advised them to lay low and Clint took them into a safe house.

Correction: Clint took them home. Clint Barton had a home without anyone knowing (except Natasha, because Natasha knew everything and shared nothing), two healthy kids and a beautiful loving wife, living in a rural idyll. And once that information settled in Steve’s head, his heart broke on an entirely new level.

He could have a home. He could see himself having a home. He might not have before, not after coming out of the ice, not even long after actually. Not even the first time he had realized he was in love with you, no. It came with gradually and Steve hadn’t been quite aware of it; perhaps that was the actual truth that the vision created by Wanda Maximoff had revealed. With that hallucination, it had dawned to Steve that he had been ready to go home, for a while now; no matter what exactly home looked like, no matter how much fighting he would still be doing, for how many mission he would be going or if he would be able to reduce that.

He was ready to go home and he wished to go home, with you.

And in reality, it didn’t matter, because the most essential part of what he considered home was missing.

It was a relief when Fury showed up and helped them to figure out how to fight back – the battles they actually could fight. It reminded Steve that there were still battles worth fighting. It took his dark thoughts away, or at least it pushed them on the back burner for a while.

Then again, meeting Maximoff’s once more wasn’t helping. And the girl, suddenly so eager to fix things she had done wrong, reminded him of you too much. He shook off the thought when he went for what could be the final battle and tried his best to focus. No matter how insane the suddenly levitating city was.

And then they all knew it was the end.

“Stark will find a way to blow this rock,” Natasha stated rather calmly as they caught a moment to breathe in on the battlefield.

It was surprising how much faith she seemed to have into Tony with how he kept doing things behind their backs – then again, everyone seemed to be keeping secrets from another lately. But that wasn’t what he found outraging at her statement.

The city was flying and there was no way to save all the people before Stark would make it explode. Lost lives. Failure. Again.

Not on his watch.

“Not until everyone’s safe.”

Natasha looked at him with disbelief, probably questioning his sanity. “Everyone up here, versus everyone down there-“

“I’m not leaving this rock with one civilian on it,” Steve exclaimed stubbornly, the flame of fury lighting up in him.

No. Not this time, not again. He had failed too many times. He had lost so many battles and he was not about to lose another one, he was not about to fail people again.

Natasha gave him a sad smile. “I’m not saying we should.”

The look they exchanged spoke thousand words. This was indeed the end. They truly wouldn’t leave – they would either save everyone’s life or more likely died trying. There was a strange peace in that. That was how he was supposed to go, right? Like a soldier. Like a person who had decided to dedicate his life to save someone else’s. He just selflessly wished it would have been yours or Bucky’s or of someone who was closer to his heart. But he didn’t get to choose.

It was as if Natasha read his thoughts, when she whispered: “There are worse ways to go. Where else am I gonna get a view like this?”

Steve looked briefly over the edge of the flying crater of the city. He would think Natasha was right; but there were so many things he would rather see before he would close his eyes forever. Your smile for example, no matter where the two of you would be. Just your smile, knowing you were safe and he hadn’t failed.

But Steve wasn’t destined to have such luck.

When Fury’s voice announced them that the view would actually get better via their comms, Steve couldn’t help but chuckle and feel a little flicker of hope. A flare in the endless darkness. Maybe there were things they could fix and people they wouldn’t fail after all.

He only realized he had been a fool thinking that, when it was over and one of the lives they lost was Wanda Maximoff’s brother’s. Strangely enough, Steve envied him. But only a bit.

────── ·❆· ──────  

The weirdest thing was Tony Stark being the one to pluck up his courage not to give up. Not that he was aware of that.

Saying goodbye to him as Steve decided to stay at the army base with Natasha, Tony had told him something so simple that it shouldn’t have moved Steve the way it did.

“Maybe I should take a page from Barton’s book. Buy Pepper a farm, hope nobody will blow it up…” Tony hummed almost lost in thoughts and Steve was once again surprised how the billionaire managed to bring a smile on his face despite all of their differences.

“The simple life.”

“You’ll get that too someday,” Tony reassured him with a smirk that poorly covered the sincerity behind his words. It was the softness in his eyes that gave it away.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Definitely, Cap. You know that me taking off doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking, right? You shouldn’t either. She’s out there somewhere. We’ll find her and bring her home.”

Steve smiled shakily at him, feeling the familiar adrenalin and determination flooding his veins. Tony was right. You were out there and they would bring you home, they just needed to try hard enough.

“Thanks, Tony.”

“Any time, Capsicle.” Tony patted Steve’s arm before he slid into his fancy car, the door clicking shut. Then the window rolled down, Tony’s head sticking out. “Oh, and do me a favour. Pop the question when we do, okay?”

The captain felt his cheeks burn, a chill running down his spine as Tony somehow sensed the change in Steve’s longing, but he couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Sure. Take care, Tony.”

The Iron Man saluted him with two fingers and with a roar of his sports car’s engine and a whole lot of whirled dust disappeared in the distance. Steve stared into nothingness for a an embarrassingly long time.

────── ·❆· ──────  

He found Natasha absently staring into a wall, a tablet in her hand forgotten. She turned to him when the door clicked behind him.

“Done gazing into Tony’s eyes? Ready to go to work?” she teased, an easy smile on her lips.

The corners of her mouth rose higher when she saw his expression; she hadn’t seen him this determined for a while. It was funny what could make people happier. Natasha didn’t think losing Bruce somewhere in a quinjet could do that. Then again, they just saved multiple lives. Unlike her, Steve deserved the feeling of victory. If she didn’t feel quite the same, no one needed to know.

Steve’s thumbs slid into the loops of his belt as he stopped in front of her, rocking on his heels.

Uh-oh. Big announcement coming, she could tell as much, and she wasn’t sure she would like it.

“I’m ready,” Steve confirmed and one look into his eyes told Natasha that he spoke it was the truth – but not quite.

She knew that look too well. He had it every time they got a track on you. And since she knew for a fact that there were no new leads… her heart sank.

“Steve…”

Steve could immediately tell Natasha understood, just like he could see she didn’t approve.

“I should be out there, looking for her. I need to be, because she’s somewhere, alone, and she can’t hide forever. I’ll find her – but it needs to be my priority from now.”

“Steve,” she addressed him, softer this time, wary of her tone, so it didn’t sound like she was admonishing him. “We got no lead for eternity-“

“That only means we need to try harder!”

“We’re doing our best and you know it. The moment we get the tiniest lead – like the last time with early snow in London –, we drop whatever we do with the recruits and we’ll be on our way.”

“Natasha-“ he started out again, but she cut him off.

“You’re not the only one who’s desperate to find her, Rogers! But the world hasn’t stopped turning! There are still threats and we need to deal with it. She wouldn’t want to-“

“Don’t you dare to speak for her, Romanoff-!“

“For God’s sake, Steve! Do you really think she would have asked you not to look for her if she wanted you to drop everything and come find her? “

He gasped as he felt the air knocked out of him.

It pissed him off, the burning feeling of betrayal squeezing his chest. Why was she discouraging him from this? Why? And how dared she to speak for you? She hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t seen what he had, what they had been doing to you and finally it hadn’t been her idly hands letting you suffer, only watching it all happen.

Steve couldn’t hold it anymore. So he exploded.

“What she did was stupid! She could be tortured right now, Natasha, serving as someone’s personal lab rat! You said it yourself, we didn’t get a single lead-”

“Exactly. Where would you go?”

“I don’t know!” he yelled, throwing his hands in the air helplessly, his breathing getting quicker. Because she totally hit the nail on the head – Steve had no clue, but he was sick it. He needed to know, he needed to do something, because just waiting for something fall into his lap was torture. “But anything is better than doing nothing!”

“We’re not doing nothing, Rogers. We just saved countless lives-“

“But not the one that mattered!” he cried out, his fist hitting the railing so hard it shook around the whole room. The sound of it resonated in the suddenly silent space as the severity of the sentence fell on both Natasha and Steve.

The redhead pressed her lips together, tears she would later deny gleaming in her eyes. Steve leaned onto the railing, bowing his head in defeat. He did not mean to say that. Especially not to Natasha, who had just lost Bruce to God knew where.

Shit.

“I’m sorry, Natasha, I-“

The spy shook her head, blinking the sudden prove of weakness from her eyes.

“I get it. And I agree with the stupidity, but she did it because she believed it was the only option and a right one. And I rather believe she’s just that good neither we nor anyone else can find her than that she was captured.”

Her voice was thick with emotions she didn’t want to show and the guilt stung harder in Steve’s gut. He was being an ass. A big one. A selfish one on top of that.

“…I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“I think I’ll live,” she sighed, lighting the tablet up. “I get it, Steve. I miss her too.” And I miss Bruce too. I’m scared for him, was left unspoken, but they both knew it might as well could.

“Yeah. I… I know.”

“And it’s not your fault she’s gone. I know you think it is, but that’s nonsense. Don’t beat yourself over it. Just don’t give up on her.”

Steve sighed, closing his eyes and attempting to regain his composure. His balled hands shook inconspicuously. He needed to be strong. He was expected to be strong, especially in front of the new recruits and no matter how much he hated it, moping wouldn’t help anyway. And hot-headed decisions, flying form one end of the world to another without an actual goal neither.

He cleared his throat. “Alright. What do we have here?”

“Bunch of kids who think they know what they’re doing.”

“And they are not a team.”

“And they are as far from a team they could be,” Natasha corrected him as she handed him the tablet and threw the door to a corridor leading to a training room open.

Steve studied all the names and pictures, mentally cataloguing them. “Sounds like a lot of work. Shall we start?”

────── ·❆· ──────  

“Captain Rogers?” Wanda whispered shyly, her unmistakable voice heavy with accent.

Steve stopped in his tracks, trying to plaster a smile on his face. Interacting with her… it was too much. Her age, her powers, her persona – it was too similar, too much of a painful reminder of you and no matter how hard he tried to ignore it, the resemblance nagged him in the back of his brain like a constant itch he couldn’t scratch, because he couldn’t reach it.

“Yes, Wanda?”

“I’m sorry.”

Steve tilted his head, pretending his heart wasn’t beating out of his chest. Had she read his mind? She probably had, if not recently, then surely when they had been fighting against each other. But why speak up now? It must have been about something else.

“What for?”

“I am… still learning how to control the abilities,” she started hesitantly and it confused the hell out of Steve.

Was she apologizing for not making progress fast enough? They had just finished the first training. And of course, had fought a battle against an army of robots.

“That’s understandable. But you’re doing great.”

She smiled faintly. “Thank you. But… it’s… I can’t turn them off. I can… feel the pain and deep sadness settled in you.”

Steve froze. Well. Shit.

“And… when I caused you the hallucinations… I got a glimpse. I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he rasped, not even shocked how the combination of her persona and the topic of their conversation brought right back on the edge. “You believed you were doing the right thing. We can’t change the past, but we can still do our best to make a better present and future.”

“Like she did?”

Steve glared into her eyes at the note, unable to say a word. She lowered her gaze.

“I said I got a glimpse, but she was almost everywhere – each of you thought of her. She always made an appearance, at least for a moment. I… I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I just… I guess I want to say thank you for giving me a chance to redeem myself and… and-”

“Wanda… you deserve a chance. You don’t need to thank for that. As for the other thing… I would appreciate if we kept the conversation about that on minimum.”

“Of course! I’m just… I’m working on some things, I’m trying to… to control someone’s emotions and I could help you to— I know it’s invasive!” she blurted out hastily as Steve’s expression changed into a horrified one. “But… with Pietro… I was able to keep tabs on him when on the field, we had a connection-“

“I’m very sorry for your brother, Wanda, I truly am,” Steve said softly, pouring some compassion in and resting his hand gently on her shoulder. Grief he understood too well.

“I… what I’m trying to say is that I would probably feel him at the other side of the world, because we were really close, and— and maybe-- maybe if you let me know Sno--- the person that you feel you have disappointed well enough, if everyone would let me… I think that perhaps with Vision’s help, I might be able to find her mind and track her down.”

Steve stared at the young woman paralyzed, absolutely stunned and with own mind a complete and utter mess.

Did she just said— did she-- could she really--- it sounded too good. It sounded insane. Like a sci-fi; but then again, his whole life was. This woman could read minds. She could move things with her mind, she could read emotions. She could---- could she really find you? It seemed impossible.

He didn’t want to give in to the hope. He always had, every single time the recognition system had found a face almost matching yours only to find a girl who could be your twin, every single time a weather anomaly occurred and he would chase down the lead like a madman only to find nothing, always scolding himself for believing you would be so careless. And the truth was, he was growing tired of it. He always followed, never letting the trail go cold, but with every failed attempt, he was being kicked lower and lower. The spark of determination from Tony had been very short-lived.

“Captain Rogers?”

“Yes?” Steve snapped from his daydreaming, eyeing Wanda absently.

“Your thoughts are screaming at me-- not your fault. Just… do you want to tell me about her? If I know her, I can start trying. And I understand we don’t know each other too well for you to open your mind completely so I could see and hear for myself. So… you could just tell me,” she suggested, this time being the gentle one. It was another reminder of you and it hurt like hell. And at the same time, the offer was painfully tempting. “I really do remind you of her a lot, don’t I?”

Steve gave her a sad smile, little broken on its edges.

“You have no idea.”

“Give me one, then. I could be a good listener.”

Steve chuckled as she offered him an elbow in a poor attempt of a joke and blinked away the tears he had no idea where had come from. He really should get a grip on himself.

“Okay. She… she was someone very special and unique…”

────── ·❆· ──────  

Part 10

────── ·❆· ──────  

Tags: @mermaidxatxheart, @murdermornings, @elisaa-shelby @ask-hellbent-tweek @cxptain, @kallafrench, @smilexcaptainx @scentedsongrebel, @orions-nebula

────── ·❆· ──────  

Bear with me. Were geting back to our Snowflake to see what she’s been up to... and as ou can probably guess, things will happen ;)

Thank you for reading!

[gayregis]

not to start arguing that the witcher was deep, but sapkowski has studied european fantasy and is very learned in arthurian legend. he didn’t just pop into existence, the witcher is a product of many things, including him being a father and his son asking him to write fantasy and him being knowledgable about different folklores. the witcher does not exist in a vaccuum... when you acknlowledge its references to classic literature and history, it becomes so much more clearer that this is a critique of fantasy tropes. 

feel free to add some references that you’ve noticed in the witcher onto this post, but here are some i can think of:

of course, the crossover with arthurian legend at the end of the saga with ciri meeting galahad and geralt and yen waking up on the island of avalon

in the lesser evil, stregobor has the illusion of a naked woman picking fruit off of a tree... this is likely a reference to eve in the garden of eden

milva barring, also known as maria, who wears a virgin’s plait, becoming pregnant, is likely another christian allusion.

there are some parallels between the roman empire and nilfgaard, as in “all roads lead to nilfgaard,” and it being a large empire to the south that keeps taking land from the ‘northern barbarians’

novigrad in eternal flame echoes the city of rome. novigrad is a large city, having 30,000 citizens, and likely double that in travellers. chapelle wears a purple toga, which was reserved for the elite of rome during their triumphs. the eternal fire which they must keep burning in altars across the city and on temple hill is much like the flame of vesta, which had to be kept burning by her priestesses in her temple in the forum

[amandaoftherosemire]

One Foot in Heaven...

Fandom: Marvel Dark AU

Pairing: Demon!Steve Rogers X Angel!Reader

Characters: Steve Rogers, Joseph Rogers, Sarah Rogers, Maria Hill, Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, Nicholas Fury, Natasha Romanoff, James Barnes, Sam Wilson, Clint Barton, Pietro Maximoff, Wanda Maximoff, James Rhodes, Happy Hogan

Author: @amandaoftherosemire​

Rating: Mature

Word Count: 8,332

Format: Two-part One-shot

Warning: Violence, angst, fluff, flangst, language, implied smut, implied torture, implied abuse, domestic and child, minor character death.

Summary: In a 19th century New York City carved up between angels and demons, you and Steve have roles in the eternal war you neither asked for nor wanted. All you really want is each other.

A/N: Written for @buckysforeverprincess’ Into the Nightmare 2K challenge. 🎉🎉🎉Congratulations, dearest!! 🎉🎉🎉 I had such a great time with this challenge. Everyone should go follow her right now cause she’s great!

Set in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, but I stayed vague so that I didn’t end up spending the rest of November doing research in the interests of historical accuracy. I am a pedantic butthole so that is totally something I would do. I had intended to have this up before Halloween, but once I got going I couldn’t stop, because I am also a verbose butthole 🤨🤔. I had promised to make this a one-shot, however, and though it’s been split into two parts for clarity’s sake, it is complete.

Prompt: Angels and demons have never played fair.

One Foot in Heaven

Upon the news that his third wife had borne him a daughter, your father beat a servant to death.

At least, he thought, the otherwise useless creature he'd tied himself to this time had managed to survive pregnancy with his child, something no other woman had managed. Though a daughter was worse than worthless to him, this was the first child to survive as well, so perhaps his vapid little wife would have some use other than her money after all.

Truth be told, all he'd wanted out of a wife was an heiress who could bear his children. She may have disappointed on her first try, but she'd done better than her predecessors. As he stood panting over the broken body of the maid he'd destroyed with his fists on the floor of his study, he considered using some of her money to buy his stupid little wife something sparkly for the birth. Not that he cared enough to know, but he imagined that as a woman she'd like that, and with the smell of blood in the air he was feeling indulgent.

As you saw your father only once in a blue moon, growing up you were mostly insulated from his disdain for you and his growing impatience with your mother. Though he exercised his husbandly rights on a regular basis to get the son he so desperately sought, his unassuming little wife rarely conceived. On the few occasions she’d gotten pregnant, she miscarried, but survived each time. He had begun to hope that she wouldn't survive the next so that he could be free to seek out another, younger wife who might finally be able to give him an heir.

To his frustration, he was reliant upon human women and their weak bodies to get what he needed. As he couldn't be certain he'd ever find a woman capable of giving him a son, he used your existence as a backup plan, arranging your engagement to a powerful family with the potential to be extremely useful to a creature with ambition. The boy was weak and sickly, but your father figured that would make him easier to manipulate. If nothing else, marrying you off to the little invalid as soon as possible would minimize the danger you posed.

You couldn't remember a time that you didn’t know Steve, didn't know that one day you and Steve would marry. You couldn't imagine a world in which you didn't adore every single thing about him, a universe in which you weren't meant to be together forever. Three years old when you were born, Steve had been your world your entire life. Because Steve's mother, Sarah, and your mother were old friends and comrades, both were delighted with the match.

Unbeknownst to their husbands, your mother and Sarah were intelligent and strong-minded women. Though they weren’t aware of it, Joseph Rogers and your father were being outmaneuvered by far more brilliant minds and your betrothal was only part of it. The only concern was whether you and Steve would comply. By the time you were sixteen and Steve nineteen, however, it had become clear that neither of you had eyes for anyone else.

Steve was small, both short and slim, and prone to illness. He spent most of his time inside, both because he was often sick, but also because any number of things outside could set off a fit of wheezing. He was pale both from the lack of sunshine and the arsenic used to treat his asthma. You knew that others looked at Steve and saw weakness, but you saw strength.

Steve wasn't just your betrothed, your beloved, he was also your best friend and the person you trusted above all else. You knew Steve wasn't weak, but quiet and shy. Steve had an unshakeable concept of right and wrong and a complete inability to ignore his conscience.

He also had not just a willingness, but an eagerness to fight for what he thought was right. If Steve thought something must be done, he would do it, regardless of all else. Between you and James, Steve's brother in arms and best friend, you had barely managed to keep him alive. His utter disregard for his own health and safety made it a nearly impossible task.

You may have been mad, but you looked forward to a lifetime of it.

Not long after your seventeenth birthday but shortly before the wedding, all hell broke loose.

You and Steve had inadvertently set the stage for the calamity a couple of days prior. You had taken a rare chance to be alone together; both your mothers had been very careful about chaperones for years.

The gardens of your father’s country estate where he most often left you and your mother to your own devices were massive and elaborate. Near the center was a little bower where the trees had been tied to force them to grow together into an arbor. After years of neglect and tucked away where you had to almost crawl in, you and Steve had found it as children and immediately claimed it as your secret. You’d spent hours there together, talking and dreaming.

Years later, in that place of childhood dreams, you and Steve had exchanged vows of your own making before making love for the first time. As you promised to love him forever and a day, joy, bright and brilliant, burst upon you like sunlight. As you moved together, tentatively as each of you was afraid of hurting the other, the pleasure was so pure and radiant you were sure it had to be magic.

 You weren’t really surprised. You and Steve had always made magic together.

A few days later, in the library of his family’s house in Brooklyn Heights, you and Steve sat next to one another on a sofa in the corner. Under the fan of your skirts, Steve had taken your hand and was brushing his thumb over the back of your fingers, something he'd done a thousand times before.

This time, though, knowing what his face looked like flushed with passion, how his eyes had glowed as they took in the sight of your body finally bared completely to his gaze, even that little touch was electrifying. Completely distracted, neither of spoke as you each focused on that point of physical contact. You could hear the little catches in his breathing you knew to be the surest sign of Steve's excitement. You'd heard them before every kiss he'd ever stolen.

You didn’t notice your mothers sending one another worried glances at the change in your behavior; you and Steve normally held animated conversations whenever you were together. You didn’t notice the looks of malevolent glee your fathers traded or the subtle smell of brimstone that permeated the room as the men tossed back celebratory glasses of brandy.

You did notice, however, the look of corrupted lust that lived in Steve's father's eyes when he crossed to you, his voice booming out. "Well, my dear! We always considered you one of the family. The day after tomorrow, it becomes official!” Joseph Rogers' eyes raked the bared skin of your chest your neckline exposed and made your skin crawl. Now that you knew what healthy desire looked like, it seemed easy to see the twisted, malignant kind for what it was.

When he reached out and snagged your hand in his, it took everything you had to not yank it out of his grip. Afraid to make a scene, especially so soon before the wedding, you forced your hand to lie lightly in his and allowed him to draw you to your feet. It seemed almost painful in that moment, but you let go of Steve's hand as your skirts fell around you.

"A kiss for my soon-to-be daughter-in-law!" he announced with a leer that a week ago would have looked avuncular and harmless. You didn't know why Steve's father, who had always seemed to you like a mostly benign drunkard, if a little over familiar, now looked like a demon from the pit. Mesmerized by the flames that danced behind his eyes, you didn't cringe away though every fiber of your being was screaming at you to run.

As his overly wet and deeply unpleasant mouth met yours, blinding light bloomed behind your eyelids and a sound like you were directly underneath clanging cathedral bells screamed inside your head. A searing pain shrieked through your body, leaving you unable to feel, see, or hear anything. It couldn't have been long before you came back to your senses, but nothing made sense when you did.

Your mother was cradling you in her arms where you'd fallen to the carpet. Your father was looking at both of you with a sneer of disgust that didn't hide the predatory gleam of anticipation that shone in his eyes. You shuddered as you looked at him; it was like you were seeing him for the first time.

He was a handsome man, but under his skin something… revolting lived. It was the raw red of a dangerously warm wound but mottled with what looked like bruises in varying states of healing, ranging from green to purple. Your gorge rose at the sight and you ached to scramble back, away from boiling black eyes so cold they burned.

"Obviously we'll have to call off the wedding." Joseph was saying cruelly. He flicked a dismissive glance your way. You were fascinated to see a similarly hideous red creature beneath his skin. He glanced at Steve, and the disappointment on his face was so clear, you wanted to claw out his eyes.

Steve looked to you as he always did, beautiful, but the bleakness on his face had your heart galloping in fear. He was cradling his mother in his arms as she sobbed into his shoulder. You thought you could see the beginnings of a bruise on her cheek and wondered if this was the source of the sadness that always seemed to haunt Steve's eyes.

Steve's eyes were on yours, liquid with love and sorrow. Underneath his skin was the loveliest golden glow, like his soul was as beautiful as his face. His mother was as golden, if not as bright, and together they created a little sun for you to focus on as you tried to catch your breath.

Your mother was holding you in her arms and murmuring words of reassurance and remorse. You couldn’t understand why she was apologizing as she rocked you, but her arms were tight around you and her voice was thick with unshed tears. Out of the corner of your eye, you saw a glow emanating from your mother that matched that from Steve and Sarah, but hers was silver.

"Pity," your father was saying, his voice both bored and irritated. "An alliance between our houses would have been formidable."

"Once we get this cleaned up," Joseph replied with a roll of his eyes toward you and your mother, "we should discuss other options." The two men smiled at one another and the sight had chills of terror running down your spine. You were trying desperately to scramble to your feet and run, grabbing your mother, Steve, and Sarah on your way. You were weak as a kitten, though, and could barely lift your arm to reach toward Steve.

Only once your arm was outstretched, however, did you realize that the silver light that had been teasing the corner of your eye was coming not only from your mother, but from symbols etched all over your skin. You wondered if they were confined to your arms and shoulders or if you were covered in them. You didn't understand what they meant or where they came from, but unlike the golden glow of Steve and his mother, or the silver glow of your mother, everyone else seemed able to see them, too.

"I-- I don't understand," you said, your voice a near soundless whisper, as your throat was as raw as though you'd been screaming with all your might.

"Excellent," your father said with a sigh of relief. "She's untrained. That will make this much easier." With that, he walked across the library to grab you by the knot of hair at the back of your head. You tried to struggle as he dragged you to your feet and scooped you into his arms, but your muscles felt like water. "Come along, Lydia. It looks like I found a use for a daughter after all."

Your mother rose to her feet, every inch of her body taut with haughty disdain. You'd never seen her like this, like a cruel queen dismissing a disappointing servant. "Only because you hold something of far greater worth than you can imagine. Perhaps you should be more careful with her."

Rather than growing stronger the longer you were conscious, you seemed to be getting weaker. You reached out to Steve again, your mouth forming the words even though your voice couldn't carry them to him. "Help me." The last thing you saw as darkness descended was Steve turning away.

You awoke in tears.

You were already crying as you swam toward consciousness, but once you broke the surface, you were shocked to hear the wracking sobs tearing from your throat in harsh cries of betrayal, heartbreak, and terror. Almost immediately you stuffed your fist in your mouth to stifle the sound of your tears, but even as you gained control over your body, your heart continued to weep. You slowly became aware of your surroundings and as you did, you began to tremble.

You were in what you thought was the cellar of your father’s house in Brooklyn, but a part of it you'd never been in before, not that you’d spent much time here. Around you was a cage, and around your cage were more cages. In the one next to yours, a girl who looked a lot like your mother but closer to your age rocked back and forth and sang softly to herself. The wounds in varying states of healing all over her bare body made you sick to your stomach at the thought of what she must have endured. You hoped she'd found a more pleasant place in her mind.

You were still wearing the gown you'd worn to your fiancé's house, though it was stained with heaven knows what from the floor you'd been laying on. The pungent coppery smell told you the identity of at least one of the substances you were now covered in. You looked down at your arms and saw the symbols still glowed the slightest bit but would not be noticeable in light any brighter than that of a single candle. The only light in your dungeon was dim, golden light from a crack under the door leading into what you assumed was the wine cellar.

Your suspicions were confirmed when you heard the rattle of bottles as the rack in front of the door was moved aside. Your heart was pounding with the fear that your father had come for you. The door opened, and you relaxed a fraction when you saw the female shape of the silhouette, even as part of you grew more frantic at the flickering light at the shadow's back.

"Miss Y/N?" The voice whispered tentatively, as though afraid to make any more sound than absolutely necessary. Nonetheless, you recognized the voice as belonging to the personal maid your mother had brought from her own household, Maria.

"Maria," you whispered back, still unable to speak out loud, though that would seem to be an advantage in your current predicament.

"Oh, thank god," she breathed. "Let's get you out of here." She went to work on the lock of your cage, pulling what you thought must be lockpicks from a pocket in her petticoat.

As she worked, you noticed the smell of smoke wafting into the room through the open door. "Maria, where's my mother?"

"I'm sorry,” she answered briskly, but with sympathy nonetheless. “Your father killed her before he set fire to the house. He was more cunning than either she or I expected." Having made quick work of the lock on your cage, she turned to the cage next to yours with pity on her face. "I don't know if I can save you," she said to the girl in low and soothing tones as she worked at the lock, "but damned if I'm not going to try." She sounded almost put out by it.

As she worked at the other lock, you crawled out of the cage and got tentatively to your feet. For reasons that escaped you, rather than your earlier weakness, your muscles now felt stronger than they ever had before, and a burst of energy made you feel like you could fly if you had to.

You could tell the effort was likely futile, but Maria was right. You had to try. Once Maria had the lock open, you reached into the cage and pulled the young woman out. As soon as she was standing on wobbling legs, Maria was wrapping her in the cloak she'd pulled from her own shoulders. You and Maria moved to each side of the girl, bracing and supporting her.

Maria didn't move toward the open door, however, but toward the back of the dank little room. That's when you realized that wisps of smoke were streaming from the door through the room before disappearing into a little crack at the darkest back corner.

Maria pushed, and a slab of rock that looked as though it couldn’t have been moved by a giant swung easily aside to reveal a hidden passageway. The girl between you seemed to wake up a little at the smell of fresh air. To your surprise, she moved forward without a murmur of protest.

The passageway was tight, especially for three people, but though you expected your father to come out of the dark behind you to snatch you back, you made it nearly to the end, and escape, without incident.

A gust of cool air blew over the three of you, making you and Maria shiver, but seeming to wake your companion. She gave a quiet whimper, dropped the cloak and turned around, running naked back toward the house. You tried to turn and catch her, but Maria prevented you.

“I can’t let you risk yourself. The house was already engulfed in flames when I ran down to the cellar. We can’t save her now.” You wanted to yell at her for her callousness, but the sadness in her eyes stopped your voice. “Come. Your uncle will be waiting.”

You sat on a settee in your uncle's study with your face buried in his chest as you shook like a leaf in a hurricane, reaction from the events of the night finally setting in. Your aunt draped a blanket carefully around your shoulders and rubbed your upper arms through the fabric like she could take some of the pain away through her palms. Sadly, no one had that power. To lose your mother and Steve in the same night was devastating beyond belief. Though you hadn’t shed a tear since you’d awoken, inside you sobbed like your heart was breaking. Because it was.

"I'm so sorry, sweetheart. This was all my fault." Tony's voice was low and throbbing with remorse. The loss of his dear little sister wounded him to the deepest place in his heart. The loss of his most trusted lieutenant in the never-ending war left all his carefully laid plans in shambles. But for Maria, there'd be nothing left of the twenty-year long plot to take his enemy down from the inside. But for Maria, there'd be nothing left of his Lydia. He met Pepper's eyes over your head and took solace from the love and understanding there.

"If everything had gone to plan, you never would have been in danger." Tony's heart hurt, because he was almost certain he knew where his plan had gone awry. If his sister had been a better soldier than a mother, perhaps things would be different now, but he would never have wished it so. "One of two things must have happened, and one is far more likely than the other." Your uncle and the last of the family you could trust pulled you away so that he could look into your eyes. His will almost broke when your pale, grieving face came into his view, but he pressed on. "Did you allow Steve the rights of a husband before your wedding?"

He knew your answer by the way your face blanched and your eyes dropped to your lap. "I did. We were to be married in a few short days. I didn't see the harm." Your voice was a rasp, still damaged from whatever had happened when Joseph Rogers had kissed you. Pepper continued to rub your arms and the sympathy in the way she squeezed your shoulders made you feel better.

Tony stood and moved to the desk where a decanter of brandy sat. He poured one for each of you as he spoke. "If you were a normal girl and Steve a normal boy, there probably would have been no harm."

Maria came up behind you and placed a cloak around your shoulders. You were standing at the rail of a steamship taking a last look at New York. You were believed dead, so it was best that you get gone before someone saw you. The bodies of two women had been found in the still smoldering remains of your burned down house, your father was nowhere to be found, and your uncle was buying two headstones, one for his sister, the other for his niece.

You were going to England to be trained.

Steve… well, you weren't sure. Your Uncle Tony had told you that he'd chosen the other side in this war, that he'd joined his father, the Demon King of Brooklyn, to become a creature like that you had seen lurking beneath the surface of Joseph’s skin. You could hardly imagine your Steve doing such a thing.

He told you Steve had helped kill his mother.

You didn't say it out loud, but that you didn't believe even a little.

Of course, you didn't think your uncle was lying, though you wouldn't put it past him if he thought it was what was best for you. Hadn't he, and your mother, and Maria, and Pepper and everyone else in your mother's family lied to you your whole damn life about who you were and your place in all this insanity? You may have understood, but you were also furious, and you'd vowed to never be used like that again.

If they’d only told you about the spell that hid you from demons, you would not have broken it by making love with Steve.

The fact was, even though he'd turned away from you at the end, you knew Steve. Steve would never have harmed a hair on his mother's head. He adored her, would die protecting her without hesitation. You could not believe that he could have had a hand in her death. If part of Tony's information was flawed, the rest was suspect. You wouldn't let your heart truly break until you'd seen Steve for yourself, heard the truth, or god forbid a lie, from his own lips.

Unfortunately, Tony had been adamant that your continued existence could not be known by anyone. He would not allow you to contact Steve in any way, was in fact shipping you off as quickly as possible to get you under the thumb of someone he trusted to control you. You were going along with it so that you could learn what you needed to obtain your revenge.

You may have chosen the angelic side, the "good" side, but you'd done it for all the wrong reasons and you knew it, not that you were concerned. You'd finally been told why your mother, a being from a powerful angelic bloodline, would have a child with a creature from the pit, a demon of a less powerful demonic bloodline. You were a weapon, but despite what the others thought, you would decide how your power was to be wielded.

As you raked the New York skyline with eyes burning with unshed tears, trying to sear the sight into your memory until you could come home again, you hardened your heart. New York meant Steve, but you had a mission now. Every day that ended with your father still breathing was an offense. You wouldn't rest until he'd breathed his last. For your mother. For a girl whose name you never learned but that now lay at rest under yours. For all your broken dreams.

Five years later you stood in front of the house in Brooklyn that had been built in place of that once owned by your father. The fire brigade had managed to save the houses around it, but your father’s house had burned to the ground. You didn’t know why, but apparently he had cut his losses and bolted. The last Tony had heard, he was in New Orleans trying to make alliances against the Demon King of New York. Your mentor's spies said the same and Fury's spies were almost never wrong.

Fury, a dark man who seemed humorless at first but, when he relaxed a little, was in actuality very funny if a little melodramatic, and the ever-faithful Maria had spent almost every hour of every day training you for the day of your return. You'd had physical training until you were agile as a cat and deadly with a blade. You currently had your favorite strapped to your thigh under the thick black skirts that could be removed with a pull of a string. Underneath you wore breeches and boots in case you suddenly needed to move unencumbered. Tony had sent him a soft, sweet little rich girl. Fury had sent back a warrior.

You hadn't been trained in only martial talents, however. The long history of your bloodline had finally been passed to you. You understood now what had happened the night your world came apart. Now that you'd been taught to use the power that had flowed through you that night, you were nigh unstoppable. Not that you had any intention of using that power today.

You'd given Maria the slip so that you could go back to your old neighborhood, thoigh you’d never spent much time at your father's house in Brooklyn. He had much preferred that you and your mother stay at the country estate. It made a lot more sense once you'd finally been told of his vicious and depraved appetites, seen the evidence of them first hand. You hoped those that lived there now never learned of the horrific things done on that unholy ground.

Almost against your will, your feet turned you towards Steve's house. To indulge his new wife, with whom he was delighted due to the size of her dowry, your father had bought his city home just a few doors down from the Rogers'. He hadn't known that he was buying it from his brother-in-law, nor had he known that it had been outfitted with an escape route in the wine cellar. But then, you wouldn't expect even a demon with your father’s pedigree to know that he'd married into an extremely powerful angelic bloodline. The Starks were nothing if not secretive.

You weren't worried about being recognized, hiding as you were in widow's weeds and a hat with a heavy veil. You slowed but remained carefully casual as you walked by. You wondered if he was in there now. What would happen if you walked up to the door and knocked? Would he welcome you with open arms? Or would he kill you on the spot?

You were so lost in thought, you didn't notice that you'd come to a stop, all your training forgotten as you stared at the house that held your heart, even now. You also didn't notice the green-eyed redhead behind you whose eyes had sharpened when she followed your gaze.

"Excuse me, ma'am?" The redhead's voice was low and almost bored as she walked toward you. When you turned in her direction, your eyes widened but you saw her intent a split second too late. In a move almost too fast to see, she had your wrists in her hands and wrapped in black rope that seemed to smoke and seethe. "Looks like I caught an angel," she murmured with a smirk as she pulled you by the rope across the street. If you were an ordinary angel, the rope would have burned like ice, but as it was it only held a somewhat pleasant coolness.

You didn't try to escape. Some part of you had been hoping for something like this, some excuse to see Steve, to find out if your heart could be trusted at all. The traitorous thing wouldn't stop beating for him. Maybe if you saw him as the creature he'd become, you could finally talk your heart out of its stubborn loyalty. When the front door opened to the house you'd run tame in whenever you'd come to Brooklyn, your heart leapt at the knowledge that for better or worse, you were going to see Steve again. You couldn't help the small smile that curved your lips.

"Since you're so compliant," the redhead was saying as you looked around, wondering at the small changes you could see, "we can put you in the library until James and I figure out what to do with you." Your head snapped around at the name James, the first acknowledgement you'd given the woman's words. "I see you've heard of our ghost story," she replied with a smirk. "At least now I know I didn't capture a doll."

She showed you into the library, though you knew very well where it was. Your familiarity with the house wasn't lost on the woman, who wondered even as she determined to get James as soon as you were trapped in the hidden sigil meant to hold captive angels. Once you were seated, she breathed a sigh of relief. However, she couldn't help but notice your apparent lack of fear considering you were an angel among demons. You folded your hands loosely in your lap as you made yourself comfortable on the sofa across from the massive wooden desk that sat with its back to even more massive windows.

You had been dreading this room more than any other, afraid the sight of the place where your life as you knew it had ended would break you despite your training. You were relieved to see that it had been changed in nearly every way. Every scrap of furniture was different; the carpets, the wallpaper, even the books seemed to have been replaced. You wondered if Steve hated this room as much as you did.

"I hear our little spider caught something." You recognized the voice as soon as you heard it. Low and warm with humor, the good-natured man was someone you'd missed almost as much as Steve. It took everything you had to not leap to your feet and hug him as hard as you could. As it was, you remained still. Fury had taught you the value of staying quiet when in doubt.

"Something special," the little redhead replied. "I think Stark either sent something top-tier, or something unusual. I wouldn't have looked twice if she hadn't stopped in front of the house."

"Give her a break. Who could anticipate our Natasha?" James was chuckling, his voice a touch flirtatious. You'd heard it enough times to see the smile on his face in your head without turning to look. You knew better, but you just couldn't help yourself. Five years with Maria and Fury had also honed your tongue to a razor edge.

"Please tell me women are not still falling for that," you said clearly, your voice dry as a desert, with an almost cracking sandpaper rasp. Your throat had never recovered from the damage done the night your blood had responded to the demon holding you. Even so, the tone and timbre were still recognizable to anyone who knew you well. You kept your gaze on the gardens outside the windows behind the desk, but the sudden silence told you that you had their attention.

A small smile curved your lips in response until you heard James breathe, "Y/N? You're alive?" The sound of his genuine grief mixed with hope broke your resistance. This was why you hadn't been allowed to see these people. Your heart was too vulnerable. It didn't matter that they were on opposing sides in an eternal war, you loved them. With a sigh, you lifted your still bound hands to your hat to remove the pin holding it on and pulled the veil from your face.

You turned and looked at James as you replied, your eyes tired and sad. "If you can call it that," you smirked.

With a whoop, James was hopping over the back of the sofa to snatch you up into his arms and squeeze you until you squeaked. "He always said he'd know if you were really gone." As he was talking he was alternating pulling back to cup your face in his hands and yanking you back into his arms to hug you again. You were laughing, though your voice was thick with tears you would not let fall. You hadn't allowed yourself to cry since the night your mother died. "I can't believe Stark let us believe you were dead. I understand hiding you from your father, but Steve? Where is Steve?" The last wasn't directed at you, but at Natasha.

"He's getting ready for his meeting with the King of Long Island about his daughter's hand." Natasha was answering James, but her eyes were on you. You stiffened involuntarily and cursed yourself. Another break in your training and you'd only just gotten back. Some soldier, easily caught, hugging one of your jailers, and jealous that your enemy(?) had been courting another.

James felt your body tense and grinned. "Not anymore, I bet. I'm going to get him. Do not let her leave." With that he let you go to run through the door and from the sounds of his pounding footsteps, up the stairs.

"I guess he forgot about the sigil I'm standing on." You spoke to the suspicious Natasha for the first time, a small smile curving your lips.

"I take it you didn't. It's supposed to burn, you know."

Your smile widened when you saw that this one wouldn't underestimate you. Good. You were grateful Steve had had suspicious, dangerous people at his back. "Is it? How odd."

"So are the ropes."

"Maybe you need new ones." Your voice bored, you sank down onto the couch and turned your gaze back to the windows.

"Buck, I really don't have time to deal with whatever spies Stark is sending now. He's been spying on me for years; I don't know why Natasha even bothered to capture one."

Your breath caught, and your heart leapt when you heard his voice. Your eyes closed as you floated on the sound you'd missed more than anything from home. That beautiful sound was different somehow, though, the timbre lower and deeper and you hurt that you hadn't kept such a sacred memory with true fidelity.

On top of that, Steve sounded different. His voice carried the tone of command, the sound of a man sure in his position and confident he'll be obeyed. You grieved a little for the shy boy who'd won your heart practically before you could walk.

"Yeah, but this one's special, Stevie. Trust me." James was practically dancing he was so happy. Steve was amused, but less than enthused. His best friend was at his most dangerous when he was this excitable.

Now that the moment was here, you couldn't seem to make yourself move. You wanted to stand, to turn and see the face that had haunted you through most of every day and all of every night for years. Tears pricked at your eyes and were viciously blinked back. You would not look at Steve for the first time again through a sheen of tears.

Natasha piped up. "The ropes and the sigil don't burn her, Steven."

For the first time, Steve sounded interested, though he still didn't sound like your Steve. "I see. Did Stark send a nephalem to spy on us this time?"

This was the moment. You stood slowly, your hands still folded in their bonds, and though you weren't aware of it, your training had left its mark. As you stood, Natasha and Steve both braced, alert to the danger you posed by your smooth movement, the sign of a highly trained assassin. As you turned to face Steve, your heart galloped in both excitement and fear. "No one sent me." Your eyes were soft as you turned to face the man your heart insisted was your husband. You'd given him your heart, your body, and your soul without hesitation, taken vows for all they’d been for his ears alone. You wouldn't take it back now, no matter what he'd become.

Your eyes had expected Steve's face much lower than it was. As your eyes lifted to his, they traced over a massive chest, brawny shoulders, and huge arms. By the time you'd reached his face, your expression was one of fear and confusion. He looked like Steve, but not your Steve. His gorgeous blue eyes were cold when they met yours and your heart failed.

You hoped he'd at least let his face be the last thing you saw before you died.

Then something strange happened. You'd been holding back your other sight, terrified you'd see the hideous red creature you knew had to be beneath Steve's skin. You cursed yourself again, angry at how weak you were, how desperate you were to avoid facing what Steve had become. Tony had told you a thousand times in person and in letters to accept that Steve was lost forever, but you were still holding onto the memory of a love that could never be.

But when you looked into Steve's eyes, you caught a flicker of that golden glow you'd seen in him that last night. Your heart murmured insistently. The corner of your mouth lifted slightly with the hope that your Steve was still in there, in this body you didn't recognize. The smile fell completely when Steve took three angry strides forward and closed his hands hard around your upper arms.

Steve lifted you up, his face a mask of rage. “Who are you and what horrible magic has Stark done to give you her face?” The flames you’d once seen in his father’s eyes danced behind Steve’s, but you weren’t frightened. You didn’t struggle against his grip because under that anger you could see his heartbreak, his grief, as fresh as when you lost each other.

“Is that really more believable than I faked my own death?” You were a little surprised to feel the buzz of irritation under your skin, but you didn’t like being frightened by Steve. These days you responded to things you didn’t like with anger. Of all the reactions you’d imagined, skepticism wasn’t one of them.

Steve set you down, hard, and his grip on your shoulders remained almost painfully tight as he answered harshly. “Yes. Because I cannot imagine why Y/N would let me think she was dead.” He towered over you as he lifted you onto your toes to bring your face closer to his, the experience dizzying in its unfamiliarity. “For years.” Steve’s eyes were sizzling black and gold, his voice a menacing growl.

You closed your eyes as guilt assailed you. "You're a demon," you replied, your voice cracking as you held back the tears. Seeing Steve like this was almost more than you could bear, proof that at least some of what Tony had told you was true.

Steve released you with a curse, turning to glare at James. "They didn't even get the voice right," he said in a tone you'd never heard from him, scathing and cruel. He turned back to you, his jaw set in rage. "Did Stark really think I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference?"

Standing in the room where it had all fallen apart, where every naïve dream you'd had ended up broken under your feet, as the love you'd never been able to escape turned its back on you, you wanted to weep. But you’d learned years ago that tears were worthless. Instead, as always, you channeled that feeling into anger of your own.

You lifted your bound hands as you stepped forward. The smoking ropes vanished in a sizzle of silver light and the sigil did nothing more than tickle as you crossed its boundaries. Natasha moved into an immediate defensive crouch, ready to leap. You stopped where you were and pulled the string at your waist, letting your skirts fall to your feet.

"The last time I was in this room, Steven," you began, your voice rasping even more harshly with your pain and rage, "you and I sat on a sofa against those windows. You had my hand in yours under the edge of my skirts and we were both thinking about..." Your trailed off as your skin ran with heat at the memory. Caught, Steve turned slowly to face you once more. "When your father kissed me," you went on, drowning in the bright blue eyes you’d never stopped dreaming of, "everything went crazy, blinding light, clanging bells, pain like I was burning from the inside out." Steve was walking slowly toward you, his eyes never leaving yours even as Natasha growled in protest. "I think I screamed, but I don't remember. My voice has never been the same."

Steve stopped directly in front of you, his hands coming up to once again close around your shoulders, but with infinite tenderness this time. His big warm hands were squeezing gently as his eyes seemed to devour your face like they were starved for the sight of you. He looked astonished, but belief was beginning to take hold. "Why?"

In that moment, with Steve’s hands smoothing up and down the outside of your arms and his eyes rich with the same love that had always lived there, you didn’t know how you’d ever doubted him. Whether or not Steve had given into his demonic heritage, he was still your beloved. You knew what he was asking; he deserved the truth.

“That last night, I reached for you and you turned away.” Tears were standing in your eyes again and the sight had Steve’s hands coming up to cup your face. “After that, I heard so many things and didn’t know what to believe. When Uncle Tony decided to ship me off to England, I didn’t argue.”

“I was grabbing a knife. Well, a letter opener.”

You gave a little hiccup of a laugh, one tear breaking rank and slipping down your face. Steve lips were there to kiss it away and the feel of his mouth on your skin made your heart ache. When he licked his lips, a flash of golden light winked in his eyes, but you were too busy looking at his mouth and wondering if he tasted the same to notice. “I should have known,” you murmured, unsurprised. “I think my heart did.” You looked up at Steve, a disorienting experience as you’d never had to do so, and the wave of love that hit you was so huge you felt you might drown in it. There was no guarantee you wouldn’t do so willingly. “I could never convince it to give up on you.”

The next thing you knew Steve’s mouth was on yours. Like coming home, he tasted exactly the same, honey and cinnamon and Steve. As odd as it felt to kiss him from this angle, you still sank in, the sob you wouldn't loose caught in your throat. When he pulled away, you saw his eyes boil black for a moment, and a shiver ran over your skin.

Even so, you didn't move away. Steve held you infinitely more securely than the rope that had bound your wrists. His hands cupped around your face, his thumbs brushing over your cheeks kept you in place when their sigil could not. His eyes, blue and green and beautiful, had caught you as surely as any diabolical snare demons had ever devised for angels. Or vice versa, to tell the truth and shame the devil.

"Should I send a message to the King of Long Island that you won't be joining him after all?" James couldn't have sounded happier if he tried. He loved you as a sister, almost as much as Steve did, and though he was furious that he'd been allowed to grieve you unnecessarily, he was too delighted to have you back to hold on to it.

"What?" Steve turned to glare at James as he barked the word. "Yes!" he shouted, his voice rich with disbelief that his friend even asked. "Go now. And close the door." Natasha made a tiny sound of protest and straightened out of her crouch as she stepped forward, making you wonder not for the first time who she was to Steve. James grinned and winked at you before taking Natasha's arm and guiding her from the room. Steve didn't see her turn to glare at you as she was led away, his eyes immediately returning to yours once he'd issued the command.

"She's my lieutenant, and my friend, nothing more." When you raised a questioning brow as your gaze returned to Steve's, he smiled. "I can still tell when you're jealous, my love. Your eyes go to smoke. I used to try to make you jealous just to see your eyes smolder."

"Did you?" You murmured the question, your lips curving in pleasure. Steve had always had a way of making you feel like the most beautiful thing he'd ever laid eyes on.

Once again you were taken completely by surprise by Steve’s mouth on yours. You couldn’t understand why, despite all your training, you couldn’t see it coming. Then Steve’s startlingly brawny arms were wrapping around your waist and pulling you tight against his broad chest and you couldn’t think at all, too focused on the press of his soft lips against yours. This, thank god, hadn’t changed.

The next thing you knew, you were being settled across firm thighs as Steve sank to the sofa you'd been sitting on and pulled you into his lap. "St--" The moment you were back in his arms, Steve's lips were once again on yours and all the questions you needed to ask went up in flames along with any thought you had of resisting the wildfire that had flared between you.

To your utter shock, Steve’s hands were already at the buttons of your bodice, unfastening them with deft but hurried fingers. You had no intention of trying to stop him, as eager for him as he for you, but this aggressive confidence in Steve’s touch was foreign to you, and thus of note, if not concern.

“It never occurred to me that breeches could be arousing, but it never occurred to me to imagine you in them, so…” Steve trailed off to bury his face between your breasts, his hands moving to unhook the modified corset you wore. The low rumble of Steve's voice sent a shiver of pure lust down your spine and you arched against him with a gasp. The delicious sound teased at your memory and you realized that you hadn't misremembered; Steve's voice really had changed.

"That's why you keep surprising me when you kiss me!"

Steve lifted his head from running his lips under the parting fabric over the curves of your breasts to smile at you. For the first time since you'd laid eyes on him again, you saw your Steve in his smile. You didn't know he was thinking something similar about you, that it was the first time since he'd heard your voice again that he'd heard his girl. It wasn't the cracked rasp, but the bored indifference that had made him question your identity. "What?" he asked with a laugh.

"Your breath doesn't catch when you're wound up anymore." You smiled softly, unable to hold your heart back from Steve, your Steve, as you lifted your hand to brush at the lock of blond hair that always fell over his forehead whenever he got disheveled. You'd always adored disheveled Steve; and absence truly had made the heart grow fonder.

Your face seemed to Steve like it was shining as you smiled down at him. His heart, whispering from wherever it hid from the demon he'd allowed to infest him, had insisted that you could not be lost to him forever, that it, that he would know if you were truly beyond his reach. Should his heart be right, and he'd never allowed himself to give that thought credence for longer than a sleepless night, he'd never dreamed you'd look at him like this ever again.

All he'd been able to hope for was that you still lived; he'd never allowed himself to hope you still loved. The sight of not only the same love as when he'd been only a man, but an even deeper, richer love, had his breath catching in his throat.

The sound had the two of you grinning at one another before you dived.

…The Other in Hell here

Tagging the usual suspects:

@hellzzzbelle @suz-123 @cheekygeek05 @lbouvet @rishlo @diinofayce @bibliophile1773 @getbuckylucky @california-grown

[justhereforthesherlock]

“Mr. Went, if you could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would you go see? Oh, not for a long time. Long visits are never permitted. But just for a moment, just for an embrace, a long look, no longer?”

His words were not in English, and I did not speak any modern Romance tongues, but he must have been a priest or a scholar, because he and I could make ourselves understood to each other in Latin and in Greek, two living men with two dead languages in common.

I was not sure where I was. The streets in these ancient cities are narrow and crooked, and they don’t put the names on street signs.

The stranger in the top hat and long coat did not linger to hear an answer. Now he paused to listen to some children singing carols — I remember they sang O Come Emmanuel, but the words were not in English — while waiting for me to climb the alley. I had stopped.

It was not that I was tired, it was just that I was used to the broad and flat streets of the Midwest, so, to me, the sight of a cobblestone street turning into broad stairs for part of its climb was a novelty. It was, no doubt, a street older than my whole nation.

I wanted to make a comment to my wife, but she, of course, was not there. In my pocket was a small Christmas gift for her, wrapped in gold paper. I had put it in the pocket of the dark and formal coat I donned for the funeral. I had intended to leave it at the grave, but the idea of bright, cheery, frivolous colors of wrapping paper beneath the granite headstone, on the darkness of the newly-turned earth, seemed unbearably hateful to me.

And I still wanted to make a comment to her, share my thoughts, share my life. And I could not. So I had paused, wrestling with the aching emptiness inside me.

I turned my eyes outward. Between the narrow and dark houses looming to either side, the gap of the alley fell like a stone waterfall (as if the stair were the broken rapids) and in that gap I could see the famous city spread below me, adorned for Christmas. I could see the festive lights in the distance.

The stranger came up next to me, offering me a handful of the roast chestnuts he had just bought from a street vendor. The children singing he had shooed away by passing out the brightly colored banknotes which looked like Monopoly money to me.

I gestured to the view below. We were halfway up one of the seven hills. “There are more Christmas trees than there were years ago.”

He said, “You have been to the Eternal City before?”

“My wife is from here. Was. She—excuse me.”

He passed me a handkerchief, and turned as if to look at the city. “The Christmas tree is a Germanic custom. Such things travel south to the more civilized nations somewhat slowly. It is in the nativity scene where the Italian genius is manifested! You should see the one was displayed at the Church of Saints Cosma and Damiano. It was commissioned by Charles III of Naples. Six master woodcarvers labored on the scene for forty years, adding new figures each year! And in the Santa Maria Maggiore, where the first Christmas Mass was said, is a presepe, or permanent display of the crib. The reliquary below the altar is said to contain pieces of the original manger. History is fascinating, is it not? Are you ready to go?”

I nodded. The stranger walked a short way up the alley, took out with an enormous key and bent over the lock of intricately wrought black iron gates. The iron gates were decorated with images of roses and winged skulls. With a groaning clang they opened. Beyond was a courtyard shaped like an “L”, closed in on each side by windowless brick walls, and in the midst of the court was a dry well, filled with leaves and dust, rusting midmost under a tiny roof.

Around the corner of the courtyard, up the shorter arm of the “L”, were more stairs guarded by worn winged lions, gaping mouths filled with grit and dust, and the grime of their faces made them seem to weep.

To my surprise, the front door to the old house was not locked. He opened the door and stood in the doorway, fumbling with something on a small table set immediately by the door. There was the click of an electric striker, a flicker of flame, and the stranger lit a candle, which he carefully placed in a black iron candlestick. Inside he went, lighting his way with the candle, beckoning me to follow.

“The power is out?” I said. I could hear the singing of the children in the street below clearly enough, but the door was so heavy and so well fitted to the frame that all noise was cut off when I shut it.

“There is power here,” said the stranger, smiling crookedly. “More than enough to shatter the cosmos. But the site has never been electrified. It would identify the era too closely, and disturb the anachronic echo effect. Come. The machine is in the attic.”

I followed him. A narrow wooden stairway led upward and upward. The walls to either side were painted with figures of satyrs chasing nymphs through patterns of grape leaves, but in the dim light, the figures seemed distorted, and the lolling tongues and goat-horned heads of the satyrs gave them sadistic, blank-eyed expressions.

The attic was brighter than the house, because large and narrow skylights admitted the colored hues of the festively-lit city, and the slanting rays of the moon.   In the middle of the blank, wooden floor was a shape covered with a tarp. The stranger handed me the candle, stepped over, and drew aside the tarp with a theatrical flourish, like a stage magician revealing his pretty assistant, alive and unchained. A cloud of dust flew up at the breeze, and it blew out the candle, so the dramatic effect was ruined.

I had no clear view of the machine. In the moonlight, and the flicker of changing Christmas lights from some nearby building taller than this house, I could see there was a small saddle or seat facing two levers connected to a rotating cylinder. The cylinder was connected by a mess of wires to a crystal bar that glinted strangely in the moonlight. This crystal formed the axis of the machine. My eyes could not focus properly on it. No matter how I moved my head, the inside reflections of the crystal bar seemed to be farther away than the body of the machine around it, as if it were not a crystal bar, but a crystal slot or well opening into unexpected depth. Behind the saddle was a large and upright copper disk, connected to a gearbox.

The whole arrangement looked something like a crystal-poled metal parasol lying on its side taking a ride on a sled, and the saddle straddled the pole, and the cylinder and levers formed an offcenter handle.

There were scrollwork and flourishes on the brass, a windrose on the copper disk, and little cherubic faces on the cylinder, which betrayed that this was made in the days when the machines were works of art, and machinists were magicians.

The stranger said, “Unfortunately, the dials are decimal. It is an oddity of the inventor. This dial indicates how many tens of days you have passed through; this one hundreds of days; thousands; tens of thousands. You will have to be clever in your calculations to know the month and the year of your arrival.”

“Or I could my just use my phone,” I said, giving him an odd look. I was sure someone, somewhere on the Internet had set up an application to calculate such things.

The stranger scowled and shrugged. “I am not familiar with such a … gizmo.” (There was no Latin word for “gizmo” of course, he just said the English word. If that is an English word.)

I said. “The book by H.G. Wells never gives the Time Traveler a name. You say he is real. Who is the inventor? Why is he not ruling the world?”

He threw out his chest and spoke in solemn tones. “The Time Traveler is Nikola Tesla. Anyone reading the book by Wells in that day and age would have recognized the man at once—part showman, part madman, all genius.

“The machine itself was built in Menlo Park some time during the 1870′s, with the help, and, to be blunt, despite the interference, of Thomas Alva Edison, who saw no practical use for it.

“In 1895, a man named George Scherff, Tesla’s legal and fiscal adviser, gave an account of Tesla’s voyage into the future into the hands of Mr. Wells to put it into publishable form, since the account would not have been believed as fact.

“The machine was thought lost in the great fire that destroyed Mr. Edison’s great factory in 1914. Mr. Tesla is not ruling the world because a Nazi agent killed him in 1943.”

I gave the stranger a frown. “How could a man as bright as Edison see no practical use for time travel? Anyone would see the advantage of being able to read tomorrow’s stock market results or racing form.”

“The machine did not perform well until it was taken to Scotland. America is a young nation.”

“What does that matter?”

The stranger said, “The machine works by a resonance effect. Think of time as a stream, but certain events are rocks in that stream, rocks that make eddies, ripples, echoes. This is why there is no need for you to physically move the machine to the cottage where your wedding night took place. Merely touching your wedding ring to the forward cylinder will attune the crystal. Your wedding ring is an object that carries time with it. Anything used as a memento is.”

I instinctively clasped my hand over my ring, as if to protect it. “It is just a bit of gold. There must be something else involved. Something more.”

He nodded. “Time will never be understood by any era which divides matter from psyche, and disbelieves in everything but matter. Is eternity not a psychic reality? Mind and body are one, even as time and space are one. Man alone of all the beasts fears the future and regrets the past. Tesla understood this. The machine cannot be operated by any man who is too perfectly satisfied with his own time. The time traveler must yearn for … ”

I had been standing with my back him, inspecting, as well as I could, the half-seen shapes and shadows of the machine. Now I turned, and the motion startled him, for he jumped back, putting his hand in his coat pocket as if there were a gun there.

I said, “So that is why you were hovering like a vulture over the graveyard…?”

He said, “Think of it as a privilege, Mr. Went. Not everyone can operate the machine. No everyone is allowed to try.”

“Allowed?”

He licked his lips. “There is a certain danger to the operation, of which, ah, perhaps it slipped my mind, and I failed to warn you.”

I uttered a sad, little laugh. “I just buried the only reason I had to live. What should I fear?”

“Well, in that case, there is no need to dwell on…”

“I am not afraid to hurt you if you don’t tell me what is going on.”

“Ah! Understandable.”

“Talk.”

“The time machine’s principles are not difficult to understand, and a working model is not difficult to build. It was, or will be, discovered again in 1968 by Dr. Ann McGregor and then again by Dr. Sam Beckett in 1999; then, after the Great Collapse, the Revisionists of the Second Era, and, when they have destroyed themselves, those horrible living machines of the Third Era, who attempted to undo the paradoxes and snarls their predecessors left behind them. The Nexxial Agents, who travel as amnesiacs, form the Fourth Era of Time Travel, and so on, age after age and civilization after civilization, up until the Danellians of the Final Era.”

“I meant, talk while making sense.”

“What do you not understand? If you touch the time machine, if you make any effort to use it, all the events which you will set in motion become, for you, actualized: a real possibility. The events springing from those possibilities become real. And this includes time travelers downstream of you, unhappy with your actions, who seek to revise them.”

“Revise how?”

“The simplest way, the least complex energy state, as it were, to prevent time paradoxes, is to kill the time traveler just before he starts.”

I said, “And so you’ve never touched the thing? You were afraid someone from the future would pop into existence next to you, and shoot you with a ray gun? Why not go back and prevent your parents from ever meeting? The fact that you are standing here now…”

He shook his head. “Men still have free will. Not until the moment I use the time machine have I stepped into the fourth dimension. They would have to stop me right at that moment. There are time-energy considerations involved.” He looked at the brass and copper machine and sighed. “Oh, I have polished it, replaced old wires, kept the jars charged. I have sat in the saddle and toyed with the levers, yes, and even powered up the solenoid and heard it hum. When I wanted to remember something I’d forgotten, for example. But—actually to attune the cylinder and engage the drive? No. I’ve never done that.”

I said, “But you don’t know me. What if I climb on that thing and just fly away? Become master of the world myself? Why take the risk?”

“I must see if it works.”

“What’s that mean? Must?”

He spread his hands. “Can I explain the agony of living with this thing in the attic so many years, unable to know whether the machine actually works or not? A machine I am afraid to touch? Perhaps everything I read was a lie. Perhaps it is merely a stage magician’s trick. I cannot live just on faith. I have to see it. Have to see it lift off.”

“So if I jump on this thing, this magic time travel machine, every time traveler from hereafter to eternity might come gunning for me? Fine. You picked me because you know how badly I need to see her again. See her alive, I mean. I’ll play along. But there is one condition.”

“What is that, Mr. Went?”

“Tell me your name.”

“It would mean nothing to you.”

“Tell me anyway. If the Time Cops arrest me, I won’t talk.”

“They will not arrest. They kill. It is Professor Pajo Mandic. I am descended from Tesla’s sister Milka.”

I turned again and threw my leg over the saddle. “You said the machine moves through space as well as time? Guided by what, again, exactly?”

Professor Mandic stepped behind the machine and turned a crank, so that the large copper disk behind the saddle started slowly rotating. He threw an old-fashioned double-throw switch and the crystal bar between my legs began to glow.

I wondered if my legs were wrapped around something radioactive, even though it was too late to worry about such things now. I also wondered when I had started to believe any of this might be real. But the fact that I was nervous that the antique contraption might blow up made the hope that it could carry me into yesterday seem possible.

Professor Mandic said, “Touch your ring to the axis of the cylinder, and engage the first lever. It controls how many days per second—subjective seconds—you will be in motion. The second lever controls how many degrees into the fourth dimension you will be rotated. The greater the angle, the less contact you have with the three dimensional world, and the less time, subjectively, your voyage will take. If you stay at less than forty-five degrees, you will see the sun like a ribbon of fire, and winter snow appear and disappear in eyeblinks and a vast panorama. If you find yourself suffering from motion sickness, use that leather sack there. The first time traveler discovered an odd yaw and pitch and sway which made him nauseous. Wait? What are you doing?”

Because it was not my wedding ring I touched to the cylinder then. It was my crucifix.

If I could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would I go see? I had only this one opportunity. Yes, I wanted to see my wife again. I would have given anything to see her again. It would be like an amputee regaining his lost right arm once again.

But there was someone I wanted to see more. I wanted an explanation.

I landed, or materialized, or whatever the word is, at the foot of a cross on which a man hung dying.

The sun was beating down and the flies were crawling on this man, and he cried out when he saw me, such a cry of hopeless pain as I had never heard. Immediately I leaped from the machine, and went to him, so see if there was any way I could get him down without hurting him further. He croaked at me, a word I did not understand.

The nails were not driven through the palms of his hands, as it is depicted in religious art, but right through the middle of his forearm, between the radius and the ulna, which looked even more painful. Other spikes had been driven into and through his lower legs, between the tibia and fibula.

He was also naked, which is also not the way religious art depicts it. I could see the insects crawling through his pubic hair. He did not have a free hand to scratch them or pluck them away.

Only then I noticed he was not alone. There were many more than two hanging to either side of him. The man to his immediate left had died, and hung there, withered like a mummy in the sun.

Perhaps I was still queasy from the gyrating motions of the time machine, or the sudden change from cool night to scalding day, but the sight of so many naked men, all dying, all with bloodstains drooling down their arms and legs, all gasping for breath, and the stench of wounds crawling with flies, made me lightheaded. And some of the men had voided their bowels after being hung up, so smears of fecal matter hung down the base of the crosses or their legs.

Worst of all was the sound, the gasping, grating, harsh, horrible sound. It was all those men trying to breathe.

Not many people talk about how crucifixion works. It is one of the most painful, humiliating and lingering deaths ever invented by man. The victim is hung by his arms to put pressure on his ribcage so he cannot breathe. The exposure will eventually kill anyone strong enough, but, before that, the pressure of all the body’s weight hanging from the dislocated shoulders, after several hours, or days, weakens the same muscles in the chest used for drawing breath until you cannot breathe.

In order to take a breath, the agonized victim has to straighten his legs, which are also nailed by spikes to the cross, and this relieves the pressure for a moment, so he can draw in a ragged, gasping lungful of air. His lungs would fill with fluid. Then, eventually, his legs lose strength, and ever so slowly, ever so painfully, he chokes. The lucky ones die of shock and exposure.

I stepped around to the back of the cross, not because I had any thought in mind, but only because I saw no way to get him down from the front. The splinters were driven into his buttocks and back, which was red, raw, and bleeding. The spikes did protrude through the wood, but I did not have any carpenter’s tools.  I pushed at the red point of one spike with my fingers, not because it could do any good, but only because I could not stand by and do nothing.

I looked left and right. There were about twenty-four or thirty men nailed there, all told. Some were children no older than fourteen. Some were graybeards, and they were dead and crows were eating their eyes with stabbing motions of their beaks that looked perversely like kissing. Perhaps some of the others, if they had been flown by helicopter to modern emergency rooms immediately, could have been saved, perhaps after amputation, and being given artificial limbs.

“Hoy! Get away from there!” This was in Greek, which I did understand.

I looked to the left. I saw a group of dull-faced children, bellies bloated with malnutrition, throwing stones at one of the crucified men, whose eyes had been torn out by birds, hitting him in the crotch and belly, grinning little dull-eyed gap-mouthed grins when he moaned and thrashed. They scattered at the voice.

The voice came from a little ways beyond them. A man in the iron cap and leathern skirt of the Romans was standing near a fire of coals, warming some snack on a stick, with an open flask nearby. I remember how impressed I was that, in a place like this, smelling like this, he could eat his picnic luncheon at leisure.  A friend of mine who used to work in the morgue could just eat his ham sandwich next to a ripe and newly sawed-open corpse like that. People get used to things; including things they shouldn’t.

There was a second soldier with him, but that man was lying down, having propped his shield up with his spear to form an impromptu parasol, and had his head in the shade.

The soldier slowly picked up his javelin (a four-foot length of wood and iron with a wicked tip) and slung across his shoulder his eight-sided shield set with a lightning-bolt motif. “All traitors’ bodies are property of Rome.”

At this, the other men hanging to the left and right now stirred and began crying out, some in tongues I did not understand, others in Greek and Latin.

They were crying for water.

I remembered reading somewhere that starving men lose their sensation of hunger after a while, but men dying of thirst merely get more thirsty and more as they die.

The mummified man I had thought was dead now stirred to life and called out to the soldier in Latin, “Break my legs, break my legs! Die! Let me die! The land of shadows!”

They were calling for the soldier, their tormentor, for water, or for a merciful death, not to me.

The soldier was now close enough to prod me with the butt of his spear, which was a lump of lead the size of a child’s fist. “Is your head in the air? No gathering the blood, necromancer! We don’t allow black magic. You barbarians are civilized now!”

Even he did not assume I was looking for a way to help the dying man.

I said to the soldier, “I am a stranger here, and have lost my way…”

That is about as far as I got when he stepped close to me, too close, so I could smell the fish and alcohol on his breath, and he backhanded me across the face hard enough to knock me down.

My Latin classes had not studied First Century swearwords, so there was a lot in what he said next I did not follow. But I got the gist. “Is this the way you talk to your betters? I march under the arms of Rome, cur. My children will be citizens. Don’t lift your eyes to me.”

I started crawling backward, inching toward the time machine, but he stepped forward and placed the iron sole of his marching sandal on my hand, driving it into the warm, bloodstained stones of the execution ground, pinning me in place.

“What? Don’t you respect the law?” he said. “I did not give you leave to go!”

“I lost my way, sir,” I said.

Only now did he seem to take in my clothing. “I’ll say. What are you? A Saxon? A Scythian?” He stared at the machine. “Your cart seems to have lost its wheels.”

I did not raise my eyes, not wanted to be beaten again, but reviling myself for being a coward.

“Robbers,” I said, “They took my horse, too.” It is hard to know a man’s mood if you are afraid to look him in the face. That makes it risky to lie, because you cannot gauge his reactions.

“Horse?”

“Donkey,” I corrected. Horses were creatures of war, not used for other purposes. This was before the invention of the horse collar. The plough-horse was a thing of the future. Slaves ploughed the fields.

“Why didn’t they take your—what is this?” He was no longer stepping on my hand, but had strolled over to the machine. “This big copper disk?”

“It is for astrology. To read the stars.”

“Ah? You tell fortunes?” He raised his voice and called out to the other soldier. “Hoy! Cratus! Come find out if your wife is whoring around on you! There is a soothsayer!” The other soldier grunted a word I did not know, probably some swearword.

“If I may be permitted, sir,” I said, “I can show you the secret. May I rise?”

He was curious, and waved me over to the machine, and he did not stop me as I slowly seated myself on the saddle. I had never opened the double throw switch, so I need only tap the handle once, clicking the second wheel over, and this put ten days between us.

This time, it was raining, and there were still crosses along the roadside, but no one was occupying them. My landing startled a pack of dogs snuffling at the foot of one, where perhaps some meat had pealed away from a previous use, and they ran off yelping.

The time machine did not have an umbrella or hood, and I wondered how well the works would stand up to being rained on. I squinted at the dials, and added up days by the tens and hundreds, and arrived at a figure, was sure I had made a mistake, and then checked it again.

I had not arrived in 33 AD, the date I expected the memento of the crucifix to land me. I am not sure if I had counted correctly, or added leapyear days correctly, or remembered the date when the Julian calendar switched to the Gregorian. I had landed in 3 or 4 BC—the nativity.

I could see, despite the rain, that the country around here was pockmarked with small caves. I picked the nearest one, and began hauling the machine toward it on its skids, seeking a place to hide it. After about an hour of sloshing through the rain, and, later sweating in the sun (for the shower was brief) I had a bright idea, walked to the cave, looked around, picked up a small chip of rock, walked back to the machine, sat on it, held the rock to the cylinder axis, and tapped the lever lightly.

The world blinked, and I was in the cave. I returned the wheels to their original setting, worked the lever again, and poked my head carefully out of the cave, and heard myself talking to the soldier a hundred yards or so away. I pulled some dry bushes in front of the cave mouth, and walked parallel to the road for some time, afraid being seen by any soldiers, and horrified by the nightmarish line of torture victims dying in the sun.

Eventually, I passed the last occupied cross. Not many minutes’ walk after that, I came across a line of people walking the road, some driving laden donkeys. They were not dressed as colorfully as one might expect from a Hollywood costume drama, and no one there even came up to my shoulder height. I am not sure how odd my clothing looked, in dark trousers and a white shirt (I had removed my coat and tie, leaving them in with the cave with the machine), but no one gave me any close looks as I simply started walking alongside.

I tried once or twice to start a conversation with my fellow wayfarers, first in Latin, then in Greek. No women would talk to me at all, but pulled their shawls in front of their faces and turned away. The men flinched, and mumbled something apologetic in tone, and cast their eyes down, and would not answer more than that.

Something in the footweary way they shuffled, the way they kept their eyes down, reminded me of photos I seen in various war torn times and places.  These people looked like refugees.

At one point, we all walked past something that looked something an energetic troop of Boy Scouts had made: tall poles lashed together with line, with a small platform topmost. I almost did not recognize it as a watchtower, until I saw the eagle on a pole above it: the all-conquering eagle of Rome.

At the foot of the watchtower, two soldiers were beating a man and taking his donkey, which was a young, healthy animal. They threw his bundle off its back into the dirt, and drove him back with blows from the butts of their lances. They led the young donkey away, laughing at their good fortune, to a paddock that had that same Boy Scout precision lashed-together-expertly look as the watchtower.

I should mention the clothing and gear of the Romans was handmade (of course) like that of the natives, but it looked as if it were handmade by better hands. It made them look like a superior race of beings, and that superiority showed in their voices and postures and the light in their eyes. It was the immense confidence, no, the pride that comes from knowing you can trample another man’s face, and tell him to kiss the sole of your boot. And he would.

Not refugees. I did not recognize what was I was seeing because, well, frankly, no one has ever conquered Kansas City, or hung up rebels on trees by the roadside to die slowly in the sun with spikes through their forearms and thighs.

They were a conquered people.

All the hope had been beaten out of them. The conquerors simply and methodically killed anyone who caused them trouble, anyone who showed too much leadership, too much initiative.  They killed the hopeful ones.

A trio of small raggedy children now darted out of the crowd of the road, and made as if to snatch the bundles and fallen belongings of the beaten man. His head was bloody, and maybe he was dazed, and he did nothing to stop them. I ran forward, shouting, slapped the biggest child, the pack leader,  across the back of his head hard enough to make him drop his loot—it was a crudely woven cloak or bedroll, nothing more—and the other urchins screamed like birds and fled. I put the bedroll back with the pile. The pile was more than one man could carry, which was why he had been using a donkey.

He stood there looking at me with big eyes. I saw the look in his face, the empty, wary look. He was expecting me to pick up some choice possession and make off with it. He thought I was a lion beating off jackals, not someone trying to save the deer.

Instead I passed him my handkerchief.  I motioned to his head. I pantomimed daubing the wound.

He said something, in a dull, dazed tone.

I said, “Do you speak Greek?” I actually used the word koine which I remember was the word for common Attic.

In the same tongue, he whispered, “Beware. They watch.”

It was true. The Roman soldiers were looking at me with flat, cold-eyed stares. They probably did not like my height, and my straw-colored hair. It is not my fault I was raised in Kansas. We have to be tall enough to see over the cornrows.

“Let’s get back with the others,” I said. “I’ll help carry the load.”

He looked a little stunned. Maybe he was surprised, or maybe he was actually stunned from the blow to his head. He tied the bundles together neatly and quickly with a rope, and I took the larger of the two and slung it across my shoulder.

We stepped back on the road, and the people near us quickened the pace, or slowed, to give us a wide berth.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Why didn’t anyone else give you a hand?”

He looked confused. “Hand?”

Idioms don’t translate that well. “Help. Aid.”

He grunted philosophically. “They are Sons of Israel, whose false temple is Jerusalem. The true temple was at Gerizim. It was destroyed by Yohanan Girhan called Hyrcanus a hundred winters ago, and now the Holy One wanders the Earth without a home.”

Now it was my turn to look confused. This did not refer to anything I knew from history books or Bible stories. “What, ah, is your kindred?” I used the word genus, which is vaguer, and could mean anything from race to nation to species.

“Ah! I am the son of Sahir, of the sons of Pincus, of the line of Issachar. And how should this servant address his master?”

I was not used to Middle Eastern exaggerations of politeness, so it took me a moment to realize he was asking my name.

“Jonathon, son of Jacob,” I said. It seemed odd to me that, though I was born in a hemisphere not discovered yet, three millennia away, my name and the name of my father sounded normal here. “At your service, sir.” I finished, and realized that his form of courtesy was not so alien after all.

We shook hands. Or rather, when I extended my hand, he wrapped his fingers around my wrist, which was almost the same.

“Why do you walk the road?” He asked.

“I am lost.”

“You must be very lost,” he said wryly.

“I am seeking Bethlehem of Judea,” I said.

“You mean ‘Bethlehem’—” my ear could detect no difference of pronunciation. “It is but a short walk hence. This is the road. Where are you from?” He was looking at my blond hair.

“I am from the farthest north.”

“I have heard of your land! No wonder your hands are softer than a woman’s. It is so peaceful there, so unwarlike, that men kill themselves out of boredom, merely to idle away the time! Yes? I thought Farthestnorth just a story.” He had heard me as if I had said Farthest North as one word, which, in Greek, was Hyperborea.

I grunted, thinking of deaths from drunk drivers and drug overdoses and heart disease caused by obesity. Indirectly, these were all forms of suicide by self-indulgence, which was another word for boredom. “Strange as it sounds, there could be some truth to that story.”

“I am northern, but not so far as Hyperborea. That is why the sons of Israel were pleased to see the Romans fall on me. They walk apart from us, so that any watching Romans know we are easy prey.”

“That is cowardly,” I said. But anger was mingled with pity when I said it. I was from a nation that had never been conquered, dropped down in the middle of a land that had been conquered by practically everyone.

Ben Sahir assumed a wry, philosophical expression. “If it lets them move along the roads without being robbed, who can say a dark word of them? We treat these Jewish swine the same when they are in Shomron.”

Now I understood. “You are a Samaritan! Are you good?”

“Ah. None is good save God alone. When the Romans savage the sons of Israel who walk our roads, we stand aside and look on. Better them than us. And what else can we do? When you fight the Romans, these trees grow fruit.” He nodded at a group of bloodstained and offal-stained crosses topping the rise by the roadside ahead. There were ten crosses together, empty at the moment. But the number of crows hovering in the air, and walking proudly along the ground, fearless of man, was ominous.

“Men should not treat each other so,” I said.

“As for that, it will be the way the world is until the he comes, the Christ.”

That last almost made me stumble. “What do you know of the Christ?”

He rolled his eyes. “Is that not the word in Greek? We call him Messiah.”

“That is the word. What do they say of him?”

“Those who count the generations say the world enters a new age soon.”

“What does that mean? Count the generations?”

“Count the years to the new age. From Father Abraham to David the King fourteen generations, and from King David to the Babylonian Exile fourteen, and it has been fourteen generations since then, so as history waxes and wanes like the moon, the time of waxing is nigh, and the Messiah will be born. He will smite the Romans and the heretical Southerners, and rebuild the one true Temple at Gerizim. The greatest conqueror of all time! But—” Ben Sahir shrugged. “Those who count the generations also said the Messiah was due three generations ago, but then others said we should omit Ochoziah, Joas, and Amasiah from the king lists, because of their wickedness, and God adds another generation of waiting for every evil generation. You know how astrologers argue. We wait, and they give a date, and it rolls by, and nothing changes, and the Romans hang out more fruit for the crows to eat. I will believe in the Messiah when I see him with these eyes, not before.”

“You think he is coming to throw out the Romans? Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough? No human power can defeat them. Should we hope for something even greater? Not just to restore our kingdom, but also to conquer theirs? Ah! Strange and wondrous indeed if all the Roman world bent the knee and served the God of Abraham! But that will never happen. Never.”

“Don’t be so sure…” I muttered.

“Be that as it may,” said ben Sahir, “My father says the Greeks were worse than the Romans. The Greeks did not enforce their own laws. And they use slaveboys for girls.”

“Uh? Greeks here?”

“You must be from very far north. It was only fifty or sixty years ago. Hyrcanus and Aristobulus fought for the throne when the Queen died, and Pompey the Great aided Hyrcanus, and the rule passed to the Herodians, and Romans, who came as guests, did not leave, but stayed as masters. And it is not as if all the Greeks living here suddenly vanished, or went home.

“Before that, it was Alexander the Great,” he said. He had a little quirk of a smile, but the voice that came from it was infinitely weary. “Before that, Cyrus the Great. And before that, Nebuchadnezzar the Great. All the great man of history march through our land to step on us.

“There is rebellion in the air,” he continued. “The Romans can smell it. They have conquered everyone, so they know the smell of mutiny growing ripe. Why do you think they declared tax gathering time? Never before have we been ordered to march the roads to the houses of our fathers and pay the tax there. It is not Roman law. Come, you are learned man, I can tell from your outlandish accent! You make the mistakes learned men make, you learn the language from books. Why do you think they are taxing us this way, now, at this time? Forcing everyone out of hearth and home?”

I shook my head. I was already sorry I had volunteered to carry his load. The sun was declining to the west, and it was cooler now, but my legs were aching and blisters were developing. What I would have given for a bottle of insect repellant! None of the short and wiry people around me seemed to be having trouble. Call it the soft living of the Hyperboreans. I was too out of breath to ask.

“You might think it was to scatter any whispering groups of young men daydreaming of the days of Maccabaeus,” he said. “I think it is to show us. To show us we are whipped dogs. To show us they could march us to Egypt, if they wished, or off the edge of the world.”

After that, I had no more breath for talking, and we trudged on in silence.

Ben Sahir’s ‘short walk’ turned out to be almost more than my aching legs could carry me.

As we neared the village, the Romans had more corpses on display, but these must have been of people of a higher class than traitors and slaves, because instead of crucifixion, they were severed heads hanging by their hair from the wooden poles of a small fortress surrounded by a ditch outside the town. The fortress had a distinctly Old West look to it, which I did not expect, being made of sharpened logs set upright, with a dry-moat around it.

It was called a village, but it had at one time been larger, because I could see the ruins of walls half toppled over, and naked gate posts with no gate, but with an ox yoke lashed across the top. The huts and hovels, some of stone, some of mud, some (to my surprise) of timber, occupied less than one fourth of the land inside the crumbled line of the ruined walls.

I should mention the climate was not what I expected. Perhaps I had seen too many Hollywood Biblical dramas, and so I was thinking everyone would be dressed in burnooses, and the land be desert. They were dressed more like Greeks, in tunics and cloaks. I was surprised at the number and size of the trees, and size of the fields both cultivated and fallow. Maybe it was a climate cycle, or maybe the Romans would cut down all the trees one day soon to make more crucifixes, but at the moment, there were trees, and many houses were timber. The rooftops were flat, and many had little tents or sails on the top of them. I was not sure what they were used for.

Ben Sahir parted ways with me, explaining that, if I ate pork, I could not stay at the same Inn with “clean” people.

But he gave me a few coins, and pointed at a large house done in a clearly Greek style, as if it had been yanked up from Athens and dropped down here, with decorative amphorae and statues of gods and goddesses on the roof eaves.

There were before the doors also stones decorated with gods with wings for ears at the ground level, but these had been defaced by some vandal. Or maybe it was an art critic, because I saw the broken stone penises, large and erect, which the vandals had hammered away from the stone. There was a wooden sign nearby with two severed hands, a left and a right, nailed to it, and some inscription in Latin and Greek and Aramaic I was too weary to puzzle out. Probably a pragmatic Roman epigram on keeping one’s art criticisms to oneself.

Something in the sight of the careful craftmanship of the obscene statues  seemed to me to be as grotesque and inhuman as the sights of torture and conquest, but on a subtler level. What kind of world would adore as sacred such demeaning images, and maim and kill to preserve them?

I stepped into the common room, which was crowded, practically packed shoulder to shoulder, but everyone stepped out of my way when I approached a man standing on a chair, whom I took to be the landlord here.

He was arguing and cursing with knot of bellowing men around him, or perhaps it was an impromptu auction, because all the men were waving fistfuls of money, or something that looked like necklaces of beads, small coppery nuggets of uniform size. I did not know anyplace from history books in this quarter of the world that used beads for money, but maybe some things slipped through the cracks of history, or were not written down, or not remembered.

For some reason, the shouting fell silent when I walked up. Maybe they thought I was a giant. I mentioned before how no one here was as tall as my shoulder, and some were shorter than my elbow. Also, while I was not exactly stout, I was certainly well fed, and so I was broader than everyone here.

I showed the landlord the coins ben Sahir had given me. I had no idea of their value. “Don’t tell me, let me guess.” I said, “There is no room in the Inn. Do you have a stable out back, where you put little kids with glowing halos? Or shepherds who hear voices from heaven, and three wise men from the East?”

He said, “There is room for you, stranger. For strangers like you. We have a room set aside.” He whistled, and a little kid with straight black hair that gleamed as if oiled can trotting out of a short door leading to some sort of enclosed yard where they were cooking a fatted calf over an open pit. (I should mention all the doors were short, and I barked my head on the ceiling beams more than once.)

The kid wore a dirty smock and an iron ring around his neck. The bellhop (or slaveboy, or I suppose I should say) did not look me in the eye, but beckoned, and I followed, and he led me across the courtyard—in this style of building, all the windows face inward, toward a common courtyard, and there are no windows in the outer walls to tempt robbers. Of course, a really motivated robber could just shoulder his way through the walls, which were thin boards roughly cut, daubed with just enough plaster to keep out the wind. Stupid as it sounds, I kept being surprised at how rude and handmade everything looked.

The bellhop showed me to a room the size of a closet, which stank with the rich, ripe odor of the many previous inhabitants, and pointed to a straw mat crawling with lice. The room was also equipped an ewer of water (unless that was the chamber pot—the water was not purified nor chlorinated).

“Presidential suite, eh?” I said to myself in English. I showed the bellhop the coins which the landlord had not taken. In Greek I said, “Do I pay now? Pay later?”

He spoke to me in English. His accent was odd, clipped, almost as if he were used to speaking at a much faster rhythm of syllables.  “The natives deem it bad luck to take money from time travelers.”

I spun on him and made to grab him by the throat. But his metal collar made a loud popping noise, I got a shock to my hand and arm like I had grabbed an electric eel. I stumbled backward and sat down heavily, breathing deeply and hoping the dancing black spots in my eyesight would not overwhelm me.

The little noises from the rooms to either side, voice and motions, fell silent, as if the Inn were holding its breath.

“You are late Twentieth Century, or Early Twenty-First.” The kid said in his flat, strangely-accented voice. “Wristwatches and telephonics of that design were not made after the Endarkening. And you have made several temporal disturbances which no one, not even a Revisionist of the Second Age would have made. You are a pre-Nebogipfel chrononaut. A rare find!”

I realized that the people in the room to either side were not holding their breath, or, at least, not willingly. The silence was deeper. I could see over his shoulder where the cookpit in the courtyard was. The reflections of the flames on the wall should have been leaping. Instead, they were frozen. Little bugs in their clouds were as still as a photograph. Someone had hit the pause button on the video tape of the universe.

“Who are you?” I managed to say.

“I am a mote of the Cosmic Sculpture of the Sixth Era of Time Travel.”

“So, everyone in that common room knew I was a time traveler?”

“Of course. Bethlehem, at the time of the retrograde motion of Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction? This is the most thickly investigated spot of all history. But no one has ever found and killed a chrononaut of your early strata.”

“Killed? Wait a minute! I have not done anything to you—”

“Have you not?” And now the flat, unemotional accent, if anything, grew even flatter and more monotone, and the kid’s eyes, which suddenly looked very old and very wise indeed, bored into mine. “The man whose burdens you carried was fated to be helped by someone coming a moment later down the road, whose daughter, by that happenstance, he would met and wed, from whose bloodline sages and sacerdotes would spring, and military leaders, including the founders of an Antarctic Republic in the Forty-Second Century, after the time of the Great Thaw, and the discoveries of polar zodiacal energy will enable the founding of colonies on other worlds. All of this you obliterated with your thoughtless blundering. Millions of lives have been lost, or changed. You have no instruments for detecting temporal potential! You do not know who is important, and who is not, who is crucial to history, and who is not.”

With this, be pulled the collar off his neck, so he held a C-shaped bend of metal, looking like a horseshoe magnet. He pointed the ends at me. “You, for example, have no potential at all. You will never return to your life, and have no effect on history. Therefore nothing remains but to…”

The room was no bigger than a closet, and mote-boy, Cosmic or not, was no taller than my waist. I made a lunge for him, grabbed him by both arms, and smashed his head into the walls. To my surprise, it worked. I was sure he would zap me with some hidden superweapon if I moved. To my bigger surprise, the wall broke instead of the kid’s head. The boards were thin and the plaster, or maybe it was mud, was less than a half-inch thick. His head went all the way threw up to the neck.

The biggest surprise of all was when I yanked him back inside, and realize I was holding a dead body. The top of his skull had been burned away, his face blackened, as if his head had been thrust into a lightningbolt. I could smell cooked brains. This was not something shoving your skull through a thin board could do.

The pause button on the universe unpaused. Firelight in the distance started flickering, and noise of man and bird and beast started up again with a roar. I grasped the semicircle of folding metal the kid had been wearing as a necklace, thinking there was a gun in it, some futuristic laser gizmo which had accidentally gone off. But there was no button, no trigger, no muzzle, nothing I could see.

But I heard a noise in the air above. It sounded like something larger than bird, moving. I stuck my head through the hole—not the first stupid and impulsive thing I’d done that day— I saw only a shadow. It was manlike, but larger than a man, and held a long wand or tube in its hands, disappearing into the clouds of sunset. It seemed to be riding a horse, or perhaps a flying motorbike. Even as I saw the figure, I was not sure if it had not been a trick of my eyes, a shape in the cloud. Another time traveler, from some era after the Sixth? Someone who did not like the way these events turned out?

Professor Mandic had mentioned that, in order to avoid paradoxes, or minimize them, the time travelers would wait to the last minute. That meant something was happening now that the Mote kid had been trying to stop.

It was then that I heard singing. They were not the Mormon Tabernacle choir, but they were better than an average dozen men from my time would have been, because we only sing on Sundays, if that. Whenever we want song, we don’t have to do it for ourselves, we snap on a radio. Even people from my grandmother’s day were all better singers (so she had insisted once) then the folks of my generation.

Whoever they were, that choir, that was the event Mote kid did not want me to hear. But now I found that I was in the ridiculous situation of being held like a prisoner in the stocks. The splinters of the wood I had shoved my head through were now snug around my jaw and ears, and I could not draw my head back without impaling wooden points into my jugular. It was like I had stuck my head through a fish trap.

On second thought, I did not want to go back and explain to the landlord about the bellhop whose skull had been blasted in half lying in my room. And I could already hear noises behind me. I figured I had less than a moment before people without modern man’s ideas of privacy peered into see the source of the meat-smell.

So I just straighten my legs and pounded with my fists and broke my way through the rest of the wall. I did not pay attention to any noise behind me, but I just kept going. I ran.

The streets of the village were narrower and even more crooked than when I had been prowling the alleys of Rome. I kept turning toward the singing.

I smelled them before I saw them. Shepherds. They were even more ragged and work-worn than the people I had seen on the road, or in the Inn. Their hair and beards were long and lank, as if they had never known soap or shears. None of them had anything better woven than poncho-like rough cloak to wear, or a dirty loincloth. But they had sticks in their hands with crooks at one end, or some sort of hook or loop of leather, for drawing lambs back, same as Little Bo Peep. Some things don’t change with time.

I must have startled them when I blundered suddenly into their midst in the narrow street. But these men did not flinch or draw back or slap my face or step on my hand. They were all smiles and cheers like they were happy to see me.

I spoke to them in Greek, and then in Latin. I don’t remember clearly what I said. It might not have been very coherent. I doubt these simple hill-folk, the yokels of First Century Palestine, understood the tongues of their conquerors. But of course they knew what I wanted. I wanted to know why they were singing. What was the news? What was going on? You don’t need language to understand this. You just need to be human.

One of them, thinner and more careworn than the rest, blind in one milky-white eye and with ugly growths  on his cheek and neck took me by the hand and led me back the way the others had just been coming.

It was a little ways outside the town. We just stepped through a low spot in the toppled wall, where the growing grass had already made a green path like a stile. He pointed at a cave.

“I am looking for a stable,” I said. “A stable with a baby in the manger! And a big honking star sitting right on top of it! Where three kings of Orient are. Maybe a little drummer boy, too.”

The shepherd just pointed again at the cave. Now, in the gloom (for the sun sank rapidly at this latitude) I saw a flicker of butter-yellow light, like a reflection from the smallest lamp, somewhere in the depth of that cave.

The shepherd gave me a little shove, and went back, grinning. As he skipped off, he raised in voice in song, his hands over his head, twitching left and right with the rhythm. I could not understand a word of it, but I could hear his whole heart was in it. I could hear the gratitude.

As I got closer, I saw there was trampled earth around the cave mouth. I could smell the smell of dung. Then, I heard the lowing of cows, the bleating of sheep.

The stable was in a cave. Who puts a stable in a cave? On the other hand, considering how flimsy the last wall was I broke through, maybe it was not a bad idea.

There was a man standing, leaning on a tall staff, in the shadow to one side of the cave mouth. He was bald on top, but with ringlets of silvery white hair reaching from his ears to his shoulders. A beard as white as snow reached nearly to his sash. His robe was finely made, especially in contrast to what the grimy, half-naked shepherds had been wearing, bold pattern of blue and scarlet stripes, with threads of purple running through it.

He looked up as I approached, and his eyes were so noble and stern that I thought I was looking at some wise king out of a storybook; but they were so sad and kind that, if it had been a storybook, it was a story about a king long banished from his home, a prince whose forefathers in their pride and folly had been toppled from the throne that he would never see. The land under his feet, which was his by right to rule, he walked through as a stranger and an exile.

My mouth was dry.

“I want to see the child,” I said. I said it in Greek. And when he merely looked at me, motionless, silent, sad, and stern, something welled up in my heart I cannot explain, and tears came into my eyes, and I sank down to my knees.

“Please, sir,” I said in Latin. “I need to know. She’s dead. I need to know there is a reason. I need to know there is a hope. I have to see the child. That he is not just a story—a lie. A lie. Everyone says it’s a lie.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, and leaned and kissed me, which I thought was a little gross, and wiped my tears off with his thumb, and pulled me to my feet. But then he tapped the heel of his staff against my shoes, first the left, and then the right, and he nodded, making a little gesture with his eyebrows.

“Oh!” I said. “Like the Japanese, are you? No shoes in the house?”

He nodded. I slipped my shoes off.

He made a wide sweep of his arm, like a king throwing open the doors to a palace for a visiting dignitary, and motioned me to enter what was, after all, a stinking stable.

The ground was cold underfoot, and there was straw and quite a bit of dung, and I wished the light were better so I would see what I was stepping into. Well, sometimes you have to walk without seeing.

In the distance, there was a little light of a brass oil lamp, the kind Aladdin rubs to get a genii, shedding less light than my phone gives off when I pull it out of my pocket to check the time. There was darkness between here and the lamp.

Why he trusted me, a giant stranger whose language he did not speak, to be alone with his wife who had just given birth, that I cannot guess. I barked my head once or twice, so by the time I came to the small flickering circle of lamplight, I was bent and holding my skull. Because I had just stuck my head through a broken wall not fifteen minutes ago, it was covered with dust.

I am sure the young girl thought I was bowing, or had poured dirt in my hair to show grief or repentance, or something.

She was sitting on the ground, and there was at least three other people with her. The closest to the lamp was a smiling and crooked old crone to which the little girl spoke a word that was, even though gently said, was unmistakably a command.

Again, I was surprised. There was, of course, no reason to assume Mary and Joseph traveled alone in this day and age, or did not have servants. In my grandmother’s time even she, who was by no means a rich woman, had hired help come by on washing days and to help with the spring cleaning, and my grandfather had hands for the farm.

The girl was very young. Maybe she was sixteen, or maybe she was fourteen. I suppose in the ancient world, anyone above thirteen was considered an adult. Considering the life expectancy, maybe sixteen was middle aged.

To be honest, I was appalled at how young she was. Who marries a girl at that age? And travel while pregnant? Who makes her bear such burdens?

She rose gracefully to her feet, holding the babe in one arm, cradled against her naked breast. I did not think it was a good idea to stare at a sixteen year old girl’s naked breasts, so I tried to keep my eyes down, but with her free hand she touched my cheek and wiped the dust from my hair, and made me to stand up straight.

There were calluses on her fingertips. Women who do a lot of weaving get them, from pulling the threads in the same way, over and over. Young as she was, she had already seen her share of work. Despite that they had servants, these were not rich people.  And I suppose even rich women in these days wove.

I wish I could tell you how pretty she was. Her eyes were calm as a sea which had never known a storm, never felt the slightest wind, but were clear and blue deep into infinite deeps. It was like looking at the crystal bar of the time machine, as if they opened into another dimension. It was like—how can I put this?—as if I were Tarzan or Mowgli, and had been raised by apes or wolves, seeing a real human being, a normal human being, a woman who looked just the way women were designed from the beginning to look, seeing for the first time.

I said something then. I don’t remember what. It must have been asking to see the baby, who was, by the way, very energetically suckling, his little jaw moving as tirelessly as a machine.

The bent old crone came forward with a bowl of water, and offered it to me. I reached to take it, but she poured it over my hands, and then wiped my hands with the hem of her shawl before I could stop her. Then she knelt and splashed my feet, and wiped them likewise. I realized then that not all the water in this land stank. It was just that room at the Inn they had not bothered drawing fresh water from the well.

Another servant, this one a wall-eyed old man in dire need of dental surgery, offered the girl a small clay cup, which she passed to me with her free hand. The final servant, a man with a whip-scarred face whose ears were cropped handed the girl something that looked like a stone. She put it to her mouth and tore it in half with her teeth, offering me half. It was sourdough bread. I drank the wine and ate the bread, grateful for the hospitality of the Middle East.

The wine of this day and age had a grimy residuum at the bottom of the cup, looking all the world like tea leaves in an old fashioned cup of tea. I started to toss the dregs of the wine away, but the girl put her small hand on my hand and made me drink the whole thing. Not daring to offend the custom of hospitality, I drained the cup to the lees. Then the earless man took the cup away.

Without a word, she handed me the child.

I wish I could say newborn babies are cute. No, they are cute after a few weeks. He was still red from birth, and wrinkled like a lizard. The umbilicus had been cut off far from the navel, and tied with a red thread. In case you want to know, Jesus Christ is an outie, not an innie.

I have always wanted to have a child. I always wanted to hold a baby in my arms. I know most women love holding babies and few men do. I am one of those few. My wife, for reasons still painful to dwell on, could not have children. She had led a wild life as a teenager, and had aborted her firstborn, and the operation had had complications.  She had picked the name, Darrel, but her boyfriend of the time did not want to leave school or get a job.

Holding young life in my arms, so frail, and so precious, always seemed a miracle. I held him close, delighted with the warmth, the living weight in my hands. The stink of the animals was in my nostrils, but the warmth shed by all the animals made the cave like an incubator. I was already blinking, trying to keep the sweat on my brow from getting in my eyes. It stung, and I my eyes swam with tears. I was wondering why in the world any mother would hand me her child to hold.

The girl looked at my face and spoke in Aramaic to the scarred man. He bowed to me and spoke in Greek, “I am Ehved son of Emeth. My lady greets you and says Peace to you. This is Mariam daughter of Joachim son of Eli son of Levi and Anna daughter of Phanuel the High Priest.”

“Ah. Peace. Peace to you and to your lady. I am Jonathan son of Jacob.”

She spoke again. Her voice was like music.

“She says the child is the son of David. He is the king. The king belongs to the people. Whose arms should uphold the king, if the people will not hold him?”

She must have seen the look of surprise on my face when she handed him to me. Or maybe she could read minds. I had been riding a time machine this afternoon, and almost killed by a time traveler, so I was not sure what to believe.

The baby reached out and grabbed the crucifix hanging on a fine chain around my neck, and tried to put it in his mouth. My hand twitched, because I was torn between the need to get the choking hazard away from baby, but also to support the baby’s head, and I did not have three hands.

The girl must have seen the look of male panic on my face, because she reached up with her small hands and neatly plucked the crucifix from the tiny red fist and hungry little mouth.

The girl inspected the crucifix with a wide-eyed stare, tilting it to catch the lamplight. She said something in Aramaic. Her tone was one of innocent wonder, delight at finding a strange mystery.

The scar-faced man said, “My lady wishes to know what you are, and where you are from, that you would willingly carry an so finely crafted an image of the death by torment only slaves suffer so near your heart? It is an abomination. In what land are such things made?”

The baby in my arms was so fragile. The girl seemed so happy, so serene. I could not say anything.

She spoke again. Ben Emeth said, “He that is hanged on a tree is accursed.”

“No,” I said.

Ben Emeth looked offended. “What do you mean, no? I cannot say this to my lady.”

I thought of my wife’s unborn child, who had never lived, and whom I have never seen, never held, and who had never been mine. There are men who are fulfilled even if they are never fathers. I am not one of them.

I was no longer blinking because sweat was stinging my eyes. Now I was weeping.

I had been seeing it, in my heart, over the grave. A boy I could hold. I would have helped change diapers, and bottle fed him, made sure the apartment was child safe, no pennies on the floor a baby could have put in his mouth. I would have bought the right kind of safety seat for the car, the kind made of lightweight spaceage material, with a basket that unhooks from the seat for ease of carrying. And a stroller. And taught him how to walk. I would have been home for his first word. I would have tickled him and made him giggle.

And, later, ah, later: baseball and cub scouts and boy scouts and first communion and first love and teaching him how to tie a bowtie and how to fold a flag and how to clean a rifle, and teaching him all the words to IMPOSSIBLE DREAM from MAN OF LA MANCHA. How to tell the truth. How to raise a child when his turn came. Everything. I would have taught him everything. Maybe he would grow up to be a doctor, and heal the sick and save their lives.

And if my son, the healer, if he got arrested for a crime he did not commit? I would have done anything, sold the car and the house to hire the best lawyers. And if he was bounced from one kangaroo court to the next, and witnesses got up and lied about him? I would keep hoping someone would give him justice. I would appeal. First to the Sanhedrin, then to Herod, then to Pontius Pilate. Someone would see he was innocent, that he had done no wrong.

But what if no one did? What if the politicians and the powerful people of the world, the priests and the princes and the conquerors decided to kill him? Would I keep hoping then?

“What do you mean, stranger?” said Ben Emeth again. Beneath his scars and the wrinkles of his age, I saw he had once been a handsome man, no doubt young and brave. He did not like people contradicting his mistress.

“I mean no.” I said. “In a time to come, there will be one, who, when he is hanged on a tree, he is not accursed. It will be a curse, but is a blessing. And after that, it will be a blessing for all men.”

The scarred man and the girl spoke in Aramaic. I could not understand the language, but her tone was curious and innocent, brave as a kitten who had never been hurt, and gentle, but gentle like a queen is gentle, who does not wish any hard word of hers to wound her loving and loyal servants. I had only ever heard politicians my whole life, never someone who loved and led a nation as a mother loves her child. There is something in such a voice you cannot mistake when you hear it, because there is nothing like it on Earth.

Ben Emeth turned to me. “My lady asks in what land is the pain and horror of crucifixion a blessing? She asks where are you from? Who are you?”

“I am…I am from … I am lost. My own lady is lost. Tell her my own lady, my very own, is lost.”

I have no idea what my face looked like, or what they were afraid I might do, but the girl very firmly and gently took the child from me, and then and there unwound the cloth she wore as a headscarf. This was linen, and was white and lined with blue.

She turned and put the tightly wrapped child into a little nest of hay in the feeding trough. She said something over her shoulder to me. Ben Emeth was behind me. “She says you will be comforted. One will come who will be your attorney, and speak the word.” The word he used was Greek: paraclete. The word for ‘word’ in Greek was logos.

She smiled over her shoulder, and busied herself tucking in the baby. He was asleep. Even as a baby, was he not divine? How could he not know what was going to happen to him when he grew up? How could he sleep like that?

I was wiping my eyes, feeling foolish, feeling full of wonder, feeling I know not what. I said, “Tell her she should sleep when the baby sleeps.” Ben Emeth translated the comment, and the crone laughed and the girl smiled.

The girl spoke a final time. Ben Emeth said, “Bow your knee, and the mother of the king will give you her blessing, since under the ancient law of David that is her right. You have come far to receive it, farther than the shepherd band. Ask of her with what blessing she shall bless you?”

I got down on one knee, and the kneecap of my pants leg landed right in a plopping of cow dropping hidden in the straw. I suddenly realized that everyone in this cave must be insane, including me. That baby was just a baby, puny, and red and weak. The world outside was a nightmare, a world ruled by sadists who worshiped obscene things, and even the Jews and Samaritans served God by slaughtering each other and slaughtering cows and sheep and turtledoves, a God too pure and remote to do anything, no matter what prayers were said, or how many cows were burnt.

No matter how many prayers you said when the tests came back positive. No matter what you said you would do or would not do, or how much faith you had. He did not listen. Not to you.

I was kneeling in a stinking stable in a cave. My face still hurt from where the Roman solider had slapped me that afternoon.

Nevertheless, I said, “Ask her to pray for me. Pray for me now, and at the hour of my death. I want to see my wife again. I want to hold her, be with her. And talk. I want everything made right.”

The girl stood up, and moved toward me with footsteps so smooth she seemed to be gliding. She put both hands on my head, and said something in her liquid tongue. I felt a flush at her touch, as if my hair were trying to stand up, and the sensation moved from my head down my spine like a warmth through my body. She again touched my chin and bade me to stand up. She smiled and gestured toward the cave mouth. The audience was over.

I turned once to look toward the child. The tiny oil lamp was behind and beneath the trough of hay where the baby slept, and the yellow light slanted through the wide, crude slats and caught the wisps of hay sticking up around his tiny head so that a circle of gold, like a crown of fire, hung there. If my eye had been an inch to the left or right, I would not have seen it. I blinked, and it was gone.

I walked away into the night.

In one hand, I had a fistful of straw that I was using to wipe at my knee, to get the clinging filth off, and then with the other hand I was wiping my face. And now I started to sob in earnest. I had come for answers. I had actually seen the Messiah, held him in my arms, something every Christian has probably wanted to do; but there was no answer for me.

What now? Find the machine, climb on, go back to a year when my wife was still alive? And then what? Knock that version of me over the head and replace him? Pile her on the machine, and find a time in the future when they could cure everyone of everything? Behind me was a little warm cave lit by a tiny light, where the cure for everyone and everything was supposed to be, it had not cured me.

And I had forgotten my shoes.

Feeling like a fool, I turned and walked back over the cold ground, but now it was completely dark, and the tiny glint of light from the oil lamp was gone. Frugal people did not waste oil at night. I could not see the cave mouth. After a few moments walking, I was sure I had gone too far, and now I turned again and went the other way, or what I thought was the other way, but all I found was a land of rocks and darkness where it became cold very quickly in the gloom.

I pulled out my phone and opened it, hoping to use the screen as a flashlight, but it had run out of power at some point. I could not remember the last time I’d recharged it. I had not prepared for a hike, or to go camping, or to go time traveling, and had not even brushed up on my ancient languages or brought a compass or anything. I had followed a crazy man in a top hat, the descendant of an equally crazy scientist, because I was half crazy myself that morning, alone by the grave. Not one of her family had come. Not one.

I stubbed a toe and stepped on a stinging insect at the same time. It was like a white-hot needled being plunged into my heel.

“Jesus Christ!” I shouted in English. Then, hoping God would not notice I had been swearing, I quickly said, “Um, uh, forgive us our sins and save us from the fires of hell and lead all souls to heaven, including those in most need of thy mercy.”

Then I had an idea. I closed my eyes and just listened. There were lots of animals in the village, and maybe more than one cave was being used as a place to stall animals, but if I were still near the cave mouth, maybe I could hear something.

Sure enough, I heard bleating. It was a young sheep, complaining about something. I groped my way in the dark in that direction, stepping on every sharp stone and thorny bush in Palestine.

I did not find the cave mouth, but found the sheep. By that time, my eyes had adjusted to the starlight. It was a young lamb, a baby.

The lamb was by itself, in a little hollow, and there were thornbushes all around it. But no cave, and no shoes.

I turned away. The poor fellow bleated so pathetically. I looked over my shoulder, “Believe me, pal, I know the feeling.” I took a step, and he bleated again.

I sighed. Then I sighed again. I took off my shirt, wrapped it around my hands, and used that the push aside the nettles and stingers of the bush. I waded into the thorns for that dumb animal. Why? Because there was no one else around.

Once inside, scratched and bleeding, I said, “Come on, sport.” And I pulled the lamb with a heave-ho up onto my shoulders. Then lamb bleated louder. I was sure he was going to void his bowels on my shoulder.

I was surrounded on all sides by thornbush. Where was the break I had just so painfully trampled?

“Okay, sport,” I said to the lamb. “You got in here somehow. Do you know the way out? And maybe back to the spot where my shoes are, not to mention a warm stall for you, and plenty of yummy Lamb Chow? And why aren’t any shepherds watching you, this time of year? Did they hear voices singing in heaven, and just leave their work, to go look at the Messiah? I did that too. But she is still gone.”

And the lamb said, “No, the shepherd chief, Asher, asked Gabriel to watch us, and see we did not stray. When we were alone with the Archangel, he granted us the power of speech which Adam the Fallen King would have given us from that great tree which fairest Eve the Fallen Queen robbed, so that once and this once only, the paschal lambs could kneel and pray. Now we have a new Eve, and she has born us a new Adam.”

I was too shocked to throw the talking beast from my shoulders. The starlight from one single star above me suddenly grew brighter, or my eyes adjusted, and now I could see the circle of thorns was not a circle, but a spiral, and all I had to do was walk and turn and turn again, to be free. Not to keep the bad course I was on.

I took a step. “Are you a time traveler?”

“No. They are thickly gathered here, but in vain. They are not permitted to see the child.”

“Why can’t they see him?”

“Ah. Gabriel was asking me that just an hour ago. Why can’t they see him?”

This was an insane conversation. I laughed, trying to take things as they seemed. “So! You are a Passover lamb? Do you mind being eaten?”

“All who are loyal to the Master wish to be consumed as He is consumed. For what other purpose was He born? For what other purpose was I? The Sons of Adam were given dominion over us, and named us our names. As you live in Him, we live in you.”

“That sounds wrong, somehow,” I said.

“Your ears are heavy with folly,” said the lamb.

“I must be asleep,” I muttered.

“You will soon wake, as do all who sleep in the Lord.” he said. “Now ask your question I was sent to answer.”

“So,” I said, “I did not see the Star of Bethlehem. Or the three kings.”

“More than three mages will come, and they come first to Jerusalem, the City of David. They are horoscope-casters and astrologers from the ruling clan of the Zoroastrians, and the Lord shows by them that He can turn evil craft to good purposes. This is not for two years to come. But that is not your question.”

I drew a breath. “Are you the comforter sent to comfort me?”

“No comfort is given to the sons of Adam except after tribulation and temptation. You are in the fire. You are being refined. And that was not your question.”

“Why does it hurt so much? This fire?”

“You know.”

“Because my faith is small? Because I love my sins?”

“You say it. Not I. And that was not your question.”

A cloud passed before the bright star. I stopped walking. The thorns were all around me. I could not see the path.

I said, “Will I see my wife again?”

“You will see her again. She waits for you, robed in white linen, by the river of the waters of life which flows from the throne, and a cup of those waters is in her hand, and her hair is woven a crown of the blossoms from the trees who leaves are for the healing of nations. You must first suffer death, as the child will, and resurrection, as he will. Beyond the trial is comfort. Beyond the darkness, light. But she will not be your wife there. They do not marry, nor are they given in marriage. The union is more intimate. And neither was that was your question!”

“Maybe I should ask why you people always speak in riddles!”

“Maybe then I would answer that you people never ask the right questions.”

I knelt and put him from my shoulders.

Kneeling, my face was near his muzzle. I was looking to see if there were some trick. To be honest, I wanted him in front of me, if the cloud would pass away from the star, so I could see whether or not his lips were really moving.

That was when it finally struck me, and despite the tears that still stained my face, and the bleeding scratches all over the rest of me, and the Roman hand shaped bruise running from my ear to my jawline, I started laughing.

I could not help it. It was too funny.

The lamb just looked at me with big, solemn eyes.

“Sorry—didn’t mean to laugh,” I said, hiccuping and trying to control myself. “I wanted to see if—if your lips were moving. And then—then—you see, I met this time traveler in Rome, and he was afraid to use the time machine, and I used my crucifix instead of my wedding ring, so the machine led me here, and then—then there was this dying guy with no pants on, and a Roman socked me like I was filth, a nobody, like you’d kick a dog, and this little kid from the Sixth Cosmic sitcom or something who wears electric jewelry got his brain blasted when I shoved his head through a wall trying to kill me, on account of I didn’t let Antarctica conquer the moon in the Forty Second Freaking Century, and Saint Joseph kissed me on the lips, and I held baby Jesus, and now, and now, and now I want to see if your mouth moves. I am afraid of being tricked. You know, because some things are too hard to believe. Don’t let yourself be fooled! Seeing is believing!” And I laughed and whooped and laughed like a crazy man.

“Listen,” the little lamb said.

And I bent my head toward him, but he said nothing. “What is it?”

The little lamb said, “Do you hear what I hear?”

In the distance, I heard a bell tolling. It was a solemn, slow, beautiful sound.

It was so lovely to hear, that the crazy laughter died on my lips.

The lamb said softly, “That is the alarm bell from the Roman fort, foretelling the downfall of the pagan world and all its love of cruelty. The Christian world to come shall be cruel as well, but a world that will not love cruelty. Every bell on the face of the Earth is ringing this night, from the Pillars of Hercules, to Ultima Thule, to the springs of the Nile, to the Forbidden City and beyond. The bells sing in joy for the Savior’s birth. The stars also sing, but only my masters, the shepherd band, heard them. Asher, Zebulun, Justus, Nicodemus, Joseph, Barshabba, and Jose. They had prayed, you see. They pondered the word spoken to Job, and wished to know when it shall be that the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of light shout for joy? This is that night. There is no war being waged anywhere, on any front, for this one night and this one alone. Will you finally ask your question now?”

I drew a deep breath. “It seems so stupid.”

“God uses the fools of the world to confound the wise, Jonathan.”

I closed my eyes. “Why me? Of all the historians and sages and widows or widowers who suffered a loss, and saints who kept their vows and wise men, and everyone else, everyone in the world, why was I given a ride on that machine, and allowed to come here, and allowed to hold him in my arms, that little baby who holds the universe in his?”

My eyes popped open in shock. “Oh, good grief! I forgot to tell her that Jesus would be in the Temple when he turned twelve! That he is not in the caravan! I could have saved her all that grief! Jesus Christ, what the hell was I thinking!! Whoops, I mean heck. I mean Jesus Christ save me.”

“Be of good cheer,” said the lamb with perfect seriousness. “Your prayers will sustain and comfort her, whether you speak them now or later. Eternity entertains all prayers at once. And here comes the one who will answer you.”

I saw a light in the distance. It was clear enough that I saw the path again, and so, without any more mishaps with the thorns, I came into  place where the ground was clear of rocks and nettles. It felt like turned soil under my feet, and the earth was cool and soothed my aches and stings.

The light was a lantern being held in the hand of a being shaped like a man dressed all in white, purer than any white Earth could make. Over his shoulder was a shepherd’s crook. Tucked through his belt was a golden horn. On his head was a hood or veil which hid his eyes, but I could see his nose and mouth.

“Rise,” he said, because I had realized who he was, and my knees failed and I had collapsed in panic. “Fear not. I am but a fellow servant of the same One you serve. See that you bow not to me! I must return the lost lamb to the fold.”

I said, “Gabriel? Were you really watching the sheep so the shepherds could go see the child?”

The great being nodded slowly beneath his veil.

“Why was I allowed to see him? And not all the other time travelers? And not everyone?”

He said to me, “Lost lamb, if you were the only man alive, the only one who had ever sinned, and every other Son of Adam had remained pure and upright, it would all have been done for you. For you the child was born. For you he lives and dies. For you.”

The living being raised the lantern, and I saw it was a spiral galaxy inside the glass, not a candle, and clusters and superclusters of galaxies. “It is all for you. The stars love you, and He who, by his word, lit the stars and set them dancing, from the greatest to the least. Everything in the cosmos, all the light of all the worlds, to the blood shed by the Messiah. It is all for you, John Went.

“And more than a mere cosmos! Eternity and infinity are yours, endless life, unbound joy. You shall be rejoined with the one you love, and all the ones you love, and the love will be greater than mortal tongues can pray to ask or praise in thanksgiving.”

I did not know if he meant I would meet her that very hour, or only after many long seasons of life in this eon or many others. But I knew, then, that it did not matter. Only one question mattered.

“Why? Why?” I cried.

Gabriel smiled and he leaned, and he spoke very softly in my ear.

Do you not give gifts to those you love?

[paulbenedictblog]

%news%

New Post has been published on %http://paulbenedictsgeneralstore.com%

Abc news Farmworkers face health risks in California wildfires

Abc news

That is a Kaiser Smartly being Files chronicle.

Drawn to Wildfires?

Add Wildfires as an ardour to no longer sleep up to now on basically the most modern Wildfires news, video, and diagnosis from ABC Files.

Over the hill correct in the good thing about them, firetrucks and first responders raced advantage and forth from a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection staging set aside of living, working to have a wildfire raging throughout the rugged hills and canyons in northeastern Sonoma County. As of Sunday, more than 3,000 firefighters had been battling the blaze, and a mountainous swath of the county — more than 180,000 residents from mountain to float — used to be below evacuation orders as Northern California persevered a ancient windstorm that used to be fueling the flames.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester/KHN

As of Sunday, more than 3,000 firefighters had been battling the explosive Kincade Fire, and a mountainous swath of Sonoma County, from mountain to float, used to be below evacuation orders.

For farmworkers in Sonoma County’s fabled wine country, the Kincade Fire poses a daunting set aside of living of dangers. October marks no longer most productive fire season in California, nonetheless also the height of the grape harvest. In areas no longer imminently threatened, some staff labored throughout the warmth and bad smoke to retrieve about a of the plenty of thousands of bucks price of grapes that had but to be harvested. As the fireplace continues to unfold, many now are discovering that their work — and paychecks — were suspended.

Sonoma County is familiar with fire. The Tubbs Fire tore throughout the set aside of living in 2017, killing 22 other folk and destroying more than 5,000 properties. Final year, dense smoke from Butte County’s Camp Fire — the deadliest in issue history — hung in the valley for days.

As wildfires of this strength and intensity develop more frequent, so create issues for discipline staff, who can face stipulations that jeopardize their health, wages and housing.

Outdoors of the fireplace itself, the main health design back in wildfire stipulations is smoke, which produces particulate topic, a mix of gases and tiny pieces of catch topic. The particles can penetrate deep into the lungs, increasing the danger of respiratory diseases and bronchial asthma, to boot as coronary heart issues.

These dangers lead health authorities to warn other folk in areas stricken by wildfire to whole indoors and limit difficulty. Farmworkers, an well-known ingredient of the wine country economy, can’t repeatedly clutch such precautions.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester/KHN

October marks no longer most productive fire season in California nonetheless also the height of the grape harvest.

On Saturday, Manuel Ortiz Sanchez, 52, sat with his family outdoors Santa Rosa’s Veterans Hall, which in a single day had been remodeled into a safe haven. He had been evacuated from his home in Healdsburg and used to be apprehensive about what it would imply for his family. Born in Mexico, he has worked in the region’s vineyards for more than 20 years. He already had misplaced a day and a half of work to the smoke. Would he be paid subsequent week if the vineyard the set aside he works had been calm shut down? “It’s as much as the boss,” he stated.

Internal the hall, volunteers with Corazón Healdsburg, a nonprofit that works with the local Latino neighborhood, used to be serving to Spanish-speaking households register at the safe haven. One woman puzzled whether or no longer the registration bracelet would name her as an immigrant and whether or no longer authorities would be coming to the safe haven.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester/KHN

Corazon Healdsburg, a nonprofit that works with the local Latino neighborhood, helps households stricken by the Kincade Fire.

At one other table, volunteers supplied to grab contact files for those that are undocumented, and therefore no longer eligible for most federal relief. After the 2017 fire, local organizations created a fund to support those that had been undocumented and stricken by the fires, and that fund is advantage up and working. Ninety percent of the more than 2,000 other folk the fund helped in 2017 didn't lose properties, nonetheless they misplaced wages and the meals of their fridge from electrical outages, stated Mara Ventura, government director of North Bay Jobs With Justice.

Advocates were pushing for labor requirements connected to wildfires and smoke. Even supposing a invoice failed to plod the California legislature this year, the issue adopted non eternal emergency regulations in July. They require employers to substantiate the air quality sooner than and all the scheme through a shift. When air pollution rise above a obvious threshold, an air quality index of 150, staff are to be moved to a safer issue if conceivable, and supplied protective masks if no longer. The AQI in eastern Sonoma County has robotically topped 150 in current days.

Even heavy-accountability masks aren’t much of a retort for any person laboring outdoors, stated Celeste Philip, the health officer for Sonoma County. When passe accurately, they're sad and rupture it complex to breathe, and it is laborious to work in them for terribly long. The correct scheme for staff to whole safe is to limit their delivery air publicity, she stated.

In the times after the Kincade Fire erupted on Oct. 23, Sonoma County authorities allowed some grape growers and their staff onto vineyards all the scheme throughout the evacuation zone to grab a ogle at and establish their vegetation, stated James Gore, a county supervisor. About 10% of the grapes in the county, mostly those passe to manufacture cabernet, had been calm on the vine when the fireplace started. “Security first, nonetheless then economy,” he stated.

Even supposing there’s no snort oversight of the system, Gore stated, the local Farm Bureau and diversified change groups bear made obvious the growers are responsive to the health dangers and staff’ rights. Many of us, including farmworkers who mainly aren’t paid for day with out work, are looking to work, he stated. “Folks can work, nonetheless it the truth is must never ever be below duress.”

Quiet, he stated, “if any person desires ideal health, they wish to disappear our neighborhood, in consequence of we bear smoke here.”

Concerns that farmworkers, loads of whom keep up a correspondence essentially Spanish, weren’t getting health advisories and diversified warnings all the scheme throughout the 2017 fires led to an overhaul of county communications, which this time are being supplied in each Spanish and English. Gore, who speaks Spanish, stated he’d been to the evacuation safe haven to keep up a correspondence with more than 100 agriculture staff about those dangers, and to allow them to know they're no longer obligated to work.

Fernando Gonzalez used to be at a safe haven in Healdsburg on Friday sooner than it, too, used to be evacuated. From Mexico, Gonzalez used to be 5 or six months into his finish in the U.S., engaged on a non eternal visa for agricultural staff, when he used to be awoke in the night time by colleagues who had seen the fireplace. His employer shuttled him and 40 to 50 diversified staff to the evacuation heart after deciding that the dwelling they shared on the vineyard property wasn’t safe.

Gonzalez stated he had about a weeks left on his contract, nonetheless they had been being despatched home to Mexico early. He stated he used to be paid for the week of work, including two missed days, and used to be contented no longer to be laboring in the heavy smoke.

Many diversified farmworkers are local residents. Another family who arrived at the safe haven on the first night time of the fireplace had misplaced their trailer home and all their belongings to the fireplace, stated Leticia Romero, director of neighborhood engagement at Corazón Healdsburg.

In a room that on the total hosts classes — a gleaming mural spanning one wall — volunteers filled boxes with garments, hygiene offers and diversified essentials for that family and others. Corazón also has launched a fund to give emergency money help.

“That is our 2nd year of fires,” Romero stated. “They’re sudden. You plod to mattress, and you wake as much as this pure catastrophe.” In some solutions, the lingering emotional trauma is the object she worries about most for her neighborhood.

This KHN chronicle first published on California Healthline, a carrier of the California Smartly being Care Basis.

Kaiser Smartly being Files is a nonprofit news carrier covering health factors. It's a ways an editorially fair program of the Kaiser Family Basis, which is no longer affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

[untoldreader]

Veiled Desires

Natasha Romanoff x Reader x Maria Hill

Summary

As their bond deepens, Maria, Natasha, and Y/N grapple with their inner desires. Conflicting loyalties, past traumas, and the dangers of their profession threaten to keep their love hidden, but their hearts refuse to be silenced

Warnings

None?

Tag list

@nayarianna1302 @alexawynters @tigerlillyruiz

Chapter 3

In the wake of their decision to embrace their burgeoning love, Maria, Natasha, and Y/N found themselves navigating a delicate dance of secrecy and desire. The world they inhabited was filled with danger and intrigue, leaving little room for personal relationships. They knew that their love had to remain hidden, veiled from prying eyes and potential threats.

Their interactions became laden with hidden meanings and stolen glances, each touch and gesture carrying a weight of unspoken longing. They found solace in stolen moments—a lingering brush of fingertips, a shared smile across a crowded room—knowing that their connection was a flame that burned bright in the shadows.

But the secrecy took its toll. Maria, Natasha, and Y/N yearned for the freedom to openly express their love, to walk hand in hand without fear of repercussions. The weight of the clandestine nature of their relationship bore down on them, testing their resolve and challenging their commitment to one another.

As they worked together on missions, the line between duty and desire blurred. They fought side by side, their trust in each other unwavering, but the knowledge of their love simmered just beneath the surface. They had to remain vigilant, constantly on guard to protect not only themselves but also the fragile connection they shared.

In the quiet moments, away from prying eyes, Maria, Natasha, and Y/N sought solace in each other's arms. Their stolen nights were filled with whispered confessions, tender caresses, and the intoxicating taste of forbidden passion. They reveled in the stolen fragments of time, cherishing every stolen touch as if it were their last.

But the world they inhabited was unforgiving, and their secret love affair remained under constant threat. They encountered close calls—moments where their secret nearly slipped through their fingers. It was during these near misses that their bond grew stronger, their shared vulnerability and determination to protect each other solidifying their commitment.

Yet, amidst the challenges and the secrecy, their love continued to flourish. It became a beacon of light in the darkness, an anchor that kept them grounded amidst the chaos of their lives. They found strength in each other, drawing courage from the knowledge that they were not alone in their desires and dreams.

As time passed, Maria, Natasha, and Y/N began to wonder if there was a way to break free from the constraints that held them captive. They yearned for a future where their love could thrive openly, unburdened by secrecy. But the path ahead was treacherous, filled with obstacles and unknown dangers.

In the depths of their hearts, they knew that they had to find a way to reconcile their love with the demands of their world. They could no longer deny the power of their desires, nor could they continue to hide their love in the shadows.

========================

Chapter 3 ended with Maria, Natasha, and Y/N standing at a crossroads, their hearts yearning for the freedom to openly embrace their love. They were determined to find a way to navigate the treacherous terrain they found themselves in, ready to face the trials and tribulations that awaited them on their journey towards a love that defied conventions and boundaries. :)

[pizzapiazzavino-blog]

Roman Neighborhood Blog Essay: Trastevere

Vendors lift their wares in linens-think

of Cleopatra in her rug-as police pace lazily up one end of the alley.

Let us not be reduced to history.

Bruno fired near here; near, the Jewish ghetto

where many survived, comparatively. Just: cappuccino's gentle bitterness.

How the foam's holes widen, evidential

as Caesar's dagger-starred tunic: here is where one entered ...

We better wrap this up, you say. I better let you go. Vendors

hawk cupid crotch lighters, mechanical bees past the cafe rail.  

-Zach Savich

Rome, known as the Eternal City, may also might as well be known as the City of Food and Culture. Pizzerias, gelaterias, ristorantes, and cafes stand dominant on every street corner. Every neighborhood seems to merge together and create one massive hub for food and drinks; however, if one were to take the time to observe the different neighborhoods, they would quickly pick up on the diversity that each one has to offer. Not only does the cuisine change with the neighborhoods, but the streets, architecture, people, and even the stop lights differ. All neighborhoods compliment one another, but bring diversity to the Eternal City in their own special way, creating one city all together.

The neighborhood that I focused on was Trastevere. This neighborhood was the first one that welcomed me to the wonderful city of Rome. I have never been abroad before, so to have a city that offered so many great places, particularly this neighborhood, was something of great fortune. Trastevere is filled with an abundance of restaurants, coffee shops, gelaterias, and places to grab a drink (“bar” in America is different than “bar” in Italy; in Italy, a bar is known more like a cafe, rather than the American usage of the word). The cobblestone streets of Trastevere are lined with old yet colorful buildings that have vines growing on and out of them. Vibrant clothes and towels hang from the apartment balconies above, as those who are lucky enough to reside in Trastevere utilize the Roman heat to dry their wash for them. The restaurant and shop scene is not sparse, and nearly every restaurant offers classic Italian dishes, some with an interesting twist on them. The shops are filled with homemade artwork and unique Italian designs. The neighborhood includes elderly people who know Rome like the back of their hand, but there's also a healthy population of youthful Italians who emerge when the sun goes down. There are plenty of delicious places to choose from here, whether you are looking solely for Italian food, or possibly in need of some classic tacos from Pico’s (where you can get three tacos and a beer for only seven euro on Tuesday nights). This is a great place to explore Rome, whether it be for you first time, or your last time. It has everything you could need, and provides a friendly and welcoming environment. Trastevere contribution to Roman history and identification can be contributed to the fact that it was one of the first neighborhood’s that was able to expand at a high enough rate so that people of different backgrounds were able to reside and bring their own culture and identity to establish a unified community.

Trastevere was the first neighborhood where people began to live on the western side of the Tiber river. Because of this, Trastevere has played a major part in the development of social structures and development within other neighborhoods throughout Rome. Due to the fact that Trastevere is such a remarkably old neighborhood, there is a slight lack of information and clear understanding of the true history of the neighborhood. Despite this, it is still possible to find many ancient statues, including Hercules on the couch, which is presumed to be a street name (Palmer 370). The Piazza of Santa Maria, where the Basilica of Santa Maria (12th century) can be found, is a main attraction in the neighborhood. In the Basilica, you can see the oil that sprayed when Jesus was born, and that is why the Basilica was founded on this very spot. The eighth hill of Rome, Gianicolo, is present here, and provides breathtaking views of Rome, while also having a limited number of tourists.

There is an abundance of art, including Caravaggio, and also the Botanical Gardens, allowing for one to enjoy all types of different pleasantries: food, drinks, baroque art, and plants. The artwork and sculptures that remain to this day have allowed for more insight into the past social development of medieval times. Palmer writes in his article, Proceedings of th American Philosophical Society, “Further, Julius Caesar will have built this basilica in anticipation of his project to annex Trastevere to the city,” (Palmer 370).  We can learn from this that many times, the reason why certain structures and artworks were added to districts were because of the desire of those who possessed a lot of authority to grow their area. The politics and politicians of ancient Rome (such as Julius Caesar), although very brutal, did indeed positively contribute to the formation of Roman food and culture identity. The continued additions to these neighborhoods led to opening the doors to more people, thus leading to more culture (food, artwork, architectural influence, etc.) exposure. With more people entering into these communities due to the continuous expansion, past food traditions and identities began to seep into one another, creating what we know today as Italian food culture.

Trastevere also experienced an interesting wine history. In ancient times, storage for where wine was kept was called “cella vinaria” and where wine could be stored and kept for long periods of time was known as “cellae.” According to Varro, a villa that was properly built included an oil-cellar, a wine-cellar, and many dolia (containers). Here you can see that not only was wine important, but so was olive oil. Although it is possible to make both cheap wine and cheap olive oil, even to this day, the highest of quality was and is expensive to make, thus requiring reliable storage rooms for both products. Modern day cellae can be found today, and they are distinguishable by the artwork on the insides, such as pictures of dolia. Alexander Conison writes in his article, The Organization of Rome’s Wine Trade, about how only five of Rome’s ancient wine cellae can be identified by name today. The first two are located near Trastevere. “The Cella Civiciana is known only by a dedicatory inscription by its vilicus to Silvanus.  Its identification as a cellar for wine relies, so far as I can tell, solely on Silvanus’ role as dedicatee. Likewise, the Cella Groesiana is known only from a dedication of a M. Scanianus Zosa to Sol, Luna, and Silvanus,” (Conison 202). Trastevere played a very important role on the transportation of wine in ancient times. Consion goes on to describe the presumed process on how wine was transported up and down the Tiber river.

“...wine came on ships down (or up?) the Tiber on naves vinariae124 at which point the austores, an occupation likely connected etymologically with the verb hausere, drained and transferred the wine into new containers for transport. Wine was then transferred from the Ciconiae—likely on the Tiber in the north of the Campus Martius—and thence to the temple for tasting and measurement after which the emptied vessels were returned to the Ciconiae for refilling,” (Conison 206).

Again, we come to understand that not just the creating of wine was a long process, but also transporting and storing the wine was tedious and could tolerate room for few mistakes.

The economic side of how wine was stored throughout the city can be seen in both a good way and also in a bad way. Wine was, and is, a main factor in the economy of Italy. During the medieval ages, wine was something that had to be monitored greatly because many times people would attempt to steal it. By spreading the wine barrels throughout the city, it made it harder for the thieves to steal as much; however, it also made it much harder and much more inefficient to transport and sell the wine. Although storing the wine in cellae, which were more secure, rather than in horrea, which made transporting the wine more efficient, the cellae ensured that the wine remained in higher quality, and also protected against thieves. Upon surveying how the social classes affected the demand of wine, Conison describes that those who were able to produce their own wine simply consumed that, rather than purchasing wine on the market. Also, the wealthy were always able to purchase wine, whereas the middle and lower classes did not have the money to do so. The distinction of classes that became evident when it came to buying wine also applied to food.

A traditional food dish that Trastevere has been able to maintain the authenticity of, as well as the quality, are the anchovies. Although the Mediterranean has an abundance of seafood, not all could afford the nutritious and tasty cuisine. Author David Downie writes,

“The contemporary Roman way of salting anchovies is reminiscent of processes used to make garum and hallex variants in Liguria and France. It relies on cool maceration.The Trastevere district, across the Tiber from central Rome, is considered the keeper of the flame of authentic Roman cooking, in part because of its large Roman-Jewish population,” (Downie 28).

He then goes on to give the recipe and process for how to prepare this food that has been able to defeat the ever looming threat of being altered. For Italians, maintaining the authenticity of a dish means everything. Even if the pasta is changed in a recipe, it is no longer the original and cannot be labeled as such. Within Trastevere, although there are some American restaurants (such as Pico’s, which I had mentioned earlier), the majority of the food that is found in this neighborhood you can be assured is authentic and accurate to the name. This is important because every ingredient in a dish is what defines the meal, and if even only one is altered, then the meal is no longer the same.

The mystery behind the separation of classes with regards to meals is starting to become clear. The rich ate the best of the best, while the poor ate whatever was left over. In ancient Roman times, an example of this would be that the rich Romans consumed the soft white bread, while the peasants had to consume the hard wheat bread. John D’Arms discusses three examples of “luxus mensae,” or luxurious meals.

“...on a rich man's floor in Antioch, on a highly unusual funeral monument in Rome, and in a Constantinian house on the Caelian Hill-there must stand a strange and distinctively Roman combination of desires, aspirations, and attitudes. Here we have some of the ways in which persons of standing in the later Roman Empire elected to represent their world,” (D’Arms 450).

Obviously there are scarce representations as to how the poor consumed their meals, as they had no money to commision such portraits. By learning about how the rich consumed theirs, we are able to form assumptions as to how the poor ate. The rich in ancient times used food as an excuse to show off their wealth, which is still a common act of today.

Trastevere is a neighborhood that has shaped the food history and identity in Rome today due to its diverse, yet traditional, population. It has influenced the culture that Rome, and Italy as a whole, is known for today through its extensive history dating back to medieval times. Today, it represents the history that molded Rome, while also being a hotspot for people, young and old, to enjoy aperitivo, sweet treats of any kind, strolling the cobblestone streets, and getting Polaroid’s taken that are hung up on the wall for all to see. It has played a huge role in the development of Rome as a city and the identity that food, wine, and culture all posses that make it truly the Eternal City.  I am already looking forward to seeing the familiar sights as the  bus runs alongside the river, signaling that we are back at Trastevere once again.

Works Cited

D'Arms, John H. “The Culinary Reality of Roman Upper-Class Convivia: Integrating Texts and Images.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 46, no. 3, 2004, pp. 428–450.JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3879469.

Downie, David. “A Roman Anchovy's Tale.” Gastronomica, vol. 3, no. 2, 2003, pp. 25–28.JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2003.3.2.25.

Conison, Alaxander. “The Organization of Rome’s Wine Trade.” University of Michigan, 2012, https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/91455/conison_1.pdf;sequence1

Hanzlik, Louise. “A Perfect Day in Trastevere, Rome's Favourite Neighbourhood.” Lonely Planet,  Lonely Planet, 10 Sept. 2015.

Robert E. A. Palmer. “The Topography and Social History of Rome's Trastevere (Southern Sector).” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 125, no. 5, 1981, pp.368–397. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/986199.

Savich, Zach. “Outside Santa Maria in Trastevere.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 2009, pp.114–114. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27653942.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Eclipses, Comets, and Dragons in a 16th-Century Chinese Text, Available from Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller

A rich and finely illustrated manuscript entitled Yu zhi tian yuan yu li xiang yi fu [trans.: “Essay on the Astronomical & Meteorological Presages by Emperor Renzong of Ming Dynasty”] on paper with 878 vividly colored illustrations, 10 volumes, tall agenda format (360 x 190 mm.), original wrappers preserved in modern wrappers, modern stitching

The upcoming total eclipse has people in a frenzy — with airfares spiking to total eclipse zones and “eclipse sunglasses” selling out — but we’re far from the first ones to be fascinated by the obscuring of the sun’s rays. A 15th- to 16th-century Chinese manuscript compendium, currently available for purchase from Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller, records prognostications related to astronomic phenomena, including the possible meanings of eclipses.

The compendium, entitled Yu zhi tian yuan yu li xiang yi fu (“Essay on the Astronomical & Meteorological Presages by Emperor Renzong of Ming Dynasty”) spans more than 800 pages and 10 volumes, with the pages filled with illustrations documenting these phenomena. Besides eclipses, the pages contain comets, fish rain, flames coming out of the earth, dragons in the sky, and the moving of mountains. More mundane entries can also be found, including the movement of the plants and the locations of constellations in the sky. Many of these illustrations depict pastoral landscapes marred by an impending cosmic calamity, while others seem prescient of the aesthetics of centuries later — one page, depicting “concentric haloes,” calls to mind the atomic diagrams and Op-art of the mid-20th century.

The manuscript was prepared for the Emperor Ming Renzong (or Chu Kao Chih or Zhu Gaochi) (1378–1425), and was intended for circulation among his high officials. Ming Renzong had a reign of only nine months, but was considered an enlightened leader who established a legacy of improvements in that short time. The prognostications on these pages were written by Zhu Xi (Zhu Wengong) (1130–1200), a thinker considered second only to Confucius in Chinese history, and other Confucian scholars.

A rich and finely illustrated manuscript entitled Yu zhi tian yuan yu li xiang yi fu [trans.: “Essay on the Astronomical & Meteorological Presages by Emperor Renzong of Ming Dynasty”] on paper with 878 vividly colored illustrations, 10 volumes, tall agenda format (360 x 190 mm.), original wrappers preserved in modern wrappers, modern stitching

Founded in 1978, Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller is based in New York City and offers books from the famous and canonical — in the past, they’ve sold first editions of texts by Aristotle, Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein, among others — to the unusual and esoteric.

Particularly fascinating are a set of diaries that chronicle the lives of four members of a prominent Bavarian family, among them a notorious libertine. Joseph von Chlingensberg auf Berg (May 26, 1777–May 24, 1830), the son of prominent lawyer Joseph Maria Bernhard von Chlingensberg (1749–1811).

Pages from the manuscript diaries of four members of the prominent Bavarian family Chlingensberg: Joseph Maria Bernhard von Chlingensberg (1749–1811), his son Joseph von Chlingensberg auf Berg (1777–1830), the younger Joseph’s wife Karoline von Chlingensberg, née Baroness von Asch (1789-1826), and their son Joseph von Chlingensberg (1808–37)

The younger Joseph recorded the last 30 years of his life in his diaries, often recording multiple entries in a single day. All details of his life are faithfully recorded — from the mundane goings-on of running a household, to his prodigious sexual escapades, which were coded in cipher. His exploits are recorded in pornographically crude language — yet he also had a sentimental side. “I had time to leisurely take my leave amid 100 kisses from the woman who is so eternally and unforgettably dear to my heart, and who alone could be my happiness on earth,” he wrote on September 7, 1807. (There are also plenty of diary entires that are not about kissing.)

Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller’s Instagram & Twitter, full of beautiful images of their current offerings, are a must-follow for bibliophiles.

Visit Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller’s website to explore their full catalogue of fascinating offerings.

The post Eclipses, Comets, and Dragons in a 16th-Century Chinese Text, Available from Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[gokinjeespot]

off the rack #1162

Monday, May 8, 2017

 Life is full of rude awakenings. There's a skiff of snow on the ground this morning but not enough that I need to haul out my boots to go to work. The weather has been brutal recently with major flooding around Ottawa. I hope everyone affected can recover so that their lives can get back to normal.

 I want to thank all the friends and families that came into Comet Comics on FREE COMIC BOOK DAY to make the day fun and happy. Spreading the joy of comic books always makes me feel warm inside.

 I'll be making my first road trip to Killarney, Ontario to visit my old friend Ron later this week. I'll return in time for Ottawa ComicCon even though I won't be attending. Pike and pickerel season opens this coming weekend so I will be out on the lake trying my luck with my buddy Matt. I will be interested to see how high the water level is and if that affects where the fish will be.

 Black Bolt #1 - Saladin Ahmed (writer) Christian Ward (art) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). This is one of them artsy fartsy first issues where it took way too long to get the story started. Black Bolt waking up in a prison is repeated three times and I almost stopped reading after the third time. The nice art kept me going until the last page but even though Saladin made it so that this isn't just a comic book starring a mime dressed in black, I wasn't impressed enough to want to keep reading. I also didn't like the downward arrow attached to the tuning fork on his head. Jack's original design was just fine.

 Eternal Empire #1 - Sarah Vaughn (writer) Jonathan Luna (art, script assist, letters). This new fantasy story is about a worker who escapes from a farm. She's essentially a slave. The kingdom is ruled by an empress who is praised or is forced to be praised by all. I love Jonathan's art and the slave's quest has caught my fancy so I'm hoping she finds her happily ever after.

 Jean Grey #1 - Dennis Hopeless (writer) Victor Ibanez (art) Jay David Ramos (colours) VC's Travis Lanham (letters). I am not a fan of the bangs. So I was wishing for the young X-Men trapped in the present from the past to get their own book and this is sort of that but the focus is on Jean. Dennis impressed me with his run on Spider-Woman and he starts off here explaining how this Jean Grey isn't all those other Jean Greys that existed before. Well, that's not confusing much. Young Jean is having lunch in Kyoto, Japan and all of a sudden she has to play super hero because the Wrecking Crew is robbing an armoured truck. Ugh. I would have believed Jean fighting some evil mecha a whole lot more. Then a major distraction helps the bad guys get away. Holy smokes, there's so much contrived nonsense that I can't go on reading. Sorry Jean. I hope the big flaming bird doesn't burn you to a crisp.

 Ab Irato #1 - Thierry Labrosse (writer & artist) Jeremy Melloul (English translation) Andworld Design (letters). The title is Latin for "from anger" and it's an angry populace living in Montreal 100 years in the future. It looks like the Saint Lawrence river has risen a lot due to climate change and the city resembles Venice in Italy. A young lad from the country has arrived in Montreal to seek his fortune while a rebellion is taking place. Thierry's art is beautiful and I like the naïve Riel so I'm going to see what happens to him in this 6-issue mini from Germany.

 All-New Guardians of the Galaxy #1 - Gerry Duggan (writer) Aaron Kuder (art) Ive Svorcina (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). This relaunch is part of Marvel's Galactic Realm and we're back to a team of five with Drax, Gamora, Groot, Rocket and Star-Lord. I relished every issue of the last run and this debut was fun. The team gets tangled in some one-upmanship between The Grandmaster and The Collector so the threat to life and limb is quite high. This is more comedy caper than universe saving so I might read this just for the halibut. Oh, and it explains why Groot is a baby too.

 Guardians of the Galaxy: Mother Entropy  #1 - Jim Starlin (writer) Alan Davis (pencils) Mark Farmer (inks) Matt Yackey (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). The second of three Guardians of the Galaxy comic books to hit the racks just before the movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 hits theatres May 5 features the team trying to work off their debts. It was fun to see one of Jim's creations show up to complicate the Guardians' mission. This story has a universe ending threat but it's kind of silly. I can't say that I like Alan's versions of Star-Lord and Gamora. Peter Quill looks like Douglas Fairbanks and Gamora's wide features are not pretty to me. She looks more like She-hulk than the deadliest hottie in the universe.

 Guardians of the Galaxy - Mission: Breakout #1 - Christopher Hastings (writer) Edgar Salazar (pencils) Allen Martinez (inks) Andrew Crossley (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). The Collector's name is Taneleer Tivan. Learn something new every day. The third of three Guardians of the Galaxy comic books to hit the racks just before the movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 hits theatres May 5 features the team trying to escape from the clutches of The Collector. Y'think he's in the movie? This was a fun space romp with superb art. I liked Gamora a lot more in this comic book.

 Savage Things #3 - Justin Jordan (writer) Ibrahim Moustafa (art) Jordan Boyd (colours) Josh Reed (letters). The bad guys want to cause a black-out in New York City. That can't be good.

 Superman #22 - Peter J. Tomasi & Patrick Gleason (writers) Doug Mahnke (art) Jaime Mendoza & Ray McCarthy (inks) Wil Quintana (colours) Rob Leigh (letters). This is some good stuff right here. Lois makes a surprising discovery that leads to some scary action with creepy townsfolk. There are more surprises in store as "Black Dawn" continues. Doug's art is so good in this. I've stopped reading a lot of DC books but this issue is a good example of why I've stuck with this title.

 Paper Girls #14 - Brian K. Vaughn (writer) Cliff Chiang (art) Matthew Wilson (colours) Jared K. Fletcher (letters). I hope this isn't the "season finale" and we have to wait three months for the next issue because this issue has one heck of a cliff (Chiang) hanger.

 Spider-Man/Deadpool #17 - Joe Kelly (writer) Ed McGuinness (pencils) Mark Morales & Walden Wong (inks) Jason Keith & Matt Yackey (colours) VC's Joe Sabino (letters). The story of Spider-Man's crisis of conscience continues. Will he kill Itsy Bitsy or will Wade save Peter's soul? I am staying tuned.

 Batman #22 - Joshua Williamson & Tom King (writers) Jason Fabok (art) Brad Anderson (colours) Deron Bennett (letters). The best thing about part 3 of "The Button" is that I wasn't confused because I didn't read part 2 in Flash #21. The bad thing is that the time traveling and other dimensional paradoxes made me grind my teeth in frustration. Father Thomas Wayne meeting alternate son Bruce Wayne was touching but I did not believe for a second that what Thomas asked Bruce to do would become reality. If none of the Watchmen show up in this story I will be sorely disappointed.

 Riverdale #2 - Greg Murray & Daniel King (writers) Joe Eisma & Thomas Pitilli (art) Andre Szymanowicz (colours) John Workman (letters). Got my teen drama fix for the week. I am so glad they updated these old characters to make them more relevant and multidimensional.

 Spider-Man #16 - Brian Michael Bendis (writer) Oscar Bazaldua (art) Justin Ponsor (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). This issue starts with the opening salvo of a turf war between the Black Cat and another crime boss. Man, Oscar draws a super cute Felicia Hardy. Then we get back to the complicated life of Miles Morales. I liked how he blew off steam there.

 The Unstoppable Wasp #5 - Jeremy Whitley (writer) Elsa Charretier (art) Megan M. Wilson (colours) VC's Joe Caramagna (letters). The members of G.I.R.L. (Genius In action Research Labs) gathers for the first time to try and defuse the bomb in Ying's neck. It's Nadia AKA The Unstoppable Wasp, Taina Miranda (engineer), Alexis Miranda (Taina's sister), Lashayla Smith (physicist), Priya Aggarwal (biologist) and Ying (chemist and ex-Red Room roomy of Nadia's). I liked that the girls don't save the day which sets up a meeting with the villain. Hello Mother.

 Champions #8 - Mark Waid (writer) Humberto Ramos (pencils) Victor Olazaba (inks) Edgar Delgado & Nolan Woodard (colours) VC's Clayton Cowles (letters). How do the kids deal with the Freelancers stealing their brand? Find out in this terrific issue. I love team books that explore the interpersonal relationships of the team members and Mark does some interesting exploring here. I would find this book boring if the Champions just went from issue to issue dealing with crises and fighting bad guys. The last page will put a crimp in the team's roster.

 Jessica Jones #8 - Brian Michael Bendis (writer) Michael Gaydos (art) Matt Hollingsworth (colours) VC's Cory Petit (letters). Jess has a new case and her client is Maria Hill, ex-director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Maria is wants to know who is trying to kill her. My favourite Bendis books have a lot of dialogue and this issue has loads.

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

The Composite Black ch.1

He crackles with such abominable laughter. Emblazoned on his mulish mask of tapered sinew, hate-hewn flesh folds caked with dust and brusque are wide swathes of topological erosion.  This is the dermatological attrition of ghouls and goblins, creatures of depravity and denizens of sacrilege, monsters whose skin weathers and bleaches in the divine of the daylight.  His garish façade is the embossment from a nightmare, a face that haunted the sculptor’s sleep, ensnared eternal in gothic stone gargoyles or the twisted grimace of an amputated stub adorning a tortured ashen oak.  His wrinkles purse like snake pleats, shivering subtly, coiled around his contemptuous orifices, intermittently blustered about by the intake of his olfactory snot-pits and wreathed around a rancid gyre of dental shards. Pan up but avoid the swallowing riptide of his gawk, those arrested by the shifting guise of his lunatic looking-glass eyes are often burnt asunder in smears of soot.  They are eyes of caged aggression, of molten wrath, volcano eyes that sear what they see.  The color of spent fuel, of cadaverous cinders, broken glass and smoke damage. Encircling this myopia is the crown-of-thorns of his brow, framing his persona like a band of spear-spiked dagger-tooth crags.  These are accelerated geologic processes, flexing tectonic plates which know not the placation of a tranquil lull; their beveled furrows exist in a duality of disgust and mockery.  Cast-iron rims lipping twin cauldrons, forever bubbling.  

This is a hardened, deadened man whose scars shroud his marred body and mind.  Each patch of discolored tissue that tattoos him tells tales, mostly violent and cruel. But the companion text is tenfold the volume, bedecking disfigured corpses strung about his travels.  Most he left horizontal but some he let vertical, a fate hardly better.  Those who walk the world mangled by the bite of his blade speak a bit softer, keep an eye at their backs, wake sweaty in the night.  He is the shade which haunts their periphery, cloaking uncertainty in fear and calling out to them from the shadows.  Just a winking remembrance causes the heart to race, the pupils to dilate, and the past superimposes the present.  A torture wheel of cyclical trauma, perpetual terror of a deathblow half inflicted.  His victims are many; they line cemeteries and bar stools, numb and cold to the touch. Almost as if he burned their spirits on the flaming alter of his own vehemence then let them frost over, a sacrifice to savagery, a vulgar display of power.      

No matter.  “Let the dead rot and the livin’ scorn,” blistering words from his blistered lips, shaky and sun-sick in the dry heat of the early morn.

“I dare say yer yella hide won’t last til’ noon. Those buzzards circlin’ up there won’t waste a horse’s fart before they’re on ya like the flies, pickin your eyes out, digging through your gizzard.  I bet even half past 11 you’ll look even more like a dimes worth of dog meat than your ugly mug does now.  Matter of fact maybe when your boots stop kickin I oughta cut you down from that tree and drag your sorry carcass through the mud into town so that the strays can each get a good meal from ya. It’ll be the only good thing you ever did for this town.”

Even as he said this, serrating his speech with disdain, the creases of the undertaker’s neck shook with fright.  He felt as he had as a little boy throwing rocks at tethered dogs, hoping that in their fury the stake anchoring them wouldn’t be snatched from the dirt.  The evil within this man seemed unnatural, impossible.  It was foreign to him, this relentless rage, foreign to this tiny town pitted on the outskirts of dusty emptiness.  This tiny town, where Main Street is the only street and whose primary riffraff are a few rough tough cattle rustlers, vagrant out-of-towners drawing from the herd come the fat flock of Spring time.  Enter this black frothing demon whose snide grin makes the white dressed church ladies sign the cross, a smirk which consumeth like hellfire, and paradise becomes pit.  Anubis had seen his share of atrocities, sights which may have maddened one of fragile temperament. He’d been a field medic in the Spanish war.  Seen, heard and sometimes felt the splatter of men being shredded into mincemeat, splayed inside out by scalding shards of metal. He’d repressed much of those wretched memories, loosing them on his past future, which even now harass every moment of absent rest.  And the days were not long passed when he’d been called on as the chief embalmer to clean up after a few of the Union’s scorched earth campaigns, burying massacred Hopi women and children, of all the vile things, in yellow-earthen mass graves usually after weeks of decay and carrion pick-throughs.  He’d even had to put down his only daughter when her body swelled up with gangrene, but the carnage left by this awful man, this brimstone beast, was the brutality of legend.  This was the monster before him, the twisted serpent of the apocalypse, Apep, fettered in maat by Osiris’ noose.

Then the shark put away his sawtooth bouquet, pivoting his rope burned neck in the guillotine of the hangman’s hoop, directing his vociferous focus on another individual from the small crowd of the witnesses who’d climbed the hill to watch this dreadful man’s death.  The old Indian woman Xmucane met his fiery craters with her own cataracted pupils, a challenge in defiance, adversaries horn-locked on the battlefield of all space and time.  Their concentrated beams of perception met and clashed, smoldering with static energy.  

The words rose out of him and blew toward their mark like a waft of chemical death, “Have you come to tell my fortune grandmother? I should hope that even a blind ol’ witch like you could see the signs of my fate today.  Or maybe you’re just so disoriented and confused you just wandered up here on this hill like the geriatric ol’ hag you are.  Too..” his lips began to leak a rotten-colored mucus foam as they flapped and pursed and sneered.  Spurts punctuated his rabid barks as the muscles in his whole body contracted in spasms of steaming rage.  His carapace turned a furious shade of boiled red. “young to die and too old to screw! I’ve seen moldy cow pies that…” a gruff fit of gravelly coughing seized the doomed man so that any further curses became just choking hoarse gasps.  Minutes passed and the hacking only worsened until only a few caustic spasms and the muted gurgling of air being forced through thick fluid remained.  Suddenly within the leather of the man, the smoke-blackened corridors of his body flooded with sludge, his air passages became expulsion channels for emergency discharge.  Prison-food regurgitation geysered up the tunnel of his throat and waterfalled out of the cave mouth.  The gastrointestinal flow sizzled down his jailbird stripes in chunks of grey dribble as eyes, nose and gob spurted like drainage faucets.  At last, when the conniption ceased, the muscles holding him ridged loosed limp, letting his weight dangle from the rope collaring him for a moment. Coated in perspiration and exhaustion, all that was left of him was the furnace of his anger and a heaving breath.  Air pressure writhed against the pressure of the lariat strangling his airway, lungs bursting in heft.  

Xmucane was already halfway down the hill, strutting slowly and steadily, never looking back, never uttering a word; she just continued driving her cane into the dry earth followed up by each hoary shuffle step. This repeated in rhythmic synchronicity as her short precise movements churned the declining distance back to town, through glades and gullies, past rockslides and embankments, hugging the curvature of the trail and moving like the passing minutes.  Somewhere, there amongst the bramble, a whisking river resided as an auditory undercurrent, a rivulet which had conveyed sediment from distant mountains for hundreds of thousands of years.  This is the sculptor who carved Hangman’s Hill from bare plane. It reached out from within the drape of the trees at a spot perpendicular with the crook in the trail of the advancing ancient seer, Xmucane, greeting her with roaring thunder from the mountains.  She continued on past the Road to Xibalba, with her descended her daughter-in-law the waning moon, fading into the light of day.  

“In nomine Iesu Christi, Deus et Dominus noster, Immaculatae Virginis intercessione ab ipsis Maria..”

In the Name of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, strengthened by the intercession of the immaculate Virgin Mary..

Back atop Hangman’s Hill, at the seat of the execution of this nameless man, the preceding spectacle of grotesque behaviors attracted like moth to flame the mercy of god’s instrument on earth, the surrogate of Papal presence, the local orthodoxical authority of godliness, the Catholic missionary Ruggieri degli Ubaldini.  With the bluff as his sandy pulpit he exercised training he’d received in the seminary as a youth.  Vocal muscle memory and gospel rigmarole drilled ad nauseam under the oratorical tutelage of the Head Father at the rocky coastline church of San Miguel.  He fondly recalled praying to the Blessed Virgin those many years ago on bent knee, tightly gripping the Bible and rosary his parents had given to him, trembling with righteousness in that stuffy old adobe chapel as chartreuse swells of spray crashed against the rocks. There were times of distant recollection when the word of god resound within his mind like vivid hanging melodic lines of Gregorian monks bounding out of mass halls and cathedrals.  But with the melting years his faith had become by jaded by dour funeral processions and exorbitant church politics.  He clutched his indented Holy Book in one crinkled hand and the other pressed palm forward, shaking with a bit of the hall-hallowed vindication he’d once felt but mostly just the fear of an excruciating death at the hands of this tenuously bound hellion.  He prayed as if blacksmithing a suit of armor.  

“Mother of God, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beatis apostolis tuis Petro et Paulo, et omnibus sanctis auctoritate officii nostri potentem..”

Mother of God, of blessed Michael the archangel, of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints and powerful in the holy authority of our ministry..

“suscipere fidenter impetus propulsare insidias diabolic..”

we confidently undertake to repulse the attacks and deceits of the devil..

A light breeze swept the hillcrest. Misty dew-laden air whisped up in thermal currents as the freshly angled sun warmed the valleys of wildflowers and sod below, cycling moisture.  The breeze ruffled multicolored swatches of deciduous leaves stapled onto the fronds and twigs of the circular band of white oaks which surrounded the site of the hanging.  Then the breeze tousled the silent crowd, flexing hat brims, swaying ties, brushing skirt tails, flapping pant-legs, bringing dusty tears to dry eyes behind the veil of handkerchiefs.  Finally the wind rippled into the ganglion of the scene stirring its focal subject.   The man’s limp unconscious body swiveled slightly in the stirrup of the noose strung from the single low-hanging splintered branch of the lone dead tree.  However most of his inanimate weight remained planted to the earth, supported by locked knees atop an aged fruit box, its paint flecking.  A crystalline snail of spittle oozed from the gape of his mouth and was blown and whipped around by the current around the side of his head, seeping into one of the few remaining haggard tufts of bristle on the back of his desiccated scalp.  

“Deus oritur; inimici ejus dispersus est et qui oderunt eum, a facie ejus, secundum impellere fumum..”

God arises; His enemies are scattered and those who hate Him flee before Him. As smoke is driven away..

“ita pulsi sunt; sicut exustio ignis tabescerent, sic animam meam in conspectu Domini. Ecce crucem Dómini..”

So are they driven; as wax melts before the fire, so the wicked perish at the presence of God. Behold the Cross of the Lord..

“fugite inimicorum. Leo de tribu Iuda, radix David, qui vicit. Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos quanta speravimus in te..”

Flee bands of enemies. The Lion of the tribe of Juda, the offspring of David, hath conquered. May thy mercy, Lord, descend upon us as great as our hope in thee..

The diminutive old man paused after that line for a dangling moment, taking a rasped breath and wiping the sweat dripping down his forehead with a cross-embroidered handkerchief produced from within the folds of his black vestments.  A few syllables still hung in the air, echoes of Medieval Latin ricocheting off canyon cathedrals, saguaro shrines, stain glass mirage.  But the point of omni-ocular convergence remained the captive.  The small crowd of tense observers were fixated, captivated by the captive, as if the depth of their focus was his only restraints.  It had to be unequivocal, this man’s extinction; if even an iota of irresolute distress remained it would be catastrophic to these quiet people and their small agrestic community.  It had to be confirmed, the light leaving his eyes, so they could live once again in their accustomed peace.  Ruggieri continued..

“Adjutorium nostrum in nobis, quicumque haec legis, Et spiritus immundi, omnis satanica viribus, omnes invadentes infernali, omnia impium legiones, et coetus sectis..”

We drive you from us, whoever you may be, unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders, all wicked legions, assemblies and sects..

“In nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi et eius virtute, ut sit Deus et effugare ab ecclesia et ab animabus ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei, divini agni sanguine redemisti. Serpens callidissime..”

In the Name and by the power of our lord Jesus Christ, may you be snatched away and driven from the church of God and from the souls made to the image and likeness of God and redeemed by the precious blood of the divine lamb. Most cunning serpent..

“YEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS?!!  You do well to utter such flattery but this meagre title leaves much to be desired by my parched discrimination.  My sapless ear has reached but a fractional portion of its full satiation and demons these days just don’t grovel as they did in those glorious days of old, the Fall anew, when plague shadows of locusts and immortal armies of darkness smote the world under my blood blackened banner. Abbadon? Lucifer? Perhaps Wicked One? Or Deciever? Appolyon is what the Greeks called me or maybe you’re feeling particularly biblical, in that case the classic Hebrew is utter elation.  Bleed your tribute and yield your dignity, lay paltry and prostrate before the infamous Beelzbub.  Nothing says ‘Prince of Darkness’ like a black winged monster that manipulates buzzing clouds of ravenous flying insects.  Although my personal favorite is good ol’ Satan, doesn’t the word just remind you of pagan blood orgies and violent fertility sacrifices cast under occult torchlight? Ssssaaataann.  It rolls off the tongue, or hisses off if yours is forked I suppose.  Let’s all say it together! Saaataan… Saaaaatan…”

“Decipere humanum genus ultra audeas, Dei Ecclesiam persequi, ac Dei electos excutere et cribrare sicut triticum..”

You shall no more dare to deceive the human race, persecute the Church, torment God's elect and sift them as wheat..

“Imperat tibi Deus altissimus, he, cui in magna tua superbia te similem haberi adhuc præsumis. Imperat tibi Deus Pater..”

The most high God commands you, He with whom, in your great insolence, you still claim to be equal. God the father commands you..

“Imperat tibi Deus Filius. Imperat tibi Deus Spiritus Sanctus.  Christus Dei Verbum caro factum, imperat”

God the son commands you. God the holy ghost commands you. Christ, God's word made flesh, commands you..

“Your feeble crusader dogma and moral avarice is fetid muck pilled high by sociopathic old men, deceptively arranged to countervail their own perverted chastity and empathetic ineptitude.  The theologic doctrines to which you egregiously prescribe, and to which you presume supremacy are just the bones and bits, carrion detritus, convenient canon leftovers that you have culturally appropriated and reconfigured from semi-legitimate religious heritages into a hypocritical, racist and sexist, anthropocentric cult of personality and fanaticism.  The tyranny, genocide and mass subjugation performed by the filthy, bloodstained tentacles of your Holy Catholic Apostolic Church and all its puppet entities and dummy financial institutions is as heinous an act of malign villainy as has ever been committed, and it occurs in the light of day, applauded by boisterous mobs of enraptured subjects. It’s commendable, it really is.  Such blood-draining callousness, such wanton barbarism, such murked wickedness.  We are brothers you and I, legionnaires of death. Don’t you remember? We cut ourselves out from the same womb.  Don’t waste your breathe Padre, let us entwine our barbed fingers, for together we can concoct such exquisite chaos and mouthwatering malcontent.”      

“Qui pro salute generis nostri tua invidia perditi, humiliavit semetipsum factus oboediens usque ad mortem..”

He who to save our race outdone through your envy, humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death..

“Qui Ecclesiam suam ædificavit supra firmam petram, et portas inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam, cum ea ipse permansurus omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi..”

He who has built His church on the firm rock and declared that the gates of hell shall not prevail against Her, because He will dwell with Her all days even to the end of the world..

“Ergo, draco maledicte et omnis legio diabolica, adjuramus te per Deum vivum, per Deum verum, per Deum sanctum..”

Thus, cursed dragon, and you, diabolical legions, we adjure you by the living God, by the true God, by the holy God..

“Per Deum, qui sic dilexit mundum, ut Filium suum unigenitum daret, ut omnes qui credit in eum, non pereat, sed habeat vitam aeternam..”

By the God who so loved the world that he gave up his only son, that every soul believing in him might not perish but have life everlasting..

“Cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque æternæ perditionìs venenum eis; desine Ecclesiæ nocere, et ejus libertati..”

Stop deceiving human creatures and pouring out to them the poison of eternal damnation; stop harming the church and hindering her liberty..

“Vade, satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis..”

Be gone, Satan, inventor and master of all deceit, enemy of man's salvation..

Explosively vaulted across the physical and virtuous distance between these two men was a putrid projectile, an expulsion of contempt, a gust its coconspirator.  The coagulated salivary squirt was a conglomerate of gastric ebullition, nostril slop, fermented dental scum and various caramel colored pusses and oozes from infected teeth, gums and cold sores.  The noxious cocktail erupted in a sticky spray that coated the clandestine breeze, commodiously transporting the range strike to its unsuspecting target. A toxic cloud of insolence and filth assaulted the castigating old man, penetrating his saintly demeanor.  It splattered in tobacco tinged splashes across his gold rimmed spectacles, a bit of the acrid pitch inflamed the sensitive peripheral creases of his naked eyes.  While most of the foul fluid doused his sun-spotted forehead and drooping cheeks, lathering them in slime, a portion cemented to his short lampshade mustache while another equitable fraction spewed into his articulating mouth via direct oral transmission.  Vomiting ensued and part of the crowd rushed over to aid the collapsing Ruggieri until he waved them off, wildly swaying up from his knees with his bible clenched under his arm.  The brown old skeleton doggedly rose to his feet and continued the exorcism, shaking in his robes, sweat pouring down the troughs in his face.  The nameless man just laughed and laughed, a rapping sound like a fissure tearing open the ground or a mammoth wave slapping a stone shore or a shimmering bolt of lightning shredding the clouds, low pitched and decrepitating.    

“Da locum Christo, in quo nihil invenisti de operibus tuis; da locum unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, quam Christus acquisivit Sanguine suo pretio..”

Give place to Christ in whom you have found none of your works; give place to the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church acquired by Christ at the price of His blood..

“Humiliare sub potenti manu Dei; contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine Jesu, quem inferi tremunt..”

Stoop beneath the all-powerful hand of God; tremble and flee when we invoke the holy and terrible name of Jesus, this name which causes hell to tremble..

“Cui Virtutes nomen istud et Potestates et Dominationes subjectæ sunt caeli, hoc indesinenter quem Cherubim et Seraphim..”

This name to which the virtues, powers and dominations of heaven are humbly submissive, this name which the cherubim and seraphim praise unceasingly..

“Dicentes: Sanctus Sanctus, Sanctus..”

Repeating: holy, holy, holy..

“HAAAHAHA HEHE AHHHHAAAAAAAAHAHA HEHE!.....”

“Better save your prayers for decent folk, Padre. This one here is just a few heel clicks away from feeding the worms at the bottom of an unmarked grave.  I don’t reckon we’ll hear his sorry squawks when he’s buried six feet under being dragged to hell by goblins and ghouls. Why don’t you give it a rest son? What would your momma say, seein’ you up there spittin’ an’ laughing like a mad-man, carrying on so shamefully, right before you meet your maker?”

“Oh I don’t know if my mother would have much to say in the matter.  She sort of lost her voice when I was born, as well as a heap of internal organs. What can I say; I was a very needy, grabby infant.  But I’m sure it made for an eventful day for the country doctor at the county courthouse, a birth certificate and a death certificate all in one wagon ride!”

“That’s enough young man.  No sense in speakin’ ill of the dearly departed now that my gavel’s swung and your noose fitted.  The big judge sittin’ up there in the sky probably has enough scorned testimony marked against your spoiled soul as it is.”

What perfunctory sympathy he usually felt for those he’d sentenced to capital annihilation had completely eroded within the judge at this point, soured in his gut like green meat.  This man was nothing to him, horse-shit stuck to the heel of his boot, malted hogwash foaming in the sun.  Yet how could ultimate justice still feel so inequitable? Tragic pawns, passive hosts of death reproducing itself.  Putting down vile men for vile acts leaves their stench on you, their skin under your fingernails, their curses echoing your ears.  After being the eminent lawman, judge and jury with a chrome peacekeeper for nearly twenty years in this township, ghosts with bullet holes in their heads followed Yama around.  If he looked over his shoulder he knew he’d see them standing there, garbed in caked blood and charnel dirt, forgotten children grown up.  “Another for the spooks,” he’d tell the barkeep each night.  With whiskey on his breath he’d sing to the sunrise, silky phantoms surrounding him. “There's blood on the saddle and blood on the ground, and a great great big puddle of blood all around; a cowboy lay in it, all covered with gore, and he never will ride any broncos no more..”

The sun beat down, acquiescing its focal zenith, heightening the midday heat.  Its rays dissolved the gruesome gaggle’s shadows like the razing eye of god, whitewashing the hillcrest in solar bleach.  High noon aproacheth, the awful hour of death.  A brazen beam struck Yama’s copper badge, ricocheting off into the prisoner’s soggy iris, branding it like a blacksmith’s white-hot nail. The scorch only magnified as the lawman took limped steps towards the disheveled captive, his spurs and leather speaking softly.  Nameless and noosed, the damned man recoiled at the brilliant bright, squirming in his chains, insulating himself under clinched eyelids.  

“The time is nigh, boy.”

From behind the wiry judge approached the town doctor, a shriveled cob pipe pinned under his icicle white mustache and a hand restraining his charcoal bowler against the pull of the wind.  His slacks brushed through the ankle-high wildgrass until the accused hinged faintly within arm’s length. Dhanvantari, the wizened backcountry surgeon, reached up as he had at countless executions to examine the machine of death.  In a far off lifetime, or only what seemed to have been, Dhanvantari was a merchant ship’s doctor, operating on deck with rusty instruments in turbulent seas, pulling the captain’s teeth by crinkling wicks of sperm oil lanterns, sweeping puddles of blood into the sea.  Those decades spent marinering the open ocean made his fingers as fluent with knots and lashings as he was with the braids of the spine or with tensile ligament musculature. This man had lost many lifetimes to the sea, swallowed by brine, swept overboard by swells, but somehow it always spat him back out, after due restitution.  How many times had he thought he’d seen the sun for the last time as the waves closed around him and the surface fell away?  Six? Seven?  Perhaps he was still there now, drifting to the salty bottom and this, an illusion in the last rays of light, an eternity in an escaping air bubble.  Regardless he thumbed the noose knot, testing its competence, ignorant of the murdering intimidation ensnared within it.  He examined the loop, stretching it across the man’s Adam’s apple in strangulation simulation.  By his determination death should be nearly instantaneous with the fracturing of the epistropheus.  Dhanvantari removed his hands.

“Whaddaya say Doc? Humane?”

“Too humane.”

“Oh I wish that was up to me, hell I’d have him drawn and quartered already, each arm and leg’d be draggin’ through the desert in opposite directions by streakin’ stallions by now.  But I suppose a bullet in the temple would get the job done too. No time to waste with slaphappy daydreams, we’ve got to adhere to the distinguished code established by our competent elect, those Washington monkeys and their executive goon.  Is it whats-his-name Rutherford or wha-cha-ya ma-call-it Garfield after the last one of their confounded dog-and-pony-show elections? God only knows.. How’s about we get on with it?  Next the accused is to be read their offenses but I’m sure all of us gathered here and now can well attest to the horrendous acts of brutality this man has committed.  No sense in speakin’ of such evil since his deplorable deeds will undoubtedly torment our waking hours forever.  But I won’t deny the prisoner his last words.  Even an infernal devil can sequester some semblance of penitence from the Lord in his last hour if his voice holds even an ounce of goodness. What say you, rogue? Bless thy tongue and utter thy last words.”  

“I have nothing to say to you people or your forlorn humanity.  I was birthed among you but sever our kinship thereafter.  Your bastard race of mutant hominids is the scourge of existence. You ungraciously tout your dubiously predominant intellect with one arm raised in self-admiration while the other quashes down your stricken brother, stepping on his pleading face and bruised throat.  You feed each other into the teeth of the meat grinder for a few pieces of silver, sealing the audacity with a smile and a kiss.  You’ve the blood of your father Ares and the fury of your mother Lyssa. Such horrific worm-like abominations of filth, I want no part of you unless you’re disinfected, dismembered, dissected and freeze-dried.  But you have taught me much, much barbarity.  Because of your imprint I am what I am, the distilled essence of your misanthropy, hate tincture.  I am the anti-soul, the maneater, the devourer of fire and light, the siren of the necropolis, the falling reaper, Death’s dragoon.  I am the one to whom the wolves howl and in my company volts of vultures and cackles of hyenas.  Draped in my cape of babies’ bones and crown of thorns I have blistered the nightmares of the fearful since the dawn of man.   In my wake spite suicides and human husks, desolation and brimstone. You cannot kill me, I am already dead.”

His taunt a command, Yama reduced him to mindless thrashing with a decisive toe-kick to the fruit box, sending it tumbling off before stepping back and affirming his capital judgement.  Gasps ran through the crowd as the knot was tested for capacity for the first time, the charred branch held strong under the burden of the man’s now disintegrating ego.  He expended his life force in feral flounders of wild muscle contractions, as if parasitic monsters within him wrestled to escape from their host’s diminishing body, spinning himself around haphazardly like a broken whirligig despite his wrist and ankle restraints.  Clearly his movements were involuntary, spastic seizures of shocked nerve endings triggered by raging lightning storms of neuronal firing as distressed organ systems desperately faced shut down and annihilation.  His already unsightly appearance became even more revolting in the absence of mental dispensation.  Cloudy eyes pinched in their sockets, bulging outward in masses of crimson jelly as the blood vessels ruptured around flaked lids. Indeterminate sloughs of foamy fluids composed of various pasty consistencies, textures and hues leaked from his orifices, drooling off the dripping points on his face like subterranean stalactites.  A scarred sliver of grey tongue draped from within his chapped lips.  Eventually the jittery agitation ceased and the stillness was broken only by the swivels of his vacant body.  His grizzled neck was crumpled in the noose, disjointed disks of irregular vertebrae pressed asymmetrically against the inner walls of his skin in nauseating bulges of obvious malformation.  

In the crowd a woman began to wail, her immediate elicit reaction to the majority of external stimuli after such loss as befitting a victim who had been made widow by the now deceased bane.  She pulled her black bonnet down over her eyes and reached for her threadbare handkerchief.  Now what? A question she posed to herself, the fates, townsfolk, anyone who’d listen to her bereaved sobs.  Her maternity scars and her wedding ring were the only remaining evidence of her curriculum vitae, her frontier family and their homestead ambition; stolen like the breath from her lungs.  Somewhere along the wagon trail, abandoned in the gutter like a roadside attraction were the charred remains of her Manifest Destiny, a monument of torched wagon frame and scattered skulls. The thought of which drove her to nihilism. But revenge was an opportune emotional departure from the tragedy her faculties refuted as preposterous, incorrigible, a night terror to be expunged by the waking mind and the ascending sun. But confound it!  There it was! That dastardly conflagration, a gleaming confirmation of calamity, the boiling skies its diabolic domain and drenched in its glow she simmered in survivor’s grief.  Niobe willed the hellmouth open, to stride between its chasmal jaws.  Her ample offerings of woe lured the rabid devils and unclean spirits from their untold ethereal realms but on upon arrival she was already of stone.  A brooding destitute, an aimless golem of flesh and bone and tears.

From within the congregation Anubis stepped forth to dress and prepare the body for burial, a process which his coarse muscles and tired joints knew well.  They were creased by the contour of the embalming tools, sculpted by a mortician’s toil; grave dirt under his cuticles from the raw tomb shoveled out this morning.  He unsheathed a blade from his belt, feet advancing, to cut down the inert cadaver from its moored swing.  Behind him his comrades held the reins of a bridled burro which had ferried the bound prisoner to this hill in life and would now from it in death.  It shifted listlessly in its halter, braying nervously with whipping tail.  He approached the hanged man serenely, detached, his mind distanced by the habitual funerary ritual he’d undergone so frequently this past fortnight with so many hideously slaughtered.  But at rest his morbid vocation invaded the asylum of his slumber.  Within the dreamscape he donned the suit of a jackal breathlessly devouring grisly messes strewn about by Death himself, scavenging meat morsels from innocents slain.  But it was over now, the beast was vanquished and this would be his final burial.  He extended his arms, blade in hand, to cleave the noose when the whiskers on his scruff spiked straight up.    

The dead man frenzied into rampage by the scent of slaughter, riving the lull, summoned to survive by his colleague in chaos the razor blade.  The tumultuous details of the next few moments can scarcely be spoken of, saturated with skirmish vectors and martial artistry but if one simply follows the slashes of the edge, its perforatory operation can be fluently plotted.  In one swift motion his blueish corpse-hand swaddled the knife’s pommel, enveloping Anubis’.  It then yanked upwards, burying the tip just underneath the undertaker’s chin, tickling his brain like a lobotomist.  The next instantaneous flash of dynamism was the stiletto’s evacuation from his greymatter.  It whistled as it arced through the air, tearing into the fiend’s own death-paled shatter-boned neck, sinking in and carving in a radial orbit around its circumference.  In a splitting second the ruined mort had accomplished a series of obscene acts totally unforeseen, completely against the natural laws while still bound in chains, and as such, the throng was baffled immobile.  Aghast with gaped mouth and opaque eyes before such ruthlessness, the man holding the burro’s reins barely noticed as it bolted off. Yama’s hand lunged for his holstered pistol as Anubis finally dropped to his knees.

As the last degree of girth was rent, gravity bisected the possessed’s brainstem, sending his feet to tread the earth and his dislodged cranium to roll it, unencumbering the blood-sprayed noose loop.  At this point fright overtook the cluster and fugue became imperative.  They trampled each other to flee this undead waif, careening down the hillside, never mind the trail with evil nipping at the heels. But one gallant soul delayed, familiar with the company of demons.  Yama leveled his revolver at the headless monster loosing three rounds before it was upon him, lopping off his gun hand, hacking through his throat and spilling open his intestines in one mercurial, clockwise arm rotation of serpentine laceration.  Like a tornado it bucked off Yama’s dead shoulders after trailing fingers relieved the weapon from his amputated grip, tumbling acrobatically through the gap between its next kill.  

Scrambling to escape was Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, sprawling over his tailored robes, clawing the muck for leverage with gold ringed fingers. A cone of destructive force interrupted the priest’s bumbling with a tremendous boom of sound shattering.  The slug pierced his temporal lobe just behind the ear, exploding from the other side in a plume of gore and smoke.  Padre crumpled in the dust but his soul soared skybound on angel wings while cherubim and seraphim beckoned him from their hammocks, the clouds.  Another righteous crusader of light skewered on the flames of evil and so sealed was his heavenly reward, obedient even in martyrdom to the cult he worshipped.   The gates of St. Peter were thrown open upon on his winged approach, the celestial scene frescoed immortal by Nuvolone’s Milanese masterpiece.  But the earth claimed his body, to the victor the spoils.

Twin claps of corkscrewing thunder plowed two more inconsequentials, their flaccid constitution summersaulted down an embankment in snaps of branches, dousing the underbrush with their blood.  The doctor, Dhanvantari afforded a precarious over-the-shoulder peak at the proximate commotion between labored footfalls, just long enough to see Death’s skeleton-hand reach for his face.  And then he was dragged to the frothy underbelly, towed from the shallows to breathless leagues of darkness, to the frigid depths, the domain of the leviathan and its swimming monsters.  His cob pipe floated up to the surface like an epitaph.  

Last alive was the half-hearted Niobe, tailed by her shadow of mourning.  She fled on instinct alone, lusting for a peaceful deathbed to lay her head.  She mused macabre that she’d be visited by twinkling visions of her loved ones, at last reunited in paradise after they carried her from her sepulchral bedstead, off and away into the white light. Her wits were unraveled by the poison of this unfulfilled conclusion, drunk with adrenaline at concept of such unimaginable pain of an undoubtedly savage mutilation.  The tree line broke and a valley of Spring-bloomed wildflowers carpeted her clambering passage with purple street signs of knapweed and rushpink, golden sidewalks of butterfly weed and bahia, creamy bushels of loveroot and turkeypea. She sprinted through their syrupy bells with hiked dress and tapping laced leather boots, soon slathered with aromatic pollen.  Their perfume seeped into her psyche, fumed by her exhausted inhalations, tousling her antediluvian reptilian cortex, the cerebral seat of fear and flight.  The flowers drenched her in a calm, resonant bliss which relaxed her gait.  Suddenly she stopped.  Her shadow had dissipated and she found herself on the embanked edge of the lily field, below a river’s bellowing whitewater scrapped against huge agate boulders.  A slight draft swept through the valley, undulating the buttercups and the tassels of her braided hair.  Where had she lost her bonnet?  She peered down and found it tangled in spines of sagebrush but her reach was interrupted by a blindsiding death.  The monstrosity shoulder tackled her while her weight was unbalanced, tossing them both off the ledge of the cliff.  It stabbed her repeatedly while falling, madly puncturing her face down to her abdomen with glossy lesions.

The white dashing crests of alpine water slapped the hurtling pair, bowing under their load and momentum.  The sacred stream drew them into its clutches, buffeting their languid corpses with jagged rapids succeeding in the thorough pulverization of their now unrecognizable meat mishmash.  Hunks of homogenous human peripherals floated downstream like the foodstuffs conveyer belt in a packing plant.  A few flesh pocked bones flipped and twisted, arrested by the current as its skeletal companions swept by the festivities, a sanguine parade.  Soon they were utterly mired on an outcropping of some rocks, the fisherman’s net of an eddy.  Passing nearby Anubis’ knife head embedded itself in the iridescent quartz-spackled river bottom.  Fast in pursuit, bouncing and bobbing like lost baubles in the whitewater, the two handcuffed fists of the nameless man inexplicably threaded a chain-link with the marooned blade.  That duplicity of hand dangled there for years; shackled, shriveled rotten flesh, palpitating so near the portal to Xibalba.  The subterranean aqueduct portion of the road’s journey began only a few hundred yards downriver, where the river water surged under the foot of the mountain.  Underground, within its cavernous limestone bowels, the freshwater runoff engaged green, salty aquafers from the distant sea.  An apparitional estuary, the nether-door to the underworld.  

Unseeing eyes parted on the decapitated head of the desperado, pealing open the world.  Though his awareness was distressingly limited, somehow the slurred outlines of shape and form came to mean something to him.  A bush.  An uncomfortable bush with prickly thorns and homely desert flowers, this was likely his setting, the bramble hemmed the borders of his peripherals like a picture frame.  Central to his porthole of vision was the simple sky, an impressionist composition of sowed blots of buttercream and torpid sheets of blue.  It was all too much, too weighty, too involved; it swam and swooned before him like a rocking bowl of water, filling him up, pressing him into the earth with its gravity.  From his phantom body, he felt each toe, each patch of skin.  Though he knew it missing, the nervous signals must’ve disseminated from a source, some sensory connection, or his brain seemed to believe so.  The invisible air squeezed his surface area.  Tightened tourniquets burdened him like a full body straightjacket or a collapsing cast.  “A mountain must have fallen on me,” he spoke without lips a sparse cognition.  The clouds seemed to descend from the sky, fused and swirled in milky stripes of fog and spewed into the man’s mouth, nose and ears.  It retarded his lucidity and reason, soon laden with dusty dunes of bewilderment. The world was a mirage of dancing light.

Then the dam began to crack.  He felt crooked fissures snaking across his skull and body like spreading vines, soon he would rupture and there was nothing to be done. Sure enough the bleeding cracks started to sweat the liquids from his body; blood, bile and lymph, and as they leaked they whispered a static hiss. Gushhhhhhhhh.  The noise vibrated through him and up to his ears, he heard it as though underwater; berating, omnidirectional and boisterous.  The gashes grew thick in sinuous ropes of entanglement, infesting ostensibly the extent of his being.  And through them breached torrents of life-water overflow.  The crevices poured out the viscous distillation with the cacophony of a thousand teeming waterfalls.  There was nothing but the thunder, no room for anything else. Its density rose past any measure of volume until it overcame him, overtaking his presence by force of will. Suddenly it crescendoed and was gone, dissolving in a fizzle of diffuse ringing.  The drainage had stopped as well, he was now presumably empty.  He cried out from the hollow of his head but was not heard, his hearing had left him.  What reverberated instead however was fear; a ping of hysteria.  In absent mannerism he desperately reached for his face and found just ruined fragments, quivering lumps of lips and chin, like crushed scraps of a Mardi Gras mask.  Hunks snapped off as his fingertips probed for a landmark, an eye socket, a cheekbone, something familiar to enshrine his ego but there was barely anything left.  He broke his pointer finger off at the knuckle scouring a caved in nostril cavity in his mania.  “Hell, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.  What do I care?” his internal thoughts illumed apathetically, for his speech facilities were in white corroded shambles.  From his powdered granules of ravaged carnage a breath of smoke arose, the rubble dust twirled up towards the void, suctioned into the lofty abyss where it surveyed from above.  

Then flames reared up like pillars of plasmic light, engorged by the heat of combustion.  Jagged tongues lapped hungrily at the abraded man whose consciousness was amorphous and unsensing, only dimly cognizant of self-presence. An incendiary holocaust raged sensation away.  Every ounce of feeling was expunged in a deliberate eradication, neuronal overstimulation to excess until the connectivity wore through and the atomic structure crumbled in fatigue.  The heap of blanched biologic matter was scarified to complete tactile stupefaction, unrecognizing even neighboring cells.  Then the conflagration expired having extracted the last of its nourishment and his botch of body cooled off.  

First the warmth left the deteriorated boneyard of his extremities, vanishing into ice like the last warm days of Autumn, blanketing the plaster hunks of disintegrating anatomy in inches of snow. Next to succumb to anesthesia was his chest of decrepit organs, frozen solid in their collapsed disrepair, forgotten now in the advancing permafrost of numbness. Last was his mess of frostbitten face, abandoned in paralysis, left to entropy.  A nearly bare mindscape was the man’s totality now, devoid of light and motion, vibration and sound, texture and touch.  His being was only tethered to locality by lingering senses of smell and taste which now dominated his concern.  Driving columns of bellowed air churned in opposite directions within lungs and sinuses that he knew were imaginary figments, apparitional muscle memories, repackaged experiential data.  Astral nostrils flecked with astral ether intake, sifting its contents. Each unlikely breath was a kaleidoscope of pungent samples comingled from various lifetimes and experiential encounters: a fresh peeled apple, steam off quenched metal, damp mattress body odor, a musty draft from the root cellar, miscellaneous tails of perfume on a street corner, etc.  Soon faded had the aromas’ potency, gradually sojourning elsewhere.  The circulations of invisible current also ceased and without its tidal oscillation there was stillness.  But before its last drags a cloudburst of amber sparks, an eruption of fireflies to festoon the sparse canvas of nothingness.  “Where do you lead, oh wavering stars? Abridge this inked abyss.”

That was when an even more extensive purgatory of nothingness descended on his bleak reality of senseless ambivalence.  Abandoned in a crawlspace of the universe, dreary anathema, doldrums of inaction, his operative reality was staggeringly reduced to a naked impression of existing, as if lingering on the threshold of non-being.  His lifeline was taste; last vestige of a world that had all but forgotten him.  His formless presence diffused into the surrounding unknown at uncontrolled random, performing its forsaken duty because the possibility of anything else did not exist.  Stimuli drifted in and out of his localized perception like a filter feeder’s chum, exotic glimpses of a fully realized world beyond this low dimension, rationale for perseverance.  This continued for an imperceptible interval, perhaps ten thousand years, perhaps a hummingbird’s heartbeat.  Over time the meaninglessness came to mean even less to the erratic coagulation of man, now only a remote ancestor of his worldly persona devolved and inbred.  It tongued the grey brittle of its immediacy, probing the filth and cobwebs of its hermitage for traces of vim, for even a hint of neurological input or residual aftertaste, anything to subdue the mental paralysis.  “I’ve no business left here.  Take from me what you will but don’t leave me in this hall of mirrors.” And at long last the candle flame was extinguished, leaving the smoke to dissipate and disseminate throughout the universe, replenishing omission, stuffing lack, becoming again.    

$+��8��~

[untoldreader]

Sparks Ignite

Maria Hill x reader x Natasha Romanoff

Summary

The attraction between Maria, Natasha, and Y/N grows stronger, causing both excitement and uncertainty. Their shared moments become charged with undeniable chemistry, setting the stage for a passionate journey

Warnings

None?

Tag list

@nayarianna1302 @tigerlillyruiz @alexawynters

Chapter 2

In the aftermath of their fateful encounter, Maria, Natasha, and Y/N found themselves unable to shake off the lingering emotions that had stirred within them. The undeniable chemistry between them crackled in the air, leaving them simultaneously exhilarated and apprehensive about what lay ahead.

As days turned into weeks, their paths continued to intertwine. They found themselves gravitating towards one another, drawn by an invisible force that defied reason. Whether it was during training sessions, briefings, or even casual encounters in the hallway, their interactions held an undercurrent of tension and unspoken longing.

Maria, usually composed and focused, found her thoughts drifting towards Natasha and Y/N at unexpected moments. She caught herself stealing glances, studying the curve of Natasha's lips or the way Y/N's eyes sparkled with mischief. It was a dangerous territory for Maria, who had always prided herself on maintaining a professional distance. But now, her heart was at odds with her training, yearning for something beyond duty.

Natasha, too, found herself captivated by the enigmatic allure of Maria and Y/N. She had always been guarded, keeping her emotions locked away behind a steely facade. But their presence had cracked open the door to her heart, allowing a sliver of vulnerability to seep through. She couldn't help but be drawn to their strength, their unwavering dedication, and the way they challenged her in ways she had never experienced before.

Y/N, caught in the whirlwind of emotions, marveled at the complexity of their feelings. They had never expected their path to intersect with Maria and Natasha in such a profound way. Yet, here they were, their heart torn between the two extraordinary individuals who had become an integral part of their life. The decision weighed heavily on Y/N's mind, torn between the fear of risking everything and the undeniable pull of their connection.

One evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon, Maria, Natasha, and Y/N found themselves alone in a quiet corner of the facility. The tension between them was palpable, filling the space with a charged energy. It was Maria who broke the silence, her voice laced with vulnerability.

"I can't deny what I feel," she admitted softly, her gaze locked with Natasha's. "There's something between us, something I can't ignore."

Natasha's cerulean eyes reflected a kaleidoscope of emotions as she nodded, her voice barely above a whisper. "I feel it too. It's like an inferno, consuming everything in its path."

Y/N, their heart pounding in their chest, spoke up tentatively. "I... I feel it too. But what does this mean for us? Can we navigate this uncharted territory without jeopardizing everything we've worked for?"

The weight of the question hung heavy in the air, the uncertainty casting a shadow over their budding connection. They knew that pursuing their desires would come with consequences, potentially endangering their careers and the delicate balance of their team dynamic.

Yet, in that moment, they made an unspoken pact. They would embark on this journey together, guided by their hearts and the indomitable flame that burned within them. They understood that the path ahead would be challenging, but the allure of love was too strong to resist.

As they stood there, the moon casting a gentle glow upon them, Maria, Natasha, and Y/N took their first steps towards a love that defied boundaries and would forever alter the course of their lives. The sparks that had ignited between them promised a future filled with passion, adventure, and the unbreakable bond they were about to forge.

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Chapter 2 ended with the trio embracing the uncertainty, united in their decision to explore the depths of their connection and allow their love to flourish, even in the face of adversity. :)