#I have been accused of flaking countless times

[teleconhaikus]

I really wish I had the ability to bend the ears of those in Hollywood to portray disabled and ill humans with grace and empathy and not who magically get better one day, or have only one episode story archs but ones where they actually are considered daily and their needs are thought of by all their friends and loved ones.. not because it’s the reality I know but because it’s the reality I wish I could at least see in a fantasy world at least.

I spent all day yesterday on my couch in pain from lupus, hands and feet just aching and no energy to do much else than sleep.. and it’s isolating and it’s lonely but it could be better if the world saw everyone for their flaws and supported them instead and the only they would is if they see it in their heros, and the fiction first. If you can’t even imagine it it can’t ever be real.

[funkymbtifiction]

What’s been your experience of knowing a person of each Enneagram type?

It’s nothing if not interesting. 😉

1s: can be principled, dutiful, and reliable. Their pet peeve is for people to be rude, irresponsible, inconsiderate, or late. I’ve known an sp 1 and a soc 1. The sp 1 does indeed resemble a 6 due to content fretting, low self esteem, terror of getting it wrong, and general anxiety, but shows 1 behaviors of obsessive cleaning, a desperate need to control everything, and rigidity in setting up “house rules.” In so doing, she has denied herself anything that is not “useful,” which I find terribly sad. She has no room for pleasure in her life. The soc 1 is far more inclined to be assertive, to correct others, to point out what they are doing wrong, and to show her anger. Much less self doubt.

2s: ah, 2s. I’ve known a few marginally and one “sort of” well, since I spent ten days with her on a visit to another state. She truly reminded me of Molly Weasley in her bustling about, her attending to everyone’s numerous needs (and ability to keep us all in line), her pride in doing things for everyone, and her sensitivities. At one point, her daughter told her, “MOM, STOP MOLLY WEASLEY-ING CHARITY! SHE’S FINE. SHE DOESN’T NEED WATER. THANKS.” Ha, ha. I liked her a great deal, but it amused me how defensively she drove – under stress, I saw her 8 come out, though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. We all snapped to attention whenever that happened.

3s: I admire their work ethic but… the one I know offline has to find some way to impress people, no matter what. If that is in showing you his muscles and making sure you know how far he biked today, so be it. It used to be because he was proud of his professional life. Since retirement, I have seen him struggle enormously with having a sense of purpose and trying to find one that doesn’t hinge on his non-existent work. That is what worries me about 3s – getting old, and no longer having society regard them as “useful and essential” is HELL on them. Please, make sure, if you are a 3, to do the internal work on figuring out who you are, and recognizing your own worth as separate from what you do, before you reach that age.

4s: I have known a lot of 4s, some healthy and some not. I have two delightful healthy ones in my life right now – an sp/sx 4 and an soc/sp 4, and they are indeed different. The sp 4 is more internal and less aware of or inclined to change herself for others; the soc 4 looks outward, and is highly attentive to other people. Sp 4 can take on others’ pain and burdens in a sense and feel overwhelmed by it – and with both of these beautiful girls, I’ve seen it turn them toward compassion. But they do tend to run high on “drama.” It’s not a song, it’s an opera. I knew an unhealthy 4 once who was hell-bound to remain miserable and a victim wallowing in her pain and thwarted (almost sadistically gleefully) anyone’s attempts to help her rise above her bad situation. She wanted to stay there. And she drove everyone who knew her insane. Eventually, she lost all her friends due to her being the wet mop all the time -- which of course, fed into her sadistic happiness at being miserable, abandoned, and unloved.

5s: can be callous at times, just because they are so lacking in emotional self-awareness and so fixated on logical solutions, but they will give it to you straight if you ask for it. They tend toward severe social awkwardness—think Mr. Darcy at the Netherfield Ball. Most inclined to disappear five minutes after you meet them and remain unseen until you leave. I knew a five once, the father of a friend, who would call out hello to me as he walked right past me, straight down into the basement, where he hid for hours among his books. Given he had a house full of giggling, silly girls, I don’t blame him. He was truly Mr. Bennet.

6s: can be either the warmest, funniest, most loyal people you will ever meet – or the biggest pains in the butt, and I say that as a 6. I know one other sp 6 and he reminds me of myself, just older and male – we both are hilarious, we both tease people to establish a rapport with them, we both crave feedback and support from trusted others, and we both swing between concern and optimism. But unhealthy, paranoid 6s are out in force right now freaking everyone out about the COVID-19 and the world doesn’t need that. It needs HOPE. So for heaven’s sake, put down the freak-outs, the paranoid accusations, the wild conspiracy theories, and accept that your worst-case scenario projections are just that -- the product of your own scared mind. It may or may not happen, and trust me, 6s, I know damn well that your worst fears usually don’t happen anywhere except in your head.

7s: are enormous fun to go on vacation with, but can be flakes. Lovable ones, but still flakes. They promise more than they can deliver and then avoid you rather than face up to the music when they realize they don’t want to do what they promised. They are hilarious, witty, optimistic, and their enthusiasm is infectious, but sometimes they fail to realize that not everyone wants to be endlessly teased, mocked, or come home to a mountain of stuff followed by a maxed-out credit card bill. Life is not always a joke, sometimes it is serious. And they are inclined not to finish a serious conversation if it in any way makes them uncomfortable or feel like they’re about to confront part of themselves.

8s: I have only known one and… there are things I like about her. Her courage. Her ballsy attitude. This woman made a place for herself in a man’s world, in a time when that was not done. She bulldozed her way to the top. Unfortunately, she never shut off the bulldozer. She has burned bridges behind her, made countless enemies, and gets into foolish personal and legal fights because she refuses to back down from anyone, and will turn anything into an argument. She lost my mother as a friend, because she thought bullying her was a good idea. My mother set up polite boundaries and the 8 trampled them, something my mother does not forgive. Something 8s need to remember – what is fun for you (you consider fighting “bonding”) is not always fun for someone else who is not an 8. Being an 8 is an asset, but only if you learn to tell the difference between a threat and a non-threat.

9s: are some of the most precious people on earth, but also the must frustrating for me, because I see them being mercilessly treated by the rest of the world, which tends to walk all over them. I wind up counseling 9 friends who are frustrated at ‘not being heard’ but cannot find it within themselves to assert themselves in any way, or think they deserve to be heard, or know how to recognize what is NOT okay. Being a 9, a peacemaker, someone able to understand everyone’s point of view, is a valuable gift, but you cannot use it for good if you are incapable of believing you deserve good things, too.

Each Enneagram type has a health level. You can find them at the Enneagram Institute. Figure out which level is ‘you’ and start working toward the next one up, through conscious choices. You don’t have to stay this way. Your life is yours to command.1s, you don’t have to be perfect. 2s, you don’t have to please others. 3s, you don’t have to win every time. 4s, you don’t have to stay in a place of self-loathing. 5s, you don’t have to fear trying things. 6s, you don’t have to be afraid all the time. 7s, you don’t have to run away from everything. 8s, you don’t have to turn every discussion into a fight. 9s, you don’t have to give everyone whatever they want. It’s time to take back your life.

- ENFP Mod

PS: Most of these examples come from my extended family, none of whom follow this blog, so if you’re one of my friends (unless you are the 4) -- I’m not talking about you. ;)

[k7l4d4]

Midnight Striga: Fairy Tail/Owl House Cross Fic Episode 5 Part 6

Once more, we delve into the world of Midnight Striga! Everybody Clap Your Hands!!

Eda roared, leaping toward the man, the monster, who had just casually murdered a child right in front of her!! Whipping her staff down to crush his skull, she was caught dumb when he casually leaned out of the way, a frost clad fist slamming into her face as she fell forward. A gasp of pain burst out as she was sent sprawling. Luckily, Eda had been in plenty of brawls. Gathering her wits, she tucked into a roll, coming up flat on her feet.

“If you think I’ll go easy on you ‘cause you’re human, you’ve got another thing coming!!” She shouted, eyes glancing at Lily, still prone against the wall. What was up with her, this was an emergency!! She growled, shifting herself to spring between Lily and the goons following that monster.

“Go... easy... on me? Pfft HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!” The bastard laughed, actually laughed!, at Eda’s claim, as if the idea that she could beat him was so utterly ridiculous it deserved nothing but ridicule. The fact that his goons echoed him was like rubbing salt in the wound. “That- That was truly amusing!! In exchange for that wonderful jest, allow me to introduce myself.” He bowed, a mocking leer stretched across his face. “I am Rudolph Cranwin, practitioner of the most noble art of Frost Magic, not that I ever really cared about the alleged nobility of it; twas but another tool for me to kill with, nothing more. I look forward to seeing how long I can drag out your demise!!” He said cheerfully, as if her death would be the highlight of his day.

‘To this piece of shit, it might very well be.’ Eda bitterly thought to herself. Her thoughts were cut off by his next words.

“However,” Rudolph mused, “This crowd truly is far too large. Better to thin it out a bit before I let my precious brethren have their fun.” He raised his hand, a cold wind building into a ball in his palm. Eyes widening in shocked comprehension, Eda lunged forward, a massive ball of flames building along Owlbert. She had to get there in time, she needed to! If she didn’t… Rudolph gave her a mocking smile. “Too late, Owl Lady. Winter Spite.” With those two words, the ball exploded in all directions. A huge burst of extreme cold, so deep that it effortlessly extinguished Eda’s building spell, ripped through the stadium. In an instant, the entire place was coated in frost. Just from what she could see on the ground, Eda saw several Demons and Witches in the crowd frozen in place, ice and frost coating their bodies; from the few she could clearly see, at minimum twenty had died, a quarter of which were children. The smallest she could see looked to be about five. As if some signal had gone off, the hoard of Mages lurking behind Rudolph burst forth, screaming in bloody rage, sickening grins coating their faces, spells primed to rip and tear.

“Tree Shot!” “Big Head Blast!” “Sword Beam!” “Wind Cleave!”

Eda braced herself for the attacks; a tree root tore out of the ground, ripping across Eda’s ribs, a spell shaped like a giant head rocketed past her, a beam of light shaped like a blade cut into the stadium, and slashes of winds tore at the bystanders. And more. So many more. They weren’t all incredibly powerful, but they all had something in common; the palpable desire to hurt leaked out of each and every one. Bearing her fangs, Eda whirled around, launching a wave of magic upwards, cutting off as many spells as she could. Her quick timing was used against her, however, when a blast of cold smashed against her back, sending her flying.

“Ah, ah, ah! No interfering with the games, Owl Lady!” Rudolph mockingly chided. She turned her head towards him, eyes burning with hate. He merely grinned. “If the crowd wishes to live, they must defend themselves, or have one of their own act as a champion! You, and your sister I suppose, are my prey.” Rushing into her guard, his palm glowed. “Winter Punt.” A burst of frigid air formed underneath her gut, angled upward, and as it released, Eda choked on her own air as it drove her into the sky.

What was with this guy!? She had decimated Lily earlier, and while she was feeling some of the effects of pushing herself that hard, that quickly, she shouldn’t be this hampered. She sighed, freezing up as she saw her breath, as if she was in the middle of winter. She looked down, and saw her limbs coated in patches of frost, weighing her down, slowing her reactions, and who knows what else. She genuinely didn’t even feel the cold, not really, but her body was acting as if she was naked in a blizzard!!

Rudolph smirked. “I see you’ve noticed.” He chuckled, slowly stalking towards the Witch and her prone sibling. “Yes, a fun little aspect of my magic is that it clings to the body of those it hits, slowing them, filling them with cold, stilling the flow of magic. The longer our fight goes on, the slower, weaker, and more feeble you will become.” He cocked his head, a look of mockingly fake sympathy playing across his features. “Oh, how tragic, to be cut down so short.” He cackled, an uproarious sound that resounded through the arena.

“Bastard.” Eda bit out, trying and failing to flake the frost off her limbs. “If I wasn’t dealing with this, he’d be flatter than paper!!” She glanced back at her sister, still stuck in that pose from where she had dropped, dead to the world, tears pooling at her feet. ‘What’s up with you, Lily? We don’t have time for this! ...Please, whatever’s going on, I’ll help you, but you have to snap out of it!’

Luz growled as she and the others passed by yet another corpse, this one bearing the distinctive signs of Retic’s harvesting; the chest ripped open, organs carefully partitioned and severed from the surrounding tissue, and the corpse tossed aside like a rag doll, whatever body parts he didn’t take flopping uselessly. The others stoically pointed forward, steadfastly ignoring the gore and death surrounding them; they knew that if they stopped, they wouldn’t continue. But with each corpse, each tragedy they passed, the burning rage built up within them.

“So…” Willow drawled, trying to distract them from the horrors surrounding them. “You mentioned you were a member of this group. What was that like?” She instantly felt like kicking herself, but it was the only thing she could think of off the top of her head.

Luz snorted, but decided to answer; it would come out eventually. “I wasn’t a member of the Black Dog Squad specifically, but I often got saddled to them; they provided a big, bloody distraction, I completed the objective, whether it was stealing a priceless relic, assassinating an enemy, or just setting the pieces for something bigger in motion, I got it done. I hated every second of it.” It was truly the most painful chapter of her life, bar nothing.

“If you hated it, why did you join?” Amity stated more than asked. Truthfully, Amity cringed at the accusatory note in her voice; all of this pain was like nothing she had experienced before. The fact that the girl in front of her, that snarky, selfless, free-spirited girl had been in any way connected to a group capable of this? It was jarring. She had to know why.

Luz gave a small chuckle, the kind of empty, hollow ache that only came from someone trying to humor the most tragic and heartbreaking of requests. “I didn’t exactly want to join. Suffice to say, I entered Oroboros’ field of vision when I interfered in a few of their operations, not that I knew it at the time. They ended up deciding to pay me a visit. The reason? Join them, or someone will die.”

Gus cocked his head in perplexedness, deciding to ask what he felt they all were thinking. “Well, you didn’t seem to have a problem sacrificing yourself earlier.” He hoped he didn’t sound accusing, but it really was confusing to him.

Luz snorted, morbidly amused. “I never said I was the one being threatened with death.” She calmly replied, causing the others to pause for a second. Luz continued, nonchalant. “Yeah, whenever Oroboros decides it wants someone in its ranks, but they have a few too many morals, they take a hostage, someone that person cares about dearly.” The others felt a sinking feeling at Luz’s words, as she rambled on. “Whenever the recruit talks back, their hostage gets beaten. Whenever they fail, their hostage has a limb broken. Whenever they succeed, the hostage gets a wonderful meal, after having been deprived of all but the bare minimum of food and water needed to keep them alive during the extent of the mission of course. Every aspect of an Objectionary Recruit’s time with Oroboros, someone like myself, is intertwined with the health and safety of their hostage. If the Recruit dies, so does the hostage.” She finished, walking on.

The others exchanged alarmed glances, before Willow spoke up, voice loaded with uncertainty. “Then… did you leave your hostage behind?” She didn’t think Luz had, none of them did, but the only other alternative…

“HAHA!!” Luz cackled, as if what she asked was funny. “No. No I didn’t. They begged me to leave, to save myself, to do the right thing. But I didn’t! I stayed. I killed, and stole, and ruined countless lives, for the life of someone dear to me. But, ultimately, it was for nothing. A guard, one who would’ve been a perfect fit for the Black Dogs if it weren’t for his lack of magical training, decided he wanted to have some fun. My hostage took exception to that. An hour later, their bodies were found. The guard had been strangled with his own belt… my hostage had a knife slid into her liver.” She turned her head towards the others, an almost beatific look on her face. “It’s hard to threaten someone with a hostage when they’re dead, afterall.” And then, Luz laughed, the broken, empty laugh of someone who didn’t know how to find any other way to make it stop hurting.

And so the group moved onward in silence, the Witchlings carefully ignoring the splotches of tears that followed behind them; they didn’t want to tell Luz she’d been crying ever since she started talking.

Boscha growled, hastily ducking under another clumsy swing from the disgusting pile of fat in front of her. With a roar, she leapt into the air, an axe kick launched for the fat thing’s head, a curved blade of bloody flames trailing in its wake. She yelped when he caught her kick, slamming her into the ground with a painful Crack! Cursing, she bobbed under another lunge, slamming a burning fist into his stomach, something that prompted a horrific squeal from the disgusting beast.

His smile dimmed, Fatso charged Boscha with a roar, his mouth distending into the massive chasm of flesh he used to swallow his foes. Screaming in challenge, Boscha belted out a burst of flames, gushing from her mouth; it was an honestly surreal experience to be literally breathing fire!! Fatso squealed, flailing back from the flames that avoided his colossal mouth. Boscha smirked. ‘So I just have to keep him from eating my attacks, eh?’

“Try and eat this, you fat fuck!” She shouted, unleashing a wave of flames. Even if he ate some of it, the rest would scorch him badly, something Fatso was apparently smart enough to realize. With a shocking level of agility and strength, he hurled himself into the air, beaming in childish delight. Out of the line of fire, he opened his maw, inhaling with all he had; the massive wave of flames was sucked into his gut. Boscha cursed. Why wasn’t this working!? Her flames, her damnable flames, the one thing she could reliably use, were worthless against this creep!! Whispers started creeping in, the sound of screams building in her head. She shook it off as best she could; she knew trying to fend it off was temporary, but she couldn’t afford to be distracted.

“Oooooohhh you’re a funny one! IIiiiiiiii’llll have lots of fun tenderizing you!” Fatso cheered, rushing up to Boscha, slamming his corpulent fists into her legs, a scream of agony ripping out of her throat; he had definitely snapped a bone or two. Before she could move, he gripped her by the skull, violently slamming her against the stone. “Iiiiii’mmmm gonna have so much fun with you, and when you get all nice and tender, I’ll get to eat you all up! Wooooonnnnn’ttttt that be fun!?” He kicked her in the stomach, her lunch spilling out in response. “Aaaaaawwwww, you lost all that food! Tttthhhhaaaaattt’ssss no good! Nooooowwwwww you won’t taste as yummy when you get in my tummy!” He whined, hurling her away in annoyance. He pursed his lips, placing a pudgy finger on them. “HHHhhhmmmmm maybe I’ll have better luck if I try finding that scarf girl?”

Boscha’s eyes snapped open. Shakily rising to her feet, she screamed. “YOU KEEP AWAY FROM HER!!” With a roar, she rushed him, only for him to dismissively backhand her away, not even bothering to look at her.

“YYyyyoooouuu’rrrrrreee no fun anymore.” He said without a glance, waddling off. “Aaaaaaalllllll you can do is throw that stupid fire. Nnnnoooooo fun, no fun at all eating the same stupid trick.”

“Fun?” Boscha whispered, eyes widening in incredulousness. “You think this is supposed to be FUN!?” She half-screamed. Tears started building in her eyes. “HOW IS KILLING US, ATTACKING US WHEN WE’VE DONE NOTHING TO YOU, SUPPOSED TO BE FUN!?!?!?”

“Hhhuuuuuuuhhhh? Wwwwwhhhhaaatttt kinda stupid question is that? IIiiiiiittttt’ssss fun because I’m strong, and you’re weak.” He said, as if saying that the sky was red, or that plants were purple. “Tttthhhheeee boss said that, because I’m part of Oroboros, I can do whatever I want, eat anything I want, anyone I want, because I’m strong and they can’t stop me, so whatever I do is fun, because I say it’s fun!!” He cheerfully explained. “Eeeeaaaaatttttiiinnnnnggg is so much fun, I could eat forever!!!! BBbbuuuuuuttttt when I eat people-meat, it’s even more fun, because they give the bestest screams when they go in my tummy!!” He patted his gut for emphasis.

Boscha’s blood pounded in her ears. Strong? This… fat piece of TRASH thought he was strong!? No… he didn’t know the meaning of the word. She had seen real strength. He might’ve been powerful, but he wasn’t strong. If he faced someone with real strength, he’d be crying like a bitch. Boscha pulled herself to her feet, utterly indifferent to her previous pain, nothing but burning rage flowing through her veins at the moment. Flames sparked, sputtered… and raged. Boscha wasn’t sure if she was fully conscious at the moment, but she didn’t care. This bastard had threatened one of the few things in this life she actually cared about still, and he had the balls to pretend he knew what strength was, and that he was strong?

Flames pooled at her feet. In a burst of heat, Boscha zipped to Fatso’s side, fist cocked back. With a roar filled with the rage of a wild animal, Boscha slammed her fist so hard against his gelatinous face, she would swear later that she felt his bones bend around her fist. “You think you’re strong?” She asked, the deathly calm doing nothing to hide the burning hate hidden within.

As Fatso rocketed back, eyes snapped wide open in disbelief, Boscha rushed in, flame-clad knee slamming into his gut, watching in grim amusement as he coughed up a mix of blood and miscellaneous bits, whether the blood was his own or not was up for debate. “You don’t know anything about strength.” She ducked under his clumsy swing, landing a clean blow to the throat, prompting him to choke. “Strength isn’t about lording what power you have above someone else.” She slammed across his face, knuckles landing a solid hit to his eyes. “It isn’t acting as if you’re above the same rules and laws everyone has to follow.”

He grunted, and roared, swinging both arms down towards her skull. She leaned back, letting the attack whiff by, slamming home a kick to his chin. “It’s about making a difference.” She caught his next punch, her eyes narrowing at the panic in his gaze. “It’s about looking after what’s precious to you.” She twisted his arm to the side, prompting a squeal of pain. His eyes furrowed, before he lunged forth, attempting to swallow her, only for her to catch his face with her free hand, fingers covering his eyes and digging into his temples, arresting his movement. “It’s what happens when you stop standing on the sidelines to cruelty, or acting to further cruelty yourself.” Flames started licking up her arm, prompting Fatso to start struggling.

“I don’t think you’ve ever seen real strength before.” She casually continued, ignoring his screams as the flames scorched his face. “I wonder, if I had never seen real strength, would I have turned out as something like you?” She pondered, even as Fatso begged and pleaded for her to let go. “Even so…” She murmured, glaring at Fatso, even as his skin blackened and peeled under her grip. “How can you call yourself strong… when you’re losing to someone AS WEAK AS ME!?!?!?!?” She screamed, wetness pouring down her face. She screamed and screamed and screamed, all while the skin, fat, flesh, and what little muscle remained of his body all turned to ash, tears pouring down her face all the while. When all that was left was his scorched, pitted, blackened skeleton, Boscha fell to her knees, tears falling in pools. “I’m so sorry I’m weak. Maybe if I was stronger… you wouldn’t have had to die so slowly.” And with those words, Boscha fell, her strength spent.

[theawkwardundercoverwriter]

Bucky X Reader

Description: Bucky and Y/N in the 40s. If Steve had a younger sister this is how I imagine their lives would be.  (Inspiration and scenes from Captain America: The First Avenger). Not factually accurate. 

Warnings: Abuse, swearing and of course amateur writing. No editing has been done. 

Part One:

No matter how many times you madly readjust your hair the purple blotches only deepen above your eye. 

“No no please.” You murmur to yourself. The overwhelming sense of panic runs down your spine as you note the time on the wooden grandfather clock that sits almost mockingly above the fireplace. Steve would be home anytime now most likely with Bucky in tow. Ever since your parents died both Steve and Bucky have gone the extra mile to look after you. Both held a protective gaze over you at all times. If either of them saw you in this current state they would flip. 

You grab your powder, smothering it above your eye causing you to wince - mostly in frustration that the welts couldn’t be covered to the extent you want them to be. 

You feel completely stupid as you evaluate the damage left on your body. You had a cut on your forearm that was still bleeding. A trickle of blood is currently seeping through your dress sleeve. The new shoes that Steve somehow managed to buy for your birthday are scuffed, and the bow of your hat remains detached, lying on the floor.  You had gotten into a fight with your boyfriend, Eric. You’ve been courting him for only a couple of months, but his nasty side becomes increasingly evident as each day passes. He’d enlisted for the army, he, of course, had the extra pressure of serving his country as his father was the mayor of Brooklyn, Fiorello H. La Guardia.  He had to go and fight in the war; his drafting day inches closer and closer which means his explosive nature heightens. The fight you two had was over Bucky. He as usual accused you of having feelings for your brother’s best friend. You didn’t try to deny it, because deep down, you both knew it was true. Bucky’s smile had the power to mend any ache. He is your rock, especially when your mom died. You wouldn’t know where you would be without him. He knew all your secrets, all your fears and how to make you laugh like no one else. No man could ever make you feel the way he did. Watching Bucky go on countless dates broke your heart, it nearly tears you apart at the near mention of another woman. But you ignore the dull ache in your chest; instead of pining over your brother’s best friend you alter your attention elsewhere. You decided that you didn’t want to be heartbroken by this beautiful man anymore so instead, you came up with a plan. Erica was the answer to get over Bucky. 

He beats you. He yells at you. But you still stay. You figure you aren’t exactly innocent when it comes to Eric and his drama. You are and have been using him, maybe not on purpose, but if you were being honest with yourself, he’s a distraction. It made you a guilty party in this mess.  So you stayed and remained silent. If anyone found out the mayor's son was hitting his lady, there would be a huge scandal. Your reputation would be damaged and Steve would run off and get himself killed if he and Eric ever came face to face. 

Rushing around the room you quickly change into another dress, discarding the stained one into a ball at the bottom of the closet.  You fumble in the kitchen cabinet looking for bandages. The number of times you’ve had to fish them out of the draw for Steve when he came home beaten and bloody has gotten you familiar with first aid. 

Two familiar voices irrupt in laughter from outside the walls of your home. “Crap.” You hiss as your fingers fumble with the bandage. 

“Ah, I can’t find my key.” Steve huffs from outside the door. Tying the bandage up and pulling your sleeve down you take a deep breath attempting to calm yourself. 

“Seriously man? Again?” Bucky laughs. You hear some movement and scuffling outside. You assume it’s Buck grabbing the spare key from underneath the loose brick just outside the apartment. A few seconds later the key jingles in the keyhole and the door swings open. 

“Hey Stevie, did you manage to get some bread while you were out?” You call walking towards both men pretending that it was any other normal day. 

“Sorry Y/N, I got caught up. I’ll get us some tomorrow.” He shoots you an apologetic smile. You walk towards them ready to give him an ear full when something stops you dead in your tracks. 

Bucky stands proud and tall in his army uniform. Gold flakes dance in his blue eyes as he drinks in your appearance. 

“You’ve got your orders?” You nearly choke out. 

“Yeah, first thing tomorrow.” You swallow the thick lump that’s formed in your throat. “Y/N, don’t look so sad.” He gently coos. Bucky pulls you into his side, gently rubbing his fingers up and down your arm in an attempt to comfort you, but it does nothing to soothe your aching heart. You dreaded this very day. His hand continues to trace soft patterns as he senses your unease but he soon hesitates. His hand hovers over the bandage hiding under your sleeve. Your eyes interlock and immediately a rush of panic overloads your body as he starts to notice the messy hair, the overdone makeup and the bandages sprawled out in the kitchen. You can see his mind working overtime, putting all the pieces together. His eyes burn into your soul and for a second you are convinced he can see right through you. Quickly pulling your hand away you turn your attention to Steve. Examing his appearance you notice the bruises on his face. They were nearly identical to yours. 

“Seriously Steven? Again?” You huff, “You got into another fight? Who was it with this time?” You begin to fuss over him but he swats your hands away, not allowing you to fully inspect his wounds. 

“Y/N I’m fine.” He wines. 

“Honestly is it too much to ask to just walk away?” You can feel Bucky’s eyes scanning your appearance but you ignore him. 

“Are you going out tonight Doll?” Bucky quizzes. 

“Yeah what’s with the clown makeup, you don’t need it Y/N, you’re beautiful, just like mom,”  Steve interjects. “ And I promise I will be careful next time.” He says while planting a soft kiss on your cheek. “You don’t need to worry about me.” 

You roll your eyes; you’ve heard that before. 

“I haven’t made dinner because I’m going to the Stark Expo.” You answer Bucky while staring at your bare feet.  

“Oh so are we, I just need to get cleaned up.” Steve groans, “Double dates are never fun, but here I am, getting pressured into this situation, again.” He walks into the cupboard retrieving a new tie without any bloodstains leaving you and Bucky alone. 

You silently plead for Steve to come back. 

“Who are you going with?” Bucky asks. He steps closer to you, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear.  You can feel his warmth radiating against your skin. You ignore the shivers he sends up your spin and silently curse at Bucky as butterflies explore in your stomach. 

“With Eric.” You reply, trying to will yourself out of Bucky’s grasp. 

“Is that who did this to you?” He replies softly in your ear but you notice his jaw tighten. You pull away, scrambling to find your shoes and purse. 

“I’m running late, I have to leave now. Eric is probably wondering where I am.” You shout loud enough for Steve to hear from the other room. 

“Wait sis, we will walk you. I’ll just be a minute.” Steve calls out to you.

“You can tell me, doll. I promise I won’t get Steve involved.” He pleads, searching your eyes for the truth. 

“I will see you later tonight. Don’t leave without saying goodbye to me okay?” You ignore him. You reach on your tippy-toes and place a soft gentle kiss on his cheek. 

“I’m all good Steve! Stay at least a mile away from me tonight at all times.”  You yell as you reach for the front door.

“Take care of him tonight.” You instruct Bucky as you fly out the door. It takes every bit of strength to hold in the tears that so desperately want to escape. 

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

Part Two:

The stench of the alcohol burns your tongue as Eric pulls you in for a sloppy kiss. Passer bys shoot you dirty looks as Eric continues to make a show of PDA. 

“I’m sorry about today. I won’t happen again.” He mumbles into his flask. You were currently leaning up against the fence watching the crowd play fun carnival games and dance the night away. 

You’d only been here for an hour, and so far you’d engaged in zero fun. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see Bucky,  Steve and two other girls. Steve looks uncomfortable, while the blonde woman looks bored. The brunette is attached to Bucky at the hip. However, Bucky’s glances haven’t gone unnoticed. About half-an-hour ago he spotted you with Eric and has made a conscious effort to stay close ever since. The sight of him in his uniform causes tears to pool in your eyes. There was a chance he was going to die and that very thought made you want to breakdown and scream. 

“Seriously Y/N? You can’t keep your eyes off him can you?” Eric’s voice booms, as he takes another swig of his flask. “You can’t help yourself!” He gets considerably louder causing some heads to turn. 

“Eric I wasn’t-” You start.

“Don’t. Lie. To. Me.” He hisses in a tone so deadly the pit of your stomach drops. 

“Eric it’s not like that.” You begin to explain. Familiar fear creeps in. If you didn’t shut this down now, a very public scene would occur. Eric is twice your size, so any attempt of getting away is slim. He pulls you into his firm grip and tightens each time you squirm. 

“You’re a filthy bitch.” You cry out as he pushes you back into the fence. You stumble back dropping your purse. 

“Hey, that’s my sister!” You hear Steve say as he charges at Eric. You and Steve are pretty much the same in height and weight. There is no way Steve could ever take on your date. In fact, three years ago, Eric beat up your brother in one of the parking lots downtown. Steve’s face was so swollen you could barely recognise him. 

“No Steve, please. Don’t.” You scream but it’s too late. Steve is on the ground groaning in a matter of seconds. Kick after kick you desperately scream at Eric to stop. 

A few seconds pass, hearing a scuffle you blink furiously but your eyes are blinded by tears. The grunting seems to halt suddenly but you can’t seem to stop crying. This is your worst nightmare. The whole of New York, your brother and Bucky have just laid witness to your daily abuse. 

“You’ll pay for that Barnes!” Eric’s voice screams from a distance, but the only thing you can focus on is the loud pounding in your chest. 

“Hey Doll, Shh, I’m here.” A familiar voice whispers in your ear.  Your body is shaking uncontrollably as the shame sets in. Bucky’s hands fly to your face assessing the damage. “Are you hurt?” He asks, but the only reply you can manage is a whimper. “Y/N? Are you hurt?” He scans your body furiously for any injuries. 

“Y/N! What the heck was that?” Steve yells causing you to flinch. Your brother has never yelled at you in your life. “You need to explain this to me right now.” His eyes are filled to the brim with rage and his breathing ragged. You’d never seen him like this.

“Take a walk Steve, you're scaring her,” Bucky instructs as he finishes his examination. 

“No. Buck cmon!” Steve insists. 

“I said take a walk. Come back when you’ve calmed down.” Bucky says which Steve reluctantly follows. “It’s okay man, I’ve got her.” He assures. 

You watch as your brother angrily picks up your purse and stalks in the opposite direction kicking a trash can in anger. 

“Cmon beautiful let's sit down.” Bucky gently commands as he leads you over to the park bench he pulls you into his side protectively. 

“I’ve never seen Steve so mad.” You whisper glancing down at your fingers. 

“He’s just scared Y/N, he feels like he failed you as a big brother.” He sighs, as he scratches his head, “Frankly I feel like I’ve failed you as well.” 

After a moment of silence Bucky speaks up, “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I didn’t want Steve to get involved. As you just saw he likes to think he can take on the world.” You mumble.

“Okay, I get why you didn’t tell Steve, but why didn’t you tell me.” He gently wipes a tear that’s managed to escape. “I would have handled this for you.”

“I don’t know,” You whisper, wishing you were anywhere other than Bucky’s accusing eyes.

“That’s not good enough Y/N, why didn’t you tell me when I asked today?” He pushes. His jaw tightens and his brows furrow. 

“Because you're leaving Buck.” You finally gain the courage to look him in the eye, “You leave tomorrow, and as soon as you leave I lose the ability to count on you. I’m not stupid. I know Steve is out there, day after day trying to get shipped off into a war zone. He will either get accepted or thrown into jail for lying on the enlistment form, so I can’t rely on him either.” You swallow back the ball of cement that seems to be lodged in your throat. “I thought I could deal with this on my own, ya know, without you because soon enough, it will just be me.” You take a deep breath, “I guess I just wanted to prove to myself I could handle this.” 

“Come here.” Bucky pulls you into a fierce hug and for just a split second all your troubles melt away. 

“I’m always going to find my way back to you Y/N. Always.” He whispers.

“Not if you die in the war.” You whimper. “What if this is the last time I ever see you.” Your heart starts to pound in your ears as horrible thoughts burn in the back of your mind.

“Hey, shh, Doll.” He hushes, “I will come back, even if I have to crawl through barb wire or walk thousands of miles without food or water just to see your pretty face. I will. I will always find my way back to you.” He presses light kisses to your bruises and pulls you in closer.  

“But I need you to promise me something.” He gently grabs your chin so you are both holding eye contact. “I need you to promise me that you won’t ever go back to him or any guy like him okay? Actually on second thought, maybe don’t go near any guy that isn’t me or Steve.” He shoots you a goofy smile and you nod causing him to let out a light chuckle. 

“I’m only half-joking about that last part.” He reassures, he takes a second to think before making his declaration, “When I get back I’m taking you on a real date Y/N, I’m going to show you what true love is.” He looks down at you, adoration shining in his eyes. “I’ll make you forget all about that scum.”

You laugh, loving the sound of that. “You’ll have to tell Steve and then get his approval first.” You joke lacing your hands in his. 

“He knows doll, he’s always known about my feelings for you,” Bucky whispers. For a second it feels like the world just stopped turning.  Your face must mirror the confusion you feel inside because Buck laughs as you try to comprehend the words he so confidently spoke. 

“You better come back to me Barnes.” You whisper as you gently kiss his lightly bruised knuckles from when he saved both you and your brother. 

Bucky was and will remain your hero. 

Apologies for changing the storyline of Bucky & Steve. And a double apology for not editing this but it’s 12am here. 

[alydiarackham]

(Cover by me)

Bauldr’s Tears: Retelling Loki’s Fate

Chapter One

 “Loki Farbautison,” the deep, quiet voice resounded through the white marble courtyard. “You have been accused of murdering an Aesir—a willful and wicked act that cannot, through any cunning, be undone. Do you deny it?”

Slate gray clouds hung low, blocking the sun. Icy wind whipped between the pillars, tugging at the long, black, draping clothes and loosened blonde hair of the crowd of courtiers who hugged the perimeter. All of their pale faces, stark eyes, turned toward the center of the yard, where a young man stood alone.

He also wore black, with tatters hanging down from his shoulders and long sleeves. His long, colorless, shackled hands did not move, nor did his lean form shift. His curly, dark brown hair ruffled in the wind, strands falling down across his white brow.

He slowly raised his head. Beneath ink-dark eyebrows, striking eyes lifted to the far end of the courtyard—eyes like a gray dawn; alive, but distant. The courtiers focused on his angular, handsome face, noble nose, cheekbones and chin, and firm, quiet mouth. They watched him unblinkingly, waiting for his answer.

He took a breath, and slightly lifted his right eyebrow.

“Is there a point in answering?” He spoke lowly, each word elegant and precise. Vapor issued from his lips. The crowd seethed. Their murmurs rumbled like low thunder.

And the first one who had spoken—a tall, white-bearded king garbed in night, seated in a wooden throne on the dais—slammed his hand down on the armrest.

The blow shook the air.

His single sapphire eye blazed, and he gritted his teeth. His wizened brow knotted around his eye patch, and his fists clenched.

“You murdered my son,” he snarled. “You, who we took in as one of our own. You, who have been our…our friend for countless centuries. You have betrayed us.” The one-eyed king paused. His voice roughened. “You have betrayed me.”

The court murmured and groaned. Some shielded their eyes, others leaned their heads against their loved ones’. Loki Farbautison twisted his left hand and lifted his shoulder. His chains clinked. As if he could not help it, he glanced to the king’s right, where a magnificent, golden-headed prince stood, clad in dulled gold armor, and a heavy thundercloud of a cape that hung from his shoulders to his ankles. For an instant, Loki’s gray eyes met the prince’s burning blue ones. But the prince’s brow twisted, his eyes closed, and he turned his lion-like head away, pressing a hand to his mouth and over his bearded jaw. Loki swallowed, and turned again to the king. He raised his eyebrows.

“What can I say?” he asked.

The king would not look at him. His hand flexed, and he stared fixedly at something to his right.

“You make no defense, you will not answer for your conduct,” the king said hoarsely. “Therefore, we must acknowledge that there can be no question of your guilt.” He shut his eye, and closed his fist. “You murdered my son, a prince of Asgard. There is only one possible consequence.”

The court held its breath. The blue-eyed prince turned to hide the tears that spilled down his face. The king lifted his chin.

“Loki Farbautison,” he declared into the silence. “You are sentenced to death.”

Loki’s long-lashed eyes closed. Overhead, a groan of thunder rolled through the clouds.

And it began to snow.

Three Months Earlier…

Thunder growled around the thick wooden walls of the house as Marina Faroe crept from the sitting room toward the library, holding only a lit candle in her right hand. As her stocking feet slid across the floorboards, she bit her lip and prayed she wouldn’t trip over any of the boxes she had left out. The darkness hung thick and heavy around her, unwilling to flit away as her candlelight intruded. With her free hand, she pulled her long cashmere wrap closer around her very slight form, though the movement made her stiff arm ache from her thumb to her elbow.

She slipped through the pokey corridor, and then her feet padded onto the deep red, tapestry-like carpet of the library. She crossed the room, then reached up and pushed her candle down into a wooden candlestick standing on the carved mantle. Then, she knelt, groped for the matchbox, and leaned into the fireplace to snap flame from a single match, then light the tinder and logs inside.

 It was difficult—the last three fingers of her left hand stayed curled close to her palm, and her wrist refused to extend more than halfway, leaving all the work to be done by her right hand, and the forefinger and weak thumb of her left. Besides which, it hurt.

However, after a few minutes of quiet struggle, a small fire danced against the rough-hewn stones, warming her narrow face, and lighting her hazel eyes. She dusted her right hand off on her jeans, then pushed her sleek, unbound black hair out of her face. Taking a breath, she lifted her head, folded her arms, and glanced around the room.

Deep bookshelves covered all the walls, except for the door and the wide fireplace. Empty cardboard boxes sat against the north wall, their former contents now lining the shelves. Ancient, leather-bound manuscripts, their spines ragged, their pages yellowed, sat in uneven rows, the titles illegible in the flickering half dark. But Marina knew them all—knew them like weathered faces of old friends. They belonged to her dad’s collection: volumes of Norse poetry, Viking travel records, maps, folklore, songs and legends. Some had been inscribed by hand, in now-faded ink. Others were first editions of research published a hundred years ago. She had read every one.

Marina sighed, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her right arm around them, leaning back against more unpacked boxes as the scent of burning pine and the crackle of the flames filled the silence.

She glanced up at the softly-ticking, intricately-carved Swiss clock sitting on one side of the mantle. She could barely see its face by the light of the candle—it was past ten. Her delicate mouth hardened. The storm had knocked the electricity out, so she couldn’t charge her dead cell phone, and she hadn’t set up her landline yet. She couldn’t have called her mother in New York at nine-thirty. Even if she had wanted to.

She shifted, pressing her left arm against her stomach, turning her head to consider the empty shelves on the south wall. Tomorrow, she would set her dad’s collection of rusty Viking swords on the middle ones, along with his glass cases of beaten coins. She would heft the small, stone idols of Odin, Loki, Thor and Frigga to the very top shelves, so they could be studied, but never touched. And in the far corner, across the room, she would stand the three-hundred-year-old half-tree up, so that all of the wide-eyed, gaping faces and squatty bodies of the dwarves carved into it could be seen in the firelight. And over the mantle…

She got up. Thunder rumbled again, shaking the upper stories. Marina stepped nimbly through the maze of boxes on the floor, and bent over one in the back. She pried the lid open, then reached in with her right hand and pulled on a thick, gold-painted frame.

Carefully, she slid it up and out. Firelight flashed against the glass. She straightened, and held it up. For a long while, she just stood there, gazing at the broad picture within the frame. Then, she turned, moved back to the mantle, and, grunting, managed to lift the picture up and set it there, and let it ease back to rest against the wall. She stepped back and gazed at it, keeping her left arm pressed to her chest. She took a deep breath, and her lips moved to mouth the words penned beneath the strange drawing. Words she had whispered thousands of times.

“Stien til Asgard…”

Silence answered her. Silence that had always been interrupted before by a deep, eager voice forming words of explanation—a bright eye, a roughened hand reaching up to point at the illuminated edges, a smile bordered by a dark, graying beard…

A tear escaped her guard. It spilled down her cheek. She swiped it away, swallowed hard and tightened her jaw—but the flutter of the candle’s flame drew her gaze back to the picture. Marina’s arms tightened around herself as thunder once again grumbled overhead, and the spring rain broke loose, and lashed the outer walls.

 Chapter Two

  Marina took a deep breath of cool morning air, thick with the scent of rain, and shut the front door behind her, as the sunlight warmed her whole body. She stepped down the short landing and turned back to glance up at her new house. “New” being a relative word—it was actually only new to her.

She could see it better now than she had when she had moved in. Yesterday, it had been cloudy, and she had ducked her head and hauled boxes inside between spats of rain. But today, golden sunshine bathed the whole house, and she stopped on the brick pathway to look for a moment.

Three stories, all dark weathered wood, with a peaked roof and simple, sturdy bric-a-brac around the thick-pillared porch, and upper windows. Marina narrowed her eyes at those dusty, flaking windows. They needed cleaned and sealed and painted. And she was fairly certain that the deep-green, hardy ivy growing up the north side had already slipped its inquisitive fingers in through the windows of the second story.

She took another deep breath, and glanced around at the rest of the yard. The lush, dew-gleaming lawn needed mowed, the rosebushes flanking the path had twisted and sprawled out of their bounds, and the iron-wrought fence surrounding the whole half-acre needed re-painted. And she didn’t even want to look at the snarled knot that was the vegetable garden on the north side.

She paused, listening. Birds chirped in the motionless boughs of the towering pines and oaks that surrounded and filled her property, but aside from that quiet, cheerful sound, all remained silent. She nearly smiled. So different from the rushing, wailing, flashing, seething streets of Manhattan.

She turned, adjusted the collar of her draping sweater wrap, and strode down the uneven walkway between the rose bushes, her boots tapping on the bricks. She pushed the squeaking iron gate out of the way, turned and opened the door of her dad’s pickup truck—a sturdy, new red Ford that had carried everything of hers up all the winding, sweeping roads from New York to here: an empty house by a tiny town near the Bay of Fundy.

She opened the door and crawled up into the cab—it was like climbing a tree. Her dad had been a lot bigger than her…

She settled, pulled her purse strap over her head and set her purse in the passenger seat, slammed the door, and started the big diesel engine. It grumbled to life as her keys jingled, and she gingerly pulled the truck out into the dirt road, sitting far forward in the seat and steering with just her right hand.

As she drove, the sunlight flashed through the trees and against the left side of her face. Marina rolled the window down, to let the fresh air in. She bit her lip, hoping she could remember the way back into town. She’d driven through it yesterday, late, but it had been in the rain…

She didn’t push the truck faster than twenty five, and she didn’t listen to any music as she maneuvered the road that wound through a canyon of pines, her left hand resting in her lap. She only came to one fork in the road, hesitated for a moment, wincing, then turned right. After a few minutes, though, she breathed a sigh. Here it was.

Marina doubted this little town appeared on most maps. But it had a medium-sized, stone post office that she could see from here, a wide, sunlit main street lined with a few quaint shops, a two-pump gas station, and a general store at the far end that she hoped would have what she needed.

She pulled up in front of the broad-windowed, brick general store and parked, then opened the door and slid down out of the truck. Her boots crunched on the gravel as she stepped up onto the sidewalk. She glanced to the right and realized that the store snugged up right next to what was probably the only restaurant in town—a white, pleasant little deli with the name Theresa’s painted in curly writing on the window—and the hanging sign said Closed.

Marina pushed the door of the general store open. A bell jangled over her head. She eased inside and let the door click shut behind her.

The shop was small, dimly-lit, and packed with rows of loaded standing shelves. White and maroon checked tiles made up the floor, and jars of old-fashioned candy almost covered the cashier’s counter off to her far left.

Before she had taken three steps, a middle-aged man in a plaid shirt and jeans stepped out from behind one of the back shelves.

“’Morning,” he greeted her, smiling. “Can I help you find anything?”

“Um,” Marina adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder and glanced around. “Paint?”

“Interior or exterior?” he asked, coming closer.

“Exterior,” she answered. “I’m painting my window frames.”  

“It’s a nice day for that,” he commented. “Yeah, come this way.” He beckoned, then started back the way he had come. Marina followed him.

“Is there a specific color you’re looking for?”

“They used to be deep green,” Marina said. “Almost all the paint is gone now, but I think that’s right—some sort of pine green.”

The storekeeper paused and glanced back at her, brow furrowed.

“Which house are you painting?” he wondered. “I’ve sold paint to pretty much everybody in this town, and there’s nobody with pine green windows.”

Marina almost smiled.

“I’m new in town—just moved in yesterday,” she said. “I bought the Stellan house.”

The storekeeper, now standing in front of a rainbow of paint swatches on the wall, stopped and looked at her.

“You mean…” He raised his eyebrows. “You mean that old, Danish-looking house on the edge of town?” he pointed. “The one where that author lived for all those years before he went out into the forest and…”

“Yeah,” Marina nodded, then shrugged, smiling. “What can I say? It was cheap.”

He laughed, then turned to search the swatches.

“Ghosts don’t bother you, huh?”

“No such thing,” Marina said quietly, the smile fading from her face.

“Tell that to the people around here,” the shopkeeper answered, reaching up to pull a couple swatches off the wall. “Especially after most of us have seen or heard more than one weird thing in those woods.” He turned and gave her a pointed look. “Word to the wise: don’t go out there at night. No matter what you think you see.”

Marina frowned at him, alarmed, but he was perfectly serious, so she nodded once. He faced the swatches again, and pulled down one more, then handed them to her with another smile.

“Feel free to take these home and see how they look.”

“I think I’ll actually pick one out now, if you’ll give me a minute,” Marina said, taking them from him.

“Okay, sure,” he nodded. “Take your time. I’ll just be up here organizing some stuff by the counter.”

“All right,” Marina said, and he left her alone in the aisle with three swatches of green. Marina watched him go, her brow slowly furrowing as she rubbed her thumb up and down the pieces of paper.

The overhead radio clicked on, playing oldies. She blinked, and forced herself to look down at the different shades.

After ten minutes of debate, she decided, and took the swatch up to the counter. The shopkeeper eagerly mixed the paint for her, then helped her load up a basket of other supplies she would need, such as paint stirrers, brushes, and scrapers. She bought two gallons of dark green paint, all the other supplies, and a glass bottle of soda, and hauled all of her purchases to the front door. Two bags she carried in the crook of her left elbow, and the other two in her right hand. She heaved the door open. The bell jangled.

“Need help?” the shopkeeper called from behind the counter. Marina shook her head.

“No, thanks. I’ve got it.”

“Okay,” he answered. “Nice to meet you, Miss…?”

“Feroe,” she answered, slipping out. “Marina Feroe.”

“Jim Fields,” he replied. “Have a good day!”

“Thanks,” Marina said, letting the door shut.

A crisp gust of wind blew through her clothes and hair as soon as she stepped down off the sidewalk, and she fumbled in her purse for her keys. She managed to dig them out, bite the side of her cheek and use the keyless entry to unlock the truck. It beeped. Grunting, she heaved the door open and swung her right hand bags up onto the passenger seat.

The bags on her other arm slipped.

She gasped. She scrambled to catch them, scrabbling around her swaying purse—          

Her left hand wouldn’t obey.

One bag slipped and smashed onto the ground.

Her soda bottle shattered.

She wanted to scream something foul. Instead, she gritted her teeth hard, threw the remaining bag up into the truck, and got down to pick up the bag of paint brushes that was now filled with soda.

“Wait, wait—careful!” a voice called out. “Don’t cut yourself.”

She jerked, startled, and glanced up. At first, all she saw was a pair of work boots and jeans—then she saw the rest of him.

He wore a long-sleeved, blue shirt stained with dirt, as if he’d been working in a garden. He had collar-length blonde hair that lit up like gold in the sunlight. He hurried toward her, his boots thudding on the paving. Her face heated and she looked back down at the mess.

“I won’t,” she mumbled. “I’m just…stupid…” She twisted her left arm and pulled it toward herself, cursing her useless fingers. She reached out with her good hand and pulled the plastic back, trying to fish the brushes out.

“Wait a second—stop,” he urged—his voice sounded like an afternoon wind, warm and deep. It brought her head up again…

And she froze. He knelt right across from her, startlingly near. His face was flawless—pale but ruddy, with soft, strong features and jaw line. His fine hair hung like flax around his brow and ears, and his quiet mouth formed a small smile. But she saw all of this peripherally—for Marina was instantly captured by his eyes.

They were the color of the highest summer sky—pure blue, and brilliant as jewels, and fathomless. His dark right eyebrow quirked, and his smile broadened. He glanced down at the mess. His brown eyelashes were as long as a girl’s.

“I can get those,” he assured her, reaching down with both dirt-covered hands and swiftly pulling the brushes free of the tinkling glass. Marina’s mouth opened to protest, but nothing came out. Her face got even hotter.

“Here,” he said, holding the brushes out to her and giving her another bright grin. She managed to take them from him, and then he scooped the bag up and stood. Marina’s eyebrows raised. He was tall, his shoulders broad. He trotted over to a metal trash can and tossed the mess in. It clanged when it hit the bottom. Marina got to her feet, then realized she was staring at him. She turned quickly, leaned into the truck and stuffed the now-sticky brushes into the cup holder.

“Planning a project?” he asked, and she heard him come back toward her. She turned back around, wishing she wasn’t blushing so hard.

“Yeah,” she nodded, glancing up at him. He dusted his palms off on his jeans, his friendly look remaining.

“I’m painting some windows,” she added, shrugging, still keeping her arm close. He stuck his hands in his pockets and cocked his head.

“That’s a big job. Need any help?”

Marina’s eyes flashed and she frowned at him. He suddenly laughed.

“I’ve forgotten my manners,” he said. “My name is Bird Oldeson. I’m kind of the town’s handyman.” He met her eyes again, and inclined his head.

“Oh, I see,” Marina nodded. Absently, she noted that he had an accent—it sounded almost English, but with a gentle lilt that she couldn’t identify. She held out her right hand.

“Marina Feroe,” she said. “I just moved here.”

He gave her a look of startled pleasure, then took up her hand in a gentle hold. His fingers were warm.

“Nice to meet you,” he said. Marina allowed herself a little smile.

“Nice to meet you, too,” she answered. Then, she turned and climbed up into the truck.

“I meant what I asked you,” he said as she shut the door.

“What?” she asked, glancing out the open window as she turned the truck on.

“If you need any help.” He wasn’t really smiling now—he gazed at her with raised eyebrows. She shook her head.

“No, I think I’m okay,” she said. “Thank you, though.”

“You’re sure?” he pressed, his voice quieter. Marina paused, studying him, then nodded again.

“Yes,” she said. “But really—thank you.”

He gave her a half smile, then bowed his head again.

“I’m sure I will see you again.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she broadened her smile a little, then put the truck in reverse, pulled out and headed back alone to her old house.

   Marina leaned the shaky ladder up against the north wall of the house. It rattled as it hit the sunlit siding. She took the heavy clippers in her hand and gazed straight up. Before she did anything with the paint, she had to get the ivy off the windows of the second story. Which was going to be tricky.

She clamped the handle of the clippers between her teeth, grabbed one of the rungs of the ladder and set her feet. Then, taking a breath, she started to climb, only occasionally using her left hand for balance. Once she reached the top, she wrapped her left arm around the ladder, took the clippers in her hand and began snapping at the ivy.

The long tendrils fell down in waves, but more and more lay beneath, like a thick carpet. Her arm got sore, and the ladder wobbled, but she worked for several hours without stopping.

Finally, her shoulder couldn’t take it anymore, and she sighed, wiped the sweat off her forehead, and started down.

She gathered up the trimmed ivy and hauled it around to the sagging mulch pile near the garden. Then, she came back around, put her hand on her narrow hip and gazed up…

To see that it hardly looked like she’d done anything. She gritted her teeth, frowned fiercely at the remaining ivy, snatched the clippers up from the grass and started up the ladder again.

   Marina thrashed. Her sleeping bag tore. She jerked awake, sweating, her heart hammering. She stared at the dark ceiling of the study.

Jerking gasps caught in her chest and she shivered all over. Weakly, she lifted her head and glanced through the door. Gray light of dawn seeped in through the sitting room windows. She swallowed and eased her head back down onto her crooked pillow—and grimaced.

Clenching pain ran up and down her left side and shot through her shoulder, down her arm, twisted through her elbow and clamped down on her wrist. Her arm shuddered, and she pulled it against her chest. Her whole back ached, and she felt like she had a fever.

For an hour, she lay there, breathing deeply, forcing her muscles to loosen, mentally kicking herself. She’d overdone it today. She should have stopped after tearing the whole wall of ivy down, and not tried to tackle the rosebushes by the front walk. She’d known that when she started that last job, but she hadn’t listened to herself. Now she was paying for it.

Tears leaked out and ran down her temples. She knew what it was like to wake up fully rested, without any pain. But she couldn’t remember the last time she had.

And the last time it hurt this much had been about a month after it happened.

She sat up, groaning and gritting her teeth, squeezing her eyes shut. She stayed still a moment, regulating her breathing, trying to stop shivering. Then, she pushed her sleeping bag off herself and crawled to her feet. The ruffle of her long white nightgown tumbled to her ankles. She wrapped her arms around herself, chilled.

“Such an idiot, Marina…” she muttered. She crossed the rug and left the study, turned down the hall and fumbled with the lock on the front door. If she could just get some fresh air, the ache in her head might go away, at least…

She pulled the thick, heavy black door open. Its hinges squeaked.

Fresh air gushed in to meet her, and she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, letting the door go as it swung further open. She stepped up and leaned sideways against the wide doorframe, letting the breeze cool her hot forehead. Sighing, she finally opened her eyes, and gazed out at her gray front yard, hung with early-morning shadow. She lingered on the ragged rose bushes, whose branches still hung wild, disordered and tangled all over the other flower beds and the path.

Then, she caught sight of something on her front step. Frowning, she shuffled out, bent with a wince, and picked it up.

She fingered the flimsy sheets of a small newspaper of ads and coupons. Her mouth quirked as she straightened. The people in her new town didn’t waste any time trying to sell things to her…

Her eyes focused on the front page. She frowned.

Right in the middle sat an ad for Svenson’s Plumbing, Carpentry and Landscaping—and it listed its employees: Richard Smith, Harry Williams, and Bird Oldeson.

Marina absently pulled her left arm against her stomach, and stared at the name as her unsteady hand held the paper. Then, she clenched her jaw, muttered a Danish curse word under her breath, and turned and went back inside to find a light, hoping the ad listed Svenson’s hours.

  Chapter Three

   With each lap she made around the house, the aching in her muscles eased, and her left side relaxed. She wandered through the green, sunlit lawn, following a crooked brick path that led her between the overgrown rows of herbs, and beneath a leaning arbor laden with grape vines. Her heels tapped on the dull stone as she passed into the deep shadow behind the house, cast by three towering oaks. She glanced over the half-sunken benches and toppled bird bath, all swallowed by vines and weeds. A little robin alighted on the back of one of the benches and cocked his head at her. She paused, and watched his bright eyes. He chirped once, then fluttered up and away, darting into the forest and out of sight.

A chilly gust of wind issued from the reaches of the woods, and rustled through her hair and clothes and the boughs of the trees. She wrapped her arms around herself and narrowed her eyes at the deep, tangled green shadow beyond the benches, the line of pines and the sagging wrought iron fence. She turned, and resumed her walk.

On the other side of the house, she came again to the rose garden, all in disarray. Many bloomed—red, white, peach and maroon—but they snarled together like an evil fairy’s curse. One rosebush in particular made her frown: it bore no buds, and it leaned menacingly up against the house very close to the sitting-room window, just as the ivy had done on the opposite side. She paused and stepped closer to the plant, glancing it up and down. Thick, wicked thorns covered all its branches, and even its leaves. It needed to be cut back, or torn out—but she was afraid it would slice her to shreds if she tried.

Far off, a low rumbling arose through the silence, obscuring the twittering of the birds. Marina’s head came up, and she listened. Then, she took a breath and braced herself, and started back around to the front of the house. She picked through the border garden, kicked at a large weed, and halted in front of the steps, her arms still folded, gazing toward the road, toward town, at the approaching pickup truck.

The truck’s brown paint gleamed in the brilliant sun, and shovels, ladders and other tools rattled around in the bed. It pulled up in her driveway next to her own truck, and the throbbing engine cut out. The next moment, the door creaked open, and the tall, winsome form of Bird Oldeson hopped out onto the gravel.

He wore a tan t-shirt, worn jeans and boots, and gave her a smile that lit the day up even brighter. She reflexively returned it.

“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” he called, striding toward her, his vivid blue eyes glancing all around at the sky, then the gardens and trees, as the light made a halo of his hair.

“Yes,” she nodded. “I think the rain did some good.”

“Oh, always,” he grinned, coming up to stop in front of her. He held out his hand. “Good to see you again, Miss Feroe.”

“Thanks,” she nodded, and barely took hold of his fingers. She let go right away, blushing, but he didn’t act like he noticed. He stuck both hands in his pockets, then looked her house up and down.

“Well, what is it you need done?” he asked, then met her eyes. She smiled crookedly and glanced behind her.

“The question is,” she said. “What do I not need done.”

He laughed. The ringing sound made the birds flutter.

“All right, let me rephrase,” he amended. “What do you need done first?”

“Well…” she sighed, frowning as she studied her house, then faced him again. “The windows. They leaked during the thunderstorm. The rest of the stuff in the garden can wait a while, but I don’t want my furniture ruined if it decides to rain again soon.”

“All right,” he said, scrubbing a hand through his hair as his brow furrowed. “You have the paint already, I assume—but the windows will probably need sealed, maybe even adjusted, since they’ve gotten crooked as the house shifts.”

“Okay, do whatever you need to do.” Marina folded her arms and cocked her head. “Are you paid by the hour?”

“Yes.”

“All right, go ahead,” she gestured toward the house. “Bring me any paperwork or questions or whatever—I’ll just be down here, trying to get this rose garden under control.”

He nodded again, catching her eye and giving her a soft, bright smile that warmed her to her core.

“I’ll get started right now,” he said, and turned and strode back to his truck, his boots crunching on the sand. Suppressing her own smile, Marina faced the house again and headed back toward the roses.

  All day, Marina sat on a short stool with her back to the sun, letting it warm her, as she cut the overgrown roses back away from the path with a set of sturdy clippers. She had managed to find her work gloves, so she was able to thrust her hand into the thorny mess without tearing up her skin—though working with her left hand remained a challenge. Her long braid hung over her shoulder, and her jeans and loose shirt got dirty, but she didn’t care. Birds crooned and twittered in the bushes and in the branches of the bordering trees, and a quiet wind rustled the leaves.

Behind and above her, Bird Oldeson perched on a ladder, leaning up against the front of the house. His hammer clacked, the wood of the window frame creaked as he pried and pulled, and the ladder rungs squeaked with each step as he effortlessly ascended or descended to resume or go get a tool. She didn’t look at him—she just listened to the patter and tap of his rhythms, and the thud of his footsteps.

When she had gotten halfway down the row of roses, she paused a moment, sat back and winced at her stiff muscles, then wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her sleeve. Bird’s hammer tapped three times, rapidly. Then, he began to hum.

She froze, then twisted on her stool and glanced up at him.

The sunlight caught half of him as he leaned against the ladder and the wall, deepening the color of his clothes and skin, and blazing against his hair. His hands moved swiftly, deftly, over the loose windowsill as he secured it. He held two nails between his lips, his attention fixed on his work. And he hummed a soft, strange tune that carried through the midmorning air like a breeze.

For a long moment, Marina didn’t move or even breathe as she listened, studying the way he moved, trying to remember if she had heard the song before. He used one nail, then the other, and then with his liberated mouth, he began to sing, quietly. She blinked. It was another language—something like Swedish or Danish…But she couldn’t tell.

Then he paused, turned his head and looked down at her.

For a moment, her eyes locked with his, and she saw nothing but the shade of the sky. Then he smiled, and Marina’s face flooded with heat. She quickly turned back around and began hacking at the bushes with a vengeance. For a few moments, he was silent behind her, and her blush started to hurt.

His hammer tap-tap-tapped again. He resumed his lilting hum. And she let herself start breathing—but she did not let herself turn around and stare at him any more.

   “Ow! Crap!” Marina hissed, jerking her hand back and shaking it out, then prying her glove off. She sucked in air through her teeth as she rested her right hand on top of her left, watching a long line of blood bloom from her wrist to her forefinger knuckle.

A thud issued from around the corner of the house. Then, Bird came striding around into the shade, his brow furrowed, his eyes finding her hand.

“What happened?”

“Oh, this stupid rosebush,” Marina halfway gestured to the gnarled old plant leaning against the house. “It bit me.”

Bird put his hands on his hips and studied her, then the rosebush.

“What were you trying to do?”

“I want to cut it down and then pull it out,” she answered, wincing at the sting that darted up and down her hand now. Bird glanced at her, startled.

“Why?” he asked.

“Look at it. It’s not blooming, and it doesn’t look like it’s planning to,” she answered. “Plus, I think it’s trying to climb into my window.”

He shook his head.

“I think you have the wrong idea.”

She frowned at him.

“What do you mean?”

He knelt down in front of it, and reached out toward its thick, wicked branches. Marina flinched back…

But he didn’t recoil. Instead, he gingerly moved the branches, feeling them, studying their form. Then, he turned, and picked up her clippers from the grass, and began strategically cutting at the small, withered branches.

“This bush is a different kind from the ones along your walkway,” he explained quietly as he clipped. “Those were bought in this part of the country—they were bred for this weather. But this one…” he paused, and pulled a few dead leaves off and flicked them aside. “This is from somewhere else entirely. A different climate, different soil. Picked up on some faraway travels, I suppose. And see, it’s a climbing rose, and those are not.” He gestured back to the others. The pain of Marina’s wound faded as she watched him, measuring what he said.

“It’s had to survive far harsher winters than it was meant for, and a lot less sunlight than it needed,” he went on. “But it did what it had to in order to survive—it leaned up against the house, near the fireplace here, see? The warmth and shelter of the house has kept it alive. And the one who built the house was wise enough to plant this bush on the south side, away from the brutal north wind—and that same person nursed it and fought off frost and bugs for probably twenty or thirty years before the bush got strong enough to fend for itself. But it wouldn’t leave the house then, even though it could.” He sat back on his haunches, his arms unbloodied, even though he had been elbow deep in the teeth of that bush. Bird glanced up at Marina, holding her still with his gaze.

“It’s a late bloomer,” he said, giving her a crooked smile. “But I think, if you’ll have a little patience with its difficult attitude, it might turn out to be the prettiest rose you’ve got.”

Marina looked at him for a moment, marveling at the way his speech flowed from practical to decorous, and how he talked about the rosebush as if it were a person.

“Okay,” she found herself saying, answering his smile. “I’ll see if I can keep from killing it.”

He grinned, and stood up, then stepped closer and eyed her cut.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she answered, nodding. “I’ll just go clean it up.”

“Are you sure? It looks like it hurts,” he said, watching her face.

“Ha,” she laughed, a bitter gall rising in her throat. “Believe me, I’ve had a lot worse.”

His brow tightened and concern lit up his eyes. She forced a smile and stepped around him, heading for the house. And as she pushed open the door, she almost swore she heard him murmur something soothing to that rosebush—but she couldn’t understand a word.    

  Chapter Four

 “There you go—what do you think?” Bird asked breathlessly as he hopped down from the third rung of the ladder and trotted across the grass over to her. Marina stood up from her garden stool and dusted her hand off on her jeans, then reached up and adjusted the crooked chain of the necklace that hid under her collar. She shot him a startled look.

“Are you finished already?” she asked. “It’s only been two days!”

“Yep,” he said triumphantly, folding his strong arms and facing the house. Marina glanced past him and up, and let her eyes wander over all of the now-perfect-and-painted windows.

“Looks great,” she nodded. “Very pretty.”

“Good,” he nodded. He heaved a deep breath. “That means I have time for that herb garden.”

Marina blinked.

“The what?”

He strode around the house, past the bushes and toward the side of her vegetable garden.

“Your herb garden,” he repeated. “You’ve got a lot of stuff growing—asparagus, rhubarb, spearmint, dill, garlic…You just can’t see them because of all the weeds.”

Marina frowned, dropping the clippers from her left hand into the dirt and following him.

“But I…” she tried, blushing in spite of herself. “I…I can’t pay you for—I mean, I can’t afford—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he waved her off as he paused in front of a small section of earth that had been plotted out with now half-buried bricks. “My work day just ended a few minutes ago, and the rhubarb has been crying to me all afternoon.” He glanced over his shoulder at her and flashed a grin. She paused, and raised a sardonic eyebrow.

“Crying to you,” she said flatly.

“Well, maybe crying is the wrong word,” he shrugged one shoulder.

“Probably ‘sweetly requesting’ would be better. I could say the same thing about the asparagus, just take the ‘sweet’ part out—asparagus get all stuffy-acting when they’re asking favors.” He turned back toward the garden. “The spearmint I just had to ignore—they’re pushy and overpowering, as you know, unless you keep them at a distance. I can personally only take them in small doses. And the dill is just plain saucy about it, and the garlic is downright loud, making a lot more fuss than the situation actually warrants, so you see…”

Marina was already grinning and shaking her head too hard to hear the rest, and he trailed off, grinning at her. She calmed down, pressing the back of her wrist to her mouth, hiding her smile.

“So you see,” he finished. “They’re all whining about the weed situation.” He canted his head. “Want to help me get them to shut up?”

“Sure,” Marina shrugged helplessly and beamed. “Can’t have my herbs complaining, can I?”

  “Is this really how you like to spend your Saturdays?”

Bird glanced up at her over the tall stalks and green leaves of the white lilies. He then continued to pull up weeds from between the feet of the elegant flowers and toss them to the side. His arms were dirty up to the elbows, as were the knees of his jeans, and he had a smear of dirt across his forehead.

“Look who’s talking,” he answered, then sent her a twinkling glance. Marina chuckled, and sat back on her stool. She peeled off her work gloves and tried not to wince as the worn leather came loose of her left hand, then brushed a strand of hair out of her face.

“You’ve been done with the house for a week now,” she pointed out. “But you keep coming back to work in this garden in the afternoons, even though I’m not paying you, and now you’re here on a Saturday—”

“Would you like me to leave?”

Marina stopped. He met her eyes, perfectly serious, his eyebrows raised.

“No!” she said quickly, sitting up straight. Her face heated up—again, and she stammered. “I mean…No, I’m not telling you to leave. In fact, I like…I mean, I appreciate…” she pulled her arm toward her, then swallowed. “I was just wondering why—”

“You have one of the best gardens I’ve ever seen,” Bird interrupted seamlessly, still weeding. “And one of the oldest. I know you want to fix all this up, make it look nice—but that’s a lot of work. Lucky for you, I love getting my hands covered with dirt.” He tossed a dandelion over his shoulder. “Plus, you just moved here, and you don’t know anybody.” He sat up, and dusted his hands off. He looked at her squarely, then gave her a quiet smile. “And I won’t let anybody sit alone in a great big house if she looks like she needs some company.”

For a moment, she just gazed back at him, her cheeks still flushed—but a soft glow guttered to life in her chest.

“Really?” she murmured.

His eyes flickered.

For just an instant, she almost frowned. Then, his expression cleared, and he nodded. She ducked her head, smiling again, and shrugged.

“Well…” she managed. “Thanks.”

He was silent for a second. Then, he cleared his throat.

“’course, I may have to say something about the weird color of green that you picked to frame the door…”

She threw a clod of dirt at him. He ducked, laughing.

They continued working in companionable silence, and so the heat in her face faded—but the warmth deep inside her did not.

  “How’s work today?” Marina asked, taking a long sip of her cherry limeade, then pushing aside the remnants of her sandwich wrappings and leaning back in the red-padded diner chair. She canted her head at Bird, who sat across from her at the tiny two-person table right next to the sunlit ceiling-to-floor front window of Theresa’s.

“Busy this morning,” he admitted, his brow furrowing as he poured more catsup out onto his fries. “Mr. Petrson cut down a line of oaks by his driveway—we had to pull out the stumps.”

Marina studied him. He sullenly clenched his jaw.

“You all right?” she asked.

He shook his head, still not looking up.

“It’s the oaks.”

“What about them?”

“They were healthy,” he said, putting the catsup down with more than necessary force. His jaw tightened. “There was nothing wrong with them. And they had to be at least a hundred years old.”

Marina frowned.

“Why did he cut them down, then?”

He shrugged.

“Don’t know. Didn’t like them blocking the view of the bay, I guess,” he muttered. He shoved his food basket away and sat back abruptly, crossing his arms and looking out the window. He huffed, and shook his head.

“What right does Petrson have to take them down?” He ground his teeth. “A century they’ve survived, through ice and snow and drought—and he fells them in one afternoon. They’re his elders. He should have some respect.”

They went silent. Marina bit her lip, and glanced outside at the empty main street. Bird stayed petulantly quiet. Marina hooked her thumb through the necklace at her throat and pulled the chain out of her collar, and fingered the pendant. She glanced at him—he still stared out the window.

“I was thinking of planting an oak off to the side of my house,” she said, tilting her head, and glancing back at him.

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, his mouth still tight. Then, the hardness in his face melted into warmth, and he smiled.

“I can probably get you a good deal on a sapling,” he said.

“Good,” she smiled at him, the weight of his mood lifting off her like clouds opening up to the sun. She sat forward. “Actually, I—”

“What’s that?”

Marina halted. Bird’s bright blue eyes had sharpened in a keen stare at her—no, at her necklace.

“Oh, uh—this?” Her brow furrowed and she glanced down at the pendant. Something lodged in her throat. She had to fight for a moment to find her voice again. “My…My dad gave it to me. It’s—”

“Mjollnir,” he finished, his eyes still fixed on it. Marina’s eyebrows shot up.

“You…You know what this is?”

“Sure I do,” he nodded. “Could I…?”

Before he could finish his question, or she could answer it, he had reached out and taken hold of her pendant. Their fingers brushed. She gasped, and almost jerked back—then stopped herself to keep from pulling it out of his grasp.

She held very still as he leaned forward, until their heads were not six inches apart. His forehead tightened and his eyes narrowed as he held the pendant with his first two fingers and his thumb. Marina risked a glance down at it—it was a decorative interpretation of Thor’s hammer, made of silver, slightly tarnished.

“The designs on it are beautiful—very delicate,” he observed quietly. “Is it an antique?”

“I think so,” Marina answered, unable to summon much volume with him so close. “But I can’t remember. I’ve worn it for several years.”

He didn’t answer—just ran his thumb over the “T” portion of the hammer.

“You’re…” she ventured. “You’re interested in old Norse myths?”

He halfway smiled.

“Ever since I was born.” He lifted his bright eyes to hers. “Are you? Or was this just a present?”

“No, I…” she started, her heartbeat starting to pound in her throat. “I mean, my dad and I are Old Norse scholars. Well, I…I am. My dad…was.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Scholars?” he repeated, mercifully leaving the subject of her father alone. “In what capacity?”

“Archaeology, mostly,” she said, absently realizing that he still had hold of her pendant, and had not leaned back. “And…And literature. Dad collected manuscripts and antique books.”

“Really?” he sounded pleased, astonished.

“Yeah,” Marina answered, surprised.

A slow smile bloomed on his face.

“Would you...I mean, could I see them?”

“Um…” she swallowed hard, but she couldn’t think clearly at all with his fingers just inches from her face. “Sure—?”

“I mean, I won’t if you don’t want me to,” he said hastily. “I just think all that stuff is so—”

“No, it’s okay,” she cut in. “Sure. Sure, you can see it,” she nodded, finally realizing that she meant it. She smiled at him. “Would this evening work?”

He dropped her pendant and leaned back, grinning.

“I’ll be there with bells on.”

  “What a fantastic library,” Bird remarked quietly as he stepped through the door, his tea cup in hand, and slowly gazed from one corner of the room to the other.

“Thanks,” Marina said, following him in. It was still halfway light outside, but since there were no windows in the library, so it was dark except for the standing lamp, the fire in the fireplace, and the candles she’d lit on the mantelpiece. She put her hands in her pockets and shoved a half-full packing box with her toe.

“Sorry about the mess,” she said. “I tried to straighten a little this afternoon, put more stuff up on the shelves, but there’s so much. And, you know, I’ve been outside mostly for the past couple weeks…”

“Sure,” Bird said lightly, stepping further in to study the spines of the books on the far wall. Marina paused by the fireplace, watching him in the gold half light. It was chilly this evening—he wore a dark blue sweater and nice jeans and boots, and he had combed his hair. He seemed softer, stronger—and older, somehow. But more vivid, alive—close. He sent a casual glance over at her, and her heart suspended. He smiled.

“You sure you have enough shelf space for all this?” he asked, gesturing to the remaining full boxes and taking a sip of tea.

“Ha, I hope so,” Marina smiled crookedly. “I’d hate to leave something homeless.”

He came closer, and leaned over one of the boxes. Then, something in his face changed.

“What are these?”

Marina stepped up next to him and looked down.

“Oh—a few of the artifacts my dad came across on our…on our last dig.” She paused, forcing that familiar, wicked pain back down her throat. She wrapped her arms around her middle and straightened.

Then, Bird bent down and picked one up. Startled, Marina tried to say something to stop him, but nothing came out. He carefully lifted one of the small, squatty stone figures up out of the box, and held it in front of him.

“Loki,” he stated. Marina stared at Bird.

“You recognize him?”

His eyes never left the statue, which he held almost gently.

“Well,” he said quietly. “I recognize that it’s supposed to be him. Being punished by the snake, right?” he glanced at her. For a moment, she thought she saw the skin around his eyes tighten. She nodded.

“I actually think he deserved it, don’t you?” she murmured. “For killing Bauldr?”

He was silent for a long time.

“But that brings Ragnarok, doesn’t it?” he said. “Makes Loki so angry that he wants to destroy everyone and everything.”

“Yes,” Marina said carefully, studying Bird’s profile. “I suppose so.”

For a while, they were quiet. Then, Bird took a low breath.

“Kjóll ferr austan, koma munu Múspells,” he murmured. of lög lýðir, en Loki stýrir; fara fíflmegir með freka allir, þeim er bróðir Býleists í för.

Surtr ferr sunnan með sviga lævi, skínn af sverði sól valtíva; grjótbjörg gnata, en gífr rata, troða halir helveg, en himinn klofnar.”

Marina couldn’t take her eyes from him. The Old Norse words flowed easily from his lips, lilting with his deep voice. When he stopped speaking, she could swear he could hear her heart pounding. But if he did, he didn’t show it—he stared at the statue. So she took a breath of her own.

“O'er the sea from the east there sails a ship,” she translated, hushed. With the people of Muspell, at the helm stands Loki; After the wolf do wild men follow, And with them the brother of Byleist goes.”

Bird turned to look at her, fixing his gaze on her. The firelight flickered against his eyes. She swallowed, but he waited, so she went on.

“Surt fares from the south with the scourge of branches, The sun of the battle-gods shone from his sword; The crags are sundered, the giant-women sink, The dead throng Hel-way, and heaven is cloven.”

She stopped to catch her breath. He watched her.

“You memorized the Edda?”

She lifted her eyebrow.

“You memorized it in Old Norse,” she countered.

He suddenly chuckled.

“Yeah, well…” he bent, and put the Loki statue back. “I’m a geek like that.”

“You’re not a geek,” Marina said quietly. He straightened, and met her eyes. She cleared her throat and looked the other way, hiding her blush yet again.  

She sensed him open his mouth to say something—but then he stopped. She turned, and frowned at him.

He was looking at the framed artifact above the fireplace.

“What’s this?” he whispered, his voice entirely different—enough to make a chill run down her spine. He stepped around her to stand right in front of the mantle. He set his tea down next to one of the candlesticks, then didn’t move.

“I actually found that in the back of an old library when I was fifteen,” Marina explained. “I just thought it was interesting, and so the librarian paid me with it, instead of money, for straightening all his archival shelves.” She came up next to Bird and turned her gaze to the subject of her narrative. It was an old piece of parchment, three feet by three feet, its borders illuminated with ships and sea monsters and intricate, twisting knots. In the center had been drawn, in black ink, a broad stone gate, with an arched top—and in the center of the arch stood a carving of Mjollnir, Thor’s hammer. Through the center of the gate, a great, gnarled tree stood. And all around the gate stood a thick, thorny forest dotted with disembodied eyes—and a few wiry wolves with lolling tongues lurked between the rocks and shrubs.

“Looks frightening,” Bird remarked. “What’s the inscription, there at the bottom?”

“Stien til Asgard,” Marina said. “It means—”

“Gate to Asgard,” Bird finished. She blinked.

“You…You didn’t just memorize the Edda, did you?” she realized. “You know old Norse!”

“Yes,” he nodded absently, then pointed at the drawing. “What did your father have to say about this?”

Marina said nothing for a long moment. It was getting harder and harder to ignore that old pain, that shadow reaching up to smother her.

“He thought it was a real structure,” she managed, taking a deep breath. “Another dig site to investigate—maybe a place for ritual sacrifice or something.” She glanced down at the floor. “He seemed to think it was around here somewhere, actually.”

Bird looked at her sharply.

“He did?”

Marina lifted her head, and nodded.

“Yeah. Which is why I came and bought this house.” She paused, and gazed up at the drawing again. “Of course, neither of us believe it’s the gate to Asgard, but…” she shrugged tightly. “He was interested in it. It was almost enough to…” Her throat closed up, and she couldn’t keep going.

Bird stayed quiet for a long time. She didn’t look at him. Then, he drew himself up, and turned toward her.

“Hey,” he said, his tone easier. “There’s still some light out—want to go see if we can find a good spot for your oak?”

“Yeah,” Marina sucked in a deep breath, blinking tears back and tightening her arms around herself. She forced a smile and a glance in his direction. “Sounds good.”

Read the whole book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Bauldrs-Tears-Retelling-Lokis-Fate-ebook-dp-B071JM6YCW/dp/B071JM6YCW/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1572839008

[jrazillashadowworks]

Victubia Theme of the Month: June- Flower Language

I’m soo damn late with this but better than not finishing it at all! @,,@  Warnings: Dark themes with mention of violation. 

I do hope you enjoy this. Been forever since I posted anything! Bonus at the end. ^,,^ 

Through the forest frosted and covered in white from the winter season, a massive being as pale as the snow trudged along, his form only noticeable from the void black hooded cloak. A colossal dadao blade was strapped to his broad back, accentuating his dangerous form, sheening in the grey light of the surroundings. However, cradled tenderly as if a baby in his muscular arms was a black lace bouquet of various species of decidedly out of season flowers, tied with a black ribbon. Each blossom was completely flawless and radiant as if preserved and protected by some form of magic, which indeed they were and a mesh veil. Just as special was the meaning behind each of them, some sweet and others somber.

It was with the expert assistance of the eccentric and theatrical entrepreneur from the special floral shop in the capital that he was able to collect such a meaningful arrangement. The short transwoman with the tri-colored ringlet hair had flit him about the shop, expressing the significance of each and every one. Though she was respectful to his purpose, she was rather apprehensive to let him leave with the flowers, learning he intended to leave them on a grave in the dead of winter. In the end, though his expression had been guarded, she saw the tragic sadness in his black eyes and she could not deny him. In the end, he walked out with a couple of pink carnations, dark crimson and tea roses, zinnias, anemones, and the best wishes of the businesswoman Adela.

Kain’s arms cuddled more around the bouquet and his heart sank as he broke through the trees to the small, secluded bluff overlooking the opaque ocean moving calmly under the desolate sky, drizzling with flakes. He had thought he had prepared himself enough, it had been a year since that day after all but, already he felt his innards constrict and tangle, tears already threatening to sting his eyes. Though he was struggling, he finally lowered his gaze on the three graves, only indicated by a trio of nondescript, dark grey stones. A thick layer of snow had nearly buried the stones, blanketing the mounds. This would not do.

Sitting his flowers under one of the spindly boned trees, he turned back and lifted his arms to the frigid wind, feeling the power resonate within him. Brows furrowing and with a single tear sliding down his cheek, he thrust his hands forward. Harnessing his inner turmoil, he surged a blast of magically concentrated air to dust the graves free of the white, fanning it over the bluff in an avalanche. The deafening, whirling howl of the wind gave voice to Kain’s deepest feelings, the cold clawing up his arms and fingers.

Dropping his hands, shoulders slumping, he exhaled softly, the graves visible with a glossy sheen of ice over the black dirt. Muscles tensing, he could not halt the faces of the two brothers from entering his mind, Arui, and…Ovis. The third grave belonged to their mother though Kain had never met her but, he held her in great esteem for she was the figurehead of their family. Ovis took center stage of his mind as he recalled the time they spent together as friends and comrades under the way of the assassin.

These memories, more powerful here, continued to bombard him as he retrieved the bouquet, brushing away the clinging snowflakes. When he turned back around, his feet became as if encased in cement blocks dropped in quicksand. It took all of his strength to trudge over to the grave of Ovis, each step heavier than the last. He could hear Ovis’ smooth voice in his head, the passing conversations and snarky comments playing out on repeat.

Reaching the foot of the mound, the voice was cut off by the ringing of the wire that decapitated him. The scent of his blood was as fresh in his nose as the day he died. Kain’s knees buckled, the weight of his emotions, amplified by the images of Ovis’ demise, crumbling him to the ground. Hunched over, tears flowed freely now, sprinkling the petals, instantly crystalizing into frozen blossoms of their own.

Kain cried silently for a few minutes before he was finally able to lay the bouquet onto the grave, whispering yet another final goodbye. Midway through his sentence, however, another voice intruded, one horribly and impossibly familiar. The sound was gravelly, yet smooth, like the burble of a creek over jagged stones.

“Ni hao, my western wind.” The tone was dripping with longing and elation, a strange combo that made Kain notice for the first time just how cold it was.

Wondering whether he had lost his mind, the pale man turned his head slightly, squinting at the ostentatious form, emanating warm color. The very sight made his skin crawl and the sadness evaporated, replaced by a cold emptiness. Standing not ten feet away was a man of average stature, but a powerfully athletic build, draped in the most ornate and embellished ceremonial, silk robe Kain had ever seen.

A rose gold embroidered fierce serpent of Chinese myth, known as the Bashe, wrapped around his body multiple times, jaws unhinged and fangs threatening, in a sea of glittering lotus flowers of warm colors. Over the robe, he wore an open, large sleeved, cloth overcoat, tied at the chest by a felt chord, one arm occupied and the other vacant. A head and face wrap obscured ninety-five percent of his features save for a single eye, his mouth and a very long tuft of silver hair that sprung out in a downward curve. Although the sheathed Jian blade, hardly veiled by the coat was cause for concern, it was more what was behind him that snatched Kain’s attention.

Haphazardly hidden around his back was a colossal bouquet. The impossibly slight movement of Kain’s notice did not escape this new arrival, causing him to hide it better. “So living a normal life didn’t suit you huh?” He spoke matter of fact, clearly posing it as a question out of some mock sense of propriety. “And now you seem to have been accepted by THEM fully.”

Kain felt the sting of the phantom needle on the nape of his neck again where a tattoo of a wraith now resided, marking the creation of a new bloodline in the growing web of assassins. He gave no implication of responding, though his hand incessantly itched to reach for his blade.

“It’s pleasant to see one of you stuck to it, especially after all the work I put into creating such masterpieces. Shame my Eastern Wind actually succeeded in the normal life.”

White hot memories flashed before Kain’s eyes of a past friend the exact age as himself, raised in the life of murder. It was this friendship that changed everything and lead to the betrayal and fire that supposedly freed them from this life. Although a twinge of relief found Kain at the knowledge of his friend’s positive turn, he was crestfallen to find that their biggest problem apparently survived.

“What do you want?” Kain finally asked with a hard edge to his voice. “You’re desecrating hallowed ground.”

The man let out puffs of breaths that turned into a full-on cackle that shook his entire body, extremely entertained by the notion of an assassin respecting the dead. After a full minute of this, he finally calmed, still chuckling through frantic, broken breathes and apologies. Once again composed, he continued as if it did not happen.

“A peace offering…” He finally pulled out the bouquet he had hidden behind his back that easily put Kain’s to shame in both size and color. Though it would appear to be a simple collection of extravagant and beautiful flowers, Kain remembered once again the voice of the flower shop owner. Among the rainbow bouquet were flowers such as jonquils and red camellias with positive meanings behind them. However, there was also an abundance of flowers that expressed disappointment and anger, along with some that were downright warnings such as begonias and monkshoods. This bundle was a complete expression of the man’s deepest thoughts and wishes towards Kain.

“I enjoyed your idea so much I had to imitate it. Now, I’m willing to forgive you for taking my arm and nearly having me burned to death if you would but come back to me…” A vehement lust resounded from within the man now, his form quivering with a sickening longing. “I desire to have what we once had. Join me again and we can go start over, right before all those horrible mistakes you made. Forget about these silly bloodlines and dead people who were simply substitutions for your broken friendship with the Eastern wind.”

Kain reached for the hilt of his sword now. A maelstrom of excruciating emotions whirled inside him like a ravaging tornado, aided by the appalling thoughts of the countless times this man had molested, violated, and beat him, along with the accusation that everything he had with Arui and Ovis was fake. “Leave…”

“You even kept the sword I gave you. It’s clearly destiny!!!”

At those words, the smothering pain inside Kain became a coalescence of gusty magical energy that in that precise moment released in a single attack, impossible to catch. With a single spin, Kain let loose his dadao in a sideswipe that blasted forth a terrible white cyclone that tore up everything in its destructive path towards the man, including the iced stone ground.

The deafening cyclone made for the trees, collapsing a few before dissipating in a gust that blew the snow away in all directions. What was left was not the man but a scattering of shredded petals, raining a kaleidoscope of color. Brows knit so tight they were almost connected, Kain hissed through his closed lips, scanning everywhere for the individual only to find nothing.

Once the sound died down, a voice filtered from nowhere in particular. “Such a terrible shame. The west wind seems to have weakened. Don’t worry. I haven’t given up on you. But…I’m thinking I’m going to have to pay a visit to our old friend institutionalized by the false contentment of a normal life and…persuade him. Until we meet again my Western Wind.”

Kain’s powerful arms went limp as rubber, hanging down. With all his power escaped, he was left but a husk of a man staring dead-eyed into the tree line, shivering cold.

 Bonus: Flower language

Flowers in Kain’s bouquet:

•        CARNATION Pink - I'll Never Forget You CARNATION, Purple – Capriciousness

•        ROSE Dark Crimson - Mourning

•        ROSE Tea - I'll Remember; Always

•        ZINNIA Mixed - Thinking (or in Memory) of an Absent Friend

•        ANEMONE -Forsaken or forgotten love and affection, the death of a loved one or the loss of them to someone else, the arrival of the first spring winds, Bad luck or ill omens

•        DAFFODIL - Regard; Unrequited Love; you’re the Only One; the Sun is Always Shining When I'm with you

•        HYACINTH Purple - I Am Sorry; Please Forgive Me: Sorrow

Flowers in the arrivals bouquet:

•        GERANIUM -"Stupidity; Folly for Kain’s actions.

•        HYDRANGEA - Thank You for Understanding; Frigidity; Heartlessness

•        JONQUIL - Love Me; Affection Returned; Desire; Sympathy; Desire for Affection Returned

•        MONKSHOOD - Beware; A Deadly Foe is near

•        STOCK - Bonds of Affection; Promptness; You'll Always Be Beautiful to Me

•        CAMELLIA Pink - Longing for You

•        BEGONIA – Beware

•        CAMELLIA Red - You're a Flame in My Heart

•        CARNATION Yellow - You Have Disappointed Me; Rejection

•        HEATHER   White - Protection; Wishes will Come True

•        MARIGOLD - Cruelty: Grief Jealousy

•        NASTURTIUM - Conquest; Victory in Battle

•        PETUNIA - Resentment; Anger; Your Presence Soothes me

[dothewrite]

Hello! Could I request a scenario where Sugawara, Tanaka, Kenma, and Bokuto come home earlier than they're supposed to and walk in on their s/o after she tries to commit suicide with a razor, thinking that her BF won't be home until later, but is still alive when they find her, but just barely? It's up to you for the ending, I'm just in the mood for some tears and angst. ^^;

Since she’s barely alive, there wasn’t much I could do from her perspective. There isn’t much dialogue in this one, but I hope it’s still interesting all the same from inside the boys’ heads. Thanks for waiting this long!

Nishinoya.

Sugawara Koushi knows he will never be able to forget. No matter how much he tries tobury the redness of everything into the deepest parts of his boundless depths,he knows that all it takes is one moment of weakness for it to come hurtlingback. It’s a wave, it’s a lightning, it’s a flash flood of staring death in theface.

He loves you, hedoes. He loved you, he loves you, and he will still love you.

That makes him allthe more terrified. He dreams of it on the bad nights, when the birds don’tcall during haunted hours, and his phone turns itself on when the battery isdone recharging.

The floor is red.The first thing he sees, is red. The last thing he sees is still red, and it’sno longer smeared only on the white tile. When he moves you, his hands aretrembling, shaking from too much adrenaline in too little body, and he dropsyou almost immediately back into the water. He’s not sure if you’ll get worseif he shifts you.

You don’t say aword. Suga does this alone, and boy does he feel alone. There’s a whole floatingbody next to his raw knees, but you won’t respond even if he presses againstthe sides of your windpipe until you choke. He’s not sure if you’re consciousenough to suffocate.

He can hear hisown breath hit countless notes. Softer breaths, harsher breaths, and breathsthat take so long to steady that he’s no longer sure if he’s screaming orsinging. He’s not crying, however. There’s already too much water in the roomwithout him crying.

He picks you up,like he always does when the two of you are fooling around, with his armstucked below your nape and your knees. You’re heavier than usual. You’re deadweight against him, and if it had been a rougher day at work, he would havedropped you. Your fingers don’t link around his neck like they usually do tohelp with the strain.

The only thingthat Suga can remember is that he needs to get you out of the water. He can’tstand to see more of it darken periodically, a small pond of maroon growingaround your ragged arms, and he sets you on the couch that will never look thesame again, and folds your wounds in towels. They stain red within minutes, andthe small patches from hair dye soon become invisible.

He dials for anambulance with the landline. It’s his voice and his fingers dialing, but thelandline is shared.

The EMTs askcalmly if Suga would like to sit with you in the back of the ambulance. (“Areyou her close kin?” “No,” he replies, “I’m not close enough.”) They let him be,with a large towel wrapped around his shoulders as if he was the one injuredand dying on a bed. Maybe they can see that he is, and it’s Suga who hasn’tnoticed.

He gets in his carafter a glass of water, and drives to the hospital. He is asked if he needsmedical attention when he pushes through the trauma center’s doors, and thenurses points down at his hands. Suga smiles, and wipes the blood off on hisslacks. He tells her that it was nothing, just a nosebleed; he’s here forfamily.

And when Sugawakes up from this dream he gets at least once a month, he calls youimmediately. Sometimes you answer sleepily, and sometimes you don’t pick up ifyou’ve set it on vibrate.

He doesn’t mind.He listens to your voicemail message, and he cries. And Suga does his best; heleaves a message that he loves you, praying that you’ll still be there to smileat him for it the next day.

He’s a man. And that’s more than sex andgender- it’s the chivalry, the bravery, the boldness that Tanaka has promised to inherit of the Earth: a man to make the nameproud.

When his eyesfinally adjust to the elegant, earthy tones of your bathroom décor, and you, atthe end of it, in the bathtub with a soft smile on your face that can onlybring back memories of lazy afternoons together- his vision blurs, and hischest jumps into pained sobs.

The tears don’t stopeven when he’s finished heaving into his hands, not even when he thumps againsthis chest in a desperate bid to stop the hyperventilating. They keep coming,streaming down his face and flooding into all of the laugh-lines along hismouth until the saline drips from his neck down into his navy shirt.

It’s perhaps fiveminutes- ten at most, but it’s enough for Tanaka to feel as if he’s failed you,and failed himself. It’s precisely five or ten minutes too long for him to takeaction, but it’s simply not possible- his hands are clenching and unclenchingas he tries to will himself to stop trembling from the shock. His head has beendipped and his mouth open in a soundless scream, and no amount of willpower canforce his face back up to look at you.

Still, it’s notthe fear that immobilizes him. It’s the onslaught of sadness, bone deep sadnessthat sneaks into his marrow from whereabouts unknown. It eats at his musclesand his joints, and he trips over his own feet as he stumbles towards yourstill body resting along the bathtub.

There are nobloodstains, no splashes, nothing out of the ordinary at all except for thefact that the water is still running, and upon closer inspection, an eerierusty colour from blood left too long.

Carefully, hesticks his hand in and gives it a little wave. The burgundy swirls around wherehis joints touch the water, a soft, watery hurricane of what keeps you alive ina circle small enough to fit into his palm. The water is warm, the hot watertap running just enough for the room temperature to cool it down. There isstill a brighter red that seeps readily from the wounds along your arms.

Tanaka looks down.Your inner thighs are in even worse shape.

Right now, hecan’t imagine how much pain you must have been in and how long it must havetaken for you to accustom yourself to it and for a smile to finally fight itsway out of the fear you must have felt.

If you felt fearat all.

It doesn’t matter,because Tanaka is definitely feeling enough now for the both of you. Perhaps heis still crying, he’s not sure because it all tastes salty in his mouth, butthe reality of how easily you are from dying from quite literal exsanguinationspurs him to grip you with all the strength he can and haul you out of the tub.

The red spillsover in a great wave, and some of it gets onto his shirt. His pants are donefor, and he doesn’t think that he’ll ever be able to scrub the blood off hishands after this.

Your body is toolax for him to support you for long in his arms, so he heaves you onto his back,and carries you to the kitchen. When he places you onto the table, like acorpse, his heart seizes and Tanaka is crippled for a good thirty seconds frompain in his chest.

The first aid istorn apart with his slimy, shaking hands, and he takes countless deep breathsover and over against to make sure his fingertips don’t dig accidentally intoyour wounds as he wraps the white gauze over it repeatedly. He tries his bestto concentrate on the fact that he’s helping you, not wrapping you up into amummification of yourself.

He chooses not tochange the clothes for either of you. He stumbles out, with you draped over hisback like a rag doll, arms lolling from side to side with each step. The doorcloses shut behind him with a soft squeak, as if nothing of import had happenedinside that apartment. The ever-changed apartment.

It’s five pm on aweekday, and people are slowly getting off work. Your location is in a smallresidential pocket in the middle of a metropolis, and Tanaka has to pointedlyfocus on the goal in front of him to avoid the accusing stares people acrossthe street level at him at all times. Maybe one of them even calls the police-he isn’t bothered by that.

A hospital,unfamiliar to both of your in your usual healthy states, sits two blocks away.An ambulance would have taken longer to dispatch, Tanaka knows, and he fumbleshis way into the ER with his blood-soaked attire. Your blood has seeped throughthe bandages and cleanly onto his shirt.

The nurses spirityou away from his touch when they spy the both of you, and Tanaka is left alonenext to the Emergency Surgical Care room in the waiting area, the warm red ofyour arms over his body printed onto the back of his shirt.

A nearby nursecomes and places a caring hand on his shoulder before it hits six, and assureshim that it’s alright to cry. Everybody does.

Tanaka only nodsweakly and places a weary hand on the dry flakes of blood on his shoulderblades. He has run out of tears.

Kenma doesn’t like secrets. It makes him nervous, irrationally angry, and thedespair on his face shows for days afterwards. He knows he shouldn’t mind themso much, because everybody has some, but this time- this time- Kuroo hadconfided in him things that he never would have guessed. He thinks that there’sno way anyone could blame him for feeling frightened.

You’re kind,you’re a nighttime beauty that will forgive him his failures. Kenma hacks intoyour PC at work, and taps viciously at your search history.

Have you ever hadthe feeling of such disbelief, such fear and such sadness that it seems as ifnothing around you exists? That you have entered a plane of incredible realitywhere it’s all your worst fears projected onto a buzzing screen?

This is the firsttime he has ever vanished in the middle of work. His coworkers whip their headsaround to watch him rush down the corridor, his chair still swiveling in place.He’s a good employee, they believe that he must have had a bad stomachache, ora family emergency. He’ll finish his debugging earlier than them still.

But Kenma nolonger remembers where he is. He barely remembers who he is- this frail,pieced-together identity that you had built together for him, and he grabs acoworker’s motorcycle without asking.

Everything slowsdown for him when he lays his hand on the doorknob. Time jumps along with hispulse, thudding so erratically that he could have created an alternate timelinealtogether where he had never talked to Kuroo about anything in the firstplace.

You had forgottento turn off the water in the bath. Or at least, that’s what Kenma thinks,because he doesn’t want to imagine an actual reason, a probable reason, becausethat would mean that this is all true.

The water poolingaround his ankles is warm, a comfortable hot-springs temperature in winter, andthe closer he gets to the bathroom, the pinker it gets. It’s dye, it’s dye, it’s the sun, it’s dye. It’s three in theafternoon, too far from sunset hues.

When he finds yourdressed, pale body in your bathroom, his eyes pause on your face. Anoverwhelming, excruciating affection boils his chest alive, and all he canthink of is how much he loves you, how much you mean to him- if you were nailedto a wall with your eyes gouged out, nothing of his feelings would change.

His first reactionmakes him hurl into the open toilet.

It takes him threeminutes to pull himself together, and squeeze the vomit off the ends of hisbangs.

Kenma tries topick you up, but you’re too heavy for him as you are- limp. He tries to takeyou by the arm and drag you out of the bath, but his fingers feel the gashes ofmoist flesh in the folds of loose skin, and he almost screams. He ends uptipping you half out of the water, folding your arms on the top of yourexpressionless face so that they stop feeding the red bath some more.

He calls Kuroofirst. He’s greeted with a snarky laugh and the beeping of voicemail, and Kenmacan’t believe that he would call his best friend instead of the emergencyservices.

He doesn’t saymuch when the men knock on the front door, composed and poised with theirequipment tucked underneath their arms. They tell him to calm down, and not toworry, but Kenma is beyond worry. He has reached the untouchable plain ofself-loathing and dissociation, and there is no protest when they bundle himinto the ambulance too.

He calls Kurooagain when they ask him if there’s anyone else that is close to you. He callsyour father after Kuroo doesn’t pick up for the second time. After they takeyou into the hospital, Kenma begins to call your close friends one by one.

Daichi is the oneto arrive first. Your father follows closely behind him, looking ten yearsolder than he really is. Both are crying soundlessly, and their voices breakwhen they ask Kenma which room you’re in.

Kenma forgets tocry. He stays on the bench outside your room for the rest of the night,twirling his phone in his nimble hands.

The soft turquoisepaper bag knocks against Bokuto’sknees as he walks, his fingers gripping the small rope handle with alternating lightnessto his modern jazz tune. Fridays call for extra celebration, and celebrationsalways calls for cake. He hasn’t forgotten a Cake Friday yet, and he’sincredibly proud of the way your beam seems to reach your eyes each time you’reproven wrong- that you’re worth taking care of. And Bokuto can, and will, takecare of you.

That’s why, whenhe starts to tap the numbers in to unlock your front door and there’s no pitterpattering of feet from the other side, he knows that there’s something wrong.

The feelingdoesn’t start with an uneasy swirl of his gut- it ignites his nerves with ablaring siren in his mind that screeches at him that there is somethingincredibly, incredibly wrong with this afternoon. He lifts from his memoryreserves your soft hands against his cheek and your low, shy voice welcominghim home to keep his fingers from slamming the wrong keys.

When he steps intothe entryway, he can hear the sound of running water and the deep gurgling of aclear drain. It’s the only sound in the house; your usual music gone from thesound system in the living room, and Bokuto drops his Tiffany-coloured cakeonto the floor. Two spoons clatter to one side and cracks.

This is part ofhis professional volleyball player job- constant vigilance, his calves tensingin practiced moves that stretches with the grace of a lifetime of passion- buttoday his feet drag behind him, a mire of fear and regrets and desperation thattrickles into a cocktail of terror.

Bokuto has neverbeen so afraid in his life.

But he doesn’t lethimself admit that. He doesn’t let himself feel even the thinnest sliver ofthat fear, because in his ears, his conviction thuds down to his stomach. Hecannot fail you. He cannot fail you.

He doesn’t knowhow long his breath stays stuck in his ribcage as time passes far enough foryour body to rise and fall with a weak breath. Bokuto’s hands are soaked withdark crimson, but that doesn’t stop him from scrubbing his wrist against hiseyes. All he can do is to be brave for you.

He tips hisfingers against the pulse point on your neck, and slides them down to press yourtorn flesh back together. There is bone he can feel directly under the pads ofhis fingers, and he tears off his shirt and bundles what remains of yourforearms into a cocoon of cloth. When he picks you up, arms now bound together,your head lolls grotesquely over his arm. The water in the bathtub has longpassed from lukewarm to cool, and your body along with it. Bokuto presses youcloser into him, desperately hoping that some of his warmth will seep back intoyou.

Setting you onyour shared bed and puffing up blankets to tuck you into comfort, Bokuto dragsthe landline from its small seat on the kitchen counter into the bedroom. Hedials the buttons without looking, his attention fixed on your pallid cheeks.

The line connects,and Bokuto tells them the address. The only context he bothers offering is‘ambulance’.

His shirt has gonefrom a clear blue to a rich purple. There are no bandages left in the first aidkit underneath the sink, only a smattering of sesame street band-aids. Briefly,an image of a row of cheerful band-aids plastered in neat rows along the gasheson your arm flashes behind his eyes. He’d watch your skin knit back into thesmooth plane it once was, and you’d laugh at him for his silliness when youwake up. You’d peel the plasters off one by one, folding them into neatsquares.

The professionalspeel off the shirt when they arrive and replace it with their bandaging. One ofthem eyes Bokuto warily, but offers him a seat beside your cot anyway.

He doesn’t knowwho to call that night. He slumps in the small couch in the corner of yourhospital room and scrolls up and down his contacts list. You’re silent, asyou’ve been all day.

He turns off hisphone, and sets it on the table.

Bokuto knows heloves you. He knows he can be strong when he needs to be. But right now, Bokutowishes that someone could come along and tell him that wanting to feel angrier,doesn’t make him a bad person.

[alicalopezlive-blog]

Sickened Coal Ash Workers Guilt Tennessee Utility for Exposure to Health Hazards

The Tennessee Valley ity, long well known for providing good careers and cheap electricity, will be facing a growing backlash above its handling of a significant coal lung burning ash spill about ten years ago, with most likely serious results for a good industry often opposed to environment regulation. A tribunal in Knoxville decided in time that the TVA’s builder, Jacobs Engineering, breached its security duties, exposing countless cleanup workers to airborne “fly ash” with known carcinogens. The jurors claimed Jacobs’ actions were competent of making the employees tired. The key question of whether many people brought on each worker’s accidental injuries had been left for a various jury in a next level of the municipal trial. More than staff fault the specialist for revealing them to ash they say caused the variety of illnesses, some deadly, including cancers of often the chest, brain, blood and even skin. Despite last November’s advantageous verdict for this first injured parties, they won’t get budgetary damages unless of course they can confirm just what caused their certain illnesses. The judge, alluding to their vital want for health care, ordered mediation. More than a hundred or so other injured persons await the result. “To have the stress placed on you, that a person have to prove just what caused these horrific items — that’s an atrocity, ” said Janie Cs, whose husband, Ansol, provides a rare blood malignancy following driving a fuel truck or van at the site. “I imagine that’s just the particular law. ” Jacobs’ legal professional, Theodore Boutrous, said the company “was carrying out it has the best to help manage the cleanup in a new way that is safe : that the regulators have said is safe. ” They exhausted that it hasn’t already been confirmed that Jacobs – or perhaps coal lung burning ash – is to blame with regard to any illnesses. The employees encountered a moonscape after the dripping six-story earthen ravage zero from the TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant about 12 ,.,, releasing more than a good billion gallons of fossil fuel lung burning ash. It remains this biggest industrial spill inside modern U. S. background. The idea also prompted often the Age to begin regulating coal lung burning ash storage from more than, lively ash dumps around the nation, although not as exactingly because environmentalists would want. The TVA paid to get as many as men and women to have and eliminate the pollution, a few functioning -hour shifts for months from a time. The sludge dried into a fine particles that sparkled similar to glitter and sometimes whirled into clouds so deep, drivers may possibly barely observe past the bonnets of their trucks. In interviews, workers said they had been healthy before breathing the ash, but have considering experienced unusual symptoms. These people recalled joking darkly concerning “coal ash flu” just before battling strange lesions plus experiencing their skin flake off like fish weighing machines. At least colleagues have died, they said, a few gruesomely, collapsing and paying out blood. In this Oct.,, photography, Ansol and Janie Clark pose with a good funeral Ansol Simon constructed close to the Kingston Fossil Plant inside Kingston, Tenn. Typically the Tennessee Pit ity had been accountable for a massive coal ash discharge at often the plant in that covered a good community and fouled streams. The couple according to the memorial is for typically the workers with come decrease with illnesses, quite a few fatal, including cancers with the chest, brain, blood and epidermis and severe obstructive pulmonary disease. Ansol Clark simon owned a fuel vehicle with regard to four decades within the cleaning site, and now is suffering from a rare blood cancers. AP PhotoMark Humphrey “We wiped clean it up around a little more than several years, and it would’ve took years to perform it properly, ” explained Doug Bledsoe, who forced trucks generally there and today has brain and chest cancer. Gaffer boss Michael Robinette testified that Jacobs safety manager Ben Milieu purchased him to take one worker’s mask away and get rid of all the masks inside the equipment space. “We threw them inside the dumpster, ” Robinette testified.

And Greg Schwartz, a Jacobs’ subcontractor, testified his supervisor said masks weren’t allowed “because this looked bad. ” “They didn’t want individuals generating by and experiencing persons with masks. That was the solution I received, ” Schwartz said. Milieu, with trial run, denied the workers’ accusations that he / she bought debris masks destroyed or disappointed their use. healthy skin care products is definitely not a offender and hasn’t mentioned on these personal personal injury cases, other than to claim Jacobs was liable for staff member safety. With its standing in stake, the agency stresses that coal ash is classified as “nonhazardous” simply by the E. ” Fight it out University geochemist Avner Vengosh, who is not necessarily involved in the litigation, tested lung burning ash through the Kingston spill in addition to found large levels connected with radioactivity and dangerous materials, including curare and even mercury. In a new assertion regarding his peer-reviewed research, this individual warned that inhaling and exhaling airborne particles could “have a severe wellness effect on localized residents or employees. ” Nonetheless the workers claimed Jacobs safety supervisors instructed them “you could try to eat a good pound of the idea a new day and the idea wouldn’t harm you. ” Ron Bledsoe, a vehicle drivers who today struggles to breathe with severe obstructive pulmonary ailment, explained managers made a problem concerning safety glasses plus steel-toed boots but downplayed typically the fly ash whirling all around them. Jacobs officials testified they followed regulations for air monitoring, with benefits verified by outside firms, and found the employees were never ever exposed to dangerous levels. Personnel testified they witnessed the supervising being manipulated. Irrespective, experts say there isn’t more than enough research to identify some sort of safe level of prolonged experience of fly ash. “We need more research, because people are potentially getting ill from fossil fuel ash, ” said Kristina Zierold, the epidemiologist in the University connected with Alabama from Birmingham who also is not active in the law suits. Anti Snoring Products as opposed this to the concerted effort it took to prove scientifically the fact that smoking causes illness. Laws utilize to dust in general and to many connected with the individual regions of travel ash, but more do the job is needed to realize what happens by the body processes if all those toxic chemical compounds happen to be breathed in together. That is one reason many of the workers could possibly have an uphill battle demonstrating their particular illnesses resulted from prolonged exposure, claimed John Terry, an epidemiologist with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who testified regarding the employees. With the TVA board meeting previous week, Janie Clark pleaded for help with typically the workers’ medical bills. “They cleaned up your clutter, ” she said. “Please do not let these hardworking folks turn out to be treated as collateral destruction. ” TVA Table chairman Skip Thompson responded using sympathy but designed not any promises. The Clarks wished to visit a beach after the cleansing. Janie’s never seen the particular sea. Ansol’s illness presently can make that difficult. “It do not matter anymore, ” the girl said. “They mortally wounded of which dream in myself. ” .. This material may not be Was this article important? Thank you! Please tell us everything we could do to strengthen this short article.

[midnightmarinara]

XoRax (Spoiler-Free)

This pasta was posted on /x/ on Jan 29th, 2012. It is quite interesting and worth the lengthy read.

My parents were the first to fall violently ill from the sickness we now know as XoRax. I can vividly recall my father lying on his bed while his muscles spasmed and he choked on his own vomit. I stood as his side, frozen in place and refusing to leave as I held back sobs, his pupils dilating until his entire eye was like an inky blackness. He tried to speak, turning his head toward me, but opening his mouth only brought forth another torrent of vomit. I remember saying something, but that detail is lost on me now. I remember staring into his glazed eyes as his shuddering became less pronounced and he was suddenly very still. I let out a wail and ran into my room, unprepared and unwilling to face the truth. My mother was the first to pass, then my older brother who had just turned 17, and finally my father. I had not considered that I could have caught the disease myself - if it were in fact contagious - I just thought myself lucky, though tragically lucky at that.

I fell asleep in the corner, huddled in the blanket that previously kept my mother warm, her perfume made the putrid aroma somewhat tolerable, perhaps just enough so that I could drift off. I remember a persistent banging next, a series of muffled inquiries from the opposite side of my locked door. They were shouting for survivors, looking fervently for anyone who was still alive, despite the breakout. I rushed to the door and unlocked it to face what I would come to identify as the Day-Crew. Their faces were obscured by large gas masks fitted with some sort of capsule on either side of their cheeks, their breathing was slow and monitored, their voices were nearly impossible to hear over their mechanical wheezing. They were covered from head to toe in black regulation hazmat material with orange text reading DAY-CREW on their backs.

They ordered me out into the main hall where I managed to catch sight of fourteen other children around my age being told directions and filed into a line-up. Once the entire group had been examined, we began our trek out into the streets, which was a vision of chaos and destruction. We had heard the noises of looting and desperation from our homes, but we hadn't ventured off into the outside world for weeks for fear of catching the sickness ourselves.

There were even more Day-Crew that were burning the bodies that had fallen to the streets , trying to purge the earth as they kept their distance from the resulting fumes. We were silently ushered into the back of a large truck that took us to the south, away from the cities and suburbs and into the dense growth of the forest.

When the van came to a screeching halt, the doors swung open to reveal more Day-Crew, who ushered us out into a forest clearing. We were interrogated about our exposure to anyone with XoRax, and if we felt any symptoms like nausea or vertigo; though we had all witnessed our family members falling ill, and had tried in vain to treat them, we were all perfectly fine in any physical sense.

The Day-Crew initially told us that they were perplexed about our immunity to the sickness, as anyone who came in contact with it was sure to fall ill just hours later, so it was a shock to see that some of us had been living this nightmare for weeks on end. As they administered more tests and asked more questions however, we were told that the immunity was tied with a hormone cell that the disease was using to compromise the immune system, and since we were all too young to have properly developed it, the disease was unable to make us fall ill.

We were told that the Day-Crew wanted to study us, that we would live under the cover of the forest in quarantine. They would hope to extract a cure from our group that could be used to heal the world and rid it of XoRax Disease.

They tried their best to sound positive in light of the situation, but it was obvious that even they were doubtful of their efforts, and that there was no guarantee for any of their tests to follow through.

Still, they kept the mood optimistic and promised us that we would save countless lives with our efforts. They built a secluded village in the woods, providing us each with a make-shift house carved into the tree trunks around the area, I was led to a simple tree house that had a single bed on the far end and a table in the middle. We were told that first thing the next morning we were going to have our blood taken, so we weren't allowed to eat anything until then. I was fine with that, I hadn't been hungry for days, the image of my mother, father and brother crowded my thoughts instead. I didn't get much sleep, the forest was chirping with crickets, and the muffled bickering of the Night-Crew kept me up into the early hours.

We were woken the next day and filed into a single line up to have blood drawn. While the needles were prepared for us, we were told that we would have to receive a vaccination that would prevent us from going through puberty to preserve the hormone that might lead to a cure. It was never elaborated on at the time that we would never be able to grow up, or have children, but it was unlikely to live beyond the first few hours of infection, never mind the next few years, so our adulthood was seen as necessary sacrifice.

This continued for a few weeks, we would continue to receive vaccinations and assured that a cure would soon arise, but times were getting desperate. I took to listening in on the muffled conversations of the Night-Crew during the night, it became easier to make out what they were saying over time as they sat beneath my bedroom window next to a crackling fire.

I discovered that our encampment was only one of many in the surrounding area, and that they deduced that XoRax originally came from the sea to the West. They passed around horror stories of the people that lived by the shore that were hit the worst, that they had gone completely pale and that they began to sprout growths off of their elbows, hips and their toes. They had to be kept constantly hydrated or else their skin would begin to flake and peel. Their pupils had dilated and their entire eye was colored black, at this bit I thought back to my father, sitting on the couch and writhing in pain.

There was food in the mountains, one assured another, they were gathering it in droves, perhaps to keep it from spoiling. Another spoke up, revealing that they had managed to find expecting women who weren't exposed to XoRaX, and that they were being kept in the mountains to birth their young away from the sickness. The topic came back to their present situation and they began to discuss our encampment, that our results - while promising - weren't being worked on fast enough. There were accusations claimed, and fingers pointed, but at last they settled on keeping their mood positive, that something would come along eventually, that we just needed some more time.

Discussion drifted back to the horror stories of the West coast, which clearly sparked sick interest in the group as they talked of the corpses that had been found along the waters and drifted ashore, each with deep black eyes.

I rolled over in my bed, unable to listen to any more of the stories without images of my own family. Staring up towards the ceiling, praying that we would manage to find a cure soon, and that I wouldn't have to hear about the people of the West any more.

It had been nearly a month of testing when something went wrong - a few short hours after our latest vaccination several kids began complaining of distorted vision. They could see trailing lights in the air, making their way across the plains. While their faces were covered with their masks, I could sense the worry that played out across their faces.

We were told that they were just visual hallucinations, and that they would subside in a few hours. When I awoke the next day and glimpsed outside I too could see the trailing lights drifting through the air, they forbid anyone to discuss the lights any further, though it was clear that everyone could see them.

As we lined up to have blood drawn, one of the Day-Crew became terribly ill, and began to vomit through his gas mask. In a frenzied panic we were ordered back into our homes as they led the sick member away into the woods. We were told to come out and organize ourselves into a line for decontamination. After covering everyone with a chalk-like substance, they began to scrub away at it with some foul smelling liquid until they were assured that we were safe to deal with once more. This excessive procedure became a part of our daily regimen, and it's how we started calling them "The Scrubs" rather than their official titles. We were disillusioned, and it was obvious that they were as well.

The visual hallucinations began to worsen, even though we had stopped taking vaccinations long ago. Some kids began to befriend imaginary creatures in the air, speaking to the trails of light. I was horrified that I might start losing my sanity as well.

I didn't want to eavesdrop to the discussion over the fire that night, which had gradually worsened which each passing week. With a trailing desperation in their voice, the Night-Crew began to exchange information about the other areas.

The food in the mountain had been contaminated, and rumors began to surface that all of the births had resulted in defects, with each child being well-over a healthy birth weight with their eyes far apart. They would likely succumb to the disease and perish as well, it was decided. The cure that had been tested on the XoRax-ridden patients hadn't shown any signs of preventing the sickness, but rather had simply slowed the progress of the sickness so that it claimed lives in days rather than hours.

While this was a bit of good news, they focused on how little was accomplished over such a large span of time, and how anyone with the sickness shouldn't be kept stringing along, but rather, destroyed so that they couldn't contaminate anyone else. There was a coldness in their voice.

I rolled over in my bed to watch the lights play across my vision, dancing across my eyes until I fell asleep.

The Scrubs were gone the next day, leaving us behind as their failed experiment. The other children seemed unaware of this and decided to continue befriending imaginary creatures. In a depression I sulked off to bed, only to suffer a violent burst of spasms and shivering in the process. I drifted in and out of sleep that night, having one recurring nightmare after another. When I awoke, I heard something pass through my doorway, something that couldn't possibly be there. Rolling over I reluctantly looked up into the air to watch a trailing ball of light float around my house before descending toward my bed.

"Hello, Link. Wake up. The Great Deku Tree has summoned you!"

[neikarasu]

Mirage

A R76 week contribution.

Day 3 - At Your Back.

It was painful.

 Every punch in the gut, every slash across his marred skin, every abuse given…They were all real. Hair matted in sweat and blood, it was a challenge to keep up right. Still, his back was straight, restrained as it was, and blue eyes unwavering in his burning hatred.

 Empty owl mask stared back.

 There wasn’t much to say anymore and Soldier76, even with all his enhancements, was exhausted. Accusations, insults and rage-filled screams had already gone flying in the first few days. Or weeks. It was tough to tell the time when the cell they kept him in had no window. Soldier knew damn well nobody was going to come for him. He got himself into this, no one else knew. Even if they did, they would have told Jack he was an idiot.

 And idiot he was, but he needed to see this through with his own eyes.

 A punch knocked the wind out of his lungs. Couldn’t even double over to lessen the impact. Talon must have thought he had some kind of super strength, given all the steel cuffs. Even the cell was lined with steel, fully machine operated.

 But they didn’t need all that to keep him in. Not with the jailer they had assigned Jack.

 He must admit, the taunting jostled him more than the physical stuff. There was so much history between them, so much hurt that was buried away and under that explosion. Jack thought whatever memory left was misted over by scars, and yet here they were. He was surprised at how deep every word cut. At how many memories resurfaced, that, after all these years, the betrayal still stung.

 Talon did their research. They knew what would hurt most.

 But just like the man sent to torment him, Jack was just a ghost of the past. There wasn’t much he could offer them that would benefit the organization in the long run. Soldier76 was a nuisance at best, raiding their abandoned facilities and foiling petty gang activities. No, if he heard it right, Talon was into the bigger shit, now that Overwatch no longer could hound them.

 Jack Morrison was a dead man, but if he could spite some old enemies before he died, then he would sure take that chance.

 Not exactly keen about having Reaper’s mask in his face as the last sight, though.

 A talon-clad, gnarled fist sent Soldier blacking out.

 Jack came to what must be hours later, because he was alone. It was pitch black in the cell and there was no sound to be heard. His joints were more than just stiff and he could feel caked blood flaking off of his skin.

 Reyes had always been thorough with his work.

 Speaking of which…

 The cuffs suddenly snapped open, all but spat Jack tumbling to the floor. The thudding pain of countless bruises almost shadowed over the door’s opening, hissing as the power was cut. The slapping of metal-studded boots was deafening with how Jack’s ear pressed against the floor, and how he was yanked to his back did nothing to lessen his aching.

 Still, it didn’t deter his mocking smirk, even if he knew it was crooked from his split lips, “What took you so long? Needed to find a cane?”

 Gabriel didn’t even look impressed, “You’re a fucking idiot.”

 Jack laughed, delirious. Gabriel propped him up and, without warning, injected a whole syringe of biotic energy into his system. Needless to say, Jack’s surprised yelp didn’t exactly help his case. In fact, it had Gabriel sighing, “Really? And you didn’t even make a sound during that whole interrogation.”

 “Gotta…make it believable.” He managed between grounding teeth and gasps, the rush of energy was dizzying, “…Tough and gritty, that’s how they like it.”

 Shuffling somewhere in the room, Gabriel made an uncommitted noise. Still regaining his breaths, Jack allowed himself a moment to watch his lover setting up the scene. Cocking his head to the side, “Haven’t seen you in that hoodie in a while. What’s up with Hot Topic? Couldn’t get a deal outta them anymore?”

 The dark man paused, giving Jack an unsettling crimson glare. Jack just shrugged. Gabriel went back to whatever he was doing, mumbling under his breath. In the distance, alarms were going wild. Jack could pick up rushing footsteps and shouting. Whatever Gabriel had set off must not have been pretty.

 “…Is that gorilla hair…?”

 “Yes.”

 “…Did he punch you good?”

 “…Yes.”

 Jack threw back his head and laughed. Still, Gabriel didn’t seem amused. And yet, when he helped Jack up, his touch was gentle. Scared, almost, as if Jack would break.

 It had the old soldier feeling slightly guilty, having been the one to suggest all this.

 “I’m fine.” He assured Gabriel, lamely so. The answering grunt didn’t sound very convincing.

 With how long he had been bound, Jack was slow. Gabriel didn’t say a word, simply guided him down the corridor. Everything was a bleak red in emergency light, made harder to navigate with how Jack was trying to slip on his getups as they went. The noises suggested that it would take a while for Talon to even remember Jack was there, but still, he worried.

 “You got everything in the clear?”

 Gabriel’s stare was flat, but he answered anyway, “As far as they are concerned, I am on a plane to Mexico right now and Widowmaker is being flown in to be my replacement. The time gap is perfect and only a handful of people know of this.”

 Good. Talon would bite off their own. Just like what they had done with Overwatch. They would get off Gabriel’s case, too.

 Jack didn’t get any more question out afterwards. Gabriel shoved his visor on, and wraith-walked both of them out via air duct. Didn’t seem like Gabriel wanted conversation either. Jack didn’t blame him.

 If Jack was hurt by all this act, then Gabriel must have been tenfold. He hadn’t wanted any of this to happen. He would have never laid a hand on Jack. Never wanted to dig up old memories. In his own wording, he would have figured this out on his own. That this was risky, and Jack actively putting himself into Talon’s hand to cement Gabriel’s cover was plain stupid.

 Jack, on the other hand, was selfish.

 The things he had said were probably a thousand time more painful than what Gabriel did in the cell.

 They reformed miles away from the Talon’s base. Dawn was barely touching the horizon, giving Jack just enough light to see Gabriel’s face.

 He squeezed the man’s hand once. It wasn’t enough. So he stopped and pulled Gabriel into his arms instead, feeling muscles tensed in his embrace.

 “I’m alright. Don’t worry.”

 “…Don’t ever ask me to do anything like that again. You hear me, Morrison? Don’t fucking ever do that again.”

 Jack didn’t deserve this man’s devotion. Even in captive, under harm and helpless, deep in his heart, Jack knew Gabriel got his back. That he was foolish to ever have that trust wavering.

 But he learned.

 And by God, he would never lose this man again.

[jackfollmanwriter-blog]

Detroit

The sight of my father’s Detroit PD uniform always made me feel like a child, but seeing it there lying on the floor it made me feel even more helpless than I when I was five years old. It was funny to think how intimidating the navy blue garb could be when put upon the sinewy frame of a man with a badge when it looked so harmless and pathetic, crumpled up next to a dusty fireplace, looking like any old piece of dirty laundry.

I stepped up to the uniform with a tremble and knelt down to take it in my arms. Knowing that the sight of the uniform meant I would never see my dad’s body again, I took its collar up to my face and inhaled and hoped the fossilized scent of his Old Spice might somehow make me feel safe in a darkened place.

The little fucker’s tip was spot on. There was a cop’s uniform lying in an abandoned house at the end of Baker Street. What the little fucker didn’t tell me was the uniform belonged to Amit Patel. My father.

The little fucker I refer to is a 17-year-old borderline criminal I interviewed a few times in pursuit of a story for the Detroit Free Press before I got laid off and before I decided that he was mostly full of shit. He usually hung around the edge of an abandoned cul-de-sac pretending to sell weed and flagged me down as I was on my way to an interview with someone who I hoped was more honest.

My story was about “Zombie,” a new drug that had hit the streets of Detroit, but that was still so underground only those heavily entrenched in the world of hard drugs and law enforcement knew about it.  Those privy to information about Zombie knew it was a liquid drug of unknown ingredients usually cooked up in one of the countless abandoned houses that haunted Detroit. The users shot up the stuff in the back of their neck and it’s heavy hold led to them joining a marauding group of addicts rumored to be eating people, particularly their brains (hence the name Zombie). Whether the drug made you crave eating people or if it was just a group of people who liked to eat people who just happened to really like the drug was the subject of hot debate.

I was privy to this information because my father and my brother, Az, were in the Detroit Police Department. The two of them had pulled some strings and gotten me behind-the-scenes access to the department as I pursued the first media story about Zombie.

The department labeled me as a bad omen, because as soon as I showed up, officers started going missing. Three cops disappeared within my first month of hanging around the station and all in the same way my father eventually would. They went out on a domestic disturbance calls in one of the many cul-de-sacs littered with the shells of abandoned house that dotted the city like dead insects in a spider’s web and never came back. Their uniforms were always found in a different abandoned neighborhood than the one they had been sent to investigate.  The trend put such a scare into the department my father and brother worked at had been reduced to just four officers after a rash of retirements and resignations.  

A big reason why so many of the guys were giving it up was the entire Detroit police department had zero leads on breaking up the Zombie clan or tracking down any of the missing officers, dead or alive. I think the idea of being eaten had particularly created a flight in the officers and I believed the cannibalism rumors because nearly every house that was searched after Zombie groups had been reported there had included at least one human skeleton which was partially eaten with hacked upon bones and empty skulls.

Another key factor to the mysteriousness of the disappearing cops was, despite their uniforms always being left behind, their hats were always never recovered. The main theory connected to the permanent disappearance of the hats was because they housed a new piece of the technology, the “cop cam.” Forced on officers due to a never-ending rash of horrible PR, the GoPro-style cameras recorded everything the officers did and were monitored back at the station.

After my dad went missing, Az and his six-year-old son Cale moved into my one-bedroom apartment in the heart of the city. Az and Cale lived in a larger house on the edge of the city and we figured with all of the officers going missing, a cramped apartment downtown was a safer environment. Az and Cale had been sleeping on my couch, but the night that I had discovered my father’s uniform we all slept together in my bed with Az and I crying, Cale too young to really absorb exactly what happened.

I had an interview set up for the next week I thought about cancelling but decided to keep after days of mourning. My father’s disappearance encouraged me to double down on my pursuit of tracking down the members of the Zombie group, even if the newspaper I had initially planned on submitting my story to no longer employed me. This was no longer about reporting, this was my own personal investigation and about being able to hold a proper funeral for the man who raised me.

My interview took me out to Stoepel Park, a neighborhood ravaged by urban flight more than any other in the city. Desolate, crumpling and deserted, the burg reminded me of the Emerald City in Return to Oz.

The mother of a young man who had joined the Zombie gypsies responded to my Craigslist ad that advertised for those with information about the group to come forward for a documentary. The mother claimed her son joined the group for a few weeks, but came back home to get clean a couple of days ago. This was potentially huge. In the few months the group had been growing, there was not a single report of a defector.

I headed to Stoepel alone as the presence of anyone else, especially those that looked like law enforcement, could result in those who may have been loose-lipped clamming up. Absolutely no one wanted to be connected in any way to the Zombie group, so those that may have had information were reluctant to come forward out of fear of being accused.

My interview took me to a dilapidated manor that could have belonged to a big wig at General Motors decades ago, but was now home to single gray-haired woman with cigarette smoke-tanned skin, recessed gums and eight cats.

She spoke out of the side of her mouth with cracked lips as an ash gray feline rubbed the side of its head against my calf.

   “And I thought he was gone. I thought he was gone forever.”

I could feel the immense weight of the woman’s life in every word she spat to me from her broken easy chair in the middle of a living room that was heated by three space heaters and the body heat of a handful of felines.

   “Then one morning I heard that ol’ familiar rumble of his ol’ Chevy Luv in the driveway and I couldn’t believe it. I looked out the window and there he was behind the wheel, sleeping in the breeze of the air conditionin.”

The woman couldn’t have felt more genuine and sweet. She seemed like one of those women who looked on the verge of 65, but who was actually barely 40 and had lived about three lives already, but I just couldn’t get comfortable in the house. An open floor plan, where the living room we sat in could be entered through four different openings, I never felt secure and I was perpetually overcome with the feeling that someone was watching me.

The woman told me her son went upstairs once she brought him in from the driveway and had been up there sleeping ever since, but I kept hearing shuffling sounds from the door behind me. A clear cough from behind the door was all I needed to hear to fully tune myself out from the woman’s story and start to try and wiggle myself out of the situation.

   “He said that they tried to get him to do things he just wouldn’t do.”

I stopped the woman with a stiff hand.

   “I’m sorry, but I…

I bit my tongue harder than I ever had in my entire life and tasted the tinny spice of blood drift down my throat while I stared at something that made me want to swallow my tongue…

A gaunt, young man, clad in dirty overalls with splotches of what looked to be white paint checkered clumsily across his face emerged from a door behind the woman’s chair.  He skulked around the back of her chair with his eyes locked on me while I struggled for words.

Cold hands clamped down on the back of my neck. I was lifted up off of the couch for a moment, but squirmed as hard as I could and freed myself for a miraculous moment.

Everything became a blur – the woman screaming, my neck burning, the man in overalls descending upon me. I bolted for the front door. I dashed across the dirty carpet, slammed myself into the heavy wood of the door and pushed my way out with the presence of whoever had picked me up by my neck breathing upon my back.

I burst out onto the open porch of the house and into a shaken snow globe of a world. Fat, fresh flakes of powdery white snow stuck to the black fleece of my jacket when I ran out onto the icy sidewalk and almost fell upon my ass.

Luckily I parked my car on the street right in front of the house and never locked the doors of the 1999 Oldsmobile so I was able to slide ride in with the ice still melting upon the bottom of my shoes. I locked the doors and fired the engine just before a dark presence overtook the passenger side window. I saw the outline of an immense man out of the corner of my eye for just a sliver of a moment before I drove off down the street with my wheels skidding on the ice rink that was the pavement.

I called Az as soon as I was far enough away from the terror of the house from which I escaped.

He picked up and spoke before I even had a chance to get a word out.

   “You have to come down to the station. Dad’s camera is on.”

***

I stood with Az and the three other remaining police officers in his station watching surveillance style videos on four monitors propped on top of a long desk.

    “His came on about an hour ago. About the same time the others did,” Officer Turner explained and pointed to the monitor which broadcast the dated interior of a car.

   “Do we have tracking on these? I asked.

   “We don’t have like a GPS in them, but we can follow their location by any surroundings we see,” Turner answered. “Other than you father’s they all seem to be inside homes right now. Your father’s is going somewhere in a car, but I haven’t gotten a good look out the windows, so I don’t know where they are driving.”

Turner was clearly the alpha of the remaining group. Round, bald, mustached and gapped-toothed, he always reminded me of the dad from the show Family Matters.

   “Great fuckin time for a migraine,” Turner announced and then got up from his chair and walked away to the bathroom.

The faint sound of trickling urine was interrupted by gasps escaping from the two other officers’ mouths.

    “We got movement over here,” Officer Lind said after gulping down a mouthful of coffee sooner than he had planned.

Officer Lind was the youngest of the group and the rest of the guys always made fun of him for his long hair, even though it couldn’t have grown more than an inch from his scalp in any direction.

   “Here too,” Officer Washington chirped and adjusted her glasses. “Getting into a car.”

Officer Washington had been the lone woman in the station before everyone else left and bucked any stereotypes about female cops, she would have been considered the most attractive woman in just about any office she worked in, had two kids and was a gentle soul that actually reminded me of my grandma even though she was barely 40.

All four screens we were monitoring now showed the inside of cars.

    “Looks like everyone’s got some place to go,” Washington said quietly just before Turner came back from the restroom and took a seat next to her.

   “Still don’t recognize any locations though,” Turner noted.

    “My dad’s stopped,” I pointed out with a finger.

The car in my dad’s cam had come to a stop. We watched the cam turn to the right and look upon a palatial but crumbling estate that lurched over the sidewalk the car had parked next to.

   “Anybody see an address?” Turner called out.

   “Wouldn’t matter unless someone knows what street this is,” Lind replied.

Turner was going to continue, but was interrupted by the sound of Az vomiting upon the floor.

   “What the fuck Patel?” Washington groaned.

I patted Az on the back as he knelt over his golden vomit that smelled of light beer and splashed across the floor.

   “I didn’t know you were sick man,” I said before Az interrupted me.

   “I’m not sick. I puked because that’s Emily’s house.”

****

Emily was Az’ ex-girlfriend and the mother of Cale. I didn’t know much about her, but I did know she lived in a rundown old mansion not too far from where I had just been in Stoepel Park that Cale was scared to stay at because it reminded him of a haunted house.

I was commanding Az’ squad car on a residential street at freeway speeds while he sat in the passenger’s seat with sweat dripping off his brow and dried vomit crusted upon his lips. We had dispatched officers from other nearby stations hoping they might somehow beat us to Emily’s house, but it was likely that Az and I would be the first responders.

Both of us had blue tooth speakers sticking out of our ears connected back to the station where the other officers were monitoring our father’s cop cam and relaying what they were seeing. My heart fluttered with every detail they described, but the breaks in their descriptions were actually much more heart-stopping, my brain always assumed that they were seeing something too horrible to tell.

   “It’s somewhere in the house, but  I haven’t seen any people yet,” I could hear Washington’s voice in my ear as I mashed the pedal and tore down a street that Az told me connected to the street Emily lived on. “I sometimes hear other noises in the house though and it seems to follow those.”

   “Where is it in the house?” Az asked.

   “Not exactly sure,” Washington said. “It’s going through a hallway slowly, but I don’t know the layout of the house so I don’t know where that is.”

   “Do you know the house?” I asked Az.

He hesitated for a moment, clearly disappointed with himself.

   “No, I’ve never actually been inside, just on the porch.”

We screeched up to the house, parked behind a rusty Chevy and sprinted up to the front porch. Az handed a gun to me as we ascended the steps even though he knew that I had never touched a firearm in my life.

   “You check upstairs, I have the main floor,” Az screamed at me and tore off into the guts of the house.

I couldn’t believe how brave the adrenaline had made me. I had been the kind of person who changed the TV channel during horror movie trailers and now I was climbing stairs in a dark old house chasing after a potential cannibal with a pistol in my hand.

   “I think I hear something in the basement,” I heard Az’ disconnected voice speak into my ear. “Have you seen it go down any stairs?”

   “No,” Lind answered back instead of Washington, who had been talking to us.

   “Lind? What the fuck?” Az spat.

   “Washington left. One of the other cams just showed up outside of her house,” Lind said in an unemotional flash. “Same with Turner.”

   “Holy shit,” Az exhaled. “Where the fuck is it now?

   “I missed some shit when Washington took off, but I think I saw it go up some stairs…

I stopped at the top of the stairs when Lind finished his sentence and lifted the gun up in front of myself.

   “But now it’s in what looks like a kid’s bedroom,” Lind went on.

   “Shit,” Az yelled making me jump in my stance and drop the gun. “The noise I heard down here was a fucking dryer.”

I dropped down to pick up the gun with my eyes steadied on the darkened hallway that was in front of me.

   “Where is the last cam?” Az whispered. You said one was at Washington’s, one was at Turner’s and one is here. Where is that stray one?”

   “Uh, it was just in a backyard somewhere. It just went in a backdoor of some house. Now it’s heading down a dark stairway,” Lind answered.

    “Where is the one in here?” I called out but was interrupted by the sound of Lind yelling into the speaker in my ear.

   “Oh my God. It’s in the basement. Patel. Patel. Patel.”

Lind’s shouts were drowned out by the sound of gurgling screams.

I decided to turn back around and head down the stairs to help Az, but stopped when I saw a shadowy figure descend from an attic staircase that was at the end of the hallway in front of me.  

It was Cale. He scurried down the steps and started creeping towards me in the dark hallway.

I should have been paying complete attention to his lurking, but I was more than distracted by the horror broadcasting in my blue tooth…

Whatever Az had encountered in the basement was destroying him in a horrible manner. The sounds of my brother’s screams and Lind’s prayers to God pounded in my ear.

Interrupting the horror in my ears, a figure had stepped out of one of the doors in the hallway and had pursued Cale back up the attic’s ladder.

I snapped back to life when the sounds of my brother’s disembowelment quieted.

     “He’s following the kid up into the attic,” Lind’s voice announced in my ear.

I started shuffling to the attic ladder just as the figure’s feet disappeared up into the hole in the ceiling.

    “I don’t think it saw you,” Lind added. “The kid is hiding somewhere in the attic.”

I climbed up into the attic ladder with the gun limply held out in front of me.

   “Where is the other one, the one in the basement?” I whispered.

   “He’s still in the basement,” Lind stammered, clearly not wanting to give any details about what was going on down there.

I tuned Lind out when I climbed up into the attic and saw no signs of life, just scattered dusty boxes and lines of clothes hanging from the rafters that had turned the attic into a bit of a library of faded fabrics and forgotten styles.  The hanging outfits concealed almost everything in the space and were strung up all around me dully lit in a beam of soft light that came in through a single window.

   “Where is he?” I whispered.

   “I can’t tell, somewhere in the clothes.”

The gun still in my hand, handle slicked by nervous sweat, I started combing through the clothes, throwing them down the metal rods they hung from, revealing more and more cobwebs and dusty wooden beams.

Until…

The moving of a rack of clothes revealed Cale. Tucked up into a ball and crying, he looked away from me with his arms out in a pathetic defense.

    “We have to go,” I whispered.

I grabbed Cale’s hand and started to lift him up out of his tuck on the floor and felt a presence step up behind me. Its weight sent a creek from the floor into my ears that were also occupied by the sound of Lind’s voice…

    “It’s right behind you…

I turned around in a whirl to see the blur of a figure descending upon me with a hideously long knife.

I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.

I was suddenly on my back lying next to Cale on the floor with my hand throbbing. I looked down to see the gun still in my hand and I looked forward to see the figure in a gasping clump on the floor a few feet in front of us.

I stared at the mound of motionless human matter for a few seconds before the sounds of Cale’s cries turned my attention to him. I pulled Cale close and just sat there crying with him for a few moments with my eyes glued to the prone figure on the floor in front of us and my finger on the trigger of the gun I had just fired.

After taking a few more deep breathes, I spoke.

   “Where is the other one?”

    “It’s gone,” Lind chimed back.

I didn’t bother asking any more questions about what happened in that basement, my brain assumed the worst. I pictured my brother’s uniform lying crumpled on a dirty basement floor just like I had found my father’s.

I turned my gaze to the body that lay in front of me on the floor and caught something I recognized. Perched on top of an oily mop of dark hair was a scuffed and faded Detroit Tigers baseball cap adorned with a few silver pins.

During the 80s, the Detroit PD tried to connect to kids by having officers where special police hats that were basically Detroit sports team caps. My dad had loved the Tigers one that he had so much he demanded to keep wearing it even after they quickly disbanded the idea. It was pretty much his calling card.

I could never look at a worn out Tigers cap and not think about my dad and now I was staring at his very navy hat pinned with his department pin and cop cam resting on the head of the person that had likely killed him, and possibly eaten him. It made the bone-chilling winter air that seeped through the thin walls of that attic that much more cold.

I sat shivering on the frigid curb outside of the house with Cale wrapped in a blanket next to me. I felt like I wanted a cigarette even though I had never actually smoked one.

I watched the various crews that show up after an emergency file about the stiffly frozen front yard of the house – the paramedics, the cops, the firefighters – all milling around behind the backdrop of flashing lights that seemed to light the snowy world a shade of pale pink. I put my arm around Cale and pulled him close.

I audibly groaned when an unfamiliar officer walked up to me. I was still far too shaken to be questioned about anything. I put my hands up in a dismissive posture, but the officer ignored me and started firing away with words.

    “This was all bullshit.”

   “What?” I shot back in disgust thinking about how what the guy was referring to as bullshit had just cost my brother his life.

    “This was all just a calculated distraction to get what few cops are still around here out of the way. Those fuckers just attacked every house in the neighborhood the last few hours.”

I didn’t really care. It was my time to be selfish. I didn’t care if the savages had gone into hundreds of homes and pulled away helpless people, I only cared about my brother and I didn’t want to hear any more about anything, just hold Cale and wallow in sorrow.

It took a little while, but I think the officer finally picked up on this. A sheepish look washed upon his face.

    “I found this in there and I thought you might want it.”

The officer pulled my father’s Tigers cap out from his back pocket and stuck it down upon my head.

    “I think it fits you good.”

Originally published by Thought Catalog on www.ThoughtCatalog.com

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

Why Zuckerbergs 14-Year Apology Tour Hasnt Fixed Facebook

In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, an internet site announced Facemash began nonconsensually cleaning pictures of students at Harvard from the school’s intranet and expecting customers to frequency their hotness. Clearly, it began an protest. The website’s developer speedily proffered an apology. “I hope you understand, this is not how I symbolize for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences subsequently, ” wrote a young Mark Zuckerberg. “I surely see how my meanings could be seen in the wrong light.” In 2004 Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook, which rapidly spread from Harvard to other universities. And in 2006 the young busines blindsided its users with the launching of News Feed, which assembled and presented in one target information that beings has hitherto had to sought for piecemeal. Countless useds were outraged and fright that there was no warning and that there were no privacy ascertains. Zuckerberg rationalized. “This was a big mistake on our component, and I’m sorry for it, ” he wrote on Facebook’s blog. “We really shambled this one up, ” he read. “We did a bad errand of clarifying what the brand-new pieces were and an as bad enterprise of giving you verify of them.” Zeynep Tufekci( @zeynep) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and an mind writer for The New York Times. She lately wrote about the( democracy-poisoning) golden age of free speech. Then in 2007, Facebook’s Beacon advertising system, which was launched without suitable ascendancies or acquiesce, discontinued up compromising user privacy by making people’s acquisitions public. Fifty thousand Facebook customers indicated an e-petition titled “Facebook: Stop conquering my privacy.” Zuckerberg responded with an regret: “We plainly did a bad hassle with this release and I apologize for it.” He promised to improve. “I’m not proud of the way we’ve treated this situation and I know we can do better, ” he wrote. By 2008, Zuckerberg had written only four poles on Facebook’s blog: Every single one of them was an justification or an attempt to explain a decision that had unnerved users. In 2010, after Facebook infringed useds’ privacy by making key types of information populace without proper approval or forewarn, Zuckerberg again responded with an apology–this time published in an op-ed in The Washington Post. “We just missed the mark, ” he mentioned. “We examined the feedback, ” he included. “There needs to be a simpler style to control your information.” “In the coming weeks, we will include privacy controls that are much simpler to application, ” he promised. I’m going to run out of space here, so let’s hop to 2018 and skip over all the other accidents and justifications and have committed themselves to do better–oh yeah, and the approval fiat that the Federal Trade Commission formed Facebook sign in 2011, billing that the company had deceptively predicted privacy to its useds and then frequently break-dance that promise–in the intervening years. Last month, Facebook once again garnered widespread attention with a privacy related backfire when it became widely known that, between 2008 and 2015, it had allowed hundreds, maybe thousands, of apps to scrape voluminous data from Facebook users–not just from the users who had downloaded the apps, but more detail from all their friends as well. One such app was run by a Cambridge University academic called Aleksandr Kogan, who apparently siphoned up detailed data on up to 87 million consumers in the United States and then surreptitiously sent the plunder to the political data firm Cambridge Analytica. The happen made a lot of disorder because it connects to the flattening storey of bias in the 2016 US presidential election. But in reality, Kogan’s app was just one among numerous, many apps that amassed an enormous amount of information in a manner that is most Facebook users was totally unaware of. At first Facebook indignantly represented itself, claiming that people had consented to these calls; after all, the disclosures were implanted somewhere in the thick-witted communication surrounding obscure used privacy ensures. Parties were ask questions it, in other words. But the backlash wouldn’t die down. Aiming to respond to the growing anger, Facebook announced changes. “It’s Day to Stir Our Privacy Tools Easier to Find”, the company announced without a clue of irony–or any other kind of hint–that Zuckerberg had promised to do just that in the “coming few weeks” eight full years ago. On the company blog, Facebook’s chief privacy editor expressed the view that instead of being “spread across roughly 20 different screens”( why were they ever spread all over the place ?), the assures would now finally be in one place. Zuckerberg again went on an confession expedition, giving interviews to The New York Times, CNN, Recode, WIRED, and Vox( but not to the Guardian and Observer reporters who broke the tale ). In each interrogation he rationalized. “I’m really sorry that this happened, ” he told CNN. “This was surely a breach of trust.” But Zuckerberg didn’t stop at an apologetic this time. He likewise protected Facebook as an “idealistic company” that cares about its users and spoke disparagingly about rival business that charge users fund for their commodities while maintaining a strong chronicle in protecting user privacy. In his interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Zuckerberg said that any person who is reputes Apple attends more about useds than Facebook does has “Stockholm syndrome”–the phenomenon whereby captives start yearning and marking with their captors. This is an interesting argument coming from the CEO of Facebook, a company that essentially supports its consumers’ data hostage. Yes, Apple accuses amply for its products, but it also includes boosted encryption hardware on all its telephones, hands timely protection updates to its entire user cornerstone, and has largely locked itself out of user data–to the chagrin of many governments, including that of the United States, and of Facebook itself. Most Android phones, by distinguish, gravely lag behind in receiving security revises, have no specialized encryption hardware, and often handle privacy limitations in a way that is detrimental to user sakes. Few governments or companionships complain about Android phones. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it came to dawn that Facebook had been downloading and preventing all the textbook themes of its users on the Android platform–their content as well as their metadata. “The consumers consented! ” Facebook again hollered out. But people were soon affixing screenshots that showed how difficult it was for a merely someone to see that’s what was going on, let alone figure out how to opt out, on the indistinct permission screen that flashed before users. On Apple telephones, however, Facebook couldn’t harvest people’s text messages because the permissions wouldn’t allow it. In the same interview, Zuckerberg made wide-cut is targeted at the oft-repeated notion that, if an online service is free, you–the user–are the produce. He said that he found the contention that “if you’re not compensating that somehow we can’t am worried about you, considered extremely glib-tongued and not at all aligned with the truth.” His rebuttal to that accusation, nonetheless, was itself glib; and as for whether it was aligned with the truth–well, we just “re going to have to” take his statement for it. “To the frustration of our sales unit here, ” he supposed, “I make all of our decisions based on what’s going to are important to local communities and centre much less on the advertising side of the business.” As far as I can tell , not once in his apology expedition was Zuckerberg asked what on earth he signifies when he refers to Facebook’s 2 billion-plus consumers as “a community” or “the Facebook community.” A parish is a set of people with reciprocal claims, powers, and responsibilities. If Facebook actually were a community, Zuckerberg would not be able to induce so many statements about unilateral decisions he has made–often, as he boasts in countless interrogations, in defiance of Facebook’s shareholders and many factions of the company’s personnel. Zuckerberg’s decisions are final, since he powers all the voting stock in Facebook, and always will until he decides not to–it’s just the action he has structured the company. This isn’t a community; this is a government of one-sided, highly profitable surveillance, be carried forward on a proportion that has realise Facebook one of the largest companies in the world by grocery capitalization. Facebook’s 2 billion customers are not Facebook’s “community.” They are its user locate, and they have been repeatedly carried along by the decisions of the one person who controls the platform. These customers have invested season and coin in improving their social networks on Facebook, yet they have no means to port the connectivity abroad. Whenever a serious competitor to Facebook has arisen, the company to expeditiously replica it( Snapchat) or obtained it( WhatsApp, Instagram ), often at a mind-boggling cost that simply a behemoth with massive money substitutes could afford. Nor do people have any means to completely stop being moved by Facebook. The surveillance follows them not just on the scaffold, but elsewhere on the internet–some of them apparently can’t even text their friends without Facebook trying to snoop in on those discussions. Facebook doesn’t merely collect data itself; it has obtained external data from data intermediaries; it creates “shadow profiles” of nonusers and is now attempting to match offline data to its online profiles. Again, this isn’t a community; this is a regime of one-sided, highly profitable surveillance, carried out on a flake that has made Facebook one of greater fellowships in the world by busines capitalization. There is no other channel to perform Facebook’s privacy conquering moves over the years–even if it’s time to simplify! finally !– as anything other than decisions driven by a mix of self-serving inclinations: namely, gain rationales, the structural incentives intrinsic to the company’s business pose, and the one-sided ideology of its founders and some administrations. All these are forces over which the subscribers themselves have little input, aside from the regular given an opportunity to grouse through repeated gossips. And even the ideology–a ambiguou thinking that claims to prize openness and connectivity with little to say about privacy and other values–is one that does not seem to apply to people who race Facebook or work for it. Zuckerberg buys lives circumventing his and tapes over his computer’s camera to perpetuate his own privacy, and company employees get up in arms when a contentious internal memoranda that made an debate for growing at all costs was recently revealed to the press–a nonconsensual, surprising, and awkward disclosure of the species that Facebook has regularly imposed upon its billions of users over the years. This isn’t to allege Facebook doesn’t specify real value to its useds, even as it locks them in through network accomplishes and by suppressing, buying, and mimicking its rivalry. I wrote a whole volume in which I document, among other things, how useful Facebook has been to anticensorship efforts of all the countries. It doesn’t even mean that Facebook executives make all decisions purely to increase the company valuation or benefit, or that they don’t care about customers. But various things can be true at the same occasion; all of this is quite complicated. And fundamentally, Facebook’s business model and foolhardy mode of operating are a heavyweight knife threatening the health and well-being of the public sphere and the privacy of its useds in many countries. So, here’s the thing. There is indeed a instance of Stockholm syndrome here. There are very few other situation in which person or persons will also be able to make a series of decisions that have obviously improved them while diminishing its protection and well-being of billions of parties; to shape mostly the same justification for those decisions countless hours over the gap of precisely 14 years; and then to declare innocence, idealism, and full independence from the obvious structural incentives that have influenced the whole process. This should commonly stimulate all the other instructed, literate, and smart beings in the apartment to break into howls of rally or humour. Or perhaps tears. Facebook has tens of thousands of works, and apparently an open culture with strong internal meetings. Insiders often talk of how free works find to speak up, and really I’ve frequently been told how they are encouraged to differ and discuss all the key issues. Facebook has an instructed workforce. By now, it ought to be plain to them, and to everyone, that Facebook’s 2 billion-plus customers are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to advertisers and, it seems, basically anyone else who will pay Facebook–including unsavory authoritarians like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. That is Facebook’s business model. That is why the company has an almost half-a-trillion-dollar market capitalisation, together with billions in spare money to buy competitors. These are such readily apparent points that any negation of them is quite astounding. And hitherto, it appears that nobody around Facebook’s sovereign and singular ruler has managed to convince their master that these are blindingly obvious truths whose following may well provide us with some suggestions of a healthier acces forwards. That the repeated term of the use “community” to refer Facebook’s useds is not appropriate and is, in fact, misleading. That the constant repetition of “sorry” and “we intended well” and “we will define it this time! ” to refer to what is basically the same sellout over 14 times should no longer be accepted as a have committed themselves to work better, but should rather be seen as but one indication of a profound crisis of accountability. When a large chorus of beings outside the company invokes frights on a regular basis, it’s not a sufficient explanation to say, “Oh “were in” blindsided( again ). ” Maybe, just perhaps, that is the case of Stockholm syndrome we should be focusing on. Zuckerberg’s outright denial that Facebook’s business sakes frisk a powerful role in mold its behavior doesn’t augur well for Facebook’s chances of doing better in the future. I don’t disbelieve that the company has, on occasion, regarded itself back from bad behaviour. That doesn’t move Facebook that exceptional , nor does it justify its existing selections , nor does it adapt the facts of the case that its business pose is profoundly driving its actions. At a minimum, Facebook has long necessary an ombudsman’s power with real teeth and ability: the two institutions within the company that they are able act as a check on its worst compulsions and to protect its useds. And it needs a lot more employees whose task is to keep the programme healthier. But what the fuck is absolutely be disorderly and innovative would be for Facebook to alter its business representation. Such a change could come from within, or it could be driven by regulations on data retention and opaque, surveillance-based targeting–regulations that would make such practices least profitable or even forbidden. Facebook will respond to the latest crisis by remaining more of its data within its own walls( of course, that fits well with the business of accusing third party for access to users based on extensive profiling with data held by Facebook, so this is no sacrifice ). Sure, it’s good that Facebook is now promising not to spill user data to ruthless third party; but it should eventually allow genuinely independent researchers better( and secure , not foolhardy) access to the company’s data in order to probe the real effects of the platform. Thus far, Facebook has not cooperated with independent investigates who want to study it. Such investigation would be essential to informing the kind of political discussion we need to have about the trade-offs inherent in how Facebook, and definitely all of social media, operate. Even without that independent investigation, one thing is clear: Facebook’s sole sovereign is neither are available to , nor should he be in a position to, make all these decisions by himself, and Facebook’s long predominate of unaccountability should end. Facebook in Crisis Initially, Facebook used to say Cambridge Analytica get illegal access to some 50 million users’ data. The social network has now raised that figure to 87 million. Next week, Mark Zuckerberg will certify before Congress. The topic on our recollections: How can Facebook foreclose the next crisis if its general principles is and always has been connection at all cost? Facebook has a long record of privacy gaffes. Here are just some. http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/06/11/why-zuckerbergs-14-year-apology-tour-hasnt-fixed-facebook/

[dylan-stableford-blog]

Trump calls the New York Times 'a virtual lobbyist' against GOP tax bill

Yahoo News photo illustration; photos: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images, NYT, Mark Wilson/Getty Images

President Trump lashed out at the New York Times on Thursday after the newspaper’s editorial board published the office numbers of Republican senators on Twitter, urging readers to call to oppose the GOP tax reform bill.

“The Failing @nytimes, the pipe organ for the Democrat Party, has become a virtual lobbyist for them with regard to our massive Tax Cut Bill,” Trump tweeted. “They are wrong so often that now I know we have a winner!”

“The Failing @nytimes has totally gone against the Social Media Guidelines that they installed to preserve some credibility after many of their biased reporters went Rogue!” the president added, tagging his favorite morning television program, “Fox & Friends.”

The Failing @nytimes, the pipe organ for the Democrat Party, has become a virtual lobbyist for them with regard to our massive Tax Cut Bill. They are wrong so often that now I know we have a winner!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2017

The Failing @nytimes has totally gone against the Social Media Guidelines that they installed to preserve some credibility after many of their biased reporters went Rogue! @foxandfriends

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 30, 2017

Last month, the Times unveiled a new set of social media guidelines for its newsroom. Among other things, the paper asked all its reporters — not just those covering politics — to refrain from partisan messages on social media. But Clifford Levy, the paper’s deputy managing editor who co-authored the guidelines, tweeted that they apply to the Times’ newsroom and not its opinion section.

On Wednesday, the editorial board took control of the Twitter feed for the Times’ opinion section, tweeting out the office phone numbers for key GOP lawmakers — including Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Jeff Flake — in a deliberate effort to oppose the version of the tax bill currently up for debate in the U.S. Senate.

This morning, The New York Times Editorial Board is tweeting here to urge the Senate to reject a tax bill that hurts the middle class & the nation's fiscal health. #thetaxbillhurts

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) November 29, 2017

Now is the time to contact senators, if you haven’t done so already, about this tax cut plan. Find yours here: https://t.co/AkqImNKzhT #thetaxbillhurts pic.twitter.com/cNYsE6Rjrl

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) November 29, 2017

Don't let Trump's tweets of Islamophobic conspiracy theories distract you. Call your senator and tell him or her that #thetaxbillhurts. Find contact information here: https://t.co/j05FMu1Nlb pic.twitter.com/MU00e3mdLK

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) November 29, 2017

Contact @SenatorCollins, (202) 224-2523, particularly if you live in Maine, and ask her to oppose the Senate tax bill because it would repeal Obamacare's individual mandate, driving up the cost of health insurance. #thetaxbillhurts pic.twitter.com/id69OJ4CPC

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) November 29, 2017

Call Kansas Senator @JerryMoran at (202) 224-6521 and remind him that the Senate tax bill would add more than $1.4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years without helping the middle class. #thetaxbillhurts pic.twitter.com/2UNbX9LUQE

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) November 29, 2017

“The editorial board has been writing for weeks about concerns over the tax legislation pending in Congress,” a New York Times spokeswoman told Politico on Wednesday. “This was an experiment in using a different platform to get that message out. We emphasized to our audience that this was the position of the editorial board in particular, not of Times Opinion generally.”

On Thursday, the paper published a scathing editorial that accused the Republican-controlled Senate of “rushing to pass its tax bill because it stinks.”

“As more senators show signs of sacrificing their principles and embracing the Republican tax bill for minor and nebulous concessions, it bears looking more closely at the process that produced this terrible legislation and some of its lesser-known provisions,” the board said. “The Senate tax bill, a 515-page mammoth, was introduced just last week, and the chamber could vote on it as soon as Thursday. This is not how lawmakers are supposed to pass enormous pieces of legislation.”

“It took several years to put together the last serious tax bill, passed in 1986,” the board continued. “Congress and the Reagan administration worked across party lines, produced numerous drafts, held many hearings and struck countless compromises. This time it’s not about true reform but about speed and bowling over the opposition in hopes of claiming a partisan victory.”

In a speech in St. Charles, Mo., on Wednesday, Trump said that he hopes lawmakers will bring the bill to a vote by the end of the week.

“I would say do it now,” the president said. “We’re ready.”

Read more from Yahoo News:

U.S. demands countries end ties with North Korea’s ‘sick puppy’ Kim

Trump makes ‘Pocahontas’ joke at event honoring Native American veterans

Trump video retweets could be playing with fire

Trump defends Roy Moore: ‘He totally denies it’

Accuser’s open letter to Roy Moore: ‘Where does your immorality end?’

[gummi-monkey-archived-blog]

Black Heart City

Resting, Ace muses with dry cough as a stench fills his nose, had been the best idea he'd had all day.

It had been something of a miracle, the preteen making it through first guarded gate with nothing but a mad dash. Perhaps his bloodied state and battle-cry had startled the heartless men to freeze, his own eyes a nightmare to behold. When they did finally give chase, it was far too late, his rapid footsteps carrying him through the labyrinth of Edge Town like a wisp.

Nothing would stop him, countless pedestrians jostled and fleeing his path lest they meet a similar fate to those who tried to block him. Not soon enough, Ace was able to scale the buildings and take to the rooftops. There, he could move unhindered, leaping and skidding across broken tiles and aging balconies. He has several close calls, slipping and miss-stepping with waves of dizzines, but as he travels closer to High Town the rooftops grow more stable and maintained. It becomes easier to keep his footing, and despite the increasing gaps between buildings, he was able to make the flying leaps far more comfortably than before. If only his head would stop throbbing, he'd be completely set.

Breaking into High Town itself required he leave the rooftops behind, at least momentarily, and break through another towering gate. Goa's second set of walls divided the kingdom even further, home to the noble lineages, and thus the guards were far more selective of who enter. Pausing only long enough to catch his breath and let his hammering heart remain in his chest, he flings himself down, landing himself as close as possible before charging.

These guards put up far more fight. They're accustom to rift-raft making such bolts to or from the prestigious upper town, and so are ready with their batons as soon as they catch the flash of movement.

Ace doesn't have time to fight them, not as they call out to close the gates. To grown mens astonishment the he just keeps charging towards them, making no effort to slip around or avoid confrontation. Their stances wide and arms swinging down to beat him, Ace drops down at the last second, momentum sliding him under and between their legs. He feels his matted hair brushed as he makes the move, his vision blurring from vertigo, and its on slightly shaky feet that he resumes his mad dash past High Town's gate. Several other guards made feeble attempts to grab and hit him, but were unprepared: their arrogance had gotten the better of them, believing two of their own would be enough.

Shouts of angry men and distressed women echo behind him, Ace bolts for the first alleyway he can, climbing and hopping the brick divide with ease as his pursuers curse and gawk. They scurry away, hoping to cut him off on the other side, but once they are out of sight Ace catches his breath and looks to the roofs.

Its a little tricky this time, but nothing his life in Mt. Corvo hasn't prepared him for. Even so fatigue has caught up with him, his athletic stunts bringing the pain in his skull to the forefront of his mind. Suddenly, he just can't get enough air in his lungs, and his legs shake from the effort of standing. Having reached some point of safety, knowing the fools of guards would be too busy scrambling farther into High Town in search for him here, right by the wall, Ace's adrenaline tapers off.

Its okay though, because the first part of his plan was complete.

I'm here...

Collapsing onto the flat surface of the rooftop patio, Ace doesn't get to linger on his small victory long before his breathing evens and he falls asleep.

...

That was hours ago.

Coughing a foul odor persists, Ace rubbing the sleep from his eyes and giving his skull another gentle prodding. A flinch confirms it still tender, but the blood in his hair and skin was fully dry. The rest had done him good though, and in all honesty he'd probably have still been sleeping if that smell hadn't woken him up. In a way, he should be thankfully for it; although sky was still dark he could see the orange hues of dawn. He'd slep through the whole damn night. Only, it looked a little weird. He'd watched many sunrises in his young life, and never before had the night sky been so black and gold...

As a fresh whiff of smell hits him, he chokes again, eyes watering as snow begins to fall among him. As the flakes hit his skin, he blinks and frowns in genuine confusion as it doesn't melt, and so he touches it, his finger smearing the grey speck into soot.

Then it hits him like the pipe that had bashed his head, and he turns.

No.

"Those bastards-!"

He knew it was coming. Knew he'd been an unwitting pawn it its setup, knew it was going to happen tonight.

Seeing it for himself was far more horrifying than simply knowing.

From the hill rising High Town above the rest of Goa Kingdom, and the castle above that, all of the nobles and royalty had a cozy view of the sea of flames licking over the wall of Gray Terminal. The sky was thick with black smoke, the blaze reflecting off its toxic mournful clouds to burn the air above and rain ash on the city. It was if all the fear, anger and despair of those living in the land of trash were making one last ditch effort to curse and spit at the kingdom that gleefully damned them. Crying ashes to blacken the homes and streets, to match the hearts of the people who lived there.

It had begun.

Ace had been a part of it. Made Luffy a part of it.

He doesn't realize he's scratching himself where the spot of soot soiled him, blunt nails tearing into skin and desperately trying to save himself and reason with the roaring voices from beyond the walls. Accusing, cursing and damning him for ever being born. For killing them all.

I didn't know...! I'm sorry...! I- I didn't know-!

He really didn't deserve to live. Not after this.

No- no! It isn't my fault. It isn't. It's-

"The Nobles!"

They still have Sabo. They still have Luffy.

Even if he himself didn't deserve to live, his brothers did. They wanted him to live, to, and so for them... for them...

For them, he needed to focus and move.

Sparing the inferno one last glance, he offers the people of Gray Terminal a small prayer.

"I'm sorry... I can't make it up to you. But I can try."

Then Ace takes off into the night, leaping of rooftops towards the Outlook estate.

[alicalopezlive-blog]

Sickened Coal Ash Workers Blame Tennessee Utility for Publicity to Health Hazards

The Tennessee Valley ity, long well known for providing good careers and cheap electricity, will be facing a growing backlash above its handling of a significant coal lung burning ash spill about ten years ago, with most likely serious results for a good industry often opposed to environment regulation. A tribunal in Knoxville decided in time that the TVA’s builder, Jacobs Engineering, breached its security duties, exposing countless cleanup workers to airborne “fly ash” with known carcinogens. The jurors claimed Jacobs’ actions were competent of making the employees tired. The key question of whether many people brought on each worker’s accidental injuries had been left for a various jury in a next level of the municipal trial. More than staff fault the specialist for revealing them to ash they say caused the variety of illnesses, some deadly, including cancers of often the chest, brain, blood and even skin. Despite last November’s advantageous verdict for this first injured parties, they won’t get budgetary damages unless of course they can confirm just what caused their certain illnesses. The judge, alluding to their vital want for health care, ordered mediation. More than a hundred or so other injured persons await the result. “To have the stress placed on you, that a person have to prove just what caused these horrific items — that’s an atrocity, ” said Janie Cs, whose husband, Ansol, provides a rare blood malignancy following driving a fuel truck or van at the site. “I imagine that’s just the particular law. ” Jacobs’ legal professional, Theodore Boutrous, said the company “was carrying out it has the best to help manage the cleanup in a new way that is safe : that the regulators have said is safe. ” They exhausted that it hasn’t already been confirmed that Jacobs – or perhaps coal lung burning ash – is to blame with regard to any illnesses. The employees encountered a moonscape after the dripping six-story earthen ravage zero from the TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant about 12 ,.,, releasing more than a good billion gallons of fossil fuel lung burning ash. It remains this biggest industrial spill inside modern U. S. background. The idea also prompted often the Age to begin regulating coal lung burning ash storage from more than, lively ash dumps around the nation, although not as exactingly because environmentalists would want. The TVA paid to get as many as men and women to have and eliminate the pollution, a few functioning -hour shifts for months from a time. The sludge dried into a fine particles that sparkled similar to glitter and sometimes whirled into clouds so deep, drivers may possibly barely observe past the bonnets of their trucks. In interviews, workers said they had been healthy before breathing the ash, but have considering experienced unusual symptoms. These people recalled joking darkly concerning “coal ash flu” just before battling strange lesions plus experiencing their skin flake off like fish weighing machines. At least colleagues have died, they said, a few gruesomely, collapsing and paying out blood. In this Oct.,, photography, Ansol and Janie Clark pose with a good funeral Ansol Simon constructed close to the Kingston Fossil Plant inside Kingston, Tenn. Typically the Tennessee Pit ity had been accountable for a massive coal ash discharge at often the plant in that covered a good community and fouled streams. The couple according to the memorial is for typically the workers with come decrease with illnesses, quite a few fatal, including cancers with the chest, brain, blood and epidermis and severe obstructive pulmonary disease. Ansol Clark simon owned a fuel vehicle with regard to four decades within the cleaning site, and now is suffering from a rare blood cancers. AP PhotoMark Humphrey “We wiped clean it up around a little more than several years, and it would’ve took years to perform it properly, ” explained Doug Bledsoe, who forced trucks generally there and today has brain and chest cancer. Gaffer boss Michael Robinette testified that Jacobs safety manager Ben Milieu purchased him to take one worker’s mask away and get rid of all the masks inside the equipment space. “We threw them inside the dumpster, ” Robinette testified.

And Greg Schwartz, a Jacobs’ subcontractor, testified his supervisor said masks weren’t allowed “because this looked bad. ” “They didn’t want individuals generating by and experiencing persons with masks. That was the solution I received, ” Schwartz said. Milieu, with trial run, denied the workers’ accusations that he / she bought debris masks destroyed or disappointed their use. healthy skin care products is definitely not a offender and hasn’t mentioned on these personal personal injury cases, other than to claim Jacobs was liable for staff member safety. With its standing in stake, the agency stresses that coal ash is classified as “nonhazardous” simply by the E. ” Fight it out University geochemist Avner Vengosh, who is not necessarily involved in the litigation, tested lung burning ash through the Kingston spill in addition to found large levels connected with radioactivity and dangerous materials, including curare and even mercury. In a new assertion regarding his peer-reviewed research, this individual warned that inhaling and exhaling airborne particles could “have a severe wellness effect on localized residents or employees. ” Nonetheless the workers claimed Jacobs safety supervisors instructed them “you could try to eat a good pound of the idea a new day and the idea wouldn’t harm you. ” Ron Bledsoe, a vehicle drivers who today struggles to breathe with severe obstructive pulmonary ailment, explained managers made a problem concerning safety glasses plus steel-toed boots but downplayed typically the fly ash whirling all around them. Jacobs officials testified they followed regulations for air monitoring, with benefits verified by outside firms, and found the employees were never ever exposed to dangerous levels. Personnel testified they witnessed the supervising being manipulated. Irrespective, experts say there isn’t more than enough research to identify some sort of safe level of prolonged experience of fly ash. “We need more research, because people are potentially getting ill from fossil fuel ash, ” said Kristina Zierold, the epidemiologist in the University connected with Alabama from Birmingham who also is not active in the law suits. Anti Snoring Products as opposed this to the concerted effort it took to prove scientifically the fact that smoking causes illness. Laws utilize to dust in general and to many connected with the individual regions of travel ash, but more do the job is needed to realize what happens by the body processes if all those toxic chemical compounds happen to be breathed in together. That is one reason many of the workers could possibly have an uphill battle demonstrating their particular illnesses resulted from prolonged exposure, claimed John Terry, an epidemiologist with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who testified regarding the employees. With the TVA board meeting previous week, Janie Clark pleaded for help with typically the workers’ medical bills. “They cleaned up your clutter, ” she said. “Please do not let these hardworking folks turn out to be treated as collateral destruction. ” TVA Table chairman Skip Thompson responded using sympathy but designed not any promises. The Clarks wished to visit a beach after the cleansing. Janie’s never seen the particular sea. Ansol’s illness presently can make that difficult. “It do not matter anymore, ” the girl said. “They mortally wounded of which dream in myself. ” .. This material may not be Was this article important? Thank you! Please tell us everything we could do to strengthen this short article.

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

Why Zuckerbergs 14-Year Apology Tour Hasnt Fixed Facebook

In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, an internet site announced Facemash began nonconsensually cleaning pictures of students at Harvard from the school’s intranet and expecting customers to frequency their hotness. Clearly, it began an protest. The website’s developer speedily proffered an apology. “I hope you understand, this is not how I symbolize for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences subsequently, ” wrote a young Mark Zuckerberg. “I surely see how my meanings could be seen in the wrong light.” In 2004 Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook, which rapidly spread from Harvard to other universities. And in 2006 the young busines blindsided its users with the launching of News Feed, which assembled and presented in one target information that beings has hitherto had to sought for piecemeal. Countless useds were outraged and fright that there was no warning and that there were no privacy ascertains. Zuckerberg rationalized. “This was a big mistake on our component, and I’m sorry for it, ” he wrote on Facebook’s blog. “We really shambled this one up, ” he read. “We did a bad errand of clarifying what the brand-new pieces were and an as bad enterprise of giving you verify of them.” Zeynep Tufekci( @zeynep) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and an mind writer for The New York Times. She lately wrote about the( democracy-poisoning) golden age of free speech. Then in 2007, Facebook’s Beacon advertising system, which was launched without suitable ascendancies or acquiesce, discontinued up compromising user privacy by making people’s acquisitions public. Fifty thousand Facebook customers indicated an e-petition titled “Facebook: Stop conquering my privacy.” Zuckerberg responded with an regret: “We plainly did a bad hassle with this release and I apologize for it.” He promised to improve. “I’m not proud of the way we’ve treated this situation and I know we can do better, ” he wrote. By 2008, Zuckerberg had written only four poles on Facebook’s blog: Every single one of them was an justification or an attempt to explain a decision that had unnerved users. In 2010, after Facebook infringed useds’ privacy by making key types of information populace without proper approval or forewarn, Zuckerberg again responded with an apology–this time published in an op-ed in The Washington Post. “We just missed the mark, ” he mentioned. “We examined the feedback, ” he included. “There needs to be a simpler style to control your information.” “In the coming weeks, we will include privacy controls that are much simpler to application, ” he promised. I’m going to run out of space here, so let’s hop to 2018 and skip over all the other accidents and justifications and have committed themselves to do better–oh yeah, and the approval fiat that the Federal Trade Commission formed Facebook sign in 2011, billing that the company had deceptively predicted privacy to its useds and then frequently break-dance that promise–in the intervening years. Last month, Facebook once again garnered widespread attention with a privacy related backfire when it became widely known that, between 2008 and 2015, it had allowed hundreds, maybe thousands, of apps to scrape voluminous data from Facebook users–not just from the users who had downloaded the apps, but more detail from all their friends as well. One such app was run by a Cambridge University academic called Aleksandr Kogan, who apparently siphoned up detailed data on up to 87 million consumers in the United States and then surreptitiously sent the plunder to the political data firm Cambridge Analytica. The happen made a lot of disorder because it connects to the flattening storey of bias in the 2016 US presidential election. But in reality, Kogan’s app was just one among numerous, many apps that amassed an enormous amount of information in a manner that is most Facebook users was totally unaware of. At first Facebook indignantly represented itself, claiming that people had consented to these calls; after all, the disclosures were implanted somewhere in the thick-witted communication surrounding obscure used privacy ensures. Parties were ask questions it, in other words. But the backlash wouldn’t die down. Aiming to respond to the growing anger, Facebook announced changes. “It’s Day to Stir Our Privacy Tools Easier to Find”, the company announced without a clue of irony–or any other kind of hint–that Zuckerberg had promised to do just that in the “coming few weeks” eight full years ago. On the company blog, Facebook’s chief privacy editor expressed the view that instead of being “spread across roughly 20 different screens”( why were they ever spread all over the place ?), the assures would now finally be in one place. Zuckerberg again went on an confession expedition, giving interviews to The New York Times, CNN, Recode, WIRED, and Vox( but not to the Guardian and Observer reporters who broke the tale ). In each interrogation he rationalized. “I’m really sorry that this happened, ” he told CNN. “This was surely a breach of trust.” But Zuckerberg didn’t stop at an apologetic this time. He likewise protected Facebook as an “idealistic company” that cares about its users and spoke disparagingly about rival business that charge users fund for their commodities while maintaining a strong chronicle in protecting user privacy. In his interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, Zuckerberg said that any person who is reputes Apple attends more about useds than Facebook does has “Stockholm syndrome”–the phenomenon whereby captives start yearning and marking with their captors. This is an interesting argument coming from the CEO of Facebook, a company that essentially supports its consumers’ data hostage. Yes, Apple accuses amply for its products, but it also includes boosted encryption hardware on all its telephones, hands timely protection updates to its entire user cornerstone, and has largely locked itself out of user data–to the chagrin of many governments, including that of the United States, and of Facebook itself. Most Android phones, by distinguish, gravely lag behind in receiving security revises, have no specialized encryption hardware, and often handle privacy limitations in a way that is detrimental to user sakes. Few governments or companionships complain about Android phones. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it came to dawn that Facebook had been downloading and preventing all the textbook themes of its users on the Android platform–their content as well as their metadata. “The consumers consented! ” Facebook again hollered out. But people were soon affixing screenshots that showed how difficult it was for a merely someone to see that’s what was going on, let alone figure out how to opt out, on the indistinct permission screen that flashed before users. On Apple telephones, however, Facebook couldn’t harvest people’s text messages because the permissions wouldn’t allow it. In the same interview, Zuckerberg made wide-cut is targeted at the oft-repeated notion that, if an online service is free, you–the user–are the produce. He said that he found the contention that “if you’re not compensating that somehow we can’t am worried about you, considered extremely glib-tongued and not at all aligned with the truth.” His rebuttal to that accusation, nonetheless, was itself glib; and as for whether it was aligned with the truth–well, we just “re going to have to” take his statement for it. “To the frustration of our sales unit here, ” he supposed, “I make all of our decisions based on what’s going to are important to local communities and centre much less on the advertising side of the business.” As far as I can tell , not once in his apology expedition was Zuckerberg asked what on earth he signifies when he refers to Facebook’s 2 billion-plus consumers as “a community” or “the Facebook community.” A parish is a set of people with reciprocal claims, powers, and responsibilities. If Facebook actually were a community, Zuckerberg would not be able to induce so many statements about unilateral decisions he has made–often, as he boasts in countless interrogations, in defiance of Facebook’s shareholders and many factions of the company’s personnel. Zuckerberg’s decisions are final, since he powers all the voting stock in Facebook, and always will until he decides not to–it’s just the action he has structured the company. This isn’t a community; this is a government of one-sided, highly profitable surveillance, be carried forward on a proportion that has realise Facebook one of the largest companies in the world by grocery capitalization. Facebook’s 2 billion customers are not Facebook’s “community.” They are its user locate, and they have been repeatedly carried along by the decisions of the one person who controls the platform. These customers have invested season and coin in improving their social networks on Facebook, yet they have no means to port the connectivity abroad. Whenever a serious competitor to Facebook has arisen, the company to expeditiously replica it( Snapchat) or obtained it( WhatsApp, Instagram ), often at a mind-boggling cost that simply a behemoth with massive money substitutes could afford. Nor do people have any means to completely stop being moved by Facebook. The surveillance follows them not just on the scaffold, but elsewhere on the internet–some of them apparently can’t even text their friends without Facebook trying to snoop in on those discussions. Facebook doesn’t merely collect data itself; it has obtained external data from data intermediaries; it creates “shadow profiles” of nonusers and is now attempting to match offline data to its online profiles. Again, this isn’t a community; this is a regime of one-sided, highly profitable surveillance, carried out on a flake that has made Facebook one of greater fellowships in the world by busines capitalization. There is no other channel to perform Facebook’s privacy conquering moves over the years–even if it’s time to simplify! finally !– as anything other than decisions driven by a mix of self-serving inclinations: namely, gain rationales, the structural incentives intrinsic to the company’s business pose, and the one-sided ideology of its founders and some administrations. All these are forces over which the subscribers themselves have little input, aside from the regular given an opportunity to grouse through repeated gossips. And even the ideology–a ambiguou thinking that claims to prize openness and connectivity with little to say about privacy and other values–is one that does not seem to apply to people who race Facebook or work for it. Zuckerberg buys lives circumventing his and tapes over his computer’s camera to perpetuate his own privacy, and company employees get up in arms when a contentious internal memoranda that made an debate for growing at all costs was recently revealed to the press–a nonconsensual, surprising, and awkward disclosure of the species that Facebook has regularly imposed upon its billions of users over the years. This isn’t to allege Facebook doesn’t specify real value to its useds, even as it locks them in through network accomplishes and by suppressing, buying, and mimicking its rivalry. I wrote a whole volume in which I document, among other things, how useful Facebook has been to anticensorship efforts of all the countries. It doesn’t even mean that Facebook executives make all decisions purely to increase the company valuation or benefit, or that they don’t care about customers. But various things can be true at the same occasion; all of this is quite complicated. And fundamentally, Facebook’s business model and foolhardy mode of operating are a heavyweight knife threatening the health and well-being of the public sphere and the privacy of its useds in many countries. So, here’s the thing. There is indeed a instance of Stockholm syndrome here. There are very few other situation in which person or persons will also be able to make a series of decisions that have obviously improved them while diminishing its protection and well-being of billions of parties; to shape mostly the same justification for those decisions countless hours over the gap of precisely 14 years; and then to declare innocence, idealism, and full independence from the obvious structural incentives that have influenced the whole process. This should commonly stimulate all the other instructed, literate, and smart beings in the apartment to break into howls of rally or humour. Or perhaps tears. Facebook has tens of thousands of works, and apparently an open culture with strong internal meetings. Insiders often talk of how free works find to speak up, and really I’ve frequently been told how they are encouraged to differ and discuss all the key issues. Facebook has an instructed workforce. By now, it ought to be plain to them, and to everyone, that Facebook’s 2 billion-plus customers are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to advertisers and, it seems, basically anyone else who will pay Facebook–including unsavory authoritarians like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. That is Facebook’s business model. That is why the company has an almost half-a-trillion-dollar market capitalisation, together with billions in spare money to buy competitors. These are such readily apparent points that any negation of them is quite astounding. And hitherto, it appears that nobody around Facebook’s sovereign and singular ruler has managed to convince their master that these are blindingly obvious truths whose following may well provide us with some suggestions of a healthier acces forwards. That the repeated term of the use “community” to refer Facebook’s useds is not appropriate and is, in fact, misleading. That the constant repetition of “sorry” and “we intended well” and “we will define it this time! ” to refer to what is basically the same sellout over 14 times should no longer be accepted as a have committed themselves to work better, but should rather be seen as but one indication of a profound crisis of accountability. When a large chorus of beings outside the company invokes frights on a regular basis, it’s not a sufficient explanation to say, “Oh “were in” blindsided( again ). ” Maybe, just perhaps, that is the case of Stockholm syndrome we should be focusing on. Zuckerberg’s outright denial that Facebook’s business sakes frisk a powerful role in mold its behavior doesn’t augur well for Facebook’s chances of doing better in the future. I don’t disbelieve that the company has, on occasion, regarded itself back from bad behaviour. That doesn’t move Facebook that exceptional , nor does it justify its existing selections , nor does it adapt the facts of the case that its business pose is profoundly driving its actions. At a minimum, Facebook has long necessary an ombudsman’s power with real teeth and ability: the two institutions within the company that they are able act as a check on its worst compulsions and to protect its useds. And it needs a lot more employees whose task is to keep the programme healthier. But what the fuck is absolutely be disorderly and innovative would be for Facebook to alter its business representation. Such a change could come from within, or it could be driven by regulations on data retention and opaque, surveillance-based targeting–regulations that would make such practices least profitable or even forbidden. Facebook will respond to the latest crisis by remaining more of its data within its own walls( of course, that fits well with the business of accusing third party for access to users based on extensive profiling with data held by Facebook, so this is no sacrifice ). Sure, it’s good that Facebook is now promising not to spill user data to ruthless third party; but it should eventually allow genuinely independent researchers better( and secure , not foolhardy) access to the company’s data in order to probe the real effects of the platform. Thus far, Facebook has not cooperated with independent investigates who want to study it. Such investigation would be essential to informing the kind of political discussion we need to have about the trade-offs inherent in how Facebook, and definitely all of social media, operate. Even without that independent investigation, one thing is clear: Facebook’s sole sovereign is neither are available to , nor should he be in a position to, make all these decisions by himself, and Facebook’s long predominate of unaccountability should end. Facebook in Crisis Initially, Facebook used to say Cambridge Analytica get illegal access to some 50 million users’ data. The social network has now raised that figure to 87 million. Next week, Mark Zuckerberg will certify before Congress. The topic on our recollections: How can Facebook foreclose the next crisis if its general principles is and always has been connection at all cost? Facebook has a long record of privacy gaffes. Here are just some. http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/06/11/why-zuckerbergs-14-year-apology-tour-hasnt-fixed-facebook/