#I hope the military generals stage a couple

[ilikelookingatthings]

finally looked at who won

I feel like I want to puke.

[kingsandbastardz]

So for basically my whole life I'd grown up with and was resigned to accept that the chinese concept of formal/nice clothing of my and the previous generation has been western clothes. So at any awards ceremonies or performances, entertainers would show up mostly in western suits/dresses and maaaaaybe you'll spot the occasional cheongsam if they're going for a Wong Fei Hong vibe. Which, you know, kinda sucks if you have any concept of western cultural imperialism in asia.

So when the hanfu revivalist movement started, I was waiting to see when it would enter the mainstream -- my hope was for fashion designers to integrate traditional/dynastic elements into their work and make it common place enough that I can buy this shit online for ME. Because I WANT.

Though some of the designs can be a bit hit or miss, I am LOVING what various stars and entertainers are wearing out and about now.

Anyway - here's a collection of Xiao Shunyao's modern hanfu inspired/hybridized stage outfits from the last couple years. For his MLC performances, his stylists seem to be borrowing inspiration from his Di Feisheng and possibly other character costume silhouettes.

I'd been seeing a few comments about how his outfits play with gender - and some of his outfits do! But I think the interesting thing to discuss is from which standard is he playing with gender? Because from a western perspective, the things he does with his western suit tops, belting on top of the jacket for a tightly cinched waist, and the addition of a trailing skirt = femme. But if you're talking from a hanfu-hybridized pov, that's just a modern take on hanfu and having any of those elements is not inherently femme and would often read masc to me.

So these things aren't necessarily gendered because they exist traditionally in chinese men's clothing or costume designs (ie video games, comics, historical fiction illustrations and film, etc, so therefore in the modern lexicon of masculine/acceptable for men):

presence or lack of a skirt

silky, velvety, gauzy or sparkly material choice, esp in formal or stage clothing

short or long length of skirt

embroidery

flowers/floral/bird designs

folding fans

certain styles of makeup

beading, gold, tassels, jewels

non-chunky jewelry

headbands

widely flowing silhouettes

What XSY's stylists are doing with some western clothing items are interesting. I'm convinced there have been one or two western jacket tops made of thinner material that they're folding over the front, and belting down instead of buttoning (which then matches with his other outfits that are designed specifically to do this). Then they're adding a skirt, cloak or bracer element to it.

The western portions often bring a military minimalist feel which they balance with a more gauzy material in the skirt or cloak portions.

Things I think are playing with gender:

row 1 - image 1: red di feisheng-inspired outfit

The lace-up girdle is there to match the bracers in both material and style. And it's positioned to be similar to the heavy belt that Di Feisheng wears. HOWEVER. That style of girdle/corset-like clothing item can't be divorced from the modern idea of sexy leather corsets. So imo, this waist piece on that outfit was a choice. Especially when paired with his allergic-to-collars-higher-than-his-sternum necklines. And if you take into context how masculine yet female coded his character is in the drama, the whole look evokes that.

row 2, image 1: black western suit with belt on top, hat, cloak, black boots and not-visible but also a black tassel fringe skirt

Hat and cloak moves the intention of the outfit from western toward a more Asian slant, because alone, it looks like a western black suit with western heeled boots, cinched waist with a lady's belt (seated photoshoot) and western style tassel skirt. The suit top consists of a vest and a shrug-like sleeve portion that appears masculine at first glance. But take the shrug and pair it with the tassel skirt (I can't find the red carpet photos but here is a better view of the skirt when seated), and I think you got a look that's both intentionally edging toward the femme in a western sense but also confusing matters by hiding within the parameters of both western and chinese traditional male styling.

row 2 - image 2 : white asymetrical western jacket styled in a front fold-over style, gauze skirt, trailing pearl embellishments

The more traditional leaning version of this is the white outfit in row 3 that he wears to the Hi6 Hello Saturday variety show -- the skirt portion on that outfit is one I'd consider non-gendered. Row 1, images 2 and 3 are examples of masculine/neutral uses of gauze that plays with flow of form but isn't inherently femme. This stage outfit is very western-appearing masculine suiting, until you hit the skirt which is giving me long ballerina tie-on skirt with the additional swan/mermaid pearl strings. Imo, another example of deliberately using traditional masculine styling but switching it up with the combination of material choice and make that is feminine.

row 2, image 3: black space military boots, black suiting, black -silver ombre sequin trailing skirt and white gauzy shawl with black floral design

The over all design is going for a masculine military-feel. (think this outfit for shen langhun) But instead of a thicker military cloak, it's replaced with a woman's gauze shawl and a skirt that trails behind him very much like the back of a woman's formal fish-tail gown when he moves around. If you take into context Wang Herun's outfit is a white-silver sequined dress cut in a way to also give a space-military-queen vibe, imo they both coordinated their outfits to balance out with both femme and masc qualities.

Thoughts? I'm curious what others think about this.

While I wait for the CNY photoshoot for XSY's red and black look, here's him with his stage collaborators with a nice range of skirt lengths, period influences and material choices. The woman in the center is the one with the most military-fighter design out of the bunch. The dudes are all in variations of formal-wear-with-good-kicking-boots (and lots of crotch space).

[apas-95]

abt the 'exit strategy for capitalism' thing obviously the natural advantages of socialist states will lead to their uncontested military and economical dominance in the coming decades, at which point they'll have both means and motive to buy out bourgeois interests and their 'possessions' and transition the economical system while there's no easy way for imperial core states to outright end these trends, their policies obviously do affect the economical development of socialist states and there's probably enough variance to shift the timetable on all this happening by a couple years, so y'know exert whatever influence you have on the particular flavor of capitalism that's in vogue if done well (and what I'm seeing rn actually gives me hope for that) the capitalists at no point have an incentive to burn the whole thing down out of spite bc they keep earning right until they don't, you know how the saying abt ropes and hangings goes (and if done poorly and they cling to and suck dry the last scraps of the world's economy they control at least everywhere else should be out of reach by then) and my main concern with a revolution is actually that one will 100% get accused of having foreign backing, at which point you just needlessly raise the odds of some general deciding he (or she #imwithher) might as well let those nukes fly (even if they're losing, especially if they're losing) But it's all w/e, I could be convinced either way, this all just makes a lot more sense to me than a succesful imperial core revolution that doesn't end with the northern hemisphere irradiated

fundamentally the notion of a peaceful transition out of capitalism is simply not in agreement with reality. no class has ever abandoned the world stage without fighting to maintain itself, and the imperial core is already both undertaking massive violence and war against the sections of the global south it already has under its heel, and preparing for high-intensity conflict against the communists that have slipped its shackles. there is no point where the bourgeoisie would simply peacefully allow themselves to be stripped of power.

the point of nukes is exactly *why* there has to be revolution within the imperial core, rather than having the rest of the world do the job for them - there is precisely one place the US has no nuclear deterrent against, which is itself. if the thing we're supposed to fear is that both 'the US military's high command, likely facing severe mutiny, rather than ordering a negotiated surrender during civil war, decides to nuke themselves' as well as 'the US strategic missile forces, upon receiving the order to nuke themselves, carry it out', then so be it - such a fundamental strategic insanity would be just as likely to start a nuclear exchange even if there weren't a revolution - which brings us to the final point.

world war is on the horizon. the economic reasons for world war remain as they did a century and a half ago. the world has been fully carved up, and the profits are drying out. the imperialist blocks, principally the US and EU, are driven to compete against each other for their holdings, first peacefully, then through proxy war, and finally through direct conflict. as it was a hundred years ago, the buildup of war is accepted on all sides with the target of the socialist bloc and the potential for its pillaging, but (as has already started breaking out among larger and larger regional powers) any conflict of this sort would manifest as general war and looting, as desperate, recession-wracked imperialists take opportunity as it presents itself. in inter-imperialist war the most ruthless techniques are used, and a nuclear exchange would not be off the table -- and, fundamentally, the conditions that lead to world war are the same that lead to instability, insurrection, and revolution within individual countries.

war is, at this juncture, an inevitability. the only question is whether revolutionary war will win out over unjust war, will convert the war between nations to a war between classes. we are against war, but we are not afraid of it.

[awkward-tension-art]

Darkness on Umbara Chp.2 (Rex x Reader)

Chapter 1. Chapter 3.

Pong Krell

cw: Rex x Reader, Reader is a medic, incorrect military procedure, graphic descriptions of injuries, blood, swearing, death and battle, Spoilers for the Umbara Arc, Pong Krell is an asshole, reader insert, reader is gender neutral, no use of (Y/N), if i miss a tag LMK

Minors DNI, even if theres no smut

“Don’t worry about me, Doc.” A trooper, Watcher, stood. His arm had been broken and it would need a few rotations to fully heal even with the bacta. 

“It’s my job to worry about you.” You smiled at him, “go on. You're all patched up.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Watcher saluted respectfully before stepping to the edge of the trench and following it to his position.

Kix sounded from where he finished up with another trooper, “You're too nice to these guys.” 

“Well, I’ve found that my patients respond better to some kindness.” You snarked back, “Which is probably why everyone prefers me as their medic.” 

“Maybe if you-”

Kix’s words were cut off by a howl of agony further down the trench. You heard the cries and calls of different soldiers.

“What is that!?” “Shoot it!” 

Immediately chaos erupted. Someone, Jesse, tackled you to the ground. Just in time, because when you looked up, you noticed a dark, smoking burn on the trunk of a bioluminescent tree where your head had been in front of. 

“Ambush!” Someone shouted out through more blaster shots. 

Out of the corner of your eye there was a clone shaped burst of electric blue. His body collapsed and from it, a glowing six legged creature leapt to the ground and scuttled through the staging area. A couple of soldiers chased, shooting at the nimble thing.

Someone's down. Electricity. Heart could have stopped. Burns definitely. 

You ran forward, skidding to a stop behind a large rock. Two shots nicked the stone, but you remained focused on the downed trooper. After a second you ran forward again, only to jerk back, narrowly avoiding a blaster bolt to the chest. 

Two Umbarans burst from the foggy darkness and ran forward, blasters glowing through the shadows. You dove back behind the boulder, hand steady on your blaster pistol. 

“Get back!” The ground shook slightly as an ARF-trooper slammed the metal foot of his AT-RT in front of your cover. He snarled, firing his laser cannons. The damn Umbarans didn’t stand a chance.

“Thank you!” you shouted up at him before sprinting to the downed trooper. His body was smoking from the heat of the electric bug. you swore, ripping off his plastoid chest piece and beginning compressions. You counted, hitting 30 before checking his pulse.

Nothing. He wasn’t moving. Brain must’ve been fried.

You tried compressions again to the same result.

Name. What was his name? Through the dark you saw a diamond tattoo next to his eye. 

Vim. His name was Vim.

Another one of those fucking blue creatures scuttled over the side of the trench. The bioluminescent creature was focused on you. It screeched and leapt, sharp, crackling claws ready.

You were ready too, pistol aim steady. You pulled the trigger and scorched its tail. It missed your body and hit the ground where Anakin swiped down with his lightsaber. 

“Nice shot.” He greeted you, kneeling down behind the cover of the trench. Rex was, thankfully, next to him.

“What the fuck are these things?!” you asked, keeping your head down. You technically weren’t supposed to be in the thick of battle. Plus, you couldn’t see if Kix managed to protect the medical speeder and its supplies. You had to get back to your original position.

The jedi stood, deflecting glowing blaster shots, “Dunno, but they’re definitely a pest.”

“Call in an airstrike on enemy positions.” The 501st nodded to the general when Anakin knelt again.

“Let's hope they’re not too busy helping Obi-wan!”

Rex, the ever strategic mind, continued, “There's an opening to our south,” He motioned in the proper direction, “I recommend we move all platoons off the ridge in case the airstrike over shoots.”

Get back to the speeder and get the supplies out of here.

You didn’t wait to hear more. General Skywalker usually followed Rex’s recommendation, so that's your cue to get back.

As you weaved through other soldiers, cover and the glowing plant-life, Anakin called out, just as predicted, “Everyone, move out! Now!” 

Thankfully, the speeder was untouched. Nearby, an ARF trooper leaning over the edge of his AT-RT raised a shaky hand to you. He was alive.

You refused to leave him.

“Kix, where are you?” You spoke into your com as you started the speeder and moved closer to the downed transport. A blaster narrowly missed your cheek, but you didn't break your focus. At the moment, the pain was barely a sting.

“Heading south, where the fuck are you?” 

“On my way.” Your hands were on the injured soldier and heaved onto the attached stretcher in a matter of seconds. Revving the medical vehicle, you sped over the edge of the trench and followed the troopers south. 

The terrain was rough. You could barely tell what was on the ground as you drove. Leaning over, you put a stabilizing hand on the injured trooper, speeding over a pretty steep ridge. The transport lurched, but you managed to keep it steady. 

Thankfully, the poor ARF trooper groaned when you got the speeder stable again. 

If he had the energy to make noises, he had the energy to survive.

You noticed Anakin’s blue lightsaber in the distance. Next to him, Rex.

You slowed the speeder down, stopping behind the cover of dark, twisted claw-like plant life. Other soldiers had beat you there, and it seemed like most of the platoons would make it. 

However, you didn’t have time to really process who was around you. Killing the engine of your vehicle, you slipped off to kneel at the injured trooper's side. Even in the lowlight, you assessed what you could. 

Two blaster hits. One through the upper shoulder. Another through the thigh. 

Your eyes roamed the troopers around you. Mentally, you checked off those that you knew. Jesse. Kix. Hardcase. Fives. Rex and Anakin, of course. Seemed you were right and a good majority of the platoons made it.

“Kix, I need you.” you called to him. Tag-teaming these wounds would be the best option.

Wordlessly, he lowered his blaster and got to your side. 

As you worked, you heard the chatter, “All here, sir.” Rex breathed in relief. 

“Stay covered, we have to hold the position!” Anakin barked, keeping his body close to the black trunk of the mangled umbaran tree. 

It was quiet for a moment before Tup spoke, “Are you sure those bombers are coming?” The poor almost-shiny trooper sounded scared, but refused to show it. Jesse nudged him slightly.

There was more thick silence as you focused on treating the ARF trooper. 

Blessedly, in the distance you could hear the approaching drone of the bombers. Briefly, you looked up, recognizing the distinct shape of Y-wings. And usually, wherever they went, precise explosions followed. 

Just as you finished your thought, the world lit up with the burning fires of the bombs. The explosives went off, shaking the ground and illuminating everything around you. Immediately the soldiers cheered as the Umbaran forces were decimated by the air support. 

“Hell yea!” 

“Good ol’ Oddball! Always on target!”

“Take that Umbaran scum!”

You couldn’t help but laugh slightly. It always brightened your mood whenever the clones celebrated. Finding even the smallest amount of happiness did wonders for morale. 

There was another groan and the ARF trooper tried to sit up. He raised an armored hand to his helmet, as if trying to rub his eyes, “Thanks Kix, Thanks doc.” 

“Lay down, you barely just came back to the land of the living.” You gently put a hand on his chest and push him back down, “Get some rest. You need a good rotation or two before you're fit for battle.”

Kix patted your shoulder and stood, shushing you softly. 

You followed his line of sight, seeing General Skywalker and your lover speaking to another jedi. You missed the first part of their conversation, but quickly put the pieces together. 

“Well, I can’t just leave my men!” Anakin practically shouted in frustration. He cared too deeply to leave the 501st to someone else. 

The new arrival, Jedi Master Krell…

Your hackles were raised. You didn’t know the bastard, but you knew his casualty number. You’ve read reports. Too many troops died under his command. Too many good men. His tactics got results, but at the cost of his own soldiers. 

You narrowed your eyes. 

“I’ll be taking over in the interim.” Krell gave a slight bow.

“Don’t worry about a thing, sir,” Rex was facing Anakin, “We’ll have this city under Republic control by the time you’re back.”

The Jedi sighed and nodded, “Master Krell, this is Rex. My first in command." Even from where you were behind him, you knew he looked proud as he practically presented the captain to Krell, “You won’t find a finer and more loyal trooper anywhere.”

“Good to hear that.” The senior jedi patted the younger’s shoulder, “I wish you well, Skywalker.” The farewell was brief and the 501st general walked to the gunship transport. Two other soldiers were going to accompany Anakin, as it lifted to the air. 

You shared a look with Kix and returned to the speeder. Something tells you that everyone will be moving out soon. 

“Your reputation precedes you, General. It is an honor to be serving you.” Rex stepped up next to their new leadership. The clone captain was being respectful, as he always was. Since this isn't the first time the 501st was given a different command, everyone did their best to show respect. It established a good relationship right off the bat, and allowed for better communication for the future. 

“I find it interesting, Captain, that you are able to recognize the value of honor,” Pong Krell’s tone became icy. He turned, keeping his 4 arms clasped behind his back, “For a clone.” 

You paused, and immediately the mood shifted. 

Oh fuck no. it's one of these assholes! You looked over at Fives, his face held the same befuddlement as yours probably did.

“Stand at attention when I address you.” The Besalisk snapped.

The men stiffened and you slipped off the speeder to do the same. 

Krell began to stalk forward, eyes roaming over the battalion, “Your flattery is duly noted but it will not be rewarded.” His gaze was clearly critical as he took in his new force, “There’s a reason my command is so effective, and it's because I do things by the book.” 

At the cost of good men. You nearly snarled. 

“You,” The jedi master stood in front of you, “Are no clone. Name and rank, trooper.” 

You introduced yourself, “I’m the field doctor of the 501st. I tend to the seriously wounded and maintain the medical supplies.”

His eyes narrowed on you, “And why, might I ask, would someone with your…skill set be slumming it with the clone troopers. There are other platoons with non-clones that could use you.”

Your hand twitches, readying to swing. However, you caught Rex shaking his head from behind the General. Instead, you swallowed your anger. 

“Respectfully, General, I am not ‘slumming it.’ my fellow troopers are good, loyal and hardworking men.” you answered him honestly, “I see no difference between them and I.”

Pong Krell let out a condescending laugh, “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. As long as you can take orders.” He walked past you, but paused to glare down at the injured ARF trooper, “Have all platoons ready to move out immediately. That is all.” He sneered.

Your new General didn’t look back as the troops prepared to move. You got back on the medical speeder and cast a worried look at your lover. 

Rex sighed and put his helmet on to join Krell at the front.

This…is going to be a long campaign.

[beardedmrbean]

Hey Grunkle Nunya, I was wondering if you could explain to me how people are seeing Israel as the good guys in the Gaza situation, because I can only ever find Palestinian civilian body counts and blown up hospitals and stuff, and it honestly does look like a genocide from the standpoint of someone who generally doesn't research politics and conflict. I know the way I worded this looks like I'm being inflammatory but I mean it genuinely. What am I missing?

Asking anonymously because currently, asking questions about the Gaza conflict makes me either pro-genocide or anti-jew to the people with no critical thinking skills. I can't physically handle the toll of being accused of supporting genocide (Israeli or Palestinians) because of a mental disability I possess.

I apologize if this still sounds like bait, I am just poor with words and you are rich with knowledge.

It's war so everything gets muddy, especially with the body counts the gaza health ministry puts out.

I do not believe those at all, they put them out faster than should be possible even at the best of times, they also make no distinction between hamass militants and civilians so that's another issue with them.

We're going to make up a scenario here.

If you're looking for why Israel went in, imagine if New Jersey were another country, one that regularly sends people into the surrounding US states in order to kill Americans and generally sow chaos, and they've been doing it for 15-20 years with no sign of stopping at all ever or even dialing it back.

No real rhyme or reason to most of their attacks, occasionally they'll get pissed off about something or other and fire off a few thousand unguided rockets, just point the at the surrounding states light the fuse and hope they land somewhere where they kill people, no specific targets just anything they can hit and cause damage with and blaming the US when their own rockets fall back down on them.

Again doing this continually with no indication that it's ever going to stop or anything will convince them to tone it down.

Instead they do a coordinated invasion and just start killing everyone they see, which they went to Sesame Place right near the border with them and Pennsylvania instead of anywhere with any military value because the plan was to kill the most people they could while encountering the least possible resistance.

The US finally says, ok we're done with you and all of this and the organization behind most of the previous attacks and this current one which happens to also be the elected government of NJ is now in the crosshairs and we're going to keep shooting till they're gone one way or the other.

That would also be where Israel said we're done with you, hamass is going to cease to exist after we're done one way or the other.

So then it's full scale invasion time.

24 hour notice was given, saying this is where we are hitting, get out, 24 hours turned into several days, couple weeks I think, there were some air raids and strategic bombing and what not, a hamass rocket hit a hospital and Israel got blamed, the usual.

Obviously mistakes were made at times on both sides at the start and continue to be made, incredibly fluid thing wars are, things change on a dime.

And then we run into issues with the fact that hamass uses civilian buildings as weapons caches, staging grounds, command centers, pretty much anything you can thing a building would be useful for if you're fighting a war, which is a massive violation of international law as well as a war crime because they're hiding behind civilians.

From 2014

Great line toward the end

There is no indication that Israel deliberately targets civilians, as Hamas does. But

The argument is brought out that this kills civilians too, which yes it does, it shouldn't unless there's a misfire from one of the guided munitions in use by Israel, for one simple reason

Which they don't need to do, not if hamass has made the place into a valid military target by keeping rockets in the school.

They try at least.

In the first couple weeks before the ground invasion started there were reports coming out of gaza where the residents were saying that hamass had either taken the keys to their vehicles or disabled them making civilian evacuation that much more difficult, on foot and such kinda screws things up.

Allegedly threats were made to civilians as well.

As for the numbers, the side that's getting invaded is going to have more of those, as for the accuracy of those numbers, there's a reason why every news agency that cares even slightly about credibility includes 'according to the gaza health ministry' to the number.

As to the genocide question, there is no genocide, mass casualty attacks =/= as genocide and someone saying they'd like to wipe gaza off the map does not indicate a official government stance regardless of if the work for the government or not.

It's a war, innocent people die in war, it's a unfortunate reality of a even more unfortunate situation, especially if your on the side that's on the defensive folks in Israel have less to be worried about it's a lot harder for hamass to get to them, true at the best of times for hamass anyhow since it's not like they have a air force of any sort.

This whole thing did not need to happen, if it weren't for the fact that there's a group that has refused any reasonable offer and some that were incredibly slanted in their direction as well people at a music festival would have gone home when it was over and had great stories to tell.

Neither side is innocent, but at least for the one Israel complete and utter annihilation of everyone in Gaza isn't the goal, they just want hamass gone.

Not to say there aren't shitheads that want everyone in gaza gone in Israel and in the IDF, but that's not the stated goal of their mission.

If it was gaza city would look more like stalingrad after the nazis were done with it.

Choice of location is made purely because 99% of the area was razed, that is all so.

As for all the ceasefire stuff, the one they had going ended because hamass couldn't manage to keep their end of the deal up even though they were given several do overs, they just had to keep launching rockets and shooting civilians at bus stops.

No reason to think they would do anything different if another one were declared, they tend to be the ones that start off the shooting when it happens.

I don't know if I've made anything clearer for you or not, jumble of information and I've tried to leave politics and religion out of the whole thing setting it up as just 2 groups of people, and it's late so my brain is going a bit slow so I likely missed stuff.

When it's all over there's probably going to be enough war crimes to nitpick over on both sides.

I just hope there's also a lasting peace

[an0nfr0mth3d3n]

QSMP Zombie Au…Zombies

I am going to REGRET writing this at 2 am when I have yet to plug in my headphones and phone or the night all the way the 2 feet across my room.

(if I haven’t made it abundantly clear, ZOMBIES TERRIFY AND FASCINATE ME)

(MOSTLY TERRIFY)

Enjoy the zombie lore dump I guess

Appearance: Fresh zombies look just like living humans, BUT the further the infection takes a hold on them, the more glazed and foggy their eyes look. The zombies don’t actually exhibit symptoms of rot as the people are still…technically alive, they just have a mind controlling fungal virus trying to spread as fast as possible through spores. Not much about appearance here cause they don’t look dead.

(NO this isn’t a cop out because I don’t want to think of rotting zombies I promise)

Behavior: THIS WILL BE HUGE!!! There are several stages of the infection that will be explained.

Stage I. The virus has JUST been transferred. The victim is not contagious yet, and exhibits no outwardly symptoms. This stage is actually able to be reverted!!! If the victim immediately cleans the wound where it was transferred (unless the victim made out with a zombie, but that’s generally advised against) they will have a fair chance that the stages will not progress. Additionally, there is actually a chance that the immune system will be able to attack and kill the spores. By cleaning the wound, you have a good chance of survival if you have a decent immune system as well! Yippee!!!

Stage II. Eyes will be slightly glazed here. Not much. The victim might experience some twitching and spasms as the body fights its hardest against the foreign spores. This stage is also not contagious. There is a small chance of reverting back this stage as well if the body has an incredibly strong immune system and the wound has been properly cleaned. It is rare, but not impossible.

Stage III. Eyes are glazed over. This stage is mildly infectious. The victim is still able to speak, but might have some difficulties with mobility as the brain is now actively fighting against the commands of the spores. Putting the victim into a coma might offer a chance of reversion, but it would be risky. Movements are jerky and the victim might struggle with memory loss issues. Keep in mind the infection is spread by spores transferred through saliva or other fluids coming in contact with open wounds or mouth.

Stage IV. Movements are almost completely controlled by the fungus now. This stage is moderately infectious and there is no hope at reversion as of now. The only chance is to cryogenically freeze the body (shhh it works here) and wait for a cure to be developed. The victim might be able to say a word once in a while, or just barely slow down the victim, but it is NOT a thing to bet on.

Stage V. The fungus has complete control over the brain now. These guys are pretty fast, not inhuman, and you could outrun because it’s not perfectly adapted, but the fungus knows how to use the body. The person behind the fungus is basically in hibernation, maybe a cure could be found one day but for now they are pretty lost.

So I might add things on later to this, but yeah. Also these stages can progress differently depending on the situation and strength of the person. Could be a week, a few days, maybe more. The victim at least has 24 hours though.

Also I’m aware that in most modern day societies a virus like this (A. Wouldn’t exist) wouldn’t be much of a threat because of the reversions in the beginning and the military presence (FUN FACT the US military has several protocols for what to do during zombie apocalypses, and one of them has something to do with space zombies and zombie chickens.)

But anyways here the government is a bit scattered and not put together and they undersell the threat level until there’s a couple of Stage V’s chilling out and getting people .

So yeah. Feel free to add asks or stuff, and yeah.

[inghrafn]

In high school, my best friend and I were as coupled as a pair of gloves. To outside eyes, we made a much stranger pair than we naturally felt ourselves to be. We shared so many things: dreams, creative ideas, neurodivergencies, a hunger for culture, surreal senses of humor... and queerness. But only one of us let that last one show.

My queerness was generally overt, but then, I had a lot of leeway. My solidly progressive parents didn't care what I identified as so long as I could punch hard enough to back it up and didn't turn Republican to spite them. Punk fit my genderqueerness. Straightedge supported my asexuality. Art brought me into contact with similar souls. I felt at home in my queer self. But my friend came from another milieu, in which homosexuality was an "abomination" and cis men had a very limited menu of ways to prove their manhood beyond doubt. For teen boys, it was sports, cars, and girls. My friend didn't care much about the first two, so he felt intense pressure to publicly pursue the third. None of his relationships with girls lasted for very long. The end of each one underscored his failure at the one thing that could keep him safe. Safe from what? Homophobia, of course-- external AND internal.

When he first started to explore his strong attraction to his own gender, it had to be carried out in absolute, almost military-grade secrecy. Being at college afforded him more privacy, but all along the way, he was wracked by guilt, terror, and self-loathing. Eventually - at his lowest point in the darkest recesses of Ye Olde Closet - he came to believe that anything was better than living as a stranger to himself. So alongside guilt, terror, and self-loathing, hope - real, authentic hope - showed up.

Coming out was an intensive multi-stage process, as it was for so many of us then and so many of us still. First my friend told me, then a few other friends, then a few more, gauging reactions all the way. The real test came when he came out to his family. Their response utterly floored him. He expected to be summarily rejected, but to his surprise, he was accepted! It seemed that they had evolved along with him, without him being aware of it. His resulting joy and relief was incredible, life-changing, a privilege for all to witness.

The moral of this story? Come out, come out, wherever and whomever you are. And bring your allies with you.

[gracehosborn]

Don’t you just love attempting to work on your outline for your historical fiction novel and you find yourself hours later with too many tabs of your main character’s papers open?

Yeah that was me for the last two days. But wow did I find and re-read some fun stuff.

Every now and then as I draft Volume I of this Hamilton trilogy, The American Icarus (whose title has a fun story that I might go into if anyone’s interested), I like to review my current outline in making sure plotlines are solid both for this book, and for Volume II and III, as some of them bleed into the rest of the trilogy (Alexander’s economic studies, his relationship with Elizabeth Schuyler, such with John Laurens, and his feelings towards the Continental Congress for instance).

Upon reviewing TAIVI’s outline again, I realized a few of these weren’t fleshed out (given time to grow and develop) very well. Really, it felt like they were crammed there. Originally I had planned to just add one new chapter, but no I added ten 😂

Nonetheless, I set to work digging through Hamilton’s papers again 😂 Here’s some of the gems I found or got to re-read for your enjoyment:

Indeed, my Dear friend, to drop allegory, you can hardly conceive in how dreadful a situation we are. The army, in the course of the present month, has received only four or five days rations of meal, and we really know not of any adequate relief in future. This distress at such a stage of the campaign sours the soldiery. "Tis in vain you make apologies to them. The officers are out of humour, and the worst of evils seems to be coming upon us-a loss of our virtue. "Tis in vain you attempt to appease; you are almost detested as an accomplice with the administration. I am losing character my friend, because I am not over complaisant to the spirit of clamour, so that I am in a fair way to be out with every body. With one set, I am considered as a friend to military pretensions however exorbitant, with another as a man, who secured by my situation from sharing the distress of the army, am inclined to treat it lightly. The truth is I am an unlucky honest man, that speak my sentiments to all and with emphasis. I say this to you because you know it and will not charge me with vanity. I hate Congress-I hate the army-I hate the world-I hate myself.The whole is a mass of fools and knaves; I could almost except you and Meade.

From Hamilton To John Laurens, Sept 12, 1780

This letter always makes me want to give Hamilton a hug.

Adieu, be happy, and let friendship between us be more than a name.

From Hamilton to John Laurens, Sept 16, 1780

Aww.

It is now a week my Betsey since I have heard from you. In that time I have written you twice. I think it will be adviseable in future to number our letters, for I have reason to suspect they do not all meet with fair play. This is number one.

From Hamilton to Elizabeth Schuyler, August 1780

This always makes me laugh out loud every time I come across it. He essentially told her “hey here’s my new filing system!”

I have received a letter from my Laurens solicitg an interview on the Pensylvania Boundary. The General has half consented to its taking place. I hope to be permitted to meet him; if so, I will go to Philadelphia and then you may depend, I shall not forget the picture you requested.

From Hamilton to Elizabeth Schuyler, [2-4, July, 1780]

This grabbed my attention for a couple reasons, but the biggest one is, did he ever get permission to meet Laurens? We don’t know.

Despite the fact that I ended up making this book longer than I’d planned, I did have fun re-reading and finding some of this for the first time. How does your outline process work? Anything exciting? The effort here wouldn’t tell you that my outline is literally just a bunch of bullet points 😂

[ramrodd]

Who's On America's Side?: With Steve Schmidt

COMMENtARY:

I love you buddy,, but I don't particularly like you, It's nothing personal: it comes from being a RINO since January 1981 and spend the next 40 years marveling at how hard you Reagan Conservatives woe ked at fucking things up by the numbers . All guys need to remember to congratulate yourselves at your success at creating Trump and the MSGS Conservatives , I know you really, really believed in what you were doing, but, is is Ben Shapiro that says, Facts don't care about your feelings ? Your entire life should be a Come To Jesus moment when, like Peter, you weep in shame.

I love you  Michael Steele, because you are black, you  have always been woke became you are one of the few Jack Kemp Republicans left standing, along with Mitt Romney, because Jack Kemp was as woke as you needed to be tough enough to get out of his neighborhood and end up Cecretary of HUD, Stuff that he did during GHW Bush's administration are still helping to propel Home Rule and Hip Hop with Muriel Bowser for another 50 years, I was there wen it started. I had  lunch a couple times with Walter Washington and the old Old Ebbits Grill on H Street just because I worked at American Security Bank across from the Treasury. In 1969, Nixon rand on getting out of Vietnam with honor, (and flare, I might add. America didn't run out with it's tail between its legs, Fuck the Oliver Stone version of Vietnam)

Sorry. Had a flashback. They come and go. And Nixon also ran on American Reparations. In 1968, America need its own Marshall Plan, Most of the South had never recovered from the failure of Reconstruction and and most of the rest of America was pretty shabby, LBJ tried to do it, but Vietnam and the Space program created a brain drain on the social and material infrastructure, generally,  Stage 1 of Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform began to resurrect the machinery of Reconstruction in the South with the Interstate system whech we would need to support the industrial matrix that evolved in delivering  Apollo 11,  

I, personally, didn't know how much excitement and hope Apollo 11 had globally until I saw the PBS documentary a couple of years ago. Nixon understood what had happened and he employed that excitement to induce Brezhnev and Mao to collude on on global Star Wars economics necessary to sustain a lunar colony for 100 years like in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  In 1971 everybody in Washington but the Plumbers in the White House and the true believers of the Weather Underground were t committed to Nixon' and Moynihan's Affirmative Action agenda to reconfigure the Military Industrial Complex to the Aerospace Entrepreneurial Matrix Eisenhower and von Bruan had conceived to run Starship America leading the way for Marvel Comics. Jack Kemp was the Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the Nixon ford administrations and he created the Republican hand book you used as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland and Larry Hogan employed as Governor,  Dick Lugar Republicans. That's what the Party of Lincoln was all about until the Nazification of the Reagan Conservatives turned everything touched into shit in the processes  that has led directly to Trump.

Now, I happen to believe that you and Nicole Wallace can restore the Party of Lincoln coalition of Jack Kemp Republicans back into it's rightful role as the adult leadership and dominant coalition of the GOP and completing Stage 2 of Eisenhower's 1956 Presidential Platform and triggering the final paradigm shift into Stage 3 of Eisenhower von Braun Star Wars economics and into Starship America. And all the passion and moral commitment that brough you to the GOP will be vindicated and rewarded.

[atozphantomsquadron]

Chapter Four: Breadcrumbs

July 8th

            My energy level is back to what it was. I’m raring to go now.

            I’m finally through with playing two years’ worth of catch-up. I took some time the last couple of days to personally meet some of the other supernaturals around the Ranch that I didn’t know, which revealed to me some interesting, potentially military-ready abilities. A lot of these folks have supernatural powers that could be used as potential weapons … weapons that the New Empire may not have any defense for. From what I’ve seen, the SSA prepares like a conventional military unit, using conventional military tactics and weapons. They’re not prepared for gas attacks, for electrical attacks, for seismic attacks, or for anything remotely related to magic.

            We have all four in spades on our side.

            Michi is probably our best magical weapon, being able to access powers from both her gauntlet and her new status as Durga’s servant. We spent a “girls’ night in” last night, catching up over ice cream and firelight. I finally got her side of the story Aunt Kitty told me.

            “I’m sorry about Mom, she’s still kind of bitter about the whole situation,” she told me. “What happened was I took what should have been a fatal injury from an SSA rifle, square in the chest. When Durga made me her servant, it saved my life.” She pulled her new tail up into her arms, cuddling it to her. “I don’t know what Mom’s so mad about, this is pretty cool. Plus, I don’t get nearly as wiped out when I use the gauntlet anymore.”

            She flexed her left arm, and I could hear the leather stretch and pop. She seemed very happy about it. I simply reached one of my hands out to her right hand, feeling the fur coating it entirely.

            “I’m just glad to be back with you guys. Especially here.”

            She grinned at me then, her new, animalistic, fanged smile. “BFF’s to the end.”

            “To the end, Michi. I promise.”

            Hugging my best friend never felt as good as it did last night. Today, though, I’ve spent focusing on preparing for the next stage of my quest. I’m packing up a backpack in my room when a familiar giant shadow passes over me.

            “Your dad told me I’d find you here.” William’s deep voice makes me relax.

            “Yeah … I figured we’ll probably be leaving sometime soon, so I should be prepared.” I turn around to see him. He has a mug of tea for me, which he hands over. “Thanks. So what’s up?”

            He smiles a little bashfully. “We haven’t had a lot of time to sit and talk since you got back. I was hoping for a chance.”

            So have I, believe me. I motion for him to sit on the bed. I place myself right next to him, leaning against him, my thigh against his. His scar is the first thing I see when I turn my face to look up at his. My fingers find it and gently stroke it. “How did this happen?” I finally find myself asking.

            He sighs. “It’s a long story, Alanna.”

            I put my hand on his. “I’ve got the time. I want to know anyway, just on general principle, what with being your girlfriend and all.”

            He smiles at that. “I suppose you’re right.” His arm curls around my shoulders. “I’m guessing you’ve already heard a lot about the battle that led to Michika being the way she is.”

            I nod. “I’ve heard about it from both Michi and Aunt Kitty.”

            “Well … while that drama was going on, I was on the far side of the Ranch house. There was an SSA contingent with some kind of new, giant weapon with rotating saw blades. I brought out the wendigo, cut through their numbers, ate a few of them, and finally got to the machine. As I was ripping out its heart, one of the blades caught the side of the wendigo’s face. I finished destroying the weapon, turned back to the soldiers, and they all scattered. When they were gone, I pulled the wendigo back and found that my face was bleeding.”

            My fingers trace the scar. “You poor thing.” Playfully, I reach up and kiss the scar gently.

            “Thanks,” he responds, smiling. “Grandmother did her best to stitch it up, but the damage was already done, and this is the result. Even after one of Cyrus’s healing potions, this was the best that could be done, and from what I’ve been told it’s because it’s the wendigo’s injury, not mine.” He sighs heavily. “Another time now that the creature has ruined my life.”

            Now that doesn’t sound like William. “What do you mean?”

            He takes my hand in his, still against his face. “Alanna, the wendigo is a terrible burden to bear. Every time I let him out, I feel like I’m losing more and more of my humanity. It’s a tenuous grip I have, and I feel it slipping the more I do it.”

            I take a deep breath. “While I was down in the Inferno, I felt the same thing. I felt like I was losing myself.”

            Now it’s William’s turn to look to me with concern. “What happened?”

            I haven’t talked about this with anyone. I’m afraid to. Especially with William … what if he stops loving me because of it? “I had a guide down there, and he led me through the entirety of Hell to find Dad. While I was there, they made me do things … terrible things … I witnessed so much misery, punishment, torture … I started participating in it.”

            William’s face darkens.

            “I tormented souls while I was down there. Some of them were by accident, because I couldn’t avoid them, but others … others I joined in their punishments, and I … I enjoyed it …”

            I can’t go on. I shrink away from my boyfriend, so afraid of his judgment. William sits there still.

            “I’m sorry, William, it did change me. I’m a horrible person … I had visions, too, terrible visions … visions of losing love …”

            I’m getting inconsolable. My face hides in my arms, in my little ball of misery. I don’t hear a word come from William.

            Instead, I feel his reaction. He wraps his arms around me. He tightens his grip. His lips are on my forehead.

            “Don’t cry, Alanna, don’t be sad. You’re not a bad person.”

            I can’t quite understand this. I look up at the man, and see his warm, smiling face. “But why not? You don’t know …”

            “I know you. I know a young woman, one who loves her family dearly. A woman who is willing to pay any cost to reunite them. A hero. She puts others above herself always. She wants to bring peace to the world in her way, she wants to restore the rule of order and common sense. She also is a wonderful friend.

            “That’s why I love her with all my heart.” He takes my chin in his hand, lifting my face to his. “And I always will, beyond eternity.”

            His lips are on mine. I can’t help but to return the kiss, the pent-up emotions being released all at once. My arms clutch around his neck. He pulls me into his embrace. Never once do our lips separate. It feels like an eternity in the most wonderful paradise I can ever know.

            This is what I want, forever.

            When we finally have to let each other’s face go, he’s managed to make me smile. My voice is but a whisper. “I love you too, William.” My head makes its way to his chest. “Stay with me tonight.”

            “I will.”

            I finish packing my bag, filled to bursting with everything I think I’ll need for the journey. All the while, though, I’m yawning. Sleep is starting to overcome me. William gently leads me to my bed and tucks me in. The cushion beneath me is relaxing, comforting; it feels like home.

            My heart jumps as I feel motion behind me, lifting the blanket, then a warm presence completely against my back. William. He’s cuddling me. My body relaxes even more. I bring one of his hands around to my face and kiss it gently before I drift fully to sleep, the best comforter in the world wrapped around me.

July 9th

            William is still wrapped around me as I rouse this morning, slowly sliding out from under the blanket, the familiar mountain lion head keeping watch over the two of us. After a quick trip to the bathroom, I lean over his prone body and kiss his cheek gently to awaken him.

            “Good morning, sleeping handsome.”

            His eyes flutter open. He turns to see my smiling face close to his, and reaches his face up to mine, to return the kiss. “Good morning yourself. What time is it?”

            “About eight. I’m about to head down for breakfast.”

            William pulls the blanket off of himself, rising to a seated position on the edge of the bed. “I’ll join you, I’m starving.”

            He’s shirtless. My thoughts drift away from the quest very briefly as I ponder the sight before me. He stretches, then reaches for his shirt and pulls it on. I file the image deep in my mind where I can come back to it, and approach him to take his hand. He stands up, laces his fingers through mine, and together we walk down the hallway to the dining room.

            Everyone else is awake by the time we get there. Michi, plowing into a double-sized breakfast, grins up at me. Dad is across the table from her, eating a bowl of oatmeal. Aunt Kitty is next to him, eating an egg and occasionally casting tired expressions toward Michi.

            At the head of the table is Gabe, the only thing in front of him being a gallon-sized pot of coffee, which he pours mugs of from time to time. You’d think he’d just pound it down straight from the spout!

            “Alanna, good morning. Now that we’re all here, we can get this started.”

            I grab two plates of food and bring them to the table, one for me and one for William. “What are we getting started?” My question seems very quiet amidst the bustling activity around us.

            Dad turns toward me. “We’re planning our next move. We’ve got two more people we’re waiting on …”

            Just as Dad says that, Teresa and Trent come up to the table. “Sorry we’re late, sir, we overslept.” Teresa’s apology seems very nervous, as she accidentally uses her ice powers and breathes a line of frost across the party.

            “Not at all, please have a seat, guys.” They both sit down, and Dad continues. “As I was saying, we need to follow some of my breadcrumbs, because at the end of the trail is probably going to be Ariel.”

            Mom. I haven’t seen you in three years, not since the SSA took you away. We’re so close to rescuing you.

            Gabe’s voice knocks me out of my brief reverie. “How do you know the SSA didn’t find them?”

            Dad smirks. “I hid them really well. Nobody’s going to think to look where I left at least one.”

            I take a bite of bison steak and chew on it thoughtfully. Michi, however, slurps down two eggs before responding. “So the video Gabe gave us was one of them?”

            Dad nods. “Every one had a message. Each was trying to tell you something. That tape was to show you I was still alive. Trent and Teresa, you were one of the breadcrumbs, to show that I still had some control at certain points.”

            “Yeah, about that,” Trent pipes up. “I’m not sure I like that we were used that way.”

            “Trent,” Teresa admonishes, “don’t get too mad at Mr. Sharpe. He was in a desperate way, and besides he got us away from the SSA. We should be thanking him, not accusing him.”

            Trent grumbles slightly. Gabe seems to detect a situation that needs defusing, and stands up, coffee mug in hand. “Arguing does us no good right now. We need to coordinate our actions.”

            Dad nods. “Trent, if you will.”

            Trent nods, pulling out a sheet of paper. “I wrote down everything I could remember about General Scolar’s itinerary. I don’t know how much it’ll help you.”

            The schedule rests at the center of the table. All of us stand up to look over its handwritten contents.

8 February -14 February: Inspection at MRZ, meetings with WO Lonstein, investigate disappearances from duty.

15 February: Attend Arlington maneuvers.

23 February: Meeting with SSA commanders, Langley.

25 February: Meeting with SSA investigators, Quantico.

28 February – 4 March: Meetings with Vice President Regent, honor guard for President Regent at UN Supernatural Summit in Washington.

          I stroke my chin. “I never heard about this summit.”

            “It was a secret summit,” Trent answers. “Only a few people in the General’s inner circle in the SSA knew about it. They were planning to take the SSA worldwide back then.”

            Dad seems very intently focused on the schedule. “Did Scolar tell you exactly what these ‘Arlington maneuvers’ were?”

            Trent shakes his head. “I never bothered asking. I assumed it was something having to do with the cemetery.”

            “Something else that’s weird,” William pipes up, “is that there’s an eight-day gap after that listing. What was Scolar planning for those eight days?”

            “Or was it you, Dad?”

            Dad’s got his eyes shut tight, like he’s trying to think. “I don’t remember. My memory’s been really fuzzy about certain things … unfortunately this is one of those things.”

            I pull the schedule toward where me, Michi, and William are sitting. It’s a ponderous thing, why this massive gap in time? I’m lost in thought when Michi pipes up. “Maybe you thought you needed eight days to rescue Aunt Ariel?”

            Dad’s eyes fly open and light up. “You might be right. Something’s at Arlington that I needed to retrieve … that’s the ‘maneuvers,’ I need to get to the cemetery.”

            Gabe sighs deeply. “It’s not going to be easy to travel. For starters, I’m not even sure right now where we are …”

            “Outside of Edmonton,” a voice chirps behind us. Aunt Kitty and Uncle Cyrus are approaching the table, having left to refill their own mugs while the conversation has carried on.

            “Okay, thanks. So let’s figure about three days’ worth of driving to get to Arlington. Three days’ worth of driving through hostile New Empire territory, dealing with checkpoints and armed patrols, and ducking around a lot of SSA agents which all have Alanna’s photo on a ‘Wanted Dead Or Alive’ poster. We need to be stealthy, or we need to make a splash and attack everybody that we meet. It’s going to be really difficult to get there, in other words.”

            I clear my throat. “What if we fly there?” To emphasize my point, I unfurl my wings.

            Dad has a thoughtful expression. “It’s a thought, Gabe.”

            Gabe has the same expression. “Maybe, but it’s a long haul. Can you manage it?”

            I nod quickly. “I flew a few times in the Inferno. If I can do that, with no air currents to speak of, then a cross-continent flight won’t be any trouble.”

            Gabe comes around the table to take one of my wings in his hands. “Then this is going to be your only defense between the group and the SSA. Are you prepared for that responsibility?”

            I stand up and turn to face Gabe. “With all due respect … I was born to do this. This is my mom we’re talking about. If there’s even a microscopic chance of getting her out of the New Empire’s grasp, then there’s no extreme I won’t go to.”

            There’s no reaction for a second. Then Michi stands up. “I’m with you, Alanna.”

            William stands up behind me and places a hand on mine. “Me too.”

            Dad stands up as well. “I think we’re in agreement here. Gabe, let’s get this show on the road.”

[newstfionline]

Thursday, December 22, 2022

Maple Syrup (CTV News) It was a bumper year for maple syrup production in Canada, where producers have made 79.1 million litres of maple syrup. To translate for Americans, that’s 20.9 million gallons of a fascinating tree-based alternative to high-fructose corn syrup. The maple syrup harvest is up 53.8 percent over 2021, and is the highest yield on record. Quebec was responsible for 91 percent of that figure with the province claiming to produce 72.3 million litres of maple syrup, which means it made 19.1 million gallons.

Tens of thousands without power after California earthquake (AP) Tens of thousands of homes and businesses along the Northern California coast remained without power Tuesday evening, nearly a day after a powerful earthquake jolted people awake and shook homes off foundations, injuring at least 12 and leaving many without water. “It felt like my roof was coming down,” Cassondra Stoner said. “The only thing I could think about was, ‘Get the freaking kids.’” When the ground stopped moving, Stoner’s family was fine—a daughter even slept through the racket. But when she showed up to work at Dollar General, she found tiles had fallen from the ceiling, shelves were toppled and the contents of the discount store she manages were scattered on the floor. The magnitude 6.4 earthquake occurred at 2:34 a.m. near Ferndale, a small community about 210 miles (345 kilometers) northwest of San Francisco and close to the Pacific coast.

DEA seized enough fentanyl to kill every person in the U.S. in 2022 (Washington Post) The Drug Enforcement Administration said Tuesday it has seized more than 379 million potentially fatal doses of illegal fentanyl this year, as Mexican drug-trafficking organizations continue to flood the United States with the cheap synthetic opioid responsible for record numbers of U.S. overdose deaths. The agency said it has confiscated more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder and 50.6 million illegal fentanyl tablets so far in 2022. That was twice the number of tablets seized in 2021, when more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. Two-thirds of those deaths were caused by fentanyl, according to U.S. public health data.

Zelenskiy visits the U.S. (Bloomberg) US President Joe Biden welcomed Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the White House Wednesday in the Ukraine leader’s first trip abroad since Russia attacked last February. Biden voiced hope for a “just peace,” but the visit comes at a critical stage of the war: Ukraine has faced a barrage of missile and drone attacks targeting civilians and energy infrastructure in recent weeks, leading to power and water cuts in brutal winter weather. Zelenskiy has pleaded for more advanced weapons systems to blunt Russian attacks and for additional energy and economic support. As for Putin, who has called up hundreds of thousands of untrained recruits to reanimate his stalled attack, he contends Russia has “no limitations” on military spending, and urged his army to continue the war.

Mexican ambassador expelled from Peru over meddling claims (AP) In a roller-coaster day for Mexico’s relations with Peru, Mexico announced Tuesday it had granted asylum for the family of ousted Peruvian president Pedro Castillo. Hours later, Peru declared the Mexican ambassador to Lima persona non grata and ordered him to leave within 72 hours. The Peruvian foreign ministry said without elaborating that Castillo’s wife, Lilia Paredes, was under criminal investigation in the South American country, where corruption allegations had dogged her husband’s administration. Paredes and the couple’s two children were at the Mexican embassy in Lima. Peru said it would allow the family to leave for Mexico, but could later demand Mexico extradite Paredes Navarro if she were to eventually face any charges in Peru. Peru’s foreign ministry said in its social media accounts Tuesday that it was expelling Mexican Ambassador Pablo Monroy because “of the repeated statement by that country’s highest authorities about the political situation in Peru.”

U.K. nurses strike over pay, testing a health-care system in crisis (Washington Post) The British newspapers are calling it the “winter of discontent.” Huge strikes are creating chaos in hospitals and standstills at transit hubs, as walkouts by firefighters, baggage handlers, paramedics, driving examiners, immigration officers, bus drivers, construction workers, mail carriers and railway conductors mount. The public has been warned to avoid train travel on Christmas Eve. Most worrisome for the government—and the public—is that nurses have just gone on strike, too. Teachers are threatening work stoppages early in the new year. Workers in wide swaths of the public sector are in open revolt against 12 years of “austerity budgets” by the Conservative Party and the soaring costs of living in 2022. Energy prices are so high here that the government stepped in to cap and subsidize home heating bills so that people wouldn’t freeze in their flats. During the worst years of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of ordinary Britons stood on their doorsteps during harsh lockdowns to bang pots and pans and clap their hands for National Health Service workers, hailing them as front-line heroes. Now the nurses are saying they need more than applause. They are burned out, overworked and underpaid, they say, and want a real raise to keep up with inflation, which has topped 10 percent.

Putin orders FSB to step up surveillance of Russians and borders (Reuters) President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the Federal Security Services to step up surveillance of Russian society and the country’s borders to prevent risks from abroad and traitors at home. Speaking ahead of Tuesday’s Security Services Day—widely celebrated in Russia—Putin said the “emergence of new threats” increases the need for greater intelligence activity. Putin instructed the FSB to maximise their “use of the operational, technical and personnel potential” to tighten control of the society. The FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, has already been operating in Russia as an expansive surveillance and censorship apparatus and Moscow’s invasion in Ukraine has involved a large swathe of the security services. Since the start of the war, demonstrations and dissent have been swiftly quelled in Russia, with more than 1,300 detained in September at protests denouncing Putin’s military mobilisation of 300,000. In a rare admission of the invasion of Ukraine not going smoothly, Putin said that the situation in Ukraine’s regions that Moscow moved to annex in September is “extremely difficult” and ordered the FSB to ensure the “safety” of people living there.

Surrender to a Drone? Ukraine Is Urging Russian Soldiers to Do Just That. (NYT) Tens of thousands of drones have been employed across Ukraine to kill the enemy, spy on its formations and guide bombs to their targets. But this month the Ukrainian military began a program to use drones in a more unusual role: to guide Russian soldiers who want to surrender. The program had its genesis in late November, when the Ukrainian military released footage of a Russian soldier throwing his weapon to the ground, raising his hands and nervously following a path set out by a drone overhead, leading him to soldiers from the Ukrainian army’s 54th Mechanized Brigade. A few weeks later, the Ukrainian General Staff released an instructional video explaining how Russian soldiers can surrender to a Ukrainian drone, and it is now part of a wide-ranging effort by Ukraine to persuade Russian soldiers to give up. The program, called “I want to live,” includes a phone hotline, a website and a Telegram channel all dedicated to communicating to Russian soldiers and their families.

Snow piles deep in northern Japan (AP) Heavy snow in northwestern Japan since the weekend has left at least three people dead, stranded hundreds of vehicles on highways, disrupted trains and left thousands of homes without electricity, officials said Wednesday. The powerful weather system brought heavy snow to Japan’s northern coastal areas since Saturday, with snow piling up more than 2 meters (6.5 feet) in parts of Niigata, Yamagata and Aomori prefectures. Self-Defense Force troops helped clear Niigata highways, where hundreds of cars and delivery trucks were stuck in lines stretching more than 20 kilometers (12 miles), and to provide other support. Local volunteers also helped to provide food and other necessities to those stranded inside their vehicles for hours. With improving weather conditions, road closures were lifted Tuesday, but another snowstorm is forecast to affect the region toward the weekend.

Taliban Bar Women From College Classes, in a Stark Reversal of Rights (NYT) The Afghan government on Tuesday barred women from attending private and public universities, officials said, in the latest severe blow to women’s rights under a Taliban administration that has all but reinstituted the hard-line rule the group maintained during its first stretch in power during the 1990s. The move is the most recent sign that the Taliban’s leadership has cast aside any intent to moderate, and it is the realization of fears that 20 years of Western human rights and governance initiatives would be undone after the Taliban took power last year. The new government in recent weeks has reinstated Shariah law, carried out public floggings across the country and conducted one public execution. All that is likely to threaten the influx of badly needed international aid that has kept Afghanistan from the brink of famine as it grapples with a devastating economic collapse.

Children among 547 detained Syrians declared dead—rights monitor (Reuters) Ever since Yehya Hijazi and his two sons were detained in 2012 by the Syrian government, their relatives had clung onto the hope they were still alive and might be released one day. But after a decade of silence from the authorities, their hopes were shattered when the independent Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) monitoring group contacted the Hijazi family to tell them it had obtained death certificates for all three. The SNHR said the documents confirming the death of Yehya and his sons were among 547 detainee death certificates issued by the authorities since 2017 that it had obtained from whistleblowers within government departments. The rights group said the documents provided answers to the fates of hundreds of missing people. The war in Syria spiralled out of a 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule and has killed over 350,000 people, uprooted more than half the population and forced millions abroad as refugees. Tens of thousands are estimated to have been held in Syrian government detention centres, according to the U.N. commission. Detainees are often held incommunicado, leaving their families wondering about their whereabouts, or if they are even alive, the commission and families of detainees have said.

Biden’s strategy for a far-right Israel: Lay it all on Bibi (Politico) President Joe Biden and his aides have a plan for how to deal with the far-right, anti-Palestinian tilt of the incoming Israeli government: make it all about Benjamin Netanyahu. The Biden administration will hold the presumptive Israeli prime minister personally responsible for the actions of his more extreme cabinet members, especially if they lead to policies that endanger a future Palestinian state, two U.S. officials familiar with the issue told POLITICO. Netanyahu is the person U.S. officials will publicly turn to, refer to and rely upon for any remotely serious talks on issues ranging from Israeli settlements in the West Bank to Israel’s relations with Arab states, the officials said. The Israeli politician has, after all, stressed that he’ll be running the show. The Biden team’s approach underscores the complexity and the growing fragility of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Israel’s role as a security partner, as well as its role as a haven for the Jewish people, means any serious break is not feasible, no matter how radical its government. But the rightward trend in Israeli politics is also eroding what was once strong bipartisan support for the country in Washington, especially among Democrats who are increasingly willing to criticize Israel despite blowback on the campaign trail.

Biotechnology risks (nti.org, economist.com) In recent years, the cost of DNA synthesis has continued to plummet, new suppliers have emerged in countries around the world, and bench-top synthesis devices that make it easier for scientists to print DNA in their own labs are now commercially available. Safeguards have not always kept up. Even more concerning, one of the main barriers to a step-by-step blueprint to assemble that DNA into a transmissible, lethal virus could be no more than a paywall in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Many journals continue to publish the latest science on how to tinker with pathogens to make them more transmissible or virulent, and how to make them from scratch. These developments are taking place in the context of accelerating bioscience and biotechnology advances that are revolutionizing the capability to engineer living systems. These can have real potential benefits in improving human health, fostering economic development, and combating climate change. However, these advances also pose significant risks of deliberate exploitation by malicious actors or through inadvertent misuse.

[theforgottenmcrmy]

Birds of a Feather (Chapter 3/?) ||| Bradley Bradshaw

Pairing: Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw x Sam “Merlin” Wells’ Daughter OC

Warnings: Explicit Language, Mentions of Death of Parent(s), Non-Explicit Sexual References, and even more awkwardness as young adults try and fail to rationalize their feelings.

Summary: … If she was going to do this crazy of a thing with anybody, Bradley Bradshaw was certainly at the top of her list. Hell, he was the only one on the list. She trusted him full-heartedly.

Word Count: 9200 ish.

DISCLAIMER: Spoilers for Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick ahead.

Masterlist /// Chapter 1 /// Chapter 2 /// Chapter 3 /// Chapter 4

A/N: Thank you all so much for the support you’ve shown for this story! It really makes me feel good (for a lack of better words) that something I’ve put a fair amount of work into has been received so well. As usual, any and all feedback is still welcomed and appreciated! This and the next chapters are going to be decently lengthy, but I felt like splitting them into three chapters would have jarred the pacing. Hopefully you all understand.

I hope you all have a good holiday, if you celebrate. (Personally, I’m going to be wearing black tomorrow, but that’s neither here nor there.👀) Either way, I hope you have a good and safe next couple of days.😊💙

Chapter 3: Out of the System

Lemoore, CA

5 years ago

…

Corpus Christi, and then Kingsville, to Lemoore would be a nice change of pace. Even if it was exchanging one hot environment for another. Either way, both had to be better than the humidity had been in Pensacola. 

But, and perhaps more importantly, the move would create more socially acceptable opportunities to don the ever growing collection of Hawaiian shirts in Bradley’s possession.

Which is why, on the Saturday before his FRS training was set to commence, just after Bradley had up and left his temporary life in Texas for sunny California, he donned one of the said shirts. And, he’d chosen one of his particularly more “obnoxious” - as his fellow aviator and friend Natasha Trace had so lovingly put it- shirts for the hell of it.

Natasha made a deal of not wanting to be seen with him when he wore the shirt, but Bradley could tell she didn’t really hold any hard feelings for the brightly colored fabric. However, she did still roll her eyes at him exasperatedly as they entered the bar.

They’d been informed that the bar was the bar of preference for most everyone on base. In theory, it would be a good place to introduce themselves to others in a more casual setting before training formally began the following Monday. But as it turned out, the bar was a pretty nice place anyway. It was somewhat tucked away, hidden in plain sight among the small suburb of military housing nearby. Plus, the owner, a veteran named Jimmy, was more than a pleasant enough guy.

After a few beers, Natasha and Bradley had made some small talk with others they recognized from earlier stages of their training. Natasha had even ran into an old friend from her days in the Academy, Reuben Fitch.

As Natasha and Reuben caught up, Bradley nursed another beer and he leaned up against the bar. His eyes scanned around the room, looking for no one in particular, but rather getting a general feel of the room. He spotted a piano on the other side of the bar, and made a mental note of it for future reference.

Then, Bradley heard a laugh that made him double take. His eyes continued to scan the bar, though with a bit more urgency, as his curiosity got the best of him and he sought to confirm his initial reactive thought.

There she was. She was seated at a table across the bar, chatting with two guys and another woman who were also seated at the same table.

Clara Wells.

Throughout the most recent stages of their training, Bradley and Clara had kept in touch mainly by text, but also with the occasional phone call. Bradley had spoken to Clara enough to already know she’d be in California. After she had completed her training six months back, she’d been given orders to report to NAS Lemoore, where she'd been lucky enough to be assigned to be an NFO on her first preference- the F/A 18.

But Bradley and Clara hadn’t actually seen each other in person in nearly two years, and he definitely hadn’t expected to see her there at the bar that night. He would have thought- or, rather, hoped- that he would have had at least one or two days to come up with the just right words to say to her.

Though phone calls and texts over the months had been enough to preserve their friendship on the surface level, the thought of speaking to one another face to face had become somewhat of a daunting task. There’d been an unspoken mutual agreement to simply not address what had happened the night before Bradley left Pensacola.

Bradley knew he ought to have brought it up, but everytime he tried to work up the courage to do so, the fears of what could happen as a result of the conversation always outweighed his desire for clarity on where exactly they stood. Would things get weird between them? Would they get into an argument? Would they simply bring up the topic once, and drop it, never to be spoken of again? Bradley couldn’t be sure. Their lighthearted conversations already seemed fragile due to the distance between them straining the relationship. And Bradley wasn’t exactly leaping at the chance to add any further burden to what was supposed to have been a mutually beneficial friendship.

Not to mention, it had been too easy to simply pretend the kiss had not even happened at all when there had been a barrier of a phone between them for safety. But now, that barrier was gone.

And to make things worse, their chats had been spotty as of late, with Bradley having been primarily focused on completing his initial training and finally earning his Wings. He’d at least told Clara that he’d been given his first preference of what to fly- which was also the F/A 18. But he hadn’t told her whether was headed to Lemoore or Virginia Beach after the completion of his training. … Then again, Clara hadn’t explicitly asked, either.

Regardless, it all meant that Bradley had absolutely no idea what to say to Clara. It was an off-putting feeling, unsure of what to say to a friend of literal years, when he was - supposedly - full grown ass-adult who should have been more than capable of having a difficult conversation. But it was the awkward position he found himself in anyway. And until he could figure out what needed to be said, Bradley was of the mind that perhaps laying low and sticking to his own business would be his best course of action.

Besides… Clara looked more than comfortable chatting with her friends across the bar. The last thing Bradley wanted to do was to interrupt them and force an awkward conversation that he wasn’t even prepared for.

Even though he still cared about her.

God, did he still care about her.

He cared about her too much, really. More than he ought to have.

Unbeknownst to him, while he was in the midst of wrestling with his thoughts, Clara had already spotted him with Natasha and Reuben.

“Hey Jimmy, the damn jukebox’s broken again!”

In response, the bartender grumbled something about leaving the machine be.

“Bradshaw, is that a piano I see over there?” Natasha asked pointedly.

Bradley took another drink in lieu of answering her redundant question.

“Why don’t ya play us a little something?” Reuben asked, immediately catching on to Natasha’s subtle suggestion.

“Nah, I couldn’t,” Bradley replied, hoping Natasha would take the hint and just drop it. Making a scene in the bar by providing such entertainment, though it wouldn’t have been the first time, was one of the last things on Bradley’s mind at the moment given who was present on the opposite side of the room.

Unfortunately, Natasha mistook his hesitancy for shyness. “Don’t let him fool you,” she said to Reuben with a smile. “This guy right here knows his way around the keys.” She clapped a hand on Bradley’s shoulder encouragingly “Come on.”

Reluctantly, though as to not make any further of a scene, Bradley allowed her to guide him over to the piano. As soon as he was seated on the bench, a fair share of the eyes of the other bar patrons fell upon him, watching with mild interest. He refused to look at any of them in particular, apprehensive as to whose eyes he might actually meet.

Instead, he chose to focus on Natasha, who was beside him, smiling reassuringly. “Too late to chicken out now, Bradshaw. You’ve got an audience.”

Oh, didn’t he know it. He gave Natasha a small smile as he forced himself to play the opening chords to a song he knew how to play so well it was nearly the equivalent of riding a bike. As the first few notes sounded, and against his better judgment, Bradley dared to look over the top of the upright piano and out across the room. 

Immediately, he locked eyes with Clara. She was too far away for him to properly discern the expression on her face, but he had no doubt that she saw him.

There’d be no flying under the radar now.

The first day of training had gone by somewhat unceremoniously. The replacement pilots and replacement WSOs were given the introductory speeches from the instructors and their CO. The more hands-on learning and training was set to begin the next day.

Most of the incomers seemed alright, Clara deduced, from her non-expert but several months’ experience of an opinion. There seemed to be a small number of them who would need to be taken down a peg, as one may have suspected, but that number was relatively small. To be fair, there were also some others who had joined the VFA-122 at the same time as her that could still stand to be humbled, even with six months of exposure under their belts.

Clara made it the entire day without having to speak to Bradley Bradshaw even once. And for that, she was thankful.

But that all changed as she entered the parking lot in her effort to go home.

“Clara!”

Clara didn’t want to hesitate, but she involuntarily did so as a gut-reaction upon the use of her name. Once she processed whose voice it was, she forced herself to continue on. Her car was just a few rows away, and with any luck, she’d reach it shortly before the person on her tail had a chance to catch up.

But it appeared luck wasn’t on her side that day, because a moment later, Bradley suddenly appeared by her side.

“Clara, come on,” he pleaded, audibly disheartened though he had no physical problem keeping up with her long strides and rushed pace. Though Clara was taken unpleasantly by surprise, at least Bradley spoke relatively quietly; the entire group had just been dismissed for the day, and they certainly weren’t alone in the parking lot.

“I didn’t know you’d be here,” Clara said casually, sparing him the briefest of glances out of the corner of her eye. In all fairness, she hadn’t asked where Bradley had been assigned to after his training, but part of her had hoped he would’ve shared the information with her anyway.

“I know, I should’ve told you,” Bradley admitted, sounding so apologetic and sincere Clara almost stopped walking then and there. Almost. “I think we need to talk.”

“What about?” Clara asked, feigning ignorance all too easy in her frustration.

“You know what about.”

Clara finally stopped in her tracks, and opened her mouth to retort, but shut it when was made ever more aware of the fact that others were in the area and could possibly overhear their conversation. She had no intention of making whatever they were about to discuss public; they were both professionals with budding careers. The last thing either of them needed was to be seen having a public spat, especially when as far as anyone else knew, they two had just met each other.

“I can count the number of times I’ve heard from you over the past month on one hand,” Clara said, fighting to keep her voice level and even. “Do you suddenly have something to say?”

Regret and remorse was very evident on Bradley’s face. He did his best to hide his pained expression, but Clara was able to see through the front easily. “Yeah, I do,” he informed her. “Please, Clara. Give me a chance to explain?”

“... Okay.” Clara offered up a tight-lipped smile to someone who passed by them and shot them a curious look. “But can we talk somewhere more private?”

Bradley gave her a relieved smile and tapped the hood of his Bronco, which Clara hadn’t even realized was parked where they had come to a stop. “My apartment?”

“Fine.”

…

Bradley’s apartment was not too far from base. It was nothing too expansive, not that it was needed for just himself, but it was still nice. He was fortunate to live alone, which soothed Clara’s nerves about their impending conversation just a little.

When they first entered the room, he offered her a drink. She declined, but accepted a glass of water instead.

For a few minutes, the two sat on the couch in his living room in silence, each drinking their respective drinks and waiting to see who would cave and begin speaking first. Though the silence normally would have tormented her, she didn’t mind it this time. It allowed her to contemplate.

Perhaps she had maybe been a little too aggressive with Bradley in the parking lot, especially since it was the first time she was having a face-to-face conversation with him in almost two years. But she still needed answers for his odd behavior, even if she feared she wouldn’t like what he had to say.

“Look,” Clara began, looking away from him in the hope that doing so would give her some additional courage. She set down the glass of water on the nearby side table as she continued to search for the right words. “I’m just going to rip the bandaid off- I know I crossed a line when I kissed you that night. I don’t know what got into me… other than the alcohol, I guess. But there’s something I don’t understand about that night. If I crossed the line, why on earth did you kiss me back?”

Bradley remained silent for a beat, though Clara was well-aware of the fact that his eyes were on her, watching her intensely. When she finally dared to meet his eyes once again, she saw him purse his lips. His brows were furrowed, his eyes focused. He was obviously deep in thought. Or deliberation.

“It just… It felt right, I guess.”

… Felt right?

“What am I supposed to do with that information, Brad?” Clara asked quietly, feeling oddly helpless and more confused than she had ever been over the past month when he subtly but abruptly shut her out.

“I don’t know.”

Clara wanted to be able to make sense of whatever he was trying to convey, but it almost sounded like Bradley wasn’t even sure what he meant. It was a lost cause. “I completely understand if pursuing this- pursuing us- isn’t what you want right now… To be honest, I’m not even sure what I want anymore. All I do know is that I’ve missed you. A lot. And if I had known that kissing you was just going to make things weird between us and wreck what we had, I never would’ve done it in the first place.”

“I missed you too,” Bradley confessed. His tone was softer than before, it sounded a bit more wounded. Almost as though he’d been insulted that she’d even insinuated that he didn’t feel the same. “And I don’t think what we have is wrecked.”

“Then why haven’t I heard from you recently? … I know you’ve been busy. Believe me, I know. I’ve gone through training; I’ve been there. … But I would’ve at least thought you’d tell me you were coming here.”

Bradley sighed tiredly. “Do you want me to be honest with you?”

“Please.”

“Fine,” Bradley said, setting his drink down on the side table. “... I was afraid of having this exact conversation.”

Clara’s eyes widened in surprise; that wasn’t what she had been expecting.

“Once I found out I was coming here, I realized it would only be a matter of time until we had this conversation,” Bradley continued, looking away from her for the first time since their conversation began. “Since we didn’t really talk about what happened that night, I didn’t know how you felt about things between us… and I guess I was just worried we weren’t on the same page.”

In all honesty, Clara still wasn’t entirely sure what page Bradley was on. But, by the sound of it, she felt confident enough that she at least had the gist. It seemed that both of them wanted to keep the friendship, and neither were ready to pursue the avenue that the kiss had opened up for them. That damn kiss. If she hadn’t caved into her feelings in the moment, they wouldn’t have even had to have this conversation!

… Wait.

“How about we just forget anything ever happened?” she proposed. “We don’t think about it, or even bring it up again. We can go back to the way things were before that night.”

Bradley met her eyes once again. The somber look in his eyes was gone, replaced with interest, and, if she squinted, maybe even a dash of humor. “Just… forget it even happened?”

“Yes.”

“You really think it’ll work?”

“We’ll have to hold each other accountable to see to it that it does. But right now, it’s the only thing I can think of. I’m not ready to throw this friendship away.”

“Neither am I.”

“Then… it’s a deal?”

 “... Deal.”

“Deal,” Clara agreed, nodding to herself as she began to process what all that would entail. “And if it doesn’t work, I guess we’ll have to find some other way to make the next six months bearable.”

In six months, Clara would receive her squadron assignment, and be headed off for who knew where, while it would be Bradley’s turn to be the one ‘left behind’ to finish the duration of his own training.

“Let’s start now,” Bradley proposed. “Friday night- let’s go back to that bar, just like we used to in Florida. I’ll even buy.”

“You don’t have to do that-”

“-But I want to. Consider it a consolation for dropping off the face of the earth for the past month. Are you in, or not?”

As much as she wanted to demonstrate some reluctance to his offer, Clara knew she was a sucker for the hopeful look on Bradley’s face. Damn him. “... Fine. I’m in.” Then, the memory struck her. “That was quite the performance you gave the other night, by the way.”

Bradley smirked. “I just knew you were gonna say something about that.”

“How could I not? You basically gave the whole bar a free concert! Who knew that one song could have so much sway?”

“It is a good song,” Bradley reasoned thoughtfully. “Though, it was kinda lonely up there, all by lonesome. I’m used to at least having a singing partner, you know?”

Clara knew exactly what he was referring to. She’d witnessed Bradley give similar performances at their old haunts in Pensacola. She’d been right beside him then, and had even sung along a handful of times. But perhaps it was too soon to stroke Bradley’s ego and indulge him.

“You seemed just fine,” Clara noted, though politely. “Who was that you were with?”

“Her name’s Natasha,” Bradley replied. “She came from Kingsville with me. I’ll introduce you two sometime. I think you two will get along.”

“... Is she-”

“Just a friend,” Bradley confirmed. Clara wanted to kick herself when he seemed to take too much satisfaction in her poorly-disguised interest in the matter.

“I was just asking,” Clara added quickly, hoping to throw him off her tracks.

“Mhmm.”

“Well, I should get going now,” Clara said as she rose up off the couch, desperately wanting to avoid digging herself into any deeper of a hole. Besides, the events of the day had made her brain feel all but fried, and she could practically hear her bed calling her name from miles away.

Bradley rose from the couch as well, following her as she walked over to the front door. “I’ll see you around, Red Cross.”

Clara almost did a double take at the nickname she hadn’t heard in a few years. Despite herself, she smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Brad.” She swore she saw the corners of his mouth twitch upwards at that… but maybe she had just imagined it. “Are you going to wear another one of those shirts on Friday?”

This time, Bradley gave her a clear smile. “Oh, you can count on it, Darling.”

“I still have the one you left behind, by the way.”

“Ah, so you didn’t burn it?”

“Ha ha,” Clara said sarcastically. “Do you want it back? I can run it over here later tonight if you want.”

Bradley shrugged nonchalantly, unbothered. “Keep it for now. You never know when I may be in need of a shirt.”

Clara laughed.

It wasn’t until she got back to her own apartment that she realized the possible deeper implications of Bradley’s off-handed joke.

“Ugh.”

“He is pretty insufferable, isn’t he?”

Bradley had offered to drive Clara back to his apartment after training the following Friday. Since they had plans to go out later that evening, it had only made sense and prevented any unnecessary driving back and forth.

On the way back to his apartment, their conversation had naturally drifted to one Jake Seresin- an incoming replacement pilot whose obnoxious ego and charm rivaled each other for dominance over his personality. He’d come from Meridian, so both of them had only known him for less than a week. However, they were both of the opinion that that short time was plenty enough for them to deduce just what he was about.

“I’m sure he’ll get knocked down a peg or two,” Clara said. “I’ve seen it first hand- it ain’t pretty.”

Bradley shrugged, his eyes still focused on the road. Though he liked the idea of that, and probably more than he should have, he had his doubts about whether anything would ever actually boot Jake Seresin off his high horse. “I don’t know- some of those Academy guys never seem to grow out of their egos.”

“Yeah?” Clara chucked. “Well, you were almost one of them yourself, remember? Are you admitting that you’d have a free pass to act like a jerk too?”

Bradley knew Clara only meant it as a joke, but he couldn’t bring himself to laugh or otherwise react to her question.

Unfortunately, Clara took his silence and jumped to a conclusion of her own. “... You’re not still mad about not getting into the Academy, are you?”

“No.”

“-Because I’ve already told you, I couldn’t even get a nomination. You, on the other hand, got the chance to actually apply. You had more of a chance than I ever did.”

“I’m not still mad about not getting into the Academy,” Bradley insisted truthfully. “That was years ago, for God’s sake.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

Bradley sighed, and readjusted his grip on the steering wheel. He should’ve kept his mouth shut, or at least minded his mouth when talking about Seresin and all the other Academy grads who thought they were still way up high on their pedestals. But he hadn’t, and in the spirit of keeping their rekindled friendship alive, he felt obligated to let Clara in fully on something he’d been keeping a secret for over a year.

“I’m not mad about not getting into the Academy,” he repeated. “... I may still be a bit upset with the reason as to why I didn’t get in.”

“How would you even know that?” Clara wondered. She laughed, “What did you do, go up to the Admissions Board and ask them why?”

Bradley chuckled dryly. “No… One of my instructors back in Kingsville was actually on the Board during the year I applied,” he informed her. “I just wanted some closure, you know? I thought if I knew what it was that held me back then, I could be more aware of it now, in case it ever plays a role down the road… So, after I got in his good graces, of course, I just asked him about it directly.”

“... And did he tell you?”

“Not at first; he didn’t want to,” Bradley recalled. “Hell, he definitely probably shouldn’t have told me at all. But I took him out for drinks one night, and you know what they say about loose lips. He told me all I needed to know.”

Bradley could feel Clara’s eyes on him. He knew why; talking about a fair share of stuff in his past was either hit or miss on whether it’d garner a strong emotional reaction from him. She was probably preparing herself for the worst.

“What did he say?” she inquired.

Bradley spared her a glance, confirming what he already knew; Clara was watching him carefully. “He told me my papers got pulled.”

“What?” Clara did a double take. “... That can actually happen?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you obviously didn’t have anything to do with it… So who pulled them?”

Bradley hesitated.

“Did he not tell you who it was?”

“No, he did.”

“Who was it?”

“Maverick.”

The silence that followed was an extremely weighted one. Bradley remained silent, not sure of what else to say in the moment, and wanting to allow Clara time to digest the bombshell information he’d just shared.

“Maverick?” Clara repeated, slowly and blankly. “Maverick Maverick? As in-”

“-Yes.”

Bradley saw Clara finally look away from him out of the corner of his eye. Instead, she stared straight out the front windshield, mimicking his own firm stance. “But that doesn’t make any sense,” she mumbled. “... Why would he do that?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. But my instructor was very clear as to who was behind my application getting pulled.”

“I can’t believe it,” Clara admitted wistfully. Quickly, she clarified, “I mean, I believe what you’re saying, I do… But Maverick? God, my dad still talks about that guy like he hung the damn moon!”

Bradley scoffed. “I know. Your dad tried asking me about him once, but if I remember right, you saved me from having to answer him.”

When Mr. Wells had asked about him several years back, Bradley hadn’t known the truth of what Maverick had done with his application to the Academy. But at the time, Bradley still hadn’t been too pleased with his later father’s best friend. He’d been way, way too eager to brush over Bradley’s supposed “rejection” from the Academy. ‘Well, that’s some tough luck, Kid… But you know how competitive it is to get into the Academy. Hell, I didn’t even get the chance to apply… And you know how worried your mother was about you. Maybe she can rest easier now.’

Just recalling the lame excuses that, in hindsight, Bradley should have taken as obvious clues got his blood boiling. But Maverick was not there anymore, and as much contempt as he held for him, Bradley would be damned if he’d let the old man impact his life and attitude anymore than he already had.

“The image I had of Maverick was already tainted by then,” Bradley confessed, referring back to the day in question. “... But I still couldn’t bring myself to ruin him in the eyes of your father, too.”

Clara said nothing, but he could tell she was still highly focused on the conversation.

“That’s why Seresin and the other Academy guys like him get to me so much. They walk around like their God’s personal gifts to the Navy, and hell, maybe they are. But they don’t acknowledge the advantage that they had. Four years of connections like that? … I would’ve done just about anything for that opportunity.”

“I’m really, really sorry, Bradley,” Clara apologized, sincerely dripping off of every solemn word. “What Maverick did- that wasn’t right. It shouldn’t have happened, and you more than deserved a fair chance. Does he know that you know? Have you confronted him about it?”

Bradley shook his head, his fingers gripping the steering wheel just a bit tighter as he slowed the car down for an upcoming red light. “No. I haven’t even talked to him in years.” Which was perfectly fine with him. “When I didn’t get into the academy, he tried to convince me that it was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t get why he was so adamant about it at the time, but now I know. And I try not to think about it, but, as you can tell, it still bothers me years later, so…”

Clara was silent once again.

“But I suppose there is a silver lining in all of it,” Bradley realized out loud for the first time.

“What’s that?”

The car came to a complete stop at the red light, and Bradley looked over at her with a small smile. “If things hadn’t gone the way they had for me, I wouldn’t have met you when I did.”

He turned his eyes back onto the road, but he swore he saw her smile out of the corner of his eye.

“Aw, Bradshaw, you’re going to make me tear up,” Clara said quietly after a moment, attempting to downplay the sentimentality of his statement. “Are you saying you don’t regret willfully letting me annoy you for going on seven years?”

“Surprisingly- no. I’m glad I met you when I did,” Bradley agreed with a smile. His focus was back on the road, where it would remain as he forced himself to finish the rest of his thoughts. “That’s when I needed someone like you the most.”

The smile she gave him in return made him feel some type of way. And it made him realize very quickly that keeping up his end of the deal and forgetting the kiss they’d shared was going to be a lot harder than he had anticipated.

Lemoore, CA

4.5 years ago

…

Due to it being a Saturday night, the bar was relatively crowded, as was the usual. In hindsight, they probably should have ventured to a place further away from base, but since Bradley had offered to pay, Clara had been in no position to argue.

“We playing the ‘game’ tonight?” Bradley asked her as he handed her a drink. He took a seat at the table they’d secured in one of the back corners of the bar. It was tucked away, and just about as private of a place they’d get in such a bustling environment.

The ‘game’ was a method they’d cooked up a few months prior, shortly after Bradley’s arrival on base. As it turned out, Bradley and Clara pretending to be involved with one another while out at bars had proven to be a relatively effective way to deter any flirtatious hopefuls when one of them wasn’t quite in the mood to be swooned. It confused the hell out of their peer aviators and WSOs who recognized them and saw their little bit, and it confused them even more so when the pair would repeatedly and vehemently deny anything had occurred between them when confronted about it afterwards. But that was a large part of the fun.

But, as it also turned out, Clara enjoyed partaking in the charade a little bit more than liked to admit. And she particularly didn’t care for the uncomfortable feeling she got whenever Bradley assured her that their arrangement was not necessary for an evening, and he would buy some other girl a drink and chat her up for an hour or so. If they had gone out together, he never ditched her for any of them, but there was no telling what he got up to when the two parted ways when leaving the bar.

Clara hated it all, actually. She hated how possessive it made her feel. Bradley could date, or not date, anyone he damn well pleased. She was his friend, nothing more. That was their agreement, and she knew that if she wanted to keep him a part of her life, she better stick to it.

Even if that meant ignoring how she actually had come to feel about him.

“I’m down,” Clara confirmed. “Unless you don’t want to...?”

Bradley put a hand over his heart, feigning offense. “Now, what kind of friend would I be if I ran off with some other girl on your last night here?”

Ah, there it was. Not even ten minutes into their little trip to the bar, and the elephant in the room had been addressed. Six months had passed by too quickly, and Clara would be leaving in the morning.

She’d been officially assigned to VFA-103. While finally getting assigned to a squadron was exciting, she couldn’t deny the fact that the past six months spent with her old friend had made the prospect of leaving less than favorable. With any luck, Bradley would get assigned to a squadron also stationed in Virginia Beach- or even better, a squadron assigned to the same carrier- so that they would at least see each other in some passing state, but that was pretty wishful thinking.

“Well, maybe it would make you a shitty friend,” Clara said, “But hardly anyone could blame you. See that blonde over by the bar? She’s been eyeing you since the moment we walked in.”

She directed her gaze over to the girl in reference pointedly. Bradley followed the gesture, and smirked as his eyes landed upon her.

“Nice,” he commented smugly.

Clara rolled her eyes and took a big drink from her glass.

“Damn…” Bradley whistled suddenly. “Do you feel those daggers she’s shooting at you?”

“What? No she’s not-”

Bradley put a hand on her arm as she went to turn, effectively stopping from looking back to see if he had been telling the truth. “Don’t look! She’ll know we were talking about her.”

“You were talking about her.”

Bradley paid her no mind as he rose, beer still in hand, and scooted his stool closer to hers. He sat back down, his back now to the woman at the bar, and gave her a grin.

“Well… What’s she going to think now?” Clara asked, unsure of what else to say as she processed their suddenly close proximity.

Bradley shrugged. “She’s probably thinking that we’re having an intimate conversation. So, unless you want to blow our cover, you better commit and pretend that you actually like me.”

Clara did her best to glare at him, but she didn’t have to see her own reflection to know that she wasn’t doing a very convincing job. For all her effort to do her best to forget about her feelings about him, Bradley’s mixed signals- whether he knew what he was doing or not- certainly didn’t help the matter.

“Bradshaw, do you really think I would have tolerated these little antics of yours for this many years if I didn’t like you?”

Judging by the content look on his face, that was exactly along the lines of what Bradley had been fishing for. “So, just how much do you like me?”

Clara laughed and took another drink in an effort to mask her involuntary blush. “Where the hell are you going with this?”

“Do you like me enough to do me a favor?” he asked plainly.

Bradley’s tone was serious, a stark comparison to the joking banter he’d fired off just a few seconds beforehand. Given their closeness, Clara had a pretty good view of his face. Though she had been avoiding meeting his eyes for too long throughout the night so far, she dared to after hearing his question, searching for any signs that he might have been anything less than genuine. She found none. His brown eyes, while still having a bit of light to them, looked suddenly somber.

“Yes.”

“Promise me you’ll take care of yourself?”

He sounded so sincere, she didn’t have the heart to do anything other than take his request as seriously as he posed it. Despite the vagueness, she knew exactly what he meant.

The whole process of training up until that moment hadn’t exactly been a cake walk; it certainly had had its dangerous moments. But being assigned to an actual squadron, where being deployed was inevitable, was another thing entirely. They both knew the risks of the careers they had chosen, and they accepted that it possibly would come at a heavy personal cost.

But that personal cost didn’t always mean sacrificing one’s own life; it also meant the possibility of losing someone else instead. And Clara knew Bradley understood the weight of that concept greatly.

“Of course I will,” Clara assured him, placing a light hand over his own as it laid flat upon the table. “I always do, you know that.”

“I know you do. But it’s not always in your control.”

It wasn’t, but that was something she had come to accept. Unsure of what else to say, she withdrew her hand slowly, and took another drink.

“Can I ask you something serious?” Bradley asked after a few moments.

“Serious?” Clara asked with a soft smile. “That’s a new one for you, isn’t it?”

“I know- but I mean it this time,” Bradley said, before finishing off the rest of his beer.

“What is it?”

Bradley scooted the empty bottle away from him as he leaned onto the table. He looked over at her, attentive eyes watching her every move. The way he was acting was more hesitant than what was usual for him, and it made her all the more intrigued.

“Why did you go through all of this training to not even try to be a pilot?”

Clara pushed her own now empty glass away from her on the table as she met his eyes once again. The look in his eyes was just as serious as it had been a few minutes before. It was definitely not the direction she had expected the evening to go, nor the question she would have guessed he would have asked of her. But she was more than willing to see where it would lead.

“It’s kind of late in the process to be asking me that question, isn’t it?”

Bradley shrugged. Though his reaction was nonchalant, Clara could tell he still expected an answer.

“You mean, besides my eyesight?” she joked in an attempt to lighten the mood between them. It wasn’t successful, the tension created by his question clung steadfast in the air between them. So, she racked her brain for the most honest, thoughtful, and easiest-to-convey answer she could produce. “... I guess I like being able to control what I can control. If I’m a WSO, I’ve got my role. I know what I’m supposed to do, and I can focus on making sure I do it the best I can. But if I had to actually fly the plane as well? … Seems like a lot.”

“You could’ve done it.”

“Maybe; maybe not. But, at the end of the day, I just never felt that drawn to it. And, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a pilot whose always known they’ve wanted to do what they do than a pilot who does what they do because they felt like they had to. Whoever I end up flying with can have whatever glory they want. I know I’m going to do the best job I can, and I know they’ll be able to handle the rest.”

Bradley visibly mused over her words thoughtfully for a few moments. “That’s a lot of trust to place in someone.”

His words made something click in Clara’s mind. Backseaters, specifically WSOs, or, back in the day, RIOs, had to place a lot of trust in the pilots they flew with.

Clara hadn’t ever really given too much thought as to why Bradley hadn’t opted to be an NFO in some capacity rather than a pilot. If he had chosen the other route, it certainly would have been a lot more comparable to his father’s career. But then, it hit her- it was about the control. Just like control had been the motivator for her own career path, it seemed highly likely that the concept of control was what had sparked Bradley’s decision as well. Though the recent grumblings throughout the squadron was that he was likely to transition to a single seater soon, Clara had little doubt that if Bradley would be assigned to fly with a WSO, their safety would be one of his top priorities.

It was hardly a surprise that Bradley was concerned about her, beyond what she would have expected of him by being his friend. He knew very well of a circumstance where a RIO’s trust in their pilot simply hadn’t been enough.

“It is a lot of trust,” Clara said, finally acknowledging his point. “But that’s the easiest way for me to rationalize it.” Another beat of silence passed between them, before she thought of something to lighten the mood. “Besides, someone’s gotta be the voice of reason for the thick-skulled pilots like you.”

Despite the intensity of the conversation, Bradley smirked at her joke.

“And you’re thinking of a worst case scenario,” Clara continued. “I could end up with someone perfectly safe and competent- someone like you. Or Natasha, even.”

Natasha Trace, a friend of Bradley’s from Kingsville, had also become a friend of Clara’s over the past six months. She admired the other young woman’s ability to hold her own. She’d witnessed more than one time where Natasha had put Jake Seresin in his place, and with each time, Clara gained more respect for her. Though Natasha took her job very seriously, she had no problem kicking back a bit outside of work, and was often a third party to their weekend happenings. In general, she was nice to be around, and in all honesty, Clara felt better about leaving knowing that Natasha and Bradley had each other’s backs.

“Maybe,” Bradley conceded, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Or you could end up with someone like Seresin.”

“God, I hope not... But why are you asking all of this?” Clara wondered then.

For the first time in a few minutes, cracks showed in Bradley’s serious front, and he gave her a soft smile. “Oh, you know- I just felt like we were long overdue for a deep discussion.”

“Oh, really? Got anything else on your mind while you’re at it?” Clara half-joked.

“... I guess not.”

Though it wasn’t exactly a solid answer, if he wasn’t going to say anything further, it was not the night to push him. As open as they had been with each other since the start of their friendship, and as much as Clara didn’t mind, but actually rather enjoyed, the deep talks they had, if given the choice, Clara would opt for her memories of him from that night to be more light, happy. The nerves she was beginning to feel from the anticipation of leaving for Virginia Beach the following morning were beginning to feel like a heavy weight, but she hoped the memories of the night to come would help give her some peace.

And Bradley was quite the sight worth remembering that evening. Wind swept sandy brown hair that was a result of the ride in his Bronco. Dark brown eyes that could hold more emotional depth within them than most people ever got to see. The dazzling smile that almost always reached those eyes.

Even the Hawaiian shirt he donned was no deterrent from the hell of a sight he was.

Clara patted his hand lightly and rose from her seat, wanting to halt her rolling thoughts before they got out of control. “I’m gonna go get us another round.”

Bradley’s eyes traveled across the table to where their hands met. Clara noticed this immediately, and began to withdraw her hand slowly, before he stopped her by lightly wrapping his own around hers.

“Wait,” he said, looking at her seriously once again. “... There actually is something else I wanted to talk to you about.”

Clara nodded wordlessly, ignoring the buzzing sensation she got from the feeling of his calloused fingers running across her palm. She sat back down on the stool, but Bradley didn’t let go of her hand. Clara looked at him expectantly, trying her best to be patient as she waited for him to tell her what was so important.

“... I can’t hold up my end of the deal anymore, Clara.”

Her brows furrowed in confusion. “What deal?”

“The deal where we agreed to forget that anything happened between us.”

Her initial reaction was shock; she wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly.

Her second reaction was gratification; so he had known what he’d been doing over the last six months when he had been giving her mixed signals! It was nice to know that she wasn’t the only one who had been having a hard time letting go of the past, try as she might.

But her final reaction, and the one that hit her the strongest, was one of sadness.

They couldn’t have this conversation, not here, not now. She was about to leave to go across the country in the morning, and he still had six months left of training in California. They had had years to come to this sort of revelation about the nature of their relationship, and for one reason or another, neither had been able to do so. Though Clara felt some relief in the fact that she hadn’t been alone in her pining for him, the timing of it made it all the more difficult to accept.

“I see your mind running a million miles an hour, Red Cross.”

Clara knew Bradley hadn’t meant any harm by his attempt at a joke, but she couldn’t help but be slightly irritated by it anyway. “What do you expect me to say to that, Brad?”

“Have you held up your end of the deal?”

Clara frowned. “We were talking about you.”

“And now, I’m asking about you. Can you look me in the eyes and honestly tell me that you haven’t thought about the kiss at all since we made that agreement six months ago?”

She couldn’t. She knew he could tell, too. “We can’t talk about this right now. I’m leaving tomorrow, remember?”

“Then there’s no better time,” Bradley offered, as if the answer was simple.

Clara huffed at his casualness. “Okay, so we’ve both thought about it- what good would talking about it actually do? It won’t solve anything. If anything, it'll just make things between us more complicated. I want you in my life, Brad, and if that means ignoring these damn feelings I have for you until they go away and I can finally accept that it’s better for both of us to just be friends, I’m more than willing to do that.”

The way Bradley was looking at her was… intense, for a lack of better word. He regarded her carefully, his eyes boring into hers as contemplating his next words. “... What if we didn’t have to wait for the feelings to go away?”

“What do you mean?”

“Before I explain, you have to promise to hear me out.”

“Okay.”

“What if we… ‘got it out’ of our system?”

His gaze continued to hold her own as he watched her process the meaning of his subtle suggestion.

“... You’ve got to be fucking joking,” Clara grumbled, attempting to remove her hand from his and rising from her stool.

“Clara, hear me out. Please.”

His tone made her pause. There was no trace of laughter, no hint that this was a joke that he had taken too far. He sounded vulnerable. Part of her wanted him to squirm a little bit, knowing exactly what that felt like. But even though he had been the cause of such feelings for her, she didn’t have the heart to willingly subject him to the same.

Clara took mercy on Bradley and sat back down at the stool, ignoring the eyes of nearby nosey patrons who had begun to eye their table curiously.

Though he seemed relieved that she hadn’t stormed off, yet, Bradley still looked on edge. Whether that was from nerves about her reaction or just the sheer topic of their conversation was unclear. He slowly leaned in closer to her, and Clara found herself remaining rigidly still. His face was just inches from hers, and Clara could only imagine what the girl at the bar would think if she saw them at that moment.

An intimate conversation, indeed.

“Just say the word, and I will drop you off at your apartment, and never speak to you again,” Bradley said, his voice low. Had he not been so close, Clara would have had to strain in order to hear him. “Or, if you want, we can pretend like this conversation never happened- and I promise to hold up my end of the deal this time. You will never hear a peep about this from me, ever again.”

Not sure how to respond, Clara nodded wordlessly to acknowledge that she was very much paying attention.

“I know nothing serious can happen between us for a whole lot of reasons,” Bradley admitted, and if Clara hadn’t been so captivated by his every word at that moment, she would have sworn there was a hint of regret lacing his words. “But we still have tonight.”

Her mouth suddenly felt dry, but feeling no other option under his unwavering gaze, she willed herself to respond. “What exactly are you proposing we do?”

“... It’s not really romantic if I have to spell it out.”

Regardless of the situation, Clara couldn’t help chuckle. “Oh, so this is you trying to be romantic?”

“No, just- ugh.” Thankfully, her joke successfully eased some of the tension. Even Bradley looked a bit grateful for the sudden interruption, and he dropped his gaze to let out a brief, breathy laugh. 

Feeling emboldened, Clara reached out, and placed a hand on his knee, not knowing- or even caring- if she had meant the gesture to be comforting or enticing.

Bradley’s eyes snapped up to hers once again, and the tension quickly magnified. “I don’t know what this is me trying to be. All I know is that I care about you, Clara, a lot more than I should. A lot more than I ever planned on. And, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you feel the same about me.”

For how little Clara had to drink, his verbal admission of his feelings still had her feeling groggy with disbelief. “I care about you a lot more than I should, too.”

The hopeful smile he gave her made her heart skip a beat. “Then, would this really be that crazy? We’re both adults.”

They were. Adults who were probably far too willing to enable each other, but adults nonetheless.

“We could have tonight,” Bradley continued, “And then maybe we can finally be able to move on.”

The suggestion was risky, and emotional damage in some shape or form to one or both of them was very likely, if not imminent. And still, Clara was painfully aware of their hands, one of which was still intertwined with one of his on the table, and the other that was resting comfortably upon his knee. Just the small touches alone were extremely tempting, and she couldn’t help but crave more.

… If she was going to do this crazy of a thing with anybody, Bradley Bradshaw was certainly at the top of her list. Hell, he was the only one on the list. She trusted him full-heartedly.

“What’s your answer, Red Cross?” Bradley asked, sounding starkly meek despite his rather bold suggestion.

“Is that still your first beer?”

Brows furrowed, he glanced over at the beer bottle. “Yeah… Is that still your first drink?”

“Yes. I just wanted to make sure that this wasn’t the alcohol talking.”

“It’s not,” he promised.

“I know.”

“Then what-”

Clara silenced him by closing the distance between them and kissing him. Though he was stunned initially, Bradley returned the kiss with fervor a split second later, his free hand slowly coming up to rest on her waist.

They couldn’t be sure how long they were caught up with one another, but eventually, the need for air outweighed everything else, and the pair were forced to pull away.

“We really don’t have to do this,” Bradley mumbled quickly, his eyes darting towards her lips.

Clara’s heart wrenched a little at his clear concern for her. She squeezed his hand tighter. “I know. But I want to... I want to do this with you, Brad.”

She could tell by the look that flashed across Bradley’s face that her words meant as much to him as the notion did to her. Still, he insisted, “Well, you can still change your mind-”

“If I change my mind at any point tonight, I promise to tell you,” Clara assured him quickly, pulling him to her by his shirt and kissing him once again. When she pulled away a few moments later, she was tempted to laugh by the dazed expression on his face.

“Your place, or mine?” he managed to ask.

“Doesn’t matter, as long as I’m going with you,” she replied breathlessly, unable to control the giddy smile on her lips. But as the realization of what was actually going to happen dawned on her, she found herself suddenly nervous. “Just… Take me to home? Please.”

She would eventually come to realize that ‘home’ was simply wherever he was.

The smile he gave in response her did wonders to soothe her anxiousness. This was Bradley... She had no real cause to worry at all.

Bradley rose from his stool swiftly, holding a hand out to her. “Show me the way, Darling.”

Bradley awoke the next morning to the sun streaming in through a small crack in the curtains. He closed his eyes, sighed contently, and reached out to the space on the bed beside him. When his hands were met with nothing but empty air, he opened his eyes again and frowned.

He sat up, head swiveling around the room as he searched for any sign of his companion who he’d come home with the previous night. Though there was no sign of her, or any of her belongings, for that matter, there were several signs of the activity they had partaken in a few hours before. Various things throughout the room were off just a bit- physically not where he recalled having left them, or otherwise missing from their usual place entirely.

It was almost comical. He didn’t remember them being so particularly clumsy the night before, but he reasoned that they had both been so engrossed on the task at hand that it probably took a back seat in their minds at the time.

It was… indescribable. Better than he had dared to hope for. Better than he probably deserved. Very much like their kiss a few years back, it just felt right. Not that it could ever feel wrong. Not with her.

But, just like that- it was over. Unceremoniously and anti-climatically, he’d been left to process what had happened all by himself. And Clara Wells was gone from his life for the foreseeable future. Again.

Something odd at the foot of Bradley’s bed broke his train of thought. His clothes from the night before were folded in both a neat and yet slightly disheveled fashion, as if it had been done intentionally but also with some haste. He almost laughed into the silent air at the thought of Clara trying to straighten up the room a little before sneaking out earlier in the morning.

At least all of his articles of clothing appeared to be accounted for… with one notable exception.

Bradley smiled fondly. His little kleptomaniac.

Despite himself, Bradley laughed. Being “buddies” was possibly one of the biggest understatements to exist ever when it came to the extent of his feelings about her. But, on a bare minimum level, it was technically true.

And if he had to decide between being buddies, or them being nothing at all, Bradley knew what he’d choose in a heartbeat.

Chapter 4

Masterlist

A/N: Thank you so much for reading! Any and all feedback is most definitely welcomed and appreciated. If you would like to be added to the taglist, please feel free to let me know.😊💙

Taglist: @gretagerwigsmuse @unluckymonaghan @pansexualwitchwhoneedstherapy @roosterschanelslut @letusbewildflowers @roses-and-grasses​

[feanorianethicsdepartment]

Alright, I read your recent post and need to know - what is your interpretation of Maglor’s relationship with the twins?

askjdhslkjag my biggest self-inflicted problem in this fandom is that my take on maglor, elrond, and elros' relationship is so intensely detailed and specific i am forever tormented by none of the fic i read ever quite getting it right (from my perspective; i’ve read plenty of fic that presents a good interpretation on their own terms, it’s just never mine.) it’s simultaneously way darker than the fluffy kidnap dads stuff and nowhere near as black-and-white awful as the anti-fëanorian crowd likes to paint it, it’s messy and complicated and surrounded by darkness, and yet there’s also a sincere connection within it which mostly serves to make all those complications worse. angry teenage elrond is angry for a great many reasons, and the circumstances around him being raised by kinslayers account for at least half of them. there’s lots of complexity here, and i don’t see it in fic nearly as often as i’d like

(warning: the post... feathers? i already have an internet friend called faeiri this could be awkward - anyway, the post she’s talking about includes the line ‘everyone is wrong about kidnap dads except me.’ this post follows on from that in being as much a commentary about why various popular interpretations of both how the kidnapdoption went and the way people subsequently characterise the twins just don’t work for me as it is a setting out of my own ideas. i’m not really interested in getting into discourse here, i’m just trying to get my thoughts down. i’ve read fic with these interpretations before that i’ve liked, even, don’t take this as a Condemnation, aight? also this turned out long as hell, so i’m putting it under a cut)

i can never buy entirely fluffy depictions of kidnap dads

which isn’t to say i don’t read them! sometimes all i want is something sweet, for these kids to get to be happy for once. it’s not like i think their time with the fëanorians was completely devoid of laughter

it’s just. the pet names, the special days out, the home-cooked meals, it can get so treacly it stops feeling like the characters they are in the situation they’re in and turns into Generic Found Family #272

it soaks out all the complexity - which is the thing i am here for - and acts like oh, these kids were never in any danger, they were perfectly happy being abducted by the people who murdered everyone they knew, there’s nothing possibly questionable about this relationship at all

and... yeah. that’s not the characters i know. that’s not the context i know they belong to

i just can’t forget the circumstances that led them to meet

rivers of blood, the air filled with screams, a town ablaze, a woman choosing to die. every interaction the three of them have is going to proceed from that nightmare

(sidenote: i tend to hold it was maglor that raised the twins, with maedhros looming ominously in the background not really getting involved. it’s mostly personal preference, i’ve been in and out of the fandom since before this kidnap dads thing blew up and when i joined that was a perfectly standard reading)

(also the cave thing was a dumb idea, old man, if only because it implies beleriand had streams safe enough for children to play in at that point. the way it separates the twins from the third kinslaying is also something i don’t particularly vibe with)

probably my least favourite angle i’ve seen on the situation (edged out only by ‘maglor was actively abusive towards the twins’ which no no no no no no no no NO) is the idea that maglor (and/or maedhros, append as necessary) took the twins specifically to raise them

like, i get where it’s coming from, but it makes maglor come off as really creepy

(i have read fics where it is indeed played off as really creepy, but that’s not a maglor i have any interest in reading about)

(’mags 100% bad’ is just as facile a take to me as ‘mags 100% good’)

even if you’re saying maglor took them in because they had no one left to take care of them - i highly doubt they were the only children the fëanorians orphaned at sirion. idk, it always makes maglor seem much less sympathetic than i think it’s meant to

i prefer to think of it as more... organic? something that evolved, not something that was preordained. them growing closer gradually, the twins finding an adult who might maybe be on their side, maglor becoming invested in them almost by accident

and then the twins are so comfortable with the second scariest monster in amon ereb they frequently sass him off and maglor’s gotten so used to not hurting them he’s not even thinking about it any more. no one’s quite sure how it happened, but they’ve made a Connection

‘wait aren’t they a murderous warlord of questionable mental stability and a pair of terrified small children who’ve lost everyone they ever knew? isn’t that kinda fucked up?’ yup! that’s the point! complexity!

another idea i don’t like is the idea that maglor was an objectively better parent to the twins than eärendil or elwing

other people have talked about this already, i won’t rehash the whole thing. i will say that while i don’t think elwing was a perfect parent - someone so young, in such a horrible situation, i wouldn’t blame her for screwing up - i do think she (and eärendil) did the best by them they possibly could

this is one of the few things they have in common with maglor

something i come across now and again is the idea that sure, elwing and eärendil weren’t abusive or horrible or anything, but they were a couple of basically-teenagers with so many other responsibilities, there was only so much they could do. maglor, on the other hand, is an experienced adult who could take much better care of the twins

and...

first off, it’s not like mags doesn’t have a job. he’s a warlord, he has a fortress to help run, military shit to handle, lots of other stuff that needs to get done to stop everyone from starving or getting eaten by orcs. i feel like sirion had enough of a government there was plenty of opportunity for elwing to take days off and play with her kids, but in the fëanorian camp nobody really has the time to chase after a couple of toddlers, least of all one of the last points on the command network. they just don’t have the people any more

(seriously, the twins getting a formal education with tutors and classes and shit is a weirdly specific pet peeve of mine. this is a band of renegades, not a royal household; if there’s anyone left with those kinds of skills they almost certainly have more important things to do)

more than that, though - well, a quick glance through my late stage fëanorians tag should tell you a lot about what i think maglor’s mental state is like at this point. he is so accustomed to violence death means nothing to him, he’s lost most of his capacity for genuinely positive emotion to an endless century of defeat and despair, he hates everything in the universe, especially himself, he’s only able to keep functioning through a truly astounding amount of denial, and he covers it all up with a layer of snark and feigned apathy, which he defends aggressively because he’s subconsciously realised that if it breaks he’ll have absolutely nothing left

(maedhros, for the record, is... i’d say more stable, but at a lower point. maglor may interact with the world mostly through cold stares and mocking laughter, but at least his mind is firmly rooted in the present)

(on the other hand, at least maedhros lets himself be aware of what they are and where their road will lead)

which... this doesn’t mean maglor doesn’t try to be kind to the twins, or rein in his worst impulses around them

there’s just so little of him left but the weapon

he stalks through the halls like a portent of death and gets into hours-long screaming matches with maedhros and has definitely killed people in front of the twins

not even as, like, a deliberate attempt to scare them, but because when you solve most of your problems by stabbing them it’s pretty much a given that people who spend a lot of time around you are going to see you do it at least once

and sometimes, he curls up in an empty hallway, and weeps

... suffice it to say i don’t think elwing’s the more preoccupied, or the less mentally ill, parent here

just. in general, the fëanorians aren’t cackling boogeymen, but they’re not particularly nice either

no one has the energy left for that. not these isolated and weary soldiers at the end of a long losing war and the beginning of the end of the world. they don’t really bother to guard the kids against them escaping. where else are they going to go?

the sheer despair that must have been in the fëanorian camp after sirion, the knowledge that the cause cannot be fulfilled, that they are utterly forsaken, that they’re really just waiting to die -

it can’t have been a happy place to grow up in, under the shadow of loss and grief and deeds unrepentable, and the slow march of inevitable defeat

they would have had a better childhood if they stayed in sirion, raised by people who knew how to hope

but that isn’t the childhood they had. and despite everything i’ve said, i don’t think that childhood was an entirely awful one

yeah, see, this is where the other side of my self-inflicted fandom catch-22 comes in. just as much of the pro-kidnap dads stuff comes off as overly saccharine and simplified to me, i find much of the anti-kidnap dads stuff equally simplistic in the opposite direction

the idea that maglor and the fëanorians never meant anything to elros and elrond, that they had no effect on the people they became at all, that it was just a horrible thing that happened when they were children, easily thrown in the rear-view mirror...

that’s even more impossible to me than the idea that life with the fëanorians was 100% fluffy and nice

like, i’ve seen the take that elros and elrond hated the fëanorians from start to finish. they were perfect little sindarin princes, loyal to their people and the memory of doriath, spurning every scrap of kindness offered to them and knowing just what to say to twist the knife into the kinslayers’ wounds

... dude. they were six. hell, given their peredhelness, mentally they could easily have been younger

what six year old has a firm grasp of their ethnic identity? what six year old is fully aware of their place in history? what six year old would understand the politics that led to their situation?

don’t get me wrong, i can see hatred in there. but something else that doesn’t get acknowledged alongside it often enough is the fear

some of the stuff i’ve read feels like it gives the kids too much power in the situation. they’re perfectly happy to talk back to and belittle the people who burned down their hometown and killed everyone they ever knew, like miniature adults who don’t feel threatened at all

and, like, six. i can see them going for insults as a defensive measure, but it is defensive. it’s covering up fear, not coming from secure disdain

(and a lot of those insults sound, again, like things an adult who’s already familiar with the fëanorians would say, not a scared child who’s lost almost everything. why would a six year old raised by sindar and gondolindrim know what the noldolantë is, let alone what it means to maglor?)

(... i’m just ranting about this one fic that’s been ruffling my feathers for five years straight now, aren’t i)

i mean, i write elrond as the world’s angriest teenager, who snipes at maglor pretty much constantly, but the thing about angry teenage elrond is that he’s angry teenage elrond

he’s spent long enough with the fëanorians he has a pretty secure position within the camp, and he knows that maglor won’t hurt him from a decade and change of maglor not, in fact, hurting him

but as a small and terrified child abducted by the monsters his mother had nightmares about? he fluctuated wildly between ‘randomly guessing at things to say that wouldn’t get him killed’ ‘screaming at maglor to go away in words rarely more complicated than that’ 'desperately trying not to do or say anything in the hopes of not being noticed’ and ‘hiding’

(and i don’t think the twins were never in any danger from the fëanorians, either. quite besides the point that before they started orbiting maglor nobody was really sure what to do with them... well, they wouldn’t be the first children of thingol’s line the minions took revenge on)

(fortunately for them, maglor did, in fact, take them under his wing. by this point even their own followers are shit scared of the last two sons of fëanor, nobody’s going to mess with their stuff and risk getting mauled. tactically, it was a pretty good decision for a couple of toddlers)

more to the point, i feel like a child that young, in a situation that horrible, wouldn’t reject any kindness they were offered, any soothing touch in a universe of terror

in a world full of big scary monsters, the best way to survive is to get the biggest scariest monster possible to protect you. that’s how elros rationalises it when they’re, like, eight, mentally, but at the time they were just latching on to the only person around them who seemed to care about them

that’s how it started, on their end. two very young very scared children lost in a neverending nightmare clinging tightly to the lone outstretched pair of hands

as for maglor...

i’ve called mags evil before, but i see that as more of a... technical term? he is evil because he did the murder, he remains evil because he won’t stop doing the murder. hot take: murder bad

but that doesn’t make him, like, a moustache-twirling saturday morning cartoon villain. he is deeply unhappy with the position he’s in and the person he’s become, and he’s always trying not to take that final step over the edge

it’s not that i can’t see a maglor who is abusive or manipulative or who sees the twins more as objects than people. it’s just that that characterisation is one i am profoundly uninterested in. i do occasionally read fic with it, but it never enters my own headcanons

horrible people can do good things!! kinslayers can do good things!! the fallen are capable of humanity!! people can do both good and evil things at the same time, because people are complicated!! maglor is not psychologically incapable of actually taking pity on these kids!!!!

it’s... again, complexity. the fëanorians straddle the line between black and white, which is a lot less sharp in the legendarium than it’s sometimes characterised as. it’s what draws me to their characters so much, why i have so many stupid headcanons about them. pretending they fall firmly on either side of the line is my real fandom pet peeve

and, like, this moment? this sincere connection between a bloodstained warlord and two children who will grow up to be great and kind in equal measure? i may not entirely like the direction the fandom’s taken it recently, but that beat, that relationship, it still gets me

so no, i don’t think elrond and elros’ years with the fëanorians were an endless cavalcade of abuse and misery. i think there was love there, despite the darkness all around them

an old, tired monster, and the two tiny children it protects

maglor never hurts the twins, not ever, not once. his claws are sharp and his fangs are keen, if he so much as swatted them he’d rip them in half. instead he folds down the razor edges of his being, interacting with them ever so carefully. he has nightmares of suddenly tearing into their skin

seriously, the power differential between them is so great, maglor so much as raising his voice would break any trust they have in this horribly dangerous creature. fics where he does corporal punishment always get the side-eye from me

the mood of their relationship is... i find it hard to put into words. melancholy, maybe, like a sunny afternoon a few days before the end of the world. three people who’ve lost so much finding what respite they can in each other as the world slowly crumbles around them

there are times when it feels like the three of them exist in a world of their own, marked out by the edges of the firelight. maglor telling stories of the stars, elros giving relaxed irreverent commentary, elrond getting a few moments to just be, all their troubles kept at bay

they are the last two lights in a world sunk into darkness, the last two living beings he does not on some level hate. he will tear his own heart out before he sees them in pain

he teaches them to ride, he teaches them to read, he gives them everything he still has left. the twins should never have been in this situation, maglor probably isn’t entirely fit to take care of them, but it is what it is, and they take what love they can

(maglor depends on the twins emotionally a bit more than any adult should rely on any child. he’s still very much the caretaker in their relationship, but that relationship is the only one he has left that’s not stained by a century of rage and grief. he’s obsessed with them, maedhros tells him frequently. maglor’s standard response to this is to try to gouge maedhros’ eyes out)

(that particular darker side to their relationship, where maglor’s attachment to the twins turns into a desperate possessiveness - that’s not something i think i’ve ever seen in fic. which is a shame, it feels much closer to my own characterisation than the standard ways this relationship gets maleficised. darker, in a different way than usual. horribly compelling in its plausibility)

however you want to read it, i don’t think you can deny this is a relationship that defines elrond and elros’ childhood. they were raised in the woods by a pack of kinslayers, the text is quite clear on this

but i’ve seen a lot of talk about how elros and elrond are only sirion’s children. they are completely 100% sindarin, they love and forgive eärendil and elwing thoroughly and without question, they identify with doriath over - even gondolin, let alone tirion. the fëanorians - the people who raised them - had zero effect on the people they grew into and the selves they created

and that, more than anything else, i find utterly unbelievable

look, i get what this is a reaction to. a lot of the kidnap dads stuff paints the fëanorians as elrond and elros’ ‘real’ family, and i’ve already talked about what i think of the idea that maglor-and-possibly-also-maedhros were better parents than eärendil and elwing. i think it’s reductive and overly optimistic and just a little too neat

but to say instead that elrond and elros held no great love in their hearts for maglor, no lingering affinity with the fëanorians, no influence on their identity from the people they grew up around, none at all? that after it happened they just left it behind and resumed being the same people they were in sirion?

that strikes me as just as much an oversimplification. it sands down all the potential rough edges of their identity, all that inconvenient complexity that stops them from fitting into any well-defined box, and replaces it with a nice safe simple self-conception i find just as flat and boring as declaring them 100% fëanorian

we can quibble over who they call ‘father’ (i personally find that whole debate kinda petty) but denying that it was actually maglor who was the closest thing they knew to a parent for most of their childhoods, and that that would, in fact, affect the way they thought of themselves and their family, elides so many interesting possibilities out of existence

(i’m not even going to get into the most braindead take i have ever heard on the subject, namely that because their time with the fëanorians was such a small fraction of elrond’s total lifespan it was like being kidnapped for two weeks as a toddler and had no greater significance than that. do you not understand what childhood is????)

like, i tend to think of elrond as a child as being very loudly not-a-fëanorian. elros is more willing to go with the flow - hey, if the creepy kinslayer wants kids, elros is happy to play into that in order to not be murdered - but elrond is very firm that he’s not happy to be here and he doesn’t belong with them

(this is after they get over their initial terror, of course, when they’ve realised they won’t be fed to the orcs for the tiniest slight. even so, elrond only really gets shirty about it around people he’s comfortable with, whose reactions he can reasonably guess at. naturally, the first person he does it to is maglor)

elros calls maglor their father exactly once, when they’re... maybe early preteens? this is because elrond hears him do it and immediately loses his shit. they have a dad, elrond says, in tears, and a mum, and any day now their real parents are going to come to pick them up and take them home

... right?

it gets harder to believe as the years roll on, as their memories of sirion fade, as they find their own places within the host, as maglor watches over them as they grow. elrond still mentally sets himself apart from the fëanorians, but it’s more of an effort every year. life in the fëanorian camp is the only one he’s ever really known. he can barely remember his mother’s voice

then the war of wrath starts, and the fëanorian host drifts closer to the army of valinor, and the twins come into contact with non-fëanorians for the first time in forever, and it becomes clear just how obviously fëanorian elrond is. he always insisted he wasn’t like the kinslayers at all, but he dresses like them, talks like them, fights like them

the myth cycles the edain tell are almost completely unfamiliar to him, he barely remembers the shape of the songs of lost doriath. even these sarcastic commentary and subversive reinterpretations he made of maglor’s stories - those were still maglor’s stories! he’s been trying to guess at the person he was meant to be, but it’s growing nightmarishly blatant how little elrond ever knew about him

instead, the people he was born to are as alien to him as the orcs of morgoth. he is a fëanorian, through and through

... yeah, elrond (and/or elros) having an absolutely massive identity crisis upon being reintroduced to his quote-unquote ‘true kin’ is another angle i’d love to see in fic that i don’t think i’ve ever come across. all those potential grey areas around who they are and who they’re supposed to be sound utterly fascinating, and i think it’s the complexity i hate to see elided over the most

i really, really doubt they could effortlessly slot back into being eärendil and elwing’s children. not when they’ve been surrounded by, lived alongside, been raised by the people who were supposed to enemies for most of their lives

they just don’t fit into that box any more. they can’t

speaking of eärendil and elwing, while i do agree that they both (especially elwing) get a lot more flak than they deserve, i don’t agree that therefore elrond and elros were never the slightest bit mad at them and fully forgave them for everything with no reservations

because, well, they were left behind. elwing had no other choice, but they were still left behind; it led to the world being saved, but they were still left behind. all the best intentions in the universe don’t erase the weeks and months and years of waiting, of a hope that grew thinner and frailer until it finally quietly broke

that’s a real hurt, and a real grievance. even if the twins rationally understand that their parents were making the best out of their terrible situation, you can’t logic away emotions like that. it’s perfectly possible for them to know they have no reason to resent eärendil or elwing, and yet still harbour that bitterness and pain

(i did write a thing once where elrond loudly rejects eärendil as his father in favour of maglor, but something i didn’t add in that i probably should have is that elrond later regretted doing that)

(not like, several centuries later, when he’d grown old and wise. two hours later, when he’d calmed down. but he was still legitimately angry at eärendil, because the one thing angry teenage elrond was not lacking in was reasons to be mad at the adults around him, and before he could figure out if he had anything less furious to say the hosts of the valar left middle-earth behind)

(it’s another element to the tragedy of the whole thing. in that particular story, which is mostly aiming for maximum pain, the only thing elrond’s birth parents know about their son for thousands of years is that he hates them)

(and he doesn’t, not really. you can’t hate someone you’ve never known)

not that i think they couldn’t ever make up with their parents! fics where elrond and his birth parents work past all the things that lie between them and form a functional familial bond despite it all give me life. i just don’t like the idea that there’s nothing difficult for them to work past

i don’t like the idea that elrond and elros would naturally, effortlessly identify with the mother they last saw when they were six and the people they only vaguely remember. i can see them doing it as a political move, i can see them going for it as a deliberate personal choice, but i can’t seeing it being immediate and automatic and easy

no matter how great a pair of heroes eärendil and elwing are, that doesn’t change the fact that to elrond and elros, they’re at most a few scattered memories and a collection of far-off stories. and so long as the twins stay in middle-earth, they’re never going to draw any closer

compared to the dynamic, multifaceted, personal, and deep bonds they have with the fëanorians - who, and i know i keep saying this but i think it gets tossed aside way more casually than it should, are the people who actually raised them, their birth parents must feel like a distant idea

and that’s why i can never buy interpretations of elrond as 100% sindarin, a pure son of doriath, with no messy grey areas or awkward jagged edges to his identity. given everything we know about his life, it seems almost cartoonishly simplistic

honestly it seems like a narrative a bunch of old doriathrin nobles trying to manouevre elrond into being high king of the sindar or something would propagate. it's neat and nice and tidy, something that’d be much more convenient for everyone if elrond did feel that way

but i just don’t see how he can. this narrative is easy and simple in a way real people never are, it ignores all the forces pulling him apart. elrond being uncomplicatedly sindarin with the life he lives and the people he's close to - that doesn’t make any sense to me

which isn’t to say i think he’s 100% noldorin, from either a gondolindrim or a fëanorian perspective. (i find it a little more believable, given, again, who he grew up around and who he hangs out with, but it’s still a bit too reductive for my tastes.) it’s also not to say i couldn’t believe an elrond who made an active choice to emphasise his sindarin heritage

it’s not how i think of him, but it works. i don’t have a problem with other people interpreting the complexities of the twins’ identities differently

i just have a problem with people acting like it doesn’t exist

in general i think there’s a lot untapped potential that gets left behind when you declare the twins, separately or together, as All One Thing

they’re descended from half the noble houses of beleriand, and they have deep personal ties to most of the rest. they belong to all of the free peoples even the dwarves, somehow, probably and i feel like that was kind of the old man’s point? so many peoples meet in them, to say they wholly belong to any one species is probably an oversimplification

they sit at a crossroads of potential identities, and rather than narrowing down their worldviews to one single path, they take the hard road and choose all of them. that’s what you need to do, if you want to change the world

and, to bring this back to my ostensible topic, in my estimation at least this mélange of possible selves does include them as fëanorians! it’s not overpowering, but it’s certainly there, and the adults they grow into long after they’ve left the host still bear influence from their childhood

nothing super obvious, nothing that wouldn’t stand out if you didn’t know what to look for, but there’s something almost incandescent in how fiercely elros reaches out for his dreams

there’s something almost defiant in elrond’s drive to be as kind as summer

as for who they publically claim as their family... honestly, it depends. while it’s usually more tactically prudent for elros to connect himself to his various human ancestors, on occasion he does find a use for his free in with the elf mafia, and elrond, code switcher par excellence, is famously the son of whoever is most politically convenient at the moment, which is rarely, but not never, maglor

(in the privacy of their own minds, well, eärendil and elwing may have been the parents elros was supposed to have, but maglor was the parent he actually had, and elros doesn’t particularly care to mope over what might have been. elrond, for his part, figures that after all the shit maglor has put him through, the least that bastard owes him is a father)

but honestly? i think before any of their mountain of identities, before thinking of themselves as sindarin or gondolindel or hadorian or haladin or fëanorian or anything, elrond and elros identify as themselves

they are peredhil, they are númenóreans, they are whoever they make themselves to be. that’s how elrond finally resolved his identity, figured out who he was and found something past the pain and the rage

he wasn’t doriathrin, or gondolindrin, or falathrin, or fëanorian, or whatever else. he was elrond, no more and no less

and that person, elrond, could be whatever he chose to be

... elros came to a similar conclusion, with much less sturm und drang that he’s willing to admit. being able to go ‘hey, i can’t possibly be biased towards any one of your cultures, because i’m descended from all of you and i was raised by murderelves’ makes it a lot easier to unite people around your personal banner, turns out

the stories other people tried to force on them shattered into pieces, and the peredhel twins were free to shape themselves into anything they could dream of

and as the new world struggles alive, these lost children of an Age of death begin to bloom into their full glorious selves -

i just. i love the poetry of that. despite every single shadow that hangs over their past, despite all the clashing notes pulling them apart, they harmonise it all into a greater, kinder theme, determined to make their world a better place in whatever way they can

they fail, of course, but so do all things. the inevitable march of entropy doesn’t diminish the long millennia they (and their descendants) held onto the light

and their growing up in the fëanorian host definitely had a huge effect on the noble lords they became. you can see it in elros’ loud ambition to create a land of happiness and hope, elrond’s quiet resolve to heal all the hurts inflicted by this marred reality

it wasn’t a perfect time by any means, but neither was it a nightmare. it was what it was, a desperate existence at the edge of a knife where, nevertheless, they were loved

even after years upon decades upon centuries have passed, it’s hard for the wise king and the honourable sage to separate out and identify all the conflicting emotions swirling around their childhood. they never knew eärendil or elwing, true, but they also never really knew maglor

not as equals, not as adults, not as people who could truly understand him. he disappeared into the fog of history, leaving only childhood memories of razor-sharp, gentle hands

it’s messy and it’s complicated and getting any real closure would be like shoving their way through a thornbush with bare hands even if elrond could find the shithead, and yet at the core of it all, there is light. not the brightest of lights, maybe, but an enduring one

that contrast, above all, that note of warmth amidst the shadows, is what fascinates me so much about their relationship. three screwed up people in a screwed up world, finding a little peace with each other

and the fact that somehow, it does have a good ending - the children grow up magnificent and compassionate and just, they become exemplars of all their peoples, lodestars of the new world born out of the ashes of the old - that makes it seem to me like this relationship must have contained some fragment of happiness

but, fuck, all the darkness that surrounds that love, all the tangled-up emotions its existence necessitates, all the prefabricated self-identities it can never slot into - nothing about it is simple, nothing about it is easy, and i find that utterly enthralling. especially how, despite everything, that flickering light never goes out

well, i don’t think it does, anyway. my take on this relationship is both complicated enough no one else ever quite gets it right and well-defined enough every single ‘error’ in other people’s interpretations sticks out like a kinslayer in rivendell

it is an entirely self-inflicted problem, i will admit. other people are allowed to interpret those complexities differently from me, and it’s entirely my own fault i lack the :waves hands around nebulously: to write my own hypothetical fic on the subject at a pace faster than glacial

still, though. i do wish there was more fic out there that engaged with these complexities. a lot of the common fandom interpretations of this relationship just sweep it all away

[captainkirkk]

✩ WEEKLY FIC ROUND-UP ✩

Danny Phantom

after school summons by blueh

"So this is the fabled Ghost King," the man says like he expected better.

Danny feels he should almost be offended if it isn't for the tiny detail that these cultists—who summoned him by using salt and goat bones—assume he is the ghost king. "…Did you seriously confuse me with Pariah Dark?"

The man pauses. "Pariah Dark?"

"Yes! He's like fifteen feet tall, has a huge sword, is a pain in the ass, and has, like, an entire ghost army. I have, I dunno, pre-calc homework in my bag. We are not the same."

Or: Danny accidentally gets summoned. He’s not happy about it.

Stranger Things

Runaway by ohmybgosh

Jim Hopper just wants to find a Christmas present for his telepathic daughter. He didn't ask for all these extra teenagers in his home.

Star Wars

The Emperor Skywalker Conspiracy by loosingletters

The Emperor is dead and so is Darth Vader. So. Uh. Who exactly inherits the Galactic throne?

Or, the Holonet discovers the existence of one Luke Skywalker and promptly makes it a meme. I present you the one long rant of a lone blogger trying to disentangle the mystery behind Luke Skywalker and his maybe inheritance of the Empire.

Clone Wars

Living Memory, My Fate to Follow by elsa3beth

Ben Kenobi expected his tutelage on Tatooine under the force spirit of Qui-Gon Jinn to yield a new perspective on the galaxy and his place within it. He just did not expect his last lesson to be so…literal. Finding himself back in the early days of the Clone Wars, Ben, now once again General Obi-Wan Kenobi, must struggle with the failures of a past he has long suppressed, while others conspire to give him hope for a future that might yet be.

It is a road paved with military campaigns, media faux pas, too many OCs to name, good Jedi, and a very very slowly developed angst that will eventually come to a boil. An exploration of war and friendship, and the moral grays of the Star Wars universe.

Capacitance by Jessepinwheel

"Oh, Cody," General Kenobi says softly, in a tone of voice that makes Cody cold with dread. "Since this war started, I have never not been in pain." Or: The story where Obi-Wan takes on other people's pain because he's that kind of a person.

second skin by 8386444

Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern. Cody doesn't quite know how to feel about the way General Kenobi keeps ending up in clone armor.

Show Me Where I Belong by Quillfeet

Master Qui-Gon once forced Obi-Wan to choose between the Jedi or the lives of children. Obi-Wan had struggled with the consequences of that choice. He feared that he made the wrong one.

But then the Mand'alor Jaster helped him and the Young, throwing everything Obi-Wan knows into chaos. Now Obi-Wan must choose between the Republic he was raised to save or the Mandalorian Empire that saved him.

Beach Party by otherhawk

Cody and Obi-Wan take time out from the war to throw a party and ensure the 212 has a chance to relax.

"The fact that the entire of the 212th had a couple of days R&R that just happened to coincide with them finishing setting up a staging area on the incredibly beautiful tropical moon of Kaleto, just as a large shipment of what might be called 'luxuries' were delivered to General Kenobi, and while the 501st arrived to take the watch, might seem like a genuine miracle. Might. If Cody wasn't fully aware that it was the culmination of a three week strategy that he and his Jedi had worked on as assiduously as any military campaign. "

[ahsokasleftbicep]

Name and Soul: Chapter 1

Alright everyone here is the first chapter of the series. Apologies for the delay, I had a lot of editing to do. I hope you enjoy it!

@mqgriett

Crosshair x F! reader

Word Count: 3440

Warnings: Amnesia like stuff. Language. Bad Batch SPOILERS: DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THE FIRST EPISODE OF THE TV SERIES!

It’s odd how quickly things change on the battlefield. This kind of change you never expected. You and the Bad Batch met about a year after the war started and with your sharpshooting and other combat skills, Hunter offered that you join their team. You got along with most of the group very quickly, with the exception of Crosshair. Over time, after a lot of sneers and eye rolling, the two of you grew closer. After a particularly grueling mission, both of you admitted how you felt and now the two of you barely went anywhere without the other. You were the perfect duo, with both of your skills combined, missions went without a hitch almost every time.

The group had been called to the planet Kaller to assist Master Billaba. Her padawan, Caleb, you believed his name was, led you and the boys to his master. That’s when it happened… that change, the shift in the air. The troops turned on the Jedi and fired on her. Order 66. Caleb bolted, running off into the woods, sliding down hills with a certain hatred in his eyes that you had never seen in someone so young, so… innocent. You, Hunter, and Crosshair ran after him. The woods were so peaceful compared to the chaos everywhere else.

It was quiet and Caleb seemed to disappear. You looked around and saw him in the trees. “Hunter, Crosshair, I found him.” While Hunter tries to convince the kid to come down, Crosshair aims at the kid. “Crosshair no!” You tackle him down into the snow.

Caleb runs off, Hunter yells out, “Crosshair, what are you doing?”

“Following orders. Get off me Y/n.” Crosshair shoves you off him before getting up.

You follow him, an angry look on your face. “What the hell is going on with you?”

“I’m following my orders. We need to find that Jedi.” The man walks off, you tailing behind him.

“Crosshair, we don’t even know what the order is.” You grab his hand, “Just wait until we know what’s happening.”

He turns his head towards you before scoffing, “Fine.”

Good soldiers follow orders. Crosshair mumbled that before Hunter sent you back with the others. When all of you got back to the ship, Tech explained that all the clones had been ordered to execute the Jedi. Saying that they committed treason and tried to kill the Chancellor. The war was just somehow over. None of it made any sense. According to the sergeant, Caleb died in a fall. You all got ordered back to Kamino, offloading and heading to your barracks.

“Hunter let that Jedi kid escape, or do you want to keep lying?” Crosshair sneered.

Hunter gets up, “I don’t like to think of executing our commanders as an objective.”

“An order is an order, Hunter.”

“Since when Cross? You’ve never been one to follow orders, why are you starting now.” You raise your voice to the two men. Everyone goes quiet.

“Don’t act noble y/n, you’re as much to blame as Hunter is for letting that Jedi escape. I could have gotten him if you hadn’t stopped me.”

“He was a child!” You walk up to him, glaring into his eyes.

“He was a traitor!” Crosshair pushes you back before continuing to clean his weapon.

You speak up after a while. “This doesn’t make any sense. General Billaba and her battalion have been in numerous battles, serving alongside each other for years.”

Echo speaks up this time, “How could they turn on her like that?”

“Because of the regs programming. It’s been documented that the Kaminoans inhibited the functions of clones to engineer them to follow orders without any question” Tech explains. “They manipulated everything, Crosshair’s sharpshooting and Hunter’s enhanced sense. And of course my exceptional mind. I assume that we are immune,” Tech glances at Crosshair. “at least, most of us.”

All personnel report to the staging area for a briefing on the state of the Republic.

--

You felt so out of place in the staging area, surrounded by clones that felt off to you. Their mannerisms were different, more robotic. You were drawn back at attention when Chancellor- no Emperor Palpatine began speaking.

....And the Jedi rebellion has been foiled. The remaining Jedi will be hunted down and defeated. The attempt on my life has left me scarred and deformed. But I assure you. My resolve has never been stronger! In order to ensure the security and continuing stability…

… the Republic will be reorganized… into the first Galactic Empire!

“Galactic Empire?” You look over to your team in confusion. Sudden cheers ripple across the room, the other clones celebrating like it's the greatest thing in the world.

--

Tech and Wrecker were arguing at the table. You kept looking at Crosshair, he was acting odd, well more that usual. He’s still acting like a prick, so that’s a good sign. He let you sit next to him, so that was good too. But he kept rubbing his head, like he had a migraine of some kind… so odd. You nudged his thigh.

“Are you feeling well, Cross? You look sick.”

“Thanks for the compliment, y/n.”

“You know what I mean... tell me what’s going on.”

“Just a migraine, don’t worry about it.”

“An Imperial’s been sent to evaluate the clones.” Hunter speaks as he sits down.

“What kind of evaluation?”

“Hopefully not mental. Clearly we’d never pass that… well, maybe y/n could.” Tech nods his head to you.

“Oh I doubt it, with all the stuff we’ve been through together, I’d probably fail.” You take a sip of your water before something catches your eye.

Omega shifts awkwardly, “Hello again. Omega. From earlier?.... in the corridor.”

“Yeah, kid. We remember.” Hunter raised his eyebrow at the child.

Hunter was about to ask about the kids parents before a couple regs interrupted. “Check it out. The defect squad’s got themselves a recruit.” Before you can react, Omega throws her food at the clone. Hunter tries to diffuse the situation, but you didn’t get your throw in so you grab your tray.

“Y/n, don’t.” Crosshair attempts to grab your wrist but just misses you.

“Don’t worry, Cross. I won’t miss.” You wink at him.

“Hey Wrecker, let's show the kid how it’s done, yeah?” You aim before to throw the tray at the clone. “Oops, my hand must’ve… slipped.”

All hell breaks loose and punches are thrown. Echo got knocked out, when the boys got up to go get him, you walked by Crosshair. Here goes nothing.

“Crosshair?”

“Hm? What is it?”

You grab his hand and pull him into a hall. “What happened on Kaller? Tell me what happened.”

“I told you, it’s just-”

“Why are you lying to me?” You pull his hand, drawing him closer.

“There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s you all. You’re the ones who refused to carry out the order.”

“An order to kill a child, Crosshair.”

“That child was a traitor to the Empire.”

“But a child nonetheless.” You retort.

“You don’t understand, none of you do. Just drop it.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. Crosshair, you’re worrying me.”

The man looks down at you, he looks so lost. “There is nothing wrong. I promised I would never lie to you when I proposed.” He tugs at the delicate chain around your neck, fiddling with the ring that he gave you just weeks before.

You look at him, skeptical, “And you’ll tell me if something is wrong? Cross your heart?”

His lips tilt up, “Cross my heart.”

--

Echo told you all about Tarkin. When you all started heading towards the training facility, the shock troopers stopped you.

“Y/n L/n? Admiral Tarkin has asked you to sit out of this battle simulation.”

You furrow your brows, “He’s asking me to not train with my team?” You look at Hunter and shrug, “I’ll be watching, I guess… Be careful, something doesn’t feel right.”

Wrecker speaks up, “Oh don’t worry Y/n, we’ll be fine!”

When you arrive at the observation deck, you are greeted by Lama Su and who you assume is Admiral Tarkin.

“Ms. L/n.” The prime minister greets you in a monotone voice.

“Prime Minister, may I-” you were interrupted by Tarkin.

“We can dismiss formalities, begin the simulation. Ms. L/n, you will be answering some questions for me.”

“....Of course, Admiral” You stand next to the man, watching the boys go through the course.

“What is your opinion of this team, L/n?”

“My opinion, sir? Well they are the best group I have worked with. Their skills are the most impressive I’ve seen.” You speak as you watch Crosshair take out the tower cannons. Wrecker is having the time of his life by the looks of things. So far so good.

“Switch to live fire.” Your blood runs cold, live fire? What is going on here? You watch the new droids take their place down below, Wrecker got hit and you tensed, unaware that Tarkin noticed your worry.

“And what of your relationship with these clones?”

“My relationship sir?” Your eyes catch onto Crosshair in the tower, moving to run out the door when he almost falls from the tower. Tarkin didn’t miss that either. He turned his head to you, an eyebrow raised.

“Surely you’re aware that relationships within the military are forbidden, especially with these… clones.” The bile in his tone made you sick, you wanted to punch him.

“I’m not sure what you’re suggesting Admiral, but I can assure you that my relationship with my team is strictly as comrades.”

“I’m sure of it then. I will be sending Clone Force 99 on a mission. I ask that you stay in Kamino during that time. And one more thing.” Tarkin turns to you. “Did your team carry out Order 66?”

You grit your teeth, “Yes sir, the death of the general and her padawan were confirmed, was that not clear to you?”

“Only the death of General Billaba was confirmed, a counter report was filed by one of your own says otherwise.” Tarkin turns and walks out. “That will be all Ms. L/n, you are dismissed.”

Once Tarkin was out of sight, you ran back to the barracks. You rush in, seeing the boys, frustrated looks on their face. “Who’s that Imperial bastard think he is?!”

Echo turns, “Y/n! Are you alright? What happened?”

“He questioned me about you guys. Asked of my opinion… and of my relationship with you all…”

“That bastard,” Echo clenches his fist, “He knows everything about everyone. He’s got it out for us.”

You look at Crosshair, “Tarkin said that one of us filed a counter-”

The door slides open and the devil himself walks through, “That was quite an impressive display, Nala Se claims that you are all more capable than an army.”

Hunter steps forward, “You have a mission for us, sir?”

“Yes, a group of insurgents in the Onderon sector. They must be dealt with. Unfortunately, Ms. L/n will not be able to join you. She will be staying here on Kamino while you complete this task.”

--

You help Tech load the last bit of supplies on the ship. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll stay in the barracks until you come back.”

“It shouldn’t take us long. If everything goes according to plan that is.” Tech says.

You smile and walk down the ramp.

“Y/n.” Crosshair calls you over.

“Yes Cross?”

He takes your hand and runs his fingers over your wrist, avoiding your eyes. “There’s something-”

“Crosshair! Let’s go!”

He looks back at you, apologizing. You squeeze his hand, “It’s okay Crosshair, we can talk about it when you come back.” You lean up and kiss his cheek. “ Be careful, okay.”

“Okay, y/n.” He pressed his lips to your temple before climbing up the ramp. They take off and you turn around, finding Omega behind you.

“Hey, uh, Omega right?”

“Yeah! And you’re y/n.” You can’t help but notice the worry in her features.

“Is something wrong?” You lean closer when the child just nods

“Kamino isn’t safe anymore, we need to get out of here. Something is going to happen, I just don’t know what. But the boys aren’t safe here.”

You kneel to her height, “Okay, I believe you. Something has been off ever since the order was declared. Keep quiet for now, okay. When the boys come back, we’ll figure something out.” Omega nods and runs off to Nala Se.

--

“Y/n!” Omega rushes into the barracks.

“Omega! What are you doing here?” You walk up and close the door. “Oh hey AZI.”

-“Ms. L/n. Omega, Nala Se instructed us to stay in the medical wing.”

“You guys can stay, think of it as a research assignment.” You smile at the girl.

Omega and AZI are looking around the barracks when troopers come to the door.

“You are not authorized to be here.”

You speak up, “Omega is fine, I’ll keep an eye on her.”

The trooper turns to his partner, “Pack up their gear and take it to the hangar. You two, you’re coming with me.”

“We’ve done nothing wrong, and you are not touching our stuff. Back off!”

The troopers grab you and Omega.

“Let go of her!” You struggle against his grip, then everything goes black.

--

You groan and open your eyes.

“Y/n! Are you okay? They hit you a-and then threw us here!”

You grab Omega’s hand. “Slow down, I don’t know what’s happening, but you need to stay calm okay?”

The door slid open, revealing the batch, they were missing their armor. “Guys!”

“Y/n, what happened?” Hunter helps you off the ground. Crosshair just rubbed his head and walked to a corner.

“I don’t know, they just threw us in here.” You rub your head. “What are you guys doing here, what happened to the insurgents?”

Hunter pauses, “They weren’t droids, they were people. There were children and elderly. We didn’t hurt them.”

From the corner, Crosshair interjects, “Because Hunter went soft, he had us disobey orders.”

“What? Crosshair, they were living people.” You look at him, confused.

“We’re locked in here because of him. First the padawan, then Gerrera. You’re becoming a liability, Sergeant.”

“Enough.” Everyone looks at you, “None of this is helping us get the hell out of here.”

--

After Omega spoke to your fiance, you quietly sit next to him. “Crosshair, I know you’re the one who filed the report.”

“How smart you are, y/n.”

“You don’t have to do this. You would never do this.” You're interrupted by the man that threw you in here.

“CT-9904, you’re coming with us.”

Hunter jumps up, “Oh, no, no, no. We stay together”

“Stand down!”

“Crosshair!”

“I said stand down!” The trooper shoves you back into the cell.

--

As Crosshair puts on his armor, he notices a chain with a ring around his neck. He doesn’t remember who or what it’s for. Help me, please. Don’t hurt them. Don’t hurt y/n.

Tarkin approaches him, “CT-9904, the prisoners have escaped from the brig. Make sure they don’t leave this planet.”

Crosshair tucks his helmet under his arm. “Yes, sir.” Good soldiers follow orders.

--

You tighten your hand in Omega’s as you run through the halls to get to the hangar.

“All right, this way. Let’s make this quick.”

Tech runs to power up the ship, and the hangar door opens.

You tighten the grip on your rifle, “Omega, get down. Do not get up until Hunter says so, okay?” You look up and see him.

“Crosshair, it’s me. I-”

“Crosshair?”

“Best stand down, Sergeant.” His eyes flit over to you. “You as well.”

“Lower your weapon.”

“Y/n” Hunter looks at you. You nod and raise your rifle.

“I can’t do that Crosshair. I’m sorry. I’ll come back for you, I promise.”

One of the troopers fire, blaster shots flying everywhere.

“Omega, go!” You yell out. You glance back and see Crosshair take aim at Hunter. A shot fires, knocking the rifle out of his hands. Omega. You take aim at his rifle when he tries to grab it again and fire. Crosshair shoots up as you run to the ramp, grabbing Omega and throwing her inside. Crosshair kept firing with his pistol, you returned fire, but did not hit him. You couldn't hurt him.

--

After the Marauder got into hyperspace, you sat down in Crosshair's room, your shared room. You fiddle with the necklace when the door opens, revealing Omega.

“Hey, are you okay?” The mattress bends a little.

“Yes… no, I’m sad and confused.” You feel tears welling in your eyes but blink them away. Omega looks at your necklace and points at it.

“What’s that?”

You smile softly at her. “It’s an engagement ring.” You chuckle at the confused look on her face. “It’s something that a person gives to someone that they love so much, that they want to spend the rest of their life with them. Crosshair gave this to me.”

“So he loves you and you love him?” The girl scoots closer out of curiosity.

“I love him very very much. I miss him very much too.”

“How did you two meet?”

You raise your eyebrows. “You really want to know?” The girl nods enthusiastically. “Well, it’s actually a pretty funny story. Before I joined the batch, I lived off the grid. When the war started I joined a local militia on Batuu, I was a sniper like Crosshair. Kept innocents safe, took out droids. One day there was a larger group of Seperatist droids causing trouble, I got sent out to look around and take them out.” You look over at Omega and she nods. “Things didn’t go exactly as planned, and a couple of civilians got caught in the middle. A droid was about to take a shot and my rifle had jammed. So I just ran towards it and tackled it. At the same time, someone shot me in the leg. When I looked back, I saw Crosshair standing on a building, all tense. Well, he was grumpy that I blocked his shot and he carried me back to the ship. After I healed up, Hunter offered me a spot on the team. And I’ve been with them ever since.”

The girls eyes widen. “So you’re a sniper too? Can you teach me?”

“Teach you? What, to shoot?” You look at the girl in surprise.

“Yes! I want to help however I can. Can you teach me? Please?” Omega got on her knees and bounced on the bed.

“I’m not the best-” You sigh, “Okay, okay. We can ask Hunter tomorrow.”

“Yes! Thank you, thank you!” Omega hugged you, smiling.

“Of course, why don’t you get some rest. You’ve had a long day.” You pat her head. “You can sleep in here until we set something up for you.”

“I’m not tired though.” She could barely hold her eyes open and she kept yawning.

“Sure you aren’t. Come on, bed time.” You pick the girl up and lay her in the bed across from you. You tucked the blanket around her and got up to leave, but she tugged on your hand. “Y/n?”

“Hm?”

“We’ll get Crosshair back, I know it.” She lets go and closes her eyes.

You crouch down and smile softly, “I know we will too, Omega.”

--

Crosshair sits on his bunk, staring at the necklace in his hands. He looks again at the engraving on the ring. O'r gai bal runi.

“What the hell does that mean?” He grumbles and turns the ring in his hand. I don’t remember why I have this. That women… y/n… she had the same ring around her neck. Who is she? Crosshair puts the necklace on the side table.

He rubs his head, furrowing his brows. Fight back! Fight back dammit! Get out of here!

“Shut up already…” Crosshair climbs into the bunk and stares at the ceiling before closing his eyes.

Everything hurts. NO! NO! Don’t let me hurt them again… I can’t hurt my brothers. I can’t hurt her. Y/n, y/n, please don’t leave me. HELP ME!

“Crosshair!” You shoot up from your bed, gasping for air. You look around wildly in the darkness. I heard him. I swear I heard him.

A small voice calls out, “Y/n? Are you okay?”

“I- Yeah, I’m alright, just had a bad dream. Go back to sleep Omega.”

You lie back down in your bed and grab your necklace, moving it around in your hand. We’ll find you Crosshair, we’ll bring you home.

[hamliet]

RWBY and the Philosopher’s Stone

So, I finally watched RWBY after a friend name-dropped several characters and I was like wait... those names are alchemical. I was still pleasantly surprised to find out just how deeply rooted in alchemy the story is, from its characters to its plot structure. 

Background: alchemical structure is a type of story structure that focuses on inner transformation via outward obstacles. You can find it in literary traditions across the world, from Moxiang Tongxiu’s novels to A Song of Ice and Fire to Harry Potter to The Witcher to Trollhunters. Carl Jung incorporated it into his psychology. Daoism plays heavily into Chinese alchemy. The Wizard of Oz, one of RWBY’s main inspirations, is a blatant alchemy allegory. It’s everywhere, so it’s not surprising RWBY is drawing heavily on alchemy, but it is neat to see how blatant the references are. 

Thematically, the goal of alchemy is a metaphorical philosopher’s stone. The philosopher’s stone, in legend, is said to produce an elixir of eternal life, and to be able to transform “baser” metals into gold. 

In stories, when positive, as it usually is, this usually results in a character either overcoming death (see, Harry Potter) and/or transforming the world and others around him (Harry Potter saving his friends, etc.) But the journey from how they get from prima materia (raw material) to the philosopher’s stone? Now that’s the story. 

(When reversed, a metaphorical stone results in something that can destroy everything; see: the One Ring, also Salem, because Salem’s whole thing is that she cheapened the process of life and death, while alchemy states that death is a necessary part of achieving life.)

So, mostly I’m gonna talk about the symbolism I’ve seen so far and make some predictions for what’s likely to happen next in the story, and for the characters.

Each of the four main characters has a name that corresponds to one of the four phases of the Magnum Opus. “Blake Belladonna” refers to the nigredo, or black stage; “Weiss Schnee” to the albedo, or white stage; “Yang Xiao Long” to the citrinitas or yellow phase, and “Ruby Rose” to the final stage, rubedo, or red (Ruby’s name is quite literally taken from that stage). Naming them for these stages shows a dual purpose: while Ruby is the central character, she needs her team around her, and Team RWBY will save the world together. Team JNR is also a part of the stages, but I’ll get to what they represent later on. 

Jung associated each of the major stages with a major archetype. The major stages can be further broken up into a total of seven or twelve or even fourteen stages. Most commonly you’ll see George Ripley’s Twelve Gates referenced, and I believe that’s what RWBY is referencing as well since its allusions are pretty perfect. The "gates” or stages also sometimes overlap, especially when different characters might be at different stages. 

Nigredo: Seasons 1-3 

Alchemy begins by gathering the prima materia, or raw material. The characters assembling in season 1 is more of the gathering than the actual transformative process. But once we hit season 2, we dive straight into the process. 

Calcination occurs during the climax of season 2, during the fight on the train. Season 3 contains dissolution, or the washing of impurities through the exposure of certain secrets (like the fall maiden) as well as the literal dissolution of Beacon Academy, and separation (the end of the season, when Team RWBY is scattered). 

Narratively, Jung associated nigredo with the shadow, with someone’s dark night of the soul, their low point. In historical artistic depictions, often part of nigredo is dismemberment... which happens to Yang when she saves Blake from Adam. See, Splendor Solis: 

The goal of the shadow is that it should be integrated with, accepted, rather than denied. Facing the shadow is a necessary part of growth and ultimate transformation... and the point is, through facing the shadow, hope and light come.  

Peacock’s Tail: Seasons 4-5

Okay, I lied, there are sometimes five phases in alchemy. At the very end of nigredo, just before albedo, there is sometimes a flash of light, of rainbows and colors, that give hope. It’s not quite a phase, more of a moment, but it’s referred to as the peacock’s tail. While this is less plot-related, it does make sense that this is the point in the story where Team RJNR is formed. Why? Because look at their colors:

Ruby: red, black

Jaune: yellow, blue

Ren: green, purple

Nora: white, pink, orange

Between them we’ve pretty much got the full rainbow. 

We also have, in Blake’s arc, the introduction of Ilia Amitola, whose last name is the Souix word for “rainbow.” 

Albedo: Seasons 5-7

Albedo is associated with the anima or animus, or the part of ourselves that we are lacking (it’s generally gendered as the male within a female and the female within a male, but please understand he’s not talking literally and more in terms of traditional qualities ascribed as feminine or masculine that we may repress), which more than fits the fact that this stage begins while team RJNR is literally wandering around a continent called Anima. 

Conjunction is a term in which all the separated parts that can be salvaged from the Nigredo come together. Obviously the main incident for this is the fight at the end of volume 5, but I’d argue it overlaps a bit with volume 4 and even with separation.

The characters are only able to come together again once they’ve accepted aspects of their shadows. Yang deals with hers in Raven and Blake with the White Fang. Nora and Ren’s fight at their home village represents them dealing with their shadow as well, and also relates to conjunction because conjunction is the stage where the first chemical wedding comes into play. A chemical wedding is the joining of alchemical partners, and while I’ll probably discuss ships in another post (there’s a lot of set up alchemy-wise), I’ll just reference the obvious one here: 

The fountain image and a person shooting arrows is some pretty uncannily similar imagery to the fight at Nora and Ren’s home village. 

Next up in albedo is putrefication (focus on death and rotting). We see this with the encounter with the Apathy, who look like skeletons, cause death, etc. We’re also introduced to Maria Calaveras, aka the Grimm Reaper. (Her last name also means “skull” aka the white results of putrefication). 

Congelation requires a lot of water, and we see this in the focus on Atlas, wherein snow (water) is everywhere. The point of congelation is to separate the thin from the thick, the latter of which will of course become the Philosopher’s Stone. We see this through Team RWBY’s break with the Ace-Ops (aka the Aesops), whose simplistic morality and rule-following are not going to bring about character growth or eternal life. 

Citrinitas: Volume 7-?

Citrinitas focuses on the light, or fire. That immediately after congelation, a giant whale brimming with yellow appears in the white-colored Atlas is not a coincidence. Citrinitas is associated with the sage or the wise old man/woman, so Maria and Pietro fill this role. 

The first stage of citrinitas is cibation, which involves feeding with fresh material. I’d actually say that it seems quite possible cibation overlaps with congelation, in that there is a focus on food and on training with the Ace-Ops early in Volume 7. The next phases are sublimation and fermentation. I can see potential for sublimation in that it essentially is when solid becomes air (think of the setting of Atlas), but it’s too soon to say what this means for the plot. 

Fermentation, though... well, things will get worse before they get better. :’) 

Rubedo: 

Finally, Rubedo is associated with the fully individualized self. We can assume each of the main seven will come into their own, confident of whom they are. Oscar should, as well, and probably will have fully control over his body by the end (ie Oz will likely... find rest or whatever).

The stages of rubedo are exaltation (the creation of the stone after two contraries meet), multiplication (the stones’ properties increase), and projection (the stone’s abilities are projected over the entire world, aka presumably RWBY will save the world). 

The most common way to display multiplication is through, well, a lot of couplings. It’s why the main characters ending single seems extremely unlikely to me. Even if it seems a fairy tale ending, well.... *gestures to everything about RWBY being inspired by fairy tales* Fairy tales were also often alchemy based. But ships will get their own meta, because I actually don’t really ship much besides Renora and am for once not super invested in anything, but I can see the set-up for four or five ships.

I also want to highlight the other symbolic names that stood out to me: 

Ironwood. While I know Ironwood references the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz (tin being one of seven metals associated with alchemy), his name also references a second metal: Iron. Tin and Iron are the two of the three basest metals in alchemy (the other is lead). Iron in particular is ruled by Mars, the god of war, meaning it is associated with violence. It’s not a coincidence that pretty much from the second Ironwood is introduced, the concept of war comes up, and his entire character has gone on to be the embodiment of the military and violence. 

Tai Xiao Long. His name literally means “sun,” and Ruby’s mother is defined by her silver eyes (silver being a color traditionally associated with the moon). Ruby is thus considered the child of the Solar King and Lunar Queen, two mythical alchemical figures who together create the “Philosophical Child,” or the personified philosopher’s stone.

Pietro Polendina: his name literally means “stone,” and Penny is his philosopher’s stone. Penny is arguably a reference to copper, another of the seven metals, as copper references compassion and love, which seems like Penny to me. 

Qrow and Raven Branwen: crows and ravens are symbolic of nigredo, or the black phase; death, decay, etc. However, within the story I think Qrow and Raven fulfill this role as the Jungian shadows of hunters as a whole and of Yang. 

Sun Wukong: obviously a reference to the sun. 

Emerald Sustrai: Emerald is a reference to the Emerald Tablet, which in alchemical lore is a tablet containing the secrets of alchemy, as written down by Hermes (in legend). Hermes is, of course, Mercury. Everything about alchemy stems from the Emerald Tablet, so Emerald should be important. In addition, green is the color of the prima materia, so it references Emerald’s arc in being shaped and molded by Cinder. 

Mercury Black: Mercury as the mythological god is the legendary founder of alchemy, so like, he’s important. Mercury is also the third most important metal in alchemy, after gold and silver. It is necessary to achieving the philosopher’s stone so, like Emerald, Mercury is probably important. Mercury is of particular note because mercurial characters are common in alchemical literature: they make stuff happen. Think of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, for example. Mercury transcends death symbolically (you can see the roots of this in Mercury’s backstory with his assassin father): it is difficult to pin down and can quickly shift from liquid to solid. Thus, in alchemy, mercury can shift between life and death. 

Mercury is also a noted servant of the white queen. I initially thought this a surface reference to Salem’s appearance, and it might be, but Salem is more associated with a black queen in the recurring chess motif, and I don’t see Mercury staying on her side (mercury isn’t fixed, after all; that’s its central tenet), so I kind of wonder if the “white queen” will be later revealed. Or maybe it just is a surface mention.