#I think this is like... twice the number of books to the image limit for posts so unfortunately no cover images

[optimistpax]

[ID: a reply from @pluralsword​​ saying “Please. Books are fine too. Doesn’t have to be transformers but hopefully something queer and/or robots. Arcee, Anode, Lug. If you want to, Greenlight, Lander, Aileron, Windblade, Nautica, Chromia, Velocity, Guage, and Sideswipe (the younger, you know the one that came out of a Trypticon hot spot) but the first three we named are the ones we’d be most curious about/most wanting to read something that appeals to them (we’re plural) end ID]

hmm I’m not sure I’m familiar with the Trypticon Sideswipe and I have to admit I don’t remember Lancer from idw2 (I started writing recs for her before realizing I’d confused her with Javelin), but I’m happy to give the rest of them a go! I love oversharing about book recommendations haha

gonna throw them under the cut bc there are SO MANY

For Arcee

I think Arcee would vibe with the Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo! The Worldbuilding and intrigue and characters are all SO interesting. I don’t have words for how very cool it is.

For You

hmmmm I think this rec might depend a little more on which version(s) of Arcee are your favourite and why, but I think Witch Boy by Molly Knox Ostertag is always a solid choice to recommend! It’s a really fun fantasy/mystery that is very affirming and gender

For Anode

I will take any excuse to recommend Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey. It’s a post-apoc western about queer librarians. It’s a fun time. Very good read for an adventurous soul.

For You

If you’re a fan of Anode, I think you’ll like The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson! I don’t want to say too much bc I don’t want to spoil it, but I absolutely stayed up till 3am to finish this book in one sitting bc I couldn’t put it down. Really cool concept, excellent execution and commentary, fantastic characters. GOOD BOOK.

For Lug

Ok so this isn’t technically queer or have robots, but it’s still firmly cemented in scifi and I can’t NOT recommend for the geologist character a book I recommended to a real life geologist who is dear to me. So! For Lug I recommend Red Shirts by John Scalzi. It’s a GREAT time tbh. It’s a parody of shows like star trek where the “red shirt” character becomes genre aware and attempts to escape his (and his friends) fate. It’s very well written and I was especially tickled by the three epilogues (first person, second person, and third person) each following a different character with loose ends.... and written in the pov of the epilogue title.

For You

Hmmmmmm if I hadn’t already recommended across a field of starlight I would recommend that one here... but since I have, I will instead recommend Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune. Also queer, also deals with death, and I cried through the entire thing (in a good way.)

For Greenlight

I think she’d like The Tea Dragon Society by K. O’neill. Very chill comics exploring different kinds of dragons has gotta be a little like xenobiology, right???

For You

Rock and Riot by Chelsea Furedi! I feel like some parallels could be found between some of the relationships in Rock and Riot and Arcee and Greenlight, and since Greenlight is rarely found without her partner it makes for good reading for a fan of her!

For Aileron

Ok so again this isn’t a queer/robot book, but oh MAN is it gorgeous. Human Target by Tom King and Greg Smallwood is a noir style mystery with gorgeous art and really excellent lettering. Aileron (in idw2 at least) to me feels like the kind of person that would vibe with a good mystery book (with all the mystery in her FICTION where it BELONGS instead of in her LIFE where it does NOT)

For You

Hmm Perhaps try Rockstar and Softboy by Sina Grace! Aileron seems like the level headed one of this group of wreckers and Softboy is a little like that as well... but even when your friends cause problems with their good intentions at the end of the day you still gotta love em.

For Nautica

I can’t not recommend The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells for Nautica. It’s got weird science and weird alien planets and murder mysteries, what’s not to love for a nerd like her?

For You

Hmmmm if you’re a fan of Nautica you may like The Last Human by Zack Jordan. It’s a lot of fun, but the second half of the book does get a little weird in a “you’ll love it or you’ll hate it” sort of way. But honestly with some books that’s part of the fun! Especially when you share them with friends :)

For Chromia

Another book that does not hit the “queer or robots” requirement, but Blacksad by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido absolutely seems like a book that Chromia would like. A noir comic about anthropomorphic animals with absolutely stunning art. The details in the backgrounds and scenery are especially well thought out, you could look at them and find new things for days, which is smth I think she’d appreciate.

For You

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. This book just about single-handedly got me out of a uhhhhhh seven year reading slump so I cannot actually tell you if it was good but I can tell you I had an absolute blast reading it. Very noir detective mystery... but modern day with a fantastical twist. I could see where the mystery was going, but honestly that just made me enjoy it more because I love seeing the inner workings of how fiction is set up so yes. Fun Book. Chromia fans check it out.

For Velocity

I think that Velocity would like Boys Run the Riot by Keito Gaku! The characters are high school students struggling to break into fashion after being told repeatedly that it’s not something they can achieve. I think that she could relate to that with her own struggle with getting into the medical field.

For You

hmm I think fans of Velocity would also Like Snapdragon by Kat Leyh! Another story about an underdog with stunning visuals and snappy writing.

For Guage

I think Guage would really like Sleepless Domain by Mary Cagle! It’s a cute magical girl comic about finding your footing and your people after the rug has been pulled out from under you.

For You

Deviating from the goal topics one more time bc I can’t not recommend Talking to Strangers: a Memoir of My Escape from a Cult by Marianne Boucher for fans of Guage. It’s what it says on the tin: a memoir of escaping a cult.

[outeremissary]

9 People You'd Like to Get to Know Better

Tagged by @turbulentpumpkin43. Thanks for thinking of me! I know I haven't been around much (for reasons we don't need to get into), but truly nothing summons me faster than the email notification about a tag game where I know I'm going to have to say something horribly embarrassing about myself.

Three Ships: I mean, if we're counting stuff with OCs then obviously anyone following my knows Balthazar and Tristian (and the wonderful polycule with Vio) is my number one. Aside from that, the latest volume of Witch Hat has fully converted me into an Agott/Coco true believer. I actually did like the Coco/Tarteh vibe but Agott's special brand of slowly changing rival just has me by the throat. Aside from that? Ummm. Elliot and Leo from Pandora Hearts? Does that count? I did my full reread of Pandora Hearts while afk in September and those two have had me since like 2012 or 2013 or whenever they were introduced in the English release. But now that I'm older and more mature I can better appreciate what the messy later arcs had to give, and that's the beauty of a relationship between equals corrupted by a growing imbalance no one has the strength to acknowledge and devotion so deep it tears both of their lives apart. That's awesome. 11/10, everyone read Pandora Hearts and I'm not even joking

First Ever Ship: Gamers, back in early 2012 when I was in middle school and could only see images on the computer at school because searching for anything visual online was mega bad for rural internet, a friend of mine used a science classroom computer to discover you could find non-canon images of The Legend of Zelda if you searched terms like "Link blue" and scrolled down a couple rows. I distinctly remember this as the first ever time I really understood the concept of "fan art," and more importantly as my entry into fandom as we all began to realize many of these came from the same site: a place called "DeviantArt." Some of these contained such salacious and unthinkable things as two boys holding hands and blushing, and also both of those boys were Link. I was so captivated by these mysterious images that I followed them to their Four Swords Adventures manga RP fandom source, where I am not proud to say the first "ship" I adopted as such was Vio (Violet Link for people who spent their time doing better things at thirteen) and Shadow (Shadow Link, of course). That's right, everyone! It was edgy Link selfcest yaoi between a traitor and an angsty villain all the way down!!! And you know what? When I write that I don't think my taste has changed. Except the selfcest. Mostly.

The other, more respectable first ship I remember not long after that was Ulquihime. What can I say, there's just something about the Stockholm syndrome of it all.

Last Song: No title - REOL. Narrowly missed this being edgy early Vocaloid. I've been revisiting old favorites recently.

Last Movie: I'm pretty sure it was Surf's Up. For whatever reason my friend decided we should rewatch it when I visited him a few weeks ago. Holds up better than it should, but I've rewatched it twice in little over a year and truly that is my Surf's Up limit. That trip was also when my friend forced me to watch Barbie and the D&D movie. Look at me catching up on relevant pop culture only for fucking Surf's Up to be what made this list.

Currently Reading: I'm pretty sure this came up last time, but because I haven't gotten started on a better book since then I'm unfortunately still periodically chipping at The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn. This book fucking sucks. Don't read it. If we could manga and stories that are actually good I recently did a Witch Hat Atelier reread after getting volume 11!!! That volume is. So painfully personal.

Currently Watching: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Jujutsu Kaisen season 2. JJK is with my friend for weekly hangout, but Edgerunners is a solo endeavor because it was bumming him out way too much. Good show though. Also JJK was way more of a bummer than expected in ways that caught me off guard??? I'm not getting over what happened to that girl, I really got fucking got by that scene. Jesus

Currently Consuming: Nothing. Just finished dinner, where I had a chicken sandwich and fries. I need groceries. It's dire.

Currently Craving: doing something creative, but that would require moving the giant zine pile on my chair........ this is how I'm procrastinating

I'm sorry, but I'm actually not tagging anyone on this tonight! I haven't been on enough lately to know who has or hasn't done it, and frankly I'm not ready to be back on Tumblr enough to map that out. If you're seeing this and want to do it, please go ahead and do it. Tag me like I tagged you, we are collaborators in this and I want to see what you say.

[ms-demeanor]

Okay so you know how I'm constitutionally incapable of letting things go?

I'm still on about the Jake Parker Alphonso Dunn thing and I finally cracked and created a pacer account and downloaded the initial filing of the lawsuit. Here's my favorite quote from it:

"Pen and ink drawing, however, is not as inviting a drawing medium as pencil, especially for beginners or anyone new to drawing, for several reasons [...] This explains why there is a drastically limited number of comprehensive ink drawing instruction books and learning resources available today as compared to the hundreds, if not thousands, of pencil drawing books.

Upon information and belief, there are less than 10 widely known comprehensive ink drawing instruction books in the art community."

Every single link in that quote is a link to a comprehensive ink drawing book that is/was widely available. Even if you don't count the ones that are out of print (but are in libraries, art classrooms, and are available online) you're still looking at *at least* ten, one of which has been in continuous publication for 100 years and two of which are different books written by one author. Also I own two books that aren't even directly linked here (both about cartooning) that include comprehensive pen and ink techniques as part of a larger whole and cover materials materially similar to what Dunn is saying was plagiarized, and that's not even getting into the really specific and narrow "pen and ink animals" "drawing in ballpoint pen" "pen and ink landscape" "pen and ink for comics" "pen and ink and watercolor" "pen and ink and charcoal" books that are out there that also cover basic pen and ink technique in a pretty comprehensive way. There are so many pen and ink instruction books that attempting to open links to all of them in the various places that I found them crashed my browser.

He also really, really doubles down on "there is no functional difference between these sections and the layouts are identical" when A) there is a functional difference because Dunn wrote a technical instruction guide and Parker wrote a low-key how-to book for casuals that is primarily about motivation and mindset and B) Dunn's book has a strong vertical layout and Parker's is square.

It is making me bugfuck crazy that he's claiming these two layouts are duplicates.

One of these pages is twice as tall as the other. One has a centered brushstroke font as the header with descriptions under each of four tools; One has left-aligned text with a sans serif header and single-word descriptions next to nine tools. One has tools that are presented illustrated at an angle that points to the gutter of the layout, one has tools that point to the center of the page. We are, literally, not the same.

My second favorite quote from the lawsuit is this:

"Dunn has found many supporters online, who believe that Parker has committed plagiarism and infringed on Dunn's copyrighted works."

Friend, what your twitter followers think isn't legally actionable.

The suit claims that the uses of Dunn's work were numerous and far reaching, but looking at the images used in the filing it kind of looks like Dunn hasn't gotten a copy of the book and is still screencapping from the ten images on Amazon. Shoutout to this absolute maniac on Pinterest who not only did a side-by-side comparison of Inktober All Year and Pen & Ink Drawing but also compared Pen & Ink Drawing to a bunch of other ink illustration books. Also I'm pretty sure Inktober All Year Long is unreleased and the lawsuit is based on sales continuing until December 2020 but I can't find the book anywhere new or used and the few people who have reviewed it have claimed they got it because Amazon sent it to them on accident after delivery was cancelled and every seller that I can find that had links to it lists it as backordered or now has a 404 error for the book.

Here's another pertinent quote from the suit:

Authors instruct on pen and ink drawings in multiple ways. Dunn's work, however, is not the result of restating standard methods or formulae, but is his original expression born from his creativity.

I do continue to feel really, really bad for Alphonso Dunn, because it really seems like he spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel and is upset that a similarly popular artist is also making a wheel. Like, in the original video he REALLY fixates on the idea of "varying" strokes, and insists that the use of the word "varied" or "variable" must be plagiarized from him because he spent so long coming up with the right word to use for that technique - but the 100-year-old pen and ink instruction book I discussed earlier has a multi-page layout about varied strokes.

Anyway the lawsuit was filed in September of 2021 and so far it's been just a shitload of extensions to serve papers and motions to dismiss and motions to extend the time to respond to the motion to dismiss.

I don't think that Parker is perfect (I actually find him pretty annoying and I do agree that it is very questionable to claim exclusive ownership of an event that became popular because of millions of participants) and I don't think that Dunn is malicious, but in this case I do think that Dunn is wrong. This guy has a take on it that pretty much aligns with my opinion.

And I'm interested in the outcome of the case because a lot of the claims that Dunn made in his video and appears to reiterate in the case have to do with attempting to claim exclusive rights to teach art fundamentals using extant language, so that's actually pretty important!

Anyway I am going to continue to Be Weird about it.

[mercy-burning]

Losing You Twice / 1: If I Hated You

Pairing: Spencer Reid x fem!Reader Summary: It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, and it turns out Y/N isn’t the only one struggling with the breakup. Category: Smut (18+), Angst Content Warnings: Language, drinking/getting drunk, penetrative/unprotected sex (If I missed anything, please let me know!) Word Count: 5,538

SERIES MASTERLIST | MASTERLIST

“My bedtime is the darkest, that’s when I’m brokenhearted. The nighttime is the hardest. It’d be easy, if I hated you.” —FLETCHER, If I Hated You

FEBRUARY 13th

It was Valentine's Day weekend, which sucked this time around. Every year for the past three years Y/N looked forward to Valentine's Day, but that was when she actually had someone to spend it with.

Well, someone she actually cared about, anyway... Whether or not Spencer actually knew it, she did really care about him. She was just stupid and didn't say it when he needed to hear it the most.

And now Valentine's Day was on Saturday and Y/N was still without him. Not alone, but still without the man who'd spent the significant holiday with her for the past three years. Memories of their dates and 'afterparties' flooded through her mind as she got ready for work like a montage, a cheesy love-song playlist she'd found on Spotify acting as the soundtrack.

Eventually she sighed and turned it off, opting for something more loud and obnoxious, and therefore not tainted by Spencer's memory. She applied what was left of her makeup and added a pair of earrings before turning the music off altogether and shoving her phone in her bag alongside her keys and other necessities.

Even though she wasn't emotionally prepared for all the cheesy Valentine's things she'd see and hear and experience throughout the weekend, it was still kind of nice to see that things in the bank never changed during the holidays— Everything in her life was so severely different at the moment, that if Marjorie had somehow decided to throw out all her elaborate decorations for each holiday, no matter how small, Y/N would have thought the world was truly ending.

Speaking of, she was met with Marjorie's brighter-than-the-sun smile almost immediately once she set her things in the breakroom.

"How's my little macaron this morning?" she chirped, Y/N chuckling slightly at the nickname— She brought macarons from the bakery down the street on her first birthday she spent at the bank, and ever since then, the older woman had adorned her with the namesake.

"She's alright, Marj... Better now that she's seen you..."

"That boy still on your mind, hon?"

Obviously Marjorie's intentions were good, but Y/N couldn't stand to think about the situation at all, least of all at work... So, setting her jacket on the rack, turned away so that her coworker wouldn't see the visible discomfort on her face, Y/N squeezed her eyes shut and cleared her throat. "So, what are your plans with Geno tomorrow night? Anything special?"

There was a brief pause before Marjorie cleared her throat as well. "Nothing short of our usual dinner plans, my dear. He's been so caught up with work at the Mill lately, I think we're just going to spend the night relaxing."

"Hm," Y/N said shortly, finally turning around and giving her the best smile she could. "Maybe I should take a page from your book and stay in..."

"You weren't going to?"

"No... Britt's been nagging me about getting out there so we're going out tomorrow night. We both haven't been single in a long time, so... Should be fun."

Marjorie didn't look convinced. Either way, she nodded with a smile and walked over to Y/N with something glittery and bright red in her hand— A cheap beaded necklace to clip her nametag onto. She draped it over Y/N's neck and patted her shoulders. "Well, I want you to have fun. And remember that you still have to come to work on Monday. Whatever shenanigans you get into should be reserved for Saturday night only so you can rest properly on Sunday, got it?"

Y/N laughed, thankful for the playful tone in Marjorie's voice. "Yes, Ma'am."

"Oh, I joke, I joke," the older woman said with a bright laugh, turning to walk out of the break room. "A little..."

The smile on Y/N's face only really lasted until after Marjorie was out of sight, then she went into her bag and clipped her nametag onto the red beaded necklace with a sigh.

Was she excited to have a good night out with Britt? Of course. Hell, had it been literally any other day of the year, she would have been practically bouncing off the walls with excitement at the idea of going out to a bar, letting men hit on her until she finally let one of them take her back to his place for the night.

But it just felt like it was too soon.

Either way, she was glad that she'd get to see Britt again, after she'd been on vacation for Christmas and New Year's to see her family and only got back a few weeks ago. She'd seen her on Facetime of course, and they met up once for coffee right after Britt got back from her trip, but a well-needed night out and quality time getting ready together was something that had been missing from their friendship for almost a year.

Y/N knew Britt would most likely spend her time trying to hook them up with end-of-the-night dates, but maybe it wouldn't be so bad...

Even still, sleeping alone the night before was probably one of the worst spells of loneliness she'd ever had. It was normal to be sad spending the first Valentine's Day in years away from a significant other, but knowing how things ended between them—bitter and stained with words left unsaid—this time was just... cold.

And that was putting it lightly.

Y/N laid in bed that night, her eyes wide open and staring at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that adorned the ceiling. They used to give her comfort, but now they just reminded her of all the nights she'd spend with Spencer, listening to him tell stories about the constellations. They were some of the most peaceful memories she had.

And now those, too—those stars that had grounded her pretty much all her life and reminded her of the better days—were tainted by her inability to properly communicate.

She almost thought about taking them down.

But if she was really going to get over him this time, for good, then she'd have to learn to make new memories with the stars. Even if it was painful. Even if replacing those memories and writing new ones over them absolutely tore her soul to pieces.

And, as if that pain wasn't enough, that night Y/N dreamt of him, making love to her amongst the stars in every galaxy, only to wake up the next morning cold and alone.

FEBRUARY 14th

She promptly decided that she hated his guts.

It was Valentine's Day, Y/N was respectfully buzzed, and courtesy of two beers and four shots of tequila, she'd just deleted Spencer's number from her phone.

"I'm done," she said, waving a hand at Britt and shoving her phone in her purse. "He doesn't deserve my wallowing."

"Yeah!"

Britt was significantly the more drunk of the two, resulting in a fit of giggles after gaining some stares from the people around them at her sudden outburst.

Y/N smiled, finishing off another shot and shaking her head. "We need more!"

"More shots!" Britt hurried off to grab them, leaving her friend behind with a half-drunken smile that also only felt half-genuine.

Sure, she decided she hated Spencer's guts, but her heart didn't exactly agree well with that sentiment. Even after deleting his number from her phone, after downing all that alcohol, her heart still ached.

Y/N knew deep down that getting over him was going to take some time. A lot of time... But maybe one night of distraction would help.

So the shots kept coming, and by the end of the night, Y/N was just about at her limit.

Which was near black-out drunk. And when you're that drunk you tend to make decisions you wouldn't soberly condone.

Britt got into a cab, and she begged Y/N to come with her, but she assured her friend that she had someone to come pick her up. Eventually the cab driver got tired of their inability to decide, and when Y/N told him to go, he did, leaving her alone on the side of the street at 1am.

Unfortunately, it was incredibly cold, and she didn't really have anyone to come pick her up. And that's where the bad decisions started.

Y/N pulled her phone out, a long sigh escaping her as she dialed the number by heart.

Would he even pick up? He hadn't answered any of her calls or texts before, so why would it have been any different now? Not to mention it was Valentine's Day Weekend. With her luck, he was probably in bed with someone else. Someone who wasn't her. As she listened to the dial tone repeating in her ear, images of him wrapped up with somebody else—sleeping in the bed she'd slept in many times before—clouded her drunken brain and made her more angry than anything.

Her gut twisted, and she almost hung up.

But then the low buzz of the dial tone abruptly stopped and in its place came his voice.

"Y/N?"

Her name on his lips, even through the phone, was grounding, the anger in her system melting away and revealing a coat of drunken relief.

"Spencer! You answered!"

"Yeah... Are you— Is everything okay?"

"Pff, yeah, 'm-fine. Just really fucking cold."

"You're not outside, are you?"

"Duh, I'm outside... I wouldn't be cold in-side... Besides, I didn't call t'alk bout the weather, I need you t'come pick me up."

There was a brief pause, and for a moment Y/N didn't think he was going to say anything she wanted to hear. She swayed on the sidewalk, shivering and praying that he would throw her a bone, even if she'd regret it all in the morning.

"Where are you?" he said finally, and despite herself, she smiled.

FEBRUARY 15th

Spencer couldn't believe he was picking her up at near two in the morning.

Honestly, he'd initially thought about ignoring her call again, but remembering the day it was and taking note of the time, he figured she was most likely in some type of inebriated trouble.

His instincts were right, of course, but he wished that he could have been wrong. He wished she'd only been calling to drunkenly ramble on about how she missed him or maybe how he was stupid and she never wanted to see his face ever again, because that was normal. At least then he could have hung up after she was done and never thought about it again— it was a normal step in any relationship that helped move things along. They could have gotten on with their lives and it would have all been over.

But of course it was never that simple.

Y/N was never that simple.

He pictured her on the street near some bar, alone and cold and drunk, and of course he would have been the only one she could call to rescue her. After all, he'd been pretty much the only thing she'd ever known to make her feel safe.

Still, he wished he was capable of only giving her a ride home and then leaving.

But again, it was never that simple.

It was easy getting her into the car— that wasn't what he was worried about. Rather, it was the fated moment where she'd ask him to stay after he finally got her tucked safely into bed that worried him. Because it was bad enough that it was Y/N... It was her in all her alluring glory, and he'd never been able to deny her anything no matter how badly he tried or wanted to.

Now add on the fact that she was drunk, and most likely sad on their first Valentine's Day apart, and it was a recipe for disaster.

Even if she'd broken his heart, Spencer still cared about her.

Which is why he inevitably agreed to stay, at least until she fell asleep.

He knew her well enough to know all the ways she'd try to get him under the covers with her, so it was a familiar amusement that settled in his being when he was finally able to get on top of the covers with her underneath. But as he entertained her silly little questions with the right answers until she fell asleep, Spencer noticed something else accompanying that amusement.

Guilt.

And then anger for feeling guilty about her sadness— sadness that could have been avoided had she just gotten over whatever was holding her back and either returned his "I love you" or  told him she wasn't feeling the same way just yet.

All she had to do was talk.

He had a right to feel upset about Y/N holding back when he'd been nothing but patient, spending almost every year of their relationship trying to make her see that she had nothing to be afraid of. He'd given her every chance to talk about what she was feeling, whether it was happy or not, and every time she pushed it all away in favor of sex.

That wasn't what he wanted in a relationship, so he ended it. And there was absolutely nothing wrong with that.

So why was he feeling so fucking guilty?

He blamed his good nature and innate need to please people, to make them feel good and happy. But he also blamed Y/N and her adorable drunken sleeping face.

He watched as she slept, willing himself not to forget the way she hurt him. She'd completely stolen his heart and shattered it at the same time, and if he was being honest, she still held some of the pieces. But he couldn't get them back, not if he didn't want to risk shattering her own heart in the process.

It felt like they were tied together by some strong, invisible force that wouldn't break unless both of them broke right along with it.

So... maybe he could afford to leave those pieces of his heart with her. He'd have to if they were going to get out of this alive. Not unscathed, sure, but alive nonetheless.

Once he was sure she was deep in sleep, Spencer quietly and carefully got off the bed and navigated through her apartment, getting her a glass of water and leaving it on the table next to her bed. And because he couldn't help it, he cleaned up some of the clothes that were scattered around her floor, depositing them into the hamper and straightening out a few more things that were out of place.

He looked over at her sleeping figure one more time, sighed, and then left, keeping her bedroom door open just a crack.

***

Spencer knew he shouldn't have stayed longer.

Despite his better judgement, he'd plopped himself down on her couch after making sure she was sound asleep, hoping to catch his breath and sort through what he was feeling before he got behind the wheel. But of course, it was 2am and he was exhausted, and he couldn't stop himself from closing his eyes and drifting off.

And now he was sitting up, looking around the apartment through the lens of morning.

Though the curtains were sheer, they didn't provide much light, but enough of it showed him just how familiar the space was. Y/N hadn't moved anything around. The same art was on the same walls, the potted ivy plant on her mantle sat un-watered and withering, and every book and record and DVD on her shelves was in the exact same spot as they'd all been the last time he was there in December.

Meanwhile, after the breakup he'd re-arranged everything. He was so sure that they were through for good this time around that he wanted a clean slate. Not that he wanted to rid himself of her memory completely, but if he was going to move on from the hold she'd had on him, he had to do something...

And yet, he ended up at her apartment the morning after Valentine's Day all the same.

He heard the shower running faintly a couple rooms away. You didn't have to pass the couch to get there, so maybe she hadn't seen him sleeping and he could get away cleanly.

Spencer scrambled off the couch, thankful that he hadn't removed his jacket or his shoes and that he could just sprint towards the door without having to find any of his belongings.

But as luck would have it, the second he took a step, the shower turned off. He had to get out of there quickly, but if he did then she'd definitely know he'd stayed overnight. But if he went quietly, he wouldn't have enough time before she caught him.

Maybe I could hide...

He shook the thought with a roll of his eyes, settling on the clearest course of action, which was to make as quick of a getaway as he could. He'd try to be quiet as well, though the creaky door was going to be nearly impossible to get through without a sound.

His hand was on the doorknob when he heard her voice.

"You didn't think you could spend the night and then leave without saying goodbye, did 'ja?"

The pure amusement in her tone made his stomach churn, and it wasn't unpleasant in the slightest.

Spencer turned and smiled softly, avoiding looking at her completely. "Sorry. Didn't want to bother you."

"You're never a bother."

That sentiment held less amusement and more sincerity, which was what guided his eyes to meet the woman who said the words.

His stomach twisted again when he saw her, exactly like he knew she'd be— wrapped in nothing but a thin towel with near-dripping hair cascading down her back. Her legs were bare and exposed, the towel not only thin but short, which meant that her chest was also practically spilling out of it. Despite the obvious and inevitable hungover look in her eye, there was also a good splash of that mischief that'd always been there— the kind that spelled out trouble.

He needed to get out of there.

"Well, um... I'm glad I got you home safe," he said, clearing his throat. "I should... I should go."

"You sure you don't wanna stay for breakfast?"

Spencer could have sworn she was teasing him, dangling her body in front of him like a meal they both knew he wouldn't be able to resist. But then she added, "I've got everything I need for your favorite omelet," and he exhaled with a small smile, exhausted with his own mind for convincing him that she was out to pull him back in.

Still, he declined. "No, I... I shouldn't. But, uh, thank you..."

"You sure?"

This time when he looked up at her, she was closer. She was gently striding forward to meet him, and he half thought about backing up towards the door until he realized he was already there.

"I—I'm sure. Really."

"But you drove around all night just to take me home when I was drunk, the least I can do is feed you..."

"Eh, it's alright. It's... Nothing I haven't done before."

She stopped then, her eyes briefly dropping to the floor. It was like her whole demeanor changed—just for a second—from the prowess she'd always been, to what seemed to be a woman filled with sadness and regret. It didn't last long though, just enough for Spencer to notice it before she looked back up at him with that wicked gleam in her eye and a remark right at the tip of her tongue.

"Still. I feel bad, making you do all that for me... Especially now."

He wasn't sure what to make of this... It seemed like she was sincere, but she was also alluring, calling to him like a siren leading him to his ultimate demise. And while he'd come to know that as merely a part of her nature, he couldn't help but shake the feeling that she was doing it on purpose.

She was in a skimpy towel, after all, and she definitely knew how to use that to her advantage.

It didn't help that he didn't have the courage to leave. Everything inside of him right then longed to drop that towel and indulge himself once more. Putting aside all the heartache and the differences they shared, all he felt in that moment was the need to touch her— to get lost in her and never be found again.

She was his fatal flaw, and it was painfully obvious.

Spencer knew he shouldn't have stayed longer...

He was over to her in just three strides, throwing off his jacket and tossing it aside before cradling her face with his hands and bringing their lips together for the first time since Christmas Eve.

The small whine in her throat signaled that she hadn't expected it, but welcomed it all the same. The moment she lifted her arms to wrap around his neck, the towel fell to the floor, and there was no going back.

"What about breakfast?" Y/N breathed out once they pulled away for air.

Spencer contemplated, studying her face, seeing the way her eyes sparkled, and decided on the two words that sealed his fate.

"Screw breakfast."

Their lips were melded together almost as soon as the words left his mouth. And it wasn't long before every other part of their bodies were melded together as well.

Y/N helped him take the rest of his clothes off as they danced around the entryway and the living room. Everything was open, no walls separating the living room from the kitchen, so to compensate for the lack of breakfast they'd be eating, they migrated to the kitchen counter once Spencer had off everything but his boxers.

He trapped her against the cool marble of the countertop, her back hitting it solid and sending a shiver up her spine. Meanwhile his hands roamed her body, unsure of where to be other than on her at all times, whether it be her waist, her stomach, her arms, her breasts, or her ass. He wanted to feel all of her, and quite frankly she wanted the same.

She even told him so, in her own way, by bringing one of her legs up and wrapping it around his waist, pulling him closer to her as she wove her fingers through his hair and tasted his tongue with her own.

The action elicited a groan from his mouth, low and desperate. Spencer settled his hands on her waist and gripped it tight, silently telling her what to do.

So she jumped up and he helped guide her swiftly onto the counter. Her legs instinctively wrapped around his waist again, and he found himself grinding into her hips, urgent to feel every part of her. And thankfully she was feeling rather desperate herself, because she rolled her hips up into him in return, breaking their mouths apart just briefly to speak.

"Fuck me..."

There was so much he wanted to say to her in that moment— how badly he was feeling about keeping her entertained while he was slowly deteriorating inside from her emotional detachment and rejection, how much she frustrated him, and more prominently, how she was so goddamn impatient and that he was getting there...

But all that he could manage was a broken, desperate whisper of her name.

It was all he'd ever known.

All that frustration... All that anger, heartache, passion, and time apart combined beautifully into those few syllables that made up her name and tore him apart from the inside out.

And his hands were just as destructive.

Spencer deftly dropped his boxers to the ground and pushed forward, almost losing all sense of self the moment the head of his dick finally made contact with her cunt. He made his way inside of her and then used both of his hands to grip her waist and bring her closer, their mouths connecting harshly as they found one another once again.

His grip was bruising— not possessive in any way, but desperate, like he had to cling to her for dear life or he wouldn't live to see another day. He held himself inside her, sighing and whimpering into her mouth as she clenched around him. It was so familiar, so comfortable and exhilarating that he almost didn't even want to move. He thought about staying there, still inside her forever.

But as always, Y/N was insatiable.

She wrapped all her limbs around him and held on, rolling her hips and seeking friction in any way possible when she briefly tore her lips away from his.

"I need you, baby, please..."

Even as his heart started to rumble in his chest, well aware of the fact that she still probably didn't love him the way he loved her, Spencer gave her everything. He pulled out and snapped his hips forward again, setting a strong, steady pace that had Y/N's eyes rolling back, and the payoff of hearing her sigh out his name was more than enough to keep him going.

Her nails dug deliciously into his shoulders, the faint sting adding something reminiscent of gasoline to a fire. The flames grew taller and brighter the more he fucked her, and with each gradual increase of volume and intensity, it was a wonder the whole kitchen around them hadn't literally burst into flames.

That's how they always were.

Together like this, so lost in the high of each others' bodies, it was easy to forget the things that made their relationship so hard. It was easy to let all the negativity slip away into the throes of pent-up, well-needed sex. The high they gave each other was merely that— A high...

A distraction.

And while that's exactly what Y/N needed, what she preferred in most cases, it's what Spencer recognized as completely unhealthy, despite his coming back to it every time.

It's also why he dreaded the moment ending. Because once they came down from the high, all that's left would be sadness, regret... Guilt... Their fire burned hot, brightly and wildly, but in the aftermath would lay only a thick layer of deadly smoke between them— hard to navigate, and nearly impossible to breathe in without suffocating.

So they simply burned and burned and burned...

Spencer gripped her so tight he was sure to leave her with bruising. And in turn Y/N dragged her nails down his back and dug them into his ass, her palm laying firmly over the muscles that aided in fucking her into the marbled surface. She whined out curses and moans, and he cried out broken whispers of her name, pet names, and curses alike.

Even once she'd come, he kept going, willing himself to hold on as long as he could. She whined into his ear at the overstimulation. And rather than keeping her legs wrapped around his body, she decided to spread them wide, perching her heels up on the counter as far as she could go and anchoring her fingers through his hair.

And though she might not have had enough orgasms in her to keep up with him, she welcomed it all the same—She welcomed the burn just as much as he did.

Even still, no fire can burn forever.

All concept of time was lost by the time Spencer finally collapsed forward, completely spent and barely standing on weak legs after coming twice. Y/N held onto him tightly to keep him upwards, lightly massaging his scalp with gentle fingers and closing her eyes as she focused on his breathing— the way it fanned over the skin of her bare shoulder and how it sounded, perfectly in time with hers...

It was the most peaceful she'd been in a long time.

She felt him pull out of her, the both of them groaning at the feeling, and a little at the mess it would make.

Spencer gently peeled his body off of hers, sniffing once and avoiding her eyes. "Sorry... You just got out of the shower..."

"It's fine," Y/N breathed. She begged him silently to look her in the eye, but he remained still... Most likely thinking. She could practically see the cogs turning in his brain.

So, in an effort to lighten the mood a bit, she added with a breathy laugh, "Besides... It's nothing I haven't done before."

The callback to his words—and memories of all the times they'd found themselves in this position before—got Spencer to laugh a little, but he still wouldn't meet her eyes.

Finally, he cleared his throat. "I'll... I'll grab the wipes?"

"Oh. Sure," Y/N returned with a thankful smile. It was hopeful, too, though the moment he was out of eyesight, it turned rather sad.

She'd known that behavior before, seen that hesitation in his movements and that sound in his voice.

It was guilt.

Regret.

Probably a bit of self-hatred, too.

When he returned, a pile of her clothes in hand and the bag of wipes on top, she took them from him with a kind smile and cleaned herself up while he put his clothes back on.

The silence was more uncomfortable than anything either of them had ever experienced.

So much so, that Y/N couldn't even muster up the courage to ask him to stay for breakfast— and she always did after one of their post-break hookups.

Maybe this time really was different.

Spencer was just at the door again when she stopped him.

"Thank you," she said. Her voice was so small, he almost didn't hear it. "For bringing me home..."

But he paused, turned, and finally looked her in the eye.

He almost sunk to his knees right there...

Seeing her, arms crossed like she was trying to keep warm, as her head hung low and she looked up at him through sad, hooded eyelids...

It reminded him of the woman he fell in love with.

But in his peripheral, he saw the towel on the floor and was reminded of the woman who'd shattered his heart.

Spencer cleared his throat. Once upon a time he might have returned her thanks with, Anytime, but... Honestly he wasn't sure there could ever be another time. For his sanity, he'd have to avoid 'anytime' at all costs.

So, he settled on, "You're welcome."

He was glad to see her return his kind smile with one of her own, even if it was tainted with sadness, and a small wave goodbye.

Maybe this time it would stick.

Even still, as he closed the door behind him and made his way to the parking lot, for some reason it didn't quite feel like goodbye.

And some of that deadly smoke that settled in his lungs as he drove further and further away from her apartment was inclined to agree.

***

Neither of them could sleep that night.

While Spencer stared out the window of the jet, a little annoyed to be called out on a case so late but at least thankful for the distraction, Y/N laid in bed, staring at the stars on her ceiling.

The same constellation caught their eye.

Columba.

The Dove.

She hadn't even meant to arrange the stars like that, but one night after a date, they were laying in her bed and Spencer pointed out that the cluster of plastic stars right in the corner of the ceiling looked like Columba.

Y/N fondly remembered Spencer telling her about how it was originally named to represent Noah's dove, which searched for dry land during the great biblical flood and returned carrying an olive branch to make news of its recession— of peace at last.

The memory made her smile. It tugged at her heart and made her dreams of him even more vivid.

All the same, Spencer noticed the constellation outside the jet window and remembered that same night. The smile on her face as he told her the story, the feel of her fingers gliding softly over the bare skin of his forearm...

It was the first night since he'd met her that he thought it.

I love her...

He almost told her then, too, but he was afraid it was too soon. So he refrained.

Looking back, Spencer was starting to regret that— Maybe without that extra time together, breaking up would have been easier. But instead, he gave her more time. He gave himself more time to fall deeper in love with her, and in the end it still wasn't enough.

Now they were both looking at the same constellation, one made of plastic and the other of gas, wondering if their flood would ever recede.

And in the event that it did... Who would be the dove, and what would be their olive branch?

“You know I dream about getting back together in the future, I could focus on you. But if I leave right now, I hope that you don’t find someone that touches you the way that I do...”

***

SERIES TAGLIST:   @reidyoulikeabook​ @yourmisosoup​ @fortheloveofcriminalminds​ @bellzo17​ @altsvu​ @flipperpenguins​ @mcumorningstar​

TAGS NOT WORKING: @reid-to-me @totallyclearwitch

[gb-patch]

Ask Answers: July 10th

I really let asks get away from me lately. I was super focused on working on that Patreon Moment. With that done I can finally think about doing other things, so here’s a new collection of answers!

Thank you for sending in questions everyone ^^.

For the new Patreon moment, will you be able to reference it in step 4? Or just like a tiny nod to it if you pick certain choices?

There won’t be. I’m sorry if you were hoping for that! The Patreon moment is meant to be entirely optional, it’s not something that gets you extra content in the main game.

Is the new CG artist the main one now? :0 I’ve noticed theres been a difference in the art style recently. Is the old CG artist still going to make art for the game? :0

The original artist still makes CGs for the game sometimes, but he mainly focuses on character sprites.

Are you going to put the NSFW our life moment on a website other than patreon? I would love to get it but I can't use patreon atm.

I don’t know. I'm afraid we can't release the Patreon Moment on a normal game storefront because we can't mix 18+ content with our family friendly game. If there's some other place similar to Patreon where it's not the normal type of full-scale public content releases we'd consider using that, but I’m not sure if there is another site that’s better than Patreon in that regard. I'm sorry.

Out of curiosity, in all of your games so far, which characters in each were the most fun to write? They obviously don't have to be your favorite characters!

Buffalo Seer in AFA, really everyone in XOD/XOBD is pretty equally entertaining to write, The Guide in LoV, and Cove in OL!

idk if you accept "personal" questions, but is there anything you've been watching/ listening to lately

Mostly, I’ve been watching/listening to Authortube videos as of late! It’s people who talk generally about the process of how books become traditionally published and/or share their own experience as they attempt to be published. I don’t have an interest in writing normal text based books, but it’s really interesting to hear about that world. I’m listening to a video about royalties right now as I answer these asks.

Will one of the desserts we get to pick be fudge? That'd be such a cute reference! 

Haha, yeah, it should. Unless I completely blank on it and forget when trying to include the various referential food options.

I don't know if this has been asked previously but what would be the approximate heights for the presets MC can choose from Step 2 ~ 4? Are there any measurement you had in mind? Sorry if I didn't make myself clear kk I've been struggling with my English lately 💀 

I don’t know, ahah. I didn’t have any numbers in mind for that. So it’s whatever you imagine it is!

I noticed a bug with the Patreon moment when it comes to what your character wears. When Jamie and Cove are kissing while my character only had dresses selected, I had both the option to remove the dress or to remove the shirt... Picking one of the options to interact with Cove, after he removed his shirt, it had Jamie remove their shirt followed by ther pants despite only having dresses picked. 

Thank you for reporting ^^

I keep refreshing steam to see when the new doc for xobd will be released. I noticed you haven't posted anything about it in quite some time. Would it be possible to ask about a timeline/potential date? (If it's even this year—) I know you and your team are probably working super hard, I'm just super curious! ~Thank you!~ 

There are more stories done, I just haven’t gotten around to publicly releasing them. Hopefully I will have a chance to spend the time on that sooner rather than later!

hello!! i’m not sure if it’s an update but i’ve just replayed our life and at the end i can’t propose to cove anymore? :(( i’ve actually tried playing twice but the options are not there anymore, did you guys remove the options? i’m sorry if you’ve answered this before!! thank you and have a good one :) 

I’m afraid things haven’t been changed or removed, so I think you might’ve accidentally picked the wrong things somewhere along the way and locked yourself out of being able to propose by mistake. Sometimes you meant to say you want to get married but instead you mis-click and have it so the MC isn’t thinking about marriage or something. All I can suggest is starting from the beginning of Step 3 and making sure to follow the steps listed in the FAQ. I’m sorry for that.

Did yall remove some of the options for when youre making out with Cove in the charity moment? I could've sworn you could grab his bonkadonk and its not there anymore 

This is the same situation as the above. We didn’t remove things and you’re not wrong that there are sometimes those options. But there are various choices you have to make to get those options and it sounds like you accidentally missed something. If your relationship isn’t long-term, you can’t do it for example.

HI IM SO EXCITED I CAN FINALLY GET THE STEP 3 DLC 

Thank you for getting it!

Is Shiloh super totally straight bc I’m very gay and a huge Shiloh fan, would my man make an exception?😩

Sadly, he is one of our super straight characters. I’m sorry.

Hi, I have a very dumb question. In Step 2 does Cove not wanna share his drink with us at the mall (or rather why he stops drinking it) because it's an indirect kiss? Or is it like ...weird to him to share? Because if I remember right he eats off our spoon in the birthday scene right? 

Yeah, he’s awkward about it because he likes the MC and it feels very personal to share a straw with his crush.

Hi! If you don't mind me asking, who is the artist for OL2? Their style is so pretty! 

Thank you for saying so! This is her Twitter- https://twitter.com/redridingheart

Do Beginnings & Always and Now & Forever exist in the same universe? 

Yep! XOXO Droplets also exists in the same universe. It’s one big GB Patch world, haha.

Do Pran's parents regret the way they raised him? Do they feel ashamed of it?

No. They’re the type of people best cut out because they’re not gonna change. Which is why Pran does go very limited contact when he’s an adult.

Hi! I just wrapped up my second playthrough of Our Life, and I absolutely adore it, but I had a question. I went to the gallery and found I was missing 2 CGS (specifically Step 1-3 and 2-3) and I had no clue where they would've shown up. Which moments are those found in? 

You get it by telling Cove about his dad offering you money to be his friend in Step 1 and Step 2. You can’t get both in one playthrough, since you can only tell Cove the truth once. I’m really glad you liked it!

Hi hi! Please, how tall is Baxter and Derek? Love the game so much and I can't wait to see more! 

I don’t know, aha. I think Baxter was around 5′10 and Derek was like 5′8/5′9, maybe. I really am not one who has specific heights for things in mind.

is adult cove a bottom, top, or switch? 

A switch, though would choose the top if he had to pick.

I was wondering if there is a way to transfer save data? Even if through the game files. I wanted to be able to transfer my save data from my desktop over to my laptop so that I could continue playing right where I left off from but I'm not entirely sure how to go about that. 

If you save the save folder/persistent data of the game from your desktop and put it into the game folder on your other device, that could work.

Hi! Is it possible for us to know the date when our life: now and forever comes out on steam? Sorry if you've mentioned it before but I haven't seen it and I'm looking foward to that happening and just wanted to know :) 

It’s gonna be a long time, I’m afraid. There’s no estimate right now.

I started playing Our Life with my sister a while ago, and I think you guys should know that we discovered your secret. >:)

L from death note and Cove are clearly the same person, and this whole game is just an origin story!!

I’ve never seen that show so I’m sorry to say I don’t understand the connection/reference you’re trying to make. I’m pretty out of the loop when it comes to media. I don’t watch movies or TV.

Will OL2 have options for disabled MCs?

I understand if it's too complicated, just curious

Unfortunately, it’s not really something we have a plan for. We couldn’t finish the game if we tried to include every disability and have it be meaningful. It’d just be too much content to create. But if we decide to only include a few, how would we choose which disabilities get to be represented and which are left out? I don’t know. It’ll probably have to be something we don’t include as an option again, sadly. I’m sorry.

playing our life > anything else 

Haha, I’m glad you’re enjoying it.

Honestly, I would like to thank Our Life for helping me come to terms with my sexuality. Before, I never would've actually thought that it was possible to like boys romantically and still be asexual. Almost all of the BL visual novels I've read had unskippable sexual content in them and it honestly just didn't click with what I feel. I'm glad I found Our Life. I love the game, the developers, and this fandom so much. Now, I can safely come out as homoromantic AND asexual (at least anonymously here anyway; my parents are still huge homophobes 😂). 

Aw, it’s great to hear you felt comfortable being yourself in the game! That’s wonderful. I’m really sorry about your parents, though.

Will the demo for OL2 be on android? Really not sure if I could wait any longer than I have to aha 

Yeah, it’ll be available for Android once we eventually release a demo!

Do all these reveals perhaps mean development is progressing ahead of schedule? Please let that be the case I'm already obsessed with Qiu 

No, sorry, aha. Art comes along much faster than script/programming-work for us. It’s gonna be a long time before the game is a finished thing you can actually play. But at least we can look at the beautiful images.

Hey! First of all I wanna say I reallllllyyyyy loooovvveeee Our Life and XOXO Droplets! I have over 300 hours of playtime on Our Life… Anyways, I was just wondering, are the Derek and Baxter DLCs going to come out at the same time? If not, which one do you plan to release first? :3 

They will come out separately and Derek will be first! Glad you like the game.

I keep replaying Our Life to get every possible iteration and I am loving it <3 I was wondering if Cove gets locked out of his confession because MC was talking to Lee, would it be possible to confess to him in step 4? 

Yeah, you can avoid the confession in Step 3 and then get it in Step 4.

Hi, my Cove wears bracelets through step 2 and 3 but I still don't get an option to give him a bracelet? I didn't even know that was possible until I seen someone else ask about it lol 

Hm, did you use the Cove creator? Maybe there’s a bug where using the creator to add bracelets doesn’t fulfill the requirement to give Cove a bracelet in Step 3.

Wait, I'm dense, when does Baxter appear in step 2? Is it from big park firework? I feel so bad since i really love Baxter and waiting to buy his dlc. 

It’s in the Soiree Moment. You have to be just friends with Cove, indifferent, or crushing but not ask Cove to the dance at all. Then while there you can find someone new to dance with. But if you bring Cove to the dance while crushing, the MC won’t wanna dance with anyone else so you can’t get the scene.

In step 2 when we go to the soiree I made my mc go alone and baxter chooses the mc to dance, i'm curious, why did he pick the mc? sorry if this has been asked before! 

Because the MC looked to be around his age, seemed to also be searching for a partner, and had nice legs. A perfect option for him.

I read some of the FAQs, and I saw that we could tell Baxter about the condo that he rented there was previously the mean old grandparents. how do we get the mc to tell him that? 

It happens in the DLC Moment “Late Shift”. If you don’t have a job you instead get a longer scene with Baxter.

I don’t know if you’ve addressed this or not, but are you planning on paying voice actors for our life: now and forever? 

Yeah, we pay our VAs in all our projects.

hey can i ask how you did the moments thing in ol? im trying to get into making visual novels and while im VERY sure its out of my comfort zone and all that atm i kinda wanna know just for the future, bc im p sure it would work well for something i wanna do :O but its also fine if you cant say for other reasons :> 

I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean. Are you asking how we programmed the screen or something script related? Adding Moments like that is pretty straightforward, though. You just have buttons that open to different labels and then the scripts are essentially individual short stories/vignettes. Good luck with your VN!

Since Autumn becomes gender fluid later in the game, will there be a character who remains as he/him to romance in game? 

OL1 has the he/him LIs, OL2 is all about other genders.

I don't want to impose on your creative plans, but a parrot could possibly make a good pet in an OL-type game? They're pretty long-lived and likely to still be thriving by the end even if the MC got them back in step 1. 

I do appreciate the suggestion, but I’m afraid it’s not likely going to happen. I understand there are technically some animals that could theoretically live long enough to last the whole game that or we could have the MC only get a pet after some years have already passed. But the many things that would have to be considered/accommodated for makes it just something we probably can’t manage adding. I’m sorry.

As time passes will we be able to see Qiu and Tamarack's other stage arts as well?

They are both so cute i can't wait to be friends with them!

Yeah, we’ll show content from other Steps in the future. It’ll be a little while from now, though.

Can you date Cove and still have your family comfort you in the car?

You can’t get Cove’s Step 3 confession scene if you have the family comfort you in the car. But that’s not the only way to date him. You can get together with him earlier in the game or later on in Step 4.

Is Mc always going to be the one walking down the aisle or could Cove do it? Also could you choose to have one of your moms walk you? 

No. Cove wouldn’t want to walk down the aisle like that and the MC automatically respects that. And the MC also gets to have their preferences respected, so it’s up to you whether they want to do an aisle walk or not. You also can pick who, if anyone, walks with you.

Once step 4 is out, will you be able to go the whole game on crush/love without either of you confessing? 

Yes, as long as you tell the game you don’t want to progress the relationship. Even in Step 4 it won’t force you to officially get together.

Howdy, so in Step 4, there will be any Romance with Derek that is not part of any dlc? 

He’s only a friend unless you get his romance story.

Will the step 4 in OL2 be one big step or are you considering moments? 

Step 4 is just an epilogue in both games.

hi kind of a weird question but!! we know tht cliff doesn't start dating again but. wht abt flings? like does he ever do 1 night stands or anything? thank u!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Nope. Cliff has a very small interest in sex. If he’s not in a real relationship with a partner he’s crazy about it simply isn’t something he feels a need for, so one night stands wouldn’t even cross his mind.

sorry if you've already answered this, but i was wondering if there were plans for there to be bonus love interests in OL2 like how we have derek and baxter in OL1.

Maybe! There are side characters who could be given romance stories, but whether or not it will happen depends on funding and how long everything else takes to finish.

I don't know if i'm allowed to ask about ol2 here yet, if not u can ignore this or answer it later. My question is can you date one of them and be good friends with the other? I don't want to be strangers with the other bcs i love them both a lot :<

Yes you can!

what patreon level do i have to be to unlock the nsfw moment? im on the $5 one right now, will that give me access to the moment, or just access to the moment progress? 

That’ll give you access! Tier 2 and anything higher allows the player to download it.

[funkyj4eva]

So, little obsessed with kyalinzumi and thought I’d share this little fic.

Kya is visiting Izumi at the Fire Nation Palace, Lin is in Republic city. Just a phone call between the ladies.

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

“Just call her to confirm. That way you can guilt trip her if she’s wavering.” Izumi responds as she waves off Kya’s incessant what if scenarios whilst making her way over to the large bookshelf in her study to find a reference to a bylaw.

“Foiiiinnneeee.” Kya responds as she drops her cheesy romance novel on the coffee table and pushes herself up off the lounge set, heading towards the phone sitting on Izumi’s desk. After dialling the number for Lin’s assistant, she perches herself on the edge of the desk waiting to be connected.

Upon verifying who the caller was, and checking the Chief’s schedule, Hui  places the caller on hold and heads over to the Chief’s office to knock on her door.

“Chief, I’ve got the Fire Nation Royal Palace on the line.” She informs her boss, who glances up from the report she was skimming through.

“Put them through.” She says as she scribbles a note on the notepad beside her.

                                ******

With a nod of her head in acknowledgement, Hui returns to her desk to update the caller, “Hello? Are you still on the line?”

“Yes, I’m still here.”

“Perfect. I’m just putting you through now. Please hold.” Hui responds to Kya.

“Patching through now, Chief.” Her assistant calls out and closes the office door once she hears the phone ring.

“Beifong.” Lin answers after she tucks the receiver between her head and her shoulder, so that she could flip the page of the report.

“What chu wearing?” Kya purrs down the receiver as she entwines her fingers with the phone’s line.

Without skipping a beat, the Metalbender replies in her no nonsense, gruff, Chief voice, “Limited edition Republic City Chief of Police uniform in black with gold trim,” as she continues skimming through the report, not paying much attention to the question or the caller as she was still engrossed in the findings.

Dumbstruck that Lin actually answered her without reprimand, the Waterbender was at a loss for words and failed to answer the woman, as the vivid image of said woman clad in her police uniform and commanding tone sent a shiver down her spine and a warmth spreading to her core.

“Hello? You there?” Lin speaks again into the receiver, after adjusting it so that she was holding the phone. “Hellooo?” she repeats as she places the report down, giving the caller her full attention now.

Still no response.

Completely forgetting what she called the Metalbender for and in her panicked state she slammed the receiver down on the hook and clasped her hands in front of her face, shying away from the phone.

“Shit.” She mutters to herself as she hears the line cut and the sound of the dial tone fills her ears, “stupid line must be playing up again,” returning the receiver onto the hook.

  Meanwhile on the other end of the line…

“So? Did you get through to her?” Izumi queried as she made her way back to her desk while flipping through to the page she was after.

“Uh… yeah.” She responded while still dazed.

“Annnddd? What did she say?” the Firebender prodded.

“She said that she was wearing her uniform.” She replies in an aloof manner, as the Fire Lord shoots her a quizzical look.

                                  ******

Riiiinnnggg, riiiiinnnnnngggg!

The shrill sound of the telephone cut through the air and temporarily paused the conversation between the two women.

Placing the book down on her desk and eyeing the younger woman, Izumi pushed her glasses back up before answering the phone.

“Izumi speaking.” She answered in her formal voice.

“Hey, it’s me. I was just on a call with the palace and the line cut all of a sudden. Were you after me?”

Relaxing as she heard Lin’s voice over the receiver, she reverted to a casual tone, “It was actually Kya.”

“Oh? Is Kya with you?”

“Yes, she was the one who called.”

“Oh, right. Sorry, wasn’t paying attention to the voice on the other end of the line.” The younger woman apologises, “Should’ve known that it was her, as you don’t exactly ask what I’m wearing when you call.” She chuckles at the thought.

“Is that something that you would like me to partake in?” the Firebender responded with a smile teasing at her lips and her eyes alight with amusement as she turns to regard Kya.

Clearing her throat from the sudden turn of conversation, the Metalbender responds, “Um, I’m not - that’s not the point of this phone call!” She splutters and abruptly cuts herself off, feeling a little flustered. “Did she actually have a message for me or was this a call for pleasure? I’m a bit flat chat today and she knows that we don’t do this while I’m at work.” She said cutting to the chase.

“She did have a reason for the call, though I am intrigued as to what you said to her. You’ve left her in a bit of a stupor.”

“She asked me what I was wearing, so I told her that I was wearing a limited edition Republic City Chief of Police uniform in black with gold trim.”

“Mhm, and did you say it in your Chief voice?”

“Uh, yes?” Lin responds a little perplexed as to why the conversation was still being steered to what she was wearing.

“No wonder.” She responds with a gentle laugh, “I’ll have to sort her out as you aren’t here.”

“Zumi?”

“Yes?”

“The original point of the call?” Lin offers in a slightly exasperated voice as she tries to take control of the conversation once again.

“Ah, yes. Kya was wondering if you will be attending the Mid-Autumn festival gala this year at city hall? I have managed to adjust my schedule and will be making my way to Republic City to make an appearance at the gala, and will also use this time to check in on the Fire Nation embassy while I’m there. Kya of course, will be joining me.” She answers in a semi-bored tone. “Irrespective of your attendance, please note that we will be staying at your residence for the duration of our visit.”

Leaning back into her chair, Lin processes the information before replying with an air of playfulness, “Is that right? And how long will your visit be?”

“A total of five nights.”

“Hm.” She hummed in response, “And what happens if I decide not to be present at either locations during your visit?”

Slightly taken aback by the Metalbender’s response, the older woman seats herself in her chair before dropping her tone of voice to a low and sultry one, usually reserved for their private quarters, “Well then you will have been a very, very bad girl, and will be punished for your actions.”

Biting back a smile and trying to stave off the slight giddiness from the possibility of some long overdue playtime, she quickly responded, “I’ll think about it” before hanging up on the Fire Lord.

With a scoff, the older woman leaned forward to drop the phone back onto the receiver, before pushing back into her chair, shaking her head in amusement at the bratty-ness of the younger woman.

“Well?” Kya asked in anticipation, having snapped out of her daze.

“She said that she’ll think about it.” Izumi said as she vacated her chair and walked towards Kya, grabbing her by the middle of her dress and pulling her in for short but searing kiss. Having brought back the warmth in her core, Izumi abruptly broke off the kiss and pushed the woman back to her original position and letting go of her dress. Using the same hand that just released the Waterbender, she lightly trailed a finger from the mocha skinned woman’s chest up her neck and to her chin and then tapping the side of her jaw twice with two fingers, eliciting a groan from the needy woman.

“Come, we need to take care of your situation.” She said in the same low sultry voice that she had only just used with Lin, before swiftly turning to exit her private study and to head to their bedroom.

[mjvnivsbrvtvs]

hi! so we have established at this point that you have A Lot Of thoughts about antony and brutus. but how does caesar (julius, not the little bitch octavian) play into that? bc like. my knowledge and impression of them is very limited and mainly constructed from watching hbo rome and idk. i think it'd be fun to throw caesar in the mix. love all the art and writing on your blog btw! have a nice day.

Hey, okay! So this used to be over 30 pages long (Machiavelli and Caligula got involved and that's when things got out of hand), but through the power of friendship and two late night writing dates fueled by coffee, I’ve cut it way down to under 10. Many thanks to the people who listened to me ramble about it at length, and also to a dear friend for helping me cut this down to under ten pages!

Also, thank you! I'm glad you enjoy the stuff I make! It makes me very happy to hear that!

And quickly, a Disclaimer: I’m not an academic, I’m not a classicist, I’m not a historian, and I spend a lot of time very stressed out that I’ve tricked people into thinking I’m someone who has any kind of merit in this area. It's probably best to treat this as an abstract character analysis!

On the other hand, I love talking about dead men, so, with enthusiasm, here we go!

For this, I’m going to cut Shakespeare and HBO Rome out of the framework and focus more on a historical spin.

Caesar is a combination of a manipulator and a catalyst. A Bad Omen. The remaining wound that’s poisoning Rome.

Cassius gets a lot of the blame for Brutus’ turn to assassination, but it overlooks that Brutus was already inclined towards political ambition, as were most men involved in the political landscape of the time.

Furthermore, although Sulla had actually raised the number of praetorships available from six to eight, there were still only two consulships available. There was always the chance that death or disgrace might remove some of the competition and hence ease the bottleneck. But, otherwise, it was at the top of the ladder that the competition was particularly fierce: whereas in previous years one in three praetors would have gone on to become consul, from the 80s BC onwards the chances were one in four. For the senators who had made it this far, it mattered that they should try to achieve their consulship in the earliest year allowed to them by law. To fail in this goal once was humiliating; to fail at the polls twice would be deemed a signal disgrace for a man like Brutus.

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

The way Caesar offered Brutus political power the way that he did, and Brutus accepting it, locked them into the assassination outcome.

Here is a man who’s built his entire image around honor and liberty and virtu, around being a staunch defender of morals and the republic

In these heated circumstances, Brutus composed a bitter tract On the Dictatorship of Pompey (De Dictatura Pompei), in which he staunchly opposed the idea of giving Pompey such a position of power. ‘It is better to rule no one than to be another man’s slave’, runs one of the only snippets of this composition to survive today: ‘for one can live honourably without power’, Brutus explained, ‘but to live as a slave is impossible’. In other words, Brutus believed it would be better for the Senate to have no imperial power at all than to have imperium and be subject to Pompey’s whim.

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

and you give him political advancement, but without the honor needed for this advancement to mean anything?

At the same time, however, Brutus had gained his position via extremely un-republican means: appointment by a dictator rather than election by the people. As the name of the famous career path, the cursus honorum, suggests, political office was perceived as an honour at Rome. But it was one which had to be bestowed by the populus Romanus in recognition of a man’s dignitas.69 In other words, a man’s ‘worth’ or ‘standing’ was only really demonstrated by his prior services to the state and his moral qualities, and that was what was needed to gain public recognition. Brutus had got it wrong. As Cicero not too subtly reminded him in the treatise he dedicated to Brutus: ‘Honour is the reward for virtue in the considered opinion of the citizenry.’ But the man who gains power (imperium) by some other circumstance, or even against the will of the people, he continues, ‘has laid his hands only on the title of honour, but it is not real honour’.70

Brutus may have secured political office, then, but he had not done so honourably; nor had he acted in a manner that would earn him a reputation for virtue or everlasting fame.

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

Brutus in the image that he fashioned for himself was not compatible with the way Caesar was setting him up to be a political successor, and there was really never going to be any other outcome than the one that happened.

The Brutus of Shakespeare and Plutarch’s greatest tragedy was that he was pushed into something he wouldn’t have done otherwise. The Brutus of history’s greatest tragedy was accepting Caesar’s forgiveness after the Caesar-Pompey conflict, and then selling out for political ambition, because Caesar's forgiveness is not benevolent.

Rather than have his enemies killed, he offered them mercy or clemency -- clementia in Latin. As Caesar wrote to his advisors, “Let this be our new method of conquering -- to fortify ourselves by mercy and generosity.” Caesar pardoned most of his enemies and forbore confiscating their property. He even promoted some of them to high public office.

This policy won him praise from no less a figure than Marcus Tullius Cicero, who described him in a letter to Aulus Caecina as “mild and merciful by nature.” But Caecina knew a thing or two about dictators, since he’d had to publish a flattering book about Caesar in order to win his pardon after having opposed him in the civil war. Caecina and other beneficiaries of Caesar’s unusual clemency took it in a far more ambivalent way. To begin with, most of them were, like Caesar, Roman nobles. Theirs was a culture of honor and status; asking a peer for a pardon was a serious humiliation. So Caesar’s “very power of granting favors weighed heavily on free people,” as Florus, a historian and panegyrist of Rome, wrote about two centuries after the dictator’s death. One prominent noble, in fact, ostentatiously refused Caesar’s clemency. Marcius Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Younger, was a determined opponent of populist politics and Caesar’s most bitter foe. They had clashed years earlier over Caesar’s desire to show mercy to the Catiline conspirators; Cato argued vigorously for capital punishment and convinced the Senate to execute them. Now he preferred death to Caesar’s pardon. “I am unwilling to be under obligations to the tyrant for his illegal acts,” Cato said; he told his son, "I, who have been brought up in freedom, with the right of free speech, cannot in my old age change and learn slavery instead.

-Barry Strauss, Caesar and the Dangers of Forgiveness

something else that's a fun adjacent to the topic that's fun to think about:

The link between ‘sparing’ and ‘handing over’ is common in the ancient world.763 Paul also uses παραδίδωμι again, denoting ‘hand over, give up a person’ (Bauer et al. 2000:762).764 The verb παραδίδωμι especially occurs in connection with war (Eschner 2010b:197; Gaventa 2011:272).765 However, in Romans 8:32, Paul uses παραδίδωμι to focus on a court image (Eschner 2010b:201).766 Christina Eschner (2010b:197) convincingly argues that Paul’s use of παραδίδωμι refers to the ‘Hingabeformulierungen’ as the combination of the personal object of the handing over of a person in the violence of another person, especially the handing over of a person to an enemy.767 Moreover, Eschner (2009:676) convincingly argues that Isaiah 53 is not the pre-tradition for Romans 8:32.

Annette Potgieter, Contested Body: Metaphors of dominion in Romans 5-8

Along with the internal conflict of Pompey, the murderer of Brutus’ father, and Caesar, the figurehead for everything that goes against what Brutus stands for, Brutus accepting Caesar’s forgiveness isn’t an act of benevolence, regardless of Caesar’s intentions.

On wards, Caesar owns Brutus. Caesar benefits from having Brutus as his own, he inherits Brutus’ reputation, he inherits a better PR image in the eyes of the Roman people. On wards, nothing Brutus does is without the ugly stain of Caesar. His career is no longer his own, his life is no longer fully his own, his legacy is no longer entirely his. Brutus becomes a man divided.

And it’s not like it was an internal struggle, it was an entire spectacle. Hypocrisy is theatrical. Call yourself a man of honor and then you sell out? The people of Rome will remember that, and they’re going to make sure you know it.

After this certain men at the elections proposed for consuls the tribunes previously mentioned, and they not only privately approached Marcus Brutus and such other persons as were proud-spirited and attempted to persuade them, but also tried to incite them to action publicly. 12 1 Making the most of his having the same name as the great Brutus who overthrew the Tarquins, they scattered broadcast many pamphlets, declaring that he was not truly that man's descendant; for the older Brutus had put to death both his sons, the only ones he had, when they were mere lads, and left no offspring whatever. 2 Nevertheless, the majority pretended to accept such a relationship, in order that Brutus, as a kinsman of that famous man, might be induced to perform deeds as great. They kept continually calling upon him, shouting out "Brutus, Brutus!" and adding further "We need a Brutus." 3 Finally on the statue of the early Brutus they wrote "Would that thou wert living!" and upon the tribunal of the living Brutus (for he was praetor at the time and this is the name given to the seat on which the praetor sits in judgment) "Brutus, thou sleepest," and "Thou art not Brutus."

Cassius Dio

Brutus knew. Cassius knew. Caesar knew. You can’t escape your legacy when you’re the one who stamped it on coins.

Caesar turned Brutus into the dagger that would cut, and Brutus himself isn’t free from this injury. It’s a mutual betrayal, a mutual dooming.

By this time Caesar found himself being attacked from every side, and as he glanced around to see if he could force a way through his attackers, he saw Brutus closing in upon him with his dagger drawn. At this he let go of Casca’s hand which he had seized, muffled up his head in his robe, and yielded up his body to his murderers’ blows. Then the conspirators flung themselves upon him with such a frenzy of violence, as they hacked away with their daggers, that they even wounded one another. Brutus received a stab in the hand as he tried to play his part in the slaughter, and every one of them was drenched in blood.

Plutarch

For Antony, Caesar is a bad sign.

Brutus and Antony are fucked over by the generation they were born in, etc etc the cannibalization of Rome on itself, the Third Servile War was the match to the gasoline already on the streets of Rome, the last generation of Romans etc etc etc. They are counterparts to each other, displaced representatives of a time already gone by the time they were alive.

Rome spends its years in a state of civil war after civil war, political upheaval, and death. Neither Brutus or Antony will ever really know stability, as instability is hallmark of the times. Both of them are at something of a disadvantage, although Brutus has what Antony does not, and what Brutus has is what let’s him create his own career. Until Caesar, Brutus is owned by no one.

This is not the case for Antony.

You can track Antony’s life by who he’s attached to. Very rarely is he ever truly a man unto himself, there is always someone nearby.

In his youth, it is said, Antony gave promise of a brilliant future, but then he became a close friend of Curio and this association seems to have fallen like a blight upon his career. Curio was a man who had become wholly enslaved to the demands of pleasure, and in order to make Antony more pliable to his will, he plunged him into a life of drinking bouts, love-affairs, and reckless spending. The consequence was that Antony quickly ran up debts of an enormous size for so young a man, the sum involved being two hundred and fifty talents. Curio provided security for the whole of this amount, but his father heard of it and forbade Antony his house. Antony then attached himself for a short while to Clodius, the most notorious of all the demagogues of his time for his lawlessness and loose-living, and took part in the campaigns of violence which at that time were throwing political affairs at Rome into chaos.

Plutarch

(although, in contrast to Brutus, we rarely lose sight of Antony. As a person, we can see him with a kind of clarity, if one looks a little bit past the Augustan propaganda. He is, at all times, human.)

Antony being figuratively or literally attached to a person starts early, and continues politically. While Brutus has enough privilege to brute force his way into politics despite Cicero’s lamentation of a promising life being thrown off course, Antony will instead follow a different career path that echoes in his personal life and defines his relationships.

Whereas some young men often attached or indebted themselves to a patron or a military leader at the beginning of their political lives,

Kathryn Tempest, Brutus the Noble Conspirator

+

3. During his stay in Greece he was invited by Gabinius, a man of consular rank, to accompany the Roman force which was about to sail for Syria. Antony declined to join him in a private capacity, but when he was offered the command of the cavalry he agreed to serve in the campaign.

Plutarch

To take it a step further, it even defines how he’s perceived today looking back: it’s never just Antony, it’s always Antony and---

It can be read as someone being taken advantage of, in places, survival in others, especially in Antony's early life. Other times, it appears like Antony himself is the one who manipulates things to his favor, casting aside people and realigning himself back to an advantage.

or when he saw an opportunity for faster advancement, he was willing to place the blame on a convenient scapegoat or to disregard previous loyalties, however important they had been. His desertion of Fulvia's memory in 40, and, much later, of Lepidus, Sextus Pompey, and Octavia, produced significant political gains. This characteristic, which Caesar discovered to his cost in 47, gives the sharp edge to Antony's personality which Syme's portrait lacks, especially when he attributes Antony's actions to a 'sentiment of loyalty' or describes him as a 'frank and chivalrous soldier'. In this context, one wonders what became of Fadia.19

Kathryn E Welch , Antony, Fulvia, and the Ghost of Clodius in 47 B.C.

Caesar inherits Antony, and like Brutus, locks him in for a doomed ending.

The way Caesar writes about Antony smacks of someone viewing another person as something more akin to a dog, and it carries over until it’s bitter conclusion.

Caesar benefits from Antony immensely. The people love Antony, the military loves Antony. He’s charming, he’s self aware, he’s good at what he does. Above all of that, he has political ambitions of a similar passion as Brutus.

Antony drew some political benefit from his genial personality. Even Cicero, who from at least 49 did not like him,15 was prepared to regard some of his earlier misdemeanours as harmless.16 Bluff good humour, moderate intelligence, at least a passing interest in literature, and an ability to be the life and soul of a social gathering all contributed to make him a charming companion and to bind many important people to him. He had a lieutenant's ability to follow orders and a willingness to listen to advice, even (one might say especially) from intelligent women.17 These attributes made Antony able to handle some situations very well."1

There was a more important side to his personality, however, which contributed to his political survival. Antony was ruthless in his quest for pre-eminence

Kathryn E Welch , Antony, Fulvia, and the Ghost of Clodius in 477 B.C.

None of this matters, because after all Antony does for Caesar

Plutarch's comment that Curio brought Antony into Caesar's camp is surely mistaken.59 Anthony had been serving as Caesar's officer from perhaps as early as 53, after his return from Syria.60 He is described as legatus in late 52,61 and was later well known as Caesar's quaestor.62 It is more likely that the reverse of the statement is true, that Antony assisted in bringing Curio over to Caesar. If this were so, then he performed a signal service for Caesar, for gaining Curio meant attaching Fulvia, who provided direct access to the Clodian clientela in the city. Such valuable political connections served to increase Antony's standing with Caesar, and to set him apart from other officers in his army.63

Kathryn E Welch , Antony, Fulvia, and the Ghost of Clodius in 477 B.C.

Caesar still, for whatever reasons, fucks over Antony spectacularly with the will. Loyalty is repaid with dismissal, and it will bury the Republic for good.

It’s not enough for Caesar to screw him over just once, it becomes generational and ugly. Caesar lives on through Octavian: it becomes Octavian’s brand, his motif, propaganda wielded like a knife. Octavian, thanks to Caesar, will bring Antony to his bitter conclusion

And for my "bitter" conclusion, I’ll sign off by saying that there are actual scholars on Antony who are more well versed than I am who can go into depth about the Caesar-Octavian-Antony dynamic (and how it played out with Caligula) better than I can, and scholarship on Brutus consists mostly of looking at an outline of a man and trying to guess what the inside was like.

At the end of the day, Caesar was the instigator, active manipulator, and catalyst for the final act of the Republic.

I hope that this was at least entertaining to read!

[lovelyirony]

Title: I wish i could forget you

Tony Stark was not supposed to be in the car when Howard and Maria Stark attended a Christmas holiday party for another company. In fact, Hydra had wanted him to stay home. 

Unfortunately, Tony had ticked off Howard a bit too much, and so here he was in a tuxedo that was a bit too big, uncomfortably shiny shoes, and a temper that was close to blowing. 

Thank god they were almost home. 

When a car crashes, one almost can’t believe it. Tony can see the outside blurring, and he can hear glass crunching, and he hears things that he really doesn’t want to hear. He is fairly sure that Maria screamed. 

A metal arm. 

Huh. 

Well, not the most typical. He also doesn’t think that the man knows he’s here. 

Howard and Maria Stark are killed. Tony feels like shit because he couldn’t do anything. His forehead is bleeding and he didn’t want to move out of fear for himself, which seems selfish, but also maybe a survival instinct? 

God, his bow-tie is still constricting air flow. 

Once the man turns, Tony realizes that he wasn’t the target. They probably had no idea he was in the car, whoever “they” were. 

He gets out of the car. The car door creaks, and the man whips around. 

His eyes widen. 

“You--what?” 

The voice is surprisingly American. 

Surprisingly? He’s not sure why it’s surprising, it’s not like an American can’t kill just look at history, but still, Kind of surprising. 

"What, wasn’t supposed to be here?” Tony rasps out. He realizes now that he’s basically sent himself a death sentence as the man surges forward. 

“What are you doing here?” 

His eyes are piercing. Also very, very familiar with some photographs that Peggy has on her mantle and her desk. 

James “Bucky” Barnes. Son of a bitch. 

“What are you doing alive?” Tony asks. “I thought you were lost in a ravine in Europe somewhere.” 

“What--huh?” 

“Ravine. In Europe. You know who you are, right? Is this some kind of sick...what did they do to you?” 

“I do not know what you are talking about.” 

His eyes get cold again. 

“Who are you?” 

“I am the Asset.” 

It is now that Tony realizes that every single shitty sci-fi book is probably right, and his disdain of “wacky science” and “magic” have all been for nothing, because here is Bucky Barnes, who apparently has no idea who he is. 

Then Tony gets knocked on his ass. His body slams against the icy road, and Barnes is rushing towards a motorcycle. 

And he’s alone. He can’t breathe, all the wind knocked out of his chest. He thinks he broke a couple of ribs. 

- 

No one believes him. At all. SHIELD brushes it aside. 

“There’s no way Barnes could be alive. You were probably just seeing things,” they tell him. “Would you like us to find you a therapist?” 

“No,” Tony says, and they ask why. He laughs, sipping on his water. “SHIELD has so much loyalty to itself, I’m afraid I’d be compromised.” 

“Therapists aren’t supposed to divulge any information,” Nick Fury adds carefully. “And we’re a secret-keeping bunch. Nothing goes out that comes in.” 

“Unless, of course, it’s necessary,” Tony drawls, staring at Fury. God, the leather outfit...that’s weird. “Then I’m out in the open, Nicky. And what fun is that unless I get to show off an outfit in full-coverage?” 

“...I’ll have an agent escort you home. We’ll have guards overnight.” 

“Don’t bother.” 

“And why is that? Think you can handle it by yourself?” 

“Fury, my family has made a career out of thinking a lot of things. You’re not being as detrimental as you think.” 

He finger-waves, grinning and winking at agents on the way out. 

- 

Now comes paranoia. This is welcome, actually, because it’s allowing him to work up new security measures and hack into various security cameras around the world to see if he can find Barnes. 

It’s like he’s a ghost. And fuck, maybe Fury was right. Tony doesn’t like that, but that may be it. 

Merry fucking Christmas. 

- 

Years go by, and Tony keeps a tiny ear to any news about mysterious deaths that can’t be explained. A man that glows in lamp-light, has no identity. He’s not sure if it could be Barnes. God knows he’s no longer seventeen, and Barnes--it if it was Barnes--would be way older. He should’ve been an old man in 1991, but he wasn’t. 

It kind of reminds him of the conspiracy theory that Walt Disney was kept cryogenically frozen, which is just ridiculous, because as far as he’s concerned, you’d need a bit more to you than just regular skin and bones. 

And this is where it hits him. 

Barnes was experimented on when he was captured by Hydra. Peggy told him that Rogers told her that he was repeating his dog tag number over and over, as if someone was trying to take him over. 

Yeah, you’d need a bit more. 

Like a fucking super soldier serum. 

- 

This then delves into Tony realizing that if Barnes is flash-frozen, then...well, could Rogers have survived? He always thought his dad was crazy, but a broken clock is right twice a week or however the hell that saying goes. He never used it, he wasn’t a broken clock. 

(He was broken, but he’s not going to compare himself to a clock. Perhaps  Model-T.) 

- 

They find Rogers. Tony realizes Howard did his math completely wrong for years, and probably never let anyone look at it because he was a World Super Genius. And a Colossal Dick. 

Steve Rogers is one tough cookie to crack. Tony chips off some of the ice and puts it in a glass of scotch. 

“Do you really think that’s the most appropriate thing to do?” Phil Coulson asks. 

He’s shocked, but mainly because Tony has seen his Cap collection, and that man has so many limited edition cards and lunchboxes that it’s a bit crazy. But at least he knows how to decorate with it and not have it look like an absolute nutjob swept into his house and did it all in red-white-and-blue. 

“Phil, my darling, when have I ever done anything the appropriate way?” Tony asks. He stares at the face that’s emerging out of the ice. “Besides, what else are you going to do with this ice, hm? Besides melt it all off?” 

Steve is a miracle. Every scientist on earth wants to poke and prod at him. 

Tony breaks him out of SHIELD in a week, because he swears to shit if one more scientist asks to take blood samples “to see how going under Arctic temperatures affects the bloodstream” (and also take DNA for cloning) he’s going to lose it. 

Fury yells at him for two hours. 

Steve flips Fury off from the couch, where he’s been channel-surfing for the better part of three hours. 

“You’ve already corrupted him,” Fury scowls. “Rogers, we need to talk--” 

“He’s retired,” Tony says. 

(Steve is not, technically. Hasn’t said anything. But Tony is putting him on mandatory retirement for at least a year.) 

“What’s...what the ever-loving fuck is that?” Steve asks. 

An infomercial. For an automated chair. Mostly used for old people. 

Tony grins. 

“You wanna see how fast I can launch you out of one?” 

“I’m going to say yes. Professionally.” 

Ten miles an hour, and Steve goes flying across the room into a pile of pillows. 

It’s not the end-all solution. God knows Steve calls him “Howard” and asks where a lot of nasty food is, and sometimes can’t tell the difference between what his brain is seeing and what is actually there. 

But Tony gets him help. And Steve goes to art school. 

It’s all very funny, actually. Steve rants about “modern art” and how “if he could kill any concept it would be abstract expressionism, what the fuck.” 

Tony buys and then donates a Rothko in his honor. 

Steve fumes, but finds it hilarious. 

Then, there’s the attack on New York. 

Norse god of mischief decides to end New York, blah blah blah. 

Captain America reappears, everyone loses their shit, and Tony almost dies. 

Then he gets four other roomies besides Steve, and he has to make a chore chart. Ugh. 

- 

Barnes reappears in France. Tony gets a fairly good image, and Natasha stills. 

“You know about Winter Soldier?” 

“Barnes? Yeah.” 

“You know who he is?” 

“James Barnes. At least, I think. He tried to kill me, wasn’t very successful at it.” 

Steve overhears. 

This leads to a chain of events that ends in Steve not coming to family dinner because he’d rather sit in his room and listen to Green Day or Glenn Miller or whatever the hell gets him even more upset. 

“Listen, Steve, I’m sorry. But up until this picture? I was only about sixty percent sure I wasn’t full of beans.” 

“Why is that the phrase you use?” 

“What, full of beans? Bruce says I have to work on my cursing. Apparently, children are impressionable. Who knew?” 

It’s not a total success. Steve still doesn’t like that Tony didn’t outright tell him, but Tony isn’t going to tell Steve that he has the mental stability of a single cashew. 

So begins the hunt for Barnes. Which actually isn’t too bad. 

He’s in DC. Not for any political clean-up, unfortunately. He’s trying to kill Fury. Tony doesn’t know why, at least until he looks up Pierce, who’s technically, mostly retired from SHIELD. 

And yet still uses most resources that technically? He needs more than one authorization from multiple people. 

God, people are getting bad at covering their tracks. Used to be harder to catch and see if someone was doing dirty deals. 

(Okay, not like he can talk because Obie was...well, no use in discussing that now. He needs to focus.) 

Nat and Steve are bad at lying. This kind of surprises him, because Steve is usually a successful liar. He’s convinced Clint that it’s not him who keeps eating his peanut-butter-fudge ice cream, but Thor. 

And Natasha used to be Natalie Rushman. Then again, Tony was poisoned during that one, so that might just be on him. 

-

Helicarriers go in the water. 

Tony’s working on making sure most of the information doesn’t reach the general public, although he can’t stop it all. 

Barnes falls off the face of the earth, and Steve wants to go on another treasure hunt. 

“Let him come to us, or figure himself out.” 

“This isn’t a college kid going backpacking in Europe for a year,” Nat snaps. “He’s...you know who he is, who he was, and what he can do.” 

“Counterpoint: we don’t know if he secretly really wanted to see traditional decoration of Ukrainian Easter eggs,” Tony says. “God knows that I want to learn more about that.” 

“Is everything a joke to you?” 

"Only on federally mandated holidays,” Tony says with a shrug. “But let him be. Steve, it’s one thing that he didn’t kill you. It’s another thing that he hauled you up from the Potomac. I’m not sure I would’ve done that because who goes up alone to a helicarrier?” 

“Historically nobody,” Natasha says. “Most people don’t have any helicarriers.” 

“God, this situation sucks,” Tony says. “What if. We potentially. Ignore all of it and have spinach and artichoke dip? Hm?” 

“With toasted bread?” 

“I’m not an animal, Steve.” 

“Your penchant for four a.m. coffee while you don’t realize you’re singing songs from the seventies says otherwise,” he responds. 

“Well well well, if it isn’t the punishment of you getting the aux taken away for a week,” Tony taunts. 

“Oh, come on!” Steve whines. 

“Nope, just you having to listen to more of Bruce’s questionable tastes.” 

“Fuck.” 

- 

Barnes comes stateside. The only reason Tony knows this is because Jarvis says that he may have spotted Barnes, but he’s not sure. 

“J, you’re the most advanced system in the world, not to mention my son, and you like to hack into the Pentagon for funsies.” 

“All of that could not have prepared me for this.” 

Barnes is wearing a neon green tank top that is advertising Coco Beach in Florida. 

“Can I laugh? Or is that sad?” 

“Multitask, Sir.” 

“Oh, true.” 

- 

Barnes is not in New York. Tony has to near-about put an electric fence around the whole state so that Steve doesn’t go on a road trip. 

Hell, Tony doesn’t even trust him to go to coffee alone, but that’s a bit much. 

“We have to wait,” Tony says. 

Sam Wilson is a godsend. Also the funniest man Tony knows. 

He is also emotionally healthy and very perceptive, so he has been noticing that Tony is nervous. 

Because how do you face the man who killed your parents? Technically? 

“Are you talking to your therapist?” Sam asks. “Just thinking you should.” 

“Sam, we’re working on my issues from 2007. Believe it or not, it will be taking a full year.” 

“I don’t like that I can never tell if you’re serious.” 

“I know you remember the tabloids from 2007, I wrote a mesh vest. Clearly, I need so much help.” 

Sam snorts. 

“Maybe. Hey, I’ll catch you later. Clint and I are gonna go try and find some questionable shirts to crop.” 

“Did his little protege convince you? Bishop, right?” 

“Kate, yeah. She’s convinced our public image will go viral or something. Good luck with helping Steve and Nat with your super-soldier hunt.” 

“Thanks. Let me know if you find a shirt with my face on it. I want it.” 

Sam snorts. 

“Will do.” 

- 

Bucky Barnes comes to New York in early May. The springtime is slowly but surely fading off, sun approaching more and more. Tony is enjoying coffee on a veranda, and then suddenly his waiter is nowhere to be found and he’s not entirely sure if his visitor takes credit or debit. 

“Can I help you?” 

“Maybe. Depends on if you’re gonna kill me or not.” 

“I think Steve would be a bit broken up about it.” 

“Do you care what he thinks?” 

“On this situation? Yes. When it comes to culinary choices? No.” 

There’s a ghost of a smile on his face. Tony’s trying extremely hard not to remember shattered glass and a motorcycle on ice. 

“Can we, uh, table this conversation? For later. Espresso and all that, plus the added bonus of our shared history, so...” 

“Shared history?” 

“You don’t remember?” Tony asks. Bucky shakes his head. “Ah. Then this is truly a comedy of errors. Maybe. Um. Listen, I, uh...I gotta go. You need to talk to Nat or Steve or hell, maybe even Thor. Is Thor a good option?” 

“I’m sorry, what?” 

“Barnes, I can’t exactly face you right now.” 

And then he jumps off a balcony. 

A fucking balcony. 

Jesus H. Christ, his therapist is gonna be so excited for their next session. 

The suit wraps itself around him, and he can finally breathe, and he’s thinking about calling Pepper and see if she would like to schedule him a vacation for maybe anywhere but New York and Iowa. 

“Why not Iowa?” Pepper asks. “They have good antique stores. I’ve gotten quite a few good finds for clothes.” 

“I can do shopping retail literally anywhere else, absolutely not.” 

“Spoilsport. Steve know you’re leaving?” 

“I didn’t even really tell Steve what happened with my parents.” 

“Oh, your therapist called. She sounded concerned, but also intrigued.” 

“It’s because Sally almost became an employee of NASA and still has a soft spot for aerodynamics.” 

“What exactly did you do when faced with Barnes?” 

“Check the front tabloid page tomorrow, just tell everyone I’m out of town.” 

“Got it. And Tony?” 

Her voice is soft. 

“Yes, dear?” 

He can feel her rolling her eyes. Affectionately, of course, but rolling all the same. 

“Be safe, and come back. You know Rhodey and I miss you.” 

“I miss you too.” 

- 

A week is spent in Malibu. He really is thinking about selling this place. But for now, it suffices. 

Steve texts him. 

bucky’s back. holy shit 

be back in a week. radio silence. 

got it. no more messages from me. thor tells me to tell you that he broke the sink 

:(((( 

And that’s it. He’s sitting in the house for a week, has already called Sally once and explained how his suit works, and then listened to her talk about how “his reliance on the suit to help him escape unfavorable situations is not exactly the healthiest but also none of my clients have had to face someone who is of weird standing.” 

It’s no secret that Tony doesn’t like Howard Stark. Who would’ve liked that sorry excuse for a father, a man who was so cold-hearted the Arctic looked like a tropical paradise? 

Maria was...Maria was different. 

She wasn’t a good mother. No, she was never a good mother. But she tried, and she didn’t deserve her fate. 

And then there was the question of Bucky Barnes. Who wasn’t Bucky when he was there, but still so damn recognizable. 

It’s kind of like when there’s a movie about a famous person, and another person plays them. Like Tom Hanks, essentially. Bucky played whoever the fuck they get Tom Hanks to play and it’s similar: you see the resemblance, but it’s not it. 

So yeah. 

There’s also the little tidbit that things get complicated when you involve personal feelings and rationality, and really? Tony misses New York. A lot. And he’s not going to let someone else overtake his life just because he’s uncomfortable. 

So he flies back to New York. 

- 

He’s in a bad way, Barnes is. 

“He remembered you,” Steve says. “What he did.” 

“Ah, there’s that.” 

“He doesn’t have to be here,” Natasha says. “I have a couple of SHIELD safe houses to choose from.” 

“None would be adequate to house something like me,” comes the response. 

Barnes looks remarkably shitty, as if he hasn’t slept in eighty years. And maybe he hasn’t. 

“Jail would be more fitting.” 

Tony rolls his eyes. 

“You are literally the most dramatic person ever, and Bruce threatened to take over the government because Thor ate the last croissant. Put those on the grocery list, Steve

“We’re not gonna throw you in jail,” he continues on. “Not because you happened to be used as a goddamned Swiss army knife. I have issues, sure, but I’m not going to be going all Hannibal Lecter or whatever.” 

“Who the hell is that?” 

“Cannibal. I realized that that’s a terrible comparison, please forgive me.” 

“Why a cannibal?” 

“Couldn’t think of anything else but Anthony Hopkins, the actor. My mistake. Point is, we’re gonna have to go through some channels, and I’m introducing you to BARF, as well as a new person who’s gonna rock your world.” 

“I’m pretty much well-acquainted with vomit.” 

“No, not that,” Tony says. “Although we can cover that through my 2005 edition of partying if we really wanna dig up some old magazine interviews. No, I’m introducing you to something that’s going to change your life.” 

-

After that, Tony doesn’t have much to do with Bucky’s life. 

He serves as a permanent guilt trip, nothing says “well, shit” much like being a permanent guilt trip. 

Sally tells him that they should talk it out. Do all that “and how do you feel?” questioning that makes his skin crawl and his eyes ascend to the ceiling. 

I mean yeah, they share a living space. Tony has seen Bucky laugh and smile with Sam, talk with Bruce about a really interesting article about regeneration of plant cells or whatever, and Bucky enjoys videochatting with Wakandan royalty. 

(It also helps that Shuri is blunt as ever, but so blisteringly smart. He’s reading her paper on regeneration of nanotechnology, and it just...it’s the Pieta of research, that paper.) 

But he never speaks to Bucky. Well, he does. But it’s more along the lines of “hey Barnes” and “how are you?” which aren’t exactly the Most Thought Provoking Statements Ever Made. 

Summer comes swiftly, and about near with a vengeance. Tony’s dealing with a heat wave and trying to figure out if going outside is even worth it, and then he and Bucky are alone in the kitchen. 

Tony was debating getting a couple of popsicles from the freezer. Bucky is considering sabotaging Clint’s smoothie that was supposed to be special for tonight, but that he’ll most likely forget. 

“Hey,” Bucky says. “Um, can we talk?” 

Shit. 

He’s been avoiding this, officially, for a month. Potentially more if you’re going to count a few choice events that have been brought up by his psyche. 

“Sure thing, buttercup. What are we talking about. Economy, world crises, the great debate on financial advice?” 

“Isn’t the third thing just the economy?” 

“We can break it down over coffee.” 

“Mm, maybe another time. No, I’m talking about us. About how I--I kind of ruined your life.” 

Tony blinks. 

“You didn’t ruin my life. If my life was ruined you’d be hit with so many lawsuits that I could make the rest of your life look like the third circle of Hell, or wherever it is that people go nowadays in Dante’s eyes. No, you didn’t ruin my life.” 

“I still killed your parents.” 

“If you hadn’t, someone else would’ve. Believe me, there were about fifteen others in line. Sometimes, myself included.” 

“You can’t not take me seriously,” Bucky stresses. “I still did a terrible thing. I just want to make sure you know that you’re being too kind.” 

“I most certainly am not,” Tony says. “Being too kind would have me feeding you grapes.” 

Bucky’s face blanks. 

“Don’t. I...I don’t wanna take advantage of your hospitality. I don’t want to remind you of what happened.” 

“You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t wanted,” Tony says. “Believe me. And if you want to leave, you’re free to leave. I don’t want to make you feel like you need to stay here.” 

“I...I want to make it up to you.” 

“Then use BARF and review it,” Tony says. “I’m serious. I need user feedback, and you’re the best candidate for it. Also, please try to convince Steve to wear neon yellow. I just want to see if he’ll do it.” 

- 

Steve wears neon yellow. Tony laughs so hard he cries. 

Bucky smiles. 

It’s a nice smile, really. It’s wide and happy and wow. That’s all worth it. 

And then BARF. Bucky just gives user feedback, nothing else. Tony doesn’t want to know anything else, but they start talking more. 

Tony finds out that Bucky’s been doing crosswords to catch up on current events, and he’s bought taped recordings of World Series games. 

He loves antique stores. He visits them and brings home little trinkets that he remembers in his own house, or what he remembered. He watched old commercials from the fifties and sixties, laughed as he remembered the Sears catalogs that would come in the mail. 

“Me an’ my sisters would beg my mom for new clothes from the catalog, and she never would. Always sewed our pants and skirts so damn well, I probably could’ve used them for the next ten years.”  

Tony laughs. 

“Well, I can’t promise I can sew. But I could give you some armor that could last you twenty years, if you want. Steve told me you’re thinking about doing some distance missions.” 

“Just observation, no armor required.” 

“Sometimes it’s the simple missions that get the worst hits,” Tony says. “Believe me, I know how it goes. So, do you want some armor?” 

Bucky smiles. 

“Sure.” 

“I’ll need feedback.” 

“I’ll give it all I’ve got.” 

- 

Bucky is a goddamned dream to design for. He knows exactly what he needs, what areas are most likely to be pierced, and also has a flair for the dramatic: he requests an Iron Man helmet be embroidered on the back. 

“You’re really just trying to be sweet on me, aren’t you?” Tony teases. 

“My master plan to gain your fortune,” Bucky teases right back. “I’ll waste it all on champagne pools and the worst-looking but most expensive shoes I can find.” 

Tony laughs. 

“Sugar, that’d be incredible if you could spend all of my money on that. I’d commend you.” 

Bucky smiles, and it shouldn’t be as nice of a smile as it is, but here Tony is with his opinions and his concerning thought that maybe he wants to see more of Bucky. 

- 

In the morning, there begins a routine. Tony is always up at eight o’clock. It’s a rare lull in Avenger-morning-routines: Nat, Steve, and Bruce are all done, and Thor and Clint won’t be in until ten o’clock at the earliest. 

(What can he say? Thor’s a god and Clint...well. He needs a lot of beauty sleep.) 

Tony makes coffee, and Bucky makes them both breakfast. Says that officially, it’s to test and make sure that his prosthetic is still performing under optimal conditions. 

(They both know that’s not it.) 

Tony always says he pours too much water, makes enough for two cups. 

- 

Steve calls them out on it. 

“You two are being weird,” he says. “And not like Thor and Bruce trying to reenact that one show about ghosts and unsolved things.” 

“That’s their form of courtship, don’t be fucking rude,” Clint remarks. Natasha snorts. 

“What, us being weird?” Tony asks, pouring a bit more coffee into Bucky’s mug. He always uses too much creamer and then won’t finish his coffee unless there’s more. “Why do you say that?” 

“It’s because you both do couple shit,” Bruce says, breezing into the kitchen. “Also, Steve, lovely to see that you have volunteered to be the next guest on Avengers: Unsolved. We’re planning on using you as a guilt-trip in order to access files about aliens.” 

“Truth will be found!” Thor adds. “But also, yes. Bucky, I thought you were taking him on a date to the art museum on Saturday.” 

Bucky turns red. So does Tony. It really is quite inconvenient. 

“I mean, we could go on a date there,” Tony says. “If you’re okay with that.” 

“You’re doing this in public?” Natasha asks, eyebrows raised. “Hm. Would not have called that.” 

“You owe me fifteen dollars,” Bucky says. “Not you Tony, quit looking at me like that. Yes, it will be a date on Saturday, I’ll wear a nice shirt. Nat said that I couldn’t do anything that surprised her.” 

“Technically, Tony surprised me.” 

“I thought dates were mutual events, hm? Fifteen dollars. I’ll use it to buy the best bouquet in New York.” 

“The best bouquet costs over a thousand dollars,” Thor answers. 

“Not questioning how you know that, but I’m scared of you,” Bucky says. “Then I will get the best fifteen-dollar-bouquet in New York.” 

Tony snorts, smiling. 

“I guess I’ll spray a bit of my perfume on my pillow then, soldier.” 

“I’ll pick you up at noon sharp,” Bucky says, grinning. He finishes his coffee. “We’ll make fun of Steve’s art exhibit together.” 

[groundcontrol21]

Landfall (Black Sails, M, 1/2)

Y’all had to have known this was coming 😈 I am utterly appalled at the lack of Black Sails recognition. So, to remedy that, have some Sick!Flint. If you have not watched Black Sails, watch it. I purposefully avoided spoiling anything major in this fic because it is truly the best show I have ever had the pleasure to watch and I do not want to spoil that for anyone. If you want queer characters, ships, pirates, badass women, ships (did I mention those already?) and show writing that feels like the best of literature, watch this show. That said, if you have seen it, this takes place before the show starts, when Captain Flint is building his image as the fearsome pirate he is when we meet him.

This was actually incredibly hard to write, both because I felt such an intense pressure to do these wonderful characters justice and because Flint is just an impermeable wall. Like this man could just take a cannonball to the face and not bat an eye. So I tried my best to stay in character and still let him suffer a bit :) Onwards! Hopefully a bit more sneezing in the next part.

They had made landfall in Nassau in the evening, just as the sun was beginning to set. The storm clouds that had then been rolling into the harbor quickly from the interior of the island were now unleashing a torrential downpour upon Captain Flint as he urged his horse faster inland through the mud. It had taken them long into the night, well after the rain had begun to unload all the cargo they had taken, and as such he was as soaked as though pulled from the ocean. Though being so wet would doubtless not do well for the headcold he was brewing, neither would spending the night at the Guthrie’s tavern do well for his headache.

When he arrived at Miranda’s home, he tied up his horse in the stable and limped into the house, his leg aching from the ride or the fight for the ship or the weather or God knows what else. The wind blew the door shut with a loud crash behind him. Flint stood for a moment, water dripping from him like a personal rainstorm, breathing heavily and not altogether successfully keeping himself from coughing. In the hearth, a dying fire cast its dim light on the room. He hung his coat, more wet rag now than anything, beside the door, when he heard a shuffling from the bedroom.

Miranda emerged in her nightgown, her hair mussed slightly from its updo in sleep. She smiled at him but Flint, upon seeing her hands empty, did not return it.

“Where’s the pistol I gave you?” he growled. “To protect yourself.”

Turning her back to him, Miranda went to stoke the fire up higher. “I left it behind, seeing as though I know there is only one man mad enough to ride out and barge in my door at this hour and in this weather. Thank you, by the way. For the puddle.”

Miranda pulled a stool out in front of the hearth and Flint sank into it, the wood creaking as his weight melted into it. “Homecoming gift,” he gritted out.

“There’s blood in it.”

“Eh?”

“In the puddle. Mixed with the water.”

“My leg, probably. Haven’t really had the chance to look at it yet.” He spared a glance at his thigh; the light was low, coming only from the fire, but he thought he could make out a glisten of red somewhere along the sodden black fabric of his trousers, as well as a tear. He coughed to clear his throat. “There’s a book. In my cloak. Probably soaked through, but it’s there. Erasmus.”

“Good that you had the time and the sense to raid a bookshelf.” Flint picked up on the unspoken and not tend to your leg and he did not care for the accusation of it, but he did not rise to the bait, simply too exhausted to do so. His head and limbs ached, and now that the promise of a hearth and true dryness was so near he could scarcely stand the wet scratch of his clothes against his skin.

Miranda disappeared to the kitchen, no doubt to boil water and prepare a salve to clean his wound. They had fallen into this rhythm, such that Flint himself could recognize which cloths and jars she pulled down based only on the direction of her footsteps and the squeaking of the cabinets. The farthest to the left of the stove was the highest pitched and it was there she kept her lavender soap which, for reasons unclear, she used only on him. He heard her open it. It would be wasted on him tonight, not that it ever wasn’t, for he was too full of cold to consider smelling it.

He gave three shuddering sneezes, the wetness of his hair snaking around his temples chilling him further. Briefly he considered going to his coat to retrieve his handkerchief, soaked as it no doubt was, but when he looked up he saw Miranda re-enter, holding a platter full of bowls and bandages to treat him, and he knew he would get a row for getting up again to bleed more on her floor.

“Dutch merchant ship with a hold full of spices and tobacco,” he told her as she set the tray down with a soft clang on the coffee table beside where he sat. She lit a candle “Enough to keep the men satisfied for a while.”

“How long is that?”

“Two months at least. Enough for us to ride out the worst of the winter storms on la--Careful!” Flint jerked back as Miranda pulled at the tear in his trouser leg, ripping it open to expose the gash on his thigh.

“Hush, they’ll have to be sewn up again, anyway.”

“At this rate, they’ll have to be replaced!”

Miranda sighed as she took in the extent of the injury, fresh blood gleaming deeply in the candlelight, then gave an airy chuckle. There was a sadness nestled deeply within it, almost imperceptible, that hurt Flint far more than the wound did. “I suppose I should have pegged you as a man who cared more for his clothing than for himself.”

Flint talked around that sadness, as they always did. “Says the woman who is more worried about bloodstains on her floor than what put them there. I think I could come in without a leg and you’d be particular about what I bled on.”

Miranda smiled, almost to herself, as she wet a cloth in the bowl of soapy water and wrung it out, before placing it on Flint’s leg. “If you had a home to clean and take care of, you’d be particular as well.”

They fell silent after that, the only sounds being the crackle of the fire and the melodic repetition of Miranda dunking the cloth in the bowl, the droplets pittering as she wrung it out, the soft squish as she pressed cloth gently to his wound. It was not unlike the cadence of a ship, the rushing waves and heaving creaks, and Flint lost himself in it, the sting of the soap as she scrubbed the only thing keeping him from drifting to sleep.

His sniffling grew more insistent as the fragrance of the soap loosened his congestion. He sneezed again, twice, jerking away from Miranda as she was wrapping a bandage around his thigh.

“You’ve picked up a cold, too, on your voyage,” she observed, not pausing her pressure on the wound as she continued to wrap it.

“It’s nothing.”

“Well, yes, compared to the gash on your leg a great number of things are nothing.” Her hands paused in tying the bandage, holding the pressure there as she looked up at him, the question unsaid burning like an ember behind her eyes. In London, she would have asked—she had asked when he had come around with a split lip from a bar fight or a bruise from his training—but since they had come to Nassau there were a great many questions she had stopped asking.

Flint met her eyes for the briefest of moments. She would not ask how he had come by this latest set of injuries, but she knew enough to fill the gaps, perhaps even enough to construct a story close to the truth. She was a smart, smart woman and Flint did not deserve her.

Her voice softened as she dropped her gaze, wiping away with a clean cloth the blood that had already seeped around the edges of the bandage. “Please, try to take care of yourself a bit, James.”

Flint made a sound in his throat, an attempt at a grunt or a scoff perhaps, but it caught and turned to a rough cough. Miranda said nothing, but set to gathering the bloody cloths and filthy bowls back on the tray. The sight of the blood, the dirt of his world infiltrating and infecting hers, made his chest burn in a way that had nothing to do with his illness.

Miranda hesitated and cupped his cheek briefly before picking up the tray, bidding him look at her. The firelight flicked across her eyes. “Allow me to do what I can. I know there are…” She broke their gaze for a moment and swallowed. “Limits to what I can do, what I can understand, but please. Let me be here for you.”

Flint smoothed a stray piece of her hair back behind her ear and studied her a moment, beholding with a sinking stomach the lines on her face, lines that had been from ceaseless smiles back in London turned lines sour with stress here in Nassau. He owed this to her, owed her the world after what he had put her through.

“I only mean you needn’t trouble yourself over this,” he said. “Over me, over a headcold, over a cut on my leg. It’s nothing that I haven’t experienced before and I’ve borne it--”

“The men aren’t here to see you,” Miranda said abruptly, and damn her for always knowing his mind even when Flint scarcely knew it himself. She carried on, her voice softening. “Any weakness you think you might display, they are not here to see it. There’s no need to be Captain Flint in this house.”

With that she turned back for the kitchen, calling over her shoulder that she would bring Flint a towel to dry himself while she made up the spare bed. Flint coughed again, knowing that if he had had the energy to follow his instinct he would have yelled at her for some senseless reason, perhaps for the sin of cutting through to the core of the very armor of ferocity he was trying to build for himself. Shame burned in his belly, and he took a small measure of comfort in the throb of his injury and the fire in his throat, as a twisted form of penance or punishment. He had become an angry man since leaving London. He had always been subject to passion, to being overcome, to loss of control. The accursed Admiral Hennessey had even observed as much. But the raw permanence of his anger, burrowing deep within him and taking up hold like a parasite, was something altogether new and different. In quiet moments such as this, he loathed himself for it.

Miranda returned to him with a towel and a handkerchief before departing to the bedroom. Flint made judicious use of both the items, his sneezing assaulting him with a vengeance as he became dry, as if to punish him for having gotten so wet in the first place. He had been ill all manner of times and in all manner of places: belowdecks in the Navy, at port, on land, even once prior on the Walrus. And this present headcold of his, while decidedly uncomfortable and a nuisance as all headcolds are, certainly ranked among the least of these times. Were he alone or at sea, he would have treated it as he treated all minor ailments: by simply going about his business as usual, perhaps indulging in a bit of rum to take the edge off the soreness in his throat. But, it was undeniably relaxing, freeing even, to know that he would sleep in a bed tonight and not have to wake to maps and ropes and captaincy in the morning. Flint felt his shoulders fall at the realization, felt the muscles in his jaw unclench, until the strain of sailing and fighting to take the Dutch caravel was as much in the background as the soft sputtering of the fire in the hearth.

His eyes slipped shut, and perhaps he had even fallen asleep briefly sitting up, when Miranda shook his shoulder gently. She nodded at him and he nodded back, feeling stupid and disoriented with fatigue. Doubtless sensing this, she led him by the arm to the spare bedroom that may as well become his as much as his own cabin at sea.

“I’ve left you an old nightshirt, in the drawers.”

Flint was overcome by a fit of sneezing and coughed a bit when he had finished, prompting Miranda to pat the pillow and add, “And handkerchiefs, tucked underneath.”

She turned to leave but he caught her by the wrist and brought her fingers to his lips. They were warm, and even through his congestion he could smell the lavender soap upon them. “Thank you,” he rasped. For everything. If ever there were a time for her to read his mind, it was now.

Miranda leaned forward and placed a ghost-light kiss on his cheek. “Try not to get too much blood on my sheets. It is absolutely beastly to get out.”

She left him, then, with a smile, and Flint gave one of his own to the empty room before collapsing on the bed and falling asleep almost instantly, uncaring of damp clothes or soaked bandages or words he should have said but lacked the courage to voice.

[shhhlikeme]

Hello, could I have a request? If it’s not too much of a bother, maybe about kenma having a crush on a foreigner who’s still new to speaking Japanese, so he teaches her how to speak better, gets to know her better and finds out she’s also a gamer? Sorry if it’s too specific, I love your writing!! 🥺

Thank you so much for reading my work! I adore Kenma he is everything so thank you for requesting him. I didn’t want to stop writing this! I hope you like it!

Kenma x Foreign Student Reader

——————————

You were the absolute ONLY thing that could take Kenma’s attention away from his Nintendo switch

When you trotted into class silently that day as a new student that just moved to Japan from [Your City] Kenma just scribbled in his notebook like he always does when the teacher is talking because he didn’t hear you come in

The teacher asked you to introduce yourself and you did, shyly and in less than accurate Japanese

This got catboy’s attention

When Kenma heard your angelic voice he lifted his head up from the paper for the first time that day

Baby boy is smart af. He doesn’t even need to listen in class and he gets straight A’s

His eyes widened when he saw you. You clearly weren’t from here and he didn’t know how he felt about that

He takes a mental note that you looked.....different.

Um, good different.

VERY good different. He realized, as he studied your features

Kenma thought you were beautiful and although your introduction had grammatical errors, he found your mistakes quite adorable

You sat in front and to the left of him which was ideal for Kenma because you couldn’t really see him staring

Since Kenma is a gifted student he is always abnormally bored in classes. His teachers always took away all of his electronics so he didn’t even try anymore. This current Modern Japanese class was no exception until you joined, and as the days went by he found himself not even missing his electronics for the first time in his life because he shared that class with you

He has you to look at now

You were so pretty and interesting to him.

He wished he could talk to you

Hiding behind his hair so that he wouldn’t get caught with red cheeks and all, he sighed admiringly as he watched you listen diligently to the teacher. The way you looked when you were concentrated made Kenma’s stomach hurt because you were just so cute. Watching you made him wish he had Kuroo’s confidence when it came to girls

Maybe he would ask Kuroo for advice, albeit a mortifying thought

Day after day in class Kenma watched as you read the teacher’s lips in hopes of slowing down the language in your head better. When everyone got a worksheet in class Kenma always did his work fast and just smirked to himself because you would quietly sound out everything you were reading and translate it to English.

So cute

Kenma knew his fair share of English because of his American gamer friends, so when he heard you translate a Japanese word incorrectly, which would have been detrimental for your grade on this paper, Kenma wanted so badly to jump in to help you

But he was anxious

In silent panic, he watched you whisper the wrong answers out loud because you had translated one early sentence incorrectly .

Oh no.

You were going to fail!

What would Kuroo do??? Kenma thought.

In his animated mind, he conjured up an air bubble version of Kuroo looking down at him and lecturing him, telling Kenma that: “you are like blood that should flow towards the blood that has the most attractive body covering it which is obviously a reference to the cute foreign girl you have a crush on so STOP BEING SUCH A WUSS AND HELP HER, KENMA!”

Kenma shook his head violently. The air bubble version of Kuroo disappeared.

God, even in his made up thoughts his best friend was obnoxious

Kenma’s volleyball team, Fukurõdani’s volleyball team and Hinata all knew Kenma’s true personality.

They knew that Kenma wasn’t a shy person like most people initially think when they see him alone in the corner. In fact, he wasn’t shy at all. He just didn’t like people. Learn the difference.

And when Kenma did like specific people he still wanted them to stay at an arms length

So why did he like you so much? He was convinced that he wouldn’t mind having you closer than an arms length because of how pretty you are. Kenma liked looking at aesthetically pleasing things, and in that respect you were much much better than his games or his volleyball friends.

But jumping in to save your assignment still wasn’t him. It just wasn’t Kenma. He didn’t chat to others in class and enjoy it like everyone else in this school. He liked chatting with Kuroo, Shōyō, and his gaming pals, sure. But everyone else was slightly annoying.

But not you.

He wasn’t annoyed by you despite the fact that he’s been watching your embarassing quirks for over a week now. He felt quite the opposite for you, actually...

Completely unaware of Kenma’s daily analysis of you like you always were, you smiled as you finished your work. Ready to leave, you collected your paper, preparing to hand in the open-book assignment worth 40% of your grade. But before you stood up you felt a delicate hand on your arm, halting you.

“Uhhhh.......” You look up to see the most gorgeous boy you’ve ever seen in all the countries you’ve been in. He had striking cat-like eyes that made your heart beat faster and his voice was soft and alluring.

With a serious face, he removed his hand from your arm and pointed to your sheet. In perfect English he said, “That means “theatre audition” actually. Not “movie theatre.”

You were shocked that his English sounded better than your Japanese

Kenma felt a burst of pride within because he could infer that he impressed you with his English

You blushed and quickly started erasing the subsequent answers. “Oh my gosh, thank you so much.”

You expected the gorgeous boy to walk away after that but you were even more taken back when he pulled up a chair next to you.

His sudden movement blew breeze in your direction which wafted the mango-scent of his shampoo toward you. You almost salivated. His hair was so shiny, he was so beautiful and to top it off he smelled to-die-for.

“You made minor translation errors in question 1, 4 and 5 too. Mind if I help you? My name’s Kenma.” He asked hopefully, still speaking to you in impeccable English.

You introduced yourself too while blushing some more and of course you accepted his help

Throughout the rest of class, Kenma, talkative as ever—asked you a bunch of questions in order to get to know you. You shared with him that your parents were divorced and that you decided to move from [Your City] where you lived all your life with your mom to move in with your dad in Japan for high school and University because you loved/missed him. You told him that your dad spoke Japanese to you as a baby but you lost a lot of it living so far away and having no one to practice with.

Kenma became more and more intrigued by you. He could listen to you talk all day which would probably give his best friend a heart attack since Kuroo was put on a strict talking time limit that kicked in after 3 hours.

The more the cat boy learned about you the more he wanted to learn. Especially when you mentioned that your favourite hobby included gaming.

Kenma, being fairly asexual but attracted to you, was unfamiliar with the way the concept of you gaming turned him alllll the way on.

He imagined you beside him during his gaming weekends wearing a baggy t-shirt & just your underwear underneath like he wears.

Damn

He flushed

Let’s just say Kenma had trouble shifting inconspicuously under the desk to adjust his tightened pants when he thought about you gaming.

He mentally prepared to get himself off on the thought as soon as he got home tonight

Yep. You officially had him wrapped around your finger, and you didn’t even know it.

You had no idea that that conversation would go on forever

You had no idea that Kenma had always denied tutoring others when the Modern Japanese teacher asked, and that is why the teacher gladly allowed you two to work together

You had no idea that the rest of the class was ASTONISHED by the quiet and stunning setter of Nekoma (who does everything in his power to not be approachable and avoid social situations) going out of his way to keep a conversation going with another student

You had no idea that all the Kenma admirers were soooooo jealous of you right now

You had no idea that Kenma would glare back at the girls who glared at you and try his best to become your friend in the coming weeks

You had no idea that you both would enjoy every moment of your close friendship. A bit too much

You had no idea that, weeks later, Kuroo would force Kenma into confessing to you, even if it was over your favourite game as avatars... and you would cry tears of joy

You had no idea that you would lose your voice cheering for your boyfriend at Nationals........twice.

You had no idea that upon graduation you two would adopt an adorable kitty and name her -cinema-

You had no idea that years later, Kenma would become the husband of your dreams and that shortly thereafter you would give birth to the most beautiful cat-eyed baby girl that was a splitting image of her stunning bearded father

Just imagine daddy Kenma all grown up with a beard omg

No.... as you sat there in class trying to repeat after him the Japanese sentence on the worksheet, you absolutely had no idea

But

When Kenma asked for your number at the bell and you blushed beautifully again, he felt butterflies in his stomach by the sight, and that’s when

He did have an idea that all of that would happen.

Because love-struck Kenma wouldn’t accept anything less.

[gingersimasnaps]

I'm not even sorry for this one 💁‍♀️

Vera is AGAIN OOC as fuck because obviously I don't know how to write canon Vera, English is again horrible, and it's angstyyy! 😁

@bakulka @fanfics-she-wrote @everythingabouthatship - I won this one. 😘

Angsty Vermish fic ❤️

This has to be some kind of a fucking joke.

Because no way this situation is happening seriously.

Vera Stone, Grand Magus, is standing in front of new Massachusetts Temple Magus and this just can't be true. She really waits for someone to jump from behind the door, laughing, and telling her it's just a joke, but it doesn't happen.

With almost sheepish smile, Derek Johnson is standing in front of her. Her ex boyfriend. Father of her dead daughter.

"Vera..." He says quietly. "Hi."

She wants to do three hundred things right now. She wants to run, to yell, to claw his eyes out, to hug him, to kiss him, to call Hamish-

Hamish.

The thought of him stops the madness in her head.

"Hi, Derek," she answers simply and tries to hold the cold tone of voice but failes miserably.

"I... Haven't seen you for a long time."

"Not exactly my fault, is it?" she snaps.

"I know, I know, and I'm incredibly sorry, Vera. I really am. I wasn't ready to be a father back then."

She scoffs. "Because I was so ready to be a mother."

Derek holds his hand up as a sign of peace. "I know I was the grand coward," he sighs.

"Yeah, you were. Now, back to the work. You were selected by your Massachusetts chapter and by the Gnostic council as the new Temple Magus. It won't be easy, I warn you. You have to be careful. You have all of your chapter's acolytes under your wing now so listen to me carefully. I don't want to hear about one single unnecessary death from your temple."

She dips into explaining him his duties and tries to ignore his body warmth when he stand closer to her to see what she's showing him in some book.

"I would love to be a part of our child's life if you allow me," Derek says when they're done and after they agree he will stay here for a week or so, to observe her work. Vera tenses up.

"She's dead."

"WHAT?!"

The next thing she knows is she's crying, and Derek rushes to hug her. He doesn't let her go when she sobs out what happened.

Suddenly the door are flying open, and Hamish is standing there, with a drink in his hand. Of course, it's 4 PM. He always brings her drink at this time. And she's still in Derek's embrace.

Hamish watches how she pulls away from the man and how he doesn't want to let her go. He watches his lingering touch while Hamish is setting the glass on her table.

"Your drink, Grand Magus," he says blankly, and turns his back to them.

"Thank you," Vera calls softly, which makes him to turn back again. Her eyes are wet. And so incredibly vulnerable. He wants to hold her. But, obviously, there is someone else to do it now.

"You don't have to thank me, Grand Magus," he answers, and goes away.

Derek stays for more than a week. It's been over a month now. He spends all his time in the Temple. With Vera.

Hamish is just tired and sick of all this. He tries so hard to maintain everything in his life and he feels he just reached the bottom of his strength.

His pack kind of excommunicated him. Randall is mad at him because he's 'not acting as the leader should act', and Jack doesn't care enough, as he's consumed with his relationship with Alyssa. Lilith is the only one who seems to care, but she has her own life. And yet, he's still trying to keep them all safe because excommunicated or not, it's his duty and he needs to do it.

He teaches fucking big bunch of classes now, because Krowchuk is on long term sick leave. He's still Magistratus, so he works for Order as well.

And the most painful thing is the fact Vera is spending all her free time with a man she swore she hates to the guts. And she enjoys it.

The last blow is delivered when he works on the drink for her (yes, he's so stupid he still does that) and hears her loud, genuine laugh from her office, where she is with Derek. After a few seconds, the door opens, and the man walks to the bar.

"I'll take it to her, Magistratus, thank you," he says with a smile. Sly smile. "She will never be yours, young man. I was the first and I will be also the last."

Hamish stands there for a few minutes, feeling completely empty. This has happened only once in his life so far - when Cassie died. Vera is still very much alive, but he lost her also.

Fuck this.

Hamish almost runs from the temple, hops in his car and drives to his parents' cabin, about an hour from Belgrave. Once he turns the engine off, he fishes his phone out of his pocket and types a single message to her.

Derek is telling Vera some story and she listens, of course, when he phone chimes, announcing new message.

"Leave it," says Derek, but she reaches for in anyway.

Hamish [5:26PM] I quit.

"Wait," she silences Derek. What does Hamish mean by quitting? His TA position? The Order? He can't exactly quit Knights. Or does he mean he's quitting them? She dials his number. It rings and rings and rings, but no one answers.

"Fuck," she grits between her teeth and furiously types a message. Then another and another.

Vera [5:30PM] What do you mean?

Vera [5:31PM] What are you quitting??

Vera [5:31PM] Answer me!

Vera [5:32PM] Hamish, please, tell me what's wrong?

Vera [5:35PM] This is not funny.

Vera [5:48PM] Hamish where are you? Tell me where you are.

Vera [5:54PM] MAGISTRATUS, COOPERATE!!!

Derek watches her attempts to contact him and of course he doesn't like it. Vera is his. She shouldn't give a fuck about the BOY when she has *the* MAN next to her. He tries to bring her attention back to him, but with no success. Vera tries another call, and this time the person answers.

"Ms. Bathory, do you happen to know where Hamish is?" she asks immediately, to hell with Mr. Duke.

"Why do you suddenly care?" asks Lilith back in her typical 'Kilith' way.

"Ms. Bathory-"

"Because to me, you didn't seem to bother with Hamish during the past month."

"Can you please tell me where he is?" Vera's voice is soft and if Lilith wouldn't know her, she would say she's almost begging.

"I don't know," she gives up. "But I would check the cabin. His parents own it, we crashed there once or twice for holidays. I'll send you the address."

"Thank you, Lilith," Vera says and ends the call. After a minute, Lilith really sends her the address.

"What's going on?" Derek asks for like 108th time.

"Hamish, the man who makes all the drinks texted me 'I quit' and I need to find him," Vera answers. "Whatever is happening, I'll help him to find a solution."

"Well if he wants to leave then let him leave, no? After all, it's gonna be better for you."

Vera turns to him with disbelief. "Excuse me?!"

"It's more than obvious the boy is in love with you. He's so bad at hiding it he could tattoo it on his forehead. Poor kid no way reaches your limits, not even with some branch two meters long. And I already told him now that I'm here, he doesn't need to bother anymore. Let him leave. It's for the best."

Grand Magus feels pure rage flooding in her veins. "What LIMITS are you talking about, Derek?! Who the fuck gave you the right?!"

Derek smiles. "Honey, we both feel we're the right match for each other. Don't deny it." He tries to reach for her, but she yanks her hand from his grasp.

"Oh my fucking God, I can't believe I was so stupid! I really thought you want to learn about your work, but all this time, you were just trying to get into my panties! And how do you even dare to talk to Hamish about him bothering or not?!" she's literally screaming on top of her lungs.

"If you need to know it, we were a thing long before you came here. Me and Hamish, and I was the one who iniciated it. I never want to have anything with you again, because it's you who can't reach HIS limits. Hamish would never- fuck this. You don't deserve to know him at all."

"Now who's running from who?!" Derek yells when she gathers her belongings, ready to chase Hamish to the other side of the planet if she needs to.

"I'm not running from you. I'm running TO him. And I'm not leaving you knocked up at 16 with words 'I don't fucking want to be dad, God knows who you fucked with!'" Vera hisses, and magically throws - literally - him out of her office.

She's driving fast, violating the speed limits, but her heart is pounding painfully in her chest and her mind is screaming at her to go even faster. What had she done? What had possessed her that she almost dumped her source of happiness and joy for Derek?! How could she hurt Hamish so much, when she promised to herself multiple times she never wants to hurt him?

Suddenly, her hands grip the steering wheel with such force her knuckles turn white.

Please, please, oh God please, he didn't think he's quitting his LIFE, right?!

She feels bile in her throat and swallows forcefully. The image of his lifeless body is in front of her eyes and a sob escapes her. No. No, no, no, no, no, NO. He wouldn't do that, not because of her, she's not worth it!!!

Vera drives even faster.

When she arrives, it's 6:47PM. Normally, she would be impressed she managed to get there so fast, but now, everything she needs is to know Hamish is alive.

Vera doesn't bother with knocking or whatever, she just bursts through the door.

Hamish is sitting on the couch, in front of TV that is switched off, and just stares at the black screen.

"Hamish-" Vera manages to breathe and he looks at her. There is so much pain in his eyes she almost cries out.

"What do you want, Grand Magus," Hamish sighs, and she drops her purse in the floor and runs to him.

"You," she says. "I want you and I want us, forever. I'm so sorry, Hamish, for everything I put you through. For the past month. I'm so sorry, can you forgive me? Please... I don't know what to do without you. I don't know how to breathe right when you're not next to me."

"You have Derek now, don't you?" he says, and she puts her hands on his cheeks.

"No. I don't even wanna know what he told you but it's not true. I never wanted him back. I have to admit it was interesting for me to have him around again, but I never wanted him back as my boyfriend, or partner, or lover or whatever connected with feelings. I have you for all of these things. And you have me, Hamish. You have all of me." She climbs in his lap and feels so relieved when Hamish wraps his hands around her waist.

"I love you, Hamish. I've never loved anyone as much as I love you, and I never will. Can you forgive me? I'm not asking for instant forgiveness, but someday?"

Hamish leans in and kisses her, and Vera kisses back, with all the 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you' and 'I want you' and basically every emotion she's feeling.

After their century long kissing (and yet it's not enough, it never can be enough), Vera hugs him tightly, presses his face into his neck, and Hamish is swinging them slowly and gently from left to right. Neither of them says a word, and they don't need to. Vera just wants to spend rest of her life engulfed in his embrace, and Hamish never wants to let her go. They both came home today.

Home is where the heart is.

[socialjusticeartshare]

How Our Stories Won’t Save Us: Teaching Valeria Luiselli’s “Lost Children Archive”

The scene haunts me because I am an immigrant, because I can’t imagine what being deported feels like or what it could mean to a child. I was six and my brother four when we arrived in this country. I still remember that day.

THERE IS A SCENE in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive that makes me reckon with the limits of my sympathy in the age of child detention centers. The main characters, Ma, Pa, Girl, and Boy, arrive at an airport. Ma is a sound archivist. She’s there to document the sounds of migrant children just moments before they board a plane to be deported. Peering at the tarmac, Ma narrates:

I slowly walk my eyes on […] the line of small figures now stepping out of the hangar and onto the runway. They are all children. Girls, boys: one behind another, no backpacks, nothing. They march in single file, looking like they’ve surrendered, silent prisoners of some war they didn’t even get to fight. […] If they hadn’t gotten caught, they probably would have gone to live with family, gone to school, playgrounds, parks. But instead, they’ll be removed, relocated, erased, because there’s no place for them in this vast empty country.

The scene haunts me because I am an immigrant, because I can’t imagine what being deported feels like or what it could mean to a child. I was six and my brother four when we arrived in this country. I still remember that day. It was December. And I felt the warm safety of arriving with my parents. I saw snow for the first time, and all I could think about was that snow was just frío frío (shaved ice). We were finally a family, here, “ready to build a better life,” like my father always said. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like if my brother and I had arrived unaccompanied in a place that didn’t want us. Yet this is the reality for thousands of migrant children at the US-Mexico border. Many are younger than my brother and I were when we arrived.

Lost Children Archive is an evocative novel about displacement, migration, family, and the cartography of parenthood in the age of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities. Published in February 2019, the novel interlocks parental angst with contemporaneous news about the migrant crisis at the US Southern border, histories of Apachería, and stories of lost children. So much of this book is about dreams of futures put off and put out, worlds that were prayed for but that will never come to fruition for migrant children.

Ma’s words raise the question: What does it mean for a child to surrender? And what can we do about it?

When a novel makes me question the limits of my sympathy, I must read it twice: one time for the story and the other to figure out how the author did it. As much as Lost Children Archive is about the child migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border, it is also about how we write, teach, and engage issues that we have not personally experienced. This is where I sit. I am a teacher, a scholar, and a creative. I am an immigrant with papers who writes about migrants without papers. I teach books about their experiences and lives. I often ask myself what gives me the right to tell and teach their stories, to translate experiences, emotions, and lessons that to me are like distant relatives.

What is a book about migrant children if not a book that teaches us to convert sympathy to action, into doing something — anything? In other words, how do we motivate our reading of such texts beyond aesthetic analysis and reasoning?

In the spring of 2021, I taught a course on migrant literatures. It was my first time teaching a class on migrants. My students and I read Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans, and Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive to debate and develop questions and arguments about (im)migration, the border, citizenship, colonization, and language.

The week we read Lost Children Archive, an unprecedented number of unaccompanied children arrived at the US-Mexico border. We read the novel alongside reports about their arrival and the living conditions in Border Patrol facilities. Like the characters in the novel, who collect histories, sounds, materials, and photographs, my class and I archived reports and images of the unfolding crisis.

On April 1, the United States Border Patrol released footage of two Ecuadorian girls, three and five years old, being hoisted and dropped over a 14-foot border wall by coyotes near Santa Teresa, New Mexico. The girls were slow to get up from the desert floor as the camera moved toward the smugglers running away and out of the frame. The two girls were taken to a nearby hospital for evaluation. They will join a caravan of lost children at various points of the US-Mexico border, awaiting a fate as obscure as the desert floors. They wait to become refugees — waiting, as Ma tells her own children, “for an indefinite time before actually, fully having arrived.”

More than 3,200 migrant children have been detained at a South Texas Border Patrol facility. They are in a “large tent complex designed to detain unaccompanied minors and families with children for short periods of time.” Customs and Border Protection (CBP) requires that minors must be transferred to shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours of custody. But no one will move these children because shelters are unavailable. CBP lacks resources, space, and even food. Afraid and alone, without their parents, many children go hungry. In interviews, minors say they’ve only showered once in seven days. A pair of boys say that “conditions were so overcrowded that they had to take turns sleeping on the floor.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended “enhanced” mitigation measures requiring migrant children two years and older to wear masks 24/7 while at the same time allowing shelters to return to maximum capacity. No one seems to think about why these children came here: what cruelty, war, poverty, pain were they escaping?

Luiselli’s narrator contemplates this exact question:

No one thinks of the children arriving here now as refugees of a hemispheric war that extends, at least, from these very mountains, down across the country into the southern US and northern Mexico deserts, sweeping across the Mexican sierras, forests, and southern rain forests into Guatemala, into El Salvador, and all the way to the Celaque Mountains in Honduras. No one thinks of those children as consequences of a historical war that goes back decades. Everyone keeps asking: Which war, where? Why are they here? Why did they come to the United States? What will we do with them? No one is asking: Why did they flee their homes?

Luiselli tells us that these are our children, this is our crisis to deal with, and this is real. The child refugee crisis isn’t an intertext, a metaphorical archive, or a literary device that we can track on the page. This is the lived reality of thousands of migrants today as I type these words. Luiselli tells us that these children “wait for their dignity to be restored.” As an educator and immigrant, the least I can do through my teaching is to try to restore some of their dignity.

In our class discussions, we move away from metaphors to think about the border as a physical and conceptual place. We turn to the theoretical architect Gloria E. Anzaldúa, who famously illustrated la frontera (the border) as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.” This is where migrant children are held — a place of alterity, of inbetweenness, neither here nor there, a state-sanctioned purgatory between fleeing and arriving. It is a liminal space of transformation, which Anzaldúa argues is,

set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.

Over the course of the semester, the border as a physical and conceptual structure becomes central to our engagement with migration. We discuss the US-Mexico border but also other, less tangible types of borders. We turn to the borders of language and how they shape the way we see ourselves. I tell my students that language can be a barrier for many migrants. I tell them that when I first arrived in the United States I did not speak English, that from the first to the seventh grade I was in bilingual classes. I did not understand the crossing guard’s commands to go and stop nor my gym teacher’s instructions to run, climb, and jump. I was bullied before I knew the word for it. I grew silent over the years and taught myself to hide my English, my accent, my legal status, and anything else that marked me as an outsider. I did this not for acceptance, which I thought unattainable, but for safety and peace.

I don’t know if my stories are relatable or if they work pedagogically. I draw from my personal experiences in an attempt to build a bridge between me and the migrant children. I don’t know if this bridge will support a path toward sympathy or action in my classroom or elsewhere. But I do know that there’s something powerful in witnessing my students engage with the child migrant crisis, question the ethics of detention facilities, and connect their own youths to the ones of migrant children.

We read reports and watch news segments about the migrant children at the border. We consume what others document about them. And in doing so, we see these children from the perspective of an immigration system designed to dehumanize the migrant. Without action, their stories become clichés. We must move beyond the negating rhetoric of undocumented, non-status, without papers, and begin to actually see these children as children in need of our protection and aid.

Children, Ma tells us, “force parents to go out looking for a specific pulse, a gaze, a rhythm, the right way of telling the story, knowing that stories don’t fix anything or save anyone but maybe make the world both more complex and more tolerable.” What are we learning from the stories we tell, from the ones we teach, from the real lives of migrant children at the US-Mexico border? What do these stories say about us, the things we value, the things we tolerate? In one form or another, we are answering these questions right now.

[aion-rsa]

Oscars 2021 Predictions and Analysis of Frontrunners

https://ift.tt/3s3HJE1

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Oscars 2021 nominations is how unsurprising they were. There were course a handful of snubs, from One Night in Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom being left out of the Best Picture category to LaKeith Stanfield surprising awards watchers with a Best Supporting Actor nod thanks to Judas and the Black Messiah (displacing Chadwick Boseman from Da 5 Bloods). But by and large? Things proceeded the way prognosticators pretty much expected.

With the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences picks in, we can see that David Fincher’s Mank is the technical favorite with below the line voters, pushing the Netflix deconstruction of Golden Age Hollywood to eight nominations. These include major nods for Picture, Director and Best Actor (Gary Oldman) and Best Supporting Actress (Amanda Seyfried), but also a lot of technical recognition too in Cinematography, Production Design, Costume, and Makeup and Hairstyling.

Even so, the obvious frontrunner remains Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, a beautiful film that turns the tragedy of the Great Recession into a bittersweet celebration of American Nomad culture. The Searchlight Pictures release garnered six nominations, including Zhao in the Best Director category and another for Best Picture. Zhao’s directing nod, alongside Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman, additionally made history with this being the first time two women were nominated in the Best Director category in the same year.

Meanwhile fans still mourning Chadwick Boseman’s tragic loss, as well as celebrating his tour de force final performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, can take some small comfort in the actor being the heavily favored contender in the Best Actor category.

In the end, things proceeded more or less as how the breathless awards race media class hoped it would. All of which raises an interesting question: Will there be any actual surprises then on Oscar night? Well… below is our best, and entirely too early, guess at what will win Best Picture and the other major categories. Be sure to check back here on Oscar night to remind us how wrong we were.

Just for clarity, nominees we want to win will be italicized while the ones we think will win will be bolded. When they’re one in the same, one contender will be italicized and bolded.

Best Picture

The Father Judas and the Black Messiah Mank Minari Nomadland Promising Young Woman Sound of Metal The Trial of the Chicago 7

I’m not sure I can think of a year with a more clear cut and inevitable frontrunner than Nomadland in 2021. There have been other years with dominant frontrunners—almost every year in fact—including several that go on to win, such as Green Book just two award seasons ago. However, there is almost always a counter-narrative that threatens the perceived frontrunner. Sometimes those whisper campaigns unseat the presumptive winner (see La La Land and 1917), and sometimes they don’t. But in the case of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland there isn’t even a serious challenger.

This in part because Zhao made an extraordinary film which uncannily mixed documentarian filmmaking and its study of real-life American Nomads with narrative storytelling. It’s a trick Zhao has done several times before, including memorably with the Independent Spirit Award winner, The Rider. But here it is done with Oscar favorite in star Frances McDormand, and it draws attention to a whole culture of forgotten (white) Americans. Additionally, Nomadland is opening in a pandemic year where most of the more traditional awards contenders have vacated. The ones that haven’t are mostly being produced by Netflix, including The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Mank. The former might be a real contender for Best Picture under different circumstances, but the Academy is notoriously recalcitrant toward awarding Best Picture to Netflix originals and other streaming efforts. Just ask Roma for more.

Nomadland braved a small theatrical debut ahead of its premiere on Hulu, supporting the theatrical experience during COVID, while Chicago 7 was snubbed a Best Director nomination, suggesting there is some skepticism toward the film among a large wing of Academy voters. Mank, meanwhile, is an acquired taste that appeals to my personal sensibility. But it’s quite cold and less a love letter to the movie industry than a loving middle finger. That fact will probably hurt it in a number of categories, including Best Original Screenplay where it was snubbed today.

Best Director

Thomas Vinterberg, Another Round David Fincher, Mank Lee Isaac Chung, Minari Chloé Zhao, Nomadland Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman

While I would vote another way for Best Picture, I am totally onboard with seeing Zhao pick up the Best Director plaudit. Hers is an entirely unique cinematic voice that has successfully blurred the lines of how narrative filmmaking can be conveyed, and she’s done so while cultivating a great sense of empathy in Nomadland. The picture that finds beauty and resilience in a story that could’ve been a tragedy, memorializing the Americans left behind by the Great Recession.

Her groundbreaking techniques make her stand out in her field. Plus, Academy will be acutely self-conscious this year about the disappointing fact that only one other woman, Kathryn Bigelow, has won a Best Director Oscar. So be prepared for Zhao to make that two.

Best Actress

Viola Davis, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Andra Day, The United States vs. Billie Holiday Vanessa Kirby, Pieces of a Woman Frances McDormand, Nomadland Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman

Carey Mulligan is phenomenal in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. Acerbic but devastating, guarded but vulnerable, and equal parts righteous and occasionally terrifying, she provides a multifaceted turn unlike anything else we’ve seen from the now twice-nominated actor. Previously she was recognized for her ingénue breakout in An Education, but now as an adult thespian, she’s a true revelation. That narrative will appeal to Academy voters, especially as they tend to favor younger actresses in the lead category. Frances McDormand is a famous exception to that rule, but McDormand has two Oscars already, and one is for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri from only three years ago. Also Mulligan is much more keen on playing the awards season campaign game.

Admittedly, Andra Day won for Best Actress in a Drama at the Golden Globes … but the Globes are always going to be their own thing (ask Jodie Foster for more). And while Day is wonderful in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, that movie’s more meager quality is going to be an albatross.

Best Actor

Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Anthony Hopkins, The Father Gary Oldman, Mank Steven Yeun, Minari

In his final performance, Chadwick Boseman is heartbreaking and utterly riveting. All strained bravado and barely masked desperation, his Levee is cool to a tragic fault in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The film he occupies, based on the August Wilson play of the same name, enjoys its contrasts about Black artists navigating white dominated industries. But while Viola Davis’ charismatic turn is above the title, the B-side to her story as embodied by Levee is where the film’s ghosts wait. And they stayed with me long after the Netflix film ended.

Read more

Movies

How Chadwick Boseman Created His Final Performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

By Don Kaye

Movies

Promising Young Woman: Director Emerald Fennell Breaks Down the Ending

By Rosie Fletcher

Boseman deserves a posthumous Oscar for his turn—which would make him only the third performer to win one after Peter Finch for Network and Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight—and he’ll almost certainly get it on Oscar night.

Best Supporting Actress

Maria Bakalova, Borat Glenn Close, Hillbilly Eleg Olivia Colman, The Father Amanda Seyfried, Mank Youn, Yuh-jung, Minari

Conventional wisdom says Olivia Colman will win Best Supporting Actress for The Father. The Academy certainly likes her, having awarded her Best Actress two years ago for The Favourite, and the Academy also has a history of being more lenient on relative back-to-back Oscars in the Supporting category, unlike the historical precedents in the leading actor categories. However, I’m taken by the relative lack of consensus-building around Colman to date. Granted the Golden Globes denied Colman in favor of Jodie Foster, whose performance wasn’t even recognized by the Oscars this year. But the Critics Choice Awards also overlooked Colman while providing Maria Bakalova with a surprise win for Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm.

Precedent should still make me wary of picking Bakalova to win the award. After all, it’s a comedic performance which the Academy usually shies away from. However, this comedic turn was so good, it was able to expose Rudy Giuliani to be a creep with his hand down his pants in front of the world. That will appeal to Academy voters, especially after a year like 2020. Meanwhile my personal choice—Amanda Seyfried’s understated but wholly authentic restoration of Marion Davies’ image after Citizen Kane—may suffer from just a general apathy toward that film’s demeanor, at least from above the line voters. Her snub by her peers at the SAG Awards unfortunately speaks poorly of her chances.

Best Supporting Actor

Sacha Baron Cohen, The Trial of the Chicago 7 Daniel Kaluuya, Judas and the Black Messiah Leslie Odom Jr., One Night in Miami Paul Raci, Sound of Metal LaKeith Stanfield, Judas and the Black Messiah

Daniel Kaluuya’s performance in Judas and the Black Messiah is a sweltering achievement. With limited screen time—despite being the ostensible messiah of the film’s title—Kaluuya is searing as the Black Panther Party Chairman who created the Rainbow Coalition and was hounded to his death by the FBI through illegal means. I’m also partial to Sacha Baron Cohen’s turn in The Trial of the Chicago 7 where he showed a more sardonic range as a counterculture activist in the Windy City. But even I’ll concede his performance isn’t the one folks will probably be quoting for years to come.

Best Original Screenplay

Judas and the Black Messia Minari Promising Young Woman Sound of Metal The Trial of the Chicago 7

Traditionally the Screenplay categories are where Academy voters tend to recognize the more challenging outside-the-mainstream Best Picture nominees they don’t want to give the top prize to. Ergo, it’s a great place for Emerald Fennell to pick up an award for Promising Young Woman. The movie is too candy colored bleak and light hearted in its tragedies to garner enough Academy support in Best Picture, but its originality will be awarded here.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Borat 2 The Father Nomadland One Night in Miami The White Tiger

I suspect the love for Nomadland will continue in the Adapted Screenplay category with Zhao picking up another Oscar. While the screenplay is quite brilliant, I personally feel the movie’s greater achievement is in its visual storytelling and melding of real stories with a broader fictional narrative. Whereas Kemp Powers’ adaptation of his own play is magnificent. There is a fair criticism to be made that Powers couldn’t fully escape the stageniess of his original conceit about spending a night in a motel room with Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. But the acute intelligence of his dialogue, and the way it cuts to the tensions of Black responsibility juxtaposed with soft American power, is as potent as it is finally exciting.

Best Cinematography

Judas and the Black Messiah Mank News of the World Nomadland The Trial of the Chicago 7

I suppose I’m predicting a sweep for Nomadland, which in some ways will be earned. In others it may not, such as if Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography in Judas and the Black Messiah.

Best Film Editing

The Father Nomadland Promising Young Woman Sound of Metal The Trial of the Chicago 7

Film editing should be the one category Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 has locked up. With a breathless pace executed in nervy style by Alan Baumgarten, The Trial of the Chicago 7 makes dialogue exchanges out to be as exciting as any special effects-heavy set piece.

Best Costume Design

Emma. Mank Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Mulan Pinocchio

I suspect Costumes will be one area where Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom receives some technical applause by the Academy. However, I think the pastel and historically accurate designs in Autumn de Wilde’s meticulously designed Emma. shouldn’t go overlooked.

Best Production Design

The Father Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Mank News of the World Tenet

The amount of painstaking research and effort that went into so minutely recreating 1930s Hollywood in David Fincher’s Mank is undeniable. While I am expecting largely a shutout for my favorite film of last year, this will be one place where Mank will not go ignored.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Emma Hillbilly Elegy Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Mank Pinocchio

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom can win for Viola Davis’ immersive transformation into the Mother of the Blues alone.

Best Original Score

Da 5 Bloods Mank Minari News of the World Soul

It stands to reason that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross will pick up another Oscar for the score of Soul, which will also mark the first one for co-writer Jon Batiste. This would be a happy outcome, but if I’m honest the Emile Mosseri score of Minari touched me more.

Best Animated Feature Film

Onward Over the Moon A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon Soul Wolfwalkers

It’s another open and shut year for Pixar thanks to Soul. There’s of course a case to be made for Wolfwalkers, which was a beautiful work of art that’s actually hand drawn. But it’s an open secret that most Academy voters (sadly) do not watch all the animated nominees, and pick solely from the Pixar/Disney catalog. And Soul really is one of the best Pixar films in quite a while so…

Best Visual Effects

Love and Monsters The Midnight Sky Mulan The One and Only Ivan Tenet

There is precedent for the Academy to award less than deserving films in this category simply because the winner is associated with a more popular movie in above the line categories. However, none of the above the line darlings were visual effects heavy this year, and for whatever you might think about Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, there is no denying its visual wizardry is astounding, from the stunt work that sees men bungie jumping upwards to having in-camera effects happening simultaneously in different time streams. So the movie that wanted to “save cinema” may not be entirely overlooked by the industry on Oscar night.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post Oscars 2021 Predictions and Analysis of Frontrunners appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/30PQKEk

[the-end-of-art]

Sewn into his jacket an incoherent note

How to Make Love, Write Poetry, & Believe in God by Nin Andrews

A few weeks ago, I was part of a Hamilton-Kirkland College alumnae poetry reading, and after the reading a woman asked a simple question: “How do you write a poem?” I didn’t have an answer so I suggested a few books by poets like John Hollander, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins. The woman said she had read books like that, but they didn’t help. She wanted something else, like a genuine operating manual—a step by step explanation.

I, too, love instruction manuals, especially those manuals on how to perform magic: write a poem or know God or make love, if only love were something that could be made. Manuals offer such promise. Yes, you, too, can enter the bee-loud glade and the Promised Land and have an orgasm.

I love the idea that my mind could be programmed like a computer to spit out poems on demand—poems with just the right number of lines, syllables, metaphors, meanings, similes, images . . . And with no clichés, no matter how much I love those Tom, Dick and Harry’s with their lovely wives, as fresh as daisies. I can set them in any novel or town in America, and they will have sex twice a week, always before ten at night, never at the eleventh hour, and it will not take long,time being of the essence.

I love sex manuals, too: those books that suggest our bodies are like cars. If only we could learn to drive them properly, bliss would be a simple matter of inserting a key, mastering the steering wheel, signaling our next moves, knowing the difference between the brakes and the gas pedal, and of course, following the speed limit.

A depressive person by nature, I am also a fan of how-to books on God, faith, happiness, the soul, books that suggest a divine presence is always here. I just need to find it, or wake up to it, or turn off my doubting brain. That even now, my soul is like a bird in a cage. If I could sit still long enough and listen closely, it might rest on my open palm and sing me a song.

God, poetry, sex, they offer brief moments of bliss, glimpses of the ineffable, and occasional insights into that which does not translate easily into daily experience, or loses its magic when explained.

In college, I took classes in religion, philosophy and poetry, and I studied sex in my spare time—my first roommate and I staying up late, pondering the pages of The Joy of Sex. As a freshman, I auditioned my way into an advanced poetry writing class by composing the single decent poem I wrote in my college years. The poem, an ode to cottage cheese, came to me in a flash as a vision nestled on a crisp bed of iceberg lettuce. Does cottage cheese nestle? I don’t know, but the professor kept admiring that poem. He said all my other poems paled by comparison.

This was in the era of the sexual revolution,long before political correctness and the Me-Too movement. My roommate, obsessed with getting laid, said we women should have been given a compass to navigate the sexual landscape. She liked to complain that she’d had only one orgasm in her entire life, and she wanted another. “What if I am a one-orgasm wonder?” she worried. The subject of orgasms kept us awake, night after night.

In religion class, my professor told the famous story about Blaise Pascal who had a vision of God that was so profound, his life seemed dull and meaningless forever afterwards. He never had another vision. But he had sewn into his jacket an incoherent note to remind him of the singular luminous experience.

The next day in religion class, a student stood up and announced that the professor was wrong—about Pascal, God, everything. The student knew this because he was God’s friend. He even knew His first name, and what God was thinking. The professor smiled sadly, put his arm around the student, and led him out of the classroom, down the steps and into the counselor’s office. When the professor returned, he warned us that if we ever thought we knew God, we should check ourselves into a mental institution. Lots of insane people know God intimately.

But, I wondered, what would God (or the transcendent—or whatever word you might choose for it: the muse, love, the orgasm, the soul, the higher self) think of us? For example, what would a muse think of a writer trying, begging, praying to enter the creative flow? All writers know it—that moment when inspiration happens. The incredible high. And the opposite, when words cling to the wall of the mind like sticky notes but never make it onto your tongue or the page.

What would an orgasm think of all the people seeking it so fervently yet considering it dirty, embarrassing, unmentionable? And then lying about it. “Did you have one?” a man might ask. “Yes,” his lover nods. But every orgasm knows it cannot be had. Or possessed. Or sewn into the lining of a coat. No one “has” an orgasm. At least not for long.

What did God think of Martin Luther, calling out to him in terror when a lightning bolt struck near his horse, “Help! I’ll become a monk!” And later, when he sought relief from his chronic constipation and gave birth to the Protestant Reformation on the lavatory—a lavatory you can visit today in Wittenberg, Germany.

I don’t want to evaluate Luther’s source of inspiration. But I do want to ponder the question: How do you write a poem? Is there a way to begin?

I think John Ashbery gave away one secret in his poem, “The Instruction Manual:” that it begins with daydreaming. Imagination. And the revelation that the mind contains its own magical city, its own Guadalajara, complete with a public square and bands and parading couples that you can visit this enchanted town for a limited time before you must turn your gaze back to the humdrum world.  

But a student of Ashbery’s might cringe at the suggestion that poetry is merely an act of the imagination. In order to master the dance, one must know the steps. And Ashbery was a master. So many of his poems follow a kind of Hegelian progression, traveling from the concrete to the abstract to the absolute. Or what Fichte described as a dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Fichte also wrote that consciousness itself has no basis in reality. I wonder if Ashbery would have agreed.

In college I wrote an inane paper, comparing Ashbery’s poetry to a form of philosophical gardening in which the poet arranges the concrete, meaning the plants or words, in such an appealing order that they create the abstract, or the beauty, desired. Thus, the reader experiences the absolute, or a sense of wonder at the creation as the whole thing sways in the wind of her mind.

Is there a basis in reality for wonder? Or poetry? I asked. Or are we only admiring illusions, the beautiful illusions the poet has created?  How I loved questions like that. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Fichte and Hegel and Ashbery and write mystical and incomprehensible books. I complained to my mother that no matter how hard I tried, I could not compose an actual poem or philosophical treatise—I was trying to write treatises, too. “That’s good,” she said. “Poets and philosophers are too much in their heads, and not enough in the world.”

I didn’t argue with her and tell her that not all poets are like Emily Dickinson. Or say that Socrates was put to death for being too much in the world, for angering the public with his Socratic method of challenging social mores, and earning himself the title, “the gadfly of Athens.”  

Instead, I thought, That’s it! If I want to be a poet, I just need to separate my head from the world. Or at least turn off the noise of the world. And seek solitude, as Wordsworth suggested, in order to recollect in tranquility. I imagined myself going on a retreat or living in a cave, studying the shadows on the wall. Letting them speak to me or seduce me or dance with me.

The shadows, I discovered, are not nice guests. Sometimes they kept me awake all night, talking loudly, making rude comments, using all the words I never said aloud. “Hush,” I told them. “No one wants to hear that.” Sometimes they took on the voices of the dead and complained I hadn’t told their stories yet or right. Sometimes they sulked and bossed me about like a maid, asking for a cup of tea, a biscuit, a little brandy, a nap. One nap was never enough. When I obeyed and closed my eyes, they recited the poems I wanted to write down. “You can’t open your eyes until we’re done,” they said, as if poetry were a game of memory, or hide and seek in the mind. Other times they wandered away and down the dirt road of my past, or lay down in the orchard and counted the peaches overhead. Whatever they did or said, I watched and listened.

That’s how I began writing my first real poems. I knew not to disobey the shadows. I knew not toturn my back on them and look towards the light as Plato suggested—Plato who wanted to banish the poets and poetry from his Republic.I knew to not answer the door if the man from Porlock came knocking.

To this day I am grateful for the darkness. For the shadows it creates in my mind. It is thanks to them I have written another book, The Last Orgasm, a book whose title might make people cringe. But isn’t that what shadows do? And much of poetry, too? Dwell on topics we are afraid to look at in the light?

(https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2020/09/how-to-make-love-write-poetry-believe-in-god-by-nin-andrews.html)

Five prose poems by Nin Andrews (formatting better at http://newflashfiction.com/5-prose-poems-by-nin-andrews/)

Duplicity

after Henri Michaux “Simplicity”

When I was just a young thing, my life was as simple as a sunrise. And as predictable. Day after day I went about doing exactly as I pleased. If I saw a lovely man or women, or beauty in any of its shapes and forms and flavors, well, I simply had to have it. So I did. Just like that. Boom! I didn’t even need a room.

Slowly, I matured. I learned a bit of etiquette.  Manners, I discovered can have promising side effects. I even began carrying a bottle of champagne wherever I went, and a bed. Not that the beds lasted long. I wasn’t the kind to go easy on the alcohol or the furnishings, nor was I interested in sleep. It never ceased to amaze me how quickly men drift off. Women, many of them, kept me going night after night. You know how inspiring  women are.

But then, alas, I grew tired of them as well. I began to envy those folks who curl up into balls each night, their bodies as heavy as tombstones. I tried curling up with them, slowing my breath, entering into their dreams. What dreams! To think I had been missing out all along! That’s when I became a Zen master, at one with the night. Now I teach classes on peace, love, abstinence. At last I have found bliss, I tell my followers. The young, they don’t believe it. But really, I ask you. Would I lie?

The Broken Promise

after Heberto Padilla, “The Promise”

There was a time when I promised to write you a thousand love poems. When I said every day is a poem, and every poem is in love with you. But then the poems rebelled. They became a junta of angry women, impossible to calm or translate, each more vivid, sultry, seductive than the next. Some stayed inside and sulked for weeks, demanding chocolates, separate rooms, maid service. Others wanted to be carted around like queens. Still others took lovers and kept the neighbors up, moaning at all hours of the day and night. One skinny girl (remember her? the one with flame-colored hair?) moved away. She went back to that shack down the road where we first met. At night she lay down in the orchard behind the house and let the dark crawl over her arms and legs. In the end even her dreams turned to ash and blew away in a sudden gust of wind.

Little Big Man

after Russell Edson “Sleep”

There was once an orgasm that could not stop shrinking. Little big man, his friend called him, watching as he grew smaller and smaller with each passing night, first before making love, then before even the mention of making love, then before even the mention of the mention of making love. Oh, what a pathetic little thing he was.

One night he tried reading, Think and Grow Big, but it only caused him to shrink further inside himself. Oh, to grow large and tall as I once was, he sighed. What he needed, he knew, was a trainer with a whip and chains. Someone to teach him to jump through hoops and swing from a trapeze and swallow fire until he blazed ever higher into the night. Yes, he shuddered. Yes! as he imagined it. A tiny wisp of smoke escaped his lips.

Questions to Determine if You Are Washed Up

after Charles Baudelaire, “Get Drunk!”

Do you feel washed up lost, all alone? Do you fear that time is passing you by like a train for which you have no ticket, no seat? That you have lived too long in the solitude of your room and empty mind,  that now you are but a slave of sorrow? Or is it regret? Do you no longer taste the wine of life on your lips, tongue, throat? Is there not even even a chance of intoxication? Bliss? No poetry or song above or below the hips? No love in the wind, the waves, in every  or any fleeting and floating thing? No castles in your air? No pearls in your oysters? Are you wearing a pair of drawstring pants?

Remembering Her

after Herberto Padilla

This is the house where she first met you. This is the room where she first said your name as if it were a song.  This is the table where she undressed you, stripping away your petals, leaves, your filmy white roots and sorrows. And there on the floor is the stone you picked up each morning, the stone you clung to night after night. Sometimes she kicked it aside. Sometimes she placed in on the sill and blew it out the window as her presence filled you like a glow, and you thought for an instant, I, too, can fly.

[kjack89]

The Liberator, Vol III: Hero of Sacrifice

Well, it’s only been two and a half years since I wrote Vol II of this AU. #mybad

There will be a Volume IV because I promised a happy ending and I’ll be damned if, some three years later, I disappoint anyone, though I endeavor to have the fourth part done sooner than two and half years from now.

ExR, modern, superhero AU, developing relationship.

Read Vol I here and Vol II here.

Before Grantaire could even open his eyes, he knew something was wrong.

It wasn’t the fact that his entire body felt like he’d been run over by a semi-truck, or that he had bruises in places he generally wasn’t sure it was possible to be bruised. It wasn’t even the dull throb that he knew from too many close calls came from a gunshot wound.

It was the fact that he could hear yelling echoing through the halls of his normally silent base of operations.

Which could only mean that, in addition to bringing him back here, Combeferre had brought Enjolras back as well. And Grantaire wasn’t entirely sure that he was ready to face him. Or the secret he’d never intended on Enjolras learning.

With a groan, he pulled himself into a sitting position, making as if to run his fingers through his hair and wincing at the flash of pain when he tried to move. “Fuck,” he hissed, debating if he wanted to try getting up or just texting Combeferre begging him to bring coffee. And alcohol. And probably some percocet.

He was saved from having to make even that tiny movement by Combeferre appearing in his doorway, coffee in hand and a particularly harried look on his face. “Good, you’re up,” he said curtly. “Enjolras wants to talk to you.”

Grantaire groaned again. “Dare I ask why you brought him back here?” he managed, reaching up to accept the mug of coffee.

“He saw your face,” Combeferre said shortly, as if it was an answer.

And in some ways, it was, but it wasn’t the answer Grantaire wanted to hear.

“And if I don’t want to talk to him?” Grantaire asked instead.

Combeferre sighed. “You owe him a conversation, at the very least,” he said, sounding as tired as Grantaire felt. “Whatever explanation you want to give — if any — is entirely up to you beyond that.”

Grantaire made a face before draining the rest of the coffee in one long gulp. He ran a hand over his face and debated whether he felt human enough for the conversation that awaited him. “Fine,” he said. “But I can’t promise Enjolras is going to like what I have to say.”

Combeferre cracked a smile. “Of that certainty, I was never in doubt.” His brow furrowed as he gave Grantaire a once over. “When you’re doing talking to Enjolras, I want to check the stitches on that GSW. You took it an odd angle and I want to make sure the stitches are holding.”

“I’m pretty sure the lack of blood gushing down my leg is probably as good an indication as anything,” Grantaire grumbled. “But fine.”

He stood with another groan, stretching cautiously and wincing as every movement sent twinges of pain through his body. But it was nothing he couldn’t handle, or nothing he hadn’t handled before, at the very least, and after a long moment, he nodded decisively. “Right,” he said. “Better go face the firing squad.”

He didn’t wait for Combeferre’s response, padding barefoot down the hallway towards the kitchen the second cup of coffee he needed to face both the day and an irate Enjolras. He realized belatedly that Combeferre must’ve changed him out of his suit, and he paused in his step, blushing a mottled shade of red at the thought of Enjolras seeing him stripped down to practically nothing.

Then again, that also gave him the tantalizing thought of Enjolras perched next to his bed while Combeferre did his level best to sew his bullet wound back together without having to call Joly in as backup.

Would Enjolras have been stoic, watching it? Or had he, maybe, though Grantaire could barely imagine it, grasped Grantaire’s hand, held it tightly even though the other man was unconscious and past feeling the pain?

Well, at the very least, that thought was going to keep him up at night.

Grantaire wasn’t surprised to see Enjolras in the kitchen, mug of coffee in front of him, and he ignored the sharp way that Enjolras looked up at him, instead heading directly to the coffeepot and pouring himself a second cup. 

Only after he had drained half of it did he finally turn around to meet Enjolras’s eyes. “Morning,” he said, with somewhat false cheer.

Enjolras didn’t smile. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

“Not if I could get away with not,” Grantaire answered honestly. Enjolras recoiled, something like hurt flashing across his face before being replaced by steely resolve, and Grantaire sighed. “C’mon,” he said, jerking his head away from the kitchen. “Let’s take this elsewhere.”

He led Enjolras to main room, ignoring the images flashing across the screen of Combeferre’s computer and instead sinking down on the couch, letting out a sigh of relief as he did. Enjolras glanced around, cradling his mug of coffee in both hands. “You know, I expected more for a secret lair,” he said after a long moment.

Grantaire snorted. “Yeah, well, not all of us have trust funds to pay for swanky digs. Besides, the place is rent-controlled and the landlord didn’t seem care about the, uh, modifications I needed to do in order to make the place functional.”

“If you don’t have a trust fund, how do you pay for your equipment?” Enjolras asked mildly, picking Grantaire’s grappling hook gun off Combeferre’s desk and looking at it with a critical eye.

“Military contracts, and will you put that down before you hurt yourself?”

Enjolras scowled but nonetheless set it down before moving to sit across from Grantaire. “Now can I ask you what I really want to know?”

“You can ask,” Grantaire said, after a long moment. “But I reserve the right to not answer.”

Enjolras’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Self-incrimination and the fact that I don’t have my attorney present, for starters,” Grantaire said evenly. “The fact that there are some secrets even you don’t need to know, for another.”

For a moment, it looked like Enjolras wanted to press the issue further, but then he shook his head before taking a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Grantaire took a sip of coffee. “Is that honestly your number one concern?” he asked mildly. “Not my tragic backstory or why I’m doing this?”

Enjolras rolled his eyes. “I already know why you’re doing this,” he said impatiently. “You care about justice, and—”

Grantaire snorted. “Justice?” he repeated, incredulous. “Enjolras, this is me we’re talking about, not you. In what world do I give enough of a fuck about justice to do all this?”

“And here I thought we were talking about the Liberator,” Enjolras shot back.

“Sure,” Grantaire said tiredly. “That too.”

Enjolras glared at him. “Fine,” he said, biting off the word. “Then why are you doing this?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Enjolras looked exasperated. “Of course I want to—”

“No, I mean it,” Grantaire interrupted, struggling to keep his expression and his tone as neutral as possible. “Do you really, truly want to know? Even if the answer isn’t what you want to hear?” Enjolras stared at him, and Grantaire added, a little desperately, “Even if the answer changes how you feel about the Liberator?”

“Grantaire—”

Enjolras broke off, his expression unreadable. Then, after a long moment, he jerked a nod. “Yes,” he said. “I really want to know.”

Grantaire jerked his head in a nod and stared down into his coffee mug, now wishing he was drinking something stronger. “My dad used to beat me,” he said abruptly. “Well, he mainly beat my mom, but that’s just because I don’t think he ever thought I was important enough to merit a beating.”

“I’m sorry,” Enjolras offered, a little tentatively, but Grantaire waved him off.

“It was a long time ago,” he said dismissively. “But once I started school, it wasn’t just my dad — the kids there used to beat me up, too, so my mom did the only thing she could and enrolled me in every martial arts class she could.” He shrugged. “The kids at school learned their lesson, but my dad—”

He broke off, his expression twisting. “He was a CPA by day and book cooker for the mob by night, and to top it off, he was a mean drunk with a meaner right hook. And one day, when he hit me, I hit back.”

A beat of silence, then—

“He died four days later. He never woke up from the coma I put him in.”

Enjolras was staring at him, but Grantaire couldn’t bring himself to look at him, couldn’t bring himself to see the expression on his face, the disappointment, or the fear, or—

“My mom and I lied to the police about one happened, said he’d gotten in a drunk driving accident. His BAC was twice the legal limit when we got him to the hospital so it’s not like the cops asked a lot of questions.” Grantaire’s voice turned bitter, and he had to swallow against the bile that rose in the back of his throat. “But for weeks after, I lay awake at nighttime wondering if this made me a murderer.”

“It didn’t,” Enjolras said fiercely, and now Grantaire did glance up, unsurprised if a little gratified at the fury radiating from Enjolras. “It doesn’t. It was self-defense.”

Grantaire shrugged again. “Maybe,” he said, as if he didn’t quite believe it. “But that didn’t stop me from wondering if I would wind up killing someone again.”

Enjolras didn’t seem to have anything to say to that, and Grantaire took a deep breath before continuing, “Then I went off to college, and I met you, and Les Amis. And when I learned about all your plans to change things without violence — I mean, I don’t really care about the whole change part, but the nonviolence part — I wanted to believe that.”

He sighed heavily and shook his head, something between a smile and a grimace twisting his lips. “And maybe I would’ve even managed it, if it weren’t for one day…”

Grantaire trailed off, and Enjolras leaned forward, just slightly. “One day what?” he asked softly.

“One day, you were attacked.” Enjolras blinked, surprise and something like confusion mingled in his expression. “You were still in law school, clerkin for one of the more liberal judges, and someone attacked you outside the courthouse with a knife.”

“I remember,” Enjolras said, his voice low. “But I didn’t think you would. I was barely scratched.”

“How could I not remember?” Grantaire whispered, trying not to sound as pained as he felt, his heart beating a painful rhythm in his chest as much at the memory as it had that day all those years ago. “I tossed and turned for weeks thinking about you being attacked. Trying to think of ways to keep you safe.”

Enjolras shook his head. “But—”

“I swear to God, Enjolras, if you ask why, you’re stupider than anyone has ever given you credit for.” Enjolras closed his mouth and managed a glare that Grantaire mostly ignored. “I had to keep you safe, but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t do it myself in broad daylight, you’d never let me—” Enjolras made a small noise of what might have been protest but Grantaire again ignored him. “—so I had to come up with some kind of secret identity. And so the Liberator was born to keep you safe from the perps you couldn’t keep behind bars, the ones who would have no hesitation killing you.”

Grantaire shrugged as if his simple shrug could diminish everything he’d done over the past few years. “I got the only person I knew cared as much about your safety as I did to help with the tech, and it was Combeferre’s idea to arrange for some military contracts to pay the start up cash and then — well, you know the rest.”

He finished a bit lamely and busied himself with draining the rest of his coffee, again not wanting to look at Enjolras’s face for fear of what he might see there. “So you did all of this — for me?” Enjolras asked slowly.

Grantaire shrugged again. “Well, uh, it started that way, at least,” he muttered. “Then it sort of turned into trying to protect the whole damn city.”

“Why?”

“Because you love this city,” Grantaire said simply. “And if you’re willing to fight to keep it safe, how could I not?”

The words were barely out of his mouth before Enjolras had crossed to him, leaning down and kissing him, something just as fierce as was in his tone earlier coming through in the kiss. For one long moment, Grantaire kissed him back, holding onto him with a desperate grip, unwilling or unable to end the moment too soon.

Then he pulled away. “Enjolras, stop,” he ordered softly.

“What—” Enjolras started, and Grantaire shook his head.

“I can’t be who you want me to be,” he said, echoing the words he had said to Enjolras once before, every word hurting more than the bullet wound he’d taken the night before.

Enjolras frowned slightly. “What are you talking about?” he asked, somewhat impatiently. “You’re exactly who I’ve always thought you were—”

“Oh yeah?” Grantaire scoffed. “And who is that, exactly? Because last time I checked, you thought I was a useless waste of space.”

Enjolras’s eyes flashed. “I’ve never once said that,” he said, his voice low.

“Maybe not, but it doesn’t change the fact that prior to knowing I was a masked vigilante, you thought I was good for nothing.” Enjolras recoiled but said nothing in response to that, and Grantaire barked a dry, humorless laugh. “Exactly my point.”

“Fine, but I know better now, and I’m allowed to take recently discovered exculpatory evidence into account,” Enjolras shot back.

Grantaire snorted. “Didn’t realize this was suddenly a trial, Counselor.”

“Well, if it is, you’re the one trying your damnedest to condemn yourself.”

Grantaire threw his hands up in frustration. “Because I am condemned!” he half-shouted. “Have you not been paying attention, Enjolras? I’m a murderer!”

“It’s not murder,” Enjolras said firmly. “It’s justice.”

Grantaire bit back the hysterical laughter he could feel bubbling in his chest. “That’s a helluva position to take as someone who’s spent his entire career arguing against the death penalty.” He ran a tired hand across his face, all the fight seeping out of him and just leaving him feeling exhausted and defeated. “I’ve annointed myself judge, jury, and executioner. Who gave me that right?”

Enjolras shook his head. “When the system is broken, what other choice is there?” he demanded.

“Fixing the system instead of tearing it down, for starters,” Grantaire returned evenly.

Enjolras rolled his eyes. “And if no one will fix the system?”

“That’s why the city needs you, Enjolras,” Grantaire told him softly. “They need someone who understands the system and its brokenness, someone who knows what needs to be done and is willing to do everything to fix it.”

Enjolras’s brow furrowed. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?”

Grantaire arched an eyebrow at him. “Well at least recently, you’ve been pretty content to let criminals walk and face the Liberator instead of facing justice.” Enjolras shook his head but Grantaire didn’t let him interrupt. “You are losing the parts of you that I believe in most, and I can’t just watch that happen.”

“What are you saying?” Enjolras asked quietly.

“I’m saying…” Grantaire trailed off, closing his eyes for a brief moment and swallowing hard before continuing. “I’m saying that I always thought there would be a day, when the city no longer needed the Liberator, and maybe then, you and I—”

He broke off as if he couldn’t quite bear to actually say the words, couldn’t bear to admit to a dream that he knew in his heart could never be. “And what, you think the city will always need the Liberator?” Enjolras asked.

“No.” Grantaire met his glare evenly. “My fear is that if you keep going down this path, you will always need the Liberator.”

Enjolras shook his head. “Grantaire—”

“Go home, Enjolras,” Grantaire ordered.

“But—”

“Go home,” Grantaire repeated. “I have work to do.”

For a moment, it looked like Enjolras might argue further, but then his expression hardened and he turned, storming away back down the hallway toward the kitchen and Combeferre.

Grantaire closed his eyes for a brief moment, struggling against the tears he could feel pricking in the corners of his eyes. “Ow,” he whispered, rubbing the bullet wound in his thigh, but the pain he felt had absolutely nothing to do with his battle wounds, and everything to do with the work he had to do, and the work he feared now more than ever would never be done.

The Liberator will return in Vol IV: A Heroic Resolve

[bigskydreaming]

This is random but based on your last meta about NTT 55 and the abuse. I wonder if that punch Bruce gives Dick is the beginning of the Batman writers upping his violence onto the kids (Dick, Jason, Tim) and just never addressing it. So like beside sparing and moments of being drug/hallucinating has Bruce shown so much physical violence and anger to them before that issue/moment. Is that the beginning of Batman writers thinking an angry/aggressive/violent Bruce/Batman is popular and creates fans.

Technically speaking, I know it wasn’t the first time but to my knowledge all the prior instances were treated as like….y’know, either a product of being written fifty years ago and nobody thinking twice about Bruce smacking his ‘ward’ or else due to various mind control scenarios, etc. 

To be honest, my knowledge of early Batman and Robin stuff is more sporadic….I got into comics when I was ten, around ‘94, and Dick was one of my instant favorites who I latched onto immediately and had to know everything about….but my introduction to him was as Nightwing, and in his new solo series and the Titans books so everything else I kinda caught up on just to have more stories with him. And since it was him as Nightwing that I was drawn to specifically, there’s a lot of early stuff when he was still Robin that I never really dove into in depth. 

I mean, new content that was being produced at the time and just was a flashback look at him as Robin, I ate all of that up (lol nostalgia does have a lot to do with my fondness for R:YO and Annual that did my preferred retelling of his origin). But yeah, its not accurate to say he didn’t interest me as Robin, per se, more just that like….there’s only so far back I could go before the earlier written stories just weren’t quite what I was looking for.

So for specifics on any earlier instances, I would look to @northoftheroad or @internal-ethics for that, as their knowledge of Dick and Bruce’s pre-Crisis days far exceeds my own.

But no, to the best of my knowledge, there was nothing before that which came even close to being like it in tone or scope.

I think its more this was symptomatic of the writers shifting to a more grim and gritty Batman, rather than that developing in the aftermath of scenes like this one. Like I mean, I don’t think that scene created a turning point in how writers depicted Bruce’s dynamics, so much as it was the result of writers in the aftermath of that turning point having already been reached. 

It was the zeitgeist, you know? Personally, I blame Frank Miller for a lot, as he spawned a ton of imitators who saw what a hit he produced with his take on Bruce and I think a lot of writers just hoped that a similar take would net them a similar reception. But to be fair, its not like it was just him, since the only reason he even was a huge hit in the first place is that his Batman resonated with what a lot of people were looking for at the time.

Like, Tim still living at home and then with his dad still being alive for a decade after he first appeared…it wasn’t an accidental divergence from the first two Robins being orphans that Bruce took in and made family….it was part of the point of Tim. There is a tendency IMO (and I’m guilty of it too) to get so focused on the in-universe dynamics and character choices that we forget at times that none of these characters do anything other than what the writers write with intent, and Tim’s origin was a product of that. 

He wasn’t written as initially having more of a strict partnership or mentor/protégé relationship with Bruce as opposed to the familial structured ones Dick and Jason had, like…..I just mean….that wasn’t the result of Bruce keeping him at arm’s length at first because of his grief after Jason’s death. Its more the other way around. That character choice, for Bruce to keep him at arm’s length, and Tim having an origin that allowed for Bruce to do that as Tim didn’t live with him or need to be around him as often as Dick and Jason had….all of that was the product of DC and the writers wanting a less familial relationship between them, initially. Because it was all part and parcel of the whole “I don’t do family, I have allies and that’s it, I am grim and brooding and alone and I like it that way except also I don’t like anything, how’s that for a riddle, Nygma.” *waves hand at the previous* Y’know. That bullshit.

Like….a huge part of why Jason was so insular to the Batman franchise and had so few friends among the superhero community and made so few appearances in other titles like Titans….you can explain that any number of ways in-universe, but ultimately that goes back to the fact that DC didn’t want to ‘lose’ another Robin to another book the way Dick eventually migrated over to being more associated with the Titans in the 80s than with Batman. Again, its not like that wasn’t an editorial choice too….they’re the reason Dick was kept away from the Bat titles, its more like….

Here, let me lay it out like this. Basically, as far as I’ve ever understood and interpreted it, it goes like this:

Dick and his group of Titans become successful in their own right, making the Titans a new separate and successful franchise in and of itself, independent of their mentors….and being the face of the Titans, DC wants Dick more strongly associated with the Titans so they create in-story reasons for Dick to stop being Robin and to come up with a new identity that’s more associated with Dick Grayson: leader of the Titans than with Dick Grayson: ward and partner of the Batman. 

And initially, there was no real conflict between Bruce and Dick about this, they were on good terms, Dick gave Robin to Jason himself….because Dick’s departure wasn’t the inevitable result of character conflicts or some narrative reason that he had to be limited just to the Titans instead of still being a steady presence in Batman’s book….rather, it was all just made to allow for DC to keep two of their franchises separate and distinct from each other, because they didn’t want to cross-pollinate and make the success of each franchise linked to or even dependent on the other one.

And Jason was just as much a product of these decisions. Jason didn’t have a lot of ties to other books because Bruce kept him so decisively by his side, nor did he and Dick not appear together a lot because they disliked each other or didn’t have a relationship….rather, all of that IMO was an end result of the DC editorial decision to have a Robin who was almost exclusively linked to Batman in readers’ minds, with no clear, visible ties to other books or franchises that would result in him being anything other than one half of the Dynamic Duo.

(And personally, I’ve always thought this is where they really screwed up with Jason and his stories. DC claimed to want to kill Jason off because readers didn’t like him, which isn’t quite as factual a claim as has been indicated at times….but regardless….DC failed to factor in that perhaps why Jason wasn’t as popular as Dick or found as compelling by readers at the time was that DC didn’t prioritize…..giving Jason his own distinct identity and presence aside from just being Bruce’s sidekick. 

Its like, DC wanted to make another Robin because Dick was so well-received, but Dick’s popularity meant eventually there was reader demand for him beyond what Batman’s book could allow for while still be focused on Batman, ergo Dick was moved elsewhere and Batman got a new Robin……who DC accidentally sabotaged from day one by deciding they wanted a Robin whose purpose was to be part of Batman’s narrative….failing to recognize that a character without a clear narrative of his own….is never going to be as interesting or compelling as others who are allowed to exist independently of their mentor).

And THEN came the zeitgeist shift. The gradual, tonal shift of reader priorities and interests (or at least, as DC interpreted them), with DC shifting their own priorities around in order to better capitalize on what they felt would be most profitable in the newer social climate. As far as they seemed to think, what readers really wanted were brooding, violent anti-heroes who were solitary and needed no one….which doesn’t really fit either Bruce Wayne: Family Man, or Bruce Wayne: Has Strong Ties to Others Outside his Franchise which Makes Them Strong Allies.

Hence, the retcon of Dick being fired from Robin instead of moving onto another identity by his own choice…..so that Dick’s reasons for not being present in the Bat franchise would be more due to emotional estrangement, thus validating the image that Bruce was (mostly) on his own, and that was the way he preferred or thought he needed it. 

And then when Crisis allowed for a ton of possibilities in changing character backstories and even natures, DC made huge changes to Jason’s character….making him the grim, gritty ‘darker’ sidekick that was a better tonal fit for the darker Dark Knight they wanted to promote, and simultaneously doubling down on Dick’s own estrangement by compounding Bruce’s errors with him, as he gave Robin to Jason without asking and gave Dick all the more reason to feel he didn’t have a place there and to stay away.

And herein lies the danger of allowing your audience (or your perception of your audience and their wants) dictate your story-telling, rather than just letting your writers tell their damn stories without you constantly trying to make it a paint by numbers scenario and get more bang for your buck.

Because only a year or so after making huge changes to Jason’s character and basically re-envisioning him from the ground up, DC still felt that Robin wasn’t as well liked or as popular with readers as they wanted him to be….shockingly, I mean considering that if you think your readers only want dark heroes oozing over with violence and barely suppressed wrath, I don’t know how you convinced yourselves Robin was ever going to fit into that paradigm without re-envisioning Robin, rather than Jason himself.

Like, you can make the sidekick of your would-be dark, gloomy antihero as angry and violent as you want….but if at the end of the day, he’s still decked out in a costume that’s meant to be cheerful and fun, with no change from the iconic look that for decades now has been associated with a playful, mischievous counter-balance to the Dark Knight’s dourness….

Basically, no one’s going to go home happy is all I’m saying. DC was never going to get the success they wanted from that, because they shot themselves in the foot from the get go by wanting it both ways. The name and image recognition and built-in audience that comes from a reputation and public awareness that took literally decades to establish…..at the exact same time they wanted that very same character to be popular with the =readers they thought didn’t want the kind of content largely associated with Robin..

(IMO they could have actually gotten closer to what they wanted and killed two birds with one stone by like….building up Jason with his own distinct identity and narratives….which in turn could have led into Jason deciding Robin wasn’t the right fit for his own mission and reasons for being at Batman’s side, and thus building his own persona and mantle distinct to him just like Robin was distinct to Dick….but for the time being, still being Batman’s sidekick. If DC weren’t so insistent on it being Batman and Robin or nothing….they could have had Batman and someone else…whose new name and mantle could have been more along the lines of whatever they felt better conveyed the grittiness they wanted to sell via the Bat franchise.)

But anyway, so then Jason is killed off, with the in-story reasons really just being the cause and effect mapping of DC’s actual editorial direction to make Bruce fit the idea they’d built up in their own heads of what people really wanted Batman to be….

And yet bizarrely, they still didn’t wind up happy with the results. Apparently, Robin itself wasn’t the issue, just as Jason himself had never really been the issue. And once again, barely a year or two later….

They created Tim, but they still weren’t giving up on their obsession with this lonely, brooding Bruce who needed no one and coincidentally had no one…so they made sure to keep clear boundaries in place, initially. This is Bruce’s student, not his son, they were insistent. Just so everyone’s clear. See? He has his own dad. He even hires an actor to play his uncle when his dad is in a coma, just to keep CPS off his back because he knows Bruce would just take him in himself if that happened, and that’s not what Tim wants see, because Tim has his own dad, he doesn’t want Bruce to be his dad, ergo there is no danger of Bruce being paternal and affectionate and having *gulp* feelings. Of the positive variety.

And incidentally, well, not incidentally at all, since my whole point is all of this is always the result of clear, deliberate writing choices made to match editorial directives……regardless of the in-story explanations of Tim being so much more independent and operating solo so much more than his predecessors, like….because Bruce spent so much time brooding and being unapproachable and Tim needed more stimuli, what’s a bored superhero in-training to do, y’know….

Well, aside from all that, there’s also the factor that Tim was so much more independent than his predecessors had been while Robin because a) DC at least had learned from their mistake in not allowing Jason to have much of an identity of his own, b) the rapid expansion of both Marvel and DC in the early nineties, following what they called a speculators’ boom (basically both companies convinced themselves comics were about to be worth their weight in gold because a bunch of speculators had taken to buying up issues they thought would be worth a ton in the future, all pretty much due to the fact that some guy managed to sell a rare, first edition of X-Men #1 for a shit ton of money. Comic book companies are stupid. Have I expressed that enough in this one single post? LOL).

Anyway, so b) due to the rapid expansion of both the Big Two, DC was pumping out a ton more books than they had previously, which meant they had room for both a Nightwing solo book and a Robin solo book, so a huge part of the perception of Tim’s independence stems completely from the fact that he had a book to showcase these independent adventures in, without Batman or another team like the Titans being present (and still the priority).

(Which again, like. I’m always insisting that just because we didn’t see much of Dick and Jason bonding or hanging out on page before Jason died, didn’t mean it didn’t happen - just that there was no place to put scenes like this that didn’t involve either Batman or the other Titans, given that those were the only two titles they appeared in. Similarly, there’s no reason to assume Dick and Jason didn’t both go off on their own at times between issues and have adventures on their own or investigate stuff at their schools or any of the stuff Tim did in his solo title…..its literally just that before there was a solo Robin title to show Robin having solo adventures……the only place for these things to happen was…..off the page).

Bottom line, everything about Tim was constructed from the get go to be as unthreatening to the idea of a dark, repressed, brooding Batman as it was possible to get while still being Robin.

And yet…..even that didn’t last, weirdly. As over time, editors and writers desperately seeking the secret ingredient that would make this franchise really gel with readers the way they so desperately wanted it too…..over time, various someones stumbled into getting away with scenes where Alfred, Bruce, Dick and Tim still managed to be warm and familial with each other regardless of all that…

And shockingly, someone at some point figured out: Eureka! Readers love this!

So they doubled down, as they usually do, the second there’s profit in the air because yay capitalism…..

And thus its again, regardless of in-story justifications….

Not remotely a coincidence that Dick’s adoption, Cassandra’s creation and clear trajectory to being included in the Batfamily either officially or unofficially, Bruce’s initial offer of adoption to Tim even though Tim wouldn’t actually accept until years later, our time…..

Like, there’s a reason that all of these things happened in basically a five year period, real time…..even though prior to this, new additions to the Batfam, let alone official inductions, were more like a once every ten years kinda thing.

For a brief window, DC figured out the magic formula for writing a family is writing them as a family, and hark, ‘twas a blessed sight indeed.

And then someone was like, hey, y’know what’s missing? What if we bring Jason back?!

…….and then DC managed to pretty much wreck every progress they’d made towards having a brain, as they fucked that up in the most spectacular fashion possible by completely missing the point of why or in what ways readers most likely would want the missing and dead member of this family to show up alive and well.

*headdesk*

And over the years since then, the kids’ various official statuses have shifted left or right without rhyme or reason, following the whims of every new writer or editor to think: Eureka! I’ve done it! I’ve cracked the code! With frequent reversions to Bruce the Brooding Billionaire Bastard, loads of Not Good Parenting and downright abusive behavior, and a shit load of confusing contradictions.

Meanwhile, me, sitting here:

“Hey DC, maybe the problem is that you just can’t shove something like “adopted a gaggle of gremlins” into the bottle after uncorking that and letting readers see that its out there and a possibility…..so what if you just fucking committed to the one and only thing that’s managed to net you a positive reception every time you do this same dumb song and dance routine: actual family acting like actual family, actually.”

Anyway, how’s that for yet another 

“How did Kalen’s Post Get From Point A to Side Tangent Z, Section 4f, Sub-Paragraph D13?”