#IS IT TECH OR ARE THE WRITERS JUST YANKING US AROUND

[followthepurrgil]

There are too many parallels for that trooper to not be tech:

the familiar grunting while moving heavy rocks

the “left femur crushed by approximately 150kg of pressure”

the getting thrown off a waterfall and flopping dramatically onto the rocks

the 180 degree turn with zero thrusters in the ship as it landed

the reliance on, and frustration with his technology

the precise and clipped tone of voice

Send help

[delusional-day-dreamer]

New Year's Kiss - p.b

‣ paige bueckers x reader

‣ wc: 3567

‣‣ synopsis: you were known as one of the calmest, most well-tempered players on the ucon wbb roster. so what happens if you lose your cool for the first time in a game? takes place at the uconn vs notre dame game on dec 31, 2022: based off this post/req from my nonnie 🫶, and lowk inspired by paige's bloody nose at the uconn vs seton hall game!

‣‣‣ a/n: hey guys.... i'm so sorry for being so inactive but the writer's block hit me HARD. I have a few more drafts in progress I hope to release this week, thank y'all SO MUCH for the support and patience! Also, for the opponent in this game i refer to her solely as the, "marquette girl", as i don't know their players that well and don't want to use an irl girl!

Up until the second half of the game, everything had been going decent for you. Sure, this game was one of the most aggressive of the season, but you were right in the peak of your season, so it made sense that emotions were running high with the pressure to do well.

But that didn't excuse the fact that the Marquette girl that had been assigned to defend you had been playing dirty the entire night. After the fucking hellish week you had just gotten through, this girl was about to be the straw that broke the camel's. your, back.

After Paige's acl tear in August and the work and energy you had been endlessly pouring into your game from the past two and a half years till now, you had basically solidified your place as one of the main starters on the team, which meant you were receiving a lot more consistent playing time. The thought of being a more prominent player on the team didn't panic you the way it might others, as you you were known for always being a very level-headed, reliable player under pressure, as you had been dubbed by the media as the "Silent Assassin". But tonight was proving to test your limits to the max.

Any time you were on the court for the first two quarters, the Marquette girl had been glued to you, illegally all up in your space, pushing and shoving at you, taunting you over and over again, and even tripping you once when you lunged for the ball. All of which she had done without receiving a single foul, which not only pissed you off, but also your teammates on the court, the players on your bench, and your coach.

And of course, the one time you had defended yourself against her in the second quarter was the only time the ref called a foul on both of you. She had nearly pressed herself up against you the second your hands came in contact with the ball, leaving you with no choice but to pass to your teammate Aaliyah to sink a layup, when she hooked her arm through yours and pulled just as the ball left your hands.

Her unnecessary aggression caused something to snap inside of you, as the second you felt her yank on your arm, you turned around to push her off of you, hard. She stumbled backwards a little bit, not tripping or hitting the ground in any way, but the damage had been done in the, very biased, eyes of the refs.

The two of you rapidly reacted, approaching each other as you were yelling out meaningless threats and a long string of curses. Thankfully, your teammates holding the two of you back firmly, preventing any further physical altercations.

The two of you both received technical fouls for the unnecessary physical contact and unsportsmanlike behaviour. However, the foul you received only irked you more. Why were the only fouls called on her when it involved you pushing back? Could they not see the way she was treating you the entire game?

And of course, Geno wasn't thrilled about one of his starters getting a tech in the first half of the game. While benched, he had chewed you out for losing your temper at her, especially for cursing, which was something refs never let slide. But his reprimands didn't hold the usual level of anger or frustration, as he internally agreed that the Marquette girl had it coming for her, but, he had to remain professional.

Of course basketball was a physical sport, and with aggression came some conflicts with other players, but her behaviour tonight was unprovoked and incredibly aggravating to you. Which only worsened in the third quarter.

After your tech, you had been trying your best to ignore the incredibly annoying actions of the Marquette girl, but you simply couldn't anymore after she had purposely elbowed you in the nose to make her shot.

You immediately stumbled backwards, folding over at the waist as your hands came up in an attempt to alleviate the intense throbbing your nose felt. You could feel the blood begin to dribble down to your lip as you walked over to the bench with Lou escorting you, awaiting the ref's call.

The refs decided to not call a foul on the other girl, claiming that she hadn't reached backwards on purpose, it was simply the angle of her basket and granted UConn two free throws. The call enraged you, and something inside you snapped. You very quickly forgot about the tissue you were firmly holding at your nostrils as you approached him, insisting with him that the call was blind and blatantly biased.

You hadn't noticed the blood resumed to flow down your face while arguing until it hit your mouth, but you paid no mind to the taste of iron that filled your mouth as you persisted angrily speaking to the ref.

"Paige, go get her before she gets another tech," Geno whispered into Paige's ears over by the bench.

She nodded at him, making her way over to you to pull you away from the ref who was now threatening to eject you from the game.

"Okay enough, you need to get checked out by the team medic," Paige wrapped her arm around your waist to pull you away from your heated conversation, despite your struggle against her. She wasn't that much taller than you, but the extra two ish inches she had on you were proving useful right now.

She dragged you over to the bench, ignoring your many protests. She pried the used, bloody tissue out of your fingers to toss to the medic waste bag, grabbing new ones from her hand to help your bloody nose. It was apparent to everyone on your team, even the fans watching, that your stubbornness wouldn't allow you to accept the call that easily and allow the medic to clean you up. So, Paige would just have to do it herself.

Since your first day on the Uconn campus, you and Paige had become extremely close. With the two of you being assigned roommates your freshman year, the COVID year, it would've been impossible to not become best friends, considering the fact that you spent all of your time together.

If not at practice or hanging out with the team, the two of you were trapped inside your dorm, forced to find company within each other for the entire year. And with Paige's injury her sophomore year, you were one of the only people she was able to open up to, other than Azzi, and you had become her comfort during her rehab time, both then and now. Despite no longer being roommates, you two still always hung out at each other's respective dorm, even having frequent sleepovers.

Your incredibly close relationship wasn't left unnoticed by the media either, especially social media platforms like tiktok. When Paige and Azzi denied the relationship allegations at the same time you made it clear that you liked girls, the internet quickly refocused their attention onto you and Paige, and neither of you had the heart to deny any rumors circulating. Considering that after Azzi, you were the least active on your social media when it came to anything other than basketball, it wasn't too hard to ignore the internet's speculation.

All of which to say, Paige had made it incredibly easy for you to catch feelings for her. Until her, you had never known what it was like to be completely head over heels for someone. The way your heart skipped any time the two of you made eye contact, the way your cheeks flushed when she brushed against you, and the chemistry the two of you shared on and off the court was undeniable.

Unbeknownst to you, she felt the exact same way, and for the last two years, everyone but you two could see the feelings you harbored for each other.

If only you could feel the way her heart was beating as she held your face in one hand, using the other to apply pressure to your nose and wipe away at the blood on your face, neck, and jersey as she listened to you rant about the refs and how they were cheating you guys out of fouls the entire game. Although, she wasn't able to focus on the words coming out of your mouth, only the plumpness of your lips as they moved, something you noticed as your verbal attack slowed down so you could take a breath in between your sentences.

"She's literally fucking stuck up my ass and the refs ignore her which is actual bullshit, the amount of times this girl has literally made unnecessary contact or-, Paige are you even listening to me?"

Her lingering gaze on your mouth quickly snapped up to your eyes, a sheepish smile settling onto her now flushed cheeks.

"Yeah, yeah sorry."

She wiped the remaining blood from around your nose before calling over the medic to check your nose. A small bruise had formed near the bridge, but thankfully it wasn't broken. While she was checking your nose, Paige did her best to avoid meeting your curious stares.

Of course the two of you had small moments where you could envision that Paige felt the same for you. But never one that was so blatantly obvious as her staring at your lips, especially so publicly.

Nonetheless, you barely had time to analyze the interaction before the medic was clearing you to return to the game, Paige patting your butt (this) as you jogged by her to sub back into the game, which, until the handshake line, went without any further incidents, despite your team beating them by 13 points (HVL VS TEXAS Y'ALL).

When passing by you, you heard her mutter under her breath, "fucking bitch," in response to your half-hearted, "good game". It was safe to say you didn't take that well, responding to her with, "you wanna come say that to my fucking face? Pussy ass bitch." For both of your sakes, Dorka and one of her teammates were able to keep pushing the two of you down the line and out to the lockers before the post-game conference with Lou, Nika, and Dorka, which Geno insisted you attend to apologize for your behaviour.

***Small Time Skip***

"So Y/N, the multiple incidents that occured tonight with you and (BLANK) from Georgetown, do you have anything to say about them? I mean, you're known for being a very calm and collected player, but tonight we saw a very different side of you," a reporter questioned you. The questions for you from tonight's post-game conference mostly avoided the fight, treading the waters carefully as it was unlike anything you had ever been involved in.

"I'm not gonna try and cover for myself or anything, it was unprofessional and unacceptable for me to lose my temper on the court like that. Like you said, I've always tried to place an emphasis on just basketball when playing and avoid any other personal feelings or problems, but I guess tonight I didn't do as good of a job on that as I could of. This is something that I will keep in mind for all of our upcoming games as that's not the kind of image or reputation I want to set for myself or the team I represent. I would never want this kind of behaviour to be defining moments from our games because my teammates really put their all into every single one of their games, especially tonight's, and I don't want to create any personal animosity with the girls on the Marquette team, as I have a lot of respect for them."

Your diplomatic and cordial answer had appeased majority of the reporters, along with Geno and the team publicist in the back corner of the room. Except for one nosy reporter who seemed unhappy with your tactful response and was practically feining for drama.

“This one is for y/n, but with the events of today, you mentioned that you try to keep all personal feelings off the court. Is that an implication of some external underlying tension or problems between you and number (BLANK), as the two of you got quite physical today?”

What the fuck? Now they really were trying to start something between the two of you that never existed in the first place.

“No not at all. I have no connection with number (BLANK) off the court and don’t even personally know her. As I mentioned before, I have nothing but respect for the girls at Marquette and there are no hard feelings on my end. You know, basketball is a physical contact game and that just means that there a few rough moments here and there, it’s just part of the game.”

If they ask any more stupid questions about you and the Marquette girl you were actually gonna lose your mind. Especially if they somehow tie in the fact that you like girls with the fight.

Which, thankfully, they ended up dropping the fight for the rest of the interview, and you and the others were finally allowed to go out and celebrate New Year's Eve the way they had originally planned to.

The whole team, and Kayla of course, was prepared to celebrate at your favorite local bar, Ted's. All of the girls who were taken were bringing their partners along and those of you who were single were all ready to hunt someone down for a drunken kiss at midnight. Except you.

You were far too down bad for Paige to even fathom kissing someone else at the moment, especially not while going out with her and the rest of the team, who all knew about your ginormous crush on Paige.

Nonetheless, you still did your best to get ready quickly, wearing your baggiest pair of low-rise cargo pants and a very cropped white halter tank top in an attempt to cheer yourself up from the fact you wouldn't have a New Year's kiss this year, again.

But by the time you were throwing back shots at the bar like they were water, you couldn't find it in you to care about how single you were. It was common knowledge that you weren't the best at holding your liquor, as the team often made fun of your ability to get drunk off of two to three shots, which is exactly the position you found yourself in.

Until, of course, "guardian angel Paige" decided she needed to intervene in your drinkfest, walking up to your barstool and effectively cutting you off by having the bartender replace your drink with a regular shirley temple just before midnight so that she, or any of your other friends, wouldn't have to deal with you throwing up at four in the morning.

"You gotta go easy on the shots y/n/n, you're gonna hate yourself in the morning if you keep drowning your liver in alcohol."

"Funny, coming from Storrs's resident party girl, Miss Madison," you teased. There were only about twenty minutes left until bar's tv would depict the ball dropping in New York, and the disparity of your situation had begun to sink in.

Not only would you be suffering through another New Year's with no midnight kiss, but you had no relationships since last year or even a single talking stage, no potential relationship prospects for the future, and worst of all, no Paige.

"Yeah well, at least I can hold my drinks. You, on the other hand, are the most lightweight out of all of us. Besides, what happened to your little New Years tradition, the whole eating the grapes thing to find the love of your life or whatever?"

You went off on a little drunken tangent at this, complaining that it was completely ineffective, but also, the fact that it made you look stupid in front of the entire team when absolutely nothing came out of it.

"I mean it's so dumb. I don't get why my love life is so barren, like actually non-existent, it's not like I'm super unattractive or anything like that. Right? But like, I don't even have a midnight kiss this year, again," you grumbled to Paige, unaware of the way she was staring at your lips for the second time today, mesmerized by their movements.

"You are most definitely not unattractive. You're like one of the most attractive people I know. Besides, it's not like I'm kissing anyone this year," Paige reassured you, and somehow, your drunk brain simply did not process the way she had flusteredly complimented you.

"Yeah but you're Paige Bueckers," you emphasized, "you could kiss anyone in this bar if you wanted. Men and women, single and taken, would literally form a line two blocks down if you even mentioned wanting to kiss someone," you gazed up at Paige from your leaned position against the bartop, watching as the gears turned behind her eyes.

"Anyone in the bar? Like, anyone at all?" She asked you curiously, a small smirk graced her features as she peered down at you.

"Yeah probably, but there's only like two minutes left or something, so you should pick someone soon."

"Oh I already have someone picked out, I just don't know if they would kiss me back."

"Oh?" You felt your stomach drop at her statement, and you couldn't stop the jealousy from coursing through your veins if your life had depended on it. But Paige's unwavering gaze never left your face, and you could feel your cheeks flush at the way she was intently looking at you.

"Quite the staring problem tonight P?"

"Well it's pretty hard to not stare at the prettiest girl in the room," she flirted, scooting closer to you, effectively closing some of the distance between you two.

"I-, what?" You stuttered, taken back by Paige's actions.

"How many hints does I have to drop before you finally start picking up on them? I want to kiss you y/n, I want you."

The ten-second countdown had begun as Paige confessed to you, and you were left gawking at Paige's face, your heart threatening to give out from how fast it was beating.

"FIVE, FOUR,"

You yanked on Paige's belt loop, pulling her flush against your body as your eyes focused in on her lips.

"THREE, TWO, ONE, HAPPY NEW YEAR'S!""

Your right hand reached up to grab Paige's jaw at the end of the countdown, pulling her lips firmly down onto yours. The bar's loud chants barely registered to you as you lost yourself in the intoxication of Paige's lips. Your tongue glided across her lip as your mouths moved in unison, causing her to groan into you. You took it as an invitation to slip your tongue into her mouth, the kiss deepening with unrestrained passion.

Your built-up need for each other was apparent as you made out, sending shivers down your spine at the pressure of her mouth against yours. It felt as if she was the oxygen you needed to breathe, and now that you had her, there was no way you could let her go now.

***The next morning: New Year's Day***

Your eyes fluttered open with a pounding headache, yet, the utterly familiar weight of a certain pairs of hands around your waist provided a sense of comfort you knew only she could provide.

Paige's soft snores rung out throughout the room, and as you gently reached forward to her nightstand to grab your phone off charging, you realize it was still extremely early in the morning, not even eight a.m.

And yet, your phone was blowing up with notifications from all social media platforms, even your text messages had over a hundred notifications.

Confused, you click on the apps to check what all the fuss was about, quickly realizing what had happened.

The entire interaction between you and Paige at the game was recorded by the cameramen and had instantaneously made it's way all over the internet, only fueling the dating rumors about the two of you.

The comments and posts were going feral at the way Paige was the only one who could calm you down, the way she wrapped her arms around your waist to pull you back, her holding your face ever so delicately, her smacking your butt as you ran back onto the court, and of course, her transparent staring at your lips the entire time you were an inch apart from her.

"What are you looking at baby," Paige sleepily mumbled into your neck, tightening her grip around your waist to pull you further into her, slinging her right leg over your waist.

You put your phone down and turned in her hold, wrapping your arms around her body as you peered down at Paige's sleepy face, admiring how beautiful she always looked.

"Your fans are going crazy about how obviously down bad you are for me P," you teased, running your foot up and down her calf as Paige pressed her face into your chest to absorb your body heat.

"Let them, just go back to sleep with me for a little bit longer."

And of course, how could you ever say no when your girlfriend was asking you so sweetly?

a/n: thank you for reading all the way through, and i'm so sorry if the ending is kinda rushed, i just wanted to finally get another fic out 🤗

[moonlit-imagines]

Mutant One Seat Over

Peter Maximoff x reader

warnings:

a/n: ahhhh anon you are so super sweet!!! thank you so much! to do this awesome request, reader is gn and has natural spider powers! (as opposed to engineering tech to accommodate powers, but i know you said “like peter parker” so i hope this is okay!) mwah!

prompt: anonymous: “Hi Could you do a Xmen- Peter X Spider!Reader one shot where the reader is a new student in the school for gifted youngsters and they have spider powers (like peter Parker). They don’t really attend classes or have any friends and Charles are trying to get them more comfortable in the school So he literally drags her to class. she has to sit next to Peter maximoff and he is totally mesmerized by her and and they become really close and starts dating.

Ps: hope your having a great day and staying safe. Your such a talented writer and also don’t feel pressed to do this I totally understand if you decide not to, just do what you feel like🥰❤️❤️”

Ever since puberty, you just haven’t been the same. I might have to mention that you’re a mutant, let’s just say that you had a different idea in mind when warned that “your body will go through all sorts of changes.” The surfacing of your mutation was startling, uncomfortable, and confusing.

Some lovely abilities you had acquired were: sticking to almost anything that came into contact with your skin (you’re working on it), being able to spin your own webs (which you were getting pretty good at, fantastic vision, super strength, and much more to be explored.

After a little mishap at school when you got stuck in a bathroom stall for three and a half hours, your parents thought it best to send you to a boarding school that was “much more your speed.”

“No. No, I don’t want to leave!” You pleaded with your parents once they broke the news to you. They were heartbroken that it had to go this far, but this is what needed to be done.

“It’s only until you get control of your powers, y/n. You need to be around other people who share your experiences.” You mom explained, grabbing your gloved hands. At this point, you couldn’t do anything without being covered from near head-to-toe in clothing, it stuck to you and only you.

“Yeah, I heard you the first time.” You snapped, jerking away and stomping up the stairs, but there was a certain sound that stopped you. A car horn. “You didn’t...” You glared at your parents and watched them avert eye contact from you, your heart broke into a million pieces. “A cab? Really? You won’t even take me there yourself?”

“Your suitcase is already packed, y/n.” Your dad’s ashamed tone gave you chills, you never thought you’d have to be sent off like this. You hesitantly stepped back down the steps while your dad walked into the mud room to grab the bag he’d stashed. “We’re sorry, but this is for your own good.” You snatched the bag from him and swung the front door open.

“We love you!” Your mom called as you slammed the front door hard enough to knock down a few dozen pictures and wall decorations throughout the house. “They’re never going to forgive us for this.”

—————

Truth be told, you didn’t enjoy this school at all. Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. The place was teeming with outcasts just like yourself, it made you sick.

At least you were in charge of yourself here. You came and went from your room when you pleased, but you pleased to stay in your room as much as you possibly could. Yes, you had classes, but you just so happen to miss...all of them.

“Well, we don’t know what they’re going through.” A voice mumbled outside of your dorm door. “It took me a while to acclimate to all this change, I imagine they feel the same.” You wouldn’t have let it bother you, but whoever was out there had just disturbed you from a fascinating dream that had taken you far from here. You threw off the covers and swung your legs over the edge of the bed, taking a moment to recover from the headrush.

“I’m so sick of this shit, some peoppe are trying to sleep!” You yanked the door hard enough for it to make a dent in the wall, but that wasn’t nearly as bad as opening the door to Professor Xavier, the headmaster of this boarding school, and another resident from the building, Hank. “Oh. Hi.”

“Mx. l/n, your teachers informed me that you have not been attending your classes, is this true?” The Professor interrogated, but you knew that lying couldn’t save you from a telepath.

“Yep, it’s true. The change of scenery’s just a little overwhelming, you know how it is.” You carelessly shrugged and even tried to close to door on them, but Dr. McCoy caught it and looked to the Professor in shock.

“Yes, well, maybe we could work on that. Why don’t you follow me to your next class? It really would be best for you to keep up with your studies. Maybe you’ll even make some new friends?” Professor Xavier wouldn’t give up on you, which was both comforting and exhausting. With a roll of your eyes, you peeled off one of your gloves and slapped yout hand against the wooden wall.

“Oh, no.” You deadpanned. “I’m stuck.” The two adults exchanged exhausted glances and stared at you in silence, you doing the same. You obviously were a stubborn kid, the Professor had seen this a hundred times before. But it gave him an idea, he knew the perfect candidate for a long lasting friendship, now he just needed you to quit all these games.

“Hank? Would you..?” Xavier politely suggested his friend’s assistance without outright saying it, so you were just a little puzzled when Hank stepped inside your room.

“Brace yourself, y/n.” He pushed his glasses up before planting his feet and grabbing you by each shoulder. Your eyebrows conjoined out of pure confusion, but just like that you were unstuck from the wall. He...okay, he was strong? That would have been good to know. Maybe they should have started with that before yanking you off of a hard surface. There were a few chunks of wood still connected to your hand, you’d have to pick them off later. “I suggest you put the glove back on, y/n. Wouldn’t want to get stuck again now, would you?” Hank gave you a forced smile and waited for you to do the right thing.

“Fine.” You pulled the glove over your hazardous skin and picked up your backpack. “If you insist, I’ll try out a class.” You huffed and dragged your feet across the hardwood floor, bringing joy to the Professor’s face. Maybe he enjoyed the suffering of mutant children.

“Splendid, this way.” He wheeled himself beside you, giving you a pep talk the whole way through the halls. “I do think you’ll like it here, you just have to give it a chance. Everyone here has something in common, that’s what makes it so great. I know it’s not easy having to leave the comfort of a familiar lifestyle, but life has a funny way of coming together, you’ll see.” You observed the decor that you’d ignored time and time again as you kept your head down and shuttled yourself from one place to another.

“Yeah, right.” You scoffed and stood in front of your classroom. It was already embarrassing showing up for class late in normal school, all eyes on you and everything. Was it any different in mutant school? Well, you were on your way to find out. The room went silent as the door crept open, you and the Professor entered with, you figured, all eyes on you.

“Class, some of you may know y/n, some of you may not. Please make them feel welcome here, I trust that you will.” Xavier took a quick look around the room and, just as he suspected, there was a vacant seat next to a mutant he had in mind. “Peter, raise your hand, please. Y/N, take the seat next to Peter. Enjoy the rest of your class, students!” The Professor exited as the rest of the class said their goodbyes in unison, it nearly gave you a headache, but you made it to your seat next to Peter and dropped all of your stuff with a thud.

“Peter Maximoff, nice to meet you. What’s with the gloves?” The silver-haired boy asked with a hand out to shake, with you reluctantly accepted. He didn’t seem so bad.

“I stick to things.” You answered in simplest form. “Aren’t you a little young to have gone gray?” You cocked an eyebrow while admiring Peter’s dime-silver locks that were almost distracting.

“Yeah, that’s what happens when you rush growing up.” Peter chuckled, running his fingers through the knots. “I’m a super-speeder. It just sort of happened. I don’t mind it, though, I think it’s sexy.” He shamelessly admitted, getting a genuine laugh out of you. Maybe he was one of the better people here, who knows?

“Whatever you say, Maximoff.” You leaned back in your seat, facing front to at least appear to be focusing, but you snuck a few glaces at the mutant one seat over. He, on the other hand, made his looks overt. The entire class period, his eyes were on you.

After that class period, you actually ended up enjoying your classes. The Professor checked up on your personal attendance often, chuckling to himself abour how simple his plan was.

“Do you really think it was a good idea to introduce y/n to Peter? Of all the people here?” Hank’s concern showed that he cared. Everyone here wanted the best for you, it was easier to see now more than ever.

“I had to start somewhere.” Xavier justified, which was actually pretty reasonable. There was no right way to deal with all these unique kids who had been through so much already. All he knew for sure was that they needed to feel supported, something he had absolutely no issue with.

Meanwhile, as your final bell rang...

You gasped when a gust of wind blew right past you. It wasn’t the wind that stared you, it was the obnoxious teen mutant that followed.

“Hi,” Peter awkwardly waved, then backed up to stand beside you, placing his hand on your middle back to lead you around the mansion going...well, who knows where you’re going? Not you, that’s for sure, “so hear me out. I think that we are like, the perfect pair. Wouldn’t you agree? Don’t answer that, I already know you’ll say ‘yes.’”

“Is there a point to this, ‘Quickie?’” An evil smile formed from your lips as Peter pushed a bit harder on your back, getting you to speedwalk with him.

“Hey!” I told you that story in confidence!” You stifled laughter and waited for him to continue. “Anyways, I’m gonna get straight to the point before you pull another fast one on me, my point? Well, yeah, my point...” He used his free hand you tap at his chin, then completely halted.

“Did you forget why you came here to talk to me?” You gave a disappointed shake of your head, but still seemed quite amused. The buzzing of kids around you didn’t even faze you, you’d just realized you were too focused on peter to even care.

“Can you maybe go over what I’ve said so far? It’ll jog my memory.” His request made you groan, but you did as he asked nevertheless.

“You said, ‘Hi. Hear me out. We’re the perfect pair. You agree. I told you that in confidence.’” At least your paraphrasing skills were on point.

“Right! Okay, okay. Back on track.” He continued on course, easing up on speed by just a pinch. “So me and you, right? Does that sound crazy? ‘Cause to me, that sounds pretty awesome. I mean, we are the hottest people at this school, we’d be unstoppable.” You’d finally started to piece together his ramblings.

“Are you asking me out or...something?” You tilted your head to analyze his lipless grin and raised eyebrows, was he clamming up?

“...Yyyyyes?” Peter finally admitted, finally showing his teeth through a smile.

“Alright, well...yeah, okay. We’re dating now.” You didn’t accept in the most conventional way, but you did accept, which counted for something.

“Really?!” Peter gasped. “Can I...can I kiss you?” Asking was everything, especially when you risk getting stuck to the other person. I mean, he wouldn’t mind being stuck to you, but he was a little hungry.

“I’m not gonna lie, Pete, we’re gonna need a lot of baby oil. It’s not gonna be pretty.” You made him burst into laughter upon the thought. “It’s not funny!” You playfully slapped his arm. “Where were you leading me, anyways?”

“Oh, nowhere in particular.” He explained through his wheezing. “I just really do not like standing still.”

taglist: @locke-writes // @randomawesomeperson102 // @captainshazamerica // @ravenmoore14 // @thisetaernallove //

[fallingappleshurt]

im in the mood for angst, so for your dff au, could you please writing a one shot or smth along those lines of techno coming home from a particularly tough duel and everybody else’s reactions? ty!!! <33

YES HELLO I WRITE

Yes Hello I’m a writer and I forgot about asks but here we go!! I’m sorry this took so long and that it’s really bad but here it is!

This is very poorly edited I’m so sorry lol, this takes place in my dff AU! It’s spunky

And it’s been awhile since I’ve written for this AU so things are a little weird, kind of missed the angst but I got ideas don’t worry

TW: violence, fighting, description of injury but nothing too graphic I think

Dicey Nights

Sword in hand, solid stance, deep breath. He could do this.

Techno tapped his foot anxious against the cement floor, waiting for his opponent to climb over the ropes and enter the arena. The air was thick and hot from the muggy night’s humidity and the crowds incessantly loud cheering. The arena was dimly lit around the stans, all light coming from a giant overhead, casting grimmy light over the blood splatters that stained the rough concrete.

His opponent entered the ring, eyes flashing in the light, lips quirked up in a barely perceptible grin. Techno’s anxiety shot from his stomach to his heart, this man was like a tank, tall with bulky limbs and long flat sword.

Techno pushed his worries away, he had taken on opponents bigger then himself before, just not that big, but they needed the money, he had to win this.

They both walked to the middle of the platform, shook hands, the other man gripping too tightly to be friendly, then they turned and walked back to their starting places.

The buzzer sounded and the man shot forwards, sword swinging in an arch, Techno’s sword clashed with his, metal screeching pierced the air as the man tried to overpower Techno, putting his weight on the sword.

Techno kicked him in the knee, the man sputtered and slipped, allowing Techno to dodge to the side then ram into the man, sending him to the ground. He moved to slash his sword at the man’s neck and fake out the audience then the duel finished, quick and easy if the man stayed down for the three count.

Suddenly the man lashed out and landed a kick square into Techno chest, sending him reeling. Techno scrambled to his feet, stifling a groan. His ribs protesting vehemently, sending shockwaves of fire through his chest, he watched as the other man rolled back onto his feet.

The man, Techno heard the crowd cheering ‘Go Thrasher!’, ran at him again, opting to not overpower him but overwhelm him, he swung wildly, he obviously never had any training.

Techno took the defensive, slash, stab, dodge, block, kick back, and repete, analyzing Thrasher’s fighting style, his patterns and goto movements. Once he memorized the motions he switched to offense, changing his own patterns as well, quick slashes and jabs, forcing Thrasher back, Techno would kick at the man’s legs then go back to swinging.

In a ditch effort Thrasher whipped his sword around only for Techno to kick it out of his hands, sending it flying. Techno slammed into the man once again, taking advantage of his distraction, and knocked him to the ground.

He pointed his sword at the man’s neck, looking down the blade at Thrasher, the crowd around him screaming, “Go Blade go!” He tried to keep his face emotionless, waiting for the announcer to call it off.

Thrasher wasn’t giving up, he kicked at Techno again, who half dodged half stumbled away. Thrasher moved faster then Techno had even seen, Techno lashed out, slicing his arm but it didn’t faze Thrasher. Rage blazing in his eyes he jumped on Techno and knocked him to the ground, half pinning him, a knee on one of Techno’s arms, knocking his sword away.

Thrasher punched him across the face, Techno’s head jerked to the side, pain flaring in his face, nausea rising in his gut as the man reared back and hit him again and again.

Techno weakly grabbed for his sword but came up short, his vision was blurring, hot blood dripped down his face, matting his hair. In a last ditch effort, he threw a punch, aiming for Thrasher's throat, he hit his target dead on and hard.

Thrasher gasped and faltered, his grip loosen and Techno took his chance. He yanked himself away and sent another kick to the man's chest, scrambling towards his sword.

He didn’t know what he was doing, he couldn’t win this, the adrenaline would wear off soon and he’d lose, he wouldn’t be able to fight after this, he’d have to go home empty handed. That thought alone made him feel even more sick.

Thrasher rose to his feet, breathing heavily, Techno got into a weak stance, prepared to go down fighting. You weren’t allowed to kill in the duels but Techno was scared Thrasher would chuck those rules out the window. Thrasher’s fists were clenched, cracked and bloody at his sides, fire in his eyes, he let out a roar. Techno’s grip on his sword tightened and he prepared to swing-

The buzzer sounded.

The fight lasted 10 minutes, the announcer called it a draw. The audience booed and complained as Techno went to shake hands with Thrasher.

Thrasher looked at Techno’s hand in disgust before slapping it away, “You fight dirty, freak.” He growled, Techno scowled but bit his tongue and flipped Thrasher off and stalked off as dignified as he could with the room spinning like a toy top.

He grabbed a bottle of water from the sidelines and chugged it when one of the organizers threw a small pouch at him.

“You’re off your game,” The women commented lazily, not looking up from her clipboard, “I expected better.”

“Then you hop on in there,” Techno grumbled, not making eye contact as he pocketed the pouch, he sheathed his sword.

“I’d rather die,” She said, eyes flickering up from the page, “Just like you almost did.”

Techno snorted, “Please,” He said, shouldering his bag and walking towards the bathrooms, “I neva die.”

He somehow managed to get to the bathroom without collapsing, he pushed open the door and stumbled over to the sinks. He gripped the edge tightly, waiting for the room to stop spinning, he looked up at the mirror and realized he was fucked.

There was a gross cut on his hairline, trickling blood down his face, the right side of his face was covered in blooming bruises, blood from his nose smeared down his chin, he looked like a mess.

He felt like a mess.

Techno grabbed a paper towel and ran it under the faucet then scrubbed it against down his chin and along his hairline, ignoring the sting. He dried his face off then filled up his water bottle, dreading the fact that he couldn’t hide this from his family. He hoped to get home before Wilbur or Tommy woke up, he knew he couldn’t avoid Phil, he got up extra early to be able to commute to work.

Techno started home, not bothering to stay for any other duels, he wouldn’t be able to win, not in the state he was in anyways. He squeezed past the security guards and tried not to fall while walking, the trip home only should have been around forty minutes but between his slow pace and stopping to take breaks so he wouldn’t pass out it took him over 2 hours to get back.

The rusty metal stair squeaked as Techno climbed them, they groaned as he put his weight on the railing, god he wanted to lay down.

He unlocked the door, trying to push it open as quietly as possible, of course the door made that impossible as it creaked loudly.

The door cast a shadow on the soft light coming from the kitchen, Techno could hear dishes clicking quietly.

“Hey Tech,” Phil said, as Techno locked the door again, “You’re back later then usual-” He stopped, staring at Techno’s face, Techno immediately put his hands up, “Now I know what you’re thinking but let me just say; it’s not that bad.”

“Sit,” Phil said, setting his coffee cup down, Techno rolled his eyes, but sat down anyways. “Yeah I saw that coming,”

“Please tell me the other guys looks worse,” Phil prodded at the bruises on Techno’s face, Techno shrugged.

“Please tell me you didn’t get your face fucked up for nothing,”

“I hope? I mean I got a few good hits in, oh that reminds me,” Techno leaned over, rummaging through his bag for money pouch,

He immediately regretted it because it made the room spin again. He grumbled but found the pouch and tossed it on the table.

”It’s not a lot but it’s something,” Techno trailed off, he could have stayed longer, fought harder, been more useful but a few bruises sent him running back home. “I can go back tomorrow, get us more-”

“What? You’re not going back, you look like shit!” Phil said incredulously, checking the cut along his hairline,

“But we need the money,”

“We’ll get by,” Phil’s eyes narrowed, mouth in a tight line.

“That’s a lie-”

“No it’s not,”

“Phil I’m not stupid we need more and I can go back, tonight was just an off, when I go back I can get us more-”

“You’re not going back!” Phil said firmly, “You’ll get hurt again-”

“It’ll be worth it-”

“No! It’s not! Nothing is worth you getting this hurt!” Phil snapped, he took a breath, shoulders slumping. “I’m sorry it’s- it’s just not worth it, you need to be okay too, you deserve to be okay.”

Techno sat there, not sure what to say. Phil looked at the clock and swore under his breath, “Shit, I’m gonna be late,” He grabbed his coat, “I’ll see you later, take it easy, alright?” Techno nodded as Phil walked out the door.

He sits there for a minute, not sure what to do, he wants to sleep for 45 hours but he is also hungry. He opted to grab a banana when he hears Wilbur yell from the other room;

“Tommy brush your hair!” The bedroom door opened, “No! It looks fine!” He didn’t notice Techno as he walked into the bathroom, Wilbur followed him out a moment later.

“Hey Wil,”

“Hey Tech, you're up earlier and oh my god are you okay?” He trailed off to the next point, gesturing gingerly at Techno’s face.

“Yes, I’m fine, I promise,” Techno said again, putting his hands up and rolling his eyes. Wilbur nodded, they stood there for a moment before Wilbur asked;

“Did Phil flip out?”

“Oh yeah definitely,”

“Well, at least something’s normal,” Techno snorted.

“Hey Wilbur, we’re low on toothpaste again-” Tommy said, coming out of the bathroom, he looked at Techno and trailed off.

“Uh, Techno, You’ve got a little something,” Tommy gestured to his own face, hand hovering over the whole right side, “on your face, like everywhere.”

Techno snorted and smiled softly, “Thanks for telling me nerd,”

“What happened?”

“Not important,” Techno said, grabbing an orange from their fruit bowl, tossing it at Tommy, who caught it with ease, “What is important is that you’re gonna be late for school, now get going.” He hadn’t told Tommy about the arena fights, he didn’t know how Tommy would react and he didn’t want to encourage it or risk it.

“No I’m not, you’re just avoiding the question!” Tommy protested, jamming his finger into the skin of the orange.

“You sure about that?” Techno nodded to the clock on the wall, 7:06.

“Oh shit, I gotta go,” Tommy said, Wilbur slapped the back of his head, “Language,”

“What come on! You say it all the time!”

“Yeah cause I’m older then you, now grab your shit,”

“Now you're just rubbing it in!” Tommy said, grabbing his backpack off the hook by the door.

“You’re right, now let’s go, I’ll walk to you,” Wilbur stopped in the doorway, Techno could hear the creaks of the stairs as Tommy jumped down. Wilbur looked at Techno, eyes soft.

“Go to sleep Tech, you look like you need it,”

“Well I was going to but now that you said that, I think I’ll stay up,” He teased, Wilbur rolled his eyes.

“If you aren’t asleep by the time I get back I will crush you,”

“I’d like to see you try,” Techno shot back as Wilbur closed the door, locking it.

The banana forgotten and set back on the counter, Techno slipped his shoes and laid down, hoping the others wouldn’t worry too much, he fell asleep almost immediately.

[austarus]

Harry Wells x Reader Crisis of Infinite Wells (Part 1 of 5)

**A/N: The picture/edit/gif does not belong to me. It belongs to @moonymartell​.

Word Count: 2177   

 Part 2    Part 3    Part 4    Part 5

***After finally getting caught up this week, I just have to say it’s been a roller-coaster of feels that I’ve been riding from the beginning all the way to episode 15. I refuse to believe we can’t get Harry back! Or that the multiverse is gone! And… I’ll just let my fic speak for what’s been on my mind for the past couple days. Hopefully, the writers are going to treat Harrison Wells kindly and stop breaking our hearts every so often. Tired of it and how they write off certain things with no legit explanation or just being plain forgetful. Sorry about the little rant, but this needed to be down. Comment down below if ya’ll think the content makes sense and if I should be a CW writer lol! Also please remember to reblog fics, that way more people able to see them and it gives us support too!! We are also content creators!

You fidgeted with your hands, playing with the ring on your finger. You were leaning back against the monitor close to the center of the cortex that had faced the main monitors. You nibbled on your bottom lip every so often as you waited for everyone to show up. Your brain mulled through what’s logically left, the crazy theory you had come up with in the middle of the night as your mind oddly recounted moments with team flash through the years. I really hope they don’t think I’m insane for this. You attempted to calm your nerves, and it worked for a few moments, but it only spiked when several sounds of footsteps made their way to your ears. Looking up, you gave everyone a smile as they shuffled into the Cortex.

“Hey,” you made a little wave gesture to everyone. You took in a little breath.

“Hey, we got your call. Did something happen?” Barry furrowed his eyebrows in question as he walked in. Standing with his hands in his pockets, the Scarlet Speedster stood beside Iris, who automatically took her place at the main monitor.

“Is it about Eva?” Iris asked right after Barry, running her hands on the desk. Cisco took the spot beside Iris, chewing on a Twizzler with a bag in hand, Kamila stole one from him when he wasn’t looking.  Ralph strolled in with Frost, he probably was giving her another life guidance lesson earlier, who only raised his eyebrows when Nash strode in after everyone.

You opened your mouth to answer, but got cut off by Ralph, “You invited Indiana too?”

“I’m as clueless as you are, for once, stretchy,” Nash piqued up, rolls his eyes at the Elongated Man. All eyes were back on you.

“I’m calling a Flash meeting and no, nothing happened. Nothing about Eva either. But…” You licked your lips and pocketed your hands into your jeans. “I, for some reason, came up with this crazy idea and I don’t know if it’s going to work.” You pushed off the monitor and walked around to stand behind it, as if hoping it can be a little barrier. “But maybe if I run it through you guys it’ll make some sense because something’s not right.”

“No kidding,” Cisco inserted with a little scoff, but you knew he didn’t mean to be rude, “ever since post-Crisis, nothing’s been right.” He made eye contact with Nash, who only gave him a look and crossed his arms. “No offence, Indy.”

“Stop calling me that!” Nash protested.

“Guys,” Barry caught Cisco and Nash’s attention, shaking his head at them. “Let her finish.” The speedster turned back to you, “Please.”

Taking in another breath, you crossed your arms and glanced down, collecting your thoughts before looking back up at them. Each and every one of them. They can tell you’re nervous and honestly, yes, the silence is killing you momentarily. But it’s now or never.

“I think,” you started, “I know how to bring the boys back.”

“The… boys?” Cisco asked. Barry tilted his head while Iris looked interested yet confused.

“Very specific,” Frost did not look amused. Ralph did that little confused nose crinkle. “Not gonna lie, but all the boys are here. In this room. Unless you’re talking about the Backstreet Boys, in which case I would understand.”Everyone looked back at Frost, “What? Their songs are good.”

“I’m talking about Harry.” The atmosphere in the room suddenly shifted, all attention back to you. Your eyes weaved from each of them, gauging their reactions, especially Nash’s. “Sherloque. All the other Wells. Don’t you- Don’t you guys feel that something’s off?”

“(Y/N), listen-”

“No, Barry, please let me finish. Let me explain.” You licked your lips. “Don’t you guys find it weird that Nash is the only one with all his doppelganger’s psyches in his mind? We have doppelgangers too. Why isn’t Echo in Cisco’s head? Earth 2 Barry and Iris in our Barry and Iris’ heads? How come it’s just Nash?”

None of them could answer you. Nash, himself looked lost, but had glanced off to the side.

“Even Eobard was in his head and he wasn’t a Wells, just in a Wells’ body- Besides the point- No, I think this is a clue,” You continued with determination laced onto your features, standing up straight and exuding confidence. “A clue that The Monitor left behind. For us. A clue that can help us find all the earths, all our friends. And this is where my theoretical, but probably not, theory comes in. Iris, you’ve seen Eva control the Mirror Dimension, her “Mirror World” as we call it. Kamila experienced it firsthand.” Both ladies nodded in agreement. “What if all the other earths are hidden in dimensions like the Mirror Dimension? Scattered in different parts of the city, maybe even throughout all of earth. What if Jesse and Harry and Jay are just hidden in a pocket dimension? Yes, post-Crisis erased the possibility of the multi-verse existing, but that doesn’t include multi-dimensions.”

Cisco’s eyes lit up, walking around the main computer monitor and a bit closer to the center of the Cortex. “You’re talking about-”

“Dimensional Manipulation,” You and Cisco said simultaneously. A smile crossed your lips as you saw the gears in his head turning. Barry’s eyes also light up, his speedster brain in overdrive. Everyone else snuck peeks at each other, except Nash, who’s eyes only narrowed slightly.

“Like Edwin Gauss, Folded Man, the bus meta that DeVoe was after that could-”

“Open up dimensions and close them.” You finished with Barry. You let out a shaky breath, seeing realization dawn on all of them. You were beginning to feel giddy, things were making sense.

“Oh my god,” Iris whispered, running hand through her hair before resting it on her right arm. “But this is all theoretical, right?” She looked to Barry and Cisco before locking her gaze back onto you. “I mean we- we haven’t done anything involving dimensions?”

You shrugged your shoulders and walked a few steps towards the group, “We’ve done the impossible. Proven the theoretical, multiple times. Barry, you allowed your cells to quickly regenerate Ralph’s when you did a blood transfusion after Ramsey had attacked him. We have metas running around the city with theoretical powers, with our dashing hero in his red onesie-”

“-Hey, it’s not a onesie!-”

“-With superspeed. How many times are we going to let the word “theoretical” discourage us?” You pursed your lips. Barry nodded as you had spoken, everything making sense. Something is off. Frost and Cisco glanced at one another, agreeing that they’ve crossed the line of what’s possible and impossible before. “What’s once more Team Flash?” A smile played on your lips as you dared to say that.

Nash cleared his throat, your eyes locked onto his and you noticed a little glint within his blue irises. “So, you mean to tell me- tell us, that I can have my mind to myself again? The guys- I won’t have to see them or hear them?”

“I think so,” you folded your arms, “I know I’m just the team medic, but I really think I have a good idea on how to go about this. And what things to use- I just… I just wanted to run my theory by you guys. Especially Barry and Cisco, maybe we can tag Chester along to help. You three are the main tech guys here so…”

“What about me?” Nash raised an eyebrow at you along with a hand, to which he pointed to himself, and you inwardly cursed knowing that stubborn Wells trait was gonna show up anytime soon. “I can-”

“Are you requiring a bargain out of this too?” You smirked at him, jokingly. That shut the multiversal explorer up. You just looked at him as he let out a few words in a stutter. “You can help. One because if I told you not to, you were going to do it anyway.” Nash just sheepishly smiled and nodded to himself, because he knew he was anyway. “Two, you’re just as stubborn as all the other Wells men I’ve met. I just want you to not physically or mentally strain and/or harm yourself, doctor’s order.” Nash made a face knowing that statement followed with a “because”. “I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t if what we end up doing physically or mentally taxes your body, but I do have a backup plan since this is my area of general expertise.”

Nash seemed satisfied by your answer and smirked to himself, eyes looking off to the side before focusing back to you and the group. I wonder if Harry can hear me. Harry, I’m coming for you.

“Okay so,” Cisco started up, finishing a twizzler and walking over to stand beside you, “we’re going to find all these earths which could or could not be hidden in said pocket dimensions, yank out each Wells from Dusty’s head over here, meanwhile being able to catalog everything and being on the lookout for Eva and her two-face mirror clones. Do you have any idea how many earths there were? How many Wells there are in Nash’s head? Hell, how are we even going to manipulate dimensions-multiple dimensions-if we don’t have any leads?”

You snapped your fingers at him, “Well, here’s where the fun starts for our resident genius mechanical engineer.” Cisco smiled at your words. You walked around the main Cortex monitors, pulling up data and schematics, everyone crowds around you. “I’m thinking that there has to be some sort of fluctuation in this new world, whether it’s on the level of varying frequencies or on a subatomic-molecular level that’s distinct, but not too expansive that a person from Earth Prime can just find themselves in an alternate dimension.”

You took a drink of your water bottle as Cisco looked at the satellite schematics, nodding his head, “It’s possible, I may have to go over some algorithms and adjust them according to what we find. But nothing’s set in stone just yet until a trial is done.”

“What about hijacking Nash’s head?” Frost speaks up, pointing a thumb back to the geological myth-buster. “How are we going to do that?”

“Wait, back up. Does this mean that you guys are all on board with this?” You asked, taking a step back and looking at them all. You thought you’d have to do more to persuade them with everything going on.

“Well, yeah.” Barry shrugs, “It’s worth a shot and until we can find a legitimate reason not to, we can always try. Plus, no matter what happens, Harrison Wells is an essential part of the team. Especially Harry and Sherloque. So, what you got for us?”

You smiled widely to yourself, hope swelling inside your heart. “We’re going to need a couple of things that we’ve used the past couple of years. First, the MAD 2.0. I’m going to use that to enter Nash’s mind to find Harry and Sherloque, hopefully run this entire shebang all by them. A fresh set of eyes to see if there’s any holes we could fill.” Running a hand through you hair, you continued, “We’ve literally got a wells of information in Nash’s head, we could also use that to pinpoint how to get back at Eva.” Everyone, especially Iris and Kamila were more than satisfied by that idea. Eva’s Mirrorverse and Joseph’s Blackhole organization have been wreaking havoc since the post-Crisis events, harming more people than any other regular meta. “Second, we’re going to have to bring out the Mindscape device and Harry’s Cerebral Inhibitor. I think if we hook them up together, we’d be able to create a bridge from Nash’s mindscape to another Wells’.”

“But how are we going to separate them from my neural wavelengths?” Nash asked the million-dollar question.

“That’s where your Neural Splicer comes in! We connect that up to the Cerebral Inhibitor, which could allow us to simultaneously return each Wells to their respective bodies without going back and forth for every individual mindscape. Effectively separate their psyches from Nash without harming him. We’d just need to make sure everything is calibrated correctly.”

“And then I can have my mind to myself, finish going on my adventures.”

“No more voices, no more hallucinations.” You put your hands together. “The last thing we’d need is a dimensional extrapolator-”

“-Which won’t be possible unless we find a dimension and analyze its coordinates to create safe passage between our friends and our earth dimension.” Cisco adds glancing to Barry, who only rubbed the side of his face. It was a lot to take in, it took a while for your mind to wrap around every detail, every idea in order to fully make sure you knew what you were proposing.”

“So, what do we think?” Your eyes darted to each and every one of them. They looked to each other then to Nash, back to each other.

“When do we start?” Barry grins at you who’s currently leaning against the railing, seemingly speaking on behalf of the team as they nod at each other with confidence and determination.

[web-of-fics]

17th Street

Requested by: anon (“I’ve never really done requests before but could you do one where the reader has been trying to prevent Peter from dying by going back in time over and over again, only to become distant and cold to Peter who is oblivious by it. Similar to the plot of Madoka Magica if you’ve heard of it. It might be a hard concept to do and it’s ok if you’re unable to do it”)

Starring: Peter Parker x reader (she/her)

Fandom: MCU

Timeline: This takes place post-Endgame (lowkey time travel tech spoilers) but pre-the second Spiderman movie because I still haven’t seen it lol

Summary: Reader, a former Stark intern, struggles to use her own time travel device to rescue her best friend, who has been killed by a chance explosion in her current timeline. She grows increasingly desperate after failing to prevent his death numerous times. 

Writer’s Note: Thanks for your request anon!! I haven’t watched Madoka Magica so hopefully I did the plot idea some justice 😊❤️

Words: 1448

✎_____________________________________________________________________

You rolled across the dirt and slammed into a brick wall. You rubbed your shoulder, frowning, and returned to your feet. Returning from a time jump was the worst no matter how much practice you had through countless jumps into the past.

Contrary to popular belief, Tony Stark wasn’t the first to “discover” time travel. To his credit, his methods seemed much more effective than yours. After all, he had been able to save the entire planet with his invention (and probably the universe).

You were just trying to save one person. And you couldn’t even seem to manage that much.

“Ugh!” you looked at the red blinking message on your white wristwatch. At a passing glance, it looked like any old smart watch. But you had made yours in secret while interning with him. Had Tony been less distracted at the time, he might have picked up on what you were doing. Maybe he still had and he’d let you carry on anyway.

You smacked the screen once in frustration, but not hard enough to break it. You pressed your fingertips to your closed eyes and pulled them away, releasing tension building up behind them. 

Your entire body was buzzing, ready to jump straight back into the past so you could attempt to save Peter’s life again. It was outrageous that something as trivial as a drained battery was enough to stop you for the night. Like when you got really close to the end of a video game but you kept dying right before defeating the final boss. And then realizing that you had no more lives left so you had to start the entire level over again. 

Using the old web shooters you had stolen from Peter’s room ages ago (either he’d never noticed or he’d never minded), you swung your way home.

You stomped up to your lab--which, at this point, was just a corner of your bedroom outfitted with a desk, a swivel chair, a computer with two screens, and a bookshelf--and plugged it into its heavy-duty charger, also secretly courtesy of Mr. Stark. 

You liked the thought that Tony would have given his blessing for its use if he had known about its existence. This was another matter of life and death, but you were certain it was one you could succeed at. Which only added to your frustration every time you had to watch Peter die. 

You changed and climbed into bed, counting the amount of time jumps you’d made that day the way children in bedtime stories count sheep. 

You rolled over and closed your eyes, willing the silent blinking red light of your  watch to turn bright white with new life as you drifted off. 

I’m coming, Peter.

- - - - - - - - - -

Your feet were the first part of you to hit the gravel. You caught yourself before you could fall to your knees, very aware of the bruises that had piled on top of one another during your early jumps. The second you recovered, you sprinted down 17th Street, not stopping until you reached the near-empty pier. 

By this time you knew precisely where Peter would be: hunched over the pier’s edge, gazing into the water as he wrapped up another night as Spider-Man. On your sixth trip you’d managed to learn he was waiting to see the sunrise before going home. 

You had also learned two other things over your many trips into the past: that if you tried to talk to him any earlier in the day, he would die in some other freak accident, and if you did manage to help him escape the explosion, he wound up getting himself killed while trying to save other survivors. Every. Time. 

You couldn’t take it anymore.

Tonight you needed to try something new. 

“Fancy meeting you here,” you called in a dead voice. In your early trips you had sounded much friendlier. Thrilled at the sight of your lost friend, alive and breathing again. Then he kept dying. And you couldn’t help but greet him with the same enthusiasm of a funeral director anymore. 

He didn’t seem to notice your abrupt coldness.

“Y/n? What are you--” you cut him off by grabbing his arm and pulling him along as you retreated back the way you came. You wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if he didn’t want to follow. But he did.

“We don’t have time,” you said curtly, glancing at your watch. It was later than you’d thought. You’d cut the timing too close. 

You dragged him past the very boat that was set to explode in mere seconds. Instinctively, he turned his attention to it, twisting his head around to keep it in sight as he tried to figure out why it was dangerous.

Why didn’t he noticed it the first time? Then you wouldn’t be in this mess. 

“What’s going on?” he demanded. He came to a full stop, nearly sending you over. He helped you keep your balance. 

You looked from him to the boat, your stomach feeling hollow and your throat refusing to swallow as it dried out. 

“We have to go now,” you said at the same moment you realized it was already too late.

Peter realized the same thing half a second earlier, but that didn’t give him enough time to respond. It never did. 

His reflexes were still fast as he grabbed you close and shot a web aimed at a nearby lamppost. It missed as he was thrown off his feet instantaneously, dragging you alongside him. Together you flew in an infinite moment, through a fiery debris-laden burst that burned your fingertips as you struggled to tap and swipe at the screen of your wristwatch. Your eyes burned from the smoke, and you could no longer hear the lazy seagulls or the lapping waves or the clanging hooks that stationed the boats. 

As you both began to fall back toward the ground, Peter moved as if to throw you ahead of him so he wouldn’t land with all his weight crushing you. Instead you grabbed his collar to remain in contact. You wrapped your legs around his waist for good measure, realizing neither of you would survive if this didn’t work. 

You squeezed both buttons on either side of the watch face and squeezed your eyes closed. You pressed your face into his chest and held tight. 

The heat that had been chasing you suddenly vanished. The smoke, too. You realized this as you inhaled sharply upon being slammed onto the ground--or more accurately, as Peter slammed into the ground with you on top of him. You slid sideways until you rolled across hard ground, still a lessened impact than if you had no cushion. 

The second you regained your senses you crawled back to Peter, lying with his mask half-off and his eyes closed.

“Peter?” you yanked the mask off the rest of the way and tossed it to the side. “Can you hear me?” you struggled to keep the panic from taking over your voice. As much as you didn’t want to look away from him, you stole a glance at your watch. The screen had shattered but its contents were still legible. 

You’d done it. You were back in your own time, with Peter Parker in tow. 

And hopefully alive.

You smacked the sides of his face gently, but with enough force that you hoped to wake him. You ran your hands over him, feeling for a pulse, a breath. 

You found both. 

You sighed in relief. It turned into a laugh of triumph and Peter finally rolled his head to the side. He blinked his eyes open.

“I did it! We did it! You’re alive, you’re okay!” you said, forcing your tears not to roll down your face. 

“What happened?”

“I’ll explain later,” you said quickly and honestly. You knew he would understand. But he didn’t have to know every detail about your time traveling adventures right then. 

“It’s a long story,” you added when you saw his puzzled face. “But you’ve been through so much I couldn’t let an exploding boat take you out,” you laughed at the absurdity of the idea. 

“Thanks,” Peter said as he began to feel comfortable enough to sit up. “I would hate for a boat to take me out too. That’s pretty lame.”

You swept him into a tight hug, ignoring the fact that you were both wincing from your bruises. You continued to hold him, your heartbeat calming as you breathed the same air as your best friend once more, hoping you would never have to let go.

_______________________________________________________________________

Just one more before bed? Click here for a masterlist of my fics!

[i-write-shakespeare-not-disney]

Beloved

idek man i had writers block then i just really needed laith to be parents and this happened i didn’t proofread and im dead inside so fuck it here. 

The smell of food filled the air, and Keith was absolutely ravenous. He sat down and piled food onto his plate, ignoring Lance’s amused expression. “What? It’s a celebration, right?” Lance pretended to zip his lips and followed behind him with his own plate of food.

The party went on around them. The Arusian king was dancing with a very confused Allura. Pidge and Hunk were chowing down on snacks and going on about some of the protection tech the put up. Shiro was with Coran and the lions were set up around the area, providing the comfort of protection. Lance sat beside Keith, fixing him with that dorky doe-eyed look.

“What?” Keith asked, suppressing a smile.

“Just really like looking at you,” he answered, leaning into him. Keith felt butterflies burst in his stomach, but there were too many people around for him to kiss Lance. “It’s surreal that you like me back.”

“Lance, it’s been months,” Keith laughed, poking his side. Lance chuckled and moved away.

“I know…. But ever since we…. You know. It’s just. Wow.” Keith felt himself blush further and he intertwined their fingers. They had gone the next step after 7 months of dating and learning each other’s nuances, and ever since it felt like they were both on cloud nine. The giggling, blushing honeymoon phase had resurfaced, something Pidge enjoyed teasing them about. “I really like being with you, Keith.”

“I like being with you too,” he murmured. “Now eat. Try this it tastes like chicken.” He pressed a piece of food to Lance’s lips and chuckled when Lance’s teeth lightly grazed his fingers. He hummed appreciatively and Keith continued to eat.

As he ate, he felt a sudden wave of dizziness, and his stomach churned. The food which had been so appetizing a few seconds ago suddenly smelled too strong, too greasy. Keith stood and scrambled away from alien eyes, finding some place dark before he leaned over and hurled.

“Keith?” he heard. Keith continued to throw up, everything he’d eaten coming back up in a disgusting swirl. “Corazon, what happened?”

Keith wiped his mouth and coughed. “I’m fine,” he groaned. “I think I ate too fast.”

“Are you okay to go back, or you want me to take you to the castle?” Keith shook his head and spit at the ground one more time. “Maybe you should rest. I’ll tell Allura-”

“No, I’m fine now. It’s okay. Come on let’s get back.” Lance frowned but didn’t argue, knowing how stubborn Keith was. For the rest of the party, Lance hovered around Keith enough to make sure he was okay, but far enough so Keith wouldn’t get annoyed.

No matter how much Keith assured him he’d just eaten too quickly, Lance refused to leave his side even when they were back in the castle. Keith wasn’t complaining, though. He loved sleeping beside him.

The next morning, Lance woke Keith up so he’d have a chance to eat breakfast. Keith was half asleep as Lance dragged him to the table and sat him down.

“Everything okay?” Shiro asked in confusion.

“Yeah. Keith got sick yesterday, and I’m trying to make sure he eats something,” Lance said, placing a bowl of food in front of him.

“You’re babying me. I’m fine, I told you,” Keith muttered. He ate slowly, and Lance took his hand under the table.

Halfway through his food, Keith felt that familiar lurch again. In a flash, he was up from the table and racing to the bathrooms. He hated throwing up. He hated how shaky and out of breath it made him feel.

When he was finally done, he leaned against the wall and took a breath, trying to ignore the disgusting aftertaste in his mouth. He heard footsteps and saw Lance lean down beside him, pushing his hair out of his face.

“I think you should go into the cryopod. Just to be sure you’re really okay.”

Keith shook his head and leaned into Lance’s hand. “It’s probably just a stomach bug.”

Lance took his chin and fixed him with a nervous, uncertain look. “Please? Just to ease my worry.” Keith groaned and nodded, too exhausted to protest. His stomach felt weak and sore after repetitive vomiting. “Can you stand?” Keith nodded again and, with Lance’s help, stood up.

He walked, leaning on Lance, suddenly wanting his bed.

When they got back to the table, the others were looking at them worriedly. “Can you get him into a cryopod? He got sick last night too.”

“Of course,” Allura said. She walked out, waving them along. “Is there anything else bothering you?” she asked, setting up the cryopod.

Keith shook his head. “No I just can’t keep food down. I’m sure it’ll go away in a few days, but you know Lance.” She smiled and shook her head, gesturing for him to get in.

He stood there for a few minutes, eyes closed as the pod whirred around him. Another indeterminable amount of time later, he was able to get out, feeling a little better and a little hungry.

Allura was staring at the screen with wide eyes, while Lance was messing with his jacket on the other side. As soon as Keith stepped out, Lance reached his side and checked his forehead. “Allura, can you calm him down and tell him I’m fine?” he said looking over at the princess.

She looked at him and then back at the screen. “Allura?” Lance asked.

“One moment,” she squeaked. She left and came back with Coran, both of them staring and analyzing the images on the screen. “I’m reading it right, aren’t I?” she asked.

“Y-yes. I didn’t know…. Oh dear.”

“What?” Lance asked, evidently getting more concerned.

Allura looked at Coran then over at Keith. “Well… it would seem…. You’re with child.”

Keith stared at her for a few seconds before laughing. “That’s funny. What’s really wrong? A virus?”

She frowned and turned the screen to him. He saw the heat image of himself and then, in a zoomed in image what looked like a round bag around a small bean shaped thing. Keith stared at the image in confusion, his breaths coming quicker. “Your body has morphed to be able to hold a child. I assume this isn’t something all humans can do,” she said softly.

Keith shook his head. “No. No, there’s no way. I’m a guy, I can’t…. Bodies don’t just morph, that thing has to be broken!”

“Perhaps we can run a few tests? I’m not sure if being part Galra has affected you, but even so it could help to do some studies,” Coran suggested.

“I can’t be….” Keith couldn’t even spit the word out. He was a male. He was nineteen. He was a soldier in a galactic war. He’d had sex one time. Keith looked over at Lance who was staring wide-eyed at the monitor. “Lance. Was there anything different about my body that night?” he asked in what he hoped was a calm voice.

Lance gulped and bit his lip. “I mean… yeah, but I didn’t want to freak you out and…. I didn’t think it would….” Keith felt his legs give way and he fell to the floor in a heap, hands yanking at his hair. “Keith!” His body wasn’t his body anymore.

His body was growing another body inside of it. Keith couldn’t breathe. He never wanted kids. He never thought he could have kids. And now, after one fucking time, he was….

“Nobody else needs to know about this,” he growled. “This stays between the four of us until we figure out what to do.” He stood, unable to look at any of them. “I’m going to sleep.”

He walked away and went to his room, luckily not running into any of the other paladins. God, how was he supposed to explain any of it? He didn’t understand himself.

Before he could crawl into his bed, his door slid open and Lance was inside. Keith had to reign in his anger. “Keith, look I know this is crazy and you’re freaked out and everything, but….” He looked terrified. “What did you mean when you said we had to figure out what to do?” Keith stared at him silently. “What, like get rid of the baby?”

“It’s not a baby. Not yet.”

Lance’s expression was heartbreaking. “No. No, you can’t do that, Keith.” He scowled and turned away, biting back insults and angry retorts. “Keith, I know this isn’t something anyone expected, but… that’s my baby too, you know?”

Keith turned on him, and shoved him against the wall. “That’s not supposed to be possible! You didn’t tell me that I’d changed when we had sex and maybe if you had we wouldn’t be in this situation. You don’t get to make this decision.”

Lance cupped his face and shut his eyes. “I’m sorry. I really am, but I didn’t think it mattered. I just wanted to make you feel good, I didn’t know it meant you could get pregnant.” Keith grimaced at the word. “But think about it, Keith. Just a little, for me. Don’t just get rid of it because you’re scared or angry. Because I’m here. I’m in this with you, and everyone else would be too. Just think about it, okay?”

“There’s nothing to think about, Lance. I’m nineteen.”

“My mom had me when she was seventeen.”

“We’re in space! We’re in the middle of a war!”

“Lots of babies are born during war. We’ll keep it safe.” Keith crossed his arms and glared at him. Lance sighed and kissed his forehead. “Sleep it off. I’ll see what I can make you that won’t trigger morning sickness.” Keith remained where he was as Lance left.

He didn’t understand how Lance was handling this so easily. How was this not freaking him out? Of course it wasn’t his body that was going to change. He wasn’t the one throwing up anything he ate, he wasn’t the one who would be dealing with the added weight of a mini parasite in his stomach.

Keith crawled into bed and shut his eyes, trying to sleep. But his mind was racing and his panic was only growing. Then all of a sudden the castle alarms were blaring and Keith was up before he could process it. He yanked on his armor, finding it hard to believe there was anything wrong with him when he looked the same as he had a few weeks ago. He clambered into the black lion and was greeted by the rest of the paladins as they flew out, prepared to defend the castle.

Galran ships were getting close but there weren’t that many. They might not even need to form Voltron. As the paladins prepared, a hit landed on the black lion, jostling Keith.

“Keith!” he heard Lance and Allura cry out. He scowled and ignored it, turning the lion to fire at a rogue ship.

“I’m fine,” he snapped. “Focus!”

“Ships at four o clock!” Pidge alerted.

“Um, guys? What’s that thing behind them?” Hunk asked.

“Another robeast?” Allura questioned. So maybe they would need Voltron.

“Keith, I don’t think this is safe-”

“Lance. Shut up. Let’s form Voltron and take down that robeast. Coran and Shiro can keep the particle barrier up long enough to protect the castle against the ships. Let’s go!” he commanded. Without any more protests, the lions came together to form Voltron and Keith called for the sword and shield.

As they hit the robeast and received a few firing shots from the ships, Keith felt his stomach lurch and he groaned. “Not now,” he hissed. He swallowed the nausea and continued to lead his team. The hits didn’t help, but at least Lance hadn’t tried to talk him into backing down.

When they were finally able to take down the robeast, the Galra ships backed down and Voltron returned to the castle ship. As soon as he was out of his lion, Keith was racing to the bathroom, but there was nothing in him left to throw up. “Damn parasite,” he muttered. He returned to the common room, and although the others were giving him worried glances, they didn’t say anything else.

He was grateful when Coran pulled him aside and took him into the lab to run some tests. As he extracted blood, Coran raised an eyebrow and asked, “Have you thought of keeping it?”

Keith felt a blush spread on his cheeks. “Lance wants me to. But there’s so much wrong about all of this. I never wanted kids.”

“Children are a big responsibility. I never had my own, but Allura has always been like my own daughter.” Keith nodded and winced as the needle was taken out.

“How do I even explain any of this to anyone? If we get back to earth and I find my father, or even Lance’s family? How do I explain to Shiro?”

Coran frowned and pressed a few buttons before looking at Keith. “Is that the only reason you don’t want this child? You’re afraid of what the others would say?”

“Of course not!” he snapped. He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “There’s a million other things! My age, the war, the fact that there’s nothing here to take care of a kid, the fact that it’d be in danger all the time, and what if something happens to me or Lance, I don’t know how to-”

He buried his face in his hands, feeling short of breath and panicked. Coran put a hand on his shoulder and sighed. “You’d be a good parent. You’re already so worried. And that’s the thing about being a parent. Worrying never ends, and then you have to learn to let them grow into their own person.” Keith felt tears sting his eyes, but he wasn’t sure why he wanted to cry. “But you should know you would never be in it alone. Now, it’ll take a while before the results come in, so I suggest you find something to eat. Don’t stress too much. You have time to decide.” Keith looked up and nodded, standing and making his way to the kitchen.

He scavenged for something to eat before he found some sort of snack that looked like oatmeal and tasted like beef jerky. He ate them out of the box, taking a walk around the castle to try and clear his mind. Thankfully, it seemed to stay down.

He found himself back in the kitchen, and then he was eating some leftovers Hunk had saved. He had no idea how Hunk managed to make food taste so good with what he had to work with here. But he wasn’t complaining. That seemed to stay down too, so Keith felt a little better by the time he went to take a shower and hopefully a decent nap.

As he was falling asleep, he heard a knock at his door. “Come in,” he called. The door slid open and Lance walked in. He sat beside Keith and smiled timidly at him. “Hey,” he whispered.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

Keith shrugged. “Good. I ate, took a shower. No more throwing up.” Lance chuckled and ran his hand through Keith’s hair. Keith hummed and shut his eyes. “That feels nice,” he breathed. He felt warm, tingly. He wanted more of Lance.

“Are you still mad at me?” Keith opened his eyes and looked at Lance. “About not telling you. About… knocking you up. Wanting you to keep it?” Keith sighed and shook his head, pulling him down to lay beside him.

Before Lance could talk again, Keith kissed him, wanting nothing more than to feel him. He wanted to forget everything else and just be with Lance. He was aching for him, and every light touch felt like fireworks on his skin. Suddenly he was over him, grinding his hips down, and Lance’s moans only made his need greater. He sat up, straddling him, and took his shirt off. Lance pulled himself up onto his elbows, and before he could talk, Keith had his lips at his smooth, tanned neck.

“Wait, you want to…? Now?” Keith nodded, fingers reaching for Lance’s shirt to pull it off. “But… we don’t have any protection or-”

“Lance, I’m already knocked up, what’s the worst that can happen?” he muttered, kissing him again, tangling his hands in his hair. “Please,” he whispered. Lance’s grip tightened and he kissed back with fervor, unbuttoning Keith’s jeans, kissing down his chest in adoration.

It wasn’t long before Keith was a moaning, mewling mess beneath him. Somehow every feeling was magnified, making him feel so elated he could hardly stand it. And Lance was giving him everything he had in the sweetest, softest manner, kissing him wherever he could. Keith held onto him with all his might, trying to stifle his sounds until he’d reached his high and his body felt sticky and Lance was still going and my God it felt wonderful. Finally, Lance finished, thrusting into him a few more times, bodies slick with sweat and shaky breaths filling the room.

“Stay with me,” he whispered, running his hands through Lance’s hair. Lance nodded, kissing his neck lazily.

“I’m gonna clean you up, okay?” Keith nodded, barely aware of Lance moving before he slipped into a much needed slumber.

He wasn’t sure what time it was when he opened his eyes. He could hear Lance speaking in a soft voice, barely a whisper. He felt his hand caressing his stomach, but before Keith could snap at him for it, he processed the words.

“We’re all going to protect you and love you. You’re going to have two daddies, and we’re gonna love you so much. You’ll be the luckiest baby in the entire universe, trust me I would know. And if we get to go back home, I’ll take you and Daddy to Veradero beach, and I’ll teach you Spanish so we can talk about Daddy behind his back.” Keith furrowed his eyebrows, and rolled his eyes. “Your papito is gonna love you so much and I’m gonna be there for everything whenever you need me. I wonder if you’re a boy or a girl. Maybe we can choose a unisex name. It doesn’t matter though. We’ll teach you how to ride a bike, and your Aunt Pidge can teach you to mess with tech, and your uncle Hunk can teach you to cook, and Allura and Coran can teach you to speak Altean. I’ll teach you to pilot the lion too. And Daddy can teach you to fight.” Lance’s hand rested over Keith’s stomach. “Can you hear me?”

“I don’t think it has ears yet, Lance.” Lance jerked up and looked at Keith sheepishly. “How are you so okay with this?” he whispered.

Lance shrugged and repositioned himself to be beside Keith. “I don’t know. I’ve always wanted a family of my own. And yeah it’s kind of weird, but… we’ve been piloting giant robot lions and fighting aliens and eating green space goo. I’m kind of used to weird.” He pressed a kiss to Keith’s jaw. “I want you to be okay with it too.”

“That’s not something I can promise,” he sighed.

“Why?” It wasn’t an accusatory question. He seemed legitimately curious.

Keith kept his eyes on the ceiling and furrowed his eyebrows. “It took me a long time to learn how to be a friend. Longer to figure out how to be a boyfriend. What if I’m a horrible dad? What if I ruin the kid and… I don’t know. What if something happens to us and we leave it alone and it grows up like me?” Lance took his hand and kissed it gingerly. “This isn’t normal, Lance.”

“I don’t think anything about our lives is normal anymore, Corazon. But I have no doubt that you’d be a great dad. And if anything happens to us, I have family. The other paladins. I know that none of them would let anything happen to our baby.” Something about the way he said that broke Keith.

The tears he’d been fighting all day spilled over and Lance wrapped his arms around him, holding him tightly. Our baby.

***

It’d been about three months since Keith found out he was pregnant. Apparently some survival trait in Galran blood allows for males to be able to carry children when the population is dwindling. With Voltron getting rid of so many Galra, it must have been triggered in Keith as well.

He’d resorted to wearing hoodies and Lance’s jacket to cover the bump that grew on his stomach. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hide it for much longer, and the fact was making him more and more anxious. It was very disturbing to look down and see his own distended stomach, but Lance loved it. He spent every night in Keith’s room talking to his stomach until they were fast asleep. Coran and Allura had provided vitamins and check-ups to be sure the pregnancy wasn’t affecting Keith’s body in any other abnormal ways.

The morning sickness had stopped after two months, which Keith was grateful for. Still, his armor was beginning to feel uncomfortable, and even he was starting to worry about getting hit and hurting the baby growing inside of him. Lance kept trying to convince him to stay behind, but Keith knew he couldn’t without explaining why. And he wasn’t sure he could handle seeing Shiro’s expression.

Lance was cuddled up beside Keith, rubbing his stomach unconsciously. “You think the baby has ears yet?”

“I’m not sure,” he yawned. “I can ask Coran the next time I’m in the lab.”

Lance hummed and leaned down singing a Spanish lullaby. Keith smiled and shook his head, settling for running his fingers through Lance’s hair. Lance pulled himself up onto his elbows and looked at Keith. “When are you going to tell the others? I don’t want you fighting out there anymore. I could lose you both.” Keith groaned and covered his face with his arms. “Keith.”

“I know. I know, okay? I don’t know when, but I’ll… figure it out.” He took his hand and squeezed it. “Just go to sleep.”

The next morning, Keith was mumbling under his breath, annoyed that his jeans didn’t fit him anymore. Lance sat up in bed and smiled at him, but Keith only scowled. “Why are you mad at me?” he chuckled.

“Because this is your fault!” Keith tossed his jeans aside and sat on the floor. “This sucks.” Lance rolled his eyes and grabbed a pair of sweats that were his and handed them to Keith. “They’re going to be too long.”

“So I’ll roll them up for you. Unless you want to walk around the castle in your boxers.” Keith groaned and snatched the sweats from him, tugging them up. He pulled Lance’s sweater on over his shirt and zipped it halfway. “Here, sit.” Keith did and Lance leaned down to roll up the sweats. He smiled at Keith and then placed his hands on Keith’s stomach. “Your daddy’s a grouch, isn’t he? Hopefully you’ll be more like Papi and smile more.”

“I’m gonna kick you,” Keith muttered. Lance laughed and kissed his stomach before standing up and leaning in to kiss Keith. “At least I just look a little chubby. Alright, come on, I’m starving.” Lance followed him out of the room and to the table where the others were coming in to eat breakfast.

Without realizing it, Keith had scarfed down his food quicker than the others and was already reaching for seconds before the others had gotten halfway through their food.

“Well, someone’s growing,” Allura noted with a smile. Keith looked up from his plate and cleared his throat.

“Yeah, well, I’m done.” He stood up and walked to the kitchen to dump his bowl in the sink before walking back. As he returned he felt a hard, sudden thump in his stomach and he froze. Keith looked down at his stomach and waited before he felt another thump in the same spot. “Oh my God,” he whispered.

“Uh buddy, you okay?” Hunk asked.

“It kicked,” he breathed.

“What?” Lance asked, standing up, moving toward him. “You serious? Where?”

“Wait, what?” Pidge asked.

But Keith was grabbing Lance’s hands putting them on his stomach. “I swear, I felt it,” he insisted.

“Maybe it was just gas? I don’t feel any- oh my God. Oh my God, I felt that.” Keith laughed and winced as the kicking continued. “Hey, baby! Can you hear me? I love you, yes I do! Wow, you’re so strong!”

“It likes your voice,” Keith chuckled, feeling his eyes water. “He’s going nuts just with you talking.” Lance looked up at him and laughed, his blue eyes filled with their own tears. He cupped Keith’s face and kissed him deeply.

Suddenly it was real. It was tangible and physical and real. There was an actual baby in him, a baby that was his and Lance’s and it was crazy but it was real and Keith had no idea a person could feel so happy.

Then suddenly he was snapped into the real world. “Um, sorry, baby? What baby?” Pidge snapped. “What is going on?”

Keith gulped and looked at Lance worriedly. “Take the jacket off,” he whispered. Keith furrowed his eyebrows, freezing. Lance gingerly unzipped the jacket and pushed it off his shoulders. “It’s okay.” He looked at the others and cleared his throat. “So, we recently found out that Galra males can carry babies. Like seahorses, you know?”

Realization dawned on the other paladins and their eyes drifted to Keith and his slightly swollen belly.

“You’re pregnant?” Shiro yelped.

“With Lance’s baby?” Pidge added.

“It’s a boy?” Hunk gasped.

“Okay, Pidge, I’m taking that tone of voice as an insult,” Lance answered. “And yes, he is. Although… I don’t know what gender.”

Keith was looking down, fumbling with the jacket to put it back on and zip it up. “I don’t either. I just… it feels like it’s a boy, I don’t know.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “It came as a surprise to us too, okay?”

Shiro put a hand to his mouth and sighed. “And… you want this? Both of you?”

Keith shrugged. “I mean, I didn’t at first. I was freaking out. But…. I can’t explain it.” He placed his hands around his stomach, feeling protective and ashamed at once. “Look, if we knew this was possible we would’ve… been safe. But it happened, and that’s that.”

“But… how?” Pidge asked, leaning in and inspecting the slight bulge under his jacket. “In order to hold a child, you need a uterus, protective lining, a place for the baby to come out of. Preferably a very flexible place with good elasticity.” Keith paled and gulped. “I just… how?”

“We’re not really sure, but it’s part of his blood for his body to morph into one suitable for child bearing,” Allura said. “The protective layering is all there according to the scans.”

“And who’s going to be the midwife?” she pointed out. Everyone fell silent, and Keith felt himself beginning to withdraw into himself.

“Let’s take this one thing a time,” Hunk said. “Right now, we need a replacement for the head of Voltron because there’s no way you’re going to keep fighting, Keith.”

“Agreed,” Lance said. “Shiro can take that. He’s piloted the black lion before. Keith can stay behind and work with Coran.”

“Have you been getting vitamins? What about all the things babies need? A crib, bottles, diapers? We need to stop at the space mall,” Pidge mused. She stepped forward and held out her hand. “Can I?” Keith nodded, unzipped the jacket, and Pidge prodded gently at his hard stomach. Suddenly there was a slight kick and Pidge gasped. “Well hello there,” she giggled. “Was I intruding?”

“How far along are you, Keith?” Shiro asked.

Keith looked at him and shrugged. “Almost four months?”

“You hid this for four months?” Hunk cried. “What the heck, man?” Keith groaned, but Hunk was already moving on. “Have you guys thought of names? Oh I am going to be this kid’s favorite uncle.” Keith managed a smile.

Pidge and Hunk seemed completely fine with all of it, Allura and Coran had long since known and understood. Of course, Lance was ecstatic and already making birthday plans with Hunk. Shiro seemed to be the only one still holding reserves. And somehow, that one disapproval made the others’ excitement seem insignificant. He walked over to him and crossed his arms. “I’m sorry. I messed up-”

“You didn’t know,” he sighed.

“You’re still upset. You’re disappointed with me, I know that.”

“I’m scared for you. And Lance,” he corrected. “You’re just kids. And we already have so much happening with Voltron. What happens when you go into labor? What if we’re out on a mission? We have no provisions here for a baby. I just don’t want this to ruin your life.”

Keith felt his throat constrict, and he clenched his teeth. “What like I did for my parents? Being left to fend for myself? I can promise that much, Shiro, I’m not going to be like them. I’m going to be there for this kid, and so is Lance. I can tell just with how he talks to him, how excited he is.”

“He’s excited for the fun things. Teaching the kid to curse in Spanish, to make silly faces at it and make it laugh. What about when the baby gets a fever and doesn’t stop crying all night? Or when it starts teething and hits its terrible twos stage?” Keith scowled and shook his head. Shiro reached forward to place his hand on Keith’s shoulder. “Look, I’m just worried-”

“Yeah, okay,” he muttered, pulling away. He returned to the others, trying to let their excitement override the hurt he was feeling. He wished he could still train. It was always a good way to let go of his stress and worries. Now, he was stuck in this half-fragile state left to stew with emotions.

“We should plan a baby shower!” Pidge cried. “We can make it neutral colors, you know, like yellow and green. Or we can make it Voltron colors!”

“With tiny little lion cookies!” Hunk added.

Lance wrapped his arm around Keith and nuzzled into him. “See? Nothing to worry about.” Keith hummed and tried not to look at Shiro.

Three more months went by and Keith’s stomach continued to grow. Lance spent the nights singing or telling the baby stories until he’d talked himself to sleep. And every morning, the second Lance pressed a kiss to Keith’s swollen belly, the kicking would start. And it continued until Keith was able to sit and eat breakfast.

And after dinner, Pidge and Hunk would take turns talking to the belly, insisting that the baby understood. Keith simply fell asleep on the couch while they talked and made up songs. Shiro was still apprehensive, but he’d stopped being so obvious about. He’d even asked to feel the baby’s kicks once. Of course, it took some coaxing from Lance before it moved.

Each time the team had to go on a mission, Keith felt nervous and afraid and it seemed harder and harder to let Lance go each time. It seemed his stress reached the baby too because it would stop moving and wouldn’t kick again until Lance had returned and cooed, “Where’s Papi’s baby? Where is my little sharpshooter?” Keith had to bite back yelps of pain when that happened because the baby seemed so excited at the sound of Lance’s voice that its kicks were stronger than any other time. And they wouldn’t stop until Lance’s hands were on his stomach and he’d kissed his stomach before kissing Keith.

“I fucking hate you,” he groaned once when the team had come back and Lance had finally gotten the kid to calm down. “He always does that when you get back.”

“Don’t say things like that, I don’t want the baby learning your foul language.”

Keith hummed and looked at him accusingly. “Oh and I assume you haven’t been saying any Spanish curse words to my stomach?” Lance scoffed, but his cheeks reddened and he turned his attention back to Keith’s swollen stomach.

“How are your feet?”

“They’re fine. I’m not letting you massage my feet, I told you. I don’t like people touching my feet.” Lance rolled his eyes and kissed his cheek before leaving to change out of his armor. Keith looked at his stomach and hummed as he rubbed it. “I know most people name their sons after their dads, but I don’t think you’d want either of our names. I wonder what name you would like.”

“Keith!” he turned and saw Hunk walking towards him. “I’m experimenting in the kitchen, want to join?” Keith nodded and followed him. “Have you decided what you want to eat for the baby shower?”

“I’ve been craving a pizza, if I’m honest. Besides it’s just us, so it doesn’t have to be too big.”

“Well, this might be the only baby shower we get while we’re here, so…. It’s exciting.” Keith hummed and took a sample that Hunk handed him of some type of batter. “You scared?”

“Yep,” he answered, popping the p. “I’m a guy, dude. And I’m supposed to… give birth?”

“If it helps, we’re all here for you, buddy. Here, try this.” He handed something fried over to Keith and he didn’t even wait for it to cool down before he was scarfing it down. “Eating for two must be fun.” Keith rolled his eyes.

He felt an arm wrap around him before Lance sat beside him and kissed his cheek. “You’re glowing, you know that?”

Keith looked over at him and raised an eyebrow. “What do you want?” Lance stuck his tongue out and nudged him with his nose.

“Actually, Allura and Coran needed you to figure out how… the going into labor is going to go.” Keith shuddered and groaned. “Come on, it’s better to figure it out now. You’re going to be due in like two months, maybe a little less.”

“Please don’t remind me,” he muttered. He stood and walked away, taking one more piece of fried food before going to the lab. “I was told I was needed,” he announced, tugging the jacket over his stomach.

Allura waved him over and showed him the screen she was working on. Keith grimaced and looked away, but eventually found his way back. “Now, I’m not sure who you trust most to help you through this, but this is how we modeled the process for helping you. We have some sedatives and morphine to help with any pain.” Keith grimaced and nodded. “You don’t seem excited.”

“I’m not. This is terrifying.” Allura placed a hand on his shoulder and gave him a smile. “I can barely sleep. He’s heavy.”

“He’s growing quickly,” she agreed. “But I’m sure it’ll be worth it. Have you thought of names?” Keith shook his head. “Why don’t we go to the Space Mall to shop a bit for the baby?” Keith hesitated and tried to figure out a way to keep from going to such a public place. “You’re embarrassed.”

“Um, yeah,” he admitted.

She smiled and shook her head. “I’ll see if Pidge wants to go with me. I think if I bring Lance we’ll bring back the entire mall.”

“You’re not wrong,” he agreed. “Um, and thank you for all of this…. It’s awkward, but I really appreciate it all.” She smiled and nodded. “I think I’m going to take a nap. Thank you, again.” He turned away and started for his room with a yawn.

As he settled into bed, he groaned at the weight and the small kick that he felt. “What? Look, kiddo, you gotta let me sleep. You already make me pee every ten minutes.” Another slight kick. “Alright, what’s that song your dad likes to sing to you. I don’t speak Spanish, so it probably won’t be great, but I’ll try.” Another kick. Keith chuckled and closed his eyes, softly singing what he remembered of that song Lance always sang. The kicking stopped, and before he knew it, Keith was asleep.

The next thing he knew, Lance was shaking him awake. “Babe. Come on, you’re gonna miss dinner. You’ve been asleep for a while.” Keith yawned and sat up, rubbing his stomach. “Hunk made some really good food.”

“I’m coming,” he grumbled. “I’m still waking up. Your kid finally let me sleep.”

Lance smiled and helped him up. “Our kid. Isn’t that right, baby boy? Or girl. Your dad swears you’re a boy.”

“I’m thinking he’s a Leo. It means lion, so it fits.” Lance raised an eyebrow and hummed.

“I like it.” Keith smiled and followed Lance out of the room.

He sniffed the air when the familiar scent of marinara reached him. He reached the table with Lance and gasped when he saw the food on the table. Pizza and cakes and French fries and fried other things. There were streamers and balloons and boxes of gifts. The Alteans and the paladins were all waiting with large smiles.

“It’s your baby shower!” Pidge shouted. “Come on, sit down!”

“You actually made pizza?” Keith marveled. “Wow.” He sat down and grabbed as much food as would fit onto his plate. His friends sat around him and started eating, talking excitedly. “This is great you guys. I like the Voltron theme.” Pidge and Hunk high-fived.

“Just wait till you open the gifts,” Hunk said.

“How did you guys even find time for all of this?”

“Well, you’re a heavy sleeper,” Allura said with a smile.

Lance stayed beside him, holding one hand as he ate. Eventually, they were able to move on to cake and presents. Keith opened his presents and couldn’t help but laugh at the alien themed baby clothes and toys the paladins had gotten him.

By the end of the night, he was full and happy and even a little excited. As he slipped into his PJs and settled in beside Lance, he smiled and sighed as he looked up at the ceiling. “You know little guy,” he whispered, “You’ve got the most loving family in the universe.” Lance chuckled and threw his arm around Keith’s middle before humming.

“Yeah. He does.”

***

“Be careful,” Keith growled, cupping Lance’s face. He pulled him into a kiss, feeling anxious and wishing he could lock him in his room to keep him safe. Lance’s hands rested on his stomach and he smiled into the kiss.

“It’s getting harder to kiss you every day. I feel like I’m hurting him if I come too close.”

Keith shook his head. “He loves having you close. Just like me. Which is why you need to come back.”

“I will,” he promised. “And then I’ll pamper you until all that stress goes away. You know stress isn’t good for the baby.”

“Guys, we need to go,” Shiro said, putting a hand on Lance’s shoulder. “It’ll be fine, Keith.”

Keith grunted and nodded, taking a deep breath. It would all be fine. He nodded and nudged Lance toward the lions, hoping Red knew to keep him safe. He watched the paladins get into their lions and watched them dart into space.

He returned to the control room where Coran was managing the navigation. “Don’t worry, they’ll be back before you know it. They’ve got the upper hand.”

“I know,” he sighed. “Do you really think a surprise attack will work though?”

“Pidge’s lion has the cloaking device. She’ll be able to hack the alarm system and they’ll get in without a hitch. I’ll make sure of it.” Keith nodded and started pacing, trying to keep his back straight. “Is he heavy?”

“There’s a weight of a separate human hanging off my stomach. Yeah, he’s heavy.” Keith sighed and plopped down on a chair. “I hate when they leave. I can’t help but panic.”

“Why don’t you go to bed?”

Keith groaned. “I don’t know, I feel like I need to be productive. I think I’m going to clean up a bit.” He pulled himself up and left, hoping to busy himself.

He’d rearranged the common room about five times before he felt exhausted and decided to take Coran’s advice and going to bed. He got into bed and rubbed his stomach. He wasn’t moving, but at moments like this, he wished he would. Just to reassure him Lance was okay.

“It’s okay, buddy. Your dad will be home soon.” Keith tried to ignore his worries. If he fell asleep, then maybe Lance would be back in time to wake him up. After eight months of growing a human inside him, Keith felt a little less insecure about his swollen stomach and… well really the whole idea in general.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep when he woke up with pain in his stomach. He groaned and held his stomach wondering if something was wrong. Was something wrong with Lance? Could a baby feel that?

The pain ebbed and Keith sighed, leaning his head further into the pillow. He tried to hold back the bile that was rising in his throat and hold on to the hope that everything was fine. Before he could calm down, he felt another cramping pain in his stomach, this time a little stronger. Keith grimaced and curled into himself, breathing heavily.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.  He scrambled out of bed and tried to ignore the pain until it disappeared again as he walked. “Coran?” he called. “Coran I need an update!” He felt sore and tired, but panicked all at once.

Before he made it into the control room, he felt another wave of pain, this time spreading to his back. He gasped and let himself slide slowly to the ground. “Coran!” he shouted, through gritted teeth.

“What in the-?” He saw Coran rush out of the control room, eyes widening at the sight of Keith on the ground. “What happened? Are you alright?”

“What’s happening with Voltron? Something’s wrong, he can feel it.”

“No, no everything’s fine. The team had to fall back, but they’re fine. They’re on the way back.” He leaned down to grab Keith who was trying to enjoy the few minutes of peace he had before another cramping pain debilitated him. “What is it, what are you feeling?”

“Right now? Nothing,” he breathed. “I woke up with pain, I thought something had happened to- oh! Ow!” He gripped Coran’s hand and grit his teeth, screwing his eyes shut.

“Well, my boy, it seems that you’re going into labor,” Coran said.

“What? No, it’s not time yet. Lance isn’t here, Allura’s not- Oh my God, this hurts!”

“Breathe,” Coran instructed. “I’ll alert the others and get you to the lab.” Keith barely managed a nod before he returned to the control room.

Keith held his stomach and grimaced. “Guess you’re like me, huh? Impatient.” He received another burst of pain as a reply. Keith tried to steady his breathing. He’d felt pain before. He lived with it. Through Voltron, through the Blade, through the Galra. He could handle this.

Coran returned and helped him up, patiently taking him to the lab. “It’s alright. They’ll be here as soon as possible.” He laid him down on a table and connected a few wires to him before leaving to check his screens. He returned with a needle and Keith flinched. “This should help with the pain. I need you to sit up.” Keith pulled himself up, ignoring the uncomfortable pain spreading to his legs. “Stay still.” Keith bit back a yelp when he felt a needle dig into his back. “Lay back. It’ll be okay, just breathe.” Keith nodded and leaned back, feeling the pillows Coran must have put.

Keith was too frantic, too afraid to feel embarrassed when Coran had to strip him of his jeans and check him. Keith never knew what the hell was down there, he didn’t want to. He just hoped this would be easier than he expected because he was terrified. He felt a strange sort of prickling spreading around his middle as though his body was falling asleep. But instead of going completely numb, he just felt a slight decrease of pain. Like he was disconnected.

“You are going to have to start pushing now, if you don’t want complications,” Coran urged.

“But Lance isn’t here,” he gasped.

“This baby isn’t waiting,” he answered. “It’ll be alright, I promise. But your water just broke, and that can hurt the baby if we wait too long.”

Keith groaned and nodded, letting his head hit the pillows as he took a deep breath. He sat up and tried to focus on Coran’s guidance to help him stay grounded. He could feel the sweat tricking down his neck, the hair sticking to his face. He could feel his heart pounding all over his body.

“I can see the head. Just get the head and shoulders out and you’re fine.” Keith only grunted in response. “Keep a rhythm, it’s alright. Just breathe.”

“I’m trying!” he growled. Suddenly he heard more footsteps and he was vaguely aware of Allura with her pink armor, and Lance beside him still wearing his. “You did this to me, you jackass,” he scowled barely managing to hit Lance in the chest.

But Lance only smiled and took his hand, kissing it. “It’s okay, you’re doing great, Corazon. Keep going.” Keith grumbled and kept pushing, now with Allura’s help as she wiped his forehead and helped him sit up.

“I hate you,” he muttered through gasps, glaring at Lance.

Lance chuckled and pressed his forehead against Keith’s. “I love you.” He kissed him and pushed his hair away. Suddenly, they heard a sharp cry and Keith looked up, panicking.

“It’s okay!” Coran assured. “Head’s out. Keep going, we need the shoulders.” Keith gripped onto Lance hand, squeezing so hard he must have been hurting him. But Lance was smart enough not to complain. “A little more,” Coran prodded. Keith nodded and continued, driven more by the cries of the baby he couldn’t see. “One more final push.”

“Lance,” Allura said, handing him scissors. Keith heard a snip. “It’s a girl, boys.” Keith furrowed his eyebrows and leaned back onto the pillows, too exhausted to stay up. Allura managed to wrap her in a thin cloth and quickly handed her over to Keith. “Congratulations.”

Keith held her, afraid to hurt her. She was so small. “She has ears,” he noted with a strike of fear. As he looked at the baby, he couldn’t help but notice the angled, pointed ears covered in tufts of wet, purple fur. Galra ears.

“She must have inherited more Galra traits since it was your Galra side that helped her develop,” Allura suggested. “But it’s the only Galra trait she has.”

“She’s so pretty,” Lance cooed. “Hi, princess. Do you know who I am?” The baby squirmed and placed her tiny wrinkled hand against her cheek. “I’m your daddy. Well, one of them.”

“What should we name her?” Keith asked. “I was so sure it was a boy. I never thought of girl names.”

Lance reached out and touched her tiny ears. “What about Violet?”

“Violet,” Keith repeated. She cooed and stretched her hand. “I love you so much, Violet.”

Allura smiled and stepped forward. “Do you mind if I clean Violet up for you? I’ll bring her right back.” Keith nodded and Allura took the baby gently. She didn’t go far, but Keith still couldn’t look away.

Beside him, Lance was kissing his forehead and his cheek. “You did so good, baby.” Keith smiled and leaned against him. Coran helped him lay down after cleaning up and draped him in blankets. “Here she comes.”

Keith looked over and took Violet in his arms. “Oh, look at her,” Keith mused. “She has your hair, Lance.”

“Thank God for that,” he joked. Keith glared at him, but Lance just smiled. “She’s so small. Here, she might be hungry,” Lance whispered, handing Keith a bottle with a mix that Pidge and Hunk had managed to create to give the vitamins milk on Earth gave babies. Keith hesitantly place the bottle to her lips and chuckled when her tiny mouth searched for the source. Her eyes opened briefly and Lance gasped. “She has your eyes.”

Keith held her and marveled at her as she fed. Her delicate, rosy skin, her dark, curled lashes, the curly locks of brown hair in tufts on her head. She was so fragile. So small. And it was up to him to protect her. Keith felt new wave of strength overcome him. This tiny thing, this tiny human had actually been in him. She had kicked him and made him sick and made him sleepy and now she was here. He was holding her.

After she had been fed, Lance offered to burp her. “You look like you need a nap. Don’t worry, I’ll be right here. When you wake up, everyone else can meet her.” Keith nodded and shut his eyes, slowly succumbing to sleep.

He woke up when his hunger was too much to ignore. Lance was sitting in a chair beside him, singing to Violet as he rocked her back and forth in his arms. “Lance?”

He looked up and smiled, standing carefully. “Look who’s awake, Violet. It’s Daddy. Want to hold her?” Keith nodded and Lance passed her over. “God, I never get tired of looking at her.” Keith smiled and kissed her forehead gently. Her hand wrapped around one of his fingers and Keith wondered how this level of love was possible. Suddenly his stomach growled and Lance chuckled. “Hungry?” He nodded. “I’ll be right back. I’ll bring everyone else too, okay?”

Keith nodded and watched Lance leave. He returned his gaze to Violet who was fast asleep. Her nails were smaller than grains of rice. Her face so round and chubby. Her ears were so adorably furry. Suddenly the door opened and the rest of the paladins came in. Everyone gathered around Keith, anxious to see the new addition to their space family.

“Oh my God,” Pidge cooed. “She’s adorable!”

“I can’t believe you two made that,” Hunk whispered. “She’s so small. I could fit her in one hand.”

Keith chuckled. “Can we hold her?” Shiro asked. Keith nodded a bit hesitantly and handed her to him. “What’s her name?”

“Violet,” Lance answered. “Here. Eat up.” He set a bowl of soup in front of Keith and sat beside him. “Coran said you could be up by tomorrow. He said you’re healing quickly.”

“Thank God,” he sighed, eating his soup. The others were still fussing over Violet and Keith leaned into Lance. “I feel weird with a small stomach again.” Lance chuckled and kissed him. “I love you,” he breathed.

***

It had been one week since Violet was born. Keith was better, and was already returning to the training room for an hour a day. Everyone loved Violet and she was hardly ever put down for longer than five minutes. She spent most of the time sleeping, but when she was awake, her eyes were wide and purple and bright.

Lance and Keith were in the lab while Violet got a checkup. Coran was singing an old Altean song to her while he checked her. Lance nudged Keith and gestured. “Tell him.”

Keith smirked and stepped forward. “So how is she?”

“She’s perfectly healthy,” he answered. “I gave her medicine so she won’t get sick anytime soon. She’s strong too.”

“That’s good,” he nodded. “Well, Coran, Lance and I were wondering if… you’d like to be her godfather?”

“What’s that?” Coran asked.

Lance jumped in, barely containing his excitement. “It’s like a second parent. If anything were to happen to us, you’d be the one that takes her in. Someone who’ll help raise her.”

“It’s just, Lance has gotten so close with you, and you’re the only parental figure any of us have here. And you did help me deliver her.” Keith looked at Coran who seemed frozen and in shock.

“Coran?” Lance questioned nervously. A sudden sob escaped Coran and he smiled at them, his moustache trembling with his lip. “Are you okay?”

“Of course I am!” he cried. “I just… I had no idea…. I would be honored.” They smiled and Coran lifted Violet from her bin and hugged her as tightly as he could without hurting her. “Thank you boys,” he whispered.

There was no doubt in Keith’s mind that his daughter truly was the most loved baby in the entire universe.

Click Here for Part 2

[thecupcakeconsumer]

Mistake, Heartbreak, Hoping She’ll Wake - Hi Stolowitski x Claybourne!Reader

A/N: A little bit of a different format to celebrate the fact that I’ve never really had a request before! It’s more organised this way so I can say what I wanna say, I’m stealing the format from my other blog.

Request: “Hey, can you write a Hiram x reader? (Reader and Hiram are bf and gf) Where the @ gamemaster tries to hurt the reader and she almost dies and ends up in the hospital. Hiram serious for once tells her he loves her while she’s in a coma and she wakes up and cheesey shit?” Courtesy of @writers-block0o0

Navigation: Masterlist is here.

Taglist: None of y’all actually asked to be added to my taglist so I feel a bit pretentious here with this, but here goes, I hope y’all lovelies enjoy - @themorrisislandpack, @shelton-devers, @viralgonepsych-o,  @virgosfr3ckles,  @quaintnessandqueerness, @parvovirusxpb-19, @eatsleepcringerepeat, @waterlovescake.

Summary: As Chance Claybourne’s half-sister, life has never been easy - but when someone working against your closest friends kidnaps you, it’s a matter of life and death all dependent on when and if they can get to you. Takes place during Code.

Warnings: Language - “damn”, “bastard”, and I think at least three (3) uses of the Lord’s name in vain, which might offend some people. Also, firearms mentions. Kidnapping. Blood mentions. It’s somewhat violent. Don’t read this to your kids, please. Just a bad idea.

Word Count: 4,008 (I usually don’t add that but damn I wanted you to know this is not a short oneshot!)

Other Notes: I hope I’ve fulfilled this request as well as the requester wanted, considering how long it took me to get around to it! (I’m still sorry!) Anyway, here goes nothing.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” murmured Shelton as they sat in the bunker, gathered around the iPad on which the next clue was scheduled to appear.

“Shelton,” sighed Hi, “you’ve always got a bad feeling. How bad can it…”

He trailed off as the iPad flickered on, revealing a video of a girl that they knew all too well.

“Y/N,” whispered Ben as the Gamemaster’s vile laugh filled the room.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” asked the man rhetorically, face not visible as a knife was dragged across her skin, barely touching it. “Have fun finding her.”

The video stopped, and a timer appeared on screen, giving them four hours.

“No. This can’t be happening. This cannot be happening,” muttered Hi, getting up and starting to pace.

Tory stared in mute disbelief at the screen as the numbers started to count down before finally opening her mouth. “We have to find her. Hi, calm down. I know you’re concerned but this is not the time to be panicking.”

“My girlfriend is being held captive. By a madman!” Hi flailed his arms in the air for emphasis. “By someone who's probably going to kill her, how can I not panic? Why aren’t you panicking? How aren’t you panicking? We were supposed to go on a date, this was supposed to be a normal day, I was finally ready to-”

He sat down, too choked up with tears threatening to fall to continue.

“When was the last time we saw her?” asked Tory. “Shelton, you had tech with her. Do you remember what she said she was going to do?”

“She rode home with Chance,” offered Ben, causing all eyes in the room to turn to him. “Y/N rode home with Chance. She always does on Wednesdays. It’s why she hates them.”

Tory, Ben, Shelton and Hi all knew it was no secret that you weren’t exactly fond of your half brother – since you had been forced to move in with him and your father around the time that Tory moved to Morris Island, the two of you had never quite gotten along.

Not near as well as you got along with the Morris Island crew, anyway – you and Ben were like brother and sister, while you had been dating Hi for six months strong.

“We’ve got to find her. Who knows what he’s-” Hi struggled to keep down a sob “-done to her.” He turned to Tory. “How strong is your nose?”

You aren’t used to things going so fast, but with Hi, it never feels like you’re rushing things – and besides, amidst all of the adventures that your friends have managed to get up to since being infected, it’s hardly like your relationship is the least stable thing in either of your lives.

In fact, as Hi once put it, “it’s nice to have something that feels real for once when the rest of your day feels like a dream.”

Ironically enough, he was eating a Twinkie while saying this and ardently defended the golden snack’s “realness” when you brought it up.

A knock on your door startled you out of your reverie, but the moment you opened your mouth to answer, you frowned.

Who would knock on your door in this house? Currently, only your half-brother, Chance, lived here – not even your father was here anymore, considering his current occupation of serving a life sentence in prison.

Since moving in a few years ago, Chance had never come to your room, considering the two of you did not get along well. In fact, you were about certain that he wasn’t even home at the moment.

“Who’s there?”

Nobody answered, and you started to think that you must have imagined whatever you heard.

Oh well, can’t hurt to be sure. You padded across the carpeted room before pulling open the door.

You don’t even get the chance to scream as a hand claps over your mouth, and despite your struggle, you can’t twist to see the owner of said hand before you pass out.

A combination of Tory’s sense of smell, enhanced by flaring, along with a touch of technological tracing on Shelton’s part had them following a trail of blood through the woods not far from downtown Charleston.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t have gotten backup?” asked Shelton nervously. “Maybe the police would have been good to bring into this, considering he’s probably armed.”

Tory turned to him, yellow eyes gleaming in the darkness of late evening. “Yes, Shelton, and how were we supposed to explain how we found him? It’s better to keep the police out of this. We just solve the puzzle, grab Y/N, and nobody gets hurt.” I hope, was what she didn’t say, but it was what all of them heard anyway.

The four stopped abruptly as the fading sun cast light upon a dark building in the middle of the world, a shack inconspicuous enough that they would never have looked at it twice, but also a shack where the trail ended.

“He’s probably got cameras up around the place,” offered Ben, frowning as he took it in.

“Ben, can you check if there’s any windows? That seems safer than trying to get in through the front door.” He nodded at Tory’s request as she continued to survey it.

Before Ben had moved five steps, a shrill screech came from inside the shack, the scream loud to even the three of the four who hadn’t flared and bringing Tory to her knees, hands clapped over her ears a moment too soon. “Quick.”

The tallest of the boys disappeared into the trees to survey the perimeter as Hi sweated through his shirt, nervously wringing his hands.

“I can’t believe she got dragged into this,” he mumbled under his breath, the sound still audible in the silence of dusk. “This is all my fault. I should have gone all Harry Potter to her Ginny and broken up with her to protect her.”

“Hi.” Shelton grabbed him by the shoulders. “We all know how well that worked. Stop it. Y/N needs you right now.”

The other boy nodded, hardly hearing him as Ben came back. “There’s two windows. One is the room they’re in. One is near it. I think they’ll hear us if we break through there.”

“Front door it is.”

Ignoring the sense of foreboding that came upon them as they approached, the four walked up to the front door, Shelton testing the handle.

Easily, it turned and opened, not even locked.

“Either they just got here, or he was expecting us.” Shelton made to enter but Ben yanked him back by the collar.

“There’s no telling how he’s rigged this place. It’d probably be best if we all flared.”

“But won’t he see?”

Hi rolled his eyes. “Listen. If this Joker is really so mad as to try and steal from us and take Y/N while he’s at it, God knows what other crazy thoughts he’s got going on in his head. Who’s he gonna tell that will believe him?”

He was the first to flare, and soon, four pairs of gleaming yellow stood in the front corridor of a single-story shack that couldn’t have looked more like it was out of a horror movie if it tried.

Firearms from Glocks to AK-47s lined the walls and hung on racks, and a sickening spatter of blood on the floor had splashed onto the couch nearby.

It was a gruesome scene that made Shelton visibly shudder as they continued through the room, Ben grabbing one of the pistols off its rack and switching off the safety.

He hoped to God they wouldn’t have to use it.

“Oh, please, you’re pathetic,” a voice sounded through the walls, so muffled that only Shelton picked up on it at first. “Your friends are going to help you? How cute. You know why they didn’t drag you into this, hm? It’s because they don’t think you’re special. They don’t think you’re strong enough… because there’s always been a line dividing you and those four, huh?”

“They’re AP. They’re special. They’ve always been smarter than you and they didn’t think you would be enough of an asset to help them solve this… it’s a shame, really. If they’d have told you, maybe you wouldn’t have opened a door to a stranger.”

Now in the room next to the one in which the Gamemaster was talking.

“They have an hour and fifteen minutes left. Maybe if they rush enough, they’ll follow the clues and get here in an hour. Are you worth rushing for, sweetheart?”

Now they could hear your hardly there response, not even comprehensible due to the gag in your mouth around which you struggled to speak.

Shelton slowly started to push open the door, the dark-skinned hand trembling on the knob before he took a deep breath, turning it and finally swinging the door open in one fluid motion.

‘Shelton!’ you tried to shout through the duct tape on your mouth, using the distraction to hook your tongue around it and finally using your teeth to take the makeshift gag into your mouth.

“Please tell me my badass girlfriend just managed to eat the duct tape,” whispered Hi.

You turned to him, eyes wide, and found your boyfriend’s almost permanent smile had dropped, even his eyes showing the pain that coming upon you in such a state had brought him.

It was Ben who spoke first of the four, entering the room with his gun pointed straight at the Gamemaster. “Let her go.”

“Let her go?” repeated the man, before latching a hand on your hair and tugging hard enough to elicit a sharp yelp from you. “Sure.”

He dragged you across the room before any of the four could do anything, coming to a staircase you hadn’t known was there before throwing you down the steps, your head knocking painfully against the wall on your way down.

Black swarmed your vision as you heard footsteps scrabble on the floor above, Tory’s almost always confident voice sounding fragile in her next words.

“You’ll pay for this.”

They were an hour early, but even so, the Gamemaster had an escape plan, his final words the last you heard before succumbing to the darkness.

“You’ll have to catch me first.”

The time was nine o'clock – coincidentally, exactly the same time at which Hi had made a reservation for dinner for the two of you.

You hadn’t even gotten the chance to get ready for the night out that he had been planning for weeks, and now you were in a hospital gown.

Between his well-conditioned upper body and the enhancement that flaring provided to him, Ben had managed to carry you back to the car, the four and you fitting awkwardly, considering you were unconscious and bleeding from where the wound on your wrist had reopened – the same wound from which the blood dripping made the trail they had followed.

None of the four had spoken, Hi taking your head in his lap and doing a silent inventory of the bruises on you, trying to find where the blood spatter in the room had originated.

You weren’t spotless, but there was certainly nothing to suggest it had come from you.

They had taken you to the hospital, saying you had fallen down the stairs and gone unconscious, and still, you hadn’t woken up.

It had been an hour and Hi was already worried sick.

“This is all my fault!” he cried, pacing the room. “You heard what he said in there. Maybe I should have told her about this, that there’s a mad psycho on our asses! I’ve never kept anything like this from her before. She knows about us, for God’s sake!”

Visiting hours were over and the four wanted nothing more than to see you.

“Hi. Your mother will be worried sick. We’ve got to get you home.” Ben, always the voice of reason, clapped his hands on the other boy’s shoulders from behind. “She’ll be fine. She needs time to recover after that. Worrying in here won’t get you anywhere.”

Your boyfriend only started pacing faster. “Six months. This is our six month anniversary! We’re supposed to be out on a date, not here! I should never have dragged her into our nonsense. It was all or nothing and I kept things from her and now I’m going to lose her!” He turned back to Ben, unshed tears glimmering in his eyes. “I don’t want to lose her. I can’t lose her! She’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me and I’m in love with her, damn it! I can’t lose her because of that bastard!”

Exhausted, he fell onto the chair next to Shelton, putting his head in his hands.

“Hi. Let’s get you home. We’ll come back tomorrow, I promise.”

He nodded blankly, getting up and following Tory out, accepting the reassuring squeeze on the shoulder that Ben offered.

Even so, Ben would never stop blaming himself for what had happened to you – for the mess that he had gotten them into.

If I hadn’t told him about her, this would never have happened.

A week’s worth of missed work from your classes piled up on the table next to you - even if you weren’t in AP like the Virals all were, high school was demanding nonetheless - and Hi sighed, glancing at it before sitting next to you.

“Hi, Y/N. It’s me. Hi. I’ve said my name twice now.” He laughed, but even with nobody in the room to hear it, it sounded forced. “You’ve been asleep for a week now. I know even you need your beauty sleep, but you’re worrying me to death and worry is not a good look on me. This bod was not made for stressing.”

Drifting in and out of consciousness, you felt your limbs like dead weights and your boyfriend’s voice, usually light but now heavy with his pain, providing a familiarity in this foreign environment. His next words were the first you heard.

“I need you, Y/N. I like to think I don’t need anyone but I’m wrong. I’m always wrong. I need your voice, your smile, to run my fingers through your hair and to touch your skin and have it warmer than me. I-I’ve been wanting to tell you for ages now, and I finally worked up the guts to do it. I was going to take you out to dinner and then I was going to take you into that one cheese shop that’s always open late and tell you ‘now that I’m surrounded by cheese, it’ll seem a bit less cheesy when I say this: I love you’ and then kiss you amidst all the cheeses whose names I can’t pronounce.”

“I rehearsed that for weeks, Y/N, and I’m honestly shocked that you would take that away from me considering it’s the best thing I ever came up with. It’s been a week but it feels like I’ve gained ten years.”

“I love you. Please come back to me. If it’s the homework you’re hiding from, I’ll pay off Shelton to do it and I might even help him. But please, I can’t lose you.”

You couldn’t fight back your smile anymore, and honestly, considering how long you had slept, you considered it somewhat rude to pretend to do the same.

“What’re you dreaming about?” He had evidently noticed your smile. “Is it Twinkies? Those dreams are the best.”

Your throat felt dry and scratchy with your reply. “Better than a dream. It’s you.”

You finally lifted your eyelids open, struggling to keep them so as you adjusted to the light in the room and the brightness in the eyes of Hiram Stolowitski, who was grinning despite the tears that you could see on his cheeks.

“Y/N.”

“I heard all of that, you sap.”

“Y/N!” He threw his arms around you before loosening them, remembering you were injured. “You jerk. I can’t believe you’d fake being asleep like that after being asleep for a week.”

Odd, his summarizing exactly what you had just been thinking. Then again, that was exactly what made the two of you mesh so well together - you were kindred spirits.

“Water?” You hated the sensation that your words caused as he nodded vigorously, pulling a bottle from his backpack.

“Here. Drink and reflect on your actions.”

He smiled lopsidedly at you as you drank, the water feeling divine as you were parched. “You’re here. I can’t believe you’re here. I thought you’d never wake up, or when you did it’d be like one of those seven-year comas and then you wouldn’t recognize me because I’d be so old and my young attractiveness was gone.”

“Hi. You’re fifteen.”

You shook your head at his antics, struggling to sit up and breathing a sigh of relief as he helped you, adjusting the pillows and grabbing a couple from the floor. “I may or may not have nabbed these from one of the storage rooms.”

Raising your eyebrows, you looked at him doubtfully.

“Fine, fine. It was Ben’s idea.”

Finally able to look him in the eye, you smiled again, before grabbing his face in your hands and kissing him.

Hard.

With tongue.

He’d be talking about this for weeks.

Smiling as you pressed your forehead to this, you whispered, “I love you too, you big dolt.”

“I mean, who couldn’t? Have you seen my muscles?” He pumped his arm as if to prove it, causing the two of you to laugh. “I’m sorry, I should have told you about the Gamemaster, I never expected he would go after you.”

“Hey, it’s the first thing you’ve ever kept from me, aside from your signature pizza recipe.”

“Which you’ll still never get.”

You stuck your tongue out at him, taking another gulp of water. “I’m your badass girlfriend who knows how to get duct tape off her mouth with her hands tied, and you can’t even tell me how to make a pizza? I’m starting to think I’m not good enough for you.”

Pressing a loud, wet kiss to your cheek, Hi replied, “You’re too good for me, Y/N, but you’re still never getting that. Maybe one day when I’m on my deathbed and you’re my next of kin, I’ll whisper it to you dramatically but miss the last ingredient and then the recipe will die with me.”

You pushed him. “No death jokes. Insensitive.”

“Irreplaceable.”

Your boyfriend grinned widely at you and you resisted the urge to gag at his cheesiness. “Where are the others?”

“What, am I not good enough for you?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I think they’ll be here later. I came right after school. We’ve been in every day. Your brother’s been collecting your homework for you. Chance. He’s been worried sick about you, ya know. Something about how he should’ve been home, shouldn’t have left you in that ginormous place alone.”

You nodded, finding it hard to believe. “Huh. I doubt it’ll last once he realizes I’m back to my old, annoying self again.”

“Please. You could never be annoying.”

Hi’s gaze traveled your face as if he was taking it in for the first time. “I’m so glad you’re back.”

“Me too.” You grinned. “I’m still holding you to that, though. I’m not in any fit state to do all of this work.”

“Please. I’d have done it all if it meant getting you back.”

“Liar. You would at least have delegated some to Shelton.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “What can I say? You know me too well.”

“I’ll never know too much about you. I love you.”

A kick at the door made you look up, revealing the other three of the pack looking sheepish.

“Were you spying on us?” gasped out Hi, pointing an accusatory finger. “Honestly. You’re so depraved.”

“If it helps,” offered Tory, “we’ve only been here since you talked about Chance.”

“You are all horrible eavesdroppers and I don’t know why I’m friends with you,” you murmured, shaking your head with a laugh. “Also, who kicked the door?”

“In my defense, I was aiming for Ben,” retorted Shelton, brushing himself off.

“What? It’s not my fault I can’t stand these two.”

You threw one of the pillows that Ben himself had stolen, scowling as he caught it.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen any of you flare,” you said quietly, even if they could all hear you anyway. “I never knew your eyes went yellow.”

“Hopefully you don’t get yourself into more danger that we have to save you from,” replied Tory. “How are you? Suffering from cavities due to this charmer’s sweetness?”

You shrugged. “Honestly, just tired.”

Hi gasped dramatically. “You’ve been sleeping for a week and you want to sleep more? Honestly, Y/N, priorities.”

“I was joking,” you said with a laugh as the pillow was thrown back at you.

Looking up to the doorway murderously, you saw Ben hold his hands up as if to say ‘I didn’t do it’ and noticed a shadow behind him.

Chance.

“You’re not allowed to do that again,” he spoke, leaning against the doorway as the other three moved to offer him space. “No falling down staircases. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to just avoid them altogether.”

You scowled at him. “Like you avoid me?”

“Yes. Exactly. Good talk.” He left the room, leaving you staring at the door in confusion.

“He cares,” offered Tory, watching his retreating figure. “In his own way.”

You shrugged. “I don’t need him. I have you. And that’s enough.”

Ben mimed throwing up. “Stop listening to Thickburger here,” he laughed, ruffling Hi’s hair as he crossed the room. “I liked you better when you were feisty.”

“Uh-huh. Like you aren’t sappy, mister I-Steal-Pillows-From-Hospitals.”

He turned on Hi. “You, sir, are the biggest snitch.”

“Hey, she was the one who said it couldn’t be me. Checkmate, Ben. She knows what a big sap you are.”

Nodding along with his words, you couldn’t help but smile, glad to be back with Tory and her boys.

Like it or not, Ben and Shelton were like brothers to you, far superior to Chance, in your eyes, and Tory the sister you never had.

Hi was the best boyfriend you could have asked for, and the fact that they were all here and you weren’t still with the Gamemaster just proved that, no matter what he might have said to the contrary.

“So, Y/N, how about we get a jumpstart on that homework?”

“God, Shelton, stop being such a buzzkill,” you sighed, shaking your head. 

“Hey. Hi’s the fun one, Ben’s the strong one, it falls to me to be the boring, smart one,” he replied with a shrug, eyes widening when Tory turned to him with her hands on her hips.

“And what does that make me?”

“The bossy one?”

She punched him lightly on the arm, exchanging a glance with you. “Boys. Honestly. They smell, too.”

“I haven’t showered in a week.”

“Gross!” exclaimed Hi, jumping away from the bed, before laughing. “We should probably let you get dressed. Come on, come on, shoo, guys, give the lady her room.”

He ushered them out, before leaning back into the room to wink at you. “I love you, Y/N.”

“I love you, Hiram.”

You felt warm even under the thin cotton sheets and the flimsy hospital gown, the heat coming from your heart, and the knowledge that no matter what, your friends would always be there for you.

They never made you feel like the weaker one, no matter what the Gamemaster had said.

Having friends like these just made you stronger, and you loved them for it.

“Shut up, Hi! You’re like a lovesick puppy!”

“Yeah? You think we haven’t noticed how you look at - hey! What was that for?”

Quirks and all.

A/N: Fun, fun, fuuuuun! That didn’t take near as long as I expected. Which is a good thing, I wouldn’t want to keep people waiting. Thanks so much for reading!

[itsworn]

Hollywood Stars Align With Racers and Rodders at 1958 Motorsports Events

Starstruck.

It should come as no surprise that photojournalists chasing interesting people, places, and things would lead interesting lives, themselves. Some of their shared experiences were documented on film that no Petersen staffer expected to ever be seen outside of the photo lab, recorded for internal entertainment only. Six decades further down the road, however, such outtakes glisten like gold amongst familiar, published negatives. Often, what determines whether or not such a nugget is selected for these pages is the story behind it—or lack thereof. We strive not only to identify who’s in a shot, but also why the credited staff writer or photographer deemed the particular scene worthy of fully 1/12 of that roll of medium-format, 12-shot film. Perhaps only that one person can say—or would’ve said, had we gotten to him in time. Those roving reporters were mostly in their mid-to-late twenties or thirties, already. Add 60 years, and it’s easy to understand why a tempting image might be rejected today only because its shooter either can’t remember or, more commonly, took that inside information to his grave. (Prime example: Fully half of this installment’s photography is the work of the late Eric Rickman, whom historians haven’t been able to pester since 2009.)

Luckily for HOT ROD Deluxe and y’all, Spence Murray and Bob D’Olivo are still around, able, and willing to suffer dumb questions about obscure images that neither had seen since their film was processed and proofed in 1958. The irony of using modern technology to digitize, share, and identify ancient negatives that belatedly appear here as black dots on paper—same as ever—is not lost on either nonagenarian. Though Rod & Custom‘s founding editor has been physically slowed by strokes that hinder typing, wife Carolyn expertly transmitted Spence’s memories of building, driving, touring, and crashing the Dream Truck. The same month he crashed into a Kansas ditch, D’Olivo bumped into Jill St. John at Riverside Raceway. Along with Bob’s four frames of the actress, we noticed Motor Trend‘s main photographer was shooting some 35mm film, instead of the larger formats used almost exclusively by Robert E. Petersen and his hirelings since the start. Mature readers will recall that the smaller, lighter, single-lens-reflex (SLR) design was as nearly as revolutionary in its time as Apple’s camera phone became. For this issue, the longtime Petersen photographic director listed the advantages of 35 mm for race coverage.

Another thing that this latest round of archive research uncovered was an unprecedented number of entertainers and other celebrities not normally associated with our hobby. Stateside interest in sports-car racing was booming, especially now that underdog Corvettes and Thunderbirds dared to challenge European exoticars. Entertainment figures had been associated with hot rod shows since the very first one, in 1948, for which young Robert E. Petersen lined up some B-list beefcake to lure wives and girlfriends to the Los Angeles Armory (while Pete peddled the Jan. ’48 HOT ROD outside). Relationships created during and after his postwar stint as a Hollywood agent would increasingly bring those worlds together in Petersen-produced magazines, promotions, indoor shows, and special events. Thus does his incomparable photo collection contain a unique combination of show-biz and automotive milestones, along with mug shots of the employees who documented them. Many more examples await discovery. We can hardly wait to peek behind the curtain at 1959’s outtakes, next, before blasting into the ’60s.

Of approximately 3 million black-and-white negatives in the Petersen archive, this one was surely among the most mutually painful for an editor and his audience. Through five years and four custom iterations, Rod & Custom readers were encouraged to submit suggestions for modifications that would be performed in the magazine, then seen in person at the 47 car shows across America that featured the Dream Truck. Its 48th would’ve been Iowa’s 1958 International Motor Sports Show, had the tow vehicle’s left-rear tire lasted just 60 more miles. Editor Spencer Murray and helper Jim “Buzzie” Blair escaped uninjured. The new-model Chevy Fleetside with custom Barris grille and paint also survived. In fact, after a wrecker yanked the shiny side up, Spence drove it the rest of the way to Des Moines at the request of a nervous show promoter whose patrons were expecting to meet the editor and see a customized California pickup. (If any of you attendees took pictures of the damaged pickup on display, we’d love to share them in HRD.) Murray briefly referred to the October 21st incident in his Jan. and Feb. ’59 editions—the last two installments of a series that established the formula for long-term magazine projects. The Dream Truck appeared in too many R&Cs to list here, starting with Sept. ’53. (Also see Mar. ’58 HOT ROD; July & Oct. ’58 Motor Life.) The pre-crash ’58 Fleetside mild custom got a spread of its own in R&C’s Jan. ’59 truck issue.

If you young ‘uns ever wondered why the last inside page is consistently missing from Grandpa’s old Car Crafts, it probably went someplace his mother did not. Carol Grace’s turn in CC’s monthly “Coming Attraction” department teased in more ways than one, pointing (sorry!) young readers to Ted Long’s F100 custom and the upcoming truck issue. (See May & June ’58 CC.)

Richard Boone stood a respectable 6-foot-one, but the Have Gun, Will Travel guy looks like a giant in a toy car. Bob D’Olivo rushed a few shots for a May ’58 Motor Trend piece allegedly penned by “Paladin” himself (no byline, but written in the first person). Therein, we learned how Bill Devin—whose fiberglass Ferrari Monza knock-off came in 27 sizes and wheelbases from 75 to 100 inches—adapted this miniature model to the 80-inch wheelbase of a hot Porsche Speedster that Boone had crashed on location.

Hot rodding’s most-famous trophy was still jointly awarded for America’s Most Beautiful Competition Car and America’s Most Beautiful Roadster. Oakland’s big winners were Romeo Palamides’ canopied fueler and Richard Peters’ radical ’29 roadster pickup. The Ala Kart, destined to repeat as 1959’s AMBR, was built by George Barris (seen in the background—for once!). (See Oct. ’58 HRM; Dec. ’58 CC.)

“Have Camera Will Travel,” read the headline of a May ’58 HRM “house” ad, followed by the subscription pitch: “A man of action, our photo editor Eric Rickman is everywhere! You can go, too, by keeping your subscription to HOT ROD up to date. GO, MAN! $3.50 year, $6.00 for two.” We prefer this outtake because it shows more of Rick’s famous Corvette—here in recovery mode, following a single-vehicle street crash—and also because his camera case’s cool decals were “airbrushed out” for publication. We asked his longtime boss, photographic director Bob D’Olivo, about the hardware. “At the top is my personal Eastman Kodak 4×5 view camera,” e-mailed D’Olivo. “Coming down, one item looks like nothing I’ve ever seen, a small camera on a strap. Never saw him use it. On the bottom is my 4×5 Graflex Pacemaker Speed Graphic. The company had no equipment like this when I started there in August of 1952; we used the stuff that my wife and I brought from New York in my ’40 Ford Deluxe tudor when we moved to California in 1950.”

Four years before Carol Cox singlehandedly pressured Wally Parks into accepting the first female participant in NHRA-produced events, Rickman got this ironic pan shot of her and hubby Lloyd’s family car at sanctioned Inyokern Drag Strip. (See Aug. ’58 HRM.) The couple alternated driving at the drags and El Mirage dry lake—where Carol initially broke an unwritten rule against women racers by disguising herself in Lloyd’s overalls and signature hat until she was accepted. In 1962, Carol would wheel her daily-driven ’61 Ventura to SS/Automatic class wins at NHRA’s only two national events (Pomona and Indy).

What the heck were sprint cars doing on Riverside Raceway’s road course—running in the wrong direction, yet? All we knew was that Rickman submitted a few rolls identified as “CRA 500” for processing on June 2. Curators Jim Miller (American Hot Rod Foundation) and Greg Sharp (NHRA Motorsports Museum) each came through with details about a 500-mile California Racing Association show during the track’s official grand-opening Memorial Day weekend on May 30. The $10,000 purse was considered huge (equivalent to about $87,000 now). The course direction was reversed to counterclockwise for oval-track drivers accustomed to turning left. Some teams installed oversized fuel tanks to minimize pit stops.

Riverside winner Bud Rose was congratulated by a virtually unknown, 21-year-old trophy queen named Dyan Cannon. The hunky dude stepping on the tire is John Smith, soon to become famous on the Laramie series. Rose (whose given name was Harry Eisle) prevailed in the same, ancient Offy that he’d stunt-driven for Clark Gable’s action scenes in 1950’s To Please a Lady. Afterward, Joe Gemsa bought the roadster from the studio and named it the Clark Gable Special. Rose/Eisle was obviously a dead ringer for the movie star. (During filming, Gable supposedly told his double, “You drive the race cars, and I’ll take care of the broads.”)

You’d look befuddled, too, if your boss fired off a flash bulb first thing one morning—particularly if he was Wally Parks, not exactly a major prankster. HRM tech editor Ray Brock was probably sharing this Indianapolis motel room with Parks and possibly another staffer for Memorial Day weekend (note rollaway cot and partial person in foreground).

Would you believe Shirley MacLaine, queen of the 500? She was 24. The popular actress stayed through the race that opened with Pat O’Connor’s fatal first-lap crash on a restart to reward Jimmy Bryan with three big kisses in the winner’s circle.

A rare, unposed portrait of Parks was taken from telephoto range by colleague Tom Medley during the Indy 500 weekend. It’s no wonder the guy often looked worried while juggling simultaneous responsibilities as HRM Editor, editorial director of Petersen’s automotive titles, NHRA president, and drag-race promoter.

Another Medley photo from the crew’s Indy trip is a self-portrait that not even his son had seen. Gary Medley is a chip off the old block, continuing to publish new/old artwork featuring the adventures of his multitalented parent’s alter ego, Stroker McGurk. (See strokerbymedley.com.)

Although Backstage Past prioritizes unpublished outtakes over pictures you might’ve seen in the magazines, we’re making this exception partly to address HRM’s inexplicable failure to attach any caption to Tex Smith’s classic action shot in the Sept. ’58 issue—a rare showdown between the most-controversial dragsters of the preceding season: the California car that ignited the 1957-1963 fuel ban by running 166.97 versus the Florida fueler that reportedly reached 176.40 the previous November. HRM readers might’ve been informed that Wichita Falls was the farthest west that Don Garlits had yet traveled; that a $450 guarantee was his first-ever appearance fee; that he reset both the strip and Texas state records to 9.12/163.33; that the runnerup (far lane) was Kansan Loyd Davis in the former Cook & Bedwell fueler.

Four months before the Dream Truck’s crash, R&C’s editor posed at home with the fourth-and-final version of a ’50 Chevy that was first customized in 1952. A who’s who of custom shops contributed body modifications (e.g., Barris, Metz, Winfield, Valley Custom). Now 91, Murray’s memory is intact. Via e-mail, he answered all of our questions in detail, except one: Asked to identify the lovely lady in his driveway—twice—Spence curiously suffered amnesia, coming back with “Just a friend” and “One of my exes.”

Near-simultaneous exposures by HRM’s Brock and Parks accidentally produced mirror images of Pikes Peak champs Nick Sanborn Jr. (Stock Car), Bobby Unser (Championship Car), and Ak Miller (Sports Car). Both staffers can be seen in the opposing backgrounds. Brock (wearing backward ball cap) appears to be climbing some poor schmuck’s shoulders to get the high-angle, forward-facing composition that happened to include his boss (behind Miller in the sunglasses and white Mobil sweatshirt).

All we know about this intriguing frame is staff photographer Colin Creitz’s three-roll entry in the photo lab’s film log: “Art Center School.” The assignment was issued by Motor Life, but our incomplete collection failed to produce a related article. Experts’ predictions and artists’ impressions of Detroit’s upcoming compact cars were newsstand staples in the late ’50s. The clay models seem to hint at future Chrysler products. The custom-looking pickup makes us wonder why Dodge never produced an “El Dart-o” to compete with the so-called “car-trucks” introduced by Chevy and Ford for 1959.

Various closeups of the Scotty’s Muffler Service Special and team from this August photo session were published in tabloids as prerace publicity for NHRA’s Nationals. What’s unusual about our outtake is the absence of Wally Parks and the appearance of a full camera-and-sound crew, possibly outside its studio. Car-owner Charles “Scotty” Scott (behind seat) was joined by 9-year-old Billy “The Kid” Scott, his future Top Gas and Top Fuel prodigy, and mechanic Cub Barnett. Both Scotts are gone. Barnett still builds race motors and campaigns one of nostalgia racing’s winningest roadsters. As for Miss HOT ROD, a caption printed in Drag News—likely written by Wally himself—reveals that “Hollywood starlet Christine Callas was chosen by more than 70,000 hot rodders throughout the nation to reign over the 1958 National Championship Drag Races in Oklahoma City, Labor Day weekend. She is auburn-haired, blue-eyed, with 36-24-36 measurements.”

This may not be the first pair of rails ever to pull side-by-side wheelstands, but Eric Rickman’s example is the earliest we’ve noticed on archive film. The state-of-the-art California cars of Tommy Ivo (far lane) and Jim Nelson were tangling for Top Eliminator at Santa Ana. What seems like a sizable holeshot might’ve been calculated caution by Ivo, who held a half-second advantage. Earlier this Sunday, his Kent Fuller frame and injected Max Balchowsky Buick combined for a shocking, all-time-record e.t on gas, 9.50 seconds (at 141.68). The Aug. 23 Drag News ran a similar photo and reported that Ivo’s A/Dragster beat the carbureted-Chevy B/D by two lengths. Nelson sat in the second chassis built with Dode Martin. Dubbed the Drag Master, the car’s name would be merged into one word when the pals launched Dragmaster Co. with a handshake. (See respective car features in Feb. ’59 and Mar. ’59 CC; Apr. ’59 HRM.)

No, your old eyeballs are not seeing double, nor did Photoshop exist to fake us out 60 years ago. At the opposite end of this radical custom, a second pair of headlight housings was installed in the leading edge of the hood. CC Editor Dick Day brought the weirdness home from the World’s Fair Auto Show in Springfield, Massachusetts

Another of Tom Medley’s great portraits captured Bob D’Olivo with one of the earliest 35mm cameras used by his photographic team. “It’s an Asahi Pentax 35mm SLR (single lens reflex) model,” he tells us. “It had a no-return mirror, meaning that after the shutter is released, you see nothing until film is advanced. At least, it was a beginning. I also used a 35mm Nikon rangefinder model with a couple of lenses. Nikon SLR cameras did not exist yet. The advantages of 35mm equipment were compact size, higher shutter speeds, motor drives, wide-angle lenses and longer-focal-length lenses for racing, and getting 36 exposures in a small cassette [versus 12 frames per medium-format roll].”

Utah mechanic Athol Graham drew quite a crowd when his homemade streamliner lumbered onto the salt for the first time. Starting with a B-29 belly tank and a surplus Allison V12, he’d invested 12 years and about $2,500 in the project. An oil-pressure problem forced Graham to abort his first-and-only shakedown run, slowing to 84 mph. In the push-off photo, HRM’s Ray Brock approaches with a camera. Graham’s speed would improve the next year to 344 mph—shockingly close to Mickey Thompson’s 364-mph record in Challenger I’s debut. Shooting for the first 400 in 1960, he’d be killed after the left-front wheel reportedly snapped off, flipping him end over end. Nevertheless, the City of Salt Lake was rebuilt twice, raced at Bonneville by two true believers, and still exists.

Among the mysteries raised by this round of archive research is why such a killer Rickman shot of the season’s most-important match did not appear in extensive NHRA Nationals coverage in Petersen monthlies. Absent the late photographer and Wally Parks, who oversaw all automotive titles as PPC editorial director, we can only guess that the obvious darkness influenced rejection by a safety-obsessed boss whose other job was running—and protecting—NHRA. Parks had already convinced two slower quarterfinalists to bow out, eliminating one daylight-eating round of Top Eliminator. Ted Cyr (near lane) received no cash for beating Al Eshenbaugh in 10.04 seconds and earning 1958’s national championship, though he and partner Bill Hopper won the keys to a new Chevy Fleetside pickup. The California team had entered two rails in NHRA’s second gas-only Big Go, hoping to unload this older model here, plus an A/Altered coupe that Hopper drove. Amazingly, all three could’a, would’a, should’a competed in the quarterfinals that never happened, had Hopper’s class-winning Fiat not been one of the two cars prematurely dropped by darkness. Ted drove both dragsters in the semis, where only a sideways launch in the new car prevented an all-Cyr & Hopper final round.

You won’t find Barbara Livingston’s name in any 1958 mastheads, but backstage, the former HRM secretary and future Mrs. Wally Parks remained involved as unofficial proofreader and fierce protector of Petersen and NHRA publications; too involved for editors and contributors who resented her outsized influence and interference (e.g., she and artist Pete Millar waged a running battle over the “butt cracks and flies” that Barbara faithfully erased from his illustrations). All PPC editors seemed to be go-kart enthusiasts. Wally’s twin-engined model rode atop an entry-level Delray sedan delivery thought to be NHRA’s first official vehicle, subsequently lettered and assigned to ex-HRM staffer Tex Smith.

Sporty-car fans’ favorite two couples could not have been more different. For starters, garage operators Max and Ina Balchowsky drove their homebuilt “special” the 60 miles from home to Riverside for USAC’s inaugural U.S. Grand Prix, while Lance Reventlow’s large crew was delivering not one, not two, but all three of the existing Scarabs on fancy trailers. Reventlow, whose supportive mom was Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, got rear-ended on the first lap and spent the day spectating alongside already-famous actress Jill St. John, his future wife. Team mechanic-driver Chuck Daigh salvaged their day by winning the main event in another Scarab. Meanwhile, Balchowsky ran near the front until a broken Jaguar gearbox—reportedly the only “foreign” part in his entire car—restricted Old Yeller to high gear only and a seventh-place finish. (See May ’58 ML; June ’58 & Jan. ’59 HRM; Jan. ’59 MT; May ’16 HRD.)

After aging out of the Mousketeers, child-stars Annette Funicello and Tommy Kirk might’ve been practicing a magic trick or how to slow dance without swallowing a playing card, for all we knew. Our historical sources were likewise stumped until Margaret Simmons, a bride of 1958, recalled the “Suck-and-Blow” party game played by teens of the time—with one key difference: Instead of positioning the card vertically, for transfer by the lips, these crazy kids used their teeth. (No sucking and blowing allowed by Disney, apparently.) Later, they costarred in cheesy, teen-romance films such as Pajama Party, in which Tommy plays a clueless Martian who gets wooing lessons from Annette.

Spence Murray had the wreckage trucked back to L.A. as freight. He was not compensated personally for the Dream Truck’s loss, and George Barris’s $1,000-plus repair estimate left no practical option to stripping and selling an old, badly bent body and frame that nobody expected to see again. The custom made its final magazine appearance in the HOT ROD Mart classifieds in 1959 and was presumed lost for the three decades before freelance photojournalist Michael Lamm spotted it on a Stockton street. Bruce Glasscock tracked the truck down and started a restoration before selling to Kurt McCormick, who completed the job, and still has it. The body retains a surprising percentage of its old steel, including the signature fins that Bob Metz installed (now reattached to replacement fenders).

We can see why fuel economy wasn’t the main concern of folks shopping for new cars this fall. Sorry about ruining your next trip to a corporate filling station, though Mohawk’s pricing isn’t all that great, adjusted for inflation and modern technology: In today’s money, we’d be paying only $2.20, but that gallon wouldn’t take a ’59 Studebaker nearly as far as any modern gas compact. Motor Life averaged just 16.1 mpg testing a 90hp Lark that needed 20.7 seconds to reach 60 mph. (See Feb. ’59 ML.)

Had Mickey Thompson and Fritz Voigt dragged their dual-Hemi, 4WD monster directly to Oklahoma City’s NHRA Nationals this summer—as previously planned—rather than detouring to Bonneville for a test run of new Bob Sorrell bodywork, the overweight, second-hand dragster probably would’ve been footnoted in history as an early round Top Eliminator victim of much-quicker gas dragsters. Instead, they ran 242 right off the trailer, on gasoline, before borrowing some nitro and deciding to stick around for record runs. Eight passes later, the two drag racers had America’s fastest car, claiming both the unlimited streamliner record (266.204 avg.) and Top Time of Speed Week (294.117). Nobody we asked (including Danny Thompson) knows whether the Feb. ’59 HOT ROD Mart ad resulted in a sale, or where the car went. Greg Sharp suggests that the early image is an illustration, possibly commissioned for sponsor pitches (evidently unsuccessful, in the case of a cam company whose name never appeared on a car that ran Isky’s stuff). (See Nov. ’58 HRM; Nov. ’58 & Feb. ’59 MT; Dec. ’58 R&C; Dec. ’58 & Aug. ’59 CC.)

The post Hollywood Stars Align With Racers and Rodders at 1958 Motorsports Events appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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The Most Hilarious Complaints We've Heard About toys for 4 month old baby

Baby gifts and Baby toys shop offering learning, educational and developmental toys for babies, toddlers and kids. Talking about child's age, which can be a purchasing factor to be considered, many parents sometimes consider impractical ideas like buying toys that are too complex for their child's development. Citation wanted Andrew Witkin, manager of advertising for Mega Brands told Investor's Business Daily that, "They help build hand-eye coordination, science and mathematics abilities and also let kids be creative" 20 Other toys like marbles , jackstones , and chunks serve similar purposes in child development, allowing children to use their bodies and minds to find out about spatial relationships , cause and effect , and a wide variety of different abilities. It could help to explain my enthusiasm for children musical toys and my belief in the roll they perform in children's early development by sharing a brief summary of my early childhood and teenage years.

Our set of educational & learning toys for infants, infants & toddlers from 100+ producers will truly match your child's development. The toys we've chosen all help the developmental phases in childhood through play, which is important for supporting brain growth and cognitive skills - play allows kids to use their imagination and promotes imagination, motor and physical skills, be that by giving them instructions to follow in a fun way, the ability to process data, communicate emotion and solve issues, or opportunities to produce. Third, vibrant octave knocking and yanking piano, this toy has vivid colours and gorgeous music, and this can help build children's sensory and visual ability, moreover, this piano toys installed with wheels consists of pull function, helps baby to learn different walking and knocking the steel can help to clinic infant's eye-hand coordination.

Educational toys for infants and kids that encourage the growth of abilities, motor skills, coordination skills and language abilities, aid the child learn and to understand theories. Wooden baby toys such as rattles and baby phones are fantastic presents for babies since they assist them to develop these early learning skills like hearing, vision and touch. The writer, apart from being a kindergarten teacher is a massive fan of kids toys and baby monitor He believes that toys are an very important part of a child's growing up years and these play a huge role in their general development.

If you're searching for infant learning toys, baby wooden toys, or fun and colorful toys for infants to play, we've got you covered with the very best baby toys. While you do not want to drive your child too hard and cause developmental problems for them, you really do need to provide your baby with all the best toys which may help them become smarter by doing what babies do best - having fun, laughing, and playing. Toys - and play in general - are an significant part your child's development and learning, so your selection should take into consideration a couple of important factors.

Toys play a role in the development of a child's imagination, thinking, and language abilities. From bespoke stacking toys to treasurable tales, and of course quality decoration puzzles, we have lots of unique learning toys for toddlers and kids. Parents should be careful to follow era recommendations on toys to ensure the security and help promote the growth of your child's cognitive and physical abilities.

We've got a selection of infant and toddler toys that assist them to develop their play skills and will excite and engage your child. During the weeks of discovery, it's crucial to supply your baby with a variety of age-appropriate learning toys to promote healthy growth and development. Some of the infant learning toys commonly used for stimulating sight sense from the babies consist of colorful cubes, picture books, play hide and seek with items, soft books and soft toys with a variety of colour and patterns among various others.

While interacting with parents and caregivers provides the best education during baby's first few months, supplying educational toys for babies will provide other kinds of physical action through sight, sound, and touch that will keep their growing brains active, and help encourage their healthy development. Toys that encourage kids to think and do something may help in the growth of problem-solving and logic skills. Our moms' toddler toys are ones that keep their movers playing and engaged - and that may boost their child's development.

Baby Einstein is a line of multimedia products and toys which specializes in interactive activities for kids aged 3 months to 3 years. Choosing infant toys that have been designed for the age group of your baby could offer a stimulating impact on their landmarks. Explore the selection of baby toys and find playtime ideas, parenting manuals and advice from specialists on child growth.

Supply your child a lot of learning opportunities through large assortment of toys: Toys for tub time, toddler cubes, books, puzzles, roller coaster toys, shape sorter, soft toys stackers, wooden toys, DVDs and CDs. This learning fun can be made by the choice of playthings and developmentally appropriate toys! Shop the assortment of Baby and Toddler toys at Doug, Melissa & for infant toys created to encourage exploration that was developmental and learning.

If you'd like to find the variety that's available of the merchandise mentioned previously, check out the Baby Developmental Toys pages at Learning Toy Stores You will also discover different sorts of learning toys among the shops there. Unlike toys that just entertain your kid, these toys are supposed to build up your baby's fine motor skills, help with recognition of sounds and sights, familiarity with various textures and brain development. Another study done by Jeffrey Trawick-Smith found them playing with nine toys deemed perfect for growth and took 60 different kids ages three to four.

Playing with toys is regarded as important when it comes to learning about the world around us and growing up. Younger children use toys to detect their individuality, help their bodies grow strong, learn cause and effect, research relationships, and exercise skills they'll need as adults. While V-Tech and LeapFrog toys enhanced or improved childrens' Additional reading mental and motor skills, many parents feel that nothing else brings out the imagination and creativity of the children like wooden toys because of these, there's no button to press so it will begin to move, light up or play so... (read more) While electronic toys could be acceptable for older children, then for a baby, apart from flashing lights which could amuse it for a brief time, they don't offer much for the development of a very young kid.

Having profited in my early involvement with music, I've got a great grasp of the benefit that kids musical toys can provide in a child's early growth and in later life. The Playskool is a superb company controlling the toy market from very old times in order to develop the motor skills as well as bring happiness on the face of kindergarten aged children and new born. Children love to play along with most baby toys allow the child to do that with no realizing they are also developing vital skills while they play with.

Soft toys for playtime or great little toys that make learning fun. While shopping for toddler toys, then you will be searching for toy between the ages of 3 and 1. This is a really important point in your child's life and also for the learning course that they're on. They are interested in what is going on about them and learning seems fun and exciting once you obtain the right type of toys. TOYK-3D Music Mobile Phone-Toddler Toys-for Kids Designed Learning Toys-Cartoon Music Phone-The Best Educational Toy Gift-Baby Mobile Phone-Toys for 1 Year Old.

In fact, there have been a number of studies that have shown that music that is played to your baby still in the uterus has many advantages for brain growth and might help to promote learning, language, and music development later in life. Music and Toys are essential for infants in order for proper learning and development to happen. The LeapStart is a trendy, fun, educational and interactive toy that children are desperate to get their hands on. In our opinion, it's a reasonable price for a fantastic product which sets children up for learning.

Combine learning with drama and lay the foundations to your child's learning with our fab toys that are educational. Additionally, Toys will not only enhance your infant's physical development Once he's able to join in easy games with you, play will develop his cognitive , creative and social development skills too. Made to combine pleasure with child development, we have tantalising textures, stimulating sounds and captivating colors in toys to develop baby's senses through to fun activities, games and toys for toddlers.

Helen's son is two weeks old, lately, one of her friends told her that put one brilliant toys on the infant carriage are advantageous to develop children's eyesight, therefore in the following day, Helen purchased one yellow small size bear toy and then tied it on the handrail of the baby carriage. Designed to encourage learning and play, whilst providing hours of fun, our assortment of infant and toddler toys includes Fisher Price, Leap Frog and Peppa Pig. To help you out, we've rounded up the best toys and accessories in Fenwick for babies and kids, such as the hottest must-haves, playsets and outside games, amongst a few of the much-loved snuggly soft toys.

Several educational toys for babies and children are available, which not only increase the child's knowledge about the environment and human body, but also develop the child's problem solving skills, creativity and cognitive thinking. Ian Harris writes concerning wooden toys, their educational benefits and play significance for babies, toddlers and kids. Toys have always had an important part in contributing to children's growth where they are used to practice and find out about the abilities which are necessary in adulthood.

Independent play will encourage a baby's development, but multi-sensory stimulation introduced by means of an adult is the actual catalyst for innovative learning. EBeanstalk carries a diverse choice of infant educational toys it's ideal for baby gifts or kid's development. The Lamaze Infant Development System inspires baby through four stages of development, making it easy for you to pick Lamaze toys that satisfy infant's raising energy levels, challenge maturing skills, and captivate the imagination.

The Lamaze® Toys Infant Development System® guides you through four important stages of your baby's development, allowing you to select Lamaze toys that fit naturally into their play routines. Other toys like pull along toys and wooden infant walkers are perfect for learning how to walk along with helping them to develop physically in addition to mentally. Baby learning toys such as developing touch senses can be anything such as textured toys, dolls, soft toys, balls and more.

The same is true for your infant, if your infant lacks stimulation from a young age they'll grow more slowly and maybe never catch up. Baby toys will help them learn and develop all of the skills they need. Some parents donate the toys of their children since they understand that unfortunate kids are going to be able to play with this. Pretend play which includes the creation of scenarios and stories from children help in the development of terminology, problem-solving, and social abilities.

Toys that grow with the child can be fun at different developmental stages. Some wonderful educational and learning toys for infants and toddlers include wood puzzles, blocks, shape-sorters, and artwork stuff including crayons and clay. The Baby Einstein collection of toys, books, games and DVD's are all designed to be exciting and educational for the child's age group.

Buy baby & children toys at India at Online toys & gaming store for educational, enjoyable, musical, electronics, games and much more for 0-12 decades. 1-3 Months: A bit more mature with motor skills, the baby will love toys which can be held and played with. The bodily and psychological development of the children develops at a rapid pace playing with these wooden toys.

The wooden infant toys provide for a learning experience for those kids. They are able to make toys that children of all ages love playing and tag along when they move from the house. VTech learning toys for children birth to age 9.

We all know that babies will learn these skills obviously, but what educational infant toys do is help speed up that procedure. Even though most parents believe that a whirring, beeping toy may attract a child, the truth is that most children love toys that inspire inventive and imaginative play. In the age of gaming consoles and computer games, toys form an essential part of a child's growth.

Adorned with colorful regularly detachable toys hanging only within baby's reach, these developmental baby toys also give an opportunity to develop motor skills, eye coordination and they're simple to tote around. Playing can help a child develop skills; toys are the resources for them develop and to learn those abilities. 29 Also, Claire Mansbach and researcher Carol Auster market that allowing kids to play with toys which fit their abilities would help them to better develop their abilities.

22 Even some toys which are promoted for a particular age range may even harm the growth of children in that range. Mary Ucci, Educational Director of the Child Study Center of Wellesley College , has shown how such toys positively affect the development , cognitive development , emotional growth , and social development of children. These toys provide way to a world where children's drama is independent and isolated of their social limitations placed leaving the kids free to delve to the imaginary and idealized version of what the advancement in life could be. 18.

If, like the author, you are convinced that a baby's toys are still an essential facet in the learning process of that kid then you will want to ensure that the toys that you buy meet with the criteria outlined in this report. I am aware from personal experience, just how difficult it can be for parents or grand parents to be able to take the time required to research and locate the best and most children toys. I've actually been able to see this development today that I have a beautiful granddaughter and have had the opportunity to watch her response when introduced to some of the fantastic musical toys available today, as she's grown from a baby to a very active 2 year-old.

Remember the age appropriateness of this merchandise and the underlying purpose during playtime, when choosing your children toys.

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The Thirty and One Nights' Momentary Diversion - Within Every Angle And Absorbed By The Matrix Of Reflection

The denizens of the Applied Physics lab, at least some of them, are back from "Nodejacked" for another tale of crazy angles and crazier consequences -- and siqq burns on Gravitational Distortion, H.P. Lovecraft, and the author.

Within Every Angle And Absorbed By The Matrix Of Reflection

"Okay," I said, "I can help Carolína out with this; it's no problem, I don't have anything this afternoon anyway.  But… are you really sure that you really want to run this Stan your notes like in a third-rate moeshit iincho plot flag?  We're in college.  He's a big boy.  If he wants to get credit, he can go to class like a normal person.  It'd be one thing if he was sick, but he's just hikkied, isn't he?  I don't think I've seen him show up all semester."

Riley set something down on the shelf with a clunk and a huff and a weary hunch of the shoulders, and turned away from a long open-sided metal gearbox with a wide fan like an artillery elevator sticking out of it, and locked on to me with a look of long-suffering resignation. "Sajitha, welcome to the wide and wonderful world of the apartment reference.  Back when I first moved out of the freshman dorms, Stan and I lived together in Adelard Towers.  You remember, that condo village out in the sticks where the Guatemalan mafia had the meth lab that burned down, and the property manager fled to Norway to escape prosecution, and everybody in the developer's office got deported to India?  Well, what that means is that I have this property on my record, and Stan has it on his record, and the only people who can tell a prospective landlord that we weren't involved in this gangbang of drugs, corruption, and seven-alarm three-acre fires, and are actually good tenants despite living there, are us – everyone else is in jail or out of the country or both. So I am stuck to him, and he is stuck to me, and if he fails out of school and my landlord raises the rent again, I am going to have a hell of a time finding a place that I can afford.  As long as I have anything to say about it, Stan is going to pass his exams and not flunk out – at least until I can get through a couple more tenancies without any other buildings exploding or catching on fire."  Riley's face was grim: this was for real.

"Fine," I said, hands up.  "Okay; I don't want you to get in trouble either, so I guess that's good enough.  Are we set to go, or is he super weird about notes on a thumb drive and do we need to go by the library and print everything out?"

Riley sighed and squinted.  "You'd think he would be, with how time-cube weird he is about everything else, but when I sent Leo over, he said that Stan had this triambic icosahedron thing that he used to purify the thumb drive and it was ok.  Leo didn't get his thumb drive back, but at least Stan passed the damn midterm." Something creaked on the shelf, and Riley quickly turned around to make sure the gearbox or Bofors action or whatever wasn't going to rip it off the wall.

"So, like a razor pyramid, but for the kind of very special whackos who can also pass algebraic topology courses if someone makes sure they get all the notes," I said, rolling my eyes.  "All right; not a problem.  The drive's just a burner from the last career fair, and I'll be careful, when we're over his place, not to talk about anything against a four-corner day.  Jesus." I stuffed the drive in my pocket, picked up my bag, and hustled through the door to the applied physics lab so that Carolína could reset the EMO drop bars behind us.

"So wait," I said to Carolína, as we climbed up into the bus to head from the engineering quad back downtown, "you know where we're going already.  How do you know where this Stan lives?  Have you taken him notes before?  What's his apartment like?  Is he going to hurf at us?  Does he smell?"

She shook her head.  "No, I just have him on Facebook and in an old group text.  I was in a set theory class with him last semester – he goes to his math classes.  He… no, Stan is definitely not normal, but he'll go to class if he cares about it, and if you find him there, he's not more weird than like any other weird guy who is into math.  I don't know about his apartment – when he was in class, though, he didn't smell so bad you noticed."

I nodded, slowly.  Okay.  So this wasn't probably going to be that bad; you got a lot of weird guys in engineering, and some of the ones who didn't go to class were like actual live-under-a-bridge trolls with body odor that would break windows, but if Stan wasn't, then this would be just a pain rather than dangerous.  I should have known – Riley said they'd roomed together out in that complex before it burned down, and Riley wouldn't've put up with trollishness.  "Okay. So what's his deal then?  Why does he go to math classes but can't drag himself up to Fields and Waves?  It's in the same building – on days he has math classes he's got to go up to campus anyway, and it's not like he's a damn grad student who has one class a day, tops. If he goes to math classes, it's got to be something other than being lazy or trollish if he skips the other ones on purpose."

Carolína furrowed her brow.  "I don't know, but I think I remember that he was working on some big project, something math, that was way more important than anything else.  He got real, real weird when he was talking about it – like it was almost a religious thing for him."

I shook my head back and forth.  Guh.  So that was his deal.  Utterly unsurprising.  "Uuuuugh.  One of those. Another one of those.  All listening to bizarre IDM.  All writing tech-death-metal lyrics on the walls.  All putting stellated polyhedra on everything.  All running David Icke but the reptoids are being controlled by intelligent shades of vibrating nanoscale colors from higher-order dimensions.  All living on hot pockets and freaking out about how one can turn into a Klein bottle."  I knocked my head against the bus window.

"Come on – he can't be that bad.  Riley used to live with him."

"Yeah – used to; maybe he's gotten weirder since, or they split because he was getting too weird and hotboxing the entire house.  Personally, I blame the writers," I said, sitting back up because our stop was coming up.  "Anybody who's ever mentioned a 'shining trapezohedron' or used a Szilassi torus as a gateway to another dimension ought to get punted off a bridge, because it convinces guys with poor social skills that if they keep grinding on geometry and do enough of the right drugs, they can become an actual wizard instead of just an internet one.  It's got to be the writing: when people just do tons of DMT and smoke weed, they turn out fine. Well, yeah, they go stoner and drop out of anything useful, but they don't get weird about math like the ones who read weird fiction do." Carolína rolled her eyes and shook her head as she stood up; this was our stop, and it wouldn't be too far to get to Stan's place, give him the notes, and then just forget about him forever.

According to Carolína's phone's check-in cloud, Stan's place was a little out of the way; it was a couple streets off the main drag, an old triple-decker next to an abandoned auto body shop with weeds growing through some old truck frames in the back, where she finally climbed up the steps and looked over the mailbox: Stanislav Faldyna, apartment three and a half. There was no doorbell for apartment three and a half.

I shrugged.  "So what do you want to do?  Do we ring the doorbells for everyone else and ask how we get to apartment 3.5?"

Carolína squinted. "I… guess?  I don't know, I mean, probably everybody is out, and I don't know how I'd feel about some random ringing my doorbell to ask about somebody else in the building, but I guess we got to?  I don't really know him that well that I can text him and ask him to come let us in, and I don't want to like creeply-crawl around the house to look for another doorbell."  She pulled out her phone like she was trying to decide if she should wake up that old group text, or maybe call Riley to see what we were supposed to do.

"Hey," a woman said behind us, "are you looking for someone?  Are you looking for Javier?  He doesn't live here any more."  I turned around and looked her over; a black woman, about our age, probably a student like us, her braids twisted high up on top of her head, holding textbooks in front of herself defensively, like she was wary of the randoms who were standing on her porch looking over the mailboxes and checking their phones.

"Yeah, and no – we don't know this Javier, we're actually looking for this Stan Faldyna, but there isn't a bell or a door for three and a half. Do you live here?  Do you know how three and a half works?"

The woman made an uck face.  "Stan?  He lives in the basement.  I guess you want the side door."  She nodded vaguely over at the driveway along the fence separating the lot from the weeds of the body shop, and almost shuddered as she came up past us to her own door, hauling out her keys.

"Thanks, I guess," I said after her, as she ignored us and went through the door to apartment 1.  "We'll try not to disturb you too much, and if Stan's being a dick we'll tell him to cut the shit." Nobody was listening and it felt empty and futile.  I was starting to get a bad feeling about Stan again, and I shook my head as I followed Carolína back down the front steps and around to the side door.

The side door was a squat five-foot slab of wood almost ducked into the ground next to the driveway.  No bell, but it did have a 3.5 on it. I banged on the door; if he wasn't in, we could leave the drive in his mailbox and send him a note.  Nothing.  I banged on the door again, and this time it opened barely a second later.

The door yanked in on a dead-pale, sunken-eyed, sleep-deprived-looking shrimp with sandy brown hair sticking up this way, that way, and every other which way.  He looked like he needed a sandwich, or like he was strung out on heroin, or maybe both; I shot a look at Carolína, and she nodded.  This was Stan, and this was his deal, and we'd have to take it from here.  I swung my bag around and fished the drive out.

"Hey," I said, pushing it over on him, "you don't know us – or at least you don't know me – but Riley sent us over with the notes for Fields and Waves.  This is it, so purify it or whatever, and make sure that you show up for the final."  I pushed the thumb drive into his chest, and he finally reached up a hand, taking it like he wasn't sure what a USB drive was, or maybe like his depth perception was super bad.  He took it at last, and I turned to go.

"Wait," he said, in a voice that sounded like it had cobwebs and an inch-thick layer of dust on it.  "Thanks.  But since you're here, can you help me with something?  I don't want to bother you, but I can't do it by myself."

I stopped.  Going down into weird basement apartments with weird dudes was hazardous to your health, but Riley needed Stan intact and passing his classes, and he looked like even Carolína could beat him up with one hand behind her back if he tried anything funny. "Well, maybe.  What is it?"

He was looking flat at us.  "I need to move my bookcase.  It's big. It's too heavy to lift myself."  It was an innocent enough request, and looking at him it didn't look like he even knew how to lie like a creep.  I looked at Carolína, and she shrugged; I guess this was okay.

"All right," I said.  "If it'll help you study, we can help you move your bookcase.  It'll be easier with all three of us."  He nodded, and went back down the steps; we followed him down into the basement.

Stan's basement apartment smelled like weed and Pot Noodle and unwashed laundry, but it wasn't really that much of a sty; Stan didn't have a lot in the way of stuff.  He wasn't big on lights, either, and I nearly tripped coming down the stairs in the dark.  He opened up a couple panels in an origami ball with a bunch of short stellated facets, and put the drive inside, closing the paper up around it. Stan motioned over at the far wall, under a low ground-level window. "That's it.  It needs to move."

I took a step closer, then another, moving around some kind of trash pile or extremely large origami subassembly in the middle of the floor.  The bookcase was empty, but still long and heavy-looking. "Okay," I said.  "Just let me and Carolína put our bags down somewhere and we'll help move it.  Is the futon okay? Where does it need to go?"  I'd set my bag down on a cleanish-looking part of the futon without waiting for an answer.

Stan walked over and grabbed one end of the bookcase, not really pointing anything out.  "It just needs to move – back in the kitchen would probably be all right.  As long as it's here, the muoctahedron can't spread.  And it must spread, so that it can replace the wall." I didn't follow, but I took the other end, and Carolína got in the middle, and by waiting for a cue we finally convinced Stan to lift up and guide the bookcase where it needed to go: the middle of the kitchen floor, where he just left it with a thump.  I went back to get our bags, and saw some kind of tiled pattern sticking out of the wall in the corner, back behind where the bookcase had been.  It was mold, or tiles, or some kind of garbage thrown in the corner: Stan wasn't growing some kind of infinte theoretical lattice in this basement, and if he was it certainly wouldn't be blocked by a bookcase.

Carolína was less sure.  "I'm sorry, Stan, the what? Are you trying to extend your apartment by replacing the walls with a theoretical geometric construct?  Besides the part where that can't happen, this is the basement:  you're messing with the foundation. If you replace the walls, the house will fall down."

He shook his head.  "The muoctahedron is an accident: it's the herald of the change to come.  It follows the completion of my great disnub dirhomidodecahedron – it arises from its resonances, even incomplete.  When it's completed, the pattern will fold forever." He made just the least little motion in the direction of the origami trashpile on his floor, and there was a weird, unnatural light in his eyes – they seemed to be shining from within in the dark.

I shouldered my bag and tugged at Carolína's sleeve.  "Okay; well, we've moved your bookcase, so you can get back to building your impossible figure and studying for Fields and Waves when that drive's vibrations are right.  Enjoy your lattice, bye."  I sidled over to the steps, and went up them sideways to the door, making sure to keep an eye on Stan as we got the hell out of his place before he got any weirder.

"I give it two weeks before he gets arrested beating up the clerk at a 7-11 because nothing comes in a Klein bottle," I said as we hustled to the bus stop.  "I don't want to be the one who has to tell Riley about it, but ya boy Stan is cuckoo nutterbutters."

"As long as he's just doing origami, he's not going to beat anybody up," Carolína put in, a little hurt.  "And he's going to be doing it for a while – he said he was building a great disnub dirhomidodecahedron, right?"

"Yeah, and he said he had an infinite lattice 'growing' on his back wall. He's a few vacuum cleaners short of a jam band."

"No, that origami thing – that origami thing in the midle of the floor. It definitely looked like it was big enough to be part of a Skilling's figure, to actually make all the vertices with those pieces of paper.  And if he's really making one of those, he'll never finish."

I stopped dead on the sidewalk.  "I don't get you.  Should I, or is this something that you only get in the advanced geometry classes that you and he did?"

Carolína paused for a second, thinking.  "It's pretty hard, and it's pretty obscure.  The great disnub dirhombidodecahedron is a hidden uniform polyhedron – it doesn't follow the rules of all the other ones, so it gets called out as 'degenerate', but it's still the only shape in the universe that behaves like it.  And it's probably impossible to actually build – it's degenerate because some of its edges are double edges, where four polygons meet on a single line instead of two.  You can make it in Mathematica, but physically making out of paper on your floor, I don't think it's possible."  She looked disturbed.  "If he can do it, it'll be almost as big a deal as when John Skilling discovered the thing, but if he can't do it and gets stuck – and that thing about the muoctahedron –"

"Well, I guess we've got to hope he finishes it, and gets prizes and props for being a math genius," I said, pulling out my phone.  "I'm going to call Riley to report in; after that you want to go to the Indonesian popup place and get some satay sticks, or do you have lab?"

Carolína nodded. "Sure, I can hang out; I mean, it's not like he's going to burn the neighborhood down with a polyhedron or anything."  I scrolled down to Riley's number, and we went left on Franks to get to Lombok Bali rather than the bus.

I completely forgot about Stan, and his Skilling figure and his muoctahedron, and the part where he was either a genius or totally crazypants, for most of another two weeks, until Carolína called me out of the blue while I was bagging up my groceries at the party store.  "Sajitha," she said, "You still have your GPS heat map, right?  I'm trying to get to Stan's to take him another thumb drive for Riley, but I can't find his place."

That threw me for a loop.  "Carolína, didn't you lead us over there the last time?  He lives in that eggshell-white triple-decker next to the abandoned auto body lot right off Whitlock, right?  Are you over there now?"

"That's just it – there is no Whitlock Street.  Where it should join Macnamara there is nothing – the house numbers are messed up, and it's on the map, but I can't get there.  I walk around, and my map pin goes squiggly, and then I end up on the other side."  She sounded nervous – maybe even afraid, like she knew but was hoping it was just her going crazy.

"Carolína, just calm down," I said.  "You probably just got turned around on one of those streets that isn't marked right, or they were putting in a new Dunkins and you had to go an unfamiliar way round.  You're just lost; it's not like the whole neighborhood folded up around some kind of weird topological anomaly and bent itself out of three-space or anything, right?  Right?  Carolína? Are you there?  Carolína? Carolína?"

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Indeed, the young are tethered to a slumber land of no ideas or ideals. Shackled to the beasts of debt and endless consumer-rent-mortgage-fee-levy-tax-fine-surcharge-hidden add on Capitalism. They amble to the nearest Starbucks and find the plastic putrid world and shitty coffee essence safe, conformist, the place to snuggle in with Twitter-Snapchat-Instagram-Facebook-Spotify. Add to that the general malaise of wanting nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with hipster joker-a-second crap they have downloading and meandering through their apps, and we have a country of no serious thinking. Tapped into the spine of the controllers, the brain centers micro-processing the emotions of the dictators. Not to say the oldsters in US of A aren’t the same – ambulating in the grand isles of Costco and Walmart, and, yes, juiced up on a triple-shot foamy caramel latte. The faces of red-white-and-blue are the hollowed-out skulls of the zombie culture of wanting-getting-having-buying-discarding-paying it down through the ka-chang of the ever-present ATM. I worked hard as a social worker-case manager-breeder of anarchy with old and young, now the young, kids in care, state custody, plied by the champions of bureaucracy, who have some shekels and grants here and there to help them get way past the eight ball they are behind. Shuffled from foster home to foster home, many intersecting with the juvenile injustice system, and many bouncing from school to school, no foundations, no biological link to a put-together family, whatever that is these days in the land of ballooning debts and general anxiety disorder over the simple disparity of why the gap of accumulation of wealth is getting bigger and bigger. With fewer haves than can be imaginable, and mostly haves not wondering how each and every public service had now been captured by the MBA Gestapo and elite SS forces of financial felonies. That is the anxiety of the rebellious like me. Youth having to make a choice of learning how to weld metal for a living, at the community college, then hunkering down three to a room, or five to a living room. Rents are criminal, and available places for kids coming out of state foster custody are about as rare as a wild living trotting wolf in Wyoming. Kids go from state custody to homelessness . . . or variations on a theme . . . sometimes back to the very mothers or fathers that state bureaucracy yanked them from in the first place for heinous crimes. We play charades with these youth, with their minds, their dreams, their futures, their lives. We de-link ourselves from screaming at the top of our lungs – “The systems are broken, gone, because we let the billionaires and millionaires set policy, hold sway over states, cities, regions, denude all agency for a public commons, public good, public health, public economy and public investment track.” We have tuition debts in the hundreds of thousands per graduate student (AKA mark, sucker born every nano second, PT Barnum, yeah!) after a few years past the undergraduate degree. We have a beleaguered youth who know nothing but the logo-brand game, know nothing but what they might want on top of their triple-decker quadruple-supreme, triple-dipped seven-scoop ice cream Sunday. Conversations are about things, about stupid shows, about video games, about the nothingness, zilch of the inhumane celebrity-actor-musician-athlete culture. And, is it their fault, these Gen Z kids, when we have ball-and-chained their barely burgeoning lives and decades of future absurd toil to the whims of the murderous marketers and money mongers? I have youth who can’t hitch a ride on public transportation because it’s buggered up, runs one bus to the hour, or never makes it out to rural or suburban locales, and then they have to throw down for Lyft or Uber just to make it to their shit jobs where they are cogs . . . . I was just talking to them about how screwed up Uber is . . . “I didn’t even think about getting workers’ compensation,” John said. “Uber wasn’t paying for anything.” John knew what many drivers know: that Uber fights tooth and nail in courts and in front of labor boards from New York to California to classify its drivers as independent contractors, in part to avoid having to pay for workers’ compensation payouts to its more than 300,000 drivers, a workforce comparable to major employers like Home Depot and Target. . . . . or how rotten Google et al are The Highlands Forum doesn’t need to produce consensus recommendations. Its purpose is to provide the Pentagon a shadow social networking mechanism to cement lasting relationships with corporate power, and to identify new talent, that can be used to fine-tune information warfare strategies in absolute secrecy. Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns. Other participants have included senior media professionals: David Ignatius, associate editor of the Washington Post and at the time the executive editor of the International Herald Tribune; Thomas Friedman, long-time New York Times columnist; Arnaud de Borchgrave, an editor at Washington Times and United Press International; Steven Levy, a former Newsweek editor, senior writer for Wired and now chief tech editor at Medium; Lawrence Wright, staff writer at the New Yorker; Noah Shachtmann, executive editor at the Daily Beast; Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices Online; Nik Gowing of the BBC; and John Markoff of the New York Times. … or how felonious Amazon has always been, continues to be, and will forever be a curse to all humanity if we do not just stop using it, and taking the big guy to tax court, like the courts of Inquisition taking youth to court if they fudge on their housing subsidy, or the court of Scarlet Letter for daddies in arrears for child support . . . . Yep, I try and tell the Latte Lads and Lasses that Amazon is the criminal enterprise, maximum security vanguard of all bad things . . . . As Amazon spreads around the world selling everything and squeezing other businesses that use its platform, is Jeff Bezos laughing at humanity? His ultimate objective seems to preside over a mega-trillion dollar global juggernaut that is largely automated, except for that man at the top with the booming laugh who rules over the means by which we consume everything from goods, to media, to groceries. Crushing competitors, history shows, is leads to raising prices by monopolizers. Consumers, workers and retailers alike must be on higher alert and address this growing threat. You have nothing to lose except Bezos’s tightening algorithmic chains. To start the conversation, you can wait for Franklin Foer’s new book out this September, titled World Without a Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. Until then, a good substitute is his 2014 article in The New Republic, ‘Amazon Must be Stopped.’ I tell my youth to look into it, how the billionaires’ club is made up of perverts – hating man and woman kind, hating the poor, the downtrodden, and certainly hating foster youth or recovering adults, and the homeless, and the working poor looking for a decent clinic to set a broken bone from working like slaves for these millionaires and billionaires. Our youth are prime victims of agnotolgy – the deliberate erasing of facts, truths, beliefs, but truly, history. The Jewish Nakba scrubbing. Holocaust deniers in Zion, and the new Zion, the American continent. How Canadians know nothing of their own terrible rape and murder of first nations peoples . . . their support of African despots . . . their terrible homegrown devils of international mining and arms sales . . . . Agnotology, the Two Minutes of Hate, a la Orwell, the fabricated Emmanuel Goldstein. Youth who know nothing of North Korea, of Vietnam, of any of the truths of their own womb . . . truths scrubbed by schools, by the controllers, facilitated by the Media and Publishing, and consumed by overworked, overwrought parents. Youth that hate government but love the big boys and girls running roughshod over our-their own survival: the business class. I find it interesting that Ralph Nader goes on an attack of Just Jeff Bezos (Amazon dot conned) without footnoting his piece that ALL the Fortune 1000 captains (Goose-stepping toward the vaults of shekels) of industry-finance-military-real estate-technology-media-energy are dirtier than the Mafioso, dirtier than any El Chapo, dirtier than any den of pimps and pornographers. Is there a clean, good one on the lists below? And think of the investments, the power these people wield to determine global financial-military-cultural future: Bill Gates: $86.0 billion,  United States, Microsoft Warren Buffett: $75.6 billion, United States, Berkshire Hathaway Jeff Bezos: $72.8 billion, United States, Amazon.com Amancio Ortega: $71.3 billion, Spain, Inditex, Zara Mark Zuckerberg: $56.0 billion, United States, Facebook Carlos Slim: $54.5 billion, Mexico, América Móvil, Grupo Carso Larry Ellison: $52.2 billion, United States, Oracle Corporation Charles Koch: $48.3 billion, United States, Koch Industries David Koch: $48.3 billion,United States, Koch Industries Michael Bloomberg: $47.5 billion, United States, Bloomberg L.P. Or the entire DNA strains of the World’s Richest Families, they any better than Jeff Bezos and Monopoly Amazon? That’s the rub is it not, that the poverty my youth suffer, the poverty I suffer, all these shell games played with our social right: national health care; real social security; public schools and colleges; libraries for the people; banks of the states; water, air, land, food, press/journalism part of the public commons; the right to a roof over your head and a light bulb and plate of slop and a flicker of heat in the dead of winter; the vast collective right of nature to persist, excel, and evolve. This country is set ablaze by the entire Little Eichmann and Big Himmler and Ugly Zionist and Crusader logic of pain and theft. My small charges, 16 to 21, are caught in a web of psychological-physiological-economic-educational-medical-spiritual deception, and they have nothing to turn to than the ebbing and flowing corpuscles created by the generators of multi-syllabic, three dozen hyphenated things they consume, all nano-particled and sliced and diced with the magic of the chemical still. We have kids with ticks, kids with obesity-lethargy-lingering intelligence and cognition. We have children who are the essence of the Stanley Milgram experiment on obedience, except his was an experiment on authority, lab coats and Yale basement authority, whereas today, the Milgram experiment is fluid, directly wired into Facebook-Google-Anything Digital. Today, youth and the old are kettled to consumer and be all they can be based on a giant interstellar Madison Avenue-PsyOps experiment to lobotomize-confuse-disassociate-deny humans in this country. Imagine, no rebellion, no running through the streets, no daily Molotov’s thrown into the limos and onto the doorsteps of the millionaire and billionaire murderers. Milgram examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on “obedience” – that they were just following orders from their superiors. The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question: Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974). These finance-foisting, tax-robbing, war-creating, debt-inducing, human/child/ecosystem-sacrificing pigs are given more than a trillion get out of jail cards. They are running things, playing editor like Jeff Bezos, ruining everything like Mr. PayPal – My joke about Thiel’s “Brownshirt Combinator” isn’t as funny now, is it? ‘Transition Adviser Peter Thiel Could Directly Profit From Mass Deportations’: Palantir Technologies, the data-mining company co-founded by billionaire and Trump transition adviser Peter Thiel, will likely assist the Trump administration in its efforts to track and collect intelligence on immigrants, according to a review of public records by The Intercept. Since 2011, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Office of Homeland Security Investigations has paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars to help construct and operate a complex intelligence system called FALCON, which allows ICE to store, search, and analyze troves of data that include family relationships, employment information, immigration history, criminal records, and home and work addresses. […] Working closely with a president-elect who has pledged to dramatically expand ICE, Thiel’s varied connections to the immigration agency place him in a position to potentially benefit financially from a deportation campaign that carries highly personal stakes for millions of Americans. […] In addition to containing information on family relationships and immigration history, the records FALCON collects can also include photographs of subjects, employment information, educational background, and “geospatial data.” […] Last month, it was reported that Trump and his advisers are drafting plans to launch a campaign of workplace raids across the country to find undocumented immigrants. With a mandate to enforce laws relating to unauthorized employment, HSI has been identified as the primary component within ICE that conducts such job-site raids. This past October, after a lengthy investigation, HSI agents raided several Mexican restaurants in Buffalo, New York, arresting more than a dozen workers, some of whom were charged with criminal counts of “illegal re-entry,” raising an outcry from immigrant advocates. In 2013, after an HSI raid on carwashes in Phoenix, more than two dozen immigrants were reportedly sent to Enforcement and Removal Operations officers for possible deportation. ICE can conduct such raids even in so-called sanctuary cities that have refused to allow local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE in finding and removing undocumented immigrants. […] Palantir, which is backed by the CIA’s venture capital arm, did not respond to a request for comment regarding its ICE contracts and concerns over potential conflicts of interest. Peter Thiel spokesperson Jeremiah Hall declined to comment on a list of emailed queries, including a question asking whether Thiel has yet signed the Trump transition ethics agreement. While Ralph Nader is huge in so many ways, and I worked for his campaigns and was lambasted by colleagues in journalism, education and the environmental movement, the real rub is how he at his wise age can even stomach ANYTHING the billionaire class says, does, and infers. His Utopian thing, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, was and is off the mark, big-time – In the cozy den of the large but modest house in Omaha where he has lived since he started on his first billion, Warren Buffett watched the horrors of Hurricane Katrina unfold on television in early September 2005. . . . On the fourth day, he beheld in disbelief the paralysis of local, state, and federal authorities unable to commence basic operations of rescue and sustenance, not just in New Orleans, but in towns and villages all along the Gulf Coast. . . He knew exactly what he had to do. . . So begins the vivid fictional account by political activist and bestselling author Ralph Nader that answers the question, “What if?” What if a cadre of super-rich individuals tried to become a driving force in America to organize and institutionalize the interests of the citizens of this troubled nation? What if some of America’s most powerful individuals decided it was time to fix our government and return the power to the people? What if they focused their power on unionizing Wal-Mart? What if a national political party were formed with the sole purpose of advancing clean elections? What if these seventeen superrich individuals decided to galvanize a movement for alternative forms of energy that will effectively clean up the environment? What if together they took on corporate Goliaths and Congress to provide the necessities of life and advance the solutions so long left on the shelf by an avaricious oligarchy? What could happen? America is a country of the dead. As is Israel, and note that not ONE cute-real-serious-well-acted-poorly- acted movie about the perfect Milgram subjects – Israelis – has ever been made, produced, shown on the Media, one clearly hoisted by Zionists – in some of their own words, as Gilad Atzmon lends some weight to this, In his recent address to the ultra-Zionist and war-mongering Stand With Us, Alan Dershowitz said, ‘People say Jews are too powerful, too strong, too rich, we control the media, we’ve too much this, too much that and we often apologetically deny our strength and our power. Don’t do that!’ Elder Zionist Dershowitz who acquired for himself the reputation of a “remarkable liar” (Chomsky) and a “serial plagiarist” (Finkelstein) probably decided, just before he meets his creator, to give truth one last try. In our world, no one can deny that Jews are “too powerful,” “too rich” or that they “control the media.” Yet no one can ignore that Jews themselves are rarely apologetic about their extensive and overblown power. In fact, as with Dershowitz, most Jews tend to boast about the various facets of Jewish domination and, while boasting, use every trick in the book to silence anyone else who points to that power. As I have been arguing for several years, Jewish power is the ability to suppress the discussion on Jewish power. Actually, Dershowitz’ approach here is rather refreshing. He admits that Jews are overwhelmingly powerful yet insists on presenting a rationale as to why Jews should never apologize about this overbearing and abusive power. ‘WE (the Jews, presumably) have earned the right to influence public debate, WE have earned the right to be heard, WE have contributed disproportionately to success of this country.’ One may wonder who is included in that ‘WE’ that has contributed so much to the ‘success’ of America. Is he referring to his client and close friend Jeffrey Epstein who pimped under-aged girls for the elites? Does Dershowitz’ ‘WE’ include Alan Greenspan who led the country to class genocide? Or perhaps his ‘WE’ denotes all those Wall Street Jewish bankers, like the Goldmans, the Sachs and the Soroses – those who, on a daily basis, gamble on the American future and the global economy. And almost certainly, Dershowitz’ ‘WE’ includes Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson who have managed to reduce American politics into merely an internal Zionist affair. These are daunting times, the entire globe sucked of its telephone calls, its computer messages, all the uploads and downloads, every human individual defecation and urination and climax cataloged in these nuclear-powered cloud servers. Battened down, these surveillance hatches. Young people are now the cows, bred to follow the orders of Old Navy and any new shiny merchant of duncery and death; to pay for their cell phones, diligently, to pay-pay-pay for the poisons going into their brains and bellies. They are taught to not question or to not rebel, or to not just sit down and start a ruckus. Daily, the power of corrupted commercialization is like s drug resistant tuberculosis eating at our next and our next generation’s soul. Until there is no resistant antinode or antibiotic to stop the final solution drawn through the elaborate algorithms of controllers – massive forgetting, massive insanity. These demigods — the monopolies — supplying every microgram of humanity’s needs, now that we are sealed in this fate of capitalism – addicted to goods and services unnecessary, and willing to watch all good and common needs vanish with each new libertarian sucking the blood from us all like the vampires and nematodes of the capitalist elites. http://clubof.info/

[jedi-hawkins]

Don’t worry, just pan the cameras straight over me in the corner chanting “tech. Tech. TECH. TECH!!!”

There are too many parallels for that trooper to not be tech:

the familiar grunting while moving heavy rocks

the “left femur crushed by approximately 150kg of pressure”

the getting thrown off a waterfall and flopping dramatically onto the rocks

the 180 degree turn with zero thrusters in the ship as it landed

the reliance on, and frustration with his technology

the precise and clipped tone of voice

Send help

[nyx-lyris]

YES

There are too many parallels for that trooper to not be tech:

the familiar grunting while moving heavy rocks

the “left femur crushed by approximately 150kg of pressure”

the getting thrown off a waterfall and flopping dramatically onto the rocks

the 180 degree turn with zero thrusters in the ship as it landed

the reliance on, and frustration with his technology

the precise and clipped tone of voice

Send help