#Mystery Militia

[heavysighing-dreamyeyes]

How would AK!Jason go with the fact that Y/N got kidnapped by Harley Quinn’s thugs while he was busy on a mission with his Militia. Love your stories by the way!

Abducted

Hi, nonnie! Thank you! Fair warning, this gets angsty. ~2.3k words

The Arkham Knight is surrounded by the dead bodies of nine of his most trusted and skilled men. It's not a mystery how they got that way. He shot the ones that were still alive himself.

Number ten is cowering on the ground, it's pathetic, really. They were supposed to be the best of the best.

That's what he was paying them for. So why the hell aren't you in the safe house he left you in? He unloads the rest of the clip into number tens leg, voice flat as he seethes, "Where are they?"

Number ten cries out. Jason doesn't really care. "They're– Harley! Quinn's gang got 'em," number ten chokes out, shaking and sobbing and weak.

"And where, exactly, did they take them?" Jason asks, reloading his gun.

"I don't know," number ten wails, and if Jason wasn't so pissed he'd roll his eyes. But he doesn't. This is serious. You're missing, and he's on the verge of blowing Gotham to hell.

"Guess," he hisses, pressing the barrel of the gun to the man's forehead.

"I don't– they said something about a carnival," number ten chokes out.

"Anything else," The Arkham Knights asks. Number ten shakes his head vigorously. Jason pulls the trigger and watches the body slump to the floor. He turns to the rest of the men, watching as they stiffen and shift under his gaze.

He's already stalking past them, "What do you have?"

"Sir, Harley Quinn hasn't been in Gotham since the Joker died," one of the men starts. Jason wonders if they notice the way his hands clench. "But there's rumors about a separate cell of Joker apologists, fanatics trying to keep his name alive."

He grits his teeth. Fine, that's not new information. But why would they go after you? "And," he forces out, "What does that have to do with them?"

His men follow him uneasily, "GCPD flagged a shipment to ACE Chemicals that went missing a few days ago. They– it was mentioned the truck was carrying chemicals similar to the ones used in the Joker and Harley Quinn cases, sir."

If he was any less trained, any less used to the hell that is Gotham, he would have stumbled, let out choked sounds and anguish and fear.

"One of the techs has a theory it's a revenge kidnapping," one of the sergeants continues, "for taking over Joker's old hideouts last week. It looks like they used a form of the laughing gas on the sentries outside."

"They're all going to be dead by the end of the night," He snaps, gesturing towards one of the lieutenants, "Get the men to set up a parameter. No one leaves the area. And no one moves in until they're secured. Understood?"

They nod vigorously. "Bring the fear toxin," the Arkham Knight grits out. He's out of the safe house and sprinting over Gothams rooftops without another word.

He knows Gotham better than most. Knows to take a shortcut over city hall, knows to jump in three... two... one... to land perfectly on a passing train. Knows when to shoot his grappling gun for the quickest route to the abandoned fairgrounds.

His heart is racing. He can see the number tracking his pulse steadily rising. He glares at the little number on the corner of his screen with a vengeance. He doesn't get to be scared. Doesn't get to panic until you're back at the base, warm and safe in his bed.

There's bile in his throat as he stalks through the shadows of the carnival. It rises with each thug he leaves crumpled and lifeless in the dirt. He's only acting on his training now, on the drive that he has to get to you, has to save you.

He slips past decaying attractions, clenches his fists at the abandoned ACE Chemicals truck crashed into a rotted ring toss booth. He follows the laughter and taunting voices to a ripped and decrepit tent.

There's not many places to hide, but Jason's the best at what he does. He thinks he might have been born to stalk the filth of Gotham.

His eyes narrow at the sight of you. Arms tied behind your back. Bruise forming on your cheek. Dazed expression, likely a concussion. Balanced precariously on the seat of a dunk tank over a pool of neon chemicals.

His fingers twitch over his gun when one of the goons throws a ball at the target, barely missing as the others laugh.

He counts the number of Joker fanatics in the room. Thirteen men. Eight women. Six posted close enough to you where they could hit the target if he's not fast enough. Seventeen with visible guns. All with visible weapons. There's more voices outside the tent.

He eyes the woman swinging a bat covered with barbed wire a little too close to the dunk tank, too close to you. Jason wants to get you out first. There's too many variables. You could get shot. He's not fast enough.

Someone throws another baseball. It's a perfect toss. He shoots it out of the air.

"You have something of mine," The Arkham Knight drawls, stepping out of the shadows. He would smile at the way most of the room flinches at the sight of him. He would if you weren't teetering over a vat of bubbling chemicals.

One of the men steps forward. Stupid of him, really, "Finders keepers." He says it like it's a game. Like you're just some toy they picked up off the street.

Jason laughs. It's funny, that they think just because they stole you, it makes you any less his, "I'm going to give you two choices. One, you drop your weapons and leave. Two, you stay and you learn exactly what the chemicals in that vat can do."

More people leave than he expected. Huh. Guess they aren't so loyal to the clowns' legacy as they said. "I'm not scared of you," Goon number one spits. Goon number one gets a bullet in his stomach.

"You will be," The Arkham Knight murmurs. It's quick work. They're untrained, inexperienced. Half of them are high. It becomes increasingly clear with each body that hits the floor gasping that someone paid off his men to get to you.

He's pulling you off and out of the dunk tank as the last thug hits the floor, "How bad is it?" Jason's hands do not shake as he unties your wrists. (They do.) His breath does not leave his lungs when you say your head hurts. (It does.)

His eyes dart over your face and he picks you up to cradle you against his chest, "I'll have a medic look over you when we get back." He tries to sound soothing, the modulator makes it sound emotionless. You don't even acknowledge it.

He carries you out of the tent. The Joker fanatics that left are kneeling in the dirt and his men have their guns trained to kill. The Arkham Knight nods to them, "Use the Fear Toxin. Inject them with the highest dose we have. Drop the freaks still alive in the tent into the vat."

"Yes, sir," his men echo. Jason ignores the begging that starts up behind him as he carries you to the armored truck. He maneuvers you inside with him, settles you on his lap as his hand brushes the bruise on your face.

"Boss," the soldier behind the steering wheel prompts.

"Take us back to base, sergeant," The Arkham Knight says evenly, gloves still tracing your bruise. He doesn't ask questions, doesn't make any promises. The only comfort he offers is his hand gripping your waist tightly, paired with the gentle caressing of your face.

He knows it's not kind, the way he's holding you. He sees it in your eyes, even through the exhaustion and headache you're feeling, he's overbearing. He can't bring himself to care. All that matters is that you're safe in his arms.

The rest he can take care of later. It'll be simple for him and Deathstroke to pick through the rats in his ranks. Scarecrow's always in need of new test subjects, after all.

His grip tightens on you as the truck stops. The Arkham Knight picks you up easily, pushing the door open and carrying you inside the base. His soldiers are quick to move out of his way. They should be. Anyone with a brain can tell he's angry.

He's livid, at the way you hardly move, barely react to him. A medic files after him quickly as he sets you down in his personal quarters.

It's not a room he ever uses, preferring to sleep at whatever safe house you're in, but you're safer here until he can weed out the traitors. He watches you shift slightly in the chair, eyes unfocused.

Jason steps back and studies you with sharp eyes as the medic talks to you quietly, taking note of each wound and stumbled answer you give.

"Mild concussion, some scrapes and abrasions. Nothing that won't heal," the medic decides, "They shouldn't sleep for the next hour and need to be monitored for any worsening symptoms."

Jason motions them to leave. He hates to leave you alone, even for a moment, but there is one more order he needs to give. He follows the medic out the door.

A group of squad leaders stand rigid outside his quarters. Good. They should be on edge. "Make an example of any Joker or Harley Quinn sympathizers," he says, tone an unquestionable command, "Anything that's theirs, is a part of our operations by the end of the night."

He doesn't bother to stay and listen to their replies, already turning back into the room where you're waiting. Jason locks the door behind him, crossing the room in three strides and kneels at your feet.

You blink down at him. He hates the distant look in your eyes. You should be here. With him. He tugs his helmet off, "Does your head still hurt?"

You nod a little, the only proof you're really listening. He takes your hand in his brushing his thumb over your knuckles, "Say something." It's a command. It makes you jolt a little. He hates himself for it.

"I thought– they were gonna kill me," You stumble out, voice weak.

He nods, there's no pretending that's not true, "They can't kill anyone now."

He thinks you would have looked alarmed, if you didn't know what he was now. Relentless. A monster. A killer. But you do know, he's made that more than clear since the moment he got you back by his side.

You look resigned instead. Jason wishes you'd look relieved, "Do you need anything," he asks instead, reaching up to brush the bruise on your cheek. He can't help it, it's his fault that it's there.

You shake your head. He hates how quiet you're being, "Say something," he prompts again. He knows he shouldn't, knows you're in shock and you're hurt and you're tired and you're probably scared and he's not helping. But, he squeezes your hand anyway, a silent demand.

"What do you want me to say, Jason?" You breathe out, eyes finally focusing on him.

"Anything. Ask me for anything. Yell at me. Curse me out. Tell me you hate me. Hit me. Give me a bruise to match," He says almost desperately, pressing himself closer between your knees.

There's something wrong with him. He realizes that. The Arkham Knight is well aware that something inside of him is twisted, that you deserve better than this, especially after what you just went through, but he doesn't stop himself.

"I don't wanna hurt you," You murmur, "You came for me."

"I'm the reason you were there in the first place," Jason protests, both hands moving to cup your face, "I would deserve it, welcome it, if it was from you."

"I want," You start, and Jason leans forward eagerly, ready for whatever punishment you deliver, "I want to lay down. I wanna feel safe."

He falters, but doesn't move from between your legs, "You can't sleep for at least another hour."

"I know," You say quietly. Jason stares at you. You're the only thing that makes him unsure now. You always manage to knock him off center, never doing what he expects.

"Okay," he relents, scooping you up just as easily as he did in the tent. He carries you over to his bed. It's unused, perfectly made. He only ever sleeps wherever you are.

Jason carefully places you at the edge of the bed and digs through a drawer, handing you a shirt. He tugs off his armor, and frowns when you don't move.

"You don't want to sleep in that," it's not a question, and maybe he should frame it as one. Try to get nicer. But he thinks he might have forgotten how. You nod and slowly change. His eyes never leave you.

There's a few more bruises than he expected, and it makes rage coil in his chest. There's nothing he can do but crawl into bed at your side. It makes him uneasy, how little he can do for you.

He tugs you against him, he's not as gentle as he means to be.

You curl against him, fingers tangling into his shirt. He should comfort you here. Tell you it's going to be okay. Promise to protect you. He should rub your back and kiss your forehead and ease whatever pain you have in your heart.

But he's not gentle. He's not good. You're like this because of him. He holds you tighter when tears start to soak his shirt, lets you tangle your legs with his.

He doesn't manage to find the right words to say, doesn't manage to do the right thing before the hour is up, and you drift off to sleep. He doesn't think he ever will.

[cathygeha]

REVIEW

The Investigator by John Sanford

The Letty Davenport Series #1

 Letty’s entrance indicated she had a skillset that would later come in handy as she found information not all would have been able to access. She is bored in her job and ready to quit when Senator Colles offers her a job that could be perfect for her. John Kaiser, the man she is partnered with as she heads off on her first investigation, is a bit older, a seasoned warrior, bright, capable, and brings similar but different skills to the partnership that will assist them both on the case. That said, the first part was a slow slog as they got to know one another, started to work on the investigation, talked to oil men about missing oil, thought about who might be taking it, how it was being taken,  what the money was being used for and all they learned eventually provided clues that had them hustling in hopes of preventing a difficult situation.  

 This book introduced the main and supporting characters for the series, gave a bit of both backstories, gave insight into Letty’s way of working through issues, and indicated trust and respect were developing between John and Letty that should provide them with a strong working relationship.

 This is the first book I have read by Sanford, and I wasn’t sure during the slow slog of the first two-thirds of the book that this would be a series for me BUT as the pace picked up toward the end, I became more invested and do believe I would like to find out what happens next.

 Thank you to NetGalley and Canelo for the ARC – This is my honest review.

 4-5 Stars

     BLURB

 By age twenty-four, Letty Davenport has seen more action and uncovered more secrets than many law enforcement professionals. Now a recent Stanford grad with a master’s in economics, she’s restless and bored in a desk job for U.S. Senator Colles. Letty’s ready to quit, but her skills have impressed Colles, and he offers her a carrot: feet-on-the-ground investigative work, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security. Several oil companies in Texas have reported thefts of crude, Colles tells her. He isn’t so much concerned with the oil as he is with the money: who is selling the oil, and what are they doing with the profits? Rumor has it that a fairly ugly militia group might be involved. Colles wants to know if the money is going to them, and if so, what they’re planning. Letty is partnered with a DHS investigator, John Kaiser, and they head to Texas. When the case quicky turns deadly, they know they’re on the track of something bigger. The militia group has set in motion an explosive plan . . . and the clock is ticking down.

[bearofohu]

i will never fucking get over this btw imagine being a famous recently widowed (again) 40 year old man who has saved the world twice and you get a letter from your apprentice to come to america to solve a mystery with him and you show up and new york is looking even more fucked up than usual and you just want to see your son again but then he fucking pulls up on your ass in his 1954 honda swag and yolo wagon and tells you to get your elderly ass in the back seat bc the evil steampunk robot militia is about to roll up and then he takes you to some resistance headquarters where they ask luke whos this guy you just snatched from the retirement home and you find out nobody in america fucking knows who you are and your 14 year old son has way more clout than you and everybody just thinks you’re the boy genius’ loser grandpa

[goryhorroor]

Upcoming horror movies (some without release years) - not in order

Longlogs - FBI Agent Lee Harker is assigned to an unsolved serial killer case that takes an unexpected turn, revealing evidence of the occult. Harker discovers a personal connection to the killer and must stop him before he strikes again.

Nosferatu - A gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.

Bermuda - Unknown details but it will be set in the mysterious patch of the Caribbean where planes and ships have gone missing over the years.

Twisters (ok thriller but imma count it because i can) - A sequel to the 1996 film about stormchasing scientists studying tornados.

Immaculate - Cecilia is warmly welcomed to the picture-perfect Italian countryside, where she is offered a new role at an illustrious convent. But it becomes clear to Cecilia that her new home harbors dark and horrifying secrets.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - The film centers on the Spengler family as they return to where it all started – the iconic New York City firehouse – to team up with the original Ghostbusters, who’ve developed a top-secret research lab to take busting ghosts to the next level. But when the discovery of an ancient artifact unleashes an evil force, Ghostbusters new and old must join forces to protect their home and save the world from a second Ice Age.

Mickey's Mouse Trap - follows a group of friends who become targets of a serial killer dressed as Mickey Mouse

Imaginary - When Jessica moves back into her childhood home with her family, her youngest stepdaughter Alice develops an eerie attachment to a stuffed bear named Chauncey she finds in the basement.  Alice's games with Chauncey become increasingly sinister, and Jessica intervenes only to realize Chauncey is much more than the stuffed toy bear she believed him to be.

Skeletons in the Closet - Haunted by a malevolent spirit since childhood, a desperate mother allows herself to become possessed in order to save the life of her terminally ill daughter.

Lisa Frankenstein - love story about a misunderstood teenager and her high school crush, who happens to be a handsome corpse. After a set of playfully horrific circumstances bring him back to life, the two embark on a murderous journey to find love, happiness… and a few missing body parts along the way.

Winnie The Pooh: Blood & Honey 2 - oh yay? I guess a sequel

Adrift - It is described as a supernatural ghost story set aboard a ship. It is an adaptation of a short story by Koji Suzuki

Dustbunny - It follows a young girl who asks her neighbor to help her kill a monster under her bed after she thinks it has eaten her family.

Faces of Death -  follows a woman who discovers violent videos that recreate death scenes from movies online. 

Heretic -  two religious women who become the focus of a strange man's games. 

History of Evil - In the near future, war and corruption have plagued America and turned it into a theocratic police state. Against the oppression, ordinary citizens have formed a group called The Resistance. One such member, Alegre Dyer, breaks out of political prison and reunites with her husband Ron and daughter Daria. On the run from the militia, the family takes shelter in a remote safe house. But their journey is far from over, as the house’s dark past begins to eat away at Ron, and his earnest desire to keep his family safe is overtaken by something much more sinister.

MaXXXine - Six years after the ‘Texas Pornhouse Massacre’, Maxine is now LA-based and on a driven quest to become a star in the acting world. But things take a sinister turn when bodies once again begin to fall around her.

Dracula - A futuristic sci-fi western version of Dracula.

Apartment 7A - Prequel to the 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby.

Baghead - follows a young woman who inherits a run-down pub and discovers a dark secret within its basement. Enter Baghead - a shape-shifting creature that will let you speak to lost loved ones, but not without consequence. 

Out of Darkness - In the Old Stone Age, a disparate gang of early humans band together in search of a new land. But when they suspect a malevolent, mystical, being is hunting them down, the clan are forced to confront a danger they never envisaged.

Stopmotion - stop-motion animator by the name of Ella whose latest project might just be driving her to the brink of madness.

Late Night with the Devil - 1970s talk show host Jack Delroy on his last legs, wrung out by personal tragedy and in need of a ratings win. His plan to feature as a guest a young girl who is allegedly possessed seems like a Halloween night layup… until the cameras roll and all hell literally breaks loose.

You'll Never Find Me - An isolated man living at the back of a desolate caravan park is visited by a desperate young woman seeking shelter from a violent storm. As the savage storm worsens, these solitary souls begin to feel threatened – but who should really be afraid?

The First Omen - When a young American woman is sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church, she encounters a darkness that causes her to question her own faith and uncovers a terrifying conspiracy that hopes to bring about the birth of evil incarnate. (this might be a prequel to the omen)

Abigail - After a group of would-be criminals kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, all they have to do to collect a $50 million ransom is watch the girl overnight. In an isolated mansion, the captors start to dwindle, one by one, and they discover, to their mounting horror, that they’re locked inside with no normal little girl. 

Return to Silent Hill - James, a man broken after being separated from his one true love. When a mysterious letter calls him back to Silent Hill in search of her, he finds a once-recognizable town transformed by an unknown evil. As James descends deeper into the darkness, he encounters terrifying figures both familiar and new and begins to question his own sanity as he struggles to make sense of reality and hold on long enough to save his lost love.

Infested -  invasion of venomous spiders, forcing residents of a suburban building to find a way out.

Tarot - Tarot follows a group of friends who recklessly violate the sacred rule of Tarot readings – never use someone else’s deck. In the wake of broken rules, consequences follow, this time in the form of unleashing an unspeakable evil trapped within the cursed cards. 

The Strangers Chapter 1 - a couple, have to survive the night while being terrorized by masked strangers in a remote Airbnb in Oregon

The Watchers - the film follows a young woman who becomes trapped with three strangers in a shelter deep within a forest in Ireland where the group must fight off mysterious creatures every night in order to survive. 

Never Let Go - a family who has been tormented by an evil spirit for years as their lives become more dangerous when one of the kids questions if the evil is real. 

The One - Follows character Taylor as she becomes a contestant on a reality TV dating show to find love. Taylor's experience takes a turn as she gets down to the final three and becomes terrified of not finding love (with a horror twist)

Thread: An Insidious Tale - new actors who play a husband and wife who use a spell to travel back in time to prevent their daughter's death, which has worse consequences than imagined

Weapons - The movie is about the disappearance of high school students in a small town, similar to the movie Magonlia's from 1999

A Quiet Place: Day One - New characters in New York

Alien: Romulus - takes place between the first & second movies

Beetlejuice 2 - not much is known about the plot details, but Beetlejuice will have a wife & Lydia's daughter will be in it

Speak No Evil: this is the English remake (all it really says; but it's just the 2022 movie but English?)

Smile 2 - it's a sequel but no details have been revealed

Terrifer 3 - not too many details revealed but it will take place on Christmas Eve

Wolfman - not too many details revealed but it's a new take on the werewolf tale

I Saw The TV Glow - Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.

Don't Move - A seasoned killer injects a grieving woman with a paralytic agent and she must run, fight and hide before her body completely shuts down.

Arcadian - Nicolas Cage comes back to save the day - and his children - from ferocious creatures at their remote farmhouse.

All My Friends Are Dead - College friends? Remote Airbnb? A secret murderer? What could go wrong in this classic toxic friend group killing spree? Looking forward to attending the biggest music fest of the year, this group of friends get together for what should be a killer weekend.

Monolith - It is about a disgraced journalist who investigates a conspiracy theory while trying to salvage her career.

some movies coming out maybe not this year but have been floating around: The Toxic Avenger (I think remake), Witchboard (remake), Year 2 (about werewolves), Shelby Oaks (A woman's desperate search for her long-lost sister falls into obsession upon realizing that the imaginary demon from their childhood may have been real), Salem's Lot (remake), Little Bites ('70s-set monster movie that highlights the lengths a parent will go to protect a child), The Crow (Reboot), Jordan Peele's untitled movie, I've also seen there's going to be another Saw (but it hasn't been confirmed), and another Scream (but that production is already a trainwreck so who knows)

[posttexasstressdisorder]

A mole infiltrated the highest ranks of American militias. Here's what he found.

ProPublica

January 4, 2025 8:26PM ET

John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.

On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the bag from his closet and rushed to his car. He had no time to clean the dishes that had accumulated in his apartment. He did not know if armed men were out looking for him. He did not know if he would ever feel safe to return. He parked his car for the night in the foothills overlooking Salt Lake City and curled up his 6-foot-4-inch frame in the back seat of the 20-year-old Honda. This was his new home.

He turned on a recording app to add an entry to his diary. His voice had the high-pitched rasp of a lifelong smoker: “Where to fucking start,” he sighed, taking a deep breath. After more than two years undercover, he’d been growing rash and impulsive. He had feared someone was in danger and tried to warn him, but it backfired. Williams was sure at least one person knew he was a double agent now, he said into his phone. “It’s only a matter of time before it gets back to the rest.”

In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.

It was addressed to me.

The documents laid out a remarkable odyssey. Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah.

Now he was a fugitive. He drove south toward a desert four hours from the city, where he could disappear.

1. Prelude

I’d first heard from Williams five months earlier, when he sent me an intriguing but mysterious anonymous email. “I have been attempting to contact national media and civil rights groups for over a year and been ignored,” it read. “I’m tired of yelling into the void.” He sent it to an array of reporters. I was the only one to respond. I’ve burned a lot of time sating my curiosity about emails like that. I expected my interest to die after a quick call. Instead, I came to occupy a dizzying position as the only person to know the secret Williams had been harboring for almost two years.

We spoke a handful of times over encrypted calls before he fled. He’d been galvanized by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol, Williams told me, when militias like the Oath Keepers conspired to violently overturn the 2020 presidential election. He believed democracy was under siege from groups the FBI has said pose a major domestic terrorism threat. So he infiltrated the militia movement on spec, as a freelance vigilante. He did not tell the police or the FBI. A loner, he did not tell his family or friends.

Williams seemed consumed with how to ensure this wasn’t all a self-destructive, highly dangerous waste of time. He distrusted law enforcement and didn’t want to be an informant, he said. He told me he hoped to damage the movement by someday going public with what he’d learned.

The Capitol riot had been nagging at me too. I’d reported extensively on Jan. 6. I’d sat with families who blamed militias for snatching their loved ones away from them, pulling them into a life of secret meetings and violent plots — or into a jail cell. By the time Williams contacted me, though, the most infamous groups appeared to have largely gone dark. Were militias more enduring, more potent, than it seemed?

Some of what he told me seemed significant. Still, before the package arrived, it could feel like I was corresponding with a shadow. I knew Williams treated deception as an art form. “When you spin a lie,” he once told me, “you have to have things they can verify so they won’t think to ask questions.” While his stories generally seemed precise and sober — always reassuring for a journalist — I needed to proceed with extreme skepticism.

So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chat logs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.

The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.

Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.

Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.

(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.)

Williams is part of a larger cold war, radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American politics into their own hands.

Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they recognized something in me.”

2. The Struggle

If there is one moment that set Williams on his path into the militia underground, it came roughly a decade before Jan. 6, when he was sent to a medium-security prison. He was in his early 30s, drawn to danger and filled with an inner turbulence.

Williams grew up in what he described to me, to friends and in court records as a dysfunctional and unhappy home. He was a gay child in rural America. His father viewed homosexuality as a mortal sin, he said. Williams spent much of his childhood outdoors, bird-watching, camping and trying to spend as little time as possible at home. (John Williams is now his legal name, one he recently acquired.)

Once he was old enough to move out, Williams continued to go off the grid for weeks at a time. Living in a cave interested him; the jobs he’d found at grocery stores and sandwich shops did not. He told me his young adulthood was “a blank space in my life,” a stretch of “petty crime” and falling-outs with old friends. He pled guilty to a series of misdemeanors: trespassing, criminal mischief, assault.

What landed Williams in prison was how he responded to one of those arrests. He sent disturbing, anonymous emails to investigators on the case, threatening their families. Police traced the messages back to him and put him away for three years.

Williams found time to read widely in prison — natural history books, Bertrand Russell, Cormac McCarthy. And it served as a finishing school for a skill that would be crucial in his undercover years. Surviving prison meant learning to maneuver around gang leaders and corrections officers. He learned how to steer conversations to his own benefit without the other person noticing.

When he got out, he had a clear ambition: to become a wilderness survival instructor. He used Facebook to advertise guided hikes in Utah’s Uinta Mountains. An old photo captures Williams looking like a lanky camp counselor as he shows students an edible plant. He sports a thick ponytail and cargo pants, painted toenails poking out from his hiking sandals.

Many people in Utah had turned to wilderness survival after a personal crisis, forming a community of misfits who thrived in environments harsh and remote. Even among them, Williams earned a reputation for putting himself in extreme situations. “Not many people are willing to struggle on their own. He takes that struggle to a high degree,” one friend told me admiringly. Williams took up krav maga and muay thai because he enjoyed fistfights. He once spent 40 days alone in the desert with only a knife, living off chipmunks and currants (by choice, to celebrate a birthday).

Williams struggled to get his survival business going. He’d hand out business cards at hobbyist gatherings with promises of adventure, but in practice, he was mostly leading seminars in city parks for beer money. He would only take calls in emergencies, another friend recalled, because he wanted to save money on minutes.

Then around New Year’s in 2019, according to Williams, he received an email from a leader in American Patriots Three Percent, or AP3. He wanted to hire Williams for a training session. He could pay $1,000.

Finally, Williams thought. I’m starting to get some traction.

3. The Decision

They had agreed there’d be no semiautomatic rifles, Williams told me, so everyone brought a sidearm. Some dozen militiamen had driven into the mountains near Peter Sinks, Utah, one of the coldest places in the contiguous U.S. Initially they wanted training in evasion and escape, Williams said, but he thought they needed to work up to that. So for three days, he taught them the basics of wilderness survival, but with a twist: how to stay alive while “trying to stay hidden.” He showed them how to build a shelter that would both keep them dry and escape detection. How to make a fire, then how to clean it up so no one could tell it was ever there.

As the days wore on, stray comments started to irk him. Once, a man said he’d been “kiked” into overpaying for his Ruger handgun. At the end of the training, AP3 leaders handed out matching patches. The ritual reminded Williams of a biker gang.

He’d already been to some shorter AP3 events to meet the men and tailor the lesson to his first meaningful client, Williams told me. But spending days in the woods with them felt different. He said he found the experience unpleasant and decided not to work with the group again.

This portion of Williams’ story — exactly how and why he first became a militia member — is the hardest to verify. By his own account, he kept his thoughts and plans entirely to himself. At the time, he was too embarrassed to even tell his friends what happened that weekend, he said. In the survival community, training militias was considered taboo.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Williams was hiding a less gallant backstory. Maybe he’d joined AP3 out of genuine enthusiasm and then soured on it. Maybe now he was trying to fool me. Indeed, when I called the AP3 leader who set up the training, he disputed Williams’ timeline. He remembered Williams staying sporadically but consistently involved after the session in the mountains, as a friend of the group who attended two or three events a year. To further muddy the picture, Williams had warned me the man would say something like that — Williams had worked hard to create the impression that he never left, he said, that he’d just gone inactive for a while, busy with work. (Remarkably, the AP3er defended Williams’ loyalty each time I asserted he’d secretly tried to undermine the group. “He was very well-respected,” he said. “I never questioned his honesty or his intentions.”)

Even Williams’ friends told me he was something of a mystery to them. But I found evidence that supports his story where so many loners bare their innermost thoughts: the internet. In 2019 and early 2020, Williams wrote thousands of since-deleted entries in online forums. These posts delivered a snapshot of his worldview in this period: idiosyncratic, erudite and angry with little room for moderation. “There are occasionally militia types that want these skills to further violent fringe agendas and I will absolutely not enable them,” he wrote in one 2020 entry about wilderness survival. In another, he called AP3 and its allies “far right lunatics.” The posts didn’t prove the details of his account, but here was the Williams I knew, writing under pseudonyms long before we’d met.

One day, he’d voice his disdain for Trump voters, neoliberalism or “the capitalist infrastructure.” Another, he’d rail against gun control measures as immoral. When Black Lives Matter protests broke out in 2020, Williams wrote that he was gathering medical supplies for local protestors. He sounded at times like a revolutionary crossed with a left-wing liberal arts student. “The sole job of a cop is to bully citizens on behalf of the state,” he wrote. “Violent overthrow of the state is our only viable option.”

Then came Jan. 6. As he was watching on TV, he later told me, Williams thought he recognized the patch on a rioter’s tactical vest. It looked like the one that AP3 leaders had handed out at the end of his training.

Did I teach that guy? he wondered. Why was I so cordial to them all? If they knew I was gay, I bet they’d want me dead, and I actually helped them. Because I was too selfish to think of anything but my career.

Shame quickly turned to anger, he told me, and to a desire for revenge. Pundits were saying that democracy itself was in mortal peril. Williams took that notion literally. He assumed countless Americans would respond with aggressive action, he said, and he wanted to be among them.

4. A New World

Williams stood alone in his apartment, watching himself in the mirror.

“I’m tall.”

“I’m Dave.”

“I’m tall.”

“I’m Dave.”

He tried to focus on his mannerisms, on the intonation of his voice. Whether he was saying the truth or a falsehood, he wanted to appear exactly the same.

Months had passed since the Capitol riot. By all appearances, Williams was now an enthusiastic member of AP3. Because he already had an in, joining the group was easy, he said. Becoming a self-fashioned spy took some trial and error, however. In the early days, he had posed as a homeless person to surveil militia training facilities, but he decided that was a waste of time.

The casual deceit that had served him in prison was proving useful. Deviousness was a skill, and he stayed up late working to hone it. He kept a journal with every lie he told so he wouldn’t lose track. His syllabus centered on acting exercises and the history of espionage and cults. People like sex cult leader Keith Raniere impressed him most — he studied biographies to learn how they manipulated people, how they used cruelty to wear their followers down into acquiescence.

Williams regularly berated the militia’s rank and file. He doled out condescending advice about the group’s security weaknesses, warning their technical incompetence would make them easy targets for left-wing hackers and government snoops. Orion Rollins, the militia’s top leader in Utah, soon messaged Williams to thank him for the guidance. “Don’t worry about being a dick,” he wrote. “It’s time to learn and become as untraceable as possible.” (The AP3 messages Williams sent me were so voluminous that I spent an entire month reading them before I noticed this exchange.)

Williams was entering the militia at a pivotal time. AP3 once had chapters in nearly every state, with a roster likely in the tens of thousands; as authorities cracked down on the movement after Jan. 6, membership was plummeting. Some who stayed on had white nationalist ties. Others were just lonely conservatives who had found purpose in the paramilitary cause. For now, the group’s leaders were focused on saving the militia, not taking up arms to fight their enemies. (Thanks to Williams’ trove and records from several other sources, I was eventually able to write an investigation into AP3’s resurgence.)

On March 4, 2021, Williams complained to Rollins that everyone was still ignoring his advice. Williams volunteered to take over as the state’s “intel officer,” responsible for protecting the group from outside scrutiny.

“My hands are tied,” Williams wrote. “If I’m not able to” take charge, the whole militia “might unravel.” Rollins gave him the promotion.

“Thanks Orion. You’ve shown good initiative here.” Privately, he saw a special advantage to his appointment. If anyone suspected there was a mole in Utah, Williams would be the natural choice to lead the mole hunt.

Now he had a leadership role. What he did not yet have was a plan. But how could he decide on goals, he figured, until he knew more about AP3? He would work to gather information and rise through the ranks by being the best militia member he could be.

He took note of the job titles of leaders he met, like an Air Force reserve master sergeant (I confirmed this through military records) who recruited other airmen into the movement. Williams attended paramilitary trainings, where the group practiced ambushes with improvised explosives and semiautomatic guns. He offered his comrades free lessons in hand-to-hand combat and bonded with them in the backcountry hunting jackrabbits. When the militia joined right-wing rallies for causes like gun rights, they went in tactical gear. Williams attended as their “gray man,” he said — assigned to blend in with the crowd and call in armed reinforcements if tensions erupted.

Since his work was seasonal, Williams could spend as much as 40 hours a week on militia activities. One of his duties as intel officer was to monitor the group’s enemies on the left, which could induce vertigo. A militia leader once dispatched him to a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at a local library, he said, where he saw a Proud Boy he recognized from a joint militia training. Was this a closet right-winger keeping tabs on the socialists? Or a closet leftist who might dox him or inform the police?

He first contacted me in October 2022. He couldn’t see how the movement was changing beyond his corner of Utah. AP3 was reinvigorated by then, I later found, with as many as 50 recruits applying each day. In private chats I reviewed, leaders were debating if they should commit acts of terrorism. At the Texas border, members were rounding up immigrants in armed patrols. But Williams didn’t know all that yet. On our first call, he launched into a litany of minutiae: names, logistical details, allegations of minor players committing petty crimes. He could tell I wasn’t sure what it all amounted to.

Williams feared that if anything he’d helped AP3, not damaged it. Then, in early November, Rollins told him to contact a retired detective named Bobby Kinch.

5. The Detective and the Sheriff

Williams turned on a recording device and dialed. Kinch picked up after one ring: “What’s going on?” he bellowed. “How you doing, man?”

“I don’t know if you remember me,” Kinch continued, but they’d met years before.

“Oh, oh, back in the day,” Williams said, stuttering for a second. He knew Kinch was expecting the call but was confused by the warm reception. Maybe Kinch was at the training in 2019?

“Well I’m the sitting, current national director of the Oath Keepers now.”

The militia’s eye-patched founder, Stewart Rhodes, was in jail amid his trial for conspiring to overthrow the government on Jan. 6. Kinch said he was serving on the group’s national board when his predecessor was arrested. Rhodes had called from jail to say, “Do not worry about me. This is God’s way.”

“He goes, ‘But I want you to save the organization.’”

Kinch explained that Rollins, who’d recently defected to the Oath Keepers, had been singing Williams’ praises. (Bound by shared ideology, militias are more porous than outsiders would think. Members often cycle between groups like square dance partners.) “I imagine your plate is full with all the crazy stuff going on in the world, but I’d love to sit down.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Williams said. “AP3 and Oath Keepers should definitely be working together.” He proposed forming a joint reconnaissance team so their two militias could collaborate on intelligence operations. Kinch lit up. “I’m a career cop,” he said. “I did a lot of covert stuff, surveillance.”

By the time they hung up 45 minutes later, Kinch had invited Williams to come stay at his home. Williams felt impressed with himself. The head of the most infamous militia in America was treating him like an old friend.

To me, Williams sounded like a different person on the call, with the same voice but a brand new personality. It was the first recording that I listened to and the first time I became certain the most important part of his story was true. To authenticate the record, I independently confirmed nonpublic details Kinch discussed on the tape, a process I repeated again and again with the other files. Soon I had proof of what would otherwise seem outlandish: Williams’ access was just as deep as he claimed.

I could see why people would be eager to follow Kinch. Even when he sermonized on the “global elitist cabal,” he spoke with the affable passion of a beloved high school teacher. I’d long been fascinated by the prevalence of cops on militia rosters, so I started examining his backstory.

Kinch grew up in upstate New York, the son of a World War II veteran who had him at about 50. When Kinch was young, he confided in a later recording, he was a “wheelman,” slang for getaway driver. “I ran from the cops so many fucking times,” he said. But “at the end of the day, you know, I got away. I never got caught.”

He moved to Las Vegas and, at the age of 25, became an officer in the metro police. Kinch came to serve in elite detective units over 23 years in the force, hunting fugitives and helping take down gangs like the Playboy Bloods. Eventually he was assigned to what he called the “Black squad,” according to court records, tasked with investigating violent crimes where the suspect was African American. (A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.)

Then around Christmas in 2013, Kinch’s career began to self-destruct. In a series of Facebook posts, he said that he would welcome a “race war.” “Bring it!” he wrote. “I’m about as fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!” An ensuing investigation prompted the department to tell the Secret Service that Kinch “could be a threat to the president,” according to the Las Vegas Sun. (The Secret Service interviewed him and determined he was not a threat to President Barack Obama, the outlet reported. Kinch told the paper he was not racist and that he was being targeted by colleagues with “an ax to grind.”) In 2016, he turned in his badge, a year after the saga broke in the local press.

Kinch moved to southern Utah and found a job hawking hunting gear at a Sportsman’s Warehouse. But he “had this urge,” he later said on a right-wing podcast. “Like I wasn’t done yet.” So he joined the Oath Keepers. “When people tell me that violence doesn’t solve anything, I look back over my police career,” he once advised his followers. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, because violence did solve quite a bit.’”

Kinch added Williams to an encrypted Signal channel where the Utah Oath Keepers coordinated their intel work. Two weeks later on Nov. 30, 2022, Williams received a cryptic message from David Coates, one of Kinch’s top deputies.

Coates was an elder statesman of sorts in the Oath Keepers, a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran with a Hulk Hogan mustache. There’d been a break-in at the Utah attorney general’s office, he reported to the group, and for some unspoken reason, the Oath Keepers seemed to think this was of direct relevance to them. Coates promised to find out more about the burglary: “The Sheriff should have some answers” to “my inquiries today or tomorrow.”

That last line would come to obsess Williams. He sent a long, made-up note about his own experiences collaborating with law enforcement officials. “I’m curious, how responsive is the Sheriff to your inquiries? Or do you have a source you work with?”

“The Sheriff has become a personal friend who hosted my FBI interview,” Coates responded. “He opens a lot of doors.” Coates had been in D.C. on Jan. 6, he’d told Williams. It’d make sense if that had piqued the FBI’s interest.

To Williams, it hinted at a more menacing scenario — at secret ties between those who threaten the rule of the law and those duty-bound to enforce it. He desperately wanted more details, more context, the sheriff’s name. But he didn’t want to push for too much too fast.

6. The Hunting of Man

A forest engulfed Kinch’s house on all sides. He lived in a half-million-dollar cabin in summer home country, up 8,000 feet in the mountains outside Zion National Park. Williams stood in the kitchen on a mid-December Saturday morning.

Williams had recently made a secret purchase of a small black device off Amazon. It looked like a USB drive. The on-off switch and microphone holes revealed what it really was: a bug. As the two men chatted over cups of cannoli-flavored coffee, Williams didn’t notice when Kinch’s dog snatched the bug from his bag.

The night before, Williams had slept in the guest room. The house was cluttered with semiautomatic rifles. He had risked photographing three plaques on the walls inscribed with the same Ernest Hemingway line. “There is no hunting like the hunting of man,” they read. “Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else.”

They spotted the dog at the same time. The bug was attached to a charging device. The animal was running around with it like it was a tennis ball. As Kinch went to retrieve it, Williams felt panic grip his chest. Could anyone talk their way out of this? He’d learned enough about Kinch to be terrified of his rage. Looking around, Williams eyed his host’s handgun on the kitchen counter.

If he even starts to examine it, I’ll grab the gun, he thought. Then I’ll shoot him and flee into the woods.

Kinch took the bug from the dog’s mouth. Then he handed it right to Williams and started to apologize.

Don’t worry about it, Williams said. He’s a puppy!

On their way out the door, Kinch grabbed the pistol and placed it in the console of his truck. It was an hour’s drive to the nearest city, where the Oath Keepers were holding a leadership meeting. Williams rode shotgun, his bug hooked onto the zipper of his backpack. On the tape, I could hear the wind racing through the car window. The radio played Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69.”

Kinch seemed in the hold of a dark nostalgia — as if he was wrestling with the monotony of civilian life, with the new strictures he faced since turning in his badge. Twenty minutes in, he recited the Hemingway line like it was a mantra. “I have a harder time killing animals than a human being,” Kinch continued. Then he grew quiet as he recounted the night he decided to retire.

He’d woken up in an oleander bush with no memory of how he’d gotten there. His hands were covered in blood. He was holding a gun. “I had to literally take my magazine out and count my bullets, make sure I didn’t fucking kill somebody,” he said. “I black out when I get angry. And I don’t remember what the fuck I did.”

Kinch went on: “I love the adrenaline of police work,” and then he paused. “I miss it. It was a hoot.”

By the time they reached Cedar City, Utah, Kinch was back to charismatic form. He dished out compliments to the dozen or so Oath Keepers assembled for the meeting — “You look like you lost weight” — and told everyone to put their phones in their cars. “It’s just good practice. Because at some point we may have to go down a route,” one of his deputies explained, trailing off.

Kinch introduced Williams to the group. “He’s not the feds. And if he is, he’s doing a damn good job.”

Williams laughed, a little too loud.

7. Doctor, Lawyer, Sergeant, Spy

Early in the meeting, Kinch laid out his vision for the Oath Keepers’ role in American life. “We have a two-edged sword,” he said. The “dull edge” was more traditional grassroots work, exemplified by efforts to combat alleged election fraud. He hoped to build their political apparatus so that in five or 10 years, conservative candidates would be seeking the Oath Keepers’ endorsement.

Then there was the sharp edge: paramilitary training. “You hone all these skills because when the dull edge fails, you’ve got to be able to turn that around and be sharp.” The room smelled like donuts, one of the men had remarked.

The week before, Kinch’s predecessor had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. This was their first meeting since the verdict, and I opened the recordings later with the same anticipation I feel sitting down for the Super Bowl. What would come next for the militia after this historic trial: ruin, recovery or revolt?

The stature of men leading the group’s post-Jan. 6 resurrection startled me. I was expecting the ex-cops, like the one from Fresno, California, who said he stayed on with the militia because “this defines me.” Militias tend to prize law enforcement ties; during an armed operation, it could be useful to have police see you as a friend.

But there was also an Ohio OB-GYN on the national board of directors — he used to work for the Cleveland Clinic, I discovered, and now led a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. The doctor was joined at board meetings by a city prosecutor in Utah, an ex-city council member and, Williams was later told, a sergeant with an Illinois sheriff’s department. (The doctor did not respond to requests for comment. He has since left his post with the UnitedHealth subsidiary, a spokesperson for the company said.)

Over six hours, the men set goals and delegated responsibilities with surprisingly little worry about the federal crackdown on militias. They discussed the scourges they were there to combat (stolen elections, drag shows, President Joe Biden) only in asides. Instead, they focused on “marketing” — “So what buzzwords can we insert in our mission statement?” one asked — and on resources that’d help local chapters rapidly expand. “I’d like to see this organization be like the McDonald’s of patriot organizations,” another added. To Williams, it felt more like a Verizon sales meeting than an insurrectionist cell.

Kinch had only recently taken over and as I listened, I wondered how many followers he really had outside of that room. They hadn’t had a recruitment drive in the past year, which they resolved to change. They had $1,700 in the bank. But it didn’t seem entirely bravado. Kinch and his comrades mentioned conversations with chapters around the county.

Then as they turned from their weakened national presence to their recent successes in Utah, Williams snapped to attention.

“We had surveillance operations,” Kinch said, without elaboration.

“We’re making progress locally on the law enforcement,” Coates added. He said that at least three of them can get “the sheriff” on the phone any time of day. Like the last time, Coates didn’t give a name, but he said something even more intriguing: “The sheriff is my tie-in to the state attorney general because he’s friends.” Williams told me he fought the urge to lob a question. (The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

Closing out the day, Kinch summarized their plan moving forward: Keep a low profile. Focus on the unglamorous work. Rebuild their national footprint. And patiently prepare for 2024. “We still got what, two more years, till another quote unquote election?” He thanked Williams for coming and asked if they could start planning training exercises.

“Absolutely, yeah, I’m excited about that.” Williams was resolved to find his way onto the national board.

8. The Stakeout

On Dec. 17, 2022, a week after the meeting, Williams called a tech-savvy 19-year-old Oath Keeper named Rowan. He’d told Rowan he was going to teach him to infiltrate leftist groups, but Williams’ real goal was far more underhanded. While the older Oath Keepers had demurred at his most sensitive questions recently, the teenager seemed eager to impress a grizzled survival instructor. By assigning missions to Rowan, he hoped to probe the militias’ secrets without casting suspicion on himself.

“You don’t quite have the life experience to do this,” Williams opened on the recording. But with a couple years’ training, “I think we can work towards that goal.” He assigned his student a scholarly monograph, “Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society,” to begin his long education in how leftists think. “Perfect,” Rowan responded. He paused to write the title down.

Then came his pupil’s first exercise: build a dossier on Williams’ boss in AP3. Williams explained it was safest to practice on people they knew.

In Rowan, Williams had found a particularly vulnerable target. He was on probation at the time. According to court records, earlier that year, Rowan had walked up to a stranger’s truck as she was leaving her driveway. She rolled down her window. He punched her several times in the face. When police arrived, Rowan began screaming that he was going to kill them and threatened to “blow up the police department.” He was convicted of misdemeanor assault.

Williams felt guilty about using the young man but also excited. (“He is completely in my palm,” he recorded in his diary.) Within a few weeks, he had Rowan digging into Kinch’s background. “I’m going to gradually have him do more and more things,” he said in the diary, “with the hopes that I can eventually get him to hack” into militia leaders’ accounts.

The relationship quickly unearthed something that disturbed him. The week of their call, Williams woke up to a series of angry messages in the Oath Keepers’ encrypted Signal channel. The ire was directed toward a Salt Lake Tribune reporter who, according to Coates, was “a real piece of shit.” His sins included critical coverage of “anyone trying to expose voter fraud” and writing about a local political figure who’d appeared on a leaked Oath Keepers roster.

Williams messaged Rowan. “I noticed in the chat that there is some kind of red list of journalists etc? Could you get that to me?” he asked. “It would be very helpful to my safety when observing political rallies or infiltrating leftists.”

“Ah yes, i have doxes on many journalists in utah,” Rowan responded, using slang for sharing someone’s personal data with malicious intent.

He sent over a dossier on the Tribune reporter, which opened with a brief manifesto: “This dox goes out to those that have been terrorized, doxed, harassed, slandered, and family names mutilated by these people.” It provided the reporter’s address and phone number, along with two pictures of his house.

Then Rowan shared similar documents about a local film critic — he’d posted a “snarky” retweet of the Tribune writer — and about a student reporter at Southern Utah University. The college student had covered a rally the Oath Keepers recently attended, Rowan explained, and the militia believed he was coordinating with the Tribune. “We found the car he drove through a few other members that did a stakeout.”

“That’s awesome,” Williams said. Internally, he was reeling: a stakeout? In the dossier, he found a backgrounder on the student’s parents along with their address. Had armed men followed this kid around? Did they surveil his family home?

His notes show him wrestling with a decision he hadn’t let himself reckon with before: Was it time to stop being a fly on the wall and start taking action? Did he need to warn someone? The journalists? The police? Breaking character would open the door to disaster. The incident with Kinch’s dog had been a chilling reminder of the risks.

Williams had been in the militia too long. He was losing his sense of objectivity. The messages were alarming, but were they an imminent threat? He couldn’t tell. Williams had made plans to leave Utah if his cover was blown. He didn’t want to jeopardize two years of effort over a false alarm. But what if he did nothing and this kid got hurt?

9. The Plan

By 2023, Williams’ responsibilities were expanding as rapidly as his anxiety. His schedule was packed with events for AP3, the Oath Keepers and a third militia he’d recently gotten inside. He vowed to infiltrate the Proud Boys and got Coates to vouch for him with the local chapter. He prepared plans to penetrate a notorious white supremacist group too.

His adversaries were gaining momentum as well. Williams soon made the four-hour drive to Kinch’s house for another leadership meeting and was told on tape about a national Oath Keepers recruiting bump; they’d also found contact information for 40,000 former members, which they hoped to use to bring a flood of militiamen back into the fold.

Despite the risk to his own safety and progress, Williams decided to send the journalists anonymous warnings from burner accounts. He attached sensitive screenshots so that they’d take him seriously. And then … nothing. The reporters never responded; he wondered if the messages went to spam. His secret was still secure.

But the point of his mission was finally coming into focus. He was done simply playing the part of model militia member. His plan had two parts: After gathering as much compromising information as he could, he would someday release it all online, he told me. He carefully documented anything that looked legally questionable, hoping law enforcement would find something useful for a criminal case. At the very least, going public could make militiamen more suspicious of each other.

In the meantime, he would undermine the movement from the inside. He began trying to blunt the danger that he saw lurking in every volatile situation the militiamen put themselves in.

On Jan. 27, 2023, body camera footage from the police killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man, became public. “The footage is gruesome and distressing,” The New York Times reported. “Cities across the U.S. are bracing for protests.” The militias had often responded to Black Lives Matter rallies with street brawls and armed patrols.

Williams had visions of Kyle Rittenhouse-esque shootings in the streets. He put his newly formulated strategy into action, sending messages to militiamen around the country with made-up rumors he hoped would persuade them to stay home.

In Utah, he wrote to Kinch and the leaders of his other two militias. He would be undercover at the protests in Salt Lake City, he wrote. If any militiamen went, even “a brief look of recognition could blow my cover and put my life in danger.” All three ordered their troops to avoid the event. (“This is a bit of a bummer,” one AP3 member responded. “I’ve got some aggression built up I need to let out.”)

After the protests, Williams turned on his voice diary and let out a long sigh. For weeks, he’d been nauseous and had trouble eating. He’d developed insomnia that would keep him up until dawn. He’d gone to the rally to watch for militia activity. When he got home, he’d vomited blood.

Even grocery shopping took hours now. He circled the aisles to check if he was being tailed. Once while driving, he thought he caught someone following him. He’d reached out to a therapist to help “relieve some of this pressure,” he said, but was afraid to speak candidly with him. “I can check his office for bugs and get his electronics out of the office. And then once we’re free, I can tell him what’s going on.”

He quickly launched into a litany of items on his to-do list. A training exercise to attend. A recording device he needed to find a way to install. “I’m just fucking sick of being around these toxic motherfuckers.”

“It’s getting to be too much for me.”

10. The Deep State

On March 20, Williams called Scot Seddon, the founder of AP3. If he was on the verge of a breakdown, it didn’t impact his performance. I could tell when Williams was trying to advance his agenda as I listened later, but he was subtle about it. Obsequious. Methodical. By day’s end, he’d achieved perhaps his most remarkable feat yet. He’d helped persuade Seddon and his lieutenants to fire the head of AP3’s Utah chapter and to install Williams in his place.

Now he had access to sensitive records only senior militia leaders could see. He had final say over the group’s actions in an entire state. He knew the coup would make him vastly more effective. Yet that night in his voice diary, Williams sounded like a man in despair.

The success only added to his paranoia. Becoming a major figure in the Utah militia scene raised a possibility he couldn’t countenance: He might be arrested and sent to jail for some action of his comrades.

With a sense of urgency now, he focused even more intently on militia ties to government authorities. “I have been still collecting evidence on the paramilitaries’ use of law enforcement,” he said in the diary entry. “It’s way deeper than I thought.”

He solved the mystery of the Oath Keepers’ “sheriff”: It was the sheriff for Iron County, Utah, a tourist hub near two national parks. He assigned Rowan to dig deeper into the official’s ties with the movement and come back with emails or text messages. (In a recent interview, the sheriff told me that he declined an offer to join the Oath Keepers but that he’s known “quite a few” members and thinks “they’re generally good people.” Coates has periodically contacted him about issues like firearms rules that Coates believes are unconstitutional, the sheriff said. “If I agree, I contact the attorney general’s office.”)

Claiming to work on “a communication strategy for reaching out to law enforcement,” Williams then goaded AP3 members into bragging about their police connections. They told him about their ties with high-ranking officers in Missouri and in Louisiana, in Texas and in Tennessee.

The revelations terrified him. “When this gets out, I think I’m probably going to flee overseas,” he said in his diary. “They have too many connections.” What if a cop ally helped militants track him down? “I don’t think I can safely stay within the United States.”

Four days later, he tuned into a Zoom seminar put on by a fellow AP3 leader. It was a rambling and sparsely attended meeting. But 45 minutes in, a woman brought up an issue in her Virginia hometown, population 23,000.

The town’s vice mayor, a proud election denier, was under fire for a homophobic remark. She believed a local reporter covering the controversy was leading a secret far-left plot. What’s more, the reporter happened to be her neighbor. To intimidate her, she said, he’d been leaving dead animals on her lawn.

“I think I have to settle a score with this guy,” she concluded. “They’re getting down to deep state local level and it’s got to be stopped.” After the call, Williams went to turn off his recording device. “Well, that was fucking insane,” he said aloud.

He soon reached out to the woman to offer his advice. Maybe he could talk her down, Williams thought, or at least determine what she meant by settling a score. But she wasn’t interested in speaking with him. So again he faced a choice: do nothing or risk his cover being blown. He finally came to the same conclusion he had the last time he’d feared journalists were in jeopardy. On March 31, he sent an anonymous warning.

“Because she is a member of a right wing militia group and is heavily armed, I wanted to let you know,” Williams wrote to the reporter. “I believe her to be severely mentally ill and I believe her to be dangerous. For my own safety, I cannot reveal more.”

He saw the article the next morning. The journalist had published 500 words about the disturbing email he’d gotten, complete with a screenshot of Williams’ entire note. Only a few people had joined that meandering call. Surely only Williams pestered the woman about it afterwards. There could be little doubt that he was the mole.

He pulled the go bag from his closet and fled. A few days later, while on the run, Williams recorded the final entries in his diary. Amid the upheaval, he sounded surprised to feel a sense of relief: “I see the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in two and a half years.”

Coda: Project 2025

It was seven days before the 2024 presidential election. Williams had insisted I not bring my phone, on the off chance my movements were being tracked. We were finally meeting for the first time, in a city that he asked me not to disclose. He entered the cramped hotel room wearing a camo hat, hiking shoes and a “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip T-shirt. “Did you pick the shirt to match the occasion?” I asked. He laughed. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

We talked for days, with Williams splayed across a Best Western office chair beside the queen bed. He evoked an aging computer programmer with 100 pounds of muscle attached, and he seemed calmer than on the phone, endearingly offbeat. The vision he laid out — of his own future and of the country’s — was severe.

After he dropped everything and went underground, Williams spent a few weeks in the desert. He threw his phone in a river, flushed documents down the toilet and switched apartments when he returned to civilization. At first, he spent every night by the door ready for an attack; if anyone found him and ambushed him, it’d happen after dark, he figured. No one ever came, and he began to question if he’d needed to flee at all. The insomnia of his undercover years finally abated. He began to sketch out the rest of his life.

Initially, he hoped to connect with lawmakers in Washington, helping them craft legislation to combat the militia movement. By last summer, those ambitions had waned. Over time, he began to wrestle with his gift for deceiving people who trusted him. “I don’t necessarily like what it says about me that I have a talent for this,” he said.

To me, it seemed that the ordeal might be starting to change him. He’d become less precise in consistently adhering to the facts in recent weeks, I thought, more grandiose in his account of his own saga. But then for long stretches, he’d speak with the same introspection and attention to detail that he showed on our first calls. His obsession with keeping the Tyre Nichols protestors safe was myopic, he told me, a case of forgetting the big picture to quash the few dangers he could control.

Williams believes extremists will try to murder him after this story is published. And if they fail, he thinks he’ll “live to see the United States cease to exist.” He identifies with the violent abolitionist John Brown, who tried to start a slave revolt two years before the American Civil War and was executed. Williams thinks he himself may not be seen as such a radical soon, he told me. “I wonder if I’m maybe a little too early.”

I’d thought Williams was considering a return to a quiet life. Our two intense years together had been a strain sometimes even for me. But in the hotel room, he explained his plans for future operations against militias: “Until they kill me, this is what I’m doing.” He hopes to inspire others to follow in his footsteps and even start his own vigilante collective, running his own “agents” inside the far right.

In August, I published my investigation into AP3. (I used his records but did not otherwise rely on Williams as an anonymous source.) It was a way of starting to lay out what I’d learned since his first email: what’s driving the growth of militias, how they keep such a wide range of people united, the dangerous exploits that they’ve managed to keep out of public view.

Two months later, Williams published an anonymous essay. He revealed that he’d infiltrated the group as an “independent activist” and had sent me files. He wanted to test how the militia would respond to news of a mole.

The result was something he long had hoped for: a wave of paranoia inside AP3. “It’s a fucking risky thing we get involved in,” Seddon, the group’s founder, said in a private message. “Fucking trust nobody. There’s fucking turncoats everywhere.” (Seddon declined to comment for this story. He then sent a short follow-up email: “MAGA.”)

Sowing that distrust is why Williams is going on the record, albeit without his original name. He still plans to release thousands of files after this article is published — evidence tying sheriffs and police officers to the movement, his proudest coup, plus other records he hopes could become ammo for lawsuits. But Williams wants to let his former comrades know “a faggot is doing this to them.” He thinks his story could be his most effective weapon.

Every time militia members make a phone call, attend a meeting or go to a gun range together, he wants them “to be thinking, in the back of their heads, ‘This guy will betray me.’”

[hpetrr]

miss militia is still a mystery for me. like yeah, guns that don't jam ig, and not sleeping (usually), and some versatility? isn't a non cape with a gun still about the same? we don't see her reproducing tinker guns or anything fancy like that, just regular manufactured guns. the wow factor is never being disarmed? trying to wrap my head around her becoming such a big wig in the prt, maybe it's more about the person, her efficiency and smarts, and not her potential. maybe the competition in the prt ranks is not that fierce with having fewer heroes than villains.

invite to any miss militia lawyers/enjoyers to enlighten me on her positive traits

[ratxklng]

the celestial authority ; 🌌

3 out of 4 diamonds in the gempire im making. from left to right, welcome quasar diamond, empyreal diamond, and umbra diamond

quasar diamond, the beaming sun, handles external affairs. with a bold, terrifying, yet bombastic presence, he is the face of militia, defense, and colonization for the empire. his gem is on her chest

umbra diamond, the somber moon, handles internal affairs. she presents herself with sharp wit and widsom as the head of diplomacy and technological advancement in the empire. her gem is on her back

empyreal diamond, the mysterious cosmos, handles leadership affairs. its divine and all-knowing power is what represents the mastery of gems. it was the origin of all gems. its gem is its third eye's pupil

together, they lead homeworld, along with a fourth diamond belonging to my bf that's in the works.

extras under the cut!

in order:

1. umbra without her glasses on

2. concept sketches for umbra and quasar's pearls

3. concept sketch for empyreal's pearl

[monsieuroverlord]

February 2025 Solicits are UP!

source here

Hellverine #3

written by Benjamin Percy, art by Raffaele Ienco, main cover by Kendrick "kunkka" Lim

With varianys by Dave Wacther (above) and David Mack (not revealed yet)

"SPIRITS OF THE PAST WREAK VENGEANCE!

AKIHIRO confronts the spirits of the dead at his birthplace in Japan!  But what does BAGRA-GHUL want with them, and how is the demon linked to MEPHISTO?  HELLVERINE is caught between two worlds…and only the combined will of Akihiro and Bagra-ghul will cut through the hellspawn in their way!"

Ultimate X-Men #12

Writing, art, and main cover by Peach Momoko

"SHOWDOWN WITH THE SHADOW KING!

• Maystorm leads her team of masked mutants in a climactic battle against Shadow King!"

Laura Kinney: Wolverine #3

Written by Erica Schultz, art by Giada Belviso, main cover by Elena Casagrande

"WOLVERINE & DAREDEVIL VS. O*N*E!

O*N*E has arrested the wrong mutant! The HUMANITY FIRST militia has forced a mutant to do the unthinkable, but if WOLVERINE and DAREDEVIL can’t quell the unrest in the city, a more EXPLOSIVE result may derail mutant-human relations forever!"

Wolverine #6

written by Saladin Ahmed, art and main cover by Martin Coccolo

"HEAVY METAL CLASH!

Two WOLVERINEs and a NIGHTCRAWER versus CONSTRICTOR, CYBER and DEATHSTRIKE in a clash of the adamantium titans! United by a mysterious power, if LOGAN can’t beat them…will he join them?  Come for the battle – stay for the jaw-dropping surprise!"

[minihotdog]

The Scout

Pairing: Ghost x Fem!Reader

Summary: Ghost runs into an old... Friend? Enemy?

a/n: idk man I'm just justing

c/w: adult themes MINORS DNI

Word Count: 8k

Ghost excused himself from the group of men after exchanging his post with Gaz for the night and headed towards the grey, empty room he’d been calling his. His body was worn out, along with his mind.

The mission had been going on for weeks and was moving at a snail’s pace. They were pursuing a militia that had recently aligned with Makarov’s forces. Laswell had received intel on a shipment of weapons that were heading for said militia’s hideout intended for Makarov. The shipment was set to arrive within the month and the task force intended to intercept it, but that meant a lot of time spent sitting and watching in shifts. 

The detachment facility was concealed but close enough to intercept coms without being detected

Ghost was getting tired of waiting. He was used to action, and adrenaline, and the slow pace was wearing him and his comrades down even more than the countless neverending firefights they were accustomed to. As much as those moments left permanent marks on his psyche, he and everyone he knew craved it in some twisted, bloodthirsty way. At this point, he was doing a thousand pushups a day for “excitement”.

He blew air through his nose in frustration as he sat on the twin-sized wrestling mat he called a bed. He placed his gun on the floor next to him and threw his heavy vest against the wall to use as a pillow.

The weight coming off his shoulders leaves him rubbing his aching shoulders in relief over the sleek material of his sweater. He lies back on the paper-thin foam and his spine lets out a series of pops, finally releasing the pressure built up from hours holding the same position.

He groans quietly, reaching under his mask to scratch his scruff.

M’as well sleep on the floor, this mat is shite.

He rests his hand on his chest and the other on the knife sheathed to his belt. His eyes shut and he chases his rest fully clothed, boots and all.

-Time Skip: Approx. 0300-

He didn’t dream often, especially on the job. On the contrary, nightmares plagued him when he was home and a threatening darkness encompassed him on the field. But this feeling wasn’t right. Even asleep, Ghost was on alert. He could sense to his core that the air in the room had changed and a wave of uneasiness flooded him in his dreamless state.

He couldn’t pull himself from the darkness as he usually could. No matter how hard he subconsciously tried, his body was begging for rest against his efforts.

Ghost felt a weight lower itself onto his lap. Another person’s hands slide lightly from his waist to his chest.

Bloody ‘ell, wake up!

His body tenses involuntarily under the fondling. The zipper on his sweater carefully unzips. The cool air hitting his bare chest causes him to twitch in the battle between mind and body. The grasp the darkness had on him was lethal.

Small, warm hands graze the exposed skin of his abdomen, lightly tracing the patches of thick scar tissue that littered all over his body.

A soft, feminine voice coos at him as he twitches and his mind rushes to fill in the blanks, sending different scenes through his closed eyes in a poor attempt to mask the sound as a dream.

C’mon, wake up!

He felt as if he was floating through dimensions as he began the process of regaining full consciousness, eyes still refusing to open.

The mysterious woman lowers herself onto him, her nose gently nuzzling his neck. She takes a deep breath as if she’s trying to savor his musky scent. Her head pulls away from his neck and he feels fingertips graze his throat.

She fiddles with the hem of his balaclava before it begins to catch at the sides of his jaw. He feels his mask being pulled up and a shock shoots through his body. His limp state disappears instantly and he reaches for her. His other hand remembers its place on the knife.

His fingers wrap around her wrist, preventing it from going any further.

“Don’t worry, darling.” She coos as her free hand caresses his cheek. “I won’t pull it off, that’s not nice.” His grip tightens but she pays it no mind. She moves her hand from his cheek and uses it to pull his mask enough to reveal his lips. Her thumb outlines his bottom lip and she swoops down to plant a small kiss on his lips. He feels her lips through her mask.

His eyes flutter, trying to rid themselves of the blurriness. Moonlight pours into the room just enough for him to make out her figure above him and some of her features.

“I’ve been watching you for so long.” She wines, bottom lip quivering slightly under the material. “I couldn’t help myself. I needed to see you.” Her eyes crinkle as if she’s smiling under the mask. The black mask only covers the lower half of her face and a long single braid falls over her shoulder. He sighs, staring up at the ceiling.

“Y/n, we have to stop meeting like this.” The rasp in his voice sends shivers down her spine. She chuckles and tilts her head.

Ghost releases her wrist and wraps his fingers around her throat so quickly she doesn’t have time to react. Her hands come up to hold his in place and a whimper falls from her lips. Her eyes stare into his, lust clouding her pupils. Ghost shifts beneath her, feeling the heat radiating off of her. Her hips involuntarily grind against his in a jerking motion and arousal begins to stir inside of him.

Even through the mask, he could see her jaw go slack, her eyes burning into him. He couldn’t stop himself from giving her a small squeeze and watching her body come alive for him.

Fuckin’ ‘ell

He snaps himself out of the trance and slides himself up until his back rests on the wall taking her with him. He lets out a shaky breath before speaking. 

“Why are you watching us this time?” He shakes her roughly when the words refuse to fall out of her open mouth. He unsheaths his knife from his belt and presses the blade to her throat just about his thumb. “C’mon, love, keep this easy.”

She grips his wrist and attempts to push the knife away but he doesn’t budge. A look of panic flashes in her eyes. “Decided to toy with the enemy and this time it isn’t going your way, huh?”

His bare lips graze her ear. “If you were under my command, I’d take you bound and gagged to teach you a lesson, you little minx.” His words drip with poison. She fights against his grip to no avail. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

The hem of his fatigues grinds painfully against her clit. He catches himself nearly panting at her little cries.

“I’m here to warn you, you stupid fuck.” She chokes out, clawing at his now painful grip on her jaw.

“Warn me of what?” He growls.

“Makarov has men heading this way. He thinks the task force has been tipped off.” She winces at his tightening grip.

Ghost chuckles, his plump lips tugging into a cocky smile. He sheaths his knife and his grip on her neck loosens and she gasps, finally being able to breathe properly.

“You’re working for Makarov now? That’s fuckin’ hilarious. You just keep getting worse.”

He tosses her backward onto the floor. He jumps to his feet, throwing on his vest and grabbing his gun. He readjusts his mask and turns back to her.

“Well, I recommend you disappear now.”

She scoffs and rolls her eyes, “So no goodbye kiss?”

“Fuck off.”

He places his headset over his ears.

“Bravo 6, Ghost. How copy?”

“What is it?”

“A little birdie told me Makarov’s men are heading our way.”

“All units pull out!”

Gunshots begin sounding through the hallway nearby. Ghost assesses the hall. When his head turns back she’s gone and the window is wide open.

He leaves the room behind to join the fight with his brothers. A trail of destruction leads to the vehicle barreling towards the compound for them. As Ghost enters the humvee he looks back to the dark building. Somewhere in the dense treeline, he could swear she was perched up watching him.

- Time Skip: UK -

“Makarov knew we were there. We did not prepare for that possibility. He could’ve used the gun deal to drag us out there and intended to have all of us killed.” Price sits at the head of the table looking to Laswell at his left.

“How’d you get out in time?” She looks over the images and reports plastered on the table.

Ghost interjects, “He had a scout visit before the attack, a familiar one.”

“Viper visited you before the attack?” Her eyebrows furrow. “This gives us plenty to look into. That’s enough for now.” She turns to Price. “Speaking of scouts, we’re gonna need one to plan for the next mission.”

They all dismiss from the debriefing, everyone heading their separate ways except Soap and Ghost.

“Yer tellin’ me she told ye they were coming? Tha’s a first.” Soap says in disbelief. “I guess Makarov isn’t payin’ them like he used tae.”

They say their goodbyes and Ghost heads to his barracks room.

[zestoflemon]

okay! heres more drawtectives star trek au thoughts bc i have a lot of thoughts :)

so all of this would take place in the lower decks era (2381), with jancy as the captain of officers rose, grendan, and york, and science expert eugene! also rosé, grendan, and york went to starfleet academy together bc thats fun

rosé is still a human, she's from tycho city bc its always funny to me when a star trek character is from the moon. she's a pilot and she learned to fly shuttles and runabouts at a young age. karina's hinted at there being some Dramatic Things in rosé's past so i briefly thought maybe she'd been recruited to section 31,, but then i thought maybe thats too much? so instead her Dramatic Thing could be that she had a conflict with a previous commanding officer that led to her being transferred off the ship. her off duty style would be very christine chapel or erica ortegas in snw vibes, she has so many chelsea boots its crazy

grendan is bajoran bc that just makes sense to me <3 their parents were in the bajoran militia so they lived on ds9 for a while and got interested in starfleet there! shes a science officer and specializes in exobiology (the star trek equivalent of walking dogs) his style is mostly earth tones plus science blues and soo many crochet vests and sweaters

york! klingon lore works really well with orc lore imo but he had to be green so! his dad is a klingon warrior and his mom is an orion starfleet officer, and york grew up with his dad on qo'nos before coming to earth to live with his mom and eventually join starfleet :) oh also since klingons mature faster than humans but i wanted him to be around the same age as grendan i just subtracted 8 years from what his human age would be, so he's technically the youngest of the star trek drawtectives but not by klingon standards?

eugene <3 i just think all the vulcan spirituality and katra and telepathy makes soo much sense for him! and i think he was with the vulcan science academy but then got really into studying the afterlife with holograms & androids so he left the academy to do his own research

i dont have a lot thought out for jancy yet but she's a betazoid bc i think telepathic jancy is neat :) and she was a diplomat before entering starfleet where she studied anthropology (and mystery solving)

also feel free to send me asks about this! drawfee and star trek are my two favorite things so i have a lot of thoughts about them but idk if im explaining them well,,

[sealestialangel]

  

　  𓏲　bive（ regretavator ） npts　｡　　📁 　 ₊ ˚⊹

　　　　　    req｡ by anon + fem╱neu╱masc ᵔᵔ　₊

  

⠀⠀❛ 📌｡ ⠀names

bive，bivey，biv，vibe，static，crack，crackle，fuzz，fuzzball，eye╱eyes，eyeball，teeth，fang，bite，chomp，chomper，glass，glasses，shard，noia，paranoia，nerve，nerves，caution，skep╱skept，skeptic，dec╱deck，tect，detect，tive，detective，clue，myst，mystie╱mysty，mystery，con╱cons，connie╱conny，conspiracy，theo，theory，theodore，theodosia，expi，peri╱perri，experiment，axie，accident，mis╱mist，mistake，lemon，demon，tele，telephone，phone，cabinet，eight，eighth，wonder，lifetime，achieve，achievement，ward，award，reward，noir，jet╱jett，nyx，onyx，tour，tourmal，mallie╱mally，maline，tourmaline，obb，obbie╱obby，obsidian，nycto，blaque，sher，sherrie╱sherry，lock，sherlock，hol╱holm，hollie╱holly，holmes，nan，nancy，ark，arkady，nero，seeley，vel，velma ｡

⠀⠀❛ 💼｡ ⠀pronouns

phi╱phim，vae╱vaem，vi╱vis，xe╱xet，xis╱xim，zi╱hir，!!t╱!!ts，!?t╱!?ts，para╱paranoia，paranoia╱paranoias，mani╱manics，manic╱manics，maniac╱maniacs，craze╱crazys，crazy╱crazys，nerve╱nerves，nerve╱nervous，skep╱skeptic，skeptic╱skeptics，skeptic╱skeptical，skeptical╱skepticals，sus╱suspicion，suspicion╱suspicions，spook╱spooks，scare╱scares，theo╱theory，theory╱theorys，fre╱freak，freak╱freaks，monst╱monster，monster╱monsters，fur╱furs，scruff╱scruffs，hair╱hairs，hairball╱hairballs，sha╱sharp，sharp╱sharps，fang╱fangs，teeth╱teeths，teef╱teefs，cani╱canine，canine╱canines，crack╱cracks，crack╱crackle，crackle╱crackles，static╱statics，noise╱noises，shout╱shouts，yell╱yells，yelp╱yelps，sci╱scis，sci╱science，science╱sciences，lab╱labs，test╱tests，test╱tube，tube╱tubes，experi╱experiment，experiment╱experiments，acci╱accident，accident╱accidents，coff╱coffee，coffee╱coffees，lem╱lemon，lemon╱lemons，lem╱dem，lemon╱demon，dem╱demon，demon╱demons，touch╱tone，tele╱telephone，telephone╱telephones，cab╱cabinet，cabinet╱cabinets，life╱lifes，life╱lifetime，lifetime╱lifetimes，lifetime╱achievement，achieve╱achievement，achievement╱achievements，award╱awards，eye╱eyes，blind╱blinds，red╱reds，black╱blacks，brown╱browns，la╱laugh，laugh╱laughs，haha╱hahas，hehe╱hehes，plegh╱pleghs，pleugh╱pleughs，eek╱eeks⦂ 🔎╱🔎s，🔍╱🔍s，📁╱📁s，📂╱📂s，🗂️╱🗂️s，📌╱📌s，💼╱💼s，📋╱📋s，🪰╱🪰s，🕵️╱🕵️s，🧠╱🧠s，🦷╱🦷s，👓╱👓s，🕶️╱🕶️s，👁️╱👁️s，👁️‍🗨️╱👁️‍🗨️s，♟️╱♟️s，🪮╱🪮s，🎪╱🎪s，🤹╱🤹s，🤡╱🤡s，💥╱💥s，📢╱📢s，📣╱📣s，🔊╱🔊s，🗯️╱🗯️s，🌲╱🌲s，🌳╱🌳s，⚫╱⚫s，⬛╱⬛s，🖤╱🖤s，➕╱➕s，➖╱➖s，✖️╱✖️s，❌╱❌s，🚫╱🚫s，‼️╱‼️s，⁉️╱⁉️s，❗╱❗s，❓╱❓s，❕╱❕s，❔╱❔s ｡

⠀⠀❛ 👁️‍🗨️｡ ⠀titles

the self–proclaimed detective，the paranoid detective，the jittery detective，the conspiracy theorist，the believer，the rambler，(prn) who rambles on，the seeker of truth，(prn) who knows the truth，the (noun) that knows the truth，(prn) who sees the red cracks in reality，the (noun) that will not be brainwashed，(prn) who is immune to brainwashing，the lab accident，(prn) who was made in a lab by accident，the hair monster，the monstrous hairball，(prn) who is made of hair，the funny maze dweller，(prn) who lives in╱at the funny maze，(prn) who wanders the funny maze，the red ball establishment employee，the red ball establishment dweller，(prn) who wanders the red ball establishment，the clown militia❜s enemy，(prn) who is weary of the clown militia，(prn) who is on the run from the clown militia ｡

[bellaxgiornata]

You're Safe With Me [Chapter Four]

Pairing: Frank Castle x Fem!Reader

[You can find the full series summary and masterlist of chapters for You're Safe With Me here.]

Warnings: 18+; series contains violence, mentions of mass shootings, angst and comfort, slow burn romance, enemies to lovers, eventual smut

Word Count:4.5k

a/n: This one is a bit darker at the beginning, but Frank and Reader bond a bit more in this chapter! Feedback is always appreciated!

Tag List: @lunaticgurly @allaboardthereadingrailroad @linamarr @hollandorks @sleeperthelazy @marcysbear @mattkinsella @mattmurdocksstarlight @xxdrixx @v4leoftears @aoi-targaryen @danzer8705 @anon-cat-posts @heimtathurs @kmc1989 @thepunisherfrankcastle @agirlcandream84 @americaarse

If anyone would have told you a week ago that this was how you'd find yourself now–face down on the dirty carpet underneath a motel bed, a couple of opened condom wrappers scattered beside some questionable carpet stains while you overheard the Punisher himself firing bullet after bullet on a group of militia members just outside–you'd have thought they were crazy. 

Yet here you were, cowering under the bed and flinching repeatedly as round after round harshly rang out through the air outside room fourteen, the grisly sound reverberating in your ears. Hands balled into fists beside your face, you could feel your nails digging into your palms with how tightly your fists were clenched. You'd shut your eyes firmly a while ago just waiting for everything outside of the motel room to go silent again. 

You knew Frank was out there killing these people. There wasn't a doubt in your mind about that because you knew that's what he did. And even though you knew these people hadn't come to ask you nicely to not provide testimony for Madani's case, that didn't stop the sick feeling roiling in your stomach at the sound of every gunshot. Though the thought of someone other than Frank being the one to come in here and find you had you wanting to vomit–and it didn’t help that the air around where you were cramped under the bed was musty and stifling and making it hard to breathe. 

As the gunfire continued, you further curled in on yourself, your hands flying up to cover your ears in an attempt to block out the noise. You didn't want to hear any of it. You didn't want to be here. Trying to fight the bile rising in your throat, you tried to think about anything else. 

If you'd never answered that mysterious phone call the other day and gone to that Patriot Militia rally, you'd be home right now asleep in your own bed. Comfortable. There'd be no bruises on your wrists or your side. No death following you. No Punisher. No deadly road trip you were forced to try and survive. You'd be cozy and blissfully asleep. Maybe when you woke up you'd take a nice warm shower in your clean bathroom. Afterwards you might have grabbed a coffee before doing some mundane grocery shopping. Maybe you'd meet up with your friends after or sit down with a book and relax for a while before making dinner. And then you’d later crawl back into bed on your comfortable memory foam mattress and fall asleep–without zip ties restraining you to a headboard. Maybe you didn’t lead the most exciting life, but right now you wished you could experience the absolute dull and ordinary over what you were currently involved in. 

Pressing your hands securely over your ears, you grit your teeth and prayed to whatever higher power there was that things would end soon. You wanted to get the hell out of here already. But for now, all you could do was continue to pretend you were somewhere else in your mind.

Which was probably why you screamed when you felt a hand grab your ankle.

In a panic, your hands flew from your ears as you startled at the touch. Entirely forgetting that you were crammed underneath the motel bed in your fright, your head darted up as you screamed. Your head inevitably slammed into the underside of the bed with a solid thwack as you tried to yank your foot out of the person's grasp. The hand on your ankle immediately released it, your heart racing as you attempted to turn and see who had found your hiding place. 

"Hey, hey, easy there," Frank soothed. "It's me. You're alright. Didn't mean to scare you, but we gotta go."

Finally managing to turn at the waist, you spotted Frank on his hands and knees, the obnoxiously patterned comforter pulled up and no longer covering that side of the bed. You could see a splatter of blood on the side of his face and you grimaced at the sight of it. Though you’d be lying if you said his deep, strong voice that was quickly becoming familiar to you hadn’t calmed you almost immediately–and that had surprised even you. 

"Cops will be here soon after all that," he continued. "We have to get outta here before they do. C'mon."

Wordlessly you nodded, even though the thought of willingly following after a man who'd just killed a handful of people seemed to go against every rational instinct you had. Nevertheless, you gradually began to crawl your way back out from under the bed as Frank rose up to his feet and disappeared from sight. Flinching at the sharp pain coming from your bruised wrists, you slowly made your way back out from under the bed, hearing the faucet running in the bathroom as you moved.

When you’d finally gotten out from your hiding place, you sat on the floor beside the bed and ran your shaky hands through your hair. You swore the tang of blood and gunpowder hung heavy in the air around you, the taste of it settling on your tongue and causing you to cringe. Swallowing roughly, you tried to fight the bile once again rising in your throat as a hand flew up to cover your mouth.

“Don’t go gettin’ sick on me now,” Frank said gruffly, appearing from around the corner. “Don’t need you leaving your DNA here and complicating things.”

Eyes widening in horror at the implication of you being tied to whatever happened here, you felt your lips beginning to tremble. The urge to vomit only grew as Frank made his way across the room towards you, your eyes noticing the blood on his face had been washed off. But as your eyes dropped down to his thick, black boots closing in on you, you spotted the specks of blood decorating them.

Frank reached down and grasped onto your upper arm with one hand, swiftly hoisting you up onto your feet. You stumbled forward, your legs unsteady beneath you at the abrupt movement, but his large hand lingered on your bicep long enough for you to gradually regain your footing. Though he released you the exact second you had, turning immediately and heading over to his large, black bag that was lying open on his bed. He began zipping it closed without hesitation.

“Get your bag,” Frank directed as he slung the strap of his over his shoulder. “We’re gonna put as much distance between us and this as we can. I’ve gotta call Madani to clean this shit up. Let’s go.”

Weak-kneed, you hesitantly made your way along the side of the bed, spotting your green duffel bag lying on the floor where you’d last left it. Stooping down, you grabbed the strap before timidly throwing it over your shoulder as you straightened back up. Your attention shifted to where Frank was standing beside the motel door now, his steely gaze on you as one of his hands gripped the door handle. The moment you took a step towards him, he turned and swung the door wide open.

A horrified gasp fell out of you as you froze mid-step, mouth falling open. Frank came to a halt instantly, his head turning over his shoulder towards you. His dark brows were drawn together in a mixture of confusion and concern as he fixed his attention on you, clearly trying to piece together what had startled you. Though the moment he saw your face and where your eyes were focused, his jaw tightened.

“It was us or them,” he stated firmly.

Your wide eyes remained glued to the lifeless body lying just past the threshold of the door, a pool of dark red coating the pavement beside it, glistening underneath the glow of the parking lot lights. Feet rooted to the spot, you couldn’t move; all you could do was stand there and stare in horror at the dead body lying there. The body of someone who’d died because of you .

“C’mon, we don’t have time for this,” Frank said, an impatient edge to his tone as he fully turned towards you. “Cops are gonna be on us soon.”

Your vision blurred as you continued to stare. It felt like you couldn’t breathe.

“You’re a reporter,” Frank pointed out. “Haven’t you seen dead bodies before?”

You shook your head, finally managing to tear your tear-filled gaze away from the body and close your mouth. Bile soon climbed its way back up your throat and you quickly doubled over, audibly retching as both of your hands once again flew up to cover your mouth. The sound of Frank’s heavy boots rapidly approaching you met your ears just before you felt his hand on your shoulder. You jumped at the unexpected touch, your eyes flying up to meet his.

“It was us or them,” he repeated, his tone leaving no room for questions. “You hear me? Us or them. Don’t you go feelin’ sorry for them. They sure as shit wouldn’t feel that way about you lyin’ there dead.” 

Sniffling, you nodded at his words as his hand released your shoulder. Even though you knew he had a point, that didn’t ease the disgust at what had just happened here. Nor did it ease the sick still roiling in your stomach as you stayed bent in half, fighting down the wave of nausea.

Frank inhaled a sharp breath through his nose, his lips thinning out as his hard eyes continued to study you. You weren’t sure if you felt comforted or not under that heavy stare of his. 

“Close your eyes,” Frank ordered.

Your brows knitted together in confusion. “What?” you asked lamely.

“Close your eyes and you keep ‘em closed,” he repeated, turning a bit to the side before offering his arm to you. “I’ll guide you to the van. You won't have to see a thing.” He lowered his face down to yours, trying to catch your eyes with his as they narrowed back at you. “Think you can do that, Spunky?”

Nodding once, you cautiously reached a hand out towards his offered bicep. You awkwardly looped your arm through his, exhaling a shuddering breath as you felt him stiffen at your touch. Gradually your eyes closed, your pulse jumping in your throat at the contact and the trust you were currently placing in him. 

"Just follow me," Frank said, already beginning to guide you out of the room. "Keep your eyes closed."

You shuffled awkwardly beside him as he moved, stumbling and tripping over your own feet a couple of times as you kept your eyes clamped shut. Unfortunately the smell of blood and gunpowder only grew as your feet landed on pavement, a whimper sounding behind your closed lips.

"You're doing good," he assured you. "Just keep following me."

Frank's arm that you were holding onto slipped around your waist, his large palm splaying wide over your lower back. His hand pressed you further into him, helping to maneuver you around what you assumed was a dead body. Gnawing on your bottom lip, you turned your face into Frank’s arm, your nose brushing against the denim of his jacket. He smelled like gunpowder, sweat, and some sort of spice–clove?

"Almost there," Frank murmured, his voice breaking through your thoughts. "Doin' good."

Fingers gripping the thick material of his jacket tighter, you continued to follow him. It was a few seconds later before you felt him draw you to a stop, your ears picking up on the sound of the van unlocking. You heard the van door open a moment later before Frank spoke.

"Get in," he ordered. "And don't look outside if you don't wanna see anything." 

Still nervously chewing your lip, you nodded again, unable to trust your voice. Releasing Frank’s arm, you opened your eyes and saw he'd led you to the passenger side of the van. You were briefly taken by surprise that he wasn’t tossing you into the back of the van again, but the sound of police sirens in the distance had you quickly scrambling into the seat as Frank made his way around the front of the van.

Buckling yourself in, you saw Frank fling open the driver's side door and toss his bag into the back before hopping into the driver’s seat. Wasting no time, he stuck the key into the ignition and started the van before he roughly yanked the door shut after himself. Not even bothering to put on his own seatbelt, he peeled out of the parking lot and sped towards the motel exit. 

You kept your eyes straight ahead, your focus on the windshield before you. Hands clutching your duffle bag firmly in your fists, you fought the dark urge to look in the side mirror to view the carnage behind you. Instead, you focused on the increasing proximity of the police sirens that were beginning to make your palms sweat as Frank continued to speed down the road, the van flying away from the motel. 

Movement in the seat beside you caught your attention and you glanced over your shoulder, seeing Frank pull a phone out of his jacket pocket. You watched him dial a number in silence, one of his hands steering the van as his attention stayed on the road before you. After he'd finished dialing you saw him place the phone against his ear, his eyes briefly darting to you for just a second before they were focused back on the road. Nervously, you shifted your gaze back out of the windshield as the van pulled back onto the interstate.

"We got a problem, Madani," Frank's gravelly voice said, cutting through the thick silence in the van. "Seven men just ambushed us at a motel right off of I-65. Had to take care of them."

You cringed at his wording, your nose scrunching up in distaste at the gruesome memory. The sound of gunfire was still disturbingly clear in your mind.

"Need you to get the heat off of us," Frank continued. "Unless you want your girl locked in a jail cell and an easy target for more of those assholes."

Fingers curling tighter around your duffle bag, you felt your chest constricting at that thought. Apparently the seven men who'd just showed up at that motel and the two men who had broken into your house weren't going to be the end of things. Which meant there would be more people with guns hunting you down and trying to kill you. 

And that knowledge only terrified you further. 

"Yeah, well, what the hell else d'ya expect me to do, Madani?" Frank snapped in agitation. "Ask them nicely to go away? You knew damn well what you were asking me to do when you called me for help. You want her alive or not?"

There was a brief pause before Frank spoke again. 

"Good," he grunted.

Frank pulled the phone from his ear, glancing down at it long enough to end the call. He slipped the device back into his jacket pocket before he reached his hand behind himself, grabbing his seatbelt and finally buckling in. 

A tense silence fell over the pair of you as he continued to drive. Now that the adrenaline was finally wearing off of you, your eyes once again felt like they were heavy and burning from exhaustion. Your muscles were stiff and sore from the hours you had been restrained with your arms above your head in that uncomfortable motel bed. Shifting awkwardly in your seat, you rested your forehead against the window and watched as billboard after billboard passed by on the side of the road in the early morning hours. 

"You good?"

Frank's question broke through the strained silence in the van as your eyes read over a billboard for an IHOP coming up at a nearing exit. You didn’t exactly know how to answer his question because no, you weren’t. But when you continued to remain quiet, you saw Frank’s attention shift from the road to you. He said your name and your jaw tensed.

“Answer me here,” Frank pressed. “You good? No stray bullet hit you? Need me to pull over because you’re gonna be sick?”

“No one shot me,” you answered, voice sounding almost mechanical. “And I’m not going to puke right now.”

Out of your peripheral, you saw Frank’s eyes dance between you and the road for half a minute. Eventually you heard him exhale a long, rough breath, his hand reaching over to the radio and turning it on. His fingers fiddled with the dial as your eyes continued to jump from billboard to mile marker to exit sign to billboard again.

“You know you’re just–just gonna have to find a way to get right with this, Spunky,” Frank said, settling on a radio station that was playing some classic rock. “This is just the way it is right now if you want to keep on breathing.”

You shifted further away from him in your seat, wrapping your arms around your duffle bag in your lap as if it would somehow bring you the comfort you so desperately craved right now. You also didn’t want Frank to see the tear that was about to make its inevitable descent down your cheek. 

Maybe Frank Castle could get right with killing people to stay alive, but you weren’t sure how you were supposed to do that.

°•°•°•°•°•°

You held the laminated Denny’s menu in between both of your hands, your eyes blankly staring down at the writing on it but not remotely comprehending a thing. Despite the fact that you hadn’t eaten much more than a couple of protein bars and a questionable gas station sandwich in the past twenty-four hours, you weren’t sure if you had much of an appetite. 

Frank had spent the past eight hours driving, only stopping a handful of times for gas and coffee or to use a bathroom. Thankfully today he’d stopped using threats and zip ties on you, apparently figuring that the men who’d come after you early this morning trying to kill you was enough of a reason to keep you from running on him. And he’d be correct on that front because you knew if he hadn’t been with you at that motel, you’d have been dead by now. Though that didn’t make any of those deaths sit right with you.

The past few hours on the road had been pretty quiet. Frank had kept the radio on, changing it anytime static cut into the station because he’d driven too far to pick it up. He wasn’t much for conversation, only ever asking if you needed to stop to piss or needed a coffee when he got one. Though it wasn’t like you were in the mood to strike up a conversation with him yourself. Besides the fact that he was absolutely intimidating, you were still internally struggling with your situation while also trying to fight away the emotions attached to it. Breaking down next to Frank in the car sounded like a horribly uncomfortable situation for the both of you. One you much preferred to save for moments when you were alone, like when you’d first used the women’s restroom at this Denny’s.

Frank sat forward in his seat, the vinyl of the booth protesting loudly beneath him at the movement as he rested his elbows on the faux wood table. You could feel his eyes on you but you continued to absently stare down at the menu.

“You need to eat,” Frank eventually said. “Can’t be stoppin’ a couple hours from now ‘cause you’re hungry.”

“Who said I’m not eating?” you snapped defensively, eyes still on the menu.

Frank scoffed, the sound grating on your nerves.

“I know for damn sure you haven’t read a single thing on that goddamn menu in the past five minutes that you’ve been staring at it,” he shot back. 

A frown pulled the corner of your lips downwards, your eyes glaring at the picture of pancakes before you. “Can’t say I have much of an appetite at the moment,” you muttered.

From the edge of your vision you saw one of Frank’s hands rise up, rubbing across his mouth. Soon after he was squaring his shoulders, his head cocked to the side as his eyes bore into you. The intensity of his stare had the hairs along your forearms rising beneath your sweater, a shudder rippling down your spine.

“Like I said earlier, you gotta find a way to get right with what we’ve gotta do now,” he told you.

“And how exactly am I supposed to get right with this?” you snapped, eyes rising up to meet his in a challenge.

Frank simply shrugged. “You find a way,” he answered. “Casualties are expected in things like this.”

You pulled a face at his words, your back straightening in the booth as you set the menu down. “This isn’t war, Frank,” you pointed out.

“Yeah?” he asked, brows rising a bit onto his forehead. “Sure as shit seems like a covert operation to me,” he countered. “Government official tasked me to quietly keep a target alive by any means necessary. You’ve got an entire militia nationwide trying to hunt you down right now. Big name politicians and spies within Homeland trying to cover up the shit you stepped in. That sound like somethin’ else to you, sweetheart? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure it don’t.”

Grinding your teeth together, your eyes narrowed back at him. You didn’t answer though, because he had a point. Again. And you didn’t like that the Punisher was beginning to make some semblance of sense to you right now.

“This is life or death, Spunky,” Frank continued. “So you find a goddamn way to get right with this or it’ll be you lyin’ on the floor of a motel room covered in bullets.”

You grimaced, your eyes dropping back down to the menu. Your mouth felt like it had gone bone dry, your tongue suddenly feeling heavy and leaden. The thought of one of those militia members finding you and doing just that had you wanting to run back to that bathroom stall and cry some more.

“Hey, hey,” Frank’s deep voice rumbled, catching onto your shift in mood. “You good over there?”

You shook your head swiftly, burying your face in your hands as that constricting feeling returned to your chest. “I can’t do this,” you breathed out, panic and fear slamming hard and fast into you. “I can’t do this. I’m not like you. I can’t do this.”

“Hey, look at me,” Frank commanded. “Look at me.”

His hand gently grabbed onto your wrist, carefully drawing one of your hands away from your face. He ducked his head, trying to meet your watery gaze with his. You couldn’t help but notice that there was nothing hard in those dark brown eyes of his for once.

“You can do this,” he stated. “Keep a clear, level head and you’ll be just fine. You’ve got me, and I promise you I won’t let a goddamn thing happen to you, you hear me? Not a goddamn thing. Not on my watch. You’re safe with me. Alright?”

Sniffling, you ran the back of your other hand across your nose as you nodded. Frank released your hand, gesturing down at your menu.

“Good, now find something to order because I’m tired of listening to your stomach,” he said.

Wiping a hand under your eyes, trying to dry the tears that had almost fallen, you shot him a disbelieving look. “You have not heard my stomach,” you disagreed.

Frank’s head canted to the side, one of his dark brows rising up onto his forehead. Heat crept its way up your neck, embarrassment flooding you at the realization that your stomach had been that loud. After a moment he jutted his chin at the menu on the table in front of you.

“Find something to order,” he told you.

With a huff you picked the menu back up, your eyes scanning over it for something simple that wouldn’t upset your stomach. Though admittedly Frank’s promise to keep you safe somehow had you feeling a little better–but that in itself made you feel uneasy. He was the Punisher after all. The man wasn’t supposed to be right in the head, or at least, that’s how the media always portrayed him, yet here he was making sense. What did that say about you?

“Are you dears finally ready to order?”

Eyes rising from the menu, you spotted a graying older woman standing beside the table. There was a bright smile on her face and a notepad and pen in her hands. Though when she spotted your red-rimmed eyes her smile faltered.

“You doing alright, miss?” she asked.

You saw the concern slowly creeping onto her face as she glanced over at Frank, shooting him a tense smile when he looked up at her. Her gaze darted back to you, surveying you a bit closer. Forcing a smile onto your own face, you waved a dismissive hand.

“Just that time of the month,” you lied quickly. “Hormones, you know? Can I actually get the scrambled egg breakfast?”

Almost immediately the smile returned to her face as she jotted down your order. “Oh honey,” she said as she scribbled along the notepad, “I don’t miss those at all .” She lowered the notepad, focusing on Frank. “And what can I get you, sir?”

You watched as Frank ordered a burger before handing the waitress your menu, shooting her another smile as she blathered on about menopause. When she finally walked away, your eyes landed back on Frank in the booth across from you. There was a slight grin on his mouth as he watched you.

“What?” you asked him.

He chuckled, shrugging a shoulder. “Nothin’,” he answered. “Just quick on the lie there.”

Reaching a hand out, you grabbed your glass of water and brought it to your lips for a drink. Swallowing down the cool liquid, you felt your stomach finally settle just a bit.

“Blaming a period works for almost anything,” you explained.

“Good to know,” Frank muttered, still grinning.

Drinking down more of the ice water, your eyes made their way towards the window to your left as the chatter in the diner filled your ears. The parking lot was fairly filled with parked cars, the afternoon sun high overhead. The normality of this moment felt comforting after the nightmare of your morning. 

“I meant what I said,” Frank told you, his soft voice drawing your attention back to him. “I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.”

You didn’t respond as you lowered your glass to the table, your hand now damp from the condensation on it. Instead you quietly observed Frank, watching as his own gaze turned to focus out of the window beside your booth, his fingers fidgeting with his fork.

You had absolutely no idea what to make of this man sitting across from you, but you couldn’t deny that you certainly depended on him right now.

[spacecowboywhit]

Tabletop Trick or Treat!

Ahh! I missed this in the flurry of boops and election crisis. Sorry, @werewolf914! I will share examples of a whole mini-genre of RPGs that I love:

Moments in History You Would Not Expect to Gamify!

Oyster Pirates by @rollforthings - Based on Jack London's journalism/short story, you are independent fisher-thieves in San Francisco Bay in 1888, illegally harvesting at night from the giant oyster monopolies and running from the police in high-speed fishing sailboat chases. Cool setting and awesome aquatic-heist rules!

The Kingdom of Prester John by @kor-artificer - A fun solo game where you are an emissary from the pope in 1177, seeking the fabled Kingdom of Prester John. Also definitely worth mentioning his other solo game, Scribe about the collapse of civilization in the Bronze Age.

Malandros by Thomas McGrenery/Porcupine Publishing - Brazilian communities coming together in the late 19th century in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of slavery in the country and the imminent transition from imperial monarchy to a republic. Tell stories that are slice-of-life, crime/gangsters/con-artists, underground martial artists, or even urban-folk-fantasy.

Beecher's Bibles by Noora Rose/Monkey's Paw Games - Blood-soaked, antislavery abolitionists in Kansas, USA in the 1850s fighting pro-slavery land owners, lawmen, and militias. Adapts the Panic Engine and Mothership rules to a very different setting.

Blackout by @open-sketchbook - There are ~54,857 RPGs of various quality where you play a soldier or spy in WWII. There are not nearly so many where you play civilians trying to survive through it. Excellent adaptation of PBTA rules. A game of war and violence, where the PCs are not the direct participants in that.

The Girls of the Genziana Hotel by @hendrik-ten-napel - The chambermaids in a hotel in the Bavarian Alps in the 1820s solve a mystery at night and navigate work and personal relationships during the day. Cool, eerie, unique. Uses the Brindlewood rules very well!

Rosewood Abbey by Kalum from The Rolistes - Monks in a 12th Century monastery solve mysteries, ala Cadfael, The Name of the Rose, or Pentiment. Also uses the Brindlewood rules very effectively!

WURM: Roleplaying in the Ice Age by Emmanuel Roudier/Dakikan - I have read this game twice and still can't decide if it's actually good or just interesting. It's slice-of-life during the paleolithic era, specifically with the coexistence between neanderthals and homo sapiens. Interesting mechanics, especially for things like survival, crafting, cooking, simply lighting a fire, and even a bunch of rules around childbirth and raising.

[fakegirlsophie-mtftm]

i'm so sad i have to wait years until the next elections, I couldn't bring myself to vote for them but I really wanted the fascists (♥️) to win last time...

what do they have in store for me? state-sanctioned detransition? camps? militia violence? forced psychiatric internment? public indecency charges? police harassment? systemic doxxing? slow desintegration of my rights and solidarity networks leading up to my inevitable un4living? hope the closest people in my life will betray me and rat me out 🥴🥴🥴🥴

It's a big mystery and I'm dying from the expectation, please make it spectacular and extra violent

crossing my fingers for trump for my US fakegirls, he'll fuck you up real good lmao sucks to be you

"but i live in california!!!" that's a cope, they will still hunt you down bro ♥️

[aingeal98]

Jim Gordon who knows Babs was Batgirl and suspects her of being Oracle but can't be too sure. Whenever he mentions a problem it mysteriously gets fixed by the bats but that could be her talking to any of them. Doesn't necessarily make her Oracle. No, what has Jim suspicious is the big stuff.

Gordon: Hey Barbara remember yesterday when we were discussing that awful militia in Markovia trying to seize power.

Babs: Oh the ones run by that white supremacist? Yeah I remember.

Gordon: Well apparently today all their funds have been mysteriously drained. They no longer have the ability to pay everyone they need to fight this war.

Babs: Wow. Imagine that. What a great gesture by an anonymous internet hacker.

Gordon:

Babs:

Gordon:... Pass the salt.

Babs: :)

[lasandra]

Per request, I asked my kid sister for what her impressions of the Dragon Age Companions were based solely on their pictures:

@merciawintersageposting Here's what my sister thought of them lol

Dragon Age Origins Companions: Alistair: "He looks like a creep." Me: "Why??" Her: "He has weird hair!" Morrigan: "She seems like a vampire!" Leliana: "She seems like a warrior princess!" Zevran: "He seems like a nosy person. He looks like he'd poke his nose into someone else's business." Sten: "He looks like he beats the heck out of people!" Oghren: "He looks like someone who would distract the enemy while you strike him!" Wynne: "She's a flirt! The face she's making seems flirty!" Shale: "She looks like she could smash a person." Dragon Age 2 Companions: Fenris: "He seems like an artist." Aveline: "She seems like a militia lady." Anders: "He's a smolderer like Flynn Ryder." Varric: "He looks like he can swim." Merril: "She seems like a storyteller!" Isabela: "A villainous sorceress. She seems cool." Sebastian: "He seems like a palace guard!" Carver: "He looks like a slave, kind of" Me: "Why?" Her: "Because of his clothes." (I guess she didn't like his outfit lol, don't know why that makes him a slave lol. Kids are wild.) Bethany: "A lady of an ancient time, from an old religion." Dragon Age Inquisition Companions: Solas: "A mysterious whiner." Cassandra: "A human butcher!" Me: "She butchers people??" Her: "Evil people." (Accurate) Josephine: "A writer!" Cole: "FARMER BOY!" Vivienne: "A commander!" Cullen: "He looks bold and noble." Iron Bull: "He looks like he'd be a good defender and he's a tattoo fan." Blackwall: "He seems like he'd be a person's best friend." Dorian: "He looks like he'd be a good jungle explorer!" Sera: "She seems like a questioner. Someone who asks a lot of questions." Dragon Age Veilguard Companions + Manfred: Lucanis: "I think he's cool. I like his hair, and his mustache, and dagger." Davrin: "He seems like he'd be good at talking to animals, like a druid or something." Harding: "She seems like she'd be a good ambassador to a king and queen." Neve: "She seems fun! And like she could calm the flow of evil magic." Bellara: "An elf princess!" Taash: "A pyromaniac!" Emmerich: "An evil wizard!" Manfred: "He's the leader. The leader usually gets to carry the lamp."