#Radius my little revolutionary

[phantombunnyman]

rip Radius you would’ve LOOOVED Gorillaz

[trans-femme-fag-dyke]

Cocaine Election

It was 2016. I lived in a bougie residential community they refer to as “resort living”, so called because you basically felt like you were renting a place in a Caribbean all-inclusive hotel.

The Palazzo was painted in deep terracottas and ravishing sunset yellows. Tropical vegetation lined the winding paths connecting the buildings, arriving in a climax of luscious azure freeform saltwater pool overlooked by yoga short clad cardio influencers prepping for their next GRWM video. Everybody there had a story, ranging from the indulged and entitled trust fund kids trying to make their way in [insert entertainment/content medium here], to the dodgier members of the community like Dan.

Dan was a lumberingly graceful british chap standing at a towering 6’8”. His tousled hair and shaggy beard sandwiched one of his many overpriced sunglasses, but unlike most appointed with TV screen size Pradas, he had zero pretension. They just looked good, hid his bloodshot hungover eyes, and their tint pushed the envelope on that power dynamic that comes from never being fully sure the bespectacled is even paying attention to you. A coarse cockney accent added extra grit to his unpolished majesty and he carried himself with an insouciance as authentic as the most operation hardened SAS soldier.

Dan ran private security for ultra high net worth individuals and pop stars. His stories went deep and wide, but he would rarely expound on them, sharing only little details that lit the way to his dark past. He’s the sort of person you could be sure had disposed of a few problems in his time. You don’t fuck with Dan. He teased and prodded, but always with a softness and jocularity that betrayed a sweet, gooey center.

The rich kids clung to Dan, desperate for the contact high that came from brushing up against his working class authenticity. He was to their WASPiness what skinny jeans are to the hipster - a faint attempt at vicarious realness that would always be intrinsically out of reach. I cannot explain why Dan surrounded himself with these people. I get the sense, though, that it was some form of fathering instinct. Perhaps also that he received a little worship in balance to his stoic work life where the fanaticism was reserved for the talent and his employer.

The cocaine that Dan had access to was good. Really good. It generated a high equivalent to that first line I did with my brother back when I was 15.

A good 15 years had elapsed since then, and snowdrifts worth of blow that made me feel like my tolerance was permanently altered. It turns out that I simply hadn’t been accessing the premium powder. It was incumbent upon Dan to have the connects considering his position. He was the guy famous rappers would turn to for party favors and he couldn’t let them down.

The shit he got deserved every hackneyed euphemism under the sun - it was a marching powder of revolutionary quality and could have just as easily powered aircraft carriers as much as it supplied the cuntery that clawed to Dan.

The first time that I took Dan’s stuff, it was within an hour of the 2016 Trump victory. TVs had been switched off at Hilary’s speech signaling the count would continue into the night, only to be turned back on minutes later when Trump declared victory. Minutes later, all the lights within a half mile radius went out. A blackout that emphasized the terror of the turnaround and one which, in my already addled state, felt like a prelude to a North Korean invasion.

I don’t know why my mind went to this east asian Red Dawn scenario, why I anticipated a ground strike, or how I connected any of those dots to anything other than a blip caused by mass usage of televisual electricity.

There’s nothing like the promise of apocalypse to rouse my hackles. Even to this day, sober, I still have a strange desire to die in a plane crash and savor those moments in between knowing and expiring. I’m fascinated by the thought life that precedes imminent and violent death.

I rushed outside to take my final sips of freedom and to seek out other people confused by the pandemonium. I encountered Dan’s acolytes who had resolved to get donuts at the store down the street. What better way to usher in this new beginning and unholy end than with a belly full of sugar and a mouth covered in jam. Like all social situations, my analysis and ultimately any decision to tag along with people was only ever driven by the promise of drink or drugs at the end of the rainbow. With Dan, if reputation served, that was an inevitability.

“Dan’s at his. We’ll see you back there!” They said, gleaming at the fantasy of buying cheap donuts and feeling like the everyman.

I made my way to Dan’s and used a knock that felt like a secret handshake. I figured that some level of esoteric announcement would be appreciated to signal that I wasn’t the security patrol. He opened the door and welcomed me in.

“Me old mucker, ’ow’s it goin’?”

He warmly ushered me into his extremely minimalist space. Like a CIA field officer with a history of secretive sorties to remote places to tinker with governments, he kept everything extremely sparse. I almost expected a go bag to be hidden underneath the floorboards, with a can of sardines on the windowsill. Not so much non-attachment as a life spent living on the edges of society and ready to disappear at a moment’s notice.

I presented the facts as they stood, “If it’s Trump’s America now, I need to get drunk and high. Where’s the coke, Danny boy?” I dispensed with the deference I would have assumed he would usually expect. I needed my drugs.

“Up there, above the fridge. Use the chair, shorty,” he replied, acceding to the urgency of the situation and the flailing look in my eyes.

I emptied a hillock of flake on the granite countertop, the contrast of white on near black building the first squares of the chessboard on which I perpetually found myself in this dark period of my life. Always impetuously making moves which any high school junior chess club member could see would seal my fate, and yet I was oblivious.

There’s this place you get to with uppers. You feel anxious and agitated from the high and you look to the cause of your problems to solve them. Caught in this self-destructive cycle where the only thing to come to your aid is more of the thing that made you need help in the first place.

A platinum Amex card, cleaned down with the bottom of my sweat through shirt, arranged the pile into a neat line and I was off the the races. An endless rain of disdain on the four years to come and little to no investment in the damage it would do to the country. Here in my amphetamine pinball machine, I just rattled, banged and dropped.

[tapedsleeves]

1, 18, 36 <3

1. what are 3 things you’d say shaped you into who you are? 

Growing up lonely. I grew up as one of the only kids in.. quite a radius. The only person I had to talk to was, in general, my older brother who didn’t want me around. So I read a lot, I spent a lot of time in other worlds. I love spending time alone, spending time with other people is mostly draining. But I love going places. If I don’t get out of the house every so often, I go a little insane.

Discord. The idea of a chatroom for friends that people can just hang out or not as they need? revolutionary to me. I use discord *so much* to talk to everyone.

Teen Wolf. Because of teen wolf. I am friends with.... most of the friends i have now. Like those dominoes? Because of teen wolf and my college roommate, I met my best friend, and thru her I’ve met so many other good friends. Teen wolf made my life better, as much as it ruined my whole brain.

18. do you believe in ghosts and/or aliens? 

Ghosts: Yes. Absolutely yes. What happens to the energy when people die? energy doesn’t go anywhere. in addition, ghosts are also memories of people, and places that haunt people, whether that’s someone’s brain or actual energy that isn’t part of a physical being in a space. Ghosts are real, but are they always people? who can know?

Aliens: It is so vanishingly unlikely that the only life in the entire universe that developed is on Earth. So yes, of course. I believe in aliens. Will we ever contact it? Do we even exist in the same time? who can know?

36. are you an open book or do you have walls up?

I’m an open book until I’m not! ;)

ask list

[longsufferingmedics]

Just a small drabble based on musings in the TFP continuity because the potential dynamics of the Revolutionary Four (Megatron, Optimus, Soundwave, and Ratchet) live in my head rent free.

ORBITS

It’s easy to imagine, with all that came after, that it was Megatronus and Orion Pax that fell into each other’s orbits first. After all, they were the two leaders. The two whose story was always told first. And in their shadow, Soundwave and Ratchet faded into the background, their roles in what was to come only remembered incidentally. 

It had been a harmless thing to start. A wounded gladiator not inclined to easily trust the butchers of the arena. A young medic too fearless by half and already cultivating a reputation in Flatline’s back alley clinic in Kaon. 

But it wasn’t the gruff bedside manner or gentle care that endeared Ratchet to Soundwave though. That gave him a persistent shadow as he insisted on throwing himself into every dark corner of Cybertron he could find.  

It was how Ratchet spoke to Ravage like an equal as the beastformer led him to Soundwave’s tiny habsuite, his cultured voice a crass contrast to the decay around him.

Even among the very few medics that bothered with people like Soundwave, that was rare. And someone of Ratchet’s caste? A rising star in Iacon’s medical community even before he graduated according to Soundwave’s careful research.

It had been… interesting. And Soundwave couldn’t help but wonder about the odd creature. And wasn’t it funny? That he of all mechs would consider someone odd. 

And so a strange friendship began. One that at first mostly consisted of Soundwave saving Ratchet’s plating when the smaller mech’s mouth got him into trouble his aft couldn’t cash in some dingy oilhouse. He had been a quiet mech even before the Vow of Silence and honestly, in those days, Ratchet did enough talking for both of them. 

But as time went on, a tentative bond started to develop. Secrets began to be shared. Ratchet looked fearlessly back as Soundwave revealed the outlier abilities he kept so carefully hidden and had sworn himself to secrecy in a way that startled the telepath with the weight of blunt sincerity. Soundwave himself heard about the bitter arguments with Ratchet’s creator (never named but it was all too easy for Soundwave to uncover Senator Spanner of the highest medical caste. He made sure no one else could) and the screaming frustration of a mech who saw everything wrong around him but was unable to reconcile himself to the willful blindness common of his caste or to the beaten down acceptance of places like lower Kaon. 

In those early days, Soundwave had feared just what the young medic would do in his aimless anger with the system. As he tried to hold together bodies and sparks ravaged by the horrors of poverty and systematic oppression. As he raged and swore and fought his way through every bar within the vicinity of Flatline’s clinic. 

They weren’t always together and in those times apart, Soundwave quietly worried. Ratchet often disappeared for decacycles at a time back to Iacon. As headstrong as the medic was, even he was cautious about bringing attention to his doings outside the capital. And Soundwave, climbing the ranks in the gladiatorial rings, began to join the touring circuits that spanned the southern hemisphere. He feared for Ratchet during those times apart, who he could see all too easily burning himself out in a frenzy of self destructive fervor. 

But eventually, they would fall into each other’s orbits again.  

Another gladiator was the third to come into their small, secretive circle and he would provide something they both desperately needed. Though Soundwave would not realize that he had been just as lost as the medic until later. That perhaps their friendship had come not just from circumstances but from recognition of someone else with the same missing pieces.

Megatronus gave them purpose. Gave a focus for the discontent Ratchet and Soundwave both felt in their sparks.

 It was a rather explosive first meeting, a happenstance encounter in a bar in lower Kaon. Ratchet had been the one to put Soundwave back together after his defeat at Megatronus’s hands and the little medic was protective, much to Soundwave’s quiet amusement. And Megatronus’s outright laughter when Ratchet had waved a wrench threateningly at his face.

That laughter had ended abruptly when the wrench connected with his nose.

The resulting barfight ended in a destroyed oilhouse, a cracked optic, a wild flight from the Enforcers, and Ratchet and Megatronus laughing like old friends while getting spectacularly overcharged even as Soundwave worriedly followed Ratchet’s garbled instructions on repairing his optic.

Soundwave was really rather grateful for Orion Pax joining their circle soon after. If only for the sake of his nerves and the surrounding potential blast radius. Megatronus and Ratchet really did bring out the worst in each other, both too competitive and clever by far and neither willing to back down. All their rough edges grating against the other’s to send sparks flying in all directions. Megatronus’s fiery idealism clashing with Ratchet’s angry practicality as the two fought over everything from history to politics to, during one memorable evening, regional differences in how to play Lob. 

Soundwave was perhaps too willing to go with the flow to handle such a conflagration. But Orion Pax somehow, in his own quiet way, managed to bring out the gentler sides of both Megatronus and Ratchet. Speaking poetry and history with the former and logistics with the latter as the four quietly began to plan a rebellion. 

Soundwave couldn’t help but be a little jealous of the data clerk’s seemingly effortless handling of the two wilder sparks.  Over how easily the fourth and youngest member of their little coterie had slotted in. They had been so careful when they had invited him to their password protected datanet group. They had even had Ratchet discreetly (or as discreetly as Ratchet could manage) meet Pax in Iacon. It had surprised Soundwave how quickly the normally skeptical medic vouched for the younger mech. But he couldn’t supply any objections of his own and Megatronus was rather eager to speak to the mech who had written the piece on the history of the Senate in a way that managed to combine perfectly respectful with plate witheringly scathing. 

And so ultimately, Orion Pax was offered a passcode to the forum where Megatronus workshopped political tracts that spoke to the downtrodden masses and Ratchet brought together disgruntled professionals to discuss the system and how it failed everyone. And they all debated and considered strategy. What direct action could be taken now and in the future and what would come after the system was dismantled. Words to speak to sparks and to speak to processors while Soundwave fended off the Senate's hunters, destroying trails behind them as he disseminated the words of their small but growing group all over the datanet. 

It was Orion Pax who would bring together the disparate pieces, bridging the gap between castes and uniting those whose only commonality was the belief that the system they all existed under was in at least some way wrong. Who would have the connections and datanet clearances that would elevate them from disgruntled dissidents to political movement. Whose quiet, unwavering conviction would give courage to those who believed but feared reprisal.

Megatronus had gained the Senate’s attention by speaking to those who had nothing left to lose. 

Orion Pax had gained the Senate’s fear by winning the allegiance of the middle castes.   

But all of it ultimately started with a medic apprentice and a quiet gladiator in the lowest levels of Kaon. A friendship that neither side would expect to be a catalyst to so much more.

[sweetest-honeybee]

Down to Dust

Chapter 4

Fic Summary: Grian will have to keep the dragon egg secure for the Watchers. But, they’re not the only ones who want it. On a completely unrelated note, Mumbo will have to deal with a version of himself thats only amplified by his No Killing mindset.

Chapter Sumamry: Mumbo was surprised to find that Grian was right when he said the egg was magical.

TW: Slight electrocution I suppose, and descriptions of lightning

Word Count: 2415

Notes: Again, the two farms are in the overworld, not in the Nether or End for the sake of the fic

Enjoy! And this one deserves a Read More because it’s long lol

——————

By the end of the next day, Mumbo had finished his first farm and half of his second farm. Much to his surprise, the egg didn’t bear any harm. It was strangely quiet recently but it didn’t bother him any. At the moment, it was in his inventory should anyone come by and see that he had it. It’d ruin his plans and he didn’t want to give up the egg just yet. Really, he could probably keep it forever. It had been completely safe and comfortable- or, as comfortable as an egg can be- since he stole it. Mumbo called that pretty responsible.

Who was he kidding, Grian would kill him eventually if he never found it himself.

He laid down the last of the comparators for the third row, focused more on finishing his farm than overthinking the egg situation. If all went well so far, they should be able to work on their own if he flipped a lever. The redstoner pulled the egg from his inventory and held it up to his face.

“I think everything looks about right so far, yeah?” He turned the egg as if there was a face to show his work. The egg quite obviously never spoke but it helped to explain the redstone and find the flaws in his contraptions.

Nothing seemed out of place. The first row’s test went swimmingly and by replicating that a few more times, all should go as planned when he tested them together. With his luck it may not happen but he could stand to be a little optimistic at least. Mumbo went on to build the last of the uniform rows and easily finished another quarter of the farm. All was down to just encasing said farm in a wall of glass to avoid the items spilling over the sides.

He stood back once more with his hands on his hips, the egg now by his feet. The redstoner was proud to say the least. He looked down at the egg which only sat stock still. Leaving the egg, he turned to dig in his chest for more materials.

Unbeknownst to him, however, the egg wouldn’t stay still for much longer.

“Glass, glass, where on Earth did I put the glass?” He mumbled to himself. He continued to rummage. Eventually, he pulled away from the chest with an internal cheer. “Of course it was next to the pistons.”

He swirled back around when he began to hear small pops from behind him. As he did, Mumbo’s eyes widened. Small purple sparks crackled every so often at the base of the egg and quickly began to grow in size. The egg itself launched into a fit of rapid vibrating.

“Oh! Uh-oh!” He dropped the glass next to him, shattering upon impact, and hurriedly jogged to the now terrifyingly lively egg. “Please tell me you're supposed to do that!”

The redstoner hesitated, going to touch it, then pulling away with a worried whimper. Mumbo didn’t want to touch it but he panicked as he was at a loss of what to do. The egg was calm for weeks before now. Even Grian would’ve said something if the egg had done something like this before Mumbo stole it.

Ah…Grian did tell him it was a magical egg.

Mumbo only thought Grian was joking to keep him from taking it. He’s never seen a dragon egg do that! It was just from the update, he suggested to himself. Eggs were just suddenly powerful and might destroy his days of work. He laughed nervously and pulled at his tie. It didn’t matter what he thought, the small sparks were now large bolts that shot their way into the ground. It singed the grass around it, turning it to a coal black. He had to back away from the egg’s ever expanding radius of energy.

“Oh what do I do- what do I do?!” Then, the obvious idea appeared and he palmed his forehead. “Grian!”

The redstoner fumbled to get his communicator from his pocket, almost dropping it several times. He miss-clicked several icons with petrified fingers and growled in frustration. Only when he finally opened the chat, the egg ceased its episode with an immediate halt. He looked up from the screen with caution and took another step away from the egg.

The area fell silent. Not a bird’s chirp or leave’s rustle broke the blanket of stillness that suddenly washed over everything. It wasn’t a comfortable silence, though.

He inched forward with small steps, clutching his communicator. Seconds passed, then a minute.

“H…Hello?” He said tentatively. He stuck a leg out, poking at it with the tip of his shoe then retracting his leg once more. A sigh escaped his lips. “Good, I guess that’s over with then.”

But it wasn’t. The egg was hardly finished as the bolts started again, much much larger than their already massive size they reached before it stopped the first time. Mumbo shrieked and attempted to retreat back to his chest. It took no longer than five seconds before a wave of the purple energy resonated through the ground and absorbed into the two farms. It knocked Mumbo from his feet and onto the grass, sending an electric shiver through his body.

He shielded his neck with his arms and waited. He only turned over when the sounds of roaring pistons caught his attention. But, that was hardly what he worried about as he watched in awe- good or bad, he wasn’t sure yet- at the effects of the egg’s sudden show of magic.

Both farms were activated and running faster than any farm he’d ever seen. Items upon items flowed down water streams and into stacks of chests. Some items avoided their intended route and simply floated in all directions above the farms. It was loud, incredibly loud. Mumbo nearly had to cover his ears as he initially cowered from the noise. However, he soon pulled himself to his feet and slowly approached the over-efficient farms.

A violet haze emitted from the redstone, replacing its originally reddish color, and from the cracks between each set of stone bricks. Each block crackled and hissed with energy, and it almost felt as if he were gaining some of that energy himself. Small bolts fizzled out over his suit. He lifted his left hand and turned it over, watching as sparks flew over and down his fingers to their tips.

To put it simply, it was a beautiful and supernatural sight. He wasn't sure how to react. His own heart was still racing- from the energy around him or his nerves, he also didn’t know.

While in the middle of the two farms, he glanced back at the egg which no longer twisted and turned, but sat with slowly flowing violet streams of energy penetrating the ground. Much like the hum of a conduit sounded from it. Now, it seemed very calm in contrast to its earlier fit. Mumbo assumed- for obvious reasons, really- that the egg powered the farms despite the contraptions having been able to power themselves via redstone. It was captivating and he couldn’t help but to become curious about what was inside the egg that would’ve given it so much power. That or had it already been created with it. Either way, he yearned to learn more about it. It could be revolutionary and improve efficiency immensely.

Although, the event was short lived as the egg’s energy flow sputtered and dissipated, leading to the farms shutting down with it. Mumbo looked up as items began to rain over his shoulders when they fell. But, he was hardly bothered. At this moment he realized a few things.

His farms worked, thankfully; The egg held an amount of power that could power several farms; Mumbo wanted to keep the egg for even longer to experiment.

Of course, he still wanted to eventually return it but as someone who couldn’t kill anything, the egg could help him for the time being...He already had many ideas popping into his head by the second. It only made him giddy for what was to come. He ran over and scooped up the egg with an ear-to-ear grin, holding it up to his face.

“You, my friend, are one wicked egg,” he complimented. Then, he put it in his inventory and prepared to fly home. He’d clean up the mess later.

As he rocketed off to his base, he noticed his red sweatered friend sitting alone on the roof of his house. Even when Mumbo flew by, Grian didn’t wave or nod up to him or really even look at him. Piquing his curiosity, though he should just go home and avoid confrontation, he landed behind Grian and carefully stepped down the slope of the roof.

“Hey! Haven’t heard from you much today,” he greeted. Mumbo was only met with silence. “Are you okay?”

After a second, Grian twitched when he realized that someone was talking to him. He turned his head to where Mumbo crouched down next to him.

“Oh! Sorry, I was just thinking. This is my thinking roof.”

The redstoner hummed. “Ah, don’t wear yourself out then,” he laughed.

“You should try it sometime with that empty head of yours.” The avian chuckled dryly and looked back to the setting sun, the small smile falling from his face.

“Thanks,” Mumbo replied, initially with a smile himself but found himself meeting Grian’s frown. He waited a few seconds before speaking again. Then, he tapped his fingers on the deepslate. “So...what’re you thinking about?”

“A lot, honestly. It's still the beginning of the season, I’m sure everyone is.” He waved a hand dismissively then looked at Mumbo. “What about you? Have you been thinking about anything?”

Mumbo snorted, attempting to lighten the mood. “Thinking isn’t good for me. I overthink when I do and it hurts my brain.” He paused. “But, if you’d really like to know, I’ve been thinking about the egg.”

This made Grian perk up. “What about it? Do you know where it is?”

The redstoner hesitated. Not yet, he can’t give it up just yet. “What? No, not at all. But, I had a question.”

Grian deflated, then looked away with his chin on his arms, legs tucked to his chest. “Alright, shoot.”

Mumbo’s stomach twisted. “I uh- maybe now isn’t the best time actually. You know, while it’s missing and all.” He cracked a half smile.

“Yeah, while it’s missing,” the builder scoffed. “Just ask me, I’m sure I can answer.”

“Ah- um, sure. Why...why is the egg so special to you? I understand sentimentality, but it just seemed more…” He sighed. “I don’t know. I wondered maybe- maybe it uh… did something, you know? You said it was a magical egg. Maybe you could tell me about it?”

He heard a low chuckle from Grian. “It’s just some stupid egg, it’s not magical.”

“I- oh.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that was disappointing for you, wasn’t it,” Grian sneered. The two stopped. Grian pulled his head up and Mumbo furrowed his brows. “Nevermind, I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry. Just stressed.”

Mumbo stood and tightened his jaw, ignoring the builder’s excuse. “You know, you’ve been real onto me about that egg. Why don’t you tell me about that instead or go bother Scar. Every conversation I have with you now is just accusing me of taking it.”

Grian thought back to what Aisling said, then his last thought before he came to the roof. “Because maybe I saw you sneak into my house and steal the egg. And maybe, I don’t know, it’s my stuff.” He stood and faced Mumbo with a finger to the redstoner’s chest. “And maybe it’s because you are an insanely terrible liar.”

The other was at a loss for words, opening his mouth then clamping it shut repeatedly. The tips of his ears reddened in embarrassment. Of course Grian probably saw him take it, anyone could’ve. But why didn’t he say anything before? Satisfaction? Did he want Mumbo to just admit to it?

It didn’t matter now, the jig was up and all of his plans for the egg were now down the drain.

“I- I’m sorry,” was all he could muster. “I didn’t think it was such a problem.” He looked down at his shoes. “You…have been acting differently since it was gone, I didn’t think I made you mad.”

The avian sighed in relief and put a hand on Mumbo’s shoulder. “I’m not- look at me,” Mumbo lifted his head, “I’m not mad. Really, I’m not. A little annoyed, maybe, but not mad.”

“But you just scolded me like a toddler!” The redstoner whined.

Grian laughed. “Because you have to do that when a toddler lies to you. But, I’m not angry at you, at Scar, or anyone else. I want to tell you why that egg is important, I do, but it’s not the time for that, yet.” He patted his friend’s shoulder. It was clear Mumbo had more questions but decided to avoid them. “So, where is it?”

“Ah- well, I should warn you first about something.” Grian’s eyes widened. “No, no! Nothing happened to it! But um- well, it’s not ‘just some stupid egg’, it’s one seriously powerful egg, dude. What kind of dragon did you fight?!”

“...Excuse me?”

“Yeah! It powered two of my farms at once, did this huge explosion thing with a bunch of lightning, and it was awesome, but the egg-”

Grian took a hold of Mumbo’s shoulders roughly. “Mumbo, did it do anything to you.” The builder was suddenly very serious, as if Mumbo would die if he said yes.

So, of course he lied. “No? I was well away from it.” Grian let go and crossed his arms with a raised brow. “I was! I ran away because I obviously didn’t want to die.”

The other sighed. “Good, I need it now, then.”

Mumbo pulled it from his inventory, hesitating to give it back. Then, he put it in Grian’s outstretched palm. With nothing more to say, he waved goodbye and glided back to his van. Grian watched as he did and once the van’s door slid shut, he looked down at the egg. While he inspected the egg, he noticed a new detail to its shell that made his stomach sink.

A cursive two letter initial, MJ.

[themissingmarvel]

Kind Regards, Detective [Part 5] -Prelude to Deepest Sympathies

(I don’t usually trigger warn or content warn, but this might be a triggering chapter. I’m including the Reader’s Drabble I wrote a little while back as recommended reading prior to this, [Drabble 2] but if it’s hard to read about family death then maybe avoid it. This chapter was hard, but important. And I think sets up a truly important dynamic. I’m a slow-burn romantic kind of lady, and I wanted their relationship to be powerful and important, not just one of lust. Or even basic attraction. I needed it to be human. Anyway I liked writing it, and feedback is always appreciated and loved and treasured ((i seriously reread any feedback and comments)) and as always, ask to be tagged or removed from tagging.

Pairing: Detective Loki x fbi!Reader

Word Count: 3k

Warnings: Death, emotional anguish, PTSD flashbacks, language)

Catch up: [Part 1] // [Part 2] // [Drabble] // [Part 3] // [Part 4] // [Drabble2]

She didn’t sleep last night, which was no surprise. She had spent much of the night awake and poring over documents and cataloged pieces. Her own theories had been spun and while some might have felt outlandish in her head, she understood that this was an outlandish case. It had been hard enough to put on those headphones and let herself fall into a trance. Remember her sister. But not directly. She remembered remembering. Buying that damn CD she would play over and over. Peter Gabriel was her sister’s favorite, not that she’d ever tell anyone. Neither would. Her sister touted her love for System of a Down and Trust Company back when those bands made you cool.

For years after her sister passed she had found the only thing that felt vaguely satisfying was leaving that CD on her sister’s grave. And when CDs started becoming scarce, she had spent a few hundred dollars on Amazon buying all of the CDs she could find with that song on it. She’d be damned if she ever missed a single anniversary. Never went on the day of her passing, though. No. That felt sacrilegious. She went on her sister’s birthday, played the song on her headphones, along with a few others, but Heroes was the one that she played most. It was the one she’d leave behind after telling her how her parents had finally divorced, or how her dad had been ‘thinking’ about retiring again. For the hundredth time. Or how she’d been accepted as an Agent and two weeks ago, about how she was feeling so fucking lost.

But memories of memories are easier to put away, and much like her locker that held Detective Loki, her sister’s, much more ornate and much larger, she put those memories of memories away.

Her bag was hanging off her form lazily and her hair was done just enough to be presentable. By no means was she falling apart, but she was working. Working hard meant she lost focus on other parts of herself. It meant she had zeroed in on certain aspects of the case. Like how all of the individuals abducted had been on the same phone carrier, Radius, or how the TV was a model made by the company Source that had been discontinued three years ago, but at the time had been beyond revolutionary. Even now it was considered brilliant. She had found no traces of the nerve agent were discovered at the scene which meant they were probably injected with the pure form. Which meant someone had a lot of it.

Her theories meant that this man was not just dangerous but he had resources. He had access to things that people shouldn’t have access to and maybe he worked with Radius? Had access to their systems? The generator powering the church had been a Source item as well, meaning both were connected. Who used Source and Radius?

The precinct was still somewhat quiet, at 8am, slightly later than yesterday. Shift change had taken place and the detectives were still filtering in. Except for Detective Loki who was hunched at his desk, a long sleeved, form fitting black shirt on his form and black pants hanging off his hips. He looked sleek. Dangerous, even. She could see how someone might fall for someone like him.

Placing her bag down in the conference room, having actually remembered her coffee traveler this time, she glanced up as one of the cops walked in with a box, “Agent Y/L/N, this was left here about an hour ago for you. UPS dropped it off.”

The 2-PAM. She smiled and took it, “Thanks. Kind of nice when things work out like they’re supposed to for once,” she chuckled, curious why the box was so damn light.

The officer left and Y/N looked down, noticing that the label wasn’t stamped ‘FBI’ and in fact the sender name was absent, save for an address in Pennsylvania that didn’t look familiar. Maybe not the FBI?

Her heart suddenly began to race, carefully putting the box down as she looked to the side, seeing Detective Loki still hunched over. The man was on a mission.

Reaching behind herself she withdrew the small switchblade she kept tucked into her waist line, the one that no one ever saw. That was small. Cold and awkward at times but useful. Like now.

Why did this feel like defusing a bomb?

The blade clicked and she carefully began to open the box. She was aware it didn’t matter anymore who touched it, or if she damaged it. She knew whatever was inside the box was key. And with a final tug, the lid opened and she peered inside.

Time stopping had always felt like kind of an exaggeration to Y/N. How does time even ‘stop’? What, does the world freeze? Well, it did.

Staring inside the box she could see the face of a man she knew well, a man who cradled her soul and her heart and sang brilliant love songs to her, who had kept her connected to her sister, even in death. The black CD cover with two red forms on it, her sister claimed them red blood cells but said they looked like rose petals.

Her hand was surprisingly steady as she picked up the note inside, reading the immaculate cursive written on some kind of specialty papyrus paper, “My deepest sympathies, Agent. Your triumph through tragedy only enhances your beauty.”

And with that, she ran for the plastic trash bin nearby and fell to it, retching hard as she threw up the entire contents of her breakfast, causing the box, the note, and the Peter Gabriel CD with Heroes on it to tumble to the floor.

Immediately David heard the noise and jumped, running inside the room as the precinct suddenly jumped to life, turning to take in the scene. The note, CD, and box were on the floor and Y/N was kneeling by the small, cheap plastic trash bin puking.

“What the fu-” David was almost able to spit the words out before a strangely animalistic sound came from her lips, screaming into the bin that she had already emptied the contents of her stomach into.

The world grew quiet as the scream died down, leaving Y/N on her knees with her eyes closed, knuckles white as she gripped the bin as though it were the only thing keeping her alive right now. Stable. Present. Here.

“Get me gloves and bags for the items, now!” David yelled out, to no one in particular as he knelt by the woman in a kind of distress he didn’t know a person could experience from a simple box, “Hey, talk to me, what happened? Are you OK?”

Her face snapped, wiping her lips as she glared, “Do I look OK to you, Detective? Do I fucking look OK?” Her voice was raised, though not yelling.

Snapping back David glared, “Do we need to decontaminate the room? Is there anything infectious?” He looked at her seriously.

Taking a breath her eyes pulled away, “No. No chemicals. But it’s toxic none the less.”

Her voice was quiet as she spoke the words, closing her eyes and trying to forget what she had just seen. Experienced. Felt in her gut. Her soul had been torn forth in that moment and the timing of the CD was so tragically horrifying. For a brief moment of paranoia she wondered if perhaps someone had been able to access her personal phone, heard what she was listening to. The artist. The song.

Getting up rather quickly, Y/N stumbled slightly as she made her way through the people that had clustered, watching as two other detectives came rushing forward with evidence collecting items. Forensics would get it. They’d dust it for fingerprints and they would come up with hers, the delivery driver’s, the handlers at the warehouse… maybe a dozen people. And none would be the culprits. David would direct people to track the package and they would. They’d track it to some nondescript location where cameras weren’t installed and it’d been paid for with cash. She knew it like she knew the songlist on that CD.

Heading for the door of the precinct her head felt light, woozy, and she was struggling for something stable. Something to keep her grounded. Even as she threw open the doors of the building, those glass doors lined with metal, solid as hell, heavy as fuck, she ran out into the bitter air, feeling the cold devour her skin.

More.

She didn’t realize it but she was running now, into the parking lot, David not far behind, though he didn’t exist right now. Her sister’s smile was there, a true memory in its purest form, the smile she had wanted to see last night but didn’t want tainted and tied to this psychopath now.

Unthinking and perhaps uncaring, her hands grabbed at the hem of her sweater, pulling it up and over her head, tossing it to the ground of the parking lot filled only with cars, otherwise without a soul. The air was frigid as it enveloped her and tore her from reality. She gasped as the item fell, leaving her in her form-fitted white t-shirt and jeans alone, able to see her breath as she felt it stopping her from hyperventilating, the cold burning her skin, tearing at her and pulling her out of this other reality.

Once, during training, she had been shot. Not with a real bullet, of course, but shot none the less. A rubber bullet the academy insisted they feel the impact of to know what they might use in certain circumstances. And, perhaps, be prepared for since it’d be similar to a bullet hitting a bulletproof vest. The bullet had been fired by some complete and utter asshole Thomas Engleson, a man who didn’t think women could hack it. He shot her in the ribcage, instead of the stomach. He hit her directly. Not indirectly. And of course he was excused for it.

The pain of the shot had been incredible but she had gritted her teeth and taken it in. A cracked rib meant she was out for a bit, but it didn’t actually stop her. She kept training. Moving. Not exacerbating the damage but doing just enough to keep going. But the pain of that moment had been etched into her body’s memory.

This hurt worse.

Her skin was covered in goosebumps from the cold, beginning to shiver as she stood, perhaps for ten minutes, David standing behind her as he looked at her. This woman unshaken by so much, who had taken in twelve dead bodies and kept going, who took information meant to terrify and had kept pushing. Whatever had been in that note, in that box, had been meant just for her on a level those notes for David never touched.

It felt like an ache, standing in the cold as he watched the woman he had found himself so fond of suddenly pushing out the entire world as though it might infect her. He wanted to grab her sweater, wrap her in it, and pull her close. He’d swear to god he’d get the guy. And he would, even if he didn’t tell her that. He swore as he watched her, that finding this man would be his only task. He wouldn’t sleep. Wouldn’t eat. This was Dover and Birch, but now he was the onve involved. His own life was on the line.

“Do you ever wonder what it feels like to die, David?” The words were loud enough for him to hear, the wind suddenly picking up as she stared ahead to the road leading into the precinct, fairly empty though cars scattered about, the day cloudy and bitter.

He took a moment to consider it. He had. He had wondered once, when the kid in his backseat was frothing at the mouth, if maybe he prayed hard enough her poison would go into his body. He could take it, he thought. Better let the child live. He had seen enough, “Yes.” He answered simply. Now was not the time for banter.

A sort of dark chuckle left her lips, “I used to wonder what it might be like to die. After my sister was killed, I thought it was the only thing left that could actually scare me. The world couldn’t hurt me any more than it did when I was seventeen. I didn’t want to die, I still don’t, but I knew I could face that fear.

“But now? God, David… I wish I was fucking dead.” She fell to her knees so suddenly it caught David by surprise, running to her as he grabbed her sweater, saying ‘fuck it’ to the world as he wrapped his arms around her, pressing her body to his as he tried to finagle a way to keep her sweater on her as well.

No sobs or cries escaped her lips as her body went lax, falling against him as she wondered, perhaps, if maybe just giving in to this would be best. This felt so goddamn dramatic, and maybe it was, but for good reason. This man had found out one of her most intimate details of her life and sent it to her in a box. He had delivered to her a piece of her, and what scared her most was the fact that this man, this murderer, thought he was showing some sort of deranged compassion.

Time seemed to stop and David was grateful for the fact that they were far enough away, and behind most of the cars in the lot, that the world wouldn’t see them like this. He could smell the free, nondescript shampoo offered by the hotel, unsurprised that she wasn’t doused in perfume. But she did smell of something. Her own personal brand of herself. Pushing back some of her hair he spoke, “You can’t go anywhere yet. You can’t possibly trust me to finish this case by myself,” he grinned, stopping himself from pressing his lips against her head.

Chuckling, despite her desire not to, she shook her head, “I sure as hell don’t expect you to solve this alone. You need my theories, Detective Loki. I came up with a bunch last night.” It was tragic in a way, how fast she was working to compartmentalize. Whoever it was that had sent her the letter had done a bang-up job scaring the shit out of her. He had opened the locker that held her sister and emptied the contents without permission. But Y/N was cleaning it up. She was fixing it. In her mind she was already putting herself and all those pieces back together.

Looking confused David pulled away slightly, “Don’t you think you should go get coffee or something? Take a- Ah, fuck, who am I kidding. You’re not listening to me, are you?”

The ghost of a smile crept onto her lips as she raised an eyebrow, looking at David now, “Not really. And I mean, what’s stopping going to do? We both know I’m invested. He… he may have targeted you and those other detectives, and honed onto you, but with me… I’m a happy accident. He picked me. I don’t want to be another body in a church, David,” her eyes changed as she looked at him, suddenly fragile and vulnerable, opening her heart to this man. Detective. The one holding her in the parking lot of the precinct while both tried to put together what they just went through.

Stroking her cheek lightly David whispered, “And you won’t be. You’re gonna get up, put your sweater on, and go back inside. And when everyone looks at you, or asks if you’re OK, you’re not gonna smile or fake it, you stare at them. Through them. None of them matter now. Not a single soul inside. We’re gonna find this asshole, and we’re gonna stop him. Now get up.”

He pulled away, nothing truly romantic in the gesture but one that broke her just the same. They were words that felt charged with something more than a pep talk, but instead felt like a true demand. David understood she wasn’t some person who just fell over because they were pushed. She’d stumble. She’d fall. And he knew she could get right back up and go back to bat. And as she stood, David doing the same, he watched her eyes as she put the sweater on. Something had changed, briefly, something else. Something oddly dark that he couldn’t put his finger on, but understood she perhaps needed. The same thing he had needed in his time.

Turning her back to him, Y/N made her way back towards the precinct, her feet marching with purpose, her eyes focused, laser focused, as she understood what this was. This man chose people. Always. He had a reason and a purpose and it was never an accident. He had found the CD she brought to her sister’s grave (though she suspected it wasn’t the same one), he had written a detailed note, and he had found the one thing in this world she was still so very vulnerable to.

Now she was going to find him.

( @escapingthoughtsandsecrets @is-it-madness @detecellie @oscarflysaac @peccobagnaia @fgtakbrjbdl​ @doritosandavocados​ @miss-missing-patd​

[jayjay547]

SHIELD's Best Podcast and Other Things Bucky Should Not Have Done: Chapter One

Summary: Bucky Barnes: natural poet, amateur author, and relationship expert. The last part was a heavy exaggeration, but he's fooled enough people into thinking so; after all, his advice was held to such high regard that he got a spot on one of New York City's most popular podcasts. He even liked to think he was revolutionary for helping break down the stereotype of relationship experts being perfect at handling relationships. If only someone had asked him for advice on how to deal with falling in love with two different people who were coincidentally in love with each other.

Not that it would have mattered, anyway. Bucky never followed his own advice.

Chapter Word Count: 3,309 words

Relationship: Sam Wilson/Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes

AU: Modern/College

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Bucky didn't ask to be famous. 

Not that he was in the normal sense of the word. No one in New Jersey knew his name, much less anyone on the West Coast. Actually, most people in New York City probably didn't know who he was, but that was okay. He liked to think the people who mattered (meaning people within a half mile radius of him) knew who he was, at least a little bit. 

If one was to go up to a college student about to go into their first lecture of the day at New York University and asked them whether the name "Bucky Barnes," or "James Buchanan Barnes" if it was a day for formalities, rang a bell, the most obvious and common answer would be along the lines of "that writer boy." Not "that failed mechanical engineer," not "the one who can't do any type of science to save his life," and definitely not "the boy who cried in his car while eating ice cream after his ex-boyfriend dumped him." Especially not the last one, even if that particular low moment was just the beginning of his rise to fame. 

He also wasn't quite famous enough to get stopped while walking through hallways, unless it was by an older professor of his; even then, it was a reach. As he walked to his class, nobody really gave him a side glance. He liked to think that the people who did were somewhat appreciative of his looks, but that was wishful thinking, the thinking of someone who was still in the rebound period of getting over a relationship even though the break up was a year ago. 

When Bucky walked into his poetry concentration class, though, he knew more than a few people recognized him. There was only one picture of him that was published with his writing, a professional headshot and all, and while Bucky looked like a wreck most days in his life, it wasn't hard to put two and two together. 

He sat down on one of the benches, shuffling the papers he brought with him around, just to look like he was doing something. Not long after, there was a tap on his shoulder. Bucky braced himself for his first fan interaction of the day (and the month, but he wouldn't tell you that). 

Turning around, he was met by a face that was somewhat familiar to him, even if he couldn't place the name. Maybe she was a fellow writer, or something of that sort. Her blonde hair was tied up in a low ponytail, and the wrinkles near the bottom of her forehead suggested that she spent a hell of a lot of time frowning. "What's up?" Bucky asked, angling his body towards her as best as he could. 

"Are you James Barnes?" Her tone was blunt, the voice of a woman who did not mess around. If she wasn't in his class right now, Bucky would think that she was a Business major. There was always the possibility that she was a double major, but that was a bit excessive. 

"Yes," Bucky said, before quickly (and clumsily) adding, "But I go by Bucky." 

"Bucky," she parroted, as if the nickname was much too personal for her. Maybe it was. "That's from your middle name, right? Buchanan?" 

Up until now, Bucky hadn't had any stalker-type fans, and he was hoping that he would keep that record. Of course, his middle name was published with his work, but still, it was odd. "Yes ma’am,” he responded. 

The woman stuck out her hand, and Bucky shook it. She didn't seem fazed by his gloved hands, and he appreciated the lack of questioning around why he was even wearing gloves inside a warm classroom. “My name's Sharon,” she said. Her handshake was firm, practiced, and Bucky wondered again whether she was in Business. “You're the one who wrote the open letter, right? ‘What's Wrong With City Days?’”

She was much too put together to be a stalker, but who the hell actually knew the title of his first published piece? Bucky didn't even know some of the titles of his own works. “Uh,” he said intelligently, “Yeah. Yes, that's me.” 

Sharon put her hand on the desk in front of her, tapping at it for a second or two, drawing attention to her perfectly manicured nails. Bucky wished his nails looked that nice. “Well, I've read your work, Bucky,” she sighed out, as if it was a tragedy that had happened to her. “And I thought it was superb.”

Maybe she was a little too put together; Bucky wasn't sure he knew anyone who used the word “superb,” much less anyone who used it to describe his work. Stalker wasn't off the list yet. “I'm glad you think so,” he said slowly, before slapping himself mentally. He was being rude. “Sorry, I'm still not used to people reading my stuff. Specifically that piece.” Bucky winced, his mind going a hundred miles per hour. “Kinda wish people hadn't read that piece.” 

Sharon leaned forward, closer to Bucky. “Why not?” She asked gently, taking him by surprise. She looked sincere enough, and he wished he could tell her, but then the door opened. As the professor walked into the classroom, Sharon straightened up, sitting back into her seat, and Bucky took that as his cue to face forward. 

Why not? The question stewed in his head as the professor Mr. So-and-so, who Bucky had missed the name of, promising himself that he would just read the syllabus, started to drone on about basic topics. 

Why not? Maybe because it was around the time he found out that Brock Rumlow had been cheating on him throughout the entire duration of their relationship. Maybe because, right after that, he realized that he couldn't pass any of the classes meant for engineering. Maybe it was because he had then been notified that he had to go in for another round of surgeries on his arm. 

There were a lot of reasons why “What's Wrong With City Days?” hurt. But he had still published it, as a dramatic and overly emotional person does. Correction: Natasha had published it, but only after Bucky told her she could. 

He had written it in between the first and second operation on his arm. The hospital TV didn't play anything he was interested in watching, and staring downwards at his laptop while it played Netflix gave him a headache he couldn't bear to have. So he wrote. And he wrote. And then he napped, woke up, and wrote some more. He may have even written when he was high on anesthesia, which Clint told him didn't make much sense. 

Getting pieces of metal inserted into your arm was apparently the best motivator there was.

He stared ahead at the professor who continued to talk, the words passing through Bucky's head quicker than the man was saying them. It was only the first day of this class, and Bucky knew he would have catching up to do.

His phone screen turned on, placed next to his binder and all his messed up papers, a notification popping up. He swiped it. 

Spider Mom

Walk Lucky when you get back. Ty 

Bucky coughed quietly under his breath to disguise the laugh he felt bubbling up his throat at Natasha’s bluntness. He texted back a quick confirmation before clicking his phone off. Behind him, a pair of eyes bored into his back, so much so that Bucky swore he could feel it. When he turned back, Sharon didn't even disguise the fact that she was looking at him, smiling slightly at him when they made eye contact. As embarrassed as he was to admit it, he looked away first. 

The minutes ticked by as Bucky entered a staring contest with the right-facing wall. His phone lit up a few more times, but he didn't check it. The one portion of exposed brick was getting more and more interesting by the second; Bucky was convinced if he looked at it any longer, he would have enough ammunition to make another viral poem. 

And then suddenly, the lecture ended. Most likely, the end wasn't as sudden to others as it was to Bucky. 

While Bucky was scrambling together the papers that he had put on his desk for nothing, the quiet sound of footsteps coming up behind him alerted him that Sharon was still here, and still interested in talking. 

“Where do you go after class?” She asked briskly, and what was left of Bucky's “Stranger Danger” alarms went off in his head. Against his best interest, he answered her.

“I walk over to Martinelli's, the coffee shop. Do you know it?” He added as her lips tilted up into a half smile at the name. She nodded slightly.

“You could say that. Let me walk you over?” She asked kindly, but something told Bucky that it wasn't really a request. He could obviously say no, but something about her compelled him to accept.

“I could always use the company,” Bucky muttered back, stringing his bag over his right shoulder. Together, they walked out the classroom, and after a few more steps, they entered the outside world.

“So,” Sharon said immediately, as if the cold city air allowed her to talk freely. “I have some questions.” 

“Uh,” Bucky got out. He had only done one interview for his writing, and he had prepared so thoroughly for that one, only for half of his words to be taken out of context. “Go for it.” 

Something that Bucky realized very quickly was that Sharon walked very, very fast. He widened the length of his strides, huffing cold breaths of air as the woman started to speak, barely sounding out of breath. “Do you know what SHIELD's Best is?” 

Bucky's heart skipped a beat, and not because he was struggling to speed walk. SHIELD's Best: the most popular podcast in New York City, not just NYU. There was no real reason why it had the renown that it had; listening to it, though, was explanation enough. If the topic was relevant, it was covered. Bucky even swore multiple times to Clint and Natasha that the podcast covered things that weren't even out yet. They never lingered on the same topic twice, and there was something for everyone, it seemed. It was his source of news, and the source of news for most people in the city. The defining part of it had to be that the four speakers all had undeniable chemistry, not to mention that they also had very, very nice voices, especially the two men. 

“Wait,” Bucky said suddenly, stopping in his tracks. Sharon slowed down with much more grace, turning to face Bucky in the middle of the slightly crowded sidewalk, a smile on her face as if she was already anticipating his question. “Are you Sharon Carter?”

She laughed, and Bucky felt a swell of pride for being correct, followed by a torrent of embarrassment for their entire conversation up until now. “I'll take that as a yes, then,” she murmured, and Bucky forced himself to move towards her as she started to walk again. Sharon Carter, one of the speakers on what was possibly one of the most influential podcasts, was walking with him to a coffee shop. 

The multiple shops passed by as they walked in silence for about a hundred feet, or something like that, which Bucky appreciated. It gave him time to collect his thoughts, and there was a lot to collect. After they passed a few more signs, though, Sharon decided that enough time was given. 

“So you're aware that we have guest speakers?” Sharon asked, and Bucky tripped. At least, he almost did, but he corrected himself right away. He couldn't wipe away the humiliated red that stained his cheeks, though. 

“Yes, I'm aware,” he said, stringing his words together as carefully as possible. He refused to mess up whatever was happening before it even happened. 

“Well, Bucky, we want you to guest speak about your writing,” Sharon said smoothly, as if it wasn't the biggest (positive) thing that had happened in Bucky's life. “I will say it was sheer luck that I have the same class as you this year, but don't think this is just a convenience grab. One of our speakers, Steve, really likes your work.” 

Bucky turned red again, which was not the best look for him, but at least he could blame it on the cold. Steve - amazing, supposedly kind-hearted Steve with a voice that Bucky would die for - liked his work?

It was only after they walked a few more steps that Bucky realized that Sharon was probably waiting for more than a lovesick look from his face. “Yeah, uh,” he got out, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I'd love to. It'd be an honor,” he finally said, and Sharon smiled again. Maybe she could sense his sincerity, as wrapped up in his awkwardness as it was. 

“Sounds good, Bucky,” she murmured in reply, slowing down. In a daze, Bucky realized that they had reached their destination. Out of pure habit, he moved to open the door. It was only after Sharon thanked him and went into the shop that Bucky remembered that she had only said she would walk him there. Once again, anxiety threatened to overwhelm him, his brain piecing together every possible bad impression he had made on the woman. 

“Hey Sharon. Hey Bucky,” was what the two of them heard upon entering the shop. Sharon immediately waved to Bucky’s (kind of) employer.

"Hey Angie. I was just walking Bucky over here," she threw out casually, gesturing vaguely to Bucky, who was still trying to figure out why Sharon was familiar enough with Martinelli to call her "Angie." 

"Cool, cool. Didn't know you guys knew each other," she added, her eyes darting between the two of them. Bucky could have said the same thing back, but his mouth had a tendency to betray him, so he kept it shut. 

"Just met today. So, Bucky," she stated, all professional, "Let's exchange numbers and you can let me know when you get back home so we can discuss times when you're not busy."

Bucky took her phone hesitantly, starting to type in his number as he spoke. "Actually, I live above the shop." 

Sharon's eyebrows went up. "Really?" Bucky nodded as she continued, "I actually haven't met any of the others who live here." 

She had to stop confusing Bucky. His head couldn't take much more thinking. Why would it be a surprise that she hadn't met them? Sharon mistook his blank stare and silence as disdain, adding quickly, "I'm not planning on meeting anyone else today, so don't worry about introducing me." 

"Oh no, it's fine, I was just..." Bucky muttered, handing back her phone carefully. "Thinking. I was just thinking." In front of him, Sharon opened up her messages, clicking the new contact he had made for himself, sending a text. In his back pocket, he felt his phone buzz, but for her sake, Bucky made a show of taking his phone out and checking to see whether he had gotten a text. He had, and he quickly created her contact. 

“So,” Sharon started again, sliding her own phone back into her pocket, a movement that mirrored Bucky's. “We usually record on Saturdays. Does that work for you?”

Bucky nodded, wordlessly, which was an appropriate enough answer for Sharon. “Alright, good. I'll send you some stuff about it later. Basically, you're allowed to pick any piece of work that you would like to share, but let me know which one by tonight. I will then send you a rough outline of questions that will be asked, but try not to practice answers. It's more engaging if it doesn't sound like you're reading off a script.” 

As much as he tried, his mind was still struggling to wrap itself around the information that Sharon was calmly relaying, as if she had practiced it multiple times over, but just enough to still be natural. Her smooth way of speech had to be attributed to the fact that she was on a podcast; Bucky refused to believe that people were just born that charismatic. He nodded again, barely remembering to answer her. 

“Alright,” she said, checking her watch. “I have to go. I'll text you later. It was wonderful meeting you, Bucky.” Her voice was honest, sincere, as was the smile on her face. It was contagious, and he let a small smile slide onto his face as well. 

“It was nice meeting you too, Sharon,” he replied back, just as sincere, earning him a flash of teeth in Sharon's smile before she made her way towards the door, only stopping to give a quick goodbye to Angie. Even after the bell on the door stopped ringing and she was past the sight of the windows, Bucky kept standing there, frozen to the floor. 

“Hey man,” came Angie’s hesitant voice, and Bucky made a small sound of assent to declare that he had heard the woman. A few more seconds without a reply, and Bucky turned around slightly, just enough to see her in his peripheral vision. “Clint mentioned to me that he wanted you to take out Lucky?” 

Bucky groaned, but it was the reality check he needed, at least.

- - - - -

When he finally came home from the long walk, he entered through the back entrance of the shop. From personal experience, bringing the happiest, friendliest golden retriever in through the front of the shop would take from Bucky about an hour of his life. Bucky and Lucky (yes, they rhyme) clambered up the stairway to the small upstairs area with two doors across from each other. The door on the left was closed, signalling to him that Wanda and Pietro, the siblings that lived there, were not home; Wanda liked to leave the door open when she was, claiming it helped with “air circulation.” 

He opened the door to the right, simultaneously leaning down to start loosening the harness around Lucky. For his efforts, Bucky got a slobbery kiss on the cheek which he took in a stride. Closing the door behind him, he unleashed Lucky, who made a beeline for his water bowl. Bucky collapsed on the one tiny couch, leaning his head back on the top of the cushion so he could stare at the plain popcorn ceiling. 

Almost immediately, his phone buzzed. Letting out a long sigh, he fumbled for the phone he had thrown clumsily onto the couch, blinding swiping on the notification once he felt the phone in his hand. 

Sharon 

Saturday, 1:00 pm. Don't worry about eating lunch beforehand. 

Also, let me know what piece as soon as you can. 

He read the text again and again in his head. For the hundredth time, he clarified to himself that it was PM and not AM before making ten alarms for Saturday, starting at ten in the morning and ending at noon. Immediately after, he returned to regarding the messages again, only glancing away to make eye contact with Lucky, who had decided that the only rational thing to do after drinking water was drool on Bucky's leg. 

“Well bud,” he muttered, reaching out to scratch behind the dog's ears absentmindedly. “I'm really doing this, huh?” 

Lucky just stared at him, which was a good enough answer for Bucky to send a quick reply to Sharon, confirming his attendance and assuring that he would, in fact, pick a piece of his writing by tonight. 

“It's just a one time thing,” Bucky said to the rest of the room. “It's a breakthrough, but it's only a one time thing.” 

masterlist

[kuramirocket]

Carlos Muñoz, Jr. remembers when he first began to ponder the meaning of his Mexican roots.Muñoz, now 80, was living in the crowded Segundo barrio of El Paso, Texas. His family—like thousands of other émigrés—had settled there decades earlier, refugees fleeing violence spawned by the Mexican Revolution.Neither of his parents had made it past elementary school, but they wanted more for their son. So young Carlos walked across town every day to an Anglo neighborhood where the local school had more resources than barrio campuses.In that world, Carlos became Charles—rechristened in fifth grade by a white teacher in an attempt to “Americanize” him.

His school records were altered to label him Charles. But nothing else about him changed. “I began to wonder about what that meant,” he recalls. “That was the first time that I started thinking about identity and culture and that kind of stuff.”

It wouldn’t be the last.

The next year his family moved from El Paso to Los Angeles, where they hopscotched among barrios from the Eastside to Downtown to South Los Angeles. And no matter whether his teachers called him Carlos or Charles, their ingrained attitudes about his Mexican heritage narrowed his path.

The counselors at Belmont High School steered Charles away from college prep and toward vocational ed, even though he was an honor student. They suggested he become a carpenter, like his dad.

“If you were Black or Brown and a male at that time, you automatically got to be an industrial arts major,” he says. “You take the basic courses in English, history and government, but you don’t get the algebra and the biology courses.”

He didn’t realize until after he graduated with honors in 1958 that those courses he missed were required for admission to California’s public universities.

It would take six years for Charles to navigate a route—through community college, military service and a white-collar job that paid well but left him unfulfilled—to the campus of Cal State LA.

There, in the midst of a nascent Chicano rights movement, Charles reclaimed Carlos and played a key role in a history-making venture that would create new paths for Latino students: the creation at Cal State LA of the first Mexican American Studies program in the nation.

Its launch five decades ago—which Muñoz, then a graduate student, helped lead—would usher in a new era of ethnic studies across the Southwestern United States and ultimately around the country. Today more than 400 universities have programs dedicated to the study of the history, circumstances and culture of Latinos in America.

“Right now, there’s an awareness of ethnic studies. … But the beginnings of ethnic studies, as a discipline, were right here at Cal State LA,” says Professor Dolores Delgado Bernal, chair of what is now the Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies.

“The discipline offers a lot to students, in terms of their identities, their intellect, what interests they pursue. Taking these courses allows students to say, ‘I can claim and be proud of who I am, and that allows me to better understand and accept others who are not like me.’ ”

“It’s becoming increasingly important to have that interdisciplinary background, and an understanding of other cultures and races,” Delgado Bernal says.

Today Muñoz is a professor emeritus in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He’s an author, political scientist, historian and scholar, specializing in social and revolutionary movements.

But the challenges Muñoz encountered on his journey from the barrio to the ivory tower typify the struggles that many Latino students still face today—and illustrate why Chicano Studies was necessary decades ago, and still has an important role to play.

In its early years, the Cal State LA program was a resource for local students who felt intimidated by college and invisible on campus.

The spotlight on Chicano history and culture allowed them to see themselves through a new lens, one scrubbed of stereotypes. And its sweeping scope connected them to other marginalized groups, illuminating struggles for equality that students found ultimately empowering.

“To me, the thing about Chicano Studies is that it was eye-opening to the truth and history,”  Carmen Ramírez, an Oxnard city councilwoman who attended Cal State LA for two years in the 1970s, says. “If you don’t know the truth, you can’t fix the future. … We need to know our history.”

And the dividends spread far beyond the campus, the student body and local communities. By its very existence, the Cal State LA program gave national credibility to the concept of ethnic studies as an intellectual pursuit.

“Chicano Studies opened the door to possibilities of employment on university faculties,” said Raul Ruiz, professor emeritus in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at Cal State Northridge, which hired him in 1970. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Cal State LA in 1967, and went on to earn his master’s and Ph.D. at Harvard. Ruiz died this year at 78 years old. 

“Chicano Studies gave us opportunities to teach at the college level. And that was very significant in an era when many of us never had a Latino professor.”

At that time, “there were only about five Mexican Americans in the country with Ph.D.s in the social sciences,” recalls Muñoz, who earned his B.A. in political science from Cal State LA and a Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School.

Like Ruiz and Muñoz, several of the campus movement’s leaders went on to become college professors and scholarly experts in the field.

But even when they were offered faculty positions in Latino Studies, their contributions were often minimized or disregarded.

“Now we’re very visible at universities across the nation,” Muñoz says. “But during my career, I often had to face that perspective— you’re just ideologues, not scholars—from conservative faculty. It was not an easy path.”

For students like Ruiz, the path was equally challenging.

Ruiz had moved to Los Angeles from El Paso as a child in the 1950s. Told he wasn’t “college material,” Ruiz enrolled in Trade Tech, studied mechanical drawing and took a job drafting engineering plans for aviation systems. A year of that made him miserable, so he quit and in the mid-’60s applied to Cal State LA as an English major.

Then, as now, the Cal State LA campus was walking distance from one of the largest urban Mexican American communities in the United States. But few students in that community were being prepared for college.

The university experience seemed so remote that Eastside parents who could see the hillside campus from their yards thought “the building on the hill was the Sybil Brand Institute” for incarcerated women, Cal State LA Professor Ralph C. Guzmán told the University’s College Times newspaper in 1968.

Guzmán, who helped draft early Chicano Studies proposals, was one of just a handful of Latino faculty members then.

Ruiz was the only Mexican American kid in most of his classes, he said.

“I remember as an English major, the sense of me being up against everything. I remember making a presentation and the other students came at me hard with criticism,” Ruiz said. “I remember saying to myself, ‘Next time you’re going to know more than everybody else.’ ”

Ultimately, that would motivate him to develop a rigorous background in research. But as a new student, he found the social isolation to be a destabilizing experience.

After a professor told him he was smart “but basically illiterate,” Ruiz spent hours alone in the library—after classes and before his post office job—teaching himself to write.

“I would practice writing sentences and improving them until I could write a paragraph, and then an essay,” he said. It took him six months to develop the skills he needed. The skills he should have been taught in high school.

Cal State LA already had a robust interdisciplinary program of Latin American Studies, with classes that focused on Mexican culture but had little connection to the American experience.

“It was a marvelous program. It opened up my consciousness,” Ruiz said. But he came to realize that he knew more about Mexicans in Mexico than he did about families like his, “Mexicans in my own community.”

Beyond the University, in his own community, unrest and outrage were brewing. Mexican Americans had found their voice and were beginning to challenge the status quo. And nowhere did that coalesce more vividly than in the neighborhoods around Cal State LA.

“It was actually right here in the city of Los Angeles where the Chicano movement started,” noted legendary civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, when she visited campus to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Chicano Studies in September 2018.

The Chicano Studies program helped empower young activists and bring national attention to the challenges and concerns of Mexican Americans, she said.

Ruiz remembered what that felt like. “We were becoming part of this growing social movement that was sweeping the country, with massive anti-war protests and civil rights marches,” he recalled.

Community organizers rallied Eastside families to join the demonstrations. Student groups on campus worked together behind the scenes for change.

“I was not a radical person,” Ruiz said. “But you couldn’t help but become involved, or at least think about it.”

In March 1968, that awareness came to a head, as thousands of students at five high schools within a six-mile radius of Cal State LA walked out of classes and took to the streets, to challenge an educational system that didn’t recognize their worth or value their needs.

Thirteen adults would be arrested, jailed and charged with conspiracy for helping organize the walkouts. Muñoz—who’d proudly changed his name back to Carlos—was among them.

By then Muñoz was a Cal State LA graduate student and a U.S. veteran, who understood why students were walking out. The kid whom counselors steered away from college prep classes in high school was now on his way to becoming a university professor—and he was on the front lines of the battle to improve education for younger Latinos.

Police arrested Muñoz at gunpoint three months after the walkouts, as he sat at the kitchen table in his apartment doing his political science homework, and his wife and two young children slept upstairs. Muñoz spent two years on bail and faced a possible prison term of 66 years, until an appellate court dismissed the charges as a violation of the defendants’ First Amendment rights.

The walkouts alarmed the educational establishment, but energized the local community and moved education to the front of an activist agenda.

Cal State LA students, faculty and administration partnered with community groups to help broaden opportunities.

That summer Cal State LA’s student government voted to allocate $40,000 for an Educational Opportunity Program that would provide the support needed by students who were motivated but underprepared. Sixty-eight Latino and Black freshmen were admitted through the program that first year.

And University leaders agreed to work with student activists to get the Chicano Studies program up and running. The pioneering program was launched in the fall of 1968—with four courses and funding from student government.

Muñoz wound up teaching the program’s introductory course in the fall of 1968: Mexican American 100. Graduate student Gilbert Gonzalez taught Mexican American 111, a course on Mexican American history, and Professor Guzmán taught two upper-division classes.

“I was a first-year grad student in political science,” Muñoz recalls. “I had no teaching experience. I didn’t even know how the University worked. … We were very, very fortunate that there were progressive people in the administration. They were very helpful in generating support.”

In fact, the Chicano Studies movement at Cal State LA created a blueprint for collaboration—in an era when campus clashes were the primary tools of social and academic change.

Students worked with parents and with University leaders. Chicano and Black student groups supported one another. Both groups wanted a voice, a bigger presence on campus and a curriculum that reflected their culture and history.

Today, the Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies offers more than 150 courses, taught by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Its academic legacy is strong and its graduates have contributed immeasurably to the University, the region and beyond.

The number of students majoring in Chicano Studies has grown by almost 40% over the past 18 months, said Department Chair Delgado Bernal at the anniversary celebration.

“Maybe that’s because of the political climate,” she surmised. “Students are looking to understand it, and to have the skills, knowledge and rhetoric to respond.”

Over the years, the department has opened new career paths for students, elevated the status of Chicano scholarship and empowered successive generations in ways that only understanding your culture and history can do.

Its success reflects the foresight of its founders and the University’s ongoing commitment to academic rigor, inclusion and equality.

“Our whole purpose was assisting our community, supporting the aspirations of students and asserting our right to be here,” Muñoz says of the department’s creation a half-century ago.

“We said let’s do something so our younger brothers and sisters won’t be victimized by racism, the way we were.”

[notalittlebutalottie]

kc+ soulmates au (I can't choose between AH or not so your choice) their lovely banter please.

Thank you for your request and being so patient with my writing! I took some inspiration from the Korean Drama titled ‘Love Alarm’ to make this soulmate AU! ENJOY!

♥♥♥ KLAROLINE DRABBLE REQUEST #17: Love Alarm♥♥♥

It was released on a Tuesday. A revolutionary app that could tell you if your soulmate was within a large radius of you. The Love Alarm. It was an app produced by the government to increase child birth rates. There was a buzz about it when she was in high school, but nothing concrete. But after years of curating the perfect product, it finally was here. No one knew how it worked, but it was a marvel of technology that got you exponentially closer to finding that special someone.

The special someone for Caroline was most certainly not in front of her.

“Do you really have to take out the last copy? We all know you can afford to buy it,” Caroline berated, folding her arms as she glared at the thick red book in the hands of Klaus Mikaelson.

Klaus rolled his eyes harshly, shaking the book for a moment as he lorded over her. “Well, maybe I like using the library copy. I’m surprised you didn’t just absorb the material by looking at it since you’re attempting to burn a hole in it with your eyes.”

They had been fated to be in the same Intro to Business class and once the group projects had begun, it was game over. He was a smug, ungrateful, rich kid who expected every girl to just drop their panties at the sight of him. Even thinking about it sent her blood pressure up.

“Tell you what, sweetheart,” he leaned in close and she stared him down without so much as a flinch. His lips curled at her lack of reaction. “I won’t take it out.”

Her eyes narrowed. God, why did he have to smell so good? It was seriously confusing her emotions with her senses. “What’s the catch?”

“I’ll be sitting in my usual spot and you can wait for me to finish.”

Caroline scoffed, “But it could take you hours?! I’m not waiting on you.”

“Then I am afraid I cannot be helped if you leave and someone else wants the book after me,” he lowered his voice, the richness sending a shiver to her core.

She eyed him carefully, searching his face for any cracks of doubt. She wouldn’t hold it against him to be spiteful and give the book away while her back was turned. “Fine.”

And so there they sat, apart from each other on opposing tables. Caroline kept her eyes squarely on him while he read and took notes and glanced at her every so often with his devilish smile. She even debated whether a simple blink would test his ‘generosity’, as he would like to call it.

“It’s out!” Elena came speeding into the library with her twin Katherine in tow. “Love Alarm!”

Caroline’s stare was broken as her two friends sat in front of her, Elena slamming her phone onto the table with a giggle and Katherine maintaining her ever so cool expression. Katherine had already announced that she preferred not knowing about her soulmate and she would continue to let fate do its thing.

But everyone else? They went wild.

The previously quiet college library was now bustling with a feverish excitement over the key to such knowledge.

“Hayley dumped Tyler right on the quad when she found out they weren’t soulmates! It was BRU-TAL. I loved it,” Katherine suddenly became animated as she recounted the scene. It seemed that even someone like Katherine would get some use out of the app if only for entertainment purposes.

“Oh my god. Seriously? She trusts the App that much?” Caroline giggled in response, soon faltering as she glanced at Klaus, whose attention was removed from the book and on her.

“You should get it!” Elena shook her hands into fists, her eyes lighting up.

Caroline laughed again, tickled by her friend’s pure energy. With a playful sigh, she downloaded the app. It was already the number one download in the store within thirty minutes. Filling out the necessary forms, she paused a few times to consider her answers. 

Welcome, Caroline Elizabeth Forbes. We are cross-referencing you with nearby users…

She swallowed, watching the little heart on the screen beat as a ring expanded around it with a tiny bell sound.

No Soulmate Detected.

“Oh. Well, that was anticlimactic.”

“I mean...it’s new, so maybe your soulmate just doesn’t have an account yet?” Elena reasoned, playing with the options on her phone.

“Huh?” Caroline scrunched up her nose. “I mean, maybe. It’s not like my soulmate is gonna be at our college anyway. They could be anywhere in the world!”

Klaus was watching her with bewilderment as she stared at her phone and chewed her lip. Her nervous mannerisms always sent a shock to his system. He found himself wondering what they were all chattering on about. ‘Love Alarm’ he thought he had heard.

After a quick glance side to side, he took his search to google.

Government’s New Phone Application That Promises to Find YOUR SOULMATE Kicks off With a BANG!

What? He stifled a brittle laugh at the preposterous nature of it all. Soulmates. As if there could ever be such a thing!

Still, it would provide some much needed amusement to try it out.

Klaus took another check of the people around him and proceeded to download the ridiculous app and fill out his details.  

Welcome, Niklaus Mikaelson. We are cross-referencing you with nearby users…

“You never know,” Katherine teased in her melodic and sultry voice as she rose from her chair. “Could be someone sexy!”

Elena giggled and pushed her sister out into the aisle. “We’ll see you later, Care!”

Caroline shook her head and set her phone on the table. Soulmates… No. If there was such a thing, maybe it was best to find it naturally. Love couldn’t be forced after all.

Before she could bring herself back to the task her friends had distracted her from, her phone lit up, and with a pairing echo from another phone, it rang:

YOUR SOULMATE IS NEARBY.

YOUR SOULMATE IS NEARBY.

She looked up, her head lifting sharply from her screen. And there he was, sat across from her. Her ‘soulmate’. Klaus Mikaelson. Shit.

[lesserlovedlovelies]

@bellbeckoned cont. from here

The Doll was, all factors considered, a supernatural being. Animate dolls, life-size and uncanny and quite tall, were not something usual folk would have been accustomed to seeing. In fact, she had never heard of any others like her existing. But the gent had mentioned nothing of the sort. Government agencies? Apocalpyse? She shook her bonneted head.

"It involves no such thing," she said, the nerves somewhat audible in her voice despite its usual semi-monotony. She was from elsewhere, yes, but she believed, or perhaps prayed, that she did not count as the sort of alien he wanted nothing to do with. And the question was, what was 'this' he spoke of? What was the 'it' she did? Herself? What she wanted?

"I am not any of those, Good Sir. You are the first person I have found since waking. I am curious what you were writing. I have never seen any like this."

A balljointed hand gestured toward a whiteboard with completed equations and their filled-in analyses and solutions all over it. The words she was accustomed to seeing were, well, legible. But these seemed entirely illogical, incomprehensible. And she did not know what a physics professor was, though the word professor was familiar from books which she had read about Byrgenwerth College, along with Gehrman's recollections. He was a wise man, she knew. But what did he teach? And did these bizarre writings have anything to do with it?

“Oh.”

Erik’s expression was admittedly a little sheepish, a hand rising to scratch at the back of his head, the wool sweater hanging loosely off his frame.  He let out a chuckle, turning to regard his board and beaming with the slightest pride.

“It’s been such nonsense recently that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to simply be approached for my work.  It’s a nice change of pace if you ask me!”  He grinned, letting out a laugh and stepping to the side so he could more easily gesture through the equations.

“There’s nothing super revolutionary here, I’m afraid--merely a few equations from the lesson I have to teach on black holes.  Here we have the Schwarschild radius--” he leaned across the board, tapping at each letter as he spoke of it, “--where the radius of the event horizon is equivalent to two times big G times the mass of the black hole all divided by the speed of light.”

He leaned back away from the board, gaze drifting upwards as if he could visualize these great celestial objects, hands waving in some vague mimicry of their movements.  “What’s most interesting about the Schwarschild radius is that it represents the warping of spacetime due to mass.  This equation here lets you use the Schwarschild radius to estimate time dilation due to these objects, a useful substitution for younger scientists as the actual equation, over here, involves exponentiation and integrating--”

Erik cut himself off there, blinking, before bringing his hands together and grinning at her.  One hand extended towards here.  “Where are my manners?  Professor Erik Selvig.”

[kylorengarbagedump]

Little Bird: Chapter 14

Read it on AO3. Part 13 here. Part 15 here.

Summary: Strangers are rarely trustworthy in Gilead. But you think these three seem okay.

Words: 1800

Warnings: Handmaid AU

Characters: Kylo Ren x Handmaid!Reader

A/N: Guys... I have... actual other characters from the source material? And they're named? This has never happened in my life. God, I'm so bad at writing fanfiction.

I'm cranking these out because I feel inspired. For now. Don't worry, Kylo Ren isn't gone forever.

I want to say thank you all for your feedback and input and everything. I love y'all so much! <3

You pulled on your gloves, glancing around the closet you’d lived in for the past few months. Though you weren’t sure what to expect today, the glow in your chest informed you with confidence that you wouldn’t be returning to this space tonight. This space, where you’d first met Commander Ren, the space where he’d kissed you, tender and anxious--you’d miss those moments. Just not where they happened. 

I’ll see you tomorrow, he’d said--but he was already gone by the time you awakened. When you bid goodbye to Emma and Rose that morning, that nag of guilt clung to your heart. How could you escape and leave them here? But to even hint to them you knew you might not return would put their lives in danger--after all, much easier to tell the truth about what you don’t know.

Heat steamed your blood when you stepped into the sun, your chest tight. Ofarmitage said you’d know them, but you had no idea what that might mean, how they might arrive, or when. The anticipation might pull at you until nighttime--maybe they’d whisk you off under the stars, muffled voices and quiet feet. Maybe it would come during dinner, mid-meal, a knock on the door, an unrehearsed ruse. And maybe they wouldn’t come today at all--maybe they’d forget about you, or just get too busy being revolutionary, or whatever.

Or maybe--you realized as you approached the Handmaid at the end of the drive--they’d come first thing in the morning.

Testing her, you began. “Blessed be the fruit.”

“May the Lord open,” she replied. Not an ounce of hesitation.

The woman in front of you was not Ofarmitage--but she was also not anyone you knew. Fair skin and chestnut hair were obscured by her wings, but as you peeked around them, you observed a well-defined jaw, the soft angles of her cheekbones leading up to moss-green eyes. When they met yours, your breath hitched, struck by some mixture of awe and fear, the power contained within her gaze paralyzing.

Ofarmitage had been right. You’d know these people when you met them. And whoever this was, she was here for you.

“I’m--”

“I know.” She was moving, head craned to the ground, voice low and quick. “Listen carefully. When we reach the checkpoint, a van will pull up and an Angel will tell the Guardians that you and I have been identified for possible re-education. Say nothing.”

Your body tensed. “Okay…”

You’d hoped that she’d elaborate on this, or provide more instructions--but she said nothing else. The short warning gave you both far too much and far too little time to panic--with every step, your heart rate ballooned, blood building in your neck, flooding your face. If you’d been hot before, you were frying, now, futilely resisting the urge to glimpse the Guardians, to see if you could spot any hint of suspicion on their faces. The closer you came, the shorter your breath, until you were within only feet, and you were certain that any bit of oxygen in a five-foot radius had combusted from your temperature.

“Your pass,” said one.

It had seemed so silly to you that they asked for your pass despite recognizing and seeing you every day--but then again, here you were, with a Handmaid that was most definitively not Ofarmitage, pretending as if everything was normal. Panic choked you as your hand crawled for your pass, waiting for this fabled van--the other woman stood there, said nothing, head bowed so low the men wouldn’t be able to see her face.

“Pass.” The other one sounded a little more impatient.

Eager to show you could listen, you tugged at your pass and showed it in silence, and the Guardian gave a huff of acknowledgement. The other woman was patting herself, and you swallowed, mouth dry. Why wasn’t she showing her pass? Did she even have a pass?

“Show your pass.” The Guardian stepped forward, and you heard metal clicking as he brandished his rifle. “Now.”

The urge to make an excuse was biting at your tongue, but the fear of betraying your possible escape loomed greater, until the Guardian came a step closer, reached for her wrist--

Before you could speak, the rumble of an engine swept behind you, a rush of air whipping your skirts at your ankles. Embarrassed, the Guardians stepped back, and you glanced over--a black van with white wings plastered on the paneling idled to your left. You stood, frozen, as the door swung and slammed. A man you couldn’t yet look in the face had arrived. So far, this stranger had kept her word.

Briefly, it crossed your mind that this entire situation could be a trap and you were about to be carted off to be tortured, or to the Colonies, or maybe just straight-up strung up by your neck. Within the moment of terror, you accepted this as an outcome--the alternatives were as just as appealing.

“Stand down,” the man said, and the two Guardians stepped back. “Your passes.”

As if by magic, the woman next to you had found her pass, and displayed it to the man--you followed suit, keeping your gaze locked on the ground.

“Get in the van.”

“Sir--”

“The Eyes have identified these individuals as possible subjects for reeducation,” the Angel said, just as you’d been told to expect. “We’ll be taking them for further questioning.”

“Oh,” said one of the Guardians. “Yes… yes, sir.”

Another door opened, and the other woman moved into the van, and you followed, your wings feeling too tight around your head. As you gripped the side of the vehicle to get in, you realized your hands were trembling. No, no--all of you was trembling. You sat down next to your would-be accomplice, eyes trained on your lap, and the door shut, and then another.

“Drive, drive,” the Angel said--and the van lurched, screeching onto the streets.

“Yes!” The woman next to you ripped off her wings, and you watched, cheeks hot, as she high-fived the Angel. “We did it! That was awesome! You nailed it, back there!”

“No, you were great!” It was only now you were getting to look at him--dark hair, dark eyes, and   a huge, gorgeous smile, white teeth contrasted with dark skin. His face was gentle and kind--not at all what you’d pictured when you’d heard the severity of his voice. “I thought for sure you were going to kick that Guardian’s ass.”

“It was close!” she said. “You and Poe arrived at just the right time.”

Poe--you glanced at the driver, a handsome man with a square jaw, black, curly hair, and a confident smirk. “It was always the plan.”

The woman turned to you, a grin splitting her face. You wanted to blush. “You made it! How are you? Are you all right?”

“Uh, yeah.” You nodded. You’d actually done it. The fear of Commander Ren’s reaction loomed in your mind. “I’m--I’m okay.”

She gripped your shoulder. “I know this is strange. But you’re safe now. Thank you for trusting us. Oh, and my name is Rey.” She gestured to the two men in front. “That’s Finn, and that’s Poe.”

“Hello.” It’d only been a couple years, but it was still so strange to greet men by looking them in the eye--you hadn’t expected the hesitation you were feeling now. You wanted to crawl inside your own skin. “Thank you, all of you. Very much.”

“What’s your name?” Rey asked, leaning forward.

“Ofkylo,” you replied automatically--and their faces maintained a look of anticipation. You balked at your own stupidity, face burning. “Oh, God, shit, that’s not my name--”

“No, no, it’s okay--”

“It happens all the time--”

“Don’t worry about it--”

“No,” you said, “no, it’s not okay.”

You stared at your hands as they turned to fists. Forget years, it’d only been a couple of months since you’d become Ofkylo, and it was the first identity out of your mouth. Your intimacy with your Commander--no, Kylo Ren--had seemed almost invigorating in the prison of his home, as if you had some illusion of influence, some pretense of power. But now, in the face of real, unshackled existence, your fantasy shattered, splinters poking into you, mocking you. The humiliation tumbled, sharp shards in your chest, and you growled, burying your head in your hands. God, you hated him. You hated what he’d done to you. More than anything, you hated what you’d become.

“God!” Shouting resonated through your bones. “Fuck! Fuck you, Kylo Ren!”

A hand rested on your back, rubbing circles into the spot between your shoulder blades. Flinching, you thought you might cry--but tears refused to form, as they had done for the past few years--so you screamed, clawing at your face, curling into your lap, willing reality to end, until you collapsed, throat sore, limbs quaking.

Kylo Ren had used you like a toy, or an instrument, something he took out of storage for his entertainment, something to be locked up again when he was done. The fact that even for an instant you’d tricked yourself into feeling special made your skin blaze with embarrassment. His tenderness, his confusion, his damn handwriting--none of it mattered now, and you wanted to blast every recollection to fragments.

Heaving a sigh, you straightened up, looking between Rey and Finn. Rey’s hand hovered over your back, and you nodded, permission for her to take it away.

“It’s really okay,” she said. “You’re not the only Handmaid to do that.”

“Doesn’t matter.” You pulled your gloves off, watching your flesh come alive. “It’s what it means, you know?”

You shook your head, and, holding your breath, tore your wings from your head, tossing them behind you. After that, you plucked the pins from your hair, gasping in relief as pressure evaporated from your skull.

“My name…” Staring at your saviors, you spoke it aloud, and it fluttered off of your tongue with soft, buttery wings. The moment you said it, you cursed the voice in the back of your brain, wondering what it would sound like coming off Kylo Ren’s tongue. Fuck him. “That’s my name.”

“Then that’s what we’ll call you.” Rey smiled. It was a weight off your soul. She turned to the front of the vehicle, peering through the windshield. Outside, you could see a large home--not as large as your Commander’s, but still pretty damn big. “We’re almost there,” “she said. “I can’t wait to show you around.”

[paleotool]

A look at the origins and evolution of our favorite camp stove…

This post was going to be a few words about the Primus stoves we all love and some images I’ve collected from around the web.  As usual, I found myself rambling all over the topic without a clear direction but here is a bit of an overview of liquid fuel stoves and how they have evolved over the past 150 years.  Clicking the image will link to a larger version in most cases.

Primus advertisement 1899. Image found on the Classic Camp Stove Forum.

Outdoor cooking has become something of a lost art for those of us raised in the industrial world, but not too long ago, what we think of as camp cooking was just plain cooking.   Several major advances made in the 19th and early 20th centuries resonate in our lives without a second thought from most of us.  Most of our grandparents or great-grandparents cooked with solid fuel (mostly wood, peat, manure, or charcoal) and their grandparents may have felt fortunate to even be able to cook indoors in bad weather. Much of the world still cooks this way and it is an eye-opener for those raised in the more industrialized countries if and when they travel abroad.

In the 19th century, the Caravan Craze, global expansionism, and long-distance campaign warfare sent massive numbers of otherwise “civilized” people back to the outdoors; often with high expectations about the board-of-fare.  Although we, as a species, have cooked over campfires for many thousands of years, this is not always convenient or desirable; whether for speed, lack of fuel, or need for a low profile in the hedgerows.  An early response to this need was the brazier or hibachi-type grill reinvented on numerous occasions in various parts of the world.  These  stoves can use small wood or charcoal but are heavy, smoky, and need large volumes of solid fuel for sustained use.  Not a good option for the traveller (sic).  When coal oil and kerosene became common, liquid fuel appeared to be the answer.

Tea at the Caravan with the Classic Svea Stove.

Although common now, liquid fuel stoves have not always been a good or safe choice for cooking on the road or in camp.  Early portable stoves used a wick and some variety of coal oil for the fuel.  The flame created with a wick is relatively low-temperature, causing incomplete combustion.

In fact, the early instructions for safe stove use are nearly the same as that of fireworks. 

“LAY ON GROUND. LIGHT FUSE. GET AWAY! – USE OUTDOORS ONLY – UNDER ADULT SUPERVISION.”

Another feature of the earliest wick stoves, due to their relatively low burning temperature, is that they exude fumes and soot, like a low-quality oil lamp. This sooting and smoke make them unpleasant at best, especially in confined spaces.  Though not a terrible option for the 1850s, they are nothing as good as what would come in the next generation.

Soyer stove.

The advancements of Alexis Soyer – The contraption above is one of the many inventions given to us by Alexis Soyer, celebrity chef and cooking guru of mid-19th century Britain.  Many of his cookbooks are still referenced and can be found for free on the web.  He was, by the way, born a Frenchman but we can forgive him this oversight for his many wonderful contributions to the world of food.

Not only did Mssr. Soyer invent several useful contraptions for cooking, but he is credited with organizing the first Soup Kitchen to help the starving Irish during the Famine.

As a further claim to fame, the large unit stove he developed for the British army during the Crimean War was such and excellent design it was still regular issue 120 years later.  But I digress from our theme.

Seen in use above, this little stove was revolutionary for the time but still left much to be desired, especially if one wanted to cook with it indoors.  I don’t believe you’d catch a sane cook using something of this sort on an actual tablecloth unless it was made from asbestos but it seemed like a good idea for the advertisement.  In the 19th century, both camp and home cookery were beginning to change drastically; up to this time the two were not very different.  Along with improvements in stoves, better cooking pots, and roasting pans, other kitchen gadgets were being developed to help make cooking better and easier.  A humble and often overlooked kitchen appliance was invented in this period…

The wind-up cooking timer –

Soyer’s Alarum.

This little beauty is something that all modern cooks take for granted.  It seems obvious now, but Soyer realized that mothers, chefs, and camp cooks have many things to attend to at once.  He wisely decided that a dinging countdown timer timer could take some of the strain away from cooking and make for better prepared meals.

The coming of the pressurized stove – The Crimean war, the Raj in India, and other colonial ventures undertaken during Queen Victoria’s reign spurred on great advances in campaign living and long-term camping.  The East India Company and the regular military encouraged officers to bring the comforts of home as whole careers were spent thousands of miles from home creating and running an empire.  From this period, the Brits gave us great folding furniture, camp bedding, portable furnishings, and the Gypsy caravan but it took a Swede to take us to the next level, and camp technology has never looked back.

The pressurized kerosene stove –

Image 1914.

From the Wikipedia Entry as of October 2014:

The Primus stove, the first pressurized-burner kerosene (paraffin) stove, was developed in 1892 by Frans Wilhelm Lindqvist, a factory mechanic in Stockholm, Sweden. The stove was based on the design of the hand-held blowtorch;

The origins of the camp stove!

Lindqvist’s patent covered the burner, which was turned upward on the stove instead of outward as on the blowtorch.

Improvements and variations came quickly after their introduction.

…The Primus No. 1 stove, made of brass, consists of a fuel tank at the base, above which is a “rising tube” and the burner assembly. A steel top ring on which to set a pot is held above the burner by three support legs. Other Primus-style stoves may be larger or smaller, but have the same basic design. The No. 1 stove weighs about 2½ pounds, and measures about 8½ inches high with an overall diameter of just under 7 inches. The tank, about 3½ inches high, holds a little over two pints of kerosene and will burn for about four hours on a full tank.

We think of this type stove as a camp stove but they were marketed far and wide for household use as well.

…Prior to the introduction of the Primus, kerosene stoves were constructed in the same manner as oil lamps, which use a wick to draw fuel from the tank to the burner and which produce a great deal of soot due to incomplete combustion.

The Primus stove’s design, which uses pressure and heat to vapourize the kerosene before ignition, results in a hotter, more efficient stove that does not soot.  Because it did not use a wick and did not produce soot, the Primus stove was advertised as the first “sootless” and “wickless” stove.

These stoves are still celebrated worldwide and are in use on every corner of the planet.  They are a labor-saving device that frees their owners from fuel collection and actually lower airborne pollutants in the immediate area.  They are also credited with limiting the natural deforestation that accompanies humans living in concentrated communities.

The ads give a hint as to how far and wide the Primus stove reached around the globe.

This Radius ad is interesting as it shows the kinship or reapplication of technology from blow torch to stove with only a little modification by the engineers.  Below, this advertisement for an aftermarket pressure cap shows the need for improvement as stoves could easily become clogged and explode as a pressurized bomb.  I narrowly escaped this hazard myself when my stove nozzle became clogged on an outing.  A chemical fire-extinguisher is never a bad Idea to have handy living on the road.

The designers continually improved this simple device with, among other features, a safety cap that intentionally failed at a lower pressure than that which would have caused the stove to turn into a brass grenade.  Although safety features were invented to reduce the number of serious accidents, I suspect these little contraptions are responsible for a fair number of burns and the loss of more than a few homes, autos, and RVs.

As with any successful product, there were and are many imitators of this relatively simple design and many still on the market models come from former Soviet Union, China, and India.

Judging by the marketing, they bring nothing but bliss and happiness to the laboring mother… but seriously, these devices were probably a huge boon to the housewife no longer in need of wood or dung for cooking fuel.

The switch to gasoline –

Although introduced in the early 20th Century, the Second World War and subsequent decade saw widespread popularity of the gasoline stove for military use.  Unlike kerosene, gasoline (or purified “white gas”) is truly explosive, not just flammable.  Placed under high pressure, these are potentially bombs.  However, gasoline or derivatives can now be found almost anywhere on earth with the spread of the internal combustion engine, making this a fuel of choice for international travelers.  As per usual with us humans, we chose practicality and convenience over safety.

The iconic early stove of this design is the Svea 123 as it it is a beautiful combination of design features including simplicity of construction, easy field repair, and heating power.

Classic Svea 123 and a close cousin.

Here’s a link to lighting the Svea 123 (and a little info about why they are so cool):  “DEMYSTIFYING THE SVEA 123“

n.b. The original link was dead when I last checked but I have saved an archive copy here with credit to the author.

Variations on the theme are endless, from the Svea 123 (gasoline) to the Ultra-Primus double burner home range (kerosene).  The various designs proved themselves in kitchens, on river trips, mountain tops, and in virtually every modern backpacker’s gear in one form or another.  For much of the world, this style stove is still the centerpiece of kitchen cooking.

A different spin on the basic Svea design. The main feature of the 71 is it’s convenient packaging for the traveller.

Summitting  Everest, a pretty great endorsement.

As a side note to history, the design was so successful that many other companies copied the essential design.  Here are just a few ads for the Optimus line of stoves and lamps, another spin-off, from their own website showing a wide range of related products over the last century.

The modern era of the camp stove –

In my lifetime, liquid fuel backpacking stoves have undergone some serious refinements but overall, the system for liquid fuel stoves is essentially the same.  Safety has been a big issue, of course, but size (decrease) and fuel capacity (increase) are probably the biggest changes.  Many stoves use canister fuel (butane or propane), alcohol, or solid fuel pellets; but I won’t get into those as they are beyond our scope and interest here.

A new era; the MSR XGK multi-fuel stove.

The final round of changes came from Mountain Safety Research and its later competitors.  The big innovation was to separate the fuel tank from the burner assembly and add a pressurizing system to the tank.  Small but efficient details were added like the self-lighting sparker, self-cleaning tube, and the inclusion of a lightweight wind screen.  I have used one of these for used with pretty good success but I still find myself choosing the Svea 123 for many journeys.

Links and Further Information –

This post is woefully inadequate in so many ways but it is meant as a quick overview of the pressurized liquid fuel stove we all love so much.  Here are some links to some great information on the web.

And my all time favorite, the Svea 123. We have been friends for many years.

If you don’t already own a 123, click the images to find out more.

With aluminum cup.

The Base Camp is a specialist equipment internet retailer based in Littlehampton, Southern England since 1986.  They stock classic stoves and have an excellent selection of obsolete parts.

A H Packstoves Supplies and Parts – is an online seller with a wide variety.  He always has good stuff and some hard to find parts.

The Fettle Box is a good source for pieces and parts for your classic stove. I have had good luck with them.

Finally, the Classic Camp Stoves Forum.  Several images above were found here.  Information about virtually every kind of stove available.  History, art, repairs, tutorials, and reprints are all available on the Forum.

Click here for the mother load of information about Classic Stoves.

More stove ramblings to come…

Classic Liquid Fuel Stoves A look at the origins and evolution of our favorite camp stove... This post was going to be a few words about the Primus stoves we all love and some images I've collected from around the web. 

[alexsmitposts]

Lies Which the West Manufactures and then Consumes After my work in the Middle East had finished, at least for the time being, I was waiting for my flight to Santiago de Chile. In Paris. I could count on a few ‘free’ days, processing what I had heard and witnessed in Beirut. Day after day, for long hours, I sat in a lounge, typing and typing; reflecting and typing. As I was working, above me, France 24 television news channel was on, beaming from a flat screen. The people around me were coming and going: West African elites on their wild shopping sprees, shouting unceremoniously into their mobile phones. Koreans and Japanese doing Paris. Rude German and North American beefy types, discussing business, laughing vulgarly, disregarding ‘lower beings’, in fact everyone in their immediate radius. No matter what was happening in my hotel, France 24 was on, and on, and on. Yes, precisely; for 24 hours, recycling for days and nights the same stories, once in a while updating news, with a slightly arrogant air of superiority. Here, France was judging the world; teaching Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, about themselves. In front of my eyes, above me, on that screen, the world was changing. For many months I had been covering the nightmarish riots of the treasonous violent ninjas in Hong Kong. I was all over the Middle East, particularly Lebanon, and now I was on my way to my second home, Latin America, where socialism has kept winning elections, but was getting beaten, even terrorized, by the corrupt and crooked Western empire. All that France 24 kept showing, I have been habitually witnessing with my own eyes. And more, much more, from many different angles. I have filmed it, written about it, and analyzed it. In many countries, all over the world, people have been sharing their stories with me. I have seen barricades, photographed and filmed injured bodies, as well as tremendous revolutionary enthusiasm and excitement. I have also witnessed betrayals, treasons, cowardice. But in the lounge, in front of the television set, everything appeared pretty groovy, very classy, and comforting. The blood looked like a well-mixed color, the barricades like a stage of the latest Broadway musical. People were dying beautifully, their shouts muted, theatrical. The elegant anchor in a designer dress was beaming benevolently, whenever people on the screen dared to show some powerful emotions, or were grimacing in pain. She was in charge, and she was above all of this. In Paris, London and New York, powerful emotions, political commitments and grand ideological gestures, were made outdated, already a long time ago. During just the few days that I spent in Paris, many things have changed, on all the continents. The Hong Kong rioters were evolving; beginning to set on fire their compatriots simply because they dared to pledge their allegiance to Beijing. Women were unceremoniously beaten, with metal bars, until their faces were covered in blood. In Lebanon, the big clenched fists of the pro-Western regime-change Otpor were suddenly at the center of the anti-government demonstrations. The economy of the country was collapsing. But the Lebanese ‘elites’ were burning money, all around me, all around Paris and all around the world. Poor Lebanese Misérables, as well as the impoverished middle class, were demanding social justice. But the rich of Lebanon were mocking them, showing. They had it all figured out: they have robbed their own country, then left it behind, and now were having a great ball here, in the “City of Lights”. But to criticize them in the West has been taboo; forbidden. Political correctness, the mighty Western weapon used to uphold the status quo, has made them untouchable. Because they are Lebanese; from the Middle East. A good arrangement, isn’t it? They are robbing their fellow Middle Easterners, on behalf of their foreign masters in Paris and Washington, but in Paris or London, it is taboo to expose their ‘culture’ of debauchery. In Iraq, the anti-Shi’a and therefore anti-Iranian sentiments have been dispersed, powerfully and clearly, from abroad. The second big episode of the so-called Arab Spring. Chileans have been fighting and dying, trying to depose a neo-liberal system, forced down their throats ever since 1973 by the Los Chicago Boys. The Bolivian socialist government, successful, democratic and racially inclusive, has been overthrown, by Washington and Bolivian treasonous cadres. People have been dying there, too, on the streets of El Alto, La Paz, and Cochabamba. Israel was at it again, in Gaza. Full force. Damascus was bombed. I went to film the Algerians, Lebanese and Bolivians; people who were pushing for their agendas at the Place de la Republique. I anticipated the horrors that were waiting for me, soon; in Chile, Bolivia and Hong Kong. I was writing, feverishly. While the television set was humming. People were entering and leaving the lounge, meeting and separating, laughing, shouting, crying and making up. Nothing to do with the world. The outbursts of indecent laugher erupted periodically, even as the bombs were exploding on the screen, even as the people were charging against the police and the military. *** Then, one day, I realized that nobody really gives a damn. Like that; so simple. You witness what happens, all over the world; you document it. You are risking your life. You are getting engaged. You get injured. Sometimes you come close, extremely close, to death. You do not watch TV. Never, or almost never. You appear on the television, yes; you supply stories and images. But you never watch the results; what emotions your work, your words and images, truly evoke. Or do they evoke any emotions at all? You only work for the anti-imperialist media outlets, never for the mainstream. But for whomever you work for, you have no clue what the facial expressions your reports from the war zones are arousing. Or what emotions any war zone reports stir. And then, you are in Paris, and you have some time to watch your readers, and suddenly you understand. You get it: why so few are writing to you, support your struggle, or even fight for the countries being destroyed, decimated by the empire. When you look around, observing people who are sitting in a hotel lounge, you clearly realize: they feel nothing. They want to see nothing. They understand nothing. France 24 is on, but it is not a news channel, which it was intended to be, many years ago. It is entertainment stuff, which is supposed to produce sophisticated background noise. And it does. Precisely that. Same as the BBC, CNN, Fox and Deutsche Welle. *** As the legitimately elected socialist President of Bolivia was being forced into exile, tears in his eyes, I got hold of the remote control, and switched channel to some bizarre and primitive cartoon network. Nothing changed. The expressions on the faces of some twenty people around me did not change. If a nuclear bomb would have exploded on the screen, somewhere in the Sub-Continent, no one would pay any attention. Some people were taking selfies. While I was describing the collapse of the Western culture on my MacBook. All of us were busy, in our own way. Kashmir, West Papua, Iraq, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Palestine, Bolivia and Chile were on fire. So, what? Ten meters away from me, an American businessman was shouting into his phone: “Are you going to invite me back to Paris in December? Yes? We have to discuss details. How much am I getting per day?” Coups, uprisings, riots, all over the world. And that plastic, professional smile of the lady, the news announcer, in her blue and white retro designer dress; so confident, so French, and so endlessly fake. *** Lately, I keep wondering whether the inhabitants of Europe and North America have any moral right to control the world. My conclusion is: definitely not! They do not know, and they do not want to know. Those who have power are obliged to know. In Paris, Berlin, London, New York, individuals are too busy admiring themselves, or ‘suffering’ from their little, selfish problems. They are too busy taking selfies, or being preoccupied with their sexual orientation. And of course, with their ‘business’. That is why I prefer to write for Russian and Chinese outlets, to address people who are scared like myself, anxious about the future of the world. The editors of this magazine, in faraway Moscow, are; they are anxious and passionate at the same time. I know they are. I, and my reports, are not some ‘business’ for them. People whose cities are smashed, ruined, are not some sort of entertainment in the editorial room of NEO. In many Western countries, people have lost their ability to feel, to get engaged, and to fight for a better world. Because of this loss, they should be forced to give up their power over the world. Our world is damaged, scarred, but is tremendously beautiful and precious. It is not a business, to work for its improvement and survival. Only great dreamers, poets and thinkers can be trusted, fighting for it, steering it forward. Are there many poets and dreamers amongst my readers? Or do they look, do they behave, as those guests in the hotel lounge in Paris, in front of the screen beaming France 24?

[selfdeterminedsymbionts]

What did the yeerk and human pairs do before they met and how did they meet? I understand you can’t get into details because of security reasons.

I worked security in the propoganda and counterpropoganda department for the Empire. My host was supposed to be temporary, but we ended up together longer than I’d expected.

-- Kalem 442

I was an involuntary host before HYPA, and I was... difficult. Yeerks tended to try to get transferred to someone else pretty damn quickly with me. I eventually ended up with a revolutionary -- not HYPA, an independent -- and we worked together for awhile. HYPA used their very public execution to stage a pool raid and I made it out in the chaos (I was attempting suicide-by-cop to avoid incriminating anyone when I got my next yeerk, but apparently some of the Empire security aren’t great shots). My current yeerk is one of those raiders.

-- Cassidy

My story’s a little boring, I’m afraid. I’ve been with HYPA since long before my current host. My previous host wanted to do field work outside the operational radius of our Pool, and it was easier to split up than to have to truck back anf forth every few days, so I paired with somebody else I knew and trusted from the field. 

-- Edrin 986

My department was studying something that the Empire was interested in, so they took key members of our team. This was, naturally, incredibly distressing, but also very fascinating -- aliens existed! Amazing!

Anyway, I’d had some somewhat reticent hosts before, and it’s rather difficult to get anything done with them. It was very good fortune to have properly aligned, mutually beneficial goals and interests for once.

Regards,

AJ

[mamgt]

There’s No Way

CHAPTER 2

Note: OH SHIT! She wrote a chapter! HHAHA I’m having writer’s block for an assignment in class and opted to do this. I focused more on the relationship of MJ, Ned, and Peter. Don’t worry PeterMJ will come back.

Chapter 1

“So what exactly did you and MJ do?” Ned wiggled his eyebrows at Peter smugly. They were walking around the new exhibit that was just installed yesterday showcasing revolutionary robotics that adhered to environmental issues like oil spills in the Pacific Ocean, garbage clean-up in third world countries, and controlling smog in China. Most of the inventors were Asians and Peter was wholly impressed with how advanced they were.

Ned gave Peter another nudge. “W-what?”

“Did you and MJ go on a date or something?” Ned teased. It was obviously a joke but Peter felt his stomach do that thing again and he wondered whether he really did have some sort of diarrhea.

“No!” he replied rather too forcefully. “We-uh…” He was thinking if he was allowed to tell Ned of their little escapade or would MJ smack him so hard in his nape he would lose all his spidey-senses in an instant. “Like she said… she--I had something in my stomach.” That wasn’t a lie because Peter could feel it right now.

“Why? What did you eat that I didn’t?” Ned looked at him suspiciously. “Did you eat burritos while you were Spi--”

“Shhh!!! Ned! Don’t say it out loud!” Peter covered Ned’s mouth and let it go, noticing that people were starting to look at them, especially the lady who was standing near the invention they were looking at. It looked like some high-tech vacuum for a giant.

“Oops...sorry, Peter…” Ned lowered his voice, “...did you...eat...burritos...in your…’mission’ for Mr. Stark?” he whispered to Peter’s ear. He sounded like he was whispering but the volume was still the same. Peter ignored this.

“No, Ned. I would never eat burritos without you.”

“Good. So what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re stomach’s just stronger.”

“Impossible. Shouldn’t your stomach be stronger being…” he lowered his voice again “Spider-man and all.” Peter thought if anyone was within at least a meter’s radius they’ve already found out Peter was Spider-man— the bad guy Peter was hunting down could have known— but good thing he steered Ned into a section where there were scarcely anybody since they embarrassed themselves in front of the lady and her vacuum. There were only a few ushers milling about on their phones, probably on their break.

Peter thought about what Ned said and sure, he should have some superhuman immune system but that didn’t stop him from having butterflies in his stomach when he saw MJ sketching in Prague. Maybe he wasn’t immune to everything.

“I guess I have a weakness,” Peter replied.

---

Back in the hotel, Peter made his usual phone call to  Liz for a daily catch-up on each other’s lives. Liz moved to Oregon after a series of events that led to her father being detained, unaware that it was Peter who had caused it. Due to his guilt, he couldn’t help but console his high school crush even if she was a hundred miles away. The attraction that began in Midtown High sparked into a full-on flame and a long-distance relationship was born. It had been four years since they started and as much as people tried to tell them that phone calls and FaceTime would not keep up a relationship, Peter and Liz proved them all wrong.

“Hey, babe!” Liz brightly picked up the phone.

“Hey! How’s it going there?” Peter moved to the balcony for some privacy.

Inside the hotel room, MJ wrestled through the door with pillows tucked underneath her armpits, her curly hair covered her face. Ned turned to see what the noise is all about and jumped at the sight of her towering over him like a bigfoot.

“Oh my god! MJ!” Ned put his hand to his chest, feeling his heartbeat slowly go back to a normal pace.

“Hey, Ned, can I crash here?”

“Sure! Just...go…” he looked around his and Peter’s messy room, “...you can just...put it anywhere I guess.”

MJ dumped her pillows on one of the beds and jumped in it. “Thanks. Where’s your loser friend?”

“Peter?”

“Yeah? Who else?”

“Having quality time with the girlfriend.” Ned pointed to the balcony where Peter was animatedly talking to Liz. He was looking out over the city and his laughter carried through into the room. MJ crossed her arms, feeling weird.

Michelle became close to Liz because of the decathlon team because otherwise, Liz would just be another airhead popular girl and Michelle would just be another girl bullied by the likes of her. But because of the decathlon, Michelle found out that Liz was honest-to-God one of the best girls she’s known. She was really different from the other snobby popular girls. She actually had substance and actually read for class or did the homework herself.

Michelle thought, finally a girl she could be friends with. A girl who she can stand and a girl who could stand her but before they could even get any closer…she moved. Figures. Liz was nice enough to keep in contact especially in passing the baton to MJ as captain of the decathlon team but after high school, they fell apart. Their conversations grew thin and messages were replied to every once in awhile. MJ didn’t talk to her like Peter did. Everyday.

“So. Ned.” MJ said, trying to remove her thoughts from Peter and Liz.

“Yeah?”

“Why don’t you have a girlfriend?”

Ned’s head whipped around so fast, “Excuse me?!”

“Wha-at?” MJ laughed.

“I would like to have you know…”

“...that you’re dating Betty?”

“I-- WAIT A MINUTE”

MJ went into a laughing fit.

“MJ? How? When?” Ned laughed with her. He knew that he and Betty being a thing wasn’t really a secret but they hadn’t really told anyone.

“I just figured. I’m observant, what can I say?” she said smugly.

“What about you and Mr. Romeo out there? Huh? Sneaking out...tsk tsk.”

“What? Peter? He was just an excuse to get out.”

“Riiiiight” Ned replied. It was his turn to be smug. “So where did you go?”

“How do you know he didn’t just have diarrhea?” MJ sassed.

“Because I know you and I know Peter. And because that excuse was lame I think even Professor McCallaghan saw right through it.” Ned said matter-of-factly.

MJ not seeing the point of hiding it from Ned said, “Prague.” It wasn’t a big deal anyways. Anyone could have been dragged to her yearning to get out and actually see the sights not just get stuck in stupid hall all day without experiencing any culture.It didn’t matter that it just so happened Peter woke up late and became the perfect excuse. MJ thought.

Ned’s jaw dropped. “I--I was kidding? You guys really?” MJ simply nodded.

“Unfair!”

Peter walked in at that moment. He asked, “What’s unfair?”

“I can’t believe you guys went to Prague without me!” Ned turned to Peter, a little mad. Peter was looking at MJ, surprised that she was in the room. MJ was smiling at Ned and turned to Peter and they caught each others’ eyes. Her face changed to a serious one, almost like she too was mad.

“Oh my god, Peter! I can’t believe you told Ned!”

“What? Wait!” Peter held his hands up, his phone still in his right hand. MJ got a peek and saw that Liz was his lockscreen wallpaper.

“Wait, MJ?” Ned said but Peter cut him off. He didn’t remember telling Ned they went to Prague. How did he know?, Peter thought.

“I-I-I didn’t tell him! I promise!” Peter stuttered. MJ burst out laughing and Ned followed suit, catching unto the joke. Peter was confused, watching them hysterically laugh at him. “I don’t get it.”

“MJ told me you guys went to Prague,” Ned explained.

“So why--?”

“I just wanted to see you squirm” MJ shrugged.

Peter shook his head, feigning annoyance but a smile was creeping from under his lips. “Why are you even here?”, again trying to sound annoyed.

“Amanda got a hold of the remote and has been glued to the TV watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Apparently, they’re having a marathon! I don’t want to spend the whole night trying to know the difference between Kiara and Kylie.”

“Kendall and Kylie” Ned said.

“Whatever!” MJ shook her head at Ned. “So I’m crashing here. Let’s watch a movie!” She snuggled into the bed she was in and snuggled her pillows around her. She grabbed the remote control and started looking through channels.

“That’s...my bed” Peter said softly.

“So?” MJ replied without looking at him.

“WAIT!” Ned shouted. Peter and MJ looked at him. “You guys...you still didn’t tell me why I couldn’t tag along to Prague!”

“It was MJ’s idea” Peter pointed at MJ.

“Simple. You can’t keep a secret” she jokingly gave Ned dagger eyes.

“You have underestimated me TWICE tonight Miss Michelle Jones!” Ned held up a finger in the air, lowering his voice to sound more ominous.

“Yeah? What secret have you kept, huh?” She taunted. “Tell me something I DON’T know” she turned her attention back to the TV.

“I haven’t told anyone Peter is Spi-” Peter tackled Ned to the ground.

“Neeeeed! Shu-shu-shhhh-Imgoingotkillyouneedtoughjustugh” they wrestled on Ned’s bed.

“I give! I give!” Ned yelled. MJ watched the two boys, amused.

“You haven’t told anyone Peter is what?”

“Uh….” Ned scrambled through his thoughts for answer but before he could find something believable Peter said:

“Smart! Ned…hasn’t told anyone…I’m smart…” his voice growing smaller as he kept talking.

“Yeah… as if getting into a good school wasn’t enough. What do you need Parker? A medal?”

“Yeah! Yeah! I haven’t told anyone Peter is smart,” Ned piped in trying to get on the conversation.

“Shut up. I heard what you said.”

“Whatdidhesay?!” Peter sputtered out.

“Spy? You haven’t told anyone Peter is a spy?”

“Uh….” It was Peter’s turn to scramble through his thoughts and it was Ned who pulled out an excuse:

“YEAH! Peter is spying…on…you…for Harry!”

Peter looked at Ned confused. WHAT? He thought. Why would I be spying on MJ? He tried to send this message telepathically to Ned or through his face at least. Ned replied to his face with a scared face of his own saying, oh shit that was a stupid answer.

“Why would you spy on me? For Harry?” MJ directed the question at Peter, moving closer to where he was standing and the hairs on his skin began to stand-up. The spidey-senses were feeling a threat.

“Uhm! Harry likes you!” Ned bursted out. He immediately clammed up his own mouth. Feeling stupid again. This wasn’t going well.

Peter was dumbfounded. They were in deep shit. The more they opened their mouths the stupider they got in front of MJ. The more their lie was getting holed.

“Harry…? Harry Osborne? Likes me?”

“Yeah but don’t tell him we told you,” Ned replied. Peter didn’t know how much of that was true but the thought of Harry liking MJ made him feel all sorts of stuff and none of them were good. It might have been the exhaustion of today or the fact that they just got through a whirlwind of lies to hide that Peter was Spider-man, but he swore he saw a smile pull at the lips of MJ.

Did she like him too? Peter thought.

Chapter 3

Note: leave messages! I like to hear what you thought of what I wrote haha! Thanks for liking the first one! 

[disgruntledchak]

Idk, fireworks can be lit by a few technicians in a field and are visible for miles. True, people can't gather densely to watch them, but as events go firework shows aren't very vulnerable to cancellation for pandemic reasons.

The more I think about it, the less "more fireworks around bc of show cancellations" checks out.

1. The show can, in fact, go on while maintaining social distancing.

2. Ind*p*nd*nce day is a whole crock of nationalist gestures, and with so many disruptions going on I'd expect those gestures to be bigger and preachier than ever.

3. Illegal use of fireworks is an extremely visible crime. If somebody sets off a firework in an urban area, everybody in a mile radius hears about it. As a type of criminal activity to suddenly skyrocket right when police abolition becomes a national talking point, it's a little too perfect.

4. Since when do marginalized communities get this excited about a holiday created to celebrate american nationalism and the success of capitalists and slave owners that started the revolutionary war? I live in a mid-lower class neighborhood and I've never seen or heard anything around the fourth of july. My grandma lives is a white boomer suburbian hellscape, and it's red/white/blue all of june and july. In my experience, the areas where fireworks are going off are not areas where people feel the need to give a damn about July 4.

5. Just because an item's price is driven down by abundance does not mean it's suddenly being widely available for sale to the public. Explain to me how the hell people across the country but specifically in black and brown neighborhoods would suddenly gain access to all these high-end, not-intended-for-public-use fireworks in the same week.

Long story short, this alibi does not add up. Let's stop pretending this is anything other than a kmart bootleg of the engineering of the coke epidemic.

A.C.A.B.

This is a long post but this is important especially if you live somewhere where fireworks have been going off every night all of a sudden for weeks now.

if you been following this blog of mine for a while you know i’m NOT into conspiracy theories BUT this shit is fucking fishy as hell. this is NOT fucking normal and i truly believe this is a part of how police fight back against calls to defund and/or disband them. i’ve said for a while now (mostly on twitter) that ppl who want to abolish the police (i am one of them) need to get ready for war cause cops will fight us to the point of killing us to maintain their power. i absolutely believe they are believe this sudden and constant stream of fireworks happening across the country targeted in areas where there were massive marches calling to defund the police. this would be very easy to coordinate given all the communication tools we have today (whatapp, fb messenger, ig direct message, skype and etc) and like the last tweeter stated, given all the crap we know the police be involved in, giving away fireworks ain’t shit BUT if raises the number of complaints they don’t respond to, they can use that to make themselves look good. i mean check it…

that’s a hell of a fucking jump (for all the ppl who want to claim this is normal (stfu)) and they are not responding to those calls. why? they are behind it and then they can use this to say “see, y’all need us. don’t defund us.” 

i won’t repeat what’s already in the tweets but yea, i am 100% this is warfare by the police against calls to hold them accountable and to defund them BUT we can’t back down. the mere fact they are doing this proves they are scared and we are right. 

fuck the police!