#The Defence Force made shirts with his face on it for a limited run (All proceeds went to housing charities)

[mechazushi]

When the panic of Number 9 dies down and people see Kafka as nonthreatening.... there needs to be a panel of some in-canon merch in Kn8.

We've already got the home made plushie, we just need the cheap, Temu plastic figurine knock off's and the lovingly recreated, but hellishly expensive, self produced T-shirts of Kn8.

All of Division Three has bought or made at least one this of Kafka as Kn8 and it torments him daily.

⚔️ Day 8 | He's wearing a Kaiju No. 8 hoodie!!! (*꒦ິ꒳꒦ີ)💜

[hopeamarsu]

Close Shave #1 - Frankie Morales

Frankie Morales x reader 

Word count: just shy of 2k

Warnings: Straight razor shaving. I guess it could technically be counted as knifeplay, so just to be on the safe side I’ve marked it down. Some James Bond quotes are lifted from the movie Skyfall.

And yes, there’ll be another piece with Clyde later on. Because these two men have my heart and I will not be able to choose. Lol.

Ever since your visit to the antique store with Frankie on a sunny Sunday afternoon, you hadn’t been able to get the set out of your mind. First off, the wood case was beautifully crafted; despite the time passed it still looked shiny and all the metal parts worked well, despite aging and darkening. It had called you from the corner, sung like the sweetest canary, and you had been unable to resist. You marveled the feel of the smooth wood as your hand caressed the corners, admiring the craftsmanship. 

Once you had opened the case, you had been sold. The beautiful straight razor with gold and copper caps, the fluffy brush with a casing for cream, the leather strop and paste box all looked pristine. Well, the strop had obviously been used before, but it still looked in wonderful condition. You could still smell a hint of the musky beard oil that was once kept in its own place within the box, the woodsy and earthy tones hitting your nostrils as you peered in for a closer look.

It had only been the steep price that had made you leave the shaving kit there. But you still had thought about it until long after dinner and as you got ready for bed that you knew you had to get something like that for Frankie. 

After some intense browsing and comparing later, you had finally placed an order for a straight razor kit, some additional oils and moisturizers and they had arrived neatly packaged this afternoon. You had taken the day off work in order to prepare. Preparing meant countless Youtube videos on the subject, practicing the use of the straight razor on air and on balloons you had slabbed some shaving cream on. 

You had also transformed your master bathroom into an oasis, with dimmed lights and one of the dining chairs sitting in the middle of it all. There were lit candles, sheets and towels in the dryer to keep them warm and a small pillow sacrificed for the occasion was sitting beside the sink, ready for use. 

You had a selection of bottles next to the pillow; a small moisturizer, a bottle of beard oil that carried a sandalwood, vanilla and bergamot scent (something you thought he would appreciate) and a little bowl with shaving cream already ready. The piece de la resistance had a prized place on a small side table you’d dragged into the bathroom.

Now you just needed the man of the hour, one Francisco Morales.

You knew he had no flights today so he should be home shortly. Maybe you’d roped Will and Benny into making sure there wouldn’t be any Friday happy hour gatherings but you would never tell. And neither would they if they wanted you to cook for them the next time boys night was at your house. 

Right on cue, you heard the truck pull up and you took the moment to gather one of the sheets and two towels from the dryer, while you waited for him to enter. 

“Hermosa? You home?”

“I’m in the bathroom, babe! Would you come and help me for a moment?”

Was it sneaky to lure him in under false pretenses? Maybe, but getting him in here would be a challenge otherwise. And you didn’t want him wandering around the house and picking up on the missing items. 

Two loud thumps followed your question and you knew Frankie’s boots were off and socketed feet carried him towards your bedroom. Some shuffling around the bed and a question rang out.

“What’s this, hermosa?”

“Please put them on and come in. I have a surprise for you. Oh! And leave the cap behind too, thank you.”  You had laid out a pair of sweatpants and his softest possible T-shirt on the bed, wanting to extend the comfort as far as you could. You pressed play on your phone and smooth classical music began to play from the bluetooth speakers. It was set on top of the toilet, far away from any water sprays. 

You heard him shuffle in the bedroom, no doubt obeying your wishes and you started to swirl the shaving cream in the bowl with the brush, making it as fluffy and airy as you could. 

The door to the bathroom opened and you were greeted by your boyfriend in his grey sweatpants, his white t-shirt and dark curls framing his face. The hair was mussed up, no doubt because of his tendency to keep the hat on at all times and this must’ve been his attempt at ridding himself of hat hair. He looked adorable as the curls hung around his forehead and over his ears all messy. His dark brown eyes were open and curious as they took in the scene and you smoothed down your own t-shirt anxiously.

“Sweetheart… What is all this?” He whispered, the awe clear in his voice. 

“Come, sit down,” You took his hand, placing the bowl back on the counter as you pulled him closer. A small kiss was placed on him by your lips and you pushed him gently towards the chair. As he sat down, you placed the small pillow under his neck, urging him to relax into it. The pillow would certainly help his position in the long run. 

“Remember that antique store a couple of weeks back?” You spoke as you draped the sheet on top of his chest once he was settled. With Frankie’s affirmative hum, you opened the tap and let water run, trying to find the perfect temperature. 

“I didn’t tell you this at the time, but there was this gorgeous antique shaving kit in the back, strops and brushes and all in tip top shape. It got me thinking that I wanted to do a little something to pamper you and I bought a modern-slash-antique-looking set. I want to give you a shave.”

As you spoke, you lathered your hands under the water, ridding them of their coldness before wetting two small makeup towels to run across his face. The surprised gasp that left his lips betrayed he hadn’t been expecting that. 

You got into the rhythm of things, wetting his face with long strokes, allowing the warm towels to soothe his skin and soften it. Frankie’s eyes fell closed as the up and down strokes lulled him. After that, you squirted some cleanser into your hands, rubbing them together.

“I’m going to clean your face real quick, before we get into the shaving part. Do you want me to leave something or would you prefer clean-shaven?” You murmured, keeping your tone low to make sure he wasn't disturbed. 

“Whatever you like hermosa,” came his reply, a sleepy mumble that made you smile. Frankie worked so hard sometimes, taking care of his baby girl on the weekend she was with you, you and your relationship, his sobriety and the copters back in the hangar. 

After Colombia, he and the Miller brothers had joined forces, opening up a business together. They combined self-defence classes and survival training and business was good. Once Frankie had gotten his licence back, they often took their students training in the mountains, testing the limits and allowing for them to train first-aid skills on the wilderness too. 

It was honest and hard work. You knew how much all of them loved it and they were hopeful that Santi would join them as well once he was able, bringing the boys together once more. But the physical aspect of the job, including the maintenance of the planes, did take a lot out of your man, so to offer him this after a long week felt really good. And judging by his blissed-out state in the chair as you swept the lather into his skin and beard, he was enjoying it too. 

Round and round the brush went, all along his jaw and cheeks. You made sure he was well covered in the cream before you stepped back a little, taking the small steel knife into your hand. 

“Cut-throat razor. How very traditional.” 

The quote slipped your mouth quietly as you admired the blade in your hand. Frankie’s eyebrow lifted but a hand on his shoulder eased it down again. Taking a deep breath, you let the blade touch his skin and waited for a beat. When there was no resistance on his part, apart from his hand finding its way to your hip as a grounding place, you let it slide across the lathered skin and stopped about an inch from his jawline. After all, there was something in a man with facial hair, especially if that man was Frankie.   

“Sometimes the old ways are the best,” You couldn’t help yourself, letting the next line fall down as the blade lifted from his skin. The motions repeated themselves, both of you getting lost in the moment. The music faded in the background, Ludovico Einaudi’s calming notes becoming only a memory as you watched the blade move and turn the cream around, revealing smooth skin beneath. Each motion was followed by a swipe on the towel to make sure the blade didn’t dull in the middle of the session. It felt almost like a dance, your breaths the only sound left.

You moved, he stayed still. He moved, you stayed still. Back and forth, like the steps of a complicated dance. 

You didn’t know how long it took, shaving his face, but when there was only the small part left in the middle of his throat, you felt him gulp. 

“Keep still,” You admonished him slightly, tipping his face backwards, his skull digging a little deeper into the pillow that separated it from the cold marble of the sink. “This is the tricky part.” The final swipe was almost tantalizingly slow as you dragged it upwards to meet his chin. The trust he placed in you that moment made you feel powerful. It felt like something settled upon both of you as you lifted the blade from his skin for the last time.  

“Now that’s better,” You breathed out, as you watched him tip his head forward and open his eyes. The dark pools drilled into yours, the arousal and relaxation dancing a tango within, battling for dominance. How you wanted to keep watching it, enjoy how the candlelight reflected from the dark orbs but there were still steps to take before you could. You held his gaze for a moment, before lifting a towel from the counter to wipe off any excess cream left behind. 

“Did you…”

“Shh, I’m not done with you yet, mi amor.” Your eyes crinkled at the corners as you smiled softly to him. Frankie nodded, the movement barely there but still visible. He relaxed back, allowing you to rub some oil into his beard and some moisturizer into his skin. Frankie’s eyes slipped close once more and you took the moment to really admire him and the neatly trimmed beard in full. 

“All done,” A whisper in the air as you trailed his regal nose with your fingertip. His eyes remained closed but his hands grabbed your waist to tuck you into his lap. Slowly, the eyelids opened and lashes fluttered as Frankie peered into your eyes. The relaxation had won out, but there was still a small fire simmering behind that. 

“Did you quote James Bond to me?” He muttered, letting his left hand trail up your spine. 

“You know how I like that scene.” You shrugged. 

“Mhmm… Will you allow me to recreate some other scenes from those movies?” There was a playful edge to his voice as Frankie’s hand rested on the back of your neck. You leaned closer, breaths mingling, as you let a sliver of air between your lips. 

“Go right ahead, mister.” 

Tagging @clydesducktape​ @wayward-rose​ @themuseic​ @miraclesabound​ @clydesfavoritegirl​ @a-true-janian-reply​  @10blurredsmoke10​  @caillea​ @mind-p0llution​ ​

[langdxn]

devotion | fire and reign!michael x fem!reader

SUMMARY: It’s the first Cooperative meeting and Michael gets familiar with one delegate.

WARNINGS: Domesticated fluff, anxiety, a bit of comedy, severely shameless smut, vaginal sex, vaginal stimulation, Barry Manilow.

WORD COUNT: 2.9k (sorry I got really carried away with this one. I haven’t proofread it yet so apologies in advance!)

Striding into the Cooperative meeting hall with all the arrogance he could muster, Michael wrung his red leather-clad hands together, his gaze lingering on the streams of expressionless masks lining the conference table. Every face was obscured, a last-ditch attempt at anonymity for the first time in their charmed, infamous lives.

Their grasp at obscurity was futile. He’d seen the seating plan ahead of schedule. He knew he was to speak two feet away from Bill Clinton, that some kid called PewDiePie was perched halfway down the table, that Jeff Bezos sent his apologies for his absence mere minutes ago, that Julie Andrews requested a seat at the last minute and paid in cash.

The Antichrist shouldn’t suffer stage fright, but Michael hadn’t often addressed a number of people at once, least of all the most financially powerful mortal figureheads in the world. He meticulously prepared his speech the night before, scrawling the highlights on a scrap of paper he stuffed down his left glove, small enough to look inconspicuous when he retrieved it yet large enough to not lose it on the journey to the conference hall.

As his expensive leather boots clacked to the head of the table, Michael swallowed hard and forced his focus on Ms Mead’s advice - find a spot at the far end of the room to concentrate on and talk to it. He chose the far right corner of the seemingly endless table, an anonymous pair of black gloved hands that rested studiously on the glass table.

“Esteemed members of the Cooperative,” he announced, swinging his hands behind his back to clasp them together. The less they saw how they were shaking in their crimson incarcerations, the better.

“World leaders, tech giants, media moguls, cultural influencers,” he proclaimed, catching his breath, “and Mrs Langdon.”

His gaze hardened on the gloved hands in the far corner. The black-clothed figure leaned forward in its seat, revealing a golden face creating a stark contrast with the sea of masks. Cascading y/h/c curls framed the feminine face, mysteriously sparkling black lipstick and deep eyeliner outlining fierce y/e/c eyes. A revealing black dress draped over her figure, her chest pouring out of its low neckline.

A knowing smirk caught the corner of Michael’s lips as he nodded in recognition. He balled his leathered hands into fists and landed them authoritatively on the table’s edge.

“The rumours you’ve heard are true: my name is Michael Langdon and I am the Antichrist.”

———

“You know you don’t have to wear a mask, honey,” Michael comforted you as he leaned his elbows on the kitchen island, planting his chin on one balled fist. You glanced over your shoulder at him as you carefully flipped an omelette in the pan.

“I know baby, but it’s the first one and I want to make a good impression,” you giggled. “After all, they’re the ones who sold their souls already. Mine’s still up for sale.”

Michael snickered under his breath, standing straight and gliding his way over to you, snaking his arms around your waist and squeezing gently, relishing the embrace.

“Is that so?” He breathed into the nape of your neck, dropping a loving kiss where his words ghosted so sensitively that goosebumps haunted your skin. You jerked the pan over to a nearby plate, tipping the omelette out and returning the pan to a cool hob ring.

“But should I wear makeup underneath? What’s the dress code for this sort of thing?” You tugged at the collar of the baggy black shirt draped over your frame — Michael’s from last night, how he adored seeing you shuffling around the kitchen the next morning wearing his discarded shirt after your night between the sheets.

“Darling, you could wear a garbage bag and I’d still be the happiest man alive to introduce you as my new wife,” butterflies flitted between both your stomachs as he called you that word you’d waited so impatiently to hear  drip from his tongue.

“I also take it I’m not sitting next to you?” You enquired half-heartedly, knowing any distance between you pained you both no matter how formal the situation. Recalling the times you sat beside each other for dinner at Madelyn’s house, how Michael’s hands charted their course towards your inner thighs before starters even hit the plate.

“So who am I going to be rubbing shoulders with tonight, Boy Wonder?” You ducked into his embrace as his breaths laced your neck with shivers.

“Let me see,” he pondered, as if conjuring the seating plan in his mind. He settled for retrieving a document from the pocket of his velour jacket and pulling it in front of you. Scanning the plan from over your shoulder with a hum under his breath, he nodded towards the red marker pointing to your seat in the farthest corner.

“That’ll be Zach Braff on your left, so no getting any ideas,” he squeezed your hips in jest, “and David Hasselhoff at the head of the table in front of you.”

“Really? You’re trusting me to sit facing The Hoff? Oh honey, your trust is severely misplaced,” you cracked, gripping onto his remaining hand that rested on your hip.

“Oh I’m sorry my darling, would you prefer Barry Manilow on the left?” He tickled you gently, tossing the sheet of paper into the air and watching it cascade to the tiled floor beneath you. “How on earth do you know all these people anyway? They’re all just names to me.”

“That may be because I didn’t age a decade overnight, Mr Langdon,” you joked, “I grew up on pop culture, that’s all. You were born after all these people became popular.”

“I also didn’t run a globally successful Tumblr which single-handedly forced the entire internet to stop talking in peaches and cucumbers—“

“Eggplants, Michael, they’re eggplants,” you giggled heartily into your hand to stifle a full-scale laughing fit. “Did the Antichrist just admit he married me for my influence?”

Michael scoffed, landing a sweet peck of agreement into your neck.

“Speaking of influencers, exactly how much power do you have in choosing new Cooperative delegates?”

“Providing they’ve sold their souls to my father already, it’s an open court. Who do you have in mind, baby?” He cooed into your ear.

“I think it would serve us well to save Benedict Cumberbatch. Hell hath no fury like Cumberbitches when they find out Sherlock was exterminated by the Apocalypse.” You turned to face Michael with eyebrows raised, proffering the omelette plate before him.

“I’ll take your word for it, Mrs Langdon. Anybody else?”

———

Michael had barely got to the crux of his introduction to the Cooperative before disembodied voices grew concerned. Each member wore a voice manipulator built into their identity masks, a second, painfully virtual line of defence that reminded you of Robocop having a domestic. It wasn’t until you could hear their discordant mechanical voices over your husband’s that you focused back into the room.

“What about my wife?”

                     “What happens if the Outposts are overrun?”

“Will I get to see my kids again?”

                 “What if the missiles don’t kill everybody?”

“When will it be safe to walk around on the surface again?”

        “Will we die down there?”

                   “What’s your backup plan?”

Michael was nervous, almost obsessively wringing his palms in an effort to disguise the shaking that had consumed him. He was drowning in a blur of desperate, panicked queries firing from all angles — for the first time in your relationship, he looked lost. Powerless. Terrified. Aimless syllables tumbled off his tongue as he tried to regain composure.

He couldn’t lose them. Not yet.

The sudden, ominous clink of your stilettos across the polished floor immediately silenced the cacophony. You strode elegantly and purposefully toward the head of the table, relishing every second of precious silence from the present number as you made your way to your husband’s side.

“What my beloved husband is attempting to articulate is that our repopulation plan is foolproof,” you ran your hand across the top of Michael’s leather coat, resting on his left side and gently leaning on him as if the angel arriving on his shoulder to save the day.

“We’ve eliminated all possibilities of unsatisfactory reproduction for the new world. We’ve limited the number of British survivors in order to reduce the risk of poor dental health — no offence Mr Cumberbatch, wherever you may be seated,” you searched in vain across the faceless entities lining the table in the hope any glimpse of body language could give your chosen one away.

“Your families will be as safe as we can possibly keep them, with the help of your investments and the security you use on a daily basis above the surface.”

Your vision darted pointedly to the far left corner of the table.

"Mr Smith, you and your wife will be situated in Outpost 4 while Jayden and Willow will reside in Outposts 1 and 2 respectively. That way, if any Outposts are compromised, we won’t have an overpopulation of Fresh Princes of Bel Air.”

A collective yet nonetheless strained chuckle filled the air.

“As for your safety against the rabid cannibals that the rest of the human race will no doubt be reduced to, that all depends on how much you’re willing to contribute to the cause. I’ll hand you back into the capable hands of Mr Langdon.”

Michael turned to you with a smile of relief and appreciation, you let loose a casual wink of reassurance before stepping back to return the floor to him.

Michael breathed in sharply and assumed his power stance, crimson leather palms pressed flat on the gleaming table, focus now fixed on the masked figure at the opposite end of the room.

“Turn to page six, section one - Outpost Construction."

———

“I don’t know what I would’ve done without you back there,” Michael sighed through both his hands, wearily wiping down his face in an attempt to erase the last few hours from his memory.

You pushed aside Michael’s hastily discarded red gloves and draping leather jacket, some desk lamps and leftover instruction manuals on the table to perch on the edge, drawing Michael between your legs by the waistband of his coat.

“You did just fine without me, my love,” you cupped his face in your hands, his angelic curls tumbling around his countenance as you planted a loving kiss on his full, if slightly bitten lips. He drew you in even closer, his kiss deeper than the azure blue of his eyes he had now clenched firmly shut.

If there was one thing you knew Michael loved more than anything, it was kissing you. When you handed each other washed dishes after dinner, when you waited impatiently in the queue at the grocery store, when you finally found something decent to watch on TV. He adored locking his lips against yours at any possible opportunity, crashing teeth and dancing tongues. He worshipped the power he had over you when you were compelled to close your eyes to kiss him, the freedom he could use to surprise you while you so innocently shut out the rest of the universe.

“How can I ever repay you, Mrs Langdon?” He breathed into your mouth as he towered over you, one hand roaming your hair and the other ghosting on top of your knee.

“I’m sure you’ll find a way, Mr Langdon,” you charmed, kissing him again as deeply as possible. This time Michael refused to separate from you, maintaining the searing connection between your lips.

Hitching your black silk dress up your thighs agonisingly slowly, Michael opened one eye to savour every centimetre of your legs revealing before him with subtle gasps catching on the tip of his tongue against yours. As the hem reached your hips and exposed your core, Michael moaned greedily in your mouth.

“No panties?” he hummed as your teeth clashed, “no wonder you were so fucking sassy earlier.”

Meeting no obstruction, his soft fingertips wasted no time in trailing between your thighs and finding their home pressed gently onto your clit. As soon as his skin made contact, your hips bucked and you felt a stream of your arousal escape your folds.

Michael could smell it before he felt it. His fingers coursed down to collect the precious droplets, raising his digits to your conjoined mouths so you could both taste you.

“You’re so fucking wet for me baby,” he cooed down your throat, his lust-blown voice reduced to a husky croon. You opened your eyes to meet his for a brief moment but your gaze was met not by his cerulean tones, instead his irises were pitch black, seductively demonic and terrifyingly sinister at the same time. Avoiding their scorching stare, you closed your eyes to kiss him again.

Michael’s hand returned between your thighs and deftly slipped a soft finger through your folds, eliciting a gentle moan from the back of your throat. Returning his fingertip to your entrance, another digit joined it and coursed inside you, curling against your walls to make your hips follow their lead.

Michael grunted into your mouth as he retrieved his fingers, jealous of the warm arousal his fingers witnessed. Tracing his tongue across your teeth, you whimpered at the loss of his touch but replaced by the rustle of Michael setting himself free from his dress pants. You trailed a hand down his chest, making light work of his shirt buttons. Before you could reach his waistband, you felt the head of his cock tracing the outline of your folds, begging for permission to enter.

“Is this okay?” He asked politely as your teeth crashed together. His reconnection with the new Ms Mead skilfully reminded him of the basic courtesies he lost sight of on his sojourn, a time he never seemed comfortable to talk about with you. A time he would rather forget.

You hummed in agreement against his lips and hooked your legs around his waist, gently nudging him closer as his cock stretched your entrance. Slowly, carefully, respectfully.

Your moans drew out longer as he took his time pouring every inch of him inside you. He craved your response when he entered you, he thrived on the ecstasy your husband gave you.

Bottoming out in one smooth thrust, his hands shot up to the back of your neck to prize you from his lips. As you opened your eyes, you met his black pupils as they shot you a determined, ecstatic glare.

“Sell your soul to my father, please. We can live forever, together,” his syllables dragged as he thrust slowly into you.

You needed no persuasion, your mind was made up on the day you married the Antichrist, the only delay was the plans for the apocalypse had taken over. However, you weren’t prepared to let him think he won you over that easily, especially while his cock was urging at the entrance of your cervix.

“What is it with you and deep conversations while you’re balls deep inside me?” You quirked an eyebrow and he forced an aggressive thrust in response. Your back arched suddenly and your eyes retreated into the back of your head, the fast motion driving you closer to your orgasm than you expected so soon.

Protectively wrapping your arms around him and lightly digging your nails into his back, you pretended to need more time to think on his proposition but another sharp snap of his hips broke your facade.

“You realise I won’t let you cum until you agree, don’t you, my darling?” He raised his hand to your throat with a gentle yet purposeful squeeze on your airways while slowly pulling his cock back out of you until just the tip rested in your entrance. He knew from extensive experience that you couldn’t say no when he teased you like this.

“Fuck—ugh fuck, okay I will, now please Michael,” you pleaded weakly, trying to pull him back inside you but he placed a forceful palm on your chest in resistance.

“Say the words honey, say the words.” His black hole stare burned through your eyes into your soul as you rolled your eyes.

“Fine. Michael Langdon, I will sell my soul to Satan,” you breathed emphatically, digging your nails into his back harder.

Your eyes trailed down between your legs to make sure he kept his end of the deal. Sure enough, he poured every inch back inside your folds, meeting your wetness inside with a greedy moan escaping his lips. Gone was his sensual tempo, overtaken by a furious thrust that made his cock twitch as it explored inside you.

“Good girl,” he cooed into your open mouth while you caved into the burning inside you as he pounded you, the familiar dynamite that only Michael knew how to ignite.

“Cum for me, baby.”

Your back gave way and dropped you flat on your spine against the polished table, writhing and squirming as your release took hold of you. All your involuntary friction led Michael to pursue his own orgasm as his frenetic thrusts plowed into you, his tip crashing against your cervix with every motion.

Between both of your frantic moans and laboured breaths, a throat cleared uncomfortably behind you. 

Michael froze to the spot while you jerked back and strained to see through the stars dancing across your vision.

“Mr Manilow? You’re still in here?”

[darkblueboxs]

howdy i love your aftg writing!! here’s a concept: i feel like once neil’s past is out, he has no reason to hesitate absolutely sucker punching someone. like we know he made neil a pushover because it raises less questions, but now that everyone knows who he is im SURE he’s just bitch slapped someone mid-game. no holding back, like if u say something fucked up he’s just gonna try to kill you!! do you know who this man is?? there’s no doubt in my mind that he knows some quick and lethal punches!

Oh yes, anon. Bruiser!Neil I can DEFO get behind. 

Here’s 3k of Neil punching stuff, and Andrew being wildly turned on by it. Read here or on AO3 (Check AO3 notes for content warnings, etc.)

*Edit* : In the original version of this fic, Nicky faces racist abuse in addition to homophobic abuse, and quotes the offensive language and slurs used against him. After concerns were raised regarding how I handled this abuse (specifically, the language used, the context in which the abuse takes place, and my position as a non-latine) I censored and subsequently removed the relevant dialogue. I sincerely apologise and promise to do better in the future. Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions and concerns regarding this subject.

[01/06/2020]

All the Guys Love a Bruiser

Neil’s mother taught him how to throw a punch, of course she did. Their lessons took place anywhere spacious enough to swing a fist, in empty parking lots behind greasy gas stations or in dingy motel rooms if she thought the walls were thick enough to cover up the noises they made.

Mary had always been more flight than fight, an instinct she had forced into Neil over years of running. Even she had to admit, however, that sooner or later they would hit a dead end, and while that would spell certain death for both of them, it would be better to go down fighting than it would on their knees.

If their lessons ended with Neil aching black and blue, it was his own fault. He needed to be quicker, smarter, crueller. More like his mother.

Matt’s teaching style is different from Mary’s, as is his fighting style. It bears the hallmarks of professional athleticism, all stances and positioning and strategy. While his mother’s idea of a lesson in self-defence was to hit Neil until he figured out how to dodge her blows or hit back, Matt talks him through how to angle his body, how to make a fist in a way that won’t break his fingers. At the end of their first boxing lesson, the only bruises on Neil’s body are the light purple spreading across his knuckles.

That evening, he and Andrew take over the beanbags, TV muted in the background while they dig into ice-cream. The tub is pleasantly cool in Neil’s hands, and he rubs his knuckles against the sides like an improvised icepack. When the residual cold has melted away, Neil flexes his fingers, enjoying the faint tingle dancing across them. These marks are different from those his mother gave him; they weren’t inflicted on him unwillingly but earned with sweat and exertion. When Matt had let go of the punching bag and told him they were done for the day, Neil had been surprised by his own disappointment. He had never been sorry see the end of his mother’s lessons.

Andrew takes his hand suddenly, startling Neil from his thoughts. It’s a purely analytical touch; he turns Neil’s hand over and runs a finger across the blossoming bruises of his knuckles.

Neil bites back the I’m fine, knowing the look it would earn him. Instead he says, “I had fun. We’re meeting again next week.”

Andrew nods. It’s a few moments more before he relinquishes Neil’s hand, however. The heat of Andrew’s skin mingles with the singing twinge of Neil’s bruises like an after-print.

Next week, Andrew slouches into the gym after Neil. He ignores Matt’s invitation to join them, flopping onto a rowing machine and leaning back against the machinery so he can kick his feet up on the seat rail. They’re lucky that they chose unsociable hours for their workout, or a line of athletes would be forming to glare at him.

Andrew watches them train from across the room with apparent disinterest. He can feign boredom all he likes; Neil knows he wouldn’t have bothered following him to the gym without reason.

Matt, if anything, seems amused by Andrew’s presence. “Dan comes to watch me practice sometimes, too.” He pauses to correct the angles of Neil’s feet before nudging his arms into blocking positions. “She did it even before we started dating. She used to sit on an exercise bike and pretend she was cycling so I wouldn’t know she was there to watch me. It was never very convincing.”

“Why did she want to watch you?” Neil shifts his weight, trying to copy Matt’s position.

Matt’s face crinkles up with laughter. “That’s the most Neil thing you’ve ever said.”

“Everything I say is a Neil thing.”

“She liked it when I took my shirt off. C’mon, man, join the dots.”

“You don’t take your shirt off to box.”

“Yeah,” says Matt. “Don’t tell her that.”

Neil rolls his eyes. “Can I hit you now?”

Matt barks out a laugh, and training resumes.

“Enjoying the show?” Neil asks Andrew an hour later, dropping down on the gym mat next to him. Andrew hands Neil his water bottle with an unimpressed look.

“You’re awful.” Andrew flicks a look over to Matt, who is using their break to chat with the only other gym regular insane enough to be working out at the crack of dawn on a Sunday. “He could knock you on your ass with one right hook.”

“I know I’m awful. That’s what training is for.” Neil pauses to gulp down most of the bottle. A droplet escapes his lips and tracks down his jugular before falling into the dip of his clavicle. Andrew’s eyes track its path. “Matt isn’t going to hurt me. Is that what you’re worried about?”

“I’m not here to babysit you.”

“Huh.” Neil drains the last of the water before shaking the residual droplets over his head. The beads glint in the corners of his vision as they catch in his bangs and fleck his cheeks, mercifully cooling against his skin. Andrew is still watching him intently. His eyes flick to Matt once more, checking that he is still absorbed in his conversation.

“Yes or no?”

“Yes,” Neil replies, and he watches as Andrew takes Neil’s hand in his. The skin is flushed from strike after strike, not yet coloured in bruising patches but soon to be. Neil’s hands feel softer for it, sensitive to Andrew’s touch.

“I know my limits.” Neil isn’t sure why the gym suddenly feels three degrees warmer. “Really, it doesn’t hurt.”

“I know. I trust you.” Andrew sends one more look over Neil’s shoulder like he’s checking the coast is clear before pressing Neil’s knuckles to his lips.

The breath Neil was in the process of catching slips from his grasp entirely. “Oh.”

“Stop looking at me like that.”

“You like watching me fight.”

“It’s more interesting than watching you run.”

Neil leans in until he can see each individual freckle on Andrew’s cheeks. “Interesting?”

Andrew’s cool look is betrayed by the twitch of his jaw. “Something like that.”

If Matt notices Neil’s new vigour when they return to practice, he doesn’t comment on it. When he catches Neil’s eye, however, he grins knowingly. Perhaps Matt’s conversation had not been as absorbing as he made it out to be. Soon, however, the rhythm of the exercise draws Neil’s attention back to the task at hand.

Neil first learned to throw a punch because his mother believed that one day his life could depend on it. That isn’t the reason that he has resumed his training with Matt; it turns out that a good instructor and fewer death threats make the activity far more pleasant than Neil remembers. It may be a useful skill, but he values the challenge more than he does the practicality. The physicality, too – in fact, he likes boxing for the same reasons that he loves Exy. Quick, brutal, thrilling. He finally understands, too, why Andrew likes to spar with Renee whenever his emotions get on top of him. There’s a certain a sense of control that comes from putting his fist through a break-board. Not that he needs the empowerment as much as he once might have – most of Neil’s tormentors were killed long ago, his fears with them. Given his new life of safety and security, it’s likely that he’ll never really need to know how to throw a good punch.

It takes all of one week for Neil to be proven wildly, wildly wrong.

Opposition strikers – with one glaring, now very dead exception – are not typically Neil’s problem. Generally, if they end up playing on the same side of the court as him, something has gone wrong in the team’s strategies.

He can tell even from a distance, however, that one of the Terrapin strikers is causing difficulties. Not in terms of ability – of which Terrapin’s #13 has little – but in attitude. Thirteen is a vocal player, and Neil can hear snatches of his voice echoing across the court. No fists have been swung, which is an impressive feat for the Fox defenders, but perhaps only because the luck of substitutions has put Thirteen against Nicky more than anyone else, and Nicky is more likely to react to insults with mirth than anger.

Shortly before the end of the first half, Nicky is subbed off at the same time as Thirteen. Nicky passes Neil on the way to the court doors, clacking their racquets together with half a smile. “Give them hell, Neil.”

Thirteen passes them at the same moment, slamming Nicky’s shoulder as he passes. Nicky mutters a word under his breath that would have earned him a month of washing-up duty at Abby’s house before heading for the Foxes’ bench. Neil watches him go, eyebrows creasing together. Nicky isn’t easily upset by the cruelty of strangers; it’s the cruelty that comes from within his own family that is most likely to shake him from his good humour. The barbed insults of nameless players on the court, on the other hand, are usually brushed off with a rude gesture and no more.

Swept up in the rush of the match, Neil forgets about Nicky’s discomfort until half-time. The team pours from the court in high spirits; they have a decent lead over the Terrapins which should carry them through the second half when exhaustion starts to kick in. Nicky, despite having blocked more shots on goal than anyone, reacts to the arrival of the rest of the team with only a pallid grin. His grip on his water bottle is tight, and the cheap plastic crackles and caves in his hands.

Nicky is an easy read, and it doesn’t take long for the other Foxes to notice. After he brushes Renee’s concerned enquiry off, however, the team leaves him be.

When Neil returns to the court for the start of the third quarter, he breathes a sigh of relief to see that Thirteen is nowhere near Nicky. He’s standing closer to goal than Neil is happy with, but Andrew is more or less impervious to verbal abuse and Thirteen has yet to show signs of physical violence. As much as he wants to keep a closer eye on the situation, Kevin’s barked commands draw his attention to the match at hand. The best thing Neil can do for the Foxes’ defence is to spend as much time lobbing the ball at the Terrapin’s goal as possible.

Neil and Nicky are substituted at the same time; they collapse onto the bench and drown their exhaustion in Gatorade. Thirteen crushed Nicky against the wall moments before the substitution, and Nicky is uncharacteristically quiet as Abby examines the cut over his eye.

“You’re not whining about cramping your style,” she says as she presses a plaster in place. “Should I be worried?”

“Nah, this is great for my style. All the guys love a bruiser.” Nicky winks despite the blood crusting in his eyelashes. “Neil knows what I’m talking about, don’tcha, Neil?”

Abby makes a noise that isn’t convinced, but doesn’t press the issue. Neil waits until she’s out of earshot before saying casually, “I still have a few contacts in the mafia.”

“Your sense of humour is dire,” says Nicky, but he’s grinning, so Neil counts it as a win. “Don’t worry about it. I think Andrew’s drawing his fire now. Andrew handles that kind of thing a lot better than me.”

“What kind of thing?”

Nicky winced. “Don’t ask.”

“Tell me.”

“Let's just say he isn't exactly lining up to lead a Pride march.” Nicky snorts humorlessly.

The joke doesn’t land, and not because of Neil’s non-existent sense of humour. He may not be as obvious as Nicky in his preferences nor as dark-skinned, but he has still been on the receiving end of enough of that brand of bullshit to know how it scratches at one’s insides.

“I wasn’t joking about those contacts.”

Nicky sighs. “I was worried you would say that.”

Neil’s attention keeps slipping from the game and over to Andrew, who is standing in goal and ignoring the tirade of insults being thrown his way like a statue facing down a breeze. His non-reaction only seems to stoke Thirteen’s fury, spittle catching in the mesh of his helmet as he watches Andrew knock yet another attempt away from the Foxes’ end.

Andrew spares Thirteen no more than a second of blank indifference in the face of his tirade. Then he drops his stance, shoulders setting into a silent challenge that sends a hot bolt of excitement straight Neil’s to gut. Andrew is locking down the goal.

The Terrapins don’t score again for the rest of the match.

Neil is through the doors before the final buzzer has died, charging into the crush of Foxes at centre-court to join in their celebrations. Andrew, as usual, hovers at the edge of the throng, but he accepts the clack of Neil’s racquet against his. A light sheen of sweat dances across Andrew’s forehead and his lips are parted as he regains his breath after the exertion of locking the Terrapins out.

“Did Thirteen give you trouble?”

Andrew snorts derisively despite his breathlessness. “He tried.”

Neil gets to see Thirteen up close during the handshakes. He barely grazes the tips of each Foxes’ fingers as he passes one by one, but he stops when he gets to Neil. “I remember you. You were all over the news, weren’t you? The runaway Wesninski.” His expression speaks to his delight at the revelation. To no-one’s surprise, Thirteen is a sore loser.

Andrew barely moves, just a slight adjustment to his footing so that he presses a little closer into Neil’s shoulder.

Neil smiles. It is the kind of smile he has not had use for in some time. “Looking for an autograph?”

Thirteen snorts. “Bet you think you’re real bad. Bet you think those scars make you look tough. Too bad you’re still a puny little bitch.”

Neil flexes his hand before clenching it into a fist. “I do think I’m real bad, actually. Want to find out why?”

The striker waits for the hit to come. Neil doesn’t give him the satisfaction; the guy is a piece of shit, but he isn’t worth the trouble he’s clearly looking for. Neil drops his hands, meets his gaze, and waits for him to give up on getting his reaction and leave.

Most of the other players are moving off to their own respective sides, and their stand-off is beginning to attract attention. Kevin squints over at them, and at his side, Aaron pulls off his helmet.

“Oh shit. Twins.” Thirteen’s gaze swings from Aaron to Andrew, flashing with sudden recognition. “I remember you too.” His expression turns sharkish. “Now that was a story. So, which one is the murderer, and which is the brother-fucker?”

Andrew barely twitches. Neil’s reaction is less restrained.

It’s almost a play-by-play of decking Riko at the Winter Banquet.  The key difference between that punch and this one is hours of training with a borderline-professional boxer.

Neil squares his stance, draws back his fist, and puts his whole body behind the punch. He’s rewarded with the sickening crack of a nose breaking and a hot spurt of blood splattering his knuckles.

Thirteen staggers back, shock registering for a second before he spits blood at the floor. He’s swaying on his feet, but there’s still fight in his eyes.

Andrew’s hands go to his sheaths, but Neil waves him back. He wipes the hand bloodied by Thirteen’s face across his jaw unthinkingly, feels the wet, red heat clinging to his skin. “Hey. This one’s mine.” The smile he tacks onto the words is toothier than he means it to be. With blood still smeared across his chin, he can only imagine how he looks.

Andrew’s hand judders to a halt at the hems of his armbands. His jaw is clenched tight but roaring over the current of concern is something far darker. It creeps into his eyes, a weight to his gaze normally only visible in the privacy of their bedroom. Andrew’s gaze runs the length of Neil’s body before coming to rest on Neil’s mouth. His bottom lip catches momentarily in his teeth as he nods.

Thirteen’s first swing hits, and a burst of blood dances across Neil’s tongue as his lip is split open. Thirteen’s luck ends there; Neil blocks his second punch with a move Matt taught him the day before. He drives his free hand into Thirteen’s solar plexus, knocking the air from him.

Neil doesn’t get much time to appreciate how the striker falls on his ass as they’re rushed by teammates and officials who break them apart.

Neil stands placidly before Wymack and bears his row with the bare minimum of decorum. The lecture is undercut by Nicky, who’s expression alternates between elation, amusement and mock disapproval from moment to moment. Matt, at least, waits until Wymack is finished before applauding.

“I’ll give you some notes later, but all things considered it was a solid right hook.”

Neil brushes the team’s reactions off as best he can; he certainly didn’t do it for their recognition.

He takes his time showering, watching with a strange, sick pleasure as he rinses the striker’s blood away. It turns pink in the shower basin before swirling at last down the drain. Beneath the blood, Neil’s knuckles have begun to bruise, satisfaction burning them blue.

It’s at these times that Neil worries that he may have inherited too much from his father; the temper, the violence, the bloodlust. Then again, they all served as tools to his survival at one point or another. The key difference between Neil and his father is who they choose to turn their anger on. Neil’s father always set his sights on the underdog. Neil prefers to punch up.

No; if there’s one thing Nathan gave him, it was a distaste for bullies.

There’s a familiar tap at the door to Neil’s stall. The rest of the Foxes cleared out some time ago, still rowdy from the post-match high. Tonight was a home game; most of the team will be halfway back to Fox tower already, thinking only of booze and the weekend stretching ahead of them. There’s only one player who would have any reason to linger.

Andrew steps under the spray, his hair is plastered to his head by the steamy drizzle. He holds his hand out, and Neil offers his without question for Andrew’s inspection.

Andrew’s voice is dispassionate as he inspects the damage. “I don’t need a knight in shining armour. Nor for you to fight my battles for me.”

“The fight was for my own satisfaction. But I’ll stop if you want me to.”

Once again, Andrew presses his lips to Neil’s raw knuckles. The contact stings, sweet and savoury, pleasure and pain. “Would it kill you to make life easy for once?” The words tingle against the tender skin.

“I thought you liked to watch me fight.”

“Just because I find your stupidity entertaining doesn’t mean I encourage it.”

“It’s my stupidity you like, is it?”

“What else do you have?” Andrew’s eyes track the rivulets of water snaking down Neil’s neck.

“I’m sure I can think of a few things.” Neil says. Then, for clarity, “Yes or no?”

“Yes.” Andrew doesn’t let go of Neil’s hand, thumb running across the reddening knuckles once more before leading it to his chest. Neil leaves it resting there, marvelling at the colours bleeding between them under the shower’s onslaught, pink and brown and red and blue. Andrew soon tires of Neil’s staring, and is the first to bridge the gap between them.

Neil once compared Andrew’s kisses to a fight with their lives on the line. Countless kisses later, this fact has not changed in the slightest. Andrew leaves a bruising trail of kisses across Neil’s neck until he can’t remember which marks are from Exy and which are from Andrew. They all sting the same, sweet way.

Each kiss pressed to his mouth carries a metallic tang from Neil’s burst lip. He can tell from the fierce pressure of Andrew’s mouth against his that Andrew can taste it too, is feeding off the adrenaline rush just as Neil is. He catches Neil’s bottom lip between his teeth and with it sucks a groan from deep in Neil’s chest.

Andrew draws back to level him with an unimpressed look. “You’re far too into this.”

“You’re one to talk.” Neil raises his hand to Andrew’s eyeline, wiggling his fingers. Andrew’s eyes catch on the blooming violet patches. “You like this. Admit it.”

Andrew steps forward until his cheek brushes Neil’s fingers. Neil turns his hand automatically, cupping Andrew’s face.

“Yes,” says Andrew. His eyes stay on Neil’s, even as Neil’s hand drops lower.

It’s a small miracle, Neil thinks, that Andrew can trust Neil’s hands on him, after all he knows they are capable of. Maybe that’s part of the appeal, the evidence painted into Neil’s knuckles that Neil’s gentler touches are reserved for Andrew and Andrew alone. It’s strange that Andrew should love Neil’s fighting spirit as much as he does. After all, it was Andrew who taught Neil how to stand and fight in the first place.

It’s a fact that neither will ever let the other forget.

Neil leaves the shower sporting several more bruises than he entered with. Some are from Exy, some are from fighting, and some are from Andrew’s mouth.

He loves them all just the same.

 * Thanks for reading, let me know what you think! Still open to prompts etc.

[writing-appreciation]

His Legacy

Paring: Peter Parker X Stark!Reader X Platonic!Harley

Warnings: ☡ ENDGAME SPOILERS ☡, Slight language

Synopsis: The reader is concerned for Peter becoming the "new Ironman."

GIF NOT MINE: @tomhollandnet

DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN ENDGAME: FINAL WARNING!!

He was distraught. We all were. Anthony Stark's sacrifice destroyed us all in many ways.

Pepper lost the man she loved.

Morgan and I lost our father.

Rhodes lost his best friend.

But Peter. Peter lost his second father figure. And that hurt him in ways that his Uncle Ben's death didn't.

I was depressed for a couple weeks. Part of me felt that it was my fault. I helped Tony figure out how to fix the snag in the Time Heist.

--Flash Back--

"D'you want washing or drying?" He asked me as we both apprached the sink.

"Drying, definitely drying." I responded, already picking up the dish towel.

"Alright, but if you accidentally end up soaking, don't be complaining to me about it later."

And a few minutes later, he did "accidentally" spray water on me, the ceiling, and a collection of photos near us.

"Dad! Ugh, I'll get the mop." I carefully walked away.

He just smiled and looked at the photos. First observing a picture of his father. Then he pulled a different photo from behind it, taking the time to gently wipe away the water droplets on the frame. He looked hurt.

I walked back over to mess. I managed to sneakily catch a glance at what photo he had: the one of him and Peter getting his "internship."

It made me want to cry. I know he felt bad about Peter dying. It's just the way dad rolled. Everything is his fault.

"Maybe it wouldn't hurt to look into the calculations about Scott's Time Heist." I slowly suggested, now staring at the photo of Peter smiling. I missed him.

My dad constantly teased us on "being oblivious to one anothers' feelings." Feelings or not, I knew I missed him. When dad told me he hadn't made it, we both cried for an hour.

"What did I tell you about easedropping young lady?" He feigned suprise. He took a deep breath and cleared his voice of any emotion other than sarcasm.

He wrapped his left arm around me and kissed the top of my head.

" It's too bad you suck at quantum mechanics too badly to help with any of it."

I scoffed at his insult, knowing I was fully capable of keeping up. I was a Stark, it's in my blood.

So we went to work. Busting out every computation of every calculation we could think of.

"This is impossible. I told them Tiny's stupid hesit is physically impossible."

I chuckled at his codename for Scott. It helped relieve some of the tension in the room.

"Okay, so the calculus works, we can agree on that?"

He nodded.

"So we just need a workable shape to bend time around and to morph ourselves around?"

I layed my face in my hands and thought of the shapes we hadn't tested yet.

"Yes, Einstein, we do. But We've tried every geometrical postulate imaginable. I'm sorry kid, it's not hap..."

"Mobius strip." I whipped my head out of my hands and looked at him.

"FRI, can you run the calculations with the Mobius strip?" He asked, desperation clinging to his voice.

I didn't have the energy to make some snarky remark on how he took my idea. I just wanted to see if it worked

I moved to where my dad was standing, also waiting with anticipation. I felt him glance at me. He wanted this to work because he knew I needed it to work.

The moment we saw the green loop appear around the stip we both fell backwords into our seats.

"Shit." Be both said in unison, stares not breaking from the display.

"Shit!" We heard a little voice behind us.

We turned around to see Morgan happily sitting on the stairs, watching us.

Dad made some quippy remark about having important shit to do, which caused Morgan to frown/smile. He then took her up to bed, but not before getting them icepops.

I turned back to the display. The green line still surprised me. I half expected it to disappear in the time we looked away.

This was gonna work. We were going to get them back.

-------

I blamed myself for it. I should've just let it go. We were happy. We had a family. We were good.

But then I remember the billions who dusted away. It was the right thing to do. It just hurts.

But Peter's pain was significantly worse. He was hard to trust. After Ben's death, he found it hard to trust people, especially any father-figure he became close to. Understandably dad's death destroyed his limited trust capacity.

We could tell it was destroying him, Happy and I. We saw it firsthand.

Fury was pushing Peter. What with his constant calls, and even him hijacking our Summer vacation. Fury wanted the new Ironman and he was deadset on it being Peter.

It made me mad a first. Fury believed I was envious of the offer being given to Peter. But it was more concern than envy. Peter was Spiderman, not Ironman. He can't be both. And nobody could ever replace my dad

Plus people overlooked the obvious choice here: Harley Keener.

He was 16, and a new student to Midtown Tech. He was the perfect choice to carry on dad's legacy. It's not like Harley had other heroic prior commitments like Peter or I did. Plus we got along great.

My dad connected us one year when we all went down to vacation in Tennessee and met his family. I immediately gravitated to Harley. Seeing as he was only one year older than me, a sort of summer fling also sprouted between us. It ended on good terms. We kept in touch, agreed to hang out every once in a while, and had a fun tendency to provoke my dad.

But when I apprached Fury about this he struck it down before I even got to mention Harley. He insisted that Peter become the new Ironman. Which was weird.

The next step was to try to convince Peter which I felt wouldn't be too difficult. He was cracking under the pressure.

But seeing as we were currently going head to head with a giant water monster in London, I figured it'd be best to table the the discussion for a later time.

So we did. Just at a different time when Harley showed up at the rebuilt HQ (the old Stark/Avengers tower) just after we got back from vacation. It was 9:30 and we both just wanted to sleep for days.

Peter went into full defense mode the moment he saw Harley sitting in the corner. In Peter's defence, Harley did look pretty shady.

The whole squabble was resolved when I pushed past Peter and welcomed Harley with open arms.

"Hey, if it isn't my second favourite Stark!" He exclaimed as we embraced.

Though he kept it silent, I could sense Peter's jealousy.

"Hey, Keener, nice suprise, but what are you doing here?"

"Well, I thought we were going to talk to Fury today, so I just figured I would come in. I heard you guys were getting back today." He smiled.

I smiled back. It was truly nice to see him again. The last time I saw him as a few days after the Funeral when he dropped the news that he'd be attending Midtown Tech. I wasn't exactly a happy time, but it was mosty better now.

"Um, I'm sorry, but can you please explain who this dude is, (Y/n)?" Peter broke our little bubble of joy.

I noticed Peter even gave Harley a side glance of disgust and distrust. This should be interesting.

"Peter, play nice. This is one of my old friends, Harley Keener. I'm not sure you two met at the funeral, but basically he was a fellow mentee my dad sort of trained. He just moved here, and he'll be a Junior at Midtown Tech in a couple weeks." I politely explained to the disgruntled Spiderboy.

"And she wants me to be Ironlad."

Oh, this can't be good.

"Ironlad?" Peter questioned, now meeting Harley's gaze. Posture suddenly taller. Was he challenging Harley?

"Yeah, (Y/n) here called me about it a while back. I already have prints for a suit and she said she'd help me with it." He replied rather egotistically.

Peter looked hurt. He looked to me and back to Harley with definative anger. He began to walk away.

I quickly hit Harley's arm in frustration.

"What the hell, Keener? I was going to tell him gingerly!" I whisper-yelled at him as I began to follow Peter. He started to suit up.

"Peter." I called to him.

"Peter!" I called a little louder.

"Peter Parker!" I jogged up to meet his fast paced walk and pulled his arm.

He pulled away forcefully. He looked pained. His eyes were showing early signs of crying, but his actions showed anger.

"Leave me alone, (Y/n)." He proceeded to walk briskly to the edge of an open window.

I followed him to the edge.

We made brief eye contact before he jumped out.

"Spidey, don't make me do this!" I shouted in his direction.

No response.

"Alright, he forced my hand." I muttered to myself.

"FRIDAY, do me a favor and don't send my suit after me, okay?" I asked the A.I, knowing she'd be listning.

So I jumped out. Completely suitless. Pepper was going to kill me.

Either I end up on th street as a not so pretty decoration, or Peter'd save me. We'll find out soon enough.

I felt the wind swishing through my hair and my clothes puffing in weird directions around me. I saw the points on the ground becoming more clear. I was getting to close for comfort. This was it. Peter was actually going to let me die because he's mad at me. Talk about petty.

Suddenly I felt a familiar tug on the back of my shirt. He really waited until the last last second to web me up.

I braced myself for the intense g-force I'd experience while being pulled back to the sky.

Before I knew it, Peter and I stood on the roof of a building near the tower.

"Do us a favor and don't throw yourself off of any more buildings." He said not even prying his eyes off of the ground. He was about to take off again.

"Peter Parker, I will keep launching myself off of buildings until you and I talk!" I yell at him.

He looked at me like I was insane. Which, jury's out on that one. I might be.

"What." He stated, again not looking at me.

"You can't be the next Ironman." I said simply.

This caused him to look up. Again, he looked like I just told him the worst news in the world.

"Peter, you can't be the next Ironman because nobody can be the next Ironman. He's irreplaceable." My voice began to crack. I was definitely going to cry. No preventing that.

"Tony Stark was an enigma. He was the best and worst man. Did I ever tell you the reason he took on Scott's Time Heist was because he looked at a picture of you two? Peter, he wanted you to live, not to crack under the pressure of being the next Ironman. If he could see you now, he'd..."

"Hey, (N/n)," He began to interrupt. But I wasn't having any of it.

"Peter, I don't even know what he'd do, but I just know he would disapprove of you trying so desperately to be the 'new Ironman.' Damn what Fury says, all he cares about is finding replacements! He wants you because he knows he can control you. Hell, he already replaced Natasha with another former assassin. He doesn't care about our wellbeing. I just know you would've been too excited to recognize you were being used, so I thought if I brought Harley in, he'd help me show my point. Peter, trust me he's great, and..."

Peter shut me up by pulling me into a tight hug and shushing me. This caused me to let out a breath I didn't even know I was holding in.

"I get it. I miss him too. And you know he wouldn't want to be jumping off of buildings." I felt his chest vibrations. They were oddly soothing.

"Excuse you Peter, he's the one who taught me that trick." I smiled and sniffled. He wiped my tears away and just held my face.

"Uhmh."

We both jolted around to see Harley, now decked out in his Mark I Ironlad suit.

"I hate to break up this tender moment my ex and my soon to be best friend are having, but you guys SUCK at the whole secret identity thing."

"Ex? So you two have a history?" Peter asked, looking at me awkwardly.

"I was 14, I had bad judgement."

This caused an offended noise to leave Harley's mouth, but a laugh to exit Peter's.

Yep, these two were going to be good friends.

"Alright, we should probably all head home and sleep. School starts soon." I, being the mature teenager I am, suggested.

Harley took off.

Which left me and Peter on a roof.

"So..."

"So." I smirked. "You should probably get going. May's gonna be worried."

"Yeah, well sure, but do you like need a lift or..?" His question trailed off. Suddenly it clicked when my dad would tease him about being awkward with me. Does Peter Parker like me?

Instead of a response, I tapped the edge of my glasses and watched Peter watch as my suit began flying out the tower and to me.

"I'll be fine, Parker." I smiled, though it was hidden from him.

"Tell May I said hey." And I took off towards our house.

When I landed Pepper was out, waiting for me.

I tapped the edge of my helmet and the suit began to return to its nano form.

"What's this I hear about you jumping out of the tower?!" She yells at me, obviously playfully.

"What? I needed a way to get Peter's attention." I breezed past her.

"I swear you are jus like your father! You're aging me prematurely."

"How premature can it be?" I quip back sarcastically.

I hear an offended gasp followed by a chuckle.

I went up to my room, deciding I was too tired to take a shower. I just wanted to go to bed. So I proceed with my Nighttime routine and in no time was cozy in bed.

My window curtains were drawn back. As I began to close my eyes, I swear I saw the outline of the infamous red snd blue suit watching me...

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and sent a quick text to Peter.

He almost fell from the roof he was on. But recovered quickly. He stood and waved goodbye as he swung off into the night.

PETER'S POV

I just wanted to make sure they made it home alright. I knew Mr. Stark would never let me live it down if I didn't. Besides, I knew they were beat after the vacation, so I was afraid they would mess up the directions home, or something; but part of me just wanted to see them one more time before I called it a night. So I sat on a roof parallel to their bedroom window.

I waited until they got into their bed, and was tucked under the covers. They looked ready to go to bed, but they suddenly grabbed their phone off their nightstand.

I felt my phone vibrate. I pulled it out, suspecting it was them.

'My hero, making sure I got home safely. Go get some sleep Peter, I'll see you tomorrow. Goodnight x.'

I slipped when I read it. The 'x', that meant a kiss, right? Oh my God. They called me their hero. This is so much to take in.

I looked up again to see their beautiful (E/c) eyes one more time and waved them goodbye.

I jumped off of the roof and began swinging home, thinking about what adventure we'll have tomorrow. Hopefully a good one.

------------

A/N: Hey, so here's a thing. I got the inspiration of the Far From Home Trailer. I'm trying to get rid of some of my lost Endgame depression, but this actually made it worse wow.

Anyway, hope you enoyed this crappily slopped together thing I wrote during school.

[valdomarx]

[Inception fic] A Pale Imitation

Fandom: Inception (2010) Relationship: Arthur/Eames Link: Also on AO3.

People think that forging is copying. They think that you look at a target, take in the lines of their nose, the slope of their shoulders, the shape of their eyes, and then you reproduce it. As if a forger were a photocopier: image in, image out.

But that's not it at all. You need to get the visual details right, sure, but they are not what sells the effect. Especially in a dream. What sells it is the way that someone stands, the way that they move, the inflection in their voice when they get passionate. It's how they brace themselves under pressure, how their face ripples when they try to repress an emotion.

To be a forger is to be a psychologist.

Eames can do a passable forgery of anyone he's ever met. He can do an expert forgery of anyone he's observed for more than a few days. His forgeries have been accurate enough to fool spouses, parents, best friends, even twins. He is a very, very good forger.

He can't forge Arthur.

He'd first noticed it on a job with Cobb. Arthur had been playing a minor role in the dream on the second level, but he'd been hit by a stray bullet and had been kicked up to the first level. They needed someone to stand in for Arthur, so Cobb tapped in Eames.

Eames had slid into Arthur's skin easily enough: the neat, precise movements, the fastidious arrangement of clothing, the face that settled naturally into a slight sneer.

But when he slipped into the room with Cobb and the mark, he knew instantly that something was wrong. The mark didn't notice anything – he'd barely spoken to Arthur – but Cobb shot him an odd look, brows furrowed. Every time Eames opened his mouth, Cobb's face darkened.

Once they extracted the information they needed and kicked the mark back up to the higher dream level, Cobb grabbed his wrist.

“What the hell, Eames?” he hissed. “That's a rookie forgery if I ever saw one. It wouldn't fool me for a second.”

An angry defensiveness had twisted in Eames' gut, mostly because he knew that Cobb was right. His forged Arthur was fundamentally wrong in some unknown way.

Other people think that forging is about memorising, as if you stand in front of a wardrobe and pick an outfit by remembering if you've seen the target more often wearing a red shirt or a blue shirt. But that's not how it works either. You need to understand the target, to see the world through their eyes, to inhabit their perspective so fully that you don't need to remember – you instinctively know that they would choose the blue. Forging is, more than anything, an exercise of empathy.

People tend to underestimate Eames. His tacky clothes and carefully insolent demeanour are a highly effective distraction: people are so busy laughing at his lack of class that they let their defences down and show him their true selves. And Eames notices everything.

He understands subtext, the power of the unspoken. He understands repression and the turning away from that which is most crucial. He understand the multitudes within every person: kindness and hatred; care and indifference; fortitude and weakness.

He doesn't understand Arthur.

The next time this becomes a problem, they're on another job and Arthur needs Eames to fill in for him.

They've been refining the Mister Charles play, and they've discovered that it's more likely to succeed when the mark has a sense of familiarity towards whomever is impersonating their head of security. For this particular job, Arthur has been trailing the mark in the real world, sitting right on the edge of his field of view in bars and cafes, passing him on the street a couple of times. Just enough to establish a vague feeling of recognition.

Now they've pulled the mark into a dream, only the one level, but his mental state is twitchier than they anticipated. It's a three man job: one person to play Mr. Charles, one person to locate the safe, and one person to run interference. Cobb takes the interference role, Arthur works on the safe, and that leaves Eames to play Arthur as Mr. Charles.

The moment that he slips into Arthur's form he can tell that something is wrong. He feels too stiff, stands too straight, his face has none of Arthur's sardonic humour. He focuses on getting the job done, and thank god the mark isn't the shiniest penny in the box. He's suspicious, sure, and the projections close in on them fast. But he's obvious too, dropping a bank vault full of secrets right into the middle of a restaurant. They grab the information and high tail it out of there, furious restaurant patrons clamouring after them.

In the moments before the kick Arthur turns to Eames, his face impassive.

“Not your best work, Eames,” he says, lip curled.

It's the last thing Eames remembers before the dream collapses.

Eames can't understand what the problem is. He's spent god know how many hours in Arthur's company. He's seen him stressed, seen him excited, seen him poised for action and anticipating every moment. He recognises the way Arthur holds himself, the things that Arthur thinks are funny, the way Arthur hums to himself when he thinks no one is watching.

Adopting Arthur's physical form isn't the problem. He can do a damn fine forgery of Arthur's arse, of which he is particularly proud.

There's something that's missing, though. Something deeper. Something more personal.

And it's driving Eames crazy, because he can't work out what it is.

He's mouthing off about his frustration in the old warehouse that the team has taken over for their latest job. Yusuf thinks that the problem is neurochemical, some kind of response to using the PASIV together so many times, But Eames can forge Cobb and the others, and they've gone under together just as often. Ariadne thinks that the problem is architectural, that Eames has to build his representation of Arthur with more detail and balance.

“Maybe you need to observe Arthur more closely,” Yusuf suggests with a shrug. “Like any other target.”

Ariadne fixes Eames with a penetrating gaze. “Pretty sure that's not the problem,” she says quietly.

Arthur himself doesn't comment on Eames' difficulties in recreating him. He simply smiles that sharp, superior smile whenever the subject is brought up.

Eames imagines him writing it down in his silly little notebook: November 21st. Eames still underperforming. Replace him for next job?

In Eames' mind, the word replace is written in red ink and underlined several times.

It's a puzzle, a nagging thought at the back of Eames' mind that he turns over on occasions when he wants to torture himself. He spends hours trying to capture Arthur’s essence, and failing.

He tries modelling Arthur's behavioural quirks: how he fiddles with his cufflinks when he needs a moment to collect himself, the sharp nod he gives on the rare occasions when he is genuinely impressed, the way he bounces on the balls of his feet when he doesn't feel in control. Eames can recreate each of them flawlessly.

And yet his facsimiles of Arthur are still wrong. They are too flat or too expressive, too uptight or too languid, too snarky or too earnest.

There is something very distinctly Arthur that is missing.

His limitation regarding Arthur is a subject of merely abstract curiosity until he’s needed again in the field. The team is doing a complex extraction job against a mark with militarised subconscious and the projections are raining hell down on them.

Arthur's been hit, and he's bleeding out from a chest wound. It's a nasty one and he won't last long.

Eames finds it hard to look at: the crimson blood spilling out across the dirty concrete floor, in sharp contrast with Arthur's pale and increasingly sallow skin. He has yanked off his tie and he's holding it to the wound, trying to staunch the flow. It's not right to see Arthur like this, crumpled and dishevelled, blood seeping between his fingers.

Eames will snap his neck with his bare hands if he has to. He will have nightmares about it for months, but he will do it to spare Arthur the pain.

He goes to put him out of his agony, but Cobb stops him with a hand on his shoulder. “Wait. We can't do this job without Arthur. If he pulls out, we have to leave too.”

“No,” Arthur coughs weakly. Blood oozes between his fingers. “This is our only chance. You can do this. Eames can take my place.”

“We both know that won't work,” Eames says, forcing himself not to look away from Arthur's mangled body. “I can't forge you.”

“That's because you don't understand me,” Arthur says, and there's an actual smile breaking through the pain.

“Insightful as ever, darling. It’s because you’re inexplicable.” Eames keeps his tone light but he holds Arthur’s gaze steadily.

“It's because -” Arthur hacks, an ugly, rattling sound deep in his throat. “It's because I'm in love with you, Eames. I have been since the Fischer job. Maybe before, I don't know.”

Eames stares. That's ridiculous, one part of his mind thinks. Arthur doesn't even like him. He barely tolerates his messiness and his ignorance and his childish whims. Eames thinks back over every disapproving frown, every curled lip, every time that Arthur has made his displeasure with Eames abundantly clear.

And yet, another part of his mind thinks. Something in his memory shifts and recontextualises, and then he's thinking of narrowed eyes that track his movements unfalteringly, not because of suspicion but because of interest, of explosions of temper when Eames puts himself in danger, not because of anger but because of worry, of a smug smirk that radiates affection, not superiority.

Eames feels as if he's standing on the brink of the Penrose stairs and that the ground has shifted beneath his feet.

“You don't have to say anything,” Arthur says weakly. “Go finish the job. We'll talk once it's done.”

Once Eames has that key piece of information, forging Arthur is simple. Eames inhabits Arthur's form, feels his fondness for precision and order, his meticulous mind with every piece of information sorted and categorised. But beyond that, underneath that, there is an ocean of love and warmth and affection. It bubbles up to the surface in unexpected ways, and Arthur pushes it back down every time. But still, it is there if you know how to look.

It's there in the way Arthur works so hard to keep the team safe, and his lashing anger when anyone gets hurt and he blames himself. It's there in the way Arthur looks up when he feels Eames watching him, sarcasm pouring out of him like a castle defence of boiling oil. It's there in the way Arthur stands a little closer to Eames than he means to, unaware of it himself, as if his body knows his feelings better than his mind does.

It's there in that infuriating smirk that has been turned on Eames so many times, that telegraphs Arthur's attention and his uncertainty and his soft heart all at once.

He and Cobb finish the job. His forgery of Arthur works like a charm.

As the two of them are on a roof, ready to kick themselves back to reality, Cobb turns to him.

“Be gentle with Arthur,” he says, stony-faced. “He's more sensitive than people realise.”

Then Cobb pushes him off the roof.

Eames goes to Arthur, once the job is tied up and everyone has gone their separate ways. He tries very hard not to think about thick red blood oozing from an ugly hole in Arthur’s chest.

Arthur brings Eames to a seedy hotel.

Bloody hell. Okay then, Eames thinks, surprised that Arthur is so forward but more than willing to go with it.

But when they arrive in their room, Arthur pulls out a chunky briefcase and unpacks a PASIV device.

“Another job?” Eames keeps his voice light, teasing. “Did you bring me to a love nest to work me to death? Is that your ultimate kink? I can’t say that I’m altogether surprised.”

Arthur gives him a look that clearly conveys you’re an idiot and subtly conveys and I love you for it, and hands him an IV.

Curious as to where this is going, Eames pushes the IV into the soft skin of his elbow and they both go under together.

Eames opens his eyes in an aviary. Sunlight streams through the glass windows two stories high, and the jungle plants surrounding them make the air hot and humid. Everywhere he looks, birds of every size and colour and species flit past him, twirling around each other in an impossibly complex dance.

“It’s a training room,” Arthur explains as he walks up next to Eames. “I’ve been working on an environment for new recruits.”

A blue tit with feathers glowing bright cyan settles on Eames’ hand. It bobs and turns to look at him with dark, intense eyes. It is unnerving to be so keenly observed by a bird.

“Forge me,” Arthur says. “I want to see what you can do.”

Eames feels an uncharacteristic nervousness, like this is some sort of test and failing it could cost him dearly. But Arthur is smiling at him, or at least the corner of his mouth is turned up a tiny bit, and for Arthur that’s huge.

Eames closes his eyes, thinks of Arthur, and steps into his forgery.

This time, when he opens his eyes he sees the same view as before but from several inches higher. He feels the expensive cotton of his shirt tight around his wrists and neck, constraining but comforting. He feels an urge to assess the environment for flaws, to deconstruct it, to quantify it and list it and to put everything it in its right place. He feels like Arthur.

Arthur is leaning in close and examining him minutely. “Much better,” he says.

And then Eames turns his own gaze inward and looks deep, beyond the desire for optimisation and order, beyond the fancy suits and the walls of professionalism. He searches for Arthur’s true motivations and finds them, lets himself feel the depth of Arthur’s care, his affection, his protectiveness. For the team, and for Cobb in particular, but most of all for Eames.

Observing Arthur’s love for him from within his own mind is like being inside a kaleidoscope, every feeling reflected and refracted in an ever changing symmetry.

It’s beautiful. It’s overwhelming. It’s more than Eames deserves.

He wraps a hand around the back of Arthur’s neck, pulls him close, and kisses him deeply.

The kiss is perfect, passionate and intense and soft, for about two seconds. Then they break apart because Arthur bursts out laughing.

“You’re going to have to take that off,” he sniggers, and Eames assumes he means his clothes until he realises that he’s still wearing his forgery of Arthur.

“What, you never wanted to snog yourself? You’re missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime, I can assure you. And I’m speaking from experience.”

Arthur cuffs him round the back of the head. “You’re ridiculous.”

“And you love it,” Eames says, slipping back into his own form.

Arthur smiles at him so softly. “I like the real you better,” he says, and it’s the most earnest that Eames has ever heard him.

Eames thinks about all he’s learned about Arthur, about how wrong he had been about so many things. “I like the real you too,” he says, and pulls him in for another kiss.

[anon-and-gone]

Project Death

Part 1 (prologue)

After being held captive in a HYDRA facility for years, (Y/N) has all but forgotten everything about herself; knowing only that which is necessary for her own survival. After being rescued by the Avengers, she struggles to adapt to a (mostly) regular life once again, and realises there may have been more to life she was missing out on than previously thought.

Fandom: Avengers (post-IW and EG but with a happy ending where no one dies)

Pairings: (eventual) Bucky x fem!reader, (eventual) platonic!avengers x fem!reader

Warnings: violence, blood, pain, mentions of torture, implications of self harm, imprisonment, panic attacks, strong language, basically every bad thing, eventual NSFW, slow burn, ANGST, bad writing, probably fluff later, literally everything idk

WC: 1,375

A/N: first chapter!! thank you guys so much for all the support you’ve already given me, I can't tell you just how much it means to me! a reminder that this is literally the first fic I've ever written so don’t expect it to be fantastic or anything, any feedback or constructive criticism is very much appreciated! Shoot me a message if you wanted to be added to (or removed from) the tag list and I'll add you for the next part :)

Thank you for reading!  Iz xx

Footsteps.

 You could hear footsteps.

 You knew they were yours. You knew you were walking, because you could hear your own footsteps. You knew where you were - the metallic stench of the facility stung your nose, working it’s way into your head and making your eyes water. You blinked away the fog which disappeared as suddenly as it had come on, snapping yourself back to the present. Zoning out wasn't a rarity with you - living in your own head made it all a hell of a lot easier. In doing so you also blinked away the droplets which formed in the corner of your eyes, barely noticing the mild discomfort - it was just a small nagging in the back of your head, one you couldn’t bring yourself to mind.

There wasn’t much more that you knew, and so you tried to keep a mental note of what you did know. One of those things was you knew that the list was getting smaller. You also knew that you didn’t know the time, whether it was day or night, didn’t know the date, or the year, or the name of the guard walking directly behind you (you could tell he was there because there was another set of footsteps not quite matching yours), or if you’ll be able to eat in the foreseeable future. ‘Foreseeable’ being irony.

The rhythmic clank, clank, clank of the chain on your legs kept you focused as you walked. You did know it would be a while before you could walk again, and you revelled in the delicious ache deep in the muscles as you stretched each leg as far as it would willingly go. The pain from this was a comfortable, familiar pain. The burning at your joints became a constant - the only one you could depend on. It kept you grounded - whatever was happening, you knew the burning would still be there.

A sudden jerk to the chain on your arm and you were halted abruptly, your weight on one foot as the other hovered mid-step. Another, and you were turning to your right; a large metal door now looming above you. You knew that this was your Room.

The keypad next to the door lit up when you were stood opposite it, the individual keys glowing with a florescent blue light so harsh that you had to force yourself not to look away or blink.

You couldn’t show weakness.

It wasn’t as if you could tear your gaze away, though - the colour always filled you with an alien emotion, one you couldn’t place if you tried (and you had, for hours, with nothing else to do after being left in the Room). It was almost a memory from another time, another life… which was ridiculous, right? 

The guard punched a combination in - different to the last time - and the mocking blue turned to a cruel green. He reached around you to twist the doorknob which had appeared after the light changed, his arm brushing your side for a split second too long. He was new. With a creak, the door swung open and you were shoved inside, stumbling unceremoniously before managing to righten yourself. A faint click echoed around the room and blood rushed back into your hands, tingling, as the chains fell at your feet. You turned now to face the man, eyes angled downwards, taking two measured steps backwards until your spine hit the wall. You held your hands out to either side, not even bothering to raise your head to see the power-hungry smirk the guard would have on his face now. Cold rushed through your stomach as you felt the harsh metal encase your fist again, this time holding it against the wall. You were used to this - didn’t know anything else - yet a small part of you, hidden in the far recesses of your mind, remained terrified, and it threatened to grow each time you heard the metal snap. You were reminded of this as your other hand faced the same doom, and you were left to swallow the feeling before it could establish itself into something more.

 You. couldn’t. show. weakness. 

Your ankles were given the same treatment, and it wasn’t long before the man reached to push your shirt up, the concrete wall behind you grazing scarred skin as your only layer of protection was withdrawn. The friendly burn from your limbs was now drowned out by the harsher, newer burn enveloping your torso -  the cool metal casing pressing you further into the wall, your own personal, hidden coffin. Your shirt was yanked messily back down over the top, hiding the miniature prison from view, and you had to choke back a whimper when you remembered what would be coming next. The fear always became almost impossible to ignore by this point. The guard noticed your gulp, and the way your eyes screwed shut, and he tilted his thin mouth into an evil grin once again as he drew himself to his full height (which, you noted, was not very high).  He opened his mouth to speak, a foul stench reaching your senses nearly making you gag, but was interrupted by an echoing yell and a crash from somewhere in the facility. You could feel old scars on your back reopen as your subsequent flinch made you press yourself into the wall far as possible (not very far). He closed his mouth (to your nose’s relief) and turned his head with a roll of his eyes to glance out the open door behind him, muttering under his breath something about needing a better defence system. You, however, were not paying attention to anything he said and were too busy trying to frantically figure out the source of the noise, your heartbeat rising unsteadily as your mind raced at increasing speeds, each rise and fall of your chest bringing a fresh rush of pain as more skin was pressed against the metal corset. You had barely noticed when the guard turned back around, pushing greasy hair back from his face, and was now reaching for the Mask.

 You didn’t - couldn’t - react as he placed it over your head, the metal stinging where it rested on the crown of your head and bruised cheek bones, and instead focused on pacing your breaths. Your vision was now obscured by small meal bars running over your eyes, and you bared your teeth as you made out the guard reaching up to pat the side of your cheek, not being able to feel it due to the thick leather. Another crash echoed through the halls - closer this time than the last, and a mix of fear and fury finally rushed through your veins. Upon hearing it, the guard’s gaze hardened, and he placed his face directly opposite yours, barking commands and reiterating orders of what to do in an emergency, lest you had forgotten. You, however, were still not listening - couldn’t even hear him over the rushing sound in your ears - and instead focused on bringing your head, heavy mask and all, down onto his with as much strength you could muster. He hadn’t put your neck harness on yet, and now he was unconscious on the floor.

Fear flooded through your system, unchallenged by the retreating rage. Oh god, what had you done? You now noticed, though your vision was still severely limited, that the alarms had sounded and every room was swallowed in a pulsating red, one which invaded your mind and chased out any emotion - any thought - other than pure terror. The door to The Room still was wide open, and the guard you had dropped lay in full view of the corridor, just waiting for someone to discover. This time you allowed the whimper to escape your throat as you desperately wished that the punishment this time would be death… you just couldn’t face the testing any longer. A second muffled cry joined the first as you allowed yourself to dwell on the possibility that no one would find out - no one would pass you and see that you were still trapped in the room, starving and rotting away into nothing but the shell that your mind had already become.

Oooooh I wonder who’s about to show up? ;) I promise things will actually start happening in the next part sksksk I’m yelling it’s so dark, I’m so sorry! well there you have it folks, part one! I've no idea when part 2 will be up I'm afraid, it shouldn't be long though. I’m not 100% happy with this but I think the more I look over it the more annoyed I'll be with it, so may as well just post it and get it out of the way! Once again thank you so much for the support and any constructive criticism / feedback is always welcome! I hope you enjoyed :)

p.s. sorry if your tag didn't work! I'm working to fix it :)

Tag list: @slender--spirit / @nerd-without-a-cause / @emilymarie0422 / @dontstopfreddienow / @strangersstranger / @thegraceofme / @uuuuuuuuggggghhh / @bloodywitches / @romimiux / @hailqueenconquer / @sinviix / @moonlitlakes-andfairycakes

[adangerousbond]

The Garden can Break the Greenhouse

I think this will be about 2 chapters all up, I have a few other stories I have been trying to work on and start but there are very few stories for Reade/Zapata, so I needed to write my own in the mini break.

Read below or at FF.net // AO3

Enjoy!

There had been multiple times throughout this mission that she had been unsure if she would succeed; the moment she had realised just how hard it would be to walk away from everyone, when she had watched the entire room around her fall to the ground, unsure if she was going to be next, confronting Reade in his apartment and more recently when she had been kidnapped and interrogated by fake CIA agents, all because Madeline got a little unsure of her, but this time felt different, because at least if she had not survived, she had won.

Slumping down against a crate, she closed her eyes for a moment in an attempt to make the dizziness disappear, her fingers sticky and wet from the blood seeping through her shirt and her ears pounding as she breathed through the pain. She had left Madeline in a room that she knew her team would find her, having had gone after the last of the older woman's helpers, knowing full well that it would take her away from the possible route out of the building that had been rigged to blow in a time frame that was too short for her to do much.

Opening her eyes, Tasha glanced towards the doorway she had come through, the pool of blood from the man she had shot a lot larger than when she had last looked and the realisation that she had been down longer than she had realised kicked in, her limited time was disappearing quicker than she could think.

Pressing as firmly as she could into the wound on her side, she ignored her body's complaints and forced herself up, she had come to far and given up too much to not at least try to get out. Her vision was blurring more with each step she took but she continued towards what she believed was the opposite direction of where the bomb had been placed; Madeline's last line of defence, if all else was lost the woman would get some solace in bringing everyone else down with her too.

Rounding a corner, she heard what sounded like footsteps coming closer to the room she was now in, unsure if it was her mind playing tricks or not, she paused to listen, her answer coming as the door opened and a gun pointed through. Raising her gun shakily towards the approaching figure, with a sudden hint of survival kicking in to cover the lack of strength, her brain barely registering the friendly face as they lowered their weapon and rushed towards her.

"Tasha?!" Reade breathed a sigh of relief, concern quickly taking over as he saw she was struggling to stand. Wrapping an arm around her, he took her weight as he led them back out the way he had come in, his other hand holding his gun tight ready to protect them.

Leaning against him, she actually felt safe for a moment, as she focused on keeping up the quick pace he was making them go, both knowing full well that they needed to be out of the building already. A hint of hope rose in the back of her mind, hope that she might actually get out of this mission alive, but it was quickly replaced by the fear that she might get them both killed.

The answer to her question came moments later as he pushed them through a door a few moments later and the bright sunlight hit her face. He continued his path towards an ambulance in the distance, as she glanced over to her former team, locking eyes with Madeline for a moment and nearly stumbling at the ice in her stare, breaking away she caught the mixture of questioning and disapproving looks from the team, even in her state she could tell Reade was ignoring the same looks, something that she tucked away and hoped she would remember later.

As they close enough to the ambulance that the paramedics saw her, she was quickly surrounded by people ready to help but Reade seemed focused on getting her to the vehicles stretcher before he let her go. The distinct sound of the building exploding ripping through the relief that had fallen over then the moment they had made it to the vehicle, Reade holding its back door in a manner to shield them from any debris from the building as they watched it crumble from the force.

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She barely remembered the ride to the hospital, waking a while later to the beeping, busy noise and sickly clean smell that could only be one place. Opening her eyes, she glanced around the white room, attempting to sit up without getting caught up in the cords connected to her body, her actions catching the eye of a nurse walking by, who smiled quickly at her before hurrying off, most likely to fetch someone to talk to her.

Her suspicions of the nurse were right when a man and woman in doctor's coats entered, followed by a blank Reade. She was surprised to see him there and it made her wonder if it was to take her into custody once given the all clear, he had made it clear that she was simply an asset and her only usefulness was catching Madeline, which she had done; she didn't have Keaton to get her out of a black site anymore, so CIA or FBI; it didn't make much of a difference to her.

"Miss Zapata, I am glad to see you are awake." The male doctor spoke, the way he seemed to be keeping his distance off her bed not lost on her and she had to wonder if they thought she was law enforcement or the enemy.

"Guess I lived." She stated nonchalantly, making eye contact with Reade for a moment before picking up the cup in front of her as an excuse to look away.

"Are you happy for us to update you with Agent Reade in the room? We can do this more privately if you prefer." The doctor spoke again softer than before, noticing the interaction between the two.

"It's fine." She stated, placing the cup back on the tray in front of her, as she wondered if the fact she wasn't handcuffed was a good sign.

"You had a small gunshot wound to the abdomen, not much more than a graze that we patched up, along with a couple other cuts and bruises that you'll need to keep an eye on, we stitched up the more serious ones. The bigger issue is that you were dehydrated and malnourished, which was making your wounds make you weaker than they should, but we have you on an IV full of much needed nutrients and your hydration levels are much better." He rattled off the basics of her injuries to her as she watched him hold himself back, clearly wanting to ask questions but knowing better than too.

"I would also like you to have a chat with our counsellor before you go." The female doctor spoke up, clearly going against a decision the two of them had decided upon before coming into her room.

"Why?" She asked a lack of anything to her tone that she then realised probably didn't help her situation.

"Well, your displaying clear symptoms of being held against your will and of being tortured, pretty seriously by what I've seen, so I would like you to at least have a quick chat with them first." The concern about her welfare evident on the doctor's voice, but Tasha couldn't help but feel it would dissipate if she knew the things she had done.

"When am I leaving, by the way you two talk it sounds as if I am being discharged pretty soon?" Tasha questioned, ignoring the statement and any questions it brought with it as she glanced at the small group at the end of her bed.

"We have a plane waiting to go back to New York." Reade spoke authoritively and his reason for being there dawned on her, he was only there to escort her to the ride home; or to a dark hole, she still wasn't sure which it would be.

"I would prefer if you stayed a little while longer, at least to keep an eye on your wounds." The other woman spoke, dropping her other issue for now. "But we cannot force you to stay."

"If you choose to leave, we will give you some medication for the pain and to try to stop infection, and some supplies to change the bandages if needed, but I would highly suggest going into a hospital as soon as your stateside." The male doctor explained further, the appearance of her having a choice nearly making her laugh, if only they knew the whole story.

"I'll be fine, changed a few bandages in my time." She stated, pretending to have made the decision all on her own, but they were right and the bruises on her wrists would really hurt if the handcuffs went back on.

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Stepping out of the room a little while later having changed into the now clean clothes that she had come in with, bar her shirt that they had cut open, but having been given one of the hospitals light green scrub shirts to wear instead, she definitely felt more refreshed than she had in the last few weeks.

"Ready?" Reade spoke coldly, as if he was here for a job and that was it; which she supposed he was.

Tasha nodded in response, handing the clipboard she was holding to a nurse at the nurses' station as they started their way to the elevator. The coldness between them hurting, but she pushed it down, knowing she had hurt him more and it had been her choice, so she didn't deserve anything but.

Their silence continued in the drive to the airport, only interrupted by a call coming through midway there, the silence returning as quickly as the call ended. As they approached the hanger, she wasn't sure if she should be worried or thankful that they had a private jet waiting for them, the unanswered question about her fate slowly eating away at her.

Following behind him quietly, at the very least she knew that was all she could do at the moment, choosing that it was safer to prepare for the worst than to hold on to the slither of hope. She took the stairs to the plane slowly, ignoring the way he waited at the top as to ensure she didn't try to run and hated that she couldn't read if he was impatient or concerned as she past him and made her way to a seat.

Curling in against herself, she sat in a seat next to a window silently, letting the other members of a team she was once a part of move around the plane, only stopping what they were doing as the plane moved towards the runway and then took off, soaring towards its destination and potentially towards her hell.

"How are you feeling?" Patterson asked as she sat opposite her, breaking her train of thought as the concern from her once close friend brought a tinge of hope.

"Been better." She responded with a weak smile, turning to face her and watching as Rich sat next to her, the two looking as if they were about to start an interrogation of their own kind.

"We got Madeline red handed, HCI Global won't come back from this." The blonde stated getting down to business.

"Good." At least it hadn't ended up all being for nothing, that was something she could hold on to where ever she ended up.

"Why?" Her old friend asked, her question drawing the other occupant to the conversation, as Reade made his way over, having no choice but to sit on the spare seat next to her.

"Why?" Tasha questioned the question, not sure which part of it the why referred to.

"Why did you agree to it?" Rich brought up the first question the group seemed to have for her.

"It's not like he had anyone else lining up to do it, I couldn't exactly turn it down." She tried to explain, but this group was FBI through and through, they had never understood why she had gone CIA and so she couldn't expect them to understand why she had been prepared to give up everything, including her job at the CIA for it.

"Was it because we weren't talking and you two were barely talking?" Patterson got right to the question that had been eating at her, wanting to understand her mindset.

"I won't lie," She started, her comment gaining a huff from the man next to her, "It helped me agree to it in the first place, but when it started, us all being friends again made walking away the hardest thing I have ever done."

"Yet you did it anyway. You left without a word and joined forces with our enemy." The blonde argued, the hurt that she had and was still feeling evident in her tone.

"Even to my standards, that's not right." Rich spoke up, trying to cut through with tension that was filling up the small plane quickly.

"You could have just told us." Reade near repeated the words he had told her when he had her in the FBI just over a week prior.

"I couldn't risk it." Tasha told him sadly, knowing how the words sounded the moment she said them.

"Risk what, we were your team." The were in his sentence cutting the deepest, she knew they weren't a team anymore, but it still hurt to be reminded.

"I had to go deep Reade, I couldn't have any outs, it was all or nothing." She tried explaining from a different angle, she knew they all had their own thoughts as to why she had done it the way that she had and that they were all still hurt by those reasons.

"All you needed to do was tell us enough that we would have known you weren't betraying us, we wouldn't have sold you out." He fired back, bringing trust back into it, because if there was anything that this team had survived on it was trust.

"If I told you and anything went wrong, if I failed I wouldn't have forgiven myself. I couldn't risk anything, and if I succeeded and you guys didn't forgive me that was a something I would have to live with." She told him softly, knowing he had every right to feel the way he did but she hadn't had the choice, after everything she had done, this mission had been the very least she could offer, no matter the cost.

"And if it went wrong, what, we would have just never known the truth?" Patterson asked, anger flaring up in her tone as she listened to the reasoning and knew that it had been a very real possibility.

"Keaton promised he would tell the team the truth if it went bad." The brunette responded, the sentence sinking in as the group realised that it was an outcome that she had not only understood but had had a plan for as well.

"Then why come to me that night." Reade broke the silence, all eyes flying to him the moment he spoke. Looking around the group she knew the other two had at least some understanding that they had crossed a line, but they hadn't quite known how far over the line they had gone and the other two was just as surprised as she was that he was bringing it up now.

"I know I shouldn't have, it was selfish, but like I told you, I thought I would never see you again." She stared him down like she had in the interrogation room, needing him to know that as much as she had lied and hurt him, that her feelings were real and that she hated hurting him.

"You also told me that you always loved me, but I guess just not enough to tell me the truth." He threw her words back at her, both of them ignoring the way Rich was watching them as he was watching a day time soap show.

"You and I both know I would have ruined us anyway." She sighed, a lone tear escaping as she droped his eye contact as and wishing he would drop the topic for a time more private, but also glad that he was somewhat prepared to talk to her and that he had clearly confided in Patterson, who was watching the two with a sad expression, having had conversations with both, she understood that they were both in pain.

"How is it you keep making that choice for me?" Reade used a previous conversation against her once more and like before, not really expecting her to answer that statement.

"How about we stop there before someone says something they can't take back?" Rich spoke up, starting to get a touch uncomfortable, confrontations; especially those in a confined space, were not at the top of his list for enjoyable situations.

"Oh, we have said way worse to each other." Tasha couldn't help but joke, her words dropping the group back into silence.

"Where's Jane and Weller, are they okay?" Tasha asked after a while, feeling comfortable enough in the group to start asking her own questions.

"Chasing up a lead for Jane." Rich responded without thinking, his answer drawing an inquisitive look from the brunette and a sharp glare from the man opposite him. "And I've said to much."

She knew better than to push her luck on the subject, clearly there was going to be things that she would miss and they all barely seemed to tolerate her, let alone trust her with information on the two main members of the team, but it still hurt. Watching Rich get up and head towards the planes far corner where his laptop lay waiting, Tasha realised that he was distancing himself before he said anything further.

"Wait." She spoke up as Reade moved to stand as well, her request gaining a glare, but he remained seated none the less, as she got the courage to ask the question haunting her the most. "What's going to happen to me?"

"I'm not handing you over to the CIA if that's what you're worried about." His words didn't answer her question fully, but they gave her a glimmer of hope, something that was quite dangerous to her right now.

"What then?" She pushed further, she mightn't have the right to push about anything else, but she knew this was the one topic that no one could blame her for wanting an answer to.

"Well they are going to want to debrief you and as Keaton is still unconscious and though Claudia backed you up to me, she might not be so forthcoming with them, but for the mean time you'll remain in FBI custody, might even set you up in a safe house if it comes down to it." He explained, trying to sound as if he was talking to any other informant but the three of them knew that he was bending his power as deputy director.

"Really?" Tasha asked, hope slipping into her tone for the first time in a long time and she couldn't stop the small smile crossing her features.

"Well the end result was beneficial to the FBI, least we can do is make sure you don't get thrown into some dark hole." He reasoned to everyone, including himself, as he looked down to give himself a chance to school his features.

"Thanks." She responded, relief pushing aside her pain for a moment as she suppressed the urge to hug him, knowing that that action would not be well received.

"We should probably go over some key points before they get a chance to brief you though, like for starters, were the doctors correct when they said that you had been tortured recently?" He switched back to a line of conversation that he was in control of.

"Yes." She answered too coolly, the only sign that the question even bothered her was the way that she pulled her legs a bit closer, even though the action would cause her pain.

"Who?" Patterson spoke up for the first time in a while, the news surprising and concerning her, she knew it hadn't been an easy mission, but this was something else.

"They grabbed me when I was supposed to meet Del Toro, pretended to be CIA or were CIA working for Madeline, but they tried to get me to admit that I was undercover, all I knew was that if I told either option the truth they would have killed me." Tasha started explaining calmly as if it was not her story she was telling.

"Guess you held out." Reade responded coldly but watching her closely non the less.

"Reade!" Rich's voice rang out from over his laptop screen, clearly requesting his presence with what he had been working on.

"We will pick this up later." Reade stated as he rose and walked away from them, Patterson following closely behind, only pausing at another seat to grab a blanket which she then passed it to Tasha.

Folding the blanket into a makeshift pillow, she placed it on the window, figuring she might as well attempt to sleep or at the very least pretend to, to allow her a quiet flight as she knew that they would all leave her alone if rest and right she had to process the last couple of days. She just wished that she could be 100% certain that they would be able to protect her from the CIA, Keaton had been the only one who would have been able to talk them down and even though her mission had succeed, she knew that the CIA would be unhappy with the way she had dragged their name through the mud.

[covid19worldnews]

Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis

When Margaret Thatcher coined “Tina” – her 1980s dictum that “There is no alternative” – I was incensed because, deep down, I felt she had a point: the left had neither a credible nor a desirable alternative to capitalism.

Leftists excel at pinpointing what is wrong with capitalism. We wax lyrical about the possibility of some “other” world in which one contributes according to one’s capacities and obtains according to one’s needs. But, when pushed to describe a fully fledged alternative to contemporary capitalism, for many decades we have oscillated between the ugly (a Soviet-like barracks socialism) and the tired (a social democracy that financialised globalisation has rendered infeasible).

During the 1980s, I participated in many debates in pubs, universities and town halls whose stated purpose was to organise resistance to Thatcherism. I remember my guilty thought every time I heard Maggie speak: “If only we had a leader like her!” I was, of course, under no illusion: Thatcher’s programme was despotic, antisocial and an economic cul-de-sac. But, unlike our side, she understood that we lived in a revolutionary moment. The postwar class war armistice was over. If we wanted to defend the weak, we could not afford to be defensive. We needed to advocate as she did: out with the old system, in with a brand new one. Not Maggie’s dystopian one, but a brand new one nevertheless.

Alas, our lot had no vision of a new system. Instead, we were in the business of bandaging corpses while Thatcher was digging graves to clear the way for her spanking new spiv capitalism. Even when we were putting up a splendid fight in defence of communities that deserved defending, our causes screamed “anachronism” – fighting to preserve dirty coal-fired power stations or the right of male rightwing trade unionists to reach sordid deals behind closed doors with the likes of Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.

Just as when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we on the left – social democrats, Keynesians and Marxists alike – had the sense we would live the rest of our days as history’s losers, so in 2008, with Lehman’s collapse, those living the ideology of neoliberalism saw history erupt with similar soul-destroying force. Some years later, surveillance capitalism forced tech-evangelists, who thought they had seen in the internet an irresistible global democratic force, also to shed their illusions.

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, in September 2008. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

Two years ago I decided we need a blueprint, a sense of how democratic socialism could work today, with our current technologies and despite our human failings. My reluctance to attempt such an undertaking was immense. Two people helped me overcome it. One is Danae Stratou, my partner. From the week we first met, she has been telling me that my critique of capitalism meant nothing unless I could answer her pressing question: “What’s the alternative? And precisely how would things – like money, companies and housing – work?”

The second, and most unlikely, influence was Paschal Donohoe, Ireland’s finance minister and president of the Eurogroup. A political opponent who thought little of me as a finance minister (a mutual assessment), he was kind enough to write a generous review of an earlier book of mine. While Donohoe liked my account of capitalism he thought the book’s ending, in which I tried to sketch some features of a postcapitalist society, was “most disappointing”.

He was right, I thought. So I decided to write Another Now.

In a bid to incorporate into my socialist blueprint different, often clashing, perspectives I decided to conjure up three complex characters whose dialogues would narrate the story – each representing different parts of my thinking: a Marxist-feminist, a libertarian ex-banker and a maverick technologist. Their disagreements regarding “our” capitalism provide the background against which my socialist blueprint is projected – and assessed.

•••

Capitalism took off in earnest when electromagnetism met share markets at the end of the 19th century. Their coupling gave rise to networked megafirms, such as Edison, that produced everything from power stations to lightbulbs. To finance the huge undertaking, and the massive trade in their shares, the need arose for megabanks. By the early 1920s financialised capitalism roared, before the whole juggernaut crashed in 1929.

Our current decade began with another coupling that seems to be propelling history at dizzying velocity: the one between the enormous bubble with which states have been refloating the financial sector since 2008, and Covid-19. Evidence is not hard to spot. On 12 August, the day the news broke that the British economy had suffered its greatest slump ever, the London Stock Exchange jumped by more than 2%. Nothing comparable has ever occurred. Financial capitalism seems finally to have decoupled from the underlying economy.

Another Now begins in the late 1970s, straddles the crises of 2008 and 2020 but also sketches out an imaginary future, and concludes in 2036. There is a moment in the story, on a Sunday evening in November 2025 to be precise, when my characters try to make sense of their circumstances by looking back to the events of 2020. The first thing they note is how drastically the lockdown changed people’s perception of politics.

Before 2020, politics seemed almost like a game, but with Covid came the realisation that governments everywhere possessed immense powers. The virus brought the 24-hour curfew, the closure of pubs, the ban on walking through parks, the suspension of sport, the emptying of theatres, the silencing of music venues. All notions of a minimal state mindful of its limits and eager to cede power to individuals went out of the window.

Many salivated at this show of raw state power. Even free-marketeers, who had spent their lives shouting down any suggestion of even the most modest boost in public spending, demanded the sort of state control of the economy not seen since Leonid Brezhnev was running the Kremlin. Across the world, the state funded private firms’ wage bills, renationalised utilities and took shares in airlines, car makers, even banks. From the first week of lockdown, the pandemic stripped away the veneer of politics to reveal the boorish reality underneath: that some people have the power to tell the rest what to do.

The massive government interventions misled naive leftists into the daydream that revived state power would prove a force for good. They forgot what Lenin had once said: politics is about who does what to whom. They allowed themselves to hope that something good might transpire if the same elites that had hitherto condemned so many to untold indignities were handed immeasurable power.

It was the poorer and the browner people who suffered most from the virus. Why? Their poverty had been caused by their disempowerment. It aged them faster. And it made them more vulnerable to disease. Meanwhile, big business, always reliant on the state to impose and enforce the monopolies on which it thrives, boosted its privileged position.

The Amazons of this world flourished, naturally. The lethal emissions that had temporarily subsided returned to choke the atmosphere. Instead of international cooperation, borders went up and the shutters came down. Nationalist leaders offered demoralised citizens a simple trade: authoritarian powers in return for protection from a lethal virus – and scheming dissidents.

Demonstrators gather outside Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ $80m New York City penthouse, to protest the retailer’s treatment of workers during the pandemic, in August. Photograph: John Marshall Mantel/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock

If cathedrals were the middle ages’ architectural legacy, the 2020s will be remembered for electrified fences and flocks of buzzing drones. Finance and nationalism, already on the rise before 2020, were the clear winners. The great strength of the new fascists was that, unlike their forerunners a century ago, they don’t need to wear brown shirts or even enter government to gain power. The panicking establishment parties – the neoliberals and social democrats – have been falling over themselves to do their job for them through the power of big tech.

To stop new outbreaks governments tracked our every move with fancy apps and fashionable bracelets. Systems designed to monitor coughs now also monitored laughs. They made earlier organisations specialising in surveillance and “behaviour modification”, like the infamous KGB and Cambridge Analytica, seem positively neolithic.

What was the moment when humanity lost the plot? Was it 1991? 2008? Or did we still have a chance in 2020? Like epiphanies, the fork-in-the-road theory of history is a convenient lie. The truth is we face a fork-in-the-road every day of our lives.

•••

Suppose we had seized the 2008 moment to stage a peaceful hi-tech revolution that led to a postcapitalist economic democracy. What would it be like? To be desirable, it would feature markets for goods and services since the alternative – a Soviet-type rationing system that vests arbitrary power in the ugliest of bureaucrats – is too dreary for words. But to be crisis-proof, there is one market that market socialism cannot afford to feature: the labour market. Why? Because, once labour time has a rental price, the market mechanism inexorably pushes it down while commodifying every aspect of work (and, in the age of Facebook, our leisure too).

Can an advanced economy function without labour markets? Of course it can. Consider the principle of one-employee-one-share-one-vote underpinning a system that, in Another Now, I call corpo-syndicalism. Amending corporate law so as to turn every employee into an equal (though not equally remunerated) partner is as unimaginably radical today as universal suffrage was in the 19th century.

In my blueprint, central banks provide every adult with a free bank account into which a fixed stipend (called universal basic dividend) is credited monthly. As everyone uses their central bank account to make domestic payments, most of the money minted by the central bank is transferred within its ledger. Additionally, the central bank grants all newborns a trust fund, to be used when they grow up.

People receive two types of income: the dividends credited into their central bank account and earnings from working in a corpo-syndicalist company. Neither are taxed, as there are no income or sales taxes. Instead, two types of taxes fund the government: a 5% tax on the raw revenues of the corpo-syndicalist firms; and proceeds from leasing land (which belongs in its entirety to the community) for private, time-limited, use.

When it comes to international trade and payments, Another Now features an innovative global financial system that continually transfers wealth to the global south, while also preventing imbalances from causing strife and crises. All trade and all money movements between different monetary jurisdictions (eg the UK and the eurozone or the US) are denominated in a new digital accounting unit, called the Kosmos. If the Kosmos value of a country’s imports exceeds its exports, it is charged a levy in proportion to the trade deficit. But, equally, if a country’s exports exceed its imports, it is also charged the levy. Another levy is charged to a country’s Kosmos account whenever too much money moves too quickly out of, or into, the country – a surge levy of sorts that taxes the speculative money movements that do such damage to developing countries. All these levies end up as direct green investments in the global south.

But it is the granting of a single non-tradeable share to each employee-partner that holds the key to this economy. By granting employee-partners the right to vote in the corporation’s general assemblies, an idea proposed by the early anarcho-syndicalists, the distinction between wages and profits is terminated and democracy, at last, enters the workplace.

From a firm’s senior engineers and key strategic thinkers to its secretaries and janitors, everyone receives a basic wage plus a bonus that is decided collectively. Since the one-employee-one-vote rule favours smaller decision-making units, corpo-syndicalism causes conglomerates voluntarily to break up into smaller companies, thus reviving market competition. Even more strikingly, share markets vanish completely since shares, like IDs and library cards, are now non-tradeable. Once share markets have disappeared, the need for gargantuan debt to fund mergers and acquisitions evaporates – along with commercial finance. And given that the Central Bank provides everyone with a free bank account, private banking shrinks into utter insignificance.

Some of the thornier issues I had to address in writing Another Now, to ensure its consistency with a fully democratised society, included: the fear that powerful people will manipulate elections even under market socialism; the stubborn refusal of patriarchy to die; gender and sexual politics; the funding of the green transition; borders and migration; a bill of digital rights and so on.

Writing this as a manual would have been unbearable. It would have forced me to pretend that I have taken sides in arguments that remain unresolved in my head – often in my heart. I, therefore, owe an immense debt of gratitude to my spirited characters Iris, Eva and Costa. Above all else, they allowed me seriously to ponder the hardest of questions: once we have conceived of a feasible socialism that blasts Thatcher’s Tina out of the water, what must we do, and how far are we willing to go, to bring it about?

• Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis is published by Bodley Head. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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https://www.covid19snews.com/2020/11/02/another-now-by-yanis-varoufakis/

[chikkachu]

Supergirl AU - NaLu ficlet

A/N: Your requested prompt is finished @s-a-r-a-r-a , I hope you like it. It’s angst with a dash of fluff - my favourite combo. Sorry for any mistakes, I’ll check it thoroughly later. Superhero AU. To clarify it’s based on the TV show. 

“Natsu, I said stop!”

Grabbing onto his wrist and jerking her body weight backwards to stop his movement, the argument between them wasn’t going to be solved by running away.

“Why are you so mad?” Natsu swivelled his body, the hand gripping onto on his wrist causing her stumble. Standing close enough their noses were touching, Lucy noticed the deep shades of green that made his eyes.

“You lied to me,” she said. Palms sweating and her unoccupied hand clenching into a fist. She hated confrontation, especially with the man in front of her.

“I don’t lie.”  Cheek twitching and crossing his arms, her hand dislodged from his person.

Refusing to allow him to retreat, as he so often did when they discussed important matters, she placed her hand on his forearm. Lucy noticed him peeking at her from the corner of his eye.

“Omission is the same thing.” She said, her tone gentle to coax him from his sour mood.

“No, it’s my business.” Ouch. Like a cornered animal, lashing out with on point barbs, he knew would hurt was a defence mechanism she anticipated. It didn't lessen the sting.

“Not when it puts the public in danger!” Lucy could see him clearly in her mind’s eye, beautiful sunset red scales, and a spectacular wingspan double the length of his body. In her surprise, she found herself wondering how he managed to hold them up, then remembering the muscle she likened to woven steel. From her spot, Lucy could see his skin ripple, propelling himself upwards in a vertical take-off.

Wind blowing Sakura locks, he arched his back, wings snapping out to enable a smooth glide as he breathed molten fire towards the enemy. Thankfully the streets had been evacuated, the heat liquidising metals and turning stone to magma. In front, car roofs bubbled before collapsing inward, traffic lights crashing to the ground as the brackets succumbed to the sea of red scorching the air.

“Oh?” He said, stepping into her space, “Am I ruffian now Lucy? Am I a beast to you?”

Green eyes stared to the side of her face, refusing to look her in the eye. Dimples formed in his cheek, jaw clamping down in response to his thoughts. Race had always a touchy subject for Natsu, a Draco. A race known to be fierce warriors, their society was brutal, winner takes all and the weak serve as slaves to the strong. Or at least that’s what she had been taught by her tutors on Celestia. It provided a rocky foundation for the start of their relationship.

“No.” Lucy rasped, blood pounding in her ears, chewing her lip.

“You don’t even believe that.” He said, voice tight and clipped. Lucy knew he was retreating into a safe-space. The people around Natsu assumed he was loud and obnoxious all the time, quick to make his feelings known. Lucy knew this to be a truth, she also knew when a matter bothered him on a deeper level. He was quiet. Natsu avoided “talking feelings” with a skill she wished he’d use in diplomatic situations, instead of pouring fuel on the fire.

“I do,” Cupping his jaw, she pulled his eyes to meet hers. He wasn’t hiding anymore. “That’s not why I’m upset.”

“I’m finding that hard to believe after our first meeting.” Natsu shifting his weight mumbled into his scarf. She took that on the chin, it certainly wasn’t a Mills and Boon eyes meeting across the room moment. Old prejudices surfacing as two people from feuding races eyed each other up. Hostile intentions clear, Makarov wisely paired them together. Natsu served as her guide and partner, with the threat of punishment if he didn’t treat their recruit with due professionalism.

“That was then, this is now.”  Her upbringing was that an upper-class girl, her head pumped full of the prejudices writhe within the aristocracy.

“I thought you were different.” Bitter words hung in the heavy silence between them. Close to tears, her hands slipped from his face to hit his chest.

“I’m supposed to know you better than anyone else!” A warm grip on her wrists halting her movement. Giving in, her fist clenched onto his shirt, tearing the tight nylon material. Lucy forced herself closer to the heat of his body. Even amidst an argument, she found his energy comforting.

“What?”

“I told you everything about me, you know me better than I know myself.” Warts and all. She didn’t hold back when it came to Natsu. He didn’t break her walls, he burned them to cinders. All her secrets, her weaknesses, laid bare at his feet.  

“Then I find out that you are royalty, through necessity rather than trust.” Lucy knew enough about Draconia to know the red scales adorning his body signified the heir of the fire king, Igneel.

“It hurts Natsu. You mean the world to me and I trust you with my life, but you don’t trust me with yours.” He had saved her once again, knew that her elemental transformations had a time limit. Slipping through solid structures the enemy proved elusive, taking her to limit of her earthen queen form, Virgo. Power fading, serrated claws dove for her throat before flames engulfed him.  

“You said,” He began, glaring past her head.  

“I know what I said Natsu!” Frustration tugged at her heart, hands weaving into his hair she dragged him down. Seeing green eyes clouded by his boneheaded stubborn behaviour, it sparked her own anger, “that was before us…”  

Silky stands bunching between her fingers, Lucy pushed her lips to his. Feeling his body tense, she kissed along his top lip, feeling the cracked texture. He was never one to keep up with skin care like her. It wasn’t a deterrent. The pad of his thumb caressed her chin, pressing down encouraging a deeper kiss. Tongues meeting before their lips moulded together, Lucy shivered as they rolled. Fingers stroking her cheek coaxed her mind into a hazy state, thoughts of his musky forest scent and low grunts making her crave touch.

“Lucy…” Natsu rumbled into her mouth, his body weight pressing into her torso. His mouth quirked upwards as he pulled away, his lips brushing her cheek.

“Why are you holding my ears?” He chuckled, bumping their noses. Jumping back, rose blossoming across her porcelain skin as she realised her hold on him. She hadn’t been paying attention to what her hands had been doing during their kiss.

“Because you’re a butthead who runs away!” Lucy shot back, pink eyebrows shot up at the outburst.

“Butthead?” She had been spending way too much time around Natsu and Gray, childish insults now flowing off her tongue without thought. Natsu looking incredulous at her choice of language left his mouth hanging open.

“Yes, I think it’s an apt description.” Considering his words earlier, Lucy dared him to challenge her.

“Yeah, you’re right.” To her surprise Natsu didn’t put up a fight, choosing instead to cradle the back of her head, tucking her face into his sternum. As hugs go it was awkward, she didn’t mind. Her choice involved tracing her hand down his arm, hairs tickling her fingertips on her way down.  

“This is our problem, we don’t communicate the important things” There was a time and a place for fun, serious conversations were a necessity. Prodding the warm flesh of his palm, a smile playing on her lips as he straightened his hand out, tangling their fingers in the process.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

[bharatiyamedia-blog]

Chilling in Churu - Firstpost

http://tinyurl.com/yyetj7zh “The AC will not be working,” I say, transferring my fingers, gently first after which with a touch of panic throughout the vents. “Sure it’s,” says my driver Suneel Kumar, as he takes a proper on nationwide freeway 52. There’s a five-second staredown earlier than a truce is struck. It’s agreed – the AC is working, however would possibly as properly not be. A couple of minutes later, our automobile trundles over a railway crossing with its two boundaries standing sentinel-like over the south-eastern entrance to Churu, Rajasthan. We’ve arrived on the hottest place in India. Temperature: 48 levels. Appears like: Dante’s inspiration. Most outlets are closed for the afternoon as we wind our manner via the streets of town’s outdated quarters seeking the century-old haveli the place we’ll be staying. The homeowners of the few which might be open are stretched out on the ground of their shops. Much less siesta, extra a nap for survival it appears. An auto-repair storage is bucking the pattern – its younger assistant splashing the sandy entrance with water. Some drops splatter on the bare metallic exhaust of a motorcycle parked close by and stand up as tiny wisps of hissing steam. Or possibly the warmth is making me think about issues. Individuals in Churu have been braving this warmth since 1541 when it grew to become a everlasting settlement, in keeping with Shyam Sundar Sharma, resident anorak and director of Nagar Shree – the tiny native museum which additionally capabilities as a analysis centre and efficiency house. Practically half a millennia of residing in excessive climate situations – Churu sees a few of the harshest winters within the nation as properly with temperatures typically falling under freezing – has made the city’s folks exceptionally resilient. “In all my 73 years, I’ve by no means heard of anybody dying from heatstroke simply because they stepped out for some time in the course of the day,” he says. “The human physique adapts to its setting. That’s a legislation of nature,” he explains. Empirically, he’s largely proper. Whereas its by-lanes are abandoned and people doing heavy labour below the MNREGA scheme have their working hours modified to 6pm-1pm, in keeping with extra district Justice of the Peace (ADM) Ramakant Saunkariya, most of Churu’s rhythms appear unchanged. NH 52, which runs proper via the guts of city, is abuzz with exercise. Tea and cigarette sellers, grocers and different assorted distributors ubiquitous throughout small-town India are all in attendance. Individuals on bikes, Churu’s favorite mode of transportation, whizz previous – a material tied over their face to maintain out the Thar sand blowing in from the southwest the only real concession to the weather. A number of put on turbans. In the meantime, I’ve industrial-strength sunblock blended with sweat pouring down my face, sneakers worn over the thickest socks I may discover, two scarfs borrowed from my spouse wrapped round my neck and a cap which has “New Zealand” (No, I haven’t been there) emblazoned throughout the entrance. I attain behind to discreetly push the umbrella deeper into my backpack. It’s a three-minute stroll from Churu Junction (additionally on NH52), the place I’d wandered in to get the day’s newspaper, to Om Prakash Sharma’s bookshop the place one truly will get the day’s newspaper – together with worn copies of Nicholas Sparks novels, NEET preparatory materials and college textbooks. It’s the summer time holidays and enterprise is sluggish, so Sharma is pleased to speak. And chastise. “All this fuss about excessive warmth is humbug. Pointless exaggeration by the media,” he says, swaying backward and forward. Possibly a number of chilled beers have been had or possibly he wants the toilet. Most likely each. “Churu,” he slurs barely, seated in entrance of a creaky cooler doing its finest to fight the total would possibly of the desert, “Is the most effective metropolis on the earth. I’ve travelled to many locations, together with Mount Abu – Churu is the most effective. So what if it’s scorching? And what’s the distinction between 45 levels in Delhi and 50 right here anyway? There are not any communal riots right here, no disturbances, no theft. It’s a protected, well-run metropolis and individuals are content material.” Sharma’s sole concern is the one which plagues middle-aged males throughout India – the dearth of respect from at the moment’s youth in direction of their elders. “They suppose they know all the pieces, however all they’re targeted on is on getting forward professionally. They don’t learn for private improvement and thus fail to understand the significance of elders. Our era was not like that.” In the meantime, detached to his complaints, a few of the offending era is cooling itself a kilometre away at Kuku Enjoyable Zone (open for households from 10am – 11am; single males allowed from 11am – 10pm), a “mini water park” located off NH 69 that results in Hanumangarh within the northwest. It advertises “a really giant swimming pool”. The declare is troublesome to determine as a result of a lot of the supposedly very giant pool is occupied by younger males screaming over the Rajasthani music blaring on the loudspeaker. Three slides deposit half-naked our bodies into the water each few seconds and mates line up precariously on the edge for selfies, oblivious to the ball of fireside unleashing fury from up above. Enjoyable Zone resides as much as its title. Nevertheless, its standing as Churu’s final get together place, at the very least for a sure demographic, is being challenged by a rising upstart. Fortunate Swimming Pool has just lately arrange operations subsequent door and is already attracting a sizeable clientele regardless of having solely two slides. A 3rd, greater one, is because of be put in shortly. Pay Rs 80 and also you’re good to go for 2 hours. “Ours is larger than Kuku’s,” says Mahesh who’s arrange the pool along with his brother to complement their farming earnings. From 200 toes into the guts of the Thar, a borewell attracts water which is then used for 3-Four days within the pool earlier than being let loose to irrigate the adjoining area, which the brothers personal. It’s been a very good day for them – scorching temperatures together with a public vacation for Eid means essentially the most of Churu’s male youth is both at Kuku’s or Fortunate’s. Those who’re not are on the Churu Truthful throughout city on Purani Sadak – both alone or with their paramours, desirous to get misplaced within the crowd. That is the place it’s most blatant that not solely do Churu people go about their enterprise no matter the climate, in addition they overtly insurgent in opposition to it, nearly to the purpose of mockery. “Is that every one you bought?” they appear to say, consuming their ice lotions and relishing each the rides the honest has to supply as the recent breeze and mud swirls round them. And the warmth. For the outsider, the warmth is nearly existential – it actually made me query all my life selections that led to this time limit. The locals merely thumb their noses at it. I’m starting to suspect they really prefer it. “We nearly really feel unhappy after we hear that one other place in India is hotter or colder than Churu,” laughs ADM Saunkariya in between sips of Saras, bottled rose milk which is the discerning Churu native’s summer time drink of alternative. We’re discussing Churu’s issues in his spacious workplace on the primary ground of the district collectorate constructing. Dealing with the warmth will not be considered one of them. “There are solely three primary sources of earnings right here,” he explains. “The military, remittances from those that’ve migrated to the Gulf and labourers – salaried and every day wage. There’s just one crop-growing season and that’s depending on the notoriously unreliable rain.” The will, bordering on desperation, to hitch the armed forces permeates town. Just like the havelis of yore, “defence academies” now dot the panorama, every promising their candidates the celebrities – which on this case is admission into the navy. The most important advert on the entrance web page of town complement Churu Patrika (printed as a part of the Rajasthan Patrika newspaper) is “Mayur Defence Academy” exhorting children to enrol and pursue their goals. Pictures of those that’ve cleared the armed forces exams, together with the title of the corresponding academy are plastered on the few giant billboards that loom over the roads. An outdated banner commemorating those that misplaced their lives whereas serving flutters subsequent to at least one such billboard as hopeful candidates from the Sports activities Defence Academy jog previous it in shorts and skinny t-shirts. It’s 6pm and the temperature is a light 44 levels now. “There isn’t a trade right here,” laments Shyam Sundar Sharma of Nagar Sheel. “That’s why there is no such thing as a improvement and little employment. When there are not any alternatives, clearly the youth can be drawn in direction of illicit actions – to occupy their time and earn some cash.” A senior civic official advised me on situation of anonymity that liquor smuggling is rampant in Churu. The shortage of improvement and employment is ironic as a result of this tiny outpost of a city on the fringe of the desert has given India a few of its most well-known businessmen. The Birla brothers, Jugal Kishore and Ghanshyam Das – whose mom hailed from Churu – constructed the city’s two most well-known landmarks, the Dharm Stupa and the Safed Ghantaghar (White Bell Tower). Jayadayal Goyandka, founding father of Gorakhpur’s Gita Press, grew up in a home a number of paces from Nagar Shree. “All of the infrastructure you see – hospitals, colleges, dharamshalas, wells – was constructed by Churu natives who made it large elsewhere however continued to really feel related to the city,” Shyam Sundar informs me. These trendy facilities jostle for house with 100 outdated havelis, additionally constructed by businessmen who struck out for greener pastures centuries in the past, leaving their households behind. Subsequent generations progressively moved out to the cities en masse with solitary caretakers to take care of the grand havelis which, shorn of inhabitants, misplaced their grandeur and finally fell into disrepair. Greater than 50 have been bought to builders who’ve razed them to the bottom and erected trendy buildings or parcelled the land into smaller plots and bought them. The 50-odd that stay, untended and unloved, function crumbling reminders of a extra superb previous. “A lot heritage, a lot tradition – all misplaced.” Shyam Sundar shakes his head. Indian historical past buffs can be accustomed to this– nearly each city within the nation has an analogous story to inform. Malji Ka Kamra, a haveli constructed as a “hangout” (he most likely wouldn’t describe it thus) by a distinguished seth within the space is likely one of the few properly conserved heritage properties in Churu. It has been transformed right into a resort, which is the place I’ve been staying these previous two days. As its sole visitor. Smart folks keep away from Churu in June. Over dinner within the cavernous corridor which is presently doubling up as a sauna – Rakesh, the supervisor, is perplexed. I’ve simply requested him what folks right here do to beat the warmth and preserve themselves entertained. “No matter they do in different cities – keep indoors in the course of the day, drink loads of water, head to the cinema. Kuku Enjoyable Zone,” he says after a pause. “It’s just a little hotter than normal right here, sure. However Churu is a traditional place, actually.” Music from a wedding procession wafts over the outdated partitions. Life in India’s hottest place goes on, displaying a center finger to the weather. And to spoilt city dwellers who can’t take a bit of warmth. Your information to the most recent cricket World Cup tales, evaluation, studies, opinions, dwell updates and scores on https://www.firstpost.com/firstcricket/series/icc-cricket-world-cup-2019.html. Comply with us on Twitter and Instagram or like our Facebook web page for updates all through the continuing occasion in England and Wales. !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function() {n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)} ; if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '259288058299626'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); window.fbAsyncInit = function () { FB.init({appId: '1117108234997285', version: 2.4, xfbml: true}); // *** here is my code *** if (typeof facebookInit == 'function') { facebookInit(); } }; (function () { var e = document.createElement('script'); e.src = document.location.protocol + '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js'; e.async = true; document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e); }()); function facebookInit() { console.log('Found FB: Loading comments.'); FB.XFBML.parse(); } Source link

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Solskjaer facing huge Man United task with multiple problems staring him in the face - opinion

Now that the joyride is over for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer he finds himself at the wheel of a very expensive sports car acknowledging just how must work is required to get it road-worthy once again.

The upkeep alone is enough to prompt feverish nightmares with Alexis Sanchez’s staggering wages being used as a bargaining tool for other stars to adjust their demands accordingly. Under the bonnet a crankshaft consisting of Matic and Herrera has seen better days and is due to be changed this summer at an extortionate cost while the Pogba piston works only sporadically. The brakes meanwhile are shot and bluntly the Norwegian will not want to be hurtling into the first turn of next season’s title race relying on Smalling, Shaw, Young and Jones to prevent an accident.

That’s enough with the analogies though. For a while they serve a purpose then become counter-productive and in a similar vein the same could be said of Solskjaer’s evocation of the ‘Spirit of ‘99’.

Regularly invoking Manchester United’s recent glory days – while reminding one and all that this is far from an ordinary club with ordinary criteria – was clearly a purposeful strategy employed by the nascent boss and clearly one too that worked a charm. Jose Mourinho’s sour end of days had sucked the life-force from an institution that thrives on vim and cocksurety and then in came a hero from an era when United didn’t just dominate English football but did so with a swagger and endless adventurous vitality. So to triumph the ‘Manchester United way’ made sense initially. It inflated chests. It instilled belief. It returned some enthusiasm and arrogance to Old Trafford.

And these qualities emphatically produced immediate results. Martial was reborn, Rashford was reinvigorated and Pogba was reanimated and on this surge of positivity the wins continued; 14 from the former super-sub’s first 17 in the technical area.

Yet from quite early on there was a notable change in approach, as Solskjaer recognised the limitations of his stock and amended to type. Their shape became more compact and long balls to Lukaku and Rashford into the channels became commonplace. The razzmatazz reverted to functionality.

This is what an evidently put-out Louis van Gaal was referring to recently when he said: “The way Manchester United are playing now is not the way Ferguson played. It is defensive, counterattacking football. The coach after me [Mourinho] changed to ‘park the bus’ tactics and played on the counter. Now there is another coach who parks the bus and plays on the counter”.

To be clear there is absolutely nothing wrong with playing pragmatically and nor is this intended as criticism of Solskjaer. Whatever gets you through the night. Whatever gets you the points. There is no right way when a top four spot is up for grabs. But this present incarnation of United does not have a direct lineage to Cantona and co and nor does illustrious DNA seep into the skin merely from putting on a red shirt. To suggest otherwise is no longer counter-ballast to the equally erroneous version of United that Mourinho espoused. To suggest otherwise, now that the honeymoon period is over, inverts to lying to yourself.

So Solskjaer’s first order of business as the defeats begin to mount up – four in his last five games – and the appointment of his dreams becomes grim actuality is to cut out the poetry and if that seems like an awfully petty point it is actually indicative of a much broader issue. For now is the time – as the initial optimism deflates and the Wolves start circling – to face a reality check: to take stock and assess who you are and where you and to determine where you might realistically be a year from now. To do otherwise is to run the risk of becoming Liverpool in the nineties. To believe you’re one thing but be quite another. Nobody wants to be Liverpool in the nineties.

That reality check is harsh on first sight and only gets harsher on further analysis. In defence former captain Antonio Valencia is leaving while Rojo and Darmian are dead-wood. An aging Ashley Young meanwhile is stuck in a depreciating spiral while Smalling and Jones are fine against the Bournemouths of this world but does any Red ever feel comfortable with the pair pitting their wits with the elite?

Typically United bring in no more than three players per summer transfer window but at the back alone they desperately need several new faces should they wish to compete seriously for silverware next term. Then there are the sums involved. Napoli’s Kalidou Koulibaly has been widely linked to the club and would be a significant upgrade, but he is only one man, one player. And at a perspective cost of £90m plus he will also eat into much of United’s entire budget.

If everything else was hunky-dory the defence on its own would present a huge problem in both scale and cost.

Stepping into midfield we find the statuesque Nemanja Matic, this being a rare instance of ‘statuesque’ not being used in a complimentary way while alongside and ahead of him Anders Herrera and Juan Mata are free to depart this summer and look very likely to. One star not expected to leave however is Paul Pogba so it exasperates that he has chosen once again to air his discontent through leaks to the French press. His relationship with Solskjaer has become strained apparently. How thoroughly and pathetically predictable.

Further forward the United boss has made no secret of his desire for a striker and winger in the forthcoming window and lord knows how much they’re going to cost but the financial demands are not only reserved for incoming talent. Both David De Gea and Anthony Martial have a year remaining on their existing contracts and each are said to be using Sanchez’s £350k per week as a yardstick for what they want to put pen to paper.

All told that is quite enough for any one person to be getting on with right now except that only tells part of the tale of course. United’s structure remains horribly askew and rooted in the dark ages with a Director of Football pertinently needed while on the pitch their quest to finish in the top four ramps up the pressure daily, essential as it is.

Securing the Manchester United manager’s job was Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s dream. Now the hard works starts to make it a reality. It would take a warped mind to envy him.

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Zadie Smith: dance lessons for writers

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Zadie Smith: dance lessons for writers

From Fred Astaires elegance to Beyoncs power, Zadie Smith is inspired by dancers as much she is by other writers

The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: its a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do.

One of the most solid pieces of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers you can find it in the choreographer Martha Grahams biography. But it relaxes me in front of my laptop the same way I imagine it might induce a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their fingers and toes. Graham writes: There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

What can an art of words take from the art that needs none? Yet I often think Ive learned as much from watching dancers as I have from reading. Dance lessons for writers: lessons of position, attitude, rhythm and style, some of them obvious, some indirect. What follows are a few notes towards that idea.

Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire

Alamy; The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images. Top: Getty Images

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly

Fred Astaire represents the aristocracy when he dances, claimed Gene Kelly, in old age, and I represent the proletariat. The distinction is immediately satisfying, though its a little harder to say why. Tall, thin and elegant, versus muscular and athletic is that it? Theres the obvious matter of top hat and tails versus T-shirt and slacks. But Fred sometimes wore T-shirts and slacks, and was not actually that tall, he only stood as if he were, and when moving always appeared elevated, to be skimming across whichever surface: the floor, the ceiling, an ice rink, a bandstand. Genes centre of gravity was far lower: he bends his knees, he hunkers down. Kelly is grounded, firmly planted, where Astaire is untethered, free-floating.

Likewise, the aristocrat and the proletariat have different relations to the ground beneath their feet, the first moving fluidly across the surface of the world, the second specifically tethered to a certain spot: a city block, a village, a factory, a stretch of fields. Cyd Charisse claimed her husband always knew which of these dancers shed been working with by looking at her body at the end of the day: bruised everywhere if it was Kelly, not a blemish if it was Astaire. Not only aloof when it came to the ground, Astaire was aloof around other peoples bodies. Through 15 years and 10 movies, its hard to detect one moment of real sexual tension between Fred and his Ginger. They have great harmony but little heat. Now think of Kelly with Cyd Charisse in the fantasy sequence of Singin in the Rain! And maybe this is one of the advantages of earthiness: sex.

When I write I feel theres usually a choice to be made between the grounded and the floating. The ground I am thinking of in this case is language as we meet it in its commonsense mode. The language of the television, of the supermarket, of the advert, the newspaper, the government, the daily public conversation. Some writers like to walk this ground, recreate it, break bits of it off and use it to their advantage, where others barely recognise its existence. Nabokov a literal aristocrat as well as an aesthetic one barely ever put a toe upon it. His language is literary, far from what we think of as our shared linguistic home.

One argument in defence of such literary language might be the way it admits its own artificiality. Commonsense language meanwhile claims to be plain and natural, conversational, but is often as constructed as asphalt, dreamed up in ad agencies or in the heart of government sometimes both at the same time. Simultaneously sentimental and coercive. (The Peoples Princess. The Big Society. Make America Great Again.) Commonsense language claims to take its lead from the way people naturally speak, but any writer who truly attends to the way people speak will soon find himself categorised as a distinctive stylist or satirist or experimentalist. Beckett was like this, and the American writer George Saunders is a good contemporary example. (In dance, the example that comes to my mind is Bill Bojangles Robinson, whose thing was tapping up and down the stairs. What could be more normal, more folksy, more grounded and everyday than tapping up and down some stairs? But his signature stage routine involved a staircase pressed right up against another staircase a stairway to itself and so up and down he would tap, up and down, down and up, entirely surreal, like an Escher print come to life.)

Astaire is clearly not an experimental dancer like Twyla Tharp or Pina Bausch, but he is surreal in the sense of surpassing the real. He is transcendent. When he dances a question proposes itself: what if a body moved like this through the world? But it is only a rhetorical, fantastical question, for no bodies move like Astaire, no, we only move like him in our dreams.

By contrast, I have seen French boys run up the steps of the High Line in New York to take a photo of the view, their backsides working just like Gene Kellys in On The Town, and I have seen black kids on the A train swing round the pole on their way out of the sliding doors Kelly again, hanging from that eternal lamppost. Kelly quoted the commonplace when he danced, and he reminds us in turn of the grace we do sometimes possess ourselves. He is the incarnation of our bodies in their youth, at their most fluid and powerful, or whenever our natural talents combine ideally with our hard-earned skills. He is a demonstration of how the prosaic can turn poetic, if we work hard enough. But Astaire, when he dances, has nothing to do with hard work (although we know, from biographies, that he worked very hard, behind the scenes). He is poetry in motion. His movements are so removed from ours that he sets a limit on our own ambitions. Nobody hopes or expects to dance like Astaire, just as nobody really expects to write like Nabokov.

Harold and Fayard Nichols

Getty

Harold and Fayard Nicholas

Writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing. For 10 and sixpence, advises Virginia Woolf, one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare. The only absolutely necessary equipment in dance is your own body. Some of the greatest dancers have come from the lowliest backgrounds. With many black dancers this has come with the complication of representing your race. You are on a stage, in front of your people and other people. What face will you show them? Will you be your self? Your best self? A representation? A symbol?

The Nicholas brothers were not street kids they were the children of college-educated musicians but they were never formally trained in dance. They learned watching their parents and their parents colleagues performing on the chitlin circuit, as black vaudeville was then called. Later, when they entered the movies, their performances were usually filmed in such a way as to be non-essential to the story, so that when these films played in the south their spectacular sequences could be snipped out without doing any harm to the integrity of the plot. Genius contained, genius ring-fenced. But also genius undeniable.

My talent was the weapon, argued Sammy Davis Jr, the power, the way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a mans thinking. Davis was another chitlin hoofer, originally, and from straitened circumstances. His logic here is very familiar: it is something of an article of faith within the kinds of families who have few other assets. A mother tells her children to be twice as good, she tells them to be undeniable. My mother used to say something like it to me. And when I watch the Nicholas brothers I think of that stressful instruction: be twice as good.

The Nicholas brothers were many, many magnitudes better than anybody else. They were better than anyone has a right or need to be. Fred Astaire called their routine in Stormy Weather the greatest example of cinematic dance he ever saw. They are progressing down a giant staircase doing the splits as if the splits is the commonsense way to get somewhere. They are impeccably dressed. They are more than representing they are excelling.

But I always think I spot a little difference between Harold and Fayard, and it interests me; I take it as a kind of lesson. Fayard seems to me more concerned with this responsibility of representation when he dances: he looks the part, he is the part, his propriety unassailable. He is formal, contained, technically undeniable: a credit to the race. But Harold gives himself over to joy. His hair is his tell: as he dances it loosens itself from the slather of Brylcreem he always put on it, the irrepressible afro curl springs out, he doesnt even try to brush it back. Between propriety and joy, choose joy.

Prince & Micheal Jackson

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Michael Jackson and Prince

On YouTube you will find them, locked in many dance-offs, and so you are presented with a stark choice. But its not a question of degrees of ability, of who was the greater dancer. The choice is between two completely opposite values: legibility on the one hand, temporality on the other. Between a monument (Jackson) and a kind of mirage (Prince).

But both men were excellent dancers. Putting aside the difference in height, physically they had many similarities. Terribly slight, long necked, thin-legged, powered from the torso rather than the backside, which in both cases was improbably small. And in terms of influence they were of course equally indebted to James Brown. The splits, the rise from the splits, the spin, the glide, the knee bend, the jerk of the head all stolen from the same source.

Yet Prince and Jackson are nothing alike when they dance, and its very hard to bring to mind Prince dancing, whereas it is practically impossible to forget Jackson. It sounds irrational, but try it for yourself. Princes moves, no matter how many times you may have observed them, have no firm inscription in memory; they never seem quite fixed or preserved. If someone asks you to dance like Prince, what will you do? Spin, possibly, and do the splits, if youre able. But there wont appear to be anything especially Prince-like about that. Its mysterious. How can you dance and dance, in front of millions of people, for years, and still seem like a secret only I know? (And isnt it the case that to be a Prince fan is to feel that Prince was your secret alone?)

I never went to see Michael Jackson, but I saw Prince half a dozen times. I saw him in stadiums with thousands of people, so have a rational understanding that he was in no sense my secret, that he was in fact a superstar. But I still say his shows were illegible, private, like the performance of a man in the middle of a room at a house party. It was the greatest thing you ever saw and yet its greatness was confined to the moment in which it was happening.

Jackson was exactly the opposite. Every move he made was absolutely legible, public, endlessly copied and copyable, like a meme before the word existed. He thought in images, and across time. He deliberately outlined and then marked once more the edges around each move, like a cop drawing a chalk line round a body. Stuck his neck forward if he was moving backwards. Cut his trousers short so you could read his ankles. Grabbed his groin so you could better understand its gyrations. Gloved one hand so you might attend to its rhythmic genius, the way it punctuated everything, like an exclamation mark.

Towards the end, his curious stagewear became increasingly tasked with this job of outline and distinction. It looked like a form of armour, the purpose of which was to define each element of his body so no movement of it would pass unnoted. His arms and legs multiply strapped a literal visualisation of his flexible joints and a metallic sash running left to right across his breastplate, accentuating the shift of his shoulders along this diagonal. A heavyweights belt accentuated slender hips and divided the torso from the legs, so you noticed when the top and bottom half of the body pulled in opposite directions. Finally a silver thong, rendering his eloquent groin as clear as if it were in ALL CAPS. It wasnt subtle, there was no subtext, but it was clearly legible. People will be dancing like Michael Jackson until the end of time.

But Prince, precious, elusive Prince, well, there lays one whose name was writ in water. And from Prince a writer might take the lesson that elusiveness can possess a deeper beauty than the legible. In the world of words, we have Keats to remind us of this, and to demonstrate what a long afterlife an elusive artist can have, even when placed beside as clearly drawn a figure as Lord Byron. Prince represents the inspiration of the moment, like an ode composed to capture a passing sensation. And when the mood changes, he changes with it: another good lesson.

Theres no freedom in being a monument. Better to be the guy still jamming in the wee hours of the house party, and though everybody films it on their phones no one proves quite able to capture the essence of it. And now hes gone, having escaped us one more time. I dont claim Princes image wont last as long as Jacksons. I only say that in our minds it will never be as distinct.

Janet Jackson Madonna Beyonce

Michel Linssen/Redferns/Getty; Dave Hogan/Getty; Matt Slocum/AP

Janet Jackson / Madonna / Beyonc

These three dont just invite copies they demand them. They go further than legibility into proscription. They lead armies, and we join them. We are like those uniformed dancers moving in military formation behind them, an anonymous corps whose job it is to copy precisely the gestures of their general.

This was made literal on Beyoncs Formation tour recently, when the general raised her right arm like a shotgun, pulled the trigger with her left and the sound of gunshot rang out. There is nothing intimate about this kind of dancing: like the military, it operates as a form of franchise, whereby a ruling idea America, Beyonc presides over many cells that span the world. Maybe it is for this reason that much of the crowd I saw at Wembley could be found, for long periods, not facing in the direction of the stage at all, instead turning to their friends and partners. They didnt need to watch Beyonc any more than soldiers need to look fixedly at the flag to perform their duties. Our queen was up there somewhere dancing but the idea of her had already been internalised. Friends from the gym stood in circles and pumped their fists, girlfriends from hen nights turned inwards and did Beyonc to each other, and boys from the Beyhive screamed every word into each others faces. They could have done the same at home, but this was a public display of allegiance.

Janet Jackson kicked off this curious phenomenon, Madonna continued it, Beyonc is its apex. Here dancing is intended as a demonstration of the female will, a concrete articulation of its reach and possibilities. The lesson is quite clear. My body obeys me. My dancers obey me. Now you will obey me. And then everybody in the crowd imagines being obeyed like Bey a delightful imagining.

Lady writers who inspire similar devotion (in far smaller audiences): Muriel Spark, Joan Didion, Jane Austen. Such writers offer the same essential qualities (or illusions): total control (over their form) and no freedom (for the reader). Compare and contrast, say, Jean Rhys or Octavia Butler, lady writers much loved but rarely copied. Theres too much freedom in them. Meanwhile every sentence of Didions says: obey me! Who runs the world? Girls!

David Byrne

Rex/Shutterstock

David Byrne and David Bowie

The art of not dancing a vital lesson. Sometimes it is very important to be awkward, inelegant, jerking, to be neither poetic nor prosaic, to be positively bad. To express other possibilities for bodies, alternative values, to stop making sense. Its interesting to me that both these artists did their worst dancing to their blackest cuts. Take me to the river, sings Byrne, in square trousers 20 times too large, looking down at his jerking hips as if they belong to someone else. This music is not mine, his trousers say, and his movements go further: maybe this body isnt mine, either. At the end of this seam of logic lies a liberating thought: maybe nobody truly owns anything.

People can be too precious about their heritage, about their tradition writers especially. Preservation and protection have their place but they shouldnt block either freedom or theft. All possible aesthetic expressions are available to all peoples under the sign of love. Bowie and Byrnes evident love for what was not theirs brings out new angles in familiar sounds. It hadnt occurred to me before seeing these men dance that a person might choose, for example, to meet the curve of a drum beat with anything but the matching curving movement of their body, that is, with harmony and heat. But it turns out you can also resist: throw up a curious angle and suddenly spasm, like Bowie, or wonder if thats truly your own arm, like Byrne.

I think of young Luther Vandross, singing backup a few feet behind Bowie, during Young Americans, watching Bowie flail and thrash. I wonder what his take on all that was. Did he ever think: Now, what in the world is he doing? But a few performances in, it was clear to everybody. Here was something different. Something old, and yet new.

Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov

Sipa Press/Rex/Shutterstock; Getty Images

Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov

When you face an audience, which way will you turn? Inwards or outwards? Or some combination of the two? Nureyev, so fierce and neurotic, so vulnerable, so beautiful like a deer suddenly caught in our headlamps is faced resolutely inwards. You cant take your eyes off him, as people like to say, but at the same time he is almost excruciating to watch. We feel we might break him, that he might crumble or explode. He never does, but still, whenever he leaps you sense the possibility of total disaster, as you do with certain high-strung athletes no matter how many times they run or jump or dive. With Nureyev you are an onlooker, you are a person who has been granted the great honour of being present while Nureyev dances. I dont mean this sarcastically: it is an honour to watch Nureyev, even in these grainy old videos on YouTube. Hes a kind of miracle, and is fully cognisant of this when he dances, and what did you do today to warrant an audience with a miracle? (See also: Dostoevsky.)

With Baryshnikov, I have no fears of disaster. He is an outward-facing artist, he is trying to please me and he succeeds completely. His face dances as much as his arms and legs. (Nureyevs face, meanwhile, is permanently lost in transcendent feeling.) Sometimes Baryshnikov wants to please me so much hell even try tap dancing with Liza Minnelli, risking the scorn of the purists. (I am not a purist. I am delighted!) He is a charmer, an entertainer, he is comic, dramatic, cerebral, a clown whatever you need him to be. Baryshnikov is both loving and loved. He has high and low modes, tough and soft poses, but hes always facing outwards, to us, his audience. (See also: Tolstoy.)

Once I met Baryshnikov over a New York dinner table: I was so star-struck I could hardly speak. Finally I asked him: Did you ever meet Fred Astaire? He smiled. He said: Yes, once, at a dinner. I was very star-struck, I hardly spoke. But I watched his hands all the time, they were like a lesson in themselves so elegant!

Swing Time by Zadie Smith is published on 15 November (Hamish Hamilton, 18.99). To order a copy for 15.57, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

[darkblueboxs]

All the Guys Love a Bruiser

Posting attempt two because tumblr is fucking with me and I can’t fix the read more on the original ask. Not today, Tumblr! Not! Today!

Read here or on AO3 (Check AO3 notes for content warnings)

Original ask

“You like watching me fight.” “It’s more interesting than watching you run.”

Neil learns how to throw a punch. Andrew is more than a little into it.

*

*Edit*:  In the original version of this fic, Nicky faces racist abuse in addition to homophobic abuse, and quotes the offensive language and slurs used against him. After concerns were raised regarding how I handled this abuse (specifically, the language used, the context in which the abuse takes place, and my position as a non-latine) I censored and subsequently removed the relevant dialogue. I sincerely apologise and promise to do better in the future. Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions and concerns regarding this subject.   

[01/06/2020]

*

Neil’s mother taught him how to throw a punch, of course she did. Their lessons took place anywhere spacious enough to swing a fist, in empty parking lots behind greasy gas stations or in dingy motel rooms if she thought the walls were thick enough to cover up the noises they made.

Mary had always been more flight than fight, an instinct she had forced into Neil over years of running. Even she had to admit, however, that sooner or later they would hit a dead end, and while that would spell certain death for both of them, it would be better to go down fighting than it would on their knees.

If their lessons ended with Neil aching black and blue, it was his own fault. He needed to be quicker, smarter, crueller. More like his mother.

Matt’s teaching style is different from Mary’s, as is his fighting style. It bears the hallmarks of professional athleticism, all stances and positioning and strategy. While his mother’s idea of a lesson in self-defence was to hit Neil until he figured out how to dodge her blows or hit back, Matt talks him through how to angle his body, how to make a fist in a way that won’t break his fingers. At the end of their first boxing lesson, the only bruises on Neil’s body are the light purple marks spreading across his knuckles.

That evening, he and Andrew take over the beanbags, TV muted in the background while they dig into ice-cream. The tub is pleasantly cool in Neil’s hands, and he rubs his knuckles against the sides like an improvised icepack. When the residual cold has melted away, Neil flexes his fingers, enjoying the faint tingle dancing across them. These marks are different from those his mother gave him; they weren’t inflicted on him unwillingly but earned with sweat and exertion. When Matt had let go of the punching bag and told him they were done for the day, Neil had been surprised by his own disappointment. He had never been sorry see the end of his mother’s lessons.

Andrew takes his hand suddenly, startling Neil from his thoughts. It’s a purely analytical touch; he turns Neil’s hand over and runs a finger across the blossoming bruises of his knuckles.

Neil bites back the I’m fine, knowing the look it would earn him. Instead, “I had fun. We’re meeting again next week.”

Andrew nods. It’s a few moments more before he relinquishes Neil’s hand, however. The heat of Andrew’s skin mingles with the singing twinge of Neil’s bruises like an after-print.

Next week, Andrew slouches into the gym after Neil. He ignores Matt’s invitation to join them, flopping onto a rowing machine and leaning back against the machinery so he can kick his feet up on the seat rail. They’re lucky that they chose unsociable hours for their workout, or a line of athletes would be forming to glare at him.

Andrew watches them train from across the room with apparent disinterest. He can feign boredom all he likes; Neil knows he wouldn’t have bothered following him to the gym without reason.

Matt, if anything, seems amused by Andrew’s presence. “Dan comes to watch me practice sometimes, too.” He pauses to correct the angles of Neil’s feet before nudging his arms into blocking positions. “She did it even before we started dating. She used to sit on an exercise bike and pretend she was cycling so I wouldn’t know she was there to watch me. It was never very convincing.”

“Why did she want to watch you?” Neil shifts his weight, trying to copy Matt’s position.

Matt’s face crinkles up with laughter. “That’s the most Neil thing you’ve ever said.”

“Everything I say is a Neil thing.”

“She liked it when I took my shirt off. C’mon, man, join the dots.”

“You don’t take your shirt off to box.”

“Yeah,” says Matt. “Don’t tell her that.”

Neil rolls his eyes. “Can I hit you now?”

Matt barks out a laugh, and training resumes.

“Enjoying the show?” Neil asks Andrew an hour later, dropping down on the gym mat next to him. Andrew hands Neil his water bottle with an unimpressed look.

“You’re awful.” Andrew flicks a look over to Matt, who is using their break to chat with the only other gym regular insane enough to be working out at the crack of dawn on a Sunday. “He could knock you on your ass with one right hook.”

“I know I’m awful. That’s what training is for.” Neil pauses to gulp down most of the bottle. A droplet escapes his lips and tracks down his jugular before falling into the dip of his clavicle. Andrew’s eyes track its path. “Matt isn’t going to hurt me. Is that what you’re worried about?”

“I’m not here to babysit you.”

“Huh.” Neil drains the last of the water before shaking the residual droplets over his head. The beads glint in the corners of his vision as they catch in his bangs and fleck his cheeks, mercifully cooling against his skin. Andrew is still watching him intently. His eyes flick to Matt once more, checking that he is still absorbed in his conversation.

“Yes or no?”

“Yes,” Neil replies, and he watches as Andrew takes Neil’s hand in his. The skin is flushed from strike after strike, not yet coloured in bruising patches but soon to be. Neil’s hands feel softer for it, sensitive to Andrew’s touch.

“I know my limits.” Neil isn’t sure why the gym suddenly feels three degrees warmer. “Really, it doesn’t hurt.”

“I know. I trust you.” Andrew sends one more look over Neil’s shoulder like he’s checking the coast is clear before pressing Neil’s knuckles to his lips.

The breath Neil was in the process of catching slips from his grasp entirely. “Oh.”

“Stop looking at me like that.”

“You like watching me fight.”

“It’s more interesting than watching you run.”

Neil leans in until he can see each individual freckle on Andrew’s cheeks. “Interesting?”

Andrew’s cool look is betrayed by the twitch of his jaw. “Something like that.”

If Matt notices Neil’s new vigour when they return to practice, he doesn’t comment on it. When he catches Neil’s eye, however, he grins knowingly. Perhaps Matt’s conversation had not been as absorbing as he made it out to be. Soon, however, the rhythm of the exercise draws Neil’s attention back to the task at hand.

Neil first learned to throw a punch because his mother believed that one day his life could depend on it. That isn’t the reason that he has resumed his training with Matt; it turns out that a good instructor and fewer death threats make the activity far more pleasant than Neil remembers. It may be a useful skill, but he values the challenge more than he does the practicality. The physicality, too – in fact, he likes boxing for the same reasons that he loves Exy. Quick, brutal, thrilling. He finally understands, too, why Andrew likes to spar with Renee whenever his emotions get on top of him. There’s a certain a sense of control that comes from putting his fist through a break-board. Not that he needs the empowerment as much as he once might have – most of Neil’s tormentors were killed long ago, his fears with them. Given his new life of safety and security, it’s likely that he’ll never really need to know how to throw a good punch.

It takes all of one week for Neil to be proven wildly, wildly wrong.

Opposition strikers – with one glaring, now very dead exception – are not typically Neil’s problem. Generally, if they end up playing on the same side of the court as him, something has gone wrong in the team’s strategies.

He can tell even from a distance, however, that one of the Terrapin strikers is causing difficulties. Not in terms of ability – of which Terrapin’s #13 has little – but in attitude. Thirteen is a vocal player, and Neil can hear snatches of his voice echoing across the court. No fists have been swung, which is an impressive feat for the Fox defenders, but perhaps only because the luck of substitutions has put Thirteen against Nicky more than anyone else, and Nicky is more likely to react to insults with mirth than anger.

Shortly before the end of the first half, Nicky is subbed off at the same time as Thirteen. Nicky passes Neil on the way to the court doors, clacking their racquets together with half a smile. “Give them hell, Neil.”

Thirteen passes them at the same moment, slamming Nicky’s shoulder as he passes. Nicky mutters a word under his breath that would have earned him a month of washing-up duty at Abby’s house before heading for the Foxes’ bench. Neil watches him go, eyebrows creasing together. Nicky isn’t easily upset by the cruelty of strangers; it’s the cruelty that comes from within his own family that is most likely to shake him from his good humour. The barbed insults of nameless players on the court, on the other hand, are usually brushed off with a rude gesture and no more.

Swept up in the rush of the match, Neil forgets about Nicky’s discomfort until half-time. The team pours from the court in high spirits; they have a decent lead over the Terrapins which should carry them through the second half when exhaustion starts to kick in. Nicky, despite having blocked more shots on goal than anyone, reacts to the arrival of the rest of the team with only a pallid grin. His grip on his water bottle is tight, and the cheap plastic crackles and caves in his hands.

Nicky is an easy read, and it doesn’t take long for the other Foxes to notice. After he brushes Renee’s concerned enquiry off, however, the team leaves him be.

When Neil returns to the court for the start of the third quarter, he breathes a sigh of relief to see that Thirteen is nowhere near Nicky. He’s standing closer to goal than Neil is happy with, but Andrew is more or less impervious to verbal abuse and Thirteen has yet to show signs of physical violence. As much as he wants to keep a closer eye on the situation, Kevin’s barked commands draw his attention to the match at hand. The best thing Neil can do for the Foxes’ defence is to spend as much time lobbing the ball at the Terrapin’s goal as possible.

Neil and Nicky are substituted at the same time; they collapse onto the bench and drown their exhaustion in Gatorade. Thirteen crushed Nicky against the wall moments before the substitution, and Nicky is uncharacteristically quiet as Abby examines the cut over his eye.

“You’re not whining about cramping your style,” she says as she presses a plaster in place. “Should I be worried?”

“Nah, this is great for my style. All the guys love a bruiser.” Nicky winks despite the blood crusting in his eyelashes. “Neil knows what I’m talking about, don’tcha, Neil?”

Abby makes a noise that isn’t convinced, but doesn’t press the issue. Neil waits until she’s out of earshot before saying casually, “I still have a few contacts in the mafia.”

“Your sense of humour is dire,” says Nicky, but he’s grinning, so Neil counts it as a win. “Don’t worry about it. I think Andrew’s drawing his fire now. Andrew handles that kind of thing a lot better than me.”

“What kind of thing?”

Nicky winced. “Don’t ask.”

“Tell me.”

“Let's just say he isn't exactly lining up to lead a Pride march.” Nicky snorts humorlessly.

The joke doesn’t land, and not because of Neil’s non-existent sense of humour. He may not be as obvious as Nicky in his preferences nor as dark-skinned, but he has still been on the receiving end of enough of that brand of bullshit to know how it scratches at one’s insides.

“I wasn’t joking about those contacts.”

Nicky sighs. “I was worried you would say that.”

Neil’s attention keeps slipping from the game and over to Andrew, who is standing in goal and ignoring the tirade of insults being thrown his way like a statue facing down a breeze. His non-reaction only seems to stoke Thirteen’s fury, spittle catching in the mesh of his helmet as he watches Andrew knock yet another attempt away from the Foxes’ end.

Andrew spares Thirteen no more than a second of blank indifference in the face of his tirade. Then he drops his stance, shoulders setting into a silent challenge that sends a hot bolt of excitement straight Neil’s to gut. Andrew is locking down the goal.

The Terrapins don’t score again for the rest of the match.

Neil is through the doors before the final buzzer has died, charging into the crush of Foxes at centre-court to join in their celebrations. Andrew, as usual, hovers at the edge of the throng, but he accepts the clack of Neil’s racquet against his. A light sheen of sweat dances across Andrew’s forehead and his lips are parted as he regains his breath after the exertion of locking the Terrapins out.

“Did Thirteen give you trouble?”

Andrew snorts derisively despite his breathlessness. “He tried.”

Neil gets to see Thirteen up close during the handshakes. He barely grazes the tips of each Foxes’ fingers as he passes one by one, but he stops when he gets to Neil. “I remember you. You were all over the news, weren’t you? The runaway Wesninski.” His expression speaks to his delight at the revelation. To no-one’s surprise, Thirteen is a sore loser.

Andrew barely moves, just a slight adjustment to his footing so that he presses a little closer into Neil’s shoulder.

Neil smiles. It is the kind of smile he has not had use for in some time. “Looking for an autograph?”

Thirteen snorts. “Bet you think you’re real bad. Bet you think those scars make you look tough. Too bad you’re still a puny little bitch.”

Neil flexes his hand before clenching it into a fist. “I do think I’m real bad, actually. Want to find out why?”

The striker waits for the hit to come. Neil doesn’t give him the satisfaction; the guy is a piece of shit, but he isn’t worth the trouble he’s clearly looking for. Neil drops his hands, meets his gaze, and waits for him to give up on getting his reaction and leave.

Most of the other players are moving off to their own respective sides, and their stand-off is beginning to attract attention. Kevin squints over at them, and at his side, Aaron pulls off his helmet.

“Oh shit. Twins.” Thirteen’s gaze swings from Aaron to Andrew, flashing with sudden recognition. “I remember you too.” His expression turns sharkish. “Now that was a story. So, which one is the murderer, and which is the brother-fucker?”

Andrew barely twitches. Neil’s reaction is less restrained.

It’s almost a play-by-play of decking Riko at the Winter Banquet.  The key difference between that punch and this one is hours of training with a borderline-professional boxer.

Neil squares his stance, draws back his fist, and puts his whole body behind the punch. He’s rewarded with the sickening crack of a nose breaking and a hot spurt of blood splattering his knuckles.

Thirteen staggers back, shock registering for a second before he spits blood at the floor. He’s swaying on his feet, but there’s still fight in his eyes.

Andrew’s hands go to his sheaths, but Neil waves him back. He wipes the hand bloodied by Thirteen’s face across his jaw unthinkingly, feels the wet, red heat clinging to his skin. “Hey. This one’s mine.” The smile he tacks onto the words is toothier than he means it to be. With blood still smeared across his chin, he can only imagine how he looks.

Andrew’s hand judders to a halt at the hems of his armbands. His jaw is clenched tight but roaring over the current of concern is something far darker. It creeps into his eyes, a weight to his gaze normally only visible in the privacy of their bedroom. Andrew’s gaze runs the length of Neil’s body before coming to rest on Neil’s mouth. His bottom lip catches momentarily in his teeth as he nods.

Thirteen’s first swing hits, and a burst of blood dances across Neil’s tongue as his lip is split open. Thirteen’s luck ends there; Neil blocks his second punch with a move Matt taught him the day before. He drives his free hand into Thirteen’s solar plexus, knocking the air from him.

Neil doesn’t get much time to appreciate how the striker falls on his ass as they’re rushed by teammates and officials who break them apart.

Neil stands placidly before Wymack and bears his row with the bare minimum of decorum. The lecture is undercut by Nicky, who’s expression alternates between elation, amusement and mock disapproval from moment to moment. Matt, at least, waits until Wymack is finished before applauding.

“I’ll give you some notes later, but all things considered it was a solid right hook.”

Neil brushes the team’s reactions off as best he can; he certainly didn’t do it for their recognition.

He takes his time showering, watching with a strange, sick pleasure as he rinses the striker’s blood away. It turns pink in the shower basin before swirling at last down the drain. Beneath the blood, Neil’s knuckles have begun to bruise, satisfaction burning them blue.

It’s at these times that Neil worries that he may have inherited too much from his father; the temper, the violence, the bloodlust. Then again, they all served as tools to his survival at one point or another. The key difference between Neil and his father is who they choose to turn their anger on. Neil’s father always set his sights on the underdog. Neil prefers to punch up.

No; if there’s one thing Nathan gave him, it was a distaste for bullies.

There’s a familiar tap at the door to Neil’s stall. The rest of the Foxes cleared out some time ago, still rowdy from the post-match high. Tonight was a home game; most of the team will be halfway back to Fox tower already, thinking only of booze and the weekend stretching ahead of them. There’s only one player who would have any reason to linger.

Andrew steps under the spray, his hair is plastered to his head by the steamy drizzle. He holds his hand out, and Neil offers his without question for Andrew’s inspection.

Andrew’s voice is dispassionate as he inspects the damage. “I don’t need a knight in shining armour. Nor for you to fight my battles for me.”

“The fight was for my own satisfaction. But I’ll stop if you want me to.”

Once again, Andrew presses his lips to Neil’s raw knuckles. The contact stings, sweet and savoury, pleasure and pain. “Would it kill you to make life easy for once?” The words tingle against the tender skin.

“I thought you liked to watch me fight.”

“Just because I find your stupidity entertaining doesn’t mean I encourage it.”

“It’s my stupidity you like, is it?”

“What else do you have?” Andrew’s eyes track the rivulets of water snaking down Neil’s neck.

“I’m sure I can think of a few things.” Neil says. Then, for clarity, “Yes or no?”

“Yes.” Andrew doesn’t let go of Neil’s hand, thumb running across the reddening knuckles once more before leading it to his chest. Neil leaves it resting there, marvelling at the colours bleeding between them under the shower’s onslaught, pink and brown and red and blue. Andrew soon tires of Neil’s staring, and is the first to bridge the gap between them.

Neil once compared Andrew’s kisses to a fight with their lives on the line. Countless kisses later, this fact has not changed in the slightest. Andrew leaves a bruising trail of kisses across Neil’s neck until he can’t remember which marks are from Exy and which are from Andrew. They all sting the same, sweet way.

Each kiss pressed to his mouth carries a metallic tang from Neil’s burst lip. He can tell from the fierce pressure of Andrew’s mouth against his that Andrew can taste it too, is feeding off the adrenaline rush just as Neil is. He catches Neil’s bottom lip between his teeth and with it sucks a groan from deep in Neil’s chest.

Andrew draws back to level him with an unimpressed look. “You’re far too into this.”

“You’re one to talk.” Neil raises his hand to Andrew’s eyeline, wiggling his fingers. Andrew’s eyes catch on the blooming violet patches. “You like this. Admit it.”

Andrew steps forward until his cheek brushes Neil’s fingers. Neil turns his hand automatically, cupping Andrew’s face.

“Yes,” says Andrew. His eyes stay on Neil’s, even as Neil’s hand drops lower.

It’s a small miracle, Neil thinks, that Andrew can trust Neil’s hands on him, after all he knows they are capable of. Maybe that’s part of the appeal, the evidence painted into Neil’s knuckles that Neil’s gentler touches are reserved for Andrew and Andrew alone. It’s strange that Andrew should love Neil’s fighting spirit as much as he does. After all, it was Andrew who taught Neil how to stand and fight in the first place.

It’s a fact that neither will ever let the other forget.

Neil leaves the shower sporting several more bruises than he entered with. Some are from Exy, some are from fighting, and some are from Andrew’s mouth.

He loves them all just the same.

*

Thank you for reading, let me know what you thought! Still open to fic prompts, ideas etc.

[okkrist-blog]

WEDNESDAY BRIEFING: ALABAMA DRAMA DING-DONG

Is it the turning of the Trump tide, or simply a victory for decency? Roy Moore, the tainted Republican candidate thumpingly endorsed

by the president, has lost his run for the Senate in Alabama. Jubilation among Democrats at the victory overnight of their candidate, Doug Jones, has been accompanied by sighs of relief among senior Republicans who feared the spectacle of a man accused of pursuing underaged girls being elected to represent their party in Congress.

Results showed Jones had won the seat with 49.9% of votes against Moore’s 48.4%. In his victory speech, Jones declared the campaign had been about “dignity, respect and the rule of law”.

Moore declined to concede as he appeared before supporters in Montgomery, the state capital. His campaign chairman raised the prospect of a recount. Moore complained he had been “painted in an unfavourable and unfaithful light” during the race. Donald Trump, though, congratulated Jones on a “hard fought victory” in a tweet that was uncharacteristically tame. “The Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time,” said the president. “It never ends!”

Guardian US columnist Richard Wolffe says Moore’s defeat reveals the limitation of Trump-style politics: “No accusation of fake news that can cover the tracks of the disastrous results for the president. This wasn’t a marginal contest in some familiar swing state. We’re talking about Alabama, one of the most Republican states in the union … If Trumpism has any future, any constituency moving forward, it should be thriving here.”

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‘Davis-proofing’ the divorce – EU lawmakers are moving to personally censure David Davis after he talked down last week’s breakthrough agreement as not legally binding. In an unusual move, the European parliament’s main parties have announced an amendment to their Brexit resolution, on which MEPs will vote today, condemning the Brexit secretary personally for damaging trust. Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, has warned that the UK’s divorce deal with the EU depends on the British government sticking to the deal made last week on Ireland, citizens’ rights and the financial settlement – “we will not accept any backtracking”.

Meanwhile, rebel Conservative MPs are backing Dominic Grieve, who will press ahead today with plans to force the government to guarantee MPs a vote on any final Brexit deal. And it is feared that hundreds of thousands of EU citizens could miss out on their right to “settled status” in Britain post-Brexit. The Migration Observatory at Oxford says difficulties in providing a history of living in the UK and meeting other requirements could complicate numerous cases.

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Sexual harassment in Bollywood – Women in India’s film industry have shared their stories of sexual assault and harassment with the Guardian. “The casting couch is one of Indian cinema’s most open secrets,” says Anna MM Vetticad, journalist and author. This year, in Kerala state, a male actor known as Dileep was arrested for allegedly orchestrating the kidnapping and sexual assault of a prominent female actor. The case led to formation of a women’s film collective aimed at quashing mistreatment. “It is an industry where actors have to wear any kind of dress or do intimate scenes,” says the female actor Padmapriya, winner of a National Film award. “And people assume, if you’re up for doing that, then what’s the big deal?”

Night out ends in tragedy – A Norfolk man has been found dead after walking off into a sub-zero night wearing only a T-shirt and jeans. Ian Tang was last seen by friends at 2.30am on Sunday morning leaving the KA club in the town of North Walsham. A motorist later spotted him walking along a road between 5.45am and 6am. Tang’s body was found yesterday, close to the village of Swafield, near North Walsham, after an extensive search. The death is not being treated as suspicious but police say they are trying to piece together the exact circumstances.

More muscles the better – Women mostly prefer a strong-looking man even if they say they don’t, according to researchers. A panel of 160 women were shown photographs of male bodies, with the head blanked out, and asked to rate them for attractiveness. “Our data couldn’t find even a single woman that preferred weaker or feminine male bodies,” said Aaron Sell, a senior lecturer at Griffith University in Australia. The men were also given a strength test, and it was by far the strongest predictor of attractiveness, explaining a 70% of the difference in scores. Being tall added a few points; being overweight deducted a few. “Our results suggest that even if you’re a bit overweight, looking strong can buffer that. Basically, being a strong, fat guy is OK, which I think would bring comfort to many.”

‘She came out crying’ – In a UK medical first, a baby girl has survived after being born with her heart outside her body. Three weeks after her early delivery by caesarean, Vanellope Hope Wilkins has undergone three delicate operations at Glenfield Hospital, Leicester, to correct the condition, known as ectopia cordis, and move her heart back inside her chest.

Her parents, Naomi Findlay, 31, and Dean Wilkins, 43, have told of their relief after being told during the pregnancy that Vanellope’s hopes were slim. “Twenty minutes went by [after the delivery] and she was still shouting her head off – it made us so joyful and teary,” said Wilkins. Branko Mimic, lead surgeon at the East Midlands Congenital Heart Centre, says Vanellope still has a long road ahead.

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Lunchtime read: What the Force did after awakening

The verdict is out on Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “An explosive thrill-ride of galactic proportions,” writes Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, as Rey and Kylo Ren cut, parry and slash onwards to destiny, while a grizzled Luke Skywalker re-emerges from the shadows.

“The Last Jedi gives you an explosive sugar rush of spectacle. It’s a film that buzzes with belief in itself and its own mythic universe – a euphoric certainty that I think no other movie franchise has. And there is no provisional hesitation or energy dip of the sort that might have been expected between episodes seven and nine.”

Sport

José Mourinho has questioned whether Manchester City’s players have the same “education” as their Manchester United counterparts and insisted the Premier League leaders were to blame for the brawl at Old Trafford that has left the clubs facing the possibility of disciplinary action. Some hope has been restored for Crystal Palace, meanwhile, after they plucked an improbable win from the jaws of defeat against Watford.

Tyson Fury has set his sights on a title fight with Anthony Joshua after being cleared to box again following a deal with UK Anti-Doping. And in Ashes news, Joe Root has urged his players to forget about England’s wretched past at the Waca and jolt their flatlining defence back into life in the third Test after Trevor Bayliss issued the squad with final warnings over their off-field behaviour.

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Business

US stock futures, Treasury yields and the dollar have all fallen overnight in Asian trading, while Asian shares edged up as crude oil futures took back lost ground. South Korea says it may tax capital gains from trading in Bitcoin and its ilk, while Australia’s central bank chief has warned of a “speculative mania” around cryptocurrencies.

Sterling has been trading at $1.333 and €1.133 overnight.

The papers

The premiere of – and verdicts on – Star Wars: The Last Jedi make most fronts, but that aside it’s a mixed bag of leading stories.

The Guardian splashes on an exclusive about corporate spies infiltrating activist groups. The extraordinary story of the baby who survived after being born with her heart outside her body makes the front of the Sun and the Mirror. There’s a dash of Brexit, with the Express reporting a poll boost for Theresa May following last week’s deal. The Times claims European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has been “dragged into” a wiretapping investigation in Luxembourg, where he was formerly prime minister.

Abuse on social media aimed at Tory MPs during the election campaign is the Daily Mail lead (a broader take on that story is here), while the i follows up the prime minister’s column in yesterday’s Guardian on the importance of tackling climate change. Meanwhile, the Telegraph warns that a gas shortage could push up fuel bills. The Financial Times thinks Fox and Disney are close to a deal. Metro leads on a court hearing for a Tory aide charged with raping a woman in the Houses of Parliament.

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Zadie Smith: dance lessons for scribes

From Fred Astaires elegance to Beyoncs power, Zadie Smith is inspired by dancers just as much she is by other writers

The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: its a canal I want to keep open. It detects a bit neglected to report to, say, the ties between music and prose perhaps because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I experience dance has something to tell me about what I do.

One of the most solid portions of writing advice I know is in fact intended for dancers you can find it in the choreographer Martha Grahams biography. But it loosens me in front of my laptop the same path I thoughts it might encourage a young dancer to breathe deeply and wiggle their paws and toes. Graham writes: There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a accelerate that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of epoch, this face is unique. And if you stymie it, it will never prevail through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how important nor how it compares with other idioms. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and instantly, to keep the canal open.

What can an artistry of words take from the artwork that needs none? Yet I often envision Ive learned just as much from watching dancers as I have from speaking. Dance lessons for columnists: assignments of prestige, posture, tempo and form, some of them obvious, some indirect. What follows are a few documents towards that idea.

Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire

Alamy; The Life Picture Collection/ Getty Images. Crown: Getty Images

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly

Fred Astaire represent the elite when he dances, claimed Gene Kelly, in old age, and I represent the proletariat. The mark is immediately satisfactory, although it was a little harder to say why. Towering, thin and tasteful, versus muscular and sporting is the fact that it? Theres the obvious content of top hat and tails versus T-shirt and slacks. But Fred sometimes wore T-shirts and slacks, and was not actually that towering, this is the only way digested as if “hes been”, and when moving always shown heightened, to be gliding across whichever surface: the floor, the ceiling, an ice rink, a bandstand. Genes centre of gravity was far less: he stoops his knees, he hunkers down. Kelly is sanded, securely planted, where Astaire is untethered, free-floating.

Likewise, the aristocrat and the proletariat have differing relations to the soil beneath their paws, the first moving fluidly across the surface of the world, the second largest specific tethered to a certain blot: a city block, village representatives, a factory, a stretch of fields. Cyd Charisse claimed her husband “ve always known” which of these dancers molted been working with by looking at her body at the end of the day: bruised everywhere if it was Kelly , not a blemish if “its been” Astaire. Not simply aloof when it came to the field, Astaire was aloof around other peoples forms. Through 15 times and 10 movies, its hard to detect one moment of real sex friction between Fred and his Ginger. They have great peace but little hot. Now think of Kelly with Cyd Charisse in the fantasy string of Singin in the Rain! And perhaps “its one of” certain advantages of earthiness: sex.

When I write I detect theres typically a choice to be made between the grounded and the float. The floor I am thinking of in such a case is speech as we fulfill it in its commonsense mode. The communication of the television, of the supermarket, of the advert, the newspaper, the government, the daily public dialogue. Some novelists like to walk this field, recreate it, separate bits of it off and use it to their advantage, where others scarcely recognise its existence. Nabokov a literal aristocrat as well as an aesthetic one just ever put a toe upon it. His speech is literary, far from what we think up as our shared linguistic home.

One argument in defence of such literary communication might be the behavior it admits its own artificiality. Commonsense language meanwhile claims to be plateau and natural, conversational, but is often as fabricated as asphalt, dreamed up in ad organizations or in the heart of government sometimes both at the same meter. Simultaneously romantic and coercive.( The Peoples Princess. The Big Society. Make America Great Again .) Commonsense language claims to take its precede from the road parties naturally speak, but any scribe who truly attends to the room people communicate will shortly find himself categorised as a distinctive stylist or satirist or experimentalist. Beckett was like this, and the American columnist George Saunders is a good contemporary sample.( In dance, the pattern that comes to my thinker is Bill Bojangles Robinson, whose circumstance was tapping up and down the stairs. What could be more ordinary, more folksy, more grounded and everyday than tapping up and down some stairs? But his signature theatre number implied a staircase pressed right up against another staircase a stairway to itself and so up and down he would tap, up and down, down and up, exclusively surreal, like an Escher publication be submitted to life .)

Astaire is clearly not an experimental dancer like Twyla Tharp or Pina Bausch, but “he il be” surreal within the meaning of outperforming the real. He is transcendent. When he dances a few questions proposes itself: what if a figure moved like this through the world? But it is only a rhetorical, fantastical interrogation, for no mass move like Astaire , no, we are just move like him in our dreams.

By contrast, I have received French boys run up the phases of the High Line in New York to take a photo of the opinion, their backsides working just like Gene Kellys in On The Town, and I have met black girls on the A train swing round the pole on their way out of the slide doorways Kelly again, hanging from that eternal lamppost. Kelly mentioned the commonplace where reference is danced, and he reminds us in turn of the mercy we do sometimes own ourselves. He is the incarnation of our mass in their youth, at their most liquor and potent, or whenever our natural endowments blend ideally with our hard-earned abilities. He is a demonstration of how the prosaic can return poetic, if we work hard enough. But Astaire, where reference is dances, has nothing to do with hard work( although we know, from biographies, that he worked very hard, behind the scenes ). He is poetry in motion. His movements are so removed from ours that he adjusts a limit on our own ambitions. None hopes or expects to dance like Astaire, just as nothing truly expects to write like Nabokov.

Harold and Fayard Nichols

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Harold and Fayard Nicholas

Writing, like dancing, is only one of the arts available to people who have nothing. For 10 and sixpence, advises Virginia Woolf, one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare. The only absolutely necessary material in dance is your own body. Some of the greatest dancers have come from the lowliest backgrounds. With many pitch-black dancers this has come with the complication of representing your race. You are on a theatre, in front of your parties and other people. What appearance will you show them? Will you be your soul? Your best self? A image? A typify?

The Nicholas friends were not street minors they were the children of college-educated musicians but they were never formally trained in dance. They learned watching their parents and their parents colleagues performing on the chitlin circuit, as pitch-black vaudeville was then called. Later, when they entered the movies, their executions were generally filmed in such a way as to be non-essential to the narrative, so that when these movies played in the south their splendid sequences “couldve been” snipped out without doing any harm to the integrity of the plan. Genius contained, genius ring-fenced. But likewise genius undeniable.

My talent was the weapon, insisted Sammy Davis Jr, the influence, the course for me to fight. It was the one behavior I might hope to affect a followers pondering. Davis was another chitlin hoofer, originally, and from straitened environments. His logic here is very familiar: it is something of an article of faith within the kinds of class who have few other resources. A baby tells her children to be twice as good, she tells them to be indisputable. My father used to say something like it to me. And when I watch the Nicholas brethren I think of that traumatic teach: be twice as good.

The Nicholas brothers were numerous, numerous importances better than anybody else. They were better than anyone has a right or need to be. Fred Astaire called their routine in Stormy Weather the greatest example of cinematic dance he ever attend. They are developing down a giant staircase doing the separates as if the splits is the commonsense behavior to get somewhere. They are impeccably garmented. They are more than representing they are excelling.

But I always visualize I discern a little difference between Harold and Fayard, and it interests me; I take it as a kind of lesson. Fayard seems to me more concerned with this responsibility of the representatives when he dances: he looks the part, he is the part, his propriety unassailable. He is formal, contained, technically indisputable: a recognition to the hasten. But Harold grants himself over to joy. His mane is his tell: as he dances it loosens itself from the slather of Brylcreem he ever put on it, the irrepressible afro scroll springtimes out, he doesnt even try to brush it back. Between propriety and joyfulnes, select joy.

Prince& Micheal Jackson

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Michael Jackson and Prince

On YouTube you will find them, locked in numerous dance-offs, and so you are presented with a stark alternative. But its not a question of stages of ability, of who was “the worlds largest” dancer. The pick is between two altogether opposite appraises: legibility on the one handwriting, temporality on the other. Between a gravestone( Jackson) and a kind of mirage( Prince ).

But both men were good dancers. Putting aside the difference in height, physically they had many similarities. Abysmally slight, long necked, thin-legged, powered from the torso rather than the backside, which in both cases was improbably small. And in terms of influence they were of course evenly indebted to James Brown. The separates, the increases from the separates, the invent, the glide, the knee bend, the schmuck of the head all been stealing from the same source.

Yet Prince and Jackson are nothing alike when they dance, and its very hard to bring to sentiment Prince dancing, whereas it is practically impossible to forget Jackson. It clangs irrational, but try it for yourself. Monarch moves , no matter how many times you may have discovered them, had not yet been conglomerate inscription in remembrance; they never seem quite fixed or saved. If person asks you to dance like Prince, what will you do? Spin, possibly, and do the divides, if youre able. But there wont appear to be anything especially Prince-like about that. Its strange. How are you able dance and dance, in front of thousands of beings, for years, and still seem like trade secrets simply I know?( And isnt it the instance that to be a Prince fan is to feel that Prince was your secret alone ?)

I never went to see Michael Jackson, but I insured Prince half a dozen days. I visualized him in stadia with thousands of parties, so have a rational understanding that he was in no sense my secret, that he was in fact a celebrity. But I still say his demonstrates were illegible, private, like the performance of a follower in the middle of a room at a house party. It was the greatest concept you ever perceive and hitherto its greatness was confined to the moment in which it was happening.

Jackson was exactly the opposite. Every move he made was absolutely readable, public, endlessly facsimile and copyable, like a meme before the word existed. He conceived in likeness, and across occasion. He purposely outlined and then commemorated once more the edges around each move, like a polouse outlining a chalk front round a body. Stuck his cervix forward if he was moving backwards. Cut his trousers short so you could spoke his ankles. Grabbed his groin so you could better understand its gyrations. Gloved one hand so you might attend to its rhythmic genius, the path it punctuated everything, like an utterance mark.

Towards the end, his strange stagewear became increasingly tasked with this job of drawing and separation. It looked like a model of armor, the purpose of which was to define each element of his form so no push of it would legislate unnoted. His arms and legs multiply fastened a literal visualisation of his flexible joints and a metal sash leading left to right across his breastplate, accentuating the alteration of his shoulders along this diagonal. A heavyweights loop accented slim hips and subdivided the torso from the legs, so you discovered when the top and foot half of the body pulled in opposite tendencies. Finally a silver-tongued thong, making his persuasive groin as clear as if it were in ALL CAPS. It wasnt subtle, “there werent” subtext, but it was clearly legible. Beings will be dancing like Michael Jackson until the end of time.

But Prince, treasured, elusive Sovereign, well, there lays one whose figure was writ in liquid. And from Prince a columnist might take the lesson that elusiveness can possess a deeper beauty than the legible. In “the worlds” of words, we have Keats to remind us of this, and to express what a long afterlife an elusive master can have, even when residence beside as clearly described a illustration as Lord Byron. Prince represents the inspiration of the moment, like an ode composed to captivate a guide superstar. And when the humor changes, he changes with it: another good lesson.

Theres no democracy in has become a tombstone. Better to be the guy still jamming in the wee hours of the house party, and though everybody movies it on their phones no one demonstrates quite able to captivate the essence of it. And now hes get, having escaped us one more time. I dont contend Rulers epitome wont last-place as long as Jacksons. I merely say that in our minds it will never be as distinct.

Janet Jackson Madonna Beyonce

Michel Linssen/ Redferns/ Getty; Dave Hogan/ Getty; Matt Slocum/ AP

Janet Jackson/ Madonna/ Beyonc

These three dont exactly invite transcripts they demand them. They go further than legibility into proscription. They extend hordes, and we join them. We are like those uniformed dancers moving in military pattern behind them, an anonymous corps whose errand it is to replica accurately the gesticulates of their general.

This was induced literal on Beyoncs Formation tour recently, when members of the general invoked her right arm like a shotgun, gathered the initiation with her left and the reverberate of gunshot resound out. There is nothing insinuate about these sorts of dancing: like the military forces, it operates as a word of dealership, whereby a decree meaning America, Beyonc presides over numerous cadres that span “the worlds”. Maybe it is for this reason that much of the crowd I heard at Wembley could be found, for long periods , not facing in the direction of the stage at all, instead turning to their friends and partners. They didnt need to watch Beyonc any more than soldiers need to look fixedly at the flag to perform their duties. Our monarch was up there somewhere dancing but the relevant recommendations of her had already been internalised. Friends from the gym put in cliques and ran their fists, girlfriends from hen nights passed inwards and did Beyonc to each other, and boys from the Beyhive screamed every parole into each others faces. They could have done the same at home, but this was a public display of allegiance.

Janet Jackson knocked off this curious phenomenon, Madonna sustained it, Beyonc is its apex. Here dancing is intended as a show of the female will, a concrete articulation of its reach and possibilities. The lesson is quite evident. My torso obeys me. My dancers obey me. Now you will obey me. And then everybody in the crowd reckons being obeyed like Bey a delightful imagining.

Lady scribes who invigorate similar piety( in far smaller audiences ): Muriel Spark, Joan Didion, Jane Austen. Such columnists give the same essential qualities( or illusions ): total limit( over their pattern) and no freedom( for the reader ). Compare and contrast, say, Jean Rhys or Octavia Butler, girl columnists much adoration but rarely simulated. Theres too much impunity in them. Meanwhile every convict of Didions says: obey me! Who operates “the worlds”? Girls!

David Byrne

Rex/ Shutterstock

David Byrne and David Bowie

The art of not dancing a crucial lesson. Sometimes it is essential to be awkward, clumsy, jerking, to be neither poetic nor banal, to be positively bad. To utter other the chances of figures, alternative evaluates, to stop making sense. Its interested in me that both these creators did their worst dancing to their blackest gashes. Take me to the river, sings Byrne, in square trousers 20 times too big, searching down at his jerking hips as if they belong to someone else. This music is not quarry, his trousers say, and his pushes go further: perhaps this body isnt mine, either. At the end of this seam of logic lies a liberating gues: perhaps nobody absolutely owns anything.

People can be too precious about their heritage, about their habit writers especially. Preservation and protection have their situate but they shouldnt block either impunity or theft. All possible aesthetic idioms are available to all families under the mansion of affection. Bowie and Byrnes evident adore for what was not theirs brought about by new inclinations in familiar dins. It hadnt arose to me before accompanying these men dance that a person might elect, for example, to converge the arch of a container hit with anything but the parallel bending action of their body, that is, with accord and heat. But it is about to change you can also repel: throw up a strange angle and suddenly spasm, like Bowie, or wonder if thats rightfully your own arm, like Byrne.

I think of young Luther Vandross, singing backup a few hoofs behind Bowie, during Young Americans, watching Bowie flail and thresh. I wonder what his take over all that was. Did he ever conceive: Now, what in the world is he doing? But a few concerts in, it was clear to everybody. Here was something different. Something old, and yet new.

Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov

Sipa Press/ Rex/ Shutterstock; Getty Images

Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov

When you face an gathering, which style will you return? Inwards or outwards? Or some combining of the two? Nureyev, so relentless and neurotic, so susceptible, so beautiful like a deer abruptly caught in our headlamps is faced resolutely inwards. You cant take your eyes off him, as beings like to say, but at the same occasion he is almost excruciating to watch. We experience we might snap him, that he might disintegrate or explosion. He never does, but still, whenever he leaps you sense the possibility of total catastrophe, as you do with certain high-strung players no matter how many times they lead or jump or nose-dive. With Nureyev you are an onlooker, you are a person who has been granted the great honor of being present while Nureyev dances. I dont necessitate this sarcastically: it is an honour to watch Nureyev, even in these grainy age-old videos on YouTube. Hes a kind of miracle, and is fully cognisant of this when he dances, and what did you do today to authorize an gathering with a miracle?( See too: Dostoevsky .)

With Baryshnikov, I have no horrors of disaster. He is an outward-facing creator, he is trying to satisfy me and he supersedes altogether. His face dances as much as his arms and legs.( Nureyevs face, meanwhile, is permanently lost in transcendent seeming .) Sometimes Baryshnikov wants to please me so much blaze even try tap dancing with Liza Minnelli, risking the sneer of the purists.( I am not a purist. I am delighted !) He is a charmer, an entertainer, “he il be” comic, dramatic, cerebral, a clown whatever you need him to be. Baryshnikov is both desiring and adoration. He has high and low modes, tough and soft constitutes, but hes ever facing outwards, to us, his audience.( See too: Tolstoy .)

Once I fulfilled Baryshnikov over a New York dinner table: I was so star-struck I is more difficult to pronounce. Lastly I asked him: Did you ever satisfy Fred Astaire? He smiled. He said: Yes, formerly, at a dinner. I was very star-struck, I hardly expressed. But I watched his hands all the time, they were like a assignment in themselves so sumptuous!

Swing Time by Zadie Smith is published on 15 November( Hamish Hamilton, 18.99 ). To prescribe a photocopy for 15.57, going to see bookshop.theguardian.com or announce 0330 333 6846.

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