#Vos: it exploded when he died?

[nevertheless-moving]

So You Just Killed Palpatine

In Which, Much To Obi-Wan Kenobi's Surprise, While Dealing With The Consequences of One's Own Action's Can Be A Lot, It Isn't Always Entirely A Bad Thing

originally inspired by this and this from anon and husborth Part One, Part Two, Part Three ... Part Fo ... uh ... there's memes somewhere... Anyway Here's Part Five:

Obi-Wan blinked awake, head cloudy and body heavy, as if under unusually high gravity. But no, there was the all-too-recognizable ceiling of the temple healing halls, its mosaic ceiling drifting in lazy, clockwise circles.

What did I do this time? Wait, there was something I had to tell the rest of the Jedi...something important...

Oh dear, he was on the good painkillers, wasn't he?

“Obi-Wan?” someone familiar asked, voice and force presence ringing with a startling jab of hope.

“Bant?” he tried to reply, only to be met with burning pain in his throat. The only thing he managed to get out was an unintelligible coughing fit which pulled sharply at his gut.

“Take it easy!” she urged, moving into his blurry line of sight. “You’ve had extensive abdominal surgery, and your throat was — was crushed rather severely — it’s going to take more time for the grafts to heal.”

Obi-Wan nodded, chastened, before cautiously starting the process of pushing himself up in bed, Bant hovering nervously all the while. The effort made his muscles ache and the room spin faster, but things settled down once he was sitting up.

He looked around, sagging in relief at a small oily handprint on one of the otherwise sterile visitor chairs. Anakin had been here recently, and was in good enough health to be tinkering. Good, that was good. That was important.

He suddenly realized half his vision was obscured and sluggishly raised a hand to his face, only to find heavy cloth.

“I’m sorry, we weren’t able to save your eye,” Bant said softly. “Once you’re a little more healed we can discuss artificial or bioengineered replacement options.”

She plucked a cup off a counter overcrowded with a dizzying array of flowers. “Here, drink some of this if you’re feeling up to it, it’ll make talking a little easier.”

Obi-Wan accepted the drink, only to feel it slide out of numb hands. Bant gently closed her hands around his, helping to guide the drink to his lips. He grimaced at the taste.

“Bacta infused water,” she apologized. “You’re going to be drinking bacta infused liquids for some time, I’m afraid.”

A wave of exhaustion swept over him and Bant set the cup down as Obi-Wan sagged.

“Anakin?” he managed to rasp out.

“Anakin’s fine, he’s completely safe,” Bant said with a comforting squeeze of his shoulder. “He’ll be annoyed to know he missed you waking up, he very much wanted to be there.”

Obi-Wan was going to say something else, but sleep dragged him under first.

//

Obi-Wan opened his eyes — his eye — to the sight of Quinlan Vos scowling over a datapad. The dark spot on the left side of his vision was more noticeable than before. What the kriff did I do to myself?

He shifted, irritated at how lethargically his body responded. The pad fell to the ground with a clatter as Quinlan lurched towards the bed.

“Obi-Wan! Hold on, let me — you’re supposed to have the water before you try to talk.”

Quinlan helped hold up a cup and straw so Obi-Wan could take several short sips of the unpleasantly viscous and vaguely pineapple flavored water.

“How are you feeling?” Quinlan asked, hovering with uncharacteristic anxiousness.

Obi-Wan paused to think. “Weak,” he replied in a hoarse whisper. “How long have I been...”

Guilt flashed over Vos’s face. “You were in and out of Bacta tanks and surgery for a full two weeks. And then another week in an induced coma. And then another week in a self-healing trance. You had...a lot of internal injuries. I’m so sorry Obi-Wan—this is all my fault.”

Obi-Wan stared at Quinlan blankly for a moment. His face helped the memories to start trickling in.

"Yes..." he said slowly. "Yes — you knocked on my door... you said... Vos... please just... just tell me if I hallucinated anything — did I try to assassinate the Chancellor of the Republic?"

"I'd say you succeeded," Quinlan replied, half-smiling, half-grimacing.

"Did I — did we think he was a pedophile, only—”

He had to pause, throat burning as he fought a coughing fit. He swallowed more disgustingly flavored water before finishing the thought.

“—only to discover that he was in fact not sexually grooming Anakin, but was doing a number of other terrible things? And did he... did he — did he electrocute me...”

Obi-Wan’s voice trailed off and he took several more sips, throat filled with an uncomfortable fizzing sensation.

Quinlan nodded, wincing. “I mean parts of that you know better than me but yeah, that matches with what I understand.”

“Hm.” Obi-Wan finished the cup, mulling it over.

Quinlan Vos muttered something under his breath that Obi-Wan couldn't quite make out, but the word "dramatic" almost definitely featured.

Grey crept in around the corners of his vision, then black.

//

When he opened his eyes — his eye, he'd have to get used to that — next, he was greeted by a convenient and increasingly familiar cup at his bedside, as well as Master Windu. Obi-Wan quickly reached for the water, clutching it in both hands and taking a long drink.

Spurred on by the sight of the Master of the Order, he also reached for the urgent thought from earlier, wanting to get it out before he slipped back under —

“Chancellor Palpatine’s a Sith Lord!!”

The corners of Mace’s eyes crinkled. “Yes, Knight Kenobi," he said. "We’re aware of that now. You’ve proved it to be the case quite publicly. And ended the threat with remarkable... thoroughness.”

Obi-Wan head fell back. “A Sith Lord... the Chancellor!” he said in amazement. He was relieved to find his throat only barely twinging at his outburst.

“It truly stretches the imagination,” Mace agreed tolerantly.

“You’re telling me!” Obi-Wan took another long drink, head spinning.

Master Windu smoothed a crease from his robe before saying, with extreme delicacy, “I don't wish to pressure you into speaking before you've healed... but I admit, we’ve all been wondering how exactly you knew.”

"He force choked me and electrocuted me with Sith Lightning. Lighting! I thought that was a myth!” He drained the cup, hands shaking slightly.

“Yes,” Mace said quietly. “The healers were amazed you survived so long... let alone had the strength to fight back with such strength. We’re all extremely grateful to the Force for keeping you alive long enough for us to reach you.”

Obi-Wan made a mental note to feel grateful later, but his mental space was a bit of a mess at the moment, and he wasn't entirely certain he had filed it away correctly.

Master Windu sighed. “We would have been there sooner but I’m afraid none of us had any idea that you were going to confront a Sith.” A twinge of reproach crept into Windu's voice, but Obi-Wan set it aside along with the gratitude, to be examined at some later date. Ideally when his head felt less full of bantha wool.

“I had no idea,” Obi-Wan said numbly.

“Well you figured it out before the Council at least,” Mace replied, not without humor.

He couldn't help but snort. “Yes, because he shot lightning at me. I mean the force choking happened first but... lightning. Lightning!”

Lines formed between Master Windu's brows as he looked down at him. “As much as it pains me, I understand the risk assessment in not telling the High Council about a Sith Chancellor of the Republic, and goading a public fight was probably the best political move possible. But why start the confrontation so privately? It seemed rather — apologies, we can debrief on that when you're rested. I presume you were trying to get a confession about the droid and clone armies?”

Obi-Wan stared at Mace Windu wide-eyed.

“The what.”

The lines on Master Windu’s face deepened. “The... Kamonian clone army — the clones of Jango Fett...”

Obi-Wan’s eyes got wider. “Jango Fett—you mean Galidrean Jango Fett? The Jedi Killer? Palpatine made a clone army of him?”

Mace was silent for a long while, staring at Obi-Wan as though he were a particularly concerning puzzle. Obi-Wan chewed on the straw, mind wandering to whether or not it would be appropriate to ask Master Windu for a refill. As unpleasant as the flavor was, the fizzing did make his throat feel better.

“Knight Kenobi...” Mace finally said, speaking very slowly. “Do you remember why Chancellor Palpatine attacked you? The soul healers were quite certain the Sith Lord didn’t breach your inner shields but I think you might be suffering from some memory loss...”

His left eye itched; he resisted the urge to reach for it. Obi-Wan sank further into the cushions behind him, trying to think. Were there gaps in his memory? No, as usual, it all seemed a fairly clear path from Quinlan Vos knocking on his door to Obi-Wan ending up unconscious in the healing halls.

“Why Palpatine starting attacking?" he mused. "I suppose he wasn't going to just dance around forever — force, when he dodged my blaster shot, I simply could not understand how — it all happened so fast, but the next thing I knew I was pinned against the wall by a Dark —”

“Stop,” Master Windu ordered, raising his hand. He took a deep breath, radiating calm into the force.

“Do you remember what Palpatine said immediately before you shot him?” he asked patiently.

Obi-Wan shifted, feeling a pang of awkwardness as he muttered the answer guiltily under his breath.

“I’m sorry, Knight Kenobi, I didn’t quite catch that.”

“He said, ah, ‘you’re a Jedi’ and ‘you can’t kill an unarmed man.’”

Mace Windu stared at Obi-Wan.

There was a long pause while Obi-Wan fidgeted with the straw. He was starting to feel that perhaps his thoughts were even less clear than he had assumed them to be, and he was not handling this conversation particularly well.

Windu took another deep breath, radiating slightly less calm then before.

“Knight Kenobi. Why did you shoot the Chancellor of the Republic?”

“...I was trying to kill him,” Obi-Wan said, looking down.

“Why?”

Obi-Wan mumbled.

“Kenobi, speak clearly.”

“Well—ah—it actually turns out that I had misunderstood...I mean it had certainly seemed like...but he wasn’t actually...doing exactly what I thought...”

Windu stared at the recumbent Knight, who flushed.

It occurred to Obi-Wan for the first time, that, considering his plan of running away and becoming a bounty hunter was no longer possible nor, perhaps necessary, he could have misrepresented some of the timeline of events vis a vis sith slaying. Or better yet, pretended to have memory loss.

In his defense, the whole experience had been extremely unnerving! For all that weeks had clearly elapsed for everyone else, Obi-Wan was still processing Chancellor Palpatine shooting lightning out of his fingers.

A wave of exhaustion flooded over him, and he sank into it with relief, recognizing now the sickly sweet painkillers pulsing through his blood, clouding his thoughts and pulling him under.

//

Unfortunately, Mace Windu was still there when he woke up. Kriff.

He opened his mouth to try and backtrack, but Windu raised his hand, cutting off any poorly thought out explanations.

Master Windu took a deep breath, radiating very little calm by this point.

“Let me get this clear. Nod if yes, shake your head if no, did you go into the Chancellor’s office with the intent to assassinate the Chancellor of the Republic?”

Obi-Wan nodded.

“Did you know he was a Sith before you went into his office?”

Obi-Wan shook his head.

“Did you suspect he was a Sith?" Mace asked, slightly desperate.

Obi-Wan shook his head, cringing in apology.

“Before you went into the Chancellor’s office, were you aware that he was working with the Kaminoians to commission a clone army?”

Obi-Wan shook his head, biting back questions.

“Did you know he was working with the trade federation to commission a droid army?”

Another no.

“Did you suspect anything about these armies? Anything about a larger plot to destabilize the Republic? Destroy the Jedi? Become Emperor?”

Obi-Wan shook his head at each question, eyes widening with shock.

Mace Windu was radiating absolutely no calm at this point.

“Knight Kenobi...” he asked with a pained expression. “Did you... attempt to assassinate the Chancellor of the republic for personal reasons born out of some sort of misunderstanding? Only to inadvertently save the Republic?”

“I mean once I found out that he was a Sith... I of course changed tactics... and personal is a bit... but... that... Well. More or less sums the situation up, yes.”

Mace WIndu stared at Obi-Wan Kenobi, who wasn’t sure if he should keep talking or not. He didn't entirely trust his ability to explain things well at the moment, and ultimately decided to err on the side of silence.

Obi-Wan vaguely wished he could slip into sleep, but was fairly sure that it would be rude and possibly obvious to do twice in one conversation. His throat itched and he considered once again asking for more water, ultimately deciding against it.

Minutes passed, Master Windu staring blankly at the wall above Obi-Wan’s shoulders, while Obi-Wan's mind started to wander.

Who on earth had been paying to feed a clone army? How was Quinlan doing at getting Anakin to brush his teeth? Am I going to prison? Ohh that’s why the force was so insistent on killing Palpatine. Maybe that would help explain things to Master Windu? Though 'the force told me to' is  generally not considered a good excuse, in of itself, for acts of violence...though this is a rather unique situation...

Eventually Master Plo walked in, letting out a pleased noise.

“There he is! The Hero of the Republic!”

Mace Windu closed his eyes.

“Is that what they’re calling me?” Obi-Wan asked weakly, when it became clear Master Windu wasn’t ready to address everything wrong with that.

“Oh! Your drink is empty! Mace, Vokara was very clear with her instructions!” Master Plo scolded.

Mace Windu didn’t reply.

Plo-Koon snatched the cup, filling it up from a pitcher across the room and talking boisterously. “Well, the public is throwing around a lot of titles, but since you already had Sith Slayer...”

“Oh dear,” Obi-Wan said faintly, accepting the terrible water and drinking it for lack of anything better to do.

Plo-Koon patted him on the shoulder reassuringly. “I’m afraid to tell you it’s going to be very difficult for you to dodge commendations for your actions. Now that you’re awake you’re going to be faced with quite a backlog of requests for ceremonies and interviews—”

Obi-Wan choked. “Ceremonies?” he repeated in a higher pitch. He snuck a look at Master Windu. His eyes were closed, though he didn't appear to be meditating.

That probably wasn't a good sign.

"Yes, ceremonies," Plo-Koon said with far too much relish. "Turns out there are quite a lot of old traditions on the books regarding —"

Master Healer Vokara Che entered the room at brisk pace. “I thought I heard voices — I will remind you that before he is the ‘Sith Slayer Returned’ or ‘The True Chosen One’ or any such nonsense he is first and foremost my patient.”

She gave a sharp look to both Council Members. Plo-Koon nodded contritely while Master Windu continued to not say or do anything.

“The — no, no Anakin’s the chosen one —" Obi-Wan sputtered. "Anakin’s the reason — people aren’t actually calling me that, right?” he asked, drugs doing an admirable job at suppressing the panic he was fairly sure he was going to feel later. The device in Master Che's hand beeped faintly in answer.

“That and more, young Kenobi,” another familiar voice suddenly added, below his field of vision. “To collect your honors, expect to survive, you did not, mmn?”

“Master Yoda! No, I—I really didn’t expect... any honors... at most I was hoping that people would understand...” Obi-Wan protested weakly, shooting Windu a beseeching look which yet again failed to garner a response.

Che rolled her eyes, flipping a lek behind her somewhat sarcastically as she attached a glowing device to his chest. "Of course you didn't."

He barely refrained from wincing as several needles bit into him.

“Perhaps we would have had a better chance of understanding had you left us any of your evidence,” Master Koon chided gently.

“Put together the pieces we did, in our time,” Yoda added, hopping up on the nightstand to affectionately poke his shoulder.

Obi-Wan leaned back, feeling increasingly light-headed.

“Your vitals look good, all things considered,” Master Che said, sounding smug. “You should be back to getting into trouble in a year or so.”

Obi-Wan jerked his head in her direction, aghast. “A year?!”

“Busy, you will be, if work you wish. A seat, open there is for you. Comfortable chair, good company, important duties.”

Master Windu’s eyes squeezed further closed.

“What?” Obi-Wan asked, bewildered.

The healer scowled. “You were bleeding heavily into more or less all your major organs, including your brain. Really, it would be faster for me to list organs that weren't damaged. The fact that you recovered at all is only because Master Gallia conducted ill-advised on-scene amateur healing—"

"Is she alright?" Obi-Wan asked.

"—ill-advised, but successfully non-self-detrimental amateur healing, and I’m a miracle worker, and, credit where credit is due, you’re a stubborn bastard; not to mention your padawan has far too much energy to throw around — you really should consider enrolling him some healer’s courses—”

“Is he alright?” Obi-Wan asked, more urgently.

“He’s fine,” Master Plo reassured him with a gentle hand on the shoulder. “Everyone is fine except for you. He just tired himself out a few times, but Knight Vos has been keeping a close eye on him, and Anakin understands that the best thing at this point is to let you heal under your own power."

“Can I see him?” he asked. His voice was growing hoarse despite the dutifully refilled cup.

Vokara’s face softened. “Of course. He’ll be stopping by after class, in another hour or so. He’s been very punctual.”

“Master Windu? Alright are you? Silent, you have been.” Mace flinched upon being prodded with a stick. He opened his eyes, pinning Knight Kenobi with a steely gaze. Obi-Wan shrunk back, but Windu just sighed.

“You...” he trailed off. He stood up slowly, as if the movement pained him.

"I —" he said authoritatively, quieting the room. "—am taking a sabbatical. Call me when—” Windu gestured vaguely. “—you all sort out this mess.”

He walked out.

A long moment passed. “What did you tell him?” Master Plo finally asked in a hushed whisper.

"Ah..." Obi-Wan paused, limbs heavy with fatigue. "Well — you see— " He closed his eyes, feeling slightly cowardly as he did so.

//

When he opened them again, the light hadn't shifted nearly as much as other inbetweens, and his bandages hadn't been changed. Master Plo was still there, speaking quietly with Yoda.

Shit.

"Not too long that time," Vokara said, pleased. "I've lowered the dose on some of your medications, it should make it easier to stay awake."

"Oh. Good," Obi-Wan replied.

"Young Kenobi." Plo-Koon moved closer. "I dislike pressuring you in your current state, but... Master Windu appears to have left the temple. We were wondering..."

Obi-Wan opened his mouth, then closed it again, considering. His mind was, at last, starting to catch up with mouth. “He asked me... some questions. About how I came to suspect Palpatine," Obi-Wan said carefully. "It would appear I may have forgotten some details. About the evidence...Master Windu was — distressed regarding what I did and did not recall."

Vokara nodded. "Memory loss is completely understandable with the type of injuries you recieved."

"Alright, it is, if remember everything, you cannot," Yoda added kindly. "Our own investigations, ongoing are."

"So if I, ah, can't quite remember everything that led up to our fight," Obi-Wan asked, feeling guilty, but force, that blank look in Master Windu's eyes. "I mean I definitely remember the force willing me to decisively seek his end — really it was unusually loud about it," he added hastily. "If that helps."

Yoda nodded slowly. "This reason, understand we do. But, present to the public, perhaps not a good idea would be."

"Yes," Obi-Wan said. "I think — I'm not certain but I believe Quinlan Vos may have helped me collect some evidence..."

"Said as much, he did. Wait to confer with you, he wanted."

Obi-Wan sagged backwards with relief. "Yes. Yes! We had security concerns... Palpatine was so highly placed..." he trailed off.

"Considering Sifo-Dyas's and Count Dooku's entanglement in all this I can hardly blame you for hesitating to reach out to the council," Plo-Koon said, exhaustion audible even through his vocoder.

Obi-Wan choked on his spit; the following coughing fit was soon rewarded with a fresh bacta drink from Vokara.

Dooku?? Sifo-Dyas??

"Perhaps after I speak with him I'll be able to better assist with the current investigations," he offered hoarsely after recovering.

"Of course," Plo-Koon said gently. "Again, we apologize for interrogating you so early into your recovery but you really can't imagine the public and political scrutiny we've all been under —" He hesitated. "Master Windu was joking about taking a sabbatical right now, was he not?" he asked, sounding strained. "I know he's been under a lot of pressure, but surely you having memory issues couldn't—"

He was thankfully interrupted by the sound of small feet moving rapidly and a gangly body launching itself at highspeeds through the doorway.

Vokara just managed to snag the back of Anakin's robes before he crashed into Obi-Wan's medbed.

"Padawan Skywalker," she said, voice tight. "I believe I have mentioned the numerous injuries your master is recovering from and the need for —"

"Care in my movements," he said sheepishly. "Apologies, master, thank you."

"Anakin," Obi-Wan said, something in his chest relaxing at the sight of his dangling student.

"Obi-Wan." His padawan's eyes immediately started filling with tears.

Obi-Wan reached out instinctively. "Oh, Anakin."

"Give you a moment, we will," Yoda said, hobbling out, as Vokara sighed, then gently placed his pupil on the floor.

"Of course," Plo-Koon agreed. "Take all the time you need." He hurried to catch up with Yoda. Obi-Wan heard him begin to say, "Mace can't actually be leaving us to deal with this clusterfu���'' Then the door closed, and Anakin was weeping at his bedside.

"Shh," Obi-Wan said, tugging his padawan up, ignoring the protestations of his abdomen. "There, there, it will be alright."

Anakin crawled up, movements ginger and uncertain around Obi-Wan's numerous injuries. Together, they somehow managed to shift Obi-Wan enough for Anakin to fit beside him. His padawan shook with suppressed sobs, and parts of him were almost certainly hanging awkwardly off the edge of the bed.

Obi-Wan ran one hand through Anakin's hair, the other hand gently resting where he could reach without twisting too much, probably an elbow, though the boy was pointy enough these days that he couldn't be sure. If Obi-Wan was also shaking, well. There was reason enough.

"Sheev," Anakin finally said, oozing misery and an overwhelming tangle of other unpleasant emotions into the force.

"...I know he was your friend—" Obi-Wan said, after what was hopefully not too long a pause. This was another conversation that probably wouldn't be helped by painkillers.

"But he wasn't, really." Anakin curled up, even more miserable. "I know. I should let go."

The side of Obi-Wan's head throbbed. On second thought, painkillers were the way to go here. "That's not what I meant," he said. "He was a friend to you. He's gone now. Because of me, your master. And... I'm sure you've found out a lot while I've been asleep. I can't imagine a single padawan learner who wouldn't be struggling with their emotions right now. I'm struggling."

"I'm angry," Anakin said into his side. "Master, I'm so full of anger."

"You think I wasn't?" Obi-Wan asked dryly.

Anakin hiccuped a sob. "I'm angry at everyone."

"It's alright, Anakin," Obi-Wan soothed. "You'll work through it in time. I'll be here to help, whenever you want. Even when I'm the one you're angry with."

Anakin sobbed another minute, force presence roiling, before finally pulling himself in with a deep breath, and wiping his nose on the sheets. "You looked so cool when you were angry," he mumbled into Obi-Wan's side.

"Oh force," Obi-Wan groaned. "Of course there was holofootage. Of course you watched."

"Are you... still angry?" Anakin asked.

Fuck.

Obi-Wan tried to think of the right answer for a padawan learner. His head throbbed again.

"Honestly? Right now I'm mostly just tired. I feel like I was run over by a pack of bantha. It's never a good idea to try and deal with large emotional gnarls while you're this exhausted, remember that my young padawan."

"You've been asleep for years," Anakin whined. "How are you still tired?"

"Years?" he asked, amused.

"At least three," Anakin huffed, curling up against him.

Obi-Wan stroked his hair in peaceful silence for a moment.

"...Did you really smash in his skull with a metal chair to protect me?"

"I would do a lot of things to protect you," he confessed. "I'm sorry Anakin — I should have talked with you when I grew concerned with his behavior. I felt at the time I had to act swiftly, but I worry I only caused you more pain."

"It was a really cool fight."

"...Thank you, padawan."

"Can you teach me how to choke people with my ankles like that?" he sniffled.

Obi-Wan groaned internally. "Of course, as a Jedi, violence—" 

"Violence is our last resort," Anakin interrupted. "Right, yeah —but if it is needed—"

"—Such as when someone," Obi-Wan said over him. "After careful consideration, is found to be both politically insulated and positioned to commit great further harm—"

"Actually, I think you, the person who killed my trusted friend, lecturing me on why he was ultra especially irredeemably evil is traumatizing, even more traumatizing than all those holo compilations of you —"

"Oh force above, of course there's — oh. Oh no — please don't tell me—"

"The latest Jizz music," Anakin said, far too gleeful.

Obi-Wan groaned. Unfortunately, the extra movement in his chest triggered an admittedly ghastly sounding coughing fit and Anakin immediately lost the small edge of grace he had managed to cultivate during their back and forth.

"Master?" he asked urgently. "Master — hold on — I'll go get—"

"I'm fine," Obi-Wan rasped. "Any more of that —"

Anakin was already scrambling to fetch the pitcher.

Such a good boy, he thought affectionately, watching him pour and carry over a glass with the same care others might have when handling molten gold.

Obi-Wan drank with a reciprocal amount of delicacy, knowing his padawan was watching falcon-eyed for any wasted drops.

"Perhaps we should finish this conversation a little later," Obi-Wan said, once his airways calmed down.

Coughing should not be this exhausting.

"Of course," Anakin said, subdued, but he crawled back into bed readily enough when Obi-Wan patted it.

“Really, though —” Obi-Wan started to say, feeling it was duty to try and wrap up the lesson, but he was fortunately cut off before he was forced to figure out exactly what that lesson was.

“It’s alright,” Anakin chimed comfortingly. “We have time to talk about it, master. Can’t you tell?”

“Hm?” Obi-Wan replied, fighting the droop of his eyelids. 

“The force clears,” Anakin said, voice sonorous. “The dark retreats.”

“Oh.” Obi-Wan’s eyes started falling closed. “That’s nice.”

“So we have time. To figure out the rest.”

 “Very nice,” Obi-Wan murmured.

His padawan curled against him, force presence like ocean waves rocking him to sleep.

“The force says it’s going to be alright,” Anakin whispered, wonderingly. “It’s going to be alright.”

Obi-Wan smiled, then once again slipped back to sleep.

[baddygab-bi]

Final predictions for the finale before I turn off my phone so I don’t get any more spoiled since I have to watch an hour later.

- Nobody from the 118 dies.

- Hen is the one who helps the most with getting Eddie out of the van. I wouldn’t be surprised if Buck is helping to call the shots, but is physically not there because he’s helping someone else.

- We start with everyone getting ready for work. So Buck at his loft, like we saw. Hen and Karen, maybe getting Denny ready for school. Eddie with Chris and (no please no) Marisol. Bathena being cute. Madney being happy about the engagement, maybe thinking about how they’ll tell the Lees or them actually telling the Lees. Not a montage, just separate real scenes.

- We saw that Hen takes on interim captain by title, but I think Buck will call the shots and do most of the stuff himself.

- Kameron has the baby. They need to finish this damn storyline already.

- Chris isn’t at the bridge.

- Time jump at the end: Buck and Natalia get a couch together, Eddie and Marisol are a quasi-family unit with Chris, wouldn’t be shocked if Marisol was in Buck’s spot on the couch. Madney are making wedding plans and/or just enjoying family time. Hen and Karen are having a good time with Denny. Bathena head off for their vacation.

- We saw BTS of a roof scene, I imagine it’ll be either before the call like how Bobby sniffed the sky and smelled fire, so the calm before the storm before the crash. Or, more likely, it’ll be at the end when everything is calm, everyone is alive, they’re looking out over LA and thinking how great everything is, and how they’re firefighters so they can help pay it all forward. All the sadness, all the worry, all the fear, all of that means nothing when they get to save lives everyday… and pay it all forward. Something cheesy like that.

- Bridge collapse, Bobby falls, Buck gets Hen out. Hen gets Eddie out. Buck gets Chim out. Buck gets Bobby out. Talk with Ravi afterwards where they congratulate him on a job well done and/or welcoming him fully back to the team <- the order I roughly think the stills go in.

- The couch being in danger is a literal reference to the physical couch being physically in danger. Such from Kameron, Connor, or Buck. I firmly believe it’s Kameron going into labor. It’s not an Eddie metaphor.

- The baby is named after Buck in someway.

- Natalia apologizes to Buck for leaving, he takes her back without hesitation. Or worse, we never see her apologize, we just see her come back because Buck says he needs a new couch and it cuts to the two of them bringing it in together, and there’s a line like “It won’t fit through the door.” “We can make it.” As a callback to both the couch and Buck’s only love history lesson, though I think line has been lost to time.

- The Buck happiness arc is either forgotten entirely, or it comes up specifically when Buck thinks about working literally falling away and how he feels best and happy and his reason for being alive, when he saves his 118 family.

- Nobody calls Buck “Evan.”

- The will isn’t brought up, even though it’s the perfect time to literally come up so freaking naturally.

- The van explodes once Eddie is out.

- No Taylor Kelly reporting, though I think that would make sense, since she’s a reporter and it wouldn’t be weird for her to be there.

- Spouses, love interests, and Kameron watching the news. Maybe a VO by Kelly here.

- (wishful thinking) A callback to Buck and Eddie having each others’ backs.

- Basketball guy helps save someone (pay it forward).

- Bobby pushes Ravi out of the way of the collapse and into safety. Because he’s #Dad

- They will fully drive a wedge into Buddie that season 7 can probably reverse, but it’ll feel very definite for this episode.

I can’t think of anything else, but I have to get off my phone now anyway so I’ll see you all at 10pm eastern/9 central/7 pacific.

[happyk44]

Melinoe allowing Jason to go on a nightly excursion to the surface. She sees a bitterness in him, small but doable, and she's still angry at Olympus so she sends him out to wander with everyone else and takes him back before the sun rises.

She just doesn't take all of him back.

The bitterness remains. The unfettered anger he always ignored, never acknowledged, pretended didnt exist. Disappointment in his sister, in friends. Rage at his father, his step-mother.

Bitterness quickly turns to vengeance the longer he sits outside of the underworld without the rest of him to reconcile it away, square it back to recesses of his soul and mind he doesn't dwell in.

He stalks along the coast, dragging storms with every ghostly step until he's at Camp Jupiter. Lightning storms set fires. Rain floods the plains. A righteous ghostly justice curls an eerie hand along the camp and into New Rome as he continues on.

The Hunters wake up freezing with torn tents. Their dogs have run amok. Thalia's diadem is shattered next to her. There's a threat in the claw marks around her shredded tent. I could've killed you, they say. But you weren't worth my time.

The Wolf House burns to the ground again. Anger festers so violently in him by then that it's only by luck the children inside make it out alive. By the help of wolves that are quickly torn apart in front of their horrified little eyes. How dare you help them and not me, the murder speaks. I was younger than them. I needed love more.

New York sinks quickly into view. Olympus ratchets up the Empire State Building. By now, news of his focused attacks has spread quickly across the Greco-Roman communities. Camp Half-blood prepares for an attack that never comes. Why would it?

No one there tore him into nothing. No one there rebuilt him into a perfect weapon, only to throw him away when he was unneeded. They gave him a home, people who truly loved him. Sure, he was abandoned by the friends he made there too but it wasn't their fault. Piper only left because she felt Hera had forced into loving him. And Leo only left because he felt he needed to die to matter, a consequence of terrible homes filled with people who didn't care.

A consequence of the gods.

The smoke gathers attention first. The smell of burning stalls and plants. Nymphs scream and cry next. They bleed out on the ground before withering away into flowers and tiny shrubs. Things shatter and break as a storm builds around him. He's inhuman now, a creature more than a ghost. Vengeance, pain, anger.

His teeth drip blood, his nails elongated. His eyes are electric. The door slam open. The portraits shatter. The thrones crack. He's a storm, whirlwnding forward for the culprits in his suffering. And they can't stop him from burning it all to the ground.

After all, what can a god do to a ghost?

His brother stands in all his godly glory and Jason hates it. How quickly will he forget the lessons he learned? Immortality paints time as a game. He'll forget what matters.

It's only Hermes' speed that saves Apollo from pure disintegration. Sure, he'd reincarnate, but, oh it would be painful.

He's a warhead on a mission, plowing down hallways and throwing back gods like toys. Lightning illuminates throughout him like veins. His father stands with lightning bolt in hand. His step-mother, the one who dangled him like steak over the snapping maws of a dozen wolves then cried as though he mattered to her, is by his side with a frightening silver sword.

This is their fault, he thinks. They created me. Lightning explodes like a bursting pipe. This is all their fault.

He feels nothing and tastes only victory. Godly blood stains the walls. But even as they fail to touch him, they don't go down easily. He batters them away and they stand again, joined by family, joined by friends.

Jason never had that. Abandoned every time he got close. Died before he could try again.

He was a child.

How dare they act like they cared.

How dare they call him their son.

"Jason." The voice cuts through his blinding haze like a train to the chest. He spins, his won personal tornado. Hermes stands, battered and bruised, beside Nico, who regards him a pinched look and an outstretched hand. "You're not supposed to be here. You supposed to be at home."

He doesn't have a home. He never did. Thrown from place to place. Home is where you are loved.

He wasn't.

He turns back to the people who took that from his. His father for letting him be born into an unkind world, to an angry mother, and for letting him be thrown to the wolves. His step-mother for throwing him to them, for taking his life and playing with it like he was a toy.

He was not a toy.

He isn't.

He's a person.

"I know you are," Nico says. His voice is patient and quiet in the thundering winds. It sings loud and clear through Jason's ears. "You're a good person, Jason. They didn't deserve you then and they don't deserve you now. You were worth more than what they gave you."

He was.

"Please. Let me take you home."

He can't. He's not done. But something pulls across his chest and he screams. Nico is unharmed as Hermes pulls him to safety, burned from where Jason's blast hit him, but gripping tight to Nico's waist.

Jason could remember that. Holding Nico, frightened and stressed out, carrying him across the skies to Cupid, to Eros. To painful confessions and anger.

He remembers how it sank out of his sink in angry shadows and grappling skeletons. And how Eros batted him away with forceful pushy winds.

"Kind of like you right now."

He stills.

"You tried to hurt me."

It wasn't on purpose.

"I can't leave until I have you in my hands, Jason. And soon my father will be here to do it himself and if he ends up injured because of you, I don't know if I can forgive you for that."

Jason stares at him. Why would he hurt his uncle? The god has done nothing to him.

"You're angry." Nico steps outside of Hermes' grasp. "Angry people do not make the best decisions. When I was angry, I listened to a homicidal maniac trying to come back to life. I almost got people killed. People who didn't deserve to die just because I was upset." He holds out his hand as Jason starts to float down. The ground scuffs the tips of his toes. Nico's palm glows back him. There's something familiar about the pulsing blue orb in his hand. "You're not thinking with your full capacity. You're a good person. You forgive. It is your best and worst trait."

Jason blinks up at him.

"It's time to go home, Jason." He pauses and glances down at Nico's glowing palm. Then sinks his hand against it, exhaling a breathless sigh. Nico smiles sweetly and pulls him close. "Let's go home."

[masterjedilenawrites]

The Sniper and The Medic: Chapter 10

Starring: Crosshair, OC Joan Vo

Chapter Warnings: Discussions of bullying, death, injuries, and other tragic things, offset by a lil fluff at the end

Taglist: @proadhog @skippyhopperwisdom

AO3 Link (In case you like it better over there, it’s okay, no judgement)

A/N: Just want to quickly apologize for the 2 week delay in updating this story, but also this will be my 99th post on this blog which is kinda fitting once you read it, so I guess some things are just meant to be...

< Previous Chapter | Masterlist | Next Chapter >

Chapter 10: Good Grief

He met her at the designated place that evening, barely able to contain the mixture of excitement and dread that welled within him. On the one hand, Crosshair welcomed any opportunity to spend time with Joan, especially after she had shown interest in wanting to grow closer to him. She looked as beautiful as ever when she joined him, wearing her cute little shorts and signature smile.

But on the other hand, they were running out of time. He deployed tomorrow afternoon. How could they possibly grow closer in such a short window?

And how could he possibly say good-bye if they did? 

He led her through the set of double doors and down a long hallway, keeping his strides as relaxed as he could, despite his every nerve being on edge. She walked fairly close alongside him, but nothing too scandalous. Not that it was likely they'd be caught. This part of the facility was more-or-less abandoned, only used to house the more rarely-used supplies for the maintenance crew. Half the walls were stripped of their usual white sheen, revealing cracked plaster and dirty insulation instead. Only a few like himself knew it was a good place to go when in need of some privacy.

But there was also something here he wanted to show Joan. A way to help her understand his life as a defective clone. He wasn't sure why the idea had popped into his head earlier; he should have just suggested the simulation room again, programmed it to a nice, romantic beach or something. But it was too late to go back now.

They neared the door in question and Crosshair punched in the code. He gestured for Joan to walk in ahead of him, wanting to keep an eye on her reactions.

It was barely considered a room, more of a corridor that was meant to connect this hallway with another. A motion-sensor light flickered on as they entered. Miscellaneous boxes and crates had been pushed up against the wall on the left, dusty and unimportant. It was the righthand wall that gave this space significance. It had long been reduced to its concrete foundation, and chiseled crudely over most of its surface were names and numbers. The largest script was in the top left corner, only two symbols.

"Ninety-nine," Joan read out loud as she stood in the center of the room and looked over the wall in reverence. "This is a memorial."

Crosshair nodded. "All the clones who've died here, never stepping foot into battle. Most of them defects, like 99. Their names won't be found anywhere else. This... is their only legacy."

She nodded at him solemnly in understanding. He watched as she brushed her hands over some of the etchings, fingers tracing the lines as she read them over. There were mostly numbers, many of them not having lived long enough to find a nickname. One of his own batch-mates had been like that, only living a few short years before his defective heart had given out. 

Crosshair tore his gaze away from Joan to find his brother's number on the wall. Beneath it was the second lost brother, who had made it just a little longer. Scraps, they'd called him. He brought his hand up to rest alongside their names, frowning deeply at the memories they gave him.

He felt Joan come to stand next to him and he swallowed hard.

"He was sick all the time, but he kept trying," he explained. "He was worse off than me, and yet I was the kid who cried every night, and he'd talk me down. He'd tell me we had to keep fighting, we had to prove them all wrong. And then one day... he was gone. He'd failed some test and they just... they took him and...."

He couldn't bring himself to finish the sentence. Thankfully Joan didn't need him to. She laced her fingers through his and squeezed reassuringly.

"They told me I'd be next," he said, his voice getting lower. "The Kaminoans. The training Sergeants. The other cadets. With Wrecker, Hunter, it was obvious they'd be useful, their mutations were fine. But me? What was I good for? Who could look at me and know what I was capable of?"

His words hung between them for a short while before Joan gave another squeeze of his hand.

"I'm so sorry, Crosshair," she said and he knew she meant it. "You deserved better. They all did. But... I know this might not sound quite right, but without that pain, you might not have become as determined and passionate and committed and loyal as you are now."

He finally looked away from the wall and down at her, surprised that she remembered the words he'd once written for her, all those months ago. The words he believed embodied who he really was.

"You didn't let your past break you. You used it to make you stronger. You should be proud of that."

He had never been told such a thing before. He'd never been given permission to feel proud, to take ownership of his life. It made him feel... relieved. To know that all of his struggles could mean something made the burden of grief that much lighter to bear.

And to hear it coming from Joan made him feel things, too. He realized he wanted to kiss her. She was standing somewhat close, her fingers were still grasping his own. She seemed to be enough at ease, comfortable here with him, even in such a sad moment. But he panicked and looked away before he could act on such impulses. He still didn't know what she wanted, or any of the things she'd alluded to having gone through herself. It didn't feel right to make to such an intimate move yet.

"Um, we can talk about you now," he stuttered awkwardly, overly aware of how clammy his hand felt under hers. "If you want...."

She laughed a little, but it wasn't a joyful sound. "I'm afraid my story's not any happier."

"Oh."

She cocked her head a little and reached up with her free hand to lightly touch the tattoo around his eye. "Didn't get a chance to tell you before, but I really like this. It's perfect."

He smirked but kept his eyes carefully fixed on hers, waiting. She seemed to be deciding what she wanted to say.

"Not sure if you've seen my own." She tried to sound playful, letting go of his hand in order to turn slightly and show off the splattering of tattooed birds around the thick scar on her thigh. "It's... kind of a memorial, too."

Joan looked toward the wall and took in a measured breath. "When the war started, my family did what we could to help. But then comes the Republic with its grand, shiny new army, and they tell us they've got it from here. Go home. My parents listened... I didn't. I couldn't. No, I marched up to the first battalion I could find and I told them I'd be helping them whether they liked it or not. They were the 116th, led by Commander Crowe."

She held a small smile on her face, fondness peeking through the sorrow like rays of sunlight into a curtained room.

"Your brothers," said Crosshair knowingly.

"Mmhmm.... They were so good to me. They taught me everything I know. We went through so much together. And then one day..." she looked over at Crosshair apologetically as she borrowed his previous words to tell her own story, "my speeder exploded, messed up my leg really bad. I did everything I could to try and fix it myself, but we were short on supplies and it just wasn't getting any better. Crowe insisted I go to Coruscant for treatment. I didn't want to, I hadn't been apart from them in years, but there was no choice."

And then the curtains were snapped shut and all that was left on Joan's face was sorrow. Sorrow and darkness.

"They died while I was recovering. All of them. A single missile to their ship somewhere in deep space. And that was it. No more 116th battalion. No more family."

Instinctually, Crosshair reached for Joan's hand as she had done for him. She seemed surprised, breaking out of her haze and looking at his hand like it was the only thing grounding her.

"I should have died with them," she said in a hoarse voice. "At least, that's what I told myself for seven months. Until Cody came. He'd been good friends with Crowe, knew all about me. He told me to get over myself. That I was still alive for a reason and that I did nothing to honor their memories by letting myself waste away. And then he offered me a job, said I could help some of his other brothers, the way I'd done for the 116th."

Slowly her sadness was fading and Crosshair was grateful. It was easier to hold on to his own pain and learn to live with it, but seeing the same feelings in Joan had scared him. He didn't know what to do to help her. As she wrapped up her story, though, he began to realize that he already had.

"He said it was an experimental unit and that none of you would look like, well, the regular clones, so maybe it'd be easier for me to get back into it. And it was. I knew I loved all of you boys from the first day. You were all confident and eager. None of the battle-worn spirits I was used to dealing with. You gave me life again. Helped me rediscover my purpose. My passion."

She took a step closer to him, holding his hand back firmly.

"You were the tough one," she smirked. "You're so calm and relaxed, so sure of yourself. Any time I felt anxious or like I wasn't making a difference, I knew I could count on you to put me at ease. Even when you were a little sassy."

She giggled, but Crosshair's mind was reeling. She thought he was the assured one? This whole time she'd been seeing him the same way he saw her?

"And then, you know, you stood me up that one day," she sighed dramatically and then it was his stomach that started doing flips as the regret from his actions returned. "Which happened to be the, uh, anniversary of their passing.... And I didn't think I'd be able to do anything that day, except that I knew you'd be coming by, and so I actually got out of bed and did some chores and saw other patients.... And I was trying to think of ways I could keep you for longer than just a consult on your injury. I was going to have you teach me darts and maybe help me sneak some good snacks from somewhere or ask to get a tour of your new ship...."

She was looking up at him with bright eyes and the thought of kissing her returned. She was definitely close enough now, and as he made eye contact, she couldn't seem to remember what she was going to say next, her voice trailing off into short little breaths.

"I really am sorry," he said, stalling for time. He wasn't sure why he kept hesitating when it was something he wanted so desperately. So much for her thinking he was confident.

"I know," she said softly. Was she leaning closer or was he?

"I... I'm leaving tomorrow," he said.

"I know." Both of their hands were clasped in each other's now, pulses beating rapidly beneath hopeful grips.

"And," he kept going, even though the space between them was continuing to grow smaller, "I've never done this before."

"I know." She grinned, and that undid him.

Whatever self-conscious walls he'd put up for whatever irrational reasons came crumbling down as he finally closed the gap and pressed his lips against hers.

[thepowerfulfour]

My TFP OC named Nightwave, or Night for short.

This OC of mine is very old compared to the other I posted here. I first made this character as my interpretation of Steve the Vehicron, and wasn't very original, but I'd say, not bad for a 14 year old. In the original Frozen and TFA crossover, Steve got his powers from Elsa. Now his name is just Nightwave or Night for short, and I gave him a much more original story so that he'd be my own character.

He and his brother, Cybereye, or Cybe for short, were born as twins to a seeker and grounder couple. Growing up as biracial, he felt like he never fit in with either race, and due to the racism between the grounders and seekers, his whole family experienced harassment, but he was overall a happy child.

Night's city of Vos was destroyed in a battle between Decepticons and Autobots which escalated the war on a global scale. His parents died from a stray missle that demolished their house. His brother and him survived but had to run out of the burning city to escape.

Vorns later, his brother and him would survive alone by stealing rations from military camps and one day tried to steal from the Iacon Hall of Records, after seeing a significant amount of energon being taken inside. They were caught by Alpha Trion, who took them in instead of sending them away.

Alpha Trion raised the teenagers for several vorns and seemed to favor Night. What Alpha Trion didn't tell Night is what he knows his future holds and what Night really is, Night is the carrier of the Allspark. One day, Alpha Trion convinces the twins to join the Decepticon ranks and to never mention Alpha Trion to anyone. While the twins were confused, Alpha Trion knew that if he didn't, Night will never get to Earth to continue his destiny.

Night became a soldier while Cybe became head of Cyber Operations with high rank due to his talent with computers. After a coupling with another soldier, Night had a son, who he raised in secret with the help of his twin brother. His son was murdered and after that, Night became deeply resentful of Alpha Trion for convincing him to join the Decepticons because of the loss of his son.

When the Nemesis arrived on Earth, Night nearly got killed after a relic him and his unit were supoosed to retrieve exploded and killed the rest of his unit. He survived and woke up days later with everything frozen around him. Megatron quickly realized Night now has special abilities and, wanting to replicate that for himself, had Night essentially tortured as Shockwave tries to figure out what is causing an ordinary vehicron to have abilities, all while never realizing Night has the Allspark.

Night was rescued by Smokescreen after he got back the phase shifter and the Omega Keys. Night, too weak to display his new abilities, was brought back to health by Ratchet and wasn't an easy patient.

Night slowly learned to control his abilities and very slowly learned to trust the Autobots. He doesn't know he has the Allspark until Alpha Trion reveals it via a vision to Optimus.

This story is subject to change and I glazed over a few details to keep this from being longer. Now, for a little about the picture!

I learned that freezing fire exists, so I decided to include that in his abilities, thus the blue fire. Instead of the Decepticon insignia I opted to put the Allspark symbol I made up using a writing system PGweinbenn from DeviantArt made. I also used my favorite gold paint, which is metallic and very nice.

[sharpnothashtag]

The Good Ship CrushWay, Chapter 43

Later that same evening, Tasha and Ro are walking/stumbling to a turbolift.

Ro: I had completely forgotten how much liquor you can put away. Tasha: (hiccup) I had, too. (Ro laughs)

The turbolift doors open, and Tasha and Ro stumble in.

Ro: Remember how we used to use these turbolifts to make things interesting? Tasha: Remember how Captain DeSoto had to give us a talking to-- Together: And we made out in the turbolift on the way to his ready room?! (both explode into laughter.)

The laughter dies down a bit, and there is a moment of silence between them.  Ro looks at Tasha REALLY hard.

Ro: I really want you right now. Tasha: Good, because I want you, too. (Tasha slams Ro against the door, and they explode into some pretty passionate lovemaking.  It takes the turbolift doors opening and them falling into the hallway for them to get off of each other long enough to go into Tasha’s quarters, where they continue the sexy times behind closed doors.)

Still at the bar/engagement party, Miles and Data are sitting on stools debating the age-old topic: Mozart or Haydn?  Keiko has joined them since Molly is now in bed, but she is clearly not feeling it.

Data: Both certainly have their merits. Miles: Mozart’s passion is unparalleled, Data. Data: I do not believe that is the most accurate adjective to use.  Haydn’s passion was different than Mozart, not better or worse. Miles: How can you compare them?  What was Haydn’s passion? Data: Many have postulated on that question, but my own opinion is that Haydn was passionate about humor. Miles: (taking a mental step back from the conversation) I can see that. Data: I would like to further state that Haydn’s passion could also be viewed as life.  He composed to stay alive.  He reflected on the many hungry nights of his youth in his writings.  He became employed with the Esterhazy’s to survive.  Mozart did not like the idea of patronage, and he died a debtor. Miles: But you never think about that when you’re playing Mozart.  (Data starts to object.) Obviously, YOU do, but no one besides you does that. Data: What do you think about when you play Mozart? Miles: I don’t think about the man himself.  I think about those I’m performing with. Data: Do you not think about your ensemble in every piece, regardless of composer? Miles: It’s hard to explain, but it’s different with Mozart. Data: Perhaps it is for you. Keiko: Ok, ok.  Enough about dead white people.  It’s a normal person’s bedtime. Data: Keiko is right, Miles.  It is a reasonable hour for you to rest in order to be fully alert for tomorrow’s briefings. Miles: All right, all right, don’t gang up on me.  Let’s go home. Data: Good night, Normal Person Keiko.  Good night, Miles. Keiko: (smiling widely) Good night, Data.  Before you leave for the mission, I’d love to have you over for dinner. Data: You know I cannot be delighted to attend, but your invitation is appreciated, and I will come for dinner when you invite me.

Bev at Daneel’s quarters.  Doorbell.

Daneel: Come in! Bev: I just came to check on you. Daneel: I’m not suffering from a physical ailment, Doctor. Bev: Well, if you want someone to talk to, I’m here. Daneel: (looking at her curiously) You want to hear my part of the story, don’t you? Bev: Only if you want to tell it.  You remind me a lot of my son, and I always know and try to get him to talk when he’s upset. Daneel: We’ve met.  He’s a pretty cool guy. Bev: (beaming)  Thank you.  I’m very proud of him. Daneel: While we are similar, we have had very different experiences.  Wesley didn’t grow up with a lot of friends his age when he was young.  I had an inseparable group of friends.

Flashback: Same scene, exactly where we left off.

Daneel: (to Girl 3) What’s your idea? Girl 3:  I ask you all again: How badly do we want this freedom? Boy 1: (beat) I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I am willing to die for it. (The room is dead silent.) Girl 3: Me, too.  And that’s what I’ve decided to do. Girl 2: What?! Daneel: What do you mean? Girl 3: (holding up a remote in one hand and a circular disc in the other) I got 7 of these from a person in the underground.  We go to him and get these implanted in our chests.  The remote will set it off whenever we choose.  We go to the base nearest us, find the most important Gul’s office, and blow up as many Cardassians as possible. Boy 2: (after a beat) Seems simple enough. Daneel: You’re ready to kill yourself for this? Boy 2: I’d rather die like this and take as many Cardassians with me as I can then have them kill me whenever they see fit.  I’m in. Boy 1: They’re going to be here to take me and my little brother to the orphanage in the next few days.  I’d rather do this and have some control over the Cardassians than have to spend the rest of my life answering to them.  I’m in. Girl 2: If it takes the destruction of my body to get the chains of my people to fall to the ground, so be it.  I’m in. Girl 3: It’s up to you, Akares. Daneel: You’re not going to base your decision off of what I say, are you? Girl 3: I’m not.  But your opinion does matter to me.  I want to hear what you have to say. Daneel: My parents are old.  They need me. Girl 3: You have cousins, don’t you? Daneel: Yes--I guess they could take care of my parents.  But-- Boy 2: I think I have an even better solution. (Daneel raises their eyebrows.) Leave them a note telling them to go here as soon as they read it, since something has happened to you. (He hands Daneel a piece of paper with some coordinates scribbled on it.) Daneel: What’s this? Boy 2: It’s a place my great-great grandfather built deep, deep underground.  The Prophets showed him where to build it so it could be used during the occupation.  I’ve left the coordinates for my parents, too, and I took the time to write it down for your families as well.  (Boy 2 hands out coordinates to Boy 1, Girl 2, and Girl 3.) Daneel: I need to go home.  I’ll decide in the morning. Girl 2: So be it.  You know where to find us when you decide. Boy 1: May the Prophets guide you, Akares.

Back to the present

Bev: What did you do? Daneel: (pulling their shirt down far enough to expose the scar) I got up in the middle of the night to go find them.  We went to get the discs implanted right then, and we planned our attack for the next morning.  (They are quiet for a moment, as if searching for an explanation.) Everyone deserves freedom.  I was just willing to die for it. (continuing on through the story, not looking for a facial cue from Bev) I left a note for my parents that morning with the coordinates written in code.  We all left for the base together.  One by one, they all detonated.  I found out that Gul Dukat was there, and I knew he was important.  I sneaked to where he was.  As I was about to press the detonator, it was vaporized by a phaser.  Somehow, the confusion of the blast and my presence there managed to distract the guards for long enough for me to leave campus.  I took the most circuitous route home I could to try to throw them off the trail.  When I got home, my parents were packing as hurriedly as they could.

Flashback to Daneel’s home

Daneel: (to their parents) There’s no time to explain.  We have to go NOW. (Daneel grabs their parents and rushes them to the underground shelter and seals them in.)

Dad: Akares.  (Gathering Daneel and Mom in his arms) Thank the Prophets you’re safe. VO Daneel: I told them what happened--everything.  It took a lot of energy out of me, and I started to hyperventilate. Mom: (trying to soothe Daneel) I don’t think it was a Cardassian that destroyed the remote.  The Prophets themselves saved you, Akares.  And you saved us.  (They hear a ticking noise begin.) Daneel: (freaking out even more than before) My chest is ticking! Dad: It has to be the implant. Daneel: WHY IS IT TICKING Dad: (Attempting to remain calm) It must be linked to your heartrate somehow. Mom: Here, lay down with me, Akares.  Breathe with me. (After about 20-30 seconds, the ticking stops.) What about your friends’ families? Daneel: We assumed you two would get here first.  We left them a rhythmic knocking sequence.  They’re also supposed to get in touch with the militia to arrange food drop offs before they come. Mom: We don’t have to think about that right now. Dad: (laying down with both of them, Daneel in the middle) Let’s just lay here for a little while and thank the Prophets we’re alive.

Present

Bev: I’m thankful you’re alive, too.  I know that story takes a lot of energy to tell, and I really admire you for it.  I’m sure there’s more to it than that.  We can talk again when the mission starts, if you want. Daneel: Thanks, Dr. Crusher.   Bev: I’ll let you rest now.  If you want, Patrick’s aunt’s hot milk toddy is in the replicator under M 13. Daneel: (nodding) I’ll see you tomorrow.

[weerd1]

Star Trek DS9 Rewatch Log, Stardate 1909.22, Supplemental: Missions Reviewed, “Treachery, Faith, and the Great River,” “Once More Unto the Breach,” “The Siege of AR-558,” “Covenant,” and “It’s Only Paper Moon.” (For Aron.)

“Treachery, Faith, and the Great River” begins with Odo receiving word from a Cardassian informant he thought was executed that they need to meet.  He informs Kira (while massaging out her sore muscles after spingball, godamighty) that he’s going alone, and take a Runabout to see if he can find the man. Meanwhile repairs are behind on the station and the Defiant, and Sisko demands O’Brien have them all completed when he gets back from a conference on Bajor. O’Brien is stymied, not having the parts he needs, when Nog offers to get them. 

He just needs Chief’s access codes to make the right trades to make it happen. Odo arrives at the rendezvous to find Weyoun, who wants to defect.  While they are heading back to DS9, they are hailed from Cardassia by…Weyoun and Damar. Turns out the Weyoun of the last couple of years died in an transporter accident. The Weyoun 6 clone is the defector, and Weyoun 7 wants him hunted down. Damar says they must destroy the ship, but Weyoung 7 knows the Jem’Hadar will never fire on Odo.  Damar mentions they don’t have to know he’s on board. Kira calls on O’Brien to explain why the Captain’s desk is missing, and Worf and Martok want to know why their bloodwine is gone. Confronting Nog, the Ferengi explains that the universe is governed by the Great Material Continuum, running like a river from places with too much of a thing to places with not enough of a thing.  He is counting on the river to get them their parts, with a little help from Ferengi trade practices. After one Jem’Hadar ship is defeated with Weyoun 6’s command, the Female Changeling confronts Weyoun 7 and Damar about what’s going on. Damar notices that the Changeling doesn’t look right, she looks dried out.  As soon as he mentions it, she changes and demands they get Weyoun 6. Six meanwhile, with Odo and cornered by Jem’Hadar reveals that the Founders are sick, all of them. He defected to make sure Odo was ok, and tell him that HE will be the last Founder, and de facto leader of the Dominion if the other die; and opportunity to reconstruct the Dominion as an organization of cooperation and peace. To Weyoun 7 to call off the attack, Six activates a built in suicide pill, and Seven is true to his word. Six asks Odo for his blessing as he dies, and indeed the clone dies in the arms of his God, his faith rewarded. 

On DS9, O’Brien expects to be derided when called to Sisko’s office, but Nog is there, as is the captain’s desk, and the repair parts are in the hanger. As they leave ops Worf and Martok appear. Somehow Nog as replaced their bloodwine with vintage 2309, far better quality than what they had before.  O’Brien is amazed, but Nog cites the Great Material River, HIS faith rewarded.

The A and B stories here almost get equal time, but there are a lot of great reveals here. The fact the Founders basically uplifted a group of timid tree apes to create the Vorta; the Vorta’s cloning practices; the fact the Founders are ill (there will be some more dire revelations about this later). All those heavy moments balance well with the Nog/O’Brien storyline.  Now, I have to tell you. This episode as a toy and nerd collector affected me deeply, and to this day, it is my policy that if someone really takes a shine to something in my collection, I pass it on to them. I like to call it, “casting it into the great material river.”  Whenever there is a hole on my shelf, something show up to take its place. I have faith my toys end up in the hands they should.

Kor comes to DS9 to ask Worf to help him go “Once More Unto the Breach.”  Kor has been marginalized in the war, and has not been able to seek glorious combat. Worf asks Martok if there is place for Kor, but Martok is incensed. Years before, Martok’s career was almost derailed before it could begin by Kor because the House of Kor was a great one, noble, and Martok was little more than a farm boy. Worf convinces him to allow Kor on as Third Officer in a mission to raid a Cardassian base. 

When Martok describes the plan, Kor states it was the same one he and Kang (last seen with Kor in “Blood Oath” way back in season 2, and before that on TOS) against the Federation in the previous century. The crew is overly respectful of Kor, D’Har Master, much to Martok’s chagrin. When the actual fight happens though, Martok and Worf are incapacitated, and Kor takes over, losing himself and thinking he is back in battle against the Federation and Kang is on his way to help. When Worf and Martok retake control, Kor is shamed and abashed, but their small fleet is also being pursued by ten Jem’Hadar ships. Worf devises a plan to stop them, but it will cost a ship. If that ship can stop even a few of the enemy ships, the others might escape.  Worf plans to take command, but Kor knocks him out with a hypo, beaming to the bird of prey that will face the Jem’Hadar. Martok monitors the battle, amazed at Worf’s bravery, but Worf appears on the bridge, informing him it is Kor in battle.

  They watch amazed, waiting for whatever ships Kor cannot stop to pursue them.  None do. Though it cost his life, Kor destroys all ten Jem’Hadar vessels, leaving Martok’s crew—and Martok himself—to drink and sing songs of Kor’s victory, knowing they will see him in Sto-Vo-Kor.

Another great Klingon episode, and a great end for the always entertaining, and slightly mad, Kor. This it turns out was also John Colicos’ final acting role, and what a note to go out on.  The heroic battle is pure Klingon here too. The tension between noble houses and minor houses on Qo’noS is interesting, as it will also factor heavily into “Discovery” in its first season, specifically with the House of Kor dealing with Voq, son of none. There are also a few nice moments between Kor and Ezri, who seems to immediately accept Dax as Dax. Perhaps he adapted better having already dealt with the change from Curzon to Jadzia, however even then he was rather quick to accept her.  An interesting quirk for someone so adherent to Klingon noble traditions.

“The Siege of AR-558” has the Defiant bringing supplies to a Starfleet outpost in the Chin’Toka system, which has not been easily held. The outpost has captured a Dominion communications array, and hope to crack it, but have been too busy defending it against repeated attacks. On the mission is Quark at the behest of the Nagus who wants a report on the state of the war. It isn’t good. These people have been defending this outpost for five months; two months longer than a tour is supposed to be.  They were 150 people, they are now down to about 40. They are constantly falling victim to “Houdini mines,” small floating explosives that hang in subspace and randomly appear and explode, perhaps somewhere you’ve walked a hundred times.

 Nog is impressed by the battle hardened humans here, but Quark warns him these are not the cuddly Earthers he knows.   “…take away their creature comforts… deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers… put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time… and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people will become as nasty and violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don't believe me? Look at those faces, look at their eyes…" When the Dominion attacks the Defiant, Worf pulls back, leaving Sisko, Bashir, Nog, Dax, and Quark on the surface to help defend the base. Ezri befriends Kellin (played by Lost in Space and Babylon Five’s Bill Mumy) who is trying to crack the mine problem, and they start to work. Sisko sends Nog out on a scouting mission with two of the Soldiers here, and though they get a good look at the Jem’Hadar base, one is killed and Nog loses his leg. Bashir plays Vic Fontaine music as they await the attack, but when Ezri and Kellin get control of the mines, Sisko uses them on the Jem’Hadar, thinning their numbers before the attack. One of the Jem’Hadar makes it to where Nog lies wounded, Quark himself shoots him down. 

When all is said and done, Kellin is dead, but reinforcements and engineers arrive, allowing the one survivor of the original group to leave with the Defiant.

A grim and powerful episode that aims to look war right in the face.  Quark’s speech I quote here is really fantastic, but comes back to haunt him when he too, put in the corner, is willing to shoot to kill, to protect. Ezri questioning Sisko’s decision to turn the mines they were just condemning on the enemy calls into question what is fair in war, but also leaves you as a viewer to decide if it was the right decision or not. The Starfleet trooper with Jem’Hadar Ketracel White bottles, ripped from his enemies’ bodies, brings to mind the Klingon was saw in “Soldiers of the Empire” with Cardassian neck bones as a necklace.  At least it isn’t body parts, but DS9 does not flinch here, and it is a better story for it.  Nog losing his leg will come into play again very soon as well.  Back on TOS, Kirk would occasionally refer to himself and other Starfleet members as “Soldiers.” Here we see that’s true; makes you wonder if they plan to bring back the Marines we saw in STVI: The Undiscovered Country (the Colonel of course was played by Rene Auberjonois!).

Kira is visited by an old friend, Vedek Fala, in “Convenant.” He gives her a gift which turns out to be a transponder that allows her transport across the sector to the previously abandoned sister station to DS9, Empok Nor.  There she finds her Vedek is actually part if the cult of the Pah-Wraits, who feel the Prophets turned their back on Bajor. In charge of the cult, she finds Dukat, who feels since he once housed Kost Amojan that he now has been touched by the Pah-Wraiths, and chosen to lead their people.

 Fala shows her the Bajorans here are completely under Dukat’s sway. Indeed there is one pregnant woman, who with her husband have only been allowed to have kids because Dukat has allowed it. Kira is less than convinced, but Fala persists telling her the Prophets have lied about the Pah-Wraits and they are peaceful. Dukat meanwhile tells Kira he has changed, and he loves his people. She points out he has set up some weird simulation of what he lost, commanding a station like Terok Nor, with a horde of Bajorans who love him. This proves startlingly true when the pregnant mother gives birth to a half-Cardassian baby. Dukat claims it is a miracle and a sign, but there are some doubters. He meets with the woman, apologizing for the “weakness” that allowed him to father her child, but when she says no one else knows, he tries to flush her out an airlock. 

Kira and Fala come along and save her, but now Dukat must act. He locks Kira in her room and is going to take poison with all of his followers so they can “shed their bodies” to help the Pah-Wraiths enter the Celestial Temple. Kira breaks out and tackles Dukat just as he was going to take the first pill, knocking his from his hand. When Fala hands him just another one out of the box, Dukat won’t take it, and they all realize he was going to let them die and go on. He tells them it was what the Pah-Wraiths wanted, but they aren’t having it, and he has to beam away. Fala meanwhile takes his pill and dies in Kira’s arms, telling her it was because of “faith.”

Dukat going full blown cult-leader is right in line with his arrogance and his ego. It’s just another example to me though that one of the bets DS9 misses is having Kira kill Dukat at the end of the series.  Yes, this sets him to as a vessel of the Pah-Wraiths, an Anti-Emissary, but I thing all the personal grudges with Kira deserve a better resolution. And for those who freak out over Scotty building an interplanetary transporter in the Kelvin Timeline, here’s one at work with Dominion tech in 2374, 13 years BEFORE Spock will go back in time and teach KY Scotty how to finish his. For that matter, before the Voyager will show up in just a couple of years with Borg Transwarp tech too. The Kelvin Timeline works if you just look at the details.

Finally, fandom tonight watched “It’s Only a Paper Moon” as a tribute to Aron Eisenberg’s passing, so I made sure I got this far.  Nog returns to the station with his new bio-synthetic leg, but it hurts him and he must walk with a cane. All his medical checks show fine though, and he is interested in doing nothing but lying in bed and listening to Vic Fontaine sing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” the song Bashir played in “The Siege of AR-558.” When Jake can’t take more than three days of that song on repeat he confronts Nog, who leaves and goes to the Holosuite to hear Vic sing it.  Nog decides to stay and live in the holosuite for a while.  Ezri is skeptical, but Vic mentions he will take care of the kid. Indeed, Vic helps wean him off his cane, and gives him something to do by letting him do the casino’s “books.” Nog though seems so comfortable he won’t come out. Ezri asks Vic when he’s going to be done with him, and Vic seems to realize he too has become dependent on Nog; usually, he’s only on for a few hours at a time, but with Nog there 26 hours a day, he is now constant. 

 Realizing he’s putting his own needs first, Vic shuts down the program himself.  Nog tries to get it running again, but can’t, but Vic appears to ask him about it. Nog says he doesn’t want to go back to the real world because he’s afraid, as anything could happen. Vic tells him that’s life, and why you have to seize it when you can, and indeed why he was happy to have Nog there. It’s time though, time for Nog to seize it for real. Nog leaves without his cane, and reunites with his family. Later, back in uniform Nog visits and tells Vic he has a present for him. Nog has made a deal with Quark, and this holosuite will continue to run full time, allowing Vic a life. Nog knows it’s the least he can do since Vic helped him get his own life back.

Bittersweet to watch tonight, but a great episode that takes a long look at the trauma of war and the mental scars that can be far worse than the physical ones.  The continued development of Vic Fontaine as a sentient lifeform is interesting, able to control who does and does not use his program. Still self aware though that there are times he is “off.” Aron Eisenberg is of course terrific and this is an important episode for Nog, demonstrating why this was the episode his friends, fans, and family chose to commemorate him.  

NEXT VOYAGE: The Orion Syndicate has come back for O’Brien, and somehow the Tigan family is involved. The Tigans are Ezri’s family before she was joined; she comes home in “Prodigal Daughter.”

[newyorkroleplay-blog1]

PARKER VOS –

Birthdate: April 23rd, 1985 ( 34 ) Gender and Pronouns: Male, he/him Hometown: New York, New York Neighborhood: Morris Park, The Bronx Occupation: Security Guard Faceclaim: Scott Eastwood Trigger Warnings: Bombs, Death, PTSD, Torture, War.

BIOGRAPHY –

Parker grew up in a house in New York with his parents and younger sister. His parents, a lawyer and a teacher at the local High school, were loving parents who doted on their children whenever they could. They did not spoil them, however, wanting them to grow up to be independent and realize what it meant to have to work hard for what you wanted. Both of Parker’s parents had come from poorer families, who often went to bed hungry, and worked their way up. They actually owned more money than they let on – they were minimalistic in what they spent, never going overboard, but anyone who got a closer look at their house and its interior could easily tell they did not necessarily have to worry about money. So while Parker never had to worry whether his parents would be able to buy him his new school books or a new pair of sneakers when he needed it, his parents still expected him to earn his own money once he was old enough to do so and wasn’t happy with his pocket money anymore. He started delivering newspapers, getting up early every morning to work before school. After school, he found himself training with the school’s football team, always having been a fan of sports, but not necessarily the biggest fan of most of his team members. One reason was that most of them were looking at his younger sister in a way he didn’t like, the other reason that they never really seemed to grow accustomed to the idea that he had been caught in the showers with their team captain after a game one night. His sexuality was not something Parker ever felt the need to hide, seeing as his parents were very accepting of who he was, but he also wasn’t the type of guy who’d walk around and make it the topic of every conversation. He didn’t see the point in it – it was part of who he was, and that was it.

Truth be told, his younger sister had always been his best friend since she was born. He’d been looking out for her for as long as he could remember, even if she didn’t always necessarily need it. They were joined by the hip until their teenage years, where they separated ways at least sometimes to go have their own lives. Parker’s dad always hoped his son might follow in his footsteps, make it into law school and that they would be working together one day. But while Parker was smart, he wasn’t necessarily school smart. His grades ranged from decent to awful, even if he did sometimes put in some extra work. He knew he didn’t want to be caught up in law school, hating it. And while he told whoever asked him that his father was his idol, he had an even bigger idol - his grandfather. The man had been a war hero, who served in the army until he lost a leg – and even after that, he never quite arrived home. The stories he told were both gruesome and inspiring, and deep inside, it was Parker’s biggest wish to fight for his country just like his grandfather had done. Not forever, maybe for a few years before he would settle down and find something else to do. He wanted to do something good in this world, and in his eyes, fighting for his country was just that.

While it had been his plan to go and join the army right after high school, love ruined his plans. It had been shortly before his eighteenth birthday when he found out that love at first sight is indeed possible. In his senior year of high school, Parker fell head over heels in love, and his plans were ruined from there on. His desire to go join the army was still there, but greatly overshadowed by the desire to spend as much time as possible with his boyfriend. A year turned into two, then into three, with Parker working at several different jobs. It wasn’t fulfilling, but for the moment it was enough as his focus lay entirely on his relationship, happiness, and moving in with his boyfriend. But as much as Parker loved his life, he couldn’t deny that he still wanted to go join the army, and if only for a short time, seeing as he couldn’t bear the thought of being too far away from his loved one for too long. To his delight, his boyfriend supported him when he finally dared bring his wish up to go and do it now just a few months after his 25th birthday. A year later, he was already sleeping in a dusty tent on the other side of the world. War was everything he had imagined, yet not what he had imagined at all. It was rough, but Parker felt like he was doing something good. The long-distance relationship wasn’t easy though, reduced to a few Skype calls and short leaves here and there. To him, it was worth it despite the pain.

But one night, it all ended for Parker Vos.

It had been a mission that wasn’t really planned. Parker was ushered out of his makeshift bed shortly after midnight, sent out into the darkness to fight the enemy once more. Except this time, luck wasn’t on their side. Maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was an ambush – no one ever found out, and Parker doesn’t remember much except for the earsplitting sound of a bomb exploding near him, screams, bodies flying through the air, and hot searing pain taking over his back. Then it all turned black. One month later, his parents, sister and boyfriend were informed that Parker had died in battle; his dead body nowhere to be found, but hardly any chance left of him still being alive. They had been searching for him and those who got lost with him, and there was no hope left. While his loved ones attended a funeral for an empty casket, Parker was on the other side of the world, hurdled up in a tiny cell with two other soldiers. Caught by the enemy, they were interrogated over and over again in an attempt to get word on the strategy of the US. Some days, hungry, thirsty, and with aching wounds, both from the explosion and the enemy’s interrogation techniques, Parker wished it would all just end.

It felt like an eternity until one day, the door to the small cellar was pulled open, light flooding inside, and this time the hands pulling him outside were not rough and annoyed, but carefully guiding him to a medical transport out of there. He found himself being interrogated once more once he had recovered, this time by his superiors, in an attempt to find out as much as they could. And then Parker found himself on a plane going home. It had been two years since Parker last set foot in his hometown – and New York had changed. Everything seemed different, and he often found himself feeling like a stranger to a place he once knew like the back of his hand, even after reuniting with his family and ex-boyfriend. Even now, so long after his return, and despite finding himself a new place to live with his dog and now boyfriend, what happened to him still overshadows his usually happy mood. His mental state is far from stable, as he only recently started doing proper therapy – and every time he wants to go on with life, his past throws him two steps back.

PERSONALITY –

( + ) encouraging, hard working, passionate. ( - ) absent minded, possessive, restless.

[damcgedsouls]

{joe keery ; twenty-three; cis man ; he/him } HAN SOLO from STAR WARS has been spotted in the quiet town of oakley lake. people say that they is CHARASIMATIC , but also has been said to be ARROGANT. around the town they spend their time as a MECHANIC AT UNDER THE HOOD. i heard that they DO remember where they came from.

basic facts:

full name: han solo

nickname: none

birthday january 12th

pronouns: he/him

sexuality: heterosexual

occupation: mechanic at under the hood

abilities: piloting

canon up to: dying at the hands of ben

+ traits: charismatic, charming, brave, & loyal

- traits: arrogant, cocky, moody, & stubborn

intro:

han never knew his mother and his father and him were never close. when he was young his father brought him to a freighter factory that his father worked out, and he pointed out to han that han was not meant to build ships like him but instead fly them. not long after his father abandoned him.

after his father left, han became involved with a criminal gang known as the white worms. though while he was a part of it, he still didn't fit him, not always following their rules. but being a part of the gang helped him survive on his own. he meant qi'ra when a part of the gang and she became his closest friend and a little bit more.

han attempted to get him and qi'ra out of the gang by using coaxium to bribe the office at a checkpoint. han was able to make it through, but unfortunately qi'ra was captured. han promised her to come back and save her.

han enlisted in the imperial navy when he got away from the white worms, there he was given the last name solo since he was all alone. during the mimbam campaign, han saw the horrors of war for the first time. the world was peaceful and he watched as his fellow soliders died all around him.

when han retreated he ran into a gang of thieves who were pretending to be a part of the imperial army. he threatened to expose them if they didn't take him with him. but instead, tobias beckett reported han for insubordination. han was then declared to be excuted by the beast, a wookie named chewbacca. han was able to use his knowledge of shyriiwook to convince chewbacca to fake a fight so they can both escape. they were able to and chewbacca proclaimed a life debt to han and became his lifelong best friend.

han starts his outlaw live by working for tobias beckett crew. however, han fails and drops the cargo, he promises dryden vos of the crimson dawn an equivalent shipment by making the notorious kessel run to get unrefined coaxium. it was when meeting with dryden vos that han runs into his old childhood friend and lover qi’ra.

han knows he will need a fast ship to do the kessel run before it was degrade and then explode. so qi'ra introducing him to a man named lando calrission. han tryies to play him in a game of corellian spike with the stakes being lando's ship, the millennium falcon. unfortunately han loses the game due to lando hiding a card up his sleeve. though, lando still agrees to help them for a cut of the profit.

they are able to steal the unrefined coaxium, but they realize to get it to savareen safely, they will need to do the kessel run in 12 parsecs instead of the usual 20. han is the one to fly the falcon with chewie as his copilot.

on savareen, they refined the coaxium and ran into the cloud-riders; who han learned were not pirates but freedom fighters trying to stop the crimes committed by the crimson dawn and other crime sydenicates. han thought of a plan to give all the coaxium to the cloud-riders and give vos fake coaxium. however, he was betrayed by beckett who was a double agent. han double crossed beckett and vos by bringing the countainer with real coaxium to vos. qi'ra killed vos and promised to go with han to kill beckett but after han did, qi'ra left him behind taking vos yacht away from the planet. han gives the coaxium to the cloud-riders and they told han they would use it to help start a rebellion against the empire. they left han with a small portion to find his own way.

han and chewie track down lando since han knows that the falcon belongs to him, he felt connected to the ship. han swiped lando spare cards that he had up his sleeve. and because of that he is able to win the falcon from lando and him and chewie fly away in it. and they start their lives as outlaws and smugglers.

over the next few years han and chewie did jobs for different people around the galaxy, but han had to drop the load he was smuggling for jabba the hutt due to imperial spacecraft and it lead to jabba placing a large bounty on the smuggler's head.

while in a mos eisley cantina, han felt like his luck was going to change when an old man promised to pay him seventeen thousand to bring him, a boy, and two droids to alderaan. han knew that this would help get him out of the bind he was in with jabba. but before he can leave the cantina, one of the bounty hunters who work for jabba showed up and threatened han. han without hesitation killed greedo and went to the falcon.

han quickly learned that the mission wasn't as easy as he thought it was when before they were able to leave stormtroopers showed up and shot at the ship. han was able to get the falcon away from tatooine and headed towards alderaan.

han and luke did not get along at first, the two have very different personalities. and han didn’t believe in the force that luke and obi-wan were talking about.

when they got to alderaan, they learned horrible news, that alderaan had been blown away and before they could get away, they get brought in to the death star. they hide in the smuggler holds in the ship till they can attack the stormtroopers and steal their uniforms.

they head to the security room on the death star, where artoo figures out where the tractor beams on the death star are. obi-wan leaves to go disables them and tells them to stay in there. soon artoo figures out where princess leia is being held, luke wants to go rescue her, while han wants to stay put. but han decides to go with him. while their plan got them into the prison hold, once they got there they got into a gun fight. han tries to talk to the security when luke goes to rescue leia, unfortunately han isn’t able to convince them and stormtroopers storm the prison hold. han, leia, luke, and chewie go down a chute into the garbage disposal.

luke is attacked by a monster that not longer after lets him go and them the walls start to close in on them. luckily threepio is able to get artoo to shut down the garbage disposal before they are crushed.

they all leave and are confronted by stormtroopers. han and chewie go one way chasing after the stormtroopers, leia and luke go another way. while at first han was chasing the stormtroopers, soon they led him to a room with a lot of stormtroopers and he quickly turns around and runs away. han and chewie are able to get away and get back to the falcon, where they run into leia and luke.

they all board the falcon and leave the death star, luke and han used the guns on the falcon to fight off the tie-fighters and get away. once they are away, han strokes his own ego, and leia tells them they are being tracked but han refuses to believe her and tells her he wants nothing to do with her rebellion, he is only in it for the money. though a part of him starts to like leia, but won’t admit it since he feels like they could not be together.

once they get to the rebel base, han starts to load his reward onto the falcon. luke tries to convince han to stay and help, but han refuses, but offers luke to come with him which luke says no to.

han decides to go back and shoots one of the tie-fighters which knocks the other two away right before darth vader’s tie-fighter was going to shoot at luke. han then tells luke to blow up the death star so they can go home. once the death star is blown up, han returns to the rebel base with luke.

together, luke and leia and han celebrate the death star. and han along with luke are given medals by the rebellion for their part in blowing up the death star, han then decides to stay and help the rebellion.

han spends the next few years helping and fighting with the rebellion. he decides to leave though when he ran into a bounty hunter on ord mantell. after he tells the general he is leaving him and leia bicker in the hallway, han trying to get her to admit she likes him, but leia refuses to say it.

han was helping chewie fix the falcon when he learns that luke never returned and it's getting later and cold on the ice planet. so han heads out to find him, not caring for his own safety since he knows his friend needs him. han rides his tauntaun looking for luke. he is luckily able to find his friend, unfortunately the tauntaun dies from the cold. so han cuts it open, placing luke inside until han can get the camp set up.

the next morning the two are rescued and return to the rebel base. but unfortunately their peace is short-lived since there was a probe droid sent by the empire that han found. so the empire heads to their planet and the rebels have to mount an escape.

han takes leia from the command room to make sure she gets to her transport, unfortunately an explosion blocked off their path, so han decided to take leia out on the falcon. they are able to get off the planet before being attacked.

when they get into space, han learns that they can’t go into lightspeed because of damage to the ship. while han is trying to fix it, the falcon flies into an asteroid field. han decides to go into it and use it to help destroy the tie-fighters chasing them. once they are away, han lands in a cave of one of the asteroids so he can repair the ship in peace.

while everyone is working on trying to fix things around the ship, him and leia have a talk and by the end they share their first kiss. only to be disrupted by threepio and leia slipped away.

leia sees something outside the ship; han, leia, and chewie head out to check out what it was. it was a mynock chewing on the ship, han tells leia to go back in and he and chewie will make sur there are no more. but before they can more fly past leia and the cave shakes again and that’s when han realizes it’s not a cave. he shoots at the ground and it starts shaking again. he tells everyone it’s time to leave. and the falcon is able to get out before the monster closes it’s mouth.

when they get out of the asteroid field they start to be attacked by the empire again and they still can’t go into lightspeed. so han does a risky move and goes towards the star destroyer and lands on the back of it, hiding, so they think that the falcon went into lightspeed and was gone.

han decides a safe place to go is bespin, a place owned by his old friend, lando. while him and lando haven’t had the best relationship, he knows that he doesn’t like the empire either so he hopes that lando will let them hide there till the falcon is fixed. and when they head there, they are unknowingly being followed by a bounty hunter named boba fett.

lando allows han to land and tells han that his people will repair the falcon. han watched over the falcon repair and heads to the room leia is in to share an update where leia shares her worries about this place and lando. that’s when chewie comes in with a destroyed threepio.lando then comes and invites them for refrreshments, when they arrive at the room the door opens to reveal darth vader and boba fett. lando apologizes before they are taken in.

han is then tortured by darth vader, not for information, just so he would feel terrible pain, in hopes that luke will feel it through the force and come. han is then placed in a cell with chewie and leia. lando explains that leia and chewie will stay in bespin, han tries to attack him but is attacked by lando’s bodyguards.

not long later they are all lead to a place that carbon freezing is done in. lando tells han that he is being frozen in carbonnite. before he is frozen leia tells him she loves him and he replies with, “i know”. han is then frozen and boba fett takes him to jabba the hutt.

for the next six months han is frozen on the wall in jabba’s palace. leia shows up one night and unfreezes him. but before they can leave jabba reveals that he has been hiding in the room the whole time. han is placed in a cell with chewie and is brought out after luke killed the rancor. han is told them him, chewie, and luke are going to be fed to the sarlaac pit.

once at the sarlaac pit luke starts his plan, leia kills jabba, and luke gets rid of all the people who tried to shoot at them. han accidentally hits boba fett since he still couldn’t see which caused boba to fall into the sarlaac pit.

lando falls off the ship, so han reaches down to save him. when the sarlaac grabs lando, han shoots it and helps pull lando up. they all head out and all but luke heads to where the rebels are meeting up.

while the generals are explaining the plans, it is revealed that han is a general leading a mission to take out the shield generator for the new death star on endor. once they get down there, han tries to get rid of some stormtroopers, unfortunately it does not work and leia and luke chase after them on speeders.

when luke returns, han asked him what happened to leia, which luke didn’t know since they got separated, so they decide to go look for her. while looking chewie tries to eat a piece of meat which turned out to be a trap. artoo got them out, only for them to be surrounded by ewoks. when they see threepio, they think he is a god and after han tries to attack threepio for refusing to pretend to be a god to get them out of the situation, all but threepio are tied up.

the ewoks take them back to their home where han, luke, and chewie are place over unlit firepits. threepio reveals that they are to be a feast in his honor. leia comes out and tries to help them, but the ewoks don’t listen until luke uses the force to make it seem like threepio has magic and they let them go.

threepio then explains their story to the ewoks who accept them into the tribe and will help them get to the shield generator.

the next day they head there and they get inside and start to try to place bombs but are captured. when they are taken outside, all the ewoks are there ready to attack all the stormtroopers. han and leia try to get back in but the code changed, they tried to use artoo, but he was shot. so han tries to hotwire it. it doesn’t work, but chewie shows up and they are then able to convince the empire workers to open the door and they head in. they are able to defeat all the stormtroopers and destroy the shield generator.

han is wrapping up leia’s arm when the death star is destroyed above them. han asks leia if she loves luke and she says yes, and he swallows his pride and tells her he will not get in their way. that was when she revealed that her and luke are brother and han and leia kiss in celebration. after they head back to where all the ewoks live and have a party celebrating the fall of the empire with all their friends.

only a few years after the end of the empire, han and leia welcomed in their son, a little baby they named ben after obi-wan kenobi.

han had a hard time being a father since he never had one himself really. when ben was young it was discovered he was force sensitive and he was sent away to be trained by luke. after that han travelled around the galaxy fixing ships, he kept in contact with leia through holograms.

the worst thing that happened to his family was when it was revealed that his wife was the daughter of darth vader. it led to his son being seduced to the dark side by snoke and destroying luke's jedi temple. after that han was unable to cope with the loss of his son, so he separated from his wife and went back to smuggling.

he spent the next couple of years flying around the galaxy with chewie doing smuggling. while they were doing their thing, the millennium falcon was stolen from han. he continued to smuggle, but also look for his ship. one day he found it, but with it came three passengers he wasn't expecting to run into. a former stormtrooper, a scavenger, and a driod with a map that leads to luke skywalker.

he takes them to takodana to an old friend maz who he knows can get them to the resistance and leia. unfortunately maz says she won't help them since she wants han to go home, though han is afraid to since he feels like leia doesn't want to see him. soon the planet is attacked by the first order. and when han gets captured he is saved by resistance pilots. and when the first order is leaving, he sees his son for the first time in years caring a knocked out rey. after the first order leaves, leia arrives and han sees her for the first time since their son's fall to the dark side.

he heads to the resistance base and there he talks with leia. where she tells him that he can bring ben back to the light since he is his father. it becomes han mission to try to save his son. with the first order heading to destroy the resistance base, han heads to starkiller base with finn and chewie to save rey and deactivate the shields of the planet.

on starkiller base they get the shields down and then find rey. before leaving they decide to plant bombs to help blow up the main reactor for the pilots. while han is planting bombs he sees his son. he follows his son and calls out his name. he goes on a bridge towards his son. he tries to talk to him and bring him back to the light. unfortunately for han it didn't work, instead his son ignites his lightsaber inside han, killing him.

last thing han remembers before arriving in oakley lake was sacrificing his life to hopefully help bring his son back to the light. han doesn’t know how or why he is here or why he is so much younger than he remembered.

[newyorkroleplay-archive]

PARKER VOS --

Birthdate: March 21st, 1987 ( 33 ) Gender and Pronouns: Male, he/him Hometown: New York, New York Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, Manhattan Occupation: Security Guard Faceclaim: Scott Eastwood Trigger Warnings: Torture, War.

BIOGRAPHY --

Parker Vos grew up in a small house in Greenwich Village with his parents and younger sister. His parents, a lawyer and a teacher at the next High school, were loving parents who doted on their children whenever they could. They did not spoil them, however, wanting them to grow up to be independent and realize what it meant to have to work hard for what you wanted. Both of Parker’s parents had come from poorer families, who often went to bed hungry, and worked their way up. They actually owned more money than they let on – they were minimalistic in what they spent, never going overboard, but anyone who got a closer look at their house and its interior could easily tell they did not necessarily have to worry about money. So while Parker never had to worry whether his parents would be able to buy him his new school books or a new pair of sneakers when he needed it, his parents still expected him to earn his own money once he was old enough to do so and wasn’t happy with his pocket money anymore. He started delivering newspapers, getting up early every morning to work before school. After school, he found himself training with the school’s football team, always having been a fan of sports, but not necessarily the biggest fan of most of his team members. One reason was that most of them were looking at his younger sister in a way he didn’t like, the other reason that they never really seemed to grow accustomed to the idea that he had been caught in the showers with their team captain after a game one night. His sexuality was not something Parker ever felt the need to hide, seeing as his parents were very accepting of who he was, but he also wasn’t the type of guy who’d walk around and make it the topic of every conversation. He didn’t see the point in it – it was part of who he was, and that was it.

Truth be told, his younger sister had always been his best friend since she was born. He’d been looking out for her for as long as he could remember, even if she didn’t always necessarily need it. They were joined by the hip until their teenage years, where they separated ways at least sometimes to go have their own lives. At the end of the day, Parker did not find his best friend in his football team or school mates though, but found himself coming back to his little sister over and over again to talk about the important things in life. Like the path in life their parents wanted for them, even if they always told them they were allowed to make their own decisions. Parker’s dad always hoped his son might follow in his footsteps, make it into law school and that they would be working together one day. But while Parker was smart, he wasn’t necessarily school smart. His grades ranged from decent to awful, even if he did sometimes put in some extra work. He knew he didn’t want to be caught up in law school, only to hate it. And while he told whoever asked him that his father was his idol, he had an even bigger idol - his grandfather. The man had been a war hero, who served in the army until he lost a leg – and even after that, he never quite arrived home. The stories he told were both gruesome and inspiring, and deep inside, it was Parker’s biggest wish to fight for his country just like his grandfather had done. Not forever, maybe for a few years before he would settle down and find something else to do. He wanted to do something good in this world, and in his eyes, fighting for his country was just that.

While it had been his plan to go and join the army right after high school, love ruined his plans. It had been shortly before his eighteenth birthday when he found out that love at first sight is indeed possible. In his senior year of high school, Parker fell head over heels in love, and his plans were ruined from there on. His desire to go join the army was still there, but greatly overshadowed by the desire to spend as much time as possible with his boyfriend. A year turned into two, then into three, with Parker working whatever job he could find. It wasn’t fulfilling, but for the moment it was enough as his focus lay entirely on his relationship, happiness, and moving in with his boyfriend. But as much as Parker loved his life, he couldn’t deny that he still wanted to go join the army, and if only for a short time, seeing as he couldn’t bear the thought of being too far away from his loved one for too long.To his delight, his boyfriend supported him when he finally dared bring his wish up to go and do it now just a few months after his 25th birthday. A year later, he was already sleeping in a dusty tent on the other side of the world. War was everything he had imagined, yet not what he had imagined at all. It was rough, but Parker felt like he was doing something good. The long-distance relationship wasn’t easy, reduced to a few skype calls and short leaves here and there. To him, it was worth it despite the pain.

But one night, it all ended for Parker Vos.

It had been a mission that wasn’t really planned. Parker was ushered out of his makeshift bed shortly after midnight, sent out into the darkness to fight the enemy once more. Except this time, luck wasn’t on their side. Maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was an ambush – no one ever found out, and Parker doesn’t remember much except for the earsplitting sound of a bomb exploding near him, screams, bodies flying through the air, and hot searing pain taking over his back. Then it all turned black. One month later, his parents, sister and boyfriend were informed that Parker had died in battle; his dead body nowhere to be found, but hardly any chance of him still being alive as his dog tags were dug up from the remnants of the vehicle. They had been searching for him and those who got lost with him, and there was no hope left. While his loved ones attended a funeral for an empty casket, Parker was on the other side of the world, hurdled up in a tiny cell with two other soldiers. Caught by the enemy, they were interrogated over and over again in an attempt to get word on the strategy of the US. Some days, hungry, thirsty, and with aching wounds, both from the explosion and the enemy’s interrogation techniques, Parker wished it would all just end. 

It felt like an eternity until one day, the door to the small cellar was pulled open, light flooding inside, and this time the hands pulling him outside were not rough and annoyed, but carefully guiding him to a medical transport out of there. He found himself being interrogated once more once he had recovered, this time by his superiors, in an attempt to find out as much as they could. And then Parker found himself on a plane going home. It had been two years since Parker last set foot in New York City – and the world around him had changed. Of course, everyone had moved on without him. While he had expected that to happen, it was still hard to find his own place. The apartment Parker had once lived in was sold, and he had to move in with his sister and her family in an attempt to get accustomed to life once more before he reunited with his former boyfriend. Parker tried to enjoy life as best as he could, with his family, loved one, a newly adopted dog and even a wedding a few months after his return home. But at night, he’s still plagued by nightmares and sudden movements or sound still hold more power over him than he would like to admit. PTSD is like a little devil sitting on his shoulder, and he has a hard time getting rid of it.

PERSONALITY --

( + ) encouraging, hard working, passionate. ( - ) absent minded, posessive, restless.

[your-dietician]

Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare | The New Yorker

New Post has been published on https://depression-md.com/britney-spearss-conservatorship-nightmare-the-new-yorker/

Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare | The New Yorker

On June 22nd, Britney Spears’s management team started getting nervous. Spears, who is thirty-nine, has spent the past thirteen years living under a conservatorship, a legal structure in which a person’s personal, economic, and legal decision-making power is ceded to others. Called a guardianship in most states, the arrangement is intended for people who cannot take care of themselves. Since the establishment of Spears’s conservatorship, she has released four albums, headlined a global tour that grossed a hundred and thirty-one million dollars, and performed for four years in a hit Las Vegas residency. Yet her conservators, who include her father, Jamie Spears, have controlled her spending, communications, and personal decisions.

In April, Spears had requested a hearing, in open court, to discuss the terms of the arrangement. It was scheduled for June 23rd. Members of Spears’s team, most of whom have had little or no direct contact with her for years, didn’t expect drastic changes to result. Two years earlier, in the midst of health struggles and pressure from Spears, Jamie had stepped down from his duties overseeing her personal life, and now the team thought that perhaps she wanted to remove him as the conservator of her financial affairs. Some of the team told reporters that they believed Spears liked the conservatorship arrangement, as long as her father wasn’t involved.

Running the business of Britney had become routine: every Thursday at noon, about ten people responsible for managing Spears’s legal and business affairs, public relations, and social media met to discuss merchandise deals, song-license requests, and Spears’s posts to Instagram and Twitter. (“This is how it works without her,” one member of the team said.) Spears, according to her management, typically writes the posts and submits them to CrowdSurf, a company employed to handle her social media, which then uploads them. In rare cases, posts that raise legal questions have been deemed too sensitive to upload. “She’s not supposed to discuss the conservatorship,” the team member said.

On the eve of the hearing, according both to a person close to Spears and to law enforcement in Ventura County, California, where she lives, Spears called 911 to report herself as a victim of conservatorship abuse. (Emergency calls in California are generally accessible to the public, but the county, citing an ongoing investigation, sealed the records of Spears’s call.) Members of Spears’s team began texting one another frantically. They were worried about what Spears might say the next day, and they discussed how to prepare in the event that she went rogue. In court on the 23rd, an attorney for the conservatorship urged the judge to clear the courtroom and seal the transcript of Spears’s testimony. Spears, calling into the hearing, objected. “Somebody’s done a good job at exploiting my life,” she said, adding, “I feel like it should be an open-court hearing—they should listen and hear what I have to say.” Then, for the first time in years, Spears spoke for herself, sounding lucid and furious, talking so fast that the judge interjected repeatedly to tell her to slow down, to allow for accurate transcription. “The people who did this to me should not get away,” Spears said. Addressing the judge directly, she added, “Ma’am, my dad, and anyone involved in this conservatorship, and my management, who played a huge role in punishing me when I said no—Ma’am, they should be in jail.”

For the next twenty minutes, Spears described how she had been isolated, medicated, financially exploited, and emotionally abused. She assigned harsh blame to the California legal system, which she said let it all happen. She added that she had tried to complain to the court before but had been ignored, which made her “feel like I was dead,” she said—“like I didn’t matter.” She wanted to share her story publicly, she said, “instead of it being a hush-hush secret to benefit all of them.” She added, “It concerns me I’ve been told I’m not allowed to expose the people who did this to me.” At one point, she told the court, “All I want is to own my money, for this to end, and for my boyfriend to drive me in his fucking car.”

Spears’s remarks were incendiary but, for people familiar with the creation and the functioning of her conservatorship, not surprising. Andrew Gallery, a photographer who worked for Spears in 2008, attended the hearing, watching the lawyers’ faces on a monitor. “As she spoke, I wanted to scream, and gasp, and shout ‘What the fuck is going on?’ ” he said. “But the lawyers had no reaction. They just sat there.”

The conservatorship was instituted by Spears’s family—in part out of real concerns about her mental health, people close to the family said. But the family was divided by money and fame, and Spears, in an underregulated part of the legal system, was stripped of her rights. She has fought for years to get them back.

As a pop star, Spears sustained a multinational industry of managers, agents, producers, lawyers, publicists, and assorted hangers-on. As the subject of the conservatorship, she has provided for the livelihood of even more lawyers and other court-appointed professionals. Jacqueline Butcher, a former friend of the Spears family who was present in court for the conservatorship’s creation, said she regrets the testimony that she offered to help secure it. “At the time, I thought we were helping,” she said. “And I wasn’t, and I helped a corrupt family seize all this control.”

Jamie Spears, who is sixty-eight, has graying hair and a hangdog demeanor. When he was thirteen, he endured an unimaginable tragedy: his mother committed suicide on the grave of one of her sons, who had died eight years earlier, at just three days old. In high school, Jamie was a basketball and football star; later, he worked as a welder and a cook. Lynne Spears, Britney’s mother, grew up with Jamie, in the small town of Kentwood, Louisiana. Sixty-six years old, she has a smile like Britney’s and thick dark hair with bangs. She used to run her own day-care center. Friends describe her as traditional and nonconfrontational. In a conversation in June, she was fastidiously polite as she declined to answer detailed questions about the case. She spoke in a whisper and apologized that she might have to hang up abruptly if other family members walked in and discovered her speaking to a reporter. “I got mixed feelings about everything,” she said. “I don’t know what to think. . . . It’s a lot of pain, a lot of worry.” She added, a little wryly, “I’m good. I’m good at deflecting.” Jamie and Lynne eloped when she was twenty-one, and the marriage was troubled from the start: in divorce papers filed, then withdrawn, in 1980, less than two years before Britney’s birth, Lynne accused Jamie of cheating on her on Christmas Day. Jamie wrestled with alcoholism, going on benders so egregious that Lynne once shelled his cooler with a shotgun.

But Jamie and Lynne worked together to make Britney, their second child, happy and a success. She was a born performer, a scene-stealer at dance recitals starting at age three. Her parents drove her to small dance competitions in Lafayette, then to larger ones in New Orleans. They borrowed money from friends to pay for gas to get her to auditions. Spears snagged an understudy role on Broadway and then a stint in the nineties version of “The Mickey Mouse Club.” When she was sixteen, she signed a six-album deal with Jive Records, thanks to an enterprising entertainment lawyer named Larry Rudolph, who became her manager. A precise and commanding dancer with an unmistakable vocal tone of sugary coyness, Spears emerged as a teen-pop singularity. In 1998, the music video for her début single, “. . . Baby One More Time,” featuring a sixteen-year-old Spears in a Catholic-schoolgirl outfit, exploded across American pop culture like fireworks on the Fourth of July. The pleated skirt and bare midriff were her idea—a fact that’s sometimes cited as evidence of her self-determination but might also suggest an intuition, common among teen-age girls, of the compromised power of sex appeal.

Because Jamie and Lynne had two other children to look after, a family friend chaperoned Spears for much of her early career. But Spears remained close to her mother, and, in 2000, she built a four-and-a-half-million-dollar estate for Lynne in Kentwood. That year, according to “Through the Storm,” a memoir that Lynne published in 2008, Spears urged her mother to divorce her father, knowing that “years and years of verbal abuse, abandonment, erratic behavior, and his simply not being there for me had taken their toll,” Lynne writes. She and Jamie divorced in May, 2002, and Spears told People that it was “the best thing that’s ever happened to my family.”

Spears had just broken up with Justin Timberlake, a fellow teen-pop icon, whom she had met when she was eleven, when they were both cast as Mouseketeers. The breakup destabilized her, people close to her remember; her status as half of a golden couple had become an integral part of her identity, and after the split her sex life became a regular topic in the news. She began going out more and hanging out with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, forming a holy trinity for tabloid culture at its early-two-thousands peak. “The paparazzi were out of control,” Hilton recalled, of one night with Spears at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Fighting over getting the shot, pushing each other against my car, scratching it with their cameras. It was overwhelming and frightening.” The hairdresser Kim Vo, Spears’s longtime colorist, remembers how, one day, as Spears was getting her hair done, a paparazzo scaled a wall and broke a salon window with his fist.

Spears distracted herself with work—a relentless grind of dance rehearsals, studio sessions, photo shoots, stadium performances, long nights on the tour bus, and hotel check-ins before dawn. “The schedule was crazier and crazier,” Julianne Kaye, a makeup artist who worked with Spears in the early years, said. “She would have little breakdowns. She was always crying, saying, ‘I want to be normal.’ ” Spears blew off steam by partying: she smoked weed, used cocaine, took Molly with her dancers and jumped into the Mediterranean Sea. But the machinery around her only grew. When she toured, the crew took at least a dozen buses and filled entire hotel floors.

In the spring of 2004, Spears met a dancer named Kevin Federline at a night club, and they were married within six months. Spears initially did not secure a prenuptial agreement, which prompted panic in her family. A considerable fortune was at stake. “Lynne lost her mind,” Butcher, the family friend, recalled. “They weren’t gonna allow the wedding to be made legal.” The marriage contract wasn’t signed until the month after the ceremony, when Federline legally agreed to limit his stake in Spears’s estate. But Spears seemed thrilled, and commissioned a photo shoot in which she dressed up as a French maid and served drinks to Federline, who wore a trucker hat, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. Spears wanted a family. “I’ve had a career since I was 16, have traveled around the world & back and even kissed Madonna!” she wrote on her Web site, two months after getting married. “The only thing I haven’t done so far is experience the closest thing to God and that’s having a baby. I can’t wait!”

Spears’s first son, Sean Preston, was born ten months after the wedding. “Our life was running at 150,000 miles an hour,” Federline later told Us Weekly. “I’d walk into a club and get a table worth $15,000 a night with unlimited free drinking. . . . But everything got so crazy.” Spears had been so sheltered that Paris Hilton had to show her how to use Google, according to a person who was there. She negotiated the hormonal and logistical turbulence of early motherhood while paparazzi, eager to monetize her mistakes, chased her down, pointing flashbulbs and shouting provocations any time she left the house. After she was photographed driving with an infant Preston on her lap, she explained that she had been trying to get away from paparazzi—and besides, she added, she had grown up riding on her dad’s lap on country roads. A few months later, visibly pregnant and holding Preston, she stumbled while surrounded by photographers; the paparazzi kept shooting as she retreated to a café, cradled her baby, and cried.

Spears had her second child, Jayden James, in September, 2006. Three weeks later, Federline took a private jet to Vegas to party with his friends. Spears filed for divorce in November, reportedly notifying Federline by text message. At a night club, he scrawled on a bathroom wall “Today I’m a free man—f**k a wife, give me my kids bitch!” He requested full custody. While the divorce was being adjudicated, he and Spears divided parental duties. Preston was a little more than a year old, and Spears was still nursing Jayden; she wanted to be with them all the time, and hated being at home without them. “I did not know what to do with myself,” she said later, in an MTV documentary. Spears and Federline both went out on their free nights, but Spears was the one who became the target of tabloid blood sport. (“MOMMY’S CRYING,” Us Weekly blared, over a full-page photo of Preston.) In February, 2007, she shaved off her hair, at a salon in Tarzana; five days later, she attacked a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. The two incidents cemented her image as “crazy.” Both were precipitated by her driving to Federline’s house, trailed by photographers, and being refused access to her kids.

Many people who were close to Spears during her early career suspect that she was dealing with postpartum depression, but none of them remembers anyone bringing it up with her. Some of the same people said that Spears was also struggling with drugs and alcohol. Her mother and Federline insisted that, if Spears wanted to spend more time with her children, she needed to go to rehab. In early 2007, she checked into a treatment center in Antigua, then checked out after just one day. The judge in the custody hearing, who had cited Spears’s “habitual, frequent uses of controlled substances and alcohol,” gave primary custody of the children to Federline, granting Spears four days of visitation per week, under the eye of a court-ordered monitor named Robin Johnson.

Around this time, Spears met Sam Lutfi, a Hollywood operator with a knack for insinuating himself into the lives of turbulent female stars. Spears had recently parted ways with Larry Rudolph, her longtime manager, and she began to entrust her professional and private affairs to Lutfi. Now forty-six, Lutfi cuts a nondescript figure: average height, occasionally goateed, favoring baseball caps and black T-shirts. Over coffee at a Los Angeles restaurant this spring, he said that Spears took to him in part because he told her that she didn’t have to work nearly as hard as she was. “She’d always believed there were massive consequences if she didn’t work, that she’d lose so much, and it blew her mind that she could just call the shots,” he said. “You want to cancel that meeting? Cancel it. You’re gonna lose five grand? Lose it. She’d walk into a car dealership, say she wanted something. I’d say, ‘Buy it.’ Her parents would say, ‘Why would you let her do that?’ But it’s an eighty-thousand-dollar car, not a yacht, and she just got fifteen million from Estée Lauder. Anyway, she’s an adult. I’m not gonna tell her that she can’t buy a fucking yacht.” (Lutfi later assumed a similar role in the life of Courtney Love, who called him a “street hustler,” and he said that he advised Amanda Bynes’s family as they placed her in a conservatorship. He is currently subject to a five-year restraining order filed against him, in 2019, by a conservatorship lawyer, on Spears’s behalf.)

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[westportroleplay]

PARKER VOS --

Birthdate: April 23rd, 1983 ( 32 ) Gender and Pronouns: Male, he/him Hometown: Westport, Georgia Neighborhood: Midway City Occupation: Unemployed Face-claim: Jesse Lee Soffer Trigger Warnings: Bombs, Death, PTSD, War.

BIOGRAPHY --

Parker grew up in a house in West Liberty in Westport with his parents and younger sister. His parents, a lawyer and a teacher at the local High school, were loving parents who doted on their children whenever they could. They did not spoil them, however, wanting them to grow up to be independent and realize what it meant to have to work hard for what you wanted. Both of Parker’s parents had come from poorer families, who often went to bed hungry, and worked their way up. They actually owned more money than they let on – they were minimalistic in what they spent, never going overboard, but anyone who got a closer look at their house and its interior could easily tell they did not necessarily have to worry about money. So while Parker never had to worry whether his parents would be able to buy him his new school books or a new pair of sneakers when he needed it, his parents still expected him to earn his own money once he was old enough to do so and wasn’t happy with his pocket money anymore. He started delivering newspapers, getting up early every morning to work before school. After school, he found himself training with the school’s football team, always having been a fan of sports, but not necessarily the biggest fan of most of his team members. One reason was that most of them were looking at his younger sister in a way he didn’t like, the other reason that they never really seemed to grow accustomed to the idea that he had been caught in the showers with their team captain after a game one night. His sexuality was not something Parker ever felt the need to hide, seeing as his parents were very accepting of who he was, but he also wasn’t the type of guy who’d walk around and make it the topic of every conversation. He didn’t see the point in it – it was part of who he was, and that was it.

Truth be told, his younger sister had always been his best friend since she was born. He’d been looking out for her for as long as he could remember, even if she didn’t always necessarily need it. They were joined by the hip until their teenage years, where they separated ways at least sometimes to go have their own lives. Parker’s dad always hoped his son might follow in his footsteps, make it into law school and that they would be working together one day. But while Parker was smart, he wasn’t necessarily school smart. His grades ranged from decent to awful, even if he did sometimes put in some extra work. He knew he didn’t want to be caught up in law school, hating it. And while he told whoever asked him that his father was his idol, he had an even bigger idol - his grandfather. The man had been a war hero, who served in the army until he lost a leg – and even after that, he never quite arrived home. The stories he told were both gruesome and inspiring, and deep inside, it was Parker’s biggest wish to fight for his country just like his grandfather had done. Not forever, maybe for a few years before he would settle down and find something else to do. He wanted to do something good in this world, and in his eyes, fighting for his country was just that.

While it had been his plan to go and join the army right after high school, love ruined his plans. It had been shortly before his eighteenth birthday when he found out that love at first sight is indeed possible. In his senior year of high school, Parker fell head over heels in love, and his plans were ruined from there on. His desire to go join the army was still there, but greatly overshadowed by the desire to spend as much time as possible with his boyfriend. A year turned into two, then into three, with Parker working at the Undercurrent as a waiter. It wasn’t fulfilling, but for the moment it was enough as his focus lay entirely on his relationship, happiness, and moving in with his boyfriend. But as much as Parker loved his life, he couldn’t deny that he still wanted to go join the army, and if only for a short time, seeing as he couldn’t bear the thought of being too far away from his loved one for too long. To his delight, his boyfriend supported him when he finally dared bring his wish up to go and do it now just a few months after his 25th birthday. A year later, he was already sleeping in a dusty tent on the other side of the world. War was everything he had imagined, yet not what he had imagined at all. It was rough, but Parker felt like he was doing something good. The long-distance relationship wasn’t easy, reduced to a few skype calls and short leaves here and there. To him, it was worth it despite the pain.

But one night, it all ended for Parker Vos.

It had been a mission that wasn’t really planned. Parker was ushered out of his makeshift bed shortly after midnight, sent out into the darkness to fight the enemy once more. Except this time, luck wasn’t on their side. Maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was an ambush – no one ever found out, and Parker doesn’t remember much except for the earsplitting sound of a bomb exploding near him, screams, bodies flying through the air, and hot searing pain taking over his back. Then it all turned black. One month later, his parents, sister and boyfriend were informed that Parker had died in battle; his dead body nowhere to be found, but hardly any chance of him still being alive. They had been searching for him and those who got lost with him, and there was no hope left. While his loved ones attended a funeral for an empty casket, Parker was on the other side of the world, hurdled up in a tiny cell with two other soldiers. Caught by the enemy, they were interrogated over and over again in an attempt to get word on the strategy of the US. Some days, hungry, thirsty, and with aching wounds, both from the explosion and the enemy’s interrogation techniques, Parker wished it would all just end.

It felt like an eternity until one day, the door to the small cellar was pulled open, light flooding inside, and this time the hands pulling him outside were not rough and annoyed, but carefully guiding him to a medical transport out of there. He found himself being interrogated once more once he had recovered, this time by his superiors, in an attempt to find out as much as they could. And then Parker found himself on a plane going home. It had been two years since Parker last set foot in his hometown – and Westport had changed. The news of Alexis were one of the first news to reach his ears. While he hadn’t known the girl, he immediately found himself worrying about his sister and whether she was safe, while she only worried about him. The apartment Parker had once lived in was sold, and he had to move in with his sister and her family in an attempt to get accustomed to life once more. But how do you do that when the lovely small town you knew turned into a town where young girls are being taken from their families?

PERSONALITY --

( + ) encouraging, hard working, passionate. ( - ) absent minded, possessive, restless.

[thebandcampdiaries]

You Died - Lividity Vol.1

February 2020 - Hailing from Forest Lake, Minnesota, You Died is a recording artist with a direct and forward-thinking creative approach, blurring the lines between different vibes and influences and incorporating so many different ideas into their sound. Recently, they released a brand new project titled “Lividity Vol.1,” which feels like a distinctive taste of what this artist is all about. The artist set the bar higher with 10 songs. Each track has something special about it, and it explores a different creative direction. The album begins with a 2-parts track, “King of Nothing,” which is split into two separate songs, each clocking in at around 3 minutes. This is a perfect introduction to the album, and it sets the mood for the rest of this release. The third song, “It Wails” actually also serves as a third part of “King of Nothing,” so it really brings this mini-suite to fruition, making for a stunning introduction to the whole project. These tunes boast some exciting production ideas, making them particularly unique and one-of-a-kind. The tone is absolutely stellar, a pattern that will follow along for the rest of the album. The huge bass especially is really striking because it feels absolutely massive, but it does not overpower the amazing balance of every element in the mix.

The fourth song on the release, “Ground,” was quite special and cinematic. The track kicks off with a lush soundscape and some glitchy textures, giving the song a eerie soundscape. The track explodes with an industrial-type beat and a massive bass sections with a buzz-saw distortion that feels aggressive and punchy as hell. The following track, “Guai,” follows along the same line, with some killer bass elements and textural distortion, bringing an edge to the composition. However, the song takes on a different twist almost right away, with some eastern string instrument samples, and volume swells merging into a minimalistic beat. The kick hits with so much powerful, and it really takes the cake for the roominess on the song! “Dissolute” has a cinematic feel to it and a very soundtrack-like introduction, which later evolves into a flavorful beat that makes me think of artists as diverse as Boards of Canada and Massive Attack, only to mention a couple. On this song, the mix is warm and balanced, allowing each element to sit in its right space, and in particular, letting the vocals stand out in a very pleasing way. “Doses With Ghosts” is one of the most melodic songs on the album, and its bouncy keyboard riffs almost make me think of trance music going berserk! “The Witch” is all about the soundscapes, with beautiful synth pads adding more to the melodic background of this release. The following track is titled “A Quicker Death Is The Struggle” and it has a nocturnal vibe that adds more to the sonic layers of this composition. In addition to that, it has a killer aggression on the beat, with the drum machine locking in perfectly with the fat bass tones. Last, but definitely not least, “Red” is one of the most diverse and ambitious compositions on this release. It starts with a blanket of sounds, and it develops into an industrial beat with so many nuances and production appointments. This track is an excellent example of what happens when genuine talent and vision get together with a strong production aesthetics and with spontaneous great vibes!  In terms of production, I am really impressed by the weight and presence of the low-end especially, as I mentioned earlier. The bass is thick and present, really allowing the songs to be filled with movement and purpose. Moreover, the top end is crisp and warm, adding a lot of definition to the mix.

All in all, this release is truly special because it features such a natural and spontaneous approach to production. On one hand, the artist has a highly defined style, but on the other, he is always keen on experimenting and taking his music to different places. This is totally not a black and white release. It’s in full color, and if sound could be described with images, this would be close to a Jackson Pollock painting! I really love the sense of artistic freedom I get when listening to this song, and you can really tell that the artist took many creative chances when coming up with this one!

Find out more and don’t miss out on You Died’s music, as well as “Lividity Vo.1” and other releases from the artist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2_A3pleW3c&list=OLAK5uy_nwMLGkeeFKynLpRFiD3pt6RnevVsQAsO0

https://www.facebook.com/youudied

https://www.instagram.com/youu_died/

Recommended if you like: Massive Attack, Korn, Dead Rituals, Nine Inch Nails, Aphex Twin, Nosaj Thing, Tool, Staind, Hanz Zimmer.

We also had the chance to catch up with the artist for an interview. Keep reading to learn more!

I love how you manage to render your tracks so personal and organic. Does the melody come first, or do you focus on the beat the most?

Answer: It all really depends on the day. I usually start with a beat, it's the heartbeat of the song. I like to build the 'body' of a song around that heartbeat. That said, if I really neat melody pops into my head, I'll always put it down. It all really depends on what inspired me at that moment.

Do you perform live? If so, do you feel more comfortable on a stage or within the walls of the recording studio?

Answer: I do play live. I love being on stage, but the music I make has a pretty niche audience so I'm picky about where I take bookings. I have a ton of energy, and the stage feels like home, but my studio will always be my sanctuary.

If you could only pick one song to make a “first impression” on a new listener, which song would you pick and why?

Answer: That's a really hard question. I guess it depends on the person. I try really hard to make every song unique in its own way, and I don't really follow a formula for writing my music. "Red" really shows the deep, moody, angst-driven vibe I like to go for, so I would probably lean towards that.

What does it take to be “innovative” in music?

Answer: Draw outside the lines. There is no right or wrong. Just make music and see where it goes. Some of it will be shit, and some of it will be gold. Either way, never be afraid to push the envelope.

Any upcoming release or tour your way?

Answer: I can't say too much at the moment, but there are some local events coming up that will be announced soon. And you can expect new music peppered throughout the next couple months, with another major release this summer.

Anywhere online where curious fans can listen to your music and find out more about you?

Answer: Definitely! You can find my music on all major platforms, and I release all sorts of stuff on my SoundCloud. You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter, and like me on Facebook to get updates and teasers for upcoming material.

Twiiter - @YouuDied

[abitterlifethroughcinema]

The Five (+1) Movies To Catch For the New Year

WOKE! 2020 Film Awards PReviews  

by Lucas Avram Cavazos

It is a mighty and yet daunting task this ‘2020 thing’ that is upon us. I think inherently we all know that some things are going to shift, others will change, some will expand and a lot more are likely to im/explode. Despite the factuality of it all, one constant I will always turn to, and recommend to you my lovelies, is cinematherapy. It goes without saying that some upcoming movies, which are either now or soon to be at our local VOS movie theatres, are also about to sweep some awards and with Oscar nominations going live this second week of January, I believe the movies below will soon be water cooler twawk, so me here at A Bitter Life brings you a BCN in VOSE look at the five (PLUS ONE!) films to catch before awards season intensifies.

In fact, it was a rather decent year for some great fare and not such a hodgepodge of Marvel and Disney movies forced down our throats every other week. The film I must start off with on this 2020 Film Awards Preview would be the excellent South Korean film Parasite ####-1/2, unanimously chosen as the winner of this year’s Palme d’ Or at Cannes and easily gracing the top or near-top of most film critic’s lists this year, as well it should. Telling the story of a South Korean family, the Kims, who slowly become interlopers within the confines of the uber-wealthy Park family. Starting off with one of them acting as a tutor, they slowly find a way to fill a need for the Park family, all while acting as non-related good Samaritans…that is until a botched getaway vacation and an underground bunker with a tale to tell reveal themselves and send the two families into a quagmire that must be seen and lived to be believed. (Now playing all over BCN/CAT/ESP)

Next up would be my personal favourite this year, though very closely followed by the aforementioned film! Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ####-1/2 became, at least for myself, a redeeming factor in the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino after the meh! feelings given off by his last big screen outing a couple of years ago. Taking the tragic, real-life story of the Manson Murders that ended the life of Roman Polanski’s then-wife Sharon Tate, director Tarantino buckles his audience into their seats and sends them into a time zone tunnel to 1969 Los Angeles. One of the things that has always revolved around a Tarantino movie is the element of revenge. Here, we have a different take on a true event, but the concept is widened by the director using actors Brad Pitt, Leonardo di Caprio and even Margot Robbie as conduits of a bygone era that give a peek into a mindset and time that usually must be lived to be remembered. The fact that we, the viewing audience, feel like we were actually there in ’69 and then also given the chance to make up our own mind as to a possible different ending to the Manson family murders is mere evidence of a great director/writer who seamlessly gives us a choose-your-own-adventure saga with superb cameos. Excellent cinema once again. (Soon on DVD/Blu-ray & VOD)

The next big film that has increased the star power and respectability factor of Happy Gilmore, uh I mean, Adam Sandler is the ever-loved and heralded film Uncut Gems ####.  If we have to put some truth to power, it must be noted that part of the film’s appeal is that it is such a New York City film. When you then throw in the elements of a thriller mixed with the Diamond District of Manhattan AND a run-around plot that also includes ballers and entertainers like Kevin Garnett and The Weeknd playing themselves, what you get is a peek into  what feels like a true-life crime show playing out in front of your eyes. Add in the ever-excellent Tilda Swinton and Natasha Lyonne, as well, and even despite the long 2-1/4 hour running time, what you get is Adam Sandler, under the direction of the Safdie brothers and along with the good graces of Netflix (who will also be distributing the film in Europe), becoming the new Comeback Kid. (To be released in BCN/CAT/ESP via Netflix on Jan.31)

While we’re on the subject…Netflix. Whatever your thoughts may be on the streaming site service (and others like it), it goes without saying that VOD services have become the wave of the future. Home cinema and entertainment centres/systems are what make for the latest in silver screen viewing. For the last three-plus years, the world cinema system (not to mention film academies and award outlets) have had to adapt to a new reality few probably ever even thought of before this new digital age. Just a few days ago, perhaps showing a bit of wane after receiving the most nominations, only two actress winners took home trophies, Olivia Colman as The Queen in The Crown and Laura Dern for A Marriage Story, reviewed below. With that said, famed director/ writer/ producer Marty Scorcese decided to go the Netflix route for his (likely) last mafia opus The Irishman ####, detailing the life story and inner workings of the Philly mob, while also detailing intricacies of the Teamster unions, Jimmy Hoffa, the Kennedys and the inner workings of the US mafia and its many minions. Financed by Mexican firm Fabrica de Cine (mad side-eye and furrowed brow) amongst Netflix and other studios for international rights, the production of the film apparently ballooned up to (and some reports even say, well beyond) $160 million. With just under 8€ million reaped at the worldwide box office (taquilla) coffers, it’s fair to say that this film in all its glory should have been edited to a slightly shorter length and intended for movie theatres. It has had a fairly great response by viewers on the streaming site du jour, but even Sandra Bullock garnered hella more viewers with her formulaic thriller Bird Box earlier in the year. As a student and tutor of history, the elements of the film that stood out to me went beyond the impeccable performances, specifically by Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa, but of course De Niro and Pesci as Frank Sheeran and Russell Bufalino, as well, but it was Scorcese’s capturing of that forgotten time around which we find so many Trump supporters harkening to, and it details the trials and tribulations of the working class then…and perhaps, even now. That aside, I abhorred the expensive de-ageing CGI process to make the Italian acting kings look younger…just vile. It was like they suddenly became animated secondary characters from a dropped scene in Spielberg’s Tin Tin film a few years ago…bloody odd for a live-action mafioso epic. Still…Scorcese is the only working director who can capture that essence of a time gone by and dress it in Hollywood’s finest if overly-priced storytelling. Which brings us to the other Netflix gem to catch…but only when emotionally prepared.  (Now streaming on Netflix and select screens)

Marriage Story ####, a.k.a. that likely Oscar-nominated film that will require too many tissue moments, also makes its way to this list. Trust, I can get my heart strings pulled quite easily if the right sentiments abound, so I was non-plussed going into this because I had already heard from my film fest peops that it was a bit of a tearjerker. Undeniably, there is a brutally-displayed realness that envelops the main characters of this film, particularly actresses Scarlett Johansson and Laura Dern. Helmed by the wonderful Noah Baumbach, Johansson gives a near-best performance as former teen actress turned TV actress Nicole Barber, who separates from her NYC theatre-directing husband played by Kylo Ren himself, Adam Driver. When she takes a role and moves to LA, along with their child, things become even more real. There is a gutsy bravado that clearly makes itself beyond relevant, as the melancholy yet funny film continues, and I, for one, could hardly keep the sobs at bay with the ending of the film. This is the stuff that ‘rom-drams’ need last their heart, not that paltry shite fed to too many simpletons by Nicholas Sparks. (Now streaming on Netflix and select screens)

Aaaaaaaaand…lastly, Knives Out ####-1/2 rightly fixes itself into a final slot on this list because it is one of those long-lost wonders of vintage cinema…a star-studded quasi-whodunnit with wit and thrills and superb, serio-comedic acting by everyone involved. A mere smattering of those actors would be Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Spanish actress and Golden Globe nominee Ana de Armas, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette and even Don friggin’ Johnson! Following an investigation into the sudden death of famed mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who had just invited main members of his family to his mansion for his birthday celebration, we see the touches of a perfectly poised ensemble film. Director/writer Rian Johnson has really stepped up to the plate with the best of the new directors and fresh off his box-office behemoth Star Wars: The Last Jedi from a couple of years back, his helming a film like Knives Out really plays his hand heavily in his diversity and directing tenacity. The fact that he also wrote this fine piece of script and dialogue makes him even more worthy of a possible director nod and it goes without saying that the cast is undoubtedly the finest ensemble piece made and released in the last year, and if you’ve been seeking a classic feel of a film with a smart, sharp modern twist, this film will satiate any of those olskie-olskie longings of a nostalgic murder mystery that makes you feel good after you leave the cinema. (Now playing in BCN/CAT/ESP)

[amwritingmeta]

Two Liars in an Impala: Deconstructing The Brologue from 11x23

I know there must be meta about this particular exchange up the tumblr wazoo, but not on this particular wazoo blog and not written by me and - honestly - I need to get these impressions out of my head or my poor melon is set to explode. And soon. Thusly, I ask you, please, to bear with me and I thank you most sincerely. And here goes.

Let’s begin straight off with a transcript of the dialogue in question, taking place between Dean and Cas in the Impala as they go for a beer run after they’ve had their last confrontation with Amara in 11x22. That confrontation resulted in Amara exorcising Lucifer from Cas' body before she, you know, mortally wounded God. Anyway, overarching plot aside, this is all about the Destiel subplot and how it’s been built into a crescendo with every single season. They came so close here and it’s pretty damn glorious to read how cleverly simplistic they are about it. It’s also painful and rather heartbreaking to read between the lines and see how fucking in love these two guys are with each other and neither believes the other feels the same. But more of that in a moment.

Here’s the exchange:

Dean: How you doin’? You good? I mean, you know, the whole Lucifer thing. Cas: That was just so stupid. Dean: No, no, no, it wasn’t stupid. You were right. You were right to let Lucifer ride shotgun. Me and Sam wouldn’t ‘ve done that. Cas: Well, it didn’t work. Dean: No, but it was our best shot. And you stepped up. Cas: I was just trying to help. Dean: Yeah, and you do help, Cas, you know, I… Sometimes, me and Sam, we’ve got so much going on that we forget about everyone else. Cas: Well, you do live exciting lives. Dean: Yeah, that’s one word for it. …But you’re always there, you know. You’re the best friend we’ve ever had. You’re our brother, Cas, and I want you to know that. Cas: Thank you.

If you surface-read this quickly it’s very basic dialogue between two friends, one reassuring the other that his choice was a good choice, that he does help and that he’s appreciated for it. If this was the only scene you ever watched with these two characters, perhaps this is all you’d take from it. You wouldn’t notice that first glance of affection from Dean before he even starts speaking, and you wouldn’t notice the quiet devastation on Cas’ face at being called a “brother”. You wouldn’t feel the pauses Dean takes and you wouldn’t think there’s any more to Cas’ rather short, but at-first-glance earnest, statements. Truth is, I don’t think I could even blame you for not noticing, because you’re not aware of their backstory, you don’t know what those looks and pauses actually signal or where they have their root. So, let’s go root-digging, shall we?

Yes, we shall!

First we should establish where the characters are actually at in their shared narrative before getting into that Impala. I say shared narrative deliberately here, because this is an exchange between Dean and Cas, and though it touches on the overarching plot for the season, it’s really about leading into the moment where Dean tells Cas he matters to the Winchesters. So why isn’t this exchange purely about that? Why isn’t it a brologue, plain and simple?

Because it’s riddled with carefully constructed lies.

Their shared narrative highlights these lies to us in this moment, but only if we’re aware of their separate backstories, because Dean goes through shit that Cas has no idea about and the same goes for Cas. Otherwise they couldn’t lie in this scene. Or, actually, lying is too big a word, they’re just not telling each other the whole truth.

Dean’s backstory leading into this moment is that he’s spent the past few weeks out of his head worried about Cas. In every single episode since they learned Cas had said yes to the Devil possessing him, Dean has been on the search for a means to find Cas and save him. He’s not been able to sleep, he’s barely wanted to hunt - Sam has had to coax him into it more than once - and he’s had Sam constantly reassuring him that they’ll find Cas. He’s also stubbornly refused to believe that Cas wouldn’t want to be saved, going so far as to argue with Sam about Cas being an “it”, nothing more than a “strong vessel”, one that might actually help them beat Amara. Even when Sam calls him out for making the “heart choice instead of the smart choice” he doesn’t back down. Add to this the fact that a running theme through the entire season has had - figuratively and literally - to do with hearts, and Dean being told, in brightest sunlight by a caring and more experienced person (aka spirit guide) that he’s obviously pining for someone and to follow his heart, then all the rest will work itself out, and what do you have? I’d say you pretty obviously have a love story on your hands, peeps.

When Dean and Sam and the roadhouse gang finally manage to trap Lucifer and reach Cas, Dean has a moment of thinking - because Cas reverts, even when he knows Dean is there, and Lucifer is let back in control - that perhaps Sam’s right and Cas has chosen this and he’s too far gone. Only, when Amara appears - to reiterate: God’s sister, whom Dean has explicitly said he’s afraid he won’t be able to resist - and she confronts Lucifer, all that comes out of Dean’s mouth is a rather furtive and yet hopeful “Cas?”. Because he can’t help but follow his heart and his heart is still right there and why doesn’t his angel hear him, when he’s always heard him before? (Yeah, I get mushy. Shut up.)

Cas’ backstory gives us the answer to Dean’s question, because after having Rowena’s spell put on him at the end of S10, we know that he feels he’s so dangerous that he even calls for assistance from the angels rather than putting Sam and Dean in harms way. Dean is cured of the MoC and that’s all that matters. The angels, however, torture Cas until Hannah shows up and stops them, consequently getting killed. Cas escapes, goes to the Bunker and gets help from Sam and Dean, only, when he’s left alone he uses Dean’s computer, comes across Dean’s favourite porn (Asian Beauties) and it triggers the spell. Cas goes on a rampage until Dean shows up, reaches through the fog and stops Cas killing an innocent woman. Rowena lifts the spell, but Cas is left traumatised, afraid of not being in control, and won’t leave the Bunker. This fear of losing control is shown to us in a quick sequence of images, brought on by Cas attempting to leave the Bunker to join Dean in an investigation.

The Flashes: (1) Dean’s voice telling Cas to fight the curse over images of Cas beating up Dean fairly severely (which ends with them in the same position as the “I Need You” moment, but that’s for another post), the flashes continue with (2) Hannah being killed, before they move into Cas unable to stop himself from stabbing (3) Crowley in the back, and they finish with the royal beating (4) Cas took from Dean while Dean was under the influence of the MoC.

Here’s my interpretation of this sequence of flashes and, yes, to be fair, I will call it an interpretation, though I swear I didn’t just pluck it from the air - this is all right there in the narrative:

(1) DEAN: the flashes begin with Dean, the voice over of his words from when he reached Cas and stopped him from killing the woman. This VO is placed over the images of Cas beating on Dean because the beating isn’t what’s important to remember - what’s important is that Dean reached Cas and stopped him from hurting an innocent. That said, I believe the beating Cas gives Dean is here because Cas - subconsciously, if not with perfect clarity - attacks Dean out of anger and frustration, stemming from finding that porn on Dean’s computer. Dean’s usage of porn didn’t come as a newsflash to Cas, but the exasperated and troubled look on Cas’ face when he closes the computer, before the spell takes hold of him again, and his muttered query about it, shows us that he finds it perplexing and yet another point where he can’t quite relate to Dean - or, rather, where he fears Dean feels they can’t relate, which goes even deeper if you look at Cas’ ambiguity when it comes to sex. It’s all angering and frustrating, all these confusing feelings, and Dean is the source of them. So Cas - his emotions enhanced by the spell and out of his control - takes his frustration out on that source.

(2) HANNAH: is Cas’ mirror. The feelings she develops for him and how that development is set up so closely resemble Cas’ connection with Dean, to the point where Cas, in the Hannah/Cas subplot of S10, is very much representative of Dean’s role in the DeanCas narrative: this is even shown, more than once, through the editing choices, where one image of Cas will fade into an image of Dean and vice versa. Now Hannah dies in order to save Cas, the same way Cas has put himself in harms way again and again to save Dean. How can Cas not reflect on how, seeing so much of himself in Hannah, his own statements of “The mission is all that matters” to her closely resemble what his relationship is with Dean.

(3) CROWLEY: So Cas has no emotional connection to Crowley whatsoever and shouldn’t feel traumatised about stabbing a demon in the back. That said, S11 is humanising Cas ever more and being under the influence of a spell and left without any sense of control when killing might be enough to traumatise even an angel as old as Castiel. Conversely, they may have wanted these flashes to feel less focused on Dean and more on that sense of a lack of control.

(4) CAS: the flashes end with a perfect mirroring of Dean being under the influence of something external and CAS NOT BEING ABLE TO REACH HIM. This is the most traumatising realisation of all: if Dean had felt even a sliver of what Cas feels for Dean, wouldn’t he have listened to Cas’ plea? Wouldn’t he have managed to bring himself to stop - like Cas was able to when Dean urged him to let that woman go?

What Cas misses here, of course, is that Dean attacking him was the Mark defending itself against what it could feel Cas’ plea was actually doing: it was reaching Dean. The Mark sensed it - all that history and all those times Cas had come between Dean and killing (Hell, Purgatory) and the Mark wasn’t going to have that. Perhaps a part of Dean wasn’t this time either, but he did stop himself at that last moment, even though it can’t have felt like it for a beaten up and bloody Cas. Furthermore, what Cas doesn’t realise is that because of Dean’s feelings for him, Dean has withstood, again and again and again, the actual physical manifestation of the Mark itself (in the form of God’s frigging sister).

So, not knowing what he really means to Dean, with all of this other crap in the back of his head, it doesn’t take much to make him believe that he’s expendable. Especially when it’s family (an angel) saying it, and then, minutes later, the woman who has had a clear effect on the man Cas loves. And feeling expendable he turns to what he knows: duty. And duty dictates that he should be ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good. And, as with every case involving the greater good: that he should sacrifice himself, ultimately, for Dean. (We could discuss tropes, but I’m not going to.) Lucifer says he can stop Amara, which does indeed mean saving the entire world, but also means breaking her hold over Dean. (Just as an extra bonus for those heartstrings of ours.) So, dutifully, Cas says yes to being the vessel for Lucifer and then he shuts himself down and doesn’t fight back and he doesn’t listen, not even when it’s the man he loves calling his name over and over again.

Another of my favourite DeanCas scenes EVER is when Cas wakes and Lucifer is finally gone. The silent exchange between Dean and Cas in that scene is fucking foreplay (Cas even says that Amara exorcised Lucifer from his body - has he not always called it his vessel before?) and that micro-expression look of relief and happiness and love on Dean’s face is precious, to say the least. The sexual undertones also perfectly echo that other time his angel came back from the dead and had a make-over and Dean desperately tried to control the semi-boner at the sight of him. But lets not digress.

So. With these backstories as our big, shiny, bright deconstruction tools - let’s take another gander at that exchange in the Impala:

Dean: How you doin’? You good? I mean, you know, the whole Lucifer thing. Cas: That was just so stupid. Dean: No, no, no, it wasn’t stupid. You were right. You were right to let Lucifer ride shotgun. Me and Sam wouldn’t ‘ve done that. Cas: Well, it didn’t work. Dean: No, but it was our best shot. And you stepped up. Cas: I was just trying to help. Dean: Yeah, and you do help, Cas, you know, I… Sometimes, me and Sam, we’ve got so much going on that we forget about everyone else. Cas: Well, you do live exciting lives. Dean: Yeah, that’s one word for it. …But you’re always there, you know. You’re the best friend we’ve ever had. You’re our brother, Cas, and I want you to know that. Cas: Thank you.

Doesn’t it read rather hollow now? Superficial, even? With all that emotional baggage between them, doesn’t it feel like there are things that are seriously left unsaid? I mean, even if you surface-watch you must know that Dean has been sincerely worried about Cas, right? And that Cas saying yes to Lucifer comes off the back of being told, twice, that he’s expendable. I’d say, even if that was all I had to go on, this superficial brologue is pretty pale for a conversation the narrative has been building up to for twelve episodes. Well, devil’s in the details (sorry, couldn’t resist) and the reason this conversation feels so superficial is because it’s a game of spot the lie.

Here are the two biggest ones:

Cas: I was just trying to help.

and

Dean: Sometimes, me and Sam, we’ve got so much going on that we forget about everyone else.

Cas was not “just trying to help”. He was doing exactly what he has been doing since the first time he saved Dean Winchester’s life: he was saving Dean Winchester’s life. Add to that the undertone of rivalry with Amara - one that’s restated on several occasions during the season - and he has another very real reason for wanting her dead: pure and simple jealousy. In short, Cas is the jilted lover. Although we must remember that Amara is trying to destroy the universe, as well as wanting to make Dean an eternal part of her, so I would think this sentiment is valid.

Turning to Dean’s line of dialogue now, there are two things that stand out. Firstly: Dean does something telling when he bunches himself together with his brother and creates a “we” rather than an “I”, and he does this throughout the entire exchange. And why does he do that? Excellent question.

Because Dean is so aware of what he would like to say, of how the first thought in his head when Cas woke up and was himself again was that he wanted to kiss him (personally, watching that scene, I can see this in their body language and it’s so calculated that I’ll be damned if I’m wrong - it’s also pointed out in dialogue but this is for another deconstruction). Now, in the Impala, Dean is terrified of his own feelings, and of being rejected, so he finds refuge in expressing himself as part of The Brothers, rather than simply speaking his own sentiments.

Then he moves into a very blatant lie, because when Cas went missing, more or less all that occupied Dean’s mind was saving him and, hey, this is a fact, okay, that’s not me Reading Into Things because Dean’s worry and search for Cas is actually in the surface-narrative of the show and can’t be argued with in the slightest. So, this statement, which includes Sam, but is more or less Dean’s pretty crappy way of trying to cover up exactly how much he worried for Cas by pretending he continuously “forget about everyone else”, this is a great, big, fat lie because he did not forget about Cas, not for a moment. Yes? Good.

Now, what about the fact that Dean can’t express how frigging thrilled he is to have Cas back? The undercurrent here doesn’t really make the subtext of this conversation feel like it’s a brologue. Sure, Dean is crap at talking about his feelings - oh wait, except when he talks to Sam about their relationship. He doesn’t open up about his private feelings to Sam, but they confront each other about their brotherhood on a regular basis, even acknowledging that a lot of the shit that’s gone down between them and the choices they’ve made is because they’re family. Not so much of that honesty here, even with all that build up. Wonder why. Could it be because Dean and Cas are not brothers, but totally in bloody love and sharing in their mutual fear of rejection?

My heart. My poor, poor heart. These two will be the end of me.

What’s lovely about this piece of dialogue is that it serves a superficial purpose that ties it in with the surface-narrative of the show, the one in which we know Cas thinks he’s expendable: the exchange effectively tells Cas that he matters to the Winchesters. Dean even manages to finish with “I want you to know that”, tossing a smidgeon of intimacy in there because he can’t help himself, because he wants to just admit how he feels, but he can’t bring himself to. And we’ve seen how much he feels. It’s just that Cas hasn’t seen it, and being Dean’s brother is a half-measure at this point, because this statement only confirms all the emotional turmoil that caused Cas to say yes to Lucifer in the first place: his love for Dean is unrequited and it makes Cas feel very much expendable. That hesitant “Thank you” of his, as well as the long, almost a little angry, look that he gives Dean underlines this.

The most heartbreaking part is how Cas doesn’t pick up on the softening of Dean’s voice when he tells him “But you’re always there, you know”, and how Cas doesn’t see that rather reflective look on Dean’s face after Dean’s told him “You’re the best friend we’ve ever had”, as though Dean is taking stock, realising that this is the truth: Cas is his best friend, and he can’t risk his relationship with him. Fear of rejection wins out and instead of attempting to express all those deeper emotions he’s feeling, Dean resorts to the one that’s always right there: family. It’s also telling that he doesn’t make the declaration of brotherhood personal between him and Cas, but something shared between the three of them: "you’re our brother”. As though Sam is the unwitting chaperone that Dean can gratefully hide behind. Then again, Sam also serves to cushion the lie - it’s not Dean telling Cas that he literally is a brother to him, it’s Dean telling Cas that he’s a brother to the Winchesters. And that’s a much less intimate statement. 

There’s also Dean’s fear of being left behind and how Cas not only up and leaves without a moment’s notice, but also how he’s done this in correlation with Dean attempting to express what Cas means to him. Every time he’s told Cas that he needs him, Cas has still disappeared, or chosen Purgatory, or found something bigger and more important to dedicate himself to.

For fuck’s sake.

That is all. Thanks for your time!

[ceslatoil]

Fiddleford in Fairyland, Part One

My first entry this week for @fiddleford-appreciation-month is a story about an expedition Parallel Fiddleford takes into an alternate dimension called Faerie. More under the cut!

Fiddleford had read plenty of stories about folks finding themselves in magical, faraway lands as a kid. He’d read each of the Narnia books over and over again, and had even kept an old, battered omnibus of the Oz books in his current private library, though in truth, he’d been more interested in all the strange, mechanical people like Tik Tok and the Tin Man than Dorothy’s silly adventures.

All the same, when the International Institute of Oddology had managed to discover an interdimensional access point to a place just as odd as Narnia and Oz right in the Oregon woods outside town, Fiddleford surprised everyone by volunteering to head the expedition. There were, of course, some doubts about this; though Fiddleford was a brilliant scientist and an integral part of the Institution, he was still a very anxious person, and his last journey, which had ended with an entire dimension disappearing all together, had left him shaken.

But, to his own shock, he insisted on going. He had grown used to the strange anomalies since he’d arrived in Gravity Falls some thirty years ago, even if most of the monsters and creatures that were drawn to this town were quite frightening. Magical creatures always seemed so charming, with the possible exception of Unicorns, who were just plain jerks. How scary could this magic dimension be?

So, after saying goodbye to Stanford that morning (a rather hug filled, warm affair that made Fiddleford second guess leaving), Fidds took a group of security officers and a few researchers and headed to the site that lay deep in the woods. It was a large, stone doorway in one of the deepest parts of the forest; strange ruins in a language none of the scientists had been able to identify were carved all over it, and an image of a sun and moon in eclipse loomed at the very top. Staring at this carving for too long sent a shiver down Fiddleford’s spine, which was not helped by the fact that nothing could be seen on the other side of the door.

Gulping, he reluctantly lead his team into the darkness, and for what seemed like hours they marched through the gloomy corridor, until they came across a bright light twinkling in the distance.

“Finally,” mumbled one of the security officers. “My feet are killing me.”

“I dunno,” whispered one of the younger officers, Cadet Corduroy, “You ever heard of looking out for oncoming trains when you see lights at the end of tunnels?”

It wasn’t exactly encouraging.

When they stepped out into the light, however, they were greeted by a lovely field of poppies that lay just by a river; beyond that was a large swath of farmland, and beyond that, a massive, dark forest.

“Golly, this is just beautiful,” said Fiddleford softly; the research team at once began to snap photos for documentation. “Just fantastical! Though I cain’t see where the reports of it being a magic dimension came from—”

Barreling from the woods came a monster, one that looked like a giant man with terrible, misshapen muscles and a lumpy, pale face with one eyelid drooping. It took one look at the tiny research team and let out a terrible, creepy cry that sounded like laughter before it lunged at them. Several of the researchers cowered and lost their heads entirely out of pure fear, but the security officers were made of tougher stuff, and took aim at the beast with their laser guns. Though they made several incredible shots that would have taken down a lesser foe, the terrible giant was completely unaffected by their attack.

“Fvb’yl qbza h spaasl jopjrlu, Jollw, jollw, jollw, jollw,” the beast snarled down at the security officers. The giant reached out one of its muscular arms and snatched Fiddleford up within the iron grip of his hands.

“Help!”

The beast leered down at Fiddleford with a dangerous look in its eyes. Or, maybe it was just sleepy. It was hard to make out facial expressions, as the giant looked like it had eaten a hive of bees and washed them all down with cold medicine: the result was a pale, lumpy faced giant who was even more terrifying up close than he was at a distance.

“Vo ohp Thyr! Ovd'z fvby zle spml,” the beast roared at Fiddleford, and just as the poor scientist thought he had reached his doom, a large rock slammed against the giant’s face.

“Kvu'a avbjo tl tvaolymbjrly,” the beast growled down to the ground. From what Fiddleford could see, a small girl in a yellow dress was flying at the monster, raising her arms and making boulders ten times her size fly at the giant’s face.

“What in tarnation,” Fidds cried, the girl continued to attack and scream profanities at the giant while the beast still kept its grip around him. Soon, other strange, flying girls began to attack the giant; a girl with wild, magenta colored curls was throwing large cherries that exploded when they made contact against the giant’s face, and another, her dress as black as her skin and hair was a ghostly, inhuman white, lobbed arrows into the giant’s eye. The giant laughed creepily once more, the arrows were about as effective as the lasers had been.

“Unhand this man at once,” commanded a powerful voice near Fiddleford’s right, he couldn’t turn his head to see who was speaking.

“Fvb svvr zv zlef Ahufh!” The giant offered the speaker an eerie, wooden smile that chilled Fiddleford to the core.

“I don’t care; you will leave these visitors to our land in piece, now let him go,” the voice snapped at the giant.

“FVB HYL ALHYPUN TL HWHYA, AHUFH!”

Enraged, the beast suddenly released his tight fisted grip on Fiddleford, and the man felt a terrible lurch as he began to hurtle towards the ground, which was roughly sixty feet in the air. Before he gained too much momentum, however, something else snatched him up around his armpits and held him aloft. He hadn’t even been able to register the thought of who or what had caught him when a sensation like being sucked into a vacuum began to consume his whole body, and he found himself being laid down upon the ground.

“Boss!”

Cadet Corduroy knelt down next to Fiddleford, who was shaking and pale, his knees bouncing together uncontrollably, but otherwise seemed perfectly unharmed. Fiddleford looked up to see a winged creature in white and gold armor looking down on him as well as the young cadet.

Good lord, what am I even looking at right now, he thought dizzily.

“Keep him safe while I get rid of the giant,” the armored creature told the Cadet, who nodded. Cadet Corduroy gently sat up the older scientist; Fiddleford looked up to see a flash of brilliant, sparkling light, one last scream from the Giant, and it was at this he lost consciousness at last.

*  *  *

When he woke about five minutes later, a tiny green creature that looked like a humanoid moth was flicking his nose with a stick.

“D’you think he died?” squeaked the creature to another, the pale, slender archer from before.

“I ain’t dead, get off my nose,” grumbled Fiddleford, who shooed away the green girl with a wave of his hand. Fiddleford still felt dizzy and disoriented, so he laid still while the others around him continued to talk.

“He has terrible grammar,” sniffed the white haired girl, who narrowed her black eyes at him disapprovingly. “Are you sure he’s really supposed to be a brilliant scientist?”

She had directed this question to Corduroy, who was a little disturbed by this strange creature, in no small part because she looked a bit like the ghost in the Japanese Horror franchise The Creepy Woman and Her Cat-Son Who Yelled at American Tourists Until They Went Crazy.

“He is brilliant,” Wendy managed to choke out tersely, “He just gets a little freaked out by some of the larger monsters. He had a bad experience with one of the cryptids he and Dr. Pines encountered when they were younger; something called a Gremoblin tried to kidnap him, it shook him up a bit.”

“Yikes. Say no more,” said the girl in the yellow dress, the one who had thrown rocks at the giant’s head. Her entire body was made of different shades of orange and yellow, from her sunset colored skin with bright yellow freckles to her lava-red hair, which she wore in several small braids across her head. “I’ve dealt with my fair share of Gremoblins in the past and I’ll say one word: Daddy. Issues.”

“Those are two words, Mustardseed.”

“Can it, Cobweb!”

“Both of you move,” said the woman in white armor sternly. The three strange girls hovering over Fiddleford dispersed as the woman knelt down next to him. She removed her helmet; the woman had a lovely, dark complexion and curly hair the color of pink champagne that she kept bound up in a bun.

“Wow,” whispered Corduroy, “She’s pretty cute.”

“That’s Queen Titania,” hissed Mustardseed, “You can’t call the Queen cute!”

“Wow, ain’t you just the cutest thing,” Fiddleford loudly told the Queen. She laughed, a warm, friendly sound, thought Fiddleford, as she helped him to his feet.

“Well, it sounds like you’re not any worse for wear,” said the Queen, looking the old man over, “Let me know if you’re feeling any pain so we can get you medical treatment. Not everyone who faces the Gurrero Street Beast gets off so easy.”

“Well golly, I sure am grateful ya saved me ladies,” said Fiddleford, addressing the six women with good cheer.

“Sorry your first trip to Faerie had an overly exciting beginning,” said Titania, shaking Fiddleford’s hand. Midway through, however, she paused as she examined his face; suddenly, her eyes went wide and she shot her hand to her chest, as if she had seen a ghost.

“Oh my stars,” she whispered; turning to the other fairies, she cried, “I don’t believe it—it’s McGucket!”

Fiddleford and Corduroy shared a bemused look. How did the Queen of the Fairies know Fiddleford’s name?

“What? Come on Tanya, this guy looks nothing like McGucket,” said Mustardseed dismissively.

“My lady, the fight with the Gurrero Street Beast was exhausting,” chimed the girl with magenta hair, whose name was Peaseblossom. “Perhaps you’re just confused.”

Titania shot her servants a glare. Without a word, she pulled a wand from a scabbard at her side, and, after giving it a flick, she made a long, white beard and a floppy hat appear on Fiddleford’s face and head.

At this point, Fiddleford couldn’t think of anything to say other than, “Why does my beard have a bandage on it? Weird.”

The other four fairies screamed.

“Face stealer!” cried the green one, Moth, who began to kick Fiddleford in the shins.

“Ouch! Now you stop that,” chided Fiddleford, lifting the tiny winged girl into his hands. “Yer actin’ like a conswalloping hogwash salesman on the fourth of july!”

“… Yup, it’s him,” Titania nodded her head in triumph. She made the beard and hat vanish by waving the silver wand carefully, returning Fiddleford to his normal state.

“I don’t understand… how can this man still be McGucket,” said Peaseblossom, scrutinizing the older scientist with narrowed eyes.

“I told you, he’s a face stealer, Duh,” squeaked Moth, still waving her fists wildly at Fiddleford.

“Well, my name is Fiddleford McGucket,” he admitted, “and my team and I are from an institution that studies the oddities of the universe—in fact, we came all the way from our world to study yours! I think we’re the only version of our dimension that can travel to different worlds, but it’s entirely possible that you ran across a version of me from an alternate dimension?”

“We did recently open up a permanent portal to Earth,” said Titania slowly, “It’s entirely possible that the portal is available to all the different possible earths as well?”

“It’s a shaky theory, but the only one we have to work with in the present,” nodded Fiddleford. He frowned, however, when he realized that at any moment, an alternate version of himself could come waltzing into Faerie and possibly destroy the entire dimension should they accidentally run into each other.

“We should probably leave,” Fiddleford turned to Corduroy, “The risk of dimensional collapse is too high if an alternate me is on the loose—I couldn’t bare to repay my rescuers by accidentally destroying their home!”

“Nonsense,” said Titania, clapping her hand on Fiddleford’s shoulder. “McGucket rarely visits this dimension, and surely we can find a way to send a warning about the possible danger. I’ll have my servants send a letter explaining the whole thing. In the meanwhile, why don’t you and your team stay at my old family home? You’d be able to set up base and have access to our library if you needed to gather some research on Faerie’s history and culture.”

“You’d really do all that for us?” Fiddleford asked excitedly, hardly believing the institute’s good fortune.

“Anything for a good, old friend,” said Titania warmly. “Who, now that I think about it, is actually a new friend? A new old friend, perhaps we should say? Oh, who cares, everybody back to Eclipse Manor for a feast!”

                                                      *  *  *                                                                  Eclipse Manor, a country chateau just outside of a small village in the woods, was quite beautiful with a quiet, comfortable elegance. The research team immediately began snapping photos and writing down descriptions of the comfortable, elegant mansion, and didn’t stop taking notes until Fiddleford chided them into putting those things aside when the Queen called them all to dinner.

It was a wonderful feast of roasted chicken, baked sweet potatoes, buttery dinner rolls and a spinach salad—it reminded Fiddleford of Sunday dinners with his family when he was a child. There was, however, a slight incident when one of the security officers refused to take a bit.

“Would you like something else,” asked the Queen, offering security officer Ramirez a concerned look, “I’d hate for any of my guests to go hungry.”

“Um…” Ramirez looked highly uncomfortable, Fiddleford could see beads of flop sweat beginning to drip down his forehead as the table turned his attention to him.

“What, do you think our food sucks or something,” said Mustardseed aggressively. Titania shot Mustardseed a nasty look as Ramirez recoiled at her accusation.

“No! Um, no I really like food, little fairy dood,” said Ramirez nervously.

“Then eat up, Ramirez,” Fiddleford said, raising his glass of wine with good cheer, “I wasn’t raised to let anyone waste food at the dinner table.”

“Yeah but—oh man, what if the food turns out to be enchanted and we get stuck here forever like in all the fantasy books! This place is nice but I’d miss my grandma!”

Fiddleford grimaced, he thought for sure the Queen would have been offended, but she merely laughed again.

“Oh, you poor thing,” said Titania, patting a now mortified Ramirez’s arm kindly. “I assure you, food chain spells have long since been made illegal in this land, but if you would like, I can get somebody to run back to your dimension and get you something else.”

Relieved that the Queen wasn’t mad at him and that dinner wasn’t cursed, Ramirez assured her that he’d eat what was put out in front of him, and soon everyone was tucking in.

In addition to the fine food, the research team’s hosts were all lively conversationalists: Mustardseed and Corduroy were arm wrestling each other once the dishes had been cleared away, Moth kept daring Ramirez to try different kinds of food, a challenge he approached with unwavering bravery no matter how odd the dish was, and the researchers hung onto every word of Peaseblossom’s stories about the history of Faerie, which kept getting interrupted by Cobweb, who would add bawdy, off-color comments about the story much to her embarrassment.

Meanwhile, as all this was happening, Titania and Fiddleford were quickly becoming the best of friends; she asked him quite a few questions about the Institute and listened intently.

“Fascinating—so you run the robotics department? Whatever made you decide to lead an expedition,” asked Titania, who was trying to urge her small son, Daya, into finishing his sweet potatoes as she spoke to him.

“Well,” said Fiddleford, taking a swig from his wine glass once more, “I guess you could say I was curious—we used to read fairy stories all the time at my house when I was a kid, and I guess I just wanted to see what it was really like.” He smiled at Daya, who was scowling at his sweet potatoes with unmingled dislike.

”Well I certainly count myself lucky to meet you today,” said Titania, who’s smile faded to a frown when Daya rudely stuck his tongue out at the hated sweet potatoes. “Come on baby, eat!”

“No!”

“I’m glad to have met you too,” said Fiddleford earnestly, “I probably would have been eaten up by that giant, completely unlike how this little fella ain’t eating his taters.”

“Tatoes are yucky,” screeched Daya.

“Well, if you don’t want ‘em, I’ll steal ‘em for ya,” said Fiddleford, reaching his fork over to Daya’s plate.

Daya’s eyes grew wide, and without any warning, he began to shove handfuls of potato into his mouth to keep Fiddleford from grabbing any.

“My taters!”

“Well, darn, guess I’ll go without,” said Fiddleford with mock disappointment as he winked at Titania.

“I should invite you over more often,” said Titania, impressed. “Maybe then Daya would eat his vegetables more often.”

“Comes with lots of practice—the institute offers a childcare program to any wayward interdimensional refugees that come across our part of the universe,” said Fiddleford brightly. “I’ve had to coax my fair share of kids into eating their veggies than I can count!”

“Perhaps I’ll give you a call when Daya’s old enough to start school then,” said Titania warmly.

“We’d be happy to have him,” said Fiddleford, just as kindly.

“Now, would you mind joining me in the library? I want to show you the place where you can keep your research handy while you’re staying here,” said Titania, standing up from the table.

“Sure shootin’, lead the way,” said Fiddleford, and the two, along with Daya, who had sweet potatoes smeared all across his face, left the rest of the researchers alone in the great hall.

                                                      *  *  *

           The library was a magnificent place, filled with large, mahogany bookshelves that towered over Fiddleford and the Queen as they walked through its aisles, the sweet, comforting scent of old books filling the air like gentle incense. At the end of the room by a roaring fireplace was where the reading area had been arranged—polished wooden tables and comfortable, chintz chairs lay out before them, and the two took a seat opposite one another on the chairs.

           “Care for a chocolate?” asked Titania, indicating a box of chocolates on a nearby coffee table. “And by that I mean please eat them so I won’t. I have enough trouble getting my kid to eat vegetables as it is, what will he think when he sees that I’m constantly eating chocolate.”

           For his part, Daya was slowly starting to doze off as he cuddled close against his mother’s side.

           “Well, I guess I got room for more,” said Fiddleford, reaching over to open the box. He spied a photograph that was kept on the table next to the chocolates, and gasped. He recognized quite a few people present—Ramirez and Corduroy for one, along with Ford, who looked much grayer and rugged than his own Ford back at home, two kids that looked like Ford’s own little niece and nephew from Piedmont, and another man, who, though a bit thicker around the middle and with a more mischievous glint in the eyes, could have been Ford’s double. Titania and her girls were also in the picture, each smiling and laughing over something just off camera.

           “I’ll be,” whispered Fiddleford, “It’s Ford’s family!”

           “Yes,” nodded Titania, a slightly worried tone tinting her voice as she spoke, “Your… partner, correct?”

           “A little bit more than that,” said Fiddleford proudly, indicating the ring on his left hand with a smile. He pursed his lips as he gazed at the photo, pausing at the two twin brothers before saying, “I take it the Ford you know is on better terms with his twin than mine is?”

           “Oh? Are your Pines twins not getting along,” said Titania with a frown.

           “Well,” said Fiddleford sadly, “I tried getting Ford to talk to Stan for years, or at the very least, invite him to our wedding, but we haven’t been able to find him. It’s like he fell off the face of the earth.”

           “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Titania, who hugged her son tightly at this confession, “I know how difficult it is when a family member to go missing. I hope you’ll be able to reunite with him.”

           “Me too, at least for Ford’s sake—he wasn’t on the best terms with him, but I think he’d take it hard if he never got to speak with his brother again,” said Fiddleford quietly. He then smiled and held up the photo as he said, “but this proves that it’s possible, don’t ya think? That they could work everything out.”

           “Of course it is,” said Titania, who at last gave into temptation and grabbed a piece of chocolate from the box. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a family I’ve liked more than the Pines in a long time. I’m sure your version could be just as happy in time. By the way, if you ever do meet Stan again, don’t tell him I said that. I have a reputation to maintain as the best head of our respective found families, and I can’t have him strutting around knowing I said he was better at something, I wouldn’t bear it.”

           “It sounds like you’re awful fond of him to me,” said Fiddleford, wagging his eyebrows knowingly at the Queen. She playfully tossed the piece of chocolate she was holding at him, but he quickly caught it in his mouth.

           “While we’re on the subject,” said Fiddleford, his mouth full of chocolate caramel as he spoke, “Do you mind if I ask about my alternate self? I’ve been meaning to gather information about alternate timelines and how different dimensions compare and contrast, but it’s too dangerous of a risk to meet up with an alternate me! We know of one fella who was able to jerryrig up a whosmajig to keep himself from dissolving along with alternate versions of himself, but he ain’t saying anything to the institute—he has some sort of silly gentleman scientists feud with Stanford for some damn fool reason. So, if’n you don’t mind me asking, your majesty… what am I like?”

           The Queen’s smile faltered, and she grew quite pensive until she finally spoke.

           “You’re a bit balder… and with quite a few less teeth,” she said, looking away for a moment.

           “Oh,” said Fiddleford, frowning. He figured that at least a few different versions of himself wouldn’t age quite as well as he had, and besides, his habit of tearing out his hair when he was anxious probably hadn’t done him any favors. But why did the Queen look so sad?

            “Is something the matter,” asked Fiddleford.

           “Well… I don’t know if I’m the best person to tell you this,” said Titania, who began to stroke her son’s hair nervously, “after all, I only know a little piece about what happened from the version of Stanford I met. There was an incident when you were younger where you fell through a portal; some kind of accident that left you traumatized. You… made a gun that erased memories.”

           There was a trickling, icy sensation that shot down Fiddleford’s back. He had remembered the fight with the Gremoblin, the horrible things he had seen—he had wanted it all to go away so badly, and he thought the gun would be the perfect solution. At Ford’s constant insistence about the possible, dangerous side effects, however, he allowed Ford to destroy his invention.

           “What happened,” said Fiddleford, gulping.

           “It took a severe toll that affected your mental health for decades,” said Titania, her voice soft and full of sorrow. “It took ages for you to recover. You were living on the street.”

           Fiddleford couldn’t describe what he was feeling in that moment exactly—just a sort of lingering shock that a person who narrowly missed being hit by a car would have felt, the dreadful horror of what could have been.

           “… How am I now?” asked Fiddleford slowly after a long time.

           “Well… the Fiddleford I know is now living in a mansion after earning a fortune in inventing patents,” said Titania, who took Fiddleford’s hand and gently squeezed it as she spoke, “He has lots of close friends, and I’m fortunate enough to consider myself one of those friends. Furthermore, just about a week ago, he finally got engaged to his version of Stanford.”

           “He waited that long? Figures he’d take near about forever to get around to it,” said Fiddleford, and for a moment, the mood was light again, and he and the Queen shared a good laugh.

           “It’s getting late,” said Titania, eying the clock on the fireplace mantle. “I need to get my son to bed, and I’m sure you and your team need the rest. I’ll show you to your rooms, if you need anything, don’t hesitate to call on any of my girls.”

                                                              *  *  *

           The bed was soft, and his stomach was full, and though his mind was still churning from what the Queen had told him about his double, Fiddleford McGucket easily found himself in a deep, comfortable sleep in his first night in Fairyland.