#about a situation he neither caused nor could have reasonably prevented

[mxtxfanatic]

Random Thought #34: If Madam Yu really had cut off Wei Wuxian's sword hand in order to appease Wang Lingjiao before the Jiang Clan was wiped out, then Jiang Cheng truly and honestly would have been fucked cause no way in hell would Wei Wuxian give up his core after that. He was already thinking of his hand in terms of debt ("if it's in exchange for the peace of the sect..." —exr), and to take away his sword hand is to cripple his ability to cultivate, which he considers a debt he owes to the Jiang for teaching him, to begin with. The scores would have been cleared, then, so any other ask (like, say, protecting the only surviving heir with his life) would be considered extraneous. Wei Wuxian would still do it because it was the right thing to do at the time with the knowledge that he had, but once Jiang Cheng lost his core? That's a wrap!

[givemea-dam-break]

like real people do (anthony lockwood x reader)

a/n: anthony bloody lockwood is hozier coded you cannot convince me otherwise!! i considered making this a locklyle fic, but i wasn't too sure. let me know if you guys want me to write a locklyle version lol. this is shorter than my usual, but i was listening to hozier and got inspired lmao

warnings: mentions of panic attacks gn reader

In the darkness, you can feel his fingers wrapped around yours and the faint pulse beating within them, steady and assuring. His hand is warm, and the knowledge that he is simply next to you, holding your hand so tenderly, is enough to soothe the horrible beating of your heart and the tightness of your throat.

He doesn't need to say anything. He's never needed to, for he understands the tornado that tore through your mind and stole the air from your lungs. Many nights have been spent in the reverse of this, with you holding him as he gasps and cries. It's a horrible situation to be in for both of you, but you've adapted. What else could you do?

So, as he so gently brushes the hair from your face, you breathe in the familiar scent of too-bitter tea as if it is the very thing keeping you alive.

"You're safe," he murmurs. "I'm here."

He is. He always has been. Ever since you met, he's been there, pulling you from the bad memories that have always clung to you. He's the reason why the nightmares are less frequent now, why you feel safe enough to sleep at night. But never once has he pushed to know what causes it all. And neither have you.

It's astounding how little you can know about a person, and how little they know about you, and yet still be their biggest source of solace.

Anthony Lockwood has been that for you for years, now. Ever since you moved to London, running from a past you feared you'd never escape, he has kept you safe, has comforted you whenever you've needed it without a single question. He's let you keep your secrets, and you've let him keep his, but you're both always there, waiting with a net to catch the broken pieces, and glue to put them back together.

You had never expected to find such a person in London. In all honesty, you came here only to run and hide, but you found him in the process, led by some string of fate. Everything you did in your first few days here led you to him as if some part of your subconscious knew he was waiting for someone to catch, someone to fall on.

Gently, he guides your head to his chest, where you let it rest as you listen to his heartbeat. With each strong pulse, you breathe in the scent of him and the promise of recuperation.

Wordlessly, his free hand rubs your back softly, and you find it easier to breathe now. It's as if with each brush of his hand, he reopens a part of your lungs.

"How are you feeling?" he asks quietly.

Your throat hurts and your voice is weak, but you say, "Better."

Not good. Not even okay. Just better. The world doesn't feel as though it is crashing on top of you now, nor does it feel like your lungs are being squeezed of every last vestigial of air they hold. You feel a little lighter, but your throat aches. Your chest hurts. Your skin feels strange and like it's not even yours. But you're better than before. It's an improvement.

He presses a gentle kiss on the back of your head. "Want some tea?"

"It's three in the morning."

"It's never stopped us before."

You can practically hear his smile. "Okay."

You're grateful that he brings you with him, that he doesn't leave you alone in the dark. No, he takes your hand so delicately as if he's worried it'll crumble if he holds it too hard, and he leads you quietly from the floor of the library down, down, down, to the kitchen.

He doesn't turn on the light, instead opting to open the fridge door and use that for light. Every so often, he shuts it and reopens it to prevent the little warning alarm inside from going off, but you appreciate it nonetheless. The big light would be far too blinding and disorientating. In no time, he's made both of you a cup of tea and sets the steaming mugs down atop the cluttered thinking cloth. Now, he shuts the fridge and opens the blinds.

It's summer, and although it's still the early hours of the morning, the sky is no longer an all-consuming inky black, but rather a dark navy that you know will get lighter. Pathetic fallacy, if you've ever seen it.

As Lockwood sips his tea, one of his hands always stays wrapped around yours as a reminder. He's here. You're not alone. Breathe. He's here.

There is no person you could ever be more grateful for than him. Throughout it all - the fall-outs you've had, the worst of your breakdowns, the worst of his - he has never left your side. He has always taken your hand in his and led you from the endless dark and into the slowly-rising sun.

You may not have been looking for him when you moved, but you'll always be glad that you found him.

And, so, as he kisses your forehead, the tip of your nose, your cheeks, your smile slowly returns. You're not perfect, nor is he, and your pasts have left you with more than you can handle, but he is slowly guiding you away from it all, as you are him. Like real people do.

[flowerandthesongstress]

When I was a child, a mangy cat dragging a freshly killed chicken almost as big as himself, entered my room through a closed window in a balcon-less apartment on the fifth floor of a high-rise building, in the downtown of a bustling metropolis of 8 million people. 

In the darkness, I found a box of matches by touch and lit a candle, and I rose up on my elbows to see him better, and I rubbed my eyes first at the clock (the hour was 88:88) then at the cat as he placed the dead chicken at the foot of my floor ‘bed’ and spoke to me, explaining his reasoning. 

He was aware that I hadn’t had any meat in half a year and he took it upon himself to rectify the situation, as little children need a nutritious diet in order to grow big and strong, a steady diet that includes lots of protein. 

Concerned, I asked: but isn’t this a laying hen? One that lays eggs? 

He succinctly answered ‘Eh’, meaning that he didn’t care neither about this chunk of meat being a laying hen, nor about anyone else’s sorrows outside of the apartment. Times were tough: you either prioritize or you perish. Besides, he couldn’t very well ask the hen to come over and stay and lay eggs for me, could he? A hunter and ruthless killer such as himself is limited in ways he could assist anyone. 

Nodding, I agreed that this sounded logical. I thanked him. I did. Multiple times. 

Being a little child, affectionate and cuddly, and lonely and deprived and touch-starved, I tried to hug him, too, but he opted out. Due to personal issues, most likely (I decided not to pry).

In conclusion, he asked if I wanted any rats, as they were easier to catch and more fun to kill — and thus were his favorite. I said no, thank you, and that he should have the rats.

The next day he left through the window on the fifth floor of an apartment tower in a city of 8 million people that is 8 hundred miles away from the nearest sea, the city that has a river of crude oil flowing through it, and brought back some fresh fish. 

I could not have wished for a better, more resourceful friend.  

∞

Magical realism is for when you can’t wrap your head around something, when that something is so unbelievable and so unthinkable and traumatic and ‘how was it even possible’ that a simplified fairy tale causes less cognitive dissonance; when an explanation for what really happened and why it happened would not only take dozens of pages instead of a couple of paragraphs, but would sometimes seem less realistic than a fantastical one. And/or would not be accepted as the truth by those who weren’t there. 

When trauma remains and persists into your adulthood, when you do not have it in you to ‘get yourself together’ and explain the truth out loud, either because your therapist wasn’t there and wouldn’t understand the scope of the horror that you feel, or simply because talking about the truth is more straining than inventing magical shit...what do you do? How do you process?

You say ‘fuck it’ and you go ahead and make the fabulist fictionalization a little MORE realistic and grounded and logical than the true event. 

You change the apartment into a country house. 

Hey, it’s a village. It’s the ground floor. The window was open. 

Plenty of food everywhere around those parts. Nature and abundance and all. The cat did not have to make much of an effort. Not a chicken, no, of course not a chicken. It was a uuuh...partridge. Yes, a wild and free partridge not locked up on someone’s balcony lol what balcony.

The cat’s thievery did not cause anyone else to starve. 

Moreover, he was not a thief at all.

The cat talked, because magic. No big deal. Magic is also abundant around those parts. 

And the cat had been given clear instructions and sent by a caring parent, to provide for you. Hmm? Why wasn’t the parent providing for you? Good question. Well, that was only because a pesky curse of some sort was preventing the parent from doing that, from seeing you. 

You, the child.

The inner child. 

Everything will be okay. Everything is okay. Shhh.

The fridge is full to bursting. Look. Look at this. There’s plenty of food. 

There’s even ice cream. All the ice cream you could ever want.

Look at this beautiful bed. It’s yours.

You have someone by your side to hug every day. And he knows. He knows, he understands.

No outages, there will never be any outages either, now come on, turn off those extra lights, you don’t need them. 

You’re not going back. Not. Going. Back.

∞

I recently gobbled up Anya von Bremzen’s memoir, and the chapter on the nineties had me sobbing. I felt like I was back in the helpless body of a tiny hungry child.

She did try to explain the truth. Duh doy; a memoir. Nonfiction. Pages upon pages of realistic, ample, poignant and even (bitterly) witty explanations...yet I can see how these explanations might be perceived as sensationalist and ‘this is some bullshit’. I think they do sound a bit sensationalist and were written as such on purpose, because sensationalism is also an alternative for processing trauma — a trauma that isn’t as deep-seated — utilized by someone who was only grazed by reality, someone who can tell a story to a crowd of well-fed outsiders and feel, if only for a couple of hours, like she belongs with them now and perhaps has always belonged with them, and like their gasps inhale her fear.

Decades older than we are, she was just a visitor, already whisked off abroad and having a safe place to return to. My mind brings forth images of rich white westerners at a dinner party, their eyes wide, the tips of their fingers against their ever-so-slightly open mouths in a show of polite consternation as they listen to an ‘exotic’ and ‘horrifying’ tale that ‘just can’t be true’ or ‘goodness, I had no idea it was that bad’. 

It took my husband decades to realize that he wasn’t ‘allergic to candy’ as a child. Same with me. It took each of us decades to separate the truth from the many fairy tales. 

Anyway...Captain Obvious here:

Authorial reticence is not for ‘being mysterious’ or ‘unique’ or ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’. It’s for when otherwise you’d stay silent, because the truth will remain stuck in your throat, choking you.

Fabulism is not for whimsy, quirkiness, ‘surrealism’, or gratuitous ‘weirdness’. It’s for when reality is more frightening than the truth. Casual magic is safer than the truth. Truth is creepier. Truth makes you want to thrash your head around, repeating ‘no, no, no, I don’t want to remember, I am NOT going to talk about it’. 

Magical realism is for when someone needs to cope, but doesn’t know how. A defense mechanism against the terror that lives inside you for all of your personal infinity, and will never go away. 

I’m sure there will be another MASSIVE boom of magical realism literature, coming up in two to three decades. 

If they get as lucky as we got; if they, too, get to grow up.  

[mariacallous]

In the latest sign of his fascination with using nuclear weapons, former U.S. President Donald Trump told a crowd in January that one of the reasons he needed immunity was so that he couldn’t be indicted for using nuclear weapons on a city, like former President Harry Truman did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As Trump consolidates the Republican Party nomination, it is past time to ensure that no president can authorize an unnecessary or illegal nuclear attack.

It’s important to remember how worried top U.S. officials were three years ago. As Trump was attempting to overturn the election results, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley about whether he could prevent “an unstable president” from using nuclear weapons. For his part, Milley reportedly gathered senior officers to remind them not to act on orders unless he was involved, telling them, “no matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure.”

In fact, neither Pelosi nor Milley had any lawful authority to prevent a determined Trump from using nuclear weapons. The sole restriction on the president’s authority to order a nuclear attack is that members of the armed forces are obligated to refuse to carry out an order that violates the law of war. Among other things, officers must decline to conduct a nuclear strike that is not necessary to defeat an enemy as quickly and efficiently as possible or that would cause damage to civilians that is indiscriminate, inhumane, or disproportionate to the military objective.

In 2017, as Trump was improvising nuclear threats to North Korea, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) made headlines by saying that he would not carry out an illegal launch order. Instead, Gen. John Hyten said he would inform a president that an order was illegal and then come up with “capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that’s the way it works. It’s not that complicated.”

But it is complicated. The expected procedure is that a president considering nuclear use would convene a “decision conference” with senior advisors to consider options that are laid out in the football, a briefcase that follows the president everywhere. However, there is no logistical or legal requirement that a president convene a decision conference, engage with it in good faith, or take its advice seriously. In fact, the football can send a decision directly to the National Military Command Center (NMCC), which then generates an order and transmits it to U.S. forces.

One of Hyten’s predecessors, Gen. C. Robert Kehler, admitted to the Senate in 2017, “I do not know exactly” what would have happened if he had refused to carry out an illegal nuclear order. What if the president tried to circumvent that official? In practice, a coalition of officers or civilian officials could probably short-circuit the command and control process to obstruct an egregious order, but the system should not depend on insubordination.

It is also not clear how specific officials would interpret their obligations under the law of armed conflict. Who has standing to object to an order? What would they consider to be a legitimate military objective? Would they be able to evaluate nonnuclear options to determine that a nuclear weapon was the lowest effective level of force, as required? Exactly how would they calculate what number of incidental civilian deaths are proportionate to the military objective?

These questions can only have subjective answers and require more information than is available to single official. Existing practices to evaluate nuclear options may not be a good guide in a crisis. It is not sufficient for Stratcom to certify an option as legal in advance, because it may not be legal in the context that a president delivers it. Furthermore, precedent that derives from Hiroshima and Cold War plans to target civilians should not guide decisions today.

Before the election, President Joe Biden should put in place a defined, effective, rigorous, and legal procedure for preventing any president from issuing an illegal nuclear launch order.

He can start by establishing a structure for the decision conference. If a president accesses the football, the NMCC should automatically convene a conference among a specified set of principals, including the secretaries of state and defense, the chairman, the Stratcom commander, and the relevant regional combatant commander who can advise on conditions in an ongoing conflict. Each of these principals should be accompanied by their primary legal counsel, who is prepared to assess the legality of a nuclear order.

When the president transmits a decision to use nuclear weapons, each principal should submit a decision to certify or not to certify that the order complies with U.S. obligations under the law of armed conflict. If the attending principals certify the legality of a presidential order, it can then become a valid order and is transmitted to the NMCC. Just as the NMCC authenticates an order as being from a president, it should also require certification of legality before it transmits that order to launch crews.

Biden should think carefully about the rules of certification. No president should be able to rush or circumvent the process. Principals should have sufficient time to assess the operation, and certification should ideally be unanimous. In cases where an immediate launch is necessary, the legality should be plain, and principals should be able to certify the order immediately.

The president should also issue guidance to calibrate how government attorneys assess the legality of nuclear options, including what qualifies as a legitimate military objective that could justify nuclear use, how they should weigh incidental loss of life against military advantage, and how they determine when nuclear use can adequately discriminate between civilian and military objects. Over time, this kind of guidance could have an important effect on the options presented to a president.

As a first step, Biden should declare that the United States would use nuclear weapons only in extreme circumstances when there is no viable nonnuclear alternative for accomplishing vital military objectives. This would not only encourage planners to prioritize more credible conventional options, but also rule out the use of nuclear weapons to coerce or terrify enemies. The president could also state that the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would violate the law of armed conflict today and will never happen again.

Currently, the Defense Department’s law of war manual contains all of three sentences on the legality of nuclear operations. These presidential statements and guidance would help future officials interpret concepts such as necessity and discrimination and provide them with grounds to object to an unnecessary, unprovoked, or cruel launch order. Once in place, they would be difficult for an irresponsible president to walk back.

Lastly, the United States can add a step to the decision conference procedure where the president is prompted to consult with the leader of an allied country that would be directly affected by nuclear use, if at all possible. Biden already made this commitment to South Korea last year. Extending the idea to other allies can not only better inform the leaders of both countries, but could also help to build stronger, more literate, and more credible alliances.

The current procedure for authorizing nuclear use both fails to inform a responsible president and could fail to constrain an irresponsible one from ordering or even carrying out an unnecessary nuclear attack. Before he leaves office, Biden should confine this system to the past and establish one that is more rigorous and more effective. At the presidential inauguration in January 2025, either way, he’ll be glad he did.

[problemswithbooks]

I find it so strange to see endeavor basically failing in all departments, both as atoning father and atoning hero at the culmination of his arc. Despite many people here “not buying” it, his arc is about redemption, it’s pretty obviously written this way. Yet the creator deliberately writes one impossible situation for him after the other, leaving him practically no choice but all the fallout. Neither his introspection nor his sacrifices work.

He gave his arm to protect Hawks and Tokoyami. What happened next? It doesn’t matter because he couldn’t kill AFO. Hawks and tokoyami were risking their lives again and again fighting him. In the end his injury and sacrifice didn’t matter, AFO easily defeated everyone again and who knows what other injuries he caused. Everything enji said he was responsible for. All the blood spilled, including Hawks losing his quirk.

Enji supposedly found new determination to keep paying penance and keep his eyes on toya? Nope! It’s all gone now. Toya is a bomb now, with his mind long gone and there’s nothing enji can do to prevent him from explosion. He can barely move and is struggling to get him out of the civilians and heroes vicinity in time. So he chooses to die with toya. Another set up by the creator for him to fail. I know it’s done for an incoming Shoto big hero moment, for his family and everyone else in Gunga. But did the author really need to make enji such a loser again and bring him down so his family would look more heroic? And he would look more pathetic and useless?

Is it likely enji doesn’t have anything significant to do in this arc anymore? He went all out on AFO and so far it just put more pressure on everyone else and put more people in greater danger than ever before. Now he can’t help his son or his family. A pretty underwhelming conclusion to his arc if you ask me but I bet his antis are gonna love it

It's defiantly getting to the point where I don't see the point of Enji having a character arc at all if he's going to fail up until the last moment. If he's just going to fail over and over again in all aspects than why even bother having him change at all? If the story was a more adult story with the Todofam drama as the center point than i could see it fitting, but in a battle shonen Enji sticks out like a sour thumb.

The reason I loved Enji's arc was because it was more mature and he was a way more human character compared to the rest of the cast. I don't mind the idea of showing him constantly struggling and backsliding or having moments of self refection that don't necessarily lead to improvement. People don't change over night, it takes more than wanting to change, or knowing how you could change to actually succeed. Someone might know what the right thing to do is, but to do that thing requires going against everything they've ever known, and fighting against their own brain.

The problem with Enji constantly failing in BNHA is it's a shonen. This isn't HBO's Succession where the entire thing is about showing the struggle of it's characters to change and failing due to how they were raised and being trapped in a system that rewards cutthroat behavior. This is a story for teenagers about the power of friendship and how all problems can be fixed if you just try hard enough. No other character struggles this much to be a better person. No other character reacts to bad situations as negatively as Enji does. Even Izuku when he was in a bad mental state acted out in a way where he was still fighting and winning, but just doing so in a way where he got a dark design change. He didn't freeze or have inner monologues about how upset he was and once his friends spent a chapter yelling at him, he was fixed.

Because every other character only has a chapter or two (sometimes just a couple of lines) to have doubts before getting pep-talked into being better and having real growth, Enji comes across as a loser in comparison who can't get with the program. Hori refuses to give him anything except mental monologues that reiterate he wants to change, but actions wise he's not allowed follow through, even if it doesn't make any sense.

And I don't really see why. If the point is that abusers are losers who can't ever fix anything or atone why have him even bother to change anyway? The point might be that change is hard, but that change of heart is only this hard for Enji. Everyone else gets to make progress and the end of manga looks like it will end with the main villains having a change of heart in 2.5 seconds. Showing that changing and atoning is hard could have been shown without repeating the same inner monologues three or four times. Progress could have been made without undermining that message.

On top of that Hori has him 'fail' in ways where it only makes sense because of shonen logic. Enji is only wrong to take Touya up in the air and die with him because the theme of the story is hope. As the audience we know there will be some solution to save Touya despite everything telling us otherwise because it's a trope in this kind of story. In a different genre or in RL Enji's choice would be tragic but the only real solution. Not a him yet again failing, but the sad culmination of his past actions toward Touya.

He fails only because of the genre and themes of the story, not because there is an actual real solution he's just not doing because he's a bad father. Which is why when people explain why he's failing they only point out framing reasons rather than actually saying what he could be doing instead.

It's one of my biggest pet peeves in Hori's writing because if he really did need Enji to constantly fail than he could have done so in a way where it felt earned. Touya doesn't need to be on the verge of exploding, that blast doesn't have to be so big that it'll take out thousands of innocent people. He doesn't have to be delirious and screaming like a flaming monster. Enji could just fuck up and stumble over his words so Touya doesn't believe him and continues to attack him while burning himself. There's no reason to make the stakes so much higher, Touya's life being on the line is more than enough--I mean would Shoto not go save him if his death wouldn't cause mass casualties?

More and more it comes across as Enji failing only because the story says so, rather than because he makes real mistakes given the situation he's in. This is an issue with a lot of the characters not just Enji, but it's the most pronounced with him because it happens to him so often. This sort of writing has always bothered me because it makes side characters feel unimportant--there's just waiting around for the main characters to actually do stuff.

Yes, main characters like Shoto need their shining moment but it wouldn't have taken anything away from him if Enji had been allowed to make better choices. He could have said all the right things to Touya and still failed due to Touya's anger and years of resentment, so Rei steps in to help, and than Shoto comes too. The choice to be on the AfO team could have been a more thoroughly discussed decision between Shoto and Enji where they both agree that Shoto would have a better chance because Touya reacts so negatively toward Enji. Enji could have mentioned he was looking for Touya while out with Izuku (because that makes sense), maybe even he does it without Shoto because he's busy learning his new move to help cool Touya down.

Instead Enji is constantly stuck having repetitive inner monologues that go no where and do nothing in this genre of story except make him look inept or even cast doubt on whether he's trying at all. Which if that was the point than Hori shouldn't have wasted the pages on his arc at all. I really love Enji's arc and to me he feels the most real due to how he struggles and doesn't always succeed to do what he wants to, but I'm starting to think his entire arc was a page sink because it's ultimately done nothing that keeping him an asshole wouldn't have accomplished with far less time.

[diddle-riddle]

My Family is... a Little Weird

"Let me recap... you come from a distant artificial world, Klyntar, that is in fact a cage designed at the origin to imprison the creator of your race and prevent the symbiotes from expending in the Galaxy; you and a small group of... individuals, escaped in a spaceship when your specie engaged in a civil war on Klyntar that split your community, and now that your unit of deserters who turned their back on their home planet landed on Earth, you need me to trace the allies who travelled with you?!"

"Pretty much, yes," the creature appreciated, Eddie could even say the large glowing white triangles that feature the alien's eyes reflect something akin to... fondness.

This aside, the picture remains highly disturbing. Batman saved his life the instant they bonded, by abandoning the too weak human envelope it carried until then. By chance, the extraterrestrial in its declining meatsuit walked outside this hour, it has been attracted by fighting noises six streets from its position. It approached, then, upon grasping the context, merged with the man who could use the intervention of a hero and... beat to a pulp the gang of drug dealers that assaulted him in a side alley, while the private detective worked on a lead to hopefully solve his latest kidnapping affair.

Two days passed since then, Edward Nygma recuperated from the shock. That doesn't mean he is quite used yet to having this... thing attached to him, even though Batman is surprisingly nice, for a vengeful monster from another planet. Eddie simply needs to adjust to the view of this jet black head prolonged by pointy... sort of 'ears' which seem immovable, a strong jaw that discovers a thick pink tongue and a myriad of sharp teeth.

"They are not exactly my 'allies',” it corrected nonetheless. "They are my... family. Only one shares my venom, I believe in Earthian language you say 'biological ties', but all five are my children. I miss them, and I need to find them before they get hurt or cause too much troubles. This Blue Planet's atmosphere is unsafe for us to move if we stay outside of an host for too long; however finding a fitting candidate can be... difficult. We kill the vessel if we are not compatible, it deteriorates until its body becomes inoperable for neither us nor them," it anticipated Ed's next question.

"Neat..." the investigator sighed, already feeling like he goes ahead of the most tricky, complicated and quirky case he ever agreed to take.

Batman undulated in an... inviting manner, half-way through a giant bat and a smooth snake.

"I knew you'd understand, Eddie Nygma," the creature purred, like a big happy cat, and that was... damn, that was weird. "After all... you know what it's like to be a father who cares for his child."

Edward smiled a bit. He can't argue against that.

Over the previous days, Ed made it very clear his unexpected roommate cannot show up when Stephanie is home. His daughter of heart may be the most comprehensive person he knows, he doesn't see how to casually break to her he became the host of an alien symbiote dad who wants to find his five alien symbiote kids disseminated across the State, maybe even across the country after they parachuted in extremis from their spaceship about to crash.

Quite the situation.

Though no doubt when Steph, who is currently at school and Ed slouched on the comfy couch of their apartment, finds out (it's evident she will find out...), she'll be super excited and eager to participate to this unprecedented adventure. Eddie taught her well.

For the time being...

"Alright, Bats. Tell me more about your family, your specie... everything. I need to collect as many clues as I can to build a reasoning and start my investigation. I am the greatest detective on Earth, I promise I'll help you find your children."

~~~

Among said children, two need to be rescued: first to jump from the ship about to blow up, Phoenix and Black Bat landed together in the countryside, in a relatively desertic landscape. Disoriented, lost and in pain with no potential hosts around, they were in no condition to defend themselves. They got captured by human scientists working for a private company prior they could adapt to the new environment or bond with any living being.

One requires assistance: Nightwing was the last to step out of the crashing plane, it made sure its family exited the spaceship first. Another piece of the reactors exploded when it was about to jump, rubble collided with its frame, nearly knocked it out and made it lose its balance. Badly injured, Nightwing effectuated a rushed landing on... salty water. The ship itself sank farther into the Atlantic Ocean. On the upside, less than twenty-four hours later, the quasi-comatose alien ended up rescued by a young woman who took a week of holidays with her father on board of their recreational craft. In some peculiar adaptation of The Little Mermaid, Barbara Gordon spotted the oily black and blue substance while her dad and her fished in open sea, not that far from the Gothamite coastline. They approached, intervened... One thing leading to another, Nightwing bonded at first sight with an 100% compatible human. On top of not being scared, Babs also devoted to nurse the symbiote back to health.

One must be apprehended before it commits a carnage in Metropolis: Red Hood kills vessels every three hours or so, its metabolism is too powerful for most persons to handle. And when it doesn't melt people from the inside, the extraterrestrial rips off the heads of bystanders it devours in dark quarters at night, starving because of the increased energy it consumes when jumping from one incompatible host to another.

One is already looking for them: Demon found the right match at third try. Now helped by a retired military, Alfred Pennyworth, the youngest symbiote investigates to reunite the family.

......

Read “My Family is... a Little Weird” on AO3 here Discover the rest of the DC Symbiotes Series on AO3 here

[locustheologicus]

Embracing a new Cosmopolis, with Kindness

The movie, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, was pretty bizarre and interesting to be sure. You have a Chinese family where the mother and daughter have a dysfunctional relationship. In some way the movie is all about that but it goes through a bizarre multiverse storyline that brings a radical perspective on the conflict.

In the scene I included above, the mother and daughter, who are in the midst of a life and death multiverse struggle, are taking a break from their conflict in a universe where life never began. This allows them to talk and listen to each other for once and "just be a rock." The conversation goes into a deeply philosophical topic where Joy, the daughter, is desperately looking for meaning in a world that is, at least to her, completely chaotic. At this point in the movie, she hopes that her mother could offer her a broader perspective, but so far that is not the case.

The deeply philosophical topic that Joy brings up during this conversation is the tension of Cosmopolis. A tension that philosopher Stephen Toulmin discusses in his book by that same title. I wrote a post on this philosophical theme as it is one of my favorite concepts that can help me understand the need to change socio-political systems based on the shifts in our understanding of nature and the cosmos. Back in the 1990's Toulmin recognized that our new cosmology, the world of Einstein and Bohr, would eventually undermine the existing social systems that were built from a Newtonian cosmology (what Toulmin calls a modern cosmopolis). As he put it, "our concern can no longer be to guarantee the stability and uniformity of Science or the State alone: instead, it must be to provide the elbowroom we need in order to protect diversity and adaptability." He goes on to say:

Nostalgia for the Modern Cosmopolis exposes us to the frailty of the image of Nature on which it rests: of a stable physical system of bodies moving in fixed orbits around a single, central source of power -The Sun and the planets as a model for the Sun King and his subjects. This model served constructive ends in the 17th century, but the rigidity it imposed on rational practice in a world of independent and seperate agents is no longer appropriate in the late 20th century, which is a time of increasing interdependence, cultural diversity and historical change. ...By continuing to impose on thought and action all the demands of unreconstructed Modernity -rigor, exactitude, and system- we risk makin our ideas and institutions not just stable but sclerotic, and being unable to modify them in reasonable ways to meet the fresh demands of novel situations. (Toulmin, Pg. 183-184)

This is the challenge that Joy is going through and she is hoping that her mom, who serves as a source of stability and conflict, can offer a perspective to help her see meaning in this multiverse reality. A reality that follows the pattern of quantum mechanics, a pattern based on diversity and probabilities versus the Newtonian order of universals and cosmic stability. Towards the end of the movie the mom does come into a insight that seems to give Joy the ability to endure the chaos of their reality. It is an insight that is based on a central Christian truth, to be loving and kind to one another. The insight comes from her husband Waymond who recognizes the chaos that causes everyone to be scared and afraid. In the midst of this chaos he pleads for everyone to be kind to one another. In his most recent encyclical Pope Francis helps to unpack this wisdom from our tradition.

Kindness frees us from the cruelty that at times infects human relationships, from the anxiety that prevents us from thinking of others, from the frantic flurry of activity that forgets that others also have a right to be happy. Often nowadays we find neither the time nor the energy to stop and be kind to others, to say “excuse me”, “pardon me”, “thank you”. Yet every now and then, miraculously, a kind person appears and is willing to set everything else aside in order to show interest, to give the gift of a smile, to speak a word of encouragement, to listen amid general indifference. If we make a daily effort to do exactly this, we can create a healthy social atmosphere in which misunderstandings can be overcome and conflict forestalled. Kindness ought to be cultivated; it is no superficial bourgeois virtue. Precisely because it entails esteem and respect for others, once kindness becomes a culture within society it transforms lifestyles, relationships and the ways ideas are discussed and compared. Kindness facilitates the quest for consensus; it opens new paths where hostility and conflict would burn all bridges.

In the movie, Waymond makes this plea in the midst of a large fight involving factions supporting the daughter and those supporting the mother. in the background you hear CEO Waymond, one of the multiverse versions of her husband who never ended up marrying her and instead became a very successful CEO, as he offers the mother the following insight during a random visit.

You think I am weak, don't you? All of those years ago when we first fell in love your father would say I was too sweet for my own good. Maybe he was right. You tell me that it's a cruel world and we're all just running around in circles. I know that. I've been on this earth just as many days as you. When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight.

In the Christian/Catholic tradition Jesus preps us for kindness and compassion and many times people see this as a great weakness. Jesus is given a pass to exhibit these qualities because he is the Son of God but that does not become a relevant ethic for us. And yet this is exactly what Jesus invites us to be. As the Cosmopolis of the Greco-Roman world was coming to its end he wanted us to usher this new cosmological shift with the same plea that Waymon makes. Unfortunately we did not do a good job of following his lead. Both Jesus and Waymond want us to know that these "nice" virtues are not a weakness but a gentle strength that has tremendous force.

As we face the new cosmological shift that Joy recognizes in the movie, we should be attentive to this Christian plea towards kindness and mutual respect. Least we forget, ths is also an American ideal.

We may not be going through a Civil War (and God willing we won't have to) we are definately experiencing social instability through the chaos of the new cosmopolis. Many on the conservative side are clinging to the ideals of nationalism with the old promise of stability and uniformity (MAGA) which does not coincide with the our new cosmological framework. The rest of us are not sure how to design the socio-political systems that embrace this new cosmological framework order but we know that the old one is repressive and unable to address the new issues that we face. We are all going through this tension and traditionally this is resolved through conflict and war. We already see this happening. But perhaps many of us can take to heart the lessons of our Catholic faith and movies such as Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, and push for a culture of firm kindness and mutual respect.

[lifeofresulullah]

The Life of The Prophet Muhammad(pbuh): The Battle of Khandaq and Afterwards

The Battle of Khandaq: Part 2

Preparations in Madinah

When the Prophet was informed about the situation, he summoned the Companions and consulted them.

The Messenger of God asked them, “Shall we fight the enemy outside Madinah? Or shall we stay in Madinah and defend the city?”

Various offers were expressed about the question that the Prophet asked. Meanwhile, Salman al-Farisi said, “O Messenger of God! When we were afraid of the attacks of cavalrymen in Persia, we would dig trenches around the city and defend it.”

The offer was regarded as reasonable by both the Messenger of God and the Companions and the following decision was made:

They decided to stay in Madinah and dig trenches around the city; so, they would defend the city from the enemy attack. Thus, defending the city was preferred to fighting in the open air.

The reason why the Prophet preferred such a method was to prevent shedding much blood and death of many people. In fact, it was a principle that the Messenger of God preferred in all wars.

They Start to Dig Trenches

When it was decided unanimously that the city would be defended, the activity of digging trenches started immediately upon the order and advice of the Messenger of God. The Prophet himself determined what places would be dug by whom. There were very thick orchards and gardens in the south of the city. It was very unlikely for the enemy to pass through them. Even if they tried to pass through those orchards, they would have to scatter and pass in a single line, which would be stopped and defeated by a small platoon.  In the east of the city Sons of Qurayza Jews and other Jews that had signed a treaty with the Prophet were living. Therefore, the trenches were dug only in the north side of the city, which was open land. The determinations that were made necessitated it.

All Muslims, even the children, worked very hard to dig trenches. The Messenger of God himself dug trenches, too, and encouraged the Muslims to finish the trenches as soon as possible. All volunteering Muslims worked during the day and returned home at night. On the other hand, the Messenger of God stayed in the tent he had put up on a small hill day and night. He both dug trenches and supervised the activities of digging trenches.

The Messenger of God worked very hard without taking into consideration the dust, hot weather and hunger; sometimes, the Muslims said,   “O Messenger of God! Our work will be enough. Please have a rest” However, the Messenger of God said, “I want to get some rewards by working”, expressing that he wanted to work and get rewards.  

From time to time, while digging and carrying the soil, he chanted the following sanza of Abdullah b. Rawaha: “O God!  If you had not shown us the true path, we would neither give sadaqah nor perform prayers. When the unbelievers that attack us want to cause mischief and disorder, give patience and tranquility to our hearts and strength to our feet when they confront us!” This increased the efforts of the volunteering Muslims.

The Muslims dug trenches all day without having a rest. The Messenger of God looked at them with compassion and mercy and prayed as follows: “O God!  There is no permanent life other than life in the hereafter. Show mercy on Ansar and Muhajirs!”

The Muslims who worked hard answered the prayer of the Messenger of God as follows:

“We have promised Muhammad (pbuh) to make jihad in the way of God as long as we live.”

The Prophet Breaks the Hard Rock into Pieces

The activity of digging was going on.

The Companions confronted a hard rock. While trying to break it, several tools like sledgehammers, pickaxes and spades were broken. No matter how hard they tried, they could not break it.

They informed the Messenger of God who was having a rest in the tent made of animal hair. They said, “O Messenger of God! We confronted a white rock. We could not break it. What do you order us to do?”

The Prophet took the sledgehammer of Salman al-Farisi. He hit the rock by saying, “Bismillah”. One third of the rock was broken. He said, “Allahu Akbar! I was given the keys of Damascus. I swear by God that I see the red manors of Damascus now!” Then, he said, “Bismillah!” again and hit the rock with the sledgehammer again. One third of the rock was broken. The Prophet said, “Allahu Akbar! I was given the keys of Persia. I swear by God that I see the city of Madayin of the Chosroes and his white manors!” Then, he said “Bismillah!” again and hit the rock with the sledgehammer; the remaining part of the rock was broken into pieces. The Prophet said, “Allahu Akbar! I was given the keys of Yemen. I swear by God that I see the gates of Sana now!”

All of the conquests informed by the Messenger of God took place during the periods of Hazrat Umar and Hazrat Uthman. Abu Hurayra said to Muslims, “These conquests are only a beginning. God gave the keys of the cities you conquered and the cities that will be conquered until Doomsday to Muhammad (pbuh) beforehand” when he saw those conquests.

The Feast Given to the Army

The Muslims who worked without having a rest in order to finish digging as soon as possible did not have much food to eat. There was a famine and drought in Arabia that year; Madinah was also affected by that famine.

The act of digging was going on.

Once Jabirb. Abdullah went home and said to his wife, “I saw that the Messenger of God was extremely hungry. Nobody else could have put up with that hunger. Is there anything to eat at home?”

His wife said, “By God, I have this kid and one sa’ (3,5 kg) of barley.”

Jabir slaughtered the kid and his wife ground the barley in the mill. They put the meat into an earthenware pot and made some dough. They put the pot into the oven and waited.

When Jabir was about to leave the house, his wife said, “Do not make me embarrassed in the presence of the Messenger of God and the people near him”, implying that the food was not enough.  

Jabir went to the Messenger of God and said,

“O Messenger of God! I have some food. Take a few people with you and let us go to my house to eat.”

The Messenger of God asked, “How much food do you have?”

Jabir said, “Bread made of one sa’ of barley and a small kid”

Thereupon, the Prophet, “It is plenty of food and it is very nice. Tell your wife not to take the pot and the bread out of the oven until I arrive!” Then, he said to the people there in the presence of Jabir, “O people of Khandaq! We will go to Jabir’s house to have a feast. Come on.” All of the people of Muhajirs and Ansar who were there stood up.

Hazrat Jabir went home and said to his wife in astonishment, “May God give you goodness! The Messenger of God (pbuh) is coming here to eat with all of the people near him! ‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun!’ (To God we belong and to Him is our return!) What are we going to do now?”

His wife said, “Did the Messenger of God (pbuh) not ask you how much food we had?”

Jabir said, “Yes he did. I told him how much food we had.”

Thereupon, his wife said, “You will be embarrassed, not me!” She asked Jabir, “Did you or the Messenger of God invite them?”

Jabir said,“The Messenger of God (pbuh) invited them.” Then, his wife said, “He knows better than you do.”

The Messenger of God went to the house of Jabir with all of the Companions that were there. He said to them, “Enter the house without squeezing one another.”

The Companions entered the house in groups of tens.

The Messenger of God said a prayer of abundance. Then, he said to Jabir’s wife, “Call a woman bread maker and make bread together. Take food from the pot with a scoop. Do not remove the pot out of the oven!”

The Prophet took the bread out of the oven with his hands and broke some pieces from the bread. He put some meat on a piece of bread and gave it to a Companion. It went on like that until all Companions ate and were full.

Although everybody ate the meat and the bread, they remained the same.

The Messenger of God said to Jabir’s wife, “Eat the remaining meat and bread yourself and give it away because everybody is hungry.”

Jabir, who had thought he would definitely be embarrassed, stated the following regarding the issue:

“I swear by God that about a thousand people came. All of them ate and were full. However, the pot was still full and the bread was still there. We ate it and then gave it away to the neighbors.”

[tastydregs]

The Case for Outsourcing Morality to AI

It all started with an obscure article in an obscure journal, published just as the last AI winter was beginning to thaw. In 2004, Andreas Matthias wrote an article with the enigmatic title, “The responsibility gap: Ascribing responsibility for the actions of learning automata.” In it, he highlighted a new problem with modern AI systems based on machine learning principles. 

Once, it made sense to hold the manufacturer or operator of a machine responsible if the machine caused harm, but with the advent of machines that could learn from their interactions with the world, this practice made less sense. Learning automata (to use Matthias' terminology) could do things that were neither predictable nor reasonably foreseeable by their human overseers. What's more, they could do these things without direct human supervision or control. It would no longer be morally fair or legally just to hold humans responsible for the actions of machines. Matthias argued that this left humanity in a dilemma: Prevent the development of learning automata or embrace the responsibility “gaps” that resulted from their deployment.

Fast forward to 2023 and Matthias’ dilemma is no longer of mere academic concern. It is a real, practical issue. AI systems have been, at least causally, responsible for numerous harms, including discrimination in AI-based sentencing and hiring, and fatal crashes in self-driving vehicles. The academic and policy literature on “responsibility gaps” has unsurprisingly ballooned. Matthias’ article has been cited over 650 times (an exceptionally high figure for a philosophy paper), and lawyers and policymakers have been hard at work trying to clarify and close the gap that Matthias identified. 

What is interesting about the responsibility gap debate, however, is the assumption most of its participants share: that human responsibility is a good thing. It is a good thing that people take responsibility for their actions and that they are held responsible when something goes wrong. Contrariwise, it would be a bad thing if AI systems wreaked havoc in the world without anyone taking responsibility or being held responsible for that havoc. We must, therefore, find some way to plug or dissolve responsibility gaps, either by stretching existing legal/moral standards for responsibility, or introducing stricter standards of responsibility for the deployment of AI systems.

But perhaps responsibility is not always a good thing. Perhaps, to follow Matthias's original suggestion, some responsibility gaps ought to be embraced.

It is worth bearing in mind two features of our world. First, our responsibility practices (as in, our norms and habits of blaming, shaming, and punishing one another) have their dark side. Second, our everyday lives are replete with “tragic choices,” or  situations in which we have to choose between two morally equal or close-to-equally-weighted actions. Both features have implications for the responsibility gap debate. 

On the dark side of responsibility, an entire school of thought has emerged that is critical of our responsibility practices, particularly as they pertain to criminal justice. Gregg Caruso, a philosophy professor at the State University of New York, is one of the leading lights in this school of thought. In conversation with me, he argued that if you “look closely … you will find that there are lifetimes of trauma, poverty, and social disadvantage that fill the prison system.” Unfortunately, our current responsibility practices, premised on the ideal of free will and retributive justice, does nothing to seriously address this trauma. As Caruso put it, this system “sees criminal behavior as primarily a matter of individual responsibility and ends the investigation at precisely the point it should begin.” If we abandoned our system of retributive justice, we could “adopt more humane and effective practices and policies.” Caruso also pointed that our emotions associated with responsibility—what philosophers call ‘reactive attitudes’ such as resentment, anger, indignation, and blame, are “often counterproductive and corrosive to our interpersonal relationships” because they “give rise to defensive or offensive reactions rather than reform and reconciliation.”

[blackwoolncrown]

For the past few days, a heatwave has glowered over the Pacific Northwest, forcing temperatures in the region to a record-breaking 118ºF. Few people in the region—neither Americans nor Canadians—have air-conditioning. Stores sold out of new AC units in hours as a panicked public sought a reasonable solution to the emergency. Unfortunately, air-conditioning is part of what’s causing the unusual heatwave in the first place.

We came close to destroying all life on Earth during the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear annihilation. But we may have come even closer during the cooling war, when the rising number of Americans with air conditioners—and a refrigerant industry that fought regulation—nearly obliterated the ozone layer. We avoided that environmental catastrophe, but the fundamental problem of air conditioning has never really been resolved.

Mechanical cooling appeared in the early 1900s not for comfort but for business. In manufacturing, the regulation of temperature—“process cooling”—controlled the quality of commodities like cotton, tobacco, and chewing gum. In 1903, Alfred Wolff installed the first cooling system for people at the New York Stock Exchange because comfortable traders yielded considerably higher stock returns. Only in the ’20s did “commercial cooling” appear. On Memorial Day weekend 1925, Willis Carrier debuted the first centrifugal air-conditioning system at the Rivoli Theater in Midtown Manhattan. Previously, theaters had shut down in the summer. With air-conditioning, the Rivoli became “the talk of Broadway” and inaugurated the summer blockbuster.

-another direct tie to capitalism. Everything born out of colonio-capitalism carries its toxic mark. Article totally not under the cut for those who can’t pay for Time. It honestly paints a really clear picture of the situation. Bolding mine.-

“It’s time we become more comfortable with discomfort. Our survival may depend on it.“

Before World War II, almost no one had air-conditioning at home. Besides being financially impractical and culturally odd, it was also dangerous. Chemical refrigerants like sulfur dioxide and methyl chloride filled most fridges and coolers, and leaks could kill a child, poison a hospital floor, even blow up a basement. Everything changed with the invention of Freon in 1928. Non-toxic and non-explosive, Freon was hailed as a “miracle.” It made the modernist skyscraper—with its sealed windows and heat-absorbing materials—possible. It made living in the desert possible. The small, winter resort of Phoenix, Arizona, became a year-round attraction. Architecture could now ignore the local climate. Anywhere could be 65ºF with 55% humidity. Cheap materials made boxy, suburban tract housing affordable to most Americans, but the sealed-up, stifling design of these homes required air-conditioning to keep the heat at bay. Quickly, air-conditioning transitioned from a luxury to a necessity. By 1980, more than half of all U.S. homes were air-conditioned. And despite millions of Black Americans fleeing the violence of Jim Crow, the South saw greater in-migration than out-migration for the first time—a direct result of AC. The American car was similarly transformed. In 1955, only 10 percent of American cars had air-conditioning. Thirty years later, it came standard.

The cooling boom also altered the way we work. Now, Americans could work anywhere at any hour of the day. Early ads for air-conditioning promised not health or comfort but productivity. The workday could proceed no matter the season or the climate. Even in the home, A/C brought comfort as a means to rest up before the next work day.

The use of air-conditioning was as symbolic as it was material. It conveyed class status. Who did and didn’t have air-conditioning often fell starkly along the color line, too, especially in the South. It conquered the weather and, with it, the need to sweat or squirm or lie down in the summer swelter. In that sense, air-conditioning allowed Americans to transcend their physical bodies, that long-sought fantasy of the Puritan settlers: to be in the world but not of it. Miracle, indeed.

But it came with a price. As it turned out, Freon isn’t exactly non-toxic. Freon is a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), which depletes the ozone layer and also acts as a global warming gas. By 1974, the industrialized world was churning out CFCs, chemicals that had never appeared on the planet in any significant quantities, at a rate of one million metric tons a year—the equivalent mass of more than 500,000 cars. That was the year atmospheric chemists Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina first hypothesized that the chlorine molecules in CFCs might be destroying ozone in the stratosphere by bonding to free oxygen atoms and disrupting the atmosphere’s delicate chemistry. By then, CFCs were used not only as refrigerants but also as spray can propellants, manufacturing degreasers, and foam-blowing agents.

The ozone layer absorbs the worst of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Without stratospheric ozone, life as we know it is impossible. A 1 percent decline in the ozone layer’s thickness results in thousands of new cases of skin cancer. Greater depletion would lead to crop failures, the collapse of oceanic food systems, and, eventually, the destruction of all life on Earth.

In the 1980s, geophysicist Joseph Farman confirmed the Rowland-Molina hypothesis when he detected a near-absence of ozone over Antarctica—the “Ozone Hole.” A fierce battle ensued among industry, scientists, environmentalists, and politicians, but in 1987 the U.S signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which ended Freon production.

The Montreal Protocol remains the world’s only successful international environmental treaty with legally binding emissions targets. Annual conferences to re-assess the goals of the treaty make it a living document, which is revised in light of up-to-date scientific data. For instance, the Montreal Protocol set out only to slow production of CFCs, but, by 1997, industrialized countries had stopped production entirely, far sooner than was thought possible. The world was saved through global cooperation.

The trouble is that the refrigerants replacing CFCs, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), turned out to be terrible for the planet, too. While they have an ozone-depleting potential of zero, they are potent greenhouse gases. They absorb infrared radiation from the sun and Earth and block heat that normally escapes into outer space. Carbon dioxide and methane do this too, but HFCs trap heat at rates thousands of times higher. Although the number of refrigerant molecules in the atmosphere is far fewer than those of other greenhouse gases, their destructive force, molecule for molecule, is far greater.

In three decades, the production of HFCs grew exponentially. Today, HFCs provide the cooling power to almost any air conditioner in the home, in the office, in the supermarket, or in the car. They cool vaccines, blood for transfusions, and temperature-sensitive medications, as well as the data processors and computer servers that make up the internet—everything from the cloud to blockchains. In 2019, annual global warming emissions from HFCs were the equivalent of 175 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

In May, the EPA signaled it will begin phasing down HFCs and replacing them with more climate-friendly alternatives. Experts agree that a swift end to HFCs could prevent as much as 0.5ºC of warming over the next century—a third of the way to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Yet regardless of the refrigerant used, cooling still requires energy. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, air-conditioning accounts for nearly a fifth of annual U.S. residential electricity use. This is more energy for cooling overall and per capita than in any other nation. Most Americans consider the cost of energy only in terms of their electricity bills. But it’s also costing us the planet. Joe Biden’s announcement to shift toward a renewable energy infrastructure obscures the uncertainty of whether that infrastructure could meet Americans’ outrageously high energy demand—much of it for cooling that doesn’t save lives. Renewable energy infrastructure can take us only so far. The rest of the work is cultural. From Freon to HFCs, we keep replacing chemical refrigerants without taking a hard look at why we’re cooling in the first place.

Comfort cooling began not as a survival strategy but as a business venture. It still carries all those symbolic meanings, though its currency now works globally, cleaving the world into civilized cooling and barbaric heat. Despite what we assume, as a means of weathering a heat wave, individual air-conditioning is terribly ineffective. It works only for those who can afford it. But even then, their use in urban areas only makes the surrounding micro-climate hotter, sometimes by a factor of 10ºF, actively threatening the lives of those who don’t have access to cooling. (The sociologist Eric Klinenberg has brilliantly studied how, in a 1995 Chicago heat wave, about twice as many people died than in a comparable heat wave forty years earlier due to the city’s neglect of certain neighborhoods and social infrastructure.) Ironically, research suggests that exposure to constant air-conditioning can prevent our bodies from acclimatizing to hot weather, so those who subject themselves to “thermal monotony” are, in the end, making themselves more vulnerable to heat-related illness.

And, of course, air-conditioning only works when you have the electricity to power it. During heatwaves, when air-conditioning is needed most, blackouts are frequent. On Sunday, with afternoon temperatures reaching 112ºF around Portland, the power grid failed for more than 6,300 residences under control by Portland General Electrics.

The troubled history of air-conditioning suggests not that we chuck it entirely but that we focus on public cooling, on public comfort, rather than individual cooling, on individual comfort. Ensuring that the most vulnerable among the planet’s human inhabitants can keep cool through better access to public cooling centers, shade-giving trees, safe green spaces, water infrastructure to cool, and smart design will not only enrich our cities overall, it will lower the temperature for everyone. It’s far more efficient this way.

To do so, we’ll have to re-orient ourselves to the meaning of air-conditioning. And to comfort. Privatized air-conditioning survived the ozone crisis, but its power to separate—by class, by race, by nation, by ability—has survived, too. Comfort for some comes at the expense of the life on this planet.

It’s time we become more comfortable with discomfort. Our survival may depend on it.

[tommyspeakycap]

i almost do - ben chilwell

the first fic of my taylor swift red fits!! took me a few months, but finally here we go!

i bet you think i either moved on or hate you, ‘cause each time you reach out there’s no reply

red masterlist

The way your life had ended up was one of those things to you now. One of those things that you spend your late nights pondering, laying in bed staring up at the patterns of the ceiling that you've probably just made up in order to occupy your sleepless mind and you wonder; how on earth has it come to this. And often your mind strays, moving from considering the sheer irritation and sadness of your situation to ponder over who else is up awake at this hour wondering. Surely a lot, probably millions of people around the world awake at the very same time asking the exact same questions of themselves that you ask of yourself each and every night nowadays. In particular, however, you wonder is he is up and thinking the same way that you are.

Is he laying in his bed, hands folded behind his head with his ankles crossed over as he finds sleep hard to come by because of his anxious mind. It was a sight you'd seen so many times when he was daily part of your life - the one who you would fall asleep next to or do your worrying next to every night. You wonder if he lies awake thinking about you, thinking about the end of your relationship and wondering if there was anything else that could have been done differently or even at all that would have prevented things from ending the way that they did months ago.

You know what it's like to have exes, of course. Usually, you cut them off at the source and then you work on yourself and you'd work on moving on with your life. This time, it couldn't be so easy. You couldn't just cut off Ben Chilwell, even if that was something that you wanted to do.

He had been such a huge part of your life that trying to cut him away would be like losing a limb. It would be like trying to saw off your own foot or your very own left hand. The Chelsea brunette had become such an important figure in your life, such a consistent presence by your side that trying to detach from him felt like a part of you was literally being ripped away. To cut off he who was the love of your life is a feat you didn't think would be possible because whether you like it or not, a huge part of you will always belong to him. He will always hold the title of being that one for you, the one love you thought you would spend the rest of your life with. The one who you thought you one grow old with, enjoy your life with. The one who you thought was your one, and maybe he truly was.

You just weren't his.

To cut Ben off - to forget about how happy he made you, how loved he ensured that you felt for most of the time that you were together and to try to find some semblance of happiness after he had left you with a gaping hole that nothing seemed to be able to fill - would in some ways definitely been in your best interest. It might've helped you to heal, might've allowed you to get on with your life instead of being constantly stuck in the same limbo, the very same repetitive loops that continue every single day of your existence and worsen vehemently every other weekend.

And that is the other reason why you couldn't cut him off. While it may have been the best thing for you - maybe - you weren't the person who you held most important. You weren't the one that you were thinking about when making these decisions and neither was Ben. Neither of you were the important people in this situation.

Your child was.

He is only two. He doesn't understand what's going on or why now he only sees his daddy every other weekend and sometimes midweek when he can find the time when he used to be able to see him every evening. He doesn't understand why mummy and daddy don't live together anymore, nor why daddy is never in bed when he crawls in beside you in the middle of the night because he's sad or scared or needs comfort. But he also doesn't understand that he doesn't understand. At two years old, he doesn't know what he's feeling. When he's upset and throws a tantrum, he just knows he's upset and he doesn't know why. You can theorise it has something to do with the fact that everything is changing so much and so quickly for him at such a young age.

When he comes home from Ben's and gets clingy, not letting you go anywhere without him either following right behind you or attached to your hip, he doesn't even really know why it upsets him when his mummy is out of his sight, he just knows the he doesn't want to be away from you. It's you that knows he gets separation anxiety now because you are his main caregiver.

You know, however, that that is not Ben being a poor or lackadaisical parent. That is Ben trying to establish some form of routine for his boy when he knows that this is a healthier than what was happening before. The situation in your house wasn't good for a child to be in, nor was it good for either you or Ben to be at odds so often.

Sure, do you wish he had given a little more trying to keep your family together? Yes of course, but he felt like it needed to come to a close, and you weren't going to fight for something that he clearly felt was over. You wouldn't burn yourself out fighting for a man who no longer loves you when you have a child to raise and give your love to. Staying in a relationship because you have a child together never ends well, and staying with someone who doesn't love you will only ever end in even more hurt than just the crushing weight of knowing you weren't good enough for the one person who vowed to love you forever.

The ceiling isn't quite doing enough to distract your mind tonight. Partially, you think it could be because you know you're all alone in the house tonight. It's Ben's weekend and the little man went down to bed hours ago. They called you to say goodnight because he was missing his mama and you read him a story together through the phone. Ben looked as though he had wanted to say something, but you hurried off the phone as quickly as you could and your mind had been reeling ever since.

You missed reading stories to your son together like that, but in person. The two of you used to curl up in bed next to him and flick through the books, telling the stories and putting on all the different voices until he was fast asleep between the two of you and then you would admire his little features. He's a perfectly replica of what you and Ben's combined genes could create. He is everything beautiful about Ben and all the very best of you. He is truly, truly perfect. You used to spend those wee hours of the morning joking about having more, how Ben wanted to have a daughter and how you'd spend the rest of your lives together watching them grow up and showering them with love.

Storytime over FaceTime had left you reeling, trying to conjure up the idea that Ben might have felt the same way, or that he might still be up at this hour thinking about the very same things that you are thinking about right now.

Is he sitting out on the balcony attached to the bedroom on one of those cushioned chairs with the doors swung open and a heavy coat wrapped around him as the wind whips at the wisps of hair that fall over his forehead. Does he sit there awake like you had watched him and done with him so many nights in the past. Is he sitting there wondering what you're doing as he looks out at the lights of the city a little way out in the distance. Does he remember all of those nights in that city, dancing around in the street with cheap chips and cheese in a styrofoam box and a wooden fork in hand as you wait on a taxi to stumble drunk into to get home? Does he think about the day you told him you were pregnant, when he burst into tears of joy and spun you around the room? Does he think about the day he asked you to marry him or the day that you brought life into the world together?

Maybe most importantly, does he even think about you at all?

But if Ben asked for you back right now, could you truly ever accept? Even if he grovelled and begged, could you ever build up the same trust in him that you used to have?

The answer is probably not.

Ben couldn’t understand you; why you couldn’t look in his eyes, could barely bare to talk to him. He was meant to be you’re forever. He was meant to be the man who you were with for the rest of your life to raise kids with, fall asleep next to and wake up next to every morning and that had been crushed when Ben told you he needed time away. Ben was the one who broke it off, Ben was the one who said this needed to end. Ben was the one who left you.

It was all him.

How could you ever be expected to trust him again after that. You were living you life in terror that he would leave your son the way he left you, or just leave both of your lives altogether and that you’d never see him again. That would shatter your entire being. It would destroy you in the final ways that him leaving you had only just about been left stuck together with tape and glue.

When he does the pickup of your little boy, you’ll avoid his eyes and try to hide the fact that you’re hands are shaking so violently you can barely hold anything. Ben wonders where it all went wrong, wondering why you won’t reply to any of his messages that aren’t about his adored two year old son. Wondering why you never accept offers to spend days as a family. Ben regrets ever leaving, but by far his biggest regret is whatever he did - and he can’t think of what that could be - that meant you couldn’t even be friends. You can be civil, for that sake of your boy. But your heart has been far too broken to ever imagine opening it up again to anyone, especially Ben Chilwell.

and i bet it never ever occurred to you, that i can’t say hello to you, and risk another goodbye

[gyusbambi]

humph; han seojun (pt 4)

part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5

click here for humph masterlist!

story: frenemies to enemies to lovers, high school au

synopsis: seojun and you have known each other since kindergarten. you’re neighbors and even attended the same singing and piano classes. despite knowing each other for such a long time, you don’t enjoy spending time with seojun. even though you are aware of his unfairness, you keep spending time with him. when will you finally leave your childhood frenemy?

note: humph! is a story inspired by pentagon’s “humph! / 접근금지”. originally, this is a seungyeon fanfiction, which i posted on my wattpad. words: 3.8k

to claim that the cupid-team is surprised to witness han seojun getting along with his long term frenemy would be an absolute understatement. in fact, they seem completely and utterly dumbfounded as they watch you both laugh at a joke seojun pulled in the middle of the bus ride back home. needless to say, the childhood friends tease each other now and then like they’re used to it, this time without hurting any feelings. all of these observations, including the fact that you decided to sit next to each other in the bus, lead to several assumptions and without you knowing, rumors start to develop. 

for whatever reason, neither you nor seojun are aware of the gossip regarding both of you. perhaps it’s thanks to kim chorong, who’s apparently really skilled at being inconspicuous. 

_

it’s been one day since you arrived home and you find yourself sleeping in till two pm on a saturday. 

seriously, you should fix your chaotic sleeping schedule.

when you finally leave your room to get some food into your stomach, dressed in your favorite hoodie and sweatpants, your mum and juyeong are already eating lunch. like expected, they give you a quick judging look without interrupting their conversation. while you’re putting some rice in a bowl they talk about juyeong’s crush on some girl. soon their conversation moves to something related to seojun, and that's when you suddenly pay attention instead of playing with the cold food on your plate.

"y/n, is seojun’s mother in a better condition now?"

instantly you look up to react to your mum’s question. instead of looking at you, she puts more vegetables on juyeong’s table,

"it's been a few days since i last visited her, maybe i should do it again soon. i really hope she gets better."

"what are you talking about?"

"seojun hyung's mum is in hospital." juyeong answers, his mouth stuffed with food while pushing the vegetables away with a scrunched face.

"what?"

"hasn't he told you about his mum? i thought you guys would tell each other everything." my mum questioned with a small pout forming on her lips, finally meeting your worried eyes.

"they broke up.", your annoying brother fails the attempt to whisper.

"we're not together!"

displeased, you hiss at your brother, voice getting higher.

"you guys act like a married couple sometimes. it's annoying."

"shut up!"

"both of you stop now." your mother sighs while her hands move in the air in attempt to stop you from attacking your own brother.

"seojun’s mum is seriously sick and i'm going to visit her tomorrow morning. y/n, maybe you should do too? or talk to him a little since he's probably not doing so well."

"i will."

feeling upset that you’re just finding out about seojun’s mother’s condition, you can’t stop thinking about it for the whole day. besides that, you are worried and consider visiting them the next day.

even though their house is quite near to yours, you have to go through the dangerous part of your quarter. as you make your way to the han’s, your hand moves to your right pocket to grab the pocketknife, which seojun gifted you in your freshman year of high school. for defense reasons, he said.

"you need to be careful when you're walking down this street. here, have this."

however, instead of seeing a group of dangerous men, you spot han seojun himself, walking towards your direction with hands in his pocket. thinking of a casual way of greeting him, you clear your throat before taking a few steps forwards in order to greet him,

"hey!”

"hey, what are you doing here?"

surprised to see you in this area, seojun raises his eyebrows.

"well, i actually wanted to visit- what the hell happened to your face?"

rapidly, you interrupt yourself when the boy is finally close enough for you to spot the multiple bruises on his pale skin. this causes you take a few steps forward and reach for his cheek instantly, worry written all over your face.

he looks horrible. bruises all over his face, lip bleeding, knuckles visibly red.

seojun catches glimpse of your worried eyes and feels embarrassed for you to find him at this state. instead of making the attempt to explain the situation, he grabs your hand which rests on his cheek. the touch of your warm and soft hand causes a pressure building in this chest. seojun doesn’t dare to take his eyes off of yours.

suddenly your cheeks feel like they’re turning into the shade of a tomato. besides that, your heart starts acting all weird when you catch glimpse of his intense eyes.

"what happened?" you question once again, this time with even more concern.

"it's not important-"

"did you get into a fight?"

"that bastard lee seungyong was getting on my nerves again, it's not important." he sighs after running his hand through his hair.

"alright. come on, we need to clean those bruises before they get worse." you mutter after grabbing his right arm and pulling him towards your house.

_

seojun hisses with a painful expression as you attempt to clean the awful wounds on his cheeks. with a concentrated look crossing over your face, you focus on the terrible cut. however, you impatiently drop your hand on your lap when seojun can’t seem to stop moving, an annoyed sigh followed after. 

“could you stop moving the whole time? i’m trying to do something here.”,

positioning yourself closer to the boy sitting on the edge of your bed, you’re ready to treat his wounds for the third time. seojun only grins playfully despite the painful bruises,

“look at you acting like a doctor.”

ignoring his comment, you raise your hand once again to reach for his chin. fingers brushing on his skin, you are able to focus. this time seojun doesn’t flinch. quite the contrary, he’s like frozen on spot. the only thing he seems to be able to focus on are your features. 

nothing but silence dominates your room as you decide to clean the cut on his bottom lip. you fingers brushing over his soft lip, eyes completely focused on them, the poor boy’s heart is about to explode in front of you. he internally thanks to god that you don’t notice his chest rising up and down or his ears turning into a darker shade of red. breath taken away, his eyes linger on your lips, blinking frequently.

yet, his relief only lasts for a couple seconds when the silence eventually makes you look up to seojun, only to find him already staring at you, eyes gazing at your lips.

not aware of your slightly surprised eyes, he continues staring. clearly, your bodies are almost attached to each other. not to mention, you leaned in a little earlier, grip on his shoulder to prevent him from moving. the young boy practically prays that you won’t hear his heart racing in his chest.

aren’t you even a little nervous? it almost makes him annoyed how the closeness doesn’t seem to bother you at all.

little does he know that you feel the exact same way. in fact, you’re so bothered by the butterflies in your stomach that you suddenly wish that he would just continue making dumb jokes or rude comments.

pulling your hand away from his shoulder in a swift move, you blink. still, you’re not able to look away which seems so stupid and unbelievably odd. 

seconds after you catch glimpse of his hand getting closer to yours but that isn’t enough for you to look away.

why would someone look attractive with a beaten face? that doesn't make any sense.

seeing him in this state, bruises, messy hair, intense gaze, flushed face, makes you want to hug him, ask him what was wrong, tell him you were here for him.

however, right when you think he is going to say something or reach for your hand and hold it...

"guess who just ate two big delicious menus-"

juyeong.

the second your brother lays eyes on seojun sitting super close to you, his eyes widen in horror.

"o-oh adult business, i get it. i'll leave now. bye, hyung!"

yet, of course, before leaving your room he doesn’t miss the chance to make gagging noises.

"and y/n, sadly, there wasn't enough food for you."

his fake pout makes you want to throw your slipper at him but you just close your eyes for a second and exhale, trying to remain calm.

seojun only chuckles with amusement.

"mum! y/n and seojun hyung are a couple again. can she move out now?"

juyeong’s annoying voice can be heard all the way too my room. embarrassed, you glance at seojun, who is obviously trying to hold in his laugh.

"i'm sorry for my brother."

"you don't need to be."

"a-anyways, are you better now? i mean your bruises?" you stammer while pointing at his face, wanting to ignore what just happened.

"yeah, a lot better. thank you."

he trails off, eyes darting through the room,

"i-i should probably leave now."

right, your stupid self forgot to ask him about his mum.

"i heard about your mum. i hope she's doing better?"

“thankfully, she is. it's a little difficult for us but we’re going through this."

“hopefully she’ll feel better soon. i’m sure you’re taking good care of her,”

you’re always like that. caring about others more than yourself.

“if you need anything, i’m here.”

he smiles genuinely, “thank you.“

and that's when he leaves.

_

the sun shines outside the next day. but instead of going out and enjoying the nice weather like other normal people, you lay on your bed while thinking about the previous day. strangely, you couldn’t stop thinking about the way seojun made you feel. 

why did your heart race? why were you left speechless?

in the corner of your mind, there’s been an explanation for your weird feelings for your childhood friend. although, you’ve always tried to ignore it and distract yourself.

but now, thinking about all the times seojun made your heart flutter, it just made sense.

you like him.

“no!”

with widen eyes you swiftly stand up, not believing yourself.

it couldn’t be, right? everyone feels this way to their friend at some point of their friendship, no?

but the thing is: you’ve been feeling like this the whole time. 

letting yourself fall on your bed, you scream into your pillow.

you like han seojun.

and there’s no way your former frenemy likes you back.

_

it’s another school morning as you walk into your class. this time however, you’re nervous to enter the room. after all, you’ll have to be around the one person you now feel nervous talking to. what if he notices your odd behavior. praying that he won’t approach you in a way that made your heart flutter, you eventually enter the classroom.

however, it seems like the universe is making fun of you when you’re met with something hundred times worse the moment you step into the room. instantly, all eyes land on you and all you hear are cheers and screams from your classmates,

“congratulations on dating, y/n and seojun!”

“you’re so cute together!”

“y/n and seojun sitting on a tree!”

at the sight of chorong and his group wearing t-shirts with your shipname printed on them, your eyes widen in horror. they think you’re dating han seojun?!

“why didn’t you tell me anything? i’m your close friend after all!”

sua pouts, hitting your arm playfully while your eyes are still glued on the ridiculous t-shirts.

“is it true, y/n?”,

from the corner of your eye you see soojin giving you a teasing smile.

“listen, guys. there has been a huge misunderstanding.”,

when you can finally focus on your friends, who surround you with curious looks, han seojun enters the classroom, completely unaware of what’s happening right now.

the young boy frowns at chorong after setting his bag on his table. yet soon his confused face changes to a shocked one, as he eventually notices the t-shirts, everyone congratulating him with cheerful laughter.

turning his head to you, he notices your helpless look while you tilt your head to the side. totally surprised by everything, seojun has no clue how to act at the beginning. 

finally, both of you manage to stand in front of the class, facing your classmates as they continue asking several questions,

“since when have you been dating?”

“no way! did anything happen during the school trip?”

“tell us the truth!”

frustrated, you move your hands in the air, trying to speak with a loud tone so that everyone can understand you,

“i don’t know how you came up with this rumor but seojun and me are only friends, okay?”

hearing your statement, everyone groans at the same time, not believing you at all,

“it’s so obvious! just tell us the truth.”

letting out a sigh, you turn your head to face seojun with an annoyed look,

“could you at least say something?”

however, seojun only raises his eyebrows before taking his hands out of his pockets,

“would you hate it that much?”

his sentence makes you frown and multiple questions appear in your head. not quite understanding his point, you continue staring at him with furrowed eyebrows before he finally slams his hand on the desk in front of him, catching everyone’s attention,

“you guys better stop spreading all those rumors around. she’s only my friend...,”

disappointed, many students groan before going back to their seats while others still don’t seem to believe seojun and shake their heads in denial.

seojun bends down to your height so that his face is only a few inches apart from yours before whispering with one eyebrow raised,

“...right?”

nervously you blink, sadness starting to grow inside you after hearing his words. of course, he only considers you as his friend. there’s no way he would see you as something more.

_

friday nights are always the same for you: watching your current favorite tv show while snacking on whatever you have at home. whereas other people from your grade probably club somewhere.

that night your phone rings and an unknown number appears on the screen. thinking it’s a stupid prank, you pick it up with an annoyed sigh.

"hello?"

"hello. is this y/n?"

"yes. who am i talking to?"

there is a short silence before the unknown person starts talking again,

"look, i work at this club near your neighborhood and this dude randomly passed out here. i found your number on his phone so i thought of calling you. can you maybe come and get him? he's seriously wasted a– dude, what the hell, stop spilling all the drinks!"

"i'm sorry but who are you talking about?"

you heard the unknown man mumble before answering, "seojung? seung- seojun?"

"han seojun?"

"yes! that's his name."

a short silence takes over when you sit up in shock.

"so, are you coming?"

you sigh before replying, "i need the adress.”

_

the moment you enter that club, you want to return to your house. many people dance on the dance floor, totally wasted. everyone is pressing their bodies against each other's. the loud music makes you feel even more uncomfortable. you look around and let out a relieved sigh when you find a bartender with a phone on his hand.

"hello, i'm here for seojun. the guy who–"

"hey, finally! he's right here."

you follow the man to the other side of the club, where people are sitting on the couches and drinks were sold every minute. it doesn’t take you long to spot seojun sitting on the couch. his eyes are closed but his head is swinging from left to right. you can’t believe your eyes. you’re pretty sure you haven’t seen him in a state like this ever before.

"don't worry. your boyfriend didn't hook up with anyone." the bartender next to you said.

"he's not my boyfriend."

"what are you then?"

"i'm his..." you trail off before answering,

"neighbor! i’m his neighbor!"

seojun shouldn't know that you came to pick him up at this time.

without waiting any longer, you help seojun getting up and wrap his arm around your shoulder. before leaving the club, the bartender reaches you seojun’s phone and makes sure to call a taxi. after thanking him you leave with seojun’s heavy body.

while waiting for the taxi to arrive, seojun keeps rambling stupid things you can’t understand. it’s getting harder for you to stand with him by yourself every minute, so you decide to sit on the bench with him, which is a couple steps away from the bus station.

you let out an exhausted sigh after sitting down and then turn your head towards him. suddenly you grab his face and make him look at you. he smiles like an idiot after you brush his bangs away from his forehead. his cheeks are extremely red, his lips pouting slightly and his eyes struggling not to close. your cold hands hold his warm, soft cheeks while you analyze his expressions. you have to admit: seojun looks cute.

after a few seconds he suddenly frowns. he narrows his eyes and tilts his head to the side slightly, looks you up and down considerately before asking,

"who are you?"

“you don't know who i am?"

"hmmm..." he rubs his chin carefully, acting like he’s solving a mystery,

"no."

"good."

"you're telling me that that's fine?" seojun giggles and covers his mouth.

"yes, absolutely."

"alright! i'm han seojun. who are you?" he stretches his hand out for you to shake.

"does that matter?”

“of course! who are you, young lady?”

"that's not important right now. what matters is that you're extremely drunk. what were you doing here?"

"you're rude!" he pouts and crosses his arms,

"you won't even tell me your name."

"why are you acting so childish?"

"i-i don't know."

"never mind. that's fine."

"really?!"

"yeah, you're good."

you notice how his lips form a small smile,

"you're nice and then rude and then nice and then- you remind me of someone you know?"

yes, that's you.

"my friend y/n."

"oh, really?" you sarcastically laugh.

"yeah! she's like you. but prettier. like so much prettier. she’s pretty."

"that doesn't even make sense."

"huh?" seojun asks confused.

oh no, why do you have to be so cute.

"actually, it’s hard for me to be her friend." suddenly he’s all sad,

"sometimes i cross the line and don’t know my limits. but she's so dumb and stubborn!"

"and why is that?” frowning, you cross your arms in front of your chest, waiting for his response. 

he only sighs with tiredness, "never mind–"

and then he falls asleep on your shoulder.

_

finally you arrive at seojun’s house and fortunately all the lights are out. with his heavy body pressing to your small one, you struggle to carry him up the stairs. quietly, the door is opened by you before seojun falls into his bed. your head starts hurting, which makes you sit down next to him and massage your temples. however, you help seojun standing up and carry him to the bathroom carefully, in order to wash his face. he lets you take off his jacket and his shoes. finally he lays down on his back, with his face facing the ceiling.

"don't lie on your back." you demand.

"hm?" seojun’s eyes are firmly closed when he mutters with tiredness.

"lie on your side." you pull his body to the side, so that he could face you.

definitely, his facials expressions change. his lips are no longer pouted, his eyes extremely tired, his cheeks pale. from analyzing his face once again, you fail to notice him staring at you with his eyebrows drawn together. soon his confused expression changes to a sad one when you cover his body with his bed sheets.

"i'm sorry." seojun mutters suddenly. you expect him to continue, as he grabs both of your hands and slightly pulls you closer to him. a shiver goes down your spine.

"y/n, you deserve better."

he knows it’s you? 

"i know i treated badly but i need you."

his eyes are barely opened, his words barely understandable. your hands start shivering as his grip tightens.

"i-i should go."

"no! please stay here." he rambles drunkly.

you decide to stay a little longer, just until he would fall asleep and hopefully forget everything that has happened this night.

“i mi..."

you aren’t able to understand his quiet mumbling, so you lean in a little,

“what did you say?"

“i miss y/n."

silence takes over the room before you finally reply,

“i missed you too, seojun-ah.”

your words make him open his eyes immediately. with a surprised face he tilts his head slightly and narrows his eyes,

"y/n?"

instead of saying anything, you hold his hand while he’s still questioning your identity. all of the sudden his hands leave yours to grab your face. without waiting too long he pulls your face closer to his. instantly, your eyes widen when you notice the small gap between your noses. intensively, he looks into your eyes. so many emotions can be read from his look, yet you can’t figure out what he‘s feeling exactly. they have the most beautiful brown color you have ever seen. so deep, that you could get lost in them. only seconds pass, but it still feels like you were staring at each other for an eternity. you can even feel his soft breath on your face, which causes your ears to turn a dark shade of crimson.

seojun then glances at your lips before looking back into your eyes again. without waiting any longer he presses your lips together, one hand holding your cheek while the other grabs your waist. you let out a small gasp, your eyes remain closed, your whole body frozen. is this really happening?

when you’re finally able to kiss him back and hold firmly into his shoulders, he tilts your head, deepening the kiss. you feel your heart beating thousand times faster, almost exploding in your chest, as his soft lips press against yours. your face is glowing when you eventually wrap your arms around his neck to pull him closer, unable to resist the warm feeling. without doubt, you are sure that you've never felt something like this before.

seojun slowly pulls back when he feels your fingers softly tugging at his hair, leaving a small gap between your lips. you feel his breath on your face when he hums something before his lips meet yours for the second time, not giving you enough time to open your eyes,

“hmm, strawberries.”

feeling his lips forming a small smile, your heart is about to explode in your chest. seojun was insanly drunk but clearly enjoys the taste of strawberry lip balm, brushing his thumb over your cheek softly.

soon you break the kiss only to find seojun falling asleep on his bed seconds later. not believing what just happened you stare at him, admiring his features before panic takes over you and you rush out of his house.

would he remember any of this tomorrow?

_

to be continued...

(p.s: sorry for making you wait for so long🥺)

[no--envies]

Nightless City – An analysis of Wei Wuxian’s accountability

I’ve come across several takes about the bloodbath of Nightless City that don’t really sit well with me. Some people say Wei Wuxian is totally to blame, others that he’s totally blameless, and I personally disagree with both. I think that, like in many other events in the novel, what really happened is more complex.

(All the translations are by Exiled Rebels Scanlations)

First of all, the text shows us that Wei Wuxian wasn’t completely clear-headed even before going to Nightless City, which is normal considering what he was going through. His whole world had crumbled in just a few hours. Everything he’d done until that moment – the sacrifices he had made for what he believed was right – appeared to be for nothing. He ended up hurting the people most dear to him, and he couldn’t even protect those he had wanted to protect. When he could move again after the three days he spent in the cave immobilized by Wen Qing’s needle, for a while he didn’t even know what to do or where to go.

After he got down the mountain, he stood amid the bushes, catching his breath. Bent down, he propped his hands against his knees for a long while before he stood up straight again. Yet, looking at the wild grasses that covered many of the mountain paths, he didn’t know where to go.

Burial Mound—he’d just gone down from there.

Lotus Pier—he hadn’t been back in over a year.

Koi Tower? Three days had passed already. If he went now, it was likely that Wen Qing’s corpse and Wen Ning’s ashes were the only things left.

He stood blankly. Suddenly, he felt that the world had no place for him, despite how large it was. He didn’t know what to do either.

(Chapter 77)

It’s rare to see Wei Wuxian so utterly lost and miserable. What happened was too much for even someone like him – who always tends to look at the bright side of any situation – to be able to deal with it. Since he doesn’t know where else to go, he decides to go to Koi Tower to retrieve the Wen siblings’ ashes, but he doesn’t manage to do anything before he’s discovered and forced to flee. He wanders without purpose for a long time until he arrives at a city gate where he hears a group of cultivators talking about him with contempt, which triggers his anger.

The longer Wei WuXian listened, the colder his expression grew.

He should’ve understood long ago. No matter what he did, not a single good word would come out of these people’s mouths. When he won, others feared; when he lost, others rejoiced.

He was cultivating the crooked path either way, so what exactly did the years of persistence mean? What exactly were they for?

However, the colder his eyes were, the brighter the raging fire within his heart burned.

(Chapter 77)

We see him come to a very bitter realization: no matter his noble intentions and moral integrity, everyone has already made up their mind about him, he would be made into a villain no matter what he does. Before what happened at Qiongqi Path he had managed to keep a positive mindset, since he was doing fine in the Burial Mounds with the Wen remnants. It wasn’t an easy life, but they were safe, they didn’t starve and Wei Wuxian was free to focus on his research and inventions in peace, creating the Compass of Evil and the Spirit-Attraction Flag. He missed his family, but he also found another one. He had people who loved him and valued him, and whom he loved and valued in turn. All in all, he was content. He thought that as long as he didn’t actively seek trouble, the world would leave him alone. But he was wrong. Jin Zixun ambushed him accusing him of something he didn’t do, and everything spiraled down so quickly he couldn’t do anything to prevent it, until he lost control of his demonic cultivation and killed Jin Zixuan.

In this moment, Wei Wuxian feels completely alone. The Wen siblings are gone, his beloved shijie might hate him for killing her husband and the cultivation world as a whole can’t wait to besiege him. If it had been another time, he wouldn’t have beaten up those random cultivators. It’s not like it was the first time he heard awful rumors about himself. The fact that he reacts so violently here says a lot about the state of mind he’s in. Wei Wuxian is clearly looking for a way to vent his anger, so he takes it out on the cultivators who are speaking ill of him. His rage is justified: not only were they saying malicious things about him without even knowing the full story, but they were doing it cowardly behind his back. However, his reaction is somewhat disproportionate to their offense: one of them gets kicked in the face until he passes out from the pain, while another gets his legs broken for daring to speak up. Although he doesn’t kill them, he does terrorize them and in the end he leaves them there immobilized by the spirits he had summoned (if Lan Wangji hadn’t been looking for Wei Wuxian, who knows how long they would have had to wait to be freed).

After this, Wei Wuxian sees the announcement of the pledge conference and goes to Nightless City. I’ve seen people argue that he was only trying to protect the Wen remnants and that the people who were there had already pledged to kill him, so it was self-defense. But is it really the case? Personally, I don’t think what he did was self-defense. Sure, he tried to discuss first and didn’t attack until he was attacked, but defending himself and the Wen remnants wasn’t the main reason he was there in the first place.

The crowd flung curses at him, but Wei WuXian accepted all of them.

Anger was the only thing that could suppress the other feelings within his heart.

(Chapter 78)

All of his pain, desperation and guilt were too much to handle at once, so he tried to suppress them all with anger, and directed that anger at the people who hated him. Wei Wuxian didn’t go to the pledge conference to try to prevent the siege from happening (since he thought it wouldn’t change anything anyway) or to weaken the Sects’ forces. He went there to vent his anger and frustration. Wei Wuxian is not clear-headed here, as highlighted by this passage:

Wei WuXian spun around to dodge the attack and laughed, “Fine, fine. I knew since the start that we’d have to fight a real fight like this one sooner or later. You’ve always found me disagreeable no matter what. Come on!”

Hearing this, Lan WangJi’s movements paused, “Wei Ying!”

Although he shouted the words, any sane person would be able to tell that Lan WangJi’s voice was clearly shaking. However, right now, Wei WuXian had already lost his judgement. He was already half-mad, half-unconscious. All evil was being augmented by him. He felt that everyone loathed him and he loathed everyone as well. He wouldn’t be scared no matter who came at him. It wouldn’t matter no matter who came at him. It was all the same anyway.

(Chapter 78)

In this moment Wei Wuxian believes everyone hates him and there’s no use trying to convince them otherwise – there’s no use trying to reason with them in a diplomatic way because no matter what he says or does, his words will be twisted to fit the opinions of the crowd. He almost welcomes the attack because this way he can attack them back and vent all his pent-up anger. Wei Wuxian is not behaving like his usual self here. He can’t see Lan Wangji isn’t trying to hurt him because his mind is not lucid. This is why he loses control of his demonic cultivation for the second time, injuring Jiang Yanli.

His shijie is the only one who manages to calm him down a little despite his chaotic state of mind. He manages to stop the corpses from attacking everyone and waits for her to tell him what she thinks of him, if she forgives him or not. However, she dies to save his life before being able to say anything, and the whole situation becomes simply too much for him to bear. All of his emotions crush him at once, so in his already half-unconscious state he activates the Tiger Seal, effectively erasing any chance he might have had to redeem himself in the eyes of society.

The point of this analysis isn’t to blame or absolve Wei Wuxian. It’s very easy to empathize with his anguish in these scenes. What he was going through was incredibly stressful and the root cause (the ambush at Qiongqi Path) wasn’t his fault. Even Lan Wangji says he can neither condemn nor justify his actions, but he’s willing to face all the consequences with him anyway.

I told [Wangji] when I went to see him, Young Master Wei had already made a grave mistake, there was no use augmenting it. But he said… that he could not say with certainty whether what you did was right or wrong, but no matter what, he was willing to be responsible for all of the consequences alongside you.

(Chapter 99)

Wei Wuxian isn’t blameless for what happened at Nightless City. I don’t think he’s proud of what he did and all the people he killed, either. The fact that he destroyed the Tiger Seal after returning to the Burial Mounds is quite telling. He definitely didn’t act in the most rational and clear-headed way, which resulted in a lot of people – including his shijie – to lose their lives, but the point of all this is that Wei Wuxian is human. He makes mistakes because no one is infallible, no matter how heroic, selfless and virtuous. Not even he can be totally immune to all the criticism and accusasions, even though he often acts like he is. Wei Wuxian is a fundamentally positive person, so most of the time he can ignore the bad things that happen to him and focus on the good, but this time his situation was simply too extreme for anyone to be able to stand it.

[whatifyoulivelikethat]

you+me+the Devil, m | myg, jjk | summon

pairing(s): yoongi x reader x jungkook

summary: The Devil and his right-hand demon are forcibly yanked from Hell to encounter a power they've never seen before, a power that everyone thought was only a rumor. In chains and unable to break free, they are asked to give up part of their souls. And they do. For science. But, mostly, to fuck.

warnings: rated M (18+) for language - if you're religious, maybe skip this one; world building; short graphic descriptions of sexual acts; supernatural and horror (and it gets way creepier during the smut, you have been warned); non-idol!AU - Hell!AU; Devil!Yoongi x chaos!reader x Devil's right-hand demon!Jungkook and switches between their POVs; they don't have your best interests at heart and neither do you.

--

you and me and the Devil makes 3 prologue | the summoning | the collection | 666

-

there’s not a word for what i wanna do to you

One second, the Devil, also known as Min Yoongi, was frowning as he gazed up at his right-hand demon Jeon Jungkook, pondering the whereabouts of the missing soul-shards. The next second, the volcanic ground below him exploded, multiple giant red-black rings adorned with symbols and images creating a circle, expanding a larger and larger surface area, crackles of red lighting and tendrils of black smoke shooting everywhere. It consumed everything, bleeding into every nook and cranny of the throne room, saturating the air with summoning intent. It was happening far too quickly for the Devil to stop, the ground splitting and black chains shooting out, surrounded by a deadly ice-silver signature of the kind of magic you don’t bring home to your mother.

“Fuck–!”

That was Jungkook.

“Ah.”

That was the Devil.

The black chains snapped around their bodies and bound them in an instant. Jungkook snarled and fought with all of his power, black wings flaring out that were instantly crushed and shredded by the enchantment, his curved black horns protruding from his head and being forced back by the power. In contrast, the Devil merely sat there. Yoongi knew he couldn’t stop it, not this kind of magic, if it could even be called that, so he didn’t try. He let the chains wrap around him and shackle him. Instead, he furrowed his brow and tried to trace the source, tried to find the purpose. In order to defeat an enemy, you must be informed. Yoongi lived by this philosophy, which was why he was the Devil.

He could not trace it.

That was very disheartening.

But he didn’t need to worry earlier, because the red-black summoning circle was closing in, and he would find out very, very soon who it was. He had nothing to worry about.

Yoongi was the Devil, after all.

-

You inspected your nails.

Matte black, pointed. You had just done them. You liked to look nice for your guests.

“Hm, the Devil works hard, but I work harder,” you chuckled.

-

This was not what the Devil expected.

Yoongi expected a dark cave, a crowd of hooded figures, lots of candles. Maybe a Bible or a Koran. Devil worshippers, Satanists, cultists, or whatever they liked to call themselves. He fully expected to fight, to kill, to maim, and to fucking enjoy it, because he was the Devil and he served no one.

That was the whole fucking point of leaving Heaven in the first place.

He did not expect this.

You.

“Oh? A new development.”

Yoongi had seen many things in his time. He thought he could no longer be surprised.

He was wrong.

You stood over the two figures chained to the ground, peering curiously at them. A plain black dress with a flared skirt and a lace high collar. Long-sleeved with small ruffled cuffs at the end. No socks or shoes, just long, beautifully sinful legs and pretty feet. Pointed, matte black fingernails at the ends of lovely hands. A single nail was on one of your full dark lips, small amused smile dancing on that pouty mouth.

Your nail pressed into your flesh.

Yoongi wanted to shove his dick into that mocking smirk.

Sharp, distinctive eyes. Unforgettable. Yoongi would not forget the eyes of the fool who summoned him anyway, but your eyes… They were different. They held no malice. No innocence either. No, your eyes were the greatest mystery of all.

They were an enigma, revealing nothing to the one who could tell everything.

Yoongi did not like this. He did not like how him, an all-powerful being, one who could poison the minds of all other beings, was being confronted with a human who seemed very not human.

You were holding something on the crook of your arm. He narrowed his eyes. A black plush goat-man with horns and an upside-down red pentagram stitched on his head. It had little leather hooves for feet and hands. Black leathery wings as well. Another common misconception of the Devil. As if he wanted to be an ugly goat for all eternity. Hmph. But there was something about the way you held it that made Yoongi think it wasn’t an homage to him.

No, you held it close to your breast, next to your heart, squeezing the plush goat-man’s little arm lovingly.

It made him ache with longing.

They were in a bedroom, on the floor next to the bed. Black sheets, fluffy blankets with white stars all over them. Black walls with posters all over them, cute animated characters, haunting imagery, various musical artists, sinful and innocent, a vast plethora that told him nothing of true intent. Modern, sleek furniture. A high-end desktop with multiple monitors. A nice flat-screen television. Many soft plushies of adorable and strange characters, stacked on shelves and in corners, both popular and niche.

Who was this person?

With every passing second, Yoongi was liking this situation less and less.

Jungkook was beside him, disheveled and disoriented, chained down with black. The demon sat up, growling in his chest, trying to exert his power.

“Who do you think–”

“Ah, little Satan, they shouldn’t talk until I allow them, isn’t that right?”

The Devil was not a fool. You were not talking to him. You were talking to the little goat-man in your arms. Yoongi heard a choking sound and he turned his head to see a very large black ball gag ramming itself in between Jungkook’s teeth, snapping closed with a black chain strap behind his pretty head. Jungkook looked livid, trying to bite through it, but Yoongi doubted he could break it.

You smiled at him.

Yes, indeed, Yoongi was liking this situation less and less.

In some ways.

Seeing Jungkook in a ball gag was a pleasant image.

“I didn’t expect it to turn out this way. I was aiming for him first,” you said to Yoongi, lowering the little goat-man and holding him by a hoof. Yoongi wasn’t sure if he wanted to rip apart the plush or be it. He decided that wasn’t important right now.

“Ah, well, this might be better,” you mused nonchalantly. Jungkook was still fighting his restraints, but neither you nor Yoongi acknowledged it. You crouched down, a delicate flash of inner thigh and black velvet panty in his view. Yoongi narrowed his eyes. You cocked a brow, smirk widening. “Two birds with one stone, no?”

You set the little goat-man in front of him.

Sat down, spreading your legs to squeeze the little goat-man with your inner thighs.

There was no question now.

Yoongi wanted to both be the plush goat-man and rip him to shreds.

“I’ll let you speak to me, Devil. You seem polite.” Conversational, calm. Not condescending, which somehow made it worse. At least if you spoke to him with hostility, he would know how to turn it against you.

“You have magic that doesn’t belong to you, human,” he said softly, a raspy renounce in his voice. He festered it with sweetness and warning at the same time, accenting it with a discerning stare.

You grinned.

Even he, the Devil, was unsettled.

“Nothing belongs to anybody. You only borrow it for a short while and then the powers far beyond even you take it back.”

Yoongi felt his heart drop and race at the same time. As he suspected. This was not the work of his father or some a wayward demon. Magic, power, illusionism, these were all words to describe things that could not be described. Entropy holds no bounds and there is no meaning behind it. It exists only to cause anarchy. For some reason, perhaps simply chaos alone, you, a human, was in possession of something even he could not control or understand.

Shit.

He stared into your eyes and they reflected his expression back to him. He tried to search for it, the desires within the heart, the small tendrils of pain that asked to be soothed, the soul begging to be freed. An ordinary demon could be fended off by a strong-willed human for a while, but Min Yoongi was no ordinary demon.

He was the Devil, even if he was bound by your chains.

You tilted your head at him, hair curling around your cheeks and lashes.

Yoongi could take even the weakest flame of desire and stroke it into a blazing fire. Even the holiest of saints could not fight him. Everyone wanted something, even if it was, disgustingly, in the name of his father. And humans, well, they were the masters of wanting things they couldn't have. Easily manipulated, even by each other. The Devil hardly needed to do anything at all. It was only a matter of whether or not Yoongi cared to do it and, most of the time, he didn't give a single shit.

You tilted your head the other way, smiling.

Yoongi did not find a maze or a barrier preventing him from the soul. He found the soul within seconds. It was there, all right.

The Devil just didn't know what the fuck he was looking at.

Why was your soul just you sitting there in the abyss, looking up at him with the same smile you were giving him right now?

And why did he feel nothing emitting from it?

He pulled back, looking into your eyes again. He did not like this.

You leaned forward and touched his horns.

His eyes widened as your fingertips brushed against the large curved black-red horns against the sides of his head. He hasn't even realized they had protruded. How? His horns were a sign of his power, a symbol he used for fear, for appearance, and for the moments of when he was exercising a great deal of his influence. Your fingertips brushed against the second set, the ones that bloomed upwards into wicked black-red spikes. Both sets? His soul-search had him reflexively procure both?

Shit.

He started into your eyes, seeing himself reflected back. Min Yoongi was the Devil. Emotion was no stranger to him. He harnessed it all, consumed himself in the passions and wonders of emotion. There were ones he felt less, simply because of who he was. For instance, there was not much that made him afraid.

You smiled.

Fear. He could feel it rise within him.

Yoongi grinned back.

Was this what he thought it was? He had heard of such things, rumors and whispers, even amongst the angels themselves. The hidden truth that Heaven and Hell belonged in a specific dimension or realm, Order. That there was another realm, the mirror, the reflection trapped, the unknown.

Disorder.

His kind, the high-above, and those between angels and insects, the humans, none of these belonged in the realm of Disorder. There were rumors that Order was merely a concoction of Disorder and that their realm could collapse any moment, erasing all of existence without a trace. Entropy was waiting for them all.

Yoongi understood now.

This was chaos.

The Devil was a master of desire. And a master of deliberately doing exactly what he shouldn't. He should not be tempted by a glimpse of chaos. His father would warn him to stay away from it.

His father could fuck right off.

Yoongi leaned forward, still bound, his horns disappearing. The chains clanged around him, his power rattling underneath. He wasn't doing it to fight them. He wanted to feel it. To understand what could not be understood, to touch the untouchable, because it was there, there right in front of him and he wanted it, he wanted it, and the Devil feeds off desire, even his own.

He wanted those lips.

You backed up.

The denial only made his desire stronger.

You left the plush goat-man sitting there right in front of him.

-

Jungkook was pissed.

Absolutely furious, jaw and head aching from this ridiculously large ball gag, fuming that he had no idea what was going on and that a single human was doing this bullshit. There was no way you were working alone. There had to be other beings behind this. He couldn't figure it out right now, but he would and he would tear them apart, right after he fucked your pathetic human body and tore you apart.

You must be a fool, thinking you could shackle him, Jeon Jungkook, the right hand of the Devil himself, the epitome of pure sin and free will.

He continued fighting the magic, trying to exert his strength, rattling the black chains, ice-silver lashes beating him back down. He tried to release his wings, but they were ensnared, pain shooting up his back. Jungkook cared not for pain. He had felt pain for millions of years. A few seconds was nothing. He tried to release his horns, but he could not, as if the very air neutralized him.

He was enraged.

Maybe would simply kill you so he could spend an eternity torturing you for your insolence.

Then the Devil's horns appeared.

How did he–?

Then you touched the Devil.

Jungkook wanted to scream.

He did, deep in his chest, muffled rage, jealousy, hate, all at once, and both of you ignored him, your fingers grazing Yoongi's horns, fucking smiling, looking unflinchingly into the Devil's eyes, and Jungkook wanted to erase you from existence, destroy every single shred of your soul for not groveling at the feet of Min Yoongi.

The horns disappeared and your hands hovered around Yoongi's head, fingers splayed out around the black hair like a shining halo.

Ironic.

The Devil leaned forward.

Don't you fucking kiss her, hyung!

But you moved away, backing up, gaze lingering on Yoongi before closing your eyes and reopening them slowly, a gradual shift to Jungkook's face.

He snarled at you through the gag.

He had you now. Eye contact and Jungkook could exert at least part of his power, the soul-search to find your deepest desires, your hidden gems, the calamity within that would call to him. He would find it and manipulate it, bend you to his will, turn you into his puppet. Play with you until you begged to die, only to find yourself in his arms once more, his plaything for all eternity.

All he had to do was find it.

You slid to your hands and knees, crawling to him. He felt it inside his chest, his own desire, watching the curve of your back to ass, his cock twitching at the sight, his mind conjuring images of your pretty body on a leash. Jungkook didn't have preferences when it came to bodies. A body was a body. In his hands, all bodies became prettier. You already had the base and he already had the wrath to want it. You stopped in front of him, the black skirt of your dress flaring out. He could see parts of your bare body.

Legs, knuckles, knees.

A small, amused smile on your lips.

Eyes that Jungkook searched valiantly, looking for malice, for innocence, for desire, for the darkest shadows and the lightest light.

Why couldn't he see anything?

This must be part of your magic. No matter. Jungkook had other ways. He was creative and cunning. You would break under his hand. He wouldn't stop until it was done. He was a demon that saw things through, even to his detriment.

His jaw was suddenly released from its prison, ball gag disappearing, fading into ice-silver smoke. He coughed, snapping his teeth, glaring at you.

"You dumb bitch," he hissed, violent resonance in his voice, oppressive and intense. "Do you think you humans are above us with your tricks and schemes? Kneel before those who invented such things."

You tilted your head.

Yoongi chuckled beside him.

Jungkook's brows furrowed. What–?

Your body trickled down like liquid, laying against the dark wood floor, looking up at him. Jungkook froze, maddening desire rising, infuriated at your face looking up at him, plush dark lips parted, hands on your chest, fingers spread out and molded to your flesh under the plain black dress. Sinking in, making him clench his jaw.

Your smile like a Cheshire Cat, eyes reflecting his rage.

Jungkook wanted to straddle your face and shove his cock into that smirking mouth, bulge your throat and cheeks with his girth.

"Is he always like this?" you asked, still not looking away.

"He pretends to be nice when he wants something out of you," the Devil answered calmly.

"Isn't that you?"

You still didn't look away from Jungkook. Why couldn't he find what he needed from your eyes?

"I'm always nice."

"That means you always want something out of someone."

Yoongi laughed, raspy and deep, the sound echoing in the bedroom, filling it up with his sound. Why couldn't Jungkook find it? His rage began to become infested with something else. Your eyes reflected only him.

Like a mirror.

No matter. The demons had other ways.

"Come here," Jungkook purred.

"I wouldn't do that."

That wasn't you. That was the Devil.

Your body lifted as if it was on a string from the center of your chest, fingers and black fingernails trailing against the dark hardwood, head tipped back, the line of your neck hidden by the high collar of lace, shielded from his hungry gaze. Legs curling up, skirt pooling around your thighs, his rage molding with carnal need, festering with something else.

Fear.

You rose to your knees, in prayer position in front of him, almost as if you were about to reach out and touch faith. Jungkook furrowed his brow, watching your presence near, wanting it, ready to coax or rip your desires from your lips themselves. It didn't matter if he was bound, it didn't matter if his black suit was torn up and ugly, it didn't matter if he was bleeding from his efforts to escape this magic.

You were still a human.

He was a demon and he would taint you.

Closer, your lids lowering, entranced by his spell. Jungkook smirked. Too easy. Humans were so, so easy. He craned his neck, lips parting, the palpable lust of his breath exhaling. So close to those pretty, dark, fuckable lips.

"You're really falling for it, hm?"

Jungkook paused. His eyes shifted to Yoongi. The Devil had turned his body to watch, clad in a tailored black suit. In contrast, Yoongi's was unmaimed, as he hadn't fought his restraints. The Devil had black hair like him, parted slightly, with shadowy dark brown, cat-like eyes that glinted with something sinister. Pale skin, almost luminescent. Exposed neck, elegantly laid black silk tie, unlike Jungkook, who preferred not to wear one. Lips that demanded you to plead for your life.

A body that made Jungkook want to sin for him.

That was the power of the Devil.

His eyes shifted from Yoongi to you, who had stilled in front of him. Hands beneath you and knuckles pressed to the floor like an obedient pet. What was Yoongi talking about? He had you right where he wanted you. And yet, he hesitated.

Then you spoke.

Delicate and calm, with no resonance. Human.

"I thought demons had free will?" you whispered. "That not even the Devil could control a demon."

Or was it?

Jungkook watched your lips form the words.

"If he is powerful enough, that is."

-

Yoongi didn't bother warning Jungkook anymore.

The Chaos knew what it was doing.

Clever girl.

-

Jungkook growled, leaning back a little, letting the passion of emotion course through him, wrath, lust, pride. Fear. All of it. Drawing from it, his power pulsing, singing through his muscles.

"Come here, human."

You had to crawl into his lap, his thighs against your thighs, hardness against softness, bringing your lips to his, sudden and sweet with your legs, knuckles, knees. Jungkook smirked, white teeth and canines flashing, urging you to him.

"What a good little girl,” he breathed softly. “I can be anything you desire. All you need to do is tell me."

Your eyes locked with his.

"A kiss, please."

He groaned at the small plea, finally getting it out of you, finally, and he would make you regret doing this, sow every seed of desire within you and reap it all, turn you into his pet on a leash. All he had to do was kiss you.

Jungkook kissed you.

He pressed his lips to yours, ravenous to consume what you had, eager to claim his offering.

You smiled against his lips, a small, amused smile.

It was instant, his hunger to your plushness, the rush euphoric and wild, immediate lust and power dominating him and now he could taste your tongue and fling open the doors, clawing for the soul within, the moment so close he could taste it, taste your moan sliding into his throat, his favorite treat, intoxicating in the way you sucked in his breath to fill your longs.

Jungkook arrived at the last gate, tearing through the door. Looked down into the abyss, triumphant.

You looked back up at him from below.

A small, amused smile.

A nothingness like he had never felt before.

Jungkook's eyes snapped open and widened, staring into the reflective glass of yours, his chest constricted. He had never felt this. Your lips still on his, tongue flicking, taking his breath, and then he felt a strange kind of compression, like everything was being pressurized, tighter, tighter, suffocating, and he gasped in your mouth, recoiling.

The kiss broke, your eyes still on his, lips shiny with his saliva. Your hand was outstretched, hovering in the air, fingers coated with black tendrils mixed with ice-silver, right above his chest.

Your eyes, void of anything but himself.

“What…” Jungkook breathed, hard cock straining against his slacks. “Are you?”

He didn’t understand. You were only a human. Only a human who had done a very stupid thing, summoning the Devil and his right-hand demon to your bedroom. Just a stupid, foolish human. You tilted your head. Lowered your hand and placed both hands on Jungkook’s thighs. He tensed. You pressed your fingers into his slacks, kneading the firm flesh underneath.

Where was your fear? Your malice? Your innocence?

Where was your desire?

He could only feel his own, rising, rearing its beautiful head, teeth bared and ready to strike as your fingers drummed against the fabric of his pants. You had tried to take something from him in midst of the kiss.

Part of his soul.

Jungkook narrowed his eyes. “What do you want?” he hissed, forceful and direct.

You stopped moving your fingers. He wanted to scream in dismay.

“Only a small thing.” Your lips curved into a gentle smile. “A token to remember our fateful meeting.”

Now, only now, did Jungkook not like this.

You removed one hand from his leg and Jungkook clenched his jaw, watching it rise, nearing his heaving chest, the black chains spreading apart, links snapping with ice-silver sparks, but he was still bound, still chained, and he did now know why and not knowing infuriated him. You stopped, right above his heart, the heart he forgot was there sometimes.

The true irony of this world was that angels gave up their hearts to serve the one above and demons kept them to serve themselves.

Jungkook felt it again, the compression of his insides, making his breath hitch and his teeth grind, the sensation unbearable. Your expression remained the same, the small, airless smile. Eyes reflecting his terror.

“I could take it just like this.”

Not a threat, only a statement. Only a testament to the power within you, a power that Jungkook was beginning to think wasn’t something he knew or understood. The Devil could take souls. He could reap them, he could tear them, he could wring them dry. But not like this.

“I will give you a choice,” you murmured, hand retreating, releasing him from the uncomfortable pressure. “Because everyone deserves a choice, don’t they?”

The chains were lessening, slowly slipping off Jungkook’s body.

“I’ll let you give it to me willingly.”

Your hand on his pants caressed the fabric.

“If you have the power to take it,” Jungkook snarled. “Why not take it?”

Your other hand found his other thigh, squeezing lightly, sparks of heat flying through his veins. The chains slid off him, clashing into the hardwood floor and turning to ice-silver liquid that faded to nothing.

“I do not want to take.”

You stopped your touches and Jungkook wanted to scream.

“It will feel better for you if you give.”

He raised on eyebrow. “Considerate of you.”

You smiled wider. He stared into your eyes and only saw himself.

“What do you think, Jeon Jungkook, the Devil’s right-hand man?”

He felt the tendons on his neck tense, expression twisting into anger. You shouldn’t know his name. You were a human. You would only know if he told you directly. Someone else was behind this. Someone who wanted to kill him and the Devil, thereby putting Hell itself in imbalance.

“How do you know my name?” he seethed.

“You told me.”

What?

“When you looked into her eyes, you told her your name,” confirmed a deep, cavernous voice.

Jungkook started, whipping his head to the Devil beside him. No longer chained, simply sitting lazily on the ground, one knee raised to rest an elbow on it. Yoongi raised an eyebrow.

“Getting soft, Jungkookie?” the Devil taunted.

How…? Was he so absorbed in his own lust and deceiving you that he did not realize? He looked back at you. Your eyes lowered to his slacks and then back up to his eyes.

“Pants can always come off.”

Jungkook raised a hand, running it through his black hair, jaw set. “You are too greedy, human. Do you even know what you’re doing?” he sneered.

Your hands jerked down a few centimeters closer to his crotch, making Jungkook hiss. Your tongue slid out, feathering against the plush dark mauve of your lips. His cock throbbed with need, demanding to abuse the mouth presented. You leaned forward, putting more of your weight on him, welcome weight that Jungkook wanted all over him. He was a demon, after all. He was no stranger to carnal desire.

“I do,” you murmured softly. “You and me and the Devil makes three.”

Jungkook sharpened his gaze. “You couldn’t handle that, human.”

You said nothing.

You simply removed your heat and turned to the Devil, where Yoongi held the little goat-man plush by a single hoof, dangling it next to his lap, making your crawl into it to reach the doll. It was almost an innocent gesture, the way you took it and tucked it into your lap before looking up at Yoongi’s face, lips parted slightly, nearly curious, childlike awe decorating your features.

Jungkook growled like a hurt animal.

Your eyes shifted to him, looking at him under lowered lashes. Dismissive, vacant gaze.

“Yes or no, Jeon Jungkook?”

“Yes.”

The thin black string between you and him darkened, searing with ice-silver, a contract made. He didn’t even know the terms. He didn’t care. No human could outsmart him. And you, you must have been human once.

The problem was, Jungkook didn’t know if you were human anymore.

-

Yoongi watched your eyes return to him. The little black goat-man plush was tucked between your legs, pressed against your core. Slowly but surely, he was understanding. The original vessel was human, now tainted by someone, something, or simply bad luck. It made you something else entirely. You were a creature from the realm of Order polluted by the realm of Disorder. How long could this last? Would you die eventually from it? When you died, what would be left? Was the soul still there? Would he be able to collect it? Contain it? Study it?

Yoongi didn’t know the answers to these questions.

He wanted to know.

“Your turn,” you whispered to his chin, warm breath against his skin. “What is your answer, my Devil?”

Yoongi chuckled. “A shard of soul is all you ask for?” he purred. “What for?”

You tilted your head. “I want to complete my collection.”

The Devil doubted that. He doubted you wanted anything. Something was driving the entropy in a direction, a purpose given to the original human you long ago, and now you did it because it was the only thing left in the shell, a memory of a purpose, the human determination so strong that it could not be killed or erased, even though this body was now only a container for the power within.

The Devil had spent a lot of his time lately doing nothing. Nothing fun, nothing exciting, nothing worthy of his attention. Yoongi already knew everything there was to know about humans. He cared not for those above. But this.

This was new.

This was different.

This was something he wasn’t supposed to know.

He raised his hand, fingers tracing your jaw, staring into the eyes of Chaos. The Entropy. The Vessel.

You.

“I’ll be part of your collection, little one,” Yoongi purred.

And you will be mine, he vowed as the black string between you and the Devil glowed, ice-silver magic contaminating it with the power of Disorder.

-

part ii the collection. if you get in bed, someone will fall in love

--

masterpost

[thefanficmonster]

Not Alone

Valkyrae (Rae) x Reader (Gender Neutral)

Warnings: Mention of death of a pet, Grieving

Genre: Fluff, Comfort, Angst

Summary: When Y/N doesn’t join the scheduled stream of Among Us with some cheap reasoning that everyone else falls for, Rae is far from convinced. She goes on to check the situation on her own just for her suspicions and worries to be confirmed further - something is off about Y/N and Rae is nothing if not determined to find out what.

Requested by @alex3atsbugs  Hello dear, consider this my farewell to the adorable little Marceline, I hope the cutie is looking down at us from heaven right now. Marceline, I might not have known you but I miss and love you regardless.  You have a special place in our hearts and you will never be forgotten. All my love, Vy ❤

“Ok so we’re only waiting on Lily now, right?“ Sykkuno asks, adjusting his earbuds as he scans over the settings for the game since he was the one to create the lobby which is now almost complete - lacking one more astronaut before the game can start.

Rae, who’s been scrolling through Instagram, looking at fanart and edits, snaps her head up to look at her computer monitor with confusion written all over her features, her brows furrowed, “Wait, what about Y/N? Aren’t they coming?”

This sudden change has surprised Rae more than someone would consider reasonable. But, in her eyes, it’s perfectly reasonable and justifiable considering Y/N has never skipped a stream nor have they ever not reported to her even for the tiniest of things such as running late. Even if they are not joining today, which is a huge oddity in and of itself, they would’ve definitely told Rae about it.

“Oh, no they won’t be joining us today. They said they were experiencing some technical troubles.” Sykkuno replies nonchalantly which aggravates Rae a tiny bit. She cannot comprehend how no one else is seeing anything odd here. Maybe it has something to do with how attentive she is when it comes to Y/N - she’s not sure why, but she is - or maybe it’s just a gut instinct but regardless, she can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong. Not to mention that in all their years of streaming together on Twitch and now on YouTube never has Y/N dealt with technical difficulties that led to them not being able to stream. 

Y/N is the type of organized person that is constantly on top of things. They’d never let a technical difficulty get between them and providing their fans with entertainment. Chances are, if there really was an issue, it would’ve been fixed by now and even if it wasn’t...

Y/N would’ve let me know they wouldn’t be joining, Rae’s mind screams, almost altering her calm facial expression. 

“Hey can you give me about five minutes? My router’s acting up, I’ll restart it.“ Rae blurts out without as much as a second thought. Her thoughts are elsewhere right now, she’s got more important things to worry about. Luckily, her ability of rational thinking pushes through to the surface even without her guidance. 

She mutes her in-game and stream mics, takes her phone and rises from her chair, giving the camera what she hopes is a more apologetic rather than distressed smile before walking off-frame. Once out of view, she dials Y/N’s number, tapping her foot anxiously as she waits for her call to be picked up.

“Hello?“ When it does get answered, she’s met with a sniff before the weak voice utters the hesitant greeting word.

“Hey Y/N! What’s up?“ Rae tried to balance her question between a ‘what’s up?‘ in the ‘what’s wrong?‘ sense and the usual cheerful greeting she uses it as. She doesn’t want to end up seeming paranoid.

“Oh, hey, Rae. Nothing much. Aren’t you supposed to be streaming right now?“ Y/N’s tone raises a bit as they try to apply a bit more energy and enthusiasm into their words, presumably to erase any suspicion that sniffle might’ve caused in their friend who appears to have a sixth sense for when things are up with the people they care about. Or with Y/N specifically.

“Um...“ Rae spares the stream set-up a skeptical look, buying herself time to think of an excuse to partner her negation. She doesn’t want to lie to Y/N but she’s aware that they’ll be quick to ditch the conversation and postpone it if she admits to indeed be streaming. “Um, no, not yet. We scheduled it a bit later. Will you be joining us?“

“Uh, no, sorry, I won’t be able to. I’m sick and feeling like absolute crap so...“

Rae automatically stops listening, not on purpose, she just can’t hear Y/N’s voice over the alarms going off in her head, screaming at here that there’s something SERIOUSLY wrong. The stories not adding up - neither of them making sense to begin with - the lack of any authentic energy in Y/N’s voice, that sniffle she heard at the start of the call. It’s all so scarily wrong that it sends Rae one second away from entering full panic mode.

“I thought you were having technical difficulties.“ She blurts out without any thought of it’d make Y/N feel or how it would change the course of the conversation. 

Y/N inhales sharply as if caught completely off-guard and backed up into a corner, “Oh, yeah, that too. My computer keeps crashing.” Being backed up into a figurative corner doesn’t stop them from trying to further pursue this lie they’ve come up with. A lie so blatant and obvious there’s really no point in them trying to keep it going. Yet they choose to do exactly that.

“Y/N, you’re BSing me, you should know better than that!“ Rae whines almost desperately, “Please, tell me what’s going on? We’re friends, I don’t deserve to be kept in the dark, Y/N!“

There’s silence on the other end, loud silence that almost sends Rae into a breakdown. Some may consider it an overreaction, but let me ask you - wouldn’t you be upset and worried if someone you immensely care about was acting oddly and completely out of character.

“You’re going to think it’s ridiculous.“ Y/N’s voice cracks, letting it be known, clear as day, that they are barely balancing on the edge between keeping it together and crying.

“Of course I won’t, baby! I would never! Talk to me.“ Rae pursues, her heart breaking a little at the sound of her friend’s sadness. It’s taking a really big toll on her, not being able to hold Y/N in her arms instead of trying to gauge out their answers over the phone which is proving to be not at all effective or helpful to either of them.

Y/N sniffles again, “My hamster, Marcy...” She inhales to prevent a sob from escaping her lungs, “...died this morning.”

Rae has heard enough to be sent into action.

                                                            *  *  *

“Thank you so much, Rae. I would’ve probably stayed in bed all day with no effort to keep living whatsoever. You’re an amazing person, I hope you know that.“ Y/N gives the hand of Rae’s that’s holding hers a small squeeze, “I’m so lucky to have you.“

The two friends have been sitting on the couch in Y/N’s living room, the atmosphere a mix of melancholy and comfort. The comfort Rae’s been offering Y/N for the past hour or so has been almost entirely silent, in the form of physical affection, to be exact - hugs, soothing backrubs, gentle abstract patterns drawn on their arm, playing with their hair etc. Needless to say, it’s been far more effective than the attempt of calming them down and helping them out over a phone call.

“Don’t ever thank me for being your friend, Y/N. The honor’s all mine“ Rae rubs Y/N’s shoulder reassuringly, resting her head against theirs.

“Rae, you ditched a whole damn stream for me! Of course I’m gonna thank you! Who else would do that for me?“ Y/N protests, their glossy eyes looking up at Rea, lit up by the small smile that has managed to make its way onto their face.

“Only someone utterly stupid and heartless WOULDN’T do that for you.“ Rae says firmly, holding stern eye-contact with her friend.

Y/N looks away almost shyly, smile growing wider, their cheeks becoming rosier. “You have a way with words, you know...” They bite their lip nervously, “Could you help me express my emotions in the post I’ve been planning to make all day? My fans loved Marcy and I’m sure they’ll be as crushed as I am, I just want to appear strong so they don’t worry about me, you know?” They shrug their shoulders hesitantly as another tear escapes their eye.

Rae carefully and gently wipes their tear away with her knuckles, “Of course, Y/N. You don’t have to do this alone - you don’t have to do ANYTHING alone. Because you are never alone - you’ll always have me.”

Something about what Rae just said and the way she said it has struck a nerve in Y/N that has provoked a few more tears to spill out of their eyes as they somehow manage to whisper a: “Thank you” before throwing their arms around Rae, enveloping her entirely in the warmest of embraces. 

Meanwhile....

“Yo guys, how long does it take for a router to be reset?“ Sykkuno asks his fellow ghostie buds out of the blue.

“Less than five minutes. Why?“ Lily replies.

“Cause Rae said she’d reset her router and be back but she’s been gone for two hours so....“

[tittytania]

Finding ChristBorg: A TED talk about what happened during the Coldharbour Compact.

Reposted from my tes reddit bc I want to see what y’all think.

I can't tell if I'm a genius, completely insane, or if I'm just late to the lore-party. Time to find out I guess. TL;DR at the bottom.

So it has never been explained what Sotha Sil did during the Coldharbour Compact to convince the daedric princes to not manifest on Nirn without an intermediary, and it probably never will be since the mystery of it all is far too cool. But that doesn't mean I can't read into it like literature and look for meaning in the other texts I can compare it to.

To start, Vivec is based off of the Shakta variation of the half female/half male Ardhanarishvara, where the gold-skinned female half is the right side. Both Vivec and Ardhanarishvara represent unity and duality, and looking at some images of Ardhanarishvara, it's kinda hard to argue that Vivec wasn't based off of them. Kirkbride even confirmed that Ardhanarishvara was the inspiration for Vivec in an AMA. Now, Vivec is part of the god trio the Almsivi Tribunal, along with Almalexia and Sotha Sil. Shiva, who Ardhanarishvara is the avatar of, is also part of a god trio, called the Trimurti in Hinduism. So it would make sense if the other members of the tribunal are also based off of one member of a real world religious triad. I have a shaky idea of who Almalexia could be, but my theory for her god-inspiration is nowhere near as solid as my theory for Sotha Sil, who I believe is based on Jesus Christ.

To start, their characterizations have multiple similarities. Both are one branch of a god-triad, with Sotha Sil as part of the Tribunal, and Jesus as The Son in the Holy Trinity. Both serve as a teacher, with Jesus being referred to as Teacher several times in the Bible, and Sotha Sil giving lessons on magic and Mysticism to the Psijic Monks. Also, both are characterized as wise, patient, and celibate. They both talk about moral and philosophical concepts with their followers, neither Jesus nor Sotha Sil are shown as having a temper or raising their voices, and neither of them are shown with a spouse or partner. Sotha Sil is specifically shown as not caring about the Night Mother's attempts to sexually manipulate him in book seven of 2920, The Last Year of the First Era. Now I know that 2920 is considered a work of historical fiction in-universe, but I don't think that matters in this situation since I'm approaching this as a person reading a text, not as a person living inside the lore world.

In terms of specific scenes that connect Sotha Sil and Jesus, the first I will mention is that they both use a makeshift whip to beat intruding wrongdoers and drive them away, while yelling about fathers. In the Truth in Sequence vol. 8 book, it says that "[t]hrough His will alone, Mighty Seht wound the veins (of metal ore) into god-bronze whips, and lashed the Prince pitilessly," saying "[b]ehold the wrath of lost Ald Sotha! Know death at my hands, false-son of a false-father!" In the Bible, Jesus found people doing sales in a place of worship, and then He "made a whip of cords, (and) He drove them all out of the temple," saying “Take these things away! Do not make My Father’s house a house of merchandise!” (John 2 15-16).

Also, Jesus had close friends and followers who were called his apostles, and Sotha Sil has his own Clockwork Apostles. Sil's apostles reside in the Clockwork Basilica, and while basilica isn't an exclusively Christian term, it is frequently used to describe a type of church architecture, and is a term the pope uses to recognize distinguished churches.

Another similarity that I found was in the plot of Morrowind, where Sotha Sil's death was caused at the hands of Almalexia, who was someone he had once loved and trusted, much like with Jesus and Judas.

The most notable life similarity as it relates to the Coldharbour Compact is that both leave the earthly world in order to make a deal for the benefit of the souls on earth, and then return to the earthly world. This parallel is given extra weight with the descriptions of the scene in the book 2920, The Last Year of the First Era. Sotha Sil returns from Coldharbour by way of someone "rolling aside the great boulder that blocked the entrance to the Dreaming Cavern. This sounds a lot like the scene in the bible of the discovery that Jesus had risen from the dead, where "an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door" (Matthew 28:2). In addition, Jesus said "after He is killed, He will rise [on] the third day," (Matthew 17:23) and after Sotha Sil returned from Coldharbour, he "felt he had been away for months, years, but only a few days had transpired." Perhaps it had been 3?

In addition to the life and behavior similarities, there are similarities in dress. In the 2920 book, Sotha Sil is always described as wearing a white robe or cloak. In ESO, Sotha Sil is shown as barefoot, and wearing a blue sash over his long white robe. In medieval and renaissance art, Jesus is most always depicted as barefoot, and is frequently shown with a blue cloth over his shoulder. In most resurrection art, as well as in almost all 20th/21st century art, Jesus is depicted as dressed in white. While Jesus usually isn't usually shown wearing both the blue sash and the white robe at once like Sotha Sil is, I found one modern interpretation of Jesus that does dress him this way, and several depictions of him in Chinese art that also portray him like this.

I'm feeling almost conspiratorial here, but these similarities are far too many for me to think it's accidental, and therefore I have to think that all of this is meant to suggest that Sotha Sil serves a Christ-figure role in his story, i.e. in sacrificing own life like Jesus did in order to make his deal in the Coldharbour Compact. However I don't think Sil's sacrifice was quite so simple. After he is asked what he offered the Daedra in return for the deal, he states: "The deals we make with Daedra... [s]hould not be discussed with the innocent." This implies that in contrast to the Christ mythos, Sil's sacrifice was not blameless; he did not come out of the deal with his hands clean.

So, a Christ-like sacrifice that isn't quite as pure and selfless as it is in Christianity. What could that be?

My theory is that in order to make the Coldharbour Compact, he sold the lives of Vivec and Almalexia along with his own. Perhaps he told the princes that he knew the tribunal's godhood would end, and in exchange for their cooperation he promised not to tell the other tribunes or make any attempt to prevent his and his companions' demise. (After all, as far as I know he made the mechanical heart for keeping his city functional, not for recreating the divinity the heart of Lorkhan provided.) Or, maybe he offered to do something to assist in bringing the Tribunal down, and losing Sunder and Keening, the tools that helped them maintain their divinity, was intentional on his part. Sil deliberately sacrificing his own life appears to be reflected in Azura's statement after his death. She said "he shed his mortality long ago, and I am certain his death was no small relief to him." Of course she'd know that he let go of his life ages ago if he had willingly sold it to her. Of course she would be certain that he found his death to be a relief, if she'd heard him say so himself when he was explaining why a god would ever offer such a deal.

It would also make sense with Sotha Sil's character, since he allegedly loved the people on Nirn more than Almalexia or Vivec did, and the destruction of Gilverdale could have definitely been a traumatic enough reminder of the destruction of Ald Sotha for him to do something dramatic to prevent it ever happening again. And guilt over sacrificing his friends could have definitely been a contributing factor to the worsening self-isolation and intense depression in his later life. It would also be a definite explanation for why he apparently never met another soul in the 10 years between losing the tools and his death. Not only had he become extremely disillusioned with the imperfections of the world, he had now finalized the deal he made so long ago, and saw no point in continuing to interact with a deeply flawed world he was essentially finished with.

However, I do see some issues with this and how it would work in-universe. Namely the fact that Hermaeus Mora's seekers said the prince received something from every individual on Nirn as part of the deal, which is quite different from what I'm suggesting. A different deal for each prince would also explain why Sil was able to include Clavicus Vile and Mephala in the compact at a much later date. There would be no reason for Vile and Mephala to submit to a collective deal whose terms had already been decided. So if he offered the tribunal's lives as part of the deal, he would have needed to offer other things as well. But for me the most significant in-universe issue I struggled with was that using his death as a bargaining tool would create a massive problem for his ability to enforce the deal in the future. This could explain why both Molag Bal and Mehrunes Dagon manifested on Nirn after Sotha Sil's death, but since I think they were summoned by qualified mortals that could have been a loophole. Either way, making a deal that is meant to last forever by promising something that can never be taken back in the case of a breach of contract seems extremely short-sighted for someone who claims to be cursed with certainty. Especially considering how many of the princes there were known to be cheats and liars.

Unless, that is, you believe this theory I read about the reason why Sil was completely silent as he was killed. My original belief was that he was silent because he'd seen it coming long ago, and knew that nothing he could have said would have changed Almalexia's mind. And while that would be in character for him, now I'm starting to think that it was because he had already uploaded his consciousness elsewhere. This would fit in with the Christ-figure parallels, due to the Christian belief that Jesus is risen from the dead and very much alive. While Jesus returned to life at the same time he emerged from the cave, the completion of Sotha Sil's death sacrifice didn't happen until long after his return via the cave. While I have found no explicit evidence that he's still around, when you find his body in Morrowind he is shown hanging, with his arms outstretched at his sides, in a sort of crucifixion pose. And after the crucifixion comes the resurrection. Perhaps Sotha Sil is still around somewhere in the gears of his city, and he promised the princes he'd never be present or have any influence on Nirn so long as they kept up their end of the deal. Additionally, the 37th sermon of Vivec mentions Sotha Sil as holding "his swollen belly," carrying "[his] daughter." While Vivec's sermons are hardly ever literal, Kirkbride's comments suggest that maybe Vivec was being somewhat literal in this instance. Regarding this concept art, Kirkbride said "note the cosmic baby growing inside Sotha Sil. While Sotha Sil is dead as we saw in the add-on pack “Tribunal”, the child survived." Perhaps one of Sotha Sil's many body modifications made him able to carry and birth a child, and then he created a daughter through self-cloning or some other method that allows him to have enough influence to enforce the compact.

TL;DR - Sotha Sil has a lot of similarities with Jesus, so he's a Christ figure and therefore his sacrifice in the Coldharbour Compact was himself, and Almalexia and Vivec too, and that also means that he may still be around.

Anyways, thanks for reading and sorry if this sounds like I'm putting red strings on a wall as my application essay to the r/SothaSimps fan club. Also, lmk if I'm missing anything obvious. For me right now Reading Lore On The Bedroom Floor is a bit more manageable than playing the games, and there may be something I've just completely looked over.