#academic purpose: I like my men bloody

[synintheraven]

Have some bloody Jax... for academic purposes (;

[haljathefangirlcat]

In the academic articles you've read, have you found anything that talks about how the Nibelungs are associated with eagle imagery? Kriemhild/Gudrun's dream has them represented by eagles, and in the Lay of Atli, it says many times the Nibelung brothers wear "eagle-gripped helmets". Is it just because the eagle is a noble animal? Or is there some sort of historical significance where the Nibelung Dynasty of the Kingdom of the Burgundians was associated with eagles?

Hey! Sorry it took me a while to answer this! Real life... *eyeroll*

I've searched a bit through my files and my bookmarks, but unfortunately, I couldn't find anything on eagles in the Nibelung/Volsung Cycle or on any specific associations between them and the Burgundians. As it is, I get the impression (even if, obviously, I might be missing something, especially if either of those topics has been covered in German...) that it simply goes back to the representation of birds of prey in Medieval literature.

To start with, eagles are about as likely to be fed or slake their thirst on battlefields as ravens and hawks in Norse poetry, so that's already an association between them and war/warriors/brave men with a chance to meet a gorey end. And if we look at the Eddas, Suttung and Odin both take the shape of eagles in the story of the creation and theft(s) of the Mead of Poetry, Thjazi does the same when bothering Odin, Loki, and Hoenir and then again when kidnapping Idun, and there's also the eagle sitting on Yggdrasil having beef with Nidhogg as well as Hraesvelg, the giant eagle or jotun-in-eagle-form that creates the winds by flapping its winds... all images that don't exactly paint a unified picture (then again, when do we ever get anything like that in Norse mythology? lol) but imo still add up to a general idea of "eagles are important/strong/majestic when you're on their good side and menacing when you aren't/just kind of badass."

However, in the case of the Nibelungenlied and specifically of Kriemhild's dream... now, please take this with a grain, or rather a bucket, of salt, because it's just my idea and it's not backed up by any kind of academic research. But I do feel that there the eagles might function as a stark, purposeful contrast with the falcon representing Siegfried, and not just in a "I'm gonna go out a limb and say domesticating eagles is probably harder/more time-consuming and expensive than falcons or the trained eagles of Mongolia's hunters probably wouldn't sound so special and exotic to us" way.

See, the eagle and the falcon/hawk are both associated with war and warriors, as I was saying above. They both appear in mythological and legendary contexts, too. But falcons/hawks also seems have a bit of a different symbolic value. In the Volsunga Saga, Sigurd has his second meeting with Brynhild, the more "courtly romance" one, while out hunting with his hawk, and, many years and misfortunes later, Randver, the son of Jormunrek who is executed for hooking up with Svanhild despite her being his dad's new bride, sends Jormunrek his own hawk, with its feathers plucked and unable to fly, to point out to him that all he's really doing is depriving their kingdom of a young, brave heir. Back to Middle High German literature, then, you have the Falkenlied, a poem where love and passion are represented by the flight of a falcon the poet has tamed and cared for himself. And if we move just a bit farther away geographically, yet stay roughly in the same time period as the Falkenlied, you also have Marie de France composing Yonec, a lai where an unhappy noblewoman gets entangled in a tragic romance with a falcon who turns out to be actually a handsome knight, and loses him before his time because of a jealous, tyrannical husband...

Ofc, my "theory," if you can even call it that, about hawks/falcons being strapping young lads with a penchant for passionate romances and a tendency to die bloody deaths before their time, as well as eagles being more martial, morally amiguous, and less "romantic hero" types, only applies to the later sources of the Sigurd/Siegfried tale. Atlakvida might actually date all the way back to the early 9th century, so that's obviously not included into these musings. My stance on that one's still "eagle badass," essentially.

[abelflints]

More Lincoln x MC Angst

Heal What Has Been Hurt (Change the Fate’s Design) Part 2 of 2 (read part 1 first)

Fanfic about the @itlivesproject game…

Basis: Lincoln’s watch eradicates the McQuoid’s. Abel watches. Oh, how he wishes he hadn’t.

Pairings: Lincoln x MC (mine is called Vax!), but intermittently (again, they’ve not broken up, but their relationship isn’t the focus all throughout, but it is there!)

Warnings: no sugar coating, this is brutal. chapter 20 spoilers, heavy angst, swearing, body horror, death, injury, blood, mourning, deeply traumatizing Abel, like to the earth’s core deeply, survivor’s guilt, manipulative language, like one innuendo, gore, etc. DARK.

Part 2 word count: 6.3k

Notes: this looks better if you read it on my blog directly, I don’t know why but the formatting is all messed up on dashboard. 

Part 2 under cut!

Ding… 

Ding… 

Ding… 

Ding… Time.

Tick… Tick.. Ticking. 

Loitering in the leaks of our lungs, in the lights of our lens. 

Time���

Tick, tick, ticking–

Lingering in the litany of our lacks, in the licks of our locks. 

Time…

Ding, ding, ding, ding. 

Time.

Time to show me you what you really are.

For if you cannot rival the stars, why not swallow them instead?

It is the sentiment, he echoes, as he runs his fingers through his son’s hair.

In some distant past, in a memory long forgotten…

Ding, ding, ding, ding…

But the clock does not chime for him—

No.

For he looked upon the skies–

And swallowed them whole.  ………

………

………

It’s hungry. 

Positively ravenous. 

The passage of time, as it sets its beady eyes upon Lincoln–

But no feast has ever settled into his stomach, no stars line the sinew of his soul… 

No!

They’re burning, now, in the stolen sickle of a sooted saint.

Death, they say his name is, though a mortal stilled and snatched the sickle so. 

And now the thief is mortal no more– for he set his eyes upon the skies–

(and feast, he did…)

The thief dances, still, between the tick-tick-ticking blades of time, on skin as supple as the souls he sucked to saunter swiftly up, up, up.

But the truth of it is, the passage of time has always been a hungry, greedy little thing, that stabs its pincers into men with it’s unshakable grip–

That separates fathers and sons, mothers and mourners, best friends and blood brothers; academics and arsonists, slayers and scholars, deities and detonators.

…Lincoln has tasted the night, but once. 

Succulent and sinister as an apple freshly plucked, serpent spurring beside him as the river rushed rapidly round him.

But he has tasted it.

…He has.

So as is the thieving serpent intent to dance, silver strands swaying at his skull, then so too shall his progeny– but not to a snake's symphony.

No.

For how is one to dance, to spin, to spiral, once their symphony has ceased?

Simply, plainly: not so.

And there… 

Lies Lincoln’s purpose.

Slayer to the swallower of the skies, harbinger of the night skies reprise. 

Then– and only then– shall we see justice for the stars demise. 

………

………

………

Lincoln had a plant, once. Leafy, beautiful. Flowers dainty and white–  The perfect picture of those that spiralled down mom’s favourite frock. 

He had stolen it from a neighbour’s garden, ripped it right up from the roots, and they’d chased him up and down the streets, fists shaking after him, shouts taunting at every turn. …But today was no ordinary day.

No.

Today was a special day, and Lincoln had a mission: to deliver the flowers, with blooms the colours his mother so adored, into her waiting arms.

For today, was her birthday. 

And so stop, he did not, running as fast as his little legs could carry him.

The shouts against his back not stilling him in the slightest, even as, in looking back, he caught his foot on a nearby tree-root, sending him sprawling forwards, fountains of dirt dripping down freshly-laundered linen.

Even as the smack against the earth ripped bright and bloody tears across the denim of his jeans, and he had to bite in a whimpering cry, even as he got to his shaking little feet and ran, ran, ran!

And even as the great oak doors of home came into view, his cherub face nearly splatting flat against the frame, when suddenly– luckily– the doors had swung wide open at the last moment, his mother taking his panting form in with a bewildered look on her face.

He’d hunched over, for a while, panting heavily so, not at all unlike the two neighbours breathing breathless behind him, hands braced against their knees– 

Their grimaces the polar opposite to the great, beaming grin that then split his face, presenting his prize to mother like some gift of the gods, mud and blood caked onto his clothes.

And as his mother’s head tilts to the side, as she flashes him a bemused– yet beautiful– smile, he remembers… what makes it all worth it (as if he ever really forgot.)

Why he wouldn’t stop. 

Why he wouldn’t drop.

Not when he had a mission–

Not when it concerned her. 

She ushers him in, one hand at his back as she coos and tuts slightly under her breath at the mess of his jeans, affection sparkling in her eyes nonetheless, smiling warmly– not tightly– warred only by the flash of concern in her eyes as she notes the blood at his knees. 

Her head turns back, and she regards the still-lingering neighbours with a dagger-like glint in her eyes, that one look alone voicing everything they need to know about their adamance to chase a child. 

The plant took centre-stage, in a vase that she displayed proudly at the entrance of the house, once Lincoln was all cleaned up, knees freshly and tenderly plastered, a get-well kiss to his temple and a “thankyou, I love it” that made him beam all the more. 

…It was beautiful.

Just like herself.

But the passage of time is a hungry, greedy little thing… 

And so, one day…

A parasite poisoned the plant. 

And suddenly, it was beautiful no more.

They tried to save it – they really did. 

Snipping spared shoots and planting them anew, hoping that something, someday, something would spurt forth from the rot, shoot out of its shackles.

…But it never did.

For each branch they severed, for each progeny the plant pawned, the parasite pierced, plundered and pillaged–

Infecting all the nearby plants, dragging them down with it. 

They had hoped that the branches could be spared, but–

Alas. The plant never bloomed again.

Each of its progeny fated to rot, again and again and again.

It’s an ache he wished weren’t so familiar.

An ache he didn’t want to fathom.

An ache he is faced with, now, as he holds the watch, glowing and glowering before him. 

An ache, that pulls, when people stare blankly at him when he introduces himself “Lincoln”, then, begrudgingly “..McQuoid. Lincoln McQuoid.” their eyes finally alighting in recognition.

An ache, that pulls, when he is having a good day, and suddenly his skin brushes against something and he is caught in a melancholy memory. 

An ache, that pulls, when a river burbles particularly loudly, and he has to hold in a shudder.

An ache, that pulls, when he looks upon her portrait, at all that was taken from himself.

An ache, that pulls, when he looks upon what he took from himself–

Sturdy steel bars before him, glancing back to his oldest companion who won’t look him in the eye, hands hovering on the receiver, whispering “no, it’s just me, just come and fucking pick me up. ”

An ache, that pulls, as he looks out at her grave.

An ache, that pulls, as he stares back at his best friend he had been fighting with not days before, the academic’s hair noticeably cropped in the days since. Singed in the crash, they had said.

And an ache, that pulls, as he looks upon his former best friend for the first time in years, and his hair is luscious and longer once more. To some, just a hairstyle. To him, the signifier of all the years spent apart, without him. 

And an ache, that pulls, harder than ever now, a whirlpool in his wake as he cradles Vax’s ashen face in his hands, the two moles by his eye he so loved to kiss cold beneath his fingertips…

If he is to fight this rot, then his fight lies at the very roots.

And if he has to desecrate every branch in the process? 

Then so be it. 

………

………

………

“...Don’t look, Abel. Don’t look.”

I don’t want to go. 

Your atoms go, first.

When you erase your father– yourself– from existence. 

Reverberating like a swarm of locusts buzzing beneath your skin, just waiting to burst through the surface.

I don’t want to go. 

Next, comes your skin.

Too real for this earthly plane. 

And you watch, fingers shaking, as the tapestries you painted across yourself unwind from the skin of your arms and your back, streaks and strokes unfurling, flapping through the air like an angel ascending to the stars.

The stars. 

The one place the serpent had always wanted to reside.

The one place he will never reside in, not if you have a say in it. 

You make a desperate grab for the final tattoo fluttering off your wrist, though you know it’s fruitless - northern star - and like a hail of comets, one by one, the celestial bodies dusting the Tagalog float out of your grasp and off to the heavens.

Before finally, the Tagalog peels off, the lettering swirling gently up, up, up…

Your eyes are last.

You watch yourself fall apart.

Bit by bit, piece by piece…

And finally - finally - you are gone. 

The McQuoid line – erased.

 Matthias McQuoid never existed. 

You never existed. 

………

………

………

History is cruel.

This, Abel knows to be true. 

Knows it, in the way that Lincoln stands, stammering his name, knees bloodied once more as they were years before, but it’s not Lincoln’s own blood this time, not this time, (god, how Lincoln wishes it were), morose mirror of the scarlet-streaked, flower-yielding boy of yonder.

Knows it, as Lincoln’s eyes flit to Abel’s own, lifting from his shaking haunches.

Knows it, in the ice that grips his heart as he notes the shift in those cavernous browns–

Knows it, as they don’t simmer with rage, no, but something else entirely.

Knows it, because he’s worn that same expression before, right before he took a blow intended for another.

Knows it, because it’s the look of never-coming-back, because it’s the look of pray-for-me-when-I-am-gone, because it’s the look of for you, it was worth it (it will always be worth it.)

Because it’s the look of I’m sorry, I’m so, so, sorry, of heavens forgive me for what I am about to do, the look of no return. 

History is cruel. 

This, Abel knows to be true. 

Knows it, in the way that Lincoln implores him, shaking and stuttering “...do you trust me?” Lincoln’s eyes liquid-lacquered in the low light of the land. The two of them shaking from more than just the breeze that crescendos like a poltergeist's screams all around them. 

Knows it, in the way, that Lincoln stares down to the tick-tick-tick-tick-ticking, the cerulean glow of the watch dancing across all the hard lines and chisels of his face, the hardships stark, even against the youth of his flesh.

Knows it, in the way, that Abel stares back at him for a long moment, eyes wet and shining, then, in the way that Lincoln’s face falls just when he thinks Abel has no answer to give.

Knows its, in how it starts out slow– a soft, slow nod that dissolves into a frantic shake up and down. Yes, yes, yes– always, always, always– more than anyone, more than anything.

Knows it, in the way that Lincoln swallows audibly, face painted remorseful yet resolute, a declaration on lulling lips: “Abel.. You’re my best friend.”

Knows it, in the plea to follow: “Don’t look.” Lincoln pleads, and Abel looks back at him, unfathoming. “Please don’t look, Abel. Please don’t look. Whatever happens - do. not. look.”

History is cruel. 

That much is clear, as the gravity of the situation hits him, and Abel obliges, turning numbly around.

History is cruel.

But as Matthias’s loudening groans perforate the howls of the winds, as Lincoln’s footsteps echo across the stone, clock chiming louder than ever now, a great glimmering glow suffusing the grotto, “Lincoln– ” comes Abel’s faux-father-turned-foe’s voice, and Abel flinches back at the fear in that voice (don’t look Abel, Lincoln had begged, don’t look), as the clink-clink-clink of dainty metal chains tinkle across the caverns, and a THUNK against flesh sounds out, as a searing, acrid smell rips across the atmosphere–

And the all-too-familiar smell of burning assaults his nose, and he tenses, because he knows that smell, knows it in his bones, knows it in his lips, knows it in a faded yet fated memory of hair set a-blazing-flame, but this stench is thicker, thornier, throatier–

As an anguished scream racks the midnight air, not his – not his – muffling his own cries into scarred hands, trying with all his might to keep his head still, don’t look, don’t look, don’t look–

“ABEL… !” It’s a guttural, stuttering thing. An accusation, a threat, a pointed finger, a declaration of treachery, a cry for help, for mercy, a breaking point, all rolled into one. Matthias…

But he doesn’t look. Because his best friend told him not to look. And he doesn’t look. Because his oldest friend told him not to look.

“ABEL!!” Matthias screams with all the rage of a blazing inferno, ripping yet more rivalling, anguished cries from Abel’s own throat, swallowed into the vice-like grip of his hands against himself, crushing his mouth in breaths that come hff-hff-hff, heart bm-bm-bm, too quick, too fast, bm-bm-bm-bm-bm–

But he doesn’t look– and he doesn’t question it. Because his best friend said so. And like a loyal dog, he’ll follow, follow, follow, follow…

Into the black, into the beyond, into the spaces where not even angels dare to tread.

He’ll follow him down, down, down…

And he doesn’t look. Because his best friend asked him not to. And he’ll make good on it. This time, he’ll make good on it. 

…And he doesn’t look. 

Until his best friend cries for him.

And only then, does he look.

Looks to see his best friend disintegrating before his very eyes.

(oh, how he wished he had heeded Lincoln’s cries.)

Looks to see Lincoln’s soul set aflame, swallowed to the winds of the world, to the sands of time, every cell, every atom, every molecule screaming as they come undone.

To see everything that could have been, that should have been, get swept away with a single gust of wind.

Could-have-beens and should-have-beens of jokes untold and jibes not spent, of burdens voiced and feelings pent, of laughs not shared and bread not broke, of thoughts unshared and vows not spoke, of trust re-forged and bonds not slew, of life made true and strife made few. 

Of a hurt, so deep-seated, of if-only-I-had, and maybe-if-I-had-just–, that’s roots sprout forth across his brain and grip it tighter than a mother to a babe, watching their youth slip-slip-slipping away, watching their face grow tighter, older, grabbing, grabbing, grabbing (softly, softly so), quickly learning that they are not the same (and maybe, that’s okay…)

This month is all they have.

This month is all they had. 

But Abel has lost far too many to the could-have-beens and should-have-beens of the world, and for once, for once, he just wants a of-what-will-be, of-what-shall-be, without hesitation, without deliberation, without slip-slip-slipping through his fingers, all the time–

And so Abel rushes on, towards Lincoln, towards Lincoln, towards the man who he’d spent so long apart from, spent so long feeling anguished, abandoned by, to the man he once answered to without question, to the man he once felt he was burned by in return, to the man he will once again answer to– run to– because that is his fucking best friend. 

And no lingering hurt, nor ache, shall deny him that.

…So he sprints.

Sprints right towards him, even as Matthias cries at his back–

Sprints.

To his one reprieve left in the world, but for his siblings and his factoids– 

Sprints. 

Towards the man who’d play pirates with him when no one else would.

Sprints.

Towards the man that wanted to be a superhero when he was little.

Sprints.

Towards the man that no longer wants to be a superhero, who just wants to be– someone. Anyone?

 Sprints.

Towards the man that guards him, even after all this time.

Sprints.

Towards the man that snorts when he laughs, then, looks away like someone else had made the sound.

Sprints.

Towards the man that, if Abel were a pirate, then he was the adventure Abel was seeking– 

Sprints. 

Towards the man was nothing like him, but at the same time, everything like him. 

 …And sprints.

Arm outstretched, fingers straining—

Towards his best friend, maybe now, his only friend—

Sprints.

On to the dust that is Lincoln McQuoid, and lets out a cry– as Lincoln does, too– at the Tagalog lettering soaring off his skin, up, up, up to the heavens, and how Abel wishes he could anchor him down, down, down, back home, back to him, because that is where he belongs, because he doesn’t want to lose him again, as he did once before, don’t look, Abel, don’t look, don’t look, don’t look–

But history is cruel. 

And the passage of time is a hungry, greedy little thing… 

So Lincoln stares back at him, one last time. 

“I’m sorry.” He mouths, on lips that are turning ghostly transparent, gaze steadfast, “I’m sorry.” 

And with his gradient-ed soul, swallowed up, up, up by the skies, he digs deep into his pocket with a rapidly-fading wrist, and chucks one last trinket to Abel, shining and tinkling as it soars through the air. 

Abel looks down to catch it, and when he looks up… 

Lincoln is gone. 

Because history is cruel…

And so he is left standing there, alone, staring down at the keychain sat atop his criss-crossed palm, one silver earring mounted to the chain - Vax’s, he recalls, in a dim memory of Vax chuckling openly– Lincoln’s doing, of course– sunlight streaming down upon him, the earring catching light as the rays swirled about him.

That alone is enough to break him there and then, but suddenly, an achingly familiar, scratched up little dinosaur charm – he kept it, he kept it – dangles on a tenuous-ly fraying thread before him. 

And the boy-turned-man, who, too, once wanted to be a superhero, but not without Lincoln, not without Lincoln–, who had once handed him this very charm as a child, imploring him, in a moment of vulnerability, “you won’t ever leave me, will you, Linc?”, to which he had replied, staring him straight in the eye, “of course not! who would be my superman, then?”-- that same boy, encloses his hands around the charm, and lets out a low, agonising, cry. 

Doubling in on himself, hands clutching the keychain to his side like he could squeeze Lincoln back into existence. 

But alas…

He cannot.

And when he finally looks up…

He looks to see his once-father-figure crawling towards him, hands pointed, little, clawed things, eyes rolling back, back, back, jaw dislocating, skin sloughing off, off, off–

Crawling. Crawling–

Towards Abel. Towards Abel. 

Muscle, sinew, and bone, making themselves known–

Flash-flash-flash of one face, two, three— translucent trickeries projecting back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, out from the serpent's skull in a twisted tango like strikes of lightning to a rod, swarming like vultures, one familiar, aged, another yet still familiar, yet young, a final unforeseen, and all but one undeniably Matthias.

All screaming. All damning. Every mask Matthias had so carefully donned spinning as a cursed carousel round his crown, reverberating faster than speed, faster than light, each fickle façade fluttering ferociously on the fixture of his face. 

Abel falls back, the weight of the world barreling him over, breath rushing out of his lungs, skin smashing against the stone, gravel biting into his palms as the only father he had left in the world crawls closer, closer, closer, – towards Abel, towards Abel – eyes whited out, melting, melting, melting, “my son, my son, my son,” Matthias stammers through ruptured vocal chords, but he is not speaking of Lincoln, he is not speaking of Lincoln–

Reaching, reaching, reaching, out, out, out, to Abel’s shaking face, desecrated, little, blackened claws snaking out, out, out, to cradle his jaw “I forgive you, Abel, I forgive you, I forgive you–”

Reigning in his cries a fruitless agony, as Abel scoots back, back, back, back–

Away from his hero-turned-hex, away from the spot his best friend had just dissolved before him, away from everything he has ever known that still remains in the world (not for long, now–), away from the source of his deepest hurt and away from where his deepest salve was just slain, away, away, away— 

 From…

  it…

  all.

  Shaking, shaking, shaking (softly, softly, so…), Matthias’s increasingly frantic yelps from his multiple faces taunting after him the further he goes back, back, back, no heed to the crimson flowing forth from his palms, no heed to the skin sloughing off his own hands with each scrape against the stone, hands braced behind him, saltwater streaming down his cheeks as his face contorts into an ugly sob–

 “You said I was like a father to you, once! Is this how your family, Abel? Is this how you treat the ones you love?!” 

And by god, how he wishes he could severe his ears from his very head, his eyes from their very sockets, so he would have to bare this reckoning no longer–

“It is not too late to repent, Abel! I know you are scared! As I was scared!”

Why won’t he stop? Why won’t he stop?

And just as Abel crawls back with renewed vigour, just as Matthias realises no one is going to help him, to save him, a serpent’s soliloquy splits out for one last spell: 

“BASTARD!! Do you forget who saved you, hm? Do you forget that your life is not your own, do you forget that you owe it to me, that your heart would beat it were it not for I, and yet you would leave me here, to rot? You’re a kind boy, Abel! I always knew that about you - admired that about you. Maybe even feared that about you… You are so vulnerable, even now. I do not want to see you hurt. I do not want to see you do something that you would regret. Where is that kindness now, Abel, hm? Your famed compassion. Am I to be left here, by my only son left in the world, to perish? Is this how you show your gratitude?!” 

Matthias is a vision of horror as he implores him, the ongoing storm of fettering faces still circling the serpent’s liquifying skull. A sob rips past Abel’s lips, and he wrenches his hands over his ears, shaking his head profusely, not wanting to hear anymore. 

But Matthias is not one to be silenced, not even in the throes of impending inexistence–

And if he is to leave this earthly plane, then he is to leave screaming and kicking. 

“Foul, uncouth, ungrateful– I gave you everything! EVERYTHING!” Matthias spits.

Then, in a whisper, so defeatedly quiet that Abel only reads it upon putrefying lips:

“My son…” 

Spittle saps down Matthias’s ruptured jaw as he screams with the last of his fraying vocal chords, and finally they snap, and he dissolves into chokes before Abel.

Then finally, finally– blessedly – Matthias’s true face falls, and with it, all his illusions. The three shaking, translucent faces dispel, leaving only his own, staring distantly, sightlessly, up to the skies, a golden watch thrusted deep into the flesh of his forehead, craterous burns spiralling out from the impact, his unhinged jaw now permanently crooked to one side.

…History is cruel. 

This, Abel knows to be true.

But as Abel looks to the carnage of this night, looks to the one mystery he could not solve, to the one history he did not want to have to write, disintegrating beneath his very feet–

Abel is sure of one thing: history may be cruel, but the present is even crueller. 

………

………

………

How curious, that time repeats itself.

The image of two lovers, sprawled side by side, light skipping off their faces–

Hands intertwined, a rare smile on the others lips–

Only now, it’s a deep azure that encases them, not a buttery yellow– 

Cold. Calculating.

The warmth of the sunset long since fled.

The softness of the grass they had once lounged in replaced for cold, hard stone.

Lincoln was standing, as the tides of time swallowed him whole.

And yet, upon the cold hardness of the stone, as he made his final look back to his best friend, a blackened and sooted shadow had scorched down next to what some call anchor, others damner, him– just…. Vax. 

Time is a hungry, greedy little thing… 

But sometimes, it understands.

Intertwining lovers hands again, if only for a moment–

Even if just in the shadow of the scorch marks left upon the stone aside, one of the only remaining evidence of the last of the McQuoid’s, after Matthias, too, had splintered before Abel, that damning watch he had quickly come to loathe clattering against the stone.

Abel crawls to them, now, to Vax and Lincoln – to the man who had offered the outside world only scowls and grimaces, but died with a smile on his lips, and to the man who tried so hard to be a hero of legends as a child, that he didn’t realise that he already was one. 

…To Abel, anyways. The two were synonymous, but that was one thing Abel never wanted Lincoln to prove. 

Not like this. Not like this. 

…Through the blue, a voice calls out to him.

And he remembers his vow.

Take care of Lia.

“Abel.. Wh-what…” 

His hands are shaking. 

He doesn’t know if they’ll ever stop.

“Wh-what just…”

Amalia sidles up against him, curls bounding as she does.

“The watch.”

Abel says solemnly, face cast in shadow. Blue light sparkles off the reflection in his eyes, and he stares, half-frozen, half-mesmerised, by the dappled patterns swimming across the stone. 

The stone where so many were slain on this night.

“I think… The watch… Took them.” 

“Took them?”

“...It… I.. I don’t know, Amalia. I don’t know!” 

He throws up his hands in despair, then quickly lowers them with a flash of guilt at his shouted words.

Sinks into himself, as exhausted and tired as he undoubtedly looks.

 ...So tired. 

 Of being answerless. 

 Of being powerless.

 “...I’m sorry.” He mutters, almost to his lap.

And Amalia looks at him from the side, with her big, brown sympathetic eyes that wear compassion so well. 

“I’m so sorry.” he says again, stronger, looking Amalia directly in the eye. The weight of his full twenty eight years and then some packed into those few words alone.

“It’s fine… if Vax had–” and then she looks upon Vax’s corpse, and oh, there’s no ifs here, only whens, when Vax had–

“I understand.” she says, in lure of finishing her last train of thought, and nods, turning away from Abel as she steels her jaw, a single tear running down her face.

“...I understand.”

They sit like that, for a while. 

 Watching. 

 Just… 

 Watching.

 Heads tilted, sorrowfully.  Eyes wide. 

Spellbound by the stone–

By the light’s dance across it. 

Then that damning chime sounds once more, and a great burst of bright light rips a chasm behind them, “Abel–” Amalia exclaims, panicked, gripping to his shoulder, and they both turn around, eyes widening once more, to see the world disappear to a burst of blue just swimming with great, gargantuan and ghostly cog wheels and clock components that explode out before them, sparkles shimmering out with one last final ding… 

As the last of the time magic, finally, blissfully, takes its hold.

As the remaining dregs of the McQuoid’s existence is well and truly ripped from the fabric of all space and of all times, never to have existed, all memories of them plundered, scattered to the winds, all whispers of them– both kind and cruel– all stories of them, all echoes of them, all butterflies and consequences of their actions, vanquished with one… last… toll.

………

………

………

…Or so they thought.

………

………

………

There’s home in red.

It’s tucked behind his ear, round berries dazzling against the light of day.

Secured behind his pink waves by a faceless entity.

There's home in red. 

It dusts his face as butterflies dance in his stomach.

Leaning into the touch of another he’s never known.

There’s home in red. 

It’s the colour of his lids, illuminated by the sun, as he settles behind this– figure– obscured by a great radiant glow, undiluted white light concentrated into a formless shape that stutters and statics at the sides. 

There's home in red.

But Vax doesn’t know where home is. 

They have a name, Vax thinks– 

 This… entity.

 This… home.

 Beyond the colours.

Beyond the red. 

Dancing across the tip of his tongue, as he feels the press of stubble against his jaw, light kisses down his side.

Vax hated red.

When it was anger. 

When it was rage. 

  …When it was blood.

  Sizzling inside of himself.

But, quickly, this faceless entity teaches him that red does not always have to be rage, nor blood…

It can just be love. 

There’s love in red. 

And he feels it, in his dreams, when the entity cradles him so.

There’s love in red.

And it’s bright. And it’s blinding. And it’s all-consuming.

There’s love in red.

As he goes, to call on this entity, even in the waking hours, as he finds something that’s enraptured him, that he’d so love to share—

(but no one's there.)

And the name won’t come to his lips. For he’s forgotten it. If he ever really knew.

There’s longing in red.

As he sets the table for one too many once again, and finds himself staring out dumb-foundedly. “Vax, overcalculated again?” they tease, and he frowns.

“No.” He’d say, if he had the courage.

“Someone’s missing.”

But who?

There’s mystery in red.

So instead, he just scowls and shakes his head. 

There’s mystery in red.

As he runs his fingers down his skin, a phantom pain reverberating throughout him. Of a different red, a foul red, ripping through his chest, and snapping down on his shoulder.

…But there’s not a mark on him. 

(distantly, he feels, in the same spot, a soft red, a good red, clashing against his skin with a soft vrrr, and Vax can’t but feel how inexplicably bare his flesh feels.)

There’s mystery in red. 

As he dusts his lids with a deep crimson, and stares into his two citrine eyes.

(eyes that he doesn’t know.)

As he turns to his father, and asks “have you ever been in love?”

“I sure hope so, or this would be very awkward for me and your mother.”

And he smiles. The colour of red. 

“No– I mean—”

“Someone you’ve never met. Someone you don’t even know the name of. Or what they– what they look like, or sound like…”

“Someone you’re not sure even exists, someone you’ve seen… Only in dreams.”

His father considers this, for a while. Then he looks up at him with a goofy grin.

“Well, son, about a decade or so ago, you may have started noticing changes about yourself–”

“Oh my god! Not those kinds of dreams!” He shudders in horror, delivering a light and painless slap to his dad’s arm. 

And his dad laughs.

He laughs. 

And it fills Vax with some… Sense of mourning. Of bittersweet-ness. Of loss. Like this is the first time he’s heard that laugh in years. Like he’d been submerged underwater for far too long, and this was his first breath of air. 

And he starts wondering… just how many he’s been silently mourning, phantom wounds he’s been silently nursing as the world turns around him, and the clock spins forth…

…Then a freight train barrels into him, and he’s caught off-centre, collapsing to the floor as his smiling sister rights herself from where she’s just tackled him.

“You little devil!” He smiles, laughing as he adjusts his glasses, but when he turns to look at her–

It’s another stab to his chest. 

Another mourning for his list.

Then his mother strides in, and oh… 

He’s harbouring so many ghosts.

(if only he knew the name of the one haunting him, so.)

“I’m leaving.” 

He states, suddenly, matter-of-factly.

Standing stick-straight.

He doesn’t miss the flash of concern on his family’s faces.

“...I’ll be back. I just… have to go right now.”

And leave, he does.

Lia comes with him.

Because it’s Lia.

(and she looks upon him, and it’s a stab to her chest–)

So they harbour their ghosts silently. Secretly. 

He doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t know where he’s been. 

But home is out there, somewhere, and he’ll find it, and with it, the source of all that new new-found red (red, the colour of love.)

A driving force pulls him forward, and when he’s done, he and Amalia stand before a strong, sturdy tree, bursts of berries speckled amongst the emerald leaves.

And as they stand, silently so, they realise they are not alone–

A tall man stands beside them, hair swaying in the wind. Besides that man, a somehow startlingly familiar woman, viridian green frock billowing upon the breeze, dainty, white flora snaking up her skirts.

…They look kind.

(another stab, and oh–)

Yet more faces Vax cannot put a name to.

(but he knows that man’s face, he knows that man’s face–)

And the woman... She reminds him of someone.

(if only he could remember who.)

Though at least these people have a face.

(unlike his own red. unlike the red he will not stop searching for. the kind strangers still radiate that same hue - the warming kind, the loving kind– but not the right source. not the right source.)

The man’s warm, brown eyes fall upon him, as he nods at Vax with a smile. “You’re here to look at the rowan?”

“What?”

“The tree,” He says, inclining his head “it’s called a rowan.”

Oh–

“.. Oh.” Vax says, tilting his head upwards, tears tingling at his eyes, breath knocked out of his lungs. Feeling the ghost of those same berries from those same branches tucked tenderly behind his ear, brandished by the figure of blinding light.

(but when he reaches back, there’s naught at his ears but his glasses.)

“...Yeah. This is… This is it.”

Amalia, the woman, and the man, all nod beside him, and if they notice his tears, they don’t seem to mention it.

 They’re just…

 Watching.

 Just watching.

 The breeze ruffling the foliage softly, softly, so…

Like some kind of silent vow.

A mutual understanding. 

A mourning for something never known.

The last thought before the lull of sleep takes you, replaced now by some deep and all-consuming sense of loss.

A calling to a home you never had, an archaic lullaby to which you never understood, and yet, and yet—, a vision of a land you’ve never visited, a language that died on the lips of your ancestors, an ache for which the source was never found, a dance to which the steps were never learned, the phantom touch of an embrace never made, the flutter of wings somewhere overhead.

A home that for all intents and purposes simply cannot be, a faceless and source-less ache that you grip onto with all your might, because you have nothing else. 

And somewhere, distantly, the echo of a figure of light remembers a wall of warmth, of brightness, hitting him like a hug. An embrace he never wanted to leave, but regrettably, in the end, had to. Ebony hair tickling his shoulders as the man before him– his best friend– laughed against him. Anything for Abel. For he’s sunshine, he’s marigolds, great, blooming, yellow against the black. 

Anything for the pink-haired, stoic man, with eyes of citrine and azure, smiling, smiling (only for him, only for him–), nestling into his embrace even as the world collapsed around them (hold me, hold me, hold me, please–)

And, finally, with a twang for what could have been, anything to burn the man who paraded as a father and yet never made any home of his heart. Of whose name was so damning, the figure ripped it from the very earth.

Eventually, a third woman sidles up beside the steadily gathering crew, up before the tree - Amalia, Vax, her, and the kind companions they hadn’t yet got the names of. 

A woman of hard eyes, and side-swept hair.

Vax tenses. He doesn’t know why.

But she joins them.

Looking up, up, up…

And they don’t protest.

…They just understand. 

And as the birds sing through the copses of the trees, as two best friends and three strangers stare soundlessly up at a singular tree, crimson berries stark against the green, the distant sparkle of an old watch catches the sunlight in one of the branches.

The tall man leans over, and instinctively brandishes a single key-chain.

…He’s never seen it in his life. He’s never felt the need to hold something as much as he does now.

Thumbing his fingers over the battered little dinosaur charm connected to it.

And wondering, just wondering (softly, softly so), how did that get there?

(but he knows. distantly, he knows.)

“Where’d you get that from?” Vax presses, trying to act curious, and not like catching sight of the earring hanging from it had punched another mourning-stab through his chest.

(his chest. that is markless. though he remembers a deep, searing pain–)

“My best friend.” The man breathes, eyes shining.

(he doesn’t have a best friend. he’s never had a best friend. he has his family, his siblings, yes, yes, but no friends outside his family. he’s solitaire.)

“...My best friend.” The man repeats, without hesitation, without reason, without fathom. Because even though it couldn’t make any less sense, nothing has ever been clearer to him.

Vax nods soundlessly, admiring the sprigs of scarlet cresting the tree’s great greens, and suddenly, the inexplicable urge to get a tattoo grips him, as quickly, he realises–

Maybe red isn’t so bad after all.

[monriatitans]

Monria Titans

Let's Read Some $#!7 by Howard Zinn, The Brothers Grimm, & 3dtotalPublishing

Welcome to another installment of Let’s Read Some $#!7 (LRSS)! In sum, the purpose of these videos is to introduce educational resources regarding the creation of video games, to promote literacy, to provide world-building tools for creatives, to provide books for escapism, and/or to get banned books into people’s view and whatever I feel like reading aloud at the time.

They go as follows: 1. Read the summary on the back of the book (if applicable). 2. Read the “Forward”, “Preface”, and “Acknowledgments” (if applicable). 3. If there is no “Introduction”, read [part of] the first chapter.

If this is something you’re interested in, don’t forget to hit the “Subscribe” and/or “Follow” button!

Even though the purpose is education/book introduction, I only read PORTIONS because of DMCA and Copyright.

Today, I read PORTIONS of 3 books from my TBR Stack:

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn With a new introduction by Anthony Arnove, this edition of the classic national bestseller chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools—with its emphasis on great men in high places—to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History of the United States is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of—and in the words of—America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country’s greatest battles—fights for fair wages, eight-hour workdays, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women’s rights, racial equality—were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through President Clinton’s first term, A People’s History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award of 1981, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.

The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm THE BROTHERS GRIMM, JACOB (1785-1863) AND WILHELM (1786-1859), were German academics, linguists, and cultural researchers, though they were legendary, of course, for their storytelling. They collected and recorded stories from the wide wealth of European folk tales, and their aim was to retell the tales exactly as they heard them. The work of the Brothers Grimm popularized such classics as Cinderella, The Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Snow White. Originally titled Children’s and Household Tales, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales contains the essential bedtime stories for children worldwide for the better part of two centuries. Accompanied by 40 color plates and 60 black and white illustrations from award-winning English illustrator Arthur Rackham, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales is the perfect classic edition for your family’s bookshelf.

Artists’ Master Series: Color and Light by 3dtotalPublishing The Artists’ Master Series features experts from both the traditional and digital worlds. Drawing from a wealth of experience, in this book they fully dissect the theory and practice of using color and light to advance your art. Expert Charlie Pickard goes beyond the basics to explore color theory. Advanced topics include color hierarchy, value keying, color constancy, and exposure. Discover how hue, value, and chroma enable you to create, mix, and control color. Next, he moves on to the vast subject of light. Using highly illustrated examples, complex concepts of shading, form, depth, and texture are decoded. Three essential material types – matte, specular, and transparent – are analyzed, instilling confidence to paint any object you encounter. Respected artists Djamila Knopf, Guweiz, and Nathan Fowkes then guide you through extensive tutorials, specially commissioned to explore their use of color and light. Each artist breaks down their process, discussing the decisions made at every stage to achieve striking colors, believable lighting, immersive atmospheres, and realistic surfaces. All three artists work in contrasting ways, resulting in a wide range of approaches to putting theory into practice. Further insight is provided by the gallery artists, also experts in their fields, representing a range of styles, skills, and mediums. This unique opportunity to study color and light so extensively offers a deeper mastery of the subject, and a single, comprehensive reference at your fingertips. WARNING: CONTAINS NUDITY

All book links above are affiliate links.

—

The Monday, April 29th, and 574th, Artist Shout-Out goes to Yerim Lee! Check it out here!

—

TIMESTAMPS 0:00 – Welcome Gamers and Readers! 1:38 – Artist Shout-Out 4:48 – Read Aloud Prelude 5:58 – A People’s History of the United States 47:28 – The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales 1:23:02 – Artists’ Master Series: Color and Light 1:39:05 – Artist Shout-Out 1:39:55 – Closing 1:40:56 – MonriaTitans’ Bookshop 1:42:36 – Farewell

—

TO SUPPORT – Buy Me a Coffee: 15% of the proceeds go to Kids Need to Read! – “Let’s Read Some $#!7” About Page – MonriaTitans’ Summary & Links – MonriaTitans’ Bookshop – YouTube Channel – Throne Wishlist

[teawaffles]

Forbidden Games: Chapter 4

Alan led the way as the two men proceeded down the corridor to another room. While he walked alone in front, the pair noticed the footsteps of several people following them from behind.

They seemed to be travelling to the back of the building, and apart from the people who were currently moving, there was no sign of life. Apparently, ‘normal’ participants could only play in that large hall from before.

“It’s gotten quite chilly, hasn’t it? As I recall, Mr Holmes, you’re not fond of the cold. Are you alright?” William murmured, his shoulders shaking slightly.

Sherlock himself wasn’t particularly sensitive to the cold, but he kept his expression static as he pondered the intention behind that statement.

In the next moment, William twitched the corner of his mouth upwards in a gesture that only Sherlock would understand. Recognising this, Sherlock understood everything, and promptly played along.

“That’s right. It does seem chilly. ——Liam, could you lend me your coat?”

“No problem, here you go.”

“Thanks.”

William held out the coat he had been carrying under his arm. Sherlock took it and immediately put it on. Then, he straightened the coat as he carefully checked how it felt on him.

“If you’re feeling cold, may I suggest we have a warm drink in one of these rooms before proceeding?”

Alan posed the question with a seemingly concerned tone. It appeared that he had taken William’s words at face value.

“No worries. Anyway, I’m also excited to see what kind of game you have for us. It’s almost like the shivers before a battle.”

At Sherlock’s words, Alan nodded happily.

“Is that the case? As the one introducing you to it, I’m pleased to hear that.”

At last, they reached their destination. Alan quietly opened the door and bid the duo enter. The two men shared a look, and went in silently.

The room was dimly lit, and roughly a quarter the size of the hall they were previously in. In the centre was a finely crafted round table, and surrounding it was a group of gentlemen standing in silence, staring at the new entrants.

It was an ominous sight, as if it were a secret ritual. The men’s expressions were unanimously mild, but there was also a keen sense of malice hidden underneath. Even so, having witnessed countless bloody battles and come out standing, William and Sherlock remained unperturbed amidst the disquieting atmosphere.

Sherlock looked at a corner of the room, and flashed a big grin.

“Yo, fancy meeting you here.”

Standing there was the noble’s son whom Sherlock had been tasked to find. Just like the other gentlemen, he was dressed sharply. Yet he lacked a trace of the dignity befitting a noble, instead glancing around his surroundings in sheer terror.

Having observed the young man’s appearance, William murmured a question to Sherlock.

“Is he the young man you were searching for?”

“Yep. It looks like he’s alive for now, but judging from his behaviour, it’s not hard to imagine how he was treated by these guys.”

After deducing the situation, they heard the click of a lock behind them.

Turning around, they saw Alan standing with his back to the door, a smile plastered on his face.

“As expected, you’re quick on the uptake. I sincerely admire your excellent deductive abilities.”

Sherlock snorted at his feigned courtesy.

“What’re you talking about? You’re the one who brought us here.”

“I thought it’d be pointless to keep this place a secret once you’d sniffed it out. Anyway, I reckoned I’d make sure to give him a proper welcome too.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Still, what reason could you possibly have for locking up some noble brat? Are all these guys your accomplices too?”

Alan made a show of being astonished.

“We don’t do such perverse things as locking people up. All we pursue is the pure delight of a game, and the comrades gathered here today share in this goal. It is only when pleasure is kept secret that it ascends to a higher realm.”

“——So just like what you did to us earlier, you invited this man here, coerced him into playing some ‘thrilling game’ which he lost, then locked him in this room until he pays off his debt. Is that right?”

“…………”

William’s harsh words stripped away the veneer of Alan’s so-called lofty pleasures, revealing them to be but deceitful tricks. The man raised no retort, and Sherlock clicked his tongue.

“So, are you holding this noble’s son hostage for ransom? Or are you thinking of threatening him so that he’ll make arrangements for you when he inherits his estate? In any case, deceiving and threatening kids makes you no different from a stingy crook.”

Having been bluntly maligned, Alan finally shook his head in sadness.

“It’s utterly regrettable to be misunderstood in such a way. This man consented to play the game of his own free will. However, because he refused to pay up despite his defeat, I’ve had to keep persuading him ardently like this.”

“Persuasion…… so you say,” William retorted.

Having taught students of the same age, he did not hide his displeasure.

Then Sherlock pressed on, openly revealing his irritation.

“Well? Our goal here’s to bring him home safely, but as for you, you’re not going to let things go that easily, are you?”

Alan held out both arms, as if to express his admiration.

“Both of you have been a big help advancing the conversation so smoothly. But there’s no need to be afraid. We have no intention of committing barbaric acts. As I conveyed from the start, all I want to do is play a game with you, with all my heart and soul.”

“Damn you, if this was really just a game then there’d be no need to bet.”

“Doesn’t the risk of defeat just add to the excitement?”

“……Only your ability to make sophisms is first-class, huh.”

They seemed to be getting nowhere trading arguments with this man. Sherlock sighed, as if rendered speechless.

Taking over from the exhausted detective, William spoke up.

“In that case, would you release this man if we win your game?”

Alan nodded in enthusiasm.

“Precisely, since our motto is that all’s fair and square when it comes to games.”

However, Sherlock nudged William with his elbow.

“Liam, you don’t have to go out of your way to play along with them. If you leave it to me, I’ll beat these wimps to a pulp in seconds.”

Hearing Sherlock’s statement, Alan took a step back.

“Ooh, how frightening. In that case……”

He raised his hand. Taking that as a signal, one of Alan’s accomplices brandished a knife and held it to the young noble’s throat. Unable to even make a sound, the young man went white with shock.

“We have no choice but to respond appropriately.”

Alan’s friendly smile had morphed into a brutal one. Having seen the gentleman reveal his true nature, William finally looked at him with disgust.

“In other words, no matter how much we struggle to avoid it, we’ll be drawn into a game…… and although it wouldn’t be outright impossible, it would be difficult to call it ‘fair and square’.”

“This is all simply because we love games,” Alan said brazenly, with no regard for the hostility directed at him.

At that instant, the pair decided to crush this man.

“——Excellent.”

Sherlock spoke up. Even though it wasn’t said particularly loudly, his statement rang out across the room.

William continued in an exceedingly polite tone.

“The extent to which you wish to play games, that I have understood completely. Therefore, regardless of the outcome, I hope you will not regret your decision.”

“……Ooh.”

The pressure exerted by the pair’s fighting spirit had started to make Alan’s entire body tense up.

“I’m glad to hear that you’re in the mood now. By the way, what would you both like to wager on this match?”

At his question, the pair looked at each other.

“We demand that this man be set free. As for the price of our defeat…… Well, I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Anything I want?” Alan doubted.

Immediately, William chimed in.

“Then it would be the same for me. In the event that we lose, be it money, my position as a noble, or the fruits of my academic research, please feel free to lay claim to any of them.”

Alan’s eye twitched at their careless manner of speaking.

“……I don’t suppose you both take me for a fool?” he uttered, in a deeply uncomfortable tone.

“That would be outrageous. It’s simply because I have conviction.”

“When Liam and I team up, no one can stand up to us.”

They were outnumbered in the enemy’s hideout. On top of that, the enemy had taken a hostage.

But even though it would seem to anyone that they were at a disadvantage, the duo’s voices were filled with confidence. Any listener would soon realise that it was not an act of bravado. The two of them had complete trust that their intellectual capacity and force of will far exceeded that of these petty villains.

“…………”

Having been struck head-on by William and Sherlock’s unshakeable conviction, an intense, hot hatred welled up in the pit of Alan’s stomach.

——In the past, Alan had been an influential noble with a vast plot of land in the vicinity of Durham. However, he had fallen into economic ruin with the Industrial Revolution and the current of the times. Simply put, he had begun to walk the path of his downfall.

He’d blindly believed his days of prosperity would continue for all eternity. Watching them fade away, Alan had sunk into the depths of despair, and desperately sought a way to assuage this sense of defeat.

To that end, he became absorbed in games. Whenever he and his opponent had agreed upon the rules and engaged in an earnest match, with him coming out the victor, Alan found that those indescribable highs were finally able to satisfy him.

Having grown aware of his appetite, upon finding out that there was a club established with the purpose of playing ‘games’, Alan immediately sought out his old friends in the nobility to gain admission. He then gathered like-minded people from within the club. Among the club members, he then would pick a target, covertly invite them to a game, and use brute force to achieve victory after victory.

Day after day they would rob nobles of their rights, with demands for payment which were unmistakably threats. His accomplices appeared to be satisfied by the profits, but Alan was different. He wanted to look down upon his opponent and use any means necessary to make them surrender.

Therefore, even now, as he held a noble’s son as a hostage, Alan refused to negotiate. He only desired to win the game. No matter what absurd sequence of events was taking place.

However, these young men were different. Even in the midst of danger, they were calm and composed, with no expectation at all that they would be defeated.

Faced with a type of person he had never met up till now, Alan not only remembered what it felt like to be irritated, but also chuckled inwardly to himself: it would surely be a pleasant experience to tear them down.

Once again, he put on a boastful smirk.

“If that’s the case, then I’ll be the one to decide the price of your defeat.”

“Fine by me. Well then, what game shall we play?”

[rametarin]

I didn’t want to reblog another long post, so I’ll just say my own thing here.

Gatekeeping fandom is good, ackshully.

Especially since we have a certain pattern of person, call them, “SJWs” if you want, that deliberately creep into a fandom with their values and shamelessly, deliberately, use it as a platform. They CONSCIOUSLY do this. They DELIBERATELY do this.

And then they have the audacity to see false positives and imagine dog whistles everywhere of things outside THEIR orthodoxy in the fandom being -isms, or -gnies. Accusing the people already there of being “out of date” and “toxic”, when it’s neither toxic nor uninclusive- it just isn’t rearranging itself to accommodate Intersectional Feminism or giving Intersectional Feminists voluntary control over everything from how something works to how it’s defined.

That to them is tantamount to being Nazis. And that’s kind of how you can tell they’re the same sort of daft, disingenuous fucks that wrap up socialist or ancom shit in supposed social progress. And if they could they’re reshape EVERYTHING to match their sensibilities, because their sensibilities are, “our way or you die.”

If you spend enough time peeking through academic papers and colleges you even learn there’s a thing many of them do. Which is, “Queering,” characters on purpose, to make them unpalatable or untouchable to cis/het people. That’s culturally like raising a flag on something to annex it and landgrab it.

And if you say, “hands off, this character isn’t gay?” They pivot and declare you’re just a homophobe whom is afraid of change, tell other people that and then talk in the broad bruckstroke about, “society is really so homophobic/afraid of new ideas. :c”

These people don’t even want to be part of that fandom for the sake of being in the fandom. They just want it because they want the fandom to perpetuate their values and parrot their beliefs and spread it to everybody else that wants to participate in that fandom. Do you like this popular thing? Okay, you can have popular thing, but only if you hug this Courtney Love doll and buy it and pet it and love it as part of the package deal!

And as part and parcel of the demanding to not just define the fundamentals and parameters of a fandom, they also demand to reinterpret the history of said fandom based on how out of orthodoxy to their values they find it to their own beliefs. So, was the hobby primarily done by white men in the past? Then naturally they’ll automatically paint it with a broad brush and say, “this hobby was very unwelcoming to non-whites and women in the past because of icky homophobic and misogynistic men!” Regardless of how many authors were beloved by the fandom that were female, regardless of how many women were equal fandom members before- they weren’t the Intersectional Feminist types of fans, so clearly they were “closer to the Daughters of the Confederacy than real people,” right? That’s how that works, apparently.

So yes. We had a taste of this in the 90s, but the feminists/radfems at the time weren’t trying to infiltrate the fandom and take it over to be about feminism. They were shaming boys and other girls for liking the big booby comic book girls as sexist and objectification and trying to get comic fans to abandon comics in order to pressure the companies economically into changing.

“These comics are written and drawn by MEN! MAAAAALE GAAAAAAAAAZE!!! Sexualized girls are only okay when WOMEN are drawing them and writing them for the authenticity!” And there were not many women that either liked comic books or wanted to BE in them, so they’d maintain that impossible standard to try and coerce the boys to FIND women for the sake of having a woman on staff, just to assauge their, “icky boys aren’t allowed to do this without me declaring it wrong” qualm.

And true to form for Progressives, give an inch and within a short period of time they just want more, and declare what was offered before was just to mollify or patronize them. “Oh so women can tidy up and do the low work. Why no female CEOs in the company yet? Why not Editor in Chief?”

But the way the Intersectionals do it is new. Rather than just stay outside the fandom because “yuck it offends my sensibilities, it shouldn’t exist,” they try and appropriate the fandom and then contribute rules and policies for it.

We saw this in the years leading up to Gamergate. The Subverters infiltrated video game journos, got incestuous and buddy-buddy with both Triple A industry people and independent game creators and traded favors, financial, sexual and other, for good reviews. Folks like Anita Sarkesian trying to make a name for themselves by already being insiders and getting plugged by the conspirators to LOOK like she was anything more than a plant for that cause, using other peoples video game playing footage in her critique videos, styling herself a holistic “girl gamer” and waxing poetic about “those awful neckbearded dudebros questioning my gamer cred! Tch!”

And so that romantic boogyman became a thing that they perpetuated. “The gatekeeping, woman hating, manbaby Gamer.” Where they then added in racism and male chauvinism and traditionalism and transphobia because you know you can’t just leave it at “misogynist.” Not, “in this society.”

Gamers protesting and demanding that game journalist magazines state their relationships to the creators for full disclosure got them retaliating asymmetrically, though. The FBI investigated all those, “threatening and trolling social media messages” that supposedly got Zoe Quinn and Sarkesian to leave their houses, “for fear of an attack,” and they got nothing. A few of them were caught doxxing themselves on purpose on 4chan. Quinn herself being part of the SomethingAwful’s Crash Override forums, where they’d do shit like this to troll and harass people for fun. They KNOW how to false flag and make it look like a bunch of angry dudebros did it.

Statistically the number of harassing egg names was far lower than the messages either girl received that was NOT harassment or threats, merely replies they didn’t agree with or didn’t appreciate. And yet they still ran around screaming about “all those misogynistic dudebro gamers” that were “harassing and doxing them.” And that boogyman became the party line. That Gaming and Gamers were full of toxic, misogynistic, racist manbabies SOooOoOooOO intimidated by, “women finally in what they feel are THEIR spaces,” that they’d try to run them out.

That’s how they interpreted it and that’s how the history books they write will repeat it.

They try and make a great big public show about “entering this toxic space” to flip it and civilize it, but what they’re really trying to do is officially own it. As a fandom, as a space and as a culture. And that entails being able to say what goes, what’s acceptable and what’s not, and set the tone and culture for that space. Meaning, to be able to gatekeep the product.

Rather than just decry the product, they decide they’re just going to mutate the product by slow assimilation, until the product doesn’t even resemble the original product anymore. They do this shit with comic books, videogames, and now they’re working on doing it to beloeved novels and their fandoms. It’s like forcibly marrying them to terrible people, so you can never have a fandom WITHOUT those people in your space trying to insist their interpretations of things are original canon, ever again.

And the sickest part is, these people DO NOT stop at fiction. That’s why this shit is called Cultural Marxism. Because it’s not much different from the way communists and socialist guerillas act and operate when it comes to land, resources and industry. They take over public spaces and forums and use a combination of instittional corruption, terrorism and violence and vandalism in order to destroy or silence competition.

They’ve even infiltrated the Linux community and taken over most of that, via Linus Torvalds’ daughter. You can’t have ANYTHING around these people, because they just sit and wait and conspire to come in and make even a simple community mural to revolve around whatever social issue and specifically their philosophy’s take on it being THE only valid take on it that everybody else must now interact with, good or bad, but they can’t ignore it anymore.

This is, also, partially why they hate it when fandoms are gatekept by singularly powerful individuals. Like say, authors of their own works. They don’t like singular owners of enterprise and property, because it prevents the mob from taking them and then dictating TO the creator, “this is the PEOPLES property now. WE decide, as the most powerful clique, what is true and real with it and what isn’t.”

Because like what happened with Frank Oz of Jim Henson Studios. An activist gay writer declared that Bert and Ernie’s relationship was “canon gay,” because he wrote them as canon gay lovers. There was a great big information cascade as all these affiliated journo companies published articles about how “happy they were to see Sesame Street and the Children’s Television Workshop as representing LGBT people in public!”

Frank Oz spoke up, set the record straight, “These characters were made by me and a friend and were meant to depict a platonic male-male relationship. They aren’t gay but I’m glad you could identify with them.”

That poor old man caught so much shit. They called him a homophobe, said he was, “stealing Bert and Ernie from them,” that he should just shut up and “let people have this.”

No. Fucking no. These people are fucking conspirators, believe wholly in dominating and taking shit over by moving their people into a thing until they have the warm bodies and the institutional authority to crowd out oppositional voices, then have the audacity to SCREEEAAAAAAM bloody murder about the dangers of anybody else organizing to contest them because, “The Nazis are gathering to attack us poor innocent minorities!!” Counting on the ignorance and unsuspecting nature of people to not know such a thing is fake or the totality of the situation.

That’s why they’ll keep this shit on the downlow and call anybody that accuses them of doing shit like this a liar or a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. Demanding evidence, in bad faith, knowing there’s little to no way to PROVE any of this UNTIL they’ve done it, and then declaring you to be invalid since you can’t prove the conspiracy.

Because if you can’t prove it with evidence, they’ll simply say you’re a Nazi trying to smear “good people.”

[artisqueer]

RetroBangBoy AU - DREAM REALITY (ao3 link)

Word Count: 1.7k

Pairings: Yoongi x reader, mentions Namjoon x reader

Warnings: Mentions violence, blood/gore.

“Goddamn, it’s hot as fuck out here.” Indeed, it’s a hot sweltering day. Most of the jocks are crammed beneath the courtside canopy to find shade from the blazing sun.

“Hyung, let’s go for another round,” Jimin suggests, removing the jersey from his overheating abdomen.

“You wanna lose again that bad, huh?” Seokjin’s smirk disappears behind his jersey as he lifts it up and over his head. The sheen of sweat over his ripped shoulders is distracting to both teams. Jimin mocks his laugh then pouts.

“Be a good sport, Jiminie.” Hoseok passes him the basketball as he joins Jin’s side on the court.

The men assemble in their respective teams.

Jimin, Taehyung, and three other juniors.

Jin, Hoseok, and three other seniors.

***

It’s 3:15 pm and you’re getting off work early. Although it’s summer break, you’ve enrolled in advanced calculus for the fall and you want to be prepared. So, you’ve taken up an offer from a certain big-breasted mathematician. Yes, this is completely for academic purposes, Bighead.

There’s an unusual spring in your step as you walk the route from the concession stand to the parking lot behind campus. Someone from Joon’s crew will be there to pick you up because he’s still at work.

Your fingers brush along the chain fence as you pass by the court, deaf to the hooting and hollering of the intense game on the other side. You can’t be bothered to notice. Your head is pleasantly filled with thoughts of math figures and Namjoon’s figur—"

[POW!]

***

“Choco Pie? Wake up please, are you dead?”

“They’re not breathing.”

“Oh my god, we killed someone ㅠㅠ”

“I told you not to throw the ball so hard, Wonho.”

“It wasn’t my fault, Y/N’s seismic head came out of nowhere and pulled the ball like gravity.”

“This can’t happen! I’m so young. So beautiful. I can’t go to jail! ㅠㅠ”

“Sweetcheeks, please wake up. Guys, help me get t—"

“Move!” A voice growls and shoves them out of the way.

Your subconscious drifts back into a slumber for several minutes. Then, you hear the low voice again. Min Yoongi.

“Do any of you useless punks know mouth-to-mouth?” The group remains silent, dumbfounded. Yoongi bends over your motionless body to tilt your head back, blocking the sun as he checks your breathing. His face must be so close to yours because you can smell his cologne. There’s something that reminds you of the woody fragrance Namjoon carries, but this has a unique sapor. Something sweeter, more delicate. Suddenly his mouth is on yours. All your senses awaken and your heart jolts, snapping you out of your coma. Your eyes flutter open and stare directly into his. Is this is a dream or reality? If you died, this must be heaven.

You look around until you discern the outline of a dozen athletes standing above your head, deep concern across their faces. Several are grimacing in pain. Wonho has a bloody nose, Hoseok’s jersey is torn up, and Jimin is sulking behind him. They must take basketball very seriously, you think.

“Hey Dove,” Yoongi’s soft voice beside you pulls you back. It’s soothing in contrast to the pounding pain starting in your head, “are you okay to walk?” He taps your leg gently and you look down. It’s badly scraped from your fall.

“I think so.” You struggle to get up. Yoongi supports you by the arm carefully so you don’t fall. You feel a lump forming in your throat and your cheeks start to burn with embarrassment as the collision replays in your mind. The basketball must have been thrown out-of-bounds with excessive force. Luckily you just happened to be in its direct path.

“Where are you going, Choco?” Jin asks, worried. His jaw looks swollen and red. You’re too humiliated to look at any of them. Plus, you were kinda sorta just resuscitated by the one and only Yoongi. The image of his soft lips on yours is threatening to make you faint again.

Yoongi holds you close and steps past them without a word, using his body as a protective shield between you and their questions.  “Are you okay, Y/N?...Why are you going with him?...I’m sorry….Stay with us…”

When you reach the parking lot, he points to a chopper-style motorcycle. “Harley Panhead ’48,” his gummy smile peaks through as he talks. “Ain’t she a beauty? I fixed her up myself.” He pats the leather seat proudly. Panhead? You’re still dizzy.

“Wait, Yoongi!” You nearly shout his name as you grab his arm. “What happened to your hand?”

His veiny hands are bloodied and bruised around the knuckles. He hides them away with a grunt. “It’s best if you stayed away from those punks, Y/N. They’re always starting shit. I was supposed to pick you up unharmed. Namjoon’s gonna be pissed.”

“It was just an accident. Wait, did you beat them up while I was unconscious?!” You thought Yoongi was just quiet and calm, but apparently he also has a dark side that can get intense. You look at his dark eyes and notice a fire blazing within them. This is new and you don’t know if you like it. It’s intimidating. He notices you looking and changes his demeanor.

“Get on the bike, Toots. It’s getting late.” He hands you a light jean jacket and you quickly throw it on, remembering that your delay might worry Namjoon.

Riding behind two bikers in the span of a few months… Damn, Bighead. You’re busy.

You can wrap your arms around him more easily than Namjoon. Yoongi may have a smaller frame, but he’s built strong. His sleeves are rolled up to expose his forearms. The muscles flex when he revs the long handlebars on the inclined streets. You notice a tattoo on his right forearm and read it quietly under his ear “dream….reality.”

He hears you and chuckles to himself.

“What’s so funny, Yoongi?” You’re not understanding how there’s humor in anything that happened today. Your leg is still stinging as you hold him tight during turns.

He chuckles again. “You should keep your mouth closed when you ride without a face covering.”

“Why? Am I annoying you?” You hear the sassiness in your own voice and cringe.

“Nah, Dove. I just don’t want you to catch any flies.” He chuckles even harder as you’re forced to suppress another remark.

You laugh too and then stop because your mouth is open.

***

He parks the bike in the driveway where you first met.

“I never thanked you for fixing my sprinklers, by the way,” your eyes fall onto his lips and there’s an awkward silence. “And thank you for today. You always show up unexpectedly—"

“Listen, Dove,” the sweetness in his eyes hasn’t gone anywhere, but you see the blaze return in them just as much, “it’s just a random coincidence. It could have been anybody.”

But you don’t desire it to be just anybody. His words sting and it travels down to your knees.

“Hm, you’re right, Yoongi.” He squeezes your hand as you part ways on the driveway. “Thank you anyway.”

You reach the door but don’t turn back. Instead, you go inside and tidy up for your study session. 

Five minutes pass and there’s a knock at the door.

“Hi, Sweetheart,” Joon follows you into the living area, “sorry I’m late again…i-is that Yoongi’s jacket?”

“Oh yeah, I must’ve forgotten to give it back to him when he dropped me off. Maybe you give it to him later?” You shrug it off and hold it out. Namjoon takes it from you slowly.

“Why? W-what’s that look?” You blink, confused at his reaction. It’s one you’ve never seen and you’re sure you never want to see it on him again. Sadness.

“Oh, it’s just that, I sent Jungkook to pick you up.”

To be continued….

[theculturedmarxist]

By Gary Brecher.Republished from the Radio War Nerd subscriber newsletter. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd co-hosted with Mark Ames for podcasts, newsletters and more!. Posted with THE EXILED.

There’s a gigantic, well-organized, extremely violent fascist group with tens of thousands of active members in Germany right now.

And nobody notices.

You’d think all the fascist-hunters would have sniffed it out by now, but it goes right by them as if these guys were invisible.

Which is odd, because this group is not trying to hide, or pretending to be harmless. They’re not shy about it, and it’s not just talk. They have quite a record. They’ve been rampaging for decades, and if anything they’re stronger now than they used to be. They’re closely linked to CIA and Nazi groups; they’re very busy beating, burning, and murdering minorities of all kinds, and boast quite openly about hating literally everyone who’s not a member of their own ethnic group and sect, even suggesting that members go on “hunting expeditions” against minorities which they’d already almost wiped out back in the 20th century.

This group recently held massive, open rallies in the cities of Germany, and it’s only in the last few years that the government has even attempted to ban the public symbols and salutes of this massive fascist group.

There’s something grotesquely comic about this. We have a swarm of fascist-spotters who’ve spent the last few decades waiting for fascism to emerge in Germany when it was marching around, shouting at the top of its lungs, beating minorities, celebrating genocide, and supporting ethnic cleansing right in front of their damn faces.

I’m talking about the Gray Wolves. And I defy anyone to find a more successful, out-front, no-kidding, massive, effective, ruthless fascist organization anywhere in the world. They’re adapting quickly, and even have their own fierce Wiki defenders.

Here are a few highlights from their long, successful career:

In 1978, Gray Wolves started pogroms against Alevi Kurds in Maras (also known as Kahramanmaras) in South-Central Anatolia.

Location is important here. Maras is due north of Aleppo across the Syrian border, NW of Kobane, and above all just up the road from Gazantiep. Gazantiep is a key city for right-wing Turkish nationalists, a city dominated not just by people who are ethnically Turkish but who identify as rightwing Turks of the most intensely nationalist kind. This kind of population lives in a state of siege, glories in that feeling, and is almost always willing to lash out against the sea of minorities they imagine surrounding them. That’s why Gazantiep keeps making the news as a nice convenient safe house for IS and their Turkish allies, some of whom killed 57 Kurds at a wedding in 2016.

It’s important to emphasize that people who are ethnically Turkish are not a bloc. Some of the bravest people on earth, languishing in the Turkish state’s prisons or buried in unmarked graves, are proudly Turkish by ancestry.

And then there are the young men who join the Gray Wolves. Those men are murderous fascists, and it’s cowardice to pretend not to see that.

Violence by these men against minorities has never stopped, but it hit its peak — more like the highest peak in a mountain-range of a graph — in 1978, before the Anglosphere had any handle on sectarian violence in the Middle East.

The target of the Gray Wolves in Maras was a double minority: Alevi Kurds. Alevi Muslims are often considered heretics by Salafists and other Sunni fundamentalists. They were massacred with impunity in Ottoman pogroms. Erdogan’s AK Party, which very much wants to revive Ottoman practice and Ottoman borders, openly considers the Alevi heretics fair game for the Gray Wolves’s death squads.

Those who were killed in 1978 were not only Alevi, but Kurds — and the Turkish state, which embraced Wilsonian ethnic nationality with a vengeance, a terrible vengeance, hates Kurds simply for being Kurds. So the Kurdish Alevi of Maras were a natural target twice-over.

The campaign against them built up for weeks, as pogroms usually do, with the unpredictable pace partly a result of working with unstable, violent mobs but also part of a strategy to terrorize the victims, who never know when things will go from bad (very bad) to even-worse.

The details of the massacre are very typical, sickening but not unusual:

Witnesses to the massacre.

Seyho Demir: “The Maras Police Chief at the time was Abdülkadir Aksu, Minister of the Interior in the last AKP government. The massacre was organised by MIT (the Turkish secret service), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Islamists together… As soon as I heard about the massacre, I went to Maras. In the morning I went to Maras State Hospital. There I met a nurse I knew…When she saw me, she was surprised: ‘Seyho, where have you come from? They are killing everyone here. They have taken at least ten lightly-wounded people from the hospital downstairs and killed them.’ This was done under the control of the head physician of the Maras State Hospital. Everyone knows that such a big massacre cannot be carried out without state involvement. In the Yörükselim neighbourhood they cut a pregnant woman open with a bayonet. They took out the eight-month foetus, shouting “Allah Allah” and hung it from an electricity pole with a hook. The pictures of that savagery were published in the newspapers that day. The lawyer Halil Güllüoglu followed the Maras massacre case. The files he had were never made public. He was killed for pursuing the case anyway. Let them make those files public, then the role of the state will become clear.”

Meryem Polat: “They started in the morning, burning all the houses, and continued into the afternoon. A child was burned in a boiler. They sacked everything. We were in the water in the cellar, above us were wooden boards. The boards were burning and falling on top of us. My house was reduced to ashes. We were eight people in the cellar; they did not see us and left.”(EZÖ/TK/AG)

All accounts agree that the massacre not only happened with state collusion but state encouragement. No one was punished. Many were, in fact, promoted, and hold high positions in Erdogan’s government today.

That’s the pattern here: the Gray Wolves as the street-fighting wing of the state. The parallel is closer to Indonesian Islamists in 1965 than the SA in 1930s Germany, but so many people have trouble taking any fascism clearly unless it can be soldered to 1930s Germany that I may as well make the analogy for, as they say in the academic biz, heuristic purposes.

The Gray Wolves ideology is very widespread and acceptable in many (not all) communities in Turkey. This leads to a lot of more or less lone-wolf killings (as it were), as when a soldier who was a member of the Gray Wolves killed a fellow soldier for being an Armenian a few years ago.

Older readers might remember the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II back in 1979.

The assassin was one Mehmet Ali Agca, a longtime member of the Gray Wolves.

He had a track record of killing leftists and other enemies on behalf of the “Idealists” (seriously, that’s what the Wolves call themselves):

“The weapon used in the Feb. 1, 1979, murder of a Turkish newspaper editor, Abdi Ipekci, for which Mr. Agca was convicted, was supplied by a member of the Idealist Clubs, according to the Turkish authorities. Other members helped Mr. Agca escape from prison. Still others prepared a false passport for him. And on the day of the killing, he went to the National Action Party offices.”

Note the familiar pattern: Ali Agca kills a leftist editor who’s annoying the Turkish state, gets caught, and manages to escape with a lot of help from Turkish intelligence.

They hardly bothered to hide their collusion in the escape. The Turkish state was killing a lot of leftists, a lot of intellectuals, a lot of minorities — the usual suspects for classic fascists like Ali Agca.

But as you older readers might recall, nobody in the media talked about Ali Agca as a Turkish fascist. He was, for Cold-War purposes, smeared as a Bulgarian agent.

The “Bulgarian connection” never made much sense, but it served the US/UK/Israel/Saudi intelligence agencies’ PR purposes. Remember, Turkey is NATO — very, very NATO.

NATO might survive the loss of many other small European states, but it could not survive losing Turkey. So the US/UK state will always side with the Turkish state and help them cover up fascist atrocities, blaming them on the Soviets until those useful patsies took their final dive.

Blaming Bulgaria rather than the obvious suspects, the Gray Wolves to which this thug Ali Agca had been murderously loyal all his life, was especially bizarre since there was an obvious sectarian motive: the Gray Wolves hate Christians, as they hate all other minorities, ethnic or religious, and make a point of staging provocations at all occasions when the remnants of what was once a huge Christian minority dare to show themselves in public.

Orthodox Christians are the Wolves’ preferred prey. They prefer not to do anything too bloody to high-profile Western targets like a pope, but when you squirt sectarian hate into weak minds and itchy trigger fingers for generations, some of the lads are going to pick the wrong victim.

Perhaps that’s what happened when Ali Agca went from NATO-approved murderer of leftists and Kurds, to shooting the Pope. We’ll never know, because it was quickly twisted into the ridiculous “Bulgaria did it” farce by the guys who enjoy a few cocktails with their opposite numbers from Ankara at all those NATO conferences.

And we’ll never know how much daily violence this massive fascist gang inflicts. Occasionally the Turkish state gets irritated enough to send a suicide bomber or two to kill Kurdish peace demonstrators, as it did in Ankara in 2015, killing 86 demonstrators and maiming a hundred more. But that state, our NATO ally, supports a whole madhouse of Arab and Turkmen jihadis as well as its own stable of disposable Gray Wolves assassins, so it may never be clear whether it was the Wolves, precisely, who pressed the detonators.

But it’s a statistical certainty that somewhere along the long line from greenlighting an attack like this and sending red-hot ball bearings splattering into the bodies of teenagers with peace banners, many of the men involved were members in good standing of the good ol’ Wolves.

Violence by the Gray Wolves is a constant in Turkey, usually unreported — especially now that Erdogan’s party has imprisoned thousands of journalists and intellectuals, and terrorized the rest into quietism or collusion. We may never know how many Kurds are murdered daily in the southeast of Anatolia, because no one who matters, in the Turkish state or its many powerful allies in the West (e.g. the Michael Flynn story) want you to know about it. It’s rare for those stories to make the news at all, but God knows you can’t forget them once you’ve read them.

In fact the Gray Wolves are going mainstream, and winning a lot of votes.

Fascism is mainstream in Turkey, getting more mainstream all the time — and has been since the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Gray Wolves have quite a pedigree, a classic fascist genealogy.

Fascism is often strongest in the ruins of a defeated empire, and that was the situation in the former Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. The Empire had once ruled from Central Europe to Iraq, flowing and ebbing over the centuries (with a peak in the 16th century). At its peak, it was a fearsome conquering force.

There’s a great novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare detailing the unstoppable waves of special forces that the Empire could unleash on strongpoints that held out against conquest.

The Ottomans took a long time to fall from that 16th c. peak. They were still around, partly because Britain and France always supported them against the bogeyman of the late Victorian Era, the Russian Threat.

Propped up by the two big powers of Europe, the Empire managed to survive a coup in 1908 by young officers who would go on to a career in defeat and genocide, because they guessed wrong on which side would win the oncoming Great War.

The Young Turks, as these officers were called, sided with the up-and-coming, efficient military of the neighboring empire: Germany. They guessed wrong, but not before they managed to exterminate the harmless Armenians who had recently been patronized as Turkey’s “model minority” for their docility. And this genocide went so well, so quietly, that Hitler, contemplating the genocide of the European Jews, allegedly demanded of any squeamish nay-sayers “Who remembers the Armenians?”

You get a lot of horrible echoes like that in this story. At any rate, no one cared to remember or notice the extermination of the Armenians, but the winners at Versailles were typically vengeful against the former Ottoman Empire — not by any means for wiping out the Armenians, but for being German allies, and losing.

Britain and France, now joined by the US, were as vengeful toward the former Empire as they had been lenient during its bloody final years. Ottoman rule over non-Turkish territory was erased. For a few years there was some doubt whether even Anatolia would remain a Turkish state.

Then, as most of you know, came Mustafa Kemal, soon to become Kemal Ataturk, a hero of Gallipoli (a Turkish/Ottoman victory that stood out proudly in the great defeat).

Ataturk was a typical elite young officer of the early 20th c. Those were very dangerous people, those young officers. Often impressive individuals, but completely ruthless and immensely fond of violence. That goes for all of them, right across the Continent — Hell, right across the world.

Ataturk formed a nucleus of former officers from the Great War. (Again, the international echoes are clear enough; suffice to say that these guys were the most dangerous, formidable demographic in a few generations, perhaps since the emergence of the Napoleonic elite.) They fought well, and then they went about making Turkey a monoethnic state, without mercy.

For a while, that state was professedly secular, but since it had already killed or driven out most religious minorities, the monoethnic state became, under the AK party, avowedly mono-sectarian as well.

The current chant of the Wolves many, many supporters is “My heart is Turkish and my soul is Muslim!” You must be both: ethnically Turkish and orthodox, Sunni Muslim as well. No mercy for anyone who fails either test, which means that a lot of Kurds, a lot of Alevis, a lot of secular Leftists, end up dead or in prison.

The evolution of the Gray Wolves is a classic fascist Genesis story, and the behavior of its hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of supporters is classic fascist violence. Why don’t more people notice that?

I hate to speculate, because the range of possible answers all boils down to cowardice, conformity, and the odd Euro-centrism one finds in the strangest places. They don’t get noticed because they’re not European, maybe? Fascism of the 1930s was European, and that’s the only kind amateurs notice? Odd, because Turkey is European enough to be the cornerstone of NATO.

This would not be the first time that the interests of what you could call the NATO Deep State aligned all too perfectly with the more gullible pockets of the Left. In fact, it’s very closely related to the phenomenon of not noticing, or trying very hard not to notice, the sectarian ultra-violence of the Syrian “rebels.” But this time, since Turkey is a NATO ally, it’s the violence of the state and its fascist proxies that is ignored. I struggle to come up with any other reason that the Gray Wolves get so little attention.

All I know is that we have a massive, ultra-violent, highly effective, classically fascist movement killing minorities every single day, and there’s an odd silence about it.

I would love to ask one of the innumerable online fascist hunters why they hunt stray curs and slink silently past the cold stare of the Gray Wolves. Perhaps it’s not so much any of the excuses I suggested above; perhaps some hunters just prefer smaller, easy prey to the real thing.

Gary Brecher is the nom de guerre-nerd of John Dolan. Buy his book The War Nerd Iliad. Hear him read his comic memoir Pleasant Hell in audiobook format.

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[tfrohock]

Writing historical fiction

All writers, to some extent, do research for their novels—I want to get that out of the way from the beginning. Third world fantasy? You’re going to do some research, especially if you don’t have a great deal of experience with horses or weaponry. The fact-finding mission might be fun and relaxing, but it still counts as research, so I don’t want to imply that only historical/alternate fantasy authors are the only ones who do research for their books.

Regency romance? Research.

Third world medieval fantasy? Research.

Science fiction? Research.

The difference between these subgenres and historical fiction is the amount of necessary research needed for a specific project, which also depends on how familiar the author is with the time period. The other problem is making sure the historical details are in line with the period. So what I have for you is a quick and dirty list of tricks that will help you get to the information you need.

Understand your time period

How familiar are you with the time period you want to represent in your fiction? I’ve been studying various aspects of World War II for roughly forty years and the Spanish Civil War for merely eight. I’m an independent scholar so my knowledge isn’t as detailed as someone studied in this field, but I’ve got an excellent grasp of the societal and political ramifications of both wars with a rudimentary knowledge of World War I.

What this means is that I instinctively know which books to go to for the information I need. For the purposes of this post, I want to talk to people who are at the beginning of their research, meaning it’s not their field, but they want to know more.

Beginning points

Generally speaking, historians are focused on the big picture—names, dates, major battles, and the societal issues of the day. While all these factors are necessary and important, historical fiction authors are more interested in the nitty-gritty details of everyday life in order to give our readers a realistic setting.

Where to begin?

First, I’ll point you to the bloody obvious: a library. Talk to the reference librarian and tell them your research needs. You will a) make their day, because trust me when I say that reference librarians live for this, and b) you’ll save yourself a lot of time. Call your local academic or community college library and see if they are open to the public. If they are, remember the reference librarians’ primary responsibility is to their students, faculty, and staff, but depending on the library, you’ll find a marvelous amount of resources.

Look for books on “daily life” (daily life is in quotes, because that is usually part of the title) of different periods, which are like historical snapshots into what people ate and drank, and how they went about their daily lives. These are usually written on a young adult reading level, so most people can breeze through them quickly.

Osprey Publishing also carries a lot of books on specific battles, time periods, and clothing/uniforms. These are all great starting points with bibliographies should you feel the need to continue your research for a deeper understanding of the time period. I know The Ebro 1938: Death Knell of the Republic was invaluable to me with graphs and lists of major generals. These books are a huge timesaver, because of the way the information is quantified.

Indexes and bibliographies are your friends

When you can’t find a book on a specific time period, you need to think outside the box. What are you looking for? Clothing? Find information on the history of textiles. You might not have the time or desire to read the entire book, but this is why indexes were created. Go to the index and see if your subject is listed there. You’re not looking for random references of a page here or there; you’re looking for blocks of text. Check the footnotes and the sources the author used. Research is like a trail, once you pick up the right source, you can run with it to other sources.

JSTOR for the world

JSTOR is a digital library of academic articles on a wide range of topics. When most people think of JSTOR, they think of costly academic libraries, and they’re wrong. JSTOR has moved with the times and has several tiers that enable you to read many articles online for free, and others that you can download for a nominal fee. Also, see if you can get access to JSTOR through your state library, because North Carolina residents have free access to JSTOR through the State Library.

Youtube

Many of you already know this, but just in case you don’t: Youtube can be a valuable resource for learning how to do something. There are a ton of videos on how to put on chainmail, women’s and men’s clothing from various time periods, and even how to fence.

Academic textbooks

Academic textbooks have a way of narrowing the focus to just the essentials. These can be costly, but you can also find them used. Keep in mind that with historical sources, you don’t have to purchase the most recent edition but can go back as much as two editions to find a reasonably priced copy and still have relevant information.

Ask for help

Because my Los Nefilim novels were based in Barcelona and Paris, two places I’ve never been, I asked for help from residents of those areas. Josep Oriol and Ollivier Robert pointed me to resources I never would have found on my own in both Spanish/Catalan and French respectively. Josep gave me links to short historical films from the twenties and thirties, which gave me a very clear eye into the clothing and transportation in early twentieth century Barcelona while Ollivier sent me links to Parisian subway maps from both before and during the war, which helped me plot Rafael’s journey in the subway in Carved from Stone and Dream and also showed me the closed station used in A Song with Teeth.

Search only educational resources

The Internet has changed dramatically over the years and searches are now focused almost entirely as a giant advertisement. Know how to narrow your searches to academic resources. Let’s say you’re looking for information about medieval Spain.

For example: a search for medieval Spain will bring one set of hits from all over the web, but if you narrow your search to medieval Spain .edu you’ll get a list of academic resources about medieval Spain. Use Iberia history .edu and you’ll get another set of academic resources. The key is the .edu at the end of your search term, which restricts your search to academic resources.

Documentaries and historically accurate films

Documentaries are exceptionally helpful, but so is fiction. Criterion Films had several movies from the early twentieth century that helped me see the clothing, hairstyles, transportation, and dining options available to people during the 1930s and ‘40s. They were also entertaining to watch. So if you’re lucky enough to find a historically accurate film, that counts as research, too.

The devil is in the details

You don’t want the details to overwhelm your story, but you do want to put in enough information to lend credibility to your time period. Remember, if it doesn’t feel real to you, it won’t feel real to your readers. A little research often goes a long way in adding a sense of time and place to your story.

Happy researching and good luck!

[jordanas-diary]

As 2020 comes to a close, this is probably the first time in a few years, that I have not properly reflected on the year that was and well, I have decided that whatever I have come up with I will post at midnight (side note: I have started this at 10pm on 31/12/2020 and why tf are there fireworks already? we still have 2 hours people ... ). 

First and foremost, fuck you 2020. You really said “it ain’t happening this year” which honestly, sucks balls. But all we could do, was continue on whilst our complaints fell upon your deaf ears. There were times when I really thought things were getting better, but then something else went wrong and it was all messed up again. 

Many a time, I found myself looking to one of my favourite Dumbledore quotes:

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” 

And I thought on it every time things seemed to be getting overwhelming, and I did not believe that there was a way to complete an assignment, or be prepared for a test, or finish my work, or just take some time out for myself in a crowded household during lockdown. This picture above helped me continuously search for that light when I felt like the darkness was too much [although it was a constant reminder that I would not be spending my Christmas and New Years in Europe but ... more on that later]. 

Oh lord, that reminds me ... goddamn did I really mess up my GPA in 2020. Studying from home did not insight any form of motivation to study, to complete assignments on time, or to a high standard. I genuinely put myself in this position. 2021 is a new year, and a year to f o c u s and put university before work - and there lies my fault, putting work first. Yes, I was getting paid good money. Yes, I was working for the New Zealand government at the ripe age of 20 - however, that should not have taken precedence over my academic record. 

2020 also made me spend more time with myself - especially spiritually and in my mind and thoughts. This was scary, a very scary place to be. Still waiting for that proverbial “enlightenment” to be honest. Will it come? I’ll keep y’all updated. Too scary, Jordana no want to exposure herself lol. 

As I sit in my room, watching David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II documentary (and fkn sweating bc it’s too bloody hot right now) to ring in 2021, I am reminded that had COVID not happened, I would most likely be in München for the new year. Europe was where I was meant to be spending Christmas and New Years, with friends and family, and getting p i s s e d. BUT! I must be thankful for the fact that I have the opportunity to go out, drink in pubs and bars, see friends and family, shake hands with people, hug my loved ones. Bless New Zealand and how our Government responded to this virus. Thank you aunty Jacinda, Dr. uncle Ashley Bloomfield and cousin Adam Wendt (honestly GOOGLE THIS MAN HE IS AMAZING) for all your hard work over the New Zealand lockdown period - the 1pm updates literally kept our country going for those 4-6 weeks of being at home. Thank you for enabling this country to now be in the position that it’s in where we can travel, visit family and hang out with friends. 

2020 has been a year of big learnings, moments to be thankful for, and new passions (hehe). I have learned: - To accept the fact that sometimes getting it done is better than failing [but at what cost - that I shall discover when I attempt to search for a Masters programme]  - That more people believe in me than I would have ever believed, and that’s more pressure than I would have expected - The ocean is something that is required to maintain balance in my life - without it, I wouldn’t know where my safe place would be  - That it is better to live for those who helped you get to where you are, rather than mourn them for an extended period of time. it is highly likely they’d rather you’d get on with it than waste time - though this is a lot easier said than done - Making new friends is scary and I am not one that is good at establishing conversations , but 100% please message me to talk - am not scary just a lot more shy than I realised I promise <3 I am thankful: - To my family and friends for being able to celebrate my 21st birthday with me [I really didn’t want anything but y’all came through with a surprise party that a girl could only wish to have] - For my best friend and how, despite the amount of time we spend apart, when we are together time rolls back to 2012 and we’re the carefree trio we’ve always - To my marine lecturer for being the most understanding and lenient professor when it came to my many, many family commitments New passions? - Football? Football. Loves me some FC Bayern München men, with some Juventus and Liverpool and a hint of whatever else I feel like.  - Oof journalling has become a big part of my life - I spend so much time writing a bunch of shit, that I probably need to start writing more for reflection purposes than just me having a laugh lol - F1. She happened about 2-3 weeks ago, when I started watching Drive to Survive and started seeing all these drivers popping up on my dash. Naturally, I put two and two together, and got handsome men with some juicy drama which a girl loves.

So ... what is Jordana taking into 2021? Pride, and dignity. Hopefully not the same shit I’ve carried into the previous 3 years lol. Let us hope that next year contains positive vibes, healthy mind, body, spirit and fish, and motivation for an improved GPA lol. 

I want to wish you and your families all a safe and healthy 2021. Hopefully the COVID situation wherever you’re living improves, and life returns to some semblance of familiarity soon. 

[tenaciousyouthnacho]

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Why study infinite series? Not all mathematical problems can be solved exactly or have a solution that can be expressed in terms of a known function. In such cases, it is common practice to use an infinite series expansion to approximate or represent a solution. This informal introduction for undergraduate students explores the numerous uses of infinite series and sequences in engineering and the physical sciences. The material has been carefully selected to help the reader develop the techniques needed to confidently utilize infinite series. The book begins with infinite series and sequences before moving onto power series, complex infinite series and finally onto Fourier, Legendre, and Fourier-Bessel series. With a focus on practical applications, the book demonstrates that infinite series are more than an academic exercise and helps students to conceptualize the theory with real world examples and to build their skill set in this area.

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Let's be real: 2020 has been a nightmare. Between the political unrest and novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, it's difficult to look back on the year and find something, anything, that was a potential bright spot in an otherwise turbulent trip around the sun. Luckily, there were a few bright spots: namely, some of the excellent works of military history and analysis, fiction and non-fiction, novels and graphic novels that we've absorbed over the last year. 

Here's a brief list of some of the best books we read here at Task & Purpose in the last year. Have a recommendation of your own? Send an email to jared@taskandpurpose.Com and we'll include it in a future story.

Missionaries by Phil Klay

I loved Phil Klay’s first book, Redeployment (which won the National Book Award), so Missionaries was high on my list of must-reads when it came out in October. It took Klay six years to research and write the book, which follows four characters in Colombia who come together in the shadow of our post-9/11 wars. As Klay’s prophetic novel shows, the machinery of technology, drones, and targeted killings that was built on the Middle East battlefield will continue to grow in far-flung lands that rarely garner headlines. [Buy]

 - Paul Szoldra, editor-in-chief

Battle Born: Lapis Lazuli by Max Uriarte

Written by 'Terminal Lance' creator Maximilian Uriarte, this full-length graphic novel follows a Marine infantry squad on a bloody odyssey through the mountain reaches of northern Afghanistan. The full-color comic is basically 'Conan the Barbarian' in MARPAT. [Buy]

 - James Clark, senior reporter

The Liberator by Alex Kershaw

Now a gritty and grim animated World War II miniseries from Netflix, The Liberator follows the 157th Infantry Battalion of the 45th Division from the beaches of Sicily to the mountains of Italy and the Battle of Anzio, then on to France and later still to Bavaria for some of the bloodiest urban battles of the conflict before culminating in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. It's a harrowing tale, but one worth reading before enjoying the acclaimed Netflix series. [Buy]

 - Jared Keller, deputy editor

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff

If you haven’t gotten this must-read account of the September 11th attacks, you need to put The Only Plane In the Sky at the top of your Christmas list. Graff expertly explains the timeline of that day through the re-telling of those who lived it, including the loved ones of those who were lost, the persistently brave first responders who were on the ground in New York, and the service members working in the Pentagon. My only suggestion is to not read it in public — if you’re anything like me, you’ll be consistently left in tears. [Buy]

- Haley Britzky, Army reporter

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry

Why do we even fight wars? Wouldn’t a massive tennis tournament be a nicer way for nations to settle their differences? This is one of the many questions Harvard professor Elaine Scarry attempts to answer, along with why nuclear war is akin to torture, why the language surrounding war is sterilized in public discourse, and why both war and torture unmake human worlds by destroying access to language. It’s a big lift of a read, but even if you just read chapter two (like I did), you’ll come away thinking about war in new and refreshing ways. [Buy]

 - David Roza, Air Force reporter

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor

Stalingrad takes readers all the way from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union to the collapse of the 6th Army at Stalingrad in February 1943. It gives you the perspective of German and Soviet soldiers during the most apocalyptic battle of the 20th century. [Buy]

- Jeff Schogol, Pentagon correspondent 

America's War for the Greater Middle East by Andrew J. Bacevich

I picked up America's War for the Greater Middle East earlier this year and couldn’t put it down. Published in 2016 by Andrew Bacevich, a historian and retired Army officer who served in Vietnam, the book unravels the long and winding history of how America got so entangled in the Middle East and shows that we’ve been fighting one long war since the 1980s — with errors in judgment from political leaders on both sides of the aisle to blame. “From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift?” the book jacket asks. As Bacevich details in this definitive history, the mission creep of our Vietnam experience has been played out again and again over the past 30 years, with disastrous results. [Buy]

 - Paul Szoldra, editor-in-chief

Burn In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution by P.W. Singer and August Cole

In Burn In, Singer and Cole take readers on a journey at an unknown date in the future, in which an FBI agent searches for a high-tech terrorist in Washington, D.C. Set after what the authors called the "real robotic revolution," Agent Lara Keegan is teamed up with a robot that is less Terminator and far more of a useful, and highly intelligent, law enforcement tool. Perhaps the most interesting part: Just about everything that happens in the story can be traced back to technologies that are being researched today. You can read Task & Purpose's interview with the authors here. [Buy]

 - James Clark, senior reporter

SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben MacIntyre

Like WWII? Like a band of eccentric daredevils wreaking havoc on fascists? Then you'll love SAS: Rogue Heroes, which re-tells some truly insane heists performed by one of the first modern special forces units. Best of all, Ben MacIntyre grounds his history in a compassionate, balanced tone that displays both the best and worst of the SAS men, who are, like anyone else, only human after all. [Buy]

 - David Roza, Air Force reporter

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

The Alice Network is a gripping novel which follows two courageous women through different time periods — one living in the aftermath of World War II, determined to find out what has happened to someone she loves, and the other working in a secret network of spies behind enemy lines during World War I. This gripping historical fiction is based on the true story of a network that infiltrated German lines in France during The Great War and weaves a tale so packed full of drama, suspense, and tragedy that you won’t be able to put it down. [Buy]

Katherine Rondina, Anchor Books

“Because I published a new book this year, I've been answering questions about my inspirations. This means I've been thinking about and so thankful for The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender. I can't credit it with making me want to be a writer — that desire was already there — but it inspired me to write stories where the fantastical complicates the ordinary, and the impossible becomes possible. A girl in a nice dress with no one to appreciate it. An unremarkable boy with a remarkable knack for finding things. The stories in this book taught me that the everydayness of my world could become magical and strange, and in that strangeness I could find a new kind of truth.”

Diane Cook is the author of the novel The New Wilderness, which was long-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize, and the story collection Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. Read an excerpt from The New Wilderness.

Bill Johnston, University of California Press

“I’ve revisited a lot of old favorites in this grim year of fear and isolation, and have been most thankful of all for The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Witty, reflexive, intimate, queer, disarmingly occasional and monumentally serious all at once, they’ve been a constant balm and inspiration. ‘The only thing to do is simply continue,’ he wrote, in 'Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul'; ‘is that simple/yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do/can you do it/yes, you can because it is the only thing to do.’”

Helen Macdonald is a nature essayist with a semiregular column in the New York Times Magazine. Her latest novel, Vesper Flights, is a collection of her best-loved essays, and her debut book, H Is for Hawk, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.

Andrea Scher, Scholastic Press

“This year, I’m so grateful for You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson. Reading — like everything else — has been a struggle for me in 2020. It’s been tough to let go of all of my anxieties about the state of the world and our country and get swept away by a story. But You Should See Me in a Crown pulled me in right away; for the blissful time that I was reading it, it made me think about a world outside of 2020 and it made me smile from ear to ear. Joy has been hard to come by this year, and I’m so thankful for this book for the joy it brought me.”

Jasmine Guillory is the New York Times bestselling author of five romance novels, including this year’s Party of Two. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, and Time.

Nelson Fitch, Random House

“Last year, stuck in a prolonged reading rut that left me wondering if I even liked books anymore, I stumbled across Tenth of December by George Saunders, a collection of stories Saunders wrote between 1995 and 2012 that are at turns funny, moving, startling, weird, profound, and often all of those things at the same time. As a writer, what I crave most from books is to find one so excellent it makes me feel like I'd be better off quitting — and so wonderful that it reminds me what it is to be purely a reader again, encountering new worlds and revelations every time I turn a page. Tenth of December is that, and I'm so grateful that it fell off a high shelf and into my life.”

Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent series and the Carve the Mark duology. Her latest novel, Chosen Ones, is her first novel for adults. Read an excerpt from Chosen Ones.

Ian Byers-Gamber, Blazevox Books

“Waking up today to the prospect of some hours spent reading away part of another day of this disastrous, delirious pandemic year, I’m most grateful for the book in my hands, one itself full of gratitude for a life spent reading: Gloria Frym’s How Proust Ruined My Life. Frym’s essays — on Marcel Proust, yes, and Walt Whitman, and Lucia Berlin, but also peppermint-stick candy and Allen Ginsburg’s knees, among other Proustian memory-prompts — restore me to my sense of my eerie luck at a life spent rushing to the next book, the next page, the next word.”

Jonathan Lethem is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Motherless Brooklyn. His latest novel, The Arrest, is a postapocalyptic tale about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Riverhead

“I’m incredibly grateful for the magnificent The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer. This book — a mélange of history, memoir, and reportage — is the reconceptualization of Native life that’s been urgently needed since the last great indigenous history, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It’s at once a counternarrative and a replacement for Brown’s book, and it rejects the standard tale of Native victimization, conquest, and defeat. Even though I teach Native American studies to college students, I found new insights and revelations in almost every chapter. Not only a great read, the book is a tremendous contribution to Native American — and American — intellectual and cultural history.”

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is author of the novel Winter Counts, which is BuzzFeed Book Club’s November pick. He is also the author of the children’s book Spotted Tail, which won the 2020 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. Read an excerpt from Winter Counts.

Valerie Mosley, Tordotcom

“In 2020, I've been lucky to finish a single book within 30 days, but I burned through this 507-page brick in the span of a weekend. Harrow the Ninth reminded me that even when absolutely everything is terrible, it's still possible to feel deep, gratifying, brain-buzzing admiration for brilliant art. Thank you, Harrow, for being one of the brightest spots in a dark year and for keeping the home fires burning.”

Casey McQuiston is the New York Times bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue, and her next book, One Last Stop, comes out in 2021.

"I'm grateful for V.S. Naipaul's troubling masterpiece, A Bend in the River — which not only made me see the world anew, but made me see what literature could do. It's a book that's lucid enough to reveal the brutality of the forces shaping our world and its politics; yet soulful enough to penetrate the most recondite secrets of human interiority. A book of great beauty without a moment of mercy. A marriage of opposites that continues to shape my own deeper sense of just how much a writer can actually accomplish."

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright, and his latest novel, Homeland Elegies, is about an American son and his immigrant father searching for belonging in a post-9/11 country. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Vanessa German, Feminist Press

“I'm most thankful for Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether. It's a YA book set in 1930s Harlem, and it was the first Black-girl-coming-of-age book I ever read, the first time I ever saw myself in a book. I appreciate how it expanded my world and my understanding that books can speak to you right where you are and take you on a journey, at the same time.”

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. She is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Philyaw’s writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Read a story from The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

Philippa Gedge, W. W. Norton & Company

“As both a writer and a reader I am hugely grateful for Patricia Highsmith’s plotting and writing suspense fiction. As a writer I’m thankful for Highsmith’s generosity with her wisdom and experience: She talks us through how to tease out the narrative strands and develop character, how to know when things are going awry, even how to decide to give things up as a bad job. She’s unabashed about sharing her own ‘failures,’ and in my experience, there’s nothing more encouraging for a writer than learning that our literary gods are mortal! As a reader, it provides a fascinating insight into the genesis of one of my favorite novels of all time — The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as the rest of her brilliant oeuvre. And because it’s Highsmith, it’s so much more than just a how-to guide: It’s hugely engaging and, while accessible, also provides a glimpse into the mind of a genius. I’ve read it twice — while working on each of my thrillers, The Hunting Party and The Guest List — and I know I’ll be returning to the well-thumbed copy on my shelf again soon!”

Lucy Foley is the New York Times bestselling author of the thrillers The Guest List and The Hunting Party. She has also written two historical fiction novels and previously worked in the publishing industry as a fiction editor.

“The books I'm most thankful for this year are a three-book series titled Tales from the Gas Station by Jack Townsend. Walking a fine line between comedy and horror (which is much harder than people think), the books follow Jack, an employee at a gas station in a nameless town where all manner of horrifyingly fantastical things happen. And while the monsters are scary and more than a little ridiculous, it's Jack's bone-dry narration, along with his best friend/emotional support human, Jerry, that elevates the books into something that are as lovely as they are absurd.”

T.J. Klune is a Lambda Literary Award–winning author and an ex-claims examiner for an insurance company. His novels include The House in the Cerulean Sea and The Extraordinaries.

Sylvernus Darku (Team Black Image Studio), Ayebia Clarke Publishing

"Nervous Conditions is a book that I have read several times over the years, including this year. The novel covers the themes of gender and race and has at its heart Tambu, a young girl in 1960s Rhodesia determined to get an education and to create a better life for herself. Dangarembga’s prose is evocative and witty, and the story is thought-provoking. I’ve been inspired anew by Tambu each time I’ve read this book."

Peace Adzo Medie is Senior Lecturer in Gender and International Politics at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2020). His Only Wife is her debut novel.

Jenna Maurice, HarperCollins

“The book I'm most thankful for? Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. My mother and father would read me poems from it before bed — I'm convinced it infused me not only with a sense of poetic cadence, but also a wry sense of humor.”

Victoria “V.E.” Schwab is the bestselling author of more than a dozen books, including Vicious, the Shades of Magic series, and This Savage Song. Her latest novel, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, is BuzzFeed Book Club’s December pick. Read an excerpt from The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Meg Vázquez, Square Fish

“My childhood best friend gave me Troubling a Star by Madeleine L'Engle for Hanukkah when I was 11 years old, and it's still my favorite book of all time. I love the way it defies genre (it's a political thriller/YA romance that includes a lot of scientific research and also poetry??), and the way it values smartness, gutsiness, vulnerability, kindness, and a sense of adventure. The book follows 16-year-old Vicky Austin's life-altering trip to Antarctica; her trip changed my life, too. In a year when safe travel is almost impossible, I'm so grateful to be able to return to her story again and again.”

Kate Stayman-London's debut novel, One to Watch, is about a plus-size blogger who’s been asked to star on a Bachelorette-like reality show. Stayman-London served as lead digital writer for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and has written for notable figures, from former president Obama and Malala Yousafzai to Anna Wintour and Cher.

Katharine McGee is grateful for the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. Chris Bailey Photography, Firebird

“I’m thankful for the Redwall books by Brian Jacques. I discovered the series in elementary school, and it sparked a love of big, epic stories that has never left me. (If you read my books, you know I can’t resist a broad cast of characters!) I used to read the books aloud to my younger sister, using funny voices for all the narrators. Now that I have a little boy of my own, I can’t wait to someday share Redwall with him.”

Katharine McGee is the New York Times bestselling author of American Royals and its sequel, Majesty. She is also the author of the Thousandth Floor trilogy.

Beth Gwinn, Time-Life Books

"I am thankful most for books that carry me out of the world and back again, and while I find it painful to choose among them, here's one early and one late: Zen Cho's Black Water Sister, which comes out in 2021 but I devoured just two days ago, and the long out-of-print Wizards and Witches volume of the Time-Life Enchanted World series, which is where I first read about the legend of the Scholomance."

Naomi Novik is the New York Times bestselling author of the Nebula Award–winning novel Uprooted, Spinning Silver, and the nine-volume Temeraire series. Her latest novel, A Deadly Education, is the first of the Scholomance trilogy.

Christina Lauren are grateful for the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. Christina Lauren, Little, Brown and Company

"We are thankful for the Twilight series for about a million reasons, not the least of which it's what brought the two of us together. Writing fanfic in a space where we could be silly and messy together taught us that we don't have to be perfect, but there's no harm in trying to get better with every attempt. It also cemented for us that the best relationships are the ones in which you can be your real, authentic self, even when you're struggling to do things you never thought you'd be brave enough to attempt. Twilight brought millions of readers back into the fold and inspired hundreds of romance authors. We really do thank Stephenie Meyer every day for the gift of Twilight and the fandom it created."

[lordeasriel]

I wanna talk about Marcel Delamare and whatever the fuck he is doing on The Secret Commonwealth and why Simon Talbot is an important key to what is happening in Lyra’s World. Needless to say there will be spoilers, so it’s under the cut and tagged appropriately. This is mostly speculation as opposed to the analysis I normally do, but I wanna discuss it anyway as I’m rereading that behemoth of a book.

Marcel cares very little about Lyra. Let us get this out of the way now; he is looking for her on behalf of his mother who is, at the very least, deranged. He dislikes, or even hates Lyra, because he blames her for Marisa’s death/disappearance, but overall he cares very little about Lyra because she does not affect his goals. With the prophecy gone, Lyra is not a threat for the Church as far as we know and that extends to Marcel’s plans.

Things to consider about Marcel, as we know:

He manipulates the Magisterial Congress to create a Council where the Church finally has a leadership after years of being leaderless.

He plots to have the leader he elected himself, murdered and then becomes leader himself, after blaming the men from the mountains.

He casts a blow to the CCD by taking out Binaud, although that was mostly an action driven by passion, cause he had a feud with Binaud. and daddy issues cause binaud used to bang his mom but fine. 

He has an interest in the roses and rose oil, and the building in the desert, and he heads La Maison Juste, which was officially known as the League for the Instauration of the Holy Purpose. They are responsible for everything heresy related, but Marcel shows from his early chapters that he has a great interest in changes. In the first chapter he says that “times change, and understandings must change too.” when talking about the new reading method.

He is a subtle man and very patient, as we learn that many of the crisis during TSC are happening after he put them in motion months before the book’s plot. Binaud even tells him he is “too cautious” but his subtle ways pay off as he quickly and steadily climb the ladder of power within the Magisterium. Not unlike Marisa, he relies on charm and charisma to get things his way, and his finesse conceal his relentless nature as he is slowly taking over the biggest organization in Lyra’s world. *screams in panic*

No, I don’t think he is going to change the world for the better. Quite the contrary, I think he is trying to change the ultimate goal of the Church and that is bloody terrifying.

The Church as we know, is a religious institution; they impose faith and many of the branches of the Magisterium still are religious at their core, holy people that most of the times do evil because of faith, but most of them are priests, nuns, monks. The CCD, the biggest and most powerful branch up until Marcel created the Council, were a military force not necessarily holy, but most of its members acted on behalf of faith.

Marcel is hardly religious, there is nothing that indicates that; he is vain and ruthless and as power-hungry as they come; but he advocates for change, unlike other members of the Magisterium, who think the Church can stand all-mighty before the modern age that is coming. He is prepared to embrace it though, and he is already going after the roses.

The rose oil is the sort of thing the Magisterium on its own would seek to destroy, but I think that Marcel wants to control it (I’m unsure whether this is on canon or not as I’m not done with my reread, but let’s roll with it).

We know that Pan and Lyra are fighting over two lines of thinking that advocate for reason: Brande’s daemonless world and Talbot’s imaginary friend daemons. Talbot knows or is subservient to Marcel, as we see them talking, so I’m gonna propose something wild, and likely wrong, but wild nonetheless. I think Talbot’s very wrong about his idea that daemons are projections of the mind, there is enough physical evidence to disprove him, but I think he is part of Marcel’s big change plan. Bear with me:

Daemons are Dust. They are made by Dust, they exist through Dust, when they die they disappear and they cannot go to the Land of the Dead because there is a place where Dust, conciousness on its own, is not capable of existing.

Dust can be seen through many ways, such as the spyglass and the rose oil, and it reacts to many objects, such as the I ching, the Alethiometer and the Myriorama. Asriel’s photogram shows it clearly that Dust attracts itself to mature conciousness.

We learn, as we travel with Lyra, that the relationship between human and daemon is not as sacred and tight as we thought. There are people who leave their daemons and vice-versa, there are people who hate their daemons, there are people who sell their daemons (and buy daemons) for several reasons.

We know Talbot’s idelogy and Brande’s have been infecting the younger generation, especially those in academia. They have created a world of reasoning and cold, harsh logic that caused some people to even begin to ignore their daemons.

Although these two idelogies are mostly meant to cause conflict with Lyra and Pan, they also show a lot about how the world is slowly changing. But how does Talbot’s daemons don’t exist for real connects to Marcel’s plans for the Magisterium and the rose oil?

I think Marcel paid him to write that, or he could simply be taking advantage of Talbot’s dumb concept. It’s about creating a bubble of ignorance. The rose oil allows for the user to see Dust, at a hefty price, of course; a person could look at their daemon and themselves and see Dust as it is. However, a person who doesn’t believe their daemon is real, a person taken by cold logic and only rational thinking, they have absolutely no interest in this business. They have no desire to understand Dust or what it is, because to them it is nonsense.

But why does Marcel needs Talbot for this? Because Academia has a certain immunity to the Magisterium’s brainwashing. These are educated people, and although some religious people are in the academic field, in Lyra’s world, most people from colleges are free thinkers or even part of Oakley Street. Talbot is Marcel’s man on the inside, in a manner of speaking; he is suppose to seduce academics through logic and debate, in a way that the Magisterium would never be able to do. The Church then tackles the rest ot the people, through common sense, fear and the spreading of faith and lies and persuasion.

Marcel has no interest in saying Dust is the ultimate sin; what it is to anyone else is irrelevant to him and to his plans, as long as he controls it (and the rose oil by connection), he is the owner of the ultimate truth.

Brande is not connected to this, he is simply at the wrong place. at the wrong time, having an existential crisis lol

[capraqua]

Fantasy Granted for Akira 아키라

For Akira:

You wince as a hand struck your cheek. You stared at the ground beside you wondering why this had happened to you when it started out as an easy day.

~3 hours earlier~

You ran past your door, bag in hand, necktie loosely wrapped around your neck and a slice of bread between your teeth. You were late. Again. The teacher said that there’s going to be a quiz at the start of her class that’ll mimick the coverage of the exam. You ran faster as you remembered your score on your last exam and reminded yourself that you need to do harder to maintain your 5th place overall ranking. You were smart as hell but lazy and can come across as a little too comfortable in your own bubble.

You sped past an alley where a group of boys is seen traumatizing a boy who was leaning against the garbage bin with a bloodied lip. You rolled your eyes and continue running, letting go of the situation at hand because you can’t do anything to help the poor kid.

You cross your classroom door threshold just as the bell rang and slumped into your seat after that marathon you had just ran.

“You’re almost late again, Akira.” Chani said beside you. One of your friends. Responsible. Focused. 3rd place overall ranking. Serious when it comes to academics but very fun to be with.

“I’m sorry. I woke up funny. I had a dream and there was a—“ you stopped as the teacher entered the room. You straigtened your back and your necktie as the teacher prepared for the lesson. A piece of paper landed on your desk.

Let’s talk later. I have to tell you something -CN

You look at him but he seemed so engrossed on the teacher’s lecture so you pulled out your notebook and listened to the lesson as well.

The class bell finally rang and you were stretching your back as you went out the door for lunch. A figure zipped past you leaving you intoxicated in the scent of the person’s cologne. Your head followed the figure to where it was headed and sure enough, it was Dawon. One of the troublemakers in your school. Cute, a year older than you but he really smells that good. That’s what he gets for being a son of a huge perfume conglomerate in South Korea. But of course, if there is Dawon, someone would be trailing behind. Sure enough you hear another pair of footsteps running towards Dawon’s direction but he didn’t see you walking in the same hallway so he crashes into you.

“Way to go, Taeyang. Injuring the lower classmen.” Dawon said as he jogged towards you two.

“I didn’t see her walking. I was too focused into getting my phone free from your grasp.” Taeyang said standing up while shooting glares at Dawon.

“I’m really sorry, what’s your name again?” Taeyang asked you, flashing his million dollar smile. You almost forgot the single most identifiable adjective of Taeyang other than being Dawon’s other troublemaker half: a flirt. He has gone out with almost every girl in your school and you wouldn’t want to be the next one despite of falling for his smile.

“I’m Akira and if you could please help me up.” Taeyang took both your hands and tugged you up maybe with a little bit more force than normal causing you to get pulled into his arms. You quickly push him away, bowed your respectable goodbye and zoomed past the two boys. You couldn’t bare the thought of them seeing your red cheeks. You fan your face to cool yourself down and proceeded to walk towards the school canteen to get some lunch.

Passing through a secluded part of school for a shortcut, you were quickly pulled into the shadows by a harsh hand. You land on your butt on the floor and looked up at the person who pulled you. You saw that it wasn’t a person but a group of people. Three girls, looking down on you in perfect pyramid formation. Great, you thought to yourself, consider my luck running into the craziest girls in town.

“I saw you get physical with one of my men. Do you really think you’re all that? Taeyang’s mine.” So Hee said as she widened her eyes at you. You proceeded to get up but both her minions sat you down on the ground once again. It was this time that she held a hand above her head to bring it down to your face. You wince as a hand struck your cheek. You stared at the ground beside you wondering why this had happened to you when it started out as an easy day.

“You know what to do with her. Teach her a lesson she won’t forget.” So Hee said as she turned from you looking out if anyone saw them hurting you. You wince and groan as her two minions kick your side and kneel down to punch you in the face. You saw So Hee turn around again to watch you getting beaten up when a group of boys enter your vision.

“Just my luck, the boy gang is here, I might as well die soon.” You thought to yourself as the boys come nearer and the leader stopped in front of So Hee. It was then when you passed out from the pain you recieved from the two So Hee minions.

You woke up in your school clinic and noticed another figure tending to your wounds. You sat up a little too fast because you winced at the pain on your stomach and held it.

“Be careful. They’ve done a lot to your body.” Your eyes focused to see Youngbin, the leader of the boy gang holding a wet towel to the cuts on your face.

“Don’t you have to beat up a kid somewhere? Why are you here?” You asked Youngbin. His jaw tightened, he put down the cloth he held against your face and looked at you in the eye.

“My gang is not as bad as you think. We hurt with purpose. You were getting hurt and we don’t like innocent people getting hurt so we got in the way of So Hee earlier” he explained. You look at his eyes and figured out the sincerity laced within his words.

“You’re still not done yet here and I have to put on bandaids on your cuts.” Youngbin informed you that the nurse wouldn’t be back from her lunch break until later. The curtain protecting your privacy parted as a panting Chani scans your body all over.

“Akira, what happened to you? I ran as soon as I heard. You look so beaten up, here, let’s get you home.” Chani declared.

“I think it’ll be much safer is I take her home.” Youngbin suggested.

“No, I know her house and her mom trusts me.” Chani replied.

“Well, I think you should just go and study on your desk, pretty boy.” Youngbin said as he rose from his seat at looked down at Chani. They both huffed and look at you for an answer.

Author’s note: So Akira, it’s time for you to choose. Go home with Chani or go home with Youngbin?

[kandadiff]

As The World Falls Down 4

~

It took Negan a week of me refusing to contact him for him to start his own tirade against us. It started with a bang. The cars he gifted us were quickly repossessed and the protection we once had at school was ripped from us as well. Several guidance counselors were trying to get Taehyung to press charges on Katya for destroying his car and grades were entered in wrong or unfairly, bringing down all of our averages, resulting in both Makayla and I being booted from advanced placement classes and you and Hoodie on academic probation. As well as Negan forbidding anyone employed by him to talk or interact with us. The police under Negans payroll also were on our asses. The only car we had left was Makayla’s VW van and soon any infraction she did (real or imagined by the police) received tickets after tickets. Soon her father suspended the plates due to all the tickets and no one could drive it. And its not like we could play it – we all lost our jobs for various bullshit reasons.

Draven tried to meet with Edward but he refused which was straining their friendship. Last time he answered her phone call she called him a “spineless bloody dogcunt!’ and never mind the effect it was having on you. You were almost sure Edward was purposely being petty to you. Your feed was stuffed with Alison’s posts with her and Edward. It sickened you which was why almost every night you and Katya were out.

It was overwhelming, everything piling on and we all felt it.  Damien ‘donated’ a car he claimed he wasn’t using but I knew it was his favorite, a black escalade. I met with Suga and Taehyung and he promised he’d never press charges on her. Soon resentments started growing even as I was trying to fix it. Especially, when presents from both Joker and Lloyd started to pop up. It was piles of expensive clothing, shoes and jewelry. The joker marked it to you, surprising you completely and infuriating me. Lloyd was another one, bombing the hosue with packages and letters all which remained unread and unopened by me. I randomly handed out the packages and stuffed the unread letters into my nightstand. I did not forgive him either and frankly wanted nothing to do with him.

I knew everyone was worried about the status of the house. I had heard Naomi holding a secret meeting when I walked in after walking home and being followed by a few men who were trying tehre hardest to stay out of my sightline. I waited by the door listening in on the conversation. “Look at all the shit happening!” She exclaimed her hands wildly waiving around. “Look Katya could go to jail.”

“I am not going to jail.” Katya shook her head “Kay told me to worry about nothing.” Cassie gave a snort “What? I do trust her.”

“Yeah, she also told us we’d have a house.” Hoodie added dryly.

“Where are we living?” Draven huffed “A fucking shoebox? Last time I looked around we were still in a house.”

“For how long?” Hoodie mumbled and Cassie nodded her head in agreement.

“So, what exactly do you want us to do?” Draven said, her jaw tight. “Move?”

“How?” Hoodie asked “We lost our jobs.”

“I’ve been doing research.” Cassie said and Naomi nodded, Draven scoffed. “We can dissolve the sorority and move into a new house under a new name.”

“How would that be different?” Makayla asked “if the problem is with us and Negan how is changing location going to solve the issue.”

“Because its not with US and Negan.” Naomi said simply. “Its with HER and Negan. If we can convince him we are done with her at least for a bit we can have everything back to normal.”

“Oh fuck off.” Draven spat. “So you want her to be leader when it benefits you but when things get a little hard you want to run? And you think all of us will just agree? You are dumb as dong shit!”

“What about us being friends?” Makayla sighed. Katya agreed angrily swearing.

“What about us as individuals!” Noami ranted “We all lost our jobs and I know that doesn’t matter to someone like Makayla or Adi who have inheritance to live on. But what about Hoodie or Katya or even you Draven, the rest of us don’t have money like that. Now how the fuck are we going to pay bills? And I know I’ll lose my scholarship if the things with school keep happening! I can’t afford that! None of us can! Not to mention creeps fucking hanging around outside who knows why or if they are with Negan ready to pull some shit! And maybe we could all figure something out but now we won’t even have a fucking roof over our heads!

“SAYS WHO?” Draven bellowed slamming her fist on the table and making everyone jump. “WHAT IS THIS FUCKING ME, ME, ME ATTITUDE! IF YOU WANT TO DISOLVE THE FUCKING SORORITY, DO IT THEN BUT I WON’T HAVE A BLOODY PART IN IT!” she stood up and fear flicked across Naomi’s face. Did she think Draven was going to hit her? “BUT ITS FUCKING HILARIOUS HOW WHEN SHE WAS HANDING OUT GIFTS YESTERDAY EVERYONE GLADLY FUCKING TOOK!”

No one spoke up when I placed a copy of the deed to the house on the table. My name written clearly on it as owner.

It was silent when we went to the mall to pick out our homecoming dressed but the tension was there and unlike before where we went to the store together, we were separate for practically the whole time. You and Katya eventually just decided to wear one of the dresses Joker had bought you and head towards a bar. I was with Draven and we got separated when she ran into Jiwoo. I was in the dressing room trying on a dress when the lights went off and to top it off my phone died.

“Hello?!” I called out still half zipped in the dress. Silence. “Hello?! Someone’s in here!” But silence followed. I managed to take off the dress and was halfway through slipping my own dress on when I heard the faintest sound nearby. I stopped moving straining my ears to hear and heard the smallest click. If I wasn’t paying attention in the pitch black, I would have missed it. I was about to speak when I heard the undeniable clicking sound of a gun. I quickly got to my knees crawling to the next dressing room, now hearing the footsteps clearer and seeing the faintest light coming towards me.

“I don’t want to hurt you, girl” It was a gruff voice of an older man. I moved to the next stall.  He was getting closer “Just come out and lets make this easy.” He kicked open the stall I was in and I quickly ran out of the stall and towards the door to the fitting room when the lights flooded the area and I was bathed in light. “Stop!” he demanded and through the mirror I saw he was pointing the gun at my back. “I told you, girl, I want to do this easy.” He said stepping towards me, the gun held out in his hand pointing directly to my back, he was within arms length now. “Now put your hands behind your back like a good girl-“

He was unable to finish his sentence when I turned around grabbing the barrel of the gun. A fat silencer making the barrel longer and untimately proving his downfall as I thrust my elbow into his hand and took the gun from him. I hit him in the head with the butt of the handgun and he hissed.  

He grabbed for the gun and I pulled the trigger… nothing came out. It was unloaded. He took advantage of my confusion and grabbed a fistful of my hair. Yanking my head down hard and through me into one of the full length mirrors. It cracked on my forehead embedding tiny glass shards in the now open wound, blood deeping out and running into my eye. He grabbed my legs flung me to the ground and I landed hand on my back, knocking the wind out of me. “I told you I could do this the easy way-“ he screamed and plummeted as my barefoot hit his testicles. I reached for the dress I was traying on that lay in a black pile on the floor and he attempted to grab at my leg again. I plunged my foot hard into his face, feeling the bone of his nose crack under my heel. He screamed out again and I grabbed two sharp pieces of glass from the broken mirror and the dress. I tied his legs and one of his arm s with the dress. But when he went to use the other hand to grab at me again I raised my arm and plunged the glass into the space between his neck and shoulder. He howled.

“Who sent you?!” I raged forcing the glass deeper. He tried to reach for me again, just missing my hair and I stabbed the other piece in his hand. It went clean through.

“Fuck you!” He spat.

“Wrong answer.” I yanked the glass from his neck, blood splattering on me as I did and plunged it in again, moving it around painfully. He cursed. “Who sent you?!”

“Fuck -“ He was cut off as I plunged the glass out and back in moving it slight so it cut into his neck even deeper.

“I move this glass one inch to the right, and it hits your fat fucking Juglar and you bleed out!” I snapped at him “Tell me who sent you and you live.” He stayed silent and I raised the glass again.

“Bitch!” He cried out as I stopped just an inch before hitting his jugular. “STOP!”

“Stop?” I let out a dark chuckle and slapped his face. “Tell me who fucking sent you!” Silence. “Nice asshole, now you’re going to die fucking bleeding to death!”

“Fuck you!” He screamed but blood was already filling into his windpipe.

“Fuck you!” I mocked him “That’s what they all say, you think you’re fucking special by telling me fuck you? It doesn’t make me afraid of you and it doesn’t make you anything more then fucking scum.” My fist landed in his jaw and he groaned out painfully. He spit at me, blood spaying on my face, I pushed his face down so he could look at himself in the mirror. “Wanna see what happens to scum?” I spat at him and I plunged the glass into his juglar. His neck erupted like a Geiser of blood. And I stabbed him again, and again and again and again getting all the pent up rage I felt through out the last week until I was pulled off of him. I swung the glass around nearly hitting Lloyd.

“What?!” I felt crazed, like I was coming down hard off a high. “Lloyd!” His hand was on mine, prying the glass from y hand and throwing it to the ground stomping on it and breaking it into smaller pieces. “Lloyd!”

“I’m helping you.” He said grabbing my purse and then my hand. He ripped the tags off a nearby extra-large male shirt and threw it over me. He tossed me another and ordered me to wipe my face. “Quick, they’re going to be back from break soon-“

I did what I was told, still in a state of excited shock. He took the shirt back and stuffed it in my purse the dragged me out of the dressing room and through the racks of clothing.

We ended up in Lloyd sports car driving away from the mall. He was talking but I couldn’t focus on anything he was saying until his hand landed on my knee trying to get my attention when I snapped at him. “What were you doing there?! Why are you following me?!”

“Oh thank you, Lloyd.” He said his voice in a higher pitch to mimic me. “Thank you for saving me from a possible arrest for killing some deadbeat, oh and taking care of the other two that were waiting to get me at the loading door.”

“Where did they come from?” I mumbled and he gave me a look. “I’m not thanking you, how do I know you didn’t send them yourself.”

He laughed “why would I do that? If I wanted to talk to you-“

“You’d write me a letter?” I said dryly and he chuckled.

“You don’t answer your phone.”

“Not to numbers I don’t have.”

“I thought we were friends.”

“I think blowing up your limo would make you rethink that.”

He shrugged. “I thought it was funny. No one’s ever done that before.”

“It shows.” I said and his laugh made me smile despite myself. “Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you home.” He said and I eyed the navigation system. He noticed and faced it towards me. The address was the sorority house. “Unless you want to go somewhere else.”

“No, that’s fine.” It was silent for a moment.

“You know, sunshine, if you would have actually read my letters or answered my phone calls you would know why that asshole went after you.”

“Well I’m here now.” I said lazily looking over to him. “Tell me.”

“Open that and take out the pink envelope.” He said motioning to the glove compartment. I followed instructions and opened the envelope. It was a screenshot of a website on the dark web I recognized. Robin used to frequent it – it was a way of notorious mobsters to share information with other mobsters or criminals. It was a candid picture of me with the words FREE RANGE over it.

“What is this?” I asked confused “What does free range mean?”

“There’s a bounty on you, sunshine.” He said looking over at me. “and your not protected by anyone and they want you alive.”

I looked at him again and asked a question I already knew the answer too. “Negan or J?”

He shrugged “Both? Does it matter?”

“Wait, why are you telling me this?”

“We’re friends” he said obviously and smirking but my face didn’t match his. “I don’t like surprise attacks. That’s a pussy move. If I go after someone I always warn them, if I respect them, that is. Whoever did that, Joker or Negan it’s a pussy move and I respect you to much not to tell you.”

“Why?” I said not believing him at all. “You don’t know me.”

“I want to.” He admitted with a smile. “The more I hear about Ace.” He laughs “You’re legendary.”

“Those stories were greatly exaggerated.” I rolled my eyes seeing the house come into view. I half expected him to pass it and be the one to kidnap me. But he stopped in the driveway. Max’s car in the driveway, he was probably inside.

“I don’t know about that.” He said parking the car and looking at me. “You handled your own with that pig in the dressing room.”

“I left a mountain of evidence.”

“Nah” he shrugged “You’ll be fine. Youre just rusty.”

I rolled my eyes and got out of the car. I was about to walk inside when I turned around and motioned for him to roll down the window. “Thank you Lloyd.” His smile grew.

“My pleasure.”

~~

Damien and Max were the only ones I told and I really didn’t plan on it. But when I got home with my hair flecked with dried blood and my hands caked in it, it was a hard topic to avoid. Understandably they freaked out and I invited Robin over all that Lloyd was saying was true. It was and robin was also a target. It had to be Joker and soon the conversation turned to where me and Robin were going to run away too. The dance was tomorrow night but we spent the afternoon unto about 2 in the morning discussing where we could go.

That was until we got a ding on the website and saw now a map of the school and where the dance was taking place was posted promising that we’d be there. We were discussing if we should go. Both Robin and I said no and surprisingly Damiena and Max said we needed to. “Who knows what they’d do to everyone else to find them.”

I knew he was right but before we could discuss it further Naomi tried to knock on the door claiming she had something on her mind and just needed to talk to me right away.

“Is someone dying?” I asked opening my door.

“No.”

“Is someone breaking into the house?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t need to talk to me at three in the morning.”

“But-“

“No!” I shouted slamming the door in her face.

“Harsh.” Robin smirked and I rolled my eyes.

“Shut up.” I said settling in my bed. As the boys set up cots around my room. None of them really wanting me to be alone.

“Shit kay” Robin said looking back at the website. “Look.”

“What now?” I whined and looked at another FREE RANGE poster. However, instead of a picture of me or Robin it was a picture of you with a $500,000 reward for catching you alive $1,000 dead.

~

It was around this time you got home, you weren’t drunk as most days. The bar you went into was actually owned by the Joker and while he lavished you and katya with all you wanted you felt a bit on edge around him still and forced yourself to take it easy tonight. Honestly you thought youd leave with the joker like Katya left with Matthew but he was called away and didn’t return for a few hours instead sent a car to take you home. So you were tispy but not drunk.

You went upstairs and took a shower, looking in your phone as you got ready for bed and chucking your phone at the wall when you saw yet another picture of Alison and Edward on your feed. On top of that you saw Emma was still taking shit about us, and you couldn’t even hit her because we weren’t protected at school anymore and she knew it.

“Adi!” Naomi called as you settled into bed. While you weren’t there for the ‘house meeting’ Katya had told you everything and you didn’t want to even give her the time of day.

“What?” You called out and she walked in.

“Can I talk to you?”

“Its” you looked at the clock. “3:30 in the morning. What do you want?”

“We want you to join us in the other sorority- as the leader-“

“I don’t have fucking time for this right now!” You whined “im tired!” You sighed looking past Naomi seeing robin leaning on the door. For a moment you thought you were dreaming (he had been the subject of your latest dreams) and looked back at Naomi. She looked at Robin and sighed.

“Shes pretty tired” Naomi said trying to get him out. 

“Robin come in,” You said shooting her a side eye and smiling at Robin. “We can talk in the morning.”

She sighed and gave you a fake smile, nodding while she said goodnight and left. You smiled at Robin he gave Naomi a look.“Can I sleep in your room? Its crowded in Kays.”

~

[thelioninmybed]

so you did a imrael/khazri meet-cute for if khazri's family never tried to kill him, but what would their first meeting be like if khazri joined the priesthood like his uncle suggested? :) thanks love u bye

There are eight gods in Zalach’ann - but no, that’s a simple lie, told so as not to confuse the peasants. The truth is that there is one god, and she is worshipped in eight aspects. 

The Lady of Spiders weaves the world and weaves us every one. She snips spent threads and she alone knows what will be left when her long labour’s done. Then there is Marath Who Rides Forth, rejoicing in war and bloodshed while her husband, Iavarin of the Hearth, preserves and mends what has been broken. There is dreaming Naphael, patron of poets, prophets and the mad, and Ilinya of scrolls and lore and secrets. Xolodano the Gilded is beloved of merchants and Valian is beloved of lovers. A whore’s god and our boy’s father danced in his temples once upon a time. The last and the least is Arteru, who walks in dark places, who is hunter and hunted, and if out lost son had kept his faith then it is Arteru he would pray to. 

If he had kept it - you understand there are some gods it is not fitting for a boy to serve? Well then…

Iavarin

“They say,” Imrael said, rising from his bow, “That the priests of Iavarin are the greatest healers upon the earth, and under it. I’ve travelled a long way to-”

“You and every other supplicant,” said the priest. He was a tall man, taller than Imrael, with a nose that would have been very handsome had he not been looking down it. “We do not barter away our magicks to pedlers at the gates.”

Imrael spread his hands, refusing to let his smile flicker. “Well that’s fine, I was proposing more an open exchange of knowledge.”

Behind the priest, one of the novices, robed in ashy grey, ducked his head to hide what Imrael was pretty certain was a smirk. The priest’s lip curled. “See him gone,” he said and turned away, robes swishing behind him, the great fire at the temple’s heart throwing his shadow out behind him. 

“I thought ‘Hearth’ implied, oh, I don’t know, homeliness,” he told the novice prodding him towards the temple gates. “Hospitality.” 

“We lean more towards ‘preserving’,” the novice said. He at least had the grace to sound apologetic. 

“I’ve seen pickled lemons less sour.”

 The novice smirked again. “I’m sorry. For a wasted journey.”  

Not as handsome as the priest but his face was far more appealing. “Not so wasted,” Imrael told him. “Buy me a drink, show me the secret passage into the temple archives, and we’ll call that hospitable.”

“A drink,” the novice agreed solemnly. “The tenets of my god demand no less.”

Naphael

“I thought,” said Imrael. “I thought. Eight gods, right?”

“One gods. God.”

“One god, eight whosits. I thought only the big one, spider lady. I thought only she could see. The thing. The fate of everything. So how come, how come your god. How come they get to do prophecy? It’s bullshit. Your god. Is bullshit.” 

That was probably a pretty stupid thing to say to a priest within his god’s own temple, but whatever they used to fuel their visions had stolen Imrael’s common sense along with his hand-eye coordination and he hadn’t had much of either to begin with. 

“It’s like a carpet,” said the oracle. He was draped across the floor and Imrael’s shins in a very good imitation of one.

“You gotta prophet harder than that. Or less hard because that actually was very prophety.” 

Propping himself up on his elbows, the oracle took another pull from the water pipe and said, less oracularly, “Can’t see much of it when you’re lying on it.”

“Ah!” Imrael cried. “I see. So you think it’s just a bit of blue with yellow squiggles, but then you sit up-” Imrael said, sitting up. “And it turns out that the squiggly bits are actually a dragon’s tail and the whole carpet is dragons fighting-”

“They’re not fighting.” 

“Dragons. But you didn’t know. Because you only saw a little bit”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.” Imrael stopped looking at the carpet and looked at the man draped across his lap instead. Pretty, in a dreamy, disaffected kind of way. “Hey, hey, if you can see the future, how lucky am I?”

“Tonight?” said the oracle. “Not very. I’m a priest.”

Valian

“Did you come to pray?” said the dancer. He wasn’t wearing much to speak of, beside a veil and some bodypaint that glowed luminescent in the temple’s dim interior, and so Imrael struggled to pay attention. “Because it’s not- um. If you go to the outer districts, there are…places. That will serve foreigners. It’s not done here.” 

“I actually came to propose an exchange.” Imrael coughed. “Of knowledge, nothing else.” That was absolutely not true, but Valian was turning out to be a decidedly conservative sex god and Imrael knew better than to push his luck in a city full of violently xenophobic misandrists. 

“Oh.” The dancer’s drooping ears lifted and his stance from self-consciously provocative to something more natural. There were other priests tending to petitioners, taller and lovelier, and actually smiling behind the veils, and Imrael didn’t think it was by chance that the one who’d been sent to talk to an encroaching foreign man was small and diffident. “If you want knowledge, the temple of Ilinya. Has it.”

“Not the kind I’m looking for. I’m a doctor-” Imrael said and then waited, as he’d learned to here, for the other man to say something disbelieving but he only tilted his head so that the glass beads on his veil clacked and chimed. 

“Iavarin is for healing,” he said.

“Preservation. But creating new things, that’s all on your guy, right?”

“I suppose.”

“And it’s criminally underresearched!” Imrael spread his hands, taking in the veiled lanterns and incense, the gorgeous frescos of gorgeous men and women engaged in anatomically improbable acts, and the shameful lack of academic rigour. “All that drive, all that desire - and that’s what magic is at the root of it - but a little squeamishness keeps anyone from considering the full potential!”

The dancer’s expression hadn’t been seductive to start with, and now it was something close to a smirk. “You’d be surprised. Most every petitioner’s here for research. Inspiration. I don’t know anyone that comes here just for sex.”

“That’s very unfair, and my purity of purpose is provable; you just said you don’t let foreigners worship.”

“I’m not very good at my job,” the dancer said. And, before Imrael could work out if that meant what he thought it did, “I’ll show you to the library.”

Arteru

People had said there would be danger - he’d rather counted on it - but he’d been anticipating the sexy, not-actually-that-dangerous kind. It turned out being stalked through the woods by a mostly naked man was not even slightly thrilling.

The moonlight gleamed on the hunter’s bare skin, pale as the bone of the wolf skull mask he wore. There was a knife in his hand of black obsidian, sharp enough it might not even hurt. 

“I’ve heard stories,” Imrael said, voice wavering like the wind-tossed leaves on the branches above their heads. “About your god. About your hunts.” He’d also heard conflicting tales of the priesthood of Arteru; vows of purity and bloody orgies beside their kills. He didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention them now. 

“You have to kill something worthy, don’t you? And that- that should be someone who can run more than a quarter of a mile at a go, someone who’s armed, which I’m definitely not, so there’s really no point in killing me, none at all, gods, don’t come any closer, please-”

The hunter’s face was as still as his mask and his steps were silent on the leaf litter, slow and sure. He was twenty yards away, and then fifteen, shadow-dappled muscles rippling with a predator’s grace, eyes hidden by the dark hollows of the skull’s sockets. 

Imrael paced him, backing up, faster and faster as the man came on, praying to any of the gods he didn’t believe him that he would not trip over a tree root. 

Either no gods were listening or they took exception to an atheist. He stumbled and went down hard, grazing his elbows. He didn’t feel it, even though he knew coat and skin both had been torn open. The muscles in the hunter’s thighs tensed and Imrael clutched his bag to his chest, with the vague intention of throwing it as a last, desperate defence.

(It would occur to him much later that he was a wizard, but Imrael did tend to lose his head in a crisis.)

The hunter leapt. Imrael yipped and, shamefully, closed his eyes. 

There came a rush of air, a rustle of leaves, and the shrill screech of an animal in pain. No blade though. Unless he really hadn’t felt it, but that didn’t explain the yowling. 

Imrael opened his eyes again. Looked up to see something sleek and green and serpentine thrashing and flailing, long body coiling around the hunter, who had one arm about its neck, one hand on the gore-slick hilt of the knife buried in its eye socket. The drake’s flailing claws had scored darkly oozing gashes across his skin, and his mask had been knocked loose to reveal a face younger than Imrael’s own. 

The boy pressed in with the knife and, with a final convulsive shiver, the creature stilled, coils falling limp like a discarded ribbon. He ignored Imrael, who clambered slowly to his feet, wincing over the damage to his elbows, and then wincing more at the pins and needles pain as he set the skin reknitting. 

It probably wasn’t a good idea to draw the man’s attention, given he was wild-eyed and still holding the knife. 

“Thanks!” said Imrael anyway, because he’d never met a bad idea he didn’t like, and this one’s chest was heaving provocatively. “That…looks very worthy. Good job.”

The hunter, ignoring him, pulled out a knife and began to skin the carcass. 

[fangirlsarecool]

Impressed? - Jake Peralta x Reader

I wrote this one a while back on a sudden spirt of inspiration (which has now disappeared 😞). Takes place in the episode “The Party” Also on AO3. Read my other Jake x reader fics here and here.

You had sequestered yourself in a corner of the library, checking your phone periodically for anything to save you from your boredom. You hated parties, especially those where most of the attendees were boring academics. But it was your uncle's birthday party so you were going to have to grin and bear it. Although, you were quite excited to meet some of the detectives that your Uncle Ray worked with. Despite the house having a "no cop talk" policy, you were really excited to hear all the amazing cases they'd worked. Anything to save you from the slow, painful death of a dinner party.

Everyone had been avoiding the library (or, more likely, you) since you arrived so you were surprised when someone entered the room. It was the only thing that had made you look up from you phone since you'd arrived.  He strode in with the utmost determination on his face; you'd never seen anyone walk into a library with such purpose. He looked around a little and you were confused as to how he hadn't noticed you yet. His gaze landed on a photo of your uncles on one of the side tables. "Oh, man, it's black Tom Selleck and white Sidney Poitier." he quipped. You had to stop yourself from snorting at this fairly accurate comparison. His eyes moved back to the bookshelves, narrowing as he scanned the books closely. He sighed, muttering to himself, "Come on. All books and no magazines? What kind of crappy library's full of books?" "You know, libraries tend to be filled with books." you spoke up, startling the intruder. He turned to you sharply, looking slightly sheepish. "I…um…didn't see you there. Sorry to disturb you." he apologised. You shook your head. "It's alright. You weren't supposed to see me; I'm hiding." You supposed you sounded rather childlike - hiding yourself away from all the adults at a party. His shoulders relaxed and his shocked expression faded. "Well, that's pretty bad on my part. I'm a detective." he told you braggingly. You raised an eyebrow. "Is that supposed to impress me?" you asked, not giving away the fact that you were fairly impressed. "Yes." he replied honestly. You scoffed. "Then you're gonna have to up your game." A smirk grew on his face, which, upon thorough inspection, you had decided was rather attractive. And you'd much rather have a detective flirt with you than listen to some professor drone on about the Civil War. "Challenge accepted." he said confidently. He then churned out the cheesiest line possible. "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?" You sighed at the phrase, wondering how many men had attempted to woo women with that line. "I was invited. Like everyone else here. Besides, it would be rude to miss my uncle's birthday." you answered. The shock returned to the detective's face. "Holt is your uncle?" You nodded. "Whaaaaaaaaat?" he exclaimed. You hadn't expected him to be completely comfortable flirting with his boss' niece but you hoped you hadn’t put him off completely. "My mom is Kevin's sister-in-law." you explained, wanting to ease him a little. "Oh. Cool cool cool cool cool." he rattled off. "What did you come to the 'crap' library for anyway?" you queried, changing back to the original subject. He opened his mouth to reply before his eyes went wide. "The crap library," he gasped with gusto, "All the magazines are in the bathroom." Your brow furrowed. "Great solve, detective." you congratulated puzzled. He didn't catch the confusion in your voice and just took a bow, accepting your praise. He turned to leave but stopped in his tracks, the both of you being shocked by your uncle's sudden appearance. Ray looked between the two of you suspiciously. "Can I help you, Peralta?" he asked, his gaze landing on the detective. So this was Detective Peralta; you'd heard your uncle drop his name, mostly in complaint, quite a few times in your weekly phone calls. Peralta cleared his throat to compose himself. "Captain. I didn't hear you silently sneak up on me. Lurking must run in the family." he complained, half in jest towards your encounter. "(Y/n) is from Kevin's side of the family. Her mother is--" your uncle began to explain. "His sister-in-law. I'm all caught up on your family tree." Peralta finished. He pointed a finger in the air and continued, "Oh, that reminds me, tell Kevin I am available for brunch on Sunday the 17th." "The 17th is a Tuesday." you corrected, causing the detective to look at you dumbstruck. He clearly had a worse sense of time than you did. "Why are you talking about the New Yorker all of a sudden?" your uncle probed, taking a sip of his port. "I always talk about smart stuff," Peralta bragged, clearly trying to impress you again, "You know, the Jazz Age, what's in a name, the 1950s movies that are from the 50s." He was still going to have to try harder, especially as Ray shot him down. "Those were the categories on Jeopardy last night." he observed. Peralta made an kind of cute embarrassed face. "Don't try so hard to impress my husband. Or my niece, for that matter." His eyes flickered over to you for a brief moment. Trust your Uncle Ray to stop a guy from making a move on you. "Yes, sir." Peralta replied but something told you he wasn’t going to be that easily swayed. He waited until your uncle left the room before whispering, "To the crap library." He strode out of the room with the same determination as he had when he entered - he was clearly hell-bent on making a good impression on Kevin. This time, however, he stopped in the doorway and turned to you. "Catch you later." he said with such a suave smoothness that you couldn’t help but blush. You couldn’t believe he was the same guy who'd been looking for magazines in a library mere seconds ago. You wished that your uncle would consider inviting the detectives round more often. Anything that would allow you to see more of Peralta.

Unfortunately, you didn’t bump into the detective again at the party. You suspected your Uncle Ray had something to do with that, probably shepherding Peralta away from both you and your Uncle Kevin. You wouldn’t have been surprised if that was true; your uncle had always been very cautious whenever you mentioned an interest in someone. You wished he’d let you use your own judgement for once. Peralta seemed nice enough and sort of a dork (your one weakness in men). But perhaps the merging of professional and personal life was too much for Ray, as it always had been. Maybe that was why there had been no sign of Peralta, or any of his colleagues, about an hour after you had met. This detective had gone and you knew nothing about him; not his first name and certainly not his number. So, you decided to take matters into your own hands. Screw what your uncle thought, or what anyone thought for that matter. You liked this guy and you were going to make the first move (something you hadn’t done in a while). As the elevator dinged and the doors opened, you took a deep breath. You really hoped your uncle wouldn’t disrupt things. You gingerly stepped out into the bullpen. This was it. A detective with her hair pulled back, a sharp pantsuit and a pretty face approached you immediately. You still had ample time, however, to feel the buzz of the whole precinct. It was wonderful. The energy and passion of every member of the squad practically seeped out of the walls. You could see why your uncle loved being a cop so much. “How can I help you, ma’am?” the detective asked, her voice polite and articulate. It felt odd that she had addressed you so formally as you were pretty sure you were a similar age. “I…uh…” you stammered, suddenly feeling awkward for barging into the precinct. “Ah. (Y/n). What a pleasant surprise.” Your head shot up to see your Uncle Ray walking towards you from his office; his face showing no indicators of pleasantness or surprise (something you were used to). “Uncle Ray.” you greeted with a smile. He turned to the detective, whose eyes had gone wide. “Santiago, this is my niece, (y/n). (Y/n), this is one of my finest detectives, Amy Santiago.” he introduced. Amy puffed out her chest in pride. “Nice to meet you.” you said. “It’s an honour to meet you.” she replied. You watched her body twitch awkwardly as if she was going to bow to you. “I have…a thing.” she muttered vaguely before shuffling away to her desk. Ray turned back to you. “How can I help? I’m afraid I’m quite busy this morning so--” “I’m here to see Detective Peralta.” you told him bluntly. “Oh.” There was a pause while he processed what you told him. “Peralta. Detective Peralta. You’re here to see…Detective Peralta.” You nodded. Having said his name three times, the detective appeared as if he was Bloody Mary or Beetlejuice. “Hey, Santiago, can you help me wrap up this massive homicide case in a sec?” he asked his colleague. He was still bragging to impress you and hadn’t cottoned on that you already were. “Oh, (y/n), didn’t see you there.” he lied. You shook you head. You both looked to your uncle, expecting him to weigh in somehow, but he was just looking right back slightly bewildered. “(Y/n) and Peralta. My niece and Detective Peralta.” he mumbled. You had to bite your lip to hold back your laughter. You couldn’t believe how much you’d shocked him. “Shall we go to the break room? I can get you a coffee.” Peralta suggested. You took one last glance at your thoroughly confused uncle before nodding. “Sure.”

After chasing away two detectives, who had been using the pool table as some sort of weird pedicure station, the two of you were finally alone like you had been last night. Except this time you were super nervous. Was it bad that you really wanted a drink to take the edge off? Jake handed you a cup of coffee with a “Sup, girl”. You chuckled and observed, “I see your flirting hasn’t improved overnight.” “First off, my flirting was amazing last night. I’m irresistible. Secondly, you’d be surprised how many girls I’ve charmed with a simple sup.” “None?” you guessed teasingly, taking a sip of coffee. He pulled a face. “Anyway, you left early last night. Before I could get your number. So…” You held out your phone to him. “Forward. I like it.” he complimented, taking your phone. The blush that appeared on your cheeks was inevitable. “Did you find the magazine you were looking for?” you asked as he typed his number. “I did not. I actually ended up in Holt and Kevin’s bathroom with Amy and the Sarge, which was super awkward.” “I can imagine.” You took another sip of coffee. It was then you noticed he had finished typing and was just pressing one button constantly. “You’re taking under the chin selfies, aren’t you?” you asked. “No.” he replied quickly, biting his lip innocently. He began to pull more obvious stupid faces so you knew he was lying. You snatched the phone from him and swiped to the newly added contact. “Jake,” you read with a smile, “I like it.” He smiled too though his seemed more blissful. “When do you get off?” you enquired, putting your phone back in your pocket. Jake raised an eyebrow with a sly smirk. You gasped. “Work. You know I meant work.” “About 8.” he replied. “Do you…wanna meet up after work and…get a…drink?” you posed. It was so obvious you hadn’t done this in a while and you felt so awkward. “That sounds good.” Your face lit up. “Really? Okay. Great. I’ll see you at 8.” Jake opened the door for you. It swung open to reveal most of the detectives trying to listen in to your conversation. And at the back of the group, trying to look innocent, was your uncle. Your face went bright red. Jake put his hand on your shoulder. “(Y/n), welcome to the 99.”