#also even if the bromide did cause her death

[onceinawhilemoon]

JON IS LITERALLY CRYING IN THIS ENDING SHERRY WHAT HAVE YOU DONNNE

[smurphyse]

Control

Masterlist

Chapter 9 of Over Your Shoulder

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Jasper Donnelly Keaton (Long Lost Love AU)

Word Count: ~11k

Summary: We learn what happened the night Jasper was tortured, and how Jack died! We also explore some corrupt cops! We learn a bit about what Jasper and Spencer have been getting up to the last two months of working together.

Warnings: Torture, talks of torture, Mentions of drug use, Murder/Body mutilation, Death, terror

Dallas, Eleven Years Ago

“Let’s get started, shall we?” Eli began, watching her intently as she hung from her wrists by a piece of wire. They were already cutting off her circulation, but Jasper couldn’t move to pull herself up for relief. “I’m sure you remember this lovely concoction from your training, though it has been some time since we’ve had a little one-on-one, Sugar.”

Jasper couldn’t speak, she couldn’t do anything but stare at the man who was going to kill her. Pancuronium Bromide was a muscle relaxant she was all too familiar with. It would keep her awake, alert, and she would feel the full pain of whatever torture Eli was going to inflict on her without being able to move.

Eli gazed at her, and had she not known him as well as she did, she would call it a look of grief. He reached out and smoothed her hair down before cupping her chin in his hand.

“I didn’t want it to come to this, pet. But we both know that you can’t be trusted anymore. You’re no longer of any use to me, but we’ll have some fun before I send you off into that long sleep.”

He turned from her and went to a table behind him. The dank room, full of pipes without windows, was in a basement of some decrepit warehouse in Dallas. By the looks of the used needles and burnt spoons littering the floor, she knew it must be some drug den. Eli must have been using since his escape from prison. His normally robust and strong figure had been wasted away to skin and bones, his face sallow and tired.

“I’ve never been much of a fan of blades or guns. As you remember from your training, the best way to earn the carrot is with the stick,” he sighed, flipping through the glittering blades on the wood surface, fingers lingering over the pristine handle of a new Louisville Slugger. The lone gun he used for protection sat on the corner, if she could only move to get it, she’d put a bullet in his head without hesitation.

Jasper had wanted to kill Eli when Jack and her arrested him a few years ago. They had learned of his dealing of opium through Afghanistan, and though he had taught them to kill and hide, he was causing too much pain throughout the world by dealing in heroin and making millions with his connections.

Jasper hated drugs, refusing to believe it was the only side business Eli was conducting, but for her his selling of opium was enough to kill him. Despite all that he had done to her and Jack, as well as the other recruits of the Church, the fucked up part of Jasper’s brain had drawn the line at heroin. She had watched opioids destroy her mother, turning a soft and gentle woman into the kind of person who would abandon her only daughter to her abusive husband, though she was sure her father had always been a monster, even without the meth and bourbon.

Jack had convinced her to spare their teacher, the man who ‘saved’ them from a life in prison, of early death in the confines of cement walls. They took him to a remote Korean prison where he would surely be killed sooner or later, but they underestimated Eli’s abilities and connections.

It was the worst mistake she’d ever made.

Jasper and Jack went on to continue their work, continuing their covert ops under the guise of the military, tracking terrorists and killers around the world. After Balad, they retired, got married and chose to live a suburban life in Austin, Texas under an alias. She was on her way out of the grocery store, thinking herself safe and untouchable, when Eli slipped up behind her and sunk a syringe into her neck.

“I know you always enjoyed a good set of knives, and your skills in sharpshooting and marksmanship cannot be overstated. You were my best success, Sugar. I plucked you from the darkness and turned you into an elite machine... “ Eli trailed off and sighed heavily, holding a small blade up to the light. She was drooling down her chin, sweat pouring down her neck. She remembered these side effects, how humiliating and demeaning they were. A blotchy blush would no doubt begin ripping through her body soon as her blood pressure and heartbeat rose.

“You bit the hand that fed you, my love,” Eli turned to her, flashing the knife sadly as she watched numbly. “Before I send you away, I’m going to give you one last lesson.”

He stepped forward, using the small knife to carefully cut away her shirt, leaving her in her bra and jeans. His slimy hands ran down her sides like a lover in awe, and her body shivered involuntarily under his touch. If she had control of her limbs, she would have been fighting, clawing, kicking, screaming obscenities. But she wasn’t in control. She was fully at his mercy.

“I’m going to remind you, in this life and the next, who you belong to.”

And then he began cutting, and all she could do was take it.

The Grind- Present Day

“Luke,” Jasper groaned, “This is so boring.”

They were sitting in a café, one with a stupid name that Jasper couldn’t remember, looking through apartment rentals. Well, Luke was mostly doing the looking, Jasper was complaining.

“What? Do you just want me to pick a place for you?” he asked, giving her a bitchy look as she glared at him. She had her head and arms sprawled across the table, anxious, bored, and hungover out of her mind.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I want you to do.”

Booger and Roxy were playing at their feet, both taking little swipes at one another and stealing the same two bones from the other over and over again. Jasper would have rather been down there with them, resting her head between the two and giving them tummy rubs, but they were in public and she didn’t need all the cranky D.C. powersuits glaring at her at six in the morning.

“Okay, how about this one? Two bedroom, balcony, pet friendly, with controlled access.”

“Perfect.”

“You don’t even know where it is, Jazz.”

Jasper sat up straight, narrowing her eyes at one of her oldest friends, “Don’t tell me you’re going to start calling me that, too.”

“I like it,” Luke shrugged, giving her a smarmy smile. “It makes you seem… softer.”

“Fuck you,” Jasper grunted, dropping her head down again, moaning in pain as her still-healing face hit the table. Her stomach lurched with the pain, her poor hungover tummy threatening to upheave the few contents in it all over her lap.

“Sounds like you two are having all the fun,” a happy voice chirped behind them. Jasper looked up to find Penelope, holding a big white cup of something foamy as she sat down in the seat next to Jasper.

“Hey, Garcia, I was wondering when you’d show up,” Luke grinned, his big dumb eyes crinkiling at the edges. Jasper had noticed the extra, gentle and dreamy, attention he paid to the tech analyst, and had decided to put that information in her back pocket for later.

“I was running late today. I had to pick up Reid because his car won’t start.”

“What?” Jasper asked, “What are you talking about?”

Just then Spencer rounded the table with a cup of his own, plopping down across from her. He gave her a polite smile, then pulled a book out of his bag and cracked it open.

What the fuck?

Today, she and Luke were just supposed to go apartment hunting. He didn’t say anything about other people joining them. She knew he was waiting for her to sober up a bit more and let her hangover fade away before grilling her about girl’s night. She decided she wouldn’t tell him shit, especially about hanging out with Spencer later in the night at Moe’s.

They had sat and talked for a few hours, mostly about the team, and then Spencer walked her back to her hotel room, lingering at the doorway but declining an invitation inside. Ever the gentleman, and she was grateful for it, as in her drunken state there was no telling what she might have done or said with a bed five feet away.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you?” Luke smirked at her, shaking his shoulders as he laughed. “Tuesdays we all have breakfast here together.”

“You fucking prick,” she seethed, her pounding head making her more surly and annoyed than usual, “you tricked me into a playdate?”

Spencer snorted behind his book, quickly bringing a hand up to cover his mouth. He cleared his throat, pretending to be very absorbed in whatever he was reading.

“Where’s the fucking apartment? I’ll go look at it myself,” she asked, reaching over and snatching his phone. “1617 Moss Avenue… wait, isn’t this…”

Jasper looked up at Spencer. He was already looking at her. His eyes were wide, his bottom lip pulled between his teeth. His cheeks were flushed and she knew that he’d come to the same realization that she had.

“That’s Spencer’s building!” Penelope exclaimed, waving her hands around happily, “Ohmygosh, what if you two were neighbors? It reads just like fanfiction, you’d slowly fall back in love an-”

“Garcia,” Spencer hissed, kicking her under the table. They made faces at each other for a few seconds while Luke and Jasper glared at one another.

“You guys know I have two kids, right?” JJ asked, coming up and sitting between Spencer and Garcia, sunglasses covering her eyes. She wore a large baseball tee and leggings, pulling her legs up into her chair as she nursed her coffee cup. “I don’t sleep, like ever.”

“You act like you wouldn’t already be awake anyways,” Spencer said, giving her an unapologetic smile.

“Shut up, Reid, my head is killing me,” JJ groaned. “Jasper out-drank us all.”

“Jasper’s got an iron stomach,” Luke confirmed, “She used to drink us all under the table. Made a nice little side business betting on it. They all thought they could beat her because she’s so tiny.”

“I’m an Irish Catholic from the south,” Jasper muttered, “drinking is in my blood.”

The rest of the team slowly filtered into the little café, and soon enough they were discussing the best places for apartments in D.C., Luke and Garcia were graceful enough to not mention the free space in Spencer’s building.

“When you find a place, we’ll throw you a housewarming party!” Garcia giggled, entirely too happy considering how miserable the rest of the women were. She’d been the designated driver, and had made Jasper text her when she arrived home after she declined the offer of a ride.

“Why?” Jasper asked, confused. She’d never really had a home , let alone a party for one. She grew up in a decrepit trailer, then she and Jack had picked a hole-in-the-wall apartment just in case something bad happened… and then it did. Throughout her years jetting around the world, she’d never had an apartment that she wasn’t ready to blow out of at a moment’s notice either.

“To celebrate! You’re settling down, and I want you to know how happy we are to have you here,” Garcia said. She squeezed Jasper’s hand, and Jasper felt a soft warmth spread through her chest. No wonder Luke was besotted with Penelope, she was an absolute gem .

“Fine, but I’m not cooking anything,” Jasper relented, unable to say no to someone who projected the literal embodiment of a sunflower.

Prentiss groaned loudly, flashing her phone at the table, “We have a case. I’m gonna throw up and then we’re all heading to the office.”

Lewis nodded, standing and following Emily back into the cafe. The rest of them finished their cups and made their ways toward the parking lot.

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

Jasper found an apartment a few weeks after, one that was quite a few blocks away from Spencer’s, but only two from Moe’s. She found herself heading there on the day of her house warming party, over a month later due to cases, for some comfort and familiarity.

She wasn’t looking forward to the party, or at least she wasn’t looking forward to letting her coworkers of two months see how little she had to put in her new place. The little apartment, nicer than she’d wanted but had to settle on to appease Luke, was a one bedroom with white walls and a large kitchen, a bathroom connected to the master suite and a walk-in closet. Jasper didn’t know what she’d do with that much space, but she was looking forward to using the clawfoot tub.

When she voiced her fears, Oona and Billy went off the deep end and picked out a bunch of things for the place so she didn’t have to. They were eccentric pieces that fit more to their colorful styles than Jasper’s, who would have preferred cheap garbage items that could be forgotten and left behind easier.

They’d picked out a deep emerald paint for all the walls, and fully expected Jasper to use it before putting together her furniture, which she’d put off until the morning of the party. The couch was yellow velvet, offsetting the dark coffee table and sides tables, and a matching fuschia armchair for the living room and matching floral artwork. Her bedroom set was bright orange with a gold colored bed frame and sunrise themed headboard. Her kitchen and bathroom items were equally garish and bright, and she’d put them all away and set them up as best she could, trying to emulate her friend’s quirky styles.

The two had insisted that Jasper’s ‘character’ needed to grow from when Spencer and Luke saw her last. Instead of a dive apartment, she needed to look like an adult who was ready to settle down, and she supposed this was the way to do it. Jasper hated to admit it, but if she ever bought a house, she’d probably have Oona and Billy decorate it like this, along with the various knick knacks and fake plants they’d ordered.

Jasper had a meager two suitcases of clothing, photos, and souvenirs from her time abroad to her name. Most of her meager clothes she kept in her travel suitcase, expertly hiding the compartment with passports and cash she had for emergencies. They were now hidden beneath a floorboard in her bedroom closet. She had a few storage units, lockboxes, and P.O. boxes around the country, each filled with innocuous things she’d found from garage sales, but with a few precious items hidden inside.

Jasper’s original birth certificate with her real name and her parent’s names written on it and her family’s photo book were in a storage locker in Arlington, Virginia. Jack and Sam’s extra jewels from their rings, her and Jack’s Marine uniforms, her mother’s horsehair brush, and some photos from over the years were close in D.C., as they were precious to her. Various bits of evidence on employers and contacts alike were stored in a few of these around the U.S., as well as buried on properties Jasper had bought under aliases for cash.

As for personal possessions, Jasper had few. She kept her ring of Sam’s pearls and Jack’s diamond on her at all times, or given to Oona for safekeeping during missions. Spencer’s Caltech sweater, her polaroid camera, the knitting needle set that Diana had given her so many years ago for Christmas, and her The Lord of the Rings box set were always packed away in her bigger suitcase with the remainder of her clothing.

She had painted the apartment room by room, then stood there among the furniture boxes, staring at her two suitcases. Her whole life fit into these little containers. When she was younger she was proud of such things, of her efficiency, her lack of need of possessions or connections. Staring at them now at thirty five years of age, being face to face with her past for the last two months, she found it sad.

Jasper could die this very instant and all she would have to show for it is a handful of photos, a ring, a torn up sweatshirt, some pieces of bamboo, and a serial killer’s dog. Her childhood had been an experiment in surviving, barely scraping by, then culminating in a brutal, blood soaked end. She’d spent her entire adult life hiding in the shadows, thriving in darkness and anonymity, and suddenly she was faced with the very real idea that sometime over the past eighteen years she had become… nothing.

It was that thought that drove her from the apartment, fleeing into the cool D.C. night. She’d grabbed a sweater off the back of that obnoxious armchair, as D.C. in September had humid days, but chilly nights. She knew she cut an odd figure, her thick wool socks pulled over the bottoms of her black leggings, combat boots, and her hand-knitted sweater barely able to fit over her big hair, covered almost head to toe in emerald paint. She shoved it over head anyway, feeling the static from the wool sending her hair from paint-stained poofy to frizzy.

Her feet carried her on autopilot, her mind racing to places she didn’t want it to as she ran to the safety of Moe’s, Booger trailing behind her on his leash. The scent of hotcakes and fries hit her as soon as the door opened. It made her eyes water, but she smiled through it. It was still early, the diner bustling with the after-work crowd, most of whom were staring at her ridiculous appearance. She spotted Spencer in their booth in the corner, and wove her way through the aisle.

She plopped down in the booth, startling Spencer out of his book coma. He smiled at her, and she smiled back. They had been ‘bumping’ into one another at Moe’s for weeks now, conveniently at the same time, ever since that first girl’s night where she’d drunkenly wandered back in here after a decade and a half.

Booger settled down between their feet, always creating a barrier between them in case of an accidental footsie moment, the table barring them from getting closer than two feet. Since the night in Alabama they avoided touch, or getting within a certain distance of the other. It was an unspoken agreement, as though they both knew that getting too close would spell either trouble or worse- reconciliation.

“I’m starving,” she told him, rubbing her tummy and glaring down at the menu. She knew she’d order waffles, but she liked to see the specials. She adjusted her glasses and pretended to be very interested in them as Spencer gave her a confused look.

“I thought the plan was to order pizza for your housewarming party,” he said, tapping a finger against the side of his coffee mug. By his tone, she could tell he had some smug all-knowing smile on his face.

“I thought you were going to eat pizza at my housewarming party,” she looked back up at him, then motioned to his half-empty plate. His face turned a bit red and he brought his mug up to hide his mouth.

“Maybe I was hoping to run into you here today.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“JASPER DONNELLY!” a voice came loudly behind her. Jasper’s eyes widened, her back coiling tightly in prepared self-defense as she tried to place it.

“Moe’s back from Ireland,” Spencer grinned, and Jasper felt a matching one spread across her paint-streaked face. She turned in her seat to see Moe McArthur, standing proud and tall in the center of the diner. Her fiery red hair had turned white over the years, her green eyes still as bright as the last time Jasper had seen her. Her plump figure still looked beautiful in that blue diner getup, and Jasper felt herself rising to stand and give her a fierce hug.

They met half way through the aisle, chests meeting with a heavy thump as their arms enclosed one another. Moe squeezed her tight, surprised laughter bubbling from her throat. She pulled back and stared at Jasper in wonder.

“José said he had a surprise for me when I came back from visiting my ma, but I had no idea it would be you!” she said, scanning Jasper’s wild appearance with a concerned eye. “Girl, you’re a mess! What have you been doing?”

“Painting,” Jasper chuckled, self consciously trying to smooth down her poofed rat’s nest. “Finally got myself an apartment a few blocks away.”

“So, does that mean that you two, ” Moe asked, motioning between her and Spencer. “Are you back together?”

Her eyes were full of hope, and Jasper hated to have to shake her head. Moe’s face fell instantly, but she quickly replaced it with a smile.

“We’re just working together on the same team. Freak coincidence,” Jasper told her, nodding awkwardly.

“Well, as long as you’re not makin’ up in my bathrooms, I’m glad to see you here together.” Jasper’s face went hot, and behind her she heard Spencer scoff. She turned to find him covering his face with both hands. Moe released her with the promise of some waffles, shooing Jasper back to the booth.

It took Spencer a few moments to look back up at her, and she pretended to read the menu again to try and hide the red covering her own cheeks. They chatted for a little bit while they ate, of course never about anything real, but about their current cases or past ones, then headed back to Jasper’s new place for the dreaded party.

Booger walked between them the two blocks back to the apartment, tail wagging happily and tongue hanging out. He liked Spencer, enjoyed the belly rubs and ear tugs Spencer would give him when they were together. Jasper was surprised that Booger was adjusting so well, as the research she’d done on abused dogs told her that their road to healing was long and hard, but the kindness both the BAU and the Misfits showed him were certainly making it easier.

Jasper unlocked her door and swung it open, surprised to see the whole team already sitting around her living room. Luke and Walker were assembling her couch while Penelope and the others sat on the various little seats and cabinets that they had already finished making up. The pizza boxes sat open and half eaten while they all chatted, but their eyes turned to her and Spencer as they closed the door behind them. Booger went straight to Roxy to steal her bone, but Garcia just produced another one and tossed it to him.

“And just where have you two been?” Emily asked with a smile. Jasper turned to Luke and his stupid grin with a glare.

“I gave you that key for emergencies,” she glowered, tossing her purse on the floor and heading for the kitchen for a bottle of water. She pulled two out of the fridge and handed one to Spencer as she came back into the room.

“The pizza was getting cold and I was tired of waiting for you,” Luke told her, focusing back on fixing the legs to the bright yellow couch. Walker chuckled and shared a knowing glance with Rossi before handing Luke another tool.

“Yeah, we waited a whole two minutes for you guys,” Lewis said. She sat on the floor, her long legs crossed as she munched on a slice.

“So?” JJ asked, “Why were you two late?”

“I went out for a coffee and ran into Spencer,” Jasper offered. Spencer nodded, taking a suspiciously long swig of his water.

“And where did you two just ‘run into’ each other?” Rossi asked from the fuschia chair, looking all too at home in it.

“The Grind,” she and Spencer said together. They didn’t look at one another, and Jasper was just glad he had the same thought as she did. She didn’t want the team knowing they’d been getting food together at the same time over the last few months, and it seemed Spencer didn’t want them to know either.

This seemed to satisfy the team, and they all went about assembling more of the random furniture and hanging up paintings around the place. Garcia was obsessed with the color schemes, and showed Jasper pictures of her own crazily decorated place. She thought the tech analyst and Oona would get along well, and the two of them paired up with Billy would be a power team in decorating and fashion had they had their own Netflix show.

She and Spencer found themselves in her bedroom with Rossi, putting together the gold bed frame while Rossi watched from yet another chair.

“Fuck this,” Jasper eventually grunted, sitting back from the frame and tugging her sweater over her head. “We should just toss this stupid thing out the window.”

“I think it’s cute,” Spencer offered, continuing to screw together the headboard. His shirt was unbuttoned a few spaces at the top, his sleeves rolled up as he worked on the bed. A bit of sweat was beginning to form on the hollow of his throat, and Jasper couldn’t blame the feeling she got looking at him on alcohol this time.

“It’s not worth the effort. I can just put the mattress on the floor,” she said, snatching her water bottle from the dresser and taking an angry swig. “I slept on rocks in Iraq, this would already be nicer than that.”

“You’re settling in, Jasper. We get this done now and you don’t have to worry about it ever again,” he told her, giving her a serious look. “And you get to make your bed every day like you like to do.”

“I bet you still leave yours a mess,” she muttered, and Rossi murmured an agreement.

“It’s easier that way. I spend time on things that matter.”

“Like stuffing books in your microwave?” she countered, smiling at the bitchy look Spencer gave her. “How’s your book pile lookin’?”

“Pile?” Rossi asked, laughing heartily. “Singular? Now it’s nothing but piles. The kid’s barely got a floor to walk on in that place.”

“I have a system,” Spencer defended himself, “I know where everything is.”

“You have an eidetic memory, Stick. You don't even need to keep them!” Jasper moved over to Rossi’s chair and leaned against it, happy to let Spencer do all the work setting up the dumb frame.

“I like to make notes in the margins. Besides, you reread books too. You read The Lord of the Rings about nine hundred times when we were together.”

“That’s because it’s a masterpiece,” Jasper told him firmly. She loved that series. Sam used to read it to her when they’d go to Tate’s Clearing late at night. He always teared up when Boromir died, and got himself worked up each time Sam gave Frodo an uplifting speech. She used to love hearing Sam do all the voices and sing the songs in the books. He would have loved to see the movies, but died before he got the chance to watch any of them.

She’d gone to the theaters by herself, sitting in the very back row on each opening night, sobbing to herself in the darkness. She bought the movies eventually, but nothing held up to reading the books and picturing Sam grunting along to the dwarves, or trying to teach her elvish.

“Hey,” Emily interrupted them, stepping into the room and flashing her phone. “We’ve got a case, we’ll have to finish this when we get back.”

They left the bedframe and mattress on the floor in the room, then left the apartment. She scrubbed paint off her face in the car while they dropped Booger and Roxy off with their sitter Lily and headed back to the BAU for yet another round of horrors.

Oklahoma- Eleven Years Ago

Luke woke slowly, as he always did. Years of chasing fugitives and living in warzones had taught him to wake his ears first, listening and testing the area around him for any intrusion, then carefully opening his eyes.

He was in some town in Oklahoma, searching for a convict and staying in a small hotel in the center of the city. He had been exhausted by the time he made it back to the bed, tired from interviewing witnesses and chasing leads that led nowhere. He lay on the stiff bed for a moment before he realized his body had woken him up for a reason.

Somebody was in the room.

“Get up, Alvez,” a voice came from the darkness, and Luke knew he was caught. He opened his eyes slowly, but the room was too dark to see anything clearly. He sat up, holding his hands up to show the intruder he was not going to cause any trouble. His gun was underneath his pillow, but until he saw the figure, he wouldn’t be able to use it to much success.

“What do you want?”

The lamp on the other side of the room flicked on, and Jack Keaton sat in the chair next to the TV stand, a Desert Eagle in one hand.

“We need to go,” Jack said, his face grim and tired. The dark circles underneath his eyes and his rumpled clothing told Luke that his friend hadn’t slept in a while.

“What’s going on, Jack?” he asked, sliding out of the sheets. He reached down and pulled on his jeans, then shrugged his shirt on.

“We need to go,” Jack repeated. His eyes were bloodshot, his demeanor frightened and ready for a fight at the same time. There was no way he was leaving without Luke, and there was no way he’d let Jack leave in such a state anyway.

“Where’s Jasper?”

“We’re going to get her. I can’t do it by myself, and you’re the only person besides her that I trust.”

Luke only nodded, tossing the pillow from the bed to show his own gun, then slowly slid it into his holster and attached it to his belt. He knew what Jack meant. The trust held between the three of them was strong, the things they’d been through and done together tying a tighter bond than anything else could. He would do anything for Jasper and Jack, and knew without a doubt that they would do the same for him.

The ride to Dallas was tense and quiet. Jack didn’t seem inclined to answer many questions, and Luke wasn’t sure he wanted answers. The little he knew of Jack and Jasper’s jobs told him enough. They were dangerous, fierce and violent, and because of that and their efficiency they got the green light to continue whatever work they were doing.

He’d gotten a letter from Jasper a few months earlier. It held a handful of photos of her and Jack getting married, as well as a few photos from their time together in Iraq.

Sorry you couldn’t be there, we decided not to wait. We’ll be in New York in December, enjoying our retirement road trip, and you’re getting a drink with us whether you like it or not. Get me a nice wedding present, yeah? I hear blenders are all the rage with us housewives.

-xo Kicker

No return address, no postmark, which meant it was hand delivered. Luke wasn’t sure if she had delivered it herself or had someone else do it, but he knew he’d never given her his address in the Bronx. Those two always had a flair for the dramatic and mysterious and it was best not to question it.

“Jack,” Luke decided, “I need to know what’s going on. Just tell me something.”

“She never came home from the store. I went down there and found her car, and the groceries, but Sugar was nowhere to be found.”

“He took her,” Jack grunted after a moment, whiteknuckling the steering wheel. “I found them, but I can’t save her by myself. I’ll just get us both killed.”

“Who took her?”

Jack turned to him, and for a moment Luke was sure he was riding with a ghost. His face was white, lips pressed into a grim line as tears pricked his red-rimmed eyes.

“A monster.”

They stopped two blocks from the location, making the rest of the way on foot. They approached an old warehouse in lower Dallas. It was littered with homeless camps and tents, broken syringes and bottles scattered all over. Near the docks, it offered little escape for people running from raids and police. The few people coherent enough to see their drawn guns skittered away, hiding in the shadows and pretending not to notice.

“I’m pretty sure she’s in the basement, but we should start from the top floor and sweep down,” Jack told him, pointing to the fourth floor. They made their way quietly up the stairwells, softly closing doors and moving in silence.

They cleared the top four floors, then made their way to the bottom. Jack was lagging, the lack of sleep and the stress catching up with him. The gold band on his left ring finger caught the dim lights here and there, and Luke feared for his friend’s sanity if they didn’t find Jasper alive.

Jack’s foot slid on a syringe, and it cracked loudly beneath his boot. They froze, solid as statues as they listened for any movement. They heard feet shuffle across the concrete, then silence. They locked eyes for a moment, then made their way down to the basement.

They swept room by room, until they found the boiler room. The light shone under the door, the sounds of sputtering and coughing echoed through the hallway. Jack used one hand to slowly turn the knob, his gun pointed center mass to hit anyone on the other side.

The lights were almost blinding in the dank darkness of the warehouse. Jack and Luke swept the room, trying to avoid the sight before them.

Jasper hung by her wrists to some piping. She was covered in blood. It pooled and caked down her arms, bones shining bright white against her red and olive skin. Bruises blossomed across her exposed stomach, her face beat purple and swollen. Her hair clung to her skull from sweat and blood, her little chest heaving from being suspended and tortured. The table in front of her was littered with knives, all covered in blood, a broken baseball bat laid at her feet.

“Baby,” Jack whispered, holstering his gun as he went to his wife. Jasper’s head snapped up and she began to struggle, snapping her jaws and snarling like a wild animal, her eyes glossy and unhinged.

“Baby, stop!” he pleaded. Luke pulled a knife from his boot and cut the wires. Jack caught her in his arms, setting her lightly on the floor as the fight left her body. “I’m gonna get you home, Sugar, I’m gonna get you safe.”

“Jack?” Jasper croaked. Her body wracked with sobs, going limp in his arms. Her chest heaved as she struggled to breathe. The blood began anew, pouring out of her arms as she looked around blindly, trying to catch sight of them.

Luke shrugged off his jacket, wrapping Jasper’s arms tightly as she cried out in pain. He shushed her while Jack patted her hair, trying to urge her to calm down.

A bottle skittered across the floors, and Jack’s head shot toward the door. He looked to Luke, his eyes feral and angry, then to Jasper. He softened, leaned down and kissed her forehead.

“Jack…” Jasper breathed, moving toward his warmth as best she could.

“Stay with her,” Jack commanded, clamping a firm hand down on his shoulder. He took one last look at his wife, then bolted out the door, gun in hand.

Luke knew he couldn’t keep Jasper here, in this dirty room with tourniquets and needles littering the scrubby floors. He waited a few moments, listening for a scuffle, but heard nothing. He scooped Jasper in his arms, doing his best to block out her moans of protest. She kept muttering Jack’s name as sweat poured off her in waves. Luke had to get her out of here and to a hospital.

Creeping down the hallway, he paused before going up the stairwell. He tried to not shift Jasper around too much, as the slightest movement made her gasp and cry. He thanked some higher power as they finally escaped onto the streets. A few junkies gasped at Jasper’s battered body, but Luke ignored them. He hustled with her down to where the car was parked.

“Jack?” Jasper stirred, trying to wriggle out of Luke’s arms. “Where’s Jack?”

“Stop moving, Kicker. You’re hurt. I’m gonna get you to the hospital.”

“No,” Jasper groaned, kicking her legs out then crying in pain, “Eli’s gonna kill him.”

“Jasper, stay still!” he commanded, lowering her to the ground next to the car. He couldn’t wait for Jack, but knowing Jasper, she’d launch herself out of a moving car to get to him. He looked around frantically, searching the darkness for him.

A gunshot rang out, loud and clear in the night, and Jasper sat up sharply, eyes alert and fierce. Luke couldn’t imagine the agony she must be in, but as always, she ignored it to save Jack.

Two figures ran at them from a distance. Another gunshot exploded through the air, the flash of a muzzle illuminating the street for a moment. They were running toward the docks, curses and snarls echoing around them. One of them disappeared for a moment, then a car started up.

The last thing Luke could make out in the night was Jack, hanging on for dear life on the top of an old muscle car as it roared past them and overwhelmed the street, tail lights disappearing from sight as the car drove over the docks and directly into the water. An explosion bloomed on the horizon, and Jasper began to scream.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Whew! A lot happened here today! Please let me know what you thought about it, or if you have any theories!

also, the way Jasper's living room is set up is modeled after mine! I have a lovely yellow velvet couch and am buying the fuschia armchair soon <3 I've got orange curtains and little gold accent pieces all over, as well as a table full of orchids! But my plants are real, I just don't think Jasper has the mindset to keep them alive XD

- Smurph ❤

Forever Taglist:

@simplyparker,@spencerreidsmommy

[morbid-n-macabre]

Doctor Death

Doctor Jack Kevorkian was a brilliant man; he was an inventor, a gifted artist, music composer, a movie producer, a pathologist, and a rebel with a cause. The doctor was very active in the Right To Die movement. Kevorkian believed that a person with a terminal illness should be able to choose their own ending, and he went beyond just fighting for this right; the doctor broke the law by ending the lives of dying patients who came to him for help. He blatantly did what he thought should be done, the law be damned.

Jack's parents, Levon and Satenig Kevorkian, had been refugees who escaped the Armenian massacres after losing much of their family. In America they quickly settled in Pontiac, Michigan, and had 3 kids; baby Jack was born on May 26, 1928. In 1953 his country needed him, so Jack went to Korea with the army to serve as a medical officer for 15 months. Later, Dr Kevorkian watched his own beloved mother waste away from cancer; she'd wished for death, but her doctors had refused to help end her misery. This greatly affected the doctor, and after his Mama's passing, he decided he was going to help those who were in her position. Dr Kevorkian frequented flea markets in search of the parts which he would need for his assisted suicide machine; this machine held 3 canisters: one contained a barbiturate called sodium thiopental, another held saline solution, and the last contained a mix of potassium bromide and pancuronium bromide. He could hook the suffering patient up to the machine, but they would have to be the one to flip the switch themselves. Dr Kevorkian purchased a rusty old VW Van to travel around in, and he was ready to help those who needed his services.

Dr Kevorkian traveled from place to place, helping people from all over the country. Once word spread, he received phone calls each and every day from suffering people begging for help. He would meet with these people and their families, video record the meeting of his patient expressing their will to stop the pain, then he'd make an appointment time to help them. It's reported that at least 130 people crossed over with the help of Dr Jack Kevorkian.

The good doctor was not quiet about what he was doing, he even wrote reports about it. Kevorkian was tried 4 times for assisting in suicide between 1994 and 1997; he was acquitted 3 times, the 4th was deemed a mistrial. Dr Kevorkian probably would've gone through life helping people die without ever seeing the inside of a prison, but he just couldn't help but push the envelope; Jack actually called the TV show 60 Minutes because he wanted to do an episode about his life's work, he even handed producers a video of the assisted suicide of 52 year old man in the final stages of Lou Gehrig's disease. This was a huge mistake as this particular patient, Thomas Youk, hadn't passed by his own hand; Dr Jack actually had given the man an injection which ended his life. During this 60 Minutes special, the Doctor even dared the government to prosecute him; after said special aired on November 22nd of 1998, the law took the good doctor up on that dare. Dr Jack was charged with first degree murder. He acted as his own attorney and a Michigan jury found Dr. Jack Kevorkian guilty of 2nd degree murder; he was sentenced to 10-25 years in prison, and finally freed in 2007.

Once released it doesn't appear that Doctor Kevorkian helped anyone else pass over; if he did, it was done very quietly. That said, the doctor did continue the good fight; he went into politics, he did everything he could to bring the Right To Die movement front and center. He also began to paint the "dark side" of life, as he called it; these were macabre paintings which you'd never guess were made by an elderly doctor. The painting with the severed head, that's actually the doctor's blood he used to paint with! To heck with Gacy, I want one one Kevorkian's artworks!

On June 3rd of 2011, Dr Jack Kevorkian passed away at the age of 83; he'd been fighting liver problems caused by hepatitis C for years, and eventually liver cancer. His legacy certainly lives on: today 8 states have some sort of right to die act in place, they are California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. Maybe this is a product of Jack's sacrifice.

Some remember this man as a killer, others embrace him as a hero; if you've ever watched someone you love suffer at the end of their life, you probably understand why his work was so important. We can choose to end our pet's suffering right now if needed, but we are not permitted to end our own. Does that seem just to you?

*I also must mention that it's been claimed some of Dr Kevorkian's patients did not have a terminal illness, but Jack helped them end their pain anyhow.

** if you're interested in a documentary about him, I'll add a link to HBO's "KEVORKIAN". (Working link, as always, available on the public fb page, Morbid N' Macabre)

https://youtu.be/D8_Ket4prGU

[dark-and-twisty-01]

The Death of Aileen Wuornos

It was disturbingly easy to watch as the state put Aileen Wuornos to death

Published October 10, 2002 STARKE -- Even for the witnesses, there was no escape. At 9:28 a.m., a guard shut the door we had just walked through and locked it from the inside. All of Florida State Prison was on lockdown Wednesday morning, the exercise yards and work fields eerily empty beneath a low gray sky. All of the roughly 1,200 inmates housed here -- except one -- were in their cells. Now the room where we'd watch Aileen Wuornos die was sealed, too. The guard pointed me to a seat in the last of four rows. There were 29 people in the room, including six relatives of Wuornos' victims, 12 journalists, a state prosecutor and various Department of Corrections officials. We sat ramrod straight, staring at the brown curtain that separated the large viewing window from the execution chamber. Two speakers were mounted on opposite ends of the wall above the window. All was silent, except for the hum of a Friedrich air conditioner set on low cool in the rear corner. We were a captive audience, brought together to witness the aptly bizarre end of a twisted life. We had different viewpoints, different roles, different feelings, but for 20 excruciatingly long minutes, we sat together as a killer was killed. There wasn't an inattentive eye in the house. But after the ritualized pageant was over, after she stiffened and turned blue and two men with stethoscopes leaned over her body and officially pronounced her dead at 9:47 a.m., I didn't feel nearly as disturbed as I would have thought. And that was disturbing in itself. At 9:29 a.m., the curtain opened. Wuornos was strapped onto a gurney, with a needle leading to two intravenous tubes poked into the fleshy bend of her right arm. Her mouth and lips were moving, but we could not hear. The microphone dangling above her was off, our wall speakers mute. Her eyes were open, darting to the side from her restrained head to quickly survey the witness room. "She seemed a little surprised to see so many people," Terri Griffith, who sat in the front row, said later. Her father, Charles Humphreys, was one of seven men Wuornos confessed to murdering. "I know she appreciated the attention." Wuornos was tucked beneath a white sheet, which was folded with military precision under her feet and around her neck and shoulders. She looked like a made bed. The only visible parts of her body: her head and her right arm. Final statement The digital clock on the wall above her changed to 9:30. The microphone was turned on. "Do you have a final statement?" she was asked. "Yes," she said. "I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the Rock, and I'll be back. Like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, just like the movie, big mother ship and all. I'll be back." She spoke in a barely audible voice, with speech that seemed slurred even though officials said she did not request or receive a sedative in her final hours. I could hardly make out a word, the low volume and air conditioner causing those of us in the back corner to exchange horrified glances and whisper, "What'd she say? I couldn't hear." Later, on the van ride back to the media area, those closer to the speakers helped to reconstruct her words. As to what they meant, nobody could figure that out. "She was off her rocker," Griffith said. "She's totally off the wall," said Wanda Pouncey of Boynton Beach, whose father, Troy Burress, was killed by Wuornos. That conclusion was echoed by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who made a documentary about Wuornos and is working on another. He had the final interview with her on Tuesday. After complaining about the "sonic waves" that were controlling her mind, she flipped him off and stormed out of the session prematurely. "She's obsessed and crazed, has totally lost her mind," Broomfield said. "She trusts nobody and is stark raving mad. She's multiple people. Every time I met her, she was a different person." It's a point that Fort Lauderdale attorney Raag Singhal made, to no avail, in a letter to the Florida Supreme Court last month. Singhal represented Wuornos earlier this year, but they weren't on speaking terms at the end. She was found competent to be executed after a psychiatric evaluation last week. I traveled with Singhal to Starke, then found myself boarding the van to the witness room when two journalists didn't claim their spots. As second alternate in the media lottery, I thought I'd be covering this execution from outside. But at 9:30 a.m., when it came time for the matter of the State of Florida vs. Wuornos to reach its conclusion after 12 years, I got to see it for myself. The woman who once said she'd kill again because she had "hate crawling through her system," now had a chemical cocktail coursing through her veins. The executioner, who could not be seen behind a two-way mirror, first released two syringes of sodium pentothol, which rendered her unconscious. Then came two syringes of pancuronium bromide, which paralyzed the muscles, and two syringes of potassium chloride, which stopped the heart. The next 17 minutes were agonizingly slow, and she didn't move a muscle, although her heart fluttered a bit on the monitors until she completely flat-lined. Then the doctors in white coats came out. The curtain was drawn, the door was unlocked and we filed back outside to the vans that would take us back to the rest of our lives. I made it home in time for dinner. Simple ritual No matter how you feel about the death penalty, watching another human being get put to death is not supposed to be easy. But this was all so smooth, so clinical, so antiseptic, that it was disturbingly easy. Too easy for everyone. Victims' relatives thought it was too easy for Wuornos, whose chest heaved once and whose eyes shut before reopening ever so slightly, in tiny slits, after the lethal mix of chemicals pumped through her veins. With vengeance and bloodlust, some relatives said they wanted to see her suffer more, preferably in the electric chair with flames and smoke shooting. It was too easy for Gov. Jeb Bush, who carried out two executions on consecutive Wednesdays a month before an election. Rigoberto Sanchez-Velasco came last week, Wuornos this week. It was an especially distasteful coincidence considering there hadn't been an execution since January 2001 and there are now major constitutional issues concerning the death penalty in Florida that should be sorted out by courts. And it's too easy to say Wuornos was evil incarnate, unrepentant and a willing participant in her own death. She was all those things, but she was also obviously mentally ill. After hearing her final statement and hearing about her bizarre behavior, I don't know how any civilized society can take satisfaction in proclaiming her mentally fit before putting her down like a rabid dog. Outside, somebody later remarked that anyone who kills more than one person is probably inherently insane. Florida has killed 53 people since the death penalty resumed in 1976, administered in a way that often seems arbitrary and unfair. What does that make us?

[glittergummicandypeach]

The Tyranny of Politesse: Why Decency Does Not Require us to Wish Trump a Full and Speedy Recovery | Religion Dispatches

Let me state for the record. There is no moral obligation to wish Trump a full recovery from Covid-19. I certainly do not. Even the Bidens, Kamala Harris, and Rachel Maddow seem to feel that hoping for Trump’s recovery is a mandatory decency.

I strongly disagree.

But, I’ve been asked: how can this reaction be compatible with basic human compassion for all? How can a Christian like myself, coming out of a “love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek” tradition not hope and pray for Trump’s full recovery? How can I, an Emeritus Professor of Moral Theology at Marquette University say that I do not hope for his full recovery or that of newly Covid-19 positive Republican Senators, the sycophantic base for Trump’s lethality?

The definition of a tyrant by oppression (tyrannus in regimine) is a ruler “who uses his power arbitrarily and oppressively.” Trump is a tyrant and a moral criminal. His murderous negligence and mendacity has so far abetted the painful deaths of over 215,000 women, men, and children; caused millions more people to be infected, perhaps permanently impaired; and caused millions of adults along with their children to fall into lethal poverty. All this while leading the attack on a sick planet already in critical condition. That is tyranny on steroids.

I do not endorse the right to tyrannicide, defended historically even by Catholic theologians who wrote before there were democratic alternatives. Thus, I would not approve of deliberately infecting him. But when he flouts all precautions and gets himself infected (thus making his tyranny less feasible and his defeat more likely) I have no sympathy for him or for his Republican enablers who are complicit in his bloody criminal guilt.

What do the Gospels say?

The most quoted lines in the gospel, Matthew 38-48, are also the most misunderstood lines in the Christian Scriptures. These are the verses about turning the other cheek and loving your enemy. Biblical scholarship shows that this passage is actually the basis for a Christian philosophy of non-violent resistance. However, it’s been crudely and cruelly interpreted as cowardly passivism in the face of injustice. Wives have been told to turn the other cheek when abused by a spouse. Slaves were told to obey their brutal slave-masters. This abused text was widely taken as a call for a slavish submission to evil.

Don’t put that on Jesus!

If he’d been preaching a message of passive compliance and submission to unjust leaders, he could have died in his bed at a ripe old age. He was killed because he resisted unjust aggression nonviolently with searingly harsh invective and with civil disobedience. In John 18:23, when he was struck on the cheek in his trial he did not turn the other cheek, he protested.

No cowering victim was he: he blasted evildoers in a way that makes our toughest pundits today seem timid, calling them “hypocrites,” “vultures,” and “blind fools” who are like beautifully whitewashed tombs, looking respectable on the outside, but inside full of the fetid stench of “robbery,” “hypocrisy,” and “crime.”

Jesus was not one to shrink before the tyranny of specious politesse. It’s been said that it’s no surprise that Jesus was killed; it’s only surprising he wasn’t killed sooner.

In Jesus terms, our criticism of Trump has been too timid. We really are a pack of wimps. His robust and courageous resistance to evil wrought by the religious and political powers of his day got him killed. In a story told in all four Gospels, he created a ruckus in the temple where civil and religious leaders conspired like thieves. He loudly labeled this tainted sanctuary “a den of thieves.” The Temple was a definite no-go zone for resisters. Some scholars think his death followed within just a few days.

Rome and the religious leaders had a vested interest in keeping this place a stabilizing paragon of “law and order.” And Jesus took on their “law and order” and paid the price. (It’s interesting to note that Jesus’ brother James was also executed as a rebel. It tells you a lot about their mother who raised two such firebrands. She certainly doesn’t fit the stereotype of the pious unthreatening woman who “knew her place,” as the sugary “lovely lady dressed in blue” would have it.)

Responses to Trump’s diagnosis

The news that Trump had tested positive for Covid 19 led to the cliche du jour “I hope and pray for his full recovery.” Along with this came a storm surge of that hackneyed vacuity: “I will keep him in my thoughts and prayers.” (It’s a safe—and not at all cynical—assumption that many who intone that banality don’t mean it and will never deliver on those prayers. Indeed, let’s declare a national moratorium on that syrupy “thoughts and prayers” bromide.)

Step back for a moment and remember that human decency does not preclude honesty. Indeed it requires it. In an act of collective candor, let us admit: there is a joy, and not necessarily an ignoble joy, in seeing someone hoisted on his own blood-soaked petard. There is good as well as bad schadenfreude.

I know many who have honestly and openly expressed joyful satisfaction upon hearing the news of Trump’s diagnosis. I certainly did. One nonagenarian who has specialized in social justice work all her life said that if her legs would permit it she would have danced when she heard of the diagnosis.

A corrupt Republican-controlled Senate will stand by as Trump’s malfeasance in office spreads havoc from caged children torn from their parents’ arms to the most mismanaged response to coronavirus in the world. Those Republican senators now contracting covid get no sympathy from me. Nature has stepped in and given them a taste of the horror they endorsed and encouraged. Many religious persons would call it providential.

Praying or just hoping this tyrant, this unjust aggressor, will get well enough to continue his crime spree is strange, not benevolent or pious. And Trump’s crime spree does continue as he malignantly insists from the pulpit of the White House that the virus is just another little old flu, failing to account for the over 200,000 people who have died of it. I weep not for him, but for his victims.

This content was originally published here.

[libertariantaoist]

WHY?

Years from now, when the history of this war is written, acres of print will be devoted to the question of the real cause (or causes) of the conflict: already, as we head into Day 37 of the crisis, the two big questions that loom in the minds of baffled Americans are: "Why Kosovo?" and "Why now?"

THE  WASHINGTON FACTOR

NATO  would naturally like us to believe that the Serbians, and specifically        Slobodan Milosevic, started this war by cracking down on their Kosovar        subjects; and that, furthermore, the Serbs are responsible for all the        region's problems. Yet the complex history of the Balkans, with its Byzantine        intrigues and unique intersections of politics, ethnicity, and religion, rules out this or any other mono-causal theory. Apart from a history rich with incident, in which the historical struggle of Serbs and Turkic invaders takes on the scale of an epic saga, outside factors have always played a decisive role in bring the Balkan cauldron to a boil. That is especially true this time around. In the era of American hegemony, what is happening in Washington, DC, the imperial capital, is at least as important to the peoples of the former Yugoslavia as what policies are being pursued in Belgrade – and, I would argue, more so.

NO ORDINARY EVIL

Why are we at war with Serbia? The primary causes of the war have little to        do with anything that is now occurring (or said to be occurring) in the        Balkans; nor is it a conspiracy of war profiteers, bound and determined to wring mega-profits out of the agony of the Serbian nation (although surely there are war profiteers aplenty, who are profiting from a war they naturally support). Some have pointed to the valuable mineral rescues under this much-disputed patch of territory; the war, they say, is motivated by greed. But mobilizing the military might of the nineteen NATO nations, not to mention the U.S., seems an awful lot of trouble to go through in order to acquire a few mines. Least credible of all is the theory of the "humanitarian" origins of this war: before the U.S. intervened, less than 2,000 people had been killed in Kosovo, not all of them Kosovars but also many Serbs who died at the hands of a terroristic "Kosovo        Liberation Army." American intervention has led to the exact opposite of its announced intent: instead of "saving" the Kosovars, U.S. meddling has worsened their pitiable condition, a result that was entirely predictable. No, none of these rather prosaic reasons really explain such a monstrous evil: such ordinary human motivations as greed, pride, compassion, and national feeling seem entirely too prosaic to explain why a six-year-old Serbian girl was killed, yesterday, in a NATO bombing raid that killed twenty people in her village and wiped out her entire family.

GLOBAL  AGENDA

What killed her was ideology. Not the familiar ideological bogeymen said to        haunt the Balkan landscape – which, as we all know, are xenophobia,        racism, nationalism, and other extreme forms of political incorrectness – but a militant and deadly dangerous globalism that has entranced American elites in the post-Cold War world and hypnotized certain powerful politicians. With the death of Communism, the end of the conservative crusade against the masters of the Kremlin has caused many old Cold Warriors to cast about for new enemies to confront, new conspiracies to counter. Likewise on the Left, a new spirit of internationalism has revived an otherwise moribund domestic agenda, revitalizing such tired old bromides as "national purpose" and bringing back into vogue such phrases as "standing should-to shoulder" that have not been heard in liberal circles since the great antifascist struggle of the thirties and forties. The end of the Cold War, far from giving us a respite from international tensions, has infused these ideological warriors with a new martial spirit: in the absence of any competition, any great power to stand in our way, the world is ours to supervise and shape, and both the Left and the Right have their own global agendas, which in substance if not in style have much in common. They have come together over the issue of Kosovo: the Weekly Standard and the New Republic; internationalist conservatives and their liberal counterparts, each with their own distinct (but similar) views of how and why the U.S. must shoulder its sacred and indisputable responsibility as the Last Superpower.

PORTRAITS OF THE WAR PARTY: THE NEOCONS

On the Right, Kosovo is the latest cause of the neoconservatives, a sect        that is small in numbers but hugely influential in the media and in Washington.    The neoconservatives, or "neocons," have never amounted to more than a few dozen intellectuals and publicists, nearly all of whom seem to be newspaper columnists, magazine editors, and foundation officials. A high-powered bunch, many of them started out as militant anti-Stalinists who yet retained their socialist credentials (e.g. Sidney Hook) and wound up, twenty years later, in the camp of Ronald Reagan cheering on the Nicaraguan "contras." The domestic agenda of these political chameleons has changed with the circumstances of the moment: when liberalism was fashionable, they were liberals; when free-market shibboleths replaced liberal bromides as the conventional wisdom, these seekers after the main chance were suddenly "converted" to capitalism (as least enough to give it "two cheers"). From being advisors to Hubert Humphrey        and "Scoop" Jackson, they went on to become the intellectual vanguard of the "Reagan Revolution." But none of these domestic issues really moved them, or occupied a central place in their political affections. What really got them going, however, was the issue of Communism, i.e., foreign policy, which was their ruling passion. Their views were shaped by an overwhelming desire to destroy their old enemies, the Stalinists, and evolved over the years into a reflexive bellicosity. The death of Communism did not even break their stride: they were on the job warmongering full-time weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, looking alternately   at Islamic fundamentalism and the Chinese as potential stand-ins for the        Kremlin. While most conservatives in Congress reacted to the intervention        in Bosnia with something considerably less than enthusiasm, the Weekly       Standard, house organ of the neocons, scolded and mocked the Republicans     for their skepticism, accusing them of turning "isolationist." While disdaining any ostensibly humanitarian motives, for the neocons American intervention was and is a question of maintaining hegemony, not only in Europe but over the whole globe. Editor Bill Kristol has called for the United States to impose a "benevolent world hegemony" on the peoples of the earth, and urges America to drop the republican pretense and adopt a frankly imperial foreign policy. The globalism of the neocons is the old liberal internationalism dressed up in the self-consciously  "tough" rhetoric of hard-nosed power politics: instead of the "We-are-the-World-we-are-the-children" internationalism of Ted Turner and the Clinton administration, editor Kristol defended the 1995 bombing of the Serbs in typically Cro-Magnon terms: "The Serbs do not put down their guns because they trust America will treat them fairly." wrote the Weekly Standard editors. "They do so because they know we sympathize with Bosnia, and they trust only that we will kick their skulls in if they break the peace."

A MOTLEY COLLECTION

For years, Kristol and his fellow neocons have been ceaselessly agitating for war against Serbia. Now that they have it, they are devoting entire issues of their subsidized magazines to justifying it and arguing for its escalation and expansion. The war, they admit, is "going badly," but this is due to Clinton's mismanagement, not to any inherent flaws in his policy. The problem is his irresoluteness, his character, which prevents him from doing the brave thing, and that is starting the ground war immediately. And if Clinton will not start the war on the ground in Kosovo quite yet, then the neocons have wasted no time in waging a war of words against those conservative Republicans who have become the antiwar opposition of the new millennium. They are, as the Weekly Standard       put it, "a rather motley collection of neoisolationists who simply don't believe the United States should much concern itself with overseas matters not directly threatening the American homeland; of Clinton despisers who don't trust the administration to do any serious thing seriously . . . and of ultra-sophisticated 'realist' intellectuals who have divined that America has no interests in the Balkans and who claim that to combat Milosevic's aggression and brutality is merely to indulge in soft-headed liberal internationalism." The editors then roll out a long list of conservative stalwarts, all safely within the neocon orbit. How could crusty old Jean Kirkpatrick be described as "soft-headed"?

REALISM VERSUS SURREALISM

For the Weekly Standard to denounce "Clinton-despisers" is hypocrisy on such a scale that it defies quantification or even comprehension: after calling for his impeachment, week after week, and salivating over the dreary details of the President's peccadilloes, both personal and political, relentlessly and with mind-deadening monotony, to now hear from these very same people that we must follow our Commander-in-chief into battle without question or hesitation, would be funny if it weren't so monstrous. What kind of robots do they think conservatives are, that they can be turned on and off with the flick of a switch? As for these "ultra-sophisticated" intellectuals who champion "realism"  – how "sophisticated" does one have to be to question the value of intervening in a Godforsaken backwater like the Balkans? And why not inject a note of realism into the fancy formulations of foreign policy theoreticians, who ceaselessly invent "new architectures" and enunciate grandiose policies that their sons and daughters will never be asked to die for? It is high time somebody did.

THE  CLINTON-HATERS

The idea that conservatives are opposed to jumping into the Yugoslav quagmire  because they cannot abide Bill Clinton is wishful thinking on the part of Bill Kristol and his neocon clique: this war has really isolated them from what they hoped was going to be their mass base in the GOP, and cut them off from the rank-and-file of the conservative movement, perhaps permanently and irrevocably. The rightist response to the new internationalism has been so violent and so intransigent that even National Review, that old war-horse of Cold War militarism and Anglophilic Atlanticism has been forced to acknowledge it. The current issue [May 3, 1999] contains two apologias for Clinton's war: Zbigniew     Brzezinski and Andrew J. Bacevich bemoan Clinton's apparent unwillingness       to kill enough civilians in the bombing campaign and urge the immediate       dispatch of the 82nd Airborne into the streets of Belgrade. Michael Lind has taken time off from attacking the Christian Coalition and conservatives in general and is readmitted to the right-wing fold in time to add his endorsement to the need to unleash the Marines on Belgrade. But this issue also features two significant dissents, by Owen Harries (editor of The National Interest) and Mark Helperin (a novelist and a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal), whose eloquence and passion far outshines the pedestrian war-whoops that fill the rest of NR's pages. Harries is, one supposes, one of those "ultra-sophisticates"       denounced by the Weekly Standard for the vulgarity of their nouveau       realism. But Harries' elegant piece is not so easily dismissed. In terms of foreign policy, American ends, he argues, have always been contradicted by the means employed: the former are grandiose, the latter inadequate to the task. We got away with it for a while, because no one dared to challenge us: now, we have to put up or shut up. Although he never says so directly, one gets the distinct impression that Harries would rather have us shut up. His logic is impeccable: people never fight unless it is in their interest to do so, that is, unless they have to defend their  homes and their way of life against some actual or perceived aggression. No such aggression or threat now exists: ergo, the Americans will not  fight, and probably should not fight, for wider and more "idealistic" ends. Ripping aside the facade of "fakery," Harries makes the trenchant point that the Balkans, "properly considered . . . should be an insignificant backwater, and it has taken a good deal of determined, sustained political stupidity to make it otherwise." Harries also deconstructs the absurd propaganda device that equates Milosevic with Hitler: "The . . . characterization was nonsense, and, in typical Clinton fashion, we have heard no more about it since its initial trial        run." We are not up against a militant totalitarianism, but Serbian      nationalism, which, like the Vietnamese nationalism we fought unsuccessfully      two and a half decades ago, has all the advantages: "We are militarily much stronger than our adversary, but he has much more at stake than we have." Aside from the political unsustainability of a high-casualty ground war, "the second argument against going in deeper is that in the end it may succeed and that this may be even more daunting than defeat. Because what does one do then?" The answer: occupy Belgrade and the whole region for the next fifty years.

THAT SERBONIAN BOG

After touching on the problem of our client, the KLA – do we really want to back a Marxist-oriented guerrilla group with ties to the Albanian mafia and the international drug trade? – and warning of "an unstable, truculent Russia that still possesses 20,000 nuclear warheads (which can be sold as well as used)" – Harries quotes John Milton's "Paradise Lost":

         A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog          Betwist Damiata and Mount Casius old,          Where armies whole have sunk.

While Milton's geography may be dubious, his sense of Balkan history is sound;  Harries exhorts us to reflect long and hard before we sink much deeper  into the Serbonian bog.

A WARNING

In Helprin's piece ["A Fog That Descends From Above,"] the new        internationalism faces an even more withering scorn: as the instrument of Albanian separatism, U.S. policy in the Balkans is a standing invitation to disaster. As for the broader policy implications of our sudden championing of the Kosovar cause, Helprin asks: "Shall we join with the Basques in their struggle, or the Catalans, the Chechens, the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis?" And that is just the beginning: "If these do not suffice, Germanophones of the Alto-Adige would like very much to reattach themselves to Austria." The original purpose of NATO, to preserve the sovereignty of European nations against the centrifugal forces of secessionism and irredentism, has been not only nullified but inverted.  In both the terrain and those will be defending it against an American assault, the difficulties are inherent and obvious: one has only to familiarize oneself with the Serbian national literature, replete with such titles as Into the Battle, South     to Destiny, Reach to Eternity, and A Time of Death, and to remember that Tito's Partisans tied down 33 Axis divisions, to realize what we are up against in Serbia. "There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that an invasion to cover our miscalculations and elemental failings, and as an ally of radical ethnic Albanian separatism, and after a humanitarian crisis – that we provoked – has passed,      is not worth the life of a single American." As for those who believe it is, they are "unduly generous with other people's sons."

A SWAGGERING JUNKER

While Helprin bring passion and historical context to his argument, Brzezinski     and Bacevitch are sorely lacking in both departments. The former constructs       thought-patterns of alarming circularity: we must intervene to save NATO and prevent America's "global leadership" from being fatally undermined, but nowhere states why NATO is an end in itself, or why we have to expand its original mission. Rather, this is assumed, as is the "devastation" a withdrawal from the Balkans would wreak on "global stability." Brzezinski berates Clinton for not moving swiftly enough to save the Kosovars, but fails to say what course of action would have saved them. We must "shock and intimidate" the Serbs with our bombing campaign, he coldly states, but only succeeds in shocking rather     than convincing. There is a kind of Bismarckian arrogance in his jeremiad,       an imperious tone that any native-born American can only find repulsive.The same swaggering bullying tone, more appropriate to a German Junker of the last century than an American of any century, permeates Brzezinki's nine-point ultimatum to the Serbs: independence for Kosovo (how is this in our national interest? No answer) – no negotiations – and no more targeting restrictions: it's bombs away, and to hell with those Rembrandts! "Let's get serious" – that's the title of this Machiavellian manifesto – and we must make our commitment        "unambiguous and enduring." How long? Five, ten, twenty years  – what about fifty? There is no mention of costs, nor is there any sense that this Great Statesman has any sense of the limits of American power. The theme of this essay, and of Bacevich's, is an insufferable hubris that virtually begs to be shot down. Here, for example, is Bacevich bloviating on the alleged incompetence of the Yugoslav military: "Indeed, to attribute to the Yugoslav armed forces more than a minimal ability to wage conventional war against modern, professional forces is to give them far more credit than they deserve. These are hooligans and gangsters, not trained and disciplined soldiers." I don't think a people fighting a defensive war on their own soil against overwhelming odds can be called hooligans and gangsters, no matter what their politics: and if I were Mr. Bacevich, I would not be so sure that such a people, with such a history, will crumble at the first sign of battle. At least they are fighting for something tangible – their national sovereignty and identity – as opposed to the pallid abstraction of NATO, or the even more nebulous "New World Order." The only Americans who believe that these are worth a single life are newspaper columnists, television     talking heads, and thinktank policy wonks who wouldn't last very long on the battlefield.

THE NEOCONS: BACK TO THE LEFT?

Both National Review and the Weekly Standard invoke the names of the same Republican interventionists like a mantra: McCain, Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Bush and Dole II, etc. But they are clearly outnumbered, not only in the overwhelming opposition to this futile and destructive war among Republicans in Congress – as shown in the recent vote disavowing the air war and restricting the use of ground troops – but also among rank-and-file conservative Republicans, whose opposition is even more unequivocal. The recent convention of the California        Republican Assembly, the conservative activist group within the state GOP, recently adopted a strong resolution against the war with virtually no debate. Opposition to this war is not even mildly controversial among conservatives, and Clinton has little to do with it: they would question it no matter who was leading us into this quagmire, and it is high time the War Party acknowledged it. In the post-Cold War world, conservatives instinctively look askance at military intervention; as the memory of Communism recedes, what Eliot Cohen calls the "ornithological miracle," the transformation of hawks into doves and vice versa, is inevitable and inexorable. Sooner or later, the militant interventionism and global do-goodism that attracted the neocons to the ranks of the Right will be totally expunged from the conservative movement, and they will be forced to go back – back to the militant, do-gooding, global-crusading Left from which they      first emerged.

[heebiejbies]

Affliction - Chapter V

Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

Warnings: This series contains mentions of violence, abuse, and vulgar language.

Characters: Tao, Suho, Chanyeol, and Sehun

Word Count: 3.8k

“It is riskier to risk nothing when the life we live is always at risk.” 

“Yes, I remember him. He was missing up until a few months before his death. It’s a shame, someone so young to have died so quickly. I will admit, I was puzzled when they brought him in. He had scars all over his body that looked like he kept shooting up something over and over again. They were really bad on his neck as well, that really made no sense,” The medical examiner said, leading me back into her office. I had gone straight there after I left from visiting Tao. I was lucky enough that the medical examiner actually allowed me to view the reports she had made on Luhan. She laid the file down in front of me, letting me flip through the pages.

“There were so many things that I found that I classified as odd. He had ligature marks on his wrists and ankles, but they never found anything that led them to believe that he was restrained,” She continued.

“What was his official cause of death?” I asked.

“That’s where it gets weird. I found massive amounts of three different drugs in his bloodstream. Sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride.” She pointed out the section of her report where she noted the drugs and how high of a dosage each was.

“Wait, so you are telling me that he died as if he was lethally injected in prison? Why wasn’t this treated as a homicide, then?” I had studied those drugs in medical school, and we learned that they were each used in executions. I wasn’t sure if they still used them and could have access to them in prisons, but I knew who could have gained access to get all three of those.

“The detectives found multiple syringes around his house, and traces of all three drugs and more. The marks that he came in with are the same that you see from addicts. He injected them all by himself and he killed himself. With all of the drugs that were found in his apartment, it’s a wonder how he didn’t overdose earlier,” She said, but she didn’t sound like she believed it herself.

“Can I make copies of these?”

It was a little past dusk when I finally got back to my apartment building. I don’t know if it was because of the all day running around I did, or the stress from this whole situation that made me exhausted. Regardless of what the reason was, I knew I wouldn’t be getting much sleep until this whole ordeal was over and done with.

I was so tired, I didn’t notice someone waiting on the elevator when I stepped out of it. We collided into one another, the copies of the file spilling on the floor. “I’m so sorry!” The stranger exclaimed, hurrying to help me pick up my papers.

“Thank you, I really should watch where I am going. I’m just so tired that I,” I paused when I saw that I had bumped into the new neighbor that I bumped into a few days ago, “We keep meeting like this,” I joked.

“It appears so. I guess we both need to be watching where we are going,” He chuckled.

“What did you say your name was again?” I asked.

“Yifan. Wu Yifan.”

“Well, what did you say after that?” Tao questioned.

“Nothing. I didn’t know what to say! I felt as if I was looking at a ghost,” I sighed, sitting down on his bed. The next day, I brought him the files from the reports on Luhan’s death. I also told him about meeting whom I now learned to be Yifan, also known as Kris. When he told me his name, I almost panicked. If he still didn’t remember his past, I didn’t want to say anything to bring those memories back up. I had told Tao about it, and he seemed so relieved to hear that he was alive and well.

“Are you going to say something to him?” He replied.

“If he doesn’t remember, I don’t want to bring trouble to him by reminding him. Especially if that means his life will be in danger if he remembers,” I explained.

“He’s going to have to find out sometime!”

“You don’t think I know that? I’m just trying to figure out what to do!”

I wasn’t even sure what my next move was going to be. When I went to work the next day, I knew the first chance I got I had to go see Suho and tell him about Tao. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to tell him about Luhan or Kris, especially with how many things were probably weighing down on him.

“This would be so much easier if they trusted me. Suho and Chanyeol seem to be the only ones that don’t think I’m an enemy. Kai especially seems to have very little trust in me, he treats me like an animal whenever I’m around him. Baekhyun, well, I know he doesn’t trust me. He knows that I’m not fully on Lilly’s side, but that’s it.” I laid back on the bed, Tao moving so I could have more room.

“What about the others? Sehun and Yixing don’t know what is going on, right?”

“Sehun, Yixing, Jongdae, Kyungsoo, and Minseok. I know I can’t convince them to believe me, and Lilly threatened to kill Suho if he told any of them. Knowing that, I wouldn’t even think of asking him or Chanyeol to convince them…” I sighed again and propped myself up on my elbows, “If I’m going to expose them, I’m going to have to find solid evidence that Lilly is drugging them. To do that, though, I’m going to need all of them on my side. That will be the hard part.” How I would do that I had no idea, but I had to. The only way any of them would ever be safe again is if all of those involved go down. I looked over to Tao who sat with his knees against his chest and arms resting on top of his knees. A plan started forming in my head, and I knew just who could help me with this.

“Tao, I need you to do me a favor.”

The next night I got off work and was ready to set my plan in motion. I waited around until around two in the morning before I headed back to the hospital. I parked my car a few streets away and walked through the woods, entering through one of the stairwell doors in the basement. The entire downstairs area just so happened to be no longer in use, leaving it as the perfect way for me to slip in and out easily. The boys were on the second floor, and this stairwell was located across from Suho’s room.

“Are you sure this is safe?”

“Positive. Lilly used to complain about how the nurse that is on the night shift nearly never leaves the nurse’s station. She’s on her phone the entire night and never really pays attention to anything but that, and the only doctor I’ve ever seen on this floor was the one that sedated Chanyeol. I haven’t seen him around since that day,” I pointed towards the security camera in the top corner of the stairwell, “For some reason the security guard that usually watches the cameras wasn’t here today. Yeni didn’t work today, and Lilly disappeared like she usually does. I took that as an opportunity to come look around on the main level and basement. It took me a few minutes but I finally found the security office. I cut the live feed from the cameras and I set the previous day’s tapes to play so it looks as if they are still working properly.” 

I opened the door to the floor, peering out to see if anyone was around to see. “The coast is clear, let’s go,” I said, motioning for Tao to follow me. Usually, the patient's doors were locked after midnight, but I managed to sneak a set of keys from the nurse’s station earlier that day. I unlocked the door and let Tao go in first, I then looked back around to check for someone again. When I saw that no one was around, I followed behind Tao.

“I can’t believe it’s you!” I looked to see that Suho had Tao in a bone crushing embrace, tears were streaming down his face. Suho was the only one that I had told about seeing Tao and having him as a part of my plan.

“You’re not restrained?” I asked.

“No, that idiot nurse forgot to put my restraints back on. She does that so often.”

I knew that I took my job more seriously than Lilly and Yeni, seeing as they were hard to find most of the time, but I never imagined even the night staff was so irresponsible. I knew that Suho wasn’t dangerous, but the nurse probably didn’t know that. I mentally thanked her for her lack of responsibility and laziness, though.

“Alright, listen. If anyone sees us, I want you to get the hell out of here. I’ll distract them long enough for you to get away,” I informed Tao. “The rooms are in this order. Baekhyun’s room is next door, but I want to go to Chanyeol’s first. His room is next to Baekhyun’s, and then Kai’s is the one next to that. After that, instead of crossing into the right wing by passing by the nurse’s station, we will take the stairwell again. The stairwell on the other side opens up right beside Sehun’s room. Then following that is Kyungsoo, Jongdae, Yixing, and lastly Minseok.” I had drawn a miniature map for reference, including the nearest exits if the stairwells we were using were not accessible in case of emergency.

“Did you talk to the others in this wing today?” Earlier in the day, I had told Suho to speak to them to let them know what I was doing. They knew about what was being done, so Lilly’s threat didn’t apply to them. Regardless if they believed what he told them was true, I hoped Tao being with me would help convince them.

“All but Chanyeol, he wasn’t out today.” He replied.

“Suho, I am going to tell you this right now. If I am caught-”

“You will not be caught,” He cuts me off.

“But if I am, what do you think will happen to all of you? I don’t want them to hurt you even more, especially because of me,” I sighed, an apparent trademark of mine ever since I started working here. My mind and heart had been racing since the moment we stepped into the building. When I told Suho earlier about what I planned to do, I first asked him if he was absolutely okay with it.

“Even if something does happen, at least we will know you risked it all to help us. That will provide some hope for us,” He smiled at me. I hadn’t even been working there for two months, yet what he said brought tears to my eyes. I found myself hugging him, telling myself not to cry.

“Alright, are you ready to go, Tao?” Tao looked over at me and nodded his head.

I opened the door slightly, peeking out in the hallway again to see if the coast was clear. I slowly walked out, going halfway to Chanyeol’s room before I motioned for Tao to follow me. When we reached the door, Tao moved to unlock the door. Once it was unlocked, I pushed him in and followed behind him.

“What’s going on?” I heard Chanyeol speak, “Tao?” He added. I turned around to see Chanyeol looking white as a sheet, Tao standing by his bedside. Tao nodded his head and leaned down to hug Chanyeol.

“I thought you were dead… How? Why?” Chanyeol was struggling to find the proper questions to ask in this situation.

“I found him. With the names you gave me, I found him. I asked him to come with me tonight as a part of my plan,” I answered.

“What plan?”

“I’m going to try and get you guys out of here. Not tonight of course, but tonight will set that in motion. I asked Tao to come with me to try and convince the others that didn’t know what was going on. I knew I couldn’t put yours or Suho’s lives at risk by asking you to convince them, so this seemed to be the only way. I’m also hoping this will convince the rest of you in this wing that I’m your ally. If I have the trust of all of you, I know that it will help me get you guys out of this. This seems like the only way to gain your trust.”

Tao began to tell Chanyeol everything he remembered after they were taken from here. He even included why he was a voluntary inmate in a psych ward, and about my visits before tonight.

“I’m so happy you’re alive. What about Kris and Luhan?” Chanyeol asked the question that I hadn’t even revealed to Suho.

“Kris, he’s fine and alive. He just doesn’t remember what happened here,” I explained, I moved closer to his bed, “And Luhan… He’s gone. I am so sorry,” I trailed off. I knew that Chanyeol was relieved to hear that Kris was also alive, but I could tell that the news of Luhan broke his heart. Tao handed him the reports from the medical examiner and explained to him that he knew that someone here was responsible for his death.

“That fucking bitch Lilly killed him! When I get out of here I am going to rip her fucking-” I jumped on the bed and slapped my hand over Chanyeol’s mouth, “Be quiet! Someone will hear you and come see what’s going on and then we all will be screwed, we can’t completely rely on the incompetent nurse here tonight. Suho doesn’t know about this, and I know it wasn’t right to not tell him about it but… I don’t believe that he can handle hearing that right now. He doesn’t even know about Kris,” I said as I removed my hand from Chanyeol’s mouth.

We stayed in his room for another five minutes before I decided it was time to move onto the other’s rooms, knowing it could take a long time to explain to them and get them to understand what was going on. I told Chanyeol that if we didn’t return tonight, I would let him know how it went first thing in the morning.

“Listen, please be safe. I cannot imagine what they would do to you if they found out you were trying to help us,” Chanyeol admitted, grabbing my hand and holding it tightly, “Thank you for doing this. It means the world to me, and I know the others will feel the same. When I first met you I never imagined you would be taking such a risk to help all of us.”

We bid our goodbyes to Chanyeol and then headed out into the hallway.

Telling Kai and Baekhyun wasn’t as complicated as I feared. Kai seemed more iffy about me than Baekhyun did, but I knew having Tao with me helped convince him more. I just hoped that whatever good spirits were with us, stayed with us as we went to tell the other five.

“Listen, maybe I should go in Sehun’s room alone first. I don’t want to overwhelm him with bringing you in there, it’ll only make it harder to understand,” I said, Tao and I stood by the door that leads into the hallway. For some reason, I had grown rather fond of Sehun in particular. It’s unclear as to why I had grown attached to him, but I had this extremely strong protective instinct over him. Not saying I didn’t with the other eight, I just felt it more with Sehun.

“No, what are you talking about? Why would I overwhelm him?” He raised his voice slightly.

“He thinks you’re dead, Tao. He doesn’t even know that he was drugged. He’s so helpless and I’m the only one that can help him. If only you could have seen him then. He was so weak, I had a hard time containing my emotions when I first saw the state he was in. He looked so helpless, so broken. One night he had me stay with him until he fell asleep. It is as if he thought that he would only be able to sleep if I stayed with him. Please, just let me go in to see him first. I’ll let him down gently, and when I know he’s ready to see you I will come get you. I promise, please,” I pleaded.

He nodded his head in an understanding manner. I went through the process of making sure no one was around, unlocking the door, and going in like the previous rooms. His room was dark, indicating that he must have been sleeping. I went over to the nearest lamp and turned it on. I was surprised when I turned around to see him laying on his back with his eyes open.

“What are you doing here?” He asked, his voice had a soft tone to it.

“I have something very important I have to tell you. Something you might not even believe, but please just believe me when I tell you this. Believe that this is the God’s honest truth, that’s all I ask for,” I said. I sat down on his bed beside him and took his hand in mine, a manner I had picked up while taking care of him that I did whenever I spoke to him.

“When Yixing turned up sick after you had been sick, I took care of him like I did for you. I was in his room and I noticed that the disposable bin in his room was nearly full. When I cleaned it out, I found medication that is used to treat Leukemia and Tuberculosis. Lilly drugged you, Sehun. She gave those medicines to both of you and that is what made you as sick as it did. I have the side effects and signs of overdose if you want to see them. Are you following me?” I checked to make sure before I went more into detail.

“Is that… Is that why she has given me so many different injections? She was drugging me?” I nodded in response. “I… I guess… I knew that something was going on like that. I just didn’t want to believe it. She told me how sick I was and always diagnosed me with all these different things. When you came along, I started to question everything she had done and said to me, but I never wanted it to be the truth,” He continued. I noticed that his expression started growing upset, so I moved onto the bed more to let him rest his head on my lap. I started petting his head to try and calm him down, knowing what I had to say next could really shake him up.

“That’s not all.  Do you think you can handle more?” When he nodded his head I continued, “Everyone in the left wing, I was told that they were there because they were more violent. I don’t know what you were told, but that’s not why. They all had figured out what was going on, and they split you all up to avoid them telling you about what was going on. Are you still following me?” He gave another nod. “This is the big one… What you were told about Kris, Luhan, and Tao was a lie. Kris found out, and he told Tao and Luhan. So they tried to suppress their memories and stuck them back out in the world.”

“How do you know this?” He questioned. He seemed to be believing me so far, but I could still sense the hint of doubt he had when I mentioned those three names. 

“I found Tao. He told me what had happened, and said that he was the only one that didn’t have his memory suppressed. He’s here… He’s with me. If you’re ready, I can bring him in. Are you ready?” Sehun whispered a faint ‘yes’. I looked to see if anyone was outside before I went to the stairwell door and told Tao to follow me, letting him come into Sehun’s room.

The moment Sehun saw Tao, he abruptly stood up to hug him. I heard him sniffle, letting me know that he had started crying. “I can’t believe it’s really you,” He whispered. He clung to Tao as if his life depended on it—like Tao was simply an illusion that he didn’t want to fade away. While they were hugging, I sat down at the foot of Sehun’s bed. I knew that Tao would want to explain everything, even if that meant confirming everything I had told Sehun and breaking his heart with the truth.

Tao told Sehun everything that he had told the others before, minus the information about the whereabouts of Kris and Luhan. I had asked him to not tell them, knowing that they wouldn’t be able to handle that information on top of what’s being said.

“I promise you this, you’ll get out of here. No matter what it takes, I will help as much as I can to get all of you out of here.” Tao promised this, looking at me to agree with him. “Even if I get hurt along the way, I’ll do everything I can,” I said.

When it was time to move onto Kyungsoo’s room, I noticed that Sehun seemed to have more energy in him than before. It was as if seeing Tao had spiked some unknown emotion in him that made him seem more lively. Before I left, he pulled me into a hug just like he had done with Tao earlier.

“Thank you. Thank you so much. You must be risking your life to do this. You have to be an angel sent from Heaven to help us,” He stated. “I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I replied. I went to pull away, but he kept his grip on me, “Please… Please come back safe to us. To me. You’ve become so precious to me I just couldn’t imagine something happening to you,” He whispered. I promised him I would, even giving him a bracelet I always wore to reassure him that I would be back.

We said our goodbyes to Sehun, and onto the next room we went.

[zeroviraluniverse-blog]

Evidence links volcanoes to Earth's largest mass extinction 252 million years ago -- ScienceDaily

Visit Now - http://zeroviral.com/evidence-links-volcanoes-to-earths-largest-mass-extinction-252-million-years-ago-sciencedaily/

Evidence links volcanoes to Earth's largest mass extinction 252 million years ago -- ScienceDaily

Pine trees become temporarily sterile when exposed to ultraviolet radiation as intense as some scientists believe Earth experienced 252 million years ago during the planet’s largest mass extinction, lending support to the theory that ozone depletion contributed to the crisis.

The effect of high UV on conifers and potentially other trees also suggests caution today in introducing chemicals that deplete Earth’s ozone layer, which has yet to recover after a global ban on chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants in the 1980s instituted after ozone holes developed over the poles. Some industrial chemicals also destroy atmospheric ozone, which is the planet’s sunscreen, protecting all life from excessive UV rays, in particular UV-B wavelengths, which causes mutations in DNA.

Results of the experiment, which was conducted by University of California, Berkeley graduate student Jeffrey Benca, will be published Feb. 7 in the online journal Science Advances.

Benca irradiated 18-inch-tall, bonsai-like pines with UV-B dosages up to 13 times stronger than on Earth today, simulating the effects of ozone depletion caused by immense volcanic eruptions that occurred at the end of the Permian Period. During the two-month experiment, none of the trees died but all seed cones, or pine cones, shriveled up only days after emerging, leaving the trees sterile.

When placed outside, the trees regained the ability to produce healthy seed cones in later years.

Scientists have proposed that ozone depletion caused by periodic volcanic eruptions over nearly a million years was one cause of the end-Permian extinction, but how has been unclear. Acid rain would have been a local effect, but the extinction of nearly 70 percent of known land animals, 95 percent of marine life and many plant lineages was global.

Previous paleoclimate modeling studies suggest the volcanic spurts could have wiped out the ozone layer worldwide, though temporarily. Nevertheless, even if ancient trees regained their fertility, repeated bouts of sterility could have hampered population growth over time, leading to collapse of the biosphere planet-wide, according to Benca.

Long-term biosphere collapse

“During the end-Permian crisis, the forests may have disappeared in part or fully because of increased UV exposure,” Benca said. “With pulses of volcanic eruptions happening, we would expect pulsed ozone shield weakening, which may have led to forest declines previously observed in the fossil record.”

“If you disrupt some of the dominant plant lineages globally repeatedly, you could trigger trophic cascades by destabilizing the food web base, which doesn’t work out very well for land animals,” he added.

The surprise findings tell scientists something about past extinctions and Earth’s future prospects as climate change, habitat destruction and pollution set us up for Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

“Paleontologists have come up with various kill scenarios for mass extinctions, but plant life may not be affected by dying suddenly as much as through interrupting one part of the life cycle, such as reproduction, over a long period of time, causing the population to dwindle and potentially disappear,” said co-author Cindy Looy, a UC Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology.

“Global biodiversity catastrophes are not about death but about the pruning of evolutionary branches on the tree of life at a rate much higher than the sprouting of new shoots,” added co-author Ivo Duijnstee, an adjunct assistant professor of integrative biology. “Jeff, who used his plant growth chambers as a time machine to test the potential of a hypothesis about what may have happened 252 million years ago, provides an excellent example illustrating how the slowly unfolding extinction on land over maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of years may have been caused by reproductive troubles at the base of the food chain.”

Siberian volcanoes

The extinction at the end of the Permian is thought to have been caused by volcanic eruptions in Siberia over hundreds of thousands if not a million years that produced what are known today as the Siberian Traps: lava fields covering much of northern Russia and originally encompassing nearly 3 million square miles with an average thickness of about 1,000 feet.

In 2004, Looy and her former Ph.D. advisor Henk Visscher proposed one way this might have played out, bases on fossilized abnormal plant spores found worldwide: volcanic gases — halocarbons like methyl chloride and methyl bromide — destroyed much or all of Earth’s ozone layer, boosting UV-B exposure that would have affected life and potentially increased the genetic mutation rates in pollen and spores of plants worldwide.

Evidence for this hypothesis grew in 2005 when an independent research team led by Clinton Foster of Geoscience Australia discovered malformed pollen grains from end-Permian seed plants. The rise in the percentage of malformed pollen, which is seen in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, coincided with the decline of forests globally.

Finding evidence of malformation mechanisms in 252 million year old pollen fossils is impossible, so Looy and others have looked for other ways to determine whether increased UV-B disrupted the end-Permian ecosystem. Benca came up with a series of experiments using living plants to test the hypothesis.

The first experiment, using pines, was designed to find out whether high levels of UV-B could cause malformed pollen grains in today’s seed plants similar to those described by Foster, and whether these malformations could affect reproduction. Squeezing a mature pine tree into a laboratory was a sticking point until Benca hit upon a novel solution: using a dwarf cultivar selected for bonsai that readily produces pollen and seed cones.

In 2013, he trucked 60 dwarf clonal pines to Berkeley from a conifer nursery in Boring, Oregon. After acclimating them for a year outdoors in full sun with sparse water and nutrient-poor soil — typical conditions for this alpine species, Pinus mugo — ran a 56-day indoor experiment using high-intensity UV-B-emitting lamps.

In three separate indoor UV chambers, Benca exposed the dwarf pines to 7.5, 10 and 13 times Berkeley’s normal UV-B intensity, in line with estimates of the impact Siberian Trap eruptions would have had on the ozone layer if their emissions occurred over various lengths of time, ranging from 400,000 years to less than 200,000 years.

Indeed, the pines did produce malformed pollen. At the medium and extreme exposures, 12 to 15 percent of pollen grains were misshapen, versus 3 percent in normal and low-exposure trees. Foster’s previous study suggested that pollen yields having more than 3 percent malformed grains are associated with environmental stress in modern conifers, Benca said. In total, he spent three years conducting the experiments and comparing more than 57,000 pollen grains produced by trees in the chambers.

To the researchers’ amazement, however, all trees subjected to increased UV levels became sterile. Their seed cones shriveled up before they had a chance to be fertilized. This seemed to be a systemic reaction to the UV-B stress, since even seed cones hidden among foliage died.

“The system we used was really quite conservative,” Benca said. “Unlike the relatively unprotected seed-bearing structures of affected end-Permian seed plants, today’s pines have elaborate and very heavily reinforced, interlocking cone scales that shield their seeds from predators and the external environment. Even so, these trees just ditched all their seed cones. Pinus mugo is an alpine species that should be quite resilient to increased UV levels.”

“That Jeff’s UV-B-blast experiment — somewhat of a calculated long shot — produced pollen abnormalities in a modern conifer similar to abnormalities observed in 252-million-year old microfossils was one of the most exciting things I’ve seen this decade,” Duijnstee said.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (1000135655, 1457846), Research Council of Norway through the Centre of Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) (223272.L.), and a Paleontological Society Richard Bambach Award.

[deepesttidalwavecreator-blog]

Things You Didn’t Know About CBD Acrylic For Dogs

Holistic vets have been sending us many interesting reports about the important things about CBD oil for dogs in their care … The senior Staffordshire Terrier experienced a 6cm mammary cancerous growth and metastasis that vanished in 3 months and did not come back … A Prise Russell Terrier had a severe heart murmur and also painful arthritis and, after the month, he wanted to go with long walks and his murmuration, murmuring, mussitation, mutter, muttering was much improved ! These are two examples of exactly how Australian veterinarian Edward Bassingthwaighte discovered how CBD essential oil could be a critical part of his or her holistic veterinary practice. “I simply can’t explain typically the improved heart murmur” states Bassingthwaite. “They normally rarely get better. ” Cutting edge of using vets have been sending us some interesting reports about the benefits of CBD oil intended for dogs in their care ! A senior Staffordshire G? World's strongest CBD oil had a 6cm mammary tumor and metastasis that disappeared in 3 months along with didn’t come back … A new Jack Russell Terrier had a severe heart murmuration, murmuring, mussitation, mutter, muttering and painful arthritis along with, after a month, he planned to go for long walks magnificent murmur was much improved … These are two samples of how Australian veterinarian Edward Bassingthwaighte discovered how CBD oil could be a critical component of his holistic veterinary train. “I simply can’t clarify the improved heart murmur” says Bassingthwaite. “They typically don’t get better. ” CBD Oil For Puppies: What You Might Not Know The results seem to be in … analysts are turning their focus on this herb and, up to now, they’re finding there’s lots to like. And just seeing that CBD has helped human beings, your dog can reap precisely the same health-boosting (and even life-saving) benefits. Let’s look at the ten things you might not know about that often misunderstood herb and the research that shows its promise in helping dogs using a variety of common health issues ! 1 . CBD Is Not Psychoactive CBD (cannabidiol) is a element found in cannabis and hemp. THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) can also be found within cannabis and it’s this particular compound that gives marijuana it is psychoactive properties. Most CBD oils are just that ! the beneficial CBD without the THC. And they typically are derived from hemp, not marijuana. Simply speaking, your dog won’t get “high” from CBD oil … he’ll get the relaxation with no intoxication. 2 . CBD Oil Reduces Anxiety Does your puppy suffer from separation anxiety or even noise phobias? CBD continues to be extensively studied for its affect on stress and anxiety. In humans, it is very been found to: Minimize anxiety caused by public speaking Decrease anxiety in both healthy persons and people with anxiety disorders Be effective for panic disorders and post-traumatic stress disorders 3. CBD Can Fights Cancer CBD and other substances found in hemp and cannabis have been located to have an anti-tumor effect. CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT has even been shown to stop cancer cells from growing and increased tumor mobile death. CBD helps typically the immune system’s killer cells to cause cancer cellular death. CBD kills cancers cells by blocking their very own ability to produce energy. CBD’s anti-tumor properties slow as well as inhibit glioma cell expansion. CBD can help increase the usefulness of conventional cancer treatment method. 4. CBD Can Handle Seizures And Epilepsy It is estimated that up to 5% of dogs suffer from seizures. Most dogs with seizures are put on drugs for example phenobarbital and potassium bromide. While they may help command the seizures, they can be extremely harmful to your dog’s liver organ and other organs. And the drugs don’t work in all conditions. CBD has been shown to work well on drug-resistant epilepsy. In one examine, 7 of 8 people with epilepsy that was resistance against drugs saw a definite enhancement within 4 to 5 months of taking CBD. As well as a survey of children with treatment-resistant epilepsy found that 84% of the children taking CBD had a reduction in the regularity of seizures.

[smurphyse]

Over Your Shoulder

Smurphyse - Masterlist

Want to read ahead on ao3 or want to read the tags/warnings? Read it here.

Chapter 9 - Control

Summary: We learn what happened the night Jasper was tortured, and how Jack died! We also explore some corrupt cops! We learn a bit about what Jasper and Spencer have been getting up to the last two months of working together.

Notes:

CW: Torture, talks of torture CW: Mentions of drug use CW: Murder/Body mutilation CW: Death, terror

- Smurph ❤

Dallas, Eleven Years Ago

“Let’s get started, shall we?” Eli began, watching her intently as she hung from her wrists by a piece of wire. They were already cutting off her circulation, but Jasper couldn’t move to pull herself up for relief. “I’m sure you remember this lovely concoction from your training, though it has been some time since we’ve had a little one-on-one, Sugar.”

Jasper couldn’t speak, she couldn’t do anything but stare at the man who was going to kill her. Pancuronium Bromide was a muscle relaxant she was all too familiar with. It would keep her awake, alert, and she would feel the full pain of whatever torture Eli was going to inflict on her without being able to move.

Eli gazed at her, and had she not known him as well as she did, she would call it a look of grief. He reached out and smoothed her hair down before cupping her chin in his hand.

“I didn’t want it to come to this, pet. But we both know that you can’t be trusted anymore. You’re no longer of any use to me, but we’ll have some fun before I send you off into that long sleep.”

He turned from her and went to a table behind him. The dank room, full of pipes without windows, was in a basement of some decrepit warehouse in Dallas. By the looks of the used needles and burnt spoons littering the floor, she knew it must be some drug den. Eli must have been using since his escape from prison. His normally robust and strong figure had been wasted away to skin and bones, his face sallow and tired.

“I’ve never been much of a fan of blades or guns. As you remember from your training, the best way to earn the carrot is with the stick,” he sighed, flipping through the glittering blades on the wood surface, fingers lingering over the pristine handle of a new Louisville Slugger. The lone gun he used for protection sat on the corner, if she could only move to get it, she’d put a bullet in his head without hesitation.

Jasper had wanted to kill Eli when Jack and her arrested him a few years ago. They had learned of his dealing of opium through Afghanistan, and though he had taught them to kill and hide, he was causing too much pain throughout the world by dealing in heroin and making millions with his connections.

Jasper hated drugs, refusing to believe it was the only side business Eli was conducting, but for her his selling of opium was enough to kill him. Despite all that he had done to her and Jack, as well as the other recruits of the Church, the fucked up part of Jasper’s brain had drawn the line at heroin. She had watched opioids destroy her mother, turning a soft and gentle woman into the kind of person who would abandon her only daughter to her abusive husband, though she was sure her father had always been a monster, even without the meth and bourbon.

Jack had convinced her to spare their teacher, the man who ‘saved’ them from a life in prison, of early death in the confines of cement walls. They took him to a remote Korean prison where he would surely be killed sooner or later, but they underestimated Eli’s abilities and connections.

It was the worst mistake she’d ever made.

Jasper and Jack went on to continue their work, continuing their covert ops under the guise of the military, tracking terrorists and killers around the world. After Balad, they retired, got married and chose to live a suburban life in Austin, Texas under an alias. She was on her way out of the grocery store, thinking herself safe and untouchable, when Eli slipped up behind her and sunk a syringe into her neck.

“I know you always enjoyed a good set of knives, and your skills in sharpshooting and marksmanship cannot be overstated. You were my best success, Sugar. I plucked you from the darkness and turned you into an elite machine... “ Eli trailed off and sighed heavily, holding a small blade up to the light. She was drooling down her chin, sweat pouring down her neck. She remembered these side effects, how humiliating and demeaning they were. A blotchy blush would no doubt begin ripping through her body soon as her blood pressure and heartbeat rose.

“You bit the hand that fed you, my love,” Eli turned to her, flashing the knife sadly as she watched numbly. “Before I send you away, I’m going to give you one last lesson.”

He stepped forward, using the small knife to carefully cut away her shirt, leaving her in her bra and jeans. His slimy hands ran down her sides like a lover in awe, and her body shivered involuntarily under his touch. If she had control of her limbs, she would have been fighting, clawing, kicking, screaming obscenities. But she wasn’t in control. She was fully at his mercy.

“I’m going to remind you, in this life and the next, who you belong to.”

And then he began cutting, and all she could do was take it.

The Grind- Present Day

“Luke,” Jasper groaned, “This is so boring.”

They were sitting in a café, one with a stupid name that Jasper couldn’t remember, looking through apartment rentals. Well, Luke was mostly doing the looking, Jasper was complaining.

“What? Do you just want me to pick a place for you?” he asked, giving her a bitchy look as she glared at him. She had her head and arms sprawled across the table, anxious, bored, and hungover out of her mind.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I want you to do.”

Booger and Roxy were playing at their feet, both taking little swipes at one another and stealing the same two bones from the other over and over again. Jasper would have rather been down there with them, resting her head between the two and giving them tummy rubs, but they were in public and she didn’t need all the cranky D.C. powersuits glaring at her at six in the morning.

“Okay, how about this one? Two bedroom, balcony, pet friendly, with controlled access.”

“Perfect.”

“You don’t even know where it is, Jazz.”

Jasper sat up straight, narrowing her eyes at one of her oldest friends, “Don’t tell me you’re going to start calling me that, too.”

“I like it,” Luke shrugged, giving her a smarmy smile. “It makes you seem… softer.”

“Fuck you,” Jasper grunted, dropping her head down again, moaning in pain as her still-healing face hit the table. Her stomach lurched with the pain, her poor hungover tummy threatening to upheave the few contents in it all over her lap.

“Sounds like you two are having all the fun,” a happy voice chirped behind them. Jasper looked up to find Penelope, holding a big white cup of something foamy as she sat down in the seat next to Jasper.

“Hey, Garcia, I was wondering when you’d show up,” Luke grinned, his big dumb eyes crinkiling at the edges. Jasper had noticed the extra, gentle and dreamy, attention he paid to the tech analyst, and had decided to put that information in her back pocket for later.

“I was running late today. I had to pick up Reid because his car won’t start.”

“What?” Jasper asked, “What are you talking about?”

Just then Spencer rounded the table with a cup of his own, plopping down across from her. He gave her a polite smile, then pulled a book out of his bag and cracked it open.

What the fuck?

Today, she and Luke were just supposed to go apartment hunting. He didn’t say anything about other people joining them. She knew he was waiting for her to sober up a bit more and let her hangover fade away before grilling her about girl’s night. She decided she wouldn’t tell him shit, especially about hanging out with Spencer later in the night at Moe’s.

They had sat and talked for a few hours, mostly about the team, and then Spencer walked her back to her hotel room, lingering at the doorway but declining an invitation inside. Ever the gentleman, and she was grateful for it, as in her drunken state there was no telling what she might have done or said with a bed five feet away.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you?” Luke smirked at her, shaking his shoulders as he laughed. “Tuesdays we all have breakfast here together.”

“You fucking prick,” she seethed, her pounding head making her more surly and annoyed than usual, “you tricked me into a playdate?”

Spencer snorted behind his book, quickly bringing a hand up to cover his mouth. He cleared his throat, pretending to be very absorbed in whatever he was reading.

“Where’s the fucking apartment? I’ll go look at it myself,” she asked, reaching over and snatching his phone. “1617 Moss Avenue… wait, isn’t this…”

Jasper looked up at Spencer. He was already looking at her. His eyes were wide, his bottom lip pulled between his teeth. His cheeks were flushed and she knew that he’d come to the same realization that she had.

“That’s Spencer’s building!” Penelope exclaimed, waving her hands around happily, “Ohmygosh, what if you two were neighbors? It reads just like fanfiction, you’d slowly fall back in love an-”

“Garcia,” Spencer hissed, kicking her under the table. They made faces at each other for a few seconds while Luke and Jasper glared at one another.

“You guys know I have two kids, right?” JJ asked, coming up and sitting between Spencer and Garcia, sunglasses covering her eyes. She wore a large baseball tee and leggings, pulling her legs up into her chair as she nursed her coffee cup. “I don’t sleep, like ever.”

“You act like you wouldn’t already be awake anyways,” Spencer said, giving her an unapologetic smile.

“Shut up, Reid, my head is killing me,” JJ groaned. “Jasper out-drank us all.”

“Jasper’s got an iron stomach,” Luke confirmed, “She used to drink us all under the table. Made a nice little side business betting on it. They all thought they could beat her because she’s so tiny.”

“I’m an Irish Catholic from the south,” Jasper muttered, “drinking is in my blood.”

The rest of the team slowly filtered into the little café, and soon enough they were discussing the best places for apartments in D.C., Luke and Garcia were graceful enough to not mention the free space in Spencer’s building.

“When you find a place, we’ll throw you a housewarming party!” Garcia giggled, entirely too happy considering how miserable the rest of the women were. She’d been the designated driver, and had made Jasper text her when she arrived home after she declined the offer of a ride.

“Why?” Jasper asked, confused. She’d never really had a home , let alone a party for one. She grew up in a decrepit trailer, then she and Jack had picked a hole-in-the-wall apartment just in case something bad happened… and then it did. Throughout her years jetting around the world, she’d never had an apartment that she wasn’t ready to blow out of at a moment’s notice either.

“To celebrate! You’re settling down, and I want you to know how happy we are to have you here,” Garcia said. She squeezed Jasper’s hand, and Jasper felt a soft warmth spread through her chest. No wonder Luke was besotted with Penelope, she was an absolute gem .

“Fine, but I’m not cooking anything,” Jasper relented, unable to say no to someone who projected the literal embodiment of a sunflower.

Prentiss groaned loudly, flashing her phone at the table, “We have a case. I’m gonna throw up and then we’re all heading to the office.”

Lewis nodded, standing and following Emily back into the cafe. The rest of them finished their cups and made their ways toward the parking lot.

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

Jasper found an apartment a few weeks after, one that was quite a few blocks away from Spencer’s, but only two from Moe’s. She found herself heading there on the day of her house warming party, over a month later due to cases, for some comfort and familiarity.

She wasn’t looking forward to the party, or at least she wasn’t looking forward to letting her coworkers of two months see how little she had to put in her new place. The little apartment, nicer than she’d wanted but had to settle on to appease Luke, was a one bedroom with white walls and a large kitchen, a bathroom connected to the master suite and a walk-in closet. Jasper didn’t know what she’d do with that much space, but she was looking forward to using the clawfoot tub.

When she voiced her fears, Oona and Billy went off the deep end and picked out a bunch of things for the place so she didn’t have to. They were eccentric pieces that fit more to their colorful styles than Jasper’s, who would have preferred cheap garbage items that could be forgotten and left behind easier.

They’d picked out a deep emerald paint for all the walls, and fully expected Jasper to use it before putting together her furniture, which she’d put off until the morning of the party. The couch was yellow velvet, offsetting the dark coffee table and sides tables, and a matching fuschia armchair for the living room and matching floral artwork. Her bedroom set was bright orange with a gold colored bed frame and sunrise themed headboard. Her kitchen and bathroom items were equally garish and bright, and she’d put them all away and set them up as best she could, trying to emulate her friend’s quirky styles.

The two had insisted that Jasper’s ‘character’ needed to grow from when Spencer and Luke saw her last. Instead of a dive apartment, she needed to look like an adult who was ready to settle down, and she supposed this was the way to do it. Jasper hated to admit it, but if she ever bought a house, she’d probably have Oona and Billy decorate it like this, along with the various knick knacks and fake plants they’d ordered.

Jasper had a meager two suitcases of clothing, photos, and souvenirs from her time abroad to her name. Most of her meager clothes she kept in her travel suitcase, expertly hiding the compartment with passports and cash she had for emergencies. They were now hidden beneath a floorboard in her bedroom closet. She had a few storage units, lockboxes, and P.O. boxes around the country, each filled with innocuous things she’d found from garage sales, but with a few precious items hidden inside.

Jasper’s original birth certificate with her real name and her parent’s names written on it and her family’s photo book were in a storage locker in Arlington, Virginia. Jack and Sam’s extra jewels from their rings, her and Jack’s Marine uniforms, her mother’s horsehair brush, and some photos from over the years were close in D.C., as they were precious to her. Various bits of evidence on employers and contacts alike were stored in a few of these around the U.S., as well as buried on properties Jasper had bought under aliases for cash.

As for personal possessions, Jasper had few. She kept her ring of Sam’s pearls and Jack’s diamond on her at all times, or given to Oona for safekeeping during missions. Spencer’s Caltech sweater, her polaroid camera, the knitting needle set that Diana had given her so many years ago for Christmas, and her The Lord of the Rings box set were always packed away in her bigger suitcase with the remainder of her clothing.

She had painted the apartment room by room, then stood there among the furniture boxes, staring at her two suitcases. Her whole life fit into these little containers. When she was younger she was proud of such things, of her efficiency, her lack of need of possessions or connections. Staring at them now at thirty five years of age, being face to face with her past for the last two months, she found it sad.

Jasper could die this very instant and all she would have to show for it is a handful of photos, a ring, a torn up sweatshirt, some pieces of bamboo, and a serial killer’s dog. Her childhood had been an experiment in surviving, barely scraping by, then culminating in a brutal, blood soaked end. She’d spent her entire adult life hiding in the shadows, thriving in darkness and anonymity, and suddenly she was faced with the very real idea that sometime over the past eighteen years she had become… nothing.

It was that thought that drove her from the apartment, fleeing into the cool D.C. night. She’d grabbed a sweater off the back of that obnoxious armchair, as D.C. in September had humid days, but chilly nights. She knew she cut an odd figure, her thick wool socks pulled over the bottoms of her black leggings, combat boots, and her hand-knitted sweater barely able to fit over her big hair, covered almost head to toe in emerald paint. She shoved it over head anyway, feeling the static from the wool sending her hair from paint-stained poofy to frizzy.

Her feet carried her on autopilot, her mind racing to places she didn’t want it to as she ran to the safety of Moe’s, Booger trailing behind her on his leash. The scent of hotcakes and fries hit her as soon as the door opened. It made her eyes water, but she smiled through it. It was still early, the diner bustling with the after-work crowd, most of whom were staring at her ridiculous appearance. She spotted Spencer in their booth in the corner, and wove her way through the aisle.

She plopped down in the booth, startling Spencer out of his book coma. He smiled at her, and she smiled back. They had been ‘bumping’ into one another at Moe’s for weeks now, conveniently at the same time, ever since that first girl’s night where she’d drunkenly wandered back in here after a decade and a half.

Booger settled down between their feet, always creating a barrier between them in case of an accidental footsie moment, the table barring them from getting closer than two feet. Since the night in Alabama they avoided touch, or getting within a certain distance of the other. It was an unspoken agreement, as though they both knew that getting too close would spell either trouble or worse- reconciliation.

“I’m starving,” she told him, rubbing her tummy and glaring down at the menu. She knew she’d order waffles, but she liked to see the specials. She adjusted her glasses and pretended to be very interested in them as Spencer gave her a confused look.

“I thought the plan was to order pizza for your housewarming party,” he said, tapping a finger against the side of his coffee mug. By his tone, she could tell he had some smug all-knowing smile on his face.

“I thought you were going to eat pizza at my housewarming party,” she looked back up at him, then motioned to his half-empty plate. His face turned a bit red and he brought his mug up to hide his mouth.

“Maybe I was hoping to run into you here today.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“JASPER DONNELLY!” a voice came loudly behind her. Jasper’s eyes widened, her back coiling tightly in prepared self-defense as she tried to place it.

“Moe’s back from Ireland,” Spencer grinned, and Jasper felt a matching one spread across her paint-streaked face. She turned in her seat to see Moe McArthur, standing proud and tall in the center of the diner. Her fiery red hair had turned white over the years, her green eyes still as bright as the last time Jasper had seen her. Her plump figure still looked beautiful in that blue diner getup, and Jasper felt herself rising to stand and give her a fierce hug.

They met half way through the aisle, chests meeting with a heavy thump as their arms enclosed one another. Moe squeezed her tight, surprised laughter bubbling from her throat. She pulled back and stared at Jasper in wonder.

“José said he had a surprise for me when I came back from visiting my ma, but I had no idea it would be you!” she said, scanning Jasper’s wild appearance with a concerned eye. “Girl, you’re a mess! What have you been doing?”

“Painting,” Jasper chuckled, self consciously trying to smooth down her poofed rat’s nest. “Finally got myself an apartment a few blocks away.”

“So, does that mean that you two, ” Moe asked, motioning between her and Spencer. “Are you back together?”

Her eyes were full of hope, and Jasper hated to have to shake her head. Moe’s face fell instantly, but she quickly replaced it with a smile.

“We’re just working together on the same team. Freak coincidence,” Jasper told her, nodding awkwardly.

“Well, as long as you’re not makin’ up in my bathrooms, I’m glad to see you here together.” Jasper’s face went hot, and behind her she heard Spencer scoff. She turned to find him covering his face with both hands. Moe released her with the promise of some waffles, shooing Jasper back to the booth.

It took Spencer a few moments to look back up at her, and she pretended to read the menu again to try and hide the red covering her own cheeks. They chatted for a little bit while they ate, of course never about anything real, but about their current cases or past ones, then headed back to Jasper’s new place for the dreaded party.

Booger walked between them the two blocks back to the apartment, tail wagging happily and tongue hanging out. He liked Spencer, enjoyed the belly rubs and ear tugs Spencer would give him when they were together. Jasper was surprised that Booger was adjusting so well, as the research she’d done on abused dogs told her that their road to healing was long and hard, but the kindness both the BAU and the Misfits showed him were certainly making it easier.

Jasper unlocked her door and swung it open, surprised to see the whole team already sitting around her living room. Luke and Walker were assembling her couch while Penelope and the others sat on the various little seats and cabinets that they had already finished making up. The pizza boxes sat open and half eaten while they all chatted, but their eyes turned to her and Spencer as they closed the door behind them. Booger went straight to Roxy to steal her bone, but Garcia just produced another one and tossed it to him.

“And just where have you two been?” Emily asked with a smile. Jasper turned to Luke and his stupid grin with a glare.

“I gave you that key for emergencies,” she glowered, tossing her purse on the floor and heading for the kitchen for a bottle of water. She pulled two out of the fridge and handed one to Spencer as she came back into the room.

“The pizza was getting cold and I was tired of waiting for you,” Luke told her, focusing back on fixing the legs to the bright yellow couch. Walker chuckled and shared a knowing glance with Rossi before handing Luke another tool.

“Yeah, we waited a whole two minutes for you guys,” Lewis said. She sat on the floor, her long legs crossed as she munched on a slice.

“So?” JJ asked, “Why were you two late?”

“I went out for a coffee and ran into Spencer,” Jasper offered. Spencer nodded, taking a suspiciously long swig of his water.

“And where did you two just ‘run into’ each other?” Rossi asked from the fuschia chair, looking all too at home in it.

“The Grind,” she and Spencer said together. They didn’t look at one another, and Jasper was just glad he had the same thought as she did. She didn’t want the team knowing they’d been getting food together at the same time over the last few months, and it seemed Spencer didn’t want them to know either.

This seemed to satisfy the team, and they all went about assembling more of the random furniture and hanging up paintings around the place. Garcia was obsessed with the color schemes, and showed Jasper pictures of her own crazily decorated place. She thought the tech analyst and Oona would get along well, and the two of them paired up with Billy would be a power team in decorating and fashion had they had their own Netflix show.

She and Spencer found themselves in her bedroom with Rossi, putting together the gold bed frame while Rossi watched from yet another chair.

“Fuck this,” Jasper eventually grunted, sitting back from the frame and tugging her sweater over her head. “We should just toss this stupid thing out the window.”

“I think it’s cute,” Spencer offered, continuing to screw together the headboard. His shirt was unbuttoned a few spaces at the top, his sleeves rolled up as he worked on the bed. A bit of sweat was beginning to form on the hollow of his throat, and Jasper couldn’t blame the feeling she got looking at him on alcohol this time.

“It’s not worth the effort. I can just put the mattress on the floor,” she said, snatching her water bottle from the dresser and taking an angry swig. “I slept on rocks in Iraq, this would already be nicer than that.”

“You’re settling in, Jasper. We get this done now and you don’t have to worry about it ever again,” he told her, giving her a serious look. “And you get to make your bed every day like you like to do.”

“I bet you still leave yours a mess,” she muttered, and Rossi murmured an agreement.

“It’s easier that way. I spend time on things that matter.”

“Like stuffing books in your microwave?” she countered, smiling at the bitchy look Spencer gave her. “How’s your book pile lookin’?”

“Pile?” Rossi asked, laughing heartily. “Singular? Now it’s nothing but piles. The kid’s barely got a floor to walk on in that place.”

“I have a system,” Spencer defended himself, “I know where everything is.”

“You have an eidetic memory, Stick. You don't even need to keep them!” Jasper moved over to Rossi’s chair and leaned against it, happy to let Spencer do all the work setting up the dumb frame.

“I like to make notes in the margins. Besides, you reread books too. You read The Lord of the Rings about nine hundred times when we were together.”

“That’s because it’s a masterpiece,” Jasper told him firmly. She loved that series. Sam used to read it to her when they’d go to Tate’s Clearing late at night. He always teared up when Boromir died, and got himself worked up each time Sam gave Frodo an uplifting speech. She used to love hearing Sam do all the voices and sing the songs in the books. He would have loved to see the movies, but died before he got the chance to watch any of them.

She’d gone to the theaters by herself, sitting in the very back row on each opening night, sobbing to herself in the darkness. She bought the movies eventually, but nothing held up to reading the books and picturing Sam grunting along to the dwarves, or trying to teach her elvish.

“Hey,” Emily interrupted them, stepping into the room and flashing her phone. “We’ve got a case, we’ll have to finish this when we get back.”

They left the bedframe and mattress on the floor in the room, then left the apartment. She scrubbed paint off her face in the car while they dropped Booger and Roxy off with their sitter Lily and headed back to the BAU for yet another round of horrors.

Oklahoma- Eleven Years Ago

Luke woke slowly, as he always did. Years of chasing fugitives and living in warzones had taught him to wake his ears first, listening and testing the area around him for any intrusion, then carefully opening his eyes.

He was in some town in Oklahoma, searching for a convict and staying in a small hotel in the center of the city. He had been exhausted by the time he made it back to the bed, tired from interviewing witnesses and chasing leads that led nowhere. He lay on the stiff bed for a moment before he realized his body had woken him up for a reason.

Somebody was in the room.

“Get up, Alvez,” a voice came from the darkness, and Luke knew he was caught. He opened his eyes slowly, but the room was too dark to see anything clearly. He sat up, holding his hands up to show the intruder he was not going to cause any trouble. His gun was underneath his pillow, but until he saw the figure, he wouldn’t be able to use it to much success.

“What do you want?”

The lamp on the other side of the room flicked on, and Jack Keaton sat in the chair next to the TV stand, a Desert Eagle in one hand.

“We need to go,” Jack said, his face grim and tired. The dark circles underneath his eyes and his rumpled clothing told Luke that his friend hadn’t slept in a while.

“What’s going on, Jack?” he asked, sliding out of the sheets. He reached down and pulled on his jeans, then shrugged his shirt on.

“We need to go,” Jack repeated. His eyes were bloodshot, his demeanor frightened and ready for a fight at the same time. There was no way he was leaving without Luke, and there was no way he’d let Jack leave in such a state anyway.

“Where’s Jasper?”

“We’re going to get her. I can’t do it by myself, and you’re the only person besides her that I trust.”

Luke only nodded, tossing the pillow from the bed to show his own gun, then slowly slid it into his holster and attached it to his belt. He knew what Jack meant. The trust held between the three of them was strong, the things they’d been through and done together tying a tighter bond than anything else could. He would do anything for Jasper and Jack, and knew without a doubt that they would do the same for him.

The ride to Dallas was tense and quiet. Jack didn’t seem inclined to answer many questions, and Luke wasn’t sure he wanted answers. The little he knew of Jack and Jasper’s jobs told him enough. They were dangerous, fierce and violent, and because of that and their efficiency they got the green light to continue whatever work they were doing.

He’d gotten a letter from Jasper a few months earlier. It held a handful of photos of her and Jack getting married, as well as a few photos from their time together in Iraq.

Sorry you couldn’t be there, we decided not to wait. We’ll be in New York in December, enjoying our retirement road trip, and you’re getting a drink with us whether you like it or not. Get me a nice wedding present, yeah? I hear blenders are all the rage with us housewives.

-xo Kicker

No return address, no postmark, which meant it was hand delivered. Luke wasn’t sure if she had delivered it herself or had someone else do it, but he knew he’d never given her his address in the Bronx. Those two always had a flair for the dramatic and mysterious and it was best not to question it.

“Jack,” Luke decided, “I need to know what’s going on. Just tell me something.”

“She never came home from the store. I went down there and found her car, and the groceries, but Sugar was nowhere to be found.”

“He took her,” Jack grunted after a moment, whiteknuckling the steering wheel. “I found them, but I can’t save her by myself. I’ll just get us both killed.”

“Who took her?”

Jack turned to him, and for a moment Luke was sure he was riding with a ghost. His face was white, lips pressed into a grim line as tears pricked his red-rimmed eyes.

“A monster.”

They stopped two blocks from the location, making the rest of the way on foot. They approached an old warehouse in lower Dallas. It was littered with homeless camps and tents, broken syringes and bottles scattered all over. Near the docks, it offered little escape for people running from raids and police. The few people coherent enough to see their drawn guns skittered away, hiding in the shadows and pretending not to notice.

“I’m pretty sure she’s in the basement, but we should start from the top floor and sweep down,” Jack told him, pointing to the fourth floor. They made their way quietly up the stairwells, softly closing doors and moving in silence.

They cleared the top four floors, then made their way to the bottom. Jack was lagging, the lack of sleep and the stress catching up with him. The gold band on his left ring finger caught the dim lights here and there, and Luke feared for his friend’s sanity if they didn’t find Jasper alive.

Jack’s foot slid on a syringe, and it cracked loudly beneath his boot. They froze, solid as statues as they listened for any movement. They heard feet shuffle across the concrete, then silence. They locked eyes for a moment, then made their way down to the basement.

They swept room by room, until they found the boiler room. The light shone under the door, the sounds of sputtering and coughing echoed through the hallway. Jack used one hand to slowly turn the knob, his gun pointed center mass to hit anyone on the other side.

The lights were almost blinding in the dank darkness of the warehouse. Jack and Luke swept the room, trying to avoid the sight before them.

Jasper hung by her wrists to some piping. She was covered in blood. It pooled and caked down her arms, bones shining bright white against her red and olive skin. Bruises blossomed across her exposed stomach, her face beat purple and swollen. Her hair clung to her skull from sweat and blood, her little chest heaving from being suspended and tortured. The table in front of her was littered with knives, all covered in blood, a broken baseball bat laid at her feet.

“Baby,” Jack whispered, holstering his gun as he went to his wife. Jasper’s head snapped up and she began to struggle, snapping her jaws and snarling like a wild animal, her eyes glossy and unhinged.

“Baby, stop!” he pleaded. Luke pulled a knife from his boot and cut the wires. Jack caught her in his arms, setting her lightly on the floor as the fight left her body. “I’m gonna get you home, Sugar, I’m gonna get you safe.”

“Jack?” Jasper croaked. Her body wracked with sobs, going limp in his arms. Her chest heaved as she struggled to breathe. The blood began anew, pouring out of her arms as she looked around blindly, trying to catch sight of them.

Luke shrugged off his jacket, wrapping Jasper’s arms tightly as she cried out in pain. He shushed her while Jack patted her hair, trying to urge her to calm down.

A bottle skittered across the floors, and Jack’s head shot toward the door. He looked to Luke, his eyes feral and angry, then to Jasper. He softened, leaned down and kissed her forehead.

“Jack…” Jasper breathed, moving toward his warmth as best she could.

“Stay with her,” Jack commanded, clamping a firm hand down on his shoulder. He took one last look at his wife, then bolted out the door, gun in hand.

Luke knew he couldn’t keep Jasper here, in this dirty room with tourniquets and needles littering the scrubby floors. He waited a few moments, listening for a scuffle, but heard nothing. He scooped Jasper in his arms, doing his best to block out her moans of protest. She kept muttering Jack’s name as sweat poured off her in waves. Luke had to get her out of here and to a hospital.

Creeping down the hallway, he paused before going up the stairwell. He tried to not shift Jasper around too much, as the slightest movement made her gasp and cry. He thanked some higher power as they finally escaped onto the streets. A few junkies gasped at Jasper’s battered body, but Luke ignored them. He hustled with her down to where the car was parked.

“Jack?” Jasper stirred, trying to wriggle out of Luke’s arms. “Where’s Jack?”

“Stop moving, Kicker. You’re hurt. I’m gonna get you to the hospital.”

“No,” Jasper groaned, kicking her legs out then crying in pain, “Eli’s gonna kill him.”

“Jasper, stay still!” he commanded, lowering her to the ground next to the car. He couldn’t wait for Jack, but knowing Jasper, she’d launch herself out of a moving car to get to him. He looked around frantically, searching the darkness for him.

A gunshot rang out, loud and clear in the night, and Jasper sat up sharply, eyes alert and fierce. Luke couldn’t imagine the agony she must be in, but as always, she ignored it to save Jack.

Two figures ran at them from a distance. Another gunshot exploded through the air, the flash of a muzzle illuminating the street for a moment. They were running toward the docks, curses and snarls echoing around them. One of them disappeared for a moment, then a car started up.

The last thing Luke could make out in the night was Jack, hanging on for dear life on the top of an old muscle car as it roared past them and overwhelmed the street, tail lights disappearing from sight as the car drove over the docks and directly into the water. An explosion bloomed on the horizon, and Jasper began to scream.

Notes:

Whew! A lot happened here today! Please let me know what you thought about it, or if you have any theories!

also, the way Jasper's living room is set up is modeled after mine! I have a lovely yellow velvet couch and am buying the fuschia armchair soon <3 I've got orange curtains and little gold accent pieces all over, as well as a table full of orchids! But my plants are real, I just don't think Jasper has the mindset to keep them alive XD

Follow me on Twitter and Wattpad for more! @smurphyse

- Smurph ❤