#and luis LOOKS AWAY. the only power he has in this situation is to watch it happen but he cant even bear that. he cant see what he has

[m-feys]

I do think that luis knew. At least a little. Even subconsiously. I mean. It isnt like saddler is subtle abt it. I think luis looked away. I think he looked away from a lot of things.

Because of his own ambitions. His own curiosity. His own need to know what he could do.

I mean. In a way. How could he not. Even the work he did was pushing it he had to know something. He created the gigantes after all. I imagine him watching rats get too big for their fucking cages and always just wanting to see how far it could go.

He didnt want to stop. So he looked away. He didnt look at the faces of any of the people he once knew in his village. Of how empty they were now.

Because if he had stopped to ask what they could be using this work for. The answer would have always been something awful. So he didnt ask. He should love to ask questions but more than that he loves coming to conclusions. To theories and getting them proven.

Until he couldnt look away anymore. Until he was the one with a bug in his chest. Until he was looking into the empty eyes of someone who had been his friend.

I wonder if he remembered his grandfather then. If he saw a look like that then too. How long has he been looking away?

[dammitadolfnomorecake]

Once Bitten Twice Stupid prt.59

Three weeks passed without a word from Pidge, Lance feeling helpless. He’d turned off his private phone in the end, and kind of guilt tripped Coran into letting him stay for the time being. He knew his moods were up and down, he also knew he couldn’t ask Keith to stay when they were. He’d had a word with Coran about Keith working, he wanted things to be clear. When Keith was meant to be working, then he wasn’t allowed down to visit Lance. Keith wasn’t thrilled, but Lance felt it necessary, or he’d spend every moment thinking about his boyfriend rather than pretending he was being useful to Allura.

Allura was nice about everything, like she usually was. He didn’t push her about her friendship with “Loturd”. Keith had accidentally let the name slip, after his boyfriend came to see him. His and Shiro’s furniture had finally arrived. Keith bringing his favourite blade to show Lance, and Kosmo. Lance missed having Kosmo around. He had Blue for company, but Kosmo was too adorable, and his precious princess was hoing herself out for pats and attention from everyone she came across. When they’d agreed Lance could stay, he’d asked Shiro if he would Keith take Kosmo home with him. He wanted his boyfriend to have that feeling of coming home to his waiting puppy. If they were going to be out overnight, Kosmo came for sleepovers. Keith was such a proud dog father that Lance kind of felt like the only time he was happy was when Keith was gushing over his fur son.

Lance’s mood hadn’t gone unnoticed. Allura had planned a “spa night” for the both of them. Curled up on the sofa with face masks on, they’d watched movies and Lance painted her nails for her, and complimented her over perfect skin. It struck him how lonely it must be for her, and he silently swore to himself that he’d find a way to invite her out for some fun on the town. His Mami had noticed his mood. Luis wasn’t there the first time he visited after the “accident”, meaning he had his Mami to himself. Climbing into bed beside her, he’d fallen asleep in her safe and loving hold, her cold hadn’t progressed into pneumonia, proving there was plenty of life left in her. He hadn’t been to see her with Keith again, she understood he had work, so Blue came in her carrier.

Called to Allura’s office, through the personal phone he had in his room, Lance powered down his laptop before heading out. He had a nicer room now. His single bed now a double, plus there was a desk and wardrobe and space for Blue. Matt had come to check on him, apologising for what had happened. They’d hugged it out long enough that Shiro tugged Matt off of him. He hadn’t heard from Pidge either, so it was what it was. Leaving Blue sleeping on his bed, Lance headed out. He’d kind of been pretty much an errand boy for Allura, “helping” by making copies of things or running things between her office and the labs. His mood had picked up when he had something to do. It got him out of his head and not thinking about how much he missed his best friends.

When Lance reached Allura’s office, he knocked lightly on her door before opening it. His eyes totally bugging out as he eyed his boyfriend. Dressed in tight black jeans, a black T-shirt, a cropped red leather jacket and a thick pair of leather boots, his boyfriend looked hot. Hot and happy. Clapping her hands together, Allura looked particularly proud

“Lance! Excellent. Now, you may be wondering why I called. You and Keith are going on a date today”

Lance raised an eyebrow. He didn’t particularly want to leave the complex. He’d only left to see himself Mami and that was it

“I am?”

“Yep! Consider this a little thank you for allowing us to steal Keith away. The work he’s doing is vital to help ensure Platt remains relatively peaceful. Plus, you haven’t had a break in the last fortnight. Tonight is completely on me”

“You’re kicking me out?”

Lance was half joking, maybe more like he hoped his tone his that he was serious. He wasn’t supposed to go anywhere. His pheromones could be a serious issue. Allura didn’t see it as a joke, quick to give a shake of her head

“Not at all! I love you having here. No, I thought you and Keith might enjoy each other’s company. Keith has proved himself a valuable asset, and we want to thank him for his work”

“What she means is they think I might snap if I have to go one more undercover mission”

“You have been rather stressed of late”

So stressed Keith had snapped at him for not understanding. It’d been a small fight, Keith easily brought back under control when Lance wrapped his arms around him and told him while he didn’t, he was still there for him. It was weighing heavily on Keith not to be able to tell him everything. In some ways being in Platt made it harder for both of them, another reason Lance didn’t want to move in with Keith. He wanted Keith to have that safe place at the of work to relax and destress. Keith sighed at Allura, Allura ignoring it

“Now, you have a few hours before your dinner reservation. I’m sure the pair of you can find something to do. I don’t want to see either of you back here tonight. Keith, I give you permission to discuss things with Lance, though that is left to your discretion”

It was now Lance’s mind went into panic mode. He wasn’t dressed for a date. He wasn’t dressed any different from normal. His hair wasn’t tamed. He wasn’t wearing nice clothes. He didn’t know how to date! He’d never done a “date” date. And Keith... Keith was standing there looking calm and collected! What... what was he supposed to do? Why couldn’t he remember what normal people did on a date? Keith wanted to go on a date with him? Him of all people? What did they talk about? What did normal people talk about? What did Keith like to talk about? Letting out a squeak, he could have died on the spot of embarrassment. Keith hiding his laughter behind his hand

“I think you broke him”

Allura giggled, playing along

“Oh, dear. Don’t tell me you don’t want to go. Keith and I planned this days ago”

“I... me... you... we... date?”

He was short circuiting. Keith’s goddamn smile made him feel all goopy inside

“That’s how a date normal works, babe. Do you not want to go with me?”

“Yes! Date me!”

Now he was yelling? And Keith was laughing again. What was he even saying?

“You guys have fun tonight. I’m leaving him in your hands, Keith”

Allura left them. Lance covering his burning face with his hands. Coming up to him, Keith kissed him on the forehead, Lance peaking up at him

“It’s okay. I didn’t plan much”

“I... are you sure you want to go with me?”

“Well, you’re the only one I’m dating. Plus, you’re not the only on freaking out”

“What are you freaking out for? You’re all dumb and hot and smiling and can work English”

“Because I’m going on a date with you”

“But you planned it!”

And he was yelling again

“I’m freaking out because it’s a date with the guy I’m dating”

“But I’m me”

“That’s why I wanted things... You know, what, let’s just go”

“But... I’m... not even dressed”

“Pretty sure you’ve got clothes on, babe”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re all... hot”

“Do you want to get changed? I think you’re fine in what you’re wearing”

“But... I look like me”

“And I like you. God. You’re making me even more nervous and shit”

“Can’t forget a good shit”

Lance swore he could almost see his soul escaping from in the inside. Groaning, he slid his hand back up

“Just leave me here. Here lays Lance. Killed by his boyfriend’s niceness and unfair hotness”

Keith wrapped his arms around him. A date with Keith... an actual declared date. Like a boyfriend date. Keith’s scent was wonderful, Lance’s knees going a little weak

“Oh, babe... hey, if you’re not up to this, that’s okay too”

Nope. Keith had said date. He was having his date. He was having this date and going to prove he could function like a normalish human not a mess of a vampire

“No. I want to... God, I want to. How are you not making a fool of yourself?”

“I already made a fool of myself asking for the day off. I asked Allura, because I know you two have been hanging out...”

Allura hadn’t told him, see if he was going to braid her hair again when she couldn’t even give him a heads up

“I feel really happy right now... and like I’m going to throw up”

Keith’s hold meant everything, his boyfriend hiding his face against Lance’s shoulder. Fuck... it should be criminal to be this awkward

“Me too... okay. We’re doing this. Just two boyfriends going on a date. Doing boyfriend things... and shit”

Keith wasn’t going to let him forget. So he was going to have to make him forget

“I’m going to date you so fucking hard you’ll forget shit”

“I’m looking forward to the full Lance experience”

Lance huffed, feeling like someone more adult should be supervising them

“You just had it”

“Over so quick? Babe, I knew I was good, but damn. Should you be bragging about it”

Oh fuck... now he was thinking about sex...

“Shut up. God. Let’s go already before I really do expire from embarrassment”

*

Keith’s brought his motorbike. Keith had brought his motorbike and Lance wasn’t sure how to feel. With his arms around his boyfriend’s waist, he spent the first 5 minutes trying to accept he was on the back of a death machine with Keith weaving in and out of traffic like a mad man. He felt like he’d left his stomach somewhere behind on the trip, the vibration and noise taking a bit of getting used to. Keith called him brave, but Lance liked to think he was more like Hunk in this situation, safely cautious.

Despite his nerves, Lance felt strangely disappointed as Keith pulled up to a stop. His ears still ringing, despite the helmet he was wearing deadening some of the noise. Raising his head, he questioned Keith’s idea of a date. The sign above the door read “SPlatter-field”. A not so clever play on the business being in Platt. In the window was a sign advertising it being a shooting range. Climbing off the back of the bike, Lance tried to hide his confusion, and some of his disappointment. Dates meant romance. He wasn’t sure how guns said romance. Keith climbed off, pulling his helmet off as he did. Noticing Lance hadn’t taken his off, his boyfriend’s face fell

“You don’t like it?”

Keith had gone to a lot of effort to plan this date. He probably wanted to do something different and unusual. Pulling his helmet off, Lance shook his head

“It’s not that. I just wasn’t expecting a shooting range”

“Allura said you went hunting as a kid.... I messed this up...”

Keith was crushing his heart right now

“No. No. Look, sure, not a place I would think of, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be fun. Besides, I’m a total crack shot at fair games”

“You don’t need to try and make me feel better”

He was a dick. He’d hurt Keith’s feelings

“I’m not. But you better be prepared to have your arse kicked”

“So it’s okay?”

Lance gave Keith the warmest smile he could muster

“It could be fun”

“If you don’t like it, we’ll go”

“Okay. Let’s give it a shot”

With Allura being Keith’s co-conspirator, she’d given Keith his wallet ahead of time. Lance hadn’t even noticed it was missing. Which probably said a lot about how distracted he’d been lately. The man behind the counter didn’t seem so sure about him being 26, but his ID was valid and he was forced to swallow his tongue, as they signed all paperwork related to their outing. Trying to remember the last time he’d held a gun, he flushed at the memory of telling Keith to shoot him. God. He’d been so lame. He was struggling to remember ever being “cool” in front of his boyfriend. Allocating them two hand guns each, Keith produced his firearms licence, which was enough to let the man take over explaining how things worked. Lance was pretty sure Keith hadn’t meant it as a bragging move, but he did delight in the man being taken down a peg. Which was probably his ego showing.

Following Keith through to the range, he found they were the only two there, other a bored looking supervisor who made to follow behind them, Keith leading them to the last two cubicles, before turning hot instructor of him, Lance blocking out the man watching

“I know you know how to use a gun, but it’s important not to treat it like a toy”

“So I don’t point the end at my feet and pull the trigger?”

His boyfriend scowled

“No. Each magazine holds twelve rounds. You fire all twelve then put your weapon down on the desk. Seeing you’ve got a sight advantage and I’ve got an experience advantage, we’ll set the targets at the furtherest points. On the paper there’s zones, each zone is worth a number of points. I know you don’t want to shoot to kill, but I think it’s important you train up on your skills”

Lance jerked back a little, not expecting Keith to be so serious. Behind him, the man supervising the range backed off

“Should I be worried? Am I in danger?”

“No. But if you ever are, I want you to be able to protect yourself. The investigation is getting nowhere fast... and... the targets are all vampires. I know we could have done this at VOLTRON, but I didn’t want you to feel self conscious while handling a firearm. Taking the shot is never easy. Even when you tell yourself it it. I’ve had to shoot before and the first time left me messed up for days”

Keith was chasing a vampire killer? Lance tried to pretend he was surprised... Well, more surprised. He wasn’t actually all that surprised given vampires were most douches. Now it made sense. Keith wanted to make this as stress free as possible, knowing he disliked guns and the Coran would fuss if he was training with them

“Okay. I understand”

“Now, the way you hold the gun depends on the make and model. We’ll use two hands on these. There’s a little bit of a kick back, so when you press the trigger, make sure you’re not squeezing or you’ll end up shooting something you’re not meant to. I’ll set the targets up. Put your safety glasses and earmuffs on”

Lance did as he was told. Keith knew his way around a shooting range. Lance wondering if the one at Blade Headquarters was anything like this. Probably not. He could picture a whole wall of guns and other dangerous weaponry. Sending the sheets to the back of the room, Lance was starting to feel nervous. A shotgun wasn’t the same as a hand gun... or one of those weighted guns at a fair. He didn’t feel guilty for winning at a fair when the owners used cheap tricks. Coming back to his side, his boyfriend tugged Lance’s earmuffs off his ears

“I’m going to show you how to stand and how to hold the gun. It’s important to control your breathing”

Lance rolled his eyes, Keith didn’t find it funny. He needed to be serious. Gun’s weren’t toys. He knew guns weren’t toys. His ego was flaring again, and he kind of wanted to shoot himself for it

“Sorry. I’ll behave... please teach me all you know, Samurai”

[fyeahwildfire]

Spirit Bound

Chapter 4

Summary: Scorpion demands a match with Sub-Zero to get his revenge on his family and clan. How will you save Sub-Zero’s life?

Pairing: Mortal Kombat x reader; Bucky x reader (later)

Warning: swearing, angst

A/N: Italics= thoughts

You, Lui Kang, Raiden, Jax, Sonya, and Johnny were surrounded by other participants. You stood between Raiden and Liu Kang. 

Raiden looks over to the side and notices one of the guards standing beside Cyrax. He gets another vision, one of Kung Lao fighting against Baraka. He leaves you and Lui Kang as he goes over to Kung Lao. Uh oh.

“Kombatants! The next match will now begin!” Shang Tsung sat atop his throne, looking high and mighty.

A burst of fire suddenly erupts before your eyes, standing inside the fire is none other than Scorpion. You look at him with awe as the crowd claps. That’s fucking awesome. He looks like a total badass. 

Johnny and Lui Kang look at each other, their both wondering who is going to be facing him.

“Scorpion! Specter of the Netherrealm. Resurrected by the sorcerer Quan Chi! Who among you is worthy of this challenge?”

“Where is the Lin Kuei Sub-Zero? He killed my family and clan. I will have his head.” Scorpion looked among the competitors.

Aw shit. Damn it. Bi-Han stay the fuck away. You thought as you internally panic. You can’t lose your half-brother. You haven’t even gotten the chance to speak with him. 

You narrow your eyes at Scorpion. He will not touch your brother. Not if you have anything to say.

“I accept the challenge.” Kung Lao steps forward and throws down the spear.

“Kung Lao.” Lui Kang says his voice laced with disbelief.

“Never mind the Lin Kuei. Now you face a Shaolin.” Kung Lao runs his two fingers across his razor-sharp hat and assumes a fighting stance.

“You will regret your impulsiveness.” Scorpion gets into his fight stance as well.

“So how good of a fighter is your friend?” You whispered to Lui Kang.

“Uh, he could use more training.” Lui Kang was worried for his friend’s well-being.

“So, he’s gonna get his Shaolin ass kicked.” Johnny said bluntly.

You and your new friends watch as Kung Lao and Scorpion fight. You cringe the moment you hear the crack of bones.

“Oh that’s gotta hurt.” You watch in shock as the powers of Scorpion prove too much for Kung Lao.

The fight between Scorpion and Kung Lao continues for a good 13 minutes, however the former soon beats Kung Lao into unconsciousness. “You are not yet a warrior.”

Without thinking, you run over to Kung Lao and place his head in your lap. Lui Kang follows behind you and kneels beside his good friend.

“Listen when your elders speak! You could not win this fight.” Raiden stands on the other side of Kung Lao.

“Perhaps, you should lecture him after...you know when he’s not fucked up.” You narrow your eyes towards Raiden.

How could he say such things to a person, who clearly wanted to prove himself worthy? No matter what anyone says, you thought Kung Lao was brave to face Scorpion and for that he earned your respect.

Scorpion is staring directly at you. He sees how you comfort the man who he defeated. How you scolded Raiden for berating Kung Lao. It was impressive that you would say such things to Lord Raiden not many would.

You sense eyes on you and look up to see Scorpion taking you in. You want to glare at him and tell him to stay the fuck away from Kung Lao and Bi-Han, but you can’t. 

Scorpion had lost his family and clan, he believed your brother Bi-Han was responsible. You understood his pain, more than anyone else here, but you needed to find out the truth. For both their sakes.

You and Lui Kang help Kung Lao to his feet and drag him away. 

“I have defeated the challenger, Shang Tsung! I demand Sub-Zero!”

You have been keeping a close eye on Raiden’s visions. He had another vision only this time it was Scorpion holding the decapitated head of Bi-Han. You gasp as you feared that would be the fate of your brother. No. You have to try. Something. Anything to save Bi-Han.

But first you have to help Kung Lao. You and Lui Kang walk past Scorpion, to find a place where Raiden can heal Kung Lao’s wounds. You place him next to Johnny and watch the fight between Nightwolf and Scorpion. It was an impressive battle but Scorpion ended up taking the win.

“The spirits have forsaken you, Shaman.” Scorpion sees Nightwolf slowly rise back onto his feet.

“An impressive start?” Shang Tsung nods his head respectively.

“You waste my time, sorcerer!” Scorpion raises his fiery fist up in the air.

“Restraint, Scorpion.” A tall, well-built man with red eyes spoke. He was completely devoid of any hair. No hair on his head, face, and chest. He also had a strange symbol on his forehead. You also spotted an authentic amulet on his belt.

Scorpion huffs out a grunt and diffuses the fire in his hands. You raise your brow, finding it strange that the man had such a hold on Scorpion. Your attention is brought back to Kung Lao as he is all healed up.

“Are you alright, Kung Lao?”

Kung Lao registers the sound of your sweet voice. His breath hitches as his eyes meet yours. He’s flirted with many women in the past, but you, you weren’t just any women. You were the type of women who made men want to marry. Your beauty could not rival another’s. In his eyes, you were a Queen.

“Yes, Lady Y/N. I am alright.” He smiles warmly. “Lui Kang and Raiden have already explained your situation to me. It’s an honor to meet you.”

You smile, “Same. Not many would challenge a man such as Scorpion and for that you have my respect.”

Kung Lao eyes widen with shock and happiness. No one has said such words to him. His closest friends and mentors had constantly compared him to the “chosen one” Lui Kang. Even Lui Kang himself, but you, you respected him even though he was defeated.

“You respect him for losing.” Lui Kang asked curiously, it did not make any sense.

“For Bravery. Many would coward upon seeing a man like Scorpion, but Kung Lao didn’t.” You smile and turn to watch the interaction between Scorpion and Shang Tsung.

You are aware of the two Shaolin’s looking at you. However, your smile turns upside down the moment you hear your brother’s name.

“You will fight Sub-Zero soon enough.” Shang Tsung stands up from his throne and takes his leave, with Quan Chi following.

The two Shaolin’s are concerned with your sudden change in demeanor.

Scorpion lowers his head and ponders recent events. You and Raiden approach Scorpion with determination to save your brother Bi-Han.

“Scorpion, I understand your desire for revenge. But Nightwolf is right. There are other ways in which you may find peace.”

“Sub-Zero deserves death.” Scorpion replies back to Raiden.

“No, he doesn’t.” You fold your arms underneath your breasts.

“Defeat Sub-Zero if you must, but do not kill him. I fear his death will give rise to a more treacherous foe.”

Ignoring Raiden’s words Scorpion says, “I will have my revenge.”

“You know what?” You unfold your arms, to clench both of your fists.

You hear Raiden’s telepathic thoughts warning you not to anger this man before both of you. For your sake and Bi-Han’s.

You take long, slow steady breaths. “Spare Sub-Zero’s life, please. Do not kill him. Raiden can request that the Elder Gods return the Shirai Ryu to the realm of mortals.”

Scorpion looked between both you and Raiden for a moment, his eyes lingered on you a bit longer until he nodded.

You sigh with relief, oh sweet sweet Suzan. I’m so scared at the thought of losing Bi-Han, I can’t even swear right now.

You immediately realize Raiden had already walked off to meet with Lui Kang and Kung Lao. The two Shaolin’s await your return to their side. They all but beg you to stay away from Scorpion, but you can’t at least not now. You had to get to the bottom of what happened to the Shirai Ryu and Lin Kuei.

You flash him a nervous smile. He doesn’t smile back. He watches you for a moment longer, but then he turns his back.

“You know I get it. I understand how you feel.”

Scorpion stops but doesn’t turn. You walk up to him and hear the thoughts of Lui Kang and Kung Lao telling you to get away and run.

“You know Nightwolf is right about many things.” You sigh sadly, you don’t exactly like bringing up your past, but if this was a way to get Scorpion on Earthrealms side then you would do what you have to. Not just for Bi-han, but for Kuai Liang, Tony, and Earthrealm. “You are not the only one whose people have been victimized. Would you care to join me for a stroll, away from prying ears?”

Scorpion nods and walks with you, you tell him all about how your family’s bloodline had been hunted down, all because they desired the Soultaker sword. How your mother was wronged. How she was killed by the Red Dragon clan.

“Do you no longer cling to the past?” Scorpion had listened intently, he hated how the Red Dragon clan took your mother away from you. You were just a child.

“No. I still find myself wishing the outcomes were different. What more could I have done to save her?” You have to suppress the tears from coming down. “Honestly, a part of me does want retribution. Not for honor or justice, but…for revenge. To see them suffer. To watch there empire burn.” You stay quiet for a moment, until you speak again. “But then I realize. If I do seek revenge…what would that get me? My mother won’t come back. I will only end up losing myself…my soul.”

Scorpion wanted to scoff, but he didn’t. The more he spoke with you, he realized you and he were from different worlds, yet you both shared similar pain. He once lived with a clan of assassins and you lived a somewhat-normal lifestyle outside of Mortal Kombat. Now, you both were thrown into the battles of Mortal Kombat, to reveal Earthrealms fate.

“Is that why you asked me not to kill Sub-Zero? For my soul?”

“Part of it.” You smile sadly.

Scorpion raises his brow, “Part?”

“Sub-Zero is my half–brother.” You look into his eyes, seeing shock and anger.

“Half-brother?”

“Yes, he and I share the same mother. His father left my mother and took her sons away so they could join the Lin Kuei.” You explained, hoping to diffuse his anger.

“So you told me all of this just to save Sub-Zero. He murdered my family, my soulmate and clan…”

“We don’t know that. You’ve only heard one side of the story. Quan Chi could be lying to you.” I ball my hands into fists. “Let me talk to Sub-Zero and I promise you I will find out who killed your family.”

Scorpion’s eyes widen, he had just met you and yet you were willing to help him find the true killer of his family and clan. Why? What could you possibly gain from this aside from saving Bi-Han? Could Quan Chi be lying? Would you lie to him?

“I give you my word Scorpion. I will find out who killed your family. I may not have been able to save my mother, but I…”

“And If Quan Chi is right?”

“Then you’ll have to kill me, because I will not let you harm my brother. And if you do, you ruin any chances of having your clan restored.”

Scorpion nods, as his anger diffused as he remembers the agreement with Raiden. “How will you find out…?”

“I’m telepathic.” You smirk. “Just don’t tell Quan Chi. Don’t need that asshole to ruin any of my plans.”

“Very well. You have my word I will not tell Quan Chi and… I will spare your brother’s life.”

“Thank you.” You bow respectively. “You know how incredibly lucky you are? You have an actual chance to have the Shirai Ryu return to the living. Wow. Fuck, I wish I had that option.”

“For your mother.” Scorpion walked with you as you both headed back to Shang Tsung’s throne room.

You nod, “Yea. For my father and stepmother too.”

“Did the Red Dragons…”

“Oh! No, they died in a car crash.” You look down to the ground.

“I’m sorry for your losses.”

You shrug, “Why you didn’t kill them. It’s life. It happens. Now all I have left is Tony, Sub-Zero, and my other half-brother I have yet to meet.”

Scorpion looks at you carefully, you had lost so much and yet that loss didn’t make you into a vengeful woman. In fact, it made you kind, caring, brave, and strong. All you truly desired was to save the last living members of your family and for that Scorpion vowed to protect you.

His took notice of the tattoo on your forearm, “What of your soulmate?”

“What?”

He nudges his head towards your forearm. 

“Oh. This. I have yet to meet him. I don’t know if I want to, to be honest. My life has been rather complicated and to involve him...” You shake your head. “...Its best if I avoid him all together.”

Several kombatants are standing around discussing things with one another. You and Scorpion walk into the throne room together, both of you see Cyrax and Sektor huddled together.

“I understand there are benefits to the Grand Master’s plan…” Cyrax speaks with Sektor. “…but his plan goes against Lin Kuei principles.”

“We are Lin Kuei, Cyrax. We will obey the Grand Master’s commands.”

You roll your eyes upon hearing two Lin Kuei members. You huff a grunt and from the corner of your eyes, you see Scorpion looking at you. “What?”

“You do not like the Lin Kuei either?”

“What? What makes you think that?”

Scorpion shrugs, “Perhaps it’s the way you tense upon seeing them.”

“I do not tense.” You scoff playfully.

“You’re tense right now.”

You relax your shoulders and glare your eyes at Scorpion. “I’m starting to regret befriending you. Woah! Hey, where are you going?” You follow behind Scorpion as he makes his way over to Cyrax and Sektor.

“It means giving up our free will…our souls. It will turn us into…” Cyrax is interrupted by Sektor, who points out Scorpion’s presence with you in tow.

“Scorpion.” Sektor voice is laced with disgust.

“Your inferior clan is dead. Soon you will join them.” Cyrax holds his head up and threatens Scorpion.

“Excuse me, wannabe ninja…” You stand beside Scorpion and send a deathly glare at the two Lin Kuei members. “…if you don’t have anything nice to say than keep that fucking mouth of yours shut.”

The three men are surprised to hear you say such a thing. Sektor glares at you while Cyrax finds it humorous. He laughs and holds your chin with his two fingers. “How cute. Didn’t know Scorpion found a replacement?”

“Do your best to keep your bitch on a leash, Scorpion.” Sektor told Scorpion.

Bitch! He called you Bitch! You cracked your knuckles. “Oh. It’s about to get real!”

Before you can pounce and hit the bastard, Scorpion beat you to it. He grabbed Cyrax’s wrist and removed his hand from you. “You will keep your filthy mouth shut and keep your blood soaked hands off, Y/N!”

Cyrax pushes Scorpion backwards to which he immediately goes into a fighting stance.

“A challenge! Scorpion versus Cyrax and Sektor!” Shang Tsung announces with Quan Chi standing beside him.

“Your obsession with Sub-Zero ends here.” Cyrax goes into a fighting stance.

Before you could stand beside Scorpion and offer aid, Kung Lao grabs ahold of your hand and pulls you to stand next to him, Raiden, and Liu Kang. The three of you watch as both Sektor and Cyrax are defeated despite being formidable warriors.

“I will have my revenge, but I will not kill Sub-Zero.” Scorpion looks over to you and Raiden. Both you and Raiden smile and nod.

“Will not? Or cannot?” Sub-Zero walks into the throne room.

You groan mentally, Come on. Seriously!

“You.” Scorpion seethes as he stalks towards Sub-Zero.

While everyone watches the intense interaction between Scorpion and Sub-Zero, you had read Scorpions thoughts. 

Oh hell! I need to stop him before he does something he might regret. You thought.

“The Shirai Ryu are dead. You will suffer as they did.” Scorpion seethes.

“To hell with your clan.” Sub-Zero insults back.

“No…to hell with you!” Scorpion goes up in flames and grabs ahold of Bi-han, teleporting him somewhere else.

You try to find a way to get to Bi-han when you heard Quan Chi’s thoughts, he wanted to antagonize Scorpion and see him kill Sub-Zero. You quickly sneak past the other kombatants and just as he is about to teleport you grab ahold of his belt undetected.

You are teleported to a place that looked like hell. You look over Quan Chi’s shoulder to see Bi-han beaten into submission.

“I have avenged my family and clan.” Scorpion speaks over Bi-Han’s unconscious body.

“This is your retribution?” Quan Chi walks closer to Scorpion and doesn’t realize you behind him. “Scorpion. Kill him.”

“I…I will not. He has been beaten.” Scorpion looks at Bi-Han and can’t find it in himself to kill him. Not after his conversation with you.

“Have you forgotten?” Quan Chi shows Scorpion a vision of an entire village up in flames. The Shirai Ryu clansmen are cut down by a hail of arrows. Others are decapitated and murdered by the Lin Kuei clansmen. Among the horseback riders is Sub-Zero.

You stepped closer seeing all that had transpired, this was the reason why the Lin Kuei and Scorpion were at odds. But, it made no sense as you delve into the minds of Bi-Han and Quan chi you were able to realize the truth.

Bi-Han regains consciousness and sees the vision’s before him.

“Your clan. Your family.” Quan Chi showed Scorpion another vision, Scorpion’s wife/soulmate and infant child huddled in the corner of their home. The baby’s wail of terror breaks your heart and sends a chill up your spine.

The door opens to reveal your brother Sub-Zero with his sword in hand. He’s unmoved by Scorpion’s wife’s tears as he brings down his blade. Blood is splattered against the walls along with the petals of a rose worn in his wife’s hair.

“NOOO!” Scorpion yells with pure rage as the vision fades.

Bi-Han badly injured is up on his feet, holding his hand up in mercy. “That is not me!”

Consumed with rage, Scorpion rips off his mask and reveals his skull enveloped in flames.

You knew then that nothing would be able to stop Scorpions rage, but you had to try and defend your brother, even if it were from Scorpion himself. You didn’t care about the consequences. All that mattered was Bi-Han’s safety.

You step out from behind Scorpion and Quan Chi, you then quickly rush over to stand in front of Bi-Han. Perhaps, you could try and reason with Scorpion. Only a fool would think to do such a thing.

Seeing you standing before Sub-Zero, Scorpion looks down at you. He can remember the conversation he had with you, but his rage had all but consumed him. He took a step forward, only for you to raise your glowing green hands.

“Move aside.” He growled.

“No. I told you before if it came to this, you would have to kill me too. I will not let you kill him.”

“He killed my clan! My wife! My son! He deserves death.”

“If Scorpion truly wishes to avenge his family and clan, then he must kill Sub-Zero.” Quan Chi looks at you. “Who are you to deny him that?”

You narrow your eyes at Quan Chi, “Someone who knows the truth, you liar. When all you have done is use Scorpion’s wrath to your advantage.” You look over to Scorpion. “Remember the promise you made to me and Raiden. You kill Bi-Han and that promise goes away.”

Scorpion takes a moment to think it over. You take careful slow steps towards him.

“Please Hanzo. Don’t kill him. I told you I would find the truth and I have….”

Scorpion looks up and you can see the flames in his eyes dimming.

“Truth? What truth?” Quan Chi spoke from beside Scorpion. “Enough of this! Kill the girl and Sub-Zero, so we can be on our way.”

“I gave you my word. I stand by that.”

Hanzo nods and places his mask back on. You sigh with relief as you don’t have to fight against Scorpion.

Back in the throne room of Shang Tsung…

All the kombatants stand and talk amongst each other as they have no idea if either Sub-Zero or Scorpion will come back alive. Kung Lao and Lui Kang were both worried for your well-being, they had no time to stop you from teleporting away with Quan Chi.

Scorpion reappears in the throne room, he steps aside to reveal you supporting Sub-Zero.

You look up to see Raiden giving you a nod of approval. “Alright Bi-Han, let’s get you to my room so we can patch you up. I don’t think this place has an infirmary.”

Lui Kang and Kung Lao both ranted about how dangerous and careless that is was for you to sneak past them and teleport away with Quan Chi. They followed you out the room and continued their ranting. Raiden just shook his head, his two students were completely smitten with you and concerned for your well-being.

Sub-Zero listened to the never-ending rants of Lui Kang and Kung Lao. If he wasn’t struggling to walk, he would have kicked both of their asses, just to get them to shut up. He looked down at you and could nearly see a vein pop in your forehead.

Once you reached your bedroom chambers, you immediately closed the doors behind you. You could not hear another word from Lui Kang and Kung Lao.

Behind closed doors of your room, you placed Sub-Zero down on the bed and began tending to his wounds. The look on your face, resemble to that of his mother.

“A little advice, do not insult Scorpions family or clan. In fact, just stay away from Scorpion.” You moved around your room to grab all the necessities you need to bandage Bi-Han. “Fuck, if I not been there you would have died.” You mumbled the last part to yourself.

Bi-Han winces as he struggles to sit up from your bed. “I thank you….” He didn’t exactly know who you were or why you decided to save him.

“My name is Y/n.” You return to the bedside with your equipment in hand.

“Thank you, Y/n. I don’t understand how you were able to teleport to us? But…”

“I didn’t teleport to you. I snuck up behind Quan Chi and grabbed onto his belt.” You wring the soaked rag in your hands and begin to wipe all the blood of his chest.

“So you have mastered stealth. Impressive.” He grunts when you cleaned around his wound. He grabs ahold of your wrist to temporarily stop you from bandaging him. “Why did you interfere? Why did you save me?”

You narrow your eyes, “What you wanted to die?”

“It would have restored my honor and...”

You glared at Bi-Han, “Honor? There is no honor in dying because you lost a match. You are a fucking idiot to think so. Clearly you did not get our mother’s intelligence.” 

You rose from your position and paced around the room as you continued to rant angrily. “Not many get a choice whether they live or die and you want to die. Be fucking grateful that you are alive…”

Sub-Zero watched as you ranted and paced around the room. Despite your age, you were clearly wiser than most your age. But then he caught onto one bit of information that you ranted angrily about. What did you mean by “our mother.” It was then he pieced it together. This whole time he wondered why you looked so familiar. Why you looked so much like his mother.

“You are my sister aren’t you?”

You stopped mid-ranting and looked into his eyes. You looked like his mother, but your eyes were not hers.

“Yes.” Your shoulders become less tense. After a moment of silence, you speak again. “Our mother would not want this life for you. To easily throw your life away when all she tried to do was give us a life of normalcy.”

You move to sit on the bed, your back facing Bi-Han and your eyes casted downwards. You scoff to yourself. “Who am I to talk? When I’m forced to do the same. If only she can see me now. She would be ashamed…her sacrifice would have been for nothing. She…”

“Sacrifice?” Bi-Han leaned forward despite the pain he was enduring. “What do you mean? Our mother is alive…isn’t she?”

When he receives no response from you, he places his hand on your shoulder. “How?”

“The Red Dragon clan killed her. They… wanted the soultaker sword.” You rise from your position and move to the door. “I’ll get Raiden to come and heal you. It was nice meeting you Bi-Han.”

Before Bi-Han could respond you had left out the door. He could see you concealing all the pain underneath. How just the slightest mention of your mother changed your demeanor. He realized then you had witnessed her death.

[mrneighbourlove]

The Rising Sun: Ch 5. Power Exchanged

"Oh thank the goddesses we're here."

"I thought we'd never hear the prattle end from your grandfather about his glory days."

"Give him a break, he's old and just wants to give an impression that he can still kick ass."

"Can he still kick ass?"

"I... think so? To a degree? If you're close enough to hit with his cane, perhaps."

"Or his farts, those are lethal."

“Oh, hush the lot of you.” Ganondorf, former King of Hyrule, had grown older with age. Man was just over a century of age. Even kept his build up over all the decades. Up until Zelda passed away. His wife’s death shook him to the core, and over the last few years since her passing, he lost muscle mass. No need to work out, but also a loss of spirit. Still, he held joy for his family: children, grandchildren, friends. And this day was one of the most joyous he’d ever have in a long time.

With all his children and grandchildren finally gathered, with their significant others, they were traveling to Taiyo Town in a large caravan.

"We would have been here sooner if you didn't have to stop to pee ten times."

"Shut it, you were the one that kept complaining about being hungry."

"I was hungry! What's wrong with being hungry?"

"Ganonpa," Luimaya sighed in annoyance, listening to her siblings and cousins’ bicker. "How did you do it with Dad and his siblings?"

“To be honest, it was your grand mother that was the level headed one. I often encouraged some healthy bickering. Was also easy to haul you all by the scruffs when you’ve been misbehaving. Also helped to have Rinku and Leere step in once in a while.” The Mortuus had a nice cloak to protect her skin from the sun. Sunny was letting little Joy play with Skyla. “Well that became difficult when all our younger siblings become rebellious giants.”

"Hmph, when you could catch us by the scruff, old man."

"Remember that time when we pranked him with the stink bomb with Skull Kid?"

"He chased us through the halls for hours before giving up."

"I told you it wasn't a good idea at the time."

"What do you mean, Lui? It was your idea."

"Yes, my idea, just not at that time. He was in a mood that day and we set it off."

"What are we even doing here, anyway? I thought the future queen couldn't leave the castle unless it was for diplomatic reasons."

"It is." Luimaya clarified. "I'm here to meet the leaders of Taiyo Town."

"But you're going to be the queen, and you're Gerudo. So, doesn't that make you their leader?"

Revan cleared his throat, sitting next to Nakeso and Luimaya. There were so many grandkids he’d barely known here now. Not to mention, he was finally about to enter the town his father put so much time and attention into. The whole feeling was daunting, but he did his best to relax. Heck, Kanisa’s kids didn’t even look like Gerudo. “Well, yes and no. All the tribes of Hyrule ha e either sworn fealty to the crown of Hyrule or formed alliances. So technically, my father and anyone else who’s in charge here could lead without outright obeying Covarog and later Luimaya.”

Luimaya and Ganondorf both shot Revan a glare at his words. Like grandfather, like granddaughter, it seemed. She definitely inherited his scowl. Evidently, the two of them agreed on the premise that the Gerudo of Taiyo Town should still hold some respect for the original King, his son, and granddaughter. "We don't want a repeat of the past, Revan. We're going to ensure it stays peaceful, but there has to be some grounds of respect." Luimaya told her bodyguard. "Your father or another leader, it matters not."

“I never suggested that.” Revan drew closer to Nakeso, freezing when his thigh touched hers. “And I’m sure my dad isn’t a fool. Just stubborn. Something I’ve heard and know you two can have in common.”

The cart laughed as Ganondorf merely smiled lightly in agreement. It wasn’t something he could deny.

"That's right, you're the fool and he's just stubborn." Luimaya teased, earning another round of snickers from everyone in the caravan. "You've nearly gotten yourself killed numerous times, not counting the times you were trying to watch my back."

"I don't know who is the worst, Revan or you."

"Revan." The grandkids all responded in unisons.

"He has more tallies." Nakeso held up a notebook. "Revan has nearly gotten killed 158 times while Luimaya is only at 37."

"What? Really? I thought she'd have more."

"She's reckless, but she's not stupid enough to put herself in situations to die."

"True."

"Hey! Your future queen is hearing all this!"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know it's true."

Revan was bright red in the face. “It hasn’t even been a year since- Wait, how long have you kept that book around for?”

"Since you were five and almost stuck your head into a forge to prove you were fireproof like your sister." Nakeso remarked, earning a snort from Donoma. "I still can't believe you did that."

"He was just jealous that I could walk in fire without getting burned." Donoma giggled. "And pouted when I held fire in my hands like a ball. Insisted he could do it too. I don't think I've ever seen Mama scold him like that for an hour."

Revan was growing uncomfortable. Pretty much every grandchild was not only older than him, Ralnor’s children themselves being in their mid thirties to cap the height of age, but they were all together on his misery. Even Donoma seemed to be more suited with them. “Yeah. Sure.” When he saw Skyla looking at him, he sighed, secretly signing to her. “ Least I’m not afraid of spiders.”

"You in trouble. A lot." Skyla signed in return with a small smile. She was still shy, like she was when a tiny girl, but had opened up to her cousins and was flourishing in her studies to be a veterinarian. "But good fighter. Luimaya lucky to have you. Don't worry. Everyone loves you. Just tease you cause love you."

“Could fool me.”

“Hey ya’ll!” Rinku shouted from the front of the horse cart. “We’re here. You all behaving back there? Hate to turn this ride around~”

"Hey, if we're not behaving, it's only because we learned it from you." Covarog snickered.

Orana jested with him. "Yeah, you tell her."

“Well, you got me there.” They could hear the putter patter of her feet walking on the sand to the doors. Opening them, sunlight poured inside. “To those unaccustomed by desert heat, please apply sunscreen that’s been provided. This mostly applies to my gothic sister pale as a vampire and Kanisa’s one eyed, blue skinned, always a pleasurable attitude husband and my adorable nephew and niece from Uskar. My sister in law Sunny has provided sun hats for those who prefer them.”

"Is your sister always this cheery?" Vidar grumbled in Uskarian to Kanisa. He absolutely loathed the desert and the heat. The poor man looked miserable. "I don't see how it's possible with all this sand and sun."

"Just deal with it a little while longer please, love." Kanisa assured her husband. "We'll be back in Uskar soon enough."

"If I don't melt first."

Leere addressed Skyla and Joy together with Tebanem. “Since you’re both the youngest, I’d like you both to stay together at all times. Stay within eyeshot of an adult.”

"Hey! I'm not a kid." Tebanam huffed. "I'm an adult!"

"She means Skyla and Joy, Teb." Faris clarified, amused, to his husband. "She doesn't want them wandering off."

"Oh."

The shit eating grin on Leere’s face filled up until she couldn’t help but keel over in laughter. “If you need the advice of the oldest siblings, talk to me or Luimaya, Tebby. I’m sure Kanny will love to be your pair buddy~”

"Oh shut it, I knew what you meant, I was just joking." Tebanam refused to look her in the eye, crossing his arms.

Once all the others had stepped outside, Ganondorf made his way out of the cart. It had been too long since he breathed desert air and tasted life upon the winds. With light robes he turned to the massive walls of the town. Was like a fortress. “Impressive.” The gates opened as Revan and Donoma handed out passes to the men that their father had given them in advance. What awaited inside amazed the old king. Gerudo of all shapes and sizes interacting as a community. Everyone of them shouted out one big greeting when they saw the family gathering. “VASAAQ!!! SAV’AAQ!!!”

Revan himself blinked, surprised by how many red headed women there were. He looked at his sister surprised. “You’ve been coming here?”

"Yeah, what of it?" Donoma was taken aback by her brother's surprise. "I've learned a lot about our history. Mama taught me all I needed to know of what we had of Lorleidian history. Dad taught us what he knew of Gerudo history, but there's only so much he can teach. The rest of it needs to be experienced. Besides," She waved at a few of her friends. "I've made a lot of progress in my studies and I have friends here. It's nice to have a second home."

“Must be nice.” Revan couldn’t help but let his bitterness out. Was he not Gerudo enough to belong here? The man of the hour appeared. Malik opted for stylized, yet comfortable robes. Beside him, Gali was wearing a nice Vai dress. The Lord of Taiyo Town smiled to Zarazu before addressing the group as a whole. “My extended family, and royal family of Hyrule. I am honoured that you can finally see the hard work all of our generations have worked towards. The Gerudo people prosperous once again. I welcome you to Taiyo town.”

Each family member extended their greeting politely before the King spoke. "I am impressed by the amount of work here, and absolutely delighted that we finally are able to see the restoration of our people." Covarog then noted Gali. "Please let me to express my thanks in allowing Lord Malik to help you oversee the construction of Taiyo Town. May I present my wife, Queen Zarazu of the Lorleidians," He gestured to his lover. "And my children. Marena and Syrena are the youngest twins, then Zahirog, then Turagor and Luimaya are my eldest. My Luimaya is next in line to rule our kingdom."

Gali bowed her head politely to Luimaya. “It is a privilege to learn the next high Queen will be a Gerudo Woman on the throne. Strong, and fiery from what Donoma has told me in her studies. You will make a remarkable queen, I’m sure. We encourage you to explore Taiyo Town on your own. We want to be an organic experience for all of you.”

"It is a privilege to be here in your town, to learn more of my history and to walk with the fierce warriors that I have read so much about in books. I feel like this is something out of a fairy tale, even though I know it's simply history." Luimaya returned a respectful nod of her head to Gali. "I ask that you teach me, my siblings, and cousins all that you know and anything you wish for us to learn; whether it be ways of combat or simple knowledge." Then the future queen gestured to Skyla. "I ask you have patience with my family, but especially my cousin, Skyla. She is deaf and reads lips. I don't suppose any of you know sign? She can write in Gerudo, but that takes a time." "Hi!" Skyla signed to Gali with a bright smile. "I do read lips, but accents make lips move odd. Please talk slowly for me." Luimaya then translated, "She is greeting you and asking for you and the other members of the town to speak slower for her, to give her time to read your lips."

Gali nodded, addressing the town in Gerudo to look out for the little one. Turning to Skyla, she got on a knee to kneel down to her and speak in Sign. “Hello Skyla. I am Gali. I think I’ve met you and your father’s people on my travels before. Hard to forget a tribe as pretty as you.”

"You tall lady." Skyla motioned to the women surrounding Gali. "All tall. Garai women like me, not so tall. Sister tribe, you come visit sometime." She then stomped the sand with her foot and made a sailing wave with her arm. "Ride Sand Rays! Learn of Gerudo now. You learn of Garai too. Too much time pass without sister tribe. Sand here. Stone there. Much to know." "Skyla, don't sign so fast, she might not get it all." Tebanam hopped down from his camel, Loogie, and signed to his daughter. "They go slow for you, you go slow for them. Not too fast." Skyla blushed and sheepishly signed, "Sorry. Excited!"

"That's more than fine Skyla. We'll get to learning about each others culture very quickly." Gali patted Skyla on the shoulder as she stood up. "We have tour guides in green patched shoulders who'd love to take you around our markets, bars, training grounds, schools, saunas, spas, and the rest of the joyous spots in Taiyo Town. If you'd like to explore on your own that's fine too. I hope you all enjoy the joys Taiyo Town can bring!"

Ganondorf was lost in thought as he looked around the town. While Gali was addressing the crowd, he watched small Gerudo children kick a ball back and forth. A woman was beating an old styled blanket he used to wrap himself in previous lives from her balcony. And there was a Hylian in the background laughing with a Gerudo. A union he had been working hard since with his wife to normalized. A view he knew his cousin had struggled to come to grips with. Yet here they were.

~

Donoma was struggling to pull her brother through the throng of women. This was a headache. She kept politely asking for the ladies to step aside, but they were more interested in talking to Revan. "Girls... girls, for fuck's sake!!!" Donoma shouted over the crowd. "You can feel his pecs later, we're going to see my mom now."

“Come on Donoma! This is the virgin brother you have! Can’t we just, you know, kiss him. For homework purposes?” Her roommate asked in a little sexy voice for her brother.

Revan wasn’t expecting so many of the girls around Donoma’s age to be so horny. This wasn’t the type of attention he wanted. “I have someone else...”

"No. At least, not now. Later." Donoma yanked Revan into the tent that her mother and father shared. Finally, maybe the crowd would go away. "Damn vultures, I swear..."

"Revan!" Asakonigei was on bed rest, currently trying her hand at knitting and failing miserably. Although, her face lit up when she saw her son and daughter. "Donoma! I'm so happy you're both here!"

“Mom!” Revan ran forward, hugging her close. “Are you ok? I can’t believe Dad got you pregnant again.”

"I'm fine, Revan, just a little uncomfortable with all this extra weight." Asakonigei hugged her son tightly. "We were not exactly planning this, but nonetheless, it happened. I've been very well cared for while I've been here."

"Do you know what the baby is now?" Donoma asked her mother. "I've been wanting to know for so long!"

"Yes, actually, I do know the baby is going to be." Asakonigei smiled widely. "You're both going to have a little brother."

"Queen Zarazu birthed three Gerudo boys and now, I suppose I'm lucky to have a second one." Asakonigei then added. "Though your father and I have been at odds about a name."

“You have?” Revan sat beside her, wanting to not leave her side. Been months since he saw his mother.

"Get a load of this," Donoma plopped onto the bed, opposite to Revan, their mother in the middle. "Dad says he wants another Gerudo name, but Mom is insisting on a combination between Gerudo and Lorleidian since my name is Lorleidian and yours is Gerudo."

"It's only fair." Asakonigei defended her point. "I doubt I'm having another baby, so half it, right?"

“Well knowing father, he most likely doesn’t want a Frankenstein name put together.”

"It's not that bad, I don't think." Donoma shrugged her shoulders. "Mufratir is all right, isn't it?" Asakonigei asked her son.

Revan couldn’t hide his displeasure at the name as his face contorted at the corners. “Keep it simple?”

"Or she could go all out like Zarazu and Covarog did with Zahirog and name the kid Malikonigei." Donoma snorted.

"Oh, hush you!" Asakonigei gently shoved at Donoma's shoulder.

“Could call him Dad’s first name?” Revan pondered on the possibilities.

"One Malik in the world is enough, the world has enough stubbornness." Asakonigei laughed.

"The world didn't need even more with Revan, what have you done, Mom?"

"Your brother is not that bad."

"He went into a match without magic."

"That's just his ego."

“Excuse me?!” The comment of the world not needing him stung Revan to his core. “I’m sorry I tried to prove that I had value in the skills I crafted for myself. I’m sorry I’m not daddies favourite child!”

"Oh, stop being a brat." Donoma snapped at Revan. "You know that's not what I meant. I implied the world doesn't need more of your 'I'm-undefeatable' attitude." She then scoffed and said, "Favorite? Dad doesn't choose favorites, but if you really believe that's true, it's only because I actually listen and behave."

"Hush, you two, stop fighting." Asakonigei scolded both of her children. "I shall not have you two fighting in front of me or your father. He has enough to worry about as it is."

“Oh you know what, fuck dad too. Too important with all of this to give a damn about me.” Revan gestured all around the village with wide arms. “Skipping dinners, celebrations, and ceremonies to be here. Except while I’m stuck out busting my ass, he chooses you to live here with him. You’re probably aware he’s never once invited me here.”

"He didn't choose me to live with him here, you dumbass! I'm a woman, for starters, and at least I look Gerudo!!!" Donoma spat back at Revan. "He's trying his best to rebuild some semblance of what our ancestors lost! If you're so upset about not receiving a personal invitation, it's not Dad's fault! The Gerudo women here don't trust men! The only reason they trust Dad is because he is Gerudo!"

"ENOUGH!!!" Asakonigei shouted so loud that Revan's ears and Donoma's rang something fierce. "If the both of you are going to squabble like children, then you can do so elsewhere! I do not need the stress of seeing you two fight and neither does your little sibling! Out! Right now!"

"But Mom---"

"I said, OUT!!!"

“You hit the nail exactly on the head. In his eyes I’m not Gerudo. And if I am, I’ll only carry the worst aspects. So how about you go crawl back to your sisterhood like the good little girl you are.” Revan looked to his mom, daring to glare at her something fierce. “A baby will kill you. Why would you risk putting us through something like that?”

"At least I don't follow around a girl who doesn't love me!" Donoma shot back. "Luimaya will never like you in that aspect and you think being her bodyguard will make her view you as some romantic hero? You're an ass." With that, Donoma tromped out of the tent.

Asakonigei gave Revan a hard stare. "I had complications with you, I lost too much blood with Donoma, and yet, both of you are still here and alive." Asakonigei said very sternly. "Your father and I didn't plan this. I did not even think I could get pregnant again with the trauma my body suffered. Yet, this baby is growing within me and will need you and your sister. I would gladly die for you and Donoma, and this baby. It's part of me and part of your father, and will be your sibling. Don't you dare patronize me, son."

“Is this because you want to give father his large family. You really think it’ll be fair to the baby to grow up in a world without a mother?” Revan sat down next to her, disbelief wrapped around his face. “You think that’s fair to me and Donoma to lose you for another one of father’s grand dreams? Honestly, are you even thinking properly here?”

"No, I don't think it's fair. Not for me, not for you, not for your sister or father, and certainly not the baby." Asakonigei stated as her son sat beside of her. "As I said previously, your father nor I planned this. It simply happened. And I am thinking very clearly. I am a mother. You will not be able to understand until you have children of your own, Revan. I want this baby to be born surrounded by love regardless of what happens to me. I may or may not survive... but at least this time, I will have more help."

“How? What makes you believe that? Your body will kill you. Dr. Bovier made that perfectly clear.”

"Yes, Doctor Boveir did. Yet, these women believe differently. So now, the only thing I have left is faith."

“Faith? Are you out of your mind?” Revan sneered at the very thought. “We should just get on our hands and knees and pray? Or perhaps we should get some shaman to throw flowers on top of you.”

"Don't. Patronize. Me." Asakonigei yanked her son forward by the collar of his armor. She was pregnant, but still strong enough to get Revan's attention. "I prayed to Kovina for you. You are here. If you are going to be like this, then you can leave. I will not have your attitude around myself or your new sibling-to-be when the time comes. Either you can support me, or go. What is it going to be?"

“I’ll leave when her royal highness deems it ready to go.” He held her hand, his fingers gentle, yet firm on her. His eyes were angry, but his lips trembled small hesitation. “I don’t want Klinge’s ego to take you away from me.”

"... you know I'll fight the Goddess of Death to stay here with you." Asakonigei held the side of his face with a small sigh. "If you don't have faith in the deities, at least have faith in me. Your mother is a tough old woman."

Revan’s eyes were heavy as he slowly nodded in agreement. “Alright...” Careful to not hurt her, he hugged his mother closely. “I don’t trust Father to look after you. So you have to be strong enough to look after yourself.”

As Revan hugged her, Asakonigei slowly stroked the back of his hair, trying her best to soothe him. "I have a lot of women here ready to help me. I'll have help, Revan. And if you decide to stay for a little while, then you can help me too."

Revan choose to ignore that last part. “I hope they can help you...”

~

The first day of the royal family visit was going smoothly. Malik was incredibly proud of his people. Seeing Luimaya, he waved the girl and her siblings over. “Young princess. Princes and princess’. How are you this afternoon?”

Luimaya had been exploring the town with her siblings and cousins. All of them were currently enjoying a recipe of the Gerudo heritage. Poor Turagor was coughing from the spiciness, the younger twins barely batted an eye, and Zahirog merely nibbled on his, trying to save face. "This is... a different experience for sure. It's not exactly what I've read in books." Zahirog admitted to Malik.

"I guess history left out a few parts." Turagor said in-between sputters from the spicy chicken leg.

"I really enjoyed seeing such beautiful custom clothes!" Marena smiled.

"And hearing the music!" Syrena added.

Luimaya stayed silent for a while, thinking. "Though... Ganonpa won't stay here to lead them." She then asked. "So I suppose Gail is going to?"

“Ganondorf is too old to lead. The man has lived long enough for this lifetime to be a ruler. Gali certainly makes a qualified Chieftain in my absence.”

The siblings exchanged glances.

"... you?" Zahirog appeared to be confused. "You're a man. I thought the Gerudo wanted a female leader like Nabooru in the old days?"

“There have been Kings and Queens in our past too.”

"Yeah, though Zahi and Turagor needed a pass just to come in here." Marena noted. "So... it's safe to assume they're not too trusting of men." Syrena pointed out to her uncle.

"I know Mom and Dad will probably want to talk to them about keeping good ties with Hyrule." Luimaya told Malik. "I know Dad is King and a descendant of Ganondorf, so surely there will be peace from here on out."

“That’s something we are working out. I just don’t want these people to be taken advantage of.” Malik smiled softly, speaking gently to them all. “Just how I didn’t want your father, uncles, aunts and all of you taken advantage. History can sometimes be tricky and like to repeat itself.”

"Do you think they'll allow Lorleidians here too? Maybe some Hylian civilians?" Luimaya inquired. "For trading purposes?"

“Yes. It’s what I want. It’s what we are already trying to integrate. Look closely, and you’ll be able to spot one or two amongst the town even now.”

"As long as there is prosperity and peace, that's what matters the most." Luimaya stated.

"Though, I really wish you wouldn't stay here."

"Yeah, the castle would fall apart without you." Turagor remarked as he chugged down some water, trying to wash away some of the spiciness of the chicken. "I mean, you did keep our aunts and uncles from arguing all the time. Sort of."

"I think what he's trying to say is you're a peacemaker and we don't want anymore food fight incidents between Uncle Corsaire and his crew against the Hylian guards." Zahirog blanched. "I was pulling noodles out of my hair for weeks."

“Children...” Malik tried to sound soft to counteract how tired he was of this particular conversation. “I’ve been a peacemaker before your parents were even born. If you still need to rely on my guidance, I fear for the stability of Hyrule.”

"What they're trying to say is, they're going to miss you if you stay here." Marena clarified.

"Yeah. It would suck, cause we wouldn't get to see you as often." Syrena added to her twin's statement.

“Your Aunt Kanisa lives a whole ocean away. I’m still less then a days travel away. Besides, distance makes the heart grow fonder.” He gently patted Syrena on the shoulder.

"Yeah, but at least she has a dragon to bring her here to see us." Syrena sulked slightly. "If you move away, you might not come back cause Uncle Ralnor annoys you."

"We all know that Uncle Ralnor can annoy anyone with his 'proper-ness'." Marena snickered. "I hold my pinky finger out when I sip tea, look at me, I'm so proper." The siblings did exchange giggles at that mentioning.

“What? You can’t travel here to see me?”

"We can but who knows when we'll be able to." Luimaya admitted with a heavy sigh. "Come on, Uncle Malik. Even Mom and Dad don't get out of the palace that much. You know that."

"And when Lui becomes queen, it will be harder for to do so." Turagor frowned slightly. "Maybe for us if we have to stay at home too."

"At least we have each other." Zahirog noted. "That's what counts."

"But on a lighter note, Mama told us that Aunt Asa is pregnant again." Marena smiled. "What are you going to name the baby?"

"Is it a boy or a girl?" Syrena asked.

“I don’t know yet.” Malik didn’t want to know, least, not quite yet. Sighing, he figured out how to approach their worries. “The same way home will keep you busy in central Hyrule, my home here will keep me busy. This is simply part of life though children.”

"We know." Zahirog shrugged, holding his siblings together with his arms around their shoulders. "Though you better find the time to visit if we do."

“I-“ Malik saw Ganondorf from afar. The man held an expression of light urgency, waving the Lord with the wrist of a hand. “If you will excuse me children.”

Reaching Ganondorf’s side, Malik still felt slightly humbled in his presence. “Is something the matter?”

“No. Not at all. However, there is something of great importance I wish to discuss with you.”

“I understand.”

“I think privately will be best.”

Privately? This intrigued Malik. “Very well. Inside the eyes of the goddess statue then?” Ganondorf looked to the edge of the town where a giant woman of stone observed the town.

“You can go inside?”

“Yes. I made it a place of pray and to chronicle our people.”

“How spiritual of you. Let’s not waste time. Still a night of celebration to share.” The two Gerudo men reminisced on their shared past as they made their way to the temple. Inside, Ganondorf and Malik took their seat in front of a mural of great Gerudo’s past. “Cousin, don’t think me rude, but I invited two others.”

"I swear, if Malik wanted me to drag my ass in here for another stupid test of his, I'mma choke him. Getting too old for that."

"Now, now, Rinku, I'm sure he just wants to talk without a ton of eyes upon us."

"I'm serious, I'm so over these tests of his, Zarazu! At least he learned his lesson with you."

"How so?"

"... you took the man's arm; he should be grateful you didn't take his dick." Rinku and Zarazu had no idea that the words in the temple could... echo.

Ganondorf turned to daughter as she made herself visible with Zarazu. “Colourful vocabulary.” Malik was surprised to see Zarazu and Rinku together. “I didn’t expect you both to be here.”

"You invited us?" Zarazu held a tone of questioning to her voice. "Unless I misunderstood, you wanted to meet with the holders of the Tri-Force?"

"Hey, I've heard worse from you, Ganondad." Rinku pointed a finger at Ganondorf.

“I did.”

“What is this all about?” Malik stiffened, uncertainty filling his being. His words said otherwise, but deep down his heart knew why they were all gathered now.

Ganondorf changed his gaze over to Malik, a deep and heavy look falling on him. “We are here to talk about The Triforce of Power’s new owner.”

Silence was cast over the room, and a shocking realization hit Malik now it was in the open air. “Me?”

"...?! WHAT?!" Rinku shook her head. "Wait, I thought Covarog was supposed to get the Tri-Force? He's next in line, no offense, Malik."

"I am... surprised myself." Zarazu stated slowly, not expecting this. "Might I ask why?"

“Rinku...” Ganondorf waiter until his eldest daughter was a little calmer before continuing. “Every child of mine, with the exception of you, carries a seed of darkness that I share. I fear the Triforce might corrupt them as it corrupted me.”

"Corrupt them?!" Rinku took offense to that. "All your kids are the best of you and Mom. Do you truly think that if you give the Tri-Force to Covarog that he'll turn dark?" She then said, "If you don't want to trust Covarog with it, then give it to Ralnor. Hell, give it to Orana or Kanisa, even Teb! They're not going to be corrupted! None of them are part of this curse that you, Mom, and I have repeated!"

“No. They both struggle with darkness in their choices. And I won’t expose Orana, Kanisa, or Tebanem to temptation of abuse. I need someone who’s motives are incorruptible. That knows the weight of true magic and power.”

"You have so little faith in them! Look at how much they all have overcome!" Rinku frowned and gestured to Zarazu. "They're married. They have families. They're happy! And not once ounce of lust for power within them! And you think Malik is the one? Good goddesses, look at what you both have done in the past!" Rinku exclaimed. "Look at how much bloodshed both of you have on your hands! He's a carbon copy of you, Ganondorf! This is not a good idea!"

“Have we not redeemed ourselves? Has he not suffered enough under my hands as much as any of my other past victims? He rose from being my tool to regaining his humanity.” Ganondorf sent a penetrating look at his daughter. “What’s more, he has never broken my trust. Even in the deepest depths of depravity he was always honest with his intentions.”

"Yeah, he regained his humanity, but not due to you." Rinku remarked with a glare of her own. "Due to her," She motioned to Zarazu, and then added, "And his wife. What do you think will happen if they're no longer around to keep him in check? Do you want me to have to strike him down like I had to do you in our past lives if he loses control?"

“I regained it due to me wanting my humanity back. I worked hard for it. I earned it.” Malik was about done with the hero talking down on him. “You speak as though you aren’t without blood on your hands. So many of your past lives ended entire bloodlines due and the ramifications can still be felt today. We keep each other in check. I was kept around to keep you in check since you were a child. So don’t patronize me.”

"I know I have blood on my hands and I regret my actions. Yet, I've never been influenced by power. That's your lot. You still seek it today, and you're blind to it." Rinku shook her head. "I don't agree with this. When Chaos comes, he'll use it against you to turn you to his side and you'll end up fighting with Luimaya instead of with her. I'm out of here." The heroine tromped out of the cave, steaming. Zarazu, on the other hand, had remained silent the entire time. Thinking.

Malik couldn’t help but laugh at the old Princess. Even now, she still had a young spirit. “You’re going down to a dead end.”

As she stomped around, Ganondorf was less amused. “Rinku. You aren’t being fair here. As Zelda trusted Zarazu, I trust Malik. Please... sit.” The old king was also tired. He didn’t want to argue this point.

Rinku was done with this conversation and refused to be a part of it further. She turned around, found another tunnel, and exited the cave to prove her point and kept walking.

"Maybe we should give her some space to think as well." Zarazu suggested, trying to keep Rinku and Ganondorf from arguing again as her sister-in-law left the temple.

“She’ll have to accept it.” With Rinku gone, Ganondorf sighed. “She’s in the dark, but I know you’re no fool to Ralnor’s darker actions in protecting Hyrule, even now. And for my eldest, I wasn’t completely sure until I heard Malik show Zannah respect where Covarog couldn’t let go of it his hatred of the Hasai. That is ultimately why I choose Malik over your husband Zarazu. Malik has shed his hate.”

Malik looked softly at Zarazu, wondering what she was thinking. “Rupee for your thoughts?”

"I can understand Rinku's view and your view, because I'm trying to be fair from a standpoint." Zarazu admitted to the men. "I'm well aware that my husband has flaws. Everyone does, we're human. However, I do think you should tell Covarog why he is not getting the Tri-Force of power. I won't lie, I'm sure it will hurt him. He has been looking forward to succeeding you in being a carrier because he wants to make you proud." She then continued, "Though, if Malik has the Tri-Force, I know you trust him and I know that he has more respect for the Hasai than my husband. I cannot help but wonder if you too will be immune to the temptation of power, my oldest friend." The queen was wise, for sure, though still cautious. "Many times in history, power has corrupted... are you sure that it's temptation will not affect you like it has Ganondorf?"

“I don’t know for sure. That’s why I want my friends and family to keep me honest. To use a seat and source of power for the betterment of all people.” Malik glanced over to Ganondorf, a sudden frown on his face. “If you give me your greatest source of power, you will lose your immortality. You might not live for long.”

“Who wants to live forever? No. Not me. As for Covarog, he knows how plenty proud I am of him.”

Finally, Ganondorf stood up from his bench. “Zarazu. I want your support on this. Do you think Malik is a good man? Do you think he can wield power in the name of peace?”

"... I do believe Malik is a good man. I do believe he sincerely wants the best for our people, for the Gerudo as well. Though, as said previously, there is always temptation." Zarazu looked at her own hand. There she saw the slight glow of the Tri-Force piece of Wisdom, reminding her there were always two sides to every tale. Those years ago before Zelda's death, she entrusted the Lorleidian queen with the Tri-Force of Wisdom. She did not want her daughters to carry the burden and trusted Zarazu to keep it safe. "Though we are only human, Ganondorf. Sometimes, even I feel the slight pull of the Tri-Force, calling me to use it. To dip into that magical essence that is so pure and addictive, that I have to be careful. I resist it for the sake of my family, my friends, and my kingdom." She held up her fingers glowing with magic. "If you want my support, and my utmost trust... then I must ask that we form a bind. This way, no matter where these pieces may end up... we will not let them fight against one another again." The queen then stated. "We'll revoke this curse."

“I can agree to that. If the pieces of the Triforce, ever, ever need to come together, then it will be for a wish of healing to the people.” Malik’s breath didn’t hitch as he reached a hand out to Zarazu to shake on this sacred pact.

"Not to destroy, but for peace." Zarazu took Malik's hand. "No longer destruction, but healing."

“For love, not hatred.”

"Agreed." Zarazu used her magic to implement the contract of the binding. A ring of runes in the Lorleidian language formed on her wrist and Malik's, identical in nature. "And if we break it... we die."

Malik nodded. When finished, he seemed almost somber when he spoke. Perhaps now was the time to tell his friend. “You should know that I’m not coming back to Hyrule. This is my home. With my people. They want to elect me to the position of Gerudo King. The sworn guardian. I’ve waited to be here again since I was a boy.”

"... I know." Zarazu simply replied to her friend. "I want you to be happy. Though I must be blunt with my next question." She took a small breath and said, "When the time comes... you will still remain loyal to my daughter?"

“I will be a friend that she can rely on.”

"She will need you." Zarazu actually looked... concerned. "As much as that snake gives me the creeps, I cannot deny his magic or his status. He said it will be soon... and I am worried."

“The Triforce bearers and the sages will need to protect the world.” Ganondorf stretched out, taking a deep breath. “Are you both prepared for that?”

"I am prepared for that. I am ready to give my life if it means my family will be safe." Zarazu clasped her hands together, her gaze downcast. "I am not ready to... to sacrifice my daughter. If what Bonegrinder says is true, and... his prophecy is correct..." It was hard for her to speak the words. "I've seen what has happened to Bonegrinder's mind. It is warped. He shares two souls in one body. He is a host for a deity and no longer his original self... if that happens to my Luimaya..."

“Bonegrinder is a freak. I won’t let him or anyone else hurt your daughter Zarazu.”

"... I trust you." Zarazu sighed, still thinking of what the future could hold. "I do think you need to check on Asa, Malik. From what Nakeso overheard when she went to take your wife some food from Gail, Revan and Donoma were... disagreeing."

“It is.” Ganondorf took a few sound breaths. Opening his right palm, a feint and soft glow emerged as a small golden triangle appeared. There was no celebration of grand ceremony behind it. The earth didn’t shake, and the sky didn’t change colour. It simply appeared. Ganondorf gently handed it to Malik to hold with both hands. “Take it.”

Zarazu simply waited in slight apprehension. She did not know what would occur once Malik took the piece.

Ganondorf stepped back as his cousin held the Triforce. Malik didn’t expect it to feel so warm, like a campfire. But with a squeeze of his right fist around it, he felt his heart light in a blaze of might. The Triforce connected to him physically, mentally, and spiritually. His breath felt freer, and he felt more alive then ever. One his palm, the triangle of the Triforce emerged from nothing, looking like tattoo. The top triangle lightly glowed, signifying the merger was a success. Malik, son of the desert and blade of the Gerudo, was now the weirder of Power.

"... Malik?" Zarazu finally spoke. "Are you all right?"

"I can relate." Zarazu took a slow inhale. It seemed he was still himself... for now. Maybe the fail-safe spell was keeping everything in check. Maybe Rinku was wrong and Malik would not be corrupted. Yet, personally, though she might not admit it, Zarazu was not willing to take that chance when it came to her daughter. If he tried to use it for evil... no, it was best not to think about it.

Malik took a few moments to self reflect. With the Triforce, he felt connected to life and magic on a deeper level in a near instant. To be truthful, it suddenly became overbearing. “I think I need to sit down.”

Zarazu formed a chair of ice for him to sit upon in the cave. "... the magic is overwhelming for a new holder." The queen then offered. "I can help you channel it for a bit to get you used to it."

“Give me a moment. I just need to adjust.”

"Close your eyes and try to imagine the flow of the magic." Zarazu instructed Malik, trying to make it easier for him. "You feel it within you, within your surroundings, and others... let it talk to you."

“Cousin, imagine the Triforce as a heart within you. It beats within you as a generator of life and magic. Ease into it. Should be similar to the magic you know.”

Malik nodded, feeling deep within and focusing on himself. Over the course of five minutes the man finally felt he had control over the new weight of his soul. “I’ll be fine now.”

"All right... let's just walk slow then. We'll need to help Ganondorf."

Malik took another breath, looking down at the yellow triangle burned upon his hand. He knew in his heart of hearts this was the key to bringing glory to the Gerudo and all of Hyrule.  

________________________________________________________________

Previous Ch. https://mrneighbourlove.tumblr.com/post/622576982282141697/the-rising-sun-ch-4-uncertain-future

Next Ch. https://mrneighbourlove.tumblr.com/post/622772431507062784/the-rising-sun-ch-6-like-father-like-son

Crossover with @ridersoftheapocalypse

[mlmdarkfiction]

Relaxing Sauna 

For a friend who wants to keep Anonymous

Fandom: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Ship: Reynar/Everyone (OC/Canon, OC/OC)

Description: Reynar goes to the Sauna every night to relax. Others join him there. First Dimitri, then Ingram, Othello and Caspar at the same time, and then finally Balthus and his debt collectors.

Note: All OC’s in this story belong to me.

Content Warnings: NSFW, Smut, Humiliation (in a sexual sense) see the AO3 Tags for more Specifics.

Read Below:

The whole situation is absolutely ridiculous. So much so that Ingram almost decided against checking it out.

No one would ever willingly whore themselves out like that, the scenario was far too fantastical even for the horniest of men.

It all seemed like something out of one of Luis’ stories. He seemed like the only person capable of imagining a scenario like this.

So when the Noble entered the Sauna to find exactly what the rumors had promised he found himself surprised.

Pleasantly so.

More surprising than someone willingly offering their holes up for the men of the Monastery to use as they please was who exactly was allowing themself to be used.

Reynar was an incredibly proud man, hardworking, and a bit of a prude. Truthfully Ingram had hardly ever spoken to the man himself, all he knew of him was common knowledge. He, like Petra, was from Brigid, and it was because of this fact that Reynar seemed to dedicate his entire life to protecting the foreign Princess.

To see such a usually powerful and serious man in this situation is insanely erotic. Although Ingram had truly only come to see if the rumors were real (at least that’s what he’d told himself) the sight of Reynar, a 6’5 man made of solid muscle, being fucked like a regular street whore went straight to the Nobleman’s cock.  

It’s the Crown Prince of Faerghus who’s currently using the Brawler as his personal cock sleeve, but it’s clear he’s not the only one who’s used him today alone.

Ingram’s easily able to take note of the cum staining his back, and sticking to his long red hair.

“You know,”  The words are already cruel, before Ingram can even finish, it’s just who he is. “I don’t think this is what Petra meant, all those times she told you to relax.”

Neither Dimitri nor Reynar seemed to have noticed up until that point that Ingram had joined them.

The words alone were enough to cause the larger man to cringe, but all they really did was turn him on even more.

He can’t imagine how his liege would react if she were to ever find out what he did in his free time. Perhaps she wouldn’t care, or perhaps she’d be disgusted entirely by her retainers actions.

“I-Ingram I,” It’s not Reynar who comes to defend himself for being caught in a compromising position, but Dimitri.

“Not to worry, your Highness.” Although there’s still some sort of aggressive judgment in the other man’s voice, he seems to have a softness for the Prince, at least enough so to actively avoid hurting his feelings.

The closer Ingram gets the more he realizes just how used up Reynar really is. A small puddle of cum, and other bodily fluids below the larger man on the ground. He tuts at the sight, despite the obvious hardness in his uniform pants.

“You’re quite the slut aren’t you?”

Reynar doesn’t answer. The only noise leaving his mouth a low moan as Dimitri’s next thrust hits his prostate directly.

“Answer me, when I speak to you.”

Ingram shows no sympathy for the blissed out larger man, grabbing his face roughly, to force him to finally face him.

There’s five tallies drawn on the man's cheek, and it’s easy for Ingram to realize what exactly it’s for, especially as the aggressive rhythmic slaps of skin on skin from Dimitri slowly crawl to a halt, and he grabs a marker to add a tally to Reynar’s ass.

“Open your mouth.” The demand is punctuated by a soft squeeze to his jaw.

Even as Reynar opens his mouth, allowing for Ingram to slip just the head of his cock past the other man's lips.

“Don’t- You won’t-” Dimitri’s fumbling to put his own cock away, watching Reynar begin to suckle on the tip of Ingram’s dick. “Ingram you aren’t going to tell anyone about this, are you?”

Despite his confidence up until this point Ingram was a virgin. Even the simple pleasure of his cock in the other man's life is overwhelming.

He only responds to Dimitri in the form of a thumbs up.

After all even from the very beginning he’d had no intentions of putting a stop to these sexcepades, he’d simply been curious about their existence in the first place.

Almost like clockwork, as soon as Dimitri leaves, two others approach.

It’s clear to both Ingram and Reynar who the approaching men are, neither man is capable of speaking in a hushed voice.

“...Was that Dimitri?”

“Oh absolutely.”

Both men are instantly recognizable; Othello Proulx, and Caspar von Bergliez. They bond in their similar height, temperament, and their inabilities to remain quiet, so much alike that Ingram finds himself unsurprised they both would happen to be the type to partake in something like this.

“I want to break Reynar’s nose again while I ride his-”

Othello cuts himself off as he enters the sauna, getting a front row view of Reynar taking Ingram’s full length deep into his throat. Instead of continuing his sentence the Blue Lion simply begins to laugh in a cackle.

“Oh no...Looks like his face is a little preoccupied!”

Caspar gives a small laugh of his own at the comment, but doesn’t seem deterred at all, already working on undoing his belt.

“Sucks to be you then.” He taunts the other man, going straight for Reynar’s ass, and giving it a firm spank which in turn causes him to jolt, and choke on the dick currently in his throat.

“Don’t you always tell me it’s not polite to talk with my mouth full?”

Once again the humiliation, the taunting, it only goes to turn the larger man on even more, it’s especially hot to hear his own words of cautionary advice thrown back at him now.

Thrown back at him when he’s no longer recognizable as his prudish self.

Caspar spanks him again, putting full force behind the swing. He likes to watch the way red blossoms across the man's tanned skin, and the way Reynar’s ass still jiggles despite it’s musculature.  

“Four already?”

Othello takes the other side behind Reynar, taking in the sight of his spent, but still eager hole. The way it twitches desperately, some of Dimitri’s cum starting to dribble down his crack and onto his thighs.

“You’re going to fuck him right?”

The question gets a nod from Caspar, who’s too busy roughly groping and spanking Reynar with the intention of leaving marks. Any moans or possible sounds of protest are drowned out by the cock erratically beginning to face fuck him as Ingram nears his end.

Othello grabs the marker, and adds a line across the four already present on his back, making it a solid five tallies.

“I want to watch.” He says after.

“At least until Ingram finishes.”

And Ingram finishes soon after, his hands having knotted themselves in Reynar’s long burning locks, tugging him further and further against him, not stopping until Reynar’s nose is brushing up against his teal pubes.

He’s held against the others pelvis for so long that Reynar was actually worried he was going to pass out.

Thankfully before that happens Ingram cums.

The first hot spurts hit the back of Reynar’s throat. He can feel the warm cum as he swallows it down.

Ingram has other plans though.

He feels an animalistic urge to mark the other, allowing his cum to join that of other men that was already mingled and cooled against Reynar’s skin.

“P-Pent up?”

Reynar asks between weak coughs as spurt after spurt of cum begins landing on his face, and in his long hair.

A shot lands dangerously close to his left eye, and he’s forced to close it entirely.

“Get out of the way!”

Othello doesn’t even wait for Ingram to put his dick away, roughly shoving the Golden Eagle back, and taking the spot in front of Reynar.

“I was preparing for this, you know? I got myself nice and wet beforehand!” He is so excited, in fact, that his fake accent seems to drop for a moment.

“Onto your back now.”

Reynar licks his lips, tasting some of the salt of Ingram still on his lips, but does as he’s told, moving from a position on his hands and knees to that of laying flat on his back.

He decides he’ll finish up soon.

After Caspar and Othello.

He’s far from satisfied, but everytime he does this it seems like he needs more and more pleasure to actually be considered satisfied.

But satisfied or no, Caspar and Othello tend to play hard, Othello almost maliciously so.

One round with them is more than Reynar can take.

Caspar’s grown bored in the time he’d had to stop assaulting Reynar’s cheeks so the man could flip over, and is instead now grinding his hard cock against Reynar’s.

The redhead is, just like with the rest of their physique, bigger than the other brawler. It’s not that his penis is small, in fact, Caspar is above average for most Adrestian men, his cock becoming a solid 6 inches once he got fully hard. Not Caspar’s not small, Reynar just has an obnoxiously large cock for a bottom slut.

Anyone would look small in comparison to the Brigidian man’s 7 ½  inch monster cock.

Being smaller in almost every way doesn’t stop Caspar from taking control of the situation though. He’s sat atop Reynar’s hairy thighs, cock roughly grinding against the bigger man’s.

Poor Reynar is leaking precum like a faucet, and said precum is then just used as lube as Caspar grinds their throbbing erections together.

Othello has made himself at home on Reynar’s face in the meantime.

Although Reynar’s doing his best to keep up with Othello, desperately trying to tongue fuck the mans pussy while using his nose to bump his clit, Othello really doesn’t give him much chance to.

He’s grinding his dripping cunt against Reynar roughly. The pleasure coming more from the rough sensation of flesh on flesh, than Reynar’s actual attempt at eating him out.

Just by looking at the Tricktster, you’d think he was fighting to stay mounted atop a thrashing steed. His hips thrash and buck wildly against Reynar’s stubbly face.

The aggressive younger male has broken Reynar’s nose before, being this rough.

Othello had been at the peak of his orgasm, a moment away from orgasming, and when he’d landed against Reynar’s face, his nose pressing against Othello’s clit in just the right way to send him toppling over the edge.

He’d heard a nasty CRUNCH but didn’t give much thought to what the sound could be, too lost to the pleasure.

It had been so good in fact, that Othello had squirted.

His cum had dripped down the Brawlers face, beginning to mix with the blood from the now broken nose.

That’s exactly what Othello wants now. He wants to fuck Reynar so hard he breaks.

“Your...Your cocks kind of useless, you know?” Caspar is laying atop Reynar, head resting on one of the larger man’s pecs, suckling on his nipples in between words.

“It can’t cum unless you’re getting fucked in the ass!”

More precum drips from his cock, smearing against Caspar’s own.

Reynar mumbles weakly against the folds of Othello’s pussy, but it was utterly unintelligible, and Othello had no intentions of pulling away to allow the redhead to speak.

“Why’d you have to have such a big dick anyway?” Caspar asks tauntingly.

“I’ll show you how to use it.”

Yes, Caspar and Othello both truly were the textbook definition of rough power bottoms.

By the time the dynamic duo finish with Reynar he’s not only been on another time, two new tallies added for the uses of his throat and ass, but he’s also covered in blood.

Blood dripping from his nose, bleeding swollen lips, and the violent hickeys covering every inch of his body.

He had been safe to assume that the two should be his last takers of the night, after all he was now thoroughly exhausted.

Still...He wasn’t given much as a choice as just as he was beginning to leave he ran into a widely smiling Balthus.

“Ah! Where are you going buddy?” His arms slips around Reynar’s shoulder, forcing him back into the sauna.

“I’ve been waiting for this all night!”

Despite the situation and the exhaustion on Reynar’s face, Balthus seemed chipper and completely unaffected. “I even invited a group of guys I own money to.” He explained. “Figured a few hours with you, and they might take it easy on me. That’s okay with you, right?”

Reynar hesitates. He’d already redressed, done his best to clean the cum out of his hair but…

Just the thought of more cocks.

Of being thoroughly fucked over by a group of men and relinquishing control.

His response is a nod. “Of course, Balthus...After all, what are friends for?”

[lynne-monstr]

several more appendages than usual

written for tentacletober day 1: tentacle cuddles

ao3 link

Magnus is halfway across the room, pillow clutched to his chest, when Alec’s voice stops him in his tracks.

“Where are you going?”

Busted. Not that Magnus is surprised. Not really. Alec’s senses are honed to an edge every bit as sharp as the tips of his arrows, and while there’s no danger here in their bedroom, some instincts aren’t so easily turned off.

Magnus’ shoulders slump and only centuries of ironclad control keeps him from wincing at the extra weight on his back that shifts with him. None of the strain shows in his voice when he answers, “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d try the couch.”

It’s not really a lie. He can’t sleep and he does think the couch will help. It’s just…well, it’s not the whole truth, either.

“Magnus,” Alec sits up, a dark silhouette with messy hair. He sees right though Magnus, the way he always does. It’s both comforting and terrifying in equal measure. There’s so much in that one word, so much love and longing and comfort wrapped up in the way he says Magnus��� name. Magnus could live a thousand lifetimes hearing it and never get over the way it makes his heart stutter.

Is it any wonder he takes a step back towards the bed, drawn towards the sheer warmth of Alec’s affection? Magnus is a strong man—he has to be in order to survive this long—but the walls around his heart are no match for Alec’s devotion. He takes one step and then another, until halfway to the bed he finally wrests control back from his traitorous heart.

It’s control that’s the problem here, the reason’s he’s fleeing their bedroom with nothing but a pillow. Well, with almost nothing but a pillow.

“Is this about the…” Alec trails off, the dark shadow of his arm gesturing towards Magnus. Rather, to the extra appendages Magnus is currently sporting. “…The tentacles?” Alec says, like he’s still tasting the strange word on his tongue. “I told you already, I don’t mind them. Come back to bed.”

A careless wave towards the bedside lamp suffuses the room in a soft glow. Magnus regrets it the moment he can clearly see Alec, rumpled and adorable in their bed. His boyfriend’s face is creased from sleep and his fingers clench around the silk sheets at his chest. The couch seems cold and lonely in comparison.

Magnus grips his pillow tighter. “I can’t control them.” It hurts to admit but Alec deserves to hear the truth.

As if on cue, the mass of tentacles at his back flares up around him, restless and wanting. It’s his own desire to touch Alec, reflected and augmented by this particular brand of magic. The chilly night air isn't helping. The urge to seek refuge under the covers is strong, to hold Alec and be held in return. Except now his embrace consists of several more appendages than usual.

Alec shakes his head, patting the empty space next to him “I don’t care.”

“It’s only for a little while. Until things are back to normal.” The tightness in his chest is back. It isn’t possible to love this man any more than he already does, but somehow Magnus manages it. Which is why he forces himself towards the door, inch by painful inch.

As much as he isn’t thrilled about his current situation, he doesn’t regret stepping in front of the spell that did this to him. A warlock under his tutelage had lost control of his magic, what else was there to do but shield him from it? It was simple enough to use his own power to divert the spell into something harmless, but it was hardly something a novice was capable of doing.

Magnus would do it again without hesitation. It was his duty as a mentor to protect his students from their own mistakes, even when those mistakes were made because an overeager young warlock overestimated his abilities and attempted a dangerous ritual behind his teacher’s back. It was pure luck Magnus had been tuned into the ebb and flow of the city's magic deeply enough to recognize the danger when he did. He could only hope that watching another bear the brunt of his poor judgement would be enough for young Luis to learn his lesson.

For now, Magnus hovers in the doorway of his bedroom. “You'll have me all to yourself soon enough, Alexander. Another week and the tide will be high enough that I can perform the counter spell.”

His tentacles wrap tight around his own chest at the proclamation, and Magnus feels the first stirrings of guilt. Which is ridiculous. It’s his body and his magic to do with as he pleases. The tentacles are a manifestation of Magnus himself, it’s foolish to feel guilty for wanting to be rid of them.

The tentacles only hold onto him tighter.

A muffled laugh escapes Alec’s lips. “Maybe they don’t like me best after all.”

Magnus nearly stumbles at the speed his tentacles surge towards Alec. He catches himself on the edge of the door frame, glaring at the writhing mass straining towards the bed. Looking up, his gaze catches on Alec. There’s no edge of revulsion in the curl of his lips, no flinching away from the eager hoard of tentacles reaching out for him. He looks at Magnus the way he always does, like there’s no one but the two of them in the entire world.

The brittle strain in Magnus’ ribcage eases. Maybe this won’t be the disaster he feared when he first woke up and saw his tentacles wrapped around Alec from head to toe. He’d been terrified in that moment, afraid he had somehow hurt Alec with no awareness on his part. It had been centuries since he’d lost control of anything but a minor glamour, and he hated the feeling of helplessness that rose up in his throat. He was Magnus Bane. Helplessness was something that happened to other people.

Except now he can’t even control his own body.

He presses his lips together, and takes a tentative step forward. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” It’s as close to asking as he can bring himself to get.

Alec just rolled his eyes. “No such thing,” he said, his voice pitched in that way he does when he’s trying to imitate Magnus.

Magnus straightens his shoulders. “I don’t sound like that!”

“Yes you do.” Alec pats the empty bed once more. “Now get in here before I have to get my stele and convince you the hard way.”

It’s like a dam breaking. Magnus practically pounces on him, but Alec is ready, rolling with their momentum so that he comes up on top, straddling Magnus’ hips. Magnus doesn’t fight as his wrists are pinned to the bed. Alec’s weight on him is grounding, reassuring.

Magnus looks up at him and winks. "Maybe I want the hard way."

"Next time," Alec promises, and closes the distance between their lips. The kiss is soft rather than heated and ends with their foreheads pressed together.

Closer, he needs to be closer. Magnus' arms are pinned but that doesn’t stop his tentacles. They wrap around every inch of Alec, around his chest and his stomach, his arms and his thighs. They pull Alec down, pull him to Magnus and wind around them both until neither of them can move.

The familiar dread is a poison seeping through the cracks of Magnus’ contentment. But this time it’s stopped in its tracks at the soft, contented laugh that vibrates in Alec’s chest. “Mmm, this is nice. Maybe you should keep them.”

They can’t move very much, wrapped up together as they are, but Alec manages to lean forward just enough to brush a kiss against Magnus’ chin. He follows it up with another to one of the tentacles.

Magnus melts under his touch. “Maybe I should.”

He strains against the constraining hold of the tentacles, aching to hold Alec in his arms. Just like that, the tentacles shift, loosening their hold just enough so that Magnus can free his hands and run fingers down Alec’s back. Alec, who sighs into his neck arches his back for more.

The last of the tension drains away. Alec isn’t upset or afraid. He should probably be annoyed at being made into a Nephilim cocoon but he seems content to lay pressed against Magnus in a tangle of limbs and tentacles. If anything, he shuffles closer as sleep pulls him under, his hand reaching for one of the many tentacles and pulling it towards his chest.

Alec isn’t repulsed and a little voice in the back of Magnus’ head, small but growing, insists that he never will be. Not for the first time, Magnus begins to believe it

This time when he drifts off to sleep, it’s without fear or worry.

[yoitsalec-blog1]

Review on “Serial” Season 1, “S-Town”, &  “The Horror of Dolores Roach” - What is a Podcast?

   I just want to start this out by saying I’m sorry I haven’t posted a blog in sooo long. I’ve procrastinated because I didn’t know what to blog about next! At one time I was going to make a blog about my Bloom Tour experience and another was a Bloom album review, but I decided to make another on these Podcasts. A week ago I have never listened to any podcasts or knew where to listen to them, I had no interest, BUT, these last few days it’s all I listen to on my phone, in the car, & on my laptop. What are Podcasts? They’re free easy to download audio books in a way is what I think of them as. I KNOW, audio books? Because myself personally am a book reader, I couldn’t listen and focus unless I see it in my hands reading with my eyes bobbing left to read like when you watch a tennis match just reading every sentence. You might not think there’s a difference between these and audio books, but you typically can’t subscribe to audio books as you can podcasts, and podcasts put the story into episodes; series. Every episode can be a different topic or a whole story that makes it into a season, whichever genres you’re into, there’s one for you. Okay enough of this, onto the reviews.

“Serial” Season 1

  Summary -  Season one of this Podcast show called “Serial” tells the story of a 1999 kidnapping and murder case of Hae Min Lee January 13th. This Podcast started their own investigation on this case in 2014, 15 years later, after Sarah Koenig receives an email about this case to try and prove Adnan Seyed innocent. Adnan was found guilty and convicted of murder and kidnapping of Hae Min Lee and was having to serve at first, the dealth penalty but was then changed to Life plus 30 years. (If i remember forgive me if that was wrong) Adnan was dating Hae Min Lee at one time 15 years ago. It’s a story that leaves you always wondering “Who actually did it?” and while you try and come up with your own theory, Koenig works on this investigation for atleast 2 years, reaching to past friends of Adnan’s and Hae’s back in highschool and Adnan’s family and childhood to learn who Adnan was really like. I cannot spoil anything for you in this podcast because it’s just a must-listen.

  Review - I loved this season out of the three “Serial” has produced personally because it’s a murder mystery case with unexpecting surprises throughout entirely. Because of this Podcast as you should know, Adnan’s case in 2016 was reopened for another trial. Nice fitting background music on pauses and suspensed moments. Professionals and experts were used in this series to give better understanding of what might to expect in situations like this. Just having real interrogations and court cases from back in 1999 that you’re able to hear yourself from everyone involved makes this season stand out and grab my attention and I know this deserved the ratings it got. Crazy amount of downloads this Series has received resulting in receiving the Peabody award and #1 on the charts.

“S-Town

  Summary -  “S-Town” comes from the same producers of “Serial” but a different host, Brian Reed. This is a 7 Chapter Series of what first seems to be about an email Reed received from a John B. Mclemore of Bibb County, Alabama, wanting Reed to investigate into a possible murder of a young boy in his town, but that topic changes. The Series follows as Brian travels to this small town in Alabama to learn more about this town, and eventually John. John is a very interesting man, even a genius as most have called him in this series, as the many revealings we learn throughout.

   Review - I have to be honest with you, at points in this series, i was left upset, even teary-eyed at how powerful this is, but that’s not the only feelings I had, no this series came at me at different angles, from laughing and happy and angry and sad. It’s a must-listen guys and definitely free to download. Also lives up to it’s ratings, not to mention how many downloads this got in a short amount of time resulting in receiving the Peabody Award.

“The Horror of Delores Roach”

   Summary -  This story tells of a Woman in her 30s, Delores Roach, just released out of prison after serving 16 years for a drug bust. The Setting: New York. being that she gets released after so long, she has no idea about the new technological world that we live in today. There’s different Broadways and stores around her that took the places of all the old shops there was before she went away. All except one, an Empanada restaraunt that her and her old boyfriend Dominik used to always go. She walks into the store and who does she find? A guy named Luis that used to buy weed from her back then, he’s the owner of this restaraunt. With only having $195 after giving $5 to the homeless man, Luis offers her a place to stay in the room below the restaurant. Since Delores doesn’t have a job, soon Luis and Delores sparks an idea for Delores to be a masseuse, a given trade she was taught back in prison, and man is she good! But one incident with a man by the name of Mr. Pearlman that winds up dead in the restaurant, things are looking badly and the body must be rid of. 

   Review - I felt if I continued onto my summary I could’ve spoiled more that you deserve to find out yourself. Furthermore this story contains adult content for the young ears out there so beware. I enjoyed listening to this story, would also hope for a following story after? Hint hint ;) I love the imagery I was able to produce in my head with sound effects and descriptions used. And the characters? Phenomonal! Well done! It honestly had me just stop in my tracks at times just focused on what’s next. Great acting, great story line and above all a must-listen

   Thank you for reading this review, hope you liked it, you can also like this post and follow me. And also tomorrow I turn 19

[ruluxe]

Scaultrite City

Fandom: Voltron Legendary Defender Pairing: Lance/Loving Himself, Lance/Original Character Characters: Lance, Original Characters Tags: Aliens, Comedy, Lance-centric, Kissing, Marriage Proposal, Gift Fic Summary: Lance rescues a small ice planet from the Galra and its prince wants to thank him in a very peculiar way. Notes: My dear Tom asked me to write a fic where Lance gets appreciated, perhaps by a gorgeous alien prince. I hope I did their request justice. Love ya babe!

Read on Ao3

Lance cautiously follows the royal guard down the long stretch of hallway towards the throne room. They're dressed in long, heavy robes made from what looks like crushed velvet, soft blue in colour and fastened together with holo buttons. They march robotically, carrying slender poles that resemble a wizard’s staff, complete with an opalescent orb caged within a crystal claw.

The castle walls are made of glistening scaultrite. He remembers the ordeal Keith once had to go through to get some and wonders just how they managed to harvest this much from the belly of a weblum.

“You could make a thousand giant teluduvs out of this castle,” he says brightly, hoping to break the uncomfortable silence. The guards do not regard him.

He stops abruptly as they halt at a giant door, one tall enough to fit the whole of Voltron through. There are knockers made of scaultrite too and as one of the guards leans forward to lightly tap one against the door, Lance begins to get nervous. For once in his life he feels like his wit and charm might not be useful in this situation, he’s already tried a number of times. It isn't until another royal guard pokes it's pale grey face out a small and round peep door inside the larger one that Lance's mood lightens. He feels like he's seen this comical movement somewhere before.

They speak to each other in a foreign language, a series of mechanical whirs and clacks that sound more like heavy machinery struggling to start up rather than words that have any meaning. The guard behind the door shifts its beady black eyes towards Lance and then nods in understanding before shutting the smaller door.

He suddenly begins to sweat profusely under his paladin armour despite the frosty atmosphere. Lance tries to convince himself that this could only mean good things, but the guards’ stiffness doesn't put him at ease. He begins chewing on his bottom lip as the guards usher him inside. It’s funny that no matter how many times he's done this before, doing it alone makes this so much more nerve-wracking.

There’s a long swoosh and a booming thud, the sounds of a big and heavy deadbolt sliding to unlock. The doors open with a loud whining creak and Lance follows their lead.

Inside the throne room, guards form a line on either side of a navy carpet, stretching the distance of this very large space. They’re dressed differently in here, with tall garish caps and chin straps to hold them in place. Their robes are just as long but the collars resemble white feather boas and the cuffs remind Lance of faux fur hand muffs. Their weapons are spears made from scaultrite with tips so sharp they could pierce through the thickest of armour. None of them look at Lance, but rather through him as he walks. Like statues. It gives him the chills.

“Welcome,” a voice calls, silken and soft. It echoes off the hollowed walls.

Lance startles, it’s the first bit of English he’s heard since arriving on this planet, other than the slurs and curses of the Galran fleet he took out moments ago.

His eyes find the throne. It’s huge and jagged points make it look like an iceberg jutting out from the Arctic Ocean. Also made of scaultrite.

“No surprise there,” Lance mutters under his breath. Then his eyes fall to the being occupying it.

He expected to find a short, pudgy alien, like the rest of the residents in the city. They, like the guards, are slightly different in appearance, a light grey compared to the sickly, almost translucent colour of occupants outside the kingdom. Their faces are round like small moons, their irises pinprick black floating around mercury-like sclera but otherwise humanoid features. One nose, one mouth, normal teeth and oddly enough, human ears. It’s kind of jarring to look at, even though he’s seen his fair share of extraterrestrials.

Their leader, however, is much different.

He is strikingly handsome, with silvery skin and flowing white hair. His irises are an icy blue, stark against the dark sclera. Just under his eyes bear the mark of an Altean, though these are crystalline, dug deep into the leader’s cheekbones unnaturally and catch the light like the rest of the castle. Lance can't help but shudder with a peculiar intrigue. His ears are pointed and peek through strands of his hair, which Lance wonders if they are also in homage to the race. Atop the leader’s head is a scaultrite crown with five high points resembling shards of glass. In the front centre is the highest and widest, adorned with a large opalescent gem. He wears a long, midnight blue mantle over a futuristic looking bodysuit that looks and shines like it was made from mithril. It’s fashionable, Lance will admit, but practical and comfortable? He doubts it.

“I am Prince Oz,” he declares, rising from his throne.

Lance snorts and hysterical laughter follows. He knows now why everything had felt so familiar to him.

The prince cocks his head in confusion. “Why do you laugh?” he asks, his mouth quirking into a smile.

Lance tries to stifle it before he gets into trouble but can’t help himself. “Your name is Oz. Like the Oz? As in the Wizard of Oz?”

The smile drops from his face as he shakes his head, his brows knit pensively. “I do not know this wizard you speak of. In this kingdom, there is only one Oz and it is I, the great and powerful.”

“Yeah huh,” Lance agrees with a nod as he fights off another laughing fit. “It’s nice to meet you, Prince Oz, the great and powerful.” He bows as the prince steps down and suddenly that anxious knot is back and Lance has to wonder if these aliens are versed in linguistic nuance. All jokes aside, he must be serious now otherwise he’ll probably be beheaded before Blue can crash through this scaultrite palace to rescue him.

The prince takes his gloved hand and kisses it, and heat flushes Lance's cheeks. “I had my guards bring you here to thank you for saving our city. It has been under the Galra’s control for too long. We fought back at first but many of my people suffered and died at their hands.”

Lance stands, watches with confusion as the prince circles around him, skimming his long fingers along his paladin armour.

“You must be a very brave warrior on your planet. We have heard the legends of Voltron but have always wondered if our kingdom was too far out of its reach. For you to travel so far through thousands of galaxies to save our home from the Galra’s clutches says a lot about your character, paladin —”

The prince stops, slides his fingers under Lance's chin. They're surprisingly smooth and cool against the heat of his skin. Oz looks at him expectantly and realisation dawns on him.

“Lance,” he squawks, instantly chastising himself for producing such an undignified sound in front of royalty.

Oz tips his chin and smiles. Lance can see his reflection in the scaultrite boomerangs under the prince’s eyes.

“Lance… what a lovely name.”

Lance's heart is thudding in his chest. He isn't sure if he's flattered or terrified or a little bit of both. He laughs nervously, feet cemented to the scaultrite floor. “Thanks… And the whole saving your planet thing well, it was really nothing,” he says as modestly as possible but it sounds just as boastful as anything that comes out of his mouth.

“I beg to differ,” says the prince, coming full circle to stand in front of him. Lance hadn't realised how tall the other was before now. Not when his words are softly spoken and his height is quite clearly being used for intimidation. “Which is why I have prepared a feast in your honour to not only commemorate your bravery but to celebrate our union.”

Lance physically feels his eyes bulge out of their sockets and his heart jumps into his throat. “Our what?!” he chokes, leaping a step back away from the prince.

Oz smiles once again and though he's still gorgeous, his facial expressions are beginning to look a lot more nefarious. Even downright eerie. “Our union, of course. Your level of courage will be a quality that my people must learn to aspire to and my excellence will continue to expand this beautiful city until we are a force to be reckoned with. Together we will lead Scaultrite City — and possibly the universe — to greatness.”

Lance forces down the panic quickly rising from his gut. He isn't quite sure how to get out of this. “Uh, look man —” He stops himself in an attempt to smooth out the tremble in his voice but he also reminds himself that he is speaking with royalty. He clears his throat again after shooting a nervous glance over his shoulder. The guards are still in their places and have yet to start closing in. Even the prince remains at the foot of his throne. “I’m sorry, Prince Oz, but I can't marry you. I also can't stay here on your planet. I have a family back on my home planet that I miss a lot. My sister Veronica, my brothers Luis and Marco. My parents and grandparents. Besides, I already have some—”

Again Lance stops himself from finishing the sentence with someone I love. He has no idea how the prince would react to that. Instead, he says, “— other planets I have to rescue from the Galra.” He ends up puffing out his chest, if intentional he'll never really know. “Voltron needs me. They'd be lost without my mad skills.”

The prince stares at him in what Lance hopes is quiet consideration. He's sure if he makes it out alive, this will definitely be a story to tell, though he'll make sure he leaves out the part where he was so terrified at one point, he probably would have peed his pants.

Finally, after what seemed like one thousand decaphoebs, the prince nods. “I agree, Lance. It would be truly selfish of me to steal you away from your duties as a valiant paladin of Voltron. You must continue your mission.”

Lance shakes his head in shock. He doesn't think he heard right. “Are you serious? You're letting me go, just like that?”

It's the prince's turn to shake his head and he begins closing the distance between them. “I do not hold you captive, Lance. You are free to leave at any time.”

“But what about our union?” Lance blurts. He scolds himself internally for not being able to think before he speaks. He backs away from the prince as he gets closer when he hears a commotion behind him and his back hits against something preventing him from moving any further. His heart starts to race and his blood runs cold knowing that the guards behind him have just blocked his only exit and this is about to get real dangerous. Lance wonders if he should try and reach out to Blue but part of him feels guilty already at the thought of the lion destroying the castle to get to him. It is truly a stunningly marvellous building.

The prince leans forward and he takes Lance's head in his hands. He's even more beautiful up close. His hands are smooth as they caress Lance's skin, igniting a fire in Lance's cheeks. Despite the gentle motion, Lance is frightened, and his eyes squeeze shut as he tries to concentrate on calling out to his lion.

However, the link is broken when he feels the plush push of lips against his own. His heart stops for a minute, either out of terror or some other emotion he isn't quite sure has a name. His petrification only eases from here on out, beginning in the tips of his toes. A tingling warmth meanders through his icy veins, and Lance can't explain it himself but he finds himself embracing the kiss, gently grasping at the prince's cloak. He has no idea what he's doing.

The kiss doesn't last longer than a dobash, at least he thinks so. Lance isn't sure if he's disappointed or relieved by that fact. Either way, when their lips part, Lance is left in a hazy and wanting state. He has half a mind to chase that heat right back to the prince's mouth.

Luckily, the prince speaks.

“It is an open invitation shall you return. It was an honour to meet you, paladin Lance. I hope one day we meet again.”

Lance can feel the heat radiating off his entire body, certain that he'd melt ice should he be near it. He's rendered speechless, and happily so, lest he make a fool out of himself saying any number of things that would get him into trouble.

The prince turns on his heel and walks gracefully up the stairs to his throne. Lance watches in awe before stammering, “It— It was uh, very nice to m-meet a great and powerful prince like yourself.”

Gone is the resistance at his back and as Oz sits, Lance catches one more of his smiles, this one more genuine than the rest. “And never will again, I fancy. There is only one of I and I am it.”

Lance nods, feigning understanding, and turns to leave the throne room. The guards are back to lining a walkway, silent and statuesque for their tiny, fat bodies. The door is closed and there is no doorman in sight. Lance's anxiety returns.

“Uh,” he asks shakily, running his hand through his hair. “How do I get out of here?”

“All you must to do is to knock on the door three times and command the wormhole created to carry you wherever you wish to go,” Oz calls from his throne.

Lance turns to face the prince and almost laughs. “Are you saying I've gotta tap three times and repeat 'there's no place like home ’?”

“If home is where you desire,” replies Oz. The marks on his face Lance had assumed were fake until now begin to glow as he places both hands over orbs on the armrests of his throne Lance had failed to notice before. Maybe he was some form of an alternate universe Altean after all.

He marvels for a moment, even more in awe than before. This is probably simultaneously the coolest and weirdest thing that's ever happened to him since this journey began. It makes him think of home, where there are vast valleys of green and blue skies with the fluffiest of clouds; crystal blue oceans and the people he loves most. Where things move at a slower pace but that's okay because he'd get to savour the moments. Yet he knows if he had never come here, he would never have found his place in the world, would have never have known what it's like to be part of a team that needs him. A universe that needs him. He would have never come to value his own self-worth.

So, as desperate as he is to go home to be with his family, Lance does not knock three times and wish for that. Instead, he closes his eyes and thinks of his other family, and the home he's found in them.

And he knocks.

[undertheinfluencerd]

https://ift.tt/3DXcz7F #

Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

While Marvel’s Phase 4 has been mostly backward-looking for its first outings, in terms of reusing character, Shang-Chi is finally here to change things up. The MCU’s first martial arts fantasy epic is certainly different and unquestionably bold, but does it work, and will Marvel fans take to it as one of the strongest origin stories so far? How does it stand as a new branch for the MCU to nurture in other words?

For the most part, Marvel’s MCU origin stories have been particularly strong. Even ignoring the usual issues with over-emphasis on exposition, comic book movie fans love to see new superheroes take up the mantle. It’s traditionally been in MCU sequels where struggles have been more obvious – apart from Captain America’s seemingly bullet-proof sub-franchise of course. In that respect, Shang-Chi had reason to be confident, even with a vastly different focus to the other MCU kickstarter projects. But at the same time, with the expectations of fans built on 24 movies and billions of dollars, aiming for something different was never going to be completely straightforward. Particularly with the issues presented by the industry at the moment.

Related: Why Shang-Chi’s Avengers Cameo Looks Different From Endgame

Early box office results suggest Shang-Chi is going incredibly well and a 90%+ Rotten Tomatoes review score into opening weekend is always a very good sign. That is a testament to what Simu Liu and director Destin Daniel Cretton have achieved. That said, though, Shang-Chi has some teething issues, even for a movie that is very good overall. In the interest of balance, here’s everything that worked incredibly well in Shang-Chi and the few areas where it perhaps missed the mark.

As with any MCU origin story, there’s a lot of necessary exposition in Shang-Chi. The majority of this is conveyed via flashback, which works, and could have been a little jarring was the narrative importance of the past not been handled well. That typically means there is less space for character, which is often particularly true of a movie with such major fantastical elements and action set-pieces, but not in Shang-Chi. Simu Liu positively radiates charisma, even as he guards his character (to protect his secrets), promising an awful lot more in the MCU’s future. Awkwafina’s Katy is not just the audience’s eyes in Shang-Chi’s world, but she’s also the breakout character (the same way Ratcatcher was in The Suicide Squad and Michael Pena’s Luis was in Ant-Man). The fact that she returns in future, as set up by the end, can only be a good thing. Add to that, the performances of legends like Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh – not just in combat, but in quieter moments – and it’s a truly great group.

Speaking of Tony Leung, his Wenwu – wrongly named The Mandarin or “The Real Mandarin” throughout the marketing – makes a strong claim to be one of the best human MCU villains alongside Michael B Jordan’s Killmonger. Even faced with being overshadowed by a colossal winged demon in the final act, Leung’s dramatic chops back up his stunning martial arts work to create a bad guy who is not only empathetic but compelling in his cause. He is in pain, haunted by his own part in his wife’s death, and corrupted by the power of the Ten Rings and what lies beyond Ta Lo’s portal. Though he also had a more traditional hunger for power before meeting Shang-Chi’s mother, he puts that one-dimensional motivation aside to be a man pushed to desperate, catastrophic measures by his grief. To contrast that with how Iron Man 3 originally portrayed the supposedly same character is night and day.

While the dynamic between Wenwu, Shang-Chi, and Xialing is great, Shang-Chi is best when it’s examining their personal story. Unfortunately, the shift in gears in the third act that sees them arrive in Ta Lo and face the impending arrival of the Dweller-in-Darkness feels like a similar situation that undermined how good The Avengers was. Suddenly adding the Dweller as the final act “big boss”, plus an army of otherwise unmentioned flying soul sucker drones is very much like Whedon’s use of the Chitauri army to escalate matters for the heroes in his final act back in 2012. That’s not to say there aren’t impressive moments in the battle – and who doesn’t want to see what amounts to the MCU’s first kaiju on kaiju battle? – but there’s not quite enough tension when the personal story is ripped away.

Related: Is Shang-Chi Officially An Avenger Now?

The benefit of adding a martial arts master to the MCU is immediately obvious as soon as Shang-Chi gets into its combat groove. The opening fight sequence on the bus careening down San Francisco’s famous hills is remarkable and it’s far from the best. Elsewhere, Tony Leung, Simu Liu, Andy Le, Fala Chen, Meng’er Zhan, and young Arnold Sun (a revelation as teen Shang-Chi in training flashbacks) all put together gravity-defying martial arts set-pieces that are unlike anything seen in the MCU. So far, the MCU brand of martial arts has looked more like the bruising style of Florian Munteanu’s Razor Fist, but here there’s balletic grace mashed up with the physical drunken boxer humor of Kung Fu Hustle (referenced lovingly not only in a poster in Shang-Chi’s wall, but also in the casting of Yuen Wah as Ta Lo Master Guang Bo. The slow-motion can get a little over-indulgent, but there’s no doubting the obscene skill involved.

Despite the mastery of the fight choreography and the incredible environmental designs that go into Ta Lo in particular, some of Shang-Chi‘s CGI is on a par with the worst moments of Black Panther‘s notorious early trailers. There’s more than one regrettable ragdoll sequence, including part of the otherwise excellent bus fight, and while the Great Protector battling the Dweller-in-Darkness is a fun spectacle, some of it is too muddied by an attempt to presumably hide the heavy effects work involved. The moment that sees Shang-Chi run up the otherworldly beast, in particular, is near-impossible to follow.

The MCU has been accused before of being too focused on shoe-horning humor in to meet the expectations of the lucrative family audience, and even some of the best Marvel movies too have clunking gags in them. Shang-Chi, though, brilliantly balances humor and heart and drama. Awkwafina’s Katy and Sir Ben Kingsley’s return as Trevor Slattery take care of much of the leg work, but Simu Liu’s comic background helps a great deal, though his jokes come less frequently than his “sidekicks”. There’s never any attempt to really undermine heavy, dramatic moments with humor, which is where Marvel stumbles a lot and crucially, Shang-Chi being an insider on his lore means there’s no reductive mockery of the mythology behind his powers and his family.

Shang-Chi is a stand-alone almost to the same degree as a Phase 1 movie, and that’s great, but there are obviously expectations to tie it back to the rest of the MCU, and – as ever – use its end as a stepping stone to what comes next. Had that ended with Wong’s recruitment of Shang-Chi and Katy and the impromptu, hilarious karaoke sessions, that would have been perfectly fine, but then Shang-Chi‘s mid-credits scene goes too far. Captain Marvel and Bruce Banner’s inclusions feel too much like big-name appearances for the sake of familiarity, particularly because both add very little to the discussion on the Ten Rings other than a bemused shrug. They’re there so that Marvel can remind the audience that there’s always something bigger coming, but it didn’t need to be done this way when Wong’s mysterious tease of what he needed Shang-Chi for was satisfying enough.

Related: How Marvel Retconned Its Iron Man 3 Mandarin Controversy

Now that there are 25 MCU movies and a number of Disney+ Marvel shows to throw into the mix, the requirement to do Marvel homework before each release is getting to the point where casual audiences simply will not do it. Luckily, Shang-Chi exists on its own merit strongly and without the crutch of the rest of the franchise, meaning any pre-watching is limited. Yes, there are nods to the post-Endgame world in posters about Snap Anxiety, and Wong and Tim Roth’s Abomination appear, but the only substantial link is to Trevor Slattery’s arc in Iron Man 3, and he is played in such a way that he’s no more than a jester brought along to help Morris become the next most memeable Marvel character. His arc is entirely explained within Shang-Chi anyway, so that serves as all the required reminder. The reason this is such a big plus for Shang-Chi is that it has to be how Marvel moves forward when establishing new MCU IPs, like X-Men, Fantastic Four, Blade, and whoever else comes along: not everything has to be tied to the nostalgia machine. Shang-Chi proves it’s still possible to strike out onto a new branch without everything being a set-up for when the next cameo will happen.

While Tony Leung’s Wenwu is great (particularly in how he retcons Iron Man 3‘s Mandarin mistake), and the fight sequences involving both are hugely entertaining, it’s difficult not to feel that both Razor Fist and – even more so – Death Dealer aren’t rather undernourished. The former’s complexity is as limited as you might expect from someone who drives around in an SUV with his own name spraypainted on the side (even when it’s achingly hinted for about two seconds that he fears for his master’s mental health), and the latter is a plot device killed off for effect. Neither is given anything like the charisma to hide their lack of development and backstory and it’s a real shame. At least Razor Fist’s likely return might afford more of an opportunity.

Not only is Shang-Chi a great stand-alone, but it is fundamentally different from what MCU fans have seen over the past decade. While it has the same hallmarks of familial conflict and daddy issues as lots of previous Marvel movies, it balances that with martial arts, new mysticism, a dragon, a giant kaiju-like demon, and the suggestion that more lands like Wakanda can exist beyond portals to other realms. There can be no accusations of deferring to type or Shang-Chi being somehow formulaic, and after 24 films, that is an impressive thing to be able to state. It also makes forthcoming new creative endeavors – like Eternals – that have a similar burden of expectation to be new and exciting a lot easier to back to succeed with the audience. The start of Phase 4 has looked backward a little more than some may like, but Shang-Chi is bold and unafraid to be wildly different to its stable-mates, and that should give future MCU creators cause for confidence.

Next: Every Upcoming Marvel Movie Release Date (2021 To 2023)

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[brevoorthistoryofcomics]

It had been a while since I’d picked up an issue of ACTION COMICS, but for whatever reason, after passing up the previous few issues, this one made the trip home. Might have been as simple as there being slim pickings on the rack that week in terms of new super hero comics of the type I knew I liked. It’s got a very nice cover by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, an artist’s artist who would go on to do tons of DC licensing artwork through the next decade, here inked by Bob Oksner, a combination I can’t recall seeing again. 

Looking at this splash page, it may have been the call-out here for the Flash and Green Lantern that made the difference, as they were my two favorite heroes of the era. Also, it ran below my personal ten-year-old radar, but after a long and bitter public struggle, the creator byline for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had been restored to all Superman stories, and appears here for the first time in my own chronology. I don’t know that I took any special note of it.

So what was going on in the life of the Man of Steel? Well, this was the conclusion to a multi-part story begun in the previous two pages. After the opening, a flashback let me know that Superman had seemingly been killed in battle with his recurring enemy, the space cowboy Terra Man. Superman wasn’t truly dead, in fact, but that didn’t stop him from tossing away his uniform Peter Parker-style. Or has he? The text informs the reader that the figure throwing his Superman costume into the sea on the splash page is neither Clark Kent nor Superman. Wha?? Meanwhile, a mysterious threadworn bum is also wandering around Metropolis in a fashion that makes it clear he’ll be important later.

Terra Man has cut off Metropolis from the rest of the world behind an impenetrable force-field–but that field isn’t so impenetrable that certain friends of the deceased Man of Steel cannot penetrate it. So it is that the Flash makes his entry into the story, ambushing Terra Man in the middle of Metropolis in the name of the fallen Superman. Flash puts up a good fight, but is suddenly and inexplicably blown out away from the fight. The culprit? Terra Man himself–who we learn is actually Superman himself, his appearance having been changed during his supposed demise to match that of his foe. Rather than trying to explain to the Flash what the truth is, the Man of Tomorrow used his super-breath to propel the Scarlet Speedster away from their conflict. But Superman himself has more questions than answers.

Recouping, Flash finds himself joined by his fellow JLA member Green Lantern, whose Power Ring was also able to get him within the force-field. But before the two super-friends can coordinate an attack on Terra Man, a flying saucer appears in the skies over Metropolis (having had no trouble getting in.) Flash and Green Lantern go to check it out, but are swiftly taken out of action by its advanced weapons. From afar, Super Terra Man has been watching, and his friends’ distress calls him back into the action.

The inhabitant of the spacecraft turns out to be the brother of the alien who, a hundred years ago, turned Terra Man from an orphaned child into a space cowboy–and he’s come back to take his revenge on the man who killed his brother. He pledges to hunt Super Terra Man down through Metropolis and destroy him. Meanwhile, the man who threw his Superman costume into the sea is revealed to be Gregory Reed, an actor from several previous Superman adventures who typically portrays the Man of Steel on film . With Superman dead, he felt there was no point in hanging onto his costume. But he can’t help but wonder what it must feel like to be the Man of Tomorrow…

Things race to a climax as the citizens of Metropolis are heartened to see a familiar red and blue streak in the sky: Superman lives! He attacks the flying saucer and defeats the alien, only to be ambushed himself by Terra Man. The appearance of Terra Man is enough to make the cop who harangued the ragged bum we saw earlier drop his disguise, revealing himself to be the true Terra Man. This is all part of the plan, though, since the fake Terra Man is, as we know, really Superman, and he kayos his enemy. The Superman who defeated the alien was Gregory Reed, his super-feats actually performed by Flash and Green Lantern incognito (Superman did get around to explaining his situation to them.). Now, with both Terra Man and the alien hunter neutralized and Superman’s features restored to their proper form, the story reaches its finale.

[go-redgirl]

The History of Presidents Using Military to Restore Order Within US Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / May 31, 2020 /

Minority-owned businesses are among the worst-hit targets of looters and rioters who rampaged in Minneapolis and then other cities after a black man died in police custody, according to news reports.

“Expressing grievances to our elected officials in the form of protest is a time-honored tradition,” Stacy Washington, co-chairwoman of the board of Project 21, a black conservative group, said in a public statement Monday.

“But what we are watching unfold across the country is a coordinated effort to destroy the rule of law and order in our communities and to gin up racial tension,” Washington said. “In video after video, we see masked white protesters dressed all in black destroying property in black neighborhoods. And it’s blacks who are trying to stop the Antifa protesters from defacing small businesses.”

During remarks Monday evening in the Rose Garden, President Donald Trump noted: “The biggest victims of the rioting are peace-loving citizens in our poorest communities, and as their president, I will fight to keep them safe.”  

The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>

Prosecutors charged Derek Chauvin, 44, with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, 46, who was being arrested Memorial Day evening on suspicion of passing a counterfeit 20-dollar bill.

Cellphone video showed Chauvin, at the time a Minneapolis police officer, with a knee pressing into the neck of Floyd, prone and handcuffed on the pavement, for nearly nine minutes.

Floyd, who was black, could be heard begging Chauvin, who is white, to allow him to stand and saying “I can’t breathe” before he fell silent.

A medical examiner determined Monday that Floyd’s death was a homicide. Outrage over his death has united Americans across political divides, as well as police chiefs and police unions.

“I understand the anger, but I do not understand destroying your own neighborhood to protest an innocent man’s murder,” Marie Fischer, an information technology specialist and Maryland political consultant who is black, said of those looting and setting fires.

“I do not understand many who are bailing out these ‘protesters’ as a sign of support. How about you fund the minority business owners whose stores and businesses have been destroyed by rioters?” said Fischer, who also is a member of Project 21. “They should fund those who were and are building these communities instead of the ones tearing them down under the guise of social justice—which in this case is neither social nor just.”

Here are six examples of minority-owned businesses across the country that were vandalized, desecrated, or destroyed by rioters.

1. Minneapolis: Where Unrest Began

Luis Tamay, an immigrant, reportedly saved for more than 10 years to open his Ecuadorian restaurant, El Sabor Chuchi, in Minneapolis seven years ago.

After guarding his restaurant during the first couple of nights of unrest,  Tamay obeyed the city’s curfew Friday night and went home, believing the Minnesota National Guard would keep order.

When Tamay arrived at his restaurant Saturday morning, it was burned to the ground, the Minneapolis StarTribune reported.

“Seventeen years of work is gone,” he told the newspaper.

Nearby, a Spanish-language radio station, La Raza, also burned down. Station owner Maya Santamaria wrote on her GoFundMe page: “Small, minority business owners found themselves with the businesses that they worked their fingers to the bone building destroyed, looted, vandalized and burned down. Some had no insurance. Others have no resources.”

Jeff Lusuer, a Minneapolis barber who is black, had two shops. One was burned down; someone broke into the other and stole supplies.

Still, Lusuer expressed empathy for the looters after what had occurred in Floyd’s killing, saying he is fed up with police.

“Even though it hurt my businesses, I understand,” Lusuer told the StarTribune.

Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, and peaceful protests began there before others turned to violence, looting, and arson.

The StarTribune reported: “The riots and arson that followed protests of George Floyd’s death have devastated organizations and businesses that serve communities of color.”

The newspaper reported Monday that looters burned a nonprofit center for American Indian youth.

La Michoacana Purepecha ice cream shop lost power as a result of the riots, and employees tried to give popsicles away.

“People right now are going to want to stay away from Lake Street, and that is understandable,” business owner Ricardo Hernandez told the newspaper, referring to the location of his ice cream shop.

“It’s very hard to see your whole life savings go down like this,” Hernandez said. “We used up all our money to build something nice for … not just the Latino community, but everybody.”

2. Atlanta: ‘A Very Sad Day for Us’

Atlanta has a strong legacy in the civil rights movement as the one-time home of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who promoted peaceful resistance to injustice in the 1960s.  

Still, the city erupted in riots as badly as any other in the nation over the weekend. Some of the stores that were broken into and damaged were black-owned businesses, Fox 5 Atlanta reported.

The TV station highlighted Attom, the first black-owned business to operate in an outdoor mall called The Shops at Buckhead, known for high-end retail stores.

“I don’t know if people know we’re owned by a black man because we don’t put it on the front of the business,” Attom owner Zola Dias told the station. “But this is a very sad day for us.”

The store is boarded up, like most of the other shops in the outdoor mall, Fox 5 reported.

“I’m a black man, I’m young, but there is another way to go and protest,” Dias added.

A group of black women set up a fundraising effort to assist black-owned businesses that were destroyed or vandalized, the station  reported.  

3. Looting in Texas Capital

Looters targeted a black-owned salon over the weekend in Austin, Texas, NBC affiliate KXAN reported.

The owner of Private Stock Premium Boutique set up a GoFundMe page and as of Monday had raised more than $60,000 to help rebuild.

Another black-owned business, World Liquor & Tobacco, was looted twice Sunday, KXAN reported.

4. ‘Frustrating’ Vandalism in Denver

A Denver restaurant called Buffalo Bills Wings and Things, owned by Zac Gabani, was a target of vandalism.

“It is frustrating,” Gabani told CBS4 in Denver, adding that breaking things “is pretty counterintuitive.”

Gabani’s eatery reportedly was one of the few businesses that tried to remain open during both the riots and peaceful protests in Denver.

“We were the only place open to feed them,” Gabani said. “We like to support the community; we just wish they would help support us as well.”

5. Milwaukee: ‘Not a Way of Finding Justice’

Dozens of minority-owned businesses in Milwaukee were ransacked by looters, Fox6 Milwaukee reported.

Sam Rahami, owner of the store Trend Benderz, smashed over the weekend, told the TV station:  “Destroying somebody’s business, somebody’s livelihood, is not a way of finding justice for anyone.”

Another store owner, not identified by name in the news story, complained to the station that the destruction was counterproductive.

“What they’re doing is against their benefit. We are here to be part of this community,” the owner of a Cricket Wireless store that was looted and damaged said.

6. Philadelphia: ‘For My Own Community to Do It to My Business’

Black leaders in Philadelphia held a forum calling for peace and in part highlighting that many black businesses were being destroyed, ABC-6 reported.

The forum included black clergy in Philadelphia as well as Human Rights Coalition 215 and Philadelphia Community Stakeholders.

Among those speaking at the event this week were Elliott Broaster, owner of Smoke N Things, a shop that was burned down.

“When I got home alone, I shed a few tears. I saw my business burn down and it hurt me a lot. And especially for my own community to do it to my business, that’s what really [hurt],” Broaster told ABC-6.

The news station reported: “What took years for this Temple grad to build was destroyed in a matter of minutes.”

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

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OPINION:  Well, no-one can blame President Trump for all these unfortunate out of control people that are destroying their own communities which does not  make any sense.

Where is ‘ole’ big Mouth Al Sharpton, Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and others that always complaining about everything but don’t have the gaul or ba**s to try to calm down these young Black Americans running through this country destroying ‘Black Own Businesses’ in their anger of a man that was murdered by a Police Officer in his community.

Certainly they are mis-guided and its certainly not a way to handle such and awful situation.

Our prayers going out to his family and friends! 

[junker-town]

Why a dead English football club lives on

Jorge Luis Borges once claimed that “football is only popular because stupidity is.” He couldn’t foresee the imagination and resiliency of Bury FC’s community.

The Estadio Antonio Vespucio Liberti rises an incurvate bowl, puncturing the skyline of Buenos Aires. It has formed an integral part of the cityscape for 80 years. Known more commonly as the Monumental de Nuñez, or simply ‘El Monumental’, the stadium is situated in the Belgrano barrios of the Argentine capital and has provided a home to River Plate, one of the country’s biggest clubs. For a huge swathe of people, El Monumental is the beating heart of Argentine football; as far as River fans are concerned, you should remove your sandals, for the place in which you are standing is holy ground.

Imagine Honorio Bustos Domecq’s surprise, then, when he takes a walk around Belgrano and finds El Monumental nowhere to be seen.

A couple of opportune contacts later and Domecq finds himself in the offices of Tulio Savastano, president of the Abasto Juniors Soccer Club. To break the ice, he does what any fan would do and talks football: “What a goal! Canary Island All-Stars pressing through Zarlenga and Parodi but unable to prevent Musante’s delightful pass through to centre-half Renovales who smashed home. Football at its finest!”

Savastano sinks into his chair, takes a deep draft of his mate and, as if dreaming aloud, says, “And to think it was me who invented those names.”

Those of you familiar with the work of Jorge Luis Borges will have recognised the telltale signs: the surrealism, the scrupulous attention to detail, the fascination with the power of the imaginary.

As with so many of Borges’ works, “Esse est Percipi” is a modern-day morality play. Beneath the surface of the narrative lies a question about the role that the imagination plays in the production of cultural phenomena: even cultural phenomena as seemingly banal as football.

The title of the story means “being is being perceived.” Borges is asking a seemingly absurd question: To what extent does the reality behind our cultural artifacts even matter? To what extent do we rely on the stories that media tell us? Would it make a difference if football was just a sham? If being is being perceived, who cares about the substance that underpins it?

Mellow-voiced sportscaster Ron Ferrabas enters the room in which Domecq and Savastano are talking. Savastano relays a message: “Ferrabas, I’ve spoken to De Filippo and Camargo. In the next match, Abasto is beaten by two to one. It’s a tough game but bear in mind — don’t fall back on that pass from Musante to Renovales. The fans know it by heart. I want imagination — imagination, understand? You may leave now.”

Gradually, it dawns on Domecq. “Am I to deduce that the score has been prearranged?”

Savastano’s answer, in Domecq’s own words, “tumbles him into the dust.”

“There’s no score, no teams, no matches,” the Abasto president admits. “The stadiums have long since been condemned and are falling to pieces. Nowadays everything is staged on the television and radio. The bogus excitement of the sportscaster — hasn’t it ever made you suspect that everything is humbug? The last time a soccer match was played in Buenos Aires was on 24 June 1937. From that exact moment, soccer, along with the whole gamut of sports, belongs to the genre of the drama, performed by a single man in a booth or by actors in jerseys before the TV cameras.”

Domecq grows bold. “Sir, who invented the thing?”

“Nobody knows. You may as well ask who first thought of the inauguration of schools or the showy visits of crowned heads. These things don’t exist outside the recording studios and newspaper offices. Rest assured, Domecq, mass publicity is the trademark of modern times.”

“And if the bubble bursts?” Domecq barely manages to utter.

“It won’t,” Savastano says, reassuringly.

“Esse est Percipi” is a caution. For Borges, what begins as a shared social practice — the watching of football matches by fans — takes on a life of its own in the imaginations of these fans until, before long, the mechanisms by which fandoms exist become more important than the games.

The real protagonists, as far as Borges is concerned, are not the players themselves but the media — those who are literally in media res, or in the middle of things: “the men [sic] in the booth or the actors in jerseys in front of the TV.” Beyond these media, there is nothing. In the words of Savastano, “These things don’t exist outside the recording studios and newspaper offices ... mass publicity is the trademark of modern times.”

Borges carries the logic of his story to its reductio ad absurdum, but in the process he falls into the trap of jumping straight to the end without making his way there from the beginning. Is it necessarily the case that, because the imagination is involved in the production of fandom, that it is therefore entirely imaginary? Does reality fall away altogether?

At the end of “Esse est Percipi”, the most generative question of Borges’ narrative is left unanswered: “And if the bubble bursts?” What then?

“It won’t,” Savastano says. But he is wrong. In the last year, the bubble burst for a football club in England. And when it did, it taught us something deeper about the powerful role the imagination plays within the human endeavour.

Visionhaus

Here’s another story; this one no less surreal than the Borges tale.

It begins in the United Kingdom in 2010. A general election is held and, when no political party holds an overall majority, a coalition government takes over, made up of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

One of the Tories’ manifesto promises is a restructuring of the payment system for people heading to university for further education. To determine the course of action, a review is carried out. By November, the government has agreed to raise the yearly cap on fees from £3,000 to £9,000 and, by 2012, these increased fees have been rolled out.

With this influx of capital into university coffers, a building boom takes place. Institutions in higher education see an opportunity to reinvigorate the tired fabric of a sector that has been underfunded for years. Unsurprisingly, where there is money to be made, there is a market. A number of companies spring up to respond to this boom.

One of these companies is Mederco, owned by Stewart Day. With business booming and the future looking bright, Day does what many industrialists have done before him: he buys a football club. Bury Football Club.

Unfortunately for Bury, Day’s company goes into receivership. Despite the riches to be found in university property, Day was reliant upon a ‘peer-to-peer’ lending company imaginatively titled ‘Lendy’. With Bury’s ground, Gigg Lane, mortgaged off to an equally dubious outfit, Capital Bridging Finance Solutions, the club accrues debt on their stadium to the tune of £1,500 per day.

Confusingly, the perceived solution to this conundrum is to find another equally unfit property magnate to buy out the club. This time, he arrives in the form of Steve Dale, who takes control of Bury FC after handing over £1 for the pleasure, and despite his failure to demonstrate to the EFL that he has the economic wherewithal to salvage the club. Dale fails to pay the players and holds onto the club long enough to instigate an insolvency process in which creditors receive just 25 percent of what they are owed.

If the creditors aren’t happy, neither are the EFL. After the Insolvency Practitioners Association announces that it will investigate a £7m claim admitted into a Company Voluntary Agreement as a debt owed by Bury to Mederco, the EFL offer Dale ultimatum. After a series of deadlines are not met, he is given a deadline of 5pm BST on Tuesday, August 27th, to provide proof he has the money to finance the club and its debts or to conclude a sale.

The deadline passes with no reply, and after 125 years of membership, Bury Football Club are expelled from the Football League.

What is left behind when a football club’s infrastructure collapses? When the stadium is dismantled? When all the historical artifacts of that club’s existence fade into oblivion?

If you were to ask Borges this question, he would say, “Nothing but the imaginary.” But as to the nature of this “nothing but,” Borges ascribes it a fair amount of heft. The power of the imaginary is enough to undercut the reality of the footballing sphere and leave it in the thrall of narratives spun by its purveyors.

Because of the capacity of the imaginary, Borges suggests that the need for actual players, actual matches, actual stadia, and the actual artifacts of fandom is entirely superfluous. In his short story, the reality that props up the imaginary realm of the football fan is slowly dismantled and the whole rigmarole continues unaffected.

The imaginary, then, as Borges views it, is detachable from the real; there is no necessary link between the two and, in fact, you can detach one from the other without the existence of either being affected.

This approach pushes us towards a bleak philosophical outlook. If the stories that we tell about the world bear no resemblance to the reality that underpins them, then what use does that reality have in any heuristic sense? You support this team, they support that team; there is nothing intrinsic to your support that makes it any more or less meaningful than that person’s fandom. The whole thing is arbitrary. It is hardly surprising that this worldview would lead Borges to utter the immortal words, “Football is only popular because stupidity is.”

In the end, Borges muses, the bubble will never burst in football because the world underlying our fandom will never break through; we are already too mired in the imaginary to allow the real to emerge before our eyes.

Getty Images

What is left behind when a football club’s infrastructure collapses? When the stadium is dismantled? When all the historical artifacts of that club’s existence fade into oblivion?

Bury’s slow decline illustrates that the relationship between the real and the imaginary is tighter than Borges suggests. Compared to the fictional Buenos Aires, the real Greater Manchester was less forgiving about the dismantling of one of its football clubs. Fan groups mobilised, attempts were made to find the club a new owner, and even local politicians were drawn into the conversation. The imaginary hardly continued on its merry way as the real Bury struggled.

The media also refused to play the part ascribed to them by Borges. Instead of persisting in their production of an imaginary that proceeded without accounting for what was going on, the media turned the situation to their favour, sending in news crews to Bury to interview fans, to speak to club and league officials, and to keep their audience abreast of things; a far cry from the cover-up of “Esse est Percipi”.

For fans of Bury, the reality where they now find themselves has an undeniable impact on the imaginary space in which they construct their fandom. Without a team to support at the weekend, without a stadium to visit, without a place to call their own, there can be no supposition that Bury supporters have not been affected by the situation of recent months. But rather than reveal the ultimate meaninglessness of fandom, Bury’s dissolution has done the opposite: fans have found renewed meaning, have been given a clearer sense of what their fandom consists.

When the club dropped out of the Football League, a number of fans and fan groups mobilised under the banner of the Bury Phoenix Club. On Oct. 26, they made the following announcement:

We are here to tell you that whilst the incarnation that we all know and love will soon be no more, from its ashes this club shall be reborn. 134 years of history will not die when Bury FC’s last rites are read. Bury FC is alive in every single fan.

We are what makes Bury FC and whilst we have fought tooth and nail to avoid the scenario that faces us, it is now time to look towards the future. A small team of supporters has been exploring ways to create a Phoenix Club from scratch. The aim is to have a football team playing competitive fixtures in Bury by August 2020.

This is not the end of the story for them. A club called Bury AFC could be playing in 10th-tier English football next season. Bury FC’s closure has not led to an existential crisis. This is simply the beginning of another chapter in the club’s history. Their imaginations are in overdrive as they make Bury Football Club a reality again.

The feted emergence of a new football club in Bury suggests a different relationship between the real and the imaginary to the one proposed by Borges.

Where “Esse est Percipi” is a tale of an imaginary whose relationship to the real has been slowly eroded, Bury FC presents a narrative in which the relationship is reciprocal: the threat of non-existence pushes Bury’s fans even closer to reality, until they are confronting it head on.

This return to reality doesn’t result in a negative attitude towards the imaginary aspect of fandom. Instead, they augment one another, creating possibilities where previously there had been nothing. A year ago, Bury FC were owned by an inveterate capitalist whose main concern was to break up the club and sell the parts for profit. Now they face the prospect of a fan-owned Bury, offering them the ability to make decisions in their own interests and take the club in any direction they want.

When Bury Phoenix Club make the claim that ‘Bury FC is alive in every single fan,’ then, this is not a rhetorical flourish or ideological nicety; it is a recognition that the imaginary which has slowly developed across the 134 years of Bury FC’s history is all that is needed to affect real change in the world.

So where does that leave us?

The story that Borges tells about football also tells a particular story about who we are as humans. As he sees it, our over-reliance on the imaginary makes us little more than automatons ascribing meaning to our meaningless lives in a bid to make sense of the world we find ourselves in. In Borges’ reality, those meanings are arbitrary; we could tell any story about ourselves and it would make little material difference.

This is why Bury Football Club must persist. Because it tells a different story about who we are as humans. It tells us that it is only through the operation of the imagination that we can ever catch a glimpse of the possibilities available to us within the world. And because the imaginary can impact upon the real, there is always the chance that we can enact these possibilities into existence.

The imaginary impels the real. Without it, there would be no Bury FC. The club would die, consigned to the annals of history. In reality, Bury Football Club only exists in the imaginations of its fans. And with them, exists the possibility that a dead football club might rise once more.

[thisdaynews]

Garth Crooks' team of the week: Pulisic, Perez, Maguire, Vardy, Mane

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Garth Crooks' team of the week: Pulisic, Perez, Maguire, Vardy, Mane

It is the first time I have included three players who have scored a hat-trick in my team of the week.

The goals started to flow on Friday night when Leicester thrashed Southampton 9-0, before Chelsea beat Burnley 4-2 and Brighton won 3-2 against Everton on Saturday.

Manchester City kept the pressure on Liverpool with a win over Aston Villa but the Reds responded with a big victory over Tottenham on Sunday.

Here’s my team of the week – have a read and select your own below.

Goalkeeper – Ederson (Manchester City)

Ederson:Two great first-half saves by Ederson from John McGinn and Douglas Luiz during the same phase of play against Aston Villa kept Manchester City alive. There is no doubt about it, City have issues in defence and it has taken Ederson in goal these past few weeks to pull them out of some very difficult situations. However, the Brazilian is not only capable of keeping clean sheets when it matters but spotting when the opposition is vulnerable. His long-ball delivery for Jesus to flick on for Raheem Sterling to ram home made a mockery of the notion that City over-indulge and cannot play a direct game. This is the best goalkeeper in the Premier League on current form.

Did you know?Since the start of the 2017-18 campaign, Ederson has kept more clean sheets than any other goalkeeper in the Premier League (41).

Defenders – Trent Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool), Harry Maguire (Manchester United), Jamaal Lascelles (Newcastle)

Alexander-Arnold: Trent Alexander-Arnold’s pass on the run for Sadio Mane in the first half was out of this world. There are very few full-backs who have such an acute appreciation of the sort of pass a striker needs but Alexander-Arnold is certainly one of them. More importantly he has the ability to provide the pass. Quite apart from anything else he is back to his best after what I thought was a shaky start to the season for such an accomplished youngster. As for Spurs, when are they going to learn that Serge Aurier, as good a player as he can be on occasions, cannot be trusted? He is rash and unreliable.

Did you know?Alexander-Arnold has provided 14 assists in the Premier League since the start of last season – the joint-most by any defender alongside team-mate Andy Robertson.

Maguire: Since the arrival of Harry Maguire in the back four at Old Trafford there has been a calm in defence. This was no better illustrated than against Liverpool at home and again away at Norwich where VAR did its best to disrupt, confuse and irritate just about everyone. While his team-mates were being awarded penalties and missing them, Maguire remained composed and played the game with a quiet authority. He may have cost £80m but I’m beginning to think he is worth it in the current climate. He might even save Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s job.

Did you know?Maguire has won 39 aerial duels in the Premier League this season – 15 more than the Manchester United player with the next most (Victor Lindelof, 24).

Lascelles: After a poor start to the season Newcastle responded to some very sharp criticism. Their performance away at Spurs was probably the catalyst to their resurgence. Leadership has been the key both on and off the pitch. Jamaal Lascelles has been quite brilliant in that department for Newcastle. He takes responsibility in defence and is not afraid to attack in the opponent’s box. Wolves, on the other hand, looked the better side in the second half but Newcastle held the fort and with 10 men. Newcastle displayed plenty of bottle.

Did you know?Lascelles has made more clearances (48) and more headed clearances (23) than any other Newcastle player in the Premier League this term.

Midfielders – Christian Pulisic (Chelsea), Mateo Kovacic (Chelsea), Ilkay Gundogan (Manchester City), Scott McTominay (Manchester United)

Pulisic: I said last week that Frank Lampard’s ability to bring on the youngsters at Stamford Bridge was starting to make an impact and I never even included Christian Pulisic. The scream of delight after the United States international scored his first Premier League goal for the club told only part of the story. When he arrived at the club I thought “what’s the game coming to; we’re now spending £58m for an American!” This hat-trick against Burnley is starting to suggest that this was money well spent. As for Lampard, how many more of these impressive youngsters does he have waiting in the background ready to explode onto the scene?

Did you know?Pulisic became Chelsea’s youngest hat-trick scorer in Premier League history (21y 38d), while he also became the first player to net a ‘perfect’ league hat-trick for the Blues since Didier Drogba against Wigan in May 2010.

Kovacic: I normally don’t care for statistics – they are for statisticians – but when I saw the pass rate for Mateo Kovacic and Jorginho against Burnley I suddenly paid attention. The performance of Kovacic in particular has been a revelation since the departure of Maurizio Sarri and the arrival of Lampard. The way he used the ball to cut Burnley to shreds was cruel at times. It’s hardly surprising Chelsea fans are enjoying their football so much these days. They have developed a generation of players desperate to play for a manager who, along with his players, are going places.

Did you know?Kovacic has completed more dribbles than any other Chelsea player in the Premier League under Frank Lampard (22).

Gundogan: If it’s not David Silva, Kevin de Bruyne or Raheem Sterling dominating the headlines, Man City still have players who can turn a game on a sixpence. This time it was Ilkay Gundogan who ran the show against Aston Villa. The Germany international is often perceived as the junior partner in comparison to the players previously mentioned. Nevertheless, Pep Guardiola may well find himself relying on Gundogan’s services as he tries to get City to their first elusive Champions League final while still trying to retain the title.

Did you know?Gundogan has completed 318 passes in the opposition half in the Premier League this season – the only Manchester City player with more is Rodrigo (343).

McTominay: I’ve watched this lad a lot in recent weeks and couldn’t work out why Solskjaer keeps playing him. He runs about a lot and is certainly not afraid to put his foot it – but a Manchester United player? Against Liverpool he was excellent and after his performance against Norwich he finds himself in my TOTW. He’s also bright enough not to get involved in taking penalties for Manchester United. I think I might have misjudged him.

Did you know?McTominay’s opener was Manchester United’s 2,000th goal in the Premier League, with the Red Devils being the first team in competition history to reach this tally.

Forwards – Ayoze Perez (Leicester), Sadio Mane (Liverpool), Jamie Vardy (Leicester)

Perez: There have been players who have scored great goals, even had great games, and missed out on being in my TOTW because other players have had a greater impact on a match. However, what I will always acknowledge is when a player scores a hat-trick in a Premier League fixture. Ayoze Perez has scored two in his career against Southampton, the latest inflicting the most telling destruction of a football team I have seen in years. Would Leicester have had such a devastating effect on the Saints had VAR not interfered in proceedings? I think not. Read more about what I have to say on this affair in the Crooks of the Matter below.

Did you know?Leicester’s Perez became the first player to score a hat-trick in back-to-back Premier League appearances against a single opponent since Luis Suarez against Norwich City in September 2012.

Mane: Two seasons ago it was Mo Salah who was carrying Liverpool. Last season it was Virgil van Dijk who had a massive influence on the success of the team. This season it’s Sadio Mane who is carrying Liverpool on his shoulders. His speed, power and strength have been a feature of Liverpool’s play this season and without the Senegal international, life at the top would be considerably less comfortable. It was Mane who caused mayhem in Tottenham’s ranks the entire match and the reason they lost. With a little help from Serge Aurier, of course.

Did you know?Mane has scored more goals in Premier League home games than any other player in the competition in 2019 (15 at Anfield).

Vardy: There is a ruthlessness to Jamie Vardy’s finishing that sometimes makes you have to look away. Vardy started his scoring tirade when Southampton were 4-0 down. He completed his hat-trick to make it 9-0 with the last kick of the game. The delight on Vardy’s face was as if he had just scored the winning goal in the final seconds of a cup final. Is it any wonder Brendan Rodgers is looking so pleased with himself when he has a striker in his team with that kind of attitude. It’s hardly surprising Vardy is so unpopular with opposition supporters.

Did you know?Vardy has scored 18 goals in the Premier League since 3 March (Brendan Rodgers’ first game) – the most of any player in the competition in this period.

Now it’s your turn

You’ve seen my selections this season. But who would you go for?

Crooks of the Matter

I thought at the time the sending-off Ryan Bertrand was a harsh decision but when I discovered Mike ‘clever clogs’ Dean was behind VAR in the Southampton versus Leicester fixture I wasn’t surprised.

Anyone who has played football at any level, and especially in the conditions both teams had to contend with, would have made allowances for the players.

If Dean has played the game (and I rather suspect he has) then he should know what defenders have to cope with and therefore I can only assume that he wasn’t a very good player.

There wasn’t one pundit in the BBC Match of the Day studio or anyone on the pitch at St Mary’s who would have sent Bertrand off for the challenge on Perez. And why? Because they recognised and understood the conditions.

Quite apart from destroying what would have been a perfectly good contest for the viewing public, he’s instigated huge embarrassment to the club, its players and put a manager’s career on skid row – all on a whim. You would also be very wrong to compare Newcastle’s Sean Longstaff’s dismissal against Wolves to Bertrand’s. Longstaff was reckless.

The long-held tradition in football that the referee’s decision is final is no longer the case. Andre Marriner gave Leicester the advantage by letting play run on and they took it. To punish the Saints further with the ultimate sanction and a sending-off, as opposed to a booking, was double jeopardy and, in my view, not in the spirit of the game.

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[willswalkabout]

Peru Part 1

It is fair to say I didn't have the most enjoyable trip to Cusco. With my plane at 6am I had to leave my BA hostel at 3am. Seeing little point in sleep I irresponsibly had a few drinks that evening. It meant I my head crashed on the 6 hour flight, and ended up being incredibly dehydrated and uncomfortable. Then there was a frustrating 4+ hour layover in Lima, where for some reason I had to go and retrieve my backpack, and then sit with it until I could check it in for the next flight. This is such an unusual situation for a layover, especially when flying with the same airline, that I very nearly forgot I had it with me, and could have quite easily subconsciously walked with it to the departure gate. The flight from Lima to Cusco however is absolutely stunning. Completely over the Andes, it is impossible to imagine a city can exist in what feels like the middle of nowhere. The range is at its highest about halfway through the flight, where only the peaks emerge from the clouds. I wish it was possible to take better plane window photos. It was therefore somewhat an anticlimax when upon arrival in Cusco it was pouring with rain. Bags collected I shared a taxi to my hostel with 2 other girls, who I had singled out as backpackers (not particularly difficult), and the driver dropped us each off at our respective accommodations. I was shattered that evening, due to being severely sleep deprived over the last 40 or so hours. I got a burger from the extremely reasonably priced hostel restaurant and went to bed. This was more difficult than it should have been due to the absolutely dire "Friday night live music". That evening I very quickly came to the conclusion that I was in a hostel for over 35s only, but this was not to be the case at all, as I discovered from the next day onwards. One of the hardest things about traveling is leaving a comfortable group of friends, that once you put the initial groundwork in, really helped to mouldy a great experience in a particular location. In the case of BA it was Roy et al, and you never feel it can be replicated in your next destination. What you do know is that at the first breakfast/dinner when people are around, you have to start again, introduce yourself, and hope to make some new acquaintances. This has obviously become less and less daunting, but does still require confidence and energy, to bound your way into a conversation, without wanting to look like you were listening in, and hoping that it's not a single group of 8 friends. Identifying that those in a group have only met recently is a skill I've developed, and always makes for a easier entrance. Saying this I met the most amazing group of people in Cusco who will get repeated mentions throughout this post. It was sad saying goodbye, as we'd had a good 10 days all in the same hostel, even if we all departed on different days for tours or to see Machu Picchu. This means right now I'm back in that state where I can't imagine meeting people in Mexico. No doubt I will, however it will not quite be the same, as I have just 5 nights spread across two hostels. I digressed. On Saturday I approached a group at breakfast. They were made up of 4 Americans who had all gone to school (university) in New Orleans. It was hard to keep up with where they were all actually from, as it seemed they'd all moved a couple of times, and were also now working somewhere else entirely. Three were very well traveled, while one was leaving the US for the first time at 25. I also met Ali, a long term traveler from Basingstoke, who for the past 6 years had been away on and off, while also pursuing a career in floristry while at home. I'm not sure I would naturally have been Ali's friend if we come across each other back home. I'm fairly organised, and enjoy sport as well as pointless discussions about politics and the world at large. Ali on the other hand rarely seemed to know where she might be in 24 hours time and hadn't a clue what was happening back home, but regardless we got on pretty well over the next week. After meeting these 5 at breakfast, I then went for coffee in the beautiful Plaza de Armes with Ali and two more of her friends. Marieka, a Dutch girl who had been with Ali the last 3 weeks, and Liz, who was Swiss and also from the hostel. We did our own walking tour of Cusco's markets, myself buying a sweater and a hat handmade from Alpaca wool, that I'm very pleased with. We also went to the food market for lunch, where we sat on tiny stools and had omelettes made to our specifications. Following this Ali and Liz (who extremely helpfully spoke Spanish), came with me to get a SIM card, a process so complicated I do not have the energy to explain. I think I put together a decent run through of my experience in Thailand in that blog, so for a reference you could read that and then multiply the difficulty by 3. We followed this up by the fairly underwhelming Chocolate museum. Though free to enter, you could pay upwards of US$50 for a cooking course, and US$4 for some cake. Both crazy expensive by Peruvian standards, though we did buckle when we saw others getting the cake. That evening myself and Ali went out looking for the cuisine known as Chicha, a Peruvian take on Chinese food. I had my first experience of beer at around 10,000 feet also, which, as expected, felt 2-3x the strength it had done in BA. On Sunday morning I was was feeling pretty tired, having had altitude induced headaches the past two nights. I therefore picked the option of a £1 uber to take me up to the Saqsaywoman ruins, colloquially known as Sexy Woman due to the sound of the pronunciation. The ruins were pretty impressive, and from them I could walk to another large Jesus, similar to Santiago and Rio. There was a great view of the whole of Cusco, and a very easy walk straight down back to the city. On Saturday I had seen a banner advertising a football match on Sunday afternoon, between the local side Cienciano, and a team from Lima. After asking Luis on the tour desk if we could get tickets, he agreed to take as many people as wanted to come, with tickets only costing 20 soles (£5). So we went to the game that afternoon, along with Marieka, Ali and the four Americans from the previous day's breakfast. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the Peruvian Second Division is the lowest standard of football I have ever paid to witness. Bear in mind the gravitas of that statement, given I've watched two League 2 games ending in 0-0, featuring the giants of Barnet, Hereford, York City and Scunthorpe. More entertainment was provided, so to speak, off the field. It began in the first half with the home fans managing to wind up an opposition coach to the extent his reaction got him sent off. Then there were the two away fans popping up in the home section, given they were wearing the team's bright pink shirts I'm not sure how they weren't spotted earlier, but police had to intervene pretty quickly once they were discovered. It is maybe important to note that there is no way Cienciano should be in the second division. Their plight is very comparable to Newcastle United's, in that they possess a 44,000 seater stadium, have a fairly illustrious domestic history, but have been let down by management from the top down. This was knowledge useful to have, as riot police used their shields to protect the home players from fan missiles, as they left the field at the end of the game. This despite them grinding out a 1-1 draw as the 13th place team hosting the league leaders. That night we all went out to a famous pizza place in the town, joined by Barry, and Irish traveller who had met Ali earlier in the trip. That's part one, I'm getting real lazy but it does require brain power I often don't have to recount the details I want to include. This worries me as in little over 2 months time my essay skills we be assessed once more... Part two will be the Machu Picchu adventure. Three should cover my 6 nights in Cusco upon return from MP. There should then be one blog from Mexico and one from Austin. I might also do a round up. I'm determined to have it all finished before I take off again to the US East coast with family on the 6th August. It will be far easier though and quicker on a laptop, than currently on my iPad.

[hollywoodx4]

Sticking with the Schuylers (37)

I’m still not fully back from NYC yet and I’m not sure I’ll ever be-my life is about to become a constant loop of planning trips-but I did manage to find some sense in this part so I’ll celebrate that!

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Tagging: @ellzabethschuyler, @butlinislin

Warnings: This story is pretty heavy on mentions of both physical and emotional abuse.

December 25th

For once, I want to live;

To feel the breath of air,

A sense of anticipation accompanying each adventure

As if every day is new and exciting

The days are new and exciting

For once, I want to live.

I see the sun and she is mine; wrapped in a warmth that stretches out with the call of my name through gloss-dusted lips.

The errant patterns of weather suffocate my sun.

The shadow her brilliance in malicious streams of fog.

The black smoke billows in bouts of days where she sits on borrowed time,

Before everything reverts to the shadows again.

A hurricane.

She lives in the midst of a wild storm, ripping the peace and the bliss and the place we once knew;

Jersey sheets. Borrowed time. The silk of her laughter finer than the red she had torn off in hunger.

A hurricane.

It consumes me as it had my hopes-my dreams-my town-

My mother.

The darkness which consumes her rolls steadily toward me, hot and taunting, reminding.

I could not save my town.

I could not save my mother.

I can not save Eliza.

A hurricane;

Darkness, doubt, depression. She is my sunshine.

I do not want to live.

…

There is a silence unlike any other, one which suffocates and consumes and envelops Alexander in a darkness he hadn’t realized the room had been cast in all along. The running of the shower sends static through his mind-eyes clouding over the same spot he had been staring at with a grainy fuzz and the whirring of technical issues. He can still feel her, if he tries. Closing his eyes she is there beside him, laughing through half-closed eyes and a dream-thick voice. Maybe she is on her side, letting his body frame hers in a comfort their tired bodies need. But then, that wouldn’t be Eliza. She would be on top of him, limbs stretched over limbs and hands pulling at the blankets. She’d kick him a few times after she’d fallen asleep. Maybe, in the midst of a dream, she’d bump the pillows from their bed. Alexander wouldn’t mind. He’s hers. She could give him a black eye in her sleep-induced flailing of limbs and he’d wear it proudly the next day.

               He doesn’t see her go-his eyes are unfocused and blurry, mind devoid of any possibility of a coherent thought.  He’s not sure what time it is when he finally blinks, realizes that the static has gone and the room is an echo of his heartbeat and his shaking hands. Alexander rises from the bed, rubbing his eyes and pulling on a pair of boxers from his drawer. The red of her dress stands out against the darkness cast around the room like a target, an attack. He holds the silk in both hands, hanging it back on the hanger over their closet door. It would have gotten wrinkled. It can’t be wrinkled.

               From his place by the closet door he can’t hear anything. The creaking of the apartment floors, the running of the tap…his ears ache for the sound of her symphonic soprano humming along to whatever song had been stuck in her head all day. He is met with silence. Alexander crosses the apartment, searching. And then, there’s a plate.

               On the counter, one of the square white dinner plates sits full and waiting for him. There’s leftovers wrapped neatly in plastic, alongside the plate of extra treats she had baked for the parties they’d been to. And hidden between them, a note;

Alexander,

               I love you. I’ll be home tomorrow. There are so many things I wish I could say to you, but my head isn’t clear and I just need some space to breathe. You are wonderful. You are so good. I won’t blame you if you aren’t here when I get back. I understand. But it’s not you-it could never be you. I need to put my feelings into words but just know that I have never loved anybody more than I love you.

               I love you,

Eliza

               He holds the paper in his hand. Her handwriting is shaky, and the pen had run out half way through where she had scratched the sides of the paper with it. He isn’t sure what he has just read, can barely decipher the words though the fog that has consumed him. He reaches for his phone and dials, the ringing drawing itself out like the long bow of a violin brushing against its strings.

               “Hello?” Alexander can hear the voice on the other side; groggy, clearing their throat. He opens his mouth to respond but nothing comes out. His voice is broken. Cobwebs barricade the vocalization of his thoughts so instead they appear as ragged breathing. His limbs are numb. His head is spinning.           The voice on the other side repeats itself-clearer, more confused. It articulates his name with rising volume and he chokes out a sound in response. There are no words. Somewhere between the lump in his throat and his ragged breathing he squeaks. The voice intensifies.

               “Alex?” It’s John-he’d dialed the number so surely, so out of his own head, that it didn’t bring about much shock upon deciphering it. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

               “It’s happening again.” A bristling of nerves hits like a water balloon exploding against bare skin. Sharp and pricking, it then fades into a pain that lingers and spreads throughout his entire body. He wants to move. He can’t move. Fear consumes his ability to form a coherent decision. The grasp Alexander has on reality is slipping through his panic-stricken fingers.

               “I need you to come right now.”

               “I’m on my way.” John’s response is immediate, through a voice hardened by concern and a knowledge of past experiences. He asks no questions-he’s smarter than that now, knows the pressure a string of inquiries can send. Instead, he launches into a story about his night. Emily had burnt the desserts. Luis and Sarah were fighting. Amaia had gotten everyone sweatshirts with the hospital logo on them. A typical collision of family drama hits Alex in waves as he stands shock still in the kitchen, letting John’s voice ground his feet on cold hardwood. The singular candle is still burning. He watches the flame flicker, flashes of orange and yellow melded together in a hesitant sort of form. Having lost its intended aesthetic it is only a muted reminder of what had happened just moments before.

               There is only silence when John finally arrives, out of breath with snow-soaked shoes. He pounds on the door, ignoring the time of night and the ritzy neighbors and anything else that doesn’t involve getting to the other side of the door.

               “Let me in, Alex. Come unlock the door and let me in. We can talk-or not, that’s fine too. I mean knowing you there will be talking involved, but,”

               The lock clicks and John pushes the door open with a heavy hand. His eyes search the apartment rapidly until they settle on the sunken frame standing on unsteady feet at the kitchen counter.

               Alexander is dressed only in his boxers, with hair standing in all directions. The muscles in his back press clear against his skin along with the lines of his shoulder blades. He is leaning on the counter, on arms bent at the elbow clearly supporting most of his weight. John calls his name but there is no response, verbal or physical. It is as if he is not even there. He crosses the apartment in two even strides, appearing to Alex as an apparition-a reminder of the light wrapped in the reason of darkness.

               He is both elated and upset upon John’s hand patting his back. His voice is clear, and soft, but it is not silk. He is calm without meditation, half a symphony. There is a thankfulness in his sunken eyes but the smile he attempts to show cracks at the corner of his mouth. It is unfamiliar, and immediately paining.

               “She left.” They’re the only words he can muster. John follows the trail of his eyes to a candle set on the counter, its flame quivering with the deep exhalation of Alex’s breath. He lets the silence linger, treading on the situation with trained trepidation. With a shaking hand Alex reaches for a paper folded haphazardly and discarded on the counter. When it lands in John’s hands Alex leans further into the counter, resting his head on its chilled marble surface.

               John looks over the writing with care; the loop of her letters, the way her words would have been narrated in her smooth and nurturing tone. He understands the situation in pieces, but is unable to fit them together without the clues that lie between the lines. What had happened to cause Eliza to up and go-and on Christmas? Alex is destroyed, deflated. Through the muffled tone of his head against his arm, John just barely makes out the thickness of his voice.

               “What if she never comes back?”

                  She climbs shivering into the cab. It had taken three tries to bring one over to her spot on the curb, and Eliza felt the ends of her dripping hair beginning to freeze from the cold it’s enduring. The driver nods at her as she climbs in, but says nothing as she directs him just a few blocks away. She’s unsure of just how she looks, but she can imagine; her hair is wild and dampened against her head. The thick coating of makeup she’d put on is almost all but washed off, save the tints of red that linger still after the boiling of the shower. Her teeth are chattering. She’d practically run out of the apartment, throwing on Alexander’s sweatshirt and sweatpants. There is comfort in his scent. It doesn’t last long.

She’s sure she’s tipped the driver too much but she is so thankful to see her destination that she no longer cares. Hood up, Eliza’s feet carry her without conscious awareness the eight flights up, to a door she knocks on with weakened power. There is no answer. She pulls her phone from her pocket with shaking hands and dials.          

“Please let me in.”

“Eliza? What time is it? Are you-you’re here?”

“Just-I-just open the door.”

She is a flurry of limbs, colliding with Angelica in a force that has her stumbling, bracing herself on two feet as her younger sister grabs at the fabric of her shirt. Eliza’s body is pressed as physically close to hers as possible, and Angelica responds with a hold tight enough to stabilize her. She shakes. Her knees buckle beneath the sudden release of emotions and the older Schuyler leads her to the couch. It is too much to bear the load of the night standing up.

Angelica is a well-masked flurry of panic; an arm around her sister as her lips are drawn into a carefully crafted line. She searches Eliza immediately, eyes scanning the minimally exposed spaces of skin for clues-for signs of damage. There is not much to see besides the well-worn Columbia hoodie, drowning her body as her hands tuck into sleeves too long for her arms. Only the audible manifestations of grief are clear; Eliza has stopped attempting to conceal herself. The presence of her older sister is a chemical reaction, persisting and pushing her through the beginnings of catharsis.

She does not speak when she has caught her breath, nor when Angelica brings her a glass of water. She downs the liquid to replenish what her tears have taken. There are a few hiccups-catches of breath in her throat that have her older sister’s ears perked and ready to listen.

Angelica is met only with ringing. John emerges with her cellphone in his hand, squinting as his eyes adjust to the light. She takes it with a roll of her eyes, and at first he’s offended by it. Then, she gestures with a flick of her eyes to the couch. Eliza cradles the empty glass in her hand, a finger tracing its rim. Her lower lip quivers but she no longer cries. Her eyes are focused on the glass, even upon John’ entrance-as if he’s not even there. She is wrapped in the realm of her own thoughts.

Concern plows over John as he observes her. In his eight years with Angelica, he had also been blessed with eight years of Eliza. She was immediately accepting of him, moving dousing the nerves Angelica had set aflame with words of reassurance and love. He’d taken to her as an older brother would; flying to her defense by Angelica’s side at each turn of events that high school-that being a senator’s daughter-had brought along. To John Church Eliza is breath of air, a cheer when he’s down. She’s grace, and kindness, and support. Now, however, she is just empty.

He wonders what is going on but does not want to pry; to bother her more than she already seems to be. So he sits, leaving a thin line of space between them, and settles his hands in his lap.

“You had better have a good explanation for this, Hamilton. Because I swear to you if I find out you’re behind this? I’ll wring your fucking neck.” Angelica is practically screaming through the phone, anger audible through sharp diction and words in terse staccato. There’s a long pause-Eliza has lifted at the sound of the familiar last name but her eyes remain trained on the rim of her glass. It is both a hope and a shock of pain, settling her back down once more in a flurry of emotions. Angelica nods, running a hand through her hair as she glances over at her little sister.

“…I never meant to push her…I-I asked, I asked every time, and I just…it was amazing. And then she just…” He chokes back his words, the noise carrying a physical pain which slams into the oldest Schuyler with brute force, squeezing her heart. His words narrate the scene before her, in which Eliza has leaned into John with a prolonged sigh and closed eyes.

“I don’t know what to do…I don’t want…I can’t lose her.”

“Alex…”

“She’s there, right? She’s safe?” It takes a moment for Angelica to answer. The initial inquiry, the knowledge of where Eliza is…there is conflict. One side of herself is so thankful, so at peace with the thickness of Alex’s voice and the way his words slow with the thought of her. But then there is safety. She does not doubt Alex, but herself.  Above everything else, there is Eliza.

“Please.” Alex’s voice cracks, his sentence stopped mid-way by a ragged breath she can feel herself take in a mirror of his own. “I just need to know that she’s alright.”

“She’s safe. She’s here.” Eliza finally glances up from her glass to watch Angelica nod through shining eyes. When the conversation ends, after a few more words of appeasement, her older sister passes the phone from hand to hand, watching her own actions in a moment of rest.

“He says that he loves you.” She shakes her head as her own eyes fill with emotion-with the loss of serenity between two of her favorite people. “-and to take all of the time that you need.”

Eliza nods once, slow and methodical, as the words digest. They linger in her mind, even as Angelica and John lead her to the spare bedroom. Their voices murmur back and forth in a conversation she is unable to understand. Their words are a foreign language to her mind, which is numb and aching and unsure of what has happened. Suddenly she is laying on the futon, wrapped in a blanket with Angelica beside her. Her eyes search Eliza’s, one hand brought to the air-dried tendrils of soft brown which frame her face.

When they were children, Eliza often begged for these moments. There was an unspoken rule between them-all three of them-that came with Angelica’s open bedroom door. There is no trace to a beginning of this pattern, as if it had simply been written within their mismatched DNA. Her bed was a refuge; a place of serenity when the world seemed to close up around them. At three and six it had been thunderstorms; pudgy feet barreling across the hall and diving underneath colorful, ruffled sheets. There they’d lay pressed nose to nose, Angelica reciting make-believe stories as Eliza giggled along.

At twelve, nine, and six, Peggy was in the middle, always the first to sleep. Angelica told Eliza what it was like to be in middle school. She calmed worries with stories both embarrassing and bright, amplifying her own triumph in hopes of granting her sister some courage to face the new school. She had told her not to worry. Eliza never worried with her older sister around.

At seventeen and fourteen, when Peggy had been away at camp, Angelica had given Eliza the sex talk as they shared covers and pillows. She told honest stories; she and John had been in the Hampton’s guest house, their parents at a gala, Eliza with a friend at the pools. She made sure Eliza would be prepared.

“You don’t owe yourself to anybody.” She’d pushed soft strands of brown from her little sister’s face. Even then, the brush of Angelica’s hand against her cheek had been a relief. “You need to love yourself as much as you want somebody to love you.”

At twenty and twenty-three, Eliza and Angelica lay nose to nose in the futon in Angelica’s guest room. The walls are warm with a mocha colored brown, the sheets a soft cotton left made for whenever a sister would come to visit. Angelica runs her fingers through Eliza’s hair; watches as her sister takes shallow, evened breaths.

“He probably hates me.” She whispers the words though the dark, admitting them as a worry she’d rather keep hidden away. But under the covers with her sister the anxieties spill easily through the air between them.

“He doesn’t hate you. Alex could never hate you.”

“I would hate me.”

The words stab Angelica as they come so easily, so hushed and drawn back from her sister’s lips. Eliza’s eyes are red, and puffy. She holds back her tears with the swallow of a lump in her throat. She is hushed by a hand on her cheek; by blankets drawn further to her chin. Eliza sinks into the comfort, body numbed and drained of its last leg of life. Even here, in the serenity, she craves Alexander. Her body pulls to him, imagines that he might be there although she knows he will not come tonight. He respects her too much-she’d asked for this space. She needs this space, and yet his name is the thought on her mind as she relaxes into Angelica’s protective touch.

“I need help…I’m ready for help.” She breathes the admission as her eyes finally shut, succumbed to a sleep induced by exhaustion.

[therealkn]

David’s Resolution - Day 7

Day 7 (January 7, 2019)

Traffic (2000)

“Well, you’ve done a fine job, General. The Office of National Drug Control Policy is in better shape than when you found it.” “I’m not sure I made the slightest difference. I tried. I really did.”

Making a movie about why drugs are bad and why you shouldn’t do them is easy. You don’t even need the length of a movie to do it, unless you really want to go into the nitty gritty about it like Darren Aronofsky. But then you have Traffic, which is about drugs but also not about drugs.

The film is adapted from a late 1980s British miniseries called Traffik and directed by Steven Soderbergh, a filmmaker who got his big break in the late ‘80s with his debut feature sex, lies, and videotape (which will be reviewed soon). He had a busy year in 2000, directing both this film and Erin Brockovich, which were both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Traffic won, in case you’re curious. But enough about Soderbergh, I’ll talk more about him when I get to sex, lies, and videotape. Back to this movie.

Like the miniseries it’s based on, Traffic follows multiple storylines that explore the War on Drugs on various levels and in various ways. The first story we see is what we’ll call the “Javier” story, which focuses on Mexican cop Javier Rodriguez (Benicio del Toro, in the role that earned him Best Supporting Actor and for damn good reason). The film opens with him and his partner Manolo doing a drug bust, only for them to get intercepted by the military, who pull a “we’ll take over from here” and handle the criminals and drugs themselves. Javier, who is a slightly crooked cop but otherwise more moral than most, is soon recruited by General Salazar, the official responsible for the confiscated bust at the beginning of the film, to help him bust the cartel that’s operating in the area, which gives Javier concern about the people he’s working with and what their intentions really are...

The next one we see is the “Wakefield” storyline, which follows Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), an Ohio state judge who is chosen as the new “drug czar” to head the War on Drugs. As he travels the country learning more about the War and the drug trade and how it works on every level, he has his own personal war to deal with: his daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen), an honors student in a good private school, is a habitual drug user who quickly becomes an addict after her boyfriend Seth (Topher Grace, back when we knew him as Eric Forman in That ‘70s Show) introduces her to freebasing. It isn’t long before Caroline goes into a downward spiral and Wakefield does what he can to help his daughter, and his personal struggle will have an effect on his new job and how he’ll carry it out.

And finally, there is the “DEA”/”Ayala” storyline, which follows three central figures: DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzmán), who bust drug dealer Eduardo Ruiz (the late and great Miguel Ferrer), which leads to the arrest of his boss Carl Ayala (Steven Bauer). As Ruiz is set to testify against Carl, Carl’s trophy wife Helena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is placed in a difficult situation. With her financial security and her family’s security at risk - she has a young son and is several months pregnant with another child - she’s desperate to do whatever she can to help her family and her husband, even after she learns from his lawyer (Dennis Quaid) that her husband is a drug lord. And all the while, Montel and Ray are trying to do what they can to incriminate Carl and put him away.

I’ll talk more about these three storylines on their own, but first I’ll talk about the film as a whole. Visually, the film looks amazing, with Soderbergh using distinctive color grading for each story to make them unique and to help tell them apart - washed-out yellows for the Javier storyline, cold blues for the Wakefield storyline, and warmer natural colors for the DEA/Ayala storyline. The idea of using distinct film colors for storytelling actually goes back to the days of silent cinema, where different film colors were used based on setting, mood, etc. to inform the audience of what’s happening.

The cinematography is also remarkable. Soderbergh did all the camerawork himself (his work as DP is credited under the name “Peter Andrews”) and the camerawork is just as striking as the color grading. It gives the film a documentary feel, which helps make it feel more real by giving us the perspective that we’re actually watching real life unfold, not just a scripted story. There are some more “cinematic” moments in the film, like the suspenseful sense of one character being targeted by an assassin, but it doesn’t really take away from the documentary feel and still feels like it fits the overall tone. I also want to give a shout-out to the music by Cliff Martinez. There isn’t much music in the film, and what music it has is ambient and atmospheric, but it fits perfectly with the film.

Now the storylines themselves. ...Actually, I don’t know if I’m the kind of person who should be talking about this movie. This feels like the kind of movie that’s better suited for someone more experienced and knowledgeable about film to talk about. I think I may be in over my head, and I feel this way seven days into the resolution. Fuck. ...I guess I’ll do my best to talk about why I like them in short without this being a bigger wall of text then it is already.

The Javier storyline, to me, feels like it’s the moral core of the story. Javier’s story is about a man who is surrounded by corruption and people trying to profit off of their morality, whether the lack of it by being part of the drug problem, or embracing it by trying to tell the truth and ending up getting killed. In a position where doing the right thing can and will significantly shorten your lifespan, it makes one question what to do. And Benicio del Toro handles this expertly. He earned that Oscar.

The Wakefield storyline is powerful stuff. The whole story is about a person who has to confront the personal effects of drug abuse and how it affects not just the abuser, but those who are close to them. It’s heartbreaking to see an honors student with a great record (a record that was very similar to writer Stephen Gaghan’s own high school record) fall into drug addiction, and the sad part is that this does happen in real life. And this is balanced with Wakefield’s learning more and more about the War on Drugs and simultaneously seeing the futility and necessity of the War. And the ending of this storyline, while kind of happy, is also ambiguous for reasons that will make sense once you see it.

The DEA/Ayala storyline is about desperation. Helena, a pregnant mother whose life and security are threatens, is desperate to do anything to protect her family and help her husband, and in that end becomes part of his lifestyle whether she wants it or not. And Montel and Ray are desperate to protect Ruiz and make sure he’s able to testify against Carl Ayala, especially as others want him dead. The lengths they go for their goals are fascinating to watch, and I won’t say how it all ends.

I highly recommend this movie. Just go see it. I think it’s better to see for yourself why this movie is great and what makes it work. Like I said, I’m not the best at talking about a movie like this and I don’t think I’m the right person to talk about it. So rather than hearing me try to explain it, it’s better to see it for yourself.

Next time: How many sermons will this psychopath preach?