#and from looking online copies are being scalped to hell

[electricea]

not me setting an alarm for tomorrow to order the LRG persona 4 golden game here.

[therealvinelle]

Ok I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I'm just now copying your Norwegian Bella AU into a text translator, and if you don't already have 50 people in your inbox demanding a translation then shame on ALL OF US because this is glorious! And while Google Translate does have a certain charm (it translated "piper hun ut" as "she beeps") I'm curious to see how you'd put it in English.

Troquantary is referring to this post. In which Bella doesn't speak English.

Fun fact, you're the only one who's gone into my inbox to request this. I was so sad, had the translation half-written and everything, but I was too proud to beg. So thank you, Troquantary, for popping this ask.

As for the dictionary fuckups, sounds about right. I made a few typos, too, that made Google Translate suffer even more. (Such as managing to mix up "henne" (her) and "hendene" (hands), resulting in Aro patting Bella instead of clapping his hands. Poor Google.)

Also, there are a few cultural references and language things that would be lost in the translation, in an attempt to keep them I included notes clarifying things.

Some things, like Aro and Carlisle's very old man way of speaking, are easier said than done to translate, you'll have to bear with me there.

Additional notes are that I added a few things to this version, many of them because translating is hard, but a few because while translating I thought "oh you know what would be much funnier-" and then wrote that.

Alright, without further ado:

When Renée left Charlie she did not go to Florida, she went to Oslo. And she went all in to make her daughter a true Norwegian, hiring Norwegian nannies and making sure never to speak English around the child. Since transatlantic flights are expensive, little Bella Swan rarely got to visit her father, and as such she never did learn what should have been her native language.

She quickly forgot what English she did have in favor of Norwegian, with the exception of words like “Yes”, “No”, and “I’m Bella”.

The few trips she took to visit her father were all the more awkward than in canon since she couldn’t play with the Black kids. Let not the blame fall upon Charlie: he took Norwegian classes and speaks conversational Norwegian. He can’t speak to Renée, because her Norwenglish is incomprehensible even to Norwegians, but he can communicate with Bella.

Not that he’s had a lot of chances to do so.

Bella makes it to seventeen years old, she’s in second grade at Handels* and is a major outsider among the preps there, and then Renée marries a handsome skier**. Together they shall travel the continent all winter to participate in as many skiing races as they can, and in the summer they’ll take gigs at Hurtigruta to see the coast.

*“Handels” is the nickname for an Oslo high school infamous for its pupils being rich and beautiful blonds who are going to be CEOs when they grow up.

**Skiing as a sport is huge in Norway

***Hurtigruta is a famous ferry that travels across the Norwegian West coast

Bella, who sucks at skiing and is too young to work at Hurtigruten, takes the hint.

With dread in her stomach and dictionary in hand she goes to her father in America.

Where she doesn’t speak the language.

Faen.

Charlie gives her a car, and I wish this meta was set in the present because I could have joked about electric cars and the automat only driver’s license*, but Twilight is set in 2005 so I can’t. The car part proceeds without drama.

*An increasing number of Norwegian youth take the driver’s license for automatic cars only, and we’re the country in the world with the highest percentage of electric car purchases.

School is worse than in canon, because she is now a thousand times more sensational than if she was merely the new student. She is from another country! All of Forks keels over with excitement.

To make matters even worse, our girl doesn’t understand a word of what people are saying.

She is too awkward to let them know she doesn’t know English. It’d become a thing, and they might think she’s dumb. To be fair, it’s not good that she’s been through primary, secondary, and now a year and a half of high school and still sucks at English.

So she nods, smiles, mumbles “Hi, I’m Bella” to the new faces, and blushes heavily when anybody says anything.

People assume she’s shy. That’s a bit boring, but oh well.

She has her biology class with the redhead hottie she noticed during lunch. She watched him and his family, they were fascinatingly pretty, but she doesn’t know anything more about them. Sure would have been great if she could have asked the tiny girl (was it Jess?) about them.

Biology proceeds as in canon - Edward badly wants to eat the delicious girl, but fortunately doesn’t.

She runs into him in the office when he tries to switch to another biology lesson, but she has no idea what he’s saying so she only has the suspicion that this somehow concerns her. Which is still uncomfortable, but Bella is probably the problem here. The hottie surely can’t be.

He’s missing from school for a week, Bella finds that weird.

He returns, and to her great horror he starts talking to her.

“Hello”, he says.

Bella dies inside. He’s too handsome!

"I'm Edward Cullen," he continues, and ok, she got that. The hottie is called Edward, that’s good to know. She’s not sure she caught that last name, though, Köln?

He says something else, it’s gibberish to Bella even though she’s concentrating, and at the end there he says “Bella Swan”.

She gulps.

"I'm Bella Swan," she confirms and nods. That should be correct. God, she hopes it’s correct.

He smiles a crooked, boyish smile. She’s awed. She didn’t think it was possible to be so beautiful.

He says something else.

Bella didn’t catch it.

She blushes even harder, she hasn’t been more embarrassed in her life. Here he is, the most handsome guy in all the world, and she has nothing to say to him. Literally, they don’t speak the same language.

She should tell him.

It’s one thing to chicken out of telling the town she doesn’t speak English, but there’s something different about Edward Cullen. He deserves the truth.

But...

He’s the most beautiful person she has seen in her life. He is American, too, so the odds of him knowing Norwegian are microscopical. If he finds out she doesn’t understand a word he says he’ll stop talking to her, and selfish as she is she doesn’t want that.

So with a slightly guilty conscience (but not enough to fess up) she contributes to the conversation with enough words and smiles to pull through. "Yes", "No", "Thank you", and "That's nice".

He is surprised by several of these answers, but instead of giving her odd looks and losing interest he grows more invested in the conversation.

Class ends.

The next day the near accident happens, and he saves her. She is stunned - dear god, did he just pick up a whole car? After teleporting across the parking lot..?

Soon she’s in the ER, and more than a little bit stressed about that fact since she knows the Americans have a terrible healthcare system.

She hopes Charlie has an insurance.

An insanely beautiful man walks into the ER, and Bella is shocked. He is just as handsome as Edward and Edward’s lunch friends!

He introduces himself as Carlisle Cullen, and Bella can only assume this is someone’s older brother. Possibly related to the blonde girl.

He smiles at her, says something, and she answers, "I'm Bella Swan."

He frowns.

That must have been the wrong answer, then.

His hands return to investigating her scalp, and to her great surprise he switches to perfect Norwegian, "kjenner De* noe ubehag når jeg holder her?" Do you feel any discomfort when I touch here?

*De is the Norwegian polite pronoun for “you”. Du = thou = the French tu, and De = you = the French vous. These polite pronouns went out of use in the 1980’s, save for when addressing royal persons, and would be considered antiquated in 2005.

He hurries to add, "Norsk lærte jeg i... fjor sommer. Det var et nettkurs." I learned Norwegian… last year. Online class.

"Hvilket da?" Which one? Bella asks, because Charlie needs to hear about this. The doctor has beautiful, if slightly outdated, pronunciation.

The doctor’s smile turns uncertain. She gets the feeling there’s something he doesn’t want to say. "Husker ikke," I don’t remember, sier han etter en litt vel lang pause.

That’s a shame. And weird.

"De hadde hellet med Dem i dag, som ikke ble truffet av den bilen." You were lucky today, not getting hit by that car. he then says, noticeably changing the subject.

"Det var ikke hell, det var Edward," It wasn’t luck, it was Edward, she replies sharply.

The doctor definitely looks uncomfortable.

She continues, "Han krysset skolegården på et blunk, og plukket opp hele bilen. Jeg så det," He crossed the schoolyard in a moment, and picked up the whole car. I saw it,

The doctor laughs. "Om han kunne det hadde nok gymkarakteren hans vært meget bedre. Nei, frøken Swan*, jeg beklager å si at det høres ut som at De er litt omtåket. Det er helt normalt ved hjernerystelse." If he could do that, his PE grade would be a lot better. No, Miss Swan, I’m sorry to say you seem confused. That’s normal with concussions.

*Addressing a young woman as “frøken” is even more outdated than using polite pronouns.

Why does Bella get the feeling he’s lying?

She’s discharged.

We’ll jump ahead to her trip to La Push - that trip uneventful, since Jacob knows she doesn’t speak English. They stick their hands in their pockets and stare at the sea.

The next day she’s shanghaied to Port Angeles, because apparently she said “Yes” at the wrong time when talking to Jessica (Turns out Jess’s name was Jessica!) and accidentally said yes to a day trip to Port Angeles.

Like in canon she wanders away from the others, and as in canon she is nearly gang raped. And again as in canon she is saved at the last moment by Edward.

He buys her dinner, and she can’t believe her own luck- and misfortune. A date with the most handsome guy on the planet (hence the luck) and she can’t say a word to him (hence the misfortune)!

He says things to her, lends her his jacket, and really this is it for Bella, she’s peaked, life can’t get better than this.

(That’s a lie, it would be better if she spoke English.)

He’s so amazing.

She’s gotten pretty good at navigating conversations with him, so she nods and aha’s her way through.

In his car on the way home the tone takes a more serious turn.

He asks her about something, and it’s a serious question, that much she’s gathered. She answers in the confirmative.

He is silent.

Did she say anything wrong?

(Edward, on his end, just asked if she knows what he is. She said yes, so calmly, not even a trace of fear in her.)

A few days later he takes her out on a walk in the woods.

He shows her a meadow in the woods, and when he steps into it he lights up in the sunlight.

Bella is in shock.

She knew there was something different about him, but- holy cow. This guy isn’t human.

Is she dating a god?

She stumbles into the clearing after him, and they spend a day together where he says things, and she can barely hear any of it (nevermind understand it) because she’s so distracted by how pretty he is.

The next day he takes her to a house in the middle of nowhere. She doesn’t want to guess that this can be where he lives. Surely gods don’t live in houses?

He shows her inside the house, and introduces her for Dr. Cullen and a lady with a name she doesn’t catch.

Bit weird that these two are acting like a couple of parents, they’re far too young and divine for that.

Edward shows her around in an old-fashioned office, and she doesn’t know what to make of i when she sees a painting of Carlisle. Edward launches into a long story when he sees her watching it, unfortunately she doesn’t catch any dates or artist names. At one point she heard the word “suicide”, though, and that’s not good.

She doesn’t get much out of the story.

The baseball game doesn’t happen because Bella didn’t pick up on what Edward wanted and didn’t realize she was being invited to a thing. They spend the afternoon watching a movie instead.

The relationship continues, impeded slightly by communication problems, but she’s mostly able to cover those up.

Until her birthday comes around.

She gets a papercut.

Jasper lunges at her. Edward throws her into a glass table, and then everyone is leaving.

Carlisle is kind enough to switch to Norwegian when he’s stitching up her arm, perhaps remembering the last time she was his patient. "Jasper har ikke vært på dietten vår så veldig lenge." Jasper hasn’t been on our diet for very long.

"Diett?"she asks. She’s never seen Edward eat anything. She wasn’t clear on what the Cullens ate, honestly she thought they were above such things. She was thinking maybe photosynthesis. The knowledge that they apparently eat food astounds her, but diets?

"Dyreblod istedenfor menneskeblod," Animal blood in stead of human blood, Carlisle clarifies.

Whachasay?

Carlisle gives a slight smile. “Jaspers liv som vampyr fikk en brutal start." Jasper’s life as a vampire got off to a brutal start.

...

Vampire?!

Bella’s missed something here.

Oh dear lord, oh fy faen, she has missed something.

“Åja”, uh huh, is all she can say, and suddenly she’s very aware of the fact that she’s sitting there with a bleeding arm.

And Carlisle.

Who is a vampire.

Over the course of the following conversation Bella makes a host of discoveries.

Edward has been a vampire this whole time, and he’s a telepathic vampire. Whether Bella should be a vampire too or not has been a matter of hot debate, but due to religious reasons Edward doesn’t want that.

Carlisle also brings up how Edward died of the Spanish flu.

"Jeg var under den oppfatning at Edward fortalte deg bakhistorien min?" I was under the impression Edward told you my back story? Carlisle asks at one point, and Bella just has to ask very nicely if he’d be so kind as to repeat it.

Turns out the guy is nearly four hundred years old.

Jaha.

Jahahaha jaa ha.

That’s… a lot.

She wanders out of the house in shock, and hardly notices Edward’s strange behavior over the next couple of days.

One day he picks her up at school, and takes her behind the house.

That works out.

He’s a vampire, but he never hurt her. He is endlessly beautiful, perhaps easier to love now that she knows he’s not a god. He’s her Edward, and that’s suddenly easier now that she knows.

They can still be together.

But now that she knows this about him, it’s about time he knows something about her as well.

It’s time to finally be honest with him.

So when he opens his mouth, she opens her mouth as well, but she doesn’t get any further than to “Edward-” before he launches into a monologue.

She’ll have to wait until he’s done before saying her piece. It’s a bit embarrassing, but it doesn’t seem like he intends to stop talking anyway.

And what he’s saying seems to be serious, so it’s probably best to let him finish.

Edward concludes his monologue by kissing her forehead. Then he disappears.

Where did he go?

A big unsure, Bella goes back to the house. She’ll just have to wait until he gets back.

She doesn’t know what to think when Charlie returns from work and tells her the Cullens have all left.

Oh, god.

Edward must have found out she doesn’t speak English.

She made a mockery of him.

He has every right to leave.

Knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to live with.

Bella sinks into a depression.

The hallucinations begin, as in canon, though Hallusinward speaks Norwegian. Thank god for small mercies.

The friendship with Jacob (dictionary in hand) blooms, as someone has to help her see those hallucinations.

The cliff diving happens, and Alice shows up. Bella’s not sure what this is about, but she has gotten good enough at English to know that something bad happened, and Alice wants them to do something.

She’s a bit surprised to find herself on a plane to Italy, though.

Alice tells her to “Run to Edward” and ok, she got that, actually.

So she saves Edward.

After that she’s taken into the sewer, which turns out to house dozens of vampires.

Bella, Edward, and Alice are received in some kind of hall, where an unusual vampire has quite a bit to say. She understands some of what he’s saying, at least the part about “la tua cantante”. She knows a bit about Italian, see, so she knows that he’s talking about a song now.

She wishes she knew the context.

At one point he takes her hand, and appears fascinated by it. She wonders if he’s a palmreader. Not very vampirey, but what does she know.

He asks her a question.

"Yes," she says.

Saying yes has gotten her this far, after all.

But when he lights up and claps his hands together, and Edward and Alice stare at her in shock and betrayal, she knows she must have said the wrong thing.

The two are dismissed from the room before Bella can do or say anything, she’s just listening to Edward make a racket outside in the hallway.

Not good.

The unusual vampire brings her further down in his sewer palace to a basement, and she is given comfortable clothes to wear.

This is getting terrifying.

The vampire leans towards her - and she chickens out.

"Jeg snakker ikke engelsk!" she squeaks. "Non habla ingles!" I don’t speak English.

Han stanser, og ser forvirret ut. "Que- Hva behager*?" I beg your pardon? spør han etter et øyeblikk.

*A very formal, and slightly outdated (you can use it, but people will think you’re putting on airs. And they will be right) way of saying “excuse me?”

Sobbing, Bella tells him the whole story, from how she didn’t want to be the weird kid in school to how she’s now somehow in Italy without knowing why nor what she just agreed to.

When she’s done the vampire starts laughing.

"Dette forklarer jo en hel del," This explains quite a bit, ler han. "Men, kjære Bella, jeg er redd det ikke endrer noe." But, my dear Bella, I’m afraid it changes nothing.

He tells her that she has agreed to serve him and his army of undead warriors into eternity.

Well fuck.

"Du skal få slippe det, når du ikke visste hva du samtykket til - men skjebnen din forblir den samme. Loven er loven." You’re released from that promise, as you didn’t know what you agreed to - but your fate remains the same. The law is the law.

After a moment of silence, during which she looks terrified, he hurries to add, "Vi har en lov. Du må bli en av oss." We have a law. You must become one of us.

A law that Bella Swan has to become a vampire?

People are finally speaking Norwegian, and Bella is still lost. And it’s too embarrassing to keep pestering this poor, polite man with questions.

So she nods.

He gives her a glittering smile, and bites her.

When she wakes, Aro offers her an English course. A language course that, naturally, leads to her staying in Volterra. Why not learn a few more languages while we’re at it, dearest Bella?

Some time later Edward breaks into Volterra to save his Rapunzel, only to barely recognize her now that she’s a vampire who says things. Lots of things, she talks all the time now. WHAT DID ARO DO TO HER.

Too mortified to admit that she never spoke English, Bella claims she’s been brainwashed.

Aro is having too much fun to correct her, and the whole sad affair sets off a regrettable flood of rumors.

[batarella]

The Commander - Part 12 (Arkham Knight x Reader)

We’ve reached the point where the events take place in the Arkham Knight video game!!! I found these more difficult since I wanted to stay true to the source material. The timing isn’t perfect but I HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY.

WORDS: 3239 WARNINGS: BATMAN ARKHAM KNIGHT SPOILERS, ARKHAM KNIGHT AUDIO LOGS SPOILERS, VIOLENCE, JASON FLUFF, AND A LIL ASS GRAB

Masterlist

THE COMMANDER - MASTERLIST

-----

The Arkham Knight to Ace Chemicals.

Deathstroke to Stagg Airships.

And Deadshot, the Militia Commander, to the abandoned Killinger’s Department Store. The Arkham Knight Headquarters.

Five trucks and two choppers surround the building. Crates for the weapons were being unloaded, drones being dropped off by the helicopters, some driving off into the tunnels and the rest through the main entrance.

The Commander held a gun to a police officer’s forehead, who was on his knees, his hands behind his head, and was trembling. Five others lined up beside him. They were found in the mall before any of the soldiers got there.

“Call off your reinforcements. Now.”

They looked up at the Commander’s chilling white mask, at the red gun optics where an eye hole was supposed to be. She looked positively terrifying. The police officer gulped, then lowered his hands to pick up his radio.

“What kind of army are you?” the officer beside him asked. The Commander pointed the gun at him. “You be quiet.”

He saw this as a chance. Instead of a radio, the officer quickly pulled out his pistol and fired at the Commander. Everyone else flinched at the gunshot.

The officer dropped his gun, then his whole body fell to the floor. His blood leaked out of the bullet hole right out where his nose was supposed to be, and smoke came out of the second pistol the Commander quickly pulled out before the officer had even moved.

She pointed the two guns at the remaining cops.

“Any of you want to do it?”

The one in the middle swallowed hard, finally thinking it right to pick up his radio.

“Commissioner, this is Officer Chang.”

A ball of sweat poured out when the commander clicked the trigger.

“Call off reinforcements to Killinger’s Department Store.”

He turned the radio off, then threw it to the ground.

“All your weapons. On the ground,” the commander ordered. All of them did as told. “Sergeant. Make sure they don’t escape. Anyone see us?”

“None so far. We’re good to go.”

“Get all the trucks out of here. Make sure no one finds us.”

Cameras. They should be here. Somewhere.

Even with the building abandoned, she could feel some where staring at her.

At the far end, on a street light. Deadshot raised her arm and pulled on the gun on her wrist. The optics on her eye flashed its signature. The camera exploded and the lights flashed red, yellow, and green at the same time.

There was another one. By the building across them. Her optics picked up the movement and she fired at it before it could fully turn at her direction.

The last one could be ignored. It was ten stories up, by a skyscraper. It only barely got a glimpse of the entrance to the shopping mall.

But she wasn’t taking the chance.

From such a distance, Deadshot raised her arm and fired from ten stories down, right at the almost microscopic security camera installed at an office ceiling.

The glass window blew up and there was a flash of light coming from the building, until her optics detected nothing more than just ceiling bulbs.

Done. It was safe.

She watched the officer’s dead body being taken away. He had a family. A daughter like Zoe. A niece like Y/N. They were waiting for him to come home.

The Commander walked over to the entrance. Sentry guns were being placed, her men marched to the elevators and some passed through the tunnels. She pressed the communicator on her ear.

“Knight. We have the base.”

“Batman is in Ace Chemicals. He’s about to go after Crane. Did they get Barbara Gordon?”

She looked over to the final truck unloading by the entrance. A red-haired woman confined to a wheelchair was being wheeled down to the elevators. She was gagged, laying unconscious while she was taken to the undergrounds.

“Arrived just now. What do we do with her?”

“Just keep her in the base. Crane and I will get there as soon as we can.”

“Copy.” The gates were being pulled down and the lights switched off. The Commander walked into the elevator with the captive.

He said Barbara Gordon worked for Batman, that she was a crucial part in his operations, and that he used to know her when he was still working with Batman.

“Keep her alive,” she said, as the elevator pried open and Barbara was wheeled into the underground base, into a secluded room which she thought used to be a large clothing store. Its window was overlooking most of the base, and she could see what went on outside.

How many innocent people has she hurt? How much guilt did she have to push back her whole life?

“Clear everything. This will be the control room for the drones and the communicators. Take Gordon to the back.”

She went with them to the offices, and just then, the generators turned on. They left Barbara in one of the rooms.

“Knight. Are you here?”

“I’ll come up in a few minutes.”

She told Lieutenant Whitman to wait in front of the closed door, walking back outside where the computers were being set up just outside.

Scarecrow walked in, just as her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. He looked at her, head to toe.

“Commander…”

“Crane…” she snarled. She took a seat at the center of the long table and pulled up the camera footage of outside the mall.

No one was outside, and the entrance remained dark. The tunnels were closed, and the Batman was nowhere to be seen. She sees Jason pull up in his motorcycle by the entrance, hiding it behind a dumpster.

“Commander,” she heard her comms buffer while watching the Knight with his hand up to his ear. “I’m at the base.”

“Just walk in to the elevator. What happened at Ace Chemicals?”

“Batman blew the whole place down. But we got what we needed.”

“Good job,” she smirked. “I’m looking at you right now from the control room. I’ve destroyed every other camera and installed new ones from all over the command points and watchtowers going online.”

Jason looked around, finding the camera and looking straight at it.

“Everything looking good?”

“Yes,” she said. “Looking good indeed. That ass looks phenomenal.”

The Knight chuckled under his visor as she watched him walk into the mall. “I’m coming down.”

“You know where to find us.”

She turned her communicators off, then glared at the sergeant looking at her funny. He quickly looked away.

Finally, this was where it all came to be. The bases were all online. On the screen newly set up in front of her, she brought up the live footage from the serpent drones flying above the three islands. Everything was in place.

But one of their bomb mines in Miagani set off an alert.

“A bomb has been hacked, Lieutenant. Send the drones to the coordinates.”

“Yes sir,” her comms spoke into her ear. Tapping onto the controls, she sent a serpent drone to hover above the scene.

And fucking hell, was it something she didn’t expect.

It wasn’t a car. Batman had a fucking tank. Bigger than any of their drones, and so much more than any of them expected.

She sent every drone close to the location to ambush the Batmobile. “Open fire.”

The drones fired their missiles. Rattlers, Diamondbacks, Mambas, and even a Boa, all firing at him. One by one, a drone went offline, and she wanted to rip her hair out from her scalp. “Why did no one tell me about his fucking tank?”

The Batmobile just went on and on, and it fired a 60mm canon right at a Boa, blowing it up after just two shots. She could only watch on, locking onto five different drones and clearing the ambush without so much as a dent. When every drone went offline, the bomb mine hacked, the Commander fell back to her chair.

She suddenly didn’t feel so good.

The Knight came up to the control rooms. He took more time down the elevator than Batman did blowing up all those drones. “Commander.”

“Knight.” She stood up. “Gordon’s in that room.”

He didn’t say anything, and the Commander realized he was looking at her new suit. “Nice job with the HQ.” Jason walked over to the back. “Where’s Crane?”

“He went in there with Barbara.”

“That son of a- Get the hell away from her!” He screamed at Scarecrow just as he swung the door open. Crane shot up, but he took his time.

“Soon, you won't be able to choose who lives or dies from your own doings, Knight.”

“I said get out.”

“Crane,” the Commander said. She walked over and grabbed him by the arm, but Scarecrow shook it off. “Remember what we talked about, Commander…”

He left the room. Commander Y/N looked over to Jason.

“Commander. Can you leave us?”

She looked at him, then at Barbara. Nodding, she left the room, but kept her ear close to the door.

“He’s gone. Did he hurt you?”

“Spare me the good cop, bad cop routine.”

So he cares about her. Fair enough.

He talked about Batman, the same things she’s already known about how he was betrayed, how he kept talking to the Joker hoping it would give him enough time to come rescue him. How he never did.

But then she heard his visor turn up, then it was Jason’s unfiltered voice, screaming at the captive.

The Commander kept at the door.

“Jason, we can fix it.”

“I can fix it! I know now what to do. I take all this pain. All this blackness. And I put it all in a bullet. And I put it right between Bruce’s eyes.”

His voice was breaking as he spoke. She wanted to go after him. But Scarecrow’s boney hand touched her shoulder. She flinched away.

“She’s ready. Be at the undergrounds in fifteen minutes.”

The Commander just watched Crane barge into the door, calling for the Knight to prepare the Cloudburst.

“Someone put a gag on her. Anyone hurts her, they’re a dead man.”

She was the only one nearby. The Commander walked in, took a gag from her pockets and placed it on Barbara’s mouth.

“You’ll be okay,” she whispered to her. Gordon stopped struggling, and a soldier came in bearing a gun.

“Watch over her,” the Knight ordered. At the control center, Scarecrow took a seat. And he brought the camera logged into the Cloudburst up on the screen. “Ten minutes, Knight.”

He nodded at Scarecrow, and the Commander trailed behind him as they headed for the elevators to the undergrounds. The one that lead to a tunnel up to the streets in Founder’s.

The cop’s blood was still probably spilling on the streets. How many people did she hurt by killing him?

Jason pressed the button, and the elevator roared in a twitching buzz.

His silence only pained her. She wanted to hold him tight, but if he wanted that, he would’ve pulled her close himself. Jason inched himself to the corner, his arms shielding his chest. He didn’t want to be bothered.

Nothing has meant more to him than putting an end to Batman’s reign over Gotham.

But what happens then?

What happens to Jason after he’s done what he wanted? When he has Gotham under his feet, when all else has been destroyed?

Y/N watched the walls outside the elevator move up, until suddenly there was a loud crash and the whole thing stopped moving, the lights dimmed out and the noise from the gears came to a halt.

Jason cursed every swear word he knew. “These fucking generators. They’re all over the place.”

“It should be fixed in a few minutes. Don’t worry.” The Commander leaned against the wall. “Are you alright?”

No. He wasn’t. Since they arrived at Gotham the dark cloud over his head just grew darker and stronger, knowing his path to kill the Bat was coming to a close. The Commander stood right beside him and brushed her arm against his larger one.

“Take that thing off. It’s only me.”

Jason pushed the button, then his hand immediately wiped the tears that had been sitting on his cheek. Y/N fell ill, taking off her own mask and pushing her shoulder against Jason’s.

“Talk to me.”

He faced her. “You already know everything.”

“But you’ve never told me yourself. I only had to find out.”

“I’ve told you enough.”

“No,” she said, taking his face. “I don’t think you have.”

He no longer flinched when she did that. Instead, the corners of his mouth curved up, taking her hand and squeezing it. He pulled it away from his face, but kept running his thumb over her fingers.

“I waited for him to come for me. Even after so many months. I never lost hope. But Joker…” he choked. “He just kept beating that hope out of me. He kept me in an abandoned wing at Arkham. No one ever found me. He paid one of the guards to let him in, beat me with a crowbar, tied me to the ceiling, strapped me to a chair, called all his friends to help torture me, did this to my face..”

She laid her head on his shoulder. “I went in there a boy with so much wonder to look at in the world. And when I came out, I was nothing. Emptied out. I only knew anger. I hated everyone around me. And there was nothing I wanted more than to kill him.”

The Commander looked up at him, and he craned his head down so his face was nearer to hers.

“I think I would’ve gone clinically insane without you.”

A kiss to the lips. Already he’d calmed.

“How ‘bout you? How are you holding up?” he asked.

“I’m trying not to think about him. For tonight, at least.”

“You know you can just sit back if you like-“

“I’m fine. I can rest after I take out the Cloudburst.”

He shuffled his arms and took his hand away from hers. “I was meaning to talk to you about that.”

“What about?

“I should be the one to go out there. I want to take him by myself.”

“We talked about this,” she said. “I can blow a tank.”

“And I know you're going to say you’re so much better than me at it.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“With what just happened, with you, your uncle, it’s better if you stay upstairs.”

She just looked annoyed by then. “Jason, I’m taking the Cloudburst.” Jason didn’t answer and kept his head craned down. The Commander scoffed. “You’re not paying me more than a million dollars tonight just to stay behind at the control room.”

“Fine,” he stood in front of her. “Five Cobra drones will be at your escort and I’ll come along in a Serpent when the time comes, or if you need any help. Also, I forgot to give you these.”

He pulled out an earpiece. “This communicator only links to mine. It’s a second one. We have our main, which Batman probably has access to. And this. He wouldn’t be looking for it. Not even Crane knows about it.”

She took it and placed it on her ear. “I’ll be fine.”

“Be careful out there.” His voice was soft.

He wasn’t talking to the Commander. He was talking to Y/N.

Jason slowly held her hips, pulled her close and finally managed a small smile. He kissed her, harder as if saying goodbye. She hugged his neck and leaned in even closer.

At the midst of a city wide apocalypse, she was his only light. And it was true. If not for her, he’d be so engulfed in his own darkness, there’d be no escape, not even if he wanted to climb out of it.

After he kills Batman, he’ll need her more than anything else. He’ll need something to level his ground, to bring out the humanity still left in him.

She knew first hand what it was like killing someone she had a terrible grudge on. It wasn’t the same as killing someone you never knew. It ruins you, drags you to every circle of hell until there’s no where else to go. She had to climb out of that deep pit by herself. And it wasn’t an easy task.

It was partly the reason why she couldn’t bring herself to go to Arkham.

When you thought your life would be a much lighter weight to carry, it only adds to the pain. Jason didn’t need to be told that.

The elevator finally started up, then the lights turned on. He slightly pulled away, leaning his forehead against hers for as long as he could. The Commander held the side of his face and closed her eyes.

“By the way,” he whispered. “I love the new suit.”

His hand grabbed her ass. She jumped up, playfully pushing his arm away. Her laughter was the last thing he heard when the doors pushed open and they pulled away.

The Knight flashed his visor back on. It was there.

She was ready.

The Cloudburst. The beautiful monstrosity that was Scarecrow’s most beloved weapon. The Nimbus Tech was in place right at the front, and it had the much of the toxin, enough to drown a person before they’d even get a glimpse of their fear. The front flashed a dark blue, much like the eyes on the Arkham Knight’s visor, and the gun optics, the Commander couldn’t help but revel in it.

It was the best tank she’ll ever get to man in her life. And she’s been through quite a number.

The gates slowly rolled up, and a soldier stepped out the hatch. It was time. She took one look at Jason, even through the visor.

She wasn’t afraid. She knew she wasn’t going to die tonight.

But she should’ve told him she loved him. Even for the just the slightest chance she might not come back. He deserved to know.

So she had to come back. For him. She still had so much to look forward to. A life outside the militia. A life with Jason. And she had to make sure he’ll be okay. That he wouldn’t have to claw himself out of the darkness, that she’d be there to hold him up. He needed her. Just as much as she needed him.

‘Breathe in. Breathe out.’

She closed her eyes, then climbed up to the hatch.

The gate was fully open, and the five Cobra Drones have been driven out the tunnels. The Commander closed the hatch, settled herself in, and pulled on the lever.

‘Always breathe. Don’t let the world touch your focus, Deadshot.’

Y/N looked onto her scope, still after so many tries. Floyd kneeled down next to her, and brought her hand further out closer to the muzzle. She knew she should have just hit the birds.

At the pull of the trigger, her eyes closed shut. She didn’t want to look. She waited for Floyd’s hand on her shoulder again, or another piece of advice that only did so much to help.

‘Bullseye,’ her uncle said. And she shot up in the air and cried in joy.

It was steak night, tonight. That was what Floyd promised.

-----

THE COMMANDER - MASTERLIST

----

  Taglist: everyartistwas-firstanamateur  @sarcasmismyfirstlove @damned-queen-of-gotham @idkmanicantenglish @wunderstell @birdy-bat-riya @get-loki@everyday-imfangirling @comic-nerd-dc @multifandoms916 @icequeen208@offendedfishnoises @egdolan @xemiefx @arkhamtoddler @elsenthal@mythicbitchx @supremehaunter @ burning-alive  @lucy-roo

[barbika1508]

Support (Kim Taehyung x Reader)

Words: 3,1K

Pairing: Kim Taehyung x Reader

Genre: One-shot / Mentions of smut / Fluff

Authors note: BF/N means Best friends name, also H/BF/N means her best friend name...I know its kinda confusing, my baddd!!!! XD

Reader’s P.O.V.

‘’So, I just spent around 200 dollars.’’ I speak up staring at the screen before me for a moment still not believing I pressed okay on the button, which proceeded the payment. The laptop on my lap remains humming, while the show on the TV goes on. I mean I’ve saved up money for this, took me some time and extra shifts but now as proud as I am and exited I’m still regretting the amount of money that I’ve spent. Looking at my hands that hover over the keyboards I pull them back under my armpits as I scrunch my nose up.

‘’Oh, wow you really did.’’ BF/N says leaning into my side, the side of his head, pressed against my left arm ‘’That is a lot of money.’’ He adds. I feel his gaze on me to which I shift sliding my hands into the pockets of Taehyung’s hoodie that I’m wearing.

‘’Its support?!’’ I ask more than reply, but he’s straightening up nodding his head quickly in agreement, his phone that he has been glued onto for the last half an hour forgotten momentarily. Sitting up he readjust his legs on the coffee table before us. we’re settled in my tiny living room; the plan was to watch a movie but it ended up falling apart he started to text with his girlfriend.

‘’Like…’’ he starts and leans into me again but this time his head over my shoulder ‘’Me.’’ he finishes and raises his phone right in front of my face.

‘’Bro nice.’’ I state impressed as I see his purchase of Wings on the screen ‘’Only wings?’’

‘’Most beautiful moment in my life, both versions. Sick albums. That are not really albums…’’ he trails off lowering his phone as I glance at the screen of my laptop again, as it finally stops to process and confirms my purchase.

‘’Mini albums.’’ I add both of us nodding.

‘’Yes whatever.’’ he waves his hand and raises another finger ‘’I got War of Hormone, You never walk alone, but I gotta wait for my next paycheck for Her. seriously your boyfriend is going to run me dry.’’ He complains making me chuckle.

‘’Yes, well same.’’ I reply checking the arrival date.

‘’Doesn’t he like…give you they’re stuff though?’’ he asks making me pause and look at his curious expression.

‘’I…I never asked.’’ I reply honestly my gaze trailing off as he straightens up.

‘’How the hell didn’t you ask? Dude I mean you could get the albums signed!!!’’ he exclaims ‘’And then get me they’re signatures and stuff!!’’ he rambles on making me smirk as I look at him.

‘’Oh, I see how it is.’’

‘’Hey!!!’’ he snaps ‘’Its not what it looks like!’’ he warns, pointing his finger up trying to make his point by being dramatic.

‘’Oh sure, sureeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.’’ I reply sarcastically and shout as he’s suddenly hitting me with a pillow ‘’Heyy!!!’’ I shout.

‘’I’m not lying!’’ he keeps hitting me, while I try to put my laptop away.

‘’Stop hitting me!’’ I end up laughing instead.

‘’Stop calling me a liar!’’

‘’Well I ain’t calling you a tr…’’

‘’I’m so pure and honest!’’ he interrupts me in a bear hug just as I manage to place the laptop onto the coffee table. He presses himself over my back and as I’m half leaning forward, his surprise jump makes me double down onto the ground both of us crashing.

‘’Oh sure.’’ I groan as he half lies on me.

‘’Tell me I’m honest!’’ he warns caging me in.

‘’No.’’

‘’Say it! Say it out loud!’’ but by this point we’re both laughing instead ‘’C’mon Y/N! you’re getting me they’re autographs!’’

‘’Who says that?!’’ I tease back as he finally sits up and helps me up as well.

‘’You as my best friend are supposed to be by my side, support me in all my nonsense, and get me my autographs.’’ He ends up blinking his eyes as if he’s going to appeal to me like this. snorting, I pushing myself into the couch again, still not over the fall.

‘’Sure, sure. I’ll do my best.’’

‘’I know. I’m the best.’’ He cheers standing up.

‘’I’m the one getting the autographs.’’

‘’You’re welcome!’’ he cheers waling into the kitchen.

‘’You didn’t do anything!!!!!’’ I shout after him grinning.

‘’I’m the best yes, I know!!!’’

‘’Jerk!!!!’’

*A month later*

Taehyung P.O.V.

‘’Jagi?’’ I call out puzzled.

‘’Hm?’’ she hums back not lifting her eyes from her laptop, her fingers remain working over the keys of the keyboards typing away.

‘’This is new.’’ I point out now looking at her ‘’Where did you get these from?’’

After a moment, she looks up at me and at the CD’s I’m pointing at. Our CD’s to be exact. The small space on her table she had free and meant for only important things she needs, is now filled with all of our CD’s we’ve ever made. Stacked in perfect order. There’s two cartoon figurines holding them on each side. Namjoon got them for her, and they fit on the empty and minimalistic looking table. She has a simple basic blue lamp, a black pencil case, stack of notebooks in the corner, and usually her laptop is on the center of the table. But seeing the CDs warms my heart. Her desk is the only thing organized in her room and so bare, she’s usually very colorful with things like I am.

‘’Oh those…bought them like some time ago.’’ She says looking back down at the laptop while I blink confused for a moment tilting my head to the side as I stare at her.

‘’Bought? Where?’’ I go on, approaching the bed now, meanwhile I unzip the jacket I’m wearing. Reaching the end of the bed I slide it off, to which she now looks up her eyes momentarily freezing over my chest before she looks at me. I bite away a smile as she hums high pitched and bites her lower lip. I’m wearing the Ramones shirt she got for me. I noticed her eyeing me, one day when I wore another bands shirt, and jeans with sneakers. I think I have a hunch that these types of clothes on me gets her…excited. So, I wanted to test the theory.

‘’Umm the big hit store online.’’ She says her voice breathy as she speaks before she clears her throat and half glares at me ‘’I wanted to have physical copies for road trips.’’ She adds on, as we stare at each other and I pretend to have struggles with pulling my phone from my pocket. Her eyes follow the movement when I tug the shirt slightly up to reveal my stomach for a moment.

‘’You could have just asked for those! We have them at the company plus you’d get them personally signed by all of us, aish jagiiiiii…’’ I sigh crawling onto the bed, and over to her. Her eyes don’t leave mine even for a second, except for a moment lingering on my body before they snap up again. I drop down next to her, burying my face into the sheets, one arm slung around her waist, the other sprawled over the bed.

‘’Its fine. You can buy me food to repay the money. Which I spent with no trouble at all…’’ she goes on making me chuckle as I look at her and watch as she closes the laptop turning away placing it onto the night table. I take the chance to crawl between her legs, and lie my head onto her stomach as I place my arms at her sides, and happily settle.

‘’Throwing away money, unnecessarily…’’ I grumble half-heartedly, as she chuckles. I feel her fingers run through my hair, making me groan in delight out loud, as she continues with her ministrations soon with both hands, her nails slightly scraping against scalp. And it’s an amazing feeling which sends shivers to run through my body.

‘’It’s not unnecessary because it’s you.’’ She replies making my blood boil, and heart sky rocket. Because that’s one of the sweetest things anyone has ever said it to me like that. So, I raise my head up, resting my chin on her stomach only touching it as I stare up at her. She looks amazing as ever, with messy hair, bare face a genuine smile meant for me. Despite all the cuteness blood starts to run down south because of the view before me.

I’ve never had a girl giving me a look that she’s giving me right now; I mean the fans gave me all sorts of loving looks of course, but I know 100% that the girl right here, means it is genuinely. Her hand lowers down, her fingers gently brush past my cheek, until she runs her fingers through the front of my hair, brushing it to the side, before it slides to the back of my skull. She has a small fond smile on, her eyes trailing from my hair, down to my lips and back to my eyes. And I can’t help but to just stare at her, wordlessly trying to talk myself into doing something.

Damn she is so beautiful. I’ve never imagined myself falling for a foreigner. A girl so un-Korean. She doesn’t resemble anyone that I have ever liked. It surprised…I surprised myself with it. How quickly it took me to realize the fact that I like her. Her confusion at simple things we were taught since birth, some words she still to this day messes up because Korean is only her third language. But it’s still impressive enough that she learned it.

And there is the fact that she doesn’t resemble any girl from here. From the way her eyes are shaped, her face, her natural hair she doesn’t bother to ruin or even the fact that she doesn’t bother with reaching any kinds of beauty standards because she is content with the way she is. Of course, she complains about losing weight, like we all do but to me she is perfect the way she is. I ignore the slight shudder and things happening in my lower region by the mere thought of her body.

I growl to myself and raise up carefully lifting my body above hers as I hold myself up and crawl higher and higher. I notice her smile falters slightly, but another one replaces it. A mischievous one, as her hands fall down from my hair, but quickly wrap themselves around my neck when I’m hovering close to her. I also notice her legs falling open, wider.

Without any words, she’s the one sliding down and pulling me into a kiss. Which I eagerly return back. I’m still rather inexperienced in this area, but I know enough basics. Which only excites me even more when she lets out a sweet moan that makes more blood rush from my head, leaving me with a blank mind.

I feel her tongue slide over my lower, lip and for a moment I don’t know what to do, so I just let her take control. She slides her tongue into my mouth, the battle for dominance beginning. Her legs wrap around my lower back, and I’m now lying down pressing my crotch into hers creating some bit of friction. But it’s nowhere near enough.

She’s the one breaking the kiss, and grins up at me as I stare down at her breathless. She giggles adorably making me smile but my eyes trail down the expanse over her exposed neck. Her hand is then suddenly under my chin, and she tugs my head upwards making me look at her lips for a second before I look her in the eyes.

‘’Not happening.’’ She whispers leaning up to kiss me again. But in the moment of confusion I’m suddenly being flipped over. I let out a shout, my back hitting the bed. I blink up at the girl that’s giggling adorably and settles herself on my crotch making me groan, as she rubs me in the right way, yet she’s shuffling upwards instead making me whine at the loss of friction.

‘’So, eager.’’ She coos affectionately and leans over, holding herself up at too much of a distance.

‘’Stop teasing jagi.’’ I pout making her chuckle as she drops down onto her elbows, her hair surrounding her face, and tickles even me to which she chuckles and pushes it away, it briefly staying to the side.

‘’I’m not, you started this.’’ She replies amused as I raise my hands up to rest them on her hips ‘’You know, I love the fact that you took the initiative…’’ she grins widely as I blush bright pink, and look away embarrassed now that she’s vocalizing it ‘’Don’t be shy now…’’ she breaths and I feel her nose and lips trail faintly over and up my neck which makes me whimper quietly as I grip onto her hips tighter. It only makes her giggle again, so I turn to her, our faces only inches from each other ‘’We can’t do this now though.’’ She states grinning widely, one hand coming up to cup my cheek while she rubs her nose against my own.

‘’Why not? You don’t want me?!!’’ I furrow my brows fear replacing every emotion. Rejection, I’m still ready and completely terrified of it. She kisses me hard suddenly, catching me completely off guard. Enough to make me forget what’s my name in the moment. We haven’t shared a kiss like this yet.

‘’Does that answer your question?’’ she says with a low tone, and I bite my lower lip when she slides her crotch over my own, rotating her hips as she rubs into me making me let out a shaky breath.

‘’Then why not?’’ I ask letting go of her to cup her cheeks as she raises up and I eagerly immediately follow after her.

‘’I um…’’ she starts her hands cupping my own as she lowers them down, but she doesn’t back away when I interlace our fingers together ‘’My first time was with my first ever serious boyfriend…’’ She starts to which I look at her intently ‘’It was nice he took care of me.’’ a blush starts to raise on her cheeks ‘’So I kinda um…’’ she looks down between us to which I now smile at how adorable she is when she’s shy ‘’I want to make it good for you too.’’ She intakes a breath and looks up at me determined. I look at her surprised, at the confession and the hesitance.

‘’Oh jagi…’’ I whisper leaning up and kiss her again. She moans silently into the kiss, as I gather courage to slip my hands out of hers and to her ass this time, as I press my crotch into her making her groan. Breaking the kiss, she rests her forehead against my own. So, I just stare at her parted lips ‘’You’re making it good for me all the time…you’re so good for me…I love you so much…’’ I admit my tone low, which makes her shiver, but she reconnects our lips together once more, this time eagerly.

‘’I NEED HELP!!’’ the door slams open, crashing into the wall. I jump at that, glancing past the girl in my arms, my arms wrapping around her in a protective manner. There’s her BF/F rushing across the room, his gaze fixated down at his iPad. I turn to Y/N that has her eyes closed, and she looks pissed of already. I notice her heavy breathing. I glance at the man, that lets himself fall right next to us, onto his stomach eyes still on the device.

‘’Are you, serious right now?’’ she asks in English. She’s glaring at him and if looks could kill…

‘’Yeah, I’m stuck this is important. How do you do that, that thing you do…the sick one…’’ he goes on turning his iPad towards us the screen showing a game that he’s been playing his character is near death. Meanwhile he stares at her with a completely neutral expression. I awkwardly shift, my boner still painfully present but uncomfortably, going down. Painfully too.

I look between the two, as my girlfriend looks like she’s ready to kill her BF/F who’s staying to my unfortune with her for a month more. And in her shoes, I would be the same; I would actually kill whoever would chockablock us like this.

Wordlessly she reaches down, her hand holding onto my shoulder while with her right hand, she types in a code which has her best friend nodding ‘’Now can you leave?’’ she asks leaning half onto me, while H/BF/N snorts the device playing sounds of victory while explosions are going off over the screen.

‘’You drunk?’’ he asks and sits up glancing around before he looks at her ‘’We have work to do!’’ he goes on making her groan and slump against me to which I smirk, ignoring the man that gets up but doesn’t give a hint of leaving. I run my hands up over her back soothingly.

‘’Don’t you see where in the middle of something?’’ she exclaims, while he walks back to us, holding her phone in hand.

‘’Eh, you’ll have plenty time later. We need to win this round and I can’t do it on my own!!!’’ He smiles at us and settles against the headboard getting her laptop, while I turn to her curiously as she pouts once she turns her attention onto me. She looks adorable.

‘’We’re not getting rid of him.’’ She switches to Korean ‘’Your room isn’t free I’m guessing.’’

At that I chuckle ‘’Who’s the impatient one now?’’ I tease her as she leans her forehead against my own making me grin widely.

‘’I’m not…’’ she grumbles a small smile finally coming to her lips ‘’I just want to take care of you…’’ she whispers moving her hips a tiny bit, which makes me shut my mouth tightly. She has the audacity to giggle at me.

‘’Please don’t.’’ H/BF/N states next to us and turns to her with a glare.

‘’You’re the one interrupting us!’’ she explodes.

‘’I killed the mood, the mood is killed!’’ he goes on.

‘’How do you know that…’’ and I’m just left there watching them speechless as they start to argue. So, I accept that tonight won’t be my night. But at least I got something confirmed; dressing in a style she likes definitely will turn her on. And that she’s the sweetest human being ever. And that I’m so fucking madly in love with her.

Copyright 2017© by barbika1508. All rights reserved.

[moonlitmoth]

Oh hey look it’s my answers to a survey no one asked for

Are you a morning person? Hell no. I’m demon spawn in the morning. 

Have you ever been to Target? I love Target

Do you like iced tea?

Yes

When is the next time you’ll be at work? Tomorrow’s my day off, then I’m working Thursday morning.

Do you have a savings account? Yes

Have you ever been to Disney World? If so, how many times have you been? No

Are you good at wrapping gifts for others? Yes and I taught all my friends how to back in middle school. I joke that I’m goth Martha Stewart, but it’s true. 

Do you enjoy big holiday dinners? In theory. I hate the majority of my family so I’ve always hated and dreaded the holidays. Someday I hope I have a nice family of my own so I can actually enjoy the holidays. 

Is your vision good? 20/20

Is your present hair color natural? Sort of. I have an ombre balayage so the stylist matched my roots so well that you can’t tell. The rest is bleach. Naturally dirty blonde. 

What was the last thing you ordered online? Special anti-itch shampoo for my dogs with seasonal allergies. Very exciting.

Have you ever worn color contacts? No

Do you follow a certain religion? Raised Catholic. I follow a blend of Druidry and Norse paganism.

Do you have any family members who live out of town? Out of town and out of state. Most of my dad’s family is in Illinois and most of my moms are in Texas. 

Do you consider yourself short? Yes

What room are you in? Mine

Do you listen to any country music? I lived with my Texan grandparents as a kid so there was always country music playing (mostly from the 70′s). I have to be in the mood to seek it out specifically, but I don’t mind it if it’s playing. I listen to some though. I like Margot Price, Nikki Lane, 16 Horsepower/Wovenhand in particular. I like Southern Gothic-type country music. 

Do you ever watch Lifetime? I have in the past, but the acting is awful

Would you ever consider having children in the future? I know I want kids

Have you ever lived on a farm? No, but the area I live in used to be fairly agricultural before gentrification

Do both of your parents have jobs? Just my dad

Ever been in a car accident? My mom got rear-ended picking me up from school when I was younger. 

Have you ever tried to walk on a moving vehicle and fallen over?: What? No

What is your favorite kind of bread? Is there any of that in your house?: I’m not a huge bread person, but I love sourdough. Don’t have any at the moment. 

Do you own any equipment to make cocktails, like jiggers or shakers?: I have them in my house, but they’re not mine and I’ve never used them. I think the only cocktail I’ve ever made myself are Dirty Shirleys and you don’t need anything special for those. 

How many times have you seriously injured yourself?: Once and it wasn’t too serious. I cracked my head open as a kid by falling backward onto a glass coffee table and had to get staples in my scalp. 

When was the last time you were a passenger in a car and sat in the back?: A week ago

Did you attend Sunday School as a child?: Not really. When we’d go to mass, halfway through the priest would call all the kids out of the audience and we’d all go to a smaller classroom and have a little Sunday school lesson from the Bible, but it wasn’t anything really official. 

What is the longest your hair has ever been?: I’ve almost always kept it very long. It’s currently past my waist. It’s been down to my butt for several years. It’s probably way too much hair on me since I’m short anyway. But I feel really powerful with long hair.  What about the shortest? (not including being a toddler or baby): I had a bob as a kid. For some years in high school, it was just past my boobs. 

Have you ever smoked a cigarette?: No

Are/were you in the school band, and if so, what instrument did you play?: No

Who does the grocery shopping in your household?: Me

What is the best thing you’ve ever bought at a thrift shop?: I was Cindi Lauper for Halloween in 8th grade and I found a perfect match for the one from the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun video. I also bought this tartan skirt in high school that I used to wear all the time. 

Would you dye your hair blue for $10,000?: I’d dye it for nothing, but I’d prefer pink

Have you ever ordered an unusual drink at a bar?:

Not really, just fairly typical cocktails. 

What is your favorite thing about summer?:

Flowers

When was the last time you went to your local library?: I go about every other Friday. I’m on a first name basis with all the librarians at my branch and they have my stuff ready for me at the front desk when I come in to pick up my holds. 

Do you have any friends who work in retail?: Yes

Can you do a proper cartwheel?: Not anymore

Have you ever been pulled aside by security at the airport?: No

Are you a fast-thinker or a slow-thinker?:

Both

What is your favorite card game and when was the last time you played it?:

I’ve never been much of a card player. Just kid games like slapjack and I haven’t played since I was 8.

Would you consider yourself to be good at spelling and grammar?: I’m not great, but I’m alright. My writing is much more relaxed when I’m doing it casually. It’s the internet, I’m not going to write the same way in my free time as I do for academic/professional things, but I try. 

Who was the last person you cuddled with?: HAHAHAHAHAHA

Have you ever spoken or performed on stage in front of a large audience?:

I read some of my poetry aloud in a talent show in middle school. I was in choir for a few years in elementary and middle school. A few dance performances.

What is your favorite seasonal candy? (only available at certain times): It’s not that they’re not available during the rest of the year, but I only eat lacy cookies around Christmas. I only eat jelly beans around Easter. 

Are there any television shows you own in entirety on DVD or VHS?: No

How far away from your house is the nearest gas station?: 1 Block

Do you know anyone who is fluent in a second tongue?: Most of my friends are bilingual

What is the scariest movie you’ve ever seen and who did you watch it with?: It's not that it really scared me when I was watching it, like I wasn’t screaming or anything, but for whatever reason, Zodiac fucked me up. I had nightmares and trouble sleeping for an entire summer. I don’t really even know why. Just the thought of how they never caught him, I guess?

When was the last time you had a bubble bath?:

Today. Used some Lush rose bubble bar thing

Have you ever been pressured into doing drugs? Did you say yes or no?:

Not seriously. My friends never pressured me. The only pressure I’ve ever gotten has been from family, actually. I hardly drink and I’ve never done any drugs at all (addiction is rampant on both sides of my family so I just never had any interest). My dad got punched in the face by one of his brothers once because he refused to drink moonshine with him at a funeral (surprise, we’re super white trash). And I had an aunt make fun of me at dinner once because I was the only adult at the table not drinking. She just had another baby who was born addicted to drugs and is going back to rehab for about the 10th time so...yeah, I’ll stick with my sprite thanks.

I copied these from someone else’s post, so go ahead and do the same!

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Why I’m Afraid

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.” Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, Harpers, 1964.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings” and “consider the end.” But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn’t, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.“ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Reason #1: Because I’m a White Liberal Coastal Elite Unaccustomed to Losing

We joked the race would be called for Clinton by the time our election-watch party started at 6:30. Which was fine, because who wanted to watch Wolf Blitzer stall for five hours while vote tallies streamed in? A gleeful gmail thread counted down to the party. Who was bringing the kleenex? There would be tears of joy to mop up. We wondered if Clinton would find a maze on the inside of Trump’s head when she scalped him. A Trump piñata was going to be on hand.

We gathered at a friend’s Echo Park home, “I Voted” stickers slapped over our hearts, half-surprised the election wasn’t yet in hand. Trump and Clinton were still tracking even in Florida, but needless to say that would change when the urban areas started reporting. 

We were graduates of good universities, many of us working in or around Hollywood, who yes, read The New Yorker, and had been listening to Keepin’ it 1600 and joked about Donald Drumpf and told everyone they had to see Moonlight because it’s just incredible. We wanted more diversity at the Oscars and used the right pronouns when we talked about transgender people, and talked about firewall states and paths to 270 electoral votes and how as soon as Clinton won Florida and North Carolina, it would be over. 

We flipped between CNN and MSNBC, watching stables of pundits on expensive sets dance around touch screens as they tried to divine the arcana of obscure suburbs. Trump was winning in counties Obama had won in 2012. The pundits scratched their heads– the polls were getting some things unnervingly wrong. Every so often they’d give a projection, a picture of Trump appearing on the screen with his smug smile, a check mark under his name. The map kept getting more red, Trump’s electoral tally creeping towards 270. We looked at each other– what the hell was happening? We poured more wine as we realized Clinton wasn’t going to win Florida, or North Carolina, or Ohio, or Iowa. Even New Hampshire seemed to be in doubt. I pulled up pathto270.com on my phone and did the math... Wait a minute: if Clinton didn’t win Michigan, she was finished. We broke out a moments-away-from-being-legal pre-roll to take the edge off.

And then Wisconsin started to turn red. And then so too did Pennsylvania. Suddenly it was Clinton who needed to surge ahead in five different states. We changed the channel to Fox News because we suspected that MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki wasn’t being entirely upfront with us. Sure enough, they had already called Michigan for Trump. "It’s over, isn’t it,” someone said despondently.

Those fucking deplorables, in their fucking baskets. Did they realize what they had just done to our country? 

We looked at the Trump piñata in the corner. We were too devastated to go near it, or acknowledge how wrong we had been. I don’t think a piñata’s ever had the last laugh at a party– but it was that kind of night.  

Reason #2: Because I’m Sheltered from Injustice and feel Entitled to Happy Endings

All around me, in communities real and online, in group-texts with friends and conversations with strangers, there’s an unquantifiable sadness. At a hip Silver Lake coffee shop the day after the election, baristas had become de facto grief counselors, each customer arriving at the cash register with a sorrowful sigh.

“How are you?” 

“Oh... you know.”

Sigh. “Yeah.”

I was in Los Angeles on 9/11. The mood on November 9th, 2016 was bleaker. 

Losing elections is one of the despairs of living in a democracy. Every few years you’re liable to feel like your country has been wrested away from you, and that you’re powerless to stop it. But Trump’s victory left us feeling far more bereft than if McCain had won in 2008 or Romney had won 2012. 

Part of it is the dissonance between where we thought our country was and where we’ve found it. We had our phones out, ready to record the moment when we burst through the glass ceiling into an era of a more tolerant, cosmopolitan, liberal, inclusive America. After 43 white male presidents, we’d have an African American and now, a woman. John Oliver had joked during the campaign that if Democracy was a computer game and Clinton was completing women’s 100 year-quest to get the oval office, Donald Trump made for a fitting final boss. We could endure his white nationalist chauvinist worldview and categorical unfitness to be President when it seemed like his campaign was a gross-out Farelly Brothers comedy and his defeat was an afterthought. 

We had believed in a myth of the teleology of liberal progressivism and placed faith in the ultimate goodness of “the American voter.” Clinton’s victory would be the triumph of forward progress over restoration, togetherness over division, high roads over low ones, love over hate. 

So it’s no surprise we were crushed. When a Republican beats a Democrat, that’s politics. When it seems like the forces of evil have triumphed over the forces of good, that can feel like tragedy. Especially to people not used to the world treating them with indifference. Perhaps we’d been standing upside down the past eighteen months– the glass ceiling we thought we’d been looking up at was actually a floor, and we’d just fallen down through it. 

But there’s also something more sinister in the air. A cosmic foreboding. A greater trauma has taken place, something menacing and chilling that makes you think “something’s different this time.” My body is tense, an epigenetic voice that’s seen demagogues and persecution in another life, warning me to be on high alert because somehow, I know how this one ends. It was only a hundred years ago that my grandfather bribed a boarder guard and dressed like a girl to flee pogroms in the Soviet Union.

Reason #3: Because I’m Being Reactive and Underestimating America

Cooler heads will cite America’s resilience: “We’ll survive because we always do.” 

We’ve had bad presidents. It hasn’t meant the end of the republic. We’ve emerged from wars, economic downturns, and attacks on our freedom. We’ve seen demagogues, and rebuffed them. If a president’s terrible, he won’t get reelected. Everything’s cyclical. The system can be slow and ugly, but it reacts and corrects. 

This is by no means the first time a party has controlled all three branches of government. Republicans did it in 2000. They proceeded to lose Congress in the 2002 midterms, and narrowly lost their senate majority in 2006. They may have charged into a few ill-advised wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people and ballooned the deficit and accelerated global warming and brought moral shame upon us with secret torture prisons and warrantless wiretapping and aggravated wealth inequality with tax cuts for the rich and the deregulation of banks and fostered conditions for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression along the way, but that whole mess brought us Obama, and the republic survived. 

And when Democrats took the White House and a majority in the house and senate in 2008? Republicans curled up in an obstructionist ball for two years, and took back congress in the 2010 midterms. It is the greatest gift the founding fathers gave us– a system that errs towards gridlock, which has protected us against the forces of tyranny for some 240 years. 

The Cooler Heads will cite reasons why this will be the case for Trump. They cite the fact that Trump’s Republican coalition is unwieldy at best. That Trump isn’t even really a Republican– his campaign was against Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment as much as it was against the Democrats. Once the Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy, appoint a few conservative judges to the courts, roll back Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the Clean Energy Act, Trump’s coalition is going to start to fracture. 

Trump didn’t win the election because he broadened the Republican coalition and attracted new voters to the Republican party– he won because voter turnout was down. Trump had a million more votes than Romney in the states he won that Romney lost– Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (with Wisconsin virtually the same), but total voter turnout was lower than it was in 2012 in all of these states (except for Florida, where voter turnout was up 8% from 2012 and Trump outperformed Romney by 11%). Longterm demographic trends still favor the Democrat’s coalition, and if Trump governs as poorly as we fear, democratic voters will be ignited to turn out for the midterm elections in 2018 and to take Trump down in 2020.

The Cooler Heads will also note there are mechanisms for the minority party to obstruct the governing one from getting things done. The Republicans don’t have the 60 votes they would need to force things through the senate. Democrats will copy the Republican playbook from the past eight years and at the very least, they’ll manage to stop Trump from doing anything that puts the country in existential danger. 

As for Trump’s campaign of intolerance and the wave of white nationalism he rode into office, cooler heads will argue that while he may hold views that are racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic, he’s more empty vessel than ideologue. His rhetoric during the campaign was designed to make the election about identity. But it was a cynical marketing strategy, not an ideology. 

The Cooler Heads might even pontificate that a Trump presidency might not be all bad. I think they’re wrong, and getting there requires a cocktail of denial and privilege, but they might reason that while Trump’s a demagogue and a narcissist with designs to use the presidency to enrich himself and his family, perhaps he’ll have a business man’s savvy about running the government. Maybe he’ll pass a big infrastructure bill that doubles as a stimulus, with Democrats ensuring its inclusive and a chastened media monitoring for corruption and graft. He’ll promulgate business-friendly policies that enrich banks and corporations and increase wealth inequality, but the American economy hums as high corporate profits propel the stock market upwards.   

Mike Pence and Paul Ryan try to push through a radical Republican agenda, but run into gridlock. They don’t have the 60 votes they need repeal Dodd-Frank, they repeal Obamacare through budget reconciliation but delay when the repeal goes into effect because no one can figure out how to replace it, as Republican voters realize through a haze of misinformation that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing, that repealing it would mean no longer being able to afford their cancer treatment, and that everything they don’t like about Obamacare was the result of Republican obstructionism and sabotage. Republican lawmakers stop short of Trump’s craziest proposals, which do indeed prove politically unworkable.  If Silicon Valley keeps innovating and a policy of isolationism keeps America out of a clash between Europe and the Middle East, Trump could even end up being remembered as a middling President, a tier above George W. Bush and Millard Fillmore.

Reason #4: Because the Real Best Case Scenario is Actually Terrible

Even if Trump was a normal politician, his platform would be dangerous. His incompetency and illiteracy and the fact that he processes the world like a five-year old child is enough to spell disaster.

Trump’s stance on climate change alone could be, by definition, apocalyptic. If he walks away from the Paris Accord, it could be a decade before the world cooperates on climate change again. We could look back on his presidency as the moment when we accelerated environmental degradation and doomed the planet. 

Trump’s complete ignorance about diplomacy and geopolitics could also rapidly throw the world into turmoil. He’s exhibited minimal understanding of how the world works or America’s place in it. He’s volatile, reactive and vengeful in a fragile world that manages order only through predictability and diplomacy. Our allies are frightened they can no longer rely on American support, and if we drive them away, they’ll find protection elsewhere. 

Trump’s belief in protectionism will cut economic ties that foster cooperation and American soft power. Trump’s plans to walk away from the TPP will cripple American influence in Asia Pacific, and cede influence in the region to China, and his plans to declare China a currency manipulator and use Taiwan as a bargaining chip could escalate tensions with China and make Sino-US relations openly hostile. 

Trump and the alt-right’s categorical condemnation of Islam and hardline approach to fighting terrorism, including a Muslim immigration ban, the astonishingly unconstitutional Muslim registry, the resumption of torture and black sites, and even the semantic obsession with saying “radical Islamic terrorism,” threaten to alienate moderate Muslims and foster more extremism, while compromising American values and diminishing our standing around the world. Trump could be the buffoon who brings the clash of civilizations to fruition.

Trump’s volatile temperament is at this point well-documented. He’s reactive and vindictive, prone to late-night Twitter rants that spew invective without any basis in fact. What happens when he takes aim at a foreign leader? What happens when he decides to escalate a Twitter War into a real one? U.S. foreign policy has never been in more reckless hands, and the possibility for a misstep that threatens our security, weakens our standing in the world, or triggers an international crisis have seemingly never been higher.

There’s a current of fear sweeping America and Europe, as white people without a college educations outside of major cities who are culturally and economically alienated from the forces of globalization, who never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and in whom a fear of Islam and terror have been ingrained since 9/11, are turning to right-wing nativist movements that promise a return to a more prosperous past. Countries across Europe are being strained by the influx of refugees, and nationalist parties in Finland (18% of the vote), Denmark (21%), Austria (35%), Hungary (21%), France (14%), and Switzerland (29%) are gaining support on the back of anti-immigration platforms that call out Islam by name. 

This is the sentiment that loomed over the Brexit referendum, which saw British voters upend polling expectations and vote to leave the European Union. On the day of the Brexit referendum polls showed a 3-4% lead for “remain” that was within the margin of error, only to have an unexpected victory for “leave” that was spearheaded by the turnout of non-college white people in the heartland, who longed to reclaim some imagined “past greatness,” felt the loss of “national identity,” and scapegoated immigrants for taking jobs and straining public services. Five months later, the US election has followed the exact same script. 

Trump spent the campaign stoking fears that America was hurtling towards the apocalypse. Now that he’s the president-elect it’s tempting to invoke the same kind of hyperbole. I’m nervous Trump’s administration is going to be one of unprecedented corruption and division, that serves one part of the country at the expense of others, that brings out the worst in us and represses what’s best.

But even in this scenario, the country would survive. Our system, our principles, our resolve have always allowed us to weather these storms. Progress doesn’t move in a straight line. We’ll survive this and come out stronger on the other side, because we always do. Sure the idea that Trump could be the end of the 240-year American experiment is the thinking of the paranoid conspiracist.

But god, if there was ever a moment to wonder if we’re in uncharted territory, it’s now. Because there’s something dangerous about the “we’ll survive because we always do” axiom: it holds true until it doesn’t. 

Because this Time’s Actually Different

There is a critical difference between the 2016 Presidential election and the 57 that came before it: we’ve never elected a demagogue like Trump to the office of the President. 

Of all the demagogues that have emerged in the course of US history–Huey Long, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Charles Coughlin– Trump is the only one to seize our highest office. We’ve watched him closely for 18 months. He’s not bound by any norms, or decency or sense of shame.  His politics are dangerous.

In Trump, we’ve elected the tyrant our founding fathers feared and designed our democracy to defend against. The populist who could rise to power by appealing to base emotions and making promises to the working class that couldn’t be kept. Soon-to-be-boycotted by the alt-right founding father Alexander Hamilton warned that it was democracy’s greatest vulnerability in Federalist #1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” 

A vengeful narcissist who believes he’s above our norms should not be in the Oval Office. Trump’s campaign followed a demagogue’s playbook– drumming up fears of terrorism and national decline, scapegoating minorities and immigrants, shamelessly lying and promising the impossible. He’s announced intentions to jail his opponents and sue his accusers, incited violence at his rallies and shown a preference for confrontation and vengeance over compromise or resolution. He’s declared the rights to freedom of speech, religion, and assembly to be annoyances he could do without. 

The institutions and norms that were supposed to keep a demagogue out of the White House have already failed us. This puts the United States in uncharted territory, and the possibilities of a Trump presidency should be considered in that light.

Trump’s consistently demonstrated a belief that the rules don’t apply to him. For 25 years as a private citizen, he stiffed contractors and creditors, committed infidelity and sexual assault, and evaded taxes. Most disturbing, Trump maintained during the campaign he wouldn’t accept the election results if he lost, a statement he modulated but never retracted. The peaceful transition of power is the most fundamental and singular political feat of American democracy. It’s the reason any of this works. If Trump was prepared to challenge these precedents as a candidate who was expected to lose, what might he do when he’s in office? It seems not a matter of whether Trump will abuse power– it’s how brazenly and destructively.

Trump plans to have his children run the Trump Corporation while he’s in office, and has put his children in charge of the transition team that will make all key hires for his administration, an unconscionable conflict of interest. I’m not about to pretend that U.S. politics haven’t always involved horse trading and corruption. I’m sure the alt-right has corruption anecdotes about the Clintons and the Obamas– but what Trump’s trying to get away with is unprecedented.

Never before has there been such an obvious channel for directly bribing the President of the United States. Foreign leaders with holdings in foreign companies could award lucrative deals to Trump Corp to influence U.S. policy. Trump’s recently opened hotel in DC seems poised to become a direct channel for foreign countries to bribe Trump, and puts him in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Trump’s children headed his campaign and have chaired his transition team– there is no separation between them and Trump. The idea that a “chinese wall” could exist between Ivanka Trump, who heads Trump Corp, and her husband Jared Kushner, who Trump has challenged anti-nepotism laws to bring into his administration, is ridiculous. 

When a company or foreign government meets with Trump Corp, it will be hard not to imagine it’s also dealing with the United States government. It’s a dangerous line that at best opens the door to unprecedented corruption and at worst leads to Donald Jr. igniting a cyber war when he threatens a well-connected Chinese Developer. As Matt Iglesias reasons in one of the most chilling articles written since the election, given Trump’s philosophy of rewarding loyalists and punishing his rivals, Trump could turn the U.S. into a post-Soviet style kleptocracy. A pay-to-play system in which fealty to Trump’s administration is necessary for doing business, while businesses that voice dissent find themselves on the wrong side of regulations, losing government contracts, or embroiled in federal investigations. 

He’s already begun to set the stage for this kleptocracy, with his deal with Carrier “to save a thousand jobs from being shipped to Mexico.” The narrative on the right is that Trump met with Carrier and convinced it to keep a plant open in Indiana, thereby saving a thousand jobs before he’s even arrived in office. Obama would have been pilloried by the right if he ever boasted about “saving jobs from leaving.” He can’t even get credit for creating 16 million jobs during his presidency. No matter that 6,000 Carrier jobs are still leaving, and that Trump has merely slowed the inevitable. This isn’t an economic policy– it’s a precedent for companies to hold the government hostage– “cut our taxes or we’ll leave.” But of even greater concern, Trump has taken the first step towards his kleptocracy, and disguised it in a triumphant and politically-difficult-to-argue-against story about saving manufacturing jobs. A world where he picks winners and losers, singling out private companies to reward or punish on a case-by-case basis. Like the most dangerous demagogues and paranoid psychopaths, Trump keeps a list of his enemies. He has shown no hesitation in using his Twitter account to attack them and seems to relish the power his tweets have to move markets. 

As for Trump’s unwieldy Republican coalition– I want to believe there are reasonable Republicans that might serve as a check on Trump. That party cooperation with Trump’s agenda will slow after they’ve implemented the top agenda items of the Republican establishment and done their best to erase any trace that Obama was in the White House. But if Republicans were too spineless to condemn Trump during the campaign, how can we expect them to stand up to him when he’s returned them to power, touts a voter mandate, and uses the oval office as a bully pulpit? 

These are the same Republicans that began undermining our institutions earlier this year, when they abdicated their constitutional duty to give a hearing to Merrick Garland. A week before the election, Republican senators were vowing to obstruct any Supreme Court nominees appointed by Clinton, abandoning any pretense that this was ever based on even the most rickety of precedents. Our institutions are all that hold our country together. When they cease to transcend any one person or party, our entire republic is threatened. 

Normally the losing party regroups after an election and begins to work towards winning back legislative control in the midterm elections. Bush lost his Republican majority in the house and senate in the midterm elections of 2002, and Obama lost his in 2010. But while a lot can change in two years, the 2018 midterm elections don’t seem to offer democrats that possibility. Republican gerrymandering will aid Republicans in holding the house for the foreseeable future, with many Republicans more afraid defeat will come from “getting primaried” from the right than from a Democrat challenger. In the senate, only eight Republicans are up for reelection, seven of them from solidly Red states, while 25 Democrats are up for reelection, ten of whom are from states won by Trump. 

Even more than gerrymandering or specific senate races though, the Democrat coalition faces a longterm structural and geographic problem. Democrats enjoy a voter majority, but their support is inefficiently distributed in a system that awards political power based on geography. For the second time in five elections, the Democrats won the popular vote and lost the electoral college. Clinton won California by 4.3 million votes, and won its 55 electoral votes– Trump won Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina by about 800,000 votes, and won 108 electoral votes. Representation in the senate is also geared towards geography– the 40 million people in California get the same number of senators as the 600,000 people in Wyoming. The arithmetic of congress and the electoral college was set up to create a buffer between voters and their elected officials and to prevent any one region from becoming too powerful. But with democrats clustered in cities and on the coasts, the arithmetic currently cedes disproportionate representation to Republicans, and even as demographic trends favor the democrats, it could be a while before demographics catch up to geographic distribution. Add to that the fact that Trump can appoint a partisan crony to chair the federal reserve in 2018 to grease monetary policy in the run up to the election in 2020 and that Republicans will delay the repeal of ACA until after the midterms, and the Republican hold on power could end up increasing in 2018.

Trump’s early cabinet moves also portend an Orwellian state, rendering every department’s name into cruel irony. The Environmental Protection Agency will be led by a fierce climate change denier who works for the oil and gas industry, the Department of Labor will advocate pro-business policies that aid in worker exploitation, the Federal Trade Commission will encourage monopolization and consumer exploitation, the Department of Justice will condone civil rights abuse and exact revenge on Trump’s opponents. Trump has appointed a white-nationalist anti-semite to a Bismarckian role exempt from congressional approval, and seems intent on filling most other positions in his cabinet with plutocrats and alt-right loyalists. Instead of emptying the swamp, Trump’s filling his cabinet with muck from the bottom of it. People is policy, and Trump’s administration is shaping up to be an intersection of the Christian right, white supremacists, Trump loyalists, and cronies of the oil and gas industry.

And what happens when a demagogue who doesn’t play by the rules decides he doesn’t want to relinquish power? For now, a 60-vote supermajority is needed in the senate for key appointments and legislation, which will allow Democrats and key Republicans to moderate Trump’s agenda. But what happens when Trump grows annoyed with the filibuster, and pressures the senate to blunt the tools of minority opposition? And makes dangerous appointments with a 51 vote majority approval that turn the courts from a check on his power to a rubber stamp?  And declares war on the the press, limiting White House access to conservative media of his choosing, and expanding on the precedent set by his friend Peter Thiel in the lawsuit that ruled against the first amendment and led to the shuttering of Gawker? And helps the passing of discriminatory voter suppression laws (the 2010 reinstatement of which already helped to sway the election for Trump) under the guise of addressing voter fraud, and deregulates campaign financing, while making Breitbart a state-sponsored TV Channel to be transmitted to every home and be built-into every American-made iPhone, which by the way, will now transmit all of your private information to the Department of Freedom. On one hand, it sounds unthinkable. On the other, everything that’s happened since Trump declared his candidacy has seemed impossible– until it wasn’t. It may be time to assume the worst about him and prepare accordingly, rather than being surprised with every new offense that pushes us incrementally closer to an autocratic kleptocracy. 

This is all without even mentioning Russia. At the very least, it appears Russia hacked the DNC and leaked information in an attempt to sway the election towards Trump, with the Trump campaign taking advantage of the leaks that dogged Clinton throughout the campaign. Remarkably, Republicans who used to call themselves patriots are now happy to condone interference in an American election by a hostile foreign power. Which is insane. But at worst, all of this goes much deeper. Multiple intelligence agencies seem to believe that Russian intelligence taped Trump getting peed on by prostitutes when he visited Moscow in 2013, giving Russian intelligence blackmail to wield against him. This theory would hold that the Kremlin systematically coordinated with and funded the Trump campaign, working through Paul Manafort, who took over Trump’s campaign over the summer of 2016 before disappearing back into the shadows and whose ties to Moscow are well-documented, and it would mean Russia has a puppet in Washington DC for the next four years. Trump’s consistent pro-Russian stance, his obsession with Putin, and his nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO and Russian Order of Friendship Recipient Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State further suggests treasonously deep ties between Trump and Moscow. Trump continues to deny all of this, even the universally agreed upon fact that Moscow hacked the DNC. If there’s unrest in Latvia in the next few years, and Russia blocks security resolutions to intervene but moves in unilaterally as a peacekeeper, and Trump doesn’t do anything about it, we’ll know the tape is real.  

Because This Could Go From Bad to a This-Is-The-Darkest-Period-In-American-History Worse

There was speculation during the campaign that Paul Ryan and Mike Pence were more ideologically extreme than Trump. “Sure, Trump’s got some crazy in him,” the thinking went, “but at least he used to kind of be a democrat.”  If Trump was to end up being impeached, be it due to allegations of treason, perjury, violating the constitution, or demonstrating with finality that he’s unfit to hold office– or if he succumbs to a heart attack because of his incredibly poor health– there was an idea that the devil we knew might be better than the devil we didn’t. It was Pence, after all, who backed a law in Indiana that would force women to have a burial for their aborted fetuses, and spearheaded the charge to leverage Hurricane Katrina to pass policies that lowered labor standards and gave handouts to oil and gas companies.  

I’m offended by most of their politics, and would no doubt look upon their agenda in horror, but I’d accept this was our democracy playing out. Red vs Blue, D. vs R., hollywood liberals vs bible belt conservatives, with a lot of filibustering, fundraising, and shouting at each other on Sunday shows on the way to relative gridlock. But I would believe that no matter the appearance of corruption, religious fervor, or even bigotry, that they believe in democracy, the constitution, and the rule of law. 

But in Trump, we’re faced with a new set of concerns. I’ve spent a lot of words talking about alarming implications of Trump’s temperament, his policy views, and his incompetence. But the only scarier thing than Trump’s blustering incompetence is that he, and more likely Steve Bannon, are in fact maniacally competent. 

For the past eight years, Democrats and Republicans have had a philosophical battle over whether our system worked. Obama tried to navigate unprecedented partisan gridlock to pull levers that nudged the country in the direction of a progressive liberal agenda, even if the movement was sometimes slight. With the nomination of Hilary Clinton, Democrats continued to stake out a belief that change could be affected within the current system. The Republicans, radicalized with the ascendence of the Tea Party, became the party of revolution– they decided they didn’t believe the current system worked, and they wanted to overturn it. This made the Tea Party well-suited to be an opposition party, because it was always ready to play the game of chicken. Either it would get its way, or it would lose and take the whole government crashing down with it– and it was perfectly fine with either outcome. The Democrats would never have risked jeopardizing America’s credit to gain a policy victory, as the Republicans did when they threatened sovereign default unless Obamacare was repealed. But instead of being thrown out of power for needlessly threatening to throw the global economy into chaos, Republican lawmakers expanded their hold on both federal and state legislatures over the past six years. There was a time when conservative Republicans could at least be counted on to be patriots and believe in upholding the constitution, but Republicans have become the party that is willing to abandon those tenets for other ideological gains. 

The country’s susceptibility to autocracy is made more challenging by the  “post-truth” environment in which we now live. The fact that “post-truth” is now a term we throw around and accept is itself ludicrous and dangerous, but seems to be the only way to adequately describe the current political and media landscape. The polarizing impact of social media networks, the death of the local newspaper, the erosion of civil society, the divide between people with a college education and people without, between secular liberals in the cities and religious conservatives in the heartland, have made it so that Democrats and Republicans no longer inhabit the same reality, and have no mechanism for even communicating with each other.  As of 2016, 72% of Republicans still doubted whether Barack Obama was born in the US.  Over 60% of Republicans still didn’t believe global warming was due to human activities. If we can’t agree on objective facts, we open the door to unspeakable horrors, with no way to hold those who propagate them to account.

Republicans have denounced every news outlet that follows basic journalistic standards as an ideological arm of liberal elites. Meanwhile, many Trump supporters get their news from Breitbart, the propaganda organization of Trump’s top advisor, Steve Bannon. No US President has ever had a news organization for directly misinforming his supporters. State-run news organizations are hallmarks of autocracies.

The Great Con of the Republican party is that it relies on the support of people its policies don’t particularly help. It’s not just democratic campaign rhetoric that Trump wanted to cut taxes for the wealthiest 1% and deregulate banks and enrich businesses at the expense of their workers– that’s really the crux of their plan.  Trump added a populist spin that won him the election– but I’m against his policies because I’m confident they’re going to leave the country worse off. 

So the scary part of a Trump presidency happens when his policies fail to make a difference in the lives of his supporters. When it turns out that fixing health insurance wasn’t as simple as selling plans across state lines. When protectionist policies increase the prices at Walmart. When putting tariffs on Mexico doesn’t bring back post-WWII manufacturing jobs, but rather accelerates the pace of automation. When the Affordable Care Act is repealed and people can no longer pay for their cancer treatments. When Americans realize they’re worse off, and Trump faces a rising tide of disapproval and charges of incompetency, and begins to scramble to deflect his failures from his administration and place them somewhere else. 

This is the point when a lot of presidents would lose reelection. But this is where Trump and his demagoguery set up a different dynamic. Trump has proven uniquely adept at speaking to his supporters, and distracting them from policy by fanning the flames of intolerance and xenophobia. He has a strong cult of personality and commands blind allegiance from a base that puts faith above reason. They have perhaps been failed by our society-- left behind by our economy and education system, they are unequipped to understand their own self-interests or confront ideas that challenge them-- as Errol Morris mused, the "a stupid person is a person who treats a smart person as if he is stupid.”  Their shame leaves them angry, their resentment leads to tribalism. Those bright red Make America Great Again hats recall a tactic used by other fascist movements to identify their supporters– badges of allegiance that serve as a mechanism of deindividuation and embolden those wearing them to express their most base and intolerant beliefs.

But it may not just be a matter of incompetency. Trump has expressed his admiration for Putin’s regime, and Steve Bannon subscribes to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory that every 80 years America has a major crisis, when the system gets remade. Trump and Clinton were both viewed so unfavorably that the 2016 election was often framed as a contest between the lesser of two evils. But we may have actually seen the triumph of a deep-seated white-Christian authoritarian world-view. Trump might be inviting crisis. 

I’m afraid we’re about to see the most cynical version of disaster capitalism. Employed by the Bush administration after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina (and documented by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine), where the Trump administration welcomes disasters and leverages them to implement policies that roll back our freedom, weaken our institutions, enrich government contractors and cronies, and try to remake the world order. I’ve already mentioned why Trump’s bluster towards Islam is strategically flawed– we risk alienating moderate Muslims we need as allies in the fight against radical Islamic terrorism, and ending up in some sort of clash of civilizations. But there’s another, scarier scenario– given Trump’s clear racism towards Muslims, the many mentions he made of killing terrorists and their families during the campaign, and his belief that the mistake in Iraq was not securing the oil– I wonder if Trump is seeking out this clash. If he’d invite another terrorist attack on American soil, blame Obama for being too soft on terror, and use it as an excuse to partner with Russia to create a white Christian world order that wipes parts of the Middle East from the earth. Scarier still, I’m nervous his supporters would welcome it.

It would seem I’ve assuredly veered into the realm of paranoia and conspiracy that I set out to avoid. I hope we’ll laugh about it one day– I’ll be happy to get a boozy, yuppie brunch in Silver Lake with all of my liberal elite hipster friends in two years, after the Democrats retake the house in 2018, a Sunday edition of the New York Times on the table with a headline “Trump Card: Congress to Begin Impeachment Hearings,” as Trump sits at 18% in the polls. We can laugh about how I was a directionless millennial– a “whiny loser,” as Trump would say– who was prone to conspiracy theories and didn’t have enough faith in American institutions, which truly do always win out in the end. 

But I can’t help but watch what’s happening and think we’re living through that fateful, chilling, divergent moment that will appear in history books. The kind of moment of which historians will ask, how did this happen and why didn’t anyone stop it? 

[thesassybooskter]

PLAYING DIRTY by Amy Andrews: Review & Excerpt

Playing Dirty by Amy Andrews Series: Sydney Smoke Rugby #6 Published by Entangled: Brazen Publication Date: July 9th 2018 Genres: Contemporary Romance Pages: 250 Source: Publisher Format: eARC Goodreads Buy Online: Amazon ♥ Barnes & Noble ♥ Kobo ♥ iBooks

Disclaimer: I voluntarily reviewed a copy of this book. All opinions stated are solely mine.

Sydney Smoke star recruit Kyle Leighton can’t believe the best sex of his life was just a one-night stand. He didn’t even know her name… Until she shows up at the locker room two weeks later and he connects the dots. 

Val King. Oh shit. 

Coach has one hard and fast rule: Never, ever date (much less f*ck ten ways to Sunday) his daughter. And not only did Kyle break that rule, but he wants to break it over and over again. In the shower. Against a wall. On every flat surface in his home.

But the coach and his daughter share more than just DNA. Their issues run deep and fooling around with her could widen the family chasm. 

And get Kyle benched for life.

So why can’t he stop thinking about her? Flirting with her? Suggesting they date for real and damn the consequences?

  Review

PLAYING DIRTY is a perfect mix of fun dialogue, spicy naughtiness and characters you can really connect with. The author makes you really see the characters, their immediate connection which is more than sexual, how real they are with their issues and quirks; in fact the good, the bad and the ugly.

I came away not seeing Kyle the hot, attractive rugby player who would make great fodder for the tabloids, but Kyle the son, brother and man who loves deeply and would do anything for those he loves.

Valerie was a little hard to like initially, but her past puts her touchiness into perspective and I really have to give her credit for her determination for build a relationship with her dad after that much time. I would have quit trying in less than a quarter of that time.

This is only my second book by this author and the first in this series, but it has definitely made me a fan of her work and I am on a quest to read her entire back catalog as soon as possible. This is the book you didn’t know you wanted to read but won’t be able to stop reading until the last page.

  Excerpt

The guy didn’t have to brag. A body like that was a flashing neon sign. He was a ridiculously good looking guy who wanted her. And tonight that felt good. Too good to pass up. Too good to listen to her wiser angels.

“Oh yeah?” She shot him her most dazzling smile. “Can you guess what I’m thinking right now?”

The beer stilled enroute to his mouth. His gaze locked with hers once again. He regarded her for a moment or two, a smile playing with his mouth. “Probably not what I hope your thinking.”

He was flirting but casual with it and Val liked that he wasn’t going in for the hard sell with her. Needled along by a perfect shit storm of baggage and something else she didn’t really understand, she followed suit.

“You might be surprised.” Her pulse fluttered at her temples and her scalp prickled.

Val didn’t go for one night stands. She lost her virginity at nineteen to a guy at uni she’d been seeing for a few months and had a series of short term boyfriends since. She’d even let a few of them into her body, but none close enough to see all the broken, damaged parts caused by the echoes of a long dead sibling and an aloof, guilt ridden father.

Rage, hot and fast lashed at her insides. She’d tried so hard. Tried to be good, not to cause any further ripples in his life. She’d only ever wanted him to love her, damn it.

Val drained her martini to quell the rising storm.

“You’re thinking you want another drink?” he said.

She sucked the olives off the toothpick one at a time with suppressed fury rather than subtle flirtation. “Nope.”

His gaze dropped to her mouth as she licked the glistening residue from her lips and muscles deep inside her belly heated, melted. He lifted his eyes to hers. “You want to order something to eat?”

“No.”

“Dance?”

“No.”

“You…want to get out of here?”

Val smiled. “Warmer.”

“To another bar?

She huffed out a small laugh. “Colder.”

“To…my place?”

They may not have been saying very much but their eyes were carrying on a full conversation. His busily assessing her signals, dancing around the question. Hers, daring him not to, expressing her interest.

“Hot,” she murmured. “Very hot.”

Hell yeah, she wanted to go to his place. Because she couldn’t think of a better way to forget this shitty day. And because it was the biggest fuck you to her father she could think of. Which probably made her a terrible human being at the moment but being good and trying to always do the right thing had only gotten her heart ache.

Maybe revenge would feel better? The fact that the vehicle for her defiance came wrapped in such a sexy package was an added bonus.

 Not that she has any intention of telling her father. It’d bring all kinds of crap down on Kyle’s head and she had no desire to trash his career. But she’d know. She’d know she’d deliberately flouted Griffin King’s unspoken rule – coach’s daughter is off limits.

The irony was gutting. Her father didn’t want her but no one else could have her either.

“To…see my harbour view?”

Val gave him more brownie points for attempting to clarify her expectations. “You live on the harbour?”

“I live a few streets back but yeah…you can see a little water.”

He could have lived in a tent that looked out onto a brick wall and she wouldn’t have cared less. “I hope you’re not offended if I say no to the view.” 

He grinned. “Not even a little bit.”

  About Amy Andrews

Amy is an award-winning, USA Today best-selling Aussie author who has written sixty plus contemporary romances in both the traditional and digital markets.

Her books bring all the feels from sass, quirk and laughter to emotional grit and panty-melting heat.

She loves good books and great booze although she'll take mediocre booze if there's nothing else. For many, many years she was a registered nurse which means she knows things. Anatomical things. And she’s not afraid to use them!

She lives on acreage with a gorgeous mountain view but secretly wishes the ocean was lapping the back fence.

Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads

  PLAYING DIRTY by Amy Andrews: Review & Excerpt was originally published on The Sassy Bookster

[gravetells]

Rebecca Zanetti’s Heath Jones from Lethal Lies on baiting a serial killer & getting serious in the sack #excerpt #giveaway

Read on for a sneak peek at Rebecca Zanetti’s newest Blood Brothers romantic thriller, LETHAL LIES, releasing May 16, 2017!

A deadly secret can’t stay buried forever . . .

Revenge. It’s the only thing that will help Anya Best sleep at night. The serial killer who murdered her sister is on the loose, and Anya will stop at nothing to put him behind bars—even use herself as bait to lure him out of hiding. But she can’t do this alone.

Private investigator Heath Jones’s job is to bring bastards to justice. This time it’s personal. He knew the Copper Killer’s latest victim so when her sister asks for his help, he’s all in. But when Anya uses the media to taunt the killer, she exposes Heath’s identity, putting them both in jeopardy. Now, secrets buried long ago are coming to light and the forces determined to destroy him are watching Heath’s every move, waiting to exact their own revenge. And they’ll use anything and anyone to get to Heath.

PREORDER it online at Amazon* (Kindle | Paperback) | B&N | Books-A-Million | Google Play | iBooks | Indiebound | Kobo | GoodReads LETHAL LIES releases on May 16, 2017!

Praise for Rebecca Zanetti’s Blood Brothers series

“4 1/2 stars! Top pick! This is a true thriller that will keep readers frantically flipping the pages as death and danger come at the protagonists from several directions. Zanetti’s brilliance at storytelling is on full display…When it comes to high-octane thrillers, they don’t get better than Zanetti!” —RT Book Reviews on LETHAL LIES

“Zanetti balances the adventure and menace of Zara and Ryker’s lives with a relatable romance. The result is a story that’s sexy and emotional, and filled with a rich look at love in all its forms.” —The Washington Post on DEADLY SILENCE

“Budget your time, readers, because this is one that’s hard to put down.” —HeroesandHeartbreakers.com on DEADLY SILENCE

Read an excerpt

“All the more reason to get you out of town,” Heath said quietly. She shook her head. “No. I’m staying.” Her words were brave, but her chest hurt. No way could she deal with a serial killer all on her own. She could train every day for the rest of her life and not end up as practiced or as deadly as Heath already was, and she knew it. “I understand you have other cases and people after you. So leave, and I’ll handle this myself.” “Those are big words, baby,” he said softly. Her lip quivered, and she bit down on it. “I know. I promised her, Heath. It’s all I have left to give to her.” He paused, understanding crossing his expression. “Ah, sweetheart. Your sister wouldn’t want that for you.” His voice turned velvety and soft. Soothing. Anya nodded. “I know. But she was my sister. We shared blood and part of a childhood. She took me trick-or-treating when I was five, and it’s one of my best memories. Then when I needed help as an adult, she didn’t hesitate. She came to me right away, like family. She was the first person I really cared about in far too long, and it hurts like hell that I got her killed.” He breathed out, the emotion in his eyes deepening. She swallowed. “I have to do this for her. Either you understand that or you don’t.” “Why don’t you just let us handle it?” She pressed her point. “I could, but you need me. I’m the bait.” Inwardly, she winced at the description. That wouldn’t help her to convince him. “Also, here’s the deal. This could be a long op. At some point, you have to leave and deal with whatever is haunting you from your past. When you do, I’ll just challenge him again, and next time you won’t be around to assist.” “That’s extortion,” Heath said, amusement curving his lip. She grinned. “Apparently I’m getting quite good at it.” Heath shook his head. “You’re putting me in an untenable position, baby.” “No, I’m not.” She shrugged out of his hold. Finally. “I’m not yours to protect, Heath. We’re not together, and we’re not responsible for each other.” The words sliced through her even as she said them. “You’ve been more than clear on that score.” “There’s something here, Anya. Maybe something real and lasting, if I get everything done I need to do.” She blinked. “What’s that?” “The less you know the better. Believe me.” “What a bunch of bullshit. Go back to your ‘This is fake’ proclamation,” she all but yelled. “Your position is one of work . . . and this is just work.” His chin lifted. “You think this is just work?” The tone—low and filled with tension—zinged through her body. Her legs trembled with the urge to take a step back. “Yes.” “Want me to prove otherwise?” His eyes darkened to the color of the sky right before midnight hit. As a threat, as a warning, it was damn good. But she’d gone too far to give in now. “You can’t.” Yeah, she’d just waved a red flag in front of a bull. He didn’t move a muscle. His focus on her was so absolute, she wanted to squirm. “You’re into challenging dangerous men these days, aren’t you?” She kept her stance. “You’re not all that dangerous, Heath.” His smile stole her breath. Then he moved. Faster than she could track, he had her by the armpits and up in the air as he carried her toward the bedroom with such speed that her legs automatically wound around to clasp his rib cage. By the time she sucked in air to protest, her butt was on the bed, and he was flattening himself over her. She struggled, her body on fire, fighting the urge to laugh out loud. His mouth crushed hers, and she stilled. Heat. Fire. True danger. He held nothing back, kissing her hard, pressing her head into the comforter. His tongue worked hers, his powerful body plastered against hers, and his hands dug into her hair to hold her in place. Desire spun so quickly into need she couldn’t breathe, even when he wasn’t controlling her mouth. She shifted against him, closing her eyes to kiss him back. This was what she’d wanted. All of this. He nipped her lip, soothing the slight pain with another kiss. Then he traced along her jawline, kissing and nipping, finally reaching her earlobe, where he bit. She arched against him, letting out a soft sigh. “Anya.” His fingers tangled in her hair, and erotic pain tingled down her scalp. One of his strong arms slid around her waist and then down. His palm spread across her butt, and he ground her against his hard cock. Pleasure swamped her, and mini explosions flew through her sex. The idea passed, somewhat fleetingly, that he wasn’t playing. Not at all. Yet she couldn’t stop herself. Her knees widened, and she rubbed against him. “This feels real,” she whispered.

PREORDER it online at Amazon* (Kindle | Paperback) | B&N | Books-A-Million | Google Play | iBooks | Indiebound | Kobo | GoodReads LETHAL LIES releases on May 16, 2017!

  About the author

Rebecca Zanetti is the author of over twenty-five romantic suspense, dark paranormal, and contemporary romances, and her books have appeared multiple times on the New York Times, USA Today, and Amazon bestseller lists. She has received a Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review for Wicked Edge, Romantic Times Reviewer Choice Nominations for Forgotten Sins and Sweet Revenge, and RT Top Picks for several of her novels. She lives in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest with her own alpha hero, two kids, a couple of dogs, a crazy cat…and a huge extended family. She believes strongly in luck, karma, and working her butt off…and she thinks one of the best things about being an author, unlike the lawyer she used to be, is that she can let the crazy out.

Find Rebecca online at her website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest | GoodReads

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from Rebecca Zanetti’s Heath Jones from Lethal Lies on baiting a serial killer & getting serious in the sack #excerpt #giveaway