#and how does that inform the way he would respond to edwin not knowing his own birthday

[the-ipre]

when monty asks if edwin is a capricorn he doesnt really have a response which could be taken as a 'oh how did he snipe me so accurately' but i take it to mean that edwin does not remember his birthday :) it has been over a hundred years, 70 of which were in hell under great duress, and without any reason to celebrate or remember his birthday why would he still know it :)

[lovelyirony]

strawberries & cigarettes by troye whatshisface but it's winteriron (idk if this is a prompt or just a statement you can take it as either)

Bucky doesn’t like the fact that he’s going to a stupid fucking private school. He doesn’t like that this is his mother’s sacrifice, that she stays up late with the bills and works another job so that he can go there and make a living. 

He doesn’t even know what he wants to do in life, that’s the thing. Mom thinks that he’s going to be a really good businessman and she doesn’t know that he smokes outside his window and sometimes just doesn’t retain any sort of information at school because he has to be good. 

“I sacrifice so much for you,” she tells him one night. “You need to make a good living for yourself. Promise me.” 

And he does. Hell if he knows how he’s going to keep it, but that’s the promise. 

- 

The one kid that he absolutely hates at school is Tony Stark. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a whole silverware drawer at the ready in case he doesn’t like the spoon. 

Tony’s kind of wealth is the kind that is so astronomically high that at some point you have to wonder what it means to him. Because it doesn’t seem to mean anything. 

He shows up in the shittiest sneakers he’s ever seen, held together with tape and drawn on by someone else. His hair is never styled, his uniform is never washed, and yet he just exudes that kind of confidence that comes with knowing that your life is better than anyone else’s, kind of. 

He’s also an ass in class. Correcting teachers, derailing the topic, and acting like it all is beneath him. 

They say he’s a genius, going to take over his father’s company. He has his future set in stone, and so there’s nothing else for him to learn. Bucky’s not really sure if he’s a genius or not, because he’s pretty sure a genius could figure out when to leave shit alone. 

Everyone at St. Anthony’s knows that Bucky is an individual who does well on his own. At most, you say hello and move on. He doesn’t talk to anyone, he makes sure he doesn’t look like he talks to anyone, and he’s said multiple times that he doesn’t want to talk to anyone. 

Tony Stark, however, talks. Doesn’t matter what the subject is, he talks. 

Bucky gets nicknames. Because of his...frigid demeanor, this means that Tony calls him shit like “Ice Pop,” “Icicle,” “Mr. Freeze,” and any other nickname that’s applicable to cold. 

“Hey Snowball,” Tony says in class. “You finished with your presentation for English class? Mine still sucks, although I’m sure it’ll be better than Hammer’s.” 

“That’s not saying a lot,” Bucky mutters. “At all. Now shut up. It’s class.” 

“We all know it’s going to be boring,” Tony says. “Sitwell has the personality of a tumbleweed, and you’re so much more interesting to talk to.” 

Bucky doesn’t respond to that. 

“Ah, so we’re at the no-talking stage, darling. I’ll make it up to you. Ice cream? Dinner? Elaborate cruise trip in summer?” 

Bucky rolls his eyes, and Tony quiets for roll call, but says one last comment. 

“I think I’m going to do the presentation in Comic Sans. Thoughts?” 

“I wish you didn’t have thoughts, then maybe you’d leave me alone.” 

Tony laughs. 

“You’re cute, Barnes. Cute. You know I don’t leave anyone alone.” 

- 

There’s a bad day. Bucky gets those sometimes. Every day of his life is a bad day, almost, but this one? The absolute worst. 

He had nightmares, barely got any sleep, and found out that his little sister used up the last of his shampoo, so he had to use his mom’s and now he smells like “Strawberry Paradise.” 

He hates the day, and it’s not even eight o’clock yet. 

Tony Stark, of course, makes it worse. He talks incessantly about something related to robotics or the weather or music or whatever, and Bucky just sees red. 

"Can you shut up for one fucking second of your life?” he hisses at him. “Oh my fucking god, it doesn’t matter. Nothing you say matters at all to me.” 

- 

Tony’s heard a lot of shit like that. Like, a lot. Probably worse. 

But for some reason, it’s hurting more coming from Bucky Barnes. 

Tony doesn’t shut up. He knows that. Everyone knows that. He has legitimately given people headaches. His dad has timed his talking and limited him to about two minutes. It would’ve been even less, but at family therapy they’re trying to work on “empathy for others.” 

(A crock of bullshit, because Tony’s fairly sure his dad doesn’t know what that is.) 

Bucky’s...he’s different. Sure, he hates Tony. Everyone does, and to be completely frank, Tony likes it that way. You know where you stand, how you can be interpreted if people only feel one thing about you. 

But Bucky is perhaps the only interesting person Tony knows at this hellhole of a school. He works really hard on his assignments, has more to work on than other kids. He looks frustrated at math equations, but stays and pores over textbooks after school. 

He brings a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every single day. Tony thinks the last time he had one was at a birthday party when he was twelve, and even then it wasn’t really a sandwich but more of a deconstructed concept thing that probably cost two hundred bucks a plate. 

- 

Now that Tony’s ruminating on it, it’s probably because no one has exactly told him that what he says doesn’t matter. They just say they don’t wanna hear about it. The two concepts are honestly very different. Tony has a sneaking suspicion that he is going to go into a tailspin about this on a Thursday night at two in the morning. 

Ha. On a Thursday night at two in the morning. What odd phrasing that is, why is that so weird? It’s night, but it’s morning and you’re supposed to be asleep but morning is a wake-up time, so--

Oh, there’s the meaning. 

Why would you discuss a night and a morning? Why does it matter? On a Thursday? 

Tony wonders how much shit he’s said that just ultimately doesn’t matter. 

This gets him thinking about how much nothing in his life matters. Don’t get him wrong, he knew it. 

Knew it in the way everyone tells him he’ll be the next Howard Stark. 

Knows it in the way that his own father isn’t exactly all too fond of him and Tony has a problem looking at anything with dear old Captain America because of comparisons that his father makes and honestly he probably almost named Tony “Steve.” 

Could you imagine him having the name of Steve? God, he’d barf. 

- 

For some reason, this is the worst he’s ever felt. Sure his father hates him and his mother could be considered an absentee at best, but what gets him to cry into his pillow and rethink his entire existence is a guy who has eye circles darker than anyone else’s and thinks that wearing any bright color is “branching out into alternative fashion.” 

God, he wishes he had a break. 

Nothing you say matters to me. 

This is the phrase that gets him. Tony is pretty sure it’s because it’s what everyone thinks. 

- 

Ever since then, Tony doesn’t talk to Bucky. Ever. 

And that’s...that’s weird to Bucky. It was routine. Tony annoys him, he snaps a bit, and then it starts all over. 

Tony looks at him, sometimes. As if he’s some sort of impossible problem he can’t figure out. 

When Bucky actually thinks about it, Tony hasn’t really talked to anyone. He’s still himself, which is irritating, but he’s not talking about anything and everything and filling up space. 

It’s...odd. 

He feels a little bit bad because what he said was super shitty and he shouldn’t have said it, but now it’s too late to just kind of awkwardly apologize, and Bucky’s already shit at apologizing anyway. 

- 

Summer arrives with a bang. School is let out ,and in comes the ninety-degree-days that melt your damn head off. Bucky’s apartment doesn’t have AC, so their windows are permanently open and fans are blasting as they swear they’re melting. 

Bucky needs a job. Preferably one with air conditioning. 

He finds one as a driver. Rich people hate taxis, it’s a huge health hazard or whatever they wanna say. He’s not gonna ask. But a nice man named Edwin hands him keys to a damn Cadillac and tells him not to drive too close to the other cars and be careful, because he wasn’t supposed to start the job quite yet, but “something came up.” 

- 

Tony fucking Stark. That’s who he’s fucking driving. 

“Oh my god,” Bucky groans. He sees Tony get into the car. 

“Hey, Jarvis told me I had a new driver, it’s really nice to--oh my fucking god.” 

“Where are you driving to.” 

“Queens.” 

“Queens, seriously?” 

Queens isn’t the type of place for someone like Stark to go to. He’s supposed to say Saks Fifth Avenue or Gucci or wherever the hell rich people go when they’re not vacationing in Europe or elsewhere. Not Queens. Especially not Queens. 

“It doesn’t matter where I’m going so long as you know where to drive,” Tony says. 

“Sheesh. Okay.” 

The rest of the drive is silent. It’s not like Bucky can do small-talk. Jesus, he’d rather take his other arm off than do that. 

And Tony, obviously, is not going to say anything. Not after hearing that stellar set of remarks from school. 

It’s a school. There are kids out front, who practically swarm the vehicle. 

“Should I be concerned?” 

“No, they do this every week. If you drive the car back home, Jarvis will explain more. You were kind of an ‘on the spot’ hire for us.” 

“Got it.” 

- 

Jarvis is a kindly old man who Bucky would trust with his Social Security number. 

He is also extremely loyal to Tony, at least. 

“He helps out with some after-school program at one of the local schools,” Jarvis says, smiling softly. “Has a spot in his heart for the children.” 

“What’s he do?” 

“Oh, helps them with schoolwork. I think he does some improvement type jobs around there, but he won’t let us know. Secretive, that one.” 

Bucky sips his tea and doesn’t say anything about how Tony once told everyone in the class that he was wearing neon yellow boxers and they were the comfiest damn boxers he had. It’s just not pertinent to this conversation. 

“You know him, Mr. Barnes?” 

“Um, yeah. We go to school together. I’ve seen him around.” 

“He’s a good student. Always getting straight A’s. Doesn’t always seem like it, but he listens well. Just has a different method.” 

“That’s for sure.” 

- 

For the next two weeks, it’s silence. Always. Bucky will turn on the radio and that’s it. The only thing that Tony has said is to “please change the channel to literally anything” when Belinda Carlisle’s infamously terrible “Heaven is a Place on Earth” came on. 

And that’s it. Seriously. 

When it is two weeks and four days, Bucky can’t take it anymore. 

“Look. I have this job for at least two more months. I’m talking to you. So tell me what you’re doing today.” 

“Teaching.” 

“Wow, way to be descriptive,” Bucky says sarcastically. 

Tony knows he shouldn’t throw it back in his face. But honestly, truly, this is pissing him off. 

“Oh I’m sorry, does what I say matter to you now? Is that what this is?” 

“Oh come on. That was months ago.” 

"Not the point!” Tony says. “I’m getting out now. Feel free to pick me up or not. I don’t give a fuck. But don’t you pretend for a damn minute that you give a shit about my reaction since you’ve already made your point.” 

The car door is slammed. 

Bucky is in somewhat of a pickle. 

- 

Sam tells him that he’s, quote, “the stupidest motherfucker on the planet.” 

And then hangs up. 

thank you for being such a good friend sam. really appreciate it. 

aw look at the little bitch boy mad because i called him stupid. shut up i’m on a date and don’t care once about you. at all. 

i think what i really like about our friendship is how open and empathetic you are to my feelings 

do you know how unattractive you are? on a scale of one to ten? prussia.  

you can’t count now? 

no i can count i’m just saying you shouldn’t exist. 

god i hate you. i’ll talk to you next month

(Yes, they have a time limit to texts. Once a month. And Bucky used his to try to get advice like an idiot. He should’ve just asked Steve. Steve probably would’ve sent him money for a milkshake.) 

- 

Sharon, upon reading his text, sends him back one message: 

so i read this but i’m not emotionally invested. can u make a playlist and send it to me? 

oh my god. you have got to be kidding me. 

i’m not. i told you that u need to b more creative in life. b spontaneous!!! 

He leaves her on read after that. 

- 

Bucky has to figure out how to apologize. Genuinely. Because nothing’s worse than having an apology made but knowing that the person isn’t really meaning it, they’re only saying it to make people more comfortable. 

(He wonders how many times someone’s apologized to Tony because of this reason.) 

He’s not exactly sure how to go about apologizing. 

But he figures it’s sooner rather than later, so he takes the subway to Manhattan and then gets a bike (that’s not exactly his, but he’s bringing it back) and starts the trek to the mansion. It’s a good and solid thirty minute bike ride. 

- 

Tony is having a rather uncomfortable family birthday dinner. Howard’s, to be specific. He’s not sure why they didn’t just go out, but maybe his father is tired of acting like a happy family in public. God knows Tony is. 

(“What’s your favorite thing about your son?” An interviewer had asked cheerily, blush lipstick stretching widely as she smiled. 

“Well, it’s certainly not his sense of style,” Howard had joked. 

He didn’t know what his favorite thing about his son was. He couldn’t answer the fucking question.) 

Jarvis mentions that “Sir Anthony” has a visitor at the door. 

“Are you serious, kid?” Howard says, hissing. “You told someone to come over? During a family event?” 

"No, of course not,” Tony says hurriedly. He doesn’t have anyone over to the house period. Too much risk, not enough payoff. There was also the fact that the house is basically like a mausoleum because both of his parents would rather be caught dead than spend time in one another’s company anymore. 

“I’ll go...I’ll go check who it is.” 

- 

Bucky. Fucking. Barnes. 

“What are you doing here?” Tony hisses. 

“I came to apologize.” 

“For what?” 

“For telling you that your words don’t matter?” Bucky says, more of a question. “I don’t know what else I would apologize for. Maybe for mean-mugging you. I don’t know.” 

“Why?” Tony asks, tiredly. “Why would you apologize for that?” 

“Because it’s obviously affecting you and also I know I was in the wrong? That’s why people apologize?” Bucky answers. “What I did was shitty. What you say matters, I was just having a shitty day and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. It obviously stuck with you a lot longer than I thought it would. So now I’m apologizing.” 

No one besides Jarvis has ever apologized to Tony. Ever. Not in a genuine way. 

“Did you...did you bike here? You have a bike?” 

“What? No.” 

“You walked here?” Tony asks, incredulous. 

“Of course not, then I’d be arriving, like, an hour later. No, the bike isn’t mine.” 

“Who’s is it?” 

“I don’t know, some hipster’s from Brooklyn.” 

“You stole a bike?” 

“The circumstances weren’t ideal, but I don’t have a car to drive to your freakishly large house,” Bucky said bluntly. 

Tony grins. 

“Well then, Buckster, welcome. Let me give you a ride home.” 

He pokes his head into the dining room, where the plates are already being cleared. 

“Hey, I gotta give my friend a ride home. Car broke down a couple miles from here.” 

“Why don’t you just fix it?” Howard asks. “You’re a Stark.” 

“A Stark who would need to order a part for a 1980 Ford Crown Victoria.” 

“Tell him to get a better car.” 

“Sure, pops.” 

“Don’t call me that.” 

“Alright, Dear Father of Mine.” 

“Just go, damn it!” 

- 

Bucky is led to a garage full of luxury cars that probably cost more than his whole block put together. 

“Which one you wanna go in?” 

“Am I allowed in one of these? Holy fuck these are nice.” 

Tony grins. 

“Best part about having a car is driving it. Choose one.” 

Bucky chooses a bright red car, a smooth Cadillac. 

“Holy hell, this is cool.” 

Tony drives. 

He’s a good driver once you get past the fact that you will fear for your life for at least twenty minutes. He is also notoriously terrible in the city traffic, yelling at drivers and pedestrians alike. 

“How are you still alive with the way you drive?” Bucky asks. 

“We made it, didn’t we?” Tony asks, grinning. “Now go return your bike and don’t try to walk to my house again.” 

“See you tomorrow?” 

“Naturally.” 

- 

Tony talks a lot. But Bucky finds himself listening. It still takes a while, but he talks. 

Tony really is smart. His mind just works quickly, and that’s why at school he never really seems to absorb anything. 

Bucky tells him about his neighborhood and how much he hates his neighbor because she keeps blasting music at one in the morning. 

“So? Blast it in the morning,” Tony says. “That’s what I’d do.” 

“Ma would say no.” 

“Then don’t tell her!” 

- 

When it all changes, it’s when Bucky picks him up from a gala. He gets the following text: 

pls come pick me up!! please! i’m begging! 

It’s eleven at night, but Bucky sighs and goes to get the car and goes to pick him up. 

Tony’s swaying outside. Bucky gets out, getting a pack of Marlboro out of his jacket. 

“Shouldn’t smoke,” Tony says. 

“You drunk?” 

“No, can’t risk it when Howard and Maria aren’t here--mom and dad.” 

He almost never calls his parents mom and dad. Ever. Only in public settings. 

Bucky lights up anyway. Tony stares at the orange embers flaring up. 

“Why did you need a ride?” 

“Kind of avoiding an old...enemy. Slash ex-boyfriend.” 

“The worst kind of enemy to have. He trying to talk to you?” 

“It’s been an all-night event, so--” 

The doors burst open. 

Out walks the sleaziest guy that Bucky’s ever seen. His suit is garishly designer, the kind that borders on being confused for a tacky suit that you find in a thrift store for two dollars total. 

“Tony, baby! Where have you been? I wanted to discuss things with you...in private.” 

He gives Bucky a once-over. 

“And who are you, catering?” 

Bucky immediately wants to clock this guy in the damn mouth. 

“Actually this is James, my boyfriend,” Tony says, snaking his arm around Bucky’s waist. 

At this point, he’ll just have to go with it. It’s not the worst thing that’s happened. 

“And who are you?” Bucky asks. “Sweetheart, you never mentioned you knew someone with such a...unique take on style.” 

“I’m Ty, an old and close friend,” he says. He sticks his hand out. Bucky makes him switch hands by holding out his metal hand. 

“Nice to see you,” he says. “But unfortunately, I have to take my guy back home. Plans and all that, you know how it is.” 

“Bye Ty!” Tony says. 

Bucky throws an arm around Tony’s shoulders, bringing him close. A ghost of a kiss to the forehead completes the lie, and Bucky looks back towards Ty, who has his eyes narrowed. 

He flips him off with his right hand. (It’s satisfying.) 

“Thank you so much for going along with that,” Tony says, looking up. 

The cigarette is still in his mouth. He takes a drag, letting embers fall down and disintegrate into the pavement. 

“He seemed like a shitty kind of person.” 

“Not the best of people, that’s for sure,” Tony mutters. “You wanna go get ice cream?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that.” 

- 

Getting late night ice cream is like going into a different dimension. Bucky’s not sure if it’s the overbearing, fluorescent white light that gets to him, but Tony seems tired. At ease, but tired. 

He gets strawberry ice cream, and Bucky gets chocolate. 

They sit and eat for a moment. 

“Why do you go to St. Anthony’s?” Tony asks. “It’s clear you hate it.” 

“You don’t?” 

“Not the worst school I’ve been sent to.” 

“You don’t want to be there either?” 

“There are a lot of places I don’t want to be, but this isn’t about me, I’m asking about you. You wanna share with the class or get a hall pass?” 

Bucky snorts. 

“Geez, okay. My mom really wants a good education for me.” 

"She know that you don’t know what to do?” 

“And how do you figure that?” Bucky asks, eyebrow raised. 

“You wouldn’t be working as a chauffeur for the rich kid if you knew what you were working towards,” Tony says with a shrug. “Seen it happen before. Usually I don’t know who they are, but you figure out commonalities pretty quickly.” 

That makes too much sense. 

“I have no fucking clue how I’m living my life and my mom wants me to become a businessman.” 

“You wanna do that?” 

“Do I look like the kind of guy that wants to wear a suit?” 

“You look like you’d look good in a suit, not that you’d wear one.” 

Bucky laughs. Takes a bite of ice cream, and readjusts the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. 

- 

Over the summer, he and Tony get closer. They take walks in the park and Tony drags him into overpriced shops to look at clothes that are the ugliest goddamn things they’ve ever seen. 

At some point, they hold hands and discuss secrets of the world of theirs that is unique to them. 

Bucky kisses him one night while they’re just leaving perhaps the worst restaurant in the entire state of New York and god Tony didn’t think he’d ever not mind being wrapped up in fake-strawberry scented hair and cigarette smoke clinging to clothing, but he doesn’t mind it. 

The whole summer, they’re inseparable. Tony chatters in the front seat of the car, now, and Bucky smiles a little bit more. 

They walk in parks together and show each other funny little jokes and make inside understandings and look at sunsets and sunrises and get coffee and look at each other across the room. 

- 

It’s love, honest and true. But it’s not love like the never-ending kind. The thing about love is that it is not included in any toolbox, physical or mental. There is one thing that everyone knows regardless of whether it is admitted or not: 

Love does not solve everything. It does not fix everything. And one should never rely on it to do anything but exist and work through your person to the best of its ability. 

- 

Howard comes back from a business trip. Sees Tony kiss Bucky goodbye, and that is that. 

You can’t something like that as a son. It just...it won’t work for business. 

Tony is sent to a boarding school upstate. Stricter guidelines, more controlling. 

Bucky only hears one thing from Tony: 

I’m sorry. 

And he doesn’t believe it. 

When you’re young, you think love is invincible. You think it survives through everything if you really want it to. 

Love doesn’t do that. 

Bucky writes letters, calls Jarvis, and mourns the loss of young love. He smokes a little bit more, leaves it clinging to his skin as a reminder that Tony would always wrinkle his nose in that adorable way, but it served to show Bucky that he had a bad habit. 

He was in the middle of quitting. 

His mother notices it. 

Tells him that he needs to get his own shampoo. 

“You can’t just use mine all the time,” she says playfully. 

He remembers Tony’s hands gently threading through his hair in disbelief as Bucky kissed the living hell out of him. 

Now there’s barely any trace. 

He stops in his tracks when he sees an old coffee cup of Tony’s in his kitchen cabinet. 

“When did you get this one?” Becca asks. She’s drinking out of it. He remembers Tony smiling over it at their little coffee shop that was hidden away. “I love it. It’s so cute.” 

“From a thrift store,” Bucky says. “You can have it.” 

“Really? Thanks!” 

- 

Tony pauses at the smell of cigarette smoke. Remembers blue eyes blazing along with orange embers, smoke curling around long hair and long summer nights. 

His roommate at this new school asks if he smokes, if he can get him a pack. 

“Uh, no. Just used to know someone who did.” 

“You think they could get me a pack?” 

“They don’t go here.” 

“You can’t call them?” 

Tony doesn’t respond. 

You can’t call them? 

He’s almost texted him about twenty times. Called him about thirty. 

He knows the number by heart. 

But he knows that Howard made him get a new phone, and now the memories are fading. He wishes he still had the pictures. 

- 

Love does not always last. Sometimes it is not meant to. Tony tries to tell himself that as he wakes up with tears streaming down his cheeks. 

You always wish it would. 

[shipskicksandgiggles]

Happy FFWF! What is your favorite character arc or moment of character growth that you've written? What did you like about it?

happy ffwf!!!

okay so technically my absolute favorite one hasn’t been published yet. it’s Harley going on a rant about regret and how your choices make you who you are, and writing it actually helped me to work through how I feel about my own past and yeah I was in pain but now I’m better for it

my second favorite is published. I wrote a whole thing in Commanding Affection where Tony and Bucky are talking about Tony’s parents and hydra’s involvement and Bucky being used as a weapon that resonated so hard with me for some reason. I’ll put it under this, but it was really satisfying to write and is probably in my top 5 favorite moments of the fic

Barnes came over to him while he was soldering a circuit board for what Tony hoped he could eventually turn into a solar powered coffee pot.

“You’re a genius.” It was a statement.

Tony flipped up his welders mask. “That does seem to be the general consensus, yes.”

“You said you built the future here. All this,” he gestured around the room, “is you.”

“Sure is, Barnes.”

“And you chose to build me an arm instead of inventing more things. Why?”

“Well,” Tony took the mask all the way off as he contemplated how to best say this. “Barnes, draw up a chair. I’d rather we both be sitting for this.”

Barnes found a stool at a nearby table and sat down across from Tony.

“First, I just want to say I didn’t do this to win any favors. I’m aware that I can’t buy friends with gifts. That’s not what this is.” He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. “When the Battle at the Triskelion happened, a lot of information was released. I went through the files myself to make sure no one felt like they could hide anything from me. I’ve trusted people before, and the last time I did, I ended up half dead in the middle of the desert. I hate to think what could happen if I let my guard down again.”

The man across from him just stared intently, not really responding.

“I came across a file labelled with my father’s name. Howard and I never had a good relationship, but I figured if HYDRA had info on him, I should probably look at it. What I didn’t expect was to watch my parents get murdered, that arm front and center. Howard might have deserved it, but my mom didn’t. Edwin Jarvis didn’t either. I knew when we brought you in, I would have to deal with the arm, so I built one.”

Barnes looked at the floor.

“It’s also important to me that you know I don’t blame you. HYDRA was at fault. They destroyed you and replaced you with that arm. Something more weapon than human, and I could not in good conscience let anyone live with those memories anymore. I suppose you could call it selfish, it is I’ll admit it, but you don’t deserve that either.”

After a beat of silence, Barnes held out the tin of cookies. “You can have first pick,” he said.

Tony took one, chewing slowly.

“Thank you Tony. It really means a lot.”

[hphmmatthewluther]

When Your Reflection Plots Against You: Part 1/3

Matthew Luther sighed, and leant onto a sink in the boy’s toilets. It had not been going well for him today. He loosened his blue and silver tie (he preferred it to the more traditional blue and bronze tie, and was glad to have a choice in the matter) and pushed the hair out of his face. No, today had not gone well. To start, he was nowhere nearer to finding his brother or the next Cursed Vault. Then, he found himself unable to focus on any lessons as a result, and finished the day with a shouting match with Merula Snyde, which led to Snape banning him from Hogsmeade for a week. These arguments usually made him feel a little better, though something was...off about today. Her insults seemed to hurt more, for some reason.

So there he was, looking up and seeing his hair flop in front of his face again in the mirror. Could nothing work for him today? He scowled at his own reflection.

“It isn’t fair. Everyone else seems to get by just fine. But oh no, not me. I bet even Merula does better than me. I have to be the one who struggles along...” He grumbled to himself.

“Hey...keep on stepping, my guy.” came a voice. Matthew scanned the room, hoping to see whoever had spoken.

“Nope, over here, in the mirror, you know?” He looked up, and was slightly surprised to find his own reflection replaced by someone else. He had black-and-white hair and was wearing denim jeans and a red flannel shirt. On his back was a large guitar case, which he put down at his feet.

“What’s shaking, dude?” he asked, in a way Matthew hadn’t heard anyone speak for nearly ten years. He had a smirk on his face that put Matthew off. However, it wasn’t like he had anyone else to talk to.

“Um...did you hear what I was saying?” he asked, looking around to make sure nobody saw him talking to a mirror.

“I caught a bit of it, y’know, this and that...” he said, looking around. “Sounds like you could use some assistance.”

“Well, that would be-” Matthew had to stop himself. “Hang on, who are you even?” he had to ask himself.

The boy in the mirror gave a laugh. “Right, right, sorry. I’m Edwin. Edwin Luther.” he announced, giving himself a small flourish as he did so. “And you?”

“Oh, well, funnily enough my name’s Matthew Luther.”

“Really?” said Edwin, his eyebrow raised. “Maybe we’re related.”

“Doubt it.” Matthew said, looking away. “My Dad was a Muggle, so that probably isn’t it...” 

Edwin sighed, and leant forward on the reflected sink. “So, you need my help. You want to be better around people, right?”

Matthew nodded. It certainly would be nice...sometimes, it seemed like everyone except him knew what to say, and anything he said or did only made things worse, and so often he was left doing very little...but he didn’t completely trust this guy just yet. “Okay, hang on. Before anything else...what’s your story?”

“Me?” asked Edwin, moving back slightly, “I’m trapped in all the mirrors of Hogwarts, y’know? Been here for a while, too. Most people just seem to blow me off, but you...you can see me. There’s something about you, dig?”

Matthew thought about this. One the one hand, he really ought to know by now that not everyone could be trusted. But his thoughts lingered back to his last argument with Merula...if he had done something different, maybe…

“How can you help me?” he asked, leaning closer to the mirror to get a closer look.

“Look, kid. I know people. Just, for now, you go about your day and I’ll give you advice.” Edwin explained. “In return...well, as you may have guessed, I’d like to blow this popsicle stand and return to the land of actual people...but that can come later.” He put his hand towards the mirror, and it appeared as a ghostly image on the other side. “So, we have a deal?”

Matthew looked at the spectral hand, then moved his own hand towards Edwin’s and shook it.

“Far out!” exclaimed Edwin, drawing his hand back. “Let’s boogie!”

“Before we carry on, when were you sealed in that mirror?” Matthew asked, “Cause the stuff you’re saying is...painful to hear.”

Edwin laughed and picked up his guitar case, slinging it onto his back. “Well, I was last out and about in, ooh, 1976, I think.”

Matthew’s eyes widened at this. “Blimey...ten years...okay, now what?”

“Do you have something reflective on you?” Edwin inquired. Matthew fished around in his pockets until he pulled out a silver spoon that he used in potion making. He watched as his warped reflection disintegrated, replaced by an in-proportion Edwin.

“Lovely jubbly, Matt.” began Edwin, moving around his new environment. “Now, what do you really want help with, hm?”

Matthew initially wanted to ask about the Cursed Vaults, but he somehow knew to keep that to himself. Ravenclaws were good at reading people, and there was something about Edwin that made him unsure about divulging information. Instead, he focused on what Edwin already knew.

“Well, I’d really like to do something about that argument with Merula.” Matthew whispered, as he left the toilets and joined the crowds of people in the corridors.

“Hmm...Merula, huh? So there’s a girl involved, I see…” “What? No, nonononono!” Matthew hissed, hoping nobody was paying too close attention to him. “It’s not...she isn’t...we’ve been enemies since our first year, ok?”

“Okay, you’re saying that, but it sounds to me like this bunny-”

“Don’t call her a ‘bunny’, she’d rip you apart for that.” Matthew noted.

“Righto, righto...” Edwin trailed off, “Still, it’s a route you could go for...”

“Trust me, Edwin, it really isn’t.”

They had made their way down to the Dungeons, for their last lesson of the day: Potions with Snape. Matthew was dreading this. He didn’t even have Rowan with him, as he was in Hogsmeade for the day. Then came a moment he was dreading:

“Oi, Luther!”

Matthew spun around and saw Merula Snyde walking up to him. He heard Edwin squeaking from his pocket.

“Wow, man...what did you say to her?”

“Nothing...” Matthew muttered before stepping forward to meet the Slytherin girl.

“Well, well, well. I suppose it’s time for you to make a fool of yourself. Again.” Matthew wanted to say something back, but something was stopping him from fully focusing.

“Why aren’t you at Hogsmeade?” he blurted out. He could hear Edwin sighing.

“Oh, boy...”

“None of your business, Luther!” she shouted, stomping on the ground. Edwin, who had been complaining for a few seconds, suddenly stopped.

“Hey...those are some killer boots...why don’t you talk about them? Change the subject!” he suggested. Matthew had to work very hard to mask his shock at Edwin’s advice.

“No, no, think about it. It sounds like you two talk about what keeps you apart all the time. You need to try different avenues.” Matthew was going to ignore this, but Edwin hadn’t finished. “Come on, dude. You hate each other already. I doubt her opinion of you can get worse. What do you have to lose?”

Merula was getting impatient. “Well? Cat got your tongue, Luther?”

“No, I just...never mind. Sorry for intruding, I guess. But, I...” Matthew sighed. Here we go. “How’d you convince Snape to let you wear combat boots?”

Merula looked at him, the malice in her expression replaced by pure confusion. She took a quick look at her feet, then looked straight back up at Matthew. “I...I...what?”

“Justify the question, mate. Doesn’t have to be anything good...I think her brain’s stopped working.” Edwin ordered, the smirk on his face palpable.

“It’s just...well, Flitwick’s always really on the ball about what we wear with our robes, and I’d imagined Snape would be even more on it, so...”

It was a few seconds before Merula’s brain started working again. “Oh, that...I mean, he’s never really said anything about it...”

“That doesn’t sound like Snape.” Matthew observed.

“Hah, yeah, I suppose not...” Merula pushed a hand through her hand, offering a rare smile. “I mean, if you’d seen the shoes they expect us to wear you’d do the same, if I’m honest!”

“Yeah, the dress code for boys is ever-so-slightly shorter for boys than for girls.” Matthew admitted.

“You can say that again!” exclaimed Merula, laughing at herself slightly, “You’re luckier than you know…” she paused and looked around. Nobody else was there. They had all gone to Hogsmeade, which made sense seeing as it was the first trip for the third-years. The crowd that usually watched their ‘debates’ had vanished. Now they were gone, there didn’t seem to be much point. Matthew sniffed the air. Merula coughed into her elbow.

“Um...where is Snape?” Matthew asked aloud. The two-third years looked around the Dungeons, but the man was nowhere to be seen.

“Do you think we could knock on his office door?” Matthew inquired, moving towards a dark green door that was near the empty potions classroom. However, before he could knock on the door, his arm was pulled back by Merula.

“Wait, you idiot!” she whispered, her eyes darting around the empty room. “I think he’s in there! If you interrupt him, you’ll get in trouble, and I’ll get in trouble, and...”

Matthew wanted to respond, he really did, but he was too focused on the hand that was gripping his arm. Merula must have noticed this, as she suddenly pulled her arm back, clearing her throat with it.

“Not an option, hmm?” Edwin remarked, “You two...compliment her again! Go ahead! Say how nice she looks!”

Matthew had half a mind to chuck that silver spoon out of sight, but before either of them could say anything, a ringing noise emerged from behind Snape’s door, causing both teenagers to jump. It was high-pitched and buzzing, and sounded somewhat...mugglish.

Matthew heard footsteps from the other side of the door. There was the sound of latches being undone, followed by the door being pulled open, and there in the doorway stood Professor Snape, looking rather surprised.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, the alarm still ringing, “Why are you not in Hogsmeade?”

“You barred me from going as punishment.” Matthew reminded the man, “Sir.”

Snape looked at Matthew like he had sprouted an extra head, then turned to Merula. He looked like he was about to say something, but stopped himself before doing so.

“There is work on the board.” he said hurriedly, flicking his wand at his desk to turn the ringing off. “I suppose if you finish early, you may return to your common rooms.” And with that, he was gone. Merula and Matthew stared at the corridor he had darted down before entering the classroom and getting their notebooks out. The silence was deafening. Matthew tried to focus on his work, but couldn’t help but wonder why Merula was here with him. Why hadn’t she gone to Hogsmeade?

“Am I blocking your view of the board or something?” she asked indignantly. Matthew quickly shook his head and looked back at his notes. He eyed the spoon. Edwin was smiling.

“I don’t believe it. Sev’s still at Hogwarts after all this time.” he mused. Matthew took a scrap of paper and wrote ‘You knew him before?’ on it before moving it so Edwin could see.

“Very clever, mate...and yes, I did know him. We got on well when we wanted to, but I doubt he’d be pleased to see me.”

‘Snape isn’t pleased to see anyone’ he wrote back. That got a laugh out of the strange wizard. Suddenly, something occurred to Matthew. Quickly, he wrote another note: ‘You are a wizard, right? Just checking.’

Edwin looked at the note and laughed. “Of course! Y’know, back in my day we started calling Muggles squares.”

Matthew could imagine Edwin calling a lot of people squares. He tried to focus on the work, but it was difficult to do so as Edwin kept moving across anything with a reflection, making loud observations as he did so (“That was there back then !”). What Matthew did notice, however, was that Edwin never appeared on the silver bracelet Matthew always wore. He had had an inkling that it was magical, considering how he got it, but knew very little about its origins. But no matter what, Edwin never crossed it. Matthew made a mental note of it; he was still a little unsure that he could trust him. It was then that he noticed Merula staring at his arm as well.

“What?” he said suddenly, the theories in his head quickly dispersing. “Am I doing something- I mean,”

“What is that?” she asked, pointing down.

“What?”

“No, not your bracelet, you dolt. That.” she said, poking at the biro Matthew had been using. He hadn’t even realised he was using it instead of his quill.

“Oh, that’s a pen.” Matthew explained. Merula still looked lost. “It’s like a quill, but you don’t have to keep dipping it in ink every few seconds. It’s way better.”

“Oh...” said Merula, glancing down at the several inkblots on her parchment. “Well, I think quills are better. We’ve used them for centuries, after all.”

“Yeah, I mean, so did Muggles.” Matthew reminded her, “But then we found a better way of doing things.” There was a silence, and Matthew could see Edwin examining the situation. But then, the obvious solution hit him. “Do you want one?”

Merula looked up from her parchment. “Do I...what?”

“I have loads of spare pens. I was asking if you wanted one.” Matthew fished an identical biro out of his pencil case and placed it on the table. Merula slowly moved her hand towards it, before snatching it quickly, eyeing Matthew with suspicion. She looked at her parchment, before slowly writing out a sentence with the pen. Then she kept going. She looked at the pen, then at Matthew.

“A-..And M-Muggles have been using these for...”

“A good hundred years or so, yeah.” Matthew finished. It only then occurred to him just how backward the Wizarding World could be. I mean, they had house-elves, they didn’t have electricity, and they still worried about ink stains. It was just so...trivial.

Matthew saw Edwin give him a thumbs up, before moving off to explore elsewhere. The Ravenclaw stared at his work, and quickly realised he had done very little. Furthermore, it looked like some of the most difficult potion work devised by wizardkind. A few minutes later, Merula slammed her quill on the desk in a rage.

“Aag! This is impossible!” yelled Merula, “Why isn’t this...in any way...for third-years?”

“Because it probably wasn’t for third-years.” observed Matthew, putting his own quill down, “I imagine he would have made it a test if he hadn’t been distracted by whatever that alarm was.”

“But...why would he give such advanced work to us?” Merula asked.

“Actually, he probably planned to give it to me.” Matthew looked over at the board again. “He wasn’t expecting you to be here, remember?”

Merula nodded at this, frowning. “Thanks for the extra work, Luther. Much appreciated.”

“Anytime.” Matthew replied with a smile.

Merula returned a smirk, before gesturing at the work before them. “Well, if you’ve got any ideas, I’m all ears.”

Edwin had been silently guiding Matthew for a lot of this, but was starting to get slightly louder now. “Okay, now flirt a little.”

Matthew really had to focus to keep his face still now. He stared at the problem at hand. With regards to a Dreamless Sleep potion, discuss whether the Fleamont or Daedalus approach is more effective at preventing Rapid Eye Movement, and-

“Oh come on, dude!” Edwin moved from the spoon to the various bottles around the room, passing by the reversed lettering on the labels. “You are alone with a girl. How much more perfect can this get?” Matthew was surprised to find himself considering the previously unthinkable. Sure, these sorts of thoughts had started showing up recently, but they were never...realistic. But he had to admit that Edwin had a point. Nobody else was around. They could talk without being egged on by anyone nearby. They could just...reflect on things.

“Well?” said Merula, leaning forward slightly to hover over the book, “Anything?”

Matthew shook his head, turning towards the Slytherin. “‘Fraid not. I mean, we haven’t learnt either of these approaches, and all I can tell you is that one of them is named after Fleamont Potter, but that’s about it.”

Merula didn’t move back, but pulled the book closer to her, albeit with Matthew’s hand still on it. She gazed at the question with clear irritation. Edwin looked on from a nearby flask.

“Hey, Matt...you thinking what I’m thinking?” Both boys turned around and looked at Snape’s office through the open door. Even from here, they could see a large file on the desk, but not what had caused the ringing.

“What is it?” Merula asked, noticing that Matthew had turned away from the work.

“This is going nowhere.” Matthew admitted. “We don’t have a solution, but I imagine Snape might...”

He turned back to her and pointed at the office. Merula eyed it for a moment, then turned back to him. She seemed to be processing what Matthew was suggesting.

“If he comes back, we’re dead.” Merula said, looking straight at Matthew.

“If we don’t do the essay, we’re dead.” Matthew reminded her, trying desperately not to sound stressed.

“You really think Snape’s stitched us up?”

“Well, if the Greatest Witch in all of Hogwarts can’t do it, who can?”

“Good point.” Merula got off her stool and moved towards the corridor. “Nobody’s there. Let’s go.”

They quickly slipped into the office, Matthew closing the door behind him. It was just as dark and dingy as the rest of the rooms in the Dungeons, although this room was slightly more colourful, with a large red chest of drawers behind the desk. On the left wall of the room was a large silver box with a bell on it, which he assumed had made the alarm. It reflected everything perfectly, yet for some reason Edwin didn’t appear in it. It was like he couldn’t even see it was there. Attached to the box was a note, which read:

Severus,

Before she died, she returned here to place one of these in each of the Heads of House’s offices to warn us when they rear their heads again. She also said that if one was ever to emerge, they would have to be banished again via the way they came in, if that helps any. The devices are a mixture of magic and “science” the likes of which the world has never seen. I can only imagine the things she could have done with her magic if she were still with us.

Good luck, and do Slytherin proud,

-Horace.

“Find anything?!” Edwin yelled from the other side of the room. He was awfully loud, yet it was odd to see Merula completely unable to hear it. Matthew quietly shook his head, and left the box alone. 

The two scoured over the room until Merula noticed an open book on Snape’s desk.

“Hah, here it is!” she exclaimed, leaning right onto the desk so that her feet left the floor. Edwin chose this moment to reappear in a nearby mirror.

“Wow, you choose well...that is one fine...”

“Shut up...” Matthew said under his breath. He didn’t just hate that Edwin was saying some outrageous things when Merula was right in front of them, but he hated that he found himself agreeing. He moved next to Merula, keeping his eyes away from her lower robes, and positioned himself next to her.

“Now how were we supposed to know that?” Merula said, scowling, before turning to Matthew. “Well, I mean, how were you supposed to know that. It’s...it’s...”

He nodded in return. “It’s bull. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s been doing this the entire time. Hang on…” Matthew sifted through the papers, until he caught a glimpse of a tiny post-it note with three equations on it. There was one labelled “Slyth'', one labelled “Other”, and one filled with division signs called “Weaks''. Merula’s jaw dropped.

“He’s...he’s been...but that’s...” she stammered, taking the post-it note with her hand. 

Matthew didn’t know what to say. He knew exactly what sort of thoughts were running through her head, as they’d run through his head time and time again. What on earth could he do? Edwin saw them struggling, and pointed at a sheet of paper on the far side of the desk. It was a collection of raw test scores. Matthew allowed himself to smile.

“Merula, look.” he said, offering her the table. “It’s the scores before they’ve been altered.”

The two gazed down the list until they came to “Snyde, Merula”, under which there was a list of perfect scores. Merula took the file with both hands as a smile formed on her face, as her breathing began to relax.

“So...panic over?” Matthew asked hopefully.

She looked up at him, the happiest she had been for a while. “Panic over, Luther.”

After about half an hour, they had both written an essay which was good enough to get a pass but original enough for Snape not to notice. Matthew put his hands behind his head and leant back on his stool.

“Boy, I can’t wait to see the look on Snape’s face when he sees our essays.” he mused, “He can’t even punish us! We’ve done the work!”

Merula smirked as she packed her things away. “Don’t get smug, Luther. He’ll find something to get you for next lesson.”

“Maybe, though I doubt it.” said Matthew. “Now I know his secret he’s a lot less of a threat.”

“As if!” Merula retorted. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around at all. They hadn’t heard anyone nearby, not even the first or second years.

“It...really is quiet, huh?” Matthew said, turning back to Merula.

“Mm, funny that.” said Merula. She paused. “Are we really the only ones here?”

“Yes, yes you are, Matt.” said Edwin, grinning, “Think of what could be!”

Matthew’s imagination began to kick into high gear. Moving towards her. Telling her how he hated their rivalry. How he wanted to be friends. How he wanted…

“Well,” she said, moving towards the door. “That’s that, I suppose.”

“Wait!” Matthew said suddenly, surprising himself. Merula looked a little shocked at that too.

“Come on, the castle’s all yours, right?” whispered Edwin, “You can do whatever you want...” At this, an idea suddenly struck Matthew.

“I was just thinking.”

“First time for everything.” Merula remarked.

“No, listen. Most of the school’s in Hogsmeade, right?”

“Yes...”

“So, nobody’s going to notice us if we...look for clues for the next Vault?”

Merula stared at him for a moment, then smiled. “Alright, sure. I suppose you won’t get another opportunity, and why wouldn’t you want to work with Hogwarts’ Greatest Ever Witch?”

“Quite so. Shall we?” Matthew said, gesturing up the stairs.

Merula smirked, and headed up the stairs, Matthew following after. This could actually work out, Matthew thought, glancing at Edwin in the silver again. He was grinning wildly. He moved around all the metals they passed as Matthew and Merula scoured the grounds for clues. As they did so, something occurred to the Ravenclaw. Edwin was a wizard, and he clearly knew Snape, but something was off. He meant to ask the strange boy about it, but he was too close to Merula at any given time to risk it, and that was a distraction in and of itself. Nevertheless, the question remained:

Where was Edwin’s wand?

[eddiesasspbrak]

When I’m With You Ch.1

Eddie can't stand the barista at his favorite coffee shop. Richie has fallen in love with the man he sees twice a week. Stan is dating someone but won't let his friends meet them. Ben is in love with Beverly, but is so afraid of scaring her away he's not moving forward. Chaotic friends navigating college together.

Read on AO3

Ch.2

6k+ words

“Please.” Ben begged, gripping his friend’s shoulders from behind as he followed him into the classroom.

“No.” Eddie slapped his hands away and sat in his preferred seat.

“But she’s so pretty and perfect and I want to go out with her.”

“Then you ask her out.”

“I can’t. What if she says no?”

“She can still say no if I ask her for you.” Eddie pointed out, unzipping his bag and pulling out his notebook and a pen.

“If she says no to you, I won’t die of embarrassment.” Ben plopped down into his seat beside Eddie, frowning.

Eddie rolled his eyes and opened his notebook to a fresh, clean page. Ben, one of his best friends, wanted to ask out a girl they met on campus. He fell in love with her at first sight and had been trying to work up the courage to ask her out for months. Every time he saw her, he turned into a babbling mess and lost his nerve. Eddie made the mistake of letting him know that she was in one of his classes and now he was determined to get Eddie’s help asking her out.

“What if I just invite her to hang out with us and conveniently get a call and leave you two alone?” Eddie suggested, taking pity on his sulking friend.

Ben perked up and thought that over. “That could work. Do you think she’ll say yes?”

“We have class today. I’ll ask her when I see her.”

Ben leaned over and placed his head on Eddie’s shoulder, a big grin on his face. His arms snaked around Eddie’s middle and he hugged him tight. Eddie sighed, but patted his arm and dropped his cheek to the top of Ben’s head.

“I’ll make it up to you. I promise.” Ben said.

“You bet your ass you will.” Eddie responded.

They separated as the professor stood from the front desk and began speaking. Ben was positively beaming for the entire class and Eddie swore he saw him scribbling her name in his notebook instead of taking notes. Honestly, he was jealous of his friend. He’d finally come out when he’d come to college, except to his mom, and hadn’t had much luck in the relationship department. He did make out with an average looking guy at a party, but it hadn’t been great, and he spent the next two weeks ignoring his texts. Why he even gave the guy his number he’ll never know. Blame it on desperation and alcohol.

*

Eddie would forever kick himself for signing up for an early class this semester. Ben was always perky in the morning, up early to go for a jog before the sun was even up. Eddie, on the other hand, was not a morning person. If Ben didn’t call him, he would never get up in time for class. He was lucky to stay awake until the end of class. He said goodbye to Ben and immediately made his way across campus and into town where a little coffee shop waited.

Eddie had begun frequenting this shop after his early class for a caffeinated pick me up. It was close to the building his class was located in and by the time he got there the line wasn’t too awfully long. It gave Eddie plenty of time to drink his coffee and relax before he had to head off to his next class. There were big, squishy chairs all over the café that Eddie really liked. He’d almost fallen asleep in them countless times, but he couldn’t resist. Most of the other patrons were always on their way somewhere else so early in the morning so it was mostly empty and quiet too and the music was never played too loud over the speakers. It was Eddie’s favorite place and almost perfect.

As he entered the shop and joined the queue, he groaned inwardly at the person behind the counter. Yes, this place was almost perfect, except for the man who seemed to work this shift every day that Eddie had class. He was very friendly, smiled at every customer. More accurately, he was smiling at whatever stupid joke he’d just made about their order or their name. He had no filter and it annoyed Eddie endlessly. He was the definition of a man child. He recognized Eddie every time and already knew what he was going to order. A medium coffee, black.

Eddie dreaded having to interact with him again. It’s like he had an ongoing bet with himself, whether he could make Eddie laugh and piss him off first. It was usually the latter. The most annoying thing he did, in Eddie’s opinion, was the way he wrote his name on his cup. The very first time he’d simply made the mistake of spelling his name like ‘Eddy’. Whatever, that was fine. It didn’t bother him. Ever since then, though, it seemed like he tried to mess up his name in new and unusual ways. How does one misspell the name Edward? Some notable names he’d written down in the past were: Eugene, Edwin, Elliot, Eduardo, Emmett, Eli, and Eileen. However, when he would call out the name for the order he always said ‘Eddie’, so he knew exactly what he was doing, and it was infuriating.

Despite how annoying he was, he was also extremely efficient at his job combined with the guy making the drinks. The line moved quickly and there wasn’t a long wait for your drink to be delivered, even the complicated ones. Which meant that Eddie only had to stand at the counter for a short amount of time. As long as the cashier was willing to leave him alone. Which was extremely unlikely. When it was Eddie’s turn in line, he was met with a wide, crooked grin.

“Good morning, Eddie. It’s Thursday.” The man said.

“Yes. It is.” Eddie responded, hoping he wouldn’t continue. “I’ll have-.”

“Medium coffee. Black. Right?”

Eddie nodded, already holding the cash in his hand for the other to take. The guy punched a few buttons on the screen before looking back at Eddie, ignoring the money in his hand.

“You’re late today. I was beginning to wonder if you skipped class today.” He said, leaning his hip against the counter.

Eddie looked back to see there was no one in line behind him and he sighed. He’d made the mistake on his first trip to the coffee shop of telling this man that he had taken on an early Tuesday, Thursday class in passing. He regretted giving him any personal information about him as he absorbed it like a dry sponge.

“Class ran a little long. Here, my money.” Eddie held his hand a little higher, in his line of sight.

“I was sure you had stood me up for our weekly date.” He winked, still ignoring the money.

“I just come here to get coffee.”

“Oh, Eddie, we both know that it’s not the coffee that keeps you coming back here. You come here to ogle me while I make your coffee. It’s my wit and wiles that have you drawn to this little coffee shop twice a week.” He was very dramatic as he spoke, putting his hand to his forehead and leaning across the counter. “I’m beginning to think there is no morning class that has you making the trip here. You can deny it all you want, my dear but I know what your ulterior motives are.” He placed one finger beneath Eddie’s chin and tilted his head up a bit.

Eddie’s face turned bright red as he leaned away and swatted his hand away. This was typical and Eddie honestly couldn’t tell if he was supposed to be flirting with him or if he just liked the way Eddie reacted. For instance, at the moment Eddie was flustered and unable to keep his cool any longer.

“Can you please stop and just take my fucking money.” He grumbled, holding the money out again.

He grinned exceptionally wide and took the money, very slowly counting it out and putting it in the register. “There’s no need to use such language, my dear. I know you can’t stand to be around me for too long lest you leap over this counter and do indecent things.”

Eddie positively fumed as he waited for him to fiddle with the register as if he was getting change. He knew exactly how much he had to pay so he always had exact change. It was all just for show to keep him standing there that much longer. While he waited, trying to calm himself, he dropped two dollars in the tip jar, he may hate the guy, but he wasn’t an asshole. Unable to calm himself completely, he tapped his foot impatiently while waiting for his receipt. He really didn’t need it, but it was like a compulsion to keep every receipt he received. He finally handed over his receipt and turned to the other guy behind the counter.

“I’ll make this one, Mikey.”

The other guy, Mike, looked over to see Eddie before smiling and shaking his head. So, it wasn’t just in his imagination. Even his coworker could tell that this guy just enjoyed annoying Eddie as long as he possibly could.

Eddie carefully folded his receipt in half and tucked it in his pocket as he walked to the end of the counter to wait for his coffee. He watched as the guy took a cup and scribbled something on it with marker. Eddie could already feel the annoyance for whatever name he was given today. The ever-present grin on his face didn’t help as he poured the coffee into the cup and put a lid and cardboard sleeve onto it.

“Coffee for Eddie.” He said, holding the cup high in the air, too high for Eddie to reach.

Eddie just stared up, refusing to jump to try and get the cup from him. He was too tired for this shit and he hoped the daggers he was mentally sending to the other showed on his face. He smiled down at him, and waited, expectantly.

“Can I just have my coffee?” Eddie asked.

“Oh, of course. I need a thank you first though.”

Eddie sighed loudly and a bit more dramatically than necessary to show how over this routine he was. “Thank you.” He grumbled.

“Thank you…what?” He asked.

“Thank you, Richie.” Eddie said through clenched teeth.

Finally, the cup was lowered to his hands and he snatched it away carefully, storming away from the counter and to the farther chair from the counter that was currently available. He looked down at the cup and just above the cardboard sleeve the name “Estiban” was written. Mike came to stand beside Richie, slapping a hand down on his shoulder.

“Why do you do that to him?” He asked with a smile.

“He’s cute. I like the faces he makes when he’s mad.” Richie shrugged.

“You know he hates you, right?”

“Nah. I’m going to marry that man one day.”

Mike laughed as the bell above the door chimed and they went back to their stations to wait for the next order. Richie could clearly see Eddie sitting in the large chair, sipping his coffee and looking like he might fall asleep. As he took the next customer’s order and entered it on the screen, he stole glances over at the tired boy. Richie couldn’t help smiling as he fought to keep his eyes open while taking another sip from his cup, his face scrunching up in disgust from the taste. It was like this every time, he hated the coffee, but he kept coming back and ordering it and drinking every last drop. Richie was smitten.

*

When Eddie arrived at his afternoon class, Bev was already there, her bag in the seat beside her to save it for him. As he approached, she moved her bag and smiled at him. She was annoyingly beautiful, and Eddie understood why Ben was so in love with her. If he liked girls, he’d probably be in love with her too. He greeted her and took his seat, immediately putting his head down on his arms, staring up at her sideways.

“I’m exhausted.” He said, followed by a yawn.

“Aren’t you always?”

“Yes.”

She grinned at him and pulled her phone from her pocket. She was really into fashion design and would often show him what pieces she was working on or had finished. She opened her camera roll and slid her phone across the table to him. He lifted his head and looked down at the pictures of a dress hung from a hanger, only one sleeve attached.

“I can’t decide if I like it with sleeves or not.” She explained. “The original sketch had sleeves, but then I really liked the way it was looking and once I attached one sleeve, I just wasn’t sure anymore.”

Eddie covered half the picture with his hand before switching and doing the same to the other side. He liked that she asked his opinion, especially seeing as she made fun of his fashion sense relentlessly. It showed that she trusted his opinion and he liked knowing that. He really enjoyed their friendship and silently hoped that if she dated Ben and they broke up, it wouldn’t somehow impact their relationship. He’d really hate to lose her.

“I like it without the sleeve.” He finally said after looking at each side several times.

“Right? Ok, it’s decided. Thanks.” She leaned over and put her arm around him in a half hug, kissing his cheek.

He rubbed at his cheek with his sleeve, knowing there was bound to be a red lipstick mark left behind. Now seemed like a good time to ask her to hang out and he honestly worried he’d forget if he didn’t ask her soon. He just had to be casual about it. “So, hey, what are you doing tomorrow night?”

“Mmmm, I was going to get drinks with a friend.” She said, taking her phone back and sliding it back into her pocket.

“Ben and I are doing the same. We should meet up, go together.”

“Yea, that sounds good.” She smiled brightly. “I could use a buffer anyway. My friend can be a bit…much.”

“Oh, joy. Please bring them.” Eddie was sarcastic and it made Bev snort out a laugh.

“He’s really not that bad. He just gets very mouthy when he drinks. More than usual anyway.”

“Well, luckily I’ll have a few drinks in me too.”

Eddie pulled his phone out and sent a quick text to Ben. ‘Talked to Bev. She’s down. Tomorrow night. Bringing a friend though.’ A second later Ben responded with a smiley face. Eddie already knew that Ben wouldn’t worry about the addition of a fourth person. He knew that Eddie would be able to distract the friend and he tried not to let that bother him. After all, it was mostly his idea to begin with so he couldn’t be too upset at the idea of being left with Bev’s friend.

*

There were few things Eddie enjoyed more than anything else. He enjoyed cleaning, organization, spending time with his friends. But the thing he enjoyed most was sitting in his quiet apartment, completely alone, enjoying the rest of his free afternoon. He’d picked up lunch on the way home and sat at his kitchen counter to eat it, scrolling through social media on his phone. After he cleaned up his lunch dishes, he moved to the living room to do some reading for class. This time of day on a Thursday most everyone was out so he couldn’t even hear his neighbors through the walls. It was utter bliss, until.

Eddie jolted when he heard the music and groaned dramatically as he flopped back on his couch. Every so often, one of his neighbors down the hall chose to listen to their music at an obnoxiously loud volume. And every time, Eddie silently hated them. It wasn’t even good music half the time, and even when it was, he didn’t want to hear it thumping through the walls and into his apartment. He stood and went to his bedroom, retrieving his earplugs from his bedside table.

He pressed them into his ears as he made his way back to the couch. They blocked out most of the noise, but he could steal hear it and feel the thump, thump, thump in his chest from the beat. There was no way he was going to finish his reading now or take a much needed nap. The buzz from the coffee he’d had a few hours earlier was long gone and he wasn’t willing to go back for another. One interaction with Richie a day was enough for him. He really ought to buy a coffee pot for his apartment. At least one of the little pod ones that made one cup at a time. He would save money and wouldn’t have to ever go to that coffee shop again. His life would be Richie free and he’d have coffee in class instead of after. He pulled out his phone to make a note to himself to price coffee machines when he saw he missed a text from Bev.

Bev: Hey, do you know what bar you’re going to yet?

Eddie: We haven’t really discussed it. Some place local, I guess. Maybe near campus

Bev: Have you heard of My Mom’s Bar? It’s down on Engle.

Eddie: I’ve heard of it, never been there though

Bev: It’s one of my favorites. Doesn’t get to crazy even on Fridays. You down?

Eddie: I’ll talk to Ben, but it should be fine

He switched from the conversation with Bev to the one with Ben and typed a quick message to him.

Eddie: Bev wants to go to My Mom’s Bar. Is that ok with you?

Ben: Your mom owns a bar?

Eddie: What? No. That’s the name of the place.

Ben: oooooh. Yea that’s fine. I’ll go anywhere as long as Bev is there.

Eddie: Even a gay bar?

Ben: As long as she doesn’t fall for another girl or a bi dude while we’re there. That could happen anywhere though

Eddie: True

He let Bev know that they were fine with her pick and they made arrangements to meet there around ten. He gave the information to Ben, planned to meet up at Eddie’s place beforehand. The idea of going out the following night and socializing was already so tiring. He liked spending time with his friends, but this wasn’t a regular social call. He’d have to interact with someone he didn’t know, orchestrate a plan and an excuse for him and the stranger to leave them alone. He really felt like he needed that nap now and silently cursed the inconsiderate neighbor with the clearly broken headphones.

*

Eddie spent most of his Friday at home alone, working on homework and finally finishing the reading he needed to do for class. If he was going to spend the evening in a crowded bar, interacting with strangers, then he wasn’t going to have a single second of human interaction the rest of the day. Eddie valued his alone time and he wasn’t going to feel bad about it.

It was now evening. He’d eaten a light dinner, knowing well that Ben would order bar food and how he was incapable of ignoring it when he’d been drinking. Still, he wasn’t willing to drink on an empty stomach. He prided himself on the fact that he had never once had a hangover or puked from drinking and he wasn’t about to start now.

Ben arrived at his door while he was still trying to decide if his outfit was fine for going out with friends. It was cold out, the winter months only half over, so he chose one of his favorite sweaters that was just slightly too big for him. He chose jeans, which he wouldn’t usually pair with this sweater, but he figured it was appropriate for a casual night out. Especially since he didn’t expect to be there too long. He and Ben had worked out a signal for when he was ready for Eddie to leave them. He hoped it wouldn’t take too long for him to work up the courage.

When Eddie opened the door a few minutes after buzzing him in through the downstairs door, Ben was bouncing on the balls of his feet with nervous energy. The smile on his face looked slightly panicked and Eddie couldn’t help but laugh. Ben’s smile fell away and he immediately looked down at himself.

“Is it my outfit? Is it stupid?” Ben asked.

“Your outfit is fine. I was laughing at how crazy you look.” Eddie giggled, stepping aside for Ben to enter.

“I look crazy? Should I cancel? What if Bev thinks I’m crazy?”

“You just need to calm down. You’ve hung out with her before. She likes you.”

“Does she though?” He placed his hands on Eddie’s shoulders and shook him slightly. “Is this all a big mistake?”

“Jesus…maybe you should do a shot or six before she gets to the bar.” Eddie shook Ben loose so he could go to the couch to slip his shoes on. “If you get too nervous then I’ll just stay. I won’t leave until you give me the signal.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, I promise. Please chill.”

Eddie grabbed his jacket and his keys and double checked that he had his phone before ushering Ben back out the door and toward the elevator. Ben’s nerves didn’t settle on the way out to the waiting uber Eddie had ordered, and he babbled on and on about Bev to their poor driver. When they arrived at the bar, Eddie practically had to pull him from the backseat of the car and mentally made a note to give their driver a glowing review.

As they showed their IDs at the door, Eddie hoped that Ben’s nervousness wouldn’t be considered suspicious as neither one looked their age. Somehow, they got in without issue and Eddie did a scan of the place. It wasn’t huge. The floor plan was open, the bar against the wall to the left of the door and tabled scattered across the room. They didn’t see Bev yet and Eddie wasn’t sure if that was good for Ben’s nerves or absolutely terrible.

“Let’s get a table while there’s still some open.” Eddie said, grabbing Ben’s arm and steering him to a table near the wall.

They sat, Eddie’s back to the door and Ben across from him. Which maybe wasn’t the best seating arrangement as Ben’s eyes were fixed to the door. Part of Eddie knew that things would get easier when Beverly arrived. She had a way of breaking Ben out of his shell. Any idiot could see they were made for each other and, while Eddie really didn’t want to be there, he was happy to help them get one step closer to being together.

“Should we order drinks now? Or do we wait?” Ben asked, quickly glancing at Eddie before looking back to the door.

“We’re not losing our table. Just wait until they get here.” Eddie was already so tired.

“Should I offer to pay for her? What if…she…” Ben’s voice trailed off as a light flush flooded his cheeks with color.

Eddie was sure that meant Bev had arrived and he lightly kicked him under the table. “Be cool. You’re drooling.”

“Hey boys.” Bev said as she approached.

Ben stood abruptly, his chair scraping loudly against the floor as it was pushed back with the movement. Eddie winced at the sound and gave him a look that said, ‘what the fuck?’. He always did this, acting like he needed to stand as soon as she entered the room like some dude in a Jane Austen novel.

“Hello, Beverly. You look nice.” Ben said, the words tumbling from his mouth.

“Thank you, Benjamin.” She grinned. “Hey Eddie.” She patted him on the shoulder and moved to sit beside Ben.

Eddie looked over his shoulder and saw no fourth person coming to join them. Maybe this would be easier than he thought. He looked back to them in time to see Ben nearly miss his chair when he went to sit down. Luckily, Bev was looking down at her phone and didn’t notice. Eddie stifled the laugh that nearly broke free, trying to save his friend any embarrassment.

“I thought you were bringing a friend.” Eddie said, bringing Bev’s attention back to the table.

“I did. He’s outside talking to the dude checking IDs. When we were walking to the door, he pulled a fake mustache from his pocket and intentionally gave the guy a really shitty fake ID. It had a picture of some guy like twice our age, bald, with a mustache. I left him there while he tried to prove it was a joke and that his actual ID was real.” She rolled her eyes, but she was grinning from ear to ear.

“What if he doesn’t make it in?” Ben asked.

“His loss. I told him to stop pulling shit like this.” She shrugged, before nodding toward the door. “There he is.”

Eddie turned to look, and his stomach dropped to the floor. He quickly turned back to the table and tried to make himself invisible. He’d been worried about having to hang out with this stranger, dreading what an awful night it would be. He just never considered how awful it truly could be. The last person he wanted to see had just strode into the bar, tucking a fake mustache back into his pocket.

“How’d you manage to convince him, Richie?” Bev asked, leaning back in her seat.

“I asked him if he really thought I’d be stupid enough to use a fake ID that looked that bad. He said yes but let me in anyway.” He responded, putting his hands on the back of the only empty seat beside Eddie.

“Idiot.” Bev laughed. “Well, introductions are necessary, I guess. This is Ben, and this is Eddie.”

Eddie gave up trying to make himself disappear when Bev said his name. He looked up into the glasses covered eyes of none other than Richie, the barista from the café. The man who made his Tuesday and Thursday coffee runs so detestable. The grin on his face was hard to ignore and Eddie wished he’d gotten a drink before they arrived.

“Holy shit, Eddie.” Richie said, finally sitting in the chair. “I’ve never seen you out in the wild like this.”

“You two know each other?” Bev asked, looking between the two.

“Eds here comes into the shop twice a week to grace me with his presence.”

“Don’t call me that.” Eddie said, leaning against the wall and hoping he could somehow fuse through it.

Richie, thankfully, turned to look at Ben instead. “So, this is Ben? He’s hot.”

Ben smiled as the color on his cheeks grew darker. “Oh, I, um…you…you too?” He said, visible flustered.

“Don’t embarrass him Richie.” Bev scolded with a smile. “As punishment, you will be fetching the first round.”

“Yes milady.” Richie said as he stood and swooped down into a dramatic bow.

“I can help carry drinks.” Ben chimed in, standing quickly.

Eddie hated himself. Hated that he cared so dearly for his friend and his desire to fall in love. Hated the words that were about to come out of his mouth. “Stay. I’ll help.” He put his hand out to Ben, urging him to sit as he stood.

Richie seemed surprised as they walked side by side to the bar. Eddie tried not to look at him, really not wanting to interact with him. This was, of course, a good chance to let him know of the plan. Hopefully, Richie wasn’t interested in Beverly. If he was, he could potentially ruin the night for Ben and then he’d have to hate him even more than he did before.

“You’re not going to cheat on me, are you?” Richie asked, just as Eddie was about to open his mouth.

“What?” He narrowed his eyes at the other.

“Their menu says they offer coffee.” Richie pointed up at the chalkboard menu above the bar. “I know it will be hard to resist but drinking another man’s coffee does constitute cheating in my books.”

“Oh my God.” Eddie sighed. “I think I need something a little stronger if I’m going to survive a night out with you and your jokes.” He shot back.

Richie grinned and chuckled. “So, I should get you drunk to make you like me. Good to know.”

Eddie was going to say something along the lines of ‘no amount of alcohol will make me like you’ when the bartender came over to take their order. They opened a joint tab and ordered a round of beer, a light beer for Eddie. Each grabbed two bottles and carried them back to the table where Bev was telling Ben a story.

“So, he jumped from the roof of the fake building swinging the wooden sword down like it was a guitar he was going to smash and when it hit the stage it broke. The top part flew across the room and hit Jared in the arm. He stumbled back trying to get away from it and fell right off the stage and now he’s in a cast.” She was saying.

Eddie handed a beer to Ben and reclaimed his seat. “What are you talking about?” He asked.

“I was telling Ben the reason we aren’t allowed to use wooden swords in class anymore. They’re all rubber now and for a while we had to use long balloons until the rubber ones came in.”

“In my defense, I didn’t think the sword would break.” Richie said as he sat.

“Maybe so, but your actions still caused poor Jared to break his ankle.” Bev said, taking a swig of her beer.

“You go to the same school?” Eddie asked, looking at Richie. He’d never seen him on campus, never saw him with Bev. She’d never even mentioned him before as a friend.

“Theater major.” He said.

“Why is that not surprising.”

“I can’t tell if that was an insult or not.” Bev laughed.

Eddie shrugged. Their conversation continued this way for a while, discussions of school and classes and how each of them met. Beverly hadn’t known that Eddie and Ben had actually grown up together in a small rural town. Ben was visibly embarrassed when Eddie pulled out his phone and found some old pictures of them from middle school. Bev and Richie loved the photos though and teased them for how dorky they looked.

“So, wait, you actually carried a fanny pack?” Richie was laughing.

The drinks had been flowing for a while by this point and each of them was more than a little tipsy. As predicted, Ben had suggested ordering some bar food for the table. Beverly had been more than willing to order food, going to the bar and grabbing a menu. Half empty plates of wings, pretzel sticks with beer cheese, mozzarella sticks and fries sat between them.

“Why is that funny, asshole?” Eddie asked, pointing at him with the top of his bottle.

“No, it’s uh…” Richie laughed again. “I’m sure you were very fashionable.”

“It wasn’t about fashion. It was about function. I kept my inhaler in there.”

“Isn’t that what pockets are for?”

“I need another drink. Ben?” Bev said, standing.

Ben nodded and stood, following after Bev. Eddie reached over and grabbed another fry from the plate, washing it down with a mouthful of beer. He knew that Richie was watching him, but he tried to ignore it. They’d been bickering all night and he wanted just a second of peace and silence. Of course, Richie wasn’t about to comply with his wishes.

“Tell me something.” He said with a smile.

“Ok, you’re not funny.” Eddie said, making himself laugh in his buzzed state.

“No. Tell me why you always order black coffee when you seem to hate it.”

“I don’t hate it.”

“You look like you want to die whenever you take a sip.”

Eddie had never realized that Richie watched him while he sat in the café and drank his coffee. It made him feel slightly embarrassed and a little uncomfortable. He knew the guy liked to tease him and test out stupid jokes on him, but he didn’t know that he paid so much attention to him.

“My friend Stanley says you just have to get used to drinking black coffee and eventually you’ll love it.” He explained.

Richie laughed. “Why would you do that to yourself?”

“It’s better than loading it down with a bunch of cream and sugar and flavored syrup. It’s empty calories.”

“Ok, so you don’t want added calories in your coffee, you drink light beer, but I just watched you help the rest of us devour a bunch of fried foods. Explain.”

“It’s not like I’m counting calories or anything. I just don’t think it’s smart to drink your calories. If you drink sugary crap all day then you’ll gain weight and spike your blood sugar. It’s not good for you.”

“So, then what do you drink?”

“Water, mostly. Sometimes I indulge in a soda with my meal if I’m so inclined.”

“Oh my God. You’re like an old man.”

“Fuck you. I just care about my body.” Eddie said, downing the last of his beer. He looked to the bar to see if Bev and Ben were headed back with another round yet, but he couldn’t see them. “Where did they go?”

Richie looked back and scanned the bar only to come up empty. “Must have left.”

“What the hell. Why wouldn’t he tell me he was leaving?”

“It wasn’t his choice. Bev had this plan from the start to ditch us so she could spend some time alone with him.”

“Are you fucking serious?” Eddie now realized that he never did get the chance to tell Richie about their plan. “Ben was supposed to give me a signal to leave them alone here. I can’t believe you didn’t warn me.”

“You didn’t warn me about your plan. What were you going to do with me?”

“I don’t know. I figured I’d just go home.”

Richie raised his eyebrows and grinned. “So, you were planning to take me home?

“Oh, fuck off. You know what I meant.” Eddie stood and grabbed his jacket. “Well, if they’re gone, I’m leaving too.”

Eddie slipped his jacket on, not catching the way Richie’s smile finally fell away and was replaced with a frown. He stood as well and followed Eddie to the bar. They closed out their tab and split the cost, though Eddie planned to get at least half of that back from Ben for ditching him without warning. He resisted the urge to pull his phone out and text him to let him know he sucked, but he was with Bev and that’s what he wanted. Why did he have to be such a supportive friend?

Without saying goodbye, Eddie turned to leave but Richie was close on his heels. They walked out into the night and Eddie realized he hadn’t even bothered to order an uber. He pulled his phone out and opened the app, only to realize that Richie was staring down at him expectantly.

“What?” He asked, glancing at him before turning his attention back to his phone.

“Before you head home do you want to get some…ice cream?” He asked.

Eddie finally looked at him. “It’s like thirty degrees out here. There’s snow on the ground. And you want ice cream?”

Richie shrugged. “Yes?”

“Yea, I’ll pass.”

“Ok, it doesn’t have to be ice cream. There’s a 24-hour diner close by with really good pie.”

“I think I’d rather go home and sleep.”

“I’ll treat.”

Eddie’s fingers paused on his screen. He really didn’t want to spend any more time with this man, but he knew of the diner he was talking about and their pie was amazing. It was the offer to pay for him that really had him considering saying yes. He was going to respond when Richie’s phone chimed. He pulled it from his pocket and frowned down at the screen.

“Shit. I um…I have to go somewhere but…rain check on the pie?” He asked, giving him a sheepish smile.

Eddie couldn’t help thinking he looked disappointed. “Yea. Maybe.”

Richie said goodbye with that same look for disappointment still on his face as he rushed off down the street. Eddie was lucky enough to get an uber that was already close by. As soon as he got home, he collapsed on his couch and sent a text to Ben.

Eddie: You left me alone with Richie. You owe me. Big

He didn’t expect to hear from him until tomorrow with a full report of what happened with Beverly. Eddie was happy for his friend. He could tell that Bev liked him too and he wanted them to be together. Wanted them both to be happy. He just couldn’t help but feel jealous. He wanted to like someone, to have someone like him back. Longed for companionship and love. He fell asleep on the couch remembering the look Richie had given him when he left and wondering where he had to rush off to.

[edxwin-elric]

Ch 1. Bachelorette Party

Rating: T (mature/smut topics of discussion)

Pairing: Edwin/Edward Elric x Winry Rockbell, Havolina/Jean Havoc x Rebecca Havolina, Implied Royai/Roy Mustang x Riza Hawkeye, Almei/Alphonse Elric x Mei Chang

Disclaimer: I don’t own Fullmetal Alchemist.

Word Count: 2725

Title: Bachelorette Party

Description: Multi-ship multichapter – fluff/smut

Conversation gets a little dirty at Rebecca’s bachelorette party, leading to some interesting after party activities.

A/N: Comments are always appreciated. Enjoy!

ffn || ao3

|| next >

Winry

I twist to the side and look at my profile in the mirror, biting my lip.

“I don’t know. I think it might be too much,” I reach up to twist one of the many curled tendrils of hair falling over my shoulder.

“Why?” Edward responds immediately, frustration leaking into his tone.

“Just…the heels and the curls? With this short of a hemline?” I tug at my slinky black dress.

His eyes travel over me from head to toe, and I feel a blush creep up my neck at the look on his face.

“Yeah,” he mutters in a low voice. “Maybe you should change. I don’t know if it’s safe to let you out of the house looking like this.”

“Ed,” I frown at him. “That’s not helping.”

“I’m very serious,” he rumbles, his eyes lifting to mine.

I quickly turn away and fiddle with my hair some more.

“I’m just a little nervous, is all.”

“It’s a bachelorette party, Win. Not the wedding. It isn’t like you’re going to have to give a speech.”

“Thank goodness,” I mumble. “But still… I’d feel way more comfortable if you were there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll have Mei and Paninya, and it isn’t like you don’t like Hawkeye and Lieutenant Catalina. Plus, I’ll be here when you get back, so we can celebrate after.”

“Celebrate?” I echo, turning to face him again. “Celebrate what?”

“Just trust me, okay? I lived in Central for enough time to know how drunk women get at bachelorette parties.”

“Drunk?”

“So, when you come stumbling back to this hotel room after, I’ll be ready for you.”

“Wait, are you talking about…”

“Drunk sex.”

“Drunk sex?” I whisper.

“Yep.” He crosses to me, his arms sliding around my waist.

“But we’ve never done that before.”

“I know.” He grins, and I look to the side.

“What if I don’t get drunk?”

He blinks and then laughs softly.

“I mean, we can have sober sex, but imagining you drunk and naked at the same time is giving me really great ideas.”

“Okay.”

There’s a knock on the door, and he turns toward the sound.

“I think that’s probably your sign to leave.”

“Right.” I swallow, trying to slow my racing heart. “I’ll just…grab my clutch.”

“Winry,” he calls me back, and I pause to look at him. “Don’t worry about what I said, okay? Just go have fun.”

“Okay.” I nod.

“I love you,” he comes up beside me and kisses my cheek.

“I love you too.”

He passes me, going to the door, and I grab my clutch, double checking to be sure everything I need is there.

“Hey,” I hear Paninya’s voice. “Is Winry ready?”

“Give her like one second,” Ed answers, his broad shoulders filling the doorway.

“I’m still not sure why you tagged along all the way to Central, considering Havoc’s bachelor party isn’t until next weekend.”

“If you think about it, it probably isn’t that hard to figure out,” he shrugs.

I can practically hear her eyebrows rise. “Oh, so, you’re just here for a booty call.”

“She is my wife.”

“Okay, well that’s enough smugness about that,” I announce, giving my husband a side-eye as I slip past him. “I’ll be back late. Bye.”

“Bye.”

As soon as the door closes, Paninya wraps her arm around my waist and starts pulling me toward the elevator.

“What? No, hug and kiss goodbye? No, sugary-sweet ‘I love you’s?”

“We did that before he opened the door,” I assure her.

“Ah. Naturally.”

She stops in front of the elevator button, and I appraise her outfit. In true Paninya fashion, she opted not for a dress, but instead for a pair of dress pants, a white satin shirt, and a vest complete with a pocket watch.

“Mei is meeting us in the lobby, and then we’re getting a cab to the bar,” she informs me.

“Sounds good.”

We talk in the elevator about automail, and when we enter the lobby, Mei immediately spots us, waving us over.

“I don’t want us to be late, so we’ll need to hurry.”

She quickly leads the way out to the street and hails a cab with incredibly ease. Once we’re seated inside, Mei leans forward and gives the cabbie very specific directions. Meanwhile, Paninya and I discuss her new job.

“I’ve only been working there for a few months, but he said he want to promote me to assistant manager after the wedding.”

Recently, Jean Havoc’s family expanded their business, opening a general store in Rush Valley. Paninya was his first hire, but she’s really shined in her work.

“That makes sense,” I tell her. “He’ll be gone for two weeks on his honeymoon, so he’ll probably need the manager to take over some of his responsibilities.”

“I’m both excited and totally nervous.”

“You’ll do great.”

“We’re here,” Mei announces suddenly, rushing us out of the car.

Inside the bar, there’s a piano playing, a few couples dancing, and people scattered at the bar and among tables. In the dim light, it takes a few seconds to identify our party, though it shouldn’t, considering the bride-to-be is standing on her chair waving at us with a sparkly tiara on her head.

“Hi!” Rebecca calls as she hops off the chair, with Riza spotting her. “I’m so glad you girls could make it!”

“Well, Miss Riza told us to be here at seven, so we’re here,” Mei says sliding into a chair.

“Just Riza, tonight,” the demure blonde says softly, sipping her martini.

“Perfect.”

“I’m so excited!” Rebecca goes on. She’s clearly had a few drinks already. “We’re going to drink, and dance, and flirt with random men…” she leans to the side and starts making eyes at an unknown person before she starts to stumble and grabs on to her chair, giggling.

“Oh, and talk!” she finishes suddenly. “I’m really excited to talk.”

“She hasn’t stopped since she got here,” Riza comments with a smile.

“You love me,” Rebecca glares at her.

“You, yes. The intimate details of your last orgasm, not so much.”

Rebecca falls into her chair and takes a deep breath before waving down a waitress, who takes our drink orders and swiftly returns, setting a sugary cocktail in front of me.

“So, Mei, has Alphonse proposed yet?” Rebecca leans forward, pulling the straw of her margarita into her mouth with her tongue as she guides her glass toward her lips.

“Not exactly,” she says, suddenly shy. “We’ve talked about the future, but he hasn’t actually asked me, and I haven’t seen a ring.”

“Soon.”

“I hope so.”

“Um, Winry, do you have anything new going on?” Riza tries to change the subject, most likely to spare Mei from any more questions.

“Not really,” I shrug. “I have a new line of automail pieces I’m working on.”

“No,” Rebecca cuts in. “No talking about work. This is my bachelorette party! Tell me about the good stuff.”

“Good stuff?” I frown.

Riza sighs. “She means–”

“Are you pregnant yet?”

I almost choke on my drink. Fortunately, none of it comes out of my nose. Paninya rubs my back as I cough.

“Is that a yes?”

I start to shake my head, but she goes on.

“Does anyone remember if that drink is a virgin?”

Before I can stop her, she steals my drink and takes a sip.

“Oh.” She frowns. “I guess that’s a ‘no’ then.”

I silently slide my drink back to my place, holding it in two hands and running my thumbs down the sides.

“It’s not for lack of trying,” I confess softly.

“What!” Paninya screeches, and I wince. “You didn’t tell me you and the Hothead were trying to procreate!”

I close my eyes and sigh before looking at her. “Really?”

“Well, I certainly didn’t know anything about it,” Mei chimes in. “Alphonse definitely would’ve told me.”

“It’s news to me, too, but I’m not surprised you didn’t say anything. Starting a family is something I would think is pretty private,” Riza speaks up, much more supportively than my friends.

“Babies are so cute,” Rebecca moans before turning to her best friend. “Remind me to tell Jean I want a hundred.”

“You should probably wait until after you’ve had one to make that call,” Riza advises gently.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” Paninya says at me again.

“You’re making it out to be way bigger than it actually is,” I tell her honestly. “It isn’t like we’re desperate to have kids. We just both agree we want one. Soon. And with the way things are going, it’s possible it’ll happen in the not-too-distant future.”

“You mean because you two fuck like rabbits,” Paninya is quick to comment.

Rebecca snorts, and Riza hides her mouth behind her hand.

“Alphonse does say you two are very…active,” Mei grins slyly.

“The walls are thin,” I glance at her. “And he likes to tease Ed to get under his skin.”

“Okay, this is good. This is exactly the stuff I want to talk about,” Rebecca says giddily.

“Really?” I glance at her. “Can’t we talk about someone else’s sex life?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I know all about mine, and I already told Riza. She’ll leave if I try to tell it again.”

“She’s right,” Riza nods, taking a long sip of her drink.

“Riza has no love life to speak of,” Rebecca’s tone is suddenly bitter, and I think I hear her muttering something about “fraternization,” but I’m not sure.

Riza gives her an unreadable look, but whatever it is, Rebecca understands it because she changes the subject.

“Mei and Alphonse are too pure to have anything really dirty to talk about, and Paninya is–”

“Decidedly single,” she finishes quickly. “So that just leaves you and your hotheaded alchemist for sex talk.”

“Of course, it does,” I mumble.

“So, Winry, tell us. Is Ed as explosive in bed as his temper is out of it?”

“No comment.”

“What? No!” Rebecca frowns. “You can’t ‘no comment.’ That’s the whole point of this.”

“But I don’t want to answer,” I admit softly.

“Here, drink some more of this,” Paninya taps my drink.

I do, but not because she told me to.

“If you don’t answer, I’m going to assume ‘no comment,’ means ‘yes,’” Pan adds after I swallow.

“And if it does, I want details,” Rebecca goes on.

I glance at Riza and Mei. “Are you two sure you’re okay with this topic of conversation?”

“Normally, I probably wouldn’t be,” Riza confesses. “But in the spirit of the evening, and considering the several drinks I’ve already had, I have to say, I’m a little curious myself.”

I turn to Mei.

“Honestly, this isn’t anything Alphonse and I haven’t already discussed, so feel free to share.”

I will so be having a chat will Al after tonight.

“Fine.” I take another long drink and stare at the table.

“Ed is…”

“Dynamite, right?” Rebecca grins.

“That’s an…accurate description.”

God, if he ever finds out I told them this. I’ll be in so much trouble.

“Is he into foreplay?” Rebecca continues, sliding to the edge of her seat as she leans forward.

“Sometimes.”

“Does that mean other times he just attacks you? Has he ever ripped your clothes while trying to get them off?”

“Only once.”

“I have a question,” Paninya announces, downing her drink. “Is his height in any way proportionate to his…size?”

My face floods with heat, and I drink more, though that might actually worsen the problem than solve it.

“Well?” Rebecca coaxes. “Is it?”

I start to shake my head, and then take a deep breath.

“No,” I exhale, my eyes fluttering shut as I try to cool down. Immediately, a perfect mental image of Ed’s swollen cock appears in my head, and I gasp. “God, no.”

“Details!” Paninya shouts, making me jump. “If it isn’t a micropenis, how big is it?”

How is this happening to me?

“Calm down, ladies,” Riza’s voice says evenly. “You don’t want to get us thrown out. And, if she truly doesn’t want to, she doesn’t have to tell you.”

“Yes, she does!” Pan retorts, jerking to her feet. “I need to know!”

“Mammoth,” I whisper so low they don’t hear me.

“What?” Rebecca pulls my friend down to sit back in her chair. “Winry, what did you say?”

“God, it’s so big,” I mutter-moan, more to myself than them, the image still fresh in my mind. My panties are getting wet thinking about it. “We’ve been married almost a year, and I still worry about whether or not it will fit.”

“Bring her a water,” Paninya tells a passing waiter.

“We should probably change the subject now,” Mei pipes up, her high voice even higher than normal.

I glance at her and bite my lip. She’s probably wondering if Al inherited the same “big dick” genes as his brother.

“I hate to say it, but I agree,” Rebecca nods. “If we keep talking about large cocks, I’ll start talking about Jean, and then Riza will probably shoot me.”

“Affirmative.”

“Wait.” I look up at them. “I… Have you ever had drunk sex?”

Riza immediately looks at Rebecca who slowly nods and starts grinning.

“Maybe. A few times.”

“Why?” Riza turns to me.

“Ed might’ve mentioned it before I left tonight, and…we’ve never done it before. I’m not sure what to expect.”

“You mean, he mentioned it for later tonight? After this?” Rebecca’s eyes widen.

“Uh-huh,” I nod.

“Ooh! How fun!”

“Winry, have you ever been drunk with Ed before?” Riza asks calmly.

“Yes.” I nod. “It was the first time I ever drank so much I threw up. He held my hair back and put me to bed after. We didn’t…do anything.”

“Was there ever a moment during that time when you felt horny and you wanted him to jump your bones right there?” Rebecca chimes back in, twirling her straw around in her glass.

“Yes,” I admit quietly. “We were on the couch, and I started…dry humping him. I quit when my stomach…”

“Okay, so if you’d held your liquor, and you’d both been naked, what then?”

A flash of images whirls through my head, and I feel dizzy.

“Oh my God.”

“That’s kind of what it’s like.” Rebecca sighs fondly.

“Excuse me,” Riza says suddenly. “I have to make a phone call.”

She rises quickly and leaves the table heading for the bar.

“Where is she going?” I glance at Rebecca.

“Nowhere, officially, but I expect she’s making a dick appointment for after we leave here.”

I squirm a little in my seat.

“Anyway,” she goes on, “after this drink, I’m thinking I’m gonna dance. Do you girls want to dance?”

“Absolutely,” Paninya grins.

“Ooh! Or maybe I’ll see if they do karaoke here! That would be the best!”

I sip my drink quietly as they start standing. Paninya pulls me to my feet just as my straw starts popping.

“You want to rush back to your man now, don’t you?” she asks quietly.

“Only a little.”

“I can practically smell the sex pheromones rolling off of you. With how hot you are for him, and how much sex you guys have, I’m surprised you’re able to walk normally anymore.”

“You’re being dramatic,” I hiss at her. “It’s not like that.”

“Look. I’m not judging. That conversation was pretty hot. If it got you thinking about things, and you need to go get a fix, I understand.”

“Rebecca might not.”

“If anyone will, Rebecca will.” She loops her arm through mine. “Here.” She pulls me toward the bar. “Come do one shot with me, and then we’ll get you a cab back to the hotel. I’ll call ahead and tell the Hothead to meet you in the lobby.”

“Paninya…”

“Just say, ‘okay,’ and do the shot.”

“Okay.” I give in.

The shot burns going down, but it doesn’t last long. I say a quick goodbye to the other ladies, who all give me knowing looks that I ignore. Thankfully Paninya walks me out since I’m a little wobbly on my feet. I feel a twinge of regret on the ride back to the hotel. This wasn’t exactly how this night was supposed to go. On the other hand, I’m really excited to see Ed.

To be continued…

[purplemaple-xoxo]

FMA Meets Ouran Chapter One

I originally wrote this for @allisontherumorhargreeves for her Birthday in October. It’s exactly what the title reads, our favourite Alchemists and members of the Amestrian Military meet the goofy members of the Ouran High School Host Club. Royai, Edwin, and Tamaharu will be present throughout the story. Hope you enjoy the shenanigans! 

Read the full chapter on FF.net

Read the full chapter on Ao3

“Winry, don’t hit me with that wrench again!”

“I wouldn’t if you would keep your automail in shape, micro bean!”

“Who are you calling a micro bean, automail freak?!”

“We’re at the command centre you two! Keep your voices down!” It didn’t seem like either even heard Alphonse.

“Guess Fullmetal is here to receive his assignment.” Mustang massaged his temples, preparing for the incoming storm.

“Go easy on them sir. They’re still young.” Hawkeye deposited a pile of paperwork on the corner of his desk and walked to stand behind him to the left.

“I’ll go easy on him when he goes easy on me.” Mustang took a glance over his shoulder and immediately tensed at the silent reminder that he was the adult in the situation and should act as such.

“Sir.”

“Alright, Lieutenant. I get it! Quit looking at me like that!”

The Colonel huffed and turned his attention to the door while the commotion grew louder. He mentally braced himself as the door swung open, nearly hitting Breda on his way to lunch. Edward tromped in, his focus entirely on Winry as they continued to yell at each other. Alphonse was behind them, apologizing to Breda on his brother's behalf, then continued to act as the ringleader in trying to calm his brother and Winry down.  

Mustang watched with a smirk as both Winry and Edward stopped in front of his desk, still bickering. He looked up at Alphonse and gave him a nod of acknowledgement before returning his attention to the commotion in front of him. Before he was able to call the teens out on their immaturity in a military office, a soft clearing of the throat from his left caused the bickering teens to stop immediately.

“I really don’t deserve her.”

“You always know how to announce your arrival, don’t you Fullmetal?”

“Save it Colonel Bastard. Count yourself lucky that I’m even here to receive this damn mission.”

Mustang raised his eyebrows at the teen's aggressive tone.

“I would have you know this mission may help you in what you’re looking for. But I can always assign it to someone else if you deem it a waste of time.”

This caught the young teens attention.

“And what exactly do you have for me?”

Mustang sat up in his chair and reached over to the drawer on his right. Pulling out a tan manila folder and placing it in front of him. When Edward went to reach for it, Mustang placed his hand down on it.

“What’s the deal now?” Edward growled out.

“I’m sorry to say but this is classified information. I’m sorry to misplace you Miss Rockbell, would you kindly wait outside?”

Winry who had been silent during the whole exchange quickly straightened her posture.

“Oh! It’s no problem Colonel.”

“Thank you Miss Rockbell. The Lieutenant can escort you out and provide you with some drinks.”

“There’s no need! I can see myself out!” Winry shook her head in protest.

“It’s quite alright Miss Rockbell,” Mustang spoke as he waved his hand in dismissal. Hawkeye then moved from her position, a small smile on her face as she addressed the young teen.

“If you would follow me Winry. You as well Alphonse. I’m sure your brother can fill you in on details once it’s over.”

Winry and Alphonse quietly followed Hawkeye out the door. Leaving the two State Alchemists alone.

“Why you do always listen to her and do what she says without a fuss?” Mustang inquired once the door closed.

“Because she isn’t a bastard like you.” Edward spat as he crossed his arms over his chest.

Mustang simply shrugged his shoulders at the teen's remark before sliding the folder towards Edward.

“The MP’s have recently arrested a rogue alchemist who was poking his nose around some local as well as military business.”

“And what does this have to do with me? Sounds like this guy hasn’t done anything wrong. ”

“If you would let me finish Fullmetal I will tell you.”

Edward rolled his eyes before returning to scanning the report in his hands.

“Like I was saying, he was arrested and his residence was searched. They found some strange alchemic notes there and asked for an alchemist’s help.” Mustang shrugged his shoulders again nonchalantly. “If the notes required an alchemist’s attention, I thought it may interest you.”

Edward looked up from the file and raised a golden eyebrow.

“And what exactly is in this for you?”

“Less paperwork. And it looks good on a report for promotion.”

Edward seemed to contemplate the idea before responding.

“I’m bringing Alphonse with me.”

“I have no problem with that. I’m bringing my Lieutenant along as well.”

“WHY ARE YOU COMING ALONG?!” Edward shouted.

“Because I am your superior officer and I’m intrigued as to what this alchemist was trying to accomplish.”

Mustang smirked as he watched the young teen sputter before him.

READ THE REST ON AO3 OR FF.NET

[thunder-the-ranger-wolf]

Memory Lane, the Adopted remix

AN: AU of the story scrap where Tony was adopted.

Summary: Anthony Rodriguez is twelve years old when a butler says that the Starks, who have just lost their son, want to adopt him. Weirdness ensues as he tries not to get too wrapped up in their lifestyle and remember his parents’ hard-working roots.

This place is strange, and he doesn't know what he's supposed to do, so he does nothing. He sits on the floor in the center of the carpeted room that the butler claims as his, and eventually he falls asleep there. The floor is what he's used to. Not because the orphanage is bad, but it is a bit crowded. He earned something of a second income for the place as a mechanic. (Sure, I'll fix your radiator and see why your sink is backed up. Of course I'll figure out why your brand new TV is running static. It shouldn't be doing that, sir. I can get my brother to mow your lawn for you as well, would you like that?)

Richie wasn't really his brother. Richie was a couple years younger than him, but still able to get cash for work just like everybody else. He was a master with machines almost as much as Tony was, and would probably go on to actually be a mechanic.

At any rate, someone is shaking him awake and he knows exactly who it is.

“Stop it, Collin, you get breakfast when the Mickers say you do.”

The shaking persisted, with a strange voice calling his name, and he eventually opened his eyes.

“Can I help you?” He deadpanned. It was the butler from the day before.

“The floor can't be that comfortable.” He offered.

“Better than hardwood.” Anthony snorted. “Don't get me wrong, I'm not some abused headcase. The orphanage just gets crowded every now and then. Is something wrong?”

“I simply wished to inform you that breakfast is almost ready.”

“Cool. Is it always ready around this time?”

“Most of the time. If I'm not the one to wake you, someone else on the staff will.”

“Thanks for that.” Anthony offered before looking around the room.

“Did I bring my clothes in here?” He muttered to himself.

“There are some clothes that should be your approximate size in the drawers, Anthony.”

Sure enough, the 12 year old spotted a chest of drawers nestled in a corner of the room.

“I shall leave you to get dressed.” The butler offered.

“I'll be down as soon as I'm done.” Anthony informed him.

“I assume so.” Jarvis acquiesced.

Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*

That left Anthony to go through his new clothes and survey his room. The walls were a light shade of green with emerald trim, the curtains over the window matched the trim, and the floor was a nice beige color that didn't remind him of dog poop in the slightest. He rifled through the drawers to find several pairs of jeans that fit him perfectly and a bunch of t-shirts that had cartoon characters on them. The Flintstones wasn't his favorite show ever, but he'd wear it. Why not? They had Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry, Pink Panther and Looney Toons, so that more than made up for it. They even had a couple shirts with cartoon characters that weren't even out yet. GI Joe and ThunderCats had been advertising lately, but wouldn't come out for another year. Maybe these folks wouldn't be so bad after all. Or maybe it was just the butler.

Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*

Okay, so it wasn't just the butler. Howard Stark liked to talk shop at the breakfast table (which was pretty damn big) despite his wife's best efforts to appear normal. Anthony got wrapped up pretty quickly when he heard the words Stark Industries pour out of the man's mouth, and Howard knew it.

“If you're interested, I might take you on a tour of the R&D department. I have government contracts, so you won't be able to see everything we're working on, but I do have some things out for civilians.”

Maria Stark’s charities were no secret, and while Howard was a genius, Anthony doubted that he was willing to focus solely on civilian products. Then again, not all wars involved the US, so something had to keep the company going during peacetime.

“If you don't mind, I'd like that a lot.” Anthony responded.

Breakfast continued to be a relatively silent affair, after which Jarvis and the others collected their dishes and Howard went about his day. Maria asked a few questions about how he liked the room before doing the same.

“Edwin tells me you slept on the floor last night.” A woman with dark brown hair and green eyes approached him after breakfast. Who-? Oh, the butler. (Edwin Jarvis, but only my wife calls me Edwin as it's a name I greatly despise.)

Although he quite liked the idea of the name, Edwin wasn't something he'd bestow on his firstborn (if he ever had one of those, which, after a few years of taking care of kids, he doubted he would.)

“Was there something wrong with the bed?”

“Not at all, Miss. I simply had to get used to my surroundings before I could presume anything to be mine. It was absolutely a one-time thing and I apologize if I offended you.”

“My dear boy, you shall be quite the flatterer when you grow up. You and Howard are quite alike in that way.”

“I doubt I have anything in common with a millionaire, but whatever helps you sleep at night is fine by me.”

“Oh, certainly. You'll see what I mean eventually.” The woman assured him.

Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*

“Your wife's got a sense of humor, Mr. Jarvis.”

“Dark brown hair, green eyes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That'll never be necessary, my boy. Jarvis is just fine by me.”

“I'll have to get used to that, sir, but I'll never be able to see you as a servant.”

“Housekeeper.”

“Housekeeper, then. It'll still take me a bit to get used to that.”

Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*

Apparently school was a must, and he was expected to be some kind of special snowflake just because he'd been Warbucked. Well he said fuck that noise. Yes, he was smart enough to skip a grade or two, but what did that help when there was nothing after high school? Because college sure as hell wasn't free, and his knowledge of how the Earth rotated wouldn't help him as a mechanic.

“What do you want to do when you're done here?” One teacher asked. Assuming she meant long-term, Anthony has no clue. He could be anything, considering the Stark’s insistence on footing the bill. Howard had thrown countless pamphlets at him about various colleges, and he seemed particularly keen on MIT.

“What's even at MIT, anyway?” He snapped one night. “Like, I get that you all want me to do something with my life but until a couple weeks ago I was actually busy living and now there's just… there's nothing here! There's no one to keep track of, no job to do, and it's fuckin weird but now you're all in my face about shipping me off to some random school… why adopt me in the first place if the goal was to have me out of the way the entire time?!” He'd snarled. And nobody had an answer to that, all stunned into silence as they were.

“That… was never the goal. You do realize that you're coming back here when school’s out for winter and summer, don't you? And at this point, I don't give a shit what you do. Get a job as a mechanic, for all I care, but you're going to need to further your education before you do anything. That's what I wanted you to think about.”

“So I'm not being kicked out?”

“Hell no, kid. You're one of the smartest people I've met. I wouldn't give you back if someone dared to pay me.” Howard scoffed.

“I… I'd like to check on the other kids every now and then. Is that something that can happen?”

“We'll do it regardless. You should've told me you were bored earlier. I've got a few things in my workshop that could use your input.”

Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*

Life went on, and Tony (as everyone took to calling him) went with it. He got to MIT just fine, thank you very much, and at the age of 12 at that. He'd have his first degree by the time most kids were getting their high school diplomas, and wasn't that rattling.

Turns out that it wasn't. Not really. He wasn't as young as he could have been. Old enough to partake in almost anything except for drinking, which he wanted no part of already.

“Why not?” Twenty-two year old Whitney Frost snorted.

“You ever been around an alcoholic, sweetheart?” He drawled. Predictably enough, she shook her head. “It's not a pleasant feeling.”

Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*Adopted*

“Gettin’ all big for your britches, Mechanic?”

Tony froze, running the voice through in his head.

“Fuck off, Lakeland.” He snorted. The other man slid into step beside him and he wrapped an arm around Lakeland's shoulders.

“You doing alright?”

“As well as I can be.”

“Yeah, but that could be anything. You eat recently?”

Tony recalled with ease the fact that food had sometimes been a scarcity, and the oldest scrounged or went without when that happened. He'd been through a couple winters of that, and it was right around the time that Jarvis had picked him up. All of 12 years old and way past anything a high school could offer him.

“Not really.” Lakeland mumbled.

Tony stopped short, forcing his old friend to stop with him.

“You really think I don't remember what hunger looks like, John?” He demanded.

“You look like you eat pretty well, to me.”

“And I've been making sure everyone at the old place does too. Or I tried. You seen anyone from around our age lately?”

“You can't fix everything with money, Tony. Some of them are sick.”

“I know that well enough.” He snorted. He remembered what Frankie junior did to the younger kids when he had one of his episodes. Woe be unto any kid who crossed the bio kid's path at that place. They'd be sore for weeks.

“Thank God they ended up revoking that license.”

“Actually, I think it had something to do with you.”

“Me? I never said anything. Are you crazy?! Saying something meant Frankie would hunt you down and beat you bloody no matter where you were. Why would I speak up?!”

“Maybe you wouldn't. Buy someone did. And Frankie had no sway over them.”

Tony smacked a hand to his head and ran it down his face.

“What happened to Richie and Collin?” He asked, already regretting the answer.

“College. Last I checked they moved in together. Richie's over at Hammer, if you feel like rescuing him.”

“Hell yeah. Didn't they buy out Tasco or something like that a few weeks ago?”

“Yep. Been there since he graduated high school, according to Collin. Man, was that boy pissed.”

Tony snorted and smothered his next question. Poking around in people's lives got you nowhere if you didn't know how to do it right. Lakeland answered it for him though.

“They been roommates since Collin dropped outta high school. You'd have been 23, I think.”

“And they haven't driven each other mad.” Tony snorted.

“Something like that.”

Tony stepped away and turned so that he could see the other man's face.

“Come back to the Mansion with me. You look like you could use a drink.”

Lakeland snorted, knowing good and well that he wouldn't take a damn thing that reminded him of old Frank's place.

“Alright.” He agreed. “Better be something good.”

[canadian-riddler]

The Oldest Riddle

By Indiana

 Characters: Edward Nygma, Jonathan Crane [Scriddler], Jacqueline Boudreau (OC)

Synopsis: Edward has located his mother and makes the trip to see her, but the result is not what he expected.

Note:  In my series Jonathan was abandoned at birth on the steps of a boarding house in Georgia and largely neglected by the woman who ran it. Edward was given a stack of photographs of his mother in ‘Like Father Like Son’ which is referenced here.  At this point in my timeline Edward and Jonathan are retired in Toronto.

AO3  en francais

It had taken him years to make this decision, but here he was.

He had previously made many excuses for his inability to locate her.  He had no name, no face, no voice, even, to use as a starting point. No marriage certificate.  No evidence, really, that she had ever existed.

Except for himself, of course.

On a whim he still did not know the origins of he had packed the stack of photographs given to him by his informant in Trois-Rivières into his getaway suitcase.  He had crushed most of them into ruin but one of the pictures of her was intact.  He had memorised the photos when first he’d seen them, but having a physical object helped to sharpen his focus.  He had looked at it quite extensively on the plane east.  You couldn’t glean much about a person from a photograph.  Many of them held only lies.  The one he had used as the basis for his search was the physical evidence of an event that had sent forward a lifelong set of falsehoods for his father, who had pretended to be one person to the outside world and let only one other see the truth of himself.  More importantly, however, that picture told him the person he was searching for had once attended a certain university.  It had taken a while to peruse the student records of an institution of that size, but once he had come upon her the resemblance to the photographs he had were unmistakeable.  He had a name: Jacqueline Boudreau.  From there it was simple enough to match the information he took from the university to the most recent New Brunswick census.  He would find her in Grand Falls.

He’d debated whether or not he should actually act on this information.  She’d left. She didn’t know who he was, or if he was even still alive.  She did not care to track him down.  

Well.  He hadn’t made it easy to do that, so even if she had she would not have gotten very far.  His name change had not been drastic, but it had been enough.  

After asking Jonathan for approximately the twentieth time what he should do, Jonathan had finally snapped, “If you did not want to go you would not keep asking me whether you should! You would have lost interest!”

“Huh,” Edward had said, because as usual Jonathan made a good point.

“Book the damn plane to Nova Scotia already.”

“New Brunswick.”

“I don’t know where either of those places are anyway so it does not matter where I tell you to go.  Just go before I lose my mind.”

And Edward had, but not before asking a few more times to make sure.

So here he was.  In Grand Falls, New Brunswick, down the street from Jacqueline’s address.  He could not quite think of her as his mother.  And why should he?  She wasn’t, in most senses of the word.  She had carried him and bore him and… done something with him for approximately eight years, but did that even count if he didn’t remember it?

Would she?

He’d come all the way here. He might as well.

He got out of the car he had rented at the airport and walked down the street to the woman’s house. One storey with a car shelter, in good condition from the outside.  He took a moment to choose between the doorbell and knocking and decided on the latter.

Only a few moments passed before a young woman opened the door; his stomach clenched in anticipation when he saw the doorknob turn, but this was definitely not her.  Far, far too young.  “Um… hi,” she said.

“Is Jacqueline at home?” he asked.  She better be, because he did not want to have to come back.

“Yes.  Who are you?”

He hesitated.  If he provided his name, Jacqueline might well refuse to see him.  He couldn’t have that.

“I believe she’ll recognise me.”

The woman squinted at him somewhat and closed the door.  He listened for the click of the deadbolt but it didn’t come.  He waited another minute or so before the door opened again and behind it was a different woman who was unmistakeably the one in his photographs, albeit more lined and with thinner, fading curls.  She stepped back when she saw him, face paling.  “Edwin?” she said faintly.

Edward found himself shaking his head slowly, the motion barely even qualifying as such.  He found he had nothing to say, suddenly, when he’d had so much he wanted to say before.  She looked at him for a long time.

“…Édouard,” she said finally, softly, and something about it got to him.  He wasn’t sure what it was.  Maybe he, somehow, had a trace of the memory of her voice buried deep in his brain someplace, and he was helpless but to respond to it.  Perhaps it was simply the fact that he had not heard his name pronounced properly in thirty years.  He’d convinced himself a long time ago it didn’t matter.  It seemed to far more than he’d ever thought it would.

That seemed an accurate initial summary for his trip at the moment.  And a terrible one, given he’d meant to have the upper hand for this as he had in all things.  Having all of those largely unpleasant feelings scrambling his thoughts left him blank on what to say.  He had never lacked words for so long in his entire life, and now was a terrible time for it to be happening.  Before he’d had much more silence with which to humiliate himself she opened the door further and stepped back.  “Do you want to come inside?”

He didn’t, he realised; he did not want that at all.  But here he was doing it, crossing her threshold and sliding his shoes into her shoe rack and following her into her home.  He gritted his teeth.  There was a very vocal portion of the back of his mind relating to him just then how pathetic he was to hand control of his life back over to a woman who had willingly absented from it.  He hated it because it was true.  It was extremely pathetic and he bitterly asked himself how long he was going to keep doing it for.  And why. He had no idea.

He also was starting to realise he didn’t actually know why he was even here.  He’d been so focused on the journey he had neglected to make a plan for when he arrived at his destination.  As he followed after her he found himself flabbergasted by what he was allowing to happen.  This wasn’t like him.  This wasn’t like him at all!

The front door led directly into the kitchen, which was somewhat cramped given there was an island spaced too close to the opposite wall.  It was done up mostly in browns and the furniture seemed dated, but serviceable. The sitting room was further on from that, with more brown and some red accents.  She showed him to the couch, which sank farther beneath his weight than was to his liking.  She sat on the other side.  

He looked to the opposite wall of the room, not because there was anything of particular interest over there but because all semblance of language seemed to have disappeared from his brain.  This was ridiculous.  When had he ever been without something to say?  

“How far did you come?” she asked.  It took him a moment of calculations before he realised she probably did not actually desire the distance in kilometres.

“Toronto,” he answered.

“The train?”

“No,” he said, confused. She shook her head, looking as though she thought he had missed out on something exciting.

“You see so much more on the train,” she told him.  

Ah, yes.  Might as well sightsee on the way out here, right? That wouldn’t have been a complete waste of his time at all!

The first thing of real significance he learned about her was that she did love to talk.  She seemed quite content to direct faltering topics onto new avenues of conversation, and she was in fact quite clever and entertaining.  He discovered that he liked her.  He hadn’t expected to, nor really wanted to.  But there it was.

She had remarried after returning to New Brunswick and had two children, and he had expected to hear that but had been unsure of what his reaction would be if he did.  To his surprise, he found that he didn’t really have one.  He was neither jealous nor resentful, and he did not have any particular desire to meet them.  When she spoke of them, there was no real emotion in her words at all.  Jacqueline just did not like children and seemed to have ended up with them anyway.  Edward understood that completely.  Jonathan disliked them as well and had no interest in Edward’s in the slightest. Jacqueline did ask if Edward himself had any children, but without looking at him and in an almost automatic way. He provided the barest details and she expressed no desire to know any more than that.  

It was difficult, at first, to be faced with it.  To be there in a room with her and the increasing obviousness that she did not care about him or what he’d been doing.  She was doing this out of courtesy and that was all.  He couldn’t pretend that didn’t hurt.  He had gone into this with minimal expectations, but he had still expected something from her. Something more than an exchange between one stranger and another.  As though there should have been some intangible connection between them borne in those eight years he didn’t remember.  He was beginning to wonder if she was the one and only thing he’d ever forgotten intentionally.  

Eventually they both realised it had grown dark in the room and Edward did not know where the lightswitches were, and Jacqueline stood up to rectify that.  The conversation lapsed here and there was a moment in which it was clear neither of them quite knew where to pick it up again.  Finally Jacqueline said, “I’m sure you have some questions for me.”

He looked over at her. At his mother.  The woman who had brought him into being and then left him behind, as though he had not mattered.

No.  This was not his mother, and he was not who he had been back then either.  She had moved on, and he had… done something else, and there was no point in dredging up old history.  She was not his mother, and he was not her son.  They were two different people entirely now, and nothing linked them together save for whatever bits of her data had made it into Edward’s own.  He shook his head.

“I don’t,” he said.

And he meant it.  He was being completely honest.  All of the questions he’d ever had throughout his life had… they hadn’t quite vanished.  It wasn’t that.  But the answers… if he had them, what was he going to do with them?  He had moved on by now.  He had moved on, and she had moved on, and it did not matter why she had done what she had done over thirty years ago because… he no longer needed to know.  He had when he was eight.  He had when he was sixteen.  He had even when he was twenty.  But now? No.  No, he no longer needed to.  It wasn’t important anymore.

He stood up, and Jacqueline showed him back to the foyer.  As he slid his shoes back on she said, “I have one question for you.”

He straightened, smoothing down his lapels.  “All right.”

“Did he send you?”

He felt it in his chest then: the helpless need for parental approval.  He wanted to tell her all of it, all of the things his father had done and what he himself had had to do afterward.  He wanted to know, needed to know, if she would have cared.  What she would have done.  He wanted to tell her he, too, had left.  He wanted her approval for doing the same thing she had done.

He turned away from her and took a long, centring breath through his nose.  He didn’t need it, he told himself.  Not from her.  She was meaningless.  He needed nothing from her.  It didn’t matter anymore.  It was time to let it go.

“No,” he said, looking up at her again.  He extended his hand.  “It was good to meet you.”  Good how, he hadn’t figured out yet.  But he felt as though it would be, once he had.

She shook his hand wordlessly and he took his leave, walking to the rental car with his own hands in his pockets.  There was an unsettling feeling in his stomach.  He sat in the car for a few minutes, the house a blur in the corner of his vision.  He realised it was going to take him the whole plane ride to properly process all of this and it made him even more reluctant to get on the aircraft than he had been before.

He smoothed his hair back and inserted the key into the ignition.

 //

 He’d been home a few hours when Jonathan asked, “Well?  Are we invited for Thanksgiving?”

Edward looked up from his laptop screen.  “Are we celebrating Thanksgiving now?”

Jonathan tapped the back of his pen against his ledger.  “Are we?”

Edward considered the other side of the room for a moment.  What on earth was he –

“Oh,” he said, returning to his computer.  “No. She doesn’t care any more now than she ever did.  Which she never did.”

“And?”

His eyebrows lowered in annoyance before he realised Jonathan was trying to be considerate and ask after the visit before Edward had some sort of issue over it.  He liked to pretend he didn’t do that sort of thing and Jonathan usually humoured him, if in a jaded sort of way.  But there was no need for any of it right now.   And talking about it might help ease the discontent that had not quite faded in the handful of hours it had taken him to return to Toronto.

“And nothing.  She simply doesn’t like children.  She might have stuck around if my father were worth it, for his sake.  She’s doing that with her current husband.”  He sat back against the couch.  “She reminded me of you a lot, actually.”

Jonathan almost smiled. “She must have been incredibly beautiful, then.”

No matter how many times Jonathan used this joke, it never got old.  When he was finished laughing Edward said, “Absolutely.  Outshone the sun.  Exactly like you.”

Jonathan snorted. “Only during a solar eclipse, if that.”

Edward looked up again when he was able, having been overtaken with amusement a second time, to see that Jonathan was smiling now, just a little.  It warmed his stomach, as always.  "And you do not fault her for leaving?" Jonathan asked.

He paused to ensure he believed his answer.  "No," he said.  "She put her life on hold for a baby she didn't want with a man she didn't love." He tapped his mouse so his laptop wouldn't shut off.  "She stayed as long as she could but there's only so long you can neglect yourself for the sake of people you don't even like."

Jonathan nodded once. "Will you go see her again?"

"No," Edward said, though he hadn't actually decided until that moment.  "I'm not going to."

"Good," was Jonathan's response, and if anything else was to follow it was interrupted by Ada appearing from the other room and throwing herself into Edward's lap.  He had given up hoping he'd ever be free of bruises and she was the entire reason why.  

For you! she declared with intense enthusiasm, and she handed him some crumpled up piece of paper scribbled on liberally with glitter crayons.  He took it and looked at it bemusedly.

"What is it?" he asked, unable to puzzle it out.  She took it from him and rotated it before giving it back.  

It's a swan! she said.  It's origami and I just learned it.

"Aha."  He was still unable to find a swan in the collection of folds and creases that this paper had become. "Thank you."

I'll make you one even prettier soon, she promised, and she hugged him far too hard as was her wont.  It was painful but he'd never actually minded it.

"I can't wait," he said, and he meant it.  He appreciated everything she gave him, though he was running out of places to put all of it.  She jumped off of the couch and ran off as he leaned over and put the… swan… on the table.

"She's missing out," Jonathan said.  Edward looked in the direction Ada had gone.  

"She is?"

"Not Ada.  Your mother."

"Jacqueline," Edward corrected.  "My question still stands."

"She'll never know her granddaughter."

Edward folded his arms. "She doesn't want to, and wouldn't even if Ada weren't a robot.  Why are you even bringing that up?  You don't like kids any more than she does."  Even Edward's.

"I like Ada sometimes."  He reached for something on the left side of his desk Edward couldn't see from that angle, though he held it in Edward's direction in the palm of his hand. Edward forgot to look at it initially because he was distracted by Jonathan's elegant fingers.  When he snapped to he got a little jealous.

"Why did she give you that and give me -"

"She didn't," Jonathan cut in.  "She asked me to help her with it.  When we were finished she said I could keep it and patted me on the head."

Edward wished he had been there to see that.  It sounded adorable.  Jonathan put the folded paper back on his desk.

"My point," he continued, "is that I don't care for children and yet Ada is fine as a person.  I don't want to parent her or be otherwise responsible for her in any way.  But she is a pleasant way to pass the time.  I am glad that I know her, even if I don't always like her."

That was an interesting way of putting it.  Edward got up and rounded the coffee table, moving to stand behind Jonathan's chair. He had the swan on top of a stack of other papers, and Edward thought bemusedly that it was going to end up lost behind the desk.  He put his hands on the chair back, it suddenly occurring to him there was something much more interesting he could be doing than discussing a strange woman in New Brunswick.  "So you don’t want me to fill out the adoption papers for you to sign?"

Jonathan leaned back in the chair and Edward had to remove his fingers in order for him to do so. He pressed his hands into Jonathan's shoulders instead.  Jonathan folded his own hands into his lap.  "No," he said flatly, and Edward laughed.  

"But she would love it," he said close to Jonathan's left ear, kissing the lobe afterward.  The skin on Jonathan's cheek tightened the slightest bit, but in response to what he wasn't sure.

"Edward."

"What," he said, bringing his thumbs up Jonathan's neck to the nape hidden under his curls. He kept himself bent over enough he wasn't far from Jonathan's ear.

"Stop doing that. I have work to do."

"You don't have a job," Edward reminded him, then bringing his lips to the top of Jonathan's head as he squeezed on his shoulders again.  He did not miss Jonathan's short, quiet exhale.

"I hope 'because I said so' is reason enough, then."

Edward wasn't a fan of that reason but if he made Jonathan angry that would put him off for a long time. Edward had only needed to learn that lesson once.  He stepped back and Jonathan moved his chair closer to the desk, picking up his pen. Edward sat back down on the couch and reactivated his laptop screen.  He'd probably done enough anyway that Jonathan would be thinking about it all day until he felt like it later.  He was rarely ever willing to get intimate before ten pm, but sometimes Edward tried his luck regardless.  

That was fine.  Edward actually did have work to do for the job he actually had, and unlike Jonathan he was far more able to ignore the call of physical temptation.  Like right now.  Jonathan was staring at the wall instead of anything in front of him, and he didn't stop doing that for the next ten minutes entirely.  At this point he got up abruptly to make coffee, and Edward could finally start laughing without Jonathan being able to see him, with his thumb between his teeth to stifle the noise.  He must have looked in a very good mood when Jonathan returned five minutes later with his coffee because he frowned and stopped in front of Edward. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Oh, you know. Memes.”

“What in the hell is a meme?”

Edward was decidedly failing not to laugh.  “A joke you wouldn’t get because I’d have to explain it to you.”

Jonathan looked over the top of his screen and Edward pulled the laptop out of range of his coffee. “Get that away from my computer.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes and returned to his desk.  “Because that’s the only one you have and you would surely be devastated if you were to lose it.”

“Says the man with every edition of a thirty-year-old textbook.”

“How else will I keep track of the minor edits and infographics inserted to inflate the cover price?”

Edward gave an exaggerated shrug.  “Why would you want to?”

“It’s my hobby.”

Edward sat back and folded his arms, looking over at Jonathan now.  He was paying a great deal of attention to his cup.  “You have a side job as a textbook editor, eh?”

“Hobby, Edward.  Try to keep up.”

 //

 That night Ada had gone outside, as usual, and they were in bed – Jonathan earlier than usual, probably because Edward had been away but he wasn’t going to ask about it lest it prod him into getting up  – and Edward’s head was on Jonathan’s shoulder, Jonathan’s arm around his back and down to his hip.  They’d been like that for about fifteen minutes but he was still hoping he was going to get lucky.  “Do you know what I think,” Jonathan said, somewhat languidly.  Edward was a little concerned that meant he was falling asleep.

“I would never make the mistake of attempting to guess.”

“I think,” Jonathan said, pressing one of his free fingers to the top of Edward’s nose without looking, “that mothers are overrated.”

“They would probably both say husbands are overrated,” Edward told him, scratching the place he’d touched.  Jonathan’s nose brushed Edward’s ear as he murmured into it,

“Mine isn’t.”

Edward was good and tired of waiting to see how things were going to go.  He threw off the blanket and positioned his knees on either side of Jonathan’s legs, straddling him.  Jonathan’s habit of falling asleep sitting up put him in a prime position for Edward to lean in and kiss him deeply, one hand against the headboard for balance and the other nudging Jonathan’s chin in the right direction. By the time Edward needed to catch his breath Jonathan’s hands had made their way onto his waist, his hands gentle yet solid there.  “I was beginning to think that – “ Edward began, but Jonathan put one finger against his lips to interrupt him.

“I believe there’s something more productive you could be doing with your mouth right now,” he said, and Edward had to admit he did have a point.  Only to himself, though.  He leaned back, enough that he could still kneel without leaning on Jonathan’s legs. He pressed one of his thumbs against Jonathan’s thigh.

“You don’t seem conducive to that sort of productivity at the moment,” Edward responded, and Jonathan did not even blink.

“You can poke fun at my age-related physical issues or…”

When he didn’t continue that sentence Edward removed his hand entirely.  “Or?”

Jonathan was smiling, which meant he was going to get lucky indeed. “Or you can prove you’re just the person to do something about it.”

“Oh, I assure you,” Edward breathed, moving forward to brush his lips beneath Jonathan’s ears, “I certainly am.”

“Your bravado, while quite entertaining, proves nothing, I’m afraid.”

 //

 “Well?  Did I prove anything?”

It was very obvious that he had; he’d been there, he’d seen it, he’d had his fun.  But teasing Jonathan was every bit as entertaining.

“Hm?”

Edward was lying on him much the same way as before, except that neither of them were wearing pants. Well, Edward wasn’t wearing anything, mostly because Jonathan liked it that way. He had left his hand on Jonathan’s hip, which was covered by his shirt, without much thought, but now it was in a convenient position of him to slide it down and rest it on Jonathan’s naked thigh.  “My bravado,” he said.  “You told me to prove its merit.”

“Oh.”  Jonathan made an attempt to move some of his hair out of his face.  Nothing really happened.  “I suppose. I’ll let you know when I decide.”

“I see,” Edward said, slowly sliding his hand back to where it had been.  Jonathan’s hand connected with the back of his abruptly, aborting his progress.

“That’s fine where it is.”

“That’s what I thought,” Edward whispered into his ear, and before he had moved his head back down Jonathan pressed his lips to his brow.  Edward smiled to himself.

Jonathan was languidly tracing the line of hair that ran up his stomach to his sternum, and it took him a moment to decide if he was okay with that today or not.  Age and a period lacking in due diligence had added weight to his waistline, and though Jonathan had already told him more than once that it did not put him off in the slightest, Edward had still not actually accepted it himself.  He was doing his best to maintain a regular exercise routine, but the plain fact was it would most likely take more hours at the gym than he was willing to put in to both remove it and keep it off.  It bothered him, but he had more important things to do with his time.  He would continue working on his fitness and his level of acceptance both, because he was going to have to reach a compromise at some point and sooner would be infinitely better. After turning all of that over he decided that, if Jonathan wanted to do that, he would let him.  Other than that, Edward was doing well at not letting age steamroll him entirely. And it did feel nice.  

“Edward,” Jonathan said after a moment, “I must admit earlier that I gave you an answer that was not quite reflective of what I was thinking.”

“You were thinking?” He said it less to make fun and more as a warning, in case Jonathan didn’t realise he was about to make some emotion-driven admission.  Edward didn’t like those any more than Jonathan did after he’d discovered he made one.

“I do that sometimes. It keeps my brain warm.”  He squeezed Edward’s arm a little, and he took that to mean Jonathan was fully aware of what he was going to say.  “But yes.  When I said your… Jacqueline was missing out, I wasn’t talking about Ada.”

That made his comment even more nonsensical than before.  “Who, then?”

“You,” Jonathan said. “I meant you.”

Edward needed a moment to process that.  In order to aid this he brought his hand up to Jonathan’s mostly nonexistent stomach. “Me?”

“Don’t take that to mean I dislike Ada.  What I said was genuine.  What I like about her more, however, is what she brings out in you.”

Had Jonathan noticed some difference in his behaviour at such times?  “Hm?”

Jonathan’s thumb was stroking his arm very softly.  He liked that.  “You have a myriad of faces for all types of people.  But there is one you show only your children.  It fascinates me.”

Edward hoped he was going to get around to explaining it, because he had no idea what any of this meant. He didn’t act in a distinct way around Ada as far as he could tell.

“You always provide her the attention she wants, even if you aren’t in the mood to do so.”  He rubbed at some place beneath his collar absently with his free hand.  “The reasoning behind it doesn’t matter.  Only the action.  In doing so you become… warmer.  This look comes over you, and it is that of… contentment.  Quiet satisfaction.  As though if you never had to do anything else, you would be happy.”

Edward had had no idea he did such a thing, though it was true… or at least he thought it could be, if ever he tried it.  He did need other things, of course, but if events had played out differently and he had had to change his plans, he thought he might have been content to spend the rest of his days in the factory with his children. He would never know for sure.  But he did know they were the only thing that had made him simply happy in those months he would have more or less lost to his delusional insanity without them.  He moved his arm farther across Jonathan’s waist.

“You would have made a good father, I think,” Jonathan said.  “Not initially.  It would have taken you far more years to work it all out than would be good for anybody. But once you knew, you would not forget.”

He agreed with that. He didn’t like it.  Didn’t like admitting he would be even the slightest bit bad at something.  But Jonathan was right.  He would have figured it out what would likely have been far too late.  Such a thing was undeniably impossible now, even if Jonathan would have agreed to it, but that didn’t stop him from wondering what it would have been like.  He could not deny that what had happened instead was infinitely better for everyone involved.

“It’s a side of you I enjoy a great deal.”  He put his free hand over Edward’s.  “It’s the only time I get to see whom you would have been, perhaps, if things had been different.  A glimpse of a world denied through a shuttered window.”

A shiver ran through his stomach.  Jonathan was so eloquent.  He’d always had a mastery of language that rivalled even Edward’s, but sometimes he forgot.  When he did Jonathan always seemed to know about it.  Edward was so very lucky to have someone who could still surprise him.

“One last thing.”

He was almost afraid to hear it.  What more could Jonathan possibly say, after all of that?

“Even if your parents aren’t,” Jonathan continued, very softly, “I am proud of you.”

Edward’s arm tightened around Jonathan’s waist of its own volition.  It meant a lot, to hear that.  More than he’d ever thought it would.  Jonathan could be sparing in his affections; in part because it was his nature and in part because he knew Edward needed it that way.  As such, Edward never had any idea when these sorts of things were going to come.  But Jonathan always knew when he needed them most, before Edward ever did.

He had gone to New Brunswick to learn something Jonathan had known all along: everything he needed was right here at home.  And it there it would stay.  It wouldn’t vanish, inexplicably, in the middle of the night.  Nor would it force him to do the same.  The need to search for answers that weren’t there might never truly fade.  But he would always have the ones at home to come back to.

“Thank you,” was all he had, and maybe this time such simplicity would be more than enough.

“You’re welcome,” Jonathan said, and he pressed his nose into Edward’s hair.

 Author’s note

I made Edward’s mother Acadienne because there was one night when I once worked the overnight shift at Tim Hortons where I was supposed to do a shift with my sister and my mom refused to let her go to work.  So I had to work the whole shift myself, from 11 pm-7 am, because it was Sunday and nobody would come in before 7 or to fill in the missing person.  I was okay until the rush started, at which time the drive thru and the store was all backed up because I was good but not Superman, and I dropped a coffee pot and people started laughing at me and I just wanted to jump out the drive thru window and abandon my life altogether.  (Not kill myself, just abandon my life).  One of the regular customers that would come in at 3 or 4 am was a man named Robert who was from New Brunswick and had a French Tricolour attached to the bottom of his front license plate because he was Acadien.  On this day I asked him if he would talk to me after work because I needed someone to talk to because I was really upset everyone, including my own family, had thrown me to the sharks, and he agreed and after I was done we drove down to the river and he let me sit in his truck and rant at him.  When I didn’t have a car he would drive me home sometimes as well (I had to walk to work and it took me 45 minutes and I had to go to high school after) and during my break he would smoke and I would go out back and talk to him every day.  So that’s in appreciation of Robert and the nice things he used to do for me.

[tashmitchviscom]

It is probably the most over-used word in the United Kingdom: whether they are sorry about the weather or sorry because someone else has bumped into them, chances are your average Briton has blurted out at least one apology in the past hour or two.

A recent survey of more than 1,000 Brits found that that the average person says ‘sorry’ around eight times per day – and that one in eight people apologise up to 20 times a day.

“The readiness of the English to apologise for something they haven’t done is remarkable, and it is matched by an unwillingness to apologise for what they have done,” wrote Henry Hitchings in his aptly-titled Sorry!: The English and their Manners.

Getting reliable data on the frequency of apologies in different countries is harder than you might think. “There’s certainly speculation that Canadians and Brits apologise more than Americans, but it’s difficult to study in a way that would provide any compelling evidence,” says Karina Schumann, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies apologies and forgiveness.

One approach is to ask people what they’d do in a theoretical situation. For instance, a recent YouGov poll of more than 1,600 British people and 1,000 Americans revealed that there would be approximately 15 British ‘sorries’ for every 10 American ones if they sneezed, if they corrected someone’s mistake, or if someone crashed into them.

But the survey found similarities between the British and American respondents, as well: just under three-quarters of people from either country would say sorry for interrupting someone. And 84% of Brits would apologise for being late to a meeting, compared to 74% of Americans.

However, asking someone what they’d do in a theoretical situation is very different to measuring what they’d do in real life. Take the last example; in the YouGov survey, 36% of British respondents said they would apologise for someone else’s clumsiness, compared to 24% of Americans.

But in her book Watching the English, social anthropologist Kate Fox describes experiments in which she deliberately bumped into hundreds of people in towns and cities across England. She also encouraged colleagues to do the same abroad, for comparison.

Fox found that around 80% of English victims said ‘sorry’ – even though the collisions were clearly Fox’s fault. Often the apology was mumbled, and possibly people said it without even realising it, but compared to when tourists from other countries were bumped, the difference was marked. “Only the Japanese seemed to have anything even approaching the English sorry-reflex,” Fox writes.

The origins of the word ‘sorry’ can be traced to the Old English ‘sarig’ meaning “distressed, grieved or full of sorrow”, but of course, most British people use the word more casually. And herein lies another problem with studying cultural differences in languages. “We use the word ‘sorry’ in different ways,” says Edwin Battistella, a linguistics expert from Southern Oregon University and author of Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology. Brits might say sorry more often, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re more remorseful.

“We can use it to express empathy – so I might say ‘sorry about the rain’,” says Battistella. “It might be that British and Canadian speakers use that kind of ‘sorry’ more often, but they wouldn’t be apologising, per se. Other researchers have talked about the use of ‘sorry’ to communicate across social classes, where you’re sort of apologising for your privilege.”

British society values that its members show respect without imposing on someone else’s personal space, and without drawing attention to oneself: characteristics that linguists refer to as “negative-politeness” or “negative-face”. America, on the other hand, is a positive-politeness society, characterised by friendliness and a desire to feel part of a group.

As a consequence, Brits may sometimes use ‘sorry’ in a way that can seem inappropriate to outsiders, including Americans. The British will say ‘sorry’ to someone they don’t know because they’d like to ask for some information, or to sit down next to them – and because not saying ‘sorry’ would constitute an even greater invasion of that stranger’s privacy.

“Our excessive, often inappropriate and sometimes downright misleading use of this word devalues it, and it makes things very confusing and difficult for foreigners unaccustomed to our ways,” says Fox. Still, she adds, “I don’t think saying sorry all the time is such a bad thing. It even makes sense in the context of a negative-politeness culture… Of all the words that a nation could choose to scatter about with such random profligacy, surely ’sorry’ is not the worst.”

There may be other benefits to saying ‘sorry’, too – such as fostering trust. Interestingly, that is true even when people are apologising not for mistakes they’ve made, but rather for circumstances beyond their control.

In one study, Harvard Business School’s Alison Wood Brooks and her colleagues recruited a male actor to approach 65 strangers at a US train station on a rainy day and ask to borrow their telephone. In half the cases, the stranger preceded his request with: “Sorry about the rain”. When he did this, 47% of strangers gave him their mobile, compared to only 9% when he simply asked to borrow their phone. Further experiments confirmed it was the apology about the weather that mattered, not the politeness of the opening sentence.

“By saying ‘I’m sorry about the rain’, the superfluous apologiser acknowledges an unfortunate circumstance, takes the victim’s perspective and expresses empathy for the negative circumstance – even though it is outside of his or her control,” says Wood Brooks.

“People worry that an apology will serve as an admission of liability, rather than as an effort to empathise with the wronged party,” says Wood Brooks. But she adds “effective apologies address the recipients’ feelings – they don’t prove a point. A good apology is unlikely to backfire, and is more likely to increase trust than not apologising at all.”

As for how to do it, Battistella has the following advice: “The right way to apologise is the way your mother taught you.” Say you threw a stone at a sibling. “She’d have you go and look them in the eye in the eye and say: ‘I’m sorry I threw the stone at you and I won’t do it again’. It’s important to name what you did wrong, to show yourself as being penitent in some way and to indicate what might be different in the future,” Battistella says.

Just how many times you’ll need to repeat the apology may vary according to where you live. Wood Brooks and Harvard PhD student Grant Donnelly have collected preliminary data that suggests that, for a minor transgression, the optimal number is a single “I’m sorry”.

“If the transgression is large, then making two apologies seems to be the magic number for conveying empathy, remorse and restoring trust and liking,” Wood Brooks says.

Of course, if you’re British, you may need to double that. “A single ‘sorry’ does not count as an apology: we have to repeat it and embellish it with a lot of adjectives,” says Fox.

[cinefiles-ithaca]

A Film Trail to Pittsburgh

As Silent Movie Month rages on for another week, I’m back at Ithaca College from a trip home to Pittsburgh for Fall Break.  While there, I popped in to the Senator John Heinz History Center, where I worked last summer, to interview Lauren Uhl, Museum Project Manager and a curator at the Center, about her love of silent film actress, director, writer, and producer, Lois Weber (1879-1939). Weber, often considered to be one of the first American female directors, was born in Pittsburgh and spent the first twenty years of her life there. Last summer, the city celebrated Lois and her accomplishments in the film industry by putting up a historical marker in front of the Allegheny Carnegie Library where Weber’s house once stood.

Senator John Heinz History Center

When I showed Wharton Studio Museum's executive director Diana Riesman the first draft of this blog post, she was excited to let me know that Lois Weber figured somewhat prominently in Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache, the critically-acclaimed documentary directed by Pamela B. Green that WSM showed this past Wednesday night at Cinemapolis for Silent Movie Month.  Alice Guy was making films in Paris in the late 1890s for Gaumont Studios, before coming to the States in the early 1900s, establishing her own studio --  Solax --  in Fort Lee, NJ, and writing, directing, and producing hundreds and hundreds of films, working with her husband Herbert Blache on numerous productions.  Alice Guy's path coincided with Lois Weber's -- Weber acted in a number of Solax films, and allegedly had an affair with Herbert Blache. Weber is sometimes referred to as "Mrs. Smalley" in the documentary, since she was married to a director named Phillips Smalley.

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache, (Pamela B. Green, 2018)

But back to Lois Weber... Throughout our conversation Lauren makes it clear what drew her to Weber, why Weber is such an important person in the history of cinema, and why having communities claim these under-represented people in this industry is important. And she describes how the historical marker came to be plunged in the ground of Pittsburgh’s Northside:

Lois Weber

Rachael Weinberg: What was the process like of creating a historical marker for too many, an unknown person?

Lauren Uhl: Would you like the background? The Heinz Heinz History Center curators have been interested in documenting the film industry for so many years, and it was probably about five years ago I ran across the name Lois Weber. I found that she was one of the first female American directors and she was from Pittsburgh. I just couldn’t believe, I had never heard of her before. I love silent film, and I have been in the Pittsburgh history business for 30 years, and I never heard of her. I found that really fascinating and, at that time, even five years ago, there wasn’t a lot of information about her really anywhere. But, not long after that, I heard through the grapevine that Pitt [University of Pittsburgh] was hosting some women in Silent Film Program, and someone named Shelley Stamp was coming, and she had been in the process of writing a book. I asked if we could go, they agreed, and Shelley said in passing, “I’ve always wanted to get a historic marker for Lois in Hollywood.” When she said that I thought, “Jeez, we should do that here.” That is something the History Center could sponsor, that I could work on, and nobody in Pittsburgh knows who she is. It became a tangible thing to do for this anamorphosis project, this documentation project that we are trying to do. I talked to a few people to my colleagues and boss, because it would cost some money, and I got the green light. I contacted the state about paperwork, and to see what I needed to do and how much money it would cost, but I kept on getting green lights. And that was sort of the genesis of the idea of it. It seemed like a tangible thing, it would last beyond program. It would be a permanent fixture in the city and something we could turn too, and it seemed like a good starting space for the project.

Shelley Stamp

RW: So you say you, “kept on getting these green lights”, but were there any issues along the way?

LU: Surprisingly there weren’t. I think it was because it went under the radar, so it flew over the heads of those in a lot of power. Plus, the cost of the marker was only $1,600, which was not inconsiderable, but in the scheme of things, it wasn’t major money. It was just kinda me sitting in a corner in my spare time. Fortunately, by the time it started to roll out, Shelley’s book came out. I used it as my background source, so I read that as fast as I could. Then I could write about Weber and her importance.

Scene from Suspense (Lois Weber, 1913), showing a custom vignette

RW: Shelley Stamp and Illeana Douglas were the two keynote speakers, what was it like working with them and how did you get that to all come together?

LU: It was marvelous. I look back and call it my Lois Weber day, where everything goes right. Shelley Stamp was the obvious one, because she was the academic and she wrote the book. When we first saw Shelley she was doing an academic lecture on Lois’s film. We wanted this to be a conversation and not a lecture, about not only Lois and her importance in the film industry, and I wanted it to reach beyond that. I had seen Illeana a number of times on TCM, she is an actress, director, and producer as well. But also she is such a good interviewer, that it would be more of the conversation than lecture. I knew Illeana would come with a price tag. I figured that Shelley would just need to come here, but I knew Douglas would come for a pause. I wasn’t sure how much it would cost and how to get in contact with her. I went to her website, I called her personal appearance person and they never responded. A few days later,  I emailed her agent and one night he called, and I had a nice conversation with him, and he gave me a price tag, which wasn’t outrageous. I went to education, and said that there was this price tag and they said, “okay, we will give you the money.”  So then it was just logistical: making sure they could both come at that time. But she was available to doing it. So everything worked out as best as I could recommend.  

Illeana Douglas

RW: How did watching Weber’s work influence you? She is a revolutionary.

LU: She truly was. But it was, at first, hard to find. What I was impressed with was that she was an amazing filmmaker. You always say the first, but she wasn’t just the first she was really good. She was a really good filmmaker. Her films had a lot of heart to them, which is unlike today. She had a way of taking moral tales and  thoughtful stories, and hard subjects like abortion or wage inequality and have you think at the end of them. Because they were good stories and good films. She was able to package all of these things I love and lift them up cinematically, and they were silent. She didn’t have sound. And she was able to blaze a trail in how to create film. I was even more amazed that she grabbed this medium and made it her own. By god, she was going to do the stories she wanted to tell, own a studio, and she had this matronly personality that made her easy to love. She was getting her point across, but in a matter that was not offensive, even if you disagree with her. 

RW: For sure. She was born in Pittsburgh, but she never worked in Pittsburgh, right?

LU: Yes, she never filmed in Pittsburgh, but she did grow up here. She spent the first 20 years of her life here, so she was formed in Pittsburgh, but never created here. 

Poster for The Blot (Lois Weber, 1921)

RW: What does that tie all the way back to the silent era mean to your project?

LU: She is foundational, but she is not the only one. We claim the Nickelodeon, the Warner Brothers get their start in Western Pennsylvania. They figure out that distribution is where the money is. Then as Edison and his patent people come here, they move west. Edwin S. Porter was born here (Great Train Robbery). So it is lovely to have a woman, because it provides balance, but there were a lot of these greats getting their starts here.

RW: That leads me to my next question… Yes, we have all these men, but what does it mean to have a woman. Especially a woman who was talking about sobriety and sex and prostitution, what does it mean to have that voice?

LU: It is interesting to me, because, personally, I am a Christian, so is comes from that world view. She was a missionary and Christian, so that comes into her world view. My understanding was that she was a missionary in Pittsburgh and New York, what that also brings to the table is it gives us an understanding of what Pittsburgh was like when she grew up here. That falls through the cracks of history. It is easy to talk about Andrew Carnegie and immigrants, but Lois could take these real life problems in Pittsburgh, which I’m sure happened everywhere else, but putting them on the forefront. She was able to use her Pittsburgh background to tell these stories. In some way it leaves Pittsburgh into these tales without explicitly saying “Pittsburgh”.

RW: What else are you doing to keep Lois alive in house?

LU: For Lois, physically, nothing in particular, but whenever I have the opportunity, I will try to invoke her. Especially since next year was the centennial for women getting the right to vote. So I will try to fit Lois whenever she fits. The other thing I would love to do, is i would like to honor her on an annual basis by having a lecture or conversation. In my mind it is two things: One would be with a Pittsburgh filmmaker, and the second would be a person who isn’t from Pittsburgh but exemplifies Lois. So that would be the way that we would keep her name in front of the people. 

RW: You named a lot of other silent players. How are you incorporating those?

LU: When people say exhibit they think of large objects, but the other curators and I would love to do other things for the exhibit, like blogs and films and events. But right now we are also looking for the tangible pieces of these people, but we also thing “Can we find a photograph? Can we find a lobby card? What are other ways to incorporate these people?” And past. I don’t just want this to end either. I want this to grow into something larger whether that is traveling or putting pieces in our permanent collections. We just want to grow and allow for this to keep spinning. 

RW: Why is it important for us to remember these women and these marginalized people in film to allow for their stories to be told, or retell their stories?

LU: I can think of two things. The first was when I was in college and I was working in the Henry Ford Museum. It was still old school, and they just had aisles and aisles of objects. I remember sitting there and thinking, these are my people. What do you learn in history class? Washington, Lincoln, the Depression? And I’m thinking, “My people aren’t even completely marginalized. They’re the German Irish, but they aren’t in the history books.” So I want to tell these stories of all of these marginalized people and give them a sense of belonging. The second part comes down to the fact that other people came before you, and it goes back to something that Shelley said. When Illeana asked Shelley something similar she said, “I’ve got this girl in my screenwriting class who thinks that she nobody has ever done it before, and that she needs to blaze the trail. She doesn’t. Women have been writing for over 100 years. It’s going to be harder for you as a woman. It always will be, but there are people who came before you and people who will come after you.” That’s one of the fascinating things about history. You don’t have to feel bad about being the cog. Lois did this 100 years ago meaning that you can do this too. So let’s keep honoring them and keep reminding people of them, so they can also see how this industry and any industry hasn’t always just been part of hegemony.

Scene from Suspense (Lois Weber, 1913)

-Rachael Weinberg, Museum Division Intern

[thechasefiles]

The Chase Files Daily Newscap 12/21/2018

Good MORNING #realdreamchasers! Here is The Chase Files Daily News Cap for Friday 21st December 2018. Remember you can read full articles for FREE via Barbados Today (BT) or Barbados Government Information Services (BGIS) OR by purchasing by purchasing a Weekend Newspaper (WN).

‘SATISFIED’ – The country’s largest public sector union is satisfied that Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s promise to send home public workers with money in their pockets has been kept – at least for those who are union members. Acting General Secretary of the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW), Delicia Burke said although the union has taken issue with certain aspects of the retrenchment exercise, she is happy that “most” public servants from government departments, represented by the NUPW, have been paid. While she could not give numbers of NUPW members laid off, she indicated that in many cases, workers have been given enough money to carry them through the Yuletide season. She told Barbados TODAY that scores of workers have gone home with at least back-pay, notice-pay and vacation-pay. “Most of them would have gone home with some money, I guess there would be concerns about the future, but the good thing, if you could say good, is that the majority of them would have gone home with some money,” she said. “Even though the money isn’t going to last forever, they would have some money now.” In October, when the administration’s “economic recovery and transformation” plan, dubbed BERT, was in its early stages, Mottley promised “that the day workers receive their notice, they would be handed with a cheque, at least for severance payments and payment in lieu of notice. “None of us would feel good having to go home without knowing where money is coming from and who is going to help us tomorrow or to come back next week or next month and be begging for money,” she said. While laid-off workers from some government departments and statutory corporations like the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation have accused Prime Minister Mottley of breaking that promise, Burke said Government had in some cases gone the extra mile to meet the needs of its former employees. “Our workers who were laid off, were given an ‘ex gratia’ payment, so even those who weren’t entitled to severance pay, they were given a payment which was computed around the same lines as severance pay, so it really isn’t true to say that they went home without their severance pay. Some who have gone over ten years who were not entitled to certain payments were given gratuities up front,” said Burke. As for the workers who remained, the acting General Secretary highlighted Customs officers at the Barbados Revenue Authority as an example of overworked civil servants in under-staffed departments. “We are concerned with the numbers at Customs, it is putting a lot of stress on those workers and only today, one of our members from statistics would have told us they are going through the same thing. They have lost quite a few members of staff and they are expected to give a greater output with less hands and it is causing a lot of stress on behalf of the remaining staff. So we will have to take up that cause on their behalf,” she said. “We are also really concerned about sanitation and we are concerned about certain things relating to how the layoffs were done.” Earlier this week, General Secretary of the NUPW Roslyn Smith before going on leave, revealed the union would be seeking the Prime Minister’s direct intervention in a number of matters which are affecting workers. With Burke now acting in the position, the union will continue to advance the cause, she said.  (BT)

LABOUR MOVEMENT UNDER THREAT – The umbrella body for trade unions in Barbados warned today that the labour movement is currently under threat due to Government’s ongoing retrenchment programme. Outspoken president of the Congress of Trade Unions and Staff Associations of Barbados (CTUSAB) Edwin O’Neal cautioned that the threat is compounded by utterances from some sections of the business sector that workers make adjustments immediately because of the economic crisis, while capital suggests they be given more time. “It is clear that the labour movement is under threat and it is about steeling your resolve and rising to those challenges. You can’t lay down and play dead. Some would want you to think so. We got to take on these challenges,” O’Neal told Barbados TODAY. The former police officer explained that whenever workers are being sent home, it results in a reduction in membership of the trade union movement. “There are other instances that led us to believe that [the movement is under threat]. Barbados is a social welfare state; it has developed its human capital on the basis of he who can best afford must pay. When you start hearing talk now about leveling a playing field and everybody got to make a contribution . . . everybody’s got to make a contribution according to their abilities,” the CTUSAB leader said. He suggested that the labour market was now being ‘right-sized.’ “So what happens? Labour getting cut and labour getting sent home. You now had an adjustment downward to corporation tax . . . and what is the response? Don’t expect to see benefits immediately; it gine tek time to kick in. Now that is an inequitable situation. Isn’t it? Labour has to start making adjustments immediately, but capital says you got to give me time,” O’Neal pointed out. Switching his focus on specific priorities for 2019, the CTUSAB president said his organization must continue addressing retrenchments, growth of the economy that hopefully translates into jobs, the stability of growth in the economy and a general improvement in Barbados. Oneal told Barbados TODAY how they intended to achieve that. “We will build a stronger and tighter Congress; continue to give assistance, both technical and moral to the affiliates and look forward to the New Year, despite the gloom, with some optimism,” he stated. Asked how CTUSAB planned to build a stronger organization with evidence of disenchantment among some trade unions, O’Neal said: “What can one do about disenchantment, except continue working towards building your credibility? Credibility in part is built by consistency and the appropriate responses to the appropriate challenges,” he said. When pressed, O’Neal preferred to stay clear of agreeing that there was a need to mend fences with some other affiliate unions such as the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW) and the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU). (BT)

‘WE’RE NOT OUT OF THE WOODS YET’ – After six months of Government’s implementation of a homegrown economic rescue plan it is still too early to tell if the measures will work, says economist Jeremy Stephen. The University of the West Indies lecturer and former president of the Barbados Economics Society says he is concerned that while the Mia Mottley administration has made a good start to tackling economic woes, it may be trying to fix too many critical things at the same time. “For the first six months the Government made rapid reforms but it is my feeling that it is too early to tell if is definitively bad or good. It is my view that they [Government] could have done a bit better if they had focused on fewer things that were critical as opposed to trying to be everything to everybody,” Stephen told Barbados TODAY in an interview Thursday morning. Stephen warned Barbadians against thinking that the worst had past under the International Monetary Fund-approved economic prescription. “There is no way that we are out of the woods yet. There are two things that still must happen no matter how we wish to dress it up. The IMF bailout has topped reserves but the problem in Barbados has always been productivity and foreign direct investment as well as growth and export potential. If we continue thinking that the IMF bailout is a formula for sustainable success then we won’t go anywhere,” he said. He noted that over the years, successive governments, via the Central Bank, have drawn down on SDRs [special drawing rights with the IMF] in order to replenish reserves. “Essentially you could have always borrowed from the IMF based on the amount of shares you have or you can sell those shares on the open market or cash them in at the IMF. So for a long time we have either been drawing or borrowing small loans from the IMF. I remember the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) under former Prime Minister Owen Arthur did it twice and so too did the Democratic Labour Party and they were all linked to the reserves,” he said suggesting that history has shown that loans to bolster foreign reserves did not in themselves solve balance-of-payment issues. But the outspoken economist noted that a number of actions taken by Government in the last six months should give Barbadians some measure of hope that things could turn around should all of the stars align with regards to debt restructuring. Stephen pointed out that progress in 2019 would also depend on the private sector changing the way it does business from being locally-driven to export orientation, following the Prime Minister’s recent decision to lower corporation tax from 30 per cent to a sliding scale of one to five per cent. “Government has ensured that external creditors have to come to fairer terms considering the impact it would have on the foreign reserves,” Stephen told Barbados TODAY. “We still don’t know where this debacle will go but they don’t make up a large portion of the debt. My biggest worry is how the commercial banks will respond, even though at the moment they seem to be playing ball. “In addition, we must watch how the private sector utilizes these new favourable tax cuts. They need to move towards being more export driven while Government must ramp up efforts to attract foreign direct investment.” (BT)

UPP QUERIES PM’S REPORT CARD – The six-month progress report on the new administration’s economic rescue mission has raised more questions than answers, the leader of the United Progressive Party (UPP), Lynette Eastmond, has charged. Eastmond, a former minister of international business in the Owen Arthur administration, contends that while Prime Minister Mottley touts the success of the Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation (BERT) programme, there is still no mention of a growth plan. In her ministerial statement to Parliament on Tuesday, Mottley boasted that foreign reserves had reached their highest level in four years, the dollar was no longer in danger of devaluation, debt-to-GDP ratio had fallen to 123 per cent and the country had received its first credit rating upgrade in 15 years. “The plan has halted and reversed the six-year slide in our reserves, which have jumped from just $400 million to over $1 billion. Indeed today our Gross International Reserves stood at $1.044 billion – the first time since 2014,” Mottley said. “Our dollar has been brought to safety… and in a few months we executed one of the largest exchanges of government debt as a percent of national income in world history. We will now save approximately $500 million of interest per year,” she added. But Eastmond argues that most of these achievements were based on borrowed money and did not represent generated growth. “While the international reserves appear to have improved, Barbadians must be mindful that this is based on borrowing and the Barbados Government’s decision to default on its loan payments. We however know that those who borrow must eventually pay back. So while we are being provided with fiscal space, the question is fiscal space to do what?” the leader of the two year-old political party questioned She told Barbados TODAY that her party was concerned that after six months in office, the Barbados Labour Party administration is yet to reveal a sound growth strategy and therefore “fiscal and tax policy decisions are being made which are out of step with the sectors most ready for growth”. “One of these sectors is the creative economy and the [decision to introduce value added tax on online purchases] will hurt that sector the most but it will also hurt small businesses generally. There is no pride to be taken in the fact that other countries have not implemented this method of taxation. Other countries have not done so because at this juncture they foresee that the cost is greater than the benefit,” Eastmond said. She also criticized Government’s recent decision to lower corporation tax from 30 per cent to a sliding scale of one to five per cent, noting that any benefits from this tax break were too much at the discretion of the private sector. “There is no doubt that there must be some fall out in the loss of corporation tax upon convergence and that there is a potential loss in personal tax because of the lack of symmetry between the personal and the corporate tax rates . . . . The strategy however seems to be that of hoping that the private sector which will benefit from the reduced taxes will “do the right thing,” she said. (BT)

WANTED: MORE SKILLED TRADESPEOPLE – A construction boss is hinting construction labour may have to be imported as there may not be enough skilled workers to meet the demand as major construction projects kick off next year. Project Manager of the JADA Group Vincent Jones said that construction companies may have to look outside of Barbados to fill the gap of skilled workers and tradesmen needed to work on large projects. He cited the building of the Sandals luxury hotel resort in another four months, a large housing project in St George which will be started in another six months by Sagicor, as well as the ongoing work on Sam Lord’s Castle as some of the major projects that will need skilled workers. Jones was delivering the 14th Samuel Jackman Prescod Memorial Lecture at the Samuel Jackman Prescod Institute of Technology (SJPI) on the topic, Building Construction for Sustainable Development: Implications for Barbados. He said the projects would have a positive economic impact and could even allow for recently laid-off public workers to find jobs “in the coming months or years”. “Of course, the tricky aspect of this is to balance your level and intensity of development in terms of construction to try and prolong such activity over an extended period of time, which permits longer term employment opportunities and possibly reduce the need to import large numbers of skilled labour,” he told the audience. The JADA project manager, himself a SJPI alumnus, charged that Barbados had become a victim of its own educational success and had created a human resource dilemma “of our own making”. He explained that whereas in the past, Barbados was said to have a good complement of tradespeople, this had shifted to the point where there were more Barbadians with degrees and white collar jobs than those who worked with their hands. He observed that subjects such as Industrial Arts in secondary schools were “now deemed as low grade or low brow” and were looked upon by some as subject areas “where the academically inclined were sent as if [it was] some kind of sentence”. Jones added that working with one’s hands had, over the years, become a “bad word”. “We have a very high literacy rate, and a large percentile average of our citizens, who might be considered to be the common folk, are holders of varying levels of degrees; certainly, a great achievement for a nation of only 166 square miles and a little over 280,000 persons. However, what have we lost in the process? “May the Lord forgive our ignorance as a nation, not to realize that academic and trade education should complement each other and not fight each other for space in society. “The sad reality, my friends, is when these projects I alluded to earlier start, we as a nation will be woefully under-equipped and under-manned as it pertains to skilled tradesmen, and we will have to import thousands of persons from the region and possibly the world to successfully complete some of the projects in the timelines allotted.” He praised Government institutions such as the SJPI and other skills training centres that maintain and improve the skills level of tradespeople. The construction boss said he hoped to see “some of the IMF and international funding” Government has received being pumped into his alma mater as well as the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Council. This, he said, would allow them to offer young Barbadians and retrenched workers attractive opportunities for the future. Jones suggested that Barbados needed “a more balanced and equitable” education system, so that people who wanted to obtain a skill from early could do so. He further added that the earning capacity of skilled tradespeople was sometimes better than that of employees in traditional jobs. “Do you know that a good tiler can earn as much as $2,000 in one five-day work week? Or that a good mason can earn as much as $1,200 in a five-day work week? Why then would we want to push a young person who might be naturally gifted with their hands into a clerical job that will pay $400 per week that they will find unfulfilling? “I think that we must re-assess our approaches to education and make the necessary adjustments required to look toward the Barbados of the next 50 years.” Jones stated.  (BT)

RURAL’ CALLS – Recent retrenchments at the Rural Development Commission (RDC) have hampered the state-owned agency’s ability to recoup some $2.4 million in arrears but acting Director Gregory Hinds says there will be no letting up in the efforts to recover the outstanding monies which date as far back as 2003. “With the current economic climate, we have had some issues with delinquency. Unfortunately, we lost the business development team due to the last in, first out process. They would have been working hard to recover some of those loans and asking customers to come in, not for refinancing but, to make some payments towards the loans which were outstanding. That process was going smoothly,” he said. However, the retrenchment of 22 RDC staff including three from the business development team meant that the work had to be re-allocated among the remaining staff in order to continue the collections drive. Hinds gave the update on the RDC’s efforts to collect on loans at a seminar on Farm Management for Poultry and Pig Enterprises held at the Commission’s Bridge Street Mall, St Michael Headquarters on Wednesday. “We lost three officers and it has slowed the process in terms of our loan recoveries and we are working now to reschedule how we manage that operation. What we would have done was to allow loan customers to make payments through the Republic Bank,” he said, adding that one of the reasons persons may have neglected their payments to the RDC is because of poor business planning. “I think it goes deeper than collections; it goes deeper with some people who would have borrowed and some never made any payments because either the business was going down or they lacked proper planning. That is the reason this morning for the training session to educate farmers about how they can plan to manage their businesses,” Hinds said. The acting director said there has been a pique in interest from persons seeking assistance from the livestock development fund for the Christmas season and he attributes this to the increase in sales of pork and chicken which have stimulated the interest of those looking for a business opportunity. (BT)

BPS WANTS IN ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA PLANS – The Barbados Pharmaceutical Society (BPS) is calling on government not to leave it out of plans to introduce medical marijuana to the country. Stating that he supports medical marijuana, BPS president Derek Catlyn however suggested today that Government should first decriminalize the drug. “We know that medical marijuana is coming on stream cause we keep seeing it in the media. So I hope that everything would be in place in terms of pharmacists being more involved when it comes to that and not just from a doctor’s perspective,” Catlyn told Barbados TODAY. He complained that the Pharmaceutical Society had no information whatsoever about use of the drug or whether Government will start with its own pharmacies as providers. “We don’t really have any information. I don’t know if private pharmacies will be involved as well, or first [if] the Government is going to be targeting, in terms of the public sector, like polyclinics and so on, and later on the private sector. But if they feel pharmacists will need sensitizing and educating regarding it, I don’t see it as being a problem,” Catlyn said. The BPS head argued that the Government should be more proactive in providing all the relevant information to the industry and not just releasing it in the Press. “I believe all the necessary stakeholders got to be involved and let us see what is really happening,” he added. Catlyn is of the view that some people have interpreted the marijuana issue the wrong way by mixing up its medicinal use and recreational purpose. “They’ve got to understand that . . . the way how I interpret it . . . you could be treating it like how you have narcotic medication [where] anybody can just come into the pharmacy and get it just like that. It has to be in a restricted area; you doing checks and balances when it comes to it; you got to ensure that patients aren’t abusing it,” the spokesman for pharmacists said. But the health care professional noted that while recreational marijuana may come into force later, “I think first they can look at decriminalization instead of wasting taxpayers’ money sending up somebody for having a personal amount of marijuana on themselves.” He suggested that once all the mechanisms are in place, he does not see a problem with its introduction. In June this year, Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Indar Weir revealed that the Government intended to develop an industry here from the growing of ganja and other plants. “I must share with you my Government’s intention to make provision for the production of marijuana and other plans for medical purposes,” Weir said in his feature address at the annual accountability seminar organized by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture and held in the Ministry of Agriculture conference room at Graeme Hall, Christ Church. “Indeed, more and more countries are passing laws providing for the use of marijuana as a medicine to treat a range of medical complaints, including headaches, muscle spasm, nausea from cancer chemotherapy, poor appetite and nerve pain,” he said. Weir said the authorities would monitor the drug to discourage rampant misuse, as it remained illegal in some countries.  (BT)

DECADES LIVING IN A SHAMBLES – For more than 30 years, Jeffrey Nightengale has been living in a house which was crumbling around him. Nightengale lives in 3rd Avenue Licorish Village, My Lord’s Hill, St Michael, and his pleasant demeanour belies his living conditions. He is now forced to live in the front of his home as the back has collapsed and is open to the elements. He said his floorboards have all but given way. He lived in the house from age 14 but left in his 20s, returning only when his father died in 1983. Now 67 years, he said his Christmas wish was for a new house to settle in for his twilight years. “The back is no use and there is not much flooring left, but I hardly have any money as most of my pension goes to pay back a loan,” he said. (WN)

VIOLENT CRIME LEAVES VISITORS SHAKEN – A violent robbery has left long time American visitors John and Janice Garrod contemplating whether they should ever return to the island. The two who own a property along the Batts Rock beach said everything has changed since the robbery.  “Before we retired, we used to visit Barbados regularly. We then bought this house in 1998 and started staying for longer periods. Now we’re retired, we spend the winters here almost every year. When we first settled here, there was a period of trouble with break-ins, but that calmed down and it’s been pretty good or we would not have stayed, which is why this is so surprising,” said John, 80. The incident happened on December 7 when the couple had decided to frequent a newly opened restaurant in the area. They left their home around 5:15 p.m., when it was still relatively bright, unaware that none of the many torches along the path were working. “We had a good time and decided to have dinner. Around 6:45 p.m. we were walking back, but you could hardly see your hand in front your face – it was pitch black as the lights weren’t working. I suddenly got a shove which sent me stumbling down and then I heard my wife screaming,” he said.  (WN)

UPDATE: MAN FOUND HANGING – The brother of the man found hanging from a tree in Campaign Castle, St George, said his brother was suffering from intense pain before his death. Joseph Liverpool, 60, said his 70-year-old brother Elroy Liverpool was constantly complaining of stomach pain and even was scheduled to have an ultrasound. He said he last saw his brother on Friday night asleep and despite missing him, did not suspect he was dead. “A neighbour told me they saw him hanging. I was stunned. I was actually preparing to go to a funeral when I got the news,” he said. Liverpool said he would miss his elder brother as he said he was “great company”.  (WN)

REVIEW ‘BAIL FOR GUNMEN’ – Commissioner of Police Tyrone Griffith wants the law granting bail to those accused of crimes involving guns to be reviewed. For the first 18 days of December, there were seven reported shooting incidents, resulting in the death of one and injury to six. Griffith said this suggested how readily available guns were in Barbados. He said more had to be done to stop them flowing into the island. Griffith was also concerned that several of those involved in shootings were people on bail for firearm offences or those who were known associates of such individuals and those suspected to be in the drug trade. Despite people’s right to bail, the commissioner is calling for the review. (WN)

POLICE NET GUNS, DRUGS IN RAID – On Sunday, December 16 around 2:45a.m., police carried out an operation at Cheapside Road, St Michael. The operation targeted a fete being held at a location occupied by A&A Wholesale, where over 300 patrons were in attendance. When the police arrived, patrons broke down the temporary fencing and ran away. Seventy three patrons were searched and nothing illegal was found on them. Two patrons were taken into custody to assist with investigations. A comprehensive search of the venue and its immediate environs revealed the following items: 1. One nine millimetre Smith and Wesson firearm with 14 rounds of ammunition 2. One 45 Colt with eight rounds of ammunition. 3. 20 pairs of scissors, and 4. A quantity of cannabis. (WN)

MAN FACING FOUR CHARGES – The police in the Bridgetown Division have arrested and charged Dario Akeem Ifill, 27, of London Road, Brittons Hill, St Michael with a number of offences. He was accused of committing the following offences on November 23, around 9:20 p.m.: 1. Serious bodily harm to Leon Lawrence 2. Use of a firearm 3. Criminal damage. Ifill also faced a charge of violent disorder, that he was accused of committing on August 18 whilst at Valerie Main Road, St Michael.   He appeared in the District “A” Criminal Court today, before Magistrate Douglas Frederick where he was not required to plead to the offences. He was remanded into custody to HMP Dodds and is scheduled to reappear at court on Thursday, January 17.  (WN)

NO CHRISTMAS BAIL  - A man facing several charges, including possession of a firearm was remanded to HMP Dodds until the New Year. When he appeared in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court today Dario Akeem Ifill, 27, of London Road, Brittons Hill, St Michael, was remanded by Magistrate Douglas Frederick. Ifill was not required to plead to the charges that on November 23, 2018, he caused serious bodily harm to Leon Lawrence with intent to maim, disfigure or disable him; that he used a firearm while committing the act of serious bodily harm and that he damaged a motor car belonging to First Class Car Rentals. He also faces a charge that together with five persons he used unlawful violence towards Gregory Shepherd on August 18, 2018. Prosecutor Station Sergeant Carrison Henry objected to bail because of the seriousness of the offences and that a firearm allegedly used had not yet been recovered. He said one person had been injured and that the incident stemmed from an ongoing feud. Henry said he feared if Ifill were granted bail the fracas would continue. The accused told the magistrate he would make a bail application on his next court date. He will return to court on January 17, 2019. (BT)

CHRISTMAS RELEASE FOR MASON – Magistrate Kristie Cuffy-Sargeant today gave Kerry Wendell Mason’s son the “perfect Christmas gift”. After being on remand for the past 15 days, he was released without a conviction being recorded against him and allowed to go home to his five-year-old son following an impassioned bail application from his lawyer, Queen’s Counsel Michael Lashley appearing in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court. The 38-year-old musician of Bayfield, St. Philip, had been remanded to HMP Dodds until the new year by Cuffy-Sargeant after pleading guilty to loitering on the premises of Lobster Alive on December 4, 2018, where there was cause to suspect he was about to commit an offence in malicious communication. Mason was held after he put his hand through a female bathroom window and used his cellphone to record a tourist as she used the toilet at Lobster Alive. Lashley gave the court several reasons why his client should be granted bail among them that he did not waste the court’s time and had immediately pleaded guilty, he had no previous convictions and was “profoundly remorseful” for his actions. But it was the last reason, that his son was now left in his grandmother’s care after  his wife was hospitalized, that touched the magistrate. Appearing in association with Dayna Taylor-Lavine and Khadisha Wickham, Lashley revealed to the court that Mason’s wife had been admitted. “He is married and has a five-year-old son and it would be remiss of me not to mention a sad situation which has occurred within his family,” Lashley said. “Since he has been remanded his wife has been incarcerated at the Psychiatric Hospital leaving the grandmother to care for the young child. “This child would like to be like any other child on December 25, spending time with his father and mother or at least one of them. And he would like the opportunity to be there with his son in his loving arms. That would be the perfect Christmas gift,” he added. Describing Mason’s actions as uncharacteristic, Lashley also said he was an outstanding person in the community and an exceptional musician, a keyboardist at his church which he attended every Sunday. Lashley asked that the court “temper justice with mercy” and give his client an opportunity to redeem himself. Before handing down her decision Magistrate Cuffy-Sargeant lauded Mason for entering an early guilty plea and praised him for giving back to the community through the church. But it was his unfortunate family situation which drew her sympathy. “The court sympathizes with you on your family situation and would not want to deprive your five-year-old,” she said. “If you promise me that you will not return to this court or any other court I will reprimand and discharge you. That is the court’s gift to your son,” the magistrate added. (BT)

JANUARY RETURN COURT DATE FOR ACCUSED – A budding tattoo artist facing several theft charges in two different jurisdictions was today remanded. Despite pleading not guilty to the four charges, Leon Seymour Freeman, 25, of 1st Avenue Sealy Land, Bank Hall, St Michael, was remanded to HMP Dodds when he appeared in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court. Freeman pleaded not guilty to loitering on the premises of Maria Brooker on December 12, 2018, where there was cause to suspect he was about to commit burglary. He also denied entering Honey Pot Apartments between December 11 and 12 as a trespasser and stealing a television, a DVR, a microwave, a coffee maker, six door locks and one bottle of detergent valued $2871 belonging to Rosalind Rice. Freeman pleaded not guilty to entering the same apartment between September 4 and October 17 and stealing two televisions, two microwaves, a toaster, a firestick and a bed sheet valued $2700 belonging to Rice. The accused also denied entering Tyrone’s On The Beach and stealing five bottles of rum, two bottles of whiskey, a bottle of Sambuca, a bottle of Tequilla, two bottles of Brandy, 30 soft drinks, two cases of beer, three bottles of wine, two speakers and $200; total value $1465.28 belonging to Tyrone Williams. In objecting to bail Station Sergeant Carrison Henry argued that Freeman’s antecedents showed he had the propensity to commit similar offences and if granted bail such behaviour would continue. He said police was also seeking other persons in relation to the offences. However, Safiya Moore who appeared on behalf of Freeman told the court that while her client did have similar antecedents, he had stayed out of trouble for the last year. She said he had opened a tattoo studio and was turning his life around. Additionally, Moore said her client had been in police custody since last Thursday having walked into the station on his own free will. “He is likely to turn up to court if granted bail and is willing to submit to any bail conditions which the court deems fit,” she added. Explaining that the matters occurred in the District ‘B’ and District ‘C’ courts. Magistrate Frederick remanded him and transferred the matters to those jurisdictions. Freeman, will appear in the District ‘B’ Magistrates Court on January 8, 2019 and in the District ‘C’ Magistrates’ Court on January 9.  (BT)

PARLIAMENT SLEEP OVER – In search of shelter from the rain Galveston Athelston Burke climbed the gates of Parliament and went into a nearby room. When police officers turned up for work the following morning they found Burke fast asleep. As a result, he ended up in the Magistrates’ ‘A’ Court where he pleaded guilty to loitering on the premises of Parliament on December 19, 2018. In his explanation, the 39-year-old first-time offender who has no fixed place of abode told Magistrate Douglas Frederick he had no idea he had slept in Parliament. “I was laying down and the rain came down and I went cross the road and jump over the gate to shelter from the rain. I didn’t even know it was Parliament,” said Burke, who was represented by attorney-at-law Harry Husbands. Husbands had earlier told the court that Burke had admitted to having an alcohol and cocaine addiction and was seeking help at Verdun House. He argued that his client had no previous convictions, which showed that he did not have the propensity to break the law, and asked for the court to extend leniency towards him. The magistrate then asked Burke if he was serious about seeking drug rehabilitation or if he would prefer to be reprimanded and discharged for the offence. “I want the help Sir. I don’t like the way my life is going,” he replied. “Good answer. That is a very good answer because I was just testing you to see if you were serious about getting help,” Frederick told him. He then remanded him to the Psychiatric Hospital where he will be assessed and it will be determined if he is a fit candidate for drug rehabilatition. (BT)

KEEP THE PEACE – If Vallam Orlando Lewis wishes to avoid going to jail he will have to keep out of trouble for the next nine months. Magistrate Douglas Frederick placed the 58-year-old labourer of Combermere Street, St. Michael on a bond to keep the peace for the next nine months after he pleaded guilty to two charges when he appeared in the District ‘A’ Magistrates’ Court today. Lewis admitted to having apparatus for the use of cocaine as well as having cannabis in his possession on December 19, 2018. Prosecutor Station Sergeant Carrison Henry said police were on patrol on Bay Street when they saw Lewis run across the road towards the area of Copacabana with a bag in his hand. When police approached him he reached into the bag and threw a bottle on the ground, causing it to break. Police retrieved the fragments and realized they contained residue which they suspected to be cocaine. A further search of the bag revealed a greaseproof wrapping that contained vegetable matter suspected to be cannabis. The drugs weighed 10 grams and had a street value of $50. “I had now come from working and the bag had in all of my clothes and things. I had the pipe and I know I wasn’t supposed to have it so I brek it,” Lewis told the magistrate. “I aint been in court in nine or 10 years Sir and I begging yuh not to send me jail,” he pleaded. Frederick then placed him on the bond for having the illegal drugs. If he breaches it he will spend six months in prison. He then convicted, reprimanded and discharged him for the apparatus. (BT)

18 YEARS FOR MANSLAUGHTER – Two years and six months after he was expected to be sentenced, Terry Cassius Seale was sentenced to 18 years in jail for manslaughter on Wednesday. The 54-year-old tractor operator of 27 Groves Crescent, St George, had been originally charged with the brutal murder of Moreta Forde, a former corporate specialist of LIME between October 30 and 31, 2013. Seale had admitted to the lesser count of manslaughter, after the prosecution accepted that Forde’s response the night her former lover had challenged her on whether or not she had infected him with a fatal sexually transmitted disease was provocation. Despite the maximum penalty in Barbados for manslaughter being life in prison, Justice Jacqueline Cornelius said she believed a starting point of 25 years was reasonable, and added a further two years as a result of the aggravating factors in the No. 5 Supreme Court. However, she took into account that Seale had spent 1 776 days on remand, adding he had a further 4 794 days left on his sentence. As a result, Justice Cornelius gave him a one third discount, settling on the final 18-year sentence. Justice Cornelius in passing sentence said the act had been committed at the home of the deceased, she had been defenseless and had received extensive injuries to her back, neck and head. “This was a domestic dispute and offenders cannot escape with impunity,” she said. She added that although the evidence showed Seale had been provoked, he was the physical aggressor and the force used was “grossly excessive”. The only mitigating factors, she said, were that it was a spontaneous incident; he had been provoked by the passing of a sexually transmitted disease and had pleaded guilty to manslaughter. During the trial, it was revealed Forde and Seale, her gardener, were in an intimate relationship at the time of her demise. While she resided at Fisherpond, St Thomas, she had allowed him to stay at her second home in St George, after his home was damaged by Hurricane Tomas. During the relationship, Seale came to believe his lover had infected him with AIDS, and had confided such to at least two people. When he confronted her Forde on the night of her death, she had queried whether he expected to “play with dogs and get a shark”. Her statement seemed to enrage him, and he took up a fruit knife which they scuffled over before Seale brought it down slashing Forde’s throat. Forde held on to Seale trying to prevent him from leaving her, but he wanted her to release him so he took a nearby cutlass and further injured her. He then lit a cigarette, dropping the lighter, and leaving the house. In the end, the house was engulfed. Seale remained on the run for three and a half months before he was spotted by police in February 2014 trying to use the village standpipe in Easy Hall, St John. At the time, he had told officers he had ingested a poisonous substance and was taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital before he was charged. (WN)

MEMBERS TOLD TO USE FIFA FUNDS – Football federations in the Caribbean region are being encouraged to take the monies FIFA is offering and upgrade their game. The call was made to 22 Member Associations (MAs) by FIFA regional director for Africa and the Caribbean Veron Mosengo-Omba, and Caribbean Football Union president Randy Harris during the opening ceremony of a two-day workshop on the new FIFA Forward Regulations at the Hilton Barbados on Wednesday. “I think the problem is we are not aware of some of the opportunities available . . . . Right now, we have the opportunity to become self-sufficient. I have observed many of us are not respecting the regional office,” said Harris, who is also president of the Barbados Football Association. “We feel because we have friends in FIFA, we can bypass the proper channels. Let us use the regional office to our advantage and let us see if we can use this money,” he further declared to the presidents and representatives from across the region gathered at the hotel.  (WN)

MAURICE BYER POLYCLINIC TO CLOSE EARLY ON FRIDAY – The public is advised that the Maurice Byer Polyclinic, Station Hill, St Peter, will close at 1 p.m. this Friday, December 21, to allow staff to attend a function. The public is urged to arrange their business accordingly. The Ministry of Health and Wellness apologises for any inconvenience the early closure may cause. (BGIS)

For daily or breaking news reports follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter & Facebook. That’s all for today folks. There are 12 days left in the year. Shalom! #thechasefilesdailynewscap #thechasefiles# dailynewscapsbythechasefiles

[laurelkrugerr]

Page experience: a new Google ranking factor

Edwin Toonen

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced Web Vitals — a new set of metrics to measure the speed and user experience of websites. Last week, Google announced that these metrics will make its way into a core algorithm update as new ways of judging and ranking sites based on the page experience they offer. This update is due to arrive some time in 2021.

UX matters, for real now

In 2010, Google announced that it would take site speed into account while determining rankings. In 2018, Google followed up with the page speed ranking factor in the mobile search results. Now, Google announces a new update that looks at a variety of new or updated metrics — combined with other user experience factors, to form the page experience update.

Page experience you say? In an ideal world, you’d click a link in the search results and the corresponding page would appear instantly. But we all know that’s a pipe dream. Over the years, pages have only increased in size and the popularity of JavaScript made them ever more complex and harder to load. Even with lightning-fast internet connections and potent devices, loading a web page can be a drag. For users, waiting for pages to load can be stressful as well. Not to mention the maddening on-site performance that some websites offer that lead to miss-clicks and the like.

For years, optimizing the performance of websites mostly meant optimizing for speed. But loading times are only part of the equation and the other part is harder to define and measure. This is about how a user experiences all those optimizations. The site might be fast according to the metrics, but does it feel fast? Thus, it’s high time to take a drastic look at page experience.

According to Google, “Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply; in contrast, a bad page experience could stand in the way of a person being able to find the valuable information on a page.”

Enter Web Vitals

Early May 2020, Google announced Web Vitals — a thoroughly researched set of metrics to help anyone determine opportunities to improve the experience of their sites. Within those new metrics, there is a subset of metrics every site owner should focus on, the so-called Core Web Vitals. According to Google, “Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience.”

Each Core Web Vital looks at a specific piece of the page experience puzzle and together they help both Google and yourself make sense of the perceived experience of a site. Core Web Vitals are available in all Google tools that measure the page experience.

The Core Web Vitals will evolve over time and new ones might be added in due time. For 2020, Google identified three specific focal points:

Loading,

Interactivity,

Visual stability.

These focal points correspond with three new metrics:

LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint: This metric tells how long it takes for the largest content element you see in the viewport to load.

FID, or First Input Delay: The FID looks at how long it takes for a browser to respond to an interaction first triggered by the user (clicking a button, for instance)

CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift: This new metric measures the percentage of the screen affected by movement — i.e. does stuff jump around on screen?

The new Core Web Vitals are aimed helping you improve the page experience of your site (image Google)

As you see, these core metrics don’t simply look at how fast something loads. They also look at how long it takes for elements to become ready to use. The Cumulative Layout Shift is the most forward-thinking of the bunch. This has nothing to do with speed, but everything with preventing a bad user experience — like hitting a wrong button, because an ad loaded at the final moment. Think about how you feel when that happens? Pretty infuriating, right?

Combining new metrics with existing ranking factors

The launch of Web Vitals was noteworthy on its own, but Google took it up a notch this week. Google is going to use these new metrics — combined with existing experience ranking factors, to help with ranking a pages. Keep in mind, Google uses an unknown number of factors to judge sites and rank them. Some factors weigh a lot, but most have a smaller impact. Combined, however, they tell the story of a website.

The new Web Vitals join several existing factors to make up the page experience ranking factors:

Mobile-friendliness: is your site optimized for mobile?

HTTPS: is your site using a secure connection?

Interstitial use: does your site stay away from nasty pop-ups?

Safe browsing: is your site harmless for visitors?

These are now joined by real-world, user-centred metrics, like the LCP, FID and CLS mentioned earlier. Combined, these factors take into account everything a user experiences on a website to try to come up with a holistic picture of the performance of your site, as Google likes to say.

The Core Web Vitals are combined with existing ranking factors to form the page experience factors (image Google)

Of course, this is just another way for Google to get a sense of how good your site is and it might be easy to overstate the importance of this particular update. It’s still going to be impossible to rank a site with a great user experience but crappy content.

While the quality of your content still rains supreme in getting good rankings, the performance and perceived experience users have now also come into play. With these metrics, Google has found a way to get a whole lot of insights that look at your site from all angles.

Our own Jono Alderson and Joost de Valk talked about the recent news in the latest instalment of SEO Company News, part of the premium content in our Yoast SEO academy subscription. Sign up and be sure to check that out.

Google page experience update in 2021

Google has often been accused of not communicating with SEO Companys and site owners. In the past, we have seen many core algorithm update happen without a word from a Googler. Today, however, Google appears more upfront than ever. In the case of the page experience update, Google warns us twice: one with the announcement of the page experience ranking factors and once six months in advance of rolling out the update in 2021.

By announcing this way ahead of time, Google gives site owners, SEO Companys and developers ample time to prepare for this update. There are loads of new tools to come to grips with how these metrics function and how you can improve your site using these insights. There’s a lot of new documentation to sift through. And you can start right now. Sometime next year, Google will give you a heads up that the update will be rolling out in six months time.

No more AMP requirements for Top Stories

You can find another interesting tidbit regarding the page experience update. Google will no longer require AMP for getting your news pages in the Top Stories section. Now, any well-built, Google News-validated site can aim for that top spot. Page experience will become a ranking factor for Top Stories, so your site better be good.

New page experience tools? You got it!

Google went all out for to get every site owner to adapt to the page experience changes. New or updated tools help you get the insights you need. They also help you to make sense of what it all means.

Start testing, start improving!

In the past, optimizing your site for user experience and speed was a bit like flying blind — you never had truly good insights into what makes a site fast and what makes one feel fast. Over the years, Google saw the need for good metrics and heard the cries of users in need of usable, safe and fast sites. By announcing these metrics — and by announcing them as ranking factors —, Google makes page experience measurable and deems it helpful enough to judge sites by.

Remember, the update won’t roll out until sometime in 2021, but the tools are there, so you can start testing and improving. Good luck!

SEO Company by DBL07.co

source http://www.scpie.org/page-experience-a-new-google-ranking-factor/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/06/page-experience-new-google-ranking.html

[riichardwilson]

Page experience: a new Google ranking factor

Edwin Toonen

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced Web Vitals — a new set of metrics to measure the speed and user experience of websites. Last week, Google announced that these metrics will make its way into a core algorithm update as new ways of judging and ranking sites based on the page experience they offer. This update is due to arrive some time in 2021.

UX matters, for real now

In 2010, Google announced that it would take site speed into account while determining rankings. In 2018, Google followed up with the page speed ranking factor in the mobile search results. Now, Google announces a new update that looks at a variety of new or updated metrics — combined with other user experience factors, to form the page experience update.

Page experience you say? In an ideal world, you’d click a link in the search results and the corresponding page would appear instantly. But we all know that’s a pipe dream. Over the years, pages have only increased in size and the popularity of JavaScript made them ever more complex and harder to load. Even with lightning-fast internet connections and potent devices, loading a web page can be a drag. For users, waiting for pages to load can be stressful as well. Not to mention the maddening on-site performance that some websites offer that lead to miss-clicks and the like.

For years, optimizing the performance of websites mostly meant optimizing for speed. But loading times are only part of the equation and the other part is harder to define and measure. This is about how a user experiences all those optimizations. The site might be fast according to the metrics, but does it feel fast? Thus, it’s high time to take a drastic look at page experience.

According to Google, “Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply; in contrast, a bad page experience could stand in the way of a person being able to find the valuable information on a page.”

Enter Web Vitals

Early May 2020, Google announced Web Vitals — a thoroughly researched set of metrics to help anyone determine opportunities to improve the experience of their sites. Within those new metrics, there is a subset of metrics every site owner should focus on, the so-called Core Web Vitals. According to Google, “Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience.”

Each Core Web Vital looks at a specific piece of the page experience puzzle and together they help both Google and yourself make sense of the perceived experience of a site. Core Web Vitals are available in all Google tools that measure the page experience.

The Core Web Vitals will evolve over time and new ones might be added in due time. For 2020, Google identified three specific focal points:

Loading,

Interactivity,

Visual stability.

These focal points correspond with three new metrics:

LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint: This metric tells how long it takes for the largest content element you see in the viewport to load.

FID, or First Input Delay: The FID looks at how long it takes for a browser to respond to an interaction first triggered by the user (clicking a button, for instance)

CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift: This new metric measures the percentage of the screen affected by movement — i.e. does stuff jump around on screen?

The new Core Web Vitals are aimed helping you improve the page experience of your site (image Google)

As you see, these core metrics don’t simply look at how fast something loads. They also look at how long it takes for elements to become ready to use. The Cumulative Layout Shift is the most forward-thinking of the bunch. This has nothing to do with speed, but everything with preventing a bad user experience — like hitting a wrong button, because an ad loaded at the final moment. Think about how you feel when that happens? Pretty infuriating, right?

Combining new metrics with existing ranking factors

The launch of Web Vitals was noteworthy on its own, but Google took it up a notch this week. Google is going to use these new metrics — combined with existing experience ranking factors, to help with ranking a pages. Keep in mind, Google uses an unknown number of factors to judge sites and rank them. Some factors weigh a lot, but most have a smaller impact. Combined, however, they tell the story of a website.

The new Web Vitals join several existing factors to make up the page experience ranking factors:

Mobile-friendliness: is your site optimized for mobile?

HTTPS: is your site using a secure connection?

Interstitial use: does your site stay away from nasty pop-ups?

Safe browsing: is your site harmless for visitors?

These are now joined by real-world, user-centred metrics, like the LCP, FID and CLS mentioned earlier. Combined, these factors take into account everything a user experiences on a website to try to come up with a holistic picture of the performance of your site, as Google likes to say.

The Core Web Vitals are combined with existing ranking factors to form the page experience factors (image Google)

Of course, this is just another way for Google to get a sense of how good your site is and it might be easy to overstate the importance of this particular update. It’s still going to be impossible to rank a site with a great user experience but crappy content.

While the quality of your content still rains supreme in getting good rankings, the performance and perceived experience users have now also come into play. With these metrics, Google has found a way to get a whole lot of insights that look at your site from all angles.

Our own Jono Alderson and Joost de Valk talked about the recent news in the latest instalment of SEO Company News, part of the premium content in our Yoast SEO academy subscription. Sign up and be sure to check that out.

Google page experience update in 2021

Google has often been accused of not communicating with SEO Companys and site owners. In the past, we have seen many core algorithm update happen without a word from a Googler. Today, however, Google appears more upfront than ever. In the case of the page experience update, Google warns us twice: one with the announcement of the page experience ranking factors and once six months in advance of rolling out the update in 2021.

By announcing this way ahead of time, Google gives site owners, SEO Companys and developers ample time to prepare for this update. There are loads of new tools to come to grips with how these metrics function and how you can improve your site using these insights. There’s a lot of new documentation to sift through. And you can start right now. Sometime next year, Google will give you a heads up that the update will be rolling out in six months time.

No more AMP requirements for Top Stories

You can find another interesting tidbit regarding the page experience update. Google will no longer require AMP for getting your news pages in the Top Stories section. Now, any well-built, Google News-validated site can aim for that top spot. Page experience will become a ranking factor for Top Stories, so your site better be good.

New page experience tools? You got it!

Google went all out for to get every site owner to adapt to the page experience changes. New or updated tools help you get the insights you need. They also help you to make sense of what it all means.

Start testing, start improving!

In the past, optimizing your site for user experience and speed was a bit like flying blind — you never had truly good insights into what makes a site fast and what makes one feel fast. Over the years, Google saw the need for good metrics and heard the cries of users in need of usable, safe and fast sites. By announcing these metrics — and by announcing them as ranking factors —, Google makes page experience measurable and deems it helpful enough to judge sites by.

Remember, the update won’t roll out until sometime in 2021, but the tools are there, so you can start testing and improving. Good luck!

SEO Company by DBL07.co

source http://www.scpie.org/page-experience-a-new-google-ranking-factor/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/620043782360104960

[scpie]

Page experience: a new Google ranking factor

Edwin Toonen

Edwin is a strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he spent years honing his skill at The Netherlands’ leading web design magazine.

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced Web Vitals — a new set of metrics to measure the speed and user experience of websites. Last week, Google announced that these metrics will make its way into a core algorithm update as new ways of judging and ranking sites based on the page experience they offer. This update is due to arrive some time in 2021.

UX matters, for real now

In 2010, Google announced that it would take site speed into account while determining rankings. In 2018, Google followed up with the page speed ranking factor in the mobile search results. Now, Google announces a new update that looks at a variety of new or updated metrics — combined with other user experience factors, to form the page experience update.

Page experience you say? In an ideal world, you’d click a link in the search results and the corresponding page would appear instantly. But we all know that’s a pipe dream. Over the years, pages have only increased in size and the popularity of JavaScript made them ever more complex and harder to load. Even with lightning-fast internet connections and potent devices, loading a web page can be a drag. For users, waiting for pages to load can be stressful as well. Not to mention the maddening on-site performance that some websites offer that lead to miss-clicks and the like.

For years, optimizing the performance of websites mostly meant optimizing for speed. But loading times are only part of the equation and the other part is harder to define and measure. This is about how a user experiences all those optimizations. The site might be fast according to the metrics, but does it feel fast? Thus, it’s high time to take a drastic look at page experience.

According to Google, “Great page experiences enable people to get more done and engage more deeply; in contrast, a bad page experience could stand in the way of a person being able to find the valuable information on a page.”

Enter Web Vitals

Early May 2020, Google announced Web Vitals — a thoroughly researched set of metrics to help anyone determine opportunities to improve the experience of their sites. Within those new metrics, there is a subset of metrics every site owner should focus on, the so-called Core Web Vitals. According to Google, “Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience.”

Each Core Web Vital looks at a specific piece of the page experience puzzle and together they help both Google and yourself make sense of the perceived experience of a site. Core Web Vitals are available in all Google tools that measure the page experience.

The Core Web Vitals will evolve over time and new ones might be added in due time. For 2020, Google identified three specific focal points:

Loading,

Interactivity,

Visual stability.

These focal points correspond with three new metrics:

LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint: This metric tells how long it takes for the largest content element you see in the viewport to load.

FID, or First Input Delay: The FID looks at how long it takes for a browser to respond to an interaction first triggered by the user (clicking a button, for instance)

CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift: This new metric measures the percentage of the screen affected by movement — i.e. does stuff jump around on screen?

The new Core Web Vitals are aimed helping you improve the page experience of your site (image Google)

As you see, these core metrics don’t simply look at how fast something loads. They also look at how long it takes for elements to become ready to use. The Cumulative Layout Shift is the most forward-thinking of the bunch. This has nothing to do with speed, but everything with preventing a bad user experience — like hitting a wrong button, because an ad loaded at the final moment. Think about how you feel when that happens? Pretty infuriating, right?

Combining new metrics with existing ranking factors

The launch of Web Vitals was noteworthy on its own, but Google took it up a notch this week. Google is going to use these new metrics — combined with existing experience ranking factors, to help with ranking a pages. Keep in mind, Google uses an unknown number of factors to judge sites and rank them. Some factors weigh a lot, but most have a smaller impact. Combined, however, they tell the story of a website.

The new Web Vitals join several existing factors to make up the page experience ranking factors:

Mobile-friendliness: is your site optimized for mobile?

HTTPS: is your site using a secure connection?

Interstitial use: does your site stay away from nasty pop-ups?

Safe browsing: is your site harmless for visitors?

These are now joined by real-world, user-centred metrics, like the LCP, FID and CLS mentioned earlier. Combined, these factors take into account everything a user experiences on a website to try to come up with a holistic picture of the performance of your site, as Google likes to say.

The Core Web Vitals are combined with existing ranking factors to form the page experience factors (image Google)

Of course, this is just another way for Google to get a sense of how good your site is and it might be easy to overstate the importance of this particular update. It’s still going to be impossible to rank a site with a great user experience but crappy content.

While the quality of your content still rains supreme in getting good rankings, the performance and perceived experience users have now also come into play. With these metrics, Google has found a way to get a whole lot of insights that look at your site from all angles.

Our own Jono Alderson and Joost de Valk talked about the recent news in the latest instalment of SEO Company News, part of the premium content in our Yoast SEO academy subscription. Sign up and be sure to check that out.

Google page experience update in 2021

Google has often been accused of not communicating with SEO Companys and site owners. In the past, we have seen many core algorithm update happen without a word from a Googler. Today, however, Google appears more upfront than ever. In the case of the page experience update, Google warns us twice: one with the announcement of the page experience ranking factors and once six months in advance of rolling out the update in 2021.

By announcing this way ahead of time, Google gives site owners, SEO Companys and developers ample time to prepare for this update. There are loads of new tools to come to grips with how these metrics function and how you can improve your site using these insights. There’s a lot of new documentation to sift through. And you can start right now. Sometime next year, Google will give you a heads up that the update will be rolling out in six months time.

No more AMP requirements for Top Stories

You can find another interesting tidbit regarding the page experience update. Google will no longer require AMP for getting your news pages in the Top Stories section. Now, any well-built, Google News-validated site can aim for that top spot. Page experience will become a ranking factor for Top Stories, so your site better be good.

New page experience tools? You got it!

Google went all out for to get every site owner to adapt to the page experience changes. New or updated tools help you get the insights you need. They also help you to make sense of what it all means.

Start testing, start improving!

In the past, optimizing your site for user experience and speed was a bit like flying blind — you never had truly good insights into what makes a site fast and what makes one feel fast. Over the years, Google saw the need for good metrics and heard the cries of users in need of usable, safe and fast sites. By announcing these metrics — and by announcing them as ranking factors —, Google makes page experience measurable and deems it helpful enough to judge sites by.

Remember, the update won’t roll out until sometime in 2021, but the tools are there, so you can start testing and improving. Good luck!

SEO Company by DBL07.co

source http://www.scpie.org/page-experience-a-new-google-ranking-factor/

[londontheatre]

YANK! Original Manchester cast, credit Anthony Robling

A poignant love story based on the true, hidden history of gay soldiers during World War Two, YANK! focuses on the life of Stu, who is called up to serve in the forces in 1943 and becomes a reporter for Yank Magazine, the journal ‘for and by the servicemen’. Telling the stories of the men in Charlie Company, the musical explores what it means to be a man, and what it is to fall in love and struggle to survive in a time and place where the odds are stacked against you.

Scott Hunter reprises his role as Stu. Scott recently answered a few questions about himself and Yank!

Q: You are in the cast of Yank! What attracted you to be a part of the musical? Scott: The book was the first thing. The story is something I wish I’d been exposed to when I was younger and it’s so expertly written that the dialogue just rolls off your tongue. I also used one of the songs for my college auditions 5 years before I knew what Yank was so maybe it was a nostalgic pull to want to do it.

Q: You play the part of Stu – what can you tell us about him and how he fits into the storyline? Scott: The Musical actually follows Stu’s journey through the Second World War and how by enrolling in the army and eventually being employed by Yank, a weekly magazine published by the U.S army, he moves from being extremely shy and anxious to an incredibly strong and brave person. He faces events we may struggle to comprehend due to the setting but Stu feels and experiences emotions and thoughts that are so recognisable to us as humans.

Q: What is at the heart of Yank!? Scott: This is a hard one to answer because Yank covers many grounds purely due to the fact it’s set in the Second World War where people faced so many things at once. There’s the question of masculinity; how people dealt with trying to adhere to certain societal creations during a time in history where everything had started to shift and change. Its core for me though is love and what it can overcome. Now more than ever that message is something that is needed and something that must be communicated. Specifically, this story is about two men who fall in love in surroundings where to do so can have tragic consequences. That is the plot, the story, and is an important part of history which needs to be shown. The heart, however, is about the bravery and grace that comes with loving freely and acting through love.

Q: You have been in the cast of Yank! which premiered at the Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester receiving “extensive critical acclaim”. Can you tell us about the run at Hope Mill? Scott: It was a rare and unique process as all of us were originating these roles in the U.K and Europe. The creative team too were creating a show from scratch so it gave us a lot of freedom which you don’t always get to experience. As for the Hope Mill Theatre… it’s an amazing space, full of character and style and the Manchester audiences were so supportive and genuinely moved by the story. To have that reaction was beyond words.

Q: 27th July 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. How significant is this to the cast and creatives in the production? Scott: I suppose there is an added poignancy with this anniversary happening during our run which we are all aware of. That being said, the work isn’t done and this story is relevant today with what is happening in Chechnya, the middle- east and even Orlando in 2016. Whenever people are forbidden to love in any way, I would hope that we all feel the significance and importance to acknowledge and respond to it.

Q: Away from the stage what do you like to do to chill out? Scott: I. Love. To. Eat. Cooking relaxes me a lot and so does eating… Exercise also helps my brain settle. Then it’s the usual; seeing friends, family and being around as many dogs as possible.

Q: And, why should everyone get along to see Yank!? Scott: Come and see Yank because it’s a story that’s not been told but one that everyone who has ever loved someone or something will understand. The score is reminiscent of MGM movie musicals and will (hopefully) stick in your head and you may even get to see a tap number. Maybe not. You won’t know unless you come!

*****

Scott Hunter’s stage credits include Cinderella (Trinity Theatre), Grease (European tour) and Howard Goodall’s The Kissing Dance. Joining the company as Mitch is Andy Coxon, whose credits include Beautiful – The Carole King Musical (Aldwych Theatre), 20th Century Boy – The Marc Bolan Musical (UK tour), Les Misérables (Queen’s Theatre) and European tours of The Rocky Horror Show and Evita. Sarge/Scarlet will be played by Waylon Jacobs, whose credits include Chicago, Memphis and We Will Rock You (West End) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Regent’s Park). Bradley Judge will play Rotelli. His credits include Aladdin (The Brindley Theatre, Runcorn), Don’t Run (Waterloo East Theatre) and Sister Act (Aberystwyth Arts Centre).

The rest of the company of Yank! is completed by members of the original Manchester production: Benjamin Cupit who made his professional debut as Professor in the Hope Mill production; Lee Dillon-Stuart (Les Misérables at Queen’s Theatre and Carousel for Pitlochry Festival Theatre) as Tennessee; Chris Kiely (The Ladykillers and Pygmalion for Theatre Royal Windsor, Sunset Boulevard at Yvonne Arnaud Theatre and a national tour of Chess) as Artie; Kris Marc-Joseph (Anno Domini at The Actors Church, Children of Eden and See Rock City and Other Destinations at Union Theatre) as Czechowski; Mark Paterson (tours of Horrible Histories and Peter Pan at Manchester Opera House/New Victoria Woking) as Lieutenant/NCO; Tom Pepper (The Mystery of Edwin Drood at the Arts Theatre, and on television, Drifters, Grandpa in My Pocket and Red Dwarf) as Cohen/Speedy; and Sarah-Louise Young (a member of award-winning improvised musical The Showstoppers at Apollo Theatre and extensive cabaret credits including Fascinating Aida) as Louise.

YANK! is based on the Off-Broadway hit production from 2010, with book and lyrics by American writer David Zellnik, with his brother Joseph Zellnik’s musical score paying homage to the timeless music of the 1940s. The musical is directed by James Baker, and is produced by Katy Lipson for Aria Entertainment, Hope Mill Theatre, Ben Millerman with Jim Kierstead and Guy James.

Completing the creative team are James Cleeve as musical director; choreographer Chris Cuming; designer Victoria Hinton; lighting designer Aaron J. Dootson; sound designer Chris Bogg; and casting director Benjamin Newsome.

LISTINGS INFORMATION YANK! CHARING CROSS THEATRE The Arches Villiers Street London WC2N 6NL Monday 3 July – Saturday 19 August Press Night: Monday 10 July at 7.30pm

http://ift.tt/2uhYihc LondonTheatre1.com