#and it’s very hard to be a queer woman and get those kind of tattoos in the area im in bc it’s pretty conservative

[brattybottomdyke]

i really want to get more tattoos and there’s a couple that i’ve been thinking about for a while but i just can’t find an artist 😭

any NYC mutuals have any recs? im not in the city but i could get there relatively easily and im really itching for another

[magnificent-nerd]

Where are the good guys?

Image description: actors Ennis Esmer and Marwan Kenzari.

When it comes to positive Muslim rep, where are the good guys?

It would be good to focus on some positive Muslim character rep for a change.

The two examples I've picked aren't from superhero media per se, but I'd call them superhero adjacent. Sci-Fi, action genre. Safe to say if you enjoy superhero content, you'll probably enjoy these recs.

Let's dive in.

Example 1. The Old Guard (2020 movie, Netflix)

The Old Guard is a Netflix movie starring Charlize Theron in the lead role, based on the graphic novel written by Greg Rucka.

So it is a comic book movie, and you could call it a superhero movie as the main characters have a superpower and they do superhero-ing. The story is grounded more in reality, mercenaries trying to do good, if you like that kind of theme.

The characters of Joe (Marwan Kenzari, Tunisian-Dutch, Arabic speaking actor, also played Hot Jafar in Disney's live action Aladdin) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli, Italian actor) are from Byzantium times when they were Muslim and Christian soldiers respectively, on opposing sides of war.

They met during that war, and they became an out and openly loving queer couple.

The movie shows Joe and Nicky as an established couple, which makes a nice change in media to see a happy couple work together.

Onscreen we see Joe and Nicky show caring yet casual affection to each other frequently; one of the movie's highlights to me.

Yes, there is an onscreen m/m kiss. RARE in any comic book movie/superhero content, so the movie gets bonus points for that.

I suppose my one complaint is that they're not in the movie that much, they are background characters. The movie focuses more on the two women characters (Andy, and Nile).

Image description: a scene featuring ‘good guys’ in The Old Guard, extremely rare to see a Muslim character like Joe included in a ‘hero’ shot like this.

It's directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, so do check it out.

The Old Guard is a great example of how easy it is to cast a SWANA actor into the part of a SWANA and Muslim character who isn't a baddie, or a terrorist, or another tired trope, but shows Joe as a good guy and a well rounded character with important lines to say.

And he doesn't die, yay! 

Also, bonus points for a queer Muslim character. We need more of those.

~*~

Example 2: Blindspot (series, NBC/WB, The CW)

Blindspot is a TV show (2015-current) from American TV network NBC, affiliated with Warner Bros. and The CW producers

(The CW is the same network who makes a lot of the DC superhero content that fans call The Arrowverse, and so far the only superhero content from The Big Two that portrays any LGBT characters on a regular basis.)

Blindspot is a spooks/gov agents/FBI procedural show, but with a Sci-Fi twist of magical glowing tattoos that hold clues to mysteries the team has to solve to stop Bad Guys.

Like CSI meets Bond, plus it's very easy to dip in and out of and simply enjoy the banter and the action. I'm calling it superhero adjacent because it definitely lives more in the world of Sci-Fi than reality (I mentioned glowing tattoos, right?) Like a James Bond theme but with a woman lead. (Jamie Alexander, also plays Lady Sif in the MCU.)

Anyway, one of the supporting cast is a queer Turkish character, Rich DotCom, who is played by a Turkish-Canadian actor, Ennis Esmer.

He is a bit part/recurring character in seasons 1 to 3, then becoming a regular from season 4 on.

My first quibble is, I'm pretty sure we have another straight actor playing a queer character, BUT at least the show managed to cast a Turkish actor to play a Turkish character. (Heavy side eye at Disney right now: see, it isn't that hard.)

While Rich Dot Com does play into the stereotype of a SWANA character as a hacker, I can say he is well rounded as a character, especially as the seasons go on.

He starts off as a criminal (a very light hearted, quippy criminal who fleeces rich white people online, so I don't really mind that aspect much) and later works for the FBI. Many of the characters including the lead (Jamie Alexander) have a good guy/bad guy grey area that's explored, so at least it's not just the Muslim character.

Showing a Turkish character onscreen as one of the good guys, being funny and likeable (he is SO likeable) with a lot of screen time (one bonus of TV shows to movies is all the screen time afford to supporting characters) is really great.

Not to mention his character is queer, and there is a recurring on/off boyfriend character (Boston) who he has interaction with.

Last time I watched the show, the pair had a tender moment when Boston found out that Rich had bought his art pieces. That was a great episode.

I really appreciate seeing a character like this onscreen on a regular basis. I do like the show, it's fun and cheesy procedural stuff. If you like spies and action, give it a watch. (Also, Bill Nye guest stars!)

I'm aware the final season (final? Really?) has been confirmed and is yet to air, but with talks about Rich and his partner-in-lab-banter, Patterson, having a spin off show, I remain hopeful that Rich won't be killed off. Don't let me down, Blindspot!

(Honestly, if you wanted to just jump into the show on any season, that's easy enough to do. That's what I did whenever it was playing on the TV channel. Procedurals allow for easy viewing, IMO.)

And just a P.S. with Ennis Esmer, he also has a recurring role on team good guy in Canadian show Private Eyes, a similar fun romp if you like mystery shows.

Now, I'm not saying the examples of Rich from Blindspot or Joe from The Old Guard are perfect, there's always room for improvement (like, can we cast queer actors to play queer roles, please?) but they're certainly a lot better than the rest of superhero media has provided.

Blindspot and The Old Guard have achieved better representation for Muslim characters onscreen in the past couple years than the MCU and DC have put together over the past decade.

And it's odd how Warner Bros(DC) has better rep all round in its affiliated TV shows but NOT its movies. Hopefully The Old Guard will prove that diverse characters AND diverse casting in superhero movies IS possible, and more studios will follow that good example.

The sad fact is, it's not that hard to write in more diverse characters and then hire a diverse cast to any media. Doing so does not impact quality either, it only enriches it.

I'd like to see more good rep on my screen. No more cardboard cut-out baddies for Muslim characters (hard side eye at Wonder Woman 1984), let's have some good characters.

~*~

Originally posted on my blog, magnificentlynerdy.blogspot.com

Have you any recs for positive Muslim and SWANA rep in superhero media? Tell me about them! Add them to this post or send me an Ask.

[back-to-louis]

Hey, I’m the anti who asked you how u would react if the larries are right. First of all, I just called them crazies because it makes me SOO furious that they don’t see how harmful and blatantly stupid it is to ignore everyone occurrence of Louis(and Eleanor’s) life just because there’s one clip of Louis leaning into harrys touch and a couple “matching” tattoos that don’t match anymore than Harry and zayns(who are very much not together, you get what I mean). Plus, they’re the same people who keep changing the theory that Freddie isn’t his kid just because god forbid Louis was with a woman, yk? Even though, like I said, I think it’s near impossible that they’re right about everything being a coverup; it’s such an interesting scenario to think about. I just wanted to know how you think us antis (the respectful level headed bunch of this fandom who don’t make baseless conspiracies) would react IF Harry and Louis have been secretly together and forced to hide that by fake dating other women this entire time. And also like you said, share mutual friends, family relationships, private occurrences, etc, with those girlfriends; and even somehow managed to build a very real relationship with a child that isn’t his. In a world where conspiracies with no logic behind them could come true, how would you react? In a world where one of the many absurd babygate theories is correct, how do u think we’d react? But specifically, in a world where somehow Sony/Syco/Columbia forced them to build this whole “narrative” ,as they call it, just to cover up that relationship, how would you react? Would you feel that you were in the wrong this whole time? Would you think it’s a Ricky Martin/Elton John situation(because I have read about them, it’s what made me realize how blind larries are to the possibility of being queer ☂ and still having kids/past opposite sex lovers)? Or would you simply not care too much and go “good for them, hope they’re happy”? I personally would just think the last one, like I said, because I’ve never been the type to get too involved with this conspiracy until recently(even if at one point I did think the concept of that ship was cute, very cute, I was never a tinhat thank god). I don’t even think it’s far fetched at all to think it’s possible that Louis can be part of the LGBT community. But since he’s said he’s not, I’m going to respect that and not try to “prove” otherwise with clips from 2012. I do think the other scenarios are near impossible though, because of all the reasons you’ve stated here on this blog. Which btw, I love your blog <3 Thanks for the reply lol 💜

Thank you, thank you, for coming back and clearing this up! I am sorry I sometimes feel I have to respond to asks like yours with an "I'm taking this in good faith.... OR AM I???" approach because in many cases, the person never comes back and I feel like I have to make my response for the readers I have rather than the ones who never really return to see what I had to say. Thanks for the kind words about my blog and thanks for being a reader!

I kind of (?) addressed a similar question to this in this post , aka, if we were in an alternate universe where all of these impossible things were possible. In that post, I concluded (?) that it's hard to define what "supporting Louis" would look like, but also noted that in this universe where Larries are correct about what's happening, they are by definition making things harder for Louis.

I'm so sorry, I can't give this a "yes or no" kind of answer because I'm me and that's probably going to be annoying. I TRIED! I was lying there in bed the other morning, giving this real thought, thinking, "right, okay, so, in this world larries were right about this whole situation. So, how do I find out that they're right?"

Wait. How do I find out that they're right? We have to start there, don't we?

Some morning, in the near or distant future, I'll wake up, and check my phone even though that shouldn't be the first thing I do when I wake up, and since I live in the US I'd probably have a ton of messages from one of my UK or EU friends due to time zones, and they would be telling me... what would they be telling me?

That there's an article in the SUN or TMZ or Hello! where Louis and Harry came out and told their whole story? Louis wrote a twitlong? Briana posted a confession to her instagram stories? Like, what would that LOOK like? What would finding out Larries were right look like? Because from what I last saw, Larries think the "story" will break in phases:

a) Either with a story about how Louis just found out his child isn't his, followed by breaking up with Eleanor over his devastation (or that order reversed)

b) followed by some stories about how Harry reached out to support Louis and they renewed their "friendship" so start to be seen interacting online and in person (I guess there's some element to take care of HARRY's current relationship with a woman as well by now, who knows)

c) followed by them "officially" becoming a couple, and then a very public and activist couple, which will result in

d) them blacklisting any questions about any prior girlfriends or children which will "make clear" to the public that those elements of the past were all fake anyway and the "true believers" will of course know and keep dear the fact that "they have loved each other since they were 16 and 18" etc.

* So I guess for the sake of brevity (too late), I'll say that if I read an article (well-sourced, not a tabloid, ofc) in the near or distant future that Louis just found out Freddie isn't his son, so he's not going to have anything to do with him any longer, I'd first take that at face value and think he's an ass, lose a ton of respect for him, and I don't really see myself being interested in what he has to offer as an artist because at least part of my interest in him as an artist is the persona he has as a generally caring person who tries to do his best.

* But if the article was about how Louis admitted that he engaged in the pantomime of being a father, signed a birth certificate, involved his family, etc., because of (?) contracts (?), I think the shock of realizing he just killed his own career would have me reaching for the popcorn.

Like, can you IMAGINE the press around that? Can you even see that being the story and TMZ being like "yeah, wow, record labels, huh, they sure do be making people make their moms pretend to be grandmothers on their death beds sometimes. Bad record labels! Poor oppressed boybanders!" Can you IMAGINE twitter and YouTube drama commentary in the wake of an announcement like that?

* I will entertain a third option! In the event that one day in the near or distant future, Louis and Harry either break contract and are sued by "[entity]" or initiate a suit against "[entity]" or press charges (?) for doing these things to them despite the fact that they're unenforceable and illegal, so basically saying "these entities are the mob and terrorized us and our families for a decade and we are taking them to court to air our grievances" which, to be sure, would probably be an ideal scenario for Larrie vindication, no? Then, yes, I would be like "wow, that's really fucked up, and I'm really glad they got to go public with all of this and "[entity]" receives the full penalty the law allows."

In that case I can imagine myself still being interested in Louis as an artist, and I would have no issue with whatever relationship(s) he's in, with Harry or otherwise, although I'd probably feel like he'd need uh, therapy. Like, I don't think he'd be ok. That would be like them admitting they were in an oppressive cult of two, for ten years.

And also, larries would have still have made all of that harder for both Harry and Louis. So.

[liron-ao3]

Happy reading

Human AU Malec & Destiel Oneshot

Dean lets his eyes run over the spines of the library books in front of him. He knows that he has likely read all the historical novels in their small town library at this point, but it doesn't harm to check for new arrivals.

He spots a cover he hasn't seen before, well placed on a small tablet stand—a new accession. Awesome. He reaches out to get it, but before he can grab it, a large hand with black nail polish beats him to it, and Dean curses inwardly.

The other man follows the hand invading his view and scrutinises Dean with black-rimmed eyes. "Sorry. Were you interested in this one?"

Dean needs a moment to take the man fully in. He is a work of art from the black cowboy boots right up to the blue-tinted tips of his spiked up hair. Dean has to clear his throat. He's never seen anyone like him in their little town. He's probably from the new settlement up the hill. Many New Yorkers moved here, much to the villagers' dismay.

Mr Perfect-Style raises a questioning eyebrow, and Dean realises that he hasn't answered for too long. "Um, yeah. It's from my favourite author, and I haven't read it yet."

The other man smiles. "Same."

Dean likes the other man's voice. And his confident posture. And his taste in books. Dammit! He hasn't looked at a man for years now. Hook-ups with women are safer. But he's settled now, and Dean is pretty confident that the man gives off queer vibes with all the makeup and shiny clothes.

Dean feels courageous today and decides to check his hunch. He leans against the bookshelf and puts on his most winsome smile. "What do I have to do for you to give me way with this book? I'm a fast reader."

Two sentences without stammering. This must be Dean's new record regarding gay flirting. He's nearly proud of himself.

The other man raises the single eyebrow even higher, eyes sparkling with mirth. He gives Dean a once-over, and his lips pull into a wide grin. "I'm not sure if I should hit that," he says, and Dean freaking blushes, the smirk gliding off his face instantly.

Suffering a rebuff is bad enough. But he never hit a wall so quickly before he could even reveal all his charm. Not with women though, so...

He straightens himself and nods. "Gonna make a reservation then," he says and turns around, leaving the library without new reading fodder.

***

"Here, Mr Winchester. Happy reading," the librarian says.

Dean smiles at her as he takes the book after she scanned it together with his library card. "I'm lucky that it was returned so quickly. Two days. That's impressive."

"Maybe the other reader didn't enjoy it," she supplies with a shrug. Dean doubts that very much. He nods nonetheless. He's still a little miffed. Usually, he's so smooth when it comes to flirting with the ladies, but men still give him a headache. All those contradicting signals.

He walks out to the bus stop, and when he finds a seat in the last row, he opens the book, unable to wait a minute longer now that he has it in his hands. At the beginning of the first chapter, he finds a scrap of paper. No. It's handmade paper adorned with beautiful handwriting. Dean furrows his brow. And reads the short note.

Sorry if I was too harsh on you on Tuesday. I would like to atone. Do you have plans for the spring fair?

Dean stares at the delicate letters and numbers, then he lets out a snort and pushes the paper into the pocket of his jacket.

***

"A date would do you good," Alec says and pushes a bottle of ice-cold beer into Dean's hand. "Is he good-looking?"

Dean snorts. "Not my usual type."

"Your usual type is women. You haven't been with a single man since you came out."

Dean shrugs. "Men are intimidating as fuck." Alec snorts at that. "You have no right to make fun of me. How many men exactly did you date in the last two years?"

"That's different. I don't need a man," Alec says and slumps on the other side of the sofa.

"And I do?"

Alec scans him from head to toe. "Most definitely." Dean huffs a laugh and doesn't dignify him with an answer. "What do you have to lose? We wanted to go to the fair anyway. Ask him if he has a nice, good-looking buddy who's interested in men, and we're going on a double date."

Dean laughs out loud. "Just a second ago, you said you don't need a man."

"I don't need a partner. But a nice flirt? Why not?" Alec shrugs.

Dean shakes his head. "I won't go out with that guy just to get you laid."

Alec rolls his eyes. "Come on, man. Maybe he knows where the hot, secretly gay people are hiding in this town."

"They are assembled in this room, Alec." Dean takes a swig of his beer and shakes his head. "Wouldn't it be easier to simply be fuck buddies?"

Alec screws up his face in disgust. "You're like my brother. Don't even—urgh."

Dean giggles and plops into the sofa cushions. "Okay. I'll text him."

***

"You owe me. Big time," Castiel grumbles. "I don't care that we've been friends since kindergarten. If my date is a stupid meathead, I'm killing you."

Magnus chuckles. "Now and then, a meathead is exactly what one needs, Castiel. It's not always about finding your one true love. You know that I'm a romantic by heart, but sometimes you just need a good, mmpf," he says as Castiel covers his mouth with his hand.

He pierces Magnus with his eyes. "I know you are a bit of a lothario, but not everyone needs that to be happy." He pulls his hand away and looks at it in disgust before he cleans the lipgloss away with a handkerchief that he pulls out of his trenchcoat.

"Sorry, darling. I should've known better than to say that. But I'm sure he'll be nice." He looks at his watch. "They must be here any second. Oh, there." Magnus waves wildly at two approaching men and shouts Dean's name.

"Which one is supposed to be mine?" Castiel grunts.

"The one with the neck tattoo," Magnus smirks.

"Of course it's him," Castiel says and rolls his eyes.

***

"So, you're afraid of heights," Castiel asks Dean, who eyes Magnus and Alec in the line for the Ferris wheel.

"Yeah. Since childhood. And you?"

"I kind of fell from the sky once. Don't need a repetition of this experience."

Dean chuckles. "I can imagine. So, you and Magnus, you never…?"

Castiel looks at him in disgust. "Oh no. He's way too sexual for my taste." His eyes widen when he realises what he just said. "I mean, I love him, and he is a great guy. Smart, funny. Stylish, I guess." He squirms under Dean's piercing gaze.

"I wouldn't have expected someone like you when he promised his best-looking friend," Dean says, grinning from ear to ear.

Castiel snorts. "That's because Ragnor is on the other side of the pond, and all his other male friends are straight or heteroromantic."

"What?"

"They are asexual but like women romantically."

Dean raises his eyebrows but doesn't comment on it. Who wants to look like a complete idiot in front of a handsome guy like Castiel? Not that Dean would look at him that way. He's on a date with Magnus, after all. Magnus, who smiles at Alec in a way that Dean wasn't graced with until now.

Dean pulls his gaze from the two other men and turns to Castiel. "So, you're a professor? Of what exactly?"

"Church history." Great change of topic, Winchester. "Are you a martial arts instructor like Alec?"

"No," Dean chuckles. "I train in my spare time, but I'm a car mechanic and teach the next generation."

It's the first time that Castiel's frown smooths out this evening and a tender smile plays on his lips. "Teaching is such a great vocation, don't you agree?"

Dean thinks of his trainees and nods. "It's pretty rewarding, yeah." Dean can't take his eyes off Castiel's beautiful lips. Alec will kill him.

***

"Oh, you must go to the London Eye, should you ever be there. It's magnificent."

Alec chuckles. "I will remember that the next time I portal over."

Magnus hits his arm playfully. "I'm just so happy to finally be on a Ferris Wheel again. Castiel is such a—no, that would be mean to say. He has his reasons."

"I like people who don't feel the need to belittle others," Alec says, seemingly apropos of nothing.

"I think everyone has an intrinsic value. No matter their strengths or weaknesses." Alec smiles at him. Magnus quirks an eyebrow. "What?"

"Nothing," Alec smirks. "You're just really beautiful." Magnus' lips part in surprise. The sight is very distracting. "Sorry. I guess that was inappropriate. You're Dean's date after all."

Magnus looks down at his date standing suspiciously close to his friend, who usually hates it when people do that. "I don't have the feeling he's truly interested in me. Are you sure he's gay?"

Alec laughs out loud. "He's a disaster bi. Can get every woman he wants, but let a man flirt with him and he switches into panic mode."

"I figured that. I was playing hard to get and he turned the other way."

Alec chuckles. "I can imagine that. But I'm happy that you tried to get to know him anyway. Although I don't think that you two are a good match."

Magnus smirks in amusement. "Is that so?"

Alec nods and moves over to Magnus' bench. "Yeah," he says when the cabin has finally stopped swaying. "I wish you were my date."

"Why? Because we have so much in common?" Magnus snorts.

Alec shrugs. "Opposites attract." He leans in, to Magnus' ear. "And I saw you checking out my ass," he whispers over the noises of the fair.

"You have a very nice ass, Alec. Who would blame me?"

***

"Sonofabitch! I can't believe he's kissing my date!"

Castiel chuckles, and the sound worms itself into Dean's chest and settles in his heart. "They look cute together, though."

"I guess they'll take another round, huh?" Dean laughs.

"Seems that way. Would you like to walk over the fair with me?" Dean smiles at him. He intertwines their fingers and relishes Castiel's answering smile. Alec will likely not use Krav Maga on him.

[normal-thoughts-official]

Actually, anti parabatai plot as a criticism of the oppressive regime would have been super interesting. Like they literally perform some magical ritual on minors. Moreover, it’s seen as prestigious and is highly encouraged. Moreover, if children have doubts they can’t even properly discuss them. Notice how in 2x03 Alec is left so alone he only has his baby sister to share his misgivings about the ritual. Moreover, he isn’t even happy about the upcoming ceremony. It really feels like he only ->

-> out of obligation (reminds me of ‘are you happy’, ‘yes, I’m following my duty’). Idk maybe it was indoctrinated that cancelling the ceremony once you gave your word is unthinkable, dishonourable, shameful or some other shit. Anyway, Alec didn’t look enthusiastic AT ALL. We don’t see what role Maryse and Robert played in this but they were probably their toxic selves. Besides, it’s strange to make a team out of two people so different both personality and career wise. And speaking of indoctrination, you can see children getting ingrained with this shit from the very young age. Like little Izzy may not have wanted a parabatai herself but you can see she was still affected. Jace legit said that they were gonna be REAL brothers as if something stopped him seeing Alec as such without a magical tattoo which is major yikes

EXACTLY!!! you get it!!!!!! not only that but the whole "the biggest pain a shadowhunter could ever know is losing a parabatai", "parabatai are the most important people to each other", "parabatai are in perfect tune" etc like so much shit that was straight up NOT SHOWN TO BE TRUE throughout the plot. valentine and luke were parabatai and he betrayed him, jace basically never gave a fuck about alec's wellbeing, he couldn't even tell when alec was literally dying lol also the bond isn't even that strong, like if ur away for a while or try to TRACK THEM it breaks??? and in the books robert and michael were parabatai as well and then they never talked again and robert legit straight up couldnt tell when michael DIED AND WAS REPLACED BY VALENTINE WITH A GLAMOUR like My God

my hc for this whole thing is that the parabatai thing was invented to increase sh loyalty to each other as well as their teamwork, and they made up this bunch of bullshit about it being like family and super important and their pain is your pain and blah blah blah to seem more desirable. kinda like how spartans encouraged relationships between soldiers to make them stronger? or how compulsory monogamy teaches you that the way to achieve happiness is through One Single Person who will be perfect for you always oops

actually o shit there are plenty of parallels between parabataiship and compulsory monogamy and i think i'm gonna go into that now. so mandatory disclaimer that compulsory monogamy =/= your monogamous relationship, just like heteronormativity =/= your heterosexual relationship. okay? okay. if yall come for me screaming that Monogamous People Aren't All Toxic i will ignore you because that's not what i'm saying and i just explicitly stated that. okay? okay

so i’m gonna skip the historical part because compulsory monogamy is very intimately related with the invention of capitalism, private property and etc., and that doesn’t work quite as well in the context of sh since it’s more of a military society than anything, and again, i do believe that it’s more of a “making them more likely to be loyal”/less likely to question missions and stuff thing. but the effects of parabataiship as it is constructed in sh lore are very similar to those of compulsory monogamy in real life:

the whole loyalty thing that can be very easily turned into toxicity/co-dependency/straight up abusive and unequal dynamics. again, i’m talking about monogamy as a system, not saying that all monogamous relationships are toxic, okay? if i sound insistent here, it’s because you wouldn’t believe the amount of times i put 4981749318 disclaimers like that and ppl still got offended on behalf of their monogamous relationships i wasn’t talking about

i’ll go further into that. monogamy ideology, like parabatai ideology, tells us that there’s a kind of relationship that is superior to all others and should be prioritized above all others (romantic relationships for monogamy ideology, parabataiship for parabatai ideology. compulsory monogamy and amatonormativity are more than just intimately related, they are a part of the other). this means that not putting the person you have this kind of relationship with above all others is seen as a crime and betrayal. and i’m not talking about cheating here, i’m talking about stuff such as “would you let your partner go to parties without you?”, seeing you at a place without your partner and asking where they are and why they didn’t come with you/assuming that you must have fought or broken up, considering that a relationship is doomed or not very close if its parts are not literally inseparable, turning the two parts of a relationship into some kind of almost symbiotic creature, where you stop being “A and B” and become “A-and-B” (this exact wording is even a trope in romantic fiction, esp fanfic), “would your missus let you come with us?”, having huge fights because one party wants to go somewhere and the other doesn’t and they can’t come to an agreement on that, etc., i think you get it by now

this mindset that the person you have this particular kind of relationship with should be prioritized above all others, that a part of your sense of self should be merged with theirs, that you essentially have to become a unit, and that it’s hard, but you have to fight to make it work (”love hurts”, “love is tough, it’s like that”, “if you love someone you have to make sacrifices for them”, etc) makes people feel guilty whenever they don’t put that person and their wishes above all else, or even when they want to do something without them, because that is seen as not loving them enough. not only that, but monogamy ideology promises you that once you find The One™ you will achieve a kind of happiness and perfection in your life that you couldn’t get any other way. this means that people are effectively scared of breaking up or of not having/wanting a relationship like that, because it means that they are broken and will never be truly happy (see what i meant when i said that amatonormativity and monogamy ideology are a part of each other?). that’s why you see people saying shit like “my greatest fear is to waste many years on a relationship and break up in the end”, “if you aren’t dating to get married you’re dating to get your heart broken”, etc. 

so you see people trying their damn hardest to stay loyal to the relationship even when it obviously doesn’t make them happy, feeling guilty for not being happy, and accepting toxic mindsets and abuse because they feel like they owe it to them. especially the weakest link in the relationship - notably women in monogamy ideology, as monogamy is also inherently linked with the patriarchy and in monogamy ideology specifically a woman in a het relationship is seen as more than just a part of the man she is in a relationship with, she’s seen as his property, but that dynamic can also be inverted or ruled by other factors such as race, sexuality, gender identity, class, etc. - are way more likely to be seen as owing their partners loyalty. not just that, but in particular with people who are otherwise oppressed, being loved is seen as almost a favor, because again, being in a romantic relationship is supposed to be your exclusive golden ticket to heavenly happiness and whatnot, and oppressed people (esp queer ppl and poc) as seen as undeserving of that, and effectively denied that in many ways, so they are more likely to want to stay in a toxic relationship out of fear that they won’t ever find anything better (it’s not a coincidence that “no one will ever love you like i do” is such a common phrase to hear from abusers). also, let’s not forget that even the right to break up in itself is something that had to be fought for. the feminist movement spent years trying to make divorce legal (in the places where it is) and still fights to make it be seen as acceptable. if it weren’t for other pressures trying to change the rules of monogamy, a “breakup” would quite literally not even be allowed, and this always benefits the strongest link

so now that that’s been explained, back to parabataiship. i think the parallels here are very clear - i mean, for one, you can’t really break it up, unless you purposefully use soul tracking or stay away for a long time, so it’s like, old fashioned monogamy. but more than that, breaking your parabatai bond is seen as terrifying. there is a lot of purposeful rethoric that directly says that the pain of the parabatai bond being severed (whether by will or by one of the parts dying) is unmatchable, and that plants a horrible fear into people, to the point where villains use that against parabatai shadowhunters (for example, the owl possessing jace and telling him that it’ll kill alec so he knows what the pain of losing a parabatai is like). this means that loyalty is owed, because even if you just want to be away from your parabatai, this might break the bond and put you through unspeakable pain (in theory. as i’ve been saying, it’s basically been proved that that’s not true, because when jace died that was far from being the worst pain that alec’s ever felt) 

moreover: the whole thing about how this kind of relationship is sacred, above all else, and will bring you a kind of happiness that is impossible to achieve otherwise. this is said many times - like you said, parabataiship is seen as something desirable and that brings honor. the vows are very similar to marriage (the highest pillar of monogamy) vows (“your family will be my family, your people will be my people”, “entreat me not to leave thee”), clary is constantly told that she could never understand the relationship jace and alec have because they’re parabatai and being parabatai is special and basically uncomparable to anything else, even by izzy, who never wanted to have a parabatai (and in the end she ends up wanting to, which reminds me of the whole “oh, you’ll want it once you grow up” trope with heterosexual romantic relationships. like, basically, you’ll want it once you find the right person. that is something aro, gay, and non-monog ppl hear all the damn time). the whole thing about how obviously jace is supposed to be the one alec loves the most, they’re parabatai, the whole thing about how “alec would die for me, we’re parabatai” like that is unquestionable; the souls becoming one, the being able to feel each other’s feelings and blah blah blah. in short: sacred, above all else, and, unless you do something very wrong, able to bring you a kind of connection and happiness you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise no matter how strong your feelings or your compatibility is; and once you get it, you can’t get out

and then there’s the imbalance it brings. like i said, notably in monogamy as a pillar of heteronormativity the imbalance lays on women, altho other factors can change that balance or be more prominent. with parabataiship, there’s an obvious trope of queer people getting heterosexual parabatai and being very obviously the weakest link (alec with jace, michael with robert, there are others but i don’t remember. the exception to this is luke, who is written as equally heterosexual and, in the books, equally white, to valentine, but who’s still the weakest link anyway because valentine gains power and prestige luke doesn’t have). again, the whole “alec would die for me” thing tells a lot. he didn’t say “we would die for each other”. he said “alec would die for me”. despite the rethoric being that both parts should be endlessly devoted, the expectation that one should fulfill that obviously falls harder on one than on the other. with monogamy, there’s even a kind of rethoric that you have to work for the reciprocation to be there (for example, victims of domestic abuse being told that if they dedicate themselves to their partners enough, the abuse would stop, like they owe their partners dedication and love and comprehension, and then their partners will give it back only once they get enough of it) that we haven’t really seen with parabatai (at least i don’t remember it) but that i wouldn’t be surprised to see present there. after all, alec can feel it when jace gets a papercut and jace can’t tell when alec is literally dying, and none of that is ever questioned in canon

and then the imbalance is kept because, again, breaking up parabataiship is unthinkable and shameful, not to mention kind of impossible/not allowed to do officially. so the weakest link is basically stuck in this situation of imbalance and, in many cases, toxicity and abuse, but can’t break out of it and effectively feel guilty because according to everything they’ve ever been told, they should be elated that they’ve found their one and they should be happy. if they aren’t happy, then they’re broken, or not trying hard enough, and it’s taboo to even talk about that

again, i’m not saying that all monogamous relationships or all parabataiships are toxic, okay? i’m saying that, as a structurer of our society (and sh’s fictional society) they favor this kind of dynamic, allow it, and justify it through their ideologies. in the same way that heteronormativity allied with misoginy makes it more likely for women to be abuse or r-word victims than men. is every het relationship toxic? no. is heteronormativity toxic? yes. monogamy works the same way

in short, parabataiship is not a relationship model. or rather, it is, but way before and more than that, parabataiship is an ideology that is specifically structured to subjugate shadowhunters, notably queer shadowhunters, and keep their loyalty to each other and to the clave, and most of its rethoric (nothing can ever be stronger than the love for a parabatai, nothing can match the pain of losing a parabatai, parabatai are one and the same and they share a soul) is absolute bullshit built to make it more desirable and make sure that structure is left unquestioned. a plotline that questions the buildings of parabataiship and shows how the whole myth that’s around parabataiship is that, a myth, built to subjugate and control people, would have been amazing, but of course we couldn’t get that so crumbles of meta it is

me: i’m tired of discourse in my blog i’m going to chill for now. me the very same day: what if i went on my first more detailed anti-monogamy rant when that is 100% guaranteed to attract aggressive people who can’t read and also criticized sh fandom’s beloved parabataiship all in one post?

[shera-dnd]

A Day at a Time - Flirtation

I have a feeling y’all are gonna appreciate this one just from the title

Have some quality glitra content as we start making our way to angst glitradora end game

Also with a link to AO3 for those who prefer to read it over there

Catra had accepted the fact that Melog was trying to kill her at this point, because once more the little bastard dragged her through the building and straight to one of the prettiest girls she had ever seen, just so she could die of embarrassment.

“I’m fine.” Catra answered, trying to keep her cool considering everything that's happening right now. “My cat just decided to be a little bastard today.”

“You sure you don’t want any help?” The woman insisted. “I could hold your groceries for you, or your cat!” And as if he had somehow understood what had been said, Melog ran for the other woman and tried to climb her. She calmly picked him up, smiling at him as she did so. “Looks like they made the choice for you!”

Catra sighed, not wanting to bother yet another neighbour. “Thanks.” 

“So I’ve seen you around a lot,” She commented as she followed Catra back to her apartment. “Don’t think we ever talked though.”

“Yeah I didn’t want to bother you.” Catra shrugged. “You look pretty exhausted most of the time.”

“A shitty office job does that to you.” She commented, “And just a ‘hello’ every once in a while wouldn’t hurt.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” That would certainly make their random meetings in the hallway a lot less awkward. “I’m Catra by the way.”

“Glimmer,” She answered with a smile. “ Pleasure to meet you!”

Catra questioned what goes through a person’s mind to name their kid ‘Glimmer’, but the girl’s trans pride flower tattoo on her arm made it clear her parents probably had nothing to do with that name. That was not the only tattoo adorning her, as Glimmer’s body was almost entirely covered in them.

“And what is this little cutie’s name?” Glimmer asked as she petted the little creature, earning a pleased purr from Melog.

“Don’t encourage him,” Catra complained. “And his name is Melog.”

“I’m sure Melog just wanted to stretch his legs.” She commented, “Maybe he thought you needed to meet new people!”

“He could do that without making me run around like an idiot and annoy the neighbors.” Catra shot a death glare at her pet, who seemed completely unbothered.

“Well, I’m not annoyed.” Glimmer replied, defending the little cat. “He did give me an excuse to talk to a pretty girl.”

“What?” Catra did not expect that. Nor did she expect Melog to jump off of Glimmer’s arms and run back to his napping spot. She had been so distracted she hadn’t even noticed they arrived. “Thanks for the help.”

“No worries.” Glimmer waved off. Both of them stood in the corridor for a moment, waiting to see if the other would say anything. “I think I should get going.”

“Yeah… Wait!” Catra ran into her apartment, grabbed a little post it note and wrote on it quickly. She turned back to hand it to Glimmer, but she stopped herself and added a little smiling cat face to the note before doing so. “Here! It’s my phone number.”

“Oh just like that?” It was Glimmer’s turn to be surprised. “Not gonna keep your distance from the ‘weird pink bitch’?” 

“You seem nice and Melog likes you, so you can’t be a bad person.” Catra shrugged.

“‘Can’t be a bad person?’” Glimmer repeated and Catra worried it didn’t exactly come off as a compliment, but the ‘weird pink bitch’ smiled and answered “Thanks, Catra. Talk to you later.”

And with a smile and a wave, she was gone.

~~~

Unlike Catra, Glimmer hadn’t wasted a single second and started her just a few minutes later. Thankfully, baking required a lot of waiting, so she had plenty of time to just talk to her. ‘Hey, Glimmer’ she wrote, but hesitated before sending. Thinking back to the girl’s tattoos, she decided to change that text a bit. “Hey, Sparkles” much better.

“Is this about the star tattoos? Because if it is I’ll fight you.” Catra chuckled when she read that message. She would make fun of how feisty Glimmer was being, but she remembered she had said something similar to Adora the other day.

“You know where I live, Sparkles.” Catra sent, challenging Glimmer. The response took a while as the three dots kept showing up, disappearing and then showing up again.

“I won’t fight you, but only because I don’t want Melog to think I’m mean.” That earned a laugh from Catra.

“I’ll let him know that the weird pink bitch is a nice person.” She joked, but then got a little curious. “Where did that come from by the way?”

“You can thank my coworkers for that one.” Catra suspected something like that, but did raise another question.

“How the hell are you keeping an office job with multicolored hair and tattoos?” This was all relevant information in case Catra ever had to take an office job.

“They wanted to get rid of me, but there were no real rules about colorful hair and I dared their asses to fire the only queer woman working there because they didn’t like her look. Would love to see them trying to recover from that HR disaster.” Apparently Glimmer had a very ‘Fuck you. Fight me’ attitude about everything. “Also they don’t know about the tattoos, so I trust you to keep that secret.” She added, with a little winky face at the end.

She was halfway through writing a witty remark when her line of thought was interrupted by the smell of burning bread. She dropped her phone on the kitchen counter and scrambled to save what was left of her attempt at baking.

~~~

Friday night at the bar was going unusually slow. Catra wasn’t exactly worried about it, she was smart enough to save up some extra money in case she got too many slow shifts. Still, it wasn’t like anything could really bring her mood down right now.

These past two weeks talking to Glimmer and Adora every day had done wonders to improve her disposition, to the point even her boss noticed. Hordak found it all extremely suspicious as he had never been Catra this genuinely happy when she wasn’t up to something. Catra couldn’t exactly blame him for assuming shit, but it was still very rude.

It’s not like Catra was ever planning to introduce the two of them to her boss just to prove him wrong, but it looked like the universe had other plans, because she could see a familiar face approaching the counter.

“Hey, Sparkles.” Catra greeted. “Didn’t expect to see you here. You stalking me or something?” She joked.

“I guess it was a lucky accident.” Glimmer answered, with a strained smile, before taking a seat. “First lucky thing to happen to me today.”

“Shitty day at work?” She guessed.

“Worse,” She answered, pulling up the sleeves of her work clothes, revealing the myriad of tattoos that covered her arm. “My boss found the bar I like to relax at and I’m so not getting drunk in the same room as the asshole that’s been trying to fire me.”

“And this is what? The least shady bar you’ve found all night?” Glimmer nodded “Well, you’re in good hands now and I promise not to use any of your drunk ramblings against you in the future.”

“Why do I find that hard to believe?” She asked, earning Catra’s most innocent look. It wasn’t very convincing.

“I wonder,” She started, playfully “Do you get even more fighty when you’re drunk or are you one of those, ‘You know I’ve always thought of you as a friend’ kind of drunks?”

“Sorry, but I’m only planning on getting a little tipsy.” She explained, “And I’m a flirty drunk, thank you very much.”

“Damn it.” Catra faked annoyance. “Looks like I’m not finding out what that looks like.”

“Maybe some other time.” Glimmer offered.

“But now that you’re not flirting and you’re not gonna start an argument with someone, what are you going to do to pass the time?”

“Very funny.” Glimmer rolled her eyes. “I think I’m gonna relax with a friend and enjoy some good music. Mind making me a Bright Moon?”

“Ugh looks like you share my boss’s awful taste in music.” Catra complained as she started making her drink.

“What is wrong with Fright Zone? Their music is great!”

“Yeah. If you like listening to a sad emo boy groaning about losing his girlfriend.” Catra countered, having heard most their songs more times than she’d like.

“Okay fine, the lyrics aren’t all that great” She admitted “I could try to find something you and your boss would like. Maybe something by Sadie Killer or The Scream Queens.”

“I have no fucking clue what any of those bands sound like, but I like the names a lot more than ‘Fright Zone’.” She commented, placing the finished Bright Moon on the counter. “Here is your drink, Sparkles.”

“A pretty drink from a pretty girl. What else could I ask for?” Glimmer said with a smile.

“You sure you aren’t drunk already?”

“Maybe I’m always a little drunk.” Glimmer joked.

“That sure would explain things.” Catra teased, earning a playful death glare that she happily matched. They kept the stares going until they couldn’t hold it anymore and burst out laughing.

“You’re the worst.” Glimmer said when she finally stopped laughing.

“Hate you too, Sparkles.” She answered, with the biggest smile on her face.

And for the first time in a long time, she was genuinely happy.

[unfolded73]

Husbands: Two Years In (5/5) - schitt’s creek ff

Here it is, the final chapter!  There's nothing I can say that can get across how touched I've been by the comments on this fic. The number of people who have shared things about their own struggles with mental health -- I'm not worthy of it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

While I'm including this fic as part of the "Labels" series, the preceding fics are not required reading. Previous fics in this series: Boyfriends; “I Love You”, Partners, Fiancés

Warning: This fic deals with depression as one of its major topics.

Rated Explicit, this chapter 4718 words. (ao3)

Thanks to @high-seas-swan for cheerleading and B13_MaybeThisTime for many valuable comments (and also cheerleading).

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter 5: Winter

“So how was your week?” Jessica asked.

Patrick always felt like he should plan before therapy what he was going to talk about, but he never remembered to do that.

“It was a little crazy. The holidays at the store always are, although it’s very lucrative. The money we make in December will carry us through at least half of the upcoming year,” he said, pinching the webbing on one hand between his thumb and forefinger of the other.

“And did you feel more equipped to handle that? The busy store, and all your responsibilities around that? Especially with Christmas a few days away?”

Patrick shrugged, feeling obstinate. “I don’t know.”

Jessica let a silence settle, waiting for him to talk. Patrick hated this part; it made him feel like he was failing at therapy when he didn’t know how to fill that silence. What the right answer was. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the sofa cushions, calling her bluff.

Finally, she relented and spoke, and Patrick felt like he’d won a round of whatever game they were playing. “You’ve never said much in here about your sexual orientation other than to talk about your husband and to say that things with your family are good. Was it always that way?”

Patrick tried not to roll his eyes. He knew this would be coming eventually. He’d been avoiding the subject of Rachel or his coming out process because he knew it would be something Jessica would fixate on. “I’m not depressed because of being gay, or… or anything to do with that. I love being gay.”

She smiled genuinely. “I’m glad. But humor me.”

“My parents always accepted me,” he said quickly, but that felt like a lie even though it was technically true.

“How old were you when you came out?” Jessica asked.

Patrick let out a frustrated sigh, seeing no way to avoid the truth now. “I was… I was in denial about being gay for a long time.” Might as well get it all out, he thought. “When I was twenty-nine I broke off an engagement to my high school sweetheart — who was a woman — and moved away from my hometown. Pretty soon after that, I realized I was gay.”

“That must’ve been hard,” Jessica said.

“Yeah, but once I got through it and… and got together with David, I’d never been happier.”

He couldn’t help but see the smile she gave him in response to that as patronizing. “New love can flood the body with so many good chemicals that it swamps out all of the bad ones.”

Patrick narrowed his eyes. “Are you saying I wasn’t happy?”

“No, I’m saying that the way you’ve framed things in some of our past sessions — that you were depressed before you moved here, and then you weren’t, and now for some reason you’re depressed again… that may not be the right way to frame it. Do you think perhaps it puts a lot of pressure on David as the source of your happiness?”

“I don’t put pressure on David,” Patrick protested.

“Is it possible that you put pressure on yourself, then? When it comes to your relationship with David and its importance in your life?” Jessica asked.

Patrick huffed and didn’t answer. Now she was contradicting herself from one sentence to the next.

“When did you come out to your family?” she asked.

“That isn’t why I’m depressed either,” he said.

Jessica sighed like he was finally challenging her constant state of serene acceptance. “Untangling the web of depression isn’t straightforward. It might be helpful to pull on different threads and see what they’re connected to. Okay?”

Patrick supposed that made sense. “Okay.” Then after another pause, he admitted, “It took me a while to come out to my parents.”

“Why is that?”

He stared at Jessica’s bookshelf for several seconds, his eyes running over the titles without reading them. “I worried that my parents wouldn’t be okay with it. They didn’t talk about gay people when I was a kid, really. Or when they did, they made it sound like a sad thing that we needed to tolerate because it wasn’t a choice. You know, that brand of ‘tolerance’ that is just that and nothing more.”

She shot him a sympathetic look. “It’s understandable why you were hesitant to come out to them.”

“But they were great about it. It wasn’t long after coming out to them that I asked David to marry me, and they were great. They love him, and all my worries were unfounded,” he said, trying to figure out why tears were threatening to spill over.

Jessica took a few seconds to rearrange herself, setting her ever-present portfolio aside and leaning forward on with her elbows on her knees. “I understand that, looked at a certain way, you’ve had a purely positive experience with coming into your sexuality. You had David, who from what you’ve said before is a very loving person. And based on what you’ve told me, you live in an accepting community. And then your parents stepped up and were there for you when you asked them to be. That’s all wonderful, and not to be discounted. But it doesn’t change the fact that for all of your formative years, when maybe on some subconscious level you did know that you were gay, or at least different in some fundamental way, you didn’t feel like your parents or the community you were living in would accept you. That kind of experience leaves a mark, even though everything turned out fine.”

She smirked, leaning backwards again. “Or not. Perhaps your serotonin is low due to simple physiology and I’m completely off the mark.”

Patrick felt strangely reassured by this honesty, this admission that she knew that she didn’t know everything. “So I need medication, then?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Medication might help. Or cognitive behavior therapy could help you. Or both together.”

His reassurance quickly dissolved, leaving Patrick wanting to scream at his therapist, fix me, goddammit! Instead he said, “That all sounds very nebulous.”

She grinned. “From what I know about you so far, I bet that’s driving you crazy, and I’m sorry about that. Can you bear with me for a little while, though? Work through the process?”

He sighed. “I’ll try.”

~*~

Patrick drove past the empty storefront on Elmdale’s main street as he was leaving his therapy appointment. He’d noticed every week that the ‘for lease’ sign was still in the window. After the second time he saw it, he’d texted Ray to ask if that was the space he’d mentioned to David. David hadn’t said anything about the second Rose Apothecary location in a while, but it didn’t take a genius to guess that he was still thinking about it, and probably wondering when Patrick would be ready to seriously entertain the idea again.

On impulse, he pulled into one of the parking spaces that lined the street and got out of the car, walking over to the empty storefront. The windows were covered in paper, but he could see enough through the gaps to make out that it had a scuffed up hardwood floor. It would need to be refinished, he thought, but it looked like it was in pretty good shape.

The smell of coffee attracted Patrick’s attention, and he looked over to see that there was a coffee shop next door. Grind House, the sign that hung under the awning said. Curious, Patrick went over and opened the door.

The barista looked up and waved. It being around two in the afternoon on a weekday, the place was mostly empty other than two people at a table in the corner who were huddled over laptop computers. The shop was decorated tastefully for Christmas, and he thought David would approve of the warmth and coziness of the space.

“Hey, what can I get you?” the barista — Taylor, her name tag read — asked him with a smile. Tattoos snaked out from under the sleeves of her t-shirt, black ink against dark brown skin.

“A small earl grey tea?” he asked.

“Sure thing. Is that it? We’ve got a few pastries left.”

His eyes strayed over to the pastry case. “Yeah, could I get a couple of those butter tarts to go? My husband is a real connoisseur.”

Taylor grinned at him. “Smart man.”

“Hey, what do you know about the empty space next door? Do you know if there’s been any interest in it?”

“Oh man, I’m still bummed about that. It used to be a comic book shop. I was afraid to go in there for the longest time — comic stores aren’t necessarily the most welcoming places to black queer women, you know? But the old guy that ran it was super nice. I remember he made a point of telling me when Ta-Nahisi Coates started writing Captain America.”

“What happened to the store?”

She shrugged. “Amazon drove him out of business, I guess. That’ll be $9.25,” she said ringing up his tea and butter tarts. As Patrick put his debit card in the reader, she added, “Why do you ask?”

“Oh.” He scratched his cheek. “My husband and I run a store in Schitt’s Creek. Rose Apothecary?”

“Holy shit, really? A friend gave me some of your lotion for my birthday. It’s great.”

Patrick swelled with pride. “Thanks. Anyway, we’re considering opening a second location in Elmdale.”

Taylor smirked, handing him his tea and a box with the tarts. “Sorry, I can’t allow you to have a store right next door to my coffee shop. I’ll spend all my profits there.”

Laughing, Patrick accepted his purchases. “Oh, well. Guess we’ll have to look for another place, then. Although David would return the favor, I’m sure.”

“What’s your name?” Taylor asked.

“It’s Patrick Brewer,” he said, setting the tea down again to shake her hand.

“Nice to meet you, Patrick. I’m Taylor. And I hope you guys get the space.”

“I… do too,” he said, surprised to find that he meant it.

The store was bustling when he got back to Schitt’s Creek, and David and Bethany were both busy with customers. Patrick put the box of butter tarts in the back room and went to work restocking Christmas decorations. Given how many decorations they sold every holiday season, Patrick had to assume that by now every Christmas tree in Elm County was fully outfitted in David Rose’s aesthetic.

As soon as David finished with the customers he was helping, Patrick went over and put a hand on his shoulder. “I got you something for your afternoon break,” he said. “There’s a white box on the table in the back.”

David’s eyes lit up, and he hurried into the back before he could be waylaid by another harried holiday shopper.

They didn’t have a chance to exchange any more conversation until Bethany finally flipped the sign on the door to Closed and locked up. Patrick felt dead on his feet, but he had to admit that the thought of all the money in the cash register made him feel pretty good. Bethany went to work cleaning the windows while David leaned against the center table.

“Oh my god, Patrick, where did you get those butter tarts? Those are the best ones I’ve had in years.”

Patrick walked over and put his arms around his husband, pulling him into a hug. “A little coffee shop in downtown Elmdale that happens to be next to an empty store that I believe Ray mentioned to you a couple of months ago.”

David pulled out of the hug, his eyes darting back and forth as he studied Patrick’s expression. “It’s still vacant?”

Nodding, Patrick leaned up and kissed David’s cheek. “We should call Ray after Christmas and go take a look at it.”

“Are you sure?”

Patrick shrugged. “No, I’m scared as hell. Among other things, I’m afraid I’m going to miss having days like this with you, working together in our store. But I want to go look.”

David kissed his lips gently. “Okay.”

~*~

Stevie stood shivering on their back porch, bundled up in her hat and puffy parka. “It’s way too cold for this,” she said.

Patrick exhaled pot smoke in a crystalline cloud of breath and handled the joint back to her. “Our families are getting here tomorrow and I don’t want the house to smell like weed.” He giggled. “It doesn’t match David’s holiday aesthetic.”

His phone chimed, and he took it out to look at it, expecting a complaint from David. Instead the text was from his cousin. There were no words, just a picture of Justin pressed cheek to cheek with another boy.

Patrick: Who’s this?

Justin 🌈: his name is Jonah

Patrick: Very cute. And closer to your age, I hope?

Justin 🌈: 🙄 you sound like my mom he’s 18

Patrick: Good. Merry Christmas, Justin.

Justin 🌈: thanks you too

Then a text arrived from David, just as Patrick expected. She’s got even more luggage than last year.

Patrick laughed. Maybe it’s a lot of presents for you, he texted back.

David: You give my sister entirely too much credit.

Patrick: See you soon.

“Why are you suddenly so fucking popular?” Stevie groused, her teeth chattering, handing him the joint back as he put away his phone.

“Sounds like Alexis’s flight got in on time,” he said. “And my cousin Justin has a new… boyfriend, I guess?” He took another hit.

“I can’t stand this anymore; I’m going inside,” Stevie said, taking the half-smoked joint from him and carefully extinguishing it, then putting it in a crumpled sandwich bag that she produced from her coat pocket. Patrick followed her back into the house. “Is this the cousin that you rescued a while ago?”

“How many gay cousins do you think I have?” he asked, pulling his coat off.

“I mean, statistically? Given how many cousins you have? More than one.” She flopped down on the sofa and stretched out on her back. “So are you liking your therapist any better?”

Patrick dropped into the overstuffed chair across from her. “I don’t know. As I predicted, she’s starting to fixate on my sexual orientation and…” He gestured airily in a very David way. “All that.”

Stevie turned her head and regarded him balefully. “The fact that you were in denial about being gay until you were thirty? And didn’t come out to your parents until you were ready to ask David to marry you? Is that what ‘all that’ is?”

“Fuck off,” Patrick grumbled.

“I’m just saying, there’s probably some stuff to unpack there.”

“Stevie, I’m completely comfortable with being gay,” he said.

“Didn’t say you weren’t. It’s not about you being gay, but maybe it’s about how you get so wrapped up in your obligations to other people that you lose track of yourself. Or that you’re so obsessed with not disappointing the people you care about that you have a hard time being truthful about who you are or what you need.”

Patrick blinked. “Wow. Maybe you should be my therapist.”

Stevie laughed. “The problem is, I need to be high to have these deep insights.”

They settled into comfortable silence for a few minutes. Finally Patrick admitted, “I don’t like the way it makes me feel cracked open.”

“What does?” Stevie asked, her mind clearly having wandered.

“Therapy.”

“Oh. Yeah, I don’t think I could deal with that either,” Stevie said.

“It’s like… you know how if you pick up a big rock in moist soil, there’ll be all these bugs underneath it?”

“Ew,” Stevie said in a perfect imitation of David, and the two of them burst into gales of laughter for a while. When Stevie finally got control of herself, she said, “Sorry, what about the bugs?”

He wiped away tears from his cheeks. “It was a metaphor for my brain. I’ve got a lifetime of practice not moving those rocks. I don’t know if I want to know what’s underneath them.”

“Yeah, I get that.” She stretched her toes out, brushing them against the arm of the sofa. “You know you’ll be okay though, right?”

Patrick felt a swell of love for Stevie and he would have hugged her, but it would probably be weird. Also he was comfortable in his chair. Maybe he’d hug her later.

When David arrived from retrieving Alexis at the airport, Patrick put his coat back on to help with the luggage. David opened a bottle of wine and turned the lamps in the living room off, leaving only the light from the Christmas tree to illuminate the four of them as they settled in to talk.

They told Alexis about the new location in Elmdale that they were considering leasing, and she made some marketing suggestions that were good enough that David went and retrieved his journal from the bedroom so that he could make some notes.

“One thing I’ve seen businesses do to get market penetration is sponsor relevant conferences,” Alexis said. “Like, professional association meetings. Then they get their business name and logo printed on everything for the conference — tote bags, lanyards, USB sticks, all that stuff.” Her free hand that wasn’t holding her wine glass flopped around to indicate all of the stuff.

“We don’t really have general store conferences,” Patrick said, bemused.

Alexis rolled her eyes. “But it works for other events too. Summer festivals, parades, whatever.”

“Elm Valley has a pumpkin festival every year,” Stevie said.

Patrick was starting to have a germ of an idea related to what Alexis had said. He sipped his wine and filed it away to mull over later, when he was sober.

Tomorrow, Johnny and Moira and his own parents would arrive and things would take a turn for the chaotic, but for right now, Patrick could enjoy the warmth of David’s hand on his shoulder as his husband bantered happily with his sister and his best friend. Leaning into the crook of David’s arm, Patrick smiled and tried to soak up all of the love in the room, an inoculation against the darkness that might lurk around the next bend in the road.

“Merry Christmas, sweetheart,” David murmured against his spine later in their bed. Their kisses had been drowsy and a little bit drunk as they decided that sex was happening tonight in spite of their houseguests. Alexis was in the guest bedroom and Stevie had zonked out on the living room sofa, David tucking an afghan around her shoulders before he and Patrick went to bed themselves.

“It’s not Christmas yet,” Patrick said with a chuckle, writhing, pressed against the sheets as David worked him up and up.

“I know it’s not technically Christmas, but tonight was so nice,” David murmured into Patrick’s shoulder, words alternating with kisses. “It filled me with holiday spirit.”

Patrick tried not to laugh, he really did, but it was a losing battle. He made an attempt to smother his giggles into his pillow.

“If you say something about me filling you with the holiday spirit, it’s over between us.” The things he was doing to Patrick with his fingers belied that statement.

Laughing again, Patrick pushed his hips back against David’s hand, and then his laughter turned into a moan, and then neither of them said anything coherent for a long time.

~*~

The first town council meeting of the new year came on a grey January afternoon, the threat of snow on the horizon. Everyone was subdued and low energy, even Roland, and Patrick felt drowsy, struggling a little bit to pay attention and type at the same time that they discussed several budgetary issues. A lot of the topics were the same every meeting, with tiny, incremental changes almost too small to detect. Or worse, they were recurring issues that indicated no progress had been made at all.

When they got to the bottom of the agenda, Ronnie asked if there was any new business, and Patrick almost didn’t say anything. The idea that had occurred to him during the holidays had seemed strong on a happier day. Today, he wasn’t sure he had the energy to argue for it. But then he thought about the things Ronnie had said to him about queer activism, and he thought about Taylor and her coffee shop, and he opened his mouth.

“Have we ever considered having something in Schitt’s Creek for Pride?” he asked.

Ronnie raised her eyebrows. “What, like a parade?”

“No offense, but it might be kind of a sad little parade,” Roland said.

“No, not a parade. Like, a street festival. Tents with food and other vendors and LGBT educational booths. Opportunities for people to find out about meetings in the area. Maybe a stage with speeches and musical performances. And we don’t have to limit it to only Schitt’s Creek. I looked into it a little, and even Elmdale doesn’t have anything like it. We could draw vendors and patrons from all over Elm County.”

Ronnie crossed her arms. “Sounds like a way to line your own pockets. I assume Rose Apothecary would be one of the vendors?”

Patrick met her gaze. “I’m sure the rest of council could be counted on to keep us on a level playing field with everyone else. Come on, Ronnie. Can you honestly say it wouldn’t be a good thing for the community? And a good way to bring money into the town?”

She tilted her head in acquiescence. “Put together a formal proposal and we can vote on it at the next meeting.”

“I’m going to vote ‘yes,’” Bob stage-whispered to Patrick.

“Thanks, Bob.”

After the meeting had adjourned, Patrick went over to Ronnie. “I thought later this month I’d go to that Thornbridge LGBTQIA+ meeting you told me about. See what they’re doing and make some connections. Ask if they’d be interested in helping out with our Pride festival.”

Ronnie stared at him for a second. “Your festival idea hasn’t been approved yet,” she said.

“Assuming it’s approved,” he said, unable to keep himself from grinning. “Would you like to go with me?”

“You want me to spend hours in a car with you, driving to Thornbridge. Really.”

“Come on, Ronnie. Someday you and I are going to have to bury the hatchet for good.” He put on his most guileless expression, the one that caused David to accuse him of weaponizing his eyes. “Why not in service to the queer community, of which we are both pillars?”

She almost, for a split second, looked like she was going to crack a smile. Instead she sighed. “Fine. Let me know when it is. I’ll see if I’m available.”

~*~

They celebrated signing the lease for the new store with pizza at David’s favorite spot in Elmdale. There were paper hearts colored by children in the front window, and it reminded Patrick that he only had a few days to find a suitably tacky gift for David for Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t worth it if he couldn’t get David to threaten to divorce him on this, David’s most hated of holidays.

While they waited for their pizza, Patrick reached across the red and white checkered tablecloth and took David’s hand. “Thank you,” he said.

David had been fiddling with his phone, but at the sound of Patrick’s voice, he set it face-down on the table and gave Patrick his full attention. “What for?”

“For being there for me so many times this past year. For… for putting up with me at my worst.”

A crooked smile threatened to erupt on David’s face. “Patrick, you know your worst is still pretty good, right?”

“I hope you’re not still grading me on a Sebastien Raine curve, David.”

David rolled his eyes at that. “No, I’m just saying that maybe you don’t have the most objective perspective on what being married to you is like.” His eyes softened. “I’m as happy being your husband today as I was the first day. Okay?”

Patrick swallowed around a surprising lump in his throat. “Okay.”

“You’re nervous about the new store,” David surmised.

“I am, but it’s the right decision,” Patrick said with confidence.

“I’m nervous too,” David said. “Don’t mistake my outward confidence for anything other than a thin veneer over all of my anxieties.”

That statement automatically put Patrick into reassurance mode. “The marketing ideas from Alexis are going to be helpful. The customer base in Elmdale is huge and has more disposable income compared to what we’re used to at home. I’ve run some numbers, and I think the revenue from this location may outstrip our Schitt’s Creek location in a matter of months.”

David grimaced. “Well, that somehow makes me feel irrationally protective of our first store. It doesn’t deserve to be the under-achiever.”

Squeezing David’s hand, Patrick said, “Never. I fell in love with you there, and there’s nowhere in the world more important to me than that store.”

“We can make new memories at the new store,” David said softly.

Patrick knew, realistically, that he and David probably wouldn’t be spending that much time together at the new store after they got it open. They’d have to split time between the two locations, and there would be even more work to do out on the road, expanding their vendor base to support the increased demand.

David seemed to read his thoughts. “And when we spend our days apart, it will make being at home together in the evenings that much more precious.”

“Yeah,” Patrick managed to say, his voice raw. He averted his eyes from David’s piercing gaze, staring out the window between the gaps in the paper hearts. “Can you… can you talk to me more about that?”

David smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Well, imagine a day when I’m at the store here in Elmdale, and you’re at the store back at home.”

“Are you at the one in Elmdale because of Taylor’s pastries?”

“Shhh,” David said, reaching out with a finger like he was going to put it over Patrick’s lips. “I leave the store a little early, letting one of our trusted employees close up, and I bring home some wine and cheese from the store. Maybe some of Heather’s new triple cream.” He closed his eyes like he was having an erotic fantasy about Heather Warner’s cheese.

“Wine and cheese that you pay for,” Patrick said.

��Naturally. Oh, and fresh berries. It’s summer, and there are berries in season. So I set everything up on the kitchen table, just in time for you to arrive home from the other store. And we drink wine and eat cheese and we tell each other all about our days. The sun is setting, and the light is all golden,” David said.

“I like this story,” Patrick replied. “Then what happens?”

“Eventually we move to the sofa. Maybe watch some TV or listen to some music. We put our feet up and finish our wine and you remember something funny that you saw on the internet and you tell me about it. And then when we get tired, we go to bed.”

“What happens then?” Patrick asked as their server set their pizza in front of them and David grabbed a slice.

David’s mouth twisted into a crooked smile and he waggled his eyebrows. “The rest of the story is very interesting, but you’ll have to wait to get home to hear that part.”

“Hmm, okay.” Patrick reached for his own slice of pizza.

“Hey,” David said, drawing Patrick back to looking at him. “I love you. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings for us.”

Patrick smiled. He felt bolstered, lifted up by David’s support and for once, he allowed himself to feel good about it. “Me either, David.”

[oookaline]

A response to this tweet:

https://twitter.com/LETMEVOL6/status/1318301718610923520?s=19

"ok. i’m bout to ask a question to the larries. yalls whole argument is that simon and modest are homophobic right? please explain to me how Harry got away with being such a strong advocate for the LGBTQ+ community while being in One Direction? Why was harry the only one dropping hints on his sexuality. if they were so dead set on pushing this heterosexual narrative onto the boys then how did Harry get away with the things that he did? harry was dropping hints at his attraction to males. no, not with over analyzed song lyrics. i mean dead ass saying it. I genuinely want to know because Harry‘s been out of the closet for years now .y’all claim that Louis is closete. Harry managed to get out of the “evil clutches of Simon Cowell“ what stopping Louis and doing the same? unless this whole Larry theory was a lie and y’all were bored like, can someone please tell me why that happened? if Harry is allowed to be so open about his sexuality what stopping louis? if Harry got away from Simon would stopping in Louis they all have the same opportunity Harry may be the richest member but Louis can’t be that far back so tell me how did Harry manage to get away and be so open about his attraction of males and louis didn’t? i genuinely don’t get that."

Harry has been refering to his partner as gender neutral since forever, its not something he dropped hints on.

Not only that you have to also consider the narratives management pushed upon each of them aswell: Ima try to do a brief summary on H and Lou only, as this is reffered to Larries.

Louis: Perfect Boyfriend, a stable girlfriend throughout the years, influencer pretty girlfriend, no background on her so no backlash, constant papwalks on them and the occasional 'theyre toguether' tweets. Literally what it would be normalized as a happy relationship.

Harry: Fuck Boy, dated a lot of people, womaniser, headlines every week linking him to a new person, kendall, Taylor, Caroline etc, all big names yet all stunts, papwalks, 18 months of dating or interaction then never talked about again, the boy to wisk you away to a magical night then leave you the next morning.

Now taking these both you can see they are very different narratives, thus enabling them for two very distinctive ways to hinting at their sexuality with us.

Louis due to stunt reasons had to make his love songs (or his songs overall) seem like they hint at a specific girl, eleanor. Building up on the narrative they've had over the years. So while he can't directly call out his 'perfect woman' in gender neutral pronouns like Harry does, he CAN on the other hand choose what he specifies her as: a good chef, long brown hair paired with a british accent.

Very specific things that very obviously link to Harry while making press and hets think its towards Eleanor.

That one interview which didn't air where Louis said he had a boyfriend...

But this is just verbal. Lyric whise Louis has been more open and smart then anyone I've ever listened to-

The lyrics directly paralleling gay relationship, the struggles, the fear of not being able to be with them... Everything that a Heterosexual reletionship would NEVER experience. A few examples:

→Alive - One Direction (Louis) MM

"My mama told me I should go and get some therapy"

"I asked the doctor, "can you find out what is wrong with me? I don't know why I wanna be with every girl I meet"

"I can't control it"

"She said, "hey, it's alright Does it make you feel alive?"

"We got to live before we get older. Do what we like, we got nothing to lose. Shake off the weight of the world from your shoulders. Oh, we got nothing to prove"

"Went to a party just after the doctor talked to me, I met a girl, I took her in up to the balcony, I whispered something in her ear that I just can't repeat, She said, "okay" but she was worried what her friends will think"

This whole song is about questioning you sexuality and realizing you like the same sex.

Read over the lyrics and change:

girl - boy

she/her - he/him

and you'll see what I mean

→End Of The Day (Louis and Liam) MITAM

"Love can be frightening for sure"

"All I know at the end of the day is you want what you want and you say what you say, And you'll follow your heart even though it'll break, Sometimes"

"All I know at the end of the day is love who you love, There ain't no other way, If there's something I've learnt from a million mistakes, You're the one that I want at the end of the day"

"The priest thinks it's the devil, My mum thinks it's the flu, But girl it's only you"

"When the sun goes I know that you and me and everything will be alright, And when the city's sleeping, you and I can stay awake and keep on dreaming"

this whole song (apart from that one "girl") is just a huge gay awakening. If you keep the girl its a wlw anthem then.

some more exaples from scattered songs:

"There's a moment when you finally realize, There's no way you can change the rolling tide" -Ready To Run

"There will always be the kind that criticize, But I know, yes I know we'll be alright" -Ready To Run

"Told myself I kind of liked her, But there was something missing in her eyes" -Home

"I was stumbling, looking in the dark , With an empty heart, But you say you feel the same"-Home

"Still high with a little feeling, I see the smile as it starts to creep in, It was there, I saw it in your eyes" -Home

"But I know you're only hiding, And I just wanna see you" -Through The Dark

"And I can see your head is held in shame, But I just wanna see you smile again" -Through The Dark

"And I will hold you closer, Hope your heart is strong enough" -Through the dark

"People say we shouldn't be together, We're too young to know about forever" -TDKAU

"They don't know about the things we do, They don't know about the "I love yous"-TDKAU

these are just some out of the many Louis wrote. You can see where I'm going with it now.

and im not even going to touch i to all the shading Louis did with his clothes, tattoos, actions etc...

Now, Harry 'got away' with those actions because of various reasons, but I wouldn't say that he got away, I'd call it more of a "You stop me from doing this we will get backlash for possible homophobia and then y'all lose money so suck it up fuckers we're going on a rainbow ride" which is true; Yes, Harry did always refer to his ideal partner in gender neutral forms, but during the rainbow direction project was when he really amped it up so he could always go with the casual "I'm just supporting my fans, there's no harm in that" when confronted about it, which includes him waving the flags around and all the other stuff.

But it also seems you all are forgetting about how along with all the Queer!Harry we got, we also got more and more headlines of Wom!Harry, more stunts and etc: 5 different official relationships (not counting Kendal twice, which would make 6) between late 2014-early 2016 ALSO NOT COUNTING RUMOURED GIRLFRIENDS which then would make the list go so much higher, Harry couldn't before and still can't hang out with WOMEN or else there will be rumours of them dating.

And this doesn't happen with Men :/ He can hang put with multiple men, and there probably will be barelly one and a half articles written about it -only by small outlets- which in comparison to when he is seen hanging our with a 'mysterious woman' we'll get hundreds of articles about it in a span of an hour.

So what I'm trying to say is that sadly he can still call his ideal partner a he and be seen kissing a guy that the media probably will focus on the chick on the background and write an article like "Harry Styles seen out with friends in LA and he seemed extra cozy with mysterious blonde".

But again, the same with Louis, he hints at us about his sexuality so much, be it us the only one who properly listens to him.

With his songs and the flags and the pins and everything.

Here's some of his lyrics from the Oned era:

"We were meant to be but a twist of fate, Made it so you had to walk away" -Happily

"I don't care what people say when we're together"-Happily

"I can't even think straight but I can tell, You were just with her"-JABOYL

"And nothing's ever easy, That's what they say"-JABOYL

"Pay attention, I hope that you listen 'cause I let my guard down, Right now I'm completely defenseless"-If I Could Fly

"I've got scars even though they can't always be seen, And pain gets hard, but now you're here and I don't feel a thing"-If I Could Fly

"One day you'll come into my world and say it all, You say we'll be together even when you're lost"-Something Great

"I want you here with me, Like how I pictured it, So I don't have to keep imagining"-Something Great

"The script was written and I could not change a thing, I want to rip it all to shreds and start again"-Something Great

"You're all I want, So much it's hurting"-Something Great

So yeah, its sad that you just alienated that one thing without having context nor looking at the bigger picture. If I missed anything please tell me. :]

sorry for the long post

(copied from my answer on twitter)

[erin-gilberts]

Bc It’s such a good post will you answer all the cafe asks?

Yessss totally! 

Vanilla Chai Latte : Are you in love?

Yes, wholeheartedly and unapologetically, I am. 

My girlfriend and I have only been together for two months, but it’s one of those things where when you know, you know. I’ve been in relationships lasting upwards of a year where I still didn’t know at the end of them whether or not I was in love. Early on in the year, I was actually even having conversations with my mom about how I wasn’t sure I’d ever been in love; I had no concept of what that felt like. I didn’t feel like I was feeling what I was supposed to be in relationships. I wondered if I was aromantic and if I wasn’t meant to experience romantic love.

With her, I’ve realized everything love IS supposed to feel like, and I’ve realized I AM capable of feeling those feelings - I just hadn’t met the right person yet. My heart was waiting for her. 

We daydream of the life we intend to build together, and it delights me to be able to wake up every day and choose her, again and again, as we run boldly and breathlessly into the future we now share. We totally u-hauled but we’re both so committed to blooming and becoming together; it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before despite having quite a bit of experience in relationships. 

Flat White : Coffee or Tea?

Coffee. It feels more substantial to me with more ways to customize it exactly how you like it. I also just have a lot of really positive memories being in coffee shops! I’m currently obsessing over Starbucks’s seasonal salted caramel mocha. 

Cappuccino : What’s your middle name?

Elizabeth! I was named after my mother and grandmother, so it’s the only part of my birth name I kept when I changed my name. 

Mocha : Dream Job?

A famous professional organizer on the same level as Marie Kondo and Dorothy Breininger! They’re my inspiration and the reason I went into this kind of work. Also, the executive director of my own LGBT-focused nonprofit (which I have been, and I intend to be again!). 

Pumpkin Spice : Dream car?

The super fancy bike I’ll use the day I ride in the AIDS LifeCycle? Haha, I don’t drive and I don’t intend to! 

Jasmine Tea : If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?

Ugh, if I could visit any place in the world right this moment, I’d choose to go back to Toronto in a heartbeat. I went there in 2015 for the Inside Out LGBT Film Festival and I LOVED that city. It was so fun and the people were so welcoming. Other than that? Moscow, because it’s where @googoogojob lives, or New York City, because I just learned Hook & Ladder 8 (the Ghostbusters firehouse) is a real place and I want to see it! 

Old English : You’re stranded on an island, who do you bring with you?

Do I have a limit?? If I have a choice, I’m definitely bringing my mom, brother, maternal grandparents, best friend, best friend’s family, cat, and girlfriend! That’s like the minimum amount of people in my life I couldn’t go without. 

Iced Chocolate : Do you have a crush on someone?

My girlfriend, who I continually redevelop a big gay crush on every day! But I feel like that’s not quite the spirit of what this question is asking, so - I also have a big gay crush on Kristen Wiig, which my girlfriend endlessly makes fun of me for! Like, to the point I named my cat Erin Gilbert. 

Caramel Frappe : Favorite video game?

It’s a tie between Minecraft and Undertale. I swing wildly between playing Minecraft daily to not playing for months, but it never gets old. The sandbox nature of the game enables infinite creativity, and the low stakes make it both accessible to me (not a gamer) and relaxing. And Undertale with its story and unique mechanics remains to this day the game to inspire the biggest emotional response in me. I’ve thought about having, “Despite everything, it’s still you” tattooed. 

Iced Lemon Tea : Favorite song/band?

My favorite songs of all time are “The Greatest” by Sia and “I Know a Place” by MUNA, both of which were written in the aftermath of the Pulse shooting and can be interpreted as the process of rediscovering queer joy at the same time your community is constantly faced with tragedy and pain. They hit hard in a beautiful way as a hate crime survivor. 

Iced Cafe Mocha : Favorite thing to do on rainy days?

I like to go out as soon as the storm passes and just walk downtown in the rain. The air always smells and feels so good; it clarifies me and I feel renewed. Walking in the light rain or before / after the storm always feels like breathing, really breathing, for the first time. It reminds me I exist and it reminds me that’s neat. 

Hot Chocolate : Are you an affectionate person?

Yessssss oh my god. I live and breathe being affectionate and not even in a strictly romantic sense. I’m naturally an exuberant person and I delight in making people happy. My girlfriend would also say I engage in “cat behavior” with my demands to be held or touching constantly. XD 

Caramel Macchiato : You’re travelling the entire world but you can only take one person with you. Who do you take?

My girlfriend @sweetmckinnon. Not only would we have the unprecedented opportunity to be gay in every country and continent, but we’re both writers, and we’d write an excellent book about these adventures! 

Green Tea : How tall are you?

5’7. 

Early Grey Tea : The inevitable Zombie Apocalypse is upon us! What’s your plan of action?

I’m rounding up everyone I care about and taking us to the nearest commune of marginalized people. We’ll be avoiding those uber-macho survivalist types like the plague, because their arrogance will 100% get everyone killed. At least marginalized communities would be more likely to understand working together and looking out for the community, not just yourself. 

Mint Tea : How do you relax?

Indoor cycling is my drug of choice. It’s HARD to be mad or stressed when you’re exerting that intensely. I might also write self-indulgent fanfics or indulge in a little controlled chaos (I’m an acrylic pour and collage artist). And talking to my girlfriend, best friend, or mom always makes me feel better, too. 

Vanilla Latte : Board games or drinking games?

I genuinely love board games and wish I had more people to play them with. 

Iced Coffee : Do you like reading? If so, what’s your favorite book?

I like reading, but having ADHD has made it extremely hard to read entire books in recent years. My favorite book is probably The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. The author takes what’s already a horrific story and a dark chapter in American history and with her devastating writing style, humanizes each woman involved to the point it makes you ache to read knowing the inevitability of their fate. Anytime anyone asks me for a book recommendation, this is the book I suggest. 

Italian Soda : Describe your dream date

My dream date would be after we’ve been together for a while - maybe on a date that’s special to us, like our anniversary, or maybe just on a random night because we feel like it, we have one of those super romantic dates like you see in the movies. We dress up super cute, go out to dinner and come home to a bedroom full of candles and rose petals on the floor, and every moment is spent just enjoying each other and what we have together in every way we can. <3 

Sparkling Water : Describe what qualities you look for in a person

Passion - I’m an activist who became the executive director of their own nonprofit at the age of 16. I’m not going to mesh with someone who’s just going through the motions of life without any aspirations. 

Flexibility - It’s a turnoff for me when someone is EXTREMELY committed to a very specific view of how their life is going to be. It tells me right away I’m going to have to continually contort myself to fit into their unbending path, because I accept I can’t predict the direction of my life with any degree of precision and I’m not rigid about it as a result. 

Creative - I’m currently dating another writer and it’s the most fun I’ve ever had in a relationship. The quickest way to get us to pop off into a spirited debate is to get us started about story structure and characterization. We. Go. OFF. And could go off for days. Our shared creative passion gives us endless ground to connect and bond on. 

Those are just a few, but definitely a few important ones for me! 

Orange Juice : Have you ever had a valentine?

My first girlfriend, who I dated from 12-17, is the only valentine I’ve ever had. The timing of my relationships as an adult has never worked out for me to be partnered on Valentine’s Day. We weren’t super out about our relationship at the time and didn’t spend Valentine’s Day together, but I still have the love letters she sent me copied into my 7th grade diary, and I still have the antique gold heart necklace with enamel roses she gave me one year, too! Lots of lovely memories from that relationship. 

Rose Hip Tea : Describe your first kiss

My first girlfriend and I were 12-13, cutting class in the bathroom because she was often bullied for her sexuality. She was having an especially rough day that day and I knew exactly where to find her. She kissed me out of the blue while I was comforting her and in all of my baby gay naivety, I hadn’t fully realized I was gay or that she liked me that way prior to that. Turns out I was and she did. We dated for five years. 

Herbal Tea : You’re at a candle shop, what scented candle do you buy?

Oh, I’m going right to the bakery scent section. I’m not a huge fan of chocolate-scented candles, but vanilla? Christmas cookies? Gingerbread? Sign me the FUCK up. 

Sandalwood is also one of my favorite scents, but depending on what it’s blended with, it can be hit or miss for me in candles. 

[almaasi]

reaction post typed while watching Good Omens (ALL OF IT)

my favourite novel is now my favourite mini-series and IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL

under the cut: a very long, spoilery six-episode reaction to MY NEW FAVOURITE THING EVER

--

may 31st 07:36pm nz

i posted my episode 1 reaction a couple hours ago but that got ZERO NOTES so i assume people are either avoiding spoilers or aren’t interested, which is fine, but i’m just gonna put all my reactions in one big post so anyone who IS interested doesn’t have to read 6 separate posts c:

edit june 1st 04:08am: btw i watched using a free trial on amazon prime, which i’m pretty sure is worldwide. soooo if yOU WANT TO WATCH THIS, YOU CAN, FOR FREE

--

EPISODE 1: In the Beginning

--

04:03pm

idk how much i’m gonna type, whether i’ll post a reaction to the entire thing in one post....... or how much i’ll end up watching right now

kinda want to spread it out and save it as a treat for after i’ve done some writing

but right now i wanna watch before writing

so maybe i’ll do one ep, write something, then return to this?

edit: aahhaha that didn’t happen

-

04:04pm

I’M SO EXCITED

I’VE BEEN WAITING SO LONG

well... since 2011 when i first read the book

but regardless it’S BEEN 84 YEARS

-

04:05

okay first off i did not know amazon prime did adverts at the start of their videos. so i was like SINCE WHEN WAS CHILDISH GAMBINO/DONALD GLOVER IN GOOD OMENS

and then

yeah

no

either way i thought it was a good opening

-

W A R

NING

cool cool cool cool cool

-

omg i’m used to where the netflix full-screen button is, and on amazon prime that’s the “next episode” button so i gotta be real careful

-

dear god my video quality is TERRIBLE

i.......... i might torrent this show and watch it offline

this is horrendous i can’t see a damn thing

i have never seen pixels this big

-

04:11

okay the quality calmed down after a minute

i loooove the intro, i love that it’s basically word for word from the book

i feel like i’d find it funnier if i hadn’t read the book 3 months ago

-

also? god is a woman? yes

-

04:13

is it just me or does the snek have a slightly david tennant-esque quality about it

-

i’m so happy adam and eve are black

-

04:17

omfg. aziraphale said “ineffable” and now CRAWLEY’S CHECKING HIM OUT TRYING TO SEE IF HE HAS ANY JUNK

WOW

...or y’know, looking for a flaming sword. SAME FUCKING THING.

-

also i looove how FLUFFY azi is

-

azi: “do hope i didn’t do the wrong thing”

i fucking love them both uhrgughhhuhuhughuhhh

-

04:21

small sob for cuteness

umbella wings

-

04:23

in the opening titles, crowley just stopped a spaceship and aziraphale turned it into fish

i feel like that was a douglas adams reference and i’m on board

-

04:25

the entire time i read the book, up until i saw video promos of this show, i thought “crowley” was said the same way as spn’s “crowley”, as in “crahwlee”

not “crOhwlee”

i definitely like that they’re different though

both probably named after aleister crowley tbh. all of whom are queer.

-

THOSE SWAYING HIPS

i haven’t found david tennant attractive in about 9 years but WHOOOP HELLO AGAIN

somehow attractive for entirely different reasons than before. like. my taste changed but tHEN

-

i’m on crowley’s side, taking down a cellphone network is VERY ANNOYING

-

04:35

crowley: shitshitshitshithsit

:D

i can’t wait for aziraphale’s big swear

-

04:37

i miss eating sushi

sushi was great

-

04:43

this baby delivery thing is sTRESSFUL

“aaaaurthurrrrr”

nooo

poor lady

-

04:45

“little toesie woesies”

where’s the sister mary loquacious fan club and where do i sign up

-

i’m glad they colour-coded the babies and did the playing card explanation because this part of the book always tied my brain in knots

-

05:00

this is reminding me how utterly gross england is

-

“MY POINT IS............. DOLPHINS”

YES

-

05:06

see in the book

i never once realised that the nanny was crowley in disguise

-

05:11

digging the snake tattoo sideburns

-

05:14

and yeah the short hair looks good

-

05:15

fINALLY crowley called azi “angel”

-

05:17

crowley: “oh no no don’t do your magic act, pleeease”

the magic act scene is one of my fave parts of the book <3

-

05:20

aw man they cut out the best part

i mean i get why

the kids shouted a bunch of gay slurs at aziraphale

and there were no secret service people with guns

but aw mannn

AND THEY CUT OUT THE BIT WITH THE DEAD DOVE AND CROWLEY BRINGS IT BACK TO LIFE FOR AZIRAPHALE

THAT WAS MY SINGLE FAVOURITE BIT OF THE BOOK

AND IT’S GONE

;C

-

OH WAIT

THERE’S THE DOVE

OH GOOD

-

aw man aziraphhale just brought it back himself

i liked it better in the book

they sat on the steps outside and crowley comforted azi and took the dove and fixed it for him, and then it flew off

idk i just had such a perfect image of that moment in my mind and this was..... good but not the same at all

could be gayer

-

05:27

good dog

-

05:28

crowley: *snifsnif* something’s changed

aziraphale: “oh it’s a new cologne, my barber suggeste--”

crowley: “no no i know what you smell like”

gayyyyyyyyyy <3

-

05:31

okay that’s ep 1 watched!!! i’ll watch more maybe later tonight :D

ENJOYING THIS SO FAR

not as gay as expected ........YET

needs 400% more “angel” and “dear”

--

EPISODE 2: The Book

07:42pm

pillar of salt guy: “something smells evil”

the fact crowley smells evil and yet aziraphale likes his company regardless says a lot

-

07:49

fully expected crowley to say “i didn’t fall, i sauntered vaguely downwards”

-

07:50

iiiii’m finding the narrator a little annoying

maybe it’s because i read the book so i know what’s going on

but saying “he has four items to deliver in his van. he works for this postage company and he’s making his first delivery in a formal warzone”.... idk i feel like all of those things could be shown visually? saying it rather than showing it probably saved seven seconds of airtime, but damn

-

07:56

i wonder if the narrator was a later addition to this, for new audience clarity? the script for god just seems a little stilted, idk

edit: i kind of got used to it, but it was still jarring, which i’m sure was the opposite of the intended effect

-

08:09

the saddest newt

-

08:13

she’s kind of exactly how i imagined her in the book

and definitely my fave next to aziraphale and crowley

-

08:17

i feel so bad for crowley’s plants

poor babies

-

08:19

for some reason i imagined her as a redhead. kind of more like mrs weasley

-

08:33

these wee children......... so soft.......... so smol

-

08:25

v happy with the casting for pepper

tiny downside is that we lose another redhead

-

08:29

i find the kids’ conversations hilarious because they’re the same age as harry potter when he goes to hogwarts the first time

idk if this is what eleven year olds are like in real life, but when i read the book i did feel distinctly like they spoke like eight year olds

-

08:35

crowley: “i like spooky. big spooky fan, me”

he just sounds like the tenth doctor

-

08:36

YEEE FINALLY CROWLeY DOING NICE THINGS FOR AZIRAPHALE

-

08:48

"you know, crowley, i’ve always said that deep down you really are a--”

“SHUT IT”

DON’T YOU CALL HIM NICE YOU PRETTY BASTARD

-

loquacious: “sorry to break up an intimate moment”

-

08:45

i imagined anathema’s tripod thing to be about 5 feet tall, not a cute little knee-high thing

-

08:48

freddie mercury: BIIIII CYCLE

BIIIIIIII CYCLE

yeah i was waiting for that

-

crowley: “get in, angel”

HE MURMURED

DON’T MURMUR YOUR TERMS OF ENDEARMENT noo

-

09:00

end of episode 2!!! i freaking loved aziraphale vs the book <3

-

the credits for this ep credit konnie huq as someone named pam but idk who that is? i had a crush on konnie huq as a kid when she was a presenter on “blue peter”

OH WAIT RIGHT the lady on the breakfast show on crowley’s tv. aw such a small part. hoping we’ll see her again later

edit: nope. might rewatch that part to pay more attention. obviously i didn’t even recognise her after like.. 15 years

--

EPISODE 3: Hard Times

09:05pm

brb gotta get some food

-

09:14

and now i wait for food

EPISODE THREE LET’S GO

is this the one that’s just crowley and azi’s backstory?

-

09:16

i can’t even put my finger on why but he’s getting more attractive

-

09:21

ah yes

aziraphale is eating shellfish and trying to tempt crowley

“oh... that’s your job”

i love this part of their dynamic

-

09:29

i adore when crowley makes aziraphale smile <3

-

09:43

SAUNTERED VAGUELY DOWNWARDS

YEE

-

i like seeing how crowley’s sunglasses differ throughout history

-

09:36

“if they knew i’d been... fraternising”

this is such a forbidden romance i love ittttt

-

09:49

CROWLEY SAVED THE BOOKS

and SOFT VIOLIN PLAYS

THIS IS A FUCKING LOVE STORY

k this is my favourite part of the show so far <3

-

09:50

this angel just fell in love

right in that moment

i see cartoon hearts around him

-

09:54

just had to pause for a second bc there was some broccoli in my tea :c

-

09:56

awwwwwwwwwwwwww 

he got him holy waterrrrrrr

-

UNIVERSAL ANGLE OF HETEROSEXUAL LONGING

-

definitely feeling a lot of “NOW KISS” right about now

-

09:59

LAUGHING BECAUSE THE OPENING CREDITS ARE LITERALLY HALFWAY INTO THE EPISODE

-

10:03

throughout the entire book azi just came across as the kind of person who wore glasses even though glasses were never once mentioned

I AM GLAD TO SEE GLASSES

-

10:12

i like this colour palette and the gold in their makeup

-

10:27

“we can go off together”

omg the world’s ending and crowley’s all RUN AWAY WITH MEEE

-

10:31

okay then

good eyelashes

edit: i also like how their relationship was explained with a simple tap on the wrist: hurry up, you’re on the clock, i’m a sex worker, finish your call because i’m leaving

-

10:32

episode three DONE

these eps don’t feel long enough

maybe that means the pacing is just right? who knows

i feel like i should be doing something other than watching this but..... why

--

EPISODE 4: Saturday Morning Funtime

10:48pm

aziraphale is SOFT and he’s perfect like that <3

fuck u gabriel and your body shaming

-

10:53

i want delivery guy to be okay BUT I READ THE BOOK

so............... i know he will be...... eventually

-

10:55

how did they get photographs taken in the 1600s

-

oh gabriel’s eyes ARE purple, i thought i was seeing them wrong

-

11:02

“maud i love you”

noo ho hoooo

-

11:09

a little douglas adams, definitely

BUT NO PEPPER POT DALEK

AWW

-

11:10

the season is very much jumping between summer and autumn

though i suppose that’s the point, tadfield is just perfect

-

11:12

“which the internet has begun to refer to as the kracken”

i wonder if good omens inadvertently inspired me to write The Wireless a couple of years back. wouldn’t be surprising

edit: no, couldn’t have, because the internet wasn’t much of a thing (or a thing at all?) in the book, given its publish date

-

11:20

that’s a v nice dress/top combo

gosh she’s so pretty

-

11:30

crowley: “we can run away together!!! alpha centauri!!!”

aw baby

-

crowley: “i’m going home, angel! i’m getting my stuff, and i am leaving. and when i am up in the stars, i won’t even think about you!!”

THAT WAS A V SAD BREAKUP NOOOOO

why has there not been a single “dear” yet :c

-

11:37

oh no, this part

i loved this in the book but i am NOT READY for maggots

damn you gaiman

-

11:39

he’s so cute

and so gay

-

11:42

uriel: “don’t think your boyfriend in the dark glasses will get you special treatment in hell”

he looks kinda delighted uriel called crowley his boyfriend

i would say he looks worried but this shot was used without context in the trailer and it came across as genuine joy, i actually thought he was looking at crowley

-

11:46

i thought it was a strange throne before

a spider at the centre of a web

dark halo

yeah

-

11:51

oh now she’s a redhead???

-

also i’m glad they implied newt and anathema just kissed because the sex thing was weird in the book

-

okay never mind

hmm

-

12:05

aziraphale: “oh.................ffffUCK.”

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAH

-

12:07

oh no

it’s happening

oh no

i hate this part but i love what happens because of it

-

12:29am

i have eaten and now i have tea and i am back from MORE BOOKSHOP FIRE

-

EPISODE 5: The Doomsday Option

12:31

nuuuuuuuuuu

and “you’re my best friend” playing while crowley’s tryna call azi

nuuuuuu

-

“somebody killed my best friend”

jfhsdfjsdj

/sobs

-

12:36

freddie mercury: “somebody find me somebody tooo ooo looove”

edit: the narration WRECKED this. it was so dramatic and visually emotional but the voiceover completely screwed with it and it was SO UNNECESSARY.

-

12:46

crowley: “i lost my best friend”

he says, while crying, while talking to that friend

-

THE ONE BOOK HE WANTS IS THE ONE CROWLEY SAVED

THEY’RE SO FUCKING BEAUTIFUL TOGETHER

-

azi wanted to share crowley’s body

and then said they had to get a wiggle on

-

12:52

they cut out the hell’s angels / lesser horsemen

i figured they would, but still a shame

-

1:54

in the book tracy’s “spirit guide” was native american but daaaaaamn that part really needed to go

now she’s irish which is... better, probably

-

01:01

ron: “SHUT. UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP”

this guy’s having the time of his life

-

01:03

he wave

-

01:05

1926 bentley; sexiest car right next to the ‘67 chevy impala

-

01:08

omg gotta translate and explain the road

-

01:13

OH NO the maggots are about to happen

they changed the placement of this but it worked for the pacing

-

OH NO

-

k well the maggots were gross but not as bad as i imagined

-

01:31

omg the dog turned upside down rather than be picked up

i wonder if that was intentional

dog: I DO NOT WANT UP

-

01:34

pfff he’s reading “american gods” by neil gaiman

-

01:44am

10/10 flaming car

-

EPISODE 6: The Very Last Day of the Rest of Their Lives

01:51am

here we go...

-

01:55

azi so happy that crowley said the dress suits him <3

-

01:57

rip bentley

-

01:59

aziraphale: “we are here to lick some serious butt!!”

crowley: “kick!! kick, aziraphale, for heaven’s sake”

-

02:06

i freaking love the parallel between the Them and the horsemen in the book

and i love that they did face shots to show the parallel

pepper = war

wensleydale = famine

brian = pollution

adam = death

the parallel is less clear for brian and wensleydale, at least in the show. was more obvious in the book. but at the same time i kind of got confused between them a lot, brian was always eating, but wensleydale was named after cheese

-

02:14

pepper: “i do not endorse everyday sexism”

/STOMPS ON WAR’S FOOT

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

-

02:25

shadwell: “anyone who wants ta get ta the hoore of babylon will have to get past me”

earlier anathema said “boyfriend”

may i point out that all the adults are paired up

shadwell & madame tracy

newt & anathema

......and....

aziraphale and crowley

-

0:28

crowley: “we are FUCKED”

these two need a holiday

-

azi: “come up with something... or.... or i’ll never talk to you again”

he knows crowley loves him aww

perfect blackmail material

-

02:32

they went from trying to kill him to being his gay angel parents real quick

-

02:35

thought they were holding hands for a second there

edit: regardless, a whole damn airfield and they’re 2cm apart

-

02:39

happy ending for the postman, hooray~

-

crowley about the bookshop, softly: “it burned down. remember? you can stay at my place”

awwWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

-

02:42

CROWLEY GOT HIS CAR BACK AND YET HE TOOK A TAXI

-

02:45

anathema: “why is your car called dick turpin?”

newt: “dick turpin is a famous highwayman. it’s called dick turpin because everywhere it goes, it holds up traffic”

i laughed

this wasn’t in the book and i always wondered

-

02:51

i wonder if holy water wouldn’t burn him because he’s too good

-

03:00

gabriel: “don’t talk to me about the greater good, sunshine, i’m the angel fucking gabriel”

really enjoying these swears

-

03:03

i thought so

-

03:30am

paused for a bit to get ready for bed

i thought it was after 4am but nope

-

“there would be other summers, but not one like this. not ever again”

that genuinely makes me emotional

i think that’s why it’s my favourite book, i can relive that summer with them

-

03:35

omg

-

OH MY GOD

WAIT

THEY

OH MY GOD

THEY WEREN’T IMMUNE, THEY JUST SWAPPED PLACES

HOLY SHIT

edit: THIS WAS NOT IN THE BOOK AND IT’S BRILLIANT AND I’M GLAD IT’S HERE

-

crowley: “let me tempt you to a spot of lunch?

azi: “~temptation accomplished~!”

THEY’RE SO STINKING CUTE

-

“just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing”

perfect

STILL NO USE OF “DEAR” THOUGH AND IT’S KILLING ME

-

that ending with the bird made me teary-eyed

-

credits: BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH AS SATAN

WOW

OKAY

AKSFJDSF /snorts

-

the end credits and the song i just wanna bawl my eyes out

i loved this so much and i’m so glad it was GOOD

i loved that they added so many people of colour. in the book i imagined crowley played by alexander siddig (star trek: deep space 9 era) but i guess david tennant makes a pretty good crowley too

i’m trying not to be upset that my favourite scene with the dove and aziraphale’s affectionate use of “dear” was taken out

but 

this was damn good regardless. even gayer in places than in the book

-

this nightingale song is my new favourite song

i never got the reference before

“and as we kissed and said goodnight, an nightingale sang in berkeley square:

GAY

SO GAY

i love

-

the end of the credits “For Terry”

ACTUAL OUT LOUD SOBBING

TERRY YOU WOULD’VE LOVED THIS

NEIL DID YOU PROUD

-

oh this was so beautiful

i’m gonna watch it again with my family probably within the week. i’m so emotionally tender now

azIRAPHALE WAS SO FLUFFY AND CROWLEY WAS SO NICE ABOUT THE BOOKS

ugh i love them more than ever

anathema...... i don’t know if i relate to her, want to be her, look up to her, want her to mentor me, live with her, or find her attractive. maybe all of the above. but she was freaking PERFECT. PE R F E CT 

the casting was so... just right. thank you casting people for anathema.

like... i also didn’t mind the newt/anathema thing so much now. it was hard to tell in the book how much of a relationship they had after, but that smile she gave while lying in bed the morning after, that worked, it said a lot. and i like that it was her choice to burn the prophecy sequel rather than newt’s suggestion

gabriel was amusing. like.. i’m glad he wasn’t in the book. but he was great here. also really like michael and uriel. uriel was so damn beautiful.

i also would really have liked to see a mention of the fact crowley and aziraphale are both agender and potentially asexual. not even a hint of it here. buuuuuut it guess i know from the book. so.

my favourite episode was of course episode 3 with crowley and aziraphale’s 6000 year backstory. especially the 1940s bit where crowley saved the books <3

this show was was less confusing than the book too. ugh it was done so well

OH

we didn’t see where the soldier guy went when aziraphale zapped him away!!! in the book he reappeared safely back home and went out to see his family. to be fair i don’t know whether he died and went to heaven, but it was a nice thing to happen

and they took out the Them’s bully/rival gang, who was led by the third baby from the baby swap, and who won awards for his tropical fish. at least that’s what i remember. which meant the parallel about heaven/hell being rival gangs was lost here. but the parallel between the horsemen and the them was stronger than ever and i loved that.

look, i mean, 10 out of 10, EASY.

favourite thing? yes. yes, absolutely.

--

shoutout to the one time i wrote a Good Omens/Destiel crossover fic The Angel Cake Challenge

IT’S 04:02am THIS TOOK ME 12 HOURS

04:40am AND FORTY MINUTES TO EDIT

congrats if you made it to the end of this!!! thank you for reading <3 AND GO WATCH THE SHOW IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY

[phoenix-angel-suyari]

This got long...

Spent three hours in the car with my sister yesterday while she alternated between being intentionally, ignorantly Queerphobic as fuck and yelling at me over my life choices. First thing you should know is that my sister is aware that I am bisexual. So let’s just start with that. She claims she understands my queerness. She understands being gay. She says she “can even understand pansexuality”. But apparently, those are her hard limits. She has some seriously black and white issues with the Trans community. And any other sexuality is not valid as far as she’s concerned. 

As usual, thinking of my Nephews’ health, safety and stability (new baby’s cicsmale so, yeah looks like another Nephew for now - and I say for now because one’s 15 months old and the other is in the womb, there’s literally no knowing at this stage if they’ll both identify as cismale in the future) I tried explaining them all to her as she ticked them off. I tried getting her to understand. But, she’s not willing to understand. She doesn’t think she needs to understand. And every time I try to have the conversation with her that her children could be literally any kind of queer at all in the future and she should learn to be positive and accepting now for their sakes, her response is always, “Why would you say something like that! Don’t curse me!” 

The irony of her yelling at me for my life choices comes from a place of pure entitlement. See, I did not get the chance to choose my college. I was told I would go to the college that offered me the most money and was in the city so I could commute because room and board was too expensive; because my mother was a single mom raising two kids and I was the oldest (and accustomed to sacrifice) I obeyed. I took out substantial loans - to which my mother co-signed - so I could afford college. When I wanted to change colleges, I was told that I had to first finish one college before I could go to another. My mother would no longer co-sign my loans if I didn’t graduate from one college before attending another. I was not allowed to do any semesters abroad because we “couldn’t afford it” and there was no way my mother was allowing me to go to some foreign country - not even for school. When I got very sick and had to take medical absence so I could be treated, my mother told me we would “figure it out”. Unfortunately, taking medical leave invalidated me from my father’s insurance. Then I got my first loan repayment letter. I showed it to my mother who responded, “You’re an adult. Figure it out.” So I got a job. 

I have been in an out of work since. I eventually paid off my loans and I am loathe to get into that kind of debt again (we won’t even discuss the debt I’m actually in) without a guarantee. Now, while all this was going on my sister graduated HS and it was time for her to go to college. She decided she wanted something easy and far away from home so she went to a culinary school six states away, studying pastry for two years. My parents paid for all of it. She even took up sailing. My parents paid for it. She came home two years later with a degree and got ONE job, decided she “wasn’t made for work” and told our parents she wanted to get a better degree then fucked off for another two years. 

Now, I had a job and she was in college. So I was paying a lot of her bills and sending her care packages and all the sorts of things your siblings do for you so your parents don’t find out what they’re really up to. I helped her out of financial jams and basically supported her in the places where my parents just literally could not give her any more money. 

And then one day she wanted a new tattoo and called me so I could pay for it. I didn’t have the money when she called me and I told her that and told her I could help her the following week. Let’s just say that was when I realized that I was part of the problem as far as her attitude was concerned. But, she was my little sister and I loved her and so even though I was more careful about it, I still paid for her own success and fulfillment for years. (A lot of this I fully admit stems from wanting her to have a better life than me; and there is literally no accounting for selfish egocentrism, but I digress.)  

The point is, my sister went from our parents paying everything, to me paying everything, to her significant others paying everything, to her husband now paying everything. So her view on responsibility and financial strife is admittedly stunted. She told me that I need to go back to school and get a degree so I can get a job. And while I agree that part of the sticking point for my employment is very likely that, I also am not financially capable of that and not sure I ever will be again. Besides the fact that I am not putting myself in that position again when I have literally no support network and am facing imminent homelessness. My sister argued that I was “being ridiculous” and then says, “Mommy can pay for it.” 

Our mother can pay for it. The woman who has only helped me ever pay ONE bill in my entire adult life. And then made me feel like shit about it. Our mother who’s response to every single financial conundrum I have ever found myself in has been, “You’re an adult; figure it out” and who then nitpicks the ways I do go about it. Our mother who is retiring early, because my sister - who was specifically told NOT to get pregnant by her health care team and has done it not once, but twice now - is “sick” and “overwhelmed” and needs her. Our mother who plans to move in with my sister to care for her home and children (and her) - who is very much capable as of this moment, but extremely spoiled - and who’s planning to leave me high and dry because I’m an adult and can figure it out, can pay for me going back to school. 

Sure. Let me just go do that. Let me ask a woman who has never trusted me with her credit card like I’m some thief who will rob her blind, to pay for school I don’t even want to attend. 

My cousin - one of the one’s whose more like a sister to me than my own sister and whom I had a conversation with many years ago and whom agreed to take in any children I had in the event that I died or became incapacitated - when I told her of the car ride up, said of my worry for my nephews potentially queer future in my sister’s household, “They’ll always have a home with us.” (Us being herself and her husband & children.) And like...THAT, that is what family is, right there. That’s what it’s supposed to be. I can’t even tell you how fucking relieved I was to hear that. 

I haven’t had any children of my own - not because I can’t - but because I’m not financially stable enough to support them on my own and I love them too much to expose them to the kinds of people and abusive toxicity I have been living with my entire life. And it just fucks me up so much that so many people who HAVE children can’t even love them enough to accept them for who they are, for things they CAN’T HELP. 

And all I want is to be able to BE that. To be there, to be capable, so that I can take in my nephews if they get tossed out on their asses for being queer. So they can know they can come to me and be safe and loved and supported and not have to live through the shit I have lived through because they don’t want to be a BURDEN. 

And I am just so very fucking frustrated, I can’t even put it into proper words. 

[mxlfoydraco]

Hiiii, this is not a gentle giant story... unless you count my fear and insecurity in the face of asking a fellow queer woman out. So, um, I face a grand dilemma. Or not even a dilemma, just a situation I’m not ready to share w/ my friends cause they will -as much as I love them- fuck shit up BUT I need to share w/ someone before I die of repressed gayness. I’m a 20-yo gal who just casually started studying fine arts after two very unfulfilling years of engineering and who is also very gay. 1/?

The rest and my answer under the cut!

I come from a very traditional (borderline disgustingly homophobic) family & though I am gay, it’s one of those things that my parents know but conveniently have erased as a phase/sin/psychological issue... I was therefore not actively looking for a relationship (and working on managing years of depression and its effects on my health and motivation and self-love). So BAM, here to hit me in my face when I least expected is a very liberal fine arts atmosphere and, most importantly, this girl. Ohhhh, this girl and I... we hit it off. I’m into HP, she’s too. I’m obsessed w/ musicals and theater, she’s studying theater and acting. We like the same books, people, etc. We love Hamilton. We are goofy, silly, awkward and a mild wreck... Together. We pick a theme for one of our subjects coursework just cause and we make every assignment about lamas. People think is brilliant, we hang out and talk a lot. She comes out to her friends and I’m the first to know. We go to the cinema, she comes to my house to help me take care of my lil sister and then we go to draw at a museum together. People are telling us we’ll end up married. We text each other in the morning w/ encouragements on hard days and help each other when needed. Talk about getting what she called “a couple tattoo”. Talk each other through worries and anxiety... So, I might have a crush. Thing is, I’m not really fine with myself?? In an, I know I’m not a bad person and I have my good things. But I can’t help but to feel like there’s is not that much I can offer right now? I’m a little work in progress. I know the kind of people she finds pretty and I’m just... not it?? There’s so much I’m working on (mental health wise, physically, etc). There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve always wanted to do that I haven’t done yet (FA being finally my first step). And so, I feel like I’m only a project of who I’d like to be or date. Idk, I guess I just feel like I may not be ready but I really like her?? Afsjsfsh  Anyway, I don’t know if there’s an anon limit and this won’t go through. But I’m insecure and I see her sometimes saying things that I don’t know if I should interpret as flirting cause like, I don’t think she’d be into me. And I don’t know if I’m crushing my own chances. I’m... I’d really like to date her but I feel like I need a few more months of working on myself before I’m ready to be w/ someone but I also don’t want to blow my chances if she’s indeed interested and I’m a mess help me😂😂

Hey, first of all I’m sending you my biggest virtual hugs. I’m sorry about your family, you deserve so much better than that! 

While I’d never suggest you to get into a relationship if you’re not ready, I want to emphasize that we are all works in progresses, from the beginning and until the end. I don’t want to sound like a cliche, because I’m well aware some of us have bigger things to work through, but when you look at the bigger picture? Change, growth and healing are a part of all our journey in varying ways, importance and size. There’s no rule that says that we have to take that journey alone, that’s usually our minds telling us that we’re “too much”. 

You are not too much though. If the bond you guys share is as genuine as you make it seem, then having someone on your corner who’ll stand by you is a gift. Your comfort, safety and well-being should always come first— but just think, if the roles were reversed, would you judge or think of her the way you do with yourself? Or would you want to be there for her?

From what you tell me, she likes you and you like her. You can go at your own pace, you don’t have to rush into or start anything, but don’t deny yourself the chance before you can even consider it. You deserve companionship, love, affection and support. You deserve it unconditionally, if it’s what you really want. Just make sure it’s you making the decision, not someone elses voice in your head, fear or anxiety. 

[tsaomengde]

The Dark - Revised

I posted this story months and months back, and since I’ve had it workshopped and I’ve revised it!  It is now way longer.  Like, Jesus, it’s massive.  But it’s also much better.

Irena Matsuo Mtukudzi is a post-human cyborg who has a very human moment, meets a pretty woman, wrestles with her inner demons, and has to kick a whole bunch of ass.  Contains violence, flirting, transhumanism, space queers, Mars, and banter.

           Irena Matsuo Mtukudzi cannot stand the dark.

           She needs very little sleep, and always leaves the illumination in her apartment on high while she does.  But there are nights, like this one, when the dark presses in, threatening to breach the harshly-lit walls, and she has to stay awake, to go out and confront it.  To walk in it, and to deny it any power over her.

           So she strides, purposeful but directionless, through the streets of Olympic City, moving between pools of cobalt light cast by the floating lamps.  She walks down long, deserted pedways, the kilometer-high superstructures of Downtown looming above her.

           And tonight, as she does this, she sees a woman in an alley.  

           The woman looks terrified; she is backing slowly toward a dead end lined with autodumpsters.  There are three men in dark coats closing in on the woman, their body language heavy with threat.  Irena’s mecheyes automatically highlight the sleek, metallic objects in their hands and flash a warning: military-grade plasma projectors.

           She slams the first man’s head against the plascrete siding of the alley’s wall before they even know she is there.  He goes down and does not move.  The other two turn, eyes wide in hard faces.  One of them brings up his projector, sighting in on her, but she takes the distance between them in a single, impossible leap. She lands on his chest, her long locs whipping forward to shroud her face.  He makes an unnatural crunching sound as he hits the pavement – armor beneath his coat, probably.  Irena punches him in the jaw, bouncing his skull against the ground, and he stops moving.

           The last man fires at the woman just as Irena springs at him and closes her hands around his wrist.  She throws his aim off, but the flashing burst of plasma hits the woman in the shoulder, spinning her around and dumping her in a heap in the loose pile of garbage strewn about the end of the alley.

           Irena wants to take her time beating him unconscious, but the woman needs her help.  So Irena sweeps his legs out from under him and kicks him in the face, hard.

           A moment later, Irena is crouched over the target of the erstwhile assailants.  The woman has short red hair, elfin features, pale white skin that suggests Amero-European heritage from back on Earth.  She wears a professional charcoal skirt suit cut in the latest Olympic fashion, hard geometric lines erasing any hint of human softness.  The illusion is shattered by the smoking wound in her shoulder, only partially cauterized by the heat of the plasma bolt.  Her eyes, startlingly blue, are open, but are unfocused.  Irena recognizes shock when she sees it.

           She looks back out at the street, about to tell her integrated comm to call emergency services, but then she catches sight of something: the closest man’s boots.  Steel-toed, vat-grown black leather – and very familiar, very distinctive blue-and-white-striped laces.

           She growls, moving over to him.  She opens his coat, unzips the ferroweave vest beneath, and rips open his shirt.  There it is: tattooed across his left pectoral muscle, a nineteen-digit identification number in dark blue ink.  If the boots weren’t enough, this confirms it.

           These men are cops.

           Two and a half hours later, Irena stands stiffly at attention in the spacious high-rise office of her employer.  Julian Thorne sits at his oversized mahogany desk, his wrinkled face scrunched up in an expression of irritation.  Irena keeps her gaze fixed slightly above and to the left of his head, which means she is looking out the panoramic window behind him. Olympic City stretches out below them, hundreds of silver spires glittering in the harsh rays of Martian sunlight, which are only slightly diffused by the diamond-lattice environment dome.  Rising above the dome and visible to Irena’s left, Olympus Mons cradles the city in its western slope, a vast expanse of reddish rock that goes higher than the window will allow her to see.

           “Just to be clear, Security Chief Mtukudzi,” Thorne says.  He only uses her title and last name when he is angry; those times tend to be rare, but memorable.  “You saw a woman being cornered by armed men.  I understand the desire to intervene.  But why did you not call the authorities and report the situation, instead of leaping into action and beating the shit out of the aforementioned armed men?”

           Irena takes a careful breath.  Thorne, as befits a man of his station, has a top-of-the-line social aug; if she lies to him, the mechanisms embedded in his head will pick up the slight increase in her heart rate, the minute excitation of body hair caused by rising blood pressure pushing cells toward the surface. Even she can’t control these autonomous reactions.

           But she certainly can massage the truth away from the blunt statement she wants to make, which is, because I wanted to.

           “Because,” Irena says, “if I had waited for the OCPD to arrive, the woman in question would be dead and her assailants might be trying to eliminate me as a witness.  I took decisive action to preserve her life and my own.  Afterward, it became apparent that if I had called them and she ended up in their custody, she might not have survived.”

           “Yes, of course.  Decisive action.  Indeed.” Thorne’s thin, dark lips twist in a grimace.  “Answer a question for me, please.  What, precisely, is the nature of your job at my company?”

           “I am responsible for the protection of all Thorne Co. assets, whether personnel or materiel, and –”

           “More basic.  Boil it down.  What do I pay you to do for me?”

           Irena purses her lips.  She knows the answer he wants, and she doesn’t really want to give it, but the best way through one of his quiet rages is forward, rather than lateral.  “You pay me to minimize risks and losses for your company.”

           “That’s right.  Did the actions you took last night do those things?”

           “Quite the opposite.”

           “So you can understand my frustration.”

           That doesn’t call for a response, so she doesn’t give one.  Thorne eyes her for a few more moments, letting the tense silence drag out.  “Do you think there were any cams?” he finally asks.  “Either in the alley, out in the street, or on the men you attacked?”

           “I swept the area as I was bringing the woman in for medical treatment and detected nothing of the sort.  I suspect the cops were not using any recording equipment, integrated or otherwise, because they knew better than to make any kind of record of a hit.”

           “Did any of them get a good look at you?”

           “One of them may have.  The other two I dispatched quickly enough that I doubt it. But I concussed him severely, it was dark, and my locs hid most of my face.”

           Thorne gives her a hard look.  “They’ll fix the concussion with nanosurgery in a matter of hours, Mtukudzi.  At which point, he will most definitely remember a dark-skinned killer cyborg with green mecheyes and dreadlocks beating the bejesus out of him and his friends. He won’t need to have seen your fucking face.”

           Breaking her at-attention stance, Irena tosses her head to the side, letting her locs settle over one shoulder, and crosses her arms. “For the record, I agree with you. But answer me this: When you go home tonight and tell your husband about what I did, will you say that I did a wrong thing, or a stupid thing?”

           Thorne leans back in his plush chair and rubs the bridge of his nose with a gnarled hand, thinking.  “Low blow,” he finally says.  “Bringing Stjepan into this.”

           Irena shrugs.  “He would agree with me.”

           “You will be the death of me one day, woman.” Thorne places his hands flat on the desk, a kind of weary finality in the gesture.  “Why did you do it, Irena?  I mean, really.  What were you hoping to get out of this situation?”

           Feeling the muscles in her jaw clench as she considers the question, Irena finally asks him, “Do you remember when you first approached me for a position with your company?  You offered me a very large sum of money to make unspecified problems go away for you.”

           “I did,” he acknowledges.

           “My counter-offer was what I do now.  I keep problems from happening, rather than going out and surgically removing them.  I don’t know if there’s a true moral difference – I have still killed a fair number of people for you, in my line of work – but I feel better knowing all of them fired first, when it would not have been like that if I were a ‘troubleshooter.’”

           Thorne nods.  “Go on.”

           “When I saw this woman in that alley,” Irena says, “I saw a problem being removed by troubleshooters.  I realized it could easily have been me advancing on her with a drawn weapon.  It could also have been me in her place, and I know I don’t need to tell you why.  The only difference between those men and me is a job title and a vestigial conscience. And I didn’t like that.”  She takes a deep breath, preparing herself to say something embarrassing.  “I suppose I wanted, for once, to do something unambiguously heroic.”

           Thorne gives a carefully calculated half-shrug which says nothing in particular.  He rises from his seat and makes his way to an apparently blank wall.  He waves his hand in front of it and a seam opens, revealing an elevator.  “Well, what’s done is done and you have managed to weasel your way out of apologizing for it.  If we’re playing at altruism today, shall we go see the damsel in distress?”

           Much to her own surprise, Irena feels heat rising to her cheeks.  Thorne notices, of course – his social aug will be telling him it’s happening, even if he isn’t looking at her.  But he remains tactfully silent, awaiting her cue.

           “After you,” she says.

           The medcenter is blindingly, perfectly white. It is almost surprising to encounter actual human beings in such a sterile space.  The techs direct Irena and Thorne to the bio bed where the woman is currently resting.  Her retinas and prints apparently belong to one Madeleine Duvier.  No priors, no outstanding warrants, at least not in the systems Thorne has had Irena spend the time and money hacking into.

           As they approach, she opens her eyes.  She gives each of them a long look before saying, “I really am feeling better.  If you need me to go, I can.”  Her voice is of middling pitch, her words quiet.  Even lying relatively still, she exudes waves of nervous energy.

           Irena and Thorne exchange a glance.  “You are not going anywhere,” Thorne says.  “You are in need of help, young lady, and we are here to provide it.”

           Madeleine’s delicately sculpted brows wrinkle in an uncomprehending frown.  “Sorry? I’m afraid I don’t speak… whatever language that was.”

           They exchange another glance.  “I said you aren’t going anywhere because you need help and we can give it to you,” Thorne tells her.  Irena’s social aug flashes a notification in her visual field that he has switched to Martian English from his usual Old Russian.  Irena knows he only speaks that now-dead language because it pleases him, in a perverse, rebellious way.  His ancestors were neo-Soviet royalty, before nationalities and nobles became obsolete, and he likes to be reminded of it.  Too, anyone important enough for him to talk to will almost undoubtedly have a social aug for translation.

           “Was your social augmentation damaged during the attack?” Irena asks.

           “I don’t have a social aug,” Madeleine says. Even if Irena’s social aug were not informing her of Madeleine’s blush, subtly highlighting the changing color of the other woman’s cheeks, it would be extremely evident – Madeleine is both pale and dressed in a white medcenter gown.  “I’m… stock.”

           Thorne does not bother to hide his surprise. “Stock?  I truly did not think anybody in Olympic City was stock anymore, excepting newborns and Puritanicals.”

           “My parents were Puritanicals,” Madeleine confirms, sitting up in bed.  “I’m not, but since they didn’t have my genome sequenced and given the usual once-over for abnormalities, I have a violent hereditary rejection response to most glial bonding agents.  And I can’t afford the gene therapy to fix it.”

           “I see,” Throne says.  “Well.  I’m afraid I have been rude.  My apologies.  I am Mr. Julian Thorne, and at the moment I am your host.  I must confess I have you at a disadvantage, as my people have told me you are Madeleine Duvier.  What do you do for a living, Mx. Duvier?”

           “Ms. is fine,” Madeleine tells him.  “I’m an executive secretary for the Governor’s office, specifically for Vice-Governor Greene.  Or at least I was until yesterday.”

           “I sense a sad story,” Thorne says, sitting down beside the bed.  Irena remains standing.  “If you’d be willing to extend us your trust, I’d like to hear it.”

           Madeleine gives him an appraising look, then turns to Irena.  She has to crane her neck slightly to make eye contact; Irena is more than two meters tall, after all.  “Before all of that, I think I should thank you for what you did, Mx…?”

           Irena inclines her head.  “You’re welcome.  And I am Ms. Irena Mtukudzi.”

           “Thank you, Ms. Mtukudzi.” She returns her attention to Thorne.  “It might not be a surprise to you,” Madeleine says, “but being stock isn’t exactly a blessing in most lines of work.  I get by without augs, though.  Occasionally someone comes in speaking a language I don’t know, like you, and I just pull out my unintegrated comm for translation and say my social aug is on the fritz.

           “So, I was with the Governor’s office for two years, no issues.  Vice-Governor Greene seemed like a decent enough man, at least for a politician. But then it came out in a conversation with a coworker of mine that – well, that I’m stock.  And somehow this information reached his ears. Apparently…”  She trails off for a moment, jaw working.  Then she continues, her voice tight, “Vice-Governor Greene is – no, he has a… fixation.  On stock people.”

           Confused, Irena looks from her to Thorne.  She can see the light come on behind Thorne’s eyes a moment later, which is good, because she has no idea what Madeleine means. “He’s a stock fetishist,” Thorne says.

           “Yes,” Madeleine confirms.  “He started making advances.  Subtle ones at first, but they got increasingly brazen as I continued to find ways to misunderstand or ignore them.  It came to a head the day before yesterday, when he basically demanded I come into his office for a performance review and then tried to make me have sex with him on his desk.  That was when it became clear he was interested because he’d heard I’m stock.” She shudders.  “I told him to go to hell, and that I would be applying for a transfer to another office, and that if he ever spoke to me unprofessionally or touched me again I would go straight to the Olympic Times and tell them everything he’d done.”

           “Did he threaten you in return?” Thorne asks.

           “He started to.  Said I had no proof, that there was no way for me to have records of any of it because I’m stock.  I told him I did indeed have records, of all of it, because I may be stock but I’m not an idiot.  You remember that unintegrated comm I mentioned earlier?”

           “Of course,” Irena says.  “You kept records on that.  Did he offer money to keep you quiet?”

           “Yes, offers I turned down.  I don’t want hush money, I just want to work somewhere I’m not sexually harassed.  And especially where I’m not subjected to poor treatment because of a decision my fucking parents made for me before I was born.”

           Irena feels the familiar twisting sensation in her stomach.  Memories, ones she has tried her best to ignore, stir and thrust themselves to the foreground of her mind.  Cold glass, needles, destiny.  Running away.  Being caught. The dark.

           With an effort, she shoves it away.  She becomes aware that Thorne is looking at her. “I’m sorry,” she says.  “Did you say something?”

           “I did,” Thorne replies, no hint of censure in his tone.  “As did Ms. Duvier.”

           “I just said that I thought that was the end of it,” Madeleine says.  “Until I was walking home yesterday and those three came out of nowhere.  And I was only out at that time of night because the Vice-Governor asked me to work late.  To ‘take care of a few things before my transfer.’”

           Irena grimaces.  “Then he is certainly complicit.”

           Madeleine shakes her head.  “I don’t understand how he could have arranged this, though.  He’s a glorified button-pusher.  The Governor has all the real power.”

           “You underestimate the abilities of hungry men with ambitions and connections, my dear,” Thorne says.  “The Vice Governor could be involved in any number of shady dealings, ones which might include officials in our less-than-sterling police force.  Such officials might be willing to send men to do an unpleasant job as a favor to the Vice-Governor.”

           “You mentioned your unintegrated comm, Ms. Duvier,” Irena adds.  “It was not in your possessions when our techs prepared you for nanosurgery on your wound.  Is it at your home?”

           “No.  It’s in a safety-deposit box at the Olympic First Bank off of Fifteenth and Baird, under the name of a friend of mine who left me their keycode when they moved offworld. I put it there as soon as I got out of the office the day before yesterday.  The box will only take my biometrics.  Nobody but me can open it.”

           “The solution to this difficulty seems obvious, then,” Thorne says.  “Retrieve the unintegrated comm, take it to the Olympic Times, and blow the whistle on the Vice-Governor.  It’s an election year, and even if Governor Shido is involved in these less-than-legal goings-on, he’ll want to act against Greene to preserve his image in the press if the Times comes forward with allegations and proof.  Irena, I want you to accompany Ms. Duvier.”

           That surprises her.  Irena whips her head around to stare at Thorne.  “Twenty minutes ago you were berating me for getting involved,” she says, not caring that the accusation will make him look bad in front of their guest.

           He crosses his arms.  “Yes, I was.  But you are involved now, and I trust you to see this through to the end.  Do you need additional resources from me?”

           “No.  In fact, it is best that I do this myself.  Plausible deniability.”

           Madeleine looks up at Irena.  “I can’t ask you to do this.”

           Irena gives her a thin smile.  “You don’t have to.  I’ll be back.”

           Irena leaves Madeleine to sleep for a few more hours. There are preparations to make before the other woman is ready to retrieve the comm, and there was already no sleep this night for her.

           First she scopes out the Olympic First Bank at Fifteenth and Baird.  There isn’t any OCPD presence she can detect, obvious or otherwise, just the bank’s own private security.  Next, she makes other arrangements – one with a friend of hers, for a little extra protection, and another by herself, to secure an alternate route in case the streets become unsafe.

           When she returns some five hours later, she has Madeleine discharged, and they head out into the streets of Olympic City. Irena wears her usual long duster, combat jumpsuit, and ass-kicking boots.  She could try to be less conspicuous, but even though she has no visible mechanized augmentations apart from her eyes – no metal limbs or brightly gleaming dermal plates, for instance – there is no way to minimize her presence in the street.  Tall, bristling with whipcord muscle, she has learned to lean into the first impression of danger she generates.  She requisitioned a similar outfit for Madeleine, wanting the woman to have a little more protection than a skirt suit in case things go south.

           “We are about forty minutes from the bank,” Irena tells her, casually doing a sweep of the area as they proceed down the pedway. Groundcars rumble past, the sound of their wheels scraping over the pavement louder than their lossless fusion engines.  It is late morning now, and the streets are beginning to become crowded again as people to go early lunches or start their shifts at work.

           “Do you want to hail a skycab?” Madeleine asks.

           “No.  Any vehicle we get into could be a trap.  We stay on foot, and if we’re engaged, we flee on foot.  We only use a vehicle as a last resort.”

           “Okay, got it.”  Madeleine looks nervous, but doesn’t argue.  They walk in silence for a few more minutes before she speaks again. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

           “Yes.  I may not answer, but go ahead.”

           Madeleine gestures expansively at her.  “You’re obviously highly augmented and genengineered. I’ve never seen anyone move like you. Not cops, not private security. Nobody.  I can’t imagine your mods are HERCA-legal.  Are you ex-military?”

           Irena purses her lips and considers her answer. She has already said she may not answer, so she can just tell Madeleine it is none of her business.  But she has learned quite a bit about Madeleine this morning, and part of her feels that there is a scale which needs balancing.  “Do you know what an ascension cult is?”

           “Radical transhumanist types, right?  Living outside the Coalition government? Illegal hive-minds, AI fusion, extreme genengineering, full-body cyborgification, that kind of thing?”

           “Yes. My parents belonged to the Church of St. Joan.  They were an ascension cult based off of Titan.  They rejected mechanical augmentation in favor of pure genetic engineering.  Their vision was of human reproduction unmoored from the vagaries of sexual congress, and children of incredible genetic potential as a result of that reproduction.  I was the First Child of the Church.”

           “You were a tubie?”

           “In a word, yes.  I have six different biological parents and my genes have been edited to the point that I am not strictly homo sapiens.  My estimated natural lifespan is three hundred years.  I am immune to ninety-five percent of known diseases.  I sleep only two hours a night and can turn my senses on and off at will, or choose specific stimuli to edit out of my perception.  I have perfect visual retention, superior strength, stamina, and speed…”  She shrugs.  “I even have a superior sense of smell.  I could go on, but suffice it to say I am the Church’s idea of the ultimate human being.”

           “So why are you here and not being worshipped on Titan?”

           “I disagreed with my parents’ plans for my future. I ran away.  And I would prefer not to discuss the details.”

           “Got it.  So you’re not HERCA-legal.”

           “No, I’m not.  But my family viewed the Human Evolution Restriction and Control Act as the greatest misstep of the last hundred years.  And existing with these modifications isn’t in itself illegal, just conspiring to make them.”

           “They still can’t have made your life easy in the Coalition.  Especially with the OCPD.”

           “No, they haven’t.  I’ve had many unpleasant interactions with the police.”  Irena looks at her companion.  “But then again, I don’t think any of what I’ve experienced quite ranks with an attempted assassination by undercover officers.”

           Madeleine manages to crack a weak smile.  “I guess that was pretty extreme.”

           “What about you?” Irena asks.  “You mentioned your parents were Puritanicals.  Old-world Catholic, Zoroastrian Neo-Buddhist, or secular?”

           “Secular,” Madeleine replies.  “A pair of high-minded academics who taught at Olympic University and thought augmentation was stagnating human interaction.  Nobody can lie to anybody anymore, or at least they aren’t supposed to be able to without being caught, and that just didn’t sit right with Mom and Dad.  Sure, the polite thing to do is to leave your aug’s truthtell off when you’re with your friends and family, but the bottom line, according to them, was that even having the option to know distorts communication.  They always thought that the mutability of truth was essential to the human condition. Or some such nonsense.”

           “You don’t seem to agree with their views.”

           “No, I don’t.  All their views amounted to was that, at the end of the day, I can’t lie to anyone, and everyone can still lie to me if they figure out that I don’t have a social aug.  Being stock is… not great.”

           Irena has no idea how to reply to that, so she lets the conversation lapse.  They wend their way through the labyrinthine streets of Olympic City in tense silence for about twenty minutes.  The sun is dimmed by the massive plumes of helium rising from the mining operations within the depths of Olympus Mons; the gas is runoff from the process of extracting the bountiful harvest of rare metals that first brought people to settle here two hundred and fifty years ago.  They arrive at the halfway checkpoint – a spot Irena picked out during her rounds this morning as she plotted their approach to the bank.  It is a small Sino-Martian restaurant whose owner, Zizhuang, owes her a favor.

           They are ushered into the kitchen and from there into a back room where Zizhuang runs illegal, cash-based card games.  He gives Irena a toothy grin, nods at an inconspicuous-looking spot on the wall, and sees himself out.

           Irena taps the wall seven times in a particular rhythm.  She swings open the hidden door which unlocked at her gesture, reaches into the wall safe – the one she bought for Zizhuang – and withdraws a pair of snub-nosed, chrome-plated hand pistols with matching shoulder holsters.  She doffs her duster, puts the holster on, and then tucks her pistol safely away in it.  Once her coat is back on, the weapon is impossible to see.

           She helps Madeleine get into her own holster, then holds out the other pistol for her to take.  She frowns when the other woman just stares at it.  “Is there a problem?”

           “I have never held a gun before in my life,” Madeleine replies.  “I don’t even know what kind this is.”

           “Gauss pistol,” Irena tells her.  “Very simple.  Point it at someone, turn the safety off, and push the trigger.”

           Madeleine swallows.  “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

           “You won’t.  These are loaded with Cripplers.  Unless you put it in someone’s eye, the worst you’ll do is – well. They’re called Cripplers.”

           “How did you get these?  Guns are illegal in Olympic City.”

           “Yes, and these in particular are extremely illegal.  But Zizhuang is a good friend with black market connections.”

           Gingerly taking the gun, Madeleine looks it over. “How does it work?”

           “A magnetized slug is propelled down a miniaturized rail by a series of solenoid coils,” Irena begins, then realizes the question is not an academic one, but practical.  “Oh.  You hold it like this.”  She adjusts Madeleine’s grip on the gun, ignoring the feeling of smooth skin under her fingers – not a sensation she is used to, and it is not the time to get distracted.  “Good.  Flip this switch, and – you see the depression on the back?  Use your thumb.”

           Madeleine lets out an involuntary shriek as she accidentally gives Zizhuang’s back room a new hole in the drywall.  The pistol makes a slight buzzing noise; the impact of the round against the wall is far louder.

           Irena smiles.  “Only use it if I’m taken out and can’t help you.  You really have never fired a gun before?  Never gone to one of the equatorial colonies and rented one at a shooting range?”

           “Some people have never been offworld,” Madeleine says, her tone a bit frosty.  “Some people have never had sex.  I, until today, have never fired a gun.  Would you give someone a hard time for one of those other things?”

           “No,” Irena says, trying and failing to hide her sudden feeling of awkwardness.  “I wouldn’t.”

           Madeleine looks more closely at her.  “Oh.  Oh.  You said – about your parents.  The whole asexual-reproduction thing.  I’m sorry.”

           Attempting to seem cavalier, Irena waves the observation away.  “You had no idea.  Holster that and let’s get moving.”

           They head out the emergency exit, which should trigger an alarm but naturally fails to.  The silence between them is tense as they reemerge onto the broad pedways of Olympic City’s main thoroughfares, Irena’s chosen route for the protection offered by the crowds.  Finally, Madeleine speaks up.  “Look, I am sorry.  I just was flustered and wasn’t thinking.”

           “It’s fine.”  Irena sweeps her gaze over the crowd, still not seeing any telltale lingering stares or obvious tails.

           “Can I ask you another personal question?”

           Irena sighs.  “If I say no, will you ask anyway?”

           “No, I won’t.  I’d respect your choice.”

           “Well, ask.  Again, I can always choose not to answer.”

           Madeleine hesitates, then opens her mouth to speak.

           In that moment, Irena – glancing over her shoulder at Madeleine – sees the glint of metal in the crowd behind her.  Her mecheyes highlight the object, just as they did last night: a military-grade plasma projector.

           Irena shoves Madeleine out of the way of the first burst, narrowly avoiding it herself.  She whips her gauss pistol out of its holster and returns fire, putting a Crippler in the right arm and leg of the grim-faced man who just tried to shoot her – charge? friend? – in the back.  He screams and crumples to the ground, plasma projector skittering along the ’crete.  Five other dark-clothed, grim-looking men within the crowd begin moving in much faster. Irena swears.  If she hadn’t been flustered by the conversation, maybe she would have noticed them earlier –

           “Run,” she says, and gives Madeleine a sharp push into motion.  Fortunately, Madeleine doesn’t ask questions; she just flees in the direction Irena indicated.  Plasma bolts begin howling after them as the pedestrians, realizing that they are in the middle of a shootout, begin to scatter.

           Irena drops two more of their pursuers with shots to the arms and legs.  A plasma bolt slams into her chest, lifts her off her feet, and sends her flying to land hard on her back two meters away.  Her combat jumpsuit absorbs and diffuses most of the thermal energy of the bolt, but it still feels like someone struck her in the sternum with a heavy ball of white-hot metal.  Irena rolls backward up onto her feet, dodges two more bolts, and shoots the third man in the gut, folding him up and leaving him writhing on the pavement.

           The remaining two exchange a glance, then stop their pursuit, fading back.  Madeleine rounds a sharp corner, gasping, and leans hard on the wall until Irena catches up with her.  “Holy shit!” she says, looking at the still-smoldering scorch mark in the center of Irena’s chest.  “Are you okay?”

           “I’ll live,” Irena says shortly.  “They are probably calling for backup.  We need to get to the bank, now.”

           They run, Irena not bothering to conceal her pistol, Madeleine not bothering to draw hers.  For five tense, silent minutes, they bolt through back alleys and side streets, abandoning the now-dubious protection of the thoroughfares for the relative anonymity of paths less traveled.  In the distance, sirens begin to wail, their volume rapidly increasing as they draw nearer.

           “Will the OCPD help us?” Madeleine gasps between panting breaths.  “Can they all be on Greene’s payroll?”

           “I’m not risking it,” Irena tells her, skidding around one last turn and arriving at their destination.  “Come on.”

           They are in an apparent dead-end alley, much like the one from which Irena rescued Madeleine only hours ago.  This one, however, has an access hatch for sewage maintenance tunnels embedded in the pavement.  It opens at Irena’s command; she spent an hour earlier today hacking it, in case they needed an alternate route to the bank.

           The maintenance tunnels are made from plascrete.  Clean, well-lit, and odorless, unlike the sewage lines for which it provides access, this particular tunnel also happens to run in a nearly straight shot to the public park right behind the Olympic First Bank that is their destination.

           “Are we almost there?” Madeleine asks, gasping.

           “The hatch ahead leads out into a park near the bank,” Irena tells her.  “I’ve already rigged it up.  All we need to do is hit this button, and –”

           She presses the RELEASE button on the wall-mounted keypad below the egress hatch.  Nothing happens.

           For a moment she just stares at it, frowning, until she notices something odd: a fingernail-sized black spot on the wall next to it.  It is a bead transceiver, a device capable of receiving and sending messages.

           A smooth, male voice emanates from it even as she looks at it.  “I don’t really know who you are, or why you’re helping Duvier,” the voice says. “You’re good, but you’re too easy to track.  I watched you prepare this backup route for yourself and knew you’d just need a push to want to take it and get off the street.”

           Irena feels an unaccustomed quiver of fear crawl through her guts.  “What do you want?”

           “Duvier,” the man on the other end says.  “Send her up, alone and unarmed, and there’s no problem. Fail to do that, and we have a big problem.”

           “Go to hell,” Irena says before Madeleine can say something, noble or otherwise.

           She can almost hear the man’s shrug.  “Suits me just fine.  I don’t get paid unless I bring Duvier in myself, so I’m not telling the OCPD goons where you are.  I’m just going to keep you bottled in there until you’re in a compliant mood.  Just say ‘please, sir’ to turn this back on. I’ll be looking forward to your call.”

           The transceiver switches off.

           And then, so do the lights.  She is back in the dark.

           There is a voice coming from far away.  Irena cannot understand what it is saying.  She is nine years old again, trapped in her room, and her parents have taken away her eyes.

           She flails, blindly, with her hands, trying to find the familiar landmarks – a bedpost, a nightstand, her body-contouring morphchair.  They have taken everything away.  There is nothing but cold walls.  They have taken her animal friends, her puzzles, her flatscreen terminal.  There is nothing.

           No, there is still something.  A small, rectangular object, many fine leaves of paper enclosed in a thick, hard covering.  The paper is covered in bumps and ridges.  Later, when she asks Father Makoto what it is, he tells her it is the Blue Protestant Reformation Bible – the holy book of the Church of St. Joan, a text she has read and been forced to read many times, a text she cannot help but know by heart – in a kind of writing system called Braille.  Father Makoto tells her she will learn to read again, with this book, and she will not be allowed to leave her room or have any of her things returned until she does so.

           And what happens when I do it? she asks. Will I get my eyes back?

           No, Father Makoto says.  Your eyes are gone.  You forfeited the gift of vision when you set your sights on heresy.

           And she wants to cry, but she cannot.  The tears do not come.  Not anymore.

           She is alone in the dark.

           How long she stays gone, Irena has no idea.  The faint voice from before seems to get closer and closer, slowly but steadily. Finally it begins to be accompanied by a physical sensation – a warm hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her. The dim noises of the voice resolve into words she can understand.

           “Irena?”

           Madeleine, it is Madeleine.  They are doing something, somewhere.  Irena has difficulty remembering what and where. She just remembers seeing Madeleine in trouble and wanting to help.  Feeling that she needed to help.

           “Irena, can you hear me?”

           It is so hard to respond, so very hard, but Irena forces herself to.  “Yes,” she says, the word coming out as a slurred croak, barely recognizable.

           “Irena, it’s Madeleine.  Do you know where you are?  Do you know who you are?”

           “Yes.”  The word is stronger this time, though producing it is still a monumental undertaking.

           Madeleine levers her into a sitting position – no easy feat, given that Irena is ninety kilograms of muscle and subdermal augmentations.  “What happened?  The lights went out, you shrieked, and you went fetal.  I’ve been trying to talk to you for what feels like hours.”

           How can she even begin to explain?  How can she make this woman, this stranger, understand?

           “The dark,” Irena finally forces out.

           “What about the dark?  Are you nyctophobic?”

           Irena manages a shake of her head, her locs making soft bumping sounds as they brush against the plascrete wall behind her. Then she remembers that, in the pitch black, Madeleine will not see the movement.  “No,” she says.  “My eyes. They took my eyes!”  She hears her voice rising in panic and can do nothing to arrest it.

           “Your eyes are fine.  I can see them right now, they’re the only light source in here.”

           Forcing herself to focus, to push through the buzzing noises and mounting terror in her head, Irena realizes she has unconsciously closed off her sensorium to input from her mecheyes.  She had done that before, to block the pain and phantom images.

           When she lets that sense click back on, she sees Madeleine’s face, extremely close to her own, illuminated faintly by the light from Irena’s mecheyes.  The soft green glow barely extends beyond that, but instantly Irena can breathe a little easier.  She can see. Her eyes are fine.  She is not alone in the dark again.

           “Hey,” Madeleine says, obviously recognizing the eye contact.  Irena swallows as she becomes aware of other sensations she had been blocking out – the warmth of Madeleine’s breath on her lips, the feel of Madeleine’s hands on her shoulder and knee.  “Glad you’re back.”

           “Yes,” Irena says, fighting the instinctive urge to try to draw farther away.  It would be both rude and useless, given that there is a plascrete wall up against her back.

           Besides, she cannot deny the closeness is helping her. “I am.”

           “What happened?” Madeleine asks again.

           “The lights went out and I was not ready for it,” Irena tells her.  “It caused a dissociative episode.  I have post-traumatic stress disorder relating to my childhood, and darkness is a trigger for it.”

           “I see.”  Madeleine’s lips quirk in a sympathetic grimace and she gives Irena’s shoulder a squeeze.  She shifts her weight off her feet – she had been crouching in front of Irena – and collapses into a sitting position next to her.  “How long have we been down here?”

           Irena checks her social aug’s internal clock. “Two and a half hours.  I am so sorry.”

           “I’m the one who’s sorry.  You’re only here because you tried to help me.”  Madeline shakes her head, anger twisting her expression. “We should just say that galling phrase the guy told us to use and I’ll go up.  At least that way you won’t be stuck in here any longer.”

           “No,” Irena tells her.  “I can counter whatever he’s done to the computer system controlling this maintenance tunnel.  I just – I needed to be in my right mind to do it.”  She tries to get to her feet and fails, for the first time in as long as she can remember.  Her muscles betray her and she slumps back down into a half-sitting, half-supine position, her arms and legs a quivering, spasming mess.  She swears in a language she doubts Madeleine knows.  “And I need to be able to give battle when the door opens and our captor puts up a fight.”

           “Are you all right?” Madeleine asks.

           “These dissociative episodes can cause desynchronization with the augmented portion of my nervous system,” Irena tells her.  “My brain patterns go so far off of normal that the system registers it as a seizure and shuts itself off to prevent me from hurting myself or others.  Turning it back on is supposed to be done with the assistance of a trained lab crew, an input terminal, and an AI.”

           Madeleine cringes.  “So… we’re fucked?”

           “No.”  Irena begins to concentrate, directing electrical impulses within her own body, something she hasn’t done consciously in years.  “But I do need a few hours to do it myself.”

           Gawking at her, Madeleine doesn’t bother to conceal her shock.  “You can reconnect your nervous system?  Don’t we have literally millions of neurons?”

           “About a hundred billion, actually, with thousands of connections each,” Irena says dryly.  “It’s not that my nervous system is disconnected, but it’s conditioned to operate with the augmented portion active, and that augmented portion is waiting for the proper electrical signals to reactivate it, connection by connection. There are about nine hundred thousand of those.”

           “And you can fix it in a few hours?”

           “I’ve already reactivated about seven thousand of them since you asked me if we were fucked.  I just need time and concentration.”

           Madeleine nods slowly, a smile spreading across her face. “You think we’re going to be okay?”

           “I think our friend upstairs is going to be in for quite a surprise,” Irena tells her.  “He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.”

           There is little to do while Irena works.  Until her nerves are completely resynchronized, she doesn’t want to try to move, and Madeleine is silent, letting her concentrate. About two hours in, however, she speaks up, so softly Irena almost thinks she’s talking to herself.

           “I did want to say sorry,” Madeleine says. “About what I said before.”

           Trying to ignore the pins and needles in her arms and legs as the process of manual resynchronization continues, Irena asks, “What would that be?”

           “Comparing never firing a gun to never having had sex. I know the whole concept of virginity is ridiculous and old-fashioned, but it was the first thing that came to my mind.  It clearly made you uncomfortable, and I’m sorry for that.”

           Irena cracks a smile.  “We’re trapped in a maintenance tunnel by a mystery man who is going to be doing his best to kill us in about an hour, and this is what’s on your mind?”

           “Of course it is.  Don’t you obsessively replay every social interaction where you’ve committed a faux pas over and over, torturing yourself with it?  I’ve been sitting here with nothing to do for two hours, and eventually you get bored of worrying about death and start worrying if you’ve offended your friend.”

           Irena feels her smile broaden.  “So we’re friends, then?”

           “I would hope so.  At least.”

           “At least?”

           Madeleine is quiet for a long, telling moment. Then, “You’ve never met the right person?”

           Irena feels her heart rate begin to pick up. “No, I haven’t.  I find men uninteresting, and most women think I’m intimidating.”

           She hears Madeleine give a soft laugh.  “Most women are idiots.”

           Sparing the concentration to turn her head, Irena gazes at her in the glow of her own mecheyes.  The soft green light casts Madeleine’s elfin features into stark relief. Her skin, already pale, seems almost translucent.  Irena can see the beat of the other woman’s pulse beneath the flesh of her throat. “Most women?”

           “Look, I get that this is quite literally the worst possible time to be talking about this kind of thing,” Madeleine tells her. “But knowing you’re probably going to die in an hour or less kind of reshuffles priorities, doesn’t it?”

           “I have to confess I’m used to it,” Irena says, trying to sound nonchalant and knowing she’s failing.  “But I can understand how being in this situation for the first time might be an enlightening experience.”

           “Very.  I’ve never been a damsel in distress before.  Apart from being shot, threatened, and about to die, I have to say it’s got its perks.”  Her eyes flit up and down Irena’s body, a lightning glance that begins and ends at her face, and she gives a surprisingly coquettish smile.  “Beautiful, dangerous rescuers, for one.”

           Irena feels the traitorous blush again, so strong that she is irrationally convinced Madeleine can see it through the near-blackness.  “You have me at a disadvantage,” she says, trying desperately to remember what people in these circumstances are supposed to say.  Witty, charming things, mostly, she thinks.  “I’m not used to being flattered.  I don’t know how to respond to it.”

           In her estimation, she thinks she falls short of that particular benchmark, but Madeleine chuckles, a low, pleasant sound. Irena feels goosebumps rise up and down her arms, goosebumps which have nothing to do with her resynchronizing nerves. “I don’t have a social aug, you know,” Madeleine teases her.  “If that was a lie, it was a pretty good one, because I couldn’t tell you one way or the other.”

           “I don’t like to lie,” Irena replies.  “I was only caught lying twice as a child, but the consequences were memorable.”

           She realizes, as soon as she’s said it, that it was precisely the wrong thing to say.  The mood dims as Madeleine’s smile fades.  “I’m sorry for whatever happened to you.  For what it’s worth, I wish I could have helped.  No idea how, just…”  She shrugs, listlessly.  “I just wish.”

           “Thank you.”

           A long silence passes.  Irena reactivates more of her augmented nervous system. Finally, Madeleine speaks again. “What did happen to you?”

           The shock is severe enough that Irena miscalculates one of the nerve impulses and shocks herself.  Her left pinky finger begins to twitch, the flesh on the back of the digit crawling in an unnatural pattern.  She instantly compensates and gets control back, hiding the brief flash of pain from Madeleine.  “It’s not something I talk about,” she says.  “With anyone.”

           “I’m not just ‘anyone,’ am I?”

           Irena opens her mouth to issue a flat denial, but the words stick in her throat.  True, she has only known Madeleine for less than a day, but she isn’t wrong.  She is no longer just anyone.  No one, not Julian Thorne, not the few coworkers and subordinates she trusts enough to consider friends, no one has seen her brought so low by a simple change in the lights.  And yet, instead of thinking that she’s pathetic, or useless, Madeleine has been – sympathetic.  Understanding.  Irena realizes the exigency of the situation has, against all odds, not diminished Madeleine’s opinion of her.

           “The truth,” she says, slowly and carefully, “is that talking about it may upset me enough that I miss a crucial nerve connection or make a cascading miscalculation.  I need my focus if we’re going to get out of here alive.  So I will make you a promise: after this is over, if we’re still both standing, I will tell you.”

           “Okay,” Madeleine says, equally grave.  “I’ll hold you to that.”

           With renewed focus, Irena finishes reactivating her augmented nervous system in record time.  She climbs to her feet, tests her dexterity with some stretches, some simple katas from a few of the many martial arts she has learned since striking out on her own.  She turns to Madeleine, nods.  But before she can speak, Madeleine makes a shushing gesture, grabs her hand, and drags her over to the opposite side of the tunnel, where they first entered.

           “What?” Irena asks.

           “I have a plan,” Madeleine says.

           Eight minutes later, Irena watches the distaste on Madeleine’s face as she says, “Please, sir,” to the transceiver.

           The smooth, male voice returns.  “Took you long enough.  Starting to get thirsty?  Maybe needing to use the ladies’ room?”

           “I’m coming up,” Madeleine says.  “Open the hatch.”

           “Right,” their captor laughs.  “Unarmed, just you, your friend stays down there and finds her own way out?”

           “That’s the deal.”

           “I warn you that if you try anything stupid you’ll regret it.  There might be a way for you to come out of this alive, but not if you fuck with me.”

           “I hear you,” Madeleine says.  “Open the damn hatch.”  She looks at Irena, nods, and winks.

           The hatch hisses open, and Madeleine slowly climbs out.

           Irena sprints.  She runs faster than she ever has in her life.

           The plan is quite simple, if multi-layered. They spent the time at the other end of the tunnel productively, Irena hacking the hatch there to open on the same signal as the park exit.  It was the only way to avoid the watchdog AI their enemy had set up around the programming of the park hatch, and the only way for Irena to also gain her freedom from the maintenance tunnel.

           She erupts back out into the alley, a single augmented leap taking her three meters straight up out of her dark prison.  The renewed sunlight would dazzle any other person, but her mecheyes adjust automatically, apertures retreating in a fraction of a second.

           Irena tears out of the alley, back along the pedways, heading full-tilt for the direction of the bank.  The fastest she has ever clocked herself was forty-five kilometers an hour.  She hits fifty as she half-runs, half-leaps down the pedway, plascrete cracking with the force of each of her footfalls.  She clears the two hundred and eighty-nine meters of complicated city travel from the alley to the park in less than twenty-one seconds.  Her eyes scan the surroundings as she slows to a manageable speed: evergreens and grasses genengineered to grow in Martial soil, pedestrians picnicking or out for a stroll – there.

           Madeleine is fifteen meters away, being roughly escorted by a heavily-modified, male-presenting cyborg.  All of his limbs are obvious chrome, and his eyes are hidden behind a reflective polymer visor built into the front of his skull.  There is a strange blurriness to his features – some kind of distortion field, perhaps.

           He hears Irena coming, of course.  She can see his lips distort in a swear, the casual, brutal ease of the way he throws Madeleine to the ground as he turns to confront Irena.  But she has fought men like this and won, many times.  The gauss pistol is already in her hand.  She snaps it up and fires –

           He disappears.  One moment he is standing there, and the next he is gone, as though he were jump-cut out of existence.  Irena gapes as her Cripplers sail through the spot he occupied only a second ago, embedding themselves in the trunk of a tree in a spray of pulped wood.

           Something slams into her hand, sending the gauss pistol flying.  Something else crashes into Irena’s chest, right where she was struck by the plasma bolt. She feels a rib give way under the impact.  The force of the strike slams her onto her side, legs spilling up out of the access hatch. She tries to roll with the impact, scrambling back to her feet, and is just in time to see a nigh-invisible blur rush at her.

           The next attack, her opponent still invisible, cracks against the side of her head.  Frantically, she switches her mecheyes from the normal human-visible spectrum to infrared, then ultraviolet, then even x-ray, but their enemy is wearing a wraithshroud, the tech more bleeding-edge than anything Irena has ever seen.  His emissions are almost perfectly masked, all but undetectable in every spectrum. For a hired gun to have access to this kind of technology, Vice-Governor Greene must have some serious connections.

           She takes another punch to the chest and feels the breath explode from her lungs.  As she tries to suck in enough air to keep herself going, to retaliate, the faint blur seems to levitate a meter into the air.  She realizes her opponent is leaping up into a spinning kick when the toe of his boot makes contact with her skull, just behind her left ear.

           Everything goes pitch black.

           It seems that she is there, alone, in the dark, for ages.  But it must have only been a few seconds, because Irena hears Madeleine’s voice again. “Wherever you are, just – shoot me, take me, do whatever you want.  Just leave her.  She’s nobody, I just hired her to get me here.  Just let her go and I’ll cooperate.”

           For a long, terrible instant, Irena is tempted to stay in the dark, to let Madeleine go.  The words hurt, after all.  But then she comes to her senses.  Madeleine is trying to play for time.  The woman who helped her through the dark down in that tunnel would not abandon her now.

           Irena Matsuo Mtukudzi gets to her feet.  She does not open her eyes.  The dark is still all around her, but Madeleine’s voice, her presence, has cut through it.  She has reminded Irena that the dark is weak.  She has conquered it once before.

           And she will do it again.

           “I’m not done yet,” Irena says.  “And –” she takes a gamble, based on this man’s insulting, patronizing egotism – “maybe this time you can try not to hit like a girl.”

           The crunch of boots in grass stops short. There is a distinctive scrape, the sound of someone turning without lifting their feet.  Irena keeps her eyes closed and moves in.

           She phases out the distant wail of sirens, the shocked outcries of pedestrians, the barking of the dogs.  All she hears is the whisper of air being cut by scything limbs, the ragged, human sounds of breathing, the telltale rustling of grass and dirt underfoot.  Angry, pride injured, her opponent overextends, tries for a wild haymaker to her jaw.  She fades to one side, catches his arm between her own.  Through the thin nanofiber of the wraithshroud, which rasps against her skin like cold, liquid silk, she can feel the hard, inhuman lines of one of his full-replacement bionic arm.

           So she plants her feet, locks her arms around his limb, and tears it out of his shoulder socket with one violent, twisting wrench.

           He screams.  She opens her eyes, sees him staggering away from her.  His entire body, from head to feet, is covered in what looks like a thin coat of plastic – the wraithshroud, its camouflage shorted out. That explains the visual distortion she detected earlier.  Where Irena tore his arm from his shoulder, sparks fly, and thick, dark lubricant seeps.  The wraithshroud has been torn in a jagged line.

           Irena readies herself to go another round with the man.  She is bleeding internally, even her hyper-specialized body not immune to the simple realities of ruptured organs from blows with metal fists.  If he gets in another good hit, he may well kill her.

           But Madeleine, who is standing behind him, now totally forgotten by him, has other ideas.  Executing her part of the plan, she pulls out the gauss pistol hidden at the small of her back, takes aim at his back, and pumps twelve Cripplers into his torso.  

           He staggers.  Even that doesn’t put him down completely – Irena estimates there is less than twenty-five percent of his actual, human body left.  But he collapses to one knee, gasping, and cranes his neck around to stare at Madeleine.  “You,” he rasps, “were supposed to be unarmed.”

           “We certainly said we were going to send me up unarmed, didn’t we?” Madeleine asks.  “We said it quite loudly, right next to that transceiver that you’d supposedly turned off.  Didn’t we, Irena?”

           “Yes we did, Madeleine,” Irena replies, enjoying the look of dawning realization on her opponent’s face.  “Someone isn’t as clever as they think they are.”

           He snarls up at her.  “You fucking b-”

           Irena grasps his severed limb firmly by the wrist and hits him over the head with the other end.

           He drops, unconscious, to the grass.

           Eighteen whirlwind hours later, for the second time in as many days, Irena finds herself in Julian Thorne’s office.  Her chest is encased in a pressure bandage to keep her three broken ribs from shifting while they heal, and there is a cortical monitor affixed to her left temple to track the nanosurgical correction of her concussion. But she is on some good painkillers and is flush with a feeling of accomplishment, so in the final analysis she decides things are not too bad.

           She glances to her right, at where Madeleine sits, and thinks that things might, perhaps, even be said to be good.

           “Well,” Thorne says, looking up from the datafeed embedded in the surface of his desk.  “Vice-Governor Greene has been arrested by Coalition authorities.  So have a number of OCPD officers in his unofficial employ, as well as a one-armed, extremely angry cyborg mercenary wanted on six planets for murder, grand larceny, and dozens of other charges.  Apparently the DA has been sitting on a mountain of circumstantial evidence about Greene’s less-than-reputable business dealings and has just been waiting for a charge to pin on him.  Conspiracy to commit murder is certainly a juicy one.  They brought an entire assault ship of Praetorian Guards in from Earth just for him and his co-conspirators.”

           Irena feels her eyes widen slightly in shock. “They don’t do that for just anyone.”

           “No, they do not.  He has been, to put it mildly, a very bad boy.  Governor Shido is cooperating fully with the Praetorians’ investigation.  I expect he’s hoping to dodge any Senate hearings back on Earth by making his innocence clear.”  Thorne turns to Madeleine.  “I expect, Ms. Duvier, that you were targeted for death because you threatened to tell the press ‘everything he’d done.’  You only meant the harassment, but…”  He shrugs eloquently.  “Crime makes men paranoid.”

           “Fuck,” Madeleine murmurs with a small shake of her head.

           Thorne leans back, steepling his fingers.  “This is going to dominate the news cycle.  If it’s all the same to you, Irena, I’d prefer you to decline any interview requests.”

           Irena nods.  “A good chief of security should be invisible.  I never will be, but I can at least keep a low profile.”

           “Thank you.”  Thorne makes a show of checking his ridiculous antique watch.  “Well, I believe I have a meeting with the board. Feel free to sit a spell and talk, if you like.  Just see yourselves out when you’re done.  And Ms. Duvier, I will expect your resume on my desk by noon tomorrow.  If we’re going to find you a job here, I’ll need to know what you can do.”  He grins. “Apart from being very clever and shooting a man in the back.”

           Madeleine blushes fiercely, but nods.  Thorne gives her an exaggerated wink and ambles out of his office.

           “I wanted to thank you,” Irena says, before Madeleine can speak.

           “Oh?”

           “Yes.  You helped me through the dark, and didn’t leave.  I – I do not have the words to express how grateful I am for that.”

           “And I don’t have the words to tell you how grateful I am.  For my life.”  Madeleine tentatively reaches out and takes Irena’s hand in her own.  “Why did you help, anyway?  It wasn’t just because Mr. Thorne told you to.  You made a decision when you saw me in the alley.  What was it?”

           Irena takes a moment to find the proper words. “I think I can explain by keeping my earlier promise to you.”

           “Telling me about your childhood?”

           “Yes.  I told you before about the Church, that I ran away.  That is true.  What I did not tell you is that they caught me, during my first attempt.  And in order to ensure I did not escape a second time, they burned out my eyes.  They blinded me.  I was nine years old.”

           Madeleine swears, softly, and squeezes Irena’s hand. “That’s horrible.  I am so sorry.”            “Thank you.  I did escape, though, on my second attempt.  And yesterday, when I saw you in the alley, I saw myself.  Alone, in the dark, surrounded by people who were going to hurt me.  I suppose I thought that if I could save you…”  Irena shrugs, trailing off.  

           “I think I understand,” Madeleine says.

           Irena looks down at Madeleine’s small, soft hand, almost half the size of her own, and clears her throat.  “So.  Would you like me to arrange a car to take you back to your apartment?”

           “Only,” Madeleine says, “if you’re in the car with me.”

           The traitorous blush starts rising in Irena’s cheeks again.  “I –”

           “You said that most women find you intimidating. I said most women are idiots.  I wasn’t just making small talk.” Madeleine gets to her feet.  “I just survived a crooked politician trying to have me murdered, so I’ll be damned if I let myself get cold feet about this.  I’ve already said I think you’re beautiful, and I have since the second I woke up and saw you standing at the side of my bed.  You’re also my hero, and deserve a little worship.  Come home with me, I’ll make you some herbal tea for your aches, and we’ll see if we can find a movie we both like.  How does that sound?”

           Irena swallows.  It is utterly absurd, but at this moment she is more petrified than she was when staring death in the face.

           She remembers Madeleine’s voice, cutting through the dark.  She remembers her face, illuminated in the light of her eyes.  And, just now – you’re also my hero.

           “That sounds lovely,” Irena says.  Still holdings hands, they leave the office together.

           And later – much later – Irena allows herself to be persuaded to turn out the lights for the first time in twenty years.

[girlonfilmmovies]

Welcome to Friend Island: "Love Island US Season 3" and the Gaping Sores of America

So I foolishly thought that in the new year of 2021, the world would be in a better place than it was the previous year. After all, we were coming out of the "worst" of the most horrifying pandemic of the past century, a middling presidency that at that point served only a wealth of TV soundbites and less actual damage to the political system, and we were looking forward to a brighter future and a return to what some hoped would be "normal". The past was the past, and this was going to be a new moment.

Oh how naïve we all were.

As of this writing Covid-19 cases are hitting staggering new highs in the southern US, with Florida (of course) somehow hitting a record amount despite vaccines being easily available in the country for months. The death rates are at almost the same as last year. The middling disaster of the 45th president had one more trick up its sleeve, a firebomb brewing for dozens of years that went off in one of the most embarrassing fiascos of American political history. Misinformation has already implanted itself so thoroughly among half the country that people would rather die than admit they were wrong; the spread of such chaos being happily spat out through the algorithms of corporations only intent on raking in dollar signs. All the potential benefits that could have come from this once-in-a-lifetime moment are being briskly swept away: offices demanding their employees come back, no respect given to science and healthcare workers, the country's clearly weak infrastructure forced right back into action as if we didn't just see its gaping holes. The earth is dying and the people who actually have the resources do something about it instead have kickstarted a capitalist space race.

2021 has gone to show that old, toxic habits die hard.

Sigh.

Yeah, I watched Love Island again.

Despite my... let's say mixed feelings regarding last year's shitshow, I couldn't help but admit that it was the closest thing that I've had to appointment viewing TV that I've had in a long time. In an era of streaming and DVR boxes, it's a bit of an actual feat to get someone who works a fulltime job (especially one with erratic scheduling) to go out of their way to watch something the second it premieres. Love Island brings the family together, so they can engage in our favorite pastime: pointing and laughing at young, dumb, fame hungry cis-hets.

Plus, the second season had offered a fascinating glance at how to contend with a pandemic while also trying to stage a typical dumb reality show. The tropical island villa was swapped for a luxurious hotel rooftop in Las Vegas -- a literal ivory tower of ignorant hedonism looking down upon a plagued nation. You could feel the sexual tension of the hot, hyper-sexual adults forced without physical contact for months finally allowed to relieve themselves the only way they know how: toxic relationships. It was trying so hard to be an oasis in a desert yearning for frivolous content, but the façade was clearly visible to the point of satire. It was a wonderful thing to experience firsthand as what I originally thought as merely me dipping my toes into the genre.

Season 2 was the show that we deserved at the time, a funhouse mirror reflecting all the callous stupidity that had led us to this moment in world history. It attempted to offer a happy ending, a look towards the future: a black couple finally winning a reality show, a first for such a mainstream program (both of them actually kind of turned out to suck, but shhhh...).

It also allowed America to completely break the hearts of people while watching them fall apart live on TV. It was cruel, it was stupid, but most of all, it was fun as hell.

Season 3 is not about torturing the competitors. It's about torturing us.

In all fairness, there were a couple of lovely positive developments for the series this season. While still struggling with racial diversity a little bit, as evidenced by them casting only one very specific kind of black man like five times, strides are being taken elsewhere in the lane of body diversity. Alana makes her debut as literally the first woman on this show who isn't a size 0-2, looking absolutely gorgeous in every single shot.

The almost aggressively heteronormative nature of the show is slowly being shaken by a more openly queer cast than previously expected -- multiple bisexual/pansexual contestants participated, even though there wasn't any overtly queer romance shown (also almost all of them were women, with them describing their sexualities being confined to streaming exclusive episodes, which isn't... great). It's certainly a step in the right direction for a show that unceremoniously shuffled off the only queer member of the Season 2 cast overnight once the internet found his gay porn shoot. Ironically, they also ended up booting off the most openly queer member of this cast too, the purple haired proudly pansexual TikTok-er Leslie, but for the more legal reason of smuggling weed into the villa.

It's not terribly surprising that both Alana and Leslie garnered a lot of positive attention both inside and outside of the villa -- they stand out so much against the otherwise predictable casting that we've come to expect from this show and white American media in general. Alana is a woman with actual curves who looks stunningly gorgeous in comparison to the monotonous supermodel figures of everyone else. Leslie almost falls into a stereotype from the way she appears: dyed purple hair, tattooed all over, obviously queer, vaping weed constantly, exuding the kind of chaotic yet weirdly fun energy that only a former stripper can. Yet she obviously grabbed the attention of the contestants because while people like her abound in real life, in the fantasy land of reality TV she's an absolute rarity, a far cry from the sanitized beauty pageant-esque standards that they seem to pluck girls from. The men are still dumb, bland, boneheaded idiots in this show, but by offering some actual variety, they get to actually pursue people they aren't "traditionally" supposed to, while an outsider audience member like me gets to see women like herself be offered up for titillation in the same way "conventionally attractive" women are.

It's kind of cool, even if it is just playing into the icky sexualization of everyone, but hey...progress?

In an odd "two steps forward, one step back" kind of situation, the show has somewhat dialed down the outrageously toxic relationships of last year into a more relatively subdued level of toxicity. Gaslighting/cheating is at least kept to a relative low in this season compared to the nightmare that was last year, although this year's ratio depends on how much of that corresponds with sexy Columbian boy Will's obviously flimsy grasp of the intricacies of the English language. He continued to be plagued by the cliquey-ness of the cast until the very end but his genuinely sweet couple with Kyra still did enough to sneak into the final two.

The actual main problem this year was an almost unbearably long love triangle between Cash, Trina, and Cinco that refused to solve itself for nearly a month. Cash and Cinco perennially kept flip-flopping in their feelings for each other, bouncing between failed partnerships despite so obviously being into each other. Trina ended up roped in as Cinco's partner for a while, a constant victim of his own lack of courage to make up his damn mind. Cash, freshly single and in horny jail (aka Casa Amor), coupled up with the handsome and mysterious Charlie.

Now we need to discuss how bizarre Charlie as a cast member. Not only is he the only member who is, looks, and acts like an actual adult, but he also seems to show no adherence to the rules of reality TV: he's very relaxed and unassuming, seems genuinely uninterested in the "game" aspects of the show, and only perks up during rare moments of actual romantic potential. He's a fascinating spanner to throw into the machine of Love Island, and once Cinco was eliminated in the competition, Charlie had to sit there while Cash only continued to openly and aggressively pine for a man who isn't even her current partner. Proving once again to be an anomaly in the cast, he actually decided to do something about this: he unceremoniously dumped fan favorite Cash like a sack of bricks, sending her home while hooking up with the previously mentioned Alana. This smart decision was met derisively by viewers, despite him being the only person there who actually acted like a fucking adult for once. Ironically, this got him and Alana into the finals, where they finished in last place with the same trademark lack of enthusiasm that we've come to expect from him.

I suppose now we need to uncork the problem of the season and by extension the franchise as a whole. You might have read that previous situation and thought, "gee, a fan favorite got tossed aside while a guy that everyone hated ended up making it into the final four? That seems weird."

But by that point it really wasn't at all.

See, the problem with the voting is that you don't usually get to pick who goes; the audience only gets to pick who to prevent getting kicked. At that point, the audience control is out of our hands and now into the contestants', and if there's one thing we all learned in high school it's that cliques are very much a thing. The contestants seemed dead set on booting anybody who was new the second they had the chance, so many potentially exciting people were so quickly thrown out. Instead of the exciting potential we could have seen, we got a love triangle sucking anyone nearby into doom, with everyone else being a relatively stable couple or part of the Jeremy/Korey wishy-washy railway. Casa Amor was an absolute bust, with people making half-assed couplings despite still being in love with somebody else (it speaks a lot to the weakness of the Casa Amor men that Olivia literally preferred to come back single than with any of those planks of wood).

Part of the problem did rely on factors that nobody could control at all though. "Romance novel come to life" Slade seemed like a threat with his rugged handsomeness, twangy accent, and classic southern charm, but had to quickly leave due to ambiguous family troubles. Similarly, the nearly perfect Josh and Shannon, who seemed like an obvious shoo-in winner by virtue of being probably the only actual relationship on the show, had to depart in the middle of the night due to the tragic death of Josh's sister. Aforementioned chaotic pansexual Leslie was unceremoniously removed in the middle of the night once they had realized that her classic vape pen was actually full of weed, an especially tragic circumstance considering she basically had Cinco wrapped around her finger and was about to bring that love triangle crashing down (also tragic because she has gone on record saying that she was fully crushing on Genny while they were both in there, robbing us of any potential of a queer couple).

But part of the pain as always has to do with how the producers control everything no matter what: what we see, what we hear, who gets the villain edit and who gets the hero edit. It's why they seem to play Jeremy as dumb hot surfer bro instead of the actual funny and charming guy he is. It's why Trina was treated as a bitch and Cash as a woeful victim despite the roles more often than not lining up the other way around. And most embarrassingly, it's how the biggest joke couple of the show ended up winning it all.

Now, look at this picture right here: the poses, the awkward hand holding, the very strange smiles between those two. No, this is not a picture of two teenagers going to prom together who just met only five minutes ago and are taking pictures on their parents' front lawn; these two are the winners of season 3, the supposedly "strongest" couple on the show. This is Olivia and Korey.

Korey is a charming boyish sweetheart by way of an absolute fucking dumbass. He's sort of like last year's beloved and wonderfully stupid Carrington: a very sweet and nice teenager who seems to have "13 Going on 30"-ed his way into an adult body. He's childish in a way that's very cute and friendly but also woefully unattractive to anyone who's an adult. Just like Carrington, he notched up a staggering amount of dates with pretty much every single beautiful woman that came into the villa, all seemingly very interested in him. Carrington, for as dumb and childish as he is, could bag anyone because he was outrageously confident too. Korey on the other hand seems incapable of making any decision, following any girl who pays him the time of day like a little puppy, constantly looking up to her with his big puppy dog eyes. It's very telling that for all the dates he had, almost none of them actually went anywhere because it's just not that appealing to anyone. If you're looking to win, he's not someone who can scheme and play the game. If you're looking for love, he's not going to cut it because he can't seem to even understand the concept of romance. If you're looking for a friend, he's probably the best damn one you'll get in that villa -- but as constantly established by everyone, this show isn't called Friend Island.

Olivia is a bit of a thornier subject. She habitually couples up with people that you can kind of tell she's not at all into. She started the first half relatively unassuming and not particularly interested in the men that she was supposedly attracted to. But you could basically see her panties drop when Slade walked in, ready for him to pull her up into the saddle and ride away into the sunset. But his sudden departure only left her more empty, desperately grasping onto whatever random attraction she could. She went off to Casa Amor single and had the gall to come back without coupling up with any of them (although once again, they really dropped the ball with the men compared to the stunning Casa Amor women). And somehow in the midst of all this wishy washy mess, she finally settled on the one single man who she hadn't coupled up with and supposedly suddenly had feelings for: lonely, little Korey.

As a watcher of two seasons of this shit, I've seen a lot of fake relationships, but this one is just ridiculous. The chemistry is really nonexistent; she seems more annoyed or at best partially amused whenever he tries to say anything genuinely sweet to her. She reacts like how you would when a little kid tries to tell you they have a crush on you, an adult: you just kind of go, "aw, cute, thank you!" and walk away chuckling. It's genuinely comedic in how tragic it is, a boy who thinks he's finally found someone when all she's found is a trip to the bank.

And what did the editors do? They tried their very best to sell this as genuine, as actual romance. We know what romance is -- we basically saw it with Shannon and Josh, and to a lesser extent Will and Kyra. And yet they whipped out that expert level edit to say, "wow, look at these two lovebirds, huh?" It's ridiculous, especially since only in the final episode did they suddenly remember that Jeremy and the stunning Bailey (aka the combination of Gal Godot and Ashley Judd circa-2001) were an actual couple and even they looked more real than the winning couple.

Love Island is, if nothing else, a reflection of America.

It's an outdated tradition desperately grasping to what's left of the typical western idea of romance. No matter how many beauty pageant contestants they pick, men like women who aren't size 2s, or with natural hair/skin, or with family-friendly occupations. Women are probably tired of the big muscle bound hunks they usually put on here, the nearly identical men that they seem to cast every single season who have all the looks but zero of the confidence or personality.

It's an example of how our choices are an illusion, how our influence can be easily overwritten by those in charge. Votes that don't matter when they change the rules on the fly, ripping out the actual choice of the people in favor of letting them decide what stays and what goes.

It's a testament that even in the face of a viral pandemic that's quickly turning into part two, as the lives of millions are being further destroyed across the world, there will always be some asshole who has more than you and looks better than you, vacationing on a tropical island stolen from its people, ignorant of everything else that's happening around them.

Love Island hates everyone. It hates it's contestants. It hates the viewers. It hates change. It hates me.

But I do still kind of love it.

[droewyn]

Closure

The day before I left California, the day before my Grandma Sunny finally died, my mother asked me if I wanted to have some time alone with her.  To “get anything you need to off your chest”, she said.

I looked at the dying woman in the bed.  She was beyond frail, and thankfully out of it; whether it was the ruptured blood clot in her brain or hunger and thirst that was killing her, I was glad that she didn’t have to be awake for it.  That was a mercy she’d been denied too often during the horrible week since her stroke, her doctor refusing to give her enough morphine to keep her sedated. “There’s a difference between providing comfort care and killing someone,” he told us with an air of paternal disapproval at our supposed ignorance.  Apparently, starving a 95-year-old to death is more ethical than risking overdose and diaphragm failure.  Letting nature take its course is certainly more romantic sounding, at any rate.

You start to seriously contemplate murder around day three or day four of the deathwatch.  A spare pillow, the plastic bag you brought your grocery store deli counter lunches in, the combined pharmaceutical inventory of two generations of women who are being treated for various chronic conditions.  Instruments of death that hold an awful sort of hope, a way out for both the dying and the living.

Don’t ever try to plot a felony with my mother and aunt, by the way.  They can’t keep their mouths shut in front of the nurses.  It’s embarrassing, particularly when they’re the ones who watch all of the crime dramas on network TV.

So we did nothing, the deathwatch continued, and suddenly it was Saturday night, I was being driven to the airport in the morning, and I was really, definitely, never going to see my grandma alive again.

Mom wants to know if I had anything to get off my chest?  Hell, where do I start?

My grandma’s name was taken from her twice. The first when it was anglicized by the orphanage that took her in after her mother died, and she was suddenly Sophie instead of Zosia. Later, there was a boy who told her that ‘Sunny’ suited her better than ‘old-lady Sophie’, and refused to call her anything else until it stuck.

The nuns at the orphanage beat her, starved her, and locked her in dark closets and attics for days on end in the name of a merciful god.  They crammed her feet into too-small shoes until they were permanently deformed.  They taught her that love was a finite thing, a commodity to be earned.  Paranoia, manipulation, and an all-consuming need for validation, for demonstrations of devotion, for any kind of attention at all; these are the things that she learned at the foot of the cross.

If I ever get access to a time machine, the first thing I’m planning is a 75-year trip to punch some penguins.  Just so you know.

My grandma ran a little wild as a young woman.  She was a divorcee in the 1940’s.  She made it through not one, but two illegal, back alley, coathanger abortions, and survived with enough of her uterus intact to later give birth to my aunt and my mom.  She met a handsome bootlegger, a member of Detroit’s Purple Gang, who became her second husband.  He was twenty-two years older than her, made and lost four fortunes before dying on his eighty-first birthday, and enjoyed the company of little girls.

To me, my grandma was the woman who called me by a Polish diminutive of my name that I hated because it sounded like a feminine hygiene product.  She’s the woman who taught me never to rinse sauerkraut, what a bay leaf was, and how to make golabki.  She took me to parks, to beaches, to the movies, to the zoo.  She loved sweets and her ‘little drinkie-poos’.  She sang to me that I was her sunshine, that she loved me a bushel and a peck.  She bought me rather adult romance novels when I was still in elementary school because she thought they were somehow more appropriate for a little girl than “aliens and monsters”.  When I turned eighteen, she gave me ‘the talk’ with a grave face, clutching my hands in her own shaking ones as she insisted that if I ever had sex I must always be sure to use a condominium.  She never failed to ask after my kitties, even if she could never remember their names. Even if she was terrified of them.

Her favorite game was ‘I love you more’.  She told lies to pick fights between me and my brother, so that she could heroically resolve them.  When she started spending winters in California for her health, she would tell us that she wouldn’t see us again because she was going to die.  She was so happy when we cried over her.  Everything was a test.  Everything.  Failure – a wrong opinion, an innocent remark that she misconstrued into something insulting, even failing to sound sufficiently giddy when talking to her on the phone – was punished with anything from guilt trips to smaller or less expensive holiday gifts.  Whenever she was fighting with a member of the family (which was basically always), she would tell us how horrible that person was, how cruel.  Even if it was my mom, my dad, my brother.  Everything was an argument, and all arguments required taking sides.  If there wasn’t something to be angry about, she’d sprinkle passive-aggressive comments around the family until a crisis had been manufactured.  Everything she said was calculated to provoke a specific reaction in me, specific behavior. I was the best grandchild.  I needed to be more like my brother.  I was looking so pretty that day.  I was looking very unfeminine, did I want to look like a little boy?  I must have lost weight!    I needed to lay off the food – no gravy for her, waiter, she doesn’t need it.

I loved her.  I hated her.  She taught me the names of flowers and how to feel satisfaction when a cruel word strikes its mark.  I have her love of music.  I have her instinct for manipulation.  I am one of the living legacies of a sad, angry, seriously fucked-up woman, and I am not untouched by it.

“No,” I told my mom, finally.  “Either she can hear me or she can’t… in the first case it doesn’t matter, and in the second it’d only be cruel to a dying woman.”

“But you could tell her that you forgive her.”

“Like that would make a difference.  She’d never admit that she needed forgiveness in the first place.”

Which… is true.  But really?  I never needed her to understand that she hurt me.  What I needed – still need, if the nightmares I’ve been having in the month since she died mean anything at all – is for her to see me.  The real me, not the good-girl mask I learned to wear in her presence before I was in my first training bra.  It’s not even about acceptance, just acknowledgement.  I wanted her to know who I am.

So, Grandma?  Whether you’re a ghost, or in heaven, or busy getting ready to be born somewhere, or there’s nothing left of you but a box of cremains that will soon be interred in one of the worse parts of Detroit:

I am your granddaughter. I’m forty years old, and I don’t play coy or lie about it.  I’m fat, I don’t wear makeup, I have a dyed-turquoise streak in my hair, and a skunk tattoo on my shoulder.  I am a pagan-flavored atheist, partly out of rationality, but mostly because I feel in my bones that causing a child to come into existence solely so that it can die ‘for mankind’s redemption’ is an act of purest evil.  I’m queer.  These days I identify as a biromantic demisexual, which means that while I could be romantically interested in anyone, it takes a deep emotional connection before I feel at all attracted to them.  That ‘roommate’ we had for all those years?  Yeah, she was my girlfriend.  I still read those science-fiction and fantasy books that you hated so much, but I have a secret weakness for historical romances.  I make a living in computers, and I still play video games. I don’t care about my appearance, except when I do, and I am a total magpie for sparkling jewelry.  I’m afraid.  Afraid of people, of the world, of the future, of the inside of my own brain. I want to kill myself sometimes. I take medication for my mental illnesses, and I don’t play coy or lie about that, either.  And I try, hard, every day, to be kind. To look for goodness in other people instead of weakness.  To not be thoughtlessly cruel.  To be straightforward.  To be less broken than my mom, who is less broken than you were.  I fail sometimes.  I keep trying.  

Hi.  It’s nice to finally meet you.

[lunafeather]

Hi, for the WIP for Brio: Lee's fic fic, post season 3 and/or don't let me go but not. And also the urban fantasy script sounds intriguing. No pressure, but very excited about potential new Brio fic from you, I love your writing!

Man, everyone has been super sweet and that makes me feel warm and toasty inside!!

Lee’s fic fic

So everyone knows and loves @johnisntevendead (ConvolutedConcussions)’s story Better Than a Harmony. Lee is/was my fic enabler (and I theirs) and we collaborated on this idea. I am obviously super in love with it, and I was inspired to write a fic of their morning after their first time in that universe -- so basically a fic of a fic. I had a really strong idea and wrote a very small bit and then it disappeared into the wind.... If they ever pick it up again, I may get reinspired! The fic was meant to be sleepy fluffy morning smut.

An Excerpt:

The first thing he's aware of is that his hand is full of warm softness. The next thing he's aware of is that he's naked, and after that -- he's not alone. This final point is punctuated by a delicious roll of wide hips against an impressive bout of morning wood, and he buries his nose in her hair to smother a groan.

“Time to get up already, ma?”

“Oh, you're the one who's up already…” she murmurs, grinding back again. “Hard to sleep through almost being impaled.”

Post S3

Answered Here

Don’t Let Go but not

My original idea for this prompt was a bit different: Beth and Dean are at this soccer league/PTA “potluck” that’s more like a little carnival, much to Rio’s chagrin. Beth sees Rio and tries to avoid him, tries to keep Dean from seeing him, but fails. They get into a fight and Dean storms off. Rio ruthlessly teases her, not realizing how upset she is. Dean retaliates by flirting openly with one of the other mom’s at the potluck, Beth is furious but doesn’t say anything -- just keeps drinking. Eventually one of the PTA moms mocks Beth because of Dean and Beth loses her shit.. Rio steps in when Dean can’t handle it, telling Dean to take his children home while he handles Beth. He takes Beth to his car with Marcus, who sweetly asks if Miss Elizabeth is okay, she suddenly goes ramrod straight despite her drunkenness. Rio gets her in his car and holds her hand, she tells him “don’t let go”.

I love how silly the idea is, and I love the fluffiness of it, and I also had a strong start -- and then I lost the idea and it drifted to what is now Don’t Let Go on AO3.

An Excerpt:

He wasn’t planning on going; he’s got too much shit to do and the idea of spending more than 10 minutes with the insufferable, snotty white suburban moms and stuck up, too-tight collared blonde, tanned suburban dads leaves a sour taste on his tongue, and he’s not sure he’s up for it, even with Marcus jutting out his lower lip and letting it wobble just so -- he doesn’t want to examine where his kid learned that particular trick -- and his ex giving him a pointed look that reeks of you-were-gone-for-three-months-and-you-owe-it-to-him.

But that tiny part of him that’s always fixated on her, his strawberry blonde, whitest of the white suburban mamas (but so much more than that, a voice whispers), urges him to finally cave and agree to take Marcus to this damn end-of-the-soccer-season potluck. Rhea had for some reason not switched their kid to a different team after the debacle with Elizabeth inserting herself into their lives (likely, he surmises, due to that lip wobble), and these kind of events scream Elizabeth’s name, so he’s certain she’ll be there with her brood. Maybe even with her dumbass husband, too.

He also would rather not examine why the thought of getting all up in her business while her husband watches gets him feeling a certain kind of way.

His hemming and hawing means he and Marcus are an hour or so late, including the time it takes to swing by a french bakery to pick up dessert as his contribution to the party. As soon as Marcus spills out of his G wagon, the kid is beelining to the playground, shrieking Jane’s name and colliding with her as she tumbles down one of the slides.

Urban Fantasy Web/TV Series

Another Lee/Meghan Collaboration! We’re both queer and interested in very modern settings with fantasy woven in, so we took an idea I had been fostering for a while and went back and forth for a while until we had a solid concept. It would probably be a Web Series as those are easier to self produce, but I would much rather see it as a one hour TV series. Alas, that’s a while off, so a web series works for now!

The main character of our story is not the main character of her Universe’s story -- the “Main Magical Girl” is a huge lesbian disaster and is often not around, seeing as she’s like.... doing stuff to save their world. Our lead woman is a bookworm who stumbles on a secret society of sorts who protects the knowledge that every book in this universe isn’t actually a book; each one is a recording of the goings on in other universes that really exist.

Magic in this world is illegal. There are other magical sentient races: Faeries, Nymphs, and Pixies (who are tiny and treated like vermin, so they have to hide. The MC has one living in the walls of her apartment that she befriends). The Fae world exists alongside the human one, there’s halflings for most of the races. There are different schools of magic.

Our MC starts talking to another woman through the books, and they eventually fall in love. Other girl is in trouble in her world, and there’s something evil stalking her. They eventually learn how to open portals between books. Our MC isn’t inherently versed in the known magical schools, but has her own type.

There’s quite a few awesome supporting characters: Corvo, the bi halfling black man who was once in an apprenticeship to be a Librarian who now runs an independent book store and has a special relationship with corvids; Tessa, our MC’s bi activist cousin who is feisty and sarcastic and ends up falling deeply in love with Corvo; Corvo’s big beefy ex bf who’s a sweet, gentle gay disaster; Artemis, the deaf non-white witch who runs a magic speakeasy and has circle runes tattooed on her fingers and palms to boost her magic.

The villain is capitalism/racism/power obsession.

I often tag stuff that inspires me for this series, the most common being ones that remind me of Corvo (tagged on my blog with that name). I really, really, really want to eventually make this happen, I am so in love with the idea, and so in love with the core 4 characters.

An Excerpt:

Close to the climax, within the third act, Sage and Aya communicate through a stable portal and Sage is giving Aya what she needs to save her world…

SAGE:  Hey, one more thing. AYA:  What?

SAGE reaches into the portal and drags AYA forward, their lips touch just where each of their worlds meet.  The kiss is passionate.  When it ends, they press their foreheads together for a brief moment.

SAGE:  I, uh--I believe in you.

+

Sage and Tessa, in the dead of night (for the dramz) have a book they absolutely should not have and are planning on finally opening the portal into Aya’s world--their plan is nebulous at best, they’re gonna bring Aya into this world, not realizing it’s not just her who’s in danger, but her entire world.  Corvo interrupts in grand fashion, telling them to stop, that they don’t know what they’re doing.

TESSA:  She’s in danger and they’re in love!  Also, fuck you! CORVO:  No, you don’t get it--you two?  Cannot do this.  Also, you’ll sorta cause the apocalypse.  She’ll die, we’ll die… lots of death. TESSA:  I’m sorry, who the fuck are you? CORVO: Never mind who I am, you’ve got bigger shit to worry about--you think your shenanigans didn’t put you on their radar?? TESSA, looking incredulous:  “Shenanigans?”

Some noise, like a clatter or footsteps, signals they are not alone.

CORVO:  Oh, shitting f--you gotta get outta here and put that thing back where it came from.  [He either points at the book or hands it to Sage or Tessa.]

Thank you so much for your kind words about my writing, it seriously gives me that boost to keep writing when I start losing steam. Thank you, thank you, thank you <3

Send me a title from my list of WIPs that you’d like to know more about!