#and they were raised in the soviet union and we had a bit of a talk about how art was better because it wasn't for profit.

[sciderman]

How do you feel about the increase in really weird NSFW ads on here (advertising panels that look like sexual encounters, and AI art apps that pride themselves on porn) but will take down NSFW posts from their users, even if it isn't technically sexual.

i hate all social media and it's consistent prioritising the advertisers over the users and the internet simply was a better place before capitalism sunk its hooks into it

[houseofbrat]

Bernie Would Have Won

By Krystal Ball

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases. 

But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. 

Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade status.

Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth. But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.

The underlying forces of destruction came to a head with two major catastrophes, the Iraq War and the housing collapse/Great Recession. The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people. How could it be that the greedy villains who triggered a global economic calamity were made whole while regular people were left to wither on the vine?

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life. 

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.  

These two movements traveled on separate tracks within their respective party alliances and met wildly different fates. On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures. The uber-rich are not among the villains of the populist right (see: Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and so on), except in so much as they overlap with cultural leftism. The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests. This comfort with him was affirmed after he cut their taxes and prioritized union busting and deregulation in his first term in office.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders from a similar party takeover. The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

This identity politics sword has also been wielded within the Democratic Party to crush any possibility of a Bernie-inspired class focused movement in Congress attempted by the Justice Democrats and the Squad in 2018. My colleague Ryan Grim has written an entire book on this subject so I won’t belabor the point here. But suffice it to say, the threat of the Squad to the Democratic Party’s ideology and order has been thoroughly neutralized. The Squad members themselves, perhaps out of ideology and perhaps out of fear of being smeared as racist, leaned into identitarian politics which rendered them non-threatening in terms of national popular appeal. They were also relentlessly attacked from within the party, predominately by pro-Israel groups that an unprecedented tens of millions of dollars in House primaries, which has led to the defeat of several members and has served as a warning and threat to the rest.

That brings us to today where the Democratic Party stands in the ashes of a Republican landslide which will sweep Donald Trumpback into the White House. The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

I have always believed that Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016, though of course there is no way to know for sure. What we can say for sure is that the brand of class-first social democracy Bernie ran on in 2016 has proven successful in other countries because of course the crisis of neoliberalism is a global phenomenon. Most notably, Bernie’s basic political ideology was wildly successful electorally with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now his successor Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. AMLO, in fact, was one of the most popular leaders in the entire world and dramatically improved the livelihoods of a majority of his countrymen. Bernie’s basic ideology was also successful in our own history.

In the end, I got this election dead wrong. I thought between January 6th and the roll back of human rights for women, it would be enough. I thought that the overtly fascist tendencies of Donald Trump and the spectacle of the world’s richest man bankrolling him would be enough strikes against him to overcome the problems of the Democratic Party which I have spoken out about for years now–problems Kamala Harris decided to lean into rather than confront. Elevating Liz Cheney as a top surrogate was not just a slap in the face to all the victims of American imperialism—past and ongoing; it was a broad signal to voters that Democrats were the party of elites, playing directly into right-wing populist tropes. While the media talked about it as a “tack to the center,” author and organizer Jonathan Smucker more aptly described it as “a tack to the top.” And as I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do with the actual left and certainly not the populist left. 

Instead, Trump’s victory represents a defeat of social democratic class-first politics in America—not quite final, but not temporary either. The Democrats have successfully smothered the movement, blocked the entranceways, salted the earth. Instead they will, as Bill Clinton did in the ‘90s, embrace the fundamental tenets of the Trumpist worldview. 

They already are, in fact. Democrats have dropped their resistance to Trump’s mass deportation policies and immigrant scapegoating. The most ambitious politician in the Democratic coalition, Gavin Newsom, is making a big show of being tough-on-crime and dehumanizing the homeless. Democrat-leaning billionaires like Jeff Bezos who not only owns Amazon but the Washington Post have already abandoned their resistance.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

[ms-spkhd]

thinking about a Blast From the Past steddie au tonight. like, think about it for a second--steve as the sweet, well-meaning himbo raised in a fallout shelter and eddie as the cynic who shows him the world as it is:

The year was 1962, and an atomic bomb had just dropped on top of the Harrington household.

Okay, not really. It was actually a fighter jet that suffered a mechanical failure just above the little plot of land the Harringtons called their home, but Walter Harrington took it differently. Far differently.

See, the thing was that the man was living in a state of paranoid delusion over the Cold War--terrified of the possibility of an outright nuclear holocaust over the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Soviet Union. He had been carefully building a fallout shelter under his home for his wife and possible children to live in with the works--canned food, running water, and even a working television.

And one day they went in and simply never left. The explosion right when they closed the door was tangible proof that the nuclear war was happening right above them.

A few years later, around 1968, a baby boy was born in a fallout shelter with no one but his mom and dad to keep him company.

They raised Steve the best they could, even if Walter Harrington was a mad genius and Madeline Harrington was a borderline alcoholic. Even if the boy was living in a perfect little time capsule of the fifties and early sixties. Walter made sure to educate him right and teach him how to be a sociable gentleman--even if he had no idea what swear words or the concept of sex were. That was for another time. Although, twenty-four years came and went for Steve Harrington, his father still owes him 'another time'.

Steve Harrington grows twenty-four years in perfect seclusion, but that changes at the flick of a switch.

The year is 1992: supplies are dwindling Walter is growing sick, and Steve is tasked to bravely set foot in the nuclear fallout to retrieve more material. (The only reason why Walter assumes they can even get more stuff is because he observed the outside world when the shelter unlocked and mistook it as a post-apocalyptic mutant society.)

The moment Steve made it outside his little bubble, he was utterly fascinated by the world--how different the people were outside of his television and his little books, how bright the sky was outside, how the irritable man on the bus wouldn't accept the money he tried to give him, how the bus moved and didn't fling him right off his seat.

(He even saw an adult bookstore. Dad told him that those things were filled with poisonous gas. How were they even to operate if they were filled with poisonous gas? That's dangerous and totally inconsiderate of the general public's safety.)

Anyway, he tries to follow the grocery list that Mom and Dad gave him the best he can, stocking up on poultry and tissue paper and the works. But by the end of the day, he doesn't know where he came from. Not a single sign or building or person can give him a single clue where to go.

After a few hours of wandering, suitcase in hand, he comes across a store with WE BUY BASEBALL CARDS written on the window.

Golly, Steve loves baseball cards--could look at Dad's collection for hours, and with the collection he has, he could make a pretty penny selling them for supplies. Despite the little hobby store being beside an adult bookstore with poisonous gas, he scampers right in.

"I see you're looking to buy baseball cards," he says breezily to the gruff, scary-looking man behind the counter.

"That I am," he replies.

Steve pulls a few from his jacket's inner pocket. "Well, these are a bit old, you see, but I was hoping you still might be interested."

The gruff man yanks them from his hands, a spark in his eye. He looks delighted to see them, and it fills Steve with an excitement he hadn't felt at all today. Nobody has been this happy over something he's done today. "Woah," he gasps, then covers it with a cough. "Mickey Mantle rookie season...how much do you want?"

"I was hoping to sell all of my cards, actually!"

The man sputters incredulously. "All of 'em? Are you fucking with me?"

"I'm not sure what that means, but all I have are hundred-dollar bills and I need something smaller. Like, uh...ones, tens, fives..."

"Tell you what, I'll give you five hundred in small bills for all you got."

Steve smiles brightly. "Oh, that would be wonderful, sir--"

"Five hundred for a case-full of rookie season Mickey Mantles, Rick, are you fucking joking?" A deep voice cuts through Steve's thanks from the other side of the small store. He turns around to find a man leaning against a magazine rack, arms folded sternly.

The man is unlike Steve's ever seen before. Long, long limbs and big brown eyes that look traced with black and smudged around the edges. Pretty lips, too almost girl-ish, in the way they were big and plush like the women he'd see on the television. The strangest thing about him, though, was the curly hair that tumbled past his shoulders.

He looked mad, though. Madder than mad.

"Tell the poor guy you're fucking with him," long-hair-pretty-lips says to the man behind the counter, who bristles.

"Were you raised in a fucking barn, Munson? Who told you to interrupt on business?" Rick counters. Steve was really not appreciating the amount of f-words dropped in the conversation, it was uncouth.

"Sure I was!" Munson saunters towards the counter and Steve's eyes follow him like a moth to a light. "But my morals go past your business practices at this point. You remember the ninth commandment, yeah?"

"You shut your Goddamn mouth--"

"Excuse me sir, but I really don't appreciate how you're using the Lord's name in vain like that," Steve says firmly.

"See?" Munson smiles. It's like sunlight. "He gets it."

He plucks the baseball card from Rick's hand and holds it over his head when he tries to reach for it again. "See this little thing?" He says to Steve sweetly. "This guy costs six grand alone."

"Get out of town! Really?"

"Oh yeah, big guy. Selling the thing would give you a small fortune, and Rick over here is trying to con you out of it."

Steve frowns. "Is that true?" He asks Rick.

"Nothing but," Munson says in place of him. He slips the card back into Steve's hands and gives them a pat.

"The Hell is even keeping you here, Munson?" Rick sneers. "Did the gig you won't shut up about fall through like they usually do? Better to bum it out here than in your shithole apartment? Stop loitering in my damn store and make like a fucking tree. You're banned."

"Whatever helps you sleep at night," Munson says rolling his eyes. He looks at Steve, then the door, gesturing at it with a flick of his head. "I'll see you out, Beaver."

He walks them both out the door, stopping to gesture at Rick strangely--hands balled into fists with only his middle fingers up--before stepping outside onto the sidewalk.

"Well merci, Monsieur," Steve says appreciatively, because Dad taught him French was always to be used on such occasions.

"What, you're French?"

"Oh no, I'm"--he thinks back to what Dad told him if a mutant asks where he's from. Gosh, he thinks he's supposed to be--"out on business."

"And you don't even have a clue about the little business trick that Rick tried to pull?"

"No...no, I--"

"Yeah, doesn't matter." Munson shrugs. He smiles sympathetically at Steve before turning on his heel and walking off. Oh boy, what would he do without him?

He follows him like a lost puppy, that's what.

"...You going the same way?" Munson asks incredulously. Steve shakes his head.

"Well, I'm following you."

Munson stops in his tracks, blinking, and Steve almost runs into him in his state. "Me?"

"Well yes! Where are we going?"

"We?" Munson asserts. "I'm going back to my shithole apartment, and judging by that jacket you're wearing, you should be taking the next left and hop-skipping straight to the barber college."

"Oh, I'm lost, though."

"Aren't we all?"

"Say, did you just get banned from that hobby store because of me?" Steve says to change the subject.

Munson sighs. "Seems like I did, sailor. The place was shitty anyways, with that dickhead running the operation. Wayne could get better cards from a different joint."

...dickhead? Steve's never heard that leave the seams of anyone's lips before. "Dickhead?"

"Yeah, he's a real fucking loser. A walking talking penis capable of human speech."

Steve gets queasy at the image he's concocted in his head. He leans against the nearest brick wall, his suitcase tumbling to the ground as he drops into a contemplative squat.

"Dude, what is wrong with you?"

"Well, the mental image that I..."

Munson's eyebrows scrunch before he reaches out a hand to Steve. He takes it, letting the man haul him upward. "Look, man, where'd you park your car?"

"I came by bus."

"Aren't you full of surprises."

"I am?"

"Okay look." Eddie raises his hands, palms splayed in the air. "It's your first time in Los Angeles, right? Everyone wants a taste of it, I know, and you're out for business and fucking famished. You got the opportunity to see the great big world outside of your little bubble and you got excited--but you took a bus and got mixed up in the middle of San Fernando Valley without a clue in the world. Am I correct?"

Steve listens in wonderment. So far, Munson's been correct in a way. He's convinced he might be psychic. He nods slowly and seriously just to see Munson flash that lighting-strike smile.

"Great, great. Which brings us to here. Correct again?"

"Oh yeah."

"Where are you staying?"

Nowhere, at the moment. Steve opens his mouth to say so, but Munson interrupts quickly. "Holiday Inn?"

"Yes, the Holiday Inn!" Steve says totally truthfully.

"Okay, cool. Cool." Munson claps his hands together with finality and starts walking. "The nearest bus station is a couple of blocks away if you take a right--"

"Don't you have a car?"

Munson stops in his tracks again. He turns to face Steve once again. "What's your name, sweetheart?"

Something warm pools in Steve's gut at the pet name. Something about the way those pretty lips form that word sends blood rushing to his cheeks. "Steve," he says.

"Alright, Steve." Oh boy, his name sounds even better when Munson says it. "Rule number one in Los Angeles? Never let a stranger drive you anywhere."

"If it makes you feel any better," Steve says sweetly, "I don't have a gun."

Munson pales, then starts running.

"Hey!" Steve cries and makes haste to follow him. "I must've said something wrong, please forgive me!"

"Nope, nope--get the fuck away from me, man!"

He grabs Munson's wrist to pull him back, which is a bad move since the man starts writhing around in his grip. "I'm not going to hurt you, sir!"

Steve drops Munson's hand and raises his in surrender. "See?"

"...Just let me get to my car."

"I'll give you a Rogers Hornsby if you take me to my hotel," Steve reasons.

Munson stills. "...That's like four grand, don't bullshit me."

He pulls the card from his jacket and presents it as evidence. "See? I was holding it back." He wants Munson to feel safe. "I got two." He reaches for the other cards in his pockets and pulls them out. "And-and all these other ones, too!"

"Okay, okay. You'll give me four thousand dollars if I drive you to your place?"

"Uh-uh!"

"That's it?"

"Yep."

"And I don't have to give you a quickie in the backseat or anything?"

"Yes sir--wait, what?"

Munson blows past his question like it didn't even leave Steve's mouth. "Can you stop with the sir crap?"

"Well, I'm sorry, sir--"

"My name is Eddie."

Eddie...Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. Wow, what a name. It's almost like something he's heard on the television.

"Why, it's nice to meet you, Eddie."

"Tolerable to meet you too, Steve."

Steve smiles shyly, then asks, "So are you a girl?"

"Excuse me?"

"Well it's just your hair...it's so long." Steve points at his as an example. "I've never seen anything like it before."

"Dude, it's 1992, every other guy looks like this--have you been living under a rock or something?"

Something like that. Steve shrugs.

"Well guys having long hair doesn't mean that they're girls, Steve, that's a given. It's not 1962 anymore." Eddie backtracks. "Well, I mean, dudes can have long hair and be chicks and chicks can be dudes too but that's not--"

"Oh, wow, my dad told me about one of those the last time he went here!"

"Oh that's fantastic, sweetheart," Eddie says, sugary-sweet. "But how about I drive you home?"

"That'd be a pleasure, Eddie."

[libertineangel]

A history & overview of communist groups in Britain

I've done so much reading into all the different splinter groups here, trying and failing to find one worth joining, that I might as well make all this accrued knowledge useful in case anyone wants to know what the situation is like (spoiler alert, it's a shitshow). I'll put it under a cut 'cause it'll probably get fairly long, and I'll tackle the Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist sides separately 'cause they split in about 1932 and have barely had any crossover since.

I will not be unduly neutral or polite in my assessments, because Mao would call that liberalism and also it's no fun, so get ready to roll your eyes a lot and understand exactly what made Monty Python do the People's Front of Judea bit.

The (ostensibly) Marxist-Leninist side

In 1920, several smaller Marxist groups merged to form the Communist Party of Great Britain, the official British section of the Third International, and immediately set to work arguing with itself about the viability of parliamentarism, eventually adopting Lenin's position on the temporary utility of reformist unions & parties, which led them to spend several years trying - and even succeeding in a couple of seats - a strategy of entryism into the Labour Party, which is a phrase we will all get tired of by the end of this post; when Labour then lost the general election in 1924 it blamed the Communists and banned all their members, which sounds awfully familiar.

The CPGB did gain a fair bit of support & swelled its membership during the general strike of 1926 though, albeit in a handful of specific areas and industries, and then lost most of them again during the Comintern's Third Period because the workers didn't want to abandon their existing trade unions in favour of revolutionary ones. Did a couple of decent things in the 30s, fought at Cable Street and raised a small battalion for the International Brigades; they went back & forth on their stance on WW2 in line with the Comintern, supported strikes, actually reached their peak membership (~60,000, still tiny compared to their European comrades) during the war because they were the loudest anti-racist, anti-colonial voice around who did do a fair bit to raise public awareness of Britain's horrific treatment of India.

In 1951 they issued a new programme, The British Road to Socialism, which is pathetic reformist bollocks that insists peaceful transition to socialism is possible and sensible, and five years later the Soviet suppression of the '56 uprisings caused a massive split that saw a good 30% or so leave the party, causing them to return to the good old tactic of trying to push Labour and the unions leftward.

Nothing material really came of that and the Party declined further with the Sino-Soviet split, after which a minority of pro-China members left to form the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which has since turned Hoxhaist (also surprisingly anti-immigration, and I'm fairly sure they're transphobic). Throughout the 70s they got increasingly Eurocommunist until even more revolutionaries got sick of them, and in 1977 another split saw the formation of the New Communist Party of Britain, which claims to still be anti-revisionist while also having spent the last 24 years insisting everyone vote for Labour (also from what I've heard they don't even email potential recruits back, so I doubt they'll survive beyond their current old membership, not that they'll be much loss because I don't believe they've ever actually done anything). Tensions between the Eurocommunist leadership and the Party membership continued to rise through the 80s until a final split in '88 produced the Communist Party of Britain, which is still extant today and still uses that silly electoral reformist programme from the 50s, and as an indicator of how that's going they earned 10,915 votes in the London Assembly elections this year, the third fewest of any candidate, less than half even of the fucking Christian People's Alliance (also their youth wing the YCL has marched alongside TERFs up in Scotland, they're the party that one author endorsed over Labour).

The CPGB finally folded in '91 and its leaders founded a series of steadily softer left think tanks, while other self-declared Leninists went on to form the Communist Party of Britain (Provisional Central Committee), which is so small and insignificant I can't even figure out when they actually started; nowadays they are, to quote someone off Reddit, "a small and almost entirely male group of Kautsky enthusiasts and leftist trainspotters with a knack for the fine art of unintentional self-parody, who regularly publish articles defending Marxism against the feminist menace."

Entirely separate from all that shit, in 1972 a group of students inspired by Hardial Baines formed the Hoxhaist Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and honestly I don't really know much about them because nobody online seems to have any idea if they do anything and looking at their website burned my fucking eyes. There's also the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (yeah a different one), formed in 2004 when a bunch of people got expelled from infamous union leader Arthur Scargill's party; they are so rabidly transphobic it makes the CPB look welcoming.

Finally, there's the Revolutionary Communist Group, which surprisingly formed out of the Trotskyist International Socialists (which became the SWP, we'll get to that soon); they're not a formal Party because they don't think the revolutionary situation here is developed enough for one, but they are fairly active in protests and pickets. Unfortunately, back in 2017 they dragged their heels investigating a member's sexual assault and then let the perpetrator back in after a two-month suspension and apology letter.

The Trotskyist side, if you can stomach it after all that bollocks

Modern British Trotskyism descends entirely from the Revolutionary Communist Party of 1944, formed by the merger of two smaller groups at the request of the Fourth International. They split after three years over the viability of entryism into the Labour Party, with the majority correctly seeing it as bollocks. Unfortunately, the majority RCP did fuck all afterward and grew disillusioned enough with the leadership to throw their lot in with the minority breakaway known as The Club, who kicked them all out again and proceeded to never do anything of note whatsoever (they eventually changed their name to the Workers' Revolutionary Party and imploded in about nine different - equally irrelevant - directions in the 80s when founder Gerry Healy was expelled for having serially abused women in the party for decades).

Followers of notable RCP member Tony Cliff (formerly the 4I's leader in Palestine) joined him in his new Socialist Review Group, devoted to Trotskyism but breaking from orthodoxy in favour of Cliff's theory of state capitalism that's silly even by Trotskyist standards that I don't think even the party itself really adheres to anymore. They changed their name to International Socialists in 1962, tried to appeal for left unity and got roundly ignored by everyone except a small Trotskyist group called Workers' Fight, which joined the IS, swelled their own ranks, tried to challenge the leadership and got thrown out again; they still cling onto existence as the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, whose existence I had completely forgotten until I saw a poster of theirs down my road and remembered I was in fact at the London Young Labour conference which banned them for refusing to properly investigate the repeated abuse of a teenage boy in their youth faction. The IS still tried to grow, but expelled what would become the aforementioned RCG in '72, expelled the faction that's now Workers Power in '74 (whom I have never heard of, which at least means I don't know of any awful shit they've done), tore themselves in half in '75 when Tony Cliff decided older workers were reformist and recruitment should focus on the youth, and in 1977 they renamed themselves the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP did do a few decent things, like form the Anti-Nazi League and organise Rock Against Racism, but to be honest those had a much bigger impact on the British punk scene than actual politics. Using charities and campaign groups to jump on bandwagons for shameless self-promotion is mostly what they're known for these days, along with making placards for any protest anywhere no matter how irrelevant they are to the party's platform; their membership and image among the left took a tremendous blow in 2014 after the Comrade Delta scandal, in which they were found to have covered up the National Secretary's repeated sexual abuse for years.

Followers of other notable RCP member Ted Grant joined him (after their expulsion from The Club) in his Revolutionary Socialist League, which believed in entryism into the Labour Party, and in 1965 it split with the 4I (because the 4I thought they were shit) to become Militant. They actually managed to take control of Labour's youth wing and successfully pushed the Party to commit to nationalising the country's major monopolies, but when Labour - on a platform of spending cuts and reformist liberal appeasement - lost the election to Thatcher in '79 they blamed it on the Communists and in December '82 they got blacklisted (which sounds awfully familiar). Took a while for that to sink in though, and Militant-affiliated members actually managed to take over Liverpool City Council through the mid-80s - they planned a massive amount of public works building, cancelling redundancies and other such things that sounded good but they really couldn't pay for, and tried to play bankruptcy chicken against Margaret Thatcher, which went as badly as you'd imagine and embarrassed them on the national stage (even if the people of Liverpool still supported them). Their last act was to help instigate the Poll Tax Riots in 1990, but that was one good deed to many for a Trotskyist group and they finally split in '91 - a majority decided they should finally sever ties with Labour and strike out on their own, while the minority insisted that entryism into the Labour Party really could net real national success if we just keep trying come on guys let's stay on the sinking ship history has taught us nothing!!!

The majority formed the Socialist Party, who have done nothing of note ever, and in 2013 they failed to adequately respond to sexual harassment within their ranks. In 2018 their international, the Committee for a Workers' International, experienced a split which it looks to me was over the old established leadership not getting with the times when it comes to women and LGBT+ people, and the majority went off to form the International Socialist Alternative, with the Socialist Alternative being its British branch; just last April the Irish section disaffiliated with the ISA because of its poor handling of abuse allegations against a leading member.

The minority stayed in Labour under the name Socialist Appeal, under the leadership of Ted Grant & Alan Woods, never really doing anything, and in 2021 Keir Starmer's left purge finally banned them, which was totally unrelated to their decision to finally strike out on their own this year as the Revolutionary Communist Party (yeah a different one). They're a money-grabbing newspaper-obsessed cult who've harboured abusers in five different countries, and to be honest I don't even see why they still exist now that they're no longer devoted to entryism considering that was the entire reason they split from the rest of Militant in the first place, they might as well reunify with the CWI or the ISA but far be it from me to expect insular Trotskyist control freaks to make sensible, practical political moves or to ever get the fuck over a split.

[xxruinaxxmcu]

Jack Thompson x Reader

Previous Chapters 

What Lies Before US

Chapter 19

A/N: once again thank you @clinicallydepressedreader for the lovely reblog of the last chapter! I do appreciate every like/feedback a great deal. 

The next morning, before the sun had made its way above the horizon, the two of them packed up their things in the office before making their way back to the bunker. It was still locked, so Jack entered the code to gain access.

“Seems like no one broke out”, he commented sarcastically.

They were greeted by silence as they made their way back towards the interrogation chamber. The first person they came across was Sousa, who looked like he hadn’t slept much.

“You look a bit under the weather”, Y/N said with a small smile, “Everything alright?”

The brunet nodded. “Yeah. Peggy’s asleep. So is her brother.”

“Did you get anything?”, Jack asked, pointing towards the interrogation room with his chin.

“Yeah”, he huffed, “seems like you really are our best interrogator, Jack. What a pity you’ll switch agencies.” He paused: “Apparently, he was captured in 1940 and brought to a facility in East Prussia, where he underwent torture for several years. After the war, HYDRA found new allies in the Soviet Union interested in their research, so the base continued in Kaliningrad.”

“So the Soviets know about that entire mind control stuff?”, Thompson asked, crossing his arms with a scowl. This was bad. HYDRA was a rogue organisation without a state to back it, but the Soviet Union had an entire apparatus behind it.

“Yeah”, Daniel confirmed, “he mentioned that they continued to work on their technique, improve the compliance of their subjects.”

“That’s why he’s only the BETA candidate”, Y/N threw in, “There must be an ALPHA, too. Someone who’s been trained better. That’s what they outlined in that booklet, too. Does he have details on that person?”

Daniel shook his head: “They made sure for candidates not to meet.”

“And do we know if he’s stable without a handler? Or is he just going to revert back into mad-mode?”, Jack questioned.

“I give no guarantees”, Daniel scoffed, “but I think without Keller’s orders, it should be fine. We’ll still send him to see a psychiatrist to look into possible de-programming, in case we were to ever run into another HYDRA scientist again.” His head turned to Y/N. “Thank you, Y/N. I know you could’ve shot him to get our mission done with less personal risk.”

She waved her hand: “Daniel. I’ve pulled the trigger too quick too often. I suppose I can try the other way once in a while.” Feeling Jack’s gaze upon her, she knew that he knew what she felt, even if he disagreed with her feeling that sense of guilt.

“We’ll take him back to L.A. with us”, Daniel said, nudging his head in the direction of where Michael was still locked up, “probably we’ll leave in about ten hours. Peggy organised private means of transportation.”

“You mean she called Stark.”

“I mean she called Stark”, Sousa confirmed Jack’s guess. “Are you coming with us?”

The two exchanged a quick glance.

“I think we have to get our affairs sorted in New York. I have to talk to McKinley to make him interim Chief”, Jack pulled a face, “and yes, I vetted him as thoroughly as I could, and though he doesn’t have my charm, he’s sure as hell not gonna turn out a Communist or HYDRA agent.”

Daniel and Y/N scoffed simultaneously.

“I described you in a great many ways, Thompson, but charming?”, Daniel grinned.

“If you need backup”, Y/N said, not having to say more than that to clarify her offer. Sousa nodded.

“We will.”

“I’ll organise our fights back to New York”, Y/N said to Jack before marching off to one of the offices to call the airline.

When she had left, Jack turned to Sousa.

“I need Carter to spend a weekend with Y/N, get her out of New York.”

“What?”, Sousa raised an eyebrow, “Are you double-crossing someone again?” It was a clearly a joke, but Jack still rolled his eyes.

“No, you jackass”, he huffed, “but there’s something I need to do, and I can’t have her knowing just yet. Come on, it’s awful keeping a secret from a spy, so I need a spy to help me!”

Daniel had his suspicions where this was headed, so he nodded without further question.

A few hours later, Y/N and Jack got ready to leave Miami behind.

“Tell Peggy I wish her all the best”, Y/N said to Sousa when they got ready to enter the taxi, “I think she’s quite busy with everything that’s happened.”

“I will”, Sousa said with a smile, “Thank you for the help.”

“Don’t mention it”, she said, “You two have saved our asses more than enough, too.”

Just when they were about to climb into the cab, the door flew open again and Peggy stormed out to hug Y/N. “You didn’t think I would not say goodbye to you, did you?”

“I’m sure you’ve got bigger things on your mind then waving at me”, Y/N laughed, “especially since I’m sure we’ll speak on the phone before you know it.”

“You can count on it!”, Peggy looked over to Jack, nodding at him. “Thank you, Jack. I even relinquish the desire to shoot you.”

Jack snorted. “Yeah? Thanks, Marge.”

“See you around, you two”, Peggy said with a smile as they departed. For once, despite the entire Michael-situation wasn’t yet resolved completely, their case was closed. Keller was dead. The Arena Club dismantled.

Jack Thompson’s and Y/N L/N’s tenue at the SSR was coming to a close.

……………

They decided to remain at the SSR for four more weeks to wrap things up, then take a few days off with the vacation days that they had, in theory, accumulated but had been unable to ever use because the world wouldn’t stop ending before starting at the CIA in March of 1948. That meant that they had a few weeks of mostly filing and other desk duties, which came to Y/N’s advantage as it gave her wound time to heal without feeling like she was missing out on anything that would’ve needed her skillset. A definite downside to that was, however, that it provided time to think. And as good as they were when dealing with criminals, from mobster to mad scientist, they were equally terrible at handling domestic issues.

And there was a rather big one that they had to take care of one way or another. Their own wedding.

‘Why the hell are you worrying about this, Thompson? You’ve seen how it goes at Carter and Sousa’s. Just don’t fall flat on your face and you’ll be fine’, Jack thought to himself, though he knew he was only kidding himself. There were a million things that could go wrong. Family was a blessing, but it was also a can of worms. And his friends from university and from his time in the Marine Corps didn’t know each other, so they might hate each other. And there was the miniscule thing around Y/N’s family. Or, more precisely, her father.

Their wedding would take place in February, which meant that it would most likely be cold as hell, but there wasn’t much they could do about it, it was one of the only moments – perhaps of their entire lives – where they could be fairly sure that they had time for such an event.

Y/N was a bit confused by the no-discussion-allowed tone Peggy had when she called her one day to inform her that they’d spend a weekend together back in Boston where Peggy knew a childhood friend who was selling wedding dresses. Y/N wasn’t that thrilled to return to that city again so soon – but after being threatened to have to fly to L.A. to meet with her instead, she agreed.

“You sure you don’t want to come?”, Y/N asked when packing her suitcase, looking over to her fiancé. “We don’t really do things traditionally, so I don’t mind if you see the dress before day X.”

“You’re right”, he pushed himself off the wall with a grin, “we did everything up until this moment in an unorthodox manner. Let’s do this one thing the old-fashion way. I’m sure my ma would be livid if we didn’t.” He gave her a quick kiss, causing Y/N to laugh.

“Your ma would be livid if she knew half the crap we’ve done together”, Y/N informed him, “And I don’t even mean just our work now, I doubt she’d be happy with all the stuff that happened before the war, either.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, we were practically saints at university”, he said with a wink, making her scoff.

“Yeah. I hope Nick bites his tongue if he’s around on our wedding day. Don’t want your parents’ image of their saintly son to be destroyed.”

………

Y/N was greeted by her friend at the airport. “You really didn’t have to fly all across the country just for this silly thing”, Y/N said after giving her a hug, “I’m sure Jack wouldn’t have walked off the altar just because I was wearing a normal dress. With that temper of his, he can’t afford to be picky.”

Peggy laughed at her jab at her fiancé. “You know, Y/N, I have to agree with you on this one! Doesn’t mean you should not do it, still. Maybe I just want to see that airhead speechless once.”

Y/N grinned. “He does have a tendency to want the last word. That, and he doesn’t have the best of filters. Should’ve seen him when we met again after the war. I wasn’t sure if he was about to jump at me to hug me, or slap me, and he just ended up accidentally insulting me.”

“What?”, Peggy looked offended on Y/N’s behalf when she heard that, and Y/N only waved.

“I’m pretty sure he had a rough night before”, she said with a lopsided smile, “and he’s never been good at personal diplomacy. Trust me, you eventually learn to handle and to interpret his insults. Most of them aren’t meant to be taken literally, or even figuratively, they’re just an expression of Thompson-doesn’t-know-what-to-say.”

As they made their way through the city, Y/N sighed. “Didn’t expect to be back here so soon, I have to say. But I guess I can’t hate every city for what happened in it, otherwise, sooner or later, I won’t be able to live in the US entirely.”

“So you’ve gotten over your hatred for L.A.?”, Peggy asked with raised eyebrows.

“No.”

“No?” The brunette laughed.

“No, but for a whole host of reasons. First”, Y/N raised a finger, “I don’t like the climate. Way to hot. I prefer more moderate weather, and New York’s summers are hot enough. Second, I am deeply weirded out by Hollywood. Feels like throwing a glittering blanket over a pile of dirty laundry.” Peggy laughed at her description of most people’s idolised part of America, but Y/N continued. “Third, I have to be a bit considerate towards Jack. And I doubt he can live in the same city as Howard Stark without accidentally murdering him.”

“Yes, some days, I share that sentiment”, Peggy agreed, “By all his brilliance, he is a nuisance, too.”

Y/N pressed her lips together, wondering if asking about Michael was appropriate. She decided, after having taken a bullet in order to save the man, she had the right to inquire. “How is your brother?”

“I think he is getting better. It is really hard, though, for him to – you know – figure out who he is, again. Who he really is, without mind control, without the programme that they had drilled into him”, Peggy replied, her tone calm and relatively collected. “But I know he’ll get through this. Michael taught me what it means to fight to get what no one thought possible. He survived all they’ve done to him – he’ll get back.”

“We’ll have to look into that programming, though”, Y/N muttered, clenching her jaw, “it doesn’t sound from the notebook that they’re thinking about scaling back their experiments. Chances are, we’ve got several other American or British POWs that underwent similar procedures and are being reintroduced into the country to do their bidding.”

“Yes”, Peggy agreed, frowning at the thought. Then, she shook her head. “But not today. Today, you’re going to find the perfect dress!”

…………

The quaint house stood in the middle of a large plot of land, and if Jack had to ever point to the definition of a house with a white picket fence, it would have been this house. It had everything one would draw on such a picture – trees in the garden, well-maintained flowers. A swing.

A swing? He looked at the wooden contraption. Yes, a swing. But Y/N was an only child – at least, she had been when she left for Europe. Oh well. ‘Here goes nothing’. He fought the urge to abort the mission, to just go home and get married to the girl he wanted to marry without pulling this stunt – he knew she wouldn’t have been mad at him for not doing it. But, once again, his stubborn self could not accept that her father was mad at her decision to leave for Europe. Even if it had taken Jack himself a minute to get around on that decision.

He sighed, and went to ring the doorbell.

First, no one answered the door. Looking through the window next to it, he saw that there was light burning in one of the rooms, so he assumed someone was in there. Then, through the window, he saw a kid walking towards him – maybe fifteen. Dark hair and dark eyes, he looked confused when he opened the door.

“Yes? Can I help you?”, the boy asked.

“I’m looking for Mr. L/N”, Jack replied, “is he here?”

“He’s upstairs”, the boy replied, “who’s asking? I can get him.”

“Jack Thompson”, Jack pulled out his SSR ID, “He might remember me from when he lived in New York. I went to school with his daughter.”

“Dad?”, the boy turned around and yelled upstairs, “someone here to see you! A federal agent!”

Jack heard the footsteps of Y/N’s father descending the stairs. When he saw Jack in the doorframe, his face froze.

“You’re the boy Y/N went to school and university with”, he stated.

“Yes”, Jack nodded, shaking the man’s hand, “Jack Thompson. I’ve worked with your daughter at the SSR after the war, too.”

An aura of darkness, perhaps of sorrow or nostalgia coated the man’s face. “Seems like she couldn’t let it go.”

Jack’s eyebrows twitched upwards. “Sir, her work saved countless lives. During her time in Germany, as well as during her time at the SSR. Most men would be happy settling for half of her record.”

Mr. L/N pressed his lips together. “And you came here to bring me the notice of her passing? Is that it? Your sworn duty as her commanding officer?”

“What?”, Jack frowned, “No. Y/N’s alive and well, sir. I came here to ask you to give your daughter the right to choose. She didn’t have to serve. And yet, she did. And when she came back, she didn’t have to work for an intelligence agency. And yet, she did. Hell, I didn’t task her with half the crap she ended up pursuing at the SSR, and in hindsight, I should thank the Lord that she did. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d be dead.”

Mr. L/N looked over his shoulder, at the boy still standing there. “Give us a moment, Rich.” Then, he stepped outside, alone, to face Jack.

“Mr. Thompson, when Y/N decided to head to England, her mother already knew that she was sick. She just didn’t tell Y/N right away. We didn’t want her to go, because we already knew we’d lose someone within the next years. Before she could tell Y/N, she was on her way to England.” He sounded bitter, angry, because that meant that his only child had left him alone.

“Sir, I get that this must’ve hurt, I do”, Jack clenched his jaw, “but we were all asked to make a sacrifice. We were asked to take up arms and run head first into enemy lines if need be. So yes, your family was ruined by war, even though Y/N came back, and for that, I am sorry. But how many families lost multiple children to the war, how many families were torn apart? She tried to do what was right, and she did a fine job.” He paused. “So I ask, is that resentment really worth ruining the chance of salvaging the relationship you could still have to your daughter? Because she left you in order to serve her country?” For once, he managed not to raise his voice to a hostile level, but he nonetheless stared down Mr. L/N.

“Mr. Thompson”, he said slowly, carefully, “Why did you come here?”

Jack huffed. “I came here to tell you that on February 19th, Y/N L/N will become Misses Y/N Thompson. She was convinced that you would not want to be at her wedding. I came here to ask you myself. And you can say no, but I wanted to give you the chance to not lose your daughter. Yes, she went to war, and yes, she came back different. But she came back. And if you let her, you can have her back, too.”

……………

February 19th was the date Jack had suggested. Y/N knew why that date meant something to him. It was the day he went to hell – February 19th, 1945, had been the day he landed on Iwo Jima. That day would always remain a black mark in his calendar, but this way, he took it back. It would no longer be the worst day of his life, it would be the best day of his life, too. Simply put, it would become the most meaningful day, good and bad, in his life.

Y/N had eventually found a dress – its long sleeves made up by a delicate lace, a deep v-neckline that, nonetheless, was modest, albeit a bit a different cut from the standard dresses. The A-line skirt allowed for easy movement, but did not consist of so much fabric that it would turn into a tripping hazard. Looking in the mirror, she saw Peggy smile at her from behind. Y/N herself didn’t manage to smile. She felt like she was staring at someone else entirely.

“You look stunning, Y/N. Absolutely gorgeous!”, Peggy stated and added with a smile, “What exactly Jack Thompson did to deserve you, I shall never know.”

Y/N couldn’t help but to grin at that remark. She knew that Peggy and Jack had started off – and continued for a long while – on the wrong foot.

“He really was a prick after the war, huh”, Y/N huffed, pulling the fabric around her neckline into place.

“The worst part is – at least he had somewhat of an explanation for it”, Peggy lamented, “But how many others are just as bad as he was and aren’t as marked by the years we spent abroad?”

“Peg, I am sorry to inform you, but if you want to live in a world without being degraded by our wonderful male co-workers”, Y/N said, turning to face the brunette with a cynical smile, “Then you were born at least two hundred years too early.”

“Well, someone has to pave the way, and I suppose, for the time being, that’ll have to be the two of us – and in all fairness, we have come a long way within the SSR”, Peggy replied, and Y/N nodded with one eyebrow raised.

“I suppose we have. Though you’ve had it significantly worse than I did. I was never accused of treason, or kicked out, or blackmailed with another person’s file”, Y/N said dryly.

“Indeed, the accusation of treason mostly came from my now-husband, I was kicked out by Chief Dooley, and blackmailed by Chief Thompson”, she recounted, laughing, “I suppose now I’ve gotten a beating from all the Chiefs, so maybe I am good now.”

“You better be, considering you’ll be heading a new organisation soon”, Y/N winked, “unless you go against yourself – you’ve got only Howard Stark to fear, and I think he has better things to do than to go after you. A suggestion from me – he should invest in a better vault. And security system.”

……………

“Mr. Thompson!”, Jack looked over his shoulder as he was walking back to his car when he saw the kid from before running towards him.

“Can I help you, kid?”, he asked, turning around with an eyebrow raised.

“Dad never mentioned that Y/N was still alive”, the boy said, “He also never said that she was dead, now that I think about it. I guess, I just explained it away, given that she was never here.” He held out his hand: “I’m Rich. I’m Y/N’s stepbrother.”

Stepbrother. That made sense. A son from a previous marriage, whose father either had died, or was so absent that he had started to call Mr. L/N dad.

“Pleasure to meet you, Rich.”

“What is she like?”

Jack knew that he meant it as a completely innocent question, but to him, it was loaded with the memories of about fifteen years that he had, in one way or another, spent with Y/N. He didn’t even know where to begin with. How should he explain to this kid what a person Y/N was?

“Y/N”, he eventually said, elongating her name in the search for words, “She’s, uhm, probably the bravest, kindest, and strongest person I’ve ever met. Words don’t do her justice.”

“Dad hardly ever mentioned her – you said that she served… where did she serve? Dad didn’t seem thrilled about it.”

Jack knew that it wasn’t his story to tell – the spying, the entire tale of Y/N’s time in Germany, but he also wanted to convey to this boy that his ‘dad’ was dead-wrong for having been upset at his daughter, so he decided to rub it right in his face. “She fought against the Nazis. She spent the war in Europe. That’s why she left.”

It had the effect he had wanted – Rich’s mouth fell open as he stared at Jack in disbelief. “What? That’s awesome!”

“Yeah, well”, Jack gave him a lopsided grin and nodded towards the house behind them, “tell that to your dad, will ya, kid?”

“I will, sir!” Jack almost pulled a face at the kid calling him ‘sir’. Only the pencil pushers in the SSR called him that, and even they only rarely did. Most of them just called him ‘Chief’. The last time he was called ‘sir’ right, left and centre was back in the military.

“See you around, Rich.”

…………

When Y/N returned, she wasn’t surprised when Jack was not at either her or his place – though their time at the SSR was coming to an end, he still didn’t like to let go off the wheel entirely just yet. So she headed to the office, where her search was indeed successful.

Entering the office, she felt the eyes of the men inside it on her.

Raising an eyebrow and putting her hands on her hips, she paused. “Is something the matter, gentlemen?”

“We knew about you leaving the SSR together with the Chief, but he only now mentioned that you’ll soon be married”, Goldberg eventually said, causing Y/N to raise her other eyebrow as she laughed.

“Yes, I’m sorry for myself, too.”

“Hey!” She grinned at Jack whose head popped out of the bullpen as he shook his head: “Unbelievable.”

“Congratulations, Y/N. Can’t say I saw that coming when you had your first day here, I thought you’d be more likely his murderer than his wife, but I stand corrected.”

Y/N laughed at Goldberg’s not entirely wrong analysis of hers and Jack’s first meeting post-war.

“What can I say”, she said, “we’ve never done things traditionally. That applies professionally as well as privately, it would seem.”

“I swear, if you now start telling them about our yesteryears, I’ll fire you on the spot”, Jack warned jokingly, “I want to upkeep my reputation for my next job.”

Y/N huffed: “I have no idea what you’re getting at, Jack. Your drinking escapades aside, and your unbelievable ability to make enemies, you were a straight-A student all your life.” And both of these aspects of his personality weren’t all that well-hidden, though, perhaps, his subordinates merely got to see the surface of both.

In fact, that was perhaps one of Jack Thompson’s most proficient traits. He had the capability to adapt to his environment, mould himself into whatever people expected from a person in his situation, put his own personality on the backburner in order to climb the ladder. He had always wanted to be the best – the best at maths, the best at sports, the best at anything he ever did, and he’d do anything to succeed. That didn’t necessarily mean to push others out the way, it certainly meant he fought hard to be better than the next guy, but as harsh as he was to others, he was at least ten times harsher with himself. He was able to build up a wall to reinforce himself to be ready to take on a world that had been incredibly hostile in their lifetime. They had experienced an economic crash and an economic recovery, they had experienced the worst war the world had ever seen. Not only that, but they had fought in it. And then they had come back to a country where they felt like strangers, only to realise that they had to second-guess every person around them. His wall of anger and of sarcasm and rudeness, it was also a wall of hard work, of doubt and of a deep conviction to want to serve this country. It was the wall that only very few got to ever climb, and Y/N was perhaps the one person who knew every brick in the wall.

To understand Jack Thompson was to understand the environment he operated in. That’s how it’s always been – he had been a different person when they were surrounded by other students as he was when he was with his family. He was different when being the SSR Chief, or her fiancé. Essentially, he grew up in a society that valued first and foremost the outcome, rather than the means. And the outcome society valued most was success. That might come across as greedy or selfish, but Y/N knew – at heart, he still did it all with good intentions. He wouldn’t ever back out of a fight in fear over his own life. He was willing to die for his job. And he didn’t trust many others to do a better job than he did himself. Again, this might sound selfish and arrogant to many, but Y/N had seen ‘the others’. Men like Vernon Masters, Calvin Chadwick and so on. They were just as ambitious, but they were cowards. They were willing to sacrifice others for their own success. He was willing to sacrifice himself.

And that, Y/N thought to herself, is why I’m going to marry him – to keep that part of him controlled. Because as much as she admired him for his willingness to give his all for cause and country – she really didn’t want him to become a martyr. She didn’t need for him to become the next Captain America. She was fine with him just being a good man, a man with a long list of flaws and a record of mistakes.

She could not ever imagine being with someone as literally flawless as Steve Rogers – then, she would feel like an absolute imposter. She had just as long a list of flaws and mistakes.

That’s why it worked. They needed each other – and in a sense, they always had.

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[mariacallous]

In 1959, the United States began construction of a real-life version of the frozen Echo Base from The Empire Strikes Back. The plan for Camp Century was to test snow tunneling technologies in northwest Greenland, not far from the north pole, ostensibly for scientific research. Really, the US was flexing its military muscle, and may have been considering Project Iceworm, a way to hide 600 nuclear missiles in thousands of miles of snow tunnels across northern Greenland, close to the former Soviet Union. The island’s massive ice sheet had other ideas for Camp Century, though—ice shifts and flows, making this not a particularly ideal place to stash nukes or run the nuclear reactor that powered the base.

Iceworm never went anywhere, and the US closed Camp Century in 1966, leaving the tunnels to collapse. But before everyone fled, researchers did manage to dig up some actual scientific dirt, drilling a 4,550-foot-deep core into the ice sheet. When they hit earth, they drilled a further 12 feet, bringing up a plug of frozen sand, dirty ice, cobbles, and mud. The military moved that ice core from its own freezers to the University at Buffalo in the 1970s. The core ended up in Denmark in the '90s, where it was kept frozen, so that now it provides scientists with invaluable insight into ice ages past.

Nobody cared much about the sediment, though, until 2018, when it was rediscovered in cookie jars in a University of Copenhagen freezer. Now, an international team of researchers has analyzed that sediment, and made a major scientific discovery.

“In that frozen sediment are leaf fossils and little bits of bugs and twigs and mosses that tell us in the past there was a tundra ecosystem living where today there's almost a mile of ice,” says University of Vermont geoscientist Paul Bierman, coauthor of a new paper describing the finding in the journal Science. “The ice sheet is fragile. It can disappear, and it has disappeared. Now we have a date for that.”

Previously, scientists reckoned that Greenland iced over some 2.5 million years ago, and has been that way since. In 2021, Bierman and his colleagues determined that it was actually ice-free sometime in the past million years. Now, they’ve dated the tundra ecosystem captured in the Camp Century core to a mere 416,000 years ago—so northwestern Greenland couldn’t have been locked in ice then.

Scientists also know that at that time, global temperatures were similar or slightly warmer than what they are today. However, back then, atmospheric concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide were about 280 parts per million, compared to today’s 422 parts per million—a number that continues to skyrocket. Because humans have so dramatically and rapidly warmed the climate, we’re exceeding the conditions that had previously led to the wide-scale melting of Greenland’s ice sheet and gave rise to the tundra ecosystem. “It's a forewarning,” says Utah State University geoscientist Tammy Rittenour, a coauthor of the new paper. “This can happen under much lower CO2 conditions than our current state.” 

That melting could be incredibly perilous. The new study finds that the Greenland ice melt 400,000 years ago caused at least 5 feet of sea level rise, but perhaps as much as 20 feet. “These findings raise additional concern that we could be coming perilously close to the threshold for collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and massive additional sea level rise of a meter or more,” says University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn’t involved in the research. Today, less than a foot of global sea level rise is already causing serious flooding and storm surge problems for coastal cities—and that’s without the potential for an additional 20 feet. 

If Greenland melts again, it could reach a point of no return, relentlessly driving up sea levels as it does so. When an ice sheet melts, it exposes darker dirt beneath it, which absorbs more of the sun’s energy, raising local temperatures and driving more melting.

“If too much mass is lost and the elevation of the surface drops significantly, the resulting warming of the surface makes regrowth of the ice sheet more difficult,” says Pennsylvania State University geoscientist Richard B. Alley, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The new paper provides further evidence that even moderate sustained warmth will drive major melting in Greenland, forcing sea-level rise.”

Exactly how the Greenland ice sheet might degrade in the future is still unclear, and requires more research. Temperatures 400,000 years ago were similar to what they are today, but the natural warming that drove Greenland's melting back then happened gradually. Humans have quickly and dramatically warmed the planet since preindustrial times, and anthropogenic CO2 will stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, unless people invent a way to remove it at large scale. We can also reduce temperatures. If we slash emissions, Mann says, Greenland’s ice sheet might remain stable.

So, how did this research team figure out that northwest Greenland was an ice-sheet-free tundra 400,000 years ago? The sediment from the Camp Century core was loaded with organic material, but it was way too old to examine by using carbon dating, which is only effective for periods up to 50,000 years back. “We pulled out little twigs and leaves, and we immediately sent them off radiocarbon dating, and they came back what we call ‘radiocarbon dead,’” says Rittenour. “There were no traces of radioactive carbon left in the sample.”

So instead, Rittenour used light—specifically the luminescence of bits of feldspar buried in the sediment. Free electrons build up in the minerals over time, producing a "luminescence signal." Exposure to sunlight essentially neutralizes this signal, but once these minerals became buried under thousands of feet of ice, the sun’s rays could no longer reach them, and the electron buildup recommenced. In a darkroom in the lab, Rittenour could peer into the Camp Century samples using infrared light. “We can use light of one wavelength, and we measure the luminescence coming off at a different wavelength,” says Rittenour. “The older the sample, the more luminescence it produces.” That allowed them to determine how long it had been since the feldspar in the sediment last saw sunlight.

To complement this, at the University of Vermont, Bierman looked at the mineral quartz in the samples for rare isotopes of beryllium and aluminum. “They're formed when cosmic rays, these really high energy particles, come zipping into Earth from beyond the solar system. And occasionally, they'll smack an element in the quartz grain,” says Bierman. “By looking at the ratio of those two isotopes, we can tell how long something's been buried away from those cosmic rays.” The result told them that this material had sat out on the landscape for less than 16,000 years.

Scientists are now racing to drill more ice cores in Greenland to gather more soil. Although the Camp Century core gives them the basis for modeling that they can use for estimations, with more cores, they can better work out how much of the island’s ice had disappeared and how quickly—and what that might presage about the ice sheet’s modern decline. “We now have definitive evidence that when the climate gets warm, the Greenland ice sheet disappears,” says Bierman. “And we've just started warming the climate.”

“We use the past to try to understand the future and understand the present,” Bierman continues. “And that makes the future a little frightening. Not that we should run from it—but to me, it's a call for action.”

[thoughtlessarse]

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases.  But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right. Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade status. Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth. But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.

continue reading

[interactivefmpyear1oliverwood]

They Live analysis

They Live reminds me a little bit of the Combine from Half-Life 2, not only because of aliens integrating themselves into Earth's population and controlling it's inhabitants through the manipulation of social and political order, by methods far flung from morality, but also the fact that the aliens uses propaganda disguised as guidance to trick the humans into their social systems.

I have a massive fascination with the macabre in terms of what an alien species would do to us without outright eliminating us that makes such a thing more morally righteous than whatever else they are planning to do with us.

Many Americans around the 20th century would go by the slogan "better dead than red", due to the natural fear of the socialist authoritarianism that would've been installed on them if they were to be captured by the Soviet Union. They believed that being dead was better than being under Soviet rule, and history makes it clear to us that Communism is a flawed political system due to our greed and selfishness, it'd be too easy for a representative to reorganise a civilisation under strict rules that break the Disney Fairy Tale beauty of a system into another off-shoot of one of the west's greatest enemies(AKA Unfiltered Fairy Tales).

Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany are common antagonists of western literature, and a lot of influence is taken from them when it comes to our fictional evils. They also relate to the common themes of the time period, like environmentalism, consumerism, futurism, religion, etc.

Such an enemy with a galaxy-wide budget and technology to alter our entire planet without us being able to bat an eye is what makes them such a intriguing and terrifying foe to be up against, and the battle's matter of information by select individuals raises the stake to highs unimaginable by our modern lens, you against the whole world. We often like to imagine ourselves being the hero, even if all the odds are against them, because we want to feel that adrenaline rush throughout the journey, which is why it's pared with our time period trends, so it makes the whole thing feel personal to the generation.

What does this have to do with planets...IDK, I was told that the planets looked like a planet had landing pads, but I can't seem to find any pictures of it, but I can envision what that may be like, and my reasoning behind it is that those are important bases of operation for the aliens, since they don't want to expose themselves and their plans to the human populous. Maybe those landing docks are able to reflect light from above it and create a lightshow of sorts that recreates that scene as if it wasn't even there, if it's on planet earth, but I haven't seen the movie so I'm quite confused.

[beardedmrbean]

If you want to cry about Laika forever, look up the song "Soace Doggity" by Johnathan Coulton. It's genuinely heartbreaking.

Johnathan Coulton did a serious song?

He really had to go in and let everyone know what actually happened there didn't he.

For all the shit we give ourselves as Americans we never sent anything living up into space without a plan to bring it home safe.

Even if we were going to dissect it when it got home, Soviets on the other hand.

Vladimir Komarov

Would you go to your death willingly in order to save a friend.

Comrade Komarov, you sir are a true friend and hero I raise my glass in your honour.

I'll likely say it again, but I get kind of absorbed in this stuff, been a learning passion since January 28, 1986.

it's a bit icky under the cut,

Sorry, soviet union space bullshit enrages me. You're not expanding the knowledge of the species by sending men on suicide missions.

They got more secretive about launch dates for missions that may not end well after this.

[typical-simplelove]

I'll Always Fly Back Home to You - 40s AU (R. Hintz)

Summary: With the threat of a Soviet Union invasion, the Hintz family moves to America to escape death and war. What happens when Roope moves in next door to you?

Series Masterlist

A/n: This is the fourth installment and one of the best things I've ever written, I believe. This fic exists in the same universe in the Jamie Oleksiak fic that comes later on. I hope you enjoy this!

Warnings: mentions of war, death, breaking up, the Soviet Union (?), suggestive photos

Word Count: 9.1k

November 20, 1939

You could do this. Yeah, you could. All you had to do was bring a tray of cookies to the new neighbors next door. This was going to be simple, right? Introduce yourself, offer any help, give them the cookies, and welcome them to the neighborhood. You walk over to their house, and you instantly catch a whiff of something that smells amazing. You walk up the steps and knock on the door. You weren’t sure what you were expecting, but it wasn’t the person who opened the door.

“Hi, my name is Yn, and I live next door,” you begin after overcoming the initial shock. “My mom is also the one who works for the agency you and your family used to come here.”

“Oh, hi Yn,” this boy tells you. He was really cute, you thought to yourself. “My name is --”

“Mrs. Yln, thank you so much for coming,” someone interrupts. “I was going to ring you up. Can you help us figure out how to use the oven?”

“Mom, this is her daughter, yn,” the boy who answered the door corrects. He gives you a smile and your face warms under his gaze.

“Oh you’re right. Yn, forgive me, please. Roope, welcome her in, please.”

So his name is Roope.

“Come on in?” Roope asks.

“Oh, sure. I made cookies for you guys as a welcome gift.”

“Thank you, so much,” Roope’s mother gushes. “I hate to ask, but do you know how to use the oven?”

“Maybe? I mean, I had to use the oven in order to bake these cookies.” You walk over to the oven and notice that it’s exactly like yours. You begin to explain how it works and strike up a conversation with Roope’s mother who tells you to call her Mrs. Hintz. You learned that the Hintz family immigrated from Finland because of the aggression of the Soviet Union. Most of the extended family was able to immigrate over and are now spread across the Dallas area.

You left about an hour after you arrived happy that your mother sent you to welcome the new family.

. . .

. . .

The next morning, you were walking out the door to go to the grocery store. It was a morning out of a novel. The sun was out shining and the temperature wasn’t too hot or too cold. It was absolutely perfect. There was dew sitting on the grass, and it seemed like a day full of potential. You walk out of your lawn and turn right; incidentally, you’d have to go past the Hintz house. You are about to pass their walkway when you hear someone call out to you.

“Yn,” you turn around and see Roope walking out the door towards you. You stop and smile and wait for him. “Where are you headed?”

“The grocery store, you?”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Go with her,” Roope’s mother yells from the door. “She knows where to go; you don’t.”

You smile and look at Roope. A soft blush is now covering his face; you laugh softly. “Do you want to come with me?”

“Is that okay? I have no idea where I’m going.”

You laugh at his comment. “Of course. It is my job as a neighbor to help you assimilate to the town best you can.”

Roope looks at you. “And I thought you wanted to be my first friend here.”

“I can do that as well, if you’d like.”

“I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you in any way..”

“I doubt that being friends would inconvenience me, Roope.”

“You say that now, but, let me tell you, you might regret that sentence one day,” Roope says and winks at you. You feel the warmth reach your face as you look away bashfully. What was it with Roope?

. . .

In the days that followed your trip to the grocery store, a budding friendship blossomed. One day, you walked to your backyard to escape the rowdiness of your sisters and brothers. Sometimes, all you needed was to just leave for a bit.

You walk to the edge of your backyard where there is a giant tree that sits on both your family’s property and the Hintz property. You walk out and see Roope sitting under the tree. Opting not to bother him, you turn around and walk away. You thought that Roope didn’t see you; however, when he calls out to you, you know he saw you.

“You’re allowed to sit under the tree, too, yn,” Roope tells you as you sit.

“Yeah, I know,” you begin. “I just didn’t want to disturb you. I’m not sure why you’re sitting under the tree.”

“Well, don’t worry. You can sit. Why do you want to sit here?”

“Because you told me I could.”

Roope laughs. “That’s not what I meant.”

You smile at him. “Yeah, I knew that. No, I come out here at nights to get away from the loud and rowdy behavior of my family. Why are you out here?”

“Because you come out here often.”

You raise your eyebrow at him. “So, you notice when I sit out here?”

Roope blushes under your words and the sunset behind you. “My bedroom faces the tree here, and I always see you.”

“So, you decided to come and sit with me?”

“I can leave if you want.”

“No, Roope, I’m only teasing. You can stay.”

“Maybe we can make a habit out of this.”

“How so?” you question.

“This can be our escape. You can escape from your family, and I can escape from the prying eyes of my family.”

“Yeah? Let’s do that. I like that idea.”

Roope smiles at you. He was starting not to mind the move to the US.

. . .

December 1, 1939

“Hey, Roope?”

“Yes, Yn.”

“The other day, you said that you wanted to escape the prying eyes of your family. What did you mean by that?”

Roope sighed heavily and you instantly felt bad. “They aren’t sure if I’m happy here. I mean, I am. We are safe and alive which is more than many can say considering the invasion.”

“But it’s hard being new.”

Roope nods. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with the friends I made, and you, but sometimes I miss where we lived.”

You nod. “So, that’s why you want an escape.”

“Mhm, but not the only reason.”

“What’s the other reason?” you ask inquisitively.

“Oh, it’s not a big deal. Don’t worry.” How was Roope supposed to tell you that his family wants him to ask you out but don’t realize that the two of you were just friends? He didn’t want anything else but a friendship with you. His family couldn’t understand that.

“Oh, okay. Well, is there anything I can do to help you with homesickness you’re feeling?”

Roope smiles at your concern. “Just be my friend?”

You smile at him. “That I can do.”

. . .

June 14, 1940

“Did you see?” you say to Roope as you walk up to him where he’s sitting under the tree.

“I mean, I can see what’s in front of me,” Roope teases.

“Haha very funny. No, did you see that the Germans are marching into Paris?” you sit down next to him and he puts an arm around you.

“Yeah, I saw that.”

“Are you worried?” you ask. Roope knows you well enough that you’re only asking because you’re worried and want reassurance.

“It depends. On the fate of the Parisians? Yeah, I’m terrified for them. On another war? I mean, it’s already started. What are you worried about?”

“Probably another war because that means that the people I love will be enlisting. You, my brothers, cousins, friends. It’s just worrisome.”

Roope begins stroking your arm in an attempt to try to calm your nerves. “Well, I promise you, that I’ll always find my way back home to you. Whether it be flying, driving, running, walking, or skating. I’ll be by your side.”

You look up at Roope and your eyes meet his. You always felt safe in his embrace and knew that he wasn’t lying. He’ll always find a way back home to you.

. . .

September 19, 1940 - the US Congress passes the Selective Service Act

“Well, I guess we can’t escape war, Roope. I mean, you knew that.”

“How so?”

“You are the same person that moved to the US from Finland because of the Soviet Union, right?” you joke lightly.

“Oh, right. Yeah. So, your brothers are enlisting?”

You nod. “Only the older ones. My younger brother is a bit too young, but he’ll be enlisting after his nineteenth birthday in a few months. What about you?”

“Not right now. They told me that I should wait until war was declared because I’m not a US-born citizen.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“Yeah, look, let’s forget about the worries of the world for right now, okay? My mother made some cookies, and I brought some out. Let’s just relax and live in our own bubble, okay?” Roope says to you as he offers you a cookie.

“Okay,” you nod and take a cookie that Roope is offering to you. “Oh, these are good.”

“I mean, they aren’t as good as the ones you made for us when we first moved in, but sure.”

“You remember those?” you ask comically.

“Of course I remember those! A pretty girl showing up at my doorstep offering us cookies? Kind of hard to forget. A pretty girl who is quite young that my mother mistakes as being the girl's mother? Even more memorable.”

You laugh audibly remembering the memory. “You know, I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t you.”

Roope gives you a look of mock offence. “What does that mean?”

“I wasn’t expecting someone my age; I was expecting a family with young children that I could babysit or watch not you and your family.”

“Do you wish I was younger?”

“Absolutely not. Who else would be my best friend?”

Roope smiles at you and pulls you into his embrace. Best friends forever, they said.

. . .

October 28, 1940 - the Italians invade Greece

On a normal October day, you always made sure to have a sweater on you in the event you grew chilly. However, today, you forgot. By the time you walked into the backyard, your arms were cold, and you wanted to turn around. You were running late to meet Roope, though. You decided that if you got sick, then it’d be fine.

“You’re late,” Roope tells you from across the backyard. If you didn’t know him so well, you would have thought he was mad. However, you knew better.

“Yeah, I know, sorry. My sister wanted to go to the cinema, and she picked a long movie.”

“How was it?” Roope asks you as you sit down.

“Pretty good, I liked it. If you want to go see it, I’d definitely go and see it with you.”

Roope smiles at you and wraps his arm around you but flinches the moment he touches you. “Yn, why is your arm so cold?”

“Oh, I’m cold; it’s fine, though.”

Roope immediately shakes his head and begins shrugging off his jacket for you. “Here.”

“Roope, no.”

“Yn, yes. You’re cold, and I’m not. Just take it.”

You look at him and see that there’s a red tint coating his cheeks. Huh, you wonder what that’s about. “Fine, but only because I’m cold.”

“Why else would you take my jacket?”

“I, okay, whatever,” you deflect. What were you supposed to say? Giving a girl your jacket was what boyfriends did not friends.

When you and Roope both said goodnight that night, you walked towards your house and were about to step inside when you realized you were still wearing his jacket. You were about to turn around but you hear Roope call out to you.

“Keep it, it looks better on you, anyways.”

You laugh. The coat sat on the hook in your bedroom; you looked at it each morning and smiled at the memory of your best friend.

. . .

April 13, 1941 - Japan and the Soviet Union sign a neutrality pact.

“How was your date last night?” you ask Roope when you’re both settled under the tree.

He shrugs.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah, I mean, she was nice. It was nice. I walked her home, but she told me that she didn’t want to see me again as on a date.”

“Oh, did you want me to talk to her?”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Do you think you know why she doesn’t want to see you again?”

“Not sure, probably something along the lines of there just isn’t a spark.”

“Did you want me to vouch for you? Tell her how amazing you are?”

Roope laughs. “No, don’t worry about it.” He wasn’t going to let you talk to her because she told Roope that it wasn’t fair for him to be dating other women when he was in love with you. Roope denied it, but as he walked home that night, he realized she was right. Roope was in love with you, his best friend. The first person he met when he moved to Dallas. He loved you. The one person who would probably only ever see him as a friend.

. . .

December 6, 1941

You were sitting under the tree reading a book while you waited for Roope one evening. It was a chilly evening, and you were starting to get cold. You contemplated going inside and getting a jacket, his jacket. However, when you saw Roope exit from his back porch, you decided against it. Anyways, the warmth that filled you by seeing your best friend made you forget about the cold.

“Hey,” you say to him as you close your book.

“Hey, ynn,” he says to you. “This is for you from my mom. She was going through some of her old stuff and found this. No one else wanted it, so I thought that you might like it.”

“Oh, wow, just giving me things your family doesn’t want anymore.”

Roope laughs at your teasing remark. “No, I didn’t know about it until before dinner, and mom asked if I wanted it. I obviously don’t but that doesn’t mean I don’t think you will.”

“What is it?” you ask, taking the box from his hands.

“Why don’t you just open it?”

“Wow, sassy. I wasn’t expecting that tonight.”

“Just open the box.”

“Fine,” you retort and open the box. You gasp and look at Roope. “I can’t take this.”

“Yes, you can. I think you will have a better use for it then the cabinet shelf in the basement.”

“But, it must have been so expensive. Don’t you want to keep it in the family?”

“You are family, yn.”

“I mean blood family, Roope,” you say. He has given you the most stunning teapot you have ever seen.

“If my mother wasn’t okay with me giving it to you, then she would’ve said something.”

“What about your aunts?”

“Same. They all think we’re going to get married one day, so what’s the point if it’s going to be back in our family again.”

You look up at Roope, and you have a weird feeling in your stomach that you can’t explain. Did you want to marry Roope? No, you were both just friends, right? “Well, too bad we aren’t going to be getting married.”

“Yeah, too bad.” You were surprised with the tone that Roope had in his voice. Was he feeling the same conflicting feelings you were?

“Well, thank your mother for me. This is beautiful.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

“I love it, Roope, thank you!”

“Of course, anything for you.” And, he’d do anything for you.

. . .

December 11th, 1941 - Germany and Italy declare war on the United States

After getting the teapot from Roope a few days ago, you decided to bring lemon squares to the Hintz household to thank them. You pack them into a tray and head out the door. You walk over to the Hintz house and knock on the door. Roope’s mother opens the door for you and wraps you into a large hug and begins to sob.

“Mrs. Hintz, are you okay?” you ask clearly knowing she isn’t.

“I’m not sure. Oh, come in, come in. Roope’s not here right now.”

“Oh, that’s okay. I’m here to see you, actually. I made lemon squares to thank you for the teapot. It’s beautiful, and I love it.”

“I’m glad, sweetheart.”

“Um, Mrs. Hintz?” you ask cautiously. She looks at you, and you know it’s safe for you to continue. “May I ask why you were crying?”

“Oh,” she says and the tears slowly start again. “Roope went to the navy offices to enlist. He’s going to war, and he’s going to be a navy pilot. You obviously knew that though because he tells you everything.”

The heat drains from your face. Roope was going off to war. You knew that eventually this would happen as your two older brothers went to bootcamp a few months ago and your younger brother’s number came up just yesterday. However, you weren’t expecting for Roope to be enlisting right away. It made sense, though, considering that the Soviets invaded his home. The one thing, though, that’s sticking out to you is that Mrs. Hintz thinks that you knew. This means that he definitely made the decision without talking to anyone, even you. “No, I didn’t know that, but he’s doing what he feels is best, right?”

“I know that, it’s just going to hurt when he leaves.”

You nod. “Did you want me to make some tea, and we can have the lemon squares I made?”

“Would that be okay?” she asks.

You smile. “More than okay.”

Roope enlisting is not your sadness to be felt. You were going to help his family in any way you could.

. . .

December 15th, 1941

“Do you miss home?” you asked Roope. Roope never not talked about his time back home, but he also wasn’t the most open about it. You never pried and you never asked for more. You were willing to just take as much information as he would give you.

“Like my bedroom?” Roope asks.

You laugh and Roope smiles at you. There was something about your laugh that made Roope melt. “No, like Finland.”

“Oh,” Roope’s smile fades and you instantly feel bad for bringing it up. “I miss some of the older extended family that couldn’t come with us and some friends, but I’m not sure about the rest of it.”

You nod. “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m happy that you’re here.”

“You are the best thing that came out of my move to the States,” Roope tells you and you feel the warmth spread to your face. “Yn, I have something to tell you. You might not like what I have to say.”

You knew what he was talking about; his mother told you. “You’re joining the navy and are going to be a navy pilot.”

Roope sits up and looks at you. The two of you were laying down under the large tree in your backyard. “How did you know that?”

“Your mother told me.”

Roope laughs sarcastically and shakes his head. “Of course she did, when you brought the lemon squares?”

You nod. “She was crying when I went over, and she told me. Don’t be mad at her.”

“I’m not, don’t worry. Did you cry too?”

“No, I didn’t,” you say but your voice wobbles. Roope looks at you and puts his hands on your cheeks to catch any tears that might fall.

Roope smiles at you; he looks like he’s contemplating something. He looks down at your lips and you feel the warmth rush to your face again. “Can I kiss you, yn?”

You nod. “Yeah, please kiss me.”

He leans down and gently places his lips on yours. The kiss lasted for a few seconds, but it’s enough for you to know you don’t want to kiss anyone else ever again. When you both pull away, you stare into each other’s eyes, and you know you’ve made a tremendous shift in your relationship. No longer were you and Roope good friends. No, now you were two people who finally realized their feelings after a few years. You know that there was no one else for you, and you hoped that Roope felt the same.

“Can I kiss you again?” Roope eagerly asks. He wants nothing in the world except to kiss you again but doesn’t want to overstep his boundaries.

“Of course.”

He kisses you again, and you’re pretty sure you melt. How could just one touch make you so happy and giddy and excited at the same time? This time, the kiss is longer, and you both deepen the kiss not wanting to separate. You couldn’t be without him and he without you.

“About time,” your sister yells from the porch. You pull away from Roope and giggle.

“I guess so,” you say to Roope and he smiles back at you.

. . .

The days leading up to when Roope was set to go to bootcamp were spent together. You both tried to fit years of couple things into three days. It was hard. You both knew that navy pilots were one of the most dangerous positions in the military, and they might not make it home.

On the day that Roope was set to leave, he asked his family to go to the train station on their own so that you and him could walk together. How romantic, you thought, despite the circumstances.

“Do you promise to write to me?” Roope asks before he’s about to get on the train.

You smile. “Of course, silly. I’ll write to you all the time that you’ll ask me to stop.”

“I highly doubt that,” Roope tells you and kisses you. “Goodbye, my love.”

“Goodbye, Roope,” you tell him with tears in your eyes. “Fly back home to me?”

Roope smiles and kisses your forehead. “I’ll always fly back home to you.” He gives you one last kiss and picks up his bag and walks away. He turns around one last time to wave. His last thought is wondering if this’ll be the last time he sees your face.

. . .

Dear Roope,

This letter might take a while to get to you, but you knew that. Now that you’re overseas, it might take a bit for my letters to come to you. Let me tell you, though, just because they are further apart or might take some time doesn’t mean I’m going to stop. Why would I? Why would I ever stop writing to the man I love? I hope I’m not jumping to any conclusions by telling you I love you because I do. I think I always did. The minute you moved in next door, I think I fell for you. It just took some time for me to realize how I felt. Let’s be glad that we finally realized, right?

Did you know that my sister is getting married? She is settling down with her childhood sweetheart. Isn’t that so romantic? Can you imagine marrying your childhood sweetheart? I have a question. Feel free to ignore this question. Did you have someone you loved back home? Did you love her and think you’ll marry her? If you don’t want to answer, feel free not to. I’m just curious. You don’t often talk about your life before moving to the US, and I just want to know more. Care to share? Please? How about for the woman who loves you to pieces?

What's flying like? You don’t have to tell me where you’re flying over or anything like that. Just tell me, is it beautiful? Have you touched a cloud? Is the sun just absolutely beautiful? Is looking at the ground from the sky put everything in perspective?

Fly back home to me, right?

With love all the way from Dallas,

Yn

Dearest Yn,

Just know, I love every letter you write to me even if they are weeks apart. I don’t care. Any letter makes me so happy. Some of the other members in my company always make fun of me for having a girl I love, but I don’t care. Mail call is always the best part of my day because I get to hear from you. The anticipation I feel is unbelievable. And no, it’s not too presumptuous to tell me you love me because guess what? I love you, too! More than you could possibly know. The minute I laid my eyes on you, I knew you were special. Every time I saw you and we hung out, my heart always had this weird feeling. I thought it was just nerves of being in a new country or having a new friend. However, as the months went on and I got to know you, the feeling didn’t go away. It took for a war to be declared for me to make a move and tell you I loved you and not just in a best friend's way. I hope that’s not too presumptuous, but, then again, you did say it first.

Send my congratulations to your sister from me. That must be awfully romantic for childhood sweethearts to be falling in love and getting married. And now, to answer your question. Let me quote you first. You said “did you have someone you loved back home?” Let me tell you, you are that girl back home. Home is in Dallas now because it’s where my family is and where you are. You are that girl back home that I dream about marrying one day. I know that you mean in Finland, and, let me tell you, no, there was never anyone who I loved as much as I love you. You are the girl back home that I want to marry one day. As for stories from Finland, what do you want to know?

Flying is beautiful. To answer you questions: it’s absolutely beautiful (but not as much as you). No, I haven’t touched a cloud. Just so you know, I’m not sticking my hand outside the window or cockpit in order to do that. From that far up, the sun is still bright, so I’m not sure if it’s beautiful. I try not to stare at it. However, if you’re talking about the sun in my life, then it’s beautiful because you are the sun and center of my life. Looking at the ground truly does put it into perspective. It makes me realize how much I want to be with you when this hellish war is over.

I’ll always fly back home to you.

With love from the sky,

Roope.

Dear Roope,

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. Oh, you want me to say it again? Gladly. I love you, Roope Hintz, and I can’t wait to spend every single day with you after this war. Getting my letters is the best part of your day, huh? Maybe I should send more to boost your morale. (or maybe something a little bit more suggestive? Actually, no, my mother would kill me if I did that and considering I still live in her house, nope. Sorry.). I’m glad, though, that you have something to look forward to everyday. I can’t imagine what it must be like over there. If you want (and can) please do share. I want to hear about everything. You don’t even have to tell me about the combat or any of that stuff. How about what you do on your days off? Who are the men in your unit? Tell me all about any friends you made. I’m not sure where you are because, you know, classified and all, but tell me, have you been able to see any of the sights? How beautiful are they? I don’t care what you tell me; I just want to read about what you’re doing because I miss you so much. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t head to the backyard to wait for you. Everyday. Like clockwork. I go to where our backyards meet and wait. It always takes me a moment to realize that you’re not coming to meet me and it makes me sad. Just know that I think about you all the time.

My sister is grateful for your congratulations to her. She told me to tell you that she is expecting our wedding next and that you should get on it, Roope. I only laughed at her. I’m sure you have other things going on in your life, so don’t worry! A wedding can wait. All I want is that you one day promise to love me for all my life because I promise to love you all my life.

Finland. What do I want to know about your life in Finland? How about, what did your house look like? Is it anything like where your family lives now in Dallas? What did your bedroom look like? Is it similar to your room here? What did you do in your free time? I want to know it all, Roope. Everything there is to know.

Your words about me being the girl back home? Melted my heart. I reread them every night before I go to bed. I didn’t know you were such a romantic, Roope. I guess it takes a war for your true romantic side to come out. Well, you’re my guy overseas that I’m waiting for.

Flying sounds so beautiful. Maybe, one day, you could take me up with you? But for now, I just have to experience flying through your words.

Fly back home to me?

Love,

Yn

Dear Yn,

I’d write how much I love but then I’d be writing for all of time and we wouldn’t want that, right? If that were the case, then I’d never win this war and come home to you! Even then, I wouldn’t be able to ever spend time with you. Because you asked, let me tell you about some of the other pilots in my unit. My CO (commanding officer) is Tyler Seguin, and he’s great. Believe it or not, there are two other men who are also from Finland. They moved away at a young age so not as recently as me but still. Esa and Miro. It’s nice having people to talk to about Finland who have a slight inkling about what I’m talking about. There are other guys in my unit - Jamie Oleksiak, Denis Gurianov, Ben Bishop, and more. This unit is like a family, and I hope that they get to meet you one day. Actually, not Jamie Oleksiak. I feel like he has the charm and looks to take you away from me. However, he has a Red Cross worker that he’s absolutely in love with who wants nothing to do with him, so maybe not that much of a threat. On my days off, I normally just hang around the base. I often reread you letters to me and it almost makes up for me not being by your side each day. Sometimes I’ll venture into town and go for walks or to a local restaurant. Before you ask again, yes, I have seen some of the sights. I’ve seen some beautiful, grand buildings that are just so beautiful. I hope, one day, I can bring you back here to show you the beauty. There might be a war but the beauty and glamour are still there. Some of the palaces or mansions are just beautiful but not as much as you! Sometimes I’ll go for a walk and see a big tree and I will sit under it thinking you’re going to join me. Every day at the time we would normally meet, I always take a step outside, if possible, and just sit there thinking about you. Because of the time difference, it’s probably early afternoon for you but know that there is not a day that goes by without me thinking about you, darling. (Don’t feel the need to send me anything suggestive; I’d rather your parents not have a negative opinion of me one day if I am to be their son-in-law. We all know that I’ll be doing worse things to you once we get married. How else are babies made?)

You can tell your sister that a wedding can be arranged the minute she can get Hitler to surrender. If she can manage that, then I’ll marry you the minute I touch Dallas soil and can get you into my arms. Better yet! Why don’t I meet you at the church and we just get married right away?

My house in Finland was slightly smaller than my family’s house in Dallas. It wasn’t painted the vibrant yellow like in Dallas; it was a beige hue that was fairly bland. I far prefer the color of the house in Dallas because it’s the same color as your house and reminds me of you. Whenever I see something yellow, I always think of you. Most things in the world that I see go back to you. My bedroom in Finland? Pretty bland and similar to the one back in Dallas. When we made the trip, we only carried what we could so many of the posters or books I had stayed there. I did get to keep a few mementos; however, I’d rather fill a home with memories and mementos of you and our relationship. My free time? Same as before. I did play more hockey, however. There aren’t many frozen ponds in Dallas, but it’s okay. Playing on the road with the neighbors is fun! Maybe I should get you to play. What do you say?

My darling yn, you should know that I can be awfully romantic. I used to charm all the girls back in Finland. Actually, that’s a lie. You’re the only one. Maybe I should be more romantic. Just wait and see, my love, I’m going to be so romantic that you’re going to get sick of it! You’ll forever be the girl I’m going home to! When asked about if I have anyone back home, it’s always you. No one else. I guess my family, but you’re always first.

With love from the sky,

Roope

. . .

August 14, 1943

Roope took to the sky as normal one morning. Mail call was just before his scheduled time to fly, so he saved your letter for later. Flying over occupied France was always dangerous, and Roope’s CO told the unit to make sure that their wills were in check for the worst case scenario. The men were expecting the worst, so it’s only important they prepared for the worst.

After flying for twenty minutes, Nazi fighter pilots began shooting at Roope and his men. To his right, Roope’s wingman went down. He didn’t see a parachute which likely means he didn’t make it out. This really shocked Roope. He knew that there was a possibility that he might die or his friends. However, this was the first time that someone so close to Roope died. It could have easily been him.

Once he touched down, Roope headed to his barracks to read your letter. Only your letters could shake away the horrors of war.

Dearest Roope,

How are you, darling?

He read the first six words, and he instantly broke down. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t keep writing to you when he knew that he’d be dying next. It didn’t matter if he loved you more than anyone or anything in the world. It didn’t matter if he had been sending money back to his mother to put aside so that he can buy you a ring. None of it mattered if he died and you were heartbroken. Nothing mattered. Roope knew that he was going to be gone soon; it was part of the job being in the military but especially a pilot. There was only one thing he could do: he had to let you go.

Dear Yn,

It pains me to write this; however, just know that I love you. I’m doing this because I love you. I think that you should stop writing to me. I believe that it will be easier for you when I’m gone if we weren’t in contact. You should be out and having fun. You should be the young woman in your twenties doing things young women do. You should be going on dates, going out dancing, and not writing to a pilot whose life is short. It pains me to write this. Please, forgive me. I’m doing this because I love you. I love you so much that I want you to be happy when I’m gone. Please, I’m sorry. Forgive me.

With all my love,

Roope.

He sealed up the short letter into an envelope, wrote your address and put a stamp on it immediately. He knew that he would regret this later on, but he knew that it was for the best. He knew that you were going to write him one last letter asking him to change his mind. He wasn’t going to. Roope was doing this because he loved you. There was nothing else. He couldn’t fathom the idea that he might die in combat one day, and you’ll never move on because you dreamed of marrying him. He couldn’t. That would be so much worse than dying. He loved you so much that letting you go was what was for the best. Roope walked to the post office; he took a deep breath and gave the mail person his letter.

Now, he was awaiting your letter that would absolutely break his heart.

. . .

You received his letter three weeks after he sent it. You opened your mailbox and smiled widely to see it. You sat on the porch swing with your sister, heavily pregnant, sitting next to you. You carefully opened the envelope and pulled out the letter. At first glance, the letter looked really small, but you didn’t think anything of it. He was fighting a war; it makes sense if his letters weren’t as long as yours.

You read the first line, and you felt the tears begin to fall down your face. Did he find someone else? Did he not love you anymore? Deciding to ignore your thoughts, you decide to continue to read.

No, this was so much worse than Roope finding someone else. This was the worst. No, he was telling you to stop writing to him.

You finish the letter and cry out. Your sister looks up next to you. She grabs the letter out of your hand and begins reading. She briefly skims it but understands the overall message. Roope wanted you to stop writing to him; he wanted you to stop talking to him. Roope was letting you go. Your sister wraps her arm around you and begins to console you. You brush her off, excuse yourself, and run to your bedroom. How could Roope do this to you? Does he not understand that it didn’t matter what happened? You would always love him no matter what? You instantly pull out a sheet of stationary and begin to write your reply. You knew that he asked you not to write to him, but you felt he should know the pain he was putting you through.

It took you four times to finally put words to paper.

Dear Roope,

I know that you asked me not to write to you, but I feel like you should know how much you are breaking my heart. I apologize that this paper is tear-stained. I was going to write it without the tear-stains, but I feel that you should be able to see firsthand the pain and heartbreak you’re putting me through because you are the cause of it. How could you feel that this is any better? Is this what you wanted? For me to be crying in my bedroom? Did you see me being okay with your letter? Am I supposed to be okay with the fact that you don’t care enough about how I feel? Just so you know, I love you more than anything in the world. So, tell me, how does me crying in my bedroom and getting over heartbreak equal what you wanted? You tell me you want me to stop writing to you and enjoy my evenings as a young woman. How am I supposed to do that when I’m sitting here with a broken heart? The idea of me going out tomorrow? No, nonexistent. You hurt me and I don’t want to do anything. Just the idea of being with someone else makes me sad and sick. Is this what you wanted? For me to be heartbroken?

Do you remember what you told me the day you left? You told me that you would always fly back home to me. Always. You added that always. What happened to that?

Let me say one last thing: who are you to tell me what I want? I think I am perfectly capable of knowing who or what I want.

Yn

You were angry now. How dare Roope assume he knows what you want? Why can’t he understand that you love him and would do anything for him? Why would he do this to you? You angrily seal up the letter and add a stamp. You set it on your dresser to be put in the mailbox the next morning. What were you going to do now? What do you do when the person who you love more than anything in the world doesn’t care for you anymore? What do you do when the person who you’ve been dreaming about marrying says he can’t give you the same thing? Why would he do this to you?

. . .

Roope isn’t surprised to see your letter. He knows you; he knows you well enough that you definitely gave him a piece of your mind. However, what he wasn’t expecting was to see a tear-stained letter. It immediately breaks his heart knowing that he is probably the cause of your tears. Roope can’t read the letter in front of his friends, so he walks into the barracks. They’d be disappointed in him. They’d tell Roope that he was being an idiot. He was head over heels hopelessly in love with you, so why would he ruin that?

Roope reads your letter and there are tears in his eyes. What hurt the most was the way you signed the letter. You just signed it “yn”. There was no “love” or “yours”. It was just your name. What was he expecting? He basically broke up with you; there was no reason for you to remind him of your love.

“Where did you run off to?” Esa says as he barges into the barracks. “Your girl send any suggestive photos for your pleasure?”

When Roope doesn’t answer, Esa gets nervous. Roope was always very smiley and happy after he got one of your letters. Esa takes the letter out of Roope’s hand and reads it. When he sees the stained writing and what it contains, Esa instantly knows why Roope is upset.

“You love her, so why did you do this to her?”

“Because I’m not going to be able to give her what she wants. She wants to marry me one day.”

“Isn’t that what you want?”

Roope nods. “I can’t marry her, though, if I’m dead.”

“Who says you’re going to die?”

“I think the fact that pilots have the highest death rate speaks for that.”

Esa sighs and sits on the bed next to Roope. “We’re in a war. We should be able to have our dreams right next to us, right? You shouldn’t have to give up everything. You’re giving up your twenties, happiness, and strength to fight a war you didn’t start. The one thing you should be able to have is your dream. The letter you wrote her? Ruined that dream. Why did you do it?”

“I don’t want her to love a man who is going to die one day. I don’t want her to dream and imagine what our wedding would look like. I don’t want her to dream about the life we will have together one day. That’s not true. I want her to dream about those things. However, I don’t want her to dream about those things if I can’t be there. I don’t want to get shot down only for her dream life not to be able to happen. More than anything in the world, I want her to be happy. I don’t think I can give her that if I die. I want to give her a life in which she can be happy.”

“Roope, from what I can tell, you made her sad and miserable.”

“If I end things with her now, then when I die, she’ll already have a mended heart and be able to move on.”

“I don’t think so.”

Roope looks up. “What?”

“Firstly, you keep talking as if you’re going to die tomorrow. There is no definite evidence that points to that. You know, she could always die in a car accident tomorrow, God forbid. Secondly, from this letter, she loves you and you broke her heart.”

A look of realization crosses Roope’s face. “Damn, you’re right. I ruined everything, didn’t I?”

“Maybe when you go home you can fix things?”

Roope nods. He only hopes that whenever this war ends you’ll still love him enough to give him a second chance.

. . .

September 13, 1945

A knock on your parent’s door has you shocked. You were sitting in the kitchen making a pie to bring over to the Hintz’s house. Despite not talking to Roope in two years, your family and the Hintz family were still close. You clean your hands on the dish rag and walk over to the door. You don’t take the time to check who it is before you open the door. When you see the person on the other side of the door, you gasp and slam the door in their face.

It was Roope.

The love of your life who told you two years ago that the two of you shouldn’t write to each other. He threw away years of love and friendship in one letter. However, it was rude to shut the door in his face, right? You open the door again carefully. Part of you is hoping he took the hint and walked away; however, the majority of you is hoping that he’s still there. Despite him breaking your heart, you still loved him with your entire heart and being. You doubted you would ever love anyone as much as you loved Roope.

So, you open the door. Thankfully, he’s still out there. “Hi, Roope.”

“Hi, Yn,” he says nervously. “Um, these are for you. Your favorites.”

You take the flowers he’s handing to you and smile. Of course he remembered. “Thank you. Why don’t you come in, and I’ll put them into water and a vase.”

Roope nods and follows you into the house.

“When did you get home?”

“Oh, um, just a few days ago,” Roope is confused at the friendliness of the way this conversation is going. He figured you would have some harsh words for him considering what he did to you.

“And you’re only stopping by to say hi now?” you tease.

“I mean, I’m not sure how much you hate me considering I broke your heart.”

“Oh, so we are addressing the elephant in the room, then.”

“Look, yn, I’m really sorry; I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just wanted what’s best for you.”

“So, you broke my heart?”

“No, that’s not what I wanted to do.”

“Then what did you want to do.”

Roope sighs and looks at you. “I wanted your heart to get over me earlier, so that when I died, it wouldn’t hurt as much. I didn’t want you to dream of this life with me after the war only for it to be destroyed by me dying in combat.”

“What would have happened if you didn’t die?”

“Like before I wrote that letter or after?”

“Both, Roope.”

“Before? I would have flown back home to you as promised and married you. After? Well, this.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s this?”

“An apology tour?”

“A tour? Who else’s heart did you break?” you tease.

“My mother’s.”

You giggle softly. “What?”

“My mother was heartbroken to know what I did. She was so upset and sad that you wouldn’t be her daughter-in-law one day.”

“Oh.”

Roope isn’t sure how to take this. “If you’ll forgive me, yn, then that would make me so happy. I know it’s not me fixing what I did but it’s a start. Even if you don’t love me as much as I love you or at all, that’s okay. I just need you to forgive me.”

“If I forgive you, what comes next?” you add on.

Roope knows you well enough to know that this means that you’re leaning to forgiving him. “Well, I’d probably ask you out for dinner and then another and another and another and that pattern would continue. After a while, I hope, you’ll realize that I never stopped loving you and still want to marry you one day. When you finally realize that, I’ll ask you to marry me and we’ll live the life you always dreamed about.”

Roope’s words put tears in your eyes. He still loves you? He still wants to marry you? “I forgive you, Roope. I could never stay mad at you,” you say as you jump into his arms.

Roope smiles and wraps his arms around you. He strokes your back as you cry into his chest and softly kisses your forehead. When you finally stop crying, Roope decides to test the waters. “Does this mean I can take you out for dinner?”

You laugh. “Yes, Roope, you can take me out for dinner.”

“I did promise to always fly back home to you, yn.”

You smile. “And that you did.”

. . .

June 15, 1946

“Hey, step outside for a moment?” Roope whispers into your ear. You were sitting in your living room celebrating the birthday of your sister’s son. You nod and take Roope’s hand. After that day he came home and visited you, Roope has spent every single day since then showing you how sorry he is and reminding you everyday of his love for you. There was not a single day in which you doubted his love for you. Roope leads you out your back door and out to the tree in your backyard. When you walk out, you notice that there’s a blanket sitting on the grass underneath it and small lights hanging from the large branches.

“Roope, what’s this?” you ask.

“The last part of my apology tour.”

“Roope, we’ve gone over this verbatim. I forgive you; there is no need to keep trying to prove you’re sorry or love me.”

“You say that now but I think you’ll like this final part. Come sit?” Roope sits on the blankets and opens his arms so that you can join him. You do. You sit with your back to him and he wraps his arms around you. You can feel how fast his heart is beating on your back.

“Before you say anything, I need you to know, I am truly sorry for all of the heartbreak I put you through. That’s the one thing I will regret for the rest of my life. There is nothing I can do to ever make it up to you. However, I hope that marrying you will help me make it up to you.”

“You’re going to have to prop-- oh!” you’re interrupted when Roope places a small velvet box in your hand. “Roope.”

“When my parents told me we were moving to Dallas, I wasn’t sure if I’d like it. I knew why we were moving, but I didn’t want to. But then, you showed up on my doorstep with a plate of cookies in your hand and my life changed forever. My family knew before I did just how much I loved you. It took some time, but I wouldn’t change a single thing. Actually, I’d change the letter I wrote during the war but nothing else. I wouldn’t change the friendship we had and the meetings under this very tree. None of it. I only wish that we didn’t lose so many years together because of the war. Yes, I’ll admit, I ruined that a bit. We probably could be married by now and maybe have a little one of our own running around or you were close to giving birth to one. However, life happened the way it did.”

There were tears starting to form in your eyes. Roope releases his hold on you and guides you to stand up. You stand, and he goes down on one knee.

“Yn, there are no words to describe the love I have for you. Not a single one. However, I hope that if you let me be the happiest man on earth, it might give me enough time to find all the words. During the war, I was sending money to my mother to save for me to use to buy you a ring. That didn’t stop when I did what I did. I actually bought this ring the day before I went to see you. I felt that, though, despite my want to marry you right then and there, I knew we weren’t there yet. That doesn’t mean we aren’t there now.” Roope takes a deep breath. “Yn, will you marry me?”

“Yes, yes of course!” you tell him and Roope smiles.

“Yeah?”

“Absolutely!”

He gets up and places a kiss on your lips. It was salty from your tears but he wouldn’t have it any other way. Roope breaks away and places the ring on your hand.

“You did fly back home to me even if it took some time.”

“You never have to doubt it, yn,” Roope tells you as yours and his family cheers from the back porch. “No matter what, I’ll always fly back home to you.”

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[hazzoranstories]

Niklaus Mikaelson x Reader One-Shot | It Was Always Me

Includes: Mild harsh language

________________________________________________________________________________

*Chicago, Illinois; 1922*

After three drinks, one late-night snack, and much singing from Gloria echoing through the bar in Chicago, I was officially high off the pleasantness of the 1920s. It was so carefree compared to other decades before it. Too carefree. If it weren't for my restless boyfriend, then I would be running this crazy city.

"Hello, gorgeous. May I buy you a drink?" The voice of a gentle and unrecognizable voice said beside me. I looked to the right and scoffed, seeing the presence of another Vampire. I was rather gifted at seeking out which was a human and which was my own species. Something that impressed Klaus, which is rather hard to accomplish.

"No, thank you. I have a boyfriend, and I don't accept drinks from Salvatores. Let alone, Stefan Salvatore. Now, Damon Salvatore is a hesitant deny. But not Giuseppe's favorite," I barked back with a smirk tugging at my lips.

"You know who I am?" Stefan muttered and sat down at the barstool next to me.

"Of course I do. After about 700 years, you pick up on stuff pretty quickly. And how could I forget Katerina's boy toy," I said and took a sip of my martini.

"You knew Katherine?" Stefan questioned with an intense, emotionless stare. I could tell his switch was off, and by the looks of it, it had been for a while.

"I know everyone. I am dating an original after all," I traced the outline of my martini glass before popping the olive at the bottom into my mouth.

"That makes two of us," Stefan replied with a certain seductive edge.

"I know you're dating Bekah. Klaus hates you, and by the way, I do too. So scurry along before he catches you flirting with me, will you?" I snapped aggressively and downed the rest of my martini, seeing Klaus and Rebekah enter the bar.

"Well, I'm not scared of some British son of a bitch," Stefan declared.

"What'd you call me, mate?" Niklaus said from behind the Salvatore brother. Stefan tensed up just a bit to signal the feeling of being caught. The brunette turned around slowly to face my impulsive boyfriend, where Rebekah stood beside him with a hurt expression spread across her face. That's what she gets for dating a player, let alone a ripper as well.

"Stefan, what are you doing?" Bekah asked, trying to sound hopeful that her boyfriend wasn't trying to cheat.

"Oh, don't be thick, Rebekah. He was obviously trying to get my girlfriend into bed. Isn't that right, Stefan?" Klaus's thick British accent hissed at the young vampire. Stefan stayed silent. Klaus grabbed Stefan by his throat and held him up in the air, so his feet left the ground. The bar went silent, and everyone looked our way.

"Come, Niklaus. We don't want to cause a scene," I whispered in my own soft Russian tone I was slowly growing out of in exchange for an English one. Klaus looked at me through a harsh glare, but I only perked up my eyebrows and straightened my back to tell him to knock it off.

He dropped Stefan and didn't spare him another glance before grabbing my arm and dragging me out of the bar, leaving Rebekah to fend for herself. My boyfriend tugged me out into the street and let go of me abruptly, making me stumble under my heels. I turned around with a scowl on my face. "Niklaus," I scolded him.

"Why didn't you let me rip his throat out like I wanted to?! He was cheating on Rebekah and flirting with you!" He yelled in disgust, making me purse my lips together.

"Calm down, Niklaus. I put that boy in his place," I snarled with irritation.

"Did you? From as far as I could see, you just stood there and stated facts that women don't even need to know," he shouted, getting in my face.

"Are you saying only men can be smart while women shouldn't bother?" I inquired furiously. He knew how I stood on justices like this, and yet he still showed no reason to change the opinion his father ingrained in him since he was a boy.

"Yes!" He snapped, and I glared at him. "I mean -- uh -- n-no," he added quickly, and I bit on my tongue so I wouldn't snap his neck right outside the bar. But my immense anger got the best of me, and I slapped him across the face with my gloved hand.

His jaw dropped, and his eyes widened in fury. I hadn't hit him since 1237 when we first met in Kievan Rus' (otherwise known today as the Soviet Union), and he was insanely rude to my mother. He shot his head to look at me, and with no hesitation, he hit me back. It was almost like we were replaying the event in 1237.

"You don't get to hit me, love," he hummed. I knew what was about to happen. He was about to break and start lecturing me like he does when we fight. "Don't you get it? I created you! I turned you! Don't you see! I gave you this amazing life, and if it wasn't for me, you would be dead! You would have died with your disgrace of a family during the Mongolian invasion! You are here right now because of me! No one else! It was all me! Me! Not Rebekah! Not Finn! Not Kol! Not even my traitor of a brother Elijah! Me! I saved you! Not them! I loved you enough to protect you! Not them! It was always me!" he ranted with tears rimming his eyes. Over the years of vampirism, you learn how certain people will react and why they're reacting that way, and that's what I've done with Klaus. He wasn't yelling at me even if he was raising his voice. He just wanted to be loved unconditionally, something he had never gotten from his family once he killed Esther. Unless you count Rebekah, but she was craving affection just as much as Klaus was.

My boyfriend started shaking lightly. His lip trembled. After a minute of silence, I brought him into my arms. The second his head hit my shoulder, I felt tears trickle down his face and onto my dress. "I just --" he began again just I shushed him softly, running my hand through his curly brown hair. He hugged my waist tightly and let out a sob.

"I know, my love. And I'm grateful to have someone like you by my side for the past 700 years. I love you, Niklaus. And I always will, okay?" I mumbled into his ear, and he nodded.

"I love you too, Y/N."

[catboygiroux]

Vitamin E

A sidgeno fic.

Dedicated to @beggingwolf and their writing prompt that I prompted them for.

🥰

Part 1/?

To say Sid was surprised would be an understatement. Confused. Disgusted. Disappointed. Confused again.

It’s not that Geno was an omega that was the surprising/confusing/disgusting/disappointing thing. It was that it was hidden for so long that was the surprising/confusing/disgusting/disappointing thing.

In grade 11 history class they had learned about the Soviet Union’s cover ups of thing that happened during the Cold War, but Sid had never considered they would hide the designations of their top hockey talent.

Looking it into however lead Sid down a messy Internet rabbit hole about how alphas, betas, and omegas were treated in the USSR. He wasn’t sure what was actually true anymore.

All Sid knew for sure was that he had fucked up.

—

(A few hours ago)

“What do you mean Geno isn’t going to be in the All Star Game? He’s one of the top scorers!” Sid looked between them with annoyance written in his furrowed brows.

“Well, Sid, he’s…he’s not… _eligible_ anymore….”

“Explain, right now. What did he do? What happened? Is he okay?” Sid didn’t often use his true alpha status to demand answers, but this involved his second, and he would have answers.

“He’s….Sid, a report came out from the IIHF, the Russians have been using banned substances. Malkin isn’t an alpha….he’s not even a beta.” A report in put in front of Sid, listing different alphas that are not actually alphas. There’s a few betas, but mostly omegas. And highlighted is ‘Evgeni Malkin - Tests Reveal Designation as O+’

“Geno is an omega? I’ve had an omega as my alternate? As my second?” Sid nearly snarled, trying to process this new information. It didn’t make sense. Geno snarled and fought with the rest of them, and he never went into heat.

Sid could smell when a teammate was about to go into heat, and often told them before they knew it themself.

“We’re working on a statement, and we need to discuss with you what to say, since your position on this will influence ours,”

“I need time,” Sid says simply, tossing the report back on the table before leaving.

Except.

Geno was on the other side of the door, and Sid nearly ran into him. Sid normally would never miss Geno, but his smell was off.

Of course. He wasn’t an alpha. That wasn’t _his_ smell. It raises Sid’s hackles at he stared up at Geno’s expressionless face.

“Sid,” He started, but Sid just pushed past him, walking away.

Sid had accepted that Geno wasn’t an alpha, as he would never turn his back or disrespect another alpha that way.

Little alphas were taught to always greet other alphas and give them space to not encroach on them.

—

Sid hadn’t seen Geno since then. It was the All Star Break, something Sid usually spent with Geno.

No texts.

No calls.

Nothing.

Of course, an omega would not text an alpha they weren’t bonded to unless it was previously established it was allowed.

But Sid hadn’t texted Geno either.

He was trying to wrap his head around big, strong, tall Geno… an omega.

An omega ready for breeding.

Ready for a knot.

Ready for babies.

Ready to be swollen and tender and—

Well. That was new.

Now that Sid knew….it made things about Geno make more sense. He didn’t take off his underwear in the locker room, and his pecs were always a bit thicker, softer, saggier.

Now Sid knew why.

But Geno was always so aggressive, he fit in perfectly with him and the rest of the alphas.

Ovechkin was also an omega? Which made sense when Sid considered it. Team Canada had bullied him that one year and then he came back with a vengeance…

Nothing had been made public other than the IIHF investigating Russia for using banned substances, they were giving the NHL a month to discuss what they were going to do before they went public with their findings.

Would Backstrom become Captain? Would Ovi not be allowed to play first line anymore?

How much of his skill was the Alpha-Tocopherol and how much was actually him?

And Geno.

Sid had done so many alpha bonding fights with him. And they were evenly matched on that front.

Geno was an omega.

Sid had treated him as an alpha. God his dad would be so upset. He always instilled that Sid had to respect omegas, treat them right. They were royalty, to be handled carefully and treated with the utmost respect.

Geno was meant to be pampered and spoiled. Meant to be cared for while he was round with Sid’s babies, breasts swollen and ready to feed.

Wait no.

No.

Fuck.

This is why only recently omegas had started to be drafted higher and higher, because their brains were hardwired to breed them.

Some of the first drafted omegas had to wear cock holds so that alphas wouldn’t do anything to them. But eventually they all retired from hockey to have babies.

Gretzky had Jagr’s babies. So if it was good enough for the great one, it would good enough for all omegas in the league.

The All Star Break was supposed to be a time to relax and unwind.

Sid was tense and wound up.

Fuck.

[guigz1-coldwar]

"Overlord: Cold War" : a new dark COD fic is out!

A fic inspired by the 2018 movie 'Overlord' with a part of the COD characters along with some OCs from the COD fandom.

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

1984, in an alternate universe where Adler's kidnapping never occurred.

In the middle of the war against Perseus, the West secret services discover a strategic position used by Perseus in a village near the capital of Verdansk, Kastovia that needs to be destroyed to gain a big advantage against Perseus. Russell Adler, the man tasked to bring that objective is asking to Zasha Smirnov, once known as 'Bell' to come with him on the mission despite the differences and things that happened between them.

But no one knows is that everything could be a lie and what they could see in Verdansk...could change a lot of things...

To read it on AO3, click here!

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

3rd June 1984

Zasha Smirnov once know as 'Bell', MI6

Century House, London, United Kingdom

Looking through the windows of my office and the weather was basically resuming my mood today: heavy rain and even thunder on the horizon. It was something that has been happening for days and to say, almost weeks but this weather was not only reflecting about how I was now but how I was for years. Staying up to look outside wasn't going to help me so I decided to get myself back on my chair to work but...that mood was staying inside of me.

The first thing I saw when I sat up was the wide opened file about Yiri, the accident that we had together two years ago, and...the investigations from the MI6 about its circumstances. It was officially closed a few days after that incident because of a lack of evidence but me, I kept it opened, impossible for me to get over it what happened that day, it went fast, still feeling to this day the pain inside my chest when the doctor told me, her words still echoing inside my head.

My eyes were looking across the file until they went on her picture, the only picture that the MI6 was having of her: dressed in a KGB uniform in the first years she entered it with behind a dark grey wall, keeping a normal face for the photo and next to the picture, there was something I never wanted to hear and see before but now, it was the main thing that I was seeing when that file was opened: [Status: Deceased] in red.

It was at this moment that I put my hands to cover my ears as her voice was coming to echoes inside my head, that voice that I have been hearing each week since she wasn't here with me anymore. A knot in my chest was forming each time and it was torture to me, more than the CIA did to me.

"Zasha, save me," The voice said to me, sounding sad and pleading as my hands were trying to cover my ears, my fingers roaming on the sides of my head. "Zasha, don't let me down," The voice asked for me, making me close my eyes, perceiving a little scene, seeing myself in front of the car she was in when the accident, and running to save her.

"Yiri, please stop," I pleaded to the voice to stop it, my voice breaking down, and my hands starting to move away from my ears to join them on my face. "Just stop it!" I ordered to her but she was insisting, keeping to say the same things over & over again.

"Zasha," It continued to despite my pleas, hearing it louder than the others demands she was saying as I was slowly starting to break down in tears, my tears going to assemble inside my eyes before crying down but then...

"Zasha!" I almost jump scared from my chair when I heard in front of me, someone slamming their hands on my desk to get my attention, making my hands go away from my eyes to see who was the one who did this, "Zasha, are you here?" This was Grigoriev herself, sounding worried at me and feeling sorry to have to do this to get me back like that on her face.

"Yeah, I'm here, I think," I replied to her in a low voice, closing Yirina's file on my desk and pulling it aside but Grigoriev's eyes were on it.

"Seeing that file again & again isn't going to help you, you know that?" She told me in a clear voice, removing her hands from my desk as I was trying to lean comfy in my chair. "You need to stop torturing yourself with it," She advised me but no, I couldn't follow it.

"I can't forget her, it's impossible," I explained, both hands passing on my face, wanting to clean up any tears that came out in the case of it.

"It's been 2 years now, just stop doing this, people are worried," She reminded me of it but it was like almost every week of my life that she tried to tell me that, and I, unable to actually comply with her demand. "I know that's hard but please, stop," She demanded.

"I'll try," I muttered, biting a part of my lips by looking at her who rolled her eyes around.

"You said that last week," She mumbled before crossing her arms to walk away from the desk in the direction of the door. "Zasha, I did also had things I needed to get over and it was hard, I know that you will move over but I don't know that it will really happen," She commented, having her hands posed on the door handle.

"I don't know, I'll try my best," I exclaimed to her before putting my arms on the chair armrests. "Were you coming in to make me stop think about it or something else?" I asked her curiously, thinking that the first option was the obvious one.

"There's someone who wants to talk with you," She responded, turning her head around to look at me. "Goes by Adler, a guy wearing sunglasses and an orange leather jacket said that he was from the CIA," She revealed to me as my eyes went wide at this.

She was basically telling me that Russell Adler himself was maybe behind that door, wanting to talk to me. It was for 3 years that I didn't talk with him, not long after I killed Perseus himself when the CIA pulled out to let the MI6 deal alone with the Nova-6 threat in London, and now, he was here. I thought that I forgot him and him too after what he did to me but no if it wasn't enough for him to give me a bad day.

"Do I let him in?" Grigoriev asked me, her hands on the handle and waiting for my answer.

"Yes," I simply answered like that, not even taking a second to think about if I really wanted to talk to him and she nodded at me, a small grin on her face before she opened the door of my office, leaving it.

"You can come in," I heard her voice through the door, talking to him and after a few seconds of waiting, he appeared at my sight, slightly opening the door, dressed up in the same clothes he wore when he was welcoming me in West-Berlin.

"Wow, didn't know that you got your own office," This...this was the first thing he said to me when he was inside the room after checking it up with his eyes behind his sunglasses.

"Seriously?" I mumbled at him, looking at him with a deadly glare. "It's been 3 years and the first thing you said is talking about my office?" I demanded at him, sounding very serious in my voice, my left hand clenching on the rest. "If it's only for that, you can get the fuck off my office," I told him, pointing at the door.

"Kid, I ain't here for that," He gestured to me that he didn't mean it with his hands. "I came here to talk about things," He explained, his right hand pointing at one of the chairs in front of my desk and I nodded, letting him sit on it.

"What sort of things?" I asked him, not really sure that it was a good idea to have him here in front of me.

"How've you been since the last time we talked?" He demanded at me, getting his hands on his lap.

"You're not aware? Not so fucking great!" I responded to him, mixed between getting myself angry, my brain wanted me to jump over that desk and punch his teeth at everything he has done to me in the past. "I'm even worse than when you put your hands on me," I stated.

"That bad?" He raised an eyebrow, looking confused.

"Oh yeah, that's right that you completely forget things that happened," I said, wanting to make him remember one of the big things that occurred. "When Lazar got killed in Westminster to stop my own brother to unleash Nova-6, you didn't come at all at his funeral!" I reminded of that, tapping my fingers on the desk, that thing having been marked by a lot of people. "Mason, Woods, Sims & even Hudson attend his funeral with Park, me & Portnova, and you, you didn't come," I added

"I'm sorry, Zasha," He sniffed, looking away from me, trying to figure out if it was about shame or denial. "I couldn't attend it, okay?" He defended himself.

"Sure you do, sure you do," I stuttered, putting the palms of my hands against the desk.

"And what about your wife, Portnova?" He questioned me about it as he saw a framed picture of me and her on my desk, one of the few remaining that I've got from her that was taken a few days before the accident.

"She's dead," I snorted, passing my right hand below my nose. "A drunk driver ran into the car she was in, I saved her and rushed her to the nearest hospital but it was too late," I continued as he was looking a bit disturbed and sad to learn about it, the first time that I saw him like that, to be honest.

"Shit...I...I'm sorry, kid," He apologized again to me, scratching the back of his head as for a few seconds, the only sound inside the office was the rain tapping against the windows. "Uhm...how's Park, by the way?"

"I don't know, it's been almost 2 months that she disappeared, no one having found her," I replied to him. Park was asked for a mission by the MI6 but she didn't come back from it and now, half of the MI6 was looking for her in the Soviet Union. "It said that she was tasked to establish contacts with the resistance in Kastovia," I added as the former Soviet republic was now in a civil war with the Perseus forces who took control of its capital.

"What I thought," He whispered to himself, making me look at him.

"What YOU thought?" I repeated, raising an eyebrow.

"Listen, I didn't come for only talking about things but also because I need your help for a mission," He revealed to me, moving his hand inside his jacket to take out something of it, discovering a little file with a name on it. "I know that things happened between us but I need you," He insisted, putting the file on my desk to look at it.

"Overlord?" I saw the name of the file, seemingly the name of something that the CIA was going to do.

"We managed to find the main communications center that Perseus is using in Verdansk to help its forces to talk between each other, it's hidden in a church of a village around Verdansk," Adler explained to me as I was checking the file closely. "If we destroy it, we can deal a big blow to Perseus," He added.

"And why do you need me?" I demanded.

"Look at the last page," He ordered, causing me to go at the last page of the file...to discover a picture of Park herself...wearing a Perseus uniform and talking to another Perseus member as she was looking followed by the CIA. "We might believe that Park has changed sides and is helping Perseus," He told me, knowing well that my eyes were on that disturbing picture.

"That's...that's impossible, it can't be true," I protested to him, putting the file back on the desk. "She hates Perseus, she can't be with them," I added.

"I know but it's been 2 months that no one saw her and seeing her in that uniform is making us fear the worst," He claimed, putting his right hand on his forehead. "That's why I need you in that mission: we either had to capture Park...or to terminate her along with the communications center," He continued before he got up from his seat. "I'm asking you to come with me despite the things that happened between us, you're the only person in the MI6 that can manage to save her,"

"I'm not the only one that can save her but...." I stopped myself, my hands crossing on top of the file of 'Operation Overlord', impossible to think that Park could have switched sides like that and that I wasn't the only one in here to save her. "Okay, I'm in,"

"I forgot to say that the detail about Park's can't be revealed to anyone, it's staying between you & me, strict orders from Hudson," He instructed, taking out of his jacket a little pack of cigarettes and taking one from it and putting it between his lips. "No one needs to learn about Park," He lighted up his cigarette as I got up from my seat to get in front of my desk.

"And why that? I know that it's strict orders but why?" I asked him, moving to lean against my desk

"Are you sure that you want to have everyone knows that one of the best MI6 agents is working with Perseus?" He asked me back, turning his head around to look at me as he put his lighter back in his pocket. "I know that Park isn't liking me but her reputation cannot be damaged, that's why that objective of finding her is only between you & me," He affirmed that to me, and for a first, he was like sounding right in his words, not lying as Park got a good reputation in here, telling it could harm her.

"Fine, I'll keep my mouth shut," I complied with him on it.

"Good, I'm asking you to take with you someone that you can trust in the MI6," He ordered to me as he starts to walk at the door of my office to leave it. "I'm waiting for you at the airport in one hour, we need to leave London to get to Turkey the next morning," He said to me before he put his hands on the door handle, me staying on my desk as my eyes were on the file he gave me, seeing that name...Overlord...

"I'll make sure that we're going to do it,"

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

Yirina Grigoriev

I was silently crossing through some of my files on my desk, mostly talking about some MI6 operations against the Perseus Collective and enjoying a small cup of coffee in my hands when I heard the door of Zasha's office getting opened, seeing this Russell Adler coming out of their office, opening the door by himself as he was looking inside of it.

"I'll make sure that we're going to do it," The man said inside the office before he let his hands off the door handle, a cigarette between his lips, and then, starting to walk away from the room, not before actually exchanging a glare with me, looking rather suspicious and not the very nice guy type.

That man was very curious and strange as I remember how he presented himself to me and what he wanted to do and I was still having this impression when he turned his head around to look away back in front of him to leave the room as I moved my head to see Zasha coming out of the room and leaning against the door frame of his office, looking rather normal and trying to stay normal.

"Is...everything alright?" I asked them, putting my cup on the desk.

"Nope, not at all," They replied to me, showing to me in their hands, a file they were holding. "He wants me to come in Turkey to put myself back to the field," They revealed, moving away from the door to get next to my office, keeping the file in their hands. "The CIA is planning to destroy a Perseus communications center in Verdansk,"

"Right in the Kastovian Civil War? That's looking interesting," I proclaimed to that, my face looking now curious to know more.

"That's what I want to thought, he demanded that I bring someone with me," They said before they got their eyes on me. "Do you want to come with me?" They questioned me in a clear voice, and like that, I thought that it's been a long time that the MI6 didn't bring me to the field and that I was alone for weeks at my place.

"Yes, I...it's been some times that I'm alone, thinking that she will come back," I pointed out at one of the framed pictures on my desk, seeing her...Park. "Been 2 months that she disappeared like that as we got together like few weeks before she left," I added as she left me alone only after 2 months together.

"Maybe that you can try to get your thoughts away for the time been?" Zasha suggested to me, the first time that our roles were swapped, they as trying to make me change my mind. "As you said, people need to move on," They said, crossing their arms before looking away at the door that the man didn't close to leave the place. "I know that you got some run-ups with Perseus but are you willing to come with me to Verdansk?" They repeated to me, wanting to make sure that I was okay with actually joining them. "I'll tell you the main part of that if you come," They continued, now waiting for a response, and then, I got up from my seat, taking the jacket on my chair and offering my hand for a shaking...

"Count me in, Zasha!"

[sailorgreywolf-legacy]

"Come closer" with USMex please?

America was looking in the mirror carefully combing his hair. He knew that coming face to face with the Soviet Union meant that he needed to be impressive in comparison. It meant that he had to be careful with his appearance in a way that he usually was not. 

As France was fond of telling him, the way he looked reflected on the West because he was the face of the free world. He gave up on trying to get his cowlick to lay flat, since it was a battle that he had fought many times and failed. For all of his effort, his hair clearly had a mind of its own and it was folly to try to tame it. 

He glanced at his tie, and his jacket. Both tastefully black, though he would have much preferred some color. It was supposed to make him look serious and imposing. Appearing to be a child next to Russia would have been a death sentence for his cause. So, for the moment he put aside his personal taste for the sake of being taken seriously. Europe was much older than him, and he was painfully aware of how many of them still saw him as a child if he did not make an effort not to look like one.

He gave his reflection one more long glance and sighed. He looked like a very serious gentleman, and it felt slightly wrong. He wanted to have some piece of himself to avoid the feeling that he was dressed up in someone else’s clothing. Mexico spoke behind him, “Looking for these?” 

America turned to see him holding out a pair of cufflinks. The sapphire stars that he saved for special occasions. He replied, “You don’t think it is too much?” 

He would very much like to have the bit of color, but he knew he was no judge of appropriateness. Mexico, on the other hand, had exceptional taste and a trained eye for these things. It was second only to France. Whatever his tendencies towards exhibitionism, he did know more about fashion than America had ever had the patience to learn. 

Mexico chuckled and said, “You’re allowed to be a little bit eccentric.” He touched America’s cheek gently and added, “It’s part of your charm.” 

America felt a warm glow in his chest at the compliment. He did love reminders that Mexico loved him and found him charming. Sometimes he doubted it, especially when they fought and he became painfully aware that Mexico had other suitors. 

He took the cufflinks with a warm smile, and said, “I’m glad you think so.” He slipped them into the buttonholes of his cuffs. He was glad for the permission; they felt like a bit of comfort. 

As he did so, Mexico changed the subject, “Have you practiced your speech?” His raised eyebrow hinted that he suspected the answer before he even asked.  America felt the slightest hint of shame as he said, “That isn’t really my style. I speak from the heart.” 

He had thought about a few of the points that Russia may raise, but he knew that his moments of brilliance were never prepared beforehand. Mexico shook his head slightly and said, “That is what Ivan will be expecting. He will try to goad you into anger to make you look bad.”

America was slightly skeptical, because it sounded like he had come to that answer too quickly. It seemed that Mexico had given the subject some thought. He said, “How do you know that he’ll do that?” 

Mexico smirked in a way that was irresistibly charming and said, “It’s what I’d do if I really wanted to make you look bad. You’re passionate, but it can get the better of you.” 

America would usually feel a twinge of mistrust, but he felt like Mexico was not being disloyal by warning him. He said, trying to be playful, “I’m not sure I like how much you’ve thought about that.” Mexico chuckled and said, “Are you really that surprised? I know you better than anyone.” 

America shook his head. In truth, he was sure that their breakups had produced some bitterness. It would not surprise him that Mexico had come up with some ideas for revenge. What mattered was not that he had thought about the ways that he could hurt him. It mattered that he had never actually done it, which did suggest that he was loyal. 

America took a deep breath and tried to get his mind back on the meeting rather than questions of his relationship. He would certainly be in trouble if he was busy focusing on Mexico instead of the Soviet Union. 

He turned the conversation back to the matter at hand, “Well, I have not practiced. So it doesn’t matter.” 

Privately, he doubted that Russia would have any idea how to rile him enough to make him lose his focus. Mexico had insight into him that someone he had never romantically been involved with never could have. 

Mexico said, “I guessed that you wouldn’t.” He put his hand into his suit pocket. As he withdrew something compact and white, Mexico continued, “So I went to the liberty of making you note cards.” 

He pressed a stack of cards into America’s hands. The thought of rejecting the help crossed America’s mind only briefly, but he dismissed it. Mexico certainly had a way of charming people and making himself heard, so perhaps it was not a bad idea to take some advice. 

He took the notecards and flipped through them quickly. They seemed quite detailed, and he could admit that it would be helpful to have the cards on hand. Then he said, “You know me so well. But I’m not going to read a speech.”

 Mexico’s little smile was very cute. Sometimes America let himself forget how sweet his partner was capable of being. Mexico said, looking almost smug, “I know. That’s why they’re just notes in case you get flustered.” 

America felt himself smile. He could tell that Mexico had really thought through the plan, and it was touching. Mexico added, “Just remember to check your notes. And make sure to smile. You’re so handsome when you smile; it’ll win over everyone.” 

America would very much like to smile for his partner.  He found it incredibly endearing that his partner was trying to help. He felt himself bite his lip as he thought about something that had been bothering him for a few days. 

He put his hand on Mexico’s shoulder and said, “Come closer.” 

Mexico obliged him with a bemused smile. America thought carefully about what he wanted to say, because he wanted to be sincere. He put his hand on Mexico’s face. He drew in a deep breath before saying, “I want to talk about Cuba.” 

He could see the way that Mexico’s face fell at the words. It was clear that he had been expecting something sweeter, and not the cause of their most recent fight. Mexico said, in a voice that sounded like he was trying to avoid conflict, “Alfred, do we have to do this now? You need to focus.” 

America had expected as much, but he was not about to start a fight. He took another deep breath to make sure that what he said was calm, and then said, “I want you to know that I am not mad at you. I know I reacted poorly.” 

He knew that his shock and frustration at Mexico’s decision not to isolate Cuba had come across as anger, and he did not want the cloud of mistrust to hang over their relationship. As much as he tried, he could not quite bring the word sorry to his lips. It would have to be enough to say that he knew his reaction had been unwarranted. He continued, “I do understand that he is your friend, and you want to stand by him. You do not have to do all of this work to show me that you’re loyal.” 

He was trying to be sincere, so he was surprised when Mexico let out a sigh. It sounded like he was frustrated, but America could not imagine why. Mexico shook his head and said, “I’m not doing this to show you loyalty. I’m doing it because I love you.” 

To make the point he kissed America softly on the cheek. America instinctively wrapped his arms around Mexico’s waist and pulled him even closer. He said, “I love you too. Don’t ever doubt that.” 

Then he kissed him firmly on the lips. The way that Mexico melted against him assured him that his words had hit the right mark. 

[yunatheintrovert]

take me out to the ball game | Belikov & Fem!Bell Platonic Soulmate AU

You weren’t quite sure what to expect when you saw the tunnel door open with the bright light of the flashlight streaming through. 

You’ve heard about the KGB insider, Dimitri Belikov, from the briefing and files on the evidence board. But you didn’t quite know what to expect.

As you shielded your eyes from the flashlight with your raised hand, you soon lowered it and looked at the man at the entrance of the tunnel. 

And what struck you wasn’t anything unexpected about his appearance. No, you had already seen his picture in the files. 

...It was the sudden nostalgia... familiarity that struck you when you gazed at him. 

He was...familiar, similar to Park but not quite-

“You’re late.” Adler said with an air of impatience.

“Adler, my friend-” Belikov abruptly stopped, instead looking at... you ?

“где вы были? Почему ты не сказал мне, что уже ходил к ним?” you heard rapid-fire Russian from him as he looked straight at you. It made your head spin as it again felt familiar but not at the same time. 

You knew Russian but there was something overlapping with his words.

Like static....

“...Do I know you?” you asked confusedly. You couldn’t quite make out his expression with the light of the flashlight still set on you and the darkness of the tunnel corridor around you. 

All you could hear was an aggravated sigh and a curse before he turned to address Adler, “You brought her here?” 

....Did you do something to piss him off? You had only met him literally five seconds ago. Then again, maybe he wanted a different operative like Mason, Woods, or Park to be on the mission instead of a more junior operative like yourself...

“Bell has a background in cryptography. The job suits her skill set, Belikov.” 

“ Bell ?” Belikov asked. There was something off in his voice. 

“Yes, that’s her codename. Now, are we done with 21 questions? Where the hell are our uniforms?” 

“They’ve just arrived.” Belikov gestured to the hallway down the corridor where you could hear footsteps coming from, “...Wait here. There has been an issue with the bunker key. Give me five minutes and I’ll get it.” 

“Are you fucking serious right now?” Adler cursed before turning to look at you, “Hide. We still need those uniforms.” 

Your thoughts of what the hell happened back there were swept away by the sound of approaching footsteps down the corridor. 

It really had been only five minutes before Belikov returned. Although, you couldn’t help but notice a metallic smell around him that was rather familiar. 

“I’m sorry for the wait, Adler.” the KGB major said in his accented voice as he handed the bunker key to Adler, “I have to leave. But you should have everything you need. If stopped, remember you’re reporting to Commander Sobol.” 

You only had time to nod before Belikov was walking back through the corridor with Adler following.

There was a narrow window of time for the operation especially due to the heightened security reported with the existence of the CIA’s mole in the KGB. 

However, it was only when you approached the entrance to the building that you realized the sheer extent that was the case. 

“What do you think you’re doing? Everyone must go through the checkpoint.” A Soviet guard interjected as he approached.

And it was just as you were about to open the door. 

Damn it . 

“Comrade Belikov already cleared us,” you said, hopefully smoothly in Russian. You were...fuzzy about how exactly you learned the language. Perhaps, it was in training prior to Vietnam. But it seemed to work well enough as the Soviet guard didn’t seem to pick up on any foreign accent in your words. 

“Go through the checkpoint,” was all he said. 

Shit. 

You nodded slightly at Adler as he looked back at you before going forward to the checkpoint. 

This wasn’t...ideal. 

After you walked through the checkpoint, you already knew what the guard to your left was going to say. 

“Comrade, place your bag on the counter for inspection.”

“There’s no need for that. Let us pass.” you heard Adler speak fluently to your right only for the guard at the counter to of course insist on the inspection. 

Trying to hide the fact that you felt like you were walking to your own funeral, you placed the bag on the counter. 

As you watched in mute horror as the Soviet guard unzipped the bag, you heard a familiar voice speak. 

“Comrade, you are needed by Zakhaev. I will handle this.”

Belikov . 

You watched with muted relief as the KGB major walk up to the bag and casually “inspect” it. 

It was only when Belikov handed the bag back to you that you noticed it . 

The brief sepia explosion that hit your vision. Like a sepia filter suddenly being applied to a camera....

You felt your throat tighten. You had to say something but not now. 

You knew the rules regarding “vision meetings” 

Sepia for platonic soulmates.

Black and white for romantic soulmates. 

You had already met your “romantic soulmate”. Although, it was clear that bond was one-sided on your end…

But your thoughts about that were cleared away by the slight nod Belikov gave you.

He would talk about this later with you...if you survived that is. 

________________________________________________________________

There were a lot of expectations and assumptions you had walking into the KGB headquarters. 

Ironically, seeing body bags all around the floor-in the hallways, general area, and more- was unexpected. 

“Who could have done all of this, Sokolov? We’re still finding bodies in the closets and bathrooms.” you heard a Soviet soldier sigh as he kneeled down next to one of the numerous body bags in the halls. 

“It must be the mole. The same one who killed General Charkov.” The other soldier said. 

Belikov... Belikov did all of this?

And he assassinated a Soviet General. 

Holy shit, was your only thought. 

________________________________________________________________

You could feel the rapid thumping of your heart as you rode the high of adrenaline. 

And then as you heard the following words, your heart just stopped . 

“We have your friend. Surrender or he dies.” 

Shit. 

You were already getting out the detonator as Adler ordered Plan B to be put into action. 

Cover. Gas Mask. Belikov. 

It was all you could process in your current state of mind as you fired your XM4 at the soldiers. 

“Умница.” Belikov said after he secured the gask mask to his head. You once again heard static over Belikov’s voice. That word...it sounded so familiar-

But that didn’t matter. After all, you couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief into your gas mask. 

He was okay. 

You didn’t know why but you just felt like you had to protect him. Not as an order no no-but as something natural.

Maybe, it was a soulmate thing, you thought. After all, you felt the same way with Adler....although he was confusing. It was a mix of a nagging insistent feeling at the back of your skull and something natural at the same time.

Regardless of what it was, you simply resigned yourself to following it. 

And so you charged ahead.

________________________________________________________________

“Elevator conversations are always awkward.”

That line stuck with you as you found yourself in the elevator with only Belikov, going up to the next floor of the safehouse. The team had to lie low for a day in the outskirts of Moscow before getting out of the Soviet Union. 

“I uh heard you took care of the informant,” you said awkwardly, glancing over at the taller man next to you, “Thanks for that. I let him go in Berlin. Stupid mistake. He was there when I got captured-” you rambled a bit nervously. 

“Я должен был убить его медленно.” you heard Belikov say. There was something different about his voice…

And it didn’t sound exactly like anything friendly to say the least...

“Ah, yeah,” you just continued on, “So I heard you like Baseball and the Chicago Cubs from Woods and Mason. I’d like to buy you tickets to the World Series or some other game if we survive this. I-if you want that is-” you rambled before cutting yourself off.

You resisted the urge to kick yourself. Why were you messing up this badly?

You had literally broken out of the KGB headquarters in Moscow and made it out alive. 

And you were freaking out over this?

“Ты помнишь меня?” You winced at what you could describe as static clouding his words. It was almost like an encryption over a frequency, as you knew from your experience with cryptography.

But this was...different.

“I’m...I’m sorry,” you murmured, shaking your head. Why couldn’t you just understand it?

You felt a warm, comforting pressure on your shoulder. Looking up, you saw Belikov smiling down at you.

“Da, I’d like to go to a game with you.” 

And even though you didn’t know a single thing about baseball, you never looked forward to something more than that. 

(Not from what you could remember anyways.) 

________________________________________________________________

….Then Cuba happened.

And what it released might as well have been Pandora’s Box. 

You remembered. 

Not everything , no, but little bits and pieces. 

Enough for dose after dose to be injected until you felt your world speed and slow down to the beating of your heart. 

And when you finally awoke, you knew everything was a lie. 

And you knew the truth. 

You had no one.

Nothing.

No matter what you did, you would be a traitor to both sides. 

But, as you numbly heard Adler’s speech about “reinventing” yourself and having a “new life”, you wanted to believe in what he said.

You wanted to believe in a tomorrow where you could still go to that baseball game with Belikov and try out crackerjacks, cotton candy, and all those things you can’t recall ever having.

And so you told them the truth.

Solovetsky. 

________________________________________________________________

“-you’re a goddamned hero, you know that, kid?” Adler said casually as he looked out over the cliff-side. There was something about the praise that just felt good even as you felt your chest tighten with your every breath and ribs ache. 

Because maybe what you did was good enough-

(Or was that just the pathetic hope you always carried around with you?)

“Heroes have to make sacrifices. That’s why when I ask you for one more-”

As Adler said that, you just knew .

( You guessed that you wouldn’t be seeing that baseball game with Belikov. And damn wasn’t that a shame. )

You already have your hand grasp the handle of one of your guns at your waist. You knew it was empty. 

You chose it for that reason. Because maybe, just maybe you could deter him from doing this.

And if not well...well you couldn’t bring yourself to kill him. 

One-sided soulmates or not, you just couldn’t-

“Ahhh I knew you were here, my friend!” 

Belikov. 

You released your grasp on the gun. If Belikov was in on this as well...then really you couldn’t bother to even pick up a gun. 

It’d just be...pointless.

“Belikov,” Adler said irritably, clearly not impressed by the Russian’s ill-timed arrival. 

“Adler,” Belikov said, much less cheery this time. You glanced back and forth between the two of them. 

Where exactly did Belikov line up in this....?

“I have a contact within the VVS. If I do not report in ten minutes, they will report the coordinates of our exfil to their superiors.” 

VVS...wait the Soviet Air Force-

“What the fuck, Belikov?”

“I made a deal with Hudson,” Belikov casually explained before gesturing to you, “Her safety and our asylum in America in exchange for intel. The former is non-negotiable, my friend.” 

“Why the hell are you doing this? You’re one of Hudson’s-”

" Bell and I are платонические родственные души. I was her handler when she infiltrated Perseus.” 

Wait, you had been a sleeper agent…?

You looked at Belikov. 

All those words and the sheer familiarity.... you knew him. 

It’d make sense if he was your handler as a sleeper agent in Perseus. 

“Bell,” you heard Belikov say, “We have a baseball game to catch, da?” 

You distantly nodded. 

You didn’t remember everything. But with everything that’s happened, you just knew that you could trust him. 

“Bell-” you could distantly hear Adler call after you. But you turned away, trying to ignore him. 

“I am surprised you tried what you did, Adler….ah nyet . I’ll let you find that out yourself.” you heard Belikov say a little too cheerily. 

But all you could think of was how you were really just looking forward to that baseball game.

________________________________________________________________

Author’s Note: So....I ended up writing a 2K one-shot of Belikov & Bell being platonic soulmates...

Well, I hope the writing wasn't too terrible and that Belikov wasn't too OOC. The implied background between Belikov and Bell is that Bell, who was roped into Perseus's lower ranks, met Belikov in the KGB and they soon had a friendship. And since Belikov would have met Hudson at this point, he would be thinking about a way to get Bell guaranteed safety and to do that meant getting enough intel for the CIA to consider them worth that much effort. Hence, Belikov working as a mole for the CIA and Bell working as an anonymous insider in Perseus. 

Anyways, if anyone read through this, I hope you guys enjoyed this. It was a lot of fun to write. Here's to the first main Belikov & Bell fic in the fandom!

Thanks for reading!!

[sergeant-donny-donowitz]

Remembering You (Hugo Stiglitz x Reader)

Requested by @mbluxaeterna

@owba-chan @war-obsessed @inglourious-imagines @tealaquinn @struggling-bee @frozenhuntress67 @kwyloz @sodapop182 @marlenemarauders @what-the--curtains @taikawho

Let me know if you wanna be added to the IB or OUATIH taglists! :) _______________________

Normally....you would have been thrilled to meet the basterds. Hell, you could have made an unstoppable team, had they encountered you at any other possible moment in time. But of course, it's now. Now, when you are a lone, rogue soldier. Now, after you've lost your team. Now, when everything around you is oh-so-incriminating.

Naturally, they took you in for interrogating, and cuffed you. "You gon' tell us who you are, or you gon' keep on lying?" You rolled your eyes, "I've told you a million times. I am not a nazi." The fact that you'd been accused of it was enough to make your skin crawl. "Then what are you doing out here, alone?" Donny prodded at you with his bat, which was meant to be threatening given its fame...but it really just annoyed you. "Same as you. Killing nazis." "Got a pretty lil German accent there," Aldo snorted some tobacco, and went on matter of factly, "So-" You rolled your eyes, "I'm sorry, really. But you have a German right there, and an Austrian. How is an accent indicative of anything?  Especially now?" You looked around. Surely, they knew all about double agents, especially those like you. "So you're trying to say you're just some kid wandering around with all these guns and knives," Omar held up your pack with all the evidence, "And you expect us to believe you?" "Pretty much." You shifted a little to sit with your legs crossed beneath you, though your hands were still cuffed. You understood their lack of trust...but also...you were a bit more than annoyed now. "I wasn't alone the whole time." You relented. They were with the OSS, and definitely not traitors. What harm would it do to tell them? It may just save your life, after all. "I was part of a team. We were called the Double Eight." Aldo didn't hesitate, "Never heard of it." He turned, almost smirking, "You boys heard of it?" A chorus of 'no sirs' and laughs rang out, and you rolled your eyes, "Of course not. Some of us are better at being undercover than others." An uncomfortable silence blanketed them, and you sighed and went on, "There were eight of us. All of us double agents, double crossers," you smiled fondly remembering your teammates, "Double trouble... Best of the best in what we did, worst of the worst to the nazis, recruited by an American officer working for the OSS." Aldo narrowed his eyes. "Oh really?" "Really." You held your ground, and held your head up high. You heard one of the boys, Smitty, ask Donny, "You think it's true?" Donny then turned to you, "Who was in your team?" He often prided himself for knowing things about agents stationed around Europe, people in resistances, and allies. He was a bit of a networking king...so if any of the basterds could tell, it was him. "A Jewish girl from Poland. Halina..." You smiled softly, though your heart broke for her. You were the one who helped her family escape...but you couldn't help her in your last mission. "She could make and break any code." "And there was Andrej. Big, tough Andrej," You shook your head remembering his loud, bellowing laugh, "Jewish kid, no older than you." You gestured to Hirschberg, "He was Serbian. He was a good strategist." The mission to recruit him was one of the earliest, (and toughest) because he was so damn stubborn. "Ruslo..." You sighed a little, remembering his kind eyes, "Romani guy. Recruited when we passed through Croatia. Didn't need a map when that boy was around." You shook your head with a gentle smile, "Then there was Konstantin. Writer and intellectual, defected from the Soviet Union. Good spy." You glanced up at, and almost imperceptibly whispered, "Good man." Omar looked around, "Kid's gotta be telling the truth." WIcki frowned a little, "How do you know?" Omar shrugged, "Konstantin is the most soviet-spy sounding name I've ever heard." Donny narrowed his eyes and nodded, "Right. Almost too perfect." Aldo rolled his eyes, "Go on." You smiled a little, remembering the unbreakable bond your team had. One even stronger within it, "We had an Italian rebel, he was an escaped political prisoner. His wife was a Spanish anti-fascist rebel. Marzio and Carmina..." Names that axis troops in the mediterranean were terrified off. You took a breath, "Our leader was an American...if you would believe that." You smirked a little, "Shelby Hellberg. Shell-Hell, we called him." You glanced off into the distance. Toward the east, where your last mission together had been. You sighed, knowing you'd never see them again, no matter how many times you passed through there. "And you." Aldo remarked, hardly believing a word you'd said. "And me." You nodded with a smile. What more could you do? Hirschberg shifted a little, rifle still in hand, "And who's you?" "Y/n L/n." You spoke with a sly shadow of pride in your lips, "After all, every team needs some muscle." Donny looked you over incredulously, "You were the muscle?" You challenged him with a simple smirk, "Why? You wanna test that theory, big guy?" You meant it,  Donny was quite a bit taller than you, but you could definitely take him down. You'd taken people bigger than him down before, after all. The basterds didn't realize that just yet. But, Hugo kept his eye on you the entire time, thinking about every word you'd said, and the way you'd said them. He'd run with spies before, he knew their ways and webs. You were unlike any of the agents he'd known before. And still, he thought he'd seen your face somewhere before. And he said so, abruptly, without any explanation. "You look familiar." The way he said it...the way he looked at you was not in an accusing manner. He meant it. You went with your default response. You smiled suavely, thumb and finger sitting square beneath your chin as you remarked, "I just have that kind of face." Hugo nodded, and looked away, though he still kept trying to remember. "So, will you let me go? I do have a mission, you know. I'll be terribly late. Madrid is a long way from here, after all." Donny spoofed, "Nice try, a real agent wouldn't have told us all that." "You asked." You reminded Donny with an eye roll. Donny retorted, "So if a nazi asked, you'd tell 'em too." "No, because THEN IT'S A NAZI." Hirschberg piped up then, "How do you know we're not nazis," as if he really got you. Even Hugo and Wicki rolled their eyes. You rolled your eyes, "Because you're basterds." Aldo seemed amused, and humored the boys, "Says who?" "Says that accent. Sorry, but it's not one many people would strive to imitate." The basterds laughed. It had been so long since someone had gotten away with making fun of his accent. "Besides, everyone knows the Bear Jew. And, everyone knows about Hugo Stiglitz...And the Little Man." Donny chuckled, "Wait, who's the Little Man." "Oh, it's-" Before you answered, Utivich stepped closer to you, "Is that...blood?" "...Oh right..." You glanced at your side, with a slowly growing red stain. "When did that happen!?" "Just before you happened." you shrugged. Hugo crouched by you, "Were you stabbed?" "Oh... most definitely." You were somehow so blunt, and so stoic. Shock is one hell of a drug. Donny, who was slowly being convinced that you were telling the truth, quickly looked around for a cue, "Why DIDN'T YOU SAY SO?!" Before you could answer, Hugo practically flung toward you with a medic kit in his hands. He didn't say a word, but he kept looking up at you. He looked you in the eyes, and it wasn't something he normally did with anyone. You couldn't shake the feeling that he was trying to see into your eyes...almost as though he was trying to dig up a memory that was not his own. The basterds went about with their day. Aldo sent a few of the boys along with a message asking the general if the OSS could confirm or deny your claims. In the meantime, the rest of the basterds scattered around. A few went to get supplies and food, some of the others went out to gather a few scalps here and there to pay off their debt to Aldo. Only Hugo remained, of course 'to keep watch.' But he was busy disinfecting and stitching your wound. "Wer hat dir das angetan?" 'Who did this to you?' "Würden Sie mir glauben, wenn ich es Ihnen sagen würde?" 'Would you believe me if I told you?' He smiled a little, which you heard never happened. You raised your eyebrow, 'Why are you helping me, Hugo?' 'If you're not who you say you are, then we need answers. But if you are you, then...' He trailed off into what was barely a whisper, and glanced up at you. By now, he hardly thought you were a nazi... But that still left him with a thousand questions. Number one being...Who were you, really? The basterds came back, slept in their tents. You were still handcuffed, left outside. In the middle of the night, Hugo's eyes shot wide. He had been dreaming, which was relatively rare for him, even before the war. But this dream was much more of a memory. He'd never been much of a sports fan, but there was one night, just before the start of the war his friend Klaus had recently become a manager and promoter in boxing, and invited Hugo to a match. Your match. He made his way outside, and found you, with your cuffed hands behind your head as you laid on your back, and looked up to the sky. You glanced over at the approaching figure, then back at the sky. He stopped a few feet away from you, "Du warst ein Boxer." 'You were a boxer.' You dismisively hummed. He was silent for a moment, then stepped a little closer, tilting his head, 'I remember you. You used to-' You shook your head.

He crouched by you, and took your hands abruptly. You looked at him, confused though....you certainly didn't mind.  Still, he wasn't holding your hands for the hell of it. He was studying the discolored memories of a glorious past in every scar from every victory, loss, and draw. 'It was you.' 'Was.' You conceded with a sigh, 'A long time ago.' 'Do you remember a promoter named Klaus?' He sat down, and wondered aloud, 'I wonder where he is these days...' You cleared your throat, ' Oh...you know....we...um...' 'Had a falling out?' He raised his eyebrow and chuckled a little. It was his way of asking if you'd had a falling in. You blushed a little with a smile, 'Well, yes...but it was so long ago.' Hugo was silent for a while, then asked, 'Is he...' 'Dead, deadweight, or a nazi?' He nodded once, again raising his eyebrow. He wanted the answer to all three. 'No, no, and definitely not. He's a spy for the OSS, too.' You smiled at Hugo, who seemed relieved. He didn't have many friends to begin with before the war. He always wondered what he'd do if he made it to the end. 'I'd like to see him again. I owe him something.' Hugo said with a chuckle. He'd bet Klaus that you'd lose your match...and you didn't. 'After the war, perhaps.' You chuckled and Hugo nodded, 'Perhaps...' You were quiet again, then he commented, 'I saw you sparring, once.' 'Congratulations,' you stopped smiling suddenly, and turned away from him as much as you could, 'good night.'

'Wait.' He shifted to sit directly in front of you. 'What?' 'You...disappeated.' 'They used footage from my matches as propaganda against my will. I left the ring, I left my family, I left Klaus, I ditched my contract, and I lost everything.' 'Where did you go?' 'Doesn't matter.' 'What did you do?' 'What are you, the gestapo?' You rolled your eyes at his sudden interrogation, and he grunted at himself and mumbled, 'Sorry..' He started getting up, thinking perhaps he had crossed a line. You sighed, cursed at yourself wordlessly, and then called out 'I worked as a bouncer in a club in Munich. Nice place. Nicer when we started hiding people where no one would think to look. I got rid of nazis that were too close.' 'Not bad,' He smirked a little. You didn't. 'It wasn't enough.' 'So what did you do? You were recruited, weren't you?' 'Same as you.' You smiled a little then, and he did too. For once in his life, Hugo's hands felt warm... He looked down, and saw he was still holding your hands. You didn't seem to mind. He let go suddenly, and uncuffed you. 'You're not a nazi.' 'Oh gee thanks,' You chuckled a little as you crossed your legs beneath you. He mumbled again, 'Sorry...' You smiled and shook your head, reaching for his hand, 'We can never be too careful, I suppose.' 'I suppose not,' He sighed, and his eyes wandered as he sat back against a tree. 'You're not going to sleep?' You smirked, and again said, 'We can never be too careful...' Of course, you meant you didn't want the other basterds to catch you without your handcuffs, and for Hugo to be in some trouble, Hugo thought you meant the fact that you were deep in enemy territory that was the trouble, 'It's safe here,' He promised you with his eyes, a slight nod, and a squeeze of his hand. 'We thought that not too many years ago, Hugo...' You sighed, remembering the day before the world turned upside down in 1933...you were just a kid then. Hugo turned to you, 'You're hurt.' 'You knew that already.' 'But you're hurting...' 'Who isn't, these days?' You laughed a little,  but he didn't. 'Let me see.' 'Fine.' He shook his head as he let go of your hand, and went for the medic kit again. As he took care of you and your wound again, he asked 'What happened to your team?' The sky was a cool dark blue, with a tinge of orange in the horizon. It would be sunrise soon... 'It was just before dawn, about a year ago. We were ambushed. From then on, I've been on my own.' 'I'm sorry.'

You didn't tell Hugo that the nazis weren't looking for your team. They were looking for the Basterds, who had just broken Hugo out of prison. 'Don't be...' You looked up at him, and for a moment, you realized you'd had enough talk of the past. 'Where will you go?' 'What do you mean?' 'After this. After the war.' He smiled, 'I don't know...The world is a big place.' He smiled and looked at you, and you understood he didn't want to go back to Germany either. 'Where will you go?' You shrugged, 'Wherever I'm needed, as always.' For reasons neither you or HUgo could comprehend, he murmured, 'What if I needed you?' You kissed him softly, 'Then I'll be there.' **** "Well....that checks out." Aldo held up a letter from the general, demanding they let you go immediately, while also chewing Aldo out. Donny shrugged, "Well, we're sorry kid..."

You laughed, "I know, I know." You glanced over at Hugo, "Can't be too careful these days." Hugo smiled, though the basterds didn't see. You turned, and started walking west, deeper into the forest. "You're leaving? Just like that?" Omar was asking what half the basterds were wondering. "I told you, I have a mission in Madrid...and I've been set back a few days." Hugo shook his head, "But you're hurt!"

You smiled softly, as you stepped back toward him. "I'll be fine," your hand grazed over his for a moment, "You'll see." He smiled quietly as he watched you go, then Hirschberg gasped, "Is Hugo smiling?!" "No." Omar rolled his eyes, "Great you ruined it." Smitty shook his head, "I didn't even get to see." Wicki asked, "Did Y/n ever say who the nazis call the Little Man?" Smitty shrugged, "Huh...guess we'll never know."

***Months Later Aldo was pacing around. They'd recently lost Andy, Simon, and Michael. Now, the basterds needed some extra firepower, and had nowhere to turn to. At dawn, they'd be moving toward a nearby village for their mission. Hugo was looking east, as the first splash of red and orange began to glow in the distant horizon. "What are you lookin' for, Hugo?" Aldo turned, taking a sip of watered down, stale, coffee. They then all heard footsteps. Boots over fallen leaves. A face peered through some low hanging branches, glad to have stumbled upon them. "Y/n!" The basterds had never seen Hugo run so fast. And they were even more shocked when they saw him wrap his hands around yours. "Klaus lässt grüßen, mein Lieber." 'Klaus sends his regards, my dear.'

Hugo smiled, and held you. You'd heard quite a few rumors in the past few months about the basterds. And seeing their faces now... Seeing Hugo... You knew where you were needed.