#at the same time ive spent so much time writing it and agonizing over it that i dont think i have the heart to delete any of it

[your--isgayrights]

Hmmm I feel like I've written myself into a hump... Like I genuinely am having such a hard time telling if any of this introductory part of the chapter is going to have an emotional impact at all or if it's just filler to get to the parts I like at the end of this section...

[bigmoneypastelhalloween]

I wonder if the chronology of my last post is coherent enough...

Missing context:

In summer 2010 just after the g20 riots i moved to toronto with veña and simon, we got the cheapest 3 bedroom we could find, it was "above the 401" as they say, the hinterlands. Veña and i moved in first and smoked salvia in the empty apartment, simon got there a month later. I got a job at a queen street headshop after a couple months, hand of god given that i dropped off 5 resumes total and spent all day every day blogging and agonizing over where i could get decent weed and how to afford more. leni moved in that fall, originally sharing a room with simon but there was conflict and she switched to veña's room. Holding pattern while i make connections thru work and hang out with coworkers. By the new year we're rolling again, we're going to dj nights, etc. The manager at work changes when 50k of legal highs disappear. Martin, who i know from uvic, moved in may or june of 2011. We all ended up on 2cb or some research chem near-analog, i was supposed to have mdma for us but the batch sold as, was later confirmed to be 2csomething via the dealers gf postfacto. Immediately martin got us househunting and within a few weeks we saw a bunch of places and then moved from 2441 finch west to 114 finch east i guess starting in august because we had a big summer moving in party. Leni and veña were on speed and i told them not to jook up with this undergrad they knew but they did anyway. The kid and their friends hung around all summer wondering when we'd actully be fun. The kid figured out martin was the fun one and got mad at veña for liking their ex better. The kid is lux. Lux starts talking to martin about metal instead of veña. Halloween '11 is a 0 degree night out of nowhere and we're at a bridge show martin has a reading at, after going to a party at my store managers place with lux, which sucks so bad lux bails for the night. Someone does a callout of a stylistic choice in martins work and things sort of derail. Martin wants us to play defense, which turns things into a popularity contest, and martin would win going strictly by defender numbers, 4 v 1 ("your network is your networth") except because the girl and her friend who are complaining about martins story have more metal attached to their clothes martin is ashamed of our bad optics. This foreshadows much to come. I lose my job by being more and more of an insane mess and go on employment insurance. Yule 2011 I went back to bc with my fiance garrett who was living in boston working on his phd in psychology. I spent that easter doing k and acid with lux. In march 2012 i had what garrett said was a psychotic break.

Martin moved out may of 2012. I went to panama to teach the primatology class at a field school for 2 sessions from june to august. I got assaulted by a coworker, martin was the only person i told from home who took the position that i was being unreasonable. I got my septum done in bocas del toro, it was a body-ownership move as much as a memento of the place; Ive never stopped wearing a ring in my nose since then, ive even gauged up a bit. I got garrett a ticket to panama, he moved into the house with us after we got back from panama together, he still had to write and defend his thesis. 2012 we had a big vegan house party for yuletime. A few days before that was the big mayan calendar failpocalypse, i spent it writing on 2ce. Somewhere in there i got into a facebook spat with martin over veña, and got blocked. New year 2013 i got a job i'd written a preholiday rush cover for, at a headshop really close to the house, at yonge and steeles. Worked there 5 months, ran into another coworker issue. General workplace friction with the whole vibe of working for GoT fan ancaps in the legal high/weed paraphernalia business. 2nd verse same as the first. I started spending more time with lux because they were the most sympathetically in tune with my rage about the panama situation and my sorrow about the state of the world, and i ended up going with them and nat to meet suzy for the first time that spring after end of session at u of t when she was moving out of the student res that a few years later got closed for being uninhabitably damaged. Suzy gave me a hundred or so caps of name brand dexedrine as a parting gift. Blast off.

Right at the time things were melting down at work again martin told the others about moving back to the city. It triggered a midtier manic episode but i was also on long speed jags at that time, it all coalesced. I left martin a letter in the paper tray of the copier they wanted to pick up. A month or so later they came to the house, probably while i was at the fort. Id started hooking up with lux after doing speed at a backyard show there and they were insanely demanding after that. (I met nix spring 2013, at one of the fort shows that happened during that time.) When i got back everyone said martin had spent the whole time trying to get them to shit talk me and itd been pretty awkward. Leni said she saw martin find my letter and disgustedly throw it away. Emma came over and we all unloaded about how martin was being so bizarre after moving out. But then simon decided to move out. I asked them to give me my first stiknpoke before leaving and they gave me a division symbol on my wrist. Lux was squeezing someone out of the fort at that time, the house founder in fact, and needed someone they could stand, on short notice, to take over a large share of the rent, so they used emotional leverage and got me to bail on veña and leni. I was almost out of money and my big plan was to go on welfare for the first time after moving to the fort.

I left in july to go hitchhiking with lux, who wanted to chase their remaining roommates to a grindcore festival in bc and basically make sure people werent just sitting around complaining about the coup that had actually scared off the house founder and her bestie, so the rent situation was tenuous and being held down by the mom of this guy ryan who lived there and had spent 3 or 6 months in prison for being a g20 rioter, he got beaten every day by guards and left with crippling depression. He was dating someone from another collective house who was in bc waiting for fastcore with nat already because they'd trainhopped and made it the whole way thru ontario in 2 days. I got my first smartphone so i could document the trip and i started a new facebook, maybe i was hoping my sudden metamorphosis into someone with a punk name would register to martin and theyd add my new account and we'd talk. We go to mtl to visit nix and bug at death church; bug had moved out of the fort before luxs coup. We doubled back quickly and then headed north. I got my 2nd stiknpoke from lux outside wawa (infamous hitching black hole), a bong. Lux and i got lucky with a 2 day ride across the praries in a dodge charger after a week in north ontario. We met cassidy and her gf at the time in edmonton, & after a few days there we got over to vancouver where we met up with ryan who said he was there to try to find shrew because theyd had a fight. He said some bad consent stuff happened, after we'd been hanging out for a day (lux loved him) and lux and i nervous laughed & called shrew who said to lose ryan and get up to squamish. We caught up with nat and shrew, eventually linked up with nat and shrews lost travel crew....and an old roommate of luxs named natalie who had gone from plur to acab in the same space of time as lux had. (All very coincidental im sure.) Remember natalie. In squamish i gave myself a mans ruin stiknpoke while we hung out at the skatepark, beautiful day. After fastcore we bummed around vancouver a couple days before lux got their guardian angel cj to buy them a bus ticket because they were cranky from bin-diving giving them food poisoning and all their internet friends we'd met turning out to be normie libs (no one wanted to lay pipe). I spend my last cash on a ticket for myself. Greyhound still runs cross country in 2013. Garrett and i move in to the fort right as nat and lux hitch to mtl together to visit nix. Shrew was still living at george street, i think doug was trying to get them to stay there at the time but all the guys there were saying ryan was a good guy and we were all totally willing to kick ryan out whether shrew moved in or not. I dont know where he was at this time, but based on the stimulator screening we went to with him back in van, he hadnt even noticed being leftcoast famous for getting arrested until that outing, and there were a lot more warm welcomes to make a tour of before trying to talk to shrew again. He was all set up at a well known collective house by the pne grounds.

So garrett and i were actually alone at the fort with shrews miniscule cat beez for a couple weeks before anyone came back. I was on my way to shrew and ryans first face to face over at g street, on my bike, and got arrested because a cop said i spit on him. He said some got on his shoe. I got cuffed and ticketed but they let me go. I missed the thing with ryan and no one at g street found getting arrested remarkable. I went home to the fort and garrett found it so remarkable that he dumped me. I spent the next three months crying at sammy yatim demos and police hearings and watching tv in bed or having last chance sex. During this time lux and nat were trying to find more renters and this runaway kid who'd been having trouble at another house moved in, along with a street artist the others knew from around. As soon as garrett was gone at the start of December 2013, nat and i took a bus across the border and started hitching to IDA in Tennessee so they could tell us how to make an effective collective house. We learned that everyone needs their own house and its normal for people to go years within a community not talking to eachother. We got back and the street artist and shrew were at it with eachother. I got a tattoo from her anyway, in the living room. On her birthday we all go to a soup kitchen, martin is there with a bunch of shrews old friends. We're weird and avoidant of one another, i decide to let martin say hi if they want to, they dont, more to it but whatever. Skip to, we tell birthday gal we need to find someone who is actually paying rent. She sets the house on fire. We put it out. Happy 2014.

Then came the business of kicking lux out for being a manipulative weirdo who turned out to be mad at natalie because natalie was like "the sex we had was not consensual, youre a rapist" and lux was just like "what a bitch can you believe this bitch" about it, and then also "technically i also raped my ex who veña always liked better" about it, too. So that was a mess. That winter and early spring are a blur, nat and shrew and i go to some parties. Doug moves in. Various other people move in and out. Random people are in and out all the time. I live in a closet, which i consider heaven. I take a bike repair class. Nat and i go to a party at emmas and i meet luke, its still cold old. I ask luke out but he seems uninvested and morbidly curious from the get go. Im morbidly curious myself once i realize that bug called this guy out over something and i recall that while lux and i were in edmonton lux defaced a bunch of his bands show flyers. I get a really cool bike via nat and start joyriding all over the city, im hoping kismet will kick in and I'll run into martin. Nat and shrew hear from shrews friends that martin lives on the eastside with them. Nat and shrew go to one of martins readings and i say be nice dont troll like you did at the soupkitchen in the winter. They troll worse, tell me all about it when they get home. It sounds like martin won them over by being mildmannered afterward but theyre not forthcoming about that part.

I think that kind of catches things up to where we were before...

I spent summer of 2014 living at the fort and hooking up with luke and a guy who lived at george street named chris. That year on my birthday i sprained both wrists doing a stupid bike stunt. That was the same day i applied to be a courier. Shrew and i got into a conflict over the runaway kid's whole deal and i decided to move out as soon as shrew said they were going to. They stayed, i left. I bused back to bc to regroup with the gang. First i met up with simon, who was hanging out with martins bestie a lot and thru an awkward series of events i ended up crashing at that persons place with them and their bf felix, even tho martins bestie was clearly terrified of me and couldnt understand why simon had brought me in the first place. Then i went to stay with veña and leni, who were living together at veña's moms place. We all did m during a bloodmoon watch and i accidentally outed some information leni had been withholding. Garrett and i kept meeting up and hooking up too, and he got annoyed that i wasnt making room for him in the veña/leni/me situation and left things on bad terms but later apologized. I kept trying to get them all to move back and get another place but the only one who was all in was leni, after the big reveal she felt like relocating would be more fun than staying and facing the music.

Over halloween we hitched from van to winnipeg to save money and bused the rest of the way. They broke up after she got to toronto with me. We stayed at emmas moms place for a month (nov 2014) while i started the courier job it turned out i'd had for weeks, and leni apartment hunted. Doing a good deed is remembered by the spirit of the city, and we found a cheap basement in the trinity-bellwoods area I'd flyered for the first sammy yatim response demo.

I kept working the courier job and one day leni and i ran into luke. He started crashing at our apartment because it was so close to the rehearsal factory. I started writing a summary of the lefty witch agenda as a thesis project for suzy because i had been relying on her counsel more and more since leaving the fort and i wanted to do something that might have some kind of tangible impact and ime she's a very talented witch, one of the most talented i know if not the most, so in her hands a document like that could go anywhere. Lord knows if she ever read it all. I remember she started it and was like you didnt cite so and so and i was like as far as i knew that was original, and its like ok well, she's seen it before. Collaged in with all the same other stuff, too, most likely. I think she thought my format choices were cute, anyway.

I stopped going to the courier job so i could work on my speedifesto full time. I spent new years 2015 on acid at a party on the eastside with a girl i was dating and leni and the girl she was dating. The night ended badly. I ruined things with the girl so many different times but having a self-obsessive bad trip while she wanted to have mindblowingly romantic sex instead, was a big one of the ruiny moments. She's happy now with someone who isnt stupid.

[daaziscoolbesties]

i yearn for one(1) thing only, and that is to have a nice, simplistic, cartoonish artstyle. an artstyle that doesnt rely on anatomy, but the "movement" of the drawing, if you get what i mean.

i dont want realistic proportions and traditional colors and basic poses and gradient shading, i want funky lil dudes in funky poses with funky styles littering my sketchbook :( but alas i havent figured out how to develop that kind of style yet, my brain wants anatomy to look nice but also i dont want to draw eyes. i dont want to take time out of my day to learn how to draw lips i want to draw a line that extends past the characters face. i dont want all my characters to have pointy chins with curved cheeks i want their heads to be round and friend-like or full of sharp edges depending on their personalities and styles. i want to give them all not-quite human ears, blob feet, simple faces, but at the same time i want enough detail to convey the story or emotion im trying to tell.

ive spent so much time recently agonizing over how to use 3d model websites, using real-life references and tracing over them for practice, color-picking from real images to try and do realism and failing miserably, but you know whats easier than that? funky little dudes. little dudes who do not care if their legs are too long or their hair is too bouncy. i dont want my characters to look human.

ive spent enough time on the artfight website to realize that most people who classify their characters as "human" have the most basic ass designs (no offense to people who like basic human designs its just not my thing) or its like dnd-medieval style outfits which i cant draw for the life of me (ive tried). again no offense to people who actively enjoy and draw characters like that. i just need my dudes to have that certain,,, off-ness to them. tails are cool. wings are swag (especially if they arent even like,, fully attached,, ), elf ears are so wonderful to me no matter how much theyre overused, horns are so much fun to draw, and colors!! i have no knowledge in the color theory department so this works great for me!! the only thing i really know is dont shade with black, other than that i just colorpick from references usually but i dont want to do that!! i want the colors to hurt people's eyes but in a satisfying way. like the character's design is so nice to look at that you dont mind your eyes hurting a bit. like how im enjoying writing this post even though its 2 am and the brightness on my computer wont go any lower.

and then another thing ive noticed from being on the artfight website is that a lot of people classify their characters that are anthro/have anthro features under humanoids/monsters. like i made a google form to find some people to attack and someone sent me in a character with some sort of animal (wolf? idk) arms and legs. like dude!! peak character design i love her. but me personally? i cant draw that shit, its so hard for me. i tried a while back and its just Not my thing. nothing against furries i just. cant. and i dont want to either.

and i got another submission that i accidentally deleted that was like full anthro/wolf-like like my comrade,,, i cannot draw animals what makes you think i can draw an animal who acts like a human lmao. i can do like. very basic tails, and also animal ears but i cant do the arms and legs and such i just dont know the anatomy, and i know i was talking about how i dont want to care about anatomy but i feel like for anthros you really do need to know at least basic animal anatomy so you know how the limbs look and shit and i dont have that knowledge and dont feel like gaining it.

and then there were some submissions that i absolutely adored. there was one that like, was vaguely human shaped but definitely was not a human. they had a dark-ish lavender colored skin and horns and tusks and like goat ears and a sorta fluffy tail with spikes on it and they had wings and such and they were such a pleasure to draw i love them. and they had a fairly simple outfit too, nothing too complicated. and then i also enjoy object head characters, theyre so neato to me. i got one of those and i really wish i had the motivation to work on it cause it looks so fun.

i want to make funky characters but id have nothing to do with them because the only book i ever tried writing (key word tried - never got past planning it out) had strictly human characters in it, and most of the books i read are humans/humans with powers in situations specific to them so id have no idea what lore to make with the dudes. assuming i have the motivation to make lore and backstory because honestly i just really enjoy character designing its super duper fun.

(side note a song about trucks doing the deed came on just now and its interrupted my flow, apologies).

i only have three actual characters right now. one is an original roleplay oc whos design is literally athletic shorts, an oversized long sleeved grey sweatshirt, long purple hair, and demon horns. the second one is my persona whos design some sorta medival knight outfit kinda thing? but not ugly it looks really cool (idk one of my friends designed it bc i won some contest from him but the drawing was on a super small scale so idrk the details,,,) with a plague doctor mask and crown, and shoulder length wavy brown hair, dyed bright pink at the end. and then my last one im not too comfortable using other places because theyre a character my friend is using in the story hes writing, and thats really the only place theyve been used. but theyre easily my favorite and im already writing a ton so ill talk about them too.

they're a sorta elf species thing from another planet, with pale green skin and pointed ears. they also have a tail, its like,, super thin, but with a feathery bit at the end. probably not the texture of a feather but i dont know how else to describe it. they have short, curly, almost-draco-malfoy-blonde hair that when it gets too long they can put in a man bun. their eyesight is kinda shitty so when they got to earth, they were exploring some supply closets around the airship. drop off area. thing. like airport but for rocketships and also fancier. yeah. they were exploring that area and found a nice big pair of round glasses with grey frames. and they also found a cowboy-style hat and a sharpie so they wrote their name on the underside of the brim of the hat and stole the hat and glasses (but left the sharpie in the supply closet).

yeah theyre my favorite, my absolute beloved, my child, so cool. i want more characters like them but with maybe a bit more snazzier designs. theyre super cool and all but they could have more pizzazz if they werent in a story where its too late to give them more pizzazz. i just want to be able to give my characters thigh-high boots with a bunch of buckles and fluffy hair with tons of accessories crammed in and abnormally large and long ears that can harbor many piercings and horns that can hold rings on them and special little details on their outfits like who knows what but i dont have any characters to do that too, so i have to make them from scratch, which is always hard especially when you have artblock.

and i also have like 17 characters i need to fully draw, line, and maybe color for artfight before august 1st. so i dont know. i have many things to do and plenty of time to do it but instead i spend my time halfway watching repetitive youtube videos that get boring or sleeping all damn day because i stay up too late doing things like this or i just do nothing at all and its tiring and frustrating but i also feel nothing about it like theres no consequence if i dont do it besides you know. not doing it, not gaining that experience, not making something i enjoy.

so i should do it but i dont for whatever reason, i think its called executive dysfunction but im not sure. this post started out very differently than it ended and i said somewhere up there that i was writing this at 2 am but now its almost 3. this is so many words why couldnt i have put this energy into something productive

[hellyeahomeland]

“Paean to the People” | Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter

“Paean to the People” picks up right where “All In” left off. Carrie and Anson are speeding through the streets of Budapest Moscow Budapow. In this opening shot, their car is the only one on the bridge, adding to the feeling of just how on their own they are, without diplomatic cover, as they try to distract Yevgeny long enough to get Simone on that plane.

The arrangement in this shot!! Everyone whose face is visible is serving so much face. Simone is like, “don’t look at me.” Bennet (with facial hair!) is like, “are you fucking kidding me?” Doxie (with some pretty great side eye) is like, “I am NOT getting stuck in Budapow.” And Ms. Pink Scarf is like, “What am I doing here again? What is my job?” You and us both, Pink Scarf. You and us both.

Let’s give a full round of snaps to Sandy this season. She brought the sassy realness and Russian know-how the whole dang time. This show needs all the female energy it can get and this shot of her pulling out the chair for Clint’s “time out” is incredible. We’re not sure if she’ll be back for season eight, but if she won’t, we will miss her so.

Both Carrie and Anson know what’s at stake in this mission but in this moment, it’s Carrie who has to convince Anson how far she can and will go. We hate to say it, but the moment of recognition shared here between them screams “America First” when Quinn tells Carrie to get in the car and stay down. If seven seasons of Homeland have taught us one thing, it’s that these people all follow the same code: Get in. Get down. Shut up. Mission over self.

IJLTP.

We will hand it to the Homeland props department for getting the birthday right on Simone’s fake Carrie Mathison passport (it’s April 5, 1979). But!! Her middle name is spelled Anne, not Ann.

Simone spent a lot of time obscuring her face from the Russian officials in that car, but this glimpse of her expression after she asks Saul if he’s really going to leave Carrie--the Carrie who CLIMBED A FUCKING ROOF LIKE TWENTY MINUTES AGO TO GET TO SIMONE--in Budapow. That is a pursed lip and evil eye if we ever saw ‘em.

...And, of course, the guilt is written all over his face.

We are CACKLING at the dude in the white jacket in the background. We are not sure if he is just a really bad extra or some random stranger who saw Claire Danes in a Budapest train station and needed to share else he was met with a chorus of “pics or it didn’t happen” from his friends.

Sara and Doxie have the same birthday (November 4), which further solidifies that he is her forever man and the best Carrie Angel of them all.

We talked about the strong “America First” vibes above and the whole sequence of Carrie running through the train station is giving us heavy “The Smile” vibes, too. After seven seasons, it’s difficult for some moments not to feel like explicit callbacks from earlier episodes. After all, maybe looking at a mirror in a crowded marketplace is just Carrie’s favorite American spy woman move. But this shot, and Carrie’s smile later, are so specific that we think the homage is intentional.

IJLTP, II.

Real talk though, you really get a sense of the loneliness of the office here, as Beau faces away, back to the camera, surrounded by those heavy curtains.

Lesli Linka Glatter is a choreographer by training and she’s talked before about the diligent preparation she does before directing a Homeland episode. In sequences like these--filmed, acted, and edited with such specific clarity--that training and preparation come through loud and clear. Every shot has a purpose and we’re exposed to all angles of the action. It really is like a dance.

Here, the slow reveal of Yevgeny coming around the corner ratchets up the stakes as Carrie waits, a sitting duck in the locked room.

And here’s our duck. What’s so great about thrilling and suspenseful action sequences like this is the human moments they’re contrasted with. We can see the fear in her face as she contemplates whether to go down in a blaze of glory. She’s not made of steel. She may only have seconds left to live. She may be a hero but she is not a superhero.

Yevgeny delivers a BudaPOW (sorry, we couldn’t resist) with his punch to Carrie, but her moment of defeat is quickly transformed into one of triumph with the news that Saul and his “package” have achieved lift-off.

This smile, guys. Damn. Claire Danes is in a class all her own.

Delirious, glorious laughter. When was the last time we saw Carrie laugh?

It doesn’t last long, of course. The first rule of Homeland is that if Carrie smiles, shit’s about to get fucked up. “At least she had this moment,” we all whisper quietly to ourselves.

The shots of Saul looking down from his window at the city of Budapow--Carrie in it God knows where, the proverbial needle in the haystack--are powerful. He has left her there. And now he has to get her back.

We love this shot of everyone arrayed out like this, watching Simone’s testimony in The Room Where It Happened. Though we would like to point out that it’s hard to take Bennet seriously without facial hair. Dude, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere. Get on it! (Also there are so many VESTS this season! We count two in this shot alone.)

IJLTP, III.

This is the sequence of shots after Keane says she’ll do everything she can to get Carrie back. There was some chatter about going to Anson first (looking pensive), then Saul (looking sorrowful), and finally Max, who looks the most doubtful and suspect of them all (and, of course, almost hidden behind the others in the back). Sara actually thinks closing with Max is the most powerful. He’s been by Carrie’s side, through thick and thin, all seven seasons of this show. And after the trauma of losing Quinn last season, it’s easy to see how history may be replaying itself for him, this time in agonizing slow-motion.

So many “Pilot” vibes. This show loves playing with reversals and bookends, and having Carrie be the prisoner now is one of the most stinging of them all.

Sara would just like to say that she even looks beautiful in a Russian prison.

The book Carrie’s reading here is called Where Avon into Severn Flows, which is actually a short story by the American writer Harold Frederic and part of his book The Deserter and Other Stories: A Book of Two Wars.

Here is the opening paragraph of the story:

“A boy of fifteen, clad in doublet and hose of plain cloth dyed a sober brown, sat alone at one end of a broad, vaulted room, before a writing table. The strong, clear light which covered him and his work fell through an open window, arched at the top and piercing a stone wall of almost a yard's thickness. Similar openings to the right and left of him marked with bars of light a dozen other places along the extended, shelf-like table, where writers had now finished their day's labor, and, departing, had left covered horns of ink and cleansed utensils behind them. But the boy's task lagged behind fulfilment, and mocked him.”

It’s easy to see the parallels. Carrie is held in a Russian prison, also dressed in plain, ill-fitting clothes. She sits in a broad, vaulted room with a plain writing table nearby. Carrie might have won the battle, getting Simone back to the United States, but here in this cell, her success must feel fleeting and the irony of her current circumstance mocking.

Some major “There’s Something Else Going On” vibes here. (Sorry, we’re just gonna point out all our vibes.)

We’re just gonna call this pose from Costa Ronin the Yevgeny Lean (#IJustLikeHowHeLeans). On a more serious note, some credit needs to be given to Ronin, who brought Yevgeny to life and made him feel like a fully lived-in person. His habit of leaning back, feet propped out before him, is just one small example, but it’s representative of the care and attention he put into crafting such a three-dimensional portrait of one of the most interesting villains in the series’ history.

IJLTP, IV. 

And that IJLTP shot of Carrie, alone in that Russian prison with the stakes (i.e., her mental health) now clearly defined, is followed by the rather astounding hero’s welcome that awaits Keane back in the West Wing. This reminds Sara of those tunnels that sports teams would form after a game for everyone to run through. And now Sara wishes Keane had run through the tunnel, high-fiving everyone.

It’s Tie Color Time! Note that Beau is now back to the blue tie, having resumed his position as Vice President.

Talk about sweet karma. The scene between Paley and Keane is remarkable for a few reasons. First, Paley does all the talking. Keane doesn’t even give him the respect that comes with a response. He lowers himself to his knees, literally begging for her mercy.

Keane is often shot from below, highlighting her stance and power. But here, it’s a point-of-view shot. We see what Paley sees: this woman, whom Saul once claimed could not “rise above her own vindictiveness,” closing in on him, a bird of prey who’s finally made her catch. And then she spits in his face.

The Washington Monument, which sits due east of the Reflecting Pool, adds great dramatic effect to this beautifully shot (and scored) moment after Keane leaves her meeting with Paley. Despite the monument’s great size, in these shots its height matches Keane’s, which is likely intentional.

As the monument was being completed. Joseph R. Chandler, a Freemason and member of the House of Representatives said:

“No more Washingtons shall come in our time ... But his virtues are stamped on the heart of mankind. He who is great in the battlefield looks upward to the generalship of Washington. He who grows wise in counsel feels that he is imitating Washington. He who can resign power against the wishes of a people, has in his eye the bright example of Washington.”  

As she drives back through the DC streets at night one last time as President, she’s clearly at a crossroads. History has its eyes on her. (We will also continue to make ALL the Hamilton references.)

We’re not sure if this moment was scripted or if it was a choice by Claire in the moment. Either way, what’s happening? If she praying? Thanking God? Carrie’s relationship with religion and atonement has been basically nonexistent since the show devoted attention to it in season five. We wonder if, like Brody before her, she may be discovering--or rediscovering, as it were--it while in captivity, a salve for her inevitable isolation.

A few things to note from this headstone:

It’s the tenth anniversary of Andrew’s death.

Are we really meant to believe Keane is old enough to have had a kid in 1979? Elizabeth Marvel was born in 1969, which means she’s playing at least ten years older than she actually is. Sara does not buy this, but whatever.

Andrew is born mere weeks before Carrie, which in hindsight kind of shifts the relationship between Keane and Carrie in season six. Carrie really could be Keane’s daughter, and if Carrie indeed did see her in some small part as a mother figure, it frames her conflict with Saul last season--and the battle for Carrie’s loyalty--in an even sharper light.

This is just a gorgeous light, the rows of headstones filling the bottom half of the screen and the large, overgrown tree framing Keane in the top half. It’s her figurative “moment alone in the shade” (figurative because she’s not really in the shade, but y’all catch our drift).

Again, it was impossible to properly capture the moment when Carrie congratulates Aleksandr through anything other than a gif. The quiver in her voice, her attempt at a forced smile. After this moment, the lighting in the room shifts--she is literally forced to see the light, as the direness of her circumstances are fully revealed.

This is the last time we see Carrie before the “seven months later” coda, so now’s as good a time as any to talk about the truly tremendous work she did this season.

From the opening episode, Claire took us on the tenuous, tumultuous journey of Carrie’s war with her own mind and the battles waged within. Every episode, every moment was brought to life with exacting precision. Sometimes we loved her, and sometimes we hated her, but Claire’s commitment to every moment never wavered, whether it was seducing Dante, having nightmarish visions of her bloodied daughter, or inching her way across that GRU roof.

The throughline of this season of Carrie’s mental health makes this moment and the final scene land with even more crushing weight than they otherwise would. When Carrie experiences a breakdown so harrowing and frightening, she goes to extreme lengths to restore her own sanity. In the last three episodes of the season, we see just how invaluable that sanity is--her mind is both her greatest asset and greatest liability.

Carrie knows here what’s about to happen. She stares, eyes wide open, almost as if she’s glimpsing into the future at what lies before her. There’s no safety net this time, no pills or ECT to pull her back or hit the reset button. But for as much as she knows that she’ll lose her mind (in every sense of the word, it turns out), there is also great uncertainty, looking into “the bottom of a black hole with no walls.”

Something we find super interesting about this sequence is just how many perspectives LLG gives us of Keane’s speech, whether it’s Wellington’s from inside the Oval, Saul in his office, or Yevgeny in Budapow. Again, LLG’s choreography background comes shining through. For almost the entire speech, we see her presidency--and what turns out to be its final moments--through everyone’s lens except her own.

LLG doesn’t shoot Keane center-frame, without some extra filter of a screen, until the very end of the scene, after the speech is over. Keane talks earlier about wanting to speak directly to the American people, from the heart, but what we actually get is everyone looking at screens, at the filtered version of this woman and her office, a metaphor if ever there was one for her short-lived presidency.

As her speech (which, like Washington’s Farewell Address, focuses on the need to not let political parties and divisions tear apart the country) nears its end, we do see Keane center-frame. But, again, it’s a shot of her center-frame on the screen, and her appearance is somehow altered and filtered.

(A quick note about her wardrobe: Keane starts the day grieving for her son at Arlington, and she keeps on the same black clothing during her speech, a signal of the impending end of her presidency. The dangling earrings are also an interesting choice, and an unusual one for Keane, who usually wears studs or conservative-looking hoops. Like Carrie in “Species Jump,” this is as close as she’ll get to “letting her hair down,” and the unconventional jewelry choice conveys the peace she’s found with her decision.)

And now the lights come down on Keane and her presidency, in every sense of the word.

The dynamics of this scene remind Sara of the end of “The Choice,” when Saul sees Carrie in that hall of dead bodies after thinking she’d died in the explosion. They shared a moment of recognition at the end of that scene, standing in stark contrast to what unfolds here.

Here’s our first good shot of Carrie, and there’s a lot to take in. The swollen face and unkempt hair are startling, to say the least. Under her bulky black coat she’s wearing white (you can see a peak of her shirt here but her pants--not visible in this shot--are also white), indicating she’s been in an asylum.

The season opened with Carrie running on a treadmill, athletic and strong, the buzzy chords of jazz blaring in our ears. It ends with our heroine on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. She’s feeble and unsteady, running away from the Russian guards and straight past Saul. We hear jazz again, but it’s slower and somehow weightier.

As Saul gently brushes the hair from her face and looks into her eyes, calling her name, she is seemingly unable to recognize him. Her eyes dart from side to side, up and down, but his remain steady on her, and we can see (and share) the concern and devastation etched on his face.

She’s searching, and so is he.

[galaxystony]

fortune’s fool: peter parker IV

peter parker x reader

multi-part fic based off of a twitter post which I won’t link until the end so as not to spoil anything :-) Each part can be read individually or as a series!

A/N: I’m sorry, I know I said I’d have this up on Wednesday, but I’ve had a ton going on this week, and I really wanted this part to be really good for y’all, so I spent a bit more time on it. I’m most proud of this installment so far. I hope you enjoy. Also, the marriage pact trope begins! Ahhh!

requested: nope

Words: 3800+

Warnings: slight angst, mentions of death

summary: Two Empire State University students fated to meet, but just out of reach

let me know if you’d like to be added to my tag list!

requests are open!

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | masterlist

4. Spaces

25 y/o Peter, 23 y/o reader

“Peter, we won’t ever stop being friends, will we?”

Peter looked up from his chemistry textbook at his best friend who was sprawled out on top of the covers on his bed.

“Duh,” he responded simply, turning back to his book. “You know I couldn’t survive without you by my side.”

She smiled softly, closing her eyes and leaning her head back to allow the sun that shone through the window to paint the length of her neck with its speckled glow. “Good,” she replied.

After a moment, she said again, “Peter?”

“Hmm?”

“Let’s never lose touch, okay? Even of you have to move upstate with the rest of  the Avengers and I have to move to the middle of nowhere. Like, Indiana or something.” She eyed him through one open eye as he turned and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“You planning on moving to Indiana any time soon, babe?” He cocked an eyebrow, his lips turning up in a half smile.

“It was just an example,” she said defensively. “But I’m being serious. You have to promise me we’ll never stop talking to each other, no matter what, okay?”

He was smiling fully now as he got up from his seat and jumped up onto the bed, laying his full body over the length of hers as she giggled wildly. “As long as you want me to keep talking to you, I will, smarty pants.”

Then he leaned down, pressed a kiss against her forehead, then got up and returned to his work as she continued to giggle softly from her spot on the bed.

-

It had been two years since she moved away. 

“I have to take care of my dad,” she’d said. “He won’t eat or sleep if I don’t make him. I’m scared of what will happen to him if I’m not there watching over him.”

It took her only three days to pack all of her things and move out of their his apartment. Three days to remove all traces of her being, not just from the home, but from Peter’s life, too. Three days to leave Peter floundering with his head just above the water.

“I need space,” she said. “I need to be able to learn to live in a world without my sister.”

He supposed he understood. He’d spent months after his uncle’s death isolating himself from the people he loved. There was nothing, nothing, he knew, that he could do to help her. She needed to heal alone. That’s what agonized him the most; that he couldn’t do anything for her no matter how much he wanted to.

And so she left. And he gave her space. And now it’s been two years since they’d spoken.

Two years, one month, and seventeen days, his mind supplied as he watched the city move below him from his perch on the roof of his apartment building.

Even after she left, he continued with his nightly rounds. He was worried, at first, about how he’d handle everything without her. She used to be the one to fix him when he came back after a particularly late night, agonizing over his latest slip-up. She always knew the exact words to say, words that no one else seemed to have. What would he do now?

It was May who gave him the idea to start journaling. She was always insightful, always knew better than she should about everything. She knew, even if Peter didn’t yet, that he’d loved Y/N, and she supposed that losing her was the equivalent of May losing Ben.

“Just write it all down,” May suggested. “That’s what helped me most after your uncle. Trust me, Peter. You don’t want to keep this bottled up inside.”

He protested at first. What would he even write about? What would he say? He thought it all felt a little… middle-school-girl-ish.

It was only after an especially rough night where he returned bloody and crying uncontrollably, missing Y/N more than usual, that he actually took May’s advice. He took a pen to the first blank page of his journal, and suddenly the words Dear Y/N were flowing from the tip, and he found himself unable to stop writing until his hand was shaking and stiff, and tears were smudging the blue ink, spreading it thin over the lined paper.

It wasn’t the same as actually speaking to her. He knew that. But he also knew that if he didn’t get the words out now, right now, he never would, and then he’d be forever stuck in his mind stewing over what he’d done wrong and what he should’ve done.

He hadn’t meant to get so stuck on her. He knew he had to move on from the girl who lit his darkest nights, a soft but persistent glowing ember that he thought would never fade. Two years without her, though, and the darkness was all he had left, like an old friend that always stuck in the outskirts of his mind, never straying far from sight, no matter how much he wrote. He was resigned to it now. Accepting of it.

He tried, though. He tried his best to forget her, but how could anyone forget that radiant sun that had cloaked so much of his life with its glow?

It didn’t take him long after she left for him to realize he was in love with her. It was inevitable, he guessed, and looking back, he didn’t know how he hadn’t realized any sooner. It was so obvious now, that they were forever entangled, souls interlocking so tight that he knew he’d never love anybody like he loved her.

And so he stayed in Manhattan in that tiny little apartment that should house two, but now held only one lonely soul and the big, gaping hole that she left behind, and he waited.

He lay awake all night waiting to hear her keys jingle in the lock of the front door. Sat solemnly at the kitchen table glaring at her obviously empty seat. Watched his phone constantly, begging it to light up with a message just so he’d know she was okay.

Nothing ever happened. No matter how hard he stared, he couldn’t will her to walk through the door or text him back.

That made it easy for him to start hating her. He knew it wasn’t fair, that she wasn’t his to keep in the first place, and that she was an independent woman capable of making her own decisions, but he also thought it wasn’t fair that she’d leave him alone when she knew how much he relied on her. He hated himself even more for thinking that. How selfish did he have to be to want to try and take her from her family when they needed each other much more than he needed her?

The hatred didn’t last long. Nine months in, and he was left with was a funny feeling in his heart that maybe she wasn’t coming back, but maybe there was also nothing he could do about it. He hoped she was doing okay, though.

He knew that she should be nearing the end of med school if she’d decided to continue schooling at home. He hoped she had, that she didn’t give up her dream. When she was still finishing her bachelor’s degree, he remembers her internal battle over staying in the city for school or moving back home.  

“Empire State’s such a good school, but I wouldn’t mind moving home for a bit. Stony Brook has a great med school, too,” she’d said.

“You have to stay here, babe. What would I do without you?” he remembers himself saying. How utterly selfish of him. Who was he to decide where she went to school? He originally felt a smug sort of pride when she finally decided to stay in Manhattan. Now, he could only wonder how different her life could have been if she’d gone back to Long Island. Maybe her sister would still be alive. He tried not to think of that very often.

He thinks there’s no way she wouldn’t have kept going to school at home. With her grades and study ethic, she would’ve gotten into Stony Brook easily. She’d come too far and had too much to lose to quit so easily. He knew, like everybody else knew, that she had one of the most brilliant minds of anyone their age. Quitting seemed like too much of a waste of her intelligence.

He hoped and prayed that she was alright. He knew how overwhelmed she’d get when the work started to pile up, that she’d work and work and never sleep until her body literally shut down. He hoped she had someone at home who would make her stop and rest, a job he used to happily call his own.

As he crouched on the roof lost in thought, his eyes absently skimmed the empty street, hoping that each taxi that approached would be her, dipping his head in thinly veiled disappointment when they continued past the building to some other, more important location.

He found himself distracted these days, especially during his rounds. He knew he should’ve been giving it his full focus, but he just couldn’t. He constantly had an eye out for a flash of her shining hair, a corner of her favorite coat, the smallest whiff of her perfume. Anything to prove she was back and she was still real.

He felt like he was going crazy, like this was his rock bottom, and everyone around him could tell. Ned and MJ would eye each other, sharing concerned glances after each time he faked another smile. Mr. Stark would lecture him after every botched mission that was a result of his unfocused mind.  May would try and coax his feelings out of him every once in awhile when she noticed that the journaling just wasn’t cutting it, but she never got more than a halfhearted shrug and an “I’m fine”.

“She’s okay, sweetheart,” May would assure him. “She just needs time.” And he’d nod in agreement, but once he got home, he’d lay in bed and wonder exactly how much more time she needed. He knew everybody was concerned, but there was nothing he could do to stop his worrying.

“It’s been two years, Pete. She’d want you to move on. Can you imagine what she’d say if she saw you like this?” MJ asked once when she’d caught him watching his phone instead of engaging in conversation with her while they were at lunch.

“Probably something about kicking my ass for putting her feelings before my own as usual,” he mumbled in reply.

MJ smiled and grabbed his hand over the table. “Exactly. You need to think of yourself now. It’s what she’d want.”

He started to get better little by little after that. He hung out with Ned and MJ more frequently. He spent one day a week after work at the Daily Bugle (who knew his personal journaling would end up helping him land a job as the writer for the advice column?) talking to Tony about what he went through in his other job. Most importantly, he began to open up to May about Y/N.

No one, he knew, would ever take her place, and some days, he felt like he was only using the others as a substitute until her return, but deep down, he knew that he was starting to heal.

His head snapped up when he heard the sound of another car approaching, this time pulling up to the curb. He watched closely as the passenger door opened, a foot stepping out before the door opened even wider to reveal its owner.

Time seemed to stop. He was no longer breathing, his heart turning violently inside of his chest. It was her. It was her. He still couldn’t breathe. He pinched his arm hard, praying that he wasn’t dreaming. The resulting sting told him he wasn’t.

He reached to pull his mask off, yanking it roughly over his head as his eyes widened. It was her. He could tell, analyzing her familiar movements as she pulled a suitcase from the car then waved it off after paying the driver.

Go to her! his mind screamed at him as she looked up at the building, clearly not seeing him, before she picked up her suitcase and unlocked the heavy wooden door with her own key.

He sat stunned and unable to move. She was here. She was home. She was back and she was okay and he didn’t know what to do.

Go find her, idiot! that little voice repeated, and he shot up, racing to the very edge of the building and jumping without a second thought, shooting a web at the fire escape just outside her old window and pulling himself up without a sound.

He slid the window open and swung in, seeing her still-dark room empty of any movement. He moved silently through the apartment and sat at the kitchen table in his usual spot, still wearing his suit without the mask.

His ears perked up at the sound of keys in the lock, a sound he’d been waiting for with bated breath for the past two years. His eyes were still trained on the door as it opened and she stepped in, and he got up from his seat to help her out of her jacket, just like he had so many times in the years before.

She turned and smiled softly in that secret way of hers, like it was saved just for him, and wrapped tight arms around his torso, pulling him close to her and burying her face in his chest, just like she used to.

He responded belatedly, his mind still trying to process the fact that she was here and he could feel her, solid and sure. He enveloped her in a hug, leaning his head down to rest it in the crook of her neck as he inhaled her scent, something that had been gone from his apartment for so long that he almost couldn’t remember it at all.

“Welcome back, smarty pants,” he whispered into her hair.

He could feel her crying, warm tears seeping through the fabric of his suit. He knew he probably was, too. They stood there for a while, wrapped up in each other and trying to make up for all of the time they’d lost when they were apart.

When she finally pulled away, her face was wet with tears, nose red and running, and the picture was so familiar that Peter’s chest physically ached with longing. She sniffed and wiped the wetness away with one of her sleeves, smiling up at him through eyes that still shone with tears.

“I’m home,” is all she said, when he pulled her back in, holding her like he thought she might drift away, that if he let go, she’d leave again, and he’d be completely lost.

“Thank God,” he breathed into her ear, and then they were both sobbing and he was walking them backwards towards the sofa, collapsing onto it when the back of his knees hit the worn brown cushion.

They pulled apart, sitting facing each other in their usual spots, crying and laughing all at the same time, both of their hearts feeling like a weight had been lifted off of them after so long.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked when they’d calmed down. “I didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”

“My dad wanted me to finish med school at my dream school, and he knew that wasn’t Stony Brook. He promised me he’d be okay if I spent one last year at Empire State,” she explained quietly.

“That’s- that’s amazing, babe! You’re gonna be living here in the city with me again! You have no idea how long I’ve waited for you to come back! I can’t wai-”

“Peter, I’m not moving back here,” she interrupted with a pained look on her face. “I still need space. Being back home only reminded me how much I missed my sister, and I barely had any time to learn to live without her. I still need to be by myself and adjust to life away from home and without her.”

His eager smile fell, lips dipping lower and lower as she continued to speak.

“I only came here to let you know I was back in the city. It felt wrong coming back without you knowing. But I have my own apartment in Brooklyn. It’s only a twenty minute subway ride from campus. I hope you understand, Peter. You were such a big part of my life, and you know I’d never want to cut ties with you forever, but I need this time. I need to know who I am without her.”

Peter nodded his head solemnly. He understood. Of course he did. He would give her whatever he wanted, as long as he knew she was alright.

“Okay,” he agreed. “I get it. I’ll give you whatever you need.”

Her smile returned, and she leaned over to hug him again, that familiar warmth filling him from the inside out as they held each other as close as they could.

“Stay the night at least?” he whispered into her hair.

“Of course,” she replied, eyes closed to fight an oncoming bout of tears as she pushed her forehead against his.

She found herself in his bed twenty minutes later, a spot carved out for her like she’d never left that was marked by twisted sheets and dented pillows and looked just how she remembered them.

They lay nose to nose, staring unblinking into the other’s eyes as they breathed and drank in the feeling of being there together again, their limbs locked together like missing puzzle pieces reunited once again.

“I need you to know something. Before you leave me again,” Peter broke the silence first with a well-placed hand on her cheek.

“What is it?” she asked softly, even though she could guess what the next words out of his mouth would be.

“I love you,” he stated plainly.

“I know,” she responded without missing a beat. “I love you, too.”

“Then stay here with me! Y/N, I want to take care of you. I know you feel like you have to handle this on your own, but you don’t! You have so many people here that love you and want to help you heal, me especially,” he spoke desperately. She sighed, smiling sadly, and he knew she wouldn’t change her mind for anything or anyone.

“I’m sorry, Peter. I love you, but I can’t stay here. I need to rebuild on my own for a while. There’s nothing I want more than for my life to return to normal, but it won’t. So until I’m able to move on, I can’t stay,” she explained as she watched a tear roll over the crooked little bump in Peter’s nose and down the side of his cheek. “I’m sorry. I love you.”

“I love you so much it scares me. Sometimes I don’t think I’d be able to live without you. Just knowing that you were somewhere out there trying to deal with this alone made me want to rip my hair out for not being able to help. You gave me the best three years of my life before you left, Y/N. It took me nearly a year to be able to sleep through a full night because my thoughts of you kept me awake. I even wrote letters to you every day that I never sent and probably never will. I still haven’t learned how to live without you.” The tears were fully streaming now, pooling on top of the pillowcase until they were absorbed into the soft cotton.

Now was her turn to cup his cheek, wiping away the onslaught of tears as they continued to fall rapidly from swollen and bloodshot eyes that used to be the wellspring of her happiness.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know I left you alone. I know you’ve had to deal with your own problems without me. I didn’t want you to get hurt, I wanted you to be able to move on,” she sniffed, her own warm tears coating red cheeks.

“God, I feel so stupid. Everything you’ve been dealing with is so much harder than what I’ve been going through. I feel so selfish making you feel guilty for leaving. That’s not how I want you to feel,” he frowned, trying to stop any more tears from falling.

“Peter, your problems are no less important than mine. I don’t ever want you to feel guilty for wanting to talk to me about what’s bothering you. Even if I’m not physically here for you, I’ll always be with you in here,” she smiled as she placed a small hand over his heart.

It thudded against her palm, something soft and steady that seemed to say listen to me, I love you, feel how I beat for you.

“And you’re always in here, I promise. There’s not a moment that I stopped thinking about you these past two years.” She reached to pull his hand to her chest, feeling its warmth over her own beating heart that played the same symphony as his own.

They lay there for a few minutes with their hands over each other’s hearts that beat in synchronicity as they sniffed well-deserved tears away, basking in the incredibly intimate moment.

“Y/N?” Peter broke the silence again after a moment of thought.

“Yes?”

“Promise me one thing,” he whispered after he grabbed the hand that lay on his chest.

“Anything,” she nodded, giving his hand a squeeze.

“If we both haven’t fallen in love with anybody else, and we’ve both learned to heal in the next five years, let’s get married, okay? When you’re twenty-eight and I’m thirty,” he implored her tentatively, gauging her reaction carefully through creased brows.

“Okay,” she agreed after a beat of silence, and he pulled her into his embrace, breathing in her scent without any intent of letting go.

-

She left for her apartment in Brooklyn the next morning with the promise that she’d get back in touch as soon as she was ready. This time, Peter didn’t mind so much. He felt at peace with the fact that they would come together again. It may be years from then, but he was content to know that there was a future to look forward to. Their lives were in the hands of fate now.

Desperate for a change of scenery, though, he decided to take up Tony’s offer from years earlier and moved upstate to live and work at the Avengers compound with the hope that rigorous training would be enough to keep his mind off of her until she was ready to speak to him again.

His first day at the compound was one of the hardest he’d had in a long time since before she’d left. That night, he found himself at his desk with a lone lamp illuminating the bare sheet of paper in front of him as he began the first letter he would actually send.

Dear Y/N…

tagged: @multi-parker @cutie1365 @cersei-lannister @oswald-1998 @kawaiianime03 @lionfart @mrsdoradominguez-barnes @nonewmessage @co0kies08 @dec-snowy @sunshine-little-miss @cubedtriangle @triggerfingerfunction​ @dailygubler​ @dianadawson @frickflop @sparkle-dinosaur @theholyholland @hayleyygrace

[thedapperrabbit]

She-Ra Rewatch: season 3 and onwards through season 4, and boatloads of Introspection time!

So Ive been rewatching She-Ra with my partner, because sharing Entrapdak is caring. I could probably squee on about that for a century or more (because eeee, sharing things i love with people i love AND THEY EVEN PAY ATTENTION TO THE THINGS AND REMEMBER THEM!)...but ill spare you, kind internet strangers who for some reason find my thoughts mildly interesting enough to be reading this. This is going to be a lot. Like, a LOT. A lot especially from a stranger that youve probably only seen a notification from due to me sticking a heart on your content or for reblogging something lovely youve made in pictures or words. I dont think anything is going to be violently trigger-y because im not always great at judging that stuff and also ive yet to feel quite comfy enough to be  fully open-posting specifics about my own past trauma, other than a vague allusion to self-harm and distant-ish unspecified abuse aaaand the usual childhood garbage truck of assholes....but i suppose you could possibly draw some darker potential conclusions from the content im focused on. Also, my ADHD makes it incredibly hard to keep to a straight and non-branching narrative so...ramble-y bits and expressions of brain frustration ahoy. Either way...you are forewarned, just in case. Sorry in advance, this is going to be a small booklet by the time Im done explaining, and thinking, and then attempting to stick words to abstract feels which sometimes im great at, and then others i fucking suck at...but at least this is all written and not me trying to say this to any of your faces! Thats....a mercy all of its own. Haa...  Anyway, while rewatching with my partner, I realized just how much more painful parts of it are to sit through now...they were the first time, and each time since, but NOW having spent a while mulling over the series as a whole a bunch, and reading a lot of other peoples writings on here and finding myself largely in agreement with most Entrapdak fan’s assessment of things, I just....feel like all the air is ripped out of me during some moments, watching  with keener insight. And despite thinking i had myself reasonably well figured out by my age, its all also made me further consider a few things about myself as well. Particularly my notable internalized fury response to chunks of it which have been consistent through all my viewings of SPOP. With Hordak at least, its way easier to understand my reactions. For me at least. Maybe not so much for the people around me. And, shittier due to intensity and subject matter, but still easier in the long run because...the broken bits in me that he resonates with are fresher and sharper and still more recent, like within the last ten years, and thus more towards the front shelves in my head, compared to things that resonate with Entrapta, which are all old, lifelong dull aches at this point. I feel like nothing i can point to is fully sufficient to fully express my feels involving Hordak. But, maybe the best representative moment is with the crying i do every damn time I see his face looking up at Prime just after he glimmer and catra were beamed up...because ive seen that face in the mirror. I HAVE MADE THAT FACE. That same. Goddamn. Face. I may not have gotten a jab to the back of the neck directly from the person I made it at...but they often seemed to silently goad me to harm myself in an attempt to jolt my brain out of getting stuck in re-looping through what theyd just done/said to me. Likewise, much of his interactions with Entrapta are very...very weirdly familiar in feeling, but in a good way. Watching the stuff with Hordak hurts because fuck me if it isnt frequently like watching myself back in 2008ish to 2013, which was the duration of the worst parts of that particular circle of hell i parked my ass in. So...that makes sense. Hes so well written in those moments, it occasionally gave me PTSD flashbacks (still does a little, but now im prepared and braced for it and can shrug it back off....thanks, lifetime of therapy and years of studying abnormal psychology! Still totally not an expert, just very passionate...just, as a disclaimer).  Entrapta though...Entrapta is a different story. Mostly, I see Entrapta and in her free expressions of delight and joy and her bouncy enthusiasm I am reminded of a younger, less discouraged me in some ways, and in others, a ��me” I could have been, but...well, extremely early-onset anxiety and depression made me insanely self-conscious super-super early on...not that i was great at hiding or...i guess the term people seem comfy with is “masking”? Which was a huge problem, or so it was in the 80s when far less was understood of such things. Id do so for a bit and then would forget to, in a way (because id forget long enough to go and trust again reflexively) and would get badly bullied and would squish everything down until id feel a crumb of safety again, and then almost instantly ADHD would pop that mask right the rest of the way off aaand it would start all over again. Ad nauseam until my teen years, where the depression sort of “fixed” that, and made it much easier to destroy my desire to share much of myself freely at all, save for with one or two people, and to a less deep extent a broader circle of nerd friends. Course, then i hit 30 and ran out of the majority of fucks I used to give. Or I became so damaged and salted with anger that parts of me dont grow any fucks anymore? Either way, plowshares to swords, WHEEEE!) And, maybe thats where this time while watching, I started to really think back to all that, and to how i see Entrapta treated by the other princesses, or really just in general except by Hordak...and why it burns my biscuits so badly. Every time I see someone roll their eyes at Entrapta’s beautiful unbridled enthusiasm or try to make it seem distasteful or at least weird and unwanted and uncomfortable for them but then dont even bother to try coming to terms with why they feel that way... or how they seem to feel free to grab and manhandle her without her consent, or the way they try to lessen her contributions because shes non-normative? Like its the fucking least she can do to make up for being weird in their space (...okay, that might just be the anger kicking in..but i dont feel like its an entirely innacurate assessment, is it?)  All of that...seeing it inflicted upon someone, It feels like someones punched me right in the damn sternum, but because its a hurt that im so desensitized to, it seems to have a much different effect than the sharp, violent crushing pain that i feel when I relate to Hordak a little too well for comfort. Again, i could go on, but its nothing more eloquent people on here havent already spoken volumes on. And my first gut reaction is always “I dont understand! why is that their reaction to her?! it doesnt seem logical at all, i dont seem to be able to parse it correctly, how is this acceptable? I HOPE SHE IMMOLATES YOU ALL.”. Which...I suppose isnt entirely usual for me (the silent wishing that people be immolated, I mean...i blame my past years of working in retail. And devouring too much Warhammer 40k contentl).  (oh gods...and this is going to be the most clusterfucky part cause i can feel my meds kicking in and thats gonna be hard to keep coherence on but i gotta get this all out of my head or ill forget it or get too scared of you fucking BRILLIANT insightful smart people on here and then ill continue to live scared and regretful that i never said..anything, and just sat here like “noticeme, entrapdak sempais!”  Ehhn...which is to say, if this is a garbage dump from here down, dont worry, when i wake up ill fix it...but hopefully itll at least make a tiny bit of sense ) But I realized something...something I hadnt ever rememberd much about due to the shitty neuronormative (apology if thats wrong term) behaviors continuing over years and years but in less and less directly aggressive ways as i grew older and was more prone to losing my shit in , (and likely because I got excessively lucky and managed through...uhhh...agonizing determination? Sheer stubbornness? Alleviatory rebalancing of universal karma? fuck if i know --to  curate a surprisingly supportive circle of other castoffs and misanthropes.) That was exactly how people used to treat me.  OKAY THISLL BE EDITED LATER to add in the rest of what i was gonna say...im...too full of Ambien sleep meds and damn write it anymore...and im aing trouble separating realigty and dream...an i k apawing at the kybord...not safe Lov yous for reading this far. Il fix it later, swears.

[the-chubbiest-dumpling]

Endings and Beginnings: Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve: Your Pal, Your Buddy

Summary: You’re just an ordinary 25-year-old photographer working in a small studio in downtown Toronto. Your life is as normal as it could possibly be, except the fact that you are given an opportunity most people only dream of.

Pairing: Bucky x Reader

Word Count: 16 678

Warnings: Swearing. There will always be swearing. Small mention of Neo-nazis.

A/N: Obviously I have no self-control when it comes to how long these chapters are getting.

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Epilogue

Tags: @shamvictoria11 @blazeshira

As promised, Dr. Markson wakes you up at 7:30am for your therapy. It was a shitty sleep, considering you woke up two more times. You’re absolutely jaded, and are not ready for the day. It takes a few extensive shakes to keep you from falling asleep again. You force yourself awake using the fact that Bucky will be with you all day. Maybe. Hopefully. At least some of it. Guaranteed.

Dr. Markson removes your Foley catheter like he said, and also the IV drip after some consideration. He changes your bandages before giving you your breakfast: scrambled eggs paired with a mixed berry smoothie. Not too bad; a healthy way to start your day. You eat moderately, and listen to Dr. Markson as you eat.

“It has now been eight days since your gunshot wound has been treated,” he starts. “I used non-dissolvable stitches. Normally, they can be removed within three to twenty-one days. But since I am who I am, that may not be necessary. I could remove them today or tomorrow. It all depends on how well you do in rehab today. Do not strain yourself, or else you may cause the stitches to break and re-open your wound. And we cannot have that.”

You gulp down your smoothie and nod as you do so. That’s some good news, at least. The quicker you get outta here, the faster you can get back on your feet and do missions. Plus, you were kind of hoping that since Tony has all this advanced technology, and the medical world has progressed so much, a gunshot wound to the leg wouldn’t be too hard to treat. You vaguely remember Natasha mentioning a Dr. Cho. You can hardly remember it, but the woman really seemed like she knew what she was doing with the Cradle thing she created. You’d love to meet her someday.

After finishing your breakfast, Dr. Markson removes the electrodes attached to your chest, and very carefully helps you out of bed. You grip his arm as you put pressure on your right foot. You grimace, the pain instantly shooting up your leg. The moment he realizes that you’re in pain, he leads you over to a wheelchair he brought for this exact reason. Your arms shake as you grip the armrests, and slowly lower yourself down into the seat. Dr. Markson raises the right footplate to ease some of the pressure on your leg. You grunt when it feels better, but it’s still sore. Once you’re situated, he pushes you over to the elevator punches in the number for the second floor.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Can’t complain,” you reply. “I’m just ready to be over and done with this.”

The elevator dings, and Dr. Markson brings you to the office where administrative affairs of the Avengers are conducted. Inside, you’re greeted by a young woman in a pantsuit, her hair neatly tucked up into a tight bun. She smiles kindly as she stands up from behind her desk.

“Good morning, Dr. Markson, _______,” she says.

“Mornin’,” you answer.

“Good morning, Dr. Laine,” Dr. Markson replies.

You’ve never really been in here before. An office is supposed to have a considerable amount of space anyway, but this is just pushing it. The whole room could easily be 500 square feet. There’s bookshelves on either end of the walls, lined with hundreds of books on physiotherapy, psychology, counselling and the like. To your left is a seating area for speaking to multiple people at a time, and on the other end is equipment used for those who require physiotherapy and physical therapy. The one you recognize right away that you might use are the parallel bars. Yawning, you wipe a hand down your face and give Dr. Laine a very tired look.

“For today, we will have a one-hour session,” she explains, rounding her desk to lean against it. “Having spent eight days in recovery already, I would hope that your wound has been healing well. Nevertheless, we are going to take it slow and see where you’re at.”

“Okay,” you say wearily.

“I leave her in your care, Dr. Laine,” Dr. Markson says. “Please update me on any developments.”

“Will do,” she nods. “Have a nice day, sir.”

He nods back, and gives you an encouraging pat on the head before he takes his leave. An awkward silence passes as neither of you two speak. Your new doctor decides to break that.

“Have you tried walking yet?”

“No,” you reply. “I mean, I tried when I was getting in this wheelchair, but it hurt too much.”

“I see. Since most of your time here will be spent training and regaining your strength in your leg, there’s only one piece of equipment for you to focus on.”

She gestures to the parallel bars behind you. You knew it.

“Alrighty,” you say, turning back around. “Now I know what to look forward to every time I come up here.”

She smiles kindly at your dismay.

“You’ll feel better in no time,” she says. “I can guarantee it.”

“Mm. I hope so.”

“Also. Dr. Markson gave me his report on your wound,” she starts, picking up a file from her desk and skimming through the pages. “You’ve been responding well to treatment, and you’re in good health. I’d say the only thing you need is determination.”

“Trust me, doctor,” you cut in. “I am determined as ever to get out of this chair and walk on my own.”

She slaps the file shut and sets it back on her desk.

“Let’s get to it then, shall we?”

Using the bars was more painful than you thought.

Dr. Laine took the first fifteen minutes to explain how she’s going to evaluate you and deem which exercises are the most beneficial to help you recover. And depending on how you progress, you’ll be permitted to push yourself a little more. It sounded spectacular, but it’s going to take time. And if there’s one thing you know about time, is that it’s unpredictable. You never know what may happen.

Currently, she’s seeing how well you can handle yourself while using the bars. She writes down notes for herself as she observes you. You can use them perfectly fine, your left foot firmly planted on the floor. As for your right foot, the most pressure you can use is from going on your tippy toes to avoid having piercing pain spread through you. You exhaust the strength of your arms to keep you upright. For the most part, it’s an easy thing to do, but without being able to use your right leg at all, you’ll have to endure the agonizing pain of using crutches again.

Once you reach the end of the bars, you breathe through the pain as Dr. Laine comes over and kneels down to examine you.

“Can you stretch your entire leg out for me?”

Nodding, you grip the bars and look down as you shakily extend your leg for her. She grips your foot, and gradually starts bending your leg. Your eye twitches in anticipation. When you can’t take the pain anymore, you tell her to stop. Your leg ends at about a 45° angle, then she gently lets you go to write down her findings. She stands up again, holding her notebook firmly in front of her, and tells you to go again.

“This is to get you used to the feeling of walking again,” she explains. “The more you walk, the more you’ll improve. But, as Dr. Markson said, it takes time. So don’t push yourself when our sessions are complete.”

“Un. I know.”

Taking a breath, you turn back around, careful not to bump your thigh into the bar, and begin again.

After your first rehab session with Dr. Laine is over, you thank her, and promise to follow her instructions. She gives you a pair of crutches, as promised, then you waddle your way to the elevator, going back to the main floor. As you exit the doors, you immediately smell something good. You have the strongest urge to go see who it is and what they’re cooking, but you’re still in your hospital gown. You can’t go walking around with your backside showing, so you quietly make your way to your room. No one notices you along the way; you shut the door quietly, and sigh in relief.

“Finally out of that goddamn bed.”

The first thing you do is go to your dresser. You lean your crutches against it and start untying your gown. Letting it drop to the floor, you pick out a brand new shirt, and a pair of loose shorts. You need to be able to change your bandages by yourself when the time comes, so easy access is the key.

You put on your shirt first, then debate how you’re going to put on your shorts. You can’t bend your leg, and the most comfortable it’s going to be is when it’s almost straight. Looking at your bed, you sigh sadly. You opt to limp over, then carefully lay yourself down. You loop the left side of your shorts over your foot before doing the same to your right. Reaching forward, you grab the hem and start shimmying them up your legs until they reach your hips, then button them up. There. That wasn’t so hard. You glance over to your crutches leaning against your dresser.

“Shit.”

You ungracefully flop off your bed, then use the strength of your left leg to push you off the floor and grab onto your desk. You grab your crutches once you’re upright, then make way for the bathroom to fix your face.

A quick face wash, brush of your teeth, and a ponytail later, you’re finally ready to face the day.

Maybe.

You come out of your room again, wondering who’s making the best-smelling thing you’ve ever smelt in the past eight days. As you round the corner, you smile widely at Steve’s Dorito back. Being as quiet as possible, you sneak up to the island and take a seat, waiting for him to turn around. You lean to the side to see what he’s cooking, but you can’t really tell. Something in a pot.

I wonder if he’s used to not boiling things anymore.

You giggle at the thought, which in turn gains Steve’s attention. He does a double-take, and smiles heartily when he realizes it’s you.

“_______!” he cheers.

“Hey,” you say, the biggest grin on your face.

“I didn’t think you’d be up and walking today.”

“Neither did I. It’s more limping than anything, though. Can’t really use my right leg yet.”

“Baby steps is still progress,” he comments, giving a glance to your crutches.

“Definitely,” you agree. “The faster this goes by, the closer I get to being back out in the field.”

“Slow your horses, _______,” he chides, turning back to his pot. “Take it easy for once.”

“I know, I know,” you say, waving him off. “I will. I don’t want the stitches to re-open, so trust me. I’m not gonna be bouncing on trampolines or go roller blading any time soon.”

“Good to hear it.”

“What’re you making, by the way?”

“Stew.”

“Stew? At nine in the morning?”

“It’s for dinner! It takes a while.”

“I didn’t know you could cook.”

“After getting over the fact that I didn’t have to boil things anymore, I got into the groove of things and decided to see what today’s technology had to offer.”

“And you opted for stew.”

“Yup.”

“Something that you can boil.”

He gives you a smile over his shoulder, then nods his head.

“Alright,” you say, holding your hands up. “I’m not judging. I just didn’t expect to see you doing that so early.”

“There’s a lot of things that you wouldn’t expect from me,” he cheekily adds.

“Should I be worried?” you ask.

“I dunno. Should you be?”

“Don’t turn it around like that, Steve Rogers. You’re making it sound like I should expect the worst from you.”

He shrugs indifferently, then focuses back on his stew. You shake your head and laugh to yourself.

“You sure are something, Dorito,” you say.

“And what is it with this ‘Dorito’?” he asks, turning back around. “Do I look–Bucky.”

You look over your shoulder; you didn’t even hear him come in. He looks a little worse for wear. His stubble is scruffier, his hair wilder, his eye-bags a little deeper. Despite his outward appearance, he manages a small smile.

“Hey,” he says softly, looking at you. “Feeling good?”

“More or less,” you say shyly. “I’m gonna be crippled until further notice.”

“That’s unfortunate,” he says, walking up to the island. “Better than being dead.”

“Got that right,” you agree, turning forward to look at him. “But it won’t be all that bad.”

“Why’s that?”

“’Cause I get to hang out with you the whole time.”

You’re surprised you were able to say that with a straight face. The corner of your mouth twitches, threatening to break out into a smile, but you bite the inside of your cheek to keep yourself under control. He smiles and looks towards the floor.

“I don’t know how much fun I’ll be,” he says honestly.

“Don’t worry about it,” you say. “Just having another person around will satisfy me.”

“If you say so.”

Steve stirs his stew absentmindedly, and smiles to himself as he listens to you and Bucky talk. He gives Bucky a quick glimpse over his shoulder. Bucky notices, but doesn’t react. He just plants his hands on the counter and rolls back and forth. You look down at your hands, and pick at a hangnail. Another awkward silence fills the air. Steve slyly stares at Bucky, and rolls his thumb in a circle then nods at you. Bucky doesn’t seem to get it.

“iPod,” Steve mouths, then nods at you again.

Bucky “oh”s, nodding in understanding. He clears his throat and crosses his arms.

“Thanks again for the iPod,” he says, peeking up at you. You look at him too and smile. “It’s uh… I really appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome,” you say kindly. “Have you learned a little bit?”

“A bit,” he confesses. “A lot of things have changed.”

“Good change?” you ask.

“A nice transition,” he clarifies. “It’s different. But I like it.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Mm.”

“Mmmaybe I could show you a little more later. I know Steve made a list for all the things he missed while he was asleep. I could do the same for you, if you’d like.”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

Steve is living right now. Bucky’s finally opening up and talking more with someone that isn’t him. He seems to be doing a lot better these days, but Steve knows how much effort it takes to smile and power through the day when everything seems to be bugging you. He puts the lid on his pot and turns off the stove top.

“You two seem like you’re gonna have a productive day of doing nothing,” Steve announces. You and Bucky turn to him in unison.

“Ah, well,” you muse, shrugging. “I think it’ll be fun. I love teaching people new things. And I’m gonna say right now, I’m sorry if I get a little ahead of myself. Being immersed in technology is a blessing. A little bit of a curse too, because you can never put it down. I get all excited about it, so just be prepared for that.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” he replies.

“_______!” a new sing-song voice chimes in. You immediately know who it is.

“Wandaaa!” you cheer happily. You twist in your seat to accept her hug as she stretches out her arms.

“How are you?” she asks as she pulls away.

“Better,” you say. “I’ll get by with the crutches, but I can’t wait for them to be gone.”

“At least you’re up and walking. Somewhat,” she adds, smiling brightly.

This girl is a dream.

She nods to Bucky to acknowledge him, and he does the same thing back. It’s sort of weird seeing them in the same room together. You don’t really know how they act towards one another. Do they just pass each other by? Or do they have conversations sometimes? You’ll have to ask her that when Bucky isn’t within earshot.

“What’re you up to today?” Wanda asks as she goes to the fridge to get some fruit.

“Not much,” you reply. “Just hanging around.”

She sets her fruit bowl down on the island, and looks towards Steve.

“Is she allowed to go outside yet?” she asks him, biting into a strawberry.

“Honestly, I’d prefer not,” he admits.

“Tony said I’m on house arrest,” you add in. “But who knows how long I’m gonna follow that demand.”

“_______,” Steve groans, shaking his head.

“What? I don’t wanna be cooped up in here until I’m better. Getting fresh air is good, y’know.”

“I know, but–“

“Ah ah ah. I don’t wanna hear it. If I wanna go out, then I’ll drag someone along with me. Deal?”

“…Fine.”

You and Steve shake on it, making Wanda, and even Bucky, smile.

“So, sorry if you wanted to take me out today, Wanda,” you apologize. She waves you off.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I can wait until you’re a little better.”

“Sounds good.”

Wanda takes her fruit bowl and goes back to her room to change before going out. Steve gives you and Bucky a hearty goodbye, then leaves the room as well. You grip your hands, mentally cursing Steve and Wanda for leaving you alone with Bucky. But you might as well get this started.

“Well. Looks like we won’t have our presence graced with anyone else for a while. Wanna start your lesson?”

“Lesson?”

“On technology.”

“Oh. Right.”

You get out of your seat, grabbing your crutches and make your way over to the living room. You plop your self down on the couch, Bucky taking a seat to your left. He’s in for a whirlwind of progression.

You started with the basics: how to use an iPhone, and all that comes with owning an Apple product. Most of the stuff Bucky couldn’t care less for, like iCloud or Airplay. The only thing he would really need a cellphone for is making calls. You taught him the art of text messaging and emojis, also things he didn’t really think were important. Though texting could be useful, he feels phone calls are easier and more efficient.

The next thing was apps, like the built-in ones Apple provides, and additional apps you can either download for free or buy. You don’t have many games yourself, just social media, but you have at least one or two for when you’re bored. After that was the actual social media apps. Explaining Facebook was simple enough; he grasped it easily. Now you’re onto one of your favourites: Twitter.

“Okay, so Twitter shouldn’t be a free app with all the stuff that goes down,” you start, opening the app itself and turning your phone to show Bucky.

“Why?” he asks, leaning forward to look at the screen.

“It’s just… firstly, you’d have to understand a lot of internet humour to know what the hell is going on sometimes,” you explain, scrolling through your news feed. “I get it just fine. But I don’t know if you’d wanna hear me go on forever about memes.”

“Me–“

“Don’t even ask,” you stop him, putting up your hand. “For now, lemme just get through the apps.” He blinks in surprise, but remains silent and let’s you continue.

“On here, you ‘tweet’. Basically it’s like updating your status on Facebook, but much wilder. You can use hashtags too. There’s ‘trending topics’ that hashtags are primarily used for. They let you know what’s going on around the world or in a certain country. This is the search icon, your notifications, and direct messages. When you swipe left, you can go to your profile and settings. You can post whatever you want, but be warned of some triggering stuff too. The last thing you want to see is a neo-Nazi on your feed.”

Bucky turns completely serious, and sits back in the couch, staring at you in shock. He’s frowning deeply, and his hands clench and unclench.

“What’re you talking about?”

You’ve never heard him sound so serious before. It’s kind of unnerving, but you’re not about to tell him that. He’s had enough of people telling him how dangerous he looks. Sighing, you lean back into the couch too and shake your head.

“Believe it or not, there are still Nazis out there,” you say. “Not exactly like Nazi Germany, but they come pretty damn close. There’s… HYDRA still, but even regular people act so terribly because they have beliefs like Hitler. Anti-Semitists, homophobes, misogynists, racists, xenophobes… it’s disgusting.”

Biting the inside of his cheek, Bucky shakes his head, thinking that all he fought for was a lost cause. That he wasted his years as a soldier, fighting for freedom, when in the end, nothing would change. He sighs and closes his eyes, fighting back the urge to punch something. When you notice him tensing up, you change the direction of the conversation.

“But there were also huge victories,” you say. He opens his eyes. “The Civil Rights Movement, breaking down the Berlin Wall, the feminist movement, gay rights movement, legalizing abortion, the invention of the internet… there’s a lot of amazing things that have happened since World War two ended. There’s still a lot of improvements to be made, but we’re getting there. And it’s always something to celebrate.”

Bucky turns his head to you, his eyes drifting downwards before finding your face again. He smiles softly. He’s sure you’ll give him the rundown of all those things after he gets past the technology part; plus, he thinks you’re just trying to calm him down from hearing that his enemies, past and present, are still roaming the earth. He shoves those thoughts to the back of his mind and clears his throat.

“Uhhh. So the, um. Tweeting?”

“Twitter,” you smile widely. You look down at your phone and close the app, then open Instagram. “That’s basically it for Twitter. This is Instagram.” You turn your phone towards him again. “It’s a photo-sharing site. You upload photos of almost anything. There’s guidelines for things you can’t post, like any other kind of social media platforms. Again, this is the home page, the search icon, adding a new photo, notifications, and profile. These bubbles up here with people’s faces in them are their stories. It’s something that all your followers will see. You can also do live videos, like Facebook, but they just copied SnapChat.”

“SnapChat?”

You give him a smug look, but he just raises a brow at you. You pat his thigh, and knowingly shake your head.

“Oh, Bucky,” you say. “This is one of my personal favourites.”

He eyes your hand on his thigh. He doesn’t mind; he’s just not used to people delicately touching him or showing him… affection? You’re touching him so gently, so he’s gonna count this as affection. You open your SnapChat, lean to the side, and tell Bucky to look at you. You tap on his face, and choose the filter that makes your eyes and lips huge. You laugh as you take the picture, then turn your phone around to show him. He blinks in disbelief, leaning his head forward to further examine his photo.

“That’s not what I look like!” he shouts, taking the phone from your hands.

“I know it’s not!” you laugh, shuffling closer to look at it with him. “It’s a filter, Bucky. It changes your face.”

“To look like that?” he questions, trying to zoom in like you showed him earlier.

“More or less,” you say. You take your phone back, and swipe left. “There’s also colour filters after you’ve taken the photo. And sometimes when you’re in a certain city, they’ll have their own personal filters. Aaaaand… looks like Tony has one of his own.”

There’s a border of little Iron Man faces surrounding Bucky’s picture. He doesn’t like it very much, so he reaches over and swipes right again. You snort, and settle on no extra filter. You save the photo to your Memories, and delete the picture.

“What’s the point of this app, then?”

“It’s a photo messaging app. So, I take a picture of me or whatever I want, and then I send it to someone on my friend’s list. You can also send a snap to your story, and it can be seen by your friends list. They last for twenty-four hours, depending on the time you took them.”

He makes a face that still says “what’s-the-point-of-this-app”, so you enlighten him.

“Trust me,” you say. “It’s a lot more fun than it looks. It’s one of my favourite things to use.”

“If you say so,” he snorts. You just give him a smile and move on with your lesson.

“Let’s see. Oh yeah! YouTube. It’s a search engine for videos. You can find almost anything on there when it comes to videos. Past events, songs, webcasts, concerts, movies. You could be on there for hours and never get enough of–Oh. My. God. Speaking of videos, I have to show you this.”

Going a little off track, you open your Tumblr app (you decide not to show him that one because it’s a shitshow sometimes), then go to your favourites where you keep all your vine compilations. You sit up a little more to face Bucky head-on, and turn serious for a moment. Though your smile gives it away.

“Vine is one of the best things to happen, okay?” you start. “Like. You cannot get better than this when it comes to entertainment. A six-second video on loop will make your day.”

Clearly, he doesn’t understand how and why something as short as six seconds could make your day, but he’s certainly about to find out. You show him your most recently liked video, handing him your phone, and side-eye him to see which ones he finds funny.

For the first minute or so, he’s either confused, or blatantly surprised. You cover your mouth to keep yourself from laughing when there’s dicks involved. He really reacts to the guy slipping on a banana peel to see if it’s actually slippery like in the cartoons.

“Oh, god,” Bucky says, covering his mouth. “Is he okay?”

“I-I think so,” you choke out, trying to keep yourself from bursting out laughing. Other than that particular vine, Bucky doesn’t react much. He smiles at the little boy that gets excited about an avocado he got for Christmas, raises his eyebrows at the guy who throws his phone because Flappy Bird is challenging, and nods along when people ask what the weather’s like for outside seating when they came in from the outside.

He hands you back your phone, and you close all your apps. He takes a minute to get his thoughts together.

“That was… interesting,” he concludes.

“There’s a lot more where that came from,” you say. “However. I haven’t showed you one of the most important things ever created. The internet.”

Opening your safari app, you type in “google”. The Google search engine comes up, and you scooch closer to him to show him how it works. Your heart beats excitedly in your chest from being so close to him.

“Google is a search engine,” you say. “Anything you want to know, you can find. And don’t let anyone try to tell you that Bing is better. Because it’s not.” You think about what to search; something safe, and something that won’t trigger anything inside him. That’s the last thing you want to do. Shrugging your shoulders, you type in “types of flowers”. In less than a second, multiple links come up. Bucky squints at the screen.

“Wanna know what kinds of flowers there are? You can search it. Wanna know the meanings of certain flowers? You can do that too. Wanna learn about hanakotoba, the language of flowers, from Japan? No doubt Google will have it. Song lyrics, world events, celebrity gossip, types of cars, medical terms, kinds of animals; the internet has it all. But the number one thing that you must remember, is that not everything on the internet is true. It’s sort of easy to tell when something isn’t accurate, but you never know. And watch out for virus’. They’re a nasty way of getting into your computer and screwing everything up. And possibly stealing personal information and locating you. They’re easy to spot, though. I’ll show you those so you never have to deal with that. But if you ever get confused about anything, just come ask one of us and we’ll clear it up.”

Bucky blows his lips after taking in all this new technological information. He doesn’t know if he’d ever use the apps you showed him, but the internet certainly sounds captivating. Anything he wants to know, anything at all, he can look it up? Just like that? It sounds too good to be true. He looks over at you fiddling with your phone now, wondering how lame he’ll sound if he just says “thanks”.

“Thanks for this… lesson,” he says. Wow. Double lame.

“You’re very welcome,” you grin. “But I don’t want to stop there, if that’s okay.”

“Sure,” he says without missing a beat. Despite having mixed opinions on today’s technology, it’s funny to him to see you talk about something that excites you. He wishes he could do that more often. You struggle as you try to stand up, pushing your hands into the couch to force yourself up, but you end up losing your balance and sitting again. Bucky stands up and offers you his hand.

“Thanks,” you say, squeezing his flesh hand to pull yourself up. You grab your crutches next and lead the way to your room. You push the door open with the bottom of your crutch and walk over to your desk. Leaning over the glass, you open the lid of your laptop and type in your password. Once it’s unlocked, you leave your crutches against the wall and hop over to your bed and sit down, mindful of your right leg’s position. You pat the seat beside you, inviting Bucky to sit with you. He obliges, sitting on your left again.

“Another thing that’s changed–or rather, evolved–is photography,” you start, opening Google chrome. “You probably already knew that, but I like to make comparisons.” In the images tab, you search “old photography”, and up pops hundreds of black and white and sepia toned photographs.

“There’s an obvious difference. The posing, lighting, style, the quality. Reminds you of the old days, doesn’t it?”

“…Yeah.”

Bucky stares intensely at the photos, his eyes wandering all over the place as you scroll further down the page. He noticed some words at the top of the page, and asks you to go all the way back up.

“What’re those?” he asks, pointing to the coloured words.

“They’re suggestions based on your search,” you say. “Just an extra little something in case you want to pair something with your original search.” One of the suggestions says New York City. Giving Bucky a quick glance, you click on it. Multiple images of Times Square come up, along with the skyline and little boys in their Sunday best.

I wonder if he had to dress like that at one point.

Bucky’s expression softens as he looks at the images. Though he was born in Indiana, he has fond memories of him and Steve in New York City. Bits and fragments floating around in his head, wondering if he’ll ever piece them back together. One thing for sure he remembers: he used to save Steve’s ass a lot.

You remove the New York City tag, and instead search “times square 1945”. V-E Day. The very first image is the infamous photo of the sailor kissing a woman in the middle of the street. A sad smile appears on Bucky’s face.

“This was on May 8 in 1945. Victory over Europe day,” you say gently. “When the Allies accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. On August 15, the Japan Empire surrendered which ended the whole war.”

Originally, you wanted to show the difference between photography back then and now, using your own photos, but Bucky seems so immersed in the past that you leave him be for a bit. You set your computer in his lap.

“Here. Have a look.”

He nods, and hovers his fingers over the trackpad, and scrolls down using two fingers like you did to look at more photos. You sit back until you hit the wall, and watch Bucky fondly delve into the past. He didn’t get to see that day. He didn’t get to be sent home, nor celebrate with his fellow comrades, the Hollowing Commandos. He’s missed out on so much, but that’s why you’re getting him back in the groove of things. To help him catch up and learn about the world that passed him by during his time as the Winter Soldier. Thankfully, those days are way behind him, so he has nothing to worry about. And you damn well hope that Vision taking away his trigger words stays out of Bucky’s mind. It’s gone smoothly, and you still can’t remember what Vision took away from you first. Vision is close to being perfect in design, so you pray his abilities are permanent.

So far so good.

After a few minutes of silent scrolling, Bucky hands you your laptop back. You set it down beside you and stare at the side of his face. He’s pulling his lips to the side, and bouncing his knee. As he rubs his hands together, you shuffle forward again. You contemplate about rubbing his back, but you opt to keep your hands to yourself. This time, at least.

“You okay?”

He separates his hands, and shrugs as if to say “I-don’t-know”. Very understandable. He didn’t get to be a part of all these celebrations and move on with life like everyone else did back then. Instead, he got pulled into the deepest circles of hell that is HYDRA. Beaten, broken, and used, he crawled his way out to his redemption, all because of Steve. He was Steve’s anchor during the war, but now the roles are reversed. Steve is everything he has in keeping him grounded. He’s still learning to accept new people into his life, like you, but he’s keeping his walls up and heavily guarded. He’s not ready to let himself go yet.

“I’ll be alright,” he answers, gazing at you. You gaze right back, staring at his incredible blue eyes. The only other time you’ve been this close to him was when you were fixing his face after his fight with Sam. But even then you weren’t able to gawk at him like you are right now. The light coming in from the window illuminates his face in just the right places. His stubble could easily be a beard by now from how thick it is. The crinkles around his eyes show his age, probably just shy of thirty biologically. His hair falls over his face in the most perfect way, and his lips… you can’t even begin to describe how amazing they look when he’s not smiling nor frowning. You can’t let this opportunity get away.

“Stay as still as you can,” you whisper.

“Why?” he whispers back.

You don’t give him an answer. You gingerly stand up to go get your camera. You pull the body out of your bag and attach a 50mm, a perfect lens for up-close portrait shots. You turn it on as you sit back down on your bed, and change the settings accordingly before bringing the camera to your face.

“Stay still, Bucky,” you ask quietly. “And look at me.”

You put the focus point on his eye for absolute sharpness. You half-press the shutter before capturing the moment completely. You smile tenderly when you lower the camera from your face. Bucky’s eyes trail to the unknown object in your hands.

“What’s that?”

“A camera. Specifically, a dSLR, but ‘camera’ works just fine.” You shuffle back next to him and show him the photo you just took of him.

Absolutely stunning.

It seems you’ll be receiving the same reaction from him every time you show him something he’s never seen before: complete surprise.

“A little different from what you guys used back in the day, isn’t it?” you smile, zooming in on his face. He raises his eyebrows.

“Totally,” he whispers, watching you zoom in on different parts of his face.

“I can capture something instantaneously, change the colour scheme, change the focus, zoom in and out, look at the photos I just took… there’s a mountain of things you can do with a camera now.”

“Mm.”

He can’t get over the fact that that’s what his face looks like in a photo now. It’s so clear, the background is blurred out, and the sole focus is him himself. You notice he hasn’t taken his eyes away from it. You smile slyly.

“Lemme show you something.”

You turn off your camera and eject the memory card, then slip it into the side of your laptop. A folder for the card pops up, and you open it, then scroll all the way to the bottom to enlarge the photo you took of Bucky. You let him look at it on the bigger screen, and laugh when you see how dumbfounded he is.

“This is…” He can’t even finish his thought. He’s so impressed by the technology that he can’t say anything else.

“If this is the reaction I get when I show you that,” you start, minimizing the photo and opening Photoshop, “then you’re gonna love this.”

You open up the image in Photoshop, and do a basic edit. You create a new layer to get rid of background distractions, like the corner of your desk and the side of your dresser. After that, another layer for a curves adjustment and contrast to give the photo a little more punch. You crop it to 11 x 14, then change the colour scheme to black and white. You don’t even need to erase any blemishes on Bucky’s face; he doesn’t have any. You sharpen the photo, then simply save it as “Bucky” to your desktop. You pull up the two photos to show the difference.

“That’s… amazing,” he says softly, flicking his eyes left and right to see the difference.

“Th–“

“You’re amazing.”

You’re left with your mouth gaping when he smoothly adds that in. You blush and look away, finding the floor a lot more interesting.

“It’s nothing, really,” you say, embarrassed.

“The smallest things can have the biggest impact, _______,” he counters.

Your heartbeat quickens when he tags your name at the end of a sentence like that. It’s such a simple compliment and phrase, and you’d accept it without hesitating from anybody else. But it’s a whole other story when it’s coming from Bucky. Of course, of course you’d crush on the most beautiful man in the world. Steve is way up there too, maybe even tied for first, but all of your tastes tie into Bucky’s entire being. He’s not the same suave, charming, Sergeant Barnes from the 107th infantry regiment anymore; nor is he the merciless Winter Soldier. He’s a mix of the two, even as he tries to push the most corrupt parts of him away. Despite all that, you can’t help but love his little eccentricities.

“What else can you do with this?” he asks, nodding at the screen.

“Oh! Um.” You pause to bring up your own photos again. “Anything, really. It’s used a lot to edit portraits, food, sports, and all that. But there’s also movie posters, movies themselves, and even drawing.”

You pull up a picture you took during the fall of a woman wearing a fancy, red dress made with red and yellow leaves decorating the bottom and boddess. The sun shines right behind her head, giving the photo a heavenly glow. A leaf crown also adorns her head, and in her hands she’s cradling a lotus flower.

“It’s pretty,” Bucky says.

“You think?”

“Yeah.”

“I made this.”

“What?”

“I made this.”

You select the original and edited photo, press the space bar, and go full-screen. You watch Bucky’s reaction again when you go left and right, showing him the major differences and effort that went into making the photo. Surprise, surprise (but not really). He’s flabbergasted. You turn the laptop towards him, and let him compare the photos.

In the original photo, the woman was wearing nothing but a plain red dress, holding a pink lotus flower. The lighting is a little dark and dull, and there’s little distractions on the ground he hadn’t noticed, like a stump, some acorns, and camera spots. Skipping to the edited photo, he notices the drastic difference in brightness. The sunlight is honey-coloured instead of white, the woman’s face is smooth, the flower crown is flawless, and the lotus flower is slightly larger. The overall work of the dress is impeccable, and he definitely wouldn’t be able to tell if it was fake or real.

“I… how do you do this?” he asks.

“With lots of long hours of practice,” you reply. “It’s not often that I take on major edits like this. So if the client is willing to pay for it, then I’ll do it.”

“What happens when you don’t want to do it?”

“I refer them to an expert editor, which happens to be a friend of mine. He has his own team, and they take on projects like this one.”

“You’re pretty talented people, being able to do things like this.”

“W-Well it’s part of our business, so we’d need to hire the best there is…”

“Can you show me more?”

“Uh. Yeah, sure.”

You didn’t think Bucky would take such an interest in this. Being shown the progression of photography maybe, but wanting to see more of your work? It feels intimate, because this is your own personal work that none of the team has seen. Some of your work has been posted to the company’s website with a credit, but you have no website of your own to share what you’re capable of. A lot of your photographs haven’t been seen by the public, and you’re a little bit worried about what Bucky may think. Times may have changed, but he still has his own opinions. It’s naïve to think that he’d give a full criticism about your work, but if he says something even slightly negative, you’re going to carry it around with you. And why? Well it’s obvious.

You like him. And when anything the person you like says something that’s not optimistic, then it’s going to drag you down because their opinion is so valid to you.

Clenching your jaw, you force those thoughts away and instead pull up a slideshow of a family of five (including their border collie) that you made for them. You make it full-screen and play the video for him. You explain that day as the instrumental music plays in the background.

“I was ambivalent about this one,” you start, planting your hands on either side of your hips. You lean back and pull your lips to the side. “I don’t usually work with pets because they’re harder to control. But their dog was pretty tame. Didn’t bark, followed commands. The only thing I had to worry about was getting the right shots. It was sunny, thank god. Makes my life shooting outdoors that much easier. Their two kids got past the stage of screaming and whining about getting their photo taken. This family was a blessing when it comes to stuff like that, lemme tell ya. They were so chatty and loved to play around with their kids. It made for a great day and photoshoot.”

For the whole of the slideshow, Bucky’s smiling warmly. He remembers seeing mothers dragging their little boys around on the streets of New York, making sure they don’t get lost in the crowd. Fathers carrying their daughters around on their shoulders, groups of friends hoop rolling down the sidewalks, and, of course, adults relentlessly chasing down their dogs that managed to escape their leashes. It makes Bucky laugh as he watches your photos come in and out of view. You’re not even watching the video anymore; you’re staring at Bucky again.

He carries his own presence; he can make heads turn when he walks into a room (hopefully more for good reasons than bad). One little smile and your day is instantly brightened. The sound of his voice is so smooth, it’ll make all of your fears disappear. Bucky Barnes. A person to be protected. You look down and continue to fantasize about him.

While you dozed off into fantasy land, Bucky had looked away from the screen to admire you instead. He gazed at your features, trailing his eyes from your eyes, to the tip of your nose, to your lips. He stared at the bandages around your leg, and how you would clench the sheets while you’re deep in thought (daydreaming about him). It wasn’t exactly a requirement for him to know how to read people when he was the Winter Soldier, since his sole purpose was to kill without being seen. But he knows enough to recognize when someone is hiding something, or when they’re being timid. From what he’s seen so far, he inferences that you’re trying to shy away from this situation to calm yourself down. Why? He doesn’t know yet. But he’ll do his best to make you feel comfortable.

When you finally raise your head and see that Bucky’s holding his gaze with you, you quickly flit your eyes to the screen and rub the back of your neck. The slideshow has already ended.

“Oh.”

You sit up and exit out of the window, and absentmindedly scroll through your many sessions with clients.

“Sooo. Yeah. That was that.”

Bucky breaks himself out of his stupor and comes back down to earth, clearing his throat and straightening his posture.

“That was great, _______,” he says, nodding his head while smiling.

“Thanks,” you say. You stop scrolling, your fingers hovering over the trackpad. Your bite your cheek and furrow your brows intensely. Licking your lips, you cock your head to the side and debate whether or not to ask Bucky for more photos of him. He let you take one, probably to be polite, but asking him a second time? You don’t know if he’d be comfortable with that. You know how he shields his left arm from everyone. He’s sat on your left side twice now, away from his metal arm. If he’s so insecure about it, he may say no if you ask.

But you give it a go anyway.

Ejecting your memory card safely, you put it back into your camera and turn it on. You close your laptop and shove it off to the side. You tap your finger on the shutter button, and glance up at Bucky.

“Would it be all right if I took more pictures of you?” you ask, slightly hesitant. His eyes go to the floor to give it a quick consideration. He hopes the photos would only be for your viewing, because god knows Steve wouldn’t stop rambling on about it if you ever showed him. He has enough trust in you to know you wouldn’t publish the pictures to show the entire world where they can find the Winter Soldier. Other than pure enjoyment, he doesn’t see why not. But he needs to make sure.

“They would be… kept in private, I hope?”

“Of course,” you reply. “These photos won’t be going anywhere.”

“Then it’s okay.”

Smiling widely, you raise your camera, and start taking pictures.

Another hour later, and you’re a smiling, giggling mess. You didn’t know having a mini-photoshoot with Bucky would be so energizing. He’s been a good sport about it the entire time, and you even had him laughing at some parts. You wanted him to just be himself while you suggested poses for him to do. Obviously he’s not used to it because he was pretty stiff, but you managed to loosen him up by using your usual relaxing techniques. Your leg would be a bother, shooting out stinging pain; but you would ignore it, because the pain was worth to see Bucky have a good time.

It felt ten times more intimate, however, when you took macro photos of his metal arm. You hate to admit it, but the craftsmanship is unbelievable. Watching the plates shift into place, the soft whirring, the tiny details; it’s a beautiful piece of work. Though Bucky might not think so, you’ll make damn well sure that he knows that you don’t care. You recognize the horrors he’s done and been through, but that doesn’t mean he has to go through it again. His arm will be used to protect instead of assassination.

“You take a good picture, Bucky,” you tell him as you go through the photos on the camera. “You don’t even need to try.”

He smiles and looks down at the floor, licking his lips. You notice he does that a lot when you compliment him: divert his gaze somewhere else, accompanied by a tick. Licking his lips, biting them, fiddling with his fingers. He would do all this before murmuring a small “thank you”.

What a sweetheart.

You plug your memory card back in your laptop to show him. You select all the images and press the spacebar, then press the play button. There’s quite a few of them, well over a hundred, so you hand your laptop to him and go to the bathroom. It’s painful, sitting down then standing back up, but you power through it, and manage to come back out without the stitches ripping open. When you look up, you snort.

“Comfortable?”

Bucky’s sprawled himself out on your bed, your laptop sitting on his lap, his metal arm behind his head. He looks up at you when you hover over him.

“Oh. Sorry,” he chuckles, sitting up again.

“It’s okay,” you say. “I was just gonna get something to eat. I’m starving. Wanna come?”

“Sure.”

He remembers how to stop the slideshow, so he does that then closes the lid before following you out of your room and to the kitchen. You don’t know what you can have to eat, since Dr. Markson said you can’t take solid foods yet. But you don’t want to just keep eating pudding and soup. Surely there’s an in-between. You sift through the cupboards, pushing things around to see what you can have. You leave your crutches against the counter and just hop along the length of the counter, searching for some lunch.

“Ah ha ha!”

You notice some noodles on the second shelf and grab a pack, then use one of your crutches to open a drawer to get a pot. You see Bucky is sitting at the island, silently watching you work your way around the kitchen.

“Want some?” you ask. He shakes his head no. “You sure? I can make you something else if–”

“Really, _______, I’m fine.”

“If you say so.”

Ten minutes later, your noodles are boiled to perfection, and eating them standing up across the island from Bucky. You eat them in silence, and notice Bucky smiling at you amusingly as you slurp them up. It doesn’t feel awkward at all. You’ve been with him since your rehab session ended, so when you have nothing to say, it isn’t as suffocating. Halfway through your meal, you can hear the elevator ding to this floor. You lean to the side to see who it is. Lo and behold, it’s Tony and Dr. Markson.

Oh boy.

You keep your head down as they chat their way into the kitchen. They both give you warm smiles, and nod at Bucky. Bucky nods back, but doesn’t say anything. He knows they’re not here for him.

“_______,” Dr. Markson greets you. He sees the lunch you’re eating, and refrains from commenting. However, you notice his look of disdain and make a comment of your own.

“Technically not a solid food,” you say. “It’s stringy and easy to swallow whole. It’s okay, right?”

“Well–“

“I guess it doesn’t really matter since I’m eating it anyway.”

You scoop another forkful into your mouth and grin at the pair of them. Tony raises a brow as he eats his chocolate covered raisins.

“Still disobeying orders, I see.”

“Still a senile old man, I see.”

Tony scoffs at your remark and plops another raisin in his mouth. He rounds the island and trails his eyes down at your leg.

“How’s that doin’, champ?” he asks, leaning against the counter.

“Fine,” you reply, shoving more noodles in your mouth. “It sucks trying to sit down and stand up again. Or try to put pressure on it. But I can manage.”

“Good to hear it. Markson has somethin’ for ya.”

You look at him, and see him carrying a plastic bag. He sets it on the island and explains what’s inside it.

“Inside are your painkillers,” he says. “Take one every eight hours, everyday, until you run out. When you’re finished, come to me and I’ll evaluate if you need more. There’s some other medical supplies in here as well. Also.” He pulls out two different pieces of paper from the bag and lays them out. “One is how to clean and dry your wound when you shower, the other is for changing the bandages. It has healed enough that you can continue taking them. We gave you a sponge bath while you were incapacitated, but you should–“

“Oh. My god.”

You drop your fork dramatically and slam your hands on the island. You purse your lips in anger–and embarrassment–and glare at Dr. Markson. Given, it’s nice that you’re not completely gross, having not showered properly in so long, but to be given a sponge bath while unconscious? It’s just gross and violating. And having Bucky hear that is just… you could kill someone right now, you’re so humiliated.

“Anything else you wish to disclose?” you grit through your teeth.

“You should shower with some plastic covering your bandages so they don’t get wet. And elevate your leg if there’s any swelling.”

“Great. Alright. Awesome. You can go now.”

“Miss _______, you sh–“

“Nope! I don’t wanna hear it. Thanks for the drugs and cleaning instructions. If something happens I’ll come find you. Goodbye.”

“Come on, kid. Li–“

“Don’t ‘come on, kid’, me, Tony. You can leave too. Hi, hello, goodbye. I’m fine. Enjoy your day.”

“Hon–“

“I said enjoy your day!”

Tony backs off, but smirks, knowing that you’re feeling better, and embarrassed. He stands up straight and walks off with Dr. Markson again, throwing a glance over his shoulder. He’s still not used to Bucky’s presence, clearly. He doesn’t care, though; as long as you’re okay. When you and Bucky are left alone again, you smack your lips together and discard your dishes in the sink.

“Well I certainly didn’t need to hear that,” you say after a moment of silence, grabbing a glass of water. You take one of the painkillers, then shove your instruction sheets in your short’s pockets. You stare at Bucky, wondering what to do.

“Wanna watch some Netflix?” you offer. You know he’s about to ask what that is, so you answer him before he even opens his mouth. “You can stream TV shows and movies. Pretty useful for when you’re bored and have nothing to do.”

“Sure,” he nods.

“Great.”

You scurry over to the living room, and Bucky helps you sit down and elevate your leg.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

You get it set up, enter your account, and start scrolling through your list. You wonder how long Bucky has gone without seeing a movie. Probably since 1944, so he most likely has no idea how much the movie industry has evolved. Or special effects. You don’t know what he’d like, since all movies from his time were in black and white, and a lot of the actors are dead. You hand the remote to him, and let him choose.

“You can scroll over an option and read the description,” you say. “If you think it’ll be good, then press play.” He looks from the remote, to the TV, to you, a little unsure of himself.

“You sure?” he asks, already scrolling through the movies.

“Mhmm,” you hum. “I’ve seen most of them, and they’re pretty good in my opinion. Then again, I usually like every movie I watch.”

After some consideration, Bucky chooses The Revenant. Netflix’s synopsis’ sound like a shitpost sometimes, but they give a good summary anyway. For The Revenant, the summary is “This father will do anything to claim his just revenge; even come back alive from an icy grave”. Short and sweet, but to the point. This time, Bucky sits on your right, giving you a clear view of his metal arm. Relaxing into the couch, you wrap a blanket around yourself, and quietly watch the movie with Bucky.

Usually, Bucky would have shifted away from anyone that got too close to his metal arm. He didn’t know if it would ever go haywire on its own, or if HYDRA secretly added a component that would make his arm controllable from anywhere in the world and given its members access to it. Nothing’s happened since he got out of cryo, but he’s still on the defensive about it. He doesn’t want anyone to get hurt unintentionally because of him. So far so good, but he still worries.

An hour into the movie, he notices you nodding off a few times. He shifted a few inches away before, keeping his metal arm close to him, but now, he places it in the space between you in case you fall over. Or if you want to lean on him. He hasn’t experienced affectionate interaction in a very, very long time. Sure, Steve makes time for him and gives him supportive hugs and talks, but it’s in Steve’s nature. All of his goodness got amplified to a hundred after the serum, so now he’s the world’s most protective man (and sometimes reckless). It’s also a positive reminder for Bucky that Steve will always be around to pick him off the ground when he’s at his worst. Bucky thanks all the gods for Steve, but sometimes, it’s just not what he wants. He’s known his best friend all his life, but now, he wants to connect more with new people. Like you.

Right from the get-go, he’s called you “doll”. He remembers it as an endearing term for an attractive woman. He’s seen plenty of pretty girls in his life, and he knows one when he sees one. He didn’t know why he just had to say it when he spoke with you on the plane ride to the compound, but he couldn’t help himself. His mind must’ve triggered a time when he would throw the word around like the swaggy man he was, and out it came. You seem to have taking a liking to it, since you haven’t protested against him using it in any way.

The face of the modern-day woman has changed drastically over the past 70 years, but that doesn’t stop Bucky from knowing what he likes. It’s no use comparing last century’s women to today’s, since they’re all 100-years-old or dead. And he’s glad there’s someone like you that he gets to be around. You carry a whole other energy with you wherever you go. It’s so different than what he’s used to, but it’s a good different. The girls he used to know were so shy around him, and were quick to be enchanted by his charm. But you, on the other hand, are loud, rambunctious, and carefree. You can hold a conversation with him no problem, and you’re cautious to avoid sensitive topics, which he appreciates. You’re unpredictable at times, too; he would know. You chased after him, Steve, and Sam because none of them told you about the trick glass wall. Some days you would be reserved, other days you would be laughing until you cried. And that just happened to be one of Bucky’s favourite looks on you.

You curled up in a blanket with your eyes fluttering and fighting to stay open is another one.

Instead of pushing himself away, he moves closer to you, careful not to disturb you if you actually managed to fall asleep. He clasps his hands together in his lap, and leans forward a bit, trying to see if you’re awake or not.

You see him peering down at you, so you flick you eyes up to him, a wide grin spreading across your face.

“Don’t worry, I’m still awake,” you snicker.

He nods his head and quickly sits back against the couch, clearing his throat before regaining his attention on the movie. You smile at the fact that he just checked to see if you had dozed off in the middle of a movie.

How thoughtful.

The remainder of the movie is spent in very comfortable silence, and you almost had the courage to lay your head against Bucky’s arm. Almost. It would’ve been uncomfortable anyway because your leg is resting on the coffee table and you would’ve put more strain on it than you’d like. Despite not being about to cuddle the hell out of Bucky, it was nice to spend time with him anyway. You sit up and stretch when the credits start rolling.

“What’d you think?” you ask, looking at him tiredly. He takes a second to get over how cute you look when you’re tired before answering.

“I liked it,” he replies. “Good storyline, amazing acting, beautiful scenery…”

“It’s certainly worthy of the Oscars it received for best director, best cinematography, and best actor,” you say. “I’m glad you liked it.”

You shift in your seat to lower your leg to the ground, then ask Bucky for help again to stand up. You grab your crutches, and slowly bend your knee to reduce some of the tension that built up from being in a horizontal position for so long. You go to the kitchen again, and beckon Bucky to come along.

“I’m gonna try and shower,” you tell him. “Would you mind wrapping my leg in plastic wrap?”

He nods, searching for some cellophane in the drawers. You point to the right one, then tell him where the scissors are. You take a seat by the island, and slowly raise your leg onto another chair. Bucky takes the roll out of the cardboard box, and starts wrapping it around your bandages.

“A few layers should be good,” you tell him. “But not too tight.”

He nods again, carefully maneuvering his hands around your leg. You stare at your leg instead of his face because he’s so close again; you don’t want to be obvious about it. When he’s finished, he makes the cut, and you stuff the end into the top. He helps lower your leg, and you stretch to see how it feels.

“Should be fine,” you say. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

You pick up your crutches again and go to your room to shower, leaving Bucky alone for thirty minutes. When you come back out, you feel like a new woman. Your hair is shiny and smells magnificent, your skin soft and smooth. Cleaning off eight days-worth of sweat, dirt, and grime is the most satisfying thing in the world. A sponge bath doesn’t cut it; scrubbing away the filth yourself is much more reassuring. You choose to wear a dress this time, as one layer is less troublesome. You pin some of your hair up and let it air-dry. No point in looking presentable if you’re not going anywhere. You take off the plastic wrap, and sigh in relief when you see your bandages didn’t get wet. When you come back out, you don’t see Bucky.

“Bucky?” you call. “You there?”

“Barnes went to one of the training rooms.”

You gasp for air at Natasha’s sudden surprise. You glower at her as she gives you a good-natured smirk. You cannot believe her sometimes.

“Thanks for that heart attack,” you say, gathering yourself.

“All part of the package,” she says.

“Well can I get my money back then?” you joke. “I don’t remember a daily heart attack being part of the deal.”

“I thought you would be used to my sneaking,” she smiles.

“Apparently not.”

You stride over to the fridge to get something else to eat, but after seeing the look on Dr. Markson’s face after he caught you eating noodles, you think better of it. Instead, you decide to make another smoothie. While you gather your fruit, Natasha has a seat by the island and speaks to you.

“How have you been with Barnes?” she asks. You stop what you’re doing, giving her a confused look.

That’s a strange thing to ask.

“Okay, I guess?” you answer cautiously. “He’s been doing well.”

“And you?”

“I’ve been doing well too.”

“I see.”

You give Natasha the side-eye as you reach in the cupboard for the blender. She looks back, a sly smile on her face. She doesn’t say anything else; not until you have the fruit and ice already in the blender.

“You need some flirting lessons.”

You don’t even hear her from the blender being so loud. You stop after thirty seconds to see how well it’s been mixed in. Natasha takes the opportunity to ask again, since you didn’t hear her the first time.

“I think you need some–“

You start the blender again, cutting her off for a second time. She closes her mouth and sighs, waiting again for another opportunity. She’s grown to hold her patience. Something as small and insignificant as you making a smoothie is a walk in the park for her. Once you’re pouring the smoothie in your glass, she speaks up for a third time.

“I’m going to be giving you flirting lessons.”

You nearly drop the glass to the floor. She smiles at your reaction and sits up in her seat. Once you’ve collected yourself, you clear your throat and give her an incredulous look.

“What makes you think I need flirting lessons?” you scoff, taking a sip of your drink. She sees right past your faux confidence. You know as well as anyone that you need a tip or two here and there. Or maybe a whole rundown of the book. You limp over to the island and set your drink down, staring at the quartz.

“When do we start?” you ask quietly, avoiding her gaze.

“Right now, if you’d like,” she says, glad to have you on board without protesting.

“Um. Sure, I guess.”

“First rule of flirting,” she says, jumping right into it. “Never sound passive. It gives off the vibe that you’re susceptible to submission.”

You flick your eyes up to her, nodding in understanding. You keep sipping your smoothie as she speaks, but cut her off for a moment.

“Do I need to be writing this down or…?”

“If you think it would help, yes. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“Okay. Gimme a sec.”

Trotting back to your room, you grab an empty notepad and pen, then return to Natasha. She’s moved over to the couch, so you take a seat next to her. You write down what she said about being passive, then look expectantly at her, waiting for her to continue.

“Keep eye-contact,” she says. “Always make sure their attention is on you. Sit with your body open. That means you cannot hold your arms, nor turn away from them. Back straight, chest out, and face towards them. You want them to know you’re interested. So you’ve got to show that you are.”

You haphazardly scribble everything down, nodding along, opting to just get her words and then go back to rewrite everything later in a more organized fashion.

“As you may know, men like to talk about themselves.” You roll your eyes at that. “Inflate their ego. It gets them talking. Move your eyes, as well. A lot can be said with the expression of your eyes. You asked your target to dance. Not a bad angle. Makes it easier for them to lower their guard and for you to take them elsewhere if need be.”

Natasha goes on and on about tips and tricks when it comes to flirting, especially phrases. That’s what you have trouble with the most. Sweet-talking is an art form all on its own, and you want–need, to learn all about it. And what better way than from an expert themselves? It’s certainly one thing being taught, but it’s a whole other situation when you have to execute it in real life. Natasha gives you a solid “C” grade based on your performance on your first solo mission. You’re embarrassed and a little self-conscious at first, but the feeling passes because you know she’s spot on. And that’s exactly why she’s giving you this informative tutorial.

“Now, if you want to make an entire room come to a halt,” she explains, now onto a new topic, “it’s all based on how you carry yourself. Dressing up helps with the seduction. But your self-confidence will grab their attention. Stand tall. Lift your head, push your chest out, shoulders back, make precise, smooth movements. Trail your eyes through the entire room once, never looking at the same person twice. Go to your designated location, and let them come to you.”

That seems like a vital piece of information.

You keep that piece of intelligence in mind in case you ever need to… impress someone. Natasha even gives some examples to help you grasp the material better. You really feel like you’re in school again. She uses herself, of course, and shows you her body language and facial expressions. You write it down in words, getting it as close as you can to what she’s showing you.

And all for free.

Your least favourite thing is when she asks you to show her what you’ve just learned. Now you really feel like this is school all over again. You’re nervous that you’ll mess up and just embarrass yourself even more. But you deem Natasha as sympathetic, so maybe she’ll give you a free slide and tone down her criticism.

She doesn’t.

Being the expert that she is, and that she cares about your well-being, she wants you to get this right for future missions that require you to seduce the target. And next time, hopefully, you’ll be spot on and will not hesitate to make a decision.

You practice with Natasha for almost two hours, and during that time, Wanda returned from her trip to the city, and joined in on the fun. To her, of course it’s fun. She has her own charm that can get her out of sticky situations. Though her power alone is enough. Natasha made you practice on Wanda, as well. That just made your heart beat faster. Flirting with a woman is completely different than flirting with a man. You just get even more tense and nervous. And those feelings double when the woman is attractive as Wanda.

Right as you’re in the middle of playing the cards with Wanda, Steve rounds the corner, sweaty from training. He starts when he sees what’s happening.

“Whoa whoa whoa!” he says, holding his hands out to shield his eyes. “Should I be seeing this?”

You burst out laughing when Steve doesn’t know how to react. You pull away from being so close to her to address Steve. You open your mouth to answer him, but then a funnier response comes to mind.

“People can be gay, Steve,” you say.  

He lowers his arms and almost looks afraid. You said it with such seriousness, and he doesn’t know if he’s just crossed a line.

“I-I, uh. I’m sorry, _______. I didn’t mean–“ You burst out laughing again at his reaction. He’s such a sweet man, never wanting to unintentionally hurt someone’s feelings or feel like he’s stepped into sensitive territory.

“It’s okay, Steve. I’m joking.”

He puts a hand on his heart and lets out a shaky laugh.

“You scared me for a second, _______,” he says, grabbing a water bottle from the fridge.

“Sorry, sorry,” you apologize. “I just wanted to see what’d you’d do.”

He smiles fondly, and takes a few sips of his water before nodding towards you three.

“What’ve you guys been up to?” he asks. “Really?”

“I was teaching _______ how to successfully seduce a target into obedience,” Natasha answers proudly. “Despite her naïve way of thinking and inexperience, she’s doing alright for herself.”

Steve’s smile only grows, so much that he can’t even drink his water.

“What’re you smiling about?” you ask, smiling yourself.

“Nothing,” he replies, standing behind the couch. “Just glad to see that my suggestions are being considered and implemented.”

“Steeeve,” you whine, covering your face. He just shrugs his shoulders and wishes you the best before taking his leave.

“He’s such a dork,” you snort.

“He is indeed,” Wanda agrees.

“But he’s also totally precious,” you add. “I love him so much.”

“He is a very good man,” Natasha pipes in. “He’s very admirable for all his work.”

“Got that right,” you agree.

Instead of continuing with the flirting lessons, you’ve moved the conversation to a new topic: Steve. Recalling what you read in the Smithsonian, the internet, and recent events when he did something funny. Complimenting his eyes, hair, new physique, his “good man” nature. There’s nothing bad you can say about Steve Rogers. He’s a total sweetheart to be around, and doesn’t shrug you off when you’re telling him about something that excites you. Of course, he also has his off days, wanting some time alone. And that’s something all of you do for each other. No matter how good of a day you’re having, when another teammate needs their space, you’re more than willing to stay out of their way.

But you’re always there if they need someone to talk to.

Soon enough, you’ve immersed yourself in an Avengers rant about the team. You already talked about Steve, but you add in a few more bits, speaking very highly of him. Next was Tony.

“Okay, despite his arrogant attitude and narcissism,” you begin, “he’s funny, caring, and always willing to put his life on the line for the ones he loves. I mean, when I first saw him as Iron Man, I thought it was amazing. Creating something like that is unbelievable, and shutting down his company was something I’d never thought he’d do. Yeah, I thought he was selfish a while after that, because whenever I saw the footage, he had an essence of egotism. Only fighting for himself. But fighting alongside him made all the difference. He tries to right his wrongs, sometimes being a little too extreme, but all that matters it that he cares.”

After him, Sam.

“Sam is such a treasure. Basically he’s similar to Steve with his boyish behaviour and protective tendencies. But since he’s of this century, it’s easier to talk to him about current events and connect with each other. He’s a total gem when it comes to cheering people up, and when you need a friend instead of a teammate. He’s so agile when he’s using his Falcon wings. I’m so impressed by technology these days, and it’s such a privilege to own something incredible as that. He’s cautious, open-minded, and will not hesitate to cut a bitch if they trample on his friend’s feelings. He’s good like that.”

You make a face as you try to describe Vision.

“Vision’s a little harder to describe because he’s so transparent. He speaks his honest opinion, which I appreciate, but at times, it can get a little annoying. He’s basically perfect, in scientific terms, I guess. That gem in his forehead certainly is something else. Part Ultron and part J.A.R.V.I.S. Two minds in one is… unprecedented, I say. I mean, if anyone could do it, I believe that it’d be Tony. And the fact that he has a British accent is just so fricken hilarious. Did Tony do that on purpose? Or was it an added bonus? Anyway. Yeah. Vision is a character, alright. I’d never thought there’d be someone like him. We’re lucky to have him.”

Since Thor, Dr. Bruce Banner, and Clint Barton are not currently present, you make a brief statement about their heroics and from what you can guess about their personalities from what you’ve seen on the news and internet. You guess they’re very well-rounded men, and also extremely protective and secretive.

Natasha comes after.

“You, are a work of art, if I might say. I just… have you seen yourself? Like… Where have you been all my life? You’re the most ruthless, kickass woman I’ve ever met. I’ve never been so serious in my life. Self-defence, infiltration, gun handling, sweet-talking, hand-to-hand combat, gathering intel, collecting background information… you’re the complete package. I’ve never seen a woman more skilled than you are. You’re a great mentor, and never lie, especially when it comes to me when you’re trying to improve my own skills. You don’t sugarcoat things, and even if it hurts my feelings sometimes, I know you’re just trying to help. You’re also the type of attractive person that makes someone question their sexuality, so thanks for being the best person ever, on behalf of all us girls.”

Natasha smiles fondly as you gush about her. She knows you’re being genuine because of the way your eyes light up in excitement. She also knows that you know that she knows the only reason why she is the person that she is is because she was trained to be able to do everything you listed off. The other women in the Red Room were a makeshift family; but here, with the Avengers, she knows she has a place to be herself. She watches Wanda as you start to ramble on about her instead.

Finally, the best is saved for last.

“And you, Wanda. Wanda Wanda Wanda. You’re the cutest, most precious person I’ve ever met. You’re soft, funny, adorable, and an overall good person. Honestly, your power is one of my favourites. Telekinesis, telepathy, and energy manipulation? Is there anything you can’t do? You kick me on my ass pretty easily when we train together, but you still go easy on me, which, obviously, I appreciate. I try not to go too hard on you too, by the way. I don’t wanna burn your loveable face. And the way you show your power is so different than what I usually see on TV. Like, you can actually see your power, instead of everything being invisible. You use your hands at all times instead of just using your mind to do all the work. And I think it’s beneficial for you because you can see what you’re controlling, which also helps us. Let’s us know where not to be when you’re on attack mode. You’re completely ruthless, and you could step on me any day of the week and I’d say ‘thank you’. You’re such a great person to talk to about anything. You’re basically my sister, if you don’t mind me saying. Also! You’re the soft, bubbly, cute type of attractive. And again, I’d like to thank you on behalf of the girls in this world.”

Wanda’s smiling the whole time, and subtly avoiding eye-contact as she blushes towards the floor. It’s extremely refreshing to have someone tell her how valuable she is outside of her power. She finds that you’re always quick to give her a compliment about any aspect of herself when you’re together: her hair, her smile, her personality. She appreciates it immensely, and she’s extremely grateful to have you in her life.

You let out a huge sigh after rambling on about your friends and lay against the couch. You don’t know if you’ve ever spoken that much in one sitting before. You cover your face with your hands and shake your head.

“I am so sorry if I talked too much just now,” you apologize (Though you’re not really sorry). “I just got really excited.”

“It is not a problem,” Wanda answers, smiling widely. “It was nice to see you in such a state. Especially when you’re injured.”

“No kidding,” you agree. “I completely forgot I was crippled.”

Natasha turns towards you, supporting her cheek with her fist. She wears a smile that suggests that you left something out. You cock your head to the side when you look at her.

“What?” you laugh.

“You forgot someone,” she says.

“I couldn’t have,” you defend, counting on your fingers. “There was Steve, and Tony, and Vision and–“

“Barnes,” she cuts in. “You forgot to talk about him.”

You stop talking, now frozen in place in your seat. Why does she keep mentioning him? Does she just want to hear your honest opinion of him? Haven’t you done that already? You lower your hand and sigh, staring into your lap.

“There’s nothing to tell, really,” you say quietly.

“I think there is,” Wanda says, joining in on the fun. She’s dying to know as well. She may have not told you about the time she took the smallest look into your mind and saw Bucky. A lot. She purses her lips and waits for you to say something.

A small smile appears on your face, now unable to keep your mouth shut about him. You just know that they’ll keep pestering you about him, so you might as well say something to satisfy them.

Unbeknownst to any of you, Bucky is listening intently around the corner, already finished with his training. He feels like he shouldn’t be hearing this, but on the other hand, why the hell not? It’d be good for him to hear your honest opinion of him. He leans against the wall, and listens on quietly.

“He’s really great,” you say, rubbing the back of your neck. “He’s just… he’s been through a lot, y’know? From a small boy to a Sergeant in World War two to HYDRA’s bitch to something in-between. He can’t take back all that he’s done, and I just couldn’t stand the thought of him hating himself and blaming himself for everything that’s happened. So I thought I’d help him, because I wanted to. I know Steve would’ve definitely done it if he knew how. And so far, after Vision took away what needed to be erased, he’s been doing well. From what I’ve seen, anyway. What he does behind closed doors is for him alone. But when I’m with him he’s… calmer. I’ve told him many times that he can come to any of us if he’s having troubles with anything, but I think Steve is his only bet on that.”

You pause for a minute, and stare down at your lap, trying to think of what to say next. You don’t want to reveal anything to them about your feelings for him, so you need to tread carefully. Wanda, however, eggs you on for more.

“I know there’s more than that,” she says, smiling gently. “You know there’s more than that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you say quickly, trying to wave her off. “I know there is. I just… there’s no one way to describe him, you know? He’s sweet and funny and caring. He can be dismissive and secretive, but that’s who he is. He just wants to live without worrying about if he’ll lose control again… He was so pure when I was teaching him about my phone. He wouldn’t need to use any of it, but it was a lot of fun watching his reactions and showing him modern technology. He’s probably seen it, but not really used it. Oh. My god. And when I’m teaching him, Steve, and Sam the dance? He’s the most compliant of the three. One time, when they finished their complaining, Bucky asked me to keep practicing with him. Which is weird, because I thought Sam would crack first, to be honest. Anyway, Bucky kept at it, and was so serious about it. I got a little fed up when he wouldn’t pay attention, but I was joking about it. It’s always nice to see him laugh. My favourite thing is when he smiles. It makes me happy when he’s smiling, but even more so when I’m making him smile. I’d do anything to keep seeing him like that.”

Wanda and Natasha look at each other knowingly, then peer down at you as you’re wrapped up in your own world.

“Oh, _______,” Natasha starts, smiling sweetly at you. “Sounds to me like you’re a serious love bug.”

“Hm? Oh, I guess so,” you shrug.

“I think so as well,” Wanda agrees. “You have much love to give. And we know exactly where you can put it.”

“A-And where do you think that is?” you ask hesitantly.

Don’t say it don’t say it don’t say it don’t s–

“Bucky,” they say in unison.

You sigh, knowing that they would go there. You wipe your hands down your face and lean your head back against the couch. You stare up at the ceiling, and without even thinking about it, you give them your answer.

“It’s already there.”

Behind the safety of the kitchen wall, Bucky’s eyes widen in shock. He never expected to hear words like that directed towards him again. Ever. Much less from you. He chews his bottom lip, wondering what the hell he’s going to do with this new information. His emotions towards you have been sifting through him, questioning what those emotions are. He’s very fond of you, having helped him and all, but there’s a lot more to it than that. His use of the word “doll”, the fact that second to Steve, he feels at home with you. You don’t judge him, and you make an effort to see him laugh and have a good time. It gets him through the day at times. And when he saw you stumble through the living room, bloody and bruised, he was worried sick. The initial reaction was because his friend got shot, then his mind shifted into the feeling of losing you. He panicked when you fell into his arms, afraid about what was happening to you. And now that he knows your true feelings for him… he’s not too sure what to feel. He hasn’t given himself time to process the emotions he has for you, but he sure as hell has the time now.

Backing away, he decides to retreat to the public showers downstairs to clear his head.

Meanwhile, Natasha and Wanda express their happiness at you finally admitting to them how you truly feel about Bucky. You smile along with them, but you yourself are still a little wary about it all. Is it love, or infatuation? It’d be important to find that out first before going to Wanda and Natasha to divulge their curiosity. It’s nearing dinnertime, so you interrupt their excited chatter to get something to eat. You stop yourself from opening the freezer, then call out to the F.R.I.D.A.Y.

“Yes, miss _______?”

“Is Dr. Markson around?”

“He is in the medical laboratory.”

“Can you ask him what I can eat for dinner?”

“Certainly.”

You tap the kitchen counter as you wait, your back to Wanda and Natasha. You’d rather them not see your face as you continue to have thoughts about your feelings for Bucky.

“Dr. Markson suggests rice and vegetables.”

“Perfect. Thanks.”

One of the easiest things to make, you immediately get to it, no matter how much of an inconvenience your crutches are. You haven’t read the instructions Dr. Markson gave you about binding your leg on your own yet, so you’ll do that when you go to bed. And also take another painkiller. You avoid Wanda’s and Natasha’s pestering questions about your confession, so you either shut them up completely, or offer another topic of discussion. They opt to make their own dinner as well, giving you the chance to eat in peace. That is, only if you were able to go to your room while holding a bowl on rice and vegetables and using your crutches at the same time. You end up eating in the kitchen, and make idle chatter with Wanda and Natasha.

You wonder where Bucky has been the past few hours. Maybe still in one of the training rooms, or out with Steve. Is he even allowed out in the city yet? Or maybe he’s on the second floor shooting billiard by himself. It’s something Steve would do, and already has, so perhaps Bucky would be into that sort of thing too. You’re so immersed in your thoughts about where he is that you don’t even notice him walk behind you three to go to his room. You only notice when Natasha says hi to him, but you only get the view of his back. You finish your dinner with a small smile on your face.

One thing that can be said about you and be 100% true is that you’re a night owl. You drag your night on just to stay up longer, and because you don’t want to go to bed so early. It’s a little eerie since you’re the only one up sometimes, but it’s nice to have a lot of time to yourself to think. It’s currently 11 p.m., and you’re sitting in the living room wrapped in a blanket, watching TV and rereading the instructions on how to change your bandages. It seems simple enough, and you’re sure you can do it yourself, but the thing is: you don’t want to. Why do it yourself when there are other perfectly capable human beings in the building to do it for you? And you’re not talking about the medical staff.

You slide to one end of the couch and put both your legs up, then lay the blanket over yourself. You stare at the TV for a few seconds before looking up at the ceiling. A short nap should energize you a bit. Taking the chance, you shuffle further into the couch, turn your head to the side, and close your eyes.

Turns out, it’s not a short nap.

You’re still snoozing away an hour and a half later, the room dark, the only source of light being the TV screen. You’ve done this many times before: falling asleep on the couch after closing your eyes for a few minutes. All you wanted was a quick ten minutes to freshen yourself up, but it always turns into a snooze fest. Some night owl you are.

And it looks like you’re not the only one.

Bucky comes striding out of his room wearing only grey sweats, and makes a beeline for the fridge. He’s dying for some water, and gulps down half of it in one go. He runs a hand through his hair and takes a few deep breaths. He leans over the sink, and splashes his face with some cold water. He’s found that this has been the most helpful after having a nightmare. It wakes him up, making it harder for him to fall asleep, and gives him the chance to think of excuses to give Steve when he asks why he looks so jaded.

After drying his face, he finally notices that the TV is still on. He takes sips of his water as he walks towards the living room, and is surprised to see you sleeping there. He sets his water down, and squints at you to see if you’re actually asleep. When you don’t correct him, he believes it’s his responsibility to bring you back to your bed. He kneels down in front of you, and gently shakes your shoulder.

“_______?” he whispers. “Wake up, _______.”

You make a pained expression, groaning and shifting around from being rudely awakened from your sleep. You don’t open your eyes, opting to just turn to the side and go back to sleep. Bucky sighs tiredly, but keeps trying.

“_______,” he says again. “Time to go to bed. Come on.”

Groaning louder, you agonizingly open your eyes and look over your shoulder to see who’s bothering you.

“Bucky?” you say, your voice hoarse. You blink a few times to get a clearer vision of him. “What’re you doing out here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” he smiles. “Come on. Get up. I’m sure your bed is much comfier than this.”

“I don’t wanna get up,” you protest, pulling the blanket closer to your chest.

“_______,” he warns. “If you don’t get up, I’m gonna have to carry you back to bed.”

“Be my guest,” you yawn, believing he won’t do it. You hear his knees crack as he stands up. You think he’s about to just leave you there, but he carefully slides his hands under you and hoists you up in his arms.

“Bucky!” you gasp, clutching your leg. It doesn’t hurt much, but you’re still mindful of it.

“I told you I’d carry you,” he tells you, also picking up his water bottle as he heads to your room. Sighing in defeat, you let him do as he pleases. Besides, it’s kind of rewarding. Bucky gets to carry you, and you get to smell him. And touch his bare chest. The blanket got taken with you, so you get to stay warm when Bucky lays you down on your bed.

“Thanks,” you mumble drowsily.

“No problem,” he smiles, smoothing your hair down. You peek up at him for a few seconds, getting a fantastic view of his body. Once you’re settled in, he starts backing away. You groan in annoyance when you remember something.

“Bucky,” you call out. He stops and turns back at you. “I hate to sound selfish, but could you change my bandages for me, please? I’m too exhausted to do it myself.”

“Sure thing.”

He comes back instantly, and you carefully bend over your bed to grab the bag of medical gauze, instructions, and supplies Dr. Markson left for you. He sits on the edge of your bed and takes out a roll, then grabs the scissors as well. You unravel yourself from your blanket, sit up, then move over to give Bucky some room. You pull up the hem of your dress, then settle it between your legs. You yawn repeatedly as Bucky cuts the gauze already on your leg and when he starts wrapping it back up.

“Sorry ‘bout this,” you say, giving him an apologetic look. “I’m supposed to change it when I wake up and go to bed, but I didn’t think I’d fall asleep for that long.”

“It’s okay,” he says, his eyes trained on your thigh. “I was already up.”

“Oh. Well, still. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. This is looking a lot better, though.”

“Yeah, it is. Still a little gross looking, but the pain’s not as bad.”

“That’s good.”

“Mm.”

You fight to keep your eyes open this time, your head drooping along with your eyes every time you feel like you’re nodding off. Bucky notices and smiles, thinking about how adorable you are when you’re tired. When he’s done wrapping, he cuts off the end and lets it sit on your thigh. He gets the medical tape and wraps it around your leg twice, secure but not too tight. He gently pats your thigh when he’s finished, and gives you a fond smile.

“Thanks,” you mumble, swaying your leg side to side.

“You’re welcome,” he says. When you try to force yourself awake again, he takes notice of how dry your lips look. He hands you his water bottle and offers you some. You mutter another “thanks” and take two considerate gulps before giving it back to him and wiping your mouth with the back of your hand. You shake your head, now being even more selfish.

“Sorry, but could you do one more thing for me?” you ask.

“Sure,” he says.

“Can you grab me a shirt?” you request. “Any black shirt from the dresser on the left. Middle drawer.”

He nods, then gets up from your bed and shuffles over to the end of your room. You blatantly stare at his bare back without shame because of how exhausted you are. Bucky comes back with one of your old band t-shirts and tosses it at you.

“Think fast,” he says as it lands on your face. You huff a laugh before dragging it down.

“How sweet,” you joke. He smiles again before sitting on your bed again. You certainly don’t mind; you just don’t know what you can talk about with him now. Thankfully, one thing comes to mind.

“You disappeared after I showered,” you say, fiddling with the shirt in your hands. His smile drops a little and he guiltily looks towards the floor.

“Sorry,” he says, looking back at you. “I should’ve told you first.”

“No, no,” you wave him off. “It’s okay. I just wondered where you went. Was my technology lesson really that boring?”

“It was not,” he replies honestly. “I myself wouldn’t use it, but I am very informed now.”

“Good. Because you’re gonna have a lot of lessons with me when it comes to all the things that’ve changed over the last seven decades. Movies, music, historical movements. You’re gonna hate me by the end of it because I’ll never shut up about it.”

“I could never hate you.”

“That’s reassuring. I’ll just talk your ear off then.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

You give him a small laugh before you yawn again. You rub your eyes and swipe a hand through your hair, and Bucky can’t help think about what he overheard earlier today. It’s a little far-fetched to say that you’re in love with him, only because you didn’t say that. You’ve only caught feelings for him, and nothing else. So far. He still doesn’t know what to think, even after pondering it for hours after he heard you say it. He feels like he’s being a bad person because he’s not telling you he heard you, but at the same time, he’s probably saving you the embarrassment of having your confession being eavesdropped on. He sighs, deciding to just keep his mouth shut about it for now. His feelings are still a mystery to him towards you, so he needs to figure himself out as well before he tells you anything.

“I should get going,” he says, standing up. “You should get some rest.”

“As should you,” you say, smiling at him. “I know designer eye bags when I see them.”

“Goodnight, _______,” he grins, making his way for the door.

“Goodnight, Bucky,” you say back. You eye him up and down again when he’s not looking, and wave to him when he shuts the door. Sighing sadly, you take off your dress and pull on your t-shirt before scooching down into bed and getting comfy. You close your eyes, hoping that one day, you’ll be able to muster up the courage to tell him you love him to his face.

Hopefully.

E/A/N: Screw it. I’m posting this. Chapter Thirteen is nearly complete, and Chapter Fourteen is in the works too. In the next chapter, you get to take Bucky into the city finally!

[caveartfair]

The Pre-Raphaelites’ Muse, Leading Light, and Sacrificial Lamb

Ophelia, 1851-1852. Sir John Everett Millais Tate Gallery, London

Oscar Wilde was, as always, correct when he wrote that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. If you doubt him, look no further than the short, unhappy career of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, the woman who was at different times a muse, a leading light, and a sacrificial lamb of the Pre-Raphaelites.

In 1848, while the workers of the world were busy uniting, three young English artists—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais—declared a different revolution. In calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they made clear what they were aiming for in their work. Their idols were Botticelli and Bellini—quattrocento masters who had filled canvases with bright color and hot passion in the decades before Italian art congealed into Mannerism. By echoing these forebears, the Pre-Raphaelites sought to convey an unusual kind of beauty, somehow sublime and fragile at the same time. They specialized in painting the doomed damsels of myth and poetry: Beatrice, Proserpina, the Lady of Shalott.

Small wonder, then, that Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52) has come to be recognized as the definitive Pre-Raphaelite painting. In Act IV, Scene VII of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we learn that Ophelia, Hamlet’s rejected lover, has drowned in a river:

“There with fantastic garlands did she come / Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples […] / Her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death.”

The scene offered the perfect tableau for Millais: pastoral, horrifying, surreal, with just a whiff of eroticism. To capture the instant before Ophelia sinks to her death, he endured five months on the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey. During that time, he fended off wind, rain, flies, and more than one trespassing notice—“Certainly the painting of a picture under such circumstances,” he wrote at the time, “would be a greater punishment to a murderer than hanging.”

Portrait of Elizabeth Siddall. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The Loving Cup, 1867. Dante Gabriel Rossetti National Museum of Western Art

But Millais wasn’t the only one who suffered. He still needed an Ophelia, and he found one in Elizabeth Siddall. Born in 1829 to working-class parents, Siddall grew up reading Shakespeare and Walter Scott, and writing melancholy, image-laden poetry in the style of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who was something of an honorary Pre-Raphaelite. In 1849, Siddall was working in a hat shop when she met Walter Deverell, a friend of Millais who had just begun a painting based on Twelfth Night and desperately needed a young, beautiful woman to model for Viola.

Through Deverell, Siddall met most of the other notable Pre-Raphaelites, though they seemed more interested in her looks than her artistic talents. Rossetti, who became her husband in 1860, rhapsodized about her “copper hair” and fair flesh, which looked “as if a rose tine lay beneath the white skin.” She modeled for various paintings by Rossetti and his peers, often standing in for the characters she’d fallen in love with as a child.

For Ophelia, Siddall spent five months in a bathtub. In order to paint his half-submerged subject for hours without interruption, Millais arranged for special heating lamps to warm the water. One day, the lamps went out, and shortly afterwards, Siddall came down with pneumonia—no laughing matter in Victorian England. The sickness proved so serious that her father demanded Millais pay £50 (no laughing matter, either) for her medical fees. Millais settled for a smaller sum, establishing the pattern that would hold for the rest of Siddall’s life: Over and over again, she’d sacrifice her health and happiness for the painter’s success, never receiving much in return.

Like plenty of enduring masterpieces, Ophelia initially met with polite confusion. Even the critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites’ loudest trumpeter, had doubts: “Why the mischief,” he wrote to Millais, “should you not paint pure nature, and not that rascally wirefenced garden-rolled-nursery-maid’s paradise?” (Was he a critic or the original troll?) But within a few decades, the painting had come to be seen as the jewel of Millais’s career, and today, you’d be hard-pressed to imagine the Pre-Raphaelite movement without it.

The same deserves to be said about Siddall. In the decade leading up to her death, she didn’t just model for other artists; she drew, painted, and above all, wrote. Rather than simply reiterating Pre-Raphaelite tropes in her work, she lived and breathed these tropes, feeling their wrenching contradictions firsthand. One of the most striking things about Siddall, in fact, is how closely her tragedy resembles that of Ophelia. Grieving her murdered father and rejected by the taciturn Hamlet, Ophelia is condemned to die offstage, a footnote in someone else’s story.

Monna Vanna, 1866. Dante Gabriel Rossetti Legion of Honor

null, . Dante Gabriel Rossetti "The Botticelli Renaissance" at Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (2015-2016)

Siddall met Rossetti in 1850 and became his lover almost immediately. As the affair ripened, she became increasingly insecure about Rossetti’s notorious womanizing, agonizing over what he’d do with her when her beauty faded. In short, pitiless verses, she described herself through the lens of her husband’s glib aestheticism: “Low sit I down at my Lady’s feet / Gazing through her wild eyes, / Smiling to think how my love will fleet / When their starlike beauty dies.” After years of being treated like a muse by friends, mentors, and lovers, she began to think of herself in the same tired terms: beautiful, fragile, disposable.

Siddall lost her confidence. She lost weight. She lost a child. She even lost, at her husband’s bizarre request, one of the L’s in her surname. In 1862, a few months after suffering a miscarriage, she drank too much laudanum and lost, at the age of 32, her life. Siddall may have intended to kill herself—legend has it Rossetti burned her suicide note to avoid a scandal—or she may have made a fatal mistake while trying to numb the ache of depression.

Almost three decades later, Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, a satire of the pure, uncut aestheticism that had inspired the Pre-Raphaelites (and, for a time, impressed Wilde himself). The title character is a callous young man so in love with beauty for beauty’s sake that he hopes never to get old. He seduces a working-class woman with fair skin and lovely copper hair, who his friend likens to Ophelia; when he grows bored of her, she kills herself. The woman’s name is Sibyl.

This wasn’t really a case of art imitating life. This was art imitating life imitating art. Siddall modeled for dozens of paintings by Millais and his friends, but her existence was already a melancholy fever-dream beyond anything the Pre-Raphaelites were capable of imagining. After 150 years of bullying, condescension, and neglect, it’s only fair to give her the last word: “Oh grieve not with thy bitter tears / The life that passes fast; / The gates of heaven will open wide / And take me in at last.”

from Artsy News

[hrk4]

The year that was...

Dear Friends:

Season’s Greetings!

Standing between the two armies eager for battle, Krishna’s exhortation to his friend in dismay was, in essence, this: Why do you hesitate to do what is most natural to you? Why are you so afraid to be yourself? Why are you combating your own temperament, making a mockery of your hard-earned proficiency, and behaving in a manner singularly ill-suited to what you hold dear? Arjuna’s despondency was a consequence of his own sentimentality and hence Krishna inspires him to return to himself, reminding him constantly of his true nature as a warrior. A twenty-first century Krishna would have most certainly appended a proviso to his famous utterance – “Try to excel in the work and path aligned to your nature, even if it is flawed or less glamorous. It is better than following the way of others. You will never feel guilty if you follow your inherent nature.” In that rider, he might well have illustrated the various machinations of society that detracts from the individual the opportunity to stay true to the Self. At every turn in the road of life, people—even with the noblest of intentions—await the slightest of chances to misguide the traveller, gently nudging him away from the inner path. He is expected to tread the beaten track; he is directed to follow the well-known route.

For someone who has relentlessly strayed from the banal passageways leading to predictable endpoints, I faced a profusion of advice and admonition this year from family and friends, badgering me to recognize, nay embrace, the multi-hued, dazzling avenues that would lead me to some goal or achievement or outcome of their choice, which in turn would be hailed by the people of the world as something that perhaps justifies my existence. I’m glad to place on record that all such attempts have failed miserably and I continue to be myself, treading the inward path wholly aligned to my nature. What is particularly memorable is that I did not react to the advice and admonition with anger or arrogance (I must admit that at times I was tempted to flash the middle finger but such murderous thoughts didn’t last long); instead, I quietly accepted it as a gift that is useless to me but given with warmth nevertheless. I smiled at them, not condescendingly, nor artlessly, but with the awareness that nobody is in a better position than I am to evaluate my mind, and therefore any such attempt is bound to fall short – at least in my eyes. Of course, the dark side of this whole business is that my instincts have driven me—often unconsciously—to be more careful around such people – the unsolicited advisors and admonishers; this has translated into the unfortunate measuring of utterances and the calculation of gestures – clearly a deviation from the natural flow of the self. Therefore the informal tête-à-têtes with such people are bound to decline albeit gradually and in not-so-obvious ways.

In my view, friends are those exceptional individuals with whom you can be yourself, in addition to the unmistakable emotional connection. This is both a function of the attitude of the friends—whether they continually judge you or not—and of your own preoccupation with what the world is thinking of you. The less they judge you and the less you agonize over what others’ think, the more comfortable the relationship. As a silent witness I observed some of my close friends moving far away from me and some of my casual acquaintances moving closer, becoming friends. Through this transitory phase, I tried to remain calm and accept the changing reality, which is inevitable. In such instances, I find solace in recollecting memories with old friends of mine whom I hardly get to meet but every time I do, we start from where we left off, even if that was months or years ago.

When I sat down to gather my thoughts on what the year 2017 has meant to me, more than what my ‘achievements’ were, or even what my ‘learning’ was, my mind was forcibly drawn towards where I stand as an individual; my focus was primarily on how I transformed through the course of these twelve months. ‘Achievements’ implies ego; ‘learning’ suggests an unfinished process; but ‘transformed’ connotes a newer, perhaps better, state of being that has already been effected. That said, to record some of the completed tasks and learnt lessons might be valuable for future improvements, and hence I have found it appropriate to archive them here.

My activities in 2017 were largely confined to the following domains: i. Writing, ii. Music, iii. Research, iv. Design, v. Publishing, and vi. Monkey Business (what my friends at Infy would call ‘इत्यादि-इत्यादि’).

I. I wrote some articles/essays and did a fair bit of translation/editing for Prekshaa Journal as well as for my upcoming books. Apart from having two short stories published (in Indian Review and Cha), I also spent some time writing a detailed outline of my first novel. I taught two courses at Bangalore Writers Workshop and was also a judge at the annual Deccan Herald short story competition. (Lesson learned: Working without constant expectations is both pleasurable and profitable; fretting over deadlines and unfinished projects is counterproductive.)

II. I formally dived into the amateur circuit of Carnatic classical music with an hour-long solo violin concert at Chowdiah Memorial Hall in November. Earlier in the year, I played a couple of chamber concerts. (Lesson learned: If playing in your room is tiring and playing in front of your guru is sweat-inducing, playing in front of an audience is in a different league altogether.)

III. This has mostly involved reading some of the important texts of the Hindu tradition, both primary and secondary sources. This has also meant my taking baby steps into the worlds of Sanskrit poetry, ancient Indian polity and law, history, Kannada literature, and the Epics.

IV. I designed close to fifteen books and four album covers, the highlight being the Prekshaa calendar. I also explored a bit in the area of Indic fonts and hopefully will have a breakthrough soon.

V. For all practical purposes, I didn’t write any book in 2017; I only published books (through W.I.S.E. Words Inc., the Indie publishing setup I run along with Dr. Koti Sreekrishna); eight in all: Stories Behind Verses (by Arjun Bharadwaj and Shashi Kiran B N; in collaboration with Prekshaa Pratishtana), பகவத்கீதை தற்காலத் தமிழில் (by Sripriya Srinivasan), The Song in Pictures (in association with my photographer-friends Anirudh, Anshuman, Divya, Frank, Navneeth, Prathigna, and Skanda), and five anthologies of essays by Prof. M Hiriyanna (a republication of otherwise unavailable classics).

VI. Apart from getting addicted to cryptic crosswords and card magic, I did some voice-acting on stage and voice-over work in the studio. Two short videos produced for Shaale stand testimony to what they’re worth. I signed out of Twitter and LinkedIn. I also spent a few extra hours sorting out my finances. Plus, I started cooking regularly. (Lesson learned: Without all this monkey business, my life will be meaningless.)

It is impossible to write down all the wonderful things I learnt in 2017 but it might be instructive—to my future self, if not anyone else—to document some learnings from my gurus as well as the wonderful artists I had the good fortune of meeting this year:

A. Ever since I was getting ready to perform on stage, my guru Dr. L Subramaniam has been consistently pushing me to improve my art; his focus has entirely shifted from the technical aspect of violin-playing (which was the mainstay during the early years of my lessons with him) and moved to the aesthetic and emotional aspects of music. To give life to every note, to add emotion to every phrase, and to make every performance unique has been his refrain. LS sir has often said: Even if you play for five minutes, it should be something sublime.

B. My entry into Sanskrit poetry and literature has been a direct result of the single-minded prodding, encouragement, and support given to me by Śatāvadhāni Dr. R Ganesh. His emphasis on the importance of familiarity with Sanskrit literature and classical art forms of India—particularly dance—for any student of Indian culture has influenced me deeply. Time and again I have felt that any student of Hindu heritage will benefit by embracing the holistic approach as advocated by Dr. Ganesh as opposed to the numerous other approaches, far more seductive in appeal but piecemeal all the same.

C. Dr. S L Bhyrappa made the astute observation that as a novelist and philosopher, instead of getting affected by a certain individual’s actions (often antagonistic in nature), he tends to go deeper into the psyche of that individual—regarding him/her as a character in a story—and analyzes the more fundamental reason that makes him/her behave in the said manner. In another instance, when Dr. Ganesh asked him during an interview, “What in your opinion keeps a relationship going? What truly sustains love?” he replied with a single word: Mārdava (tenderness, gentleness, compassion).

D. Every visit to Dr. S R Ramaswamy’s office room—rather karmabhūmi—in Chamarajpet is equivalent to reading a pile of books; he teaches us so much, not only by his eloquent speech but also by the force of his personality. When a friend of mine inquired about his fragile health condition, he merely said, “From my twentieth year, I realized that I’m just an āgantuka (stranger, guest, visitor) here in this world.” One seldom finds that sort of awareness—not merely in word, but in action as well. The wonderful paradox in SRR’s worldview is that although he feels like a visitor, he toils with the gusto of a landowner!

E. I have learnt so much just by observing Prof. L V Shanthakumari, an epitome of tranquillity. It baffles me how a person can transcend such pain and yet not make any bones about it. Her presence itself is calming and reassuring but not without a healthy dose of humour and wide-ranging discussion. If only our society had more elderly sages like her.

F. During a conversation I had with Mantap Prabhakar Upadhya, he spoke a great deal about the mind of an artiste during performance. He underscored the importance of art leading to self-forgetfulness; unless the artist can become one with the art, the connoisseurs will not get the ultimate experience. He then told me that when he dances, he doesn’t do it for the applause or for appreciation but as a means of washing off his ego.

G. In my interactions with Nirupama and Rajendra, I found unmatched zest for innovation and a relentless pursuit of self-betterment, not just as dancers but also as human beings. I am reminded of an old saying—One can accomplish almost anything for which one has unlimited enthusiasm—whenever I meet them. When there is absolutely no need to do anything different, when the formula works, and when things are going smoothly, and yet you choose to innovate, that is when you become a pioneer.

H. The continual learning from the extended Prekshaa family—it would be gross injustice to use a term like ‘team’ or ‘crew’—is something that I cannot fully put in writing. I have never seen a more selfless bunch of people, always putting the needs of the organization over their own, making mock of their own travails, and creating an atmosphere of riotous fun without ever subtracting from the tasks to be accomplished. To me, this is nothing less than lokasaṅgraha in action.

2017 started off with a celebration of my mother’s sixtieth birthday (in February) with a small get-together and large doses of music. On the occasion, we brought out her book Sixty Years, Sixty Episodes, a collection of interesting anecdotes from various dimensions of her life. By mid-year, our family was going through a terrible phase with the sudden deaths of members of the immediate and extended family. My grandmother, Smt. Malathi Rangaswamy passed away in July at the age of eighty-five. She was perfectly normal even the previous evening—afflicted by neither a fever nor a cold—and the next afternoon, she was gone. To live according to your terms is rare but rarer still is to die according to your terms. Those who knew her surely felt that with her passing, an era had ended. An old school orthodoxy that had its own warmth and beauty in spite of its obvious limitations. A life of rigorous economy and wise investments. A determination that always placed principles before passions; a firmness, even rigidity, that put faith above joys and comforts; motherly love that knew no discrimination; and benevolence that knew no bounds. The end of 2017 brings with it my father’s semi-retirement from his erstwhile semi-retirement. After a few successful consultancy assignments, he is setting out to write a book chronicling his twenty-year journey of social service in the area of Avoidable Blindness; quite aptly, he has chosen to call the book Eye-opener.

My travels this year were mostly limited to South India—south of the Vindhyas, to be precise,—a place that is my home and that satisfies me more than anywhere else on the planet, with the sole exception of the Himalayas.

The more I read international news and the more I talk to friends living in the US and Europe, the more I’m convinced that as on date, India is—in addition to being so vibrant and diverse—among the safest and sanest places to live in the world; doubtless, we have our own problems but when a population of over a billion is governed by less than a hundred thousand police stations and yet able to maintain peace by and large, then it has definitely something to do with our ‘civilizational maturity,’ as one of my friends put it.

Speaking at the launch of his most recent book, Dr. S R Ramaswamy recalled a wonderful remark by his guru D V Gundappa: “If we were to think that the Supreme [or Destiny or the universe; call it what you wish] bestows upon us those things that we deserve—ex officio—then we would have absolutely nothing. It is because of His immense kindness that He grants us—ex gratia—all the things that we have.” In sum, we don’t get merely what we deserve, but far more than that. And I shall leave you with that thought.

Here’s wishing you and your loved ones a great 2018!

Cheers, Hari

[incarnate-death]

Slaughterhouse part 1

I don’t think I will ever understand Paul Celan’s agonized poetry. He kept looking for something in the poetry that poems cannot provide and so failed to capture the misery, loss, love, and deaths of millions of people killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Talk about pressure. He wrote in German for the Germans who killed his father and mother and left him scarred for life. Through the decades of nightmares, anti-semitism, accusations of plagiarism, and mental hospitals, he never stopped writing in German. Such maddening horror—the inevitability of escaping the trauma even while seeking to be relieved from would be enough to drive anyone to drown themselves in the Seine River, which he did in 1970. But he made it further than other writers! Walter Benjamin: suicide, 1940—he tried to reach America through Spain but Nazis contacted the Spanish government to return him home (the camps) and he killed himself with a couple handfuls of morphine tablets (boy am I jealous) before the police could arrive. Benjamin’s friend and colleague, Arthur Koestler was not so lucky. After Benjamin’s death he took the leftover pills and tried to suicide with them—it didn’t work. Everything turned out alright for Koestler anyway; he made it until 1983 before he did what he should have done decades ago: Koestler and his wife killed themselves with an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol, which is much more appealing than opiates in my opinion. (To tell the truth, I’ve never even read Koestler’s work. ) But the best way to go was told to me be my friend, a professor: lay in a cold snowy forest, one pack of Newport Menthol 100s (my addition), an iv drip of dmt (my addition) a fistful of barbiturates and another fist full of 2mg xanax bars, but they can’t be generic. 2mg xanax bars are a wonder of design. There should be a special exhibit for bars at the MoMA.

I bet the pharma company spent millions deciding the precise size and shape of the 2mg xanax bar; perhaps this is why I can buy brand name 2mg bars for 8 dollars a piece, but only  $4 four 4 half milligram pills. 4 pills for two milligrams?? We’d get full before we could eat enough to feel it, much less kill ourselves.

I sometimes fantasize about iving fatal doeses of DMT straight to certain egotistical and/or evil people’s veins when they’re not looking. Some people just need to join the dead. My partners father: he was a piece of shit ass and tried to drown Z when they were ten, then when they came home from college he told them he couldn’t stay cause of his transition.

Jean Amery’s shoulders were dislocated as the Nazis tied a rope around his hands behind his back and hung him up like and did lots of other dirty things. Amery admitted the truth about writing about the Holocoaust and torture: to convey the pain of his torture, he must torture. Amery refused to write about the camps or in German more than a decade after his release. He also brought up the problem implicit in our lives: what is dignity? Some people thing a human loses dignity when they can’t marry who they want, Amery writes. I think he knew it was futile to write in German for Germans about the Holocaust, but failure is irresistible so he ended up doing it anyway. Perhaps his resistance kept him alive longer than Celan, who wanted everything and never stopped writing for a moment until his death. Celan was almost even greedy with poetry. Amery didn’t kill himself until 1978—another overdose. But Primo Levi (also yet to read his writing) is the real marvel: it wasn’t until 1987 that he threw himself out of the third story of his apartment. I hope you don’t think worse of Primo Levi because he made some poor EMSA person scrape him off the pavement. I worked in emergency services and it would be an honor, perhaps even a joy or a privilege to clean up anyone in artistic relation to Celan and maybe even fuck with the leftovers a little bit while no one is looking. but most of all I am validated by the knowledge that because i did my job right, no one will step over him like the road kill we all are. As much as I’d like to be on the EMSA team that scraped these guys up, I’ll admit it was quite inconsiderate of him to make such a mess.

there is however much to admire about Celan’s stamina. He wrote from the 1940s until his death. It’s unthinkable to me. Theodor Adorno explained the dilemma of Celan and his contemporaries: it is impossible to write in the same language and produce cultural capital in the German context without recreating the Nazi horror and therefore barbaric.

The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation. (Prisms, 34)

The Nazis didn’t disappear. They are still neighbors. But Adorno later retracted the statement; the poetry isn’t barbaric, but it requires the same bourgeois coldness to the suffering of others that characterized Nazism. In a sense, they all wanted that coldness, even Adorno. He is brutally honest in

his retraction of his previous critique of poetry: “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.

In other words, if they had any sense they would have killed themselves long before they had the time to write much less publish. Yes, Celan, Levi, Amery, and Koestler must have been truly evil not to suicide before pen became print. Instead, they spent countless hours sharpening their line breaks, enjambments, and images, reading literature, philosophers and mystics and magicians and historians so they would have the power to peel the skin off their readers’ bodies and make them watch it while the poet douses the husk of their readers’ flesh with kerosene and sets it on fire. It’s obvious that this is what they would have liked to do, but in the end, meh. Their writing was brilliant, yes, but flashes not sunlit hours, no spontaneous human combustion at the site of a poem. I wish they were magicians, not just poets; maybe then they could recite incantations and really show me what torture is like. I can handle being knicked for sure, but not if reading their writing requires me to adopt the cold bourgeois mentality of your average US secretary of state, which is pretty fucking cold. No, I’d rather be dead.  V soon now, I will kill myself with a bullet to the brain in the two bedroom apartment I share with my partner.

     I’m not the scholar on the above authors. My partner is. I simply became obsessed with their research, particularly regarding Celan and began investigating it in a different academic field. Z’s research has convinced me that suicidedeath is the only way for people like me. I’m not comparing myself to being a Jew in 1942. I just see partial homologies that help me understand the world and my relation to it.

     Once, when Z was escorting in Chicago to earn extra cash for grad school, someone stole hundreds of dollars and enough bars to make us both forget a month. I was at home doing drugs and had no solution but would listen as best I could. Z’s friend, D, is also an escort.  Some of her money was stolen as well and she called her boyfriend who got the numbers of the dudes who tried to rape our significant others, then stole from them, and threatened to come to their house and personally beat them. I’ve never been scared of D’s boyfriend because even though he’s big and got a deep voice, he’s mostly slumped. But damn he must have scared them, because they gave the money, but the drugs were gone. Some of my partner’s friends from highschool took care of him and his friends for us a couple weeks later; they are allmiddle class whiteboys and they lied about their addresses, saying they lived in the ghetto. We all threw a little money up and no one knows what happened or who beat them. Z called me after it first happened and said how angry they were they were trying to think of something to punch that wouldn’t break any knuckles. I said stopsign and they went straight out of a 5 star hotel in Chicago and started smashing the side of the nearest street sign over and over with their brass knuckles. If you don’t touch the bar in the middle, it just snaps back. he got arrested for disorderly conduct, but the cops didn’t find the cocaine stuffed up his vagina. They didn’t find out about the prostitution or anarchist organization we work for. I paid bail and we moved on. It tends to goes like that.

[john-rowell]

Best bargains for wildlife photography

Best bargains for wildlife photography

My wildlife kit

5D IV + 500mm f/4L IS II

5D III + 70-200 f/2.8L IS II

40mm f/2.8 pancake

1.4x TC III

Photography in general is an expensive hobby, and wildlife photography is definitely at the more expensive end of this spectrum with many of the larger lenses costing in excess of 10,000 €. I am frequently asked, as I am sure a lot of us are, “what camera should I buy?”...  Sometimes, for fun, i reel off the best-of-the-best kit, quote a price (around 30,000€) and watch there eyes pop out of their heads. The problem is that it is such an open ended question, it is not easy to answer, and that is exactly why we are asked! It depends on many things but basically comes down to this; what do you want to shoot, and how much do you want to spend? Even when broken down, the answers to these questions are so diverse, it is little easier. 

Generally, the people who ask the question fall in two categories; those who are starting out, and don’t want to invest that amount of money (right away), and those who want to get the best gear they can but have not got the crazy budget required for the top of the line lenses and camera. Well, I've been in both of these places, and i spent a lot of time agonizing over each of my camera and lens purchases to get to where I am now (and yes, there are still lenses I would love to get).

I am going to try and answer this question the best I can based on my own hindsight and experiences, offering some suggestions at the end in different price brackets, but for more specific advice, give me a shout and I'll try my best to help out. :) 

I shoot Canon, so feel I can only really talk about Canon gear as I have had little to no expierence with other manufacturers...  But the general premise is true.

What needs to be in a kit?

I frequently use focal lengths ranging from 16mm to 700mm to shoot nature and wildlife, but that is because different situations need different lenses. I can’t come up with combinations of lenses and cameras to cover every possible situation, so I am going to make some recommendations for a ‘Safari kit’. For me a minimal safari kit needs to have the following capabilities:

A long telephoto lens - it is rare to get the subject as close as you want, so we need a telephoto of some description. That is to say a lens which is 400mm or more ON A FULL-FRAME CAMERA (this is an important distinction).

A DLSR - Mirrorless cameras are getting better all the time, but DSLR's still have the best auto-focus, which makes shooting any kind of action easier.

A fast lens - Wildlife is usually most active in the mornings and evening when light is not good...  having a fast lens (low f-number) means it will let in more light and means you can take better images in those low light situations. It will also make images with blurred out background easier as it will have a narrower depth-of-field.

In addition to this, you might want to extend your kit to include:

A normal to wide angle lens - for those times you are lucky enough to get a close sighting, and to capture landscapes.

A tele-converter (TC). These extend the focal length of your lens, but be warned, it will also increase the f-value equally, and reduce image quaility. They work better on some lenses than others, and can reduce focusing too... 

Choosing a camera

There are two types of DSLR cameras. Full-frame (FF) and cropped sensor (APS-C). The full-frame cameras have a sensor the same size as an old frame of film (hence the name); the cropped APS-C cameras have a sensor 1.6 times smaller.  Many people consider APS-C cameras as worse than full-frame because their sensors have lower image quality, lower low light performance compared to full-frame. But they have two big benefits, they are also a lot cheaper and by cropping the sensor, you are also increasing the magnification. A sensor that is 1.6x smaller makes any lens on it 1.6x longer. So a 250mm lens on a APS-C camera is like having a 400mm lens on a FF camera. This is a major plus for wildlife photography, as longer lenses cost a lot more, and all of a sudden, every lens is 1.6x longer if you use a crop sensor body; which in turn is cheaper too! Twice the win! So if you are a budget Wildlifer...  APS-C is your friend! :)

A general rule of thumb to get the best value camera body is to go for the previous model, or even the one before that. Most entry-level and mid-range DSLRs are updated every year or two with incremental improvements in general. As a result you can pick up the previous model for a great price.

Since cameras are constantly changing, I will just say this: choose the best camera you can in that range considering the following actors;

AF points - the more the better!

ISO capabilities - the higher the better!

FPS - the higher the better, but this is the least important.

Go second hand.

If the shit hit the fan and lost all my gear (touch wood), I would probably replace most of it second hand... there is a huge second hand market for cameras and lenses, and if you know what to look for, you can get some great deals. Click here for advice on buying and selling Lenses and Cameras.

The lens is mightier than the camera...

Lenses are the most important part of your equipment. So when choosing a kit, I put the lens as my number one priority. Also, lenses don’t get updated nearly as often as cameras, so investing in a good lens will last you longer than a camera body. As a rough guide I would say spend 25-30% of your budget on the camera, the rest on a lens…  but when you look at the lower end of the budget scale, you don’t have many options.

The mainstream options

These are the lenses that I would initially recommend to anyone wanting to get into wildlife photography (other than the big white's)

Some alternatives well worth considering

Now that I have gotten the obvious and mainstream recommendations out of the way...  here are some fantastic alternatives, especially if you can pick them up second hand! The other advantage of using some 'less popular' yet excellent lenses is that your images will look more distintictive, and not the same as everyone elses! :)

The no-brainer

There are two lenses that I say are so good, useful, and cheap, there is really no excuse to have them. they are the Canon pancake lenses; EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM (APS-C) and EF 40mm f/2.8 STM. These lenses are so small and useful, they are a solid addition to a wildlife kit for those times you need a wider angle. You can get them for around 100€, which makes them a fantastic deal! I always have the 40mm in my bag. So get one if you have the chance! :)

These lenses are so small, I use them as body caps a lot of the time. Just leave them in your bag and you will always have a wider option if the need should arise! :)

Tele-converters

Tele-converters (TC) extended the focal length of your lens. For canon there is a 1.4x and a 2x TC which will multiple the focal length accordingly. At about 400€ this seems like a great idea, turning a 300mm lens into a 480mm or even a 600mm lens. But like everything in life, it comes at a cost. You don't only increase the focal length, but you increase the aperture, slow down the auto-focus and increase the flaws in the lens too. So that 600mm lens you could have is an f/8, with significantly slower AF and no where near as sharp as the lens without the TC. So you have to balance the extra length you get with it against the drawbacks.

Another point of consideration is that a TC works better with different lenses. For example, on a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II, both TC's work fantastically, but they do not work well on a 135mm f/2L...  so it is not a global solution. I do have TCs and use them from time to time, but not often. They can be a useful addition to a kit to get some extra reach, but only when paired with already excellent lenses.

Some complete set-ups!

Now that I have tried to go trough a lot of the options, I challenged myself to see what would I get within 4 different price brackets; 500€, 1000€, 2000€, and 4000€. A lot of the time, i went for buying second hand/used gear, as I feel this is the best value. If you have the cash to buy new, do it...  but don't be afraid of those used bargains! 

Scenario 1 : <500€

At this price range, there really is only 1 option:

the Canon EF-S 55-250 STM (make sure it is the STM version) + the best cameras you can buy with the change (a used 650D at the time of writing).

This is a great kit, and pretty much what i started with. It covers the middle to long telephoto range, has good image quality, and is light. It will do everything you need to make great images. It will however struggle in poor lighting conditions as the lower end camera body and lack of a fast lens will make it difficult. It will though, without a doubt, beat any bridge and compact camera hands-down! If you are just getting into wildlife photography, check out my previous post with tips that might help you.

Scenario 2 : <1000€

This is still at the budget end of the spectrum but you can start to get some great lenses if you dig around for used gear.

A used 300mm f/4L IS + the best cameras you can buy with the change (a used 650D at the time of writing).

A used 70-200 f/4L IS + the best cameras you can buy with the change (a used 650D at the time of writing).

The choice between these really depends on you...  the longer 300mm (480mm equivalent on a full-frame camera) is great, but you lack flexibility you could get from having the 70-200 zoom. Both are fantastic lenses, but the choice comes down to how and what you want to shoot....  Option 1 would be my choice, but I am used to shooting a long prime with all of its inherent benefits and drawbacks.

Scenario 3 : <2000€

Ok, this is starting to get into the expensive part, but it is still tough to buy a great new set-up in this price range. But the extra money allows you to have two lenses and a better camera body too. Here are my two suggestions.

A used 100-400 f/4.5-5.6 L IS I + 200mm f/2.8L + the best camera with with the change (a used 70D at time of writing)

A used 300mm f/4L IS + 135mm f/2L + the best camera with with the change (a used 70D at time of writing)

Both set-ups have a longer lens and a shorter faster lens. giving you length and low-light capabilities. This is what I would consider my minimal kit...  The 100-400mm zoom is a classic and great lens, despite its age, and you can pick them up easily and cheaply second hand. this lens on a APS-C camera is like having a 160-640mm lens on a full-frame body... it is not, however fast, so I have combined it with the 200mm f/2.8L prime lens to give some low light power to the kit, and to get some nice blurry backgrounds for those larger subjects or when the subject is closer. This would be my general recommendation for other people.

The second option is probably my personal choice, being very similar to my own kit (480mm and 200mm full-frame equivalents). The 300mm is a great middle ground telephoto length on a APS-C camera, and a f/2 lens is just fantastic!

Scenario 4 : <4000€

This is definitely well into the expensive range, but is still a fraction of the price of the top end kits. It also gives you many more options and possible combinations. That being said, this is what I would get for this money.

A used Canon 70-200 mm f/4 L IS USM + Canon EF 300mm f2.8 L IS USM lens + the best camera with with the change (a used 70D at time of writing)

A used 300 f/2.8L IS I + 1.4x TC III + the best camera with with the change (might get a 7D II in this range)

A 300mm f/2.8L IS I is a top level pro lens...  even the version I which is now old. It is fantastic, truly! Combine that with either the 70-200 f/4 to give you more width or a 1.4x tele-converter (turning it into a 420mm f/4) for more range, and you have a killer kit. I would be very happy with this kit.

The bottom line:

Lens is the major factor, so invest in them

Buy second hand to get the best bargains

Pick up a pancake lens

There is no right answer, just the answer the is right for you...  really look at how and what you want to shoot

You will always need more money! :)

If you have any specific questions, leave a comment or contact me and I'll do my best to help!