#banging my pots and pans for lost potential

[bellsyafterdark]

Can I request the aftermath of din fucking the rancor + pov switch so we can see what everyone is thinking? 🥺

Unrelated but THANK YOU for having your stuff both here and on ao3...ao3 is down but you're still here so I may yet survive

Pieces on AO3 are more polished and while you can find things here in their rougher pre-edited version, I'm glad they've still come in handy through the intermittent outages!

///

In the aftermath, the Gamorreans are quietly impressed. Jabba used to let his own rancor enjoy those who defied him however the creature liked, whether that meant tearing into an easy meal or, well...

They've never seen a being as small as the Lord's pet take a fully-grown rancor. Nor enjoy it (difficult to tell, all screams sound the same after a point). None had survived without eventually succumbing to significant injury.

The guards grunt at each other, gesturing to where the rancor is still bent on its haunches, Lady Shand and the shiny one lost beneath its shadow. All doubts are clarified. The shiny Mando pet is not human.

They doubt any of Lord Fett's company are. Not that it matters to them, sole survivors of a once hundred strong Gamorrean guard. But to pass under the guise of another, meeker species is an apex style of camouflage: Lord Fett, Lady Shand, and now the shiny one....

At their side, Krrsantan quells their curious exchange with a subsonic rumble in his chest.

He ignores their glance, knuckles sparking as his hands clench and unclench at his sides. It's not that Krrsantan is responsible for Din's welfare. He's not really sure what his role is in this castle-- fight at Boba's side when needed? Be a shield against his enemies?

He's certainly not the head of security, that's Fennec, for the little instructions she gives him and the other guards. She's been distracted ever since Krrsantan brought their new Mandalorian home. But ever since he helped sate Din's appetite in transit and dropped him in Boba's lap, Krrsantan has found himself watching whenever the silver Mandalorian strolled across his radar.

He remembers how feral Din could get. Krrsantan has heard whores described as starving in their desire, but those were all exaggerations until he met Din, trembling and pale, laser-focused on his needs, unlike those glassy-eyed, violent tweakers.

It's not that he feels responsible. But someone has to be.

The one watching Din definitely wasn't.

Fennec surfaces from her feeding stupor with a growl. Something tugs at the meal between her jaws and her hands fasten across steel and armour, clutching tight.

"... nn?"

A weak moan trembles from the one under her tongue and she blinks to clear her vision of the euphoric stars and smears. Dark shadows move above her.

"Fenn?" Boba's modulated voice finally reaches her, and she tilts her head, hearing over-sensitised as all her senses commonly grow in this state. Blood trickles from her chin and she pants hard, fingers moving instinctively to stem the flow at her meal's neck.

Sweetheart. Morsel. No, Din. This is Din.

She presses harder and feels a sting of guilt at the pained whine from their pet, his helmeted head lolling on the stone with exhaustion.

"I'm going to back up," Boba says. "Put the big one in his room. You ready?"

Din barely responds when Fennec nudges him with the nose of her helmet and laving her tongue flat over the fresh bite on his neck.

"Fennec."

She glares up at Boba astride the crown of his prized rancor, thick chains still coiled in his glove. He is a vision that would make her mouth water if the thirst hadn't been slaked. But the beast's eyes are starting to droop and she doesn't want to still be under it when it decides to nap. Fine.

With her chest to Din's back, she wraps an arm protectively round his front and her other reaches down between his legs to clutch at his inner thigh.

The sound Din makes when the rancor pulls out is guttural and wounded and Fennec's stomach drops at the way Din startles alert, scent surging with pain, hands flying up to cling to her.

She purrs and hushes him even when she just wants to drink in the veritable gush of seed that streams from his cunt, unstoppered, knees drawing up protectively as the rancor retreats, and Din is shivering into a ball, whining, and Fennec doesn't have enough arms to wrap him up in the way she wants, she can't do this alone.

"Boba!"

Nobody stares as Boba marches through the halls of his palace with Fennec and her rifle at his heels, they have more self-preservation than that. Curled in his arms, Din is rigid and silent with pain, Boba can only imagine how he clenches his teeth behind his helmet.

It makes his heart pang. He promised to keep him-- them safe. All of them, under his roof. He never thought Din would resort to this.

For the first time in a long time, he's glad he wears a cloak, less for the modesty and more for the comfort it seemed to provide Din once he was wrapped in it, slumping into Boba's chest as he was pulled in.

"The hell were you thinking?" he grumbles under his breath, quickening his pace. Two more flights and then Din will be resting in bacta.

Having mistaken the accusation for her, Fennec retorts, "He was hungry."

He glares over his shoulder at her. "The rancor? The fucking rancor, Fenn?"

A terse beat of silence. "It hasn't been enough for him."

We haven't been enough.

Again, that ugly twist in Boba's chest that makes his stomach swoop. His mouth hardens in a scowl. It had just been a few days, Boba had needed to attend to political negotiations, recon with the water traders, Fennec and Din had their own missions, it was almost a return to how things were before.

This was not the homecoming he'd expected.

"This can't happen again." The rancor was precious to Boba, but it could have killed Din, and then... and then....

Fennec scoffs under her breath. "He doesn't take orders from us."

Boba stops and rounds on his second, watching her body language freeze, primed for whatever reprimand comes next. He watches her for a long moment, sees the moment she softens from living stone, wariness leaking from her edges.

"Maybe he should," Boba says.

.

.

.

/ping @battlemastercoffeeco @shalltheseboneslive

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

Thoughts on a potential Sam & Benny relationship? Platonic or otherwise? 👀✨

Hi!!! thank you for asking this hehe. See Benny falls under the category of characters 'assigned' to Dean who personally, to me, also have a lot in common with Sam when you really look beneath the surface (Cas is another character who falls in this camp). And what he has in common with Sam is just. a lot more thematically meaningful to me lol. Also I'm sorry... this is gonna be mostly literary analysis because i'm a real freak who judges ship potential between characters according to ~themes~ 😔

Benny, like Sam, is a character who's born from liminality. He's forced to occupy that space by the nature of his existence, but just like with Sam, his ambiguities aren't allowed to remain within the narrative. I'm using liminal here as a catch-all to cover both the idea of ambiguous identity and ambiguous zones between bordered territories, regions that in essence don't 'belong' anywhere.

Both Benny and Sam are not-monsters. Sam is the human who's never quite human, Benny is the monster who's never quite a monster. It's interesting to me that on a narrative level, Benny has to be 'exorcised' from the story first before the show fully leans into the stable home territory of the Bunker. From that point in the story onwards, any ambiguities in Sam's identity get squashed too. He's forced to occupy a rigid, unquestioned sense of belonging now - to the hunter community and to his family. His monstrous associations are something purely referred to in the past tense (i'm not referring just to the demon blood arc here, but how his soulless and hallucifer arc frame him as something 'dangerous' to the narrative).

Benny's introduction alone renders him a liminal creature, he comes from Purgatory, an 'in-between' realm sandwiched between Earth and Hell, a place of perpetual fighting, journeying and movement. there is no real home to be found in Purgatory. There's no place for rest. And when we learn his backstory, we learn that he was a literal sailor, a monster pirate hunting on open waters. He is a displaced person without a nation, no stable 'home'. The ocean doubles as another form of Purgatory; a liminal space for travellers, where one is always journeying and vulnerable. In that sense, he's a metaphorical double for both Sam and Dean, stuck journeying forever in their car, moving from one liminal space to the next (for them, in the form of motel rooms. there's a great chapter in the book TV Goes To Hell: An Unofficial Roadmap of Supernatural on this).

On a surface level, Benny embodies the type of free, rugged masculinity Dean has always idolised and aspired towards. On one level, he fits neatly into the same category as Gordon, Ketch etc. under the category of guys who just hearken back to John. But the added dimension of him being a non-practising vampire is what ties him to Sam, and what makes him an engaging side character to me. (Like, the literal denying-themselves-of-blood of it all). Real belonging will always come at the cost of erasing some integral part of who they are, a part of them that marks them as non-human.

Benny's brief subplot also directly mirrors Sam's arc in early s8 - both of them try to settle down and try and place roots. For Benny, it's with a descendent in Louisiana (a migrant trying to reconnect with his roots? [sniper on the roof takes me ou-]). But for the both of them, Dean is the ghost of hunting who disrupts this false, temporary sense of settlement. For Sam, it's Dean's return from Purgatory that pulls him away from a 'false' peace. For Benny, it's his association with Dean that draws hunters upon him (through Dean comes Sam, then Martin). Hunting in Supernatural is the boundary enforcer, the border police, the violent vigilantism that draws strict lines in the sand between humanness and monstrosity - a functional metaphor also for the ways we define who gets to be considered a citizen vs. an illegal alien.

(Also all of this fits into a meta I'm currently trying to write where I'm parsing my own feelings on why Sam's isolation/ambiguity resonates so particularly with dilemmas around identity and isolation as an immigrant child of migrants, compared to a character like Dean. So a bookmark here for further meta on a deeper reading into migrant narratives present in Benny + Sam's arcs?)

tldr; imagine if there was a single person of colour in the Supernatural writer's room (lol) damn what could've been!

[lilbittymonster]

(banging pots and pans) HAVE YOU SEEN MY WOLSHIPS???

NOW YOU HAVE!!!! :D

Putting the rest under a cut bc it got long but in my defense, they're very convoluted.

Once upon a time, there were two Temple Knights of Ishgard who fell in love. However, Ishgard's political climate being what it is, Estinien broke things off not long after he became Azure Dragoon for a myriad of reasons, first and foremost because he would not stand in the way of Aymeric climbing the power ladder to Lord Commander. They didn't stop loving each other, they were both just Very Good Close Ishgardian Friends about it.

Fast forward a handful of years to ARR, Aymeric is over the moon to meet this Warrior of Light he's heard so much about in person for the first time (maybe he'll even get to be friends with her that would be so cool wouldn't it Lucia wouldn't it be cool-) and Kitali wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. She thought he was just another stupid politician who wanted to try out the big WoL guns to fix his problems and she has had it up to Here with being treated like that. So Aymeric is crushed and moping about his hero not being what he had expected (I wrote a whole fic on their first few interactions) and Kitali is trying to not at least actively antagonise him for the first bit of Heavensward.

And then there's the whole "tried to kill each other, ended with Estinien getting punted off the edge of the cliff into the Sea of Clouds" dynamic with Kitali and Estinien. We love to see an enemies to best friends speed run. Kitali, whether or not she wanted to, wound up gravitating towards him a lot because he was one of the few people in the whole city that treated her like just another person. And Estinien found a smiliar bit of solace with her that he did with Aymeric in that he didn't need to keep up a front around her, she had just as much disdain for the nobility as he did, and she was the one other person in his life aside from Alberic who understood the whole Azure thing. Kitali and Estinien can be summed up with the phrase "whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same" and they run the entire gamut from (derogatory) to (affectionate) over the course of the game.

So after the war ends and Estinien leaves, Kitali and Aymeric are both feeling kind of unmoored, he because Estinien and him had made a promise to each other to see Ishgard delivered from her sorry state, and she because she just lost her friend after losing so many other people in such a short amount of time. Aymeric is working himself to the bone after being promoted to president of Ishgard as well as still being Lord Commander, and Kitali remained to assist in the restoration (I put that directly after 3.0 on the timeline bc it makes the most sense). So they're both pretty distracted but still occasionally cross paths, and they sort fall into a casual....flirtation? Almost? There's a lot of will-they-won't-they going on. And then Aymeric has the attempt on his life made, and Kitali's (and my) stomach drops out from under her and she has to grapple with the sudden realisation that oh no she Might Have Caught Feelings for Aymeric.

And so she deals with that by hooking up with Hilda for a bit.

So they continue like that, staying friends with Kitali and Hilda doing their fwb thing, up until the piano ceremony in the Firmament. And missing the concert is what finally breaks Aymeric and prompts him to ask her to dinner, properly. Then the Warriors of Darkness happen, then the grand melee happens, and then Mhach happens, and then Shinriyu happens, and after that, they decide to make a proper go at having a relationship. Secretly, though, they don't want to draw too much attention and there's potential conflicts of interest and yada yada ANYWAYS so they're together for about a month before the meeting with Leofard. And they're together for about 4ish months when Kitali makes them matching bands before she goes off to deal with Dun Scaith in a "in case I don't come back, here's something to remember me by" gesture which is So Normal, Kitali, So Normal Of You To Do That. Holy shit.

So Aymeric is trying not to read too much into that and Kitali is trying not to die to voidsent and she does not die to voidsent and returns to Ishgard and the two of them fold into a little bubble of domesticity together. If it weren't genuinely the most healthy and supportive option for each other it might be almost codependent. But Kitali is around at odd hours and is usually still up when he gets home so he's no longer lonely at home anymore and she reminds him of how to be a person again and he gives her somewhere safe and stable she can return to no matter how long she's gone for. it wasn't even them who started calling each other husband and wife, it was some disgruntled lord who made a sneering comment at Kitali and neither of them refuted it. So even only having just exchanged rings in the privacy of Aymeric's home they considered themselves married.

Fast forward again to the end of Stormblood, during the patches when the Doman Enclave is being rebuilt and Kitali is learning how to be khagan when Orn Khai finally arrives in Kugane. They figure out where Faunheim is, and who is there strolling up in new armour like nothing has changed is Estinien fuckin Wyrmblood. Kitali winds up working out all her pent up anger at his absence in keeping them both alive while trying to get Faunheim unbrainwashed, and she offers to take Estinien to Reunion after the fight is over. They get food, they sit on top of the hill, and they catch up. And once Estinien leaves to wherever the fuck he's going next, Kitali just crumples in on herself with the realisation of "him??? really??? I don't fucking need this right now" and calls Aymeric on their linkpearl in distress. Aymeric thinks it's kinda funny.

Thankfully, there's an escalating war with Garlemald to keep her distracted, and it's not like Estinien is around anyways. Until she wakes up in a hospital bed in Ishgard with Aymeric telling her that Estinien was the one who got her away from Zenos, and the two of them have a mutual "and he didn't even stick around, what a piece of shit" moment.

And so she goes into ShB carrying around this weight of unspoken feelings and regrets and preemptive grief at never seeing either her husband nor Estinien ever again since she was told there's no way back to the Source, even if she does succeed. And then she does succeed, and then there suddenly is a way for her to go back. And this coincides perfectly with Estinien returning and seeing her for the first time in almost a year, and he finally has the emotional breakthrough of "oh these feelings I have for her might not be just friendship this might be more intense than frien-oh Fury am I in love with Kitali? I might be in love with Kitali. I'm in love with the wife of my best friend who I'm also still in love with-" and he has a whole panic attack after making his abrupt exit from the Rising Stones.

So now the two of them are both Scions, both regularly in each other's space, and they pick right up where they left off before Estinien left Ishgard. Kitali has been separating herself from the rest of the Scions in a pretty intense bout of me vs them, excluding the twins, after the events of ShB, and so Estinien is her safe haven. And he really doesn't know anyone all that well outside of her and Alphinaud so he sticks as close to either of them as he can. And during all of this time, neither of them say anything to the other in fear of driving them away, but it's still. They're still best friends. They still care immensely about one another. The details are just that, details, they don't matter all that much.

During Endwalker they're practically attached at the hip. It takes all they way up until after returning from Elpis for Kitali to crack and ask to speak with him alone, and she finally confesses. Which I have also written from his POV. So everything is out in the open, they're not going to untangle All That just yet, they still have the End of Days to prevent. And them taking their relationship from platonic to romantic is a completely lateral move the only real changes are they're having sex now. But they don't really settle in and discuss things properly until a couple months after they land back in Sharlayan since Kitali has to go home and rest and recover.

So, as of 6.5, Aymeric and Kitali have been married for about 3 years, having just legally married in a church before the eyes of the Fury, Kitali and Estinien are working out their relationship, and Estinien and Aymeric are figuring out how to pick things back off since they ended in kind of a mess.

In conclusion, Bisexuality.

WoL/OC Question(s)!

This one goes out to the WoLshippers! Who do you ship your WoL/OC with? An NPC or another WoL/OC? How did they meet, and how long have they been together? What kind of relationship do they have?

Show me your favorite SFW gpose/art of them together!

[woodsmokeandwords]

"The hours after English magic had been restored, duly restored - he still marvelled at the concept - were strangely mundane. Mr Childermass, his face still bleeding, had ridden off in a great hurry and returned hours later, quiet and wan with the look of a man trying to remember something that kept slipping away." Segundus has questions, Childermass has an wound that needs tending to. I shan't pretend this is anything other than indulgently trope-y. My first foray into writing JS&MN fic after years in the fandom Read on AO3 above or keep reading below

The hours after English magic had been restored, duly restored - he still marvelled at the concept - were strangely mundane. Mr Childermass, his face still bleeding, had ridden off in a great hurry and returned hours later, quiet and wan with the look of a man trying to remember something that kept slipping away. With him came the somehow even more bedraggled Vinculus, throat covered in bruises that no one could look at for very long. But before they had returned, a hundred questions tripping in at their heels like wind blown autumn leaves, the house had been... normal. More normal than it had been for months. With the faerie’s enchantment lifted the shifting, labyrinthine passageways of Starecross had ceased their slow merger with the Other Lands and become once more confusing in a reliably mortal way. The overpowering press of faerie magic had ebbed away like the tide and in its place Segundus had sat quietly with what he gradually began to appreciate as the comforting presence of His Own Magic. If he concentrated he could still feel the spell tingling in his fingertips, akin to the last traces of pins and needles. Lady Pole had been fussed over by the cook and the maid and was now settled in the parlour with a stack of paper and pen and ink, furiously committing her experiences in thrall to the faerie to paper. Segundus had not asked what she intended to do with this record of her mistreatment at the hands of Norrell, she might send it to the Prime Minister, or to The Times, or both and be completely justified, in his opinion. He did not need to know, all of England would know soon enough. The lady had been silenced long enough and one did not need to be particularly attentive to see that her anger was as a storm that has long since been sighted on the horizon breaking at last. Whilst Lady Pole seemed to brim with energy, Segundus found that he was sorely lacking in it. The tingling in his fingers was accompanied by a slight tremor, as though after strenuous activity, although he had performed none. Except the magic. Childermass’ words continued to ring in his head - Do The Magic - over and over. Well, he had done it and now they would have to see. He sat at the quiet kitchen table and watched the sun begin to slip down the sky. First to meet the trees on the distant hills, their bare winter branches like spidery writing against the pale February sky, and then to glare at him from between their twisted trunks and finally to wink at him from behind the crests of the hills until its comforting warmth disappeared from the kitchen and he was left with the glow from the hearth at his back and a cooling cup of tea sheltering between his tingling hands. 
 -

A great banging pulls him from his reveries. He has lost track of the hour, the sun is fully set and his tea is cold and only half drunk. The banging comes again and slowly he realises that it is the front door.

-

The door wrenches open and reveals Mr Segundus, who blinks at him from the gloom of the entrance hall. Childermass steps forward into the scant light escaping past Mr Segundus and out into the night. Vinculus, half leaning into him, half propped against the porch, comes with him like flotsam. “We had not expected you back, Mr Childermass?” “They are gone.” He hears himself reply, and adds “Strange and Mr Norrell.” belatedly realising this might need some explanation. “Gone? Gone where?” his large brown eyes are full of questions and sincerity. “I do not know.” Childermass sighs and gestures passed Segundus into the hall. It is at this moment that Segundus seems to take in Vinculus’ near-prone form and his manners catch up with his curiosity. “Please, do come in!” He says, stepping aside to allow them entry. “I put Brewer in your stables, I hope you don’t mind?” “No, no, of course not. Mr Childermass, what happened?” Childermass heaves Vinculus onto the settle in the hallway and looks away as the man slumps back in his seat and his hands wander towards the cruel bruising on his throat. He meets Segundus’ gaze and almost as one their eyes travel down to the blood soaking the cuff on his left wrist. “Many things. More than I think I can remember presently.” “How do you mean?” Segundus’ careful examination of him transfers from his wrist to his face, to the cut on his cheek that is somehow no longer a cut. “I cannot yet say...”

Mr Segundus was too polite a host to badger him with the questions Childermass could see he was brimming with. At least not straight away. And so he is settled in one of the empty guest rooms, Vinculus installed in another, and left to himself. The maid brings in a steaming pitcher of water and a bowl and is followed by the footman with his saddlebags, he nods his thanks as they leave the room. For some time he stands, caught in a web of indecision, unable to do anything but stare at the worn leather of the saddlebags that contain his possessions. He is a frugal man, he has never had many things, let alone an attachment to them, but in this moment it seems important to him that he has them with him. Some record of his life in physical form. He had watched Hurtfew vanish. Swept out of existence in a whirl of darkness and stars and with it a significant part of England’s magical future. Regardless of what Vinculus believed.

As if dazed he strips off his greatcoat, jacket and waistcoat. His reflection in the small mirror above the dresser is pallid against the gory mess of his shirt. He had thought he had caught the blood from his face but in actuality it has soaked into his neckcloth and the collar and shoulder of his shirt. He begins to remove them and set them aside, he’ll scrub the blood out later, he does not have the luxury of many shirts, but stops with it clutched in his hands as he catches sight of the cuts he had made to his forearm. Unlike his face they have not healed without explanation and the few King’s letters he had managed stand out raw and angry against the pale skin of his arm. Bloody fool Had he really thought to carve The Book into his own flesh? Looking at the poor job he’d done he is relieved he had dismissed the idea. Childermass splashes his face with water, then uses his ruined neckcloth to wipe the dried blood from his skin and goes to fetch his spare shirt from his bags. Back in front of the mirror the glisten of water on top of the scar on his cheek catches his attention and he leans in the better to see it. Healed, perfectly. As if it were years old and not mere hours. How? He brushes his fingers across it and in that touch feels the ghost of another, there is something... parental in it? And he remembers black hair but he cannot now be sure if he is remembering something from that afternoon or the shade of his mother, some scrap of half forgotten memory from his childhood. However it was done, it is fortunate. Lascelle’s knife had been sharp and it had cut deep, there is not a doctor or barber-surgeon around for miles who could have repaired his face so neatly.

A clock somewhere in the house chimes and he takes a breath, as if he has been underwater. It shudders into his lungs. He takes another. And then one more. Careful not to jostle his forearm and restart the bleeding he dons his clean shirt and his waistcoat, he has nothing with which to bind the evidence of his foolishness on the moor and so will have to prevail once again on Mr Segundus’ hospitality. 

-

 Segundus for want of company had returned to the kitchen. He’d had soup from luncheon, some hot toast and a pot of tea sent up to Vinculus after Mr Childermass’ back had disappeared up the stairs and suddenly without an immediate purpose he had felt melancholy. He kept returning to the words Childermass had spoken on the doorstep; they are gone. But where had they gone? Were they coming back? How were they to go on without the foremost magicians of the land? What was to be done? They were questions that he sensed were without answers, or at least not simple answers at any rate. 
Sarah was finishing the washing up in the corner and the clatter of crockery and pans was a welcome, grounding racket for his mind which felt like it might be on the verge of flying away, spiralling up into the aether like a sparrow in flight. 

 “Oh, sir- Mr Segundus?” he glances over his shoulder and sees Sarah, drying her wet hands on her apron, looking between him and the doorway. Standing at the top of the two steps down into the kitchen is Childermass. He is in his shirtsleeves, with the left sleeve rolled up exposing the raw skin of his forearm, bearing strangely shaped wounds that stand out grotesquely from his pale skin. And he is pale, more so than he ever usually is, there is a sunken, defeated look in his eyes that makes something in Segundus’ chest ache. They have never been close, they have never even been on good terms. Any potential for acquaintanceship would have withered under the oppressive knowledge of who Childermass served, even if Segundus had contemplated such a connexion. The scant few times they had met he had been under the distinct impression that he was on the back foot and forces outside of his control had manoeuvred them into position, whether that force was Norrell, English magic, fate or simply Childermass’ own mysterious machinations Segundus could never have said. 
“Thank you, Sarah. Please feel free to go to bed, the washing up can be finished in the morning.” he does not take his eyes off of Childermass as he speaks, in his periphery the girl executes a clumsy curtsy and walks quickly towards the door, head down. Childermass steps backwards to let her pass and she awkwardly half-nods-half-curtsies to him too. 

Segundus watches as the blank expression on his face is replaced by something faintly bemused as he descends the steps onto the flagstone floor of the kitchen. It is gone again however when he looks up and their eyes meet over the large table. 
“She is rather new.” Segundus says to break the silence, Childermass nods once. 
 “I’m sorry to trouble you, Mr Segundus but have you anything with which I might bind this?” He gestures vaguely to his wounded arm and Segundus makes himself look away from his eyes for the fist time in minutes. 
 “I- Oh. Oh yes, of course. Just one moment.” He half turns, trying to remember where they keep the cloth set aside for exactly this purpose, hesitates and then, “please, have a seat. I’ll be back in a moment.” He pulls out the chair he had been sitting in a little further and hurries off to fetch the bandages. 
 They keep a box of neatly trimmed strips of linen in the upstairs landing closet. He remembers distinctly when Stephen Black had quietly informed him that Lady Pole had once been in the habit of hurting herself and Segundus had that very afternoon sent into town for two yards of linen and had sat up that evening cutting it into strips and rolling them himself. Whilst he is there he fetches a clean cloth and then brings his bundle of supplies back down to the kitchen. Childermass is sitting at the table examining his arm with care, he glances up when Segundus sets the roll of bandages and the cloth down on the table. 
“How did it happen, Mr Childermass? It is a strange injury.” he asks as he goes to the dresser and retrieves a clean bowl, fills it with a little cold water and places it on the table next to the bandages. 
“You will think me a fool, sir, but I did it myself.” Segundus halts only for a moment in the act of placing the kettle on the hook over the fire. 
“If you did such a thing, I suspect there was a very good reason for it.”
 “There was, although it proved needless in the end. A good thing, for no matter your tactfulness, it was indeed foolish.” He looks towards where the kettle hangs above the flames in the grate, “you will not have seen in the dark but Vinculus… Vinculus is very special. He- Did you ever hear of the Book of the Raven King, sir?” 
“Only vague allusions to it in theoretical texts, nothing tangible.” Childermass nods, seemingly to himself, at this. “I do not know how it came to be but Vinculus is that book. It is written on his skin, has been since his birth and today he insists that he is changed. That he does not say what he said before.”
 “What?” Segundus cannot help his stunned reaction. He drops into one of the other chairs at the table.
 “Just so… When I found him on the moor he was hanged. I… I had to cut him down and as I laid him on the earth I saw it there on his skin, in a strange alphabet. Having no ink or paper I could not think of a way to replicate it and in a moment of foolishness thought to cut it into my own skin.” Childermass is looking down again at the marks on his arm, large and jagged and surely no approximation for the words he says cover Vinculus’ own skin. 
 “Mr Childermass-” he gasps and covers his mouth.
 “Now you see, foolishness.”
 “But,” he says collecting himself, “how can it be that Vinculus was hanged when he is currently upstairs eating toast?”
 “I cannot account for it, sir. If I understood it at all I would tell you.” he shakes his head again and wipes a hand over his face momentarily covering his eyes. It is then that the kettle starts to boil so Segundus gets up and removes it from the fire, pouring a little of the hot water into the bowl and the rest into his teapot from earlier. He pulls out the chair next to Childermass and sits down in it before spooning an extra helping of leaves into the pot. 
 “May I see your arm, Mr Childermass?” he asks and Childermass twists in his chair and offers out his left arm. The cuts are fairly shallow and mercifully clean of any dirt but the curving letters Childermass tried to replicate have cruel edges and it looks painful. Segundus very gently takes the proffered arm and dipping his cloth into the bowl of warm water ever so lightly draws it across the wounds. He squeezes it slightly and lets the water drip onto them before wiping away the excess. He continues for some time and is surprised when Childermass speaks. 
“I appreciate this, Mr Segundus.” Childermass sounds awkward and slightly gruffer than usual, Segundus feels himself colour and is glad he has an excuse not to look up. It is a long moment before he can think of a proper response. 
“Please, think nothing of it. I would be a poor sort of colleague not to offer my help.”
 “Colleague?”
 “Are we not both magicians now, sir?” Segundus sets his cloth aside and reaches for the bandages. 
 “I suppose we are.” Childermass says and shifts a little in his seat. They are quiet for some time as Segundus winds the bandage around Childermass arm and ties off the end. When he has done this he stands and fetches a clean cup and saucer from the dresser and fills it with tea before setting it in front of Childermass. 
“I had not thought to find you here.” Childermass says, glancing between Segundus and the cup of tea that has been placed in front of him. “In the kitchen? It is not befitting of a gentleman, I know, but I like to sit here to think.”
 “Your staff do not mind?” 
 “There is not such a vast amount of difference between them and myself, Mr Childermass. I have been a bachelor for many years and until recently… Well, you are aware that I was not a man of means. I still am not, were it not for the kindness of Mrs Lennox I would not be in the position I am currently in.” he busies himself with fetching a plate and cutting two slices of bread which he then sets about toasting. 
“There are not a great many gentleman who would bandage the arm of a servant, or make him tea.” Childermass says quietly and Segundus hums noncommittally. 
“No, I suppose not but I do not mind being unlike them if it means that I helped a person in need.” he finishes toasting the bread at that moment and almost as if to reinforce his stance on helpfulness sets it down on the plate beside Childermass’ tea. “We have some fresh butter in the pantry, and cheese? Or perhaps honey?” he asks. 
 “Just butter is fine, thank you, Mr Segundus.”

 - 

 He has been watching the gentleman bustle about the kitchen making tea and toasting bread and now he watches as Mr Segundus fetches the butter dish from the pantry for him with a sense of surreal detachment. He is very conscious of the fact that he has been a thorn in this man’s side for ten years and yet has found nothing but kindness under his roof this evening.
 “Here you are.” Segundus says, returning with the butter and resuming his seat at the table. His chair is still close from when he was bandaging Childermass’ arm, he seems to realise this halfway through sitting down and rises again to nudge it backwards slightly. 
 “My thanks.” Childermass manages. 

He is almost grateful for the overwhelming weariness that sets in as he eats his toast, it falls over him like a quilt, blanketing many of the concerns that have been rattling around in his head since he saw Vinculus hanging from the twisted branches of the hawthorn tree. A grim tableau against the windswept, desolate moor. Mr Segundus does not seem to mind the silence, his is a comforting presence as he carefully sips his tea and stares at a knot in the wood of the table. 
 “Who else knows about Vinculus?” he asks quietly, surprising Childermass. 
“No one. My master knew he had a book, Vinculus boasted of it to him many years ago, but Mr Norrell never saw it, I searched for it to no end for some time.”
 “You mentioned- You said earlier that- that they are gone, Mr Strange and Mr Norrell. What did you mean?” Mr Segundus is looking at him, his large brown eyes full of questions again. Childermass sighs and leans back in his chair. 
 “We rode from the tree to Hurtfew and found it vanished. I left as Mr Strange arrived with his pillar of night that we have heard so much about in the last weeks and when I returned with Vinculus it was simply as if the Abbey had been cut out of the countryside.”
 “But how?”
 “I am not certain, it was as if it had been unpicked and the space either side of where it was stitched back together, edge to edge. Vinculus said it was the King’s doing. His spell spinning out to its natural end.”
 “I do not think I understand.” Segundus frowns down at his hands, clasped in his lap like a schoolboy. 
 “I am sorry, sir. I’m afraid I am doing a bad job of explaining anything tonight.” 
“No, it is I who should apologise, you are exhausted and I am plying you with questions. Please, Mr Childermass, answer no more of them and go and get some sleep. We can talk more on the morrow.” Segundus looks up then and smiles apologetically at him. 
 “I’m much obliged to you for your kindness this evening, sir. I will do my best to set everything out clearly in the morning, two heads are better than one as they say and two magicians are sure to have more success than one alone also.” 
“Goodnight, Mr Childermass”


 - 

In the bright, winter sunshine drenching the dining table the following morning Childermass does his best to explain to Mr Segundus and to an imperiously inquisitive Lady Pole exactly what he had seen first upon the moor and then later at Hurtfew. Neither of them have much more insight into the matter than he himself does but Lady Pole does have a few choice words on the subject of unreliable, meddling magicians, present company only somewhat excluded. 
In the days that follow, when the letters trickle in and reports of the disappearance of not just Hurtfew but of the houses at Ashfair, Hanover Square and Soho Square begin to surface, Mr Segundus and Childermass do their best to respond to them together. Careful not to say too much to their associates and acquaintances, mindful of events progressing too quickly. 

Some two weeks later Sir Walter arrives to meet with Lady Pole and the two magicians absent themselves to the far reaches of the garden when the ensuing shouting match between the couple proves too loud for them to pretend they are giving them any privacy from the next room. 
 “I think I shall go to York soon.” Childermass says, watching a snowflake settle on the leaf of a holly bush. 
 “You will go through with it then? Call a meeting of the York Society?"
 “I will, it is time they knew.” 
“They will wish to meddle.”
 “Let them, unlike Her Ladyship I am of the opinion that some good can come of meddlesome magicians. After all, without your intervention things may be very different.” Childermass drags his eyes away from the holly bush and watches the pink flush on Mr Segundus’ cheeks that was already present from the chill air deepen considerably. 
“There are some days that I wonder what would have happened if I had not asked the question.” Mr Segundus replies, a little wistfully. 
 “Do not wonder, Mr Segundus. In fact,” he says, a winding path unfurling before him in his minds eye, “I think I should like you to be at this meeting and ask another question.”

 The end

[normal-thoughts-official]

Ok hmmmm fake dating art school au with Malec, Claia, Lukemaryse and (platonic, obviously) garrowbane where hmmm magnus is with an ex at the start and tries setting up Luke with people

well this got really cracky really fast

okay so im gonna go ahead and say that i have no idea how art school works in the US so for the sake of My Convenience™ imma go with the way it is in Brazil, which is "there are numerous kinds of arts going on in the same institute/college"

so im thinking..... clary obviously is doing visual arts, painting, whatever its called (this is probably where i should warn you that i know nothing about visual arts). maia is not really an arts major, but she's doing a course on technical/scientific drawing since shes a biology major and that's useful for her field studies. magnus is on the same course, except hes like an engineering major really. im a slut for inventor Magnus so yeah he wants to be an engineer to develop new kinds of technology so technical drawing is important for him. meliorn (watch me slip meliorn in literally everything i can) is a theatre major, and Luke and Maryse r both studying music

Luke and Maryse r older and like idk how common that is in the US but here in Brazil some ppl (spec retired ppl) come back to college to study something they have Always Wanted To but that wouldnt bring them money. i know that the whole "no free college" thing makes that harder but they can be post-graduates i guess. or Luke is and maryse is a regular major but shes a super rich hotshot lawyer who after the divorce decided to be less stuck up and dedicate herself to things she enjoys, and since shes rich, she has the money to do a major or a music course just for fun

anyway! Magnus is the kind of guy whos friends with everyone from all ages and courses. he quickly becomes friends with maia (shes on his course after all) and meliorn (who is a theatre major but takes classes in everything they can because.... they can)

i just realized maia/meliorn has a LOT of brotp potential but ok anyway

magnus and maia bond greatly over their shared interests (yeah shes a biologist and hes an engineer but magnus' interests vary a lot and also hes a fan of biochemistry. they also have relatively similar life stories and a similar sense of humor, even if maia is sharper at the edges - which is something Magnus likes, really. she's fierce and fun and unafraid and he wishes he were more like her sometimes. they have a mutual admiration and kind of protection pact). meliorn on the other hand is kind of the local queer cryptid in a way, which of course means magnus immediately befriends him, and Maia is just delighted at how much of a trickster they are. magnus also likes meliorn a lot because they're so... chill and easy and unbothered by social conventions to the point of being nearly unaware, which makes Magnus feel so comfortable. and meliorn thinks Magnus is interesting, and they all get along.

maia kind of brings luke into the group. luke is kind of maia's adoptive uncle. she lives alone but once she ran away from home luke was super nice and helpful and also one of the ppl who most encouraged her to go after her major like she wanted

luke and maia are clearly close and have each other's backs, but they also tease each other a lot. so when one day luke teases maia over her crush on clary, she retaliates by looking DIRECTLY at meliorn and being like "he's just jealous. did you ppl know he hasnt been on a single date in years" and meliorn, who thrives on the chaos, is like "oooh we should set him up" and magnus of course jumps at the opportunity

so the three of them keep trying to set ppl up with luke, and it just ...... never works. like doesnt come even close to working. its kind of a disaster actually. its awkward, it never clicks, and at this point luke is begging them to stop but you know thats not gonna happen. so as a last resort, luke lies that he's dating a woman from class. cue him asking maryse, whom hes never talked to in his life but is the only eligible woman his age at class, to like, please do him a solid. and maryse is just so shocked by this random (but handsome) man's life, shes like. lmao sure. look shes a post-divorce woman she wants to be free and cease giving fucks

and maryse kind of has fun pretending to date luke, but she's a busy woman and she doesnt hang out with them often, and they are like [BANGING POTS AND PANS] WE WANT TO ACTUALLY MEET HER

and luke is all like "well maybe if all of yall singles got dates we could have a date together otherwise get out" so maia asks clary out purely out of spite and turns out it works, but Magnus and Meliorn are like "uuuuhhhhh,,,,,,," so meliorn is like "what if we pretend to be together lmao" and Magnus is like shit we're gonna do that aren't we

i know its not exactly Magnus having an ex but look im struggling to put all of this together okay udhdhdbd also im not big on the whole "breaking up because of someone else" trope ya feel

god this is just the setup for malec to meet, im,,,, a mess

so anyway Magnus and Meliorn are determined to totally sell this to luke (maia knows its a scam of course, she can smell bullshit from miles away). and luke and maryse are also totally determined to sell this cuz everyone is an idiot. so they keep having, like,,,,, dates together, until eventually they kind of become a solid group of friends. they all welcome maryse and are really impressed by how critical she is of her pre-divorce self and how it did wonders for her, they think shes really strong. she even shares about how she struggled with her son being gay and her daughter deciding to become a forensic pathologist instead of a lawyer like her, you know. in short they all become good friends

so now everyone (but maia and clary who are happy and drama free and laughing their butts off at Magnus and Meliorn) is in a difficult situation because now theyre all friends! what are they gonna do, confess it was a scam all along? pretend to break up and make the whole thing awkward? they're trapped in their fake dating and it looks like they're just gonna have to, like ... deal with it

and in luke and maryse's situation it's even more complicated because they are kind of getting into each other, and theyre like groaning because theyre grown ass adults they shouldn't be living this trope. and yet

anyway as they become closer they start going to maryse's (shes the only one with a large enough place) and that's when Magnus meets Alec and meliorn meets izzy

which,,,,, despair

because they had been doing a great job of fake dating so far, excuse you, they are partners in crime. they're a well oiled lying machine and they work together flawlessly. magnus is not even a good liar but shit if meliorn didnt teach him every trick on how to not technically lie, and also they are very close and the kind of ppl who are comfortable with sharing affection, so yeah they drape their arms on each others shoulders and hold hands and kiss each others cheeks NO PROBLEM but now theyre both interested in someone else

hell, theyre both interested in maryse's kids

fuck

shit

goddamn

meliorn is all like "i told you we should have pretended to have an open relationship" and Magnus is like luke KNOWS im monogamous he would KNOW we're lying and meliorn is like FUCK and maia and clary are losing their shits

meanwhile luke and maryse are becoming more and more domestic and oblivious to the world. they will b like "you kids put the movie on, we'll make dinner" and be all like fluffy asshole

izzy quickly picks up that its a scheme cuz shes smart, and flirts with meliorn when maryse isnt around, while Alec is like SHIT dude i cant believe ur into a TAKEN MAN what the fuck kind of sad gay stereotype r u

but their pull is like,,, stronk and they frequently find themselves getting lost in their own little world and lowkey flirting and just being a liiiiil too close (especially in alecs case since hes like ..... stoic extraordinaire) and then theyre like AH SHIT WAIT and they jump and pretend nothings happening

and look, izzy would tell Alec about the scam, but she's, como se dice...... having way too much fun at his expense. she and meliorn start dating on like day 1 and make a pact to see how long they can keep the act up and enjoy the show

maia and clary have eaten their combined weight in popcorn by this point

the intrigue. the chaos. the misunderstandings

it gets more and more ridiculous as time goes by but Magnus is still determined to yknow keep the act up and not expose his and meliorn's lies

they just,,,,,,, live like this

it lasts for so long

like ..... months of ridiculousness

and alec is suffering because hes into a taken man whos obviously very in love with his partner and he feels guilty and all of that shit

and magnus just.... doesnt know what to do with his predicament. look he has anxiety this was a bad idea how is he gonna walk up to Alec and b like "hey so I'm not really dating meliorn it was all a scam so we could spy on luke and ur mom but it went too far" and the more time passes the more awkward it gets

the dam probably breaks when magnus finds meliorn and izzy on a date on accident, and hes like rjrhrjrjdnc SO THEY KNOW???? and meliorn is like nah only izzy knows we wanted to see how long itd take for u and alec to get ur shit together. and magnus is like oh my god and meliorn is like "in my defense i didnt think it would take literal months!!!!!! and then it started to feel awkward to just tell you to go for it"

so magnus is like FINE i guess i will TELL ALEC and ask him if he wants to DATE ME IN SECRET so we can keep NOT HAVING TO CONFESS WE LIED TO HIS MOM

and then i guess he tells Alec???? and he still isnt sure whether or not Alec likes him so he isnt planning to ask him out immediately afterwards, just, you know, let him in on the secret, and Alec is like "dude my mom is lying too" and Magnus is like what she and luke are like married

anyway knowing about that gives them full permission to come out as lying bitches so they're like "how dare you lie to us like this.. but also we did the same thing"

eventually luke actually asks maryse out

i dont even know whats happening anymore god im done

this is your fault anon

if anyone wants to actually write this, feel free rjrhdjdn honestly id read it

[daily-wonwoo]

Hey, Neighbor

Genre: Fluff (to the max)

Wordcount: 3.5k 

Prompt: Fluff scenario where you and wonwoo live in adjacent apartments and the power goes out and you scream and he goes to comfort you??

A/N: I hope you feel i did your prompt justice! this was super fun to write and i probably got weird looks from the baristas at starbucks as i smiled lovingly into my computer lol. Enjoy!!

You had always hated thunderstorms.

The loud noise, the bright flashes of lightning, and impending threat of either your power being knocked out or your front yard being filled with stray tree branches all came together to create a deep hatred for the stormy weather. The storm tonight was particularly unruly, so you swaddled yourself in a blanket and plugged in your headphones to try and drown out the noise. It worked for a little while, until your phone started to die. You plugged it in and leaned against the wall by your charger, wincing every time there was a particularly loud rumble of thunder. It was okay, you thought, you could just charge your phone and eventually fall asleep with the loud music to drown out the rain. And it really was, until there was an extremely bright flash of lightning and the power went out.

It was a knee-jerk reaction, the scream you let out. You swaddled yourself further in the blankets and began to panic. What was going to happen to the food in the fridge? What would you do about your phone? There’s no way it would last enough to wake you up for your morning classes, and attendance counted towards your grade in one of them! Great, you thought, just great.

You were forced out of your worries as there was a banging on the door. Unfortunately, the combination of situations only created different worries. What if the person at the door was a murderer? A robber? You didn’t have anything to defend yourself and you weren’t the strongest person out there. You grabbed the nearest object you could use as a weapon and cautiously approached the peephole. Looking through it, you saw that it was a fairly non-threatening boy, around your age you thought. You’re pretty sure you’ve seen him before, right? Maybe he lived in the building. You turned the door handle and peeked your top half out of the door.

When Wonwoo heard a scream as the power went out, he sighed and stood up to make sure whoever was next door was okay. When he knocked and heard shuffling on the inside of the apartment, he anxiously tapped his foot. This was where the scream came from right? He thought maybe he had the wrong place. Not long after though, he saw a small figure wrapped in an enormous blanket peek out of a crack in the door. He smiled slightly, because wow, he never knew his neighbor was so freaking cute.

“Hi, I’m your next door neighbor Wonwoo. You screamed when the power went out right? Are you okay? Do you need anything?” He asked, nervousness evident in his voice as he spoke. You blushed, you didn’t think that anyone would have heard you, but you suppose it made sense. You can always hear the guy on the other side of you belting out girl group songs on the weekends anyways.

“Oh uh, no I don’t need help I was just trying to drown out the storm with my music and then my phone started to die and I plugged it in and then the power went out and I was really surprised and my phone died and I was scared I didn’t mean for you to be worried” you kept going on and you gestured with your blanket wrapped hands as you frantically attempted an explanation for the boy in front of you.

Wonwoo couldn’t help but smile as he looked at his neighbor, drowning in their blanket, waving their blanket around as they attempt to explain.

“Do you want to come over? I have a big charging bank you could use, and a wireless lamp so it’s not that dark.” Wonwoo explained, still smiling as he noticed that you started to blush at his offer. You hug the blankets closer, because you weren’t sure if anything would happen, but after weighing your options you decided that if he was secretly some murderer, he had a solid few minutes of you two standing there to have already dragged you away and kill you. After running in and grabbing your phone and its cord, you followed Wonwoo into his apartment.

The layout was the same, but it looked very homey inside. There were a few polaroid pictures of him and his friends in various poses scattered on his wall, and bookshelves with several well-worn books filling the space. You stood awkwardly in the middle of his living room before he gestured for you to sit on his couch, rummaging through his cabinets to pull out a few candles which he scattered around his apartment as you sat. Taking the time to look around, you noticed a book laying on the arm rest of his couch, receipt half-heartedly thrown inside to mark his place. You carefully removed the receipt, putting your thumb on the page number so you wouldn’t lose his place. You lost yourself in the pages as you skimmed the words, and a deep voice from behind startled you.

“Like the book?” He said, smile evident in his voice.

The comment caught you off guard, and you dropped the other’s book in surprise. You immediately blushed, both from his comment and the fact that you dropped the book and lost his place in it. You started to babble out an apology, picking up the book and seeing if you could remember what page he left off on.

Wonwoo couldn’t help but smile at how flustered you became when you dropped the book. He quickly assured that it was alright, and soon he became the same blushing mess that you were initially. Wonwoo hoped that you couldn’t tell how flustered you made him.

“Have you eaten?” Wonwoo asks, desperately trying to create conversation that didn’t leave you both blushing.

“No,” You were hesitant to respond, but you were sure that no matter what you answered, the rumbling of your stomach would eventually give you away, so you decided to simply tell the truth.

“Perfect! I only have ramen and side dishes though if that’s okay… It’s not much but its food..” Wonwoo looked down shyly, scratching the base of his neck in embarrassment. He should have known he wouldn’t be able to impress the cute person in front of him with his college budget diet.

“That’s totally fine, don’t worry!” you answered, honestly just excited to eat “I was probably gonna eat ramen too anyways, can’t really afford quality food on a college student’s budget” You smiled, and Wonwoo’s worried glance softened immediately and he smiled back at you. He was glad you were a student like him, maybe you could talk about school over dinner or something. Wonwoo lost himself a little bit in his thoughts, but seeing you stand there and tilt your head curiously at him, he blushed again and hurried to the kitchen to prepare for the meal.

After trying to light the stove and failing initially, Wonwoo’s face began to heat up in worry. What if he couldn’t make food? Would you leave his apartment and never talk to him again? He paced back and forth in his kitchen while you sat perched in a chair at the table. You noticed him stressing out, and smiled to yourself as he walked back and forth in front of his stove. Grabbing the matches on the table from when Wonwoo lit the candles, you padded over to the stove and motioned for Wonwoo to step aside. He looked at you gratefully and took your place at the table as you used the match to light the gas from the stove. It immediately worked, and Wonwoo beat himself up for not thinking about it first. If he couldn’t prove that he could at least make food for his neighbor, how was he going to impress them? Wonwoo began to get lost in his thoughts, looking down at the counter sadly.

“Hello?” you said, waving your hand in front of his face. Wonwoo snapped out of his thoughts as he looked at you curiously “Where do you keep the pans? That’s kind of an important step in this whole thing,” You joked, allowing him to help you even though you could have just opened up cabinets until you found them.

While Wonwoo prepared the ramen, you began taking out the side dishes from his currently lukewarm refrigerator and started to set up the table for the two of you, finding some chopsticks and setting them in front of the seats. You sat down and watched Wonwoo bring over the steaming pot of noodles, using his sleeves cutely as a hot pad.

The two of you eat in relative silence, more focused on eating than each other. Wonwoo glances at you, and quickly looks down as your head raises, avoiding potential eye contact. He chastised himself for being so shy around you, and tried to make conversation while you ate.

While talking, the two of you found out you went to the same university, and that most of his friends were in the fine arts department. He began talking about Seokmin and Seungkwan, two of the theatre department’s more talented performers, and you wondered how they got along. Wonwoo seemed so relaxed and grounding and from what you had seen of his friend they were… rowdy to say the least. As Wonwoo talked about some of his other friends, one of them you recognized the name of.

“Minghao??? Oh I know him. He was in my econ class last semester, but I didn’t talk to him much because I sat in the front row and I sometimes saw him sitting towards the back” You explained, interested in Wonwoo’s connection to the other student

“Oh?” Wonwoo asked, curious “Did you ever help him with his homework?” You nodded your head and Wonwoo continued “Oh, he would always talk about you, how his cute econ tutor helped him pass the class,”

“Oh, I-“ you struggled with what to say, face heating up quickly as your handFs frantically moved to try and deny Minghao’s claims. Wonwoo laughed slightly, and was quick to reassure you.

“It’s okay,” He chuckled “He didn’t really talk about you much, I just wanted to see you blush”

Despite Wonwoo’s reassurance, his admittance of wanting to see you blush did nothing to calm the angry red in your cheeks. You quickly looked down and finished your dinner, unable to come up with any sort of conversation to ease the tension in the air. After eating you stood up and moved the dishes to his dishwasher. As you walked back towards the living room, you realized that this is the point where you should leave, thank him for letting you charge your phone and eat dinner, and return to your room where you try to sleep and leave. You also knew that you really didn’t want to, and that you better come up with an excuse for why you didn’t want to leave just yet.

“Do you want to watch a drama or something?” You asked without much confidence, looking at the floor as you moved to grab your blanket again. “I just don’t think I can be alone until the power goes back on..”

Wonwoo looks at you with fond eyes and feels a warmth spread in his chest as you stand there, blanket wrapped around your shoulders, shyly asking if you can stay in his apartment. Relief filled him when you asked to stay, because Wonwoo hadn’t quite spent as much time with you as he’d like, but couldn’t exactly tell you to stay in his apartment. He agreed to your request and set up his laptop, asking if you have any recommendations for dramas. Insisting that you had no preference, Wonwoo decided on a horror show he had been watching lately, eyes focused on the screen until the first monster appears and he feels you jump beside him. He laughs slightly at your reaction and continues to watch the show, but a minute later there’s another jump scare, and you let out an embarrassingly high pitched squeak as you bury your face into Wonwoo’s shoulder, eyes closed tightly and blanket shielding anything from scaring you.

Wonwoo’s heart feels like its about to burst. He looks at you, swaddled in a blanket nuzzling into his shoulder and doesn’t think he’s felt this warm in a long time, and the warmth that’s spreading in his chest isn’t helping the situation. You look up slightly, and Wonwoo’s gaze immediately turns back to the computer between you too, heart beating rapidly and face flushing. He wonders if you can hear his heart in his chest, and nervously looks back at you. As soon as you make eye contact, the front door flies open with a bang and there’s a tall boy standing in the doorway, stumbling slightly.

Wonwoo was going to kill Kim Mingyu. Wonwoo looks in horror at the giant swaying in his doorway, and regrets ever giving a key to his apartment to his best friend. Wonwoo is thoroughly embarrassed, and Mingyu takes this time to open his big, dumb, mouth.

“WONWOO!” Mingyu screams, stumbling out of his shoes. Wonwoo frantically gestures at Mingyu to attempt to silence him. “WE ARE BEST FRIENDS RIGHT! WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME YOU FINALLY ASKED OUT THE CUTE NEIGHBOR?” He’s closing in on you and Wonwoo sitting on the couch, forcing Wonwoo to squish against you as Mingyu makes room for himself. “You guys are my favorite couple.” Mingyu mumbles out, wrapping his arms around Wonwoo, closing his eyes, and promptly falling asleep.

You were definitely uncomfortable, but also a little glad. On one hand, Wonwoo’s alleged best friend just burst into his apartment, screamed about you two, and passed out. But on the other hand, he basically told you that Wonwoo had a crush on you, and that he has for some time, even enough to talk about with his friends.

Wonwoo picks Mingyu’s arms off him and stands up, and you stand up as well. You’re shuffling towards the door and Wonwoo can’t let you go like this, the discomfort something he wasn’t willing to have this be your last impression of him.

“Wait, uh,” He says, reaching a hand out towards your blanket covered form. “I know it’s weird but… can you help me get him into my bed? He always sleeps there even if I tell him to sleep on the couch. And he’s a blanket hog,” Wonwoo laughs slightly, moving to grab Mingyu by the legs. He knows that he can do it himself, but hopefully the task will allow for him to explain himself more.

You agree hesitantly, and move to grab the tall man’s arms as the two of you haul him into Wonwoo’s bedroom. When you set him down with a huff, Wonwoo speaks again.

“I’m sorry, by the way,” He begins “He’s just very… lets say interested in my personal life. Especially my love life because I haven’t dated anyone before. I’m really sorry you had to be put in that situation. He means well, just a bit over excited.” Wonwoo explains, not meeting your gaze.

You don’t know how to respond but in surprise, because hearing that he hadn’t ever had a girlfriend was surprising. Not only was the boy in front of you attractive, but the night you spent together showed how caring he is and can’t help but imagine a relationship with him.

“You deserve someone like that,” you say, gaze also firmly locked on the ground as blood rushes to your cheeks again, “someone to date, I mean. I think you’d be a really great boyfriend.”

Wonwoo’s heart is swelling and this is probably the happiest he’s been in a long time. He looks up at you and meets your eyes with an intense gaze.

The lights turn on.

You blink rapidly to try and adjust your eyes to the harsh lighting, and Mingyu groans between the two of you and rolls over. You suddenly realize how late it is, and how you have to be going back to your apartment to sleep now. Rapidly thanking him, you gather your belongings and head to the door. Just before you exit, you turn around and smile at him.

“Bye Wonwoo, it was really nice hanging out with you, and I’d definitely be interested in hanging out again.”

Wonwoo smiles at that, reaching his arm up to grab the door as the other goes behind his neck to rub at it sheepishly.

“Of course. You know where I live, after all,” He laughs awkwardly “rest well,”

With that, you return to your apartment and enter your bed, plugging in your phone and falling into a slumber filled with thoughts of a certain dark haired neighbor.

Your alarm clock goes off, loud and unforgiving as you groan and turn yourself over in your bed. Thanks to the power outage you didn’t get much sleep, and you quickly begin your morning routine. Right as you’re putting on your shoes, you notice a small note on the floor just in front of your door. You hope that it’s from Wonwoo as you pick it up and begin to read.

It turns out to be an apology note from Mingyu, and you blush slightly of the memory of him telling you that Wonwoo had feelings for you. Folding the note to put back in your pocket, you notice something on the back side. Taking a look you see it’s a phone number, and read the small note of ‘I know you’re both too shy to ask’. Quickly opening the door of your apartment, you head to class as the note seems to burn a hole in your pocket with how aware you are of its presence.

You spend most of the day thinking about the numbers scrawled on the back of the note, and as you walk out of your lecture you’re looking at the note, and don’t notice somebody in front of you until you bump into each other. Dropping the note, you go down to reach for it but the guy you ran into beat you to it, picking it up and handing it to you. Bringing your gaze to his face, you see the familiar intense stare of your neighbor. Your eyes widen as it registers that he’s holding a piece of paper with his own phone number on it and handing it to you.

“He’s right, you know” Wonwoo says, smiling slightly and adjusting the straps of his backpack

You cock your head to the side in confusion and Wonwoo continues

“I did want to ask for your number but I was too shy to ask”

You smile softly, but on the inside you are beaming. You start to make your way to class and notice that Wonwoo is still next to you, and you think that maybe he has a class in a similar building and you think nothing of it, bobbing your head to the music blaring in your headphones and thinking about the number still in your pocket with a smile on your face. As soon as you had put your backpack in the seat next to you, someone stands in front of the seat. Apologizing and picking up your backpack, you are met with Wonwoo. Again. You blush thinking that he definitely saw you dancing in celebration on your way to class and quickly bring out your notebook and begin to write down what the professor says.

You pull out your phone eventually, and take out the note to put the number in. You hesitate for a bit, but decide to put his name in as “Wonwoo Neighbor” with a few emojis next to it. Smiling, you send out a quick message with your name and soon your phone returns to your pocket and you continue to listen to the professor. Wonwoo smiles as he sees the cute emojis next to his name, and enters in your name in his phone and reminds himself to thank Mingyu for writing that note.

The class drones on for another 30 minutes, but it seemed like a lifetime to Wonwoo as he tried to convince himself to ask you out the remainder of the class. He figures since you weren’t uncomfortable and seemed to maybe like him back, it was as good time as any to ask you out. As the professor dismisses you, Wonwoo stops you right outside the building.

“Hey, I was uh wondering, would you want to go out with me for coffee at like 3 today?” He nervously asks, pulling at his sleeve in nervousness.

You smile warmly and accept, and relief floods Wonwoo’s features. He promises to text you later, but he has to go to his biology class and waves goodbye as he quickly walks away. A few minutes your phone vibrates andyou look down at your phone.

From: Wonwoo Neighbor: 3pm don’t forget! Meet at the coffeeshop next to the library?

You smile and text out a response.

To: Wonwoo Neighbor: Wouldn’t miss it for the world! 😊

[agirlunderarock]

Writing through the Decade: 14 years old (2012)

So this was some sorta original fiction, I think it was supposed to turn into an Avengers fanfic or something. I don’t even know if this is finished. I haven’t read through it in forever, So I’m going to apologize for whatever cluster of word barf this turns out to be. I was fourteen when I wrote this, I’m pretty sure....

I think there was some influence from the Maximum Ride series and Percy Jackson and the Hunger Games and a lot of things

Running from myself

Clutching my arms close to my body, I tried to keep hold on whatever warmth I had left. The ground below was littered with my small camp from last night, and the tree I slept in creaked with every move I made. The late morning sun shined brightly through the leaves above me. The sun light felt good so I spread open my feathery charcoal wings on my back and let the sun warm them. I jumped gracefully from my branch and landed lightly on the ground near where I hung my food supply. Its been close to a year since I ran away from my old life. My family, friends, the idiots with the media who just wanted their stupid story, all of them out of my life. Then unfortunately, the gruesome images come crawling back to me. The insane monster of a man holding a knife to my back, the countless syringes he plunged into my arm, the fiery explosion that finally ended him and his heinous experiments. It’s because of him that I have wings, and my body morphs into different people. I finished eating my breakfast, and began to clean up my small camp. I didn’t have much to pack up really; one frying pan, a small pot, three small water bottles, matches, my small food supply, a compass, and two sets of clothes, all of which fit into my back pack. Before long, it looked just like the world around it. Normal, something I wished I could be again. I just finished changing when the bush next to me started to rustle violently. I jumped back just as a large German Sheppard leaped forward, teeth bared, and ready to attack. His cold bloodthirsty eyes eyed me viciously as I took out my frying pan. “How is this possible?” I said eyeing the dog cautiously. “I’m miles away from any city! I’m in the middle of freaken nowhere!” I thought panic rising in my chest. I held up the pan as another dog bounded out from the brush behind me. “Mae, Mae, Mae.” A cold voice cackled from somewhere behind the trees. “Did you really think you could escape me that easily?” “I thought you were dead,” I said flatly. “And in what way is making a laboratory explode easy? But then again I guess you monsters would know all about that kind of thing.” I added to hide the fear boiling up. “Monster? Is that really what you think of me, Mae?” the insane mad man said pretending to be taken back as he stepped into my view. Allister’s mouth twisted into a cruel sneer, and his blacker than his soul eyes laughed at my frying pan weapon. “So since you’re not dead after all, what do you want with me?” I demanded eyeing the snarling dogs. The way his sneer blurred into a vicious smile, made my stomach churn. “Isn’t it obvious? My only surviving test subject got away from me.” He reached for something on his belt as he crept closer. The dogs snapped at my heels as I tried to step back. “And I intend to get it back!” Allister shouted as he flung a weighted net at me. In that same instant, my wings burst open and propelled me up and over the dogs as they jumped at my feet. The net came crashing down on the beast as they tried attack again. Allister’s cruel smile melted into an icy glare as I smirked at the failed capture. “You’ve lost your touch Allister.” I mocked as I landed again. “But it seems that’s not the only thing you’ve lost.” I said noticing his most of his blood red hair was either missing or burned. I heard more rustling to my right. On instinct, I swung my pan just as a Doberman Pincher hurled its self at me. It yelped in pain and fell to the ground with a sickening thud. “You little brat!” Allister shouted in rage as he drew his gun. In one fluid movement, I grabbed my pack, and used the monster’s chest as a spring bored to take off into the afternoon sky. “So long Monster. You won’t be missed!” I taunted as Allister stumbled to his feet. The wind felt so amazing as it flowed through my feathers, and the day seemed as bright as I felt. BANG! Pain shot through my leg. “You son of a biscuit!” I shouted as I glared down at the monster. With that, I took off into the clouds faster.

~~~~~~~

When I felt I was at least out sight I dared to glance down at my still stinging leg. To my surprise, it wasn’t completely gushing blood. It only cut the skin and what little it had bled already stopped. “Huh I guess it just grazed me,” I thought as I continued soaring over the countryside. The trees became smaller and smaller as I flew west. I really didn’t have a set destination, I went wherever I wanted, whenever I pleased. Soon the small forest gave way to smaller and dryer trees and then eventually farmlands. Considering I was somewhere in southwestern Tennessee and now I was seeing more of what looked like northeastern Texas, I had to say I was making pretty good time getting nowhere. I checked my water supply and decided I needed a refill. I swooped down closer to look for a river or any source of water really. I landed heavily along the bank of a large rushing river. I knelt down by the edge and unpacked my water bottles as I crouched over the side. I jumped back startled that the reflection I saw wasn’t mine. Staring at me with startled crystal blue eyes, and messy midnight black hair, was a teenage boy. I looked behind me, but of course no one was there. I looked back at water and the boys face relaxed along with mine. He or I guess I should I let out a sigh of relief. Sad blue eyes stared back at me as I filled my water bottles. Unlike when I usually shift, I knew the boy I looked like, and it broke my heart to see his face again. Skyler, was the best friend a girl could ask for. He was always there when I needed him and kept me out of trouble. Little did I know he turned out to be something like an agent in training. I still don’t fully understand what he did. Anyways, the Monster wanted to kill Skyler along with the other agents like him, and anyone related to them in anyway. That’s how I got dragged into this mess. Allister came after us one day when we went to an amusement park. He posed as a park security officer and accused Skyler and me of vandalizing the park in order to get us out of the public eye. As soon as we were out of sight he pulled out his gun, shot Skyler in the back, and kidnapped me in chaos that unleashed through the gunfire. For a month, I was held captive, tested on and relived Skyler’s final moments. Allister said the experiments were to unlock mankind’s true potential, when in reality he wanted to watch me suffer. Not long after I was changed into the body-morphing freak I am today, some kind of tremor rocked the entire laboratory. Allister cursed at his monitoring system just as the doors to the room were blown open. There stood Skyler gun in hand, ready to shoot the Monster. The next thing I knew I was running for my life as the building went into emergency lockdown and slowly counted down the seconds I had left. I made it out in time, while the explosion threw Skyler violently from the exit. It was there as he laid dying in my arms that I finally believed him when he said he loved me. I shook my head trying to clear my thoughts, as I continued refilling my water. I closed my eyes and concentrated on trying to look like my self again. Slowly but surely I felt my long hair grow back and my body turn smaller. I looked back in the river and saw a worn out, puffy brown eyed, beaten down, long black haired teen-aged girl. “Back normal,” I thought with relief. I looked up at the sky as the last fingers of sunlight stretched across the horizon. I debated staying there near the river, but it still felt too close to where Allister found me this morning. So it was a race against time to get nowhere fast. Again I took off soaring into the sun set, I could feel the wind pick up and it brought the smell of rain with it. I started to panic slightly. I had never flown in the rain and with night falling I really didn’t want to get caught in it. The clouds began to darken as I kept flying, yet some how I had the bright idea to keep going the same direction. Lightning flashed across the purple orange sky, and my wings caught the now raging wind. “That’s it I need to find shelter,” I thought finally. I looked down and saw nothing that looked like it could protect me from the storm. A small strip of grey caught my eye as it snaked its way through the countryside. I dove down to get a better look at the highway, and that’s when I saw it. I deep red Chevy truck flying down the road. I don’t know why but that particular truck called out to me. It had two covers on the tailgate, so the gap was just big enough for me to climb into, and that’s exactly what I did. No sooner had I crawled under the protection of the tailgate covers did the rain start coming down. “Thank God I found this just in time,” I thought very relieved. Slowly I let the steady rumble of the trucks engine put me to sleep.

~~~~~

“Hey! Hey, kid wake up! Darn it kid wake up, people are gonna think I kidnapped you or something!” A strong girl’s voice yelled at me as she pulled my legs over the edge of the tailgate. “Ouch!” I yelped in pain when she hit my wounded calf. I flinched back when my eyes flew open to a harsh glaring afternoon sun. “Good you’re up. Now get out of my truck.” The girl said sharply. She looked a little older than me, at least nineteen maybe twenty. Her brown hair fell in light layers to her shoulders, and her brown eyes seemed to be analyzing everything at once. She looked frustrated but there was a hint of sympathy in her stern face. “Where am I?” I asked rubbing the sleep from eyes. “At a gas station in Roswell, New Mexico kid.” She said flatly and unsurprised. “How the heck did you get in the back of my truck?” She asked part of her southern accent showing through. “Well one, stop calling me kid. I’m sixteen and you’re what nineteen? Twenty? You’re still pretty much a kid still if you’re calling me kid. Second it doesn’t matter, I’ll get out of your hair now. Thanks for the lift.” I said jumping down from the truck. The girl looked at me with serious eyes, trying to figure me out. “What’s your name kid?” I didn’t answer “When’s the last time you ate some thing?” “Yesterday morning.” “Geez what’ve you been eating? Your as thin as a tooth pick!” She said looking me over her eyes softening the tiniest bit. I shrugged I wasn’t going to argue I figured I looked pretty bad and sick. “Okay kid here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to buy you some food and then get you to a phone or police station so you can call your parents. Okay?” she said leaving no room for debate. “Come on I think you might like a hot dog from here or something.” “Mae” I said quietly hopping out of the truck and trying unsuccessfully to hid my wings. “What did you–?” She stuttered when she saw my wings. “My names Mae. Not kid.” I said stubbornly ignoring the stares as we walked to the gas station convenient store. “What’s yours?” I asked not looking at her. “Andrea Wayne. What’s your last name I need it for when I drop you off.” I stayed quiet for a long time. “Kyle.” I finally said. I needed the food but I didn’t want Andrea to take me back. Sure she thought she was doing something good, but as soon as we paid I planed on running away. But when we walked out I some how couldn’t find the strength to do it. Andrea was the first person in a year to show me any kind of kindness and if I’m being honest I really didn’t want her to go. We climbed in her truck, then ate lunch in silence. There was something calming about eating lunch with a total stranger. Once Andrea finished she started the truck and started down the road. I couldn’t help it, tears started rolling down my face. I couldn’t believe what was happening. All year I didn’t cry, and now I felt like I was about to have a mental break down in front of a complete stranger. Andrea noticed but didn’t say anything at first. “Happy to go home Mae?” She questioned. She seemed to know already but I guess she felt she still needed to ask. “No. Not really. I don’t want to go back.” I said tears streaming down my face, yet some how my voice was even. For some reason I just started unleashing everything on Andrea. Everything I had kept bottled up over the last year. “I know it probably sounds weird, but I don’t want to go. Everyone back home looks at me like I’m a monster. I don’t know if you noticed but I have huge bird wings on my back!” I started almost yelling now. Andrea didn’t flinch, her steady eyes stayed on the road, while she absorbed everything I’ve told her. “I cant go back. He’ll find me. He’ll hurt my family, friends, heck he might even kill you now just for helping me!” “Hey, its okay Mae. Its okay.” Andrea said in a soft voice. She turned to look at me, her eyes growing wide with shock, then she quickly recovered. “Did I forget to mention that I’m a shape shifting freak?” I smiled through my tears. “What do I look like?” I asked taking a glance at the side mirror. It didn’t surprise me when the face I saw was Andrea’s. I looked just like her only I seemed more fragile, and broken. I concentrated on my own looks and gradually I began to look like my self again. “Mae, I wont take you back if that’s really what you want. But I wont have you flying all over the country like some wild child. I also don’t think I could live with myself if I let you do that and who ever is after you gets a hold of you. You can stay with me, but you have to tell me everything that’s happened. I mean everything.” Andrea said staring at the open road. “Okay,” I sighed. “But get ready for long story.” I told her everything. She said she wanted the whole story and that’s what she got. Everything from meeting Skyler, to finding out he was an agent, when I got kidnapped, the experiments, to Skyler dying in my arms. I told her about how when I got home my family kind of pushed me to the side, how alone I felt, how everyday reporters would swarm my house interrogating me about my life and the kidnapping. I told her how I couldn’t take it any more, how trapped I felt. I told her about what happened the morning before I met her how I wound up in the back of her truck. If something freaked her out, she didn’t show it. She seemed totally calm as I explained everything her only comment was, “When we stop for the night I need to bandage your leg, other wise it’ll get infected.” It was only six o’clock, but we still stopped when we made it to Albuquerque. Andrea pulled into some dinky little hotel and told me to wait in the truck. Five minutes later, she came back with a triumphant smile and keys to room in her hand. I grabbed my pack and followed Andrea to the room. “Hey how did do you feel about pizza for dinner?” she asked looking at small plastic menu. “They have room service here?” I said in disbelief. “I know right! So I’ll take that as a yes.” She said laughing. It seemed like Andrea was really starting to open up to me. “Dude when’s the last time you’ve had a shower?” She said as she walked passed me to get the phone. “Uhhh.” I stuttered. The only thing I was able to do was swim in rivers and I wasn’t about to do that without clothes. “Like a shower, shower, or like a dump freezing river water on my self shower.” I laughed. “You nasty go take a shower!” Andrea laughed throwing a towel at me. I caught the towel and got my stuff together. “What about my leg?” I asked a little bit worried. “Oh yeah let me take a look.” She said grabbing a small black pouch. “Okay looks like that bullet just barely scraped you. Lucky too, if it would’ve gone through it may have punctured your main vein that runs through there. What kind of gun was it?” she said as she cleaned it up. “I’m not sure. Just looked like a hand gun.” I said wincing. “Mhmm. Well this is interesting….” She mumbled as she took a better look at the small gash. “Are you studying to become a doctor?” I asked curious. She laughed lightly as if the thought of her being a doctor was amusing. “No. I’m actually a mercenary.” She looked up at me with careful eyes, studying my reaction. “But I won’t work for someone who wants their enemies dead. I might be good with a gun but that doesn’t mean like using it. I have almost all of my guns rigged with tranquilizers. No real bullets. You can call me a crook, a thief, a bandit, what ever other names they have for robbers, but I wont ever be called a murderer. I’ll steal and rob, but I’m not going to take someone’s life. That’s not my choice.” She said still looking at my wound. Her calm face turned confused then concerned, then calm again. Something was up. “What’s wrong?” I asked panic started to rise in chest. “Nothing. You should be okay now. Just make sure you clean it good when you take your shower.” She said not meeting my eyes. “Okay if you say so.” I said panicking slightly and went to the bathroom. By the time I got out I heard Andrea’s muffled steady voice coming from the main room. It sounded like she was talking on the phone. I assumed she was ordering the pizza but then as I listened closer she sounded pissed. “How did you get this number...........Like I’m gonna believe that trash. No, why should I? I don’t care…..how much? I don’t know…..I’ll think about it. But I swear if you ever call this number again, you’ll be sorry.” Andrea said sternly. As I stepped out of the bathroom she hung up the phone. Before I could ask who it was she took out the battery, crushed the SD card, opened the door and threw the phone out side. “What did you do that for?” I asked cautiously. “That freak scientist guy freaken called me. He some how knew you were with me and got my number. He could use it to track us.” Andrea said quickly. She scanned the room abruptly then her head snapped to my injured leg. “Mae let me see your leg!” she demanded. “What’s wrong?” I asked panic flooding through me. “Darn it! I knew the cut looked off!” Andrea said inspecting my leg. She looked me dead in the eyes when she spoke again. “Mae the reason that graze hurt so much was because the bullet didn’t just scrape the skin. You were actually hit, but not with a bullet. It was a tracking devise! Mae we have to go now!” Andrea said urgently. She was already getting up and packing her things. “Why should I trust you? You’re a mercenary right? You steal to get paid. How do I know that you’re not just going to hand me over to Allister. Give me one good reason why I should trust you!” I demanded angrily. Andrea looked defeated, as if she knew that was coming. The sad look on her face confirmed my suspicions until she said, “Because I’m your only chance Mae. I know what you’re going through. Of course you probably already figured I’m running too.” She looked me straight in the eyes daring me to question her. “I was raised by crazed uncle who wanted to see the world crumble. He trained me to kill. He trained me to be his personal weapon. I was too blind to see that and now I’m stuck in this mess. I’ve tried to come clean countless times, and every time I just fell into the same routine. Heck, when you flew into the back of my truck I was just running my former boss, who was also my boy friend. When I found you in the tailgate, I was just going to let you go on your way. But when I looked at you I saw something. I saw someone scared, and worried, yet a fighter. I saw my self. I saw a girl not only running for her life but also running from herself. And I knew I had to help you.” She finished hanging her head “I’m sorry.” I said packing up my gear. “Its okay. I figured sooner or later we’d have that discussion.” She smiled weakly then added, “The pizza should be here any sec—“ A knock at the door cut her off. “Who is it?” Andrea said eyeing the door. “Pizza guy.” A deep muffled voice said from the other side of the door. Andrea slowly opened the door. A lean guy stood in the door way his baseball cap covering his eyes. He looked at Andrea then at me. His cold dark eyes seemed to stare right through me. A flash of recognition flickered across face. I didn’t think when I kicked him out the door. His hat fell off revealing singed red hair. “Allister!” I growled. “Mae my dear, nice to see you too.” He said coldly as he stumbled into the parking lot. I stepped out side ready make a run for it. Andrea stayed near the door gun in hand ready to fire. Allister saw this and smiled evilly. “Andrea, have you had a chance to think over my offer?” he said pulling out a stack of cash. “Yes I did, and decided only a sicko would work for a monster like you.” She spat angrily. “Oh such a shame.” He pulled out a small remote and the room exploded throwing Andrea through the air. She landed hard on the ground and didn’t move. Knots formed in my stomach. “Another person is dead because of me,” I thought in despair. I stared at Andrea’s limp body as she laid motionless. “Andrea get up!” I yelled desperately as I felt a tug in my arm. “Now Mae, how many more people must die before you realize you belong to me?” Allister cackled. I turned to look at him and I spat in his face. “Let go of me you sick monster!” I yelled as I tried to get out of his grip. “You little brat! Its useless to try to escape me! Even with the powers I gave you, you’re still to pathetic to even fight back! You cannot fathom the plans I have for you. Though I don’t know why I would still use you after all the trouble you’ve caused me. Then again I could always erase your memory and then you would comply.” He said angrily. I was running low on options and time. Mind reeling I bit down hard on the Monster’s hand. A salty taste contaminated my mouth when Allister released me. He glared at me with hate-filled eyes and pulled out his gun. “I don’t need you!” he spat. “I can use others! With or without you I will –“ “BANG!” There stood Andrea gun drawn and breathing heavily. She looked pissed and relieved at the same time. I ran up to her before she fell over. “Man that guy just wouldn’t shut up.” She sighed with relief. “Welcome to my world.” I said sarcastically. “Was that a real bullet?” I asked cautiously. Andrea just nodded. My eyes grew wide, “Are you okay? I mean you just killed someone!” I said shocked. “I’m fine. I didn’t shoot a person. I shot a monster,” she said quietly. “Well then, now what do we do? The police have been looking for this guy for ever, and now he’s gone. So where does that put us?” Andrea stayed quiet for a long time. “Well I’m pretty sure we’re still going to have to live on the run, but it also means we have to buy another pizza.”

[cesium--133]

Okay, I wrote it, It’s not great but as a wise person once said Writing is either, ‘I AM A GOD, WITH CONTROL OVER EVERYTHING’ or ‘Will you guys please stick to the script?’ This was the latter.

___________________________________________________________________________

My days are far too normal for me to handle this sort of situation. I’m just a dude who goes to work, and drinks more water then I should, and goes to the gym twice a week, and now I’m standing at the edge of The Woods™ having practically yeeted my life out a window. Explanation? Ok fine. It started 2 hours ago.

The gym I go to is a friendly place, everyone knows everyone else, the staff calls everyone by name and the words bro, dude, and man get thrown around a lot. My personal trainers name is Dan, and I call him as such, but 2 hours ago, he passed me my water bottle after a training session and I wasn’t thinking about anything but a hot shower and a vegetable sandwich. So I responded in kind with “Thanks Daddy.” Time froze and in that split second I bolted out the door, an acute awareness of what just transpired banging pots and pans in my brain.

I got to the front desk which was thankfully empty and cancelled my membership. Kate, the receptionist was understandably confused, I’d been going here for 3 years now, but cancelled the membership. After that I was out of there, I hopped into my car and made like a banana, peeling out of the parking lot like I was being chased by a mildly terrifying duck.

I drove, no I didn’t know where I was going, I was barely thinking about anything, much less directions. I settled into that driving haze here everything fades as you focus on the micro road rules and it’s like your memories have been stolen afterwards. So now I stand at the edge of the woods, which at this point is like saying I’m standing in front of my new future log cabin, and with little to no thought on anything in particular, I start walking.

So by now I think you all know where this is going right? Yeah I figured that too, which is why I started screaming my aggression and awkwardness out in the form of Disney songs. My rendition of Let it go was probably what scared any potentially malicious spirits off. That’s probably why I managed to find it.

At what I assumed as the center of the woods was the tattered remains of a log cabin, there were 2 walls, half a roof, a threadbare armchair and a pentagram. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find a water bottle sitting in the center of the pentagram, and i bet you aren’t either. What surprised me was water bottle as one of those tiny metal ones, labeled “Redo of one embarrassing moment.”

I sat down and scrutinized the water bottle, on one hand, this was far too lucky, on the other hand, the fairy I saved a week ago said that things would go great for me. On my left foot, the bottle is sitting inside a pentagram, in the exact center of the woods in a crumbling log cabin, on my right foot what else could possibly happen? I’m already lost as heck and probably won’t leave These Woods™ for the rest of my life. So I made like a character in a horror movie and I pick up the water bottle. The bottle only had a little bit of liquid left, enough for one person, that looked and smelled like water. So I held the bottle to my lips and took a swig.

Yes, I know, horrible decision, if this was that kind of story I’d be stuck in an inter dimensional prison making weapons for a war going on in hell until I die from exhaustion. But this is not that kind of story, and I found myself back in the gym after what seemed like a minute, but could have been a century for all I knew, of nausea and blankness. My mouth as moving and I managed to stop myself, but to late “Thanks Da-” I panicked, this was my last shot at this whole ordeal I was just going to make the same mistake despite knowing the 5 w’s and that one h of how it was committed.

My thoughts were in that strange spinning wheel of death place and my everything was sort of frozen, and my vocal chords just kept going, It was awkward, but I made it, the full sentence had maybe 10 seconds of “aaaaa” but I stuck the n at the end of it like someone who had just fallen off a cliff grabbing onto a branch sticking out of the side. Dan gave me a funny look, but I made it. I wouldn’t have to move to the middle of the woods on this day.

Omg someone PLEASE write a fic about this!

[newstfionline]

As the poor join protests, Venezuela may be hitting a turning point

By Mariana Zuñiga and Nick Miroff, Washington Post, April 29, 2017

CARACAS, Venezuela--In the cramped hillside slums where they once adored Hugo Chávez, hungry families now jeer and bang pots at the man struggling in his shadow, President Nicolás Maduro.

Chávez, a master showman who promised his country a socialist “revolution,” loved to wade through crowds of poor Venezuelans, blowing kisses and dispensing hugs. But when his successor has ventured out in public in recent months, he’s been pelted with eggs and chased by angry mobs.

“Maduro is so different,” said Irene Castillo, 26, who lives in El Guarataro, a tough neighborhood not far from the presidential palace. She voted for Maduro in 2013 when Chávez died after 14 years in power. But no one on Castillo’s block supports the government anymore, she said. “Now, those who remain ‘chavistas’ are just the radicals.”

As the country’s bloody, volatile, month-old protest movement hardens into a prolonged standoff between demonstrators and the government, the loyalties of poorer Venezuelans like Castillo have become a swing factor in determining whether the president will survive.

The thousands of demonstrators pouring into the streets in recent weeks are mostly middle class, outraged by Venezuela’s economic collapse and the government’s increasingly authoritarian rule. But Venezuelans from longtime chavista strongholds are starting to join them, at considerable risk. Residents of Castillo’s neighborhood protested openly against Maduro for the first time last week.

Pro-government block captains in neighborhoods like El Guarataro have responded by threatening to deny food rations to those who march with the opposition or fail to join pro-Maduro rallies. Militia groups armed by the government and known as “colectivos” are deployed to intimidate would-be defectors and are suspected in the deaths of several protesters.

As the confrontation escalates, many other destitute Venezuelans remain on the sidelines, disillusioned with Maduro but unpersuaded by his opponents, or too busy looking for food to join a march.

Aside from a military revolt, there is perhaps nothing Maduro fears more than a rebellion spreading through the neighborhoods that long backed Chávez. There are signs it’s already happening.

On several occasions this month, a pattern has emerged in which mostly middle-class Venezuelans and student activists swarm the capital’s main highway during the day, while poorer residents stage smaller protests in their neighborhoods at night, some of which have degenerated into chaos and looting.

In El Guarataro, where services such as electricity and water are frequently shut off, residents built barricades of flaming debris in the streets last week , clanging pots and pans at their windows to amplify their frustration. Riot police and national guard troops arrived, touching off clashes in a neighborhood that has long been a solid-red bastion of support for the government.

“The base of the chavista movement has eroded, and the situation is growing more explosive,” said Margarita López Maya, a political analyst in Caracas. “There’s no bread, but the government continues to insist it has the majority of Venezuelans on its side, so it looks increasingly dissociated from the reality of people’s lives.”

The leaders of the Democratic Unity party, the big-tent coalition of Maduro opponents, are demanding that the government release political prisoners and move up presidential elections due to take place in late 2018. They also want full power restored to the legislative branch, which Maduro and pro-government judges have stymied since the opposition won majority control in 2015.

Maduro depicts his opponents as terrorists who are trying to sow chaos to prepare the ground for a foreign invasion.

With the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela used to be one of Latin America’s most prosperous nations. Now it’s among the most miserable, tormented by rampant crime, corruption and staggering government dysfunction. A scarcity of food and basic medicine has left more and more Venezuelans suffering from empty stomachs or languishing in squalid hospitals.

The shortages have spread widely but fallen hardest on the poor.

A survey by three of the country’s leading universities found that three-fourths of Venezuelans lost weight last year, by an average of 19 pounds.

Aware that mass hunger will hasten Maduro’s political demise, the government last year began assigning food sacks to Venezuelans in poorer areas, putting local party activists in charge of distribution. The program is known by its acronym, CLAP, and in neighborhoods like El Guarataro, residents know they could go without meals if they join protests or decline to join government-organized marches.

“They are afraid of losing the CLAP bag,” said Mirlenis Palacios, 45, an activist for the Primero Justicia party of opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who was recently banned from running for office for 15 years.

In interviews, several residents of poorer Caracas neighborhoods said they have been warned not to participate in any anti-government protests. “They blackmailed us with the bag,” said one man in El Guarataro, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Pro-government “colectivo” militants on motorcycles are a more fearsome threat. Phil Gunson, a Venezuela-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, said they function like a paramilitary police force, suppressing potential protests while allowing the government to deny responsibility for their violence.

“They are a very effective form of intimidation,” Gunson said. “They openly display weapons on the street, and everyone knows who they are. So if you’re an opposition activist, it’s very risky to dissent in the barrios.”

The poorer neighborhoods are still widely referred to as “chavista” neighborhoods, but the label no longer applies, said Luis Vicente León, director of the Datanalisis polling firm, whose recent survey found that 88 percent of Venezuelans are unhappy with the government.

“The Venezuelans living in those neighborhoods want change, too,” León said. “But they don’t have time to go to marches, and they have no leadership.” Even as they sour on Maduro, he added, they feel the middle-class opposition movement is “not their natural ally.”

Democratic Unity activists only recently have begun making inroads in Caracas’s poorest districts, he said, because it remains dangerous for them to attempt ordinary grass-roots political work like knocking on doors or staging rallies.

But León said there are clearly more poor Venezuelans at opposition protests now than there were in 2014, when the government last faced a major rebellion, months of clashes in which more than 40 people were killed.

The political violence this month has left 29 dead, including Venezuelans apparently slain during looting.

Maduro still has Venezuela’s military, its oil revenue and its state-run media, even as the poor have started to tune out the propaganda. But the biggest obstacle the opposition faces in appealing to the poor may be the perception that the street protests won’t make a difference.

“We’re almost reaching a month of protests, and it’s done nothing,” said Xavier Hernández, 23, a motorcycle-taxi driver who lives in El Guarataro. “I’m not going to risk my life for it.”

[cruelonlytobekindarchived]

Alana Stark verse facts because @tallandbronzed​ JUST HAD TO BE BACK DIDN’T YOU BINX and now she won’t go to sleep and she’s impossible to ignore because she’s just having a second muse BANGING POTS AND PANS LOUDLY

Pretends not to be Iron Man and gets by because the suit is male-coded, taller than she is, has a voice changer, and doesn’t possess the Arc Reactor on the outside like she does when she isn’t in it

Also, she’s absolutely that playboy jerk with a heart of gold (or iron, ha ha), so no one necessarily believes she could be a superhero because-- well, she’s a continuous fuck-up who can’t quite get anything right

The above is an excuse as to why she keeps misbehaving in her own head. She insists she can’t live up to Iron Man so she won’t improve her issues because no one would believe she was that good anyway

There is at least one Iron Man fanboy/fangirl/fan who has analyzed her behavioral patterns and tried to prove she’s Iron Man because they have the same verbal diction

Alana sometimes goes on forums to drop the conspiracy theory that Alana Stark is Iron Man because she likes living on the edge and watching the ensuing tire fire

I have two main verses, which is v: turn up the faders as my main one and also my verse with @thatsmydiick (binx is EVERYWHERE) which is v: a princess for the throne in which Beca is Alana Stark’s kid she had at legitimately like 19 and she isn’t the best mom there is but damn it she’s trying

Doesn’t have a liquor preference. Her liquor preference is liquor

Graduated college at 17 years old and then took a year to find herself. Found herself basically nowhere, lost herself a little more, didn’t find anything really

She suffers from undiagnosed Bipolar I disorder but has never been to a therapist for it. Her first manic episode happened not long after her parents died and was followed by a major depressive low. This was the reason she set out on a year old expedition to ‘find herself’-- she didn’t know what else to do

Also suffers from severe PTSD after the kidnapping and the incident that led to the Arc Reactor. She’s as close to a functioning alcoholic as she can get, and has no idea how else to cope

She can’t sleep in a bed because the softness of a mattress makes her feel uncomfortable and too at-ease. After the months in the cave forced to be alert, being relaxed spikes her already serious anxiety. So she has to sleep on the floor or on a hard surface

Beca verse things

She sleeps around an awful lot but you’re not meeting her kid unless it’s super, super serious. If you’re sleeping with Alana Stark and this isn’t a continuous thing, you’re in and out without much circumstance involved. She’s not bringing anyone into Beca’s life who isn’t important and in a real way, be you male, female or otherwise

Has a more decent handle on herself, though not completely so. Goes out of her way to try to hide her falling apart qualities from her daughter, though she’s doing a terrible job of it

Play-dates are double-checked, triple-checked-quadruple-checked, and she has to meet the parents before she’s letting Bex go for a play-date. She knows she can do this digitally, but she’s too little for Alana to feel comfortable with the digital check.

This is, mercifully, easier when she’s older. Alana’s not cruel enough to infringe on all her potential friendships, but everyone gets triple background checked by FBI level security

She sometimes buys out FAO Schwartz in Manhattan in the middle of the night to take Beca there so her musically inclined genius daughter can play on the big piano

She has baked with Beca from the time she was small. Her favorite activity is always rice krispie squares because they’re so very easy to customize. Alana likes hers with mini m&m’s and pretzel bits

The baking gets gradually more complex as she gets older. Alana learns with her as time goes on, because it was an activity she took up with Beca to bond, and found out she had a knack for it

She has absolutely no idea who Beca’s dad is. She did a lot of experimental drugs and drank an awful lot during the finding herself expedition, and she couldn’t tell you who she slept with on any given night if she tried

[tiliaeuropaea-blog]

sapphic-nd replied to your post

“*banging pots and pans* MOFF-TISS-HATE   MOFF-TISS-HATE...”

why, though? can you think of a legitimate reason to back up that point or are you just bitter bc your ship wasn't canon?

Under the cut, a list of things I’m “bitter” about, regarding all seasons of Sherlock, in no particular order.

They butchered all the female characters. Straight up butchered their character potential and made them tools to be used by male characters. Let me be a bit more specific about a couple of them:

Irene Adler (and yes, I always going to be bitter about it). Now, Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia (published in 1891!) is a more proactive, progressive, appealing and genuinely interesting character that BBC!Irene will ever hope to be. And if you think about the 120 year gap, it’s kind of sad. ACD!Irene is a successful thirty-something woman who has retired from her career after making a fortune and now lives in a fancy area of London all by herself (IN THE FUCKING XIXTH CENTURY), marries for love and outsmarts Sherlock Holmes so hard he is left speechless. She’s funny, talented, smart, has a wonderful sense of humour, and sometimes dresses as a young lad to walk around London without being restricted by gender norms. An icon to this day. Now Steven Moffat read this story and went, “This is absolutely NOT a feminist victory! I, a straight white cis middle-aged man, know EXACTLY what a feminist victory looks like!” So BBC!Irene is a woman whose power literally comes from her vagina and her being fuckable. Her agency is reduced to her reliance on powerful male figures. Sure, she’s smart, but it’s made clear she’s not smart enough. The Alpha Man outsmarts her, humiliates her and then swoops in to mercifully save her. She should be the Woman who beat Sherlock Holmes, but she’s not. And don’t even get me started on her sexual orientation (and the implications that all gay women are promiscuous and just waiting for the Right Man). I highly recommend reading Antonija Primorac’s The Naked Truth for more insight on the matter.

Molly Hooper. They mistreated her character all along, and I think this is pretty clear. She’s depicted as needy, pathetic, weak time and time again. I thought they were getting better at writing her until season 4 came along. They simply used her when they needed her (e.g. for looking after a baby they created just for the sake of a good pun; and of course Rosie’s babysitter had to be Molly or Mrs Hudson, god forbid it’s a man? Greg who?). Zero agency, zero character development. But the last straw had to be the I Love You scene. First of all, how is it possible that Molly is still in love with Sherlock? Honestly? They literally haven’t spoken to each other in months, it’s just not realistic. This is character regression. Secondly, she is just brought back so she can be humiliated. Again. I truly believe Moffat has a kink for getting praised by women and humiliating them in return. Talk about issues. What’s even worse is that she’s shown visiting 221B in the final episode, as if nothing happened. She’s expected to be humiliated by Sherlock again and again and forgive him every time.

Rosamund Mary Watson. I’ll just refer you back to these two metas, x and x, I wrote after T6T. 

Eurus Holmes. Her depiction as the Mad Woman in the Attic is in itself problematic, and if you’re interested in reading more about this, please read @aherocanbeanyone‘s post about the depiction of mental illness in TFP. Also may I add something Beatrice pointed out in private: weird how the only Holmes sibling to be “mad” is the female one, uh? Her own character is inconsistent at best: she’s a mentally ill person, who has been locked up since childhood for murdering another human being, but in the end she just needed... a hug? So you’re either telling me Mr and Mrs Holmes are horrible, cruel parents who never showed affection to her daughter and/or intervened when they realised Euros was jealous of Sherlock and Victor’s relationship? Or her psyche is totally inconsistent and far-fetched. Moreover, when Sherlock hugs her and comforts her, she is once again saved by a man and has her agency wiped away - she’s unresponsive, doesn’t talk, etc. As Kaite Welsh said: “Although Euros in villain mode can be truly horrifying, at least she had power. At least she had agency. [...]  Every woman on the show has been systematically defanged and no amount of Mrs. Hudson driving a sports car can erase that.” (x)

That being said, we can safely say Sherlock is a sexist show. Most episodes don’t even pass the Bechdel test, I think.

Now, onto my “bitterness about Johnlock not being canon”. The reason I’m angry that Johnlock was not canon, is that it made the whole series a prime example of queerbaiting. Queerbaiting is cruel and honestly, some of the people on here who believed the most are young queer fans who were really hurt by the way Mofftiss treated us. I don’t approve of the carrot and stick approach they used. They repeatedly insulted and disregarded the Johnlock community in interviews and peppered the show with gay jokes, but kept playing with the subtext and the fans. They exploited their queer fans, their resources and then revealed they actually don’t care at all. If they cared about us they would’ve followed through and made the subtext text. If they didn’t want this from the start, they shouldn’t have played with the feelings of queer youth just because it’s fun. But what’s wrong with an ambiguous ending, you ask? It’s cowardice and cruelty. By leaving the ending ambiguous they revealed that they care more about the money that the larger straight (and homophobic) audience can give them, than about the loyalty and respect of a smaller but dedicated group of fans, whose lives would’ve been changed by this kind of representation. I’m sorry but this is just plain evil. 

And now last but not least: they’re mediocre writers at best. They rely heavily on illogical plot twists just for the shock value. They’re like architects that built a house with stained glass windows and a pool with a 30ft slide, but didn’t really bother with the foundation. The house is going to collapse eventually, no matter how pretty it is. The show may be exciting and shiny, but if you take a closer look you’ll notice so many plot holes and fortuitous coincidences. “You know what they say about coincidences? The universe is rarely so lazy.” But they are. Most plot lines are built on coincidences, chance, and far-fetched deductions that magically turn up to be correct. This has always been their modus operandi since day 1 (the suitcase has to be pink because the woman wears a pink coat? you do realise most women don’t have as much suitcases as they do coats, do you?) but it got worse with the seasons. The reason is that they bit off more than they could chew, wanted to build ever cleverer and more convoluted plot lines without being able to make them realistic and plausible. Season 4 was supposed to reference back to previous seasons, to tie up all loose ends, so be the overarching glue that kept all season together. It was obviously not, most characters were OOC and their character development made a sharp U Turn to FuckedUpVille. Also, they said that the big plot twist was something they hinted at throughout the series but they did not??? They literally introduced a new villain two episodes in with no other hint beforehand? Also, it’s pretty obvious they did NOT plan this ahead because this season is completely detached from the others plotwise. Well of course except for Moriarty, who we are expected to believe knew about Sherlock’s secret sister but did not use it against him? Because he’s what, kind-hearted?

They’re also pretty shitty at handling climaxes: all the climaxes in the show have deeply underwhelming resolutions that resolve absolutely nothing: Morairty has Sherlock and John at gunpoint? Ooops, phone call. Euros shoots John? Nah, tranquillizer. Reichenbach Fall? Who the fuck knows how he did it? Not them. What I mean is, they come up with a shocking scene where all hope seems to be lost, how will our hero survive? Cool, right? But they cannot come up with a decent answer to that question either, so they scramble up a (again, furtuitous) way to dodge the situation. That’s a sign of bad writing. If you can’t figure out how your hero survives, you should not write that scene.

But if they’re just plain incompetent, they do not deserve hate, right? They deserve to be explained their mistakes so that they can grow and become better writers! Wrong. We’re past constructive criticism, Moffat refuses to listen to criticism, he even sounds personally offended whenever someone says anything about his shows (x x). He’s just like a giant entitled toddler who needs a reality check. About Gatiss, I honestly to this day cannot wrap my head around what is up with him. 

This is the end of my presentation on how much I hate Mofftiss. I’m sure I forgot something but I’ll add if it comes to mind. Anyway, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are sexist queerbaiting assholes, lame writers and horrible human beings. End of.

[capechicago]

“If the Coronavirus Was A Person I Would Beat It Up” Or, Meditations on the Loss of Co-Presence in Learning

We are fond of celebrating our adaptability as a species. The quick pivot to virtual learning during this pandemic has been touted with pride by many, and not without good reason. Back in April, I was overjoyed to be reconnected with my students after such a long and unexpected absence. But now that we’re five months into distance learning, and poised to potentially embark on another entire year of the same, other thoughts and feelings have surfaced.

  As an artist who’s spent my entire life working in the medium of live theatre, I find the mediated experience of google meets a particular challenge. I will never forget my mentor Robert Woodruff turning to me after a particular scene showing in graduate school and throwing out the question: What feeling are you trying to create in the room? It was the single most impactful question I received as a graduate student in directing, and I’m always mindful of it, not only in the experiences I create for an audience, but like most teachers, in the classrooms in which I’m teaching. There’s what we’re doing, and then there’s the energy with which we’re doing it, and the energy we create as we do it. As I’ve gone through life, I’ve come to feel more and more that the later two are the more important.

  At a moment, then, when shared, three dimensional space has collapsed and there is no “room,” I have felt cut off from my purpose, a purpose strictly tied to the empirical senses and to what I’ll call the sixth sense, where you perceive something energetically beyond what is tangibly evident (like when I come home late, open my car door and stop dead in my tracks because my body knows something is wrong. I look around and spot a skunk poised to defend itself two feet away. I stay in the car, close the door, it goes away, and I safely enter the house without needing to go bathe in tomato juice). Like someone suddenly gone blind, I have been struggling to compensate for a lost – or many lost – sense(s). Gone is touch, peripheral vision, smell and taste (irrelevant as they are not shared), and my “sixth” sense. Seeing and hearing as they relate to the only communally available experience (the screen) are on overdrive. I have found it exhausting to try to gather – and transmit – the same amount and kind of information as I used to with my now limited resources.

  This doesn’t mean that I can’t affect the feeling of the zoom (rhyme intended), but it’s a lot harder, and the effect is more limited. Even if the technology is working flawlessly, I have a very limited ability to access the intangible feeling in the room in which the children are individually situated, adding an extra barrier to my ability to transform it. If Dad is cooking in the kitchen three steps away or brother is watching tv over on the couch, these can be obstacles for a child’s attention (not to mention my own, as I hear the banging of pots and pans, unrelated music and conversation). Children lie on their beds, wander off for a snack, disappear altogether for sizable chunks of time. Without the room uniting us, without the substantive and sizable impact of group focus, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm that magnifies each individual’s experience exponentially, creating the tide that raises all ships, how do we go after things that are individually challenging or difficult? What prompts a child to move out of their comfort zone, into a place of discovery? What does this mean, I have been asking myself, for personal growth, for learning, for society??

  An experience in class last week started to answer these questions for me, addressing the gulf I perceived regarding my ability to actualize what I have put at the center of my own teaching mission – creating connection and tending to the quality of energy between people – and reshaping my general expectations of teaching and learning in this moment.

  John Doe is a wonderful rising fifth grader, smart with lots of personality – a “character” – that we are more than happy to have in our drama class. From the first day he had a tendency to regularly pop out of, then rejoin, class. Based on this behavior, my teacher reached out to a former class teacher of John’s and confirmed what she suspected, that he had a learning disability. We proceeded with that understanding, continuing to embrace and celebrate his presence. In the third week of class, our work took a heavily writing-based turn, and John disappeared from class altogether. After two full days of absence, my teacher and I decided to reach out to the parent and share how much we missed John as well as vaguely offer to accommodate him in whatever way would prove useful. We never heard back from the parent, but John returned. The whole class was happy to have him back (they’d been asking after his whereabouts) and when we sensed any tension from him about engaging in certain activities (journal writing, reading aloud etc), we allowed him to opt out. On the second day of his return, while the teacher was reading a story, John went to his bed, laid down and pretended to fall asleep. After receiving no attention, John then verbally announced his intention to go to sleep, at which point the teacher spoke, surprising me. “You go ahead and take your nap. It’s nice to rest your eyes when someone is reading to you. We’ll let you know when it’s time for your nap to be over.” After this, John stopped trying to make his napping obvious (loud snoring, etc.) and we continued uninterrupted in our reading. When the book was done and it was time to “get up,” he did.

  After class during our planning period, I complimented my colleague on meeting John so kindly and gently where he was at. She expressed how important it was to her to have him hear the story, to remain with us and not to blip out as he’d done before on so many other occasions. As I digested this information - how she had abandoned redirection and given him permission to conduct himself in ways that would not necessarily have been tolerated in a live classroom - I realized that a completely different set of teacher-student expectations were emerging. You couldn’t teach the child at all if they weren’t on the call, so keeping the child there, connected to you and the group regardless of participation level or behavior, was the goal.

  The next day, after we had done group sharing, warmed-up and played some improv games, it was time to move on to project work. I asked one of the students to try an experiment with the piece she was working on. After staring at me a minute, the student slowly but surely started inching her screen in a different direction, so that she could no longer be seen. A very eloquent expression of her shyness, yes, but also – unintentionally – a kind of threat: If you ask me to do something that makes me uncomfortable, I’ll leave. If something like this had happened in a live classroom, I would have changed the temperature in the room, become silly and created an even more loose and forgiving space. Other students might have chimed in and egged her on, taking stabs at the task themselves or offering their own interpretations, resulting in her giving it a try. But with each of us in our own separate spaces, individual pieces of kindling spread throughout disparate fireplaces, the flame couldn’t catch hold and there was no change of heart. What could we do? We moved on. Another student was asked whether they’d completed a suggested overnight experiment; the answer was a soft and sheepish “no.” John showed up without his notebook altogether.

  My point is not that these events were a negative outcome from John’s behavior in bed the day before; no, students had shirked “discomfort” here and there all along. What I realized now very consciously, however, was that, more and more, our response was becoming, “it’s okay.” Our teaching had essentially evolved into the practice of protecting the fragile ecosystem of our collective. Fragile not because the children (or we) found the class a chore – no! We could sit and chit-chat and do show and tell all day long! We all genuinely enjoyed being together. Rather, the fragility was based in the now  more limited space available for learning – which I’ll define as the activity of stretching one’s mind, body, spirit, will or interest, into new or unfamiliar territory potentially beyond one’s comfort zone – ostensibly the thing we were all gathered together to do. Had willingness to venture beyond the known or familiar shrunk in proportion to our current physical willingness to roam? Is it only our bodies that are sheltering in place?

  Let’s face it, times are stressful. Whatever degree of fear or anxiety we experience individually with regard to the virus, the response to contain it has had myriad consequences that have impacted everyone, including fundamentally interfering with our most basic needs and routines. When the course of life has been so dramatically interrupted, how can we expect “learning” to proceed “as usual?”  What is becoming clear to me – what the children seem to be showing us – is that learning will no longer – can no longer – happen on what I will call previous “teacher’s terms.” The balance of power has shifted, command of the dynamic is equally distributed amongst the uniformly-sized squares of the screen, each cocooned in the relative comfort of their own distinct world. In these times, for virtual learning, the reality is that connection for it’s own sake may potentially be both the most urgent achievement, and the lowest common denominator.

  A few weeks ago I learned that, far from proceeding with “business as usual,” Barnard College was in effect making the “Big Problems” laid bare by this moment in history the center of its entire curriculum for the upcoming fall. I know that many CAPE artists shifted projects in the spring not only to adapt to altered circumstances, like access to materials, but also to address our changing, unfolding landscape. As a team working with a young cohort of 2nd-4th graders, continuity seemed like the most significant thing we could provide and we held onto our project as planned as we went virtual. After several weeks, however, I was left unsatisfied by our ability to engage students with the events we were living through. Consequently, we chose to foreground the matter in our summer program, where we’ve been writing monologues about our thoughts and feelings in response to shelter-in-place and social distancing, allowing space for both students and parents to process their experiences.

I am now wondering how far to pivot away from traditional teaching methods, subject matter and discreet art skills/training going forward. I have marveled at the snack camp created by our CAPE colleagues this summer. What better way to meet basic needs (course budget is dedicated to purchasing ingredients for students), teach a fundamental life skill, and provide a sense of community than cooking class? As we all strive for the grace to reach children where they’re at in this ever-evolving moment (while also acknowledging where we’re at as teachers, artists and humans), I’m grateful to have the CAPE network of teachers and artists with whom to puzzle through the profound and complex questions, issues and opportunities.

[pensarelvirus]

The pandemic is a portal /  Arundhati Roy

. Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”

.

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.  

 The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists?

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed.

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”.

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers.

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed.

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

 As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.   

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual.

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

.

State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear.

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

 As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting.

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place.

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now.

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

*

Arundhati Roy’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’

Fuente: https://www.ft.com/content/Arundhati Roy

[Publicado 3/abril/2020]