#big mama is not related to the boys in any way but she's rich enough to pay a lawyer to finagle some legal claim to them

[thedawningofthehour]

"Papa, I want to go to school."

"Hush, you can't leave the sewers because my rich and powerful ex-wife wants to take you and spoil you all rotten, and the geneticist who helped me make you also has custody rights for some reason and I committed felony kidnapping by not letting them see you. Now go to sleep in this cardboard box with your brothers, they're looking for daddy in Japan and they'll never guess I'm living underneath your other father's apartment building and stealing his wifi."

AU where they're not even turtles Splinter is just some guy who committed parental kidnapping after a nasty divorce and custody dispute (completely separate from each other) and moved into the sewers because he couldn't afford Manhattan rent prices.

[dancerlittle006]

Can’t Go Home - The Many Adventures of Sammi & Race

First things first, I don’t own anything related to Disney or Newsies. Second of all, this is a continuation of my “Extra Extra Read All About It” story. You don’t necessarily need to read it to understand this one but it might fill in some blanks. 

There’s mentions of cursing, drinking and slapping/punching in this section. This isn’t where I intended to go with this update . . . it just sorta happened! 

For reference: Sami - 17; Ellie - 15; Tommy - 13; Benny - 12; Lizzie - 11; Maisie - 10; and Lucas - 8

November 18, 1918 1:30pm

It was a rare day that he didn’t have anything to do. The kids were all in school and Spot was at work.  After dropping the kids off at school that morning, he decided to walk; no real place to go or people to see, just the sidewalk at his feet and a city to discover. 

As he walked, his thoughts wandered. He and Spot had just celebrated 13 years of marriage. The kids were all growing like weeds - it was fun to sit back and watch them grow.  Ellie and Maisie were both into dancing while Benny was into football; he lived and breathed the sport which turned Spot into a football papa. They did relatively well in school and seemed to enjoy the social part of the day. They had learned about Spot and Race’s past as Newsies and had often negotiated old Newsies stories as bedtime stories. 

After having lunch out, he made his way back to the brownstone to enjoy the silence before the kids came home from school. Walking across the street, Race paused seeing someone sit on the steps of their brownstone. Looking around the street, nothing was out of the ordinary but that figure shouldn’t have been there.  Even after being off the streets for so long, his heightened awareness never really left him. 

“What’s yous doing here?” Race leaned against the brownstone, looking suspiciously at his niece. “Yous supposed to be in school, if Is recall correctly, since yous cousin is there too.” 

Sighing loudly, she lifted her head, eyes red from crying and gave her uncle a look. “I couldn’t go home.” 

Sighing, Race nodded, walking up the steps, he motioned her to follow him. She walked into the house, dropping her bookbag in its normal place before going to sit on the couch. Shutting the door behind him, he took a deep breath and counted to ten before joining her on the couch.

“First things first, are yous okay?” He asked, looking her over. Besides the bruise on her cheek, she looked okay. Her hair was pulled from the neat ponytail she usually wore it in, her clothes a bit roughed out, and her shoe scuffed. “Sammi?” 

He barely caught the small nod she gave him, tears threatening to fall once more. “Do yous wanna talk about it?” 

“I’m sure mama’s already gotten a call about it.” She whispered, tears streaming down her face as Race pulled her into his arms. 

Race agreed, knowing that their phone would probably ring at any moment. “What do yous want me to do?” 

“Can you make me a cup of hot chocolate?” She whispered, as Race dropped a kiss on her forehead before pushing himself off the couch. 

He stopped in their room, grabbing a pair of sweatpants and an oversized shirt. “How about yous go get cleaned up and Is make you that hot chocolate?” 

Walking into the kitchen, he pulled the ingredients out for his somewhat famous hot chocolate. It had quickly become a staple at the Kelly/Higgins-Conlon family get-togethers.  As he stirred the chocolate and the milk together, he knew he should let Kat know Sammi was there. Hearing the bathroom door shut, he quickly picked up the telephone receiver, requesting to be connected to the Kelly Household. After a few rings and no answer, he put the receiver down, knowing that the brownstone would be one of the first places Jack and Kat would look when their daughter didn’t return from school that afternoon. 

Pouring the rich mixture into two mugs, he picked them up, walking into the living room as the bathroom door opened. He bit his lip at the sight in front of him; both the pants and the shirt were way too big for the 17 year old but she looked comfy and more relaxed than when he found her. “Hot Chocolate’s getting cold.” 

She dropped her folded school uniform on top of her school bag before joining him on the couch. Accepting the mug, she wrapped her hands around it in comfort, blowing on it slowly, sighing in relief at the sweet scent. “Thank you.” 

The words came out so quietly that he almost didn’t hear them. “Yous welcome. Now, do you want to talk?” 

“I’d rather only say this once . . .” She looked up from the mug, giving him a small hint of a smile. “But I’m sure I’ll need to repeat it multiple times.”

Race put his mug on the table before holding out a hand to her. It was something they had started when the kids were younger and had something hard to tell one of the adults. They would let the kid squeeze their hands as they told their story; something to occupy them with. 

She slipped her hand into his before sighing. “I hit a boy at school today.” 

“Okay.” He wasn’t expecting that to come out of her mouth. “Does it have something to do with the bruise on yous cheek?” 

She nodded, squeezing his hand. “Yes. There’s a boy who’s been less than gentlemanly to me for the last few weeks. I didn’t think much of it, opting to hang out with Bella and a couple of my other friends.” 

He squeezed her hand back gently, letting her know he was there for her. “He had been saying things; it started off innocently enough - him wanting to go out on a date with me but soon turned creepy, but just saying them. He would tell me that he wanted to take me out, which is flattering, but then it became more stalkerish and weird. He said something about how we should run away in the night. I kept laughing it off or dismissing whatever he was saying. Until yesterday.” 

Tears clouded her eyes. She leaned forward, putting her mug on the table, wrapping her arms around her uncle. “He grabbed my wrist and twisted it. Of course he hasn’t been doing any of the talking or creepiness when any of the teachers are around.” 

Race’s breath wavered as his arms tightened around Sammi’s shoulders. He looked at her left wrist where a very colorful bruise was present. “Can you keep going or do yous want to stop?” 

“I wore a long sleeve dress today, hoping it would fend off any questions about my wrist. He noticed and when the teacher stepped out to get something from the office, he was at my desk. He ran his fingers down my cheek and was mumbling something. I grabbed his wrist and pushed him away but he came back and slapped me. I was stunned but before I knew it I pushed him away before punching him, grabbed my stuff and walked out of the classroom.” She laughed a little. “Thanks for teaching me how to punch.” 

Race sighed, placing a kissing on her forehead. “Yous welcome. Not sure this is what Spot and Is had in mind when we taught yous girls how to punch. Why didn’t yous tell us?” 

“Why would I?” She huffed, shaking her head, tears falling from her eyes. “No one would’ve believed me if I said that this boy was being less than gentlemanly.” 

Race leaned over and tilted Sammi’s chin so she looked up at him. He paused, looking Sammi directly in the eyes. “I would’ve believed you; Spot, your mom, and dad all would’ve believed you.  Your family would believe what you were saying, especially with that wrist and bruise on your cheek.” 

The dam broke with those words, Sammi’s sobbed, burying her head into Race’s chest as he held her close. Biting his lip, he had to hold his anger in as he listened to his niece’s heartbreaking sobs.  He wanted to punch something, get his anger out but this was neither the time nor the place for that. 

He held her until her body went slack. Looking down, he saw that she had fallen asleep. Maneuvering her so that she was laying down on the couch, he threw a blanket over her before walking into the kitchen. He wished it was later in the night so he could have a stiff drink but he had to be level-headed, especially when Jack Kelly found out about this. 

Picking up the telephone receiver, he asked to be connected to The World. From there, he asked for Katherine Kelly and was connected to her desk. “Katherine Kelly?” 

“It’s me.” Race sighed loudly. “I wanted to let yous know that Sammi’s here but you and Jack need to get over here. She’s fine at the moment but yous guys really should get here.” 

“Racetrack.” So many questions she wanted to ask but her voice wavered. “What’s wrong?” 

He shook his head. “She needs to tell yous this. She’s asleep right now but I think you and Jack need to get here. I’ll call the school and have them tell the kids to come here instead of your house.” 

After reassuring her Sammi was fine, he hung up the phone before calling the schools, getting a message to the kids to come to the Higgins-Conlon household. The final call he made was to Spot. “Well this is a pleasant surprise; usually Is don’t hear from you during the day. What’s wrong? Is it the kids?” 

“The kids are fine. It’s Sammi. Any chance yous can come home early tonight?” Race felt like he had aged several years in the last hour. 

Spot knew that Race wouldn’t ask that if it wasn’t important. “Sure. Let me finish this one thing and Is be home. Do yous need me to get the kids?” 

“Is called the school letting them all know to come here and not the Kelly Household.” Race said. They quickly said their goodbyes before hanging up the phone. 

Walking into the living room, he sat in their decorated chair, watching Sammi sleep.  He was pissed off that a little jerk touched Sammi. He had the audacity to lay a hand on her. This little punk was going to pay; whether that was by his hand, Jack’s hand or Spot’s hand, he was going to pay.  He held his breath, watching Sammi shift on the couch but relaxed as she remained asleep. 

He was soon lost in his thoughts. It seemed like yesterday he had held the girl laying on the couch for the first time. He had watched her grow, becoming more independent and confident as she made her way through school and becoming a pretty great older sister to her own siblings as well as his children. She was respectful but firm in her intentions of following in her mom’s footsteps in becoming a journalist, one her father found hilarious. 

Race was knocked from his thoughts as Sammi sat straight up on the couch, sobbing hysterically. He leapt from the chair before going to sit beside her on the couch, pulling her into his arm as one hand ran up and down her back in comfort. “You’re okay, Sammi. You’re safe.” 

Her chest heaved as she tried to control her crying. She sobbed against Race’s chest as he started humming and running his hand up and down her back. The opening of the front door didn’t deter his attention from the girl in his arms. “Shhhh . . . Sammi, yous got to calm down. It’s okay, you’re safe, baby girl. Yous safe.” 

Jack and Kat made their presence noticed by walking quietly into the room. Kat’s eyes were wide as Jack held her hand tightly as they took in the scene of Sammi in Race’s arms, hysterically crying. Sitting on the opposite couch, they watched quietly. Race caught Kat’s eye and smiled sympathetically. “Hey, Sammi. Yous parents are here.” 

She nodded in acknowledgement, the sobbing calming down some as she regained her breath. “Shhh don’t talk . . . just focus on calmin’ down. Yous doing good, Sammi.” 

The room was quiet, except for the occasional hiccup or sniffle from Sammi. She lifted her head up, trying to give her parents a small smile as she wiped her face with the t-shirt.  Sighing, she pushed her hair back and pushed off Race’s chest. “Thank you, Uncle Race.” “You’re welcome. How about you go wash your face?” He suggested, giving her a look. 

Sammi hesitated, biting her lip. “Will you tell them?” 

“If yous want me to.” He suggested, not knowing if she could retell the story again. 

She held out her hand as he slipped his into hers and squeezed it. “Please?” 

Nodding, he watched her stand, getting her balance, before walking into the bathroom and shutting the door. Hearing the door click, he sighed, running his hand through his hair before looking at his brother and sister-in-law. “Hi.” 

“What was that?” Jack asked, cutting to the chase of why his oldest daughter was crying hysterically a few moments ago.

Race rubbed his hands on his jeans as he watched the two of them. “I think that was a reaction to a nightmare.”

“What happened, Race?” Kat asked, lacing her hands with Jack’s. “You were pretty vague on the phone.” 

The opening of the door caught all of their attention. Spot was slipping through the door before kicking his shoes off. “What’s wrong?” 

“Is just telling Jack and Kat. Come sit.” Race said patting the couch. He waited until Spot was seated before starting. “I had the day off and got home about 1:30pm. Sammi was sitting on the front steps, eyes red from crying and said something about not being able to go home. I brought her in and she explained it all to me.” 

Giving Spot and Jack a look, he paused. “This isn’t going to be easy to tell you but you need to be calm for that girl in the bathroom. She’s fragile right now, alright?” 

Spot and Jack looked at one another before looking at Race. “That doesn’t sound good.” 

“You’re gonna be pissed as hell . . . hell I’m pissed but being that upset isn’t going to be beneficial for Sammi.” Race sighed, shaking his head. “I need you to be as calm as you can be before I tell you this.”

Jack and Spot both agreed before motioning Race to continue. “Alright. There’s a boy at school that has been less than gentlemanly to her - she said that it started off by him telling her stuff and telling her he wants to take her out. She said that it was all talk before it got a bit creepy. She’s been ignoring him and laughing it off. Yesterday, it got physical - he grabbed her left wrist and twisted around. She hid it because she didn’t think anyone would believe her.” He paused, watching Jack and Spot start pacing the living room, trying to reign in their anger. Race ignored them for a moment, opting to look at Kat only. “Today, he slapped her and she punched him, leaving the classroom and school before coming here.” 

Kat covered her mouth, tears in her eyes as she took in Sammi’s story. Pushing herself off the couch, she walked to the bathroom where Sammi was. Knocking gently, she turned the handle, pushing open the door as Sammi flew into her arms, crying. “I’m so sorry, mama.” 

“Shhhhhh . . . . you have nothing to apologize for, Sammi. Race just told us that you fought back.” Running her hand through her hair, Kat pushed her own anger away as she consoled her daughter. “I’m so proud of you Samantha Anne.” 

Pulling back, Kat took that moment to really look at her daughter. She noticed the two bruises and ran her fingers over both of them gently. “I’m sorry that you were afraid of speaking up because no one would believe you.” 

Sammi shrugged, biting her lip. “Sammi, you’ve got three fully pissed off angry men ready to fight your battle for you in that living room. This isn’t going away and you’re going to be fine. I’m so sorry this happened to you baby girl.” 

“Can we go back to the living room?” She asked, wiping away the tears that had streaked down her cheeks, taking a deep breath. 

“Wash your face, first then we’ll go back out.” Kat said, giving her a daughter a kiss on the forehead, leaning against the door with a sigh. 

Meanwhile In the Living Room

Watching Kat leave the room, Race looked over his shoulder at Jack and Spot, who both were pissed off, pacing the room angrily. Both of them had similar anger mechanisms, pacing and cursing under their breaths. Sighing, he leaned back on the couch. His heart broke again for the second time as he thought about Sammi, her sobs echoing in his head. 

“What do we do?” He was brought out of his thoughts by Spot’s question. 

Jack looked between his brother and brother-in-law with a mixture of anger and worry across his face. Race looked at the two men he admired and loved more than anything else in the world. “I have been asking myself that question for the last hour. I have no more answers than you do.” 

“How? Why?” Jack’s brain was in overdrive as he tried to process everything that he had heard in the last 20 minutes. “Why Sammi?” 

Race stood, putting his hand on Jack’s arm. “You’ll drive yourself crazy the more you question it. It happened, wes got a girl that we need to help move on from this.  Sammi’s a hella lot  stronger than wes give her credit for. She fought back, Jackie. She punched him.” 

“But she should’ve never had to.” Jack cried, looking at Race. “She’s just a girl.” 

And with that, Jack collapsed into Race’s arms, tears streaming down his face, his resolve breaking. Race fell onto the couch with Jack on top of him, crying, as Spot sat next to him. Race ran a hand through Jack’s hair as he calmed himself down. The three men were quiet, each lost in their own thoughts. 

“For the first time in a long time, I don’t know what to do.” Jack sighed, clearing his throat and rubbing at his cheeks. “What do we do next?” 

“We love her.” Spot whispered. “We let her know that we’re here for her and will do anything to make sure she’s safe.” 

Race and Jack both nodded, taking in Spot’s words. “Do we tell the kids?” 

“Theys gonna know something’s up.” Spot said, considering Race’s question. “Sammi has to be the one to decide what and how much wes tell them.” 

Hearing the bathroom door open, they all looked up as Kat led Sammi back into the living room. All three stood, waiting for Sammi to make the first move as not to spook her. Rushing into Jack’s arms, she hugged him tight as his arms wrapped around her. They could hear her cries, as he gently whispered in her hair. Race walked over to Kat, pulling her into a hug. “Thank you.” 

“Yous welcome, Kat. I just loved her and was here for her.” Race murmured. “She's the one who deserves all the credit. She gets her strength from you and Jack.” 

Pulling back, Kat watched her daughter hug Spot as he spoke gently with her. Jack soon joined them, pulling Race into a hug. “Thank you Race.” 

“Yous would've done the same with any of my kids.” Race shrugged. “Now wes gotta figure out what to do.” 

Jack pulled Kat into a hug as Sammi hugged Race, a hint of a smile on her face. “I know you’ve heard it but thank you. Thank you for talking with me and comforting me.” 

“Yous and me are thick as thieves, I hope that never changes.” He grinned at her. “Nows come sit, wes need to figure out what we’re going to do.” 

Sammi went and sat between her parents on the couch as Race and Spot took the other couch. “So what do we do?” 

Sammi looked between her parents and her uncles, lacing her fingers with her mom’s. “We need to get a meeting with your school, tell them what’s been happening. Then you need to decide if you want to go back to school or go to a different school.” 

She nodded, taking in her mom’s words. “I guess it all depends on what the school is going to do.” 

Kat hugged her close. “We’ll go to the school tomorrow. You can come with us or stay at home.” 

“Or you could come here.” Race offered, knowing he wasn’t working until later in the afternoon. 

Sammi smiled. “Here. Don’t really want to be alone.” 

Kat nodded. “Now, it’s 3:30, your siblings and cousins will be here shortly. What do you want to tell them?” 

Sighing, Sammi shook her head. “Can we not tell them anything?” 

“They’re going to know something is wrong, Sam.” Jack said, giving his daughter a look. “We have to tell them something.” 

Taking a deep breath, she looked between her uncles and parents. “Can we just tell them I had a bad day at school?” 

“And the bruise?” Spot asked, looking over at her left wrist. “What do we tell them about that?” 

Cradling her wrist, Sammi looked at it, biting her lip. “I don’t know . . .” 

“We’ll tell them you fell.” Race said, looking at his family. “Simple as that.” 

Sammi nodded. “Thank you. You’re the best uncles and parents a girl could ask for. Just thank you for believing me.” 

“We’ll always believe you, Sammi.” Jack squeezed her hand. “You just have to tell us, any of us. We love you, baby girl, and we’ll always be here for you. We’ve taught you kids that from the beginning and it would be crappy of us, if we turned our backs on you now.” 

Sighing, she nodded. “Can we go home? I just want to go to bed.” 

“How about you and I go home and dad can wait here for your brothers and sister?” Kat suggested as Sammi nodded. 

Hugs were quickly exchanged, Race and Sammi’s hug a little longer than the rest. Race watched them walk out the door, sighing loudly. The house was quiet for all of 10 minutes when the door was thrown open with an excited roar. 

There were many voices, trying to talk over one another as they noticed that Jack, Spot, and Race were all waiting for them in the living room. Luckily, everyone but Ellie didn’t notice the tension in the room. 

“Homework kids?” Race asked, clapping his hands together. Groans were his answer as he ushered them to the table. Spot was busy cutting up apples and smearing them with peanut butter as a snack.  Once the kids were settled, Spot keeping a watchful eye, Race joined Jack in the living room. He saw Ellie sitting on the couch, biting her lip. 

“What’s wrong, bug?” Race asked, sitting next to her, pulling her to his side. 

Looking between her da and uncle, she sighed. “There’s rumors going around school that Sammi punched George. I waited for her after school but she never showed.” 

Jack looked at Race, nodding. “She did. She came here around 1:30. Kat took her back home a little bit ago. She’s shook up but she’s okay.” 

“What’s going to happen?” If Race wasn’t being interrogated by his 15 year old daughter, he probably would have been laughing. 

Jack looked up. “Kat and Is gonna go to the school tomorrow to talk to the principal and sees what’ll happen. But she’s safe now and really upset by what’s happened.” 

Ellie nodded. “Okay.” 

“Did you know, Ellie?” Jack asked, looking at his niece, who’s eyes went wide. “Did you know what George was doing?” 

She shrugged. “Sammi mentioned that a guy was being dumb and talking to her, asking her out. But she said that it wasn’t a big deal. She mostly laughed about it whenever she told me. I didn’t know it was this bad.” 

“None of us did, bug.” Race sighed. “But something’s going to be done about it. The important thing is Sammi’s alright and safe. Go get started on your homework, okay?” 

She nodded, walking into the kitchen to join her siblings and cousins, leaving the two men with their thoughts. “How are you feeling?” 

“Just remembering when the biggest thing we had to worry about was scraped knees and if the kids did their homework.” Jack sighed, shaking his head. “I’m both angry for her and proud of her. She’s a hella kid.” 

Race chuckled. “Of course she is, she’s YOUR kid, Jack. Sammi is all you when we were at the strike. She’s the clone of her father, and that should make YOU hella proud because you did your job.”

“She’s all her mother.” Jack argued. 

Race shrugged, agreeing with that. “True but she’s your kid too and that tenacity and determination is all you, Jack.” 

“Someone swallowed a dictionary.” Jack cracked a small smile, giving his brother a look.

He chuckled. “Nah, it was one of Benny’s vocabulary words a few weeks back. It sounded like a cool word so Is kept it in my back pocket.” 

Jack shook his head. “I should probably grab my crew and head home. Kat’s going to want to have everyone close tonight.” 

Race nodded, pushing himself off the couch. “Let us know if there’s anything we can do.” “You’ve already done enough. I really don’t know how to thank you.” Jack weakly told him, giving him a look.  “But we will.” 

Pulling Race into a hug, Jack slapped his back a couple of times in appreciation.  Gathering his crew, Jack made haste and got the three kids shuffled out the door. His head was otherwise occupied as he walked home. Kat, thank goodness, had dinner ready and awaiting on the table as they stepped in the door. “Sammi in her room?” 

Kat nodded, taking a bowl out of the oven, walking over to the table. “She changed into pajamas as soon as we got home and she’s been in there reading. I brought her a plate and she was eating as you came in the door.” 

They managed to settle down the kids, getting them to eat and talk about their days. No one mentioned Sammi, as Spot had told them she had a horrible day at school and she would be in bed by the time they got home. 

The kids didn’t put up much of a fuss when Kat announced it was bedtime. Baths were taken and hair comb before stories were ready and kids ushered to bed. Jack knocked quietly on Sammi’s door, pushing it open gently. “Just wanted to check on you kiddo.” 

“I’m alright dad.” She sighed, bookmarking her page. “Today was just awful.” 

Leaning against the door, Jack nodded. “But it’s over and in the past. You can start to move on from it.” 

“Hey dad?” Sammi called, giving him a look. “Would it be okay if I come to the school with yous and mom tomorrow?” 

Jack was slightly stunned by her question but mostly proud.  “Yous sure about that?” 

“I can’t let George get the best of me.” She nodded. “I’m sure Ellie talked to you about it . . . I wouldn’t be shocked if the entire school didn’t know what went down. I have to go back there and walk in with my head held high.” 

Jack pushed off the door, walking to sit on the corner of her bed. “Ellie did mention that the school knows and of course you can come with us. I’m so damn proud of you Samantha Anne. Yous make your mom and me so proud of you.” 

“Thanks dad.” She leaned into him as he gave her a half hug. “I love you and thank you for today. I know that couldn’t have been easy to hear but you held it in.” 

“I cried like a baby when you and yous mom was in the bathroom.” He scoffed, leaning over and kissing her forehead. “But I love yous, Sammi and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, your mom, or your brothers and sister.” 

“You don’t have to be a tough guy, dad.” She grinned at him, putting her book on the bedside table. 

He laughed. “I’ve got a reputation to uphold, Sammi.”

“That went out the window a long time ago, dad.” She rolled her eyes, leaning over and kissing his cheek. “Please don’t worry . . . I’ll be alright.” 

He pulled the covers over her, leaning over and kissing her forehead. “I know you will be but mom, your siblings, and I are here if you need us. Your uncles and cousins as well.” 

“I know. Thanks.” She snuggled down into her cover, a yawn escaping her mouth as her eyes fluttered. 

“Try to get some sleep tonight, kiddo. I love you.” Jack walked to the door, shutting off the lights. “Night Sammi.” 

“Night dad.” Shutting the door behind him, he made his way to each of the kids’ rooms, saying goodnight to them before walking into his and Kat’s room. She was taking her hair out of the up-do she had. He quickly grabbed his night clothes, changing before collapsing onto the bed with a sigh. 

“How’s our girl?” Kat asked, climbing into bed with a sigh.

Opening his arms, Kat took the opportunity to snuggle into his chest. “She’s a hella lot stronger than she has every right to be. She was reassuring me that she’s okay. Also, she wants to go tomorrow.” 

“She does?” Kat’s voice was full of surprise. 

Jack nodded. “She said she has to walk into that school with her head held high. She knows that the entire school knows about what happened today and she has to prove that it hasn’t shaken her.” 

“Damn.” Kat shook her head. “I’m not sure I would’ve been that brave at her age.” 

Jack chuckled. “Is was but only because I had to be.” 

“I know that Sammi usually gets compared to me but today, she was all you, Jack.” Kat lifted her head, looking up at him. He could only nod as his throat tightened with emotion. He placed a kiss on her head, as she laced their fingers together. “I love you, Jack.” 

“Love you too, Kat.” He whispered. “Lets try to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.” 

The Next Morning

To say the morning was anything but smooth, would be an understatement. Tensions were high in the house but as soon as they left the house to head to the school, that tension was lifted and determination settled in. Jack and Kat held hands as Sammi walked beside them into the school. Making their way to the office, Jack asked to speak to the principal. 

Mr Johnson made his way out of the office, his eyes widening when he saw who was standing in the middle of the office. He knew exactly who Mr. and Mrs Kelly were and their prominence in the city. And it didn’t escape him that they were the daughter and son-in-law of a Mr. Joseph Pultizer. 

“Mr. and Mrs. Kelly, Samantha, how can I help you today?” He made his presence known, holding his hand out for Jack to shake. 

“Is there somewhere private we can speak?” Jack asked, shaking his hand. “There’s an issue that we need to discuss.” 

Leading them into his office, he shut the door behind him, motioning them to sit in the chairs. Sammi and Kat both sat, while Jack stood behind Sammi. “How can I help?” 

Kat and Jack looked at Sammi. Jack put a hand on her shoulder while Kat held her hand out for Sammi to take. Taking a deep breath, Sammi proceeded to tell Mr. Johnson what had happened the previous weeks and days. Jack kept his eye on Mr. Johnson, watching his face for any sign of how the man would react. 

As Sammi finished, Mr Johnson looked at the family. “How would you like the school to proceed, Samantha?” 

She looked up at her dad before looking at Kat. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I’m not sure, to be honest. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.” 

“If I may.” Kat started, looking at her daughter as Sammi nodded. “We want Sammi to feel safe going to school. If this young man is still in school, Sammi won’t be safe. It might be in the best interest of all parties involved, if this young man is expelled from school. His behavior is appalling and I would be more upset for this to happen to any other student in this school.” 

Mr Johnson looked at them. “Well I will need to speak with the young man’s parents along with his and Sammi’s teachers.”

“Until that happens, Sammi will not be present in school. Please inform her teachers and you can give her schoolwork to Eleanor Higgins-Conlon.” Kat’s eyes fired with anger. “I will not subject my daughter to this young man. And if need be, we will remove her from this school and transfer to another school.” 

“I think we’re done here.” Kat stood up, motioning Sammi and Jack to join her. “Good day, Mr. Johnson.” 

Walking out of the office, she was upset and frustrated. She huffed until they were outside of the school, walking down the sidewalk. “Kat, Katherine!” 

She stopped hands on her hips, sighing loudly. “What?” “You alright?” Jack asked, smirking, as he looked between his wife and Sammi. 

Sighing, she shook her head. “He has to talk to this young man’s parents before he decides anything. He’s going to sit there and act like nothing has happened. I’m sorry Sammi.” 

“Mom, it’s okay.” She said, hugging her mom. “It’s not a closed door yet.”

Kat chuckled. “We do have something up our sleeves.” 

Jack looked between two of the most important women in his life. “Do I dare ask?” 

“Would you rather know now or later?” Kat asked, Sammi grinning with her mom. 

Jack shrugged. “Is it legal?” 

“As legal as it can be.” Kat confirmed, grinning. 

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Jack groaned. “Just tell me.” 

“We have a lawyer at The World, who would love to get his hands on Sammi’s school.” Kat’s eyes lit up at the thought. “If this young man isn’t expelled from the school, then we can leverage the lawyer.” 

Jack’s eyes lit up, matching his wife and daughter’s. “You’re both geniuses.” 

“Naturally.” Kat and Sammi both laughed, shaking their heads. 

“Shall we head home?” Jack asked, knowing full well that Race would meet them at the house to learn about the morning. 

It would be a wait and see game with the school but right now, all he could think is that Sammi was safe, laughing with them, and okay in this moment. There would be tough days ahead but as long as his family was safe, Jack couldn’t really complain.  

5900 words written in about 6 hours. I hope you enjoy this latest update! Feedback is always appreciated!! 

[thespiralgrimoire]

I. NEED. TO. LEARN. MORE. ABOUT. FERRO's. UNIVERSE. Like are you kidding me? Fuego and Leo pulled a coup and killed every non-vermillion??! that's, wow, that's rich!! What's the heck is wrong with /THAT/ timeline? What about Asta's story there? the elves? the devils? Fuego really killed everyone? including NOZEL? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!

OH MY GOD ANON YOU’VE MADE MY ENTIRE DAY

HONESTLY this AU is underdeveloped because of the way it came to fruition in the first place, so nothing would make me happier but to make it a collaborative fandom project but here’s everything I’ve got on it

Under a Read More because it might get lengthy

First, a disclaimer: This AU was born out of a dream. I had a dream about a plucky teenager participating in a Magic Knight’s exam that was designed more like The Hunger Games, and when I woke up, I said to myself, I gotta get in on that. So that’s why some of the details of this AU are a little fucky. Dream logic.

Now, the inciting event for this AU is twofold: First, Acier lives. SECOND, her sister, Kirsch and Mimosa’s mother, dies giving birth to Mimosa.

Sister’s death completely breaks down any bond between the Vermillions and the Silvas. It’s just. Messy. A lot of finger pointing, a lot of people not handling things well. Because while the Silvas were taught from a young age to bottle up their feelings, Vermillions tend to use their feelings as a weapon. And relations go south fast.

Acier has still been training Meoroleona. Nozel and Fuegoleon have still been rivals. But when this happens, everyone is forced to pick a side. Acier and Meoroleona don’t end their relationship on bad terms, but they do end it. Nozel and Fuegoleon’s relationship swiftly turns hostile. In hindsight, nobody is happy about the way things went down, but at this point there’s a No Man’s Land to civility that nobody is willing to cross, and nobody will cross it.

The Vermillions have the roughest time with this, but unlike the way the Silvas handled Noelle, nobody actually blames Mimosa for her mother’s death. They turn their grief into what they see as righteous fury and determine to turn this into a “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” situation. This takes different forms over the years, but what basically happens is that everyone internalizes these feelings so deeply that while they all grow stronger, they also sort of grow apart.

Fuegoleon and Meoroleona have a blowout that completely shakes House Vermillion, and when Meoroleona leaves, she vows to never come back. No one believes that she would actually stay away, what with how close Fuego and Meoro were as kids, but when she leaves, she leaves. They see her once a year TOPS, and it’s never for a happy reason.

Fuegoleon, who has let his anger completely isolate him from the rest of his family, throws himself into being the Crimson Lion King, and while he’s incredibly successful, he loses parts of himself along the way. His ambitions override his caring nature and his inclination to share his strengths with others, and he becomes cold and determined, with a methodical outlook on relationships.

Leopold doesn’t become so callous-- he wasn’t old enough to remember his aunt’s death, he just had to grow up in the aftermath of it --but he follows in his brother’s footsteps, and while he’s not as mean about the way he does it, he’s not afraid to make some harsh decisions if it means being the best.

Kirsch and Mimosa decide that the best way to deal with this is to keep their heads down. Kirsch is fiercely protective of his little sister, because even though nobody is blaming Mimosa, he can’t shake the feeling that she may still have a target on her back. This makes Mimosa jumpy and clingy, never really developing the confidence to be her own person. While she can’t really nail down a particular reason for it, she’s scared of Fuegoleon and doesn’t trust Leopold. She can’t help but wonder how her cousins in House Silva are doing, but knows that all hell would break loose if she actually sought them out, so she feels constantly stuck between a rock and a hard place; the living embodiment of a schism between the royal houses.

The Silvas, on the other hand, go the other direction. Acier is still here, and she’s not letting her family rip itself apart like it did in canon. She remains the captain of the Silver Eagles and well-respected. Her kids have an even easier ride to the top with her still there to pave the way. She misses Meoroleona terribly. She knows that none of this was fair to any of them, and losing her sister AND her star pupil is a lot to work through. She keeps thinking that eventually she’ll get a letter or a surprise visit from the Undefeated Lioness, but she never does.

Nozel is genuinely heartbroken to have lost his rival and best friend, and, consequently, be left in the dust when he can’t keep up with Fuegoleon’s ambition, but he’s still got his mother and three little siblings, so they become his whole life. Without Fuegoleon’s rivalry to spur him on, he becomes good but not great, and is content to coast. He’s a mama’s boy, and as long as his mother is satisfied, he’d rather read and organize missions than go on them. On the bright side, he doesn’t deal with 90% of the stress he deals with in the canon universe. He’s actually pretty happy most of the time.

Nebra ends up being the classic middle sibling. Her magic is nothing special, but she’s a Silva, so she can go with the flow and still come out looking a little better than everyone else. While Nozel would rather spend time with books and Solid and Noelle would rather spend time with each other, she’s a drifter; she can hang with any of her siblings, or her mother, but she’s no one’s first pick. It doesn’t really bother her all that much unless she feels genuinely left out, and Mom never forgets about her, so it’s all good.

Solid and Noelle are thick as thieves, and the Silver Eagles’ superstars. They bring out the worst of each other and have a great time doing it. They’re a dynamic duo on the battle field and harbor unfathomable chaotic energy off of it. Getting sucked into their gravitational pull is dangerous, so Nebra, Nozel, and Acier tread lightly, lest they get dragged into, or end up the victim of their shenanigans. Of all combinations of Silva duos, they are by far the closest. Totally ride or die. That doesn’t mean that they don’t drive each other absolutely batshit crazy, and have some HUGE blowouts that waterlog half the castle, but that’s what siblings do. The nice thing about having each other is that neither of them end up in their siblings’ or mother’s shadows. The not nice thing about that is that they’re just. Little shits. Imagine Noelle acting the way she does in the beginning of the series, but being sincere about it. Imagine Solid acting the way he does, except he’s never checking to see if he’s got his siblings’ approval. Now imagine them patting each other on the back for acting like that. Yikes.

Then Ferro comes along. He’s the result of Solid knocking up his unnamed noble girlfriend when he’s 16-17. Acier is PISSED. All the other Silvas are scandalized. Solid is in big trouble. Acier suspends him from the Silver Eagles while she does damage control. What she eventually ends up doing is paying the girl off, and when the baby is born, she takes him into House Silva to raise him in secret. Nobody outside House Silva ever knows about him. He is House Silva’s best kept secret. This is an important detail.

The coup comes together. Fuegoleon has been working on this plan for a long time. Years. Leopold is on board, because Leopold would follow him off a cliff. But he’s also scared shitless. This is a much bigger deal than stepping on a few comrades to rise through the ranks. He slips a little. Kirsch catches wind of the plan. He gets in Leo’s and Fuego’s ear to remind them, hey, we’re Vermillions, too. So we’re cool, right?

Yeah, they’re cool. All they have to do is help their cousins kill everyone whose last name isn’t Vermillion. Kirsch thinks this is a pretty good deal to save him and his sister. Mimosa will later have her doubts, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Meoroleona was invited, but never shows up.

We’re about at the beginning of the show when the coup begins. I don’t have a good reason that it goes off as smoothly as it does. But everyone in Houses Kira and Silva dies, except Acier and Ferro. Ferro, now two, manages to watch his entire family get bodied without getting a scratch on him, because no one anticipated him being there. Acier is only able to defend herself and him before sneaking away.

Acier and Ferro flee to the Forbidden Realm, to a little town in bumfuck nowhere, to hide. They are never discovered by the Vermillions.

Fuegoleon becomes the Clover King. As far as they can tell, the coup is 100% successful. But the thing about fire is that it’s super useful for making people really dead, but when people are dying in heaps and being burned to ash it’s kind of hard to count how many bodies you’ve got. They don’t realize that they’re one short. With no one to stand in their way, Fuegoleon crowns himself Clover King. He disbands the Silver Eagles, and within the next few years, will crown himself Wizard King. It actually becomes pretty easy after Julius nerfs himself, whoops.

Unfortunately, Fuegoleon is starting to unravel. He gained a LOT of enemies doing all this heinous shit, and he is not a beloved king. Leopold is now the head of the Crimson Lion Kings, and he’s reporting back a lot of hostility among the captains. Not that they didn’t expect that, but there’s no way to practice sleeping with one eye open. That’s not to mention that the people are scared and confused, and that doesn’t make for a peaceful kingdom.

Over the course of years, he puts greater and greater restrictions on magic. It starts as permits to use spells in public places and soon grows into a near-total ban on grimoires for anyone outside the magic knights. With absolute power, he can kick people out of the magic knights AND take their grimoires. These rules both ease and exacerbate his growing paranoia. Everyone is pissed, but effectively stripped of their power, there isn’t much they can do about it.

Meanwhile, Acier is raising her grandson as a peasant, but never forgets that they’re royals. She teaches Ferro all of their family history, even though they have to keep it a secret. That gets kind of tricky since Ferro has royal-level magic in the middle of a town of peasants, but, you know, who’s gonna call him on it?

When Ferro is ten, he get recruited by a mysterious hooded figure to train his magic in secret. 90% of his magic training happens in a location he is taken to by a spatial mage. He, along with about a dozen other kids, are trained by a small band of mages who claim to be the resistance. Their goal is simple: Train the next generation of mages to take out the king and restore order to the kingdom. Ferro thinks this is pretty cool, and the honor isn’t lost on him, but he’s mostly glad that he can learn to control his magic in a way that makes his grandmother proud.

By the time Ferro is 15, grimoire ceremonies have been almost completely outlawed, so it’s a big deal when the resistance throws their trainees a grimoire ceremony. Once they’ve received their grimoires, they begin the next leg of their journey: become magic knights.

The Magic Knights Entrance Exam has changed a LOT in the last 15 years. This exam is deadly. In many instances, the point is to kill or be killed. Magic knights are being trained as a military force first and foremost, and their most important feature must be that they take orders unblinkingly. This does not fly with Ferro. While he’s extremely qualified for the position in every other way, he’s too nice to let people die, let alone kill them. He fails the exam. However, some of the other kids he’s trained with make it in.

So he needs a new plan. Spurned on by his grandmother and his teachers through the resistance, he decides to travel the Clover Kingdom. In the midst of his travels, Acier dies. At 20 years old, he is now the last Silva.

This fact makes Ferro pretty fatalistic, and at this point he decides the only rational thing to do is to force an audience with King Fuegoleon. Surely this won’t end in disaster. Definitely won’t be his untimely end by flames.

--

So there are a lot of holes in this AU, because it sprang up around this one character I had a wild dream about. A few mores notes:

Noelle joined the Silver Eagles, if that wasn’t obvious

The Vermillion coup takes place 1-2 years after the start of the show, and I have no explanation for how those events could fit into this timeline. They would definitely look a LOT different, that’s for sure

My notes on this end where they do because at the point where Ferro breaks into the royal castle to force this audience with the king, he actually gets thrown out of this universe and into another. So I guess for all intents and purposes, the Silva line ends for good in this universe

I know exactly where Meoroleona is and what she’s doing

I don’t know where exactly Kirsch and Mimosa are and what they’re doing when they disappear

So that’s all I’ve got! This isn’t a super duper happy AU, and definitely not flattering for everyone, but I was forced to flesh it out because I was told, very emphatically, “Evil Vermillions sexy.” I don’t disagree.

[squidbatts]

i'm not just a boy (i'm a-)

Your name is Fabian Aramais Seacaster, son of Bill and Hallariel Seacaster, grandson of Telemien Lomenelda, co-leader of the Bad Kids, captain of the Aguefort Owlbears, Master of the Hangman, conqueror of Kalvaxis.

or: of fear, duskmoss, and the forest of the nightmare king

((happy fh day, i wrote this while i was crying watching the episode so it Is canon divergent, but i related to fabian’s fears a bit too much to Not write about it))

{ao3}

Your name is Fabian Aramais Seacaster, son of Bill and Hallariel Seacaster, grandson of Telemien Lomenelda, co-leader of the Bad Kids, captain of the Aguefort Owlbears, master of the Hangman, conqueror of Kalvaxis.

You take a deep breath as Gorgug lights up the duskmoss, burying your want to chase after Riz because you think that this is the point of the forest, that this is what’s supposed to happen; it scares you, one of your crew running into the forest alone, even more than it scared you when Ragh disappeared. You think that worrying about Riz or Gorgug or Fig or Adaine or Kristen more than your other friends, the hirelings that you dragged on this quest with you, might make you a bad person. You can’t particularly find it in yourself to care.

You feel the smoke settle in your lungs, the fullness of it filling your chest. You hold it in, closing your eyes almost reflexively as it burns in your throat. Something inside you, base and afraid, remembers dragon fire on prom night, the feel of Adaine shaking against your back as you try to outrun Him on the Hangman. You shake the thoughts out of your head and breathe out.

Your name is Fabian Aramais Seacaster, son of Bill and Hallariel Seacaster, grandson of Telemien Lomenelda, co-leader of the Bad Kids, captain of the Aguefort Owlbears, Master of the Hangman.

You take another breath in, looking at your friends around you. Their presence is comforting, even though you can nearly feel the air between you all thrumming with nerves.

This summer, when Fig and Gorgug were on tour and Riz was doing detective stuff with the Elmville police and Adaine was working through things with Jawbone, you spent a lot of time alone, and then, a lot of time with the Hangman. You rode around on him to get information about Aelwen and to set up a crew, obviously, but even besides that, there was a lot of free time that led to you jumping on him and going. Going to half-pipes and highways, to bank around sharp corners and through narrow alleyways, to feel the wind on your face as you let your motorcycle run wild; going fast enough that your loneliness and your stress and your worries about your papa couldn’t catch you.

It was a summer of only you, escaping with the Hangman every second that you weren’t training with your mama. Just a fighter and his demonic mount.

You think, as you breathe out, that it suited you, honestly. You still would rather not be alone. 

Your name is Fabian Aramais Seacaster, son of Bill and Hallariel Seacaster, grandson of Telemien Lomenelda, co-leader of the Bad Kids, captain of the Augefort Owlbears.

Ragh calls you “his QB” sometimes.

You know that’s what he called Dayne, you heard him yell it in the halls often enough to recognize it. You also know that it should unsettle you, that you should ask Ragh to stop or remind him that Dayne fucking Blayde was a douchebag and that you deserve your own moniker, unsullied by having belonged to him as well. You hope that you’re not becoming like Dayne, apathetic and cruel in turns, making people around you hide themselves in order to avoid your ire. It’s a terrifying idea, to become a nightmare creature with blank scarecrow eyes and a cold, shriveled heart.

Still, there’s something about Ragh being so excited that makes you keep all these worries deep inside.

You take a deep breath, feeling your ribs move as your lungs expand. You know that you’ll let Ragh keep calling you his.

Your name is Fabian Aramais Seacaster, son of Bill and Hallariel Seacaster, grandson of Telemien Lomenelda, co-leader of the Bad Kids.

You’re not the boss of the Bad Kids. You're all "co-leaders," really, and you make decisions together, for the best of the group. It works best this way, you think. The Bad Kids, your friends, aren’t afraid of you like your papa’s crew was afraid of him, not even a bit. You inhale and remember toddling around the original Hangman, a tiny half-elf with a too-big sword and a sharp need to be great enough for his papa’s legend. The crew smiled after you, but none of them ever got too close for fear of your papa’s mercurial moods.

It was a weird childhood, being the only kid on a ship of pirates, surrounded only by potential playmates that were decades older than you and the unforgiving sea.

In retrospect, you decide that you don’t like to think about it, actually. The past is best left in the past, isn't it?

Fig looks at all of you with dilated pupils and says that she’s going to cast a spell, a third-level Fear to help you all reach the center of the forest just a bit faster. Your hand shakes as you take off your father’s eyepatch and purposefully fail your saving throw. You exhale. You trust the rest of the Bad Kids implicitly.

Your name is Fabian Aramais Seacaster, son of Bill and Hallariel Seacaster, grandson of Telemien Lomenelda.

William Seacaster didn’t have any parents.

Or, well, that’s not true, you know that’s not true, because surely he had someone once upon a time, but your father never talked about his own parents.

In the distance, what feels like miles away, Gorgug says something about being afraid and coming for Kristen. You chant along, barely registering the words that you’re saying as you think about how your mama didn’t ever talk about her family either, really, besides one day when she looked at you, eyes strangely clear even as she took a deep gulp of her wine, and said “My father would love to meet you.”

She never introduced you to him back then, landlocked as the forests of the Lomenelda are; the Hangman went many places in your youth, but the Seacaster family wandered only the seas of Spyre, your ship going where the tide and the whispers of riches took you. Once, you thought you saw your mama twisting and twirling on the deck, spinning herself into a tornado under the pale light of the moon. Her hands opened and closed, clutching for something beyond the reach of even a woman as well connected as the beloved wife of the feared pirate Bill Seacaster. You feel like you were never meant to see her like that, but you still can’t keep the image out of your head in quiet, dark moments.

Your name is Fabian Aramais Seacaster, son of Bill and Hallariel Seacaster.

Your parents love you.

You’re certain of that, you know that they’ve said it, that you’re their darling boy, that your mama is trying and your papa is dead and your mom is-

Wait. That’s not right.

Your mama is trying, your papa is dead, and Cathilda has always been there for you. Cathilda will always be there for you. You have a father and a mother and a Maid, that’s more than enough, as long as you have them. None of them are in this forest, confusing and dark, with you, though.

You take a deep breath in, the woodsy air filling your body. You look down at yourself, how you fade in and out of visibility. You watch as Adaine disappears between one blink and the next, as Fig tells Gorgug, “We need to find Adaine and Riz and Kristen” and doesn’t mention you at all.

When your hand goes through Gorgug’s shoulder, it’s almost a relief.

Your name is Fabian Aramais Seacaster.

You- You have a family. You have friends. You’re pretty sure that both of these statements are true.

You go to school, probably, unless… unless you live in this forest, in this grim place. You can’t imagine that there’s a school in here and, if you live here, then you must not go to school. Something, in the back of your mind, says that you don’t belong here, but you can’t remember anything before this, so you’re fairly certain that this is your world: you and the grass and the trees, you and the forest, you and nothing.

You take a seat on the cold ground as the world spins around you. You don’t think that the grass even bends against your weight.

Your name is…

Uh.

You know this. This is an easy one. Your name is...

It’s-

Fuck.

You’re-

You're... scared. It comes on you, suddenly, between one breath and the next, and you are so, so scared, more afraid than you ever have been. You don’t really remember being afraid, before, but you know this fear that holds tight to something in your chest is worse than anything you’ve ever felt before, and you hate it. You don’t know why and you don’t know how to stop it. You only know that it’s awful, terrible, and that you must feel it.

You are in a forest. The light is dim and the edges of the path are blurred by overgrown plants. You do not know your own name. You think you must have a name; everyone does, you know that at least.

You are sure you have a name.

You’re also sure, as you look at the blurred and pale outline of your own form, it probably doesn’t matter much anymore, to anyone.

[lifeawoke]

ramble on about our fave's kid(s) please

if they had a kid ask meme    -    open    ! 

i WILL and i will do it for all of them because i love the bezukhovs very much.

name: marya “masha” pyotrovna bezukhova (honestly should just be bezohova in my opinion but whatever)

gender: female

general appearance: dark hair, dark eyes, tanned skin. not particularly special looking, like both her parents honestly. nose that goes right down and ends with a curve rather than a point. 3a hair, never a hair out of place (thanks aunt marya). a little tall for a girl, average weight for her height. 

personality: marya had a lot more say in masha’s raising so she takes after her a little bit. also, she’s the eldest of the bezukhovs, so she’s more strict and responsible than her siblings. she’s religious, not to the same point as marya, but where her dad’s a spiritual religious person & her mom’s a church-going, pray when something bad happens/you want something religious person, she’s more of both. not very artistic but smart and practical. knows a lot about politics from her dad. caring & protective, especially of her younger siblings. not soft spoken but not loud like her parents might be. will stand her ground though. more of an ambivert than anything, appreciates silence though. i love her

special talents: is the only one of the rostov-bezukhov kids to remember any english & often translates things, mostly political articles, for her parents/family.

who they like better: pierre, he’s a little more serious than natasha. but if she had to choose anyone ever it would be aunt marya or grandma natalya even.

who they take after more: pierre. facts. i kinda explained it earlier. 

personal head canon: marya, like her aunt, is a lot like sonya. she has the most potential/reason to marry up or rich and leave the family, maybe even travel, but is far too dedicated to her family to leave before the youngest are grown up.

face claim: i hate this no

next kid !

name: elizaveta “lisa” pyotrovna bezukhova 

gender: female

general appearance: a bit of an oddball, light brown hair, hazel, eyes, tanned skin. looks a lot like pierre, despite being a short little thing like natasha. has long arms though, something you wouldn’t really notice unless she points it out (and she will point it out to complain about them). a big mouth like natasha and more brown-ish lips, which she also hates. lisa also has “curly” hair, although its more of a wave so maybe 2b-2c. it suits her well enough, considering hair is mostly pulled back in her generation/time. a lil thicca than the rest of the litter. chubby cheeks that suit her round face. i’m kinda thinking a half-guatamalen e.liza s.canlen.

personality: was raised with a lot more freedom than masha, so a little less prim and proper. this was kinda the point where nat & pierre already knew they were gonna end up popping out kids the way disney pops out remakes so they kind of just went with the flow and got a lot more.. parenty with lisa. this didn’t mean much. she’s affectionate like natasha and passionate like pierre. doesn’t share his interests, though; lisa’s more of an athletic type. is a big complainer, which is sometimes endearing but less so the older she gets. fairly feminine but doesn’t have this obsession with boys and marriage the way her mother did and the way that girls were expected to. gets along well with her sister. more of an extrovert. 

special talents: she’s an excellent horse rider, also says fuck side saddles because she heard a queen in denmark did it once and she’s only gotten better since. 

who they like better: she’s freest around pierre & she loves that but she relates most to natasha, so it’s 45/55 tie honestly.

who they take after more: natasha; they both like riding (lisa more than nat) and both have personalities that demand to be seen in a mostly endearing way. 

personal head canon: growing up lisa was probably closest to nikolai andreyevich, and you can see even as they grow up how close they are. there are even moments when lisa goes to coco before she goes to her own sister about something. it scares some guys off as lisa gets older but she doesn’t really mind.

face claim: if e.liza s.canlen was half gutamalen, i’d say her

the boy !!

name: pyotr “petya” pyotrovich bezukhov

gender: male

general appearance: okay you know o.scar i.saac? imagine him young, tall, and SKINNY. except not when he’s young, he’s a chubby kid and it’s the cutest thing. some pictures for reference. he also is p confident looking, if that makes sense. maybe not the long hair but maybe when he’s younger? 

personality: mirrors his namesake a lot. young kid that’s just so weirdly mature it’s like... who are your parents bc it’s definitely not nat & pierre. except it is. he gets a lot of extra love from natasha who has been wanting a boy for so long so she could name him after petya. he’s a mama’s boy, #respectwomen, an intellectual like his dad. has a lot of the same problems as his dad in his youth– indecisive & sometimes hedonistic. i mean he grew up rich it does things to you. but i love him dearly. and he does find his purpose earlier than pierre did, finds love in government stuff, which he half gets from his dad and half from his older sister, who cared a  l o t for him. is super close with marya, gets along well with lisa. he isn’t very sentimental though, although he has a soft side for his mom and eldest sister, he can be too objective for some people. an introvert but not shy.

special talents: he can knock out a novel a day if he wants to; his attention span is a mile long

who they like better: oh natasha. she loves that kid & he loves her

who they take after more: pierre ! petya admires pierre for sure and i can imagine pierre feels a lil more comfortable teaching his son about puberty nd sex and stuff than he does his daughter so i imagine they speak freely to each other

personal head canon: petya was even going to run off into the army like petya ilyich without knowing that his uncle did the same thing, but natasha caught him and explained to him what happened to her brother & he’s been jaded by the idea of fighting in a war ever since.

face claim: o.scar i.saac but half russian bhsbdj

the last one! in my head they have a lot more but we shall discuss them at a different time. 

name: yeva “yevochka” pyotrovna bezukhova

gender: female

general appearance: an oddball again, but less so. dark brown eyes and straight blonde hair. a skinny, long face and a very unique nose, one you don’t ever see– i’m thinking like a.licia v.ikander’s nose. it adds character to her already freckled face. her skin is many shades lighter than her father’s but she tans well and often.  very feminine in appearance and dress but looks shy. very skinny, almost sickly skinny like her mom is. average height. 

personality: more of the observing type. spoiled but not necessarily bratty (at least not compared to most rostovs growing up). enjoys the arts, especially performance ones, but doesn’t really enjoy being a part of them. she’s insecure like lisa is but isn’t as vocal about it, which gives this sad kind of air to her. she’s more religious like marya, almost soley because she spends the most time with marya. lives life slowly. very chill but clearly lacks purpose. not very comfortable with who she is as a person. ends up being very close to her parents because she would rather spend time with them than other kids. 

special talents: she’s an excellent chef because she spends a lot of time in the kitchen (usually with grandma natalya until she died, then just on her own going through old recipes) 

who they like better: probably natasha because she admires her outgoingness. 

who they take after more: pierre ! doesn’t have his passion but has his slight awkwardness.

personal head canon: yeva grew up watching her father a lot, but felt the most embarrassed when he’d say something that wasn’t well-received. this proclivity towards second-hand embarrassment stops her form doing a lot & putting herself out there. 

face claim: a.licia v.ikander’s nose on a much paler, freckled, and blonde a.dria a.rjona. it sounds weird but i think it?? kinda works for what i’m trying to get across

[thegoosereads]

maybe this is stupid but i have to get it out of my BRAIN.

so. if i wrote fan fiction i would write one years and years down the line. feysand has like.. three kids. in my mind it's the canon son and two scary bad ass girls. they're all adults or late teens. maybe the other ships have some too. anyway. some crazy fae politics shit is going down, you know how fantasy books are- and somehow it brings all the kids (who are rebelling and taking shit into their own hands behind their parents' back or something) or maybe just one of them at first to meet another one of Rhysand's sons.

the first son.

the one no one knows about, because he was hidden away as a baby.

also Amarantha's son.

OKAY SO HEAR ME OUT- in my head it doesn't strike me as unlikely that Amarantha would not always be in the mountain. she was working with Hybern or whatever, i'm sure she had to meet with him sometimes or go torture people elsewhere, leave some cronies in charge. some attor level followers. anyway. so maybe she could have hidden the pregnancy with some fae glamour bullshit or just heavier clothes and been gone long enough to either give birth or not be around for when she got real big if the glamour part is a no go.

so she gives birth, and hands the son off to someone. another trusted cronie, or something. she definitely isn't the mothering type, she wouldn't want him until he started to get older and more useful. i'm sure she would have planned to use him to control Rhys or to strengthen her authority as mother to Rhysand's heir, a.k.a son of the most powerful high lord, or maybe just to train him to be her heir so her fucked up way of reigning continues. whatever. i imagine the baby is kept outside the mountain in a place no one would expect.

but then she dies. and all her cronies are sought out and killed. maybe some soldiers from one court or another raid a number of homes that they know belong to faeries who were supporters or maybe some are found and killed away from their homes- either way, cronie-babysitter is killed while Amarantha's baby is hiding in a room somewhere, obliviously sleeping in a crib (i imagiqne the baby is born only about a couple years before Feyre saves everyone, so Canon Son is only like 6 years younger at most).

however it goes down, the baby is left behind. like 2 days later, a very poor woman, a mother probably, who has mouths to feed and is desperate, is going through the abandoned house. she finds some food and some money. she shoves it in her pack. she continues snooping. maybe she finds a painting, or some documents addressed to the Amarantha supporter that lived there, but she figures out who this place belonged to. the person's well known and feared by most, but maybe she saw the soldiers drag a faerie out of there a few days before, or maybe she's been scoping this place out as a place to rob (eat the rich?) for awhile and knows no one's been inside for a bit. she's not too worried. she's bad ass. she keeps snooping.

then she hears a baby cry.

obviously, she's like.. "what the fuck". so she follows the sound and finds the room and the crib and she looks inside.. and sees a baby with a whole head of red hair and violet eyes.

now. Alis avoided being taken to the mountain with her boys. i'm sure this faerie could have as well.. especially because in my head she's a very smart woman, one who's got a quick mind and is particularly versed in the art of survival, and there's no way she's letting her kid(s) be taken under the mountain. but also because of the things i just said, she's maybe heard through the grape vine or seen from hiding spots what important people, people who could be a threat to her and her family, look like. like the high lord of the Night Court and Amarantha. she also knows that this person was Amarantha's cronie, has probably heard the phrase "Amarantha's whore", and knows that the cronie did not have red hair or violet eyes or look to be any relation at all to this baby who was very clearly high fae.

she has found this baby, this baby who could likely be very powerful and influential some day. she knows that raised in the wrong hands, he could grow to be the worst monster the world has ever seen. but she has found him. she picks him up and hushes his cries. she finishes gathering what she needs, and she takes him home. and she raises him to be good.

he knows for his whole life who he is and that he must stay hidden, that the high lord and lady of the Night Court can never find him or it's likely they'll kill him. that no one else but their family should know about his heritage, especially his biological mother, or citizens would likely kill him. but he's also very invested in the on goings of Prythian, in how to prevent wars and how to keep peace. he feels he must be, because of who his parents are. because of who his mother was, especially.

when the feysand kids meet him, they end up working together to fight whoever the knew big bad enemy is. he admits immediately who he is, but also why they can trust him and what he wants to do. he finds it necessary given whatever situation they're in. maybe because of who they are, maybe because he kind of resembles Canon Son and his eyes are closer to their father's than any of their's actually are and he knows they know something's up.

they probably disappear for awhile, much to feysands worry, to fight whatever they need to. they bond during this time and begin to accept A's son as their brother. they learn much more than what they were told about under the mountain from him. A's son learns about what kind of person his father really is. but they are all still lvery afraid of what will happen if their parents find him.

there's probably some acowar style final battle where feysand and everyone are already fighting when the kids show up. with A's son. and A's son is like internally shitting his pants because "CAULDRON thats the guy who i've been told will ABSOLUTELY KILL ME ON SIGHT for my ENTIRE EXISTENCE" but is cool on the outside cause his mama didn't raise no bitch and also Rhys's genes. Rhys's reaction is just REAL ANGSTY AND GOOD but i don't have one solid plan for that or how it happens. i do know that at some point he probably does try to kill him and one of the kids, in my head his youngest daughter, is like "nah" and there's a mini magic fight between them. A's son calls out for youngest daughter to stop bc he's worried for her and Rhys is like "???"

or maybe the feysand kids immediately tell Rhys that they'll all fight him for A's son so he better just not. Rhys is horrified.

i also love the idea if Feyre being like "oh, another son" pretty quickly but i also think his existence might break her for awhile so i don't really know.

Rhys absolutely hates him for the longest time. which is why my angst loving heart fucking nuts at the idea of him being the one to inherit the high lord power. mmm good shit 👌👌👌

WHAT THE FUCK DO Y'ALL THINK OF THIS CAUSE I'D LOVE FOR SOMEONE TO WRITE IT LOL

[im-fairly-whitty]

Hi! So related to the detective stiletto au(I think it's yours? I remember seeing it here) I've been wondering what would happen after Imelda sees Ernesto with Hector's guitar, would she confront him asap with a boot? Would he even say anything? Or would she go around and find out where was the last place Hector was seen so she could gather evidence for Hector's murder?and if so I can't help but wonder what if she ended up stealing from the dead in her search for evidence?

“[cont.] She’d end up in the land if the dead and I gotta wonder how that’d go… I think that with what she found out Imelda would be unhappy but willing to hear out Hector. Imelda would find out Hector’s been trying to get home the whole time and Hector would find out that Ernesto isn’t as good a friend as he thought… (also: lots of freaking out and hopefully some hugs)”

Hello! You’re thinking of this ask post from @upperstories where she headcanoned what it might look like if Imelda found out Ernesto had killed her husband while she was still alive. In Upperstories’ post they get as far as Imelda sneaking into one of Ernesto’s performances and being shaken to the core when she sees him playing Hector’s white skull guitar.

“Detective Stiletto” was indeed my addition to the post, as I suggested that I badly needed an Imelda PI fic. :)

I don’t think Uppers has expanded on it at all, and I don’t have any plans right now to write it out in full, but I’ll give you a bit of how I imagine it going:

- I really imagine this story being Imelda’s journey, she’d still in deep pain after Hector’s disappearance, and she can’t take it anymore so she begins to defensively turn that pain into anger that she can aim at someone else. In the movie Hector becomes that target, he receives all the betrayed blame so that Imelda can move on, convince herself that he deserves it, and then live the rest of her days surviving out of pure spite of the man who had torn her heart apart. 

- But in this version, we catch her just as she’s starting to blame Hector, and instead, Ernesto catches her suspicion. And boy howdy does all that Mama Imelda anger get channeled and hardened into something extremely dangerous.

- At first she tries to handle things the way that friends should. After all, Ernesto is a good family friend that Hector knew his entire life, even though there are red flags screaming at her that Ernesto is perhaps to blame for Hector’s disappearance she can’t make herself believe that he could ever do something so terrible. There has to be a better explanation.

- But Ernesto's been avoiding her letters. and he was the last one to see Hector. and now he’s using Hector’s songs, and his guitar, and there’s the call Imelda got from his lawyer?? 

- So she’s got a terrible feeling twisting in her stomach as she creeps back to wait in his dressing room to talk with him after he’s done performing, knowing that he’d try to avoid her if she approached him in public. But this is all wrong, Ernesto’s a friend, he’s eaten dinner at their house and played with little Coco and was the best man at her wedding and there HAS to be a good explanation for all this and she dearly hopes that he does have one.

- But the moment he ducks into his dressing room, pulling at his tie and sweeping off his sombrero she already knows something is deeply wrong. There is a new edge to Ernesto, like he thinks someone’s watching him, there’s a new subtle darkness around his eyes that you would only notice if you knew him before it appeared. And suddenly Imelda is frightened to be alone with this man.

- Ernesto freezes when he sees her, all the blood draining from his face like he’s seen a ghost (or maybe the wife of one) and that’s when Imelda knows without a shadow of a doubt that something terrible has happened to her husband, that Ernesto did it, and that she will probably never see Hector, the father of her daughter, the love of her life, the music of her soul, ever again.

- And this nearly breaks her. Nearly. 

- Ernesto’s pulled on a smile as fake and brittle as the navy sequins on his mariachi jacket and he asks her how on earth she got into his room? What she’s doing all the way out here when she has little Coco at home. Imelda is nearly in tears, but she instead takes those tears and freezes them, turning them into the ice that laces her words when she asks Ernesto where Hector is. 

- Ernesto can see that she knows. He doesn’t know how, but she does. And then all the pretended warmth drops from his voice and all that’s left is a sharp smile as he reminds her pointedly that he can call security if she doesn’t go back to Santa Cecilia right now, lingering on the fact that Coco must miss her mother very very much. 

- If Imelda had the element of surprise and her boot already in her hand then maybe she would fight, but Ernesto is twice her size and unrecognizable from the man she used to know, and it sends a chill down her spine to see the desperate hunger in his eyes. It seems clear to her that whatever it is that he’s gained from Hector’s death (please don’t let him really be dead, but is there any real chance that he’s alive??) Ernesto just might be willing to kill again to protect it. 

- She tones down her anger as she inches towards the door, but picks up a pocket knife sitting on the vanity table behind her as she does. Ernesto goes along with the charade they both know they are playing as they talk and she edges towards the door, but he’s edging just a little faster, changing his mind about letting her go.

- Imelda’s never stabbing a man, but when Ernesto growls and suddenly lunges for her the pocket knife jerks into action, landing squarely in Ernesto’s upper arm. Imelda leaps for the open door and throws herself through it, pelting down the hall as Ernesto howls in pain, then starts screaming for security that he’s been attacked. 

- Imelda barely escapes the venue as burly men try to catch her at every turn, but she makes it out into the night streets in one piece, her heart pounding and tears streaming down her face as she realizes how very alone she is in the world, her husband gone, his best friend a traitor. It’s not until she’s on the steps of the police station and sees two officers shouting to each other as they saddle up about some famous musician getting stabbed by a female assassin that she realizes just how deeply in trouble she is. 

- Maybe it would have been fine if she’d gone into the police station anyway, maybe the officers would have believed her side of the story and arrested Ernesto on the spot, but Imelda is a woman in the early 1900′s, she’s a widow, she’s poor, and she has Ernesto’s blood on her skirts. Ernesto, on the other hand, is an up and coming musician, a murderer, rich enough to hire expensive lawyers, and a man. Also, Imelda has no proof. And she’s terrified. And so she runs.

- Imelda spends the next few days keeping to the shadows of Mexico City as her face begins appearing on wanted posters for attempted murder, Ernesto obviously played up the story of the insane jealous wife of his old music partner that ran off from her. Not even the other criminals in the city want much to do with Imelda when she starts encountering them, she’s got too big of a price on her head, and besides, they’ve heard there’s a shadier warrant out for her if she’s dead before the police find her.

- But Imelda is strong and she’s determined, and now her anger is back and she’s aiming it all at one target: Ernesto. She knew Hector would never leave her, she knew she hadn’t been wrong about him, she knew it. And so Imelda pulls her hair back into its braid, gets herself a better weapon than a pocket knife, and begins to shake down the criminal element of Mexico city for all the information she can get. 

- This should get her killed, but it turns out that a certain big-chinned mariachi player maybe slept with a certain gang bosses’ girl, and when that boss hears about Imelda’s mission he decides it would be much more entertaining to back her in his plan to get revenge on Ernesto rather than just killing him outright.

- Imelda is granted all the muscle she needs to get anywhere she likes in the city as she searches for the information she needs to prove Ernesto’s guilt, and she works quickly as the police, and those in Ernesto’s pay, get closer and closer to trapping her.

- And the clues start to come. She finds Hector’s suitcase thrown into a rubbish heap on the side of town, his songbook gone. Hector’s blush mariachi jacket is found in a local pawnshop, his initials still stitched on the inside pocket, a scrap of a letter to Coco tucked inside. The letter’s post-script to Imelda tells her that he’s coming home soon, that Ernesto’s beginning to act strange. There’s a bottle of tequila that an inn-keeper swears killed his dog after it was spilled on the sidewalk by the housekeeper. 

- All the terrible puzzle pieces come together as Imelda works tirelessly to chase down every lead she comes across, until the terrible moment that she meets the miserable beggar who is intimidated into retelling his story of how he saw a man dragging a body through town several months ago. Imelda nearly doesn’t have the self-control to keep from siccing her gang muscle on the seedy man as he cowers and produces the treasure he may or may not have looted from said body after the murderer had buried it in a shallow grave just outside of town. 

- It’s Hector’s wedding ring.

- And she finally has all the evidence she needs. She has a terrible stiff pride as she ascends the steps of the police station, flanked by thugs and carrying evidence strong enough to damn even Ernesto. Ernesto tries desperately to deny it, but there’s too many witnesses trickling out of the underworld against him now, some even Imelda hadn’t heard of, but it seems that the criminal element of Mexico city is done with this murderer after seeing Imelda (their new darling that everyone has affectionately began calling “Detective Stilettoe”) fight tooth and nail to redeem her husband.

- Ernesto is taken into custody. For life. Imelda returns home, Hector’s exhumed body resting in a new coffin in the next car over to be reburied in Santa Cecilia for the somber train ride home. Two days later she’s kneeling at his new grave, a proper grave with his name and photo lovingly placed on it. She’s sobbing, but she has closure. Thier daughter will know what happened to her Papa, Imelda will keep his memory, his music alive in their home as long as she lives. Every Dia de los Muertos she can feel him near, and she visits his grave often to tell him all about how their daughter is flourishing and a beautiful young woman and a dancer.

- She lives a long and happy life, never remarries, and the day that she slips from this life to the next is a happy one. Hector is there waiting for her, and he sweeps her into a long, long embrace that makes her feel young again, they kiss tenderly as they cry with the bittersweet joy of having been separated so long, and he thanks her for never, never forgetting him.  

Yeah, okay, so that was a bit more than “a bit,” but I hope you enjoyed your long-form answer. :)

Thanks for the ask!

- Wit

[chiseler]

JEAN HARLOW: Bombshell

Her mother Mama Jean called her “The Baby” during her short life, and Jean Harlow did exhibit a babyish sense of delight when she smiled in her films and in stills, but the men who looked at her on the movie screen saw not a baby but a babe that they wanted in their arms. She was the successor to Clara Bow and a kind of bridge to Marilyn Monroe, and she was more good fun than both of them combined. Very few film stars made such an impression in such a brief time as Harlow, or grew as a performer so quickly.

Notoriously, Harlow didn’t wear underwear, and when James Cagney asked her on the set of The Public Enemy (1931) how she kept her breasts up and at ‘em, she good-naturedly replied, “I ice ‘em!” Harlow had hair so bleached blond that it was nearly white, and her legs were Dietrich-level beautiful and shapely. When she died unexpectedly at age 26, rumors ran rampant and ugly about why and how this had happened to her, culminating in the 1960s with a nasty and inaccurate biography by Irving Schulman and two equally inaccurate movie biopics, one with Carroll Baker and one with Carol Lynley. Thankfully, David Stenn’s biography of Harlow in the early 1990s set the record straight just as Stenn’s 1989 Clara Bow book gave the It Girl a fair shake.

Harlow was born Harlean Carpenter in 1911, and she married at 16 to a society boy, but she worked for a while as an extra at star-struck Mama Jean’s urging, getting her skirt caught in the door of a car and walking away with her black underwear showing in Double Whoopee (1928), a Laurel and Hardy short where childlike Ollie seems genuinely hot and bothered by this cotton candy blond looker. She posed for beautiful semi-nude shots for Edwin Bower Hesser in Griffith Park with her body covered only by a wet piece of fabric, showing off her curves for him with joy and abandon, but Harlow was still stiff in front of a moving picture camera. Bit parts proliferated, including one with Bow in The Saturday Night Kid (1929), where Harlow had one line of dialogue that she delivered in an amateurish way as she looked at her watch.

Harlow fell under contract to breast-obsessed Howard Hughes, who put her in his aerial epic Hell’s Angels (1930) as sexpot relief. He had a party scene shot in two-strip Technicolor in order to show off the pearly beauty of his new star’s skin, her breasts barely covered by her backless dress, and though Harlow delivers dialogue in a very stilted way in Hell’s Angels, she already had a way of looking at men that was unmistakably carnal.

“Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?” she asks Ben Lyon in Hell’s Angels, taking joy and pride in the way she makes his temperature rise. The distinctive thing about Harlow is her total lack of shame about sex on screen, her sheer anticipatory enjoyment of it as an idea, and an ideal of pleasure, a force that totally loosens her up. Harlow’s relation to sex in her movies makes Bow seem slightly jittery and insecure about it in comparison, and makes Monroe look like a sexual basket case.

“I want to be free, I want to be gay and have fun!” Harlow says in Hell’s Angels, leaning back happily on a couch to be admired. “Life’s short, and I want to live while I’m alive.” No bra, no panties, no problem! Her smile is so open, so inviting, as if to say, “Come on, let’s enjoy ourselves,” and she wants to take that enjoyment to the limit, and beyond that limit. Harlow in Hell’s Angels is the kind of person who will make out with you in a bar and won’t care how many people are watching. In fact, she obviously gets a kick out of being watched, in the bar on screen and from the dark of the movie theater, because that attention adds to her pleasure.

Luscious and so gracefully knowing, with her fantasy hair and her freely moving and nearly exposed body, Harlow tries to sound ritzy and classy in her first few talkies but she has a nasal, funny voice that keeps betraying her sense of humor. Hughes loaned her out and kept her working, paying her little and pocketing the rest of her salaries. Expected to play disparate roles in her 1931 movies, Harlow became mainly chastened and inhibited, though she has a brief moment of connected wisecracking with Clark Gable in The Secret Six.

Harlow is embarrassing in The Public Enemy with Cagney, descending to an Ed Wood level of wooden dialogue delivery, and she tentatively played Louise Brooks’s part in a remake of A Girl in Every Port (1928) that was renamed Goldie for her hair. “Men don’t marry carnival girls,” she earnestly tells Warren Hymer in that movie. “They think we’re all bad.” Harlow had trouble seeming like a manipulative society girl in Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde, even though she had moved in society circles herself during her first marriage. She knew she wasn’t cutting it as an actress and even told her agent that she would try to get work in a department store if her acting didn’t improve soon.

MGM producer Paul Bern, who had been instrumental in shaping many careers for women at his studio, got Harlow a very good part in The Beast of the City (1932), and she’s much improved in that due to the gentle Bern’s coaching, closer to the magnetic tough-girl style of her star period (seen in a line-up, she gives a raspberry to the cops who are grilling her). When a tough guy grabs her hard and she says it hurts her, he asks, “You don’t like to be hurt, do you?” She looks at him steadily and says, in her “ritzy” voice, “Oh, I don’t know…it’s kinda fun sometimes if it’s done in the right spirit.” Harlow on screen knows or senses that sex is partly theater, and theater is best, or “kinda fun,” when it’s boldly rough and dramatized in terms of fluctuating power dynamics.

Harlow keeps her hands on her hips and does one helluva seductive dance for a copper in The Beast of the City, filling her undulations with that distinctive “sex is fun!” spirit she had, rubbing her hands down her gyrating body and fluffing her hair. She harnessed all of her sexual energy and put it on screen without any inhibitions, and it still makes for a hackle-raising spectacle. “Are you gonna try and reform me?” she asks the copper breathlessly, after they kiss.

Bern convinced her to go titian for Red-Headed Woman (1932), where we see her hair being dyed in the first scene. “So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?” she asks, in that pinched voice, before looking at herself in the mirror. “Yes they do,” she drawls, smiling and giving a pure 1930s sock-it-to-‘em nod. “Can you see through this?” she asks a saleswoman, striking a pose against a window in a new dress. “I’m afraid you can, miss,” the prim saleswoman informs her. “I’ll wear it,” Harlow cheerfully replies.

Her ruthless and hotheaded Lil goes through five men in Red-Headed Woman, and Harlow gets away with it because she is so funny and so good-humored about her man-eating. Bern told her that if she made the part funny that the audience would forgive her anything, and he was right about that. And she gets away with a lot in this movie. When Chester Morris smacks her, Harlow lets out a growly little noise of excitement and approval and says, “Do it again, I like it! Do it again!” and then kisses him, which goes shockingly further with her “kinda fun” rough sex formulation from The Beast of the City. Her growl of S&M excitement is not to be forgotten once heard, once she has let it out of its box, so to speak.

There is no part of sex or the sexual instinct that Harlow doesn’t openly enjoy on screen, and that’s what made her such a radical presence in the early 1930s, and that sexual radicalism hasn’t dated; it would still cause an uproar today if done in the swaggering way she does it in Red-Headed Woman. And she is not made to be redeemed or reformed or even punished at the end of that movie, where her designing woman winds up with a rich older protector and still gets to keep her handsome chauffeur lover (a young Charles Boyer). Screenwriter Anita Loos gives Red-Headed Woman the essentially French and Colette-like morality and frankness that went into her classic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and you can see why moralists in America at the time were outraged and alarmed by Lil, who is a truly amoral, even homicidal wretch but so filled with Harlow’s saucy pep that she still winds up being somehow attractive.

Yet this brazen woman on screen was living with her mother off screen, obediently following Mama Jean’s wishes. (Mama Jean had wanted to be an actress herself, and she lived vicariously through Harlow’s success.) Compliant in some ways but also rebellious, Mama Jean’s “Baby” got into big trouble off the set. Harlow married the gentlemanly Bern, and shortly after that marriage Bern shot himself, leaving behind a cryptic suicide note. Their marriage had not been consummated, and Bern had in his past a mentally unstable common law wife named Dorothy Millette, a woman who was still obsessively attached to him. Millette confronted Harlow and Bern one night, and whatever transpired between them led to his suicide. Millette killed herself a few days after his death. This was a rare mess, and it was feared that it might ruin Harlow’s career.

She was midway through shooting Red Dust (1932) with Clark Gable at that point, and she returned to work under duress. To the studio’s surprise, public sympathy was on her side during the Bern suicide scandal, and it helped that she was at her very best in Red Dust, with all her sexuality and humor at her command but a new shading of vulnerability, too, just enough to make her irresistible to just about everyone. Look at the pained way she stares after Clark Gable and Mary Astor as he carries Astor out of a storm, which reveals the strength of her feelings for him underneath all the other slangy “I like it!” sexual fun she still offered us. This scene proved that Harlow’s on screen persona could handle a show of hurt feelings, and it also showed that she could be appealingly stoic about them, too, and toughly gallant and magnanimous. In the scene where she good-naturedly pours a drink for her love rival Astor and gives her a little advice, Harlow is one of the most appealing of all American screen women.

Red Dust was perhaps Harlow’s zenith, but she advanced even further in three more films the following year. She turned to rat-a-tat-tat verbal comedy in the very knowing, often scathing Bombshell as movie star Lola Burns, who is “born for men,” according to salacious studio advertising, but mainly born, it seems, to support a family and retinue, just as Harlow herself was. “You’re a boon to re-population in a world thinned out by war and famine!” cries Lee Tracy’s publicity man, and that’s certainly one way of looking at it.

Role and star get deliberately confused in Bombshell, for Lola is called back to shoot retakes of Gable catching her nude in a rain barrel in Red Dust, as if she and Harlow were the same person. “You can get another ‘It’ girl or ‘But’ girl or a ‘how, when and where’ girl, I’m moving out!” Harlow’s Lola cries toward the end, saying that she wants to retire to domestic life, but Bombshell knows that some people are just more charismatic than others, and some women would be imprisoned by the threat of home and babies. Harlow was certainly one of those women, at least on screen.

Cleverly, shortly after filming, Harlow married her much older cameraman, Harold Rossen, who did much to shape her visual image (Mama Jean put the kibosh on that one after only eight months). And then, for director George Cukor, who egged her on to just the right degree, she was Kitty Packard, a gutsy trophy wife putting Wallace Beery in his place in Dinner at Eight, a monument to the enriching vitality in unabashed sexual vulgarity.

Sitting up in her absurdly billowing white bed, taking bites out of chocolates and then throwing them back, ringing out her powder puff, Harlow gets laugh after laugh in Dinner at Eight, one after another, like she’s ringing gongs. She throws herself into her scenes with both abandon and accuracy of expression and timing, a very different style from Clara Bow or Marilyn Monroe, much brassier, more self-sufficient; if she talked baby talk, as Monroe did, it was in a very knowing, parodic way.

Harlow is the only big female movie sex symbol who never seems dazed, never seems really out-of-control. “I’m gonna be a lady if it kills me!” she tells Beery in Dinner at Eight, standing up to him all the way down the line and applying more lipstick in between. (She was sown into her gowns, so that she couldn’t even sit down on set but had to resort to a slant board.) Harlow throws some left hooks and gets caught in her bath again by Gable in Hold Your Man. “Yes sir, that baby’s got rhythm,” Gable says appreciatively as he watches her walk away from him at one point, after she visits him in prison. She is at her toughest in Hold Your Man until a redemptive ending, a harbinger of worse to come.

“The vulgar, cheap, and the tawdry is out!” promised Joseph Breen, the new chief of the Production Code censorship bureau, in a newsreel from 1934, and that meant that proudly vulgar, cheap, and tawdry Harlow was hardest hit by the new Code. Her first film under the Code was supposed to be called Born to Be Kissed, but the title was changed to The Girl from Missouri (1934), and it made Harlow stuffy and bent only on matrimony in a way that feels very constricted and depressing.

They even began to darken her platinum hair to a light shade of brown in Riffraff (1935), where she played another virgin holding out for marriage and sparred with Spencer Tracy. Harlow was at least somewhat brassy again as good-time girl China Doll in China Seas (1936) with Gable, but in Wife vs. Secretary (1936) she played a true-blue stenographer who wouldn’t dream of putting the moves on Gable’s boss, a far cry from the rapacious Lil of Red-Headed Woman. Even her car horn voice got tamped-down and refined back to the level it had ludicrously sought in her first awkward years in movies, as if speaking quietly were some sort of triumph for the “good taste” that now reigned on film.

In Reckless (1935), Harlow was asked to talk her way through a risible song and act out a suicide drama that was exploitatively close to her own ordeal with Bern. She is made to defend herself from a stage, confessing to an audience her dead husband’s unhappiness and how she tried to make him happy, and the result on screen feels very punishing and unfair, so that there was no star who was so humiliated and ruined by censorship as Harlow, not even Mae West. She got one more chance at rapid-fire comedy in Libeled Lady (1936), where all she wants to do is marry Spencer Tracy, and she has her moments in that, but the great sexual thrill of Harlow is confined to Hell’s Angels and her movies from 1932 and 1933 only.

She really did want to marry her Libeled Lady co-star William Powell, but he kept putting that off. Harlow looks and seems ill and low energy in Personal Property (1937) and in her last film, Saratoga (1937), which was finished with a stand-in after her death at 26 from kidney disease. She collapsed on the set and was attended by physicians for eight days before she died, contrary to the stories about her never seeing a doctor because of Mama Jean’s Christian Science leanings. MGM chief Louis B. Mayer had Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy sing “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” at her funeral, which certainly would have made the screen Harlow guffaw. It was a short career, but her initial impact is still fresh, and it can still be felt as liberating, sexually and otherwise.

by Dan Callahan

[sassasquashedgrapes]

Kardashian Dreaming

Had the coolest/most bizarre dream ever. 

I was seated at this meeting with Mama Kris Jenner, Rob was there and prolly the other family members, I can’t remember. And she was gonna hire me or wanted to hire me, and it was an interview or something am not so sure.  But basically my role was to hang around the whole Kardashian-Jenner clan, be on the prowl on the stuff they do, find research backing up evidence that what they do is effective by science (but way better than David Avocado Wolfe levels, more classier and actually backed up by a medical doctor (hello, me!), and yes, blog about it.

Or ghost write articles whatever floats my boat. Basically tag along with them, maybe occasionally take their pics for Instagram/Snapchat as to back up the article I wrote or blogged, but not in a PA kind of way.  I’m more like just like a third party observer, I am to be treated cordially and kindly, not like staff, whom I don’t like as some are bossy, snobby divas (must be competition syndrome who knows?).

I don’t get to be on the show either (Thank God, I wasn’t the type who wanted that sort of attention to begin with), but as a fan of the series, it’s a treat that I get a full-depth view of what goes on in the family for real and ahead from what’s aired on E!, way before everyone else gets to see it (of course I have a disclosure clause tho I can write anything, as long as Mama Jenner approves of the topic of course, like I report directly to her anyway and she does keep direct tabs with me on the stuff that I write).

Well, anyway, going back  to the story: Then Kris goes for the jugular and looks  me in the eye and says “we pay higher than 500 per hour”, kinda making me know she’s done her homework about me and that whatever I’m currently being paid for at my current job,  she’s willing to pay me higher (lol. 600 maybe?) and before y’all start thinking, I knew deep down Mama Kris meant she was gonna pay me at least 600 US Dollars per hour just to “keep up with them”,  and I had a fixed schedule of reporting 3-4x a week at least four hours to a maximum of 8 hours a day, as for specifics on time well, if there are evening events and if I’m free, I can go and would be paid double for night differential. All of which was pretty ok by me.

I learned in my 90 minute snooze that the Kardashian clan are actually pretty generous employers. Like you got free range around the house (of course you can’t enter the private rooms unless you’re invited by the owner to go in and there are CCTVs so they do know when PAs steal their stuff), you can eat whatever food is in the pantry (except stuff that’s labeled with the names of the girls if they’re saving it for later, like Kim writes her name on it labeled as “Kim” or “Kiki”, Kourtney uses a green tape label so you know it’s hers, shit this dream is so detailed, it was beyond!!!

Anyway, so I get the job yo’. I’m hanging out with Kanye West. He’s not even scary. He’s actually very nice and polite, not like the angry dude you always see on the telly.

So he’s going about talking being drawn to different kinds of wall graffitis (I swear I had no idea there were even types to begin with!  Shit there it is on google, people I am just typing this website and googling it down now because I thought that dream was just crack but fuuuucccck nnnhhooo!!!) and showed me this wall written with words like yeezy (yes written in bold with no caps on the first “y”) and a quote, I can’t remember but I know it was a cool quote about believing in yourself and pretty profound one at that. It took me a while to realize while talking to this man that he was in the process of making his own font!! People, Kanye West was designing his own fucking Times New Roman y’all!!! Prolly use the letterings to put it on his shirts, on his album, have it sold on Microsoft Office or whatnot, this shit is superb I simply cannot!!!.  It wasn’t a useless font,  it’s like a relatable font that could be used for making a slogan, a poster, or heck even as a document paper if you don’t mind wasting some ink on the printer.

It was super genius, I tell you. I remember giving him feedback about it (because he asked me, that’s how cool the ‘Ye is, he gets feedback from the masses coz he wants to understand the common people!) that I liked the design on the wall except if I stood at a certain distance, I couldn’t read the first word written on top (I can’t believe I had the nerve to talk up to the ‘Ye) but he was super cool about it and admitted he hadn’t thought about that but was “going with the creative flow” when he was in the moment and having an artistic flair myself, I understood where he was coming from.

Next I’m in the gym. Now I’m pretty certain this is recent, I cannot confirm if Khloe is pregnant but she sure wasn’t working out either.

Out of the Kardashian sisters, she’s the one I genuinely get along with the best. She even calls me by my first name Kristina, opting not to address me by my middle name which Kris and Kim do as I didn’t want to confuse myself into sharing a nickname similar to my new boss (aka Mama KJ). I dunno but I clicked best with Khloe and could honestly imagine that IRL we could be really good pals. She does have one interesting habit: she always has to turn off the lights when not in use.

It’s weird because you think one: these people are ridiculously rich but are stingy with electricity? Two, shouldn’t the Kardashian/Jenner fam invest in motion sensor lights? And Three: according to Khloe, she started getting back into this habit to reduce energy in lieu of Climate Change (of course), and it used to be the one reminder her dad, the late Robert Kardashian Sr  always made her do because, like me, she had a habit of leaving the lights on too.

So basically included on my job description was yep, turn off the lights each time I went out of a room or check if there are unused lights.

So one time I’m in the family gym, and Kim was there. Now out of all the Kardashian/Jenners (don’t tell Khloe ok, ORZ) Kim is my favourite. IRL she’s not tall, prolly around my height, but has a doll-face and is really curvy but small in the areas that matter. TBH Kim leaves me star-struck, very Kween- like: regal, formal, never losing her shit (unlike me the whole freaking dream sequence) but still approachable and likeable.

Out of all the Kardashian/Jenners, Kim is the most like Kris. Like literally Mama’s carbon copy, even in some mannerisms, except Kim is more reserved, polite, but still approachable without being intimidating, which that part is mostly like her Mom.  Though Kim can be intimidating in a different way.  Let’s just say both women have that Alpha air about them.

Kris Jenner is all business and is the the Queen Mom, kinda like my boss so it’s ironic I leave a job only to be hired by someone who resembles a lot of qualities similar to the former boss. But who can deny BIGGER and BETTER PAY?

As for Kim, I really can’t compare her to anyone I’ve ever met, but she’s definitely got an aura of being something extraordinary. Like Celebrity vibes.  That feeling one gets when you’re in the presence of someone who is gonna either change the world or bring it to its knees and end the rest of humanity, XD. 

 Anyway, I’m in the gym and I dunno why but there are icicles on the machines (the elliptical, the treadmill, the bikes)  I don’t feel cold or anything but it I chose to ignore it prolly coz I was astonished that there were icicles on the machines and yet no one bothers to turn off the AC and plus hello, I’m watching Kimye work out a sweat or rather, breathing cold air like some friggin’ Elsa with her long platinum hair which makes me miss own on bleached Khaleesi mane too.  Kim’s working on the treadmill, she gives me a polite smile and nod, and says hello, addressing me by my middle name (it’s shocking because I’ve barely been in this house or at this job for long, and already Kim knows me by name and face.  It’s like an amazing talent she and Kris have, they remember faces and names of people they’ve just met, whether you’re a Royalty or a servant, they’ll remember.  They’re like natural politicians!).  

Khloe asks me if I could turn off the lights, which was the gym, I dim it a bit, with Kim’s permission, of course.  She doesn’t mind, she’s in her own zone.  Breathing out cold air probably from those iced exercise machines I dunno (I believe I found new material for my writing blogs that I was hired for too).  

I move on to another side of the gym, which is a lounge area.  I see in the corner of my eye Kourtney having a informal business meeting with a blonde long-haired Japanese business dude who gives me Steve Aoki vibes, a translator (who is my friend Aira), and a bunch of other peeps lounging on sofas.  I yell over to Khloe and tell her that someone’s in the lounge room and she goes over to me and says “Oh yeah, leave the lights on.” Laughs off and walks away.

I’m not close with Kourt tho.  I don’t think we have bad vibes or anything, actually we’re the same age, it’s just Kourt and I never had a chance to bond because her top priority are her kids and we just never had time to chitchat, but I think she’s just as nice as the rest of the family, probably even more casual than Kim, but less chummy as Khloe.  She did mention once that I’m a natural with kids even though I never baby sat any of the Kardashian kids, but they’re really sweet and they seem to like me well enough.  

I’ve interacted with Mason, Reign, and Penny; they’re the sweetest kids, Reign and Penny always greet me with hugs, they’re super friendly.  Mason’s already a big boy, so hugs are not in order and he’s usually somewhere off doing his own thing or hanging out with Scott aka The Lord (who doesn’t seem like the douchebag he’s normally portrayed as in the show).  I’ve met North and Saint briefly as Kim was in a hurry, North’s a bit shy, she’s got the cutest smile tho. I just don’t think North warms up to people as easily as compared to Kourtney’s kids do tho.  Saint is adorable, as expected, but it’s too early to tell how he’s gonna be when he’s older, but he’s so darn cute. Saint reminds me of this kid of a friend of mine who was just about the cutest darnest little kid whom I preferred to babysit over his naughty older brother, Andrei, hahaha!

And as for the Kardashian-Jenner girls.  Well, all I can say is Kendall is by far the tallest and prettiest sister and has got the most amazing legs, but she’s moody as f tho.  Like let’s say she’d walk in a room I was in, she’d ignore me (unless I’d be the first one to greet her, then she’d respond with a bored hi or mumble something close to it) then Ken would do her own thing like sit on a corner of a table or lounge on a couch and interact with her sisters but mostly looks bored as if she’d rather be somewhere else more interesting than at home, which is kinda disappointing since I’m a huge fan of hers, but I get her deal.  She grew up into the whole limelight and unlike her older sisters, she never wanted any of it and if you asked her, she’d probably wish she was living a rather normal life. Plus the bad bitterness she has as a model and having to prove to everyone she’s a supermodel because people hate on her for the nepotism even though she really does work hard.  Basically Kendall is the Kuudere of the Kardashian/Jenner girls.  So I get her deal. But compared to Kun-Kuun Kenny, Kylie is more like the typical teen/Generation Z/late Millenial: Always on her phone, not really in tune with anything going on about in the house.  I like Jordyn Woods tho, she’s really friendly and warm that you don’t get an air vibe out of her, like she’s genuinely a nice girl that you’re glad she’s there for Kylie.  Maybe that’s the reason why Kylie’s got a lot more mellow than her older sister Kendall, since Kendall doesn’t have that sort of friendship from what I’ve seen based on that whole dynamic I’ve gathered in that 90 minute dream.

Oh, and as for Kylie being pregnant? Let’s just say, I can’t say :P

Lol.  If I had to make Dere-s out of them

Tsundere Type A: Kourtney

Himedere: Kim

Formerly Kamidere/ but now mostly Dandere: Kanye

Yandere: Khloe

Deredere but really Mayadere: Rob

Kuudere: Kendall

Undere/Ultimate Shota: Kylie

Sadodere: Kris Jenner (for sure!! Lol)

That dream was so awesome!!  Too bad I had to get up after dozing off when the alarm reminded me that I had to leave the house early because I had an exam. I woke up feeling shitty because I didn’t get enough rest and as I took a cold shower, it suddenly hit me that I had dreamed about this during that 90 minute accidental snooze and I found myself having to write it down, and added more of my personal in-depth thoughts because tho it was such a vivid dream that happened so fast, I’m amazed by how much insight I actually got based from those details that I decided to write it all down and post it on tumblr/twitter with hopes that I do wonder if any of this shit was accurate. 

 Hit me up to tell me what your thoughts are.  

I’m out!

[kamiboothblog]

“The Best Way Out is Through” - Robert Frost

I used to think Dora the Explorer was stupid. That, or she desperately needed glasses. Now I believe she is wiser and sees things more clearly than many adults.

The little Nickelodean cartoon character with big brown eyes and dark, bobbed hair was a staple in our house when my kids were young. Sometime after morning Kindergarten and lunch and before afternoon naps my son or daughter and I would turn on Dora’s TV show and snuggle on the couch, eager for our fictional heroine to teach us more Spanish words and watch her go on her latest adventure with her sidekick, Boots, the monkey. 



Besides the fact that young Dora was trekking across the computer-animated countryside without her parents or any other responsible adult, carrying only a magical, seemingly bottomless backpack that boasted more tricks for getting out of tough spots than a James Bond movie, one thing bothered me about her: She insisted on going THROUGH every obstacle in her path - a huge bush, a locked gate, a dark, eerie-looking tunnel, etc. You see, it was obvious to any viewer over the age of three that Dora could simply step off the dirt path and go AROUND the roadblock, then continue on her merry way. But for some reason, Dora wouldn’t do it.

“Go around it!” I would shout impatiently at the TV as Dora would come across a roadblock, stop, turn her puzzled eyes toward us and ask us what to do. During the brief pause that followed I would continue my one-way dialogue with her: “There’s plenty of room on either side. Don’t you see? Are you blind?!!!”

“Tell her, mama,” my kids would chime in agreement as they continued to shovel handfuls of Goldfish crackers in their mouths, unaffected by my outburst and never ungluing their eyes from the TV screen.

Dora never listened to my advice (a trait that is perhaps the byproduct of being a self-sufficient child roaming the earth alone), but she always found a way to go through anything that crossed her path.

The one day it hit me: Dora is a genius.

Dora is a genius because she knows that going through the hard stuff - rather than avoiding it - is better in the long run. “Going through” builds character. It helps us learn about ourselves and others. It makes us stronger and wiser. It makes us more compassionate. It helps us live authentically. Dora knows we must face our greatest fears head on in order for them to release their control over us. Taking the easy route, sidestepping the challenge, the pain or the fear - well, that just makes our journey more difficult in the end. When we avoid, we can sometimes get caught up in things that aren’t good for us. We don’t always learn what we need to learn to grow into the person we are supposed to be. Ultimately, by not “going through,” we may even delay ourselves from finding true happiness and peace of mind.

But let’s be real. Some of us don’t want to do the work. We feel more comfortable staying where we are, even if that familiar place is dark and we feel stuck. In our anxious minds, dark and stuck feels safer, less scary, than what change might bring. Change makes us feel vulnerable, and we certainly don’t want to feel vulnerable, do we? Vulnerable is an icky feeling. So we hide. We deny. We distract. We self-medicate. We do anything to avoid dealing with the discomfort.

Until the pain of changing outweighs the pain of staying the same.

Harry Potter fans will relate to this idea in one of the final scenes in the movie series where Harry willingly comes to his nemesis Voldemort to be killed. (“The boy who lived has come to die!”) Harry is terrified, but he knows that he must go through with his execution to keep his friends, Hogwart’s classmates and the rest of the world safe. Years of running and hiding and battling have worn the boy with the scar on his forehead down, and he feels that he has no other alternative but to give up his life for the greater good. 



Any comforting words from Harry’s parents, now ghosts, as he strolls with them toward his fate does little to assuage his fears during the final moments of his life. He has no idea what he will feel as he dies. He does not know if a new life like his ghostly parents have will await him after his demise or if he will simply fade away to nothingness. But after all the running and hiding and death and destruction that occurred through the years between Harry and Voldemort, Harry knew the madness had to end. He had to get unstuck. And so he stood there, weaponless and vulnerable in front of bald, noseless Voldemort. And with a passion-filled cry of the killing curse “Avada Kedavra” from The Dark Lord, Harry braces himself for the deadly blow.

Harry didn’t avoid. He chose to go THROUGH. And thankfully, at the risk of spoiling the ending for those who haven’t seen the movie, it all turns out well for him. But…what about us? Granted, we aren’t dealing with the burden of being stalked by a narcissistic, evil wizard. But we’ve got our own “stuff” that is weighing us down or holding us back or making us stay in a dark place, be it a confrontation with the boss at work, the breakup of a relationship, a move to a new city, an unhealthy addiction, and so on. Do we remain stuck, unmoving, wallowing in self-pity, anger, resentment and indecision? Or…do we summon the courage to go through the process of movement and healing? Do we allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to stand in the fire and trust we won’t burn? To feel the ache of grief, heartbreak, loneliness or shame and believe that it won’t swallow us whole? To push through the door of the unknown or take that leap of faith that gets us out of limbo and accept that whatever we find, wherever we land, we’ll be okay…perhaps even happier than we are now?

Each of us is unique, with different strengths and different weaknesses. But I believe we all have it in us to do the things we think we cannot do, even if it’s one small, brave step at a time. And I’m here to tell you that “going through” pays off. I know because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I hold tight to these stories, blessed to bear witness to them and proud and in awe of those who did what at one time seemed impossible for them to do:

The alcoholic who, tired of numbing her thoughts daily with booze and burdened by bad choices, admitted she needed help. She left her husband and children one bleak January day several years ago to check into rehab. To this day she remains sober, healthy and happy. She has traded in her chaos for a rich and rewarding family life and a cute dog. Dare I say she’s grown even more beautiful, inside and out. This woman could have stayed stuck, medicating herself with alcohol, instead of spending weeks away from home detoxing and telling her heartbreaking truths to rehab counselors and fellow addicts. But instead, she went through.

The doctor who battled crippling anxiety but through meditation and perseverance found his way back to peace. He openly shared his story with my daughter, who is dealing with anxiety, to give her hope that she, too, can persevere. He could have remained silent, treating only her body but not her mind and avoiding any mention of his struggle from the past. But instead, he spoke up. He went through.

The stay-at-home mom who gave her family her all but neglected one thing: herself. She sought out a personal trainer, slowly and healthily lost the weight and is now living her dream by teaching fitness at her own gym. She didn’t have to do the hard work of changing her health exercise habits. But she did, and she has inspired others. She went through.

And me. This year my family dynamics have changed, and I spent Christmas alone. Mind you, I had several invitations from lovely, big-hearted people to join them to celebrate the holiday, but I graciously turned them down. You see, deep down, I knew what I had to do. I had to go THROUGH. I had to sit with it, this painfulness of change, and really FEEL it in order to start the healing process. And feel it I did. I went to the 5:30 p.m. family service at my church Christmas Eve and (go figure!) I was the only one there without family. It was rather unsettling at first. But my congregation, as always, was just as warm and welcoming as ever. And I felt God’s presence, and I knew then that with God’s help, I was going to be okay and that I would have strength for the journey ahead. And that was good enough for me. So I enjoyed the unusual gift of sleeping in on Christmas morning, and when I finally was awakened by a friendly feline lovingly nuzzling my nose, I was reminded that “going through” isn’t all white-knuckling and sweat; it can still come with many short, sweet moments. That’s the healing trying to find it’s way in.

Indeed, the poet and theologian Rumi said it best: “The cure for the pain is in the pain.” But when it comes to statements of well-wishing, no one ever says “I wish you pain.” Still, as backwards as it sounds, it could very well be that by going through the pain, the discomfort, the hardship, the fear….you eventually find your greatest joy. You find the cure. You find comfort. You find peace. You overcome that which haunts or paralyzes you. You become the truest version of yourself.

So as this new year unfolds, I won’t wish you pain. Instead I will wish you STRENGTH - strength to face your challenges and fears head on. And strength to GO THROUGH them with bravery, dignity, grace - and above all, with that glorious thing we call hope.

[amorremanet]

11, 14 & 17? ^.^

asks for fanfic writers.

I did 17 over here, but!

11. do you listen to music when writing?

Sometimes, yes! It sort of depends on what I’m writing and what kind of mood I’m in, but I pretty much always listen to something. It’s more just a matter of whether I’m going to listen to music or TV/movies.

And then in each case, there’s the issue of like, “do I want to listen to the Twilight Princess OST or the Silent Hill 2 OST?” (because video game OSTs are great at both evoking mood and increasing focus), or, “do I want a video game OST, or my playlist for [character, ship, project, the mood I’m in, whatever; I have playlists for everything]”

—or if I’m going to listen to TV/movies, then it’s like, “TV or movies?” and then, “Disney movie or superhero movie? Marvel movie or DC movie? Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, or Female Trouble? The Prince of Egypt or Crimson Peak? Star Wars” or in TV Land, it’s more, “Well, I can’t work and listen to something relatively new [which is one of the biggest reasons why I’m perpetually late to everything new on TV], so… House or Criminal Minds? Yuri on Ice dub [because I can’t watch the subs and write at the same time] or SVU reruns? Firefly or Futurama?”

14. easiest character to write

Oh gosh, that’s…… hard. And it often depends on the fandom, and sometimes it depends on what kind of mood I’m in, but…

Barty Crouch Jr. has always been really easy for me (partly because he has Favorite advantage, and partly because I’ve put 16+ years into his character at this point, so like. JKR could drop all of her notes about his family and backstory and everything on us tomorrow — not that I really think said notes exist, but if they did — and I’d probably just go, “Yeah, that’s nice, but with all due respect, Mum? My version’s better, and I’m just going to continue treating it as if it’s canon because bite me, that’s why”).

AlSev Potter and Scorpius Malfoy are both really easy, too, but tbh, I think that’s because my versions of them are essentially glorified OC’s, since my attitude toward Cursed Child with regard to characterization is, “*nods mildly* That’s nice, but I’m going to pick and choose at my leisure, thanks. No offense, but I’ve been working on these kids since DH first came out, and I much prefer my headcanon Scorpius who is the biggest, loudest, gayest Drama Princess you have ever met in your life and has been trying to shock Lucius into having a heart attack and dying since he was like six,

“and my headcanon AlSev who’s sometimes Ruby Minerva Severus, most often genderfluid but sometimes a binary trans girl and other time a gay cis boy, loves Ginny but has a complicated and often strained relationship with her (but in fairness, AlSev-Ruby talks to Godfather Neville and Hagrid about their problems more than they talk to either Harry or Ginny), has a complicated relationship with Harry too but for other reasons and when Harry and Ginny eventually divorce each other, AlSev-Ruby is going to stay at their Dad’s more often than their Mum’s, and never lets anyone forget that their middle name is Severus because AlSev-Ruby likes pissing them off with that fact — especially their Weasley grandparents

“Ron but AlSev-Ruby usually feels bad about this because they know on some level that they’re usually lashing out at Ron unfairly because it’s not about their name in most of these scenarios and entirely about other emotions that AlSev-Ruby has no earthly idea how to handle or express in a healthy or constructive way, and they boil over very easily when people needle them about their name (and if it weren’t Ron on the receiving end of this, it would probably be James)

“and Snape’s portrait, whom AlSev-Ruby accidentally made respect them by going, ‘You’re a painting. You are oil on canvas, magically imbued with the real Severus Snape’s personality and memories. Snap at me all you want, but you can’t do anything to me that’s worse than what Rita Skeeter and Molly have been doing for my entire life so far. If you want to get to know me, instead of using me as some conduit for all of your lingering issues with my Dad, then cool, I’d like to get to know you, too. You’re the closest I can get to getting to know my real middle-namesake instead of the myth of him that’s been built up since the War. But if you’ve got nothing interesting to say, then please shut up and let me wait for the Headmistress in peace’ in their first year, if not as eloquently because they were eleven and being Sulky™”

As much as I still hate being compared to her, even accepting that I totally deserve it, Hermione Granger is another easy one for me to get into and always has been. The hard thing with her is not reducing her to either Perfectly Perfect Hermione (which JKR can even fall into some times, like when Hermione hexed the DA sign-up sheet and it scarred Marietta’s face without regard for how Umbridge is the one to blame in that situation and not Marietta) or some joke about some of the times in canon when she was Over The Top about something, in ways that Harry didn’t entirely get so the narrative treats them as Totally Hilarious, even though SPEW (for example) is actually not funny when held up to scrutiny and Hermione works so hard at school out of deep-set fear of failure and being dispensable, and probably also fear that maybe she doesn’t belong in the magical world

Luna Lovegood is also pretty easy for me, though the hard thing with her is trying to make sure that I write her thought processes honestly but in a way that makes sense for the reader (it’s a variation on the big problem of stream of consciousness writing, where writing actual facts stream of consciousness looks like Finnegan’s Wake and is tedious as fuck to read, so Luna has to be close to stream of consciousness but tamed enough so that the experience of reading anything written from her POV is more likely to be enjoyable, and less likely to be like getting hit upside the head with a tire iron labeled, “IT’S ART OKAY, IT’S NOT FOR YOU”).

Then, Remus Lupin is by far the easiest of the Marauders for me to write, and Andromeda Black Tonks can actually be pretty hard for me sometimes, but she’s easier than either of her sisters and still one of the easiest MWPP-era characters for me, period.

And as far as non-HP characters go: well, my other biggest source of fandom writing in the past while has been Teen Wolf, and the top five easiest kids for me there are Scott McCall (to the surprise of no one ever), Kira Yukimura (#still bitter),

“Camden Lahey (but lbr, he’s pretty much just an OC with a canon name because literally all we know about him in canon is, “Isaac’s older brother, on the 2005/6 swim team, died in the military” so the rest of it is shit that I wholesale made up and of course he’s easier for me to get into character with than, say, Allison — who is probably the third easiest of the ladies for me to get into character with, after either Braeden or Malia but it depends on the day — because Allison has, like, actual canon shit to deal with and Cam…… kinda doesn’t.

Like, all of the vaguely Actual Canon shit that he has to deal with is stuff that’s off in the realm of extrapolation, interpretation, and, “Hey, nothing in canon says that he DIDN’T visit Derek and Laura in New York on his way back from his first visit home during his service, or that he DIDN’T drag Derek uptown to see Patti Lupone as Mama Rose because Cam is a Fanboy for reasons relating to his and Isaac’s late Mother, or that they didn’t argue at the intermission about how IT’S A MUSICAL DEREK STOP TRYING TO QUESTION WHY THE CHARACTERS SING JFC IT’S LIKE I DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU”

or, “lbr, Derek is as subtle as a brick hitting you in the face at 5,000 mph and Paige canonically figured out that he was a werewolf anyway, so I don’t think it’s entirely implausible that, if we accept the idea of him and Cam being friends — and Cam being one of the only people who, like, genuinely likes Derek, instead of tolerating him because he’s okay at basketball and his family is rich — then Cam probably figured out that Derek and Laura are werewolves, and if that’s the case, he probably got trotted over to the Hales’ place so Talia could give him third-degree about whether or not he’s with the Argents or any other hunters.

“And, because he was like fifteen and had literally just found out that supernatural shit is real, Cam probably showed that he wasn’t a hunter by getting way too excited about hearing which magical creatures are real and temporarily shelving his hate-on for Talia to be all, ‘oh my god, are vampires real? can they infect werewolves? could Derek be like, a vampire werewolf, how would that even work’ or, ‘so silver bullets don’t hurt you, but what about someone saying your True Name? is True Name magic real?’ or, ‘do seances actually work? I’m totally not asking because I want to try and perform one to contact my dead Mom, I just want to know, like. For curiosity’s sake. Yeah……’”

[spoilers: Cam was TOTALLY asking because he wanted to try and use a seance to contact Eleanor. Derek and Laura had to stop him from trying to do the thing no fewer than eight times before Cam and Derek graduated. To his credit, Derek at least skipped trying to give Cam any kind of lecture, but tbf, he did that because he knew Cam would argue back at him about how Derek had no right to tell Cam that he was doing something stupid and dangerous and playing with things that he didn’t understand, and that Cam’s argument would probably be more than fair.

This did not stop Laura from giving Cam the lectures that he completely deserved, though, because: 1. he was essentially walking up to a big red button labeled, “do not push” and trying to push it without even reading the owner’s manual or the informational plaque on the wall that had a full explanation of why you shouldn’t push the button, and he KNEW that he was doing this, but he felt like it was all going to work out TOTALLY FINE because he wanted his Mom to be not dead and in lieu of that, why can’t he have a seance, Laura, UGH;

and 2. because, unlike Cam and Derek, Larua generally doesn’t do shit that’s too horribly stupid or that has completely awful consequences (…mostly), so she had an actual high-ground from which to give Cam these, “don’t screw around the magic, what the fuck are you thinking” lectures and wasn’t intimidated by Derek’s loudmouth little friend who, like, actively repels everything that even vaguely resembles chill.]

—so, anyway, the point is that I can pretty much do whatever I want with Cam and it makes him a lot easier to write. Laura is a similar case of, “this character is easy for me to write because I made her up,” and in fairness, a lot of my characterization for Braeden is headcanon, too. It’s just headcanon that has more of a basis in canon than Camden and Laura do.

I mean.

Except for parts like Braeden’s twin sister Belladonna who is a ballerina because fuck Jeff Davis, that’s why and also the only family member Braeden still talks to on any regular basis, and their parents who teach at Miskatonic University because I’m pretty sure it’s in the public domain at this point so nyeh, I’m gonna use it, and also they’re in the know about the supernatural but part of a group who has a policy of strict non-intervention, which Braeden thought was bullshit so she set out to do her own thing, which initially involved more plans to help people…… but then she learned that a girl’s gotta eat, and the mercenary work got started.

Also, she will wipe the floor with you at karaoke. Because I felt like it, that’s why.

Yeah, that’s all pretty, “this is not even remotely implied by canon and I wholesale made it up because canon wasn’t giving me like any damn Braeden backstory beyond the barest implications and I fucking felt like it, so there. PS: fuck Jeff Davis.”)

Derek Hale (I’m not always proud of this fact or entirely thrilled about it because when I get into Derek’s head, I take a lot of things from his canon characterization — especially in earlier episodes, before he started trying to be less of a jerk and discovered that: 1. he sucks as an Alpha, and 2. he loves Scott sooooo much — to their logical conclusions and his head is usually not a very pleasant place to be.

Like, he’s my werewolf disaster and I begrudgingly love him but we’re still talking about a guy who, when I write him, makes leaps of logic like, “Well, Cam said to look out for Isaac because he’s not here to do it himself. That is totally the same thing as giving me verbal permission to stalk his baby brother and manipulate him into accepting the Bite, very good plan, way to go, Derek!! :D” and thinks that, “Scott kissed ME first and didn’t explicitly SAY that he’s NOT 17, therefore I’m totally not obligated to ask him shit about shit or consider whether or not he’s having sex with me as a form of emotional self-harm” is a completely valid conclusion and way of doing things

He’s also a guy who would do things like cheat on Braeden with Cam and Cam with Braeden, while telling neither of them about this, and then when he gets arrested for doing something ridiculous, he would call both of them to come get him at the Sheriff’s station because he’s pretty sure that one of them will be mad and decide to just leave him there to think about what he’s done this time — which would end up in both of them coming, and figuring out that they’ve both been getting cheated on, and skip right past the, “being mad at the other cheated upon party” part to the part that’s more like,

“going for coffee and complaining about the fuck-up they’ve both been dating and making fun of things like his secret One Direction blog, or the Star Wars fanfic he writes where his blatant self-insert OC gets to bang Han, Leia, Mara Jade, Lando, both of the Solo twins, and Padmé (in some wonky shenanigans involving time travel) — oh and sucks for Derek, but Cam and Braeden decided to tell Parrish to just leave him in his holding cell because fuck him, they’ve been getting cheated on so he can just call Laura and beg her to come save his ass tonight”

negl, one of my favorite places to put Derek in non-supernatural AUs is prison. How he wound up there usually involved him killing Peter, and it sometimes involved him panicking and hiding Peter’s body under the floorboards because he’s a loser who thinks Edgar Allan Poe is actually a good model for How To Handle Murdering Someone, and…… yeah, I just. I love Derek, he’s easy for me to write, but he’s a disaster in ways I don’t always feel like dealing with, so sometimes, he gets to just go the fuck to prison so I don’t have to deal with him today.)

and……… ugh, I can’t pick between Danny Mahealani and Jackson Whittemore for the number five spot, but both of them are really easy for me, and like. Jackson, I am still vaguely ashamed of, but I don’t feel that bad about it because I got here by virtue of writing him when Astrid and I RP’d TW stuff together and she didn’t want to just talk to herself for ages by writing Isaac and Jackson, and I refused to half-ass it with Jackson and found a way into his head and here we are.

And Danny as I write him is, in a lot of ways, only somewhat less of an OC than Cam and Laura, so…… basically, that.

And bonuses, because I like talking about my legitimate OC’s, oops: Margot, Pete, and Sebastian are the easiest for me to write at the moment but in fairness, that’s largely because I’ve done the most work developing them as characters, relative to everyone else in the cast.

Like, Todd (who is officially Seb’s “it’s complicated,” and Seb’s Gawain Stacy, if you ask Pete — or sometimes even if you don’t ask Pete, because he will totally tell you this whether you like hearing it or not, especially if your name is Sebastian) — Todd has this notion that he, Margot, and Seb are basically gay boy!Hermione (Todd), lesbian!Harry (Margot), and, “Ron but like what if his family had Malfoy money and he was gay” (Seb). He’s not entirely wrong (and their Houses map onto the Trio’s secondary Houses because of course I know my OCs’ Hogwarts Houses, like why would I not know that)

(This whole Thing of Todd’s actually STARTED because I knew that he is a Ravenclaw, Seb’s a Hufflepuff, and Margot’s a Slytherin, and went, “lol, it’s like the Golden Trio in an AU where none of them wound up in Gryffindor, heh”)

and it makes sense that this is how Todd sees things with them because the three of them found each other in undergrad (though Seb found Margot when their RA paired them up for some “getting to know you” thing during orientation because they were the tallest and the shortest people on the hall, and he found Todd at the first meeting of the campus LGBTIQ students organization, had a crush at first sight on the cute chubby guy in the hot pink t-shirt with the screenprint of the Pink Flamingos poster, and totally meant to go be Super Cool about asking Todd out……

……buuuuuut he got excited and instead it came out like, “Hi, oh my god, I love your shirt, you like John Waters, I love John Waters, he’s my hometown hero, oh my god hi hi hi, my name’s Sebastian what is yours do you want to go get coffee, please be my friend, do you like Rocky Horror too? there’s a theatre a couple blocks from here that does a regular shadow-cast, we should totally check it out, I have just met you and I like you please be my friend” instead of like an actual date invite. And he totally called his Mom later that night to go, “MOM, I MADE ANOTHER FRIEND. TWO IN TWO DAYS, MOM. yeah no i still kind of hate my roommate he’s a jerk BUT I HAVE TWO NEW FRIENDS MOM”

………He was very lonely before undergrad because his only constant friend who wasn’t one of his siblings and didn’t shun him after he got outed at Catholic school [though technically, he sort of outed himself in an attempt to spare his boyfriend/best friend from being outed because Seb’s parents already knew he was gay and were totally cool about it, but Damian’s parents believed in reparative therapy and his uncle was the priest at their Catholic school, so him getting outed was really not an option]? Yeah, that only friend was Pete. But I digress.)

Anyway, Todd’s view of things is a little skewed by how he’s lived them, and strictly speaking, trying to map any of my kids onto the Golden Trio and Company is going to end up being a discussion of archetypes and tropes more than anything else because…… But they’re not the Golden Trio and Company.

There are some similarities, but they are mostly in the realm of archetypes AND the ones that aren’t quite as trope-y happened by accident (like, when I noticed that Seb actually does have quite a few similarities with Ron, aside from having Malfoy money — right down to his dad having an A name (Abraham) and his mom having an M name (Marceline) — I went, “well, FUCK” and started trying to get some of those similarities to be…… less so? Because…… Seb’s not Ron. And I don’t want him to be too overly similar to Ron because I want him to be himself, in his own right.

Fortunately, though, Ron isn’t a filthy rich, gay recovering addict who’s been living with undiagnosed major depression for his entire life and sort of accidentally stumbles into finding his mutant superpowers, and whose abusers aren’t his parents — because Abe and Marceline are pretty chill and have been fab to all four of their kids — but rather a series of douchebag ex-boyfriends who [unlike Molly and Arthur] are for real in-text acknowledged as being abusive jerks, and that’s a pretty solid start on Seb Is Not Ron)

But if you were going to try to do the Golden Trio And Company map here, then Todd would probably be Ginny, actually. They don’t have a lot in common, but there are some points of crossover, and the biggest one for me at the moment? Is that right now, I’m guilty of something that I bag on JKR for doing all the time, which is, “Ginny is a great idea for a character but you didn’t fully actualize her like she deserved in the text, you regularly reduced her existence to being Harry’s Significant Other, and it’s frankly bogus, Joanne” — and I’m aware of this, so I’m trying to fix it by working on Todd as a character

But I’m also trying to not spend forever fine-tuning every last detail about a story and then not having a draft of it so much as I have a two-foot stack of print-outs about different parts of it that kinda sorta look like a complete picture when you arrange them just so and tilt your head slightly to the left. So, basically, at the moment? Getting Todd to be more fully realized is on my List Of Shit To Do, but it’s way less of a priority than, “actual complete draft of this train-wreck” because I can do some of this work in revisions and rewriting

But since I opened this door anyway and want to complete the thought for the amusement factor:

Seb, obviously, is Harry in the bigger picture, even if this is mostly based on, “Harry is The Protagonist of his series, and although MY series is ultimately going to be more of an ensemble cast thing, Seb is the focal character for the first book because, in fairness to all the others, he was here first”

Todd is Ginny for the reasons that I just said

Pete and Margot both have very fair claim to being either Ron or Hermione, so they could arguably take turns, and ultimately, the big reason why I’m going to say Pete’s Ron and Margot’s Hermione?

is that Pete has two older siblings and some Issues with both of them (though he’s working them out with his sister, and not so much with his older brother) and has been Seb’s friend longer

while Margot’s an only child and they have totally used the, “we’re both gay, we love each other like brother and sister” line when they don’t feel like explaining their no romo soulmates kind of relationship to people (and sometimes when trying to make Seb’s siblings be less…… not pleased that Margot is so important to him, because to varying degrees, all three of them kinda sorta blame her for some of his problems in ways that she doesn’t entirely deserve)

Lucy is Neville but, like, a plucky ginger lesbian. This is probably one of the comparisons that looks a lot more like reaching, because on the surface, Lucy has a lot more in common with Ginny outside of their roles in the plot — but the thing is?

Even once I get Todd to be more developed, and even if he and Seb aren’t endgame (which was my original plan and I might stick to it but they have a LOT of shit to work on before they can go there so we’ll see how that goes), Todd is still going to be Ginny’s closest analogue to me because the ideas of them and their arcs are closer than anyone else’s (though in fairness, my idea of Ginny and her arc isn’t necessarily anybody else’s because JKR botched writing Ginny so much that this is almost, “room for wild mass guessing” instead of, “room for interpretation”)

Whereas…… yes. Lucy comes on strong, she’s a plucky go-getter who would probably try to fight the sun if she thought the sun was looking at her girlfriend funny, she’s a complete loudmouth and not always in ways that are conducive to anything, she’ll call you on your shit but usually without realizing that she’s saying something she needs to be hearing too, she tries too hard to do everything on her own and usually needs to experience some kind of big setback before she’ll consider accepting help with anything, and she will probably shout at someone while telling them to go calm down because they told HER to calm down.

Also, she’s the only one in my main ensemble cast who’s a legit Gryffindor, for better and for worse (Pete is a Slytherin — though in fairness, Gryffindor is his secondary House [he is aware of this, thanks to an ex of his who made him get Pottermore Sorted and was dead shocked when he wound up in Slytherin, but he has no idea what this means but he’s offended by it because Gryffindor’s colors are red and gold and no thanks, he doesn’t like how he looks in red and gold. He loves how he looks in green and silver, though] — and Josie’s a Ravenclaw)

—but a lot of how Over-The-Top Extra™ she is? that comes out of insecurity and trying to be various things that aren’t true to herself, because she deeply believes that she isn’t good enough. Granted, a big difference between her and Neville is that, while Neville spends a lot of time in the early books being terrified of his potential because he might screw up and prove right everyone who’s ever called him useless, Lucy instead tries to outrun her all of feelings of self-doubt and self-loathing instead of dealing with them, and basically plays a game of, “if I ignore them and just act like the popular idea of me — or like the me I want to be — but louder, maybe they will go away!!”

She’s going to be shocked when this catches up to her, because when she first shows up in the story, she’s of the mind that hey, she has accepted that she’s a lesbian — even if she’s only out to a small handful of people because…… uh, she’s Damian’s baby sister and their parents are still Not Really Very Safe to come out to. Their dad is probably going to die without Lucy coming out to him and she has VERY fair reasons for being afraid that he’d disown her for this — but!!! She has still accepted this!!!! Clearly it was the ONLY THING in her life that she wasn’t at peace with and now she IS so everything is going to magically be ALL BETTER NOW RIGHT!!!!!

No, not really, Lucy. Your sexuality is just one of the things about yourself that you aren’t at peace with.

Lucy’s response: *throws herself even harder into trying to outrun her self-doubt and being completely disingenuous to herself in the process, while trying to smile and laugh like nothing is wrong even though it really blatantly is*

So, that’s all going over about as well as you’d expect (i.e., not very well, not even a little bit whoops), and a lot of her arc in the series is going to be about finding peace with herself and finding her own ways of being a hero that may not necessarily line up with any more conventional expectations thereof, or even her own preconceived ideas of How To Hero Good, and yeah. She’s Neville, but like, a plucky ginger lesbian.

Also, she and Seb are foils for each other in a loooooot of ways that make them mapping onto Harry and Neville make more sense than trying to make Lucy map onto Ginny, in structural terms

Josie is Luna, and I’m short-changing my genderfluid empath child a lot right now but I’ve also been writing this post for WAAAAAY longer than I intended and ahahaha, everyone’s probably bored

And Conrad is Draco Malfoy, but absent any of the excuses that fans love making for Draco (especially not the age thing, like. Draco behaves in a LOT of ways that are completely unacceptable for any person of ANY age, but I will acquiesce that his age is a contributing factor in some instances because he’s a freaking CHILD. Conrad’s not, though. Like, Conrad is 46 and the oldest member of the main cast in the first book. Conrad gets no excuse for his bullshit based on his age.

He also doesn’t get to claim anything about being terrified for the safety of the people he cares about, because…… uh. While I think that the HP fandom oversells that point re: Draco in HBP because at first, he was completely gung-ho and proud of himself for joining a group of Pureblood supremacist domestic terrorist fascists, Draco was still abused and manipulated by Voldemort here — and during the entirety of HBP and DH — and…… well. Conrad was lied to and played by people who are even bigger douchebags than he is, yeah. But he wasn’t sold on joining the neo-fascist supervillains by having his loved ones threatened; he was sold on it by having his ego stroked and only giving a fuck about how this could benefit him)

So, basically, Conrad is Draco with even fewer redeeming qualities

Given that I think Draco only has, like, TWO redeeming qualities, or maybe three on a good day (and that’s debatable because at least one point here is, “it’s not really a quality of his own so much as the fact that I hate victim blaming more than I dislike Draco”), uh

Yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaah, no.

Conrad is only not The Literal WORST EVER because there are other douchebags in his neo-fascist supervillain club who are even worse than he is.

i just love my oc mutant weirdos a lot, thank u for reading

[1taiwan-blog]

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For one gives then 2 gives double as rich RedSea Foxconn etc. 為阻止父親再婚　19歲女竟與父亂倫 | 三立 Buddhism says no sex all people!! reposts!! fake ghosts are not fortune tellers my Benediction from God I'M at my concert tonight's, PEACE! if God I know ghosts are coming which God I will be ready or they just carried a back bag to use one side to go through the inside gym escalator and I kicked Sam because at first GOD I would say what a rude member then you see he has no very clear lower legs after while he was passing and his shirts have been transparency colorful which I also knew or th initial was he moved way to light by faster to pass my side to arrive my front escalator steps but at dark night it's hard to tell only by my airs! ET ETS Aliens are easier because they act like a real person and you know their dumb WiFi to try to analyze knowledge!! 福地福人居！ why U.S. have least problems because Ghostbusters know stupid Americans can't understand through trying hard waste!! to sell them leaving tickets for they have been uselessness fake GODS then you DON'T need to provide tickets when you ask them to leave if they DON'T by no food and they'll leave anyway!! San 3 DOESN'T eat which they depend thoughts! how they got occupied certifications?? either they were watching as the steel New born bae airs to land at delivery from pregnancy or their roots were part of the Dao temples or they got friendship to invite 666 Japanese Ghostbusters who didn't speak English and hanged out Texas! now it's even worse for they're still in lotus city! Jose died in Spain where he was born had his funeral but he came back Formosa in TPE to try few others before he got successfully through ET ETS Aliens at one family did call San 3. San 3 hanged herself in the hospital but she didn't stay in the hospital and when she was called by that PhD she used her Wechat to make videophone with him!!