#but then grew more and more apathy at him because it's been 2 MONTHS AND HE STILL SUCKS AT COMBAT

[alexis-died-inside]

i wonder how they convinced this stubborn ass to train for the dark tourny

[queen-haq]

Fic: A Woman Scorned - Part 8

Fic: A Woman Scorned - Part 8

Pairing: Billy Russo x Reader

Rating: R for language.

Words: ~2000 words.

Summary: You’ve been sleeping with Billy Russo for a few months now. Knowing his aversion to emotional commitments, you’re satisfied with your clandestine arrangement until you catch him having dinner with Dinah Madani one night. Then it finally dawns on you. It’s not that he doesn’t want to commit, he just doesn’t want to commit to *you*.

Billy may think he knows you, but he has no idea what he’s just lost...

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5   Part 6   Part 7

Part 8

Billy read through the file on his desk for the third time that day. After the night of the gala he’d hired an investigator to gather info on you, and now all the major events in your life were neatly encompassed in a red folder, ready for his perusal. Despite your refusal to share anything, he’d managed to learn a lot about you reading your file. Except instead of giving him clarity on you, the documents triggered an avalanche of questions and emotions that left him rattled.

You grew up in the projects, in a poor neighbourhood in Chicago, but had managed to wrangle your way into a state university. He knew how expensive those were, and even with the scholarships you’d earned it was almost impossible for someone in your socio-economic background to be able to attend college – but you had, and judging by your relatively low student loans it wasn’t simply due to luck. Billy had learned a long time ago that when opportunities presented themselves, he had to make quick and tough decisions to get ahead. Rawlins had presented such an opportunity, which had given Billy the cashflow he needed to start Anvil. Who was your Rawlins, he wondered.

Throughout college you interned at a moderately-sized company in Chicago and they hired you immediately upon graduation. You never looked back after that, moving from firm to firm while going up the corporate ladder. There were so many things about your life you didn’t share with Billy but you had been honest about one thing – Anvil couldn’t afford you. If he’d hired you, your salary would be on par with his.  

Billy still remembered when he’d signed his first lucrative contract. He’d been eyeing the Wraith for months prior to that, and as soon as he could justify the purchase he did. The penthouse in a luxury high-rise building came next. You, however, were the complete opposite of him. You owned your condo, and while it was nice and in a decent neighbourhood, it certainly wasn’t a luxury purchase. You were careful with your money, except when it came to shoes. Based on your credit card records, you bought a lot but the ridiculously expensive purchases weren’t as numerous. He guessed those were the ones you bought when you were especially troubled, like Davina had said.

Billy had pored over your life starting from where you were now all the way back to your childhood. The first time he read the child abuse investigation report in your file was two days ago, and it had taken him hours to finish because of the sheer rage it provoked in him. It was an incident reported by one of your teachers after you’d shown up to school with bruises and burn marks. Of course the child protective services had done nothing, you’d been returned to your parents. There were no other reports filed after that but abuse that vicious didn’t stop just because the cops came around. Your parents probably just learned not to leave visible bruises.  Billy was all too familiar with that kind of violence and realizing you went through the same made him want to destroy every fucking person in your life that ever hurt you.

“I fought like hell to make something of myself, to be safe and happy.”

Your words still rung in his ears. They had haunted him for a week now. He could still remember the strange look of apathy on your face even though your words were obviously coming from a place of hurt and anger. At the time he didn’t know what you meant, but now he understood and it both sickened and infuriated him that you felt threatened by him. What could he have possibly done to conjure the same fear in you as your goddamn family? How could you compare him to them?

“You will not destroy me.”

Your voice had been steady and calm when you said the words, a complete contrast to the confusion he’d been feeling. Fine, he may not have recognized your worth sooner before but that didn’t mean he wanted to hurt you. Yet you’d accused him of doing just that and it pissed the fuck out of him. Yeah he’d bragged about Anvil to Roger but that was to get you actual protection and keep you safe – something your precious fucking Roger should have done from day one. Corporations didn’t give a fuck about their employees until their bottom lines were threatened and knowing a competitor had access to that kind of info meant bad PR for Valiant. You were smart, you should have realized exactly why Billy had played that card but instead you chose to be willfully blind and accuse him of jeopardizing your job. It made him so angry that it had taken every bit of willpower he had not to shake the stupidity out of you.

The phone rang, pulling him out of his thoughts. Upon seeing who it was, he picked it up immediately. “Yeah?”

“Hey, boss. Just wanted to give you a heads up. Looks like she’s lost her tail. Didn’t even take her that long. The guy’s an idiot.”

Frustrated, Billy ran his fingers through his hair. The little talk with Roger had worked and Valiant had assigned a bodyguard to you, but like everything else about the company, the guard was ineffective. Fortunately Billy had already anticipated Valiant’s ineptitude so he’d made arrangements for one of his best trackers to keep an eye on you. “Think she knows about you?”

Andy snorted. “This ain’t my first gig.”

Even though Billy knew Andy was great at what he did - he was one of Anvil’s best - it still didn’t assuage his anxieties about you. “Where is she right now?”

“Driving out of town. I’m on her tail.”

“Headed for?”

“Not sure yet. Connecticut, I think.”

Billy exhaled an agitated sigh. “Okay, let me know if there’s trouble.”

“Will do.”

After hanging up with Andy, he called your number. As expected, it went to your voicemail automatically. Just like it had every time this past week. Obviously you’d blocked him, which irritated the fuck out of him, but he realized it was something you needed to do for yourself. And if you didn’t have some unhinged lunatic after you, Billy would have given you the space you needed - but now was not the time to respect your goddamn boundaries.

“Hey, it’s me. I get it. You’re pissed but we need to talk. Call me.” He paused, breathing. A part of him wanted to add a ‘please’ but he didn’t like the thought of pleading with another person, even you. Because if he begged and you still didn’t call back… he didn’t want to think about what that meant.

Reluctantly, he put your file down and returned to reviewing the contracts in front of him.

***

It was almost two in the morning. He’d gone out for dinner with some potential clients and schmoozed the hell out of them. After a lot of booze and ass-kissing, they finally shook on the deal. All in all, it was a pretty great night except he couldn’t stop thinking about you.

Every time his phone rang he hoped it was you; it never was. And now he was lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling and thinking of you like some lovesick fool. It was pathetic. He should have gone home with the waitress that had slipped him her number. She’d been hot, fun, and more than happy to fuck him but some stupid part of him felt guilty – actually guilty even though you’d been ignoring him for a week – of sleeping with someone who wasn’t you. What the hell was wrong with him?

Yeah, sure, he’s been in some relationships before but they never lasted long. When things were bad, they were terribly, horribly bad and the good times just weren’t worth it. And so, in the past few years, he’d decided to keep things casual with everyone until you fucking came along and dropped a bomb and now he was right back in the middle of a hurricane. Fuck you. Fuck You. Fuck you for making him feel like this. For making him feel desperate and clingy and pathetic. For making him worry about you. For making him care.

He grabbed his phone and called you. There was your fucking voicemail greeting again and the dreaded beep.

“I make you feel worthless?” A bitter laugh escaped his throat. “What the fuck did I do to make you feel that way? Tell me. Because you actually haven’t given me any reasons. You just spouted some bullshit about having feelings for me before you walked away. Now you’ve blocked my number and I’m sitting here trying to figure out what the fuck I did wrong.” He scooted off the bed and began pacing the floor. “Eleven fucking months we’ve been sleeping together and you tell me nothing about yourself. Nothing. You were a glorified sex doll. A fucking fleshlight who spoke and only told me things I wanted to hear. Yes, Billy. No, Billy. Fuck me, Billy. You kept everything bottled up! Not once did we have a real conversation. And then all of a sudden you come alive and I find out there’s more to you and I want to get to know you better but then you tell me you have feelings for me, that you might actually love me and instead of giving me a chance to process any of this shit you dump my ass and block me? Fuck you, Y/N!”  

He hung up the phone, feeling much better, but within seconds that feeling of euphoric release turned to anxiety. What if you misinterpreted what he meant? What if something he said inadvertently hurt you again? This time when he called you, his voice was calmer.

“This isn’t me, Y/N. I’m not the guy who calls a woman over and over again, especially when she wants nothing to do with me. But you’re in my head. You’re everywhere I look. I don’t want to think about you, I don’t want to give a fuck about you, but I do…” He took a deep breath. “You said you might love me but I think you’re full of shit. Because when you care about someone, you don’t leave them behind. Shutting someone out, abandoning them, that’s not love. That’s being a fucking coward.”

After putting his phone back on the nightstand table, he lay back in bed with his arm propped up behind his head. He pondered the message he left, realizing the truth. As hard as he’d fought it, as much as he didn’t want to, he had fallen for you. You. Not the woman he’d been fucking for eleven months who didn’t have any personality but the real you, the woman who challenged him, who made him laugh, who was brilliant and incredibly smart and so fucking beautiful he’d get a hard-on practically every time he looked at you. There was so much about you he didn’t know, but he wanted to spend the rest of his life discovering you, fucking you, making you his.

He didn’t believe in destiny or any of that romantic nonsense. The universe had fucked him over too many times for him to accept sentimental bullshit like that. But what he did believe in was himself. Everything he had he fought for and he destroyed anyone who got in his way. Something told him you were the same as him. You two were connected.

He reached for his phone again and dialed your number. His voice was strong, calm, and resolute as he left you a final message.

“I like you. I want you. I’m not walking away.”

He hung up, smirking.

Part 9

A/N - I’m back from lovely St Maarten, all tanned and relaxed :) I hope you guys had a wonderful week, and that you enjoyed this new chapter. I know it wasn’t plot-heavy, just thought-heavy but that was on purpose. I really wanted a chapter just for Billy to process his feelings about “You”. Hope the lack of plot wasn’t a disappointment. As always, thank you for the lovely feedback on the last chapter.  I’m sorry I didn’t respond in a timely manner while I was away!  Please know that I truly appreciate the likes, the reblogs, the wonderful feedback and the asks you guys left me.

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[yoursinfulurges]

AntiHero

[The Venom Within] <- read part one here.

Description: The events that soon followed your emotional downfall turns dark and horrifying after Hydra gains possession of your freedom. 

1/2 of part 2

Warnings: Abuse. Kidnapping. Angst. 

Disclaimer: In this story' venom has no conscious and is simply just the readers alter, or the readers inner thoughts and insecurities. This takes place after civil war time. So Endgame and Infinity War never happens.

____________ 

You huffed inaudibly, hearing your stomach roar from starvation for the fifth time this minute. You had only gotten twelve blocks away from the tower, which was still very much visible when you turned back. Annoyingly so, you tried to avoid any peripheral contact with it, in fear of changing your mind and running straight back. 

Even trying your very hardest to block out any childhood memories spent there from coming back to you, as the last thing you needed was for more tears to be shed. You felt eerily deprived of sensation, and you didn't know if it was because of the cold New York air or the fact that you left a part of you behind back in that tower. The one capable of deciphering the many layers of the overwhelming apathy you ever so felt reside within you. 

The one able to comprehend and break down your other feelings that remained intacted, yet almost seemed brain dead. As if not computing the sitution that had happened moments ago, defying how your tense heart truly ached. Feeling as though you were just a walking body, an empty shell of the person that once was. You knew your inner subconscious was protecting you from added trauma, and was doing the best thing it could by preventing you from feeling the complexity of it all and only allowing minor details to slide. As said feelings would only send you into a spiralling depth of anxiety.

 And only god knows what would happened if your emotions alone suddenly decided it was time to have a panic attack at this very moment. Despite being greatful for the somewhat unorthodox coping mechanism that was forced upon you, you were at war with yourself. Almost angry that you couldn't process the overwhelming wave of sensations, having to submit to the black cold solitude of your mind till your brain finally decides to open up and evaluate just how badly the damage was to your mental health. 

But till that happens your soul was left to wonder and yield in confusion instead of settling on one dependent emotion.... 

You were conflicted to no doubt. 

You were angry yet, if tried hard enough and dug a bit deeper, pass the wall you built around your heart, you found yourself strangely at peace. Contradicting the forefront frustration you had with the profound perplexity of the situation, confusing you once more. As a part of you almost beams at the sudden calmness that over came you, in contrast to your outbursts merely an hour ago. 

Sure, you felt a myriad of miniscule emotions coincide you, tiny enough not to affect you in any way shape or form, or take away your apathetic structure, (thankfully so). And you knew that you were definitely far from okay as of right now, especially since you were somewhat going through an existential crisis. Yet in a funny defiant kind of way you were fine. It was as if your amygdala had froze, preventing you from registering everything that had happened. Forcing you to rerun the moments leading up to here in order to get to the bottom of what your true emotions and opinions were. 

You made it out of the tower unnoticed, given the fact that you dressed a lot more muted than you'd normally do. Nobody would think that it was Y/n Stark under the hood of one of Steve Rogers' old jacket. Your clothes weren't exactly ideal, but you were in no position to complain, you acted in a panic and grabbed whatever was on the way to the exit. 

That being Natasha's grey hoodie and Steve's oversized leather jacket. Both laid untouched, draped over the abandoned conference room chairs. You saw it the moment you stepped out the elevator, peering through the glass walls just to confirm whether it was really their's. It was a given that the room hadn't been cleaned out yet, being that it had been months since anyone has been in there. But then again, only a few people had conformation to that area of the tower. 

Without thinking, you had scanned your hand onto the access pad, and before you knew it, the glass door slid open. A decision you silently curse yourself on now for doing, since there was no doubt about it that Friday had already informed your dad that your last digital encounter was going into that room. You knew how incredibly smart that AI was, so you even made it an effort to take the route with less cameras. Even purposely running around the building, going to useless area's to confuse her in the future before sliding pass an unsupervised emergency exit. 

Despite the fact that it was 1:30 AM, the streets of Manhattan was as lively as ever. Though there was a lot less traffic at this time of the night. It gave you comfort to know that you weren't completely alone walking the streets. You may be skilled in hand-to-hand combat, but at the end of the day, you were still a girl, and that fact alone made you a clear target for some. 

And you doubt you could put up much of a fight, especially with how starved weak (and not to mention injured) you were. You had to be weary of who was around you at all times, stick to crowded areas yet be inconspicuous enough not to be spotted by cameras. As you knew for a fact that Friday was most likely scanning the area. 

Though despite how stress driven the situation was and how fidgety you felt, you weren't completely wandering lost, you had a destination set at mind and it gave you all the hope that you needed to keep moving onward. That location being the small little Chinese restaurant tucked away at a back alley passage seven blocks away from where you were. As you were quite close with the owner, being a regular weekly. So you knew for a fact that if you asked she would let you stay for a couple of days without hesitation. The small cozy family owned business reminded you so much of your old home, back when you still lived with your mother. 

After that night- or more so week spent with Tony, your mother had decided it would be best to stay put in China for a while. Delusions of starting something more than just a hook up with the oh so' brilliant Tony Stark flooded her mind. She wanted to be at arms reach for the man and stay exactly where he left her. Tony told her multiple times over the course of seven days that he'd be back for her, but he never came back... 

As weeks went by your mother had come to the realization that those words were merely nothing but empty promises and drunken slurs. Thus feeding her resentment for the small little child that grew inside her. You weren't a native of China but you were born and raised there up until age eleven or twelve, when your mother passed from cancer. Your childhood for the most part was dry and barren of any affection, having to submit and be degraded to being your mother's personal maid. Despite the mistreatment you had to endure, you couldn't exactly complain because you weren't exactly suffering. You had a roof over your head and all the food and water you could ever want, not to mention access to education. From a young age you had always shown signs of carrying the infamous Stark gene, harboring a profound skill to grasp and master any subject thrown your way. At the age of only six you were already capable of speaking three different languages; English, Chinese, and French. You had all characteristics of being a Stark. 

Except of course the looks.... Which was primarily why Tony didn't believe you were his child to begin with. You knew from the age of twelve that you looked more like your mother rather than your dad, but the contrast was blatantly eye striking next to the man whom was supposed to be your father. You had your mom's features more not to mention her complexion, being that your mother was [your race]. 

(If you're white then imagine y/n is paler or tanner than Tony, I'm Asian so....) 

You had never forgotten the most pivotal and accurate representation of your relationship that unfolded the day you first met... 

🕸🕷🕸 

You ran towards the man stood a few feet away from you, letting go of the woman's hand. Your face beams displaying a blinding smile as you ran towards Tony. 

"Dad!" 

You screamed in joy running towards the male engulfing his mid waist with your arms. The man looked down at you in a fright, his brows furrowing together as he looked at the Stark family lawyer and the social worker. 

He gently yet assertively pulls your arms off of him, not sparing you a glance as you looked up in question. 

"Are you sure she's mine?" 

Your heart drops at that moment as all becomes clear... The smile no longer present on your face as you looked down and distanced yourself away from Tony. Something no one took notice of. 

"We've already done a DNA test on her sir and she's yours..." The social worker lady spoke timidly, clutching her files tightly. 

"Well do two more tests, god damn it!" 

Tony screamed causing you to flinch slightly. A prickling sensation of shame washing over you as you watched him begins to pace, rubbing his face with the palm of his hands in distress. 

"Come here sweetie, let's go get you something to eat, you must be hungry from your flight." 

A woman with ginger hair spoke lightly as she forced out a smile, extending her hand for you before glaring at the man when you took her hold. 

"I want a cheese burger...." 

She nodded briefly, pulling you away from the scene and straight towards the elevator. 

🕸🕷🕸 

And at that day was when you realized that things were only going to get more complicated from there. Because the first moment that you both met, he had already decided that he didn't want you. 

Though contrary to his primal feelings, you were very much aware of your fathers attempts in searching for you, even though it had only been forty five minutes since the fight. It was reassuring but, you weren't in the mood to awe about it. You were still mad at him, and had zero plans of forgiving him any time soon. Or returning any time soon... You wanted him to worry and loose sleep, it was petty but it would be a mere compensation for the suffering he put you through. 

You brush pass a halted group of people, no more than twelve, lightly shoving pass them irritably. Slightly annoyed with their odd behavior, as they all seemed to be watching something you couldn't care less about. You let out an inaudible scoff, as you walked passed them. Your attention devoted to unwrapping the bubble gum you had in hand. Harshly shoving the minty treat into your mouth before putting your bandaged hands into the pockets of the leather jacket. You heaved in relief, finally giving your roaring stomach a somewhat rest after fourteen hours of starvation. The gum was probably months old by now since you found it in Nat's hoodie, but you couldn't care less. It was only meant to sustain your hunger for twenty more minutes. 

You walk at a leisurely pace, stopping slightly to push the pedestrian button at the cross walk. You watched as multiple cars pass by, rolling your eye irritably as you hear the crowd of people gasp in awe again. You normally weren't so easily agitated, but you're currently having a hard time figuring out just what your new normal would be from now on... Tapping your foot on the concrete pavement, you wished time would speed up. 

"What do you think is happening up there?" 

"Who knows" 

"Maybe he's just testing out his new suits.' 

With that, you freeze all movements. It was as if everything stilled at the command of one word. You were scared shitless of all the possibilities it could be, not knowing whether you were willing to look or not, but your anxiety was killing you. Feeling it increase at every breath, taunting you like marionettes on a string, dearing you to look, only to scream no just afterwards. With an in take of air, you pushed back those thoughts and slowly, you turned to view what all the fuss was about. Gasping in shock and horror at the sight infront of you. 

He was insane. 

There stood the Stark tower tall and proud, being lit up like a firecracker with multiple yellow streaks of light ejecting from the building. It looked as though hundreds of missiles were being fired into the air, contrasting the twilight sky. Even with the skyscrapers that surrounded the tower, the sight demanded all the attention. No, those weren't missiles...  

They behaved too smart to be simply just that. And you knew better than to dismiss them so easily. Multiple flew in every direction, some swirling around the tower, and others going straight up. There was at least two or four going north and south, while a dozen takes off headed east and west. It looked as though someone was celebrating New Years early, and doing so extravagantly, except it was the middle of fall... 

The sight was beautiful you couldn't deny that, but you were confused as to what exactly that could mean. Was it meant for you? Was he calling you back? Was that his version of an Amber alert? Or maybe they celebrating that you were finally gone... Images of Pepper, Tony, and Peter celebrating your leave quickly flash through your mind, stabbing you in the back ones more. Quickly, you shake them out of your head, returning your attention once again to the event in front of you. Your brows pulled together in question before it officially clicked. Hitting you hard like a brick, demolishing the wall of protection you built around yourself to stop the flood of overwhelming emotions. Feeling a small tug in your chest, the numbness that guarded your heart slowly dispersed as anxiety crept up your spine. 

He had unleashed the entirety of his Iron Legion's to search for you. 

All 108 suits.... 

Without thinking, you quickly crouched down, seeing one flying low into the street, right towards you. Your hood fell from a gust of wind as your hair blew all around. You screw your eyes tightly, covering your ears at a loud swooshing sound invading your eardrums. Thankfully, it flew pass you. You ignored the cheering of the crowd, quickly trying to run and sprint into an underground sub station. Turning back one last time, only to be greeted by more iron suits taking off from the tower. You frantically focusing your eyes, seeing a blue and red figure swinging from a far. 

      Peter....  

As luck may have it, he swung left, following a completely different road. 

And with that, you ran. You ran as fast as your feet could carry you, frantically looking for the 99th street substation opening so that you could hide underground. 

Cut short gasps of panic erupt from your mouth as you hurriedly ran across the street. You closed your eyes tight, feeling tears forming and falling down your face. Oh no, not now... Cold frost bitten air hits your skin as you maneuver yourself around bystanders. Not now, not now, not now. The tears fell more frequently as you squeezed your eyes shut once more. 

You were not going to send yourself into and anxiety attack, not now, and not because of this. 

Your running comes to a halt as you stand exactly where you're supposed to be, eyes quickly looking around in search for the station opening. 

There! 

In a fright, damp cold sweats engulfs your body as you enter and ran down the steps, out from above ground sight. You jump over the turnstile, panting from the tiredness as you took note of how soar your legs were becoming. You gulp, chest rising and falling rapidly as you looked around to see if anyone saw your odd behavior. And to your surprise the station was completely empty, odd... Though that could very well be because the scheduled 1:40 train had just took off fifteen minutes ago. You moved with hesitation and weariness as you looked around for any person in sight. Silently, you plopped yourself down onto a steel bench, trying desperately for your breathing to calm down. 

You didn't know how long it had been or how much time passed since you've sat down, but you stayed put fidgeting for what seemed like hours. Your thighs bounced anxiously as you kept an eye out for any short of movement, the dimly lit grimy station gave you an on edge feeling and it didn't sit right in your stomach. You felt like you were being watched from all sorts of corners and you shook it off as anxiety but something told you to stay guarded. 

Your ears would perk from time to time, hearing loud gusts of winds and cheering from above ground, ensuring the fact that your father's search party wasn't going away anytime soon. 

You hear movement coming in, snapping out of your haze as you felt a presence sit beside you. You peer up meekly in curiosity before gasping in shock and horror at who the person was. 

      Brock Rumlow.... 

"Long time no see little Stark." He spoke voice raspy and sinister as you cringe at the sight of his face. There, half of his profile was burnt and agitated red as one of his eyes was completely titanium white, you figured he was blind there. Wanda really did a number on him as you all suspected that she had killed him.... 

Little Stark.... That was something only Fury called you... 

You swallow in fear as you notice five more men appearing suddenly. You suddenly felt incredibly hyper aware of the situation, your vision tunneling as your heart rate increases. This was really happening... 

"I've waited a long time for this kid... knock her out!" 

Before you could scream in distress a throbbing pain consumes the back of your skull, and then everything turned black...

_____________

I owe you guys an explanation, and to put it simply, I was depressed and felt unmotivated so I took a lot of time to myself... I wasn't aware that so many people were expecting a follow up to a stupid little story I had written in April... I am without of words and am absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of support and love you all have given me. Yet the feeling of being pressured to write came with the notion of so much positivity, thus tainting it. I can't promise when the second half of part two will come out, but know that it is coming......

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[laurenmm62017]

When You Find Your Answers, I'll Be There Chapter 2

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31111016

Here's the 2nd chapter! I don't think I nailed Kallus' POV so i appreciate any feedback!

Alexsandr Kallus grew up on Coruscant, the most populous planet in the galaxy. He knew about soulmates before he was even able to walk. He was surrounded on all sides by people talking about soulmates.

He absolutely hated it.

He hated that all he can see are shades of grey just because he hasn’t met someone he’s supposed to spend the rest of his life with. He hated that it wasn’t even guaranteed that he and his soulmate would be romantic partners, but they could be simply platonic (which would be fine with him) or even hate each other (which he was less fine with). He hated that he might not even meet his soulmate AT ALL. He hated how all of his family, friends, classmates, and teachers always made such a big deal about soulmates.

He was so tired of it.

Alex was 11 when he was bullied for these views so much that he was cornered after school and beaten up so hard, his ribs were bruised for a solid month afterwards.

He decided then that he would enlist in the Grand Army of the Republic when he came of age. Everything was grey on those giant Venators anyways.

He never really thought about who his soulmate could be. He pushed himself to be as strong, fast, and smart as possible. He pushed himself so hard, he passed out due to exhaustion every night. During a particularly grueling sparring session, he had pushed so hard, that his partner grew enraged and broke his leg to get him to stop fighting. Pain lanced up and down his leg as he screamed and writhed on the ground. Their instructor calmly, almost too calmly, called to the medbay on campus for a stretcher. Alex never really forgot that look of apathy.

When Kallus was 20, The Galactic Civil War ended and the Empire rose to power, with Emperor Palpatine at the helm and his second in command Vader at his side. The Grand Army of the Republic became the Imperial Army, and he was recruited into the ranks as a Commander. It took a long time for ranks and respect to cement into place, but by the time he and his troops went on their first real mission to Onderon, a former base for major rebellions led by Saw Guerrera, he gained the respect of all under his command. He regarded them all as capable soldiers and friends in return.

The mission went south, of course. It turned out that Guerera’s troops hadn’t left the planet yet because they had blown up his company’s transports. Kallus had been knocked out in the first blast, and woke up on his back on the side of the road. He attempted to stand up, but he found that he couldn’t move a single muscle.

Then, slowly, a tall, dark grey Lasat menacingly prowled down the path of destruction, executing every one of the soldiers who were still showing signs of life.

John, Lina, Corbyn, their medic, Stim, everyone.

Kallus’ eyes were as wide as can be, as the Lasat slowly passed by his position.

‘Don’t notice me, don’t notice me, don’t noti-’ He frantically thought, but it was in vain.

The Lasat’s head whipped around to look at him, paralyzed on the ground.

“Well, well, looks like I found the commander of the group. That’s some fancy armor compared to the others, isn’t it?” He purred dangerously. Kallus tried to open his mouth, but found he still couldn’t move.

‘If you’re going to kill me, just get it over with.’ He glared up at the Lasat.

“Ooooooh, look at those eyes. Tell me, have you found your soulmate yet, Commander?” He snickered, leveling his weapon at him, some kind of modified electrostaff. “Tell you what? I’m feeling pretty generous tonight, so I’ll let you live. But I gotta make it look good. So what should I do.... Heh, I got it.”

The Lasat swung down on Kallus’ leg and it broke cleanly. Kallus still couldn’t move but the pain of the same leg that broke a few years ago was so excruciating, he passed out.

When he woke up, he was lying in a medical bed. His superior officer, Admiral Yularan, was sitting in a chair at his bedside.

“Good to see you awake, Commander. The medical droids tell me you’ll make a smooth recovery. Whenever you are able, I’d like a full report of what happened down there.”

“My men?”

Yularan shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, my boy. You were the only one we found still alive.”

He looked up at the ceiling, anger, guilt, and fear flooded through him. He felt so helpless. He was caught off guard, and as a result, everyone was dead.

Because of him.

In that moment, on that uncomfortable medical bed, he vowed that this would never happen again.

Kallus was 26 years old when he was recruited into the Imperial Security Bureau on the recommendation of Admiral Yularan. He was trained to be ruthless, unforgiving, and as stoic as a rock. He was first assigned to Internal Affairs in order to keep loyalty to the Empire. He was very good at this job. Because he garnered the respect and loyalty or his coworkers and subordinates, many of them were rather to get in his favor by reporting any disloyalty or traitorous activity to him. He was one of the most successful Agents in ISB at this time. However, he was becoming restless just staying on Coruscant every single cycle. He wanted to get out in the field, and assist the Empire from out in the stars. He requested to be transferred to Investigations.

That was where he first encountered his soulmate.

His Lasat soulmate.

For kriff’s sake, how cruel could the universe be? A Lasat? The very one who slaughtered his first unit? One of the species he helped hunt to extinction. Surely this was a joke.

That first time he made eye contact with him, however, was admittedly magical. The way that color seemed to first saturate within the Lasat’s eyes, and spread to his soft-looking fur, and then to his surroundings made him pause for a moment. He was so captured in his eyes, it was like the galaxy paused just for this moment.

But reality came back as a blaster bolt nearly caught him in the shoulder and he ducked back to cover.

In his free time, he learned the names of the colors of his soulmate. His eyes were bright green. He had light purple fur and dark purple stripes. His jumpsuit is dark green normally, as he rarely could disguise himself. He encountered his soulmate many more times in the span of a few months, but he was never able to capture him or his group of rebels.

And then they somehow crash landed together on that Geonosian ice moon.

~

Alexsandr sat on the ground, and watched his soulmate, Garazeb Orrelios, member of the Spectre crew, jog towards the Ghost and as his friends poured out of the ship to welcome him back.

He sighed and leaned back against the wall of the cave they had taken shelter in.

“When you find your answers, I’ll be there.”

That is what Zeb had said. But why in the galaxy would he try to find answers to questions he knows he won’t like the answers to?

For himself? For the galaxy? For Zeb?

He knew that no one in the Empire would run out and embrace him like Zeb’s teammates had. The most interaction he will have is with the medical team to fix his leg. He would simply send a report to a superior officer that he would make up.

Kallus was picked up by an Imperial shuttle long after the Ghost left the atmosphere. As he suspected, he is sent to medical, discharged after his leg is set, and sent back to his quarters. No one except Konstantine greeted him on the way back.

Alone in his quarters, he sat down heavily on his bed and stared at the grey floor, walls, bedsheets. It was as if he had never even found his soulmate at all. The only burst of color there was the small meteorite he smuggled back with him.

“It’s the same color as Zeb’s bo-rifle…” He thought, idly stroking his thumb along the crevices in the meteorite.

“I’m going to find my answers, Zeb.”

~

The next time he saw Zeb in person was right after his escape from the Chimera. He messed up. He got caught, and he caused a huge loss for the Rebellion. Would he really be welcomed into their ranks after everything he had done? He was genuinely not planning to ever join up with them. If he got caught, he figured he would never see the light of day again and he would die as Fulcrum.

He never expected Kanan Jarrus, of all people, to approach him after their first jump into hyperspace.

“Kanan.” He whispered, clutching his arm to his chest and shifting his weight to one leg. It still hurt even after the medical droid looked him over. “Thank you, for taking me in.”

Seeing Kanan this close, without his mask, Alexsandr could see why the Jedi usually wore his green face shield. The scars across his face were much lighter than the rest of his face, jagged and haunting. Kanan placed a hand on his shoulder gently.

“Thank you, for risking everything.”

“It wasn’t that hard. Once I found my answers, it was clear to me.”

“We’re glad to have you, Fulcrum.” Kanan smiled and dropped his hand back down. “Zeb is in the common room, if you want to speak with him. The debriefing is almost over.”

“Thank you. Kanan. And please. My name is Alexsandr.”

He smiled at Alexsandr. “Get in there, Alexsandr.” Then, he continued through the ship with the comfort of someone who has been in a place for a long time.

Alexsandr slowly limped up to the door of the common room, pausing for one moment before he opened the door. Inside was Hera Syndulla, General Dodonna, Sabine Wren, and in the far corner, his soulmate, Garazeb Orrelios. Their eyes met and for a moment, it seemed as if everything fell away. It didn’t matter that he just barely managed to escape from the Empire. It didn’t matter that he had been beaten down over and over. All that mattered was that he was safe here, caught in those sharp, bright green eyes.

Zeb motioned for Alexsandr to stand next to him, and he limped over as fast as he could. He leaned his weight against the wall  and Zeb placed his hand right next to his. He could feel the heat radiating off of Zeb, and in that moment, Alexsandr had never felt safer.

“So, did you find your answers?”

“I did.”

[fortheloveoffanfic]

Protective Service

John Wick x Reader (A/n-random fact, in reality, The Irish is actually from the West, i.e, they’re called the Westies, but this is fiction so *shrugs*)

Masterlist   Chapter 1   Chapter 2   Chapter 3  Chapter 4  Chapter 5

Warnings- Tension?

Chapter 6 Jealousy And Other Sharp Objects

A week has passed, and things between John and Y/n had gone back to the way they used to be, as if she hadn't opened up to him, in a way she usually didn't to anyone, as if they hadn’t seen each other in a light that would blur the lines of what they were. Of course, the apathy exchanged immediately afterwards should have been telling enough, and for the most part, it was, at least for the first four or five days. It hadn’t even bothered John until, late one night, when he was heading to Y/n’s home office for confirmation on a work matter.

He was just walking up the hall, hands slipped coolly into his pocket and a file wedged between his arm and his side, almost near the door when it opened. He was wholly expecting Y/n, and was a little taken aback, even if he didn’t show it, when Donavan walked out instead, buttoning his wrinkled white dress shirt and blazer draped over his crooked elbow as he nudged the door closed behind himself. Both men brushed past each other hastily, not wanting to share the same square footage for longer than absolutely necessary and an irrational wave of jealousy surged up in him. Reaching the door, John could even hear Y/n shuffling around, probably just getting dressed. Still though, he knocked.

It took a minute, but eventually her voice rang through, cool and unaffected as she permitted, “Come in.” Drawing in a sharp breath, John pulled the door open, not sure if he should keep looking or turn away when he caught her in the midst of pulling on her thin chiffon blouse. She wasn’t half as exposed as she was during their shared evening in the kitchen, but there was something about knowing that Y/n had just been with someone else that made it seem wrong for John to look. Though he didn’t have much time to think on the matter for the minute she’d finished fiddling with the stylish ruffles at the neckline, Y/n moved to lean against the lip of her desk, breaking John’s thoughts as she ran her fingers through sex mused hair, “What do you want?”

Unable to keep the edge of unwarranted envy to himself, John lounged on the leather upholstered sofa kept against the wall, setting the file next to him before leaning back and crossing one ankle over his knee, “Does he know?” Nonchalantly, he nudged his head towards the door.

Her reaction wasn’t what he expected and Y/n quirked a mischievous smirk, her lithe fingers finding a half drank glass of Cabernet near some disarrayed papers, swirling around the remainder of her drink before slowly bringing the glass to her lips. Y/n’s gaze holding John’s didn’t waver, nor did the mischief reflected on her features, “Know about what?” Feigning innocence didn’t really suit her because even then a dark, menacing mystery lurked beneath her façade and Y/n didn’t look any less the vixen that she usually was. 

“Don’t do that,” John huffed. It was a battle to maintain some semblance of dominance over the situation, neither of them wanted to be at the other’s whim and it only then dawned upon John that it was a miracle that they’d existed in the same space for just over two months without getting into a fight. They’d come close though, two personalities that alike were bound to clash. “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” he persisted, not phased in the slightest by her behavior. 

“Why would he need to know?” Finishing off her wine, Y/n replaced the glass on the surface with a quiet thud, “Who I fuck isn’t his business, and its not yours either,” folding her arms, Y/n’s smirk widened a bit when upon noting how John stiffened slightly, “Are you jealous, John?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” John fired immediately, sounding more defensive than intended, “It’s just,” clearing his throat, he pondered only for a second before voicing his suspicions, “I don’t trust him.”

Smoothly, like aged whiskey over ice, Y/n chuckled, rolling her gorgeous orbs, “Donavan? You don’t trust Donavan? Now who’s being ridiculous?” Pushing off the edge, Y/n sauntered around the desk, easing into her chair, “He’s loyal, there’s no reason to doubt him.”

“I’m just saying,” pressing the matter was fruitless, yet John still continued, “You should keep an eye on him.”

“Stop it,” immediately, her tone grew firm and her jaw tightened, “Don’t do that,” exasperated already, Y/n threaded a hand through her loose tresses, “Is this what you came here talk about?”

Now, equally irritated by her dismissiveness, John’s voice took on a new harshness, “No,” He stood, swiping up the manila folder and taking long strides towards her desk, “These are the specifics for Vienna next week,” he offered hastily, the folder almost falling to the table top during the trade off, “Review it, tell me what you you think in the morning.”

Sighing heavily, Y/n almost felt guilty about the turn their conversation had made, but something stopped her, leaving her to try to call out to him in a tone tinged with annoyance as he headed for the door, “John-”

“Good night, Y/n,” he cut her off, stalking out of the room, leaving the door open.

The next week, Vienna. It was the morning of Y/n’s second meeting with the High Table and like the first, the hours before had brought a sense of dread with it, the only thing soothing her in the tiniest bit was that John would be right outside the door that time. They still hadn’t ironed things out after that late night in her office, once again sinking into a state where words spent between them were short and few. Usually something like that wouldn’t have bothered Y/n, but somehow, being at odds with John wasn’t the same; she secretly wanted him to care and not knowing if he still did was disheartening.

The whole thing had made her more snappy than she usually was; her quick temper grew shorter, her sharp words were given a new edge and her moments of quiet were vastly extended. For the most part, it made those around her even more willing to back down instead of pushing an issue. All except one.

The three of them had gathered at Y/n’s room that morning; Donavan to brief Y/n on the fast approaching meeting and John to leave with her when she was ready. “The mayor of New York is requesting your audience; at the charity gala next month,” Donovan casually eased in as they ate at a table near the room’s living room window.

Scraping her fork against the delicate china, Y/n’s absent gaze snapped up, focusing on the source of the words, “You can tell the mayor to go fuck himself.”

“Vila-”

Without letting him finish, she was cutting him off, “Donavan. I’m not interested, okay. We stay away from politics.” Clearly over the conversation, Y/n stood, taking her plate over to the room service cart, refilling her coffee afterwards.

“This could be good for us,” Donavan reasoned, forgetting his food and glancing at a still silent John before looking to Y/n, “He needs funding for his reelection campaign and he says that if he’s in for a next term he can give us a leg up; an in with the D.A and couple judges on our side just in case.”

“Yeah,” she huffed, “But it also gives him leverage. He can betray us just as easily as he’s betraying them, and one word and we’re over,” taking a long drag of her coffee, Y/n shook her head, “This isn’t a good idea.”

Standing abruptly, Donavan tried to step next to where she stood at the cart, though Y/n simply moved away, walking near to the table, standing where Vienna’s early morning sun would cast an otherworldly glow on her face. Simply taking it all in, John continued reading through the intel he’d had on the other members of The Table as he ate. “It is. Vila,” he whispered the name, hidden affection laced with the word, “This union could give us an edge on the Irish. Fuck the city, you’ve wanted to take time down since you stepped foot in the club house. If we don’t do this with Balinski, they will, and we can’t risk that.” 

“Donavan,” Y/n’s exasperation was audible and John was internally glad that he wasn’t the only one on the receiving end of it, “You don’t understand. We need to be careful with who we trust, and Balinski, he’s not the kind of man we can trust. God,” she scoffed a humorless chuckle, “He’s a fucking politician, we don’t need his type sniffing around.”

“What we don’t need is the Irish with such a big leg up in the game. Look, we already have Staten Island and everything else in the west, but they have most of the east. We work with Balinski, we can take it, and wherever the fuck you want, no questions asked,” anyone from a mile away could see that Donavan was reaching his rope’s end and there was an sense of desperate urgency in his explanations, as if there was a lot riding on Y/n accepting the invitation to the gala, “We can not just hand this over to them, right now, we’re the one’s he’s asking for, but if you refuse this offer, he’ll be offended and he’ll shack up with them just to take you down.”

“There are other ways,” Y/n gritted. She didn’t want to, for even the slightest of a second, think that she might need someone alongside her to help her rise to the top. Y/n worked alone, it was how she had been trained and she intended in keeping it that way. She didn’t need anyone, especially not some sleazy politician looking for dirty money to help him plaster his face on billboards, to help her fight her battles, “And we can explore them when necessary.”

“You don’t understand how big this is for you Vila. For us,” Donavan emphasized, shaking his head and grinding his teeth, “You,” he spun hastily, turning to John, “Since she trusts you so much, why don’t you talk some sense into her?” 

With a hard, cold gaze, John just stared, and Y/n was the one to interject, able as ever to speak for herself, “Talk some sense into me? Who the fuck do you think you are?” Folding her arms and standing her ground, “I don’t need anyone to talk sense into me, and if you think that that’s what you're here to do then maybe you should sit this one out.” For a minute more, Y/n and Donavan traded sharp glares, and again, it was Y/n that spoke, pointing to the door that time, “I mean it Donavan.”

Sniffing for effect, Donavan nodded bitterly, “Whatever you want boss,” the word was said with such disdain that it might have been an insult. And really, it was, considering that most times, Donavan was the only one that ever got a taste of being her equal. That was, until she’d hired John. “But I’m telling you,” he warned pointedly, “You make the wrong decision, it won't be pretty.”

Largely, she ignored him, pretending his words weren’t an omen, rooted to the spot until Donavan slammed the door. Fuming, Y/n suppressed the urge to throw something. She absolutely hated being questioned, her word should have had finality, not room for argument. Yet, when she shifted her gaze, feeling John's stare bore into her, Y/n suspected that another argument was in the making, "What?" She snarled, planting a hand on her hip, "Just say it."

"I know that this isn't my place," John began, standing as he did, swiping up his mug as he walked past Y/n into the living area, "And I hate to admit it," he continued, a begrudged twinge propelling his words, "But Donavan is right. If the mayor wants an alliance, you should give it to him."

Taking another sip from the scalding black liquid, Y/n followed John into the living room, sinking into an armchair; crossing her legs and placing her arms on the cushioned rests. "It's not that easy," turning to face the blank television, Y/n hoped the gesture would guard the first traces of defeat, "I don't need him having leverage on me."

"But he has it anyway," John insisted, going through the weaponry he went armed to her room with, "Think about it, he knows who you are and what you're doing. Balinski can rat anyone out if he wanted to. But he hasn't. Besides,” John was in the process of assembling a gun he’d taken apart for cleaning earlier; his stocky fingers working with precision and fluidity, “If he’s working with you, then you have leverage too, if he’s willing to partner up, then that’s gotta mean he has some skeletons in his closet, and if not, you’ll be the first one. You have the upper hand Y/n.” John cut his words short, putting the gun to his ear as he made a couple more adjustments, “I’m not saying you have to do it,” he sighed as he finally loaded the handgun that would ultimately become part of his on-person armory, “But I am saying that you should think about it.”

Y/n lapsed into a bout of deep thought, pensive stare far off and unintentionally falling to the display on the glass table, littered with an array of guns and blades, along with John’s mug near the edge. He was right, they both were, and Y/n hated defeat, but the more his and Donavan’s words sank in, the more she realized that she needed the alliance with New York’s mayor. If she didn’t take it, he and the Irish would have the upper hand, but if she did, for the price of a small risk, Y/n would have insurmountable power. She’d had to have been foolish to pass it up.

“Alright,” draining the last of her coffee, Y/n carelessly discarded the delicate cup on the end table next to her, standing with purpose, “I’ll do it, and I’ll go to that gala,” she was already walking off towards her bedroom and John had already nodded in acknowledgement when she added, “Under one condition; you go with me.”

“I go where you go, that’s the rule,” he hummed gruffly, not thinking much of it until Y/n turned, leaning against the metal doorframe, her constant, amused stare beckoning his attention.

“No,” a glimmer of a wicked smile tugged at her lips while a mischievous glint danced in her eyes, “I meant you go with me. Invitations for those things are usually for two people, you’re gonna be my…..plus one.”

Straightening his back, John briefly reflected on their conversation in her office and then more so on how confused his feelings towards Y/n made him. Guilt for seeing her the way he did, jealousy when she was with Donavan, irritation during almost every conversation they had and finally something simply…...undefinable. Fondness maybe, likeness, something that made him wish things weren’t as complicated as they were, that Y/n wasn’t who she was so maybe, just maybe, he could give letting someone in another shot. “That’s not part of our arrangement,” he countered dismissively; since she was so protective of her boy toy then should have just taken him anyway, “You should take Donavan.”

“I said I’m taking you,” Y/n turned again, strolling off into the bedroom, “Hope you’ve got a nice tux,” she teased, disappearing into the shadowy dimness before shutting the door behind herself.

*****

Tagging-@harrisongslimited @magnificentclodpiebanana @keandrews @greenmanalishi  @rdjloverxxx @danceoftwowolves  @planetkt @wheretheriversrunintothesea  @jupiterdawngirl

[woeismyhoe]

I won't say the fandom isn't misogynistic at all or Korra wasn't shit on for things she wouldn't have been had she been a guy. But I will say that Zuko has this extreme popularity despite his many flaws because of his arc. If Zuko simply had flaws that were accepted then I think he wouldn't be as popular. People would call them out more. But instead Zuko suffers and struggles and is not accepted alot due to his flaws. So through this people get on his side. They want to see him succeed 1/2

Zuko’s popularity is heavily due to Zuko’s appearance. It’s undeniable. If Zuko wasn’t a hot emo Prince then I doubt people would be this sympathetic with his behavior. If we’re even going to talk about intriguing arcs then Zuko’s wouldn’t be number one. Azula and even Mai and Ty Lee had a more intriguing yet subtle arc than his.

Since Korra was literally the main character of LoK, we saw everything that happened with her. How she grew from that arrogant hotheaded kid to this more wise and mature kid after going through trauma. We saw when she was repeatedly told she wasn’t needed, when she fought Vaatu and lost her past lives, when we saw her legitimately almost die because of Zaheer, when we saw her struggle during those months when she lost her ability to walk, when she suffered from PTSD because of Zaheer— we saw through it all, and yet the audienc still trashes her for making a single mistake that barely harmed anyone but herself.

Losing past lives in a fight VS assisting in killing the world’s last hope and betraying everyone’s trust— which was worse?

Zuko’s flaws (wrongdoings) that he redeemed himself for wasn’t the same things that made him struggle. When he struggled (when he became a fugitive and a beggar), that was because of his own rashness and impulsiveness. What got him to be challenged in his first Agni Kai was because of his rashness when he accidentally spoke over the Fire Lord, and then banished and scarred because of again his rash decision to choose NOT to fight the Fire Lord. Those qualities were the reason why he struggled and suffered, but they weren’t why he wasn’t accepted. The reason why he wasn’t accepted was because of his inability to please their father, but that wasn’t a flaw. It was something beyond his control.

The narrative did spend half of the show on Zuko’s arc, but it rarely called him out for any of his wrongdoings. When it did, he was easily forgiven (except Katara) and what he did was quickly brushed aside e.g. when he attacked Suki’s village. Even till this day, there are Zuko apologists hating on Katara because she wasn’t open to giving Zuko a chance (despite it being warranted). Zuko wasn’t the only tragic character in the series. He was just the most expressive about it.

But when Korra was expressive about her struggles? She’s treated with apathy and hate. Misogyny exists in this fandom, and it becomes very apparent when you compare any of the female characters to Zuko.

In the end, it’s not truly about his arc which is why Zuko is worshipped by the fandom. It’s his appearance and the audience’s forgiving nature to hot emo boys. We just tend to set different standards towards male and female characters which is why we’re usually more forgiving to male characters, but apathetic towards female characters.

[kob131]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4l1pL3ATN0

Let’s break down Vexed’s Weiss video, shall we?

“You know how i feel about Weiss, she’s my favorite character.”

Vexed, what does that even mean? Considering how invested you are at this point in the show’s failure, I don’t know if “favorite character” means “character I like” or “My go to shield to deflect accusations that I hate the show.”

“Weiss worked because they had a plan for her-”

They also had a plan for Blake and you proclaim her as the worst so clearly that doesn’t mean anything.

“Weiss could have been selfless and traveled with Qrow and Maria to hand over the relic-”

*slams down a huge stack of papers*

1. Cordovon SPECIFICALLY said WEISS could come home. She never said anyone else could come as well. And considering her attitude, there is a good reason to assume she WOULDN’T let anyone else with her. 

2. Weiss coming home would likely result in the Relic landing in Jacques’ hands. Even if we didn’t know already that Watts was going to meet with Jacques (which would end with him getting the Relic), Jacques is shown to be self serving and pretty damn weak. Meaning if someone threatened his life for the relic (say, a psychotic scorpion Fanaus?), he’d probably hand it over. And Weiss would logically have no way of stopping this. After all, she escaped in part thanks to her weapon (which Jacques would take from her) and Klein (fired). If either DID happen, you’d screech ‘Stupid for the sake of the plot!’

3. There is no way for anyone to sneak with her. You can’t hide anyone away in the ships for that long, they can’t take Qrow because why would Cordovon let Weiss take back a suspicious bird and she’d be powerless on her own.

4. You screeched for two years that spiliting up the main cast was a terrible idea and now you demand that they should have done just that? Way to flip flop.

5. You’d bitch about the others letting her go as ‘letting their friend be kidnapped and shipped back to her abusive household.’ You already twist so much to benefit your agenda so I know this for certain.

This shit was pointed out a year ago. Get with the program.

“Why didn’t Weiss go back?”

*jabs above* In your own words: it’d be ‘stupid for the sake of the plot.’

“Let’s play a quick game-”

Yes lets.

“5 seconds to answer: Why did Weiss escape to Mistral?”

Because she was being coped up in a room by her father, thought her sister was in Mistral and escaped to go find her..and she didn’t know where Team RWBY was and the source of her escaping was Jacques’ abuse.

That took me a nanosecond. It took you several months to ask it. Speed up.

“If you answered: ‘to escape her father’ You are wrong. If you said “To meet up with team RWBY, you are wrong. She did it to find Winter-”

Yeah huh, smug asshole?

Mind sating WHY she went to find Winter?

... No? Strange. One would think explaining a character’s actions would be your priority here to show it doesn’t make sense.

Oh right. You didn’t explain because the explanation was exactly what I said: She didn’t know were Team RWBY was and she was escaping her father. Both of which DO NOT APPLY in this situation. Gee, it’s almost like context and truth is your fucking Kryptonite.

“Why didn’t she offer to take the relic to Ironwood?”

Because it’s stupid, forces her back into the same situation she was in before and goes against the thing you screeched for years about.

“Weiss thinks she’ll be taken back to her-”

She KNOWS she’ll be taken back to her father. Cordovon specifically said “I’ll take you HOME”. You played the fucking clip were she said that Vexed, is your short term memory shot?

No wait, he had to write out the script, record the audio, find the clip and download it, edit this all together and post it. AT least because I would assume he would do the bare minimum of research to make sure he wasn't spouting shit. So either he is so assured that he’s right he didn’t even pay attention to this VERY OBVIOUS detail or he’s relying on the audience’s negative perception of RWBY to cover his tracks. This is why I do not accept the idea of Vexed Viewer making mistakes like this: he spends weeks making these videos. I can catch myself making stupid claims with posts that take an hour to type up. Clearly he should know better.

“Oh wait, they didn’t take her back to Ironwood-”

Which is noted by the characters to be something unusual and unexpected. So to present this as a rebuttal to Weiss not wanting to go back to Atlas is to expect the characters to know the plot and script instead acting on known information (like, you know, human beings?).

“Oh look at all these times Jacques should have been able to be taken back to her father because you claim she’s a minor!”

No one has ever argued that Vexed. As I have shown, she KNEW she would be handed over back to her father because that was the offer CORDOVON GAVE HER.

This is blatant strawmanning to avoid the fact that the actual argument against you can’t be denied. And since you refuse to not bitch like a self entitled brat, you won’t admit you were wrong. 

“There is no downside to Weiss return-”

“Cordovin: (sighs) If Miss Schnee has truly come to her senses and wishes to return to her family, then, of course, the Atlas military will escort her home. But the kingdom will not be responsible for her "friends" of... questionable character. (glances at Blake specifically upon saying her last statement) “

Reminder we have just passed the five minute mark. Of a twenty two minute video. And Vexed has made, being abnormally generous to an unwarrented degree, two demonstrably false to the point of lying arguments. 

Starting to realize the sheer volume of his failures?

“I had to believe that a protector of the world would rather be with her friends than save the world”

*glares up at everything said previously*

No, you WANTED to believe that. You CHOOSE to believe that. You ACCEPTED it over far more rational, simple and according to you, convenient explanations.

Unless of course, you’re looking for anything and everything to bitch about in RWBY and this is your confirmation bias.

“The writers decided for Weiss to be annoying in Volume 6′s Brunswick part.”

Oh? So these parts should be so bad that they override your supposed ‘favorite character’ right? You aren’t just bitching and completely contradicting that criticism shield your dredged up right?

“Weiss screams loudly and starts hyper ventilating-”

Funny thing is he uses Keiven from Home Alone putting on after shave to say Weiss Screamed louder...even though they sound about the same (Weiss just has a higher pitch from being a woman) and Keiven screamed longer. 

Not to mention that in the original scene, it was being played like a horror scene. Same music, same angles, same pacing: it’s to sell how disturbing and unsettling the sight of these bodies are. Of course, if you were just going off memory and Vexed’s footage, you wouldn’t know that. 

“Weiss is a trained warrior and fought at the Fall of Beacon were people were dying left and right-”

A. Weiss isn’t fully trained yet. She was a first year at Beacon and had two more years at least.

B. Huntsmen are not warriors. Their training is not built to break them like a soldier or warrior. Not to mention Weiss grew up in a relatively peaceful time so it’s not like death was a close up constant like this (unless you count the WF which is different.)

C. Number of times Weiss has seen a dead body on screen before now? ... Zero? Hm, guess Vexed ‘convienently’ forgot that.

D. Any off-screen deaths Weiss would have seen at the Fall of Beacon you would have bitched about as not being shown. You bitch about stuff on a lower level (he’s bitched about the phrase ‘Oh God’ before) so there’s a perecedent for this/

And E. These bodies are in a different situation than any in the Fall of Beacon. Those are freshly killed bodies on a battlefield. Weiss would be expecting those. These are mummified bodies in a civilian setting, with the killer nowhere in site and out of nowhere. No shit she’d be shocked: Yang (someone who lost an arm) is also acting the same and Qrow (a seasoned warrior who actually DOES fit your description) is shocked too.

Once again though, this stuff wouldn’t come up in your mind because Vexed doesn’t acknowledge it or consider it. Thus you’re being guided away from these issues. 

Starting to see how sneaky Vexed is?

“Weiss is being dumb and could break through the cellar door!”

Once again, he’s being sneaky, splicing this next to the body discovery point, trying to make them seem like similar situation...even though the moment he is talking about is them running from the Apathy. Grimm that have been shown to be immune to regular weaponry. AND is making them sluggish AND is advancing on them. She’s panicked and all the shit Vexed is pointing to takes time and concentration: stuff their situation is ROBBED of. And yet again, you wouldn’t know that because Vexed NEVER GIVES CONTEXT HERE. Only after this is stated.

“I know you guys are saying in the comments-”

Just another strawman.  Vexed is pretending to addressing points by making up weaker ones. Even then, his bullshit counterargument “The Apathy drain your will, not make you a damsel in distress” kills his OWN argument as a lack of will would cause Weiss to lose concentration and fail.

For Vexed’s argument to work, Weiss would have to either not be panicking (stupid and unrealistic) or ignore her own powers’ limitations (bad writing).

“Thank God Yang was down there-”

Ruby had just disintergrated the Grimm. They were given a reprieve. Once again, Vexed doesn’t show this.

“You can’t have her be fearless now-”

She’s neither trapped nor panicking nor being affected by the Apathy. The fear bullshit is on you.

“*Vexed cringes*”

Oh look, that thing I was doing about ten minutes ago. Catch up Vexed- Oh wait, you’re too busy gutting your own eyeballs.

“We don't see Weiss in Atlas-”

Gee, not like we have to set up the Ace Ops, set up Ironwood, Winter and Penny again, set up Watts and Tyrian’s threat, set up Robyn, work through all of this and much more and end it all. It’s almost like that’s fucking SECONDARY to telling the story and as you showed, Weiss already has moments in Volume 7.

So I guess Vexed is basically saying “Volumes 4 and 5 weren’t THAT bad” since he’s been begging the CRWBY to go back and overstuff the Volumes AGAIN.

Next part has him actually praising the moment between Weiss and her mom. Sounds good right? It would...if it actually matched Vexed’s standards. 

How many times has he ignored things like distance, positioning and the such in things like the Adam Vs. Yang and Blake fight just to push his bullshit through to the audience? Just how many moments that would qualify for, in his own words ‘well written, well directed moments’ just so he can prove a point?

At the very least before, I could give a bare minimum level of respect for Vexed for sticking by his principles, as stupid as they are. But no, he just praises a scene because he likes what happened in it even though stuff of similar quality he overlooked or bashed. 

“Weiss just gets handed her proof about her dad and doesn’t have to do anything!”

Except endure being shot at by her mother and there’s nothing that's been shown before that could be used as proof besides this. What do you want, proof to magically appear in Jacques’ office? To have Weiss gain fingerprint scanning tech despite never showing that before? To have Jacques be excepetionally dumb? At least we get something respectable out of Weiss’ mother here and it isn’t a huge leap in logic like the others.

“I’d have more of a problem if this scene wasn’t so good and I’d have less of a problem if this made sense for Willow. It doesn’t but this isn’t her video-”

No no no no no.

No.

After all the tangents and bullshit you’ve pulled in other videos AND THIS VIDEO, you denying proof for something you call ‘a point of contention’ is pretty fucking rich of you. Just because you like a scene doesn’t mean you can just ignore the problems with it, same with the inverse too. How is this any better than a Yang fanboy ignoring issues with scenes involving Yang because they like it?

Literally all you had left was your own daman principles, Vexed. Now you’re burning them.

“One thing the writers have made very clear is Weiss really enjoys dunking on her father-”

Using her ignoring her father’s call in Volume 3, her breakdown at the Atlas Elite and her talk back to Jacques in Volume 4? One of which is not ‘dunking’ (or extreme humiliation) and the other is only partially about her father and mostly about how detached the elite of Atlas are.

“-SO I shouldn’t be surpised she came in like a-”

Not even gonna let you finish that shitty reference. That was just unnecessary and not even funny. It feels more like a combination of a Family Guy cutaway for it’s abruptness and a fanboy cheering for it’s framing.

“The Jacques being taken down scene was bad because it was matter of fact and silly instead of emotionally driven-”

Vexed, the issues Weiss has with Jacques is rooted in his abuse of her and her family, his entitlement to the family business and his business practices harming her family name. This takedown has nothing to do with any of these. She is not confronting him about the damage he has done to her and her family nor the damage he has done in his pursuit of growing the business. She is confronting him about the election fraud, a story point.

No shit this isn’t emotional- Weiss’ emotional ties here are SHALLOW. It would ring hollow to the audience for her to make this emotional because she has no emotional attachment to the actions he performed. All she would have is it being her dad, which isn’t enough. 

Then again, from the perspective of a Weiss fanboy, this would look bad because that moment you’ve been writing in your head didn’t happen. I should know.

“*Vexed bitches about a joke about Weiss not knowing if she can arrest Weiss because ‘hur dur book smart!’*”

She’s not an officer, she’s a Huntress. I don’t think they can actually arrest people.

“This should have been between father and daughter in an epic moment-”

*rolls eyes*

Vexed, look at this scene. Look at all the other shit happening here. Then remember the people dying to the cold in Mantle.

What makes you THINK it was meant to be that way? Hell, what makes you think that would be a GOOD IDEA?

.. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

“I wanted to see the sister dynamic that has been missing from RUby and Yang-”

You had your chance in Volume 6. You ignored for Bumbleby bashing. You don’t get a say.

“Hur dur, characters ssay things we know already!”

Gee, it’s almost like Weiss and Winter talking about this was to restablish were they were because a certain group of people made it certain that they needed everything spoonfed to them or else they throw a tantrum.

“Ironwood done nothin’ wrong!”

There’s Vexed’s pandering again.

The man made no attempt to talk anything through until he was forced to with Mantle. He lied to Team RWBY about Amity and made them operate under false information. And I have made the fuck ups in Ironwood’s plan in Episode 11 VERY clear.

Stop pandering to the RWBY hate crowd and have some fucking principles.

“Oh, Weiss lied to Ironwood! How hypocritical”

*holds up a piece of paper saying ‘That’s the point’*

“Why would it bother Winter that she’s chosen as the Winter Maiden? ANd why does she say that she wasn’t given a choice when she said she was ‘proposed’?”

gee, wasn’t it you guys who claimed Ozpin proposing to Pyrrha wasn’t giving her an actual choice? Hm, I guess things change...when they benefit you.

“Wow, Weiss is so bad for not telling Winter about the Relic!-”

COnversation wasn’t about that and it wouldn’t come up, nor is it a particularly serious thing. But nice try Vexed.

“Weiss runs away because she pains to carve out her-”

Wait a minute, didn’t you say that Weiss was going to Msitral to find Winter? Hmmm, awfully inconsistent of you vexed. Almost you lie constantly for your own benefit.

“HOW MANY TIMES WILL YOU TALK ABOUT FINDING YOUR OWN WAY?!”

Gee, didn’t know that, by your own admission, three times in four Volumes was SOOO awful.

“This is how they treated their relationship?”

As a narrative tool to emphasize a theme of the Volume? Good on them.

“You know, everyone still thinks Weiss is this pampered heiress-”

One guy said that. In the entire Volume. About self reliance and finding your own path.

“Weiss never said a word to Robyn and didn’t support her-”

You know Vexed, what’s the difference between you and a whiny Bumbleby shipper bitching about them not kissing yet? You sound so entitled and so whiny about you not getting your way. Your arguments are breaking down into disjointed bitching, just like an entitled brat.

It’s fucking pathetic.

“Maybe she’ll try her luck doging the coronavirus at RTX! Maybe she was too busy watching Gen:LOCK.”

Aw, what’s wrong? baby didn’t get his undeserved baba?

I can’t believe how much has changed Vexed. You’ve pretty much outed yourself as an entitled fan perpetually whining about the show not being the way you want it. You have no respect earned. You have no principles. You have no standards. You don’t even have an end goal: all you have is your whims.

Pathetic.

[rt8815]

OC Ask Game

I was tagged by the amazing @illegalcerebral

I put a Keep Reading link because this is looong.

1) Name (and why you chose it if you like) McKinley Campbell Durand. I named her after McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters. However, the “in universe?” reason that will be given - which I haven’t written yet - is that McKinley and Campbell are family names from a few generations back.

Campbell comes from the Gaelic words for ‘crooked’ and ‘mouth.’ I just like the name. Here’s a post (that I had to rewrite because Tumblr’s a dick and wouldn’t let me edit the typos in the original. The rewrite had typos too! Blargh!) that discusses her first and last names. I thought it would be funny for her full name to consist solely of last names.

2) Fandom and how they fit into the story Criminal Minds. She works at a D.C. museum practically around the corner from the J. Edgar Hoover building (as indicated in “Let It Bleed”). That’s a tiny hint that it’s the National Museum of African American History & Culture, but I don’t think I’ll mention it very often, if for no other reason than I’ve never been to the NMAAHC and don’t want to describe it inaccurately.

The official story is that Spencer and McKinley met at the museum (again, in “Let It Bleed,” which is probably the least favorite thing of mine that I’ve written). However, they’d met once before, and texted a few times after that. Because my brain is all over the place, and because I’m telling the story in non-chronological order, I haven’t written their first meeting yet. The only details I’ve revealed thus far are that it was nighttime in a park, McKinley caught Spencer off guard and made him fall to the ground, and whatever they talked about set Spencer straight and lifted his spirits. Also, a swingset was involved. Beyond that, I’ve inserted McKinley into the plotlines and events of the show, with necessary alterations, and there’s a ton of domestic Spencer and off-duty team stuffs.

3) Do they have any family? Biological family: daughter Sophie and son Jason; her Mom (no name yet); maternal grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins; and her estranged father (no name yet). Chosen/found family: husband Spencer; the BAU.

4) As a child, what did they want to be when they grew up? When she was a toddler, McKinley wanted to be a pediatrician (a doctor just for kids?! Cool!) or an ophthalmologist (she’s worn glasses practically her whole life). As an older child she aspired to be an entomologist or herpetologist. In her teenage years she considered a career in forensic pathology or criminal psychology. While earning her BA in English, she discovered that Public History was her true calling.

5) Their greatest dream To be a good Mom. To inspire learning in others.

6) Their worst nightmare Losing her family; having to see her father again.

7) Strengths Empathy, insight/self awareness, forgiving nature but knowing when to cut her losses

8) Weaknesses McKinley struggles with imposter syndrome.

She can be very mean. I mean, downright nasty cruel, verbally. This is rare though because, and I’m paraphrasing a future bit of dialogue here, anyone whose behavior could arguably warrant such a response is beneath her notice and not worth the effort. She’s more likely to close the door on someone. When she’s removed a person from her life, she is done. They become literally nothing to her. McKinley will rightly claim that this is about self-preservation and boundaries, but she really takes it to the next level.

9) What would they chose between: morning and night, sweet and savoury, beaches or meadows, cities or countryside, winter or summer, Christmas or Halloween (sorry, Spencer!), movies or TV shows, action or rom-com, clowns or vampires, stars or the moon (both!), cocktails or pints [Neither. McKinley doesn’t care for cocktails or beer. Scotch, brandy, rum, and dry wines are her poisons. She’s been known to add Kahlúah to vanilla ice cream, Baileys Irish Cream to coffee (she wants to try Drambuie next), or make hot toddies when she has a cold (obviously not mixing any alcohol with any medicine)]

10) How do they relax? Reading, or having Spencer read to her; knitting; listening to her records or playing her guitar; exercising with Boogie so she’s exhausted enough to sleep that night; baking and cooking

11) What makes them angry? Injustice, apathy/indifference, ableism, willful ignorance

12) What makes them afraid? The awful things she’d possibly do under duress; her family getting hurt or worse; spiders and other bugs that bite and/or sting

13) What is a moment from their childhood that has shaped who they are? It’s not a single event, but growing up with an abusive parent has certainly had a lifelong impact on McKinley. You’ve heard the expression “once bitten, twice shy?” She’s “once bitten, there’s no twice because you no longer exist.” She’s working on that. It’s also cultivated empathy, though, and is part of the reason she volunteers in the hospital’s rehab wing.

14) Do they have a sense of humour? Intellectual humor, pop culture references, puns/Dad jokes, science jokes. Sometimes morbid.

15) What do they value in their friends/loved ones? Honesty and empathy

16) Do they have any pets? An Aussie Collie/Border Aussie named Boogie-Woogie. He’s her first child.

17) Worst memory? Probably the day Meadows shot her and she thought she’d never see Spencer and Penny again.

18) Best memory? The days Sophie and Jason were born. Minus, y’know, the agonizing pain of labor and delivery.

19) Do they have any tattoos? (If no would they get one?) Nope and nope

20) If you could write them into another fandom, which one would you choose? If I knew the MCU better, I’d love to write her in as a Stark Tower employee! She’d be an anthropologist and would study alien societies the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. have encountered. She’d naturally be drawn to Loki, initially in a professional capacity (they quickly discover they relate to each other on a personal level as well).

He’d first find her annoying: “Why are you pestering me, Mortal? Surely you’d rather interview my oaf of a brother?”

“No, not even remotely. He only ever wants to discuss battles he’s won. There’s so much more to Asgard and the other realms than that. I want - I need - to learn your literature, your science, your culture and history. You’re well versed in all of these subjects and you’re an excellent teacher.”

He stares at her impassively over his mug of tea, but his heart - that Judas of an organ - flutters slightly at the compliment. And how can he say no to a fellow scholar?

“I prefer your company to Thor’s too. You have this calming presence. Thor’s sweet but he’s also obnoxiously loud and brash and he always hugs me even though I keep telling him I don’t like it. And he’s constantly swinging his hammer around, which makes me think he’s overcompensating for something.”

Loki nearly chokes on his tea. Yes, this mortal is considerably more tolerable than others.

“Very well. Friday evenings at 6:00, my chambers. Arrive late and suffer my wrath.”

From that day forward, whenever Thor tries to hug her, he gets mildly electrocuted.

Did I accidentally sorta kinda write a drabble? Would anyone be interested in making this a collab? That’s what they’re called, right? (Can you tell I’ve given this some thought? Haha! I have even more details in my head.)

21) Do they like their job? (What else would they do if they could?) She loves it! Hmmm, what else…? A librarian maybe. Or animate and produce an educational cartoon series.

22) What is their sexuality? Demisexual

23) Do they believe in love at first sight? Soulmates? One true love? McKinley believes in “seeing the potential for a good relationship at first conversation.”

Yes, although she feels that term has become overused and poorly redefined.

People can find love again after it’s been lost.

24) What music do they listen to? Has that changed over time? I actually recently answered an ask about this. Yes, she grew up on what passed for country in the ‘90s. God help her, she had a boyband phase in junior high.

25) Can they cook? What food do they love? McKinley does pretty well in the kitchen. She loves a wide variety of food. She grew up in the south, so tons of carbs/comfort foods. She loves Thai, Japanese, and Indian food. She cooks up Middle Earth-inspired dishes (ha! nerd). She’s especially proud of a seed cake she bakes.

26) What are their hopes for the future? For her family to be healthy, safe and happy. To be debt free.

27) How do they react to being threatened? It’s a coin flip. McKinley might curl up like an armadillo and hope the predator gets bored and leaves, or she might kick the stool out from under them and cause their chin to slam into the bar and crack several teeth.

28) What is their love language? McKinley and Spencer both exhibit the Acts of Service love language, because just saying “I love you” isn’t enough. You ought to show it. She’ll randomly bake doughnuts for Spencer or play guitar for him in bed, and he’ll take care of laundry, dishes, and any other chores he sees need doing.

Quality Time is important for them too. Once a month, Luke and Penny babysit so Spencer and McKinley have a day alone together. It doesn’t really matter what they do. The point is it’s just them.

It caught McKinley by surprise how much she enjoys physical affection, given that she can be touch averse but holy moly she was more touch starved than she realized. She lives for snuggles and makeout sessions and playing with each others’ hair. When one of them doesn’t want to be touched, they hook their pinkies together.

29) What do they find most challenging in relationships? At work? In general? At work she struggles to gain her colleagues’ respect (think “Boy Genius” treatment except she has lady bits). In general, she struggles with trusting people.

30) What do you as a creator love best about writing this character? Giving her everything I wish I had but don’t.

Bonus: Include a link to your favourite work with this OC or write a small drabble.

October 12, 2021

Warm sunlight filtered through the curtains, gently rousing Spencer from a pleasant sleep. Just when he’d decided to get up, he felt the mattress dip behind him and his wife’s breath fanning over his ear.

“Who’s the birthday boy?” whispered McKinley.

Spencer smiled softly but feigned being asleep.

“Who’s the birthdaaay boooy?” she repeated, bouncing slightly.

“The good-looking guy to your left?”

“Happy Birthday!” she laughed, pressing kisses along his neck, suddenly shifting the mood from playful to sexy.

“Would the birthday boy like his birthday present?” she asked as she lifted the covers.

“Well, look at that - it’s already unwrapped!”

[witharsenicsauce]

(XCOM) Chosen Stories From the War #2: We’re Not Using the “Zed” Word

For a month, Kon-Mai stayed secluded in the XCOM medical bay, spending most of that month sleeping, in deep meditation, or staring at the ceiling while her thoughts tangled in her mind. Her wounds, despite Malinalli’s assurances, were deep and painful, and often seemed just on the cusp of infection. Her IV contained one dose of antibiotics after another and, when the pain got too bad, the occasional shot of morphine so she could relax enough to sleep.

Seclusion leads to depression. Kon-Mai had never been very social with her brothers before, but being surrounded by the unfamiliar faces of people who kept you at arm's length, it was beginning to wear on her. Tygan was one of the only people who didn’t seem to fear her, but his social skills were lacking to say the least, and thus she didn’t trouble him for conversation.

Her only respite was Malinalli. While often swamped with tending to other injured soldiers, when her nurse could get a moment she would come change her bandages or refill the IV, and then take a bit of extra time away just to talk. She was much more talkative than Kon-Mai would ever be, but even listening to the human girl ramble was a nice reprieve from the solitude.

“I think you need a break.” The girl said to her one morning while changing Kon-Mai’s bandages.

“I have been resting diligently for weeks on end.” Kon-Mai replied. “I am already in the middle of ‘a break’ as you say.”

“I think you need a break from resting.” Malinalli pouted. “You don’t talk to anyone besides me.”

“They do not wish for my companionship.” Kon-Mai tried to sound dismissive. “I am used to being solitary.”

“Is that why you look so sad all the time?”

“I do not look sad, this is just the structure of my face.” Her borther had often commented on her “resting bitch face” and while she hated when he did...she ad to agree. She was no pretty sight.

“Mhm.” Malinalli pulled the new bandages tight and tucked them in. “You’ve gotten most of your strength back, haven't you? If nothing else, your wound looks much better. I don’t even think there’s a risk of dehiscence anymore.”

Kon-Mai was silent. While she’d been out of bed occasionally since the last time, it was only with help from Malinalli and while leaning heavily on a walker, and that was only because her medic insisted that she use her muscles so they didn’t atrophy. There was no other reason: she had no need for food of any kind and, thus, no need for the restroom facilities the other soldiers used. She also had not showered or bathed herself since she arrived, but that was less due to her own genetics and more out of...apathy.

“A bunch of my colleagues usually like to meet in the bar to hang out.” Malinalli kept talking. “I want you to come.”

“I appreciate the offer, but I’ll have to decline.”

“I told them you were coming though.”

“What?” Kon-Mai bared her sharp teeth and growled. Malinalli flinched, but only for a split second. She stood her ground firmly.

“I can’t pick you up and force you to go.” She said, “I mean literally. You’re a lot heavier than me. But, I want you to.”

“I can assure you, your colleagues DO NOT want me to join them.”

“I think you’d be shocked.” Malinalli said. “They’re really excited to put a face to the name. Everyone’s been talking about you.”

“They fear me.”

“Yeah but…” Malinalli shifted on her feet. “How do I put this...you have a bit of a growing...fan club.”

Kon-Mai growled. “Wonderful. As if the pathetic civilian stalkers were not enough, the very enemy wishes for my attention. Would they like me to autograph their plastic swords?” She said in a high, mocking tone.

“They admire you.” Malinalli insisted. “Facing you in battle made a lot of us realize we’re woefully unprepared in melee combat. Goldilocks has been trying to make a training regimen based on your work but without you it’s all guesswork, and I know she’d love to learn from the best-”

“Cease!” Kon-Mai held up her hand. “You prattle like a Sectoid! Who is this ‘Goldilocks’?”

Malinalli seemed to smile knowingly. “I could tell you, but it would be much easier to just...show you.”

Kon-Mai bared her teeth, but it was half-hearted. “...I will need garments.”

“You can borrow mine…wait…”

Kon-Mai raised a brow.

“I guess you can’t. Um...gimme one second!”

.

.

Kon-Mai stared at herself in the mirror of the tiny bathroom. She towered over the sink and had to look down in order to see her reflection, but even at that angle she noticed how ragged she looked. The battle had taken more from her than she’d thought it had. Aside from her main, self-inflicted injury, she was dotted with tiny bullet wounds that had bruised as they healed, leaving her peppered with indigo dots.

She reached up behind her head and ran her hand through her...her hair. Her long, white hair. She had not worn it down since...she couldn’t remember when. She remembered being issued her clasps, the tubs with which her hair had hidden behind. She remembered the circlet fitting around her skull, the priests clasping it in place and then drilling-

She ran her fingers along the slight scars along the sides and top of her head: they looked uneven. She supposed the doctors must have removed her circlet? If they’d removed her chip, they must have had to. Now, her white hair breathed again: her eldest brother’s hair was soft and radiant, almost glowing. Hers, in perfect contrast, was knotted, kinky and so very oily from years being neglected, only taken from the tube every few months to be cut down and scrubbed raw. She shook her head, the while curls bouncing around her shoulders, and ran her fingers through it. It only grew from the back of her head and down her neckline to the nape. There already wasn’t much of it, and the way it stuck together made her look as bald as The Hunter. No wonder he wore a hood, it was not a good look on either of them.

Following her scarred hairline, she reached back and felt along the thick scar where her chip used to be. She no longer heard the Elders’ voices, and they could not read her thoughts. To them, she must have been presumed dead. She had expected the emptiness in her mind to be stifling, but for perhaps the first time in her life, she had been sleeping peacefully at night.

Kon-Mai reached into the shower and turned it on. She was the Assassin, and if she was going to present herself to the enemy, it was on her to make sure she looked presentable.

She pulled off her gown and stared at herself, at her scar, running jagged along her belly. Her dagger had cut so deep; so many torn muscles and arteries, so many split tendons, she had nearly felt her soul leave her body when she drove the blade into her ribs. The fact that the Commander not only saved her life, had brought her back to near perfect health…

She was supposed to die there.

That woman was hiding something.

Kon-Mai stepped under the hot water, shivering at the sensation. She didn’t remember this kind of warmth. Her baths had always been cold, and she herself was always...cold.

She hugged herself and just stood there for a moment, feeling the water run over her body.

Then she reached for the shampoo. If she went to all this trouble to take her hair down, she might as well wash it.

.

.

She put her hair into a single braid when she stepped out, not wanting to encase it while it was wet. With that, Kon-Mai dried herself off and reached for the clothes Malinalli had brought her.

They were small, of course. That was to be expected, no one here was even close to her size. The pants she was given were more like shorts, stopping just below her knees and hugging her body where Kon-Mai was pretty sure they were supposed to hang loose. The shirt was a flowy dress that on a human would come down to the knees. On her, it almost reached her waist and hugged her lady-lumps a bit more than she would have preferred. It had no sleeves, leaving her arms exposed. She looked over the glowing veins and…

Shook her head.

There were no shoes that fit her, of course, so she walked barefoot into the infirmary, the cold metal floor biting the soles of her feet. Malinalli was waiting for her, and beamed when she saw her. “You look so pretty! And your hair! I didn’t realize you…” She trailed off.

“I do indeed have hair.” The Assassin glowered. “I simply can’t leave it flying like my brother can.”

“No, no, I totally get it.” Despite her dark complexion, Kon-Mai could see Malinalli blushing. “I have to keep my hair back during work so I understand….”

Kon-Mai said nothing, barely meeting her gaze. “Let us get on with it then.”

“Yeah.” Malinalli held out her hand but Kon-Mai shook her head.

“I can walk perfectly fine, if you lead the way.”

“Okay...the canteen is this way.” She opened the door and held it. “After you.”

Kon-Mai had to duck slightly under the doorframe. Perhaps it was a good thing she was barefoot, she could only imagine the trouble she’d have wearing something akin to heels.

Despite the insistence on her independence, every step Kon-Mai took sent a shot of pain up her legs and into her chest. She clenched her fists, biting her lip and willing herself to keep a steady pace with the small human woman. Thank goodness she was walking slowly.

The canteen was, thankfully, close by. They rounded a corner and the metal shifted to dark, polished wood. The bar was much darker, lit with mood lighting and candles, and Kon-Mai could feel her muscles relaxing in the calm environment.

Until she heard the yelling.

“I TOLD YOU!” A distinctly British voice cried. “WE ARE NOT USING THE ZED WORD!”

“Why not?” Resounded another woman’s voice, without the noticeable accent. If Kon-Mai had to guess, she’d say this one was American.

“Because it’s RUDE!”

“Rude to who, the zombies? They don’t fucking care!”

Kon-Mai heard Malinalli sigh audibly, and she looked over to the source of the nose, where two human women sat at a booth.

“It’s the principle of the matter!” The British one said.

“There is no ‘principle’ to this matter.” The other one began counting on her fingers. “They walk like zombies, they’re half-rotten, they eat brains, they talk in weird growls, they are zombies, so I will call them zombies!”

“They still have human rights!”

“NO THEY DON’T! And neither do we, Princess! Have you forgotten the world ended?!”

Kon-Mai approached the table, and the shadow she cast over it made the two women stop and look up at her.

“Guys!” Malinalli called. “Meet Kon-Mai!”

“Oh!” The British woman, a girl in her youth with short purple hair, perked up. “Oh yes! We’ve been absolutely dying to meet you!” She jumped up, and Kon-Mai noticed that clasped in her hair was a little tiara. “Lady Demetria Min of the British Isles!”

“Don’t believe anything she says.” The other woman piped up. “You’re not an actual Lady, Princess.”

“Shut up.” Princess snapped.

The other woman looked significantly older, with wrinkles and scars carved in her dark ebony skin, but the bright red hair she sported gave her a youthful demeanor.

“Kon-Mai, this is Zuri Temitope.” Malinalli gestured to the woman.

“I prefer Tisiphone.” The woman smiled, looking the Chosen up and down. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but you...certainly live up to the hype.”

Kon-Mai nodded in thanks, but remained silent.

Tisiphone turned to Malinalli. “Hm. She’s quiet. I like her already.”

Princess pouted. “Well, come on! Sit with us, don’t just stand there!” Kon-Mai yelped as Princess pulled her into the seat beside her. 

“Maybe she can finish this debate for us.” Tisiphone said as she sat back down. “So. I say that the Lost should just be called ‘zombies’.”

“And I say that it’s rude to call them the zed word, and ‘The Lost’ is more politically correct!” Princess countered, her tone rising.

“I’m not fucking worried about hurting the zombies feelings, Princess.”

“It’s not about feelings, it’s about what’s right!”

“What do you mean what’s right? Our job is to mow them down like grass!” Tisiphone turned to Kon-Mai. “But what do you think? Your perspective is probably a lot different.”

“Yes. Tell her I’m right.”

“Shut your goddamn mouth, Princess.”

Kon-Mai blinked as the two women finally fell silent, staring at her expectantly.

“I believe it was one of your kind that said, ‘a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.’” Kon-Mai said slowly. “What you call them does not matter, or change what they are. As long as you can do what must be done and eliminate them.”

“Oh fuck off.” Tisiphone said. “That’s a non-answer. You gotta pick a side.”

“Guys, come on, she said her piece.” Malinalli cut in. “Don’t badger her.”

“Why do you object to their current title?” Kon-Mai asked Tisiphone.

“It sounds like some sci-fi fantasy bullshit. Zombies have been part of human mythologies for centuries and everyone knows the term. Calling them ‘The Lost’ is just needlessly complicated.”

“Of course it is!” Princess cut in. “Everything is complicated right now, Tisiphone! But we have it so much easier compared to them, the way they’re suffering. Even if I gotta put them down, I don’t wanna forget that they are human, just like us.”

There was a brief silence, in which Kon-Mai’s eyes drifted to the hallway and she, unfortunately, locked eyes with a familiar Skirmisher woman.

“Betos.” She hissed, and hid her face with her hand, but it was too late. The conversation died at the sound of combat boots clomping their way towards the group.

“The Commander instructed me to fetch you.” Betos’ gravelly voice sounded too close for her comfort.

Kon-Mai looked up briefly, again catching Betos’ narrowed, yellow eyes. 

“I did not expect to see you here.” she said as she stood, Princess helping her to her feet.

“My soldiers are here, and thus so am I.” Betos turned to Malinalli. “You are dismissed.”

Malinalli stammered. “I need to return the patient to-”

“When the Commander is done, she will page you.” Betos said firmly. “You are dismissed. Go back to your post.”

Malinalli looked warily to Kon-Mai, who gave her a nod.

“...Understood.” Malinalli mumbled as she left.

“It was nice meeting you!” Princess called after Kon-Mai. “Come back sometime, alright?!”

Kon-Mai did not answer her.

.

.

Betos’ pace was much faster than her human nurse’s, and despite her best efforts, Kon-Mai found herself falling behind. She dared not call out, but she saw Betos getting farther and farther away and knew if she didn’t, she’d get left behind on this damned ship.

Luckily for her, Betos stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face her, her yellow eyes glowing in the low light.

Kon-Mai bared her teeth. “This was your plan, then? Lead me away, so I would be helpless, and then strike me down?” She nodded. “A devious trick, but it has worked. If you wish to kill me, now is your time.”

“Believe me, if I wanted to, you would already be dead by now. Dead and rotting in your stronghold, where your poor brothers would find the broken body of their little sister, and they would know that your life was taken by your own hands...” Betos shook her head. “But no. No, it’s not enough. Killing you, it wouldn’t be enough.”

Kon-Mai’s goading smile fell, and she felt a chill run up her spine. “What?”

“If you died, that would be it. You might feel a moment of pain and in the end, you might even beg for repentance. But…” She smiled. “No. I began this journey not so different from you. Mox has killed more than you, lest we forget.” ”Do not remind me of that.” ”I will. You are not the monster you want yourself to be. And I want you to look upon that truth, and swallow it like medicine. I want you to renounce your precious Elders and become exactly what you swore to destroy, to live like us, to truly feel.”

“I did feel, once. You saw it yourself, Betos. And yet you did not seem to care so much then.” Kon-Mai blinked violently, hot tears in her eyes. “...Do not be so sure that anything will happen.”

“We’ll see.” Betos turned her back to her. “It’s why the Commander wants to meet with you.” She continued her pace, and Kon-Mai limped along, trying to catch up.

Thankfully, it was only a few more feet down the hallway that they stopped at a single metal door, upon which Betos knocked. “Commander, I have her.”

The door opened, and Kon-Mai froze.

The woman stood up, her long white hair flowing like it had its own wind current around it. She walked slowly around to the front of her desk and locked eyes with the Assassin, those green eyes glowing with warmth and light and calm. She radiated with ethereal beauty.

“Welcome, Kon-Mai Mordenna.” The woman said. “I am Commander Senuna of XCOM. I’ve been so looking forward to our meeting.”

.

.

.

.

.

(God I’ve been looking forward to this. I’ve decided I’m going to post a new chapter once a week on Saturdays, but I already have five or so written so waiting to post this has been torture.

Now that it’s out, I hope you all enjoy!

Also extra credit to the people who catch the “Shawn of the Dead” reference.)

[maybeformepersonally]

fics i probably will never write #2

the umbrella academy au where dan was one of the 43 special babies but his mother refused to give him up when reginald hargreeves tried to bribe her for him, so he grew up with her and her boyfriend (later husband) until they were in an accident when he'd just turned 17. 

dan was left alone, as his mum had no family and her husband’s (dan’s dad in all but blood) family never accepted him, so old man hargreeves appeared out of nowhere with an offer he couldn’t refuse: basically to legally adopt him so that dan can join the rest of the gang (at this point they’ve been presented publicly as a superhero team). dan accepts because he doesn’t want to have to go into the system, and while old man hargreeves is weird and suspicious, the other teens seem to be well cared for. hell, worst case scenario he can run away.

there’s also another reason why dan accepts, and that is because he’s desperate to get his power under control, and the old man has publicly alluded to helping the others develop and control their powers, and as supportive as dan’s parents had always been, they hadn’t known how to help him. dan has tried to shut it down, but that never worked, and he’s tried to wield it, with limited success, but maybe the man who’s made it his life mission to develop others’ powers can help him overcome his once and for all.

dan has power over the dead. he can see them, he can speak to them, he can even touch them if he concentrates real hard, but he cannot shut them out. it is often gory and terrifying, and almost always sad and overwhelming, and it has led him to see the world through red tinted glasses as it were. he’s a hopeless pessimist, always seeing the glass half empty, and he was diagnosed with depression at age 13 (though he knows it started earlier).

so dan joins old man hargreeves’ little band of misfits at age 17, full of apprehension and (despite himself) a cautious bit of hope, and it’s weird (completely fucking bizarre, let’s be real), but not bad. 

allison is the first to welcome him, a warm friendly smile on her face and answers to all the questions he can come up with while he’s still mostly in shock (there aren’t all that many that first day, but they’ll come with a bit of time, and she keeps answering whenever she can). she’s sweet, and charismatic, and dan is grateful she’s taking the plunge for him, because all of the others seem rattled by dan’s addition to the team (and the family, although dan is pretty sure that’s more a formality than anything real).

luther introduces himself as the leader and he does some passive aggressive posturing that dan would have zero patience for even on a good day, so he mostly ignores him. (it takes him a few weeks to figure out the reason for this was that luther was jealous that allison was being so friendly to him. luther is a disaster, but things go along more smoothly once he realises there’s nothing there other than a budding friendship.)

phil is the only one other than allison that doesn’t look mad or upset that dan’s joining them, just a bit awkward. but he’s every bit as nice as allison, and dan notes every time he makes an effort to make conversation with him or to diffuse uncomfortable silences and the less than welcoming attitude of his siblings, and dan is glad to have him as a buffer when luther awkwardly tries to establish social dominance or when diego makes smartass remarks.

diego is huffy and confrontational, but he’s also incredibly kind when he runs into dan in the middle of that first night when the anxiety rocketed up and prevented him from getting any sleep. dan thinks he’s going to make fun of him, because dan has been here before: antsy and prickly and vulnerable, and struggling to breathe in the midst of an uncaring and cold universe, and whenever blokes who acted like diego had seen him bleed, they’d only strived to drive the knife deeper, and twist. but diego doesn’t. instead, he offers to show him some basic moves dan will be learning in training, nonchalant, as if it’s nothing. diego talks to fill the silence dan still can’t bring himself to breach, haunted by too many spectres, both real and figurative. and it only takes dan a few minutes of careful instruction and gentle conversation for dan to realise diego was not at all what he first thought.

vanya is... different. she’s quiet and unobstrusive. subdued. dan doesn’t quite know what to make of her. he doesn’t pick up on how weird (and fucked up) it is that she’s always excluded from everything on his first day, but when he does, the house dynamics take a slightly more sinister tint to his eyes. 

he really tries with her, because he knows what it’s like to be different, to be excluded by peers, to be considered subpar, less than, a freak, and dan knows that look, dan knows that sallow, withdrawn, desperate look in her eyes, he knows the lethargy, and the apathy, and the pain. he knows, intimately, because that’s what he looks like on his bad days, on the days when he wakes up in a hole, when reality doesn’t feel real and all the colour in the world has been sucked out, when no one can’t break through it to reach him, and getting out of bed feels every bit as impossible as it is useless, he knows, and he wouldn’t wish that on anyone. 

and so he tries, and he tries, and it’s like trying to run underwater at first, but he’s never felt so accomplished as the first time he makes her laugh, not smile or chuckle but laugh, full and bright and free, and it’s like her face transforms with it. she’s beautiful like that, and dan can’t understand why no one else is trying to bring that out in her, why no one else even seems to notice.

he’d asked allison about it, and it’s one of those times when she doesn’t have an answer for him, but he didn’t mind that because he sees the wheels turning in her head afterwards, he sees her start to pay attention, a cute little frown in her face when vanya is purposefully excluded from activities that don’t even require the use of their powers, and he sees her try to reach out to her sister, and he feels a little better, like he actually made a difference for once, like he did some good. dan is new, is still an outsider (and nevermind that he’s included in the family’s activities more often than vanya herself, who grew up in this house, and how awful is that?), but allison is family, and dan can see how much it means to vanya that she’s trying.

(and why wasn’t vanya trained in physical combat like the rest of them when that has nothing to do with having or using their powers? allison hadn’t had an answer for that one either.)

they don’t talk about five, but there’s a huge portrait of him in the parlour that’s taller than dan, which is saying something.

pogo, despite being the most unusual member of the household, turns out to be the most sensible one of them all, dan himself included.

dan starts training the day after he arrives, which is fine for the first month or so, but then old man hargreeves decides to lock him into his fucking mausoleum (and why the hell does he have a fucking mausoleum on his property, in the middle of the city??) because he’s a fucking lunatic apparently, and dan is so mad he not only has one of the ghosts open the door for him from the outside, but he also offers any of the few dozen spirits lingering there that he’ll lend them his strength so that they can terrorize the bastard. he can only have them interact physically with their surroundings for short bursts of time, and he explains that they’ll have to take turns for this reason, but they seem happy enough with it. it’s not like any living being has been able to see and hear them before, waiting a few days or weeks for the chance to manifest and move things and spook the eccentric millionaire that bought their estate is frankly more than they could have hoped for.

and so, dan declares war. of a sort.

he didn’t tell the old man that he’d freed himself, just went back to his room after a long planning session with the intrigued spirits right there in the garden. reginald was pleasantly surprised when dan turned up for dinner, realising he must have used his power to set himself free.

reginald is a lot less happy when things start to move around unexpectedly in his office, in his bedroom, in his private bathroom, everywhere he goes really (dan’s favourite is matya, the no nonsense old jewish woman that moves reginald’s chair straight from under him so he ends up on the floor. even vanya had cracked a little smile at that.)

in the end, dan ends up building up his stamina and his power gets stronger even as he learns to control it better for mischief-making purposes. before he realises it, he’s spend half a year with the hargreeves, and the odd ensemble had become, if not like a family, then at least familiar. some of them, he’d venture, were even good friends.

first on that list was phil, who turned out to have a wicked sense of humour and a wonderful imagination, as well as being possibly the kindest person dan had ever met in his short but eventful life. he also had the prettiest eyes dan had ever seen. dan had jokingly asked him if they were part of whatever this mutation was that had given them powers, and for the first time dan had seen, phil had laughed at a joke about his powers.

phil’s power was... violent. destructive. eldritch-abominations-levels of terrifying, literally. phil hated it. 

phil was the opposite of all of that, he wished he’d been saddled with anyone else’s powers, even dan’s, even after dan had opened up to him about how being surrounded by dead people who more often than not were fixated on their horrible deaths all the time had been so traumatic for him that he’d developed complex PTSD and depression before he even fully understood what those words meant. phil had apologised about saying he’d trade for his powers in a heartbeat, but dan hadn’t been bothered by it, just sad. because he was pretty sure that if phil could have exchanged the power to destroy others for a power that only brought suffering onto himself, he’d have chosen to hurt himself over being in a position where he might hurt others. and dan also felt guilty, because he knew he wouldn’t be that selfless.

[laurasinele]

Magpies

Prompt 4: “I know you didn’t ask for this”

Fanfic from: the Harry Potter series

Tags: preslash Drarry, epilogue what epilogue, heavy dialog, seven years post Battle of Hogwarts, ofc, Harry & Draco’s friendship, mental health, guilt

Warnings: mild swearing, mentions of abuse, mentions of war, mentions of death

Ao3

Outside the window a couple of magpies were fighting over an apple, effectively distracting him from his reading. Not that he was very focused to begin with. One of the birds had picked a rotten apple from the orchard ground and the other was trying to steal it. They cawed angrily and flopped their wings in ampulous, threatening motions while clashing talons. Draco was engrossed by their belligerent dance, open book forgotten on his lap.

The hinges of the reading room door screeched as it opened. All the elfs in the Manor had left to work at Hogwarts or the Ministry immediately after Draco informed them of that possibility, so there was no one left to oil the joints nor announce visitors. Not that there was any need. The only visits he got regularly were Ministry’s agents on Ministry’s business or his designated/volunteered auror, checking weekly on the conditions to his house arrest. Mother wasn’t allowed to leave St. Mungo’s and his aunt Andromeda, who was trying to forge a family bond with him, was always sensible enough to owl before coming. By the works of the DMLE, the doors and floo system would not open for anybody else. 

Aware of this at all times, Draco didn’t pause his keen observation of the magpies’ strife. It was Friday after all, and Auror Appleworm made always her appearence on that day at the time of her best convenience.

“I would have prepared lunch for us both, had you come half an hour earlier”, said Draco as he rose and put the book aside, still looking out the window.

“Thank you Malfoy, I’ve already eaten”. 

Malfoy startled at the male voice, and then startled again when he realised who it belonged to. He turned slowly, disbelieving, his aristocratic training supplying a small surge of nonchalance thanks to which he managed to pocket his hands and look calm. 

“Excuse my surprise, I was expecting Mrs Appleworm, as usual. To what do I owe the pleasure, Potter?”

Harry remained near the door, politely waiting for an invitation to sit. His auror robes were impeccable, their maroon bringing back to Draco’s memory their quidditch matches.

“Mrs Appleworm’s daughter went in labor this early morning. She is going to take some months away, although we are trying to convince her to retire and enjoy her grandchildren. Septuplets”, he added at Draco’s curious expression. 

“Oh, my. I thought she wasn’t due until next month. I trust they are all healthy and well”

Harry nodded, “I paid a visit on my way here. They are all well and Agnes and Mr Appleworm are over the moon”.

“I’ll have to remember to send them a present”. 

An awkward silence settled between them while Draco reigned his nerves and Harry looked around the room, taking in the elaborate shelf-cases, the light upholstery and drapes, and the yellow wallpaper. It was nothing as he remembered the Manor. 

“I made some changes”, offered Draco, guessing Harry’s train of thought. “Now that I am the only inhabitant I figured I could make this house, eh, more welcoming. Please, do sit down”, he finished gesturing towards the armchair next to his, by the other side of the window. “And please excuse my manners earlier, I was caught in two magpies fighting over a piece of apple in mid flight right outside the window”

Harry looked perplexed at that confession and a small smile graced his face while he approached the window. “They don’t look like fighting now”, he said as he spotted them through the window, resting atop of an ornamental stone cornucopia, grooming each other. 

Draco followed Harry’s pointing finger and he couldn’t contain a delighted exclamation upon finding the two birds. 

“They must have learnt to share, then. Now, what can I do for you, Auror Potter?”

--

They fell in a comfortable routine. Every Friday at precisely 2 o’clock, Harry appareted outside the reading room door and knocked before entering. Draco would put aside whatever book he had picked from the list the Ministry had provided as one of the conditions to keep him out of Azkaban and, after the compulsory questions and tests, they’d settle in an easy conversation that could go on until dinner time. Draco would always politely extend an invitation to stay and Harry would always politely refuse. They’d talk about quidditch, muggle culture —a big part of Draco’s assigned readings—, recent news, what were the Manor’s elfs up to…

Over time, more than seven years if he wasn’t mistaken, Draco had struck a sort of friendship with Mrs Appleworm. He had started to forgive himself for his acts of war and his past arrogance upon learning how she saw him. A veteran auror and elderly mother, when she looked at Draco Malfoy she saw an abused child never too rotten to mend. Draco might not think as benevolently about himself yet, but he was willing to get there someday, which was a huge step forward from the self-deprecating, self-harming depressive state Agnes Appleworm found him in. This days he barely indulged in regret and sadness and fear. He stayed firmly attached to calm and apathy. 

After five weeks of Mrs Appleworm leave, eagerness joined those two main emotions. Draco found himself eager for Friday afternoon well early in the week, and Saturdays and Sundays were usually filled with a peaceful sensation akin to happiness. It felt good to face Potter once a week for a few hours. It gave his before and after a certain continuity. They never talked about school or the war, not even a passing mention, but the fact that Harry Potter existed, and acknowledged Draco’s existence, made all the memories and every movement away from them and past his prior ways, somehow more real. 

That afternoon, however, Harry’s dark mood was all over the place, making it impossible for Draco not to ask if everything was alright. 

“I’m sorry, it’s nothing important. I just had a tough session with my therapist last evening”, said Harry with an apologetic smile. 

“A therapist? Like a muggle psychotherapist?”, Draco couldn’t refrain to ask, surprised as he was. Harry scoffed.

“A muggle psychotherapist, actually, yes”. 

Draco made a very polite, very English face of understanding and promptly looked through the window in search of and urgent change of topic, for he could not possibly fathom a non-personal, prim and proper way to continue this conversation. Providence delivered in the form of two magpies landing on the windowsill. 

"Oh!", softly exclaimed Draco, inexplicably delighted. "Would you look at that!" 

"Are they the same two?" 

"I couldn't tell…"

Both young men fell silent, watching the birds. They had landed side by side with a fraction of a second between them. They had looked around with that avian sort of movement that made most corvids look offended, and then started to skip all along the windowsill, apparently without purpose but very pointedly ignoring each other. 

After a while, Draco could not take the ominous feeling that scene had sparked in him, and turned to Harry, who was still transfixed by the magpies' bizarre dance. 

"Should I ask? About your therapy". 

Harry smiled as if he had been expecting the question, and didn't say anything nor looked away from the birds for a little while. 

"Why, Malfoy, what would you ask?", inquired Harry, finally looking at him with a placid expression, devoid of any hostility Draco might have anticipated. At this, Draco shrugged his shoulders almost imperceptibly and gave a spontaneous response that seemed to be aching to be spoken.

“What is it for. Although I can imagine. How is it going. Or whether it helps or not”. After a very brief pause he added: “How are you”. 

Harry laughed softly, throwing his head backwards. He covered his face with his hands and sighed. 

“I am fucked”, he declared meeting Draco’s gaze. “I’m a child soldier with PTSD, abandonment issues, identity issues and claustrophobia. I’m an abuse victim and have a deep distrust towards any authority figure. This, added to my natural tendency to bend rules results in ‘severe misanthropy and incapability to work within a hierarchy’”, he said, signing in the air the quotation marks before dropping his hands on his lap with mild frustration. “Every fatherly figure I ever had aside from Hagrid and Arthur Weasley is dead. All my friends are war heroes with similar issues, so we barely talk about normal stuff. So to avoid feeding each other’s neurosis we barely talk, full stop. My adopted family was so invested in actually making me one of them that they unconsciously pushed a relationship that ended up feeling unsettling close to incest and finished awkwardly and dramatically, distancing me from them. Oh, and right when a single month had passed without the press pestering me, tomorrow the Prophet is going to be all about me being queer because the guy I met at a muggle gay pub last Friday happened to be a squib, and he knew exactly who I was. So, uh, yeah. I’m fucked”.

Draco’s eyes were wide in shock and concern. He hadn’t known what to expect when he had enunciated the hypothetical questions he would make, but he was pretty sure he’d have been shook even if he had imagined the half of what Harry had just said. 

“I am deeply sorry, Potter. I shouldn’t have brought the subject up”.

“I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t wanted to”.

“Nevertheless, it is none of my business”.

Harry scoffed, this time a tad irritated. When he spoke it was patent that he was trying to refrain from lashing out completely onto Malfoy:

“How is this not your business? My psychopathic tutors certainly aren’t, but all the rest? My parents’ death? Voldemort’s return? The war? You were a part of it ever since you were born!”. Draco only managed to mouth like a fish, watching as Harry grew more and more indignant. “You conspired and helped to set on the battle at Hogwarts. At a bloody school!”, he boomed now. “You put a cursed necklace on a student! You let the Deatheaters into the castle! You were a bloody little soldier just like I was!”.

Draco rose from his seat, trembling with rage and shame: 

“I didn’t have a choice, Potter! I was born into it! I didn’t ask for any of it. I didn’t ask for this!”

From his armchair, Harry was looking up at him, at first with defiance. Upon hearing this, watching Draco looming over him, eyes wet and breathing deeply, his features softened. 

“I know you didn’t ask for this. It was uncalled for. I am on edge since I knew about the Prophet, but that’s not an excuse. I am very sorry for yelling at you and bringing up the past. For the record, I think you’ve already done more than enough to repay your debts and change your ways”. 

Draco was still staring, still looming, still breathing heavily and holding back his tears with all his power. He stood there for a few beats, and then he sat back down slowly, not taking his eyes off of Harry. A few moments of silence elongated between them, faces flustered, bodies tense, eyes locked. Finally, Draco relaxed into the backrest and spoke calmly:

“I never knew you were mistreated as a child. It’s an abomination”.

“I never knew you would be learning about muggle culture willingly”. 

“It’s part of my sentence”.

“Hermione told me you wrote her like six feet of an apology letter and asked for books, music and films”, shot back Harry with a mischievous grin. Draco rolled his eyes, mocking annoyance:

“You can’t keep secrets anymore”.

“Not between Hermione, Ron and I, no”.

They smiled at each other with something warmer than the pleasant politeness that had grown between them during the past weeks. Harry broke eye contact first to look out the window. Draco kept looking at Harry, letting the list of his presumed flaws sink in. They both spoke at the same time: 

“The magpies are gone”.

“Did they know?”.

Harry looked at him, seeming at loss.

“Sorry, who knew what?”.

“The new head of Muggle Relations and her husband. About you being queer”.

Harry avoided Draco’s eyes and bit his lower lip. “No they didn’t. If I don’t tell them today, they’ll find out tomorrow and they’ll be pissed I didn’t tell them. Luna Lovegood was the only one that knew besides my therapist. We had a one night stand some years ago. In the afterglow we were talking about this and that and I told her I liked guys. She said that people is people no matter what they pack, and love is love. Honestly we were high and I’m derailing. You’re the third person I tell this and I’m not getting any good at it”. 

Draco smirked. He rested his elbow on the armrest and his face atop his open palm, his little finger tracing the corner of his smile.

“I used to think I was asexual. Many honorable wizards were by birth or choice. Something to do with amplifying magic with your ‘life drive’”. Harry stifled a laugh and Draco smiled wider. “I used to think I’d marry Pansy Parkinson, or Millicent Bullstrode or one of the Greengrasses, force myself to produce one single heir and dedicate my life to study potions and being a socialite. Then I saw Cedric Diggory on a broom”.

Harry gaped, completely pleased with this piece of gossip, and maybe also with the fact that he and Draco Malfoy were talking about Hogwarts and it was not a sensible topic.

“Cedric whispered in my ear that I should bath with one of the clues for the Triwizard Tournament and I still get the chills when I recall it”. 

“He was stupidly handsome”, murmured Draco looking away, suddenly aware of the cause of Cedric’s death. “And stupidly brave. Like you”. He looked back at Harry just in time to notice he was flustered. He told himself it was because they’d been talking about Cedric. 

“I have to go soon. I have owls to send”, stammered Harry standing up to take his cloak and leave. Draco stood to see him out.

By the door they stopped and looked at each other, not knowing exactly what to do. In the end Draco offered his hand and said:

“Thank you. For telling me all that. And acknowledging that I’ve changed. And volunteering to be my counselor. I know nobody else beside Agnes was willing to come here and not beating me up”. 

Harry ignored Draco’s hand, his earnest look of gladness invading all of Draco’s range of sight. He pressed his lips together and dove for a hug. It was a tight, deliberate embrace, oozing sincerity and the true, deep affection that only likeness invokes. Draco wrapped his arms loosely around Harry, completely dazed by such gesture.

“Thanks to you”, whispered Harry on Draco’s ear. “For trying, getting there, and leveling me all the way up to here”. He stepped away and out the door, and a muted snap confirmed that he was gone until next Friday.

Draco stood there, the chills running through his spine. 

[bountyofbeads]

The Last Time Democracy Almost Died

Learning from the upheaval of the nineteen-thirties.

By Jill Lepore | Published January 27, 2020 February 3rd Issue| The New Yorker | Posted February 2, 2020 |

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s Administration had promised that winning the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued.

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“Epitaphs for democracy are the fashion of the day,” the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, dismally, in 1930. The annus horribilis that followed differed from every other year in the history of the world, according to the British historian Arnold Toynbee: “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work.” When Japan invaded Manchuria, the League of Nations condemned the annexation, to no avail. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Mussolini predicted in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” By 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann was telling an audience of students at Berkeley that “the old relationships among the great masses of the people of the earth have disappeared.” What next? More epitaphs: Greece, Romania, Estonia, and Latvia. Authoritarians multiplied in Portugal, Uruguay, Spain. Japan invaded Shanghai. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. “The present century is the century of authority,” he declared, “a century of the Right, a Fascist century.”

American democracy, too, staggered, weakened by corruption, monopoly, apathy, inequality, political violence, hucksterism, racial injustice, unemployment, even starvation. “We do not distrust the future of essential democracy,” F.D.R. said in his first Inaugural Address, telling Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. But there was more to be afraid of, including Americans’ own declining faith in self-government. “What Does Democracy Mean?” NBC radio asked listeners. “Do we Negroes believe in democracy?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked the readers of his newspaper column. Could it happen here? Sinclair Lewis asked in 1935. Americans suffered, and hungered, and wondered. The historian Charles Beard, in the inevitable essay on “The Future of Democracy in the United States,” predicted that American democracy would endure, if only because “there is in America, no Rome, no Berlin to march on.” Some Americans turned to Communism. Some turned to Fascism. And a lot of people, worried about whether American democracy could survive past the end of the decade, strove to save it.

“It’s not too late,” Jimmy Stewart pleaded with Congress, rasping, exhausted, in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in 1939. “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light.” It wasn’t too late. It’s still not too late.

There’s a kind of likeness you see in family photographs, generation after generation. The same ears, the same funny nose. Sometimes now looks a lot like then. Still, it can be hard to tell whether the likeness is more than skin deep.

In the nineteen-nineties, with the end of the Cold War, democracies grew more plentiful, much as they had after the end of the First World War. As ever, the infant-mortality rate for democracies was high: baby democracies tend to die in their cradles. Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. Authoritarians rose to power: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald J. Trump in the United States.

“American democracy,” as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod’s name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.

Nothing so sharpens one’s appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its demolition. Mussolini called Italy and Germany “the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today,” and Hitler liked to say that, with Nazi Germany, he had achieved a “beautiful democracy,” prompting the American political columnist Dorothy Thompson to remark of the Fascist state, “If it is going to call itself democratic we had better find another word for what we have and what we want.” In the nineteen-thirties, Americans didn’t find another word. But they did work to decide what they wanted, and to imagine and to build it. Thompson, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria and had interviewed the Führer, said, in a column that reached eight million readers, “Be sure you know what you prepare to defend.”

It’s a paradox of democracy that the best way to defend it is to attack it, to ask more of it, by way of criticism, protest, and dissent. American democracy in the nineteen-thirties had plenty of critics, left and right, from Mexican-Americans who objected to a brutal regime of forced deportations to businessmen who believed the New Deal to be unconstitutional. W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that, unless the United States met its obligations to the dignity and equality of all its citizens and ended its enthrallment to corporations, American democracy would fail: “If it is going to use this power to force the world into color prejudice and race antagonism; if it is going to use it to manufacture millionaires, increase the rule of wealth, and break down democratic government everywhere; if it is going increasingly to stand for reaction, fascism, white supremacy and imperialism; if it is going to promote war and not peace; then America will go the way of the Roman Empire.”

The historian Mary Ritter Beard warned that American democracy would make no headway against its “ruthless enemies—war, fascism, ignorance, poverty, scarcity, unemployment, sadistic criminality, racial persecution, man’s lust for power and woman’s miserable trailing in the shadow of his frightful ways”—unless Americans could imagine a future democracy in which women would no longer be barred from positions of leadership: “If we will not so envisage our future, no Bill of Rights, man’s or woman’s, is worth the paper on which it is printed.”

If the United States hasn’t gone the way of the Roman Empire and the Bill of Rights is still worth more than the paper on which it’s printed, that’s because so many people have been, ever since, fighting the fights Du Bois and Ritter Beard fought. There have been wins and losses. The fight goes on.

Could no system of rule but extremism hold back the chaos of economic decline? In the nineteen-thirties, people all over the world, liberals, hoped that the United States would be able to find a middle road, somewhere between the malignity of a state-run economy and the mercilessness of laissez-faire capitalism. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 on the promise to rescue American democracy by way of a “new deal for the American people,” his version of that third way: relief, recovery, and reform. He won forty-two of forty-eight states, and trounced the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, in the Electoral College 472 to 59. Given the national emergency in which Roosevelt took office, Congress granted him an almost entirely free hand, even as critics raised concerns that the powers he assumed were barely short of dictatorial.

New Dealers were trying to save the economy; they ended up saving democracy. They built a new America; they told a new American story. On New Deal projects, people from different parts of the country labored side by side, constructing roads and bridges and dams, everything from the Lincoln Tunnel to the Hoover Dam, joining together in a common endeavor, shoulder to the wheel, hand to the forge. Many of those public-works projects, like better transportation and better electrification, also brought far-flung communities, down to the littlest town or the remotest farm, into a national culture, one enriched with new funds for the arts, theatre, music, and storytelling. With radio, more than with any other technology of communication, before or since, Americans gained a sense of their shared suffering, and shared ideals: they listened to one another’s voices.

This didn’t happen by accident. Writers and actors and directors and broadcasters made it happen. They dedicated themselves to using the medium to bring people together. Beginning in 1938, for instance, F.D.R.’s Works Progress Administration produced a twenty-six-week radio-drama series for CBS called “Americans All, Immigrants All,” written by Gilbert Seldes, the former editor of The Dial. “What brought people to this country from the four corners of the earth?” a pamphlet distributed to schoolteachers explaining the series asked. “What gifts did they bear? What were their problems? What problems remain unsolved?” The finale celebrated the American experiment: “The story of magnificent adventure! The record of an unparalleled event in the history of mankind!”

There is no twenty-first-century equivalent of Seldes’s “Americans All, Immigrants All,” because it is no longer acceptable for a serious artist to write in this vein, and for this audience, and for this purpose. (In some quarters, it was barely acceptable even then.) Love of the ordinary, affection for the common people, concern for the commonweal: these were features of the best writing and art of the nineteen-thirties. They are not so often features lately.

Americans reëlected F.D.R. in 1936 by one of the widest margins in the country’s history. American magazines continued the trend from the twenties, in which hardly a month went by without their taking stock: “Is Democracy Doomed?” “Can Democracy Survive?” (Those were the past century’s versions of more recent titles, such as “How Democracy Ends,” “Why Liberalism Failed,” “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” and “How Democracies Die.” The same ears, that same funny nose.) In 1934, the Christian Science Monitor published a debate called “Whither Democracy?,” addressed “to everyone who has been thinking about the future of democracy—and who hasn’t.” It staked, as adversaries, two British scholars: Alfred Zimmern, a historian from Oxford, on the right, and Harold Laski, a political theorist from the London School of Economics, on the left. “Dr. Zimmern says in effect that where democracy has failed it has not been really tried,” the editors explained. “Professor Laski sees an irrepressible conflict between the idea of political equality in democracy and the fact of economic inequality in capitalism, and expects at least a temporary resort to Fascism or a capitalistic dictatorship.” On the one hand, American democracy is safe; on the other hand, American democracy is not safe.

Zimmern and Laski went on speaking tours of the United States, part of a long parade of visiting professors brought here to prognosticate on the future of democracy. Laski spoke to a crowd three thousand strong, in Washington’s Constitution Hall. “laski tells how to save democracy,” the Washington Post reported. Zimmern delivered a series of lectures titled “The Future of Democracy,” at the University of Buffalo, in which he warned that democracy had been undermined by a new aristocracy of self-professed experts. “I am no more ready to be governed by experts than I am to be governed by the ex-Kaiser,” he professed, expertly.

The year 1935 happened to mark the centennial of the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” an occasion that elicited still more lectures from European intellectuals coming to the United States to remark on its system of government and the character of its people, close on Tocqueville’s heels. Heinrich Brüning, a scholar and a former Chancellor of Germany, lectured at Princeton on “The Crisis of Democracy”; the Swiss political theorist William Rappard gave the same title to a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago. In “The Prospects for Democracy,” the Scottish historian and later BBC radio quiz-show panelist Denis W. Brogan offered little but gloom: “The defenders of democracy, the thinkers and writers who still believe in its merits, are in danger of suffering the fate of Aristotle, who kept his eyes fixedly on the city-state at a time when that form of government was being reduced to a shadow by the rise of Alexander’s world empire.” Brogan hedged his bets by predicting the worst. It’s an old trick.

The endless train of academics were also called upon to contribute to the nation’s growing number of periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic, arguing that “at no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today,” ran a series on “The Future of Democracy,” featuring pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. “Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?” the editors asked each writer. The series’ lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. “I call this kind of question ‘meteorological,’ ” he grumbled. “It is like asking, ‘Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?’ ” The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”

Don’t ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain.

Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. Charles Beard (Mary Ritter’s husband) spoke out against the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, when he smeared scholars and teachers as Communists. “The people who are doing the most damage to American democracy are men like Charles A. Beard,” said a historian at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking at a high school on the subject of “Democracy and the Future,” and warning against reading Beard’s books—at a time when Nazis in Germany and Austria were burning “un-German” books in public squares. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U.S. history textbooks which “omit any facts likely to arouse in the minds of the students question or doubt concerning the justice of our social order and government.” Beard’s books, God bless them, raised doubts.

Beard didn’t back down. Nor did W.P.A. muralists and artists, who were subject to the same attack. Instead, Beard took pains to point out that Americans liked to think of themselves as good talkers and good arguers, people with a particular kind of smarts. Not necessarily book learning, but street smarts—reasonableness, open-mindedness, level-headedness. “The kind of universal intellectual prostration required by Bolshevism and Fascism is decidedly foreign to American ‘intelligence,’ ” Beard wrote. Possibly, he allowed, you could call this a stubborn independence of mind, or even mulishness. “Whatever the interpretation, our wisdom or ignorance stands in the way of our accepting the totalitarian assumption of Omniscience,” he insisted. “And to this extent it contributes to the continuance of the arguing, debating, never-settling-anything-finally methods of political democracy.” Maybe that was whistling in the dark, but sometimes a whistle is all you’ve got.

The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V. Denny, Jr., was banking on, anyway, after a neighbor of his, in Scarsdale, declared that he so strongly disagreed with F.D.R. that he never listened to him. Denny, who helped run something called the League for Political Education, thought that was nuts. In 1935, he launched “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” an hour-long debate program, broadcast nationally on NBC’s Blue Network. Each episode opened with a town crier ringing a bell and hollering, “Town meeting tonight! Town meeting tonight!” Then Denny moderated a debate, usually among three or four panelists, on a controversial subject (Does the U.S. have a truly free press? Should schools teach politics?), before opening the discussion up to questions from an audience of more than a thousand people. The debates were conducted at a lecture hall, usually in New York, and broadcast to listeners gathered in public libraries all over the country, so that they could hold their own debates once the show ended. “We are living today on the thin edge of history,” Max Lerner, the editor of The Nation, said in 1938, during a “Town Meeting of the Air” debate on the meaning of democracy. His panel included a Communist, an exile from the Spanish Civil War, a conservative American political economist, and a Russian columnist. “We didn’t expect to settle anything, and therefore we succeeded,” the Spanish exile said at the end of the hour, offering this definition: “A democracy is a place where a ‘Town Meeting of the Air’ can take place.”

No one expected anyone to come up with an undisputable definition of democracy, since the point was disputation. Asking people about the meaning and the future of democracy and listening to them argue it out was really only a way to get people to stretch their civic muscles. “Democracy can only be saved by democratic men and women,” Dorothy Thompson once said. “The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic method and the democratic heart. If the democratic temper be exacerbated into wanton unreasonableness, which is the essence of the evil, then a victory has been won for the evil we despise and prepare to defend ourselves against, even though it’s 3,000 miles away and has never moved.”

The most ambitious plan to get Americans to show up in the same room and argue with one another in the nineteen-thirties came out of Des Moines, Iowa, from a one-eyed former bricklayer named John W. Studebaker, who had become the superintendent of the city’s schools. Studebaker, who after the Second World War helped create the G.I. Bill, had the idea of opening those schools up at night, so that citizens could hold debates. In 1933, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and support from the American Association for Adult Education, he started a five-year experiment in civic education.

The meetings began at a quarter to eight, with a fifteen-minute news update, followed by a forty-five-minute lecture, and thirty minutes of debate. The idea was that “the people of the community of every political affiliation, creed, and economic view have an opportunity to participate freely.” When Senator Guy Gillette, a Democrat from Iowa, talked about “Why I Support the New Deal,” Senator Lester Dickinson, a Republican from Iowa, talked about “Why I Oppose the New Deal.” Speakers defended Fascism. They attacked capitalism. They attacked Fascism. They defended capitalism. Within the first nine months of the program, thirteen thousand of Des Moines’s seventy-six thousand adults had attended a forum. The program got so popular that in 1934 F.D.R. appointed Studebaker the U.S. Commissioner of Education and, with the eventual help of Eleanor Roosevelt, the program became a part of the New Deal, and received federal funding. The federal forum program started out in ten test sites—from Orange County, California, to Sedgwick County, Kansas, and Pulaski County, Arkansas. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated. “It seems to me the only method by which we are going to achieve democracy in the United States,” Du Bois wrote, in 1937.

The federal government paid for it, but everything else fell under local control, and ordinary people made it work, by showing up and participating. Usually, school districts found the speakers and decided on the topics after collecting ballots from the community. In some parts of the country, even in rural areas, meetings were held four and five times a week. They started in schools and spread to Y.M.C.A.s and Y.W.C.A.s, labor halls, libraries, settlement houses, and businesses, during lunch hours. Many of the meetings were broadcast by radio. People who went to those meetings debated all sorts of things:

Should the Power of the Supreme Court Be Altered?

Do Company Unions Help Labor?

Do Machines Oust Men?

Must the West Get Out of the East?

Can We Conquer Poverty?

Should Capital Punishment Be Abolished?

Is Propaganda a Menace?

Do We Need a New Constitution?

Should Women Work?

Is America a Good Neighbor?

Can It Happen Here?

These efforts don’t always work. Still, trying them is better than talking about the weather, and waiting for someone to hand you an umbrella.

When a terrible hurricane hit New England in 1938, Dr. Lorine Pruette, a Tennessee-born psychologist who had written an essay called “Why Women Fail,” and who had urged F.D.R. to name only women to his Cabinet, found herself marooned at a farm in New Hampshire with a young neighbor, sixteen-year-old Alice Hooper, a high-school sophomore. Waiting out the storm, they had nothing to do except listen to the news, which, needless to say, concerned the future of democracy. Alice asked Pruette a question: “What is it everyone on the radio is talking about—what is this democracy—what does it mean?” Somehow, in the end, NBC arranged a coast-to-coast broadcast, in which eight prominent thinkers—two ministers, three professors, a former ambassador, a poet, and a journalist—tried to explain to Alice the meaning of democracy. American democracy had found its “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” moment, except that it was messier, and more interesting, because those eight people didn’t agree on the answer. Democracy, Alice, is the darnedest thing.

That broadcast was made possible by the workers who brought electricity to rural New Hampshire; the legislators who signed the 1934 federal Communications Act, mandating public-interest broadcasting; the executives at NBC who decided that it was important to run this program; the two ministers, the three professors, the former ambassador, the poet, and the journalist who gave their time, for free, to a public forum, and agreed to disagree without acting like asses; and a whole lot of Americans who took the time to listen, carefully, even though they had plenty of other things to do. Getting out of our current jam will likely require something different, but not entirely different. And it will be worth doing.

A decade-long debate about the future of democracy came to a close at the end of the nineteen-thirties—but not because it had been settled. In 1939, the World’s Fair opened in Queens, with a main exhibit featuring the saga of democracy and a chipper motto: “The World of Tomorrow.” The fairgrounds included a Court of Peace, with pavilions for every nation. By the time the fair opened, Czechoslovakia had fallen to Germany, though, and its pavilion couldn’t open. Shortly afterward, Edvard Beneš, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Chicago on, yes, the future of democracy, though he spoke less about the future than about the past, and especially about the terrible present, a time of violently unmoored traditions and laws and agreements, a time “of moral and intellectual crisis and chaos.” Soon, more funereal bunting was brought to the World’s Fair, to cover Poland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. By the time the World of Tomorrow closed, in 1940, half the European hall lay under a shroud of black.

The federal government stopped funding the forum program in 1941. Americans would take up their debate about the future of democracy, in a different form, only after the defeat of the Axis. For now, there was a war to fight. And there were still essays to publish, if not about the future, then about the present. In 1943, E. B. White got a letter in the mail, from the Writers’ War Board, asking him to write a statement about “The Meaning of Democracy.” He was a little weary of these pieces, but he knew how much they mattered. He wrote back, “Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.” It meant something once. And, the thing is, it still does. ♦

______

Published in the print edition of the February 3, 2020, issue, with the headline “In Every Dark Hour.”

**********

[daazurebanana]

The In-between

Memories are stretchy and blurry things, pliable to new information and experiences so I can’t give the exact order of the events of the year I turned six, but I do remember moving to Utah, my mom giving birth to twins, and my dad being admitted to the hospital. My aunt and uncle offered to watch my older sister and I, so we packed some clothes and drove for hours before arriving in the nasty, suffocating heat that is Las Vegas to stay for two weeks (the equivalent of 2 months in kid-years). Being six, I couldn’t understand why I was with these people instead of my own family. Every night I’d sit on my bed with my 16 year old cousin and sob slow, fat tears as I made her show me how many days were left before my sister and I could go home. In my mind I was an orphan now, my parents had given me up to drag out a sad existence in this godless heat. Fret not, my parents soon “saved me”, and although temporarily traumatized, I grew up to be, in most respects, a very happy and functional adult.

What I couldn’t comprehend at the time was that my father was admitted to the hospital due to a mental breakdown. It was the beginning of a recession and he had just lost his job, been injured in a car accident, become the father of now 6 children, and signed a new mortgage. He was thrown into a situation that would have been too much pressure even for someone “normal”. That episode was the first of many I can remember--the latest being last week, when he had a severe anxiety attack and was admitted for a week and a half to a mental institution that confiscated every possible danger, right down to his shoelaces.

I personally--and I am sure I am not alone--have had the tendency to interpret his reaction to stress as weakness. My six year old mindset was that, when presented with a trial, it is one’s responsibility to remain strong, to protect those one loves--not to weigh them down. To me, vulnerability and sensitivity were, and I regret often still are, signs of human weakness; something to be smothered, swallowed and overcome. But that is simply not true.

It is often said that stress is to the mentally ill person, what sugar is to a diabetic. For this reason mental illness usually becomes manifest in young adulthood. When someone who has a genetic disposition for mental illness experiences extreme stress, it can trigger a chemical reaction resulting in anxiety, depression, mania, schizophrenia, or some kind of combination. Since young adulthood is a time of new and increased pressures like living independently, choosing a spouse, starting a family, or career--it is a time when an individual is most susceptible to the onset of mental illness.

Being aware of these kinds of stimuli is important and doubtless aids one’s ability to sympathize with someone who suffers from mental illness, but what I want to know is how to accept the reality of mental illness, and with that knowledge, figure out how we can communicate better and create a safe environment not only for the sufferer but also for us “normal (?)” folks (question mark inserted because what can one truly label as “normal” in this world? In regard to mental illness, I would argue we are all afflicted in some form or another). How can I accept their weaknesses and help them without sacrificing myself and my life completely? While there is unquestionably value in Christ’s teaching that “whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25) , how much should the individual be sacrificed? I would like to know how to help both groups involved in mental illness; find the inbetween. Selfish human that I am, I dream that through researching disorders and interpersonal relationships maybe I can finally understand my dad and help him understand me. Unselfishly, there is a world full of me and my father--other people who need to understand and be understood.

I would like to begin with a discussion of mental illness. Are we living in an age of mental illness inflation where 14 year old girls use it as an excuse to avoid responsibility? With so many people crying wolf, hearing words like anxiety or depression typically cause one to roll their eyes and tell the person to grow up. So what is real and what is imagined? Where does one draw the line?

By obtaining a better grasp of the nature of mental illness, treatment methods, and family aid methods, a solution will become apparent. I am aware there are methods out there in the world of address family relations, but which is the most effective, and how can it be more publicly known? To find out, I will interview people with a variety of mental health challenges, as well as their family members and friends to hear first-person experiences, read articles and books such as “Unquiet Mind” by Kay Redfield Jameson to further understand the scientific side of the issue. I intend to learn what programs are available to the public and what behavioral adjustments will help the sufferer and family members. If addressed correctly, I believe less tragedies would occur such as emotional isolation and perhaps even suicide could be prevented. We can learn better as a species to respect each other.

Simply said, I want to finally be able to accept the reality of mental disability and grow to respect it without feeling drowned by it. Mental disability is not a problem in itself. It's our rejection of it as wrong, different. We tend to reject things we do not understand as humans, but I would like to finally be ready to welcome different, stopping cycles of resentment and apathy preventing anyone from progressing. Maybe it won’t happen by the end of this paper, but I would like to be closer to forgiving, letting myself be forgiven, finally balanced in that beautiful in-between.

[starkassembled]

So I wanted to write out my thoughts on Howard and Tony’s interaction in 1970, because that scene was really rather important, and I connected to it pretty strongly from my relationship with my own dad.

I feel like Tony’s relationship with his father, obviously, was never a great one. They were always at each other’s throats when he was alive. And one can infer from certain canon elements that Tony very likely blamed his mother’s death on his father for 20 years, up until discovering the true reason for their deaths in Civil War.

Howard Stark has been a central character in the MCU for quite a long time. We’re introduced to him in a fairly interesting way. We first see him through Tony’s eyes and in Tony’s perspective in Iron Man 1 and 2. We see his coldness, his apathy towards his son. We also see the weight of having a father like Howard on Tony’s shoulders. In fact, Tony’s public persona, the personality that the media and general public sees is an amalgamation of Tony’s own perceptions of his father. Arrogant, snarky, charming smartass. The original Iron Man trilogy shows the audience that the blown out public persona of Tony is rather different than the Tony Stark that those in his very small inner circle get to see.

And we also see Howard Stark in Cap 1 (as well as Agent Carter), how young he is, how very similar he is to Tony in many ways. They share similar mannerisms, similar expressions and outlooks. But by the end of that film, it leaves the audience wondering, how exactly did he turn from this young Howard to the older one we’ve witnessed in Iron Man 2? The older Howard we see in the future films of the franchise. 

We have to glean that from Tony’s telling of things. Howard was cold, detached and obsessed with finding Steve Rogers. Years of failure building up a resentment and an anger within him. He never told Tony he liked him, he never gave him a compliment, he was always pushing him to be better, do better, and be more, but in the completely wrong ways.

And that culminates in their meeting in 1970. Tony sees his father before he knew him, not quite young, not quite old, at the crossroads of his life. Howard is busy with SI and SHIELD business, yes, but he’s also focusing on Maria and their future child. He’s excited and nervous and unsure of himself. And we finally gleam the first bits of understanding from Howard, that he himself was abused by his own father. His fears that, well, if the child is a girl, maybe she’ll be different. The bittersweet part of this is that we know, and Tony knows, just how things end up. We know that Howard slips into the cycle of abuse, we know that he mistreats his son, we know that their relationship is never a good one.

But Tony in this scene, in these brief moments, he forgives him. And I don’t think he forgives Howard for Howard’s sake, I think he forgives his father for his own sake. The last bits of emotional baggage that could possibly hold him back from fatherhood. 

I had a very similar moment with my own father a couple months ago. My parents separated when I was 5, I never grew up with him, and I last saw him in person nearly 10 years ago. Since then it’s just been sporadic phone calls. And for years and years I felt guilty. I felt like it was my obligation to continue this relationship, that it was something I did wrong, and something I had to insure continued. But I came to the realization that no, it isn’t my burden, it isn’t my fault. He’s the parent, he’s the father, it should be up to him if he wants to continue having a relationship with me. I shouldn’t be the one feeling so guilty about it. 

So I stopped calling him on holidays, and I stopped calling him on birthdays and father’s day and I told myself that I wouldn’t call him again unless he reached out to me. And it took almost 2 years, but he did it. And when he did, he actually ended up having the first genuine conversation we’d ever had. He apologized to me for how things had worked out, for how our lives had turned out, and for not being there. And I think it was exactly what he needed to say, and exactly what I needed to hear.

I think that in Endgame this was Tony’s moment. Tony being able to realize that the burdens of the father are not the burdens of the child.

[goshiyachi]

Of a heart, I couldn't steal

Fandom: Haikyuu!! Pairing: Atsumu Miya/Oikawa Tooru Summary: Oikawa was all too familiar with the routine: 1. Pick a victim carefully (while making it seem like a random tragedy) 2. Never play with your food 3. And certainly, don’t ever fall in love with fragile notions of masquerading as a human. Haikyuu Halloweek Prompts Used: Vampires, Halloween Night, Blood, Crime Fictober 18 Prompts Used: “Take what you need.”; “How can I trust you?”; “You shouldn’t have come here.”; “I felt it. You know what I mean.”; “I’ve waited so long for this.”; “I hope you have a speech prepared.”; “This is gonna be so much fun!” A/N: Referenced murder, and death A/N 2: @fictober18 ; @haikyuuhalloweek

Or Read on Ao3

Part of the problem has always been that he was, Oikawa.

He had lived, and lived that he became too bored and almost too careless every other decade that passed him. Humanity had proved to be dull and annoying with their petty wars and glutton for power. They were hardly worth his glance; but, when he got too bored he wasted some years like minutes and learned their habits when he chose to roam in their midst. It was a risky business; having a chance of watching their feeble attempts of conquering the world and stepping closer to whispered lost thoughts.

He didn’t know why he did that, it wasn’t like he had ever been truly invested in their trifles and despairs. There had never been any leverages for him to gain their thrones. He had all the power and knowledge to live beyond their lifespans anyways. It must have been due to when he lost his humanity a long time ago. A fog of memories had been buried, and the likelihood of ever finding a fragile piece of his old sanity felt thin. Oikawa would never admit it out loud, but he was in some sense, just a lonely being.

Someone who had been pitied once an upon ago, who was now doomed to live in a world where his apathy was consuming his whisks of life. It shouldn’t have made a difference now, with all those past diminution coursing into his present. Relearning how to speak, and become a shadow from society was all that awaited him. Maybe that was why Oikawa was known to be an inexcusable idiot, because he was getting too thoughtless. He had witnessed one too many dull decades and his boredom was recalling his need for adventure and risky submissions.

What he wanted to grasp was a fulfillment to cease his thoughts and make him feel almost alive. A challenge perhaps, but that had been the issue. There were obligations to honor; rules that suppressed any gambles of getting something he lost when he was transformed. The pressure to obtain the standard illusion was crushing his style. Oikawa couldn’t or rather, didn’t want to continue having to live in a specific direction.

Their rules on how to survive were absolute, and for necessity for the lost but, Oikawa had come to know rules as second nature guidelines and mere strategic suggestions for the bored. There was no need for him to be cemented on remaining as a lone creature with too strict ropes to cross over from. Yet, that was all that was waiting for him, a constant sense of becoming too constricted and more willingly to break the code he was forced to learn from his second beginning. It had always been an issue of him living too long to start taking more risks as he lingered in cities and neighborhoods for periods that made him almost stand out as weird or impossible with his clinging youth. He found himself coming into odds with others as he played his former role too perfectly flawed.

He missed his past.

A little too much that it surprised him when he first re-discovered his love with the sports that were roaming his territories. He didn’t go out too much but when he did Oikawa saw what his missed. The chance to be somebody who could have lived a life of full passion. With no regrets, and discovering all the untouched corners of the world and maybe beyond the skies he kept looking up each day. It had been an old selfish wish, but nonetheless, Oikawa still dreamed about it when he walked the night streets while looking for a quick bite.

They would always end the same. With him finding a snack and pondering how long he would have until something would crack.

Oikawa needed a warm body.

The bed that he had been using for a month now, was too lonely. He couldn’t say anything else, the fact had made him sigh in disappointment. It had been years since he had cupped another face that had not been a snack. Longer that Oikawa had been taunted by others when he went to some gatherings. He had been one of those vampires that lived long enough that he had been seen as a teenager in the eyes of the elders.

Enough decades that he should have had a semi partner or have joined a more permanent coven. But he hadn’t. Oikawa just couldn’t find it in himself to stay with others, even when he had clearly had signs that he needed a companion. No matter what he did, or who he had tried to stay with, there had always been a disconnection. A sort of wall he couldn’t overcome when he spoke to them.

They had always felt faceless, with pretenses that never felt genuine. It figured that Oikawa would only be accompanied by other covens with few things in common with him. But then, Oikawa had always been different.

When a new century had come and passed he came back to the question. People changed rhythmically, and metaphorically; but never in spirit. They grew bolder in some aspects too with the supernatural gaining more popularity. The technology had never surprised him. It had fascinated him, had made him laugh at the elders’ reactions. But it had always forged a sort of visual representation of a new chapter that been forced on to himself.

They could learn of him, could find a way to make him human again, or just plain kill him.

And while that would produce some form of entertainment, Oikawa couldn’t still wonder back to his old thoughts. A long life hadn’t taught him the true values, it had just furthered the answers from his grasps. They had always escaped when he delved further away from the traditions the elders taught him before he started to question more when his thirst became just a fact and not a constant issue over his head.

He had come to expect their stance when he woke up and lived closer than recommended, or when he had woven himself in and out of their affairs because he was getting desperate. When the idea popped up Oikawa had known it wouldn’t end well; he was idleness, but never a true fool. Until then, when he felt himself consider it.

It had actually started in a Halloween.

He had been dangling off a building roof when a heartbeat woke his trance. A figure came forward, his hair was a mess, but it had been his eyes that had loomed over Oikawa that made him look back. His pale skin had glown but, it almost looked sickly.

He wouldn’t make for a good meal, Oikawa could already smell the alcohol and smoke from him as he walked closer to Oikawa. His costume had been fairly simple but with some notches of creativity like the face paint on half his face. The smudges that had been cleared showed his tense jaw. The stranger didn’t open his mouth right away, but had faced the skyscrapers for a couple of seconds.

“You good?” The stranger’s voice had been raspy as if he had finally stopped yelling and now, he was recovering.

Oikawa eyes didn’t show any interest with the way he shrugged his shoulders. He had a fairly recent meal so, he hadn’t been particularly hungry. Or had much patience to wrestle a game yet.

“As much one could be.”

They didn’t say much after that. The other guy had taken out his phone, making the light spark up and highlight the make-up he wore.

“What are you supposed be?” Oikawa hadn’t really cared before, but when the night grew so did some of his attention to the world.

“Don’t know some half skeleton dude. Wasn’t listening to what my friends were sayin’ when they dressed me up.” He texted someone before looking at Oikawa. “What about you? Not into Halloween?”

Oikawa’s legs had started to get cold, “Eh, just didn’t feel like it this year.”

The only things he had don had been some cat ears he received as a mock present from one of his neighbors. A bell choker had been added too and painted whiskers when he had handed out candy for the tikes and kids that roamed earlier from his apartment complex. In the past, he had found the holiday to be somewhat amusing. After most of his second life, it had been liberating to say he was a vampire and nobody took another glance. The loopholes were fantastic trips for him.

The rest of the night Oikawa kept to himself, while the stranger who gave his name, Miya Atsumu, had minded his business. The rooftop stayed like that, a ghost zone for two people that wondered why existing had been so hard. One with too much time, and the other with too little.

“I hope you have a speech prepared.”

Oikawa had been in the middle of dumping his dinner and had been preparing to leave the site when he noticed another presence. The other person had hitched his breath, took a step back until they hit the back of a brick wall. Oikawa’s hood still covered most of his head and the lack of lighting made it easier to make his face seem faceless. But with the other person, they had smelled familiar.

(In the back of his head Oikawa had wished it weren’t one of his neighbors because he always hated it when they got too nosey. It made killing them more of a chore and having the police too annoying.)

When he turned back the other person had the same dyed blond hair, and pale skin. But this time, they lacked the other smells he had associated from their last meeting; they knew each other, but not by much. Recognition hit him when he saw their face mirror him too.

“Dude. You’re a murder?” He had sounded a tad more curious than scared.

Oikawa, like usual made an annoyed noise as he scrunched his nose when he dropped his hoodie. The reveal hadn’t been that dramatic. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

Miya’s shivering body didn’t move an inch closer, but he had observed the body then to Oikawa who had no visible blood on his clothes. Without bothering to be sensitive Oikawa lit up a match and threw it to the body, the smell hadn’t made the scene any better; it had felt like it bottled Oikawa when he walked away and hearing Miya call to him. He hadn’t known it, but that had triggered Miya to keep tabs on him. Had made it for Oikawa to see that he had unknowingly opened another door into his life of playing human with an actual human.

Eventually he had to ask him it :“How can I trust you?”

Miya at the time, had witnessed Oikawa burying, burning and chopping a couple of bodies for a couple of months. He never told anyone else of Oikawa’s activities, and Oikawa had never allowed him to know the real truth of why he did the things he did. He only furthered the illusion that Oikawa was just a killer. And that Miya was as guilty of not reporting.

“I haven’t said anything yet have I?”

No. He hadn’t. He only observed first. Then he wrote the people’s names, death and area where they got rid of them or picked up. (He had claimed that Oikawa needed to be organized about it. In case of people catching up to him.)

The questions almost never did come out in the beginning; but the suggestions did. Oikawa had asked once about that. Miya just followed Oikawa’s usual answer by shrugging and saying it all nonchalant.

“I watched a lot of crime documentaries and TV shows. Figured I’d give a few variations to keep it from getting too repetitive.”

The next time Oikawa had been feeding, and away from Miya he had wondered why he tried to pretend to be human. It had never benefited the way he wanted; it had done the opposite. The deep-rooted sadness that could never be carved out from him had made it impossible for him to seek peace. They had only been temporary. He had been given hell on earth, had been wondering and seeking for something to occupy his mind away from the clock that would never be stopped.

Besides the odd affair of having Miya accompany him in some of his adventures (he never allowed Miya to watch him kill them or catch him feeding from them), he had felt Miya give him small courses of behaving like a normal person. They went to the movies, amusement parks and some clubs. He had been taken to a tour of Miya’s university, and had met his twin brother (that had reacted with a little more sense and didn’t approve of him in the end). Oikawa had almost thought and believed he was human again. But then his thirst would come back harder, more resilient when Miya pushed the boundaries Oikawa had laid. It had made it harder to ignore him.

The warmth of the bed when they laid on it and talked about Miya’s day and Oikawa’s next day off to find a new victim had almost tasted like a victory for him. As if he had found a life almost similar from before. Oikawa had almost believed it could have comforted him.

They had been sleeping for of the day when Miya broke the silence.

“I felt it.” His neck was exposed, his eyes looking directly at Oikawa as he cupped his face. “You know what I mean.” His skin was flushed and Oikawa loved how the blood underneath Miya’s skin was so warm.

Oikawa hummed as he kissed his neck in slow appreciation. Had teased the other of what he wanted to do.

(He wanted it. Wanted to just bit his neck. And then―)

“Tooru. I want to go with you tomorrow.”

He immediately pulled away. Separated his limbs from him as he watched the other sitting up. The conversation that he always dreaded came back with vengeance.

“No.”

The whirl of the statement made him look at how Miya was upset of not being able to be a part of the whole process again.

Miya pushed himself closer, “But I have been there making adjustments with you with the planning and always helping you with the cleanup. Why can’t I go and help with the actual climax?”

Oikawa had been playful, had been dramatic with few people, but with Miya, he had been distant in some clear ways. Ones, he knew he could never really crack and allow him to see. The elders had always been strict with adding any more numbers, and Oikawa would never break and make Miya see what his life really was. He was killer to exist. Not because Miya had certain assumptions of him that made him almost admire Oikawa.

“Miya.”

“Tooru.”

The bed had been comfortable, but as he loomed over Miya Oikawa found his resolve. He sighed. And with one last glance at his room and Miya waiting for his response, he got off the bed and with a clipped tone he ordered: “Take what you need.”

The only grace he had that he had taken two other people previously. Therefore, that night Oikawa had to only humor Miya when they picked their targets. He watched and found Miya to be a quick learner when he approached and taunted his person. Miya had memorized the lessons that Oikawa had taught him and applied it well when he neared the finishing blow of his person. Oikawa in the background had been somewhat paranoid when he leaned in close to his chosen person when he thought about wasted blood that seeped into his cloth that protected his shirt.

It hadn’t been as dull when he mocked his prey; but Oikawa had remembered of the rules that his old master had taught him. Playing with his food was below him. (Even if it had brought some fun into it.)

When he heard Miya swing and swipe and the other heartbeat stopped Oikawa had to control himself from activating his fangs. He had been a little messy, but Oikawa had figured that he had done well considering where Miya had started first when he caught Oikawa burning a man before. He would have to wipe clean his face and fingers and the clothes would need to be destroyed but Oikawa had in the end congratulated Miya for a good first kill.

They ended up cleaning up a bit later than usual.

Oikawa blamed the blood in air when he kissed and nipped Miya in the neck.

(But never too deep. His master had shown him before how to effectively nip others without accidentally creating another vampire. After all, he didn’t need another reason to have the elders come back and question him when he wasn’t done questioning himself.)

Miya’s thirst became a game for Oikawa. To find the right places for him to have, and when Oikawa had to babysit. It became a cycle. One that entertained him for a while. They had fun. Miya caught him up in almost all the pop culture and Oikawa had taught him how to be efficient. It had come closer thought, having Oikawa to leave the city again.

He hadn’t said anything, but he had been sure that Miya had come to understand what he couldn’t directly show him. He pulled away from his job, and Miya took that as a sign to follow him too when he didn’t apply for another semester.

“When are you coming back?”

Oikawa had a small backpack on when he didn’t make a motion to grab his apartment key. The room had been lowly lit; the last exams that Miya had been close as he had some big textbooks near him. A lamp was on and a cold coffee cup was left alone. His heart was calm when Oikawa kissed him softly. It almost hurt like the first time he did it―but, this time had been different and the same.

Because, this time Miya had almost shown him the answers he had been looking.

But then he didn’t. Couldn’t really because he had a heart that worked, and had few different beliefs than him. He kissed his neck. (He was there―ready―willingly if he told him everything.) Oikawa cradled his head, had gently hummed and said his name once.

He couldn’t help but say out loud his thoughts that crosses him when he first met him. The rooftop had been the perfect place. And Miya had been unsuspectedly the perfect partner.

“I’ve waited so long for this.”

He snaked one hand to the back of Miya’s neck, and the other tilted Miya’s head for the perfect angle.  Miya’s heartbeat picked up, the warmth that only Miya could radiate had been addicting but, Oikawa had finally cracked. Many lifetimes he supposedly lived flashed within his head as his fangs appeared.

Miya’s facial expression had been interesting too when Oikawa allowed him to see his eyes shade into red and, to see his fangs appear.

He laughed out loud when Miya’s lit up and especially when he said, “This is gonna be so much fun!”

[winteriron-trash]

Hey for the auideas prompt list could you do 3 and 4 combined for WinterIron?

Oh, my god, this ended up 3k long, and I still deleted some filler. Damn. There’s a fuck ton of time skips, just because if there weren’t I would’ve gone overboard and written 10k worth of fic here. Character A is Tony, Character B is Bucky just because the most natural thought would be the other way around, and I wanted to mix it up a bit. 

3- ”Old Cold Soul AU”: Character A grew up in an environment where they weren’t offered very much affection as a child and now that they’re older, they have a lot of trouble conveying any emotions outside apathy, sarcasm, and being mildly interested in something. But after befriending Character B, an extremely lovey and affectionate person, Character A begins to fall hard for them. Awkward romance shenanigans ensue as Character A gets flustered over hand holding and hugging because affection is relatively alien to them.4- Character A has been given one month to find and kill Character B. Character B, however, falls in love with Character A.

It was an easy hit. Tony didn’t even understand why he’d been given so much time. It was a quick, easy hit. The son of some politician, a guy about Tony’s age, if a bit older, who seemed pretty laid back enough. It could’ve taken him less than a day if asked. Hell, if Tony pressed it, he could’ve done the job in an hour.

But no. The client had been specific. They wanted Tony to get close to him. Be all chummy, someone known by the family. And then kill the son, right in front of the rest of the family, leaving before they could gather any evidence on Tony. Something about the pain of betrayal or some dumb shit.

Tony really didn’t understand his employers sometimes.

Tony had asked, even begged, for the job to be given to someone else. Natasha was the best at putting on airs, she could have anyone wrapped around her finger in minutes. Everyone liked Clint, he was the type of guy you couldn’t even try to hate. Hell, even Sam had a charm to him.

But no. It was Tony’s mission. It always had to be Tony’s mission.

Tony didn’t mind killing people. He was an assassin for that reason. He was the cliche of all cliches, as Clint had put it, when it came to being an assassin. A borderline alcoholic, hardened and scarred by a shitty life, who’s only two emotions were apathy and sarcasm. And he was fine with that, in all honesty. As long as Tony got the job done, he didn’t care.

This job though was going to be the death of Tony. And just to prove a fucking point, he wasn’t even going to try. Maybe if he fucked it up, Fury wouldn’t send him on touchy-feely bullshit like this and let Tony do what he was good at.

Tony studied his file one last time with an annoyed sigh. James Barnes would be dead in a month, and no one could stop that.

James Barnes was attractive, in a youthful sort of way. His hair stuck up in wild directions, his smile glittered with a wicked gleam of a rich kid living at the height of his life.

“You’re my new bodyguard, right?” James said, pointing at Tony.

Tony chewed on his gum, containing his glare to a simple deadpan look. “Yes. Antonio Carbonell.” Tony was still pissed at Fury for making that his alias. It was too close to his real name.

“Cool.” James grinned. “I’m James, but everyone calls me Bucky. You can call me Bucky.” He studied Tony. “Aren’t you a bit young to be a bodyguard?”

He was, objectively. Tony was in his early twenties and looked his age, if not a bit younger. With the right hairstyle, he could pass for sixteen. “I passed the background check.” was Tony’s only response. “I’m supposed to be undercover.”

James shrugged. “Okay. So what, I’m supposed to tell everyone you’re my sulky new friend in a leather jacket with a gun in your waistband?”

Tony tilted his head to the side. “I don’t have a gun in my waistband.” His gun was in his coat pocket, thank you very much. With two knives.

“Are you sure?” James leered, wearing a filthy smirk. “Maybe I’ll have to check.”

“With all due respect, Mister Barnes-”

“Bucky.”

“Mister Barnes,” Tony repeated, eyes narrowing a fraction. “Our relationship is a professional one, and will be maintained as such.”

James pouted a bit. “You’re no fun.” He walked down the street, and Tony followed him. “Did you hear what I did to my last bodyguard that made him quit?”

“No.”

“Okay,” James said, in a way that was leading up to a story Tony most definitely didn’t want to hear. “So don’t ask how, but I had ten pounds of guacamole, a rubber chicken, and one of those office chairs with wheels…”

-

James Barnes was going to be the death of Tony. There was no question about it, it wasn’t an if, it was a when. When would Tony finally snap and shoot himself in the foot because of this abomination of a human being.

Tony was sitting in a coffee shop, sipping a black coffee as James waited for his friend.

“Hey!” James said suddenly, catching Tony’s attention. “Stevie! Over here you dumb punk!”

A blond man came and sat at their table, wearing a tired smile. “Hey, Buck.”

James grinned. “Hey, punk.”

“Jerk.” The blond man punched his arm.

“Steve, this is my new bodyguard Antonio.” Bucky introduced. “Tony, this is my best friend Steve.”

“Don’t call me that.” Tony deadpanned.

Steve blinked. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Antonio.” He offered his hand for a shake. Tony only stared at him, sipping his coffee.

“Yeah, he’s like that.” Bucky waved, speaking to Steve. “A real killjoy.”

Oh, that was ironic. Tony almost smiled at that. Almost.

“He’s young,” Steve noted.

“He’s undercover.” Bucky shrugged.

Tony held back an eye-roll. “Won’t be if you tell everyone.”

Steve snorted.

-

Three weeks later, Tony was ducking between drunk twenty-year-olds, looking for Bu-James. He zeroed in on an annoying laugh.

“Come on.” Tony grabbed James’ arm, tugging him away from the blonde slut that was getting a bit handsy with him.

“Tony!” James nearly shouted with delight. “Tony, why didn’t you tell me you were coming, I would’ve gotten you a drink.”

“Fuck your drink.” Tony damn near snarled, grabbing the red solo cup from James’ hand and dumping it in a plant. “You’re gonna get alcohol poisoning if you keep it up.”

“No!” James wailed. “I was drinking that.”

“Aren’t anymore.” Tony deadpanned. “Come on, you need sleep.”

James stumbled, and Tony righted him. “That depends, will you come to bed with me?” James purred, and a hand grabbed at Tony’s ass.

“No.”

“Why not?” James whined. “I’ve tried everything!”

Tony glanced up at him as he herded James into a car. “The hell is that supposed to mean?” Tony asked, sliding in next to James, giving the driver the go-ahead to start driving.

“I’ve tried getting you coffee, I’ve tried asking you if you wanna do romantic shit, I’ve even tried just hitting on you! What do I gotta do to be with you?” James asked, with the biggest damned puppy eyes Tony had ever seen. James whined, putting his head on Tony’s shoulder. Tony didn’t push it off.

“I’m your bodyguard.” Tony kept his tone even, professional.

“Yeah, but it always works out in the movies,” James mumbled.

Tony stared at him. One more week. One more week until Tony was supposed to pull the trigger. “This isn’t a movie, James.”

“Do you even like me?” James looked up at him. “Even a little bit?”

Tony didn’t say anything.

“Damnit,” James muttered, wiping at his eyes. “Damnit. I thought- I thought if I loved your stupid face so much, maybe I’d get somethin’ back.

“You don’t even know me.” Tony didn’t know why his throat was so tight as he said that.

“Maybe not,” James admitted with a sniff. “But I wanted to.”

Tony didn’t say anything. He didn’t have anything to say. He looked out the window with a pained sigh.

Wait.

“Hey.” Tony knocked on the window between the driver and passengers seats. “Hey, where the hell is this car going?”

“Sorry, kid.” The driver said, and that was not a driver who worked for the Barnes. Fucking shit. “It ain’t personal.”

Tony pulled out his Glock, cocking it. “Oh shut the hell up.”

“Tony?” James sat up, frowning through the haze of alcohol.

“Get down, and don’t fucking move,” Tony ordered. “You do exactly what I tell you, okay? Shit’s gonna get messy.”

Tony shot the driver in the shoulder first. Not because he was too sentimental about the man, but only to make sure if he didn’t have accomplices, Tony would still have someone breathing to interrogate.

The car veered, and Tony shielded James’ head with his own jacket as they crashed.

Then there was gunfire, and things really went to shit.

“Get down!” Tony barked.

“Oh fuck, I’m gonna puke.” James groaned.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Stay in the car. I don’t care what you hear, just stay in the fucking car unless I tell you otherwise.”

Before James could give Tony a confirmation, Tony was barreling out of the car.

One other car. Four guys. Judging by their gait, minimal training. Oh, this would be easy. Just a little stretch.

Tony identified the biggest guy and took him out first, bullet straight to the head. The other three charged, and Tony had to hold back a smile.

Ugly #1 took a swing at Tony’s head. Bad move. Never aim for the head first. Tony grabbed his fist, yanking him forward to use his other arm to break Ugly #1’s elbow over his knee. His scream was cut off by Tony snapping his neck.

Ugly #2 was at least a bit more oriented in his attack. He swung low with a fake out and managed to clip Tony in the jaw with the real hit. Tony snarled and pulled him forward by his still outstretched arm, shooting him in the chest.

Ugly #3 shot at Tony, firing so many bullets Tony wasn’t even sure if he was aiming. He did get a lucky shot in, grazing Tony’s bicep just before Tony shot him in the face.

Once they were all down, Tony ran back to the car with James and the driver still in it. He opened the drivers’ door, dragging the half-conscious man out of the car.

“If you think I’m gonna talk, you’re nuts.” The man laughed reaching into his pocket. Tony slammed his foot down on the hand, sending a cyanide tablet skittering across the pavement. The man screamed.

Tony squatted over him, pulling out a small knife. “Here’s the thing.” Tony’s voice dropped an octave, tone taking on what Clint had once called his ‘death death murder voice’. “I know you’re going to talk.” Tony trailed his knife over the man’s arm. “You’ve got ten fingers. And for every second you keep me waiting, you lose one. After that, who knows,” Tony dug his elbow into the man’s chest. “Maybe I’ll start breaking ribs.”

“Fuck you.” The man hissed.

Tony shrugged and snapped the man’s pinky with a quick move. His scream was like fucking music to Tony’s ears. “See? Look at me, being merciful. I didn’t even cut it off.” Tony leaned in close. “Can’t be too sure I’ll be that nice again.”

“HYDRA!” The man gasped. “I work for HYDRA! I don’t fucking know what they want with the kid, okay? They just said take him in, alive. They’ve got plans, wanna experiment on him or some shit. Said something about making an example outta him so other rich families wouldn’t step outta line! Shit, that’s all I know!”

“Hm.” Tony stood up. “I believe you. The cops won’t. But because I’m feeling generous, I’ll let you handle them on your own.” He slammed the butt of his gun against the man’s temple, and he was out cold.

“Oh god.” James was standing up, well, leaning against the car. “You just killed those guys. Who’s HYDRA?”

“I told you to stay in the car,” Tony growled. He dragged James over to the curb. “Sit down, I’m calling your parents.”

An hour later Tony was standing in front of a cop, recounting the story. He left out the bit about HYDRA, though.

“Don’t you think you went a bit overboard for self-defence?” The cop asked.

Tony shrugged. “It wasn’t self-defence. I was doing my job.”

“Bit young for this type of work.” The cop arched an eyebrow.

“So everyone says.” Tony deadpanned. He pressed the ice pack a medic had given him to his jaw.

The cop sighed. “You and Mister Barnes need to go down to the station to give your official statements. Considering this is a Barnes related incident, it’ll get swept under the rug. The worst you’re gonna face is that nasty bruise you got going on there.”

Tony forced a fake smile. “Thanks.” He stormed over to James, whose parents were still fussing over him.

“Thank you.” Mrs Barnes damn near tackled Tony with a hug. “Thank you for keeping him safe.”

“It’s what you hired me for,” Tony said. Tony glanced over at James, pursing his lips. “And if I’m allowed to speak freely…”

Mr Barnes arched an eyebrow, waiting.

Tony pulled out a cigarette, lighting it. “Might wanna be careful who you play in the sandbox with. I’m just some bodyguard. I don’t know a damned thing.” He shrugged, taking a drag. “But if I did know something, I’d tell you HYDRA’s got a big ass red target on your backs.” He spun on his heel, facing away from them. “But you know. That’d only be if I knew anything.”

He walked across the pavement, over to where James was sitting on the curb, still wearing Tony’s jacket around his shoulders.

“Hey.” Tony nudged him with his foot.

James glanced up. “You saved my life.”

Tony arched an eyebrow. “Is it that shocking that I did my job?”

“You killed four guys,” James whispered. “And you don’t even look winded.”

Tony sat down next to James. “I’ll have you know, I have a killer pain in my jaw right about now.”

James snorted. “Wow. You actually have a sense of humour.”

Tony didn’t say anything, only taking another drag.

“Thank you,” James said, staring at his hands. “You… I don’t know, you did some freaky shit tonight. I don’t know what it’s like to be a bodyguard, but I don’t think racking up a body count is supposed to be a part of the job.” James shook his head. “You’re my age, and… well, I’m scared shitless at the idea of haftin’ to kill someone.”

“It’s a part of the job.” Tony shrugged. He closed his eyes and sighed.

At least now he knew why the hit on James had been put out, and why it’d been so important that Tony get close, make it personal. If the Barnes had ties to HYDRA… Fury would do anything to cut those ties. Make an example of James. Not too different from what HYDRA wanted to do.

Ironic.

“Hey,” James elbowed him. “What’s wrong?”

“I just killed four guys, you really wanna ask me that?” Tony glanced at him.

“So you do have a heart.” James elbowed him again, grinning.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Shut up. Come on, let’s get your drunk ass home.”

-

Tony tried not to think too hard about the fact that he stayed the night watching James sleep.

James woke up with a groan, gripping his head. “I'm dying.”

“Yeah, that much vodka can do that to a person,” Tony noted, sipping a cup of coffee.

“I liked you better when you had no personality.” James moaned, shoved his face into a pillow. “Sarcastic Tony is a dick.”

“I try.” Tony pushed himself to his feet.

James sat up with a guttural noise. “I’m dead.”

“Uhuh.” Tony walked over to him, offering a bottle of aspirin and water.

“Hey, I almost got killed last night.” James pouted, taking the aspirin and water. “You could give me a little sympathy.”

“Why? I saved your sorry ass.” Tony took the aspirin bottle back and set it down.

James stared at Tony. Tony… Tony didn’t know how to understand the look on James’ face. James leaned forward, and Tony, someone who’d always hated people up in his personal space, didn’t move away.

“I have a theory,” James said suddenly, voice soft.

Tony couldn’t do much else than arch an eyebrow.

“I think…” James cleared his throat. “I think maybe you do like me. But you don’t know shit about emotions. You’re like the old, rugged hero who buries his emotions by punching people. And I think if you let yourself like me, you’d be a lot happier.”

Tony blinked. He took a deep breath. “I think your hangover is doing most of the talking for you.” He spun on his heel, walking away from Bucky. No, James. Walking away from James.

“See?” James stood up, then groaned, grabbing his head. He righted himself again, following Tony. “That’s what I mean! You completely avoided the emotions!”

“You’re my employer, Mister Barnes.” Tony glanced over his shoulder. “That’s the only emotion that needs to be between us.”

“Need and want are two different things.”

Tony studied Bucky. Six days. He had six days to live. Tony couldn’t get emotional, those sorts of things could get messy. They always did. Bucky was just another mark. Tony tried not to think about how things might’ve been different if Bucky wasn’t his mark.

“Your point?” Tony fought to keep his voice even.

“My point is,” James grabbed his arm. “I want you. And I think you want me too. Just… give me a chance?”

“You don’t want to get tangled with me, Barnes.” Tony pushed his hand away. “Your father has a press conference in an hour. I suggest you get dressed.”

-

Bucky was right. Tony had a problem. Oh god, he had a big problem.

He was supposed to kill Bucky today. In fact, his deadline was in less than an hour.

And Tony knew he wouldn’t be able to make it. Oh fuck.

“Mister Carbonel?” Bucky’s mother called. “Would you like some pasta? It’s amazing. Tastes like it came from Italy.”

Tony glanced up. It did admittedly smell amazing, like something his mother would’ve made ages ago. But with the way Tony’s gut was churning, he couldn’t stomach it. “No thank you.” He shook his head.

She offered him a smile but sat down to eat with her family. Tony watched them eat, watched them while away his precious time.

This would’ve been a perfect time. With both parents present, a calm atmosphere, no one would see it coming. Tony could pull out his knife, slit Bucky’s throat. Be out of the state before morning, ready for a new mark, with SHIELD already covering his tracks.

He couldn’t do it, though. Tony knew he couldn’t. Bucky was right. Tony liked him. And as someone who wasn’t used to emotions, he couldn’t do it. So instead he numbly watched the family eat dinner, clean up the dishes, then followed Bucky to his room.

“James.” Tony grabbed Bucky’s arm.

Bucky screamed. “Jesus fuck! Don’t scare me like that!” He thought a moment and frowned. “Hey, you called me by my first-”

Tony glared hard at him. “Shut up. James, do you trust me?”

“Do I- what?” Bucky blinked.

“Do. You. Trust. Me.”

“Yes?” Bucky tilted his head to the side.

Tony nodded. “Good. Pack this pack-” he threw a black duffel bag at Bucky- “with only what you absolutely need. Now.”

“Wait, what?” Bucky caught the bag but didn’t do anything with it. “Look, if you’re trying to get me to elope, you should know I’m honoured but-”

“God, would you shut up!” Tony snapped. “I’m trying to save your fucking life. I’ll explain in the car if you just move!”

Bucky stared at him for a long moment, then shook himself out of it and started moving. “I really hope you’re not kidnapping me.” He muttered as he shoved clothing into the bag.

It took Bucky less than ten minutes to pack, something Tony was marginally impressed by. He grabbed Bucky’s arm, dragging him down the stair, out the back door, and into a car.

“Okay, do I get an explanation now?” Bucky asked as they started driving.

“It’s not one you’re going to like,” Tony warned.

“I don’t care.” Bucky insisted.

Tony took a deep breath. “I was hired to kill you.” James opened his mouth, but Tony silenced him with a finger. “Shut up and let me finish. I work for a place called SHIELD. I’m an assassin. You were my mark. They wanted me to get close to you, then kill you.

“I didn’t want to take the job. I don’t do long-term marks. I’m in, I’m out. That’s what I’m good with. But apparently, I was on someone’s shit list. And I got you. Look, you know how those guys said they were HYDRA? The ones who tried to kill you?”

“Yeah?” Bucky was nodding along but didn’t look quite like he was getting it.

Tony flexed his fingers on the wheel. “HYDRA and SHIELD are longtime rivals. Don’t ask me why. Your parents were working closely with HYDRA, and SHIELD wants to hit them where it hurts.” Tony glanced at Bucky. “They must’ve stepped out of line, though. Because HYDRA doesn’t seem too keen on them either. And you’re the collateral damage both ways.”

“Oh,” Bucky whispered. “Oh. Shit.”

“Yeah, shit is right.” Tony gripped. “And trust me, when SHIELD realizes I missed my mark, they’ll send someone in to finish the job, and it really won’t be pretty.”

“Why?”

“What?” Tony said.

“Why?” Bucky repeated. “Why did you save me? Why didn’t you kill me? You… you killed four guys without thinking. Even if you didn’t want to kill me… you could’ve just left me. You’ll get in trouble for this, right? Saving my life and protecting me?”

“I can handle that heat.” Tony shrugged. “As for saving you… maybe you weren’t completely off base.” He said quietly. “About the emotions stuff.”

Bucky sat in silence. “Oh my god. You like me.” He finally, finally whispered.

“Shut up.”