#decided to be extra funny and made jason suffer instead

[theglidingbat]

Need to draw this as Ghostbat +Harley/clownhunter....

Edit:

I did it.

[elareine]

Adamare (2/7)

Read here on ao3. 

Year Two 

Jason hurried down the steps of the dungeons. He didn’t want to be late. 

They had been assigned a partner work for Transfiguration class, a project that took weeks to brew and would be 40% of their grade this year. Since Jason was very much the odd one out in his year, he had been assigned to work with the remaining Slytherin in his class: Tim Drake. 

They had classes together before. Jason hadn’t known much about Tim beyond noting that he was intelligent when he bothered, which he mostly didn’t. He’d done his share in the project without complaint, though. 

Actually, he hadn’t talked much at all. Or smiled. Maybe he just didn’t like Jason? 

Eh, whatever, not like Jason cared. At least Tim was punctual as always today, already waiting for him outside the storage room where their animation was housed for the time being.

“Hey,” Jason greeted him. 

“Hey.” 

Looked like Tim was feeling conversational today. He was looking at the ground instead of Jason, too. “Alright, let’s get this done,” Jasons said, opening the door. 

The project was supposed to teach them how to layer and interlock charms. Jason suspected it was more about losing your nerve with fiddly stuff. They’d quickly decided they would work on it a bit most days of the weeks instead of all at once, and it was coming along beautifully, the little farm animals moving and interacting as if they were alive. Today, they were going to start adding sounds. 

Or they would have, had the room been empty, but no. Huxley and Sebastian, the two main instigators of trouble in their year, together with two others Jason didn’t know well, were in there, doing something to projects that Jason couldn’t see.

“Hey, what’re you up to?” he asked, stepping into the room. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Tim tense. 

“None of your business, mudblood!” Sebastian sneered. “Why don’t you tell your real daddy to write a complaint? Oh wait, he can’t, because he doesn’t even have an owl.”

Jason mentally rolled his eyes. Wizard society and their insistence on magical bloodlines. It was as if none of these fuckers had ever visited a history class—oh wait, they hadn’t, because the only thing taught at this school was magical history, and Jason suspected even that was heavily edited. 

“Let’s just go. We can come back later,” he murmured to Tim, who nodded, his face unreadable. But before they could, Huxley blocked the door. 

“Didn’t you hear me, mudblood?” 

“No, sorry, could you maybe speak just a little bit louder? I think there’s a deaf granny in Las Vegas who hasn’t heard you.” 

“What?” 

“Las Vegas? It’s a big city.” Jason spoke extra slow as if he was talking to a particularly stupid four-year-old. “City, that’s a place where people live—” 

Huxley turned purple and drew his wand. “You asshole, I’ll show you—”

Tim just lifted his wand, smiled and whispered, “Petrificus Totalus,” perfect wand motion and all. Huxley went down like a stone. 

“What the—you’ll pay for that!” His friends tried to advance on them, wands drawn and intent on hexing them. 

Jason watched how fixated they were on his left hand holding the wand, actually rolled his eyes this time, and punched Sebastian in the gut with his right. He might be shorter than anyone else his age, but at least he didn’t rely purely on his magic. 

“Expelliarmus,” Tim said, and the two remaining boys found themselves without a wand. They immediately looked terrified. Jason introduced one of them to his right hook anyway, just cause he could. The last one standing shrank from him, so he didn’t bother.

“Anything else?” Jason drawled. 

The boy visibly decided that retreat was the best part of valor. 

“You’ll never be one of us, you—you psychos! A mudblood and a psycho!” Parting shots fired, they left, dragging their petrified friend along by the shoulders. 

The room was silent. 

When they didn’t come back after a minute or so, Jason allowed himself to exhale. “Well, that was… fun?” 

Tim snorted. “Fun.” 

“Huxley’s face when you petrified him? C’mon, that was funny. No wonder they left spewing insults.”

Tim didn’t answer directly. “Are you one? Like they said?” 

“Am I what? A psychopath? All signs point to yes.” 

“A mudblood.” 

“I have absolutely no idea.” Honestly, maybe his mom had merely been too drugged up to show him her magic, and his dad stupid enough to get himself locked up and killed despite his. Jason could be a pureblood for all he knew. 

Yeah, Jason didn’t think so either. 

There was no need to ask Tim the same question. The Drakes were one of the oldest pureblood families and proud of it, even Jason knew that. Begged the question of why Tim had even defended him. 

Just as he was about to ask, however, Tim looked over his shoulder, and his eyes widened. “Oh, no.” 

Jason turned around. Fuck. 

He stared at the remains of their project in dismay. It would take days to fix all this, just to get back to where they had been. Tim wouldn’t want to invest that much time in it, and Jason wouldn’t be able to do it by himself, and then his grades would suffer and—

Bruce wasn’t going to throw him out because of one mediocre grade. Jason knew that. He knew that. 

There was gentle pressure on his elbow. “We can fix this,” Tim said. 

Jason made himself look at him, but Tim’s face was turned down even as he continued: “We’ll just have to camp out during the weekend.” 

“You’d do that?” 

“Of course.” Was that a blush? “I’m not going to leave you hanging.” 

Jason took a deep breath, and then another. “Okay. Okay, let’s just… check what’s left, and clean up.” 

Tim pressed his elbow again and smiled at the floor. “Sure.” 

When he entered the Great Hall the next morning for breakfast, Jason looked around. Tim wasn’t with his usual Gryffindor friends. Instead, he sat at the Slytherin table, keeping a notable distance from the other members of his house. Now that Jason thought about it, he’d seen the other boy alone more often than not for the last few weeks. 

With a glance, Jason confirmed that Roy and Kori wouldn’t miss him (they were holding hands under the table again, Jason knew that expression on their faces,) and changed course. Tim’s face when Jason slid into the seat next to him and started helping himself to food was pretty priceless. 

Tim stared him for a full minute before asking: “What are you doing?” 

Jason stalled: “Uh—” 

He had no idea what to say. 

The corner of Tim’s mouth began to switch. “You didn’t think this through, did you?” 

“Nope.” 

Tim was full-on grinning. “Wanna talk about that book you’ve been carrying around for weeks, and I’ll rant at you about Quidditch?”

“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“…that’s not my name.” 

“I know.” 

[andrewuttaro]

New Look Sabres: GM 35 - TOR - WHY NOT?

5-3 Regulation Loss

This is a confluence of events that gets you thinking about what kind of Sports City Buffalo is. The Buffalo Bills just locked up their first ten-win season since the year the Buffalo Sabres were last in the Stanley Cup Final. That sealed a playoff appearance this NFL season, the second such appearance this century. The last team the Sabres overcame to go to that 1999 Stanley Cup Final is none other than the Toronto Maple Leafs. Time is a flat circle but this all still feels very new. Buffalo has supported their teams loyally through thick and thin but mostly thin. Times like these feel like the reward. I’m not saying the Buffalo Sabres are due to go to the Stanley Cup Final but us holding the fort through this beyond shitty decade of hockey deserves some catharsis too. Spare a moment to think about how Buffalo is often regarded as a City free agents don’t want to come to. It feels bad but look at the Taylor Hall trade. New Jersey had him, got an MVP season out of him, but has now ultimately lost him. There are far fewer guys in Sabres history who were here for a short time and left. Yeah, there’s Drury, Briere and a handful of others but we don’t suffer from the same things the big popular cities suffer from. In those big markets you don’t have the attachment. They just leave whenever the contracts don’t line up. Sure that happens everywhere, but certainly a lot less in the frozen hellscapes nobody wants to visit like Buffalo. Just food for thought I guess. In the bigger, richer frozen hellscape up the highway, the new Toronto Maple Leafs, the Big Four Leafs if you will, have been good for nearly four years now. That’s begun to feel normal but in spite of that seeming inevitability it is the Sabres who are higher in the standings today. A rough start preceding a Head Coaching change still holds back the team everyone though was a Stanley Cup contender before the season began. National TV and the good taste of Sunday Night Football in our mouths this game was tantalizing opportunity.

Despite a high forechecking start for the visitors the Leafs struck first. Fredrik Gauthier benefited from a Brandon Montour turnover and ripped off a quick one past Linus Ullmark. In spite of the early 1-0 lead for the Leafs, Buffalo continued with an aggressive attack and very rarely too far away from the puck. The problem is they didn’t get many shots on goal, only five total for the whole first period. Most of the Sabres shots were after the twelve-minute mark. New Toronto Maple Leafs Coach Sheldon Keefe played around with line matchups and started juggling the Auston Matthews line away from the Eichel line. That and floating an extra winger seemed to get Buffalo lodged in their zone for uncomfortably long periods of time. Linus Ullmark had a lot of work in the first period. He was dancing with the best of them and robbed John Tavares before robbing Tyson Barrie. Like when I say robbed, Barrie’s jaw literally dropped. Ideally though you want to be the team taking the shots, not the one needing your goalie to have a big night. In the first period the Leafs were the ones shooting. The second period went… well worse. What do you call a horny white dude with a streak of hair on his upper lip? A 1970s pornstar… No: Auston Matthew. His scoring streak was done and the best porn stache Glendale, Arizona has seen in decades decided to whip it out when Jack Eichel is in the house!

A frantic zone entry preceded Morgan Rielly shooting a quick assist over to Matthews who fired it quicker than Ullmark could get over, 2-0 Leafs. What followed afterward for Buffalo was not the best hockey. Uh, no sir, the shooting was better than the first period by purely a shots on goal metric, but something just wasn’t clicking. In some respects the visitors just kind of… well flailed. There was a decent two-on-rush the Sabres got, that mind you was Conor Sheary and Jimmy Vesey, that just stopped dead in its tracks for no reason. Sheary just stopped to dead to play target practice. He did not aim well. When Auston Matthews scored the second time it was a rush done properly and a defensive scheme from Buffalo that just saw nobody try to stop anyone from doing anything. Rasmus Dahlin was in the net behind Ullmark like he didn’t know where to go! 3-0 Leafs and I got to say this was the first time since mid-November it looked like this team was down on itself. Ralph Krueger must have said what the astute observer of the NHL was thinking in the second intermission: this isn’t 2017, y’all have no reason to get down on yourselves playing THIS Leafs team. Stop it. Buck up and go get em. Go get em they did.

If you have a cursory understanding of the Toronto Maple Leafs Hockey Club you may know they just love throwing away leads. Funny thing in this season of giving is that the Buffalo Sabres Hockey Club loves late game comebacks. The Sabres won the Thanksgiving Playoffs last year doing it! The carry over from a John Tavares holding penalty from the last period gave the Sabres the man advantage in the early going and they took some momentum from it. Jack Eichel sets up Dahlin at the point and he launches one all the way home past Fredrik Andersen. Buffalo is on the board down 3-1 now and you better watch out because when the Sabres score powerplay goals they play with reckless abandon. Suddenly this game was a track meet back and forth. On one of those crazy rushes Dmytro Timashov beat Ullmark short side to extend the Leafs lead 4-1. A couple plays later Toronto almost scores and the puck is quickly rotated out of the defensive zone to Eichel already off down the ice in the opposite direction outrunning Justin Holl. Eichel puts it top shelf because FUCK Toronto! Get out of the way of my fucking yuletide spirit! Technically Eichel’s point streak was already continued by an assist on the Dahlin goal but yummy yummy in my tummy, give me banger against the Leafs, thanks Jack! The crazy pace did slow down a little after that unfortunately. I’ll be honest, it’s been a crazy week for my wife and I, so we were eyes deep in Kate McKinnon impressions at this point. Nonetheless the look of a comeback was brewing.

Kyle Okposo scored a rebound tap in sneaky shit and suddenly it’s a one goal game 4-3 with a little over five minutes left in regulation! Steve Dangle’s heart doctor isn’t going to like the look of this one at the next appointment! When Okposo scores it triggers one or both of two things: toxic hockey bros’ tweets about his concussion history or a big dick goal scoring streaks in comeback games. In this case it was both. The Sabres laid it on thick like some warm Canadian maple syrup at a holiday breakfast. I could hear the suburban hockey dads gently whisper “grind it out” into the crisp winter air like angels getting their wings. Unfortunately it was just not to be tonight in the center of the universe. After Ullmark was pulled all it took was one poor pass by Marcus Johansson to spring Ilya Mikheyev on the empty netter insurance goal. That was basically it and this one ended 5-3 in regulation. Those are the worst kind of losses: the ones in regulation… against the Leafs. Wah wah. That was all she wrote. Unlike Saturday’s overtime loss to the Islanders, a loss you almost get up out of your chair at home and clap for, last night’s loss was just… bleh. A regular grinch who stole Christmas.

Now the totally understandable surge of tweets begging for the reunion of Jack and Jeff that unfolded after this game felt like they were forgetting Victor Olofsson. I suppose we do need to see what he can do without Jack centering his line for a prolonged sample size, sure. But that’s not really what you might be apt to take coming out of this game. Like we’ve felt since before fucking Memorial Day: a trade is due here. One top six winger pushes this team to a place where they have some sustainability on the scoring front. This trade has to happen. I would hate it being for a center at this point though those are harder to get! Johansson has done a fine job in the 2C role, but we all know eventually he has to go back to wing, right? We sent Casey Mittelstadt down to Rochester. Johansson was visibly struggling in this game and its hard not to see how that contributed to his game-ending mistake. One more guy, Jason. I know you got some deals on deck. Take them off the back-burner and do them now. Give us a Christmas present. Even with this loss the Sabres are in a divisional playoff spot ahead of the Leafs. Perhaps the Sabres are higher up on the pecking order than they deserve but how about not? Why not this team? Why not go for the playoffs this year? I know you have a long-range plan looking toward the summer, Jason, but come on, these guys can make the playoffs with just a tiny bit more help. At this rate Jack might just drag them there; don’t make him do that. Send in reinforcements.

Now off to a Philadelphia Flyers team flying high on Gritty’s white dust tomorrow. Sure, that looks like a tough game but allow me to introduce you to a new thought. Us Sabres fans are always waiting for the wheels to come off. We look for it and when it happens we feel satisfied in that we predicted it would happen with the same old Sabres. But what if there was another question fans could ask that was less negative all the time. Here’s a clue: I’ve already asked it in this postgame. Instead of predicting how the wheels will come off here’s a new question to ask: WHY NOT? It’s better shouted than spoken. WHY NOT? Why not this team this season? Why not playoffs? Why not us? We’ve learned to ask this question with the Buffalo Bills this season as they’ve put together a nice record and made their playoffs. Let’s start asking it with the Sabres. Why not the Buffalo Sabres? Why not us? Well, how about you like, share and comment on this blog. The Bills making the playoffs give the Sabres a little cover for now. We’re a bit less grumpy about a loss to the Leafs than we normally would be, eh? I’m here for it. Let’s Go Buffalo!

Thanks for Reading.

P.S. Tre White using his alma mater slot to say “Tre White Goalie Academy” has to put a smile on Carter Hutton’s face, right? Don’t we think Hutton could use some smiles these days?